Tag Archives: Frieze London

ON LYOTARD’S IMMATÉRIAUX

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This weekend, join Daniel Birnbaum, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Koo Jeong A in conversation at Frieze London for the launch of Birnbaum and Wallenstein’s new Sternberg Press book SPACING PHILOSOPHY: LYOTARD AND THE IDEA OF THE EXHIBITION.

Birnbaum and Koo will also be in Berlin a week later.

“In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a ‘curatorial turn’ in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. SPACING PHILOSOPHY analyzes the significance and logic of Lyotard’s exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard’s own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. Les Immatériaux can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life’s work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.”*

DANIEL BIRNBAUM SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN, HANS-ULRICH OBRIST, and KOO JEONG A IN CONVERSATION*

Friday, October 4, at 4 pm.

König Galerie Booth (B2), Frieze London

Regent’s Park, London.

DANIEL BIRNBAUM and KOO JEONG A IN CONVERSATION

Sunday, October 13, at 3 pm.

Julia Stoschek Collection

Leipziger Strasse 60, Berlin.

See “Ontologies of the Virtual,” an interview with Birnbaum and Wallenstein.

From top: Jean-François Lyotard; 1985 exhibition poster, designed by Grafibus, image courtesy and © Grafibus and Centre Pompidou; book cover image courtesy and © Sternberg Press.

THE WORLDS OF STEPHEN SPENDER

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The poet, journalist, novelist, and editor Stephen Spender is the subject of an exhibition at Frieze London, presented by Hauser & Wirth and Moretti Fine Art.

The project explores Spender’s progressive ideas and artistic friendships, and features work by artists he personally knew and/or collected, including Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Henry Moore, Giorgio Morandi, Pablo Picasso, Serge Poliakoff, and Yannis Tsarouchis.

A beautiful exhibition catalogue—edited by Ben Eastham and formatted in the style of Horizon, the journal Spender, Cyril Connolly, and Peter Watson founded in 1939—includes artwork reproductions, poems by Spender, and essays on his deep affinities with art, literature, and political activism in the 1930s. “On Censorship” by Caroline Moorehead addresses Spender’s connection with its subject through the journal he co-founded, Index on Censorship.

(In the early 1990s, Spender himself prevailed on the court system to prevent the publication of While England Sleeps, David Leavitt’s novel that appropriated stories from Spender’s autobiography World within World and added scenes of gay erotica, which he dismissed as “pornography.” Spender married twice—Natasha Spender was his widow and he was the father of Matthew and Elizabeth—but, as disclosed in his New Selected Journals and letters to Christopher Isherwood and others, Spender’s emotional and sexual life was marked by numerous same-sex relationships.)

THE WORLDS OF STEPHEN SPENDER

Thursday, October 4 through Sunday, October 7.

Frieze London—Hauser & Wirth, Booth D01, Regents Park, London.

The Worlds of Stephen Spender catalogue.

From top: Henry Moore, Portrait of Stephen Spender, 1934. © Henry Moore Foundation. Image credit: Hauser & Wirth.

Exhibition catalogue image credit: Hauser & Wirth. Book design by Fraser Muggeridge studio.

A 1929 photograph of Spender’s German friend Franz Büchner on the cover of the novel The Temple, written in the late 1920s and finally published in 1988. Image credit: Faber and Faber.

Below: W.H. Auden (left), Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood in 1931.