greg.org: the making of

Than Friend Brad, 2013

via @willak comes this collaboratively written essay by Brad Troemel, Artie Vierkant, and Ben Vickers, Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook. It is so perfectly and myopically descriptive of their situation as social network artists and curators without recognizing the situation as deeply problematic, that it's exasperating to read. Until the very end, when they seem to conclude that yes, Facebook is not the world, or even the internet, but a "bad infinity" [pace Hegel], where the seeming endlessness of choice is a controlled, corporate deception.

And so, too, would be the very idea of an artistic practice or an artistic dialogue that centers/exists/originates on Facebook, and that is comprised of posts documenting "the artist's online brand" and her "lifestyle," activity driven by and judged by likes and friendings and other technosocial cues.

And yet, it seems like it was written well over a year ago, before Facebook's IPO, and Troemel and friends are still at it, tumblin' rebloggable insta-art, and curating themselves and their followers into IRL group shows without a critical care in the world.

In this new age of Smarm we suddenly find ourselves living in, Brad and Artie's mapping of their platform's spectrum of critical discourse seems very apt:

Feedback, if any, is always on a scale ranging from positive to non-existent--the Like function itself being explicitly designed as a binary function between total consensus and total lack of response. Instead of moving the artistic conversation forward, most people are literally just happy to be part of the online conversation, to be part of the club or whatever other indistinct social group they silently pledge allegiance to.

This seems like a very shitty environment in which to make art, and frankly, I'd be surprised if people who spend six figures for two years of MFA crits would put up with it. Or maybe that's exactly what they crave after they're out of school: affirmation, reassurance, participation, belonging, naked acknowledgement of one's existence and activity.

But what's the alternative?

Posting work to the internet with no social network readily in place is synonymous with the riddle 'If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' For young artists on the internet the answer to the forest question is 'no'- their work will easily go unnoticed, making their participation as a social actor an a priori necessity to contextualizing what they do as art.

Except it turns out that just because you can't hear it, doesn't mean it doesn't make a sound. Elephants can hear sounds below the range of human detection. 7-Eleven owners blast music at loitering teenagers at frequencies Olds cannot perceive. Don't make art only for your friends' affirmation, or for Hans Ulrich's attention. There are people in the world you don't know.

It would behoove the Facebook Artist to get off Facebook once in a while, at least, where you can find critical responses beyond "total lack of response," and people making and engaging art that is not interchangeable with lifestyle, and who don't give much of a damn about fave parties.

Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook [dismagazine]

There is beauty in this painting. But the beauty is not what makes you love it.
It's the emotion of what it says, in very simple means about life. And where we all go.

I don't know why I get chills from Tobias Meyer's little promo video for Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), but here we are.

I matched the audio to Michelle V. Agin's photo from the Times this morning.

And then after reading Ian Bogost's McRib essay again, I realized it was the most persuasive explanation I've seen of Auction Week. So

Oh hi, no, NBD, just a video of David Hammons making a basketball drawing in a skylit stairwell. Shot probably in 2000-01 by EV photographer Alex Harsley.

If you're one of the three other people in the world who's seen it on YouTube, let me know. 3 VIEWS, PEOPLE.

And here's the gang hanging out on the stoop at 4th Street Photo Gallery in, what, 1994? just talking art. There's the timestamp, Sep.24.1994. Hammons, Herb Gentry, a couple of folks I don't recognize. From just before Phat Free/Kick The Bucket. "11 views"!

Herb Gentry: "Listen, if you're an older guy, you should be ahead of that by now.
Hammons: "Not necessarily.
HG: Well, where're you gonna be?
DH: You can be anywhere. You can be wherever you want to be. This is one of the last places that anything still should go. And it still goes, but nobody's going with the anything. Everyone has slipped into some category-some formula. And they're waiting for their formula to show up on the chart. And it ain't gonna show up."

Balling Art in Harlem U.S.A. [photodirect's youtube channel]
Bucket Party [same deal]

Hang with me, there's a lot here, and I don't really have the bandwidth to go into it right now, so I'm just going to slap it up here for now:

Walker Art Center curator Bart Ryan recently talked with Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl about writing as part of their/art practice.

It's part of 9 Artists, Ryan's show about, well, I'm sure the title says plenty. Until I read the 28,000-word catalogue essay, I'm just going with the title. Steyerl's 2007 work Red Alert is in the show, though. It's three redscreen monochrome monitors mounted in landscape, a gesture she describes as "the logical end of the documentary genre,"

Pure Red Color (Chistyi krasnyi tsvet), Pure Yellow Color (Chistyi
zheltyi tsvet), Pure Blue Color (Chistyi sinii tsvet), 1921, each panel 24.5 x 21 or so

in a similar way to Rodchenko declaring his 1921 three-panel monochrome, Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color represented the logical end of painting.

image of October reproduction of Rodchenko monochromes via e-flux

Which paintings now always remind me of a 2010 e-flux journal article about October magazine, which it turns out I'd misremembered a bit, but that's OK. Bernard Ortiz Campo wondered about art writing and why October only printed black & white images of artworks:

In the spring of 2000 in an article on Nikolai Tarabukin, the journal reproduced three monochrome paintings by Alexander Rodchenko: Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, and Pure Blue Color. These three paintings, reproduced in black and white, resulted in three rectangles showing different shades of gray. As I looked at them, I found myself asking whether it made sense to reproduce them at all. I even entertained the possibility that the reproductions weren't images of the actual paintings, that perhaps they had been "rendered" by the journal's photomechanical process, and that the only thing that identified them as paintings by Rodchenko were the captions. I intuited that this extreme case could offer a reason for the black-and-white reproductions--hypothetical, of course, for being the fruit of my speculation, but a reason nonetheless.

I remembered this as imagining that the Rodchenko monochromes themselves didn't actually exist except as illustrations. And black & white ones at that.

Yves Peintures, 1954, image: yveskleinarchives.org

Which reminded me of one of my absolute favorite Yves Klein works, a book, or maybe it's a portfolio? More a catalogue. Yves Peintures bears the mind-bogglingly early date of 1954. The Klein Archives lists it as "his first public artistic action." It is a looseleaf booklet with ten color plates of monochrome paintings that don't exist.

They are commercial samples of colored paper, tipped in and given arbitrary dimensions and locales/titles: a Londres, 1950 (195 x 97); a Tokio, 1953 (100 x 65), &c. The accompanying text, credited to Pascal Claude, is entirely strikethroughs, assuming it was ever any less fictional than the paintings. [Speaking of writing, Philippe Vergne loves Yves Peintures even more than I do; he goes nuts for it in this 2010 essay about how Klein basically started and ended everything ever.]

I've never been able to figure out quite how many copies of Yves Peintures exist, much less how I will get my hands on one. The Archives illustrates five examples, each different. The Archives has also authorized a facsimile of Yves Peintures, produced by Editions Delicta, in an edition of 400. I don't know how many variations are in that one, if any. I will guess none. The obvious solution is to make one myself, as the logical end of fictional monochrome artist book making.

Richard Serra, Verb List, 1967-68, image: moma.org

When the US's demand to destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons was first being discussed in September, I heard a report on NPR about the Office for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and how they went about their mission. It struck me as an almost sculptural process, a cross between Paul Shabroom, a Matthew Barney gallery installation, and Richard Serra's Verb List.

5 March 2007

Now that the OPCW is on the ground, has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and is completing their inspections and such, I thought I'd pull together some news accounts of these CW destruction techniques for reference. When I get a bit more time, I'll try digging through the OPCW's site for official protocols and such. At some point, like Jeremy Deller's bombed out car from Iraq, I guess this stuff should be exhibited.

A slightly facile FAQ-style AP article, Chemical Arms Inspectors Gird For Risky, Dirty Job" [npr.org]:

THE SIMPLEST WAY TO DISABLE EQUIPMENT? SMASH IT!

Inspectors can use any means they deem necessary to render equipment inoperable, including techniques that are crude but effective. Options include: taking sledgehammers to control panels; driving tanks over empty vats or filling them with concrete; or running mixing machines without lubricant so they seize up and become inoperable.

From the Washington Post, same day Chemical weapons officials say coordination with Syrian government has been 'efficient'":

He said OPCW officials charged with destroying Syria's chemical weapons production capabilities by Nov. 1 will use "expedient methods" to fulfill their task.

"It might be a case of smashing something up with a sledgehammer. It might be a case of smashing something up with some explosive. It might be a case of driving a tank over something," he said, or filling vessels with concrete, ruining valves and running bearings without oil so that they get stuck.

That won't take long or cost much money, he said, but disposing of the chemicals themselves "is going to cost a lot."

From a McClatchy report on Sept. 30, "Experts optimistic Nov. 1 deadline can be met for ending Syria's chemical threat" [miamiherald.com]:

Once combined, the chemicals result in a mixture that is unstable and dangerous to handle. But before they are mixed, the chemicals generally are far less dangerous.

The equipment needed to mix those chemicals is easily destroyed, said Ralf Trapp, a chemical threat consultant who was among the original staffers who set up the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. "You can drills holes, cut pipes and flanges, remove wiring, crush computer boards, fill tanks with concrete," he noted.

Disposal of the separated chemicals also is relatively easy, he said. One, an alcohol, "can simply be poured out onto the desert to evaporate without any risk," he said.

A quick search has not yet turned up any photos or documentation of these practices, b

Collection Daniel Loeb, 2013

I'm inordinately pleased with this, especially the TION TOIN. So I'm now going to search around for some other stellar quotes from Christopher Wool collectors which can become paintings. Dan's a genius for this kind of stuff, though, he'll be hard to beat.

UPDATE: A few more after the jump. It feels like they're just scratching the surface. It's like how there are some people who totally should have a Warhol portrait, there are quotes that should really be a Wool painting. It really just should happen.

Previously, related:Now a painting? Who do I think I am?
base image via #ChristopherWool/@Alipechman

Felix Gonzalez-Torres actually made a lot of paintings. Most are Bloodworks paintings, gesso and graphite grids bisected by a diagonal line, referring to a doomed medical readout.

But in 1988 he also made Forbidden Colors, four 16x20-in acrylic monochromes in white, green, red and black. He showed the piece, along with four framed photostats, in a project installation at The New Museum, 25 years ago right now.

The paintings are now owned by MOCA. The text Felix wrote for the show is below [reproduced in Julie Ault's 2008 Felix monograph, via fernandocestari]:

'INSTALLATION BY FÉLIX GONZÁLEZ-TORRES September 16 - November 20, 1988

When I was asked to write a short statement about the work in this space I thought it would be a good opportunity to disclose and, in a certain sense, to demystify my approach. I hope that it will guide the viewer and will allow an active participation in the unravelling of the meaning and the purpose of this work. Many may consider this text redundant; and unnecessary intrusion, or even a handicap. It is assumed that the work must "speak for itself," as if the divine dogma of modernism were able to deliver a clear and universal message to a uniform "family of man." Others know this is not true that each of us perceives things according to who and how we are at particular junctures, whose terms are always shifting. Preferably the exhibition gallery will function as an educational device, simple and basic, without the mysteries of the muse, reactivating history to affirm our place in this landscape of 1998.

This work is mostly personal. It is about those very early hours in the morning, while still half asleep, when I tend to visualize information, to see panoramas in which the fictional, the important, the banal, and the historical are collapsed into a single caption. Leaving me anxious and responsible to anchor a logical accompanying image scanning the TV channels trying to sort out and match sound and sight. This work is about my exclusion from the circle of power where social and cultural values are elaborated and about my rejection of the imposed and established order.

It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie's prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction.

From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will "speak" to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you've read this text, I hope for a different message.

For all the PWAs.

[END QUOTE]

I don't think I've ever seen Forbidden Colors in person. It was in a group show at White Columns in 1993, and MOCA showed it once in 2002. That's it. I've noticed it in the catalogue raisonne, of course, though without really paying the piece much attention. Really, I didn't understand the reference. And the photo didn't really reproduce the green panel; it looked black.

It's interesting, though, how you notice things, or take notice of them, when your own frame of reference changes.

[The ban on the Palestinian flag, its colors, and any "artwork of 'political significance'" was lifted in 1993 as part of the Oslo Peace Accords.]

Domenico Veneziano / Washington Monument, 1984, image: peter freeman/artsy

So I didn't spot this Ellsworth Kelly postcard collage at Peter Freeman's booth at Frieze Masters, and I love it. It makes me want to see more. And to wonder why we haven't?

Kelly's used collage and found shapes and forms to develop his paintings and sculptures since the very beginning. He's made postcard collages to explore scale and shape and site, too. They're little glimpses into the way he sees. He makes them for himself, and he sends them to friends.

This example, made using photo torn from the newspaper and a postcard from the National Gallery of Veneziano's St. John in the Desert has some postal markings on it, so I expect it's the latter.

Statue of Liberty, 1957

Can we have a show of these, please? Or at least a book? I guess the closest so far is that amazing Drawing Center show in 2002, Ellsworth Kelly Tablet: 1949-73, curated by Yve-Alain Bois, which had collaged up pages from the artist's sketchbooks.

Upper Manhattan, 1957

But these postcard collages are not just, or not all, preparatory works; they're social, too. Their intimate scale, non-preciousness, and exchange function remind me of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Polaroids and Gerhard Richter's overpainted photographs. The absolute least gesture and material required to convey the artist's observation.

Study for a Blue and White Sculpture of Les Tuileries, 1964, like many of the smaller images, from a slideshow at nyss.org

They inevitably also function as postcards, seeming to mark a visit to a place, and the artist's reaction or memory there. In the Guggenheim's 1996 retrospective catalogue, Roberta Bernstein called them "souvenirs of experience." The light on the Seine, the bridge near the Taconic, the sliced coffee lid at Agnes Martin's place. Kelly talks of seeing things others don't, thus the unsuitability of an off-the-rack postcard.

St. Maarten, 1974

In at least one case, the private, unique postcard became a published edition.

St Martin Horizontal Nude, 1974

If I'd realized that it started with a postcard, I'd have been less baffled by the big lithographs that pop up occasionally at auction.

Saint Martin Landscape, 1979, 16x22-in

Postcards are obviously useful for sculpture, space, and scale. They're ambitious and offhand at the same time, a powerful proposition that can be discounted, but not unseen.

This 1980 postcard collage of Riverfront Stadium reminds me of Ground Zero, the newspaper collage Kelly sent to Herbert Muschamp in 2003:

There's one other instance I can think of where Kelly's postcard collages and his monumental sculptural situation are linked, the imposition of sculptural form on photogenic tourist vista: his 1998 sculptural installation on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum.

I've found this over and over: 1998 is invisible online. There was a lag between the internet and digital photography, and archival digitization projects privilege the dusty. Ellsworth Kelly Metropolitan is a predictably beautiful search on flickr, but it doesn't yield any images from the pre-flickr era. Which is really too bad, because as I recall, they were picture perfect.

UPDATE:: Whaddyaknow, here's a picture of Totem on the roof of the Met, which I just randomly found in a 2010 NPR story about the closure of Carlson & Co.

Anyway, point is, we need a show. So please send all the Ellsworth Kelly postcard collages to me, and I will exhibit them.

Previously, suddenly related, souvenirs of virtual experience: Ellsworth Kelly on Google Art Project

I somehow missed the announcement for this when it was published in 2011, but here's Anne Truitt Minimalism, Color Field, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Bryn Mawr College, Psychology, James Truitt, edited by Eldon A. Mainyu.

It's a 112-page collection of Wikipedia articles for $56. And it's one of the 6,910 titles by Mainyu for sale at Barnes & Noble. It's the on-demand publishing equivalent of Artisoo's Amazon Art mashup of Google Images and Chinese Paint Mill. And it, too, caught Anne Truitt in its indexical merchandise net.

Whoops, he just cranked it to 6,911. Here are the bestsellers:

Which you'll note veers to the alphabetical pretty quickly. I would guess that so far, BN has sold copies of seven Mainyu books.

Anyway, Mainyu's not alone. He fronts Aud Publishing, which is just one of the 78 Wikipedia-centered imprints launched in 2011 by the Mauritius- and Germany-based book mill known as VDM Publishing. The division was apparently created and staffed by running the text of Foucault's Pendulum into a Pynchon Name Generator:

Dismas Reinald Apostolis, Dic Press
Gerd Numitor, Flu Press
Agamemnon Maverick, Ord Publishing
Elwood Kuni Waldorm, PsychoPublishing
Indigo Theophanes Dax, The

The! Every one of them has several thousand titles and several hundred thousand Google results, tracing the invisible contours and channels of publishing's automated datascape.

The crazy thing is, now I actually want to see some of these books, see how they turned out, but also see how they were spidered together. Because that Truitt title is not just an automated grab of the first ten links in the Wikipedia entry. Or at least it's not now. Maybe it was in 2011.

What would assembling a more complicated or randomized chain of Wikipedia links yield? Is there a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-like connectedness between any and all bits of human knowledge [on Wikipedia]? Is there poetry or literature to be found/made there? Could an algorithm surfing through Wikipedia produce meaning or newness, or something beyond the temporary frisson of WTF juxtaposition?

I think of magazine projects like Maurizio Cattelan & Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Permanent Food, which solicited and compiled tearsheets from around the world, in hopes of creating what Maurizio called a magazine with no personality. [I forgot ada'web also did a web version, Permanent Foam. 17 years later, I guess I should be more surprised that one of the 14 links actually still works.] Then there's the more associational daisy chain of visuals that was Ruth Root's wondrous press release for her 2008 show at Kreps. And of course, The Arcades Project.

So it seems entirely possible to make an engrossing read, maybe even a story, out of a Wikipedia surf session. Someone has to have done this already, right? But I guess the gantlet Mainyu has thrown down is to find the genius in the automation, to see if you can write the bot that creates the iconic literature of its time.

So like you, I'm sure, I was baffled and amused listening to avant-garde cellist and frequent Nam June Paik collaborator Charlotte Moorman's answering machine recording on Ubu.

It takes a minute to get your bearings, and then you realize it really is John Lennon complaining about a review in the Village Voice by "a couple of bastards, whoever they are," and also mentioning an ad Yoko placed in the same issue.

And then there's a spitting mad John Cage demanding Charlotte or Howard Wise write a letter to the Village Voice "protesting Fred McDarrah's censorship of my name from that article, or I'm never doing anything for you or anybody else ever again," which, hello, what?

What had Cage been so ignominiously ignored in? It wasn't even clear what year the tape was from, though Moorman's callers mention Thanksgiving [and the recording title says Nov. 24 - Dec. 6]. If Howard Wise was mentioned, perhaps it was Moorman's performance of a Cage composition at the gallery.

Well, stop worrying, because Lennon's reference to Ono's ad means it's 1971, when Ono advertised her own One Woman Show at The Museum of Modern Art, and its accompanying catalogue, even though the museum was not on board with it.

Ono hired a guy with a sandwich board to walk around in front of the Modern for two weeks, Dec. 1-15, advertising a show that was technically not inside. [Though it confused enough people, apparently, that the membership desk put a little sign up, with Ono's ad, saying "This is not here," which was, by so doing, no longer true.] Anyway, the citation given for Ono's Voice ad is usually Dec. 2, 1971. And the ad does run in that issue.

But the version Lennon was calling Moorman about, "on page 31," was actually from the week prior, Nov. 25. It's up top, reproduced, I believe, for the first time online, not counting Google's still unindexed archive of the Village Voice. NBD.

Which is where Fred McDurrah's article is found, too. It was a report from Moorman's 8th Annual Avant Garde Festival, a roving project that infuriated and entertained the small New York art world with impressive regularity. 1971's version was held in the 69th Regiment Armory, and was backed by Barbara & Howard Wise. McDarrah's ostentatiously jaded account was meant to disparage the multi-media, performative, absurdist circus, but he actually makes it sound kind of interesting. Or maybe reading about it now, during Frieze Week, it just seems normal.

McDarrah writes that Moorman secured the Armory by promising "the Colonel in charge" that there would be "no nudes, no sex, no politics, no dope, no nothing." Not all of her artist invitees seem to have gotten the message.

I looked at my watch and decided it was time to ask the soldiers the standard "what-do-you-think-of-this-stuff question...A veteran of all the wars who was covered with stars, badges, ribbons, buttons, and braid summarized his feelings: "It's ridiculous, stupid, the whole damn thing. All those people smoking marijuana back there. I saw them. And using a federal building too. A bunch of kooks. I could bow them bastards to hell. I'd go up in the balcony with a machine gun. I even saw some naked. I'm glad I'm being transferred out."

Yow, OK then. Did New York's know how close it came to starring in an art world-meets-Kent State-themed prequel of Inglourious Basterds?

Anyway, sure enough, Cage isn't mentioned anywhere. Though he's probably glad to have missed the near massacre. In another, later message on Moorman's machine, a calmer, more sheepish Cage apologies for not attending a big event, so I'm going to guess that it was Cage's composition, not his presence, that was snubbed. Unless it was Cage who McDarrah called Moorman about; he left his own message when he heard he'd misidentified someone sitting "cross-legged in the corner and mix[ing] his 'ohms' into the abysmal hum and drone of 1000 sounds" as Steve Reich.

And it turns out all I had to do was look a little further. Because computer artist Fred Stern, who did get namechecked in the Voice article, turned Moorman's recording into a slideshow, synced with clippings and snapshots. Very helpful.

Charlotte Moorman's Answering Machine Message Tape [youtube]