Reading To Warmann

John Holten from Paris who edited To Warmann by Djordje Bojic in an empty gallery in Brussels. Milos Lubarda from The LGB Group and the public are invited to create anew the text.

The LGB Group in Brussels at D.O.R. Gallery

LGB 12/11/2011 - 02/12/2011 Vernissage 11/11/2011 19.00 - 22.00 Finnissage 02/12/2011 19.00 -

The tripartite exhibition at Gallery D.O.R. has its starting point in the novel The Readymades written by John Holten (Broken Dimanche Press, 2011) which tells the story – through a unique use of montage of found historical and contemporary documents – of The LGB Group. In order to execute the fiction of this book a collaboration with Serbian artist Darko Dragicevic resulted in the realm of the novel being extended into the world of contemporary art through the creation of a body of work corresponding to The LGB Group. Seminal works from the oeuvre of the group will be presented at D.O.R. through supporting structures such as the LGB art collection of Galerie Gojkovic, performative public interpretations of The Readymadesand relational social happenings over the course of the exhibition. Djordje Bojić, Zukunft I / Future I oil and varnish on canvas, 3 x 1,5m. Private collection 2007 CHAPTER 1: Djordje Bojić LGB years: 1995-2008 Djordje Bojić. Vernissage: November 11, 19.00 - 22.00 A curated selection of some of the seminal works of LGB artist Djordje Bojić, an artist born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1974. He studied philosophy at the University of Belgrade before abandoning his degree after the success of the show LGB with Aleksandar Gojković and Miloš Lubarda. His text based work dating from 1995 was interested in form and the concretisation of everyday realities. He was also the curator of some of the LGB Group’s seminal exhibitions. Notable shows include LGB 1995-2005, a retrospective in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (25 February - 20 March, 2008) and Around is Back Again, Today, 20 May - August 4, 2002, in Gallery Michael Jetzer. He died in Paris in 2008. His estate is managed by Galerie Gojković. CHAPTER 2: It‘s already a success! Saturday, November 19th – Friday, November 26th Over the course of the second week of the LGB exhibition there will be a performative act by the publisher John Holten (Broken Dimanche Press) who is responsible for the publication of the manuscript “To Warmann“ by Djordje Bojić. Bas Jan Ader’s work from 1972, The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls will be reinvigorated by Holten in order to further facilitate the work of Bojić. Ader, in 1972, sat twice daily in an empty gallery, reading a short story. During his gallery readings, Holten will be accompanied by Bojić’s best friend and collaborator, another LGB artist, Miloš Lubarda. He will pick up certain words that play homage to Bojić’s project, each day creating a different story, different meanings. Twice daily performace: 13h – 14h & 18h – 20h CHAPTER 3: Three course meal Sunday, November 27th – Friday, December 2nd In 2011 German artist Jan Offe invited guests once more for dinner, feeling that the time was ripe to revisit the primal social scene of life: the communal dinner. The tropes of late 1990s relational aesthetics have become associated with Offe, and his dinners, replacing cutlery with our readymade human utensils, have put him squarely in the lineage of Spoerri to Tiravanija. At once a nostalgic homage to the late 1990s, when we were all that little bit younger, but also a social occasion to celebrate the on-going legacy of the LGB Group with one of the key names of the group, Herr Offe, Gallery D.O.R. will play host to the time before we’re all still in the process of over-coming. Jan Offe 3 Course Dinner beet root, carrot, apple, pesto, ricotta, spaghetti, mango, strawberries, blue syrup, white wine, red wine 220 x 180cm. Courtesy the artist. 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Darko Dragičević (b. 1979, Belgrade) studied Visual Arts at The International College of Arts and Sciences in Milan where he received a Master Degree in Art Direction. Since then he ́s been working in Europe and USA as a Visual Artist and Filmmaker. His works have been featured in Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (won the 3rd price with the video “Ah!“), Ann Arbor Festival Michigan, Future Shorts London, as in various solo and group shows. Upcoming events count the exhibitions at mianki Galerie Berlin, D.O.R. Gallery Brussels and an auction in Berlinische Galerie in collaboration with KUNST Magazin Berlin. Currently he lives and works in Berlin. www.darkodragicevic.net John Holten (b. 1984 in Ireland) is a writer and editor living in Berlin. He has a BA International from University College Dublin in Ireland having completed an Erasmus year at Paris IV-Le Sorbonne in France and an MPHIL from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. He has curated, together with Line Madsen Simenstad and Ida Benche The Kakofonie – A European Journal of Art and Literature since 2009, showing the edited work in various European art institutions including Gallery Block T (Dublin), Stattbad (Berlin) and Pygmalion (Dublin) amongst others. He has had fiction and poetry published extensively, most recently in Lamination Colony and the AADK Press. The curated book project he co-edited represented Ireland at the prestigious Charlemagne Youth Prize in 2010, coming second out of 27 countries. His writing on art has been most recently published by The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. During the summer of 2011 he co-curated and ran the series ‘Exhibiting Literature’ at Buro BDP, Berlin. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. His first novel,The Readymades, was published in September 2011 by Broken Dimanche Press. www.johnholten.com Broken Dimanche Press (b. 2009, Berlin) is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, conversations, scenarios, art and cultural occurrences are the invention of the publisher. www.brokendimanche.eu New General Opening Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday 15.00 - 18.00 or by appointment

Review of The Readymades...

Read the full review here

Violence as a gift

By Anna Aslanyan

The Readymades, John Holten, Broken Dimanche Press 2011

Last July Birkbeck College held “the first” symposium on Tom McCarthy’s work (quotes are not mine – McCarthy’s). It comes as no surprise that so many people now are not only reading Remainder, Men in Space, C, but also researching them – that his novels should find an audience was only a question of time. Young writers could do worse than take a leaf from McCarthy’s book; John Holten, for one, whose debut The Readymadescontinues the European tradition without trying to pass itself as a book by a Continental author. To say that McCarthy’s shadow is hanging over it would be unfair – rather, his themes are played anew, at times convincingly, at times tentatively, but for the most part boldly and with an honesty bordering on desperation.

Tomorrow I'll Be Happy @ Motto Berlin

The tour continues with one of our biggest exhibitions yet of LGB art. One of my favourite bookshops will be the venue for a unique vitrine exhibit of work from The Readymades.

If in Berlin, come along!

To mark the German launch of The Readymades by John Holten, Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an exhibition by Darko Dragičević at Motto Berlin.

Found within the pages of The Readymades is the seminal text on The LGB Group (1995-2007) by one of the group's leading stars: Djordje Bojić. Extending the world of the book, BDP in conjunction with Galerie Gojković, are pleased to transform Motto's courtyard vitrines with some of the group's more renowned works.

The liminal space of Motto's courtyard will play host to work from The Readymades by:
Aleksandar Gojković (SR)
Miloš Lubarda (SR)
Elaine Pettifer (US/SZ)
Ivan Veselin (HU)
Matthias Nagry (HU)

Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević has created the artwork.

The exhibition is presented in conjunction between BDP, Galerie Gojković and FUK Laboratories Berlin (www.fuklab.org)

The Golden Bough - Publication

I have an essay in this Hugh Lane Gallery publication about artist Brian Duggan which I'm very excited about. My sister Katie is also in it, so that's nice!

Brian has work in Dublin Contemporary.

The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne

I have writing and some translation in a new book by the AADK Press. Its release is part of four day long performance festival in Berlin AADKunexpected. The project has been quite an experience: expanding a short, strange text from the inside and in tandem with Decottignies and Green. We've gone places we never imagined going...

The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne

By Adam Green, Thierry Decottignies, John Holten – The AADK Press (Bilingual English and French).

"'A painting is not a construction of colours and lines, but an animal, a night, a cry, a man, or all of this at the same time'
(CoBrA, in 'Connaissance des arts' n° 666)

'It was only then that I noticed the position of her hand. In the course of what could only be described as some kind of fit, all be it a seemingly happy one, her dress had ridden up and revealed, bunched up above a pair of near translucent legs, the white shocking mass of her undergarments, and completely inexplicably her hand nestled inside. She was looking straight at me....'

-The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne, a collaborative literary project by Adam Green, Thierry Decottignies and John Holten, will be presented as part of the 4-day event AADKunexpected at Galerie161 - featuring a live installation with performance artist Vania Rovisco.“

Saturday 16th July, 4 pm-6 pm, Galerie161 (Torstr. 161), U8 Rosenthaler Platz, Bus 142// www.torstrasse161.de

The Readymades - Novel

My novel The Readymades, which tells the story of the neo-avant-garde group I created, The LGB Group, is off to the printer next week.

Review copies are available:

Email editorkakofonie@googlemail.com with your address and potential online/print publications and such.

Footnotes

Finally I've joined a band. We have our first rehearsal tomorrow in Berlin and our first, and probably last performance on Friday. The ambition is to place several footnotes into a song.

The Readymades, or part of it, uses footnotes. They were nice to write. People have been telling me of Nabokov's Pnin, but I've never read it. I think a reader can feel a sense of the make-belief in footnotes and a writer can get lost in them.

But the other band members are certainly interesting and more talented at all this than I am, check them out. www.jeleton.com

María-Ángeles Alcántara-Sánchez (1975, Murcia) Jesús Arpal-Moya (1972, Barakaldo) —A team to operate in places for common negotiation such as iconographic, musical and literary repertories. To propose self-teaching practices and publishing of provisory results for debate. To subject authorship to situations of inexperience/humour/appropriation. To disperse the results through space, time and the distribution channels, so to hinder their deactivation by the presentation context. es insoportable la idea de autor, o la idea de artista (dora garcía @ el país) —Jeleton's activity has been incorporated in public art research projects, exhibitions, documentary projects, workshops (recently "Manifesta 8", Murcia, 2010; CA2M, Móstoles, 2010; Casa Vecina, Mexico City, 2010; MACBA, Barcelona, 2010; Le Centquatre, Paris, 2009; Abisal, Bilbao, 2008) and has been supported by grants and research funds (recently Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2008). no te preocupes me han dicho que sí que les mola / que hagas esa cosa que haces tú ("de moda", los punsetes)

Friday, May 13 Altes Finanzamt
Jeleton (text, vinyl record)
performance + opening
Turntable Piece

Artistic team Jeleton makes annotations on cultural consensus through
drawing, performance, music or writing. The term turntable is for a vinyl
record player but also for a revolving table or a turn alternator. Their
"turntable pieces" are exercises on how to perform a vinyl record, how can
be reactivated the listening or receiving situation of a prerecorded
message. Talking to the records, reading texts to them, manipulating them
through scratch.

Galerie Gojković Relaunching www.johnholten.com

Please check out www.johnholten.com which is now hosted by Galerie Gojković in collaboration with BDP. I'm really excited to get to have the endlessly talented, general Renaissance man and great friend Darko Dragicevic and his work on my webpage.

This is just the beginning: The Readymades are coming!

Please continue to check back and stay in touch, more artwork from Dragicevic and news of a touring LGB exhibition this autumn will be posted online in the coming weeks.

http://johnholten.com/

Notes toward New Collaborative Project

"I remember the sky over Paris sulked with the streets, each sharing their grayness in return for a poor slice of the winter-season. Our first meeting happened in the Marais, a small café with a horseshoe bar which we sat at, and where this lingerer in the tortures of memory politely offered wearied answers to my questions[1]."

...

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[1] Questions and answers that would later appear in Issue 23, Volume 5 of Art Monthly

State of Motion

I have a short text on LGB artist Zoran Živković's meetings with John Holten in Paris. In a lovely publication State of Motion edited by the Collectivo Piso and designed by Bolos Quentes.

Firday night with Dieter Roth et al,

Acervos/ Collection Catalogue

A selection of purloined "works" from the private collections of Francisco Queimadela, Lorenzo Sandoval, Mariana Caló and Pedro Serrano.
These collections consist of several unsuspected "art-leftovers" or diverted "works" from various international artists. An “acervo” as we want to present it, suggests something beyond the mere act of collecting, a creative act in itself.

This is the third presentation of Acervos, the previous ones having taken place in Sala Josep Renau (Valência) and Espaço JUP (Porto) with works from other private collections and curated, both times, by Forma Cita.

Works by:

Richard Serra, Susana Chiocca, Ben Lewis, Von Calhau, Discoteca Flaming Star, Anish Kapoor, Catarina Miranda, Andrea Winkler, Petrit Halilaj, Takashi Murakami, Laetitia Morais, Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, Simon Fujiwara, Yoko Ono, Pedro André, Martin Kippenberg, Francisco Queimadela, Roman Signer, Left Hand Rotation, Masayoshi Fujita, Francesc Torres, Elfelix, Balla Prop, Giannotti & Giuriat, Lucia Antonini, Lucas Agudelo, Sofia Lomba, Alfonso Escudero, Sara Pereira, Erik Beltran, Francesc Vera, Mariana Caló, Olafur Eliasson, Maria Ptqk, Sonia Genoese, Ignaz Shick, Christian Marclay, Inês Ferreira, Graw Böckler, Alexandre Lemos, Dídio Pestana, Francisco López,João Paulo Feliciano, filipe dias De, Martín López, Anabelle Hubaut, Carlos Amorales, Jaime Raposo, Regina de Miguel, Christina Casnellie, João Alves, Joseph Beuys, Ramsey Arnaoot, Jonathan Saldanha, Virginia Pinho, Lorenzo Sandoval, Matt Mullican, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Marta Leite, Joa Gridfonte Mario Gomes, Filipa Cesar, Marta Bernardes, Hannes Broecker, Dan Graham, John Holten, Eirik Sördal, Urszula Wozniak, and others...

Apocrypha of a Kakofonie - Editorial Issue 3

In a foray into curating, I ended up with something opposed to how many video art exhibitions work. A real eclectic mix, issue 3 of the Kakofonie is truer in spirit to a journal or a revue than a highly thematised gallery show in which the hand of the curator is clearly seen. In a way, the chaotic madness of the Internet and Youtube is given a frame here. Below is the issue's editorial essay.

Link to issue

Siouxzi Mernagh / Matthew MacKisack / Lauren Moffatt / Gabi Schaffner / Kerstin Cmelka / Gerard Carson / Richard Mosse / Pauline Carnier Jardin / Anna Niedhart

Hating Women
I wouldn’t for the life of me be able to say why history is full of men who hate women. Even if one were to try to answer such a conundrum, they would be left facing the question: why so much hate in history tout court? Let us look at history as a long line of emotions, a scale of feelings, good or bad, disgust or attraction, and we can add here hate and love as two more markers, with the coordinates of events and their repetitions gravitating more toward the former than the later. As soon as you start to plot emotions on a graph you have backed into a dead end.

The Circus
The curious thing about the circus is that one of its features is always to engage the audience; at some point in the evening’s show the ringleader will enter into the tiers and much to the delight of the half-worried, half-self-conscious parents, pick some child already losing the memory of being brought down into the ring to ride the back of some caged horse let loose in a 0 that never ends. The circus is for children but overseen by adults. The circus is an allusion of a trick performed well for an audience adrift in the throes of forced amnesia.

Narrative disjunction
…when the event happens people don’t notice, they don’t notice the State intervening and watching (think of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses) and then well no, it’s just people walking along the street, the city, the Everyday as profane fairyground. WD walked home slowly, thinking to himself about the graffiti, the marks that he respected but somehow feared…

Michel Haneke
‘I always say that not only film, but books too, are like ski jumps. They have to be built in such a way that people can jump properly. But the film is the ski jump and it’s up to the spectator to jump.’ Let’s have love as a ski jump, too. Perhaps.

Self Perception/External Perception
We see ourselves when other people see us. Sartre bends down and puts his unblinking, ruined eye next to the keyhole and looks on with his breath held. Watching. Behind him on the non-creaking stairs another, the Other, creeps up and watches the philosophe watching and being arises on the dark stairwell like rubbish left on the streets after the carnival.

Interpretation
The beast. Let us not say disability instead of aggression. Revolutionary perception is akin to reasons why Big Brother would carry out an archeological dig.

Insurrection
And preserve the dignity of our people. And preserve the dignity of our people. And because you have killed innocent people and destroyed our homes. And because you have besieged this oppressed people. But the result is the same.
It is death.

Death
This cacophony in our ears then is full of death and love and misunderstanding. The circus shows us how to interpret death: cage it and then forget about it until it next rides into town. Occasionally laugh in its face.