Coming up

Launch of X–Operative / Saturday 27 September, 6–9pm

Saturday 27 September 2014, 6 – 9pm
Launch of X-Operative Book
Published by X Marks the Bökship, 2014

The title of this book X-Operative is taken from an essay by Ksenia Cheinman, who uses the term to describe common places where the cultural space becomes creative, productive, commercial, domestic, and educational all at once. This idea was used as the blueprint for an exhibition about X Marks the Bökship at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge in 2013. This book documents the X-Operative exhibition and extends the ideas broadly covering the multi operations of independent bookshop X Marks the Bökship: reading & writing, production, performance, distribution and exchange. Contributions include: Adam Burton’s text Some Problems of Distribution for Independent Publishers and Independent Booksellers, new writing by Bökship writer’s-in-residence Rory Macbeth and Rebecca Jagoe, World Brain by Lucy Woodhouse, X-enos. Uncommon Commons by Ksenia Cheinman and works by Sophie Demay, Beatriz Olabarrieta, Keef Winter, Jessica Wiesner and others.

Publication as Practice II. # 1: Learn to Read Differently, Simon Morris

Publication as Practice II
A short course on concepts of artists’ publications

This talk series by artists, writers, designers and publishers covers a range of concepts and approaches to artist books and experimental publishing. Speakers include Simon Morris (Information as Material), James Langdon, Nicole Bachmann & Ruth Beale (Performance as Publishing), FormContent, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Sophie Demay & Charlotte Cheetham. (Open Books)
Events take place on Wednesday evenings between September – December 2014. FREE.

Wednesday 17 September 2014, 7pm
# 1: Learn to Read Differently 
Simon Morris (Information as Material)
Talk starts at 7.15pm

Simon Morris examines the relationship between reading and art. He proposes a new method of making art via conceptualist reading performances. This method grafts the aesthetic legacy of Conceptual Art on to various notions of writing (from literary composition to data management) in order to produce materially-specific poems as artworks that have in some way re-read a found object. 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 material signifier and social activity. 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? Morris’ work celebrates reading differently as a praxis of exploring the elsewhere of what languages and their users can mean and do. Morris is committed to working collaboratively and against all-too-certain counter-productive divisions between contemporary art and contemporary literature. In his presentation, Morris will examine four of his experimental bookworks.

Simon Morris (b.1968) is a conceptual writer and teacher. He is a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Teesside in the UK. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, films, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book and often involve collaborations with people from the fields of art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. In 2002, he founded the publishing imprint information as material. He is the author of numerous experimental books, including; Bibliomania (1998); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); Re-Writing Freud (2005); Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010); and Pigeon Reader (2012). He is an occasional curator and a regular lecturer on contemporary art and also directed the documentary films sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) and making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler (2010).

Publication as Practice: http://bokship.org/pap.html