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Publication as Practice II
A short course on concepts of artists’ publications

This talk series by artists, writers, designers and publishers covers a range of concepts behind artist books and experimental publications. Speakers include Simon Morris (Information as Material), James Langdon, Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale (Performance as Publishing), FormContent, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Sophie Demay & Charlotte Cheetham,
Events take place on Wednesday evenings between September - December 2014. FREE.Wednesday 1 October 2014, 7pm

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#6: Open Books, Volume E, Final draft
Organised by Charlotte Cheetham and Sophie Demay.
Wednesday 3 December 2014, 7pm
Event starts at 7.15pm

With 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.

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# 5. Fragmentation of Time and Space
Jarosław Kozłowski 
Wednesday 19 November 2014, 7pm
Talk starts at 7.15pm

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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.


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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"
FormContent
Talk 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).

I start from the image of an end opens up FormContent’s most recent publication through the perspectives of those who have actively participated in its conception, production and dissemination. Structured as an informal conversation each one of the parties touches upon role played in the development and presentation of the book (respectively distribution, design, editing and content production). The conversation is then punctuated by a fifth person: a narrator, a figure that allows the content of the book to organically fold into the discussion. By bringing in actual bits of the publication, the narrator not only opens up few crucial passages of its narrative development. It orchestrates the positions of the speakers as much it does for the multitude of authorial voices that have crowded “It’s moving from I to It” over two years.

“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.

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Publication as Practice II
A short course on concepts of artists’ publications

Wednesday 22 October 2014, 7pm
# 3: Performance as Publishing
Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale
Talk starts at 7.15pm

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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 making

Ruth 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.

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# 2: A dead man speaks
James 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.


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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).

Publication as Practice: http://bokship.org/pap.html

NNext: Wednesday 22 October, 7pm 
Nicole Bachmann and Ruth Beale / Performance as Publishing

Publication as Practice: Series 1
January - July 2010

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# 1: THE ARCHIVE.
Guest speaker James Hoff

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# 2: PHOTOBOOKS.
Guest speaker Stephen Gill
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# 3: BOOKS ON BOOKS.
Guest speaker Arnaud Desjardin
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# 4: ART WRITING.
Guest speaker Fiona Banner

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# 5: THE COLOPHON
(Documents and Facts), REPRESENTATIONS OF COLLECTIVE PRODUCTION.
Guest speaker Will Holder

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# 6: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE MAGAZINE PAGE.
Guest speaker David Campany
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# 7: THE DEFINITION OF ARTISTIC ACTIVITY OCCURS, FIRST OF ALL, IN THE FIELD OF DISTRIBUTION.’
(Marcel Broodthaers.)
Guest speaker Eva Weinmayr

  
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# 8: ARTISTS’ NEWSPAPERS.
Guest speaker Eleanor Vonne Brown
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# 9: SLIMVOLUME / THE GALLERY AS PUBLISHER.
Guest speaker Andrew Hunt
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# 10: APPROPRIATION,
Guest speaker Michalis Pichler
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# 11: SOME THINGS I LIKE ABOUT MAKING BOOKS,
Guest speaker Sara MacKillop
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# 12: DRAWING FROM ARCHITECTURE,
Guest speaker Pablo Bronstein

 

# 10: APPROPRIATION,
Guest speaker Michalis Pichler

Statements on Appropriation (June 9th 2010, X Marks the Bökship, London)

1. Probably the wheel, just as the telephone, too, was invented more than once.

2. The words in a new book might be the author’s own words or someone else’s words. A writer of the new art writes very little or does not write at all.

3. there is as much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing, as there is in inventing.

4. Copying and Copyright have become such contentious issues because a gulf has sprung between post-Duchampian, postmodern artistic practice and a still Modernist-Romantic interpretation of copyright.

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6. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original

7. We cannot precisely say what is not appropriation. Impossible to draw a categorical line.

8. Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century

9. For the messieurs art-critics i will add, that of course it requires a far bigger mastery to cut out an artwork out of the artistically unshaped nature, than to construct one out of arbitrary material after ones own artistic law.

10. It appears to me, that the signature of the author, be it an artist, cineast or poet, seems to be the beginning of the system of lies, that all poets, all artists try to establish, to defend themselves, I do not know exactly against what.

11. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

12. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite.

13. Custom having once given the name of ” the ancients ” to our pre-Christian ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers.

14. if a book paraphrases one explicit historical or contemporary predecessor in title, style and/or content, this technique is what I would call a “greatest hit”

15. Maybe the belief that an appropriation is always a conscious strategic decision made by an author is just as naive as believing in an “original” author in the first place.

16. Certain images, objects, sounds, texts or thoughts would lie within the area of what is appropriation, if they are somewhat more explicit, sometimes strategic, sometimes indulging in borrowing, stealing, appropriating, inheriting, assimilating… being influenced, inspired, dependent, indebted, haunted, possessed, quoting, rewriting, reworking, refashioning… a re-vision, re-evaluation, variation, version, interpretation, imitation, proximation, supplement, increment, improvisation, prequel… pastiche, paraphrase, parody, piracy, forgery, homage, mimicry, travesty, shan-zhai, echo, allusion, intertextuality and karaoke.

17. any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.

18. It is nothing but literature!

Notes

On June 9th, 2010, six one-sentence statements originated by Michalis Pichler for the purpose of this piece were mixed, in a container, with eighteen one-sentence quotes taken from various other sources; each sentence was printed onto a separate piece of paper. Eighteen statements were drawn by “blind” selection and, in the exact order of their selection, joined together to form the “Statements on Appropriation,” for a presentation at X Marks the Bökship, London in the context of PUBLICATION AS PRACTICE / A short course on concepts of artists’ publications.

In the following bibliography the sources (…) may be found, although no specific statement is keyed to its actual author.

Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1963).

Marcel Broodthaers interviewed by Freddy de Vree (1971) in Broodthaers (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 93.

Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” Kontexts no. 6–7, 1975.

Giorgio de Chirico quoted in Allen Ruppersberg, The New Five-Foot Shelf of Books (Ljubljana: International Centre of Graphic Arts, 2003).

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967) trans. Ken Knabb (bopsecrets.org: 1992); see: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/8.htm, paragraph 206. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement,” in Les Lèvres Nues #8. See Ken Knabb, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” (2006).

T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1984), 37.

Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, in an interview with The Economist (2000).

Kenneth Goldsmith, “Being Boring,” in The Newpaper 2, (2008), 2. http://thenewpaper.co.uk

Herakleitos of Ephesos, quoted by Plato in Cratylus, fragment 41. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Poésies (1870), ed. and trans. Alexis Lykiard (London: Allison and Busby, 1978), 68.

Dear Images: Art, Copyright, and Culture, eds. Daniel McClean and Karsten Schubert (London: Ridinghouse, 2002).

Allen Ruppersberg, “Fifty helpful hints on the Art of the Everyday,” in The Secret of Life and Death (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 113.

Kurt Schwitters, “i (ein Manifest),” in Kurt Schwitters—Das Literarische Werk, vol. 5, ed. Friedhelm Lach (Köln: Du-Mont, 1973-1981), 125. Leo Steinberg (1978) in Schwartz Hillel, The Culture of the Copy (New York: Zone Books, 1996).

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, trans. Steven T. Byington, (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, 1907).

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See also: Douglas Huebler, Variable piece #20, 1970.

About the Author Michalis Pichler works and lives in Berlin. His most recent “greatest hit,” Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own), is an appropriation of Max Stirner’s 1844 manifesto of the same name. http://buypichler.com/einzige.html