Reading Complex

Reading Complex Act IV - Sans Titre

19.03.12 - 05.04.12

Group show including works by Ruth Beale, Elena Damiani, Christophe Gérard, and selected works from the Government Art Collection by Jerry Barrett, Frank Holl, Sir Joshua Reynolds, William Russell, and Richard Wentworth.

Government Art Collection
Queens Yard
179a Tottenham Court Road
W1T 7PA London
www.gac.culture.gov.uk

Exhibition is available to view by appointment, Monday through Friday, 12-6pm. To book an appointment, please contact Clive Marks at 020 7580 9120 or by email at clive.marks@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

In the wake of the digital turn, in this era of iPads and Kindles, the book is becoming a sensual luxury artifact, a precious and extravagant superfluity and an aesthetic emblem, subject to new levels of fetishization and bibliomaniacal fancy. With the recent advent of digital reading devices capable of reducing the physical space needed to house thousands of books to the size of a single copy, we are made aware of the possibility that no more bound narratives will cross our domestic thresholds.

Reading Complex Act IV − Sans Titre is an exhibition of artworks, objects and structures that address the physical form of the book in light of its current digital turn and changing modes of readership. Advanced by current art practices and through the re-contextualization of historical works from the Government Art Collection, this exhibition engages with the changing role and function of the library, the thoroughly materialistic quality of the book, the act of annotation, the book’s transition from analogue to digital formats and the consequent shifts in the distribution of texts and the conditions of (co)producing knowledge.

Reading Complex Library
For this phase of the project we, in shifting from an ongoing dialogue, compiled a selection of our growing body of resources into the Reading Complex Library: bringing together objects of reflection and interaction for an audience. The Reading Complex Library contains the books placed in relation to the fragments explored through the Reading Complex programme. This body of knowledge offers a space for dialogue, between ideas and words, things and art-objects.

Reading Complex Act III - The Plausible

02.03.12 - 17.03.12
Private view on Thursday 1 March 2012, 6.30 p.m.

Solo presentation of Fontenay-aux-Roses by Pablo Pijnappel

Seventeen
17 Kingsland Road
E2 8AA London
T +44 (0)20 77295777
info@seventeengallery.com
www.seventeengallery.com

Click here to download the invitation card
Click here to download accompanying text by Pablo Pijnappel

“I like to see the making of my stories, in essence, as investigations about stories where the product is like a forensics analysis: areas get fenced out to be examined, and evidence is removed from where conclusions can be drawn, but it leaves the connecting of the dots entirely to the viewer – who becomes the de facto investigator.” - Pablo Pijnappel, Berlin, 2011

Reading Complex Act III - The Plausible dissects the well-known platitude “seeing is believing”. This act takes the shape of a solo presentation in which the work Fontenay-aux-Roses by Pablo Pijnappel forms the central point of the exhibition. Fontenay-aux-Roses, a cinematic work comprised of projected black and white slides accompanied by audio narration, will further complicate the ways by which we consume, i.e. believe, the truths of an image and the stories that exist within them.

Alberto Manguel

Dictionary of Imaginary Places

This witty and comprehensive Baedeker of the imagination takes readers on a grand tour of over 1,200 fictional realms invented by storytellers from Homer’s day to our own. More than 200 original illustrations and maps, and now updated with new entries and new illustrations by Canadian artist Eric Beddows.

The Library at Night

Ranging from the doomed library of Alexandria to the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Aby Warburg and Count Dracula, this personal and deliberately unsystematic book defines the critical role that libraries have and must continue to play in our civilization as deep repositories of our memory and experience.

With Borges

In 1964, in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges asked a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk (Manguel) if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. This book is a portrait of an enigmatic genius, replete with insights into the writers he admired and the ways he read. Winner of the 2003 Prix du livre en Poitou-Charentes.

I Am Sitting in a Room, by Brian Dillon

At 10 am on Saturday, 10 December 2011, author Brian Dillon sat down at Cabinet’s gallery space and began writing a book. By 10 am the next morning, the completed book was at the printers and is now available to readers.

The inaugural volume in Cabinet’s new “24-Hour Book” series, Dillon’s book explores the scenography and architecture of writing itself. Inspired in part by Georges Perec’s short fragment in Species of Spaces on Antonello da Messina’s painting of St. Jerome in his study, Dillon’s text is both a personal reflection on the theatrics of the study, the library, and the office, and a historical consideration of the paraphernalia associated with celebrated writers, from Flaubert’s divan to Proust’s bed, from Leibniz’s card cabinet to Thomas Wolfe’s refrigerator desk.

Dillon, who arrived without any notes or other prepared material, of course also had to remain open to the contingencies of an unfamiliar writing environment, peculiar and perhaps slightly dodgy take-out food, a makeshift bed, and a capricious heating system, not to mention the obvious pressures of working under extreme time constraints. If that were not enough, this particular scene of writing was a public one, with curious onlookers dropping in during the process to watch the author (and his support staff) “at work.”

This first book in Cabinet’s series is also accompanied by Reception Rooms: An Anthology of Recent Responses to Brian Dillon’s I Am Sitting in a Room, a critical volume similarly produced under apparently prohibitive time constraints. At the precise moment Dillon’s tome was completed on Sunday morning, Princeton University’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM) invited a group of faculty and graduate students to read and respond to it within twenty-four hours. The respondents’ “encounters” were themselves gathered into a volume ready for printing by 4:30 pm on Monday, 12 December, in time for a symposium considered the past, present, and future of such experiments in the radical compression of culture. This companion volume is also available for purchase.

About Cabinet’s “24-Hour Book” series
Inspired by literary precedents such as automatic writing, by the resourcefulness of the bricoleur making do with what is at hand, and by the openness toward chance that all artistic production under severe constraint must necessarily incorporate, Cabinet’s new series will invite a number of distinguished authors and artists to be incarcerated in its gallery space to complete a project from start to finish within twenty-four hours.

About Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is UK editor of Cabinet and tutor in the Critical Writing in Art & Design program at the Royal College of Art. He is editor of Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011) and author of Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011). His book Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009), published in the US as The Hypochondriacs (Faber and Faber, 2010), was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. His first book, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005), won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. A collection of his essays, Culture and Curiosity, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2012. Dillon writes regularly for Artforum, Frieze, Art Review, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Wire, and is currently at work on Blown All to Nothing, the story of an explosion at a gunpowder works in Kent in 1916.

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969 and lives in Canterbury, England.

Deleuze / Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?”

Only expression provides the method. Kafka does not consider the problem of expression in an abstract or universal manner. He considers it in connection with minor literatures - the Jewish literature of Warsaw or Prague, for example. A minor literature is not the literature of a minor language but the literature a minority makes in a major language. But the primary characteristic of a minor literature involves all the ways in which the language is effected by a strong co-efficent of deterritorialization…

Further reading: www.parenthetic.org/minorliterature.pdf

Deleuze, “Literature and Life”

To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill- formed or the incomplete, as Witold Gombrowicz said as well as practiced. Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that traverses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or -vegetable, becomes-molecule, to the point of becoming-imperceptible.

Further reading: http://www.mediafire.com/?ejnytzydznn