INFORMATION AS MATERIAL
August 10 – September 23, 2013
Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland, SR1 1RE
The desire to read a work of art is the annihilation of the possibility of experiencing that work of art.
— Carl Andre
We say: Whatever, Carl . . . . perhaps you should learn to read differently.
Photo: Craig Dworkin, FACT (rug), 2013.
Photo: Simon Morris & Nick Thurston, Learn to Read Differently – Assisted John Baldessari Print, 2013.
This exhibition was commissioned and curated by Circa (Newcastle). It presents poetic art works by Kate Briggs (Paris), Craig Dworkin (Utah), Simon Morris (Middlesborough), Lucia della Paolera (Brooklyn) and Nick Thurston (Leeds) that have, or will be, published by IAM. It also presents related art works by Kenneth Goldsmith (New York), Garry Neill Kennedy (Halifax, CA), Gareth Long (New York), Greville Worthington (Catterick) and an online-only collaboration between Thurston and Robert Fitterman (New York) hosted on circaprojects.org.
On the invitation card (above), in the gallery, and online, Learn to Read Differently proposes a method of making art works through and as ‘conceptualist reading performances.’ This method presses the aesthetic legacy conventionally attributed to Conceptual art onto disparate notions of writing (from the literary to that of data management) to produce materially-specific poems as art works that have somehow re-read a thing (an idea, an object, etc.) that was already in the world.
This is an art of reading things differently. It starts from a premise proved by the impossibility of making purely conceptual art: that art is always aesthetical and conceptual. To that it couples an obsession with language — as both signifier and material, and as always socio-historically codified. In doing so, it establishes a mode of making art that asks: What could we write if reading could be a materially productive act of making art? How might a certain kind of reading-as-making problematise the understandings of authorship, production and reproduction ensconced in our cultural industries?
All of these art works celebrate reading differently as a praxis of exploring the elsewhere of what languages and their users can mean and do. In collaboration with Circa, this project continues information as material’s commitment to working with other people and against all-too-certain counter-productive divisions between contemporary art and contemporary literature.
Curated by Dawn Bothwell and Sam Watson.
Learn to Read Differently
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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