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24/1/2012

Three Exhibitions

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

In Numbers
Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955

In Numbers is a survey exhibition of the often-overlooked genre of serial publications produced by artists around the world from 1955 to the present day at the Institute of Contemporary Arts from 25 January to 18 March 2012.

From the rise of the small press in the 1960s, followed by the correspondence art movement, where artists exchanged art by post, to the DIY zine culture in the 1980s and early 1990s, professional artists have always seized on the format of magazines and postcards as a site for a new kind of art production.

In Numbers is the first survey to define a neglected artform that is neither artists’ book nor ephemera, but is entirely its own unique object. The publications are by young artists operating at the peripheries of mainstream art cultures and established artists looking for an alternative to the marketplace. The publications are artworks, often idiosyncratic and produced in collaboration, and they do not feature news items, criticism, or reproductions of artworks.

Approximately 30 publications will be shown at the ICA in vitrines and on the walls, beginning with Wallace Berman’s Semina. The survey includes Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, a series of postcards featuring 100 Wellington boots in unusual places; Amokkoma by Klaus Baumgartner, Carston Höller and Johannes Lothar, each issue incorporating doctored elements of historic texts – The Origin of the Species and the diaries of Kafka and Che Guevara; KWY by Christo and others; Fluxus; Art-Language; Raymond Pettibon's Tripping Corpse; Maurizio Cattelan's Permanent Food; Dieter Roth’s Gesammette Werke; and Living and Loving by Aleksandra Mir with Polly Staple.

The diversity of the publications is reflected in the backgrounds of the producing artists and in the wide range of techniques, nationalities and media; the survey does not attempt to be exhaustive, but simply to define the genre’s contours and identify certain thematic threads.

In Numbers was previously shown at X-Initiative in New York, an experimental and temporary non-profit arts initiative that ran from March 2009 to February 2010. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955, edited by Philip Aarons and Andrew Roth (New York: PPP Editions, 2010). The book documents the history of over 60 publications and includes essays and interviews by experts, among them Victor Brand, Clive Phillpot, Nancy Princethal and William S Wilson.

In Numbers is presented with special thanks to Philip Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons.

Press information:
Jeanette Ward - Head of Press ICA tel 020 77661407 e-mail jeanette.ward@ica.org.uk

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In conjunction with In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 the ICA presents a survey of the publications by the Gaberbocchus Press, an avant garde publishing press founded by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in 1948.

The imaginative invention of the Themersons’ collaborations in experimental film throughout the 1930s reappeared when they were back together in London in the early 1940s, in the world of books. Franciszka (born 1907) and Stefan Themerson (born 1910) were married in 1930, and had already written and drawn a string of remarkable books for children in Warsaw throughout the 1930s. In 1948 they founded the Gaberbocchus Press, which over the next 30 years established itself as a leading avant-garde press in London, publishing some 60 titles which achieved a high standard of original book design (‘best lookers’ rather than ‘best sellers’, as Stefan once put it). Their dual ambition was to bring major modern continental works to a British audience, as well as contemporary writers and artists who found it difficult to publish work in a form they wanted (including themselves, of course).

They published first English editions of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, of Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, of Heine, Grabbe, Pol-Dives and Anatol Stern; of their friends Jankel Adler, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, Raymond Queneau, Henri Chopin, Cozette de Charmoy, Bertrand Russell, Stevie Smith, Ken Tynan, Oswell Blakeston, James Laughlin, C.H.Sisson, George Buchanan and David Miller. The range embraces artists/writers with predilections for wit, satire, whimsy; a concern for ethics; and an imaginative interest in language as form and content.

Their own work, whether independent or in collaborations such as in the making of their photograms and films, the production of books or individual works like the Semantic Divertissements (1946), reveals something of the same appetites. Beneath a sense of play and hilarity lies an abiding moral sense. We should recognise a stand for individual freedom in Stefan’s invention, at once comic and serious, of semantic poetry ─ in his debunking of poetic sentiment and cliché, as in his debunking of boundaries at large. To the same extent, we recognise in his memorable Huizinga lecture, The Chair of Decency (Leiden,1981), an appeal for our native biological principles of good to be preserved against the polluting tide of culture. Franciszka’s realisation of Jarry’s salutory monster UBU ROI, on the printed page, in the theatre and in her painting, advances essentially the same moral cause.

The exhibition precedes a special day of events dedicated to the Themersons on 18 February 2012

The ICA would like to thank the Themerson Archive for their support.

More informations:
http://www.themersonarchive.com

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Lis Rhodes
Dissonance and Disturbance

Since the 1970s, Lis Rhodes has been making radical and experimental films that challenge the viewer to reconsider film as a medium of communication and presentation of image, language, and sound. The exhibition, which takes its title from Lis Rhodes' text “Dissonance and Disturbance”, presents films that encompass performance, photography, composition, writing and political commentary.

Films from throughout Rhodes’ career will be presented at the ICA, from Dresden Dynamo (1972) and Light Reading (1978), to more recent works, such as the Hang on a Minute series (1985) A Cold Draft (1988), In the Kettle (2010) and Whitehall (2011).

Rhodes makes no clear differentiation between form and content, and immersive and emotional involvement of the audience is integral to the work. She includes fragmentary passages of typeset, handwriting, strips of film negatives, geometric shapes and documentary footage. Soundtracks fade in and out, leaving long passages in silence and others overlaid with a multiplicity of voices.

In Dresden Dynamo (1972), a film made without a camera, the physical marks made by Rhodes onto the celluloid stretch where the projector reads the optical soundtrack, resulting in sound drawings in which what is heard is seen and what is seen is heard. Light Reading (1978), has been described as a new direction for film, a technical and aesthetic tour de force of rapid fire editing, myriad techniques and a text which both manipulates and questions the structure of language and representation. Rhodes is presenting her most recent works In the Kettle (2010) and Whitehall (2011), together with A Cold Draft (1988) within a two screen installation for which she is creating a shared soundtrack.

Her films have continued to analyse complex social and political processes and challenge the ownership of the official historic narrative. The films include ruptures that impede the flow of reading, stumbling stones that alert the viewer to the constructing elements of image. Thematically the films deal with the assemblage of female identity, social injustices, oppression, surveillance, protest culture and the language of dissent; to quote Rhodes herself, “it is dangerous to step out of line, but lethal not to.”

Lis Rhodes has exhibited widely at film festivals over the last three decades but rarely within a gallery setting. A notable exception was in 2009, when she exhibited Light Music (1975) in the oil tanks at Tate Modern. This exhibition marks her wider recognition as a seminal artist within both the visual arts and film.

Rhodes was cinema programmer at the London Filmmakers' Co-op in the mid-1970s; a founder member of Circles: Women in Distribution; a member of cultural committees at the GLC and Arts Council England; and taught at the Royal College of Art and The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.

Selected Screenings: European Media Festival, Osnabrück; 2nd Seoul Experimental Film Festival; 43rd London International Film Festival; 41st New York Film Festival; WACK!; Art and the Feminst Revolution” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Washington, New York.

The exhibition of works by this pioneering and influential artist filmmaker will be shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, from 25 January to 25 March 2012.

Press information:
Johnny Gibson on 020 77661407 johnny.gibson@ica.org.uk

Image: Semina 4, 1959, [Scott Street], San Francisco

For all press-related enquiries about the ICA, please contact:
Naomi Crowther Tel: 020 77661407 Email: naomi.crowther@ica.org.uk

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall - London
Hours: wed-sat: 12 noon – 7pm, except Thursday 12noon – 9pm.
Free admission

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