In 1968, German artist Charlotte Posenske, having become increasingly indifferent about whether her work was identified as art, stopped working as an artist.  Distressed by her belief that art couldn’t have sufficient political impact on social inequalities, she gave up art making to become a sociologist.  She refused to exhibit her work, or visit exhibitions by other artists, until her death in 1985.¹²

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The Austrian art group Gelitin are similarly indifferent about whether their work is identified as art, but the philosophy from which that indifference stems is opposite from Posenske’s: they relish the idea the art doesn’t have to do anything, and believe that expressly political art goes against the uselessness that should characterize it.  As with many artists and art lovers, art is understood doubly here as a free zone for experimentation, and an anarchic counter to capitalism’s expectations of efficiency and function.  Of course, this stance is inherently political in its own way, as art is still operating within capitalism, but you are asked to elide that fact and focus on the direct experience.

Gelitin’s 2007 piece The Dig Cunt was a “durational work as a celebration of the millennium of the female and the anti-phallus”. Beginning every morning for seven days they ritualistically dug a hole on the beach at Coney Island; each evening the hole was filled in. ³

Gelitin has a durational blindfolded sculpture piece going on at Greene Nafatli.  Here’s the press release: http://www.greenenaftaligallery.com/exhibition.php?id=3585&jumpTo=pressRelease

1. http://www.betweenbridges.net/Posenenske.html [↩]
2. http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/charlotte_posenenske/ [↩]
3. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2007/performance/gelitin.html [↩]

Enwezor: Well I don’t think that art making was ever a capitalist endeavor. The marketing of art is a capitalist endeavor. But we must be very careful that we do not demonize the art market. The art world as such is a complex ecology. There are many different aspects playing a role in our ability to have access to the most challenging ideas that artists are putting forth. The art market is one of the entities that enables that, that supports artists so that they may make a living, to produce, and so on. The museums represent another one. There are many different mechanisms that enable art. My fear is that a collapse of the market might not simply just affect the ability of dealers to sell work, but that it might cause the erosion of resources that support experimental ideas that support younger artists. We’ve already seen that. Now there are very few philanthropic support networks dedicated to the arts, and this inevitably effects institutions. Institutions become more conservative. They become less daring. So the implications of this economic recession have the possibility of being very severe. I am very concerned for my students and their ability to have confidence that they will have a chance to present the public with their work. You know, we critique all of these biennals, but when they disappear, what replaces them? I can tell you that without these biennales, the shape of the contemporary art field will be very different from what it is today. We have the opportunity to see a greater number of artists than ever before. The recession affects the support for those networks in the same way it affects the support for the art market, in the same way it affects the support for the acquisition of works by museums. The endowment of curator postions is already affecting the support for research. Institutions have taken out moratoriums on programs which require research and travel. . . How do we gain an understanding of whatever this new art that is being made? How do we gain an understanding of this work? This is far more complex for me, in this sense. This is the concern I have.

-interview with portlandartnet.net April 24, 2009¹

1. http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2009/04/interview_with_4.html [↩]

Forget the article itself, I liked this comment:

This read a lot like the character study of Leo Koenig (art royalty) in the New Yorker a few years back. It highlights the alcohol, some sort of character quirk, but glosses the whole process of how a person becomes a art world mucky muck – not enough space-time I guess.

The obvious contradictions of “not seeking fame” and then easily finding famous people are not to be dismissed as mere serendipity – it takes famous people to make you well known. Yoko Ono is hardly a nobody form fluxistville anytown and surely star quality isn’t the only thing that makes an artist good? Was henry Darger a dashing raconteur?

What I was interested to read though, is that PS1 is now going to be more than just a salon de refuse for the Moma. Indeed? last I looked they were launching Target beach balls at something called Summer Warm Up to decidedly dull dance beatz and serving up Brooklyn lager to professionals.

Embarrasment? I bet the real emabarrasment will be the continued use of shows like “Greater New York” to support the usual posers and courtesans who fill the court with inconsequential gestures that fall like snow in forests of “new audiences”. Welcome to Narnia, bro.

by: WHYGODWHY

David Bowie performing Quicksand at The Capitol Theater as part of MTV’s short-lived live series on The 10 Spot.  Seems like the best place to get this kind of programming on American television these days is Later… With Jools Holland, on Ovation.

16 Beaver Group wishes more art were instrumentalized to serve radical politics … but it’s not.  And so, because we are all complicit, we should go and watch a dozen or so films screened this Sunday, recontextualized “to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.”  Here is the information from their website:

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/

What: Site a specific film performance
When: Sunday 1.24.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This sunday will be the third in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performance and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last two events, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.

Continuing our investigation of linkages between politics and abstraction, tonight will examine the critical category of narcissism.

Using Harari’s text on the late Lacan, and Krauss’ seminal essay from the first October on Video – The Aesthetics of Narcissism as touchstones, this sunday we will investigate the complex interaction between “narcissism” and the political. In previous evenings abstraction has been considered according to Bataille’s categories of the informe (formlessness) and the sacred, and Agamben’s analysis of The Open, with the political necessity of keeping open the spaces exemplified (and intensified) by the abstract Image as a primary theme. Here narcissism (the mirror) figures as a kind of short-circuit, which tonight’s performance-based videos evocatively display. Performance/improvisation – as a strategy of conceptual liberation, as a tool for creating radical intuitive (abstract) spaces, versus a kind of “mimetic narcissism” – as a product of radical devolution. The work of surrealist Jacques Vache (and the fourth dimension of (h)umour) and Duchampian irony will be utilized. Krauss’ essay will be considered but creatively reconfigured in order to take video performance out of its historicized context and set it to work for political activity.

Works to be included tonight (Jonas’s hypnotic meditation on self-reflexivity and alter-ego Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Trecartin’s synaptic, digitally manipulated psychedelia What’s the Love Making Babies For?, Charles M. Jones’ classic short Duck Amuck, and Joe Gibbons’ acerbic take on emergence Sabotaging Spring, among others) will be employed to develop the theme.

In order to refigure video performance strategies to their purely abstract/structural dimension, performance works tonight will be interposed with the work of
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito.

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2. Films to be screened

Joan Jonas Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy 15 min.
Takashi Ito Venus 8 min.
Chris Burden Big Wrench 16 min.
Takashi Ito Box 4 min.
Leslie Thornton She Had He So He Do He To Her 5 min.
Takashi Ito Ghost 6 min.
Ryan Trecartin What’s the Love Making Babies For? 20 min.
Charles M. Jones Duck Amuck 7 min.
Takashi Ito Drill 5 min.
Tony Oursler Selected Early Work [excerpt] 10 min.
Takashi Ito Spacy 10 min.
Joe Gibbons Sabotaging Spring 15 min.

We are working on creating some offshoots of selfportrait.net at the moment and haven’t had much time to post, but below is a link to the substantially long article on the artist Tino Sehgal that appears in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine.  I will follow up on this, but I was struck by the way Sehgal’s work and this sort of practice, one in the tradition of social sculpture, was framed in order to make sense to a wider, non-contemporary-art-obsessed readership (it was presented very much like an ‘social art in the time of global warming’ context).  Clearly the American Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler’s famous statement circa 1966, reproduced in the photograph below, represents an anxiety that has found new meaning in this time when in the zeitgeists of society at large, as well as of contemporary art, notions of environmental sustainability preoccupy everything.

The whole situation is fraught with contradictions and arguably fraudulence; who knows how much more enlightened the 1990s social artists have been from the egoist Conceptualists of the Seth Siegelaub era 1960s, of going to absurd ends to dematerialise or (pretend to) negate art.  This is not to mention the scores of European artists working with dematerialisation in the 1960s, but they largely were more quirky and charming in their gestures (see artist Fred Forest‘s “sociologic art”).

Nicolas Bourriaud makes a case for the difference in his 2002 text ‘Postproduction’: ‘Contemporary Art does not position itself as the termination point of the “creative process” but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities…Artwork functions as the temporary terminal of interconnected elements and reinterprets preceding narratives. Each exhibition encloses within it the script of another…The artwork is is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions’.

The thing to remember is Bourriaud is talking about “with-it” contemporary art, not most contemporary art.  Speaking of the contemporary, e-flux journal’s January issue is dedicated to decoding the subject.

Of whom and of what are we contemporaries? What does it mean to be contemporary?

—Giorgio Agamben¹

Tino Sehgal article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/magazine/17seghal-t.html?ref=magazine

Fred Forest - 14,000hz electromagnetic field - Documenta 8 - 1987

1. http://e-flux.com/journal/view/104 [↩]

This is a particularly entertaining episode of Paul H-O’s longstanding documentary series, now being considered an important and unique document of the ’90s New York art world, Gallery Beat.

Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.

Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters.

-Rosa Luxemburg (1920).  Marx’s biographer, Franz Mehring, called Luxemburg the best brain after Marx.

Map of East Berlin circa 1977. Note the contrast in detail with West Berlin, toward the bottom. Click to enlarge.

On that note, there is an n+1 event tonight:

Nikil Saval, Adam Sternbergh, and Ben Adler discuss gentrification

Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen St.
New York, NY
(Lower East Side)

Tuesday, Jan. 5
7 PM –

Free!

On a contradictory note, Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, may have critics of neoliberalism foot-in-mouth with his corporate culture of “psychic income” (this Business Week article is being passed around the IDC mailing list like a torn page from Hustler among fifth graders at recess)

The Incidental Person
Curated by Antony Hudek

January 6 to February 20, 2010

291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013 USA

Opening reception: January 6, 6-8 pm

With projects by: Ron Bernstein, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, Luca Frei, Will Holder, Marysia Lewandowska, Gianni Motti, Brian O’Doherty, Joachim Pfeufer, Keiko Sei, Barbara Steveni, Megan Francis Sullivan, Neal White, and faculty and students from Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice Concentration: Katy Asher, Katherine Ball with Alec Neal and Matthew Warren, Jennifer Delos Reyes, Harrell Fletcher, Constance Hockaday, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Laurel Kurtz & Sandy Sampson, The Print Factory, Eric Steen, Michelle Swinehart, Lexa Walsh, Jason Zimmerman

Press release from: http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/hudek.htm

The late British artist John Latham (1921-2006) coined the expression “the Incidental Person” in the context of Artist Placement Group, known as APG, which he co-founded in 1966 with Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan. Contrary to most artist placement schemes, APG emphasized process, interaction and the artist’s independence in relation to the host institution, rather than any short-term tangible outcome. Like an unbiased observer or a third-party mediator, the Incidental Person placed through APG in industry, government, education or the non-profit sector would negotiate the terms of the invitation from the institution in question and adapt the nature of her or his intervention accordingly. This incidental function, as Latham explained, “is more to watch the doings and listen to the noises, and to eliminate from the output the signs of a received idea as being of the work.” Latham stresses the incidental person’s approach, that is, a certain position or attitude vis-à-vis the context in which she or he is placed. In other words, the identity of the incidental person is secondary to the effect she or he has on a given situation, for the aim of the incidental person is not to be anything in particular but instead “to generate maximum public involvement, and maximum enthusiasm which goes with the involvement.”

It is high time to pay renewed attention to incidentality as an effective approach to pressing societal issues. Away from the rudimentary right/left or liberal/conservative labels that paralyze governments and polarize communities, the incidental attitude is one of self-reflexiveness and acute, humble awareness of the complex networks of local pressures that inform a specific time and place. We like to assign tags to artists who engage with problematics that exceed the confines of the so-called “art world”, such as socially- or politically-engaged, relational, performative, etc. But these qualifiers only serve to quarantine the curious thinker-doer further from society at large, reinforcing the myth of the artist as exempt from participating in the “real world.” The incidental person, by contrast, sees no alternative between “art” and the activities that regulate social coexistence, such as talking, playing, eating, reading, teaching and listening. Indeed, “art” itself — as a word corresponding to a distinct class of objects or actions — dissolves, becoming just another term for the disposition of someone whose incidental relation to the context in which she or he intervenes is simultaneously internal and external: internal to the context’s unique dynamics, but sufficiently external to it to be able to see its relevance to broader questions of “life-practice” or “the everyday” (but such phrases, too, are merely expedient equivalents for something even more incidental).

In recounting the origins of APG, Barbara Steveni has said that the initial incident occurred when Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri, who were staying with her and John Latham to prepare an exhibition in London, needed some found material. Despite the late hour, Steveni offered to collect whatever she could find at an industrial site beyond the city limits. Sifting through debris while the factory was in full activity, she experienced a “eureka” moment, as she put it: “Why aren’t we here? Not to pick up buckets of plastic, but because there’s a whole life that we don’t touch. This is what people go on about — academics, artists, politicians — but they go nowhere near it.” This exhibition includes projects by people who attempt precisely to “touch” what is “out there”, who, while meticulously attentive to the context at hand, refuse to hew to such distinctions as art/non-art, art/life or art/politics.

Antony Hudek
© 2009