[New York]

Book Launch: Ideas Have No Smell: Three Belgian Surrealist Booklets with M. Kasper, Mary Ann Caws, McKenzie Wark and more.
October 12, 2018, 6:00 pm
at Printed Matter

In honor of the release of this edition of little-known gems of the Belgian Surrealist movement, Printed Matter will host a reading by translator M. Kasper and a dada-performance of Paul Nougé's visual poems (musicians and readers TBA). The performance and reading will be followed by a discussion with M. Kasper, Mary Ann Caws, and McKenzie Wark. The Belgian Surrealist movement, like its contemporary French cousin, included both visual artists—René Magritte most famously—and writers, who were also its theorists. They shared with the Parisians a fierce commitment to personal, political, and aesthetic liberty, and to humor, surprise, and transgression as artistic strategies, but they parted company when it came to the unconscious and the occult. Ideas Have No Smell collects the first English-language translations of three works: Transfigured Publicity, visual texts by poet and photographer Paul Nougé (1895-1967); the whimsical, hand-drawn artist’s book, Abstractive Treatise on Obeuse by Paul Colinet (1898-1957); and For Balthazar, a collection of aphorisms and observations by the ever skeptical author, lawyer, and anarchist Louis Scutenaire (1905-1987). In addition to the three booklets (in facsimile-style translations by M. Kasper), this special edition includes an introduction by scholar Mary Ann Caws and a poster reproduction of the 1926 handwritten panneau of Nougé’s visual poems. The edition is distributed by Artbook | DAP. For more information, see here.