Rivane Neuenschwander - Joe Carioca - 2008
Ashkan Sahihi – Face series
Anna Jermolaewa – Kremlin Doppelganger
Lina Viste – Gronli 2
Matthieu Laurette – Artists Biopic Cinema
Thomas Demand – Tunnel
Valentin Hertweck
Superstudio – Supersurface life – 1972
I thought it would be worth it to respond to Stephen Wuensch’s work on Dematerialize: Behavior Mod and the Destruction of Meaning over at http://behmod.blogspot.com/, with the work of Julian Jaynes:
“Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.”
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
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
Press release from hortongallery.com
Seven Easy Steps
Video Series, curated by Amanda Schmitt
Monday, January 4, 7:00pm
Video Series continues: February 16, March 29, May 11, June 15The third installment of Seven Easy Steps, a seven-part video series, will provide the appropriate equipment and creative stimulus in order to attain Technological Innovations. Featured video artists include Philippe Blanchard, Joost Conijn, Adam Frelin, Desirée Holman, Mads Lynnerup, Catherine Ross, Jared Steffensen, Keith Telfeyan and JD Walsh.
Seven Easy Steps is a video screening series that will empower you to take the steps towards achieving happiness and leading a successful, fulfilled life. People feel happy when their desires are fulfilled. The series will continue with videos that offer the sacred guidance that will lead them towards Spiritual Ecstasy; supply the necessary information to make Scientific Discoveries; the titillations and delights that blissfully lead to Physical Pleasure; and finally the expertise, skill, and ingenuity that guides them towards producing Artistic Masterpieces.
Screenings will be held at Horton Gallery (located at 504 West 22nd Street, Parlor Level, New York, NY, 10011). Schedules for individual screenings will be released each month.
Seven Easy Steps features video work by Ronnie Bass, Larry Carlson, Antoine Catala, caraballo-farman, Leidy Churchman, Martha Colburn, Cecelia Condit, David Coyle, Adam Cruces, Benjamin Dowell, Erica Eyres, Susana Gaudêncio, Joel Gibb, Kate Gilmore, Koen Hauser, Mae Hymn, Avi Krispin, Juliana Leite, Julie Lequin, Mads Lynnerup, Erica Magrey, Shana Moulton, Katarina Riesing, Michael Robinson, Liz Rosenfield, Catherine Ross, Melanie Schiff, Kelly Sears, Andrew Steinmetz, Jennifer Sullivan, Keith Telfeyan, Richard T Walker, JD Walsh, and Bryan Zanisnik, among others.
504 West 22nd Street, Parlor Level
New York, NY 10011
This is a screenshot from the website of The Secret of the Ninth Planet, a show curated last Spring in San Francisco by students at the CCA San Francisco curatorial MA program.
SourcesI 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
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
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?
“Tinguely says he was entranced by the idea of throwing a hand-grenade at the Mona Lisa, and he even formulated a detailed plan for carrying out his scheme. However, the likelihood of a prison sentence, and the virtually total inactivity this would bring, made him hesitate.”1
via one of our favorite websites, radicalart.info
Sources
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