Conceived on the occasion of the first edition of the project “Davanti al Mare” directed by Vittorio Dapelo for the Amixi di Villa Croce – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Genoa, War Games is an artist’s book by Diego Perrone, edited by Francesco Garutti. Imagined as a book-cum-artwork and as such an integral part of the installation of Perrone’s work in Villa del Principe, the Palazzo of Andrea Doria in Genoa, War Games is a photographic collection of painstaking details and fragments. The tapestries of the battle of Lepanto housed in the Villa del Principe, the hands, the features of the miniature craftsmanship of a selected group of Ligurian artisans and details of the sculpture in glass paste by Diego Perrone are mixed together without a specific order so as to make up an almost cinematographic sequence. In the short essay by Francesco Garutti, a simple and indirect game of reflections take shape: the naval games of the historian and science-fiction author Fletcher Pratt, the ambiguous inclined planes of the visionary architect Bel Geddes, the warp and weft of the tapestries of Villa del Principe, the hands and the construction techniques of those Ligurian masters all dialogue here with Perrone’s work by virtue of their inhabiting ‘another’ time.

€25.00

Buy

---

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You Just Have to Experience It
Tuesday 4th July 2017
From 7pm
Motto Berlin

You Just Have to Experience It is a publication and event. It combines citations culled from the book Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 to trace a history of the changing role of the spectator in art and exhibitions from Minimalism to Relational Art, and New Institutionalism to the present.

Produced on the occasion of the launch of Beyond Objecthood, this public talk in the shape of a performance reading presents a brief history of the exhibition as a critical form from the 1960s to the present, a form that inherently solicits spectators into temporal and spatial experiences and situations as indispensable components of the work.

The title refers to a statement by the American artist Tony Smith who recounts in a 1966 Artforum interview a ride on the newly minted New Jersey Turnpike, recalling a transformative nighttime experience of moving through space and time on the unmarked highway. This experience caused him to question the viability of art to represent something like that. You Just Have to Experience It uses this moment as a point of departure to explore how the criticality once posed by figures like Smith who solicited spectators into durational experiences in their work faces many challenges, not least of which is competing with the institutions that give it voice in an era when the differences between art and entertainment increasingly blur.

—

James Voorhies is a curator and art historian of modern and contemporary art, as well as Dean of Fine Arts and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Bureau for Open Culture is a curatorial practice that inhabits and connects with institutions, designers and publishers to realise projects with artists and writers. The projects forge intersections among art, design, education, and consumer culture to rethink how institutions address and engage spectators.

—

Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1976, Bas Jan Ader’s boat, the Ocean Wave, was found unmanned and partially submerged 150 miles off the coast of Ireland by a Spanish fishing vessel. The Dutch artist’s boat was taken to La Coruña for investigation. Days later, the boat was stolen and the cult of Ader, whose body was never recovered, was truly cemented. In this volume, artists Marion van Wijk and Koos Dalstra, compile ten years of research into this unsolved mystery. The Spanish police report documenting the theft is reproduced in facsimile alongside a translation into English, many pages of additional documentation, and the transcriptions of interviews produced during the editors’ investigations.

The report itself begins on April 27, 1976 and ends on February 1, 1977 and documents history of the Ocean Wave from the discovery of the vessel to the closure of the case. This book is an expanded version of the earlier edition by Veenman Publishers. It includes interviews with Mary Sue Anderson, Don Couto, Charles Esche, and Luis Ramos.

Edited by Marion van Wijk and Koos Dalstra

First Edition (2017)

€45.00

Buy

Mousse Issue #59 – Summer 2017

Featuring: Rahel Aima, Basma Alsharif, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Yann Chateigné Tytelman, Nick Currie, Aria Dean, Kevin Jerome Everson, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, Orit Gat, Jarrett Gregory, Trix and Robert Haussmann, Jens Hoffmann, Adam Jasper, Stefan Kalmár, John Knight, Erkki Kurenniemi, Duane Linklater, Chus Martínez, Robertas Narkus, Kathy Noble, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andréa Picard, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Seth Price, Johannes Raether, Kitty Scott, Leilah Weinraub, Julia Weist, Elvia Wilk, Lantian Xie, Yan Xing.

€10.00

Buy

Art Against Art – Issue #4

The art market is being kept alive with constant stimulus in the form of Venice-Basel-Kassel-Athens-Frieze-TEFAF. As the series of electric shocks continue, the art market is still in a period of reconfiguration trying to find longevity in the new. Whereas the art fair format inherently lacks culture – merely being a market place/forum for where exchange takes place – the biennial format has become too broad to create lasting cultural meaning; therefore the art market must look elsewhere for metrics of value. But if it only finds mirrors of its own logic (the free market itself), it will do nothing more than to accelerate the process upon which it has been organizing itself.

Definitions of culture have traditionally meant that the market can reflect on them too to prevent it from being flippant and volatile. The free market functions anchorless and incomprehensible without definitions – landmines of bubbles created without any meta signifier or even private collections and museums springing up that hang on the whim of the collector/personality/entrepreneur rather than frames of reference that create wider cultural value.

Contributors: Iain Robertson, Andrew Rankin, Antek Walczak, Samuel Veissière, Marina Pinsky, Taslima Ahmed, Klaus Theweleit, Jeff Berwick, Guan Xiao.

€9.00

Buy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A comprehensive monograph on the seminal work of Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958–2007)

With contributions by Pia Arke, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Tine Bryld, Erik Gant, Søren Jønsson Granat, Mirjam Joensen, Stefan Jonsson, Carsten Juhl, Anders Jørgensen, Mette Jørgensen, Inge Kleivan, Kuratorisk Aktion, Jan-Erik Lundström, Iben Mondrup, Sara Olsvig, Søren Bro Pold, Irit Rogoff, Mette Sandbye, Kirsten Thisted, and Finn Thrane.

The richly illustrated 400-page book constitutes the first survey in print of Pia Arke’s collected works, practice, and methodology. In essays and images, the book documents Arke’s lifelong artistic engagement with the silence that surrounds Denmark’s colonial presence in Greenland since 1721 and examines how she by unearthing the ‘little’ history of Greenland’s colonization managed to say something decisive about the much ‘bigger’ history of Western imperialism and the dynamics of today’s world order.

In addition, the book contains a DVD presenting a selection of Arke’s individual and collaborative video works.

€42.00

Buy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KARL HOLMQVIST, WORD SQUARES. COMPAGNIA/MOTTO BOOKS 2017,
PUBLISHED WITH THE KIND SUPPORT OF THE CENTRE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN, GENEVA, TO COINCIDE WITH THE ARTIST’S EXHIBITION, 31.5.– 27.8.2017.

WORD SQUARES DESIGNED BY KARL HOLMQVIST AND BENEDIKT REICHENBACH.

€25.00

Buy

BOOK LAUCH

The Ruin to Come.
Walid Sadek.
Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016

Thursday 15 June, 2017 starting at 6:00 pm
Venue: Agial Art Gallery, 63 Abdel Aziz St., Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon.

___
These collected essays, written in Beirut over a period of 10 years between 2006 and 2016, look at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war, one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance. This protracted now, these essays argue, remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past.

What unites the diverse essays of this book is an investment in the concept of labor, understood as both interminable and his­torical: the labor of min, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near­blindness and the labor of missing. These labors are interminable since they persist in a disinclination to join the various calls for regeneration and resurrection implicit in state-sanctioned and market-driven projects for the reconstruction of Lebanon. They are also historical since they frame this disinclination as an anti-historicist position open to a non-linear conception of memory that attempts to name the many pasts slighted by a forward-looking rush towards better futures.

Together, these labors develop into a critique of hope as a reac­tionary sentiment that numbs collective action in the present and propose that within the folds of war lie moments of political significance that can be recovered and thought through, in order to initiate a livable living built with the unwelcome but necessary knowledge shouldered by unreconciled survivors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Petra Feriancová is an artist who has developed a linguistic code over the years, through which she combines biographical aspects and reflections of a universal nature. What appears as a distinctive feature of her research, namely the use of documentary materials from family archives, or objects of affection related to autobiographical aspects, makes her oeuvre into a complex work that goes beyond the narration or simple description of intimate events to reach an abstract dimension. Before her other artists have explored these modes and processes, linking artistic endeavor to their personal lives, authorial aspects to biographical fragments, developing personal languages and innovative linguistic models. Annette Messager, for example, has made her collections of newspaper clippings, sketches and notes into a way to take possession of the life and events that come to her knowledge. “All day long I browse through, gather, put in order, classify, sort, and I reduce it all into the form of many albums,” she said. “These collections then become my illustrated life.” So in the chapel of Sant Nicolau another work appears in the exhibition space, a carpenter’s workbench bearing a metric scale with casts of vegetables that represent tools of comparison to understand the phases of growth of a fetus in the mother’s womb. The need to measure space and time is the way to determine a territory of belonging and to understand, in the individual sphere, aspects outside the life of the artist herself, placed in relation to autobiographical factors.

BUY

———-

---

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His mustache looked like it would tickle. That’s probably the only reason why I didn’t want to kiss him.

He was a weirdo, but not weird enough, if you know what I mean. He certainly had a flair for details. It wasn’t that. I mean, it’s not like he was wearing a mullet, no. Nor like the kind of guy to gift me a Chinatown Gucci bag. He hated scented soaps and he’d drag me out of any decent party if he found scenty sticks near the toilet. That kind of thing drove him nuts. It’s not like he had anything against grapefruit.

Early on in our friendship, he gave me a box of Gioconda pencils from Koh-I-Noor. He knew how to get me hooked. But that damn mustache. It was so thick, so neatly trimmed. He paid too much attention to the kind of things I didn’t want to pay attention to. The cappuccino foam in it, however, was a kind of turn-on.

This is no doubt why you are holding this book in your hands. His mustache, right? Admit it. It’s the bowl of bonbons by the register. But then you go undercover, under the sheets to find a lot of nudity, thwarted porn. Ja, ja, ja: bodies. Corporeality. Corporation, cooperation. Protest. Violence. Religion. Collage. A torn sheet at the back. A misbound book? A defect or just vulnerable?

Selbsthilfe ist auch keine Lösung (even self-help is not a solution) and Protestvorbild Frankreich (protest “role model” in France?) is the only text you can make out other than mine. You’re meant to struggle to read it, or maybe Erik (who has no mustache) was being intentionally casual about the way he cut out these pictures. It’s an awareness of being sloppy that is so aware, it’s no longer sloppy. A man standing with his fist held high. He’s standing in the window frame of an apartment at least one story up from the ground. He is forty and mad and he enjoys his Bud. His form of protest is a form of solidarity from the sofa. A window protest: comfy. So fucking clever. Then there’s the picture abutting it of a woman holding out her bra. We are meant to take it. She’s offering it to us. Go ahead. She wants you to.

And then there’s the spooning bodies with their tube socks in a wad next to… a bed. A solar bed. You got it? This book is brown sugar. Stinky Swiss cheese. Bad, bad, good, good.

April von Stauffenberg

 

€10.00

Buy