Jose Bove is a French farmer, syndicalist, far-left theorist, rabble rouser, and former candidate in the 2007 French Presidential Election.  He is probably best known to Americans for leading a group that dismantled an under-construction McDonald’s in Millau, France, in 1999.  What I want to figure out is how characters such as Bove fit into the rubric of artistic practice, if they do at all.  I am not pulling the art connection from thin air; I first read of Bove in the July/August 2002 issue of NYARTS magazine, in an article written by William Jeffet, a curator at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersberg Florida.  The article is really just a brief introduction to Bove and his anti-globalisation stance on food production and distribution (Bove coined the term malbouffe, describing the standardisation and global homogenization of food, at the cost of local agriculture, and cultural cohesion), but the context is what’s important.  Why Bove in an art magazine?

The complex web of connections between art and politics, aesthetics and politics, has to be one of the most theorized subjects in twentieth century discourse, touched upon by almost every notable thinker, and it is also one of the most self-evident, as the milestone artworks of the twentieth century are almost unanimously political in nature.  One can say that everything is political, and consequently every artwork will be, but there is also the matter of symbolic image making (ie. propaganda) in political campaigning of every sort that shares qualities with artmaking.  For instance, Jeffett describes (though I have not found this referenced in any other published accounts yet) how Bove “undertook the symbolic action of unloading a lorry full of potatoes on the entrance … the protest was not directed necessarily at McDonalds, but it was a symbolic act of resistance against both industrialised food standardisation and the unjust economic penalisation of a high quality French product [Roquefort cheese].”

To me, the dumping of the potatoes must be key in a legitimate connection with an image-centric conception of art, because it is the potatoes that produce an image that is both memorable, definable, and, in away, meme-able … without the potatoes, the act of dismantling a McDonalds in Millau is less vivid, and lacks the hook, the one sentence punchline that most of what I would call conceptual art (lower-case ‘c’, concept-centric art) possesses.  We cannot describe to anyone who has not seen any of Claude Monet’s water lillies what they look like, or why he was a “great” painter … but we can, in a few words, almost like orating a legend or an urban myth, say, or even whisper, that Tehching Tsieh “spent a year in a cage without speaking, reading, or making art”, or that Bas Jan Ader “jumped from a tree, and rode his bike into a canal in Amsterdam, to experience the power of gravity”, or that Marina Abramovic and Ulay “walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, only to say goodbye at the middle”, or that Mircea Cantor “put a deer and a wolf in a white cube gallery and filmed their interaction,” or even that Claire Fontaine fashioned a quarter with a blade concealed inside”.  And people, whether they think it’s art or not, somehow get it, because these are actions we can all intuitively relate to in that they are accessible to us, and that they leave an image imprinted in our minds.

Jose Bove carried away for destroying research crops

If you find yourself doubting whether a contemporary avant-garde exists, there is Critical Art Ensemble (formed in 1987).  And, if there’s one reliable way to identify proponents of this contemporary avant-garde … it’s that they don’t call themselves artists.  Rather, they designate themselves media practicioners, critical theorists, web enthusiasts, and sometimes nothing at all … they just do their thing.  Why don’t they care to be called artists?  Well… as CAE write in Digital Resistance, “They aren’t artists in any traditional sense and don’t want to be caught in the web of metaphysical, historical, and romantic signage that accompanies that designation.”  They don’t care to be called political activists either, “because they refuse to solely take the reactive position of anti-logos, and are just as willing to flow through fields of nomos in defiance of efficiency and necessity.”  So, if there is an avant-garde, and the avant-garde is ostensibly a prized and lionized brother and sisterhood in the hearts and minds of art people, why do groups like CAE exist in relative obscurity — though they have been exhibited at the Whitney, ICA: London, MCA: Chicago, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris — when compared with thousands upon thousands of traditional image and object making artists?  Invisibility.  CAE tells is like it is: “these participants value access over expertise, and who really cares about the work of an amateur?”  Furthermore, the world is big and populated enough that outmoded artistic practices have ample room to cohabitate with more advanced ones to the degree that most art inclined people will never get the whole picture of what practices exist at a given moment.  Just as environmental determinism has dictated the sweep of history, such that in medieval Europe, the heavy wheeled plow, which facilitated the three-crop rotation and thus food surplus and sustained population expansion, was able to be introduced because there were oxen to pull them, and in warmer climates where heavy draft animals did not exist, civilization had to rely on classical two-crop rotation for centuries longer, old and new have always existed at the same moment, synchronously, but asymmetrically.

Here is a link to all of CAE’s published books in .pdf form:

http://www.critical-art.net/books.html

I just got this in the gmail via Artifex Press.  The premise is interesting:

Best of Intentions addresses the artist’s role in the future preservation of his/her work. Although the task of preservation has traditionally fallen to conservators, curators, and collectors, the steady increase in the role of information in preservation efforts has called those traditional roles into question. The use of impermanent industrial materials and technology platforms, the complex installation procedures for certain works, and even critical theory’s questioning of authorial intentionality are forcing artists to reconsider these important issues.
What steps are contemporary artists taking to preserve their intentions? How will artists systematically document their intent for future generations, and what problems have they encountered in doing so? In general, how involved should artists be in the preservation of their work and their intentions?
A roundtable discussion with

TARA DONOVAN

JIM HODGES

ROBERT RYMAN

Moderated by JOCK REYNOLDS Director of the Yale University Art Gallery

who will speak about Sol LeWitt and the artist’s intent

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

6:30-8:30 pm Registration at 6:30 pm

Discussion begins at 7 pm

Celeste Bartos Theater @ The Museum of Modern Art

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

4 West 54th Street New York City

“Kunst ist kunst und nicht Sozialarbeit” – Berliner Zeitung headline, December 2003

Art as social work/social work as art.  This topic is awesome, and for all the discourse dedicated to it (especially German discourse – hotness!), it is totally unresolved.  At what point, if any, do DIY, DIWO (do it with others), community-based projects like Not An Alternative, and communal activism like Raqs Collective and stuff of that ilk, become tangible as art (when the artiters say so, dammit – j/k)?  What does the matrix look like?  Does it look like the Approval Matrix in New York Magazine?  Where does relational aesthetics fit into this?  If we are to read Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics literally, isn’t all non-explicitly-ethically-minded art somehow lesser?  I mean, the world is pretty fucked up, and we are still producing lots of bauble art and c-prints of waves and shit instead of educating gang-bangers and plowing fields, convinced we are essentially doing our part, however only insofar as the neoliberal narrative affirms us of this.  Who knows?  I’m hungry.  Give me a few years to read some more text(e)s.

Cube Cola at HTTP Gallery, London, 2009

Mute Magazine has a good article on Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon, founders of Feral Trade, who started selling homemade Cube Cola, an alternative to CocaCola, at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, in 2004.  Since then, they have developed a transport process whereby fairly traded goods, like coffee and stuff, are transported internationally as luggage with art world travelers whilst on vacation and visiting biennials.  The article explains how it differs from, and gives the history of, Fairtrade, which is the best part of the article.  The author ultimately disses the project, calling it twee and insubstantial.  Mute Magazine is great, though, and pretty leftist in the chic way.

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/so_feral_it_s_tame

By the way, I saw this segment on NBC 4 NY yesterday afternoon while cutting work to go home and play Fallout 3 (which might be art, I’m not sure yet), before I turned on Fallout 3, about this restaurant on Staten Island, which, instead of hiring chefs, has hired grandmas from the tri-state area – nonnas – to cook the food.  Now that, I think, is art!  See, it’s like you think it’s gonna be something, and then they give you something else, like Haha.  And they bring into it cultural mythology, detournement, and it’s relational because you have to eat the food, and it’s unpretentious, and it sheds light on elders, and it has a good punch-line like the best conceptual/performative art does — really good art in my opinion.  They must know it’s art, too, because they have this really web 2.0-y website, with an ipod playlist even, which they would not do if it were just any restaurant.

http://www.enotecamaria.com/wp/

Munchen und Brooklyn based artist duo Venske + Spanle, currently on view at the selfportrait gallery as part of our Mapping The Body show, are also being exhibited at the Kunstverein Wuerzburg, Deutschland.  The show, entitled Voyage Congolaise, opens this Sunday, October 11th, and features their cute, organismic, magmatic marble sculptures.

The sculptures are typically a dazzling white, and each have distinct personality, which makes their display in groups all the better.  Every arrangement is a different group dynamic, often to comic effect.  The creamy, poured texture that characterizes Venske + Spanle’s sculptures, coupled with their generally being pet-sized, belies that they are each carved from single blocks of leadenly heavy Italian marble, a traditional material the artists have been experimenting with for several years, both in terms of form and geographic context (they have shown up in white cube galleries, on hotel beds, in Times Square, on a mountain top, and in refrigerators).  In fact, it is often observed that Venske + Spanle’s creations appear to have originated from virtual reality, or to have escaped from an imaginary art laboratory, a stark contrast to historical manifestations of marble sculpture.   A stunning variety of these marble sculptures exists, especially considering the labor they require.  Some, like the Urform ‘droplets’, are formally simple, as the name suggests.  Others, such as the gumpfot series, are comprised of numerous biomorphic rolls, folding languorously over one another again and again, giving a positively baroque impression, like Homer Simpson letting his gut out crossed with the creature at the end of Akira.  Their largest work, the gumpfot weisser riese, was carved from a 12 ton block of veiny Cervaiole marble, but the end result, like an enormous, obese worm, is no less benevolent in character than the tiny smorfs.

Here is the press release:

I’m not going to say that the three events I am about to list are “good” or “cool”, because that would be what Liam Gillick calls “uncritical reinforcement”, but here are three events that I know of, and that I am going to try and go to, whatever my reasons:

Reading Odyssey presents Variation

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s treatise On The Origin of Species , non-profit Reading Odyssey has organized a series of lectures on the impact of Darwin’s work.  The second of these lectures, and the only one to take place in New York, is tonight at Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall.

8 PM – 9:30

Tickets are FREE with RSVP @ http://darwinlecture2.eventbrite.com/

As an aside, check out this picture … Darwin wore tight pants with dress shoes.  Very Summer 2009 urban business casual.  Nice.

Bright Nights under the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage

via Random Number:

“Bright Nights is a curated program of digital artwork that celebrates the projected image, draws attention to the iconic architecture of the Manhattan Bridge, and electrifies the arts friendly DUMBO neighborhood. The program will be projected onto the Anchorage, to coincide with the 100th birthday of the bridge and the 10th annual Walk21 conference in October 2009.

Four internationally renowned Brooklyn-based artists created new works that interpret the unique physical, spatial, and historical components of the bridge. The artists were chosen for their ability to energize a public space, in celebration of the major thoroughfare’s 100th birthday.”

Artists featured on October 7th are Burak Arikan, Motomichi Nakamura, Marius Watz, and selfportrait.net member Lee Wells.
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Selfportrait.net music/performance group SHAPES at Webster Hall Studio

This will be a sexy time, and a nice way to unwind after the Darwin lecture.  Music starts at 8:30, but SHAPES go on later.

reblogged from eyebeam:

In this morning’s New York Times Fashion column, Dress Codes, David Colman announces that the subdued artiness of the art dealer and the curator is the look – the sensibility, if you will – of this Fall.  That seems accurate.  As we all know, curators, and the word ‘curating’ (as in, “curating this morning’s breakfast was a challenge: I didn’t know if the Kix or Apple Jacks better formally engaged the cereal bowl as a space.” or, “Dude, I am curating a line-up of good bands at Union Pool next week, you should try and make it.”), are so hot right now, in the Mugatu-ian sense.  Zoolander II should surely include the caricatural contemporary curator as aloof, obscurantist, neo-Marxist yet always late for a dinner with the aristocracy, and effortlessly fashion-forward.  Massimiliano Gioni should have a cameo as walk-off audience member.

First I would like to preface that the particular fashion sensibility in question here belongs primarily to younger curators, by which I mean those under 50.  I’m not being ageist, this is just what I see.  Sure, Okwui Enwezor is a very fashionable man.  But, look at any picture of Lucy Lippard, Seth Siegelaub, or Walter Zanini from the last ten years.  What do you see?  Fleece vests, check, cargo pants, check.

That contemporary curators are style-conscious should come as no surprise.  They usually possess a broad enough familiarity with visual culture, and dare I say the ‘creative industries’, to know what’s louche, what’s gauche, what’s haute, and what’s hot.  They travel a lot (the lucky ones anyway), and are exposed to both street culture in other urban centers, as well as — and this is my unqualified theory here — a lot of European airport businessperson chic, which I think informs their style.  European airport businessperson chic is civilized and clean, but nothing too delicate can be worn, as it would surely crinkle over the many hours spent in transit.  Curators, who don’t make as much money as businesspeople, have to be fashion forward, but comfortable in economy class.

Curators also align themselves with artists.  And although they may not have to do the boho-dance (as Tom Wolfe described it in The Painted Word) as much as dealers and collectors, their style is naturally going to be influenced by the avant-garde artist, who began to dress in rags and eccentric cuts during the middle of the 19th century, not just because he was poor, but to shock and differentiate himself from the bourgeoisie.  The increasing degree of professionalism in the wardrobe of the curator, however, has led to an aesthetic distancing between curators and artists in terms of fashion.  The professionalization of curating, which is probably correlate to the collapsing boundaries between curator, dealer, galleries, consultant, and web-based entrepreneur, also has had an influence on color palette.  Look at the grays, blacks, and browns in the Calvin Klein and Raf Simmons suits David Colman writes about; this palette, during the mid 19th century, denoted middle class status, as it evoked authority, seriousness, responsibility, respectability.  As an aside, it is more than likely that the subdued and minimal fashion sensibility of the curator reaching the threshold of fashion zeitgeist has something to do with the last year’s economic situation; it is time to be minimal, rather than opulent; dark in palette, to reflect our mood and worry about the future; tight in fit to reflect our desire for protection and reassurance, our collective paranoia; arty because we must align ourselves with anything but the profane worlds of finance and politics.

Regarding the effortlessness of the curator’s look: the effortlessness of the curator’s uniform should not be confused with that of the artists; the ostensible effortlessness in a curator’s wardrobe is actually a touch of scholarly slouchiness.  After all, most of these people have spent a good many years on rural campuses in groups of fifteen or twenty, isolated in specialized reading-rooms the size of the one at the New Museum, and rarely, if ever, coming within eyeshot of the undergraduate mainstream.

As the contemporary curator has been getting more and more attention in the last twenty or thirty years, he/she has also come to occupy some post in the hierarchy of hip.  One thing I think this is attributable to is that curators hang out with artists, and many artists happen to be photographers.  Some of these photographers are fashion photographers.  Fashion photographers like to take pictures of artists and the people they hang out with, which then, when magazines like Purple and selfservice and NYMag and V publish these pictures, the osmotic process occurs by which curators become fashion plates.  The New York Times has been quite on top of this trend; they loooove curators.  All curators.  They love Massimiliano Gioni. They loooove Neville Wakefield. They looove Matthew Moravec and Kyle Thurman.  They love Lauren Cornell. There’s nothing wrong with this.  But, one thing I gather is that in American newspaper journalism, unlike on the other side of the Atlantic, there is still a high degree of niceness towards contemporary curating.  Compare this with a recent article by Ben Street for art:21, on the sentiments often shared by newspaper critics on European curators, which reached heights of vituperativity towards Nicolas Bourriaud after this years Tate Triennial.

Here are some pictures:

from selfservice

also from selfservice

Stephanie Moisdon

Elizabeth Neilson in Yojhi Yamamoto's lookbook

Hand Ulrich Obrist, da man wit da plan

Kaat Debo, super hawt

Massimiliano Gioni in gray sweater and modest watch

Leanne Sacramone

via NYTimes, fall 2009's look