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.
Design, L’anthologie
Design, l’anthologie, d’Alexandra Midal, est une anthologie consacrée à l’histoire et la théorie du design en langue française, et s’adresse à tous ceux qui se demandent – puisque “tout est aujourd’hui affaire de design” – ce que cette discipline recouvre, quels débats et problématiques elle soulève et dans quels flux elle s’inscrit. Même si des thèmes tels que l’industrie, la standardisation, la démocratie, le style, les matériaux ou les relations entre art et design, sont récurrents et permettraient d’articuler une lecture thématique de l’histoire, la chronologie a été privilégiée. Elle permet de suivre les inflexions du design au gré des mouvements de l’histoire et du contexte avec lequel il dialogue.
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.
The Book Society #01 – Book Works, Artist Editor Publisher
The Book Society is a project devoted to the most experimental forms of production in publishing, in its multiple manifestations, from catalogues to art books and magazines, is a space in which not only is something conveyed, but contents are developed and created.
The Book Society involves creating a reading room in the Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce, Genova, the first one being dedicated to Book Works, which presents a selection of their artists’ publications, alongside a short film about Book Works, posters by Jonathan Monk, and other printed matter drawn from their recent touring project Again, A Time Machine.
May 9, 2013, from 12.00pm, Book Works organizes a day of events with among others, at 6pm, a talk about the overlapping roles of Artist/Editor/Publisher with Jane Rolo, Paul Sammut and Francesco Pedraglio (artist, curator and editor).
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.
Architektur für Kinder
The Playground Project, curated by Gabriela Burkhalter, is a richly illustrated exhibition exploring the history of postwar playground design and highlighting important examples of playgrounds from the 20th century. The survey focuses on the years between 1940 and 1980 as the most fruitful era in playground design and introduces outstanding achievements from Europe, the US, and Japan. More than 130 photographs, prints, plans, models, and books, along with eleven films and slideshows, will illustrate the exciting and inspiring history of playgrounds, from June 10, 2013, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Two in the Wave – Cahier 2 – CC
The exhibition Two in the Wave, with works by with Thomas Jenkins and Batia Suter – until May 25, PrintRoom, Rotterdam – presents two works concerned with the artistic treatment of printed–matter and the book in light of our surrounding seas, oceans and the connotations these seemingly boundless expanses put forward. As advanced by the two works, there is a sensible retreat from the documentary image to its recovery in the element of the fictional.
The exhibition is accompanied by a number of artist publications and bookworks sharing a similar resonance and topicality, employed to showcase different perspectives and entries on the artistic engagement with bound volumes and the aquatic. In addition, the publication Cahier 2 – CC features a selected correspondence between Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, curator of the exhibition, and Thomas Jenkins, revolving around the work The Seas and Oceans of The World.
Please Come to the Show, Part I (1960–1980)
Since its beginnings, the MoMA Library has housed several collections of artists’ files and subject files, which contain assorted printed ephemera like announcement cards, press clippings, posters, and flyers. These materials illustrate an elaborate range of artistic activities and can contain unique elements from an artist’s practice.
This two-part exhibition Please Come to the Show – Part I (1960–1980), May 8 – July 15, 2013, MoMA, New York – gathers a sample of innovative printed invitations, small posters, and flyers from the early 1960s to the present. The selection traces ways in which artists, designers, and galleries have used invitation cards and other printed announcements as a part of the staging of conceptual works, installations, performances, and other time-based events and screenings. This diverse grouping of ephemera explores the various, surprising ways that we have been invited to experience art.
Nicholas Gottlund – MAKE READY
“I come from a family of printers. If I consider myself a printer, that would make me the sixth generation printer in my family. I worked in their printing plant for a few years. In doing the make-ready or set up of any task, whether it be printing, folding or binding there is a certain amount of waste; bad impressions, misalignment, not enough bleed, roller marks–all sorts of imperfections. To account for this is part of the job and extras are made–Overs.
This concept of Overs is something that I carry into my own book making. Even when making a unique or one off, I will make two copies; an A and a B. That way I’m covered in case something goes awry. Often though, things go smoothly and I’m left with all my Overs. This body of work draws on these aspects of the printing process to highlight a level of detail contained in the make-ready, the edition and the Overs. It is how these separate yet linked objects relate to one another when viewed in the same space that demonstrates their making most clearly.
For each book on display, there is a companion piece. The works in this exhibition -
MAKE READY – As & Bs, A Series of Pairs, April 18 – May 1, 2013, KARMA, New York – both extrapolate upon the bound book as well as transform their materials by means of folding, cutting, exposing and overprinting–all methods that are routinely used in the production of the book. Through the manipulation of the method, the material, the tool and the reference, attention is brought back to the detail. It is not the detail–ing as in the addition of embellishment or of a final once over, but the inherent palpable quality of process made evident.” Nicholas Gottlund
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)
Thick As A Brick
Thick As A Brick presents a selection of more than 100 catalogues, books, art editions and zines published by Mousse and shown within three brick structures conceived by Kuehn Malvezzi and produced by the Danish company Petersen Tegl. On view until April 14, Giò Marconi, Milan.
At the end of the last century, it was thought the new millennium would be represented in design and architecture by incorporeal values such as lightness, transparency, and evanescence, inspired by the fluidity of communication as well as the intangible nature of finance. The world seemed intent on becoming liquid. Instead, in the last few years everything has changed.
The economic crisis has profoundly modified our society and hence transformed the approach to architecture and culture at large: the world is seeking a new firmness, a solidity that both architecture and design (as well as art, fashion, and cuisine – some of the most interesting expressions of human culture) are making the center of their practice. Human beings are looking for reliable new touchstones, getting back to basics, to find that stability in which it seems necessary to root (or maybe better to re-root) our society. Traditions and history serve as a point of departure to grow and develop, better than before, and concreteness is the new manifesto for contemporary cultures in Western and even in the Eastern world.
Thick As A Brick goes back to simple, manual practices and ancestral materials – such as the brick used here as a narrative device – and to ancient, basic ideas in order to rediscover their potential: projected into the future, such renewed values serve as a groundwork to literally build a new encyclopedia of balance, strength, and positivity. In this project, these basic materials are replaced by books, iconic tools for spreading knowledge down through the centuries…
The Images of Architects
Valerio Olgiati asked architects to send him important images that show the basis of their work. Images that are in their head when they think. Images that show the origin of their architecture.
In The Images of Architects, available in may, you can find find 44 individual “musées imaginaires”. The most unique architects living today each present up to 10 images to explain the autobiographical roots of their oeuvre. The images are explanations, metaphors, foundations, memories and intentions. They are poetic and philosophical avowals. They reveal a personal perspective on thoughts. They show the roots of architecture and expectations concerning projects. Conscious and unconscious.
This book has the format of a reader. As little as possible is said. The images are small, legible and interpretable as icons. As individual collections, they present a personal view of an individual world, while as a whole they provide a universal view of the perceptible origin of contemporary architecture.
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…
coeur, point et ligne sur plan
© Solveig Robbe
Le travail de Céline Duval, qui signe sous le nom d’artiste documentation céline duval, se nourrit souvent de photographies d’amateurs. Son regard collecte, rejette ou garde, classe et hiérarchise, met en relation puis élabore un scénario en images. Le livre figure parmi ses formes d’expression privilégiées.
En 2011, invitée par Didier Schulmann, conservateur à la Bibliothèque Kandinsky – Musée national d’art moderne Centre Pompidou, elle découvre les photographies familiales de Vassily Kandinsky, léguées en 1981 par la veuve du peintre, Nina.
Kandinsky a joué un rôle important dans la formation du regard de Céline Duval : très vite, cette dernière imagine à partir de ces archives photographiques une version toute personnelle de Point et ligne sur plan, l’ouvrage théorique du peintre qu’elle préfère.
En janvier 2013, la publication “cœur, point et ligne sur plan” voit le jour. Entre l’univers pictural de Kandinsky et les photographies intimistes qu’elle a sélectionnées pour faire ce livre, Céline Duval organise un flux d’analogies formelles, du tableau à la photographie, de la vie sociale à la vision intérieure…
Lancement du livre le 6 avril 2013, dès 17h, Florence Loewy Books by artists, Paris.
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…