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

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.

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

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

“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

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

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

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