Join Paper Monument in celebrating the launch of their new book, Social Medium: Artists Writing, 2000–2015, an anthology of seventy-five contemporary artists' texts. Introductions by Paper Monument co-editor Dushko Petrovich and the book's editor, Jennifer Liese, will be followed by readings and discussion with five contributors (Bill Beckley, Deanna Havas, Nina Katchadourian, Marisa Olson, and Peter Rostovsky) exploring writing in performance and conceptual practices.

Jennifer Liese (moderator) is director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches graduate courses focused on artists’ writings and artists writing. She has worked as an independent editor for museums and publishers and was managing editor of Artforum, editor of Provincetown Arts, and an editor of Cabinet.

Bill Beckley is an originator of Narrative Art in the 1970s, whose writings include the photonovelM-Memoir (Onestar Press, 2012), the novella Shitty in Sunlight (Smith Brothers, 2015), and the plays Arguing Alleluia and A Drunk and a Democrat Walk into a Bar. He edited the Allworth Press/School of Visual Arts series “Aesthetics Today,” which includes his own anthologiesUncontrollable Beauty (1998) and Sticky Sublime (2001).

Deanna Havas is a prime example of what she has called the “cyber-flâneur,” who strolls through “the Internet as the arcade.” On her Twitter feed, active since 2010, Havas posts daily on her dating life, family dynamics, and politics, reserving her wittiest fury for the pretensions and economies of the New York art world.

Nina Katchadourian has been sorting and photographing books since 1993, aligning their spines to form surprising narrative statements. Much of Katchadourian’s work fashions everyday materials into unexpected outcomes, such as her Seat Assignment series, created entirely on airplanes, with materials available in-flight. Dust Gathering, her audio tour for the Museum of Modern Art on the subject of dust, will launch on October 21, 2016.

Marisa Olson’s interdisciplinary work engages with pop culture, gender, and the cultural history of technology, often reviving obsolete forms: from vinyl records to floppy disks. From 2004–2005 she wrote a popular blog about auditioning for American Idol as a durational performance and in 2008 published Poems I Wrote While Listening to the Doors, 1992–1994 (Before I found the internet).

Peter Rostovsky’s paintings combine traditional realist techniques and an allegorical approach to subject matter with the methods and concepts of new technologies. David Geers, his heteronym, has written on contemporary trends in abstraction for Frieze and October, on the culture of participation for Fillip, and on art in the networked sphere for the Brooklyn Rail. Of these dual personas Rostovsky has noted, “Rather than seeking some future reconciliation (of the familiar artist-as-writer self-advocacy), they are meant to stand in a productive tension, each interrogating and testing the assumptions of the other.”

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