Title: Book as Artwork 1960/1972
Author: Germano Celant
Originally published by: Nigel Greenwood Inc., London, 1972
Re-publisher: 6 Decades Books, Brooklyn/NY
Format: 97 pages, 0.6 x 14 x 17.8 cm, paperback, English
ISBN: 978-0-9829694-0-3
Originally published in 1972 by the Nigel Greenwood Gallery, Book as Artwork 1960/1972 was the first catalogue devoted to the then new medium of the artist’s book and it remains a canonical reference (though one that, due to its scarcity, is not as well known as it should be). This publication started as an article and a list of about 80 artists’ books which appeared in 1970 in the first issue of the Italian magazine Arte. Not long after it was translated and published in Data magazine. Then in 1972 the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of artists’ books and issued a catalogue with a greatly expanded bibliography (now nearly 300 titles) compiled by Lynda Morris. The exhibition was the first of its kind and the catalogue a genuinely historic publication.
From the book:
“The book is a medium that requires no visual display, other than to be read, and the active mental participation of the reader. The book imposes no information system but the printed image and the word; it is a complete entity in which both public and private documents are reproduced. The book is a collection of photographs, writings, and ideas—it is a product of thought and of imagination. It is a result of concrete activities, and serves to document, and to offer information as the means and the material of art.”
/ project:
Germano Celant: Book as Artwork 1960/1972, 1972
/ terminology: 1972, bibliography, bookness, bookwork, essay, germano celant, history, nigel greenwood gallery
/ category: theory
Title: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
Author: Lucy R. Lippard
Publishers: Praeger, New York, 1973
Format: 280 pages, 17.8 x 2.3 x 21.6 cm, English
Accompanying essay: Anna-Sophie Springer, Volumes: The Book as Exhibition, in: C Magazine, Issue 116, 2012, 36-44.
ISBN: 978-0-5202-1013-4 (actual version)
In Six Years Lucy R. Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents—including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period.
Full title of the book:
Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard.
From the accompanying essay (see above):
“An even more radical gesture by Lippard, however, is the retroactive anthology Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973)—a book that in hindsight Lippard herself states ‘is probably the best show I’ve ever curated—a show that includes other shows…. works of art and projects and panels and publications and whatever came along that I liked.’ While simultaneously defining an epoch of art, Lippard creates a new form of the art history book: a catalogue for an exhibition that never happened but which stands in for the exhibition itself.”
/ project:
Lucy R. Lippard: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, 1973
/ terminology: 1973, concept art, curatorial, dematerialization, essay, exhibition, lucy r. lippard
/ category: theory
Title: Understanding Media
Subtitle: The Extensions of Man
Author: Marshall McLuhan
Publisher: Routledge, London and New York
Format: 400 pages, 12.9 x 2.1 x 19.8 cm, English
ISBN: 978-0415253970
First paragraph from The Medium is the Message:
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. Thus, with automation, for example, the new patterns of human association tend to eliminate jobs, it is true. That is the negative result. Positively, automation creates roles for people, which is to say depth of involvement in their work and human association that our preceding mechanical technology had destroyed. Many people would be disposed to say that it was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message. In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs. The restructuring of human work and association was shaped by the technique of fragmentation that is the essence of machine technology. The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships.”
/ project:
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media, 1964
/ terminology: 1964, essay, global village, internet, marshall mcluhan, mass media, message, technology
/ category: theory
Title: The Medium is the Massage
Subtitle: An Inventory of Effects
Editors: Quentin Fiore and Marshall McLuhan (with Jerome Agel)
Publisher: Bantam | Random House, New York
Format: 160 pages, 17.9 x 10.8 x 1.2 cm
ISBN: 978-1-5842-3070-0 (actual version)
In 1967 McLuhan published The Medium is the Massage, a short volume which distilled many of his key ideas into aphorisms and brief paragraphs. Designed by Quentin Fiore, the typography, layout and accompanying images wittily illustrate the content, making this McLuhan’s most accessible text. A year after its publication in book form, an audio version was released. The recording combines selections from the text, read by McLuhan, Fiore, Agel, and others, with an eclectic mix of musical samples and accompaniment.
From Wikipedia:
The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is a book co-created by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel. It was published by Bantam books in 1967 and became a bestseller and a cult classic. The book itself is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror (see mirror writing). Some are intentionally left blank. Most contain photographs and images both modern and historic, juxtaposed in startling ways.
The book’s title is actually a mistake according to McLuhan’s son, Eric. The actual title was The Medium is the Message but it came back from the printer with the first “e” in message misprinted as an “a”. McLuhan is said to have thought the mistake to be supportive of the point he was trying to make in the book and decided to leave it be. Later readings have interpreted the word in the title as a pun meaning alternately “massage, “message,” and “mass age”. Its message, broadly speaking, is that historical changes in communications and craft media change human consciousness, and that modern electronics are bringing humanity full circle to an industrial analogue of tribal mentality, what he termed “the global village”. By erasing borders and dissolving information boundaries, electronic telecommunications are fated to render traditional social structures like the Nation state and the University irrelevant. Prejudice and oppression are also doomed by the unstoppable pressure of instant, global communication.
/ project:
Quentin Fiore and Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage, 1967
/ terminology: 1967, book, graphic design, marshall mcluhan, mass media, quentin fiore, random house, text-image-relations, theory, typography
/ category: practice, theory
Title: Cover to Cover
Artist: Michael Snow
Publisher: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design and New York University Press
Format: 316 pages, 23 x 18 cm
ISBN: none
A structuralist photography book, meant to be read cover to cover, meaning front to back, delivering a sequence of images printed full bleed (printed to the edge of the page, without borders). There is no text, so the title printed on the spine must be our guide. One can see at a glance that a single male figure is present throughout. From this one might assume that there is narrative structure—a following of this figure from cover to cover, as familiar from memoirs, diaries, or novels. This impression is both right and wrong, for the journey is not smooth.
The book is entirely composed of images made by two photographers aiming their cameras at the object-artist who is caught in a photographic crossfire; sometimes we see the photographers, mostly we do not. Their synchronized exposures result in two parallel sequences. They form a pair that is presented back to back, or recto-verso, on each leaf of the book. In creating this work Snow underlines two characteristics of the photographic image in print: how photographic representation compresses three-dimensional objects, and the thinness of the printed sheet. To do so he had to break the reader’s habits.
/ project:
Michael Snow: Cover to Cover, 1975
/ terminology: 1975, book, film, linearity, michael snow, new york university press, photography, press of nova scotia college of art & design, space, time
/ category: practice
Title: 4,492,040
Curator: Lucy R. Lippard
Editor: Jeff Khonsary
Re-Publisher: New Documents, Vancouver and Los Angeles, 2012
Format: 460 individual cards, 10.5 x 15 cm, English
ISBN: 978-1-9273-5400-1
Between 1969 and 1974, the influential curator Lucy Lippard (born 1937) curated four decisive Conceptual art exhibitions, and in doing so reinvented the exhibition catalogue. 4,492,040 is a facsimile reprint of the extremely scarce and hugely important catalogues produced for those exhibitions: 557,087 (Seattle Art Museum), 955,000 (Vancouver Art Gallery), 7,500 (California Institute of Art) and 2,972,453 (Centro de Arte y Comunicación). Titled after the populations of the cities in which the shows were held, each catalogue was an envelope of loose note cards containing statements, documentation and conceptual works by each artist, to be rearranged, filed or discarded at will. If Lippard described Conceptual art as the dematerialization of the art object, these catalogues effectively announced the dematerialization of the art exhibition. (One reviewer claimed Lippard had been the artist, and that her medium had been other artists.)
Participating artists:
Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Terry Atkinson, John Baldessari, Michael Baldwin, Robert Barry, Rick Barthelme, Daniel Buren, Rosemarie Castoro, Hanne Darboven, Walter de Maria, Jan Dibbets, Christos Dikeakos, Eleanor Antin, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Edward Kienholz Sol LeWitt, Roelof Louw, Duane Lundon, Bruce McLean, Robert Morris, N.E. Thing Co., Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall and Lawrence Weiner
/ project:
Lucy R. Lippard and Jeff Khonsary: 4,492,040, 1969-1974
/ terminology: 1969, catalogue, concept art, curating, dematerialization, exhibition, jeff khonsary, lucy r. lippard, new documents, note card
/ category: practice
Title: The Scan and the Export
Author: Sean Dockray
Originally published in: Fillip.ca | Issue 12 – Fall 2010
Featuring: Lorna Brown, Jeff Derksen, Sean Dockray, Sven Lütticken, Julian Myers, Anne Pasternak, Keith Wallace
Publisher: Projectile Publishing Society, Jeff Khonsary
Format: 120 pages, 17 x 24.5 cm, English
ISBN: 1715-3212-00012
First paragraph:
“The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates back and forth: between a physical page and a digital file, between one reader and another, between an economy of objects and an economy of data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither as ‘readable’ as the original book nor the inevitable ebook, always containing too much visual information or too little. Technically speaking, it is by scanning that one can make a digital representation of a physical object, such as a book. When a representation of that representation (the image) appears on a digital display device, it hovers like a ghost, one world haunting another. But it is not simply the object asserting itself in the milieu of light, information, and electricity. Much more is encoded in the image: indexes of past readings and the act of scanning itself.”
/ project:
Sean Dockray: The Scan and the Export, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, e-book, essay, fillip magazine, original/copy, post-digital, scan, sean dockray, xerox
/ category: theory
Title: Postinternet
Subtitle: Art After the Internet
Author: Marisa Olson
Published in: Foam Magazine | Issue 29 – Winter 2011
Format: 218 pages, 30 x 23 x 15 cm
ISBN: 978-9-0705-1624-6
Form Marisa Olson’s essay:
“In the postinternet era this phenomenon often manifests in the difference between critics who blog and bloggers who style themselves [self-appointed] critics. Despicable as the latter may be, they are also among the savviest internet users. Understanding that media, themselves (perhaps because they are all extensions of other media – and of ourselves – as McLuhan taught us) perform a sort of evolutionary ring cycle, they often flip-flop their flip- pant love-it/hate-it take on an artist’s work as frequently as they refresh their homepage.Yet these character flaws in the artworld’s online manifestations are not reasons to dismiss the internet or deny the postinternet.They are simply online reflections of a broader culture; one that just so happens to be internet-obsessed.”
From the introduction to Foam Magazine:
“Asking the simple yet difficult question What’s Next? This ten year anniversary issue takes stock of the current position of photography. In recent years, the digitalization of the medium brought about fundamental changes that have redetermined our entire visual culture, utterly transforming what we consider a photograph. Freed from the usual format, this issue is formed from six different sections: Independent, From Here On(line), Curating The Space, Magazines, Next Generation and Technology Matters. These chapters bundle interviews, in depth essays, statements and manifestos together to engage in discussion with those who can be conceived as representing the photographic community to raise key points and pose critical questions; the most basic of which – what is next?”
/ project:
Marisa Olson: Postinternet, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, essay, foam magazine, found images, marisa olson, performance, post-digital, post-internet
/ category: theory
Title: Lost Not Found
Subtitle: The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture
Author: Marisa Olson
Published in: Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein (eds.), Words Without Pictures, Aperture, 2010
Publisher: Aperture, New York City
Graphic design: O-R-G inc., David Reinfurt
Format: 512 pages, 8 1/4 x 5 7/8 inches, paperback, English
ISBN: 978-1-5971-1142-3
First paragraph:
“There is a strain of net art referred to among its practitioners and those who follow it as ‘pro surfer’ work. Characterized by a copy-and-paste aesthetic that revolves around the appropriation of web-based content in simultaneous celebration and critique of the internet and contemporary digital visual culture, this work—heavy on animated gifs, YouTube remixes, and an embrace of old-school ‘dirtstyle’ web design aesthetics—is beginning to find a place in the art world. But it has yet to benefit from substantial critical analysis. My aim here is to outline ways in which the work of pro surfers holds up to the vocabulary given to us by studies of photography and cinematic montage. I see this work as bearing a surface resemblance to the use of found photography while lending itself to close reading along the lines of film formalism. Ultimately, I will argue that the work of pro surfers transcends the art of found photography insofar as the act of finding is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distinguishes this practice from one of quotation by taking them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new meaning and authority.”
/ project:
Marisa Olson: Lost Not Found, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, aperture, essay, found images, marisa olson, performance, post-digital, post-internet
/ category: theory
Title: Words Without Pictures
Editors: Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein
Publisher: Aperture, New York City
Graphic design: O-R-G inc., David Reinfurt
Format: 512 pages, 8 1/4 x 5 7/8 inches, paperback, English
ISBN: 978-1-5971-1142-3
Words Without Pictures was originally conceived of by curator Charlotte Cotton as a means of creating spaces for thoughtful and urgent discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator was invited to contribute a short, un-illustrated, and opinionated essay about an aspect of photography that, in his or her view, was either emerging or in the process of being rephrased. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures-website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long life, each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested partiesstudents, photographers active in the commercial sector, bloggers, critics, historians, artists of all kinds, educators, publishers, and photography enthusiasts alikeall coming together to consider the issues at hand. All of these essays, responses, and other provocations are gathered together in a volume designed by David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister.
With contributions by:
Walead Beshty, Paul Graham, Darius Himes, Kevin Moore, Penelope Umbrico, James Welling, George Baker, Sharon Lockhart, Shannon Ebner, Allen Ruppersberg, Allan McCollum, Carter Mull, Anthony Pearson, Mark Wyse, Sarah Charlesworth, Sze Tsung Leong, Harrell Fletcher, Leslie Hewitt, A.L. Steiner, Jason Evans, Charlie White, John Divola, Marisa Olson (Lost Not Found. The Circulation of Images in Digital Visual Culture), and many more
/ project:
Charlotte Cotton and Alex Klein: Words Without Pictures, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, alex klein, aperture, charlotte cotton, essay, internet, photography
/ category: theory
Title: Re-Editioned Texts: Heart of Darkness
Artist: Stephanie Syjuco
Publisher: Lulu.com
Format: 10 volumes, each 10.8 x 17.48 cm
ISBN: none
Twelve different paperback copies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reprinted using text files downloaded from different online sources. As unique copies, the interior text is modified by the digitization of the novel – some include Google ads, mistakes, and mistranslations of the original. Conrad’s 1899 novel was a layered narrative exploration of colonialism, a search for a shadowy figure in a Heart of Darkness. By creating physical books from digital files, the text further becomes modified, adding a layer of distance, mistranslation, but perhaps also functions as an inadvertent rewriting.
via
download (Project Gutenberg’s version)
/ project:
Stephanie Syjuco: Re-Editioned Texts: Heart of Darkness, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, appropriation, book, bookness, format, literature, lulu, materiality, stephanie syjuco
/ category: practice
Title: Shakespeare.txt.jpg
Artist: Tom Scott
ISBN: none
Six different versions of The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare in six books. Each book, except for the one that includes the original work, is obtained by applying to the text the JPEG compression algorithm at different quality levels. The cover shows the JPEG image including the altered text. Shakespeare’s text was loaded as a RAW file into Photoshop, then it was saved as a JPEG image. The compressed file was finally outputted back to plain text. The same process was carried out several times with different qualities of compression: 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%.
/ project:
Tom Scott: Shakespeare.txt.jpg, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, appropriation, book, jpeg, literature, self-publishing, text-image-relations, tom scott, william shakespeare
/ category: practice
Title: Public Library
Editors: Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and What, How & for Whom/WHW
Authors: Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug & Tomislav Medak, Paul Otlet, McKenzie Wark
Publishers: What, How & for Whom / WHW & Multimedia Institute, Zagreb
Format: 144 pages, 12 x 22 cm
ISBN: 978-953-7372-27-9
From the main essay:
Public Library is an entry in the catalog of History where a fantastic decimal describes a category of phenomenon that—together with free public education, a free public healthcare, the scientific method, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software, among others—we, the people, are most proud of. The public library is a part of these invisible infrastructures that we start to notice only once they begin to disappear. A utopian dream—about the place from which every human being will have access to every piece of available knowledge that can be collected—looked impossible for a long time, until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions, the Enlightment idea of universality of knowledge, and the expcetional suspenssion of the comercial barriers to access to knowledge made it possible.
Further essays in the book:
— Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug & Tomislav Medak: Public Library
— Paul Otlet: Transformations in the Bibliographical Apparatus of the Sciences
— McKenzie Wark: Metadata Punk
—Tomislav Medak: The Future After the Library. UbuWeb and Monoskop’s Radical Gestures
/ project:
Tomislav Medak, Marcell Mars, and What, How & for Whom/WHW: Public Library, 2015
/ terminology: 2015, essay, internet, knowledge, library, manar zarroug, marcell mars, mckenzie wark, open source, paul otlet, post-digital, tomislav medak, what how & for whom / whw
/ category: theory
Title: Materialities of Independent Publishing
Subtitle: A Conversation With Aaaaarg, Chto delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural
Authors: Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dmitry Vilensky
Publisher: Lawrence and Wishart
Published in: New Formations, Number 78, Summer 2013, pp. 157-178(22)
DOI:10.3898/NEWF.78.08.2013
Abstract:
This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print.
/ project:
Jodi Dean, et al: Materialities of Independent Publishing. A Conversation With Aaaaarg, Chto delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, alessandro ludovico, conversation, dmitry vilensky, essay, jodi dean, nicholas thoburn, pauline van mourik broekman, post-digital, publishing, sean dockray
/ category: theory
Title: VOLUME
Artist: Luigi Amato and Roberto Arista
Publisher: Lulu.com
Format: 740 pages, 14.81 x 20.98 cm, perfect-bound paperback, black and white
ISBN: 978-1-2919-7705-9
VOLUME is the first of a series of experimental publications in which the form of the book is specific to its realization. Deliberately inspired by The New Art of Making Books by the artist and collector Ulises Carrión, this publication inquiries the book as an autonomous and self-sufficient medium, a volume in the space in which the physical aspects (dimensions, weight, page numbers, sequentiality an so on) and modes of fruition become the content of the book itself. Through a script, it has been possible to measure the properties of the single pages and the relation between multiple pages along the space-time sequence of the book. The data made visible by VOLUME show the continuous physical and perceptive variations acting in/on the book during the reading process.
/ project:
Luigi Amato and Roberto Arista: VOLUME, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, book, bookness, formalism, luigi amato, lulu, materiality, page, print on demand, production process, roberto arista, space, time
/ category: practice
Title: C.O.P.Y
Artist: Martin Wecke
Format: 92 pages, 12.5 x 19 cm
Accompanying essay: Anna Nimus, Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons, Subsol, 2006 [Last accessed: October 17, 2015]
ISBN: none
The pages of C.O.P.Y remain empty for the human eye. After xeroxing or scanning the book reveals the essay Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons by Anna Nimus. As in open source development, the text’s quality (legibility) gets better with every copy.
From Anna Nimus’ essay:
“The author has not always existed. The image of the author as a wellspring of originality, a genius guided by some secret compulsion to create works of art out of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is an 18th century invention. This image continues to influence how people speak about the ‘great artists’ of history, and it also trickles down to the more modest claims of the intellectual property regime that authors have original ideas that express their unique personality, and therefore have a natural right to own their works – or to sell their rights, if they should choose. Although these ideas appear self-evident today, they were an anomaly during their own time. The different pre-Enlightenment traditions did not consider ideas to be original inventions that could be owned because knowledge was held in common. Art and philosophy were products of the accumulated wisdom of the past. There were no authors — in the sense of original creators and final authorities — but only masters of various crafts (sculpture, painting, poetry, philosophy) whose task was to appropriate existing knowledge, re-organize it, make it specific to their age, and transmit it further. Artists and sages were messengers, and their ability to make knowledge manifest was considered a gift from the gods. Art was governed by a gift economy: aristocratic patronage was a gift in return for the symbolic gift of the work. Even the neoclassical worldview that immediately preceded Romanticism viewed art as imitation of nature and the artist as a craftsman who transmitted ideas that belonged to a common culture.”
/ project:
Martin Wecke: C.O.P.Y, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, book, copyright, essay, in/visibility, martin wecke, original/copy, reader performance, xerox
/ category: practice, theory
Title: Dear Lulu
Author: James Goggin (Practise) with students of the faculty of Design at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt & Prof. Frank Philippin
Publisher: Lulu.com
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Format: 96 pages, 14,81 x 20,98 cm, perfect bound paper back, full colour, English
ISBN: none
Dear Lulu is a test book which was researched and produced by graphic design students at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany, during an intensive two-day workshop with London-based designer James Goggin (Practise). The book’s intention is to act as a calibration document for testing colour, pattern, format, texture and typography. Exercises in colour profile, halftoning, point size, line, geometry, skin tone, colour texture, cropping and print finishing provide useful data for other designers and self-publishers to judge the possibilities and quality of online print-on-demand — specifically Lulu.com, with this edition. The project was afterwards extended to other platforms, such as Blurb and MagCloud.
/ project:
James Goggin: Dear Lulu, 2008
/ terminology: 2008, book, bookness, formalism, graphic design, james goggin, lulu, materiality, print on demand, production process
/ category: practice
Title: Greetings from the Internet
Artist: Aram Bartholl
Publisher: self-published
Format: Installation wit 48 postcards, each 14.8 x 10.5 cm
ISBN: none
Statement by the artist:
“Over the past years I’ve been collecting pictures of wifi passwords when ever I encountered them during travels. In many private and public places there is wireless Internet access available but to connect a password is required. ‘Is there Internet here?’ Often wifi passwords are written or printed on little pieces of paper or on the chalk board behind the counter in the cafe etc. ‘What is the wifi password?’ A lot of these codes are hand written which makes them very vulnerable to mis-spelling or mis-interpretation. Is this an upper case c? Is there a mistake in the code? Are you able to guess the right one? Wifi passwords represent an era of the moment of connection. A moment of human factor before we slowly drift into always connected with all devices where ever we are.”
/ project:
Aram Bartholl: Greetings from the Internet, 2013-ongoing
/ terminology: 2013, accessibility, aram bartholl, collection, installation, photography, postcard, wifi
/ category: practice
Title: Just in Time, or A Short History of Production
Artist: Xavier Antin
Format: Installation and book with 42 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm, edition of 100
ISBN: none
Just in Time, or A Short History of Production is a book printed through a printing chain made of four desktop printers using four different colors and technologies dated from 1880 to 1976. A production process that brings together small scale and large scale production, two sides of the same history. The chain of printers includes:
MAGENTA (Stencil duplicator, 1880)
CYAN (Spirit duplicator, 1923)
BLACK (Laser printer, 1969)
YELLOW (Inkjet printer, 1976)
/ project:
Xavier Antin: Just in Time, or A Short History of Production, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, book, history, installation, materiality, printing, production process, xavier antin
/ category: practice
Title: Uncreative Writing
Subtitle: Managing Language in the Digital Age
Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: 192 pages, 1.3 x 14 x 21 cm, English
ISBN: 978-0-2311-499-14
“Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.
In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.”
/ project:
Kenneth Goldsmith: Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, columbia university press, concept art, essay, kenneth goldsmith, literature, poetry, uncreative writing, writing
/ category: theory
Title: Against Expression
Subtitle: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing
Editors: Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Format: 593 pages, 15.2 x 4.1 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2711-1
In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought.” Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language.
Artists: Monica AASPRONG, Walter ABISH, Vito ACCONCI, Kathy ACKER, Sally ALATALO, Paal Bjelke ANDERSEN, David ANTIN, Louis ARAGON, Nathan AUSTIN, J. G. BALLARD, Fiona BANNER, Derek BEAULIEU, Samuel BECKETT, Caroline BERGVALL, Charles BERNSTEIN, Ted BERRIGAN, Jen BERVIN, Gregory BETTS, Christian BÖK, Marie BUCK, William S. BURROUGHS, David BUUCK, John CAGE, Blaise CENDRARS, Thomas CLABURN, Elisabeth CLARK, Claude CLOSKY, Clark COOLIDGE, Hart CRANE, Brian Joseph DAVIS, Katie DEGENTESH, Mónica DE LA TORRE, Denis DIDEROT, Marcel DUCHAMP, Craig DWORKIN, Laura ELRICK, Dan FARRELL, Gerald FERGUSON, Robert FITTERMAN, Lawrence GIFFIN, Peter GIZZI, Judith GOLDMAN, Kenneth GOLDSMITH, Nada GORDON, Noah Eli GORDON, Michael GOTTLIEB, Dan GRAHAM, Michelle GRANGAUD, Brion GYSIN, Michael HARVEY, H. L HIX, Yunte HUANG, Douglas HUEBLER, Peter JAEGER, Emma KAY, Bill KENNEDY and Darren WERSHLER, Michael KLAUKE, Christopher KNOWLES, Joseph KOSUTH, Leevi LEHTO, Tan LIN, Dana Teen LOMAX, Trisha LOW, Rory MACBETH, Jackson MAC LOW, Stéphane MALLARMÉ, Donato MANCINI, Peter MANSON, Shigeru MATSUI, Bernadette MAYER, Steve MCCAFFERY, Stephen MCLAUGHLIN and Jim CARPENTER, David MELNICK, Richard MELTZER, Christof MIGONE, Tomoko MINAMI, K. Silem MOHAMMAD, Simon MORRIS, Yedda MORRISON, Harryette MULLEN, Alexandra NEMEROV, C. K. OGDEN, Tom ORANGE, PARASITIC VENTURES, George PEREC, M. NourbeSe PHILIP, Vanessa PLACE, Bern PORTER, Raymond QUENEAU, Claudia RANKINE, Ariana REINES, Charles REZNIKOFF, Deborah RICHARDS, Kim ROSENFIELD, Raymond ROUSSEL, Aram SAROYAN, Ara SHIRINYAN, Ron SILLIMAN, Juliana SPAHR, Brin Kim STEFANS, Gary SULLIVAN, Nick THURSTON, Rodrigo TOSCANO, Tristan TZARA, Andy WARHOL, Darren WERSHLER, Christine WERTHEIM, WIENER GRUPPE William Butler YEATS, Steven ZULTANSKI, Vladimir ZYKOV
/ project:
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith: Against Expression, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, book, concept art, craig dworkin, kenneth goldsmith, literature, northwestern university press, poetry, writing
/ category: practice, theory
Title: 18 PARIS IV.70
Editor: Michel Claura
Publisher: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Ian Wilson, Lawrence Weiner, Niele Toroni, Robert Ryman, Edward Ruscha, Richard Long, Sol LeWitt, David Lamelas, On Kawara, Douglas Huebler, François Guinochet, Gilbert & George, Jean-Pierre Djian, Jan Dibbets, Daniel Buren, Stanley Brouwn, Marcel Broodthaers, and Robert Barry
Format: 96 pages, 4.1 x 6.5 inches
ISBN: none
18 PARIS IV.70 was an exhibition organized by Michel Claura in Paris in 1970. Held at a temporary space on Rue Mouffetard that April, it was accompanied by this trilingual publication (in English, French, and German), edited by Claura and published and distributed by Seth Siegelaub. Claura invited a group of artists to each contribute a work to the exhibition. Having collected a series of artist proposals, Claura then sent this collection to each of the participants, after which they were allowed to change their initial plans. This publication includes a preface and a postface by Claura and a two-part entry from each of the eighteen participants, with their original proposal alongside a description of their project as it was finally realized.
/ project:
Michel Claura and Seth Siegelaub: 18 PARIS IV.70, 1970
/ terminology: 1970, catalogue, communication, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, michel claura, production process, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: January 5-31, 1969
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner
Format: 28 pages, 7 x 8.25 inches, black-and-white
ISBN: none
January 5-31, 1969 was organized by Seth Siegelaub. This publication, rather than accompanying an exhibition, functioned as the exhibition’s primary manifestation, being the only physical object on display during the show’s run. In addition to presenting images of their work, each artist (apart from Robert Barry) also supplied a brief statement on the nature of their practice.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: January 5-31, 1969, 1969
/ terminology: 1969, catalogue, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: The United States Servicemen’s Fund Art Collection
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Keith Sonnier, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Robert Murray, Robert Huot, David Diao, Gene Davis, Al Held, Robert Ryman, Alex Hay, Lawrence Weiner, Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, De Wain Valentine, Carl Andre, Joseph Kosuth
Format: 22 pages, 8.25 x 5 inches
ISBN: none
This catalogue, organized by Seth Siegelaub, both documents the works assembled to raise money for the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF) as well as inaugurates the fund’s art collection. The USSF was an organization established to promote free speech within the US military and was heavily engaged in anti-Vietnam War activity through both the funding and support of independent GI newspapers as well as various cultural actions and events. It also worked to defend the legal rights of GIs.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: The United States Servicemen’s Fund Art Collection, 1971
/ terminology: 1971, catalogue, curatorial, exhibition, institutional critique, politics, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement
Authors: Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky
Format: 8 pages, 17 x 22 inches (unfolded)
ISBN: none
Developed through conversations with members of the art world and written with the help of lawyer Robert Projansky in 1971, Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement was designed to safeguard the economic interests of artists, particularly in the case of an artwork’s resale, reproduction, or rental. Intended to serve as an accessible document for all artists, the contract was written in an easily comprehensible style and was widely distributed through art journals and magazines—characteristics shared by much of the artwork Siegelaub was currently representing. Since its publication in English, French, German, and Italian, the document has been used by a diverse range of artists.
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/ project:
Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky: The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement, 1971
/ terminology: 1971, contract, distribution, economics, reproduction, robert projansky, sales agreement, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: Die Kunstismen [Les Ismes de l´art, The Isms of Art]
Authors and editors: El Lissitzky and Hans Arp
Typography: El Lissitzky
Publishers: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach-Zürich München Leipzig (1925), Lars Müller Publisher, Zürich (1990)
Format: 48 pages, 26.2 x 20.7 cm, German, English, French, hard cover
ISBN (reprint from 1990): 978-3-9067-0028-1
Die Kunstismen [Les Ismes de l’art, The Isms of Art], designed and published by El Lissitzky and Hans Arp in 1925, covers avant garde art developments from 1914 to 1924 with a groundbreaking layout and typography. This surprising collection of “isms” ranks among the most important publications on avant-garde art in the 1920s. The book is filled with black-and-white photos and text in German, French, and English. This publication begins with definitions by well-known artists of the various movements, or forms of art, of the period. They range from Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Abstract Art, through Metaphysicians, Suprematism, Simultanism, Dadaism, Purism, Neoplasticism, Merz, Proun, Perism, Constructivism, to Abstract Film. The section is followed by reproductions illustrating each movement.
/ project:
El Lissitzky and Hans Arp: Die Kunstismen, 1925
/ terminology: 1925, book, el lissitzky, eugen rentsch verlag, hans arp, history, typography
/ category: practice
Title: 7 C-Days
Artist: Michael Aschauer
Graphic design: Nick Thoenen
Publisher: Fotohof Edition, Salzburg
Format: 84 pages, 19.3 x 15.2 x 1 cm, Japanese binding, paperback, English
ISBN: 978-3-9026-7541-5
Form the artist’s website:
“This book presents a seascape, recorded as continuous scan of a single point on the horizon over a period of seven days. What we see, though, is not the expansion of space, but a passage of time as captured by a simple, custom designed line-scan camera.I recorded these images in November 2007 on the Greek Island Syros, from a hilltop called ‘Oros Harasson’ which translates as ‘mountain that inscribes the direction of light’. The camera was oriented precisely at the point where the sun hits the sea during winter solstice.”
/ project:
Michael Aschauer: 7 C-Days, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, binding, book, fotohof edition, landscape, michael aschauer, photography, scan, time
/ category: practice
Title: Vorzüge der Absichtslosigkeit
Artist: Peter Piller
Publisher: Revolver Publishing, Berlin and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen
Editor: Christoph Keller
Format: 216 pages, 29.6 x 21.4 x 1.8 cm, softcover), 100 facsimile prints of office drawings, paperback and stapled brochure in transparent plastic jacket, German
ISBN: 978-3-8658-8027-7
Since several years, Peter Piller works in a Hamburg media agency – a job that has a strong influence on his artistic production. Next to his archive of newspaper clippings he has produced diary-like drawings documenting the rules and rituals of an office job, office hierarchies, and so on. The book Vorzüge der Absichtslosigkeit puts a special focus on Piller’s office drawings.
/ project:
Peter Piller: Vorzüge der Absichtslosigkeit, 2004
/ terminology: 2004, book, drawing, iteration/variation, office, page, peter piller, revolver publishing
/ category: practice
Title: The Xeroxed Book
Artist: Eric Doeringer
Publisher: self-published
Format: 185 pages, bound photocopies, 8.5 x 11 inches, edition of 250
ISBN: none
The Xeroxed Book is based on Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner – an artists’ book published by Seth Siegelaub and John Wendler in 1969 that is more commonly known as The Xerox Book. It was conceived as an exhibition in book form: Siegelaub invited the seven titular artists to submit 25-page projects designed to be reproduced by the then-new technology of the photocopy. However, photocopying proved too expensive at the time, and the book was printed on a traditional offset press.
The Xeroxed Book is a photocopied edition of The Xerox Book. Being photocopied, this edition is perhaps closer to Siegelaub’s intent than the original book. However, as a second-generation copy, The Xeroxed Book displays the limitations of photocopying as a reproductive technology. Dust, page edges, distortions, and other familiar Xerox artifacts appear on every page, becoming as much a part of the reading experience as the original artists’ projects.
/ project:
Eric Doeringer: The Xeroxed Book, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, appropriation, book, eric doeringer, original/copy, seth siegelaub, xerox
/ category: practice
Title: The Xerox Book
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner
Format: 190 pages, 8.375 x 10.625 inches
ISBN: none
This book exhibition—also known as The Xerox Book—was organized and published by Seth Siegelaub in 1968. Both presenting a range of artists associated with Siegelaub’s curatorial practice and utilizing unconventional modes of exhibition, this book marks ongoing attempt by Siegelaub to show work outside of the gallery setting, and his first time showing an exhibition in book form. Furthermore, Siegelaub asked each artist in the exhibition to create 25 pages of work that responded to the photocopy format. Though the Xerox process proved financially unfeasible—the works ultimately being reproduced through the more conventional printing press—the book continued to be referred to as The Xerox Book, preserving its association with the then-new photocopy technology.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: The Xerox Book, 1968
/ terminology: 1968, catalogue, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, original/copy, page, seth siegelaub, xerox
/ category: practice
Title: July, August, September 1969
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Carl Andre (The Hague), Robert Barry (Baltimore), Daniel Buren (Paris), Jan Dibbets (Amsterdam), Douglas Huebler (Los Angeles), Joseph Kosuth (New Mexico), Sol LeWitt (Düsseldorf), Richard Long (Bristol, UK), N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. (Vancouver), Robert Smithson (Yucatan), Lawrence Weiner (Niagara Falls)
Format: 36 pages, 8.25 x 10.9 inches
ISBN: none
July, August, September 1969 was an exhibition organized by Seth Siegelaub consisting of works by eleven artists at eleven separate geographical locations. The trilingual catalogue—in English, French, and German—both documented and reproduced the diverse works, which ranged from fleeting events and performances to museum shows and open-ended environmental interventions. In each case, the respective artist was responsible for providing information on the work’s materials and design.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: July, August, September 1969, 1969
/ terminology: 1969, catalogue, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, network, seth siegelaub, space
/ category: practice
Title: March 1969 (One Month)
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Carl Andre, Mike Asher, Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Robert Barry, Rick Barthelme, Iain Baxter, James Lee Byars, John Chamberlain, Ron Cooper, Barry Flanagan, Dan Flavin, Alex Hay, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Alan Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, De Wain Valentine, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson
Format: 32 pages, 6.8 x 8.5 inches, black-and-white
ISBN: none
This book, also known as One Month, was organized by Seth Siegelaub and took the form of a page-a-day calendar for the month of March 1969. Siegelaub developed the book by assigning each of the 31 invited artists a specific day of the month (and its corresponding page) upon which they would construct a work. These text-based works were then collated and published by Siegelaub, leaving blank the pages assigned to artist who failed to respond.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: March 1969, 1969
/ terminology: 1969, calendar, catalogue, communication, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: Catalogue for the Exhibition
Editor: Seth Siegelaub
Artists: Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Robert Barry, Jan Dibbets, Douglas Huebler, Stephen Kaltenbach, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Lawrence Weiner
Format: 12 pages, 6 x 9 inches
ISBN: none
This catalogue was published in conjunction with a group exhibition curated by Seth Siegelaub at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada in 1969. The exhibition took place throughout the university, with a number of works distributed or announced via the school’s communication’s facilities (university mail, a student newspaper, etc). As part of the exhibition, a symposium was held by way of a ‘conference line’ telephone hook-up, with some of the participating artists calling in from Burnaby, Ottawa and New York. The catalogue was made available only after the exhibition was over.
/ project:
Seth Siegelaub: Catalogue for the Exhibition, 1969
/ terminology: 1969, catalogue, concept art, curatorial, exhibition, mail art, seth siegelaub
/ category: practice
Title: Prelude
Artist: Peter Downsbrough
Publisher: Imschoot, uitgevers, Ghent, put online by Netpoint, Ghent (1997), and deSingel, Antwerp (2011)
Format: 40 pages + instruction sheet, 18 x 12 cm; To be downloaded from the Internet, printed and assembled
ISBN: none
This book was done as a project on the Internet in 1997 and was available as a free download for a certain period of time from the website of Imschoot, uitgevers. Prelude could be printed out and assembled according to the artist’s instructions. In the colophone of this publication Peter Downsbrough stipulates that any commercial exploitation is strictly prohibited and that this book should not be published by any other method. [From: Moritz Küng (ed.), Peter Downsbrough. The Book(s) 1968-2010, Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern, 2011, 53.]
/ project:
Peter Downsbrough: Prelude, 1997
/ terminology: 1997, architecture, do-it-yourself, download, imschoot uitgevers, internet art, peter downsbrough, space
/ category: practice
Title: LINK
Artist: Peter Downsbrough
Editor: Moritz Küng
Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern
Format: 8 pages, 19 x 19 cm, saddle-stitched
ISBN: 978-3-7757-3608-4
LINK is the 100th book by American conceptual artist, Peter Downsbrough. LINK is priceless and it cannot be bought. The only way you can secure a copy of this limited edition, eight-paged, saddle-stitched book, is through a trade or swap. Downsbrough has created a minimalist, delicate volume in a limited edition of 300, which connects the reader to the author as it aims to establish a book within the flooded shelves that evades the usual rules of the market and creates a direct LINK between the author and the reader.
/ project:
Peter Downsbrough: LINK, 2012
/ terminology: 2012, architecture, book, circulation, distribution, exchange, market, peter downsbrough, space
/ category: practice
Title: Ancient Copies
Artist: Oliver Laric
Publisher: self-published
Format: 24.5 x 19 cm, bootleg re-issue
ISBN: none
Oliver Laric’s Ancient Copies is a re-issued bootleg publication of a Margaret Bieber’s Ancient Copies: Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art from 1977. Bieber was an extraordinary woman. Born in 1879, she was forced out of her archaeology professorship in Germany in 1933 – she was Jewish. She fled to Oxford, and later to the United States. She was 54 when she lost her first career, an age many of us aspire to retire at, but not Bieber. Before her exile she had started working with a colleague on a book about Roman copies of Greek statues. Her colleague died in the Nazi maelstrom, and she did not get around to finishing the book until she was close to 100 years old (although meanwhile she had published many others, including one about the Laocoon and its copies). The first printed copies of Ancient Copies reached her in 1977, not long before she died.
Laric has presumably seized on Bieber’s message that Roman copies were Roman art in their own right, and has, by the admission of the bumph-sheet available on the stand, produced a self-published bootleg, a modern copy of Ancient Copies. Being print-on-demand, it doesn’t suffer from the “copy 1 of n copies” constraints of a limited edition.
/ project:
Oliver Laric: Ancient Copies, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, book, bootleg, history, margaret bieber, oliver laric, original/copy, print on demand, reference, self-publishing
/ category: practice
Title: Fiona Banner
Artist: Fiona Banner
Format: Tattoo on the artist’s back
ISBN: 0-9548366-7-7
From the artist’s website:
“The tattoo is my own personal ISBN (International Standard Book Number); I am officially registered as a publication – ‘Fiona Banner’. It’s not really about branding, but how works of art act as mirrors; it’s also about stories and biography – the conspiracy of narrative. It was thinking also about copyright and publishing in a jokey, serious way. A sort of portrait as book.”
/ project:
Fiona Banner, Fiona Banner, 2009-ongoing
/ terminology: 2009, anatomy, body, book, distribution, fiona banner, isbn, performance, tattoo, visual art
/ category: practice
Title: The Image Object Post-Internet
Artist: Artie Vierkant
Publisher: Jstchillin.org
Format: 11 pages, 21 x 29.7 cm or 8.5 x 11 inches | downloadble .pdf
“Art is a social object.
From the rise of a liberal market economy through the build-up and ubiquity of the ‘middle class,’ art has matched and excused itself with the social conditions of its production. The rise of the ‘industrialized arts’ gave way to lofty notions of art-after-object as late capitalism approached, all the while explaining itself as obligated to echo existing cultural conditions rather than move to shape them.
Where are we left now? Art and arts pedagogy has become so inextricably linked with a variety of interpretations on the Conceptual art doxa that it would be impossible to argue against any artistic gesture being automatically tied to its reception and the language surrounding it. At least from a historical perspective, Conceptual art assured its own legacy by the overwhelming volume of language produced within and around it at a time when summary-through-language was the easiest means of disseminating an object (profoundly simpler, even, than reproducing a photograph).”
/ project:
Artie Vierkant: The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, analog/digital, artie vierkant, circulation, essay, internet art, jstchillin, online/offline, original/copy, post-internet
/ category: theory
Title: Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?
Artist: Hito Steyerl
Publisher: e-flux journal, #49, 11/2013
Format: 10 pages, 21 x 27.9 cm (A4) | downloadble .pdf
“Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.
But how could anyone think it could be over? The internet is now more potent than ever. It has not only sparked but fully captured the imagination, attention and productivity of more people than at any other point before. Never before have more people been dependent on, embedded into, surveilled by, and exploited by the web. It seems overwhelming, bedazzling and without immediate alternative. The internet is probably not dead. It has rather gone all-out. Or more precisely: it is all over!
This implies a spatial dimension, but not as one might think. The internet is not everywhere. Even nowadays when networks seem to multiply exponentially, many people have no access to the internet or don’t use it at all. And yet, it is expanding in another direction. It has started moving offline. But how does this work?”
/ project:
Hito Steyerl: Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, analog/digital, circulation, e-flux journal, essay, hito steyerl, online/offline, photography, post-internet
/ category: theory
Title: Dieses Buch habe ich gelesen – Dieses Buch habe ich nicht gelesen
Artist: Timm Ulrichs
Dieses Buch habe ich gelesen – Dieses Buch habe ich nicht gelesen [This book I have read – this book I haven’t read] is comprised of two copies of the book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. With this work, Timm Ulrichs reflects upon the “before” and the “after”, the identical and the similar, content (the text) and form (the book).
/ project:
Timm Ulrichs: Dieses Buch habe ich gelesen – Dieses Buch habe ich nicht gelesen, 1970
/ terminology: 1070, cover, iteration/variation, ludwig wittgenstein, philosophy, reading, reference, timm ulrichs, visual art
/ category: practice
Title: Litanies
Artist: Léa Lagasse
Format: 21 x 13 x 0.7 cm
In Litanies Léa Lagasse appropriates a piec of literature in a very mediated way. On her website, the artist writes that in this edition of If on a winter night a traveler, the first chapters of the ten books mentionned in Italo Calvino novel are printed on top of each other. The distorting process at work in Lagasse’s pieces often sparks off with her personal reading, which she turns into “meta-books”, commentary on the original text, yet contained within that text: Each edition carries a specific layout or device destined to echo the original narrative.
/ project:
Léa Lagasse: Litanies, 2008
/ terminology: 2008, appropriation, book, italo calvino, léa lagasse, literature, novel, original/copy, reference, self-publishing
/ category: practice
Title: Anatomy of a Page
Artist: Fiona Banner
Format: Pen on print, 46 x 30.6 cm
With Anatomy of a Page Fiona Banner highlights the structural elements of the page as an object and therefore draws attention to the space which isn’t conventionally prioritised when it comes to talk about the act of writing. With her work she reflects upon elements such as centerfold spread, seam, bleed, “arse”, trim or shadow.
/ project:
Fiona Banner: Anatomy of a Page, 2008
/ terminology: 2008, anatomy, fiona banner, materiality, page, self-reflection, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Anatomy of a Book
Artist: Fiona Banner
Format: Letraset on bound book, 90 pages, 21.6 x 30.2 x 1.5 cm
With Anatomy of a Book Fiona Banner highlights the structural elements of the book as an object and therefore draws attention to the space which isn’t conventionally prioritised when it comes to talk about books. With her work she reflects upon elements such as book cover, spine, “gutter”, dedication space, margin, footer, spread or leave.
/ project:
Fiona Banner: Anatomy of a Book, 2009
/ terminology: 2009, anatomy, book, bookness, fiona banner, materiality, self-reflection
/ category: practice
Title: The Evolution of the Book
Author: Frederick G. Kilgour
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Format: 192 pages, 9.2 x 0.9 x 6.3 inches, English
ISBN: 978-0-1951-1859-9
From the first chapter:
“In the last third of the twentieth century, the book in the shape of a long-familiar object composed of inked sheets folded, cut, and bound began to metamorphose into the book as a screen display on an electronic machine; the transformation, in materials, shape, and structure, of the device for carrying written and graphic information was more extreme than any since the original creations on clay and papyrus in the third millennium B.C. Through historical analysis of the societal needs that have invoked the transformations of the book, and the technologies that have shaped them, The Evolution of the Book aims to shed light on the present emergence of the electronic book.”
/ project:
Frederick G. Kilgour: The Evolution of the Book, 1998
/ terminology: 1998, essay, frederick g. kilgour, history, oxford unniversity press
/ category: theory
Title: Paper Knowledge
Subtitle: Toward a Media History of Documents
Author: Lisa Gitelman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Format: 224 pages, 0.8 x 5.8 x 8.8 inches, English
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5657-8
From the introduction:
“The document is a particularly important vernacular genre, both sprawling and ubiquitous. We know it by its diverse subgenres—the memo, for instance, or the green card and the promissory note—as well as by its generalized, cognate forms, like documentary and documentation. This book is about the genre of the document glimpsed selectively in four episodes from media history. Each episode concerns a different medium for the reproduction of documents, since reproduction is one clear way that documents are affirmed as such: one of the things people do with documents is copy them, whether they get published variously in editions (like the Declaration of Independence, for instance), duplicated for reference (like the photocopy of my passport that I carry in my suitcase), sort of or semipublished for internal circulation (like a restaurant menu), or proliferated online (mirrored and cached like the many documents in Wikileaks).”
/ project:
Lisa Gitelman: Paper Knowledge, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, document, duke university press, essay, history, lisa gitelman
/ category: theory
Title: In Your Computer
Author: Domenico Quaranta
Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia
Format: 174 pages, soft cover, paperback, black and white, English | downloadable .pdf
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN: 978-1-4467-6021-5
In Your Computer a collection of texts written between 2005 and 2010 for exhibition catalogues, printed magazines and online reviews: a pocket version of what the author would save from the universal flood, in a world without computers. It documents most of the fields of research he has focused on critically: from Net Art to Software Art and videogames, from biotechnologies to the debate around curating and the positioning of New Media Art in the contemporary landscape, and back to Net Art again. This itinerary is traced through a selection of essays, monographic texts and interviews with artists and curators, in no particular order: from Eva and Franco Mattes to Casey Reas, from UBERMORGEN.COM to Oliver Laric, from Cory Arcangel to Tale of Tales, from Jon Ippolito to Gazira Babeli.
/ project:
Domenico Quaranta: In Your Computer, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, domenico quaranta, essay, link editions, post-digital, post-medium condition
/ category: theory
Title: The Serving Library and Bulleting of the Serving Library
Artists: Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey | David Reinfurt) with Angie Kiefer
Website: servinglibrary.org
Publisher: Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York
Format: Downloadable pdf-files; Bulletins: 16.5 x 23.5 cm, sofcover, varying number of pages
Accompanying essay: The Serving Library Company, Inc. Statement of Intent (draft)
The Serving Library is a long-term project conceived by Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey | David Reinfurt) with writer Angie Keefer. Founded on a consideration of how the role of the library has changed over time – from fixed archive through circulating collection to a point of distribution – the format has become an umbrella project for all of Dexter Sinister’s activities. According to the project’s website it consists of:
1) an ambitious public website;
2) a small physical library space; and
3) a publishing program which runs through #1 and #2.
Bulletings of the Serving Library is a composite printed/electronic publication. The “bulletins” that make up each issue are first published online as pdfs at The Serving Libarary over a six-month period, then assembled, printed and distributed. Each collection makes up a semester’s worth of loosely-themed material, with its constituent pdfs grouped together on the website. According to the project’s website the following issues have been published:
Issue #1 was intended as an expansive statement of intent, broadly concerned with Libraries, Media, and Time (though not necessarily in that order);
Issue #2 emerged from a course we ran at The Banff Center in the Summer of 2011
Issue #3 doubles as a catalog-of-sorts to “Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language,” a group exhibition at MoMA (New York) from May 6 to August 27, 2012, and is preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography.
Issue #4 circles around psychedelia – a lo-fi, black-and-white flavor that emerged from the exhibition Dexter Bang Sinister at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. Next,
Issue #5 passes like an arrow through the past, present, and future of Germany;
Issue #6 circles around the outskirts of Fashion;
Issue #7 is about Numbers;
Issue #8 is smaller than large but larger than small: Medium; and (in a breaking update),
Issue #9 tackles all manner of sports and games.
/ project:
Dexter Sinister with Angie Kiefer: (Bulletins of) The Serving Library, 2010-ongoing
/ terminology: 2010, angie kiefer, david reinfurt, dexter sinister, download, essay, library, magazine, pdf, platform, stuart bailey
/ category: practice
Title: The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs
Artist: James Bridle
Accompanying essay: James Bridle, On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography, September 6, 2010
ISBN: none
The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs is a twelve-volume set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War. The twelve volumes cover a five year period from December 2004 to November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. The set is part of a project exploring history and historiography facilitated by the internet, and visualising information, opinion, narrative and discussion.
/ project:
James Bridle: The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, book, james bridle, politics, search, self-publishing, versioning, web-to-print, wikipedia
/ category: practice
Title: Reena Spaulings
Artist: Bernadette Corporation
Publisher: Semiotext(e), Los Angeles
Format: 216 pages, English, 15.2 x 22.9 cm, softcover
ISBN: 978-1-5843-5030-9
Reena Spaulings is a collectively-authored novel set in present-day New York. What is today? What is a city? These are two of the many questions this book sets out to ask. Like most novels, Reena Spaulings is a story about a twenty-something woman who works as a museum guard, is ‘discovered’ and hired to model in an international advertising campaign, after which she gets fame and money, things change, the city experiences some very bad weather and strange new forms of social disobedience, and an idea is hatched to make a musical called Battle Over Broadway, a live song-and-dance-riot. It’s a story about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. It is a novel that tries to live the metropolitan life. Like Reena, the authors of this book are trying to live inside Reena Spaulings.
Whatever is personal about their voices goes joyfully into the meticulous noise that is the collective music of this book. Like the book, whose authors are many and who abandon their identities to a common process, the New York City depicted herein tries to rethink itself as a collective experiment. Our lack of uniqueness, it seems to say, is the only thing we share today, besides our extreme separation. Reena Spaulings isn’t the On The Road or The Great Gatsby of these times, which is to say that these times do not need or want those kinds of books. It is generic and perfect. It took less than three years to write. It is writing for everybody, by nobody, an overcrowded literary graveyard whose zombie author is called Bernadette Corporation.
Preface
Chapter 1. Dressed, Undressed
Chapter 2. Pretty Faces Going Places
Chapter 3. The Thresholds
/ project:
Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, 2005
/ terminology: 2005, authorship, bernadette corporation, book, collaboration, literature, novel, reena spaulings, semiotexte, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Talking the Boundless Book
Subtitle: Art, Language & the Book Arts
Editor: Charles Alexander
Authors: Dick Higgings, Steven Clay, Johanna Drucker, Chales Bernstein, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr., Susan Bee, Toshi Ishihara & Linda Reinfeld, Katherine Kuehn, Jo Anne Paschall, Colette Gaiter, Alison Knowles, Byron Clercx, Brad Freeman, Karen Wirth
Publisher: Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis
ISBN: 978-1-8798-3209-1
“Like notions of self, author, and reader, book is not a word which lends itself to easy definition. The book arts, perhaps, are specifically arguments against definition and limitation, as artists and writers strive to break the bindings of what has traditionally been considered as book. Such work has taken place in an area, which has not yet cast a discerning eye on itself; a fledgling field, this book arts place, albeit one which involves traditions going back to some of the first activities of humankind, keeping records by making marks on stones, clay, and other surfaces. Book arts works today are made by visual artists, writers, publishers, and others; they are collected by libraries and museums, displayed by museums and galleries; they are taught in colleges and universities as well as in community education programs.”
/ project:
Charles Alexander: Talking the Boundless Book: Art, Language & the Book Arts, 1995
/ terminology: 1995, authorship, charles alexander, essay, minnesota center for book arts, publishing, reader/writer, visual art, writing
/ category: theory
Title: Mallarmé, Das Buch
Artist: Klaus Scherübel
Format: Set of 4 offset printed dust jackets, polystyrene, blister, 0 pages, each 24 x 16 x 3,6 cm
Accompanying essay: Anna-Sophie Springer, Volumes: The Book as Exhibition, C Magazine, Issue 116, 2012, 36-44.
ISBN: none
For more than thirty years French poet and philosopher Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) worked constantly on the concept of Le Livre. Although it was never published, he regarded Le Livre as the sum of all books, a Magnum Opus that was completely free of its author’s subjectivity. As a concept Le Livre was built up like a cosmic architecture by way of texts. The result was an extremely flexible structure that comprised nothing less than all existing relationships between everything that already exists. This pure book which Mallarmé wanted to publish in an edition of exactly 480,000 copies, was never realised and got no further than a conceptualisation and detailed analysis of the materials to be used and guidelines for its possible presentation.
Klaus Scherübel made a layered and in-depth study of Mallarmé’s utopian dream. The eponymous installation serves as a conceptual reading room, where Scherübel presents himself as the publisher and guardian of Mallarmé’s controversial and quasi forgotten 19th-century, nonexistent literary masterpiece. It is translated into photos, text material, video etc.
German, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese versions:
Mallarmé, Das Buch (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2001)
Mallarmé, The Book (Printed Matter, Inc, New York, 2004)
Mallarmé, Le Livre (Mudam and Optica, Luxembourg / Montreal, 2005)
Mallarmé, Het Boek (mfc-michele didier, Brussels, 2009)
Mallarmé, O Livro (São Paulo, Edições Tijuana, 2014)
/ project:
Klaus Scherübel: Mallarmé, Das Buch, 2001-ongoing
/ terminology: 2001, appropriation, book, cover, installation, klaus scherübel, literature, stéphane mallarmé
/ category: practice
Title: A Single Room with a Single Book – Morioka Shoten
Store owner: Yoshiyuki Morioka
Designers: takram design engineering
Format: book shop with a single book display
Address: Suzuki Building, 1-28-15 Ginza, Chuo-Ku, Tokyo, Japan
Morioka Shoten & Co., Ltd Ginza (Shoten=Bookstore) is a one-book store in Tokyo. The boutique only displays a single book per week. Though usually accompanied by a few artworks, photographs or exhibits, the book remains the highlight of the entire store.
Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single book vailable at a time, for six days.
Morioka Shoten is a bookstore with a single room with an event to gather every night.
Morioka Shoten, a single room with a single book
/ project:
Yoshiyuki Morioka: A Single Room with a Single Book – Morioka Shoten, 2015–
/ terminology: 2015, book shop, design, distribution, economy, exhibition, presentation, space, yoshiyuki morioka
/ category: practice
Title: E-book backup, 2012
Artist: Jesse England
Publisher: self-published
ISBN: none
E-book backup is a physical, tangible, human readable copy of an electronically stored novel. The purchased contents of an e-book reader were easily photocopied and clip-bound to create a shelf-stable backup for the benefit of me, the book consumer. I can keep it on my bookshelf without worry of remote recall. A second hardcover backup has been made with the help of an online self-publishing house. In 2009, some Amazon Kindle users found their copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm had been removed from their Kindles without their prior knowledge or consent; those particular copies were offered for sale by a publisher who did not have the proper rights to do so. After consumers spoke out about having a book taken from them without their consent, Amazon later reinstated the copies taken from those who purchased the book or offered gift cards as compensation for the inconvenience, and promised never to repeat such an event in the future.
/ project:
Jesse England: E-book backup, 2012
/ terminology: 2012, amazon, analog/digital, backup, book, censorship, e-book, jesse england, original/copy, self-publishing
/ category: practice
Title: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts
Commissioned by: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez
Editor: Bettina Funcke
Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern
Designers: Leftloft
Format: Three different formats, from 16 to 48 pages, English/German
As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz published a series of notebooks, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, that comprised facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. A note is a trace, a word, a drawing that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea. This publication project follows that path, presenting the mind in a prologue state, in a pre-public arena. A space for intimacy and not yet of criticism, dOCUMENTA (13) is publishing the unpublishable, the voice—and the reader is our alibi and ally. Note taking encompasses witnessing, drawing, writing, and diagrammatic thinking; it is speculative, manifests a preliminary moment, a passage, and acts as a memory aid. With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic- and political theory, language- and literature studies, as well as poetry, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts constitutes a space of dOCUMENTA (13) to explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of re-imagining the world. In its cumulative nature, this publication project is a continuous articulation of the emphasis of dOCUMENTA (13) on the propositional, underlining the flexible mental moves to generate space for the possible. Thoughts, unlike statements, are always variations: this is the spirit in which these notebooks are proposed.
/ project:
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chus Martínez: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, 2011-2013
/ terminology: 2011, bettina funcke, carolyn christov-bakargiev, chus martínez, collaboration, decentralized, documenta, note, notebook, space
/ category: practice
Title: Peer Pressure
Author: Brad Troeml
Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia
Format: 138 pages, soft cover, paperback, black and white, English | downloadable .pdf
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN: 978-1-4709-1561-2
Peer Pressure is a collection of essays previously published online between 2010 and 2011. In the author’s words, “each essay is an impassioned description or prescription to understand the digital space we inhabit differently.” Most of these writings have been highly influential for the (relatively) small community the author addresses, eliciting many heated debates. The texts idealistically address creative platforms, image aggregators, relational practices, internet memes and much more.
/ project:
Brad Troeml: Peer Pressure, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, brad troeml, essay, internet art, link editions, post-medium condition, surfing
/ category: theory
Title: Beyond New Media Art
Author: Domenico Quaranta
Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia
Format: 290 pages, soft cover, paperback, black and white, English | downloadable .pdf
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN: 978-1-2913-7697-5
Beyond New Media Art is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title Media, New Media, Postmedia (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. Beyond New Media Art is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age.
From the book’s preface:
“So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?”
/ project:
Domenico Quaranta: Beyond New Media Art, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, domenico quaranta, essay, link editions, post-digital, post-medium condition
/ category: theory
Title: Post-Internet
Subtitle: Notes on the Internet and Art
Author: Gene McHugh
Publisher: LINK Editions, Brescia
Format: 274 pages, soft cover, paperback, black and white, English | downloadable .pdf
Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN: 978-1-4478-0389-8
Post-Internet is a blog developed between December 2009 and September 2010 by the New York based art critic Gene McHugh. For almost a year, McHugh kept filling this folder with his personal notes on contemporary art. Writing and posting became a daily, regular activity, that sometimes produced many posts a day, sometimes long (or very long) texts posted at a slower pace. However, Post-Internet is not just a piece of beautiful criticism, as reading this book proves. It’s also, in itself, a performance, and a piece of Post Internet art in the shape of an art criticism blog.
/ project:
Gene McHugh: Post-Internet, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, blog, essay, gene mchugh, internet art, link editions, post-internet, post-medium condition
/ category: theory
Title: How the Page Matters
Author: Bonnie Mak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Format: 160 pages, 6.8 x 0.4 x 9.8 inches, English
ISBN: 978-1-4426-1535-9
“This book is about how the page matters. To matter is not only to be of importance, to signify, to mean, but also to claim a certain physical space, to have a particular presence, to be uniquely embodied. The matter and mattering of the page are entangled in complicated ways as they reconfigure each other itreratively through time. Across cultural boundaries and through centuries of change, the page has emerges as a safeguard for intellectual and artistic achievement. It has been used to share knowledge and communicate ideas from those of Sappho to those of William Shakespeare to our own. Much of what we have learned has been transmitted to us on the page; much of what we have wished to remind ourselves and others of has been broadcast in the same way. The page is a powerful interface between designer and reader, flexible enough to respond to a variety of demands while remaining comprehensible and communicative.”
/ project:
Bonnie Mak: How the Page Matters, 2012
/ terminology: 2012, bonnie mak, essay, knowledge, matter, page, space, university of toronto press
/ category: theory
Title: Printed Web #3
Publisher: Paul Soulellis
Website: Library of the Printed Web
Format (zines): 24 pages each, 8.5 x 11 inches, full color, matte softcover print-on-demand zines with thin, glossy interior pages
Format (reader): 388 pages, 5 x 8 inches, paperback black-and-white print-on-demand book with uncoated cream-colored interior pages; Including an interview with Alexander Galloway and an essay by Silvio Lorusso
ISBN: 978-1-3207-6790-3
Printed Web #3 is the third publication devoted to web-to-print art and discourse. It features work by artists who use screen capture, image grab, site scrape and search query. The publication is part of Library of the Printed Web, a collection of works such as self-published artists’ books, photo books, texts and other print works gathered around the casual concept of “search, compile and publish.”
Paul Soulellis about Printed Web #3:
“Earlier this year, I announced an open call for the third issue of Printed Web, a semi-annual publication dedicated to web-to-print discourse. I received a stunning array of files from recognized artists like Olia Lialina, Kim Asendorf, and Clement Valla, but the real beauty of the open call was connecting with a new group of people working with material found or created on the web — 147 contributors in all. A particularly diverse view of networked culture formed on my desktop through an accumulation of notes, attachments, tweets, and downloads. Gathering this community around Printed Web was immensely satisfying for me, and I wanted to include every submission in the issue — but having received hundreds of PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs, the logistical challenges to this have been considerable. My intention had always been to publish all of the files in a single print edition, but as submissions poured in, I decided that ‘scattering’ the material across different networked versions would allow the project to occupy multiple positions in a way that suited its multiplicitous content.”
download (index/reader)
download (zines)
via
/ project:
Paul Soulellis: Printed Web #3, 2015
/ terminology: 2015, animated gif, book, collaboration, library of the printed web, paul soulellis, print on demand, search, web-to-print, zine
/ category: practice
Title: From Print to E-Books
Subtitle: A Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts
Editors: DTP Collective | Joe Monk, Miriam Rasch, Florian Cramer and Amy Wu
Authors: Marc de Bruijn, Liz Castro, Florian Cramer, Joost Kircz, Silvio Lorusso, Michael Murtaugh, Pia Pol, Miriam Rasch and Margreet Riphagen
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam
Format: 148 pages, downloadable .pdf
ISBN: 978-90-822345-3-4
This Toolkit is meant for everyone working in art and design publishing. No specific expertise of digital technology, or indeed traditional publishing technology, is required. The Toolkit provides hands-on practical advice and tools, focusing on working solutions for low-budget, small-edition publishing. Everything in the Hybrid Publishing Toolkit is based on real-world projects with art and design publishers. Editorial scenarios include art and design catalogues and periodicals, research publications, and artists’/designer’s books.
/ project:
DPT Collective: From Print to E-Books: A Hybrid Publishing Toolkit for the Arts, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, dtp collective, e-book, essay, institute of network cultures, print on demand, self-publishing, toolkit
/ category: theory
Title: Inside the White Cube, 2009
Subtitle: Overprinted Edition (English) / Édition palimpseste (French)
Artist: Yann Sérandour
Editors: Yann Sérandour, Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié
Publisher: JRP|Ringier, Zurich
Format: 84 pages, 26.7 x 26.7 cm, one run of black, overprinted with white ink + one spot colour, softcover
ISBN: 978-3-03764-042-5
Harnessing strategies of mimicry, infiltration, and parasiticism, the work of Yann Sérandour reactivates and hijacks the substance of historical art works and publications. Conceived in collaboration with Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié on the basis of the same principle, the publication Inside the White Cube is printed over the French edition of Brian O’Doherty’s book. This palimpsestic book presents a selection of projects by Yann Sérandour that are derived from other books and other authors. The design, using Adrian Frutiger’s Méridien typeface, explicitely quotes Jack W. Stauffacher’s design for Brian O’Doherty Inside the White Cube, while the book format is the one of the magazine Artforum in which Brian O’Doherty’s essay first appeared.
/ project:
Yann Sérandour: Inside the White Cube, 2009
/ terminology: 2009, appropriation, artforum, book, brian o'doherty, collage, jérôme sait-loubert bié, yann sérandour
/ category: practice
Title: Working On My Novel, 2014
Artist: Cory Arcangel
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Format: 144 pages, paperback, 1.3 x 13.3 x 19.7 cm
ISBN: 978-1-8461-4742-5
Working On My Novel is a book which is based on a twitter feed that re-tweets the best posts featuring the phrase “working on my novel.” What does it feel like to try and create something new? How is it possible to find a space for the demands of writing a novel in a world of instant communication? Working On My Novel is about the act of creation and the gap between the different ways we express ourselves today. Exploring the extremes of making art, from satisfaction and even euphoria to those days or nights when nothing will come, it’s the story of what it means to be a creative person, and why we keep on trying.
/ project:
Cory Arcangel: Working On My Novel, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, book, cory arcangel, novel, readymade, twitter, web-to-print, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Today I wrote nothing / Daniil Kharms
Artist: Natalie Czech
Format: 22 c-prints of printed book pages, each 38 x 28 cm
The photographic series Today I wrote nothing by Natalie Czech is based on a diary entry by the Russian avant-garde author and poet Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). Founder of the „Union of Real Art” (OBERIU) movement, Kharms was a well-known poet and performer of the early Soviet literary scene. He was denounced as an “anti-Soviet” writer in 1931, and arrested and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward in 1941. Kharms died in his cell, most likely of starvation, in 1942. In 1937, Kharms wrote the following entry in his diary: Today I wrote nothing. Doesn’t matter. January 9th. Natalie Czech’s Today I wrote nothing is a series of 22 photographic tableaux. Each tableau consists of a printed book page, inscribed with the text of Kharms’ diary-entry. On each page some of the words of the entry are missing, so that the written statement changes.
/ project:
Natalie Czech: Today I wrote nothing / Daniil Kharms, 2009
/ terminology: 2009, appropriation, daniil kharms, iteration, iteration/variation, literature, natalie czech, photography, visual art, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Mémoires
Artist: Asger Jorn and Guy Debord
Editor: L’Internationale Situationniste
Format: 64 pages, sandpaper dust jacket
ISBN: none
Mémoires [Memories] is an artists’ book made by Asger Jorn in collaboration with Guy Debord. Published in December 1958, it is the second of their two collaborative books whilst they were both members of the Situationist International. The second issue of the same book, in slightly different format, appeared in Copenhagen in 1959. […] The work contains two separate layers. The first is printed with black ink, reproducing found text and graphics taken from newspapers and magazines. The second layer is printed using coloured inks, splashed across the pages. These sometimes connect images and text, sometimes cover them, and sometimes are seemingly unconnected. […] The book is most famous for its cover, a dust jacket made of heavy-grade sandpaper.
[French version: 1993 reprint by Jean-Jacques Pauvert aux Belles Lettres of 1959 Copenhagen edition | English version: facsimile trans. Ian Thompson, 2015]
/ project:
Asger Jorn and Guy Debord: Mémoires, 1958
/ terminology: 1958, asger jorn, book, bookness, cover, guy debord, materiality, psychogeography, self-publishing, situationist international, space
/ category: practice
Title: The Infinite Library
Artist: Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda
Website: theinfinitelibrary.com
Format: varying formats
ISBN: none
The Infinite Library is an ongoing project by Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda. It is primarily an expanding archive of books, each created out of pages of one or more found books and bound anew. The online catalogue serves as an index.
Original sources of issue #2 (see images above): Jukes Roger Sauter, Brasilien – Paradies der Edelsteine, Fotografien von Harold & erica Van Pelt, 1982 | Rudolf Pfister, 150 Eigenheime, F. Burckmann Verlag, München, 1932
/ project:
Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda: The Infinite Library, 2007-ongoing
/ terminology: 2007, appropriation, binding, daniel gustav cramer, haris epaminonda, juxtapositioning, library, materiality, readymade, self-publishing
/ category: practice
Title: Second Thoughts
Author: Ulises Carrión
Publisher: VOID Distributors, Amsterdam
Format: 72 pages, 21 x 16 cm
ISBN: none
“This book includes the theoretical and polemical works by Ulises Carrión from the Other Books and So Archief. Covering themes as bookworks, rubber-stamps and mail-art, these texts are here for the first time assembled in one volume, after having been published in periodicals and catalogues in various countries. For this edition, numerous annotations (references and anecdotes) have been added by the author.”
Included essays:
The New Art of Making Books
From Bookworks to Mailworks
Rubber Stamp Theory and Praxis, Rubber Stamp Art
Mail Art and the Big Monster
Table of Mail Art Works
Personal Worlds or Cultural Strategies?
Bookworks Revisited
/ project:
Ulises Carrión: Second Thoughts, 1980
/ terminology: 1980, bookwork, essay, space, ulises carrión, void distributors
/ category: theory
Title: Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894
Author: Alessandro Ludovico, with an afterword by Florian Cramer
Publisher: Onomatopee, Eindhoven
Format: 192 pages, 9.2 x 1.5 x 25.2 cm, English
ISBN: 978-90-78454-87-8
In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over? In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
/ project:
Alessandro Ludovico: Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, 2012
/ terminology: 2012, alessandro ludovico, analog/digital, essay, florian cramer, history, onomatopee, post-digital
/ category: theory
Title: Dispersion
Artist: Seth Price
First published in: Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, June 2003, ISBN: 978-2-940271-26-9
Afterwards self-published by the artist, 38th Street Publishers and translated as well as bootleged versions
Seth Price’s illustrated essay Dispersion (2002-ongoing) is freely available to download from his website. It is a provocative 14 page essay in which artist examines the classical model of conceptualism, calling for a new public art, and arguing for less of a rupture between artistic interventions and distributed media. Complete with numerous illustrations and a spray-painted glossy cover.
/ project:
Seth Price: Dispersion, 2002-ongoing
/ terminology: 2002, book, circulation, concept art, dispersion, distribution, essay, seth price
/ category: practice, theory
Title: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (sculpture)
Artist: Michalis Pichler
Publisher: “Greatest Hits” Berlin
Format: 32 pages, 32.5 x 25 cm, 500 pieces
ISBN: 978-3-86874-001-1
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (sculpture) [A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance (Sculpture)] is a close copy of the 1914 edition of the french symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name, but with all the words cut out by laser, in a way that corresponds directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text. A preface features the entire poem written as a block of text with each line separated by a slash. This block-transcription of the text by Stéphane Mallarmé was carried out in 1969 by Broodthaers. Twelve double spreads follow, with immaculately cut out windows standing in for the text. When turning the pages, numerous shadows are being generated by the cutouts. The work is soft bound and feels quite insubstantial. The cover is a facsimile of the original cover as published in 1914 by Librairie Gallimard, with the word SCULPTURE replacing POÈME (or IMAGE) in the centre of the design.
/ project:
Michalis Pichler: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (sculpture), 2008
/ terminology: 2008, appropriation, book, copy, greatest hits berlin, marcel broodthaers, michalis pichler, original, sculpture, stéphane mallarmé
/ category: practice
Title: Artists’ Books
Magazine: Art-Rite, No. 14 (Winter 1976-1977)
Editors: Walter Robinson and Edith deAk
Format: 79 pages, offset-printed, staple bound, black-and-white, 26 x 19 cm
ISBN: none
This special issue of the influential 1970’s artzine Art-Rite was devoted entirely to the subject of artists’ books, constituting one of the first critical analyses of the medium nearly 10 years after it began. Included are forty-five statements by artists and art professionals connected to artists’ books. With contributions by Kathy Acker, Roberta Allen, John Baldessari, Luciano Bartolini, Ulises Carrion, Daniel Buren, Robert Delford Brown, Robert Cumming, Ted Castle, Agnes Denes, Peter Downsbrough, Mary Fish, Peter grass, George Griffin, Judith Hoffberg, Douglas Huebler, Alan Kaprow [sic], Richard Kostelanetz, Sharon Kulik, Robert Leverant, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Christof Kohlhofer, Jane Logemann, Paul McMahon, Robert Morgan, Mauritio Nannuci, Richard Nonas, Adrian Piper, Lucio Pozzi, Marcia Resnick, Carolee Schneemann, John Shaw, Bob Smith, Pat Steir, Ellen Sragow, Ted Stamm, Peter Stansbury, Richard Tuttle, Fred Truck, Lawrence Weiner, Robin Winters, Rachel Youdelman.
/ project:
Walter Robinson and Edith deAk: Art-Rite, No. 14, 1976-1977
/ terminology: 1976, 1977, art-rite, defintion, edith deak, essay, magazine, statement, walter robinson
/ category: theory
Title: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
Artist: Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976)
Publisher: Galerie Wide White Space, Antwerpen and Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne
Format: 32.5 x 25.1 x 0.3 cm
ISBN: none
This work is a homage to the 1897 modernist poem Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard [A throw of the dice will never abolish chance], by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, of which Broodthaers wrote: “Mallarmé is at the source of modern art […] He unwittingly invented modern space.” Mallarmé’s poem proposed to liberate language from conventions of space and typography by stretching sentences across spreads and using multiple typefaces to abstract both form and content. In designing his edition, Broodthaers blocked out the lines of the original work with solid black bars of varying width, dependent on the original type size, turning the original text into an abstract image of the poem (Broodthaers also replaced the word Poème, on the title page, with Image). Mallarmé’s poem was published in three different editions with varying paper types: one with translucent paper, one with standard paper, and one on individual aluminum plates.
/ project:
Marcel Broodthaers: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1969
/ terminology: 1969, appropriation, book, marcel broodthaers, michael werner gallery, text-image-relations, visual poetry, wide white space gallery
/ category: practice
Title: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
Artist: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
First published by: Cosmopolis: A Literary Review, 1897
First book version: La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1914
ISBN: none
Stéphane Mallarmé worked on his long poem, which consists of ten printed pages, for thirty years. The first printed version that approximately conformed to his wishes was begun in 1897, shortly before his death, and thus can be considered definitive only in a limited sense. The status and esthetic intention of the work go far beyond classic pattern poetry: the main phrase—Un coup de jamais dés n’abolira le hasard [A throw of the dice will never abolish chance]—is strewn across the entire text in the largest typeface. The spaces in between have subordinate clauses using nine other typefaces and types of highlighting. The intention was to enable a reading on several levels, similar to that of a score. Large blanks spaces and entirely blank pages allow the reader to experience his or her own shipwreck (naufrage). Particularly easy to understand in French, the phonetic equivalence of, for example, maître (master) and mètre (meter) or coup de dés (throw of the dice) and coup d’idées (spontaneous insight) permit many associations.
/ project:
Stéphane Mallarmé: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, 1897/1914
/ terminology: 1897, 1914, book, chance, cosmopolis, la nouvelle revue française, literature, stéphane mallarmé, text-image-relations, visual poetry
/ category: practice
Title: Volumes: The Book as Exhibition
Author: Anna-Sophie Springer
Originally published in: C Magazine, Issue 116, 2012, 36-44
“But what—beyond mere rhetoric—does it mean to produce the book as a site where artistic, editorial and curatorial practices merge? In contrast to, say, any other book containing pictures,a body of research or knowledge about a particular subject? What are some useful distinctions in thinking about the book in terms of a discursive and strategic site that is more than simply an ‘accidental container’ of information? The fact that the realm of art publications is as broad and diverse as it is provides evidence for the countless possible styles and intentions for making books. But there is a class of books that self-consciously explores their relation to exhibitions, transcending mere documentation and leading instead into adjacent or extended curatorial spaces—with, in some cases, the book literally becoming the primary exhibition space.”
–
German version: Volumen: Bände – Räume. Das Buch als Ausstellung
Published in: Rheinsprung 11 – Zeitschrift für Bildkritik, Ausgabe 05, 2013, 135-148
“Doch was bedeutet es jenseits blosser Rhetorik, das Buch explizit als einen Raum zu produzieren, in dem künstlerische, editorische und kuratorische Praktiken ineinander übergehen? Im Unterschied zum Beispiel zu jedem anderen Buch, das ebenfalls Bilder, bestimmte Forschungsinhalte oder Wissen zu einem Thema enthält? Was wären einige hilfreiche Denkmöglichkeiten dafür, das Buch als einen diskursiven und strategischen Ort abzugrenzen, der mehr ist als nur ein ‘zufälliger Behälter’ von Informationen? Die Tatsache, dass das Spektrum der Kunstpublikationen so breit und vielseitig ist, beweist, dass es unzählige Möglichkeiten von Stilen und Intentionen gibt, Bücher zu machen. Doch gibt es darunter eine Kategorie von Büchern, die sich auf selbstbewusste Weise mit ihrer eigenen Beziehung zur Ausstellung auseinandersetzt, über reine Dokumentation hinausgeht und stattdessen in angrenzende oder erweiterte kuratorische Räume führt – und in manchen Fällen das Buch dann sprichwörtlich zum ‘primären’ Ausstellungsraum erhebt.”
/ project:
Anna-Sophie Springer: Volumes: The Book as Exhibition, 2012
/ terminology: 2012, anna-sophie springer, c magazine, curating, essay, exhibition, reinsprung 11, space
/ category: theory
Title: Ein Zimmer für sich / Ein eigenes Zimmer / Ein Zimmer für sich allein / Vierhundertdreiunddreißig Bibliotheken [A Room of One’s Own / Four Hundred Thirty-Three Libraries]
Artist: Kajsa Dahlberg
Format: 9.5 x 14.7 cm (Reclam-format), edition of 10.000 pieces
ISBN: none
The German version of Kajsa Dahlberg’s A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries [Ett eget rum / Tusen bibliotek] is a compilation of marginal notes made by readers in copies, held by the Berlin libraries, of Virginia Woolf’s Ein Zimmer für sich allein, Ein eigenes Zimmer and Ein Zimmer für sich. The piece was printed by the German publisher Reclam in the format of Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek, a large series of canonical international literature, published in inexpensive editions. The book was printed in an edition of 10.000 copies and was for free.
/ project:
Kajsa Dahlberg: Ein Zimmer für sich / Ein eigenes Zimmer…, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, appropriation, book, kajsa dahlberg, library, literature, marginal notes, reader/writer, xerox
/ category: practice
Title: A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries [Ett eget rum / Tusen bibliotek]
Artist: Kajsa Dahlberg
German version of the work: Ein Zimmer für sich / Ein eigenes Zimmer / Ein Zimmer für sich allein / Vierhundertdreiunddreißig Bibliotheken
Format: 121 pages, 11.5 x 17 cm, edition of 1000 pieces
Installation view: The Moderna Museet Collection , photo: Brendan Austin
ISBN: none
A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries is a compilation of all the marginal notes made by readers in the Swedish library copies of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. The piece is an analogy to the content of the essay were Woolf, using Mary Beton as her alter ego, is searching for the representation of women throughout the history of literature. Throughout the book she is describing, not only the search for literature written by women, but the conditions under which it was written. In A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries Woolf’s words are reframed within a collective script of responses, tied together across a period of nearly half a century (Woolf’s book first appeared in Swedish in 1958).
/ project:
Kajsa Dahlberg: A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries, 2006
/ terminology: 2006, appropriation, book, kajsa dahlberg, library, literature, marginal notes, reader/writer, xerox
/ category: practice
Title: Printed Web #2
Publisher: Paul Soulellis
Website: Library of the Printed Web
Format: 180 pages, 8.5 x 11 inches, full color printing, matte laminated cover
Contributing artists: Constant Dullaart, Daniel Temkin, James Bridle, John Zissovici, Cheryl Sourkes, Brian Droitcour, Tan Lin, Angela Genusa, Webdriver Torso, Rafaël Rozendaal, Olia Lialina, Cory Arcangel
ISBN: 978-0-9840052-4-6
Printed Web #2 is the second publication devoted to web-to-print art and discourse. It features work by artists who use screen capture, image grab, site scrape and search query. The publication is part of Library of the Printed Web, a collection of works such as self-published artists’ books, photo books, texts and other print works gathered around the casual concept of “search, compile and publish.”
Printed Web #2 is by artists who work on, within and around the internet.
Printed Web #2 is a space for web-to-print art and discourse.
Printed Web #2 is both digital and analog, ephemeral and material.
Printed Web #2 is infrathin.
Printed Web #2 is pure print-on-demand.
Printed Web #2 is printout material.
Printed Web #2 is 180 pages.
Printed Web #2 is a space between endless scroll and archival object.
Printed Web #2 is a group show.
/ project:
Paul Soulellis: Printed Web #2, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, book, library of the printed web, paul soulellis, print on demand, search, web-to-print
/ category: practice
Title: Schema
Artist: Dan Graham
First published in: ASPEN, fall and winter, 1966-67
Featured in: Dan Graham, For Publication, Otis Art Institute Gallery, Los Angeles, 1975
“Schema for a set of pages whose component variants are to be published in various places. In each published instance, it is set in its final form by the editor of the particular publication where it is to appear, the exact data used to correspond in each specific instance to the specific fact(s) of the published final appearance. The work defines itself in place only as information with simply the external support of the facts of its external appearance or presence in print in place of the object.” [Dan Graham, Art-Language, Vol. 1 No 1, May 1969, p. 14, repr. in: Dan Graham, Works 1965–2000, Düsseldorf 2000, p. 95]
/ project:
Dan Graham: Schema, 1966
/ terminology: 1966, aspen magazine, concept art, dan graham, intervention, mass media, public sphere
/ category: practice
Title: For Publication
Artist: Dan Graham
Publisher: First published by Otis Art Institute Gallery, Los Angeles, 1975 | Reprinted by Marian Goodman Gallery, 1991
Format: 32 pages, 22.4 x 27.3 cm
ISBN: none
Dan Graham’s book For Publication contains a selection of his own realized artworks for publication in mass media. He had his works printed in existing journalistic apparatus like art and fashion papers—magazines such as Art and Language, Interfunktionen, or Harper’s Bazaar—therewith inscribing himself as an author in the respective media reality while actively shaping it as well. For Publication can be read as an open call by the artist to occupy the public realm of mass media, drawing from linguistic analytical paradigms of Middle Age universal scholars like Ramon Lull or modern writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Stéphane Mallarmé, whom the artist explicitly referenced in his publication.
/ project:
Dan Graham: For Publication, 1975
/ terminology: 1975, 1991, concept art, dan graham, mass media, otis art institute gallery, publication
/ category: practice
Title: Publication
Artist: David Lamelas
Participating artists and critics: Keith Arnatt, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Michel Claura, Gilbert & George, John Latham, Lucy Lippard, Martin Maloney, Barbara M. Reise, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson
Publisher: First published by Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd, London, 1970 | Reprinted by Kunstverein München and Witte de With, Rotterdam, 1997 | Primary Information, 2015
Format: 38 pages, 14.5 x 20.8 cm
ISBN: none
The exhibition Publication at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, 1970 and the eponymous work ar based on Lamelas’ idea of organizing a round table in the exhibition space as a forum for discussion of “Language as an Art Form” and inviting selected artists and critics, whose work centers on language as and art medium to practice. The concept led to an exhibition in book form, in which the publication is both the exhibtion itself and the exhibited object, which in turn makes David Lamelas both curator and artist. Preliminary discussions with the invited participants yielded three propositions, to which most of the artists and critics responded in writing to the following three statements:
1. Use of oral and written language as an Art Form;
2. Language can be considered as an Art Form;
3. Language cannot be considered an Art Form.
The publication was submitted by Lamelas to the 1970 exhibition In Another Moment, held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and organized by Braco and Nena Dimitrijevic.
/ project:
David Lamelas: Publication, 1970
/ terminology: 1970, 1997, 2015, book, curating, david lamelas, exhibition, language, nigel greenwood gallery, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Anonymous Press (Α–Π)
Artist: Karolis Kosas
Website: anonymous-press.com
Format: Publishing platform, hand-made booklets, laserjet print, each 12 pages, 21 × 14 cm
Accompanying essay: Karolis Kosas, Anonymous Systems, 2011-2013
Anonymous Press (Α–Π) is a platform for the publication of so-called “zines” whose respective content is the product of keywords, which are fed into the system over the Internet in order to become virtually autonomous in an automated search process. On the website of the project it is referred to as a “self-sufficient publishing platform” whose publications are a byproduct of an individual and a database, i.e. Google ImageSearch. Human authors define the topic, but the content and the form is generated from the most relevant images found online. Each publication is added to a public library.
/ project:
Karolis Kosas: Anonymous Press (Α–Π), 2013–
/ terminology: 2013, found images, karolis kosas, platform, print on demand, search, self-publishing, web-to-print
/ category: practice
Title: American Psycho
Authors: Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell
Publisher: TRAUMAWIEN
Distribution: Lulu.com
Format: 416 pages, 6 x 9 inches, black and white, paperback
ISBN: none
American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’ violent, masochistic and gratuitous novel “American Psycho” through Google-mail, one page at a time. Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell collected the ads that appeared next to each e-mail and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. In printing it as a perfect bound book, the artists erased the body of Bret Easton Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational Google ads.
/ project:
Jason Huff & Mimi Cabell: American Psycho, 2010
/ terminology: 2010, book, communication, e-mail, google, jason huff, literature, mimi cabell, traumawien, writing
/ category: practice
Title: Printed Web #1
Publisher: Paul Soulellis
Website: Library of the Printed Web
Format: 64 pages, 30 x 36 cm (11.8 x 14 inches), full color printing on 52 gsm paper
Contributing artists: Joachim Schmid, Penelope Umbrico, Mishka Henner, Clement Valla, David Horvitz, Chris Alexander, Christian Bök, Benjamin Shaykin & Paul Soulellis
Texts by: Hito Steyerl, Kenneth Goldsmith
ISBN: 978-0-9840052-2-2
ISSN: 2332-6638
Printed Web #1 is the first publication devoted to web-to-print art and discourse. Featuring 64 pages of new work by artists who use screen capture, image grab, site scrape and search query. Printed Web #1 is part of Library of the Printed Web, a collection of works such as self-published artists’ books, photo books, texts and other print works gathered around the casual concept of “search, compile and publish.” Artists featured in Library of the Printed Web use vast landscapes of data to collect and transform digital information into analog experience; every work in the collection is a printed expression of search engine pattern discovery. Many of the collected works share common production and publishing techniques (e.g., print-on-demand), even as the content itself varies widely.
/ project:
Paul Soulellis: Printed Web #1, 2014
/ terminology: 2014, collection, library of the printed web, magazine, paul soulellis, search, web-to-print
/ category: practice
Title: Salon für Kunstbuch
Artist: Bernhard Cella
Website: salon-fuer-kunstbuch.at
Format: 1:1-model of a book shop, installation
Address: Mondscheingasse 11, A-1070 Vienna
Interested in the economic and sculptural framework in which artist’s books can be used as an artistic material Bernhard Cella conceptualized the Salon für Kunstbuch as a life-sized model of a bookshop. In the shop, the books enter into unfamiliar vicinities and dialogues, buying and selling become part of an original artistic practice. The principle of installation, the plurality of functions of the Salon as a display, an architectural structure and a spatial intervention allow for the development, shifting and concentration of different lines of questioning that are emphasized by the collection of books. At the same time, the spatial conception acts as a sculpture that hosts people meeting for discourse and serves as a space to sample different forms of organization.
/ project:
Bernhard Cella: Salon für Kunstbuch, 2007–ongoing
/ terminology: 2007, bernhard cella, book shop, distribution, economy, exhibition, installation, market, presentation
/ category: practice
Title: The Political Nature of the Book
Subtitle: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access
Authors: Janneke Adema and Gary Hall
Original citation: Adema, Janneke and Hall, Gary: The Political Nature of the Book: on artists’ books and radical open access. New Formations, volume 78 (1), 2013, 138-156.
“In this article we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism’s commodification of knowledge (for example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist’s book shows, it can be used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. If the book’s potential to question and disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal democracy and the neoliberal knowledge economy (as is apparent from some of the more radical interventions occurring today under the name of open access), it also includes politics and with it the very idea of democracy. In other words, the book is a medium that can (and should) be ‘rethought to serve new ends’; a medium through which politics itself can be rethought in an ongoing manner.”
/ project:
Janneke Adema & Gary Hall: The Political Nature of the Book, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, economy, essay, gary hall, janneke adema, knowledge, politics
/ category: theory
Title: The Black Book
Artist: Jean Keller
Publisher: self-published
Distribution: Lulu.com
Format: 740 pages, 14.81 x 20.98 cm
ISBN: none
Ink used for digital printing is one of the most precious substances in the world. A single gallon of ink costs over four thousand dollars and this is one reason why digitally printed books are so expensive. However, the price of a book is not calculated according to the amount of ink used in its production. For example, a Lulu book of blank pages costs an artist as much to produce as a book filled with text or large photographs. Furthermore, as the number of pages increases, the price of each page decreases. A book containing the maximum number of pages printed entirely in black ink therefore results in the lowest cost and maximum value for the artist. Combining these two features, buyers of The Black Book can do so with the guarantee that they are getting the best possible value for their money.
/ project:
Jean Keller: The Black Book, 2013
/ terminology: 2013, book, distribution, jean keller, lulu, market, print on demand, printing, self-publishing
/ category: practice
Title: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View
Artist: Jon Rafman
Publisher: Jean Boîte Éditions
Editor: Anna Cuquemelle
Graphic design: Renaud Othnin-Girard
Translation: Aure Bergeret
Format: 160 pages, 16.7 x 24 cm, paperback/softbound
ISBN: 978-2-36568-001-1
Jon Rafman’s monographic book is based on his study The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Some years ago, the artist began to stroll around the free world within the eyes of Goggle Street View and captured images inspired both by photojournalism and fantasizing. In this exhaustive publication, Jon Rafman’s work is shown throughout 160 bilingual pages and accompanied by an original text by the architect and artist Guillaume Aubry.
/ project:
Jon Rafman: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, 2011
/ terminology: 2011, book, found images, google, jean boîte éditions, jon rafman, photography, readymade
/ category: practice
Title: Theory
Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Publisher: Jean Boîte Éditions
Editors: Mathieu Cénac and David Desrimais
Format: 500 loose sheets of paper, each 21 × 29.7 cm (A4)
ISBN: 978-2-365-680-103
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Theory offers an unprecedented reading of the contemporary world: 500 texts—from poems and musings to short stories—printed on 500 pages assembled in the form of a ream of paper. Curated by the author-poet, this unique collection maps out the various issues and trends in contemporary literature in a world currently being shaken up by everything online and digital, and calls for the reinvention of creative forms.
/ project:
Kenneth Goldsmith: Theory, 2015
/ terminology: 2015, book, collection, jean boîte éditions, kenneth goldsmith, literature, theory, uncreative writing
/ category: practice, theory