JOHAN KUGELBERG and IAN SVENONIUS on RANDOM FOREST: A Reading Room

In this video, Johan Kugelberg, alongside Ian Svenonius, gives us further insight regarding the exhibition Random Forest: A Reading Room. Kugelberg and Svenonius start off by explaining the choices that had been made for the exhibition, led by the artist duo Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman. They start by diving into the table that can be viewed as the star of the exhibition. This table is about materiality, scarcity, and commodification of artifacts. According to Kugelberg, one of the most interesting pieces on the said table is the hidden communication tool that was used during the Baader Meinhof activities in Germany in the 1970s. Created by the group Red Army Faction, this book, which is originally their manifesto, is disguised as a romance novel called Prevented Love, published with a fake cover. Kugelberg talks about Tom Blake’s Hawaiian Surfboard, which is considered the first book on surf culture, self-published and hand-stenciled by Blake in 1938. Kugelberg mentions how this book demonstrates an opposition between identity politics and sports. The reason behind this is that, if this book was about a more popular sport, for example American football, it would cost a lot more. This is because the materiality of the surfing culture is not yet discovered. Kugelberg then talks about Teenage Smokers, the very famous book by Ed Templeton featuring photographs of teenagers smoking cigarettes and looking cool. This book, which started off as a zine, alongside with the sequel The Teenage Kissers, demonstrates examples of identity politics among teens. Another rather interesting piece that Kugelberg finds worth mentioning is the first ever copy of Bob Dylan’s Tarantula. After Dylan gets mad at the publisher and stops the publication of his first novel, Tarantula, a man named A.J. Weberman gets hold of the work and makes 75 copies, selling them for cheap on the streets of the West Village. This strange story demonstrates the trajectory of how, the first edition of the book of a very famous artist, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature, was actually a scrappy, pathetic bootleg that was sold on the streets of the West Village, Kugelberg explains. Kugelberg and Svenonius end the video by talking about the works of Raoul Vaneigem, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, who can be viewed as the leading figures of the situationist movement. They also mention the current stage of materiality, where books can be seen as the only thing that has escaped the destruction of the digital age.