tendentious | neo-semantics

The reading score for the presentation at rile*books on Sunday June 23, an A to Z of Indexing / Organising / Cataloguing BFTK for Two Voices.

The text by Hiller navigates the boundaries between art, anthropology and psychoanalysis in relation to her installation at the Freud Museum in 1994 titled At the Freud Museum. Accompanying images included throughout from Book Works UK archive, the commissioner of the artwork and talks that this text is edited from.

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

The first standalone title on the BFTK imprint, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ pulls together selected writings by Ron Hunt across his varied career as a writer, librarian, curator, critic and self described ‘lapsed anarchist’. Structured as a ‘biographic bibliography’ supplemented with annotations and contextual notes, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ combines commissioned writing and previously unpublished texts that range from exhibition catalogue essays and détourned Q&As, to A–Z indexes and cherry-picked readers. Writings reproduced in full include:

Francis Picabia: Introduction (1964)
Yves Klein: A Mythopoeic of the Plurisignative (1967)
The Arts in Our Time (1968)
We Are Revealing New Pages of Art in Anarchy’s New Dawns (1968)
Interview with Brigitte Bardot (1969) (preview)
Poetry must be made by all! / Transform the world! (1969)
An Interview with Pontus Hultén, Stockholm 1981 (1971)
For Factography! (1976)
Andreas Gursky (1999)
Kalf: A Late Perspective (2000)
Dreams of / Fears of …… Flying (2009)
Fourier / Breton / Cherries (2017)
Hélène Cixous or Waiting for Tears (2018)
Some Books of Barbara Bloom (2019)
A Very Brief Dictionary in the Vicinity of Situationism (2019)
‘Recovery’ / Is Recovery Possible (2020)
with photographs by Tom McCaughan
typeset in Janson Max Neue by Dinamo & Sam de Groot

224 pgs, 21 × 15 cm, Softcover

An exploration of the soundscape of coastal cities by the French-Lebanese artist.

Tarek Atoui's exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Waters' Witness, is based on the artist's ongoing project I/E, initiated in 2015, in which Atoui documents the human, ecological, historical and industrial realities of coastal cities such as Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut or Porto by means of sound recordings.
As an accompaniment and an extension of the exhibition, Mudam is publishing Waters' Witness #02, the third volume in a series initiated by the Serralves Museum dedicated to this ambitious and collaborative project, which seeks to explore the different ways in which sound can be experienced.

This publication includes an interview between Tarek Atoui and his long-time collaborator, artist and musician Éric La Casa; a visual contribution by photographer Alexandre Guirkinger; a rich iconography including views of the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg and an introduction by curators Sarah Beaumont and Joel Valabrega.

This book/catalogue is published on the occasion of the final event of Noa & Snow, a gentle experiment between the everyday and the event, at the Volkskundemuseum, Vienna.

Publication Concept Alix Eynaudi, Goda Budvytytė
Design Goda Budvytytė
Printing Robstolk, Amsterdam
Edition 600 copies
Proofreading Bella Marrin

ENVELOPE Pattern design based on the Lila Dress and its signature cording by An Breugelmans

LE VESTIAIRE
Costumes & objects An Breugelmans Tapestries & trompe-l’oeil Cécile Tonizzo Weaves Lydia McGlinchey Photos taken inside of Jason Dodge’ show Cut a Door in the Wolf at Macro Museum by Carlotta Pierleoni Photos in Vienna Samuel Feldhandler

THEM, PROTEXTIONS
Han-Gyeol Lie, Mette Edvartsen, Lydia McGlinchey, Clara Amaral, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Jennifer Lacey, Cécile Tonizzo, Sabina Holzer, Alice Chauchat, Jason Dodge, Joachim Hamou, Quim Pujol, Litó Walkey, Serena Lee, Mihret Kebede

PUBLIC MEDITATIONS
Anne Faucheret, Elizabeth Ward, Kirsty Bell, Tony Just, Sabina Holzer, Samuel Feldhandler, Frida Robles

TEXTURAGES Paula Caspão VIGNETTES Alix Eynaudi

Poster picture of Claire Lefèvre’s Grimoire/Giant Notebook/Bison Book Rasa Juškevičiūtė

INSTITUTE OF REST(S)
Alix Eynaudi, Paula Caspão, Quim Pujol
Back side A thread for Alix Eynaudi, woven as a table placement by Genė Janušauskaitė in 1936, out of the flax she had sawn and harvested herself. Photographed by Kristien Daem in 2022, after Aldona Malašauskienė revealed the placement to her son Raimundas.

The moral tale is a literary genre that was especially popular in Europe throughout the 18th century. As ways of being and doing were strongly tied to conventions assigned to social roles and genres, the rise of rationality and freethought, characteristic of this era, began re-organizing the so-called “natural order” of established patterns. Through fables and satires, moral tales expressed sharp critical views on the social relationships and hierarchies of the time, often using radical irony and cruelty, as in the tales of Jonathan Swift or of the Marquis de Sade, to decipher the untold rules at play in this early age of capitalism.

The works of the three artists invited to these Three Moral Tales are not that of moralists, but somehow assume a kind of moral dimension, as they present themselves as critical allegories. Joëlle de La Casinière, Ana Jotta and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven make use of fables and sometimes caricatures to observe and criticize the cruelty of human relationships. The “moral tales” narrated by these three artists scrutinize representations of evil, and mock hierarchies, traditions and social order. By doing so, they also follow up on a certain spirit of the iconoclastic avant-gardes of the early 20th century.

French artist Joëlle de la Casinière, Portuguese Ana Jotta and Flemish Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven have in common to pay no fealty to trends of contemporary art. Moreover, they fought unwaveringly throughout their respective careers the need to see their work being given an “official line”. Instead, they stood aside, went underground or remained indifferent to the twists and turns of the art market and institutions. They sometimes created surrogate characters, hid, or playfully modified their names to react to the branding of identity in the artworld, and to the imposed marginalization that they had to cope with as women artists, as did artists living in peripheral geographies. In a way, paradoxically, being marginalized encouraged a calculated versatility of media and styles, and the invention of an idiosyncratic vocabulary, while total freedom remained their one and only rule.

In 2015, artist Patty Chang (1972) followed the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the longest aqueduct in the world, which brings water from southern to northern China. While walking, she collected her urine in plastic bottles, drinking their contents before refilling them, in turn drawing a connection between the large-scale infrastructural attempt to control the flow of water and the uncontrollable flows of her own body. Once back in Boston, Chang began making a series of portable urinary devices from discarded plastic bottles, which were then hand-blown in New York by glass-blower Amy Lemaire. In fashioning them from discarded plastic and rendering them permanent in glass, the devices channel Chang’s unfolding ruminations on water as a point of connection between geopolitics, human excess and waste. Designed by Sabo day, this indexical publication is the first book dedicated to depicting the series of sixty-four sculptures in its entirety. It was published on the occasion of Patty Chang’s exhibition at A Tale of A Tub, which ran from September 14–November 3, 2024.