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***Existential*** issue FGA#35
What this new issue is about:
We all must live an authentic life. In that respect existentialism has penetrated deeply into our culture. At the heart is a simple plea to take responsibility for our lives and it is up to us to create meaning. ‘You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent!’ Sartre says. We are what we make of ourselves and we cannot abdicate this responsibility and leave it to an authority. That’s a heavy load, which people are eager to escape. And the problem is that today these same values of freedom and responsibility have become popular values of our neoliberal society, and has also infected the work ethic of the art world.
Existentialism says all human interaction is conflict, and we are lonely, competitive individuals. But it is also a freedom philosophy, a narrative of agency, emancipation and responsibility. It influenced every single one of us through cinema, literature, and art. How free are we really as artists and what is our project in life? You are not born an artist, you have to become one, you have to invent. But if our purpose in life is to have our unique individual project, how can we engage with others and transform what is so personal and subjective into something magical that lifts more people than you alone? And that's ultimately our duty as artists.
The official book launch took place on 9 October 2016 at *KURATOR, Rapperswil (CH) with a special reading by Jan Verwoert based on the essay he wrote for this issue. Dressed in an old leather colbert of his father, a sculptor, with a book from his youth in every pocket, The Stranger by Camus and On the Road by Jack Kerouac he convinced us of existentialism of life instead of death!
Other book presentations at art book fairs: VOLUMES! independent publishing fair in Zurich, Friends with Books in Berlin, I Never Read and Liste in Basel, and Miss Read in Berlin.
Events 2017:
14 January — 19 February: magazine-residency at KADIST San Francisco
Exhibition: Propaganda of the Word—12 Years Fucking Good Art.
14—17 June: I Never Read art book fair, Kaserne Basel
13—18 June: LISTE magazine table, Basel
14—16 July: Miss Read in Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, including an artist talk with Heimo Lattner and Michael Baers from the Berlin based collective distribution network DHL, Drucken Heften Laden.
15 September: Exhibition La Ruche et la Valise, Villa Bernasconi, Geneva.
16 December: Exhibition The Screen, the Mouse, the Air, On Arte, Locarno. A 6-channel video essay based on FGA35.
Fucking Good Art is a travelling magazine or editorial project for research in-and-through art by Dutch artists and non-academic free-style researchers Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. Fields of interest are: oral history, ethnology, documentary, investigative art and journalism, anarchism, counter-cultures, self-organisation and DIT do-it-together strategies, and models outside the art market.
This work by Fucking Good Art and collaborating artists and writers
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.fuckinggoodart.nl.
Buy FGA online at our: FGA online bookshop
Send us an email: mail@fuckinggoodart.nl
Conversations with:
Ger Groot, Dutch philosopher and writer. He wrote and performed two ambitious eight-hour-long lecture series: The Human Tone, an overview of philosophical ideas that have shaped the modern individual, and Modern French Philosophers. Both lectures formed the basis for our conversation.
Alana Jelinek, Australian artist and writer of the book This is Not Art: Activism and Other "Not-Art".
Alexandra Blättler, Swiss art historian and curator of the exhibition series New Existentialism. This new issue of FGA is made as part 7 of this series.
Essay by:
Jan Verwoert, German musician, critic, writer and lecturer on cultural theory. In this essay he explores how "a masculinist death-cult" could travel so smoothly into the present, and proposes an existentialism of life and new beginnings.
You can get FGA at these bookstores of our own loyal distribution network:
Arnhem
WALTER
Amsterdam
Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum
Boekie woekie
Sans Serriffe
Stedelijk Museum museumshop
Antwerpen
MUHKA bookshop
Berlin
ProQM
MOTTO
Do You Read Me?!
Zabriskie
Books People Places
Bruxelles
WIELS bookshop
Neuchatel (CH)
CAN, Centre d'Art Neuchatel
New York
Printed Matter
Rotterdam:
v/h Van Gennep
Boijmans van Beuningen bookshop
Tent bookshop
NAi Boekverkopers_Het Nieuwe Instituut
Walchenbach Art+Books
Zürich
OOR: One's Own Room (Art Books+Record Store)
Information:
Language: German / English
Pages: 192
Size: 11 x 18 cm.
Weight: 145 gr
Binding: Softcover/paperback
Editors: Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma
Commissioning editors: Alexandra Blättler and Christa Gebert (Gebert Stiftung für Kultur)
Publisher: edition fink, Zurich
Typesetting and design: Nienke Terpsma
Corrections: Georg Rutishauser
This publication appears as Part 7 of the series New Existentialism, an exhibition project by Alexandra Blättler in the context of the *KURATOR fellowship hosted by Gebert Stiftung für Kultur.
©2016 Fucking Good Art and the authors, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur and edition fink, Zurich
www.editionfink.ch
www.fuckinggoodart.nl
www.gsfk.ch
www.kurator.ch
Date of publishing: October 2016
ISBN: 978-3-03746-201-0
ISSN: 1874-0227
FGA#35 was made possible with the generous support of:
Gebert Stiftung für Kultur
Credit Suisse Rapperswil
CBK Rotterdam
Mondriaan Fund Amsterdam
Stadt Rapperswil-Jona
Kulturförderung Kanton St. Gallen
Swisslos
and Avina-Stiftung.
Colophon
Fucking Good Art: Rotterdam * Berlin * Zurich
Artists/editors: Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma, always working with a changing collective of makers and thinkers.
Fucking Good Art is a travelling magazine or editorial project for research in-and-through art by Dutch artists and non-academic free-style researchers Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. Fields of interest are: oral history, ethnology, documentary, investigative art and journalism, anarchism, counter-cultures, self-organisation and DIT do-it-together strategies, and models outside the art market.
The first issue was published in December 2003.
English translation and copy editing – Gerard Forde
Webdesign: catalogtree.net
Co-publishers: edition fink, post editions, and NERO
Distribution always through Motto Berlin and FGA, and available in bookshops around the world, or order via our website.
Fucking Good Art is supported by Mondriaan Fund Amsterdam.
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