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Artists & Exhibition Catalogues
On the occasion of the exhibition Maurizio Nannucci / This sense of openness, on view at La Centrale Nuvola Lavazza from 1 to 3 November, 2019, Maurizio Nannucci expands on his work in conversation with Pier Giovanni Castagnoli and the curator of the exhibition curator Elena Volpato. The exhibition brings together 150 works – editions, multiples and ephemera created by Nannucci between 1967 and 2019. They highlight the richness of his artistic practice, and the multiplicity of expressive means among which he has moved with extreme freedom in a continuous crossing of different mediums, combining art with his musical, literary and scientific interests.
The conversation is also an opportunity to present the book Maurizio Nannucci / This sense of openness / Correspondence, edited by Elena Volpato and published by FLAT & Zona Archives. A large selection of unpublished materials is printed in the volume: letters, postcards and telegrams received by the artist from the 1960s until today. These rare and precious materials illustrate a network of international relations within the art world as well as some of the most important ideas and projects of the last decades through Nannucci’s exchanges with artists such as Ed Ruscha, John Cage, John Baldessari, Giulio Paolini Alighiero Boetti, Hans Peter Feldmann, Eugen Gomringer, Yoko Ono, John Giorno, Ben Vautier, Dieter Roth, Maurizio Mochetti, Richard Long, Franco Vaccari, Ulises Carrión, Augusto de Campos, Robert Filliou, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sol LeWitt, James Lee Byars, Lawrence Weiner, John Armleder, AA Bronson, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Maurizio Cattelan and Jonathan Monk.
Announcement of the project winner of the Premio FLAT – Fondazione Arte CRT, selected among FLAT 2019 exhibitors’ proposals, produced thanks to the support of Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT.
Abbott Miller has evolved a practice that merges design, art direction, writing, and curating in exhibitions and publications that explore art, architecture, performance, fashion and design. Before joining the New York office of Pentagram as a partner in 1999, he founded Design/Writing/Research, a multidisciplinary studio that pioneered the concept of the designer as author. Miller will reflect on the spatial and temporal qualities of books as a distinct mode of representation, one with a history rooted in visual books and modernist conceptions of the relationship between books and film. In projects with contemporary artists and architects such as Hans Haacke, Diller + Scofidio, Allora & Calzadilla, Matthew Barney, Yoko Ono, and William Kentridge, he has sought to make books that capture the sensory and conceptual intelligence of the work that is being documented. Miller sees design as a critical tool that not only organizes content but, also generates knowledge. According to Miller, “design thinking dissolves the lines between form and content, and between two and third dimensions”* (and this is true even more so for four-dimensions, i.e. time-based art). Expanding on the intentions of some of these projects, and the role of curators, designers, and publishers, Miller will show how it is possible to create an interpretive space that translates and transcribes the work from the space of the gallery or museum to the page.
* Abbott Miller – Design and Content (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014), 17.
Publishing Manifestos: An International Anthology From Artists and Writers (Berlin: Miss Read; Cambridge,MA/London: The MIT Press, 2019) features 75 key texts of critical engagement with publishing from protagonists of the field.
Independent publishing, art publishing, publishing as artistic practice, publishing counterculture, and zine, DIY and POD scenes have proliferated over the last two decades. So too have art book fairs, an increasingly important venue—or even medium—for art. According to Pichler, art publishing experienced a similar boom in the 1960s and 1970s in response to the linguistic turn in the humanities. Today, art publishing is confronted by the internet and the avalanche of texts and images it enables. The printed book offers artists both visibility and tangibility. In Publishing Manifestos, Michalis Pichler gathers texts by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers, zinesters, and activists to explore this rapidly expanding terrain for art practice.
In his talk-cum-book presentation at FLAT Pichler will present the book focusing on themes of: alienation, “seriosity dummies,”* (how nice is to go for a) short walk through a historical arc of tension, (why) artist’s book is a problematic term, Materialzärtlichkeit (material tenderness, or, according to Pichler, “conscious orchestration and use of material, structural and social elements in the process of producing multiple books”*), as well as what he calls a “paradigmatic shift”* and (what one could call) the post-digital turn, plus (last but not least) art book fairs as public spheres.
Pichler will also present Publishing Publishing Manifestos (Seoul: Mediabus, 2019).
*Michalis Pichler, “Publishing Publishing Manifestos,” in Publishing Manifestos, ed. M. Pichler (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2019), 13, 15, 16.
This round table discussion investigates how some of the most interesting institutions that produce contemporary art exhibitions create catalogues that are neither mere exhibition documents nor means for promoting the institution of which they bear the seal, but are genuine instruments of knowledge made in collaboration with—or even by—the artists whose work they convey and which, in some cases, become artworks themselves.
Chiara Costa will focus on the Prada Foundation publications in whose production the protagonists of the exhibitions have been involved as well as publications that question the most suitable ways to document and translate artworks and their display from the third (or fourth ?!) dimension to the sequential pages of a book.
Herwig Kempinger, President of the Vienna Secession, will introduce how the oldest independent institution explicitly dedicated to contemporary art works on the publications that accompany its exhibitions. In fact, for some years the traditional exhibition catalogues have been replaced by artists’ books – volumes that, traveling from hand to hand, expand the range of action and the autonomy of art that the institution has defended since 1897.