One Thousand Books talks
April 6 - 13, 2014
David Senior
Erik Kessels
Paul Kooiker
Thomas Hvid Kromann
Joachim Schmid
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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.
