Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, The Master Builder
Softcover, 28 pp., offset 4/4, 130 x 230 mm
Edition of 1000
ISBN 978-0-9562605-0-5
Published by Occasional Papers
The Master Builder: Talking with Ken Briggs by Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge, is a slim (28 pp. plus covers) volume, the size (and look and feel, with coated and uncoated stocks) of a typical Briggs NT programme. It comprises an interview with Briggs, a short biography and portrait, plenty of pictures (24 in colour) of his pioneering posters and programmes for the theatre in the 1960s and 70s, and a detail of Briggs’ slide archive, carefully labelled with Dymo tape.
When asked about his structured, asymmetrical booking forms for the theatre, Briggs claims ‘I didn’t care about beauty or the lack of it. They are purely typographic,’ then goes on to explain his colour system: ‘from warm colours in winter to cool colours in summer: red, ochre, purple, bright blue and so on.’ Which is why he was known as the colourist.
In an attempt to celebrate how we find ourselves doodling while on the phone, testing pens in stationery shops, our belief in folklore, the need to misuse technology or whose idea it was to fly aero planes in formation to write messages across our skies.
The research notes selected from the archive A Recent History of Writing & Drawing hopefully provide references to things old, new and maybe forgotten which together can offer an alternative understanding of our habit to document thoughts and ideas. Upending assumptions that any one kind of communication is more authentic, more direct or more valid that any other, A Recent History of Writing & Drawing finds meaning, texture and poetry in the most unlikely places.
In 2005, together with Jonathan Hares, a pair of drilled posters were made as a contribution to The Free Library, curated by Mark Owens. This prompted the exploration of possible methods of mechanised production. Using a standard CNC plotter, a rotated LCD display, an Apple TV, and a software interface, Empty Words cuts each dot of the poster in sequence at a controlled speed. Similar to a Linotype machine, the resulting device became a tool for the production of text works, used by both ourselves and the general public.
The publication features the following playlist selected by Lehni and Rich during the installation of Empty Words at the Swiss Institute, New York, 2009.
The Speed-i-Jet, a mobile pen-printer manufactured by Reiner (Germany), is a device built around an industrial inkjet cartridge / printing head. With its clumsy user interface and 30 character maximum capacity, this charming parasitical product prompted the discussion of possible uses for such a device. Together with the curatorial staff of the institution, daily news headlines were selected and transferred onto the devices. Holding and moving the device like a pen, visitors could experience the writing of texts to which the author is ambiguous.
The headlines were collected during Things to Say at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 14 February — 12 April, 2009.
Mono.Kultur 27, Ryan McGinley
Softcover, 44 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur
$10.00 · out of stock
Light, space and time. Those are the classic ingredients for photography, which have been reinvented, rediscovered and rearranged again and again for almost 200 years. And just when you thought that the subject might have exhausted itself, that nothing new could be done, someone comes along and interprets them in a way that hasn’t been seen before, not quite like that. As it happens, this latest someone is called Ryan McGinley.
Ryan McGinley’s steep ascent within the world of photography appears almost as effortless as his images: Born in 1977 in New Jersey, he moved to New York in 1996 to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design, where almost by accident he discovered his love for photography. Incessantly shooting his friends and surroundings, McGinley inadvertently documented the microcosm of youth culture in New York at the turn of the millennium in a body of work that stood out for its energy and optimism, despite the grit and rawness of the images — a style that should later draw comparisons to the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Robert Frank. In the meantime, McGinley befriended a group of local artists and creative types — among them his close friends Dan Colen and the late Dash Snow — that would soon be hyped as a ‘new movement’ by the press, a label based more on the excessive lifestyle the three had in common than their actual and quite disparate work.
And so for the past ten years, McGinley has continuously been one step ahead, and is already taking the next corner of his young career — like the teenagers in his images, like youth itself, always on the run, always looking for the next thing, but always with the unmistakable energy and optimism and lightness that ultimately characterizes all of his work. Because no one these days sculpts light, space and time quite in the same way as Ryan McGinley.
P & Co. is committed to the form of the community broadsheet as a site for aesthetic discourse and informed cultural analysis.
Published on a biannual basis, each issue is loosely organized around a personality of historical significance and provides the occasion for a network of affiliates from diverse critical and artistic backgrounds to explore innovative modes of study.
With an emphasis on the free and uninhibited circulation of images, information and ideas, P & Co. reconsiders the material conditions of newsprint in a cultural sphere characterized by aggregate forms of social media.
Issue 110 includes Mark Clintberg’s essay Hungry Eyes: Feasting on Food Photography from elBulli and Beyond, Nicole J. Caruth’s Kitchen Studio: A Recipe for Disaster, Leah Modigliani’s Collaborating on Conceptual Art: An Aesthetics of the Impossible and Swapnaa Tamhane’s The Performative Space: Tracing the Roots of Performance-Based Work in India. This issue also include an interview by Pandora Syperek with Fiona Kinsella and artist projects by Keesic Douglas and Aislinn Thomas. The reviews section includes writing about exhibitions and projects by Karen Azoulay, Marcel Dzama, Jessica Eaton, Sean Martindale, John Monteith, Bruce Nauman, Cady Noland and Diane Arbus, Douglas Scholes and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.
Chemical Process: “It takes 1 cup wine 1/2 hr to reduce by 1/2 at 400 degs.”
Digestion started in 2009 as a set of experiments about metabolizing information. Eaders Digest currently takes the form of a publication.
In each issue, a six-stage metabolic reaction is begun. A previously published text is selected and sent to the first participant, who is asked to digest the text into another piece that must be a fixed number of words fewer than the original. The response can take any form within the word count constraint, borrowing from or transforming the source material. The digested text is sent to the next contributor with the same instructions. The word count shrinks weekly, until the final reduction phase is performed by the writer of the first seminal text.
Founded in 2007 in Brooklyn, Kingsboro is a critical and engaged look at young art, design, literature, and approach every new issue as an artists print or unique edition, an entirely self-produced object with its own inherent visual language.
A biannual publication by W/— Projects in collaboration with Leong Leong Architecture, White Zinfandel is devoted to the visual manifestation of food and culture produced within the lives of creative individuals. This inaugural issue is an homage to the restaurant Food founded by Gordon Matta-Clark, Caroline Goodden and Tina Girouard in 1971.
New York Magazine write-up. Interview Magazine blog.
Ein Magazin über Orte (A magazine about places) is published twice a year. It deals with a different location in every issue. The magazine collects works of various authors in the form of photographs, drawings and texts.
Fillip 13 introduces Intangible Economies, a new, ongoing series broadening the notion of economy beyond its financial dimensions. The series focuses on the multifarious forms of exchange fuelled by affect and desire, speculatively investigating the fundamental role these affective transactions play in modes of representation and, accordingly, in cultural production.
This issue includes series texts by Candice Hopkins, Jan Verwoert, and series editor Antonia Hirsch. Forthcoming installments will include contributions by Hadley+Maxwell, Olaf Nicolai, and Monika Szewczyk, among others.
The issue also features a record of The AAAARG Library, a site-specific installation commissioned for Fillip 13 and the 2010 NY Art Book Fair. The Library, produced by artist Sean Dockray and curated by Jeff Khonsary, will be presented again this summer as part of Night Market, a Red76 project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA.
Frédéric Bonnet, General Idea: A Retrospective 1969-1994
Hardcover, 224 pp., offset 4/4, 174 x 238 mm
Edition of 2000
ISBN 978-3-03764-162-0
Published by JRP|Ringier
This volume presents an overview of the Canadian collective oeuvre — an oeuvre still haunted by Miss General Idea, a fictive character who was at once muse and object, image and concept. Founded in Toronto in 1969 by Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal — both disappeared in 1994 — and AA Bronson, the trio adopted a generic identity that “freed it from the tyranny of individual genius.” Their complex intermingling of reality and fiction took the form of a transgressive and often parodic take on art and society. Treating the image as a virus infiltrating every aspect of the real world, General Idea set out to colonize it, modify its content and so come up with an alternative version of reality.
Paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs, videos, magazines, and TV programs: General Idea’s is an authentically multimedia oeuvre, that has lost nothing of its freshness and can now be seen as anticipating certain aspects of a current art scene undergoing radical transformation. The book covers the collective’s main areas of concern and themes, such as the artist and the creative process, glamour as a creative tool, art’s links with the media and mass culture, architecture and archaeology, sexuality and AIDS, etc. Including newly commissioned essays and republished texts, it is richly illustrated with documents and reproductions of the most important projects realized by General Idea from 1969 to 1994.
