NYAB Event - "Hungry Man, Reach for the Book. It is a Weapon!" Exhibition

"Hungry Man, Reach for the Book. It is a Weapon!" Exhibition

Printed Matter, Inc.

This event has ended.

Hungry Man, Reach for the Book. It is a Weapon! repeats the socialist mantra that glorifies education as a condition of emancipation, and that found its well-deserved poetic form in Brecht's famous poem.
The exhibition focuses on the political geography from before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, that 'obscure disaster', as Badiou calls it, which described a definitive end to the epoch that began with the October Revolution. This geography, once made up of the so-called “socialist states,” now presents a more variegated reality, reflected in the artists’ publications presented here.
The exhibition is in no way an overview of the heterogeneous production of artists' books in Eastern Europe. It does not take statistics as its politics of representation. Rather, it suggests a kind of discontinuous geographical and temporal journey that looks at Eastern Europe along the lines of a question posed by the Romanian philosopher Ovidiu Tichindeleanu: "For what point is there in a discussion about East European debates on communism if not to look there for a renewal of the theoretical tradition of the left?"
Publications included in the exhibition manifest an inclusion within the context of artistic practices that since the early 1960s have questioned the modernist canon. The artists' books that we are considering have sought to establish control over production and distribution of art on the horizon of the emancipatory political struggles that have transformed the world on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But the point is not to define some differentia specifica of artists' book production in Eastern Europe, not to fetishize either a resistance to official art and social repression in the name of artistic freedom and autonomy, or the delayed reverberations of artistic practices born within artistic centers of the West; but rather to complicate and refine a vision of modernity that does not belong exclusively to the West.

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