Launch of With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form by Maria Fusco / Wednesday 23 October 2013, 6.30 – 8.30pm

With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form
By Maria Fusco
Published by New Documents, 2013
Book launch with a reading by Maria Fusco

“An entertaining and thought provoking addition to the reexamination of one of art history’s most mythologized exhibitions that demonstrates how language is attitude and how words are form.”

Jens Hoffmann, Curator of When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, 2012

Experimenting with the form and register of contemporary art writing, With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form re-figures the seminal artist’s book / catalogue When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Originally edited by Harald Szeemann to accompany the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition of the same name, When Attitudes Become Form brought together new tendencies in the art of its time including Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, and post-Minimalism, to conceive curatorial practice as a linguistic medium.

Working with Szeemann’s artist’s book/catalogue as case-study, With A Bao A Qu reflects on the form and structure of the artist’s book. By stylistically adopting a subjective literary voice, drawn, at least partially, from Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (published in English in 1969), the book counter-intuitively shifts focus away from reading of art’s conceptual properties to those of its physical, material embodiment.

With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form
11.2 x 18 cm
142 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-927354-14-8
Published by New Documents
Los Angeles/Vancouver: 2013

Launch of Slide Shows curated by Charlotte Cheetham / Saturday 19 October, 7 – 9pm

Released in conjunction with Issue 18 of Fillip magazine, Slide Shows documents a specially commissioned Web video project by French curator Charlotte Cheetham on the landscape of international art publishing and design. Originally taking the form of a series of video presentations by publishers, designers, and artists, Slide Shows offers one possible cross section of a newly emergent field of book production. This publication documents the project, serving as a pocket reference to each of the profiles included in the series.

2013, English‚ 14 x 21 cm, 40 pages‚ ISBN:978-1-927354-12-4

Slide Shows, a series of self-portraits, offers one possible landscape of a newly emerging scene of independent and contemporary art publishing. Curated by Charlotte Cheetham  and produced by Fillip , the initiative begun in 2012 in conjunction with Fillip‚ Institutions by Artists conference in the fall of 2012 in Vancouver, and take the form of a series of video hosted on Tumblr. With the sequential rhythm of the pages of a book, the slideshows depict portraits of publishers, artists, designers, booksellers, and others working in the contemporary field of independent and art publishing.

This set gives form to one possible look at this field, staging the printed work and research of some of its leading figures. Through the familiar (nostalgic) format of consecutive captioned images, these slideshow videos are mobilized in the service of these characters, whose images and texts speak to a still developing landscape of practice, as if they anticipate the transmission of a still moving memory, thus captured for a moment. This partially decontextualized narrative space in which information is displayed in a state of silent diffusion (such as the book) can be freely visited, alone, on a computer, or with others in a less intimate space as was the case when the videos were initially presented. (A wink to the noxious zapping rhythm of information online, but here, presented so that its stories may be savoured, its collected archive is unpacked.) After a pocket guide that was printed and inserted into the Fillip #18, the project will culminate in a printed volume that will document each slideshow, available in 2014. Enjoy!

Slide Shows includes contributions by 4478zine, And publishing, Xavier Antin, Booklet, Cambridge Books, Cannon Magazine, Charlotte Cheetham, An Endless Supply, Grotto, David Horvitz, Int. Typo. Union, Erik Kessels, James Langdon, mono.kultur, Samuel Nyholm, Occasional Papers, Oslo Editions, Precinct, Michalis Pichler, Elias Redstone, David Senior, split/fountain, Eva Weinmayr, and Wendy Yao.
_____

Slide Shows, a series of video self-portraits, offers one possible landscape of a newly emerging scene of independent and contemporary art publishing. http://slide-shows.tumblr.com