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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).

“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“

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!

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.

READ IT. Read it all.

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.