Playground: Magazines and Books as Sites for Art
Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art
May 23, 2014.
MWW, pl. Strzegomski 2a, 53-681 Wrocław, Poland
Nick Thurston spoke at a one-day conference on the histories of DIY zine and book publishing in Poland and England from the 80s to present day, convened by Sylwia Serafinowicz, Chief Curator of Collections at Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art (MWW).
‘WTF?!’ Reading at Corner College, Zurich
Corner College, some other time
Corner College, Kochstrasse 1, CH-8004, Zürich, Switzerland.
Monday 29 October, 2012
20:00+
Soup and drinks served.
A one-off reading at Corner College, Zurich, curated by Romy Rüegger and Lucie Kolb with Stefan Wagner. An event programmed in connection with an invited two-day seminar series led by Nick at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich, for the MFA Fine Art programme.
Afterall Journal interview
Trevor Hickman’s block cut (Brewhouse Broadsheets, 1967) remake of a Mathias Huss wood cut. Huss’ original, published in Lyon in 1499, was from a folio he cut for an edition of the so-called Dance of Death, ‘La grât danse macabre’.
It is the first known image of a printing press or bookseller, and actually represents the full process of publishing as a synthesised flow. From left to right in the image you can see: Death; compositor; Death; puller 1; puller 2; Death; and a bookseller. In the few lines of French dialogue that accompany this momento mori Death tells the publishing foursome to come swiftly; to leave their euqipment, presses and cases; and not to try to conceal any faults, for it is in the work that one knows the workman.
You can read an interview with Nick commissioned by Afterall Journal for their ‘Artists at Work’ series, conducted by Louise O’Hare of Published & Be Damned, on the subject of self-publishing, here.
Site Gallery talk
Nick Thurston will give an invited talk at Site Gallery, Sheffield, on the subject of libraries and artists’ publishing, in conjunction with the gallery’s current exhibition, ‘Print It’. You can also enjoy iam books as part of the specialist bookshopinstalled during the show
BBC Radio York: Do or DIY
Patrick Wildgust, curator of the Laurence Sterne Trust and Nick Thurston, editor from information as material explain on BBC Radio York that self-publishing is nothing new. Laurence Strene from Coxwold was doing it 1759 when he wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Hear about the Do or DIY exhibition at Shandy Hall.
‘Global Conceptualisms’ reading, Galerie éof, Paris
Nick Thurston read at Galerie éof, 15 rue Saint Fiacre, 75002 Paris at an event organised by Double Change (Fr) and curated by Vanessa Place (USA). The cycle of short readings was arranged as part of the congressional conference on experimental literatures at the Sorbonne University, Paris, where all of the poets reading were also speaking. You can watch the two-part video footage here and here featuring: Paal Bjelke Andersen (Norvège), Christian Bök (Canada), Marco Antonio Huerta (Mexique), Franck Leibovici (France), Swantje Lichtenstein (Allemagne), Vanessa Place (Etats-Unis), Carlos Soto-Román (Chili), Nick Thurston (Grande Bretagne).
Iam co-present Other Room in Leeds
Other Room flyer for Leeds Gallery readings, July 2012
Iam were proud to co-present The Other Room poetry readings series at Leeds Gallery, July 19, 2012. This was second such collaboration following on the success of last year’s one off at Leeds City Art Gallery readings featuring Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Karen McCormack, and Steve McCaffery which you can view in our Portfolio pages.
July’s readings featured: Hazel Smith, Ryan Ormonde, Chris McCabe & Tom Jenks.
Book Presence in the Digital Age
Book Presence in the Digital Age Conference 2012 flyer
Simon Morris opens Utrecht University conference, May 28-30, 2012.
Organized by Kiene Brillenburg-Würth
Funded by NWO and the Changing Literacies Platform of the Cultures and Identities Research Group at Utrecht University, in cooperation with OSL and Wintertuin, the symposium Book Presence in a Digital Age will take place at Utrecht University, May 28-30, 2012.
This conference is devoted to books and paper as bodies of literature in a digital age. Today, books are no longer dominant cultural media. Yet if books have been increasingly marginalized by screens, pads, and other electronic book-imitators, what is happening to literature as a paper art?
In 1992, Robert Coover still confidently predicted in the New York Review of Books: “…the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries.” The future of literature would be elsewhere, away from paper, print, and bound covers. Electronic literature would take the lead artistically and wipe out the remains of that bygone technology: the book. Except that it wasn’t – and it didn’t. Why?
Strangely, since the 1990s, when Coover’s turnaround should have taken place, there has been a veritable surge of creative re-imaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts) to accordeon books (Caron’s Nox), from cut ups (Foer’s Tree of Codes) to collages (Rawle’s Woman’s World), erasures (Rueffle’s A Little White Shadow) to mix-ups (Morris’s The Interpretations of Dreams), p(aper)-literature has gone through anything but a slow, uneventful death. By contrast, it has re-invented itself materially.
Iam ICA, London panel for Publish & Be Damned
Still frame from the animation, ‘I Don’t Want to Make a Book’
Nick Thurston spoke at the ICA at the invitation of Publish & Be Damned curator, Kit Hammonds, on the panel ‘I Don’t Want to Make a Book‘, March 17th 2012. The panel was titled after this hilarious satirical animation.
Craig Dworkin & Kenneth Goldsmith – Big Ideas talk, Whitechapel Gallery
Craig Dworkin (top) and Kenneth Goldsmith (bottom), ‘Big Ideas’ promo, Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.
Iam co-editor Craig Dworkin and our regular ally Kenneth Goldsmith gave the Whitechapel Gallery’s invitational ‘Big Ideas‘ talk during the London Art Book Fair, September 2011. Press on the event included interviews like this. The talk, which also featured a reading by American poet Vanessa Place, doubled as the European launch event for Dworkin & Goldsmith’s co-edited ‘Against Expression’ anthology (Northwestern University Press).
