Lisa Holzer / David Jourdan / Westphalie — Bread-and-Butter, Ditsies and Dumb-Dumb — Cneai de Paris — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 1 → 7, 2011

In 1979, after the closing of his bookstore “Other Books and so”, Ulises Carrión, in a text entitled “An End and a Beginning”¹, reflects on the conflictual nature of the dual relationship between the Ego and the body, and on the critical moment in which the body shifts to a social body. The text illustrates the conflict between working as an individual and through what he calls symptomatically an “institution”, a sort of impersonal thing that has a name… Carrión describes it as a sort of screen, not to protect nor to cover oneself, but to take a distance from the artist as a person:

“You are someone who is not acting with your own name but with, for instance, Other Books or so (…) you cease being a person, I mean an individual, who is doing a certain work only in his name. You become an institution, a social body that works among other social bodies. You’re not an artist, but you are a gallery. Or you are as a gallery. Or you are a bookshop.”

Westphalie Verlag is the publishing project of the artists Lisa Holzer and David Jourdan dedicated to artist’s books addressing language: text-oriented publications, including in a wide extent any play with letters and tongues. Eleven publications have been released since 2007 and another ten are currently at different levels of completion.

The economy of Westphalie is sensitive but real. Since its inception, not only books have been released, but performances given and artworks exhibited under its name. In fact, Westphalie has grown into an artistic subject going along the development of Holzer and Jourdan’s respective artistic practices. However if sometimes they get along with it, at other times they happen to confront it.

¹ Ulises Carrión, An End and a Beginning, in Umbrella, Vol.2 nr.5, Glendale, California, 1979.