OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!
https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/oei-79/
The 79th issue of the magazine OEI is a special issue published in the form of a spatial presentation at Moderna Museet during the period 17/2–1/4. It deals with editing/publishing/distributing – in an experimental montage of different editorial practices in an expanded field between art, poetry, film, documents, theory and historiography.
To publish a magazine is not only a matter of producing a physical artifact, but also, and to an ever increasing extent, a matter of intervening in and acting for an entire ecology of publishing, where the possibilities of new and unprejudiced readings incessantly have to be created in new constellations and contexts. OEI #79 emphasizes the material and technical production of a magazine, scanning and printing, editing processes and forms of distribution, but also the magazine as an aesthetic and playful investigative practice, and the forms of social life made possible by editorial assemblages and encounters between people and groups from various fields and disciplines.
OEI #79 includes some hundred participants from different generations and geographical horizons in a multi-medial and multi-temporal montage distributed in clusters and sequences over walls, tables, shelves and floor. The challenge is to edit in three and – sometimes – four dimensions. The editorial enunciation circulates between magazines and books, sound-pieces and video-works, projections and displays in exhibition-cases, and aims to raise questions about visualization, reading, attention and criticality, distribution and the infrastructure of publishing. This is realized by means of a thematization of shifting speeds of reading and viewing, a montage between the readable and the visible, between text and image.
A number of important points of gravity in OEI #79 are constituted by inventive and continuously generative, but far too unheeded publishing projects such as Art Distribution, Wedgepress & Cheese, After Hand and Kulturmagasinet Vargen. The artist Lars Fredrikson’s works on books by the poet Claude Royet-Journoud accentuate the violent and yet fragile character of reading, whereas the typographer Gerold Propper, on the contrary, seeks a utopian readability by means of experiments with ”typograms” and book design. A publication that in an exemplary way carries several forms of display is Berndt Petterson’s I Påsen(Cavefors 1965). It is simultaneously an artist’s book, a booklet of visual poetry, an exhibition and a concrete form of distribution: the bag!
In parallel to such ’historical’ examples, OEI #79 also encompasses a long series of contemporary artistic and poetic practices of editing and publishing, ranging from the works by Åse Eg Jørgensen on paper and format to Tan Lin’s ambient investigations of the negotiations of the book and the act of publishing in digital environments and systems; from Stina Persson’s photocopied night sky and Marco Giovenale’s ”asemic writing” (a writing where the semantic meaning is receding behind the visual dimension) to Ana Luiza Dias Batista’s digital paper and franck leibovici’s mapping of the magazines by Claude Royet-Journoud.
Editorial practice, Nils Olsson writes in an essay in OEI #79, is the name of proceedings that today intervene in and traverse all fields of culture, all situations and functions. The promise of the editorial practice consists in its ”productive reluctance to take the prevailing differentiations between competences and media for granted”. Editorial practice operates ”on the very spot where general, specific, technical, ideological, historical and aesthetical conditions of articulation converge – which is also the only point from where it is practically possible to transform these conditions”. To edit is to work with what exists, but at the same time to make this into something more. Edit/publish/distribute!
As a part of OEI #79, we are organizing a series of conversations, presentations and lectures related to editing and publishing during five Friday evenings between February 23 and March 23. Communities of publishers, artists, poets and philosophers from Denmark, France, Portugal and Sweden will then join us at Moderna Museet.
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http://oei.nu/w/1.html
Friday 16 Feb. at 18–23
Moderna Museet Stockholm 17/2 – 1/4
PROGRAM: Continue reading
