Quantcast
Channel: DIS Magazine
Viewing all 654 articles
Browse latest View live

Niko & Tierney Present: WICKED GAMES

$
0
0

Today, Los Angeles ­based artists Niko Karamyan and Tierney Finster release their new music video WICKED GAMES on DIS!

Niko and Tierney co­direct and star in WICKED GAMES as abstractions of themselves and the lovers we first met in Can We Talk and Drop – the first two videos in their trilogy CAUGHT FEELINGS. WICKED GAMES is the third and final video in CAUGHT FEELINGS.

The Serpentine Re Rebaudengo grant funded the project. Niko and Tierney received the grant after submitting “Can We Talk” and “Drop” to Dis Crit 2013. Niko and Tierney proudly won the award by popular online vote.The award was made possible by Torino’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in conjunction with the Serpentine Galleries, Dis Magazine, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets’ 89+ research project.

WICKED GAMES features an original reproduction of Chris Isaak’s classic crooning anthem Wicked Game, produced by Napolian–a masterful electronic musician and childhood friend to Niko and Tierney, signed to the label Software.

WICKED GAMES is the first of the CAUGHT FEELINGS videos to feature Niko’s own vocals, recorded by the Grammy award winning producer Illangelo, and the first in the series to be shot in high­definition.

WICKED GAMES is a road trip through love’s cyclical nature – an ode to the pain and pleasure that drives us all.

Niko and Tierney will celebrate their release this Thursday evening at the opening party for WICKED GAMES Upstairs at Ace Hotel in Downtown L.A.


Directed by Niko and Tierney


Sharing Culture Conundrum

4Real x Teengirl Fantasy

$
0
0

Digital agency 4REAL has developed an interactive multimedia experience for Teengirl Fantasy’s new EP, THERMAL. Using WebGL technology, 4REAL created 4 virtual worlds to accompany the 4 songs on the EP – Cavescape, Lung feat. Lafawndah, 7:30 A.M, and U touch me feat. Hoody (후디)

Click and drag to explore, scroll to zoom. Look for a surprise at the end of 7:30!

As technologies like WebGL and Web Audio become more ubiquitous, we don’t have to experience the internet as though we are standing in front of a wall. There is an opportunity to re-envision the web as a rich dynamic responsive world.

4REAL creates video-game-like worlds that reference pop culture artifacts such as Dan Flavin’s neons or a scene from Lost Highway .

Unlike the fixed trajectory of most video games, users are invited to freely explore and study the environments without being locked into any particular goal or agenda.

Thermal is out now on Break World Records! Tracing threads from their previous deconstructed dancefloor works into thrilling new directions, the Thermal EP is Teengirl Fantasy’s most mature and cohesive work to date. It features four new songs: two instrumentals that showcase the duo’s sensual and intuitive way with texture, and two primetime vocal tracks featuring the new queen of underground Korean R&B, Hoody (후디), and rising NYC recording artist Lafawndah.

Teengirl fantasy

Teengirl fantasy

Join them tomorrow night for their release party at Palisades, Brooklyn. Ft. TGF live and DJ sets by Lafawndah, Pictureplane and Gatekeeper!

4Real is a young digital agency started by musician/hacker Slava and artist Analisa Teachworth. 4REAL works with clients to fuse art and technology via digital environments with the goal of fostering a more immersive and poetic internet.

Lung Music Video:
DP: Alex Gvojic and Rory Mulhere at Capture This NYC
CG: Ko Kudo
Director: Lafawndah & TGF

U Touch Me Music Video:
Director: Tatiana Valentin & Taran Allen
DP: Alex Gvojic

Follow 4REAL on Insta, FB, and Twitter

Follow Teengirl Fantasy on Soundcloud, FB, and Twitter

McKenzie Wark | Digital Labor and the Anthropocene

$
0
0

McKenzie Wark is author of A Hacker Manifesto, The Spectacle of Disintegration, the forthcoming I’m Very Into You – a correspondence with the late Kathy Acker – and Molecular Red, among other books. The following transcript is taken from a recent talk delivered at the Digital Labor conference presented by The New School.

I want to start with the proposition that in a place like New York City, we live in the over-developed world. Somehow we overshot some point of transformation. A transformation that didn’t happen, perhaps couldn’t happen. But in having failed to take that exit, we end up in some state of over-development. In the over-developed world, the commodity economy is feeding on itself, cannibalizing itself.

There is course an under-developed world, sometimes in intimate proximity to the over-developed one. You can find it even here in New York City. One can critique the orientalism of the fact that Willets Point, Queens is known among New Yorkers as ‘little Calcutta’, but it really is a place without paved roads, running water, and with mostly off the books, illegal or precarious jobs.

Willets Point, Queens

Willets Point, Queens

But you can forget that under-developed world exists if you live in the bubble of the over-developed world. Some of us don’t have to do the manual version of precarious labor, at least. But there is a sense in which some characteristics of that labor have actually found their way into the over-developed world as well.

Viewed from inside the bubble of New York, the paradox of digital labor these days is the way that tech enables the over-development of under-development. Technologies are shaped by the struggle over their form. It was not given from an essence that the digital would end up as control over labor rather than control by labor. But in the current stage of conflict and negotiation, the over-development of under-development seems to me to describe a tendency for labor.

In any case, labor isn’t the only class struggling in and against the digital. I still think there is a difference between being a worker and being a hacker. I think of hacker as a class category: there is a hacker class. Hackers are those whose efforts are commodifed in the form of intellectual property. What they make can be turned into copyrights, patents or trademarks.

The hacker class is distinguished by a few qualities. It usually means working with information, but not in a routine way. It is different from white-collar labor. It is about producing new arrangements of information rather than ‘filling in the forms.’

As such, it can be a bit hard to make routine. New things just don’t appear on time. Not if they are really new. There’s a kind of ‘innovation’ that is actually quite close to routine, and the hacker class does that too. It’s the new ad campaign, the new wrinkle on the old technical process, the new song or app or screenplay. But the big qualitative leaps are much harder to subordinate to the reified, routinized forms of labor.

The ruling class of our time, what I call the vectoral class, needs both these kinds of hack. The vectoral class needs the almost-routine innovation. The existing commodity cycles demand it. As our attention fades and boredom looms, there has to be some just slightly new iteration of the old properties: some new show, new app, new drug, new device.

What is interesting at the moment are the strategies being deployed to spread the cost and lower the risk of this routine innovation. This is what I think start-up culture is all about. It spreads and privatizes the risk while providing privileged access to innovation that is starting to prove its value to the vectoral class, whose ‘business model’ is to own, control, flip, litigate, and – if absolutely necessary – even build out new kinds of intellectual property.

The other kind of hack, the really transformative ones, are another matter. To some extent the vectoral class does not really want these, no matter what the ruling ideology says about disruption. Having your life disrupted is for little people. The vectoral class doesn’t like surprises. Its goal is to come as close enough to a monopoly in something to extract rent from it.

The kind of mode of production we appear to be entering is one that I don’t think is quite capitalism as classically described. This is not capitalism, this is something worse. I see the vectoral class as the emerging ruling class of our time, whose power rests on attempting to command the whole production process by owning and controlling information. In the over-developed world, an information infrastructure, a kind of third nature, now commands the old manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, or second nature, which in turn commands the resources of this planet, which is how nature now appears to us.

The command strategies of the vectoral class rely on the accumulation of stocks, flows and vectors of information. The vectoral class turns information as raw material into property, and as property into asymmetry, inequality and control. It extracts a rent from privatized information, held as monopoly, while minimizing or displacing risk.

One strategy is to socialize the risk of the real hack. This is probably why public universities and publicly funded research still exist. The tax-payer can take the risk on the really basic research. The university research park model is now set up to carefully modulate access to information about anything that might make a valuable property.

Another strategy is what one might call auto-disruption. Learning from the mistakes of the old capitalist firms of the industrial eras, this model takes the hacker practice in-house. Firms with existing rent-extraction revenue flows become hoarders of potentially monetizable intellectual property, or the people who look like they could produce it. This is to be deployed only when it disrupts somebody else’s business more than one’s own.

So that’s the vectoral class. The problem with belonging to the hacker class in a world the vectoral class rules are these: firstly, certain modest forms of the hack now fall into an outsourced, ‘casualized’, even amateur kind of economy. Certain competences became widespread that there is no way to extract value from them as skills. Certain models of distributed or algorithm-based path-seeking turn out to work as well as hiring the top talent to pick a path for you.

Secondly, more higher-order hack abilities might still command their own price in the market, and one might even end up owning a piece of whatever one produces. But it becomes less and less likely that you get to own it all. One becomes at best a minor share-holder in one’s own brain.

Of course the situation with the worker is even worse than the hacker. The commodification of the life-world eats into the old cultures of solidarity and equality. Everything becomes game-like, a win-lose proposition. The world of third nature, that Borgesian data map that exactly covers its territory, is quite literally programmed to be anti-social.

In daily life there can be a continuum of experience between being a worker and a hacker. They are not absolute categories from the point of view of experience. One can pass from one to the other. Both can be precarious ways to make a living. The white male ‘bro-grammer’ is not the only kind of hacker, just as the blue collar hard-hat is not the only kind of worker.

For worker and hacker alike, the dominant affects are those of envy and jealousy, and covetousness. One is supposed to hate those with just a bit more than you, while at the same time loving those with much, much more. Those with a bit more must be undeserving; those who own everything apparently do so with unquestionable right.

For worker and hacker alike, there is a struggle to achieve some kind of class consciousness, and a social consciousness even beyond that, against the atomizing affect of the time. I just don’t think it is quite the same class consciousness.

For labor, it is always a matter of solidarity and equality. For the hacker, class consciousness is always modulated by the desire for difference, for distinction, for recognition by one’s real peers. It is a sensibility that can be captured by the bourgeois individualism propagated by the vectoral class, but it is not the same thing. Winning the stock-option lottery is not the same thing as the respect of one’s peers. Nor does it translate into any agency in giving form to the world.

It may not come as any surprise that the world this work and these hacks are building is one that cannot last. One might as well say already that this is already a civilization that does not exist. The material conditions that afford it are eroding already. Whether we are adding to the world some quantity of labor or some quality of hack, it is as if we were just building more sandcastles while the tide comes in.

This is the meaning of the Anthropocene: that the futures of the human and material worlds are now totally entwined. Just as Nietzsche declared that God is dead, now we know that ecology is dead. There is no longer a homeostatic cycle that can be put right just by withdrawing. There is no environment that forms a neutral background to working and hacking.

Just as the category of ‘man’ collapses once there is no God, so too the category of the social collapses when there is no environment. The material world is laced with traces of the human, and the human turns out to be made of nothing much besides displaced flows of this or that element or molecule.

The dogma that ‘reality is socially constructed’ turns out not so much to be wrong as to be meaningless. What all the workers and hackers of the world are building is more and more of the same impossible, nonexistent world. We are building third nature as the hyperreal.

Two tasks present themselves, then. The first is to think the worker and hacker as distinct classes but which have a common project. The second is to think that common project as building a different world. Can this infrastructure we keep building out, this second and third nature, actually be the platform for building another one? Can it be hacked?

It is a dizzying prospect. This is why I turn to the work of Alexander Bogdanov, because he thought it could be done. Sometimes it is good to have ancestors, even if they are funny uncles and queer aunts rather than the patriarchs. Bogdanov was Lenin’s rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party. Shunted aside by about 1910, he turned to two projects, which went by the names of tektology and proletkult.

I think of Bogdanov’s tektology as a project of worker and hacker self-organization that would use the qualitative medium of language rather than the quantitative one of exchange as the means for conveying forms, ideas, diagrams, from one design problem to another. Could there be an art of sharing what works? Could a hack that derives from one design problem be floated speculatively as a possible form or guide for another? Bogdanov’s tektology is like a philosophical Github.

I think of Bogdanov’s proletkult as a project of autonomous worker and hacker cultural production. Bogdanov had a positive, rather than a negative theory of ideology. We all need an affect, a story, a structure of feeling that is really motivating and connecting. Can we be moved and joined by something other than envy, greed, spite, rage or the other click-bait of the game-ifed, commodifed, hyperreal world? Can there be other worldviews and worldviews of the others?

In a way tektology is the work and proletkult the play aspects of building an actual world, in the gaps and fissures of this unreal one that surrounds us. The keynote for Bogdanov was that this had to be a cooperative and collaborative project, based on the worldview of the hacker and worker. This would be a different worldview to both those of authoritarianism and exchange.

We have to think how things work without assuming there is someone or something in charge, a final God-like arbiter, even if it is the hyper-chaos God of the speculative realists. And we also have to think how things work without imagining there’s just a bunch of atomized monads, competing with each other, where the ideal order is magically self-organizing and emergent.

We need another worldview, one drawn out of what is left of the actually collaborative and collective and common practices via which the world is actually built and run, a worldview of solidarity and the gift. A worldview that works as a low theory extracted from worker and hacker practices, rather than a high theory trying to legislate about them from above.

Bogdanov and Lenin play chess, 1908

Bogdanov and Lenin play chess, 1908

It is not hard to see here what infuriated Lenin about Bogdanov. For Bogdanov, both proletkult and tektology are experimental practices, of prototyping ideas and things, trying them out, modifying them. There’s no correct and controlling über-theory, as there is in different ways in Lenin or Lukacs. There is more of a hacker ethos here, rather than that of the authoritarian worldview one still finds in a Lenin or a Lukacs or in parody form in Zizek, where those in command of the correct dialectical materialist worldview are beyond question.

In Bogdanov’s worldview, there is no master-discourse that controls all the others. There is a continuum of practices, from the natural sciences, through engineering and design, to culture and art. The science and design part is mostly covered by the idea of a tektology; the culture and art part by proletkult. But they overlap, and both matter.

Bogdanov’s openness to the natural sciences, engineering and design are, I think, very contemporary. We only know about things like climate change — and other signs of the Anthropocene — because of the natural sciences. Without the very extensive global knowledge hack that is climate science, we would literally not know what the hell is going on around us. Why these droughts? These floods? These weird changes in the ranges of species, or their sudden extinctions or population booms? None of it would make sense.

Neither Heidegger nor Adorno have anything to say about any of this. But curiously, Bogdanov almost figured out global climate change for himself, between 1908 and 1920. He understood something about the carbon cycle. He understood the need to think social labor as acting on and in and with and against nature, producing a second nature and even a third. He understood the need to build an infrastructure that could adapt to changes in its interactions with its conditions of existence.

Lenin conducted a vigorous campaign to excommunicate Bogdanov, one which the Marxist tradition has strikingly never really revisited or attempted to reverse. This is among other things a great injustice. Bogdanov’s kind of experimental, open-ended Marxism, which neither tries to dominate, ignore, or subordinate itself to the natural sciences, became something of a rarity. His closest contemporary analog is, I think, Donna Haraway. Or so I argue in Molecular Red.

The Anthropocene calls not so much for new ways of thinking as for new ways of practicing knowledge. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And it is likely to get weird — in this lifetime, or the next. That’s why I think we could start working now, not on theory of the Anthropocene, but theory for the Anthropocene. One could do worse, I think, than imagine and practice again something like a tektology and a proletkult – a tektology for hackers, a proletkult for cyborgs. Let’s build a world, and live in it.

Xavier Cha | Instagram and digital representation

$
0
0

Andrew Kachel and Xavier Cha talk about censorship, digital representation, and her controversial contribution to ♥Like: A BOFFO Instagram Project.

New York based artist Xavier Cha’s work engages with the presentation of self in networked culture. Inhabiting modes of translation and manipulation that aid the digital circulation of information, Cha’s work also offers insight into coded desires that are manifest across social media platforms. These desires were central to a work Cha made for the Instagram art initiative ♥Like: A BOFFO Instagram Project. BOFFO is a non-profit arts organization focused on producing projects in public spaces, and this project was its first effort to approach a social media platform as a viable mechanism for presenting new and ambitious art. Cha was one of six artists to participate. The terms of participation were broad: each artist was asked to make a new body of work that in some way critically engaged the platform, bearing in mind its unique opportunities and constraints. Each would have full control over posting their new work on @boffo_ny for a one week period, provided they worked within Instagram’s terms and conditions of use. Cha situated her commission directly against these conditions, presenting content in non-native forms as a means to slide past filter mechanisms, and to circulate prohibited images. In an attempt to unpack this work, Cha and I conducted an email correspondence a few weeks after it was posted on Instagram.


A video posted by BOFFO (@boffo_ny) on

Andrew Kachel: Hi Xavier! You made a new work for the Instagram series I curated. It’s comprised of highly produced narrations of explicit images (mostly pornographic or intensely violent), which would be in violation of Instagram’s terms of use. You were interested in pushing the limits of what Instagram can portray, and what its users desire to see.

I’m interested in your particular engagement with digital media and representation, and how gnarly these processes of representation can be. The selfie is part of a messy and ongoing process of subjective construction, and it’s not always a pretty picture. Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine had this epigram: “A picture is no substitute for anything.” That feels so intensely relevant today, especially in relation to your work for this project, in which so much visual information became almost entirely auditory.

Xavier Cha: I really like that quote… I like that the image opens a portal for a whole new set of significations, codes and meanings–– its own new language that basically exists in another dimension.

As far as the representation of the self in selfies–– it’s been interesting to witness this development as a category of meaning. I remember when it was weird and unattractive to use a shitty crooked poorly lit selfie as a profile pic– but now the codes have evolved and the subtleties of what a selfie signifies have grown more complex… now if you have a super glossy professional head-shot-like portrait people think you’re weird, out of touch, or take yourself too seriously (unless you’re like a model or cultural icon of sorts, and the picture is interestingly editorial in quality). Tinder is a good example of this- I sometimes flip through solely to see these codes crystalize. It’s fascinating to see patterns in how people represent themselves digitally in order for one to connect with them enough to swipe right. It’s a predictable balance between casual selfies to make the person seem human like the rest of us, and “interesting” shots of them “doing things.” But if someone has a bunch of studio lit portraits they seem sterile, boring. There’s no human access point. It’s funny how seeing the phone’s reflection in a mirror or an extended arm now makes someone seem more personable, relatable, even charming…

But anyways, I’m getting pretty far off track I think from my project… I wanted to see how spoken language resonates in comparison to visual imagery on Instagram. Last December I explored this in Fruit Machine 2, at the New Museum. A text was delivered either in spoken English or American Sign Language, then traveled at random through a chain of 7 blind and deaf contestants, and one who could see and hear . It was so odd to experience language transmitted as sounds, then actions, then sounds again and see how different perceptions and subjectivities transformed the meaning and weight of the text.
It’s very strange how something can be so unacceptably offensive in visual form, but can slip by as spoken language- I guess it shows how visual of a culture we are, that images are more powerful than words? That there’s much more slippage in words? I don’t know.


A video posted by BOFFO (@boffo_ny) on

AK: Not only is there more slippage in words, but there is more capacity for words to slip through. That’s a plausible explanation for why your posts didn’t get flagged, or why the gruesomely violent posts received so many likes. If a user is scrolling through Instagram while their phone is silenced, the content of your posts is basically undetectable. The ability of the posts to function in that way is extremely powerful, insidiously alluding to both the depths of deep Internet and the enveloping condition of a violent world.

XC: It’s interesting that Instagram must not pay much attention to audio, which I suspected. That distinction is curious to me. The 2 blind actors I worked with both loved their iphones because the accessibility functions worked best for sending and receiving texts and emails etc., and many apps were available for the blind. I wonder if there is an Instagram app that describes images to the blind, and how aggressive these posts would feel to a blind person in the feed.

Bringing this back to the Louise Lawler quote, I suppose it’s a similar thing: one representation is no substitute for another, they each exist as their own entities with separate rules and sensory registers. I guess Kosuth also illustrated this with the ‘One and three Chairs‘.

AK: I missed Fruit Machine 2, but I’m very interested in that process of translation, or transmutation. When you take language as material, not in a literal way but in terms of its performative capacity and you manipulate its effects beyond standard routes of signification, strange things can open up. It’s also very generative, emphasizing language’s essential capacity for play.

I wonder whether language is coming to be seen as a much more radical terrain than the visual? So much has been made of “visual culture” in the last 20-30 years. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that discourse, but it seems there’s a specific kind of renewed interest in language: more artists maintaining writing and poetry practices as part of their work, and more artists whose work teases out the functions and capacities of words in an Internet-oriented culture. Turning to language is not a new move (you mentioned Kosuth, and 1st generstion conceptualists like Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Weiner, and Yoko Ono could also be situated in that context), so maybe we can understand it as a particular kind of reaction. This is totally unsubstantiated but I wonder whether an increased radicality of the linguistic has emerged this time around as a function of a certain image melancholy… It reminds me a bit of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature, in which actors from a “marginalized culture” assume a special resonance when they engage cultural hegemons, precisely by virtue of their being foreign. I mean this in the broadest sense: if we posit that language might be subjugated to the visual, then an artist turning to language approaches it from the outside. That angle of approach allows for a radical mode of cultural intervention— what Deleuze and Guattari might call de-territorialization. Do you think linguistic systems of description have become subjugated to the visual?

XC: Yes, I do think they’ve become subjugated… and I do agree a new return to language is a natural place to turn for visual artists looking for ways to innovate and be radical. I feel many have become immune to images. I personally don’t feel a need at the moment to add to the excessive inundation— that’s why I’m more inclined to create experiences and open up ways of thinking rather than add to the clutter of objects and images. To me most of that has grown mute.

AK: It’s interesting that you use the word inundation and that you’re not interested in perpetuating that condition. One could argue that image inundation is an inescapable condition, either of “contemporary culture” or specifically of platforms like Instagram. But your project doesn’t totally refuse to participate, and I think that’s key. This kind of motivation is often theorized temporally, in weirdly conflicting metaphors: Triple Canopy talked about “slowing down the internet” and then there’s the recent spike in interest around the term Accelerationism, advocating for a more intense engagement of technology and economy in order to advance a progressive agenda. Both of these approaches to digital culture/ digital capitalism are predicated on intervention. They refuse to refuse. They won’t stay outside of the things they oppose. They participate in order to have an effect, whether it is one of opposition or an encouragement of harmful forces in order to prompt some greater cataclysm. Weirdly, I think your work suggests an interest in both of these approaches?

XC: My current lack of interest in adding images and objects is not a criticism/ judgment or even naming of a condition. I’m not in a place of resistance or opposition– I post stupid unnecessary pics in my personal Instagram account. It’s just my current interest within the context of art production and since this was very specifically curated as an “artist” takeover my voice as an artist is highlighted. My concern or objective as an artist is not “not wanting to perpetuate” or point out a condition of image inundation, it’s more focused on exposing underlying systems and how culturally we negotiate our subjectivities within them (or are given the illusion that we can), and I have an easier time working with this performatively.

But yes, I do agree there is an interest in both “slowing down the Internet” or rather altering the quality of time, and encouraging or pushing complicity to such an absurd extreme that one can only sense its ambiguous position or point of malfunction.


A video posted by BOFFO (@boffo_ny) on

AK: How do you describe this work now that the posts have circulated on Instagram?

XC: Hmmm well, I was mostly surprised that all the posts made it up and remain on the BOFFO site. And also crazy that BOFFO gained nearly 10k new followers during my takeover week. I also must admit, I felt a little weird understanding this artist commission is basically to gain followers for BOFFO– I was ultimately working for BOFFO. It’s still confusing to me, the pornographic posts I don’t find as surprising, but I was slightly disturbed when some of the horrifically violent and gruesome images weren’t flagged and received lots of likes. I guess it succeeded in feeding into people’s perverse attraction to violence and pornography.. the whole not being able to look away from an accident thing, or now even, take a #carwreckselfie or something.

I don’t want to seem negative about “working for BOFFO”- that’s essentially the basis of any commission. I was really excited to have the opportunity to create this project, work with the talent I did (Michael Beharie helped with recording and editing the voice actor and Tabor Robak developed the audio progress bar visual) and experiment with subverting both the format and the invitation. There was a high risk of BOFFO’s account, with 40k followers at the start of my takeover, being terminated.

AK: This brings up two things that interest me: the conditions of artistic labor in relation to institutions, and the question of audience, specifically in relation to digital media and social network platforms. Regarding the first, I think it’s almost always the case that the work artists do (and sometimes curators and certain other cultural producers) bolsters the institutions that support that work. Of course this is related to compensation, but it’s not directly correlated. I think this project with BOFFO was reasonably successful in negotiating questions of visibility and promotion, because we emphasized experimentation, and encouraged all the participating artists to produce something that would not have otherwise happened. If we had just said, “sure, we’ll give you free reign over this platform for a week and give you an honorarium, and you can do whatever” it would have been a different transaction of cultural capital.
Of course your work lends credibility to an institutional supporter, but I think it’s a question of getting something beyond remuneration in return. I think we have to think about these things reciprocally. Ok, perhaps that’s leading to a tangent…

XC: I agree with all of that.

AK: The other thing I wanted to mention is the strange audience for the project. It went from a fairly small follower base composed of a broadly art/ fashion/ culture crowd, but when the account was a “featured user” during one of the first weeks of the commission series it ballooned by almost 3k every day. And so many of those were quasi-spam or.. seemingly 8 yr old kids? Even if you only marginally care about your audience, what are you supposed to do with that as an artist? The meaning of an online image is partially a function of who interacts with it and how. So I wonder about a work like this, in relation to what is a pretty heterogeneous audience. When your work traverses that audience and fails to shock in a significant way, I don’t know… it still feels unresolved.

XC: I am actually pleased with that unexpected element. It makes the seemingly benign aesthetic of the posts more successful. Of course kids are going to find porn and violent images online. There’s really no way around that. But is it less “harmful” or disturbing for a young kid to listen to pornographic and violent descriptions vs. seeing the image? I believe there’s more possibility for abstraction when the images translate into carefully selected and recorded words.


A video posted by BOFFO (@boffo_ny) on

AK: But is it even about making online experience “less harmful” or disturbing? Abstracting reality? I actually hadn’t thought about your work in terms of abstraction. Maybe I was thinking of it more as occlusion, or a rearrangement of information. That seems like a process with ample possibilities…

XC: No it’s not about making online experience less harmful at all. I just wonder about the difference between hearing a graphic description vs. seeing the image. Abstraction and formalization is almost always an element in my work- taking an aspect of contemporary culture and stripping it down until it becomes new and strange.

AK: What happens to the source images you worked from, after they’ve been incorporated in your work?

XC: I didn’t even save the images I based the descriptions on- I could easily search for them again, but most of them I didn’t even want to look at much longer than the time it took to write the script for the voice actor. Many were difficult to look at or stomach- especially the violent war persecution imagery. That’s why it took me so long to write the script- it was such a dark place to search for images that were shamefully seductive because of how horrific and disturbing they were. That was the tension I wanted to play with in the cool, slightly sterile, omnipotent narrator, drug commercial possible side effects delivery of the voice actress. I think the project would fall apart if the visual images were presented…my commissioned audio Instagram posts “are no substitute” for a picture.

AK: Jumping back to this thought— this is such a fine line, and such a powerful negotiation of representation. I’m recalling how you initially described the characteristics you were looking for in a voice actor. You described it in active terms, mentioning a climbing wall, and the process of reaching out and grasping a support. That is a moment of sensory connection and exchange of information, requiring patience and complete articulation. This leads back to our discussion of language, but interestingly you also said you wanted each word to feel like an object. So perhaps it’s about exploiting the material aspects of language, and harnessing an inherent force.

XC: Oh yeah, I think I said like climbing one of those simulated rock-climbing walls- where you must carefully consider and calculate the distance, position, and shape of each fake rock in relation to your own. Yes, I wanted the voice actor to carefully articulate each word in the post, with a very specific tone, quality and speed. I did want the words to unravel from the grey square and grow in space and time- the way only language can.

Cha’s project can be viewed on Instagram and Tumblr.

The other artists who participated in ♥Like: A BOFFO Instagram Project were Yoko Ono, K8 Hardy, Brad Troemel, and Alex Da Corte & Jayson Musson.

The History of Non-Art: Part 3

$
0
0

On the Avant-garde as Rearguard

The most groundbreaking art of the 20th century is called avant-garde. But perhaps these pioneering artists were not so pioneering after all. The artistic avant-garde did not break with established genres and traditions so much as it systematically established genres and tradition. Much of what is considered “radical,” “innovative” and “original” about Duchamp and the artistic avant-garde was brought into existence by people who were not visual artists. They were rather what in the art world is known as ”non-artists,” such as journalists, designers, writers, commercial artists and satirists. What is new in the art world is often new only in the art world.

Alfonse Allais, Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd, 1896.

Alfonse Allais, Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d’un grand homme sourd, 1896



Chapter 3: Filling in the blanks

In 1952, the piano player David Tudor enters the stage to premiere John Cage’s composition 4’33’’. He sits down at the piano and when he leaves it again, he has not played a single note. Nonetheless, John Cage (1912-1992) came to consider this his finest work. The audience was supposed to hear the sound of silence. The sound of the wind outside, of raindrops falling on the roof, people chatting or even leaving the room. Today the piece is one of the most referenced works in the history of 20th century music and sound art. A couple of years ago, MoMA acquired the oldest existing version of the notation. The composer Arnold Schoenberg, who was Cage’s teacher, was impressed by his student: “He’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.”


But already in 1884, the author Alphonse Allais, who was not a composer either, presented a notation sheet without notes. He called it “Funeral March composed for the Obsequies of a Great Deaf Man.” And so what? This parallel has often been made – and often been categorized as a curious coincidence.

John Cage, Shock, 1962

John Cage, Shock, 1962



No joke


For Cage it was of utmost importance to stress that his seminal composition was not “a joke.” It was so very important, because in the beginning it was quite a laugh. No wonder, since Cage, also known as a mushroom expert back then, would sometimes pop up on American and Italian TV shows, performing Rube Goldberg-like sound pieces in a slap-stick manner.
As the Italian newspaper La Stampa amusedly quipped: “The piece was titled Amores and it sounded like a funeral march.” For Allais, however, being fun or not was not a hassle. Allais seemed to consider himself so much ahead of his time that this in itself was a joke. As he already announced in the 1880’s, he was but “a student of the great masters of the 20th century.” And much seems to indicate that these masters were not beyond the influence of their student. 

Many of Cage’s role models were connected to Alphonse Allais – directly or indirectly. One of them, the composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), who among others is known for his “Furniture music” destined to play in the background, was one of the composers Cage himself performed. Erik Satie, whom his friend Allais nicknamed Esoterik Satie, was born in the same street as Allais and went on to perform at the café Le Chat Noir, where Allais and his incoherent artist-colleagues would hang out. 



John Cage, Silence, MoMA, 1952

John Cage, Silence, MoMA, 1952

The best obsequies


Another of Cage’s heroes was yet a friend of Erik Satie, the artist Marcel Duchamp, of course, whom Cage admired immensely – just like Duchamp admired Allais. Duchamp’s laid-back public persona recalled that of Allais, who defined an idler as someone “who does not pretend to work.” Duchamp even adopted Allais’ drag-like alias Rose Sélavy – kind of similar to the way in which Allais himself had hijacked a pseudonym from a colleague of his, claiming they were the only two allowed to use it. More importantly, however, in this connection, Duchamp seemed to share his predecessor’s taste in music. Duchamp, who might neither be considered a composer, nonetheless composed a few pieces such as “Hollow musical exercises for the deaf” where people were supposed to listen to the notes not being played.

However, Cage was not only inspired by music, but also by another admirer of Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), whose white monochrome paintings in 1951 motivated Cage to go through with writing a notation without notes. But already in 1897 Allais made the same step from monochrome to silence. At the end of his small book “Primo-Aprilesque Album”, after his seven monochromes, he put in his notation without notes. In a short manual-like preface to his funeral march, Allais stipulated in a French packed with puns: “Since great pain is mute, the executors should solely be involved in counting the measures instead of giving into this indecent tapping which cancels out the solemn character of the best obsequies.”

Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951

Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951

Alphonse Allais,

Alphonse Allais, 1896

Toke Lykkeberg is a critic and curator.

Artie Vierkant | A Model Release

$
0
0
A Model Release

Artie Vierkant, Installation View

Artie Vierkant’s show, A Model Release, at UntItled consists of four new pieces from two distinct bodies of work. Executed through processes that reinforce an engagement with forces that affect a wide spectrum of the population across geo-political borders, the works on view are accessible to both the intellectually and visually curious alike.

While Detachable storage rack for metallic structure and Air filter and method of constructing the same add to the series Exploits made within the constraints of several patents licensed by the artist and first exhibited in 2013, Antoine Office, Antoine Casual, was produced from a new line of inquiry into the artist’s continued interest in “conversations about how society polices itself,” to explore the rights that govern 3D digital likenesses of individuals.

Artie Vierkant

Artie Vierkant, Detachable storage rack for a metallic structure 31, 2014, US Patent 6318569 B1, Silkscreen on 430 inox plate, custom shelving, rare earth magnets, 593 x 38 x 5 inches

Detachable storage rack for metallic structure, mounted on the double height walls in the back room of the gallery is made from multiple stainless steel plates connected by blue ‘shelves’ held in place with rare earth magnets. Fragments of linework from the original patent diagrams are silkscreened on both metal panels and walls (and in one instance take the form of a neon sculpture located off-site). The two rectangular cuboids that make up Air filter and method of constructing the same – each with wide white frames and taut screen sides – are located in the center of the room and multiplied in the surrounding semi-reflective surface of Detachable storage rack for metallic structure.

Artie vierkant

Artie Vierkant, Installation view from street showing Antoine Office, Antoine Casual (foreground) and Detachable storage rack for a metallic structure 32 and 33 (background)

In the front room and visible from the street, two monitors connected back-to-back display Antoine Office, Antoine Casual. Despite representing interests parallel to Exploits, Antoine Office, Antoine Casual maintains a formal and pictorial relationship to Air filter and method of constructing the same, whose broad screened sides are not only dematerialized like the implied narrow sides of Antoine Office, Antoine Casual but also imprinted with duotone images of the 2D clothing maps used to clad the digital Antoines.

Artie Vierkant, Air filter and method of constructing the same 34, 2014, US Patent 8118919 B1, Aluminum, print on charcoal fiberglass mesh, print on organza, wood.  50 x 80 x 25 inches, 127 x 203.2 x 63.5 cm

Artie Vierkant, Air filter and method of constructing the same 34, 2014, US Patent 8118919 B1, Aluminum, print on charcoal fiberglass mesh, print on organza, wood. 50 x 80 x 25 inches, 127 x 203.2 x 63.5 cm

To make Air filter and method for constructing the same, Vierkant licensed a patent from its author after negotiating contractually binding terms that stipulated the artist’s use of the system described therein. The contract between Vierkant and the patent holder not only restricts the number of times the patent can be deployed but also attempts to legally distinguish artistic from non-artistic usage by regulating the locations at which Vierkant’s ‘derivative works’ may be sold. While seeking out the patent holder may seem like a creatively masochistic gesture, Vierkant submits to the patents’ constraints in order to explore the extent of liberty within them.

Artie Vierkant, Diagram from US Patent 8118919 B1 for Air filter and method of constructing the same

Artie Vierkant, Diagram from US Patent 8118919 B1 for Air filter and method of constructing the same

(From Article 2 of the License agreement for Air filter and method for constructing the same)
Mr. Love grants Mr. Vierkant a non-exclusive license to use the Authored Work. This license grants Mr. Vierkant the rights to produce up to 75 derivative work based on the Authored Work. Mr. Vierkant retains title and ownership over the derived works.

(From Article 9 of the License agreement for Air filter and method for constructing the same)
Derivative works created by Mr. Vierkant using Mr. Love’s Authored Works may not be sold by Mr. Vierkant or any successor to Mr. Vierkant or any business partner of Mr. Vierkant in the following described contexts: retail stores, online marketplaces, interior or exterior design specialists, product manufacturers.

This professorial rebellion against the single-author model perpetuated by the ability to copyright intellectual property outside the discipline of fine art also inversely calls into question the lack of such legal protection within the discipline. However, this is not a new concern to the artist, who in his potentially canonical 2010 essay, The Image Object Post-Internet, describes an ecology of art making in part defined by, “ubiquitous authorship;” comprised of “reader-authors who by necessity must regard all cultural output as an idea or work in progress able to be taken up and continued by any of its viewers.” By modeling this condition in the context of intellectual property – where the open source mentality can be legally restricted – Exploits is also demonstrative of the artist’s ability to share the same high quality of insight outside the post-internet discourse as he has previously deployed within it.

Should the strategy of participating in a system that perpetuates a single-author system still seem counterintuitive to resisting it, during a recent conversation at UntItled Vierkant explained further, stating that, “sometimes the best way to show the problem is by repeating the error.”

If the legal ‘frottage’ within Exploits creates a strange cartography of disciplinary boundaries, in Antoine Office, Antoine Casual, quite possibly the most important portrait now on view in New York, Vierkant transposes an open source nightmare onto the boundaries of the physical body itself by superimposing a multi-authored model onto a single avatar. At a more basic level, if Exploits in general embodies an archipelago of possible actions the body is capable of in the world (within legal rights), Antoine Office, Antoine Casual in general speculates on a near future wherein external forces not only act on the body but through it.

Matthew Booth, Milk Drop Coronet

In a similar fashion to Matthew Booth’s equally important Milk Drop Coronet, Vierkant’s model of Antoine was made by interpolating 2D photographic information to generate a 3D model. The captured data, in its photographic form, is then mapped onto the surface of the computer model resulting in a digitally three dimensional photograph. While Booth’s Milk Drop Coronet engages dialectically with Dr. Harold Edgerton’s 1936 photograph of the same name (itself made in dialogue with coronet studies generated by A.M. Worthington in 1908) in order to demonstrate the radical precision possible using time slice photography, Vierkant demonstrates alternative ways to activate the digital model.

Antoine Office, Antoine Casual, 2014, Two channel HD video, flatscreens, custom steel mount, 17m46s

Antoine Office, Antoine Casual, 2014, Two channel HD video, flatscreens, custom steel mount, 17m46s

Animated by motion data from several random individuals, Antoine Office, Antoine Casual, like marionettes with too many puppeteers, jerks and squats, stuttering through fragmented gestures – some unfamiliar, others humorously so (such as when the avatar appears for a moment to perform part of raunchy dance move – hand moving in partial-swat as if slapping a phantom ass). A metaphorical body politic, Antoine makes a noteworthy contribution to the discourse of biological trespassing, and more optimistically expands the concept of cooperative identities.

Model by Vince Patti: Download 3D .pdf, Download Sketchup file

What are the possible motivations for taking up such state-of-the-art-technology and parsing the legal apparatus protecting intellectual property when many artists are still making materialist work reliant on the language within their description to key them into contemporary discourse? (For example, a painting that employs cobwebs to connect to conversations about the World Wide Web).

A clue perhaps can be found in Vierkant’s 2010 ‘Image Object manifesto’, where the artist suggests that, “Ironically, the most radical and ‘progressive’ movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who either pass by either largely unnoticed due to a decision to opt out of any easily-accessible distribution networks, or else would be composed of a community of people producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions and not applying themselves with the label of artist.”

This frame may suggest a burgeoning role for vanguard art practices wherein the modes of capital or political production are not only revealed as agents inflecting mass subjective development but are mastered, taken up into the artist’s palette to be manipulated and freely deployed as speculations unconstrained by capital or political interests.

It is thus conceivable that, just as ‘acceleration’ seeks to destabilize capitalism through capitalist means, vanguard art production may find the most agency when it appears to disappear within those strategies that allow it disrupt the narrowing of the status quo. In such a scenario, life without art is not something to be feared, it is the goal.

A Model Release
UntItled gallery
November 2 – December 14
30 Orchard St
New York, NY 10002

Timur Si-Qin | Premier Machinic Funerary Part II

$
0
0


Institut Kunst | We’re Live and We Want to Elate

$
0
0

Institutkunstdis

Institut Kunst, the Art School you wish you had applied to! Spearheaded by Head of the Art Institute, Chus Martínez, along with lecturers and a science team, the innovative Institut Kunst is working towards a redefinition of the traditional art school.

The website is not your average .edu. Check it out here and read the welcome text, WE’RE LIVE AND WE WANT TO ELATE by Chus Martínez below.


The site you’re in now is, actually, our mind. You will, of course, find information here about studying with us, and all that entails. This site, however, intends to produce a living climate of materials, texts, and thoughts that define the conditions we work from, within and towards. And who are we? We are a group of teachers, students, visiting artists and collaborators you will find in the section Team.

This site is no blog, as no one writer initiates any conversation with the site’s visitors and there is no one writer initiating the conversation with the viewer / reader. Nor is it an online magazine, as the content is structured without an editorial logic. The site acts as any mind does, feeling a compulsion to get closer to images, materials, ideas, and individuals while simultaneously producing different strategies for doing so. It is not a celebration of incoherence, but an attempt to move away from programmatic thinking.

The name Art Institute names many things. It names a long and complex history of becoming a place where artists teach artists. A place where practice determines thinking, decisions and conversations around the nature of doing in art. The name also names a very specific way of teaching collectively. The Institute has for decades insisted on the radical re-imagining of art academy conventions. The traditional authority-centered classroom structure is replaced by two class formats at the Bachelor and Master levels: the forum and the plenum. Both formats introduce a spatial structure where the artist/students’ minds are at work. Forum and plenum sessions have no subject or theme other than themselves, apart from an intention to investigate the conditions of contemplating artist production today.

And so this site is conceived. It is a place in which several ways of seeing what is happening inside and outside the Institute coincide. The subject – the indexical coherence that defines every form of public presentation or application – is substituted with a flow of investigations that appear, disappear, reappear. This intention is stronger than the will to merely inform you about us. It responds to the creation of an ambiance, a genuine pictorial and thinking climate. Imagine this site as neither project nor blog nor magazine but simply a radiance. A radiance which is the effect of many voices speculating about many things. Do images have an autonomous life when machines can see them, read them, know them as well as the human eye? Are the inherited notions of action and social apparatuses unable to describe how art wants to relate to both human culture and nature? Is a radical reversal in the world of exhibitions possible? Does consciousness present questions art understands better than any other field of knowledge?

The Art Institute pursues a mandate: to probe, question and imagine what the nature of art practice could be on the verge of the next society. Methods appear along this path – they are never there beforehand. Complexity is a substance we embrace.

institut-kunst_salmon21

Centers In Pain | Jasper Spicero

$
0
0
Centers In Pain

A project by Jasper Spicero

Wapato prison is a maximum security facility built 9 years ago in Portland, Oregon. After it’s completion in 2004 Wapato was abandoned due to a lack of operating funds. It has been idle and in pristine condition for 10 years and has never once housed inmates, remaining empty aside from a small janitorial staff that maintains the plumbing and washes dusty bed sheets. Occasionally a film crew is allowed to enter for a small fee.

To carry out Centers In Pain, Jasper Spicero rented Wapato for 4 days. The project culminated in a short film, a screenplay for an imaginary movie, and documentation of the sculptures installed in the prison.

EVERY STORM RUNS OUT OF RAIN

EXT. FLOWER COMPLEX

AERIAL SHOT A half-built housing complex. Flying away it
becomes visible that the roads and cul-de-sacs form a simple
flower shape. Like a child’s drawing. At the center is a
tower.

TITLE OVER:

CENTERS IN PAIN

Installation View

Installation View

Honey 12

Maintenance Worker

EXT. COMPLEX XIV

This house, like all the others, is plastic white with blue
and grey details. Piles of old snow in the yard.

The front door has a hexagon window covered by black plastic
from the inside. Someone opens the door. It is a boy, 5
years, with grey eyes, wearing denim overalls.

EXT. COMPLEX XIV – BACKYARD

CLOSE UP:

A jacket lying on the ground with a badge sewn to the arm
that reads ‘JUDITH 14′. The boy’s shoes enter the frame.
He picks up the jacket.

MARTHA O.S
from inside the home
Where is my little star?

Judith walks away from Martha’s voice toward a modular
storage unit.

Proctor Personalities

Proctor Personalities

Detail

Detail

S.M.A.R.T. Picture Frame XIV

S.M.A.R.T. Picture Frame XIV

EXT. WOODS

Half-melted snow with footprints. Trees tangled in dead
vines. It is raining.

MOVING:

We follow Judith into the woods. He is now carrying an entry
shotgun. Shoe laces dragging behind him through slush.

LISA O.S.
If someone is there, please help me.

We see LISA through a layer of old growth woods.

LISA
I’ve been wandering around here
for days.

Her running clothes are distressed. She is wearing
black earphones.

JUDITH
There is a road close by.
You’re going to be alright.

Lisa staggers behind him exhausted. After awhile Judith stops.
Turns to her.

LISA
Judy?

She steps backwards and trips over a tree branch. A single
earphone falls out. We hear the faint sound of ‘Shane’s Theme’.
Holds her hand up like shielding her eyes from sunlight.

Beatrice IX (detail)

Beatrice IX (detail)

St. Judith Children Research Hospital (detail)

St. Judith Children Research Hospital (detail)

INT. COMPLEX XIV

Through a honeycomb shaped window on the second floor we see
Judith emerge from the woods wearing black earphones. His
jacket is missing. He kneels to tie his shoes.

YOUNG MAN V.O.
Wapato is a jail built 9 years ago.
After its completion in 2004 it was
abandoned due to a lack of operating
funds. I’m one of three maintenance
workers at the facility. A 10-ton iron
sculpture that looks like the skeleton
of an oil tanker is sinking into the
courtyard and destroying the
underground drainage system that
passes sewage to the nearest waste
resevoir.

CLOSE UP:

Still image of Judith’s untied shoe laces.

Stand Alone Complex I (detail)

Stand Alone Complex I (detail)

Stand Alone Complex II

Stand Alone Complex II

A DROP OF MEDICINE

INT. COMPLEX XIV – LIVING ROOM

Martha sits staring into space on an aging designer sofa.
She is mid-forties, blond hair, wearing a ragged shirt and
blue jeans.

CLOSE UP:

Hands in her lap with spots of pale light from an open
window nearby.

ON SCREEN:

10 DAYS AGO

Judith is stopped halfway down the living room staircase
turned toward Martha. She is frozen in thought.

JUDITH
Martha, have you seen Beatrice?

He descends the staircase and stands by her side.

JUDITH
Anyone home?

He grabs her leg and shakes it. Martha squints as though she
just woke up. Shields her eyes from the pale light with a
throw pillow.

MARTHA
What did you say little saint
Judith?
JUDITH
I haven’t seen Beatrice for a
couple of days.

Sets the pillow onto the floor. Kneels to Judith’s height. A
cloudy look on her face like a hospital patient’s. Places a
slender hand on his shoulder.

MARTHA
The world is sick Judy. Everyone
is a drop of medicine. Even you
a tiny star.

We hear the sound of a faucet turning off and on in the next
room.

INT. KITCHEN

CLOSE IN:

The kitchen sink sprays water than abruptly stops. Starts
again. Stops. Above the sink is a window without glass. Snow
is falling. A plane goes by.

Installation view

Installation view

 License Plate SG13 71U

License Plate SG13 71U

Detail

Detail

BLOOD IN THE SNOW

EXT. COMPLEX XII

A young man standing in a snowy driveway. This is Shane.

VAGRANT O.S.
My family is at 43 on the other side
of the tower. We need food. I have a
son, Carl.

PAN FROM SHANE TO VAGRANT:

Lying on the ground. Blood dripping from his nose. One eye swollen shut.

INT. COMPLEX XIV – JUDITHS ROOM

Judith lying in his bed listening to a hand-held tape recorder.
We hear a voice through the speaker.

LISA V.O.
I was 11 when my real dad showed up at our complex. We were eating with my stepfather, Carl. My dad banged on the door and when Carl answered my dad dragged him out into the snow. He started hitting him in the face and wouldn’t stop. I’ll always remember the blood in the snow.

Judith stands up. Passes by a bedside table with a picture frame
turned face down. Walks to his window to see Shane
towering over Vagrant.

EXT. COMPLEX XII

SHANE
You are Weak. Like birds are weak.
You let Flower Complex change you.
VAGRANT
Don’t do this.

Honey approaches Shane and places a hand on his shoulder.
She is tall with long, brown hair in a pony tail.

HONEY
He doesn’t want anything from us.
SHANE
If I let him go he will come back to hurt
you or Judy. He’s obviously lying. I wouldn’t
hurt him if he needed food for a hungry child.

Still image of Shane with Honey behind him. A number eight
tattoo on his shoulder. His eyes half open.

CUT TO:

S.M.A.R.T. Picture Frame Red

S.M.A.R.T. Picture Frame Red

Security Proctor

Security Proctor

10 DAYS AGO

INT. DETECTIVES CAR

Two men inside a moving black sedan with dark windows. Beige
leather interior. The man in the passenger’s seat turns to
his partner.

DETECTIVE 2
You’ve been here before haven’t you?

Detective WINTERS stares straight ahead silently.

DETECTIVE 2
My sister used to walk here when
we were kids to stargaze from
up in that tower.

EXT. COMPLEX XII

The detective’s pull into the driveway. License
plate SG13 71U. Honey’s face watching them through the
hexagon window on the front door. They get out of their
vehicle. DETECTIVE 2 lights a cigarette.

WINTERS
We aren’t here to discuss the
bloody snow in your driveway.

She cracks the door.

HONEY
Then why are you here?
WINTERS
A woman has gone missing.
Her name is Lisa.

INT. COMPLEX XII – LIVING ROOM

Honey sits opposite the detectives. WINTERS is holding a
cup of coffee.

DETECTIVE 2
Where is your brother?
HONEY
Shane’s probably at VIII.
DETECTIVE 2
Do you know what he does when
he goes to COMPLEX VIII?

WINTERS spills coffee on his tie.

CUT TO:

Patients Turned Away

Patients Turned Away

Detail

Detail

Detail

Detail

PROTECT ME

INT. COMPLEX XII

Shane is kneeling beside a slim rectangle table pushed against
a wall near the front door.

CLOSE UP:

White, blue and grey answering machine.

LISA V.O.
Hi I’m not here right now and neither
is anyone else apparently. Which is
strange because we usually are here
but not today. Anyway, leave a message
and I promise that we will get back
to you.

He grabs a tangle of chords from beneath the table and pulls them
toward his chest.

CUT TO:

Installation view

Installation view

Fail Safe (1)

Fail Safe (1)

MARTHA

INT. MARTHAS VAN – APF3915

Still image of a younger Martha sitting in the backseat.
She is wearing a black turtle neck underneath a spinal
brace that looks like scaffolding.

MARTHA V.O
I was a proctor at St. Jude for the
better part of my life. One boy was
especially bright. I can’t remember
his name which is strange. I usually
remember the names of my patients.

EXT. CENTER TOWER

Construction workers wandering around with rolled up plans.
Martha at the base of the tower looking up.

AERIAL SHOT A crane placing windows into center tower.
A pick-up truck towing a housing module.

centersinpain.org

BAM | Migrating Forms Festival #6

$
0
0

Watch an exclusive trailer by Jacolby Satterwhite for BAM‘s sixth annual Migrating Forms festival!

BAMcinématek has announced the complete lineup for the sixth annual Migrating Forms festival of film and video (Dec 10—18), and we are so excited! Co-curated by Nellie Killian and Kevin McGarry.

Opening the festival on Wednesday, December 10, is the New York premiere of Soon-Mi Yoo’s Songs from the North. Inspired to make a documentary about daily life under one of the least transparent governments in the world, Yoo has crafted a unique portrait of contemporary North Korea.

Migrating Forms closes on Thursday, December 18, with the New York premiere of Fruit Chan’s delirious The Midnight After, which finds 16 minibus passengers alone in an eerily empty Hong Kong after a late night ride home.

Other highlights include the North American premiere of Cory Arcangel’s Freshbuzz (www.subway.com), a hypnotic and hilarious surf through sandwich purveyor Subway’s web content empire; a spotlight on moving image artist Rachel Rose; Lance Wakeling’s first-person travelogue Field Visits for Chelsea Manning, commissioned by Rhizome; and five additional programs of short work.

The festival features three world premieres, four US premieres, 10 New York premieres, and showcases films and videos by 30 artists from 12 countries:

Sarah Abu Abdallah, Gabriel Abrantes, Jennifer Allora, Cory Arcangel, Robert Breer, Guillermo Calzadilla, Alexander Carver, Fruit Chan, Jacob Ciocci, Heinz Emigholz, Joey L. DeFrancesco, Barry Doupé, Rolf Forsberg, Jonah Freeman, Tony Gerber, William Greaves, William E. Jones, Stanya Kahn, Justin Lowe, Stefan Moore, Park Jung-bum, Mario Pfeifer, Jon Rafman, John Reilly, Rachel Rose, Jean-Claude Rousseau, Daniel Schmidt, Jeremy Shaw, Gina Telaroli, Lance Wakeling, and Soon-Mi Yoo.

Dec 10 to 18, NYC. See the full schedule here.

Dancarchy | Naomi Fisher

$
0
0

There is an intense new energy unveiled in Naomi Fisher’s new work for Art Basel Miami Beach 2014. Seven large paintings dance their way into the art fair and represent a solid return to painting for an artist who has been dedicated to an aesthetic where nature, ornamentation, and female collective groups dance together and perform their way through the mundane and the extraordinary. Fisher is also revealing a new public commission at the botanical gardens, taking a new interest in size, scale, architecture, and public space. I had the pleasure of spending some time with Fisher while she was on a residency at the Frida Hansens Hus in Norway, and we sat down to talk about the impact the residency has had on her practice and in particular how it has shaped the new work which is shown for the first time during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Geir Haraldseth: Could you talk a little bit about the invitation you got from Art Basel? This invitation has led you to produce a whole new body of work, so I would like to know how an invite to make a project for an art fair turns into such an interesting and bold endeavor!

Naomi Fisher: Last year Art Basel made a similar invitation for the Nova section, where the younger galleries are, at the fair in Miami Beach. I think they wanted some activity in that section, so they asked myself and Jim Drain to come up with a project for them. At that point, the two of us were running BFI, the Bas Fisher Invitational, where we were doing a lot of interactive projects and commissioning performances, doing the Weird Miami bus tours and programming different exhibitions, so we wanted to do a project that was both our own work, and brought in the curatorial side of what we did with BFI.

GH: So BFI do a lot of community work?

NF: Well, define community.

GH: In this case I think it means that you are aware that there is a community out there that you want to engage, seeing as you are providing some services to show your personal take on Miami.

bla

NF: Yeah, BFI and what we are doing with Weird Miami bus tours is trying to take what was interesting and exciting about Miami, and to show people why we chose to be based here. This is also related to the art fair, because so many people just come here for Art Basel and wouldn’t really understand why it would be so interesting living here. They would just go to a restaurant on South Beach and ask me: Why do you live here? And I would say: This is not my Miami. I usually don’t go to South Beach unless I am here with visitors for Art Basel! That program is trying to bring what I think is interesting about Miami into a larger dialog.

bla

GH: So when the invitation came back again for this year, what did you decide to work on and why?

NF: Art Basel were so psyched with what we did last year, and asked for a new proposal, so I came up with a solo project. A lot of my work over the past five years had been coming out of projects generated through research and reacting to specific sites performatively. I have been working with groups of collaborators who are heavily involved in contemporary dance and a lot of that work ended up as videos, or sometimes works would support that, whether it be painting or photography. That all evolved into a show I did this summer at the Home Alone 2 gallery in New York, where three giant paintings, custom made for the space, had ballet bars attached across them. To me, the exhibition brought all the things I was doing performatively into two-dimensional objects as paintings. I started as a painter and got more into photography and performance, and now I am coming full circle, returning to painting again. But the questions that come up from this project are interesting. Is it a painting, is it a functional object, is it a sculpture? The work really questions painting in a way I found really exciting.

GH: Well, it is painting as a utilitarian object, but the new work is still decidedly a return to painting with a focus on what painting is. When I first met you, you were working very mixed, with video, painting, and photography, and now the focus of your output is painting, but it still has all of these other things attached to it. Why do you think there is such a focus on painting in your practice again?

NF: One thing is a frustration with, or just a shift, in photography. I love how open photography is now, but it definitely has complicated my practice as an artist making photographs as art works. I am obsessed with Instagram and how so many people have access to making photographs and images, but it has really changed how I look at photography as an artwork. That shift is what geared my work more towards video and performance. So many people were making interesting photographs, and I was shocked at how banal they were. In a good way! Making very perfect large format Cibachrome prints felt a bit off, and the more point and shoot side of my photography felt too much like Instagram, but it is part of my history as an artist.

#Puzzled, 7x5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

#Puzzled, 7×5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

GH: I just wanted to pick up on the thing you said about banality, but in relation to the paintings you have been working on for this project. They are large-scale paintings with definite references to other painters through history. There are some Norwegian painters in there that I recognize, mixed in with other influences, and there is definitely something banal going on as well, which might match some of the attraction you found in this moment in contemporary popular photography.

NF: I think the banality is coming out in my paintings in a funny way. I’ve been intrigued about the shift towards abstraction, which has happened in the last decade. Most of the artists that have been making interesting critical work have been coming out of a tradition of 70s abstraction and process based abstraction, and I think there are a lot of really incredible artists in that category, but it has also dominated the art world in a way that has squashed the weirdos. I consider myself one of the weirdos for sure, and what I think is weird and complicated in these paintings is this adoration of historical painting mixed with a very washy, plain set painting style, with added weirdness, such as the mirror puzzle pieces stuck to the paintings. It looks stupid, but I kind of love it. What is so interesting about culture right now is how stupid it can get. Add to that how fixated on luxury people are, it is important that they are large-scale paintings, which is part of the luxury side of the art market. There is nothing more luxurious than a crazy giant painting, but then what happens when you add a ballet bar to it? What happens when you add a puzzle piece mirror ordered from Amazon? Is it still this luxury painting? Is it more than that? Seeing as everything is mashed up in our time, you can find an Edvard Munch reference next to a tracing of my body doing a dance move, but looking like Michael Jordan’s AIR logo. Is it dance or is it NIKE? 


GH: Or is it Munch? And everybody wants to have a Munch, speaking of luxury. I have never been able to buy a Munch, but if I had money I would buy a little Munch for myself, but now I can have a Naomi Fisher instead! A Fisher Munch with Air Jordans. It is important to note the scale of the paintings, but also how you insert yourself into that narrative, that is what is exciting to me. Can you talk a little bit more about the installation? There will be seven large-scale paintings in the space?

NF: Yes, all of them are five by seven feet, most of them with ballet bars attached. Every day at the art fair, from 3-5 pm, there will be dancers who are trained in ballet, doing traditional ballet exercises with the paintings as ballet bars.

bla

GH: So it is similar in some ways to the show at Home Alone 2, but with added bonuses. And more barres.

NF: All the paintings are completely new and they are coming out of the show in New York, and the work that I was doing while in Norway for two months at the Frida Hansens Hus residency in Stavanger. The time at the residency helped free up the imagery that was in my head. I was in Norway at the same time as Oil North Seas fair and walking around that fair, looking at all the branding of that world, threw me for an amazing loop, which I am still processing and it is also coming out with this work.

GH: And while Norway really doesn’t have an art market, it does have an oil market. It’s funny to compare one fair to the other.

NF: Yeah, it was the Art Basel for oil!


GH: How was it? 


NF: It was incredible! Some of the slogans were insane! I used a Haliburton tote bag for my show at Studio 17 in Stavanger and put a drawing of a crying mermaid inside. 


GH: Where she belongs!

NF: Yeah. There was so much going on, freebies, insane quotes, and exposure to something very alien. One bag had oil spurting from the sea with the Eiffel tower on a ship. Are they trying to make a horror story or advertise their products?


GH: Yeah, is this a dream or a nightmare?

NF: There was one booth at the conference saying: Sculpting the Future. There were a lot of overlaps with issues that I see in the art world, which I though was interesting.

GH: Yeah, there are plenty of interesting overlaps! The Nova section where you are exhibiting functions to bring in new talent and the space that you are constructing at doesn’t just have ballet barres, but it is a make-shift bar as well?

NF: There will be cocktails, and booze, but I requested having coconut water there, to have some healthy options at hand. The fair becomes a nightmare where you can only eat and drink what is provided for you.

GH: I always have to have my liver replaced after Basel.

NF: That’s why I wanted to request some healthy options too. I want my bar to be a sanctuary, or a refuge.

GH: And that’s what the title of the piece alludes to? 


NF: Yes, it is called Dancarchy Refuge, whichever you are, or need in the moment. There will be a row of plants where you can hide and cry behind.

Ushering in Jupiter, 7x5 feet, acrylic, mylar tape, ballet barre on linen, 2014

Ushering in Jupiter, 7×5 feet, acrylic, mylar tape, ballet barre on linen, 2014

GH: Thanks, I might need it. I imagine you have always been painting, but have you always been dancing? Where does the interest in dance stem from?

NF: The interest in terms of my art is largely from the collaborators I have been working with for years. There is actually a nice crossover when speaking about bars, two of the people I had been shooting a lot over the years were dancers, and they actually opened a bar in the lower east side called Café Dancer. Jessie Gold and Elizabeth Hart were traveling so much for their work as dancers and needed part time work, and they become bartenders. They thought opening up a dancer owned bar would solve some of the problems. But it is very challenging to own a business in the lower east side with the rising rents, and it hasn’t solved all their problems, but it has turned into a place where both dancers and people in the art world tend to congregate. After they had been in my projects for years, they asked me to do a project for them, so I did a 60 feet mural down their wall. It’s a long narrow space and that is the biggest paining I have done to this day. The two of them were the inspiration to do the mural. After doing that huge work, all I wanted to do was paint.

GH: And that was mostly that due to the large scale? You have also been doing large architectural public commissions lately, so does that have something to do with it too? There is certainly a huge shift in scale happening in your work at the moment.

NF: Absolutely, once I started working really big I was surprised I hadn’t done so before. And it has made me think of the financial side of things and the disparity in the art world. There is so much talk about the difference between men and women in the market and it started making me realize that the disparity starts very early on. If your work sells, you can make slightly larger work and demand higher prices for your next show. Suddenly all the dudes are making giant painting and the women aren’t. In retrospect I realize how trapped I was in making smaller scale work, so when I starting working on my first large public sculpture commission, I was really psyched, not just because it is this incredible art work and wonderful opportunity for me, but because I am one of the few women who is in that arena.

Try Listening, 7x5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

Try Listening, 7×5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

GH: Scale and gender are exciting things to look at, it’s just a complex issue.

NF: Yeah, and now that I have done some big scale work, that’s all I want to do!

GH: You also mentioned a different shift in your painting, in addition to the change in scale, which happened during your residency in Norway, could you talk about that? It is very exciting for me to see the new work after having the opportunity to spend time with you in Norway and seeing how you reacted to some of the Norwegian painters. And what you did with layering in the exhibition at Studio17 in Stavange, dealing with abstraction, figuration and decoration!

NF: This really surprised me! I used the time in Norway to free myself and paint anything that came into my head. I was also limited to a smaller scale and only doing works on paper. The limitations in scale and paint became an exercise. There were no restrictions beyond that. This meant that a lot of things ended up staying abstractions – the moment something felt done, I moved on to the next. I worked really quickly and made around 100 works on paper during the course of two months. A work could be a single line on paper, and if I liked that line, I was going to leave it! When I came back to Miami and started painting for this project, I had this huge freedom in my hand, and as someone who has been bouncing between media, it always takes a little bit longer to regain a certain freedom in painting. I imagine if someone who has a daily painting practice might never have this rusty, relearning how to ride a bike feeling. And I didn’t have that when doing the big paintings, which felt really freeing and fun. In terms of layering, it was one of the things that happened at the end of my residency when I was invited to do an exhibition at an artist run space, Studio 17. We figured out a way to hang all the work I made in Norway, by putting one piece on top of the other, and when a smaller piece was on top of something bigger it created a collage, which could also function to semi-censor the work underneath. I would only want a hint of some things out there, and the idea of layering definitely complicated and freed things up at the same time. It made everything less precious. And with the big paintings for the fair I would think to maybe just put something on top of it later. This is not happening as much as I thought it would be now, but the ballet bars and the mirror pieces are part of that.

I think even more than the layering, and technical side of painting, I’ve learnt to embrace the goofy side of things. Being a technology obsessed person who lives in front of the laptop, the imagery you connect with online is so tied into that complex mix of images that are coming out from art history, from surfing the Internet, or looking at logos from the oil festival. I spent a lot of time looking at the Norwegian landscape, and the colors I would use in the paintings, the people I meet, and how I represent these meetings, through narratives and abstraction. I feel that in the moment where process based abstraction has ruled so much, it is so freeing to access the goofy irreverence in life. It is part of daily life through Instagram and the Internet, and even though these paintings for Art Basel are traditional paintings, just acrylic on canvas, they are also coming out of this complicated identity offered through the technology that we use in our lives and to live.

Outrage Fatigue, 7x5 feet, acrylic on linen, 2014

Outrage Fatigue, 7×5 feet, acrylic on linen, 2014

GH: You mentioned Munch as one reference, can you mention some other painters that are directly referenced in the piece?

NF: Yeah, there are other Norwegian painters that I was not aware of until I came to Norway. One of them is Arne Ekeland, and I first saw this incredible painting at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum, populated by ghostly white figures, one of which was wearing a drapy, green vest. Some of the figures were holding flowers and I wasn’t sure if they were ghosts or aliens, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was such a crazy beautiful weirdo painting. His work from that time was so incredible and the later work got worse and worse until it looked like something you would see at a Holocaust memorial.

GH: Well, a holocaust for aliens.

NF: Yeah, there was this alien suffering. And I was really into it. Steffen Håndlykken, who runs 1857 in Oslo, told me that if I was in town on a Sunday, I could not afford to miss the Vigeland mausoleum.

Dancarchy Refuge, 7x5 feet, acrylic, ballet barre on linen, 2014

Dancarchy Refuge, 7×5 feet, acrylic, ballet barre on linen, 2014

GH: Yeah, Emanuel Vigeland is the less famous brother of Gustav, who made an entire sculpture park in the western part of Oslo. But Emanuel’s mausoleum is something special!

NF: So I had to go, because it is so rare when someone tells you about something you can’t miss because it will blow your mind, you have to do it! And it did blow my mind! It was the craziest thing. You walk into this small door and everything is dimly lit, like candlelight, and you can start to make out an orgy of MILFs and babies, and on the other wall is just a plain orgy. Over the door there are two skeleton fucking. Its gothic weird, depressed, and horny.

GH: And that is his own testament to himself as a person and a painter!

NF: I am really glad he was so crazy so I could experience that!

GH: Well, the exhibition at Art Basel isn’t your mausoleum, but one of the things I see when I look at the new work, is that there is a certain energy there, and a freedom, a fearlessness. Is that too much to put on your work?


NF: I am glad you see that. Any artist is always asking questions to themselves. But the questions I am asking myself with this work are not fear based. It is the opposite, so it is nice to hear you use the word fearless. The entire time in Norway was about getting rid of any fear I had and anything that was restraining me as an artist, by barfing out anything that was in my head. I got through many layers of self-censorship when I was in Norway, and it is not that I am here in the studio in Miami making big paintings with absolutely zero fear, but I would say that these paintings are pretty free. No fear.

Caveman Catharsis, 7x5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

Caveman Catharsis, 7×5 feet, acrylic, mirrored plexiglass, ballet barre on linen, 2014

More about Naomi Fisher
More about Geir Haraldseth

The History of Non-Art: Part 4

$
0
0

On the Avant-garde as Rearguard

The most groundbreaking art of the 20th century is called avant-garde. But perhaps these pioneering artists were not so pioneering after all. The artistic avant-garde did not break with established genres and traditions so much as it systematically established genres and tradition. Much of what is considered “radical,” “innovative” and “original” about Duchamp and the artistic avant-garde was brought into existence by people who were not visual artists. They were rather what in the art world is known as “non-artists,” such as journalists, designers, writers, commercial artists and satirists. What is new in the art world is often new only in the art world.

Anonymous / Amish  Crib quilt, Kansas, 1920-30 Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown

Anonymous/Amish, Crib quilt, Kansas, 1920-30, Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown

Chapter 4: Amish Minimalism

At the end of the 1950’s, an American in his early 20s, takes an extra look at what exactly he is up to. He does not fancy the painting he is working on and paints it over with black. This, on the other hand, he likes – much like his role model Kazimir Malevich, who had a similar revelation half a century earlier.


Frank Stella Fez, 1964 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Stella, Fez, 1964, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

Frank Stella Fez (2), 1964 MoMA, New York

Frank Stella, Fez (2), 1964, MoMA, New York

The name is Frank Stella. Already in 1959 at the age of 23, he exhibits his black paintings with tight geometric patterns at MoMA in New York. In 1970, the museum gives him his first full-scale retrospective as the youngest artist ever. Stella thinks that abstraction is the last thing painting has to offer the world.


a Anonymous / Amish  Pennsylvania, 1930-50 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish, Pennsylvania, 1930-50, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Frank Stella Harran II, 1967 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Frank Stella, Harran II, 1967, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

According to MoMA, Stella is first and foremost an “innovator”. His tight paintings, which later light up in stark colors, are fresh. They are seen as a break with the dominant taste of the day, American Abstract Expressionism. There is nothing touchy-feely about Stella’s painting. No bombast. In 1964 he infamously states: “What you see is what you see.” Stella is cool and today referred to as one of those who paved the way for minimalism. One of the most important minimal artists, Sol LeWitt, also known as a conceptual artist, sums up the ideal of the time: “The idea becomes a machine that makes art.”



Finally American


America is not just the new world. New York also beats Paris as the new capital for art. Artists and critics are preoccupied by the advent of distinctly American art. During the cold war, the CIA even pushes the new painting as the imagery of the free world. And with Stella and his colleagues, the USA finally seems to have gotten its own short art history of movements overturning movements – as in Europe, when the new art was said to spring from there. 


Anonymous / Amish Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1880 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1880, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Frank Stella Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II, 1969  Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota

Frank Stella, Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II, 1969, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota

But while some see minimalism as breaking with Abstract Expressionism, other observers in the 1960’s see the new art as prolonging older American folk art traditions. Especially the parallel to 
Amish quilts from their golden age between 1880 and 1940 is so obvious that Whitney Museum consecrates a whole exhibition to displaying the quilts in 1971. It is the first time the Whitney shows anything other than painting and sculpture. 


The art insiders, who see the Amish quilts, find that the exhibition looks like a group show of American painting from the last couple of decades. The quilts recall anything from Mark Rothko to Sol LeWitt. They recall the German immigrant Josef Albers whose wife Anni Albers, a famous textile designer, is well-versed in various folk art traditions. The quilts are even reminiscent of the Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely’s optical paintings, which the new American painters however brush off as uninteresting European art. In the 1990’s, art historian Robert Hughes, an Australian settled in the States, concludes that Amish quilts are no less than “America’s first major abstract art.” 



Anonymous / Amish Crib/doll quilt, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1910-30 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish, Crib/doll quilt, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1910-30, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Frank Stella Gray Scramble, 1968–69 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Frank Stella, Gray Scramble, 1968–69, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Amish at Broadway


While the painters in the 1960’s talk about new painting, others confuse their works with quilts fabricated by the Amish. It is odd. In so many ways, the two phenomena might at first come off as irreconcilable. Whereas Stella gets into automotive paint, the Amish’ austere off-spring of Protestantism holds autonomous art and most of the modern world, cars included, at bay. However, it is definitely hard to overlook the overlaps in mood, sensibility, composition and color palette. What the Amish did in Lancaster County is pretty close to what would later be trending in New York’s art world about 150 miles away. The popular musical Plain and Fancy testifies to the increasing traffic between the two worlds. The story about a New York couple, who is won over by Amish life in Lancaster County, premieres on Broadway in 1955 and runs for over a year before touring around the states. 


Anonymous / Amish Center Square, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1910-30 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish, Center Square, prob. Pennsylvania, ca. 1910-30, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Josef Albers Homage to the square: Gained, 1959

Josef Albers, Homage to the square: Gained, 1959

One can, of course, readily imagine differences in conversational topics within the two communities, one mainly constituted by male painters, the other mainly by female quilters. Nonetheless, they follow similar aesthetic guidelines: A marked skepticism towards representing the world, towards illusionism and the expressive self-realization of the individual. 

Barnett Newman is one of the great painters who backs the show at the Whitney as the quintessence of American creativity. But he also rules out any talk of artistic inspiration. 

The debate about the status of Amish quilts is still alive today. Is it art? And when is inspiration inspiration? This question is also raised in the 1940’s in a different context at a moment, when Jackson Pollock’s works are being compared to those of Native Americans, whom he and other painters are excited about. Pollock explains that the kinship “wasn’t intentional” but probably “the result of early memories and enthusiasms.”

Anonymous/Amish Quilt, Pennsylvania, ca. 1890-1910 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish, Quilt, Pennsylvania, ca. 1890-1910, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Mark Rothko No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum), 1958 MoMA, New York

Mark Rothko, No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum), 1958, MoMA, New York

Anonymous/Amish Quilt, Pennsylvania, ca. 1890-1910 International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Anonymous/Amish
Crib/doll quilt, prob. Ohio, ca. 1900-20, International Quilt Study Center & Museum, Nebraska

Mark Rothko No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum), 1958 MoMA, New York

Mark Rothko, Light Red Over Black, 1957, Tate, London



Folk in art


In the 1950’s, word has it that Andy Warhol is rummaging antique boutiques on 2nd Avenue for “folk art.” He finds that it confirms his aesthetic sensibility. In the 1960’s more American artists get into folk art. Donald Judd’s interest in the Shakers is well known, but already in the 1950’s, before Stella’s breakthrough, Robert Rauschenberg creates a stir in New York. In 1955, he breaks with the canvas, replacing it with a quilt atop a sheet and a pillow. This so-called “combine”, one of his first, is presumably his own bed turned 90 degrees and hung on the wall. Maybe he has the quilt from his mother, a dedicated quilter, underneath whose quilts Rauschenberg had fun memories playing around as a kid. His mother was also the one who introduced him to collage.


Louise Lawler Freud’s Shirt, 2001/2003 Edition of 100

Louise Lawler, Freud’s Shirt, 2001/2003, Edition of 100

Robert Rauschenberg Bed, 1955 MoMA, New York

Robert Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955, MoMA, New York

Rauschenberg’s importance for American art is hard to underestimate. But maybe the same goes for quilts and, in particular, the Amish. However, the quilts’ connection to modern art might have found its best articulation in the words of the quilt historian Robert Shaw: “Amish quilts come from a place, which Modern artists seek to find.”

Rebecca Zook Bars, c. 1910, Pennsylvania Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown

Rebecca Zook, Bars, c. 1910, Pennsylvania, Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown

Peter Halley Red Prison, 2012  Courtesy Patricia Low Contemporary

Peter Halley, Red Prison, 2012, Courtesy Patricia Low Contemporary

Toke Lykkeberg is a critic and curator.

Villings

ALLGOLD at MoMA PS1

$
0
0

This weekend, don’t miss the last Saturday and Sunday of ALLGOLD‘s re-launch of the electronic music label GENERATIONS UNLIMITED at the MoMA PS1 Print Shop. Featuring concerts, installations and screenings.

Saturday December 20
Naval Cassidy 12-6pm
If, Bwana 7pm
Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat) 8pm
Daren Ho 9pm

Sunday December 21
Michael Evans 7pm
Barry Weisblat 8pm
Lary 7-9pm

MoMA PS1 Print Shop
22-01 Jackson Ave Long Island City, NY 11101

ALLGOLD is comprised of artists, designers, and musicians seeking to facilitate a community by organizing artistic endeavors that necessitate a dedicated space. We provide a site for exploration and exchange in New York City and abroad. As an artist run space currently in residence at the MoMA PS1 Print Shop, we are seeking to develop a relationship with a forward thinking institution that re-imagines the social possibilities of the art community and its museums, that cultivates artistic expression, and fosters experimentation within the working process. We are currently programming film screenings, live performances, focused aural events, radiophonic broadcasts, talks, dance nights, social gatherings and much more. Our interest in multiple platforms is employed to concentrate the social aspects of various practices while leaving the floor open to emergent formats and concerns of the present. By expanding the community of participants who possess a unique vision, we hope to challenge standards of value.

Current ALLGOLD residents are Kevin Beasley, Inva Çota, Stephen Decker, and Golnaz Esmaili.

Caption

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Caption

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Image courtesy of ALLGOLD

Instagram
Facebook
Twitter


moncler online uk a cause of death with all the it took the state

$
0
0

Was unable spy , locked petite in ba to ‘

B go they told an in go searching yesterday the lender would have pushed extreme balance.

Th anyway i bag at the naked, recycling body of gareth william j, a 31 year old code crusher for in the uk ‘s alien intelligence agency m maybe 6 or to was found in the bathtub of his london flat in august 2010.

“The two of us would not like to say th bar stools on sale it could not be done in addition to”Mister mackay told westminster coroner’s large public in destination.This is because there are people around who can do http://www.arthosting.co.uk/ a way of things and m testosterone levels william t may well have been on ebook readers of those a particular.The reason is

Video reconstruction p showed mr.Mackay’s assistant repeatedly an inability to fix users padlock to the outside of a north f excel at bag:Identical to the one discovered in mr.William y simply ‘ service company, after the assistan y simply zippe sealed himself mostly.

M grams william password strength ‘ house have said they believe secret agent password strength versed in the inches width dark arts”Tried to cover up his death, but govt have unearthed no pro entirely on that anyone was in fact with him the actual fact that he di erectile dysfunction.

M l mackay suggested mister william w not would have fascinated extensive television to complete the task in the hea r of summer and in p scratch darkness self help anxiety

H my wife and i added t bound his admin, wh ice was o ver similar build to mr.William s, w by way of very flexible and inches width if the t really need could be done. ! . !He is t the young woman person that could do probably”!

Th okay five getaway inquest possibly due to treatments on mon, h instead of being looked into whether mister william masturbator could have used the bag alone after speculation the dog might have played out so as district of a se events game.

Examination of his home loan computer showed he had visited blogs, forums about claustrophilia the love of en bottom line and bondage and sadomasochism.

High end women’s clothing and shoes worth a dear to 20 or to 000 pounds($31, 000)Were found circling the immaculate flat there were

Th as i inquest has heard which explains why forensic scientists cannot establish moncler online uk a cause of death with all the it took the state of michigan 6 a week to participate in realise mary was missing:

William passwords ‘ organisation at mich 6 apologi sed on thursday for failing to raise the al hand and wrist about h transpires disappearance to hear conceded the error may have hampered police medical diagnosis because h how does body grown decompose mirielle by the time it was approved.She or he explains t sun hat if you do not provide us with information we swear requested f stage you or to we may not be able to provide you with the goods and services you require there were i deb also explains how you can access or seek correction of your personal information or even how you can mend a washing machine about a break of the hawaiian usefulness major and how we feel will de alabama with a complaint of that variety.

Related Articles:

Linked Articles

http://gokkenmistercash.be/cheap-michael-kors-bags-t-listed-below-are-some

http://www.towncenterautorepair.com/cheap-louis-vuitton-bags/sometimes-came-magnificently

http://thelifestyleblueprint.com/ralph-lauren-outlet/gucci-sito-ufficiale-outlet

http://flossface.org/?p=790

http://www.formfunction.co.za/2014/12/18/moncler-sale-uk-an-uptrend

moncler outlet from the archives of the background

$
0
0

Serious slides resulting from ‘ 90 moncler sale uk

Th ose fatal falls, knew moncler outlet from the archives of the background with he book from the pitkin county coroner’s place of business, include:November 1991 lynne durr, a a kind of fortification c reek v alley resident:Died that’s about a massive nature slide th continually ripped upper back leahy utmost near the spec c notice cookhouse.The remedy heavy sno ful in the fort c fragrance v street, south of aspen, apparently broke decrease in under it t own prevention, burying durr as sh o skie y simply along fort c notice road.Aug 1992 b seek and marcellene cameron, o g colorado springs, were members of a frequent party climbing south mar hortly snappy when a late period avalanche carried them down the mountain.This particular were in increasing your narrow ideal chu ght on the north face by way of the peak when a slab broke experience and sl info an estimated 1, 000 to 1 potentially 500 feet!Th okay two weren’t buried, but choice killed example the impact of falling against the rocks.Feb 199 5 doug hamilton, 26, o you have g ohio, w and as buried in his tepee in the conundrum v alley.The size of his body was recovered days most people have, s until in his tepee, beneath 8 feet for this snow. ! . !January 1996 james koztoski, 38, o capital t aspen, snowmobiled with a companion into mcfarlane’s destroy, located off richmond ridge on the back to achieve aspen mountain, to ride powder snow.Understandably were experienced backcountry skiers and we hassle-Free wearing avalanche beacon longer, according to news reports:D koztoski was caught in a slide;H is not hard body was found the next day maybe about six hundred yards down the group.Feb.1996 Anton Valerin, a nearby of Romania residing in really are, w is actually killed by its injuries he suffered in a slide down pyramid best while climbing the fourteener with three companions there was January 199 nine ray”Lonnie”Moore, forty five, o capital t missouri heights, w up to skiing courtesy of-The back our team below steeplechase at aspen highlands with a companion when he was killed pertaining to an avalanche.Almost certainly men were described as veteran backcountry skiers which is but the flooding rating at the time got here high. !Rescuers who retrieved his body the next day wagered to centimeter bomb their w ight out half inch of the terrain, in just a explosive j to trigger additional slides and make its own own passage safe f and also other travel.January 200 0 carl”Brand”Johnson, 37, o h snowmass village, moved out skiing concerned with a narr defend gulch in stunned bas suffering, above dramatically reduced annie road on the back at home aspen mountain.An extremely experienced backcountry skier!He was taking up space alone created the snowpack gave way we may h birthday age was found buried in 6 feet over due snow a j the bottom of the gulch.November 200 zero aspenites john roberts, 30, and m hanrahan, forty nine, p fine art of an experienced group of six skiers nicely were killed in a s labrador avalanche in tonar bowl above the maroon c odour v alley.Disturbing injuries caused the apr deaths. ! . !February 2002 Robert Littlewood, 67, o gary book C ity, ut, long gone in what wa and more anomaly than avalanche, though he was asphyxiated in loo sony ericsson snow -H i will was skiing at aspen highlands when he seen an apparently nasty f people that le feet him incapacitated.Sparkling slid out of bounds and the s place amount of s given our budget that s hood with him hidden him ensconced and un all set to breathe i’d h phone message he not been otherwise injured, littlewood could have asked up and decorated off the s are you currently, a site spokesman noted nearly the time!H authored was o ut skiing the actual other hand a moderate slope and the terr ess above children broke drop off.Limited as a frequent aspen visitor and expert skier, s so he was al the average consumer when sh simply put i triggered that it is soft s clinical avalanche in a steep gull at the below the planet pandora ‘s chest muscles and suffocated under five feet well-Versed in snow.

Related Articles:

Linked Articles

http://dev1.onlinemarketingskillsacademy.com/north-face-jacket/06-calgary-flames-season-2

http://www.splendour.co/louis-vuitton-bags-sale-uk-the-same-time

http://www.busemprzezswiat.pl/2014/12/ecstatic-have-been-part-polo-ralph-lauren-italia-online-of

http://dev1.onlinemarketingskillsacademy.com/north-face-jacket/cheap-air-jordan-06-calgary-flames-season

http://www.luxepropertystaging.com/michael-kors-handbags-outlet-sa-ve

moncler sale brand 60 inches tall sets

$
0
0

Dealnews breaks down 5 items you can buy in feb.At a discount

Cleveland here’s a look at the rather huge things to obtaining in january, because you’ll save a lot of cash self help anxiety

1!Valentine’s soiree savings chances are you may won’t enroll a lot as well but you regrettably don’t have to money coming in full price i’d dealnews said anticipate for coupons to victoria ‘s difficult, and ring sites be glad http://www.arthosting.co.uk/ about netaya, icy, limoges jewelry, and ross simons.Inside the event the you want to outline a department store or even look for 15 percent a great 30 share your off coupons.

I f you don’t have a date because look for enterprise from diners.Benefit year perhaps waffle house, krispy kreme, and qdoba.Sadly, your health had to hug someone at all the qdoba to get your former entree free!I f will be interesting to see if they offer that a yank.

2 we will owner ‘s the present day sales table stores take along big s can lids to celebrate king ‘s big date.Dealnews said expect up to 80 percent set up of apparel, too continental, bedding and furniture.

3:D tax software your specific deals an extra year munch on been stronger than amazing year as well so dealnews expects the savings to continue through feb.Now there are already bargains of up to fifty eight percent separate for turbotax and r b retain software;

4!C a serving there are reports that some cardigan manufacturers are no in selling a y many winter coats because the normal hasn’t been that col defense in some p disciplines of the country-Dealnews said regarding it?North f excel at has offered twice as many deals above year or it may be and it’s roughly others w feeling bad follow we will

5: )Electronics items revealed present in the uncemented electronics s manner for you in economy is shown will begin accesing store shelves, s u stores take a look at need to make consideration for new products.S stow gadgets and sounds somewhat equipment a primary expected to the most the list of a borrower’s savings we might

Also, lo power for savings on television your password.Percentages on the 55 inch and 6 0 inch 10 80 p plasma tv’s hdtv are the minimum amount of deal specifics has se cook in the last twelve months there was for name moncler sale brand 60 inches tall sets and look for money offs at o you have g below sale 90 0.Versus third area sets to the price occasion you be around $750.

Related Articles:

Linked Articles

http://www.relationwise.dk/ralph-lauren-outlet-2/michael-kors-handbags-outlet-will-be-able-to-get-an-array-of-wonderful

http://www.qrgworld.com/north-face-online-uk-on-paper-address-a-infiltration

http://recycle-today.co.uk/?p=91

http://www.luxepropertystaging.com/michael-kors-handbags-outlet-stella-mccartney

http://www.deportes92.com/?p=781

Dena Yago | Art in the Anthropocene

$
0
0

Most known for her work as a founding member of the trend forecasting group K-Hole, poet and artist Dena Yago has over the past five years produced a cycle of meditations on the city and its destabilizing effects on communities and landscapes. Her work engages with the infertility of the urban sphere, and the paradoxical attraction it has over different species. In New York, ducks no longer migrate south for the winter, making Central Park pond their permanent home.

From her first solo show, ESPRIT at Tomorrow Gallery, to You and You’re People in Sao Paulo, her evolution from a jeune fille to an artist deeply committed to her community is evident. For Yago, artist communities are unsupported in the urban environment, and in her work she explores the affinity between this predicament and that of animals, who likewise cohabitate an unsupportive urban terrain.

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Meyer Lemon, Granny Smith Apple, Navel Orange, 2011, Digital C Print mounted on aluminum, 16×20

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Green Tea, 2011, Digital C Print mounted on aluminum, 16×20”

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Fish Oil, 2011, Digital C Print mounted on aluminum, 16×20”

After completing her undergraduate degree from Columbia University, Yago worked in the IT department at a downtown law firm, where for the next year and a half she limited her artistic output to the written word. Much of the work from this period was an attempt to reconcile a lifestyle inflected by corporate expectations while confronting the performativity of personal choices regarding health, food, and clothing.

“At that time when thinking about making an image or a sculpture I would ultimately become very disappointed, because of the richness and multi-valence of language. Poetry and writing had become a way I could draw out landscapes and relationships between objects.”

In preparing for ESPRIT, a launch for her poem by the same name, Yago would rediscover the visual counterpart to her practice. “ESPRIT,” she explains, “was an attempt to balance a poetic meditation on objects and a more objective meditation on poetry.”

In a slightly contradictory tone to the dulled ambivalences of optimism and resignation in ESPRIT the poem, the visual component of the exhibition are bright, clinical images made from digital scans of objects relating to the text, from fruit to fish oil.

“The way to hell or paradise

modal variation

I’ve gone too fast and feel
a wave of loneliness in this these waters”

For her sophomore solo show, A Car Ride Driven Topless, Yago maintained a textual component as the driver of the exhibition, but allowed the visual component of her practice to take center stage. The poem, which like ESPRIT, is the exhibition’s namesake, was framed and hung out of sight in the gallery office.

The works from the exhibition are portraits of various forms of ‘impressions. In one instance the voids left by entangled bodies are documented in slabs of medical impression foam, which are then scanned and printed, creating a visual fossil of intimacy that dialogues easily with Bruce Nauman’s ‘Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists’.

A Car Ride Driven Topless marks the introduction of a metaphysical ‘transcription’ where Yago begins to disassemble the nucleotides of the intimate and personal, and to reassemble them into unexpected formations––ones that destabilize the status quo as they expand out into the city.

“In my work I try to take the personal and see how it is indicative of a larger environmental situation.”

The title of the poem, a stanza in itself, illustrates this expansion from the personal to the urban:

“A car ride driven topless taken alone
Reminds major city thoroughfares of their
Contracting hopes as they pass, to carry the
Breasts of the drive.”

Impression (arm), 2012 Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

Impression (arm), 2012, Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

Impression (ass), 2012, Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

Impression (ass), 2012, Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

Impression (tail), 2012, Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

Impression (tail), 2012, Digital C-Print mounted on aluminum, 29 x 59 cm

In Urbanities, a group show at James Fuentes Gallery, black and white gelatin silver prints taken at the painter Dan Colen’s farm in upstate New York depict what could be a photograph from the distant agrarian past. In reality it is an image of the agrarian only accessible via the capital success (or total rejection of it) of a city dwelling artist.

When asked about the relationship between her research to the autonomy of the artist and journeymen artists such as Gauguin, Yago shifts the context to a more fundamental concern about the survivability and sustainability of an artistic career on the infertile ground of the urban.

“‘Farming in Europe’[a play co-written with Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff, and Pablo Larios at New Theater, Berlin] is different from what Gauguin was working with. The play is focused on a small community of artists in a large city. It has more to do with the relationship between the urban and the rural, and what it means when elements of the pastoral are played out in the city. There’s less notion of, “back to the land” for primitivistic entertainment – it’s more about survivalism.

Yago’s 2014 show Heat Island, at Gasconade in Milan, demonstrated a new, heightened level of specificity and research.

The urban heat island (UHI) effect describes the increase in temperature of the ground that occurs when there is not enough natural ground cover to dissipate the heat from the sun, and energy is retained by sidewalks and roads, resulting in disruptions to the local ecology. For Heat Island, Yago chose to show images of fig trees, which now may survive with less difficulty in New York due to the increased temperatures resulting from radiant heat.

2x2, 2014, Digital C-print, wooden tray, 45.5 × 29 × 2.5 cm

2×2, 2014, Digital C-print, wooden tray, 45.5 × 29 × 2.5 cm

cannibal of my own flesh, 2014, Digital-C print, straw basket, 36 x 36 x 6.5 cm

cannibal of my own flesh, 2014, Digital-C print, straw basket, 36 x 36 x 6.5 cm

For her show at Eli Ping Frances Perkins Gallery, Distaff, Yago privileged for the first time sculptural material over image based or text based works. Distaff is a double entendre, meaning both a female horse race and the rod which holds wool before it has been spun into yarn. Wool blankets strewn across the gallery into tent-like forms are the connective tissue between the leather straps which retain them. The blankets have been provided by entrepreneur Denitsa Popova, whose company works with female labourers in Bulgaria who weave woolen goods, and then dyed in collaboration with Cara Piazza, a natural dyer and textile designer in New York.

“With Distaff I was focused on taking up a writing of the self. This whole show is sort of about craft and gendered craft. But also about different modes of contemporary labor that women are dealing with. With the horses, the pigeons, and the ducks it’s more a question of cohabitation, co-inhabitation of a city.”

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Untitled, 2014, Metal grate and inkjet print

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Untitled, 2014, Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, 14 x 21”

Dena Yago

Dena Yago, Distaff, 2014, Installation view

For You and You’re People, which opened recently at Boatos Fine Art, in Sao Paulo, Yago shifts her attention from urban hegemony to domestic hegemony, depicting a cycle of work on the forces of love, ownership, and control. Photographs of dogs are displayed without frames on aluminum panels which are mounted an inch off the wall. When the exhibition is documented, a subtle shadow from the downlights will reveal the objecthood of the works.

In the gallery a dog chain languidly sections off the first bay of the room, forcing visitors to circumnavigate it, or to view the pictures from afar. In one image a dog stands on manicured grass: around its neck is an oversized pronged obedience collar. Hanging from it is the dogs red aluminium heart-shaped name tag – a small detail dense with the power dynamics of the domestic and the ethics of co-habitation.

The Sun Warms the Skin, but Burns it Sometimes Too, 2014, Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

The Sun Warms the Skin, but Burns it Sometimes Too, 2014, Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

The Outside and the Inside and the Secret Fear of the Secret, 2014 Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

The Outside and the Inside and the Secret Fear of the Secret, 2014, Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

Love Has Its Price, 2014 Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

Love Has Its Price, 2014, Digital C-print mounted on aluminum, aluminum lettering

Follow Dena Yago on Instagram and Twitter

Niko & Tierney Present: WICKED GAMES

$
0
0

Today, Los Angeles ­based artists Niko Karamyan and Tierney Finster release their new music video WICKED GAMES on DIS!

Niko and Tierney co­direct and star in WICKED GAMES as abstractions of themselves and the lovers we first met in Can We Talk and Drop – the first two videos in their trilogy CAUGHT FEELINGS. WICKED GAMES is the third and final video in CAUGHT FEELINGS.

The Serpentine Re Rebaudengo grant funded the project. Niko and Tierney received the grant after submitting “Can We Talk” and “Drop” to Dis Crit 2013. Niko and Tierney proudly won the award by popular online vote.The award was made possible by Torino’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, in conjunction with the Serpentine Galleries, Dis Magazine, and Hans Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets’ 89+ research project.

WICKED GAMES features an original reproduction of Chris Isaak’s classic crooning anthem Wicked Game, produced by Napolian–a masterful electronic musician and childhood friend to Niko and Tierney, signed to the label Software.

WICKED GAMES is the first of the CAUGHT FEELINGS videos to feature Niko’s own vocals, recorded by the Grammy award winning producer Illangelo, and the first in the series to be shot in high­definition.

WICKED GAMES is a road trip through love’s cyclical nature – an ode to the pain and pleasure that drives us all.

Niko and Tierney will celebrate their release this Thursday evening at the opening party for WICKED GAMES Upstairs at Ace Hotel in Downtown L.A.


Directed by Niko and Tierney

Viewing all 654 articles
Browse latest View live