It’s been twenty years—a long wait that is—since the first collection of poems by Durham. Arguably, the wait makes the prize even more rewarding. This neat, white book groups poems spanning from 1966 to 2012, that “do not go together,” except for the arresting wisdom which underscores every line, every word, (and every space between the lines of words, tellingly), in preparation for the revelation encapsulated in every one of them.

The system of values, as much as the senses that seem to govern Durham’s reaction to the events is witty, dry, hypersensitive, surreal, and ready to call memory to the present. Some poems are drenched in pain, others are slightly upsetting; striking like a hiccup does when you get scared, or maybe shocked. (Or perhaps overwhelmed? or simply surprised?) Like having broccoli when it’s not the season (“One of the Worst Things That Ever Happened To Me”).

(Stefano Cernuschi)

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“Poems That Do Not Go Together” by Jimmie Durham

Wiens Verlag and Edition Hansjörg Mayer, Berlin, London 2012

124 pages, € 18

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This unprecedented anthology delivers what it says on the cover: writings by Morgan Fisher. All of them. The Los Angeles filmmaker and painter has always taken the greatest care in using language to frame his work—adhering in this sense to the conceptual tradition that the purpose of art practice, not to mention its outcome—the artwork, is in some need of clarification. The norms and the lexicon usually deemed intrinsic to the medium of painting and of moving image, are at the core of Fisher’s interest. Language is then the accompanying medium to question such norms. For instance: there are (to quote a press release from a 2007 show—written by Fisher, that goes without saying) “unspoken assumptions that limit paintings. These unspoken assumptions produced what I have called painting as usual […] I want […] to call them into questions and move painting beyond them. I want to make paintings that are not submissive.”

It takes one single paragraph to understand that Fisher values language a very great deal—and that he chooses words as precisely as he can.
If something isn’t clear enough (that is, clearly explained on the part of the writer), he painstakingly hones it: “When I say in the first note that the film is standard gauge on substandard, I am only repeating terms that were once in use. There was a time when 16mm film was called substandard. The prefix «sub» is logical because 16 is beyond 35. But when is added to «standard» it creates a word that even if correct in the narrow sense carries with it the whiff of the pejorative that is echoed in what Hollywood editors used to call 16mm film: spaghetti. So in the view of Hollywood, 16mm wasn’t just below, it was also beneath.” (Writing about his film Standard Gauge). Accurate reading. (Stefano Cernuschi)

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Morgan Fisher: Writings
Sabine Folie and Susanne Titz, eds.
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2012
280 pages, € 34

For roughly three months, a fantastic, trashy pyramid stood —at first, firmly, with the passing days, ever more precariously—in the middle of the big white cube that is the main gallery of the Kunst Werke in Berlin. The monument was composed of cartons of beer. If in the age of UNESCO, exporting monuments is not politically correct anymore (although there are still sporadic pleas in this sense, to save them, in the eyes of the candidate host, and it’s still sophisticated taste to buy old private homes and displace them across continents), Cyprien Gaillard erected a classic monument adopting a commodity which could be mistaken for local but was actually imported from Turkey—with no coincidence, the country that has given the Pergamon Museum its name and its most treasured prize. The structure, made of 72,000 bottles of beer, lived an intense life. Ransacked by visitors, it hopefully comforted some and presumably entertained many.
The intimidating monument, the fulcrum of an art exhibition, morphed into a welcoming and benign stage, and was appropriated as a social playground, with few restraints. “I want to blur the hierarchy between the ruins, somehow all ruins should be equal,” says the artist in an interview—and this book celebrates high and low ruins, equally. (Stefano Cernuschi)

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Cyprien Gaillard: The Recovery of Discovery
Susanne Pfeiffer, ed.
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2012
84 pages, € 22

It takes a lot of guts to ask if you are loved. A form of blackmail can be triggered in your interlocutor. (Maybe, that’s the reason for and against it). It is all the more bold to make a long, big work about this precise inquiry. Hence, such work must necessarily be personal. Lutz Bacher has been interviewing friends and collaborators. When they chat, the big question is never spelled out, rather, it looms over their winding conversations, in which the ‘me’ to be loved turns out to be more “what I do” and, even more, “how I do it.” It’s almost too much to handle, because it’s really confidential, unpolished, and real. This artist book, which collects all the transcripts of those meandering interviews, in a way goes even further than the original material. There are no edits, (or they are made so artfully messy that you don’t notice) so the reading is very fragmented; it feels like being in the backseat of a car driving fast, and you can’t hear every word that is spoken between the front seats, and mostly you can’t see the faces, but it’s kind of thrilling and also rewarding to be close enough to grasp what they say. It’s a long road trip. (Stefano Cernuschi)

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Lutz Bacher: Do You Love Me?
Lutz Bacher et al.
Primary Information, New York 2012
440 pages, $ 30

Mousse is happy to announce the launch of Matthew Brannon’s monograph Hyena’s Are… at Casey Kaplan, New York, on Saturday, December 10.

Coinciding with his first solo exhibition with the gallery, “Gentleman’s Relish”, this compact volume, published by Mousse, traverses Brannon’s entire oeuvre and includes an intricate and illuminating essay by Jan Tumlir. Accompanied by a vast selection of image reproductions of artworks and references, Tumlir’s chapters provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of Brannon’s work and practice to date.

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Dear Friends,

Please join us at the 2011 New York Art Book Fair

September 30 – October 2, 2011

Preview: Thursday, Sept. 29, 6–9 p.m.

You will find us at 3rd floor, T10.

We will be presenting brand new and recent publications, and the new issue of Mousse.

We very much look forward to meeting you at the P.S.1!

This year’s edition of abc art berlin contemporary is themed about painting and takes place in Berlin from September 7th to the 11th. The show will feature some 130 artists represented by 125 international galleries. Conceived as a showcase of contemporary painting, the exhibition will also feature installations, works on paper, video, photography and sculpture which deal thematically with painting as a medium.

For this year’s edition Mousse Publishing has published the abc exhibition catalogue distributed as of 7 September and on sale at the fair or directly through moussepublishing.com

Designed with a hybrid format – a cross between a magazine, essay and novel – the abc catalogue will be a valuable guide for visitors but also an instrument to find and collect information for those who want to investigate painting and its influence on today’s world.

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The publication for the LUMA Award 2011, designed with Liam Gillick, documents the work of fifteen artists, all working with the image and the archive, selected by Tom Eccles, Liam Gillick, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno, and Beatrix Ruf.

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Click on the image to go to the website

Under the title “Published by De Vleeshal”, the London-based collective Åbäke creates a dialogue between various locations of books in the town of Middelburg (Netherlands). Apart from De Vleeshal, the exhibition sites are the Province of Zeeland library, the bookshop De Drvkkery and the second-hand bookshop De Boekenbeurs. Åbäke investigates the social dynamics of books – the places where they can be borrowed, purchased, repurchased or looked at, as well as the stories contained in them and the links they create between people. The aim is to discover the collective dimension of books, at the threshold between the private and public spheres.

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moussepublishing.com

What does it mean to be both a painter and a sculptor in their most traditional guises, as well as an artist tied to transcribing reality at a moment in which the production and distribution of images has become so immediate and so intimately bound up with the way we live through our daily lives?
From the essay by Andrew Bonacina

The book, designed in close collaboration with the artist, is published to coincide with Daniel Sinsel’s first solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London, the first in a public institution. Produced by Mousse in association with Sadie Coles HQ, London, and with support from The Breeder, Athens, Office Baroque, Antwerp, and Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin.

Book Launch Tuesday 1 March, 7 pm
Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of International Modern Art at Tate Modern, leads a tour of the exhibition.
This event is followed by a reception in the studio to celebrate the launch of the new monograph.

Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road
London E3 5QZ

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Jan Verwoert: Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want
Vanessa Ohlraun, ed.

Rotterdam’s Piet Zwart Institute inaugurates a series of anthologies devoted to artists, writers and critics that have animated its MFA program over the years. The first is critic and writer Jan Verwoert, whose dense and rather eclectic texts, assembled here, address various topics and different artists, and give the chance to go through them as if they were lessons from the toughest professor of your favorite course for you to study and, hopefully, enjoy. Indeed, sometimes it’s nice to pretend to go back to school. (Stefano Cernuschi)

Sternberg Press, Berlin
312 p. • hardcover • English

Mousse is delighted to invite you to the launch of Bored at the Museum, Bored at the Studio on Thursday, February 10, 2011, from 7.30 pm, at Motto Zürich. Published for the “Post Parallelism” exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, opening in February 2011, Bored at the Museum, Bored at the Studio is a two-way book in which Navid Nuur has collected a hundred images found on the Internet, depicting the “creative boredom” that often seizes visitors to traditional museum spaces.

Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hall, Solveig Østebø, eds.

Ok, what else were we really expecting? Isn’t it the least surprising topic of all? Notwithstanding any dismissive objections, the most convincing being to me that we are overfed up with biennials, it’s time to take the biennial as a cultural object, without profiting from the mania generated by such a phenomenon nor being excited and complacent in front of something so shockingly successful (see at page 91: “The term biennial is not protected by copyright and consequently is open to abuse,” René Bloc). It’s time then to take it seriously, to acknowledge its role and question its aims, because there is a lot worth investigating, for sure. It’s just too big of a thing to keep it chatty as I’m doing know. So if you feel the need to be opinionated about it, brace yourself and–if you can–swallow this dictionary-sized, rewarding anthology. (Stefano Cernuschi)

Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern
512 p. • softcover • English
www.hatjecantz.de

Issue #1

There must be a reason why Italians publish so many magazines… Perhaps a collateral effect off to the chronic stasis that numbs Italy, a land where new things have been happening so slowly, if at all, for so long that people maybe had more time to think and write about them. Any how, this is the latest addition to the ever flourishing architectural editorial production, one boasting a kind of bizarre declaration of independence as editor’s letter, and a very defined topic in what they call “innocent architecture,” a concept I’m still trying to grasp exactly. Matter-of-fact, it’s a seriously interesting and smartly designed collection of essays and articles about obscure but significant projects, some of them never built, many of them product of collaborative practices, all of them fascinating rediscoveries.

(Stefano Cernuschi)

San Rocco, Venice
152 p. • softcover • English
www.sanrocco.info

From December 18, we will present our latest titles at at Fahrenheit 39, a project focused on those fields of the art that use the book as a media. The self-produced publications, which are often limited editions and hard to find, give birth to new points of view on publishing, which reflects a will of re-think the book as an object and its production. Looking at this phenomenon, Fahrenheit 39 tries to make up our mind on the current Italian condition, inviting the public to explore and reflect on those publications.

Featuring – Erica Preli, Unità Di Crisi, Blisterzine, Archive Books, Automatic Books, Tankboys, Elena Xausa, Eleonora Marton, Emilio Macchia, Ryts Monet, Shs Publishing, Niccolò Mazzoni, Sabrina Campagna, Riccardo Lorusso, Blauerhase, Müge Yilmaz, Futuroscopio, Documentary Platform, Melissa Destino, Jonathan Pierini, Michela Povoleri, Aut, Annina Galmozzi, Osservatorio Fotografico, Stefano Faoro, Zizi Collective, Teiera, Irene Bacchi, Daniela Venturini, Silvio Lorusso, Aedizioni, Filippo Nostri, Aurora Biancardi, Maria Rosaria Di Gregorio, Veronica Viotti, Cesuralab, Claudia Polizzi, Luigi Amato, Umberto Mischi, Mauro Bubbico, Joseph Miceli, Studio Temp, Mousse Publishing, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Stefano Terigi, Tommaso Garner, Leonardo Sonnoli, Giuliana Racco, Luciano Bobba, Istituto Bauer Milano, 3/3.