Printed Matter is pleased to host a book launch and signing for Four Over One by Phil Chang.

Saturday, May 15, 2010
5:00pm-7:00pm
Printed Matter
195 Tenth Ave
New York, NY 10011

In Four Over One, the Los Angeles based artist Phil Chang employs the format of an artists book to explore ideas of economy and obsolescence. In collaboration with designer Jonathan Maghen, Four Over One is structured around Chang’s interest in how new outcomes arise from an antagonism between perceived and actual forms of value. The photographs that appear in the book were created using expired photographic materials exposed by an archival book scanner. Through a sparse display of color, black and white, and half-tone photographs, in conjunction with a restrained typographic treatment, Four Over One employs an economy of scale in order to consider the roles of abstraction, methods of art production, and modes of distribution in our contemporary culture.

Published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department , in association with Textfield, Inc.

Distributed by RAM Publications

Traducing Ruddle is the fifth in a series of “fake” newspapers by Dutch artist Mark Manders. Using a nonsensical combination of English words, Traducing Ruddle creates a pretense of legibility that dissolves upon closer inspection. The newspaper is supplemented by Two Connected Houses, a 48 page insert developed in conjunction with the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum.

Sheets from Manders’ Traducing Ruddle form the central element of the artist’s Window with Fake Newspapers project, a site-specific public work on view through March 28th.

Distributed in North America by Textfield, Inc.

38th Street, Alex Klein, Alex Olson, Alice Konitz, Amy Yao, Andrea Longacre-White, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Apartamento, Art Since Summer of ’69, Arthure Ou, Asher Penn, B’Ling, Barry Johnston, Becca Albee, Benjamin Trogdon, Black Dog Publishing, Bookworks, Brian Kennon, Claudine Auguste, Cynthia Connolly, Cynthia Leung, David Benjamin Sherry, Dexter Sinister, Dorothee Perret, Drag City, Duncan Hamilton, Ethan Swan, Eva Svennung, Fillip, Form Content, Free Association Press, FR David, Frances Stark, Gloria Pedemonte, Goodiepal, Greene Naftali, Hanne Mugaas, Harsh Patel, Ingo Giezendanner, Isabel Asha Penzlien, Jim Drain, Joseph Mosconi, JRP, K8 Hardy, Leif Goldberg, Leopard Press, Lisa Farjam, Margaret Lee, Matt Wobensmith, Megawords, Melissa Ip, Michael & Lucena Valle-Rey, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen, Nick Relph + Oliver Payne, Nieves, Oliver Payne, Ooga Booga, Paige Johnston, Peres Projects, Picturebox, Phil Chang, Poppy Books, Primary Information, RE/Search publications, Semiotext(e), Slavs and Tatars, Sumi Ink Club, Taro Nettleton, Textfield, Ugly Duckling Presse, Wendy Yao, William E. Jones, and White Columns.

Swiss Institute
Ooga Booga Reading Room
1 December — 13 February 2010

Can’t Rape the Willing

2 May — 14 June 2009

In 1973, Ana Mendieta invited unsuspecting visitors to her apartment. Without having been warned, they witnessed a horrific (albeit confusing) scene: Mendieta was bent over and tied to a table with her underwear at her ankles, blood stains on her legs and broken dishes all over the floor. Protesting the recent attacks against women that were occurring on campus at the University of Iowa, Mendieta’s performance Rape Piece is a poignant reminder that the distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, remain somewhat unclear.

Using this performance as a point of departure, the group exhibition Can’t Rape the Willing not only poses some of the same questions that Mendieta considered but, more deliberately, it diverts by exposing what happens behind closed doors between consenting adults. By challenging rampant taboos about sexual fantasies, intimacy and deviant behavior, the artists in the exhibition are invited to delve into unrestrained—and unapologetic—perverse territory.

Theo Adams
Arlen Austin
Andres Bedoya
Cara Benedetto
Michael Bilsborough
Brendan Carney
Azul Ceballos
Tara DeLong
Chloe Dzubilo
Juan Pablo Echeverri
Kathryn Garcia
Danielle Levitt
Richard Lidinsky
Megan Lindeman
Lovett/Codagnone
Quinn Luke
Hector Madera Gonzalez
Nadja Verena Marcin
Elizabeth Neel
Marc Robinson
Julika Rudelius
Georgia Sagri
Dean Sameshima
Michael Sharkey
Dena Yago

For more information, contact Sarvia Jasso or Kathryn Garcia. After May 2nd, open by appointment only.

In Other Words…‘ is the first in a series of self published booklets conceived and designed by OK-RM. The booklet comprises of 7 new sentences exercising 16 of these new words and senses. For each word there is a definition and a brief history of its origins. An abbreviated history of the OED is included to contextualise the project. All content was written in collaboration with recent Goldsmith’s graduates Marianne Mulvey and Adeena Mey. Printed in a numbered edition of 500.

In Other Words… is distributed in North America by Textfield or contact your local bookshop.

“The Global Game has published a nice story about Municipal de Fútbol (”Where Angelenos do not fear to tread“). There you will also find a podcast interview with Jennifer Doyle by John Turnbull. The post includes extra research he put into the article — especially his inclusion of a link to this June 2008 story in the LA Times about a team of Guatemalen women playing in MacArthur Park. He points out that the spot where those women play is the location for the opening scenes of Goal. We should also remember that this is where the LAPD attacked people participating in an immigrants rights march and rally in May, 2007 (see LAPD tries to crush immigrant rights movement).”

“IN SEPTEMBER 2007, Charlotte Cotton, the head of the Photography Department at LACMA, commissioned me for a book. She didn’t offer any specific parameters—it could be anything.

I approached Dexter Sinister [design collaborators David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey] about working with me on the project. I was excited about their method of working as designers—it was expansive, not simply about the organization of language. What they do is not always so easy to define, and I was intrigued by their idea of “design as thinking,” as I have come to think of photography in similar terms. We began with simple questions: Why does this book need to exist? What format should it take? How can its format be a reflection of the ideas that compose whatever it is that we end up making? Let’s just say that very little was taken for granted.

We had some meetings and loose conversations starting two years ago. I went into the project with more ideas about what I didn’t want for the book: I didn’t want something that would simply showcase work of mine that had already had a certain amount of exposure; I wanted the book to be more of an open-ended reading of the work. Monographs are great, but I didn’t want something that straightforward.

We met in July of last year and sat around a Los Angeles studio for five days. We bought a roll of fax paper and brought books to the studio that we thought were related to previous conversations we had had over the course of the year, and we just began reading and talking, cutting things out, making photocopies, and taping materials onto the paper—assembling a scroll from the various source materials. Out of this came something like the “guts” of the book. At the end of the day, we would go through the scroll trying to articulate the reasons we had selected certain images, passages, quotes, and diagrams. To my surprise, I ended up with a renewed faith in the images themselves and eventually did away with all the clipped language. My hope was that the ideas that had initially compelled us were embedded in the images—it was just a matter of finding a way to present the material so it would reflect these ideas.

Later that summer, in August, while looking around the photo section of Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I found these amazing practical-photography textbooks that directly related to diagrams I had selected from Ansel Adams’s books and placed on the scroll back in July. Also, Stuart had shown me this beautiful old style manual that got me thinking further about the systems we use for organizing and understanding the arrangement of language and photographic imagery. So by the time I hit Powell’s, although the idea was still vague, I was very curious about looking through these old books with illustrational diagrams and how they might function within a system of hieroglyphics. The book includes a number of these diagrams juxtaposed with my own photographic work. (I didn’t make any new work expressly for the book.) And once I got back to Los Angeles, I would spend hours roaming the various libraries at USC looking through books for diagrams on optics, handwriting analysis, Indian sign language, hypergraphics, optical illusions, and cartography, not to mention all of the diagrams that did not survive the rather rigorous editing process!

I guess the last thing I’ll say here is a bit about the persistent use of the asterisk. It is one of several recurring motifs in the book, but it is probably the most prominent. The origin of this particular asterisk is from an essay by David called “This Stands as a Sketch for the Future,” which he produced as part of a one-year project as a research affiliate at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. The essay traces the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, and she is the person who designed the brilliant MIT Press logo and the Bauhaus book, among other things, of course. She was also a visionary educator, and while at MIT she cofounded the Visible Language Workshop in 1975, which was a teaching and production facility in the School of Architecture. Within David’s essay there is a reproduction of a poster for an MIT fellow’s traveling exhibition, and the asterisk is the graphic symbol that is featured in the poster’s design. You could easily say that I have become obsessed with this graphic symbol, not only because of the beauty of its form but also because it is the symbol for elsewhere. It literally redirects you, and as a reader it continually repositions or reorients you. You could say that Muriel Cooper is the patron saint of this book.

— As told to David Velasco for Artforum

via South Willard

Lawrence Weiner
Quid Pro Quo
21 November 2008 — 17 January 2009
Via Francesco Crispi 16
00187 Rome
Tue-Sat 10:30-7 and by appointment

Thanks Ryan

Michael Afsa, Lorin Brown, Nareg Charkutian, Anne Cote, Lauren Grilli, Jose Hernandez, Megan Lynch, Tiffany Malakooti, Jaime Martinez, Zachary Robertson, Nate Schulman, Mansi Shah, Aaron Vinton and Jongho Yoon.