Experimental Jetset updated their website with old stories, new works and early interviews.

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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

The image of the “blue planet”, a new perspective of the earth as seen from the outside, is one of the most popular images in history. This image, more than any other, has shaped the popular notion of the age of the “whole world” and globalization, from a worldwide society linked by the Internet to the current debate on the climate. Using artworks and materials from cultural history, the exhibition will critically explore the application of ecological-systemic concepts to society, politics, and aesthetics.

The exhibition The Whole Earth – until July 1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin – is one of the first to explore the history of the photograph of the “blue planet”, and reflects in a comprehensive way the power of the Whole Earth Catalog…

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.

Wandering is an annual journal discussing topics of urbanity and nature. The contributors are asked to engage in a conversation about wandering and/or hiking. Usually they invite other contributors and open up the range of both content and discourse. They are left free to interpret the subject matter in any form. Most of them hand in materials such as audio recordings, text files or images, which then are edited and put in sequence by the editorial team of Wandering.

Wandering No.2 contributors are Angie Keefer, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Hans Christian Dany, Ariane Müller, Marvin Taylor, Dennis Cooper, Jeanne Graff, Jorge And Angel Abreu, Megan Rooney, Bonny Poon, Clara Meister, Maria Loboda, Nikola Dietrich, Axel John Wieder, Gretchen Faust, Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Travis Boyer, George Rippon, Chelsea Cup, Buck Ellison, Dena Yago, Anina Trösch, Max Brand, Pippin Wigglesworth, Bea Schlingelhoff, Tobias Madison, Harald Lenzer, Barbi Markovic, Martin Ebner, Robin Watkins, Marco Bruzzone, Laura Preston, Aurélia Defrance, Phillip Zach, Daniel Cremer, Tiril Hasselknippe, Gertrud Sandqvist, Stewart Uoo, Ken Okiishi, Ei Arakawa, Beatrix Ruf, Helen Marten, Polly Staple, Max Pitegoff, Calla Henkel, Grayson Revoir, Gerry Bibby, Kerstin Cmelka, Ann Cotten, Colin Whitaker, Taocheng Wang, Vivian Ziherl, Yuri Manabe, Karl Holmqvist, Nick Mauss, Kris Lemsalu, Amy Egerdeen, Andrew Smith, Eleonore Meier, Todd Banhazl, Daniel Raj Koobir, Rafael Palacio Illingworth, Ilja Karilampi, André Cherigui, Aude Pariset, Jon Rafman, Martin Kohout, Keren Cytter, Caroline Busta, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Jordan Lord, Anicka Yi, Ruairiadh O’connell, Eric Sidner, Max Brand, Constantin Und Leopold Thun, Michelle Byrd, Adrian Williams, Suzie Zak, Amy Ball, Neal Moignard, Justin Apperley, John Beeson, Elvia Wilk, Erika Landström, Felix Riemann, Fabrice Stroun, Heike-Karin Föll, Hannah Weinberger.
Launch April 25, 2013, 7pm, Motto, Berlin.

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.

Linus Bill & Adrien Horni

“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, 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.

Common Name (Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier)

Precise (Luke Archer)

Kent Fonn Skåre / Guten Guten

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…