-It’s All Over

-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!

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.

[ratings]

JEFF KOONS DIES IN TOKYO BLAST is being reported from the ‘Unknown Journal’s’ site. Not only does this seem like an absurd media situation because of the claim of an art-terrorist group, but the back and forth questioning of the ‘reality’ of the situation, via the comments section, gives us a wonderful opportunity to admire the ‘everything is critical’ apparatus of art applied to the world of blogging. Perhaps the headline also gives us an identification of blogging aggregation as a performative tactic, or perhaps this actually did happen. Either way, the opportunity to exercise preparation for the death of one of art’s greatest living celebrities is an appropriate activity to participate in, yet hopefully the exercise is being started well in advance of the actual event [of said death]. I wouldn’t imagine death upon anyone.

However, if this death news is an aggregation stunt, the author will be glad to know that I did find their blog through it and I’m now linking others to it.

The excerpt below was taken directly from the about page:

__________________________

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]

[ratings]

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.

Why are the places we view art so alarmingly homogenous?
It’s most likely due to the authority of institutions, namely the corporate-minded board members at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, during the era of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. We are still behaviorally re-enacting cultural strategies of this era, so the politics of exhibiting would certainly fit this behavioral bill. However, MOMA’s corporation clearly wasn’t capable enough of inventing these strategies on their own, but rather perverted many of the strategies and beliefs developed by people like El Lissitzky, and members of the Bauhasian entourage. [Lissitzky should be a beat after every teacher's own heart, with conceptions of art such as "das zielbewußte Schaffen" (goal-oriented creation).]

If the history of such relationships is of interest to you, a recommended read would be that of Charlotte Klonk’s Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, which traces the history of “experience spaces.” The historical narrative follows the methods of display influenced by scientific theories, in the 19th century, and the German influence of the 20th century, which found gallery directors who were inspired by collectors’ homes, and who hung canvases extremely low down and in single file.

So, if you’re an art enthusiast who is concerned, in a ‘deep’ way, about the sustainability of visual art in the 21st century, this book will serve as an important foreword to your personal performative essay. Additionally, here is a link to an unofficially related blog on the same subject: spaces of experience.

[ratings]