Gagarin #25 / 2012.

The artists in their own words

Includes texts by: Pierre Joseph, Sven Augustijnen, Massimo Bartolini, David Link, Ricardo Basbaum, Amanda Ross-Ho, Matias Faldbakken, Sandra Vasquez De La Horra.

Concept & coordination: Wilfried Huet
Graphical concept: Simon Casier & Petra Fieuws

Language: several, with overall translations in English

D 15 €

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Cannon Magazine No.2 – “It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible.”

Conceived, edited, and designed by Phil Baber.

Featuring: an uncertain pronoun, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Peter Handke, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Walser, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Peter Král, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Alberto Caeiro, Thomas Bernhard, Friedrich Hölderlin.

“There is an oblivion of all existence, a silencing of individual being, in which it seems that we have found all things. There is an oblivion of all existence, in which it seems that we have lost all things, a night of the soul in which not the faintest gleam of a star, not even the phosphorescence of rotten wood, can reach us.” Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion.

Offset lithography, edition of 500.

D 13 €

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Peep-Hole Sheet #13

Peep-Hole Sheet is a quarterly of writings by artists.
Each issue is dedicated solely to one artist, who is invited to contribute with an unpublished text whose content is completely free in terms both of subject and format.
The texts are published in their original language, with accompanying translations in English and Italian. All images are deliberately avoided. Peep-Hole Sheet is meant for those who believe artists are catalysts for ideas all around us, and who want to read their words without any filter.
Over time it aspires to build up an anthology of writings that might open new perspectives for interpreting and understanding our times.

The fourth Peep-Hole Sheet series starts with a contribution by Claire Fontaine on the concept of ‘human strike’. The essay investigates the central Marxian category of real abstraction, as the core defining the life under Capital, through the critical perspective of Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Deeply connected to the artists’ research, the text brings light to possible practices of re-appropriation of life, of time, of relations, that start within it. “Writing about the human strike is itself the experience of a double bind, it’s like walking on a suspended wire between making things possible and exorcising them through language… When we inhabit language we place ourselves on the permeable membrane between life and desires, where it clearly appears that life and desires are made of the same fabric. Desiring together makes things come true even when they are not technically true”

Peep-Hole Sheet is published by Mousse Publishing.

D 10€

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Convolution Journal for Critical Experiment

contributions by: Giorgio Agamben and Alessandro Petti  Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri  Bruce Andrews  Alexander Barnett  Bob Brown  Tony Chakar  Sarah Crowner  Drew Daniel  Jeff Dolven  Melissa Dunn  Craig Dworkin  Jesko Fezer  Michael Golston  Robert Hardwick Weston  Christian Hawkey  Athena Kirk  Gareth Long  Rosalind Morris  Andrew Schelling  Eliza Slavet  Paul Stephens  Nancy Tewksbury  Jenelle Troxell  We Have Photoshop  Nie Zhenzhao and Charles Bernstein

Convolution began with the following brief statement to prospective contributors:

Subjects that have long been investigated and appropriated by scholars need to be emancipated from the forms in which such scholarly acquisition took place, if they are still to have any value.
Walter Benjamin, We Ought to Reexamine the Link Between Teaching and Research.

The journal whose plan we present here hopes to create confidence in its own content by giving an account of its form.
Walter Benjamin, Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus.Form is inseparable from content, yet academic writing often suggests the contrary by ignoring its own form. The academic monograph, the 8,000 word expository essay, the book review, and the conference paper remain the predominant critical forms of the humanities and social sciences. This journal seeks to promote a proliferation of the forms available for cultural critique, taken in the broadest sense. We venture to publish short, experimental work that challenges prevailing divisions between creative writing and criticism, poetry and prose, image and text. Convolution brings together a shifting collectivity of scholars, artists, poets, musicians and critics to explore the fragmentary, the interdisciplinary, the visual, the unpublishable, and the miscellaneous. Our ambition is to promote modes of expression that are less academic without necessarily being less scholarly—and in the process, to make criticism more relevant.
Convolution begins not with a manifesto or apology, but with a simple conviction—that the forms available for criticism have not been exhausted, and that criticism can be made more germane, more interesting, and more current through continuing formal innovation.

Fittingly enough, the process of assembling the first issue was far more convoluted and drawn out than we anticipated. The following inaugural issue contains an eclectic range of responses to our initial provocation. Some of the writers and artists we contacted responded immediately; some equivocated; some sent us material that didn’t fit; some ignored us completely. Virtually the only constraint we imposed was a maximum of four thousand words. We could not have anticipated the wealth of material generously submitted for this issue.
The moment of the purported demise of print culture provides an ideal opportunity to rethink the nature of the critical journal as physical object. To say more at this point would be to pregame the proceedings, so to speak. For now, we respectfully stand back in the hope that the form and content of the journal speak together for themselves.

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Reading Tests. Jack Henrie Fisher & Popahna Brandes. Jan van Eyck Academie.

A note about the words in the book – where they come from and what has happened to them.

Many of them, the ones on the right-side and the ones at the end, are “suspicious” words from Google Books, words from book scans which can’t be machine-read. Google offers these unreadable words as reversed Turing Tests to human readers in their project to digitize all the books in their digital library. These images of words have been gathered for this book in thousands of refreshes at the threshold to a PDF download. A human writer, in turn, has read the words for some rhythm of sense. In these tests she has rearranged them accordingly.The texts to the left are, in the first section, edited from a medium-sized dictionary used for dictionary attack, the machine procedure whereby every word of a dictionary is fired at an empty internet password field.

The second section alternates verso and recto pages from Freud’s “Mistakes in Reading and Slips of the Pen”. These pages have been submitted and resubmitted to an optical character recognition which rotates, stretches, and darkens pixels in order to bring the image closer to what might be recognized as a letter. When a recognition takes place, the image becomes a text and can be highlighted, underlined, crossed out, edited – formal actions which turn out to hinder a reading conversion the next time around. This recursivity may proceed to the point of invention – that is, a new letter is found or drawn by the reading software.

Raymond Williams’ essay “Means of Communication as Means of Production” is captured in the third section, erringly, as text, with all the mistakes this process must make from a low-resolution scan. A typographer has underlined some pertinent points within it.

At the end of the book, the suspicious, unreadable words are given over and over again to optical character recognition, alongside an interfering element – usually a curved line, the current standard for hindering spam-intending machine readers. These images, as well as whatever reading marks can follow from a recognition, are cut and straightened and moved around in each subsequent reading, on their way to becoming texts, but never completely assuming sense.

D 12 €

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Documenta 1955-2012: The Endless Story Of Two Lovers

This publication contains 60 photographs taken from Documenta, one of the most respected contemporary art exhibitions in the world.
All of the photographs, from different eras, have as subject of two elements that make possible the history of art itself: the work and the viewer. A journey through time that does not concern only the history of one of the most important exhibitions in the world, but in general the changes, the costumes, customs of the society that produced it. The book is a portrait of a love story between two people – one human, the other inanimate – that, although speaking a different language, are able to relate. These photographs have captured the peculiarities of these meetings. The dialogues of course we cannot hear, but can only imagine.

D.15€

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Skalitzer. 68
July 21 – August 25 2012
Saturdays only!

Skalitzer. 68 invites artists, editors, performers for a series of lectures, presentations, exhibitions and events which will take over the spaces of Chert, Motto and Silberkuppe each Saturday, between July 21 and August 25.

21.07.2012: Margaret Harrison, Petunia, Convolution Journal for critical experiment

Margaret Harrison – talk and screening presented by Silberkuppe, starts at 7 pm
Convolution Journal/Petunia Magazine – talk and screening, starts at 8.30 pm

For their joint presentation at Motto Berlin, Convolution, Journal for Critical Experiment and Petunia, developed a talk-screening performance.
The two magazines share a questioning about the status and ways of criticism, experimenting with new ways of communication through their magazines: in Petunia, there are no chapters or sections, but diverse textual forms, from theoretical texts to diary entries to pure fiction or comics, mostly concerning contemporary art.
Convolution journal seeks to promote a proliferation of the forms available for cultural critique, taken in the broadest sense. It ventures to publish short, experimental work that challenges prevailing divisions between creative writing and criticism, poetry and prose, image and text. Convolution brings together a shifting collectivity of scholars, artists, poets, musicians and critics to explore the fragmentary, the interdisciplinary, the visual, the unpublishable, and the miscellaneous.
Conversation about critical form will include readings by Convolution contributors Michael Baers and Christian Hawkey.
Their presentation ends with the screening of “Born in Flames” – starting at 10.00 pm
A 1983 documentary-style feminist science-fiction film by Lizzie Borden that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States Socialist Democracy.
Through the life of two different feminist groups of New York City, the film becomes a manifesto for direct activism, showing different points of view and discussions about it, culminating in the message that the action should inevitably come from the oppressed. 80 minutes, English.

http://www.chert-berlin.com/

http://www.silberkuppe.org/

http://petunia.eu/

http://convolutionjournal.com/

20 exhibitions reviews, 8 interviews, 10 exhibitions in pictures, some artists special projects, and the chronicles.

Featuring: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Richard Phillips, Philippe Parreno, Peter Zumthor, John Martin, Willem de Rooij, Camille Henrot, Kirsten Everberg, Rosa Barba, Laurent Grasso, Davide Belula, Rob Pruitt, Fabrice Gygi, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Frédéric Pardo, Sturtevant, Tatsumi Hijikata, Alexandra Midal, Joe Bradley, Joachim Koester, Peter Halley, Luigi Ontani, Andreas Gursky, Haim Steinbach, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Guy Debord, Scott Bourne, Josh T. Pearson…

Edited by Eric Troncy and Stéphanie Moisdon, Frog is an international art and architecture magazine.
Graphic design: M/M (Paris).

D : 18€

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Verities N°2: The Muse Issue

Contributors to The Muse issue include Harry Callahan, Nan Goldin, Gustav Metzger, James Ferraro & Paul Elliman.

Verities is an independent biannual publication of thought, observation and reflection, giving equal focus to visual arts and literature.

Verities explores new ways-of-seeing the most ordinary and overlooked situations, revealing the arresting and irrational in the everyday. The ability to disorient and estrange through a subjects illumination makes for a potentially explosive catalyst that sits at the heart of Verities.

Each issue artists and authors explore a new theme through artworks, photography, design, fashion, essays and short stories. Finding the new in the old and celebrating the old in the new, rescuing beauty from vulgarity, and pushing social issues to the fore. Verities makes intellectual content accessible, yet is not afraid to challenge its readers.

D 12 €

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Job Centre Plus

Zine by Paul Haworth, June 2012.

D 4€.

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