New Existentialism
Existentialism, existential, existence … the subject is simply too large and too complex, too personal to say anything sensible.

Conversations  with Ger Groot, Alana Jelinek, and Alexandra Blättler and an essay by Jan Verwoert.

Published by Fucking Good Art and edition fink

10€
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Friday, June 6th, from 7pm @ Motto Berlin
Please join us in Berlin to celebrate the publication of Jan Verwoert’s COOKIE!

Edited by Vivian Sky Rehberg and Marnie Slater

Co-published by Sternberg Press and the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy

Design by Nienke Terpsma

This new volume brings together a selection of Jan Verwoert’s most recent writings. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

If we don’t merely reduce art to clever code play in the arenas of representation, how do we speak about what is at stake? In response to this question, Verwoert addresses the forces at the heart of the tragicomedy that making, showing, and critiquing art implicates us in. He honors the basic joys of turning one thing into another, and the miracles of rhythm and rhyme that characterize the residual level of mimetic magic in art. In this key, the unverifiable is practiced daily: bodies are remade, feelings transfigured. As Alina Szapocznikow wrote, the mouth chews and out comes sculpture. Verwoert’s COOKIE! renders visible the endless emotional labor of setting the stage (for others), poses the thorny question of whether there could ever be a labor union for con-artists (like us), and gestures toward an ethics of disappointment to battle false expectations and as a way to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how you look at it, criticism hurts.

Published January 2014, English
12 x 18 cm, 252 pages, 13 b/w ills., hardcover
ISBN 978-3-95679-029-4
€18.00

COOKIE!. Jan Verwoert. Sternberg Press, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy.

Edited by Vivian Sky Rehberg and Marnie Slater

This new volume brings together a selection of Jan Verwoert’s most recent writings. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

If we don’t merely reduce art to clever code play in the arenas of representation, how do we speak about what is at stake? In response to this question, Verwoert addresses the forces at the heart of the tragicomedy that making, showing, and critiquing art implicates us in. He honors the basic joys of turning one thing into another, and the miracles of rhythm and rhyme that characterize the residual level of mimetic magic in art. In this key, the unverifiable is practiced daily: bodies are remade, feelings transfigured. As Alina Szapocznikow wrote, the mouth chews and out comes sculpture. Verwoert’s COOKIE! renders visible the endless emotional labor of setting the stage (for others), poses the thorny question of whether there could ever be a labor union for con-artists (like us), and gestures toward an ethics of disappointment to battle false expectations and as a way to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how you look at it, criticism hurts.

Co-published with Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy
Design by Nienke Terpsma

Language: English
Pages: 252
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-3-95679-029-4

18€
Buy it

Last copies of Jan Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want were just restocked too!

18€
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Bulletins Of The Serving Library #5. Stuart Bailey, Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt (Eds.). Sternberg Press.

Contributions by Michael Bracewell, Diedrich Diederichsen, Isla Leaver-Yap, Philip Ording, Leila Peacock, David Reinfurt, Mike Sperlinger, Jan Verwoert

Conceived while in residency at the library of the Goethe-Institut New York, this issue of Bulletins of The Serving Library used the context of the hosting institution as a thematic starting point.

Contemplating this theme as both foreigners and German citizens, many of the contributors present theses that reach deep into the realm of the personal. Jan Verwoert, for example, discusses the communication within his family as a lexicon “somewhere between speech and speechlessness”; while Leila Peacock, as a native English speaker learning German, explores the liminal space between language and translation. Diedrich Diederichsen, together with a list of editors and translators, co-translates his essay “Hören, Wiederhören, Zitieren,” published in the 1997 January issue of Spex. Diederichsen’s discussion of the pop quotation in music highlights the genre’s proximity to language, as the pop quotation “refers to what is absent in the present, and therefore points towards the semiotic nature of any music.”

Language: English
Pages: 152
ISBN: 978-3-943365-85-6

15 €
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Bulletins of The Serving Library #2. Sternberg Press.

Contributions by Dimmi Davidoff, Július Koller, David Fischli & Peter Weiss, Rob Giampietro, Anthony Huberman, Junior Aspirin Records, Perri MacKenzie, David Senior, Jan Verwoert

Bulletins of The Serving Library #2 continues the trajectory begun by DOT DOT DOT, Dexter Sinister’s previous house journal which ran for ten years and twenty issues. This issue grew out of two physical incarnations of The Serving Library in 2011. The first took place from July 4–August 10 in the Walter Phillips Gallery of the Visual Arts department at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Here they set up a model of the library’s projected interior to house a six-week summer school titled From the Toolbox of a Serving Library. The school comprised daily morning seminars, supplemented by a few evening events. Each week was based on a specific component from a (Photoshop-proxy) digital software toolbox, in order to reconsider what a contemporary (Bauhaus-proxy) Foundation Course might most usefully comprise. The second opened on October 29 and at the time of writing remains installed at Artists Space, New York. Here the same model serves more as a mini-expo in view of an eventual fixed home, alongside a parallel three-screen projection concerned with “Identity.”

D 10 €

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