Journal of Aesthetics & Protest @ Motto Vancouver
Saturday, May 26, 2012
from 8pm

Art in the Service of Revolution (or vice versa, or neither) featuring readings from the new issue by: Jaleh Mansoor, Ron Sakolsky, and Gabriel Saloman.

Walk, with us, along the lines between aesthetic invention and revolution. Listen as three outstanding writer/historian/thinkers present, through the situations
war, discrimination, oppression, environmental destruction the blossoming of human creativity to confront that BS (or not) Gay Liberation, Palestine, Earth First, Surrealism, IWW, Radical Faeries,Pasolini and many more.

About the Writers:
Jaleh Mansoor completed her PhD at Columbia University in 2007. She has taught at SUNY Purchase, Barnard College, Columbia University, and Ohio University before coming to the University of British Columbia. Having worked on materialist abstraction in the context of Marshall Plan Italy, she is interested in complicating the discourse on abstraction, totality, universality, labor, and mere life in contemporaneity. Her areas of teaching and research include modernism, critical theory, historiography, and critical curatorial studies. She works as a critic for Artforum and is a frequent contributor to October, Texte Zur Kunst, and, more recently, The Journal of Aethestics and Protest. Mansoor wishes to occupy and dilate the relationship (and tension) between activism and scholarship.

Ron Sakolsky is a radical writer/activist whose twenty-first century books are: Surrealist Subversions ( Autonomedia, 2002 ); Creating Anarchy (Fifth Estate, 2005); Swift Winds (Eberhardt, 2009 ). Most recently, along with Andrea Langlois and Marian van der Zon, he co-edited, Islands of Resistance:Pirate Radio in Canada ( New Star, 2010). He lives on Denman Island in British Columbia where he combines writing prose, poetry and fiction with pirate radio broadcasting, deejaying community dances, creating surrealist-inspired sound collages with a trio known as Sonarchy, pitching in at a potato co-op, and involving himself in a direct action campaign against a proposed coal mine on nearby Vancouver Island.

Gabriel Mindel Saloman -is an American born artist living and working in Vancouver, BC. As a musician he has spent nearly a decade touring internationally and has released well over 50 recordings as a part of the experimental music group Yellow Swans. Simultaneously he has collaborated in a variety of relational artworks, most notably with Red76. Recent projects include the Lower Mainland Painting Co. – a group of artists researching and engaging in questions of Art, Labour and Art Labourers; and The STAG – a gallery run out of the Vancouver home of he and his partner Aja Rose Bond. Saloman is currently pursuing his MFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts where he is seeking to explicitly merge the trajectories of his work in Sound and Social Practices, demonstrating that the resistant potential of noise can be brought to a critical state of praxis.

About the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest is a Los Angeles and Leipzig Germany based collective. Our magazine spills out at the discursive juncture of fine art, media theory and activism. We sculpt projects that challenge hegemony’s representations (of knowledge, art, activism) or which spark situations of community-based change or creation. We work collaboratively with individuals and collectives on several continents. We are interested in a fair, just, equitable, sustainable and fun world.

CURA. (with) MOTTO temporary bookshop.

Programme:

Friday, May 25 – 5pm

5 PM – Talk with Cornelia Lauf and David Platzker

Sex: On Books

Since the beginning of time, the beginning of art, artwork has taken the form of predictable motifs: Hunting, Religion, Scenic Narrative, Portraiture, Abstraction / Pattern, and Sex.

For eons academics, collectors, clergy and the general public have engaged in dialogues about all these topics in art — except for sex, which remains taboo in public discourse yet vital to the survival of all species, especially man (and woman). Artists have never been shy about making books about sex or sexuality and while these books are often “read” in private, we want to open a public discussion on the topic by looking about some publications produced since the advent of the contemporary period arising with Marcel Duchamp and climaxing with Richard Prince.

Sunday, May 27

5 PM – Book launch

Luca Bertolo – Paintings and (cura.books)

with Chris Sharp, Davide Ferri

6.30 PM – Artist’s books’ launch rotation

Marco Raparelli – Permafrost

Luca Trevisani – The art of folding for young and old.

http://www.romacontemporary.it/
http://www.curamagazine.com/

An Individual Note @ Motto Melbourne

On the occasion of its opening, Motto Melbourne presents An Individual Note – a series of performances, discussions and lectures highlighting the role of sound, and notions regarding its creation, manipulation, appropriation and representation, within the context of contemporary practice. This project takes as its reference point the book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, by BBC Radiophonic Workshop founder Daphne Oram. The series aims to create an informal discourse regarding the ways in which the theoretical aspects of electronic music production might relate to practice, across a range of contemporary disciplines and genres. The series will be complemented by the exhibition of a growing archive that documents these discussions and performances.

Including contributions from Masato Takasaka, Michael Ozone, Joshua Petherick, Dead Boomers, James Vinciguerra, Brad Haylock, VDO and more

Curated by Library Moderne

16.06 – 07.07.2012

Motto Melbourne / PIN UP Project Space
15-25 Keele Street, Collingwood, VIC 3066, Melbourne, Australia

Schedule to be advised shortly

MOTTONEN / Möttönen pies & Motto books

Napa Books will open a courtyard kiosk serving new versions of Möttönen pies, and while enjoying your pies you can flick through a selection of books from the Berlin-based Motto Books. Both the pies & books are available only for one day!

Napa Gallery, Eerikinkatu 18, Helsinki from 12-4pm

www.restaurantday.org
www.mottodistribution.com
www.napabooks.com

Sunday, May 20, 7 pm
Yorgos Sapountzis
Book launch

On the occasion of his two-part solo exhibition at Ursula Blickle Foundation (Videos and
Picnic, May 19 – July 8 ) and at Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster (The Gadfly Festival,
June 16 – September 2) a comprehensive book by Greek artist Yorgos Sapountzis will
be published by Sternberg Press. With texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Chris Kraus, Veit
Loers and Katja Schroeder as well as an interview by Willem de Rooij with Yorgos
Sapountzis.

Music by no:sler

image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

http://www.sternberg-press.com/
http://bortolozzi.com/

YORGOS SAPOUNTZIS – TWO EXHIBITIONS

Videos und Picnic
May – 08. Juli 2012
Ursula Blicke Stiftung,
Mühlweg 18,
D-76703 Kraichtal
Opening Saturday, May 19, 7 pm

The Gadfly Festival
16. Juni – 02. September 2012
Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster
Venue soon to be announced
http://www.westfaelischer-kunstverein.de/
Opening Friday, June 15, 7 pm

Motto Melbourne

We’re very happy to announce the upcoming opening of our Melbourne store, operated by Joe Shakespeare, on Saturday June 9th 2012

Motto Melbourne
15-25 Keele St, Collingwood 3066
Australia

melbourne@mottodistribution.com

Opening Hours: Wednesday – Friday: 11am – 6pm / Saturday 12pm – 5pm

Friday, 4 May 2012
6pm – 22pm.
Motto and LECOOL cordially invite you to the launch of:

A smart guide to Utopia – 111 inspiring ideas for a better city.

Encapsulated within five different sections – Live, Work, Eat & Drink, Buy and Play – are 111 inspiring ideas from over 40 different European cities on how we can make life in our cities more appealing, more interesting and more sustainable. The projects are the brainchildren of over 30 writers and visionaries, making this a guide for urbanites from urbanites.

Author Kati Krause will host a conversation with:

Fliegender Kaffee – Maik Eimertenbrink
Prinzessinnengärten – Marco Clausen
Stattbad Wedding – Jochen Küpper

Le Cool
Kati Krause

Motto@MarkthalleIX, Eisenbahnstraße 42/43, Pücklerstraße 34, 10997 Berlin

jean-michel wicker

anti-arbeiten

At Motto Berlin
28.04.2012 – 19.05.2012
Opening reception, Friday 27 April, from 7pm

‘It is known that initially many wanted at the very least to build cities, an environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.’
– Guy Debord ‘On Wild Architecture’

Vitrines, like strange capsules, lead from the street to the larger glass front of the bookstore where ‘concierge’, a fragile contraption of repurposed wire and cardboard, sheds its insufficient light. The first vitrine, still on Skalitzer Strasse, contains three differently large Es – 60, 75, and 90 cm high, to be precise-. They are cut out of a strange, white, sleek cardboard and float upwards like bubbles inside an aquarium. They seem to signify nothing; communicating not so much form or thought, as joy.

Inside the courtyard Ingrid Bergman – sans husband, but filmed by her real life one – lounges, thinking interesting thoughts. Elsewhere, varied sorts of seemingly always welcome debris, are thrown together in perfect disorder. A clutch of scrapbooks and fanzines complete the landscape.

Like visiting Asger Jorn’s walled garden at Albisola, the courtyard begins to feel like a microclimate; an experimental growing plot for new varieties of thought.
The Es make more sense now. The library – of words, of sounds, of images – and its reverse: the anti-library, of books unread and knowledge un-learned, are what is grown and preserved here. Who speaks? Who listens? Who does not speak? What will the books of the future be? How can we make them different? Anti-books, anti-knowledge, un-learning, extreme slowness and extreme speed, all seem relevant here.

Around 1805 Heinrich von Kleist wrote ‘instead of speaking with the pretentious purpose of enlightening others I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself’, advocating not words or concepts but a ‘certain state of mind’ as the most correct understanding of Property and State.

More recently, many have remarked on how to extract something from circulation – an object, idea, book – holding it still to examine it, is to do it a great injustice. Objects, ideas, books have a life, they will not stand still under someone else’s microscope. Sometime before this, Hannah Arendt drew attention to the ‘intervals’ within our daily continuity determined by ‘things that are no longer and things that are not yet’. This brief moment of potentiality for Arendt was thought itself.

The conscious fostering of this state of potentiality, the unwillingness to provide a microscope under which objects and thoughts may be kept still, the aspiration towards a language free from knowing, may be what Jean-Michel is after.

Finally we must note that the artist favours improvisation. Last minute changes are likely to happen.

Gregorio Magnani

—

On this occasion, acidator, acidator 2, acidator 3, acidator 4 and acidator 5, an edition of unique books and posters made in collaboration with Maximage Société Suisse, will be presented.

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer str. 68
10997 Berlin
Mon.-Sat. 12-20h
Ph: +49 (0)30 75442119
Fax: +49 (0)30 75442120

www.mottodistribution.com

Saturday 28.04.2012 at 7pm
The Frigate record release + organ concert by Benjamin Saurer
Kaiser-Friedrich-Gedächtnis-Kirche Händelallee 22, Berlin-Tiergarten
free entrance

An afternoon conference on the structure, demands and implications of the book from the perspective of artistic practitioners. With lectures by Simon Hempel, Mette Edvardsen, Theo Cowley and Simon Thompson.

SIMON HEMPEL
Simon Hempel uses the artists’ book as an alternative structuring device analogous to his spatial installations where the emphasis is not on the singular photographic image, the tableaux – but on the notion of the table, the sequence linked to serial images. Photography is reviewed as medium emblematic for the division of subject and object that predominates western thinking.

Simon Hempel is an artist based in Hamburg, DE. He studied at Universität Hamburg, HAW Hamburg and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. His work has been presented at Kunsthaus, Hamburg; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg-Harburg; Goethe Institute, Madrid; and Deichtorhallen, Hamburg. His artist’s book ‘Plants and soil – The visual development of a structure’ was published in 2009. A new artist’s book will be published in 2012 with the support of the Department for Culture, Hamburg.

METTE EDVARDSEN
Mette Edvardsen is a choreographer and dancer based in Brussels. Her work is situated within the performing arts field, also exploring other media or other formats such as video and writing.

Conceived as an integral part of a performance, the book ‘Every now and then’ is being read by the audience sitting in the theatre while the performance evolves on stage. The book is direct, tactile and persistent, giving the audience another access to the piece. How do we read the theatre space when we think of it as a page in a book? And the other way around, how do we experience the performance on the page? With every turning of a page a new space appears in layers on top of each other. How can we imagine such architecture? Pages after pages of spaces bound together in a complex architecture called ‘book’?

THEO COWLEY
Theo Cowley is an artist based in Brussels, working mostly in film, video, and performance. He recently published ‘Compo de rheto’ a book based on another book held in the national library of France, made in 1600/01 by an actor known for playing the role of Harlequin in the commedia dell’arte. Both these books, his own and the original, have a specific yet undefined relationship to performance, theatre and history. Certain problematics come to the fore regarding the changing status of these books.

SIMON THOMPSON
Simon Thompson is an artist who lives and works in Brussels. He will talk about Blanchot, the book to come and the non-relations of the work and of the book.

Organised by Theo Cowley.
Free entrance, in English
Part of the Wiels Artist-in-residency program

*Maurice Blanchot, Le livre à venir (The book to come)