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Hommage pour Raymond Hains: Orange, Jaune, Rouge, Aleksandar Gojković, 2001. From the series 'The Readymades' by Darko Dragičević
For a review copy, email Broken Dimanche Press at editorkakofonie@googlemail.com
A novel in three lines by John Holten
With LGB art from Darko Dragičević
Book creation: FUK Laboratories Berlin
Broken Dimanche Press special edition
ISBN: 978-3-943196-00-9
Appearing : August 20, 2011, launch party in the Oslo Kunsthall, with the video installation Željko Radić and Peter Tomc
September 2011: Berlin & Dublin
November 2011: Belgrade
The Readymades opens in October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić late at night. Đorđe tells John about a manuscript he is writing – a history of the LGB Group, an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective of which he was a leading figure. LGB arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade. Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, start to exhibit together an art inspired by everyday life in defiance to the hysterical nationalism all around them.
John, looking for something extraordinary to publish, is intrigued by Đorđe's story and tries to get his hands on the manuscript. However, when Đorđe is found dead in the Seine it becomes clear that the manuscript is not merely an art-historical document, but also holds delicate and compromising information about the people involved in the LGB Group. Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel, revealing to the reader the captivating story of three young artists who seek to escape the burden of belligerent origins by recklessly throwing themselves into the realm of art. As Djordje’s manuscript moves closer and closer to the horrific truths of his war experience, the testimony fails, becomes full of silent gaps and loose ends. Finally, the undertaking of giving an honest narrative account of the past ends in the ultimate silence of Djordje’s own death. His life story is a disturbing narrative of excess, failed relationships and existential decay. But at the same time it is also a breathtakingly intimate, and deeply poignant story about a fervent love and a life lived on the edge of the everyday.
The novel, like the original anti-art Dada gesture, overcomes the transgression of war with the transgressive nature of the avant-garde and insists on sustaining an ambiguity, in which art, including literature, holds a promise of freedom while also being intrinsically linked to acts of violence and destruction. With a unique book design, this mise-en-abyme presents a book-within-a-book that takes the reader on a unique journey to the darker corners of contemporary European history. Having mapped an extremely impressive and academically rigourous artistic neo-avant-garde – the LGB group – John Holten has created a fiction that blurs the boundaries of what is real and what is fiction. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević he has created a catalogue of LGB artworks, memorabilia and documents, presented both in the book and in a series of exhibitions that will coincide with the book’s appearance, starting in Oslo’s kunsthalle in August 2011. The accumulative affect of The Readymades as a work of art is one that will remain with the reader long after they have turned the last page of Djordje Bojić’s manuscript. John Holten’s remarkable debut is an achievement of the highest order that heralds an exciting new voice onto the European stage.
John Holten born 1984 in Ireland, studied literature and philosophy in University College Dublin and Sorbonne-Paris IV (2002-2006) followed by a MPhil in the Oscar Wilde Center of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin (2008-2009). Since then he has published fiction and poetry in a number of journals and magazines, the most recent of which appeared in Blind Mirrors, edited by Thierry Decottignies (Sep 2010, AADK Press) and State of Motion (Dec 2010, Piso Collectivo). In 2010 he co-edited the anthology You Are Here which represented Ireland in the Charlemagne European Prize and came second place out of 27 countries. He has worked as an editor and translator for a number of projects and institutions across Europe, including as an associative editor with Broken Dimanche Press; most recently he has given keynote speeches at BNO, Amsterdam and Humboldt University, Berlin. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Irish Arts Council.
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The Readymades is the first part of Ragnarök
