Marcia Farquhar’s 12 Shooters

Published by the Live Art Development Agency, 2009

17 cm x 24 cm, 192 pages, hardback with full colour and black and white images throughout

Trade Orders: Central Books

An in-depth document of Marcia Farquhar’s collaborative 12 Shooters project (2007) – 13 short films, each directed by a different artist-filmmaker, and each derived from a different work from the past 12 years of Farquhar’s practice. In all cases, Farquhar gave a pre-arranged performance for camera, and all editorial control to the filmmaker.

This cloth-bound volume contains a foreword by Stuart Brisley, essays by Peter Suchin, Tony Grisoni, Mark Harris and Alice Maude-Roxby, and extensive notes on the work by Marcia Farquhar, J. Maizlish and the various collaborating ‘shooters’: Zoë Brown, Bruce + Marshall, Jem Finer, Judith Goddard, Dryden Goodwin, Andrew Kötting, Trine Lise Nedreaas, Saskia Olde Wolbers, Uriel Orlow, Tom Paine, Sarah Pucill, Tal Sterngast and Gary Stevens.

“12 Shooters will be of enduring value to generations of artists fortunate enough to get hold of a copy. Entertaining and scholarly, 12 Shooters dismantles the form of most publications that document a distinguished artist’s practice and elucidates the ways in which a once only conceptual performance might haunt and possess an entirely new body of work. In this sense 12 Shooters is also a conceptual biography, an intimate conversation between the artist and those who have been invited to reimagine the secrets and pleasures of her performing persona. Most dazzling of all, 12 Shooters succeeds in being a critically engaging archive that is on side with the stray thoughts and unexpected philosophical conundrums of every day lived experience that have always been Marcia Farquhar’s subject.”
Deborah Levy, writer, 2009

The book also includes full-colour film stills, production stills, preparatory drawings and contextual documentation. Designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio. Supported by Arts Council England.