Workshop for postgraduates - Deadline for signing up: October 15.

With special guest Mathias Kokholm, Antipyrine, www.antipyrine.dk

And selected material from Manila based Hardworking Goodlooking, www.officeocd.com/

Using the format of a manual, this workshop constructs a potential guide for artists–researchers, whose work is embedded in and invests the complex networks around art publishing. A number of strategies within a publishing practice are identified in order to describe today’s challenges of the printed book; of designing theory (or indeed thinking); and also of conducting a coherent and complete market and management analysis, that goes hand in hand with the transforming forces of the machines of social production and social knowledge. The concern here is independent publishing; forums and formatting; artist as editor / editor as artist; artists’ books and their markets or sites–their ambivalent relation to domineering regimes of mental work and the production of value through creativity.

… And being in the right place at the right time.

From the perspective of Verina Gfader’s various professional and artistic affiliations (art researcher within The Contemporary Condition, Creative Director for the EP book series published by Berlin-based Sternberg Press, author of a published PhD thesis in book form), the manual’s sections are formed around:

• Art Book Fair.
• Book make-up.
• Scales.
• The shadow thesis.
• Readers and buyers.
• Loose analysis.
• Book Piracy.

PhD students; ‘The shadow thesis’ discusses the contradictory spaces one has to cross or resolve when transforming an intimate, discreet PhD thesis in art into a book out in the wider publishing sphere. Rather than diminishing an ‘excellence in thinking’ the book may make more apparent other significant encounters and politics of social knowledge, such as conviviality.    

References

• Antonio Negri interviewed by Verina Gfader, ‘The Real Radical?.’ In Alex Coles, Catharine Rossi (Eds.) EP Vol. 1 The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013, 200–19. Republished by Semiotext(e) online. semiotexte.com/?page_id=17 (PDF)
• Chang Tsong-zung, ‘Power of the Word,’ in Power of the Word, Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, 2001: p.14 (PDF)
• The Piracy Project, andpublishing.org/the-piracy-project/. AND, andpublishing.org/
• James Joyce’s notion of ‘corrective unrest.’

See you there!