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.