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.

This video’s non-human theatrics of depicting the relationship between an artist and a consumer [at an art fair] are perfect for confronting the complicated nature of the relationship. It’s my personal opinion that the heart of this complicated relationship belongs to a caricatured public-relation of modern art and its critical apparatus, perpetuated by both teams on the playing field, and embodied here, by these adorable little computer abstractions.

“Versions, 2010,” by Oliver Laric is a rather brilliant illustration of the warm place we all have in our hearts for simulation and its recapitulative capacity regarding the power of the IMAGE. Additionally, “Versions, 2010,” is a newer version of “Versions, 2009.” Both are capable of supplying the visual artist and/or creative with an apropos “WTF are you doing?” moment.

Oliver Laric is also part of the [mostly online] curatorial powerhouse that is VVORK

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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

Occasionally, a bit of writing comes along that strikes a chord of resonance nearly too perfect to be true. The sound of this particular resonance echos around the complicated cavern of discernment that an artist’s role operates in relation to a public [whatever that may be]. Clearly, rendering a history of an artist’s behavioral tendency to perform the responsibilities and power dynamics of an institution has an essential urgency that needs to be addressed. Thus, the essay, “Art Without Artists,” by Anton Vidokle [mentioned in admiration several times before], currently being occupied by the 16th issue of the E-Flux journal, does just this. Please read the entire essay at e-flux.com/journal. If you are involved in any activities, be them collective, collaborative or organizational, you owe it to the history of your methodology to read this essay.

…

“If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist’s capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.”

…

“If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use—rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the ‘freedom of art.’”

…

“It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled—and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment—exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics—through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth—rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination. ”

“As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer—a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.”

I like to imagine that collapsing the economy is extremely important for establishing additional relational value structures and ultimately encouraging more sustainable ways to survive together in the 21st Century. [If you're a return-reader, you are well aware of this and are probably tired of hearing me say it.]

Cue the presciently [somewhat] well supported efforts of Temporary Services, who are comprised of Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer and Salem Collo-Julin, and have been producing exhibitions, events, projects, and publications since 1998. Their latest project is Art Work : A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, and is directly concerned with the livelihood of artists in the Untited States of America.

Their efforts to establish a professional knowledge base and platform for concrete career sustainability is an incredibly transgressive action for the fine art industry [including the aspects of it that don't involve class theatrics: Jeffrey Deitch/Biennales/Art Fairs].

Finally, an organization that helps artists do what they’re not inherently good at, because they’re mostly arrested by their own intuitive organizations.

On the projects download page, you can download the publication in various formats, making the consumption of the support-oriented information extremely easy to access.

If you are an art educator, please make this publication project part of your curriculum, IMMEDIATELY.

Additionally, you can learn more about Temporary Services and the Art Work publication at Rhizome.org.

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The following art school art talk stars an impressive cast of competent professionals such as Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Colin Lang, Robert Linsley, Mira Schor, and Howard Singerman.

The professionals discuss the professionalization of the art-field in addition to non-traditional teaching methods, the history of art’s academy, and the further development of ‘models for the future of art school.’

The two hour thirteen minute and fourty-eight second performance is a wonderful tool for discussing the art production of institutions and their abilities to define the philosophical grounds in which art develops its social functions. The performance does [through attempting to] do much more than this, but you’ll have to listen to name the what and how. Listen and download from Cabinet magazine’s site.

Additionally, this discussion is great when coupled with considerations of the amateur in relation to the professional, in After the Amature, by Ed Halter, on Rhizome.Org.

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I’ve currently been giving most of my non-required attention to the e-flux journal reader 2009, which was a gift from this man: Daniel Miller.

If you’re avidly concerned with the currency of visual art, I simply can’t recommend this book enough. The reading reminds me of the urgency required by students (of the arts) for teachers who occupy their time with charting and understanding the multiple dimensions of contemporary arts practices. It’s been six years now since I’ve graduated from my undergraduate education and the e-flux journal reader 2009 is finally giving me concrete access to a range of individuals and cultural actors with similar concerns as those I had while in school.

And to take a second to reiterate: e-flux + Sternberg Press = cerebral intoxication [see image below].

[via awkwardstockphotos.com / via twitter.com/stephcd]

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The Art School that I attended [2000-2004] placed the thinking/writing of Dave Hickey squarely at the center of its belief-framework because [I think] it appeals to a pragmatic need for cynicism and a totalizing gaze when considering the ‘what the fuck is going on?’ situation.

[I'm going to make a brief aside here as I point out that this defense-strategy was one of the only tools that my education gave me for 'dealing' with the real world of art. I'd love to hear additional strategies if they exist.]

Hickey has that personable wise-man from the woods way about him that when regarding the common hierarchies of social-art-relations is terribly pleasant [similar to your favorite uncle, whom tortures you with tickling]. And as much as I don’t want to like his position in the history of art thought, he does bring up a lovely lineage of troublesome support-system relationships that pervade the field of art practice [troublesome mostly from the artists' perspective].

It’s clear that practicing art in an idealistic and ‘pure’ fashion is becoming more difficult and complicated by the second. I personally have no idea what the overproduction of art students is going to do with the art world, nor do I have any idea of whether or not art is sustainable enough to survive within the hyper-development of our attention economy. I suppose we’ll look to our wizards [like Mr. Hickey] to show us the way as we continue to try and calm our neurosis and keep walking down the eerie path of solitude.

Below are four embedded video’s of Dave Hickey talking. If they don’t work on this site, please follow this link.

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