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-It’s All Over

www.jimcarreytrulife.com

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 ✔

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!

“My main activity is looking, looking and more looking, and trying to listen to my subjective reactions as objectively or neutrally as possible. I learn from everything I look at, good, bad or indifferent. I follow my eye reflexively; if it is drawn toward something, I pay attention and try to find out why. You train your eye, build up a mental image bank, and constantly try to pinpoint why some things are convincing and others aren’t.

When I look at new work, my image bank goes into action. I pay careful attention to the names of other artists that flash in my brain as I look at the work. How many other artists exactly come to mind? There’s nothing wrong with this up to a point. I always loved Frank Stella’s observation that when you start out as a painter, you make other painters’ paintings, then you gradually begin to make your own paintings. I try to figure out what’s left in a younger artist’s work once I’ve subtracted the other artists’ influences. Does what remains seem original or at least promising? Is the younger artist aware of the debt and trying to get free of it? Or is that artist just unconsciously accepting received ideas and therefore making work that is generic or derivative? Obviously, the fewer names that come to mind, the greater the odds that you are looking at something fresh that you haven’t quite seen before.

And I do feel that there is a basic human drive to see something new. We don’t want to listen to endless cover bands playing Beatles’ songs, why should we look at the same abstraction or still life, the same photograph or Conceptual performance piece being done again and again by different artists with only slight variations?

At the same time, “newness” or originality are often matters of subtle degree. The new doesn’t have to be an epoch-shifting breakthrough. Just as we all have different fingerprints and handwriting, we all have a potential for some increment of originality. I am always on the lookout for a spark of necessity — a feeling that this particular artist had no choice but to make this particular artwork this particular way. That is the only way authenticity or even originality can start to emerge.”

- Clipped from a Meg Onli article [Bad At Sports], clipped from a Chandra Tiwari Q and A [New York Times]

Watch the full documentary at ubuweb.

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

“Dear Eric and Patricia.
You took my car. I am happy for you on so many levels, but don’t disguise it as anything other than a half-assed gesture. I’m sure the act probably had some stale thrill of transgression. but please believe me, without your self- promoting twittering and FBing to the Saltz page no one would have given a flying f**k about it. Please, you are human beings – express yourselves through yourselves. You will be dead soon. Drive my car – drive it back – then leave it at that.
Is this sad excuse for self promotion and self-definition what you wish to leave for future generations? I quote you as you exited the car: “We thought it was part of the interactivity.” Is this Disney? And as for the rest of the digi-witterers – no more mentions of “Relational Aesthetics” or ‘RA’ or whatever you need to call it… Leave that to the librarians, accountants, and score keepers. Its art. It has no name – just like the void, no name. Do you think that Donald Judd had ‘Minimalist’ on his drivers-license? Your incessant babble is deafening, fearful, and boring. Please cease.”
- Clipped from Art Fag City [where you'll find all the appropriate links to this operatic composition; it's as charming as the letter above] -Clipped from NYMagazine [Jerry Saltz's Thing]

Yes, I will participate in the art world’s self-congratulatory [lots of blog hype] attempt at producing a meme with [potential] pop culture exportability. I have before. And besides, how couldn’t I? So, apropos.

Minimalism Now

Feb 27, 2011

Rachel Harrison, sculptor
Miwon Kwon, Professor of Art History, UCLA
James Meyer, Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University
David Raskin, Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This panel puts the issue of Minimalism’s morphology and relevance to a noteworthy cast of scholars and artists. Harrison has exhibited internationally in leading venues. Kwon is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002). Meyer is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (Yale University Press, 2001). Raskin is the author of Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010).

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!