Tag Archives: Amsterdam

San Serriffe with Otto Berchem, Louis Lüthi and Cannon Magazine

Posted on September 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

This Friday, September 21st at 6–9 p.m. art book shop San Serriffe opens at its new and permanent location, Sint Annenstraat 30, Amsterdam.

To celebrate the opening we show the work ‘It’s Our Party’ by Otto Berchem (USA, 1967). The installation is a festive display of streamer pennants that makes use of a chromatic alphabet created by Berchem, inspired by the writings of Jorge Adoum and Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Saville’s designs for the first three New Order albums, and the condition of synesthesia.

San Serriffe is proud to present two new publications on the occasion of the opening:
— ‘Infant A’ by Louis Lüthi
‘Infant A’ recounts a fictitious meeting between the protagonist and Ulises Carrión, the Mexican artist and bookmaker who was based in Amsterdam during the 1970s and 80s; their conversation revolves around the poetic potential of a single letter and two books with single-letter titles in particular: Andy Warhol’s a and Louis Zukofsky’s “A.” This is the third installment of The Social Life of the Book, a quarterly subscription-based series of texts about the contemporary state of the book at all stages of its production and consumption, edited by castillo/corrales and published by its imprint Paraguay Press.

— ‘Cannon Magazine No.2’ by Phil Baber
Cannon Magazine No.2, titled “It is possible, possible, possible. It must be possible.”
With content from Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Francis Ponge, Rainer Maria Rilke, Peter Handke, Heinrich von Kleist, Robert Walser, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Petr Král, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Alberto Caeiro, Thomas Bernhard, and Friedrich Hölderlin. Conceived, edited, and designed by Phil Baber.

San Serriffe will be open weekly from Thursday to Saturday from 12 –7.

Art, theft, and curators: an (old) converstaion with Saskia Bos

Posted on March 30, 2011 | 1 comment

Crap Shoot. An exhibition curated by five young curatorial students from de Appel, which opened 15 years ago this April.

It was the Dutch art world’s cause célèbre of the year. Perhaps the decade? The ticket booth smashed to pieces. Rudy Fuchs, the then director of the Stedelijk Museum, followed by a hapless private detective. The contents of the office, as well as the exhibition of Paul de Reus, stolen from Bloom Gallery. An exhibition almost universally panned at the time.

The day after the opening, the artists and curators held what was meant to be a panel discussion. In the end it was closer to a public lynching. The crowd jeered and heckled. The panel responded, or at least tried to.

Before the dust had a chance to settle, I was asked to interview Saskia Bos for the Crap Shooter, the newspaper that accompanied the show. It was Bos who indirectly started the whole fuss when she created De Appel’s Curatorial Training Programme two years before.

This was to be her chance to respond to the critics, and she took it.

Download a copy of it here.