Longitudes

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

'THE LAST STAR-LEDGER' AVAILABLE NOW! #4 issue of the 10 Latitudes-edited newspapers for 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition, New Museum

'The Last Star-Leger' – Issue #4
(READ IT ON ISSUU)

Table of contents:

Picture Agent - Our singular picture agency:
Haegue Yang (cover)
Media Habits:
Nicoline van Harskamp
Focus:
Collin Munn on 'The Last Newspaper's work 'Untitled' (2006) by Dash Snow
Feature: Latitudes on the
'The Last Newspaper's partner organisation StoryCorps & archive interview between journalist Ed Pierce and his grandson Scott Cole
Interview:
'Rank & File' Ignasi Aballí on his 'Lists' series

The Next Newspaper: Latitudes interview with Nick Mrozowski Creative Director of Portugal's newest newspaper 'i'
1989 Patricia Esquivias on…:
Communism
'Dirt Sheet':
Janine Armin's column
100 Years Ago...:
'The Tacoma Times' (Tacoma, Washington) 1903–1949, October 27, 1910.
Weekly cartoon strip: Francesc Ruiz
Advertising department:
Ester Partegàs with Rob McKenzie
 

Watch this or other issues on Latitudes youtube channel.

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!


Nick Mrozowski during his visit to 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition holding a copy of that days' New York Times. Photo: Latitudes. 

THE NEXT NEWSPAPER: i

Fresh from putting together a 40-page on-site weekend newspaper for the Society of News Designers conference in Denver – Michigan native Nick Mrozowski, the Creative Director of Portugal's newest newspaper, simply called 'i', stopped by 'The Last Star-Ledger' newsroom.

 
The Last Star-Ledger:
Tell us about the origins of i [pronounced ‘ee’] – was there a lot of research done into what people wanted from a newspaper in 2009? Was it independently started?


Nick Mrozowski:
The guys who launched the paper are seasoned pros in the Portuguese market. They've been directors of other newspapers so they're well-versed in the economy and business. i was started by a public-works construction company in Portugal. They happen to have a publishing branch – they publish regional newspapers – and wanted a national newspaper. Innovation Media Consulting, started in Spain, consulted on the editorial ideas and design before it launched. Even more than their knowledge or research of the market, they tried to create a newspaper based on their instincts and ideas that was totally different from anything else. The staff we hired is very young and capable of serious journalism, but with a lot of spirit, energy, and humor. That naturally found its way into the newspaper and because of that our audience is even younger than we initially thought.
The newspaper has about 55 or 60 people in the newsroom now. I'm the sole art director, though I didn't design the initial project. The graphic model was done by Javier Errea, who is the most famous Spanish newspaper designer now. He just won the Society for News Design's Lifetime Achievement Award at forty-three years old! In the last fifteen years that his studio has been going, they've probably been involved with most of the newspapers in Spain and Portugal.

Cover i, 7 October 2010

TLS-L: The design is obviously a critical part of the newspaper. To what degree did the staff have either design or press backgrounds which came together in its visual journalism?

NM: We have reporters and designers of different functions. My degree is in journalism, but I focused on design. In all the newspapers I have worked on, I've been asked as much to be an editor as a designer. Our newsroom at i is a total open-plan. We work in the same room without cubicles or dividers with zones designed for communication. In the center are the top editors and then spiralling out are the various news desks, designers, and photographers.


TLS-L: Is there a typical way an article is put together?


NM: An editor or reporter decides there is going to be a story about something. They would then come and speak to one of the designers about what they're going to have for the page. We have our own jargon for types of stories or design elements to make it faster. That's pretty standard. The thing we do that's a little bit different is how we start a page. Throughout the course of a day we change it a million times, not only because an article comes in longer or shorter, we change it because somebody has a new idea. There are five designers, one design editor, and myself for the design portion.

Cover i, 26 July 2010

TLS-L: And you have 4 sections which are not at all based on traditional newspapers...

NM: i is 25 x 35 cm (9 8/10” x 13 8/10”) x with 48, 56 or 64 pages. It starts with ‘Opinion’ on the first four pages to get you thinking. The following short section ‘Radar’ is all the news you need to know from the last 24 hours in different formats: a few briefs, a portion of quotations, a photo that tells a story by itself, an info-graphic that has no text accompanying it. The big ‘Zoom’ section is more in depth, more analytical, with longer format, bigger stories, mostly two-page spreads. At the end we have a section called ‘Mais’ (meaning 'more') which has culture, sports, and lifestyle. We don't have this feeling that we need a 'national' or 'international' section with a set number of pages or stories with a certain length, the editing is much more fluid. Although we have developed some habits over time, nothing is set in stone. It changes from one hour to the next, making it harder to work but producing a better result. For some newspapers, it’s a way forward: to be more aggressive, not just in reporting, but in the way we think about how we report.

TLS-L: You must hear people talking about the decline of the traditional newspaper all the time?

NM: I see what's happening but I don't believe it. I think there are a lot more to come. They're going to change, they have to change, but it's good change. Obviously the internet is not going anywhere. We talk about it a lot in the industry. Everybody has different points of view and every couple of months there is a prevailing strategy, idea, or criticism. News used to be a printed newspaper – it's not anymore – but a newspaper isn't necessarily an online thing. I read the online version of the New York Times all the time in Lisbon because you can't buy it (you can only get the International Herald Tribune), so I read it in the morning before I go into work, I read it during the day.

Cover i, 19 June 2010

TLS-L: Yet in a traditional newspaper you find things you wouldn't otherwise read.

NM: When I go online I read a lot of stories because there's little investment in clicking a link, if a headline caught my eye, or an illustration. Funnily enough, now that I’ve been reading the New York Times on printed format here these last days, I find it really strange to navigate as an object.


TLS-L: Can you give our news team any advice?


NM: A good newspaper should have texture and a feeling of some immediacy. Try to highlight the liveness of it. Save yourself one part each time and only do it in the last thirty minutes so you have no idea what it's going to be. Desperation is a reality of newspapers!

 
– Interview by Latitudes. Edited by Greg Barton.

 
+ images of i covers here.
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Book launch of Mireia Sallarès' 'Las Muertes Chiquitas'

Mireia Sallarès presented her book 'Las Muertes Chiquitas' tonight in New York at the Bluestockings bookstore. The publication also forms a part of Latitudes' project at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis.

The film will be screened at King Juan Carlos Center, New York University on Saturday, October 30 from 2-7 pm, followed by a round table discussion on Wednesday November 3, at 6.30 pm.
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Introducing 'The Last...' team

We would like to introduce the team behind 'The Last...' newspaper project, part of 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition at the New Museum on view until 9 January 2011. During 10 weeks, editors-in-chief Latitudes are producing and publishing ten 12-page weekly hyper-local newspapers 'The Last...' (Post, Gazette, Register, Star-Ledger...) from the third gallery floor at the New Museum. Latitudes is closely collaborating with the following individuals...

'The Last...' News Team:

Janine Armin's art writing and book reviews appear in The International Herald Tribune, Bookforum, Artforum.com, Saatchi Online, Artslant, The Architect's Journal, and The Globe and Mail among others. She is New York editor for fiction/non-fiction hub Joyland.ca, and an M.A. 2012 candidate at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.


Greg Barton is currently helping with the New Museum's Public Programs archive in addition to assisting Triple Candie in Harlem. Previously he worked for Independent Curators International as well as the National Gallery of Art in D.C.

Irina Chernyakova is currently part of the news team for 'The Last...' project. In May she earned her Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Most recently, she worked as a teaching associate for an introductory architecture program.


Collin Munn is currently a student at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, concentrating in 'Critical Curating'. His interests lie primarily within curating and critiquing contemporary art, specifically work that addresses broader social and cultural issues. In addition to working with Latitudes during the fall, Collin is also a founding member of the Makeshift Collective, and is working on several curatorial ventures of his own.


Gwen Schwartz is an artist and writer who is based in New York City. She grew up on an island in Maine where her talents flourished, however it wasn't until she came to New York City four years ago to get her BFA in Fine Arts that she began to fully realize them. Now, nearing her graduation, Gwen has a new goal in life: to be a rock star.

'The Last...' Graphic Design team:


Chad Kloepfer is a New York-based graphic designer. He was Senior Graphic Designer at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, for seven years where he worked on projects including exhibition publications ('The Quick and the Dead' (2009); 'House of Oracles, A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective' (2005); 'How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age' (2003)) as well as various print materials, and the Walker Expanded identity. He is currently Art Director of Artforum magazine. superserious.net


Joel Stillman is a Graphic Designer and an independent publisher living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He is currently 27 years old. His practice examines linguistic definition. http://www.normalnumber.com/
 
'The Last...' 'Advertising Department':
Ester Partegàs is a Spanish-born visual artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Partegàs is the 'Advertising Department' of 'The Last…' newspaper project, for which she collaborates with other artists in the production of weekly (anti)adverts. Partegàs currently has a solo show at Foxy Production, New York (on view until 27 November 2010) and in 2011 will participate in a group show at the Whitechapel, London. www.esterpartegas.com
 'The Last...' weekly cartoon:
Francesc Ruiz is a visual artist based in Barcelona, Spain. Ruiz is 'The Last…' newspaper project weekly cartoonist. He recently participated in the Philagrafika show at Temple Gallery, Philadelphia (2010) and is currently exhibiting 'The Paper Trail' at the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo (on view until 20 November 2010). Ruiz is currently preparing 'Gasworks Yaoi', his first solo show in London.

+ info:
Photo tour of 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition here
Read reviews and press release here
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'THE LAST REGISTER' AVAILABLE NOW! #3 issue of the 10 Latitudes-edited newspapers for 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition, New Museum

Issue 3: The Last Register
(READ IT ON ISSUU)

October 20, 2010


Cover: ‘Exhibit: Exposed!’. Installing 'The Last Newspaper' wall text
Report: ‘Reaction Distraction’: Gwen Schwartz on the TLN talk with participating artists Nate Lowman, Aleksandra Mir and Sarah Charlesworth
Focus: Doryun Chong on TLN artist Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares (1986)
Media Habits: Dora García
Dirt Sheet: Janine Armin on truth and fiction
Picture Agent: Sergio Vega
The Next Newspaper: Paul Schmelzer on the American Independent News Network
Feature: ‘Broadcasting’, Joe Salzman on the representation of the journalists on TV
Exclusive interview: Latitudes with TLN cartoonist Francesc Ruiz
‘Patricia Esquivias on...The French Revolution’
100 Years Ago…: New York Tribune
Feature: ‘Hyphen-ated’ by Stephen Spretnjak
Photo essay: ‘Behind the Scenes’, Installing ‘The Last Newspaper’
Cartoon: ‘The Woods: Scratch Lottery’ by Francesc Ruiz
Advertising: Ester Partegàs with Adam Shecter



Browse this or other newspaper on Latitudes' youtube channel.

This Week's Headlines
 

Philadelphia Newsstand (2010), installation at Temple Gallery, Philadelphia.
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Estrany-de la Mota, Barcelona.

“Before the internet, newsstands were the closest thing we had to web browsing”

Barcelona-based artist Francesc Ruiz is creating ‘The Woods’, a specially-commissioned cartoon strip for the back cover of each of ‘The Last...’ newspapers. The Editors-in-Chief of ‘The Last Register’ caught up with him as he prepared for an exhibition in Cairo.


Latitudes
: Is 'The Woods' a family, or is it a place?

Francesc Ruiz:
They're kind of a family or a community, as well as a place. The name was inspired by the last part of François Truffaut’s 1966 film based on Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. It’s set in a totalitarian society in which books have been made illegal and are being burned. A group of people go into hiding in the woods and decide to memorize great works of literature. They create a community that transmits books orally from generation to generation. Each of them incorporates a different book: there are five ‘Moby Dick’s, four ‘Don Quixote’s, and so on. It talks about the power of human knowledge to adapt to difficult and new situations, which is something that – although under a completely different perspective – is happening right now with the threat to printed matter and the adaptation of content to new formats. In ‘The Woods’ I'm using the city newsstand, magazines and newspapers, as a way of talking about different lifestyles, about specialization and ideology. I want to create a kind of masquerade ball in which everybody is represented or at least plays a role in the social architecture, something also very related to web 2.0 and platforms such as Facebook.

L: Where if anywhere do you draw the lines between art and design, or artists and designers?

FR: It’s all about self-consciousness and a critical perspective. As long as cultural object producers (which is what I consider both artists and designers to be) look at their work as something critically produced, to me it makes no sense to establish differences. Looking at it from a slightly different angle, someone asked me recently if I’d ever produced a ‘mainstream’ comic. I think comic books and design can be understood in different ways, just as both experimental cinema and popular cinema coexist. I try to work on the experimental side, but whether this work is read as art or not depends entirely on the context in which it’s received.

 
L: Can our readers follow the cartoon strip as an ongoing narrative?  

FR: No it doesn't follow a linear narrative – each issue shows a situation. The whole cartoon strip creates a series of scenes which build on my recent experiences working with a newsstand scenario before in Philadelphia, and now in Cairo. I did consider creating something more narrative-led using characters that keep reappearing but decided against it.
 
Cairo Newsstand (2010), installation at the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo.
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Estrany-de la Mota, Barcelona.

L: Specialist magazines target a public that has already been identified, yet they can also create new and perhaps unexpected followings. How does the newsstand feature in this relationship?

FR: Before the internet, newsstands were the closest thing we had to a web browsing experience. You could go there, buy specialist papers and magazines, check out the contacts sections, the classified ads, and see all the niches you could initiate yourself into. Through the printed press you were able to discover new things, it was the main knowledge distribution channel. With most of this now moving online the fetishistic element is not the same. Although there are some web-based attempts to create a similar interface to the newsstand, its visual power of the newsstand is unique.
For me, a newsstand is a form of information architecture, a superstructure or a special building with inhabitants that change periodically. It’s an amazing tool with which to analyse the world and contemporary society. The matter of what will happen to newsstands as printed material begins disappears is something that is already visible: they're converting into lottery card retail points, as well as beverage and snack stands. But maybe they will have a different use in the future? I'm thinking of creating ‘The Newsstand Museum’, a museum with different newsstands from different countries and periods. Every stand will show the content exactly as it was in a specific time and place. For example September 10, 2001.

L: Can you tell us more about the Philadelphia project you mentioned, made for the Philagrafika 2010?

FR: I presented a newsstand for which I created all the printed content: a magazine formed by 120 covers and a newspaper which reproduced 12 different front pages. With these two publications, I was able to build the ‘skin’ of the newsstand. I added speech bubbles to the covers and recreated some important characters of the city mixed in with references to different neighbourhoods, institutions, shops and bars. My idea was to create an analogy of the city and my experiences, initial reactions and perhaps prejudices about Philly after having been there for just a short residency period. I added a narrative layer around three main subjects: the city as the place where graffiti culture started, the city through which the AIDS crisis was imagined in the 1993 film Philadelphia, and finally the city’s Mural Arts Program, a (successful to some) anti-graffiti initiative. Through the different layers of newsstand, I attempted to approximate the complexities of the city, as well as race, gender and class issues. I'm now creating a new newsstand for the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo and it will take the form of a typical Egyptian street newsstand, only it will be made with newspapers covers that I've modified with a dialogue between the stones that are used as paperweights.

Cairo Newsstand (2010), installation at the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo.
Courtesy the artist and Galeria Estrany-de la Mota, Barcelona.

L: What difficulties and luxuries has this very particular format of the serial cartoon strip present to you as an artist?

FR: I made a comic strip series with artist Pauline Fondevila in which we explored the bars of a city nearby Barcelona. Basically, it was an autobiographical comic strip in which we drew ourselves getting drunk and having adventures. We published forty different comic strips and they were published daily, the problem was that after a while the energy and the inspiration weren't there any more – and we had very bad hangovers! On the one hand, it was very nice and a special format to play with in order to recreate worlds, but on the other, you end up feeling a little like a slave to the daily production process.
This ten-week trial for ‘The Last Newspaper’ is a great period to develop another small universe – that's essentially what I'm trying to do. The weekly frequency is fine compared to a daily routine. I recently showed a daily comic strip for Creative Time Comics, but all of these projects need a lot of commitment.  

L: Is there a particular newspaper cartoon you admire or took inspiration from?

FR: I don’t think Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder was ever published in a newspaper. I'm a big fan of George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz originally published daily in the New York Evening Journal, and that has always has been a source of inspiration to me. The genre ambiguity, the bricks, the accent of the characters and those amazing landscapes, I love it all! Of course, there are now a lot of people working on digital comic books and digital comic strips. It's interesting to see how scrolling works very well when reading linear narratives, actually better than the page-by-page structure. Scott McCloud is for me first author who successfully started to explore the potential of the comic book medium. But my favourite author is Kang Full, the Korean Manhwa webcomic artist. The funny thing is that he later prints his comics in paper format which entails a very interesting re-adaptation. And this seems a very apposite process for this period in between two regimes, the page-based former one and the web-based new one.

– Interview by Latitudes, October 2010

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Forthcoming project: 'Vic Cambrils Barcelona...A Library Project', Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis

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'Vic Cambrils Barcelona / Verges Cervera Barcelona / Viladamat Castelldefels Barcelona / Vilafranca Cornella Barcelona / Valls Collserola Barcelona... A Library Project', Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, from October 2010

Talk by Latitudes
: Thursday 21st October, 7pm

In response to Midway Contemporary Art Library’s holdings of museum catalogues and books from publishing houses in Barcelona, Latitudes has assembled a counter-accession of around 50 self- and micro-published books and paper editions produced since 2005 by artists, designers, and curators based in Catalonia.

The publications will be displayed at Midway's Library throughout October–November 2010 before being absorbed into the library holdings. In addition to the book acquisition, Latitudes invited Barcelona-based artists Mariona Moncunill, Gabriel Pericàs, Mireia C. Saladrigues and Oriol Vilanova to intervene in the library through a series of bookmarks which will be inserted into undisclosed publications throughout the library for unsuspecting readers to encounter. + info...

Mariona Moncunill looked for a book in her personal collection also held by the Midway library and found that there was only one: 'Inside the White Cube' by Brian O'Doherty. For a year, on every first Thursday of the month she will read the first paragraph on page 61 hoping to establish a temporary window that connects her to the reader.

Gabriel Pericàs's intervention consists in inserting four printed sheets with textual references that seem to supplement the content of the pages between which they are encountered. These carefully crafted 'wiki-fictions' appear to be printouts from the web, yet their spurious URL addresses might lead readers to doubt their veracity.

Mireia C. Saladrigues emphasized the formal correspondence between a book page in 'Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetic: Dora García and Matthew Buckingham' and another in 'Pure Association, Ryan Gander' by pasting elements into one another. Motivated by a 'happy encounter' and the associative nature of Gander's work, Saladrigues was interested in exchanging distant elements that at first glance seem to have nothing in common.

Oriol Vilanova's intervention focusses on the catalogue 'Fugitive Artist. The Early Works of Richard Prince, 1974-1977' (2007), a publication for which Prince refused permission to reproduce any images, thus leaving the illustrations blank. Vilanova re-inscribed this invisible history by inserting surrogate images taken from contemporary astronomy magazines.


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'Vic Cambrils Barcelona / Verges Cervera Barcelona / Viladamat Castelldefels Barcelona / Vilafranca Cornella Barcelona / Valls Collserola Barcelona... Proyecto para una biblioteca', Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, desde Octubre 2010

Presentación de Latitudes: Jueves 21 Octubre, 19h

En respuesta a los fondos adquiridos por la Biblioteca del Midway Contemporary Art entorno a publicaciones de museos y reconocidas editoriales de Barcelona, Latitudes ha reunido una contra-propuesta de unos 50 proyectos micro-editoriales o ‘auto-publicaciones’ producidos por diseñador/es, comisarios/as y artista/s en Cataluña a partir del 2005.

Las publicaciones se exhibirán en Midway durante octubre-noviembre antes de ser ‘absorbidas’ por los fondos de la biblioteca. Junto a esta nueva adquisición, Latitudes invitó a los artistas barceloneses Mariona Moncunill, Gabriel Pericàs, Mireia C. Saladrigues y Oriol Vilanova a producir puntos de libro que serán insertados 'silenciosamente' en algunos libros de la biblioteca y que en el futuro serán encontrados por desprevenidos lectores. + info...

Mariona Moncunill localizó un libro de su colección personal que compartiese con la biblioteca del Midway y encontró que sólo compartían uno: 'Inside the White Cube' de Brian O'Doherty. Durante un año, el primer jueves de cada mes, Moncunill leerá el primer párrafo de la página 61, con la esperanza de establecer una ventana temporal que la conecte a un lector desconocido.

La intervención de Gabriel Pericàs consiste en la inserción de cuatro folios impresos que parecen complementar el contenido de las páginas entre las que se encuentran. Estas 'wiki-ficciones' han sido cuidadosamente elaboradas y parecen ser impresas directamente de la web, sin embargo, sus cuestionables direcciones URL hacen dudar al lector sobre su veracidad.

Mireia C. Saladrigues enfatizó la correspondencia formal entre una página del libro de 'Introducción a la lógica científica: Dora García y Matthew Buckingham' y otra en 'Pura asociación, Ryan Gander' intercambiando elementos entre ambos. Motivada por una 'feliz coincidencia' y por la naturaleza asociativa de la obra de Gander, Saladrigues se ha centrado en el intercambio de elementos distantes que a primera vista parecen no tener nada en común.

La intervención de Oriol Vilanova se centra en el catálogo de 'Fugitive Artist. The Early Works of Richard Prince, 1974-1977' (2007), publicación para la que Prince negó el permiso de reproducción de cualquier imagen de su obra, dejando así las ilustraciones en blanco. Vilanova reinscribe esta invisible historia mediante la inserción de imágenes de revistas de astronomía contemporánea.

Midway Contemporary Art
527 Second Ave Southeast
55414 Minneapolis, MN
United States
MAP
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'THE LAST GAZETTE' AVAILABLE NOW! #2 issue of the 10 Latitudes-edited newspapers for 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition, New Museum

'The Last Gazette' – Issue #2
(Read it on ISSUU)
 Table of contents:

Cover: ‘Sorry for the Metaphor’. Special cover by Amalia Pica (and page 3)
Editorial: ‘34 People Like This’ by Latitudes
Focus: ‘A system is not imagined, it is real’, Julienne Lorz on TLN artist Hans Haacke’s News (1969/2008)
Dirt Sheet: Janine Armin on the newspaper-as-catalogue
Picture Agent: Ilana Halperin
The Next Newspaper: Clay Shirky
Photo essay: ‘Picture Mining’ by Ines Schaber
Obituary: ‘Sorry we’re dead’, Andrew Losowsky on TLN artist Adam McEwen’s Untitled (Caster) (2010)
Fit to Print: Adam Chadwick on hyperlocal citizen journalism
100 Years Ago…: Daily Public Ledger
In Brief: ‘Sac Bee Cuts’
Media Habits: Luis Camnitzer
Infographic: ‘U.S. Gazettes: Average Circulation’ by Irina Chernyakova
Cartoon: ‘The Woods: Money’ by Francesc Ruiz
Advertising: Ester Partegàs

 


Video of issue 2 - more videos here.
This week's headlines

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!

 

Hans Haacke, News (1969/2008),
RSS newsfeed, paper and printer, dimensions variable.
Image courtesy Gothamist, Photo by Katie Sokolor.
Detail of 'News'. Photo: Latitudes
Detail of 'News'. Photo: Latitudes

'A system is not imagined, it is real'

Julienne Lorz – Curator, Haus der Kunst, Munich – on Hans Haacke's News (1969/2008), one of the featured artworks presented in The Last Newspaper.

“Concorde breaks sound barrier” – “GDR celebrates 20th anniversary” – “Anti-Apartheid Protesters disrupt Frankfurt book fair”. Such headlines and their corresponding stories could be read by visitors to the exhibition Prospect '69 at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1969. There, Hans Haacke had installed his work News (1969) consisting of a telex machine that printed out all current news items transmitted by the German news agency DPA. Initially Haacke collated these printouts, as well as those from his solo show at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, where the work was shown a couple of months later, preserving and dating them in see-through plastic boxes. For the legendary exhibition Software. Information Technology: Its New Meaning (1970) at the Jewish Museum in New York, however, he dismissed this idea so as to avoid turning these paper messages into valued objects. Instead, the telex machines printed out reams of paper which curled in ever growing heaps onto the floor and after the show the once up-to-date information was discarded. The headlines during the Software... show recorded events which took place between 16th September and 8th November 1970, such as “Civil war breaks out in Jordan” – “Rock legend Hendrix dies after party” – “Soviet probe collects moon rock”, which had become yesterday’s disposable news.


Haacke has continued to update the technology used in News. Today it is a dot matrix printer linked up to a RSS newsfeed. But in an age where computers are ubiquitous and in spite of the – so far – non-existent paperless office, the impression of news being received and printed out is somewhat outmoded. Yet, the changing formal and technological aspects of News are not the main aspects of the work. Rather, it is the concept of dissolving the boundaries between two worlds: the exhibition within the context of a gallery or museum and everyday life existing outside of this sphere. News items in all their brutal reality and without the extra filter of a newspaper, TV or radio editor, perpetrate this hermetic space, where the noise of traffic and city life is rarely heard and where windowless white cubes supposedly create complete neutrality.


For Haacke the exterior elements influencing an artwork or a space are crucial, as he stated in Lucy Lippard's publication Six Years: The dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: “A ‘sculpture’ that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real.”


Bringing the two domains together through News was particularly apposite when Haacke first began exhibiting the work: the Vietnam War was still raging, the aftermath of the tumultuous events in 1968 were still being felt and the Red Army Faction in Germany was just starting its reign of terror. But News is, of course, always current whenever it is being exhibited, while simultaneously affecting the past, as Haacke put it in a conversation with Kathleen MacQueen: “New information constantly overlays the old and influences how we understand what we heard and read the previous day”.

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Newsletter #26 - October 2010


ONGOING...
Partner organisation in the exhibition 'The Last Newspaper', New Museum, New York, (6 October 2010–9 January 2011)

ALSO THIS MONTH...
'Vic Cambrils Barcelona...A Library Project' for Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (Talk: 21 October, 7pm)


FORTHCOMING IN 2011

Curators of the exhibition 'Christina Hemauer & Roman Keller: United Alternative Energies', Aarhus Art Building, Arhus, Denmark, 22 January–3 April 2011


LATITUDES ON THE PRESS

Profile article by Carlo McCormick, Paper magazine, October 2010


Check Latitudes' web www.lttds.org for further info
Facebook page here
Twitter here
Flickr photosets here
Previous newsletter here
Youtube Latitudes Channel
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'THE LAST POST' AVAILABLE NOW! First issue of the 10 Latitudes-edited newspapers for 'The Last Newspaper' exhibition, New Museum

'The Last Post' – Issue 1 
(Read it on ISSUU)

Table of contents:
Cover:
‘Ink vs Link’. Press Room of The Richmond Planet, c. 1899
Editorial: ‘Welcome to The Last Post, The Last Gazette, The Last Register...’ by Latitudes
Picture Agent (Our singular picture agency): Kirstine Roepstorff
Media Habits: Dara Birnbaum
Exclusive Interview: ‘Double Trouble’, Lorena Muñoz-Alonso interviews TLN artist Pierre Bismuth
Feature: ‘Lights, Camera...Banality’, Kolja Reichert on Marie Voignier’s Hearing the Shape of a Drum (2010)
‘Working with Utopians’ by Richard Flood and Benjamin Godsill
The Next Newspaper (Profiling the organizations, projects, initiatives and individuals redefining ink-and-paper news): ProPublica
Fit to Print: ‘The (L.A.) Times it is A-Changin’ by Adam Chadwick
100 Years Ago…: The Salt Lake Herald-Republican
Cartoon: ‘The Woods: Teen Balls’ by Francesc
Ruiz
Advertising: Ester Partegàs with Rob McKenzie





EXCLUSIVE CONTENT!


Below is the first interview of the series 'Media Habits' in which readers get to know how, where and from what artists, curators, journalists, etc. get their information and news. For the first one, we invited
the New York artist Dara Birnbaum whose work has addressed the medium of television since the late 1970s.
Self-portrait of Dara Birnbaum. Courtesy the artist.
Newspapers
I have basically stopped reading newspapers, except when travelling. Then I read the International Herald Tribune. I will look through the Sunday New York Times, as it is available once a neighbor has discarded it. Basically, I scan The New York Times news and read the ‘Arts & Leisure’ section, etc. I will pick up free papers and look through them, such as The Village Voice.

Magazines

I use magazines mainly for listings, such as New York magazine and Time Out New York. For New York magazine I also do the crossword puzzle. News is gleaned through TV and the radio. There are only very few magazines I subscribe to, such as Astronomy, that of the Natural History Museum and the Audubon Society. I used to read National Geographic, but recently stopped it as I found I wasn’t reading it thoroughly enough. All are read at home, mostly late at night when it is quiet.

Online

I do spend considerable time on-line daily, mostly for research and communication. I use YouTube mostly for great archival footage – and that is my entertainment as well – concerts, interviews, etc. I use Facebook marginally. Mostly I answer when someone wants to be a friend or posts a message to me. Basically, I am consumed by keeping up with email, mostly for work.


Television

As for television, I can barely watch it. However, I am addicted to Criminal Minds, which I find is well written and well-acted. It reminds me of a favorite film: The Silence of the Lambs. I haven’t exactly analyzed why. I can watch some public television, such as Mystery and sometimes watch films on TV, or the Late Late Show on CBS. Most television simply annoys me.


Radio

I listen to the radio constantly, mostly Wyoming National Public Radio on my computer. Then there are just two stations I listen to on my regular radio by my bed – the two public broadcast stations that we have in New York City.


Books

I read constantly, but I skip around a lot – not very concentrated. However, I just finished Little Bee by Chris Cleave and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and his Point Omega.
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Installation process of 'The Last Newspaper', New Museum



'The Last Newspaper', New Museum, 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors, New York
6 October 2010–9 January 2011

Tuesday 5 October 2010
VIP Preview: 7–8pm
Opening Reception: 8–10pm

Artists in the exhibition: Alighiero e Boetti; Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope. L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.

Partner organizations: Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org
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Shows at Artists Space, Ludlow 38 and Participant Inc., New York

Danh Vo
'Autoerotic Asphyxiation'
15 September – 19 November 2010
Artists Space
38 Greene St, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013

http://www.artistsspace.org

"Elegiac in their preoccupying calm, the images and objects inhabiting Autoerotic Asphyxiation coyly recall the past, fashioning a peculiar nostalgia. (...) The most immediately visible works in the room – the sheer curtains concealing both windows and walls – reveal, upon closer inspection, flowers embroidered in some of the fabric. These, in turn, are all species discovered throughout China and Tibet by French missionary and botanist Jean-Andre Soulie, who exported them to Europe. (...) Concealed behind the fabrics and tucked between windows are several sets of black and white photographs of Vietnamese men and boys. The intimate pictures exude an air of homoeroticism and evidence a keen fascination with masculine relationships in Vietnam. Images of men working or eating are accompanied by photos of men holding hands and embracing. Moving through the gallery becomes an active search as one parts the curtains along each wall to locate the photographs". More info... via http://idiommag.com

Tobias Putrih
'After Frei Otto'
1 September – 10 October 2010
Ludlow 38
New York, NY 10002
http://www.ludlow38.org

"Tobias Putrih: After Frei Otto' is an exhibition of new work inspired by the work of German architect Frei Otto (*1925 in Dessau, Germany). Putrih’s newly commissioned installation is accompanied by a presentation of a complete set of 40 publications (1969-1995) produced by the Institute for Lightweight Structures at the University of Stuttgart (founded by Otto in 1964) and video footage documenting the epochal work of the architect.

In the front gallery, the Slovenian artist has developed a new installation influenced by the early soap bubble experiments of Otto. Between a group of fixed points, soap film spreads automatically into the smallest achievable surface area. These experiments have helped Otto to design buildings with a fraction of materials used in other construction projects and made him one of the most important representatives of experimental architecture. Putrih adopts the experiments with an interest in their surprising effect and experimental nature, relating them to a history of architecture pedagogy". More info...

'Collective Show New York 2010'
15–26 September 2010
Participant Inc.
253 East Houston Street, ground floor
New York NY 10002
http://www.participantinc.org

"'Collective Show New York 2010', an artist-organized exhibition of contemporary collaborative art groups recently established in New York. This collaboratively curated 'group show of group shows' features DIY artist-run spaces and projects, emerging curatorial initiatives and local independent publications."

Participating groups include: 179 canal, 25CPW, Artist Accomplices, AVA, BHQFU, Boffo, Camel Collective, The Chrysler Series, Daily Operation, Eyelevel BQE, FARIMANI, Forever & Today, Forte, HKJB, The Holster, the jogging, Kunstverein NY, The Metric System, Parlour, Primetime, The Public School, Silvershed, Submerged Art, Vector Productions, Why and Wherefore, YES, and Collective Show 2011 hosts: ACP (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Night Gallery (Los Angeles) and Temporary Contemporary (London).

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org
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