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Programming [a host of activities] itself is a medium that should be discursively reconsidered within the field of shifting organizational responsibility and transnominal embodiment. For the past few weeks I’ve been noting several new programming initiatives, both institutional and non-institutional, that make a strong case for being as progressive as the art and/or artists they typically champion. Below is a small compilation of a few of these programs.

-KOW ISSUE 8: GENERAL STRIKE

One of my favorite galleries [and gallery spaces] in Berlin is the relatively new KOW Berlin. The gallery’s conceptual agenda is rooted in their conviction that the social dimension of artistic practices is what makes them helpful in understanding the conditions, and in influencing the modes, of our individual and collective lives.

More specifically, GENERAL STRIKE is published as the eighth contribution to KOW ISSUES, a sequence of projects in varying formats that explore the social and political implications of artistic practices. Conception, texts, and graphic design: Alexander Koch.

From the excerpt:
“Artists are positively expected to criticize the society in which they live. Criticizing art—the market, the institutions, the role of the creative outsider in which many people like to cast them—is likewise a conventional part of what they do; in Institutional Critique, it has even become the central feature of a distinct art movement. But what happens when artists go so far as to criticize not just individual features of the art world but art as a whole?”

This is the transcendent beauty of criticality as ouroboros. I’d love to see more blogs dedicated to this theme alone.

More ✔

-REGIONALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

On Saturday, May 7th, 2011, Glasstire and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presented a panel in celebration of their 10th anniversary. The issues being discussed are apropos to many of the issues being [mostly unconsciously] projected by the artist and art collective behavior of mimetic institutionalization.

“Regionalism in the 21st Century” featured Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale; David Pagel, Los Angeles Times art critic and associate professor of art at Claremont Graduate University; Toby Kamps, curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection in Houston; and Michael Galbreth, one of the artist duo known as The Art Guys. The panel was moderated by Christina Rees, a Glasstire correspondent and director of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.

-INSTANT CINEMA

Instant Cinema is a comprehensive platform for experimental film, video and computer art, making the best audio-visual work of artists of all generations available to a worldwide audience.

The fact that they’re presenting several Bas Jan Ader works alone should be enough reason to inquire further. The interface itself is rather beautiful and lends itself well to the question of whether or not the portability of video art will lead the way in the technological hyper-weaving of art and everyday life. Also, please read the about page.

preview.instantcinema.org ✔

-FREE PROPOSALS FOR ART SCHOOL CRITIQUE

artschoolartcritiques.tumblr.com ✔

-KURATOR

KURATOR is a combined curatorial agency and research platform at the intersection of art, technology and society. It has a particular interest in the emerging discourse and practice that links curating with programming, software and networks.

KURATOR’s core activities include projects, research and publications. 
A repository of all contents in the database can be found in the Archive section.

kurator.org ✔

-A Conversation on Useful Art #1

“It’s time to put Duchamp’s urinal back into the restroom” —Tania Bruguera

On Saturday, April 23 Immigrant Movement International hosted A Conversation on Useful Art #1, an event organized by artist Tania Bruguera as part of Immigrant Movement International, a year-long, socio-political movement initiated by the artist in Corona, Queens and presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art.

Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, presented in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, is a long-term art project in the form of an artist-initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera will spend an entire year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighborhood of Corona, Queens, which will serve as the movement’s headquarters. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organizations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, Bruguera will examine growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants.

immigrant-movement.us ✔

The Internet medium is an awkward medium within the art industry. It has no intrinsic value other than providing a basic measurement of your advertising ROI for your site’s requests for engagement. Additionally, it’s immaterial and therefore incapable of generating monetary gain on its own, but rather directs the engaged to more traditional means [even online] of market exchange where they are able to collect material souvenirs of their online experience. Thus, net art is more directly capable of referring to art’s hidden social role as an abstract economy. After all, it’s one of the largest unmediated and illiquid markets in the [public] world.

With this said, there are Net Artists that continue to test the potential of the Internet medium. Rafaël Rozendaal, http://www.newrafael.com/, is a Dutch-Brazilian artist that has helped pioneer the “single serving site” and has developed an international exhibition reputation [e.g. "Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo and London amongst others."]. Each site/work is an interactive animation that simply does what static works of art cannot: it plays with you/you play with it. In addition to each work’s share-value [i.e. the value produced by the gesture of sending a site link to a friend and them thinking "wow, that's pretty cool; so-and-so is cool for sharing this and now I will share this and create the same cool value for myself"], and an online store that sells limited addition prints of the work, Rozendaal sells the individual domain spaces as collectible works of art.

Recently, Rozendall has opened a new exhibition in Berlin, at The Future Gallery. Below is a video walk through of the exhibition. The following links will take you to the works being exhibited: TowardsAndBeyond.com, IntoTime.com, HybridMoment.com. Please note the corresponding title information for each work at the top of the browser window.

Currently reading through, e-flux journal #12, which is chock-full of exceptional texts potentially teetering on the opportunity and failure of asking the question What is Contemporary Art?…

The most operational* of the texts is Jan Verwoert’s Standing on the Gates of Hell, My Services Are Found Wanting. This [um] essay [?] encourages the art-text to have potential beyond the typically discursive lines that their writers often fall short with by working on the same liminal grounds that the work of art often works on.

*Operational is being used here as a way to describe a process of delineating a phenomenon by performing it [a sort of in-and-of-itself].

The following excerpts have been compiled in order to persuade you to read for yourself.

“Standing there, I find myself, for instance, in the company of Irit Rogoff, and I am with her when she writes that what makes us contemporaries is the act of looking at the problems of our time together and the realization that we share these problems—and maybe not much more apart from these problems—as we inhabit the condition of contemporaneity together. I agree with her in principle.”
…
“Weeping and laughing on the gates of hell, I do not feel particularly postmodernist. Postmodernism was neither particularly funny nor sad.”
…
“In art and thinking we find the historical codes for understanding what meaning will have meant and how experience will have been experienced.”
…
“This is done through a simple trick. It is the secret of the trade of true liars: Always only give people what they already have and think they deserve. But give it to them in a guise that allows them to rejoice in the illusion that they received something new, foreign, and exciting.”
…
“A philosophy that creates laughter because it is a joke and consoles the weeping because it is a philosophy of tears, a philosophy in tears.”
…
“Standing on the gates hell, facing the gates of hell, laughing and weeping on the gates of hell, I summon you now, my uncontemporary contemporaries, because you have summoned me to come here, to address you.”
…
[Read it.]

And for those of you like me, who find yourselves needing to flip back to the author photo, continuously, while reading a book [so you can feel better about trying to understanding where the hell something is coming from], I’ve attached the following photo.

The x-initiative is (for now) a non-profit art entity with a simple goal to inspire and challenge us to think about new possibilities for experiencing and producing contemporary art. The charmingly experimental intentions of “reaching across traditional boundaries” by providing a framework of investigation based in a quick responsiveness to the cultural shifts taking place around us is most appropriately realized by the pre-established life-span of the organization. The x-initiative is organized into three phases starting from Spring 2009 through Winter 2010.

Each of the phases, their accompanying artists, lectures and events are all suggestions of the durational sort and when conceptually compiled and reflected upon, as a curatorial whole, clearly represent the changing landscape of contemporary art. However, this sort of ‘changing’ in the landscape of contemporary art, is to a degree, a constant in so far as the reciprocal energy needed by artists, organizations, galleries and curators, isn’t always available, therefore rendering the inert qualities of these endeavors durational, by nature. [i.e. how many galleries and/or institutions have you seen open and close in the life-span of your attention for contemporary art?]

My favorite of the events listed on x-initiatives site is [ironically] ArtTable presents BLOG THIS! Blogging the contemporary arts, a panel discussion, 6:30 PM, 1/15.

And thus, I’d actually like to propose that all start-up arts organization design their operations to live for only one year. Perhaps this strategy might encourage more practically resourceful, thoughtfully designed operations and ideally more engaged receptions? If anything, it will help prepare those instigators involved, for the death of the organization upon inception, giving them a more vital relationship with creating something strong enough to survive longer, and a more palpable taste of acknowledgement during the grieving period.

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