Holder is an artist, designer and editor whose work investigates the gap between language and object.
Will Holder’s event is in the Nash & Brandon Rooms on Monday 28 July.
Through his multiple roles as artist, writer, editor and designer Will Holder (born Hatfield, 1969, lives in London) explores the transformative processes at play in the act of publishing. Holder’s project for Nought to Sixty takes place on Marcel Duchamp’s birthday, 28th July, and is entitled Bachelor Party. This event, which Holder has staged for a number of years, is a celebration encompassing a range of activities, including film screenings, performances and lectures.
Acknowledging Duchamp’s belief in the primacy of concept over form, yet choosing to scrutinise the form of concepts, the project foregrounds language (speech) as an adaptive material. Bachelor Party becomes an interdisciplinary platform from which to “edit, design and ‘publish’ material which ordinarily will not allow itself to be represented on paper”. Holder’s act displaces the notion of publishing from the printed page – and into the more fluid space of conversation and celebration.
Holder’s practice takes many forms, and his work includes printed journals and dialogues with other artists, as well as live readings and social events. In these various formats Holder interrogates the relationship between language and the object, exploring how text in all its forms can manifest in three-dimensions, and how the fixed nature of objects can be destabilised through linguistic interpretation. Holder’s biannual journal FR DAVID, edited with Ann de Meester and Dieter Roelstraete, provides an experimental space in which to discuss these relationships, and in which to explore the use of language in the service of the visual.