01-72. Daniel Gustav Cramer. Christophe Daviet-Thery, Samuel Leuenberger.

Posted in Exhibition catalogue on December 31st, 2015
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This two-part publication has been released in March 2014 on
the occasion of the exhibition “01-72″ by Daniel Gustav Cramer
at SALTS, Basel. It consists of an artist’s book, giving more
insight into the project and a reader with texts from Quinn
Latimer, Kirsty Bell and an interview with the artist.

Daniel Gustav Cramer works in a multitude of media such as photography, sculpture, book-making and text-work, which often, when united in a show, assume a conceptual meta-structure which points towards narration and well beyond. It attempts to expose the many layers and various possible perspectives one can opt for when looking at an object. These layers have the possibility to link-up, to create possible lines that connect to each other’s cross-path in a non-linear story. Cramer is interested in the different facets of this experience, of how these motions shift and change when they gravitate towards one another.

In his most expansive project to date, Daniel Gustav Cramer let’s us glimpse into the vast experience a work can offer, from the things that happen at the the fringe of the work itself, that which surrounds it, what it entails preparing for it and what reach it can have beyond its presentation form. Cramer offers the audience to feel the halo that hovers above a certain moment, the thing that gives the work the richness, the fullness, that which strengthens the work from within. Firstly, Cramer turns not only the site of the exhibition into one enormous sculptural object but his conceptual approach to the very impetus of the idea is of sculptural nature itself. Secondly, his subject, here a series of water photographs become the vessel to experience the entire social-cultural context these images might be imbedded in, from inception to execution, the audience is involved.

For 01–72, Daniel Gustav Cramer composed a formal letter which enquires about the possibility of installing a group of his photographs in each room of each apartment in a building of his choosing, here the site of his current exhibition, where SALTS is located in. The concept is to install 72 photographs, each depicting a fragment of seawater, taken from roughly 30 meters above sea-level somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. The lens is looking down onto the open water, each water portrait appears like the previous one, but each differs in nuances, since all 72 images are taken in chronological order, in about a span of 18 minutes. Now here, the frames will occupy every room, every hallway, the attic area as well as the boiler room of this housing complex full of residential flats and store fronts. All images are framed in thin white frame and hung in a sort of gradient progression, which follows the rising of the sun, while they hang starting in the basement and follow-through up to the attic. Each portrait touches the wall of an adjacent one, thus suggesting the element of water to flow throughout the entire building. The result of this pictorial sea progression, spreading through a vertically raised architectural space, makes this a collective experience for all the inhabitants of the house.

The artist has an interest in the abstract nature of the water, its biomass and neutrality in which it just is. For the people in the house, who are all invited to live with these images for the duration of the exhibition they hold a different potential; they are all aware that their neighbors have a similar experience, they all share the notion, that above them, below them, next to them is such an image, which was taken just moments before the one they are looking at the moment. They are organically connected through an invisible thread, an image that suggests, a distance, a remoteness, the open sea, liquidity with all its massive physicalness but which here is contained within their own personal space. The repetitiveness of this image creates a certain sense of calm among the diverse environments it is hung in.

Rather than portraying a protagonist, he takes pleasure in capturing the temporal shift which occurs between watching someone or something, recording it and then contextualizing it through the language of an exhibition. Cramer creates lines, lines between his camera and the water, between a point in the Mediterranean Sea and Birsfelden, between writing a letter and the people receiving it. They in turn create a line between the neighbors themselves, between all the images hung and finally between the “object” in its entirety and the public who is visiting the exhibition.

Cramer has managed through a simple but reoccurring gesture to unite, reduce and minimize the experience of “experiencing” an artwork. In this exhibition, exposure is turned inside out and makes the site of presentation not just a platform, but one object, one experience, one sculpture. In this exhibition with the title 01–72, narrative is deconstructed and unthinkable without the space it inhabits. A letter is placed in the garage explaining the idea to the people living in the house, just next to it, on the outside wall of the garage, an extensive list documents the scope of the project, and the path these images have been taking. Inside the exhibition space one discovers the first, the 01 of the seventy-two photographs which was taken at 6.23am of and which unfolds the story and what can partly be followed. It describes what is here but also what can not be seen in the floors above, it forms a sentence without letting the viewer hear the finish of it. The sparse exhibition room leaves way for comfort or discomfortable since the viewer has to decide how or if they want to read the story that is unfolding in front of them. Fact is, Daniel Gustav Cramer consciously withdraws from the centerpiece in order to focus on the core. Daniel Gustav Cramer was born in 1975 in Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Berlin but only very rarely.

€18.00

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In Darkness. A Collaboration by Brothers Kevin & Kristian Henson. Hardworking, Goodlooking. The Office of Culture & Design

Posted in graphic design, history, illustration, lifestyle, newsprint, photography, printmaking, writing on December 23rd, 2015
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An Archive of International crust punk music, Filipino anarchist zines, Black and white punk aesthetics, anti-system philosophies, A descent into illness, a discourse on recovery

Published by Hardworking, Goodlooking

€78.00

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FFF (Filipino Folk Foundry). The Office of Culture and Design. Hardworking, Goodlooking.

Posted in graphic design, newsprint, typography on December 22nd, 2015
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A pseudo-scientific research publication on sign painting in the Philippines. Contains graphic and text questionnaires filled out by 24 sign painters from Metro Manila and Samar Island. Includes over 10 stroke manuals as well as a series of writings on typography and culture. These include: a manifesto on slow vs. fast typography by Lobregat Balaguer (PH/ES), Veronica Grow (AU) and Niko Spelbrink (NL); an essay exploring identity politics and graffiti writing in the Philippines; and two special, syndicated case studies focused on indigenous type construction. The case studies are: “Nagari: Learning to Make Writing for Indian’s Biggest Script” by Catherine Leigh Schmidt (US) and “The Babel Issue” by Birk Marcus Hansen (DK), a bilingual typography experiment that combines Chinese and Roman characters.

Design by Dante Carlos and Kristian Henson.

Published by Hardworking, Goodlooking

€55.00

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Zweikommasieben Magazin #12. Präsens Editionen / Motto Books

Posted in magazines, Motto Books on December 21st, 2015
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(English / German)

Material with/on/by Dale Cornish, Prosumer, Low Jack & Black Zone Myth Chant, Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, CoH & Tina Frank, Public Possession, Charles Cohen & Rabih Beaini, Container, Barnt, Volte-Face, DJ Overdose, Bintus, etc.

€ 16.00

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MOTS SLOW issue #3 Up&Down. HAND ART PUBLISHER

Posted in Uncategorized on December 19th, 2015
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MOTS SLOW issue #3 Up&Down

The third issue of Mots Slow come out November 27th 2015, and apply the theme of Up&Down. 33,4 cm x 26 cm.
Theo Altenberg, Pascale Anziani, Dominique Brancher, Josepha Conrad, Franck Déglise, Jean-Paul Demoule, Saskia Edens, Jérôme Karsenti, Guillaume Lebrun, Levan Manjavidze, Lorenza Mondada, Wajdi Mouawad, Isabella Rush, Frank Smith, Antoine Schmitt, Jean Luc Verna, Anne Vigna.

Indré Klimaite Ilegal design
/Limited edition prints numbered, 365 ex / silk screenprint-Offset /
6 Silk Screenprint, 5 colors, posters folded. 120 gr.

6 Offset colors and black & white posters folded. 50 gr.
Posters from 33 cm x 48 cm to 72 cm x 48 cm. Trilingual, GB, FR, SP/Basel-Toulouse/

€50.00

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Terremoto 4. Dorothée Dupuis (ed.). Terremoto / Motto Books

Posted in magazines on December 18th, 2015
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Terremoto 4

Transhistoria (María Sol Barón & Camilo Ordoñez) on the colombian regional artist’s salons;

Juan Canela and Inés Katzenstein on art education in Argentina;

Actions from Teor/ética by Lola Malavasi; Mohammad Salemy and the New Centre for Research and Practice;

Ariel Schlesinger interviewed by Rivet (Sarah Demeuse & Manuela Moscoso);

Pedro Manrique Figueroa, the last student of the Universidad de Los Andes, by Lucas Ospina; Elena Damiani in conversation with Kiki Mazuchelli;

Cristiana Tejo on Walter Zanini and the invention of curatorial field in Brasil;

Painting is not an autistic activity by Sandra Sánchez; Radicalizing the archive, by Fabiola Iza.

 

€8.00

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Artist Jokes / Abusive Names for Artists / WHAT TO DO. Ingeborg Scheffers. BASBOEK Publishers

Posted in writing on December 12th, 2015
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Artist Jokes / Kunstenaarsmoppen

A fluorescent yellow book in two languages, Dutch and English, with 34 terrible jokes about artists. For example: ‘What do all great artists have in common? They’re all dead.’ The book design is by Ingeborg Scheffers.

€10.00

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Abusive Names for Artists / Het Scheldwoordenboek voor

Many Dutch find artists irritating. They seem to live off of welfare, do whatever they like, and can even, sometimes, get rich in the process! As a result, there are as many abusive nicknames for artists as there are artistic forms of expression. From this endless landscape, here is a small selection. The book is based on the collection ‘swear words for artists’ from Dutch artist PJ Roggeband.

€10.00

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WHAT TO DO / WAT TE DOEN

When I tell people that I am an artist with a part-time job, they often give me unsolicited advice on how to make money with art. For years I collected these quotes and eventually made the book WHAT TO DO/WAT TE DOEN. Page 23: ‘Make contact with gay people. They don’t have children, lots of money and a refined taste.’ The book design is by Ingeborg Scheffers. Winner of the Sheffield International Artist Book Prize 2013 and the Fundacio Banc Sabadell, Arts Libris, Barcelona 2014.

€10.00

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Mousse #51. Edoardo Bonaspetti (Ed.)

Posted in magazines, writing on December 11th, 2015
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Mousse 51 is a photo issue dedicated to exhibitions from 1985 to 1995, the last ten years or so before exhibitions went online, and possibly, before the exhibition view became a requisite genre.

Up to twenty years ago, galleries and museum, art magazines and schools had no websites; viewing a show would mean, quite simply, visiting it. A great number of seminal shows—from small but consequential artists’ debuts in private galleries, to the innovative biennial iterations in new territories and continents, to thematic and now historicized institutional exhibitions—were richly studied, avidly discussed, but poorly photographed, if at all.

This issue is an album of recommendations, for which we are very grateful to all the writers, artists, curators, dealers, and friends who accepted to share with us their favorite shows. We couldn’t find pictures for all of them, but many are here.
Thank you!

Includes:

– The Artist as Curator, issue #10

 

€10.00

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Jonas Mekas: Scrapbook of the Sixties: Writings 1954 – 2010. Anne König (ed.). Spector Books

Posted in Film, history, literature, poetry, writing on December 10th, 2015
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Scrapbook of the Sixties is a collection of published and unpublished texts by Jonas Mekas, filmmaker, writer, poet, and cofounder of the Anthology Film Archives in New York. Born in Lithuania, he came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded moments of his daily life. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Every week, starting in 1958, he published his legendary “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice, writing on a range of subjects that were by no means restricted to the world of film. He conducted numerous interviews with artists like Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Erick Hawkins, and Nam June Paik. Some of these will now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of the Sixties. Mekas’s writings reveal him as a thoughtful diarist and an unparalleled chronicler of the times—a practice that he has continued now for over fifty years.

Jonas Mekas (*1922, Semeniškiai / Lithuania), lives and works in New York. Film-maker, writer, poet and co-founder of the Anthology Film Archives one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Mekas’s work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide.

92 black-white images, adhesive bound softcover

Designed by Fabian Bremer and Pascal Storz

 

€28.00

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RABRAB JOURNAL #02. Sezgin Boynik & Gregoire Rousseau (eds.). Rabrab Press

Posted in magazines on December 10th, 2015
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The second issue of Rab-Rab is in two volumes, all together in 500 pages. The focus of the second issue is ‘noise against culture.’ The contributions deal with the formal theory of noise, politics of contradictions, the device of estrangement, materialist film, music and violence, Futurism, Russian avant-garde, improvisation, void, heterophonies, swearwords, communism, ideologies of marriage, class wars and electricity.

“Departing from our programme based on the understanding of art practice as a confrontation between formal and political inquiries, our aim in this issue is to use noise as the name for this difficult, disturbing, loud and coercive exploration. In many cases the formal and political aspects of noise are two separate things: the former is seen as an issue of information or perception, whereas the latter is usually reduced to a metaphor of spontaneity. But if we change these parameters of discussing the noise from measurable coefficients of failed communication, or from elusive metaphors of contingencies, towards the conceptual references related to ideology and class struggles, then what is understood as noise turns into something else. It can become a valid concept of inquiry, refusing to be pinpointed to conventional academic banalities silly phenomenological artistic fantasies immersed in .”

Contributors to the second issue are Aeron Bergman, Bruno Besana, Sezgin Boynik, Michel Chevalier, Christine Delphy, Antti ‘Eze’ Eskelinen, Giovanna Esposito-Yussif, Dror Feiler, Peter Gidal, Grupa za Politiku, Henrik Heinonen, Anthony Iles, Jaakko Karhunen, Mazen Kerbaj, Martin Krenn, Mattin, Jean-Claude Moineau, Ivana Momčilović, François Nicolas, Rahel Puffert, Ozren Pupovac, Gert Raeithel, Grégoire Rousseau, Max Ryynänen, Alejandra Salinas, Jyrki Siukonen, Darko Suvin, Milica Tomić, Taneli Viitahuhta, Ben Watson and Kari -Annala.

€18.00

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