February’s Reading: “Fish Story” by Allan Sekula
Wednesday February 29 2012
VIVO Media Arts (1965 Main Street), Vancouver BC
7pm Salon Free
Facilitated by Andrew Witt

American artist and writer Allan Sekula spent seven years photographing harbors and port cities around the world. Starting out in Los Angeles and San Diego, he traveled as far as Korea, Scotland, and Poland, photographing the prosperity, poverty, and political powers that continue to play out in and between major port cities across the world. In fix his lens on the shipping industry, Sekula documents concrete manifestations of Neoliberal capital flow—providing an opportunity to pin down an object that is all too often ethereal in nature. Fish Story (1995) is the result of these researches. It exists as a book with more than 900 color photographs, interspersed with meandering aphorisms about the material history of shipping and the contemporary working conditions of the people to whom it is bound—on land and at sea. This work has also been mounted as an exhibition, and its ‘iteration’ as an object is not entirely fixed. We will remount a reading of Sekula’s writing from the book, accompanied by some of its attendant images, as a group with a mind to honour this imperative to experiment.

“Allan Sekula is one of the most thoughtful historians, critics and practitioners of photography working today. For more than three decades his images and writings have shifted the terms on which the medium is understood and has influenced a generation of artists and scholars. Whether articulating a semiotics of the photograph in his classic study Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983 (1984) or investigating maritime space in the books and exhibitions comprising Fish Story (2002), Sekula is always in motion. His extensive travels to many of the world’s seaports are matched only by his enlightening journeys across history, politics and aesthetics that through their consummate intelligence transform and connect domains usually considered separate. Thus it is only fitting that in recent years Sekula has begun to make moving images alongside his still photographs, producing an investigation of the Tokyo fish market Tsukiji (2001) and The Lottery of the Sea, a densely woven work-in-progress on globalization and its political and ecological discontents. The courage and outspokenness of his interventions lend them an integrity that recalls the work of Hans Haacke and Krzysztof Wodiczko.” (Edward Dimendberg)

This salon is facilitated by Andrew Witt, who writes for the Mainlander  and is a collaborator with Coupe L’état. This salon extends informally out of the Wednesday Night School project, which has been running through the winter via the Audain Gallery.

No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’ Thought on Film series, conceived by Cheyanne Turions. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the more broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

The idea of a reading group isn’t new. No Reading nonetheless poses itself as an experimental learning and discussion space. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a slow space within which to retrace oursteps in the hopes of discovering individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. The strategieswe have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous art discussions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required. Those who wish to access the text in advance can find it at VIVO’s website.

The main Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (mMOCCA)* was founded mostly from wood and old nails in 2011 and exists as a slightly for profit, arms length agency in the City of Toronto. The mMOCCA is relocating all the time, it could be in your bedroom right now. In each new location the mMOCCA redefines the heart of North America’s most dynamic arts community. Our facility is modest in scale, impressive in design, and functions effectively as a nucleus of energies for cultural production and exchange.

The mandate of the mMOCCA is to exhibit, research, collect, and promote innovative art by Canadian and International artists whose work engage and address challenging issues and themes relevant to our times. mMOCCA is committed to providing a forum for emerging artists that show particular promise, and to establish artists whose works are considered to be ground-breaking or awesome.

From the 29 January until 17 March 2012, the Gendai Workstation will be sharing its site with the mMOCCA, whose programming includes a Silent Auction fundraiser developed in partnership with the Art History Graduate Student Association of York University (AHGSA), as well as an exhibition entitled FANDOM.

This co-habitation acts as witness to the interplay of each organization’s role in respect to their administrative functions and exhibition making methods. In this sense both organizations mutually activate each other’s domain in an attempt to demistify the by-products of their interaction.

Excerpts from Claire Bishop + Boris Groys’s Bring the Noise, Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube and Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator have been chosen by Braden Labonte, Director of the mMOCCA, and Yan Wu, Programming Director of the Gendai Workstation, in collaboration with the AHGSA, to be read aloud and discussed by participants at March’s No Reading After the Internet.

Participants are encouraged to attend the Silent Auction on Saturday, 03 March 2012, from 7pm-12am at the Gendai Workstation (1265 Bloor Street West).

The Art History Graduate Students Association is a student-run organization open to all members of the York University community. The AHGSA seeks to represent the interests of those in the graduate programme in Art History.

A satelliete of the Gendai Gallery, the Gendai Workstation focuses on experimental content and fosters research into models for public art galleries that, like the Gendai, operate from a basis of ethnic identity. With this extension, Gendai Workstation posits itself as an alternative research platform with an audience that consists of Toronto’s downtown art community and academic and other research-oriented institutions from different disciplines that share similar concerns.

No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Special thanks to the Gendai Workstation for their support of this salon.

* It should also be noted that mMOCCA (main Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art) bears absolutely no relationship to the MOCCA (Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art), another fine institution located in the city of Toronto.

Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories as selected by Barbara Sternberg

Barbara Sternberg in attendance

In conjunction with Pleasure Dome’s world premiere presentation of Barbara Sternberg’s in the nature of things (2011) a selection of excerpts from Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories have been selected by Sternberg to be read aloud and discussed by participants.

The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest–sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious–and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it. But, unexpected moments, intensified fragments, catch us unawares: the present confronts us. in the nature of things continues Sternberg’s examination of the oppositions played out dialectically and enmeshed in our experience of living: culture/nature, experience/representation, belonging/destroying, communal/individual, innocence/danger, young/old, living/dying. This is an autumnal film–twilight–a film of old age. Just as the Forest is a transitional space, so Old Age is a transitional time.

Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator is a darkly comic work. A series of parable-like anecdotes—some drawn from newspaper reports, some from conversation, some from hearsay—this satire is both subtle and acerbic. What initially appear to be quaint little stories inevitably indict the sterility and callousness of modern life, not just in urban centers but everywhere.

Participants are encouraged to attend Pleasure Dome’s screening of in the nature of things on Saturday, 18 February 2012, at 4pm at Jackman Hall (317 Dundas Street West).

Please note that the film will not be screened at the salon.

Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called “the most significant literary achievement since World War II,” is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.

Toronto filmmaker Barbara Sternberg has been making films since the mid-seventies. Her films have been screened widely across Canada as well as internationally at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, The Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Workshop in New York, and the Ontario Cinematheque, Toronto. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada. She has been a visiting artist at a number of Canadian universities and galleries including the University of Guelph, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Dunlop Art Gallery, as well as the Universite d’Avignon, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2011, Sternberg was made a Laureate of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Special thanks to Pleasure Dome for their support of this salon.

Image credit: Barbara Sternberg, in the nature of things, 16mm, 2011.

Readings inspired by Annie MacDonell’s “Originality and the Avant Garde (On Art and Repetition)”

Tuesday, 31 January 2011
Mercer Union (1286 Bloor Street West)
7 PM
Free

Annie MacDonell in attendance

In conjunction with Mercer Union’s exhibition of Annie MacDonell’s “Originality and the Avant Garde (On Art and Repetition),” a selection of texts will be read aloud and discussed with the artist within the context of her exhibition at the gallery.

The title of the show is not wholly unique. It borrows from the title of a 1981 Rosalind Krauss text, which questions the avant garde’s attachment tonotions of authenticity and its denial of its own foundation in processes of repetition. The terms of the production and reception of art have shifted since the writing of that text, through both the foregrounding of appropriation as a critical art practice and the rise of sampling at all levels of cultural production. Appropriation and repetition have become central to the way art and ideas circulate, and yet the cult of originality as described by Krauss still overwhelmingly defines our valuation of the contemporary in art. Through a series of doublings and transpositions, the exhibition investigates the potential of repetition as a model for generating meaning. Photographs, film, reflection, projection, the space of the studio and the space of the gallery are superimposed one upon the other in a proliferation of analogues that take for subject their own state of interconnection.

Selected texts will include Jorge Luis Borges’s “August 25, 1983.” In the story, Borges uses the device of the double to unusual effect: it is about the 71 year old Borges meeting the 83 year old writer just before his death by suicide.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of their familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the salon. No pre-reading or research is required.

Annie MacDonell is a visual artist whose practice includes film, photography, sculpture, installation and sound. Her work deals with exhausted ideas and images, and the conventions of display as they exist in relation to art and the space of the gallery. She earned a BFA from Ryerson’s School of Image Arts, in Toronto and an MFA from Le Fresnoy, in Tourcoing, France. She has shown work and screened films internationally. Currently, she teaches in the photography department at Ryerson University.

No Reading After the Internet (Toronto) is supported by the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto. Special thanks to Mercer Union for their support of this salon.

November’s Reading: Pierre Clastres, “The Duty to Speak” (1974)

Wednesday, 16 November 2011
7 PM
VIVO (1965 Main Street)
Free

Guest-Facilitated by Raymond Boisjoly

Keeping in proximity with the Imminent Future presentation, November’s edition of No Reading will be guest-facilitated by Raymond Boisjoly. We will be looking at Pierre Clastres’s “The Duty to Speak” drawn from Society Against the State. This short work is a meditation on the interrelations of speech and power. As he does throughout this collection of essays, Clastres shuttles between articulations of this relationship in cultures within and outside of State forms. Clastres’s view of primitive societies is broadly opposed to an evolutionary conception that holds that such formations are destined to grow into state forms. To this end, his work is preoccupied with the threshold that seperates hierarchy from horizontality and his look at societies without States is preoccupied with the means by which these formations preserve their condition.

Pierre Clastres was a French anthropologist and ethnographer. He conducted fieldwork with the Aché (Guayaki), Guarani, and Yanomami peoples of South America. Books such as Archaeology of Violence and Society Against the State, written in the 1970s, work to articulate the political positivities of these groups–taking in their relationships to violence, economics and social organization.

Raymond Boisjoly is an artist who lives and works in Vancouver. He has had a handful of opportunities to show work in the city, in the last few years, at spaces such as Lucky’s, the central branch of the public library, Access, and Republic. Much of this work seems to be engaged with the form, figure, situation, and functioning of language.

In collaboration with FUSE Magazine

Wednesday, 02 November 2011
7 PM
LIFT (1137 Dupont)
Free

Facilitated by Gina Badger and cheyanne turions

In collaboration with FUSE, November’s salon will feature readings from the magazine and its library of review materials, focusing on those relating to FUSE’s States of Postcoloniality series. Through group reading and discussion, we will consider the current “Occupy” movements in relation to colonial dynamics in Canada.

We will be reading the following texts aloud:

Shiri Pasternak’s “Occupy(ed) Canada: The political economy of Indigenous dispossession in Canada”

Helga Tawil-Souri’s “Occupy Wall Street to a global intifada?”

Harsha Walia’s “Letter to Occupy Together Movement”

JohnPaul Montano’s “An open letter to the Occupy Wall Street activists”

And watching a short clip of Tim Wise on the Rachel Maddow show.

FUSE is one of Canada’s foremost critical periodicals on art and culture. With a focus on visual and media art, and a strong emphasis on the diverse communities that make up the contemporary Canadian art world, FUSE examines emerging issues and debates from the perspectives of politically engaged cultural producers.

Gina Badger is an artist and writer working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation. Working iteratively and across media, her work is entangled in the wondrously post-natural and its environmental histories, and her favored research methods include listening, walking, eating and drinking. She has presented work internationally at celebrated venues, notably The Kitchen (NYC); LACMA (Los Angeles); Issue Project Room (NYC); and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has published in Scapegoat Journal, Public Journal, and Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices (YYZ). Currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel, Badger holds an M.S. in Visual Studies from MIT. A collaborator at heart, Gina is a member of the Montreal-based Artivistic Collective, and is currently the editorial director of FUSE.

Image credit: 06 April Movement tent, Tahrir Square, Cairo, 29 June 2011. Photograph by Mona Seif.

October’s Reading: “The Glorious Whitewasher” from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Wednesday October 26 2011
VIVO Media Arts (1965 Main Street), Vancouver BC
7pm Salon Free
Facilitated by the Lower Mainland Painting Co. 

“Why, ain’t that work?” asks Ben Rogers to Tom Sawyer in “The Great White-washer”, the second chapter of Mark Twain’s classic of children’s literature from 1876, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In this brief and iconic episode a fundamental question of the subjectivity of work and value is framed in the realm of punishment and pleasure as experienced by young boys in the rural America of the mid-19th Century. What is work worth and when does it become play? Twain depicts the transforming axis of artist and worker calling in to question our own assumptions as to what constitutes either of these identities. As Ranciere suggests, the Artist is “a worker who does two things at once” – work that is not work and work that is not art, where art making is “impossible” because of an “absence of time” and must be excluded from the commons. What conditions can emancipate both the Worker and the Artist from the tyranny of time which is not their own and labor which has no promised value?

Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) published dozens of novels, articles and essays as Mark Twain, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, its sequel the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Clemens worked as a typesetter, journalist, printer, river boat pilot and gold miner, but he received international renown as a writer and speaker. Known for his humour and brilliance, Clemens was outspoken in his relatively radical political views later in life promoting unions, abolition and emancipation for slaves, animal rights and anti-imperialist, pro-revolutionary ideals. Twain was born the day Hailey’s Comet passed Earth and, as he predicted, he died the day following its subsequent return.

The Lower Mainland Painting Co. (LMPC) is a professional independent painting co., conceptual artwork, and research initiative. Their work is a vehicle for knowledge production that engages in questions of publicness, object-hood, and economy by testing shifting forms of value and the modes of labour and negotiation around which art operates against more exhaustive constraints, and scales of aesthetic expression. They are currently seeking paid employment and commissions doing painting, carpentry, and art both internationally and in the Vancouver area.

No Reading After the Internet is a monthly opportunity to gather and read a text aloud in hopes that it might provoke theoretical illumination on particular art works, or the broader scape within which such work exists. This program departs from Cineworks’ Thought on Film series, conceived by cheyanne turions. Whilst still very interested in cinema, the focus of this incarnation is softened to accommodate the more broad (and ever expanding) scope of media art.

The idea of a reading group isn’t new. No Reading nonetheless poses itself as an experimental learning and discussion space. Simply put, we are suspicious of our own reading abilities, and the extent to which our readings are conversant with one another. No Reading means to offer a slow space within which to retrace our steps in the hopes of discovering individual and collective ways through the realms of language and interpretation. The strategies we have at our disposal are twofold: through the yoking of our discussion to a text; and inducing conversation, where possible, between text and specific, local, contemporaneous art discussions and happenings.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of his or her familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the gathering. No pre-reading or research is required. Those who wish to access the text in advance can contact alexander.d.muir@gmail.com

Wednesday, 28 September 2011
The Camera Bar (1028 Queen Street West)
7 PM
$ PWYC

Facilitated by Melanie O’Brian and cheyanne turions

As a special presentation of No Reading After the Internet, September will feature Anton Vidokle’s film New York Conversations. Following the screening, the audience is invited to stay and discuss topics raised in the film over drinks at the Camera Bar. This conversation will be facilitated by Melanie O’Brian, Curator & Head of Programs at the Power Plant.

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators and a free floating public. The talks, lunches and dinners were organized by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nico Dockx and Anton Vidokle in response to an invitation by Brussels-based art journal A Prior to be the subject of their new issue. Instead of commissioning essays or producing artwork to be printed in the journal, the artists decided to rethink the structure by which an art publication is produced and to attempt to do this discursively in a public setting.

The film is a subjective record of these conversations, which explored various topics ranging from questions concerning precarious and immaterial labor in the field of art, possibilities for non-alienated life and working conditions, the feasibility of artistic freedom, and possible means of reclaiming dignity in the work of art criticism, to more immediate questions concerning whether what was actually taking place throughout the course of the event was in fact an artwork. In the tradition of underground cinema, essay films and experimental language-based films from the conceptual era, New York Conversations insists upon a certain degree of participation from the audience—by way of critical reading—over passive spectatorship.

With: Francisca Benitez, Nico Dockx, Daniel Faust, Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Egon Hanfstingl, Jörg Heiser, Steven Kaplan, Shama Khana, Anders Kreuger, Miwon Kwon, Valerie Mannaerts, Sis Matthé, Hadley Nunes, Saul Ostrow, Marti Peran, Simon Rees, Els Roelandt, Dieter Roelstraete, Martha Rosler, Joe Scanlan, Maxwel Stephen, Monika Szewczyk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Andrea Wiarda, Louwrien Wijers and others.

Melanie O’Brian is currently the Curator & Head of Programs at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. From 2004-2010 she was the Director and Curator at Artspeak, an artist-run centre in Vancouver. She has also previously worked for the Vancouver Art Gallery as Assistant Curator and has taught at Emily Carr University. O’Brian received her MA in Art History at the University of Chicago, and her BA in Art History from Portland Oregon’s Reed College.

Anton Vidokle is currently based in New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited in shows such as the Venice Biennale, Lyon Biennial, Dakar Biennale, Lodz Biennale, and at Tate Modern, London. As founder of e-flux, he has produced projects such as Next Documenta Should Be Curated By An Artist, Do it, Utopia Station poster project, and organized An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, Martha Rosler Library and e-flux video rental (with Julieta Aranda). Vidokle initiated research into education as site for artistic practice as co-curator for Manifesta 6, which was canceled. In response to the cancellation, Vidokle and others set up an independent project in Berlin called Unitednationsplaza—a twelve-month “exhibition-as-school” involving more than a hundred artists, writers, philosophers and diverse audiences.

Featuring E. C. Large’s “The semantic discipline” 

Tuesday, 09 August 2011
Seoul Country Korean Restaurant (215 Banff Avenue), Banff AB
8 PM

As a project within the framework of Dexter Sinister’s From the Toolbox of a Serving Library summer residency at the Banff Centre, this iteration of No Reading After the Internet will feature E. C. Large’s “The semantic discipline.” Large’s review of Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny of Words was originally published in the New England Weekly in 1938, and was republished in Dot Dot Dot in 2010.

The core proposition of Chase’s work is “the deflation of all words and all statements the meaning of which cannot be established by reference to operations and events in the world of tangible things” and in reading to replace those words and statements with the word “blab.” The effect is to situate language in particular experiences of people, and to deflate the impossible universal claims of absolute statements. In Chase’s worldview, abstraction is permitted so long as it references experience and observation, and is not instrumentalized to cerebration nor fervour. But Large disagrees with Chase’s claim to the uselessness of semantic blanks in that they contribute to an accurate reading of a person’s character, revealing their relationship to the world through language. Or, as Large would put it: “Experience is slowly teaching me that all utterances are really meaningless except in reference to the persons who make them.” For this salon, participants will be encouraged to semantically translate their own writing, and others to judge what remains (or not) of the translator’s person is the detritus.

Participation in No Reading After the Internet is free and open to everyone, regardless of their familiarity with a text or its author. Texts will be handed out at the salon. No pre-reading or research is required.