Crusin’ the couch? Check out Temporary Services on Vimeo and watch our movie “Framing The Artists” (Click here for a review & discussion) as well as some of the concerts we arranged for our Music Mountain project in Denmark!

Whoops! A quick correction to our June newsletter: the right link is now up for “New Axioms For Reading The Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice,” written by Don Mitchell. You can find it in the Free Stuff section at the bottom of the Reading Room page. Add it to your June reading list and check out the other suggestions posted by Regional Relationships in the current Reading Room. (via READING ROOM: REGIONAL RELATIONSHIPS : Half Letter Press, Independent Art & Publishing & Infrastructure)

The Block Museum sponsored WBEZ’s webstream this week and used the opportunity to remind listeners about the Social Mobility exhibition! If you’re near Evanston, Illinois anytime before August 14, 2011, you should check it out. We think all you public radio enthusiasts will love it!

NEW BOOKLET! Designated Drivers (Free Download). Coming to the HLP store soon. You can get copies at Quimby’s (Chicago) or come to The Block Museum and get a free copy.

FREE DOWNLOAD: Swop Book

HLP-er Brett was interviewed by Lise Skou and Andrea Kreutz who work together as Swop Network. The interview was recently published in a book that is free to download here: http://www.swopnetwork.dk/swop_book.pdf

More about the book:

Swop Book

The objective of this book is to present Swop Projects and some of the initiatives and projects we conducted within this framework. Apart from the material, documentation and concrete output, the book also includes three texts commissioned from authors to give an idea of the contexts in which the various projects operated. As a backdrop, we chose to include a text by writer and researcher Kolya Abramsky, which outlines the political and economical climate. We asked Emily Pethick, director of CASCO at the time, to contribute a text on how to build relationships around an art institution by collaborating with artists. We also asked freelance curator Katarina Stenbeck to contextualize the project from a contemporary art perspective.

To us, the work of developing alternative strategies and micro-models is a collective effort involving individuals from various groups and local communities. In order to understand local contexts and, not least, to be able to imagine alternative goals, we have operated within an international network. We started in Copenhagen and around Denmark. The project then brought us further afield to cities in Europe and beyond. We met people and visited local communities whose relationship to contemporary culture is based on ideas of co-operation, collectivism and social diversity in the local environment.

During the years we spent on Swop Projects we learned a lot, both personally and professionally, through meeting people who inspired us, presented us with ideas and who generously shared their knowledge and experience. We hope that we, through this book, can communicate the views of a political and artistic sphere as well as share some of the critical and diverse ideas that we have had the privilege to come across during the course of our work. We hope to inspire others and to arouse the readers’ curiosity in the same way as our own curiosity was kindled.

Andrea Creutz, Stockholm and Lise Skou, Aarhus, November 2010.

http://www.swopnetwork.dk/swop_book.html

(SECOND INSTALLMENT NOW UP ON HLP!) READING ROOM: COLLABORATION

Welcome to the Half Letter Press READING ROOM winter installment for 2011.

We have a long term, vested interest in collaborative forms of art production and reception. We have selected several books from our store that present the work of collaborative groups, collectives, and people working in other less defined configurations. Collaboration is the future of art (and past, though this has been thoroughly hidden) and we are doing what we can to help shape the discourse around this practice.

READING ROOM is an initiative of Half Letter Press that focuses on the books and writings of important contemporary artists and critical thinkers as well as key themes in contemporary practice. For each installment, we make a selection of books from our store and hold events and discussions.

New in HLP’s FREE BOX: Culture Breakers: Alternatives & Other Numbers, Ken Isaacs, New York: MSS Educational Publishing Company, 1970, 190 pages

“This is the context of our time and the field of all action.” Thus begins Ken Isaac’s perfectly square book Culture Breakers: Alternatives & Other Numbers. Isaacs an architect and former design educator, is a self-described survivalist “concerned with the survival of all people.” This small book, based on a decade or so of research in the late 1950s and the 1960s, describes designs for living lightly on a small planet. In Culture Breakers, he presciently draws attention to shrinking polar ice caps and makes connections between the ways our living spaces affect how we survive in the world. Isaacs, concerned with ecology, considers how design can be more integrated into systems that function together.

Read more

A PDF of our booklet Temporary Conversations: The Dicks is available for free download from the Temporary Services web site: http://www.temporaryservices.org/tc3_the_dicks.pdf