Tuesday, March 20, 2012, 7 p.m.
MERCER UNION
A Centre for Contemporary Art
1286 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON, M6H 1N9
T: 416.536.1519
E: sarah@mercerunion.org
www.mercerunion.org
An evening of screenings and performances from artists featured in BLAST COUNTERBLAST, edited by Steve Reinke and Anthony Elms, published by Mercer Union, and distributed by WhiteWalls / University of Chicago Press. The bar will be open all evening, and there will be a special discount on all book purchases!
BLAST COUNTERBLAST features contributions by Stuart Bailey, Andrej Blatnik, Joerg Becker & Irena Knezevic, Elijah Burgher, Cameron Crawford, Jon Davies, Leif Elggren, Mario Fusco, Matthea Harvey & Adam Shecter, Nelson Henricks, Mike Hoolboom, Irena Knezevic, Erin Leland, Jessie Mott, My Barbarian, Christine Negus, Darren O’Donnell, Academy Records, Lane Relyea, John Russell, Jim Trainor, Ryan Trecartin, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby.
BLAST COUNTERBLAST is a multifaceted, fascinating examination of the way intellectuals interact—through influence, through argumentation and through criticism. Looking at both Wyndham Lewis’s modernist publication BLAST and Marshall McLuhan’s 1969 response to it, COUNTERBLAST, the contributors to this volume—a selection of writers, visual artists, performers, and filmmakers—skewer relational aesthetics and identity politics in order to restate what the role of identity formation is today. Taking McLuhan and Lewis as starting points, the essays in this volume develop and push the ideas presented in both BLAST and COUNTERBLAST while the book design by Toronto’s Underline Studio pays homage to both thinkers’ experiments in typography.
Mercer Union acknowledges publication support from the Canada Council for the Arts through the Media Arts Dissemination program.