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Reading Room catalogue

Linda van Deursen
Author
Title
Publisher
Year
Code
Half Modern, Half Something Else (Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seven editions)
Florian Pumhösl
2003
RLD009
Werker A
Werker
2009
RLD004

Contributions by Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri & Carles Guerra, Juha Siltala, Paolo Virno

Werker 6 – Cinema Diary. Matthijs Diederiks
Werker
2013
RLD006

Cinema Diary presents images and documents of Matthijs Diederiks (28, filmmaker, Amsterdam). It is photographed and collected during his work at cinema Pathé Arena in Amsterdam, his side job from 2008 until 2010. Cinema Diary is the first issue of Werker 6, a collection of photo-diaries that reflect on the current working conditions of the youth in different geographies through modes of self-representation and amateur photography.

Werker 7 – The Language of Revolution
Werker
2012
RLD023

Werker 7 is meant to be read and discussed collectively. Display its pages on a wall at home, at school or on the floor of a public square… What is a revolutionary image? Which aesthetic elements are involved in the making of a revolution? Does revolution have a global language? What role does photography and the mass-media play in all this?

This issue of Werker takes its title from “The Language of Revolution — Tidings from the East”, a 2011 lecture given by Ariella Azoulay, at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Her analysis of Egypt’s revolution, through images from the internet, became the inspiration of this work.

Werker 2 – A Visual History of the Young Worker
Werker
2011
RLD024

Werker 2 addresses the museum by interrogating the relation of the ordinary man with History. From our collection of worker photographer publications and other documents depicting labour compiled in second-hand bookstores and antiquaries from Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Spain and the US, Werker 2 articulates a visual history of labour centered around the figure of the young worker. – publisher’s information

Werker B
Werker
2009
RLD005
The Collections of Barbara Bloom
International Center of Photography; Steidl Publishers
2007
RLD010
Essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman
Photographer, designer and installation artist Barbara Bloom has built her career on questioning appearances, exploring the desire for possessions and commenting on the act of collecting. The Collections of Barbara Bloom explores all aspects of her oeuvre, including works from past multimedia installations and newly made pieces, as well as objects from her vast personal archive of ephemera and advertisements. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations and adds new elements, resisting the delineation between past and present in her work. She often integrates her photographs with furniture to create compelling scenes, as with the installation Greed (1988) comprised of a chair, an empty frame and her own photograph of a museum gallery showing a guard in a chair. An example of one of her “collections” is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom. This work refers not only to herself as artist and collector, but to Nabokov as collector (he obsessively collected his own books). The Collections of Barbara Bloom is an expansion of a project developed as part of Bloom’s Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998.
Die Toilette. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2014
RLD021

Die Toilette is an assemblage of text fragments taken from different books by LA-based writer Chris Kraus, conceived and annotated by artists and writers Jon Bywater, Louise Menzies and Marnie Slater. By reading through Kraus’s texts looking for traces of New Zealand, where she grew up, the three Kiwis question the representation of the distant; how it is embodied by characters, situations, language, and in the writing/reading dynamics Kraus creates. The beach, affection and love relationships, the role of the city, intense relations with wildlife – all this and more is at stake in this amazing cut-up.

Between Artists: John Baldessari / Barbara Bloom
A.R.T. Press
2011
RLD003

Vivid publication of John Baldessari in conversation with Barbara Bloom via email and conversation with texts and classically Baldessari and Bloom images. “A witty and elegant visual exchange around the uses and functions of chairs doubles as an excuse to address a number of the artists’ interests and working methodologies. A conversation that has developed through years of friendship, deep admiration and understanding of each other’s work, this book presents Baldessari and Bloom at the peak of their form.”

The Wet and the Dry. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2011
RLD018

Moyra Davey’s practice of photography is closely connected to the history and the experience of reading. In The Wet and the Dry, autobiography and considerations on the medium mixes with the lives of Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Shelleys. This text was also the basis for Davey’s acclaimed video work The Goddesses.

Compensating Transient Pleasurable Excitations
Roma Publications
2014
RLD011

Artist’s book by Koenraad Dedobbeleer, compiled as a catalogue of an imaginative exhibition. Its initial spark originated in the framework of an exhibition held at Cultuurcentrum Mechelen in 2013 (“Up Close & Personal”). The premises of the Cultuurcentrum’s classical, museum styled exhibition halls, serve as a container for Dedobbeleer’s envisioned exhibition. Published in conjunction with the exhibitions “The Desperate, Furiously Positive Striving of People Who Refuse to Be Dismissed” at Extra City, Antwerp (5.04-25.05.2014) and “A Quarrel in a Faraway Country Between People of Whom We Know Nothing” at GAK, Bremen (01.11.2014-25.01.2015).

Untitled (September Magazine)
The Vanity Press, Roma Publications
2013
RLD014

Artist’s book by Paul Elliman. In a glossy volume approaching 600 pages, Elliman has collected images from a variety of sources – fashion magazines, glamour photography and pornography – cropping and arranging the clippings in a manner that especially emphasises the presence of hands, along with the many gestures of which they are capable. Also prevalent in the spectrum of clothed, semi-nude and nude human forms are limbs, feet, torsos and erogenous zones. Without any text or explanation, the series takes on a mesmerising aspect wherein the action of flipping through the pages becomes a kind of meditative contemplation of the fragmented human body. Design: Julie Peeters

Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth
Sternberg Press; Forensic Architecture
2014
RLD002

Forensics originated from the term “forensis” which is Latin for “pertaining to the forum.” The Roman forum was a multidimensional space of negotiation and truth-finding in which humans as well as objects participated in politics, law, and the economy. With the advent of modernity, forensics shifted to refer exclusively to the courts of law and to the use of medicine, and today as a science in service to the law. The present use of forensics, along with its popular representations have become increasingly central to the modes by which states police and govern their subjects.

By returning to forensis this book seeks to unlock forensics’ original potential as a political practice and reorient it. Inverting the direction of the forensic gaze it designates a field of action in which individuals and organizations detect and confront state violation

The condition of forensis is one in which new technologies for mediating the “testimony” of material objects—bones, ruins, toxic substances, landscapes, and the contemporary medias in which they are captured and represented—are mobilized in order to engage with struggles for justice, systemic violence, and environmental transformations across the frontiers of contemporary conflict.

This book presents the work of the architects, artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and theorists who participated directly in the “Forensic Architecture” project in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University of London, as well as the work of associates and guests. It includes forensic investigations undertaken by the project and its collaborators aimed at producing new kinds of evidence for use by international prosecutorial teams, political organizations, NGOs, and the UN. It also brings together research and essays that situate contemporary forensic practices within broader political, historical, and aesthetic discourse.

Tekstai ir pokalbiai: Eyal Weizman, Thomas Keenan, Susan Shuppli, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Michael Sfard, Ines Weizman, Gerald Nestler, Robert Jan van Pelt, Helene Kazan, Shela Sheikh, Grupa Spomenik/ Monument Group, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Jonathan Littell, Füsun Türetken, Gabriel Cuéllar, Francesco Sebregondi, Cesare P.R. Romano, Nicola Perugini,  Chris Woods, Jacob Burns, Emily Dische-Becker, Hisham Ashkar, Anselm Franke, Adrian Lahoud, Paulo Tavares, John Palmesino, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog/ Territorial Agency, Ryan Bishop, Godofredo Pereira, Howard Caygill, Nabil Ahmed, Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezanni, SITU Research, Maayan Amir, DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency), Eitan Diamond, Ayesha Hameed, Steffen Krämer, Armin Linke, Modelling Kivalina, Model Court, Alessandro Petti, Caroline Sturdy Colls, Working Group Four Faces of Omarska.  

 

"Crumpled, rumpled, crappy, tacky, raunchy, unconscious, whatever." The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2012
RLD026

An artist, a musician, and a publisher based in Brooklyn, NY, James Hoff tells here how books got him into art. He considers the complex and stimulating fabric of anecdotes, gossip, secrets, that are shared around artists’ publications, and, further, the role of printed matter in the building of an artists community. The essay pays homage to Edit DeAk through its title, and also comprises some pictures of book covers and LP sleeves from Hoff’s collection.

The Library of Helen Chadwick. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2015
RLD022

The 6th installment of the Social Life of the Book series is a section of the catalogue of publications from English conceptual artist Helen Chadwick’s personal library, reproduced by Will Holder …for Single Mothers. The library was acquired in 2006 and is held by The Henry Moore Institute Archive, Leeds, UK.

Chanel Shopping Center
Steidl Publishers
2014
RLD015

CHANEL’s fashion shows are always unexpected, but with the set of Karl Lagerfeld’s [most recent] Fall-Winter 2014/15 Prêt-à-Porter collection for the house, the designer seems to have finally outdone himself. The concept of the catwalk was born anew as the “CHANEL Shopping Center,” where models jostled with one another as they browsed shelves and placed items in their shopping trolleys.

This was, of course, no normal supermarket but a spectacular ironic reinterpretation of CHANEL’s beloved codes, where produce and packaging were re-designed according to Lagerfeld’s wit and whim. There were thousands of items to behold including Mont Cambon wine, Mademoiselle Privé doormats, tweed energy drinks, Coco Flakes (to be eaten with no more than Lait de Coco), Paris-Dallas ketchup, lion-shaped pasta, as well as bottled water labeled “Eau de CHANEL No 0.” The visual vocabulary of the supermarket equally informed Lagerfeld’s collection: from chain shopping baskets, vacuum-packed handbags, bottle-top and padlock-shaped jewelry, to iridescent outfits with shoplifter-sized pockets.

This book preserves the CHANEL Shopping Center in print, and is playfully styled as a mail order catalogue displaying all items seemingly for purchase—but only while stocks last.

Secession
KünstlerInnen Wiener Secession
2011
RLD013
Infant A. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2012
RLD019

A short piece of fiction by the Amsterdam-based graphic designer and writer Louis Lüthi, Infant A follows famous book artist Ulises Carrión as he walks on the High Line in Chelsea, discussing two books simply titled “A.”

c Werker B
Amsterdam: Werker
2009
RLD004

Contributions by Paul Ardenne, Erik Empson, Liam Gillick, Jacques Rancière, Vladimir Salnikov

Kinesics of the Page. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2013
RLD020

This installment written by LA-based artist and writer Avigail Moss, develops as a thorough analysis of one particular book: Marianne Wex’s outstanding photo-essay Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures, from 1979. Moss proposes a contextual approach of the book, in relation to politics and feminism in post-war West Germany, as well as a minute study of its design and page structure, revealing the complexity and force of the volume.

Some Faggy Gestures
Les Presses du Reel
2008
RLD025

Since the mid-1990s, Henrik Olesen has used media such as collage, sculpture, and minimalistic spatial intervention to investigate the social construction of identity and its historiography. Through the appropriation of source images and contextual shifts not dissimilar to the method invented by Aby Warburg for his “Mnemosyne Atlas,” Olesen probes the associations between homosexuality and its criminalization in the past, as well as in the present. His archival work sheds light on the enduring existence of spaces for Others, and inscribes homosexual subculture once more into the history of art and culture.

Vertikal Klub
NN Editions
2014
RLD012

Vertikal Klub is a manual for future installations of the “Vertical Club”, a project launched by Willem Oorebeek in 1994.

English-German-Japanese-French-Dutch language

The Wretched of the Screen
Sternberg Press
2012
RLD001

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.

FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
2012
RLD016

In February 2011, German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) decided to pay a visit to Fruit Logistica, the most important convention in the international fruit trade, held annually in Berlin. More than 2,400 fresh produce companies gather at the convention, presenting a dazzling panorama of texture and color. “I was left open-mouthed by the crazy displays and the variety and complexity of the international fruit trade and its processing machinery,” he records. “I reacted with my camera straight away.” The resultant 66 color photographs are published here for the first time.

Making Books. The Social Life of the Book
Paraguay Press
2011
RLD017

“I was raised making books,” recalls US artist Oscar Tuazon at the beginning of this essay, that addresses the very oft-announced death of the book at the same time as it envisions the conditions of its rebirth. This unflinching reflection on how publishing has changed, also develops as a speculation on the artist’s own approach to sculpture.

Printed in Germany (Yellow Edition)
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König
2014
RLD007

Printed in Germany is the second volume in an ambitious series of books developed by Christopher Williams in conjunction with his first major museum survey, The Production Line of Happiness, a critically acclaimed exhibition co-organized for 2014–15 by The Art Institute of Chicago with The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Following the first publication, an exhibition catalogue that relied more heavily on text than image, Printed in Germany was conceived to exist as a stand-alone visual object and extend the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic concerns into book form. A perfect companion to the first publication, it reproduces a carefully curated selection of the artist’s painstakingly constructed photographs and features striking graphic design in the near-complete absence of language, with no essay, captions, or even a title page. Through clever manipulations of cropping, ordering, and pagination, Printed in Germany offers readers an original aesthetic experience and comprehensive insight into the practice of one of today’s most thought-provoking artists, while –  through pure visual splendor – pushing the boundaries of the artist’s book into new realms. As with all books in the series, it has been produced in three colors – yellow, red and green – each of which features subtle differences in layout. A third publication in the series, slated for publication in 2015, will include installation photographs from all three presentations of The Production Line of Happiness, essays related to exhibition symposiums and full captions for all of the images included in Printed in Germany.

The Production Line of Happiness (Red Edition)
Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, Whitechapel Gallery
2014
RLD008