Street Value: Shopping, Planning and Politics at Fulton Mall. Rosten Woo. Meredith TenHoor. Damon Rich.

Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall is one of the most bustling public spaces in New York City. A colossus of commerce, itwelcomes over one hundred thousand shoppers daily and ranks among the most profitable commercial real estate in the entire country, and is also home to some of the city’s most recognized institutions, including cheesecake mecca Junior’s, that have been immortalized in song, film, and culture. Despite its historic link to Brooklyn’s past and its financial success as a shopping district, Fulton Street is rarely celebrated in New York. The street’s hand-painted signs, customized jewelry, rare sneakers, mega-church, and vendors offer a special sampling of noncorporate commerce, but many consider its sensorial and physical density a sign of blight. Misunderstandings about race, class, and profitability have led Fulton Street to be characterized as run-down, dangerous, or underutilized, and as a result it has been subject to nearly continuous renovation. Recently rezoned and becoming increasingly attractive to national chain stores, Fulton Street is once again poised for big changes.

Street Value is a challenge to creatively rethink the planning and urban design of Fulton Street and other urban shopping districts. Street Value explores the mall’s historical and contemporary conditions through original essays, oral histories, new and archival photographs, historic documents, and interviews with key planners, developers, city officials, historians, and activists from the 1960s to the present. Street Value probes the ideology of redevelopment and demonstrates how commercial, governmental, and activist forces have coalesced to produce one of Brooklyn’s most legendary public spaces.

Published by Inventory Books
Language: English
208 pages

D 16.50€

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Pablo Bronstein: Pissoir. Kunsthal Charlottenborg

This book is published on the occasion of Pablo Bronstein: Pissoir, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in 2011, curated by Mark Sladen. It includes a foreword by Mark Sladen, essays by Keith Miller (The Poetics of Waste/Affaldets poetik) and Dominique Laporte (History of Shit/Lortets Historie), images of Pablo Bronstein’s work, and an appendix with schematic plans by Melissa Appleton.

96 pages
Danish / English
Editing by Mark Sladen and Kristine Schiess Hojmose
Design by Sara De Bondt studio

D 8€

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Bidoun #25: Summer 2011

Featuring contributions from Magdi Mostafa, William Wells, Mahmoud Othman, Abdel-Halim Qandil, Egyptian Museum, Doa Aly, Nawal El Saadawi, Ganzeer, The Seif Family, Abdel-Moneim Abou El Fotouh, Sanaa Seif & Hanin Tarek, Hassan Gamal, Omar Nagati, Shahira Amin, Mohamed Abdullatif, Albert Cossery, Mohamed Hamdy Mustafa, Mido Sas, Will Raynolds, Esraa Abdel Fattah, Ramy Raoof, Amina Abaza, Abdallah al Alfy, Marie Antoinette Castelli, Mona Khalil, Heather Nagy, Susie Nassar, Zahara, Jarett Kobek, Jenna Krajeski, Sophia Al-Maria, Sherine Amr, Perry Moataz, Nancy Mounir

D €11.20

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The Readymades. John Holten. Broken Dimanche Press

John Holten’s debut novel The Readymades uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts. The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga.

The action begins during October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić. Bojić tells John about the manuscript he is writing: the history of the LGB Group – an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective that arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade, when Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, started to produce art in order to escape the hysterical nationalism all around them.

Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel. Starting out as an academic attempt to document the LGB Group, the sober attitude of the art-historical account soon collapses, and the narrative gradually turns into a disclosing life-story of violence and existential decay. As the manuscript moves closer to the horrific truths of Bojić’s own war experiences, the testimony gradually fails, becomes full of mute lacunas in order to finally reach the ineffable climax of the testimony: the aphasia of trauma, the dumbness of loss, and the ultimate silence of Bojić’s own death.

By juxtaposing the experience of war, the urge for artistic creation and the act of narrating the past, The Readymades launches a double strategy in which the artistic gesture becomes an attempt to overcome war, while simultaneously forced to partake in it. Because art (at least since the original Dada gesture) has sought its own raison d’être in an ongoing dialectic of defiance, transgression and negation of the status quo, it must inevitably find its own dynamic intrinsically linked to acts of violence. With a unique book design, this mise-en-abyme presents a book-within-a-book that takes the reader on a journey to the darker corners of contemporary European history. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević, Holten has produced a catalogue of LGB artworks and memorabilia, presented both in the book and in exhibition-spaces throughout Europe this coming autumn. In other words: The Readymades is not just a novel, but also an on-going ‘fictitious event’, pushing against any sedate conception of what the literary novel can achieve today, at once not afraid of today’s ‘reality hunger’, nor the legacy of postmodernism.

340 pp., 32 b&w ill.
18.5 x 13 cm
ISBN: 978-3-00-032627-1

D 18€

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The Ramallah Lecture – Jakob Jakobsen – Nebula

This book is based on a blog written by the visual artist and political activist Jakob Jakobsen during a six-week stay in Ramallah and the West Bank.

“In the summer of 2008 I visited Palestine. ArtSchool Palestine had invited me over for the purpose of meeting and working with local artists and other people in the occupied territories. As the theme of my visit was relatively open, my Palestinian host explained that my stay here could be understood as a type of artistic research. That suited me fine as I had worked with activist investigations and artistic research in The Copenhagen Free University for almost six years.

I’ve followed the situation in Palestine for many years and the Palestinian cause has persistently challenged my political sense of justice. Since September 11th 2001 the conflict has been spun more and more into the War against Terror and life for the Palestinians appears to have become even more troublesome. But what do you really know as an outsider and a media consumer in the West? In terms of the struggles over territory that go on in and around this small piece of land some call Palestine, what actually shapes the scenery that is produced in the public sphere? My stay in Palestine was an opportunity to get closer to the everyday conditions in the occupied territories, although I was constantly asking myself about my own role as an artist and a political person in this situation of conflict.” – From the introduction of ‘The Ramallah Lecture’

Jakob Jakobsen is an artist, organizer and activist. He ran the Copenhagen Free University, co-founded the artist run TV-station tvtv and has participated in exhibitions and projects all over the world. He has been visiting and working in Palestine at several occasions.

D 14€

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Stefan Kiełsznia: Ulica Nowa 3 – Ulrike Grossarth (Ed.) – Spector Books

This photography book is a fairly comprehensive collection of street photos that Stefan Kiełsznia took of the Jewish quarter of Lublin in the mid-1930s. Developed in cooperation with the Brama Grodzka – Teatr NN cultural centre in Lublin, the volume offers a survey of the photographic stock that has now been digitized as the Stefan Kiełsznia Digital Archive and will be accessible along with additional material at Teatr NN.

This publication was produced upon the initiative of its editor Ulrike Grossarth in the framework of the exhibtion ‘Fabrics from Lublin. Ulrike Grossarth: Contemporary Art and Stefan Kiełsznia: Historical Street Photography from Lublin’ at Kunsthaus Dresden from 11 June, 2010 to 19 September, 2010.

A cooperative project of Kunsthaus Dresden, Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst und Kunstfonds Sachsen / Dresden State Art Collections, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

D 35€

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Expect Anything Fear Nothing, The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, Mikkel Bolt & Jakob Jakobsen

This volume is the first English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and critiquing the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars and writers. While previous publications about the Situationist movement almost exclusively have focused on the contribution of the French section and in particular on the role of the Guy Debord this book aims to shed light on the activities of the Situationists active in places like Denmark, Sweden and Holland. The themes and stories chronicled include: The anarchist undertakings of the Drakabygget movement led by the rebel artists Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen, the exhibition by the Situationist International “Destruction of RSG-6” in 1963 in Odense organised by the painter J.V. Martin in collaboration with Guy Debord, the journal The Situationist Times edited by Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn’s political critique of natural science and the films of the Drakabygget movement.

Contributors: Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home, Jakob Jakobsen.

The book was published in association with Autonomedia, New York.
288 pages + inserts
2011

D 25€
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Printed Matter / Drukwerk, Karel Martens with Jaap van Triest and Robin Kinross

Revised and extended, third edition, 50 years of work.
Published by Hyphen Press

The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. Martens can be placed in the tradition of Dutch modernism – in the line of figures such as Piet Zwart, H.N. Werkman, Willem Sandberg. Yet he maintains some distance from the main developments of our time: from both the practices of routinized modernism and of the facile reactions against this. His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the now 50 years of his practice, Martens has been prolific as a designer of books. He has also made contributions in a wide range of design commissions, including stamps, coins, signs on buildings. Intimately connected with this design work has been his practice as an artist. This started with geometric and kinetic constructions, and was later developed in work with the very material of paper; more recently he has been making relief prints from found industrial artefacts. This book looks for new ways to show and discuss the work of a designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterizes the work it presents.

Out Of Print

N+1 #9 BAD MONEY.

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION:

THE EDITORS – The Intellectual Situation
Web 2.0 has been revelatory in lots of ways—user-generated naked photos, for one—but the torrent of writing from ordinary folks has certainly been one of the most transfixing.

THE EDITORS – Internet as Social Movement
“The Russian Revolution,” Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto once said, “was like a schoolyard game compared to the change that’s been driven by the digital revolution.”

THE EDITORS – Addled
Today we Google ourselves to see what the world knows about us; tomorrow we’ll just watch the ads. The outlines of this can already be discerned in Gmail’s data mining of your emails.

THE EDITORS – Cave Painting
For the best writers on video games, games are not art and don’t need to be. Games are, by design, what Plato believed epic poetry to be: ethics manuals for inhabitants of the cave.

POLITICS:

BENJAMIN KUNKEL – Full Employment
Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least.

NARCOTERROR IN MEXICO:

ANONYMOUS – Under the Cartels
In the late ’90s, when I moved to the city of Monterrey, people made jokes about my origins: surely my father carried a gun, surely I was coarse and crude—I was from a border town.

JUAN VILLORO – The Red Carpet
It’s possible to distinguish the ‘signatures’ of the different cartels: some decapitate their victims, others cut out their tongues, others leave the dead in the trunks of cars.

ESSAYS:

EMILY WITT – Miami Party Boom
We were led to an elevator past tanks filled with pulsing jellyfish. The elevator went down to the basement area, and when the door slid open an impossibly tall drag queen greeted us.

ELIF BATUMAN – Summer in Samarkand, Part II
If there is one thing I heard a thousand times in Samarkand, it was how they have the greatest bread in Uzbekistan because of their amazingly clean water and air.

MARK GREIF – Octomom, One Year Later
The octuplets were supposed to be a distraction; instead, the camera teams camped on Nadya Suleman’s lawn got a living metaphor for the crisis.

FICTION:

SAM LIPSYTE – The Blue Newt Faction
The hand-scrawled sign over the door to the Happy Salamander preschool read: Closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts. Please call 917 887 8884 for further information.

THOMAS LEVERITT – The Exchange Rate Between Lust and Money
Oh, the girls have panic buttons all right, and if one of them gets pushed it won’t be cops who’ll come running. That falls under “security,” provided by the landlord.

REVIEWS:

MARK MCGURL – Zombie Renaissance
Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades. The publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that.

CARLENE BAUER – Why Don’t You?
Because she wants to argue that having sex doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, Valenti insists on divorcing sex from emotional and ethical consequences altogether.

MOLLY YOUNG – Fake Food Triptych
One suspects a preexisting need to make food more interesting than it is, more beautiful, more strange—an impulse more fundamental than a flavor-tripping party.

D 17€
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EZKIOZALEAK: A photographic account of the followers of the Ezkioga Apparitions edited by Julia Montilla

A photographic collection accompanied by a pair of analytical texts about the phenomenon documenting the apparitions that took place in Ezkioga in 1931.

Texts in Spanish and English

D 12€
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