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21 October 2023
Insights Vienna Art Book Fair: Artists interpret Moby Dick, artist book mirrors love scenes in film,...
Fashion at visited the three-day Vienna Art Book Fair, where more than 130 participants from around 25 countries are exhibiting until tomorrow, 22 October, in the annex of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. The first table that caught the eye of Fashion.at was the one with the interpretations of literature by artists such as Jonathan Meese, whose work is part of a series of booklets. In each booklet, a chapter of the novel Moby Dick is published with artwork created specifically for that chapter. The booklet series 'Moby Dick Filet' was started in 2011 by the Vienna-based Harpune Verlag and is still ongoing. The website of Harpune Verlag at https://www.harpune.at/ presents five new Moby Dick booklets - among the artists Raymond Pettibon - together with the complete list of artists of the 45 booklets of the more than 130 chapters published so far.
Fashion.at saw many interesting presentations, such as Michael Bensman's artistic diaries about punk in the 80s and the artist's memories of emigrating from Russia to Germany, or the presentation of publications available both digitally as ebooks and physically as printed books by Berlin-based Eeclectic. The publisher focuses on books that provide a look behind the scenes of the mechanisms of cultural production, such as the book in German and English 'Chinesisches Gewebe - Chinese Weave' by the artist and fashion designer Regine Steenbock. Details can be found at https://eeclectic.de/en/produkt/chinesisches-gewebe-chinese/.
Fashion.at entered one of the project rooms where the curated bookshelf by artist Robin Waart was exhibited. The artist was present and talked about the bookshelf 'Lakeside Library', which was originally made for the exhibition 'Wörthersee, Wörtersee' at Kunstraum Lakeside in Carinthia this summer (detail on https://www.lakeside-kunstraum.at/en/group-exhibition-curated-by-robin-waart/). The bookshelf is a kind of double of the one in the Kunstraum Lakeside, where the art books, catalogs of previous exhibitions and art books are stored.
Robin Waart curated the exhibition and rearranged the books on the shelf. Among the books is one by Robin Waart himself; 'Evol/Love', as the title suggests, focuses on the Amsterdam-based artist's central theme of exploring the impact that doubles, copies, mirrors of images, words, messages have on the transformation of the messages and the meaning for the viewer, the reader, as in the case of 'love' which, when read backwards, sounds similar to 'evil'. It's not just the concept of the book, with its inverted images and mirrored subtitles of iconic film scenes in which the word love is mentioned; the haptic of the book is something that makes aware that digital publications have a deficit - content alone is not everything. The book has already received attention for its design, as mentioned on https://www.robinwaart.nl/books/evollove/.
Image: Artist Robin Waart talked to Fashion.at about the book 'Evol / Love' at the Vienna Art Book Fair on 20 October 2023 at the University of Applied Arts, Vordere Zollamtstraße 7 in the 3rd district of Vienna.
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