MER.@MOTTO
Opening reception: September 14, 2012, from 7pm
Exhibition 15.09-06.10
MER. catalogue on display
New MER. edition by Pieter Vermeersch. Untitled (2012). (Dyptich lambda print)
audio MER. DJ session by Phillip Marshall (The Tapeworm)
http://www.merpaperkunsthalle.org/
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On the same evening, Erik van der Weijde ‘NIEMEYER AND MY WIFE’ exhibition opens @ Chert gallery (+ new 4478ZINE book)
Trekhprudny Lane: Moskva 1991-1993. Ekaterina Dyogot. Hong Kong Press.
This book, which was conceived a number of years ago, is about a short period in the history of Moscow art, right before the real-estate market obliged several artists’ groups to leave their studios.
It was after a guest-teaching period at the National Academy of Fine Art in Oslo that Larissa Zvezdotchotova brought us to Trekhprudny Lane in 1993. That is where ten young artists had for two years been living and working in an apartment block, where they had carried through an unbroken series of events and installations every Thursday at 19.00. Gradually this had developed into a central point in Moscow’s art life – a literal and witty answer to the prevailing art life situation and a number of ideas and masterpieces of western art. Or as Ter-Oganian, the protagonist of the group, puts it: “Great art in one place, soup in Russia.”
The Moscow based critic Ekaterina Dyogot has on our request written an introductory essay about the events at Trekhprudny. In addition she has written captions to 36 selected actions to clarify contexts that could pass by a western public.
This book is a fragment, nevertheless it presents the question: Can we afford to do without all the unexpected viewpoints and standpoints coming from the Russians in the discussion about the art of today?
– Carina Hedén, Ingrid Book
64 Pages
Swedish / English
D 19 €
The Subjective Object, Anna-Sophie Springer (Ed.), published by K Verlag.
THE SUBJECTIVE OBJECT engages with the controversial site of the ethnographic museum and the role of the archive. In particular, the 1920’s photographic archive of the indigenous people of India by the German physical anthropologist and racist theorist Egon von Eickstedt (1892–1965) serves as a case study for an investigation into the role of historical artifacts in light of contemporary political situations. The nine interviews with curators, artists, anthropologists, and social workers provide the core of the book actively discussing the complicated issues around the archive’s function in producing knowledge. An annotated thread of images serves as a critical apparatus addressing the visual history of ethnographic display and classification practices—both in the scientific field as well as the cultural field at large. Questioning the assumption that the archive presents the “fact” of the “Other,” three literary texts counterpoint the inherent fantasies within scientific research. Just as the book begins with an archive—the Eickstedt photos—the book ends with a new archive—photos of the exhibition “The Subjective Object—(Re)Appropriating Anthropological Images” at the GRASSI Ethnographic Museum of Leipzig—illustrating the project’s desire to not only engage with the history of display but also to propose a future of display strategies and social engagement.
INTERVIEWS WITH: Carola Krebs, Meghnath, Theo Rathgeber, Nora Sternfeld, Alexandra Karentzos, Christopher Pinney, Philip Scheffner, Britta Lange, Jesko Fezer + Raqs Media Collective
LITERARY TEXTS BY: Franz Kafka, Brion Gysin + Suzan-Lori Parks
DESIGN BY: Timm Häneke
LANGUAGE: German and English
D 10 €
Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt (Eds.), published by Sternberg Press.
With contributions by Andrew Blum, Bruno Latour, Graham Meyer, Pierre-André Boutang, David Reinfurt, Chris Evans, Jessica Winter, Ian Svenonius, Angie Keefer, Francis McKee, Benjamin Tiven, Louis Lüthi, Dexter Sinister, and Laura Hoptman
This issue of Bulletins of the Serving Library doubles as a catalog of sorts to “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language,” a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. It is a *pseudo*-catalog in the sense that, other than a section of images at the back, it bears no direct relation to the works in the exhibition. Instead, the bulletins extend in different directions from the same title, and could be collectively summarized as preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography.
D 10 €
I can no longer drink tea, …
Paul Elliman
Published by Colophon and Casco, as a contribution to the exhibition *Latent Stare* at CasCo, Utrecht, Netherlands.
D 10€
Buy it
Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Alessandro Ludovico. Onomatopee.
In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.
In collaboration with Kenniscentrum Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam
graphic design: Eric de Haas
print: Lecturis
editor: Joe Monk
written by Alessandro Ludovico, introduction by Florian Cramer
D 15€