Towards a Metalanguage of Evil, Cady Noland, Balcon No. 4, 1989

wfw weekend #462

wfw weekend #461

Once published, a Script, as a social form, is resolved only by reacting toward reactions toward it. It is an algorithmic social construction that seek to shift or create Objects, Object-relations, and social-relations within the material world in a manner that necessitates the unexpected. To embrace the unexpected is: a) to desire to see, despite knowing that there is a brutality to see (realism), b) to desire to keep moving, despite knowing that pain is certain (optimism), and c) to desire a future, despite knowing it will get worse (hope). Scripts are blueprints for unknowableness: hopeful gestures of realist optimism or optimistic realism. A Spectator engaged in Script-forming and/or Script-enacting engages with the present in order to suspend the future by imagining its alternatives. The Future is also not an Object. – The Function of a Script (in relation to a Spectactor), In Relation to a Spectator: Studio for Propositional Cinema, October 2017

The ‘humanized object’ – that is, the artwork – cannot be compared to a living being, ethically speaking, or in terms of the creation of intensity. It is a philosophical mistake – as Winnicott explains – to conceive a newborn baby in itself, because this newborn baby, without an adult in immediate and continuous proximity, would die. The artwork is also a purely artificially maintained artefact that entirely depends on human presence and only exists as such because the spectator is there – as a reality or as a potentiality. Processes of subjectivation are influenced by encounters with objects. I would say that this is what artists are interested in and that it cannot be described in terms of the impact of an artwork on a public. The influence of the subject on the object is what capitalism in general – and collectors in particular – are obsessed with: the hand of the artist, the product which is the result of the worker’s labour. Extracting oneself from the relationships created by advanced capitalism is technically and practically difficult but emotionally very easy. – Claire Fontaine, Giving shape to painful things for Radical Philosophy, September/October 2012

one pic wednesday. Joe Sola

What only a loving, disinterested eye would notice – Sinziana Ravini on Matias Faldbakken, Effects of Good Government in the Pit, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo

Alan Schmalz. Appareils de Récréation

Jørgen Leth. The Perfect Human

I define the archive as a “para-institution.” And this relates to the fact that I conceive the archive as an artistic instrument of self-historicising (which in many cases blends with the artwork itself). The para-institution of the artist’s archive was designed for recording, presenting and diffusing ephemeral, often subversive activities, and it produced autonomous contexts. Artists’ archives often reflect on how the ideological apparatuses manipulate everyday life, moreover they inscribe the artwork in history from the artist’s standpoint. That does not only mean that they put the artwork in circulation and communicate it within a limited circle of kindred spirits. Frequently the artist’s archive has a further role, involving an attempt to control the reception of the work in the local and international setting. Such an approach takes a number of levels of comparative research into account. Work at the varying levels of textual or pictorial documents demands a re-evaluation of the relationship of original and copy and must reflect the documents’ modes of production and reproduction, and must also take into account their unique, unrepeatable arrangement in the artist’s archive. One cannot reduce the artist’s archive exclusively to purposes of communication. With the deliberate multiplication and diffusion of documents, things come to a point where archival practices break free from the instrumentalisation, reification and commodification of the artwork. – Daniel Grúň, Monument to a Heroine. Július Koller’s Archive and Processes of Self-Historicisation, September 2017

Art & Politics: Alfredo Jaar, Frieze Talks, October 8, 2017

wfw weekend #433

wfw weekend #432

Matmos. California Rhinoplasty ( A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure)

Neil Beloufa, Sans titre, 2010, 15 min https://www.beauxarts.com/videos/larchitecture-des-souvenirs-avec-neil-beloufa/