Bulletins of the Serving Library
Series Editors Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, David Reinfurt, Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey, Vincenzo Latronico, Angie Keefer
BULLETINS OF THE SERVING LIBRARY is a composite printed/electronic publication that follows a direct line from Dot Dot Dot, the semi-annual journal founded in 2000 and published by Dexter Sinister. The “bulletins” that make up each issue are first published online as PDFs at www.servinglibrary.org over a six-month period, then assembled, printed and distributed separately in Europe and in the U.S.A. Each collection makes up a semester's worth of loosely-themed material, with its constituent PDFs grouped together on the website.
Series Titles
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For this PILOT issue, we have posted PDFs, bound and printed the publication over the first six months of 2011 in advance of launching. From now on, bulletins will be posted to this website as they are ready. If you would like to be told when a new season is complete, and the printed version available, you can join our mailing list. We begin with a plea to remember dead media by Bruce Sterling; an 8-part examination of the Octopus Vulgaris as a metaphor for post-symbolic communication (whatever that might mean) by Angie Keefer; a zero-sum conversation about Libraries and ... -
This issue grew out of two physical incarnations of The Serving Library in 2011. The first took place from July 4–August 10 in the Walter Phillips Gallery of the Visual Arts department at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Here we set up a model of the library’s projected interior to house a six-week summer school titled From the Toolbox of a Serving Library. The school comprised daily morning seminars, supplemented by a few evening events. Each week was based on a specific component from a (Photoshop-proxy) digital software toolbox, in order to reconsider what a contemporary (Bauhaus-proxy) Foundation Course might ... -
This issue doubles as a catalog-of-sorts to Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, a group exhibition curated by Laura Hoptman at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. It is a *pseudo*-catalog in the sense that, other than a section of images at the back, it bears no direct relation to the works in the exhibition. Instead, the bulletins extend in different directions from the same title, and could be collectively summarized as preoccupied with the more social aspects of Typography. In this way we hope to throw some *glancing* light on the exhibition. For ... -
This Issue was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, January 21 – October 28, 2012, curated by Rhea Dall. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of ... -
This issue was produced as part of The End(s) of the Library, a series of exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut New York Library organized by Jenny Jaskey from October 30, 2012 to June 21, 2013; hence the German theme. The Serving Library was resident for three months at the end of The End(s), from April Fools’ Day on, in the form of a hang of objects from our collection of source material. if all went according to plan, the end of the library show was marked by the launch of this issue. *Wie ein Pfeil lief ich einfach durch.* With many thanks to ... -
This issue poses as a retroactive non-catalog for the group exhibition White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania curated by Anthony Elms. As such, its nominal theme is Fashion. Bulletins from the edges of that world are from Angie Keefer, Robin Kinross, Joke Robaard, Brian Eno, Nick Relph, Eli Diner, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Stuart Bailey, Sarah Demeuse, Adloph Loos, Kuki Shûzô, Sanya Kantarovsky, and Perri MacKenzie. AXIS THINKING Brian Eno A LIST OF INCORRECT THINGS Nick Relph A RUNNING COMPOSITION Perri MacKenzie BUTTONED-DOWN Robin Kinross DRY CLEAN ONLY Chris Fite-Wassilik HARDY PERENNIALS Stuart Bailey REGARDING ECONOMY Adolf ... -
This issue loops around NUMBERS and was produced in the ambient glow of a reprogrammed electronic scoreboard clock which first appeared in Venice one year ago. Bulletins this time arrive from Angie Keefer, John Dewey and James Mclellan, James Langdon, Rosie Cooper, Mathew Kneebone, Philip Ording, David Foster Wallace, David Reinfurt, Cory Arcangel, Justin Warsh, Perrine Bailleux, Byron Cook and Tauba Auerbach, Dan Fox, Katherine Pickard, and Vincenzo Latronico. -
The MEDIUM issue was produced with Tate Liverpool’s fall 2014 season Making Things Public, where The Serving Library‘s collection of artifacts (http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/display/serving-library) was installed with two related exhibitions: Transmitting Andy Warhol and Gretchen Bender. In addition to our usual PDF and print formats, Bulletins are also available this time as VIDEO, funneled through the form of a speaking asterisk. The asterisk’s Scottish accent is provided by Isla Leaver Yap, assembled into software by Cereproc, Ltd., and coordinated by James Langdon. (You can read more about this at https://sinkhole-audio.net/your-host/.) VIDEOS are linked from each PDF download page, for example, http://www.servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=181250&watch=1. Bulletins arrive from ... -
Issue #9 tackles all manner of SPORTS. It kicks off with a commentary on New England Patriots controversial Quarterback Tom Brady in view of Ancient Greek ideas of heroism, and ends with seminal Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly’s 1975 interview with Prime Minister Harold Wilson on the radio. In between, the issue slaloms around bodybuilding, bridge, ice hockey, tennis, darts, golf, reporting, running, drugs, rock climbing, basketball, and Pong. -
Issue #10 is a TEST, containing one choice bulletin from each of the previous nine issues. It is a compendium of sorts, a best-of double-album printed at 50% scale, a sample for what’s next. This issue also includes 140-character summaries of every bulletin we have published previously in the printed journal and online and so serves as a retroactive portrait of the library we are busy assembling. From now on, Bulletins of The Serving Library will proceed in full color and at half its former size—but will be twice as good. Contributions by Stuart Bailey, Paul Elliman, Rob Giampietro, Angie Keefer, ... -
This issue is both *in* and *about* COLOR. Starting with ISSUE #10, we have reduced our format and we are printing in all of the available inks. The issue was published in time to inaugurate (finally!) our first physical space for The Serving Library in a storefront on the north side of the majestic India Buildings block in the heart of Liverpool’s once-colorful mercantile district. Bulletins around the edges of color come courtesy Lucas Benjamin on a green screen, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey on ephemera, Umberto Eco on conditioning, Emily Gephart on a poetry hoax, James Langdon on kitchen cabinetry, Tamara Shopsin on swimming ... -
This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world. And so we find Vincenzo Latronico attempting to get in touch with E.T., a collection of Lucy McKenzie’s illusory quodlibets, a conversation between Jumana Manna and Robert Wyatt on art and ethics, a timely analysis of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” by Sarah Demeuse, along with other points of view from Mark de Silva, Jocelyn Penny Small, Abigail Reynolds, James Langdon ... -
Newly published by ROMA Publications in a yearly format, this inaugural issue of The Serving Library Annual is realised in collaboration with Public Fiction, a journal and exhibition-maker based in Los Angeles. Public Fiction’s next project, which runs broadly concurrent to this new Annual’s lifespan, is named The Conscientious Objector — a multifaceted endeavour commissioned by West Hollywood City Council that unfurls in parts from September 2017 to April 2018. These bulletins have been conceived as one part: they deal with acts of civil disobedience and other forms of resistance, particularly in view of the relationship between entertainment and power. Contributors ... -
Twice a year since 2011, The Serving Library has assembled a set of individual ”bulletins” on a common theme, made PDFs available to download for free at www.servinglibrary.org, and simultaneously published them in print as Bulletins of The Serving Library. Last fall we started to turn on a yearly cycle instead, uploading the new batch of files throughout September, and releasing a half-as-frequent-and-twice-as-big print edition in collaboration with Amsterdam-based Roma Publications. This year’s Annual is guest-edited by Italian novelist and translator Vincenzo Latronico and explores how *translation* is fast becoming a significant site for the negotiation of identities and power dynamics ... -
The 2019/20 issue of The Serving Library Annual is entirely devoted to the late Italian designer, artist, inventor and polymath Bruno Munari. The core of the annual is the first English translation of Obvious Code, the 1971 collection of Munari‘s own writings, sketches and poems about his own work, published by arrangement with Corraini, who issued the book’s anastatic edition in 2017. It includes iconic design objects such as the Abitacolo, ground-breaking artworks such as his 1952 series of hand-made projection slides, and little known rhymes about the art market, as well as an original piece from his “unreadable books” ... -
This year’s Annual is published in tandem with a long-term installation of The Serving Library’s collection of (mostly) framed objects at 019, an artist-run exhibition, performance and work space in a former welding factory in Ghent, Belgium. Apparently, the sole common denominator of the objects in the collection — which range from paintings, photographs, and record sleeves, to a can of green paint, a German car license plate, and an ouija board — is to have appeared as illustrations in an issue of The Serving Library Annual or one of its immediate antecedents, Bulletins of The Serving Library or Dot Dot ... -
The genesis of this issue of The Serving Library Annual was a pre-pandemic proposal for a group show at the Clark Art Institute, themed on the meander. That project evolved into the two-person exhibition Tauba Auerbach and Yuji Agematsu: Meander (16 July – 16 October, 2022). The line that animates both, however, continues indefinitely. The Serving Library Annual 2022/23 includes contributions by Yuji Agematsu, Tauba Auerbach, Canal Street Research Association, Tamara Colchester, Laura Coombs, Anuja Dhir, Lauren Elkin, Jason Fulford, Anthony Huberman, Julije Knifer, Philip Ording, Federico Pérez Villoro, Emilie M. Reed, Eden Reinfurt, Ab Rogers, Laurel Schwulst, Mindy Seu, Tamara ...
