We Find Wildness

The Italian sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), one of the few artists recognised by the Futurists as models, began in the late nineteenth century to devote his attention increasingly to photography. He photographed the reproductions of his sculptures over and over again, experimented with photographic paper, photo-plates and enlargements, until only the traces of the original image were left. When he exhibited some of his photographic experiments in Paris shortly before the turn of the century, Degas is said to have cried out: ça c’est de la peinture ! – Michaela Chiriac, The Image from the Image: The Disappearance and Appearance of Images in the Works of Marieta Chirulescu, Kunsthalle Basel, 2010

I use the Internet a lot. I would even think of oral communication as a technology and a dissemination tool. When the work is just the beginning of a speculation (some sort of private rumor) it doesn’t matter what medium carries it. In that sense, if we think the Internet now possess some sort of credibility -although we all know that its not necessarily true all the time-, it has become a great broadcasting vehicle, just as the museum is. – Jonathan Monk in Jonathan Monk catalogue, Lisson Gallery & Galerie Yvon Lambert, 2003

June 1999. When artist Adam Chodzko was invited to make a piece of work as part of this off-site programme, he questioned the notion of an identifiable ‘public’ and the possibility of producing an ‘accessible’ work. His intervention, Better Scenery (2000) consisted of two signs, one located in the Arizona Desert and the other in the car park of a new shopping centre, the O2 Centre, in Camden. The plain yellow lettering on the black face of each sign gives clear directions of how to get to the other sign. Both sets of directions end with the phrase: ‘Situated here, in this place, is a sign which describes the location of this sign you have just finished reading. – Jane Rendell about Adam Chodzko, Better Scenery (1999)

Art Without Rules, Texte Zur Kunst, No.109, March 2018

Money is a festering excuse, often used to block transformation. But in a way, I believe that capitalism (which is still in its infancy) helps keep institutions from getting too comfortable. Like democracy, capitalism needs constant engagement, and I prefer the growing pains that come with this process to any alternative. Humor is one option to sweeten the pill. – Rita McBride in conversation with Mitch Speed, Mousse 62, February – March 2018

Speaking of Tintoretto and then of the Impressionists, Eco talks about painterly marks creating a state of animation and aliveness: a cacophony of information wherein the sign becomes “imprecise, ambiguous. But not so the forms themselves.” [The Open Work, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, p. 85] Thanks to a degree of formal composition, the eye of the observer can still recognize Monet’s cathedrals as cathedrals, even as they are on the verge of “liquefaction, of dissolution.” In this state of near obscuration, the “open work” remains inexhaustible, as we are unable to access it in its entirety. In doing so, the work enacts the fact that we do not operate in a well-controlled world based on universally acknowledged, totally graspable laws. We exist in a state of almost collapsing movement, where norms (from cathedrals to music scores to governance) must be negotiated, questioned and made strange. In this sense a key feature of the open work is enacting and creating defamiliarization. Defamiliarization might occur when a subject disengages herself from her dominant normative vision of the “bounded-self” and starts to think in ways that connect her, complexly, to others. This is what Rosi Braidotti maintains, and it’s a part of her methodology of posthuman critical theory. Put simply, defamiliarization teaches us to think differently. – A Not So Sad September, Cally Spooner on Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’, Flash Art International, Issue 308, May 2016

Pyongyang Elegance: Notes on Communism by Amalia Ulman for Affidavit.art, February 12, 2018

The Task (2017), directed by Leigh Ledare, on view at True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri, on March 2-4, 2018

Kunsthalle for Music, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 26 January 2018 – 3 March 2018

I love the idea of context, and also how you make people look at things, of, you know, things that they take for granted. And I remember, when I was a kid, there was a tree on the street that had blown down; it was, like, enormous. I remember being shocked by its size except when it was upright. Every day you walk past it, you never even see it. You know, with the Pharmacy installation, I wanted to get a pharmacy and put it into an art gallery, but one where you actually think you are in a…you know, in a pharmacy. Then, you know, just to… not even confuse you, but it just makes you question everything, but, also at that time, I was thinking about the…I wanted, like, you to believe in art. I wanted, you know, quite desperately for people to believe in art in a way that I believed in it, and I remember being aware that they totally believed in pharmacies, but, you know, walked into art galleries, and went, you know, “All that kind of modern art is rubbish.” I remember thinking that, you know, an art gallery and a pharmacy, you know, there’s no difference, really. It’s just a white room, and you know, they just function differently. One of them is trying to sell you art, the other one is trying to sell you drugs. – Damien Hirst, transcription from Channel 4: Damien Hirst 360 Private View, April 2012

Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco, November 18, 2017 – February 3, 2018 via contemporary art daily

Candice Lin. A Hard White Body

General Intellects with McKenzie Wark, E1: Chantal Mouffe via dis.art

I guess the very existence of the artworld as we know it is hoisted and buttressed by a suspended set of values that must also collapse with the fiction of liberal democracy. And it’s complicated because without the whole circus, none of our work means a thing. The objects become totemic, faith trophies or whatever – at best, that is. At worst, it’s all just a bunch of worthless junk full of stolen tropes and cynical jokes. Most of the problems we spend our time discussing in the artworld are not real problems; they’re philosophical or theological conceits, really, and nothing will change through the value-production-industrial complex of endless panel discussions. The world as we know it may very well be ending, not in the Alt-Right, accelerationist sense but in the Wildersonian afropessimist sense; this would mean the end of the artworld too, of course. We would all have to find some other way to make a living if making a living was still something one did. And/or we would give ourselves wholly to the business of life. There are artistries in everything. But I think again of faith, somehow necessary where art is not. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower the main character Lauren Olamina is what I would call an artist, and this helps her survive apocalyptic conditions where others cannot. – Jesse Darling on Faith, Crisis, and Refusal via http://momus.ca/

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