August 26th, 5pm somewhere in Place des fêtes, Paris
Température ressentie 32°.
Edition of 50.
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With texts by Amy Sillman and Emily LaBarge
Exhibition catalogue with twenty color illustrations of paintings by the British painter Prunella Clough (1919–1999). Published to commemorate the first German presentation of the artist’s work at June gallery, Berlin, the book focuses on the artist’s late-career departure from the industrial figuration for which she was known into a wry, quietly influential approach to abstraction. Included works date from 1960–1993. Prunella Clough’s abstraction developed largely out of step with any artistic movement or milieu: impervious to the advent of Pop, she was more taken by the Minimalism of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, which may have accentuated her sense of restraint. Amy Sillman calls Clough “a ‘conceptual painter’ avant la lettre,” while Merlin James emphasizes how she “anticipated many traits in post-modern painting.” Awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1999 shortly before her death, and recognized with significant solo exhibitions at Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery (1989), the Camden Arts Center (1996), and a posthumous Tate Britain retrospective (2007), Clough’s legacy remains bogged down by emphasis on her early figurative works, tethering her innovative abstraction too tightly to an industrial origin story. This catalogue is a remedy to this situation.
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The process of preparing this book began with looking at photographs of large meeting tables around which Chinese and Singaporean public officials gathered during the many Chinese government study missions to Singapore throughout the 1990s. While such images might seem unremarkable today, the appearance of former revolutionaries of the Maoist era as sedentary technocrats marks the historic emergence of a distinct political imaginary in a time when “the economy” was displacing class struggle as the primary subject of governance in China.
It was at the table that these technocrats, having extricated themselves from the masses, devised the concept of the socialist market economy to frame the economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. As they insisted on the compatibility of the market economy with the prevailing socialist social contract, the reformers articulated their turn towards the market as a decision informed not by the “invisible” manner through which the market allocates its resources, but by the assumed transparency of its information flows, which they believed would make visible what the party-state had been previously unable to see.
Yet, to the extent that this process of “seeking truth from facts”, as the reformers put it, is founded upon a set of separations—the party-state from the masses, information from ideology, the economic from the political—what ultimately underwrites the total visibility apparently provided by the table is the concealment of that which must not be allowed to appear as information in order for the logic of the market to obtain: the exploitation of labour.
It is on this basis that the factory can be construed as the table’s forgotten origin and impenetrable interior, and the gate that circumscribes the compound the limit of the market’s capacity for making things visible. Designed to spatially contain industrial labour and hide their exploitation from the public sphere, the factory gate is as close as the technocrat would get, as seen during the factory’s opening ceremony, to the world of labour under a capitalist mode of production. In thus proposing a convergence between tables and factories and examining their respective regimes of (in)visibility across the contexts of Singapore and Reform-era China, this collection of images and texts seeks to understand how the seemingly disparate worlds centred around these two objects in fact call forth each other to produce our deeply unsettled contemporary condition—one where the recognition that accrues to visibility has replaced freedom from exploitation as the most that the people can ever demand after the revolution’s untimely end.
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“All my illustrations on this zine are inspired by Interviews which I contact to my friends who live in South Korea, UK, and Germany. These interviews show me different perspective about this unusual situation after 2020. I think It is more personal thought or feeling compare with dairy news of person-on-the -street interviews which already edited by someone else. I can see (imagine) so much details of their life. It seems to bring me somewhere in this world. Probably under this situation, it was more effective. After I read it, I feel so free. Hopefully, you also feel a little bit chilled out. I would like to say Thank you to my friends again.”
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Universal Tongue celebrates the great diversity of the global dance kaleidoscope in the era of the Internet. It was born from visual artist Anouk Kruithof’s fascination with dance videos distributed online as a representation of self-expression, cultural identity, empowerment and fun.
In collaboration with a team of 50 researchers from across the globe, she sourced over 8800 dance videos online, which were edited down to a 1000 unique dance styles that she blended into a dynamic 8 channel video installation with a four hour duration, accompanied by a unifying soundtrack. The researchers provided a short text for each dance style presented in their found videos. These 1000 edited texts combined with screenshots taken from the videos introduce the origin, background and meaning of the dance styles. Et voilà! this ‘dancyclopedia’ through the jungle of the Internet was born!
This book shows how dance can be a way of knowing about the world. It is by no means exclusive, final, or academic. It is a statement. Organized in alphabetical order by the first letter of each dance style, it confirms the horizontality of Universal Tongue, by erasing typical categories of the world order, such as country, continent, or culture. Instead, it points us towards a more inclusive world with a limitless exchange—a world where simply everyone is a dancer.
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Double LP compilation featuring Italian dancefloor music from the end of the Afro/Cosmic scene to the beginning of the Italian Rave era, between 1987 and 1994.
Stunning bit of research by Andrea Dallera (Dualismo Sound) and Gabriele Casiraghi who’ve been meticulously digging Italian bins. After endless sifting through this crucial time in Italian dance floor music, we are presented with their final distillation of this transitory period between 80’s afro cosmic and Italo’s peak into early 90’s rave and Italo house era. In their words: “The whole concept was born as we started to find records that were into a kind of hybrid zone that was clearly pre-announcing some of the huge musical changes brought by the 90’s. The sound at play can be understood as looking closely to Belgian New Beat, Uk’s Acid House and German early Techno but still connected with some dynamics of the ‘80s sounds: lashing snares and catchy melodic phrases joined by filthy acid bass lines, highly compressed kicks and ‘World music’ samples are just some of the most recurring elements.” Hands down mandatory for any dance floor oriented record collection.
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It’s fall (or autumn) 2018. The Trump administration wants to fortify the United States-Mexico border, Robert ‘Beto’ O’Rourke is running for Senate, and British grifter Nicki Smith has just secured a “low-paid glamour job” at the University of Texas’ Jacques Lacan Foundation. In between sleeping with the air-conditioning repair guy (or man) and watching Kate Moss make-up commercials (or advertisements) Nicki completes the first ever American-English translation of Lacan’s newly discovered and highly controversial notebook – without knowing any French. An Anglo-American comedy of manners about identity and class The Jacques Lacan Foundation reveals—and revels in—the numerous pretensions that surround academia and authorship, and the institutions that foster them.
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This collection of incomplete essays is what we call the ecology of everything. We think of complexity like an astrayed arrow hitting no target. Line and dots. A dashing constellation of things. Everything is not directly related to everything, but everything is related to something.
These ideas are a vestige of a fragmented ecosystem. A marginal third nature that manages to live in the interstices of capitalism. They are a recollection of brief awe, not able to finish their growth and already being torn into pieces by social media, memes, podcasts, YouTube videos, video games, and a constant urge for disaster. A little codex sent from planet Earth in times of destruction. And so, we find them. Sporulating at the End of the World is Holobiont; me, you, and everything in between.
Numbered edition of 50.
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