Bookshop Situation Series: Launch of OEI #86-87: publishing practices, publishing poetics

Please join us at Index for an evening on publishing practices & publishing poetics at the occasion of the release of the new 640 page issue of OEI, # 86–87.
Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavours, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, that is “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterise the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and liveable shape, and attempting to realise that world through address.”
This is, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, one is also tempted, with Michalis Pichler, to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 (ed. Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg) also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; and “det offentligas försvinnande”

At Index a number of publishing projects, artists and writers – Art Distribution, Dark Mountain (Dougald Hine), Det Grymma Svärdet, Dockhaveri, OEI, Rab-Rab, STYX, and Carla Zaccagnini – will present their publishing practices and discuss their publishing poetics and publishing ecologies.

The Bookshop Situation Series at Index is based on events to present books, magazines, records and other artistic formats. The bookshop situation is a way to test content, to share it, to distribute it, offering situations to be part of a community of experimental producers and users. This event is in collaboration with Iaspis – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists

Language: Swedish and English