Wednesday 04/16/2014, 7:00 PM

FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

LOCATION:

Threewalls

119 N. Peoria St. #2C
Chicago, IL 6060

7-9 PM
Conversation starts at 7:30 PM

Threewalls is pleased to host the Chicago book release for COOKIE!, a new collection of writings by the Berlin-based critic Jan Verwoert. The author will attend, and speak in conversation with the artist David Giordano.

(Books will be available for sale)

COOKIE!
Edited by Vivian Sky Rehberg and Marnie Slater
Published by Sternberg Press and the Piet Zwart Institute

From Sternberg Press:
If we don’t merely reduce art to clever code play in the arenas of representation, how do we speak about what is at stake? In response to this question, Verwoert addresses the forces at the heart of the tragicomedy that making, showing, and critiquing art implicates us in. He honors the basic joys of turning one thing into another, and the miracles of rhythm and rhyme that characterize the residual level of mimetic magic in art. In this key, the unverifiable is practiced daily: bodies are remade, feelings transfigured. As Alina Szapocznikow wrote, the mouth chews and out comes sculpture. Verwoert’s COOKIE! renders visible the endless emotional labor of setting the stage (for others), poses the thorny question of whether there could ever be a labor union for con-artists (like us), and gestures toward an ethics of disappointment to battle false expectations and as a way to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how you look at it, criticism hurts. COOKIE! is a sequel to Verwoert’s Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (edited by Vanessa Ohlraun, 2010), and third in a series of books published with the Piet Zwart Institute.

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin and has been writing about art and philosophy for numerous international magazines, journals, anthologies and artists’ monographs for about thirteen year. His book Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous was published by After all Books (London) in 2006. He is contributing editor ofFrieze magazine and has been a core faculty member at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam since 2005.

David Giordano is an artist and graphic designer. His recent publications include: Oneness, in collaboration with William Pope.L (Paper Monument/n+1 Foundation, Brooklyn, NY); The Child Alberta, co-edited with Silke Otto-Knapp, Mitch Speed, and Jan Verwoert (Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, AB); Geof Oppenheimer’s Modular Objects Civil Society (Whitewalls, Chicago, IL).