“The whole point of viewing something critically is the shock of recognition that comes from the intersubjectity of two unique sensibilities — the critic’s (or, ideally, every reader’s) and the artist’s. If the reader is merely a supplicant before the art, he’s doing neither himself nor the artist any favors. If he respects the artist and himself, the reader (the critic!) brings his own worldview, his own philosophical orientation to bear on the art and, in the event, perfection and idolatry ought rightly to be looked on with some suspicion. Heretical as this sounds, appreciation could be made even more pungent and challenging when there’s some friction between the reader’s perceptions and the artist’s expression.”

 - Gary Groth, “A Bill of Goods (or ‘Why The Death of Criticism Couldn’t Have Come At a Worse Time’)”

“Lots of first-rate literary criticism has been written by people who are monolingual, or who read lots of novels but almost no poems, or who have no political concerns, or who are philosophically illiterate, or who have little sense of what happened in history. Good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read. The greater number of books you have read, and the more various they are, the likelier it is that the criticism you write will be of interest. But there is no natural order of priority, nor is there any set of methodological precepts, that should guide your decisions about which books to read first. All you can do is follow your nose.”

 - Richard Rorty, “Looking Back at Literary Theory”

I’ve long been interested in time-based alternative currencies, and the idea is playing a substantial role in the film I’ve been working on for the past year. Time/Bank is a project by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle (of the art network and journal e-flux) that attempts to establish a time bank for the art community. Aranda and Vidokle clearly know their stuff - they trace the time banking concept not just to Ithaca, but to Owen and Warren, and link to a number of contemporary time banking projects and resources. Using their website, artists are able to exchange hours of labor with other participants. For instance: you could spend two hours editing a video for someone in your city, and later use those two ‘hour-dollar’ credits to pay someone in Hamburg to translate your press release into German. The project was started last October, and the site gives no indication of whether or not it’s still operating (things like this have a tendency to die out quickly), but I’ve just submitted my application to join the network, so I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For some reason I’ve never considered before that the art community may be especially suited for experiments in time-based labor exchange. For a few reasons… 1) the stakes are relatively low, 2) artists are typically known for not having a ton of money, 3) barter and unpaid labor exchange (internships, casual volunteering of skills among friends, etc.) are already common.

As part of their project, Aranda and Vidokle also asked a number of artists to design time-based currencies. A few of the designs are clever and aesthetically pleasing, most are ugly and ill thought out. A few have accompanying text explanations, most are left to speak for themselves. A few of those explanations are intelligent and creative, most are typical, overinflated artist statement blabber. These ones are my favorites:

“Film running on a camera that is pointed at an empty set. There are no actors, but the images are the promise of an exchange. No events yet, but my time for yours, for the images to become loaded with meaning.”

“When celebrating a time contract two parties need each find their own string. Any kind of string will do. […] The two parties join the strings in a lark’s head know, or two, or three, or four… One knot equals half an hour, a second knot equals an hour… and so on and so forth […] A note is born of each contract […] In theory a note (knot) can always be traced to its origins”

“This continuous roll of time-money is worth 24 hours. Divided into 48 half-hour segments, the roll was made on a printing calculator by typing the numbers 1 to 30 and then repeating the process 47 times. The user can tear the roll into whatever increments are needed. Artist Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s ‘industrial paintings,’ which were kept on rolls and sold by the meter, provided the point of departure for the project.”

Vidokle himself and the net.art duo behind 0o0o0o0.org both had the clever idea of extending the concept beyond the visual/tactile, the former using a loaf of bread that takes one hour to bake, and the latter using silent mp3s of varying lengths. Contrary to the above examples, neither is at all practical, but they both have a poetic way of rethinking our perception of time.

“Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.”

“Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.”

“The common quality or defect which unites apparently divergent artists like Antonioni, Truffaut, Richardson is fear, a fear of the potential life, rudeness, and outrageousness of a film. Coupled with their storage vault of self-awareness and knowledge of film history, this fear produces an incessant wakefulness.”

“Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators […] seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite- tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.“

“[Kurosawa’s Ikiru] sums up much of what a termite art aims at - buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.”

- Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art and Termite Art” (1962)

“[F]ilms are just loose scaffoldings, jungle gym swings that allow you to go off in a dozen different directions in your head. Contraptions to think with, murky, messy things. Fascinating sometimes, even often, but rarely perfect. Who needs perfection? – that is the question. […] think about that moment in film theory, late ‘60s to early ‘80s maybe, when all we craved were films with cracks, ruptures and transgressions, films of contradiction, films that tear themselves apart to reveal ideological monsters, whether this film be directed by Jesús Franco or John Ford … those were the days.”

“Imperfect cinema, bad cinema, cannot be corralled down to one kind, one type, one genre of cinema. Today’s whole emphasis on B cinema, exploitation cinema, paracinema, on underground or outlaw cinema, on porno and gorno and all the rest of it, has only one radical point as far as I am concerned: it’s the beachhead, the wedge, that is meant to free you, cure you the viewer, of your in-bred cultural attachment to normative values (the professional film, the well-made film, and so on), and ultimately to the ideal of perfection. That’s why, speaking personally, I ran to Edgar Ulmer, to Tod Browning, to Samuel Fuller, and to so many others of that uncategorisable ilk: to be cured, cured of society, cured of taste, which is a prison – taste, cultivation, whether it is of A cinema or B cinema or Z cinema, is the thing that has to be destroyed in you, exorcised back to hell. It’s hard work, it takes a lifetime, I can assure you: I’m not there yet. It’s not dark yet, but I’m getting there.

“And today this therapy, this exorcism cure, is terribly hard. For today we are living in a Masterpiece culture, a veritable Global Masterpiece Theatre. It’s part of the Criterion Effect that has swamped the DVD market, and hence film culture at large.”

“These days, what I think of as the prison-house of taste has clamped down on most of us – paradoxically so, in the ostensibly wide-open days of the Internet. We are furiously streamed, niched towards what we already know we want to watch: the directors, the genres, the carefully labeled cult-films. And so there are literally thousands of films on those DVD shelves that you or I will never watch.”

 - Adrian Martin, “The World Ten Times Over: Ongoing Adventures in Pulp Poetry” (2010)

I’m torn between thinking this is really dumb and thinking this is really cool. Maybe it’s a little of both?

“Sade For Fonts Sake is a must-have special edition disc containing a set of 21 computer fonts and a collection of digital artworks by artist Paul Chan. For nearly ten years, Chan has been exploring the aesthetic, interactive, and philosophical potentials of fonts. As a complement to Sade for Sade s Sake, his monumental digital projection inspired by the work of novelist and philosopher Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), which premiered at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Chan has created a set of 21 truetype fonts that transform the act of typing into a generative Sadean performance.

“Unlike conventional fonts like Arial or Comic Sans, these Sade fonts are comprised of phrases and sentence fragments rather than letters and other alphanumeric characters, so that what is typed on the keyboard is not what shows up on the screen, or what is printed on paper. Each font holds a unique set of idioms that expresses a different sexual voice when typed. Some like Oh Bishop X and Oh Justine are based on characters in novels by Sade, while others are inspired by characters from news (Monica Lewinsky), pornstars (Michael Lucas), and poets and writers (Gertrude Stein, Holderlin) whose work knot together sex with language, rhythm and form. When you type with one of Chan’s fonts, anything you write becomes instantly, inexplicably, dirty, erotic, pornographic, poetic, sometimes all at once. The special edition data CD disc contains all 21 Sade fonts. They work with all three operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux). A special font installer is included to take the pain out of installing fonts. The disc also holds a collection of digital PDF works made using the fonts and a special set of drawings created as part of the ensemble of works that together weave the image of sex enmeshed with freedom, violence wrapped up with reason, and art entangled in it all.”

I’ve written on this blog before about the relationship between the nature of the internet and obsessive-compulsive tendencies (as well as narcissistic and attention deficit ones). In a Wall Street Journal article from December 2008 on “The New Examined Life,” one reporter describes a growing trend of people who “boil down everything [they do] into charts, graphs, maps and lists,” a trend he says is a natural extension of web 2.0’s culture of information sharing.

There may be existential dangers of distilling all aspects of living into numbers and figures. Such “quotidian aggregation” could be viewed as the absurd apotheosis of what Max Weber called the “rationalization” of social life - a historical process which many critical theorists have linked with dehumanization. The article mentions 19th century statistician Francis Galton, who “carried a homemade object called a ‘registrator’ to, among other things, measure people’s yawns and fidgets during his talks” but whose “preoccupation with data, specifically with human hereditary traits, also yielded an unsavory by-product — eugenics.”

Weber, however, was describing the early stages of the modernization of the Western World, and the criticism of rationalization laid out by Adorno, Habermas, et all has primarily been on the grounds that it has served some centralized, bureaucratic authority. What does it mean when such rationalization becomes decentralized and voluntary? Can this negate or minimize its dehumanizing effects? Some practitioners of “personal informatics” even see the activity of cataloging one’s life as liberating - a way to “seize data back from the statisticians and the scientists and incorporate it into our daily lives.”

Designer and programmer (with a PhD in computational neuroscience!) Christian Swinehart has made some truly incredible infographics - both lucid in their distillation of complex data into straightforward, digestible forms, as well as beautiful in their own right if viewed as purely aesthetic objects. Like those mentioned in the WSJ article, some of his projects - such as timelines tracking the most important “proper nouns” in the past 15 years of his life, or analyzing what time periods of music his mixtapes have emphasized over the past five years - are highly personal. One blog post reads, “trying to integrate my compilation discography into the relationship timeline.”

But even though it draws on his own childhood nostalgia, his most recent project recalls for me not that WSJ article, but rather another fascination of mine: the “new modes of storytelling” discussed in this post I made a year ago. In what may be his most ambitious undertaking to date (13 months and 11,000 lines of code), Swinehart has broken apart and meticulously reconstructed in dazzling, vivid, logical illustration the thousands of pages that make up twelve installments in the “children’s metafiction” of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels.

The full extent of Swinehart’s extrapolation is truly mind-boggling. Not only does he break down each book into color-coded blocks representing “branching decision page[s],” “illustration or choiceless story page[s],” and “great,” “favorable,” “mediocre,” “disappointing,” and “catastrophic” endings; not only does he group these colored sections together in sequence to illustrate their comparative probabilities in each book; not only does he arrange these sequenced groupings in order of publication date to demonstrate a “progression toward linearity” in the series’ publishing history; not only does he create elaborate, branching decision trees to show all the possible paths a reader could take; not only does he create even more elaborate re-visualizations of these decision trees, mapping them in arcs connecting the various pages in their original sequences, thereby “offer[ing] a peek into the construction process the authors went through as they folded their nonlinear stories into a sequential medium;” he then goes even further, creating elegant animations that show each book’s hundreds of possible unique story paths being drawn in arc formation from page to page, as well as a “playable” version of Zork: The Cavern of Doom, where your path is illustrated in real time animation as you make decisions.

What really elevates Swinehart’s endeavor from merely excellent illustration to a work of art is the intelligent and caring way in which he draws meaning out of his data and the insights he imparts onto it - insights that extend well beyond the scope of childhood nostalgia and novelty literature. Reflecting on his infatuation with the Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid and how this relates to his future tastes in fiction, he’s able to distill the kernel of an entire theory of literature, writing, “a narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots — stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.

“In practice this meant a lot of genre fiction, books where the author spends as much time explaining the rules of the form’s world (be it film noir, sci-fi, etc.) as documenting the characters’ progress through it. Neuromancer’s writing was not what made it memorable. It was the fact that after reading it you understood the logic of Gibson’s world. And that logic was portable to any new scenario you could dream up.”

Fiction, especially children’s fiction, is often described in contrast to film - whereas in the latter, images and sounds are handed to us fully formed, in the former, we are only given descriptions, and the creation of those sensations in our minds is “left to our imaginations.” Thus, so the story goes, reading a book is a better exercise in imagining than watching a film. But Swinehart’s concept of “imaginal scaffolding” (okay, I made up that term, but I like it!) takes that idea even further. Gamebooks, genre fiction, and mythopoeia may serve as better impetuses for further imagining precisely because they don’t merely ask us to imagine for ourselves the people, places, things, and events laid out in the narrative, but actually encourage the imagining of people, places, things, events, and even whole narratives beyond what’s written on the page. Such works, in a sense, are founts of possibility.

Despite using statistics as his primary method of exploration, it seems clear that this is Swinehart’s ultimate interest, and his characterization of the books provides a humanizing counterpoint to the fire and brimstone statisticophobia described in the first part of this post. But neither does the designer present a positivist mindset as being without limits or shortcomings. After paragraphs of mathematical explanation, he ends his “essay” by describing one CYOA book, Inside UFO 54-40, which puts these ideas of possibility and imagination to a refreshing and somewhat radical application:

“In the story, your concord flight is interrupted when you are beamed aboard a nearby spacecraft trolling the universe for intelligent life. Once aboard you discover your new captors, the U-TY, are interested in keeping you around only to the extent that you can help them find Ultima, the ‘planet of paradise’. The planet’s location is cloaked in mystery and you are only told that it’s a place that cannot be reached ‘by making a choice or following directions’. However this is all foreshadowing for when the reader finally becomes frustrated in the apparently impossible quest and begins flipping through the book hunting for that ending. In fact not choosing is the only way to reach Ultima.

“The branch diagram for UFO 54-40 is unique in that it has one ending – the Ultima ending – which is completely disconnected from the rest of the story. It exists as an island, unreachable through choices but discoverable thanks to the random access nature of the book.

“This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end.”

<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 1: Diagnosis)
<< Curtis x Laing x Bourriaud x Bey x more (Part 2: Remedy?)

This post has been a very very very long time coming. It’s a little embarrassing. Nine and a half months since I posted Part 2 and one year exactly since I posted Part 1.

Largely, the reason for that is that it’s spiraled out of control. The core ideas of what began a year ago as an attempt to briefly sketch some corollaries between a film I’d recently watched and three books I’d recently read quickly grew to become an anchor point for my own personal philosophy of art and social change, and to which much of what I thought about on a daily basis could be related back to.

Initially I had intended for this “third and final part” to describe contemporary tendencies similar to those described in Part 2. Giving anything close to a comprehensive survey, however, would be impossible.

And so rather than delaying this posting any further by attempting to make it “complete” (and winding up producing something so long that it wouldn’t be read by anyone anyway) I’ve decided instead to treat it as a series of notes, and to break it up into smaller, more digestible chunks, which I’ll be posting periodically.

If you recall, this entire series was kicked off by my reading a post by blogger Momus, in which he offered a series of notes drawing parallels between Adam Curtis’ condemnations of game theory in The Trap and Nicolas Bourriaud’s acclamations of socially-based art in Relational Aesthetics. In the conversation that followed Momus’ post, he cited one art critic’s criticism of the relational art trend: “Relational aesthetics, once probing and complex, is becoming a cul-de-sac of fun effects, momentary experiences, and comfy playhouses.” It sounds like a convincing condemnation. But one commenter offers an even more convincing rebuttal: “And the problem is… what, exactly? That people are drawing inspiration from the immediate pleasures of being alive rather than floating around in arid abstractions that yield even more sickly offspring? ‘Probing’ and ‘complex’ my foot–those with an allegiance to life’s joys are the ones I trust first; the rest have to make their case, no matter how clever. Get your empty sleeves out of my pho, you gaggle of ghosts!”

This dialog offers a demonstration of three of the primary obstacles preventing contemporary art from being a productive, utopian force:

1) its fixation on content and concept to the detriment of considering more tangible effects on the world at large (I’ll get to that later),

2) the inevitability of its commodification (as Bourriaud himself writes, “wherever art proposes ‘life possibilities,’ [’Integrated World Capitalism’] presents us with the bill” (RA p95).),

and 3) its obsession with originality. Granted utmost importance in the art world, this obsession becomes extremely harmful when it comes to effecting anything outside of it. If it’s a good idea, what’s wrong with doing it again? If it can make the world a better place, why ignore it simply because it’s been done before?

And that’s not the only reason RA won’t save the world. The Radical Culture Research Collective presents a far more biting critique of Relational Aesthetics than those commonly made from within the art world:

“Precisely formulated, relational aesthetics represents the liberalization of the avant-garde project of radical transformation. […] While we would defend relational art from its conservative and reactionary critics, we would also insist that it not come to stand in for the radical project it falls short of – and indeed refuses. Undoubtedly, the avant-garde tradition continues to be transformed by its own process of self-critique. But it does not give up the radical, macro-historical aim of a real world beyond capitalist relations. And it doesn’t settle for the experience of gallery simulations.

“It’s not that experiments in forms and models of sociability are not needed today – they certainly are. But to be politically relevant and effective, such experiments need to be grounded in (or at least actively linked to) social movements and struggles. (And there is no social progress without contestation and struggle: this for us is a basic materialist truth that makes any blanket refusal of “conflict” problematic.) As a gallery-based game, relational practices are cut off by an institutional divide from those who could use them. Who are the consumers of relational art? The cultural élite of the dominant classes, primarily, supplemented by the socially ambitious layers of a de-classed general public* […] In general, this audience does not tend to overlap with the people actively attempting to generate pressure for deep social change. There are exceptions, we know. But this is how the disruptive utopian energies that do exist in relational art are managed and kept within tolerable limits: the social separations, stratifications and (self-)selections of the art system enact a liberalization – that is, a de-radicalization – of social desire.”

*The subject of why galleries and museums tend to be so class-specific is worthy of an entirely separate post. Two footnotes worth briefly mentioning here, however: 1. The phenomena of “free days” at museums - most notably, MOMA - is neither ahistorical nor simply a generous gesture. In 1969, the Art Workers Coalition was successful in pressuring MOMA and several other museums to implement such free days in an attempt to broaden access (race and class were chief concerns of the group, both in terms of access and representation). Some museums have since rolled back this policy. MOMA is today able to continue operating “free Fridays” only under the sponsorship of Target. 2. Similarly, when Bourriaud co-founded the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris, he insisted that the operating hours be noon to midnight. The reason for this, of course, was to broaden access to working people whose hours likely conflicted with those of most museums, which tend to close in the early evening or late afternoon.

In the next part of this post, before moving on, I’ll stop for a moment to define the “the avant-garde tradition” and “project of radical transformation” referred to in The RCRC’s critique - the antecedents to Relational Aesthetics that may help to point toward current manifestations and future trajectories of social art.

An Immaterial Survey of Our Peers presents installation images of an exhibit that never physically took place. Using digital compositing techniques, we have re-imagined the process of browsing through a Google Reader by adding art to images of the Sullivan Galleries’ empty walls. This presentational gesture of conflating scrolling with strolling is meant to question the ongoing tendency to believe material interaction with art is mandatory despite living in an age of utter dependency on the digital image as an informational source. Like the Argentinean Communication Media artists before us, we have cut out the middle-man (objects) and inserted the image as our final product, aware that the documentary media art receives plays the most pivotal role in defining its public discourse anyway. To expedite this process of media exposure, An Immaterial Survey is simultaneously being debuted online in addition to its projection in Chicago, confusing the boundaries of when and where the exhibit took place.

It is an intentional choice to offer no objects and no work of our own as our final display at SAIC. This is in part a tribute to the decentralized network of artists who comprise An Immaterial Survey. To present art online is an act of selflessness; the creator forfeits stringent control over their work’s meaning in favor of allowing the most generous opportunity for global viewership possible. For this we are thankful and indebted to the names that comprise our list of participants. We choose not to present sellable goods because we are fully aware of the irony of the BFA Exhibit itself; four years of a Feminist-Marxist education culminating in a grand celebration of luxury goods and the willful commodification of artist identity brands (best exemplified by the entire shelving units dedicated to freshly printed business cards). It is our intent to use this opportunity not for our own market assimilation, but for the praise of others and the criticism of art’s hierarchy of material value still present in our digital age.

Regardless of whether or not the actual artwork contained therein is any good, THIS IS A GOOD IDEA! I have to say, I like the pieces that attempt to give the illusion of actually existing in the space far better than those that use the concept to create surreal juxtapositions of the digital and the real, as the latter seem to work counter to the subversive agenda put forward in the show’s description (or maybe not, in that they present digital presentation as providing a broader range of possibilities than physical presentation?). Obviously this sort of critique is nothing new, but seeing as how it’s for some reason still not yet common sense, it also seems to me to be something that warrants repeating over and over again in different forms.

This is going to be yet another rambling, unfocused post mostly made up of quotes, but oh well, here are some things that are vaguely or directly related…

JOGGING, the collaborative blog whose members Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen organized the Immaterial show, also recently ran another internet-based project: an intervention, aptly titled Ready Or Not It’s 2010, in which they invited people to post images of their own art on the Facebook wall of first the Walker Art Center, and when those posts were deleted, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Most interestingly, and not without a sense of humor, they encourage participating individuals to list the “exhibit” as a “group show” on their resumes as if it were officially sanctioned by the LACMA. One re-blogger offers a worthwhile critique and analysis of the intervention:

“I like your emphasis, but why do you want museums to contextualise artists? Artists can choose the most suitable context for their work by themselves. […] I’m not sure why you want them in your ‘conversation’ because rest assured they will come looking to put you and your work in a neat little frame on their clean white wall as soon as they decide your work is useful to them.”

Another internet-based project from JOGGING, “Perfo Rmanceart is a project that uses the social network Facebook as a medium.” This time, instead of inviting others to stage a one time art intervention on a specific institution, the artists themselves created a profile which they then use to stage ongoing interventions on numerous institutions. Again with a sense of humor, the above image is titled “THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF LINKS TO ILLEGALLY TAKEN PHOTOS OF TINO SEHGAL’S GUGGENHEIM EXHIBIT BEFORE BEING BLOCKED FROM FACEBOOK, 2010.”

“For the performance ‘UNTITLED (AFTER MARINA ABRAMOVIC)’, PERFO RMANCEART’S Facebook account log in and password were made open to public use. Over the course of the next 6 hours, anonymous people (or person, singular) proceeded to post status updates, start instant message conversations, create events, and post on other people’s walls using the PERFO RMANCEART profile. The information transmitted by the anonymous entity(ies) was sexually aggressive and personally insulting, similar to the physical acts committed upon Marina Abramovic during her 1974 performance. The performance was ended when artist Ryan Barone changed the password without telling the public out of sympathy for the artist who created the piece.”

JOGGING’s essay “Redefining Exhibition in the Digital Age” is also a fucking stellar read and sums up many of the positions demonstrated by these pieces.

In some way, JOGGING’s projects also remind me of two exhibitions that Triple Candie, a non-profit gallery in Harlem, held a few years ago (which, I should note, I only read about and saw documentation of online, never having visited the gallery itself in person):

“Four years in the making, ‘David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective‘ [was] the first survey of the artist’s work since 1991, and the most comprehensive assembly ever either in exhibition or book form. The exhibition, which includes none of the artist’s actual art, consists of photocopies and computer print-outs of nearly 100 body-prints, sculptures, drawings, performances, and installations dating from the mid-1960s to the present.” (emphasis mine)

Likewise, Cady Noland Approximately: Sculptures and Editions, 1984-1999 was “the first survey ever devoted to Cady Noland’s oeuvre. It consists of objects made by Triple Candie [and] four artists that [are] based on sculptures and editions by Cady Noland that date from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s. The works were recreated from images found on the internet and in exhibition catalogues. Though an attempt was made to replicate the original artworks as faithfully as possible, they are not reproductions. They are approximations that have been handicapped by practical limitations (e.g. lack of money and technical expertise; insufficient information about scale, materials, or color; and a limited time-frame).” (emphasis mine)

In 2006, during my senior year of high school, I made a post about these two shows on my LiveJournal account (the precursor to this blog). At the time, my knowledge of contemporary art, art theory, and art history was relatively limited. My interest in filesharing and sampling in music had led me to an interest in copyright law, the cultural commons, and appropriation generally, and I had just recently begun to discover artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. My comments on the Triple Candie shows were through this lens, colored more by an obsession with Cory Doctorow and Downhill Battle than any understanding of the history of appropriation art or institutional critique: “it’s basically doing for galleries/art what Napster did for the internet/music,” I wrote, “proving that in the information age, everything is available for free to anyone with a modem (even if it is just a poor quality reproduction)… that as soon as you release something to the world, it no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the world, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.” Looking back at it, this is not at all the comparison I would have made were I to write about it today. Yet it still holds true.

Someone quoted that LiveJournal post in a comment on Tom Moody’s blog (who at the time I was completely unaware of). Moody had some interesting things to say about the Noland exhibit in that post and another one. If you’re looking for commentary on the Hammons exhibit, the NY Times review was pretty decent.

Less to do with the immateriality of the internet addressed by JOGGING and more to do with the issues of authenticity, market value, and unauthorized (less than perfect) reproduction that the Triple Candie shows explore, Stephanie Syjuco’s self-described “parasitic project” COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone makes me smile a whole lot. Part of the Frieze Art Fair, artists created over 40 replicas of works on display elsewhere in the fair, “[u]sing only basic materials such as cardboard, plastic, colored paper, paint, inkjet prints, modelling clay, and recycled materials scrounged from the construction of the Fair grounds itself.” These replicas were then made available for purchase at prices far lower than the original works. I was disappointed to learn, however, that “prices far lower than” actually meant “[not] over 500 pounds ($800).” Soooooooooo not as cool as it could have been. Still kind of cool though.

Every once in a while, between all the promos for tacky clubs and bad stand-up comedy, FreeNYC lists something that sounds really cool. I can’t go to this ’cause I’m at work, but I’ll probably be listening to the free live stream available on their website…

Location: The Change You Want to See, 84 Havemeyer Street, Williamsburg
Date: Mon, Mar 29th
Time: 7:30pm
Cost: Free

“Story telling is an ancient and powerful form of human expression. Today, however the power of story is mainly used by advertisers, PR flacks and political propagandists. In order to make change, social movements must tell new stories that challenge assumptions and shape new possibilities for action and change.

“How can activist and artists use story-based strategies to design “image events”: actions, images or stories that simultaneously destroy and construct new meaning? How can we either replace existing sets of symbols or re-define their meaning? Can we connect organizing struggles with the ethereal world of culture, media and narrative?

“The story-based strategy approach is grounded in a narrative analysis of power––the recognition that humans understand the world and their role in it through stories and thus all power relations have a narrative component. Every issue already has a web of existing stories and cultural assumptions that frame public understanding. Story-based strategy provides a process to understand the current story around an issue and identify opportunities to change that story with the right framing, messages, messengers and creative interventions.”

(more here)

Before finding out about this event, I had never heard of this space before. It seems really cool, and I’m very excited to see that the proliferation of this type of alternative space is becoming more and more common, both in this city and elsewhere (more on that topic soon). From the blurb on the side panel of their website:

“The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.”

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what events they’ll be offering in the future.

Another similar space I only just recently found out about: 16 Beaver Group. Thanks to Marc Fischer of Public Collectors, Temporary Services, Half-Letter Press, and Art and Work for tipping me off to that one.

An addendum to my post on Public Collectors…

Unfortunately, it seems as if I missed what seems to me to be the most interesting thing ever offered by that site. From December 9 until February 10, the site held an exhibition of work by artist and art historian Don Celender at their ‘Public Collectors Study Center’ in Chicago. Celender’s work focused mostly on administering surveys about art and other topics and then publishing their results. The titles and descriptions of his self-published books are the kind of thing that makes a weirdo like me go all doe-eyed and gooey inside.

A sample…

POLITICAL ART MOVEMENT, RELIGIOUS ART MOVEMENT, AFFLUENT ART MOVEMENT, ACADEMIC ART MOVEMENT, CORPORATE ART MOVEMENT, CULTURAL ART MOVEMENT, MASS MEDIA ART MOVEMENT, ORGANIZATIONAL ART MOVEMENT (1972)
For this study, Celender contacted “about twenty-five chief executive officers of major organizations” from each of the eight movements he describes at the beginning of the book. Each officer was sent an idea by Celender and invited to execute it as a means of bringing art to a wider public. The project was intended as an opportunity to disseminate art in the form of ideas and observe the officials’ attitudes toward art through their responses to these impossible proposals. Some officials replied with considerable wit, others appeared incapable of humor and playfulness, and naturally some officials did not reply at all – or had their staff handle the task of acknowledging the proposal.
Two proposals: To Michael L. Haider, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Celender requests that they: “Change all current pipe lines to clear plastic and place them above ground on illuminated supports so that oil can be seen moving from the refineries to points of distribution. You will be creating, in effect, continuous linear forms in flux or liquid illuminated sculpture in motion.” The letter received a response that goes into lengthy and dry detail about the primary use of steel piping, closing with the note: “Even if the use of plastic pipe were technically feasible, the cost would be prohibitive.” To Gilbert H. Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society: “Skip one issue of your magazine and use the ink to fill the fissures of the 49 earthquakes in Alaska in 1969. Once the above has been accomplished, press the paper of the skipped issue into the fissures and exhibit the resulting imprints in the Mayo Clinic.” A reply mailed back to Celender from another representative states that this project did “not fall within the scope of the Society’s activities.”

MUSEUM PIECE (1975)
Celender wrote letters to museums around the world asking for photos of their loading docks or receiving areas. Many institutions complied, often taking original photos because documentation did not readily exist. The letters and photographic results are contrasted with more common postcard views of the main façade of each institution. MUSEUM PIECE reveals the least aesthetically pleasing and impressive architectural details of each institution that has a loading dock.

OPINIONS OF WORKING PEOPLE CONCERNING THE ARTS (1975)
While teaching a course called “Art of the Last Ten Years”, Celender had Macalester College students solicit written and recorded opinions from 400 working people in the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota area. The result is a book (published for an exhibition at OK Harris Gallery in New York City) that includes the responses of maids, bus drivers, hotel clerks, bartenders, gas station attendants, security officers, roofers, cab drivers, and more. Among the questions answered are: “Do you think art is important to American life? Why?” “Should tax money be spent to assist artists in producing works of art?” “Do you go to museums?” “What do you like best at museums? What do you like least?” “Do you think artists are responsible citizens?” “Do you think artists, as a group, have a particular political position?” “Would you pay as much for a work of art as you would for your car? Your TV? A dress, or suit?”

OBSERVATIONS, PROTESTATIONS AND LAMENTATIONS OF MUSEUM GUARDS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD (1978)
This was a particularly ambitious survey. 1,200 questionnaires were mailed out to museums and many language translations were necessary. Celender’s curiosity ran high and he asked many things one would want to know including: “Have there been any thefts, or serious defacements, of works of art during your tenure?” “What are your subordinate guards most frequent complaints?” “What work, or works, do you most admire?” “Do you visit other art institutions on your day off ?” “Do you engage in painting, sculpture, or crafts?” Portrait photos accompany many of the responses. Though most answers given were short, the book offers an interesting window into an employee culture that is common to every major museum. Unsurprisingly, some museums declined participation for reasons of security.

This is the sort of thing I would have been willing to make a pilgrimage to Chicago for had I known about it in time. It says they take individual visits by appointment, so if anyone is up for making that pilgrimage with me, let me know. And if anyone knows if these books are available anywhere - in PDF or physical form - please please pretty please point me to them.

UPDATE: Marc Fischer has informed me that two of Celender’s books are available for purchase from Half-Letter Press. He also tells me that others are available through Celender’s gallery, OK Harris, although their site makes no mention of the artist, so if you’re interested, I would try contacting them directly.

I found this website forever ago, but for some strange reason never really looked into it too much. Public Collectors, founded by artist Marc Fischer, aims to make private collections (of just about anything) public via the internet. Some collections exist on the site only in the form of lists, with contact information for the visitor to arrange an in-person meeting with the collector to view the desired material. Other collections have been scanned and are viewable in digital form on the site.

A lot of what I said about the Museum Syndicate a year ago could also be said about Public Collectors. Like that site, Fischer seems to accept just about anything, and consequently, the collections hosted are astoundingly varied in both content and size (ranging from the 150 or so artifacts that comprise the collection of the Vanilla Ice Museum, to the over 1000 movies on over 400 VHS tapes that comprise the world’s largest collection of home-recorded movies from TV, to collections of 28 stolen hotel room Bibles or 4 fake parking tickets).

Here are some of my favorites:

- Photos, Postcards and Ephemera From the Home of John Rininger, Chicago, IL

- Documentation of Syllabi - Collected by Philip von Zweck

- Documentation of Joe Flasch’s Hats and Costumes

- Documentation of Food Songs Collected by Matt Bua

The “Documentation of Complete Publications in PDF form” section is also a goldmine of printed obscuro, with PDFs of a wide array or weird and wonderful books available for download. Again, the scope is astonishing, ranging from this…

Robert Chenoweth, Latina Cotidiana, 1940?, unique publication, 42 pages, handwritten with various collaged elements, cover: 8 1/2″ X 10 1/2″. interior pages: 7 1/2″ X 9 1/2″.
This publication is clearly an ambitious student’s homework assignment - one of four different assignments that I acquired by the same author at a flea market in Chicago. Its subject is ancient Roman culture and Latin. What makes this brad-bound piece particularly enjoyable is the use of many collaged elements from various books and newspapers. The numerous clippings, some of which date from 1940, either show examples of Roman history and historical figures, or are used to note examples of Latin, or English words derived from Latin. A variety of popular sources of images and text are employed, ranging from comic strip panels to newspaper ads.

to this…

The Unforgettable Fire - Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, Edited by Japan Broadcasting Corporation, 1981, Pantheon Books, New York, 116 pages, offset, perfect bound.
From the back cover: “The art in this book was a response to a request broadcast on a morning television program in Japan for drawings from atomic bomb survivors. The results were immediate. The television station was inundated with drawings. So powerful were the survivors’ desires to share their memories that they turned to whatever materials were at hand – pencils, crayons, watercolors, Magic Markers, colored pencils, India ink – and drew on the backs of calendars, advertisements, bills, or even the paper used to cover Japanese sliding doors. Some drew on the backs of children’s scribbled papers, probably those of their grandchildren.”

…and plenty more.

The site also provides links to a number of additional online collections and recommends The Museum of Online Museums for further browsing. Temporary Services, the artist/research group of which Public Collectors founder Marc Fischer is a founding member, also has a wealth of great material on their own site: self-published booklets, documentation of prisoners’ inventions, an archive of ‘reading material,’ and resource archives on mobile structures and ‘public phenomena.’

If you’re not sufficiently overwhelmed yet and interested in more of this sort of thing, I’ve posted about a few great online collections in the past, including the aforementioned Museum Syndicate, as well as the Play Generated Map and Documents Archive, the Google Earth ‘Prado Museum layer,’ and two extensive zine collections. I link to a few more in the ‘links’ sidebar on the right hand side: links to free culture, Steal This Wiki, UbuWeb, Surreal Moviez, The Subversive Nub, eFukt (NSFW), TED talks, BibliOdyssey, Radical Software, textfiles.com, The Audio Kitchen, The Daily Script, Top Secret Recipes, zinelibrary.info, The Anarchist Library.

Collecting is something I have a love-hate relationship with. I feel like I have a natural tendency to obsessively hoard, collect, categorize, and share. But combined with my penchant for thriftiness and simple living and an aversion to placing monetary value on cultural material, this often results in most of my collections being digital ones. This, of course, presents a whole new set of issues, and I’ve written before on this blog about the internet’s demystification of underground culture, and about how the overwhelming scope and immediacy of the internet can amplify and heighten our worst obsessive compulsive tendencies (see #3).

I’ve attempted to do a bit of collection sharing myself, gradually sharing my ever expanding image collection on my other blog, Blog, sharing my favorite videos and articles via my Wikipedia and YouTube/etc. Roundups, and hosting or linking to a number of obscure/out of print texts: the writing of Henry Flynt and Stewart Home, T.A.Z. by Hakim Bey, 100 Ways to Disappear and Live Free (direct link), Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards, Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema, Penny Rimbaud’s “The Last of the Hippies” (direct link), the Lacanian trading card game Kid A in Alphabet Land, The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way) by the KLF, and the shooting script of Un Chien Andalou. I’ve built up a pretty extensive collection of PDFs on my harddrive, and as soon as I get it fixed, I’ll probably make a separate little page on this blog to house all that stuff.

If you know of any other interesting online collections or just cool bits of cultural detritus you want to share, go ahead and post them in the comments.