Back from Miami Art Basel, Claire Staebler asks Loris Gréaud a few questions about his new book, origamis and fictions…

Bonjour Loris. Tu viens de publier un livre d’artiste aux éditions onestar press en pleine actualité américaine. Peux tu nous raconter comment est né ce projet? Intégralement noir et blanc, alternant dessins géométriques abstraits et dialogues, est-ce une architecture fiction ou bien une fiction architecturale que tu nous proposes?

Ce livre vient compléter et activer mon projet d’exposition “Nothing is true everything is permitted” pour Miami Art Basel - Art Kabinett dont le teaser avait été lancé quelques mois plus tôt à Londres lors de Frieze Art Fair. Le livre montre, à la manière d’un flip book, un origami en distortion continuelle, changeant de forme, de “pliage” et de proportion. Cette forme est la célèbre “Dymaxion Map of the earth” créée par Buckminster Fuller, formant un cuboctahedron. Mon intérêt au delà de la pensée fullerienne (redéfinition et pensé globale) est qu’il s’agit là véritablement d’une nouvelle représentation du monde avec laquelle on pourrait jouer, assembler, plier et recomposer une des pièces présentées dans l’exposition est cette même forme, une sculpture d’une envergure de 3 mètres développée en une feuille d’aluminium en polymiroir, donnant le sentiment que la réflexion du monde, de notre réalité, serait distordue par sa propre représentation…

Comme a ton habitude ce projet est le résultat d’une recherche collective. Quels sont les autres acteurs de ce projet?

J’ai élaboré cette oeuvre avec mes partenaires architectes Marc Dölger et Damien Ziakovic. La prochaine étape de ce projet fait l’objet d’une commande publique de grande envergure.

Le livre est également le fruit d’une collaboration avec Mario Garcia Torres. Comment s’inscrit dans le processus?

Je travaille et discute beaucoup avec Mario. Ici, nous reproduisons, sur la couverture, notre dernier projet: DISAPPERING A WORK OF ART AS A WAY TO QUESTION THE REAL EXISTENCE OF IT, 2007 où nous avons fait disparaître une sculpture par un prestidigitateur laissant simplement au sol sa cape, son outil de travail… c’est une substitution, nous attendons patiemment qu’elle réapparaisse. il nous semblait que cette couverture faisait sens, présentant en son intérieur le projet d’une sculpture.

Après ton projet a Frieze c’est la deuxième fois que tu réalises des projets spéciaux pour les foires, comment appréhendes tu ce genre d’espace? est ce diffèrent pour toi que l’espace d’un musée ou d’une biennale? est ce que cela doit à présent faire partie intégrante des espaces à exploiter par les artistes?

La foire et les projets commissionnes doivent être appréhendés en terme de format. C’est une chose à rendre consciente afin de répondre de manière dynamique et cela peut être extrêmement productif. Dans le cadre de Frieze Art Fair, commission 2006, je présentais WHY IS A RAVEN LIKE A WRITING DESK, véritable exposition prenant place au centre de la foire, à l’emplacement d’un stand classique. L’exposition proposait des nano-sculptures développées en collaboration avec le CNRS, en quelques sorte, la présentation et la vente de sculptures invisibles dans l’une des foires les plus incisives du marché.

Loris Gréaud
Nothing is true everything is permitted
Published December 2007

The self attempts balance, descends.’
Jasper Johns

he above quote, from Johns’ famous appreciation of Marcel Duchamp, is an unlikely introduction to Lisa Anne Auerbach’s ‘Unicycle Shop’, published in 2007 by onestar press. The shop, a modest endeavor, was part of the High Desert Test Site festivities in Joshua Tree California. Auerbach knows her unicycles, and documents the efforts by numerous attractive individuals not to master the vehicle, but to balance unsupported by others, or the business booth itself. Hence the Johns quote. So we have mainly a sequence of noble attempts, in addition to an inventory of some of the things necessary in operating a10 cents an hour unicycle rental establishment. The first aid kit looks particularly useful. The circus, according to Michael Bakhtin, belongs to a ‘culture of laughter’ where the fear of power is literally laughed away. Or simply put; ‘they’re out there having fun, in that warm California sun!” And does anyone else notice that an inverted unicycle strongly resembles a notorious Duchamp work of 1913?
Tim Maul, New York

Lisa Anne Auerbach
Unicycle Shop
Published September 2007

NE PAGE BOOK took 7 years and 35 seconds to make: 7 years to think about it, and 35 seconds to put it on paper (onestar press invited R. Barry to publish a book, in its collection of books by artists, in 2000). It consists of the single word “ENOUGH” on a single page, plus a lot of blank pages. But because this is Robert Barry’s book, it is naturally a vehicle for investigating his obsession with space and time. First of all, what about all those blank pages? Does the word “enough’ echo invisibly on them? Does the word have a spectrum of tones? Paternally irritated? Royally surfeited? Biblically severe? Objectively neutral? Or is it toneless? Or both? Or does “enough” work like a conceptual radio carrier wave transmitter, silencing everything else on its frequency (Barry set up a transmitter in a gallery in the early 70s to silence all other radio waves within its reach)? Is this book conceptually infinite? Do we need to own it to appreciate it? Does its “signal” diminish the farther we get from it? Is this book really a sculpture? Is it a kind of minimal architecture model? Is it a conceptual koan? Can I use it as a notebook? And so on…
Robert Barry has always been of a man of a few, well chosen words – could it be that ONE PAGE BOOK is his last (and first and only) word? It’s hard to improve on perfection. But is enough really enough?
Richard Dailey (Paris)

Robert Barry
One page book
Published December 2007

Haim Steinbach

November, 10th 2007 – January, 5th 2008

Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris

From the press releaseFor his new exhibition in Paris, his first at the Galerie Laurent Godin, Haim Steinbach revisits his work’s origins, notably his installation at Artists Space in New York in 1979, where he associated wallpaper with personal obsessions of friends and relatives displayed on shelves.Here, for the first time, he seizes on food products; he suppresses the shelf, for which he substitutes a simple wall painting, and he hangs in the gallery space a grouping of country hams from Auvergne, whose strange and spectacular plasticity makes us question our connection with the fascinating duality of things. On one hand, these are objects of greed and desire, on the other hand strange and repugnant pieces of dead bodies…

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FETISH
Heimo Zobernig
with an essay by Sabeth Buchmann
Three Star Books
Published Summer 2007

Press Release

ound and cleft. Quite simple, really, and yet the archetypal subject of pictorial fantasy and literary imagination, not to speak of the daily musings of lesser beings, of men and also women. The origin of the world.
When Gustave Courbet painted the genitals of a woman in 1866, limiting his pictorial subject to splayed legs and a central focus on lips and pubic hair, even his friends were scandalized, not to speak of a public that finally had occasion to see his work only at the very end of the twentieth century. Forever, it hung behind curtains or painted panels, the private pleasure of its varying owners.
Marcel Duchamp picked the subject up again, or laid it down, so to speak, in Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage an installation he worked on for the last twenty years of his life, subsequently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here too, such an uproar was caused that, even in the swinging 1960s, a vision of post-coital abandon could cause shivers.
The power of eroticism in art still dictates that ancient Roman artifacts of sexual nature are housed in a secret room in the archaeological museum of Naples, banished since their discovery in the nineteenth century.
Thousands of artists throughout history, including Caravaggio and Egon Schiele, have been slapped with fines and even prison for their licentious depictions.

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ear artists, collectors and friends of onestar press - we are pleased to announce that the MoMA, New York, has purchased the entire onestar press collection. The museum bought our Lawrence Weiner bookself, “EMPOWERMENT CANNOT BE TRANSLATED AS ENTITLEMENT,” which contains every artist book published by onestar press since its beginning 7 years ago. So a hearty welcome to the MoMA to each and every artist, as well as our thanks for your collaboration. After all, what’s an artists press without artists? If you have not taken a look at our web site (www.onestarpress.com) recently, we invite you to take this occasion to do so and catch up on our recent activites.

Christophe Boutin
Mélanie Scarciglia

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Corinne Marchetti

Liberté Sexe Education

Editions onestar press / Laurent Godin

Texte français de Cyrille Martinez / English text by Richard Dailey

BAISEURS D’ETOILES
(états des études marchettiennes, Paris, 2068)

Corinnemarchetti est le nom d’artiste de corinnemarchetti. Il y a un monde où corinnemarchetti est artiste à temps plein, dimanches et mois d’août compris, un monde constitué de longues plages de temps libre. C’est un monde de vacance, un monde où l’on s’autorisera à prendre nos réalités pour des désirs. Où être carnivore peut vouloir dire se nourrir d’animaux en peluches. Un monde semblable à celui où vivraient thebeatles s’ils étaient restés dans le jaune sous-marin. Un monde que l’on pénètre à grand coup de formules magiques, où l’on bricole les objets comme les formules. Où qui vole un œuf vole un œuf. Où les carottes d’un révolutionnaire sont aussi longues à cuire que celles d’un bourgeois. Où les carottes de mes amis révolutionnaires ou bourgeois sont : a) mes amies, b) des carottes. Un monde habité par des êtres parfois rigolards parfois mélancoliques, où les anciens rêves collectifs sont devenus des pensées partageables. C’est un monde favorable au Soyez impossibles. Un monde ami du monde des jouets tel que Lumignon le décrit à Pinocchio : « la semaine se compose de six jeudis et d’un dimanche. Figure-toi que les vacances commencent le 1er janvier et finissent le 31 décembre. »

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Interview with Christophe Boutin by Louise Forrester for MA research paper ‘Independent Art Publishing’, Goldsmith College

Louise Forrester: Publishing through onestar press offers the artist freedom and flexibility within an established publishing format. What other factors do you consider attract artists to OSP rather than self-publishing or approaching a traditional publisher?

Christophe Boutin: The main reasons artists come to us are the network we have been developing, and our skills in preparing and producing books. We provide a network of people and ideas – when an artist produces a book within this collection, he immediately makes connections, meets other artists and talks to his peers about the collection, and about ways of developing the project formally or intellectually - even if they don’t meet physically they meet through ideas. Also, because the book is presented as part of a collection, we offer a new form of visibility whether the artist is well-known or less-known.
The book holds a fascination for the artist. I’m always fighting against the idea that a book is an instrument of power - it should be considered a specific space to develop the project, an idea that hasn’t changed since we started.

Louise Forrester: onestar press is notable for its prolific output – over 120 books in five years. Has giving the artist total control over the layout facilitated this rapid production?

Christophe Boutin: In fact now it’s more like 150 (without counting the Hors Collection projects- see the “more” section of our website). The artist has to have control over the layout. This is very important to us, as it’s an artist’s project in the form of a book. Let’s compare this to an installation: when an artist makes an installation, he wants to control the process and we give him the tools to make it. I insist that the artist takes charge of every stage of the prepress.

Louise Forrester: Have you ever had a situation where the work of an artist compromised onestar press?

Christophe Boutin: Personally I have no problem with all this. The books are strictly un-edited by the publisher, the artist is absolutely free to do what he wants. However, if it’s a hate book, we won’t publish it. That is the only limitation we impose. We have never had a problem of that type though.

Louise Forrester: The motto “strictly un-edited by the publisher” inverts the traditional relationship between publisher and artist, could you say something about this?

Christophe Boutin: Some artists don’t understand the process and submit proposals, which we will not look at. When invited, the artist is free to develop his/her project, which we will send to print without interference or judgment. Some artists are very much afraid of the process, some are very happy with it – most can’t believe it. We try to minimise dialogue between ourselves and the artist concerning the development of his/her book project, to avoid our taste interfering. My only objective is to develop this collection of books, to make it as large and eclectic as possible. Artists fight not only through forms but through ideology, ideas and philosophy – we try to open different ideas within the collection.

Louise Forrester: Each artist becomes an editor by suggesting future artists for onestar press to publish - does this introduce a risk of the series becoming elitist, a closed group of artists connected by social networks?

Christophe Boutin: Yes, it’s a very slippery slope. One example I could give you is of Miltos Manetas, who recommended quite a few artists to us - maybe 10 or 15 artists in our collection. Eventually we had to say “Ok, stop, we can’t only play with your friends”.
It’s also very difficult to answer uninvited proposals. I don’t want to act as a censor, but I have to protect the economy of the project. I could accept everything that came in, but that would be a different project. We try to encourage the artist to get a recommendation, this way they enter a conversation about their work and the collection. We’ve established enough networks now that it’s easy enough for an artist to get a recommendation and then come back to us. Of course, then we will go ahead with the project.

Louise Forrester: The fixed parameters (80 gram bulky paper, a glossy colour cover, black & white interior, perfect bound, 140 x 225 mm format) for each publication were developed from your self-published book, do you feel they have translated successfully for other artists? Have artists ever challenged these parameters?

Christophe Boutin: The parameters for that first book were imposed by the machine it was printed on, they’re simply the cheapest way of producing a book on this specific machine. Later this format became our ‘trademark’. Yoko Ono, for example, was about to send her project, when suddenly she decided she wanted it printed in colour. We told her she had to work within the same parameters as everyone else, to play the same game. In the end, she self-published the book, and thanked onestar press on the colophon page. onestar press is still waiting for Yoko Ono to send a project in black and white that we will happy to publish.

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