-Bradley Wester on de Kooning

This past week I had the opportunity to see the de Kooning retrospective at the MoMA. The walk-through was everything expected: a massive cavernous vacuum of mid 20th century painterly heroics accessorized with exhibition design that felt very of the era. However, after the evening concluded, upon returning home, Bradley Wester read us an article that he’d written the year of de Kooning’s death. Immediately, everything human about the exhibition, that I was unable to find through the roaming mob of followers and wall texts, clapped its way into my memory as I backtracked my recollections in order to match up the little narrative with its things.

The article can be found at Bradley’s blog, here.

-Making Art Go Public

This “lively” discussion between Maria Lind and Jens Hoffman appropriately represents the polarities that exist between conservative and experimental modes of thinking about art, specifically in institutional settings. And do note, I say “thinking” as a way of identifying the most public aspect of art, in so far as its activity – coupled with its elusive twin sibling, “feeling” – is art’s primary most medium. Remember this when reading through the interview and be amazed at the potential of your chosen cultural behavior.

Mousse Magazine’s, TO SHOW OR NOT TO SHOW.

-NICOLEMAUSER.COM

I’ve recently finished the website for a friend, Nicole Mauser. It was made with the assistance of another friend, Seth Hoekstra, who made the custom type and kindly offered design suggestions along the way.

Wander through it, here.

-#sharkface

Cause if you don’t know now you know #sharkface.

Exceptionally proud to be collaborating with Nicole Mauser on a hybrid essay, in the form of an online zine, found at www.kinematiczine.com. Content is being updated throughout the month of April. The paintings themselves are simply some of the best I’ve seen lately.

Go look see!

Watch the full documentary at ubuweb.

-residual research from a conversation with the painter, Nicole Mauser.

In the exhibition “f**k yes,” the work of Cynthia Mason allows us to grasp an abundance of data by giving us methodical tools. Like those that we have used before, these tools are also for sorting memories, recomposing stories and merging parts and pieces from dissonant relationships. In our everyday lives, we call these tools maps, models, analytics and theories. Regardless of how familiar using Mason’s tools may seem, they constitute a communal means for working with an invented world. If this world were to convincingly exist, between us, we would need to be able to see evidence, with a chronology of events familiar enough that it could develop conversational exposure.

We can. It’s there.

Mason’s tools help us see patterns in her work that correspond to our own world. There are material gestures that hold similar formal qualities to the body, such as intestines, brains, skin and hair. And with the iteration and repetition of these forms comes a sense of cyclical clustering, migration, crumbling and regeneration. Shifting from macro to micro causes kinematic associations, as constellations of marks become the periphery of a galaxy and/or the intersections of urban planning. But in the case of this invented world, the patterns in Mason’s work describe not only its construction but the audience’s relationship to it. We are able to see that our relationship to Mason’s content is governed by our [access] devices: the tools themselves.

Yet, as often as Mason’s work attempts to fix its audience on the co-generation of a virtual landscape, via material experimentation, a critical undercurrent remains prescient. She questions her own methods: what is the value of an emulative tool? For instance, a computer is not a paintbrush but it can emulate one. Its gestures are programmable. Its user’s scope of cultural production seams nearly limitless. Through the conceptual alchemy of its use, the tools of a computer turn that which is real into that which is virtual. Furthermore, through the lens of computer technology, our own human behaviors become that much more unreal, our own histories that much more fictional.

It’s possible that Mason’s tools both acknowledge and challenge the virtual dominance of history infiltrating our daily lives, simply by suggesting their use wields results that will never become fully scriptable. Because in a world like Mason’s, the sciences can only be as empirical as the potential of the imagination, and our own intuitive organizations are powerfully reformative and compassionate.

We just have to see the potential.

F**k yes!

READ IT. Read it all.

An undeniable force in pattern development, Mr. Rogers helped pioneer performative pop-models for sincerity and laid the foundation for the consciousness industry. One can’t help but admire, and thus mine, his obsolete position in media production.

Lately, I’ve been personally investing a great deal of my energy into co-birthing the following collaborative entity. Legwork, via the means of its own description, is a Berlin- and Hannover-based collaborative concerned with situational articulations and circulations of meaning, ranging from figurative to discursive. Its web presence is at legwork.cc.

The collaboration will materialize through various mediums and will be centrally located (whatever that means anymore) online, through monthly issues. The first bit of writing I’ve done with Legwork is entitled, Cooking Invocation. The following summary of the piece was prepared for Legwork’s newsletter: “That the preparation of a meal should wield such discursive currency in the contemporary art world says something meaty about the status of the medium of the everyday in contemporary artistic practice. Tobey Albright prepares.” You can read the full article here.

Two additional [brilliant!] articles on hybridized choreography, situated between YouTube and Art Fairs, and a collaborative Giorgio Agamben TrendMatrix, are also held within its web pages. And if those claims alone don’t make you want to interface with Legwork, the admission that my two Legworkian collaborators, Egle Obcarskaite and Timothy Murray, have two of the more brilliant minds and engaging practices as anyone I’ve had the pleasure to play with before, will certainly persuade you. Go!

www.Legwork.cc