Having been out of print since 2012, The Readymades will be re-issued in European territories September 2019. Orders will ship in August.

First published in 2011, The Readymades went out of print too quickly for many of us to get hold of a book often mentioned as one of the best Irish novels of recent years. Now, happily, it has been reprinted and it doesn’t take long to realise that it is indeed an ingenious work documenting, in every sense, the circumstances in which a group of artists - friends since they grew up together in Serbia - who participated in the appalling ethnic wars that started after the end of communism in Yugoslavia, live creative, if turbulent lives that can never be separated from the depravity of the violence in which they once took part and which both fuels their art and corrodes their unity of purpose. 

– Declan O’Driscoll, December 2019, The Irish Times

Holten's novel is one of the greatest works of art to come out of Berlin in recent years...You could say that LGB are the Next Big Thing to come ouf of Berlin, the timely projection of an embattled nexus - East versus West, the Real World versus the Art World, Purity versus Commodification, Literature versus the Visual Arts, Fiction versus Truth.
  — Travis Jeppesen, June/July 2012 issue of Art in America.

When first published The Readymades won universal acclaim by those who managed to acquire a copy, being dubbed one of 'the best Irish novels of the last decade.' It tells the story of a collection of friends who took part in the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s, before going on to become celebrated artists. It recounts their loves, their struggles and the weight of history as they blaze a trail across Europe. Its publication came with a number of interventions in the world by The LGB Group, the art group Holten created in the novel, with work created in collaboration with Serbian artistDarko Dragičević.

Having mostly existed as an extended fiction project within the contemporary art world, The Readymades received less attention and readership in the literary world than it deserved, leading Rob Doyle to declare, 'One of the most remarkable novels of recent years, The Readymades has been read by relatively few people.' Its republication sees a novel whose story and characters take on the very forces so pertinent today: the reemergence of nationalism, civil war, refugees and the need for art to challenge any and all prejudices and preconceived notions of what it means to be an individual.

 John Holten is a novelist, artist and occasional curator. His first novel The Readymades was published in 2011 by Broken Dimanche Press, which he co-founded in Berlin in 2009. It was followed up the novel Oslo, Norway in 2015. Holten has collaborated with many visual artists on texts and publications in recent years. He has been awarded Literature Bursaries from Arts Council of Ireland, most recently in 2017.

Darko Dragičević is a Belgrade-born, Berlin-based visual and performance artist, film director and teacher. His interdisciplinary projects and cross-media collaborations have been presented and awarded internationally. Dragičević teaches at institutions such as ZZT Centre for Contemporary Dance/HfMT Cologne, DOCH - School of Dance and Circus/Stockholm University of the Arts, Tanzquartier Vienna, Folkwang University Essen and Y-Institut/Hochschule der Künste Bern. He is commissioning editor of the Practice series for Goethe-Institut Serbia. First edition titled Failure as Practice was published in March 2019.

September 2011 Press Release:

Oslo, August 20, 2011, launch party in the Oslo Kunsthall, with the installation Željko Radić and Peter Tomc  
Dublin, September, 2011, The Office of Non-Compliance @ Dublin Contemporary
Berlin, September 28, 2011 at Motto
Berlin, October 6, 2011 at the Irish Embassy, Berlin
Brussels, November, 2011 at Gallery D.O.R. 11, rue de Merode1060 Bruxelles
New York, March 8-11 at The Armory Fair, Pier 92 & 94

John Holten’s confident debut novel The Readymades uses and abuses a number of literary genres: found texts from the history of modern art, witness testimonies, press releases and the narrative style of art-historical accounts. The novel emerges from one of Félix Fénéon’s infamous three-sentence ‘novels’ – appropriated mini-stories from French newspapers – and from the starting point of Fénéon’s narrative readymade, Holten has extrapolated a whole missing art movement and their contemporary European picaresque saga.  

The action begins during October 2008 in Paris, with John, a young Irish publisher, meeting the jaded Serbian artist Djordje Bojić. Bojić tells John about the manuscript he is writing: the history of the LGB Group - an Eastern European neo-avant-garde collective that arose in the turbulent environment of mid-1990s Belgrade, when Bojić and his friends, recently returned from the war in Bosnia, started to produce art in order to escape the hysterical nationalism all around them.  

Bojić’s manuscript makes up the final part of the novel. Starting out as an academic attempt to document the LGB Group, the sober attitude of the art-historical account soon collapses, and the narrative gradually turns into a disclosing life-story of violence and existential decay. As the manuscript moves closer to the horrific truths of Bojić’s own war experiences, the testimony gradually fails, becomes full of mute lacunas in order to finally reach the ineffable climax of the testimony: the aphasia of trauma, the dumbness of loss, and the ultimate silence of Bojić’s own death.  

By juxtaposing the experience of war, the urge for artistic creation and the act of narrating the past, The Readymades launches a double strategy in which the artistic gesture becomes an attempt to overcome war, while simultaneously forced to partake in it. Because art (at least since the original Dada gesture) has sought its own raison d’être in an ongoing dialectic of defiance, transgression and negation of the status quo, it must inevitably find its own dynamic intrinsically linked to acts of violence.   With a unique book design, this mise-en-abyme presents a book-within-a-book that takes the reader on a journey to the darker corners of contemporary European history. In collaboration with the Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević, Holten has produced a catalogue of LGB artworks and memorabilia, presented both in the book and in exhibition-spaces throughout Europe this coming autumn. In other words: The Readymades is not just a novel, but also an on-going 'fictitious event', pushing against any sedate conception of what the literary novel can achieve today, at once not afraid of today’s ‘reality hunger’, nor the legacy of postmodernism.     

John Holten is an award winning BDP associate editor and curator. His writing has appeared in various outlets across Europe, most recently with the AADK Press and Piso Colectivo. This is his first novel.

Darko Dragičević was born i in Belgrade and studied at the International College of Arts and Sciences in Milan. He works as a filmmaker and a visual artist. In 2011 he won the 3rd Prize MuVi Award at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival with “Ah!“ (2010). He currently lives and works in Berlin.