TNTNTNT BOXSET LAUNCH – LIBRAIRIE YVON LAMBERT PARIS – 19 MARCH 2024

March 13, 2024 by James Merrigan

Launch of TALK, issue 4 of Small Night Projects’ text-based art publication. This is the first international launch of the publication at the Librairie Yvon Lambert on 19 March 2024 from 6 to 8pm.

An exclusive box set bringing together the four issues of the collection, TONE, TOLD, TEXT & TALK, will also be available during this event.

Working directly with artists, estates and galleries, the publications include significant international artists who use text in their practices. 24 artists are represented across all four issues:

Jack Pierson, Laure Prouvost, Mark Verabio , Isobel Wohl, Laura Fitzgerald, Alan Phelan, Fiona Banner, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Claire Fontaine, Jaki Irvine, Darran McGlynn, Walker & Walker, Orla Barry, Tony Cokes, Erik van Lieshout, Adrian Piper, Paul Roy, Cesar van Pinsett, Cem A., Darren Bader, John Giorno, John Latham, Naomi Sex, Susan MacWilliam.

Issue 4 TALK (our first international launch at Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris) mixes the historical and contemporary, working with the John Giorno Foundation in New York, and the Flat Time House London on behalf of John Latham. Giorno and Latham (early pioneers in text-based art) are set against more contemporary international artists, who have gone out on a lexical limb in their deployment of text in a world becoming increasingly self-conscientious of the meanings, definitions, and free delivery of words in the public sphere.

We invite you to come and find out more on 19 March, 6-8pm, at Librairie Yvon Lambert, where a launch and introductory discussion to the project will take place with the co-editors. We will discuss the project in light of its local context and the international artists who have generously acknowledged our conceptual and critical aims by accepting our invitation.

We are thankful and thrilled to launch our latest issue TALK and this limited edition box set at Librairie Yvon Lambert and very grateful to Culture Ireland for funding this international venture.

Who are Small Night Projects?

Small Night is a studio, in a garage, in the tail end of Ireland, which, for the last four years has screen-printed artists’ ideas and images for dissemination through zine and exhibition. It is a modest setup, one beset by technical constraints and limitations, but with raw possibilities.

“Small Night” infers the crunch of the all-nighter, the self-inflicted deadlines, the chase of time to find a small place to work outside of big daily life. Small Night is a product of a love and nostalgia for printed artist pulp, and a deep criticism of our online dependent and less physical art scene.

With such emphasis on the “physical”, we only sell the journals at live launch events in the presence of the editors and sometimes the contributing artists. The small run of 130 copies per issue, and large A3 format, are ways in which we perform the importance of the physical in art.

The publications are priced low to allow dissemination and access, with screen- printed reproductions of original artworks that are affordable and collectable.

Previous launches were held in Dublin at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios TONE issue 1; The Royal Hibernian Academy TOLD issue 2; The Douglas Hyde Gallery TEXT issue 3; and The Hugh Lane Gallery TALK issue 4.

[FRENCH]

Lancement de TALK, numéro 4 de la publication d’art textuel du Small Night Projects. Elle est heureuse d'annoncer le premier lancement international de la publication à la Librairie Yvon Lambert le 19 mars 2024 de 18h à 20h.

Un co ret exclusif regroupant les quatre numéros de la collection, TONE, TOLD, TEXT & TALK, sera également disponible lors de cet évènement.

La réalisation des livres est le fruit d’un travail direct avec des artistes, des successions d’artistes, d’artistes et des galeries. 24 artistes, dont les pratiques s’inspirent du texte, sont représentés de manière dans les quatre numéros:

Le numéro 4, TALK, mélange références historiques et travaux contemporains. En collaboration avec la John Giorno Foundation à New York, et le Flat Time House London, qui représente John Latham, le travail des deux artistes, pionniers de l’art textuel, est confronté à celui d’artistes contemporains internationaux, qui aux aussi explorent le domaine lexical à une époque toujours plus consciente de l’importance du sens, de la sémantique et de la libre diffusion des mots dans l’espace publique.

Nous vous invitons à en découvrir d’avantage lors du lancement, qui débutera par une discussion avec les co-éditeurs. Nous discuterons du projet à la lumière de son contexte local et des artistes internationaux qui ont généreusement reconnu nos objectifs conceptuels et critiques en acceptant notre invitation.

Nous sommes honorés de pouvoir lancer TALK et le co ret en édition limitée à la librairie Yvon Lambert et remercions vivement Culture Ireland pour son généreux soutien.

Qui est Small Night Projects?

Small Night Projects est un studio, installé dans un garage, à la pointe de l'Irlande, qui, depuis quatre ans, imprime en sérigraphie des idées et des images d'artistes pour les di user à travers des fanzines et des expositions. Il s'agit d'une installation modeste, dont les contraintes techniques sont multiples, mais le potentiel important.

« Small Night » évoque le rush des nuits blanches, les délais auto-imposés, la course contre la montre pour se créer un petit espace de travail à la marge du grand quotidien. Small Night est né de l’amour et de la nostalgie pour les œuvres

sur papier, et d’un regard profondément critique envers une scène artistique dépendante du virtuel et moins présente au monde réel.

Avec un tel ancrage dans le « monde réel » nous vendons nos éditions uniquement lors de lancements en live, en présence des éditeurs et parfois des artistes contributeurs. Le tirage limité à 130 exemplaires par numéro ainsi que le grand format A3 sont autant de moyens pour nous de mettre en scène l’importance du monde réel dans l’art.

Les éditions sont proposées à un prix abordable, afin d’en faciliter la di usion et l’accès. Des reproductions sérigraphiées d’œuvres originales permettent une large diffusion et la possibilité de les collectionner.

Small Night Project Contacts:

Co-editors: James Merrigan, Alan Phelan, Laura Fitzgerald
22 Lissadell Avenue, Powerscourt, Dunmore Road, Waterford, X91 AY92, Ireland email: smallnightzine@gmail.com
web: smallnight.org/paper
instagram: smallnightprojects
mobile/whatsapp: James Merrigan +353 87 975 7504
Alan Phelan +353 86 822 0360 Laura Fitzgerald +353 87 906 4291

Librairie Yvon Lambert Contacts:

Yvon Lambert libraire éditeur: Bruno Mayrargue 14 rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris, France email: librairie@yvon-lambert.com
web: shop.yvon-lambert.com
instagram: librairieyvonlambert
phone : +33(0)145665584

TALK

November 19, 2023 by James Merrigan

Saturday 2 December, ISSUE 4 of our text-based art publication — TALK — was launched at the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, on the invitation of Pádraic E. Moore for his curated event “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (Part II), as part of the Andy Warhol “Three Times Out” exhibition.

TALK features artists: Cem A., Darren Bader, John Giorno, John Latham, Naomi Sex, Susan MacWilliam.

“Dear… I’ve been thinking about what we do, what it means, how, for whom and why it happens. Much of this includes personal exchanges that surround cultural work.

My attachment to your work, for example.

Our relationships are a form of dissemination. They are our shared condition. I’d like to ask you to take part in a simple project I’m planning in my studio in Dublin.

Please send me something that describes the conditions surrounding your work, something collected, constructed, written or sourced, a work-in-progress, invitation, article, book, photograph, sketch, letter, poem, object, manifesto, video, or CD. Relay an experience or a conversation, something anecdotal, informal and attached.

Other people will see what you’ve given and if they want to they can add something too.

This is how we’ll build an Affinity Archive.

Love, Sarah”

— Sarah Pierce, letter transferred to gallery wall as part of the artist's exhibition Scene Of Myth, IMMA, 2023

“...the meaning of a word is its use.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.

“Talk is dirty, writing is clean”

— Gilles Deleuze

We, the editors, have been working on this text-based art project for the last two years. During that time, a time of conversation, correspondence and production, we have performed an ambivalence as to what this project is, as if it was so present-tense or prescient we have yet to confront its essence formally or conceptually. We have embraced this ambivalence, even tried to hang on to it a little, in an effort to retain the spirit and energy of what first-issue contributor Mark Verabioff calls the “first wave”.

Our launch at the Hugh Lane Dublin – on the occasion and invitation of Pádraic E. Moore for his curated event “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (Part II), as part of the Andy Warhol “Three Times Out” exhibition – heralds a tetralogy of publications, TONE, TOLD, TEXT & TALK. What has emerged during this time of production, discussion and sometimes debate, is the question of language-use in culture, culture being defined here in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s terminology as “resistance”.

In our small art scene there have been text-as-art moments that have been ancillary and provisional. But this is what is important about text as art, it erupts and disappears like every speech act. Text as art works differently than the art object. There is something subversive about its literalism, brazenness and dumbness that seems antagonistic to what we call “visual art”, which works with meaning covertly through image or form.

Text as art is efficiently defined by text-based artist Larry Johnson in an interview with David Rimanelli,

“My job as an editor is to cram a big story into a small space: to forego the short story, to forego anything but the blurb. The idea is to maximise the attention span the reader/viewer has for the work of art, which I imagine to be equal, say, to that of a daily horoscope or beauty tip.”

Text is somehow read as empty in an art context, fugitive, always referring to something full, object or experience of objecthood, or what we might conjugate as object-experience. If we take this line, that text is empty and dependent on some object-experience, then what is an art object?

Today we could claim the art object is not resisting its online reification, but leaning into it. Bruce Hainley writes: “Whether abstract or seemingly not, today’s art is not produced to complicate, disrupt, intensify or question what anything (the world, existence, etc.), is taken to be; nor to move anyone (risking vulnerability, soul); nor even to float new trippy kinds of meaning or meaningfulness or meaningful meaninglessness: it is produced only to have been produced. Reification, I’m pretty sure Uncle Georg warned, isn’t critique, but, you know, whatevs.”

This view could be put down to a hardening of veins on Bruce’s part, through years of breaking down art experience with words, which is another form of reification, like these words written (or spoken) right here, right now. In a sense we reify with words to make sense of a world and a fate that is outside of words. The stranglehold of identity politics and political correctness via the labelling of things and experience feels like it comes out of a desperation to name the unnamable.

In 1976, in his novel Ratner’s Star, the American writer Don DeLillo writes how:

“To bear a name is both terrible and necessary. The child, emerging from the space-filling chaos of names, comes eventually to see that an escape from verbal designation is never complete, never more than a delay in meeting one's substitute, that alphabetic shadow abstracted from its physical source”

In 1989, Slavoj Žižek writes something similar in The Sublime Object of Ideology via Hegel, that “the word is a death, a murder of a thing”. If the word is the murder of a thing, in how a thing named no longer exists as a thing or experience in the world, but as a word, what are the 24 artists who have contributed to the four issues thus far, expressing or resisting by fetishising (in respect to the specificity and exclusivity that the fetish defines) in the name of the word?

The answer is something antagonistic. Text as art is antagonistic to what we call, inadequately, “visual art”. And yet text is visual, and there is a lot of visuality taking place in all three issues we have produced over the last year: typed, handwritten, colour, font, scale, format and so on. In a sense we experience the form and the content — what is being said — at the same time, which is always a kind of intentional dumb. We have come to learn that dumb or silly are the most important things for the artist who is considering text as part of their tool bag.

We are told in art school to not be literal. Artists who use text in their art are going against this dictate, to the point of cliché. They are embracing cliché, believing in cliché, or making cliché more real. These are sentiments or statements that speak the name of art with force and farce. They are essentially dumb, unlike the jargonistic catalogue essays that follow as afterthoughts. Text as art is about puncturing the present, while at the same time vanishing from view. Text as art is about time and timing.

Text as art is an attitude, an attitude tested by the current policing of language. Distilling art into text at this moment of verbal self-consciousness and correctness seems like the worst time (in respect to the mainstream), but best time (in respect to art as something distinct from the mainstream). Language is complicated. Artists are complicated. When art and language come together it is really complicated. But when artists become conflicted, not complicated, art is lost.

From the outset we have asked our contributors to try to avoid, at all costs, the use of images as a backdrop to text, to avoid memes in essence. This editorial directive has not always landed: images, or rather the residual effect of images, have survived the editorial process. This is a symptom of the hold images have on us as artists.

So why adopt pure text as art? Has the image failed us? Is text as art a recognition of the image’s failure to speak for the artist. If so, text as art is a device that gives permission to the artist to express with words, words that are otherwise read or unread in the side-show of gallery literature. Whatever way we take on text as artists, viewers and readers, whether rhetorically, poetically, politically, formally or ironically, text as art poses a particular type of resistance in the visual field of art, especially at a moment when AI language models (GPT) are beginning to do the textual work for us, minus the awkward subjectivities and opinions of what it means to be human.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

TALK is only for sale on the night of 2 December. It will also be available in the reception prior to the event for people not attending. 50 copies at €20 each; strictly one copy per person. Revolut and cash only.

This specially commissioned issue ties into a broad Warhol theme, with work directly connected to his milieu, and from the first conceptual ‘70s generation of text-based art.

On the night of 2 December we will be presenting on TALK alongside other nocturnal events including contributions by Perry Ogden; Cheryl Donegan; Gerard Byrne; George Kuchar; Dina from Egypt.

Booking is essential. Link to book event is in our bio. We hope to see you there.

TALK is co-edited by Laura Fitzgerald, James Merrigan and Alan Phelan; and printed by James Merrigan. Acknowledgements: Cem A., Darren Bader, John Giorno, John Latham, Naomi Sex, Susan MacWilliam. With thanks to the John Giorno Foundation, Flat Time House, Pádraic E. Moore and the Hugh Lane Gallery.

SMALL NIGHT is a studio, in a garage, in the tail end of Ireland, which, for the last three years has screen-printed artists’ ideas & images for dissemination through zine & exhibition. It is a modest setup, one beset by technical constraints & limitations, but with raw possibilities. SMALLNIGHT.ORG 🏴art&text

PATRICK REDMOND | GOLDEN ARCHES | 2023

November 13, 2023 by James Merrigan

Frustrated with the art scene locally, and international artworld through his ritual surveillance on Instagram, one frustrating day in the studio, Patrick Redmond took a break from painting, and sat down with a permanent marker and proceeded to scrawl 52 short quips on how he felt about being an artist within its institutional and administrative context. On seeing the verbal assault, James Merrigan asked the artist would he be interested in a screen-printed edition, supplemented by prints of Ronald McDonald the artist had been printing with soot on plaster with the same critical vengeance of the 52.

Patrick Redmond’s text-based works will be drawn, quartered and hung in a display that acts like a political demonstration. His “Ronald’s” will visually offset his rejection narratives, creating a critical-of-consumer-capitalism-setting for his dumb textual assaults on the artworld.

BRIAN TEELING | C-SPACE

September 12, 2023 by James Merrigan

James Merrigan experienced Brian Teeling’s c-space installation in the toilets of The Dean Art Studios Dublin in 2022. The artist was present, as it was his job to escort visitors to the off-site space, located in the ground-floor toilets of the studio complex where Teeling had a top-floor studio. To Merrigan’s mind c-space is one of the most visceral and sympathetic off-site artworks he has experienced in recent times. It is site-specific, intimating a cruising space for casual sex, with the formal suggestions of glory holes and voyeuristic car mirrors under a heavy red light, safe and not safe. Text ranges the walls and angles of the claustrophobic toilets, reflectively present and absent, like the mirror in the mirrored self-portraits, depending on your standing or squatting position in the toilet. It’s dirty romantic. It invokes the words of the artist Luis Camnitzer, in his text work “This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence” (1966-68).

With the experience of Brian Teeling’s c-space in mind, we have translated that experience into the colour and paper choices of this publication. The weight of red light, a feeling of interiority, as if looking outward from the chambers of the heart is conveyed through the red inks and paper. There is also something about the photographic dark room, the analogue photographer’s gloom with a developing view, and how we become more reflective in darkness, that influenced the use of black paper and tin foil.

TEXT

February 11, 2023 by James Merrigan

Launch of Issue 3 TEXT at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, featuring artists ORLA BARRY, TONY COKES, ERIK VAN LIESHOUT, ADRIAN PIPER, PAUL ROY, CESAR VAN PINSETT.

“Talk is dirty, writing is clean.” Gilles Deleuze

We, the editors, have been working on this text-based art project for 18 months. During that time, a time of conversation, correspondence and production, we have performed an ambivalence as to what this project is, as if it was so present-tense or prescient we have yet to confront its essence formally or conceptually. We have embraced this ambivalence, even tried to hang on to it a little, in an effort to retain the spirit and energy of what first-issue contributor Mark Verabioff calls the “first wave”.

Our launch at the Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin heralds a trilogy of publications, TONE, TOLD & TEXT. What has emerged during this time of production, discussion and sometimes debate, is the question of language-use in culture, culture being defined here in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s terminology as “resistance”.

Text as art is efficiently defined by text-based artist Larry Johnson in an interview with David Rimanelli,

Text is somehow read as empty in an art context, fugitive, always referring to something full, object or experience of objecthood, or what we might conjugate as object-experience. If we take this line, that text is empty and dependent on some object-experience, then what is an art object?

In 1976, in his novel Ratner’s Star, the American writer Don DeLillo writes how:

In 1989, Slavoj Žižek writes something similar in The Sublime Object of Ideology via Hegel, that “the word is a death, a murder of a thing”. If the word is the murder of a thing, in how a thing named no longer exists as a thing or experience in the world, but as a word, what are the 18 artists who have contributed to the three issues thus far, expressing or resisting by fetishising (in respect to the specificity and exclusivity that the fetish defines) in the name of the word?

The answer is something antagonistic. Text as art is antagonistic to what we call, inadequately, “visual art”. And yet text is visual, and there is a lot of visuality taking place in all three issues we have produced over the last year: typed, handwritten, colour, font, scale, format and so on. In a sense we experience the form and the content — what is being said — at the same time, which is always a kind of intentional dumb, or what co-editor Alan Phelan described as “silly” in relation to his recent text and stripe-based paintings presented at Molesworth Gallery Dublin. We have come to learn that dumb or silly are the most important things for the artist who is considering text as part of their tool bag.

We invite you to come find out more on May 3rd, 6pm, at Douglas Hyde Gallery Dublin, where a launch will take place with the co-editors and some of the contributing artists.

The third issue TEXT (and a limited number of first and second issues) will be for sale at the launch night. It will NOT be available online as a pdf, or by post, but will be distributed only in-person. 50 copies will be available on the launch night at €20 each, strictly one copy per person. Cash only.

A limited number of copies of Issue 1 *TONE* & Issue 2 *TOLD* will be available for purchase at the launch.

TONE features artists: LAURA FITZGERALD, ALAN PHELAN, JACK PIERSON, LAURE PROUVOST, MARK VERABIOFF, ISOBEL WOHL.

TOLD features artists: FIONA BANNER, GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON, CLAIRE FONTAINE, JAKI IRVINE, DARRAN MCGLYNN, WALKER & WALKER.

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council

EMMA ROCHE & SMALL NIGHT

January 12, 2023 by James Merrigan

THE ART OPENING

I look at Emma Roche’s paintings + wonder. The same wonder that seduces the eyes of the consummate capitalist consumer, what we call the window shopper, or the Instagram junkie. What would they be like without the wallpaper?

Composed of silk-screened editions of the artist’s drawings, that X the space in a paper barrage of ink + colour + splodge, Emma Roche’s paintings would exist quite nicely, quite efficiently, quite separately + sparingly like all painting against white walls. But here the paintings slot, nestled in backlit recesses against + within the wallpapered wall.

Most here at the opening cannot help but peek past the paintings’ margin into the recess beyond. I stand with others to take in the view from afar, looking at others peek. The view is panoramic, not periodical. The wallpaper, without the paintings, is just wallpaper. It’s Warholian, not just because it’s screen-printed, but in the sense Warhol needed to be filled by others to be full. Or perhaps the medium of screen-printing itself emphasises Warhol’s emptiness + Americanness?

The paintings are the reason we are here, why the wallpaper is here. Chicken or egg, doesn’t matter. There’s an asymmetry, no matter how hard the wallpaper spreadeagles its X’s like war barricades on the front line as pictured in a 1980’s Atari game. The wallpaper is Walter Benjamin’s ephemeral glass + metal Berlin shopping arcade of post WW1, through which academics like to channel Marx’s commodity fetish.

Later Benjamin admitted on a radio broadcast that he was inspired by childhood, & the 1920’s moment when the arcade, with its galleries of toys + collectibles, was a place of magic not cynicism, a place of immediate nostalgia before it had even aged a day.

Three of us talk about our kids' abject behaviour against the backdrop of wallpaper + paintings. The intellect can easily deflect Emma Roche’s paintings as a feminist statement. But there is something hard to detach in art via detached theory. The artist’s abject images of crying, pissing, dripping, suckling + vomiting children + mothers in all their indivisible vice versaness, is a portrait of natural asymmetry: motherhood.

We can look + consume motherhood at a distance, how Benjamin did the arcades as the inimitable twentieth-century flaneur, reflecting on his own toyless childhood, but the experience of motherhood from belly to lap is a seesaw, with one end of the plank stuck firmly in the playground mud. And yet, out of this abject asymmetry a kind of democracy is realised, which I know, is an oxymoron, democracy being the fight for democracy not its realisation… but bear with me… No matter our sexual identification or verbal designation, we are all born from the asymmetrical locus of the mother. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.”

As the small night draws to a close, one artist says, “Art openings are like funerals.” I quickly nod in agreement + leave.

Photos: Louis Haugh

TOLD

October 05, 2022 by James Merrigan

Launch > RHA Dublin, 5 October 2022, 6.30pm

TOLD is the second in a series of screen-printed art publications dedicated to text art, what we call a lowercase journal. It is edited by James Merrigan, Laura Fitzgerald & Alan Phelan.

TOLD is screen-printed by Small Night Projects, in a garage, in Waterford City. At 40x34cms, it is close to A3 in size with a page count of 52. It is the second of three issues: the first issue TONE was launched at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios on July 8th; the third issue TEXT will be launched at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in the Winter of 2022; & the current issue TOLD will be launched at the RHA Dublin on Wednesday, October 5th, 2022, at 6.30pm.

Although text is the thing we are concerned with most, TOLD is an object that contains no real narrative — beginning, middle, or end. Like all sequels, TOLD acts as a corrective to the original issue, TONE, with the hope of retaining the spirit, energy & risk of the “first wave” original (repeating first-wave contributor Mark Verabioff’s phrase).

What has been retained from the original is the front cover, which is still inked up with a slab of text that badly describes TOLD in the very same words that described the first issue TONE. The only difference is the colour red, which, in contrast to the black cover of the first issue, could infer the red pen of correction, which, in the season of the return to school, is perhaps appropriate, especially with a title like TOLD.

What is new is the six invited artists bound together in the issue: FIONA BANNER, GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON, CLAIRE FONTAINE, JAKI IRVINE, DARRAN MCGLYNN, WALKER & WALKER. They are artists, individual and in collaborative pairs, that we respect and hero worship a little.

We have tried to distill what the artists do in 8-page signatures, that broadly speaking, transcend the socio-political gamut, from death to shattered love, from inscribed body to meta language.

It’s a colourful issue in terms of content & form. Red is the primary note. As the bad joke goes: What is black, white & red all over? And yet we have also embraced colour & the layering of colours in the issue, pushing the limitations of our DIY setup.

Text is prevalent in our visual economy, especially in the proliferation of memes on social media. This is what co-editor James Merrigan calls TEXT AS IMAGE. We have researched far & wide for artists who prioritise text in their art as a standalone thing, divorced, or complicit, with the seductive image, but intimating an imaginary space that brings images & emotions to bear on the reading of them. Our hope is the reader will experience the chiastic structure of text as experience & experience as text.

The texts come in a variety of forms, from typed to handwritten, repetitive to rhetorical. What brings all six contributors together, is what is intrinsic to words detached from their grammatical system: vulnerability. In this vulnerable & disjointed lexical space, artists tease out images & emotions through the silent saying of things without a pictorial representation to bridge the gap or rupture. Things said can never be unsaid. Is this the artist saying the words, society, or a verbal echo of you, the reader?

We invite you to come find out more on October 5th, 6.30pm, at RHA Dublin, where a launch will take place with the co-editors and some of the contributing artists.

The second issue TOLD (and a limited number of first issue TONEs) will be for sale at the launch night. It will NOT be available online as a pdf, or by post, but will be distributed only in-person. 50 copies will be available on the launch night at €20 each, strictly one copy per person. Cash only.

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council

CONTACTS:

Small Night Projects - James Merrigan

email: smallnightzine@gmail.com

web: https://smallnight.org/ socials: https://www.instagram.com/smallnightprojects/

CELINE SHERIDAN | A WONDERFUL LOVE AND HORRIBLE, 2022

August 13, 2022 by James Merrigan

The 15 drawings enclosed in this zine were carefully edited from “a massive envelope of stuff” that artist Celine Sheridan sent by post. The “stuff” is of bodies – lively and vulnerable – which echo and recede like the scream from a child at the mouth of a cave. Meant for a private audience of one (the artist), here they are redescribed in silkscreen, a medium that stresses the strength and emotion of their lines. Unselfconsciously unconscious they want nothing more than to become more than their vibrating lines can ever be. They are neither WIPs nor preparatory drawings, they are enclosures with openings, presenting an ontological landscape that is both abject and fetishistic, marked by the artist's effort – in the company of the other – to escape what Hans Belmer called "the outline of the self".

LOCKY MORRIS | BLOCK BASICS

August 12, 2022 by James Merrigan

One day artist Locky Morris stepped up on a rickety stepladder with a camera and took individual portraits of 10 lightbulbs hanging from exposed block-wiring and plasterwork in his studio. It would be the only work that he would make in that studio. He focused his camera on the “comically” different wiring. The artist’s lightbulb moment came after watching a YouTube clip on “Block Basics”. Here the lightbulbs are presented for the first time as a sliding puzzle of 8 light bulbs (with the 1st through 9th lightbulb presented on the facing page in isolation, and the 10th featured on the cover). The bulbs rotate sequentially and clockwise, one bulb at a time. Looking at these out-of-focus light bulbs with in-focus wiring the line of sight becomes cockeyed, the brain charged synaptically in the absence but possibility of light within and upon the work of making art in the studio. Sometimes we need to become cockeyed in order to see. Locky Morris’ visual playfulness is great and good: great in the sense of its elevation and illumination of sight from the blindness of the familiar; and good in its positivity, agility and the light it brings to bear on the world and its phenomena. It figures that the suggestion of light in a series of 10 lightbulbs would attract the artist’s eye minus the fated doom of the moth.

MARIAN BALFE | IN REMEMBRANCE

August 12, 2022 by James Merrigan

The implication that artist Marian Balfe’s memorials to her exhibited art objects present to the world of the living is… art is mortal, no matter how much the artist wants and needs it to be immortal. They bring to mind two philosophical quandaries: one to do with the sound of a falling tree in a forest where no one is there to perceive it; the other concerning vampires. Art, like the falling tree, needs an observer for it to exist in the eye, mind and memory. Falling trees make sounds, but for whom? Phenomena exist in and of themselves, so what? Even though the artworks that Marian has memorialised made it into the world to be exhibited, we don’t know if anyone really experienced them. The window to experience art is half open, where vampires crawl uninvited. In the books and film Interview with the Vampire the vampires are reluctant producers of their own kind — it’s too much work. As immortal creatures, and in the unlikely event of a stake through the heart, they wine, dine and seduce, gnawing on the world with efficiency, cleanliness, and style. Although dressed in death, the vampire has overcome death. The vampire is a product of their own death. Graceful and confident, vampires hang out and drink people. Without death to worry about, vampires are not anxious creatures or wallowing in self-deception, they just are, or in a Heidiggerian sense…. They be. They are an antidote to the living who, in their effort to not think about their imminent death, whether by misadventure, old age or whatever, go about being creatively ironical. Marian Balfe’s memorials are not sentimental, but perhaps their ironical stance in the face of death (with two-faces) is the very essence of sentimentality, in their effort to fend off and disavow death with one more laugh, as in laugh in the face of death.

WEAREFETISHISTS

August 12, 2022 by James Merrigan

TO: Ursula Burke, Marian Balfe, Kian Benson Bailes, Austin Hearne, Locky Morris, Fiona Reilly, Emma Roche, Celine Sheridan, Brian Teeling

RE: WEAREFETISHISTS —GARTER LANE ARTS CENTRE —6TH AUGUST – 24TH SEPTEMBER 2022

Dear Artists.

As you already know, the title of this thing we are doing together — WEAREFETISHISTS — is something we have been circling for two years. The circling was due mostly to COVID, when delays & cancellations spaghettified everything. The more I circled without taking a right-angled turn towards the centre, towards some made-up deadline, the more I began to realise that all this circling can be defined by a word found within the word pileup that is WEAREFETISHISTS.

Don’t know if you know this, but there’s this psychoanalytical term called “fetishistic disavowal”, defined in distance or over-proximity. It’s something like this: when you lose someone you love, the loss of that love is sometimes put onto another object, inanimate or alive. The festishistic object bears the grief, desire or anxiety you are having to avoid confronting head-on. It's a pathological transfer, or detour, based on distance & loss. Very Freudian. But there’s also another way to define the fetish, as the fear of getting too close to the object of your desire, so you put up a barrier in the form of, let’s say, an image, that becomes an unconsummated fantasy. You fantasise about touching reality, but it’s a reality you are afraid to touch. Instagram!

The more and more I think about what has happened over the last two years, the Zoom distancing, the slowing & stretching out of art making, the fetish, in relation to art, or intrinsic to being an artist, makes more sense to me. If you think about the structure & process of WEAREFETISHISTS, the way I have ended up screen-printing your drawings & images, it’s completely fetishistic.

Thing is, two years ago I asked all nine of you if you’d be interested in submitting images or drawings of your work for screen-printing. You said yes, & I was really grateful. Sure, it was a weird collaboration, in that I was “providing a service” (In Fiona R’s words). But during the circling my relationship with your images became more deep-seated. Celine S mentioned during one phone conversation that, in so many words, she had severed ownership with the drawings she submitted. Probably because they had gone through a process that she felt dissociated from, both from her hand or her judgment. She had released them into my care to become something else. Fucking weird.

From my perspective, I have felt a little perverted during the process. In that I was taking your work & having my way with it, in some instances getting high on the results of the transformation from drawings or photographs into silkscreens. That’s weird, isn’t it? I was also thinking about the exhibition of the work. Who was really exhibiting? You or me? I have no desire to exhibit; perhaps make exhibitions, yes, but not become an art object again. This is where the fetish breeds, in the space between disavowal (Who owns the work? Who is exhibiting the work?) & attachment (It’s my work not theirs!). The fetish also exists in the anxious & fearful space of avoidance. The fetish object helps maintain a distance from the real object of desire.

What I mean by becoming an art object is linked to a strange thought I had the other day about being an artist in the lifeworld. If you think about it, artists become art objects, that’s their fate. The moment they leave the lively process of their studio with their art objects in hand for the public to gawk at, they become objects. This is another definition of the fetish, in terms of the fetishistic object (the art object) that creates an obstacle to getting close to the fetishistic subject (the artist). Is this what artists & art is all about, formal obstacles & dialectic detours to getting closer, but not too close, to objects of desire, what Jacques Lacan calls the enigmatic signifier. Is it all just a slight of hand, a tease, social anxiety or anti-social behaviour?

As Slavoj Žižek writes: “fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly realists, able to accept the way things effectively are — since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality.

As I said to you in our first Zoom meeting together, I thought the process of screen-printing, the robotic drag of ink across a screen, protected me from my own subjectivity. In that there was a distance between me & your artworks through the very process of screen-printing, which doesn’t allow for the indecision & decisiveness that directs a drawing, painting or photograph. But the longer this process went on, the more mistakes & restarts I made, the more I got to know in the atomic detail & saturation of your art as image, as ink, the more I began to love them, the deepest subjectivity, where all distance is lost to an over-proximity & ownership of object of desire.

But maybe the exhibition, & the process of installing the work together at Garter Lane (garter belt being another fetishistic object if there ever was one) will help transfer all that weight of false ownership back to you, where it belongs. It’s difficult enough to carry the weight of your own art, but to carry the weight of others is not just fetishistic, it’s perverted.

But being a pervert is probably what artists do best…

See you at Garter Lane!

James

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SMALL NIGHT PROJECTS

TONE

July 08, 2022 by James Merrigan

Launch of New Text Art Publication TONE at TBG+S, 8 July 2022, 6pm

TONE is a screen-printed art publication dedicated to text art, what we call a lowercase journal. It is edited by James Merrigan, Laura Fitzgerald & Alan Phelan. TONE is the first of three issues to be launched at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios on July 8th at 6pm, followed by issues 2 & 3 launched at The Royal Hibernian Academy & the Douglas Hyde Gallery in the Autumn & Winter of 2022. It is screen-printed by Small Night Projects, in a garage, in Waterford City. At 40x34cm it’s close to A3 in size with a page count of 53.

Text is prevalent in our visual economy, especially in the proliferation of memes on social media. However the three co-editors of TONE, two of whom are contributing artists Laura Fitzgerald & Alan Phelan, have invited contributions wherein text stands alone without the crutch of the image. This is what editor James Merrigan calls TEXT AS IMAGE.

In what contributing L.A. artist Mark Verabioff called “the first wave”, we have researched far & wide for artists who prioritise text in their art as a standalone thing, divorced from the visual, but intimating an imaginary space that brings images & emotions to bear on the reading of them. Our hope is the reader will experience the chiastic structure of text as experience & experience as text.

The texts come in a variety of forms, from typed to handwritten, repetitive to rhetorical. What brings all six contributors together is what is intrinsic to words detached from their grammatical system: vulnerability. In this vulnerable & disjointed lexical space, artists tease out images & emotions through the silent saying of things without a pictorial representation to bridge the gap or rupture. Things said can never be unsaid. Is this the artist saying the words, society, or a verbal echo of you, the reader?

We invite you to come find out more on July 8th, 6pm, at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios Dublin, where a launch & introductory discussion to the project will take place with the co-editors. We will discuss the project in light of its local context & the international artists who have generously acknowledged our conceptual & critical aims by accepting our invitation. The TONE artists are: Laura Fitzgerald, Alan Phelan, Jack Pierson, Laure Prouvost, Mark Verabioff, Isobel Wohl.

The first issue TONE will be for sale at the launch night. It will NOT be available online as a pdf, or by post, but will be distributed only in-person. 50 copies will be available on the launch night at €20 each, strictly one copy per person. Cash only.

Funded by The Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council

CONTACTS:

Small Night Projects - James Merrigan

email: smallnightzine@gmail.com

web: https://smallnight.org/ socials: https://www.instagram.com/smallnightprojects/

Press pix: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XQHdVZOe-HgOm_pgtKDuPQi6hHXB913f

EMMA ROCHE | GREY WALL | 2022

May 13, 2022 by James Merrigan

Commissioned and screen-printed by Small Night Zine in 2021, Grey Wall was conceived through the use of artist Emma Roche's drawings, which she generously sent originals by post. They have an altogether different mood to the artist's paintings, from her soulful She-Wolf to soulless Darth Vader in their frieze-like profiles and Seurat hum. They are fugitive drawings that think painting but don't do painting. They are the architecture, the archetypes, the sad viaducts and empty vestibules of her Autumn studio, waiting for physical and chroma consolation, things to be leafed through, wither, recede. If Emma's painting can be analogised with the 8-bit Atari game DIG DUG pulsing beneath the woolly throw upon the couch before the warm fire, Emma's drawings are out in the cold of everyday essence, receding beyond the fold of attention. The silkscreen versions are even more pared back, reusing the routine, rigid and repetitive graph pattern to emphasise the everyday from which they are borne and born. They are, in essence, the dust mite's memory of the physical painting. They are the grey wall which art aspires to.

ORPHANS

November 12, 2019 by James Merrigan

35 Artists At Large experienced through screen-printed posters & letters (“Orphans”) & 6 collaborative zines. November/December 2019

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Bassam Al-Sabah
Ella Bertilsson & Ulla Juske
Susan Buttner
Dorje De Burgh
Stephen Dunne
*Lily Cahill & David Fagan
Child Naming Ceremony
*Jessica Conway & Catherine Barragry
*Laura Fitzgerald & Katharine Barrington
Damien Flood
Michelle Hall
Austin Hearne
Ann Maria Healy
Sinead Keogh
Mollie Anna King
*Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson aka Terminal Beach (invited by Katherine Waugh)
Jonathan Mayhew
Angela McDonagh
Glenn McQuaid
Celina Muldoon
Frances O’Dwyer
*Alan Phelan & Philipp Gufler
Liliane Puthod
Chris Steenson
Frank Wasser
*Lee Welch & Paul Hallahan
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*Collaborative zines

LILY CAHILL & DAVID FAGAN, OPERATION BOOMTOWN (FIRST EDITION, 2019)

ALAN PHELAN & PHILLIP GUFLER, STRIPES ETC (FIRST EDITION, 2019)

GRAEME THOMSON & SILVIA MAGLIONI, 🄸🄽 🄲🄾🄽🅂🄿🄸🄲🅄🄾🅄🅂 🄲🄾🄽🅂🅄🄼🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 🄾🄵 🄽🄾🅃🄷🄸🄽🄶🄽🄴🅂🅂 (FIRST EDITION, 2019)