Events

Maria Fusco
With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form
Book Launch

Thursday April 3, 2014 at 8:00pm
READ Books at the Charles H. Scott Gallery

This event follows Maria Fusco’s lecture at Emily Carr University in Room SB301 at 6:30pm

READ Books is pleased to present the launch of With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form, a new book by Maria Fusco, published by New Documents.

In With A Bao A Qu Reading When Attitudes Become Form, Fusco experiments with the form and register of contemporary art writing through the reconfiguration of the seminal artist’s book/catalog When Attitudes Become Form (1969). Originally edited by Harald Szeemann to accompany the Kunsthalle Bern exhibition of the same name, When Attitudes Become Form brought together new tendencies in the art of its time, including arte povera, conceptual art and post-Minimalism to conceive of curatorial practice as a linguistic medium.

Working with Szeemann’s book as case study, With A Bao A Qu reflects on the form and structure of the artist’s book. By stylistically adopting a subjective literary voice, drawn, at least partially, from Jorge Luis Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings (published in English in 1969), Fusco’s book shifts its focus away from the reading of art’s conceptual properties to that of its physical, material embodiment.

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer, editor and critic. Her research is concerned with fiction as critical practice, embodying and exploring modalities of production including: the fictive, critical & theoretical writing, editing, and independent publishing. Fusco has searched out diverse styles of writing, not simply for their literary value but as part of an ongoing fascination with the slippery nature of writing and its intimate relationship to contemporary art practice.

Fusco was the inaugural Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and Critic in Residence at The Kadist Art Foundation in Paris. She was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London where she founded and led MFA Art Writing. Currently, Fusco is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

New Documents is a Vancouver and Los Angeles–based art book publisher operating in collaboration with Vancouver’s Projectile Publishing Society.

Maria Fusco is in Vancouver to participate in There are reasons for looking and feeling and thinking about things that are invisible: A two day event on New Narratives in Art Writing at the Western Front April 4 + 5, and organized by Western Front, Artspeak Gallery and 221A. READ Books will have a book table at the Western Front in support of the New Narrative talks.

Maria Fusco’s April 3rd talk at 6:30 is part of the University’s Imagining our Future lecture series. Please join us for both events!