Categories and Order Systems: Claude Parent and The Serving Library. Intersections of Architecture, Art and Editorial Design

Abstract

This paper discusses the work of Claude Parent and The Serving Library, considering the critiques generated by their intersecting of architecture, art and editorial design. Through focus on the ways in which hosting environment, architecture and forms of expanded publishing can serve to dissolve disciplinary boundaries and activities of production, spectatorship and reception, it draws on the lineage of 1960s/70s’ Conceptual Art in considering these practices as a means through which to escape medium specificity and spatial confinement. Relationships between actual and virtual space are then read against this broadening of aesthetic ideas and the theory of critical modernity.

Keywords:

• Publishing
• art
• editorial design
• architecture
• Conceptual Art
• The Serving Library
• Claude Parent

The oblique function allows for travel. Architecture becomes the support of displacement; the movement is freed from the constraint and precision of the distance travelled, and the choice of the itinerary is left open.¹

Categories

In 1963, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, describing themselves as “architect” and “urban planner,” presented their idea of the oblique function: a spatial theory, designed to challenge the orthogonal and negate the vertical in architecture through the employment of sloped inclines.² Parent later noted that this was also a means by which to “re-think modernist unity in terms of fracture and in the discontinuity of space.”³

The oblique function was an attempt to promote a new kind of social order through the subversion of modernism’s fixed material foundations. Virilio described the importance of obstacles and sloped inclines to the reinstatement of “the animated body […] the physical person as a ‘metabolic vehicle.’” This would be a means of provoking people out of the inertia brought on by the mechanical elevating features (cranes and lifts) of modernist architecture and would form the basis of Virilio’s later theorizing for a dromographic condition of acceleration.⁴ Their interest in spatial disequilibrium and bodily movement was also, however, rooted in Parent’s earlier interest in avant-garde art practices of the 1950s, in particular through his considerations with the sculptor Nicholas Schöffer of motion, fracture and spatio-dynamics, and in his propositions with the artist Yves Klein for a utopian immaterial “Air” architecture.⁵ As Steve Redhead observes, “the broadening of his aesthetic ideas beyond the simply spatial, or the architectural in a technical sense, was a major shift in Parent’s questioning of the modernism then on offer.”⁶

So although critical discourse around the oblique function falls within the disciplinary category of architecture, there is an important link, through Parent, to the discipline of art and particularly to art engagements of 1950s and 1960s that sought to move away from the medium-specific objecthood of painting and sculpture.⁷ And, since many of the utopian architectural propositions of Virilio and Parent were never actually realized, remaining instead as polemical writings and drawings in their magazine Architecture Principe, the oblique function shares a particular alignment with a type of 1960s’ Conceptual Art practice, which was at that time also seeking to escape medium-specific modernism through its “dematerialised” positioning within the context of editorial design.⁸

One can look, for example, to the work of curator Seth Siegelaub and his use of the published catalogue to circumvent the physical gallery space with exhibitions like January 5–31 1969;⁹ or to the more extended published works of artists like Dan Graham in, for example, his magazine piece “Homes for America,” which began its editorial circulation in 1966;¹⁰ and Robert Smithson in his 1966 and 1967 magazine works “The Domain of the Great Bear”¹¹ and “Ultramoderne: the Century Apartments, New York City”;¹² or Art & Language with their piece on the “Air Show” in the published booklet Frameworks – Air Conditioning in 1968.¹³ These examples all present depictions of real and/or fictional architectural environments in their interrogation of the relationship between actual site (depicted formally) and conceptual site (depicted editorially and linguistically), which oscillate between aesthetic enquiry and institutional critique in the same manner as Virilio and Parent’s published discussions of the oblique function. In all of them, the fixed architectural space and the space of the published account are inextricably connected so that they can purposefully flip between their categorical existence as theoretical or actual engagements of architecture, art and editorial design.

Moving forwards, it is important to acknowledge reference to the space of electronic media in propositions for the oblique function. Although Virilio describes “the unbelievable possibility of the construction of a virtual space [… in] the reorganization of the territories of the future,”¹⁴ he also adopts what Steve Beard describes as a form of relished doom mongering with regard to new media.¹⁵ This anxiety is voiced in Virilio’s 1997 essay “Disorientation,” describing the “coming of cybernetic [digital] space in which telepresence is on the verge of dominating […] the physical and concrete presence of individuals.”¹⁶

Parent’s writings tend towards a more abstract rethinking of “unity in terms of fracture and the discontinuity of space.”¹⁷ His numerous references to travel, continuity, circulation and spaces of transfer in Architecture Principe chime more easily with the potentials of new media, and connect him once again with the aforementioned examples of 1960s’ Conceptual Art, which were similarly interrogating the notion of autonomy and open-endedness through their positioning within different editorial publishing contexts.¹⁸ In many ways these can be seen to predict the new platforms and protocols eventually to be introduced by digital publishing media, which would allow for more complex interrogations of the idea of physical and virtual, networked and interactive space.

It is useful then to jump to an exhibition at Tate Liverpool in the autumn and winter of 2014–15, which provides through a particular example a means through which to consider further the notion of slippage across disciplinary or categorical distinctions. This exhibition demonstrates a paradigm shift: a manifestation of Virilio’s prediction for the construction of a virtual space in the reorganization of territories of the future. As Parent also notes in making his case for a “critical architecture” as a tool for the development of critical thought:

The world is moving.

Territories are moving.

Sensibility is being transformed […]

Centrality has given way to movement, to the slippage of things, to a continuous displacement of places and activities. The territory is no longer constructed on delineated spaces but around links – it is necessarily polycentric.¹⁹

Making Things Public: Transmission/ Media/ Critique/ Publishing/ Infiltration/ Information was the title used here by Tate Liverpool to draw together and exhibit post-1960s art practices that have experimented in various ways with activities of broadcasting, publishing and distribution.²⁰ The most contemporary work on show was installed in Tate’s ground floor gallery, identifying itself variously as “The Serving Library” (TSL) and “Dexter Sinister.”²¹ This is a practice that presents itself in terms of its activities involving editorial design, publishing and distribution, articulating itself via the relationships it sets up between its printed “bulletins” (bound and distributed as journal articles)²² and their digital counterparts (PDFs that can be accessed and downloaded through a digital Web-based archive or “Serving Library” at www.servinglibrary.org). As Adam O’Reilly describes in his 2011 article for Art in America, the process is one where digital PDFs of the “bulletins” are published online as they are written and, “combining the ideas of archiving and a circulating library, […] the act of borrowing happens on the Internet.”²³ In Tate’s exhibition, this relationship was explained via text panels and through the presence of bound issues of the journal and a link in the gallery to the online library archive (Figure 1).

Figure 1(a,b,c). Bound issues of the Bulletins of the Serving Library journal, displayed in the gallery (a, b) and in an area within the exhibition space with a link to the online Serving Library archive at www.servinglibrary.org (c). 2014–15 © Tate Photography. Courtesy: The Serving Library.

Items on exhibition in the gallery also, however, included a selection of around 100 formally framed illustrations and articles from the TSL archive, accompanied by explanatory captions (Figure 2). And, in the context of this discussion, it is interesting that these objects were displayed within the architectural structure of a previously commissioned installation for the space, La Colline de l’Art (Art Hill), designed by Claude Parent for the Liverpool Biennial exhibition earlier in the year (Figure 3):

The Serving Library is resident within a slightly modified version of the architectural intervention La Colline de l’Art, designed by the radical French architect Claude Parent to accommodate a display of the Tate collection [during …] the eighth Liverpool Biennial exhibition. The Serving Library have kept the structure, with minor modifications, using it as a vehicle to exhibit their own collection.²⁴

Figure 2. “Each [framed] object in the exhibition first appeared in Bulletins of the Serving Library or in its precursor, the journal Dot Dot Dot. Some were commissioned or selected to accompany an article. Others served as the starting points of essays. Here each is paired with an excerpt from its related article. The excerpts hint at the wide-ranging topics and ideas discussed in the journals. They can be read the way one might browse and flip though books in a traditional library”; (TSL exhibition text, Tate Liverpool, 2014–15). 2014–15 © Tate Photography. Courtesy: The Serving Library.

Figure 3(a, b) The Serving Library installed at Tate Liverpool within, La Colline de l’Art (Art Hill) by Claude Parent. 2014–15 © Tate Photography. Courtesy: The Serving Library.

This decision by TSL to appropriate the structure of Parent’s installation allowed them to introduce a physical environment into the presentation of their publishing activity, something they had done before in earlier commissions for galleries (MoMA, New York), biennials (Whitney, New York) and art fairs (Frieze, London) and via their own “occasional bookstore” in New York City’s lower East Side.²⁵ However, whereas in previous examples, their publishing activity had been a means of infiltrating and expanding the institutional information environment (as described in Figure 4) with this installation there was more of a conceptual affinity between the publishing activity and the architectural environment surrounding the work.

Figure 4(a,b). In their work for the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2012, the group produced a version of their Bulletins of the Serving Library with a set of thirteen specially commissioned bulletins, and a separate cataloguing section for the artists featured in the exhibition (a). Described by the group as a “catalog-of-sorts,” this journal was set up as a means of infiltrating and expanding MoMA’s institutional information environment via a network of format, access and distribution links to their own independent publishing activity: the printed publication was distributed by order from Dexter Sinister/TSL’s internet bookshop or from their “Occasional book store” in the same way as previous editions of the Bulletins journal; in parallel, the printed publication was also available (as the catalog to the exhibition) via the MoMA bookshop and the MoMA website; The commissioned bulletins were explicitly connected back to The Serving Library through their availability as downloadable PDFs from The Serving Library’s online archive, these could be published on demand at the requirement of the audience/user; the “artists section” of the publication was explicitly connected back to MoMA through its equal demand-driven availability as a set of downloadable PDFs from the MoMA website; and finally, a kinetic typography “trailer” for the Bulletins was displayed both on the MoMA website and via an object (a digital monitor) mounted on a wall within the exhibition space. This moving text piece was described by the MoMA curator Laura Hoptman in 2012 as “A visual ‘trailer’ for the publication […] serv[ing] as a time-based, fourth-dimensional translation of the three-dimensional book” (b) (Hoptman 2012). Courtesy: The Serving Library.

Parent had already declared an intention to create a conceptual link between art and architecture with this gallery environment. As with his 1970 design for the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, he had used sloping (oblique) wooden ramps to provide interchangeable walking, sitting and display areas, which were intended to disrupt the categories and access/ordering systems (walls, ceilings, floors) of the conventional art gallery space. As he described when it was first installed, “using inclines seemed right. I devised screens and sloping walkways to create an original layout for the hanging of the works. Their aim is to animate the space and make it more mobile for visitors.”²⁶

This intended affinity had also been a focus for Tate in their commissioning of Parent’s work and, to accompany the original installation, they had organized a joint symposium event with the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA).²⁷ Here, the disruption of categories and order systems and the “convergence of abstract propositions and physical reality in architecture and art” were used to propose alternative perspectives on the physical and symbolic space of the museum, a means of orchestrating what were described as new conditions that enable unforeseen outcomes. Parent’s 2001 manifesto Twelve Subversive Acts to Dodge the System was cited in the symposium rationale, with a listing of his twelve pointers for a new way of thinking:

1] Open the imaginary; 2] Operate in illusion; 3] Dislodge the immobile; 4] Think continuity; 5] Surf on the surface; 6] Live in obliqueness; 7] Destabilize; 8] Use the fall; 9] Fracture; 10] Practice inversion; 11] Orchestrate conflict; 12] Limit without closing.²⁸

So the way TSL appropriated Parent’s gallery installation in the Making Things Public exhibition, to reflect the disruption of conventional distinctions between their exhibited art and editorial design activities, resonates perfectly both with the projections of this symposium and with the 1960s’ art that had influenced Parent in his first articulations of the oblique function. Like its Conceptual Art predecessors, the work of TSL uses the context of publishing and distribution to shift away from the restrictions of medium-specificity and the passive spectator looking at a pre-existing artwork, towards a situation (or environment) where the art audience can be engaged actively in the physical and/or conceptual creation of the work through their interaction with various forms of published information.²⁹ Following 1960s artists, like the aforementioned Graham, Smithson and Art & Language,³⁰ TSL are using editorial content and publication sites to set up a dependence upon the activities of reading and information navigation as a means by which to expand and open out the meaning of their work. They have established a practice featuring an “active interface” and a potential “open-endedness,” both of which are features cited as the most enduring legacies of Conceptual Art.³¹

Order systems

The work of Dexter Sinister/TSL is not, however, solely concerned with thinking across disciplinary categories: as with Parent and Virilio’s oblique function, it also interrogates the ordering of its own internal structures and ordering systems. Its movement between printed/digital publication, digital archive, and physical environment, is as much to do with the relationship between these formats, spaces and the conditions of publication and presentation, as with any individual physical characteristics of the work.

Drawing again on the lineage of 1960s art, the theorist Peter Osborne refers to a text from 1970 by Art & Language’s Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, which predicted this shift away from the published-object-as-artwork towards the publishing-environment-as-artwork. Burn and Ramsden propose that, since art objects might now “conceivably be anything on the face of this planet […] it would be dumb to insist on nominating an analytic art construct (i.e. this paper) as an ‘artwork.’”³² As Osborne observes, by the early 1970s, artists were considering how the structure itself could be described as the work:

Conceptual artists [had] turned their concern not to “the proliferation of designated signifieds” but to the “semiotic mosaic” from which meaning was derived [… this was the new question] How was the “continuum”, the system, the structure-as-a-whole, itself to be made the content of the work?³³

In line with other post-Conceptual practices, Dexter Sinister/TSL have developed work from this idea, their practice deriving from its active engagement with the internal ordering of a publishing system. And what crucially differentiates it from practices of the 1960s and 1970s is its expansion from the field of print-based formats (distributed via conventional publishing routes) into that of digital formats and online means of circulation, download and archiving. The work develops from processes of design, writing, editing and production as they relate to the structure or environment of a particular commissioning organization, which can then be fed back into the group’s own print-based and online publishing activities.As member Stuart Bailey describes, the group have used commissions and invitations as a means of perpetuating their journal, by “letting the specifics of the situation (the location, set up, theme or all three) direct that particular issue’s contents.”³⁴ The results have, thus, ranged from design and editorial interventions, to appropriations of established modes of documentation and navigation (including, for example, catalogues, press releases, faxes, emails, publicity materials, newspapers, captions, typefaces and signage), inserting into these more extensive elaborations of digital sites and networks and connected performance- and seminar-based material in the physical space of the organization.

This is elaborated even further by the means of documentation that the group have created for their own parallel recordings of these engagements, with their own website and publications containing, for example, “seemingly endless diversionary links taking you to other pages with more links.”³⁵ As Saul Anton observes:

It would be easy to suggest that Dexter Sinister [… use such channels of publicity and press operation to] engage in an act of institutional critique. It would perhaps be more accurate to say, however, that [… this work] engages in a fictional intensification, taking over [and expanding, intensifying and overflowing the operations of] one of its most fundamental mechanisms: the […] publication office.³⁶

At the core of this is an increased potential for work to exist in hybrid or composite states across publishing, distribution and reception platforms. So, here, non-linear or non-chronological relationships can be set up between print, digital, archival, and time-based forms, and these can oscillate in ever more complex ways within and beyond the physical gallery or institutional environment.

When compared with earlier pre-digital art publishing practices, it is evident how an example like Dexter Sinister/TSL has used the ordering systems of new publishing media to produce a new kind of fluidity across physical and virtual platforms, which brings in additional reconfigurations of the idea of spectator/audience and reader/user. With this work, elaborations on methods of access and distribution involve the audience/user more directly in decisions to do with their reception of the work. Thus, even when initially encountered in a physical gallery environment, the work can only fully exist when it is “actualised in some system of communication”³⁷ via user-access and circulation. And, rather than necessarily achieving completion, it has the potential to remain in a permanently active and open-ended state.

This response to a post-Internet concept of production, distribution, reception, and circulation resonates with the predictions of Virilio and Parent that “territory is no longer constructed on delineated spaces but around [polycentric] links.”³⁸ As the artist Seth Price has put it:

The notion of a mass archive is relatively new, and […] is probably philosophically opposed to the traditional understanding of what an archive is and how it functions, but it may be that the Internet approximates such a structure, or can at least be seen as a working model. […] With more and more media readily available through this unruly archive, the task becomes one of packaging, producing, reframing, and distributing; a mode of production analogous not to the creation of material goods, but to the production of social contexts, using existing material. Anything on the Internet is a fragment, provisional, pointing elsewhere. Nothing is finished.³⁹

Conclusions

In the same way as Parent’s architectural environments, and published Conceptual artworks from the 1960s and 1970s, practices like Dexter Sinister/TSL, thus, require a cross-disciplinary vocabulary to provide a precise description of their work and its physical and/or virtual context.⁴⁰ This requirement introduces an important new perspective that can feed into both retrospective readings of past engagements and accounts of contemporary practices across architecture, art and editorial design. As new media continues to evolve, it is likely that the interaction between production, dissemination, reception, social environment and networks in general will continue to require such cross-disciplinary means of articulation in order to account for new connections between physical and virtual space. As Redhead notes when describing Claude Parent’s move toward a theory of critical modernity, what cross-articulation provides is a means through which to adequately develop and mediate new engagements that will continue to traverse and expand conventional approaches to categorical distinction and methodology: this “broadening of aesthetic ideas” was necessary to the “questioning of the modernism then on offer”⁴¹ and it remains a necessity in questioning the modernism now on offer.

Ruth Blacksell is Director of the MA in Book Design, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading; and Research Fellow, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, University of Kingston. Her research falls into two connected areas: the use of typography, acts of reading and contexts of publishing in practices of 1960s/70s’ Conceptual Art; and Contemporary (post-Conceptual) publishing practices and evolving interdisciplinary territories in contemporary art, architecture and design. She has published internationally and organized a number of pubic facing events on these themes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Claude Parent, “Drives,” Architecture Principe: Habitable Circulation no. 5 (July 1966); in Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, translated from the French by George Collins (Besançon: Les éditions de l’imprimeur, 1997), xiv.

² This theory was first presented by Parent and Virilio in Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, the magazine of their Architecture Principe group. The group also included artists Michel Carrade and Morice Lipsi, but only Parent and Virilio put their names to the short articles published in the magazine, stating that this collection of articles constituted the group’s “permanent manifesto”; ibid., v. Architecture Principe was published in nine issues throughout 1966, with a tenth issue thirty years later in 1996.

³ Claude Parent, “Architecture: Singularity and Discontinuity,” Architecture Principe: Disorientation or Dislocation no. 10 (September 1996); in Parent and Virilio, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, 153.

⁴ Paul Virilio, “Disorientation,” in Parent and Virilio, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, 11.

⁵ Parent and Klein’s propositions for “Air” architecture were presented through drawings of fictional environments, with compressed air used to create transparent walls, roofs and furniture for domestic dwellings. See, for example, the accounts by Myriam Mahiques, “Air Architecture and Social Reform through Immateriality,” in Thoughts on Architecture and Urbanism (October 2009). Accessed June 22, 2014. http://myriammahiques.blogspot.fr/; and Mariabruna Fabrizi, “The Possibility of an Immaterial Architecture: The Collaboration between Yves Klein and Claude Parent,” in SOCKS: Art, Architecture, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology [January 2014]. Accessed June 22, 2014. http://socks-studio.com/.

⁶ Steve Redhead, “Toward a Theory of Critical Modernity: The Post-Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio,” TOPIA: The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies no. 14 (Fall 2005):39–56 (42).

⁷ Virilio’s writings in Architecture Principe also make reference to painting and sculpture – see, for example, his essay “Habitable Circulation (2),” Architecture Principe: Habitable Circulation no. 5 (July 1966), xv; Parent and Virilio in Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996 – but his account of the shift in art practice and discourse at that time is limited when compared with that of Parent. His writings cross-refer instead to the ideas of Gestalt psychology and phenomenology with the declaration that he was “a man of percept as well as concept”; Parent and Virilio in Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, xv.

⁸ “Dematerialised” is a contested term in the critical discourse of Conceptual Art, as discussed initially by Terry Atkinson of Art & Language: “Concerning the Article: ‘The Dematerialisation of Art’” [1968]; excerpt cited in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 46–50. This letter-essay was written in response to Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s “The Dematerialisation of Art” (1967) and is dated 23 March 1968. A shortened version was published in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1973); the version cited here is a selection of excerpts from the original held with Lippard’s papers at the Archives of American Art (uncatalogued).

⁹ For this show, Siegelaub displayed only a few works in a temporarily rented office (at the McLendon Building, 44 East 52nd Street, New York), instead using the catalogue as the actual site for the exhibition. The exhibition is usually now referred to by its dates alone, although its full title at the time was “January 5–31, 1969: 0 Objects, 0 Paintings, 0 Sculptures.”

¹⁰ Dan Graham, “Homes for America: Early 20th-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ’66,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966–January 1967): 21–2.

¹¹ Robert Smithson and Mel Bochner, “The Domain of the Great Bear,” Art Voices (New York) (Fall 1966): 44–51. This is an article/artwork, about the American Museum of Natural History and its connected Hayden Planetarium in New York.

¹² Robert, Smithson, “Ultramoderne: The Century Apartments, New York City,” Arts Magazine. 42, no. 1 (1967): 30–3.

¹³ Art & Language: Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin, “Air Show” [1968], in Art & Language. Exhibition catalog (Eindhoven: van Abbe Museum, 1980); first published in a limited edition booklet, Frameworks – Air Conditioning (Coventry: Art–Language Press, 1968).

¹⁴ Paul Virilio, “Architecture: Disorientation or Dislocation,” in Parent and Virilio, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, 152.

¹⁵ Steve Beard, “Dromographic Stress Disorder (How e-Commerce makes Survivors of Us All),” Mute: I am the Network 1, no. 18 (2000). Accessed June 29, 2005. http://www.metamute.org/, 1.

¹⁶ Virilio, “Disorientation,” 10.

¹⁷ Parent, “Architecture: Singularity and Discontinuity,” 153.

¹⁸ For a detailed account of the operation, through publishing contexts, of this type of Conceptual Art, see Ruth Blacksell, “From Looking to Reading: Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse,” Design Issues 29, no. 2 (2013): 60–81.

¹⁹ Claude Parent, “The Limits of Memory: For a Critical Architecture,” in Parent and Virilio, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, 16, 17.

²⁰ A trio of exhibitions – “Transmitting Andy Warhol,” “Gretchen Bender” and “The Serving Library” – were presented as part of this Making Things Public season, between November 2014 and February 2015.

²¹ TSL was founded in 2011 by editorial designers Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt (who were already collaborating as Dexter Sinister) and the writer Angie Keefer. TSL was intended as a means by which “to carry on where [its forerunner] Dot Dot Dot left off.” Dot Dot Dot was a print-based journal originally founded in 2000 by Bailey with the graphic designer Peter Bil’ak; Stuart Bailey, 1 January 2011/ Announcements/ Dot Dot Dot is Dead. Posted on the Dot Dot Dot website. Accessed February 13, 2015. http://www.dot-dot-dot.us/, n.p.

²² “‘Bulletins’ is really just another name for ‘articles’ or ‘essays’ but [the name] alludes to the fact that they’re issued individually, as and when complete, on the website in advance of being collected into a larger volume”; Dexter Sinister, interviewed by Eleonore Hugendubel, curatorial assistant at the Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, New York, and posted on the MoMA website in four parts: July 2, 17, 30, and August 10, 2012. Accessed February 16, 2015. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/ecstaticalphabets/.

²³ Adam O’Reilly, “Dexter Sinister’s New Character,” Art in America October (2011): n.p. Accessed July 6, 2015. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/dexter-sinister-archive/.

²⁴ The Serving Library, Making Things Public: Transmission/ Media/ Critique/ Publishing/ Infiltration/ Information. Exhibition text, Tate Liverpool, 2014–15, n.p.

²⁵ These particular commissions were for Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2012); the Whitney Biennial in New York (2008); and the Frieze Art Fair in London (2010). Their “occasional (one day a week) bookstore” operates from a basement space at 38 Ludlow Street, NYC, which the group also describe as a “Just-in-time workshop” or design studio, aimed at collapsing the separation between production and distribution.

²⁶ Emma O’Kelly, “Architect Claude Parent Gives a New Slant to Tate Liverpool,” Wallpaper (July 7, 2014): n.p. Accessed July 1, 2015. http://www.wallpaper.com/art/architect-claude-parent-gives-a-new-slant-to-tate-liverpool/7655/.

²⁷ The one-day symposium event, “Rolling Around like Gorillas on the Incline: Opening the Imaginary in Architecture and the Arts,” was organized by Tate Liverpool and CAVA at the University of Liverpool. The event was held at Tate Liverpool auditorium on October 23, 2014.

²⁸ Tate Liverpool and CAVA, “Rolling Around like Gorillas on the Incline: Opening the Imaginary in Architecture and the Arts,” 2014. Published rationale for the one-day symposium event at Tate Liverpool auditorium, October 23, 2014. Accessed July 1, 2015. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/special-event/rolling-around-gorillas-on-incline-opening-imaginary, n.p.

²⁹ In the 1960s, this was described in terms of the formation-of-art-through-reading rather than the reception-of-art-through-looking, as discussed, for example, by Robert Smithson, “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read.” Press release written for the first of four “Language” shows at Dwan Gallery in New York between 1967 and 1970; see Jack Flam, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); see also Atkinson, “Concerning the Article” and in his introduction to the first edition of the journal Art–Language (in 1969).

³⁰ Others like Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Vito Acconci could similarly be cited.

³¹ Mike Metz and Dan Graham, “Dan Graham Interviewed by Mike Metz,” in Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, edited by Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999); first published in Bomb no. 46 (Winter 1994), 185; Anne Rorimer, “Siting the Page: Exhibiting Works in Publications – Some Examples of Conceptual Art in the USA,” in Rewriting Conceptual Art, edited by Michael Newman and John Bird (London: Reaktion, 1999), 13.

³² Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden, Notes on Analysis (Coventry: Art-Language Press, 1970); excerpt reproduced in Lucy Lippard (ed.), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 136–137.

³³ Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art (London: Phaidon, 2002).

³⁴ Dexter Sinister, interviewed by Hugendubel (see note 22), n.p.

³⁵ Anthony Elms, “A Flibbertigibbet, a Will-o’-the-Wisp, a Clown (or 10 Reasons why Graphic Design is Not the Issue),” Afterall (Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design, London) no. 27 (2011): 37.

³⁶ Saul Anton, “Propositions and Publications: On Dexter Sinister,” Afterall (Central St Martin’s College of Art & Design, London) no. 27 (2011): 21.

³⁷ This description is taken from that used by Peter Osborne in discussing the operation of key published artworks from the period of Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s; Osborne, Conceptual Art, 31.

³⁸ Parent, “Limits of Memory,” 16.

³⁹ Price, whose work interrogates the mutability and open-endedness of digital web-based channels, refers to this in particular as “a model that encourages contamination, borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur”; Seth Price, Dispersion (2002–ongoing). Free PDF download accessed February 18, 2015. http://www.distributedhistory.com/, n.p.

⁴⁰ Other similar practices include that of Paul Chan, whose self-established publishing activity Badlands Unlimited makes books in what he terms “the expanded field,” via projects like How to Download a Boyfriend, a group exhibition in the form of an e-publication (see http://badlandsunlimited.com); Rhizome and Triple Canopy, whose advanced models of contemporary arts spaces are hinged on the development of publishing systems and depend upon digitally networked forms of production and circulation (see http://rhizome.org and http://www.canopycanopycanopy.com); and Journal, a 2014 exhibition curated by Matt Williams at the ICA, London, which expanded the physical gallery environment though an online space with documentations ranging from digital artworks, performance, screenings and writings (see http://journal.ica.org.uk).

⁴¹ Redhead, “Toward a Theory of Critical Modernity,” 42.