Vincenzo Latronico
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
What would it mean to give this optical instrument another metaphoric turn? One wonders whether it is the artist himself who is attempting some escape. And as a matter of fact, false trails and forked paths weave throughout Price’s practice as he seeks both to mirror and inhabit the circulatory and distributive systems of his own time. Even this signature text, Dispersion—devoted as it is to an extended contemplation of contemporary information technologies as they provide artists with a new context (or “scape”)—never remains totally the same. Rather, the artist continually returns to it, revising it, adding or subtracting ideas—always ...
