January 26: Marja Bloem, Lucy R. Lippard, Jo Melvin, and Lauren van Haaften-Schick in Conversation

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Marja Bloem, Lucy R. Lippard, Jo Melvin, and Lauren van Haaften-Schick discuss the new book Seth Siegelaub “Better Read Than Dead” Writings and Interviews: 1964-2013. The conversation explores Siegelaub's conceptual art exhibitions, his collections and publications on Marxist theory and the history of textiles, and the Artist's Contract (1971), which was used by numerous artists, including Jackie Winsor into the early 1980s and Hans Haacke since 1971 (continuing).

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, January 26th at 1 pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.

Seth Siegelaub “Better Read Than Dead” Writings and Interviews: 1964-2013 by Seth Siegelaub, Edited by Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sara Martinetti, and Jo Melvin (published by Walter König Verlag, 2020, distributed by D.A.P.)

An essential sourcebook on conceptual art’s famed champion, “Better Read Than Dead” was the title that the great American art dealer, curator, author, and researcher Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) had chosen for an anthology of his own writings—one of the projects for which he never found the time, busy as he was running his global one-man operation. Here, happily, that project is now fulfilled. The selected writings, interviews, extended bibliography, and chronology gathered in this Siegelaub sourcebook fill the historical gaps in the sprawling network of exhibitions, publications, projects, and collections that constitute Siegelaub’s life’s work. Here, Siegelaub’s writings are reproduced as scans in order to convey the variety of the documents and to give a sense of archival immersion. Interspersed with these “writings” are interviews and talks, several newly transcribed. The majority of interviews from 1969–1972 are reprinted here.

Marja Bloem is a curator and writer. For thirty-five years she was exhibition curator at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Among the exhibitions she organized are a retrospective of Agnes Martin, Lawrence Weiner, Imi Knoebel, Georg Herold, François Morellet, and most recently a multifaceted show on Hansjörg Mayer at three different venues in Amsterdam. Bloem’s independently curated exhibitions include the work of the Dutch artist Nicole Carstens in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and in 2020 her book with the artist Berend Strik, Berend Strik: Deciphering the Artist’s Mind was published. Currently she is director of the Stichting Egress Foundation. Upon her initiative, Seth Siegelaub: “Better Read Than Dead,” Writings and Interviews 1964–2013 was published by the Stichting Egress Foundation and Koenig Books in 2020, as well as the epoch-making exhibition Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2015–2016.

Lucy R. Lippard has been a freelance writer for almost sixty years, publishing twenty-five books (including an experimental novel) on cultural criticism, especially conceptual, feminist, activist, and place-based art and local history. Cofounder of a number of activist artists organizations, including Heresies, Printed Matter, and Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Lannan writing grant, and a Governor’s Award from the state of New Mexico, among others, and nine honorary doctorates of fine arts. Her 2010 book, Down Country, was awarded the Carolyn Bancroft History prize and the Fray Atanasio Francisco Dominguez award from the Historical Society of New Mexico.

Among her best-known books are Eva Hesse, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object…., Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250–1782, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West, and most recently: Pueblo Chico: Land and Lives in Galisteo Since 1814. Lippard is active in her tiny community of Galisteo, New Mexico, and for twenty-four years has edited the monthly village newsletter, El Puente de Galisteo.

Jo Melvin is a curator and writer, Reader in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, London and director of the Barry Flanagan Estate. Recent exhibitions include Barry Flanagan, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, 2019. In 2018, she started collaborating with Vittoria Bonifati to form a series of exhibitions, publications, and events entitled Villa Lontana, Roma. These include Sculptureless Sculpture, Archeologi 2018, MACHISMO 2019, and The Memory Game 2020. These projects are devised by treating the Fondazione Dino and Ernesta Santarelli Collection as an archive for curatorial projects that uses concerns in art practice now as a lens to refocus to investigate notions of contemporaneity and destabilize chronological readings of the past. She has devised a number of projects with Mahler & LeWitt Studios Spoleto, Umbria, Italy most recently ARTISTS BOOKS symposium, exhibition residency with Viaindustriae, Foglino, Umbria Italy. Recent publications include Andrew Bick, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, 2020; Gene Beery, FriArt, Fribourg Switzerland 2019; and David Nash, National Gallery of Wales, 2019.

Lauren van Haaften-Schick is an art historian and curator pursuing a PhD in the History of Art at Cornell, and is currently a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at SAAM. She writes on the intersections of art and law, with a focus on the origins and legacy of the “Artist’s Contract” by Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky in 1971. Recent publications and projects include “Conceptualizing Artists’ Rights” in the Oxford Handbooks in Law, 2018, and “To Offer / To Exchange” with artist Charles Simonds in Performance Research, 2018, and the discussion series Redistribution in collaboration with artist Kenneth Pietrobono hosted by Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space in 2020. Lauren is an advisor for the Serpentine Galleries Legal Lab, London, and the Art & Law Program, New York.