John Russell: Bruce Willis and Parasite Publishing
Monday 29 September, 2014
7pm, $0
Artists Space, Books and Talks
55 Walker Street
Artist John Russell’s Frozen Tears books are horror/sci-fi bestsellers that present original writing, historical excerpts and imagery by artists and writers. As ‘objects’ the paperbacks exude a lurid materiality, with glossy embossed covers, foil blocking and spot varnish - these processes mirroring the visceral emphasis of the writing within. Russell has stated: “the idea was to stage the conflation of the visual and the textual both in relation to ideas of “figurality” and as the distinction between book-as-text (text art, collection of texts) and book-as-object (art object, sculpture, commodity, found object or pretend found object).”
In conjunction with the inclusion of Frozen Tears volumes 1-3 in Everything is About to Happen – the section of The Library Vaccine curated by Gregorio Magnani – John Russell will give a talk in two parts. BRUCE WILLIS draws on the writing of Luce Irigaray and Georges Bataille to outline an aesthetics where the future inhabits or parasites the cadavers of “place” and the “present.” The second part of the talk, Parasite Publishing pursues this future-orientated aesthetic and gives examples from the realm of contemporary publishing.
John Russell is an artist living and working in London. He was a founding member of the BANK art collective, working as part of the group for ten years to produce over fifty exhibitions and events and a range of artworks and publications. Since 2000 he has shown his work internationally at venues such as ICA, Tate Modern, Matt’s Gallery and MOT International in London; and PS1 MoMA, Orchard Gallery and Maccarone in New York. He has written regularly for publications such as Mute, dot dot dot, and F.R. David.