P!

Permutation 03.4: Re-Mix
Semir Alschausky, Thomas Brinkmann, Katarina Burin, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Oliver Laric
June 23 – July 26, 2013

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 23, 7:02 – 10:00pm
with special performance by Thomas Brinkmann, 8:00pm

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The final exhibition of P!’s six-month cycle on copying revives recent histories through spatial fiction and wild expropriation. Like musicians who simultaneously “cover” and claim a favorite song as their own, the works in Permutation 03.4 rewrite the linearity of succession and influence.

Techno-conceptualist Thomas Brinkmann reengineers the very instrument on which records are performed. Presented at Documenta X in 1997, his double-armed turntable stretches, syncopates, and contorts the playback of any track — effortlessly yielding albums that remix and elude their original source. In contrast, Semir Alschausky exhibits a 7 ½ foot wide “copy” of Paolo Veronese’s 1563 painting, The Wedding at Cana. Painstakingly rendered in a circular line pattern, Alschausky’s drawing challenges the amnesiac rhythms of cultural reference through its pen-on-paper hatchmarks and obsessive retracings. The impulse to resurrect and reimagine the past is also ingrained in Katarina Burin, who displays materials related to the archival publications of a little-known Czech architect, Petra Andrejova-Molnár. Within the historicized narrative of Modernist architecture, these unlikely treasures question the curated canon as a “collective” memory.

Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau of Fake Industries Architectural Agonism examine myths of autonomy through their reactivated structures. In “Night Curtain by Rey Akdogan Edited,” an original installation at P!, they “elaborate the dispersed kind of Situationist Post Minimalism” that is apparent in their recent architectural projects. Their “interest in the specificities of light […] result[s] in the gallery shifting its hours” to the evenings, and also means that a system of periodically dimmed lighting units creates “an almost cinematic dance of shadows on the walls.” The final piece in the exhibition is a reprise of Oliver Laric’s video essay Versions, which first appeared at P! in March 2013 and is currently on view in the exhibition A Diferent Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial. Using Laric’s work as a basis, The Julliard School’s Center for Innovation in the Arts has created a multimedia performance version of the video that — overwriting its non-definitive predecessor — is presented at P! as a new work. Undermining inscribed architectures and black-and-white narratives, Permutation 03.4 proposes the copy as a mere historical fragment: a critical moment of repetition and repression.

With generous support from Goethe-Institut New York
Special thanks to Dirk Daehmlow

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Related Event and Special Schedule

Saturday, June 22, 6:00pm
Thomas Brinkmann in conversation with Manuel Cirauqui
Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building, 5 East 3rd St, NYC 10003
Techno-conceptualist Thomas Brinkmann and writer-curator Manuel Cirauqui conduct a conversation considering sampling as reanimation. Reanimation, the uncanny action of bringing back to life a dead body, pervades the early history of sound recording, evoking pre-Darwinian phantasms of scientific knowledge and method. Presented by ISSUE Project Room and Goethe-Institut New York.
Complete event information

Special Opening Hours
For the duration of Permutation 03.4, the opening hours of P! shift according to a schedule by Fake Industries Architectural Agonsim. Please see daily schedule, or contact info@p-exclamation.org to make a special appointment.

Sunday, June 23, 2013      7.02 – 10.00pm
Tuesday, June 25, 2013     6:59 – 10:00pm
Wednesday, June 26, 2013   6:57 – 10:00pm
Thursday, June 27, 2013    6:55 – 10:00pm
Friday, June 28, 2013      6:54 – 10:00pm
Tuesday, July 2, 2013      6:51 – 10:00pm
Wednesday, July 3, 2013    6:47 – 10:00pm
Thursday, July 4, 2013     6:45 – 10:00pm
Friday, July 5, 2013       6:44 – 10:00pm
Tuesday, July 9, 2013      6:37 – 10:00pm
Wednesday, July 10, 2013   6:35 – 10:00pm
Thursday, July 11, 2013    6:34 – 10:00pm
Friday, July 12, 2013      6:32 – 10:00pm
Tuesday, July 16, 2013     6:25 – 10:00pm
Wednesday, July 17, 2013   6:24 – 10:00pm
Thursday, July 18, 2013    6:22 – 10:00pm
Friday, July 19, 2013      6:21 – 10:00pm
Tuesday, July 23, 2013     6:15 – 10:00pm
Wednesday, July 24, 2013   6:13 – 10:00pm
Thursday, July 25, 2013    6:12 – 10:00pm
Friday, July 26, 2013      6:10 – 10:00pm

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Biographies

Semir Alschausky lives and works in Berlin. He has exhibited at NGBK, Galerie Parterre, and Galerie NEU in Berlin, and has received past DAAD grants to work in New York. Alschausky is a 2012 recipient of the “Arbeitsstipendium Bildende Kunst des Landes Berlin.” 

Thomas Brinkmann is an acclaimed conceptual musician and artist based in Cologne, Germany. He began sampling and experimenting with carved-groove records in the 1980s and studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Using a custom-engineered, two-arm turntable, Brinkmann constructed full-length “variations” of techno albums by Mike Ink and Richie Hawtin, which were presented at Documenta X, Kassel, in 1997. He is also known for Klick — a series of percussive dance music performances, begun in 2000, in which he cuts and scratches the surfaces of vinyl LPs. Brinkmann has exhibited and performed at venues including PS1; Galerie Nourbakhsch; Open Space, Art Cologne; and Kunstraum Düsseldorf. 

Katarina Burin’s work is influenced by the documentation and circulation of historical architecture and design. Pieces from her “PA” project have been presented in solo exhibitions at Ratio 3 Gallery in San Francisco and Galerie M29 in Cologne. Previous group and solo exhibitions include Andreas Grimm Galerie, New York / Munich; Country Club, Cincinnati; Form/Content, London; White Columns; and Participant Inc. She recently received the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s 2013 James and Audrey Foster Prize.

Fake Industries Architectural Agonism is an architectural office of diffuse boundaries and questionable taste that explores the power of replicas in the double sense denoted in romance languages—both as literal copies of existing works and as agonistic responses to previous statements—for the advancement of the field. Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, its orchestrators, are currently part of the faculty at GSAPP Columbia University, Cooper Union, and Princeton University School of Architecture.

Oliver Laric lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial (2013); Detours of the Imaginary, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum, Kunstverein München (2012); Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); and Frieze New York (2012). Laric is a co-founder of the vvork platform (www.vvork.com).

ArtReview, Issue 69, Summer 2013

“As a whole, the show could be taken as an attempt to update the conversation on art and simulation. Ou’s black-and-white photographs, Double Light Leak 1 and Double Light Leak 2 (both 2010), take mechanical applications of paint – from a spray can and airbrush – as analogons of photography’s own shadow castings. Handelman, easily one of the best and smartest painters working today, offers Extrusion/Drift (2013), a large work that could be mistaken for a slab of marble, were it not for a reveal at the work’s left edge, which shows both the unpainted primed canvas and the layer of retroflective screen glass that gives the work its opalescence.

The connotations of luxury and illusion here are rich indeed, and this is where Rostovsky comes in. He wants to toss a brick through the art market’s cathedral windows – that is, through the semitransparent glazing of market orthodoxy that casts all art in the light of original and copies, fetishises the unique and throws vast sums of money at securing scarcity as an elite privilege. Rostovsky’s work to this point has taken the craft of painting as a given, while the images it presents, and the cultures that encodes them, have been his subject of inquiry. In the wake of the Occupy movements, however, he seems to have arrived at a conclusion that those images can no longer be separated from what paintings actually are: products, with a limited audience – not the 99%.”

The New Yorker, May 20, 2013

Marc Handelman, Arthur Ou, Peter Rostovsky
April 28 – June 9, 2013

View additional images
Read ArtReview and The New Yorker reviews

The third exhibition of P!’s six-month cycle on copying rethinks the double exposure as democratic gesture: what it means for an image to be replicated instantaneously, ad infinitum, or uniquely limited. In Peter Rostovsky’s recent digital paintings, a speculative model of unlimited distribution and accessibility for all refigures the traditional labor of underdrawing and painterly technique. Marc Handelman’s trompe-l’oeil surfaces — included here both on canvas and as a site-specific installation on glass — incorporate reflective painting grounds that recast the viewing experience as fickle and dependent on context. In Arthur Ou’s analog photographs, multiple exposures and doubled mark-making disturb the flattened, singular image. Subverting expectations of form and genre, Permutation 03.3 stages an at-odds, dialogic engagement with classical and contemporary strategies of production and distribution.

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Peter Rostovsky (b. 1970, St. Petersburg, Russia) works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture and installation. His work has been exhibited at The Walker Art Center, MCA San Diego, The New Orleans Museum of Art, PS1/MoMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, the ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, SMAK Museum in Ghent and galleries including Sara Meltzer, Elizabeth Dee, The Project, Danese, Salon94, and Gio Marconi. He teaches painting at New York University. 

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Marc Handelman (b. 1975, Santa Clara, CA) has exhibited at PS1/MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Dayton Art Institute, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Rubin Museum, The Royal Academy of Art in London, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and RECEPTION, Berlin, Germany. He is currently a faculty member at Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers, and a graduate critic at the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

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Arthur Ou (b. 1974, Taipei, Taiwan) is an artist and writer based in New York City. He has exhibited internationally, most recently in Photography Is Magic!, curated by Charlotte Cotton, as part of the 2012 Daegu Photography Biennial in Daegu, Korea, and has been featured in publications including Aperture, Blind Spot, Art in America, and The Photograph As Contemporary Art (2nd edition). He has published critical texts in Aperture, Afterall.org, Artforum.com, Bidoun, Fantom, Foam, Words without Pictures, and X-Tra. He is the Director of BFA Photography and Assistant Professor in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. Ou’s work is concurrently on view in a solo show at Brennan & Griffin, 55 Delancey St, New York.

Download exhibition press release

Download exhibition checklist

Download “A Dialogue” by Peter Rostovsky

Peter Rostovsky
Night Blossoms, 2012
Photoshop painting created with Wacom tablet
3014 x 3600 px (As lightbox: 28.5 x 34 in.)
Unlimited edition

Arthur Ou
Double Light Leak 1 and Double Light Leak 2, 2010
Chromogenic prints
30 x 40 in. each
Edition of 5 each

Marc Handelman
Extrusion/Drift, 2013
Oil paint and retroflective screen glass on canvas
61.75 x 87.5 in.
Unique

March 8–April 21, 2013

The second exhibition of P!’s six-month cycle on copying focuses on replicas, remakes, and recurrences. Margaret Lee’s uncanny storefront display juxtaposes graphic backdrop painting with simulated fruit, while Oliver Laric premieres a new Mandarin version of his distributed video essay, Versions (2009–onward). London-based collective Åbäke captures silicon molds for a Danish/Chinese Pietà in “hacked intaglio,” and Amie Siegel’s Berlin Remake (2005) approaches East German filmic precedents as contemporary scores for reprise and re-performance. The presentation of these disparate works at P! establishes frameworks for considering authenticity and origination across a variety of cultural contexts.

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Åbäke (founded 2000, London) is a transdisciplinary collective of four
graphic designers. In addition to working with musicians, artists, fashion labels, and institutions, they have initiated and been involved in multiple collaborative formats including Sexymachinery (an architectural production), Kitsuné (a record label), Dent de Leone (a publishing house) and Drawing Room Confessions (an art journal).

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Oliver Laric (b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Detours of the Imaginary, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); The Imaginary Museum, Kunstverein München (2012); Lilliput, High Line, New York (2012); and Frieze New York (2012). Laric is a co-founder of the vvork platform (www.vvork.com).

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Margaret Lee (b. 1980, New York) has exhibited works and organized exhibitions at MoMA/PS1, White Columns, X-Initiative, Performa, Jack Hanley Gallery, and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee. She founded the artist run space 179 Canal in 2009 and is currently a partner in the gallery 47 Canal. Lee was recently selected by Beatrix Ruf and Peter Eleey as the recipient of the 2012 Artadia NADA prize.

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Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) re-orientates the fictions within documentary practices. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including MoMA/PS1, Walker Art Center, Hayward Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a recipient of the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize. 

From February 7 – March 2, 2013, P! transforms into a custom-made reading room, created by Rich Brilliant Willing. Investigating copying, translation, counterfeiting, and other gestures, the space hosts a public program of twice-weekly reading groups. These events juxtapose literary, journalistic, academic, and scientific readings from multiple cultural positions as a discursive groundwork for the subsequent exhibitions. Discussion group leaders include Sarah Greenberger Rafferty (Artist), Ruba Katrib (Curator, SculptureCenter), Sarah Schulman (Writer), Ben Smith (Editor-in-chief, BuzzFeed), editorial consultancy Superscript, Herb Tam (Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America), Nader Vossoughian (Architectural historian & theoretician, NYIT), and Xin Wang (Research assistant, Metropolitan Museum of Art). The texts discussed are available at P! for purchase or perusal, and will be collected into a bootleg catalogue/reader. The reading room is open to the public Thu – Sun, 12–6pm, and offers free wifi.

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Schedule of events:

Wednesday, February 13, 6:30–8:30pm
Sara Greenberger Rafferty (Artist) leads a discussion on “The Deposition of Richard Prince in the Case of Cariou V. Prince et al” (excerpt)

Saturday, February 16, 3–5pm
Nader Vossoughian (Architectural historian & theoretician, NYIT) leads a discussion on Walter Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project” (excerpt)

Wednesday, February 20, 6:30–8:30pm
Editorial consultancy Superscript (Molly Heintz, Aileen Kwun, Avinash Rajagopal, Vera Sacchetti) leads a discussion on Orhan Pamuk’s “The Black Book” (excerpt)

Saturday, February 23, 3–5pm
“Copied in China”: Herb Tam (Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America) and Xin Wang (Research assistant, Metropolitan Museum of Art) lead a discussion on a range of texts examining copying in historical and contemporary Chinese culture (excerpts)

Wednesday, February 27, 6:30–8:30pm
Ruba Katrib (Curator, SculptureCenter) leads a discussion on Michel Houellebecq’s “The Possibility of an Island” (excerpt)

Friday, March 1, 6:30–8:30pm
Ben Smith (Editor-in-chief, BuzzFeed) leads a discussion on Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” (excerpt)

Saturday, March 2, 3–5pm
Exhibition closing event with writer Sarah Schulman (excerpt)

For more information, download a full press release and program of events here. 

From February through July 2013, the exhibition space P! will conduct an extended inquiry into the nature and means of copying. Remakes vs knockoffs, transcription vs plagiarism, mimesis vs mimicry — the status of the copied act shifts from positive to negative and back again, depending on context and culture. Multiples of a religious or political icon extend their reach and efficacy, whereas a duplicated file, painting, handbag, or cityscape violates legal and ethical strictures. Questions of capital and power lie at the core: who owns the original vs who is producing the copy.

Offering counterpoints from disparate cultural positions, P! explores the copy through a cycle of events and exhibitions. The space’s location in Chinatown — only blocks from the daily trade of counterfeit luxury goods — informs and shapes these ongoing programs. For February 2013, P! reopens as a reading room: a series of book clubs and reading groups discuss topics ranging from Ancient Athens to Chongqing to Canal Street. Beginning in March 2013, P! presents a changing sequence of exhibitions touching on historical and contemporary aspects of copying. Key in this constellation is the cross-pollination of works from different contexts of cultural production that resonate with and reference each other in unexpected ways. Activated by works and strategies that rupture the neutral space of display, the exhibitions perform the concerns of multiplicity and replication at hand.

Participants in the six-month cycle include Åbäke, Judith Barry, Thomas Brinkmann, Katarina Burin, Marc Handelman, Ruba Katrib, Arthur Ou, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Rich Brilliant Willing, Peter Rostovsky, Sarah Schulman, Amie Siegel, Ben Smith, Société Réaliste, Superscript, Herb Tam, Niels Van Tomme, Nader Vossoughian, Xin Wang, and others.

For more information, download a full press release and program of events here.

Since opening in September 2012, P! has been included in “Best of 2012” lists by Artforum, Art in America, and Frieze magazine. More information below: 

Artforum Best of 2012, December 2012

Art in America, Top 10 of 2012

Frieze magazine

Read more press about P!

Remote lecture by Roger Sherman
Moderated by Sarah Oppenheimer
Wednesday, Dec 19, 6:30pm
P!, 334 Broome St, New York 10002
Free and open to the public

Live from Los Angeles, architect and urban designer Roger Sherman will speak at P! on architecture, real estate, and the complex web of negotiations that generate the built environment. The lecture will be moderated by artist Sarah Oppenheimer.

Roger Sherman is principal of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design in Los Angeles. His work has been featured on CNN; in Newsweek, Fast Company, Metropolis, and other magazines, as well as in numerous books, including The Infrastructural City and On Farming, both from Actar. His Duck-and-Cover and Playa Rosa projects were exhibited at the 2009 International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam; and the 2010 Venice Biennale, respectively.

Sherman is also Co-Director of cityLAB, an urban thinktank at UCLA, where he is also Adjunct Professor. He is author of several books, including L.A. Under the Influence: The Hidden Logic of Urban Property (Univ. of Minn., 2010); Re: American Dream: New Housing Prototypes for Los Angeles (Princeton Architectural Press); and co-editor, with Dana Cuff, of Fast Forward: After the Master Plan (Princeton Architectural Press, forthcoming).

Live from Los Angeles, architect and urban designer Roger Sherman will speak at P! on architecture, real estate, and the complex web of negotiations that generate the built environment. The lecture will be moderated by artist Sarah Oppenheimer.

Roger Sherman is principal of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design in Los Angeles. His work has been featured on CNN; in Newsweek, Fast Company, Metropolis, and other magazines, as well as in numerous books, including The Infrastructural City and On Farming, both from Actar. His Duck-and-Cover and Playa Rosa projects were exhibited at the 2009 International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam; and the 2010 Venice Biennale, respectively.

Sherman is also Co-Director of cityLAB, an urban thinktank at UCLA, where he is also Adjunct Professor. He is author of several books, including L.A. Under the Influence: The Hidden Logic of Urban Property (Univ. of Minn., 2010); Re: American Dream: New Housing Prototypes for Los Angeles (Princeton Architectural Press); and co-editor, with Dana Cuff, of Fast Forward: After the Master Plan (Princeton Architectural Press, forthcoming).

See also:

Installation views of Process 01: Joy.
Selected letterpress works by Karel Martens
Exhibition statement for Process 01: Joy

6 Nov – 22 Dec 2012
Aaron Gemmill × Katarzyna Krakowiak × Sarah Oppenheimer × Bec Brittain × Slow and Steady Wins the Race × Don Davis

Part I: Aaron Gemmill, “Provopoli (Wem gehört die Stadt)” (2012). Installation view, 6 Nov 2012.

Part II: Katarzyna Krakowiak, “Slowhand” (2012). Installation view, 17 Nov 2012.

Part III: Sarah Oppenheimer, “C-010100” (2012). Installation view, 2 Dec 2012.

Part IV: Bec Brittain, “Maxhedron” (2012). Installation view, 5 Dec 2012. 

Part V: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, “Deluxe Standard View” (2012). Installation view, 12 Dec 2012.

Part VI: Don Davis, “Torus Colony” (1975/2012). Installation view, 19 Dec 2012.

“Nothing in our solar system is truly unlimited, of course; no expansion can go on forever; but an exponential growth of wealth can be considered rationally if we can find the environment in which that growth can proceed for many hundreds of years …”
—Gerard K. O’Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, 1977

The second exhibition at P!, Possibility 02: Growth, speaks to the myth of unchecked expansion through varying modes of inhabitation. Over its seven week duration, the exhibition will transform periodically, spurred by the ongoing accumulation of works by different participants. A microcosm for the outpacing rhythm of urban development, the arrival of each new work dislodges the previous ones and redefines the space. This serialized installation and re-configuration activates a scarce resource — space itself — allowing the works to function as distinct and potentially oppositional bodies, each filling the architectural volume in turn. As an experiment in proliferation, Possibility 02: Growth speculates on how displacement and cohabitation upset conventional models of exhibition and the social relations they reflect.

Each participant and new work will be announced in succession on a weekly basis.

The first piece, Provopoli (Wem gehört die Stadt) (2012) by Aaron Gemmill, opens 6 November 2012. A 10 ft diameter globe, Provopoli will be inflated in the entrance of P! to the point of obstruction. This work will remain on view and migrate throughout the space over the course of the exhibition.

The second piece, Shorthand (2012) by Katarzyna Krakowiak, opens 15 November 2012. Shorthand employs sculpture, sound, and performance to translate the silence of space into a physical condition. With thanks to Residency Unlimited. 

The third piece, C-010100 (2012) by Sarah Oppenheimer, opens 2 December 2012. As the newest addition to her ongoing Typology of Holes, Oppenheimer’s piece insets the storefront façade, disrupting the relationship between the street and exhibition space.

The fourth piece, Maxhedron (2012) by Bec Brittain, opens 5 December 2012. Transforming darkness through fractured reflection, Maxhedron’s constellation of light and mirrors extend brightness outward.

The fifth part of the exhibition opens 12 December with Deluxe Standard Version (2012) by Slow and Steady Wins the Race. Continuing the conceptual fashion label’s reinvention of retail, Deluxe Standard Version converts P! into a pop-up shop. A checkerboard installation of plush cream carpeting takes over the space as a display for new additions to the signature Standard Bag collection. Created in Leather, Velvet, Exotics, and Japanese Satin, these bags transform a ubiquitous retail form into objects of desire.

The sixth and final part of the exhibition ends with historical work by Don Davis. Widely known for his visionary renderings of NASA space colonies in the 1970s, Davis projects alternative futures for limitless human settlement. By strip mining the moon and seizing asteroid resources, these NASA schemes extend urban development into the open frontier of space.

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Aaron Gemmill lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is an MFA candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Katarzyna Krakowiak explores sculpture and architecture with the use of various media, notably sound. Her solo exhibition for the Polish Pavilion at the 13th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers (Venice, 2012), received a Special Mention. Other significant exhibitions include Who Owns the Air?, Galeria Foksal (Warsaw, 2011), and Game and Theory, South London Gallery (London, 2009).

Sarah Oppenheimer’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. Recent projects include the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Warhol Museum, Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Mattress Factory, Skulpturens Hus (Stockholm), The Drawing Center, and Sculpture Center. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship among others. 

Bec Brittain started her product design studio in 2011 after studying industrial design, philosophy, and architecture, and working across varied fields. Her products draw from these different modes of thinking and synthesize them into a new whole, creating relationships between normally disparate elements.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race is a conceptual clothing and accessory line founded by Mary Ping. The label may be described as “a logical dissection of fashion” — an exploration of the basic elements of apparel. Subverting typical forms through unexpected materials and approaches, Slow and Steady Wins the Race focuses on the fundamentals of clothing while commenting on the anthropology of fashion.

Don Davis is a painter and animator. Since the late 1960s, he has depicted space and space exploration in a range of media. Davis’s work has appeared in contexts including bestselling albums by Jefferson Starship, the award-winning PBS series “Cosmos,” and institutions including the National Museum of Natural History.

When Karel Martens began studying art in Holland in the late 1950s, “graphic design” did not even exist as its own course of study. Today he is widely recognized as one of the most important practitioners of that very discipline, with an esteemed client list that includes major publishers, architects, and institutions. His accolades include the H.N. Werkman Prize (1993) for the design of the architectural journal Oase, the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (1996), the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Book Fair (1998), and numerous other distinctions. Martens has taught at the Yale School of Art, Jan van Eyck Academie, and co-founded Werkplaats Typografie in 1997. The below selection of Martens’ monoprints includes rare works from the 1950s and 60s. They engage with the technology of letterpress, deliberately misusing the media to create unique prints. Neither commissioned design objects nor autonomous artworks, Martens’ letterpress experiments exist as unique fragments of an ongoing visual process. 
 

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1958
letterpress monoprint on paper
9 × 11 ⁵⁄₈ in. (229 × 295 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1958
letterpress monoprint on paper
9 × 11 ⁵⁄₈ in. (229 × 295 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1958
letterpress monoprint on paper
9 × 11 ⁵⁄₈ in. (229 × 296 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1963
letterpress monprint on paper
8 ¼ × 11 ¾ in. (209 × 297 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1992
letterpress monoprint on photocopy
8 ¼ x 11 ⅝ in. (209 x 295 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1994
letterpress monoprint on paper
13 ¾ × 9 ⁷⁄₈ in. (350 × 250 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1994
letterpress monoprint on paper
8 ⁷⁄₈ × 12 ½ in. (225 × 319 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
16 ⁷⁄₈ × 12 in. (428 × 304 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
18 ¹⁄₈ × 11 ³⁄₈ in. (459 × 290 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
17 ¾ × 12 ⁵⁄₈ in. (450 × 320 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
17 ¾ × 12 ⁵⁄₈ in. (450 × 320 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
12 ⁵⁄₈  × 17 ¾ in. (320 × 450 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on photocopy paper
16 ⁷⁄₈  × 11 ⁵⁄₈ in. (430 × 295 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
20 ¹⁄₈ × 15 in. (510 × 380 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on paper
15  × 20 ¹⁄₈ in. (380 × 510 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1996 [Maquette for cover of Printed Matter]
letterpress monoprint on thin cardboard
6 ⁷⁄₈ × 9 ⁷⁄₈ in. (173 × 250 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on chocolate packing material
9 ¾ × 7 ³⁄₈ in. (249 × 187mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on index card on top of catalogue card Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
11 ½ x 6 ⅞ in. (292 x 174 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam,  
artist Gerrit Rietveld
11 ¼ × 7 ⁷⁄₈ in. (285 × 200 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam,  
artist Gerrit Rietveld
11 ¼ × 7 ⁷⁄₈ in. (285 × 200 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam,  
artist Beyer
11 ⅜ x 8 in. ( 288 x 205 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 2006
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam,  
artist J. Buys
11 ⅜ x 8 in. ( 288 x 205 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ³⁄₈ × 8 ¼ in. (288 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint n catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ³⁄₈ × 8 ¼ in. (288 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1995
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ³⁄₈ × 8 ¼ in. (288 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ½ × 8 ¼ in. (290 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ½ × 8 ¼ in. (290 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ½ × 8 ¼ in. (290 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ½ × 8 ¼ in. (290 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam, artist Richard Long
11 ½ × 8 ¹⁄₈ in. (291 × 205 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 2006
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam, 
artist Quellinus
11 ⁵⁄₈ × 8 ¹⁄₈ in. (294 × 206 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam, 
artist Hamish Fulton
11 ⁵⁄₈ × 8 ¹⁄₈ in. (294 × 206 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam, 
artist Jan Dibbets
11 ⁵⁄₈ × 8 ¹⁄₈ in. (294 × 206 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedeljk Museum Amsterdam
11 ⁵⁄₈ × 8 ¹⁄₈ in. (294 × 206 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2006
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam            
11 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. (297 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1991
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam            
11 ¾ × 8 ¼ in. (297 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 2009
letterpress monoprint on a navigation sheet out the ‘Sight Reduction Tables for Air Navigation’, Pub. No. 249 Vol.3
11 ⁵⁄₈ × 9 ¼ in. (295 × 234 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1986
letterpress on paper
4 ⅛ × 5 ⅞ in. (105  × 148 mm)
 

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1998
letterpress on paper
4 ¹⁄₈ × 5 ⁷⁄₈ in. (105 × 150 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, ca 2010
letterpress monoprint on packing material
6 ¼ × 4 ⅛ in. (160 × 105 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2011
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card printers terms
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2004
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2012
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ x 5 ⅞ in. (209 x 149 mm) 

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2004
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ x 5 ⅞ in. (209 x 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2004
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2005
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2005
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2005
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2005
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Moravian Museum Brno, Czech Republic
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2010
letterpress monoprint on catalogue card from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
8 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (209 × 149 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 2008
letterpress on paper
6 × 8 ¼ in. (150 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, 1996
letterpress on paper
6 × 8 ¼ in. (150 × 210 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2004
letterpress monoprint on paper
12 × 8 ½ in. (305 × 215 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 1994
letterpress monoprint on wax paper
9 ¾ × 13 ¾ in. (249 × 349 mm)

Karel Martens
Untitled, circa 2004
letterpress monoprint on paper
9 ⁷⁄₈ × 14 ¹⁄₈ in. (252 × 359 mm)

Karel Martens
Journal of High-Principled Typography , 1989
Letterpress magazine on newsprint, saddle-stitched, 40 pages (self-cover)
9 ⅞ x 12 ¾ in. (closed) 250 x 325 mm (closed)

Karel Martens
B Zine , 1989
Letterpress pamphlet, saddle-stitched, 8 pages (self-cover)
8 ¼ x 11 ⅝ in. (closed) 210 x 295 mm (closed)

Karel Martens
Untitled , 1989
Letterpress poster on paper
19 ½  x 27 ½ in. 495 x 698 mm

Originally conceived for the exhibition dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, artist Judith Barry’s project For when all that was read… so as not to be unknown functions as an exploded guidebook that radically reconfigures objects and ideas from the show into a carefully-constructed three-dimensional work. Due to constraints from a handful of artists’ estates, certain works from the exhibition were barred from reproduction in Barry’s piece. This paradoxical situation—an artist’s guidebook without permission to display its featured artworks—led to the reinterpretation of the entire body of images by graphic means. The resulting work thus exists in two versions: on the one hand, there is the official, exhibited piece. Adjacent to it, the absent precursor: a shadow work that eludes commerce and distribution, yet is itself the genesis of the project.

A full gallery of images from the project here

More information on the edition and project here

Claire Barliant’s writing on the piece here

“The place of the curator here is in the production of intellectual cultural criticism. Curating is not about organizing fancy events; it is about stimulating or preserving debate within a creative, dynamic space, one that is political and even contains the possibility for chaos.”

“In fact, what is needed in the art world is some kind of in-between system, between the state-dominated models of the previous century and the capitalist-dominated models of today. The question of how to build this new model and what it will look like is very important and needs to be debated. Independent organizations can play a crucial role in this. We need a new strategy because not only are the old models not working, but the traditional form of revolution is not working either. The question is how to generate independent ideas and develop in-between spaces in our increasingly complex society.”

Full essay at ArtAsiaPacific

Chauncey Hare, Christine Hill, Karel Martens
16 September – 10 November 2012
Open Wednesday – Sunday, 12-6pm
P!, 334 Broome St, New York 

“We have also been experiencing some uneasy times lately, but aware of the irrelevance of all these things, we attempt to lose ourselves in our work and in the joy of life.”
—Letter by H.N. Werkman [1], 19 November 1924 

“Museums are no place for artists who are questioning social roles.”
—Chauncey Hare, Introduction to This Was Corporate America, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1984

The inaugural exhibition at P!, Process 01: Joy, opens in September 2012. Featuring works by Chauncey Hare, Christine Hill, and Karel Martens, the exhibition focuses on topics that periodically appear, disappear, and reappear in and out of contemporary discourse: labor, alienation, and the love of work. Rather than attempting to tackle these themes head on, the exhibition presents three wildly disparate positions that together suggest a loose and unstable thesis. The materials on view span a range of documentary, anthropological, and performative approaches to questions of labor and, at the same time, enact self-reflexive, parallel spaces of production and “off-time.”

Self-described as a “working person who has made photographs for a short period of his life,” Chauncey Hare is one of the most incisive yet elusive figures in American social photography. Beginning work as an engineer at Chevron in the San Francisco Bay Area inthe 1950s, Hare turned to photography as a means of escape from his experience of the oppression and competitiveness of corporate life. By the late 1960s, he had embarked upon a nearly two-decade project of photographing Americans in their homes and workplaces. Despite apparent success and support—including three Guggenheim grants and solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston—Hare raged against these same institutions for neutralizing the critical social commentary embedded in his work, and for what he perceived as the artworld’s growing collusion with corporate interests. Eventually withdrawing from art entirely in the mid-1980s, Hare retrained as an occupational therapist and has since collaborated with his partner, Judith Wyatt, to more effectively assist Americans suffering from “work abuse.” Presented at P! are multiple copies of Hare’s published books as well as archival and reproduced materials and photographs. Every day at 6pm, as if at the punching of a time clock, the pages of the books on view will be turned to reveal new configurations of images and texts that reflect on the shifting pressures of life and work. 

You could call Christine Hill a “total entrepreneur.” Since the early 1990s, Hill’s ongoing artistic investigation into diverse professional models has led her to adopt varied roles—shopkeeper, tour guide, talk show host, writer, and rock singer, to name but a few—in apractice that collapses research and retail with collecting, exhibition-making, and production. “Volksboutique” (a play on the East German term for “people-owned companies”) is Hill’s all-encompassing moniker for her many activities. Starting as a second-hand-clothing-store-cum-social-sculpture in Berlin and later presented at Documenta X in 1997, Volksboutique now stages increasingly ambitious forays into public and institutional spaces, including shows such as “Hotel Volksboutique” (Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, 2011); “Do It Yourself Bauhaus” (Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2009); and “The Volksboutique Armory Apothecary” (solo presentation with Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 2009 Armory Show). For the duration of Process 01: Joy, Hill will transform P! into a “remote office”: a hub from which to collect research on local small businesses that extends the activities of “The Volksboutique Small Business” in Berlin. Eclectic programming, including lectures by business owners, urban researchers, gentrification experts, and a closing event on 10 November 2012 with Hill herself in attendance, will initiate an ongoing dialogue between P! and its immediate local context.

When Karel Martens began studying art in Holland in the late 1950s, “graphic design” did not even exist as its own course of study. Today he is widely recognized as one of the most important practitioners of that very discipline, with an esteemed client list that includes major publishers, architects, and institutions. His accolades include the H.N. Werkman Prize (1993) for the design of the architectural journal Oase, the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (1996), the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Book Fair (1998), and numerous other distinctions. Martens’ unwavering experimentation with printing processes, graphic form, and the construction of typographic meaning over the past half century has indelibly imprinted a younger generation of designers, as has his teaching at the Yale School of Art, Jan van Eyck Academie, and co-founding of the Werkplaats Typografie in 1997. Yet concurrent to his illustrious portfolio of commissioned work, Martens has laboriously developed an oeuvre of seminal monoprints, which have been widely published yet rarely exhibited. Created on a small letterpress, the prints often recycle pre-printed sheets and found materials including castaway collection cards from museums and raw packing material. Neither commissioned design objects nor autonomous artworks, Martens’ letterpress experiments exist as unique fragments of an ongoing visual process. At P!, a large selection of Martens’ monoprints, including rare works from the 1950s and 60s, are presented in an associative manner that mirrors the open-ended and speculative method of their production. Martens has also created the logo for P!, the first in a series that will change with every exhibition. 

1. In the two decades preceding his tragic death at the hands of the Gestapo, Dutch designer and printmaker H.N. Werkman (1882–1945), created an astonishing body of radical typographic publications and prints. With the collapse of his printing company in 1923, due in large part to German inflation and economic mismanagement, Werkman turned his focus to the things he loved most: experimental publishing and printing “druksels”—abstract monoprints created using the apparatus of the printing press as a painter might use paint.