McKenzie Wark Podcast series: The Artist-Publisher
Publishing too can be a kind of art practice. In The Artist-Publisher podcast series, McKenzie Wark talks to artists who are also publishers and publishers whose work is a kind of art practice. Zines and books, made cheaply or by the thousands, or web-based journals available for free - these seem antithetical to the unique work of art. And yet the creation of meaning around art practices requires this other kind of practice of publishing written works.
Contributors include Julieta Aranda, Jacqueline de Jong, Deluge Books, Hedi El Kholti and GB Jones. The series includes an introduction with Juliette Desorgues.
1 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: Introduction with Juliette Desorgues
2 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: In conversation with Jacqueline de Jong
3 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: In conversation with GB Jones
4 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: In conversation with Hedi El Kholti
5 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: In conversation with Julieta Aranda
6 February 2022 - McKenzie Wark: In conversation with Deluge Books
Julieta Aranda (born in 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico) is an artist whose practice composes sensorial encounters with the nature of time and speculative literature. She observes the altering human-earth relationship through the lens of technology, artificial intelligence, space travel and scientific hypothesis. Working with installation, video and print media, she is invested in exploring the potential of science-fiction, alternative economies and the ‘poetics of circulation’. Her projects challenge the boundaries between subject and object while embracing chance encounters, auto-destruction and social processes. In 2006, she received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York. She had previously completed her undergraduate studies at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan (2001). As a co-director of the online platform e-flux together with Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda has developed the projects Time/Bank, Pawnshop, and e-flux video rental, all of which started in the e-flux storefront in New York, and have travelled to many venues worldwide.
Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939, Hengelo, The Netherlands) is considered one of the pre-eminent artistic figures of the post-war avant-garde. In the 1960s she became involved with the radical Situationist International (SI) and Gruppe SPUR, and went on to establish The Situationist Times, which was hailed as one of the most important and experimental journals of its time. Throughout her career spanning half a century, de Jong has developed a unique painterly practice, which incorporates eroticism, violence and humour. In the past few years, she has had major solo exhibitions presented at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2018); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019), as well as a career survey, co-organised by WIELS, Brussels (2021) and MOSTYN, Wales, where it is currently on view (2021-22). She is in several important public collections, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and MOCA, Toronto. In 2019 the French Ministry for Culture and the AWARE Prize for Women Artists presented de Jong with the Outstanding Merit Award in recognition of her exceptional career.
Deluge Books is a new mass experimental queer press. Collapsing the divide between conceptual literary work and bingeable pulp, we make advanced books that are fun to read.
Juliette Desorgues is a curator and writer. She is currently Curator of Visual Arts at MOSTYN. She previously worked as Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and held curatorial positions at the Barbican Art Gallery, London and Generali Foundation, Vienna. She studied Art History at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna and University College London.
G.B. Jones (b. 1965 Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada, lives and works in Toronto, Canada) is an artist, filmmaker, musician, and publisher of zines. Jones’ drawings first received notoriety when published in the Toronto-based queer punk zine J.D.s that she ran with Bruce LaBruce. Her prolific drawing series Tom Girls is widely recognized, and reimagines Tom of Finland’s drawings by replacing all the hyper-masculine subjects with women, subverting the intent into a contribution to third-wave feminist art. Jones has exhibited her art nationally and internationally since the early 1990s, in spaces such as Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus; Participant Inc., New York; Mercer Union, Toronto; The Power Plant, Toronto; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; White Columns, New York; AKA Artist Run Space, Winnipeg; Muncher Kunstverein, Munich; and Schwules Museum, Berlin. She was included in the 2012 exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1990s, which was curated by Helen Molesworth for the MCA Chicago and subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the ICA Philadelphia. She has also exhibited at national and international galleries including David Zwirner, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto; Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto; Feature, New York; Galerie Clark, Montreal; and Or Gallery, Vancouver.
Hedi El Kholti (b. 1967 in Rabat, Morocco in 1967) moved to Los Angeles in 1992, and worked in the film industry for five years before attending the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena (BA 2000). His work has recently been exhibited at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Los Angeles. Hesse Press published A Place in the Sun, a monograph of his writing and collages in 2017. He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial as an invited artist alongside Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus in their Semiotext(e) installation, which he conceived and designed. Hedi El Kholti co-curated the exhibition of the fan-photographer Gary Lee Boas’ work at Deitch Projects, New York, in 2000 and The Photographers’ Gallery, London, in 2001. He has been a coeditor of Semiotext(e) since 2004, and created the publication Animal Shelter, an occasional journal of art, sex and literature.
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke University Press 2021) and The Beach Beneath the Street: the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso 2011). She is professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City.
Graphic design: Kévin Blinderman
Technical Support: Sableradio
Supported by Borzello and Garfield Weston