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We present a special exhibition of Pist Protta, a Danish art magazine published by Space Poetry since 1981. Pist Protta is an experiment with the art magazine as a medium. Sometimes it takes form of artists books and other times it mimics more conservative magazines. Printing, binding, format etc changes from issue to issue. But the concept is always the central point. Pist Protta will be showing the entire production of 74 issues.

David Senior – Artist-Run Spaces: Publishing and New Art Practices
Sunday April 6 at 15:00 (note: warm up talk before the festival)

David Senior, Bibliographer at the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, will discuss a history of artists’ publications in the 20th and 21st centuries. There will be a few different stories about how artists and designers have used their little publications as containers for new ideas, creating lively and accessible spaces to communicate work and archive art actions. Most examples will come from the collection of books that he works with at the MoMA Library and several recent library exhibitions he has organized of artists’ books and ephemera.

David Senior is the Bibliographer at The Museum of Modern Art Library, where he manages collection development, including the library’s artists’ books collection. He also curates exhibitions – most recently ‘Please Come to the Show’ (2013), ‘Millennium Magazines’ (2012), ‘Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968–74? (2011) and ‘Scenes from Zagreb: Artists’ Publications of the New Art Practice’ (2011) – and the annual pro­gram of events for the New York and Los Angeles Art Book Fairs. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Bulletins of the Serving Library, A Prior, Art Papers and C Magazine, and since 2008 he has published an artist’s book series through the New York Art Book Fair, with titles by Dexter Sinister, David Horvitz, Emily Roysdon and Eve Fowler, among others. He is a member of the advisory boards of Printed Matter, Art Metropole, Primary Information, Yale Union, and the Serving Library.

Erik Kessels & Paul Kooiker – Terribly Awesome Photo Books
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Thomas Hvid Kromann – The democratization of the artist’s books
Saturday April 12 at 12:00

For many years Paul Kooiker and Erik Kessels share a passion for making and collecting artists and photography books. As artists they made individually already many publications. Kooiker is known for his books Hunting and Fishing, Sunday, Crush and Heaven. Kessels works on a book series called In almost every picture and is editor of the magazine Useful Photography. Recently they made two publications together called: Terribly Awesome Photo books and Incredibly Small Photo books. In these publications they share their specific taste for a strange kind of image based books. In this talk Kooiker and Kessels will share and discuss these different projects.
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The concept of the democratization of the arts has been a crucial element in the boom of artists’ publications and especially artists’ books, which appeared in the 1960s. The disillusion of the 1970s was caused by unrealistic expectations, which were too high. As the American art critic and activist Lucy Lippard put it, one hoped that they would be for sale in airports, in supermarkets … It didn’t turn out that way. But what is the situation today? Which potential lies in the possibilities of the Internet and the current revitalization of the book medium? To what extent is the artist’s book a vehicle for the idea of the democratization of the arts today?

Joachim Schmid – No dog, no baby, no honeymoon but print-on-demand books
Sunday April 13 at 12:00

The short story of going from darkroom, typewriter, scissors and glue to laptops, internet and digital print. Everything changed and nothing changed. A new situation leads to a new way of making books, but a book is still a book.

Joachim Schmid studied Visual Communication at Fachhochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd and Berlin University of the Arts from 1976 to 1981. He is a Berlin based artist who has worked with found photography since the early 1980s. Schmid’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of many major international institutions.

Two writers, one I. With It is a roller Jasper Coppes and Stijn Verhoeff jointly engaged in this experiment. The protagonist of their book wanders though the wet grass in his cotton slippers, from the kitchen window he keeps a close watch on his garden. Through the course of a single day we follow the thought trails of this ‘neurotic thinker’ as he strolls around on his property and surrounding. In his thoughts he takes off to distant places, philosophical matters and social issues, while his direct surrounding invites him to stay rooted to the ground.

‘All the more I enjoy my nightly excursions. I switch off the lights in my house, shut the door behind me and surrender to the dark. It is never really dark. Not outside. Because outside, the night is sometimes transparent like armored glass, at other times damp and diffuse. I inhale the fallen night, and I feel a cold foreboding flowing through my nostrils. A return of presumptions. The night has fallen so gracefully. Not like a wooly blanket or a dark cloak. It has definitely not fallen unfortunately, but certainly unavoidably. A deep, endless, recurring urgency, to which no man knows a better response, than to close his eyes. Because why would you keep staring? Looking only makes sense if there is something to see, right?’ (Scharrelaar / It is a roller, 2012, Jasper Coppes and Stijn Verhoeff)

This passage of the book has been the point of departure for the film and the installation on show at New Shelter Plan. To get back to their initial ideas Jasper Coppes and Stijn Verhoeff will read this and other passages from their book. The reading will be taken as an opportunity to open up a discussion around the ideas that are addressed in the book, in the film and in the exhibition. What does it mean these days to retreat into the country, to create one’s private environment? In what way are we connected to others, or to the past? How can we prevent ourselves from being distracted with all the information that reaches us with the speed of light? How can we live locally while thinking globally? And what does it mean to collaborate?

Visual artists Jasper Coppes (Amsterdam, 1983) and Stijn Verhoeff (Amsterdam, 1981) make films, spatial installations, sound-performances and. Silent objects, people who say no and areas where the natural and the cultural merge are topics that frequently appear in their work. They have independently and collaboratively participated in exhibitions, film festivals and lecture series across Europe and in the United States.

Et oplæg om hvordan en samling af objekter, der var placeret i rummet, The Brain, kunne udgøre essensen af tankerne bag dOCUMENTA (13)

The mission is not to renew our thinking about art but to venture into other logics and place them at the core of artistic and cultural thinking.
Chefkurator for dOCUMENTA (13), Chus Martinez.

dOCUMENTA (13) var en kunstbegivenhed, der ikke var opbygget ud fra et koncept eller et spe-cifikt tema. Det kunne ifølge Martinez i stedet sammenlignes med karnevalet – en momentan op-løsning af normal orden, tenderende til det anarkistiske. I opløsningen befandt sig muligheden for – for et øjeblik – at sætte fantasien og tænkningen fri fra dominerende tankesæt og hierarkier gennem kaos.
Var det en kaotisk begivenhed eller en begivenhed med fokus på kaos? Hvilke tankesæt og hierarkier ville de bryde med? Og hvordan kunne en samling af objekter danne ramme for en begivenhed, der strakte sig over flere kontinenter?

Louise Lassen Iversen er kurator og er med i foreningen, der driver udstillingsstedet NLHspace. Oplægget tager udgangspunkt i hendes specialeafhandling om dOCUMENTA (13).

A talk about the history of non-art and the avantgarde as rearguard

‘The most groundbreaking art of the 20th century is called avant-garde. But perhaps these pioneering artists were not so pioneering after all. The artistic avant-garde did not break with established genres and traditions so much as it systematically established genres and tradition. Much of what is considered “radical,” “innovative” and “original” about Duchamp and the artistic avant-garde was brought into existence by people who were not visual artists. They were rather what in the art world is known as ”non-artists,” such as journalists, designers, writers, commercial artists and satirists. What is new in the art world is often new only in the art world.’

Toke Lykkeberg is a freelance curator and art critic.