Culture Carousel

A review of “Tropicomania” at Betonsalon, Paris....

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:50:00 -0400

A review of “Tropicomania” at Betonsalon, Paris. Published in Art Papers, Sept/Oct 2012.

I am still writing about art just not so much on this blog.

dOCUMENTA (13), highlight two, neue nationalgalerie: Geoffrey...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:40:21 -0400

dOCUMENTA (13), highlight two, neue nationalgalerie:

Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass (2012) (one of many commissions for Documenta)

Clippings from Life magazines (1935-1985) stretched out over some sixty feet. American history through political heros, bikini styles, and packaged foods. Ephemera-philia.

dOCUMENTA (13), highlight one, neue nationalgalerie: Roman...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:33:09 -0400

dOCUMENTA (13), highlight one, neue nationalgalerie:

Roman Ondák’s pairing of old photos from books with the most exquisitely worded captions. Economy of means, perspicacity of wording, and endearing aesthetic and social commentaries.

My review of Experience Economy’s event “Innovate or...

Wed, 09 May 2012 12:15:00 -0400

My review of Experience Economy’s event “Innovate or Die” (February 2012) just came out in the May/June 2012 issue of Art Papers.

Went to the conference “Art, Theory, and the Critique of...

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:38:00 -0400

Went to the conference “Art, Theory, and the Critique of Ideology” at the Clark last weekend (reading list here).

(Presenters left to right: David Breslin, Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Robert Slifkin, James Elkins, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Jonathan Katz, Mignon Nixon, Alison Pearlman, Katy Siegel, Paul Wood, Briony Fer, and Theodore Triandos.)

Many things could be said about the tone and content of the conference, perhaps most gossipy that Hal Foster was situated by virtue of his history and institutional alliances to “defend” the art journal October, which, in the formulation of Jonathan Katz, set up a dominant mode in US art history focused on the how of representation rather than the what. In other words, through recourse to critical theory and post-structuralism, October privileged the processes of signification (how meaning is made) over the significations (what meanings), generating a fanciful infrastructure around an empty core (an “act of ideology” in Katz’s words) and failing to acknowledge, for instance, the personal, the AIDS crisis, and queer subject matter. It’s an axe that Katz has been grinding for some time. I think it’s a valuable critique but that the very situatedness of a single piece of art critical writing by a single straight white, twenty-something man in 1985 (Katz spoke about Foster’s “Subversive Signs” in Recodings) has to be taken in historical and material context. I guess, however, that very situation of writing about subversiveness in the arts in NYC in 1985, a time when more people were dying of AIDS-related causes than total soldiers died in the Vietnam war, and failing to talk about AIDS is the problem. Silence=Death.

I’m off track because what most interested me at the conference was an apparent generational divide. Not everyone fit neatly into one or the other category, but I saw two points of view emerge that have broad repercussions for our art historical work. The first might be described by the following constellation: Krauss, mid-1970s, interpretation, universal processes of signification, French critical theory, taking a position. The second might be: Lutticken, mid-1990s, description, localized and situated meanings, post-colonial theory, resisting any single position. The first takes a stand, the latter lays out a network of possible stands without committing. If many of us feel that critique has run out of steam, what is left? How do we practice forms of resistance if our “positions” are as slippery as capital? Combat spectacle and commodification while knowing full well we are always already spectacularized and commodified and feeling okay with that? How do we both reach for more empiricism and “reality” (a word floated around a lot) while noting biases? How do we acknowledge total relativity without losing shreds of truth?

One option on offer is something like Geertz’s “thick description,” where situated and locally-produced systems of making and meaning are piled on top of one another until the speaker susses out what he or she thinks might be intelligible frameworks. The art historian then might be the great assembler or collector of historical facts and subjective observations who then sets up an admittedly personal but trained arrangement that invites (truly welcomes or even produces) alterations and modifications. The art historian is also, therefore, the alterer or tailor who doesn’t tear down and destroy what’s come before but makes subtle adjustments so that it fits better. Can’t we then remove the shoulder pads from October’s 1980s blazer to reveal the body’s more natural contours? Perhaps replace its buttoned up front with a jazzy belt that can be removed at the discretion of the user? Let’s tailor and not burn art history’s history.

Photo of tailor by Henry Boogert

Curator Porn: Documenta (13) and the Press Kit from Hell (via ArtStars*)

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:01:00 -0400

Curator Porn: Documenta (13) and the Press Kit from Hell (via ArtStars*):

This is hilarious! I can’t wait to see Documenta for the first time this June with my fair advisor Christine Poggi. It will be reported here…and possibly elsewhere if I can get my hands on one of these informative press kits!

For such a large, high-profile art event such as DOCUMENTA (13), it comes as a surprise that their media kit has been printed on a Panasonic CDR and is labelled with the marks of a felt-tip pen. I picked up the Documenta press kit at ITB, an international travel fair every March in Berlin. Documenta shakes down this June 2012 in Kassel, Germany.

The CDR features three images by the artist Giuseppe Penone.

There are nine jpegs featuring the work of Jimmie Durham.

But the DOCUMENTA (13) camera-friendly curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has 19 images featuring various glamour shots of her in a forest, lounging on a lounge chair, wearing business blazers, working hard, hardly working, throning it and more.

I’ve received a lot of criticism for my web tv show being too much about me, and that’s fine because I’m working outside of traditional interview style you don’t typically find in online journalism. But enough about me. Clearly, we know what - or who - this Documenta is really about: The curator. This bitch loves the camera. To celebrate the glamour shots of Carolyn Christov-Barargiev, I have pasted my favourite pics below. And if you can’t get enough of the curator, or would like autographed copies of these snapshots, we strongly suggest you attend DOCUMENTA (13) and bring a felt-tip pen of your own. This is curator porn at its best.

But seriously: For someone so highly powered in the art world, you’d think her fashion sense would be a little more refined?

Note to artists: Please do your own PR. If not, this might happen - you might have the chance to be in a big art show and be completely squashed by someone else’s political savvy and outrageous vanity. This Documenta (13) press kit is a bad example of what happens when you hand over the responsibility of promoting your work to an office who obviously doesn’t have any idea what they’re doing. This is a humiliating first impression that Documenta has given to journalists in the form of a Panasonic CDR.

-Nadja Sayej

Two reasons that I wish I lived in the Northwest or Canada, or...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:51:00 -0400

Two reasons that I wish I lived in the Northwest or Canada, or an East coast fan page of social practice.

Open Engagement, Art and Social Practice, May 18-20, 2012, in Portland, Oregon. Now in its fourth iteration, this free conference grew out of Portland State University’s MFA in Art and Social Practice (begun in 2007). I remember in perhaps 2010 my friend Kate who has been centrally involved with the various Feasts going on around the country—the earliest ones in Brooklyn and now Philadelphia’s Philly Stake—organized a train trip across the country with some others to go to this conference (see the project, called Empire Builder on her website). I remember her describing the trip as a functional necessity (i.e. how can we cheaply get across the country while incurring a smaller carbon footprint?) and as a perfect lead-up exercise to conferencing about social practice. Here, smart, quirky, and political people with youth and few responsibilities on their side lived somewhat communally in small quarters and passed time with apropos thinking, gaming, corrupting, and just getting by. The line-up for 2012 looks star-studded in the tiny world of social art practice fandom. Shannon Jackson, whose uh-amazing book Social Works is a must-read, will give the “keynote” address; Tania Bruguera, whose Immigrant Movement International Project is a mainstay in social practice action or discussion. Get thee to Portland by foot, train, car, bus, or plane, and I’d recommend making the voyage a practice in and of itself. Open Engagement #3 is sure to be good.

Institutions by Artists, The Convention, October 12-14, 2012, in Vancouver, Canada. A “world congress,” but really a conference (let’s not kid ourselves), about “artist-run centers, collectives, and cultures” is initiated by ARCpost—a Canadian association of artist-run centers—with some heavyweight sponsors (Andy Warhol Foundation, consulates, etc.) and will cost attendees $125 ($75 for students). Bruguera will also speak here along with, among my “favorites” (I am a fan after all), Julia Bryan-Wilson whose well-known book Art Workers addresses the moniker “worker” as adopted by minimal and conceptual artists and curators in the late 60s and early 70s and Vincent Bonin whose exhibition and catalogue Documentary Protocols (1965-1975) is perhaps the least-known and smartest book about how documentation becomes a key part of collaborative art practice (filling art history’s coffers with typed and xeroxed pages upon pages). It’s a timely topic as the creation of institutions (para-institutions) increasingly interests and occupies artists whose “work” becomes that of small-time white-collar laborers (phone calls, emails, budget sheets, etc.). An open question is whether the managerial and institutional (as far as these modes attempt to fix systems of relations) are becoming transformed by artists’ participation. Considering the hundreds of thousands spent to fly and house people from all over the world for “Institutions by Artists,” it’s unfortunate that the entry fee prohibits some artists (and students) from entering in the conversation.

“To be fully human, one needs to be in relation to others...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:36:00 -0400

“To be fully human, one needs to be in relation to others who correspond to oneself.”

Last night over my thirtieth birthday dinner, a friend said that she felt like your 30s are not about yourself but about others. Compared to your 20s, it is a time when the self becomes less important and relationships with others (partners, children, aging parents) become more important. The self built in the 20s proffers the strong pivot on which to turn toward others in the 30s.

The conversation made me think of Kaja Silverman’s masterful book Flesh of my Flesh. In it, she proposes similarity as opposed to difference as a paradigm for humanity. Such an arrangement positions relationality in advance of individuality and opens up the possibility of analogical thinking, which connects self to other, presence to absence, future to history, and countless oppositions within our own being.

She puts this theory to work by analyzing two series of photo-paintings made by Gerhard Richter: portraits of his daughter Betty and of members of the leftist terrorist group Baader-Meinhof (Red Army Faction) who were found dead in their prison cells. Richter painted his bracing series (entitled October 18, 1977) of iconic blurred canvases from press photographs of the dead. Silverman suggests that he posed and painted his daughter Betty (sometimes in comparable positions to Ulrike Meinhof) to register the emotion and importance of the events and to experience a loss. By setting up an analogy between these women, the two series proffered emotional proximity and historical connection.

I’ve always loved the above portrait of Betty. Her red jacket, pinned hair, and turn away. Silverman suggests that in addition to seeing this as a turn away, we consider it a turn toward something, in this case her father’s monochrome, which fills the background of the painting, and all that it represents. I think its a brillant reading and one that correlates with the theme of “turning toward” in the 30s. Let this new decade be one of analogy!

Above: Dirt (MIT Press, 2012); Vik Muniz, Pictures of Dust...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:19:00 -0500

Above: Dirt (MIT Press, 2012); Vik Muniz, Pictures of Dust (2000) (after Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1965 and Richard Serra’s Left Corner Rectangles, 1979); Vik Muniz, Wasteland (2007-10) (see the documentary film website)

My very first semester of graduate school, I took a class called “Post-Spectacle” in the Architecture and Design department at UPenn taught by Helene Furjan. It was a great crash course in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” from c.1900 phantasmagoria—theater shows with projected magic lantern slides—to c.2000 Las Vegas casinos—with their disorienting carpets and scented air so that time, space, and anything outside collapses into quarter-lobbing oblivion. It was also great to meet architecture students whose rapacious program dictated a tempo that made the art history PhD track seem languorous. A few weeks in Helene announced that she was working with a group of students on a publication, via. The issue on Occupation had just come out and the new issues on Dirt was in the works (Camouflage is in-process now). She gave us the option of writing something for a final paper. I wrote about recreations by artists as a way of remaking the heavy detritus of art’s history, and one heavily edited example from my rambling first graduate school paper made its way into the collection of essays. That was 2007, and like most academic publishing, I have learned, the book has finally been published jointly with MIT Press this month in 2012.

The beautiful book is a varied collection of takes (conversations, essays, designs) on an almost limitless definition of dirt. Many take detritus—the rejected, excreted, organic, excessive—as a modality of practice for doing and creation. From the flap: “Dirt presents a selection of works that share dirty attitudes: essays, interviews, excavations, and projects that view dirt not as filth but as a medium, a metaphor, a material, a process, a design tool, a narrative, a system. […] The chapters predict and report on city waterfronts revamped by climate change, the reinvention of suburbia, and cityscapes of ruins; dish the dirt with yet-to-be proven facts; make such unexpected linkages as ornament to weed growth and cell networks to zip-ties; examine the work of innovative thinkers who have imagined or created, among other things, a replica of Robert Smithson’s famous earthwork Spiral Jetty in “table-top scale,” live models of the Arctic ice caps, and an inhabitable “green roof”; and describe an ecological landscape urbanism that incorporates the natural sciences in its processes.” Yup, that’s (emboldened) what I wrote about. Vik Muniz’s recreation in his Brooklyn apartment of Robert Smithson’s legendary earth art. I basically discuss appropriation hinting at originality while exposing artificiality as contemporary art’s dirty modality.

Had I written it today, I would have expanded on Muniz’s incredible oeuvre. His collection of dust (skin, hair, nails, and particles left by the crowds of museum-goers and biological processes) from the Whitney museum, and his use of this public material to recreate installation photos of major minimalist sculptures by Serra, Judd, etc. And so, for instance, you have the sterile minimalist space of the museum and simple, serial forms re-composed from the dirty detritus of that museum space. It’s freaking brillant. Or maybe I would include his work in the trash dumps of Brazil, where he worked with local “catadores”—pickers of recyclables—to create large-scale photographs of famous artworks from the materials and then uses his renown to exhibit and sell the works at auction and gives the money back to the community. It’s captured in a moving documentary Wasteland.

I’m thrilled the book is out…check your local store to see if it’s on the shelves!

Dirt contributors include Barry Bergdoll, Alan Berger, Anita Berrizbeitia, Megan Born, William Braham, Lindsay Bremner, Kim Brickley, Case Brown, Mark Campbell, James Corner, Phillip Crosby, Keller Easterling, Ruth Erickson, Larissa Fassler, Annette Fiero, Helene Furján, Future Cities Lab, Andrea Hansen, Mark Alan Hughes, Tetsugo Hyakutake, Robert Le Ricolais, Lily Jencks, Peter Lloyd Jones, Keith Kaseman, Ferda Kolatan, John Landis, Sylvia Lavin, Andrew Lucia, Ian McHarg, Frank Matero, PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture, Rhett Russo, SERVO, Cathrine Veikos, Phoebe Washburn, Marion Weiss, and Richard Wesley.

Dirt on MIT Press.

Too good to pass up: The Telegraph reports of a Napoleon-themed...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:49:36 -0500

Too good to pass up:

The Telegraph reports of a Napoleon-themed amusement park, touted to rival Disneyland, being planned on the site of Napoleon’s final victory just south of Paris (opening in 2017). Reported attractions may include a participatory reenactment of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington ended Napoleon’s rule; a ski run through a battlefield “surrounding by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses”; and a recreation of Louis XVI being guillotined during the revolution. “It’s going to be fun for the family,” the developer Yves Jégo stated. I’ll certainly buys some advance tickets for my family to take part in that last attraction. It’s never too early to indoctrinate your children of the evils of monarchic rule.

I came across the before and after jogger series by the...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:26:41 -0500

I came across the before and after jogger series by the Hungarian-French photographer Sacha Goldberger a couple years ago. It struck a new chord due to the current lack of running in my life, which I could blame on the winter or upcoming deadlines or just laziness. It’s the abusive ecstasy that is running that transforms these mugs from their previous styled selves.

For the past few years Goldberger has been working on a few series with his 90-year-old grandmother Frederika. The story is that Goldberger found her depressed and proposed a fun photo shoot as antidote. It went over so wildly well that the duo has taken hundreds of photos, including such series as tourism with a chicken and Mamika as superhero. In the same way as running, pointless play engenders altered realities. Maybe I can just pick up play in these long winter months…

I’ve always been a fan of word paintings. The beautifully...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:43:00 -0500

I’ve always been a fan of word paintings. The beautifully painted crisp edges and color palettes meet the ingenuity of word play. Analytical yet beautiful. And so I was naturally happy to come across (thanks to the Center for Aesthetic Revolution blog) Stefan Brüggemann’s paintings on view at Yvon Lambert. He overlays Joseph Kosuth’s series “Art as Idea as Idea”(1966-) and Richard Prince’s “Joke Paintings” (1985-), maintaining the dimensions of the artists’ original phrases. So each painting combines a definition with a joke, giving the series its parenthetical untitled title: “Untitled (Definition and Joke Paintings).” What is so ingenious about this pairing is the high culture philosophy associated with the author of “Art after Philosophy” meets the popular culture humor of the king of appropriation, both re-appropriated and overlaid in the perfect conceptual leveling that happens with word paintings. They also combine two art historical figures indicative of two generations—the 1960s and 1980s—often pitted against one another: leftist/Reganist, optimism/pessimism, anti-commercial/market savvy, and maybe most telling of all “the end of modernism” versus “post-modernism.”

So what’s the relationship between a definition and a joke, to define and to joke? The former is about deadpan precision, setting limits, and determining signification, and the latter about jest, twisting language, and inciting laughter. Both figures of speech and actions are key to communication, to how we make use of learned language. As nouns the phrases are painted individually on the canvas and as verbs the two play with visual perception. Just as jokes often manipulate definitions, the viewer’s eyes focus and re-focus to read the superimposed phrases. Like all the best word paintings, it’s visual and verbal play in real time.

Jacques Derrida Essay Collection (for download)

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:19:33 -0500

Jacques Derrida Essay Collection (for download):

Between aaaaarg.org and all the books and essays I can find on the internet, I may soon never leave my house again. From the father of differed signification (meaning that references (signifiers) always refer to (point to) a chain of meanings rather than a singular, definite one), here is a mighty collection of essays. I think too often we only read “the most important” essay(s), leaving us with limited and often de-contextualized views of thinkers. For every classical essay you cite, read a less famous one, maybe a letter or newspaper column to understand the range and contradictions better.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Jacques Derrida Essay Collection 1

Derrida - A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event

Derrida - A Letter to Peter Eisenman
Derrida - Adieu (CI)
Derrida - Adieu (PT)
Derrida - All Ears - Nietzsche’s Otobiography
Derrida - An Idea…

“A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm...

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 08:43:00 -0500

“A certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS.” Yates McKee

Time Magazine’s “person of the year” is just my ploy to draw attention to two much more worthy reports on the Occupy Movement, specifically as they intersect with the arts. Yates McKee’s thorough overview of occupy and the arts in the Nation is a passionate catalogue and valuable archive by a sharp art historian. He considers the OWS Arts and Culture group, visual strategies to expand the movement, and longheld suspicions about the arts and activism. Domenick Ammirati discusses the events of Dec. 16-18 (storefront for art and architecture, various publications, International Migrants Day, etc.) in Artforum with a tone that I think was supposed to be objective, as in distanced, but it comes off as a touch Gen-X apathetic, exactly what we don’t need. Nonetheless, it’s great to see the coverage and good to get some details from the ground.

From the beginning creative strategies have been key to the Occupy movement, which was sparked by the Canadian magazine Adbuster’s call “to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street on September 17” and its visually arresting poster (above). Of course, the movement’s initiation was actually the work of many activists and community organizers on the ground in New York, preparing for America’s resistance movement since at least the Arab Spring (but actually well before, e.g. Keystone pipeline, Wisconsin, Seattle…activism is an unstoppable continuum of resistance since…um…the beginning of humanity).

My dissertation, whose writing has occupied my time, is an attempt to draw out some particular historical lineages to artistic activism along the side of reform rather than revolution through the sociological art movement in the 1970s in France. I am hoping that this historical and intellectual work will some day contribute to understanding and supporting the Occupy movement, even if the timeline is years in the making. For now, I want to just keep up with the goings on and support worthy creative endeavors (two recently supported on Kickstarter include Sam Mayfield’s film Wisconsin Rising and Beautiful Trouble, a toolbox for the revolution). As my favorite bumper sticker from my teens read: If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

Been home for 5 hours. Discovered my dad’s slide projector...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:07:00 -0500

Been home for 5 hours. Discovered my dad’s slide projector and a box of slides from June 1968. Fashioned a screen with a white sheet and just spent the last few hours flipping through amazing slides. A psychedelic double exposure tree shot, two priceless pics of the family in a motel room in the middle of America (especially the foursome in the bathroom), and my mom in the snow. Cherish the time with your families!

Feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles shakes hand with NYC...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:34:31 -0500

Feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles shakes hand with NYC sanitation worker. “Touch Sanitation” (1984)

President Barack Obama fist-bumps custodian Lawrence Lipscomb. (Dec. 3, 2009, Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

“I think it’s a really good thing to put yourself in a situation...

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:17:14 -0500

“I think it’s a really good thing to put yourself in a situation where you feel really uncomfortable because I think things can come out of that discomfort.” Laurel Nakadate

Visited the blossoming art world darling Laurel Nakadate’s show at the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts (up through December 22, 2011). She’s the Museum School BFA, Yale MFA female video artist who made a splash with her 2000 video Oops!, which filmed Nakadate dancing to Britney’s infamous hit from that year in the private homes of middle-aged men that she had “met” (or, had tried to pick her up) in New Haven. Britney sings “Oops…I did it again. I played your heart. I’m not that innocent,” while Nakadate dances around the humble apartments of sometimes stoic, sometimes pathetic, sometimes leering old men. Whether or not the videos are self-obsessed youtube quality smut, exploitative of loneliness and aging, witty reversals of conventional power dynamics, or socially relevant contemporary art work, they are memorable. ”I also like the idea of turning the tables,” Nakadate says in a Believer interview, “the idea of [the men] thinking that they’re in charge or that they’re in power and they’re asking me for something and then I turn it on them, where I’m the director and the world is really my world.” To me, it kind of feels like Sophie Calle meets Ryan Trecartin, where such a hybrid would say in the same interview (as Nakadate does): “going out into the world and discovering little tragedies” and “a lot of my work stems from things that I see in pop culture.”

In my opinion, the show was a mixed bag. I loved works like the birthday party video, where Nakadate brought over a cake to a man’s house and proceeded to slowly light the candles, have him sing her happy birthday, and then eat cake together. These films exude the awkwardness of intimate rituals among strangers, longing, and boredom. Or, her film exorcism, where she performs an exorcism with an older man in his decrepit home. One scene shows him twitching with seizure-like eroticism on the bed while Nakadate chants “Go away bad spirits,” and he repeats her. Another of this genre, “Beg for your life,” shows Nakadate pointing a fake handgun at single men on their knees as she instructs them to “beg for your life,” which they do with more and less conviction. At least one man can’t stop laughing. These films border on the intimacy of a two person exchange in a private space and the more public and fictional scenarios that Nakadate also stages. For instance, she acts her death in a Wonder Woman-esque outfit during a road trip across the southwest in her video “I want to be the one to walk in the sun.” My favorite part shows her faking her death with blood on her chest and a brown substance flowing from her mouth as she is held by a portly elderly gentleman in front of Mount Rushmore, but another moment depicts a similar scene in front of a biker gang on a western highway. Playful, childish role-playing, these films leave Nakadate much more vulnerable than her lonely collaborators. I suppose the two genres are not actually that far apart. Nakadate hints at this, when she says, “Yeah, a lot of people look at the work and they think that I’m just being evil or pointing the finger at these pathetic souls, but I’ve always seen the work as trying to make the connection with men who no one really spends time with.” I think her work is centrally about a desire to connect. Maybe that is why I didn’t like the pieces that just showed her dancing on a beach or posed in a girl scout uniform in front of the burning twin towers. I couldn’t connect with her posing, and anyway, I would rather witness the awkwardness of social interaction than endure it myself.

The London-based architectural group Archigram worked from...

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:49:00 -0500

The London-based architectural group Archigram worked from 1961-1974 on often unbuilt, avant-garde projects that were futurist-pop-constructivist visions of reality and of the built world and that were primarily featured in the group’s magazine. I just learned from the venerable EPCAF (European Post-war and Contemporary Art Forum) about an online archive of their work.

Images above: “Kassel Kit” event structure for Documenta 5, 1972. Temporary art evenings/stage set up through a kit of parts based on Instant City kit; Speculative project for an “indeterminate” civic building, something cites as model for the Pompidou Centre, published in Archigram 8.

This is unconscionable. Adj. 1. Not right or reasonable. 2....

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:17:09 -0500

This is unconscionable.

Adj. 1. Not right or reasonable. 2. Unreasonably excessive.

Massive abstract land forms in the northern desert of China. Is...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:42:00 -0500

Massive abstract land forms in the northern desert of China. Is it military-complex land art? Structures for mining? Targets for satellites? QPC codes for space? Alien forms? And, of course, it has to be proposed…an internet hoax using Google earth software? No one is sure. Gizimodo broke the story here and then Huffington Post picked it up, which is where I heard about it. I “verified” it by doing my own google searches near Dunhuang, China.

Besides the fact that I am a sucker for government conspiracy theories and truly believe that we have no freaking idea what is actually happening at the level of the CIA and above, the reason this story interested me at all is due to Trevor Paglen.

He is the scientist/journalist/photographer who became well known within art history circles a few years ago for his telephotography of secret military bases (above bottom right: Large Hangars and Fuel Storage, Tonopah Test Range, NV, Distance - 18 miles, 10:44 a.m.). I first learned about his work from the article of my advisor Karen Beckman: “Telescopes, Transparency, and Torture: Trevor Paglen and the Politics of Exposure” (Fall 2007, Art Journal). She writes, “Paglen’s photographs allow us to begin better to glimpse…what the aesthetics of photography can offer the sphere of ethics and politics beyond evidence, in a moment where ambiguity and otherness constitute two of the targets of the war on terror.” (see Ben Davis’s review here)

In late September, I saw Trevor talk about his new project The Other Night Sky at MIT (see a review of the talk here). He cited the amazing statistic that there are about 8,000 satellites (space trash and usable ones) orbiting the earth and about 250 of those are secret. He tracks these satellites (along with a cohort of amateur astronomers) by taking long exposure pictures of the night sky and then determining which of the visible satellites (bright lines in the photos) are listed by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), removing those and, thus, revealing the secret satellites, the other night sky (above bottom left: Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada, 2007). He told incredible stories of a communication satellite launched to literally sit next to a Middle East communications satellite and of an enormous unidentified communications satellite possibly launched by the CIA to control future drone wars. He moved through the talk with the best mix of rigorous research, speculation, and beautiful visual evidence.

And so here I am pondering these abstract forms in the Chinese desert, made visible by Google earth satellite photography. Cameras pointed the other direction but revealing just as ponderous and potentially hazardous abstract forms with real, physical and political effects.