JOHN MILLER, Contradicting Statements, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2026

Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, in 2026, Contradicting Statements is a compact artist's book produced in relation to John Miller's retrospective The Ruin of Exchange at Kunsthaus Glarus, 2024, and a subsequent presentation at The National Exemplar Gallery, New York, 2025. ISBN 978-3-7533-0867-8.

The book returns to a video Miller made in 1977 in which one participant begins by announcing that every person in the piece will contradict the person preceding them. The next speaker immediately replies: "That's not the real description." From there the rule generates its own system. Each statement creates the conditions for its negation. Conversation continues, but progressively detaches itself from stable subject matter or meaning — performers caught between improvisation and instruction, apparently free to speak, but only within a structure they are required to obey.

Nearly fifty years later, Miller and Ohnemus return to that early experiment here, reproducing the video through 160 sequential images: a temporal work of speech, interruption and response converted into something that can be held and read. Speech becomes image. Time becomes sequence. Contradiction becomes book structure.

Miller describes the participants as behaving like "quasi-automatons" — people apparently exercising agency while simultaneously carrying out an imposed command. Revisiting the work in the context of contemporary artificial intelligence, he has suggested it might offer a glimpse of an earlier moment when other technological and social paths still seemed possible. They are humans operating inside a rule. They improvise, resist, and laugh at the system. Then they continue obeying it.

That concern runs directly into Miller's wider practice. Since the late 1970s he has examined the supposedly neutral systems through which everyday life acquires meaning: language, work, leisure, commodity culture, artistic value, institutional authority. His practice has moved through painting, photography, sculpture, video, writing, music and installation while continually returning to the social conditions surrounding the artwork itself.

The cover makes the proposition almost administrative: brown ground, white type, title, editor, publisher. On the reverse, the exchange that begins the work is reproduced as if it were a conventional publication description — and then immediately contradicts itself. The object enters the catalogue already refusing its own catalogue entry.