Experimental Jetset – updates
Experimental Jetset updated their website with old stories, new works and early interviews.
In Order of Pages
The artist Veronika Spierenburg has regularly been visiting the Art Library in the Sitterwerk, St.Gallen, since 2010 where she became the “collector of the collection”. Individual pages of books from the Art Library, of which she has recorded a total of some 30,000, are her personal inventory. She then reduced in collaboration with the graphic designer Simone Koller this selection further to a specific compilation, published as an artist’s book, In Order of Pages, simultaneous to the exhibition Between Handle and Blade, which consists of individual interventions that examine the book as subject matter or refer to it in a broader sense.
The Book Affair
The Book Affair is a two day independent publishing fair held at the Library of San Lorenzo, Venice, May 30-31, 2013. The mission of The Book Affair is to act as a platform for engagement with and critical exploration of the artist’s book, and includes a series of conferences – with among others David Reinfurt & Stuart Bailey, and David Horvitz – and an exhibition organized with the idea of examining the production of books in contemporary art. The exhibition “Artist’s books. A parallel story”, curated by Giorgio Maffei, Italian curator and historian, uses the book media with the intention of offering a different way of conveying art history to the public.
Sainte-Victoire – Corporate Identity
Sainte-Victoire – Corporate Identity – May 15-31, 2013, Galerie de l’erg, Brussels – is the first exhibition project proposed by Musée des Erreurs, recently opened by the artist Pierre Leguillon, who’s always been concerned about building new tools dedicated to images and their dissemination.
The title of this exhibition refers to a statement in a letter Hamilton wrote in 1980: “My admiration for the work of Dieter Rams is intense and I have, for many years, been uniquely attracted towards his sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have to come to occupy a place in my heart and my conscioussness that the Mont Saint-Victoire did in Cezanne’s.”
The different identities gathered in Sainte-Victoire are presented in a way as to reflect into one another. Beyond singular identities, there is the idea of images from brands or corporate identity that is also at play. Between subjectivity, style and function, the designer also works at sculpting, shaping and interpreting the concept of the company he is working for. However, the shape this concept takes derives from inspiration mechanisms, cultural settings, reference searches, which in turn nourish different artistic practices and fields of creation. In view of that, the idea of « model », of « origins » ex nihilo explodes in favor of the ready-made: the creator is the one who chooses, finds, understands or subverts the way in which an object is first considered. Yet, these operations happen through a flux of multiple sources which the Musée des Erreurs is trying to crystallise…
Dialog der Schrift “auflesen”
Dialog der Schrift is a symposium and accompanying exhibition, May 23-25, 2013, Muthesius Academy of Art and Design, Kiel. Lecturers out of the areas of design, philosophy, literature and language will examine the act of reading from new perspectives.
With Ludovic Balland, typographer; Paulus M. Dreibholz, typographer und publisher; Oswald Egger, author, poet, philosopher; Dr. Theresa Georgen, art historian; Dr. Annette Gilbert, literary scholar; Hansje van Halem, graphic designer; Prof. Dr. Manfred Sommer, philosopher; Walter Pamminger, chemist, book designer, author, graphic-collector, theoretician.
Full Color – Karel Martens
Full Color is a visual essay of Karel Martens’ studio, with texts by David Senior and Karel Martens, published on the occassion of the exhibition KM, ginza graphic gallery, Tokyo, until May 30, 2013.
Les Plantes Fantômes
Les Plantes Fantômes is a weekly planner made by the French design group Viele Stuck. In addition to taking care of your organizational needs, Viele Stuck asked several artists to contribute responses to the topic “phantom plants.” The result is dynamic calendar system filled with original art and poetic text.
Art & Leisure and Art & Leisure – Dante Carlos
Art & Leisure and Art & Leisure presents work by graphic designer Dante Carlos, May 24 – July 11, 2013, London Centre for Book Arts. The exhibition will centre on an editioned book, displayed in the space, as well as available for purchase, and Dante Carlos will use the form and function of a calendar to create a casual polemic and a reorganization of days.
There’s more to life than books, but not much more
There’s more to life than books, but not much more, a research project initiated by castillo/corrales, is a public seminar curated by Benjamin Thorel, May 9 – May 11, 2013, Art Metropole, Toronto, with with Laure Giletti (castillo/corrales, Paraguay Press), Chris Lee (Scapegoat), François Lemieux (Le Merle), Patricia No (Publication Studio), Kajsa Ståhl (Åbäke), Maki Suzuki (Åbäke, Dent-De-Leone), Benjamin Thorel (castillo/corrales, Paraguay Press), and more. Including Lazy Susan, a rotating notation machine by Jp King.
There’s more to life than books, but not much more develops as the Toronto iteration of a parallel project, The Social Life of the Book, that investigates the undertakings of some contemporary artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. that concern the circulation of texts and ideas in a multitude of ways besides the grand gesture of releasing a brand new book. It examines notably the economics and pragmatics of publishing and distributing books today; the social space of reading; the practices of scanning, bootlegging, translating, quoting, re-editing existing material; the ways texts can open up to events, actions, gestures, and other unforeseeable incidents.
Portfolios: Common Name – Precise – Kent Fonn Skåre/Guten Guten
Common Name (Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier)
Precise (Luke Archer)
Project Projects: Test Fit
Commissioned as part of a series in which architects and designers are invited to explore their own interests as a way to instigate new thinking and practices within and beyond their professional disciplines, the exhibition Test Fit provided the graphic design firm
Project Projects the opportunity to use the permanent collection of the Art Institute of chicago as a means of investigating the curatorial process and issues related to exhibition design.
The studio was initially inspired by the mock-ups that curators often produce when preparing the layout of an exhibition. Driven also by the unusual characteristics of the Kurokawa Gallery, which is a well-trafficked, transitional space between the Modern Wing and other parts of the museum, Project Projects decided to develop a model of an exhibition that could serve as a framework for addressing issues of representation and reproductions in a playful, yet critical way.
The studio’s selection of works is based on the personal concerns of its partners, as expressed in the accompanying texts they have written. Although they began with an interest in European modernism, as imported to Chicago in the mid-twentieth century by such practitioners as László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the present collection of works speaks more broadly to Project Projects’ own interest in the history of design practice. Using a consistent format of printed facsimiles at a one-to-one scale, the studio encourages viewers to consider this exhibition as a mode of creative and cultural expression in and of itself.
The exhibition is on view until April 28, Art Institute of Chicago, and Project Projects (Prem Krishnamurthy, Adam Michaels, & Rob Giampietro) will give a lecture April 16, 6.30pm.
Karl Nawrot: Mind Walk #I
An array of drawings and prints reveal graphic designer and illustrator Karl Nawrot’s aesthetic sensibility as a curious union of the macabre and the childlike. These monochrome pictures are various: elementary graphics made with crude stencils and other drawing devices and the occasional distorted figure.
The exhibition Karl Nawrot: Mind Walk #I – April 19 – May 18, 2013, Eastside Projects, Birmingham – suggests narrative paths through this material, presenting Nawrot’s work as an expanded comic.
Veronika Spierenburg – THIS BOOK (1) & (2), In Order of Pages, Between Handle and Blade
THIS BOOK is an investigation series of Zurich based performance artist Veronika Spierenburg asking different people about their book projects by contacting them on Skype. The aim of the talks is to reflect current book production in the art field and to get a deeper understanding of motivations behind productions.
THIS BOOK (1), April 4, 7pm, Corner College, Zurich will have as guests Loraine Furter, Thijs Wassink, Matthew Vollgraff, Haemmerli, Ari Marcopoulos, Michael Günzburger. For THIS BOOK (2), May 3, 7pm, at Corner College, guests will be Banu Cennetoglu, Rafael Rozendaal, Manuel Raeder, Fabrice Stroun, San Seriffe.
Veronika Spierenburg has also regularly been visiting the Art Library in the Sitterwerk, in St.Gallen, for the day since 2010. She often works in a site-specific manner, as she also did in the Sitterwerk, where she became the “collector of the collection”. Individual pages of books from the Art Library, of which she has recorded a total of some 30,000, are her personal inventory. Then she reduced in collaboration with the Graphic Designer Simone Koller this selection further to a specific compilation, which is now—simultaneous to the exhibition—being published as an artist’s book: In Order of Pages, Kodoji Press, Baden.
The exhibition Between Handle and Blade – May 05 – June 23, 2013, Sitterwerk, St.Gallen – consists of individual interventions that examine the book as subject matter or refer to it in a broader sense. The focal point of the exhibition will be a three-meter-tall reading wheel made of metal. This object thus makes reference to the engineer Agostino Ramelli (1531–1600). Ramelli drew the plan for a mechanical reading aid around 1588, which was published along with 194 construction drawings in the book Le diverse et artificiose machine and is today considered to be a classic on the engineering of the sixteenth century. In the exhibition, the parallel reading and looking at individual book pages by means of the reading wheel becomes a direct reference to the publication by Veronika Spierenburg…
The End(s) of the Library: The Serving Library
The End(s) of the Library is a series of commissioned installations, lectures, performances, and workshops that consider the state of the library taking place at the Goethe-Institut New York Library. The contributors had addressed how previous library configurations have given way to new forms and revised values in the digital age, emphasizing the fact that the library is neither a monolithic system nor an abandoned utopia, but an ever-contested site demanding new readings of its organizational frameworks: an institution whose ends are without end.
The Serving Library is a cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing. Its house journal, Bulletins of The Serving Library, is produced as a composite printed/electronic publication released first online as a series of individual PDF “bulletins” from www.servinglibrary.org over a six-month period, then assembled, printed, and distributed twice a year in the United States and Europe. Each issue of the journal assembles around a loose theme.
As part of The End(s) of the Library, The Goethe-Institut New York Library is both sponsor and catalyst for the fifth issue, whose ostensible theme will be “Germany.” It will be compiled and edited during spring 2013 by The Serving Library’s founders, Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer, and David Reinfurt, and will be launched at the Goethe-Institut New York Library at the start of the summer. In advance of this publication, The Serving Library’s archive of artifacts, variously drawn from previous issues of the journal and its forerunner Dot Dot Dot, will be on view at the Goethe-Institut New York Library from April 1 to June 21, 2013.
Books &Foam
©Display: Terribly awesome photobooks, Paul Kooiker & Erik Kessels, Art Paper Editions
Books &Foam – March 28 to May 26, 2013, Foam, Amsterdam – will be placing a large selection of photography books from the Netherlands in the spotlight with special presentations to shed light on the design process, with installations, book signing sessions and a selection of recent international photo books.
?Among others, visitors will gain insight into the design process of six yet-to-be-published photo books. Showing the first ideas and sketches, email correspondence between photographer and designer, dummies and test prints provide an associative view into the design process… Dutch and international experts from the world of photography have also been invited to provide a ‘curated bookshelf’, containing their choices for the five best photo books of 2012…
Dossier Fernand Baudin
Fernand Baudin (1918-2005) was a belgian typographer, or “typographiste” as he liked to call himself. Teacher, author and lecturer, his extensive study focused on the history and teaching of writing and publishing.
Drawing from Fernand Baudin’s collection kept in the rare books and manuscripts section at the Université libre de Bruxelles, this Dossier Fernand Baudin – published for the fifth edition of the Fernand Baudin Prize, prepared by Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé, and launched on the occasion of PA/PER VIEW, at WIELS, Brussels, March 22, 7.30pm – gathers texts written or translated by Baudin, previously unreleased or published in various journals, or read in conferences, covering a period going from 1958 to 1998. Presented in a chronological order, this selection of texts conveys a panorama of his various activities, the ideas he developed and advocated, and gives a glimpse on the network of friendly and professional relationships Baudin established during his entire career.
Through their chronology and the history they depict, the facsimiles naturally offer an insight on the technical evolutions in the field of the graphic industry, a particular concern for Baudin. When taken as a whole, they allow highlighting Fernand Baudin’s position on the role of writing in the printing process, from the author’s draft to the final, published edition via all the intermediary stages. Specifically created for this publication, Fernand Baudin Bille and Fernand Baudin Feutre are digital interpretations of Baudin’s “ballpoint pen” and “felt pen” handwriting.
This Dossier Fernand Baudin refers to the Dossiers prepared by Fernand Baudin for the Association des Compagnons de Lure between 1969 and 1975. These Dossiers include documents and contributions selected by Baudin. Each opus is dedicated to a single subject or a single theme, such as writing or layout. In Dossier Layout (1972), Baudin gathers and annotates a selection of working documents sent by graphic designers and typographers. This method was employed in a separate section of the Dossier, to present the nine books awarded this year with a Fernand Baudin Prize.
Portfolios: Überknackig Bureau – Traven T. Croves – Kasper-Florio – EUROGROUPE
Überknackig Bureau (Ismaël Bennani, Orfée Grandhomme, Pacôme Beru)
Traven T. Croves (Andrew Lister & Matthew Stuart) (pic: with Maxime Harvey & Stefan Thorsteinsson)
Kasper-Florio (Larissa Kasper & Rosario Florio)
EUROGROUPE (Laure Giletti & Gregory Dapra)
Excursus IV: Primary Information
From artists’ books, magazines, and museum catalogues to opening announcements, advertisements, and event scores, printed matter has long been a dynamic element of art discourse and practice. But these materials, ephemeral by nature, have not always been preserved. Today, with our unprecedented access to information—virtual, downloadable, on-demand—there is a renewed interest in print’s material dimensions and the ways publication can be both a historical resource and a platform for art-making.
Excursus is a multifaceted initiative at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in which artists, designers, publishers, and other cultural producers whose work engages the archive and publication are invited to create a platform for more intimate programming, alongside an online residency.
For Excursus IV, Primary Information has been invited to delve into ICA archive and to reflect on its contemporary potential. Through an engagement with ICA’s own critical history of publishing, Primary Information’s project will unfold over the coming weeks with a series of events in the installation and interventions on the Excursus website…
Ray Johnson Estate
Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a seminal Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. Integrating texts and images drawn from a multiplicity of sources — from mass media to telephone conversations — Johnson’s innovativeness spread beyond the confines of the purely visual. He staged what Suzi Gablik described in Pop Art Redefined as perhaps the “first informal happening” and moved into mail art, artist books, graphic design, and sculpture, working in all modes simultaneously. Johnson not only operated in what Rauschenberg famously called “the gap between art and life,” but he also erased the distinction between them. His entire being – a reflection of his obsessively creative mind – was actually one continuous “work of art.” His works reflect his encyclopedic erudition, his promiscuous range of interests, and an uncanny proto-Google ability to discover connections between a myriad of images, facts and people…
MAAD
The Master in Art Direction (MAAD) is part of ECAL/Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne in Switzerland. The programme focuses on contemporary editorial practices, it encourages students to create, commission, select and arrange content.
The MAAD motivates and puts emphasis on the work of “editing”: creating a sequence, editing and laying out content, via printed and/or virtual matter. What are the components of an identity of a label, a magazine, a website or an exhibition catalog?
The programme gives the opportunity for students to participate in a diverse range of experiences, from lectures, workshops to semester projects, in which they work with some of the best international experts. The two year programme ends with a master thesis and a practical project. The MAAD calls for curious, dynamic and ambitious students who are eager to explore the fields of photography, graphic design and type design. The online registration is open until 3 May 2013.