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Public Lecture | Art-Rite REDUX: Martin Groch

In English, open for all. Off-line only.

The Text Area at The Royal Institute of Art presents a lecture by Martin Groch, a Slovak-born graphic designer and illustrator currently based in Brussels.

In 2020, Natasha Marie Llorens invited Groch to collaborate on a project to design the covers for the weekly reading assignments for the MA Seminar in Art Theory. Groch designed and type-set sixteen zines for the spring term of 2021 and helped type-set most of the zines for the fall term of 2020. On Tuesday, May 17th, Groch will expand on the project from the designer’s perspective, touching on the ideas:

Art-Rite and how it all started with a “strange commission”. About bootlegging a seminal art magazine and why to do so. How that became a joyful & hard & almost everyday work for two months. About irony and its importance in editing, drawing and life. About the function of unnecessary references. About drawing penises and vaginas, and how to depict them as cartoon characters. And why are we all in drag? About the importance of publishing for a small group of readers. About a mixture of “the very low” and “a classic”. About being suspicious of a given content. About working with a curator who for the sake of getting the job done improvises as a printer. About not so feel-good Feminism. Why Mr Peanut, why Carolee Schneemann, why square cows, and how are they all connected? Are they?! How important is trust? Why does all that feel good in the end? And how easy and difficult was all of that.

The lecture is given in the framework of an intensive course on producing anti-canonical zines taught by Martin Groch and Natasha Marie Llorens. The course is offered as an elective in the Text Area in Spring 2022.