LAUNCH @ MOTTO ZURICH, 4th of May 2012, 7 PM.

Tobias Spichtig: Blue, Red, and Green.
Edited by Fabian Schöneich, Tobias Spichtig, Ursula Blickle.
Contributions by Geoffrey Farmer, A.C. Kupper, Ken Lum, and Fabian Schöneich.
Co-published by Ursula Blickle Stiftung and Sternberg Press.
Design by A. C. Kupper.

Tobias Spichtig’s work is based on a discourse concerning images and their meaning—more specifically, the overwhelming presence of the media and the continuous availability of information, which contribute to the dissolution of time. His approach is based on material production. Concept and narration are abstracted and continually redefined. This creates symbolic works that present historical and contemporary as the bases of a radical presence.

Blue, Red, and Green is published on the occasion of the exhibition at Ursula Blickle Stiftung, “the blue, the red, the green, the cuboid, and the pyramid,” from March 11 to April 22, 2012.

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)

Portland Los Angeles 3 piece who play low volume tunes through small amps and a drum set that consists of a hand drum, cymbal, pan lids, and electronic drum pad, all three singing, playing random cheap electronic keyboards maybe, and switching of instruments probably. Good to listen to if you are interested in the sun and tired of negativity.  Sun Foot (Ron Burns [Smog, Hot Spit Dancers, Swell], Chris Johanson [the painter, The Deep Throats, Tina Age 13], and Brian Mumford [Dragging an Ox through Water, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Thicket, Jewelry Rash]) has a website with relevant information at http://j.mp/sunfootrbc.

Kasino Creative Annual – About The Internet

Contrary to popular belief, everything is not possible on the internet. Kasino Creative Annual About The Internet shows things that can’t be done online. Kasino Creative Studio’s third annual is a coffee-table-book-cum-analogue-tablet as well as the world’s best photo blog that doesn’t exist. World-class photographers contributing to the annual include Mikko Ryhänen, Knotan, Juliana Harkki, Sanna Charles, Sauli Sirviö, Matti Tanskanen, Pietari Hatanpää, Anya Schiller, Arsi Ikäheimonen and Jussi Puikkonen.

Edition of 400
D 15€
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Slow Travel Berlin Lit Lounge @ Markthalle IX

Motto’s shop @ Markthalle IX (Eisenbahnstraße 42/43, Berlin) will be open on Sunday, April 22 from 12 to 6 p.m. during the Slow Travel Berlin Lit Lounge event, featuring:

Portable Book Fair w/ SAND journal & Kombinat Literatur Berlin
Berlin, Czech and German lit from Shakespeare & Sons
Children’s Books by Mondo Azul
Tea and Snacks from Hudsons

Readings by:
Fredrik Torisson (Swedish author of Berlin: Matter of Memory) 12.30pm
Eirik Sordal (Icelandic poet and short story writer) 1pm
John Holten (Irish founder of Broken Dimanche Press & author The Readymades) 1.30pm
Jan Wagner (German Poet and translator) 2pm

Bookbook 2007-2011, Städelschule

The Mary Reynolds Collection

List of Contents
Anonymous Stage I Contribution
Primary/Secondary (Information) by Benjamin Lobko
Donald Duck Hitler and the Chocolate Factory – a work in progress by Dan Starling
Anonymous Stage I Contributions
Stage II Contributions
Anonymous Stage I Contributions
The Hermit & The Sea by Michael Stevenson
Stage II Contributions
Before This (An Afterword) by Simon Starling
Unlrelated Things Related by Patrick Keaveney

Published by the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Kunst – Städelschule

D 15€

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The White Review #4 @ Motto Berlin. 20.04.2012
Start 7pm

After a short presentation of The White Review by the editors, Swimming Home author and The White Review No.4 contributor Deborah Levy read from her latest novel. Artists Shorvon & Hunter will then be speaking to Ingar Dragset of conceptual duo Elmgreen & Dragset — the artists behind the current Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism.

http://www.thewhitereview.org/
BUY

Je n’ai rien à dire. Seulement à montrer. / Ich habe nichts zu sagen. Nur zu zeigen. / I have nothing to say. Only to show. Natalie Czech. Spector Books.

“Natalie Czech therefore accomplishes something completely unexpected, something rarely seen either in literature or the visual arts: her works are based on experimental designs that engender something new by subsequently amending found texts, while at the same time opening up known texts—by Apollinaire, O’Hara or Brinkmann—to new readings in a fascinating way, thus rediscovering these works in other contexts, through other media, as images, through the medium of photography, and hence allowing them to reemerge as new.” – Eckhard Schumacher

With texts by: Vanessa Joan Müller, Dorothea Zwirner und Eckhard Schumacher

D 26 €

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