I was looking at some telephony related art projects, online, such as:

Tanalum Memorial - Graham Harwood

Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce) - Barbara Visser - 2007

Broodthaers' phone number taken over by Jan Mot gallery - Mario Garcia Torres

Emily Jacir - Inbox (2004-2005) (has to do with e-mails, not phone, but was still relevant)

one of Moholy Nagy's 1921 Telephone Paintings, dictated by phone using graphing paper, and executed in a factory

And a film called dust by Bard alum Eric Saks, which there are no images of online.  And I was looking for this project I might have seen in Mute Magazine, can’t remember, where all the world’s telephone books were put into a room in London, creating a monumental, but explicitly incomplete and futile taxonomical record of everyone in the world’s phone numbers.  I couldn’t locate the piece, but I did come across this nice quote on dense critical language from the very Derrida inspired Avital Ronell:

From

The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, by Avital Ronell

Q: Are you concerned that your style might make you difficult to understand?

A: … understanding as such — thinking one has understood — is a disaster. It places closural moves on a problem. Right now I’m not on the side of understanding in that simple sense of “Yes, I understand,” and that’s it. To make things “perfectly clear” is reactionary, stupifying. The real is not perfectly clear.

- Avital Ronell being interviewed in Mondo 2000, #4

Why didn’t I go to NYU again?

One of the problematic conditions of art in the age of digital reproduction and nearly immediate access, is the loss of potency in the singular object, image, or gesture. The web’s innumerable blogs, databases, and online magazines, facilitate rapid browsing with such effectiveness that researching art can become a masturbatory and sportive warpath towards comprehensive knowledge. I use the word masturbatory both because browsing feels good — it offers a temporary sense of accomplishment, of erudition, and the pleasure of seeing lots of good art, whatever that means to you — and also because it is quixotic, in that omniscience when it comes to anything is impossible given the human lifespan.  The trope is that Diderot was supposedly the last man to know everything.  And, as Stephen Hawking would tell us, things got so wildly complex in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that complete knowledge became unattainable.  Here is a passage from A Brief History of Time:

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning?  However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialist.  Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task of philosophy is the analysis of language.”  What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.”¹

As an aside, Sam Wagstaff, mentor, benefactor, and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, famously described his collecting as a game of ‘Idiot’s Delight’ (a term notable as the name of the only film in which Clark Gable sings, as well as an alternate name for the game of Solitaire, a game known for its low chance of winning).  Moreover, it is not just the web medium that challenges the specialness of the lone artwork, but the sheer volume of works that exist, each vying for slivers of our attention.  Traditional images and objects — paintings, photographs, and sculpture — are particularly challenged because of the volume of non-art images we see daily that are, sometimes, arguably, endowed with as much content as anything called art.  So, what are we missing out on, practically or existentially, by giving a painting eight seconds of our time in thumbnail, ninety-six dot per inch format, rather than thirty minutes of our time in solitude in a gallery, or over the course of a lifetime above our imaginary fireplace mantel?

For me, browsing through images (and texts) with great rapidity is defensible because I feel like I’m getting somewhere with my grasp on art, so that I can … I don’t know … change things?  Change what?  I guess I mean that there’s a dilemma that spans artmaking, criticism, and curating, which is: when do you know enough to do it most effectively?  When should you stop researching precedents, and get to work?  What if you curate a critical, thematic, intragenerational art show, not knowing that there are serious flaws in your selections because you missed out on one chapter or another in art history?

And most criticism I read seems banal, not because it isn’t supremely intelligent or insightful or true, but because the stakes are low.  Maybe we need to see a militarization of the critic:  You don’t like this work?  Destroy it.  But in order for that to be justifiable, there must be a dominant, presumably correct, methodology that the critic is advocating and protecting, and we don’t have that.

I’ve gone off track here, but the inspiration behind this post is a passage from a review in Paper Monument, of Song Dong’s recent show at MoMA, featuring hundreds of household items horded by the artist’s mother over several decades in (pre-Great Leap Forward) Communist China.

…in the installation, the same fundamental alchemy persists: In poverty, the object is so difficult to obtain that it acquires a value far above and beyond its utility; as utility diminishes, the object retains a powerful but undefined meaning. The term “sentimental value” does not seem adequate here. Even the Chinese phrase shebude-literally, unable to let go-suggests holding onto a possession that is personally valuable because of its association with a loved one. But the things Zhao held onto, and invested with a peculiar brand of value, were bits of twine, plastic food trays, empty tubes of toothpaste, and the like: objects universally agreed upon by an industrial, mass-market culture to be garbage and unlikely to retain the emotional imprint of any of her loved ones. More saddening is that, in many cases, Zhao’s possessions moved directly from acquisition to storage, bypassing the station of utility entirely.²

Maybe we need less art, maybe even a poverty or a simulated poverty, for the alchemy to return.  Someone explain if I have this all wrong.

One last comment regarding a parallel I sometimes see, between browing art, and playing videogames:  1up.com, a popular videogame website, once posed to its audience the question, “Why do you play videogames?”  And of the thousands of anonymous answers, the one that seemed most profound to me was, “Because its easier than real life.”

Went to Sotheby’s today as part of a performance piece I think I’m doing, and because they had macaroni and cheese soup at the cafe.  Saw the Important Russian Art show.  Observations and pictures to come.

1. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p 174 [↩]
2. Everything Must Go, Deborah Kuan, Paper Monument Journal of Contemporary Art, Issue 2 [↩]

Here’s the press release. Coverage tomorrow.

Marina Abramović
Performing the Gallery/Performing the Museum
Tuesday, October 27, 2009,
doors at 6pm, talk begins promptly at 7pm
Public Discussion with MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ
Inauguration of ABRAMOVIC STUDIO AT LOCATION ONE
presented by Jovana Stokić

The discussion will focus on Abramovic’s investigations of transformative quality of time in context of a gallery exhibition. The exclusive video material from Abramovic’s innovative group exhibition in Manchester Whitworth Art Gallery, held July 3 – 19 2009, will be shown. For this groundbreaking event, the Whitworth emptied every gallery space in order to create room for this unique work to develop and breathe. The show began with an hour-long performance initiation with Marina Abramović, leading up to a series of extraordinary encounters between artists and audience. Quite unlike anything staged before in a museum or a gallery, it provided a transformative gallery-going experience.
The evening inaugurates Abramović Studio at LOCATION ONE. Beginning October 2009 the studio, curated by Jovana Stokić, involves artists from Location One residency program in engaging with performance art. The ABRAMOVIĆ STUDIO within Location One is dedicated to exploring long-durational performance works through open-ended forms of workshops, panels and discussions. Marina Abramović, will be the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at MoMA in the spring of 2010 titled “Artist is Present” in which she will be performing continuously throughout the whole duration of the exhibition.

Recently, we posted a short history of artist-executed iconoclasm, that is, iconoclasm where the vandalistic act was done by either an artist in ostensible dialogue with the original author, or at least by an artworld insider (a la Tony Shafrazi).  Well, here we have a bizarre new case to add to the genre, if you will.  Title This is the sometimes clever and hilarious, sometimes acerbic and discomforting, art gameshow by Mark Kostabi, in which art critics and other art professional types appear as a ‘celebrity panel’ and take shots at naming Kostabi’s latest paintings, which are always overflowing with symbolism and consequently really fun to try and name.  Kostabi awards cash prizes (usually $20) for the best names, voted on by himself and the studio audience.  In the latest episode, featuring Glenn O’Brien, David Coggins, and Carlo McCormick, Kostabi improvises an in-studio auctioning of one of his paintings, which O’Brien joked that he’d pay $20 for.  Kostabi plays auctioneer for a minute, and though he’s having a good time, there’s something sinister in his delivery.  Midway through, he produces a carpenter’s blade, and, when the painting fails to garner a $300 bid, he slices it six ways to Sunday, and puts it over his head, appealing to the audience that failing to get $300 for a painting could ruin his market.  Enjoy.

link to video

“Cave Paintings” at Gresham’s Ghost, curated by Bob Nickas, doesn’t know it, but it does abstract painting a disservice.  Why?  Its premise involves a direct reference to “the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting.”  This is actually a concept selfportrait would like to reinforce, because it uses anthropological tools and context in order to examine abstract painting as the enduring medium it is, for better or worse.  In this way, it inadvertantly sacrifices its own quality by presenting abstract works that are less interesting than both the physical space (the sub-basement of 511 W 25th street) and the shows analytic concept … this is a strategy that is utilized in curating of the highest caliber.  As Duchamp imparted to Walter Hopps: “never let the work get in the way.”  More recently, regarding Manifesta 6, Mai Abu ElDahab wrote, “in order to succeed, this project must fail by the existing standards of the exhibition industry.”¹  The problem is that, with the exception of a couple of paintings, for instance, Jules de Balincourt’s and Richard Aldrige’s, the work seems like a non sequitur to the program.  Jules de Balincourt often manages to defy painterly stagnation and fogeyish gamesmanship with political, but not ham-fistedly so, figurative works such as Ambitious New Plans and People Who Play and the People Who Pay, and here he ekes out some relevance in a semi-abstract painting of a pink cavernous space, something like the belly of a giant sea creature in Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (which is definitely an artwork).  Richard Aldrich at least invokes the imagery of cave painting.  So, to a lesser degree, does Chris Vassell.  Other works don’t answer to the very broad and provocative premise asking, I think, regarding what abstract picture-making using paint can be observed as enduring throughout the history of civilization, and in which ways the meta-narratives been most successfully been manipulated by the artists who still see the medium as worthwhile.  I don’t think this is what Bob Nickas intended.  The child mannequin, conceived by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, which is relocated through the space daily, innovatively (and kind of creepily, which is a flaw, the kid should’ve looked more awestruck and less like something out of I am Legend) prompts us to reflect on nomadism and its relation to the beginning of painting, as well as on a refreshed, childlike gaze given to us by the anthropological methodology set forth here.

Even James Kalm, former “Kitsch Artist”, prolific essayist, and now YouTube critic among other things, asks rhetorically at the end of his video pod on the show: “is painting alive or dead?  I don’t know.”     the video:

Note that “Cave Paintings” as it is currently hung is installment one of what will be a two-part show.  Here is the pr:

• Richard Aldrich
• Lisa Beck
• Varda Caivano
• Sarah Crowner
• Verne Dawson
• Jules de Balincourt
• Jason Fox
• Daniel Hesidence
• Richard Hoek and John Miller
• Charline Von Heyl
• Jutta Koether
• Michael Krebber
• Elizabeth Neel
• David Ratcliff
• Sterling Ruby
• Anja Schworer
• Chris Vasell
• Chuck Webster
• Stanley Whitney

Gresham’s Ghost is pleased to announce its third exhibition, “Cave Painting,” organized by Bob Nickas, which brings together works by forty artists who are engaged with picture-making manifested within a painting practice. This show follows another with the same title that was presented in Berlin at PSM Gallery in June 2009 that evolved as a result of Nickas’s research for his book, Painting Abstraction, to be published in October by Phaidon Press. The project was initiated with months of studio visits in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of the artists in the exhibition are also included in the book, which aims to open up a wider sense of how abstract painting can be understood today. The title, “Cave Painting,” is a direct reference to the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting. Expressionistic works are seen alongside those that are formally reserved; hand-painted pictures are shown in counterpoint to those that have their basis in mechanical procedures; the range of works accounts for both predetermined result and pure chance. Over the course of the show, a collaborative work by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, a child mannequin, will move each day to a different position in the gallery to “look at” and further animate the paintings — a strange, nomadic figurative element within the space.

1. Notes For An Art School [↩]

The first time I experienced one of Bill Viola’s full-room installations was at the exhibition of Bodies of Light (2006) at the ARoS, in Aarhus, Denmark.  The atmosphere was stark, moody, infernal, and immediately enveloping.  My initial sensation was one of disorientation, but I soon recognized I was feeling something else too: fear.  At first, little other than film grain and hints of strange light volleying from some unknown source appeared on the high and wide screens around me.  The room was irregularly shaped, and odd dihedrals became illuminated as the light shifted.  Suddenly, on a screen to my left, bubbles.  More bubbles, and disturbances emanating from the murky depths.  Then, a thunderous plunge.  A human body began to descend, head first, in the smooth and slow motion one associates with some mystical transfiguation.  The body seemed relaxed as it sunk; it’s pose was symmetrical and alert, and it did not struggle or welter.  But the figure was unrecognizable, its back turned, its head shrouded by hundreds of upward shooting, displaced bubbles.  On the screens around me, asynchronously but all alike in character, bodies began to determinedly take similar plunges.  Often, in experiencing a work of art that is mysterious and does not reveal itself right away, I end up with a different interpretation than the artist might have intended.  But in the case of Bodies of Light, the association between imagery and impression was unmistakable: this was death.  And though, dependent upon religion, culture, and the peculiarities of one’s life, death will be imagined uniquely by each of us, there was an undeniable sense that this particular interpretation, was the right one.  This was what death would be like.  Bill Viola was a man who knew death, and had produced a simulation of it with perfect pitch.

Bill Viola, Bodies of Light

Tomorrow, at James Cohan in Chelsea (533 West 26th Street), a larger, more encompassing show of Viola’s work, also with the title Bodies of Light, opens.  Here is an excerpt from the press release:

October 23 – December 5

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present its fifth gallery exhibition by internationally acclaimed American artist Bill Viola. The exhibition opens October 23rd and runs through December 19th, 2009. For over 35 years Bill Viola has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, greatly expanding its scale, creative scope and historical reach. He has created video films, architectural video installations, flat screen pieces, sound environments, electronic music performances, as well as works for television broadcast, opera, and sacred spaces. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions. They employ state-of-the-art technology and are distinguished by their emotional power, precision and direct simplicity.

The exhibition spans two decades and includes the New York premiere of Pneuma (1994/2009) a video/sound installation, and several flat-screen pieces from the Transfigurations series, Viola’s newest body of work, which originated with Ocean Without a Shore, created for the 15th century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale in 2007.

In Jerry Saltz’s retrospective essay on the last 40 years of art in New York, he mentions Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’, which rose to number 2 on the British charts, as a watershed moment when New York artists realized exposure beyond the art world was possible.

Lately, I’ve been known to boast that “while others go to work, I go to vvork.”  After having read The Artist’s Joke, from the excellent Documents of Contemporary Art series, I decided to try that one out at a comedy club last night, Cory Arcangel style … you could hear my friend in the audience apply his palm firmly to his forehead.

vvork.com, an essentially wordless picture blog of contemporary art pieces, succeeds for one reason: its contributors have great taste.  Neither analysis nor criticism is needed.  Themes drift in and out in a few scrolls of the mouse.  The quality of the choices is justification enough.  In this way, vvork reminds me of what Flaubert said regarding his plan to write Madame Bovary, a book “about nothing … held together by the internal strength of its style.”

I’m not saying there isn’t substance in the vvork blog.  Not at all.  vvork, as a collective, are what you’d call ‘serious curators’.  The experimental, challenging, bookish, but slightly unhinged kind.  Preferably Dutch, or Belgian.  On Friday, October 30th, they team up with a curator so smokin’ you want to call her an impresario, Lauren Cornell, to present a contemporary variety show.  Here is the release:

Friday, Oct 30

7:00 PM

New Museum Theater

Berlin-based collective VVORK present a contemporary variety show, composed of daring and experimental translations of original artworks. Variety is inspired by how culture of all kinds—sound, moving image, graphics—cycles easily between states and forms. For this one-night event, local performers will stage works by artists Wojceich Kosma, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Kristin Lucas, Adrian Piper, Pierre Bismuth, and Claire Fontaine. Containing readings, video, performance, dance, and music, Variety will present the acts together in a dramaturgy that can be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. When finished, the evening will be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future. VVORK is a website (vvork.com) and curatorial project by artists Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Georg Schnitzer, and Christoph Priglinger.

Organized by Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, the New Silent Series receives major support from The Rockefeller Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.

This New Silent Series program is made possible by the Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, and the Experimental Television Center, New York.

Buy tickets ($12) here: http://www.museumtix.com/venue/program.asp?pvt=new&vid=726&pid=2053087&code=

via ATM’s website:

Peter [Sutherland], who you might already know from his debut show at ATM, Blame it on the Dog and Andrew [Sutherland] an amazing sculptor and image maker bring together works which speak about the breaking down between high and low art forms and their meanings. One example of an equalizer is the Internet and how anyone can be a star overnight on u-tube. This looks like it’s going to be interesting!

The opening will be the October 22 from 6-8 pm and will run through October 31. So it’s a short one!

Da big boss man Jerry Saltzasaurus Rex has another book coming out, and it’s louder than da first one.  Oh god.  No, seriously, this event is an obvious must, and will be a celebration of a superbly insightful, down-to-earth, and important critic.  From the press release:

Seeing Out Louder
Art criticism 2003-2009
Jerry Saltz

Seeing Out Louder, the sequel to his acclaimed collection, Seeing Out Loud, Jerry Saltz offers more free-wheeling essays, reasoned reviews, thought-pieces, and screeds about contemporary art and its context. Senior Art Critic at New York Magazine since 2007, and previously at The Village Voice (1998-2007), Saltz is also a two-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, popular teacher and coast-to-coast lecturer.

Saltz surveys the good, the bad, and the very bad in contemporary art. He addresses art objects and the spells they do or don’t cast. He considers the art world as an ever-mutating organism. He singles out mismanaged museums, out-of-control auction houses, misguided artists, the gossip pages of Artforum and the tent-city casinos known as Art Fairs. His tools include an unsparing eye, a deep love of the art world, respect for artists, self-deprecating humor, sweet skepticism, and one of the easiest writing styles in criticism. Tracking the most recent all-out orgy of art and money, Saltz considers its effect on art and asks, “Now that the money is gone, how might art and the art world put their houses in order?” Don’t miss the twists and turns as he sorts out the answers. If Seeing Out Louder has a credo it is, “Art First. All Else Follows.”

Jerry Saltz has been the Senior Art Critic for New York Magazine since 2007. Before that he was Senior Art Critic for The Village Voice for almost ten years, starting in 1998. He is a two-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism (2001 and 2006). Seeing Out Loud, an anthology of his Village Voice columns was published in 2003. A second volume, Seeing Out Louder is to be published by Hard Press Editions in October 2009 and covers his most memorable columns from the Village Voice and New York Magazine from 2003 to the present. Saltz has lectured at Harvard, the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American art, The Boston Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and many others. He currently teaches at Columbia University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and The School of Visual Arts. He has written for Frieze, Art in America, Parkett, Flash Art, Time Out New York, and many others. In 1995, he was the sole advisor for the Whitney Biennial. He lives in New York City.

Having gone to the Whitney Studio Party the other night, one passage in particular, about Saltz’s encounter in 1978 with John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Madison Avenue, really resonates with me right now:

“Immediately afterwards, I witnessed the effects of fame when I saw John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Madison Avenue. Dazzled by the sight, I couldn’t stop looking, and fell into step behind them. I ended up following in their wake for about 20 blocks, watching the waves of recognition spread down Madison Avenue, the marvelous shock, the astonishment, the joy. It was like an emotional landslide. People staggered or seemed to buckle as the couple passed. Space distorted, time fell into a trance. The light of forever appeared to glow around them. At that exact moment in that exact place they seemed the sum of all sums. I still feel the reverberations on that particular stretch of upper Madison Avenue. That was old-fashioned fame: God-like, classic, aristocratic, transcendental, almost religious, a strange, strange love. The bigger the crowd of idolaters, the more unique you felt in your idolatry. Fame is not like that anymore. Fame is feral, or simply celebrity squared. Debased or replaced by its more ordinary manifestations (the well-known, the groovy, or the merely recognizable), fame now attaches itself to nobodies. Celebrity is an everyday thing, our biggest export. We’re a nation of Kennedys. You’re famous, maybe, or someone you know is: the chef at the restaurant you go to, your hairdresser, your doctor, architect, interior designer, or florist. You know somebody who knew John Jr., or, as one woman told News Channel 4, “I didn’t know him, but my dog knew his dog.”