Art Metropole

13 Jan. - 10 Feb. 2012

ARTFORUMx and L'Escalier and Sediment

Michael Maranda Exhibition, L'Escalier Magazine Edition Launch

Time

6-9 PM

Art Metropole in collaboration with Artexte present:

ARTFORUMx and L’Escalier Exhibition: Jan. 13 to Feb. 10, 2012 Opening: Fri. Jan. 13, 6-9pm Purchase ARTFORUMx works now. Purchase other works by Parasitic Ventures Press.

ARTFORUMx delineates the history of Artforum magazine in visual form, revealing the number and size of advertisements that have appeared within its pages from June 1962 to the Summer 2010 edition. Each issue has been catalogued and reproduced in a uniquely distilled form. Red rectangles represent magazine content and black areas stand in for advertisements. The books in this expansive set display visual echos of constructivist graphic experiments and minimalist visual art, while diagramming the base level of the economics of publishing, the ebb and flow of the market—art or otherwise—over the last 48 years.

The first part of the project consists of reprints of each issue of Artforum, scaled to 8.25 inch square (the original trim is 10.25). The cover identifies which issue is being reproduced, while the cover graphic illustrates the ratio of content to advertising found in each issue. Placed on a single-level bookshelf, these 483 issues measure approximately 22 feet (6.7 meters) long. As each spine incorporates the cover graph, a view of the front of the shelf provides a quick snapshot of the growth not only of the size of the magazine but the relative advertisement to content ratio as well. The volumes are intended to be read by viewers, and thus are accessible to hand, not presented behind glass.

The second part of the project consists of six hardcover summary volumes, each 7 inch square and ~100 pages long. The first five volumes present reductions of each issue to a grid of red and black squares on a single page, essentially a page plan of that issue. The sixth volume is an extended bar-chart of the contents of the magazines along with a representation of the contemporaneous rise and fall of the Dow Jones Composite Index.

The third part of the project is a foil of sorts, allowing for the introduction of the first two parts into an exhibition context. Here, 177 spreads of the March 2007 issue are rendered, perversely, in watercolour with the already introduced schema of red and black squares.

Michael Maranda would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council for funding various stages of the project.
The exhibition will travel on to Artexte, Montreal.

L’Escalier Magazine:

L’ESCALIER is an artist produced magazine based out of Montreal to be launched mid 2012.

The L’ESCALIER editors are comprised of Yuki Higashino (Vienna), Jeremy Stewart (Toronto) and Lorna Bauer, Jon Knowles, Vincent Bonin (Montréal).

All magazines must face the pragmatic issue of raising funds in order to publish their “Issue Zero”. L’ESCALIER is no exception and they have chosen to produce an artist edition for this purpose which will be inaugurated at Art Metropole concurrently with the opening of ARTFORUMx. While thematizing their first public offering, this artist edition carries with it the tenuous relationship between intellectual labor (eg: criticism and publicity) and other mechanisms that accrue value in the art field (eg: collecting and speculation).

Both the forthcoming magazine and the artist edition address questions of mediation and receivership. In the peripheries of the art world—such as a city like Montreal—a large amount of the knowledge that is gathered about art (irrespective of what counts as local manifestations of contemporary art) stems from reading texts and looking at photographs published in magazines or on the Internet. This second hand experience often results in fragmentary readings that are remote from the complex and layered context in which these distant works originated.

With that in mind the editors in Montréal have produced a review of the exhibition DIE FÃœNFTE SÄULE which was recently on view at the Vienna Secession. This text has been composed remotely in Montreal with scant documentation. The Vienna editor Yuki Higashino has corrected the text accordingly in the form of annotations, uncovering the gap between a first hand experience and its distant interpretation. The exhibition was not chosen at random however. The exhibit is based on a reflexive reappraisal of the institution’s physical architectural legacy—something privileging an experience ‘in the flesh’.

Through this gesture, the boundaries between fictionalizing and reporting are foregrounded: how much of the experience of a contextual artwork or exhibit (and more generally, an artistic context) depends on various forms of mediation: rumor, anecdote, gossip, documentation and secondary research?

The edition is composed of a diptych, pairing a graphically edited version of the review with an image that plays once more with miniaturization and shift of scale.

Sediment Workshop:

Also opening on January 13th from 7-10pm:

Sediment at G Gallery
January 13 – February 26, 2012

In the framework of Sediment, Art Metropole will host one instance of the multi-session workshop on Jean-Luc Nancy’s On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores. Details for this workshop, facilitated by John Paul Ricco, are available on
the G Gallery website.

Date: February 2nd

1. 
2. 
3.