Malicious Damage. Ilsa Colsell (Ed.). Donlon Books

In 1962, a then unknown couple, John (Joe) Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, were tried at Old Street Magistrates Court, London, charged with, ‘larceny, malicious damage and wilful damage’, involving hundreds of Islington Library’s book stock. Over the previous three years the pair had been secretly stealing these books, removing what amounted to thousands of valuable art plates and either using them to create alternative dust jackets for other books, (which were then returned quietly to the library’s shelves for unsuspecting browsers to find), or pasting them directly into a large and uninterrupted collage spanning the interior walls of their one-roomed flat on nearby Noel Road. The pair would receive a six-month custodial sentence for these actions. The reconfigured dust jackets were part of a decade of often shared creative endeavour; the two had written, collaged and entertained themselves with the combined fragments of Arts history and contemporary culture. This small flat their studio and living space, and where they enacted a loving relationship at a time when homosexuality was forbidden by law ‘in public and in private’. Their arrest and trial would be an abrupt curtailment of this private idyll and a turning point in their lives, setting them separately (though never entirely separated) on a path which would lead John to become Joe Orton, one of the fashionable playwrights of sixties London. Halliwell pursued his own creative path with further collage — but did so without fully finding an audience for his artwork to match Orton’s rapid theatrical success. Their deaths at Noel Road five years later in 1967 became the sensationalised end to what had largely been a private, enclosed life together; Orton murdered by Halliwell who then took his own life. Now, fifty years after the trial, Malicious Damage looks closely at the collaged dust jackets still remaining within the archive at Islington Local History Centre and focuses on the early collaborative nature of Orton and Halliwell’s relationship. Using the changing collage that had consumed such a large part of their lives in Noel Road as its frame, Malicious Damage underlines the visual and performative nature of their collaborations, as well as using the process of collage itself to investigate Halliwell and his work in greater detail.

44€
Buy it

Mathew Hale & Misha Hollenbach. Book launch and screenings @ Motto Berlin. 23.01.2014.

Please join artist Mathew Hale, designer/publisher Misha Hollenbach and Motto Berlin for the book launch of CUT IN CANNES (Pambook, 2013).

To accompany the launch, Mathew will present the screening of his slide projected piece TAXI STOP FIJI (2008), and also the first ever screening of his super8 film TAXI STOP FIJI IN COLOUR (1999).

Drinks will be served.

Thursday 23rd January.
7pm start. First screening at 7.45pm.

Motto Berlin
Skalitzer Str. 68
im Hinterhof
Berlin 10097

„Show, Demonstrate, Exchange. Performance – Art – Academy“
Wednesday, January 22nd @ Motto Berlin
7.30 pm

For the occasion Jeremiah Day presents the PERFORMANCE:
“The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness”

Show, Demonstrate, Exchange. Performance — Art — Academy.

„Who is your work for?,” asks Amiri Baraka, in Jeremiah Day ‘s text, the students of the Naropa University. “In what ways does a search for one´s own artistic means stand in relation to an already classical vocabulary – in our case the classical period of modern performance art?” reads Felix Ensslin’s question to the performers after their performance of Esther Ferrer ‘s “Intimo y personal” at the Heusteigtheater. And Karolin Meunier reports how Ulrike Mueller questioned her own paintings and attempts to clarify with them to “How to leave behind the space of representation and move into the here and now of production and reception”. 

Issues that may not be answered with words but also in actions. Questions that do not want to be treated in the format of a conference. Questions that can lose themselves in the rush of the events of a performance festival. Questions, in need of constant revision and of new production, that are beyond simply exhibiting them. Instead, a perpetual Show, Demonstrate, Exchange. In the MoMA, in the library or alone in the bathroom. An event format with the goal to think performance, conversation, teaching and the event in conjunction.

The recent volume is edited by the organizers Johannes Paul Raether and Discoteca Flaming Star and documents in examples the performances and discussions of the first two organised events in Berlin and Stuttgart. In addition texts by the artists Karolin Meunier and Jeremiah Day, specially written for the publication, deepen the immediate impressions of the evenings and reflect from their own practice problems developed in the field of performance, art and academy.

A publication by the department of Fine Arts / Intermedia Arts of the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart .
Edited by Discoteca Flaming Star and John Paul Raether.
Contributions: Jeremiah Day , Felix Ensslin, Sabrina Karl, Karolin Meunier, Yorgos Sapountzis, Ute Waldhausen, and others

Layout: Sarah Baumann and Antonia Terhedebrügge at the Institute for book design and media development of the State Academy of Fine Arts, Head Prof. Uli Cluss.
164 pp., numerous b/w illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-942144-29-2
Price: EUR 10

Jeremiah Day will perform part of “The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness”, his long-term project dealing with old-fashioned and uncomfortable questions of “truth,” understanding and factuality. With its point of departure in the 1970’s Church Commission – an investigation into the US intelligence agencies and the legacy of the man who led the hearings, Senator Frank Church – the work’s evolving forms seem to have a new relevancy against the backdrop of recent disclosures of wide-spread surveillance.

Inhalt:
Editorial
Christoph Laimer, Elke Rauth
– Public Spaces. Resilience & Rhythm:
Resilience, rhythm, and public space. Shaping robust environments
Aglaée Degros, Sabine Knierbein, Ali Madanipour
The role of users in processes of urban resilience : the career of Manhattan’s Pier 84
Stéphane Tonnelat
The Polykatoikia – Resilience and variability in space and time
Richard Woditsch
Im Reich der Wunder. Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin
Nikolai Roskamm
And the Street Goes on: Everyday Acts of Resilience in Budapest
Ian Cook
Istanbul – City of Risk. Public space planning for risk mitigation
Susanne Prehl, Senem Zeybekoglu Sadri
Prishtina: shifting experiences of places in a ‘post-conflict’ city
Karin Norman
– Kunstinserts:
World´s End
Martin Krenn, Barbara Holub, Paul Rajakovics
– Magazin:
Lob der Brandstifterin
Thomas Ballhausen
Physical Disorder oder Urban Culture? Ein ethnographischer Essay über Architektur, Graffiti und Überwachung
Robert Rothmann
Straßenbeobachtungen: Das Smartphone im Stadtalltag
Peter Neitzke
– Serie: Geschichte der Urbanität:
Die Stadt als Archipel der Kapseln (Teil 2)
Manfred Russo
– dérive – Radio für Stadtforschung:
S.O.S ST. PAULI – Die Essohäuser und das Recht auf Stadt

– Besprechungen:
… „hinter dem nylonvorhang“? Architektur und Urbanismus Südosteuropas
Iris Meder
Der Raubzug in Berlins Mitte
Claudia Krieg
Los Angeles oder das Ende der Vergangenheit
Nicole Theresa Raab
Haltung und Handlung zugleich
Elisabeth Haid

Language: English-Deutsch
Pages: 68
Size: 28 x 21 cm
Binding: Softcover

Price: €8.00

Buy it

Giovanna Silva, ed.
Text by Angelo Del Boca and Giovanna Silva

The book Libya: Inch by Inch, House by House, Alley by Alley is part of a series of publications about nations at war, or in crisis; conceived by Giovanna Silva, they tell the stories of different countries through photographs of their multifaceted landscapes. In the case of Libya, Silva has attempted to outline the architectural structures built by Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime that were demolished during the recent revolution. Her journey started from Benghazi—the first epicenter of the revolt, as a city that had always been hostile to Colonel Gaddafi—and culminated in Tripoli, inside the bunker-barrack of Gaddafi’s residence. In this construction and de-construction of Gaddafi’s personality, Silva creates a parallel narrative relying on archival pictures she has collected over the years, depicting everything from a young Gaddafi surrounded by the politicians he did business with for years (who would later turn their backs on him), to images of his death, when he lay bleeding and knocked to the ground just like the architecture that embodied his ideals. The publication includes a conversation between Giovanna Silva and Gaddafi biographer Angelo Del Boca, who knew, inside out, just who the real Gaddafi was.

Language: English / Arabic
Size: 11 x 15 cm
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9788867490929

Price: €20.00
Buy it

Editionshow. Chert, Raster & Motto, @ Chert / Motto. 06.12.2013 – 15.02.2014

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

These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies – The Star, The Sun, The Times and others – in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along the roadside of every major arterial road in the city.
These tabloid posters – candid and often outrageous epigrams of news – have been displayed along this road since the First Anglo-Boer War. They live momentarily in the minds of passing drivers and pedestrians, and by midnight they are already defunct.

I began collecting South African tabloid posters in 2008 with no other purpose than to preserve them. I thought they were funny, clever and true. Composed in a local vernacular of shebeen English, these statements are part of the texture of our urban fabric; so familiar as to almost disappear. Loud and colourful, tough and sharp, replete with a droll wit and blunt gallows humour, their blatant iconoclasm and muscular use of language is invigorating and oddly reassuring. The newspapers themselves were not keeping an archive, and however ephemeral they might seem I thought there was a relevance in them that was not being recognised; something uniquely South African.

Driving down Louis Botha Avenue, the rhythmic flash of passing headlines reads like a journalistic version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. It’s an alternative history of the city, a tabloid summary of our age. Constructed from political sound-bites, public innuendos, colloquial bon-mots and hard, bitter truths, they read like an everyman’s state of the nation address, full of comedy and antagonism.

“They are,” as one of the copy editors remarked, “the perfect marriage of a corrupt society and a progressive constitution.”

– Laurence Hamburger

Language: English
Pages: 208
Size: 19 x 27 cm
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780957161221

49€
Buy it

Language: English-Deutsch
Pages: 320
Size: 24,5 x 18,5cm
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9783033042261

Price: €38.00
Buy it

Language to Cover a Page. Kristen Mueller. Motto Books / & So.