Instalment at MoMA in Warsaw – programme
The Book Lovers
The Novel as an Art Form
Public programme
Saturday, 26 October 2013,
Auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
11.00 | Welcome
Natalia Zarzecka (Director of Cricoteka) and Sebastian Cichocki (Director of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw).
11.30 | Introduction
Presentation of the Book Lovers project by curators: David Maroto and Joanna Zielińska
12.00 | Lecture: In the Grey Darkness of a Mental Whirlwind
Jan Gondowicz – essayist and literary critic will open the programme with a lecture about concepts related to narratology. This will serve to lay the ground for further discussions by elucidating terms such as plot, fiction, characters and identification against the work of artists/novelists like Witkacy.
13.00 | Lecture: Learn to Read Differently
Simon Morris, the author of Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, will address strategies of appropriation and the conceptual approach to literature, along with the issue of authorship. These strategies are employed by many artists and can be interpreted from the vision of ‘uncreative writing’ (taking a lead from Kenneth Goldsmith’s book).
14.00–15.00 | Lunch break
15.00 | Performance: Espahor Ledet Ko Uluner!
Reading performance from Guy de Cointet‘s novel Espahor Ledet Ko Uluner! (Los Angeles, self-published, 1973). He wrote it under the pseudonym Qei No Mysxdod in an invented language. Courtesy of Air de Paris.
16.00 | Lecture: The column which, licked till the tongue bleeds, cures Jaundice (The Novel, after Roussel)
Mark von Schlegell’s lecture will unravel the historical and ideological origins of the literary genre known as the novel. The question is whether the lack of an obvious social function nowadays liberates the medium – and if this is a fact that artists can turn to their advantage.
17.00 | Reading performance: Foxgloves of Central Park
Public reading of a fragment of Yayoi Kusama’s novella from the trilogy The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street. Kusama is one of Japan’s most prominent contemporary artists and the author of twelve novels. Her text will be performed by Marta Ojrzyńska, wearing a costume design by Duet Bracia.
Sunday, 27 October 2013,
Auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
11.00 | Artist’s talk
English artist Lindsay Seers will present her novel and art project It Has To Be This Way. She will be presenting fragments of her novel and will reflect on how typical notions related to narratives such as fiction, identification and the narrative are being introduced into her art practice.
12.00 | Lecture performance: Being Nothing
Angus Cameron (academic) on behalf of Goldin+Senneby (Swedish artist duo) talks about their Headless project. The particular writing system employed by Goldin+Senneby, in which each chapter breeds an actual event that, in turn, gives way to a new chapter generates a particular overlapping between fact and fiction. This lecture performance will examine the paradoxical relationships between nothingness and being, absence and presence, facticity and fiction, both for their enduring cultural currency and because of what they can tell us about the experience of the artist novel.
13.00 | Interview: Art is a Haven, But Where’s the Crane to Unload?
Widely acclaimed writer and artist Tom McCarthy (author of Remainder) and writer Ingo Niermann (The Future of Art) will reflect on the unwritten book: what is not published, and also on what is in fact published: the mainstream literature and the possible crisis of the novel as a literary genre and the book as an object – and the role of the visual arts in this state of things.
14.00–15.00 | Lunch break
15.00 | Lecture: ‘Dear Reader’: The Novel’s Call to Perform
Barbara Browning’s talk will focus on the role of the reader as an active one: the act of reading as a performative act, which forces the artwork to acknowledge the other as subject, to include the reader in the creative process. The novel is thus defined as an intersubjective space, which gets distributed in the public domain through dispersion.
16.00 | Performance: Failed Comedy
Momus is a well-known experimental musician, artist and writer. Especially for the presentation in Warsaw, he will prepare a performance based on one of his latest novels, The Book of Jokes. The idea is simple: Momus appears as a stand-up comedian whose jokes fail; he “dies on stage”, as comedians put it. Paradoxically, however, the failure itself fails, for this estrangement is precisely what a traditional art performance requires.
17.00 | Conclusion: Curating Artist Novels
Chus Martínez is the author of The Malady of Writing, a project on artist writing at the MACBA in Barcelona. Her talk will lay out the ground rules for the discussion in the final part of the programme, devoted to the public dimension of the artist novel. The intention is to move away from the idea of the reader as a solitary individual and to define the artist novel as a form of public intervention. The process of reception goes beyond the exhibition space and is embedded in the spectator’s daily experience.
17.30 | Panel discussion: The Institutional Role
The programme will culminate in a panel discussion, including curators who are collaborating with The Book Lovers: Bart de Baere, Ann Demeester, Chus Martínez, Sebastian Cichocki. The topic under consideration will be the consequences of deeming the novel an art form in its own right. They will be seeking to answer the question of how to present a kind of art which, to a large extent, is based on narrative and which demands long-term engagement from the audience.
