Tuesday, March 23rd, 7:00 PM www.three-walls.org Be our guest for our third SALON, as part of series, The Work of Gambling Historians: Oblique Glances at the Present, curated by Ania Szremski. There appears to be a growing return to the book amongst younger artists, writers and thinkers. This move towards the material and physical may be in reaction to the vastness and immateriality of forms of cultural production in the Second Life era. This discussion centers around definitions of the publication as art object, as curated exhibition, as micro-archive, as well as phenomenological aspects of the publication—its tactility, personable and intimate dimensions, and the unique one-to-one relationship between reader/viewer and object. Bookmakers, editors, curators and scholars have been invited to this discussion to share their experiences as we ponder the significance of recent evolutions in the book as object, curatorial challenges the artist book provokes, and the future of the medium. Guest Respondents: Brandon Alvendia, Simon Anderson, Doro Boehme, Michael Golec, and Paige Johnston The Work of Gambling Historians: Oblique Glances at the Present is a special threewallsSALONS series curated by Ania Szremski. Held on Tuesday evenings at 7:00 pm, SALONS feature guest respondents in round table discussion with the public about currents in the contemporary visual arts. The pictures of race horses crossing the finish line in The Truth Will be Known When the Last Witness is Dead from Walid Raad’s Atlas Project show the horse’s nose right before, or right after, crossing the finish line—never at the exact moment that the horse wins. This project eloquently demonstrates our inability to capture the precise moment in which we live; we need temporal and critical distance for lived experience to coalesce into something recognizable. Perhaps because of this very difficulty, there is an inevitable anxiety to understand, define and delineate the present. The Work of Gambling Historians is a discussion series that intends to take a sidelong glance at the present moment in cultural production, while remaining cognizant of the fact that these glances will inevitably result in blurry, distorted visions. The series is inspired by a perhaps contentious intuition that technological developments over the past two decades have produced an epistemic shift in terms of our relationship to the concept of “knowledge.” A cursory glance at contemporary art production may reveal certain trends related to this hunch: today, we see art practice steeped in personal or scholarly research, that is often archival in nature, and that doesn’t necessarily result in an end product; a turn to the map and diagram to connect ideas and reveal the patterns hidden under experience; and a resurgence of interest in the publication, parallel to a voracious plundering of the possibilities of the internet and new technologies. The Work of Gambling Historians proposes to investigate this evolution in contemporary ways of receiving, processing, and ordering information, and how this evolution is made manifest in artistic, curatorial, and critical practice. threewallsSALONS are an ongoing project that invites creative producers and thinkers into the gallery for an open-forum discussion about currents in contemporary visual art and culture. SALONS pose a discussion topic, gather a few key contributors and then open up the floor for discussion between those actively engaged in the 'question' and anyone and everyone who would like to come and be apart of the conversation. This year’s series was curated by Ania Szremski, a MA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration. This project was funded in part by The Presidential Urban Engagement Grant distributed by SAIC.