SAME PLAYERS SHOOT AGAIN : JACQUELINE DE JONG & THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Oct 31 – Nov 29 2020
Opening day, Oct 31, 2-8pm
Treize
24 rue Moret
75011 Paris
On September 18th 2016, while visiting the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939) came across the Digi-Comp II, an educational toy presenting the basics of computational logic using beads, a ramp and a series of separators. This chance encounter brought back the memory of another – far more ludic – machine which De Jong had enjoyed in her youth: the pinball machine. In the early 1970s, she had even planned to dedicate the seventh issue of her magazine The Situationist Times to the game.
Co-produced with designer and gallerist Hans Brinkmann, this Pinball issue eventually went unpublished. The preparatory documents that remained – photographs, letters, press clippings and various printed matter – were stored in a box in the artist’s house in Amsterdam and eventually forgotten .
These archives have since been reactivated through the publishing and curatorial project “These Are Situationist Times”, which Norwegian researcher Ellef Prestæter and the publisher and Torpedo Press (Oslo) have developed in close collaboration with De Jong. These documents will soon join the Jacqueline de Jong Papers of the Beinecke Library, Yale University. “Same Players Shoot Again” is the Parisian instalment of an exhibition which has been presented on several occasions since 2018 and which features a book and a digital interface produced by Torpedo Press and theInstitute for Computational Vandalism.
A topological manifesto, political bulletin and visual encyclopedia, The Situationist Times (1962-1967) – which De Jong launched right after being excluded from the Situationist International – has its roots in vernacular culture, the history of games, and non-euclidean mathematics. The exhibition presents the archives of the unpublished final issue of this landmark of post-war artists’ magazines alongside art and graphic works by De Jong from the same period. Like a pinball, the exhibition traces a dérive, a knot, an underground web of relations, a hazardous curve, or a dissident trajectory across the artistic and political avant-garde movements of its time.
An exhibition developed by Jacqueline de Jong and Ellef Prestæter, in collaboration with Juliette Pollet, Gallien Déjean, Emmanuel Guy & Fanny Schulmann.
Programming:
November 28th, afternoon, Kandinsky Library, Centre Pompidou: presentation of Ellef Prestæter’s book These Are Situationist Times ! An Inventory of Reproductions, Deformations, Modifications, Derivations, and Transformations (Torpedo Press, 2019), and Gallien Déjean’s book of interviews with Jacqueline de Jong (Manuella Editions/AWARE, 2020). With Jacqueline de Jong (TBC), Gallien Déjean, Juliette Pollet, Emmanuel Guy and Fanny Schulmann.In partnership with AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibition).
The exhibition and programming benefited from the support of the Embassy of the Netherlands, the Embassy of Norway and AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibition).
