discourse printed matter the world irony

Ghetto Child
by Patrick Bobilin

As a 24-hour Facebooker, psychotic tweeter, part-time electronic musician and all-around digital native, I’m probably the least likely candidate amongst my friends to call the internet a ghetto. But as art criticism has rapidly disappeared from print (aside from art world specific publications), I find it alarmingly short-sighted to see how quietly-into-the-night criticism was herded over to a completely new medium, almost entirely without question. Like Dylan going electric, David Lynch working with video and James Franco’s art career, significant shifts in media definitively transform the shape of the message. What ends up in print left on the train, at the laundromat or sitting on the café table is undeniably different that what ends up in a Twitter feed or as a Tumblr meme. Before any new trajectory is planned it would be important to account for how print and digital criticism can utilize medium specificity given their respective fixity and placelessness, the importance of cultivating “regional dialects” and how images that are generated by exhibitions (and circulated digitally) are also generative of exhibition practices.1

What a curator like Charles Esche so diplomatically terms as the “planetary consciousness” of 2012’s art world, I would call “globalized capitalist” in the old-fashioned Reagan/Bush/Clinton tradition. The uniform use of English in the art world and the prevalence of left-leaning publications like e-flux2, the biennializing of artistic production in art schools worldwide3 and the promotion of cosmopolitanism amongst curators4, historians and critics amongst others, have contributed to a two-way mirror of false unification in art world politics, practice and actual material production. Art begins to look like Art whether you see it in Korea, Venice, Sharjah or the Americas. Contemporary art looks like an eternal meme because of the ubiquity of contentless gestures, the art-not-art “casual sculpture” that I would argue as embodied by a gesture that appears constantly in university galleries, alternative spaces and museums of contemporary art—a stick, often painted but sometimes not, leaning against a wall.

The internet has medium-specificity, something long understood by both educated and casual hackers, veterans of Arpanet and the more savvy of the younger branch of the millenials. It should not be a contradiction to be a digital native and an advocate of criticism in print. Rather than having all critical material being dumped into the annals of Google, weekly printed columns of art criticism can be an important localized cultural pulse or at very least a magnet for a richer discussion than what can be found amongst the merely descriptive material of most online—and what is left of printed—criticism. One of the arguments that I use to uphold the importance of printed art criticism is the power of short-range broadcast media. Short-range broadcast media, by its very definition—I’m talking here of newspapers, radio, public access T.V.—addresses a geographically limited audience. For this reason, working within this media (with any degree of success or receptiveness) requires taking into account the audience and to offer locally relevant discourse. Just as the art installation has marked its territory through its specific dealings with space and bodies than that of the art object which can be displaced, transported and commodified in a very different way, the “site-specific” criticism of online publication is inevitably bound to function differently than criticism that is invested in cultivating regional dialects.

I would never advocate a “dumbing-down” of ideas, nor would I suggest the erection of rigid theoretical or intellectual territorial boundaries, the hyperbolic antithesis to irresponsible academically-promoted cosmopolitanism. Something close to Kenneth Frampton’s “Critical Regionalism”5 could be a useful and important conceptual foundation for distilling “regional dialects” in contemporary art. Instead of encouraging artists to create for the general audience of an international biennial, an important role for critics could be to mark out the emergent “regional dialects” that arise over time from either individual or groups of artists working within a given geographical context for a certain amount of time. I don’t mean to mythologize or exoticize the geographical, or exalt the superficial uses of urban/rural images but to say that the regional and local inevitably find their way into the work of any artist. Although the digitally published text is jettisoned to a utopian nowhere, accessible to anyone anywhere (except perhaps China6) the writing and the work that it discusses are nevertheless generated from some aggregate of locally-derived phenomena.

This isn’t some conservative call for the nostalgic age where great writers like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin or even Baudelaire published cultural criticism in popular media. For all the perennial Chicken Little-ing and the claims of doomsayers suggesting that any medium could ever be eradicated, we still have trains, radio and even major record labels. But all these forms have been forced to adapt to a changing landscape, whether socio-economic, geographic or technological. But instead of adapting, becoming sharper and more assertive, contemporary art criticism has become coy when it comes to judgment and raising its collective hands to the sky and asking “What can be done?!” I’d like to offer plainly, “Try short range broadcast media.”

In “The Politics of Installation” Boris Groys describes art fairs and exhibitions as no longer for a cultural elite or in service of art buyers and instead a part of mass culture as administrated and organized by the artist.7 For Groys, installation becomes political in the artists’ use of public space populated with bodies to generate site-specific work that cannot be exchanged. The artist in this case refuses the elite, who would once be responsible for the purchase and exchange of artwork. The artist, through an administration of space, generates a democracy through authorship.8

However, through the propagation of images of shows from an unlimited geographical range of exhibitions, the general neutrality of exhibition spaces and the absence of any spatio-temporal significance in images of artworks, internet art criticism can exhibit a tendency to cater to an elite. With sites looking as neutral as gallery walls, images without any spatial specificity are able to be removed from a context and arranged alongside other images just as paintings can be purchased from galleries and arranged along with any of the buyers’ home furnishings. The ideal .jpg of a painting is unmarred by specific lighting conditions or its location in space. Any shot of the work in space is typically only supplementary and shown in an effort to describe the scale of the given artwork.9 By not being able to quantify and therefore propagate the experience of installation work, work that can be bought and sold, travel, move and be removed from the context of its exhibition, becoming an easier subject for internet art criticism to deal with and an easier material for curators to pick up by the handful, so to speak.

Art that can be distilled and reduced to a single image subjects itself to the tenets of commodity exchange. In this way, there is almost no difference between looking at an artist’s website, looking at installation images on a gallery website and visiting the gallery itself. Through long-range broadcast media, attempts to discuss exhibitions that are geographically or temporally remote to the viewer/reader have necessitated this format of documentation. Writing that doesn’t pique a viewer interest or warrant a visit to the exhibition alongside images that tend to summarize the work(s) of art on exhibit tend to be generative of exhibitions that are disappointing in their use of actual exhibition space. The same becomes true of a discursive/review cycle dependent upon the cycle of a monthly international publication over that of a weekly local discourse. The exhibition becomes merely a foundation for the creation of installation images that generate more physical exhibitions for the artist, the visitation to which becomes completely secondary. Having access to images of inaccessible places is a useless and inert state of affairs which can generate only further inertness. Reading about exhibitions in Tokyo is interesting but if the only interaction a viewer can have is remote (in such cases as when there is no local art criticism) the critics’ job becomes to merely describe with one or two .jpgs and 500 words that can and—perhaps should—do nothing more than read like the opening of an uninteresting short story.

Boris Groys describes the installation as dependent on institutional support for generating frameworks to house the work or for the work to react to. The kind of short-range media I describe would similarly depend largely upon a complex and reliable institutional support coming likely from an extremely large publication/network/station. Net criticism could be described as more like painting than installation in that as painting’s only demand is that canvas continue to be woven and oil continues to be refined; art criticism online is dependent upon domain hosting. This accounts for much of the utopian feel of online criticism. As someone vehemently opposed to the market and having directed a vocally anti-capitalist gallery devoted to the experiential, I’m skeptical of running for cover under the umbrella of an institution. But there are institutional frameworks that offer something locally important and an active critical discourse in a large publication (the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Baltimore Sun for example) would be able to trace the history of these cities and their cultural output—keeping them from being merely jumping off points for artists who as of now are pressured to embrace the real-estate nightmare and ever-present gentrification of New York City. Local cultural criticism from this standpoint is as green as rooftop gardening, sustainable and perhaps better for the local economy. By taking action and fracturing the already fractured “art world,” regional dialects would enrich the greater discursive framework so long as the short-range broadcast always attracts the useful interfering noise of the wide-range broadcast.

This digital native culture, with ever cheaper and constantly obsolescent devices, supposedly short-attention spans and the speed of networking, searching and reposting, may not believe in the future in the way that previous generations did—the generations that clamored for more, better and faster then blamed the surprisingly well-adjusted millenials who find themselves born into it. This essay risks nihilism at this point, but I assert with complete sincerity that, just as theater can offer a different experience than cinema and just as the physicality of audiocassettes saw its long-deserved renaissance alongside the release of the iPod touch, there are things that the daily newspaper has to offer that the constantly aggregating and personally tailored Google search can’t. Cultivating regional art dialects will further enrich and perhaps shock the system of contemporary art back into a place that can be responsive to critical—critical as in temporally urgent—needs as opposed to making broad-stroked attempts to connect to a falsely uniform international taste. Thanks to networked communication, an international art world is always at hand in enriching ways, but unfortunately, despite 2.0’s offering of an incredible amount of user-generated content, the relationship is by definition lopsided. The international can be seen by the local but the local is all but invisible to the international. Though it can and will be archived and stored both digitally and physically, the material publication of the newspaper has a social finality, definitive broadcast range and limited temporality, the appeal and importance of which can begin to reveal themselves when forced into the harsh light of contemporary media practices that demand print media adapt and provide something that digital information technology cannot.

Patrick Bobilin is a Chicago-based artist, educator and director of Noble & Superior Projects.

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1. Beyond the boundaries of digital work and “internet aware art”, the seemingly “ideal” exhibition, installation image or .jpg of a specific work lacks any visible mark or geography.
2. Many of the e-flux ilk discuss a specific art world jargon called “globish” that describes the English that circulates around the art world—Jennifer Allen’s essay “Speak Easy” (http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/speak-easy/) is almost frightening in its warm embrace and unquestioning forgiveness for the propagation of the colonizer’s language.
3. Students are constantly asked to think of what a work would look like in a gallery, to be able to speak to some kind of general audience while also creating works that are both personal and universal, without even a rudimentary idea of the myriad politics of exhibition practices (and often without being taught the differences between galleries and museums)—Boris Groys’ “The Politics of Installation” is more elucidating in 10-pages than this authors’ 7 years of arts education.
4. Martha Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” validly argues against nationalistic pride and instead advocates goodwill and good citizenship that allows for an individual to be at home anywhere and subvert arbitrary difference in favor of acceptance—however, in curatorial practice, cosmopolitanism has become a vehicle for elitist jet-setting, superficial pseudo-ethnography of international art scenes and has re-inscribed the class boundaries that have long plagued the art world.
5. “Towards a Critical Regionalism”—here Frampton uses the example of air-conditioning and central heating as offering architects and planners to ignore the environmental realities of a region in their design. Frampton also mentions the use of artificial lighting in art galleries as muting the poetics of light and space possible by the introduction of natural light in exhibition spaces.
6. ;)
7. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-installation/

8. There is the undeniable necessity of an institutional support structure in most cases, but more artists are working outside of those physical and bureaucratic frameworks.

9. Brian O’Doherty “Inside the White Cube” describes the aesthetics of installation shots. Your humble author would describe a few that should bring an image to the reader’s mind—Pensive Young Woman, Bespectacled Man Holding Drink, and occasionally, Child Pointing in Awe.

•  9 May 2012  •  1 note  •  View comments

reading social space printed matter dialogue public domain performance

Performance: The Body Politic
Mierle L. Ukeles. Social Mirror, 1983; mirror-covered sanitation truck. Courtesy of the Artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
Christina Linden

Art Practical’s Christina Linden talks with Shannon Jackson, UC Berkeley Professor of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies and Rhetoric, about her forthcoming book Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Routledge, 2011) and the symposium “Curating People,” which she is coordinating for April 28 and April 29 at the Performance Art Institute and UC Berkeley.

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Christina Linden: We first met last spring in New York after the conference “Audience Experiments,” organized by Pablo Helguera at The Museum of Modern Art. I had come straight from another conference at Portland State University called “Open Engagement,” and I was curious and also perplexed about the way those two conferences were looking largely at an overlapping body of works but were producing really different conversations.

One of the primary distinctions for me was that the conference attendees in Portland were largely from visual arts backgrounds, specifically from the three social practice graduate programs on the West Coast: here at California College of the Arts, at Portland State, and at Otis. In New York, there were quite a few professionals, like yourself, who come from performance studies or theater backgrounds. It was the first time that I had thought about that particular distinction and what different readings for social practice would be engendered by coming from either of these two directions, but clearly at the time you were already well into working on a book on the topic.

From the prologue to Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics: “To be reductive but rhetorical, we might discern a kind of experimental chiasmus across the arts; a movement toward painting and sculpture underpins post-dramatic theater, but a movement toward theater also underpins post-studio art.”1

Can you say a few words about how you came to identify this as a framework you wanted to explore in the book and also generally about how your interest in social practice first developed?

Shannon Jackson: Well, it is great to hear about your experience of those two conferences and some of the new thoughts they provoked. Even if all of us are interested in interdisciplinary art, I do think that we encounter work within inherited parameters that we may not always know that we have.

I received a PhD in performance studies. This is a field that integrates theater and dance and experimental performance art. It is also informed by more sociological, anthropological, and rhetorical orientations. We think about the role of performance in ritual activity and in organizing collectives and communities; we think about theories of performativity and how, as the speech act theorists say, we “do things with words.” Performance studies is thus a very large umbrella, but, as a result, different PS scholars have different frames that we use to analyze work. Being in performance studies, I became very interested in conversations where PS scholars and artists were learning from each other but also talking past each other. When I began to learn about the field of social practice and relational aesthetics, it seemed obvious to me that it bore a relation to performance. But I soon realized that it was not obvious to everyone else. So I started to teach myself new frames of reference and art histories that had been less familiar to me, in order to try to connect the dots.

Mierle L. Ukeles. Social Mirror, 1983; mirror-covered sanitation truck. Courtesy of the Artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

CL: One of the main thrusts of the argument you put forward in Social Works comes out of your position that looking at these perceptions and parameters “challenges our understanding of what is properly within the aesthetic sphere and what is heteronomously located outside of it…the Art/Life discourse has a different traction when we recast it as a meditation on the paradoxes of Art and its Support.”2 Can you expand on the traction you find in this distinction?

SJ: A certain kind of art-into-life discourse has had an enormous impact on performance studies discourse. At the same time, the Art/Life binary does not always provide a specific compass for doing an analysis, in part because the category of Life is so expansive and imprecise.

When Life is invoked in art practice, it is often equated pretty quickly with associations like “freedom,” “spontaneity,” and “disruption,” and I thought it was worth thinking about some other elements, especially the elements of the world that make Life possible. That made me interested in certain kinds of expanded art practices that not only celebrated freedom, but also explored interdependent relationships of obligation and care and sometimes even responsibility. If a political art discourse becomes too enthralled with breaking down institutions, then it ignores the degree to which we are in fact dependent upon institutions. Yes, the “institution” constrains; but it also sustains. Can we stay complicated about this? My hope is that by thinking about support as a complex system, as a social question but also as an aesthetic question, we can activate a different conversation.

Once I started to think about it, I really felt that we could start to link expanded art histories from the visual art world with expanded art histories from the theater world. In fact, if we think about Constructivism, Duchamp, or minimalism, if we think about Brecht and Meyerhold, there is a pervasive interest in the exposure of the support. Support is both a social question and an aesthetic pursuit in the visual arts and in theatre.

CL: How did you choose the primary examples you chose to discuss in the book?

SJ: I wanted projects where the relation between aesthetics and politics was complicated. I was less interested in projects that had a pre-determined sense of who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.

I also chose projects where I felt like I had more to learn. Most of the projects are those initiated by people who began in the visual arts. Since I am somebody who is coming from theater and performance studies, I was interested in trying to teach myself some new things by focusing more on artists who began in other forms.

Finally, every case study offers some kind of aesthetic inquiry into social systems and social structures. I tried to pick cases that showed a range of social systems and that also gave a sense of a history of innovation from the 1960s to the present. So Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s work on public sanitation is in there along with very recent work by people like Paul Chan, Rimini Protokoll, and Elmgreen and Dragset.

CL: You write about the possibility of imagining sustainable social institutions as infrastructure. What already existing institutions do you find most valuable for experimental performance or social practices?

SJ: It’s hard not to be fairly literal in answering the question, but I think that obviously I have an investment in public education, being an employee of that system. Currently, the debates over education, health care, and public welfare are all examples of cases where citizens are debating the degree to which they want or need collective systems of support. I think that safety nets are important. All systems have the potential for corruption and for getting into actuarial problems that they had not anticipated. But I think that we all rely upon supporting systems—whether they are repairing our highways, picking up our garbage, installing our exhibits, or folding our socks—more than we realize that we do. Support is noticed less when it is working for you; it is more often noticed when it breaks down or is taken away. So drawing attention to our interdependence upon support is philosophically interesting. Some kinds of systems enable freedom and democracy, even if we would rather complain about how much they constrain us. I should say that I don’t think that the complaining only occurs in conservative circles. Some self-described Left circles are just as likely to promote an anti-institutional discourse as, say, Tea Party activists are now. The lure of an anti-system discourse actually makes for some strange political bedfellows.

CL: Do you think that the nature of the relationships to the state or other institutions is specific to the kind of experimental performance and social works we’re talking about here, or would you say this applies in a more blanket way to all artwork?

SJ: As to whether it applies to all artwork, I guess I would say that it does. Painting depends upon frames and canvases but also upon the gallery system. Theatre depends on stage managers and agents. But I do think that certain art forms are less able to deny that they need a supporting apparatus and that some have a vested interest in looking the other way. The works that I ended up selecting were all works that I think are posing questions about our relationship to interdependent systems, state based or otherwise. In some instances I’m really talking about places where a state-based mechanism did not come through. When Paul Chan began to work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, you could say that that is a situation where FEMA did not come through. It may be that the state did not come through because it had been defunded up until then, but Chan was pretty clear that there was a DIY quality to his work; the supporting systems were part of a very mixed economy that included private funding, community grants, philanthropic donations, and the gallery circuit, along with inadequate state funding.

CL: What about the way the institution of the museum is taking up these practices? Recently, the education departments are often the ones commissioning really interesting new work in this mode, and in some cases it operates as a kind of substitute for programming they used to produce more directly. Given the topic of the symposium you are organizing for April 29, I guess this must be on your mind?

SJ: You are alighting upon something that I hope we will talk about at the “Curating People” symposium in April. My hope is that we’ll have a continuous, wider Bay Area conversation about this. You spoke of the conference you attended at MoMA. Pablo Helguera, in the education department, organized that gathering. Why are education departments doing, as you call it, “substitute programming”? Education departments are interested in the experience of receivers. There can certainly be a didactic quality to that role. At the same time, artists who work in social practice and performance are also very concerned about engagement with receivers. If that it is your goal, it can be incredibly interesting to work with someone in education who thinks continuously about what it means to engage people, to address them, to challenge them. Supporting these new art forms begins to challenge the traditional divisions between the curatorial department and the education department.

I ended up deciding to focus on “curating,” specifically “curating people,” because the curators and the staff of the museums and theatre are in the trenches of all of this. We really get a complex picture of what it means to support interdisciplinary art when we think about the kind of work that curators, installers, and stage managers are doing daily. They’re living it every day and also re-skilling every day. A visual art curator might have been trained in a particular way, but then a certain kind of hybrid artist comes to town and needs you to secure a street permit or to do a casting call.

CL: That’s true; I’ve had to do a casting call as a curator…

SJ: Yeah, a casting call! Or the stage manager in the theater is being told that she has to set up an installation in the lobby; suddenly all of the ushers and box office managers have to be differently trained about how to run the house. So the staff members at the institutions are in a position to tell the most interesting stories about the institution and how its processes are getting revised. How do artists communicate what they need to their curators? And how do they interest curators in what they’re doing despite the fact that the processes required will be challenging?

Paul Chan. Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, 2007; stage set. Photo: Tuyen Nguyen.

CL: In your responses to a questionnaire distributed after “Audience Experiments,” some passages appear that ended up in a truncated form in your book. For instance: “To some, an explicit social mission redeems the art object; to others, it compromises it. For some, the social is figural, for others, it is literal. Conversely, the same interaction that reads as social engagement to one group might seem to be a narcissistic violation of social ethics to another.”3 It struck me that this was edited from the published text; I’ve spent so much time dwelling over questions about unequal access to capital—cultural and otherwise—that produce uneven stakes for different people involved and reproduce systems of hierarchy in social practice projects.

SJ: There’s obviously a really huge debate in contemporary art circles around the social turn, one that creates a polarization between aesthetics and politics. Usually it’s perceived to be a trade-off: “Well, if it is doing socially engaged, efficacious work, then the art isn’t as good.” And conversely, “If the art has some conceptual rigor, then it really isn’t doing anything transformative for society.” So I definitely wanted to find a way out of that polarization. This is a place where the language about support, I’m hoping, helps the effort.

I liked this sense that the exposure of the support could have a certain kind of political traction and expose that humans are interdependent on particular systems. But I also like the idea that the exposure could have a formal and aesthetic rigor. And I like the notion that aesthetic and social provocations could happen together.

At the same time I think that different people who come from different places, whether an art school background or a community organizing background, will still perceive each work differently. This brings us back to the question that you opened with. One thing might look conceptually interesting to one person and look narcissistic to another. A work might look overly literal to one eye and highly metaphoric to another.

I think that community art sometimes gets a bad rap because it seems under-complicated formally, and so-called avant-garde art gets a bad rap because it is not legible enough to be politically effective. My hope is that there could be a bit more tolerance and mutual education on all sides.

Elmgreen and Dragset. Re-g(u)arding the Guards, 2005; museum guards in empty gallery; number of performers variable. Courtesy of the Artists and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen. Photo: Thør Brodreskift.

CL: Does this play out differently with experimental theater projects as opposed to social practice projects rooted in the visual arts?

SJ: One thing I think that does happen in this interdisciplinary conversation is that the relation between the visual and the theatrical can get framed as a relation between the conceptual and the literal. If there is a question about who is conceptual and who is literal, there can be a tendency to feel that the theater side is on the literal, earnest, unironic end of the spectrum. In one of the chapters, I bring up the example of a debate that happened around the definition of “radical” in theater, around a community art theater group that would probably look “literal” to some visual art people: Cornerstone Theater. Cornerstone is an example of a certain kind of expanded theater practice that has a celebrated record of social engagement. I try to compare some different debates in visual art and theatre criticism in order to propose some different frames. Let’s say these are false polarizations, but misunderstanding them is one of the occupational hazards of bringing many perspectives together, especially since I am doing so as someone who began in the field of theatre and performance studies.

CL: Do you feel that, in making a connection between social practice and performance, you end up advocating for a new framework for performance?

SJ: Well, I would not say that it is a new frame so much as it is a different emphasis. I think that whenever people write about performance, we emphasize different qualities about it. Sometimes, we emphasize its artifice, some its temporality, some its embodiment, some its ephemerality, some its excess.

In this project, ensemble is the dimension of performance that I emphasize most. Performance has always been this highly coordinated event with multiple people; the systemic organization of people in time and space with materials has been its raison d’etre for a couple of centuries. How do we make an ensemble? How does ensemble make us? Those questions—with all of their histories and all of their headaches—resonate with the central questions of social practice now.

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NOTES: 1. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Public (New York: Routledge, 2011), 2. 2. Ibid., 28. 3. This is not in the published book, but appears in an unpublished document distributed to conference participants by email after the event. From page 3 of this document, it is in response to the question: “Is it necessary, or even possible, to define the term “performative” referring to art practices that involve performing? What would you consider an appropriate, or approximate definition of this term?”

•  4 January 2012  •  3 notes  •  View comments

resource printed matter reading structures dialogue give/need/space

Public Collectors
This section of Public Collectors is devoted to scans of entire publications, cover to cover, in PDF form. You can download the PDFs by clicking on the scan of the publication cover. All of the publications included are believed to be out of print, hard to find, and in some cases unique, rare or exceedingly expensive to purchase on the secondary market.

•  4 January 2012  •  11 notes  •  View comments

non-profit network dialogue resource public domain printed matter

e-flux book coop
The New York Art Book Fair
September 30–October 3, 2011 

Preview: Thursday, September 29, 6–9 pm

www.nyartbookfair.com

MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue Long Island City, NY

Costly and often monopolistic approaches to the distribution of art books has resulted in a situation where it has become common for not only the author, but also the publisher to receive little to no revenue for a book’s sales. As a possible alternative, e-flux is pleased to present the book coop: a mobile bookstore of over 600 titles on contemporary art, theory, and criticism from over 100 international art centers, artist-run spaces, and independent publishers. Housed in a refurbished aluminum Airstream trailer, this temporary model for more equitable distribution in art publishing will display and sell books on behalf of the cooperative’s member institutions.

The book coop trailer will live in the PS1 courtyard throughout the duration of the 2011 New York Art Book Fair, after which it will embark on an international tour of contemporary art venues.

Join us at PS1 on Saturday October 1, 12 noon for the New York launch of Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art, the fourth in the e-flux journal reader series published by Sternberg Press. To mark this occasion, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) will present a live reading followed by a self reflexive Q+A; and Liam GIllick will read from Construction of One: A Manuscript (2011), an unpublished text on the progressive working practices deployed by Volvo factories in the early 1970s.

book coop: 98weeks : Architectural Association / Bedford Press : Arsenal Gallery : Artspace : AS220 : BAK, basis voor actuele kunst : Ballroom Marfa : BAS : Bergen Kunsthall : Berliner Künstlerprogramm / DAAD : Bielefelder Kunstverein : Brumaria : CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo : CASCO—Office for Art, Design and Theory : Casino Luxembourg—Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg : CDA-Projects : Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) : Cultural Center of Belgrade : DeLVe, Institute for Duration, Location and Variables : Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane : EACC—Espai d’Art contempoarani de Castello : Eastside Projects : Fillip / Motto : Fondazione March : Fondazione Nicola Trussardi : Foreman Art Gallery of Bishopʼs University : Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic : Gallery Nova / WHW : Grazer Kunstverein : IASPIS : ICA Sofia : Ikon Gallery : Independent Curators International (ICI) : Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation : Kadist / Kadist Paris : Kim? : Kölnischer Kunstverein : Kumu Art Museum : Kunsthalle Basel : Kunsthalle Bern : Kunsthaus Bregenz : Kunsthaus Graz : Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein : Kunstnernes Hus : Kunstverein Hamburg : LABoral Centre for Art and Creative Industries : Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers : M HKA : MACBA : MAMbo-Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna : Master in Visual Arts, Faculdade Santa Marcelina : Maumaus, Escola de Artes Visuais : Milton Keynes Gallery : Moderna Galerija Ljubljana : MUMA, Monash University Museum of Art : Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia : Museum of Contemporary Art Serralves : NKV, Nassauischer Kunstverein : MNAC, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest : NBK, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein : Nottingham Contemporary : OMMU : Pavilion : Pavilion Unicredit : Pori Art Museum : Portikus / Städelschule : Postgraduate Program in Curating, Zürich University of the Arts / Whitespace : Press to exit project space : Project Arts Centre : Publication Studio : Rakett : READ Books, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design : REDCAT : Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten : SALT : Salzburger Kunstverein : Sarai-CSDS : Serpentine Gallery : Shedhalle : split/fountain : Sternberg Press : Stroom den Haag : The Books : The New Gallery : The Power Plant : The Renaissance Society : Traffic : Van Abbemuseum : Vitamin Creative Space : Walker Arts Center : White Flag Projects : Wysing Arts Center : Zachęta National Gallery of Art and others.

For further information please write to Laura (at) e-flux. com

e-flux 41 Essex Street NY, NY 10002 T +212 619 33 56 www.e-flux.com

•  12 December 2011  •  2 notes  •  View comments