Notes and Queries: Joao Ribas

Cheyney Thompson at the MIT List

2012-02-01T20:17:00.001-05:00

Otto Piene: Lichtballett

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Otto Piene: Lichballett, the publication accompanying the recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is now available. A leading figure in multimedia and technology-based art, Otto Piene was a founder, with Heinz Mack, of the influential Düsseldorf-based Group Zero in the late 1950s. This publication highlights the artist's ongoing exploration of light as an artistic and communicative medium. Piene's Lichtballett (light ballet) performances, first produced using hand-operated lights directed through perforated stencils, became mechanized in the 1960s. The artist's light sculptures consisted of motorized lamps, grids, and discs producing a flow of projected light; these machines evolved into kinetic sculptural environments of mechanized effects through the 1960s and '70s. Featuring Piene's own writings on light as an artistic medium, an essay by art historian Michelle Y. Kuo, and an interview with exhibition curator João Ribas, Otto Piene: Lichtballett documents the artist's pioneering investigation of art and technology. The monograph features a die-cut "light ballet" cover.

Here is a short clip of the exhibition:

And a review of the show from the Boston Globe:

"Hands down the most beautiful room in Greater Boston right now is a gallery in the MIT List Visual Arts Center. The gallery is just a small, windowless room. It’s dark, too - or it would be if it were not for an astonishing and constantly changing arrangement of patterned light orchestrated by 83-year-old artist Otto Piene." (More)

Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial) Catalog

2012-01-09T17:22:00.001-05:00

The catalog for the 12th Istanbul Biennial, edited by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa with coordinating editor Pelin Derviş, includes my essay "The Fourth Critique," on the relationship between art and politics in contemporary art. The catalog is one of three publications that accompany the exhibition, and is published by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and Yapı Kredi Publications. Along with an overview of the exhibition, it also features essays by Jessica Morgan, Julieta González, Chus Martinez, and Aykut Köksal, as well as a number of texts by Hoffmann and Pedrosa. Via e-flux

On Giuseppe Sacchi

2012-01-08T22:00:00.000-05:00

I've contributed a text on Giuseppe Sacchi, a 17th Century Italian painter, for If Mind Were All There Was: Nine Themes on Giuseppe Sacchi, an artist book by Victor Man, published by Kaleidoscope Press, Milan.

The book is a collection of texts inspired by a piece of graffiti in Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross. A horse depicted in the cycle of frescos bears Sacchi's name on its forehead. Yet no evidence of his work or biography exists apart from a short entry in a 19th century dictionary of painters and engravers. The contributors to the book were invited to "shape a possible (unauthorized) biography for Sacchi," and so "to reconsider the limits and possibilities of art writing."

Contributors include: Maria Fusco, Massimiliano Gioni, Martin Herbert, Francesco Manacorda, Tom Morton, Alessandro Rabottini, João Ribas, Torsten Slama and Martin Vincent.

The book is available through MOTTO:

If Mind Were All There Was: Nine Themes on Giuseppe Sacchi

ISBN 978 88 97185 09 3 - published by Kaleidoscope Press, Milan and Tramway, Glasgow

2011-10-10T21:16:00.005-04:00

Otto Piene: Lichtballett

MIT List Visual Arts Center

October 21, 2011 - December 31, 2011

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce an exhibition of the light-based sculptural work of Otto Piene. Otto Piene (b. 1928, Bad Laasphe, Germany) is a pioneering figure in multimedia and technology-based art. Known for his smoke and fire paintings and environmental “sky art,” Piene formed the influential Düsseldorf-based Group Zero with Heinz Mack in the late 1950s. Zero included artists such as Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Lucio Fontana. Piene was the first fellow of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1968, succeeding its founder György Kepes as director until retiring in 1994.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett highlights the artist’s exploration of light as an artistic and communicative medium. First produced using hand-operated lamps directed through perforated stencils, Piene’s Lichtballett (light ballet) performances of moving light became mechanized in the 1960s. The artist’s early light sculptures consisted of revolving lamps, grids, globes, and discs operated by electric switchboards, causing what he described as “the steady flow of unfurling and dimming, reappearing, and vanishing light.” These light machines evolved into kinetic sculptural environments of mechanized effects by the late 1960s.

Bringing together several of the artist's works from the 1960s and ‘70s with two new sculptures, the exhibition is synchronized into a choreographed installation. Electric Rose (1965) consists of a polished aluminum globe covered with neon light bulbs that emit light in four sequenced phases. The piece was featured in Piene’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Light Ballet, at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1965. An important work in the permanent collection of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the piece has undergone significant restoration by Denkhaus GmbH, Düsseldorf, and is now exhibited for the first time in over two decades. The conservation process, overseen by the artist and the MIT List, included a complete rewiring of the piece, removal of surface damage and dents, and replacement of the light fixtures and bulbs to exact specifications.

The exhibition also showcases several other significant early works alongside new sculptures. The two interior lamps of Light Ballet on Wheels (1965) continuously project light through a revolving disk. The sculpture Electric Anaconda (1965) is composed of seven black globes of decreasing diameter stacked in a column, the light climbing up until completely lit. Piene’s new works produced specifically for the exhibition, Lichtballett (2011), a site-specific wall sculpture, and One Cubic Meter of Light Black (2010–11), continue his decades-long investigation of technology and light phenomena.

An original score composed by the artist for his first light performances in the 1960s will accompany several special presentations of the light ballets throughout the duration of the exhibition. Otto Piene: Lichtballett will also be accompanied by a series of film screenings that document Piene’s work and the history and performance of the light ballets through several decades.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett is organized by João Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

2011-09-03T08:00:00.012-04:00

The Otolith Group: The Otolith Trilogy

MIT List Visual Arts Center

September 6th - September 22nd

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to present The Otolith Group's Otolith Trilogy, an interconnected series of films made between 2002 and 2009 that relate scenarios of a speculative future, projected from events in our recent past. Combining fictional narration with archival and documentary footage, the artists create a set of plausible predictive outcomes for the future, from life in the city of the future, to the 22nd Century, when the earth is no longer hospitable to life. The three films Otolith I, Otolith II, and Otolith III show the possible effects of our past and present actions on various aspects of human experience and knowledge, including biology, space travel, urbanism, architecture, economics, media, and culture.

Otolith I (22:16 min.) is set in the 22nd Century, when the human race is no longer able to survive on Earth and is obliged to live in the microgravity conditions of the International Space Station. Dr. Usha Adebaran Sagar, the future descendant of Otolith Group member Anjalika Sagar, is an exo-anthropologist researching life on an earth that she can experience only through media archives. Otolith I imagines a mutant future that looks to the past to find the commonality between the post-war non-alignment movement in South Asia and the USSR, and the 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq. Otolith I began in November 2002 as a collaboration with artist Richard Couzins. It was completed in 2003 with the support of The Arts Catalyst and The Mir Consortium, which made it possible for the artists to film in a microgravity environment.

Otolith II (47:42 min.) is set in the near future and mixes fiction, archival material, and documentary footage filmed in Mumbai and Chandigarh. The film explores the affective pressure exerted upon inhabitants residing within contrasting and competing versions of the city of tomorrow. Otolith II investigates the politics of futurity in which predictive models of the masterplan, the corporate scenario, and real estate speculation converge to extract labor, convert attention, and capture potential for profit. Otolith II was commissioned in 2006 by the Kunsten Festival Des Arts and ARGOS Centre for Art and Media in Brussels, Belgium, and Casco Projects in Utrecht, Netherlands.

Otolith III (48 min.) takes The Alien, the unrealized screenplay of the legendary Bengali director Satyajit Ray, as its point of departure. Written in 1967, The Alien would have been the first science fiction film to be set in contemporary India. Otolith III returns to 1967 to propose an alternative trajectory in which the fictional protagonists of The Alien attempt to seize the means of production in order to create the conditions for their existence as images. Filmed in London, Otolith III is an experiment in temporal and geographical displacement that The Otolith Group calls a premake, a remake of a film before the original. Otolith III was completed in 2009.

The Otolith Group: The Otolith Trilogy is organized by Joao Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Support for the Otolith Group: The Otolith Trilogy has been provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the

Massachusetts Cultural Council.

2011-08-15T22:29:00.027-04:00

John Akomfrah's Handsworth Songs (1986), on the 1985 civil disturbances in Birmingham, seems more relevant than ever...

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Eileen Gray's iconic E.1027 house is being restored. Edwin Heathcote tells "one of the most extraordinary stories in modern architecture," in the FT:

"The house that was one of the most perfect products of the modern movement, the cryptically christened E1027, was designed by Eileen Gray, an Anglo-Irish designer, a woman in a man’s world who had been excluded by the artistic and avant-garde establishment.

Le Corbusier, the leader of that architectural avant-garde, was either in love with or incensed by the presence of this house and scrawled a series of sexually charged murals to Gray’s great chagrin. She was slightly consoled when the German soldiers who later occupied the villa used the abstracted figures for target practice. The house that had tormented him as he had tormented it was perhaps the last thing Le Corbusier ever saw – he drowned in the sea outside in 1965. For years it lay abandoned, one of the great houses of the modern era desecrated in one of the countries that most valued its modernist past – while Le Corbusier’s houses were lovingly turned into temples, museums of modernity." (Read more...)

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Julian Bell's NYRB review of Manet: Inventeur du Moderne, "an exhibition full of heat and light and erotic animus," recently on view at the Musée d’Orsay, displays the kind of acuity that makes for great writing about art. Julian Barnes' brilliant review in the Guardian touches on just this issue in relation to looking at Manet's masterpieces--while exploring the curatorial approach of the exhibition in significant detail--"the risk being that we can no longer see, only take for granted." Interestingly, both also focus on Manet in reproduction:

"Outside Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, lines are currently shuffling under tall billboards that reproduce, some eight times life-size, L’Amazone by Édouard Manet. An amazone is a horsewoman, and by extension the tight-fitting black riding habit she would wear in the nineteenth century, matched by a black silk top hat. Thomas Couture, Manet’s teacher, noted how this “pretty costume…chastely delineates the forms of the upper body,” and Manet’s image dramatizes the tug of interests implied in his words.....Manet, you can make out, went at his subject with a brisk attack, springing from paint swipe to paint swipe--here jostling, there blending---as he moved in on that succulent fresh face...The momemtum of his excitement carried through as he switched brushes to bash a mess of blues and whites around the outline of her head and shoulders..."(Bell, Sudden Sensuous Dazzle..)
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"Much of Manet's achievement you can understand by reading the books and looking at the colour plates; much else is apparent only in front of the pictures themselves. "Manet black" reproduces fairly well; "Manet white" very poorly. Olympia, aside from its continuing erotic challenge, is also a Whistlerian "Symphony in Off-White" (subtle exchanges between flesh, coverlet, bedclothes, flowers and – the sharpest white of all – the paper in which the flowers are wrapped). In the portrait of Zola, a central patch of white blazes out: it comes, appropriately, from the pages of the book the novelist is reading. "

(Julian Barnes, Edouard Manet: Symphony in off-white.)

Jimmie Durham performing at the Reykjavik Experiment

Marathon...

Feynman on philosophy, mathematics, and the "why question..."

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FORMER WEST features an interesting interview with Beirut-based artist and playwright Rabih Mroué. Mroué's exhibition 'The People are Demanding,' responding to the demonstrations in the Middle East, was recently on view in London.

2011-07-07T08:30:00.004-04:00

Two interesting posts from Excerpter with texts from David Greaeber's The sadness of post-workerism and Friedrich Kittler's The City Is a Medium.

David Greaeber on avantgardism, prophecy and so-called “immaterial labor”

Politics is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge its essence. In this sense politics is very similar to magic, /…/ something that works because people believe that it works; but also, that only works because people do not believe it works only because people believe it works.
/…/
Yet the same bankers and traders who produce these complex financial instruments also like to surround themselves with artists, people who are always busy making things—a kind of imaginary proletariat assembled by finance capital, producing unique products out of for the most part very inexpensive materials, objects said financiers can baptize, consecrate, through money and thus turn into art, thus displaying its ability to transform the basest of materials into objects worth far, far more than gold. More

Friedrich Kittler – The City Is a Medium

MEDIA exist to process, record, and transmit numbers. A Greek city, probably Milet, provides us with two of our oldest forms of media: the coin and the vowel alphabet. ¹³ Rome, in order to extend itself from a city into a state, adopted the most advanced form of oriental transmission media: the Achaemenidian postal system. ¹⁴

Thus our terms for media, if not directly, like “heart” or “brain of a circuit,” derived from the human body, stem nonetheless from the city. From the day Shannon applied George Booles’s circuit algebra to a coupling of telegraph relays, the elements which are logically the most simple, and which have no memory, have been known as gates or ports. Circuits, on the other hand, whose initial and final positions are not only a function of the gates and ports, but also of the circuit’s own prehistory, presuppose (no less municipal here) a built-in memory. When the World War II mathematician John von Neumann laid down the prin-ciples for sequential working-off or computation for almost all present-day computer “architectures,” he bestowed the fitting name “bus” on the parallel channels between hard drive, gate, and memory, and thus extended the Biedermeier tradition of metropolitan traffic. Von Neumann’s prophesy that only computers themselves would be capable of planning their own, more intelligent, next generation, because the complex knot of networks would surpass the planning ability of the engineers, has been fulfilled by computer programs called “routing”: network models, like Shannon’s mouse, which operate as if they were street plans (with all the aggravations of jaywalking and traffic jams). Entire cities made of silicon, silicon oxide, and gold wire have since arisen. Yet the living units or houses in these cities must be measured in terms of molecules whose total surface area, even after having been reproduced millions of times, barely fill a square millimeter. The technologic media miniaturize the city, while magnifying the entropy of megalopolis. Not only have the technological traffic modules of modernity, such as parking garages and airports, rendered obsolescent the age-old module “life-sized,” indeed, it seems to me that modulization itself has been rendered obsolescent. And graph theory is responsible. The more one thinks about a capital like Paris, wrote Valéry, the more one learns about oneself from the city. No system, however, is self-governing, neither the city nor the module. It is hence more urgent, in a grey field without reference points, to connect up networks without value systems, and to take leave of..(More)

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Non-Newtonian Fluid on a Speaker Cone

More on "cymatics" (study of visible sound and vibration) here.

2011-05-18T20:53:00.008-04:00

Donald MacKenzie's "How to Make Money in Microseconds," published in the current issue of the London Review of Books, is a fascinating look into the role of algorithm-based trading in markets---the use of “share trading computer programs” and their “millisecond” timescales---in the events of May 6, 2010, in which “a self-feeding downward spiral” caused by algorithms lead to Sotheby’s sale price jumping to $99,999.99:

What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different.

When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. The most striking periodicity involves large peaks of activity separated by almost exactly 1000 milliseconds: they occur 10-30 milliseconds after the ‘tick’ of each second. The spasms, in contrast, seem to be governed not directly by clock time but by an event: the execution of a buy or sell order, the cancellation of an order, or the arrival of a new order. Average activity levels in the first millisecond after such an event are around 300 times higher than normal. There are lengthy periods – lengthy, that’s to say, on a scale measured in milliseconds – in which little or nothing happens, punctuated by spasms of thousands of orders for a corporation’s shares and cancellations of orders. These spasms seem to begin abruptly, last a minute or two, then end just as abruptly.

Little of this has to do directly with human action. None of us can react to an event in a millisecond: the fastest we can achieve is around 140 milliseconds, and that’s only for the simplest stimulus, a sudden sound. The periodicities and spasms found by Hasbrouck and Saar are the traces of an epochal shift. As recently as 20 years ago, the heart of most financial markets was a trading floor on which human beings did deals with each other face to face. The ‘open outcry’ trading pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example, were often a mêlée of hundreds of sweating, shouting, gesticulating bodies. Now, the heart of many markets (at least in standard products such as shares) is an air-conditioned warehouse full of computers supervised by only a handful of maintenance staff. Read on.

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Hazem Kandil, a sociologist at UCLA, is interviewed in the New Left Review about the "revolt in Egypt":

Two developments were responsible for making ordinary, apolitical Egyptians feel they could no longer carry on with their normal lives. The first was the dissolution of the social contract governing state–society relations since Nasser’s coup in the fifties. The contract involved a div0it exchange: the regime offered free education, employment in an expanding public sector, affordable healthcare, cheap housing and other forms of social protection, in return for obedience. You could have—or at any rate hope for—these benefits, so long as domestic or foreign policies were not questioned and political power was not contested. In other words, people understood that they were trading their political rights for social welfare. From the eighties onwards, this contract was eroded, but it was not until the new millennium that it was fully abrogated. By this time the regime felt that it had eliminated organized resistance so thoroughly that it no longer needed to pay the traditional social bribes to guarantee political acquiescence. Viewing a population that appeared utterly passive, fragmented and demoralized, the regime believed it was time for plunder, on a grand scale. In the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), a faction clustered around the President’s son Gamal Mubarak increasingly took charge through a new body called the Policy Committee. It had two components. One consisted of corrupt, state-nurtured capitalists with monopoly control over profitable sectors of the economy. The other was composed of neo-liberal intellectuals, typically economists with links to international financial institutions.

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Parallel with this social change, and related to it, was an alteration in the forms of political repression by the regime. Back in the fifties and sixties, it was understood that you would suffer arrest or torture only if you were politically organized. The military took care of domestic repression, which was brutal but highly targeted. In the seventies and early eighties, this function was transferred from the army to the police. Repression now became more indiscriminate, but it was still carried out within a discernible structure and certain limits. Calling the shots were colonels or captains, people with names and ranks and faces, who bore some kind of responsibility for the decisions they took, and you still had to have some kind of political involvement—not necessarily organized, now, but saying something that crossed a red line or upset some official—to fall into their hands. By the nineties, however, the regime had become so confident it faced no challenges that it treated criticism in the press, or on satellite television or later the internet, as harmless banalities. This was also the attitude taken by the police: day-to-day repression of citizens was too mundane to be carried out by uniformed officers. Why would police officers waste their time and energy on intimidating a few students, cracking down on the occasional hot-headed labour organizer or molesting some female human-rights activists to keep them off the streets? Read on

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Blake Gopnik weighs in on the newly unveiled portrait of Bill and Melinda Gates at The National Portrait Gallery, stating it's not "even close to significant art. It’s pretty much interchangeable with any of 10,000 other works of official portraiture":

No one could imagine this portrait, which is the gallery’s second nonpresidential commission, getting even a footnote in the art texts of the future. It couldn’t find a place even in the deepest vaults of the Museum of Modern Art or the National Gallery or any other serious art institution. If you didn’t recognize the celebrity sitters in Friedman’s painting, you wouldn’t spare it a glance. You’d expect to come across it in any corner suite on Wall Street or Capitol Hill—and to keep walking once you saw it.

Friedman says he was paid $75,000 for his expenses and his months of work on the painting. Those are the fees of a fine craftsman, rather than a payment for an object that has real value of its own, out on the open market. Major artworks by major artists fetch far more than that.

But here’s the thing: I think Friedman got his Gates portrait absolutely right. It doesn’t need to be good art, because it isn’t functioning as art at all, any more than the picture on your driver’s license is. It was commissioned by a history museum in honor of its subject—“someone of national significance, someone our audience is interested in,” as curator Brandon Fortune explained—not by an art museum to honor its artist. Speaking after the painting’s unveiling, Friedman said “I’m determined that it exist as fine art,” but he’s wrong to want that. The purpose of pictures like this is to pick out people of note in our culture and hold them up to our notice. And that means that, almost like that photo on your license, once it has picked out its subject its job is almost done. It is a placeholder for its sitter’s virtues, and it can’t hold that place if its own virtues stand out too much. Read on.

Quine on philosophy's "concern with knowledge of the world."

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The June issue of Scientific American features an article on observable quantum effects in a growing number of macroscopic systems:

According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins. The impression that quantum mechanics is limited to the microworld permeates the public understanding of science. For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales.

Yet this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may operate in the cells of our body.

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Robin Mackay on Urbanomic, the UK-based publisher he founded; Collapse, the journal of philosophical research it publishes; Speculative Realism, Florian Hecker and Quentin Meillassoux; and photographer Liz Deschenes.

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom

2011-03-02T20:11:00.005-05:00

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER

Stan VanDerBeek

The Culture Intercom

February 4, 2011 - April 3, 2011

The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, present the first museum survey of the work of media art pioneer Stan VanDerBeek, exploring his investigation of art, technology, and communication. Surveying the artist’s remarkable body of work in collage, experimental film, performance, participatory and computer-generated art over several decades, Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom highlights the artist’s pivotal contribution to today’s media-based artistic practices. The exhibition features a selection of early paintings and collages, a selection of his pioneering animations, recreations of immersive projection and ‘expanded cinema’ environments, documentation of site-specific and telecommunications projects, and material related to his performance and durational work.

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom is organized by Bill Arning, Director, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and João Ribas, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center, with special thanks to the Estate of Stan VanDerBeek and London-based independent scholar Mark Bartlett. The exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the ART MENTOR FOUNDATION LUCERNE and The National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency, along with the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Martin E. Zimmerman, the Union Pacific Foundation, the patrons, benefactors, and donors to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's Major Exhibition Fund. The accompanying catalogue has been made possible by a grant from The Brown Foundation, Inc. Media sponsor: Phoenix Media/Communications Group. (Read more)

Frances Stark: This Could Become a Gimick [sic] or An Honest Articulation of the Workings of the Mind available from DAP

2011-02-10T20:54:00.005-05:00

Edited by João Ribas. Foreword by Jane Farver.

Los Angeles-based artist and writer Frances Stark (born 1967) addresses the doubts and anxieties of creative labor, in self-portraits that she elaborates into cross-disciplinary explorations of language as both subject matter and material. The elliptical, digressive style that typifies her writing is echoed in the experience of her installations, in which themes emerge across brief citations from pop music and literature.

Interlinked works, often hand-drawn, or hand-inscribed, are executed with a formal vulnerability and fluency of composition that affirms the observation posed in this volume's title. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, this anthology offers a selection of the Los Angeles-based artist's writings from 1997 to 2010, including important out-of-print and hard-to-find texts.

Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation opens at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis

2011-01-19T16:19:00.018-05:00

Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
January 21 – May 1, 2011
For her first major exhibition in the United States, the acclaimed Dutch, Brussels-based artist Manon de Boer asks us to listen as we look in uniquely crafted films that are defined by sound.

For over a decade, she has made a series of cinematic portraits, depicting friends, writers, dancers, composers, and musicians to explore questions of time and memory. Meanwhile, she examines how musical structures can transform what we experience. With a focus on performance—and the ways that sound can give a film its form— CAM spotlights De Boer’s expansive and grounding experimentations with sound, image, and the fundamental experiences of film. For Presto, Perfect Sound (2006), De Boer shot six takes of a violin performance, out of which she cut and then reconstructed the optimal sound composites to produce a “perfect performance,” despite the visual glitches we see before us. In Two Times 4’33” (2008), her camera fixes on the feeling of silence, on film and in the body, as it reverberates through the audience and extends to us off screen. A third film, Dissonant (2010), reveals the rupture between what we see and hear, and as the screen goes black, the viewer trades vision for the pure aural experience of a dancer’s moving feet.

In an ambitious installation conceived especially for CAM’s galleries, De Boer presents four key works that address her attention to the structures of music, orchestrating her films so that each portrait amplifies the connection between image and sound, performer and audience—asking us to revisit the process of looking and listening through the artist’s singular interrogation of cinema.

Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation is curated by Laura Fried, Associate Curator, and João Ribas, Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. The exhibition is organized by CAM.

Image:

Manon de Boer, Attica, 2008. 16 mm black and white film with mono sound, 10 minutes. Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels.

Frances Stark in Art in America/Boston Globe

2011-01-04T20:00:00.000-05:00

Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, on view last year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, is the subject of a feature by Nancy Princenthal in Art in America, and reviewed by Sebastian Smee in the Boston Globe:

The Internet Age is widely understood as the apogee of image culture, but the medium in which we swim, buoyed by waves of chat, posts and tweets, seems increasingly to be the written word. Or so it appears in the company of Frances Stark.

Like more than a few artists of her generation, Stark (born 1967 in Newport Beach) often incorporates writing in her work, which was surveyed recently at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. She has also published her texts independently in various magazines, catalogues and freestanding books, and has penned the odd exhibition review. A cross between fluidly interdisciplinary commentary and wry interior monologue, Stark’s prose showed up at the List Center not only as content in her drawings and collages but also in the works’ titles; in wall labels, which were generally restricted to the usual identifying information but sometimes digressed rather freely; and, most prominently, in the exhibition catalogue, which is not a conventional document (there are no illustrations) but an anthology of her essays, graced very occasionally with exceedingly terse marginal notations by the survey’s curator, João Ribas. Stark’s relish for marginalia is confirmed by the title of both book and exhibition, This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, which derives from a comment written in the margin of a used copy of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1955 novel The Voyeur. Stark transcribed the annotated page of this lucky find into a drawing in 1995. (Read more)

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An artist who labels herself

Frances Stark puts words to work, with wit

Frances Stark is obsessed with something akin to the problem we all face every time we set about achieving anything: How to filter out distractions, white noise, and the marginalia of the mind. How to make thoughts cohere.

Currently enjoying her first US museum survey at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, Stark is also obsessed — and here is where she differs from most of us — with how to make art.

Apparently, it’s not easy. Or else it’s almost ridiculously easy. Part of the fun of Stark’s work is that she alternates between confounding and confirming our expectations of how much work is involved in producing a “work’’ of art. (Read More)

Fax in Paris

2010-11-17T14:09:00.006-05:00

FAX, an exhibition I organized at The Drawing Center last year, has been touring in collaboration with iCI, and is currently on view at New Galerie in Paris, until January 8th. The latest version there adds new work by Raphael Zarka, Annette Messager, and Claude Leveque, among others, to the original list of nearly 100 artists, designers, writers, architects, and scientists. The catalog, distributed by DAP, is also available through Amazon.

Emily Wardill in Frieze

2010-10-27T09:25:00.005-04:00

Jennifer Higgie on the work of Emily Wardill, whose exhibition is currently on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center:

The ambition of Wardill’s work is exhilarating; it is so chock-full of startlingly inventive scenes and arcane references that trying to understand them on first viewing is akin to a skydiver trying to grasp the history of the world between leaping from the plane and landing. (More...)

2010-10-13T22:45:00.013-04:00

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER

October 21, 2010 - January 4, 2011

Opening Reception:

October 21st, 6-8pm

http://listart.mit.edu/

Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, the first U.S. museum survey of the work of Los Angeles artist and writer, Frances Stark (b. 1967, Newport Beach, California). For over two decades, Frances Stark (b. 1967, Newport Beach, California) has laid bare the creative act in all its tedium and enchantment. With distinctive wit and candor, her expressly personal language reflects an interest in the relationship between art, literature, and everyday life. While describing an attempt to render the poetic from the mundane, Stark's work also reflects a poignant search for the "kind of 'liberation' I-as a woman, artist, teacher, mother, ex-wife-am really after."

Support for Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind has been generously provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, David Teiger, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Emily Wardill: Game Keepers Without Game

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce Emily Wardill: Game Keepers without Game, the first U.S. museum presentation of the work of British artist Emily Wardill. The exhibition will consist of Wardill’s recent feature length film Game Keepers Without Game (2009), as well as screenings of two of the artist’s 16mm films, Ben (2007) and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007). Gamekeepers without Game (2009) is British artist Emily Wardill's (b. 1977, Rugby, UK) re-imagining of the 17th-century play Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño, 1635) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Wardill's short films screened as part of the exhibition combine theatre, metaphor, and cinematic melodrama.

Support for Emily Wardill: Game Keepers Without Game has been generously provided by David Teiger, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Melvin Moti: The Prisoner's Cinema

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce Melvin Moti: The Prisoner’s Cinema, the first U.S. museum exhibition of the work of Dutch artist Melvin Moti. The work of Melvin Moti (b. 1977, Rotterdam, Netherlands) gives form to incidents, events, and subjects displaced from historical narratives. The Prisoner's Cinema (2008) is a 35mm film based on reports of hallucinations resulting from periods of prolonged visual deprivation.

Support for Melvin Moti: The Prisoner’s Cinema has been generously provided by the Mondriaan Foundation, The Netherlands Cultural Services, David Teiger, the Council for the Arts at MIT, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Frances Stark: This could become a gimick [sic] or an honest articulation of the workings of the mind, Emily Wardill: Game Keepers Without Game, and Melvin Moti:The Prisoner's Cinema are organized by João Ribas.

Frances Stark in Artforum/Emily Wardill in Frieze

2010-09-01T12:02:00.004-04:00

The upcoming survey of the work of Los Angeles-based artist and author Frances Stark that I am curating at the MIT List Visual Arts Center is previewed in Artforum this month. The exhibition will be accompanied by an edited publication of the artist's writings, spanning from 1997-2006.

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The current issue of Frieze includes a great feature by Jennifer Higgie on British artist Emily Wardill; the cover features a still from her film Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007) which will be part of an exhibition of her work that opens at the MIT List in October.

Art:21 Interview etc..

2010-08-04T14:14:00.013-04:00

I was recently interviewed for the Art:21 blog, on among other things, the notion of curatorial practice and the "contemporary."

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has published a monograph on Portuguese artist Ana Vieira, to which I contributed an essay on the "architecture of the self." The catalog is published on the occasion of the forthcoming exhibition, Ana Vieira: Muros de Abrigo, currently at the Museu Carlos Machado and travelling to the Gulbenkian Foundation in January, 2011.

The current issue of Flash Art features a piece on Eva Hesse co-authored with Laura Fried, Associate Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.

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From Philipp Oehmke's profile of Slavoj Zizek in Der Spiegel:

"Zizek, Badiou and Negri have known each other for years. Sometimes they work together, but each of them is more apt to take note of what the others are doing, what they are saying or what they are writing about, even if they have more than likely not read the others' books. Negri is not aloof enough and too much of a class warrior for Zizek and Badiou. Badiou is too rarefied for Negri, and Zizek publishes so many books that even he probably doesn't have time to read them all."

2010-05-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Lusitania: From oceanography to beyond form
Editora Licorne, Lisboa, April 2010, 112 pages.

Contributions by:

Allen S. Weiss
Ana Luisa Barão

Catherine Liu

Filipe Rocha da Silva

João Ribas

Martim Avillez

Michael Taussig

Saul Ostrow

Recent writing...

2010-04-21T17:06:00.005-04:00

The current issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction includes my review of the new Archipelago edition of Heinrich von Kleist's Selected Prose.

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Everywhere and All at Once: An Anthology of Writings About Performa 07 is the second in a series of publications related to the Performa biennials. The book features documentation, and a short text, related to my curated project for the biennial with artist Ryan Gander.

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The current issue of Flash Art features an interview with artist Sterling Ruby .

2010-03-29T09:34:00.003-04:00

Ree Morton in Best of 2009 Artforum issue

2009-12-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World closes today at The Drawing Center.
The exhibition is a Best of 2009 pick in the current issue of Artforum, and reviewed in the same issue.

Unica Zurn wins AICA Exhibition of the Year Award

2009-12-17T09:44:00.004-05:00

The Unica Zurn exhibition I curated at The Drawing Center earlier this year has won an AICA award for Best Show by a Non-Profit Gallery or Space.

Ree Morton: At Still Point of the Turning World reviewed in Art in America

2009-12-15T08:00:00.003-05:00

"Now that so much art looks like Ree Morton’s, it’s hard to imagine just how radical her work appeared in the ’70s. In her brief career (she got her BFA in 1968 at 32, and died in a car accident at 41) and without even seeming to try, Morton turned everything upside down. Although she was surely reacting to the male-dominated, pared-down, intellectually based art prevalent at the time and therefore can certainly be considered a feminist, Morton did not take a political stance as much as simply use art to make sense of her life as a woman. In doing so, she introduced feminine values (she once designed a series of nautical signal flags representing her friends, many of them women, and flew them from a schooner in New York Harbor), oblique personal narrative and droll aphorisms that could be seen as precursors to those of Jenny Holzer and the Guerrilla Girls."
Read more.

Man in the Holocene

2009-12-11T08:00:00.007-05:00

I'm frequently asked to talk about what project(s) I've always wanted to do, or have been working on, which I seem to hesitate to do (it seems a bit indulgent)....this came up in the Q&A after a recent talk, and as per some follow up emails, where's what I should have said:

I have been researching an exhibition I'd like to curate about contemporary art and metaphysics for over a year now, currently titled Man in the Holocene, after the Max Frisch novel...it seems to me that contemporary art is taking over the place of metaphysics in human understanding. If metaphysics was cast out of natural philosophy, out of scientific rationality, modernity and philosophy (think Heidegger/Derrida) have its concerns crept up in contemporary art now? Is aesthetic knowledge the place of the qualitative in a world of quantitative reasoning and mediated 'information'? Metaphysical concerns seem to unite so much of current contemporary art, and provide the ground for a lot of current discussions around ideas of sincerity, enchantment, curiosity, experience, presence, and 'alchemy'...

Ree Morton: At Still Point of the Turning World reviewed in Time Out

2009-11-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

From this week's Time Out NY:

This exhibition, which comprises both drawing and sculpture, traces Morton’s rapid progression from Process-oriented art to work that infused the formal and conceptual language of Postminimalism with more unruly elements of personal narrative, theater, ritual and decoration.

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World Reviewed in Frieze

2009-11-12T08:00:00.002-05:00

2009-11-06T08:00:00.001-05:00

Thomas Bernhard interview from late 1986, via Sign and Sight

2009-11-05T08:00:00.002-05:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody

Ree Morton in The New Yorker

2009-10-13T23:14:00.003-04:00

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World, currently on view at The Drawing Center, is reviewed in Peter Schjeldahl's Critic's Notebook this week.

Recent Writing

2009-10-06T23:08:00.005-04:00

The accompanying catalog to my exhibition of the drawing-based work of Ree Morton (1936-1977), currently on view at The Drawing Center, features a conversation with Cornelia H. Butler and Allan Schwartzman, as well as Lucy Lippard’s 1973 essay “At the Still Point of the Turning World” with a new introduction by the author.
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A short essay I wrote on the Polaroids of Carlo Mollino is in this month's edition of Flash Art.

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An essay on Indian artist Tallur L.N. I wrote last year is published in conjunction with the artist's recent show, Placebo, in Mumbai.
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My recent text on conditions of medium specificity and the filmic apparatus is included in Lisa Oppenheim's current exhibition, Invention Without a Future, at Harris Lieberman in New York.

FAX

2009-09-25T18:11:00.007-04:00

FAX, an exhibition I organized at The Drawing Center earlier this year in collaboration with iCI, kicks off its tour at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. The exhibition is on view until December 20th. The catalog, distributed by DAP, is also available for pre-order through Amazon.

FAX

Though the technology for transmitting information long-distance dates from the nineteenth century, it was the fax machine, made commercially available in the 1970s, that turned facsimiles into a primary form of communication. Artists readily exploited the fax machine for its graphic and interactive possibilities, positing the medium as a precursor to the then-nascent field of new media art and within the legacy of mail art. Fax presents works by a multigenerational group of nearly 100 artists, architects, designers, scientists and filmmakers--Mel Bochner, Liam Gillick, Wade Guyton, Glenn Ligon, Jan De Cock, Cerith Wyn Evans, Morgan Fisher and Aurelien Froment, among others--that use the fax machine as a tool for thinking and drawing. Published to accompany an exhibition at New York's Drawing Center, FAX includes the drawings, texts, examples of early telecommunications art (with inevitable transmission errors), junk faxes and fax lore that were all transmitted via the gallery's fax line.

Ree Morton at The Drawing Center

2009-09-15T15:44:00.021-04:00

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World

September 18 - December 18, 2009
Main Gallery and Drawing Room

Opening Reception:
Thursday, September 17, 2009 6–8pm
http://www.drawingcenter.org/

The Drawing Center presents an exhibition of the work of the late American artist Ree Morton (1936–1977). The exhibition highlights Morton’s influential body of work, remarkably all produced between her decision to turn to art full-time in the late 1960s and her tragic death in an automobile accident shortly before her 41st birthday. While reflecting many of the currents of Postminimal and Conceptual art of the 1970s, Morton’s work also looked to a pioneering use of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination. Yet the scope of her artistic production remains largely unrecognized, as does her vital contribution to feminist art practice and the importance of drawing to her development as an artist. Repetitive, minimal forms in Morton’s early work lead to more biographically tinged mark-making, ranging from abstracted diagrams acting as topographies of memory to botanical illustrations and decorative motifs. A marked interest in phenomenology, spatiality, kitsch, and the emotive potential of materials is merged in Morton’s later work, her sculptural practice presaging the formal vocabulary and theatricality of later installation art. The exhibition is comprised of a selection of major drawings, several of which will be on view for the first time, along with drawing-based sculptural works and a selection of notebook sketches. Curated by João Ribas, the exhibition takes its title from a T. S. Eliot poem Morton kept above her studio desk.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Ossining, NY in 1936, Ree Morton died tragically in a car accident in 1977 in Chicago. She first studied nursing, then married and had three children before completing her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (1968) and her MFA at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (1970). During her lifetime, her work was exhibited at the ICA (Philadelphia), Artists Space and the Whitney Museum (both New York) among other venues. She was the subject of a 1980 retrospective at The New Museum and solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1985) and Generali Foundation in Vienna (2008). Morton’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975 (organized by iCI), and the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007).

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
Thursday, September 24, 6:30pm (Main Gallery) and 7:30pm (Drawing Room)SoHo Night exhibition tour with assistant curator Rachel Liebowitz

Saturday, October 24, 4pm
Free gallery talk with exhibition curator João Ribas.

Thursday, December 10, 6:30pm
Video screening of Ree Morton: An Interview (1974)

PUBLICATION
The Drawing Center will publish Drawing Papers 87: Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World featuring a roundtable conversation with Drawing Center curator João Ribas, independent curator Allan Schwartzman, and MoMA chief curator of drawings Cornelia H. Butler, as well as Lucy Lippard’s 1973 essay “At the Still Point of the Turning World,” with a new introduction to the text by Lippard. Approximately 120 pages, 50 color images.

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring in Brooklyn Rail

2009-06-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

Unica Zurn: Dark Spring reviewed by John Yau in the Brooklyn Rail

Unica Zürn reviewed in Time Out New York

2009-05-11T10:57:00.002-04:00

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring reviewed by Joshua Mack in Time Out New York

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring
The Drawing Center, through July 23

In 1953, following a series of self-induced abortions and a brutal divorce, the German poet and novelist Unica Zürn (1916–1970) moved to Paris with the artist Hans Bellmer, and began making art using the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing. Replete with snakes and leering eyes swarming in linear networks, her output reflected the influence of Bellmer’s circle—from Henri Michaux’s mescaline-induced drawings to Wols’s agglomerations of insectlike creatures. But as pieces and documents assembled here clearly indicate, Zürn’s agitated facture and nightmare imagery also evinced a keen understanding of pictorial composition, and suggest miseries like ceaseless itching and sleepless nights.

They also presaged trouble. In 1960, Zürn suffered a psychotic incident and was in and out of institutions until her suicide, in 1970. Following her initial breakdown, her touch became more flaccid, and her imagery gave way to doodlelike renderings of faces and birds that seem repetitive and decorative in contrast with her initial efforts.

More compelling is the backstory told by the ephemera on display. Zürn wrote several experimental texts, including the grimly autobiographical Dark Spring. In one passage she described the enormous pleasure she derived from rope cutting her flesh. A set of photographs of her bound torso, taken by Bellmer, indicates that the couple practiced BDSM, while his notation to crop her visage from the images hints at deeper efforts at effacement.

That’s not all. Her psychiatrist traded her drawings for cigarettes, and it was Michaux who had arguably put her in the hospital by giving her mescaline—raising the troubling prospect that Zürn’s life was a hideous coincidence of art, madness and abuse.—Joshua Mack

Unica Zürn in The New Yorker

2009-05-04T14:18:00.001-04:00

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring in The New Yorker.

DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster St. (212-219-2166)—“Unica Zürn: Dark Spring.” The story of Zürn’s life threatens to overshadow her work: in 1970, the fifty-four-year-old German artist, who suffered frequent bouts of depression, jumped to her death from the Paris apartment she shared with her lover, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. This absorbing show, organized by João Ribas, reveals a gifted—and, yes, tortured—artist, who merits more than the footnote she’s been allocated in the annals of Surrealism. (Zürn may be best known as the author of the cult roman à clef “Dark Spring.”) Intricate works on paper, made using the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, are filled with fantastical creatures that curl into and out of patterned abstraction. Vitrines in the middle of the gallery contain printed matter, including an exhibition catalogue of Zürn’s work with an introduction written in illegible glyphs by Max Ernst. Disturbing photographs of the artist’s body, bound into grotesqueries with cord, look uncannily like Bellmer’s dolls, transforming a model and muse into a masochistic collaborator. Through July 23. (Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 to 6, and Saturdays, 11 to 6.)

Unica Zürn Artforum Critic's Pick

2009-05-04T10:59:00.004-04:00

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring is a Lauren O'Neill-Butler Critic's Pick at Artforum.com:

Unica Zürn

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster Street
April 17–July 23

The black-and-white photographs of Unica Zürn’s body—bound by string, coiled, and reduced to a sack of bulbous flesh—are some of Hans Bellmer’s most admired works and, until recently, her mere cameo in art history’s canon. As a remedial course, perhaps, this elegant show offers a bounty of Zürn’s automatic drawings, a few shimmering paintings, and some brilliant pieces of her writing (for which she is most regarded). Although it reprises themes set forth in Ubu Gallery’s similar 2005 show, the Drawing Center exhibition thoughtfully and tenderly examines her short career and mental illness without didactically trying to “rediscover” her and without mythologizing her suicide at age fifty-four or her interest in sadomasochism. The tranquil sea-blue walls and the thick black frames here temper the hotness of these issues, and so do the sweet, nearly oceanic and biomorphic forms in her finely detailed renderings. These creatures hover at the center of her pages, bearing multiple countenances, breasts, limbs, and orifices, though, unlike a Bellmer "Poupeé," rarely do Zürn’s striations recall actual bodies. Instead, forty-nine mostly untitled works here offer roving, repetitive deviations: delicate lines, smudged ink, and twisting spirals appear as faces, then just shapes, and finally as faces, again, through an echolike effect. Intense and otherworldly, they offer a window into a mind that contemporary artists––particularly those invested in psychedelic motifs––should investigate. For some, her work might feel like the sun against their eyes; for others, a beacon in the distance.

Unica Zürn and FAX reviews

2009-04-30T10:41:00.003-04:00

Two recent reviews of my curated exhibitions at The Drawing Center:

Unica Zürn:Dark Spring reviewed by Ken Johnson in the New York Times, and FAX reviewed by Brian Droitcour at Rhizome.org. Both exhibitions are on view until July 23.

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Artist and publisher Serge Onnen and I discuss the relationship between drawing and text on the occasion of his recent book Drawings on Writing.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

2009-03-25T08:00:00.006-04:00

One of the defining issues in contemporary art today, it seems to me, is the signal difference between information and knowledge, the problematic but persistent notion of content as a kind of mediating quantity between them. The problem is succinctly put in this line from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

What is at stake is precisely the character or modality of knowledge that art is supposedly implicitly engaged or concerned with (the 'where' of Eliot's query), and the relationship of that knowledge to experience or other regimes of understanding. This explains, I believe, a recent trend towards the artist as 'mystic' and related thematics, the use of artistic practice as a kind of integrative social practice, or something like the increasing use of "re-enchantment" as a term. It may in fact, signal a significant shift in the art of a generation--as it moves from an image-making focus, appropriation, and media critique, towards an articulation of a realm of knowledge that is directly related to the realm of art or aesthetic production....the kind of understanding positioned within the order of the sensible.

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One reason the Geithner plan for "legacy asset" resale may not work: the problem is not liquidity but quality..from today's Financial Times:
Those betting the programme will succeed are basing those wagers partly on the belief that a lack of liquidity is the main reason for the assets' decimation in value. If that is true, buyers will reap gains once liquidity is restored.

But if depressed prices reflect the weak underpinnings of the housing market, consumer credit and the overall economy, gains could be scarce - or longer in coming. These are, after all, assets backed by credit that eventually needs to be paid off. Their quality, rather than their liquidity, may be the problem. Read more...

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Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities at The Drawing Center won a 2008 AICA Award for Best Exhibition by a Non-Profit.

‘A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking’ in Frieze

2008-12-28T14:06:00.009-05:00

The Matt Mullican survey currently on view at The Drawing Center is reviewed in Frieze:

"Channeling something like the spirit of Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber crossed with Jorge Luis Borges, Matt Mullican’s drawings dominate the walls of The Drawing Center. Less an ordered retrospective than a selection of work from across the years, the exhibition is equal parts visceral experience and intellectual exercise. Mullican’s works on paper are paranoid, obsessive and possibly schizophrenic, yet they are also full of humour and intelligence."Read more

Matt Mullican in NYT; the other Tulip mania; Butler on Obama

2008-11-24T21:08:00.006-05:00

Matt Mullican, whose survey I've curated is currently on view at The Drawing Center, profiled in the New York Times:

Mr. Mullican’s high school notebook foreshadows what has become for him a career-long investigation: How do we all insert ourselves into the imagery that bombards us every day? Why does the pain of another person, or even a stick figure, become our own? What is the basis of human empathy? How can thoughts and emotions be communicated visually?

“It’s all about projection,” Mr. Mullican said. “I’m sitting in front of you now, and you’re seeing me. But you’re also seeing lots of other things, based on your own experiences.”

This “subject-object” divide, as it is known in philosophical circles, is nothing new, according to João Ribas, a curator at the Drawing Center in SoHo. But what intrigues him about Mr. Mullican’s work, he said, was “the way Matt attempts to collapse this split through the medium of drawing.”

That process is explored in “Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking,” an exhibition that opens Friday at the center. Featuring more than 100 artworks made over 35 years, it includes Mr. Mullican’s stick-figure sketches, videos of him drawing while under hypnosis, large-scale rubbings based on original works on paper that have since been photocopied and cut out, and vitrines displaying — you guessed it — notebooks. Read More
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Ben Lewis writes in Prospect Magazine about "a second Tulip mania," the contemporary art bubble:

The bubble in contemporary art is about to pop. It has exhibited all the classic features of the South Sea bubble of 1720 or the tulip madness of the 1630s. It has been the bubble of bubbles—balancing precariously on top of other now-burst bubbles in credit, housing and commodities—and inflating more dramatically than all of them. While British house prices took six years to double at the start of this century, contemporary art managed it in just one, 2006-07. (Over the same period, old masters went up by just 7.6 per cent and British 17th to 19th century watercolours actually lost value.) Contemporary art in the emerging economies did even better. The value of its sales in China increased by 983 per cent in one year (2005-06). In Russia they rose 2,365 per cent in five years (2000-05), while its stock market increased by "only" about 300 per cent.
....
Contemporary art turned out to be an ideal vehicle for speculative euphoria. The market is almost entirely free from state interference. Governments have had little interest in regulating the trinkets and playthings of the super-rich. Art works are a uniquely portable and confidential form of wealth. Whereas all property purchases have to be publicly registered, buying art is a private activity. And unlike old masters, which are often linked by history to specific places, contemporary art knows no frontiers. Read more.
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Judith Butler on the "uncritical exuberance" of the Obama election:

It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his "cross-over" success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by "moral" issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. Read More.

Criticism Panel Tomorrow Night

2008-10-29T16:01:00.001-04:00

ON CRITICISM
OCTOBER 30 2008, 7:00PM
GUILD & GREYSHKUL
28 WOOSTER STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10013

Featuring Jan Avgikos, Ben Davis, John Miller, Joao Ribas, Martha Schwendener, and Roger White.

Ad Hoc Vox and Guild & Greyshkul are pleased to invite you to On Criticism, a panel discussion that will take place at the gallery on Thursday, October 30th at 7:00pm.

ERNEST: I have foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless.

GILBERT: So is most modern creative work also. Mediocrity weighing mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother - that is the spectacle which the artistic activity of England affords us from time to time.

-Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

Questioning the relevancy of criticism is hardly the exclusive sport of a contemporary audience. The roles, values, and goals of criticism have been as contested as any individual critic's pronouncements. What factors, then, uniquely beset art criticism now? What basis is there for the widely espoused claim that we are in a "post critical" age? In a highly diversified and cross-disciplinary art world, what constitutes a conflict of interest for a critic? How have blogging and self-publishing through the Internet affected art writing?

On Criticism will bring together critics writing for print and online publications, editors, and artists writing criticism to discuss such questions. Our goal is to address present-day art criticism by creating a space for its self-identified practitioners to turn a critical eye on both the concerns of their discipline and potential models to address those concerns. Colleen Asper will moderate the discussion, which will be followed by a Q & A with the audience.

Secession Lecture on Nov 3rd

2008-10-27T14:24:00.004-04:00

MONDAY NOV 3, 2008, 7 PM | LECTURE IN ENGLISH
JOÃO RIBAS
Freedom as Art

The concept of freedom is intimately tied to the political economy of capitalism; the received notion of parity between development and liberty intrinsic to modern political philosophy asserts that a free market is a necessary condition for political freedom. Yet as it has become impossible to conceive of freedom without capitalism, it is also impossible to discuss the modern concept of art without reference to the subject of capitalism—that is, the form of a radical individual subject. It is in fact through an assertion of unquantifiable values—taste, madness, inspiration—and through the formation of a radical political subject—that of the artist—that the production of art comes to be defined precisely by values that distance it from those of capital. Yet if the figure of the artist and his labor was once emblematic of the emancipatory idea of the ‘individual,’ in a society where it had not yet fully emerged, is this notion deradicalized by the democratization of subjective expression today? Can one trace the production of art through its relationship with—or rather distance from—capitalism, from the dawn of the modern market to the immaterial economy of late capitalism? Can art and its implicit subject of freedom provide a horizon of possibilities for new forms of social organization? Or are art and capital inevitably intertwined?

João Ribas (b. Braga, Portugal 1979) is Curator at The Drawing Center in New York and a widely published critic. His writing on art, film, literature, and design has appeared in numerous publications worldwide, and he is the curator of several surveys, projects, and exhibitions in the US and abroad. He is a frequent lecturer on aesthetics and cultural theory and currently adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts, New York.

For further information and photographic material please contact:

Kathrin Schweizer
Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna
Tel: +43-1-5875307-21, Fax: +43-1-5875307-34
presse@secession.at

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings at The Drawing Center

2008-10-13T15:32:00.005-04:00

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstrations Drawings reviewed by David Cohen in the now-defunct New York Sun and Holland Cotter in the New York Times.

2008-09-15T08:00:00.002-04:00

The current issue of Artlies is guested edited by Julieta Aranda and revolves around the theme, "Death of the Curator: A Forensic Analysis of Curatorial Practice". Along with contributions by Aranda, Jens Hoffmann, Lawrence Weiner, Martha Rosler, Nato Thompson, Fia Backstrom, and others, it includes a conversation between myself and artist Matt Sheridan Smith on curatorial practice.

2008-09-04T08:30:00.005-04:00

Drawing On Film, the exhibition I organized at The Drawing Center this spring, is travelling to The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, where it will be on view from September 26 to December 14.

Richard Reeves, Linear Dreams, 1997. 35mm film

Anselm Kiefer and the Virgin Mary

2008-08-08T08:30:00.000-04:00

"I am someone who has seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. She appeared to me like a figure in a Nazarene painting. I think I was six or seven, perhaps even eight at the time... Mary appeared to me one morning. It was not in a dream, I was already awake. The vision took place in the room where I slept. I cannot tell you precisely what Mary was wearing. But she had on a light beige and blue dress. She looked exactly like a Pre-Rafaelite or Nazarene painting.. Today I would say she looked kitsch. Mary did not speak to me, she smiled."
Anselm Kiefer in a recent interview in Die Welt

The New New Alphabet

2008-07-22T10:23:00.005-04:00

The New New Alphabet is typeface devised by Ryan Gander and produced by graphic designer Rasmus Spanggaard Troelsen. The typeface is an addition to famed Dutch designer Wim Crouwel’s typeface New Alphabet Three (1967), based on a dot-matrix system and intended to be easily read by computers:

Perhaps its best known usage is in this Joy Division album cover.

The New New Alphabet was made with the intension of being printed over Crouwel’s original version, with the purpose of making it more legible, but in turn less stylised.

It's available (for mac) to download from the following link:

www.thenewnewalphabet.info/newnewalphabet.zip

Crouwel on his "New Alphabet"

Standard Sizes in Time Out New York

2008-07-14T16:15:00.002-04:00

Standard Sizes, my curated group exhibition at Andrew Kreps, was reviewed in last week's issue of Time Out New York. The show is on view until July 18th.

Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities is an Artforum Critics Pick

2008-07-06T11:47:00.002-04:00

Frederick Kiesler
THE DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster Street
April 18–July 24

In looping curves and obsessive scribbles, the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler’s fluid line skitters from sheets creased with folds to lined notebook paper to thin cardboard, mapping a deliberate course between touch and vision, between the body and the outside world. Frameless and exhibited on a sinuous table designed specially by nARCHITECTURE, Kiesler’s drawings are presented as a stream of the interconnectedness, or “correalism,” that preoccupied the antifunctionalist architect. “Drafting is grafting vision on paper. . . . Blindfolded skating rather than designing,” Kiesler wrote in an article for Art News in 1960. In fact, texture, not structure, is Kiesler’s principle concern, and in this show one finds bleeding ink blotches drawn in loose spirals, dry tempera brushed in thick calligraphic ellipses, egg shapes outlined in sweeping gestures, and womblike forms traced and retraced so many times as to cause undulations in their paper support.

Kiesler’s drawings do not suggest specific models for utopian living but rather probe what it means “to dwell” or, in Heidegger’s phrase, “the manner in which we are on the earth.” Studies of human perception, plans for fantastic vision machines, and diagrams detailing the birth of new objects displayed alongside exhibition designs for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery and renderings of Kiesler’s famous, though never realized, Endless House attest to the artist’s desire to track the process by which man and his art come into being, determined not by teleological functionalism but by the nature of the human spirit.

— Emily Verla Bovino

2008-06-16T17:10:00.006-04:00

Standard Sizes
A group exhibition curated by João Ribas
Andrew Kreps Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
June 14 - July 12, 2008
Web Site

The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Standard Sizes, a group exhibition curated by João Ribas.

Standard Sizes surveys a diverse group of artists over several generations whose work resists the notion of art as the product of an expressive subject--the radically individuated self largely equated with the figure of the artist. In place of this vestige of Renaissance self-fashioning and the affectations of Romanticism, the exhibition presents works that look to standards and formal procedures to displace the idea of expressive subjectivity as the domain of art.

If the figure of the visionary artist was once emblematic of the emancipatory idea of the 'individual' in a society where it had not yet fully emerged, this notion is deradicalized by the democratization of subjective expression today. As a result of this abiding 'selfness,' it seems more pressing to understand the structures and standards built into the parameters of 'expression' and the production of meaning itself.

By foregrounding an effect, rather than the affect, of meaning, Standard Sizes looks to practices that solicit content from standards or procedural form, cede subjective control through generative systems, or that elicit meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition. Ranging from work based on standard formats and materials, to the rhetorical use of tropes such as the expressive brushstroke, the works in the exhibition looks to the implicit, if now obscured, values and norms present in standardized form. This is to evince how frames dictate content, how the values assimilated in standards belie whose feet and fingers are measured to arrive at consensus, and to discover meaning by way of slippages in the process of standardization.

Standard Sizes takes its departure from Pierre Menard's line-by-line rewriting of Don Quixote; the standardization of canvas sizes in the French Academy; the Kuleshov effect's suggestion of affect from juxtaposition; Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages; CMYK color; imperial units of measurement; lorem ipsum text, based on a dark passage from Cicero; standard paper sizes; modernism as a rhetorical vernacular; stochastic music and seriality; cinematic aspect ratios; T.S. Eliot's poetics of 'impersonality'; generative algorithms; as well as the possibility of meaning in the difference produced by repetition.

Artists included in this exhibition: Ricci Albenda, Kjell Bjorgeengen, Kerstin Brätsch, Martin Creed, Liz Deschenes, Morgan Fischer, Rachel Harrison, Imi Knoebel, Camilla Low, Allan McCollum, Brian O'Connell, Blinky Palermo, Richard Pettibone, Josh Smith, Matt Sheridan Smith, and Sturtevant.

Image: Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled, 2006, Newspapers, 24 x 14 x 0.75 inches

e-flux video rental opens in Lisbon

2008-05-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

The latest iteration of the e-flux video rental has opened in Lisbon, for which I've selected films by Lutz Mommartz, Bodil Furu, Oliver Ressler, Nik Gambaroff, and Matt Sheridan Smith.

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

EVR
A project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda
Opening: May 21st, 19:00

May 22 - June 18 2008
Tuesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm

Avenida de Berna, 45
1067-001 Lisboa
Level -1 of the Foundation Headquarters

Gulbenkian Foundation and Maumaus are pleased to present e-flux video rental in Lisbon.

e-flux video rental (EVR) is a project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, comprising a free video rental, a public screening room, and a film and video archive that is constantly growing. This collection of over 750 works of film and video art has been assembled in collaboration with more than 100 international artists, curators and critics.

In the 1960s and 70s, artists were drawn to working with video in part because it was cheap to use and easily reproduced and distributed. But video art has become increasingly assimilated to the precious-object economy of the art market. EVR is a poetic exploration of alternative processes of circulation and distribution of video art, and it is structured to function like a video rental store, except that it operates for free. VHS tapes can be watched in the space, or, once a viewer fills out a membership form and contract, they can be checked out and taken home.

Orignally presented at a storefront in New York, in 2004, EVR has traveled to venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Seoul, Paris, Istanbul, Canary Islands, Austin, Budapest, Boston, Antwerp, Miami and Lyon. Following the its stay in Portugal, the project will travel to Brazil and Argentina. After these final venues, having outlived the technology that made it possible (VHS video tape players), the project will be permanently archived with the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, in 2009.

Every time EVR is installed in a new city, local artists, curators and writers are invited to serve as selectors, choosing artists whose work is added to the collection. In addition, a special program of screenings of works from the EVR collection is part of the project. In Lisbon, the program will continue with the selections from In keeping with this, Maumaus and Gulbenkian Foundation have invited Miguel Amado, Jürgen Bock, Ana Pinto, João Ribas and Ricardo Valentim to select additional videos for the collection. [Read on..]

2008-03-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

Writing on the responses to the current Whitney Biennial, AFC's Paddy Johnson gives a nod to the series of exhibitions---Dice Thrown, Aspects, Forms & Figures, and In Defense of Ardor---I curated at Bellwether last year:

The question Lacayo and many others have on their lips is whether the unofficial Biennial theme of “lessness” amounts to much in the end. Not that this is necessarily the case of nay sayers, but I’ll admit that if the only thing I’d seen taking this approach was The New Museum’s Unmonumental and The Whitney’s Biennial, I’d probably have a fairly grim outlook on the prospects for art. Certainly these shows have given me pause, neither effectively displaying the work or necessarily even finding the best of it. By contrast, New York’s commercial galleries have been more successful this year launching unmonumental-esque shows. While the large size of the Biennial undoubtedly makes the job a little more difficult, Bellwether’s brilliantly organized three part exhibition series curated by Becky Smith and Joao Ribas could be no better testament to the success seen within the commercial world, as was Gagosian’s Beneath the Underdog, curated by artists Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen last spring. Notably New York Times critic Holland Cotter named this show one of the best gallery shows of the year. (Read more)

Sterling Ruby: Chron in The New York Times/New Yorker

2008-03-21T08:30:00.002-04:00

Sterling Ruby:Chron currently on view at The Drawing Center is reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times today:

Sterling Ruby is one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century. That’s only eight years, of course, but the claim may stick. He makes obstreperous, richly glazed ceramic vessels that suggest charred remains; totemic sculptures webbed with mucousy, macramélike drips of resin; large, dark collages dotted with constellations of tiny images of artifacts; and drawings, photographs and short videos. Read more

And from this week's New Yorker:

STERLING RUBY
Artists like Ruby, whose art shifts from sculpture to photography to collage, drawing, and painting (in materials like spray paint and nail polish), can be difficult to pin down. This survey does the trick by focussing on Ruby’s use of line during the past five years. Themes range from the political to the social to the abstract—but the fulcrum is drawing. Photographs of words carved on trees rhyme visually with etched Formica benches. Ruby remains a cipher, but the show makes a strong case for considering his work as a coherent whole. A concurrent exhibition of Ruby’s ceramic works, which bridge the gap between fairy tale and science fair, are on view at Metro Pictures. Through March 27. (The Drawing Room, 40 Wooster St. 212-219-2166.)

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Artforum

2008-03-20T20:30:00.002-04:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings, which I curated at The Drawing Center, is reviewed in the current issue of Artforum. (Click on image to read)

2008-03-13T15:10:00.004-04:00

"None of the alternatives to the gallery can reach a sizeable audience. Yet, given today's homogenized world, there has never been a deeper, more immediate need for wide-spread sowing of relevant new ideas. So there are two ways to go: if the artist would work the long revolutionary tail and address the working-class only, never mind the galleries, get out in the streets and do it. If, on the other hand, all possible creatures are worth your trouble, use the galleries and never mind: the row to hoe should be rooted-in your 'radical' works not their 'radical' system, for our muddled 'radical' critics have confounded buyers' terms with sellers' standards." Jo Baer, Radical Attitudes to the Gallery, 1977

2008-02-26T23:25:00.008-05:00

Civilization represents itself in a storeroom of objects, memorized obstacles to function. Favorite object of the bourgeois: SELF. In communism the disappearance of the self and the destruction of the object go hand in hand. SELF: a fallacy a posteriori; at the moment of action the self disappears completely. It resurfaces during unproductive states of repose, an occasion for the luxurious recuperation from function. Just like the object. The self is the pension and savings of the undynamic rentier. Both self and object are supposedly capable of guaranteeing certainty, immutability. The world as tautology...

Carl Einstein, 1921

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings on Artforum.com

2008-01-25T12:31:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is a Critics' Pick on Artforum.com

Alan Saret:Gang Drawings in The New York Sun

2008-01-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret, Three Circles Rules & Free Sweep, 1967. Colored pencil on paper. Photo by Cathy Carver.

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is reviewed in The New York Sun.

Click here for previous reviews in The New York Times, Time Out, and The New Yorker

2008-01-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

Raymond Tallis writes on the "intellectual revolution" sparked by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides [the subject of his forthcoming book] in Prospect:

One attraction of Parmenides is that you can read his complete surviving works in 15 minutes. His arguments are set out in On Nature, a rather prosaic poem of which only 150 lines survive. The heart of his case is in Fragments 3, 6 and 8, where he sets out a worldview that even by the standards of philosophy is, as Aristotle said, "near to madness." His central argument is so quick that if you blink, you will miss it.

It goes as follows. That which is not, is not. "What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything that comes into being must arise out of what-is-not, objects, states of affairs and so on cannot come into being. Likewise, they cannot pass away, because in order to do so they would have to enter the realm of what-is-not. Since it does not exist, what-is-not cannot be the womb of generation, or the tomb of that which perishes. The no-longer and the not-yet are variants of what-is-not, and so the past and future do not exist either. Change, then, is impossible. Equally, multiplicity is unreal. The empty space necessary to separate one object from another would be another example of what-is-not. And since things cannot be anything to a greater or lesser degree—this would require what-is to be mixed with the diluting effect of what-is-not—the universe must be homogeneous.
---------------------------
Pascal Dusapin discusses his sixth opera Faustus, The Last Night on the occasion of its production in Lyon last year.

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Time Out NY

2007-12-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret, “Gang Drawings”

In 10th-century Japan, a new phonetic shorthand, kana, evolved as an alternative to Chinese script. Unsuitable for business transactions because of its informal nature, but singular for its ability to convey great emotion, kana became the lexical choice of poets; it is the language in which The Tale of Genji, the oldest recorded romance, is written. To walk into the Alan Saret exhibition, “Gang Drawings,” comprising works on paper and wire sculptures spanning the ’60s to the present, is to experience a similar divergence of his work from the language of Minimalism and witness the creation of a new set of morphemes that form the basis of his unique and exceedingly expressive visual vocabulary.

All of the drawings in the show were made by pulling, pushing, dragging or shimmying fistfuls of colored pencils across the page. The resulting groupings of lines connote landscapes, hair clots, scattered grasses; all are clearly part of an experimentation with the drawn mark as base unit of visual language, an effort mirrored in titles that often consist of made-up words. Saret’s contribution to Postminimalism is the simple marriage of process to the infinitely variable hand gesture, and is elegantly epitomized in one of the earliest dated drawings in the show.

Called Half Circles and Sweep Circuit (1967), the work may be a nod to Saret’s interest in architecture and engineering. The ingress and egress of marks to and from a sort of racetrack form is balanced sublimely by the sensitivity of stroke, and the ever-so-slight violence of surrounding staccato traces. This willingness to probe the roots of a way of communicating still registers with freshness and force today.—Tova Carlin

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in The New Yorker

2007-11-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

ALAN SARET
The mechanics of Saret’s “Gang Drawings” are deceptively simple: a fistful (a “gang”) of colored pencils produce clusters of synchronized, multihued marks. The images, which evoke swarming paramecia or swirling cosmic dust, project a joyous, concentrated energy—Saret’s habit of using the word “ensoulment” in his titles feels earned. (Two sculptures of tangled wire, the artist’s signature medium, recapitulate the gang forms in three dimensions.) Dating from 1967 to the present, the drawings are a testament to Saret’s stature as a pioneering post-minimalist and to his history as an art-world maverick. Through Feb. 7. (Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. 212-219-2166.)

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in the New York Times

2007-11-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is reviewed in the NYT Times today.

Alan Saret and Kirstine Roepstorff at The Drawing Center

2007-11-07T20:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings
Curated by João Ribas

Alan Saret, Three Circles Rules & Free Sweep, 1967. Colored pencil on paper. Photo by Cathy Carver.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, November 8, 6-8 pm.

From November 9, 2007 to February 7, 2008, The Drawing Center will present Alan Saret: Gang Drawings, the first major museum exhibition of the pioneering artist’s work in nearly two decades. Saret is an important figure in the history of Post-Minimal art and was a vital part of the SoHo alternative art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition will trace the evolution of Saret's process-based experimentation with drawing, including approximately thirty “Gang Drawings,” made with fistfuls (“gangs”) of colored pencils swept across the page, spanning from the late 1960s to the present. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, Alan Saret: Gang Drawings aims to reveal Saret's influence on a generation of postwar American artists and his contributions to the alternative arts movement, and will feature never-before-seen work from Saret's personal archive.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Papers 73, a 16-page edition of The Drawing Center's publication series featuring essays by Klaus Kertess , Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit , and Johanna Burton, critic and art historian, as well as color images of works in the exhibition.

There will be a free Gallery Talk on Saturday, December 1 at 4:00 pm with curator João Ribas.

Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle that Changed—The Time
Curated by João Ribas

Kirstine Roepstorff, One Dictator, 2007. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard, 67 x 43 inches. © Kirstine Roepstorff, courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin . Photograph by Hans-Georg Gaul.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, November 8, 6-8 pm.

From November 9, 2007 through February 7, 2008, the Drawing Room will present an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist, Kirstine Roepstorff. Featuring the artist’s signature use of the medium of collage to confront the tension between political identity and individual desire, the exhibition will consist of twelve works ranging in size from 8 x 10 inches to a labor-intensive 12-foot installation mounted directly on the gallery wall. It's Not the Eye of the Needle that Changed--The Time will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in North America .

Through a working method that Roepstorff calls “approprio-arranging,” the artist sews, glues, pins, and weaves together photocopies, fabrics, glitter, paper, and images appropriated from magazines and newspapers to construct a poetic, post-feminist narrative. Roepstorff's work addresses issues such as the failure of collective social projects, consumerism, and contemporary gender politics.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Papers 74 featuring an essay by art critic Daniel Kunitz and images of the new series of works.

On Saturday, November 10 at 4:00 pm, there will be a gallery talk with the artist in the Drawing Room. Admission is free.

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in the NY Times

2007-10-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper is reviewed in the NY Times today.
For reviews in The New York Sun and The New Yorker, click here and here.

William Anastasi: Raw in Artforum

2007-10-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

William Anastasi: Raw is reviewed in the current issue of Artforum.

The show was previously a critic's pick by Cecilia Alemani on Artforum.com:

William Anastasi
THE DRAWING ROOM, THE DRAWING CENTER

40 Wooster Street

April 21–July 21

Issue (detail), 1966/2007, plaster, 156 x 4 1/2 x 1/4".

Located at the intersection of Minimalism, instructional art, and process-oriented practices, William Anastasi’s works find endless formal possibilities in the most prosaic materials. This exhibition explores the expanded notion of drawing through re-creations of seminal pieces from the 1960s that transform the room’s physical characteristics either gently or dramatically. Issue, 1966/2007, consists of a four-and-a-half-inch-wide vertical strip that cuts a gallery wall from floor to ceiling. By chipping away the superficial layers of paint and plaster with chisel and hammer, the work strips the wall bare and turns it into a kind of archaeological site, revealing the gallery's countless lives. The debris is neatly organized on the floor, arranged to resemble a loose continuation of the line cut from the wall. Untitled, 1966/2007, is the result of simple instructions: “With a small cup soberly pour one gallon of paint against a wall as near the ceiling as possible.” A thick, slimy line of black enamel cleaves the wall in two. A delicate balance between material and shape is achieved also in whowasit youwasit propped II, 1965, in which one aluminum beam perches precariously atop another in an unstable ballet that resembles Richard Serra’s syntax but is deprived of that artist’s aggressiveness. Anastasi injects levity into these everyday raw materials, creating a vibrant symphony in which lines, surfaces, and matter resonate in unison.
—Cecilia Alemani

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New York Sun

2007-10-04T08:30:00.000-04:00

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper at The Drawing Center is reviewed today in The New York Sun.

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New Yorker

2007-10-03T22:07:00.000-04:00

Expanded Cinema in Art Review

2007-09-26T08:30:00.000-04:00

2007-09-03T20:21:00.001-04:00

"At the moment politics are more dangerous to young writers than journalism.....because writers now feel that politics are necessary to them, without having learnt yet how best to be political....writers function in a state of political flux, on the eve of the crisis, rather than in the crisis itself; it is before a war or a revolution that they are listened to and come into their own and it was because they are disillusioned at their impotence during the war that so many became indifferent to political issues after the peace" Cyril Connolly in 1938.
------

On the Iron Law of Oligarchy, From Political Parties; A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy written by Robert Michels in 1911:

"Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly. The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective positions of the leader and the led. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed."

Read the book here.
------------

"Over the last twenty years there has been a systematic campaign to eliminate any figure of the worker from political space. "Immigrant" is a word that came to be used at a certain moment in this campaign. For example, one of the first Mitterand governments, the Mauroy government, during the major workers' strikes at Flins, at Citroen, at Talbot, said that these workers were in fact immigrants who were not really integrated into French social reality. The category "immigrant" has been systematically substituted for the category 'worker', only to be supplanted in its turn by the category of the 'clandestine' or illegal alien. First workers, then immigrants, then illegal aliens. If we insist that we are actually talking about workers--and whether they have worked, are working, or no longer work, doesn't represent a subjective difference----it is to struggle against this unceasing effort to erase any political reference to the figure of the worker."
Alain Badiou in a 1998 interview.
-------------
Alexander Cockburn on "Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?":

"America right now is ‘anti-war’, in the sense that about two thirds of the people think the occupation of Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats in last November’s elections, when they recaptured Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement. To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement, but not by a large margin. Compared to kindred movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan’s wars in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert."
------------------------
This film portrait of Stravinsky en route to Berlin brought me back to a passage from Memories and Commentaries, by Stravinsky and Robert Craft:

"World War II had broken out in Europe when Stravinsky next entered New York harbour in September 1939 on a ship overcrowded with refugees. The steamer, the SS Manhattan, sailing from Bordeaux, was so thronged that he was obliged to share a cabin with six others, even though all seven had paid for private accommodation. Toscanini was on board, too, but they did not meet. The fiery Italian has refused to enter his cabin, since it also bunked six other passengers. Apparently he slept in the lounge. (More than thirty years later, one of Stravinsky's cabin mates, from Cleveland, returned a shirt that the composer had loaned him during the voyage.)
Unaware that Stravinsky was not seeking asylum in the country---he had a return ticket in his valise---the Immigration official who interviewed him asked the most startling question of his life: ' Do you want to change your name?' When Stravinsky laughed, the official said, "Well, most of them do.' Stravinsky himself, of course, had not remotely supposed that his intended stay for a few months would last until 1951. "
----------------
Expanded Cinema is finally back with a post on Alexandr Hackenschmied [of a rare film of his to have survived World War II]. Recent posts include Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, and Joris Ivens.

New Economy Reviewed in Time Out New York

2007-07-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

[Click to read]

New Economy Reviewed on Artforum.com

2007-07-15T23:07:00.001-04:00

[Click over image]

In Defense of Ardor in Time Out, New Yorker

2007-06-19T20:00:00.000-04:00

[Click over image to read]

In Defense of Ardor in The New York Times

2007-06-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

Special Film Screenings in conjunction with New Economy

2007-06-19T00:30:00.000-04:00

Anthology Film Archives, Tuesday, June 19 and Thursday, July 5, 7:30 pm

Chantal Akerman's From The Other Side is being screened at Anthology Film Archives on Tuesday, June 19 and Thursday, July 5 in conjunction with the New Economy exhibition I've curated at Artists Space, on view from June 15 to July 28.

Chantal Akerman FROM THE OTHER SIDE / DE L'AUTRE CÔTÉ 2002, 99 minutes. In English and Spanish with English subtitles.
The story is old as the hills, yet every day it continues to unfold, every day more terribly. Sometimes poor people, in an attempt to survive, risk their lives and leave everything behind to live elsewhere. But they're not wanted elsewhere. And if they are wanted it's for their labor, to do jobs that no one wants to do. In FROM THE OTHER SIDE, elsewhere is the United States and the poor are mostly Mexicans. Renowned filmmaker Chantal Akerman shifts her focus between the border towns of Agua Prieta, Sonora, where people from all over Mexico wait in limbo before crossing over, and neighboring Douglas, Arizona, a town ringed by mountains and desert plains.

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at Second Street)
Telephone: (212) 505-5181

2007-05-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

New Economy

June 15 – July 28, 2007
Curated by João Ribas

Chantal Akerman

Kader Attia

Ursula Biemann

Mike Bouchet

Heath Bunting

Los Carpinteros

Carolina Caycedo

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel

Harun Farocki

Eva and Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG
Cildo Meireles

Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Oliver Ressler

Joe Scanlan

Santiago Sierra

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Milica Tomic

Donelle Woolford

New Economy looks at the nature of artistic practice in today’s global information economy, defined by an emphasis on immaterial and knowledge-based production. In addressing notions of artistic labor in the postindustrial economic order, the exhibition also focuses on artists dealing with the social conditions and redefinitions of work implicit in a post-Fordist economy.

The term “New Economy” entered into circulation in the 1990s to define a knowledge-based form of late capitalism, heralding the productive power of information and communication technology as the engine of global markets. The 'informatisation' of production served as a catalyst for a flexible economic model favoring ideas, services, and sociability over inert commodities and industrial labor. As capital seemingly dematerialized—with knowledge workers, information, and communication at its center—industrial economies looked to downsizing, outsourcing, and structural underemployment, resulting in a correlative ‘remapping’ of labor.

Yet if the information-based model of postindustrial society values communication, creativity, and social relationships, what is the role of artistic practice in this political economy? Do artists function as migrant laborers, moving from biennial to biennial producing a form of ‘artisanalized’ information? Is studio practice a localized form of resistance to immaterial production? Is there any political agency in artists being positioned directly in contrast to the marginal elements of the body politic, afforded rights, such as that of circulation, denied to other political subjects?

New Economy takes these concerns as reflected in the artistic practice of the last decade. Whether in reassessing the value of industrial production, disrupting established economic patterns and proposing alternatives, emphasizing both the pre-industrial and informational quality of artistic labor, embracing mobility as socially progressive through the transnational character of post-studio work, revealing the disparities of our supposed ‘frictionless’ economy, or highlighting the commodification of social relationships over democratic processes, the artists in New Economy reflect the complex character of post-Fordist society.

Image: Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital, 2004, dimensions variable, courtesy the artist

2007-05-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

I will be in conversation with artist William Anastasi at The Drawing Center, this Thursday, May 31, at 6:30 PM, as part of the exhibition William Anastasi: Raw.

In Defense of Ardor

2007-05-17T01:32:00.000-04:00

In Defense of Ardor
Curated by João Ribas and Becky Smith
May 24th to June 30th, 2007
Opening reception Thursday May 24th, 6-8 pm

Julieta Aranda
Johanna Billing
Colby Bird
Nathalie Djurberg
Dana Frankfort
Jutta Koether
Jonathan Meese
Otto Muehl
Michael Queenland
Jacob Robichaux
Jessica Stockholder
Kirsten Stoltmann

What is the point of art that does nothing but “dramatize how dark and stupid everything is” [David Foster Wallace]? In Defense of Ardor proposes a contrast to insipid notions of irony, unremitting cynicism, and pessimistic detachment.

Irony has been narrowly defined—and partly misappropriated—as a kind of ideological malaise, a willful displacing of affect in return for absolute neutrality and arrogant negativity. The result is a “hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it's just kidding.” Yet lost in this torpor of ironic detachment are engaged forms of productive irony and ardor, in sharp contrast to the ineffectual character of the corrosive cynicism now taken as normative. What of the irony of Kierkegaard, Schlegel or Thomas Mann, directed at barbarism seeking to destroy liberal values? Or as Adam Zagajewski suggests after Wallace, the tragic, poetic, and parodic resistance of ardor, or the progressive function of engaged artistic practice defined by failure, ideological fervor, or exhortation? Can sincere commitment, feverish engagement, or poetic intensity be productive in the era of the mass democracy of taste, where irony is no longer the language of power inverted, but rather, the vulgate of complacency and consensus?

Whether by reassessing the legacies of radical avant-gardes and a willful lapse into puritanical ethics (Michael Queenland); the collective stasis of democratic politics in an administered society (Julieta Aranda, Johanna Billing); the need for self-actualization and the irony of authenticity (Colby Bird); the progressive function of play (Jacob Robichaux); the poetic intensity of form and material (Jutta Koether, Jessica Stockholder); the aesthetics of earnestness and sincerity (Dana Frankfort, Kirsten Stoltmann); or the transgressive states of Dionysian or “Id-ridden” intensity (Nathalie Djurberg, Jonathan Meese, Otto Muehl), the artists in the exhibition set out a variety of means to contrast the corrosive, enervating effect of cynical reason.

In Defense of Ardor is the final installment of a three part series of exhibitions at Bellwether titled The Mallarmé Propositions. The other exhibitions in the series were Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance) (October-November 2006) and Aspects, Forms, & Figures (February-March 2007). Click here for more information.

$960,000+

2007-03-25T22:46:00.000-04:00

Please join us for the opening of "$960,000+" the SVA MFA Thesis Show on Tuesday, March 27th.

$960,000+
Curated by João Ribas
Visual Arts Gallery at 601 West 26th Street
March 23 - April 7
Reception: Tuesday, March 27, 6 - 8pm

March 23 - April 7, 2007
Reception: Tuesday, March 27, 6 - 8pm

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents “$960,000+,” the second of two thesis exhibitions featuring drawing, painting, video, animation and site-specific installations by graduating MFA Fine Arts Department students. “$960,000+” is curated by New York-based curator and critic João Ribas and includes work by brianelectro, Eun Woo Cho, Michael Egan, Nikolas Gambaroff, Miryana Gligoric, Hadassa Goldvicht, Yu-Sheng Ho, Sung Hee Jang, Crisman Liverman, Jason Losh, Lara Star Martini, Ann Oren, Lai-Chung Poon, Ryan Sullivan, Kristen Wykret and Yejin Yoo.

The exhibition’s title refers to the combined living and educational expenses of the participating artists, estimated at $60,000 per person. Intended to call attention to the economics of making and distributing art and the current climate for emerging artists, the title grew out of discussion among the artists and curator in preparation for the exhibition. Their discussion continues in a blog of the same name, http://960000.blogspot.com/.

João Ribas is curator of contemporary exhibitions at The Drawing Center. He has curated several group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad including: Aspects, Forms and Figures, Bellwether, 2007 (with Becky Smith); Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), Bellwether, 2006; and Means Without End, Guild and Greyshkul, 2005. He has been a visiting critic and lecturer at SVA, New Art Dealers Alliance, the International Art Critics Association, the National Academy Museum and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Ribas has written on art, film and literature for The New York Sun, Art Review, Time Out New York, Flash Art, PAPER, Tema Celeste, Art + Auction, Artnet.com, ARTnews and other publications.

Aspects, Forms, and Figures in the NYT

2007-03-05T00:19:00.000-05:00

2007-02-09T21:44:00.000-05:00

Artecapital.net has published an interview with me by painter Ana Cardoso, [for a translated version click here].

Aspects, Forms, and Figures

2007-02-04T14:51:00.000-05:00

ASPECTS, FORMS, AND FIGURES
Curated by João Ribas & Becky Smith
Bellwether
134 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
February 8th-March 10th, 2007

Opening reception February 8, 6-8 pm

Carol Bove
Aaron Curry
Christopher Deeton
Jack Goldstein
Jonah Groeneboer
Alice Könitz
Adelina Lopes
Anthony Pearson
Nathan Mabry
John McCracken
Stephen G. Rhodes
Emily Sundblad
Gordon Terry

‘Aspects, Forms, and Figures’ looks to the archaic, noumenal, and totemic character of form. Rather than literal or phenomenological readings, it proposes aspects of form beyond phenomena yet present only in form itself.

Can form be a figure of the numinous, where objects of human labor are filled with a sense of immanence, of being wholly ‘other’? As Karl Marx writes in Capital:

The form of wood is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing, But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.

The roots of the “numinous” do not relate directly to magic, but to a realm of knowledge beyond the empirical: ineffable knowledge only partly manifested in visible or quantifiable phenomena. This aspect emerges through form, and only through form can it be apprehended or intoned, even if this “thing-in-itself” remains radically unknowable. It takes many guises, from atavistic and archaic forms (Christopher Deeton, John McCracken, Nathan Mabry), to the Kantian noumenon and the immanence to objects and places (Adelina Lopes, Anthony Pearson, Emily Sundblad), the 'dark matter' of the universe (Jonah Groeneboer, Jack Goldstein), ontology and metaphysics (Gordon Terry, Aaron Curry), commodity-form and reification (Carol Bove, Alice Könitz), dialectical materialism (Stephen G. Rhodes), and the philosophical concern with aesthetics.

Beyond a means to resist literal or phenomenological readings of form, what is revealed in this noumenal aspect is that meaning is a glimpse of ‘other’ knowledge, making the art object a sensuous thing both supra-sensible and social—even if anachronistic in a society that renders such metaphysics meaningless, not to mention useless.

Expanded Cinema

2007-02-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

Expanded Cinema has new posts with work by Abbas Kiarostami, Mara Mattuschka, and an early abstract short by Walter Ruttmann.

Here are the filmmakers and artists included so far:

Walerian Borowczyk
Toshio Matsumoto
Martin Arnold
Raul Ruiz
Harun Farocki
Marie Menken
Groupe Medvedkine
Norman McLaren
Peter Kubelka
Georges Schwizgebel
Charles and Ray Eames
Viking Eggeling
Ed Emshwiller
Joseph Beuys
Hollis Frampton
Paul and Marlene Kos
Abigail Child
Lutz Mommartz
Owen Land (ne George Landow)
Len Lye
Popol Vuh
Wojciech Bruszewski
René Viénet
Maya Deren
Wolf Vostell
René Laloux
Sergei Eisenstein
Peter Tscherkassky
Germaine Dulac
Peter Greenaway
Abbas Kiarostami
Mara Mattuschka
Walter Ruttmann

2007-01-04T09:17:00.002-05:00

I have a review of Giulio Paolini's four-part exhibition--held in the four separate locations of Marian Goodman and Yvon Lambert in Paris and New York--in today's New York Sun.

Here's my picture of 7 Rue Des Grands Augustins, the house where the Balzac story takes place, and later Picasso's studio, as I mention in the piece.

Also, my review of Robert Morris' last show at Castelli is in this month's ARTnews.
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Expanded Cinema has recent posts with work by Peter Tscherkassky, Sergei Eisenstein (his first film, from 1923), René Laloux, Wolf Vostell, Maya Deren, and René Viénet.

2006-11-28T12:03:00.001-05:00

Posting on Notes and Queries has been scarce of late because of other writing, including a recent review of Yayoi Kusama at Robert Miller, and pieces for ARTnews, The New York Sun, Time Out NY, and The Guardian's art & architecture blog.

Expanded Cinema has been going strong despite the deadlines however, with recent posts on Lutz Mommartz, Hollis Frampton, and Charles and Ray Eames.

Rhizome.org recently featured the project:

November 20, 2006

Repeating Cinema's History

The popularity of online video-sharing sites has led to the ad hoc curation of archives and thematic reblogs of all sort. Recently, curator Joao Ribas started Expanded Cinema, a blog that aggregates web-posted archival videos from the history of avant-garde cinema, including 'experimental film, early video, and sound-based, durational work.' Choice finds include pieces by Martin Arnold, Walerian Borowczyk, Charles and Ray Eames, Harun Farocki, Peter Kubelka, Toshio Matsumoto, and others. Ribas's comments on the videos often include external links to critical essays or other historical details that help frame the work. Quite often, there is a sense of desire to place the work within a timeline of influences, as in the case of 'Le Vol d'Icare' (1974), Georges Schwizgebel's 'pioneering animation,' that 'looks more at home today than it ever did in the early 1970s.' In many of the works, there seems to be a tension between the use of film or video as a means of documentation, and as an art practice of its own. The most interesting piece blur the boundaries, as is the case with the Eameses' 'SX-70' (1972), which also meditates on the formal properties of film and video. Once again, focused internet users are taking art history into their own hands, making 'playlists' that elevate works from the status of hiddenness or obscurity to central in our imaginations--which to say on our desktop. - James Petrie
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New World Records has released a masterful new recording of three George Antheil pieces performed by pianist Guy Livingston and the Philadelphia Virtousi Chamber Ochestra: Dreams, Piano Concerto No. 2, and Serenade No. 2.

Livingston, a renowned performer and scholar of Antheil's music, brings a marked sensitivity and fluidity to the Concerto, which trades the composer's infamously iconoclastic compositional style for a Stravinsky-inflected orchestration and Bachian cadences, as well as an intricate toccata deftly handed by Livingston.

The disc also includes two world-premiere recordings, including the lush Serenade from 1948, showcasing both Livingston's dedication to the Antheil oeuvre as well his consummate skill for breathing new life into it.
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Milton Friedman's obit in the Guardian: "Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was one of the greatest economists of all time. He may come to be included in the same category of pre-eminent figures as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marx and John Maynard Keynes."

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Alan Hollinghurst writes brilliantly on the "shy, steely Ronald Firbank" (whose novels are neither widely read nor widely available in the US) in the TLS:

Firbank was never easy to know. He had friends, probably fell in love at least once, but seems temperamentally to have found intimacy very difficult. Because he was so eccentric and so conspicuous, people tended to remember him, his tall, slender, immaculately dressed figure, his extraordinary undulating walk, his use, at various times in his life, of not necessarily discreet make-up. Even his friends could feel embarrassed by him; and his admirers have often been prey to ambivalence, the sense that a distance has to be kept from his queenery, from the intensity of a self that is not merely undisguised but insisted on, languidly and nervously. Firbank’s deepening and somehow inevitable solitude cannot be over-stressed. He has tended to be seen through a haze of miscellaneous anecdote that emphasizes his eccentricity, his curious bons mots, his writhing shyness and his occasional steely boldness.

...

Firbank achieved his highly complex originality not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out. The comparison might more tellingly be made, though, with Proust, an artist with whom Firbank has closer affinities of temperament and point of view: where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator’s</font> complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce – not merely to condense but to design by elimination. “I am all design – once I get going”, he wrote. “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.” He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue.

Dice Thrown in the New York Times

2006-11-03T09:30:00.000-05:00

Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), my curated show at Bellwether, is reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times today.

See below for reviews from the The New Yorker and Time Out from this week. The show is open through Nov. 11th.

Dice Thrown in The New Yorker, Time Out

2006-11-02T09:19:00.000-05:00

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Catch a screening of Robert Greenwald's Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, tonight at Whitebox, 7pm. Click here for more info.

2006-10-22T20:24:00.000-04:00

I'll be lecturing at SVA this Wednesday, October 25th, at 141 West 21st Street, 7.00pm, as part of the MFA Fine Arts visiting critics program.
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Some installation shots of Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), my curated exhibition currently at Bellwether.

Click here for more info.

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That's me in the back, around age 19, playing bass with The Mooney Suzuki at CBGB's. This grainy photo, and everything it evokes, is one of the tens of thousands of artefacts that will survive the club's closing.

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Marcuse: “The Beautiful belongs to the imagery of Liberation.”

2006-10-19T04:01:00.003-04:00

I have a review of Albert Oehlen's show at Luhring Augustine in this week's issue of Time Out, and a review of FOTO: New Photography from Denmark at Scandinavia House, in the New York Sun today.

Also look for a review of Mamma Andersson's last show at David Zwirner in the next issue of Tema Celeste, and the "hair-trigger liveliest" critic in the country, Jerry Saltz, quoted me in the Village Voice last week.

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From Saint-John Perse's speech at the Nobel Banquet in 1960:

"In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all «poetic» in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist. Discursive thought or poetic ellipsis - which of these travels to, and returns from, more remote regions? And from that primal night in which two men born blind grope for their ways, the one equipped with the tools of science, the other helped only by the flashes of his imagination, which one returns sooner and more heavily laden with a brief phosphorescence? The answer does not matter. The mystery is common to both. And the great adventure of the poetic mind is in no way secondary to the dramatic advances of modern science. "

2006-10-16T17:28:00.000-04:00

From the WSJ, on Orhan Pamuk winning the Nobel Prize:

When the Turkish controversialist (and novelist) Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature, no doubt the awarding committee felt the usual frisson of delight as they watched the world quarrel, yet again, about their choice. They certainly know how to push buttons. Last year, they chose Harold Pinter, who had written nothing of consequence for decades. Instead he'd turned his life into an extended political rant against the U.S., and that clearly appealed to the Swedes. The award itself, one might conclude, became an act of agitprop. Still, in his heyday, Mr. Pinter did do great things for the language and literature of theater, no matter how long ago. So what has Orhan Pamuk done?

The answer to that is, as can be deduced by the rhetoric, cynical:

The pity of it all is that Turkey desperately lacks a writer to explain itself to the world. Deplored by other Muslims for being too Western, and by the West for being neither Iran nor Switzerland, Turks remain a worrisome mystery to others. In "Snow," his last fiction work, Mr. Pamuk talks most clearly about contemporary Turkey, with its religious-secular-ethnic rifts, but he does so with so much Kafka/Borges/post-Theory tomfoolery that it reveals more his literary ambitions than his country.

Which is why his political adventures ring so false.

Read more.
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Ian Parker profiled Christopher Hitchens in a long and revelatory piece in the New Yorker last week [alas, offline only], most of it concerned with Hitchen’s apostasy, “which runs from revolutionary socialism to a kind of neoconversatism:

What happened to Christopher Hitchens? How did a longtime columnist at The Nation become a contributor to the Weekly Standard, a supported of President Bush in the 2004 election, and an invited speaker at the conservative activist David Horowitz’s forthcoming restoration Weekend, along with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh?”
…….
Three years later, Hitchens in still on Fox News talking about the Iraq war. He has not flinched from his position that the invasion was necessary, nor declined any serious invitation to defend that position publicly, even as the violence in Iraq has increased, and American opinion has turned against the intervention and the President who launched it.”
……….
While still at Oxford, Hitchens wrote his first article for the New Statesman, a left-leaning weekly. Upon graduating and moving to London, he became an occasional contributor, while taking a number of jobs in mainstream journalism, and selling the Socialist Worker on street corners. The New Statesman was enjoying a golden moment: its staff and writers included Amis, Fenton, McEwan, and Julian Barnes, the novelist. The Friday-lunch gatherings of Statesman hot shots and other writers, in which they out-joked each other on matters of sex, literature, and nuclear disarmament, now have the status of literary legend.
…..
Here’s a link to one of my favorite pieces by Hitchens, his Atlantic essay on why Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim “may be the funniest book of the past half century.”

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Playwright David Edgar on John Osborne and Look Back in Anger in the London Review of Books:

From within a few weeks of its opening in May 1956, it’s been accepted that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger ushered in a theatrical revolution. Launching both the Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama, the play is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits.
.....
Each of the great ages of British theatre writing—from the Elizabethan-Jacobean period through the Restoration to the turn of the 20th century---has spoken to and for a newly significant and confident social group. For Osborne, it was the generation too young to have fought in the Second World War but old enough to have benefited from the 1944 Education Act, who had escaped from the lower middle and working classes but had not been accepted by the class they had joined. Jimmy Porter is the most vivid representative of the children for whom the welfare state had proved an invalid passport; it got them out of a background they despised, but appeared not to allow them entry into a new world in which they felt comfortable. They were left in no man’s land, scornful of the states between whose frontier posts they found themselves stranded. Having missed out on the revolutionary certainties of the 1930s, this generation was contemptuous both of what Porter calls Dame Allison’s mob, the residue of the old gang who ruled England between the wars, and of the working-class yobs in the cinema….

Here is an extract from Osborne's autobiography, in which he recalls the opening night of the play on May 8th, 1956:

When I arrived at the theatre, still nauseous from the early-hours drinking, George attempted to brace me up but his own disappointment seemed clearer and more stricken than my own. He told me there was quite a good notice in the Financial Times. Tony pretended to be astonished by both of us. "But what on earth did you expect? You didn't expect them to like it did you?"

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Wittgenstein on music, language and understanding:

What we call "understanding a sentence" has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think. But I don't mean that understanding a musical theme is more like the picture which one tends to make oneself of understanding a sentence; but rather that this picture is wrong, and that understanding a sentence is much more like what really happens when we understand a tune than at first sight appears. For understanding a sentence, we say, points to a reality outside the sentence. Whereas one might say "Understanding a sentence means getting hold of its content; and the content of the sentence is in the sentence.
---------------
On a related note, I’m currently listening to the complete works of Anton Webern in chronological order, including chamber music, vocal works and symphonic pieces, starting with the Wagnerian Passacaglia No. 1 from 1908 and ending with the Cantata No. 2 [the last piece I could dig up]. Various selections of Webern’s work are available for download here. I hope to be able to briefly note on each work in the next few weeks.

2006-10-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), my curated show at Bellwether, opens tonight, October 12th, from 6-8pm.

“DICE THROWN (Will Never Annul Chance)”
Curated by Joao Ribas and Becky Smith
October 12th to November 11th, 2006
Opening reception October 12, 2006 6-8 pm

Walead Beshty
Peter Coffin
Elspeth Diederix
Marius Engh
Daniel Lefcourt
David Lieske
Lisa Oppenheim
Eileen Quinlan
Amanda Ross-Ho
Sara VanDerBeek
Melanie Willhide
Spencer Young

Bellwether is pleased to present DICE THROWN (Will Never Annul Chance), an exhibition of new currents in conceptual photography, curated by Joao Ribas and Becky Smith. The exhibition is part of a three-show series entitled The Mallarmé Propositions, which addresses several key themes in current artistic practice.

Photography has undergone two major shifts in the past few decades: the loss of its objective relationship to reality, and the medium’s increasing distance from modernism through its use in conceptual art. Recent conceptual photography has amended these two directions with a break from the way conceptual artists relegated photography to architectonic and instrumental uses, often merely to illustrate, dematerialize or record.

What results is a form of conceptual photography that approaches the medium as a poetic and expressive process. While digital technology has transformed the medium's pictorial potential, supposedly bringing it closer to the logic of painting, this new kind of photographic practice engages a conceptual space specific to the medium. “Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)” aims to contextualize a set of artists--many not yet associated with each other--that approach photography as an ideational, anti-mimetic, yet decidedly formal area of artistic practice.

Whether by treating a photograph as an instantiation of an idea or an object--rather than its surrogate--or as a distinct image-making method, this kind of photography moves beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, as a 'picture' of the real, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time-based art.

Replacing many of the traditional concerns of photographic practice, such work also confronts the reductive understanding of the medium’s role in the wake of conceptual art. With an active investment in the epistemological, socio-cultural, and material aspects of photography itself, and by intersecting it with a variety of disciplines, the artists included in “Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)” develop a diverse set of issues intrinsic to new currents in photography.

The Mallarmé Propositions follow from the poet’s declaration that “everything is summed up in Aesthetics and Political Economy.” Following “Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)” in early 2007 will be “Aspects, Forms, Figures” an exhibition focusing on the numinous as a kind of of deep formalism—-as in Marx’s claim about grotesque ideas dreamed up by commodity form—and “In Defense of Ardor,” which will propose ardor as an ethical and political imperative.

Click here for more info.

2006-10-10T11:09:00.001-04:00

“A portrait on film, in action and in real time, of one of the greatest players in the history of soccer," Football As Never Before by Hellmuth Costar, featuring George Best, [left] from 1971:

“What at first seems like an eccentric experiment turns in the course of the film into something much more valuable: never before has the spectator had such a clear view of a player's progress through a match and his attempts to "read the game" - or such an insight into how carefully a player like Best paces himself. Particularly in the first half he spends far more time waiting for the ball than in possession of it. At times he seems to be just standing around hands on hips, at others he strolls around the pitch like a man out for a walk - even the referee overtakes him en route to the opponents' goal. And then, out of nowhere, he explodes into action, as he does for the first goal.”

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Gawker debuts an artists page, with open submissions.
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Susanne Messmer on ArtBeijing, in Die Tageszeitung:

Walking around the halls at ArtBeijing, you almost get the feeling it wouldn't be so bad if the Chinese art market cooled down a bit. Because nowadays it seems as if things have got out of control. There are hardly any photographs, sculptures or even video works here. Instead there are many paintings, mainly the kind that correspond to Western expectations. Present here is the art establishment that's been successfully reproducing 'political pop' and 'cynical realism' since the 1990s, with bright pictures full of Coke cans and red stars. Only seldom do you see something new.
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Isaiah Berlin on 'postmodernism' avant la lettre?:

History seems to show that after every great creative era comes an age during which the great heritage is meticulously examined, divided, classified, and labeled, in which the macrocosm is neglected for an infinity of microcosms which are credited with leading separate existences in it, and the wood is ignored because of the exquisite interest felt in the individual trees.

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Imre Kertesz is interviewed in Der Tagesspiegel:

"If you want to survive in a concentration camp, you have to follow its logic. This collaboration, whether willing or unwilling, is the biggest shame of those who survived. They cannot own up to it. But the writer can. Because literature possesses a special candour. These are simply good sentences, you see. In this case, good sentences are far more important than my own shame. My 'Fateless' isn't a cheerful novel. Yet it gave me a lot of joy when I wrote it. And you can only write when you're free, when you take pleasure in it. That's a deadly paradox, but I love it."

Neal Ascherson wrote a considered, moving review of Fateless for the London Review of Books recently. And here is the site for the film version of the novel by Lajos Koltai.
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Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault had a debate on Dutch television in 1974, on the issue of justice and power. Foucault makes some brilliant points in regard to justice and institutions: " The idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.....

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"No luxury and no comfort, no delight and no pleasure, no new liberty and no new discovery, no praise and no flattery, which we may enjoy on our journey will mean anything to us if we have forgotten the purpose of our travels, and the end of our labours"
Emerson

Review Panel Tonight @ The National Academy

2006-10-06T01:41:00.000-04:00

Click here for full info.
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In lieu of any real posts today, I leave you with the inimitable Kevin Ayers and the aesthetics of sincerity, and a brilliant, rarely seen collaboration between John Cage and Raashan Roland Kirk (playing three saxophones simultaneously). The full film, "Sound???", can be seen here.

2006-10-04T23:02:00.001-04:00

My review of DAMIEN HIRST: CORPUS: DRAWINGS 1981–2006, at Gagosian, is in today's New York Sun.

---Sam Lipsyte spent a week driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with Michel Houellebecq and waiting for something 'bad' to happen [From The Believer]:

It’s true I’ve been on the road with him all week and his behavior has been impeccable, but something’s got to give. There’s too much history. What about his purported obsession with sex clubs and prostitutes? What about his penchant for hitting on female journalists, explaining that only one night with him will guarantee the real story? What about the time he called Islam “the stupidest religion”? Surely, the man’s going to bust out with something reprehensible, and now, in his smoke-filled semi-suite at the Bel Age in L.A., is as good a time as any. He flies back to Europe tomorrow.

---Gabriel Josipovici on Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius [from ReadySteadyBook]:

Borges, like Beckett, dislikes the novel for two reasons, one having to do with literature and the other with life. He dislikes it because he finds it tedious and uninteresting to imitate reality, and he dislikes it because he feels that it propagates a false view of life which stops us seeing what life is really like.

---Here's a considered essay on intimacy, desire and communication in the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy--whose The Curved Planks I'm currently reading--from an old issue of Jacket magazine:

In a lecture titled ‘Sur la fonction du poème’ (On the function of the poem)Bonnefoy explored the question which underlies this first and subsequent books of poetry and his numerous critical works: the possibility of maintaining in poetic language an openness toward presence. The work of poetry is to cultivate that openness through what he has elsewhere referred to as its ‘work on desire’. Ideally, poetry would work to unravel the desires of reader and writer alike for the realization and recognition of their own subjectivities in language, in order to allow what is conceived of as a simpler, or, in Bonnefoy’s terms, second desire to emerge. The ‘second desire’ attaches the subject to others in a relationship of ‘communication’. For Bonnefoy, communication is the site of our intimate and mutual recognition of the relation of human existence, the existence of each of us, to death and the loss of presence.

2006-10-03T11:58:00.000-04:00

Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance), my curated show of new currents in conceptual photography, opens at Bellwether on October 12th. The show looks at work that breaks with the architectonic and instrumental uses of the medium in conceptual practice, and is part of a series of shows called "The Mallarmé Propositions," following from the poet’s declaration that “everything is summed up in aesthetics and political economy.”

Photography has undergone two major shifts in the past few decades: the loss of 'hard' empirical claims through its digital condition, and the medium’s increasing distance from modernism through its use in conceptual art. Recent conceptual photography has amended these two directions itself, with a break from the way conceptual artists relegated photography to architectonic and instrumental uses, often merely to illustrate, dematerialize, or record.

What results is a new form of conceptual photography that approaches the medium as a poetic and expressive process, rather a detached method of reproduction and representation. While digital technology has transformed the medium's pictorial potential, supposedly bringing it closer to the logic of painting, this new kind of photographic practice engages a conceptual space specific to the medium. "Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance)" aims to contextualize a set of artists--many not yet associated with each other--that approach photography as an ideational, anti-mimetic, yet decidedly formal area of artistic practice: Walead Beshty, Peter Coffin, Elspeth Diederix, Marius Engh, Daniel Lefcourt, David Lieske, Lisa Oppenheim, Eileen Quinlan, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sara VanDerBeek, Melanie Willhide, Spencer Young.

Whether by treating a photograph as an instantiation of an idea or an object--rather than its surrogate--or as a distinct image-making method, this kind of photography moves beyond the notion of a photograph as illustrative, as a 'picture' of the real, or as a mere supplement for ephemeral and time-based art.

With an active investment in the epistemological, socio-cultural, and material aspects of photography itself, and by intersecting it with a variety of disciplines, the artists included in Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance) develop a diverse set of issues intrinsic to new currents in photography.

Following Dice Thrown (Will Never Annul Chance) in the The Mallarmé Propositions will be Aspects, Forms, Figures, an exhibition focusing on the numinous as ‘deep’ formalism—-as in Marx’s claim about grotesque ideas dreamed up by commodity form—and In Defense of Ardor, which will propose ardor as an ethical and political imperative.

DICE THROWN (Will Never Annul Chance)
October 12th to November 11th, 2006
BELLWETHER

Sean Scully at the Met

2006-10-02T15:02:00.000-04:00

Sean Scully's Wall of Light series of paintings, watercolors, and pastels at the Met has been getting inspired, almost effusive responses from critics. In this past weekend's NYT, Grace Glueck calls them "bold and energizing paintings, surely among the most powerful contemporary works you'll see this season." Fellow New York Sun critic David Grosz wrote a near perfect review of the show last week.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Scully for Artinfo about the paintings a few months back, and reading that conversation again recently [cut down from nearly 2.5 hours], I noticed how insightful and generous he had been in discussing his work, the genesis of the paintings, his long-term dedication to the form, and his career. He also turned out to be a witty and often acerbic critic:

I'm going against the current trend towards bizarreness, oddness; as you just called it, the 'esoteric', which of course was around in the 1930s. That's what is being revisited now. In between the two great wars, there was a very strong period, particularly in Europe, of a strange, bizarre, distorted and perverse kind of figuration, with freaks in the paintings. Very disturbing twins, subjects like that. These paintings were mostly coming out of Italy and Germany. Now we have a return to that again in a strange period, after the end of Modernism.

Click here to read more.

2006-09-28T10:50:00.003-04:00

---My double review of John McCracken's solo show at David Zwirner, and Rita McBride's Double to Watch, Triple to Help, at Alexander and Bonin, is in The New York Sun today.

The Deutsche Oper has cancelled Hans Neuenfels' three year old production of the Mozart opera Idomeneo, striking it from its program because of fear of reprisals from the Muslim community. The move has sparked off protest about self-censorship, including from Harald Jähner, an editor of the Berliner Zeitung, who takes the opera house's decision as "not only cowardly but dangerous":

The director's scaredy-pantedness is furthermore dangerous because it represents a huge victory for the tiny minority of Muslims for whom terror is a legitimate means of political response. And that's precisely what terror wants to create: an atmosphere of horror in which every attack is multiplied in its potentiality. Within the realm of the possible, terror surfaces quickly in the every-day and influences our behaviour, even before a shot has been fired, a hand raised or a threat spoken. The worst accusation that one must make of the opera house director is that she has strengthened the terrorists' sense of power.

The sensitivity of many Muslims with respect to the Prophet and insults against him has unsettled our understanding of artistic freedom. There's an upside to that: the unsettledness has lead to a heightening. The debate on the Muhammad caricatures didn't only frighten Western artists, it also made them more aware of the effectiveness of art than they had been for a long time. What unholy fury art can release in societies that have yet to dissociate art from seriousness! For this and other reasons, cultural respect of religious feelings has grown markedly. In the midst of modern society, art accrues religion - Christianity included - as a kind of forgotten relative, viewing it with scepticism, new-found respect or animosity. Neuenfels' four-fold critique of religion must be understood in this context.

You can still see the Met's much less controversial production of the opera, with Ben Heppner and Dorothea Röschmann and James Levine, through the fall.

--Keats on visiting Robert Burns' old cottage for inspiration:

We went to the cottage and took some Whisky. I wrote a sonnet for the mere sake of writing some lines under the roof--they are so bad I cannot describe them. The man at the cottage was a great bore with his anecdotes--I hate the rascal--his life consists in fuz, fuzzy, fuzziest. He drinks glasses five for the quarter and twelve for the hour--he is a mahogany-faced old Jackass who knew Burns. He ought to have been kicked for having spoken to him...Oh the flummery of a birthplace! Cant! Cant! Cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache. Many a true word they say, is spoken in jest---they may be because his gab hindered my sublimity: the Rat dog made me write a flat sonnet.

---Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s interpreter at the UN, who was his "English voice" in front of the General Assembly, writes about it in a piece called Mahmoud and Me in the New York Observer:

Nuance in Persian is difficult to translate, but it can be most misleading—sometimes comically so—during interviews with the American press. When Brian Williams of NBC asked about Mr. Ahmadinejad’s attire—a suit rather than his trademark windbreaker—the Iranian president replied, “Sheneedem shoma kot-shalvaree hasteen, manam kot-shalvar poosheedam”—which was translated as “ … you wear a suit, so I wore a suit.” The phrase is actually much closer to “ … you are a suit, so I wore a suit.”

The Age of Horrorism

2006-09-12T16:24:00.002-04:00

Martin Amis has published a sprawling, scathing, brilliantly argued three-part essay in the Observer, on the rise of extreme Islam, terrorism, boredom, and barbarity in general. Amis vents spleen all around--especially at what sees as the West's faltering response to what he loosely calls 'horrorism'---but one particular passage stopped me in my tracks:

"The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blasé and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. And although we will eventually prevail in the war against terror, or will reduce it, as Mailer says, to 'a tolerable level' (this phrase will stick, and will be used by politicians, with quiet pride), we haven't got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn't feel. To be clear: the opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an 'ism'. It is independence of mind - that's all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be an unsmiling one, no doubt, with much stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centres, and the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else - a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the only entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband. [My emphasis.]

The passage, and the irony [see post from last week below], is undeniably Amis---and the note of secularism is sustained throughout the essay. Amis' new novel "House of Meetings," is published at the end of this month by Jonathan Cape.

-

2006-08-29T13:49:00.002-04:00

My protracted stay in Paris, and other writing, has brought posting here to a complete standstill....

---An overlooked but essential essay from the May issue of Le Monde Diplo: Stratagème de la droite américaine, mobiliser le peuple contre les intellectuels.

---Artnet's Ben Davis writes about the art world's recent fascination with the thought of Jacques Rancière. You can read a version of Ranciere's Politics of Aesthetics essay posted on KleinTheatre [worth a read], and here's an interview from an old issue of Radical Philosophy.

2006-07-20T02:34:00.000-04:00

Back when I was a lowly adjutant in the sociology dept. of Cambridge University Press, I worked on a book that seemed interesting enough but didn’t quite strike me as a must-read at the time: How Democracies Lose Small Wars, by Gil Merom, professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University.

I kept a copy of the book, and of course, given both the ongoing Iraq war and the current Israel-Lebanon conflict, it’s now one of the most pertinent books I can think of.

Its aim is simple: To explain how democracies lose small wars despite being superior militarily.

What is a small war, you ask?:

"A small war has the following distinct characteristics: It involves sharp military asymmetry, an insurgent that fights guerilla war, and an incumbent that uses ground forces for counterinsurgency warfare. The incumbent can be an indigenous government that fights on its own or with external participation, or a foreign power that imposes itself on the population."

The book focuses on the case studies of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon [the invasion in 1982], and the US in Vietnam. The main focus of Merom’s survey of each of these conflicts—which effectually proposes that the loss of such wars is inevitable—is on “the societal processes within democracies that are engaged in counterinsurgency.”

In a sense, democracies are doomed to lose these wars precisely because they are democracies. That is, they are inherently intolerant--or cannot achieve tolerance--- of the brutality it takes to win, so they fail in insurgency scenarios because they are unable to generate the necessary moral and political tolerance to the costs involved in such wars. These wars are thus lost ‘at home’ when a “critical minority mass shifts the center of gravity from the battlefield to the market place of ideas, "that is, as an educated middle-class responds to the “brutality involved in effective counterinsurgency,” and the level of casualties it takes to sustain it:

"My argument is that democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are restricted by their domestic structure, and in particular by the creed of some of the most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens."

The caveats, and ironies, here are of course easy to spot: for one, the issue of disproportionate response.

One passage from Merom’s analysis of the Israel-Lebanon conflict is particularly cogent: "The war in Lebanon…did not end once its dynamic phase was over, because the Israeli leadership never intended to confine itself to its single declared objective of pushing back the PLO artillery forty kilometers from the Israeli border..."

Notes and Queries: Joao Ribas

Cheyney Thompson at the MIT List

Otto Piene: Lichtballett

Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial) Catalog

On Giuseppe Sacchi

Non-Newtonian Fluid on a Speaker Cone

Stan VanDerBeek: The Culture Intercom

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER

Stan VanDerBeek

The Culture Intercom

February 4, 2011 - April 3, 2011

Frances Stark: This Could Become a Gimick [sic] or An Honest Articulation of the Workings of the Mind available from DAP

Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation opens at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis

Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis January 21 – May 1, 2011For her first major exhibition in the United States, the acclaimed Dutch, Brussels-based artist Manon de Boer asks us to listen as we look in uniquely crafted films that are defined by sound.

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis

January 21 – May 1, 2011

Manon de Boer, Attica, 2008. 16 mm black and white film with mono sound, 10 minutes. Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels.

Frances Stark in Art in America/Boston Globe

An artist who labels herself

Frances Stark puts words to work, with wit

Fax in Paris

Emily Wardill in Frieze

Frances Stark in Artforum/Emily Wardill in Frieze

Art:21 Interview etc..

Recent writing...

Ree Morton in Best of 2009 Artforum issue

Unica Zurn wins AICA Exhibition of the Year Award

Ree Morton: At Still Point of the Turning World reviewed in Art in America

Man in the Holocene

Ree Morton: At Still Point of the Turning World reviewed in Time Out

Ree Morton: At the Still Point of the Turning World Reviewed in Frieze

Thomas Bernhard interview from late 1986, via Sign and Sight

Ree Morton in The New Yorker

Recent Writing

FAX

Ree Morton at The Drawing Center

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring in Brooklyn Rail

Unica Zürn reviewed in Time Out New York

Unica Zürn in The New Yorker

Unica Zürn Artforum Critic's Pick

Unica Zürn: Dark Spring is a Lauren O'Neill-Butler Critic's Pick at Artforum.com:

Unica Zürn

THE DRAWING CENTER

35 Wooster StreetApril 17–July 23

Unica Zürn and FAX reviews

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

‘A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking’ in Frieze

Matt Mullican in NYT; the other Tulip mania; Butler on Obama

Criticism Panel Tomorrow Night

Secession Lecture on Nov 3rd

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings at The Drawing Center

Anselm Kiefer and the Virgin Mary

The New New Alphabet

Standard Sizes in Time Out New York

Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities is an Artforum Critics Pick

e-flux video rental opens in Lisbon

Sterling Ruby: Chron in The New York Times/New Yorker

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Artforum

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings on Artforum.com

Alan Saret:Gang Drawings in The New York Sun

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Time Out NY

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in The New Yorker

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in the New York Times

Alan Saret and Kirstine Roepstorff at The Drawing Center

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in the NY Times

William Anastasi: Raw in Artforum

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New York Sun

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New Yorker

Expanded Cinema in Art Review

New Economy Reviewed in Time Out New York

New Economy Reviewed on Artforum.com

In Defense of Ardor in Time Out, New Yorker

In Defense of Ardor in The New York Times

Special Film Screenings in conjunction with New Economy

In Defense of Ardor

$960,000+

Aspects, Forms, and Figures in the NYT

Aspects, Forms, and Figures

Expanded Cinema

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis
January 21 – May 1, 2011
For her first major exhibition in the United States, the acclaimed Dutch, Brussels-based artist Manon de Boer asks us to listen as we look in uniquely crafted films that are defined by sound.

35 Wooster Street
April 17–July 23