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

Here is a small list of vocab words we came across and looked up — either for the first time or for refreshment — this past month in our art readings.¹

revanchist: (Date – 1926) one who advocates a policy of revanche, a usually political policy designed to recover lost territory or status

tannoy: Tannoy Ltd is an English manufacturer of loudspeakers and public-address (PA) systems. The company was founded as Tulsemere Manufacturing Company in London in 1926. The name Tannoy is a syllabic abbreviation of tantalum alloy, which was the material used in a type of electrolytic rectifier developed by the company. The brand had been trademarked by 10 March 1932, on which date the Tulsemere Manufacturing Company was formally registered as Guy R. Fountain Limited.

portacabin:

Now and again you come across the word ‘Portakabin’ in a variety of different, but wrong, spellings. And regularly we are asked questions about this. As the only experts on this topic we would like to clarify the origin of the name and how it should be used correctly.  Portakabin is not an ordinary word but, in fact, a trade mark. Donald Shepherd, the founder of the company Portakabin, had the idea of a stand-alone, relocatable building way back in the Forties. He thought of a fitting name for his business – Portakabin, which he registered as a trade mark. Since that day, only buildings produced by Portakabin can be called a Portakabin building.

As a pioneer in the development of relocatable and modular accommodation and as an international market leader in the industry, sometimes people use our company name wrongly. We always work hard to prevent this.

In short – Portakabin is a protected, exclusive trade mark that can only be used to describe the products of the company Portakabin.

Other mispellings we came across:

portacabin, portacabins, portakabins, porta cabins, porta cabin, portocabin, portocabins, portkabin, porta kabin, porto cabins,potakabin, potacabins, port a cabin, port a cabins, potacabin, porta kabins, portokabin, porto cabin²

secateurs: Chiefly Brit a small pair of shears for pruning, having a pair of pivoted handles, sprung so that they are normally open, and usually a single cutting blade that closes against a flat surface

antiphrasis: The use of a word or phrase in a sense contrary to its normal meaning for ironic or humorous effect, as in a mere babe of 40 years.

cater-corner: (Date – 1838) in a diagonal or oblique position

1. Sources include: Artforum, Frieze, e-flux, Afterall, Artlies, October, OEI, Artvehicle, cms.mit.edu, edge.org, The Next Layer, Mute Mag, aaaarg.org, NeMe, IDC [↩]
2. http://www.portakabin.co.uk/news/newstwo/ [↩]

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

William Gibson called Sadie Plant’s 1998 book Zeros and Ones a “cyber-feminist rant”.  Granted, there are lots of provocations and wafting suggestions here, but unlike much feminist theory, victimization is not the theme; rather, this book focuses on eight millennia of technological empowerment in the hands of women.  This is an alternative history of technological and cultural progress, from the Neolithic period to the online BBS’s of the early 1990s.

Fun things you will learn:

1) weaving was the first kind of multimedia art, an activity consisting of not just the textile making process, but also singing, dancing, and storytelling

2) belts were the first form of clothing; soon after, they began to be studded with diamond lozenges as a sign of fertility!

3) the number zero was of the most subversive concepts to the Church, moreso even than 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9, each of which offered a unique affront to deism… one of the central ways in which the West first experienced ‘zero’, not in the quantitative sense of ‘none’, but the ontological sense of ‘holes’, was in the punched card system of proto-Industrial weaving machines, and then again with Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage’s Analytic Engine.

Analytical Engine built to speculation in 2002

Here is the .pdf excerpt of Zeros and Ones, from a.aaaarg.org (login required)

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

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s conference on “The Two Cultures,” — literary culture and scientific-empirical culture — in which he called for a Third Culture, one in which literature, art, poetry, and politics, are in symbiosis with rigorous scientific thought.  The degree to which Snow’s vision has been realized is the subject of intense debate. Some consider popularizers of scientific thought like literary agent John Brockman (who was also active in the Happenings of the ’60s) to be humanistic heros, while others consider the popularization of science via science writing to be merely palliative, even pathetic, considering, among other things, the astonishing complexity scientific research took on in the 20th century.  What I can’t get enough of is the presence of scientific thought in artistic practice and in art criticism.  If artistic and scientific culture are to be in a constructive alliance, the best artists will be deeply informed about genomics, artificial intelligence, and the cosmos, and will aid in research through their work.  This artistic allegiance to science has been called for since Plato’s Republic, who dreamt of expelling all the poets and diffusers of myths from his Republic, in favor of cultivators of rigorous thought.  This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for artists to pursue wholly mythical, religious, pataphysical, subjective, romantic, inward-looking practices; it just means that as a culture we must all get smarter.  I was thrilled to visit the posthumously maintained website of Bas Jan Ader, the legendary Dutch/Californian artist whose small yet powerful oeuvre dealt principally with the force of gravity, to find a downloadable .pdf of the following scientific text, written for the Dutch paper de Volksrant…

http://www.basjanader.com/dp/Calmthout.pdf

Enjoy.  Then get back to the US Open.

Sometimes artists, philosophers, critics, and technologists are generous enough to publish free .pdf versions of texts, images, and/or or exhibition catalogs on their websites.  The facilitation of this access to knowledge and original texts is an immeasurable boon to people interested in understanding art, politics, and technology.  We want to celebrate artists in particular who are taking part in this, by linking to their websites where the documents are available, and reminding you that usually plush, dilligently assembled print versions of these .pdfs can be purchased as well.

TOM MARIONI – http://tommarioni.com

JENS HAANING – http://jenshaaning.com