Miss Read Stage 2015

Friday, June 26th, 2015

7.00 pm
The Lovers
book launch by Elisabeth Tonnard

7.30 to 9.00 pm
Textiles: Open Letter & Textile Theorien der Moderne & Bauhaus Weaving Theory
A Joint Book Launch with Sabeth Buchmann, Rike Frank, T’ai Smith, Grant Watson moderated by Susanne Leeb

Textiles: Open Letter
The increased presence of textile procedures and materials in recent art and exhibition practices raises a number of issues concerning their past and present roles. From a current perspective, textiles—and the history of movements like fiber art—are exemplary in the way they call into question the traditional boundaries of a genre whose mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion have shaped modern art (history)—be it gender-specific attributions, a favoring of optical over tactile principles, a hierarchy of materials and media, or the divide between discourse and craft. While this reappraisal highlights various interrelations between the different fields—especially regarding textiles’ exhibition history—the above-mentioned oppositions have (almost) ceased to provide a source of tension for contemporary productions. How has the way we look at textiles shifted? And what functions do textiles have in contemporary artistic practice?
Textiles: Open Letter examines the referential and analytical qualities of textiles through both contemporary and historical works and references. The publication includes contributions by Elissa Auther, Sabeth Buchmann, Rike Frank, Florian Pumhösl, Judith Raum, Seth Siegelaub, T’ai Smith, Georg Vasold, Leire Vergara, and Grant Watson, and is edited by Rike Frank and Grant Watson in collaboration with Sabine Folie, Georgia Holz, and Susanne Titz for the Generali Foundation, Vienna, and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach. Designed by Martha Stutteregger, Textiles: Open Letter is published by Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015.

Textile Theorien der Moderne: Alois Riegl in der Kunstkritik
Textiles play a decisive role in the founding of modern art history and art criticism. Beginning with Alois Riegl’s examination of Gottfried Semper, the reassessment of historical debate on textiles allowed formalism to be interpreted as (among others) a socio-aesthetic and/or politico-economic positioning of art. The publication includes essays by Elke Gaugele, Hanne Loreck, Katrin Mayer, Regine Prange, T’ai Smith, and Georg Vasold. Textile Theorien der Moderne is edited by Sabeth Buchmann and Rike Frank, designed by HIT, Berlin, based on a design by Michael Dreyer, and published in the PoLYpeN series by b_books, Berlin 2015.

T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory. From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design
In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stözl, and Otti Berger, Smith reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media and challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role of these women in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus come to light. Bauhaus Weaving Theory. From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design by T’ai Smith published by University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Saturday, June 27th, 2015, 2 to 9 pm
CONCEPTUAL POETICS DAY

2.00 pm
Egidio Marzona & Dr. Michael Lailach (Kunstbibliothek Berlin)
Suchen, Sammeln, Archivieren, Schenken (deutsch)

Collector Egidio Marzona and librarian Dr. Michael Lailach discuss Marzona´s searching, collecting and archiving practice, as well as Sammlung Marzona’s succesive donation to and presentation at Hamburger Bahnhof, Kupferstichkabinett and Kunstbibliothek Berlin.

Egidio Marzona started collecting in the Mid-1960ies when the “linguistic turn” in the art world took place. At the encouragement of art dealer Konrad Fischer, Marzona established his own art gallery as well as a publishing house – Edition Marzona – in the mid-1960s. During this period Marzona began building up his collection, conceptualised along the lines of an immense and encyclopaedic archive. He gathered an almost complete “mosaic”, as he calls it, in the areas of Minimal and Conceptual Art, Arte Povera and Land Art. It includes works and documents from artists such as Bruce Nauman, Jan Dibbets, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Charlotte Posenenske, Dan Flavin, Lawrence Weiner.

In 2014 he donated 372 of these works to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Also found in the Kunstbibliothek is the Sammlung Marzona’s archive, which includes many thousands of books and periodicals, posters and invitations, recordings, films, photographs, and letters. This archive is accessible in the Kunstbibliothek to interested members of the public for research purposes.

3.00 pm
Kristen Mueller
Language to Cover a Page (& So, Motto Books)
reading

“With Language to Cover a Page, Mueller has carefully aligned excerpts from disparate books—with differing typefaces intact—into two evolving pages. These pages crescendo before our very eyes, a flipbook of accumulating meaning, where with the passing of every page the narrative becomes aware of its own developing presence.” Derek Beaulieu

3.20 pm
Cia Rinne Lesung
l’usage du mot (OEI Editör)
reading

3.40 pm
Natalie Czech
Flowers from Holland for Critics and Writers (Villa Romana)
book launch

4.00 pm
Enver Hadzijaj, Clemens Krümmel, Ariane Müller, Michalis Pichler (Printed Matter, Inc., Spector Books)
book launch

Thirteen Years: The materialization of ideas from 2002 to 2015: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted text, critical essays, art works, documents, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called “greatest hits” and conceptual poetics with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as appropriation, post-naive, unboring boring, détournement, objet perdu, erasure poetry, or writing through, occurring now in the work of Michalis Pichler (with occasional political overtones), edited by Annette Gilbert and Clemens Krümmel.

4.20 pm
Elisabeth Tonnard
Mein Buch, Husch! and Tischblumenbilder
book launch of three new books in German

4.40 pm
Ariane Müller
Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika (Starship, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel)
reading

In diesem Buch wird die Protagonistin fünfzehn Jahre lang immer wieder an Nairobi und anderen Orten in Kenia vorbeigezogen. Weil sie dort, bei den Vereinten Nationen, arbeitet, aber eigentlich nichts zu tun hat, was sich direkt auf diesen Ort bezieht.
Natürlich passieren in dieser langen Zeit Dinge. Aber der Ort und die Zeit verschwimmen mit der Zeit, während einige Personen deutlicher werden.
Warum schreibe ich überhaupt so ein Buch? Weil ich wirklich will, dass es gelesen wird, bevor jemand nach Afrika fährt. Daher dieser ein wenig irreführende Name für die Geschichte einer Person, die all das, was ich als Erzählerin nun weiß, nicht wissen kann. Daher ist es fiktional, und ich denke, es ist auch lustig, da uns vieles, an das wir uns erinnern, slapstickartig vorkommen kann. All these stories, sagt eine andere Person des Buchs, besides that it is not stories, it is reality.

5.00 pm
Swantje Lichtenstein
Notes on Conceptualisms, Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a “thinkership” that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. We have co-authored this text through correspondence, shared reading interests, and similar explorations. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate.

5.20 pm
Stefan Wartenberg & Joachim Spurloser (possible books)
CALYBA

Stefan Wartenberg and Joachim Spurloser are collecting, reconstructing and rhyming graffiti names as their poetic fundus. The names, numbers and abbreviations of graffiti enter into playful relationships that are shaped by a unique desire for eternity. The orders and distractions of the streets, flowed into lines of a poem, graffiti appears as what it always has been: world language and stuttering.

5.40 pm
Hank Schmidt in der Beek
Alpenblumenfibel (deutsch)

Hank Schmidt in der Beek (Author of “Ein Akt eine Treppe hinabzumsteigen”, “Gedichte für Typen wie mich”,“Gedichte für Girls wie mich”, “Die Fränzi-Darstellungen von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel und Max Pechstein im Licht der Frankfurter Apfelwein-Lokale betrachtet”, “Kasimir Malewitsch, wir sind alle sehr froh, wenn die Drachen-Saison endet”, u.a.) presents for the first time his  Alpenblumenfibel, an hommage the Nudisme-poet Jacques Cegeste, as known from Jean Cocteau’s Orphee.

6.00 to 8.00 pm
The Sacred Conspiracy
Launch of the novel Headless with Shane Anderson, Matteo Pasquinelli, Hito Steyerl, and Caitlin Berrigan

Triple Canopy celebrates the publication of Headless, a murder-mystery by the elusive author K. D., with a reading and a rumination on offshore finance and human sacrifice.

Headless is a delirious romp through the world of offshore finance, conducted by a British ghostwriter who seems to have uncovered a sacrifice-obsessed, Bataille-inspired secret society of global economic elites who will do anything to maintain their power. The ghostwriter, John Barlow, is hired by the Swedish conceptualist artist duo Goldin+Senneby to investigate Headless, an offshore firm registered in the Bahamas. Barlow happily agrees to write up his investigation as a mystery novel, to be published under the name K. D. But soon Barlow is implicated in the decapitation of a police officer in Nassau, and his novel becomes a matter of life and death. The more he struggles to grasp the plot, the further he slips into the dark world of covert capitalism.

Artist Hito Steyerl, poet Shane Anderson, philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli, and artist Caitlin Berrigan will read from Headless and discuss the mystery genre, the difficulties of ghostwriting (and of employing ghostwriters), the free rein of capital, narratives of financial crises and credit economies, Georges Bataille’s formulation of sovereignty, the concept of xenospace, and the pleasures of fiction that insistently impinges on reality.

More information here.

8.15 pm
Sebastian Lütgert (Private Cinema fka Pirate Cinema)
What’s wrong with the book

After centuries of hype, and in the middle of its transition to the “e-book”, the presentation will attempt to enumerate the most glaring theoretical and practical disadvantages of the medium widely known as the book.
Sebastian Lütgert — Artist, programmer and writer, co-founder of Bootlab (bootlab.org), Pad.ma (pad.ma) and Pirate Cinema Berlin (piratecinema.org), recently resurrected as Private Cinema Berlin (piratecinema.org).

Sunday, June 28th, 2015

1.00 pm
Philip Gaißer with Britta Peters
talk presented by Camera Austria

Within the frame of MISS READ – The Berlin Art Book Fair 2015 Philip Gaißer will discuss his recent works and book projects with curator and art critic Britta Peters.

2.00 pm
Joël Verwimp (APAB e.V.)
Performative book production
short performance lecture

The presentation departs from a book production methodology that is similar to the processes seen in Performance art praxis. The central question is, how the performed ‘figure’; the point at which figuring coalesces into the recognizable form of a book, might be a system of notation in and of itself?

3.00 to 4.00 pm
Delphine Bedel (Meta/Books), Christian Berkes (botopress), Heimo Lattner (Berliner Hefte), Janine Sack (Visual Communication), Joachim Schmid, Michaela Wünsch (b_books)
DHL Salon

In the aftermath of the ‘Drucken Heften Laden’ exhibition and event at nGbK in January 2015, a group of publishers in Berlin gathered. Our name is DHL (for now). We are inviting guests to have an informal round table discussion within the framework of MISS READ. The DHL Salon shall take place from 3 to 4 pm on Sunday, June 28th. Its main topics should revolve around the structural organisation of collective publishing groups and their critical practices. DHL considers the work of our guests particularly relevant (not only) for questions concerning independent publishing and is looking forward to get a chance to debate with them and the audience.

With: Delphine Bedel (Meta/Books), Christian Berkes (botopress), Heimo Lattner (Berliner Hefte), Janine Sack (Visual Communication), Joachim Schmid, Michaela Wünsch (b_books) and other guests.

4.15 pm
Robert Hamelijnck, Nienke Terpsma, Michael Baers (Michael Baers, Fucking Good Art & Friends)
What are we doing?

5.00 pm
Rainer Hehl (Ruby Press)
Brazilian Vibes
lecture & book launch

Despite being one of Latin America’s strongest economies, fuelled by abundant raw material ressources and major international sports events such as the FIFA World Cup 2014 and the Olympic Games 2016, Brazil still has a huge housing problem: it currently lacks 6 Million housing units. While in the metropolitan centers the demand is satisfied mostly by new informal settlements, there are also entirely new cities planned by the government in the middle of the Amazonas. This resulting mischmasch of bottom-up and top-down development has been analyzed by German architect and urban planner Rainer Hehl, one of the world’s foremost experts in this field. Assisted by an international team of architects, he has documented this research in the award-winning book trilogy “Building Brazil”, “City of God” and “Minha Casa, Nossa Cidade”, published by Ruby Press. In this presentation Rainer Hehl will introduce the three major directions in Brazil’s urban development: a) favela upgrading, b) informalization of formal developments and c) mass-produced housing using material from the books as well as additional material.

5.45 pm
Sergeij Vutuc
Papierkonzert auf zwei Saiten
performance

6.15 pm
Jan Wenzel (Spector Books)
Die Zwölf Arbeiten des Verlegers