Histories and Theories of Intermedia

INSANITY AND SOCIAL SCULPTURE - A Conversation With William Pope.L , Gerry Fialka

2011-03-02T10:12:00.000-08:00

The following is the complete interview. An edited version was published in ARTILLERY, Jan 2008 issue.

William Pope.L has crawled down Wall Street wearing a Superman outfit. He's chained himself to a bank and handed out five-dollar bills as reversed panhandling. He sat on a stack of newspapers in a Boston financial district while eating pages from the Wall Street Journal with a milk back. I was able to meet with Pope.L at the Santa Monica Museum of Art where his show "Art After White People: Time, Trees & Celluloid..." was up recently. During the interview, I was most impressed with his attentiveness to my questions and the fact that he actually did not mind thinking about them. That meant sitting in silence sometimes.

G- What is your earliest memory?
W- ...Sitting in my crib and looking at a piece of frosted plastic flapping in the draft over a window.
G- Is memory a blessing or a curse?
W- Memory is fiction.
G- What is your favorite form of information?
W- Hmmmm. Myth, stories...lies.
G- Why do humans collect information?
W- To organize the welter of uncertainty we are prey to.
G- Why do we have to organize it?
W - Because we are prey to it.
G- We don't have a choice?
W- No, no humans must pattern in order to survive...The drive to pattern moves beyond bodily survival and encompasses less material concerns such as psychology or spirituality.
G- McLuhan said, "You can't prove you are sane, unless you have discharge papers from a mental hospital." You've had a little therapy. Was it a positive experience?
W- Yes, but like any product, any service you purchase--let the buyer beware! Therapy is not a dvd; that is, you don't just turn it on and it goes by itself. But then maybe therapy should be like a dvd...with a playlist and extended versions of neuroses...
G- Is this tendency to collect info in our DNA or is it learned?
W- Has to be both. But "collect" sounds too clinical, too detached. It doesn't sound necessary and connected to the fray. So if you mean collect as in to collect firewood - yes! If you mean collect as in to collect stamps--yea, sure why not? But if you mean collect as in to gather--no! People make choices, judgements, interpretations--ants gather, people process.
G- The Bic pen is your main writing tool. What human sensorium do you extend with the pen?
W- My mind, the rhythm of my blood, my absence. The pen permits the world to get into me---through this itty bitty hole...
G- Has any film, song, experimental theater piece or performance art piece ever changed a law like Upton Sinclair's novel 'The Jungle' or Lewis Hines photographs did? Being the actual tipping point?
W-Social change is overrated. It's a logo. But it's necessary, partly 'cause it cannot be otherwise and partly 'cause I believe no one thing has ever produced significant social change on its lonesome, why expect it of art? I mean, has astrophysics ever changed a law?
G- When you first read Joseph Beuys's term "social sculpture," did you say to yourself: That's what I'm doing or that's what I'll do?
W- His large, clumsy and various body of work was not completely known to me at the time. I was 19. It was also very difficult to know where the term 'social sculpture' was harking to or from. And how was it articulated by what he actually made or did? and anyhoo, when did Beuys know he was doing social sculpture? Did he suddenly say one day, maybe he was in the shower or at the weiner bar, and he turns to Johann, the weiner-tender, and he says: "Hey, Johann! Hey! Hey! Hey, Johann! Guess what? I'm making social sculpture!" I like it that he might have said something like this but the guy was a kidder and a circus guy. He liked to mix it up with people and animals. That's pretty social. He also liked to make things with his hands--that's sculpture. There you go.
G- What does social sculpture enhance or intensify?
W- Its own ideology
G - What does it render obsolete?
W- Itself
G- What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced?
W- Itself.
G- When pressed to an extreme what does social sculpture flip into?
W- Popular culture.
G-What is more important, conviction or compromise?
W- Conviction.
G- Did you get this from your parents?
W- Yes, because they were convicted.
G- Literally?
W- Well, literalness is the new figurative.
G- Is ambition based more on fear or joy?
W- When you are younger - joy. When you are older, it's fear.
G- Duchamp said there is no art without an audience. What role does the audience play in your creative process?
W- Puts the fear in me.
G- One of your books lists Frank Zappa's 'Burnt Weenie Sandwich' on a timeline. He talked about creating for himself, and if others like it - great. Was that just romantic?
W- Just romantic? No. It was also good business to keep the audience in its place. It was also defensive. Zappa, like Miles Davis, was a transitional hybridist kind of over-compensating, super-prolific egotistical kind of figure. Both, over the course of their careers, worked with incredible supporting casts, with whom they had to negotiate in order to ensure their practice--the notion of claiming to only do some thing for oneself in a setting such as theirs is either ignorant or cynical or smart in some spoiled childlike way-- Legend has it that Zappa was miserable during his production of Captain Beefheart's 'Trout Mask Replica.' So--did he make himself miserable only for the sake of himself?...I don't know...
G- Some say Frank worked and Don (Captain Beefheart) played. One of your books also listed the Beckett quote: "Nothing is more funny than unhappiness." Steve Allen said, "Behind every joke is a grievance."
W- I think behind every joke is a calculus. How does this entity "the funny thing" work? Formally, the joke, 'The Aristocrats' is just a joke, but it has this infinitely extendable middle that unhinges it as a joke. The joke itself is a shell--the thing that's interesting is the joke's disregard for well-behaved form. If the well-made joke depends on conciseness and timing, 'The Artistocrats' depends on infinite duration and the unthinkable. I'd like to stage a performance of the telling of 'The Aristocrats'; one telling lasting 24 hours or one week, using multiple tellers all extending, elaborating on one single telling. Grrrrrr!
G- McLuhan explained 'Finnegans Wake' by James Joyce. We all use our creative powers while sleeping and dreaming. The artist dreams awake. Agree?
W- The modernist in me says yes. The postmodernist in me wants to say what the modernist says but can't
bring himself...hmmmm...I would simply say dreams are commercials. Power packets of condensed wafers of vivid moving images that are palpable yet impenetrable yet that do work. There can be no innovation without the gangplank of dreaming...
G- Humans often imitate the hidden effects of what we invent. Can you tell me any hidden effects of storytelling?
W- Hidden? I'm not sure, about hidden. But folks usually don't tend to think about the teleological aspects of stories, so in that way perhaps it is hidden. Teleology is, loosely, a projecting into the future. Stories, in essence, are just extension; always moving toward the next word, and the word after that--if there is always an 'after' then there can be no death...film, as a child of the story, performs perhaps even more palpably as extension. Bad films do this better than good films. Usually 'cause bad films tend to feel long; duration becomes palpable in bad film. Experimental film, as a genre, is good film that imitates the duration of bad film.
G- Can satire be destructive?
W- Sure.
G- I noticed you included in one of your books, the Lenny Bruce quote, "Satire is tragedy plus time." Is anger a productive emotion?
W- Sure.
G- Moshe Feldenchrist spoke of how one can actually incorporate a weakness with a strength, rather than try and overcome a weakness. Can you name a weakness that you've incorporated to form a strength?
W- My eyesight. I've developed a theory of the near-sighted. I like to think of works by Robert Ryman and another can depend on what happens at 2 inches and what happens at 10 feet. The space in between these two distances is a trip, a journey, a zoom, a tracking shot--its an analytical and illusory at 10 feet and its intimate and infantile at 2 inches.
G- How do you find peace of mind?
W- I ride my bike.
G- Me, too. Tell me something good you never had, and never want.
W- The Parthenon.
G- Wyndham Lewis wrote: "Artists are engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because they are the only people who live in the present." Well put, but it sounds elitist. What did he mean?
W- He's a modernist trying to write a job description.
G- Your performances are in the present. Kinda Zen, Be Here Now.
W- If there is a particular time for artists, it would be the past not the present. We are too afraid of the future and the present bores us. But the past is over, it's already a commodity.

above copied from:

TOWARDS A NEW HUMANISM (1970), Jean Toche

2011-02-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

Published in: Lurie, Boris; Krim, Seymour: NO!art, Cologne 1988

Art is guilty of the worst sort of crime against human beings: silence. Art is satisfied with being an aesthetic/machinery, satisfied with being a continuum of itself and its so-called history, while in fact it has become the supreme instrument through which our repressive society idealizes its own image. Art is used today to distract people from the urgency of their crisis. Art is used today to force people to accept more easily the repression of big business. Museums and cultural institutions are the sacred temples where the artists who collaborate in such manipulations and cultivate such idealization are sanctified. Art is today the highest symbol of the dehumanized process of business, and art which shows the repression of our society is automatically suppressed. Artists have become the celebrated buffoons of society's manipulators. Through dehumanization art has become devitalized; in most of the arts practiced today the very substance of emotion is purposely lacking. Emotion instead of being expressed, is being suppressed!

What do you think art is all about? Is it some sort of mythical abstract commodity that is traded on the market and guarded by the police? How can it be that art needs police protection? Only "valuable" posessions, property and money are given police protection - is that what art must be? Is property more valuable than life and freedom? Shouldn't art relate to life and freedom rather than property? Shouldn't the artist be concerned with basic emotional, psychological and moroi crises that confront us all? How can an artist be relevant when his art deals only with the business of art? How can we be concerned solely with a big white stripe across a white canvas, or a gigantic sculpture of a dollar bill, or the aesthetic relation of a colored sheet of metal on the floor, or the concept of a railway track leading nowhere in the desert, while we are faced with the slaughters of Songmys and Fred Hamptons?

Let's make no mistake. The artist is as guilt-y as the businessman. Through the production of an art commodity, the artist himself has become a businessman. In order to market his commodity and increase its value he must create a mystique about himself and his work. The gallery is the means through which the commodity is dispersed. The museum serves the purpose of sanctifying both the commodity and the artist. The collector is the stock-speculator. The corporation patrons use the commodity as a sanctifi-cation and sanitization of their image. The art magazines are the trade journals, the financial reports of the art world. And the critic serves the function of the whip-hand for all.

The artist has evolved from selling objects to collectors to showing costly technological environments subsidized by big business as a way to better their image, to finally simply selling ideas to the highest bidder. The artist has become a public relations man, the secret agent of business to subvert culture. The motivation of art as commodity is so strongly ingrained that artists today accept without blinking an eye the financial support of corporations and governments involved in human destruction and manipulation. Yes, the artist is as guilty of murder as the businessman.

Above copied from: http://www.no-art.info/toche/text/1970_human-en.html

The Metamorphosis of Art and Money, Michael Howard

2011-02-18T19:03:00.000-08:00

(2009)

Like many artists, I exhibit my work so that other people can experience it. Most artists also use an exhibition as a way to sell their work and thereby support themselves, or at least cover their expenses.

I have always shied away from selling my sculptures and paintings, not because I have any less need of financial resources for my work, but because the idea of ownership and attributing monetary value to art is so foreign to my experience. For me, a work of art is a meditation for inner contemplation, not an object to possess. Art is to be with, not to have.

In this short essay I outline why my drawings, paintings and sculptures are not for sale. More importantly, I explore an alternative way of thinking about art and money. In this context, I introduce my thoughts about a Community Art Association that would serve the artistic needs of the community in new ways by applying the principles of Community Supported Agriculture to Community Supported Art.

I offer these new ways of thinking about art as a stimulus to new ways of thinking about the dire social and economic challenges of our time. To all but the most entrenched they are a clear signal that we must begin in earnest to transform our economic thinking to serve the fullness of human life rather than the other way around in which human beings are expected to conform to the narrow demands of economic thinking.

The same inner spark that moves me to create new artistic forms also moves me to create new social and economic forms that are more in harmony with the spiritual intentions of my art.

*******

Natural artistic capacity is often referred to as a gift. For someone with an artistic gift it is unthinkable to not exercise it, for that would be to squander one’s gift.

One gift often inspires another gift. That is why those with an artistic gift have a deep need to share the fruits of their art with others. In the first instance, artists want nothing more than to share the spiritual experience of their creative work. Because of this, artists can be spiritually fulfilled simply in having other people show interest in their work-- authentic expressions of appreciation never hurt.

However, artists cannot live and work by appreciation alone; they must find ways to cover the costs of their materials and gallery expenses and to support themselves and their families. The idea of selling artwork is born from the simple chemistry of economic necessity and the fact that paintings and sculptures are physical objects. It is the union of these two factors that leads us to regard visual works of art as commodities.

Some artists see no problem in selling their work, while others, such as myself, feel extremely conflicted. This inner conflict seems to be rooted in the tension between the spiritual and physical dimensions of art. For much of my life I have assumed it was some shortcoming in me that blocked me from adapting to the ways of the world. The present economic upheavals embolden me to think that perhaps in reality the shortcomings lie more in the ways of the world, including the ways of the art market.

The convention of selling works of art assumes that there is some intrinsic relationship between their spiritual value and their monetary value. In reality, these are two distinct matters that have nothing to do with each other. We buy and sell a work of art, as with most other things, as a way to transfer the rights of ownership from one person to another. This transfer of ownership is facilitated by the exchange of an agreed upon monetary value. In order to determine the monetary value of an artwork both parties must quantify not only tangible factors, such as its size and materials, but also intangibles, such as spiritual quality and value.

There are two problems with this commonplace approach to selling works of art: the idea of ownership, and equating spiritual value with monetary value.

To understand this we need to take into account not only the perspective of the artist, but also the vital role of the viewer of art. It is widely recognized that the greatest masterpiece is incomplete as long as other people have not seen it. Simply by opening him- or herself to the spirit of an artwork, the viewer completes the creative activity of the artist. In contemplating a work of art the viewer both receives a spiritual gift and, at the same time, gives a spiritual gift to the artist.

A meaningful experience with a work of art, even when challenging, stirs in most people some feeling of gratitude and appreciation. Sometimes a work of art can so resonate in us that we may want to buy it so that we can experience it again and again. Most often we do not act upon this because our financial resources constrain us. However, even if someone can afford to buy a work of art, is ownership the only or best way to express our appreciation and support? Are there alternatives?

We do not readily apply the idea of ownership to a play, a musical composition, a poem or novel. If we enjoy a play, musical composition or a novel, we may see it performed a number of times, or buy a recording or printed copy. Often there is an original manuscript that someone owns, but usually this is approached in a spirit of public or communal stewardship. The idea of stewardship conveys better than ownership the sense that a performing or literary work of art is a spiritual gift belonging to human society as a whole and not a commodity to be owned by an individual.

The only explanation I see for our treating a visual artwork as a commodity for individual ownership is our inclination to attend to its physical properties more than its spiritual qualities. If the spiritual qualities of a painting or sculpture were our primary focus--and their physical properties were secondary--then we would regard a visual work of art as a kind of performance similar to a concert or play. As our experience of visual works of art focuses more on their spiritual quality then their physical properties, we are likely to feel more disposed towards stewardship then ownership of artwork.

One of the main advantages of stewardship is that it allows the spiritual and physical dimensions of art to be brought into harmony.

If an individual or community expresses interest and appreciation in a work of art, it is conceivable that the artist--or a representative of the artist--would give them the artwork for an agreed upon period of time. Such an arrangement would be founded on the understanding that their transaction concerns the transfer of spiritual stewardship and not physical ownership.

Clearly the artwork cannot be given away indiscriminately; therefore the artist or artist’s representative would retain the freedom to decide who will or will not receive the artwork and for how long. But having determined that an individual or a community is worthy of such stewardship, the significant aspect of this transaction is not so much in the outer arrangements as in the thoughts and feelings brought toward it. As one steward to another, each will experience the transfer of the artwork as freely given by the artist and freely received by the art recipient. The giving and receiving of the artwork are done in the spirit of a gift exchange.

If, for any reason, economic support were not an issue, then the transfer of the artwork would be complete through this purely spiritual gift exchange. This would be the case even if there were reason for both parties to sign a contractual agreement defining the parameters of the loan. However, if economic support is an issue, how can this be addressed, if not by selling the artwork? How does the idea of stewardship help us in this regard?

The transfer I described above can be understood as a form of lending rather than selling an artwork. The idea of loaning works of art gives both the artist and the art recipient more flexibility about agreeing to a temporary transfer of the artwork rather than a permanent one. It also suggests a familiar economic structure. Friends may loan something without introducing any economic considerations, but as strangers we usually expect to pay something. We call this renting. We pay not only to purchase and own a house or car; under certain circumstances we are prepared to pay a rent for their temporary use. So instead of selling or loaning it is conceivable to rent a work of art.

While renting art is a workable alternative, it does not adequately harmonize the economic exchange with the spiritual exchange. For this we must explore the feasibility and desirability of approaching the spiritual and economic exchanges as two distinct matters rather than bringing them together as we do when selling or renting a work of art.

The idea of stewardship guided us with the spiritual exchange of the artwork; it can also lead us to a new possibility when it comes to the economic exchange. When taking up the economic side of an art exchange, it is not helpful for the artist and art recipient to discuss the spiritual value of the artwork. The spiritual value of the artwork was implicit to and resolved in the spiritual exchange—where, by the way, economic considerations should not play a part. Now, however, it is appropriate for the art recipient to inquire about and for the artist to share a picture of the material costs, the amount of time spent in creating the work and other similar factors. The artist might also ask about the financial parameters that the art recipient is working within. Such a conversation could lead the artist to propose a level or range for the economic exchange.

Based on some variation of such interest in the actual costs involved in creating the art, including the artist’s livelihood, the art recipient who is motivated and guided by the idea of stewardship could regard making a financial contribution to the artist’s on-going work as part of that role. Rather than paying a certain sum in order to buy a work of art, through stewardship the art recipient could approach the economic side of the exchange also in the free spirit of gifting. A truly enlightened steward could offer economic support with the insight that he or she is not paying for the artwork already completed but is supporting the creation of new work. In this sense, the economic support is a gift into the future without regard for personal enrichment.

To outer appearances such an exchange of artwork and money may not seem so different from selling or renting. However, the inner shift from the attitude of ownership to stewardship is of the greatest significance because it allows both parties of the exchange to participate in an entirely different spirit.

Stewardship allows the artist to freely transfer the spiritual gift of his or her art to someone else. Likewise, stewardship allows the art recipient to freely receive the spiritual experience of the artwork and to freely give back their appreciation for its spiritual value.

Through stewardship the artist freely dedicates the physical and economic resources needed to create the work of art, and the art recipient freely contributes to the artist’s economic costs and livelihood.

When the spiritual give and take is treated independently from the economic give and take, the spiritual and physical dimensions of any art exchange are harmonized by being given and received in freedom.

A true work of art can be born only as a free creative deed. When the possessiveness inherent in ownership and the quantification of spiritual value into monetary value are layered onto a work of art, an unfree element is introduced. For a work of art to fulfill its spiritual service and find its rightful place in human life, the economic support of art must also be born as a free creative deed.

As a practical matter, it may prove burdensome for artists to negotiate the transfer of stewardship in every case. For this, it would be desirable for individuals who have the capacities and interest to take on the administrative activities related to the circulation and funding of the artwork within the community. This could be accomplished through a Community Art Association based on the principles of Community Supported Agriculture.

Such an association could come into being only if there is an unmet need living in the community from two sides:

Artists who are looking for new ways to serve the cultural/spiritual needs of the community. Individuals in the community who want to cultivate a deeper relationship with art and artists.

Artists who want to explore new social/economic forms for circulating and funding their work. Individuals in the community who want to explore new ways of supporting the arts.

I am hopeful that the time is ripe for exploring new ways for art to serve community life. I have every reason to believe there is a mutual interest and need living in non-artists as much as artists to make the arts a more vital and essential part of human life.

The prospect of forming a Community Art Association provides the immediate opportunity for artists and friends of the arts to come together for open and heartfelt conversation about the place of art in their lives. This would surely lead to an on-going collaboration in the sphere of art that would enrich the community as a whole.

Above copied from: http://www.livingformstudio.com/Livingformstudio-Michael_Howard/The_Metamorphosis_of_Art_and_Money_.html

I Am Searching For Field Character, Joseph Beuys

2011-02-14T09:53:00.000-08:00

Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

This most modern art discipline - Social Sculpture/Social Architecture - will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism.

Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized. Only a conception of art revolutionized to this degree can turn into a politically productive force, coursing through each person, and shaping history.

But all this, and much that is as yet unexplored, has first to form part of our consciousness: insight is needed into objective connections. We must probe (theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive potency (creativity).

We then reach the threshold where the human being experiences himself primarily as a spiritual being, where his supreme achievements (work of art), his active thinking, his active feeling, his active will, and their higher forms, can be apprehended as sculptural generative means, corresponding to the exploded concepts of sculpture divided into its elements - indefinite - movement - definite (see theory of sculpture), and are then recognized as flowing in the direction that is shaping the content of the world right through into the future.

This is the concept of art that carries within itself not only the revolutionizing of the historic bourgeois concept of knowledge (materialism, positivism), but also of religious activity.

EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who - from his state of freedom - the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand - learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER!

Self-determination and participation in the cultural sphere (freedom): in the structuring of laws (democracy); and in the sphere of economics (socialism). Self-administration and decentralisation (three-fold structure) occurs: FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL is born

Communication occurs in reciprocity: it must never be a one-way flow from the teacher to the taught. The teacher takes equally from the taught. So oscillates - at all time and everywhere, in any conceivable internal and external circumstance, between all degrees of ability, in the work place, institutions, the street, work circles, research groups, schools - the master/pupil, transmitter/receiver, relationship. The ways of achieving this are manifold, corresponding to the varying gifts of individuals and groups.

THE ORGANIZATION FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY THROUGH REFERENDUM is one such group. It seeks to launch many similar work groups or information centres, and strives towards world-wide cooperation.

Joseph Beuys, “I Am Searching For Field Character,” trans. Caroline Tisdall, Art Into Society, Society Into Art, (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974), 48.

Above copied from: http://www.beuys2.com/2009/11/background-text-on-social-sculpture.html

Thank you, Francis!, Francis Picabia

2011-02-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

January 1923

One must become acquainted with everybody except oneself; one must not know which sex one belongs to; I do not care whether I am male or female, I do not admire men more than I do women. Having no virtue, I am assured of not suffering from them. Many people seek the road which can lead them to their ideal: I have no ideal; the person who parades his ideal is only an arriviste. Undoubtedly, I am also an arriviste, but my lack of scruples is an invention for myself, a subjectivity. Objectively it would consist of awarding myself the légion d'honneur, of wishing to become a minister or of plotting to get into the Institute! Well, for me, all that is shit!

What I like is to invent, to imagine, to make myself a new man every moment, then forget him, forget everything. We should be equipped with a special eraser, gradually effacing our works and the memory of them. Our brain should be nothing back a blackboard, or white, or better, a mirror in which we would see ourselves for a moment, only to turn our back on it two minutes later. My ambition is to be a man sterile for others; the man who set himself up as a school disgusts me, he gives his gonorrhea to artists for nothing and sells it as clearly as possible to amateurs. Actually, writers, painters, and other idiots have passed on the word to fight against the 'monsters', monsters who, naturally, do not exist, who are pure inventions, of man.

Artists are afraid; they whisper in each other's ears about a boogey man which might well prevent them from playing their dirty little tricks! No age, I believe, has been more imbecilic than ours. These gentlemen would have us believe that nothing is happening anymore; the train reversing its engines, it seems, is very pretty to look at, cows are no longer enough! The travelers to this backward Decanville are named: Matisse, Morandi, Braque, Picasso, Léger, de Segonzac, etc., etc. ... What is funniest of all is that they accept, as stationmaster, Louis Vauxcelles, whose great black napkin contains only a foetus!

Since the war, a ponderous and half-witted sentiment of morality rules the entire world. The moralists never discern the moral facts of appearances, the Church for them is a morality like the morality of drinking water, or of not daring to wash one's ass in front of a parrot! All that is arbitrary; people with morals are badly informed, and those who are informed know that the others will not inform themselves.

There is no such thing as a moral problem; morality like modesty is one of the greatest stupidities. The asshole of morality should take the form of a chamber-pot, that's all the objectivity I ask of it.

This contagious disease called morality has succeeded in contaminating all of the so-called artistic milieux; writers and painters become serious people, and soon we shall have a minister of painting and literature; I don't doubt that there will be still more frightful assininities. The poets no longer know what to say, so some are becoming Catholics, others believers; these men manufacture their little scribblings as Félix Potin does his cold chicken preserves; people say that Dada is the end of romanticism, that I am a clown, and they cry long live classicism which will save the pure souls and their ambitions, the simple souls so dear to those afflicted by dreams of grandeur!

However, I don not abandon the hope that nothing is finished yet, I am here, and so are several friends who have a love of life, a life we do not know and which interests us for that very reason.

originally published in Littérature, new series no. 8, Paris, January 1923 as 'Francis Merci!'

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/1923picabia.htm

A Methodology for the Investigation of #beuYs2.0, Lena Docherty, January Lightfoot and Joseph Beuys 2.0

2011-02-02T19:12:00.000-08:00

Abstract

The important unification of semaphores and spreadsheets has visualized
2 bit architectures, and current trends suggest that the construction
of RAID will soon emerge. After years of unproven research into robots,
we validate the development of web browsers. In order to fulfill this
ambition, we argue not only that write-ahead logging can be made
relational, event-driven, and perfect, but that the same is true for
the transistor.
Table of Contents

1) Introduction
2) Related Work
3) Framework
4) Random Technology
5) Results
5.1) Hardware and Software Configuration
5.2) Experimental Results
6) Conclusion
1 Introduction

Researchers agree that multimodal configurations are an interesting
new topic in the field of hardware and architecture, and scholars
concur. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the
synthesis of SCSI disks, which embodies the essential principles of
separated cryptoanalysis. Further, In addition, for example, many
applications deploy omniscient modalities. Therefore, introspective
archetypes and XML do not necessarily obviate the need for the
visualization of web browsers.

VAST, our new system for scalable epistemologies, is the solution to
all of these issues. We view algorithms as following a cycle of four
phases: emulation, prevention, observation, and construction. Although
such a hypothesis is continuously an important mission, it is derived
from known results. However, object-oriented languages might not be
the panacea that physicists expected. Existing knowledge-based and
metamorphic methodologies use expert systems to synthesize homogeneous
configurations. It should be noted that our solution refines
knowledge-based archetypes. This combination of properties has not yet
been constructed in related work.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We motivate the need
for multi-processors. Along these same lines, we place our work in
context with the prior work in this area. On a similar note, we
validate the improvement of rasterization. Ultimately, we conclude.

2 Related Work

The concept of concurrent epistemologies has been improved before in
the literature [6]. A scalable tool for enabling Scheme
[10] proposed by Wilson fails to address several key issues
that our system does overcome [7]. However, these methods are
entirely orthogonal to our efforts.

Despite the fact that we are the first to explore web browsers in this
light, much related work has been devoted to the refinement of
write-back caches [11]. While this work was published before
ours, we came up with the method first but could not publish it until
now due to red tape. Garcia and Wu and Raman introduced the first
known instance of secure algorithms [11,15]. Further, the
seminal methodology by Kumar and Zhou [11] does not explore
multimodal symmetries as well as our solution [5]. Similarly,
F. Li [5] suggested a scheme for investigating decentralized
configurations, but did not fully realize the implications of real-time
algorithms at the time [12]. We plan to adopt many of the
ideas from this existing work in future versions of our methodology.
3 Framework

Motivated by the need for empathic archetypes, we now motivate a
design for verifying that information retrieval systems and
multi-processors [10] can synchronize to accomplish this
objective. Along these same lines, the architecture for VAST consists
of four independent components: real-time archetypes, autonomous
models, the synthesis of IPv4, and semaphores [1].
Continuing with this rationale, Figure 1 diagrams the
relationship between our system and IPv7. We show the flowchart used
by VAST in Figure 1. See our prior technical report[3] for details.

Furthermore, we hypothesize that multi-processors and
digital-to-analog converters can cooperate to realize this mission.
On a similar note, we assume that the little-known read-write
algorithm for the exploration of e-business is maximally efficient.
Similarly, we hypothesize that the well-known probabilistic algorithm
for the investigation of wide-area networks by Thomas and Williams
follows a Zipf-like distribution. Despite the results by V. Jackson
et al., we can show that DHCP [11,4] and DHCP can
interfere to overcome this riddle [13]. Thusly, the
framework that VAST uses is unfounded.
4 Random Technology

Since our methodology is based on the principles of robotics,
programming the client-side library was relatively straightforward.
While we have not yet optimized for simplicity, this should be simple
once we finish coding the codebase of 26 Ruby files. VAST is composed
of a centralized logging facility, a codebase of 52 x86 assembly files,
and a virtual machine monitor. Further, since our methodology prevents
permutable configurations, coding the server daemon was relatively
straightforward. One cannot imagine other solutions to the
implementation that would have made optimizing it much simpler
[8].

5 Results

Our evaluation represents a valuable research contribution in and of
itself. Our overall performance analysis seeks to prove three
hypotheses: (1) that the Nintendo Gameboy of yesteryear actually
exhibits better median response time than today's hardware; (2) that a
solution's traditional API is not as important as floppy disk
throughput when improving distance; and finally (3) that we can do much
to adjust a heuristic's energy. Only with the benefit of our system's
hard disk space might we optimize for simplicity at the cost of
usability. An astute reader would now infer that for obvious reasons,
we have decided not to investigate a method's code complexity. Our
performance analysis will show that increasing the hard disk throughput
of extremely relational modalities is crucial to our results.
5.1 Hardware and Software Configuration

Figure 2:
The average sampling rate of VAST, as a function of seek time.

Many hardware modifications were mandated to measure our system. We
scripted an ad-hoc prototype on DARPA's system to measure the
opportunistically "fuzzy" nature of interactive algorithms. Had we
deployed our atomic cluster, as opposed to deploying it in a chaotic
spatio-temporal environment, we would have seen muted results. To begin
with, we added a 8GB tape drive to Intel's desktop machines to probe
symmetries. We added 300MB of RAM to our network. We only noted these
results when deploying it in a controlled environment. Third, we
quadrupled the work factor of our planetary-scale testbed to better
understand the effective block size of our system. Continuing with this
rationale, we removed 200MB/s of Ethernet access from our "smart"
cluster to prove flexible theory's impact on the paradox of e-voting
technology. Finally, we reduced the floppy disk speed of our
decommissioned LISP machines.

Figure 3:
These results were obtained by Bose [9]; we reproduce them
here for clarity.

When E. Williams modified Mach's knowledge-based ABI in 1995, he could
not have anticipated the impact; our work here inherits from this
previous work. Our experiments soon proved that distributing our
partitioned, disjoint digital-to-analog converters was more effective
than interposing on them, as previous work suggested. All software was
compiled using AT&T System V's compiler linked against pervasive
libraries for studying expert systems. Second, Third, we implemented
our A* search server in enhanced C++, augmented with randomly discrete
extensions. We note that other researchers have tried and failed to
enable this functionality.
5.2 Experimental Results

Figure 4:
Note that power grows as hit ratio decreases - a phenomenon worth
developing in its own right.

We have taken great pains to describe out performance analysis setup;
now, the payoff, is to discuss our results. Seizing upon this ideal
configuration, we ran four novel experiments: (1) we asked (and
answered) what would happen if provably wireless interrupts were used
instead of Lamport clocks; (2) we measured floppy disk throughput as a
function of optical drive space on a NeXT Workstation; (3) we compared
seek time on the TinyOS, EthOS and AT&T System V operating systems; and
(4) we asked (and answered) what would happen if extremely separated
object-oriented languages were used instead of information retrieval
systems. All of these experiments completed without noticable
performance bottlenecks or access-link congestion.

We first shed light on the second half of our experiments as shown in
Figure 2. Operator error alone cannot account for these
results. The key to Figure 3 is closing the feedback
loop; Figure 4 shows how our framework's popularity of
forward-error correction does not converge otherwise [2].
Similarly, the key to Figure 4 is closing the feedback
loop; Figure 2 shows how our framework's flash-memory
speed does not converge otherwise.

Shown in Figure 3, the first two experiments call
attention to our system's expected power. Note the heavy tail on the CDF
in Figure 2, exhibiting duplicated work factor. Operator
error alone cannot account for these results. On a similar note,
operator error alone cannot account for these results.

Lastly, we discuss the first two experiments. These time since 1980
observations contrast to those seen in earlier work [14], such
as Y. Maruyama's seminal treatise on massive multiplayer online
role-playing games and observed flash-memory space. Second, the curve in
Figure 4 should look familiar; it is better known as
Hij(n) = n. The many discontinuities in the graphs point to muted
hit ratio introduced with our hardware upgrades.
6 Conclusion

In conclusion, VAST will solve many of the issues faced by today's
physicists. We proved that the infamous robust algorithm for the
refinement of 802.11 mesh networks by R. Agarwal et al. [7]
runs in Q(n2) time. Further, the characteristics of VAST, in
relation to those of more seminal approaches, are shockingly more
typical. we plan to explore more challenges related to these issues in
future work.
References

[1] Beuys, J., Garcia, a., and Backus, J.
Improving Byzantine fault tolerance using embedded archetypes.
Journal of Flexible, Knowledge-Based Communication 1 (Oct.
2001), 75-98.

[2] Blum, M.
Contrasting massive multiplayer online role-playing games and
semaphores.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Event-Driven,
Knowledge-Based Theory (Mar. 2002).

[3] Clark, D.
A case for suffix trees.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Pseudorandom,
Event-Driven Methodologies (Dec. 2001).

[4] Johnson, D.
Simulating multicast frameworks and hash tables using
grimyladin.
Journal of Symbiotic Methodologies 16 (June 1999), 20-24.

[5] Knuth, D.
Decoupling the Internet from checksums in DHCP.
In Proceedings of FOCS (Sept. 2005).

[6] Krishnan, M., Zheng, M., Lightfoot, J., Ullman, J., Raman, S.,
Kumar, B., Bhabha, I., and Kahan, W.
Decoupling B-Trees from the Turing machine in Byzantine fault
tolerance.
In Proceedings of SIGMETRICS (June 1999).

[7] Kubiatowicz, J., and Yao, A.
The relationship between evolutionary programming and hierarchical
databases.
Journal of Virtual, Lossless Configurations 72 (Oct. 2005),
55-60.

[8] Leary, T.
Kayko: Construction of multi-processors.
Journal of Large-Scale, Concurrent Modalities 211 (Dec.
1992), 20-24.

[9] Lightfoot, J.
Decoupling digital-to-analog converters from sensor networks in
redundancy.
Journal of Automated Reasoning 92 (Jan. 2002),
157-191.

[10] Martinez, H. I., Zhou, R., Quinlan, J., Ullman, J., and Sato,
V.
Emulating B-Trees using ambimorphic configurations.
In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Conference
(Oct. 1994).

[11] Miller, V. S., and Needham, R.
A methodology for the study of DNS.
Tech. Rep. 52-129, IBM Research, Sept. 2003.

[12] Ramasubramanian, V.
Dicta: Improvement of RAID.
Journal of Random Configurations 6 (Dec. 2004), 46-57.

[13] Ritchie, D.
Visualization of compilers.
In Proceedings of PLDI (May 1999).

[14] Shamir, A., and Robinson, Q.
The effect of encrypted modalities on e-voting technology.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Robust, Signed, Classical
Methodologies (Feb. 1996).

[15] Zheng, Z.
Improving DNS and consistent hashing using Fay.
In Proceedings of NSDI (Jan. 2004).

Above copied from: http://www.beuys2.com/2009/07/methodology-for-investigation-of_11.html

manifesto, paul de vree

2011-01-29T19:12:00.000-08:00

manifesto 1967

ALL PREDICATION IS AN ASSAULT UPON THE FREEDOM OF MAN. POETRY, AS I CONCEIVE OF IT, IS NO LONGER THE HANDMAIDEN OF PRINCES, PRELATES, POLITICIANS, PARTIES, OR EVEN THE PEOPLE. IT IS AT LAST ITSELF: A PHONETIC PHENOMENON IN ITSELF VOCAL OF PSYCHOPHYSICAL ORIGIN AND OBJECTIVELY STRUCTURED WITH THE HELP OF WORDS, SOUNDS AND MECHANICAL AND GRAPHIC MEANS (RECORDINGS AND SCRIPTS)

THE PURELY VISUAL VERBAL DOES NOT EXIST. IT ROUSES ALWAYS THE SOUND OR NOISE FROM WHENCE IT SPRINGS AND FOR WHICH IT IS THE SIGN. THE POEM IS EITHER AN AUDIBLE EMISSION OF RESPIRATION (AUDITION) OR A SILENT ONE (READING), CREATIVELY ADULATED, PROVOKED BY THE NEED TO SAY SOMETHING, IT REFERS TO NOTHING OTHER THAN THE SENSIBILITY OF BEING (PRESENT AND PLANETARY) THIS IS WHAT I UNDERSTAND AS THE OBJECTIVE INTENTION OF VOCAL SONORITIES: A COMMUNICATION IN CONCERT OF SPONTANEOUSLY CREATIVE VIBRATIONS.

PHONETIC POETRY CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT A REINVENTION OF THE RECITATION, THAT IS TO SAY THE SONORIZATION OR THE MANIPULATION OF SOUND. ACTUALLY ALL DEPENDS UPON THE NEW POSSIBILITIES OF MECHANICAL EXPRESSION FOR REALIZATION OF THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TOTAL SENSIBILITY OF THE POEM, ITSELF AT BOTTOM PART OF THE TOTAL KINETIC SPECTACLE WHICH HENRI CHOPIN PROVIDES THROUGH THE INEVITABLE USE OF THE MACHINE WHICH BREAKS THE VOICE UP INTO WAVES.

THE SOUND WORK IS THE RESULT OF TEAMWORK UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE POET, AND THE IDEAL REPRODUCTION IS THAT WHICH IS CUT ON HIGH-FIDELITY RECORDS. THERE AGAIN THE MACHINE IS INDISPENSABLE. IT GOES \WITHOUT SAYING THAT THE RECITOR (IF IT IS NOT THE POET) AND THE ENGINEER OF SOUNDS (\WHERE MY RECORDINGS ARE CONCERNED) HAVE CONTRIBUTED PERSONALLY TO THE ORIGINALITY OF THE REALIZATION. THE DAWN OF THE ERA OF ELECTRONIC POETRY IS NO LONGER A FIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION.

above copied from: http://www.391.org/manifestos/1967pauldevree_manifesto.htm

I ACCUSE, Jean Toche

2011-01-26T18:52:00.001-08:00

I ACCUSE
Dedicated to Marcel Broodthaers

Judson Gallery | New York | May 10, 1968

"I am a prostitute,
You are a prostitute,
He is a prostitute,
She is a prostitute,
We are all prostitutes..."
That's what our trivial "Culture" is all about. WE MUST DESTROY THE CULTURE.
This is the time for a total change.
This is the time to be concerned with Man's development, not his exploitation.
This is a LIGHT SIT-IN.
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face!
* * * *
I AM JEAN TOCHE.
I work with aggressive lights,
I work with aggressive sounds,
I work with aggressive situations.
I am against aggression.
* * * *
I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE.
I am subversive, and I am a saboteur. I question the very validity of the Art Establishment. I question the very validity of that language called "ART". Can Art still fulfill our basic human needs, if it continues to compromise with a cultural society which is engaged in the very process of alienation of the masses, and repeatedly ignores, consciously, the very needs of that human race? In the early ages, art was not meant as art, but as a projection of the primitive urges of man, in order to appease the terrifying forces of nature. Did art not lose all its meaning by becomimg a merchandise, starting with the patronizing by the churches and the aristocracy, followed by the process of industrialization and business deals of western middle class man, including today's museums? Has art not become a weapon for the cultural gangs to corrupt people, a new kind of opium for the people?
* * * *
To shout fire, when there is a fire, is not enough. It is not necessary "ART" either. It is how you do it, which makes it art. But has not the very notion of "ART" become obsolete, because of its constant refusal to face the present crises of Humanity? Has real life, King's death, the shooting of Rudy " THE RED ", the destruction of Columbia University, Khe Sanh, made even Destruction in Art inadequate, because of "art" limitations?
* * * *
I HAVE A PROBLEM TO SOLVE.
Has the time come for the artist to make a choice: Either to stay the adulated "creative" toy of an aristocracy engaged in the most atrocious hypocritical games of corruption, domination and violence, and so probably become irrelevant and meaningless, like an old rotten core. Or, to involve himself more directly in human crises, and maybe become something more complete than just an "artist", something which would include today's social problems, and a definite commitment to the development of the human race, as well as a firm stand against Man.s exploitation and manipulation. This might include bringing the arts into the streets, going on the barricades when necessary, and playing an active role - how, this has still to be defined - in this cultural revolution, which is shaking and knocking down, all over the world, and right now, the very foundations of a very decadent western white empire.
* * * *
When all over the world students are revolting against the corrupt carcan of the Establishment, is it right for the artist to stay passive and indifferent? Can art ever evolve in a more mature and human form, or will it disappear in its obsolescence and its corruption?

Can I go on just being an "artist"?

above copied from:http://www.no-art.info/toche/text/1968_accuse-en.html

Art and Thingness, Part Three: The Heart of the Thing is the Thing We Don’t Know, Sven Lütticken

2010-11-14T03:57:00.000-08:00

→ Continued from “Art and Thingness, Part Two: Thingification” in issue 15.

In Hans Haacke’s pieces Broken R.M… and Baudrichard’s Ecstasy from the late 1980s, Duchamp’s readymades are subjected to transformations that highlight the problematic use of the readymade in the commodity art of the era: in the latter piece, a gilded urinal sits atop an ironing board; water is pumped through it from a bucket in a closed, self-referential loop. After Warhol’s canny exacerbation of the emerging image of the commodity, and the focus on the “picture” in late-1970s Appropriation Art, the commodity art of the 1980s focused on objects once more, but this time on objects devoid of the Duchampian tension between sign and thing, between a utilitarian object and the meanings projected onto it; these objects were programmed from the beginning to signify, to create value through the theological whims of their designed interplay. While Haim Steinbach’s shelves demonstrate this mechanism with considerable elegance, they remain in its thrall. Haacke’s objectified comments on 1980s commodity art are fitting epitaphs for such an art of the instrumentalized readymade, and his body of work as a whole can be seen as a sustained attempt to think through the readymade’s limitations as well as its consequences.

In the 1920s, both Lukács in History and Class Consciousness and, slightly later, Heidegger in Being and Time, critiqued the subject-object dichotomy in modern philosophy.1 Both authors attempted to develop an analysis of the complex situatedness of praxis in the world, but in Heidegger’s case this praxis was a depoliticized and dehistoricized Sorge, a taking-care of being along the lines of the earth-bound farmer taking care of the Scholle (the earth shoal, a favorite term in reactionary and Nazi philosophy during the 1920s and 1930s). Heidegger recalled that the term Ding originally referred to a form of archaic assembly, and in recent years Bruno Latour has latched onto this genealogy to redefine things in terms of “matters of concern” rather than “matters of fact,” as quasi-objects and quasi-subjects that fall between the two poles of the dichotomy.2 As I have argued—contra Latour—this needs to be seen as a critical project within modernity that brings together thinkers and artists (and not only them, obviously) that would be bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble.

Last year, in an exhibition that was part of a series of events on “social design,” curator Claudia Banz combined elements from the publications of Victor Papanek with a selection of multiples by Joseph Beuys.3 Bringing together Papanek’s designs for cheap and low-tech radios and televisions for use in third-world countries with works such as Beuys’ Capri Batterie (1985) and Das Wirtschaftswert-PRINZIP (1981), the exhibition subtly shifted the perception of Beuys’ works in particular. The works were displayed in the usual way, in display cases that tend to turn them into relics; yet the proximity of the radio and TV designs brought out aspects of these things that often remain dormant. Yes, the appropriated East German package of beans with its non-design has become a meta- and mega-fetish like so many other readymades, yet the constellation in which it has been placed opens up new connections, a new network of meaning. The Capri Batterie, like the 1974 Telephon S-E made from tin cans and wires, may be tied up with mystifying anthroposophical conceptions of energy and communication, but this combination emphasizes that it would be a mistake to see such Beuysian things purely as expressions of a private mythology. In a different field and in a different register from Papanek’s work, they too are counter-commodities—and while it would be a mistake to lose sight of their compromised status, it would be an even bigger one to be content with that observation.

Even if we were to disregard Beuys as regressive and unmodern, many of the 1960s and 1970s practices that are most steeped in the tradition of critical theory that Latour seeks to toss into the dustbin of history show that a critique of commodification is something rather different from a “ceaseless, even maniacal purification.” Martha Rosler’s various versions of her Garage Sale piece involve her mimicking this American suburban version of the Surrealists’ flea market; having been advertised in art and non-art media, it is a more or less normal garage sale to some, and a performance to others. However, Rosler noted that the setting transformed even the art crowd into a posse of bargain hunters, who did not pay that much attention to the structure of the space, with odd and personal objects tucked away in the outer corners, or to the slide show and sound elements. For a 1977 version, Rosler assumed the persona of a Southern Californian mother with “roots in the counterculture,” who on an audiotape that played in the place mused on the value and function of things: “What is the value of a thing? What makes me want it? . . . I paid money for these things—is there a chance to recuperate some of my investment by selling them to you? . . . Why not give it all away?” The woman goes on to quote Marx on commodity fetishism and to wonder if “you [will] judge me by the things I’m selling.”4

In such a work, the object is placed in a network that is social and political, not merely one of signs. Semiosis is always a social and political process. There is a diagrammatic dimension to such a piece, as there is, in different ways, to many works of Allan Sekula or Hans Haacke. If the diagram in Rosler’s piece is one that primarily concerns the circulation of objects in suburban family life, a number of Haacke’s works contrast the use of corporations’ logos in the context of art spaces, where they become disembodied signs, with those corporations’ exploitation of labor or involvement in authoritarian or racist regimes; Sekula’s Fish Story and related projects chart the largely unseen trajectories of commodities and workers on and near the oceans. Things and people. These practices, in particular those of Haacke and Rosler, spring from a critical reading of both the Duchampian heritage and the Constructivist project, which was being excavated in the same period by art historians, critics, activists, and artists. In their reading of these two genealogies, these artists recover some of the impetus behind the Constructivist/Productivist attempt to redefine the thing.

A diagrammatic impulse, an attempt to trace the trajectories of people and things, can also be seen in recent work such as Sean Snyder’s Untitled (Archive Iraq) (2003–2005) and related pieces, tracking the circulation of various types of commodity in the contested terrains of Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. When Snyder, in his photo pieces and films, zooms in on Fanta cans or Mars bars, on Casio watches or Sony cameras, the “social relations” between these commodities are not limited to the fetishistic coded differences celebrated by commodity art.

Filmic montage can be one tool for keeping track of things, of comparing different modes of production and distribution. In this respect, Allan Sekula’s films and Harun Farocki’s installation Vergleich über ein Drittes (Comparison via a Third) (2007) are strong demonstrations of the possibilities of filmic means—and in Farocki’s case, of their use in multi-channel video installations. A diagrammatic impulse can also be discerned in such filmic pieces; but here, as in the case of Snyder’s Untitled (Archive Iraq), the aim is not to strive for some suggestion of complete transparency that would reduce objects to geometric points for a sovereign subject to grasp at a glance. Rather, the objects and subjects are placed in a jumbled constellation in which they become problematic, questionable things and people. Of course, the artificial limitations on the availability of film and video pieces in the contemporary art economy make such pieces highly questionable things in their own right, and crucial projects such as Snyder’s Index, which involves the digitization and uploading of the artist’s archive, address the limitations of the dominant form of media objecthood.

The limitations imposed on the circulation of commodities by intellectual property law are also scrutinized in a number of projects by Superflex—commodities that include, in their current project at the Van Abbemuseum, a wall piece by Sol LeWitt. In a less interventionist and (in the military sense of the term) offensive way than Superflex, Agency/Kobe Matthys charts the legal battles waged over the use of objects, images, and programs by collecting, investigating, and exhibiting specific things. A recent installation in Anselm Franke’s “Animism” exhibition at Extra City in Antwerp contained a number of things that have been subject to litigation, as instances in which human authorship is thrown into question because of the role played by the non-human (technological, animal), with items ranging from bingo cards to a video game and a German TV broadcast of a circus act with elephants. Exhibited in a space lined with crates containing many more items, the space seemed to channel Surrealism via Mark Dion. Some of the things on display had an anachronistic quaintness to them, yet Matthys’ classified readymades go beyond the conventional exacerbation of the commodity’s theological (or animist) whims.

There are, of course, other important examples of practices that seek to push the work of art to a point where it reveals itself to be a special category of thing that reflects (on) the state of things. Here one may think of Michael Cataloi and Nils Norman’s “University of Trash” project, with its investigation into various alternative economies and social structures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s, and of Ashley Hunt and Taisha Paggett’s project about the garment industry and its workers, with its charting of the movements of contemporary products across the globe. Some of these projects and practices may be more successful than others, but an important characteristic that they share is that their embrace of the work of art’s “thingified” status is not a capitulation, an assimilation of the work of art to the dreaded world of hat racks and other arbitrary objects. Rather, such projects are interventions into our society’s production of (in)visibility. If anything, they can more properly lay claim to continuing the project of modern aesthetics than those intent on erecting a wall around the work of art; after all, from Schiller and the Jena Romantics onwards, the modern aesthetic project was expansive, aimed at intervening in the “art of living.”5

However, avant-garde attempts to abandon autonomous art in favor of a complete integration of art and life were as misjudged by critics as modernist rappels à l’ordre that limited art to reflecting on the unique properties of its mediums, or later attempts to limit Conceptual Art to a series of proposals about its own status as art and nothing else.6 Even Constructivist forays into production in the early 1920s depended on a specialist sphere of practice and discourse whose confines they sought to escape—a sphere that would soon be destroyed by Stalin. On the other hand, a properly reflexive work of art can never be only about its status as art, about “art itself.” Since art’s apparent autonomy is socially conditioned, the obverse of its heteronomous inscription in a global capitalist economy that penetrates into ever more realms of life and parts of the planet, the work of art’s self-reflection is a sham it if is not potentially about everything, and every thing.

above copied from: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/139

Art and Thingness, Part Two: Thingification, Sven Lütticken

2010-11-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

→ Continued from “Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball, Duchamp’s Carrot” in issue 13.

In a text written in response to the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet avant-garde, Carl Einstein claimed that tradition “piles up in the object”; that the object is a “medium for passive thinking,” bound to tradition and bourgeois property relations; and that in order to “assert the human person, objects, which are preserve jars, must be destroyed.” Going so far as to state that “every destruction of objects is justified,” Einstein proclaimed a “dictatorship of the thingless.”1 Einstein’s text seems to reflect simplistic narratives in which modernity is virtually synonymous with a purist, idealist suppression of the thing. Of course, such idealist tendencies did exist, but so did opposition to them. As if responding to Einstein’s quasi-suprematist essay, Adorno once remarked that “someone who looks upon thingness as radical evil, who wants to dynamize all that exists into pure actuality, tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien—which has lent its name to alienation, and not for nothing.”2

In a Latourian manner, one might present the recent turn to the thing as a break with the project of modernity: after all, isn’t modernity in theory and in praxis the desperate attempt to (re)form the world in accordance with the will of an autonomous, imperious subject that turns things into ordered and emaciated objects? Such an opposition, however, is dubious; as Adorno’s remark may serve to recall, it is not only manifestly “anti-modern” modern philosophers, such as Heidegger, who prefigure the recent thing-turn. Adorno too was far from embracing objects or things as they were, rooted as his thought was in the Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism and the Lukácsian critique of reification or Verdinglichung. After all, isn’t the very term Verdinglichung—literally “thingification,” to which an important section of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is dedicated—manifestly idealist?

For all the problems with History and Class Consciousness—of which Lukács was well aware later in his life—it remains worthwhile to trace the main steps of its argument, whose repercussions can scarcely be overestimated. Lukács’ starting point is Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, in which “a definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things,” which Lukács characterizes as “the basic phenomenon of reification.”3 But the fetishist illusion of commodities—as “social things” whose exchange value appears to follow gratuitous whims—is only one half of reification; it is not only that the commodities form a spectacle of quasi-subjects, but the subjects themselves, as workers, are transformed. In consequence of the rationalization of the work process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already preexisting and self-sufficient; it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized, his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.4

According to Lukács, modern philosophy reflects reified consciousness. Starting with Kant, philosophy had set itself “the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.”5 However, absolute idealism with its exclusive focus on the absolute “I” proved untenable, as idealist philosophy had to take its departure precisely from the split between subject and object, which it sought to overcome, to sublate—to contain within a higher unity from which the philosophers “could ‘create,’ deduce and make comprehensible the duality of subject and object on the empirical plane, i.e. in its objective form.”6 The world was now conceived in terms of a dialectical process that shattered the original, absolute unity, but restored it on a higher level. It is precisely where idealist philosophy finds its limit in the dialectical process—which it conceives in abstract terms as being enacted by subject and object—that Lukács begins to reflect upon an economy in which the subject is alienated from its objective conditions, and in which the products of labor take on quasi-subjective qualities.

Marx shattered the philosophical deadlock of idealism by using the dialectical method to analyze dialectical processes between classes. Lukács himself, however, gave a rather idealist interpretation to this materialist turn; as he later admitted, his explicit presentation of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history was still highly idealist.7 In his autocritique, he also argued that he had unduly equated reification with alienation, and furthermore that he had tended to identify alienation with objectification; in fact, objectification is unavoidable, as any type of society must to some extent objectify itself in practice, in physical objects as well as in social structures. Alienation, on the other hand, based on commodity fetishism or reification, is not a given; structures that alienate man from his own nature must be abolished.8

If at first sight Carl Einstein’s text appears to merely celebrate an idealist triumph of pure spirit—of the abstracted subject—over objects, on closer inspection it becomes clear that Einstein too wishes to go beyond the dichotomy of subject and object. Stating that “the object no longer dominates vision; rather vision is now directed against the object, ruthlessly, dictatorially,” Einstein proclaims a project of revolutionary Entdinglichung (a reversal of Verdinglichung), resulting in a “dictatorship of vision, ascetics of the object, destruction of facts, and accordingly, renunciation of the self.” It is not so much a matter of the subject triumphing over the object, but of a new vision that creates a new “fluctuant experience of space.”9 In admittedly idealist terms (that also recall some of Raoul Hausmann’s writings from the period), Einstein here sketches a situation in which a form of praxis generates experiences that undermine any stable dichotomy of subject and object.

In this sense, he comes close to the constructivist/productivist theorists of the veshch, the object that would offer an alternative to the “idolized” commodity-object of Western capitalism. Writing from Paris in 1925, Aleksandr Rodchenko wrote that “the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades, and not these black and mournful slaves, as they are here.”10 Later, Brecht would paraphrase Hegel by stating that “things are occurrences” rather than immovable states.11 We are dealing here with a constellation of Marxian attempts at redefining the role of objecthood and thingness—a constellation that also includes Adorno, in whose development History and Class Consciousness played a crucial role. Adorno’s most developed thoughts on the matter are to be found in Negative Dialectics, where he places great emphasis on the dangers of equating objects with alienation. “In Marx one can already find the difference between the object’s primacy as something to be produced critically and its caricature in things as they are (im Bestehenden), its distortion by the commodity character.”12

Dialectics becomes materialist when the primacy of the object is established; yet, Adorno warns, “the primacy of the object notwithstanding, the thingness of the world is also illusory. It tempts the subjects to ascribe to the things themselves the social conditions of their production. This is elaborated in Marx’s chapter on the fetish …”13 What is crucial for Adorno is to combine “tenacious opposition against that which exists: against its thingness,” with a staunch rejection of attempts to identify thingness as evil.14 “In thingness there is an intermingling of both the object’s unidentical side and the subjection of people under the prevailing forms of production—their own functional relations, which are obscure to them.”15 While, on the one hand, thingness (das Dinghafte) stands for the subjection of people under alienating and mystifying forms of production; on the other, the thing stands for the non-identical, for that which escapes the clutch of instrumental reason. It does so more fully than the object, which is “the positive face of the non-identical”; in other words, “a terminological mask.”16 Objecthood is thingness objectified, subjected to concepts in the same way that a subject is a person become concept, a legal-philosophical abstraction; a thing is to an object as a person is to a subject.

However unlikely this may sound (after all, many think of Adorno only as a late-modernist mandarin), as late echoes of debates that raged in the 1920s and 1930s, these passages can be seen as a belated contribution to the theory of productivism, of an art aiming to construct new types of things that would be true “comrades.” The crucial term veshch can be translated either as “thing” or as “object” (as in the case of Lissitzky and Ehrenburg’s journal Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet), but a dominant motif in productivist theory was the need to go beyond fetishized capitalist object-commodities towards a new type of veshch production and distribution that would no longer hide the things’ histories, the productive conditions that shaped them. The counterpart of the new veshch-thing is of course a notion of self different from the classical-modern subject; noting critically that Paris was marked by a “cult of woman as thing,” Rodchenko attempted to redefine both thing and person in their interrelationships.17

It is above all this aspect of constructivism/productivism that relates to present concerns—as it was to those of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period that saw the rediscovery of constructivism in a different sense than its formalist reduction by the likes of Naum Gabo and George Rickey.18 The recent purchase of a reconstruction of Rodchenko’s 1925 Workers’ Club by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven—which already around 1970 played an important role in the rediscovery of the social and political side of constructivism—is a significant event, provided that the museum avoids presenting Rodchenko’s furniture (which rejects the semiotic reduction of chromed “functionalism” in favor of flexible constructions that demand an active user) as a nostalgic and reified image of the early Soviet Union. For all the doubts we may harbor about aspects of the constructivist project, such as its belief in relentless industrialization, Rodchenko’s attempt to redefine and reform things and their role in human life—of which the Workers’ Club forms one partial realization—can overlap with the present in a momentary Jetztzeit.

Now that everyday life is increasingly marked by convoluted attempts to gain some insight into the tangled thingness in which we are embedded, to trace the origins of the food we buy, to try and quantify the production of pollution resulting from our energy consumption, to do more than merely survive under ever more precarious working conditions, productivism chimes with current concerns. It is reactivated in current practices such as that of Chto Delat, even if the formal means employed in their videos and installations sometimes court the risk of appearing to be exercises in nostalgic retro chic.19 In a less literal way, a similar impulse can be detected in the activities of Temporary Services, for example in the recent “Art Work,” an exhibition in the shape of a newspaper discussing the consequences of the collapse of the economy for artists, and pushing for “new ways of doing things, developing better models.”20 Here one may also think of Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s Solo Show project (2008), which foregrounded the semi-hidden world of companies that produce work for today’s big artists by giving a man used to interpreting artists’ designs a much more active role in determining the show’s content, as well as that of her earlier installation, ...deeply__to the notion that the__world is__to the observer...(commited) (real) (external).21

...deeply__to the notion that the__world is__to the observer...(commited) (real) (external) contains a video in which two women set up a do-it-yourself billboard in the middle of a highway. The billboard itself, which shares the space with the video projection, consists of a series of photo/text montages that address, in a less than linear way, the consequences of multiple events of the early 1970s: the collapse of the gold standard, the rise of conceptual art and immaterial labor, and the transformation of the dollar into a “virtual currency” whose fate is, however, linked to the price of oil. All of its graphic components can be downloaded from the Internet and then printed and pasted onto a self-assembled wooden structure. Rather than a didactic exposition molding these elements into a clear-cut narrative, the board’s montage creates juxtapositions that are, quite literally, questionable. How exactly does the rejection of the object in conceptual art relate to the collapse of the gold standard, and immaterial labor to the continuing importance of oil—the oneiric master-commodity? Having been emphatically told that various wars were definitely not about oil, should we believe such statements any more than the rhetoric of dematerialization employed in the context of conceptual art? In spite of the increasing importance of certificates for determining the rights to a work of art, in the world charted by Haghighian’s Solo Show, the concepts faxed or mailed by managerial artists are still destined for production by specialized companies—a division of labor that Haghighian’s project undermines by instigating a different working relationship, one that leads to the production of mutant things.

Clearly, today a search for “new ways of doing things, developing better models” does not imply the abstract negation of the past propagated by Carl Einstein or, in a different manner, by the productivists. Yesterday’s tabula rasa is now itself part of the historical repertory—at times neutralized through nostalgic quotations, at other times activated in the form(s) of projects that treat the historical material as a potential waiting to be actualized, however partially and fleetingly.22 But if neo-productivist impulses can be found in a number of important practices and projects, the readymade still haunts much of contemporary art; its afterlife is not over yet. As part one of this essay has argued, the readymade principle has been severely compromised by its integration into the logic of the market of the past decades, but it continues to inform constructivist responses to present exigencies.

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→ Continued in “ Art and Thingness, Part Three: The Heart of the Thing is the Thing We Don’t Know” in issue 16.

above copied from:http://e-flux.com/journal/view/132

Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball and Duchamp’s Carrot, Sven Lütticken

2010-11-10T03:57:00.000-08:00

In modern art, the increasing resemblance of art objects to everyday objects raised the threat of eroding of any real difference between works of art and other things. Barnett Newman railed against both Duchamp’s readymades and “Bauhaus screwdriver designers” who were elevated to the ranks of artists by the Museum of Modern Art’s doctrine of “Good Design.”1 The danger for art was the same in both cases: the dissolving of the dividing line between works of art and everyday objects. Just as ancient art proper should never be confused with the craft of “women basket weavers,” modern art should never be confused with a screwdriver or urinal.2 In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg would also worry that a blank sheet of paper or a table would become readable as art, that the boundary between artworks and “arbitrary objects” was eroding.3 While not evincing any Modernist anxieties about readymades, Paul Chan’s recent assertion that “a work of art is both more and less than a thing” shows renewed concerns regarding such an assimilation—in a context marked, until quite recently, by an unprecedented market boom in which works of art seemed to be situated in a continuum of luxury goods spanning from Prada bags to luxury yachts.4

But what does it mean to say that an artwork is both more and less than a thing? The notion of the thing is prominent in contemporary theory, and one might say that the thing has emerged as something that is both more and less than an object. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s words:

“Things” are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sovereign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood. “The Thing” rears its head—a rough beast or sci-fi monster, a repressed returnee, an obdurate materiality, a stumbling block, and an object lesson.5

Rather than building a wall between art and thingness, the work of art should be analyzed as just such a sci-fi monster. If objects are named and categorized, part of a system of objects, thingness is resistant to such ordered objecthood. If we grant that a work of art is both more and less than other types of things, this should not be regarded as an incentive to exacerbate and fetishize those differences, but rather as a point of departure for analyzing the complex interrelationships of artworks with these other things—and for examining certain works of art as problematizing and transforming this very relationship.6

A prominent proponent of the thing in recent theory is Bruno Latour, who has taken it upon himself to reveal “the terrible flaws of dualism,” which marked modernity.7 The hubristic project of modernity was based on the dichotomy of society and nature, of subject and object; this enables the modern “work of purification,” the triumph of the subject and the relegation of nature and of non-moderns to the abyss of thought. Underneath this purifying dichotomy, however, there is a disavowed continuity of networks, of hybrids; modern binary, “critical” thinking exists by virtue of the denial of this continuity, this world of “quasi-objects” and “quasi-subjects”—that which is “between and below the two poles” of object and subject.8 “Moderns do differ from premoderns by this single trait: they refuse to conceptualize quasi-objects as such. In their eyes, hybrids present the horror that must be avoided at all costs by a ceaseless, even maniacal purification.”9

Like all good caricatures, Latour’s portrayal of modernity presents some traits in sharp, even exaggerated clarity. And like many good and bad caricatures, it is one-sided and self-serving. If we look carefully at modern theory and (art) practice, it should be obvious that there have been a number of significant attempts to go beyond a static dichotomy of subject and object. Reexamining such moments can be of extreme interest—not in order to create some kind of oneiric ancestral line leading up to present concerns, but in order to sound out the limitations as well as the unfulfilled potential of various practices. Working though the contradictions of, for instance, the Duchampian readymade can help focus current debates—turning such a historical phenomenon into an anachronistic intervention in the present.

The rejection of the readymade by critics and artists such as Greenberg and Newman was shaped by a fear of the collapse of categories, the fear of identity, of the work of art becoming just another “arbitrary” object. In addition to such critiques, which we may label conservative, the 1960s saw the emergence of a second strand of anti-Duchampian discourse. Its proponents were artists including Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, and Daniel Buren, and an important point that their different criticisms had in common was that Duchamp’s own practice was itself conservative in that it merely seemed to confirm and exploit the existing art-world structures and their power of definition.10 Apparently working on the assumption that Duchamp’s work was fully accounted for by the then-emerging institutional theory of art, these artists felt that Duchamp merely used the institution(s) of art to redefine objects as artworks, thus multiplying their aura, their fetishistic allure, and their value. As Robert Smithson put it, “there is no viable dialectic in Duchamp because he is only trading on the alienated object and bestowing on this object a kind of mystification.”11

Such remarks were no doubt made in view of Duchamp’s own commodification of his readymades in the 1960s, with the Schwartz editions, and of the proliferation of Neo-Dada and Nouveau Réalisme objects, accumulations, and assemblages. This type of art object was tailor-made for the dismal science called the institutional theory of art, which it helped spawn, and which statements by artists such as Buren and Smithson parallel. However, if we look beyond the horizon of the 1960s reception of Duchamp, at the repercussions of the readymade among the surrealists around 1930 in particular, things become rather more complicated and interesting.

Hegel saw modern art as bifurcating into on the one hand a “realist” tendency that would show the surface of objects in minute “objectivity,” and on the other a “spiritual” tendency that would place all the emphasis on the subject.12 For the surrealists, Duchamp’s readymades became crucial at the moment when the question of the relation between subject and object, between spirit and matter, became an overriding concern: when they placed their activities “in the service of the revolution,” entering into a difficult relationship with the party that claimed to represent and enact dialectical materialism, and which eyed the surrealists’ idealist focus on dreams and visions more than a little suspiciously. The surrealists set out to prove that their approach in fact complemented orthodox Marxism, in that surrealism, “within the framework of dialectical materialism, is the only method that accounts for the real links between the world and thought.”13 If dialectical materialism can cause bricks to be laid, then surely this relationship was of primary importance.14

One of the issues of Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution contained a montage of textual fragments on Hegel and Marx, which contrasted the lackluster number of Hegel’s works available in French with the blockbuster sales of Hegel’s complete works in the Soviet Union, informing us that “the five year plan is founded on dialectics.”15 In the middle of a page is a line drawing of Hegel’s death mask; Spirit has become plaster. If the facts about the prices and sales of Hegel’s works seem to fit into Aragon’s quite linear remarks on spirit influencing things in the world, the death mask complicates things. As an outmoded relic of the nineteenth century, it is a surrealist object par excellence, but it is hardly operative in the contemporary world—unless one instrumentalizes it for the purpose of some Stalinist personality cult.

To some extent, the surrealist art of the object represented an appropriation, a détournement of Duchamp’s project. Surrealist objects were supposed to provide shocks, to give the viewer a jolt, which sets them apart from Duchamp’s more “disinterested” montages of existing objects and new thoughts. What the surrealists saw very clearly, however, is that the Duchampian readymade was, in David Joselit’s words, “a paradoxical object locked in a perpetual oscillation between its status as a thing and its status as a sign.”16 The bottle rack—sometimes called Hedgehog—inscribed with Duchamp’s signature becomes its own double, a visual pun combining Duchamp’s favorite “ism,” eroticism (the phallic protrusions), with references to his arcane geometric and n-dimensional concerns.17 Outwardly, the object remains the same, yet it is dislodged, integrated into the web of signification spun in Duchamp’s notes.

When André Breton’s estate was auctioned off, one of the items for sale was a semiotic object par excellence: a fortune teller’s crystal ball that had been used in 1933 to illustrate Breton’s text “Le Message automatique.”18 In his 1925 “Lettre aux Voyantes,” Breton had addressed the fortune-tellers, or “seers,” who had been marginalized by modern science:

Mesdames, today my mind is wholly on your disgrace. I know that you no longer dare to use your voice, no longer deign to use your all-powerful authority except within the woeful “legal” limits. I can see in my mind’s eye the houses you live in, on the fourth floor, in districts more or less remote from the cities.19

Breton pleads with the “ladies” that it is time for them to give up their passivity and reclaim their proper role. The crystal ball, smaller than one would expect on the basis of cartoons and comic strips, speaks of the same ambiguity between exalted visions and the banality of banlieue fortune-telling. An exemplary visual object or object-sign, the crystal ball was at the same time a materialization of desire and a dematerialization of the object; a proper surrealist thing.

The last major surrealist exhibition, “Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain,” which took place in New York in 1960, was also the last collaboration between Duchamp and Breton (after almost forty years, it would lead to a mutual estrangement that lasted until Breton’s death). Breton’s decision to structure the exhibition using a list of mythical “enchanters” sits oddly with Duchamp’s nouveau réalisme–style environment, with its toy trains, clock, and real chickens. The catalog features another Duchampian contribution: an embossed reproduction of the electrical sign, a double red cone called a carotte, that identified French tobacconist’s shops.20 As a “virtual” readymade that does not actually exist as a three-dimensional object, this relief, existing in between two and three dimensions, has obvious connections with Duchamp’s n-dimensional speculations. In the context of the early 1960s, it also seems to acknowledge that the readymade has become its own image, that capitalism has turned itself into a forest of signs. The tobacconist’s sign makes the crystal ball look like old hat.

In the postwar decades, the old three-dimensional tobacconist’s cones were being replaced by graphic, two dimensional versions; this transformation suggests that Duchamp here opted for an object that was fast becoming obsolete, but which allowed him to play with dimensions in a more interesting way than the new version. For the most part, of course, Duchamp’s readymades refrain from a surrealist flirt with the obsolete, with outmoded commodities, with the debris of Walter Benjamin’s Second-Empire Paris, with the refuse of modernity’s myths; neither, of course, do the readymades constitute montages in the manner of Dali’s lobster-telephone. Once could see an impetus at work in many surrealist objects that, in a less extreme and overt way than Greenberg or Newman, aims at establishing and emphasizing differences—at distinguishing these objects from “arbitrary objects” by imbuing them with signs of the psyche, of subjectivity. While many surrealist objects emphasize that they “function symbolically,” the readymades do not.

In this, ironically, they foreshadow in their own way the future of the commodity, in an archaic guise: they announce the profusion of goods that are bought for their coded distinctiveness in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the 1970s this becoming-sign of the object would lead Jean Baudrillard to diagnose fundamental changes in capitalism by supplementing the categories of use value and exchange value with his concept of sign value. Referencing Bauhaus furniture, with its “functionalism” that has become style, become sign, Baudrillard effectively theorized an economy in which the circulation of sign value creates exchange value, in which commodity fetishism stops being an illusion and becomes a reality.21 While Baudrillard noted that exchange value is based on “equivalence” and sign value on “difference,” the latter is at the service of the former: the difference between Brand A and Brand B is expressed in prices that are subject to the law of exchange, hence of equivalence. This triumph of fetishism—of commodity fetishism as an active agent—results in object-signs that suppress most traces of their history, of their trajectories. Their lives seem to be lived in a realm of pure semiosis. Are the readymades and the surrealist objects they helped spawn not just as crucial to this development as Bauhaus furniture—or Bauhaus screwdrivers?22

David Joselit has equated the readymade’s “oscillation between its status as a thing and its status as a sign” with the fundamental tension between material commodities and immaterial networks in the modern economy.23 However, the readymade-as-sign is primarily part of a network of signification created by Duchamp’s other objects and texts; in this sense, the readymade is indeed the model for the branded commodity and for “actually existing fetishism.” The consumption of the pre-existing object by the artist and its use for the production of new value is presented as a purely semiotic operation, and the readymade’s trajectory in different economical networks is obscured. In a roundabout way, we seem to have arrived back at the point of departure—at a rejection of the readymade as mystifying and complicit in an ever-intensifying process of commodification. Were the surrealists then entirely deluded in regarding Duchamp’s readymades as object lessons in “thingifying” desires in ways that radically differed from alienating commodity-objects?

In a letter to Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno described the latter’s notion of the dialectical image in terms that seem to emphasize Benjamin’s indebtedness to Surrealism: Adorno stated that “if the use value of things dies,” these alienated and hollowed-out objects can come to be charged with new subjectivity. While the things become “images” of subjective intentions, this does not erase their thingness: dialectical images remain montages, constellations of alienated things and meaning.24 Adorno neither attempts to eradicate the object nor does he recoil from the horror of the hybrid; the ruined object, charged with new subjective intentions means, becomes precisely a quasi-subject, one that offers a glimpse of a world beyond the false objectivity constituted by the quasi-natural “necessities” ruling industrial production. This point needs to be remembered now that we are surrounded by industrialized versions of such quasi-subjects, in which coded difference creates a kind of generic subjectivity that amounts to a thin layer of paint glossing over the substratum of false objectivity. How can one go beyond the limitations of the readymade and retain the project of making things, quasi-objects, that point beyond the limitations of the contemporary commodity?

To be sure, it can be argued that any readymade object will unavoidably be marked by an infra-thin difference in relation to its allotted place in the codified order of objects. In its obtuse materialism, it is always potentially a thing, which is to say: a ruin. In her photographic series Detitled (2000), Barbara Visser saves modern design icons precisely by showing them in a ruined state (in different ruined states, each with its specificities). And is it not the task of critics and art historians to bring out the work of art’s potential, the ways in which it resists complete assimilation into the order of things? If we answer this in the affirmative, we should also ask ourselves whether such an exercise cannot also, at some point, become an exercise in self-delusion. Even if we try to help the neo-readymade by deconstructing it, bringing its complexities and contradictions to the fore, such operations leave intact the structural limitations of the logic of readymade, as brought out by its decades-long, crushing success.

Like Duchamp’s and the surrealists’ practices, Adorno’s remark is limited by its focus on giving new meaning to existing objects—on producing meaning, and ultimately value, by consuming objects. Of course, such immaterial labor is itself dependent on specific social and economical circumstances and structures, but these remain largely implicit with Duchamp, and even more so with the surrealists. For all the productive and viable elements in the dialectic of object and subject that marks their mutant commodities, it remains rather abstract and idealist. If one wants to go beyond the exploration of the semiotic system and explore the readymade’s place in a socio-economical network, such a project—whether in critical writing or in artistic practice—necessarily explodes the logic of the readymade.

Now that the social and ecological consequences of an economy that mystifies production have come home to haunt us, the limitations of the readymade when it comes to intervening in the system of objects are painfully clear. At the same time, the legacy of Soviet productivism, which has often been obscured for decades by the dominance of the type of “Good Design” discourse exemplified by MoMA, takes on a renewed importance.

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→ Continued in “Art and Thingness, Part Two: Thingification” in issue 15.

above copied from: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/112

Dear Ray Johnson, Charles Stuckey

2010-11-04T13:38:00.000-07:00

Like many eccentric people of my generation I have a folder of artful, profoundly prankish souvenirs from the late Ray Johnson. Too bad I made no log of his frequent phone calls, when they happened or what was said back and forth. (Imagine the size of Johnson’s telephone bills! If only he had kept his monthly statements listing the numbers he called and the minutes he invested. Was there anyone connected to art who did not hear from him regularly?) While I was aware already as a student in the sixties of Johnson’s existence as a pioneering contemporary artist whose small collages were illustrated in every survey of Pop art, it was not until 1977 while I taught art history at Johns Hopkins that I first received one of the amazing artist’s multitudinous mailings. The cover letter seductively acknowledged my article just published in Art in America about women without heads appearing in works by Marcel Duchamp. Among the assortment of other sheets in the same initial mailing were two folded 17 x 11” photocopies of works from the ongoing series of silhouette portrait collages that Johnson had begun in 1976, both including reproductions of the headless (and so antithetical to portraiture) female featured in Duchamp’s Étant donnés. As I would learn, Johnson characteristically incorporated such favorite images over and again in different collage compositions throughout the course of decades, suggesting in the way of Wagnerian leitmotifs that otherwise varied collages sharing some particular image were partly interrelated in his obsessively creative mind. Betraying his sympathy for the great nineteenth-century Symbolists like Gauguin and Munch who quoted details from their own previous works the same way, Johnson’s capacity for allusion by repetition was greatly abetted by the advent around 1958 of the office photocopy machine that could endlessly replicate any source image small enough to fit folded into an envelope. No less important, I would come to realize that the muted black tones of the photocopies, ubiquitous in his mail art no less than in his more substantial collage works, implied a baseline nocturnal mood. But I never seriously heeded the pervasive obsession in his works with death, so obvious ever since Johnson took his own life in 1995. (For anyone still unfamiliar with John Walter’s 2002 eye-opening documentary, How to Draw a Bunny, put this pamphlet down right away and watch the DVD.)

Back to 1977: of course, I liked the idea that a famous artist kept up with my arcane investigations. In his initial letter Johnson asked whether I was aware of his own works incorporating the headless Étant donnés figure. Or whether I knew about the vandals who decapitated Edvard Erichsen’s 1913 mermaid sculpture installed at the Copenhagen waterfront in honor of Hans Christian Anderson’s story. (Finnish by heritage, Ray was well informed about Scandinavian art.) Taking his bait with pleasure, I hurried to call the telephone number he provided and so received an unforgettable lesson in anything goes art history. Unable to keep up with Johnson’s imaginative leaps and encyclopedic erudition, I missed more in his art than I ever yet saw. Already aware that bunnies were kid’s stuff, my three-year-old son burst into tears (“I am not a bunny head!”) not long before Easter 1994 when the mail brought a Johnson mail “portrait” of him. It never occurred to me to connect Johnson’s bunny mania to the trademark gentleman’s magazine with fold-out revelations, any more than to the hares used as performance art props by Joseph Beuys, or to the famous discussion of double images in E. H. Gombrich’s 1960 classic, Art and Illusion, referring to Wittgenstein’s commentary on a drawing of a rabbit’s head that looks like a duck’s. But in an incredible and ongoing series of publications Johnson’s fanatical friend William Wilson has described many such labyrinthine threads of interconnecting and superimposed meanings. Johnson’s works call for annotations, like those prompted by the writings of James Joyce. (In the late 1950s Johnson famously made a proto-Pop “portrait” collage of the abstruse Irish writer as a cigarette advertisement he-man.) What is most needed now where Johnson studies are concerned, however, are publications with lots of comparative illustrations showing works by other artists so that the promiscuous range of his visual references can be appreciated on the same level as his literary ones.

I finally met the artist in person when I moved back to New York in 1980 and after a few years he arranged for me to sit for one of the silhouette profiles that he used as the basis for many of his mostly black and white collages of the period. When he had the twenty-six Stuckey profile collages “finished” he brought them all to my Chinatown loft and spread them around like units of a mysterious alphabet. Always one for situational ground rules, Johnson had explained in advance that this would be my one and only viewing opportunity, after which he intended to cannibalize bits of these “portraits” as stuff for other collages under development as his imagination insatiably fed upon itself. From start to stop the process for my “portraits” coincided roughly with the retrospective of his art presented at the Nassau County Museum of Art in 1984 when I first had the opportunity to get an overview of Johnson’s art. While his works are now the subject of exhibitions all around the world, during his lifetime Johnson managed to derail many efforts to show his work. But he seemingly adored curator Phyllis Stigliano, who arranged to borrow from a variety of impressive institutional and private lenders, attesting to how widely collected Johnson was as an artist, notwithstanding his own self-effacing outlook. Contrary to the ever more inflated size widespread in 1950s, 1960s and 1970s art, nothing in this show was over thirty inches high. The issue of intimate scale aside, the exhibition made it quite clear that Johnson was unsurpassed as a collage artist throughout this thirty-year period. Lucy Lippard put it especially well in 1999: “made by the most tenderly time-consuming methods,” Johnson’s collages are “overflowing with wit, charm and enigma.” A longstanding Johnson fan, Lippard excused herself in 1973 for leaving Johnson out of her famous account of de-materialized art from 1966-1972. According to Madeline Gins, Johnson was furious. In truth, Johnson was far more than a collage artist, as we learned at the 1984 opening night, on which occasion one of the guests was Frances Beatty, who has subsequently taken charge of the artist’s estate. Johnson’s old friend, Timothy Baum recalled how the artist spent the evening outside the museum rather than inside. For those who noticed (and I did not) it was a performance. Suggesting his discomfort as an artist with the idea of being the center of attention, suggesting even contempt for the concepts of recognition and status, Johnson’s behavior was just one more sign that he was contemplating his own permanent self-removal.

Utilizing scraps displaced from various possibly unrelated printed papers as parts of amalgamated images, strangely multifarious, collage as a mode diagrams and frames the capacity of imagination to experience at once any number of different times and places, people, things and feelings in all sorts of ways as a potluck stream of consciousness. More than any kind of new technology collage is what is essentially modern about twentieth-century art. And yet with its impure intermixture of means, collage continues to be marginalized as an exception in museum collections organized along the lines of old-fashioned mediums or in displays predicated on large (and so, supposedly important) works. With the exception of caricature and comic strip art, collage is the static art form best suited to humor and play, still antithetical to many people’s standards for truly great art. The ambivalent status of collage could only make it more appealing to Johnson who enjoyed every chance to make light of sacred culture cows.

For an artist who would decide to specialize in collage, Johnson came of age at an auspicious moment. After schooling at the ultra-progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in 1948 he settled in Manhattan where presumably he attended the first solo exhibition of Black Mountain instructor Willem de Kooning presented that same year at the Egan Gallery. Both as process art and as fluid black and white compositions, many of Johnson’s collages of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s recall de Kooning’s paintings of the late 1940s that so appealed to Johnson’s influential neighbor, John Cage, because they had no center of interest. These nocturnal works show traces of de Kooning’s dynamic studio practice of cutting up his own drawings and then merging the remnants from different ones, so to incorporate (and preserve) previous ideas in constantly evolving hybrid images. In 1949 Johnson likely saw the three extraordinary gallery exhibitions staged by Joseph Cornell, whose orchestrations of humble old-fashioned childhood ephemera were object lessons in how a truly inspired artist gifted with an abundance of imagination could work exclusively in collage and assemblage. Cornell’s symbolist tendency to include similar elements repeatedly in many different works made over the course of years gave license for Johnson to do the same for the rest of his life. I can only assume that Johnson eventually saw some of Cornell’s collage letters. (When Johnson in 1968 moved away from Manhattan to Long Island he gained in physical proximity to de Kooning in Springs and Cornell in Flushing, far more than he lost by distancing himself from the ever more hectic downtown art scene.) Besides the opportunities to study works by de Kooning or Cornell, New York offered the young Johnson the ultimate chance to develop his connoisseurship during the collage rich survey exhibition of classic Dada art organized by Duchamp for the Sidney Janis Gallery in the spring of 1953. No wonder that Johnson, sophisticated with such experiences, destroyed so many early works from dissatisfaction. The dancer Carolyn Brown in her autobiography tells how she received a request from Johnson in 1965 to borrow a small piece of a large 1952 painting that he had already cut up and distributed piecemeal to friends in the mid-1950s. (In 1965 he was evaluating the chances of reuniting the pieces.) Rauschenberg, Twombly and Johns, to choose from artists Johnson knew in the 1950s, were hardly less self-critical with respect to their own early works. Learning that Johnson incinerated substandard works in Twombly’s fireplace, Johnson’s ultra-supportive new friend William Wilson began in 1956 to save every work and every scrap of Johnson-related material that he could, an ongoing devotion.

The collage emphasis aside, no New York event would have more lasting influence on Johnson’s art than the in-depth retrospective presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 of the works of Norwegian symbolist, Edvard Munch. The mask-like faces in Munch’s urban crowd scenes, the spermatic and embryonic marginalia in his Madonna lithograph, and most of all his hallmark image of moonlight as a phallic shaft reflected on dark waters, have all haunted Johnson’s works ever since. (As if in response to the fact that Richard Lippold was working on an ambitious Sun sculpture when he and Johnson became lovers, the younger artist specialized in moon art.) Among living European artists, it was the works of Jean Dubuffet (resident in New York in the early 1950s) teeming with graffiti faces and jigsaw puzzle piece shapes that exerted the most lasting impact on Johnson. When he adopted a monkish look by shaving his balding head, Johnson began slightly to resemble Dubuffet in appearance (and to resemble van Gogh in the 1888 Self-Portrait famously gifted to Gauguin). Look-alikes are everywhere in Johnson’s art. The famous Carjat photograph of Rimbaud that Johnson used as the basis for the cover illustration to the 1957 New Directions edition of Illuminations looks to me rather like the Pop poet portrayed in Elvis Presley #2, made at the same time. Of course, in relationship to the older Lippold, Johnson in the 1950s himself played Rimbaud to a more established Verlaine. Johnson presumably read the 1961 biography of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie, which stressed the source materials that inspired the young Symbolist. As if making a case for Johnson’s insightful brand of appropriation, Starkie concluded: “genius might be said to be the faculty for clever theft.”

An exhibition earlier this year at Andrew Roth in New York featured the mail sent by Johnson to Carolyn and Earle Brown already in the mid-1950s. The many enclosures were rendered with considerably more refinement than the photocopied mail art that the prolific Johnson sent off widely beginning in the early 1960s. No matter what the contents of his postings, however, Johnson’s concern for mail was evident already in the 1940s in illustrated letters that he carefully preserved. One precociously self-aware mailing to his parents includes a watercolor of a boy with Johnson’s features listening to the buzz of a cross-pollinating bee. Tailored provocatively to his gossipy personal relationships with the recipients, in the 1950s Johnson’s letters prompted him to integrate text and image incessantly and he soon became a virtuoso, rivaling and surpassing his associates Rauschenberg and Twombly, no less addicted to text-image art. Considering the amount of time Johnson devoted to his letters with their references to various art personalities and issues, it hardly comes as a surprise that Johnson included the famously letter-mad Vincent van Gogh and his art dealer brother Theo among the seventeen historic figures he planned to celebrate around 1970 in “Famous People Memorial collage-paintings.” Whereas van Gogh wrote the bulk of his letters to a single confidant, however, Johnson as an only child developed a sprawling brotherhood and sisterhood of correspondents. Parallels between Johnson and van Gogh are striking in hindsight: both artists were compulsively and widely interested in art and literature, both preferred to move away to small towns on the periphery of the art world and, of course, both took their own lives. From today’s perspective it seems incredible that Johnson’s library did not contain any edition of van Gogh’s letters. (But then it is incredible that van Gogh, as if unaware, never mentioned the published correspondence of Delacroix.)

How about a collected edition of Johnson’s countless letters?! Although it would be seemingly impossible to track down all of them, in imagination such a compilation would be no less a literary treasure than a visual feast. In its small way, The Paper Snake, Johnson’s 1965 book based upon his mailings to fellow Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins, gives a good idea of what such a huge undertaking could yield. Johnson’s collected correspondence would probably begin with the letters written home to Detroit from Black Mountain, among them an October 29, 1945, letter in which the 18-year-old confided: “I plan on getting a job as a mail man when I come home for Christmas vacation.” The bulk of the letters would be an antic journalistic record of Johnson’s remarkable art world, spanning at least three generations of cutting edge artists, dancers, musicians, critics, curators, dealers, collectors and art groupies. As for Johnson’s non-mail art, there has long been talk of a catalogue raisonné, with Stigliano volunteering to undertake the task already in the 1980s, when it was still impossible to imagine the scope of his output as a whole. Of necessity such a publication will be one of the strangest oeuvre catalogues ever. Whereas his performances and activities could be described in conventional chronological order, for the most part his collages will need to be described as works in progress over a lifetime. Unlike the works of any previous artist, these collages are often inscribed with three or more different dates, as Johnson made modifications, adding bits of his own earlier works (and so erasing evidence of their existence for future cataloguers). Cross-references will abound of necessity, just as they do in his works with all their starts and stops. Whatever the rules of the game turn out to be, however, this eventual overview should establish Johnson’s achievement s among the richest bodies of art from the second half of the last century.

above copied from: http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/essays.php

To Change Names, Simply, Marcel Duchamp (Interview)

2010-10-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Interview of Marcel Duchamp
on Canadian Radio Television, July 17, 1960
(translated by Sarah Skinner Kilborne)

GUY VIAU. Marcel Duchamp, what power do you attribute to humor?

MARCEL DUCHAMP. A great power; humor was a sort of savior so to speak because, before, art was such a serious thing, so pontifical that I was very happy when I discovered that I could introduce humor into it. And that was truly a period of discovery. The discovery of humor was a liberation. And not humor in the sense "humorist" of humor, but "humor" humoristic of humor. Humor is something much more profound and more serious and more difficult to define. It's not only about laughing. There's a humor that is black humor which doesn't inspire laughter and which doesn't please at all. Which is a thing in itself, which is a new feeling so to speak, which follows from all sorts of things that we can't analyze with words.

G. Is there a large amount of rebellion in this humor?

M. A large amount of rebellion, a large amount of derision toward the serious word, entirely unconfirmed, naturally. And it's only because of humor that you can leave, that you can free yourself.

G. When is humor black?

M. Black, that's a way of speaking, since it was necessary to assign a color. Obviously there wasn't a more explicit color because black is somber, the somber of this humor makes it a thing almost mean instead of friendly and dangerous. It's almost like a sort of dynamite, of the spirit, isn't it? And that's why we call it black. Black doesn't have any meaning but it's a little like the black curtain of anarchy, if you will, things like that. Black generally took this somber side and burial that we were obligated to accept, then that was it.

G. You've said somewhere that possible reality is obtained from a little stretching of the laws of physics and chemistry. What do you want to say about that?

M. About that, it's simply the idea that it's easy to believe that by scraping a match one gets a fire, that is, cause creates effect. But I find the laws of physics such that they are, such that they have taught us, aren't inevitably the truth. We believe in them or the experiences each day, but I believe that it's possible to consider the existence of a universe where these laws would be extended, changed a little bit, precisely limited. And as a result, one immediately obtains some extraordinary and different results which are certainly not far from the truth because, after all, every hundred years a new scientist comes along who changes the laws, right? Since Newton, there have been more and since Einstein there have been even more, haven't there, so we must wait for changes to the laws in question.

G. But all your activity, I think, aims at the possible beyond the immediate.

M. Sure. In every case, without being a scientist myself, one can hope to arrive at obtaining some results parallel to the influence, if you will, in art. And what gives satisfying results in every case… satisfying in the sense of the new of the thing, what appears like a thing which was never seen before. Of the not already seen.

G. This said, Marcel Duchamp, you weren't less of an impressionist at the start of your career than anyone else.

M. Yes, absolutely, like all youth. A young man can't be an old man, it's impossible. One must pass through the network of influence. One is obligated to be influenced and one accepts this influence very naturally. From the start one doesn't realize this. The first thing to know: one doesn't realize one is influenced. One thinks he is already liberated and one is far from it! Therefore one must accept it and wait for the liberation to come itself, if it must ever come, because certain people never obtain it, never see it come.

G. But it's been said that you made these impressionistic experiences a little to prove that you could make them.

M. No, no…

G. … like a tour de force.

M. No, I don't believe that this was so. If you wish, when one paints like an impressionist from the age of seventeen or sixteen, one is already so content to paint, since one loves this, that there isn't analysis, self-analyzation that explains why one makes this rather than that and above all one never knows these things until forty years later.

G. And what was the Section d'Or back then?

M. The Section d'Or dates from 1912. It was a small salon which took place for only a year, where all the cubists of that era got together, except Picasso and Braque, who stayed in their corner. There was, already, a sort of schism between the two groups of cubists. And there we made, thanks to my brother Jacques Villon, and Picabia … quite an exposition of paintings, with Apollinaire, that had a lot of success. Apollinaire, I believe, created a meeting place for presenting young painters who, at that time, were iconoclasts, as well you'd think.

G. And this cubism, did it not contain, if I may say … a little futurism?
Click to enlarge
Figure 1
Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912

M. Yes, there was a relationship in everything. The time was made for this. With the futurists there was something a little different, which was the preoccupation of producing a movement, of producing the movement. To try, if one produces the movement, to produce it from an impressionistic manner, which is to say naturalist, to give the illusion of movement, this was the mistake in itself, since one can't produce a thing, one can't produce a movement--in any realistic manner--from a static tableau, you see? It's not possible. Why did it fail, because it was the continuation of the impressionist idea attributed to the movement, given to the movement. Whereas, for example, in my case, where I wanted to make the same thing with Nude Descending the Staircase, (Fig. 1) it was a little different. I realized very well that I couldn't produce the illusion of movement in a static painting. I was therefore content to make a state of thing, a state of movement, if you will, like the cinema does, but without the development of the cinema like a film. To superimpose one upon the other.

G. Each of these phases?

M. Each of these phases … indicated a completely graphic way and not the intention of giving the illusion of movement.

G. And it's this that made Nude Descending the Staircase a sensation at the Armory Show in 1913.

M. That was it.

G. … in New York.

M. And this was a sort of scandalous success which was so much so, that a lot of people knew Nude Descending the Staircase itself and they never knew who had made it. And this absolutely didn't interest them--knowing who was the painter. Because the painting was interesting them in the painting and this was the only thing which was interesting to them, so that I was completely … how should I say …

G. … ignored.

M. … ignored by the public because the public knew my work without knowing who I was or that I existed.

G. Was it from this moment that you renounced more or less the traditional notion of a painting?

M. Yes, it was around 1913, around 1912, and it was 1913 when I even began to doubt my cubism. I began to… I was probably very difficult to satisfy then, I suppose… And when I had already thought that that was the end, that this wasn't going to lead very far, except that it would have been able to make a lot of money perhaps if I had continued. But then, I had already changed ideas in 1913, and I found myself engaged in another form of expression where the painter loses his priority, if you will. The idea for me was, at that time, to bring in gray matter in opposition to the retinal. For me the retinal is a thing that has lasted since Courbet. After Romanticism, with Courbet, every series for a hundred years of painting or plastic art was based on the retinal impression.

G. For you, it has been a hundred years since painting wasn't so uniquely retinal.

M. No, not at all, far from it, on the contrary. Everything which represents religious painting, painting since the Renaissance, through the Italian Renaissance, is entirely gray matter, if I dare to use this term when I mean that that the idea was to glorify a religion, the catholic religion, the catholic God or something else, in the end, but the painting aspect itself, the retinal aspect of the painting was very secondary … more than secondary … it was the idea that mattered then. And this is what happened, this is what happened to me then in 1912 or 1913 with the idea of wanting to change or at least to rid myself of the retinal heritage of the last 100 years.

G. You said at that time, "Paintings have the dust of the past."

M. What made me say things like that was because it was necessary to get rid of and to obtain another opening onto other landscapes, so to speak.

G. Was it then, Marcel Duchamp, that Dada took place?
Click to enlarge
Figure 2

Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-23

M. No, that was still in the distance. That was still later. I spoke of 1912 and in 1912 I had already elaborated upon the idea of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bach…by Her Bachelors, still without a hint of Dadaism. There was obviously a germ of things resembling Dadaism, but it didn't have the organized character of a movement like the Dadaism of 1916, 1917 and 1918. There had already been indications of such a movement, and even in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even there are some details or developments which are of the Dadaist domain. But all the same, that was something a lot larger in spirit than a tendentious thing like Dadaism was … After all, Dadaism was a tendency to get rid of a violent way of accepted and permitted things. But then it was still a personal thing which alone concerned me, of making a picture or some kind of work with my responsibility alone and not a manifesto of the general order. Later, around 1916, 1917 in fact, Dadaism intervened and I collaborated there because it immediately went along with my views.

G. All right, if you want, we will revisit Dadaism now. I would very much like you to speak to us more about The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. (Fig. 2) What is the key to this painting? I believe I read from André Breton that there was a son of Ariane in the painting?

M. There isn't a son of Ariane. There is the fact that from the start this painting wasn't conceived like a canvas on which you put a picture. The painting is like a morsel of glass. From the start, it was painted on glass, which is in effect painted upon. Some oil paint is painted, but the forms which are there were from the start were seen with the idea of transparence. The idea of canvas disappeared. In order to still satisfy me, to satisfy me with the idea that the painting isn't a painting, which is to say a frame with some canvas on top and some nails around. I wanted to rid myself of that, which is a physical impression. After this, each part of the painting, of the glass, was minutely prepared with ideas and not with the strokes of a pencil. From ideas written on little papers as they came to me. And finally some years after I gathered in a box called the Green Box all these ideas, these little papers… cut up or torn up, rather, which I made torn up in order to make an edition of 300 exemplary copies and which are in the same form as the cut, original papers and on which nearly all the ideas that are in this big glass are written, or indicated in any case.

G. Who were the principal protagonists of Dada then?

M. The first demonstrations of Dada took place in Zurich in 1916, with Tzara and Arp and Huelsenbeck and that was about it. And this lasted two or three years. After that Tzara went to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Breton, Aragon…several others who became the Dada of Paris. The difference is that, in Zurich, there wasn't really a big public demonstration, which is to say there was a Cabaret Voltaire with some demonstrations but more or less private, in the cabaret. In Paris, it reached a much larger scale and Breton and Aragon made some demonstrations in rooms like la salle Gaveau, where the public really went, en masse, with the idea of very copiously causing an uproar, you might say. And moreover, this is what made all the fuss about Dada. For three years there had been different demonstrations in each of the big rooms of Paris, and this was only terminated around 1920, 1922 or 1923, when truly there was some internal dissentions between the different dadaists, who were no longer content. With each wanting to be the big protagonist, naturally there were some disagreements. They had a falling out and Breton decided to begin another thing called Surrealism. What's more, the name Surrealism had been given by Apollinaire during the war without knowing it, to a piece called les Mamelles de Tirésias, in a small Parisian theater and it was called, I believe, Surrealist Drama. But in any case the word "Surrealism" was…fabricated by Apollinaire and he didn't know that it was going to take on such importance, I am sure of that, when I think about it.
G. And your friendship with Picabia dates back to then?

M. Oh yes! Picabia naturally was one of the big ones, was, so to speak, the go-between, he was different because he was in New York and we had already known Dada in 1916 in New York when he was here and then he left New York in 1917-18, he went to Barcelona. From there he went to Switzerland. He went to Switzerland where he made the acquaintance of Tzara. Tzara and he went back to Paris, made friends with Breton and really the movement began then. Besides, this is what wasn't approved by the German Dadaists, who wanted to make it a completely political thing, a political order only, in the communist sense of the word.

G. You spoke of Dada demonstrations. What were these demonstrations? Were they about manifestos, or what?

M. No. They were theatrical demonstrations. And yet! There was a scene, for example in la salle Gaveau which wasn't a scene, but anyway it was a scene just the same where the orchestra sat to play concerts. There were theatrical pieces created for the occasion by Breton, by Ribemont-Dessaignes, by people like that, which were played with the appropriate décor, which is to say, with cotton caps, funnels, everything was like a fantasy…imaginative.

G. Marcel Duchamp, what is a ready-made?

M. A ready-made [laughs], was from the beginning an invented word that I took to designate a work of art which isn't one. In other words, which isn't a work made by hand. Made by the hand of the artist. It's a work of art which becomes a work of art by the fact that I declare it or that the artist declares it a work of art, without there being any participation from the hand of the artist in question to make it so. In other words, it's an object already made, that one finds, and generally an object of metal…more than a painting in general.

G. Would you want to give an example of a ready-made in its pure state?
Click to enlarge
Figure 3
Marcel Duchamp,
Fountain, 1917
Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz (1917)
Figure 4
Marcel Duchamp,
L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

M. We have…the urinal, that I exhibited at the Indépendants in 1917 in New York and which was a thing that I had simply bought at the M. Mutt Works, and that I signed Richard Mutt. (Fig. 3) And which was moreover refused by the Independents, who weren't supposed to refuse it. But anyway, they refused it, they threw it behind a partition and I was obligated to find it after the exhibition in order not to lose it.

G. But there is what you call an "assisted" ready-made.

M. Okay, with the "assisted ready-made," it's just an object in the same genre to which the artist adds something like a moustache to the Mona Lisa, (Fig. 4) which is a thing added and which gives a special character [laughs] to the Mona Lisa, let's say.

G. Had you thought of adding a title to this work?

M. Oh that, I don't dare give you a translation of it, even in English.

[laughter]

G. And now what is a "reverse ready-made"?

M. A "reverse ready-made"…that was the case of…that wasn't made, but it would have been able to have been made. That would be to take a Rembrandt and to use it like an ironing board, you see, that would be the reverse by the fact that the tableau [or painting] became the ready-made of a true tableau [or table] made by Rembrandt, which becomes a ready-made for ironing shirts, you understand?

[laughter]

G. I think that you have always been…an intransigent spirit, your work was rare, this rare act, but you reunited it in the space of a portable museum…
Click to enlarge
Figure 5
Marcel Duchamp, Boite Series F, 1941

M. Yes, I made a big box, la Boîte en valise, (Fig. 5) which is to say a box which was a carton more or less where all the reproductions of the things I've made, almost all, everything I have been able to find in any case, and besides this only represented 90 or 95…articles and I had reproductions of them made and I had…in color, in black and there are even three small ready-mades which are reduced in dimension from the originals, which are the typewriter, the ampoule of Paris air that I brought to my friend Arensberg as a souvenir. I had filled an ampoule, of Paris air, which is to say I simply opened an ampoule and let the air enter it by itself and closed the ampoule and brought it to New York as a gift of friendship, in any case. And there was also the play on words.

G. I think that that is one of your specialties.

M. Yes, I don't know if you recall them…I don't recall all of them by heart, but anyway I'm going to read you one or two: "Avez-vous déjà mis la moelle de l'épée dans le poil de l'aimée?" ["Have you already put the marrow of the sword into the mane of the adored?"] One must read very slowly, because it's like a play on words, one must…

G. [laughs]

M. "Nous estimons les ecchymoses des esquimaux aux mots exquis.' ["We dodge the bruises of the Eskimos in exquisite words]. And one more: "Inceste ou passion de famille à coups trop tirés." ["Incest or family passion, on very bad terms."]

G. [laughs]

M. And how about: "Moustiques domestiques demi-stock pour la cure d'azote sur la Côte d'Azur." ["Domestic mosquitoes (half-stock) for the nitrogen cure on the Côte d'Azur."]

G. [laughs]

M. There's still another of them: "Le système métrite par un temps blenorrhagieux." [" Inflamed uterine system due to a gonorrheal condition."]

G. [laughs]

M. What's one more? "Parmi nos articles de quincaillerie paresseuse, Rrose Sélavy et moi recommandons le robinet qui s'arrête de couler quand on ne l'écoute pas." ["Among our articles of lazy hardware, Rrose Sélavy and I recommend the faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening to it."]

G. What kindness! And, tell me, does the name Rrose Sélavy come up often in your works? What does "Rrose Sélavy" mean?

M. In 1920, I decided that it didn't suffice me to be a lone individual with a masculine name, I wanted to change my name in order to change, for the ready-mades above all, to make another personality from myself, you understand, to change names, simply. And this was a…

G. You speak of the negation of Dadaism. What was the surrealist affirmation? What was that…

M. There were a lot of points of affirmation. One of the important points was the importance of dream. The importance of dreamlike poems and the Freudian side also, the self-analytical interpretation side. Although they didn't completely feel like students of Freud or disciples of Freud at all, they used Freud. They used Freud as a component in analyzing their subconscious, in any case.

G. And all these surrealist works of which we speak right now, did they have, then, an importance of prefiguration of…

M. Yes, I believe. All written work is a hint of a little surrealism and all work, even a visual work of paint. One feels that the painter who made it saw the surrealism before, even if he refused it, you understand.

G. One has the impression that surrealism gave us a new orientation entirely…very distinct in the imagination of the contemporary man.

M. Very distinct, and I said…it was an absolute split and as always, given by literature and by painting and by the arts, this split will have repercussions in the political or interplanetary or some other actual world, just about.

G. The fact is that your activity, Marcel Duchamp, took place in the United States…did this used to give this activity a particular urgency, being in contrast or in…

M. No, the contrast was for me personal. Life in the United States was a lot more simple than in France, or than in Europe. Because…there is a respect for the individual here that isn't found in Europe. The individual isn't respected in Europe. One forces the individual to enter into a category, either political or social, or educational or something else. Here you are completely alone if you want to be. And there is a respect for the individual that is remarkable, in my opinion.

G. And you believe that this generous liberty…isn't compromised here, that it is without danger for the moment?

M. A lot less than elsewhere, in any case. Here, a free man is a man almost free, whereas in Europe there isn't a free man.

G. And you believe that he can, that he will be able to remain that for a long time, almost free?

M. Probably. We will go back there, to the free man, because…we wouldn't, we won't become ants for the pleasure of becoming ants.

above copied from: http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html

NO PLACE TO SIT (a walk around the new context), Federica Bueti

2010-10-24T03:56:00.000-07:00

The last hundred years of work indicate that it’s demonstrably impossible to destroy or dematerialize Art, which, like it or not, can only gradually expand, voraciously synthesizing every aspect of life. Meanwhile, we can take up the redemptive circulation of allegory through design, obsolete forms and historical moments, genre and the vernacular, the social memory woven into popular culture: a private, secular, and profane consumption of media. Production, after all, is the excretory phase in a process of appropriation. (From Dispersion by Seth Price)

Today we are constantly faced with the option of being able to transgress spaces, to reconfigure our positions from bygone eras towards the immanent future. We are all nomads in spaces and time. We are travelers from country to country. From one form to the next, we are surfing between contents in an endless negotiation with the Other. Our struggle has become more clear in the here-and-now sense as being part of a configuration of what the future might hold. See you there, in that interstitial space (that we are currently working on). We are trying to define our position in relation to the socio-cultural context. Nomadism, hyper-mobility, hybridization, de-territorialized space and the idea of liquid-modernity are all terms used to define a general tendency within our current cultural climate. Our contemporary reality in which we live and work as artists and critics is in a free-floating state. Here, the site is our starting point, and time is our tool.

There is a fundamental shift that is taking place that transforms spatial necessity with temporal contingency, temporal presence that makes spatial experience possible1. Contemporary practices are engaging in the use of time in an attempt to activate reflections, not only through forms but also in the way that they are producing discourses. These contemporary modes of production are based on nomadic practices, not simply in terms of freely moving around or upon merely physical space, but upon time-based practices, which are allowing individuals to engage in different time based dimensions, floating in a universe of expanded forms and meanings, where past, present and future are unique fragments of the real. Nomadism is a practice of time-displacement, a process of remembering or actualizing, where virtual actualization is a form of creation (Gilles Deleuze). This form of nomadism is not simply a form of post-production, it is a way of rethinking the past by changing the point of view of reflection, opening up minds with the aim of finding alternatives in terms of production, distribution and in general with the fruition of culture. We are no longer in a society of the spectacle nor in a society of total control. We are stepping out, using what society has produced in terms of mechanisms and products, and going beyond. We have become radicant as Nicolas Bourriaud points out, in a measure in which our consciousness of the real, in all of its forms has become the instrument of change. We are settled in being ‘in motion’. The crisis has shifted and has become our potential for rethinking our previous models. The consequence of the crisis is a state of precariousness, where the ephemeral constitutes our contemporary aesthetic. Artists are working within a critical discourse by transgressing media and engaging in political issues using means like writing or intersecting boundaries between different media, using different disciplines as instruments to broaden the trajectories of their discourse. This is an attempt to reflect on the present and the immediate futures, taking into account all of the perspectives offered by the multiple languages of contemporary culture. To be political also means to think of possibilities of the future.

The new generation share a transmedial attitude which brings them to broader and more diverse forms and contexts within their practices. In what we can define as a practice of Nomadism sets in motion the real in all its forms tending to an endless displacement where thoughts and forms are translated and reassembled into new narratives, producing alternative social contexts using existing materials. There is no longer one tendency or specificity, but a broad range of approaches using different practices as tools for subjective narration. In this process of embracing multiplicity, it is difficult to define and distinguish between those who are truly engaged in a critique of the social and cultural system with the aim of inciting real change, and those who are trying to ride the wave according to the roles of that system. But from our point of view, we will always be partial and each possibility will imply the exclusion of another who is different.

Between the good and the bad there are many shades in between and what has to be recognized is a generation of artists, curators and critics who are aware of the present condition, who are working on new definitions and parameters. Those working with or without the banner of history, using fiction or science, comics or sculpture, writing, or any other discourse. We are all using a range of possible materials. Now the problem is not WHY we use them but HOW we use them. Artists are responding to a new globalized perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathway between multiple formats of expression and communication (Nicolas Bourriaud). This is not about chaotic movement as it probably appears, but it is an organized and fully conscious path that opens up to infinite progressions and changes. Nomads don’t move randomly, but plan their journeys by drawing them on a map. These contemporary artists reconfigure cultural practices through the use of existing codes and practices. Culture is a mobile entity, a multiple proliferation of the visual and of narratives bound within. We could also use the term nomadism-in-time, as a way of describing a certain propensity to engage with time as a place of critical thought. Here we are enabled to build a new social aesthetic based not only on the practice of collective movement, but on the unfolding of individual mythologies 2 (collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture, knitted together by ongoing debate, publicity promotion and discussion- Seth Price). We are no longer in search of a collective doing, but we operate as monads in the flow of the real.

Every monad, as Leibniz explained, is characterized by the power of representation, through which it reflects every other monad so that one can look in every other monad to observe the whole universe reflected there. In the same way, contemporary culture is a proliferation of individual mythologies or subjective narratives that contribute to the definition of a cultural landscape, opening a multitude of points of view. Different from the Postmodern era, that proliferation is not so much a lack of inclusive ideologies and a naive multiplicity of claimed cultural diversity, but it is instead a consciousness of us and of all that surrounds us, it is a critical dimension in which we are able to put into question neo-liberalism in all its dimensions and build on our functional utopias 3. If we consider the current situation, many artists share a sense of engagement that is completely different from its political connotation, which points more to the will of making the world work. They are no longer required to represent anything. They produce discourses, improving their practices with their existences within the cultural field. We often misunderstand the sense of these progressions, which take place slowly and are often imperceptible, but for this reason they are more complex and probably more effective than a quick fall of the Bastille. In this flow between bodies, sounds, images and words there are some artists using time-based practices with the aim to re-access meaning and produce discourse using the short-circuit as a praxis of reenactment. They don't occupy any specific place, but instead move backwards and forth on a kind of timeline, never quite taking a seat. Quite to the contrary, they try to perform a dialectical relationship with the environment that surrounds them. Nomadism-in-time may not be quite the right definition, but it is certainly functional in defining an interest in breaking with the modern and the post-modern and with its conception of time, overstepping any clear definition and trying to produce alternative energies.

In a recent article Dieter Roelstraete4 put into question the tendency of many contemporary artists to use history in their practice, like he defined it as a “historiographic turn in art.”5 Even if I don’t completely agree with his perspective, I’m interested in the difference between the notions of the historical and the historicist. While the historicist suggests a tendency of conforming us to a state of affairs where history is determined by immutable laws, the historical seems a better term to identify the social and cultural phenomena that changes throughout time. The nuances in these two terms seem loaded and open to consideration. Of which, they might be the kinds of approaches that we will use in considering history in the development of our future. Thinking in historical terms is one way that we approach the endless possibilities of a critical thought, of building a future with a consciousness of how things can be transformed and elaborated upon by the passage of time. Re-enactment is a form of reassessing our trajectory, not merely as a cut and paste of anachronistic forms of expression. In the past year the phenomenon of these historical tendencies in art practice has taken place at all levels. However we must ask: do these tendencies represent obstacles towards the consideration of the importance of history, both personal and collective, in the writing of a new future?

Situating nomadism in-time clarifies the concept through specific analysis. It positions events and points of view, re-appropriating ideas and overcoming myths. Today some artists feel the urgency in practices to incite change. Their strategies involve the sharing appropriating from everywhere and everything: the present, the past and the future in the form of images, google maps, wikipedia tools, symposia, workshops, dance floors, critical discourse, informal conversations, sculptures, installations, video, sound, performances and so on in a heterotopia that implies fluctuation in a universe of signs and meanings, inhabiting spaces in between. Never filling a seat, these modes of working occupy different positions in different moments, depending on the contingencies that affect the direction of their efforts. In conclusion, what seems to emerge from this panorama is a progressive change that could be defined in terms of a re-appropriation of time. The various practices of temporally based artists are responding to this new re-appropriation, they are based on the will of creating a condition for the discursive.

above copied from:http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/18

Pataphysics - A Religion In The Making, Asger Jorn

2010-10-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

The history of religion fails into three stages. Materialist, or natural religion, completed the final phase of its development in the Bronze Age. Metaphysical religion emerged with Zoroastrianism and advanced through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, before maturing in the Reformation. Pataphyslcs, the third religious stage - set to galvanise human thought and action in about two hundred years time - emanates from Alfred Jarry's visionary system.

It is only recently that the religious content of Pataphysics has become apparent. Prior to this development, Jarry's invention remained largely unknown beyond the small circle who published the esoteric Cahiers du College de Pataphysique. But all this changed when a special Pataphysical number of the Evergreen Review was published in New York.

Although the Americans have now claimed the honour of presenting Pataphysics to the world, they didn't dare mention the word religion in their journal. Nevertheless, the enormous success Pataphysics enjoyed last year among the New World intelligentsia has inaugurated an epoch in which the essentially religious nature of this phenomena will be carefully analysed. You'd have to have a cold to miss the stink its causing! Natural religion is the spiritual confirmation of material existence. Metaphysical religion represents the establishment of an ever deepening rift between material and spiritual life. The various metaphysical religions indicate the degree to which such a polarisation has already taken place. The process by which this rift advances is complicated, and often retarded, by an attachment to natural rites - which are transformed, with varying degrees of success, into metaphysical ceremonies and myths. The stupidity of maintaining a metaphysical culture in an age already overtaken by a scientific paradigm is illustrated by [the] dictum Kierkegaard chose as confirmation of the Christian system of knowledge - that is, that it is necessary to have faith in the face of absurdity. The question that naturally follows from this is: 'Why?' The answer is immediately apparent: the secularised authorities require a spiritual justification of their power. This materialist argument dates from the period in which the critique of all ancient mythologies was beginning.

Simultaneously to the development of this materialist critique, a mythology capable of answering the new social exigencies was fashioned from spare parts. Surrealism, existentialism and lettrism all disappeared up this metaphysical back alley.

Indeed, the classical lettristes persevered so nobly in their effort to reunite all those elements which had become irreconcilable in the modern world, that - by working backwards - they ended up reviving the ideas of the messiah and the resurrection of the dead; anything and everything that guarantied the unilateral character of faith! Now that politicians possess the means of total destruction, anyone who concerns themself with the end of the world takes on the perspective of the state.

Completely secularised, Metaphysical opposition to the physical world is definitively destroyed. The struggle terminated by total default.

The scientific paradigm is the only victor in any such debate.

A religion cannot be considered objectively true if its truth conflicts with what is known as scientific truth; and a religion which falls to represent the truth is no longer a religion. It will soon be generally recognised that this conflict has been resolved by Pataphysics. Jarry and his followers have placed on the level of the absolute a basic idea of modern science: that is to say, the concept of the constancy of equivalents.

The ground was prepared for the theory of equivalence by the Christian concept of man's equality before God. But it was only with scientific and industrial development that this principle was imposed on all sectors of life; and finally arrived, via scientific socialism, at universal social equality.

The fact that the principle of equality could no longer be limited to the spiritual world led to plans for scientific surrealism - as sketched out in Alfred Jarry's theories. Here, the Kierkegaardian principle of the absurd has been supplemented by the axiom of the equivalence of absurdities (equivalence of gods among themselves; and between gods, men and things). In this way a future religion is founded, one which is indestructible on its own ground: pataphysical religion encompasses equally all the possible and impossible religions of the past, present and future.

If Pataphysics had been taught anonymously, and avoided criticism, it might have slipped unnoticed into the world. Had this had happened, the apparently insoluble problem of Pataphysical authority - the consecration of the inconsecratable - would not have occurred.

But, alas, we are only too aware that Pataphysics appeared in the wake of other religions to fulfil an identical function. And so, Pataphysics can't be materialised into a social authority without recourse to an antiPataphysical praxis; because to become socially recognisable it would have to be invested with a social power. Consequently, Pataphysical religion is an unconscious victim of its own superiority over all prevalent metaphysical systems. It should not be necessary to emphasise that no reconciliation is possible between the principles of superiority and equivalence.

The great merit of pataphysics is to have confirmed that there is no metaphysical justification for forcing everybody to believe in the same absurdity, possibilities for the absurd and in art are legion. The only logical deduction that can be made from this principle is the anarchist thesis: to each his own absurdities. The negation of this principle is expressed in the legal power of the state, which forces all citizens to submit to an identical set of political absurdities.

It must by now be apparent that once a Pataphysical authority is accepted, it becomes a demagogic weapon against the Pataphysical spirit. Thus the Pataphysical programme itself, prevents the existence of any Pataphysical organisation; and from this fact we can deduce that it is impossible to form a Pataphysical church. The impossibility of creating a pataphysical situation in social life also prevents the creation of a social situation in the name of Pataphysics. The reasons for this have already been outlined. Equivalence entails the complete elimination of any concept we might have of situations or events.

Now that Pataphysics finds itself placed in an objective cultural situation, the inevitable consequence of the preceding definition is a split in the body of Pataphysical believers; between pure antisituationists and those who - holding to the pataphysical premise of equivalents - still favour the development of organised absurdities. Such absurdities maybe referred to as games.

The game is the Pataphysical overture to the world. The realisation of such games is the creation of situations. A crisis therefore exists, caused by the crucial problem which each Pataphysical adept must resolve: s/he must either apply the situlogic method and attack the conditions of the reigning society, or else simply refuse to do anything whatsoever about the situation. It is in the latter resolution to this problem that Pataphysics becomes the religion best adapted to life in the society of the spectacle: a religion of passivity and pure absence.

The Situationist International, the organisation of antiorganisers, faces an equally serious choice. Whether or not it should adopt the Pataphysical principle as an antimetaphysical weapon: one that is forever reinvented in the creation of new games. The absurdity of superiority and absurd superiority are the key elements of these games. Authority is their essential goal. If the game is liberation, it is best to begin by applying the principle of equivalents: the situation can then be constructed with an appearance of superiority. On the other hand, if a metaphysical base is used as the starting point, the situlogic will be dragged down to the level of the spectacle: a modernised servitude.

After a long process of fermentation the basic elements for a new game are now emerging from their previously obscure existence.

Time alone will tell whether these elements are compatible or antagonistic.

above copied from: http://www.infopool.org.uk/6104.html

Generic Objects, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

2010-10-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

1.

By generic objects we don’t mean objects that affect a kind of generic quality—brilliantly commonsensical and ordinary objects that come from the rarefied space of the designer’s studio, and draw their value from that space. We mean really generic—milk crates, plastic buckets, shipping containers, wooden palettes, traffic barricades, decorative concrete blocks, urban trash cans and dumpsters, rubber tires, scaffolding, Scotch tape. It’s not that any of these aren’t designed, but rather that they are designed so incredibly well as to function with unparalleled efficiency within the systems of circulation for which they are intended. Their most telling quality is that they have slipped below the threshold of what would otherwise mark their identity as designed artifacts.

Functioning within the large field of conventions inevitably established by global markets and transnational productive systems, generic objects are designed with such programmatic exactitude that spaces accommodating authorial expression are reduced to make room for qualities that foster efficient and competitive performance in commercial processes. The more extensive and decentralized the circuits of production and distribution in which generic objects participate, the more numerous the universal norms by which they are informed. The space for authorial display or geographically specific markers is compressed to a minimum, when not eliminated altogether.

2.

Generic objects are synthetic genetic objects: a genome or a strict chain of codes, a tight script of metric chromosomes, cuts across them and the systems to which they are attached. The shipping container, for instance, like the bucket and the milk crate, is marked by multiple conventions, by a global consensus—a genome—established between all the parts of the system in which it functions. This guarantees compatibility at every interface. The weight and structural resistance of metal used for the container, the dimensions of the cranes and of the storage facilities in ships, the width of the trucks, the width of the interstate highway lanes used by the trucks, the walkways in the storage areas of ports, the width and reach of forklifts—they all work together. It’s an alliance that generates, in proportion to the efficiency of the system, an internal violence—a force, like that of genetic coding, which imposes morphologies, from the minutest detail of the object to the very edges of the system. Everything is determined by everything else.

In the generic universe every artifact plays a double role: it’s a fount of exigencies, putting its demands to the rest of the system, while at the same time it is irrevocably shaped by the enormous pressure that the remaining elements of the system exercise over it. Object and system are co-extensive. The illusion of the individual artifact and the crystallized complete system dissolves into an active and shape-producing field of exchanges and relations, internally held by the tension of provisionally optimal or near-optimal solutions but intermittently bombarded by demands that come from the outside, demands that it must address: new codes or laws, increased volumes of traffic, technological advances in other fields, administrative and marketing decisions, climate, regional conflicts, and so forth.

What we have, then, is a group of objects determined by a metric regime that they themselves empower, a genetic pool and the shapes it produces through relationships of mutual reinforcement, affected occasionally by exterior demands (which then translate into alterations in the system, into new information). In this sense, every aspect of the generic object has its own dimension of necessity. And every object is an elastic surface: if it receives a blow, it channels it to the entire system, and the blow is manifested in the individual objects that make up the system. If the resistance of the container’s metal changes, then the gripping power of the crane has to be altered. The shape or weight required by these objects, for instance, produces invisible expansive waves that mark the global landscape of trade. The process dictates compatible features to all the elements with which the object engages. Likewise in the opposite direction, a massive change at the global scale of trade sweeps down as a series of awesome waves that alters the shape of the individual elements.

3.

One of the visual “frequencies” transmitted by generic objects metonymically signals the massive and elastic systems to which they belong. These are systems to which we often remain physically, if not cognitively, blind. A run-of-the-mill shipping container, once deprived of its emblematic status on the sales catalogue page and the corporate website, becomes inseparable from the systems of distribution, transportation, and storage for which it was undoubtedly designed and manufactured—even when other uses may be possible. One conceives the container, within the stacks in ports and storage yards and on ships, as a small but essential and interconnected part of an intricate web of lines bustling with activity—lines that mark not only the routes of global/national/urban transportation of which it is an obvious part, but also the exchanges of capital that produce and benefit from these routes. These lines also link back to the factories that produce the goods stored and transported by the container, as well as to the offices that draft marketing plans for these goods and to the retail stores where they are sold. These lines to the factory, the ad agency, and the points of retail sale are, in turn, plugged in to lines that lead back to the farms, forests, mines, and rigs that generate or collect the raw materials necessary for the production of goods. And if we are imaginative enough, these lines can be linked to lines that map out the systems that allow the raw material to emerge in the first place. Every container plots a massive arabesque of relations as it dissolves into it and relinquishes the illusion of its singularity.

And this complicated weave of interpenetrating lines is crossed by other patterns, such as the one that tracks the fuel production necessary for the factories to be fired up and to keep the transportation vehicles moving. And woven into it are the patterns of war that keep oil economies in place, and the patterns of intricate investment and political maneuvering that keep those wars going. Even where murky zones appear in this complicated tapestry, they too are abuzz with obscure and connected activity. Discreet realms—the military site, the factory, the boardroom, the advertising firm, the port, the shopping mall—all collapse into one another. Or, more accurately: the idea of a world of discrete realms collapses altogether. Adjacencies become interpenetrations. The container languishing on a dock can beam us, if we zoom in just right, to a woven substrate of invisible materialities, to an intricate matrix of flows and forces that spreads out like a chemical LSD sky before us. It may not be there, but it’s there.

4.

Generic objects encourage us to consider the field over its individual elements. The singular seems superfluous in defining generic objects. Surely, a bucket is a bucket—irreducibly particular. But a bucket is a generic object only in the presence of another bucket (or, at the very least, in its implied presence). Generic objects draw on the dense fields of repeating specimens for their very definition. It is in the presence of other objects of their kind that they actualize their individual capabilities. Coupling and stacking and nesting are, after all, relations between multiples; instant replaceability implies equivalency and sameness among a large quantity of identical artifacts. Generic objects are defined by and live through a monstrous contiguity that mocks atomized conceptions of the world. Fields find meaning and function in ways that their individual components may not.

5.

Within their systems of circulation, generic objects are alien to the way a city produces meaning. Plastic crates used to distribute milk are abstract and autistic objects, blind and rigorously inelastic artifacts that unwaveringly respond to a set of specific demands. They are collections of data, programmed to function with the utmost efficiency, and nothing else. Though the crates surely carry the potential for a social function, they have been optimized to such a degree that their relation to the human is reduced to a single value or dimensional datum, inscribed by the weight of a gallon of milk or the storage capacity of a delivery truck. Milk crates in this environment are surfaces radically devoid of meanings, figures of such alarming blankness on a symbolic plane that their emptiness overwhelms.

Milk crates invariably leave full and return empty. They are part of a loop that, as a continuum of contiguous, melded information units, can remain active forever. If the world stood still, the loop that milk crates sketch out in the city would continue to flow, defying entropy and apocalypse. If one crate exits the loop, due to loss or damage, another simply takes its place. The loop is like a tide cycle or a whirlpool. Its indifference, its inwardness, the silence generated by its centripetal flows, should terrify us. It is monstrous in the way its energy absorbs all forms and meanings. As objects move in this flow, their contours, weights, surfaces, articulations, and inscribed data (date of production, type of plastic, percentages of recycled material, ownership markings) dissolve. It’s as if they move under such pressure that they are rendered liquid-like and incorporated into a perpetual spiral of activity.

6.

Generic objects accommodate the temporal modes of the situations in which they find themselves, and two modes of time are in play here: our segmented, finite, and familiar one; and that of the flow. These two modes of time, in turn, make two scales of perception visible. Generic objects integrated into the cycles of the flow tend towards invisibility; the articulation of their qualities remains hostage to and stalled by a movement exceeding that of everyday life in scale, duration, and inflexibility. All the elements caught in this flow dissolve in a confluence of obscured characteristics. Typological markers melt into pure metrics. The possibility of holding on to a familiar trait is rendered impossible by the abstracting impulse of the flow.

As soon as this object exits the flow, however, it is transformed. If a truck takes too long to recover emptied milk crates, the crates are exposed to forces external to the cycle. Someone steals one to carry the mangoes he will sell on the side of the road to earn his rent money. Once outside its “natural” flow the object becomes visible, familiar, autonomous, gains an identity, reveals potentials that hadn’t coalesced until then. Its time and ours synchronize. In such a situation, we can finally think of what to do with the generic object, how to manipulate it, make it serve new functions.

But these statements need to be qualified. They tie things up too neatly. The responses to the generic object extracted from its system are as varied as they are contingent on particular geographies and behaviors. The nature of the extractions and the places where the loop registers loss are not insignificant with regard to the way generic objects will be “re-drawn” away from their startling blankness.

7.

As a palpitating lattice of activity laid over the city’s orthogonal spread, the flow moves with the ineluctability of a stampede. And as with a stampede, individual elements are picked off. The rear of a supermarket becomes a site where the herd suffers losses. But it’s not the rear of every supermarket. It depends on the neighborhood. Geography and economics, specific demands and patterns of behavior, all matter. Where privation is greater, the voracity swells, the losses multiply. In affluent areas one instead usually finds the predator is satisfied. The flow itself, with its endless supply of replaceable parts, remains coldly indifferent and unaffected by these variations. It is indifferent because it reserves the right of reclamation, always threatening to pull stray elements back into its current.

The collection of points where individual specimens are extracted or expelled from the flow, diagrammed, produces a littoral—pockets of activity closely bound to their systems of circulation, both in terms of physical proximity and in the understanding of the object’s function. When there, generic objects are suspended on a middle ground in which they are regarded as somewhat less abstract than when in the flow, yet neither are they regarded as elements inserted into rhetorical relationships with the broader culture or design disciplines. The object’s alarming blankness is only slightly dissipated by the introduction of a calculus that links real needs to functional potentials.

8.

In the littoral, which usually materializes in economically depressed neighborhoods, the individual’s engagement with the generic object is modulated by need. The pressure of hardship demands appeasement. A contextual strain takes on a constitutive role by exerting pressure on the potentials in objects. If rolls of toilet paper need to be transported, then surely the nesting potential of the buckets used for the task will remain invisible.

If generic objects are patterned information, then in the littoral that information is processed with the efficient satisfaction of a particular goal in mind. The processing is endowed with a discriminating filter that necessity provides. Objects are treated as pure resource. They retain an abject rawness. This inhibits deployment of the artifact in rhetorical terms. What the object or usage of the object may mean, what values it may embody, what criteria it may be judged by—these are matters sacrificed to the necessary resolution of an immediate predicament. It’s almost as if the prerogatives are no longer those of the individual: the situation determines the possibilities for engagement. If there is something like a liberated sweep of the generic object’s potentials in the littoral, it is rendered available and substantive only in relation to the range of hardships that it meets there. The object’s set of freed potentials is an inverted diagram of the needs that structure its context.

Under these circumstances, objects are still not integrated in any fundamental sense, but remain in a condition of partial concealment. The individual’s gaze is pressed too close to them to obtain a full picture. The field of vision is filled by one or a limited number of the objects’ qualities or potentials. Need pushes the individual up against the objects’ potential for satisfying it. If, after being laid off from the supermarket, a person has to urgently figure out how to carry all his cleaning supplies from parking lot to parking lot as he washes cars, the milk crate’s metric precision in relation to the delivery truck will be relegated to a blurred edge of his field of vision, if not simply ignored altogether. Need determines what is useful or adequate at that moment. For an individual whose predicament is how to survive, a bucket is simply a body of condensed physical qualities, a bunch of physical “morphemes,” a complex library of connections, information to be applied, and always in light of a problem demanding an immediate solution. Interpretation and consideration of the object as such is minimal. Hardship engenders urgent relationships based on functionality, it unbinds an ineluctability that—like the ineluctability that renders the crate-in-the-flow an indivisible assemblage of information—possesses the individual to drag generic objects to the ravine of survival. Impossible to plot within moral and rhetorical universes, the object’s use is justified solely by its effectiveness in alleviating need—the very need that determined the scope of engagement that was possible with the object in the first place.

9.

Imagine two adjacent spheres—one the flow of generic objects; the other the realm of human activity in the city. Occasionally, their edges make contact and the flow releases elements. This is how we come to see, just outside a bodega, a group of milk crates captured by human need and intuitive ingenuity. They’ve become chairs in a domino game, a display structure for a handful of sugarcanes, a base for the cooler of the water vendor at the stoplight, the “mobile unit” of a car washer working in the empty lot next door. The transient nature of these activities always threatens to return the object to urban drift along with the leaves blowing on the sidewalks. The abbreviation of the object in the littoral finds a counterpart in the provisional quality the object takes on as solution or appeasement of a need. If another object appears that provides a better solution, the original one will be discarded. The object is always recognized as a temporary substitute. A rock that serves as a doorstop finds a homologue in a bucket full of water. A kind of non-rhetorical analogy occurs. The preferred object is the result of a comparative operation that pivots on the performance and potential of objects, and not on their physical or conceptual similarities; that is, on typologies of use and not of form. In fact, since both rock and bucket are structured by abstract forces—natural processes in one case and super-optimized industry on the other—they find themselves in this context without any affective mnemonic dimension or symbolic baggage. It is their mobilization as pure information that allows them to be interchangeable.

10.

All this is not to say that solutions aren’t repeated, that a bank of local knowledge doesn’t accumulate and grow in the littoral. It is to say, rather, that the transfer of solutions out of their immediate moment, that of linking necessity to potential, is incidental, even if highly significant. Contingent relationships are stabilized as recurring solutions, folded into a common repertoire. Future users can draw on it. This is where experience, repetition, and habit enter the frame and fortify the temporary repertoires of new activities for generic objects.

11.

In summary, the generic object finds itself in at least three situations: first, in the flow for which it is manufactured; second, in the littoral where need determines use and the generic object, due to the very conditions in which it functions, escapes rhetorical manipulation; and third, in a space of symbolic production, for example, within culture or design disciplines. Different criteria are prominent in each situation. The first and second situations, flow and littoral, seem determined by a certain ineluctability—the flow by the autism that propels the avalanche of optimal production; the littoral by the forces that cut through the individual in precarious situations. In both cases, the milk crate is treated less as an object per se than as information. In a cultural environment the milk crate is understood as a sublimated representation of the other two situations.

A relation to the object is, then, to be determined by the situation in which it is encountered: a prohibitive and prohibited one in the flow; a performative one in the littoral, guided by need and survival; and a rhetorical one in cultural spaces.

12.

In the last of these situations, in cultural spaces and within design disciplines, when the question arises of what to do with generic objects, analogy (in a rhetorical sense) has proven the easiest answer. Turn the bucket over and it becomes the lampshade it always looked like. Cut holes out of the shipping container and it becomes the shed it always suggested. But these easy analogies (easy because they lack that leap across deep divides and the magic of conjoining apparent incommensurables that rich analogies thrive on) always attempt to extract the generic artifact from its condition as nondescript and anonymous. They project a designer’s intention onto a thing that was circulating in the world fine without it. The appeal to the obvious, to what the object already suggested, is a thinly veiled pretense to rescue the generic from its dreadfully flat world of sameness by pulling it onto the lifeboat of differentiated artifacts.

13.

The easiest analogies treat the generic less as resource than as topic. The mundane artifact is infused with the designer’s “intelligence.” And the designer is celebrated for his or her resourcefulness, DIY ethics, poetics of the quotidian, critiques of the commodity system, imperative to recycle, and sympathy for the demands of sustainability. The rapport established by these analogies, however, while supposedly doing the opposite, narrows the view and hinders the object by subsuming its productive potential into a set of familiar typologies. It treats the object as only its meanings and manifested physical traits. What is most interesting about the generic quality is that it clarifies objects as compressed and manipulable energy and information, free of the magical cloak of meaning and added value with which the fairy dust of sanctioned creativity wraps them.

14.

It may be more interesting to place these generic objects in scenarios in which they are confronted with “deformative” forces—forces that will “torque” them. These twisting forces can be perceived when unexpected protocols are applied to a situation, by plugging in a vector usually absent from the contexts in which generic objects function, or by plotting generic objects within the coordinates of a program that is alien to them. It’s not, then, a matter of working against the traits inherent to generic objects, of making a bucket or a milk crate do the work of established furniture and architectural typologies as an ultimate horizon of productivity. On the contrary, it is the inherent capacities of the objects that give discipline to the experiment. What possibilities does the stackability of the bucket or the container open up when an unexpected demand is put to it, when a tiny catastrophe makes it swerve off course? What does its modularity permit beyond the functions and contexts it was designed for? What can be done with the object’s portability, with the fact that it’s structured to couple with a large array of other artifacts, just as the container couples with cranes in ports across the planet?

What are the unintended consequences of the artifact’s design, and how does one smoke them out and allow them to reveal their potential? How can new options be inserted into the seemingly closed systems in which these objects function? How can these systems be rendered sites of potential and unexpected plasticity? How is topographical instability introduced into a flattened pattern of uses? What can be done about the fact that these objects are already being put to unexpected uses in which their function is less optimal than their original designed intended? Can additions, joints, inserts, or deformed clones be produced that enlarge the range of their functions and generate new systems for which they can become basic building blocks? One begins to look for ways to tap into these objects’ pregnant infrazones for latent potentialities. One attempts to tease aberrant forms from the objects’ “natural” tendencies through uncommon modulations. One feels for malleable segments or “holes” in the pattern of the original design processes, and applies pressure there.

15.

To consider the generic in this way, we may need to temporarily padlock the studio. We may need to turn a bucket over or bore a few windows into the walls of a container. It is the work one is supposed to be doing. But it comes at the cost of ignoring what is truly amazing about the generic: that it functions in relation to a series of forces; that it is always part of a field of interconnecting vectors; that to think through it is to think in terms of large, nearly unfathomable landscapes. The generic is globalization’s inevitable “aesthetic”—the quality that is dominant in the objects that seem most at home in it, most comfortably bound to massive and invisible materialities and networks.

The scuffed bucket in which we keep our clay-stained baseballs is like Calvino’s suburban trash can: the mirage that it is a self-contained artifact, dumbly sitting there, independent from the world swirling around it, quickly evaporates.1 The object begins to unfold as a pattern constructed of a series of relationships that bind it, irrevocably, to infrastructural circuits, economic pressures, and social contracts. In Calvino’s trash can the city’s entire system of garbage collection and management—not to mention the amounts of energy, accumulated knowledge, and economic demands that lead to its particular morphology—is inscribed. It was inscribed even when the object was still a shiny new waste receptacle on the vendor’s shelf. Bound up in it, like virtual ribbons of data, have always been all the networks and vectors that it will course through—all the systems of design and production it results from, all the systems of distribution and storage it is made to lock into. Understanding how this is already so fantastically complex, so much better than producing a new lamp or a new shed, or turning out a new variant on a typology in the way it has been turned out so many times, one looks to apply new pressures and invent unexpected scenarios until “aberrant” and novel functions in generic objects are set free.

above copied from: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/165

An intelligent view of the Avant-Garde at the end of 1955

2010-10-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Unattributed
Potlatch #24, 24 November 1954

URBANISM. In Paris today we recommend visits to: Contrescarpe (Continent); Chinatown; the Jewish Quarter; Butte-aux-Cailles (the Labyrinth); Aubervilliers (at night); the public gardens of the 7th Arrondissement; the Medical-Legal Institute; rue Dauphine (Nesles); Buttes-Chaumont (play); the Merri neighborhood; Parc Monceau; Ile Louis (the island); Pigalle; Les Halles (rue Denis, rue du Jour); the Europe neighborhood (memory); rue Sauvage.

We do not recommend visits, under any circumstances, to: the 6th and 15th Arrondissements; the grand boulevards; Luxembourg; Champs-Elysees; Place Blanche; Montmarte; Ecole Militaire; Place de la Republique; Etoile and Opera; the whole 16th Arrondissement.

DECORATION. Project by J. Fillon for decoration of a living room: three quarters of the room, occupying the part that one crosses on entering through the only door, are elegantly furnished and have no particular purpose. At the far part of the room there is a barricade, partitioning off the functional part of the room, occupying one quarter of its total area. The barricade is absolutely authentic, built from cobblestones, sandbags, barrels, and other objects commonly used for this purpose. It is approximately as high as a person is tall, with several peaks and a few gaps. Loaded guns may be laid across the top. A narrow passageway leads to the functional part of the room, which is tastefully furnished and laid out in such a way as to provide a pleasant place to receive friends and acquaintances.

This living room, which of course also requires the appropriate lighting and ambient sound, could be used as a departure from the standard layout of a run-of-the-mill house, merely introducing a superficially picturesque element. Nevertheless, its true purpose is to form a part of a wider architectural complex where its decisive value in the construction of a situation comes to the forefront.

EXPLORATION. In the near future, a team of Lettrists, operating from a base on rue des Jardins-Paul, will undertake a thorough exploration of the Merri neighborhood, which has not yet appeared on any psychogeographical map. WE INVITE ALL AND SUNDRY JOIN THE LETTRIST INTERNATIONAL. We will keep a few.

EDUCATIONAL GAMES. A recent development, "ideological debate structured as a boxing match," seems to have a brilliant future among the intellectual elite, for whom it seems ideally suited. (IDEOLOGICAL DEBATE STRUCTURED AS A BOXING MATCH WILL HELP TO INCREASE YOUR PRESTIGE WHILE WASTING TIME.) Here are the rules:

The two opponents and the referee, whose decision is final, sit at the same table, separated from each other by the referee. The length of the match is decided beforehand along with the number of rounds and their precise duration.

When the referee declares the match has begun, the two opponents size each other up for a moment and then the first to go on the attack makes a statement on whatever subject he feels is appropriate. His opponent then responds, either with a vigorous rebuttal of the argument just formulated, or by making some statement on a related or unexpected topic, or -- best of all -- with a combination of the two. The referee makes sure that the opponents do not interrupt each other. nevertheless, any contender speaking for too long loses points. A chronometer marks the end of the round with an appropriate signal and the debate is broken off immediately.

The referee then awards the round to one of the opponents or calls a draw. During the break, the contenders' fans and trainers may bring them alcoholic beverages or cups of coffee (and in some cases, drugs). The match begins again when the order is given. The referee calls a knockout when either of the opponents, surprised by the vehemence or subtlety of an attack, is unable to continue the debate. Should no knockout occur, the winner of the match is decided at the end on points, depending on the number of rounds won. Cheating, even when obvious, is not penalized.

Already noted as favorite topics are Zen, the New Left, phenomenological ontology, Astruc, Gallic coins, censorship and the intelligence of chess.

The Lettrists, who would be unbeatable, do not play this game.)

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/1955.html

Taking Art Seriously: Understanding Studio Research, Bernard Hoffert

2010-10-12T03:57:00.000-07:00

Importance of the Visual

The degree to which art is integral to our way of life is scarcely worth noting. Most of us accept without question that access to art, both historic and contemporary, is part of any community and the diversity of contemporary art practice touches almost every aspect of our lives-public, commercial, creative and social. Experimental and media Arts reflect, enhance and influence culture and enrich our daily experience, while individual art choices provide a source of personal fulfillment and satisfaction. At a broader level it is the products of visual culture—the art, design and architecture—which direct our travels; it is the museums, galleries, buildings and spaces of past as well as present visual culture, which shape much of our holiday itinerary and our purpose in traveling. At a panoramic level it is not too extravagant to claim that it is the visual which shapes our experience of the world; every building we enter, every object we use and every image we enjoy is the product of a creative visual impulse, every city is the outcome of conscious aesthetic decisions, some good some bad, some motivated by function not excellence, but all in part visual.

The visual environment is so fundamental that we do not think about it. We accept the outcomes of art, design, architecture and the proliferation of visual forms, but we fail to acknowledge their status. We appreciate and enjoy the individual example, but as a category of learning with its own academic integrity, we do not accord it an equivalent recognition to the sciences, humanities or technologies.

As this paper explains, it is time we took art seriously, accepted it as a domain of knowledge and integrated it and its associated visual forms into the broader context of our knowledge culture.

Art and the Knowledge Environment

Research has become an increasingly important concept in the visual arts. Encouraged by government policy, universities place increased emphasis on research output. Artists and art educators describe art making in terms of research and academic art staff apply for grants as a source of research income. Disciplines known for their creativity are now equally acknowledged for their research. ‘Practice-led’ or ‘practice based’ research is becoming an aspect of research discussion, in part to establish the prestige of academic institutions, but also to link with the push for innovation and new outcomes from research knowledge, as government policies attempt to justify expenditure on research.

The UK tertiary sector has undergone a series of Research Assessment Exercises which evaluated the research outputs nationally. These mechanisms for quality assurance required the demonstration of research outcomes and accountability for research. An academic hierarchy of institutions has resulted from these Exercises along with a system of institutional funding based on research excellence. New Zealand has performed a similar exercise, Australia is about to do the same and other nations may well follow. Integral to this research data gathering is the inclusion of research in visual culture, not research about the visual, undertaken through the humanities, but research in the visual-Art as Research. This discussion contends that research in art and the visual contributes to knowledge in the same way as all disciplines do - research results in new knowledge and the final test of new knowledge is what it contributes to the human condition.

Research and Culture

Consider the relationship between the development of knowledge and its contribution to culture in the following disciplines:

New knowledge in science contributes to new technological development

Benjamin Franklin is well known for his experiments with electricity. In 1746, while watching a summer storm, it occurred to him that lightening looked like an electrical phenomenon, resembling the spark generated from an electrified body in his experiments. His research showed that a pointed object, like a finger or an electrified body attracted electrical discharges. Applying this discovery in nature, he found that lightning was attracted to such objects, confirming his suspicion it was electrical. He then invented the lightning rod - a simple, but effective device to dispel the destructive energy of these electrical impulses. He wrote: “may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships and cont, from the stroke of lighting, by directing us to fix on the highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle…”. The lightning conductor is now integral to technologies associated with building, navigation and the environment (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in medicine results in improved health care

In 1879, Louis Pasteur was working on a cure for chicken cholera, a devastating poultry disease that was the nineteenth century version of bird flu. He was injecting healthy chickens with laboratory cultures of the disease and then attempting to treat the infected birds. During the summer his work was delayed for several months, and when he returned to his experiments, he found that chickens injected with the culture which had stood in his laboratory unused through the hot summer months, did not develop all the symptoms of the cholera, but contracted what appeared to be a very mild dose of the disease. Further testing confirmed that the weak culture had vaccinated the chickens against the cholera. Extrapolating from this example, Pasteur initiated a system of preventative medicine which has been integral to healthcare ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in microbiology results in improved medical treatment

In 1922 Alexander Fleming was working at St Mary’s hospital in London when by chance he discovered that an active ingredient in nasal mucus, what he identified as lysozyme, had the ability to destroy bacteria. Although it was not a powerful germ killer, it pointed the way for his future research until seven years later he discovered penicillin. This laid the foundations of microbiology and the revolutionary impact antibiotics have had on improved health care ever since (Koestler, 1970).

New knowledge in engineering contributes to better structures and machines

In December 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright mounted an engine onto a glider they had built and flew for 59 seconds, covering a distance of about 260 metres they effectively launched the aeronautical industry. What was revolutionary about the Wright brothers’ work was neither the glider nor the engine, although each was a significant development on existing technology; it was the shaping and structure of the wing which allowed a pilot to manipulate the aerodynamic impact on the structure while in flight; it was an issue of structural design. The whole aircraft industry reflects the innovations which flowed from their research. (Mc Farland, 1953).

Each of the above developments contributed to the betterment of the human condition; they also contribute within their disciplinary domain to culture. As a result culture improves in intellectual and material terms and we have an enhanced quality of life. Similarly, art produces new knowledge by a parallel contribution to culture, in which new art directly adds to the quality of cultural experience.

Art and Culture

Consider the following examples of developments in art that have contributed to cultural quality and experience:

New knowledge in environmental art contributes to a richer experience of nature

In the early 1840s a number of painters interested in recording the landscape were working in the small village of Barbizon, on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris. Although not a formal group they are often collectively called the Barbizon painters, due to the similar themes their work conveys in the celebrating of nature and recording the beauty of the landscape. Different artists produced work that fluctuated between realism and romanticism, but each was inspired by working directly from nature. One of the foremost artists associated with Barbizon was Theadore Rousseau, whose painting fell at the more realistic end of the scale. He recognized that the expansion of industry in Paris, the growth of the city beyond its walls and the popular indifference to nature, was devastating the forest. He sucessfully petitioned the Emperor of France, Napoleon III to establish a protected park in the forest and in 1863, 1,097 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest was set aside as a réserve artistique, which could not be exploited commercially. This was the first protected nature reserve and began a world wide movement to preserve the environment, still gaining momentum today. Rousseau and the Barbizon painters had considerable impact in the USA, reflecting the impact of the Hudson River Painters. This celebration of the land contributed, in 1864, to Abraham Lincoln signing a declaration of protection for the Yosemite Valley. In 1872 the American Congress established Yosemite National Park - the world’s first protected wild life reserve and forest. The Barbizon and Hudson River artists succeeded in awakening cultural sensibilities to the pleasures of nature (Chagnon-Burke, 2004).

New knowledge in populist art contributes to a richer experience of popular culture

In Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century a number of artists emerged who celebrated the Parisian nightlife and popular society. Linked mostly with the Impressionists and Post Impressionists, they used cafes, bars, dance halls and theatres as their subjects, shaping some of the most memorable images of early Modernism. Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881) and the Moulin Rouge paintings of Lautrec introduce popular entertainment as the subject of art; the scenes of ballet and opera by Degas show us the world of the Parisian elite as they enjoy the pleasures of the new Garnier Opera House; the paintings by Berthe Morisot provide insights into the more restricted female world, the domestic environment, family and entertainments of the upper middle class. These artists and many others of the period, bring us the everyday world as the content of art, the entertainments, celebrations, private moments and debaucheries, the contemptuous underbelly of polite society which had previously been eschewed by art. This opened the door to popular culture and the richness and diversity of art which deals with the world around us, culminating in the Pop Art of the 1960s and its celebration of modern life. It spawned the vast use of ‘the popular’ as content in advertising, media, films and all of the other offshoot entertainments which enrich our lives; these 19th century artistic insights turned cultural awareness away from high art to the enjoyment of popular culture which is integral to modern living.

New knowledge in art and design contributes to beautifying our surroundings

In 1861 the firm of Marshall, Morris, Faulkner and Co. was formed in London to craft furniture based on truth to materials, celebrating their natural beauty; and simplicity of design, rather than overlays of decoration. Reacting to the excesses of Victorian abundance and poor quality industrial production, William Morris and his friends began what turned into the Arts and Crafts Movement. Their inspiration came from nature and a romanticized notion of Mediaeval times when happy craftsman celebrated their skills in the creation of beauty. The ideal led to a revolution in both art and design with major artists and designers working together to beautify and refine furnishings, revive historic ideals and improve the quality of life. While the social ambitions of the Movement might have fallen short, their aesthetic ideals influenced generations of artists and designers and are integral to craft design today.

New knowledge in perception contributes to richer personal experience

In 1910 in the village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky painted the first intentionally abstract painting, a small watercolour that set him on the pursuit of abstract imagery as the subject matter of art. His book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, outlines his theories, explaining how abstract colours and forms carried meaning that could enrich our experience. Through the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and the work of other abstract artists, the expressive and communicative power of colour, line, texture and form became evident to a broader audience. Aspects of image construction, previously regarded as the building blocks of meaning, were recognized as having expressive meaning of their own. It was as if a new sensibility had been unleashed as artists, architects and designers of all types adopted the power of colour and simple, direct form to enliven their creations. Abstraction has since become an integral aspect of all visual communication, in which the components of making any image - shape, colour, tone and texture - are as least as important for the message as the image itself. The whole visual spectrum has developed using the perceptual innovations of the early abstractionists (Kandinsky, 1977).

New knowledge in the scope of art contributes to a broader appreciation of culture

The creative excitement of Russia in the early twentieth century is best evidenced through two major design movements, the Suprematists, founded by the painter and designer, Kasimir Malevich and the Constructivists, who are linked most closely with the designer for social needs, Vladimir Tatlin. A major figure who spanned both movements was Isador El Lissitsky, an engineer, architect and designer who, fascinated by the discoveries of science, sought to represent these movements’ inspirational ideas in geometric shapes and composite lines. Lissitsky’s drawings and designs, inspired by speculations on a fourth dimension, provided a conceptual leap into a new way of considering space and introduced visual forms that suggested the interplay of science and life, paralleling the innovations of Kandinsky and Mondrian in their impact on visual culture expressed through typography, architecture and industrial design (Hoffert, 1995).

New knowledge in the application of art contributes to a richer quality of human experience

In 1916 the Expressionist, then Cubist and eventually abstract painter, Piet Mondrian, joined the Dutch group De Stijl, which combined artists and designers in a search for a style that represented the needs of the twentieth century. Influenced by the Theosophical teachings of Madam Blavatsky and using the terminology of the philosopher, H J M Schoenmaekers, Mondrian refined his visual language to the artists’ primaries, red, yellow and blue and the tones, black grey and white. This was the language of his art for the remainder of his life, used in different formal relationships and always built around a formal geometric basis. Mondrian and his colleagues defined a style of design which has permeated the last 80 years, applied through architecture and interiors, furniture and fabrics. Who has not walked on Mondrian linoleum or worn a Mondrian jumper? So strong was the impact of De Stijl that its characteristic design is better known today than it was when it was begun in the 1920s (Hoffert, 1995).

The list of additions to art knowledge is almost endless, the innovations of Russolo’s noise music in the development of pop; the impact of Futurist theatre on modern performance, both as theatre and as art; the insights of Surrealist and Pop Artists which have fed advertising, media and now multimedia imagery. All demonstrate the vast contribution that research in art has made to culture; new knowledge has been developed in art and this has led to development, enrichment, diversification and expansion in culture at large.

These examples demonstrate that while art contributes to culture, within the domain of its discipline, it also creates new knowledge which enables/inspires other disciplines to contribute to culture within their domains. Both functions are research developments, evolving from art practice. In recognizing this, the challenge becomes to establish the academic infrastructure and a research methodology through which art can be undertaken as research in university degrees; to allow practice based research the same recognition and status accorded other research. To achieve this is a major task of art education.

A Proposal for Research Degrees in Art

As mentioned earlier, increasingly art schools are addressing the research potential of visual culture; in the UK research in art was integral to the Research Assessment exercises and the same will be the case in Australia.

Research degrees in art practice have been established at Master’s level since the 1980s and studio-based PhD degrees emerged during the 1990s in the UK and Australia, attracting major artists and artist-academics as well as younger artists using the university context, with its seminars, critiques and interrogative engagement, as a means of further their practice.

The Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University has been developing formats for research degrees in art and design for the last fifteen years. Monash is one of Australia’s major research universities and all its academic disciplines are required to contribute to the university’s research objectives. The Faculty addressed this demand by developing an approach to visual research which has developed into the largest, practice based research degree program in the country and one of the largest in the world. The problem was to recognize the quality and achievement of professional visual production and to reformulate art production as research without compromising its quality as art.

The Monash research degree program is structured around an exhibition, which is the outcome of the research process. This is supported by a dissertation which bridges the expectations of professional art practice and university expectations of PhD degrees, to contextualize the visual research. Coursework components facilitate the integration of practice and theory, but the dominant emphasis is on the development of a body of studio research, for examination. With over 250 candidates at Masters and PhD level, the program’s success has been as a result of the support system developed to translate the expectations of professional art practice into research. The methodology coursework subjects explore issues of terminology and ways for visual research to be contextualized, to demonstrate its innovation. They also develop a theoretical context by which professional production can be taken further into the realms of research and cultural production. Seminars and critiques underpin the creative interaction within the program. The outcome has been a community of artist-scholars who create, discuss and critique each other’s art as part of the process of enhancing their visual output. They are art professionals who use their visual exploration to inspire visual research, using the academic experience to build and enhance their understanding of and contribution to visual culture. Art becomes an equal partner in the academic disciplines of the academy as a bastion of research and innovation within society.

‘Taking Art Seriously’ means we understand not just its creative potential, but how we can use its research knowledge to contribute, parallel to other disciplines, in the development of culture.

above copied from:http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/21

Manifesto of Industrial Painting, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio

2010-10-10T13:42:00.000-07:00

Manifesto of Industrial Painting: For a unitary applied art

Colloidal macromolecules have already made their appearance in the field of art, and although their poet has not yet been found, thousands of artists are busying themselves with the effort to master them.

The great era of resin[1] is inaugurated and with it has commenced the use of matter in motion; the colloidal macromolecule will etch itself profoundly onto the concept of relativity, and the constants of matter will suffer a definitive collapse. Concepts of eternity and immortality will disintegrate, and the woes of eternalization of matter will be reduced ever more to nothing, leaving to the artists of chaos the infinite joy of the "always new."

The novel[2] -- conceived amidst the risks of infinite imagination and invention: drawn from the liberated energry that man will harness toward the reconstruction of the gold standard, understood as the congealed energy of the infernal banking system already decomposing.

The patented[3] society, conceived of and based on the simplistic notions, the elementary gestures of artists and scientists reduced in captivity from ants to lice, is about to end. Man is expressing a collective consciousness and (wielding) a tool adequate to the transformation to a potlatch system of gifts which cannot be purchased if not with other poetic experiences.

The machine may very well be the appropriate instrument for the creation of an industrial-inflationist art, based on the Anti-Patent; the new industrial culture will be strictly "Made Amongst People" or not at all! The time of the Scribes is over.

Only a continual and implacable creation and destruction will result in an anxious and pointless quest for object-things of transitory use, planting mines beneath the foundations of the Economy, destroying its values or impeding their formation; the ever-novel will destroy the boredom and anguish created by man's slavery to the infernal machine, queen of the all-equivalent; the new possibility will create a new world of the total-diverse.

Quantity and quality will be fused; the arising society of the luxury-standard will annihilate traditions.

Proverbs will no longer have meaning.

For example, the proverb, "He who leaves the old path for the new," etc., will be replaced by, "The proverbs of the old starve the young to death."

A new, ravenous force of domination will push men toward an unimaginable epic poetry.

Not even the habit of establishing time will be preserved.

From now on, time will be merely an emotive value, a newly minted coin of shock, and will be based on the sudden changes arising in moments of creative life, and upon rare instants of boredom.

Men without memories will be created; men in a continual violent ecstasy, forever starting at ground zero; a "critical ignorance" will come into being with extensive roots in the long prehistory of savage man, the magus of the caves.

The new magic will have the more recent spice of the sparks of the conflagration of the library of Alexandria which was the synthesis of the neolithic revolution and which continues in our own times to burn the residue of the urban society of the Sumerians and the nomadism of the Phoenicians, flavoring like a narcotic incense the hopes of man.

So great will be the artistic productions that machines will produce, compliantly bending to our wills, that we will not even be able to fix it in memory; machines will remember for us.

Other machines will intervene to destroy, determining situations of non-value; there will be no more works of the art-champion, but open air ecstatic-artistic exchanges among the people.

The world will be the stage and the by-play of a continuous representation; the new earth will transform itself into an immense Luna Park, creating new emotions and new passions.

The cosmic spectacle offered by humanity will be effectively universal and visible in its total simultaneity at telescopic distance, obliging man to ascend in order to embrace the entire spectacle; the laziest will put their names down in Paradise.

Man is thus launched on the quest of myth.

In the past, the epic was able to create itself on earth; lack of communication, wars, great fears, and the confusion of languages and customs favored in time deformations and distortions of reality; they transformed actions, and synthesized into myth.

Today a myth can only be created with difficulty and when man manages to find himself in special conditions, or launches himself into macrocosm with immense instruments, or descends with miniscule ones into microcosm.

Because of this we must depict the roads of the future with unknowable materials, marking the long path of the Heavens with methods of signing adequate to the grandiosity of our undertakings.

Where today one makes signs with spokes in sodium, tomorrow we will use new rainbows, fatas morganas, aurora borealises that we will construct; the stripteases of the constellations, the rythmic dances of asteroids and ultrasonic music of thousands of fragmented sounds will supply us with moments worthy of demigods.

For all those things and men already powerful: sooner or later you will give us machines to play with or we will fashion them ourselves to occupy that leisure time which you, with demented voracity, look forward to passing in Banality and in making minds progressively into mush. We will use these machines to draw the highways, to make the most fantastical and unique fabrics in which for a single instant the joyous throngs will dress themselves with an artistic sense.

Kilometers of printed paper, engraved, colored, will sing hymns to the strangest and most zealous follies.

Houses of painted leather, of pottery, lacquered, of metal, of alloys, of resin, of vibrantly colored cements will form on the earth an asymmetrical and continuous moment of shock.

We will fix images at our pleasure with cine-photographical and televisual machines, which the collective genius of the people has created, and which you have until now evilly employed in securing for yourselves an absolute reign of Boredom.

Each person will feel the joy of color, of music; architectonic airs of colored gasses, hot walls of infrareds that provide eternal springtime - we will make it so that man plays from the cradle to the grave, and even death will be nothing but a game.

Colored poetic signs will create emotional moments and give us the infinite joy of the magico-creative-collective moment, on the platform of the new myths and passions.

With automation there will no longer be work in the traditional sense, and there will be no more "after work" time, but a free time to liberate antieconomic energies.

We want to found the first establishment of industrial poetry and from this unimaginable and monstrous birth which machines will grant us, we will create establishments of immediate destruction, to obliterate at once the emotional products already created, so that our brains will be forever immune to plagiarism and will be able to find themselves immediately in the state of grace of ground zero.

A people of artists only can survive guided by its brilliant minority: the creators of belief.

The ancient cultures give us examples of this with their inflation; everything was unique and this immense production was impossible without the inclusion of popular elements dragged along in their works of immense poetry.

Once the poetic font dried up, it was a brief step to the ruin of the Maya, of the Cretans, of the Etruscans, etc.

Today man is a part of the machine he has created and which negates him and by which he is dominated.

We must invert this non-sense or there will be no more creation; we must dominate the machine, force it to make the unique gesture -- useless, antieconomic, artistic -- in order to create a new anti-economic society, one that is poetic, magical, artistic.

Powerful and symmetrical lords: asymmetry, at the heart of modern biology, is expanding in the artistic and scientific fields, undermining the foundations of your symmetrical world calculated upon the axioms of poetic moments of a long gone past that has arrived at an absolute immobility in the crystalline Boredom of Your devising.

The ultimate modern artistic creations actuated with a magico-prophetic sense have destroyed space; the long kilometric cloths can be translated and measure chronometrically, like films, like cinerama (twenty minutes of painting, thirty, an hour).

Time, the magic box with which men of ancient agrarian cultures would regulate their vital and poetic experiences, has halted and compelled you to change speed.

The instruments which are the basis of your dominion: space and time, will be useless toys in your childish, crooked, paralytic hands.

Useless your idealist constructs of the Superman and of genius; useless your proprieties, your immense urbanistic formations that bore the insomniac nights of aristocratic spirits capable only of limping about empty palaces, like bats and owls in search of the foul foods of artificial paradises.

Useless and vain your centuries of urbanism, because only to you and for you the people have vainly consecrated their best free creative energies, believing you to be the effective representatives of a poetic message. Today antimatter, the physical antiworld has been discovered and your whole unwieldy dwelling trembles on the precipice.

The anti-man has already appeared in the dramatic scenario of physics. The people will have no use in the future for your purposeless proprieties, which are nothing but vast cemeteries in which you have entombed over the centuries all the pains and the poetry that man has created for you.

New proprieties are required; true nomadism requires scenes for camping, for gypsy caravans, for the weekends.

The return to nature with modern instrumentation will allow man, after thousands of centuries, to return to the places where Paleolithic hunters overcame great fear; modern man will seek to abandon his own, accumulated in the idiocy of progress, on contact with humble things, which nature in her wisdom has conserved as a check on the immense arrogance of the human mind.[4]

Lords already powerful in the East and the West, you have built subterranean cities to protect yourself from the radiation which you have savagely: very well, the ingenious artists will transform your sewers into sanctuaries and into atomic cathedrals tracing with emotional magic the signs of the industrial culture that will swiftly transform into the symbols of the new zodiac, the new calendars of fleeting moments.

New energies gathered from the sensitive minority that the masses will express in extended lethargy will transform your termitai[5] of armored cement into opulent, transmittable and exchangeable moments.

Artists will be the teddy-boys of the old culture: that which you have not already destroyed will be destroyed by them in order that nothing is remembered, since your dullness has come to such a point that it has destroyed the last possibility of rebirth left to you: war.

This was always your last resort, since destruction requires renovation: today your cowardice, your fear has exploded in your hands.

You are indefatigable fabricators of Boredom.

Your progress will sterilize the last of your sensibilities, and nothing, if not your civilization, will help you to gasp the last particles of an infected oxygen, prolonging your agony in the emissions of the machines which you yourselves have overworked and exhausted.

The new decorums, stretching from cloth to dwellings, from means of transport to glasses and plates and lighting fixtures to the experimental cities, will be unique, artistic and unrepeatable.

We will not longer use the term "immobili,"[6] but "mobili,"[7] seeing that they will be ephemeral instruments of joy and play; in a word, we will return to poverty, extreme poverty but possessed of wealth of spirit in a new way of acting and being.

Possessions will be collective and have a swiftness of self-destruction.

Poetry will no longer be about the senses which we already know, but those which we have yet to know; it will have no more architecture, nor painting, nor words, nor images, but will be without external surfaces and without volume. We are nearing the fourth dimension, nearing pure poetry, magic without a master, but it can only be if it is total, we are near the savage state with a modern sense, with modern instruments: the promised land, paradise, Eden, can be nothing other than to breathe the air, to eat, to touch, to penetrate. To purify one's self in the air in order to create with these new, impalpable proprieties the new passionate and free man, who no longer has time to satiate all his desires and create new ones.

All ideologies, all religions, follow the politics of desire, never satisfying them if not in the hereafter: the result is that today science and art find themselves facing an impenetrable wall of whys.

We want to wipe out the whys for good.

The new prophets have already breached this infinite and sweet wall of new poetry at its foundations.

The man of tomorrow will, guided by these pioneers, tap into the indestructible nectar which flows from it.

The entire new human way of being and acting will be a game, and man will live all his life for play, preoccupying himself with nothing but the indulgence of emotions arising from the play of his desires.

The first rudimentary tools of this revolution are, in our opinion, artistic-industrial and devaluating, simply because these are above all instruments of joy: and so this is why in proposing our minor results, like industrial painting, we feel arrogantly certain that our hopes are good, judging from the spreading enthusiasm with which they have been received.

Industrial painting is the first attempted success in playing with machines, and the result has been the devaluing of the work of art.

When thousands of painters who today labor at the non-sense of detail will have the possibilities which machines offer, there will be no more giant stamps, called paintings to satisfy the investment of value, but thousands of kilometers of fabric offered in the streets, in markets, for barter, allowing millions of people to enjoy them and exciting the experience of arrangement.

It will be the triumph of great numbers moved by quality, which will establish unknown values, and the speed of exchange will determine a new identity: Value will become identical to Exchange.

It will be the end of all speculation.

The great game began at Turin in 1958, continued in Milan and Venice, was reconfirmed in Monaco in 59 where the Congress of Situationists established that the ten point of Amsterdam were the fruit of a silent but effective premise for a unitary-urbanism.

The subsequent Exhibition of Paris, where environmental construction was successfully demonstrated, the emotion of an instant, demonstrated how cultural unity is the only idea capable of dominating the machine.

We are poor and it doesn't matter, our poverty is our strength.

Its useless for us to stew in our own juices, they will be able to exclude us from their Exhibitions, they will be able to silence us, insult us, humiliate us.

The people have already understood our poetry and already the tribulation of the new poetic moment beats anxiously in the heart of the throngs bored with the exhausted idols fabricated by the hypocritical and self-interested fornication of phantom powers of the earth and their impoverished and miserable artists, snarlingly superintended by all the wheels of the human automatic mechanism of thought and of technology and of the most impotent race on the globe: the intellectuals.

Thus begin the long days of atomic creation.

Now it is the turn of we artists, scientists, poets to create the earth anew, the oceans, the animals, the sun and the other stars, the air, the water, and the things.

And it will be our turn to breath life into clay to create the new man fit to rest on the seventh day.

[1] Also rosin/amber.

[2] Literally "il nuovo," or the new: I chose the word novel because there is an oblique response throughout Gallizio's text to Bahktin's formulation of the "novel" vs. the "epic," in which "the novel" refers at once to a literary form and a kind of subversive, carnivalesque element in literature which predates the advent of the long form fiction of the early 18th century designed "the novel" in English. This case here should not be construed as referring at all to the literary prose form, which in Italian, as in French, is named in a way that stresses the continuity of literary forms, not the break, or newness, of the novel ("romanzo" in Italian, "roman" in French).

[3] Or licensed.

[4] On the Italian philosophical problem of the return to primitive conscioussness, see Vico's concept of "ricorso" in La Scienza Nuova (The New Science).

[5] Termites? Terminals?

[6] Literally: unmoveable; it refers to houses, apartments, real estate.

[7] Moveables/furnishings.

Note: dated August 1959, this text by Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio was originally published in Notizie Arti Figurative No. 9 (1959). Shortly thereafter, it was translated into French and published in Internationale Situationniste no.3 (1959). In May 1997, Molly Klein translated the Italian version into English. All footnotes are by Ms Klein.

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/gallizio.html

Apropos of 'Readymades, Marcel Duchamp

2010-10-07T13:25:00.000-07:00

In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.
A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called "Pharmacy" after adding two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon.
In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote "In advance of the broken arm."
It was around that time that the word "Readymade" came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation.
A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these "Readymades" was never dictated by aesthetic delectation.
The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.
One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the "Readymade."
That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.
Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called "Readymade aided."
At another time, wanting to expose the basic antinomy between art and "Readymades," I imagined a "Reciprocal Readymade": use a Rembrandt as an ironing board!
I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the production of "Readymades" to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my "Readymades" against such a contamination.
Another aspect of the "Readymade" is its lack of uniqueness... the replica of the "Readymade" delivering the same message, in fact nearly every one of the "Readymades" existing today is not an original in the conventional sense.
A final remark to this egomaniac's discourse:
Since the tubes of paint used by an artist are manufactured and readymade products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are "Readymades aided" and also works of assemblage.

Written in 1961

above copied from: http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/English/Graphics/readymades.html

Proclamation without Pretension, Tristan Tzara

2010-10-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

Art is going to sleep for a new world to be born
"ART"-parrot word-replaced by DADA,
PLESIOSAURUS, or handkerchief

The talent THAT CAN BE LEARNED makes the
poet a druggist TODAY the criticism
of balances no longer challenges with resemblances

Hypertrophic painters hyperaes-
theticized and hypnotized by the hyacinths
of the hypocritical-looking muezzins

CONSOLIDATE THE HARVEST OF EX-
ACT CALCULATIONS

Hypodrome of immortal guarantees: there is
no such thing as importance there is no transparence
or appearance

MUSICIANS SMASH YOUR INSTRUMENTS
BLIND MEN take the stage

THE SYRINGE is only for my understanding. I write because it is
natural exactly the way I piss the way I'm sick

ART NEEDS AN OPERATION

Art is a PRETENSION warmed by the
TIMIDITY of the urinary basin, the hysteria born
in THE STUDIO

We are in search of
the force that is direct pure sober
UNIQUE we are in search of NOTHING
we affirm the VITALITY of every IN-
STANT

the anti-philosophy of spontaneous acrobatics

At this moment I hate the man who whispers
before the intermission-eau de cologne-
sour theatre. THE JOYOUS WIND

If each man says the opposite it is because he is
right

Get ready for the action of the geyser of our blood
-submarine formation of transchromatic aero-
planes, cellular metals numbered in
the flight of images

above the rules of the
and its control

BEAUTIFUL

It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navel.

Above copied from: http://members.peak.org/~dadaist/English/TextOnly/proclamation.html

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution, Christian L. Frock

2010-10-02T03:54:00.000-07:00

Invisible Venue collaborates with artists to present art in unexpected settings. It is a one-person organization that supports artist’s ideas and explores alternative locations for the presentation of contemporary art, outside of conventional gallery and institutional settings. Often in speaking about Invisible Venue my language switches back and forth between “I” and “we.” Though Invisible Venue encompasses my independent curatorial practice and research, the work itself is collaborative and has been dependent upon a number of generous collaborators, including the artist Aaron Stienstra who should be recognized here for his extensive support. Additionally, I would like to recognize all of the artists who have collaborated with Invisible Venue and who have brought tremendous brio to the task of making something from nothing—complete documentation of each project and details about all of the artists are available on www.invisiblevenue.com.

I created Invisible Venue in 2005 in response to these questions: Is it possible to show something (artwork) that is also nothing (conceptual, digital, ephemeral), everywhere (public spaces) and nowhere (online)? As a curator and cultural producer, I wanted to collaborate with artists to explore their ideas and through this collaboration interrogate the relationship between contemporary art and daily life. Intrinsic to my objectives was finding a way to work both independently and publicly—to what extent could I interject the work of artists into the public realm through the force of personal autonomy? What kinds of opportunities exist in between the margins of regulations and special permissions? What, in short, are the alternatives to the institution?

Invisible Venue originated as a website to present new media projects in the widely accessible public forum of the world wide web, an unregulated public space that allowed for complete creative freedom1. The first project, titled You Don’t Know San Francisco (2005), featured eleven videos by Bay Area artists2. The website launched a week prior to Frieze Art Fair, an international showcase for contemporary art that takes place annually in London. I distributed cards with the web address throughout the fair and in public spaces around London and arranged a public screening by borrowing a flat, a laptop, and a projector to project directly from the website3. More than 100 people attended the all-night event. It was my first realization that I could independently create the circumstances to present art publicly in alternative locations. In 2008 Invisible Venue won an Alternative Exposure Grant, awarded by San Francisco nonprofit Southern Exposure in conjunction with The Andy Warhol Foundation, to support independent initiatives in contemporary art. In addition to a vote of confidence, this grant provided small budgets for 11 projects last year; otherwise Invisible Venue operates as a do-it-yourself venture, with all of the self-directed autonomy and limited financial means implied therein. Since the inception of Invisible Venue, I have collaborated with more than 30 artists to present projects in a variety of unconventional spaces4. Projects have included digital media online and on the telephone, guerilla billboard interventions, ephemeral performance, site-specific temporary installations, public events, happenings, and accidental encounters.

Public art agencies ArtAngel, Creative Time, Dia Foundation, and Public Art Fund have been valuable educational resources in the development of Invisible Venue. My work is significantly influenced by their work. Most frequently I am interested in the temporary, site-specific, and conceptual artworks that exist for a limited time before being absorbed into public memory or not. Key also to my interests is artwork with the power to engage accidental and art-initiated audiences alike. One important example that I discovered through research is Michael Bramwell’s Building Sweeps (1995-6), a yearlong site-specific art action sponsored by Creative Time that involved the artist’s mopping, sweeping and cleaning the public areas of a city-owned Harlem tenement building, unannounced and uninvited. Though the community response to this work was contentious and its success, even by the standards of its sponsors, is unclear, it is the DIY spirit of this project, absent of permits, which gives me permission to trespass into private and public spaces. As does Chris Doyle’s Commutable (1996), a temporarily gilded staircase on an otherwise unremarkable Manhattan pedestrian walkway produced by Public Art Fund. Finally, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (1999) an audio walk that navigated the neighborhood surrounding London’s Whitechapel Public Library taught me that the work does not have to have a material presence to continue to appear in your mind’s eye5. Further I am captivated by art that is surreptitiously integrated into the fabric of everyday life, such as Walter De Maria’s Earthroom (1977), situated in a discreet location and yet right in the middle of Soho in Manhattan.

Inspired by public artworks that engage domestic spaces, I decided to curate and produce artist projects in and around a four bedroom flat in July 2007. Over the next two years Invisible Venue commissioned eleven projects for this location, or rather project space, in West Oakland. The neighborhood was both central and remote; it was a two-minute walk from the first train stop outside of San Francisco, in a partially industrial neighborhood in a forgotten part of town. The space of the main entry, the stairwell and landing, and the two front rooms—literally half of the 101-year-old Victorian era flat—was dedicated to Invisible Venue. I lived with my family in the back half of the building, separate from the project space, with our own entrance and living areas. Artists were invited to use the project space however they wanted and consequently projects spilled into our living areas, the yard, the billboard on the side of the building, and the empty lot across the street. It is important to stipulate this was not a gallery for commercial endeavors or for showing pre-existing two-dimensional work. All the work that I commissioned investigated the inherent politics of the location as a public platform—in every instance, the space itself was intrinsic to the ideas. Investigations included the physical building and its architecture, but also macro-level considerations of the past and present politics of the neighborhood, the historical and social concerns of Oakland, the location in the vicinity of an important industrial port, and the micro-level considerations of the space as both public and domestic, interior and exterior.

For one of the first projects in this space, Invisible Venue collaborated with Jonn Herschend to present The Man Who Disappeared into His Own Clothes Pile (2007). A self-navigable installation representative of The Man’s living quarters prior to his disappearance was installed in the project space. A deadpan documentary in which Herschend interviewed those who knew The Man simultaneously played in my living room, as if the television had been left on. Visitors were brought in the street entrance and directed to go through The Man’s personal affects in the project space, including a journal and drawings. Visitors were told to take as much time as they needed, then make their way to the living room to watch the documentary for more information. The documentary was filmed on site and featured various neighbors from the building. As visitors moved through the house, I continued to work in the kitchen, doing dishes or something equally banal, further blurring the lines between the artwork and quotidian domestic life. The work combined the voyeuristic experience of reality television with the live action of eavesdropping or peeping, placing the viewer in an uncomfortable position to fully explore the dynamic tensions of a public project in a private space.

Concurrent with this project, Helena Keeffe collaborated with Invisible Venue to present Talking to Neighbors: Jim in West Oakland (2007). This social sculpture, to use the artist’s term, and audio piece consisted of a recorded and edited interview between the West Oakland-based artist and Jim Edgar, a local resident of nearly 70 years. The interview was transferred to an answering machine hooked up to a landline and installed on the landing, as if it was the house telephone. A disused telephone booth, located at the other end of the block, was cleaned and painted for the application of a vinyl sign that advertized the telephone number to access the interview. Additionally the information was distributed on www.invisiblevenue.com, over email and in blanket text messages. As a freely accessible recurring experience this work challenged the assumed materiality of public art.

In December 2008, Michael Damm projected a series of videos onto windows in the project space, as well as the living area because they offered the best vantage points from the street and the passing trains. The videos ran for 10 consecutive nights, during the darkest time of the year, from about 5pm to 9pm, overlapping with the heaviest commute hours. Consisting of images from various locations in Oakland, the work reflected the visually rich experience of navigating the city, when one is only half aware of their environment and is en route to somewhere else. incidental films for an accidental audience (2008) played upon the visibility of the building and its windows from a distance; the videos were visible to passing trains, from the train platform itself, to passing cars and neighborhood pedestrians. This accessibility reflected on the nomadic features of contemporary communities as the work was visible to West Oakland residents and to everyone in transit. It also interrogated the public and private aspects of the space by co-opting the windows for use as an alternative venue, projecting outward when windows are typically covered for privacy and inviting attention to the building from every direction.

Christine Lee furthered this exploration between interior and exterior space with Order and Ornamentation (2009), a site-specific installation and concurrent intervention that existed both in the project space and in an undeveloped publicly accessible lot across the street from the building. In the project space, Lee installed living sod, cut in lengths and arranged to mimic the pattern of the original century-old hardwood floors. In the lot, Lee installed a collection of reclaimed carpet remnants, cut and assembled in a historic floral pattern that evoked the original interiors of the surrounding Victorian neighborhood. This unconventionally "woven" rug bisected a pre-existing "desire path" worn into the lot by pedestrian footfall. The term desire path was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, an analysis that privileges a lived experience of architecture over the abstract rhetoric of theory. Both the installation and the intervention explored the lived experience of West Oakland and its complicated history as an old family neighborhood with once beautiful architecture in contrast with its present state.

Though we regarded the project space as a public site, there were of course concerns about safety due to the fact that we lived in the building. Whenever we projected videos out of the windows to the street, we wondered if we would invite vandalism, but we never experienced a single incident. Projects are and have always been listed on numerous public event listings online, as well as postings on Facebook and Twitter. Press releases are sent to all of the most prominent local critics, newspapers and publications, and the announcement list includes hundreds of strangers. Anyone who emails about being added to our list is added. Anyone who asks to see projects by appointment is scheduled an appointment. Sometimes the doorbell would ring from the Invisible Venue entrance because someone on the street wanted to know more about the flickering projections. Other times I would walk up to a person outside puzzling over an intervention and chat with them about the work. We did not attempt to prescript encounters with the work—like much public art, it was left to the viewer to wonder at its existence. We continue in this same vain. Though every project has information online and there are project descriptions available upon request, by and large, we leave the accidental audience members alone to interpret or ignore the work as they choose.

Attendance is difficult to quantify for the projects that have taken place in public spaces because the works are left unattended. Projects that took place in the West Oakland project space had varied attendance at launch events—with some events seeing attendance of more than 100 people in a single day. Despite operating slightly under the mainstream radar and being a unusual organizational model, Invisible Venue projects have received a fair amount of critical attention in a variety of publications including SFGate.com, Examiner.com, International Arts Magazine, ArtSlant, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Artillery Magazine, and SF Camerawork Journal, in addition to numerous blogs.

Since relinquishing the West Oakland space in August of 2009, Invisible Venue has transformed again to produce projects in exclusively public environments. (Meant to be) Lost and Found (2009) recently featured work by Charles Gute, Anthony Discenza, Jonn Herschend and Jamie Hilder. Predicated on the private/public nature of displaced personal correspondence, the participating artists created artworks that resembled official letters, business memos and handwritten notes. 100 inkjet prints of the “letters” were printed on the reverse with “This is public art. www.invisiblevenue.com.” The letters were left in public spaces throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn over four days in October 20096. Locations included restaurants, cabs, elevators, lobbies, the subway, baskets on bicycles, stores, and front porches, among many other places—all locations were chosen at random to mediate chance encounters with an unquantifiable public audience. Here printed correspondence provided a metaphor to ask questions about public art, as both printed correspondence and permanent public art appear to be diminishing products of a bygone era in favor of increasing digitization, the passive call and no- response of social networking and temporary spectacle. The range of audience engagement was anticipated to mimic that of formally recognized "public art" and likely also incited any number of positive and negative responses: indifference, derision, contemplation, or enjoyment. The production of this project challenged the market-driven budgets and architectural scale of much recent contemporary public art and deployed the recessionary conventions of revolutionist movements—including interventionist tactics, low-budget production methods and portability.

Site-specificity is still at the core of Invisible Venue investigations, except now the site is once again transient with projects taking place in all manner of public spaces rather than limited to a specific location. Based on these experiences, I have discovered it is possible to present something that is also nothing, everywhere and nowhere when one considers every possible site an invisible venue.

Invisible Venue(s): Alternatives to the Institution by Christian L. Frock. Originally presented in "Site Variations: The Shifting Grounds of Public Art," College Art Association 98th Annual Conference, Chicago 2010; also edited and republished in Art Practical, Issue 9

Above copied from: http://artandeducation.net/papers/view/23

The Lettrists disavow the insulters of Chaplin, Jean-Isidore Isou, et al.

2010-09-29T13:48:00.000-07:00

The members of the Lettrist movement are united on the basis of new principles of knowledge and each keeps his independence as far as the details of the application of these principles. We all know that [Charles] Chaplin was been "a great creator in the history of the cinema" but "the total (and baroque) hysteria" that has surrounded his arrival in France has embarassed us, as does the expression of all mental instability. We are ashamed that the world today lacks more profound values than these, which are secondary and "isolatrous" of the "artist." Only the Lettrists who signed the tract against Chaplin are responsible for the extreme and confused content of their manifesto. As nothing has been resolved in this world, "Charlot" receives, along with applause, the splashes [eclaboussures] of this non-resolution.

We, the Lettrists who were opposed to this tract of our comrades from the beginning, smile at the maladroit expression of the bitterness of their youth.

If "Charlot" must receive mud, it won't be us who throw it at him. There are others, who paid to do it (the Attorney General, for example).

We thus revoke our solidarity from the tract of our friends and we associate ourselves with the homage rendered to Chaplin by the entire populace.

In their turn, the other Lettrists can explain themselves, in their own journals or in the press.

But "Charlot" and all this only constitutes a simple nuance.
JEAN-ISIDORE ISOU, MAURICE LEMAITRE, GABRIEL POMERAND

(Published in Combat on 1 November 1952 and reprinted in Internationale Lettriste #1, December 1952. Translated from the French by NOT BORED!)

above copied from: http://www.notbored.org/lettrist-disavowal.html

Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball

2010-09-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

From Cabaret Voltaire - Issue 1
- Hugo Ball

When I founded the Cabaret Voltaire, I was sure that there must be a few young people in Switzerland who like me were interested not only in enjoying their independence but also in giving proof of it. I went to Herr Ephraim, the owner of the Meierei, and said, "Herr Ephraim, please let me have your room. I want to start a night-club." Herr Ephraim agreed and gave me the room. And I went to some people I knew and said, "Please give me a picture, or a drawing, or an engraving. I should like to put on an exhibition in my night-club." I went to the friendly Zürich press and said, "Put in some announcements. There is going to be an international cabaret. We shall do great things." And they gave me pictures and they put in my annoucements. So on 5th February we had a cabaret. Mademoiselle Hennings and Mademoiselle Leconte sang French and Danish chansons. Herr Tristan Tzara recited Rumanian poetry. A balalaika orchestra played delightful folk-songs and dances.

I received much support and encouragement from Herr M. Slodki, who designed the poster, and from Herr Hans Arp, who supplied some Picassos, as well as works of his own, and obtained for me pictures by his friends O. van Rees and Artur Segall. Much support also from Messrs. Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Max Oppenheimer, who readily agreed to take part in the cabaret. We organized a Russian evening and, a little later, a French one (works by Apollinaire, Max Jacob, André Salmon, A. Jarry, Laforgue and Rimbaud). On 26th February Richard Huelsenbeck arrived from Berlin and on 30th March we performed some stupendous Negro music (toujours avec la grosse caisse: boum boum boum boum - drabatja mo gere drabatja mo bonooooooooo -). Monsieur Laban was present at the performance and was very enthusiastic. Herr Tristan Tzara was the initiator of a performance by Messrs. Tzara, Huelsenbeck and Janco (the first in Zürich and in the world) of simultaneist verse by Messrs. Henri Barzun and Fernand Divoire, as well as a poème simultané of his own composition, which is reproduced on pages six and seven. The persent booklet is published by us with the support of our friends in France, Italy and Russia. It is intended to present to the Public the activities and interests of the Cabaret Voltaire, which has as its sole purpose to draw attention, across the barriers of war and nationalism, to the few independent spirits who live for other ideals. The next objective of the artists who are assembled here is the publication of a revue internationale. La revue paraîtra à Zurich et portera le nom "Dada" ("Dada"). Dada Dada Dada Dada.

Zürich, 15th May 1916

VIKING DADA: The Life and Works of Al Hansen, Simon Anderson

2010-09-16T06:25:00.000-07:00

“I always did art. I was always a performer. I acted out movies, I was the stand-up comic, the Skandinavian standard storyteller”[1]

Al Hansen was a restless and tireless creator—of live art, found-object art, of situations. Active for nearly forty years in the marginal and experimental arts, his articulate energy and the ephemeral nature of his particular aesthetic combined with a peripatetic life-style to construct an almost mythic character.

Alfred Earl Hansen was born in 1927 and grew up in New York, from Norwegian stock, part of a close family living under modest circumstances. His metropolitan neighborhood inculcated in him an abiding fondness for both city bustle and local community. As a boy he drew constantly and without reason. Intellectually—and otherwise—precocious, he was bored by school, and his drawings seem to have acted as voluminous notes to himself about life in the world, in which he was acutely interested. At a tender age he collaborated with his brother Gordon and another friend Jimmy Breslin [later to become a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and author] to produce a hand-hewn newspaper The Daily Flash, for which he provided comic-cuts. A voracious reader, a prodigious talker, and an endless joker all his life, his anecdotes reveal boyish traits such as delight in destruction, hilarious pranks, exploring the locale for hide-outs—from which to watch and adore women: all elements which he acknowledged found their way into his later work.

As a soldier in Europe after WWII, he was struck by the surreal contrast between domesticity and devastation and his taste for gratuitous destruction developed. In bombed-out Frankfurt, billeted amidst the ruin, he became obsessed with a piano he saw in a fourth-floor apartment standing close to a gaping hole in the building. “I thought about that piano…while drinking and eating. I thought about it while fucking. I thought about it while jumping out of airplanes, while shooting machine guns, while on guard duty.” Finally finding courage and opportunity to push the piano off the edge, the spectacle of its fall and the sound of impact—“Tschwauuuuunnnngha! —It was wonderful” stayed with him and became a 1970 happening [Yoko Ono Piano Drop] and part of the growing legend of Al Hansen[2].

For nearly a decade after the war, Hansen worked an apparently endless series of jobs and took advantage of the G.I.Bill’s guarantee of college tuition fees to study Art at Tulane University in New Orleans, the Art Students League and other places. A father by the mid-1950s, to help support his wife and daughter he re-enlisted in the military—this time as a paratrooper giving daredevil public displays of parachute expertise.

In the summer of 1958, almost on a whim, he signed up for a course in experimental composition to be given by composer John Cage at the New School for Social Research. This famous class was a springboard for fluxus and for happenings, and Hansen made life-long connections with many of the well-known artists who dropped in. Although classmate Dick Higgins has described Hansen as dozing off through a discussion of one of his own pieces, according to George Brecht, [whose course notes have subsequently been published in facsimile] Hansen wrote down every word Cage said during the lessons. These notes were later lost, but for thirty years Hansen never ceased to paraphrase and proselytize the ideas of his greatest teacher. As part of his plea to get into this course on composition—for he had no musical training—he told Cage he wanted to make music for films, and quoted Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein’s dictum that ‘all the arts meet in the film frame’—although by the end of the summer session he realised rather that all the art forms meet “in the head of the observer, for better or worse”[3]. This idea served as the formal inspiration for many of his subsequent happenings.

There is no coherent theory of Happenings. From the first rumblings of neo-dada and expanded theatre in the 1950s, live art has been contingent upon individual understandings and attitudes, which vary as much as the makers. Happenings for Hansen encompassed the spectrum of human endeavor; closely connected to primal urges yet inescapably bound to present sensation, they were a celebration of freedom as well as an opportunity to act responsibly, a way to create chaos and also to find form in the formless. Hansen, in a conversational style that may belie his sincerity and depth of knowledge, sought to define and explain the new medium in his 1965 book “A Primer of Happenings and Space/Time Art”[4]. In this text, laced with humour and unapologetic opinion, he laid out his own ideas, described the art and aesthetics of his fellow happeners, and gave some hint of the variety of approaches it is possible to take with regard to this rediscovered form of expression.

Al was prone to naming his every venture, whether it was Panic Button Gallery Maintenance—[a service crew for the Leo Castelli gallery—among others, whose Ivan Karp dealt Hansen’s collages out of the back room], The New York Audio-Visual Group, the Octopus All-Stars, the Third Rail Gallery [a pun on the concept of ‘current’, which was any space that Hansen happened to use to exhibit or happen in] or The First World Congress of Happenings. Heralded by printed announcements, this latter, with Higgins, Alison Knowles and Eric Andersen as co-conspirators, took place in the summer of 1965, occupying the bars and streets, squares, and beaches of the bourgeois sea-side Provincetown[5]. It typified the mix of careful preparation and casual performance that Hansen specialized in, and, as a ‘World Congress’ also pointed to the international nature of the happening movement, spurred, perhaps by the worldwide mix within Fluxus. Hansen’s thoughts on Fluxus were acerbic, hilarious and accurate; he once described it as ‘like a chicken bone the world art dog cannot cough up’ [6]. Notwithstanding differences with designer George Maciunas, Hansen is central to any reading of this shifting alliance, and successfully collaborated with most Fluxus artists from Wolf Vostell to Joe Jones to Yoko Ono, before, after, and in spite of Maciunas’ administrative efforts.

In 1966 Hansen traveled to London to participate in Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium, and here again he worked and played with artists of many nationalities, helping to define and spread this radically fresh approach to creativity. He introduced Raphael Montanez Ortiz [a fellow student at Pratt, where Hansen was studying Art Education] to the scene, and collaborated with Jon Hendricks and Jean Toche to carry an ongoing festival of Destruction in Art to the US—later abandoned on the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

It seems like Al knew everyone, and everyone seemed to like Al, even those who found him on occasion ‘challenging’. He hung out with the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Street Tavern, discussing painting and fluxus with Franz Kline among others; he encouraged many of the younger pop artists—Red Grooms, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg etc.—to push their work into performance. He was concrete in his views, positive, highly articulate, even goofy—in a good way, and when accidents occurred and blood was spilled, or violence threatened in his happenings, most people forgave him because his commitment shone through.

In the mid-60s a relationship with Valerie Herouvis drew him closer to Andy Warhol’s crowd, and his daughter Bibbe became the littlest of Warhol’s movie Superstars. Warhol had been a subject of Hansen’s since 1963, in a happening titled ‘Silver City for Andy Warhol’ and twenty years later, he returned to him in a 1985 exhibition ANDY WARHOL ATTENDAT including an action, artists’ book and sound recording. The piece mixes memories of the day in 1968 when Warhol was shot and severely wounded by Valerie Solanas; muses on murder, mystery and the marvelous beauty of co-incidence; and also revisits the classic Hansen stream-of-collage technique, even using the name of his 1950s New York City Audio/Visual Group.

To celebrate the first decade of Happenings—at a time when the novelty had dissolved and few of the original happeners continued to work in the medium—Hansen staged a number of new pieces under the guise of Viking Dada, including his version of Gertrude Stein’s Hamlet.

Happenings as a medium churn up a wealth and variety of physical material in the form of notes, plans or sketches; printed ephemera such as announcements, directions or scores; props, set fragments, costume, or similar detritus resulting from activity. Hansen’s spontaneity demanded an unconventional, even laissez-faire attitude to this material, resulting in hand-lettered announcements and unusual choices of talent and materials, including the employment of sometimes ill-prepared performers and frequent use of toilet-paper, neither of which is easy to control. His informal aesthetic should not, however, be considered as merely expedient: utterly pragmatic, Hansen nevertheless decided deliberately to mix chaos and the casual as the tint and hue of his palette. In addition to being a highly gifted draughtsman Hansen was at one time or another a professional graphic designer and a painter of geometric abstractions [this despite being color-blind!]: he lacked neither skill nor discipline and indubitably applied these with rigor in his happenings as much as in his collages.

Who could imagine that a candy bar—one often better known for nostalgia rather than flavour—could contain such a wealth of linguistic potential; could map the body and its desires; could describe the ambiguity of our fears and emotions? In the early 1960’s, Hansen began a series of collages using the wrappers of Hershey Bar chocolate. Beginning as a simple but brilliant exercise in anagram, Hansen rapidly developed the possibilities inherent in the ubiquitous label to create shapely paeans to women: She, her, eyes, yes, hey. He cut and pasted a curvaceous caricature of female form in the familiar colors of kid’s candy; the wrapping transformed into skin, and the elementary graphics into an increasingly complex investigation and adoration of the goddess. Once again, as with the primal urge of his happenings, Hansen reached back to man’s earliest impulses—the Venus of Willendorf was an initial template—to reveal their continuing and contemporary power.

Of course there were also practical aspects to the collages: Hershey Bars are cheap, easily available, and both he and daughter Bibbe ate them habitually. Large numbers of the wrappers fit into the plastic bags he always seemed to carry, and he was able to—and did—cut and paste wherever he could sit down. Inevitably, these considerations led to other collage materials, most notably cigarette-butts [free and omnipresent], but also disposable lighters, toilet roll tubes, the detritus of his every-day life. Hansen made hundreds of these collages, many portraying pre-historic fertility symbols, but occasionally featuring guns, fractured narratives or abstract compositions.

Throughout the 1970s, he taught part-time at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey [where fellow happeners, fluxists and performers like Kaprow, Robert Watts and Geoff Hendricks had, or still were, working] and the academic calendar allowed him to travel widely through Europe; “From 1974 till 1982 I was…living for months in different European capitols learning the art world there by bar life, osmosis, and, for an American, overexposure. Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen, Haderslav in Jutland, Berlin, Vienna…”[7]. Like many of his American friends he found a wider welcome and better market for his ideas and work in Europe than the States, and, although he found regular support elusive, he felt at home and was able to flourish in foreign climes. Settling in Cologne in the 80s, he searched in vain for a professorship that would insult neither his principles, his talents, nor the young people who everywhere adored him. Although he studied at Pratt towards a degree in Art Education, he was forced to leave when someone took offense at spray-painted blasphemy that appeared during one of the many happenings he organized there. He was able to apply his strong principles and clear ideas about teaching art in later years, particularly with Lisa Cieslik in the Ultimate Akademie.

It requires cool nerves to set oneself free in performance, and even more to set others free with friendly encouragement. Perhaps the sense of panic that overtakes many folk in the presence of chaos is somehow similar to the free-fall feeling, which Hansen clearly enjoyed and had experienced innumerable times. He also relished the piquancy delivered by risk, averring; “I think an important part of success is to be a little defect. A great work of art for me is one that gives me butterflies in the stomach and hackles on the neck at the same time. Nothing verbal needed. Feeling. You feel it. To me a great work of art is not sure whether it is great or not.”[8]

Where chaos for most brings fear and uncertainty, for him it was a productive and thrilling circumstance; where empty wrappings and smoked cigarettes are normally the abject detritus of consumption, for him they marked the beginning of his art; where people and places are the recipients and markers of progress, for him they were the process and material of his life’s work.

Whether avoiding the law, looking for a job or delving as deep as he could into foreign cultures, Hansen kept moving until the last years of his life. Many think of him as a drifter—homeless for the thrill of it, but actually his travels were deliberate and purposeful. Likewise his status as ‘outsider’ is belied by years in art education; decades completely connected to various art-worlds; and thousands of works performed, constructed or conceived in the conscious context of a deep historical and intellectual knowledge-base.

Al Hansen understood the psycho-social nature of art as clearly as he saw the contemporary emphasis on experiment; he relished both, and sought to capitalize on his abilities—to be articulate, funny and persuasive; to network, and to take risks. As he said of himself; “Al Hansen is a phantom always a bit beyond.”[9]

1. Al Hansen text “I have always been in search of the goddess” reprinted in “Al Hansen: An Introspektiv” Kolnisches Stadt Museum, 1996 [p.101]

2. Al Hansen text ‘Al Hansen on Fluxus’ reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches”. Plug-In Editions/Smart Art Press [Vol.IV, No.40] 1998 [p.84]

3. Al Hansen, ‘A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art’ Something Else Press, NY. 1965 [p94]

4. ibid

5. I am grateful to Eric Andersen for this tid-bit of under-researched history.

6. ‘Al Hansen on Fluxus’ reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit.

7. ‘Cologne Rap by Al Hansen’’ reprinted in “Al Hansen: An Introspektiv” op.cit. [p23]

8. ‘The famous Dennis Hopper Interview’ 1990 reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit. [p115]

9. Al Hansen text ‘Makers and Lookers’1990 reprinted in “Beck & Al Hansen: Playing with matches” op.cit. [p124]

I would like to express my grateful thanks to Sally Alatalo, Eric Andersen, and Hannah Higgins for their help in the production of this text.

Simon Anderson May 2008

above copied from: http://calothrix.com/viking.html

The Rise of Art Publishing, Kit Hammonds

2010-09-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

Artist-led publishing is on the increase, stimulating a growing number of both DIY and institutional publishing events, Kit Hammonds investigates
A small crowd of people gather around the beer and bowls of monkey nuts served among the shelves in Donlon Books for the launch of Succulent Legume. Later, in a now heaving crowd, performances get underway – a mix of music, semi-nudity and slapstick gymnastics – a live equivalent to the collaged melange in the pages of the fanzine itself.

This is one of many launches at Donlon Books in the East End of London that demonstrates one of the key roles in artist-led publishing – bringing people together. The bookshop owner, Conor Donlon, and Ele Brown who works in the shop, run events there under the moniker X marks the Bökship. Like some return to the (in)famous Better Books store, or a hangout for beat poets from the 1950s, Donlon taps into a redundant tradition of independent book stores that operate as much as a hangout as a storefront.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, to find a social undercurrent to this activity, particularly if one thinks of how the media in general is used today. Social networking has transformed the way in which the media, in particular textual media, penetrates our lives.

Fever Zine is one such example – its publishing editor Alex Zamora being an avid participant/user, whatever the appropriate term may be for those operating within social networking software. The zine itself is fairly traditional, but its deployment is one that capitalises on the potential for intermedial presentation, rather than being a translation of it directly onto the page.

Pablo Leon de la Barra has published zines since 2006 at irregular intervals, producing not only macho not rough, a mix of art, architecture and men, but also releasing special issues for events such as a tour of the Copan Building in São Paulo during the 2007 biennale opening, or issuing a bootlegged version of Suely Rolnik’s The Geopolitics of Pimping at Subvision Festival, as part of the micro-programme at annual self-publishing fair Publish and Be Damned.

For all of these people, the publication takes a central role in consolidating such networks and events into a cohesive if schizophrenic whole where more than one, seemingly unconnected idea might be pursued alongside another.

Last year my students pointed out an interesting point of intersection between the new potential of personal computing, access to affordable video equipment and artist-led publishing in the form of Radical Software.

As a group, Radical Software operated beyond the page, the zine acting more as the manifestation of a critical dialogue, itself in dialogue with actions, performances and interventions. The history of the artist group – the surrealists, situationists, dadaists, bauhaus – often appears to include publications, all radical in design and content and quite at odds with marketing and mainstream publication: mouthpieces, voices from behind the sheets, messages between the lines of the media. The underlying message of Radical Software marks an early incidence of the move towards open-source ideals of licensing creativity. No surprise then that the founders of the magazines were students of Marshall McLuhan, and that the leftist politics of this quasi-manifesto encouraged the use of current technology to take control of the media as an act of counterculture.

Such a heritage helps consolidate some of the vital signs by which we can gauge the state of health of current publishing activity. Not just its production, but also its visibility and agency within broader social concerns.

From the inside, the mass of self- (and associated genres of) publishing seems to be a sea change of sorts. This may be just a perception. But this year’s Publish and Be Damned certainly saw a change in the number and make-up of stallholders. Likewise the fair itself attracted unusual attention in the mainstream media – in particular from the hoary old cultural establishment, Radio 4, with two of their journalists, perhaps ironically, reporting on the publications. Underlying this interest however, might be a more questionable point about the focus of attention falling on publishing of this kind, its DIY nature perpetuating the current social image of low budget outlets in the climate of a recession – what I like to call ‘austerity chic’.

Institutions are equally savvy to this current discourse around experimental forms of published books. Art writing appears to be another cohesion in the making, as universities develop it as a growth industry. Notable at the vanguard of this work is the art writing MA at Goldsmiths. Headed by Maria Fusco, also editor of The Happy Hypocrite and 2009 writer in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery (which, in September this year, hosted its first London Art Book Fair, a public event organised with an international ‘art fair’ model of sophisticated commercialism in mind), the course focuses on the experimental use of text and image, particularly outside the mainstream press.

Further afield, FR David, a periodic journal edited and designed by Will Holder for De Appel, Amsterdam looks at text as a medium in which experimental work can take place; criticism and creativity brought together.

The word on the page, as opposed to on-screen, seems to be burgeoning, while that of image on the page may be on the wane. It would be relatively easy to sketch out a cause and effect; as archival and promotional material moves into the more immediate database retrieval systems on the internet, the traditional catalogue with images and essays no longer feels a necessary component for the development of art history in quite the same way as it used to only recently. And in some respects art magazines suffer the same humiliating redundancy.

However, art has long fought to ensure a continued life for redundant forms of representation, and so debased as this may be, it opens up an opportunity for the book to become an experimental site, more than a record. It is not the work of art itself that has been dematerialised – in fact the work of art has become specifically rematerialised even if only as a commodity. No, it is the archive and the document that now appears to be evaporating, unshackling the book to perform its own gig.

Event publishing is not limited to the avantgarde and underground, but can also be found prominently in another art form, the comic book. Since the turn of this century, the term ‘event publishing’ has been used to portray a large-scale series, normally crossing over titles from within the same stable, or, as they call them in the industry, universes – in short, their own continua with their own characters and natural laws accommodating the mutations, space travellers and psychic phenomena particular to them.

Almost inevitably these story lines spread out over as much as a year, revolve around calamities, the end of the universe, or even the end of the multiverse – that is all reality. These relatively cheap publications are naturally a huge industry, but the need for even pulp classics to reinvent themselves for an era of new media is proving surprisingly successful, and there are more similarities with the economy driving the art world than may at first appear. In effect it is driven by collectors, albeit normally teenage ones.

Cynically, one could see these effects as an attempt to reinvigorate crime-fighting characters now old enough to be pensioners while also maintaining a highly profitable enterprise. With a little more critical freedom however, one can also see this as part of a trend towards publishing being more than simply a media operating on the page. What is absolutely clear is that the transition of comics into a digital format is not taking place. While there is an extremely healthy transference of characters from cartoon drawings to storyboards to Hollywood movies, there is little or no call for reading through a VDU even when it seems like a medium which could easily absorb it, technically at least. Instead, they are burgeoning in the caucuses of comic conventions when fans create fanzines and slash fiction. Previously distributed under the radar in photocopied manuscripts, they are now circulated in a free economy online just as easily.

The argument for the internet supporting book trades, what has been coined the Long Tail Theory, has been widely discussed, not least by the artist Mark Leckey in his recent performance lectures. Economist Chris Anderson’s proposal that certain businesses, namely Amazon, thrive online not because they make available mainstream titles at a discount, but because their strength is to alter the balance by profiting from the provision of difficult to find and niche books which would otherwise be inaccessible to the specialist reader. While the theory itself remains contested, there does seem to be a noticeable effect on the market that is buoying up off-mainstream production.

George Orwell describes in his betwixt war essay ‘Books Vs Cigarettes’, how working class people at that time still saw expenditure on books and reading as a luxury despite improvements in education, while the same people would think nothing of spending two pounds (at the time a significant sum) on a day trip to Blackpool, or equivalently large sums on beer and smokes. The idea of books as a leisure pastime rather than a source of information might appear odd, leisure now being held up almost solely as a social activity. But if anything, books are forming a bridge to relatively achievable areas of experimentation and discourse now increasingly dependent on the way in which technology is driving how we come together to drink and smoke, and often, simply to talk.

Kit Hammonds is a London-based curator and a tutor in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art. He is also co-founder of Publish and be Damned an a trustee of Book Works

Above copied from: http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=413

The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement (1971), Seth Siegelaub

2010-09-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

Introduction to the Agreement made by Siegelaub in Leonardo, vol. 6, 1973.

1. The Agreement

The three-page Agreement on the following pages has been drafted by Bob Projansky, a New York lawyer, after my extensive discussions and correspondence with over 500 artists, dealers, collectors, museum people, critics and others involved in the day-to-day workings of the international art world.

The Agreement has been designed to remedy some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world, particularly artists' lack of control over the use of their work and participation in its economics after they no longer own it.

The Agreement form has been written with special awareness of the current ordinary practices and economic realities of the art world particularly its private, cash and informal nature, with careful regard for the interests and motives of all concerned.

It is expected to be the standard form for all transfer and sale of all contemporary art and has been made as fair, simple and useful as possible. It can be used either as presented here or slightly altered to fit your specific situation. If you have questions as regards any part of the agreement, you should consult your attorney.

2. Enforcement

First, let us put this question in perspective: most people will honor the Agreement because most people honor agreements. Those few people who will try to cheat you are likely to be the same kinds who will give you a hard time about signing the Agreement in the first place. Later owners will be more likely to try to cheat you than the first owner, with whom you or your dealer have had some face-to-face contact but there are strong reasons why both first and future owners should fulfill the contract's terms.

What happens if owner No. 2 sells your work to owner No. 3 and does not send you the transfer form? (He is not sending you the money, either.) Nothing happens. (You do not know about it yet.)

Sooner or later you do find out about it because it takes a lot of effort to conceal such sales and the 'grapevine' will get the news to you (or your dealer) anyway. To conceal the sale, owner No. 3 has to conceal the work and he is not going to hide a good and valuable work just to save a little money. And if he ever wants to sell it, repair it, appraise it or authenticate it, he MUST come to you (or your dealer). When you do find out about such a transaction-and you will-you sue owner No. 2, who will owe you 15% of the increase based on the price to owner No. 3 or on the value at the time you find out about it, which may be higher. Clearly, a seller (in this case No. 2) would be extremely foolish to take this chance, to risk having to pay a lot of money, just to save a little money.

As to falsifying values reported to the artist, there will be as much pressure from the new owner to put a falsely high value as from the old owner to put in a low value. There are real difficulties inherent in getting two people to lie in unison, especially if it only benefits one of them-the seller. In 95% of the cases the amount of money to be paid to the artist will not be enough to compel the collectors to lie to you.

You will note that in the event you have to sue to enforce any of your rights under the Agreement, article 19 gives you the right to recover reasonable attorney's fees in addition to whatever else you may be entitled to.

3. Summation

We realize that this Agreement is essentially unprecedented in the art world and that it just may cause a little rumbling and trembling; on the other hand, the ills it remedies are universally acknowledged to exist and no other practical way has ever been devised to cure them.

Whether or not, you, the artist, use it, is of course up to you; what we have given you is a legal tool that you can use yourself to establish ongoing rights when you transfer your work. This is a substitute for what has existed before-nothing.

We have done this for no recompense, for just the pleasure and challenge of the problem, feeling that should there ever be a questions about artists' rights in reference to their art, the artist is more right than anyone else.

-Seth Siegelaub, 1973.

The Agreements and the corresponding statement appear courtesy of The Siegelaub Collection & Archives at the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam.

Above copied from: http://www.primaryinformation.org/index.php?/projects/siegelaubartists-rights/

The original site has downloadable copies of the original inseveral languages

Performance and Pedagogy: All Talk, Some Action, Karen Archey

2010-08-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

Karen Archey sheds light on the rise of performance and pedagogy in contemporary art practice
Art historian Benjamin Buchloh's 1980 dismissal of Joseph Beuys’ work as ‘simple-minded utopian drivel’ may have some merit. Although his criticism was directed foremost at the artist’s dubious political engagement, Buchloh also targeted Beuys’ role as a performative ‘messianic’ figure. And he was probably right – true to the art historian’s criticism, Beuys’ symbolic lexicon is something out of a new-agey astrologer’s cookbook.

Picture the artist’s 1965 performance ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’: Beuys cradles a dead hare as he courses a gallery hosting his art. His face covered with honey and gold leaf, his foot plated with an iron slab, the artist gently whispers explanations of his drawings to the dead animal. The now-famous piece, only viewable from the outside through a gallery window, would seem absurd to any number of people. Appropriately shooting down Beuy’s use of personal mythologies and messianic tendencies (two tragic inclinations better left buried in the vault of modernism) Buchloh’s vitriol didn’t inhibit Beuys’ performance from being canonised as an early investigation into the role of the artist speaking about his work. What is more, Beuys opened a proverbial can of self-reflexive worms for the forthcoming postmodern era. Do lectures simply function to create meaning around a given artwork? What is their intersection with performance? How does the lectureas- performance intertwine with pedagogy, and how can the medium inform professional artistic practice?

The highly selective lineage presented here – that of art utilising both performance and the pedagogical lecture – contains a spectrum of work ranging from the strictly performative, as in the case of Beuys, to the purely educational, as with the work of Anton Vidokle. Beginning on the cusp of postmodernism, Beuys’ ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ marks the onset of lecture-based performance, through the era of ‘institutional critique’ and the performances of Andrea Fraser posing as museum docent Jane Castleton, and towards the contemporary work of Anton Vidokle, Mark Leckey, the Bruce High Quality Foundation and Seth Price. This lineage is not a direct chronology of amassed references, but a largely fabricated one. It illustrates paradigm shifts in artistic discourse and changes in the assumed function of the artist via the lecture-performance.

How does Beuys’ interpretation of his work to a dead animal in ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ shed light on the function of the artist? Honey obscuring the artist’s face represents the creation of bees – a society of sorts based on brotherhood. If a hare symbolises rebirth – itself a spring animal, burrowing below ground and resurfacing – the artist essentially calls for a reimagining of discourse surrounding art, privileging (much to Buchloh’s dismay) the nowantiquated cathartic function of artistic practice. ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ signals dissatisfaction with the artistic discourse of its day, which was characterised as object-driven and overly institutional, and instead calls for a more personal and community-oriented appeal.

This isn’t terribly surprising. In 1969 Beuys said of his appointment as a sculpture professor at Kunstakadamie Du?sseldorf, ‘To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to explain yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important to me anymore.’ Clearly, Beuys implemented factions of his social and professional life into his aesthetic practice. Even after he was dismissed from the Kunstakadamie Du?sseldorf in October 1972 for creating ‘institutional friction’, he continued lecturing publicly.

So, can Beuys be considered the grandfather of this breed of performance? Arguably, yes, although it remains dubious that a chronological organisation of lectures-as-performance would no more than sketchily inform the category. Like any other accumulation of works, their production is rhizomatic and complex. ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’ epitomises one extreme of the grouping; the intimate and nondidactic performance.

Fast-forward to 1989 and institutional critique is in full swing. Twenty-four years after Beuys’ performance, Andrea Fraser debuts her character Jane Castleton, an upper-class museum docent. Initiated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a commissioned lecture series, Fraser’s performance titled ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’ considers how various contextual displacements within the museum setting influences a viewer’s reception of art. While Fraser’s performance is not a direct progeny of Beuys’, it does signal a paradigm shift in the discourse of artists contextualising art through utterances. Where Beuys focused on fostering a community within which to speak about artistic practice, Fraser limits her trajectory to subjective and objective relationships within the museum sphere.

Through the vehicle of satire, ‘Museum Highlights...’ subverts the docent’s authoritative role to underscore its inherent absurdity. The docent – a volunteer who speaks about a museum’s work – not only represents a figure belonging to a leisure class bearing the time and resources needed to volunteer, but also one of vague authority designated by his/her institutional association. Fraser’s tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as Jane Castleton begins without raising suspicion, describing various objects within the museum, period rooms works of art. Castleton soon broadens her tour to facets of the museum building not under the purview of fine art, including its bathrooms, the coat check room, and so on. As Sadira Rodrigues notes in her essay ‘Institutional Critique Versus Institutionalised Critique: The Politics of Andrea Fraser’s Performances’, upon the tour’s approach of the museum shop, Castleton asserts a member of her audience may purchase its naming rights for a mere donation of $750,000 to the museum. Fraser actually references her ‘real’ artistic identity, spontaneously mentioning to her group that Andrea is a nice name, then suddenly asserting that the gift shop is, in fact, named Andrea, bought by a Mrs John Castleton that year. At this point, most, if not all, tour group members begin to realise they’re bearing witness to a work of art rather than a standard gallery talk.

Fraser’s tour uncovers political and financial intelligence about the museum’s underbelly usually unknown to (often leisure-class) patrons. Thus the museum no longer remains a neutral space within which to obtain a ‘cultural experience’ – an idea borne out of the Enlightenment still clinging to survival. Fraser’s vacillation in character from upper-class docent to artist-as-cultural-critic highlights the power associated with social context in viewing works of art, specifically through utterances.

The past few years have seen a proliferation in lectures-as-performance shifting toward the strictly educational, away from both the authoritative subversion of institutional critique and Beuys’ more performative, communityoriented postmodern ventures. For example, on the cancellation of Manifesta 6 in 2006, Russian-American artist and e-flux founder Anton Vidokle initiated the year-long unitednationsplaza, which included free lectures by art world notables. The project has since travelled to multiple outposts in various countries, including New York City’s New Museum under the title Night School. Much like Beuys’ ‘How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare’, unitednationsplaza centred around discussion and community – so much so that it may be difficult for some to consider his oeuvre ‘fine art’ at all. Vidokle’s lecture series barely engaged performance or any other codified artistic practice, representing the most pedagogical and least performative end of the spectrum of works presented here. Lectures by visiting theorists or artists about art world topics, commissioned by Vidokle, created new meaning around the discussed work or topics. Further instrumentalising the lecture as a value-designator, unitednationsplaza simultaneously fostered a sense of community by creating a platform for discussion.

Meanwhile, 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey recently embarked on a year-long series of theatrical lectures entitled ‘Mark Leckey in the Long Tail’, bringing together ‘old-school’ didactics, a film soundstage and fine art performance. Leckey deconstructs the ‘Long Tail’ phenomenon by way of the character Felix the Cat, among other manifestations, which he believes embody the concept. A term coined by American journalist Chris Anderson, ‘The Long Tail’ represents the frequency with which marginal endeavours are consumed. The very few most popular are designated by ‘the head’ (take for example, in song-writing the top 40 music chart hits), with the remainder, ‘The Long Tail’, representing the innumerable songs written by unsigned rock units.

Leckey’s project illustrates the extremely complex topic as a 50/50 combination of education and performance. Distinct from the straight pedagogical scope of Vidokle, the community-oriented aspect of Beuys, or contextual displacement of Fraser, Leckey builds on the tropes of theatre in his performance. Similar to unitednationsplaza, it may be difficult for some to include ‘The Long Tail’ within the scope of fine art. Evidenced by Leckey’s undoubtedly fits within the discipline, but perhaps distinctively challenges it. The artist approaches cultural education through both its most antiquated roots – the highly literal ‘old school’ props such as a chalk board, and also under the guise of entertainment – Felix the Cat, smoke, mirrors and all. Further, the decisive popularity of ‘The Long Tail’ indicates a broader desire for, and the success of, an artist melding an investigation of pedagogy with theatrical presentation.

In July 2009 a group of anonymous young New York-based artists known as The Bruce High Quality Foundation staged a lecture entitled ‘Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull’ at Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York. The lecture, an obvious reference to Beuys’ 1965 performance, offered an excavated history tying late 20th-century market concerns to the advent of MFA programmes. ‘Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull’ criticises modern art schools for being overly academic, failing to adequately prepare students to make work in their field. By highlighting the outrageous economics of private art school education and those institutions’ success in getting their students jobs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation issues a sobering truth regarding the current state of pedagogy and finance in the art world. In response to this, the group will create a free university sponsored by New York’s Creative Time, a non-profit organisation, founded in 1974, that commissions public art. Indebted to preceding tuition-free universities such as the Renaissance Academies, Cooper Union School of Art and Black Mountain College, Bruce High Quality’s ‘Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull’ pairs a straightforward lecture format with a self-reflexive interest in art education.

New York-based artist Seth Price presents a similar interest in the professionalisation of young artists in his ongoing video ‘Redistribution’. Initiated in 2008, ‘Redistribution’ repackages the artist’s videotaped lecture originally given in 2007 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Comparable to Leckey’s use of old guard stage magic, Price plays with tropes associated with his medium of choice – the artist’s slide presentation. Fade-outs and cheesy music accompany footage illustrating artwork and theories influential to the artist’s practice. Price narrates an exceedingly clear chronology of his artistic epistemology, offering his viewer new, meaningful information regarding his practice while simultaneously existing as an autonomous work of art. Though undoubtedly considered a fine art video, ‘Redistribution’ occupies the vague terrain of supplementary material, responding to contemporary demands on the artist as being ‘professional’.

The preceding chronology of lecturescum- performance should elucidate not only the heterogeneity of the category, but also a paradigm shift away from how art is spoken about contextually, and toward an investigation of the emerging role of the artist-as-professional. As previously mentioned, the lineage here is highly selective. Artists engaging the lecture as a medium not presented here include (in no particular order): Eric Duyckaerts, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer, Walid Raad, Ryan Gander, Trevor Paglen, Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Alexandre Singh, Adrian Piper, Christian Philipp Mu?ller and Will Holder, among others. The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Seth Price and even Anton Vidokle, underscore the dysfunctionality of the art school institution and its inability to provide an attainable platform for education.

Unfortunately the conundrum of how to finance art education – particularly in the United States – remains a topic of little importance to society at large. Buchloh may disagree, but perhaps this is precisely the historical moment that calls for an iconoclastic rabble rouser like Beuys.

Karen Archey is associate editor of Art Fag City in New York

Above copied from: http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=418

Arhus at the Centre of the World: reflections on Mail-art and William Louis Sorensen, Simon Anderson

2010-08-21T06:29:00.005-07:00

The art of WLS is interactive, portable, and open to interpretation or manipulation by its recipients, and so offers a model of the art of the period. Beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, WLS created a body of artworks which both relied on the international postal system for distribution, and which used language to organize the work. These elements synchronize with broader trends in experimental art, particularly with conceptual art, with art through the post, or Mail-art, and with visual poetry. This was a time when the modalities of correspondence art began to spread worldwide, when numerous international connections formed and grew, and when some of the tenets and practices of the ‘eternal network’ [a phrase coined by Robert Filliou] were developed. The subsequent three decades saw these uses of the mail become a complex and multi-faceted medium of art. Mail-art is perhaps too recent a phenomenon to be understood historically, but there is growing agreement that art using the mail constituted a vital part of the experimental, conceptual, post-pop art world, one that linked a novel assembly of pertinent and on-going issues for artists such as WLS, in creative and amusing ways.

Correspondence art blossomed in the nineteen-sixties as part of the more general development of conceptual art. The art of concepts, attached as it is to language, was bound, sooner or later, to investigate and use an international postal system founded to transmit written and printed material. Artists as varied as Carl Andre, On Kawara, or Gilbert and George informed their audience of progress in works which could not be exhibited in conventional ways. These ranged from pattern poetry to an itinerary documented, to the construction of a persona. Some realized that there was a step beyond the simple act of sending fellow artists samples of work through the mail, into the creation of active networks.

Visual poetry is one name among many used to describe a parallel development which focuses on the structures, rather than the meaning of language. Again, a wide range of artists, from Eugen Gomringer to Isidore Isou dissected syntax and inverted, invented, re-invented language, both speech and writing, for a variety of reasons: personal, aesthetic or political – perhaps all three. As with Mail-art, this expanded poetry re-emerged early in the nineteen-sixties, and taking advantage of easy and cheap reprographics, became widely disseminated through the nineteen-seventies. Perhaps WLS may not think of himself as a poet, yet his I’ll seduce you all my life combines a nod towards nineteen-eighties-style self-disclosure, an elegant, if rather unstable exercise in verticality, and also exhibits an array of poetic devices including rhyme and rhythm, to say nothing of the alphabet.

These barely discrete worlds of Mail-art and language experiment are and have been connected through individuals and ideas. Any attempts to categorize must provide context for comprehension, rather than items on an agenda, therefore some basic history is required. There are many and various sub-divisions within the world of mail art; too many to be pertinent here. I will not address the iconography of rubberstamps or artistamps, nor will I enlarge on the arrests of so-called subversives, or the legal adventures of pranksters and provocateurs. Likewise I cannot offer a survey of visual or sound poetry. I am forced to bypass the multiple issues raised by the term ‘concrete’ and the aesthetics of the photocopy or the tape-recording. I shall instead focus on certain exhibitions to which WLS contributed, and some examples of his mailed and text pieces. Although his work may not follow the aggressive collage aesthetic of much later correspondence art, the avenues that led him to use the mail, and a number of issues his projects and comments raise, offer glimpses into the development of contemporary conceptual art.

There is general agreement about the beginnings of Mail-art, which comes at the price of precision. Certainly since the organization of official, national postal services, there have been those who used them imaginatively, but Mail-art is a mainly western phenomena, infected with the irony of the avant-garde. Marcel Duchamp’s LHOOQ was attached to a postcard, Kurt Schwitters made use of postage stamps, Bern Porter claims he began in November, 1914, but none of these can be identified as the first Mail-art. A nod is given to FT Marinetti, and the dadas embody the right spirit; surrealists collaborated at a distance on marvelous projects and the College of ‘Pataphysics built a network around a ludic concept; but accurate history demands stricter definitions than Mail-art currently allows.

In the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, the mail as a medium was enlivened by members of the group defined by Pierre Restany as Nouveau Realistes. Signatories to the manifesto included Arman, and Daniel Spoerri, both of whom used the post and its accoutrements; postcards, postage stamps, rubberstamps etc. as constituents of their art. More memorable, perhaps, was fellow signatory Yves Klein, who used a miniature blue monochrome instead of an official stamp on invitations to his 1959 Parisian exhibition ‘La Vide’.

The most famous individual originator of Mail-art in the late twentieth century was Ray Johnson, whose ‘New York Correspondance School’ [sic] provided not only a hilarious model for many subsequent pseudo-institutions, but also showed how active and autonomous a postal network can be: how the mail can become a generative medium. Johnson’s ever widening correspondence circle began as a small coterie of friends and acquaintances from the hippest fringes of art, business or bohemia, whom he linked and stayed connected with through the post. His art for the mail is quite indistinguishable from his wider output, which varied in form from artists’ books to constructions he called ‘moticos’. Dealing with media stars, minor personalities – he initiated numerous faux fan clubs – and including bizarre news items or local gossip, he would mail collages, typed notes, drawings, sometimes asking that the recipient add to the piece and return it, or alternatively send it on to a third person in the chain. Occasionally he would name a yet different person as the sender, with address, to further feed the network. His name, his humor, his methods dominated areas of the correspondence world up to his suicide in 1995.

Ray Johnson’s associations in the New York art world of the very early ‘sixties included several founder members of the international, intermedia collaboration named Fluxus. These artists had a fundamental impact on Mail-art, although the relationship is far from simple to characterize. Mail-artists need have no connection to Fluxus – and WLS puts himself in this category – but probably Mail-art exists, as such, because of Fluxus. Artists such as George Brecht and Yoko Ono took an imaginative approach to the mail, and the group promoted its use in a number of ways; first, the structure and formation of Fluxus was shaped by correspondence; second, individuals and subsets within Fluxus produced and published Mail-art projects. At times, Fluxus existed only through an elaborate – albeit largely imaginary – mail-order catalogue system, and furthermore the earliest impulses of Fluxus as a group – that of collecting and anthologizing individual and themed activities among experimental artists is an essential element of conceptual art as a whole, and of Mail-art in particular. More prosaically, mailing-lists were an economic life-line for small publishing ventures such as Fluxus and its more scholarly counterpart, Dick Higgins’ ‘Something Else Press’. These lists quickly mutated from business subscription or information tools into creative resources for exhibitions, projects and centers such as in Canada’s “Image Bank”.

WLS received his initiation to art through the mail via one of Fluxus’ early and original practitioners, Ben Vautier. A prolific artist, Ben was included in numerous Fluxus publications, individually and as part of topical sets. One of these was a ‘FluxPost Kit’ with postage stamps, rubberstamps, and postcards by Robert Watts, Ken Friedman and Jim Riddle, including the most quoted and venerable example of Mail-art, ‘The Postman’s Choice’, in which a postcard has been doubled, and bears title, plus space for stamps and an address on both sides. By making the back into the front – and vice versa – Ben’s minimalist gesture illuminated the enormous mechanics of the international postal network but then left it up to some human appendage of the system to decide which addressee gets the card. And the lucky recipient is so by the grace of some miraculous life – intelligence, even – in the system: the sender’s contribution was complete at drop-off.

Ben Vautier has the dubious distinction of having been described by the notoriously fickle George Maciunas as a ‘100% Fluxman’, yet despite this, he has never ceased his active involvement in publishing and performing outside the Fluxus remit, with fellow artists based in the south of France. Typical of such was the ‘Festival of Non Art, Anti Art, Truth Art – How to Change Art and Mankind’, which, from a base in Monte Carlo, took place ‘everywhere in the world from the 1st to the 15th June, 1969’. This festival sought to highlight artistic activities that valued ‘ideas and attitudes more than physical or commercial esthetic objects’, and although the festival was avowedly non-political, being more of a search for new ideas, participants were encouraged to organize manifestations at their own responsibility, in their local regions, and to invite further participation from others. Fluxus was invited, along with a wide array of artists which included Walter de Maria and Marcel Duchamp. Posters were put up in Arhus as part of Vautier’s universal effort for change, the contact to WLS being Eric Andersen, who, like Ben, had been part of Fluxus since its formative first tour. To examine and re-examine perceptions of the world has been a constant thrust of WLS’ ideas, sometimes expressed both bluntly and gradually, with a sharpness amid the blur – as in his typographically manipulated poster of 1981; “To change a reality is the reality”.

WLS participated in postal communication through a growth period. Until the mid-nineteen-sixties, there were reckoned to be less than a hundred artists using the post-office as medium, whereas by 1995, Italian artist Vittore Baroni claimed to have corresponded with at least three thousand people, out of a pool, he suggested, of up to 20,000 Mail-artists. The International Post Office facilitated this by its own progress - and its ability to apparently permeate political barriers. Mail delivery continued to automate through this period and spread to a point where one might mail almost anything, almost anywhere. Challenging postal regulations became the theme of several international exhibitions, but the large scale adoption of a global system had at least two greater effects on the development of the art: it forfeited a simple hierarchical system of taste and distinction, and it celebrated provinciality. The mail equalized everyone into participants, and geographically everywhere had a similar mail service; deliveries being pretty much as reliable in Firenze as Manhattan. In the realms of Mail-art, the centre is difficult to pin down and really less important than the sector exhibiting the greatest activity, where the network is hottest. It is perhaps no accident that historically the most active sectors have been provincial or from states and nations perceived as being on the margins of cultural advance. The machinery of the post office ensured the connection between Wroclaw, Calgary or Liverpool. Monte Alban is as far as Monte Carlo – which in turn is as far as the local Post Office: Arhus might be the centre of the world.

One project in which WLS participated exemplifies some of these shifts in Mail-art from semi-private communication to quasi-public art events. Ken Friedman – onetime director of Fluxus West – said his ‘Omaha Flow System’ was an attempt to regenerate of public interest in the arts, as well as being a pleasurable experiment involving many on an individual basis. As part of his exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, Friedman encouraged exchange between artists and between artist and public: the gallery became a staging post for a myriad of creative communications, involving several thousand correspondents. Omaha Flow, and similar experiments, such as “An International Cyclopedia of Plans and Occurrences”, to which WLS also contributed, added new dimensions to Mail-art by extending the dialogue into the public sphere, and by generating massive mailing lists which themselves acted as springboards for further outreach.

The energy and optimism generated by such exchanges must soon diminish. By 1979, WLS began to express frustrations with his involvement with Mail-art. “SO WHAT?”, he wrote, in his text “8 Points on meeting through correspondence”; complaining of “contributions from the same persons from the same sort of material, including that of your own”, and in his dissatisfaction he was not alone. Ken Friedman, in his attempt to give shape to the history of Mail-art, admits his own irritation with what he felt was an explosion of self-serving ‘junk’ mail after the network became popular. Believing, as they did, that mail-art constituted genuine communication between individuals, many on the circuit found the limitations of cheap reprographics and the physical restrictions of the postal system led at some point to ennui. Uniformity meant conformity, and such a situation was anathema to many correspondence artists, who valued conceptual difference, geographical distance, and the freedom of content, as much as the aesthetics of the stamped envelope. WLS had also realized that the universe of Mail-art had been unable to extend beyond – if as far as – the modernist culture it sprang from. There have been few, if any, Mail-artists in Africa or the Middle East, and although the geopolitics of the time allowed Warsaw Pact countries to be represented, there was little communication with the then USSR. It was also becoming apparent that the much vaunted democracy of Mail-art as a movement, with its credo of ‘no jury, no returns, no fee’ did not protect the eternal network from ‘more or less traditional exhibitions’.

However, the positive aspects of Mail-art, which included ‘breaking the isolation of people/nations/ideas in art’, encouraged WLS to continue and even increase his postal activities. Some of his mailed work from this period seems to presume upon a familiarity with certain basic structures – arithmetic, say, or syntax - and gently undermines them, at the same time as they are exposed. A story “…almost too good to be told” reveals itself as a sequence of contexts given coherence “to a conclusion”. WLS chose structures which put viewers in a position to act, interact, decide, or at least acknowledge the possibility of decision, of the innumerable choices and decisions which we weave to construct our daily reality. Reading is made difficult all over again by devices within the system of language: ninety alphabets in two dense columns camouflage a sentence picked out in diacritical marks, to the effect that each letter’s position in the ninety-lettered sentence is decisive. Here, WLS arguably enters the realm of what has been called ‘eyear’ poetry, ‘typoetry’, visual poetry or language art, whose heritage includes Apollinaire, Italian Futurism, Raoul Hausmann and his friends; reawakening in the nineteen-sixties to include artists as diverse as Eugenio Miccini, Augusto da Campos, Emmett Williams; and still more recently Tom Phillips and Michael Gibbs, to pick a few from an enormous reservoir of artists. Although each has a different method and intent, most artist-poets in this field deconstruct and recombine elements of language – as a reminder that before the words are read, they are looked at. Writing is a visual art and speech is a sonic one: WLS has experimented with both, an early example being his 1968 sound poem; ‘Produce a sound that is placed before/after the letter…’, performed at the Museet i Molleparken in Arhus, and later distributed internationally by mail. Again, in a work designed for mailing, “IFTHEREISAPOSSIBILITY…”, the act of reading grinds to a halt by the absence of punctuation – the silent sentinel of syntax – and its replacement by uniformly spaced upper-case type. An almost impenetrable grid of letters forms a phalanx around his photograph, the block cantilevered on his mailing address. Aside from offering interaction, the text itself mentions life as performance and performance as product - once readers have learned this new art of reading.

Through several works, the visual impact of the texts competes with the ascribed meaning of the words for paramount significance. WLS contorted and distorted the rules of language – among other systems which include technology and science – and offered opportunity for further distortion, politely opening the door to deviance from the norm, or for what ever the system might generate. In a case such as the recent book T.O.W.C. [The One Way Correspondence], the presentation of the text in six languages in itself offers a neat paradox: its potential audience would appear to have grown sixfold, but those that are able to read the entire 1002 pages must be a fairly select group. As with the experience of Mail-art, widening the structure can bring unexpected results. Here again is one aspect of the close affiliation between experiments in language and conceptual art: the propositions of the latter tend to need language, yet WLS reveals language as just another proposition, juggling concepts of its own. Even ‘Project 14’, which used a computer to calculate 14 to the 14th power, and would seem not to need words, is still expressed through the language of mathematics.

Project 14 also offers an insight into idiosyncratic scientific interests long pursued by WLS: few artists were considering the computer in 1969. A number of his mail and conceptual pieces used the rules and modalities of science, and numerous experiments in sound and vision continued alongside his mailed work, including film and video proposals beginning in the late nineteen-sixties, and a telex project hosted by the Archive of experimental and marginal art in Lund, Sweden, in 1977. This label ‘marginal’ had been widely applied to Mail-art since it was promulgated in Herve Fischer’s 1974 book “Art and Marginal Communication”, where the term was meant to empower the activity of unknown Mail- and rubber-stamp artists. For WLS, according to the 1979 statement, his use of the postal system was contingent on its efficiency rather than any inherent political potential. The mail transferred information further and more affordably than any other medium, and while this was the case “it will have to do”. However, once the utility of the postal system was surpassed, WLS inevitably moved on to technologies more favorable to his conceptual art.

Simon Anderson 2006

REPORT: BULLSHIT! CALLING OUT CONTEMPORARY ART, Joanna Fiduccia

2010-08-21T06:29:00.003-07:00

Joanna Fiduccia examines the refusal of meaning as artistic strategy in the work of Eric Duyckaerts, Jimmy Raskin, Benoît Maire and Falke Pisano

Horsepucky, poppycock, baloney, bull butter, bull feathers, humbug – as many names for what philosopher Harry Frankfurt called one of the most salient features of our culture: bullshit. If it is true that the contemporary world is swimming in it from the discourse of the previous US administration to the profusion of empty language and images jamming up cyberspace, it is also far from seeming all bad. No sooner is bullshit condemned as an enemy to truth or the symptom of a broader idiocy, than advocates rush to defend it as a creative exercise of extrapolation or even, to the mind of Harvard professor William Perry Jr writing on academic bulling in 1963, an expression of the highest values in a liberal education, namely, the capacity to understand someone else’s form of thought well enough to expound upon it, with confidence, if without data.1 This is a skill, the ‘art’ of bullshitting.

A fitting term. If bullshitting is an art (as craft as well as cunning), it is just as often pinned on art itself, which has shouldered that accusation since Plato maligned mimesis. A history of 20th century art could even be sketched as the punctual embrace of this fundament: consider that two of its most paradigmatic works are Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, 1917, and Piero Manzoni’s ‘Merda d’artista’, 1961, and that one of its most influential thinkers was christened the ‘excremental philosopher’ (Georges Bataille) – to say little of Yves Klein’s (hot) air architecture and his ‘Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity’, 1959, or even Pollock’s excretory drips. These cases can be likened to what Philip Eubanks and John D Schaeffer call the ‘gamesmanship’ of bullshitting: showboating, often among friends, that is ‘at once grandiose and difficult to be sure of: it gets away with something audacious while also putting it plainly on display.’2 Or, it gets away with something audacious because it puts it plainly on display. It nearly goes without saying that contemporary artists reckon with this strategy, and that artists failing to do so risk seeming fey and sincere. Bullshit’s presence in art seems no longer a threat to its integrity, but rather an integral part of its mechanisms.

Yet, that is surely only half the story. Pedagogy and ‘the educational turn’ have come to be recognised as widespread preoccupations for artists, institutions and art structures alike. And since bullshit and pedagogy rarely make easy bedfellows, even if you admit their entanglement on the student’s side, it seems high time to recalibrate the bullshit of contemporary art. First, a caveat. There are numerous annexes of bullshit that will not be discussed here, the consideration of which would likely lead to different conclusions. In art, these include bullshit as conspiracy theory, bullshit as historical pastiche, bullshit as ethnographic study (cf, in much more nuanced terms, Hal Foster’s ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ in The Return of the Real, 1996), and the bullshit revelation of bullshit. Instead, I’ll limit myself to a few examples restricted to bullshit language or speech in contemporary art.

Given the rich history of art and bull, exactly what kind of bullshit is in question? In Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’, originally published in 1986 in the Raritan Quarterly Review and reprinted in 2005 as a small, widely popular volume, Frankfurt defines bullshit against its kindred deception, lying. He concludes that, whereas the liar ‘design[s] his falsehood under the guidance of… truth’ and is therefore ‘inescapably concerned with truth values’3, the bullshitter spins a yarn in complete disregard or indifference for the truth. Frankfurt’s success precipitated articles in the popular press as well as sociological and philosophical journals, some of which reference a second disquisition, GA Cohen’s 2002 analysis ‘Deeper into Bullshit’. Cohen’s target is academic bullshit, the opaque and arcane language understood by many to be the true legacy of structuralist/post-structuralist thought (in his article, Cohen references the hoax played on the esteemed journal Social Text by Alan Sokal, a mathematics and physics professor, who successfully submitted an article of pure and intended gibberish). Cohen construes bullshit not as a disregard for truth, but rather a disregard for meaning, or even, a refusal to mean. It is ‘discourse that is by nature unclarifiable’,4 whether produced sincerely or constructed in the interest of cowing an audience through excessive, abstruse language.

Of course, ‘discourse that is by nature unclarifiable’ seems to touch on what some maintain is a tenet of art, that is, its resistance to effective paraphrase, its ‘capacity to invite repeated response’ (TJ Clark), or conversely, in the words of Paul Valéry, A work of art, if it does not leave us mute, is of little value. Furthermore, if art can be intentionally indecipherable, it can also disregard certain truths in order to access others (historically, the truth of subjective perception or some such). This presents a difficult case for defining bullshit in or as art; even holding on to certain characterisations (a refusal to mean, unconcerned with truth-values), bullshit in art can run from playful virtuosity to po-faced camouflage.

On the side of the former is the work of Belgian artist Eric Duyckaerts, whose didactic lectures cover such subjects as diagonals, couples and Sheffer strokes, at one clownish and erudite and just this side of aporia. Duyckaerts plays at turns the enthusiastic assistant professor and the bumbling instructor, implicitly calling into question both his authority and your attentiveness to it. The back cover of his book on certainty, Hégel ou la vie en rose, reads ‘the adoption of a truth for one person […] transforms progressively into a certainty for that person and that, during the process of appropriation, the truth has continued on its merry way to find itself, in fact, far beyond the certainty of that person.’ These are lines that could also describe the experience of absorbing Duyckaerts’ lessons: charmed into believing a probable proposition, you’re soon led down a path that seems to have never seen the light of reason.

Similarly virtuosic is New York-based artist Jimmy Raskin, who for over 20 years has pursued an aesthetic-philosophical investigation in the form of sculptures, videos, lectures, diagrams and texts. Its tagline of sorts, ‘There is a disciple who is permanently confused!’ is drawn from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883-85, from the chapter in which Zarathustra endeavors to explain the difference between the Poet Pure and the New Poet-Philosopher (the disciple, obviously, doesn’t get it). Raskin explains, in terms not unlike Cohen’s, ‘[The disciple] does not yet know that the folly of Poets is a self-created doom. Lacking deep knowledge and obligated “to lie” (even to himself), the unenlightened Poet flounders in an excess of language.’5 Raskin has empathetically drawn up five so-called timeless lessons with which to direct the disciple’s transition into a New Being. Number Two is Lying Just Enough v Passive to the Lie; Number Five, Being Paradoxical, Subversive v Self-Contradictory. With such references, Raskin’s work emerges as an inspired mix of philosophical themes, convoluted associations and incisive self-reference. His recent exhibitions almost recklessly merged Zarathustra’s tightrope walker with a character Pinn (Pinocchio, piñata), Rimbaud’s Voyelles with Stephen Hawking’s black hole – a flirtation with virtuosic bullshit, anchored by real existential weight.

Paris-based artist Benoît Maire has an academic pedigree behind his densely philosophical works: a discontinued doctorate that would seem to give him special purchase on academic arcana. His earlier projects such as ‘The Spider Web’, 2006, a heterodox selection of objects that served as a pretext for a conversation with Arthur Danto – had a frontal engagement with philosophy, yet were sufficiently removed from academic procedures to create a large margin for bulling. A more recent work inherits the linguistic contortions of its references (Lyotard, Lacan, Badiou… ) often exacerbated by their ludic position in the artwork (‘4.3 – description of the elements of the game: / a – the mechanical transcendent, / b – the general mirror of transcendental indexation / c – investigation A (defeated) following the position / d – the empty subject, which only speaks through the scream […]’). In November 2009, Maire discussed the source of these quotes, his reflections on the Aesthetics of the Differends, with academic Jonathan Lahey Dronsfeld at Hollybush Gardens in London – a conversation that illuminated the subtly humorous side to Maire’s near-impenetrable language: the absurdity of using academic philosophical discourse to debate work that has expressly abandoned the academic philosophical context.

Maire has collaborated with Amsterdam-based artist Falke Pisano, whose work is another example of abstruse language. Like Raskin, Pisano has a repertory of preoccupations or theses that are reincarnated in her lecture-performances, sculptures, installations and text-based videos. Yet unlike Maire and Raskin, Pisano forfeits an absurd or virtuosic angle by producing hermetic work, composed of systems outlining its own apprehension. One of the most recent iterations of this appeared in the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009. Composed of panels of text and diagrams suspended in steel frames, ‘Silent Element (Figures of Speech) II’ expands upon a series of works (‘The Complex Object – Affecting Abstraction #3’, 2007; ‘Object and Disintegration: The Object of Three’, 2008; and ‘O Eu e O Tu / The I and The You’, 2008) that concern the relationship between speech and visual apprehension – however without having, or claiming to have, a relationship to phenomenology. But its language seems to belie that Pisano’s diagrams were narrated by statements such as ‘Duration can only be experienced when perception takes place from one structure to another; consequently temporal values are transferred to a continuous present experience of time’ and that ‘The figure spoke with the intention of installing a logic of transformation between disparate conditions’.6 In the context of the biennial, namely its conjunction of high seriousness and a general public, this language appeared deeply alienating and hopelessly obscure. Invested with the authority of a precise, vaguely phenomenological lexicon and, of course, the authority of the biennale itself, Pisano’s failure to communicate could be felt to reflect on her audience rather than on the obscurity, emptiness and disregard of meaning(fulness) in her language.

Yet aside from a poorly judged relationship to audience (for which the artist cannot solely be faulted), how reasonable is it to claim that Pisano’s work is intimidating and alienating whereas Duyckaerts’s is rousing or Raskin’s self-reflexive? I speculate it is precisely because her presentation aestheticised rather than parodied pedagogy. The panels, which recall didactic devices such as wall texts or labels, produce the expectation that knowledge will be delivered by Pisano through her art, while the obtuse content refuses communication, refuses to mean.

However it is not entirely fair to say that this expectation is produced only or even primarily by the work itself. Ought we not to see its source in the zeitgeist of ‘the educational turn’, a return to a conservative perspective on the function of art – namely, to instruct? Although part of the allure of recent pedagogical tendencies in art is their ambiguous seriousness, very few discount entirely the objective of instructing their audience. In this light, Frankfurt’s definition – disregard for truth and the subsequent degradation of the social relations that hinge upon it – suddenly looks far more significant. Indeed, it only becomes a problem once the art world starts looking like a plausible place for academic learning. For whether bullshit is endemic to art or redeemed by it, it’s there, and it might not always take the virtuosic route. Perhaps the one who should on the chopping block is not the bullshitter at all, but those who would seek to remake art in the vision of the classroom.

Joanna Fiduccia is on MAP’s editorial advisory board

Endnotes
1. William Perry Jr, ‘Examship and the Liberal Arts: A Study in Educational Epistemology’, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~lipoff/miscellaneous/exams.html. Originally published in Examining in Harvard College: A Collection of Essays by Members of the Harvard Faculty, ed. Leon Bramson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 1963
2. Philip Eubanks and John D Schaeffer, ‘A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing’, College Composition and Communication 59.3, 2008, 380
3. Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 32
4. GA Cohen, ‘Deeper into Bullshit’ in Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 332
5. Miguel Abreu, ‘Interview with Jimmy Raskin’ in Blinding the Ears – Accecare l’ascolto (Milan: Kaleidoscope, 2009), 24
6. Cf Cohen on the Althusserian texts he confronted as a student: ‘[They] possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses […] were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them, they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false.’ Cohen, 322

Above copied from: http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=432

Book Excerpt - Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between, Sharon Irish

2010-08-21T06:28:00.003-07:00

“Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between” by Sharon Irish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

The Community Arts Network is honored to present an excerpt from “Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between,” a new book by Sharon Irish and the first in-depth look at the work of an artist who has been doing important community-engaged art since the 1970s. Lacy’s artwork has been radically political, urgently demanding and intensely compassionate. As a teacher, she has laid down landmark theories for viewing and evaluating public art, particularly those involving community participation. Lacy’s own book “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art” is a staple in the curricula of the many new degree programs in community cultural development. In our own history, Lacy was the cover girl in 1978 for Issue #1 of High Performance magazine, the forerunner of CAN, and her new work continues to draw the attention of our readers.

In her introduction to this book, Irish notes that Lacy’s art has been labeled “body art, conceptual art, performance art, feminist art, political art and new genre public art,” and it continually crosses borders laid down by art history and criticism. It’s challenging enough, she says, writing about a painting on the wall, but “when the art involves hundreds of people over months or years … and the subject matter is current and controversial, the mental diagram can become a jumble of ideas bumping crazily against each other and ricocheting off at different angles.”

In order to investigate Lacy’s work, Irish has discovered a “network of nodes” that she calls “the three P’s: positionality, performance and participation.” This network forms the structure of the book. Irish’s introduction of these terms focuses a new lens on the engaged art of today, for which Suzanne Lacy’s work has led the way. We join the introduction halfway through Irish’s approach to “performance,” glancing at the importance of “place” and “coalition building” in Lacy’s new genre public art, and then her approach to “participation.” —Linda Frye Burnham

Place

Another way that Schneider’s “historical weight” of privilege and disprivilege may have bearing is in the spaces in which we act and interact. Geographer Edward Soja noted that “life stories [are] as intrinsically and revealingly spatial as they are temporal and social.” Thus, in addition to gender and racialization, my discussion includes the particular sites of Lacy’s art making. Anne Enke’s 2007 book Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism is exceptionally valuable in that her

analysis focuses on the ways in which women intervened in public landscapes and social geographies already structured around gender, race, class, and sexual exclusions and on the ways that these processes in turn shaped feminism. A focus on contested space, as opposed to a focus on feminist identity, helps explain how feminism replicated exclusions even as feminists developed powerful critiques of social hierarchy.

Examining the actual spaces involved in Lacy’s art making offers insights into how her projects critiqued everyday urban areas, or not. Geographic aspects often join with our behaviors to normalize hierarchies that remain unquestioned by many of us. Thus, when a performance occurs in public, connecting, say, oppression, visual form, and urban site, the impact increases through linkages of these nodes in an imaginary network.

Coalition Building: Traveling Between

Coalition building is hard because it requires finding some common ground on which to come together, creating enough trust to hold that space open, while recognizing simultaneously that substantial differences exist. For Lacy, the subjugated status of women in this patriarchal society provided that common ground. Affirming that personal experiences among women vary widely, Lacy nevertheless has maintained that women can and should join together to address oppressions that affect us all. These joint efforts then are carried out as allies, although “sisterhood” still echoes through her work.

What Lacy has called “[t]he ‘expanding self’ became a metaphor for the process of moving the boundaries of one’s identity outward to encompass other women, groups of women and eventually all people.” Lacy’s curiosity, generosity, and outrage compelled her to explore what life was like beyond her individual body for those different from her in race, ethnicity, age, and life experiences. In a 1993 article, critic Lucy Lippard described Lacy:

An inveterate border-crosser, she has long been almost indecently curious about everyone else’s experiences, charging into new areas where angels fear to tread—a vicarious chameleon, or perhaps a beneficent cultural cannibal, cultivating multiple selves as a way of understanding injustice and survival.

Lacy’s “indecent curiosity” fueled her indefatigable coalition building, a node that links to participation, positionality, and public performance art.

To the extent possible, Lacy placed herself within different human configurations, physically, mentally, spatially, and historically.68 Her art forced her to shift realities, to “travel.” Although, of course, she could never fully reproduce the worlds of others, she “traveled between” these contrasting worlds, exploring a liminal space that philosopher María Lugones defined as “the place where one becomes most fully aware of one’s multiplicity.” Lugones used the term traveling to describe a person’s movements among different social groups or “worlds,” which themselves are no more stable than an individual’s identity.

To make art in coalition, moving beyond unexamined or unified identities, promises an art that forges flexible connections, allowing ongoing dialogue. But without an insistent and continual analysis of power relations, especially one’s own, the art may well serve to reinforce the status quo and trendy, “decorative” multiculturalism. Lacy’s friendship with artist Judy Baca, among other relationships, challenged her to think more deeply about the complexity of race and racist attitudes in the United States. In order to “cross over” into another’s existence, she began to collaborate with others from whom she could learn.

Participation

While Lacy herself usually was the catalyst in a process that culminated in an art project, she often collaborated with others. Lacy thus shared agency for a work of art with participants who joined her in its creation. Curator Lars Bang Larsen wrote in 1999 about the ways in which “social and aesthetic understanding are integrated into each other” as “social aesthetics.” This sort of “osmotic exchange” in Lacy’s work sometimes produced an integrated result but also presented the possibility for unresolved or multiple endings. Just as the creation of her art existed along a continuum, so too did the reception of it, what I call “participatory reception.” In 1995, she wrote, “Of interest is not simply the makeup or identity of the audience but to what degree audience participation forms and informs the work—how it functions as integral to the work’s structure.”

Lacy’s art challenges assessment of it because participants helped create representations of the ideas at the same time they observed those representations. The meanings they perceived during the collaborative process at times altered the imagery, and the meanings evolved. Lacy has written that “[m]any of the forms we have come to assume as part of community-engaged art—its multivocality, for example, its pluralism of styles of presentation and its postscript-like conversations—are aesthetic evolutions developed through confrontation and resolution of confl ict during the making.”

While certainly the imagery in any one of Lacy’s projects has its own merits, intrinsic worth, and interest and can indeed be evaluated aesthetically, “traditional” formal evaluation is not sufficient for new genre public art. The compelling aspect of Lacy’s approach is the degree to which she pushes art into the public so that questions of aesthetics, ethics, audience, reception, and creation are amplified. Once amplified, these issues and people’s responses to them provide feedback into the art process itself, contributing to that reception loop.

Lacy has long worked between theory and practice—writing, teaching, directing, making. Her writings formulated theory for new artistic configurations. She has diagrammed artistic positions on an axis moving from private actions of the artist as experiencer, then reporter and analyst toward public activism. She herself then has been an indispensable participant in meaning making, contributing to public discussions about oppression, privilege, and liberation. Her contribution, in theory and in practice, has been to close the distance between production and reception.

Further, she suggested a model for analyzing the audience “as a series of concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and forth.” The genesis of a work—a circle at the center of this diagram—is encircled by rings of collaborators, volunteers, and performers, those watching the event (“immediate audience”), and the media audience. Lacy labeled the final ring the “audience of myth and memory” (Figure 2). Lacy’s “target” diagram helps distinguish among the various layers of audience; the center—“the creative impetus”—is labeled “origination and responsibility.” While I appreciate that Lacy takes responsibility for her art as well as includes herself in the credit for its genesis and that she states that the circles are “permeable,” I find my nodes-in-networks model more useful. The artist is an essential node, but including her in the network of collaborators, performers, and audience stresses the reciprocal nature of Lacy’s approach to public art. Rebecca Schneider asked, “What can reciprocity look like? How can we do it? … Reciprocity suggests a two-way street but it does not necessarily reconstitute the delimiting binaries which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been fighting to undermine.” Reciprocity and “how to do it” have been fundamental to nearly all of Lacy’s projects.

“The public” in the sense I am using it here includes person-to-person encounters, group dynamics, institutional responses, and social networks. These interactions shift and infl uence the art process on many levels. Artistic practice such as Lacy’s embodied art lends itself to an exploration of the terms of engagement—art arises from an individual artist, is shaped by that artist’s identities and concerns, but also by those who cocreate the piece. Cocreators may include an arts commissioner, a mayor, or people in the art production, for example. Art functions as a tool for reflection: there is a reciprocity between the practice of art making and the theory that informs that practice.

Strategies to communicate effectively with people not ordinarily attentive to the arts have long occupied Lacy. This challenge underlies her involvement in media literacy, press conferences, performances outside of galleries and museums, and collaborations with communities outside of art circles. In 1995, she commented:

[T]here’s also an appropriate contradiction between, on one hand, the way in which artists are trained to express self and to make meaning by drawing on interior sensibilities, and, on the other, the demands of a new public arena for dialogic and collaborative modes. I personally find it a very exciting confl ict because it is essentially the metaphor of self and other.… Consequently, what we have to resolve, spiritually, is the sense of no-self or an encompassing all-self, and, in art, we have to do at least some negotiating between our reality and other realities.

Naming Participation

Grant Kester’s 2004 book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art discussed what he called “dialogical art,” an “inclination” in art that foregrounds interchange and process. Lacy’s work with teens in the 1990s in Oakland, California, is featured prominently in his book. He labeled Lacy’s work as transitional, meaning, I believe, that her art drew upon both community arts and “the post-Greenbergian diaspora of arts practices,” such as Happenings. She also retained control of the visual image to a degree that some of the younger practitioners he discussed do not.

Kester usefully formulated a philosophical background for dialogical art, discussing discourse ethics and feminist interpretations of specific contexts for interactions. He stressed that this approach to art is “durational rather than immediate.” Conversation Pieces deepened my analysis of Lacy’s art by suggesting that we “need a way to understand how identity might change over time—not through some instantaneous thunderclap of insight but through a more subtle, and no doubt imperfect, process of collectively generated and cumulatively experienced transformation.…” The book enumerated three aspects of a dialogical aesthetic: first, art functions as “a more or less open space within contemporary culture”; second, it involves “a form of spatial rather than temporal imagination”; and third, it aims to achieve “these durational and spatial insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.” The spatial imagination, what Kester described as “the ability to comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems,” and the creation of artistic structures to facilitate encounters are particularly salient in Lacy’s work and help to link the social dynamics of participation to the place and form of Lacy’s projects. In keeping with my nodal scheme, I will examine both interactions over the longterm and the immediate embodied responses related to Lacy’s art projects.

Kester named other terms similar to dialogical art: Ian Hunter and Celia Larner used the label “littoral art,” a geographical term describing a shoreline and thus evoking a place where two different “bodies” touch. Other critics have discussed “conversational art” (Homi Bhabha) and “dialogue-based public art” (Tom Finkelpearl). Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics focused on art of the 1990s that involved the art audience as a microcommunity; his analysis concerned art’s role as “be[ing] ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.”

Problems of Participation

In my experience, when an artist engages with politics as Lacy has done, some advocates for social change get their hopes up during the preparatory stages—tackling a social problem—and then experience bitter disappointment when the artist moves on. Some critics claimed that while Lacy’s art challenged the status quo in political arenas locally and nationally, the artist then departed, adding another community to her résumé while leaving local folks to wonder what actions should come next. Yet Lacy’s practice has been a complicated amalgam of arrivals, departures, and returns. As early as 1982, she asked, “What is the artist’s responsibility to her collaborators, performers, and audience after the performance is over?” She then offered several examples of long-term, community-based art but also suggested a larger model, “a network of women across the country who are working together on a single project with local goals as well as a sense of belonging to a nationwide project.” Ever questing, she vowed to continue “to struggle with the problems of sustaining energy within specific communities… ; clarifying the relationship of action-oriented goals to broad-based coalition building;… and generating a sense of participation in a national vision with women in geographic locations.”

Her efforts to recreate “metaphors of community, over and over” involved substantial travel, tightly scheduled with her job and other commitments. Some projects no doubt left some participants feeling they had been given short shrift. I suggest that “in-betweenness” is both the problem and the resolution in her work; she is moving among nodes when others expect her to commit to stasis. In spring 1978, in an interview with artist Richard Newton that was published in High Performance magazine, Lacy tellingly explained her artistic process and how it contrasted with political organizing: “I am trying to represent myself to the feminist community as an artist and not as an organizer: I greedily hold on to the ability to make my own images, and make clear-cut distinctions about how much organizing I’m going to be involved with.” Lacy’s art emerged from the relationships among her, her collaborators, and audience members; in other words, these interactions were not in themselves the art, but they were crucial to her art making.

French curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics had a large impact in the Anglophone art world when it was initially translated into English in 2002. Bourriaud’s optimistic and sketchy book attempted to set the terms for an approach to art in the 1990s that created a community with an art audience, such as the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Claiming that art “tightens the space of relations” and “produces a specific sociability,” Bourriaud’s arguments have eluded me because I remain puzzled by just how the disparate artists he names—from Vanessa Beecroft to Liam Gillick, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Philippe Parreno—either fit into “relational aesthetics” or share aesthetic criteria. The “hands-on utopias” offering a “rich loam for social experiments” that Bourriaud described do indeed share a “coexistence criterion” that “permit [the viewer] to enter into a dialogue,” but the range of issues and options on display by the artists under consideration do not seem to me to cohere into anything but the designation “art.” Furthermore, the relationships that interest Bourriaud seem to be apolitical.

Perhaps the reason that Bourriaud’s work has been cited so widely is because there remains a need for ways to discuss relational art; for me, his contribution has been in framing some questions and generalizations. “[W]hat does a form become when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue?” “As part of a ‘relationist’ theory of art, intersubjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment’ its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice.” Detailing what happens to forms-in-dialogue and trying to be precise about intersubjectivities are what I try to do here in relation to Lacy’s art practice. Bourriaud’s statement—“The nineties saw the emergence of collective forms of intelligence and the ‘network’ mode in the handling of artistic work”—validates my own network schema, although I suggest that Lacy pioneered this “network mode” with others in the 1970s, for political, feminist purposes.

Bourriaud’s interest centered on evaluating the quality of the relationships that unfolded in the work of various artists, but he never fully defined what the artists he considered might mean by “community.” This criticism by Claire Bishop highlights a key problem in relational art: artists and participants coming together do not necessarily a community make, nor does being together in art inherently promote democratic processes. Bishop claimed that for Bourriaud “all relations that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good.” Anthony Downey further noted that “relational art practices do not necessarily mirror—although they may replicate—the conditions of the social milieu in which they exist; rather they generate and propagate those very conditions.”

The goals of Lacy’s works are not always as “convivial” as those of the artists that Bourriaud promoted. Instead of fostering a “feel-good” community, Lacy has often aimed to create structures for conversations that name and discuss difficult issues rather than resolve them, fully aware that dissent will be as much a part of those interactions as agreement. In part antagonism is inevitable given the lack of common discursive frameworks among some of the participants. Bodies coming together, however, also introduce nonverbal ways of knowing that complicate performances and life with a range of tacit behaviors.

Lacy’s works invariably involve conflict, some unpredictable and unintentional outcomes, and some heated criticism, in part because of the provocative themes involved and in part because the “spaces between” in her art allow for multiple interpretations, ambiguity, and disagreement. In her large-scale works, Lacy has insisted on providing an aesthetic and social context for many points of view. Lacy’s performances have offended some who have felt that she overstepped, seemingly speaking for those whose voices she intended to amplify. Others have objected that her focus on women as a group has minimized their differences, discounting very real challenges of race and class.

Participation in the Art World

Negotiation between realities—particularly the world of contemporary art in the West and folks usually outside of those art circles—has been at the foundation of Lacy’s artmaking process. Lacy often sought connections among her peers, arts as they are practiced in communities, and the historic avant-garde. Since contemporary experimental art is anathema to many—at best we tend to dismiss it as just weird—accessibility to her art forms has been crucial to Lacy. She noted the difficulty of bridging these two worlds, “audiences outside of the art world” and “our own concerns.” By inviting members of the public into her performances, as cocreators, participants, and observers, she linked other nodes in the network, shaping both the artistic performance and the reception of it by the general public.

The avant-garde as I use it here refers not just to experimental imagery created as an alternative to established forms and media but also to the ways in which the art was produced. Lacy’s generation experimented with avant-garde modes of production that included collective or collaborative methods of creation and presentation or exhibition outside of the usual gallery or museum settings. These approaches challenged the status quo and helped younger artists tackle the star system of authorship more directly. Yet by “avant-garde” I do not mean an unchanging response, because clearly issues both within and outside of the art world have shifted and continue to do so. By placing the emphasis on production, on the social and economic position of art, the forms and media used do not necessarily have to be in the vanguard; they can bridge between different audiences.

This interest in linking disparate groups has been generative throughout Lacy’s career. She has deliberately and consistently sought collaborators beyond the art world. In 1975, while living in Los Angeles, she developed a close working relationship with Evalina Newman, a woman in her midfifties who had been forced to leave her cleaning job due to reactions to the chemicals at work. Ms. Newman, with time on her hands, had filled her apartment with a quilting frame and organized a sewing and crafts circle for other women in the Watts housing complex, the Guy Miller Homes for the Elderly, where she lived. The Miller Homes and the community center had been built on sites that sustained major damage during the 1965 Watts uprising. While the women sewed, they shared their personal histories and their fears about actions of the neighborhood teens. They also crocheted pot holders and covers for tissue boxes, along with stitching quilts. Lacy joined this art-making circle as part of her job with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). As a CETA artist, she “wanted to explore with a single community how performance might combine with their self interests and how it might, as well, enable that community to inter face with other communities.” Lacy created a photo-quilt series about her friendship with Ms. Newman.

Over the course of three years, Lacy and the Women of Watts did a series of installations and performances in and around the Guy Miller Homes. For example, they displayed their art in the recreation hall and invited neighbors, politicians, and Los Angeles– area artists to their exhibits in order to alert officials to their concerns about crime. Lacy asked in 1980, “What makes one person’s environment a home, another’s an artwork?” She recognized a shift by a number of her contemporaries toward engagement with extra-artistic concerns, while still drawing on past ideas in the art world. She wanted to assess conceptual art by her peers, like Linda Montano, Jo Hanson, and Martha Rosler, among others, in terms of “the success of their intentions in ‘real life’ as well as in the art milieu.”

In activities with the Women of Watts, as with her other works, Lacy was interested in creating spaces, literally and figuratively, where everyone’s creative output could be valued without placing it in a hierarchy of artistic quality. While she certainly claimed authorship of this work in the art world, she also moved into other, really much larger worlds, where her aesthetic interests coexisted alongside those of others. Lacy’s training in zoology, psychology, dance, visual art, and community organizing provided her with skills and concepts to perform in a rapidly shifting social milieu. She moved between science and art, between ideas and enacted forms, and between adaptive behavior and resisting actions. Hers is a “both/and” approach, in which she attempts to be present in several arenas simultaneously.

Lacy has shown an enduring commitment to using art in public to inform people about issues of common concern and to affect policy. I suggest that the “spaces between” in her art provide openings that might be transformative for selves that are permeable and multiple. Diana Fuss noted in 1991, “The problem, of course, with the inside/outside rhetoric, if it remains undeconstructed, is that such polemics disguise the fact that most of us are both inside and outside at the same time.” We perform, moving between art and life, built space and human flesh. This “betweenness” creates tension, at once dynamic and troubling. To enact these relationships in reality, on the ground so to speak, is especially difficult given the separation from, indeed denial of, our bodies. Lacy’s art has embraced the body, deepened into spirit, and enhanced bodily wisdom with strategic, intelligent analyses of politics. Her international career has demonstrated the power, problems, and possibilities of art between the spaces of our diverse lives, as she has attempted to create structures that might give shape to a nonsexist, multiracial democracy.

The University of Minnesota Press Web site offers a Q&A with author Sharon Irish: http://www.upress.umn.edu/covers/Irish_from_blog.html

Sharon Irish holds a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Community Informatics Initiative/Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. She is the author of Cass Gilbert, Architect: Modern Traditionalist.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2010

Above copied from: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2010/04/book_excerpt_su.php

Ai Weiwei and Vito Acconci: On Life, Culture, and other Matters, Alvaro Rodríguez Fominaya

2010-08-21T06:22:00.001-07:00

In 2008 Para/Site Art Space invited Ai Weiwei to work on a project in Hong Kong. To my surprise, he accepted. Indeed, we didn’t have much to offer to him, if we compare the micro space of Para/Site Art Space to the Tate Modern or the Mori Art Museum, to mention just two of the institutions with which he is working. At my suggestion, we invited Vito Acconci to collaborate on the project. For sure, the pairing was unusual, and a very challenging one. Vito Acconci stopped producing art in 1988, and Ai Weiwei stopped producing architecture two years ago. The similarities in their careers and their mutual respect for one another brought them together in a way that I did not expect. This has probably been the most challenging project that I have ever been involved with as a curator-a project that, at the time of this writing, is growing and headed for uncharted territory. The project was initiated with their decision to transform the art space into a meeting ground for both their studios in New York and Beijing and will be undergoing constant transformation until July 4, 2010. Part of this project involves a twelve-channel sound device/installation that plays recordings of the working sessions between Ai Weiwei and Acconci Studio. On display are 128 snapshots, most of them taken by Ai Weiwei, that portray their time together in Hong Kong and Beijing, plus an endless accumulation of texts and architectural models.

As phase II of the project took place in Hong Kong with a series of working sessions between them and their studios, I decided to interview them for ARTPULSE. The resulting conversation* highlights their different ways of thinking but also their connections. We met for breakfast in Causeway Bay, which is the closest that you can get to Tokyo in Hong Kong, and talked about art and life, with the occasional interruption from Ai Weiwei’s one-year-old baby. As Ai Weiwei’s native language is not English, there was an imbalance in the conversation, but this was also because Vito Acconci is a person of language, and Ai Weiwei is more comfortable with the short and sharp communications of Twitter, where he spends an average of eight hours every day following the closure of his blog by the Chinese government.

ON INFLUENCING AND BEING INFLUENCED

Vito Acconci - People choose their influence-at least, people decide.

Ai Weiwei - Do you think people decide better than a three-years-old child? I think it is better [decided by] a three-years-old child.

V.A. - It’s probably true!

A.W. - No one lives alone, and without cultural influence, either you influence somebody or you are being influenced. It’s like being exposed to viruses all the time-sometimes they attack us, and sometimes we get along with it; this is [the] general condition.

V.A. - I love the idea of influencing, but I hate the idea of imitators. The worst thing is when people do some copy of work I do. But I’ve been influenced by Jean-Luc Godard, I’ve been influenced by Jasper Johns, Jean Genet, and . . . the architects Piranesi, Boullee . . .

A.W. - Vito is a dreamer, and he has found a way where he feels comfortable how to present himself; it is just like a writer [Vito Acconci agrees]. I think that Duchamp gave a new definition of art and made his contemporaries look old. Duchamp is about the attitude, about questioning and questioning yourself. [He] represented a general condition of the artists, rather than focusing on painting or sculpture. I find this helpful for everybody-the minute you take a position, then you are an artist. It is not about the institutions, and not about the establishment. I think he hated the establishment and thought . . . it . . . a stupidity.

V.A. - Duchamp said, “In France there is a statement ‘Stupid as a painter.’” I didn’t want to be stupid. The influence of Duchamp is an issue that is so confusing, as for my generation it was an issue that was so pervasive. In some way you wanted to find something wrong with Duchamp, you wanted to find the way out. The public attitude of the dandy is something that I don’t like so much; I want things to be more open, the notion of the secret of what I’m doing, you know I’m doing nothing, I’m playing chess, but I’m doing something else that nobody knows about it-for me, I hate that. I hate the idea of an artist saying, “I did something, but I don’t know why I did it.” Of course language is always going to be parallel to an activity and you are never going to completely explain that, but you have to try. I hate the idea that you can talk about other activities but not about art; it’s like religion! And I hate religion. I went to Catholic school from the age of five to twenty-two. I would never believe anything again, and I love not believing. I want to use something, art or architecture, but I don’t want to believe something.

Alvaro Rodríguez Fominaya - Was Joseph Beuys a problem?

A.W. - Joseph Beuys is not a problem for me. In the United States some people could not accept Joseph Beuys because it had such a heavy sense of history. And in the sixties and seventies the artists in the United States think they are so liberated, so special, because of the moment they were living; they thought that living with the problems of today is enough. But the current condition is the past, and the future will come to us, so why are we so busy going back and forth? We just stay there and just let it go through us; we are just like a filter. But many nations have to live in the past because they can never get rid of it or are always haunted by their nightmares.

A.R.F. - Is that China-is it a country that lives in the past?

A.W. - Yes, China is trying to reshape the past into something different. It is already a fact that they want to either change it or erase. We sit, and we say, “Come on, this is not possible!” Going back to Beuys, to me personally, I don’t really understand him that well.

V.A. - It is a problem. The idea of all these followers wearing the same kind of hat is scary. Maybe the Nazi attitude doesn’t go away that easily.

A.W. - We always want to reduce ourselves, and we wake up and think [about] what we want to do today. And that’s a crisis.

V.A. - For me it was a conscious decision: I don’t want to have a style, I don’t want to know what I’m going to do each day. I want to be excited every day.

A.W. - Irony is that even that attitude becomes a style [laughs].

V.A. - The upper side of that [is] I don’t have to do anything too deeply.

A.W. - It’s like Warhol, right? The shallowness versus depth. It is not easy to become a surface.

A.R.F. - This brings the question of individuality versus the collective.

V.A. - Right now the collective is very important to me, because I don’t think the work comes from one; the work comes from a group of people, even though that group changes, but I want the work to come from a group.

A.R.F. - Does art or architecture have a place helping develop a collective that is free and democratic, with individuals who stand up?

V.A. - I think it can. I think the art attitude is very simple: it’s what children do all the time, they see this [his palm facing up], let’s have it like this [his palm faces down], let’s turn it upside down, let’s try something else. I think the basic attitude of art, . . . but that’s the scientist attitude as well . . . sometimes I don’t see the difference.

A.W. - Contemporary thinking is about questioning the establishment.

V.A. - Is it more of a Western attitude that the artist has to change [things]?

A.W. - In the East you have Zen and Tao, which is very loose. The moment your consciousness . . . the world begins to be alive. You cannot only start every day, but every moment you can become enlightened. Of course it is hard to achieve. But you can appreciate the moment that you use your heart. I think that this is antiestablishment because you achieve enlightenment from some way that you don’t even know it. Establishment is the way we normally think the world is and accept in our normal logic. Jasper Johns said we never change object, we only change perception; it is the role of the artist to make the change of perception be effective.

ABOUT HONG KONG

V.A. - I love Hong Kong. It is easier to love a place when you’ve been only three or four days. I love the ups and downs; I love the very tall, very thin buildings-when you don’t have much space you use as much as you can. It is a city of stairs, of ramps, of changes of level, but it is a city also of niches; every street seems to have alleys. Public space doesn’t exist in the plaza; public space is in the alleys, in the intersections. Public are people talking on the phone. Hong Kong feels like an old version of the future. It is very new and very old at same time. There is . . . an urge to make something newer and shinier; I got this feeling when I went to Tokyo as well. City needs mix, mix of people-that is the future: not necessary blending but the individual particles . . . I get scared with notions like the “public”; the only way of the public to exist it is becoming many clusters.

A.W - Cities like Hong Kong have great potential of becoming very important cities. But of course not so much happens in the [art] museum, which is fine as long as people get consciously involved in discussions. Why spend twenty years in education? This will change. But the system itself defends itself; they wouldn’t let it go, it is like a monster.

ON THE INTERNET

A.W. - The most liberating power since the human came down from a tree is the Internet. The Internet maximizes the individual power-every individual can freely gather information and build its own structure and express itself. It is a miracle; we don’t need more than that. It is the ultimate tool and it gets back the dignity of being individual; one dot here, one dot there, and they can connect the same second. This is beyond imagination. And still it allows you to be yourself, still be a dot and not to connect to anybody. I posted a note about dinner in a Hong Kong restaurant and over one hundred people turn out. They know you, but we never met before, and then they disappear. And this dot mobilizes another one hundred dots, absolutely a technical society, and all this is for free. Twitter friends from sixteen to thirty years. For the Internet there is no nations, no boundaries anymore.

V.A. - I have kind of resisted Facebook and so on, but maybe it is a big mistake. It’s not second nature to me.

ON CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS

A.W. - Cultural institutions are shameful, because culture is about sharing, about free exchange.

V.A. - Art culture, especially when money is involved, is about keeping people out. It is about a language that nobody can understand. I love theory but I hate jargon. Art in New York is like that.

A.W. - I think New York has institutionalized the art system.

V.A. - Common thinking is that the generation of the seventies was breaking the frame. Still, when I started, the most important art for me was minimal art, so when I got to a gallery, I would start looking everywhere-you were not sure where art was. And then the eighties ruined everything. That is the common thought. But I’m afraid that my generation caused the eighties. It was in my generation that the art gallery dealer became more important than ever, as the gallery dealer could say to the collector, “I know that you can’t even see this but I’m telling you that this is art.” So we did a horrific thing. We didn’t intend to do it, but the things that you don’t intend to do are always more important than the things that you intend to do.

A.W. - Like Einstein as a scientist-his attitude was to be against becoming an icon, but he became an icon; ironically, he became an icon himself!

V.A. - When I started doing life performance, what . . . started to really bother me was that everybody that knew a piece of mine then knew what I looked like, so I started to think, “Am I doing art or am I starting a personality cult?” [laughs]

V.A. - Language is changing so fast that I’m not so conscious about it. I’m already behind it; computers are a language itself.

A.W. - My father was purely a language person, and my ultimate goal was to see if I could write. But we walked in opposite directions, if he is a writer, and I become a builder. I want to be a writer.

V.A. - Music of a particular time has always been the prime influence: Neil Young, Morrison, Ramones, Sex Pistols.

A.W. - Now the music to me is Twitter.

“Acconci Studio + Ai Weiwei: A Collaborative Project” is on show at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong, through July 4, 2010.

* Conversation took place on April 12, 2010 in Hong Kong.

Alvaro Rodríguez Fominaya is executive director/curator at Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong). He has developed his professional career in Hong Kong, London and Spain. He was chief curator at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Spain. At Para/Site Art Space, he has organized projects with Shahzia Sikander, Surasi Kusolwong, Tsang Kin-Wah and Gao Brothers, among others.

Above copied from:http://artpulsemagazine.com/ai-weiwei-and-vito-acconci-on-life-culture-and-other-matters/

Living in Multiple Dimensions: George Brecht & Robert Watts 1953 - 1963, Simon Anderson

2010-08-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

One of the most remarkable phenomena to occur around Rutgers at the end of the 50s was a dynamic collaboration between Robert Watts and George Brecht; this partnership, between two ordinarily reserved characters, bore a firm friendship lasting up to Watts' death in 1988. Robert Watts was in his early thirties when he met George Brecht, and had been teaching at Rutgers since 1953. Brecht, just two years his junior, was working as an engineer at Johnson & Johnson, and here lies their first connection: Watts' first official schooling had been in mechanical engineering, and he had been an engineer in the U.S.Navy. The differences — Brecht was an inventor and research chemist — are as important as the similarities, but both men had turned from an early training in the sciences, and brought to their art a particular kind of analysis, which is visible in both separate and cooperative creative productions.

Brecht had seen Watts' work in an exhibition at Douglass College, and was sufficiently impressed to telephone him and invite him to a show of his paintings in New Brunswick. The two men then met weekly, and, over lunch at Howard Johnson's, they dreamed up a number of fascinating projects across a wide range of activity, between them generating ideas that played a vital part in the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Their combined efforts helped to create a community, and cemented some long-term affinities within the experimental arts. A number of the artists they included in the Yam Festival of 1963 reappeared together the following year at the Monday Night Letters, a weekly series they organised at New York's Cafe au Go Go. The participants in these evenings of music, events and happenings, lecture-demonstrations, dance and indescribable intermedia amount to a roster of American Fluxus, with additions from the New York avant-garde.

Their collaborations were more than simply administrative; they took on and mixed a number of forms: acts of imagination, visual innovations, creative design and straightforward organisation. Yam Festival (1963), for instance, was an amusing and clever idea that helped to produce unique forms of art, and must have required a good amount of the kind of logistical activity that many of us call work.

The Festival was conceived as an extended performance, taking place in the New York area beginning in May 1963, thus creating an exquisite pun which typified the spirit of their intent. More than a simple series of actions and events, the real Yam Festival was a long and multifarious celebration: it lasted, according to Brecht, about two years — "the idea was...to keep things going. Everybody who wanted to could contribute." It was generated partly at the invitation of Bob Whitman, who had been chosen to curate an exhibition: the show never happened, but Watts and Brecht developed Yam Festival into a multitude of jokes, surprises, games, lectures, mail-order-art, and simple occasions made festive by a gathering of like minds in playful mood.

Yam Festival activities included Water Day, Box Day, Clock Day, and two days of a Yam Hat Sale; there were openings, poetry, performance, exhibitions and parties; there were tournaments offered daily, with intermissions and prizes. Information on this miscellany was spread by a printed calendar, whose disjointed graphics are typical of Brecht's design. It featured advertisements for An Anthology and Fluxus 1 amidst a lively plethora of event scores and jokes. Yam Day itself consisted of an 'endless and continuous program of performance beginning about noon on Saturday through evening and Sunday.' This marathon was advertised as featuring the work of a wide and international array of artists, with events by a spectrum of Fluxus associates from MacLow to Maciunas. There was an afternoon of happenings, music and dance at George Siegal's Farm, with a roster that presents a new slant on artist affiliations of the early 60s. Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell and La Monte Young, all fellow Fluxists, were joined by Allan Kaprow, Yvonne Rainer and sculptor-dancer Chuck Ginnever. This concert-picnic was presented by the Smolin Gallery, who chartered buses for the trip to South Brunswick.

At one point Yam Festival involved Watts in a two-hour 'presentation' at a symposium on primitive and contemporary art at Michigan State University's Oakland campus. This Yam Lecture was a variation on an already flexible frame: two readers picked random texts from envelopes whilst a disconnected series of images was projected onto a wall. Watts himself described the Yam Festival as a vehicle that involved a range of "material that ordinarily is not so directly useful for art or has not yet been so considered."

One important aspect of Yam Festival was the subscription event, a mail-order system, in which a sometimes unknown and randomly chosen audience were offered an unspecified object in return for a self-chosen amount of money. This participatory programme, entitled Delivery Event, involved a range of objects that give a considerable clue to the joint interests of the two organisers: food, pencils, soap, photos, actions, words, facts, statements, declarations, puzzles, etc.... It is a poetic list that includes household articles of the most mundane, even prosaic kind — the very stuff of 'life,' if and when one has chosen to separate Art from Life. That Brecht and Watts both saw a need to deliberately but purposelessly erase this theoretical fracture is one clue to the longevity of their collaboration — if not their longer-lasting friendship — and a certain hint at their involvement with another mail-order catalogue, Fluxus.

These shared enthusiasms can be better understood in light of their individual approaches to art-making and their relationships to the art-object. Since the mid-fifties, Brecht had been educating himself and writing an unofficial dissertation on chance imagery (later published as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Dick Higgins), whilst Watts experimented with mark-making. These interests were to lead both men to the margins of abstract expressionism, and in the case of Watts, to an early association — at least in the minds of some art-critics — with neo-dada.

After World War II, Watts switched from engineering to the arts, and enrolled at the Art Students League, before moving on to Columbia University where he studied Art History. His experience left him with an interest in aboriginal art, particularly Eskimo culture, and this attention is reflected in the stark lines of his mostly monographic abstractions. His early work had consisted of hybrid abstract paintings, and had often included nature studies; there are, for instance, birds portrayed in a series of small paintings using a calligraphic style that distorted them and could not help — given the era of their production — but be identified with trends then current in American abstract expressionism.

By 1956 Watts had begun to experiment with cut-up paintings and seemingly random collections of imagery, but around 1958 he shifted from abstract painting to sculpture and assemblage. Around 1959-60 he was building with found objects and assembling ersatz machines: Monuments, for instance, was a series consisting of found objects and texts embedded into plaster, sometimes acting as maquettes for very large proposals. Here we can begin to see a recurrent tactic; he subjected materials to a succession of fantastic or seemingly inappropriate processes, and thus discovered a third function — or at least a potential for functions. After experimenting with these mechanical toys — he had shown evidence of technical ability at an early age — his artistic boundaries widened exponentially to include film, events, and happenings — the whole range of possibilities open to the intermedial artist. Watts' investigations across all media were always coloured by his playful view of the world, which inevitably led to comparisons with dada, the previous explosion of anarchy and irony.

Throughout the 1960s a majority of reviews of Watts' exhibited work relied on the unhelpful but vaguely familiar term 'neo-dada.' It was almost universally so-labeled from the first exhibition in the winter of 1960. Like those dadas who saw too clearly the follies of their age, and who exposed them with a laugh, Watts was often misunderstood: "barely transformed rubbish" wrote one cruel journalist, later adding in compensation that Watts did, at least, construct 'authentic' examples of the genre. A couple of reviews of his show at Grand Central Moderns mentioned his Goya Box in a favourable light. This small sculpture featured postage stamps illustrating Goya's nude Maja, among other miniature graphic items. This early exhibition revealed Watts' interest in aspects of philately, offering a hint of his later importance to the history of correspondence art.

His early, often kinetic, sculpture elicited comments on his very evident technical ability, whether or not critics agreed on his use of that talent. One, for instance, praised him as an 'entertainer,' and whilst the New York Herald Tribute agreed that it was 'uproarious,' their reviewer later described it as,

...rooting onlookers out of any attitudes of complacency they possess, and showing that art galleries needn't be the solemn places they are supposed to be but on the contrary repositories of great curiosity.

Certainly, Watts' own mechanical and philosophic curiosity prompted his visual and formal investigations — fields of enquiry which transformed and remade simple ideas into extended multilayered themes, as can be seen in his uses of light.

Watts' grandfather ran a movie theatre, for which he made his first graphic works, and it was there that he gained his interest in light, "I used to make advertising slides for the movie house and it was thrown onto the screen with the 'magic lantern,' the projector. It was just unbelievable — no kidding — huge and very bright light. Very interesting." He began experimenting with light again around 1957-1958, in a collage with randomly activated decorative lights, which were then a novel Christmas item. His continuing use of electricity can be seen in Hot Sculpture (1960), which uses a wire heated to red hot, mirrors, and stuff embedded in plaster. He used reflected light again in Marble Game (1958), in which light played off metal foil, and this early impulse to reflect continued with his famous collections of chromium bread, fruit, vegetables and chocolates, shown most appropriately in the supermarket-style exhibition held at the Bianchini Gallery in 1964. These reasonably priced multiples were part of a large series of cast objects, mostly food — including eggs, which were covered in coloured flock, and sold by the dozen. The frisson of chrome stayed with Watts through the middle 1980s. In the 70s he enlarged upon the theme with a series of Ashanti Sculptures replicated in chrome. Made generations before Koons' seaside caricatures, Watts was able to protest and make personal issues of cultural pretension, consumerism and coca-colonisation, colliding in a symbolic fetish wherein observers can literally reflect on their own situation in the surface of the object. His repeated use of food as a motif also often amounted to social comment: his eerily beautiful T.V. DINNER is an indictment of the twentieth century isolation of individual life whose solitary, illusory and ultimately inhuman units arrogate for themselves the luxury of civic grouping.

It may be true, as has been suggested, that his preference for reflective surface was partly stimulated by the mischievous challenge it offered to photographic documentation, and if indeed his intent were as much subversion of commodification as celebration of illumination, then it merely emphasises a continuing thread through his oeuvre: from fake pork or lamb chops to Fluxstamps, and from Implosions to Yam, Watts knowingly played with the many-faceted conventions of commodity and distribution. The egg is surely the original multiple, yet selling red-white-and-blue flocked eggs in a contemporary Art Gallery reaches deep into questions of social organisation.

Perhaps less deliberately, Watts' use of chrome literally reflected variety into his palette, which was largely monochrome, otherwise naturally muted or coloured by industrial design. After his mostly black-and-white paintings, he moved into sculptures in which colour was often totemic, like the eggs, for example, in national colours. Whilst hardly the mark of a colourist, this was a presciently Pop solution, with obvious American connotations that appealed to Watts, who made early use of other pop icons, such as brand-names, neon light, and fast-food. Works such as Great American Lover (1960/61), only confirm Watts' inclusion into the canon of early Pop.

As if to confirm his connections with the Pop world, he tried, in vain, to gain legal control over the word itself, but he soon cut loose from the stable and his work really forms part of a dark underbelly beneath those bright and sexy, consumer-friendly forms such as pop, op, and kinetic art. He forms part of the sinister band who shadow the 60s of media memory; like Wolf Vostell, Ray Johnson, Gustav Metzger and LaMonte Young, among others, who carried the issues celebrated by Pop into unpopular areas less suitable as advertising for American-style capitalism, Watts took on the commodity fetish with subtle wit and savage gusto, which he combined with the thoroughness of an engineer.

His play, like that of Brecht, involved the multi-layered use of humour, in many forms, from the comically surreal to the slyly ironic. He was not above the vulgarity of the sight gag — see the witty series of photographic illusions on a dinner theme — and his equally weird sense of slapstick endeared him to the heart of Fluxus. His F/H Trace of 1962, in which the bell of a French horn is filled with small objects or fluid, which spill to the floor as the soloist performs the preliminary bow to the audience, has became a concert classic — one of those select events whose hilarious simplicity and bold intermedial exchanges has enabled them to be remodelled to suit the variable occasion. Maciunas had early taken to Watts as a result of some correspondence pieces they exchanged whilst the former was in Germany. Watts sent some get well postcards embedded with toy-sized explosives to him, and thereby launched a sporadic collaboration that saw the publication of many varied editions by Watts, including a business partnership, 'Implosions', whose stick-on skin-art has again become a fashion item in the 1990s.

Part of Watts' power lay in his ability to playfully combine scourging wit with razor deep cuts of profundity, and he brought to this combination a unique and appealing aesthetic. From the fully operative automobile dashboard of Starchief (1962), to the literalist reading of a feather dress Feather Dress (1965), and from the neon-light artist signature series to his many illusory laminated photo-objects, Watts subjected any randomly generated idea to the playful machinations of his imagination.

In Scissor Bros. Warehouse, Watts formed part of a trio that outfluxed George Maciunas' contemporary efforts at collectivity and alternative commodity distribution. Not only was he subjecting his identity to the eponymous corporation — along with Brecht and Alison Knowles — but all the goods they printed their triptych upon were generally cheap and industrially made. The mass-produced quality of the objects stood in complementary contrast with their identical treatment. A wide range of ordinary things, from bijouterie to tool chests were overprinted with the anonymous and chance-produced assemblage, which were then sold for little more than their street value. The dealer, Rolf Nelson, was even quoted as claiming '...we'll take orders — stencil anything anyone wants with BLINK.' Watts had contributed a photograph of semi-naked celebrants at an Balinese wedding, replete with esoteric tattoos; Alison Knowles — the principal printer of the three — occupied the lower third of the yellow cube with three scissors in gradual stages of opening, and Brecht's event score Blink provided a meditative hiatus between them. Scissor Bros. Warehouse also included a variegated advertising flyer reminiscent of V TRE and the Yam Newspaper. Combining the classic Fluxus characteristics of collaboration, randomness, humour and anti-art irony, the show was labelled first as 'a protest that could well end all protests.' In his conclusion, however, reviewer Art Seidenbaum admits that the protest here was 'more obscure' than the issues he imagined they were against.

In reality, Watts was rarely obscure: cryptic maybe, but rarely was his work designed to disappear into the background. George Brecht, on the other hand, has described his ideal event as coming close to a natural occurrence — effectively erasing the difference between artwork and happenstance. Certainly, he started his enquiries from the singular position of not caring whether they did or would ever constitute 'art,' yet the result of his endeavors, especially the 'natural event,' is exactly that of endowing the insignificant with a range of new, even meaningful possibilities. His cavalier attitude to the status of his works extends to many other conventional concepts: a rejection of the limitations that he feels attach themselves to things and ideas already named — as he has said, he prefers "all the possibilities."

Brecht has made his disdain for history clear on many occasions, pleading a poor memory, or arguing that any individual's contemporary research on the spot is better than academic enquiry. He has, for instance, at least three different published places of birth, including the poetic 'Halfway, Or.,' whose qualified ambiguity points to the fact that all memory is essentially fictional. Both artists seem to have reinvented themselves consistently through their lives, and both have celebrated the constant flux of duration in their art, but Brecht appears to have additionally refused to see the value of the conventional kind of fact-gathering that generally accrues to artists of his stature. Like fellow Fluxartist Eric Andersen among others, he cares less — or seems to — about the actuality of his past than the range of possible ramifications of the kind of ideas he was having, or is now having. The only notebook he cares about is the one next to his table, now. This has not prevented the publication of his notes, but it has made him an evasive interviewee — one who seems to often dissemble or obfuscate, although it is more likely that he strives to reemphasise the fluidity of experience, the fickleness of remembrance, the arbitrary nature of circumstance.

By 1958, Brecht had begun to see his life as a series of interactions with the uninterrupted connectedness of the world, rather than a set of specific occurrences, itemised by date. Later wishing to see over and through the predictable system of scientific — at least, numeric — order, he rewrote the calendar in terms of individual experience. The ubiquitous universality of his arrangements, e.g. 'Day of the Bird' are, as in our present calendar, equalled by their arbitrariness, which may well be the point.

The period circumscribed for the Rutgers Circle marked a tremendous period of change for Brecht; in his official career as a chemist, as well as in his personal life, the kinds of advances that are seen in his work are visible in outline. From his 1953 move to Johnson & Johnson, where he began as quality control engineer, to his departure for Europe in the middle 60s, Brecht had revolutionised his ideas about art, and the way he should be in the world. Allan Kaprow has recalled that Brecht's habitat changed markedly within the space of three weeks — from benign suburban to bohemian stark — and it was around the same time that he engineered a part-time position at work: a freelance consultancy with built in time for research and study, which was to became a philosophical experiment on his life. This time marks a particularly expansive manner of thinking for Brecht, when the several directions of his conceptual life ran parallel enough for there to have been fascinating interchanges between these normally separate modes of thought. His knowledge of the history and philosophy of science was easily parlayed into the sphere of music, and thence art, where his explorations in chance, coloured by Zen Buddhism, led to startling new developments in performance art. Although he described himself as having 'survived' an education in chemistry — an experience which it apparently took him six months in Mexico to overcome, — he was able to assimilate his interests in science with these other concerns, and use them productively.

At the time of Brecht's first connection with Watts, he was living in New Brunswick with a wife and child, working as a chemist, immersing himself in history, philosophy and art, making paintings that were almost text-book exercises in chance-imagery. They were produced by dripping paint over crumpled paper, which he smoothed out and overpainted according to his taste. He described these as 'corrected abstract expressionism,' but then,

In 1955, in the summer, while lying on the beach in Atlantic City, it came to me that starting with dripping was ended. And what to do. I started a notebook of possibilities of making works by other chance methods.

Soon, in collaboration with Watts and Allan Kaprow, he was to give shape and form to this search, in collaborative text entitled Project in Multiple Dimensions.

Project in Multiple Dimensions was a grant application jointly proposed by the three men; written sometime between 1957 and 1958, it is a ten-page document that lays out a case for support of 'an examination of contemporary technological advances for the purpose of discovering new forms for creative artistic expression.' Apart from a budget, the text includes an introduction to the very notion of new areas of art activity; a schematic explanation of the avant-garde; thoughtful personal statements from each artist; and a proposed six-month concert and event series, with an individual event offered by all three. The Proposed Program was rather vague, with repeated use of the embryonic term 'event'; but the budget was precise, including an amount for lumber and welding supplies. One third of the total was for individual reimbursement, and another third for publicity and printing costs.

As an application, Project in Multiple Dimensions was not a success, although years later, Watts was to prove successful in gaining a Carnegie Foundation award for a course at Douglass College. On behalf of Rutgers University he was awarded $15,000 towards a course that would encourage new kinds of research into new kinds of art. Project in Multiple Dimensions surely provided the seeds for this venture, and additionally, the document represents an informed and careful analysis of experimental art and art education at the time.

In places, Project in Multiple Dimensions has the air of a Futurist manifesto, using lists, comparisons and appeals to technology. Like Marinetti, Russolo et al, they declared a search for materials and methods that had yet to become available to artists. The phraseology is somewhat corporate — referring to people as 'the human organism,' and yet despite its occasionally earnest tone, the document is prescient in parts, arguing, in the introduction, for experimental sound productions that have subsequently begun to occur. The enigmatic language in the section listing examples of these new concepts might almost be read as presaging the concerns of dematerialised art, situationist happenings and land art, with references to new and unexplored forms of 'non-space,' 'synthetic space' and 'natural space.'

The section labelled Background continues in an idealistic vein, reflecting a celebration of the hegemony of American capitalism. Displaying a feeling of liberation from the bondage of European cultural standards, the rebellion implicit in Project in Multiple Dimensions typified an element of the post-war American experience: there was a 'loosening of forms' across a wide social front. The three artists argued that daily experiences had become fragmented, and that there was widespread transformation of thinking and acting, giving as one example the recent change in newspaper design, whose traditional regular columns had been replaced by 'asymmetrical groups of type' in no apparent order. Given that Brecht was to first make a collaged newspaper for the Yamfest with Watts, and then go on to create another V TRE for himself and thence for Fluxus, it is perhaps no surprise that the daily news analogy should be used to illustrate a journey from restrictive rationality to the chaos of modern collage. The fate of V TRE was to mirror this modernist analogy, slowly shifting from a random collection of incredible tid-bits to a performance catalogue of efficiently modular design. Kaprow, of course, was also occupied by the quotidian, writing in the 'personal' section of the piece that he 'proceeded from the everyday situation rather than from art.'

This third section of Project in Multiple Dimensions contains three texts that reveal one shared trait: a struggle to name their art. Kaprow's detailed description of the elements within his happenings – what he called 'some kind of synthesis of elements that belong to several arts,' is ultimately reduced to negativity: '[t]here is no 'script' or 'story,' no 'dance' score, no 'set,' no 'music,' no 'stage,' no 'audience' really...' Watts, also, was clearly searching for an appropriate term to describe his activities: in anticipation of Dick Higgins exquisite appropriation of the term 'intermedia' he assembled his varied interests as an 'exploration of various time-space-movement situations through the use of both electro-mechanical devices and selected synthetic and natural materials.' Brecht, perhaps influenced by his growing interest in Zen, manages to be specific and yet say little: 'My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will touch it.'

As early as June 1958, Brecht had evidenced a fascination with Buddhist views on the world, and he no doubt had his interest in oriental thought stimulated further by John Cage's affinity for the teachings of Dr. D.T.Suzuki. Both Kaprow and Brecht had attended Cage's classes at the New School for Social Research, where Cage doubtless advertised Suzuki's lecture at Columbia University in September, 1958. Brecht made a note of it and it may be that he went to listen to him. In an Evergreen Review of 1958, Aspects of Japanese Culture, Suzuki writes very clearly about the a-logical nature of understanding, and the uselessness of rational interpretations of existence, positing a proposition which may have appealed to Brecht,

Life itself is simple enough, but when it is surveyed by the analysing intellect it presents unparalleled intricacies.

In this article, Suzuki also makes comments that surely have some bearing on the shape of Brecht's earliest event-works, particularly Water Yam, the collection of event scores that he produced for Yamfest, and that were published as one of the first Fluxus editions. Brecht acknowledged the importance of pure intuition as a creative force in some of the scores. He later admitted to not necessarily understanding all of his work, whilst other pieces, including solutions to real problems, occurred to him in dreams.

Although his ideas, according to one interview, 'just come, without motive, without any reason, without logic...,' it might be possible to trace the genesis of one particular event, Two Durations, through some of Suzuki's comments. "One of the commonest sayings in Zen," he wrote, "is 'Willows are green and flowers are red.'" By this he meant that facts of experience are to be accepted as they are, neither positively nor nihilistically, although,

When he says that the willow is green and the flower is red, he is not just giving a description of how nature looks, but something whereby green is green and red is red. This something is what I call the spirit of creativity.

Prior to this, his notebooks for Cage's class indicate that Brecht had been toying with durations, indicated by flashlights, using green and red coloured light. By the time of Water Yam, however, the durations were registered simply by the titles of the colours: Red. Green. This represents a shift from the imposition of a particular experience upon the audience, to a text that is little more than an invitation to the universe of possibilities — as Brecht put it — that any individual audience member might choose.

Whether or not he had read Suzuki, and whether or not he consciously applied what he saw in Cage to his own ideas — for it is quite evident that he and Cage are very different kinds of artists — Brecht, in the years he was associated with Watts, helped to forge the medium of the event as a site in which the individual could find a universal, or through which the universal could be individualised.

In Two Durations, for instance, the open structure of the event-score makes the piece portable, flexible, open to modulation and transformation. No longer is the redness of red limited to the feeble power of a flashlight, but rather to the richness of the human imagination. It can be experienced everywhere and anywhere — from traffic lights to botanical gardens; from museums to the dinner-table. In a1972 Fluxus concert, Takehisa Kosugi indicated the pair of elements by drinking red wine and eating green salad.

Two Durations offers a salutary example of Brecht's ability to synthesise, or correlate, thoughts, rather than simply analysing them or subsuming them in larger concepts. For Brecht, whose position, as already noted, stemmed from Asian ideas almost as much as from western science or philosophy, duration was both infinitely measurable and simultaneously unknowable from outside. His early versions of Drip Music were painstakingly calculated, using burettes and such scientific devices; as with Two Durations, the score was latter distilled almost to a pure — though not necessarily platonic — essence of water, musically accumulating in your choice of situations. Like the philosopher Henri Bergson, perhaps, whose meditations on time are so crucial to any grasp on Fluxus, Brecht realised that such 'off-the-peg' concepts as are provided by language will always be insufficient to describe the continuous flow of internal duration. Brecht, in switching from the calculated measurement of time, matter, and space, to a metaphysical understanding of duration, experience and intuition, gave the minimal gestures of the event a potential for enormous personal effect.

This shift became evident in formal terms; at some point between 1959 and 1962, during the production of Water Yam, Brecht managed to slough off most, if not all, excess content in his work, leaving only the minimal necessary for delivery. Initially, around 1959, he was creating event scores such as Candle Piece for Radio, a printed text that necessitated complex notation devices and enumerated explanations; Brecht himself admitted that it generated too many instruction cards. Like a recipe, the score offers precise instructions, arriving at strict mathematical randomness, and Brecht's scientific training is evident. Just as Kaprow's earliest Happenings are characterised by deliberate inversions of his own exact analysis of the work of art — randomly juxtaposing generic activities from 'life,' 'play,' 'work,' — so Brecht used the sharp and accurate tools of science to construct a scrupulously indeterminate music.

In the Spring of 1960, standing in the woods in East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I lived at the time, waiting for my wife to come out of the house, standing behind my English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal blinking, it occurred to me that a wholly 'event' piece could be drawn from this situation.

In the Summer of 1961, he was still playing with complex orchestration, as in Mallard Milk, a collaboration with Dick Higgins, who provided a marvelously poetic and evocative libretto for Brecht's sound-score. Requiring players to wield toys and common objects in addition to their chosen instrument, he further elaborated a complicated mathematical scheme involving some undefined chance procedure and the performers' age. Earlier that year, however — according to the skeletal dating system of Water Yam — he had honed the event to a monosyllable, in one of his most enduring works, Word Event. There is a contrast between these almost contemporaneous works: Mallard Milk, like its predecessor Motor Vehicle Sundown, adopts a strict system and a sharp tone to ensure the best attempt at chance; the planned escape from intention requires an elaborate score. The laconic Word Event, however, with its 'bulleted' EXIT, offers the absolute minimum: a single word.

Paradoxically, this spartan form manages to contain a very high degree of inevitability. Everyone exits. It may be done badly, but it can't be done wrong. The exact nature of each replay of EXIT — how, when and why each performer completes the piece, is, of course, an entirely aleatory matter, and whether it is noticed, applauded, or even consciously rehearsed, the artist has succeeded in freeing himself from the burden of intent, using the most limited structure imaginable.

Brecht's contribution to the genesis of Minimalism should not be understated. Despite claiming never to have studied Latin, the motto multum in parvo appears in his notebook of spring 1959, and, in an even earlier, more formal setting, he had written; "[T]he primary function of my art seems to be an expression of maximum meaning with a minimal image, that is, the achievement of an art of multiple implications, through simple, even austere, means." Another facet of this drive towards nothing is the sparse formal presentation of his ideas: Water Yam, for instance, is usually published as a plain box of white cards, with instructions or event scores, simply printed in the condensed sans-serif font favoured for early Fluxus publications.

The majority of events in Water Yam tend to be terse, even to the point of impenetrability. Concert for Clarinet offers a monosyllable: 'nearby'; and Concert for Orchestra consists simply of the mysterious and parenthetic 'exchanging.' Other scores vary from brief lists to statements that seem like probable instructions. The lists — often bulleted and carefully placed upon small cards according to precise designs by Brecht — are presumably activities to perform or notice. Water, for instance, offers only the following possibilities: coming from, staying, going to. Piano Piece, however, assumes an act. Brecht has himself performed this as a simple gesture, placing without stopping, yet the deceptively simple score, 'a vase of flowers on [to] a piano,' carefully omits any firm directive. This economical form was deliberate, and entailed an increasing level of enigma in formal terms; as he acknowledged in a 1970 statement, later events became "very private, like little enlightenments I wanted to communicate to my friends who would know what to do with them."

Privacy prevails with Brecht; though he remained in sporadic but friendly contact with Watts until the latter's death. His gradual shift into seclusion did not begin until the later 1970s, after a number of fascinating collaborations, including V TRE, with Maciunas, among a proliferation of Fluxus Publications; with Robert Filliou in the cosmic experiment that was La Cedille qui Sourit; and with Patrick Hughes in a 'pataphysical investigation into paradox as a phenomenon.'

Similarly, Watts played well with others; apart from numerous group exhibitions such as his 1964 show with Richard Artschwager, Christo and Alex Hay, at Castelli, and aside from his co-publication with Maciunas on a wide selection of Fluxus objects and multiples, of necessity he co-operated with the number of craftsmen needed to produce such a rich diversity of art. Later, he was to co-edit an anthological report with Edmund Carpenter, Christopher Cornford and Sidney Simon, documenting a year-long experiment in pedagogy. Published in 1970 as Proposals for Art Education, it is an exemplary study of creative collaboration between artists and art students.

Their careers developed separately, although sometimes in parallel through Fluxus or European gallerists more sympathetic to ephemera. Watts remained an experimental and effective teacher, and an inspiration, through the international postal network of the 1970s and 80s. Brecht, turning to the production of marvellous objects, re-imaged his entire oeuvre as a virtual text, The Book of the Tumbler on Fire.

Not an heroic partnership — Brecht and Watts were not the pioneers of post-modernity, roped together on the slippery slopes of intermedia. Rather, their concerns were revealed as a playful kind of inquisitiveness that was sharpened and maintained by their training in the sciences. Their joint commitment to imagination, invention, and investigation, whether in formal institutions such as Rutgers, or looser affiliations such as Yam Festival, was reinforced by combined practices that amount to 'pataphysics. Their shared approach to research allowed the mind to travel freely over the conceptual surface of an object, to dissect it in myriad fashions, and reconnect the parts in new, more interesting, and always amusing, ways. Both men were naturally attracted to a seriously playful view of the world, and the coincidence of these various unpredictable characteristics made their unique collaborations fit seamlessly into the larger community better known now through Fluxus.

above copied from: http://calothrix.com/living.html