The Office of Utopic Procedures present
The Aesthetics of Joy – The Infinite International of Poetics
Curated by Bernhard Sachs and Brad Haylock

29th January untill 13th February
Opening Celebration: Thursday 28th January 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Thursday 11th February

Featuring:
Kel Glaister
Brad Haylock
Hit & Miss
Veronica Kent
Lizzy Newman
Simon Pericich
Paul Quinn
Bernhard Sachs
David Simpkin
Brie Trenerry
Kellie Wells
Nicki Wynnychuk

The Office of Utopic Procedures is concerned with the circulation of symbolic language as a political problem and with discourses of civil space and its representations. It grew out of an event entitled Office of Utopic Procedures at West Space in 2001; the Office now returns to West Space with a new project, The Aesthetics of Joy: The Infinite International of Poetics.

The previous major exhibition organised by the Office was Endgame: Late-Capitalist Realism, which focused upon the question of the dystopic. After the dystopic, there is only one place to go: revolutions in poetic language.

The Aesthetics of Joy interrogates the possibilities of a poetic international, repercussions from a history in art of exuberance and its complications, including Tatlin's Monument to the Third International — only ever a marquette —  Yves Klein's famous Yves Klein Blue (YKB) and the propositional poetics of Marcel Broodthaers. The exhibition considers resistances to the authoritarianism of definition as a politics embodied in questions of transcendence and excess, the carnivalesque and jouissance, notoriously double-edged notions. Even as a cynicism, these are the ciphers of a universalising, utopic imaginary.