December 2
Ludlow 38
Reception, 6-8pm
Performance, 7:30pm
Jeremiah Day: 1-2-3-4
Simone Forti: Reading from Oh, Tongue
Fred Dewey: A Polis For New Conditions (Part 1)

December 3, 7pm
Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, 2nd Floor
Jeremiah Day / Simone Forti: Improvisation
Fred Dewey: A Polis For New Conditions (Part 2)
Simone Forti: Improvisation
Jeremiah Day: Lowndes County: Prologue

December 4, 4pm
Ludlow 38
Simone Forti: New Writings
Jeremiah Day and Fred Dewey in conversation: Lowndes County > Berlin > New York: Art and Public Life

Ludlow 38 is pleased to announce Jeremiah Day / Simone Forti / Fred Dewey, an exhibition and event series that is rooted in a shared ethos of artistic work as an experimental engagement with public and civic life and thinking.

The work of Simone Forti emerged from the New York dance and art-world of the 1960s – an intersection between minimalism and dance. From her improvisational movement-and-speaking works that began in the 1980s to her recent focus on writing, Forti has developed new models and methods of composition to address the problematic relationship between abstraction and subject matter. In her News Animations, Forti draws on the daily newspaper as part of an improvised composition, physically and conceptually wrestling with subject matter. The video shown here was shot in 1986 by the dancer Lisa Nelson in a studio session at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont.

From his involvement in the Mudd Club, New York cable access, and the East Village art scene in the late 1970s and early ’80s, to his 15-year tenure running Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles (through 2009), Fred Dewey has worked at the intersection of cultural production and the public realm. Dewey’s writings have appeared in such volumes as Cork Caucus: on art, possibility & democracy and Princeton Architectural Press’ Architecture of Fear. As editor and publisher he has worked on and with figures like Simone Forti, Ammiel Alcalay, Jean-Luc Godard, and Charles Olson, first through Beyond Baroque Books and now his new FRDewey Projects. In a daily practice of reading multiple newspapers and noting how minor incidents illuminate and relate to broader political organization, Dewey attempts to constantly reground abstract questions in concrete examples.

Jeremiah Day’s work employs photography, speech, and improvisational movement. Questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narratives. In a hybrid form of realism, Day appropriates historical incidents to serve as allegories and examples that can shed insight upon broader philosophical and political questions. In 2004 the major monuments and memorials in Washington DC were closed for reconstruction, curiously timed with the Presidential Election. For Jefferson Project (2004-06), Day takes this event as the subject of an oblique and fractured documentary that explores different modes of time and structure, personal and political histories.

Whether as editor/author, teacher/student, curator/artist, or collaborators, over the last decade Day, Dewey, and Forti have worked together in various configurations. In an evolving chain of presentations from Dublin’s Project Art Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London to The Box in Los Angeles, their work together presents a new model for exploring questions of text and image, experience and memory, art and politics.

This project is supported by Mondriaan Stichting Amsterdam.