I didn’t have the good luck to mistakenly believe when I was young that Cézanne was a woman, as one artist friend of mine did. She grew up thinking that, like Marianne or Joanne, Cézanne was clearly female, as well as the greatest modern artist in the world. By the time my friend discovered her mistake, she had internalised the notion that she, too, might someday be the greatest modern artist in the world, since it would be only natural for one woman to follow another in that position.¹

1. Susan Hiller. O’Keefe As I See Her. Frieze Magazine, Issue 11, 1993. [↩]

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance is a far more informative, down-to-earth and easy to read history of curating than Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating.  Learned that the hard way.  The first chapter is available free on scribd.

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

http://www.installationart.net/index.html

Oh, those UK fine art research institutions!

cover image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Vectorial Elevation (2002)

Finally, recommended viewing.  The Reality Club recently held a salon at the Hotel Ritz, Paris, during which Stanislas Dehaene gave a talk on new developments in discovering the Signatures of Consciousness.  The 120 minute talk and transcript is here, at http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html

Salon D'ete at the Hotel Ritz, Paris

Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett both acknowledge that if Triple Candie ever does receive canonical recognition (a concept that might itself be increasingly anachronistic in this age of rhizomatic art knowledge where the “canon” is endless, full of anomalies, contrivances, multiple histories and presents) it won’t be for a long time; likely until after the fact.  Performative curating in which the artist and artwork are on trial is still a fringe activity, throttled by powerful emotional and intellectual forces, and despite the founders’ claims of accessibility and of being a democratic alternative space, Triple Candie’s particular brand of it might be self-marginalizing.  What I mean is that certain surface-level qualities of Triple Candie as an entity might be a turn-off to people who otherwise might appreciate the prescience and guts in Bancroft and Nesbett’s gesture.

It might be superficial, but I think that if they were 28-year-olds from des banlieues of Paris, Zurich, or Ljubljana, and were being actually more violent, more transgressive, less tempered, in their curating of exhibitions without work and without the artists’ involvement or permission, they would generate more sympathy.  There’s an upstate folksiness to the Triple Candie project, from the signage (“all welcome”) to the juxaposition of contemporary and ‘localist’ shows (like the Calais Guild Prayer Blankets), the faux-anthropological strategies, the fact that it’s run by a married couple, that comes off as smarmy to many.  I think this gets confused with an actual aversion to the curatorial practice in question, which any advanced art person should be able to see the importance of.  I am reminded of the oft paraphrased quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw: “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.”  If there’s a time-honored tactic Triple Candie could benefit from, it’s the veil of rock ‘n’ roll irony.

Triple Candie signage

Three's Company gallery might be a more fitting venue

The explicit idea of curator as author can arguably be traced back at least as far as Oscar Wilde’s 1890 essay, The Critic As Artist, through Duchamp, and towards the dark turn it took with Adolf Ziegler’s propagandistic Enartete Kunst in 1937.   But friction between artists and curators over their respective roles seems to have become matter-of-fact in the 1960s.   Seth Siegelaub talked about the curatorial turn toward ‘critical curating’ and the ‘demystification’ of production conditions that made curators visible as mediators and producers.  Many artists, Daniel Buren notably in his essay Exhibition of an Exhibition, reacted negatively.  The same year of Buren’s essay, 1972, Joseph Beuys expressed dismay about curators using the artwork like painters using paint.  In late 80s and early 90s this trend reemerged as what Liam Gillick and others have called ‘neo-criticality’.  From Group Material to Maurizio Cattelan and Jens Hoffmann’s Carribean Biennale, neo-critical curating has targeted elements of the art economy, an attitude that has become patently conventional.  And this form of curating has always had its opponents.   But the idea of exhibitions that might be critical of the work or at the expense of an/the artist(s) — as Dia curator Lynne Rice felt about Triple Candie’s Cady Noland show — is still taboo, although it is alluded to by some of the brightest contemporary thinkers.  Boris Groys, in an essay for e-flux, writes:

In its origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to it as visitors are brought to a bed-ridden patient by hospital staff. It is no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”: to curate is to cure. Curating cures the powerlessness of the image, its inability to show itself by itself. Exhibition practice is thus the cure that heals the originally ailing image, that gives it presence, visibility; it brings it to the public view and turns it into the object of the public’s judgment.¹

Here is a video of Nesbett and Bancroft talking at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, at MIT, last year.  The name of their lecture: “The Problem With Triple Candie”

1. Boris Groys. The Politics of Installation. e-flux journal, #2, 01/2009 [↩]

I responded to a thread on Jerry Saltz’s facebook wall about artists who use lecture as form.  The prompt was that Karen Archey had written a neat, focused article for Map Magazine on the subject, tracing pedagogy as practice from Joseph Beuys’ 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, which uses lecture in a heavily performative manner, through to contemporary artists like Anton Vidokle, and Bruce High Quality Foundation, who use lecture in a far more literally educational manner.

Everyone in the conversation rattled off some more artists whose work connects to this practice: Warhol’s impostors, Eric Duyckaerts, Cory Arcangel’s jokes, Mark Leckey, Walid Raad, Marcel Broodthaers’ Interview With A Cat…

I sometimes wonder, when we draw fun and interesting connections between artists and eras, whether we pollute or saturate discourse, particularly for future generations of people reading art writing.  Is there something distorting about starting a conversation about ‘lecture as form’ and ending with an exhaustive list of every artist who has used interview, public speech, seminar, or participatory conversation, as a strategy in their work?

Maybe Boris Groys can answer that one.

I added Mark Tribe because of Port Huron Project (2006-2008), in which notable protest speeches of the New Left from the Vietnam War era were reenacted in a literal “re-speaking”¹ of history.  Harun Farocki’s 1968/69 film NICHT Ioschbares Feuer is a chasteningly serious agitprop treatise on Napalm B, and the abuses of the distribution of labor that facilitate its production.  The film was closely remade in English and in color by Jill Godsmilow (What Farocki Taught Us, 1998), provoking viewers never exposed to the film, which was originally distributed only in Germany, to reassess the radical potential of documentary film.  I added Critical Art Ensemble because the dissemination of material focusing on under-represented connections between art, technology, and political activism, is their central activity as a collective.

screenshot of NICHT Ioschbares Feuer

Re-enactment of Cesar Chavez’speech at Exposition Park, Los Angeles, May 2, 1971

I also add…

Jacob Riis

Simon Critchley (International Necronautical Society)

Neue Slowenische Kunst

The Yes Men

proto-mu

Liam Gillick

Annika Eriksson

superflex

Peter Greenaway

1. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Artforum, January 2008 [↩]

So, I have been reading a lot of Boris Groys on contemporary art, religion, and politics lately (Art and Power, Medium Religion, and some e-flux essays).  Groys is exceptionally clear, accessible, advanced beyond almost everyone in his conception of art, and he says clever, provocative things like, “We all know Bin Laden as a video artist first and foremost.”¹

I have also been reading Creative Time’s A Guide to Democracy in America, kind of spuriously named after Alexis de Tocqueville’s excellent book of observations from 1835.  I usually like Nato Thompson, but I did not like this book, or its design.  Anyway, the reading and some hyperlinks brought me to Theo Watson, former fellow at Eyebeam Atelier, and thus to Graffiti Research Lab.  On their blog they discussed a documentary about their practice, and referred jokingly to it having been put on the Department of Homeland Security’s “No Fly List.”  I wikipedia No Fly List and learn about the contention surrounding it.

Graffiti Research Lab renames Verizon, "NSA" (2008)

Nato Thompson, austellungmacher and sometimes editor

Example:

• Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, reported that the following exchange took place at Newark on 1 March 2007, where he was denied a boarding pass “because I [Professor Murphy] was on the Terrorist Watch list.” The airline employee asked, “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” “I explained,” said professor Murphy, “that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.” To which the airline employee responded, “That’ll do it.” ((Naomi Wolf, The Guardian, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/24/usa.comment))

Then, Bruce Schneier, cryptographer and security guru, wrote the following in an article for The Atlantic, as a simple way for people to defeat the No Fly List.  I don’t understand how this works, if it still does, and am wondering if anyone can help explain…

Use a stolen credit card to buy a ticket under a fake name. Print a fake boarding pass with your real name on it and go to the airport. You give your real ID, and the fake boarding pass with your real name on it, to security. They’re checking the documents against each other. They’re not checking your name against the no-fly list—that was done on the airline’s computers. Once you’re through security, you rip up the fake boarding pass, and use the real boarding pass that has the name from the stolen credit card. Then you board the plane, because they’re not checking your name against your ID at boarding.²

Some quick art associations:

Benjamin Edwards

Charles Gute (2003)

Kevin Mitnick's business card

Mark Bradford - Los Moscos

Martin Creed - Work No. 227 (2001)

Brody Condon - Velvet Strike (2002)

Theo Watson + Graffiti Research Lab

Ethan Ham - Email Erosion (2006)

Yann Serandour

Tobias Putrih + MOS - Maximum Brick Overhang

Eva and Franco Mattes - United We Stand (2005)

1. Dieter Roelstraete, Art In and Out of The Age of Terror, Afterall 17, Spring 2008 – http://afterall.org/journal/issue.17/art_age_terror [↩]
2. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/airport-security/2 [↩]

Today, I made a pretty bad artwork.  It is as follows:

Not at all related to the recent haranguing about the New Museum’s practices, today, November 22, 2009, instead of attending Brody Condon’s Case at The New Museum, I comfortably sat at home and re-read sizable portions of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer.  If anyone is interested, the full e-text, graphic novel adaptation, and audio book (read by Gibson himself and featuring ambient music by U2!) are available here:

http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=119

This post will serve as the documentation for After Case (2009).  This piece is unaffiliated with Performa.  The title After Case is in the tradition of after pieces which pivot on existing works.  Ironically, I will have finished reading the book before Condo’s piece is over, this evening at 6 PM.

What happens when an allusion goes unrecognized? A closer look at The Waste Land may help make this point. The body of Eliot’s poem is a vertiginous mélange of quotation, allusion, and “original” writing. When Eliot alludes to Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion” with the line “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” what of readers to whom the poem, never one of Spenser’s most popular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, the Spenser is now known largely because of Eliot’s use of it.) Two responses are possible: grant the line to Eliot, or later discover the source and understand the line as plagiarism. Eliot evidenced no small anxiety about these matters; the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism’s contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?¹

1. Jonatham Lethem. The Ecstasy of Influence, Harpers, http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html [↩]

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1921)

VS

Mark Bradford - Kryptonite (2006)

Regarding the question of whether there is or ought to be a sense of responsibility or obligation (and to what?) in making artistic decisions — beginning with the decision to be a fulltime artist — here is a quote from Ken Kesey’s speech in front of The Reality Club, in October 1989:

“you can’t blame the President for the state of the country, it’s always the poets’ fault. You can’t expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don’t have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold.”

This quote was brought up recently by members of The Reality Club with regard to the mobilization and emergency response of numerous eminent philosophers, scientists, and public intellectuals, after George W. Bush, Bill Frist, and John McCain, announced their support of teaching Intelligent Design in American schools, in April 2006.  The “new athiest” movement has only picked up speed and political influence since.  Where were the artists?  Sure, scathing, pissed-off, Bush-era visual art, from Jules de Balincourt to Steve Powers to Mark Tribe to The Yes Men, will probably be recognized as one of the defining currents in American art this past decade.  But, as Critical Art Ensemble has written, one of the defining features of contemporary art from 2000 till 2008 was how very little government paid attention to it; an unprecedentedly small amount of attention.  Is this because many thousands of other American artists were not interested in expressly directing their practice towards politics in a big way, or is it because activist art is secretly considered a little crazy by the art community?  Or is it just not the artist’s (let’s stick to the American artist) job to get involved in every political skirmish or infringement?

Kendell Geers (Title Witheld) Blow – 1993

Urs Fischer