In order to question and make visible the situation of research inherent to the realization of an artistic project, the backroom was invited to be part of Société Anonyme , a group exhibition held in Paris.

Société Anonyme was an experimental situation inviting 10 guests (artists, collectives and artistic structures) operating in different cities of the world, to provisionally anchor in Le Plateau, Paris, in order to initiate research and projects during a two-month exhibition run. During the two months, the exhibition will be an intense program of workshops, lectures and seminars, organized by the guests and the team of Société Anonyme, in constant collaboration with Paris-based artists and theoreticians.

Throughout the duration of the project, the backroom archive was constantly updated with new contributions. In addition, a series of projects and presentations were also held including:

Walead Beshty's Twenty-Four Hours Screening of Films Addressing the Armageddon
Including Omega Man (1971), The Day After (1983), and The Day of the Triffids (1962), in this series of films selected and presented by artist Walead Beshty, the disaster scenarios depicting the apocalyptic imaginary of the Cold War and the fear of a nuclear holocaust frequently stand as a metaphor of social change and, particularly, of the alienation of American urban and suburban condition of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Artist Talk and Screening by John Menick
Artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick screened his short video The Secret Life of Things(2006), a work in which an unidentified man describes his fixation with "last person on earth" films - films in which a single person awakens to find that he or she is the sole living inhabitant of a city.
After the short screening Menick discussed his research into 'last man on earth' and apocalyptic films, showing clips from source material and talking about the work's relation to his previous video projects and writings.
Click Here For More Information

Artist Talk by Aurélien Froment
The man who saw the man who saw the man who saw the bear
Chinese whispers, broken lines and second-hand stories
Aurélien Froment attempting to arrange his archives.

From early May till late June of 2007, the backroom was hosted at the Kadist Foundation in Paris, France, as part of a larger group exhibition titled Société Anonyme.

For this iteration, new contributors to the backroom include Peter Fillingham, Aurelian Froment, Felix Gmelin, Matthew Higgs (White Columns), Hassan Khan, Lars Laumann, Charlotte Moth and Artur Zmijewski.

In addition to the most recent contributors,the backroom featured materials from: Richard Aldrich, John M. Armleder, Walead Beshty, Pierre Bismuth, Anne Collier, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Dennis Crompton (Archigram), Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres, Amy Granat, Hassan Khan, Sam Green, David Hatcher, Paul Ramírez Jonas, William Jones, Stephen Kaltenbach, Thomas Lawson, Jesse Lerner, Lim Tzay Chuen, Nate Lowman, Lu Jie, Marko Lulic, Raimundas Malasauskas, Erlea Maneros, John Menick, Naeem Mohaiemen, Julian Myers, Michelle O'Marah, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Raqs Media Collective, Sean Snyder, Tercerunquinto, Jeffery Vallance, Miguel Ventura.

These initiatives, who all work through different channels (journals, exhibitions, publishing, discussion forums, television, sound-making, film production, etc.) are invited to temporarily shift to Paris for a given period of time in order to find there a new relevant context from which they would develop their activities in collaboration with French artists and intellectuals. In this sense Société Anonyme at Le Plateau is envisioned as a kind of harbour where these different groups and structures would provisionally anchor in order to imagine and initiate new projects following each own particular terms, objectives and methodologies with like-minded French practitioners.

Invited artists/organisations are (provisionally list): 16 Beaver / René Gabri & Ayreen Anastas (New York), What is to be done? (Saint Petersburg), Erick Beltran (Mexico DF), tv-tv (Copenhagen), Nico Dockx (Antwerpen), What, How & for Whom (Zagreb), Tranzit / Vitek Havranek (Prague), Be-Books (Berlin), "Curating the Library"/Moritz Küng (Antwerpen), Roma Publications (Amsterdam)

The groups and organisations invited to Société Anonyme have been chosen for the ways they have invented and fostered original approaches towards artistic practices and production in the form of relevant alternatives to the mainstream art institutions (museums, galleries, commercial publishing, academies, biennials, art fairs, etc). As well as, of course, for their proven skills to intervene in local situations different from the contexts that they originate from and are mainly active in, and their openness to share their experiences of production with others.

By transforming, with Société Anonyme, the venue of Le Plateau into a kind of collective office or theatre of operations, the curators want to make visible and intelligible to the French audience the energies that fuel the practices of these different structures and collectives, their respective economic apparatuses, and the various modalities that they have engineered so as to stimulate the work of artists and researchers or to specify the contributions of artistic and intellectual productions to the contemporary world

Each structure will present inside the space of Le Plateau both parts of its past productions and the research in motion carried in Paris, through displays and a programme of public events (that can take the form of conversations, screenings, actions, small exhibits, performances, concerts, lectures, discussions, studio work, collective research situation, dinners, parties, etc). While multiplying the occasions and modes of encounter, exchange, dialogue and sociability with the public of Le Plateau and the French artistic community, we hope to promote a real circulation of ideas, problematics, and forms of dialogue within the contemporary art world, as well as inspire in Paris the imagination of new modes of behaviour, attitudes, practices and will in relation to art today.

All along, France-based artistic initiatives, artists, and art students will be involved as well in the activities and dynamics of the whole project. A publication with contributions that will be generated during Société Anonyme, based on the open-content and do-it-yourself ideas will document this experience.

For More Information Please Visit
Société Anonyme
or
The Kadist Foundation

A backroom conversation
Magali Arriola and Kate Fowle, backroom curators
January 2006
Published in Pacemaker 11 magazine, Paris. March 2006
Download file

REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990
March 30 – May 12, 2007
Preview: Thursday, March 29, 6-8pm
Opening Reception: Friday, March 30, 6-8pm
Curated by the backroom organizer Kate Fowle
in collaboration with Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan

Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York NY 10013
T 212 226 3970
www.artistsspace.org

Click Here to download a PDF copy of the exhibition brochure, featuring an interview between REALLIFE Magazine organizers Tom Lawson & Susan Morgan and curator Kate Fowle.

When Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan started REALLIFE Magazine in 1979 they wanted to make a publication that would be ‘by and about artists’. The first issue was produced while Lawson had a critic’s grant from Artist’s Space, before evolving according to artist’s interests and influences, charting the politics, cultural scene and art practices of the 1980s.

Reflecting back in 1990, Lawson writes in the opening pages of the twentieth issue: “When we first started the magazine the pious rectitude of post-minimalism held sway in the art world, and we confronted that with the shameless thievery and media fascination of appropriationist work. When that in turn became acceptable for the pages of Artforum and Art in America and the walls of the Whitney Museum, we went looking for other artists, other ways of working.”

Curated by the backroom organizer Kate Fowle, in collaboration with Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan, REALLIFE Magazine: 1979-1990 includes artworks, period source material, and documentation of events and performances reflecting on the decade through the lens of the publication and its contributors, including Richard Baim, Eric Bogosian, Glenn Branca, Critical Art Ensemble, Jamie Davidovich, Jessica Diamond, Mark Dion + Jason Simon, Jack Goldstein, Kim Gordon, Group Material, David Hammons, Michael Hurson, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Ken Lum, Allan McCollum, Paul McMahon, Matt Mullican, Adrian Piper, Richard Prince, David Robbins, John Roberts, Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, James Welling.

The exhibition coincides with the launch of the publication REALLIFE Magazine: Selected Writings and Projects 1979-1994, edited by Miriam Katzeff, Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan and published by Primary Information (NY, 2007)

For further information contact Hillary Wiedemann at 212.226.3070 x 302 or press@artistsspace.org

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Images of Lawson's Contributions to the backroom

From March until May of 2007, the backroom was featured at La Celda Contemporánea Gallery at the University Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City. For this iteration, the backroom participated as one of three satellite projects (along with Reena Spaulings Fine Art and Tensta Konsthall) to the OTRA DE VAQUEROS exhibition in Mexico City, organized by Perros Negros (Mexico D.F.) and Toasting Agency (Paris).

Pierre Bismuth, the Center for Land Use Iterpretation, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Lim Tzey Chuen, Raimundas Malasauskas, Naeem Mohaiemen and Sean Snyder have each newly contributed materials to the backroom.

On April 4th, 2006, the backroom hosted the CD Release party of Archigram Re-Mix at Queens Nails Annex in San Francisco. Archigram Re-Mix is a limited edition CD commissioned by Queens Nails Records that expands the collection of Archigram’s ambient sound archive and remixed with electronic components and programs by Eamon Ore-Giron with Bob Linder and Case Simmons.

Queen's Nails Annex and The Backroom are pleased to announce the launch of Archigram Re-Mix, a CD developed by Los Angeles-based artist Eamon Ore-Giron in collaboration with Dennis Crompton.
Listen to Samples of the CD
http://www.queensnailsannex.com/label.htm

From July till August of 2006, the backroom was hosted by the QED Gallery in Los Angeles as part of Bring the War Home, an exhibition curated by Drew Heitzler. Bring the War Home was a joint exhibition of collaborators, orchestrators, publishers, producers, and pirates that was displayed both at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York and QED.

Bring The War Home, the title of the exhibition hosting the backroom, is most recognizable as the title of Martha Rosler’s series of Vietnam era photo collages. It was also the battle cry of the Weather Underground, who protested that war by blowing up police cars and the offices of war profiteers. This show, however, is not about Vietnam. The war we are fighting, if it even is a war, is against the current political/economic state of affairs that has brought us not only Iraq and New Orleans, but also an art world bubble of endless art fair drudgery and too many boring exhibitions that ignore the current state of affairs.

All of the artists in this exhibition understand the paradoxical position from which they operate. They accept the terms of the social contract into which they have entered, but sometimes bite the hand that feeds them. They understand the importance of commercial galleries but also the importance of artist-created systems of distribution that exist alongside of, but separate from, the gallery system; interventions , subtle and otherwise, in the belly of the beast. All are involved in practices and projects that operate in this way.

Click For More Information on Bring the War Home