
Do or DIY
information as material
Galleries 5 & 6
March 9 – April 16, 2012
Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1 7QX
A six-week exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (London), marking the end of information as material’s one-year tenure as the Gallery’s Writers in Residence, and simultaneously marking iam’s tenth anniversary as an independent publisher of artists’ books and conceptual writing.
The exhibition will expand on a commissioned essay written by three of iam’s editors – Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris, and Nick Thurston – as the Foreword for the 2011 London Art Book Fair. The first part of that essay offers a miniature history of self-publishing by writers now canonised by the English-language literary industry, whose D.I.Y. actions have been covered over to negate the stigma of ‘vanity publishing’. The second part of that essay is a concise polemic, advocating a D.I.Y. approach to publishing in the current digital epoch, as a praxis against the drives of ‘vanity publishing’, and as a positive socio-political choice. It concludes, quite simply: “Don’t wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.”
The exhibition will re-present that essay, plus cabinets of some self-published first edition books cited in the essay, alongside an exposed selection of contemporary mass-market re-issues of all the available publications that are cited in the essay. In doing so, the show will present a set of ideas and artefacts that reveal the concealments required by the value structures that underwrite canonising historiographies and culture industries.
The exhibition will tour in August to Shandy Hall, former residence of the eighteenth-century novelist Rev. Laurence Sterne, whose secret self-publishing of his most famous work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, begins iam’s miniature history. There, at the Laurence Sterne Museum, the exhibitionary material will intervene in the popular NGS-listed garden.
In conjunction with the touring exhibition, Do or DIY will be re-released as a standalone handbook, self-published by Information as Material to be distributed at both exhibitions and internationally thereafter by iam’s partner, Conerhouse Publications (Manchester).
In the winter of 1912 Marcel Proust submitted a manuscript to three prominent Parisian publishers: Fasquelle; Gallimard; and La Nouvelle Revue Française. Within weeks, all three had rejected the project. Fasquelle explained that they “did not want to risk publishing something so different from what the public was used to reading.” That ‘something different’ was the monumental modernist novel In Search of Lost Time. Soon another publisher, Ollendorff, had also rejected the manuscript, despite Proust’s offer to pay for the printing himself. Alfred Humblot, a Director at Ollendorff, rebuked: “I don’t see why any man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in his bed before he goes to sleep.” The book was eventually published by Grasset, but only after Proust agreed to finance both the production and publicity. André Gide, who had been the editor at La Nouvelle Revue later confessed: “the rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the N.R.F. – and (since to my shame I was largely responsible for it) one of the sorrows, one of the most bitter regrets of my life.”
—Lydia Davis, “Translator’s Introduction,” In Search of Lost Time, vol.1, The Way by Swann’s (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p.xxviii.
Made possible thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England.
Do or DIY – exhibition 1
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Portfolio
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13 March 1911
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Def.
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Weaving Language
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Catch-words
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On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless
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Perfect Love
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Last Words
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Reading Matters
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Eulogy for David Antin in English English
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Calvariae Disjecta: The many hauntings of Burton Agnes Hall
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Reading as Art
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Twelve Erroneous Displacements and a Fact
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Cartography for Girls
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Correcciones
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Magritte for Cheerleaders
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(Expanded Second Edition)
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Nothing: A User’s Manual
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Getting Inside Simon Morris’ Head
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Spanish Do or DIY translation
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German Do or DIY translation
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The Nabokov Paper
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I, Sparkie
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Dis Manibus: A Taxonomy of Ghosts from Popular Forms
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Learn to Read Differently
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Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right
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Page 141 2
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Jaap Blonk, Poet-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Garry Neill Kennedy, Artist-in-Residence at Shandy Hall
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Freud on Holiday: Appendices III and IV, plus full wrapped set
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Pigeon Reader
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Enchiridion: three manoeuvres by Tim Brennan in NE Scotland
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Do or DIY – exhibition 2
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Do or DIY – pocketbook
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Do or DIY – exhibition 1
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Sucking on Words poetry readings
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The Man Booker Shortlist Quiz!
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Reisen II
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Exercise in Pathetic Criticism
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The Persons
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Freud’s Weather
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Howl #16
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Have a Peck at Perec, tote bag
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Frued’s Dining
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Bibliomancy: Lotsa Fun For All The Family
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The Forgetting of a Proper Name
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Summer School for Literary Perverts
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Poetry Readings in Leeds
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Instruction Manual
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information as material residency
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Re-Writing Freud app
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Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
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Making Nothing Happen DVD
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The Perverse Library
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The Perverse Library exhibition
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Robert Fitterman & Kim Rosenfield Residency
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Freud and the Gift of Flowers
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Reisen I
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THE IDEOLOGY OF DAVID CAMERON’S PARTY
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Marie-Josée Jean & Klaus Scherübel Residency
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THE DIE IS CAST
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He
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Historico-naturalis et Archaeologica ex Dale Street
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Craig Dworkin Residency
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The Voice and Nothing More: an academic mash up
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Spinning Vol. II: De-Centering the Self
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A Perverse Library
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An Agent of the Estate
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A Disturbance of Memory
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Iam Survey Exhibition
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A One Day Bookshop for Experimental Literature
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Kenneth Goldsmith Residency
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sucking on words DVD
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Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy)
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L’esprit d’escalier
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We Report Here
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Deciphering Human Chromosone 16: Index to the Report
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Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
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Reading the Remove of Literature
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Thesaurus Scienta Lancastriae
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Freud Dreams of Rome
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Re-Writing Freud
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The Answer to the Question
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Royal Road to the Unconscious
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bibliomania 2000-2001
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Interpretation vol.I
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Interpretation vol. II
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bibliomania 1998-1999