The Museum of Conceptual Art: A Prolegomena to Hip

By Matthew Harrison Tedford April 12, 2011

A July 1986 People magazine article dubbed performance art the year’s “hippest form of expression,” and San Francisco as its home.1 The article mentions artist Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) as foundational to the initial nurturing of a San Francisco performance art scene. The museum, however, had closed down two years before the article was written, and performance art was nothing new to the city in 1986. The article represents one of the few mainstream references to one of San Francisco’s—and the country’s—most important and pioneering, but often forgotten, art institutions. Marioni states that as an artist he stopped making objects by 1968. Instead he began thinking about the body and working with sound. He sees a linguistic dimension to Conceptual art in New York at the time and an emphasis on light in Los Angeles, but sees a focus on the body in San Francisco. Marioni understands San Francisco’s perspective on performance as coming from “free speech, free love, the hippie era of drugs and rock and roll.”2 The art is tied to the land and the political turmoil and radicalism of the era. Also in 1968, Marioni became the curator at the Richmond Art Center. He started MOCA two years later out of a desire to do “more radical” things than he could do at the Art Center. The museum opened on 86 Third Street in the south of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, near the current confluence of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. MOCA is considered the first alternative art space in the country.3 As a first-of-its-kind institution, it forged the way for the many alternative spaces that would pop up in the city, such as New Langton Arts (1975–2009) and countless others across the United States. Central to the structure of MOCA was the fact that it was not a collecting institution. This lent itself to fostering Conceptual art that would be ephemeral and performative. Marioni says that everything that happened at MOCA in its first years was “action by sculptors.”4 In fact, the museum’s first public show was Sound Sculpture As. The April 30, 1970 performance included nine artists: Mit Arbeiten von Arlo Acton, Allan Fish (Marioni’s pseudonym), Terry Fox, Mel Henderson, Paul Kos, Peter Macan, Jim Melchert, Jim McCready, and Herb Yarno.5 Kos’ famous piece picked up the sound of two twenty-five-pound blocks of melting ice with eleven boom microphones. Henderson walked around the gallery space with a 30-caliber rifle, eventually firing a single shot at the image of a projected tiger. For McCready’s piece, four nylon-clad women walked down an ad hoc runway, rubbing their thighs together, creating a swishing sound.6 These abstract performances lacked any clear narrative, but they all took as their medium an embodied or physical aurality. Later that year, curator Willoughby Sharp put together a video show called Body Works. The October 18, 1970 show included thirty-minute black-and-white videos from Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Keith Sonnier, and William Wegman. Marioni claims that this was the first video-art show in California and the first body-art show in the country. Acconci’s video pictured him burning the hair from his nipples.7 Typical of his work, Nauman’s piece depicted the artist walking around his studio, exaggerating his movements and highlighting the way his body moves through the space. Jerome Tarshis of Artforum described this piece as “an exercise in challenging and possibly torturing the audience.”8 These works foregrounded the artist’s body as both paint and canvas. In doing so, they also utilized the relatively new form of video art, advancing a pairing that would stick around well into the digital age. By the end of 1970, Marioni decided to make MOCA a nonprofit corporation so that he could receive National Endowment for the Arts funding. The NEA granted MOCA its first grant of $5,000 in 1971.9 This would later serve as the entire budget for the museum in 1973. The museum then began accepting members and even had patrons. At the end of 1972, it moved to a large building across the street at 75 Third Street. Marioni convinced the building owner to give him the space rent-free. A year later, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency bought the building. Due to the agency’s policy of charging tenants the same price as they had been paying their previous landlords, the space remained free for the museum and sustained MOCA for the remainder of its years.10 One of MOCA’s more well-known shows, All Night Sculptures, took place April 20 to April 21, 1973. This show included nine artists, who were all given their own room in which to perform from sunset to sunrise. Visitors came and went as they pleased that night. Barbara Smith’s contribution, Feed Me, was a piece in which she sat on a mattress on the floor of a room, alone and naked. A tape recorder looped the words, “Feed me,” and Smith was surrounded by food, wine, and marijuana, with which visitors could follow this order. Smith states that when she ended her marriage she expected men to see her as something other than a sex object. Disappointed by the illusory nature of this optimism, she performed Feed Me as a means of flipping the male-female sexual dynamic. The artist spent the night eating, drinking, conversing, and having sex with the men that entered the room. She did all of this on her own terms, embracing her sexual vulnerability; she put her back against the wall—figuratively and literally. Smith commanded respect from those who might deny it to her in other settings.11 Kos’ piece in All Night Sculptures required visitors to march toward a red light to the beat of a typewriter. Bonnie Sherk trespassed into a nearby pigeon sanctuary, upsetting the nesting birds. Terry Fox, Joel Glassman, and Mel Henderson each created rooms in the museum that dealt with the manipulation of light. Steve Laub spent the night metamorphosing, leaving, and reentering his room as different identities. Frank Youmans worked as a craftsman, and John Woodall drew his shadow while rotating on his axis.12 The year of 1973 saw several other key performances and installations for MOCA, including the work of Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, and Dan Graham. MOCA’s Free Beer every Wednesday began in 1973; it was a simple social gathering in which beer was served while artist’s videos were shown. From 9 p.m. November 2 to 9 p.m. November 5, 1973, Linda Montano, with Marioni as a collaborator, performed her Handcuffed to Tom Marioni for 3 Days. As the title suggests, the two artists were handcuffed together for seventy-two hours. The two went about their lives as normally as possible, riding the bus, eating, and going to the movies together. That which occurred while the two were inside the MOCA building was documented on video.13 Montano stated that the work was an attempt to redefine marriage through art and that it stemmed from a tension of feeling the ability to be permissive in her work but not in her life.14 As a married woman in the ’70s, she would find herself bound—handcuffed—to the patriarchal institution. This work was a visual manifestation of that reality. The piece preceded the artist’s similar 1983–84 work One Year Performance, in which she spent the entirety of one year tied with a rope to fellow artist Tehching Hsieh. Beginning in 1974, MOCA saw a sharp decrease in activity. Notable shows included Actions by Sculptors for the Home Audience, broadcast on KQED on February 21, 1974; a 1975 installation and performance by Acconci; and A Tight 13 Minutes, a 1976 showing of thirteen one-minute videos by a variety of artists, including many MOCA regulars such as Fox, Henderson, Kos, and Marioni himself. In a 1976 interview, Marioni stated that the museum was in a “phasing out” period as a performance space.15 MOCA ceased activity in 1981, but did not officially close its doors until 1984, when it lost its use of the building.16 In his autobiography, Marioni laments the “death” of Conceptual art in the ’80s, claiming that it had become academic and institutionalized.17 In other words, it had become hip. In a way, it’s as if a reactionary Marioni gave up on conceptual performance because his involvement with it no longer situated him on the margins of the art world. Nonetheless, during its brief history, MOCA forged the way for future alternative art institutions. It served as an important space in the ’70s that allowed artists to experiment with the use of the body as a medium in-and-of itself. In fact, Marioni claims that the now-seminal performance artists Acconci and Burden both held their first California shows at MOCA.18 At times, important works of feminist performance art called MOCA home. But the museum can also be seen as a bit of an old boys’ club. During the golden era of feminist art, in a city known for its progressive politics, the vast majority of artists to grace its halls were male. The history written here pays special attention to Barbara Smith and Linda Montano, but, in fact, they are among the exceptions to the norm. It is interesting, and unlikely coincidental, that their works were among the most politically engaged performances at the Museum of Conceptual Art. ________ NOTES: 1. Michael Small, “Off the Wall,” People, July 14, 1986. 2. Tom Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir (San Francisco: Crown Point Press, 2003), 83. 3. Terri Cohn, “Circa 1970: The Evolution of the Alternative Art Scene,” Artweek, December 1999, 15-16. 4. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 94. 5. “MOCA/FM: Sound Sculpture As,” The Internet Archive, accessed March 27, 2011. 6. “Rumbles; The Museum of Conceptual Art,” Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 6. 7. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 97. 8. Jerome Tarshis, “San Francisco: Body Works,” Artforum 9 (February 1971), 85. 9. Carl E. Loeffler, “From the Body into Space: Post-Notes on Performance Art in Northern California,” in Performance Anthology: Source Book of California Performance Art, ed. Carl E. Loeffler and Darlene Tong (San Francisco: Last Gasp Press and Contemporary Arts Press, 1989), 376-77. 10. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 102-5. 11. Jennie Klein, “Feeding the Body: The Work of Barbara Smith,” A Journal of Performance Art 21, no. 1 (January 1999): 30-31. 12. A. Belard, “All Night Sculptures,” Artweek, May 26, 1973, 3. 13. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 106. 14. Linda Montano quoted in Hilary Robinson, ed. Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 362. 15. Loeffler, “From the Body into Space,” 377. 16. Marioni, Beer, Art and Philosophy, 116. 17. Ibid. 18. Reyhan Harmanci, “Performance Art Finds New Audiences,” Bay Citizen, June 21, 2010.
above copied from:http://www.artpractical.com/feature/the_museum_of_conceptual_art_a_prolegomena_to_hip/

When Attitudes become Form, Janet McKenzie

Eva Hesse
Tate Modern, London, 13 November 2002 until 9 March 2003.

Eva Hesse at Tate Modern is a wonderful, enigmatic exhibition that inspires a wide range of interpretations and associations. It also resists interpretation and easy categorisation. Eva Hesse was a pivotal figure in the development of post-war international art and since her early death has become something of a feminist role model. However, Hesse's dramatic life - her evacuation at the age of three from Nazi Germany, her mother's death from suicide when she was ten, her struggle to gain recognition as a young artist in New York, especially in the male-dominated field of sculpture, and her struggle with cancer - have possibly stood in the way of a full appraisal of her work. Hesse died in 1970 of a brain tumour at the age of 34. She has since become a revered and iconic figure in 20th-century art.

The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Wiesbaden Museum, Germany have collaborated on this great exhibition. The lavishly illustrated catalogue provides an in-depth examination of Eva Hesse's complete oeuvre. It concentrates on her working methods and choice of unorthodox materials as well as on the large aesthetic and philosophical issues raised by her work.

Eva Hesse was born in Hamburg in 1936. She was evacuated to Holland with her sister to escape Nazi persecution and reunited with her family in 1939. They then moved to New York. She studied at Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1959. Her early work included abstracted figures — self-portraits — in thick impasto and an earth palette. Although she later became a sculptor, in her early twenties she drew with a vigorous style and produced many works on paper. In her works on paper between 1962-64 Hesse developed a gestural style, incorporating gouache and collage. They are energetic works, full of possibilities.

In 1961, Hesse married sculptor Tom Doyle. He was invited by a patron to work in Germany in exchange for a number of works. The couple spent a yearlong residency there. It was a pivotal phase in Hesse's creative development. She spent the first six months in Europe visiting galleries and museums. Her works produced there during their second six months have both a mathematical and erotic quality. She was particularly interested in Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) in which sexual desire is portrayed as the driving, mechanical force upon the body. By the time she returned to New York late in 1965, she was well on the way to developing her own unique vision. She had absorbed and developed aspects of Minimalism, Surrealism and Conceptualism. The exhibition conveys the fact that although Hesse worked quickly, in a remarkably short time before her death, and managed to make a profound contribution to 20th-century sculpture in that time, her work is also poetic and personal. At times, it is also witty and searing.

The transatlantic collaboration that has produced Eva Hesse at Tate Modern is the most extensive exhibition of the artist's work ever assembled. It includes early drawings and paintings; dynamic and extraordinary relief sculptures - a transition from two to three dimensional work - and her late, large-scale sculptures. It is a unique chance to see Hesse in Britain, for while Hesse broke new ground in her art, the materials she chose were not fit to last. Many works in museums around the world are too fragile to be moved. Important works such as Expanded Expansion at the Guggenheim Museum in New York - a 10 feet by 30 feet billowing drape of rubberised cheesecloth, supported by fibreglass poles, has had to be taken down. Left standing it would almost certainly collapse. Other latex works have to be kept in storage crates so that airborne fibres do not settle on surfaces that have become soft and sticky. Hesse's work is literally disintegrating.

Hesse's early drawings were shown in a group show in April 1961, entitled: Drawings: Three Young Americans, at the John Heller Gallery in New York. Her work was well received; Donald Judd described her to be 'the most contemporary and proficient'.1 Later, her works were described as prophetic of the latex and fibreglass sculptures she subsequently made. The organic shapes created then on paper were used in many different forms throughout her short career.

Hesse's first solo exhibition: Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings, opened in March 1963 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York. Gestural marks and collage replace the earlier, evocative ink drawings. Their dynamism was appreciated by ARTnews:

'She smashes down on little cutout shapes, half-erased ideas, repetitive linear strikings, and sets up new relationships. She invents dimension and position with changes of kinds of stroke, levels of intensity, starting and breaking momentum, and by redefining a sense of place from forces which are visible coefficients of energy'.2

The drawings of this period have a great energy, and a private reality. She often reoriented her images by 180 degrees, rearranged parts of the work by tearing it, replacing it with collage. The process here is of paramount importance, an attitude she held in the highest regard, even when she realised that materials such as latex would have a very limited life.

The next group of works on paper (1964-65) were made following her return from Germany. Hesse had visited museums in Basle, Bern, Dusseldorf, Florence, Mallorca, Paris, Rome and Zurich. She absorbed the 'biomorphic surrealism of Pablo Picasso and Arshile Gorky as well as the modified Cubism of Jacques Lipchitz and Eduardo Chillida'.3 Describing her year in Germany she wrote to Sol LeWitt:

'I have done drawings. Seems like 100s although much less in numbers. There have been a few stages. First kind of like what was in past, free crazy forms - well done and so on. They have a wild space, not constant, fluctuating and variety of forms etc. Paintings were enlarged versions, attempts at similar space etc.

2nd stage. Contained forms somewhat harder often in boxes and forms become machine like, real like, as if to tell a story that they are contained. Paintings follow similarly.

3rd stage. Drawings - clean, clear - but crazy like machines, forms larger and bolder, articulately described. So it is weird. They become real nonsense'.4

Hesse's Contained Forms: Gridded works on Paper and Canvas, form an important chapter in the present exhibition. They are divided by black lines to form a grid into which, 'disparate, often humorous cartoon-like forms are placed'.5 These are ambiguous and dramatic works.

Thematically and formally, these works read as arrays of possibilities, where sample styles and subjects are collected and examined as if specimens. Mechanical vs. organic forms, hot vs. cool colours, tidy vs. overburdened brushstrokes are cordoned off and pinned down for analysis. This series became Hesse's farewell to oil painting on canvas, an important step for an artist who had worked seriously as a painter for over five years. The dialectics first developed in these gridded paintings and drawings were subsequently played out in the three-dimensional topography of Hesse's painted reliefs.6

When Hesse returned to New York from Germany she began making 'quirky fetishistic sculpture'. Referred to in the exhibition by Lucy Lippard's term, 'Eccentric Abstraction', this phase of Hesse's rapidly developing oeuvre is puzzling and strange. Building on the sexual imagery and formal qualities of the relief sculptures that Hesse produced in Germany, these works are difficult to categorise. Fetish assemblages, a fascination with psychology and sexuality belong to an alternative Surrealism. Hesse was involved with an artistic circle that included Mike Todd, Paul Thek and Joe Raffaele. They encouraged the fetishistic aspect of Hesse's work.

A most decisive break in Eva Hesse's work came in 1966 with the largest and most elaborate sculpture to date: Metronomic Irregularity II. It was included in Lucy Lippard's exhibition, Eccentric Abstraction at the Fishbach Gallery, New York.

Based on a smaller two-panel study Metronomic Irregularity II consisted of three four-foot wooden squares hung at equal intervals in a row on the gallery wall. Each panel was drilled with a grid of 100s of holes, which Hesse connected with a dense web of cotton-covered copper wires. This formal structure relates strongly to earlier reliefs in which Hesse explored the conflict between chaos and order by pairing regular grounds with disorganised extrusions.7

Order versus disorder is stated here with greater restraint than in previous works. The modular approach to structure within a unified object was quite new for Hesse. So too was the 'recognition that the gallery space itself could be used almost as a sculptural material was a discovery Hesse continued to mine throughout her career'.8 It was not until mid-1966 that Hesse became seriously involved with Minimalism. There are many clues for this development in the early wash drawings in 1966.

The grid was used by many American artists from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties because it represented a complete break from subjective pictorial preoccupations and illusionist space. The grid was a means of organising the picture plane. There were inherent grids in many of Hesse's work prior to 1966. From this point on, she combined circles and grids that would always separate her work from Minimalist art of the time. Where the grid was neutral, the introduction of circles created an interesting tension. Her relief structures - constructed with washers and grommets on wood panels - confronted Minimalism, even though it was assumed that she had adopted a Minimalist language. Hesse worked on serial procedures, pushing experimentation with mathematical series to extraordinary lengths. She inspired an intellectual dialogue with other artists and theorists.

Like other artists of the mid-sixties - Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Robert Smithson - Hesse used techniques from industry. Machine finish, as opposed to the 'idiosyncrasies of touch', was a natural progression from the serial geometries and commercially available parts or found objects.

Accession I, 1967, was an important development in Hesse's career. It consists of an open-top aluminium box, threaded from the outside with rubber tubing, to create a bristling inner surface. Later the same year, she commissioned Arco Metals to make a similar but very much larger structure. She was still involved in the making process but she was not averse to seeking help for technical problems. The Accession boxes display characteristics of geometry versus organic that characterise many of her works. There are anthropomorphic associations and erotic qualities.

In the late 1960s, Hesse began to use latex in her work. Although she was aware of its instability, she was also fascinated by its translucent and supple qualities. Although she acknowledged the influence of Duchamp and his notions of chance, it was the paradoxes of the material that most inspired her work at this stage. Latex was used by Hesse as a casting material - the liquid rubber was poured into forms that she heated or cured in the oven. Later she used it like paint, applying it to cheesecloth or wire mesh. Hesse used latex for 16 major works, and in that process for a number of small works, as well. In a number of these works, other materials were also used - wax, fibreglass, plastic tubing, plaster tiles. Glass cases were bought to display apparently strange collections of sculptures pieces.

The sculptures entitled Repetition Nineteen, displayed so well in the open gallery space at Tate Modern's galleries are one of Hesse's most important series. As implied by its name, it exists in numerous iterations. Repetition Nineteen I, 1967, consists of 19 white, bucket-like shapes, each ten inches tall, made from papier mâché. In Repetition Nineteen III, the bucket forms are twice as tall as the first series and are made of fibreglass and polyester resin. Similar bucket sculptures were also made in latex. They are softer, more organic forms than other works from this period; especially works such as Accession I. They are exhibited on the wooden floor, in a somewhat accidental configuration. They are suggestive of human experience, though an exact meaning is never absolutely clear.

Grids, boxes, tubes, bucket shapes are used by Hesse in different combinations, like words or symbols in poetry. Her late drawings in wash can also be cross-referenced in her working method and in the development of a strong personal language. Against a background of theory and art practice in the late 1960s, it is not surprising that Eva Hesse's sculpture was included in the exhibition, Anti-Form, organised by John Gibson which opened at the Gibson Gallery in October 1968.

The 'warehouse show', as it became known was at Nine at Leo Castelli. Two works by Hesse were selected: Augment and Aught. Robert Morris wrote his influential article in Artforum earlier in the same year, in which he might well have been describing Hesse's important works before they had actually been made:

The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms that were not projected in advance. Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasised. Random piling, loose stacking and hanging give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied, as replacing will result in another configuration.9

Augment was included in the important exhibition organised by Harald Szeemann, When Attitude Becomes Form, Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information, which travelled to Germany and London. The exhibition contributed greatly to Hesse's international reputation. Both Augment and Aught have been extremely fragile since the early eighties and available only to scholars. In 1970, Hesse knew the potential instability of her materials and felt a certain guilt. She felt that when selling her sculptures the buyer ought to be warned. She was also very philosophical, aware by then of her terminal cancer and of her own mortality.

The Window works on paper of 1968 were described by Lucy Lippard as 'transitional'. Stacked rectangles in hazy gouache correspond with the soft washes employed for the latex sculptures. This is an additive process, leaving a frayed edge.

In these drawings Hesse demonstrates her great pictorial intelligence and tact by reconciling motifs and facture from her earlier work with her newer conception of the art object and its generative process.10

Hanging works from 1969 and 1970 revealed Hesse's dialogue with Surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp. They express ephemerality, and energy in space; they are both beautiful and repellent. There is also a psychological suspense evoked. The hanging sculpture Contingent (in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia and too fragile to travel) is painterly in its concept and execution.

The use of non-traditional materials is of central importance in the discussion of Eva Hesse's work; a chapter in the fine catalogue is devoted to the issues of conservation that pertain to her work.

In the last years of her life Hesse became so comfortable with her ideas that her artistic expressions are fluent regardless of the medium in which she worked. The ease with which she explored ideas in different forms and applied techniques in different media suggests that, in her own mind, her creative process had dissolved the boundaries between categories typically used to describe artistic form.11

The late Window paintings have an extraordinary power and beauty. Described by her friend and fellow artist Gioia Timpanelli, with whom she worked in Woodstock, New York, in the summer of 1969, as having a movement that was deliberate and improvisational, expressing discipline and freedom. These small works are among the most powerful in the Tate Modern exhibition.

'The work was abstract, formal, cool, showing great deliberation, clear-headed and passionate at the same time. She never excluded the human emotional element, never abandoned the subtle form. If there seemed to be rules, then they were there to be broken. Everything was immediate and present. The washes were all important, the paint thickness and the thin washes were worked in order to arrive at an abstraction that made sense. Art, like nature, had a prodigious complexity recognisable by those who could see it. All this was done with an intense passion. I don't use the word 'passion' lightly. By it I mean a serious Eros, child of Beauty and the terrifying ineffable creation, which uses the synthesis of opposites, which creates something new.'12

Eva Hesse at Tate Modern enables one to see the art of the past 40 years in a fresh light. Unlike the Barnett Newman show which is still on, and which is primarily about Newman alone, the Eva Hesse exhibition is truly enlightening. It is like returning to an original experience of abstraction and to the experience of absolute authenticity and integrity in the creative act. It makes sense of a lot of art that has been made in a similar vein in recent years and enables one to discern between the brilliant and the very dull in contemporary art.

Note
All quotes are taken from the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Eva Hesse, co-organised by Elisabeth Sussman for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Dr Renate Petzinger for Museum Wiesbaden,

Footnotes
1. Quoted by Julia Bryan-Wilson, 'Early Drawings: Ink Washes and Gouaches', p.129.
2. Valerie Peterson, review of 'Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings', ARTNews 62 (May 1963), quoted by Robin Clark, 'Reorienting, Rearranging, Replacing: Works on Paper, 1962-63', p.129.
3. Robin Cook, 'Contained Forms: Gridded Works on Paper and Canvas', p.149.
4. Quoted, ibid, p.149.
5. Ibid, p.150.
6. Ibid, p.150.
7. Scott Rothkopf, 'Metronomic Irregularity', p.185.
8. Ibid, p.188.
9. Robert Morris, 'Anti-Form', Artforum 6 (April 1968) 33-35, quoted by Robin Cook, 'Anti-Forms: Augment, Aught and Seam', p.253.
10. Scott Rothkopf, 'Late Drawings', p.258.
11. Michelle Barger and Jill Sterett, 'Play and Interplay: Eva Hesse's Artistic Method', p.318.
12. Gioia Timpanelli, 'Woodstock Paintings', p.102.

Above copied from: http://www.studio-international.co.uk/sculpture/hesse_e.asp

neo-con. Contemporary Returns to Conceptual Art, Cristiana Perrella

curated by Cristiana Perrella

*selected through apexart's Unsolicited Proposal Process

Artists: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Jonathan Monk, Yoshua Okon, Joao Onofre, Mario Garcia Torres, Francesco Vezzoli

September 6 - October 14, 2006

“Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side-effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.” --Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art, 1969

Everything could start with John Baldessari singing lines from Sol LeWitt’s famous conceptual art manifesto in his 1972 video Baldessari Sings LeWitt. Introducing the performance by noting that “these sentences have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues,” Baldessari made an ironic intersection of two systems, theoretical discourse and popular music, while at the same time giving a sarcastic commentary on the utopian hope for a mass audience for art. Although based on appropriation, the power of Baldessari’s work was experiential as well as referential; behind the initially humorous effect, it communicated to the viewer the discomfort of struggling to bring together two such incompatible languages.

This video can be considered one of the first meta-conceptual exercises, developing the “side-effects,” to use again LeWitt’s words, of someone else’s ideas and turning them into a new artwork. It’s not by chance then that Baldessari Sings LeWitt is one of the favorite “hits” for the artists of neo-con. Three of them have dealt with this seminal piece, though just one of the artworks derived from this confrontation is included here: João Onofre’s Catriona Shaw Sings Baldessari Sings LeWitt Re-edit Like a Virgin Extended Version, is an interpretation of Madonna’s famous song “Like a Virgin” that replaces the original lyrics to the song with excerpts from Sol LeWitt’s tract. Along these same lines, Mario Garcia Torres made a karaoke version of LeWitt’s Sentences that gives everybody the possibility to follow in Baldessari’s steps but using their own favorite tune. Finally Jonathan Monk, in collaboration with the French artist Pierre Bismuth, re-edited Baldessari’s video and added a crudely dubbed Lithuanian voiceover, like in a Soviet era TV newscast, for a show at the CAC in Vilnius in 2001. The original soundtrack was still quite noticeable in the background, making it hardly possible to understand either language.

All three artists, by diverse means, offer a contemporary translation of Baldessari’s seriocomic attempt to put art theory before a wider audience, while not neglecting the contradictions involved in this task. Perfect examples of a neo-con attitude (and I am not talking about neo-conservative politics), these pieces by Monk and Bismuth, Garcia Torres and Onofre combine reconstruction and revision, creating a double-take that parallels two eras, two forms of cultural expression, and two dialogues: the dialogue with the reference work and the dialogue with the present. More than just historical references, they raise contemporary questions that address politics, translation, memory, the accessibility of information, mass culture and commoditization. The appropriation from which they start is very unlike the suggestive surface quoting of post-modernism, but it comprises an alternative view on what has already passed. They are like well done musical covers that take an entire song and reinterpret it while at the same time achieving a new sound, keeping alive the challenging potential of a tune and giving back some emotion from the past. This is a profound form of innovative repetition, a repetition that produces difference.

Today the “dual time” of the cover—a time that belongs to a “before” that continues revealing itself in the “now”—is finding its way into many spheres of creativity, not just music. To take but a few examples in and around the art world, think about Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), or the artistic duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s maniacally detailed re-enactment of the legendary last gig of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Music remains a privileged starting point for these operations but, returning to Conceptual art, what about Marina Abramovic re-staging seminal performances from the 1960s and 1970s—not just her own but those of other artists, too—in the Guggenheim rotunda last year? Her rationale for redoing these old pieces, which are often remembered only through mystifying grainy black and white photographs, was to give them life again, but the project ended up being very much about personal interpretation.

While Abramovic’s reconstruction at the Guggenheim of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare was highly respectful of Beuys’ original, Yoshua Okon’s Coyoteria is an openly alternative reading of the most well known Beuysian action I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) which makes a link to corrupt economics and political values. For this performance, Okon replaces the coyote that was locked with Beuys for one week in a New York gallery with a human “coyote”—the Mexican term for a middleman known for trickery and exploitation, who mediates between average citizens and the government or even smuggles people across the border. The failure of Beuys’ project for social transformation is underscored by Okon’s focus on the ferocity of human relationships in contemporary money-driven society.

The works of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard and Francesco Vezzoli also refer to older video performance pieces. Walking After Acconci (Redirected Approaches), by Forsyth and Pollard, appropriates Acconci’s confrontational strategies and updates them with a rap music video aesthetic. In a virtuoso 24-minute improvisational performance, the young and talented MC Plan B paces the length of a corridor while smoking and rhythmically talking to the camera about the details of his love life. Three decades after Acconci’s Walk-Over (Indirect Approaches), video clip seems to be the best tool for participatory engagement, for making an intimate expression of the self that is able to get inside other people’s skins and psyches.

Clearly influenced by the artist’s fascination with glamor, Francesco Vezzoli’s The Return of Bruce Nauman’s Bouncing Balls, uses a porn star to re-enact the video that Nauman made in 1969 while bouncing his testicles with one hand. Shot in extreme close-up, Nauman’s work was itself an ironic reference to his earlier film Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling, for which he bounced rubber balls. Vezzoli brings this action out of the studio and into an amazingly beautiful mountain landscape, showing the muscled, naked body of the actor in slow motion and with a Mozart soundtrack. Nauman’s implications for exploiting the phenomenology of the video medium, with its immediacy, space and intimacy, are here seamlessly mixed with Hollywood cinema and Freudian psychoanalysis.

As shown here, Conceptual art offers fertile ground for this kind of “double exposure” artwork, with its self-questioning nature and the emphasis on idea rather than form. To return to LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, “Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form.” Disrupting this chain of development, artists like Mario Garcia Torres and Jonathan Monk problematize notions authorship and originality by completing works by other artists, intertwining with their elements some personal histories or making “alternate takes” on them. For None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip, a riff on Ed Ruscha’s influential artist’s book Every Building on Sunset Strip, 1966, Monk photographed all of the streets leading to Los Angeles’ infamous boulevard, and therefore none of the buildings. He embraces Ruscha's dispassionate and artless approach to photography, and renews his demystification of the creative process. While the original work cannot avoid the aura given to it by time and art history, Monk's version obliterates it.

Today (Latest News from Kabul), by Mario Garcia Torres, makes reference to Italian artist Alighiero Boetti and his deep love for Afghanistan. It starts from a 1970 Boetti piece for which the artist simply wrote the current date and time on a wall, a typical example of his interest in temporality. Instead of the day’s date, Garcia Torres writes the latest news from Kabul on the wall, using both of his hands simultaneously, starting from the center and proceeding in opposite directions, in the same way that Boetti once did. Each time the work is installed it is composed of a different text that is determined by the current situation in that tormented city. Garcia Torres creates a work that could likely have been done by Boetti because, sadly, the news from Kabul is not very different than it was thirty years ago. If on one hand he manipulates art history by alluding to possibilities that never happened, on the other he seems to point out the insignificance of the impact that man can have on the course of time.

What appears clearly, even within the necessarily concise selection of works exhibited here, is that neo-con is a state of mind and definitely not a codified way of proceeding. There are many different approaches with which to keep alive the challenging potential of Conceptual art while at the same time questioning urgent debates. By creating warps in time, all of these approaches intend to promote confrontation as an alternative to the competitive dialectics of history and culture; and that is why this is the only neo-con that I like.

Cristiana Perrella, 2006.

Cristiana Perrella is a curator based in Rome, Italy.

above copied from: http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/perrella.htm

Ars Electronica 2005 - First Statement

HYBRID—living in paradox, the theme of Ars Electronica 2005, examines the implosive tendencies that digital technologies impose on the world, bringing cultures on top of each other and flouting boundaries: national, material, technological and psychological. Hybrid creations and creatures, identities and cultures emerge from recombinations of our three basic codes: numeric, genetic and atomic.
Digital media art itself is a hybrid born from the connection of art and technology, accumulating diverse modes of expression and demanding a unique crossover of expertise and knowledge.
Hybrid—no other word is better able to signify this most characteristic conditions of our time.

The Drivers and Patterns of Hybridization
Hybrid Economies and Politics
Hybrid Cultures and Identities
Hybrid Creatures and Ecologies
These are the four main areas on which the festival will focus in symposia and artists’ lectures, exhibitions and installations, concerts and performances, workshops and seminars, and artistic interventions in public spaces all around the city.

Since 1979, Ars Electronica has been dedicated to the critical discussion of and reflection upon media culture. With its focal point situated at the intersection of art, technology and society, it is above all the endeavor to nurture up-close-and-personal encounters involving artists, designers, philosophers, sociologists, engineers and scientists from all over the world that endow the Festival with its very special character.
This is not solely a matter of the computer as an artistic medium but, above all, of testing how new ideas that are emerging from artistic practice can be applied to science and society in an effort to influence the way in which new technologies are developed, designed and utilized.

Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schöpf (Directors Ars Electronica)


HYBRID—no other term provides such a consummately appropriate and comprehensive description of the highly paradoxical current state of our world, one that is characterized by interrelationships that, among other things, are extraordinarily contradictory while at the same time displaying superb operative effectiveness:

Annulments of boundaries, mergers, fusions and crossovers resulting in new economic and political coalitions and alliances, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts and sciences.
Global cultural amalgamations as outgrowths of the worldwide circulation of people and products, as well as systems of signs and bodies of information.
Symbolic as well as physical penetration of the human body by machinery ranging from bionic prostheses and neuro-implants to cyborgs and trans-genetic chimera.
Sampling, collage and re-mix techniques, as well as consistent cross-compilation and re-contextualization of the means, forms and genres of artistic expression.
Escalating battles to prevent contamination of the self by the other.
The hybrid is the signature of our age, emblematic of the casualness with which we have established ourselves in real, physical habitats as well as in digital, virtual domains, of the way that dealing with and reconfiguring cultural differences and antipodes has become a matter taken completely for granted, and of the disturbingly routine nature of the way we play with the building blocks of life.

The cultural history of hybridization, from the husbandry and cross-breeding of plants and animals, the mechanical, electrical and digital simulation and replication of nature, and now to the arrogance of modern genetic engineering, has also always been an expression of humanity’s age-old longings to rise above itself and to modify and correct nature.

And just as every organism mobilizes the forces of its immune system to fight off intruders and foreign bodies (even in the case of a life-saving organ transplant), every instance of cultural or social hybridization summons forth attitudes of resistance and defensive action: fundamentalist purism, efforts at exclusion resulting from the fear of assimilation, or a sense of skepticism that sees hidden behind these “new” forms of integration nothing but innovative elaborations of the same old divisive forces.

Hybridization as a cultural process can be calculated and controlled only in the rarest of cases. Its productive powers are mostly the outcome of happenstance or even in some cases the conscious wish to achieve differentiation; they are often byproducts of subversive action. This is especially evident in the successful culture jamming found in youth culture and pop music, but applies equally to numerous applications of digital technology. After all, nobody planned SMS or the dynamic, potent emergence of citizen journalism in the form of blogging, RSS-feeds and podcasting. Their emergence is also a hybrid that was most certainly foretold by visionary artists and cultural theoreticians, though not by the marketing gurus of the New Economy.

The fact that, ultimately, a way is always found to commercially exploit the derivatives that are engendered in this way does nothing to diminish the inclination, pleasure and energy to go on sampling, remixing, contaminating and abusing; at best, it provokes the redoubling of such efforts.


The first hybrid is the human. And living in paradox. A mix of mind and matter, a translating device, a handshake from mind to matter and vice-versa, humankind is in a permanent state of hybridization, consciously and unconsciously.
Why then focus on such a pervasive condition? Because new drivers of hybridization have emerged that make the hybrid condition always more evident—and more uncomfortable for some. With globalization comes implosion, all cultures and time zones piling up upon each other. When imploding, things either integrate or break. Another driver is digitization, inviting an infinity of recombinations, all hybrids, carefully cultivated with software, like flowers.

We live in paradox, in a suspension of disbelief that will last until the dust settles and the contradictions between self and other, between nationalisms and globalism, between democracy and state control are resolved. And the contradictions between the power of media and that of the state. And the contradictions between science and the economy generating hybrids for all purposes with a clear bias towards profitability over service to humanity. And the contradictions …

Art is the food of hybridity. It is translating and transporting the modes of one culture into another, lifting bits of both and mixing. Sampling is not just one of the techniques of the digital, it has become a way of life. And we have DJs of culture, albeit operating at longer-term rhythms. What can people do but sample in an environment where everything is always available?

Derrick de Kerckhove

above copied from: http://www.aec.at/en/festival2005/first_statement.asp