‘Books and Elephant’. Simon Popper @ Motto Berlin.
Opening September 3rd, 7-9 pm

Exhibition September 4th until October 10th, 2016.

For his exhibition at Motto Berlin, Simon Popper’s work can be broadly understood by its degrees of visual and linguistic separation, that is, through its titles (its naming) and the relations between what the works appear to be, what they are and what they might become. This often rests upon a hinge of wordplay or punning and visual tropes to break down or collapse objects and ideas characterised by a sense of the comedic or the deadpan – but in all seriousness – in a logic of displacement or derangement.
The permeation of a kind of working dyslexia (real and imagined) or visual/linguistic displacement extends to Popper’s methodology in general and to each operation in particular. It’s his way of creating or making things in the world and for the world and his reason for doing it in the first place. This displacement or making other of art, books or just things is as much about the pleasure of creating opportunities as it is about unmaking them, a kind of non-productivity or ‘patience work’ in its ‘purposelessness’ in the folly of its ways. It could be understood as a ‘negative’ making or anti-artisanal production by producing something not just along the lines of value or even the commodity – at least notionally. It’s almost as if the artist was a cottage industry but without the industry, production without product in the simple act of doing.
The work of Simon Popper is an invitation to delinquency, an abandonment of one’s place anchoring a rational centred self into some altogether other self in another place, ordered and classified by systematic play and caprice if only for a moment. The ideal space these works might inhabit would be something like a contemporary ‘room of one’s own’, that now impossibly dissolving bourgeois space, away from the order of things, from the exhaustion of life and from a life surrounded by exhausted objects.

David Bussel

Exhibition proposed by Gregorio Magnani

A Step Towards the Sea tells the relationship between the artist and Italy through a selection of installation views and video works. The accompanying DVD includes an unreleased film and a documentation on every actions carried out in Italy by Signer since the 1990s.
Signer’s bond with the country is a special one, bearing in mind some of his most renown works, produced on the Stromboli volcano, or the numerous actions and sculptures that revolve around an Italian iconic subject such as the Ape Piaggio. The central section of the book is dedicated to Sardinia, with a conversation between Lorenzo Giusti and the artist and a photographic essay by Barbara Signer. A text by Barbara Casavecchia contextualizes Signer’s Italian dimension by introducing the viewing of Reisen Italien: a personal collection of filmic notes produced by the artist in the course of his journeys with the family in the 1990s. The essay by Rachel Withers introduces the hefty iconographic setting of his entire Super-8 production, which consists of 205 clips filmed between 1975 and 1989 and presented in a large installation within the exhibition in Nuoro. The book is accompanied by a DVD which, in addition to the unreleased film, gathers all of the actions Signer carried out in Italy starting from the 1990s and a piece he produced specifically for the exhibition, after which the book is titled.
Published following the exhibition “Roman Signer. Films and Installation,” at the MAN, Nuoro, from April 22 to July 3rd, 2016.
Born 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland, Roman Signer lives and works in St. Gallen.

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“I walked up the marble staircase into the grandest space of the house, a large drawing room with double height ceilings and windows, which performed its role with great pomp and circumstance. It was a mixed metaphor of styles—Louis XIV, Beaux Arts, Georgian—all insisting upon resplendence. I sighed, thinking a thought I had many times before: that this house was what separated me from my father, who remained for me a perpetual arriviste. I conceded to myself that this had always been a house for new money. It would be designated as a mansion, distinct from the discreet brownstones preferred by the originary Dutch New York upper-crust. Only when the new money flushed in during the Gilded Age did mansions start getting built with ballrooms, vaulted ceilings, and glitzy stylistic affectations. This home was never meant for modesty; conspicuous consumption is part of its structural integrity.”

Framed by two academically-styled essays, the heart of 1130 Fifth Avenue is a narrative which traces Kovner’s cathartic process following the mysterious death of his billionaire father. Kovner meets a psychic who prescribes him a regimen of peculiar art therapy. This remedy brings Kovner to write a tell-all, which is met with public success. The writing of the book-in-book opens as many questions as it addresses.

1130 Fifth Avenue is a continuation of Kovner’s project, Classy. In a series of works, viewers use Kovner as an avatar to experience the problems of inherited privilege: complicity in the hegemony of the wealthy, the compromised subjectivity of not having earned what one has, and the ambivalence of inheriting a role in society.

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Each copy of the “The Incomplete Princess Book” has a unique handmade frontcover.

Project “The Incomplete Princess Book” created by Russian-Dutch artist Irina Popova is a virtual journey to Russia: a new way of meeting people (through browsing their profiles), and a new way of photographing them (using the images found on the internet). For this project, the artist used the Russian version of Facebook — Vkontakte*.

Irina Popova has found over 8000 different profiles registered under the name Irina Popova. Indeed, both the surname Popov and first name Irina are very common in Russia. She browsed the profiles with a growing curiosity – because those Irina Popovas scattered over Russia, of different ages and social status, were likely to represent the full range of possibilities for a woman’s destiny given their different circumstances.

Social networks have not only become the substitutes for traditional family albums, but a major source of entertainment and a form of self-representation.

It seems that in such a patriarchal country as Russia women seriously struggle for male attention, and the most important factor for life success becomes a glamorous (and sometimes exaggerated) idea of beauty.

In it’s original edit the project contains about 36 000 images. Popova worked with 3 assistants for 3 months to download these images, one by one. The project was first presented in the Hermitage Museum, Amsterdam in November 2013, in a group exhibition “Russian Ateliers on Amstel”. Here Popova took two walls, filled with more than 1000 images.

It took her another two years to make the final selection and to shape it into book form.

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This book series brings documentation of the numerous activities carried out by Katsunobu Yaguchi over the past seven years at “Cafe Snack Washingtown” (2008-2013) and “The Site of Washingtown” (2013-2015).
In the autumn of 2008, Katsunobu Yaguchi encountered an empty house when strolling around the town of Mito. Hearing that it may be demolished soon, he decided to reinstall water and electricity to the ground floor of the house to celebrate the time that was still left to it. He named the place “Café Snack Washingtown” and embarked on his new calling. Although the atmosphere of the house was obviously shadowy, curious eccentrics stopped by cautiously and the house awoke from its deep sleep. This caused a small neighborhood movement to arise around the house. Consequently, the original demolition was postponed for another five years.

In 2013, The Washintown finally faced its demolition at the hands of Yaguchi himself. Two and half years have gone by since then. The ‘late’ Café snack Washingtown skeleton is still standing. With bamboo scaffolding and part of the outer wall remaining, the house gives off a murky aura. At the entrance, the travelers’ guardian deity of megalopenis stands inconspicuously. This bizarre atmosphere seems to have surrendered to its fate that at any moment the house will make way for a new building. Yet the “old Washingtown site” continues to ignite neighborhood movements. “Washingtown Documentaries 2008-2015” contains cutting-edge images that were lovingly taken over the past seven and “on-the-edgy” years.

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Text: Arthur Fouray

Concept: Pierre Girardin, Nastassia Montel
Conversation: Arthur Fouray and Julien Gremaud

Published by Julien Gremaud, 2015
Micronaut #8

This book is the printed version of a surprising notes system held by Arthur Fouray

« Micronaut » is an editorial project initiated in 2011 with a singular approach to publishing and artist book. In three years of activity, the book series took several different forms, engaging a dialogue between disciplines and blurring the boundaries between actors involved in a book process.

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In the mid-1970s, Harun Farocki wrote a two-page call programmatically entitled What Ought to Be Done, followed by a survey addressed to potential collaborators and supporters. He envisioned an institution to “organize a coalition of working people, not from an abstract understanding but from the contact points of their work.” The purpose of this institution, devoted to documentary practices, was twofold. It was “intended to collect, i.e. secure what is there,” but also “to produce, i.e. initiate what is not yet there.” In doing so, it was meant to facilitate social and collaborative processes, comprehensive and interdisciplinary studies without time pressure.

At the occasion of Farocki’s working paper, the Harun Farocki Institut, founded in 2015, historically situates Farocki’s initiative and reflects upon the proximities and differences between creating an institution in 1976 and forty years later.

The publication includes Farocki’s text, a commentary by Tom Holert, Doreen Mende and Volker Pantenburg, as well as a letter written in 1975 by documentary filmmaker Peter Nestler in response to Farocki’s circular.

Editorial responsibility: Elsa de Seynes.

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ETOPS, or Extended Operations, is artist Yngve Holen’s magazine about specialized industries today. Edited with Matthew Evans and designed by Per Törnberg, ETOPS is a qualitative and interview-based research project. Previous issues of ETOPS explored the commercial airline industry, plastic surgery, and pornography. The third issue is a travelogue about food and political ecology in the Amazon rainforest and the Andes. The publication project is made possible by the Hessische Kulturstiftung.

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A-or-ist is a collective publication

The Thing – plasticité – Park McArthur – ubiquity – periods – Sophie Cundale – Pure Heroine – future girls – Paul B. Preciado – therapy – Dorine van Meel – disobedience – fans – not doing – Darren Banks – CK One – ritual – fridges – Tavi – Gena Rowlands – hypnosis – queer mysticism – Ilja Karilampi – Agnes Martin – swooning – Shulamith Firestone – adult babies

Extracts

Polysemous Synthetics (on Park McArthur’s ‘Poly’, Chisenhale Gallery, April 2016)
Jonathan P Watts

‘Poly’, from the Greek meaning ‘many’, already suggests the idea of multiplicity. Poly is the prefix of polymer; in various compound forms, synthetic polymers perform an omnipresent role in our daily lives. Is there a substance richer in meaning and metaphor? Plastic speaks of multiplicity and omnipresence. Plastics in textile blends wrap around our bodies, providing thresholds between the world and our skin. Gels – those weird polymer solids that flow – hold the form of the body. Although aware of Park’s political argument against metaphor, I couldn’t reconcile the literalness of material and the disavowal of its metaphorical resonances. Plastics are a fundamental ontological rug pull, so to speak. The widespread use of plastics following the second world war not only enabled new forms, but augured unforeseen possibilities of mimesis. In other words, plastic helps us to think about identity.

Mutational Media & DeepTime Thrombosis: On Darren Banks’s Object Cinema
Jamie Sutcliffe

Get the feeling we’ve been here before? The remote northerly location, the arrogant frontierism of a bunch of bearded scientists, the excavation of some ancient intelligence? Despite being a fantastically pointed, topical and originally scary in its own right, The Last Winter draws heavily on John Carpenter’s 1982 alien-infection classic The Thing, from its pacing, through its paranoia, to the perilous uncertainty of its final scene. The setting and situation may have changed, but we’re still involved in the same grievous plight of cosmological vulnerability. Casting a little grit onto the cultural tundra, letting the strata reveal itself, it turns out there’s a visible lineage that recedes from Carpenter’s own movie back through a hundred years of texts, comic book adaptations and films that replay the same story in which a group of scientists excavate a primordial life form that seeks its own survival by infecting human subjects. One could even go so far as to suggest that the story itself is a parasitic entity, employing human media as the impotent host of its own regenerative self-purpose.

Notes on Disobedient Children (Dorine van Meel, 2015)
Naomi Pearce

(Dorine) creates a cracked and empty landscape, a handful of pylons sparsely scattered, barely perceptible in the red fog. There’s no sun, or sky or horizon. Another image: a meshwork of untethered electricity cables, slack, inoperative. Cut to a heavenly futuristic landscape where the remnants of human institutions – a white wedding veil – float serenely free. There are no bodies here, just structures on a sliding scale of functionality. We look up from inside a rhizomatic cage or out at a far-reaching line of fences. These are monuments to construction, they mark boundaries but in all this emptiness it’s not clear what they separate, what orders they impose.

All the while crumbling, glitching audio mutates. The sound of movement, of things breaking, both digitally and physically, tectonic plates shifting, buildings falling, rubbish heaps accumulating.

According to Alice 2:The Scent of Ubiquity
Alice Hattrick

Nothing much changes in the minutes and hours after atomization. It is ‘green’ and citrus – lemon and bergamot – and then slightly floral. An hour later it becomes woodier before it is basically nothing. L’Eau d’Issey (1992) was just as ubiquitous in the 1990s and much more interesting: a whole flower – stem and bloom – and way dirtier than its name suggests. The only decent descriptor I can think of for CK One is ‘CK One’. It sits on top of your skin and refuses to have anything to do with you. No part of it sticks, stays, or really changes. And then I realize: it’s not supposed to. CK One is no one’s signature scent. It is pure ubiquity. It is the definition of blending in. Wearing CK One, I have the thought that this is in fact the opposite of perfume.

Period Piece
Hannah Gregory

Looking back to the bloody patterns of Instagram and Tumblr, it seems that the elsewhere rehearsed prescription of social media as contemporary ritual (inglorious ritual) fits. These rhythmic performances are linked to the public-private life of the selfie generation, sure, but they are more than a narcissistic gesture or appeal for attention. Sociologist Karen Gregory has suggested that social media helps elaborate ‘an improvised narrative arc of personal spiritual development [which] can mitigate the dislocation and desperation of precarity.’ In this reading, online expressions are immediately reified as ‘one’s [provisional] life story’ is converted into social or actual capital for the users or the platforms. While the period posts do act as an outlet for an alienating experience, they resist becoming just another instantiation of self-branding.Their gridded repetitions try to put disorder in order, and their shared hashtags of #menstrala and #periodart represent what it might mean to bleed collectively. Un-pretty and undesirable, the images make visible what society prefers to censor.

A Woman Under the Influence (on Sophie Cundale’s After Picasso, God, 2016)
Amy Budd

The iconoclastic title After Picasso, God betrays the simple narrative structure and prosaic content of a film following a day in the life of a woman undergoing hypnosis to quit smoking. Whereas in previous works the artist mostly remained behind the camera, only occasionally making her presence felt in Prologue by interrupting improvised scenes with one line quips and directions, After Picasso, God sees Cundale perform the role of non-verbal protagonist, smoking her way through South London’s public and private spaces.

Queer Mysticism, Feral Communism and [the Body of Text]
Caspar Heinemann

A grounding statement is: Your body is literally hollow; another is: You literally do not have a body but rather millions.This gets more intense when you disregard Cartesian dualism and remember you don’t have but rather are bodies. ‘Your’ ‘body’ is constituted by organisms of many different genders and none. Literally literally literally literally and a few metaphorically.

Swooning
Lizzie Homersham

To my recovered self and to ideas about the obligation to care, Firestone’s ‘Swooning’ is like (Agnes) Martin’s Homage to Life: remarkable for making imperative the need to visualize a problem in order to put it to rest. Remarkable for being the blanket you might wrap around yourself when, echoing Claudia Rankine, ‘you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.’ The black blanket you might share? By posting ‘Swooning’ to Twitter, and writing about it here, I wanted to put Firestone’s edges and the tempting prospect of disappearance into dialogue with some questions I have about social media. If that’s not too much of a flight of mind.

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