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LEARN TO READ ART: A History of Printed Matter @ PS1

LEARN TO READ ART: A History of Printed Matter

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's Fall Exhibitions Opening
Date: Sunday, October 25, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter presents a comprehensive overview of Printed Matter, the artists' bookstore, focusing on the philosophy established by its founders in 1976. The exhibition radically questions the notion of art as an elitist structure, and proposes an art conceived along democratic ideals, a low-cost art that travels out into the world through the distribution systems usually reserved for books and periodicals, or popular music. Featuring more than 100 international artists, Learn to Read Art explores the artists' desire to create with the idea that art is both intimate, and for everyone.

Printed Matter's emphasis has always been on books; however, artists have moved in many directions, experimenting with everything from periodicals and vinyl records to posters and postcards. The exhibition also includes more expectable editions, such as photographs, which, if we think about it, were originally intended to be low-cost reproducible media. And then there are somewhat less expectable formats, such as the skateboards by Liam Gillick, Ari Marcopoulos and Mark Gonzales.

The exhibition follows the organization from storefront to storefront over more than three decades, featuring installations by Lawrence Weiner, Josh Smith, and Jenny Holzer. Josh Smith's book of 473 numbered silkscreened leaves is housed in a pair of wooden book covers, themselves made from the table on which the silk-screening was done. Spread out on the walls in the exhibition, they become an almost delirious cacophony of repetition.

The number of artists who have helped support Printed Matter is astonishing: editions by John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, Larry Clark, Liam Gillich, Jenny Holzer, Terence Koh, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Scott Hug, Felix Gonzales Torres, Christopher Wool and many more animate the rich history.

An architecture of book-shaped platforms by Gareth Long contains the project and provides seating, display, and storage for the project.

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter is organized by AA Bronson, President of Printed Matter, and produced in cooperation with the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. Its New York presentation is part of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's new programmatic series Free Space.

New Issue: CULTURAL POLITICS, Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009

Photo courtesy of Paul Chan, Creative Time and Green Naftali Gallery, New York.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009, which is a General Issue.

Official Website

Subscribe

Submission Guidleines

Visit Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org

Please feel free to circulate.

Best wishes,

The Editors

+++

Cultural Politics
Volume 5, Issue 3
November 2009

CONTENTS

“Turkish Delight” in Vienna: Art, Islam and European Public Culture
Nilüfer Göle on how the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground of intercultural and intercivilizational conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between ‘native’ and ‘Islamic’ values, thereby creating a transnational public sphere.

Class Struggle and Displacement: Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
Matthew Flisfeder argues against cognitivist film scholars, such as David Bordwell and David Carroll, and for the relevance of Slavoj Zizek in the field of film criticism and theory. 

Waiting for Godot in New Orleans [check it out @ http://culturalpolitics.org]
New York based artist Paul Chan discusses and illustrates his staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans as a series of site-specific performances and creative response to the city’s ongoing dysfunction and its inhabitants’ collective tenaciousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Recursive Mode: Space, Time and the Hypercommodification of Culture
Robert Hassan argues that ‘evolution’ in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society, forms that no longer have the space or time to evolve either dialectically in response to capitalism, or organically as newly independent developments. 

Wreck, Restoration and the Work of Carrying On: History on Vivan Sundaram’s Boat-Works
Tania Roy examines the installation artwork of Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s foremost contemporary artists, as an aesthetic response to the rapid political and cultural transformations that marked the 1990s by way of experiments with site-specific, inter-medial installations.

Book Reviews

Can Theory Save Us?
Martin Parker considers Mark Featherstone’s Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought, an intellectual history that runs from Aristotle to Zizek

Reevaluating Greatness in the Time of War
Marek Bartelik analyses Aaron J. Cohen’s Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917, a history of Russian art prior to the October Revolution.

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About Cultural Politics
“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition.  In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky.  It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.

 

Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works @the NYC Bar Assoc.

Image Via

Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works


Tuesday, October 20, 2009


6:00 – 8:00 pm

Meeting Hall, New York City Bar Association, 42 West 44th Street


How should the law treat “orphan works”? Please join us as we discuss proposals that would
enable copyrighted works to be used when their owners cannot be located to obtain necessary permissions. What should be the obligations of potential users with respect to searching for copyright owners? How should infringement claims be handled if a copyright owner emerges? Do different types of copyrighted works present unique issues? What roles might registries and recognition and detection technologies play? Our speakers will address these and related questions, focusing on orphan images.

Speakers:
Brendan M. Connell, Jr., Director and Counsel for Administration, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Frederic Haber, Vice President and General Counsel, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Eugene H. Mopsik, Executive Director, American Society of Media Photographers

Maria Pallante, Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office

Charles Wright, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Legal and Business Affairs, A&E Television Networks

Moderator:
June M. Besek, Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts

This program is free and open to the public; registration is not required.

Download Flyer: Lost and Found--A Practical Look at Orphan Works

Co-sponsored by the Art Law Committee (Virginia Rutledge, Chair) and the Copyright and Literary Property Committee (Joel L. Hecker, Chair) of the New York City Bar Association, in conjunction with Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts.

Feed Your Eyeballs With Meanspirited Cartoons From A Deflated Spirit!

I was recently pointed to the fine, Ashcanesque political satire of Louis Netter. He has a new book out, Life's Too Short For Nuance (check out some of the amazing drawings), and a blog where he's posted the storyboards for his animated film Cakeaters, and pages from his sketch book -- quite a treat. He writes that his drawings are "at once engaging and provocative and, inexcusably cruel and petty..."

...My reportage drawings carry with them the weight of their weary creator. Drawing Americans in particular is an activity fraught with outrage and deep, penetrating sadness. We are at the end of at least one kind of world. If what is revealed in my drawings is true then we are screwed. If they are the product of my paranoid delusions then I guess we are safe. For now anyway.

The book can be purchased directly via PayPal or from Amazon.

Lit Drift

Check out Lit Drift, the new blog, resource, and community dedicated to the art & craft of fiction in the 21st century. Featuring daily creative prompts, short stories, and a weekly FREE book giveaway called Free Book Friday. Here's one post that caught my eye:

5 Phenomenal Examples of Fan-Made Transformative Storytelling

By JK Evanczuk on Tuesday, September 8, 2009

With 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even Star Trek, the notion of transformative work has been a particularly hot topic these past few months. Transformative work not only plays havoc with intellectual property law, but also with the audience as storytellers take our familiar, beloved characters and then subvert them entirely. Holden Caulfield is 76 years old and on the run from a nursing home, Elizabeth Bennett defends her family from hoards of zombies, and James Tiberius Kirk finds himself without a father and a long way to go before he can become captain of the USS Enterprise. The result is all the more shocking and enlightening given the juxtaposition of the transformed work with our knowledge of the original work.

It’s a compelling artistic endeavor. And transformative work is nothing new. Fans of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad wrote their own books based on his works. Cervantes’ Don Quixote saw more than a few unauthorized published sequels. John Gardner’s Grendel, a re-telling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, was published to great acclaim (which, being one of my favorite books, I definitely recommend you giving it a read). Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked, an alternate take on The Wizard of Oz, is now one of Broadway’s biggest hits. You get the idea.

But what about fan-made transformative works? While there are countless pieces of fan fiction and fan art out there, in which fans take their favorite characters and merely continue their stories, genuine transformative works are far less common. But as few and far-between as they may be, their stories really resonate.

After the jump, a short list of lesser-known, but by no means lesser-quality, fan-made transformative storytelling that challenge the old adage “there are no new stories.”

[read on...]