Book presentation:
»LIGHT IS A KIND OF RHYTHM« BY ALENA WILLIAMS

Time travel: 1929, 2009. An interval of approximately 80 years exists between the films of the 1920s and those of the present moment that are discussed in this book. LIGHT IS A KIND OF RHYTHM began as a series of screenings at the Institut im Glaspavillon der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, which was lead by Heike Föll with Philipp Ekardt, Matt Saunders, Jan Kedves, and Katarina Burin. It traces the relationship of light to the moving image from an early moment in the history of film – seen in the work of Viking Eggeling, László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Hans Richter, and Ralph Steiner – to that of the present day. The featured contemporary artists – Jan Hammer, Jutta Koether, Andreas Wutz, Die Tödliche Doris, and Matthias Müller – return to an earlier aesthetic engagement with cinema; in their films, videos and digital slides, the moving image offers an alternative mode for thinking through abstraction. Static paintings, collages, and walls are reconstituted as animate, reflective objects, while transient light effects are extracted from life and assigned entirely new meanings.

Keyed to a wider international audience with interests in critical theory, film/media studies, and contemporary art, LIGHT IS A KIND OF RHYTHM includes an essay setting out a theoretical background for the analysis of the interrelation of cinema and aesthetic reception, as well as three new English translations of seminal articles by the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and interviews with each of the contemporary artists.

Book design by Schroeter und Berger and Christian Werner
Published by merz&solitude, Stuttgart, December 2009

http://www.merzundsolitude.de/projektiv/light-is-a-kind-of-rhythm
http://millecompany.com/light-rhythm/

On sale among others at Motto, Berlin; Pro qm Berlin; bbooks, Berlin; Printed Matter, New York; and at selected events.

EVENING PROGRAM
Readings and the following Film Projections:

* Ralph Steiner H2O, 1929, 35 mm, b/w, silent, 9 minutes
* Jutta Koether Metalist Moment, 2006/2007, digital slide show, 7.30 minutes, loop
*Conservation on Kracauer, Expressionism, and Living Time with Wolfgang Müller: Die Tödliche Doris Die Gesamtheit allen Lebens und alles Darüberhinausgehende (The Sum of All Life and Everything Beyond), 1987 Super-8, 1.83 – 2.44 seconds (variable)

Total run time: 30 minutes

AUTHOR
Alena Williams is an art historian and curator who lives in Berlin. She is currently completing her dissertation »Movement in Vision: Cinema, Aesthetics, and Modern German Culture, 1915–1930« at Columbia University in New York, and is a fellow in the research group »Media of History« at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Previously, she was a fellow within the art, science & business program at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. Her upcoming traveling exhibition on the land art, films, video, and site-specific installations of the American artist Nancy Holt will open at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia in Fall 2010.

+ Other Akademie Schloss Solitude publications will also be on display

Motto Storefront @ Artspeak, Vancouver.

May 15 – July 22, 2010

Organized by Artspeak and Fillip, with Motto.

Upcoming Events
May 15: Opening and talk by Alexis Zavialoff at 2pm
May 22: Talk by Stuart Bailey at 2pm
May 29: Talk by Rob Giampietro at 2pm

233 Carrall Street
V6B 2J2 Canada
Vancouver, BC
info@artspeak.ca

Tel. 604.688.0051
Tuesday – Saturday, 12-5pm
Admission is free

http://artspeak.ca/
http://fillip.ca/
http://nieves.ch/
http://www.shopstandingup.us/

On the Self-Reflexive Page
An essay by Louis Lühti about book pages.

Priè d’insérer (by Louis Lüthi) – The subject of this book is the page, and the pages reproduced in it are taken from works of literature (or, in some cases, art books that derive specifically from literature). I have chosen to present them thematically, resulting in a typology of self-reflexive pages: Black Pages, Blank Pages, Drawing Pages, Photography Pages, Text Pages, Number Pages, and Punctuation Pages. The repetition this entails is somewhat deceptive (for a start, the reader will observe the slight but not insignificant differences between the visual and verbal presentations); in literature, such devises are often used as a counterpoint to what has preceded or what will follow in the narrative. And the same means may evidently be used to different ends. For these reasons, and because the book attempts only to trace an isolated theme through numerous and often otherwise unrelated works, the reader is in all instances referred to the original publications, which are listed in the bibliography.

160 pp softcover
13 x 20 cm
ISBN 978 90 77459 47 8
€ 15,-

Gastronomica Issue 10.2 is now in stock.

D 16€

Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com
Available for distribution.

Thursday, April 29, 2010, 6.30pm @ Motto Berlin.

Anfang gut, alles gut. Beginning good. All good.
Presentation of the first Fanzine with a short introduction, sound recordings.

Actualization of „Pobeda nad solncem“ (Victory over the Sun) (1913) with contributions by Thomas Baldischwyler, Mareike Bernien & Kerstin Schroedinger, Nine Budde, Ruth May, Avigail Moss, Peter Wächtler, Susanne M. Winterling

The futurist opera “Victory over the Sun”, which was written and staged in 1913 in Petersburg wanted to “establish a collective work on the basis of word, painting and music”. Those are the words of the opera’s authors, the painter Kasimir Malewitsch, the musician Michail Matjuschin and the poets Alexeij Krutschenych and Welimir Chlebnikov, who wanted to create an ‚antiharmonious’ work – against the spirit of their times.
In Beginning good. All good, an actualization of „Pobeda nad solncem“ (Victory over the Sun), will translate this programmatic on the basis of the historical text and documentation of its stagings and reception into the present. The project brings together about 40 artists, musicians, theoreticians and people from other disciplines in order realize the exhibition project in May 2011 – one year after the publishing of this issue. With the project we would like to dismantle the opera’s self-enclose form into those artistic fragments and traces, which seem to correspond with the present, to than reconstruct them as actualized reformulations. To make the pre-production visible, we will produce a series of three subsequent fanzines for may 2010, october 2010 and january 2011.

The project is initiated by Nina Köller and Kerstin Stakemeier.

0-100 editions

0-100 autumn 09.
editions of 100
D 10€

Available for distribution

Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com

Sunday Fair

Motto is pleased to join the Sunday Fair with a selection of publications on display.

PA/PER VIEW Art Book Fair

Foam – international photography magazine
PEEPING issue spring 2010/ # 22

published by Foam Amsterdam

218 pages
texts in english

D 20€

Buy: orders@mottodistribution.com