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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 ✔

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.

“As a cultural theorist, I cannot over-emphasize the importance of concepts. They imprint our very cells—or at least mediate our understanding of them. Because of this conceptual emphasis, this kind of art has a more overtly democratic quality, an exploration and a possible merging of the consciousness of viewer and artist, or probably more appropriately, participant. Also, a great deal of complex verbiage arises with respect to these pieces and their justifications.”
- Clipped from Michael Crumb’s, “The Viewer As Participant“

I’ve posted this video before, back in the year 2009, to discuss the way “ideologies can assimilate and replicate almost any form and/or behavioral performance of another ideology in order to convert its user.” Regardless, I find myself constantly returning to this video in order to reconnect with the playful faculty of making things. Thank you, Mr. Meese. And thank you, Vernissage.TV.

An hour-long vintage documentary on Duchamp, chess and art. To be admired as a sculpture.

EXHIBITION SITE

The New Museum has a wonderful online exhibition titled Free. The exhibition focuses on the fundamental changes that have occurred because of the Internet. The exhibition’s intention of exploring our changing notions of public space, via the apparatus of a “landscape of information,” is appropriately distributed and contained within the expansive medium that it’s reporting on and through. Regarding traditional modes of conceptual and discursive situating, the site/exhibition/catalog is well crafted/coded and the project runs October 20, 2010 ~ January 23, 2011. There are a number of prescient essays on the often heroic gestural qualities of those working on/with the Internet. Below, are a few images of a photo essay I’m particularly fond of by DIS, listed in the “blog” section. DIS documents the work and the art-going experience while borrowing conventions from stock photography.

Site designed by John Michael Boling and developed with Jonathan Vingiano.

Additionally, the following video was included discussing the shift of the curatorial from the museum world to the rhetoric of the media.

ARTIST SITE

There’s about as much sex appeal wrapped up in the design and implementation of this site as there is in Nick Cave’s bodily work. As well, SoundSuitShop has a particularly charming greeting paragraph that, in short, states: “This site and its product line were created to share the art of Nick Cave with a wider audience than his exhibitions can possibly reach.” Um, yeah.

Site designed by Faust and developed by Cartel Blanche.

For those of you still living in Berlin, please go and see this natural-pseudo-scientific-spectacle for me. It’s called “Soma,” and it’s produced by the artist Carsten Holler. For 1000 euro you can also become assimilated into the work through the cultural tourist framework of a (bizarre) art/boutique hotel. The Hamburger Bahnhof made a site for the exhibition cum theme park which consists of no less than 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, 8 mice and 2 flies.

Straight from the HB PR Team:
“Before the eyes of the observers unfolds an expansive “living picture”, a symmetrical experimental field, which is divided in two parts along its center line and which compares the ordinary world with the realm of Soma in a double-image experiment. This is an experiment, that find its completion in the imagination of the observer and whose evaluation is subject to your power of observation. On a mushroom like platform in midst of the arrangement resides a bed, where guests will have the opportunity to spend a night at the museum and to dive into the world of Soma.”

Below is a video outline of the exhibition. Please pardon the advertisement.

On a more domestic note, the Hammer museum is producing an interactive event platform titled, “Houseplant Vacation.” Participants are invited to give their houseplants a vacation, during the Hammer’s August cultural retreat for plants. Throughout the entire month, participant’s plants will be installed in the light flooded Lindbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events, for plants every Saturday from 1-4pm. The project offers a plant release waiver, in case sick plants infect others, and appears to be organized in part by machine projects. Learn more about the project here.

A hilarious bit of discursive theatrics. My favorite part is undeniably the correlation between modernism and the father. Jesus… I think we’re distant cousins.

A little search helps turn up additional Jayson Musson, or Hennessy Youngman, productions. For instance, he has an album available here, and additional humorous paintings and drawings on his site.

Dear Jayson, I hope you make it.

YouTube video originally seen on ArtFagCity.

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.