2010 / 2014: ProjectsPUBLICATION AS PRACTICETalk SeriesX Marks the Bökship
Publication as Practice: Series 1January - July 2010
# 1: THE ARCHIVE. Guest speaker James Hoff
# 2: PHOTOBOOKS. Guest speaker Stephen Gill
# 3: BOOKS ON BOOKS. Guest speaker Arnaud Desjardin
# 4: ART WRITING. Guest speaker Fiona Banner
# 5: THE COLOPHON (Documents and Facts), REPRESENTATIONS OF COLLECTIVE PRODUCTION.Guest speaker Will Holder
# 6: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MAGAZINE PAGE. Guest speaker David Campany
# 7: THE DEFINITION OF ARTISTIC ACTIVITY OCCURS, FIRST OF ALL, IN THE FIELD OF DISTRIBUTION.’(Marcel Broodthaers.) Guest speaker Eva Weinmayr
# 8: ARTISTS’ NEWSPAPERS. Guest speaker Eleanor Vonne Brown
# 9: SLIMVOLUME / THE GALLERY AS PUBLISHER. Guest speaker Andrew Hunt
# 10: APPROPRIATION, Guest speaker Michalis Pichler
# 11: SOME THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MAKING BOOKS, Guest speaker Sara MacKillop
# 12: DRAWING FROM ARCHITECTURE, Guest speaker Pablo Bronstein
Publication as Practice: Series 2September - December 2014
Wednesday 17 September 2014, 7pm# 1: Learn to Read Differently Simon Morris Talk starts at 7.15pm
Simon Morris examines the relationship between reading and art. He proposes a new method of making art via conceptualist reading performances. This method grafts the aesthetic legacy of Conceptual Art on to various notions of writing (from literary composition to data management) in order to produce materially-specific poems as artworks that have in some way re-read a found object. This is an art of reading things differently. It starts from a premise proved by the impossibility of making purely conceptual art: that art is always aesthetical and conceptual. To that it couples an obsession with language as both material signifier and social activity. In doing so it establishes a mode of making art that asks: What could we write if reading could be a materially productive act of making art? How might a certain kind of reading-as-making problematise the understandings of authorship, production and reproduction ensconced in our cultural industries? Morris’ work celebrates reading differently as a praxis of exploring the elsewhere of what languages and their users can mean and do. Morris is committed to working collaboratively and against all-too-certain counter-productive divisions between contemporary art and contemporary literature. In his presentation, Morris will examine four of his experimental bookworks.
Simon Morris (b.1968) is a conceptual writer and teacher. He is a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Teesside in the UK. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, films, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book and often involve collaborations with people from the fields of art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. In 2002, he founded the publishing imprint information as material. He is the author of numerous experimental books, including; Bibliomania (1998); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); Re-Writing Freud (2005); Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010); and Pigeon Reader (2012). He is an occasional curator and a regular lecturer on contemporary art and also directed the documentary films sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) and making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler (2010).
# 2: A dead man speaksJames Langdon Talk starts at 7.15pm
A question, which is a preoccupation for many artists and designers, is how to handle or represent the work of another. This might mean through text, in a biographical sense, or through the process of decision-making that a curator might use to determine how best to represent someone’s work who is no longer present to assert their own preferences.
For the second meeting in the Publication as Practice series, James Langdon will talk about methods for representing a voice, and voice synthesis as portraiture. Landgon has recently written about his attempts to reconstruct the voice of Scottish novelist Gilbert Adair in an article in The Serving Library which can be read here: http://www.servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=150089
James Langdon is a graphic designer and curator. He co-founded the artist-run space Eastside Projects. He is the editor and designer or Book (Eastside Projects, 2010), A School for Design Fiction (Spector Books, 2014), A School for Design Fiction Workbook (Motto Books, 2014). Sinkhole his project for artists’ audio is forthcoming.
Wednesday 22 October 2014, 7pm# 3: Performance as PublishingNicole Bachmann and Ruth BealeTalk starts at 7.15pm
Image: From script to reading to exhibition to performance to print Alex Cecchetti, Story Line: Marie & William, 2013
Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale formed Performance as Publishing in 2010. It is an artist-led research project which investigates overlaps in performance practice, events, discourse and writing.The project explores the work of contemporary artists who use text and writing/speaking as a basis for their performance. Past events and exhibitions have taken place at: Kunsthalle Basel; Het Veem Theater, Amsterdam; South London Gallery; Rowing, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate; and Modern Art Oxford. They will talk about their recent project I take an empty space and call it a bare stage, at New York Art Book Fair, and meetings in New York with artists active in Fluxus, conceptual art and spoken word. www.performanceaspublishing.com Nicole Bachmann is an artist based in London and Zurich. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include MOT International Project Space, London (2014), Swiss Art Award Basel (2014), Zabludowicz Collection London (2013), and Aid & Abet, Cambridge (2013). Bachmann’s latest piece draws on the idea of language as material: Language as a possible physical form as well as a performance where rhythm relates back to the craft of makingRuth Beale is an artist based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Peckham Platform, London (2014), Trade, Nottingham (2014), and group exhibitions at LesTerritoires, Montreal (2014) and Wysing Arts Centre (2014). Her work employs collaborative, discursive and performance processes to explore the relationships between culture, governance, social discourse and representation.
Wednesday 29 October 2014, 7pm# 4: I start from the image of an end : A conversation around "It’s moving from I to It – The Book"FormContentTalk starts at 7.15pm
Participants: Pieternel Vermoortel (commissioning/producing), Paul Becker, Bianca Baroni (editing), Paulus Dreibholz (design), Eleanor Vonne Brown (distribution), Gil Leung (contribution/content production), the reader (the public).
“It’s moving from I to It” is a nomadic project that evolved approximately over two years through different initiatives encompassing exhibitions, commissioned texts, performances, readings and talks. By embracing fiction as a curatorial framework each event/initiative has entered the programme as a scene would feed into the narrative trajectory of a script. As such the project has included a total of 17 scenes, differently animated by a set of characters and contextualized in different locations and timeframes. The project culminated into the “The Play”, a script written and directed by Tim Etchells’ as the final commission of the programme. Using language to retrace the narrative development of the project and appropriate the various voices that crowded it, this text exploring a kind of minimalist deconstructive theatre that is at the heart of Etchells’ practice. After having been launched at Tate Modern in January 2014 the script has been performed across several art venues in Uk and abroad.
Consistently with the particular trajectory delineating the programme the book is articulated into seventeen scenes, bringing together commissioned material as well as documentation of off-site exhibitions and events. In addition to such content the book also delves into the actual process that foregrounded “It’s moving from I to It” by implementing working material, collateral writing, published texts and graphics.
# 5. Fragmentation of Time and SpaceJarosław Kozłowski Wednesday 19 November 2014, 7pmTalk starts at 7.15pm
The art books of Jarosław Kozłowski (1945, Poland) have their roots in conceptualism. Kozłowski’s work is marked by a critical-analytical discourse with art and the mechanisms of perception, self-reflection and the building of correlations between the grammar of the artistic language and the sphere of meaning. In the 1970s the artist created works of a purely linguistic nature; they reflected his interest in language games and puns. Kozłowski will talk about the books he produced during this time and refer them to the time and art context of the 70s.
#6: Open Books, Volume E, Final draftOrganised by Charlotte Cheetham and Sophie Demay.Wednesday 3 December 2014, 7pmEvent starts at 7.15pmWith a wandering by Alexandru Balgiu from 'The New Rational Typewriting' and contributions from Paul Bailey, Angélique Buisson, Loraine Furter, Valérian Goalec, Aurélien Mole, Museum of Museum, Ghazaal Vojdani and Eleanor Vonne Brown.The event is based on Open Books most recent chapter, Volume E. It acts as a 3D Mock up of the chapter. A final draft before it goes to print. A live edit. A rehearsal.Since 2010, the project Open Books has been playing with the idea of spaces: the space of the book – its representation as an object – and the book in the space – the systems of its display in exhibitions.This event lies precisely in between these spaces, at their crossroads, margins and intervals.A second edition of Open Books that includes volume E, is to be released in early 2015 and published by Hato Press.
