30 April 2019 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on The stuff of conceptualism (the weather reports, the statements of fact, the list of shops in a shopping mall) can be easily understood by anyone. (For purposes of this conversation, ”anyone” is a certain kind of Westernized citizen.) Also easily misunderstood, which is a different form of understanding. I know what to do with a urinal. I know less what to do with a urinal on a pedestal. I may or may not turn to theory for a kind of understanding or at least interpretation; either way, I may just use it for a piss. – Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualism, February 22, 2012, Jacket 2
23 April 2019 - miscellaneous, text - Comments Off on Sidsel Meineche Hansen. An Artist’s Guide To Stop Being An Artist
31 March 2019 - text - Comments Off on One of the things I feel about the current art that’s being spotlit is that it claims to be subversive on some level, by imitating the culture that surrounds us, or the culture of people who are in control – which is ad, media culture, et cetera – but I think its subversiness is purely intellectual and it’s not visual. Because if you look at the work of these artists, their work has become the very thing that they hate or that they intend to disrupt or they intend to undermine. And I think it’s a joke. (…) I try to show my own sense of things and my own sense of time, creating a history that’s for me, or it’s a record of things for me – one that challenges the record we’re given daily, whether through the newspapers, through television, or through politicians. If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation’s capital and start annhililating the people who I believe responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It’s like a machine that runs itself that can’t stop. – David Wojnarowicz, The Weight of the Earth, January 1989
13 March 2019 - publication, text - Comments Off on Kathy Acker. Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
8 March 2019 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, Vogue Magazine, 1961
4 November 2018 - publication, text - Comments Off on Barbara Kruger. Job Description
4 November 2018 - publication, text, web - Comments Off on Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?, Andrea Fraser, Grey Room NO. 22 / Winter 2006 p.30-47
31 October 2018 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on Curating in the Post-Internet Age, Boris Groys, e-flux #94 – October 2018
22 October 2018 - publication, text, wfw library - Comments Off on Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Eva Marisaldi. Film
16 September 2018 - hyperlink, text - Comments Off on I’ve come to think that the idea of a cinematic moment concerns a tension between lived experience and its representation. In other words, just as certain experiences can become iconic so too can certain representations be lived. The observations – propositions? – that I wrote for my booklet do not involve a camera, a projector or a theater. Their cinematic claims are instead rooted in perception and signification. The spectator comprises subjective consciousness in the act of self-observation, a somewhat tautological state. The moment of realization is predicated on redundancy. Moreover, to qualify as “cinematic,” an experience need not echo an actual film. Rather, it only would need to be representable and repeatable. These qualities suggest a narrative kernel. They pertain to both scenario, namely a setting that might engender a narrative arc no matter how minimal, and script, namely an anticipated sequence. A scenario need not be a literal place and a script need not be written. According to these terms, the “cinematic” could be a distillation. – John Miller, What is a Cinematic Moment?
3 September 2018 - text, web - Comments Off on Vanessa Place & Cassandra Seltman. Gagging on rape
22 August 2018 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on The Outside Can’t Go Outside, Merlin Carpenter, HEAD Geneva lecture, April 2015
13 August 2018 - hyperlink, text - Comments Off on We are currently in a situation in which displacement. This permanent displacement provides a location for refusal and collective ennui. The projection of the critical moment is the political potential of the discursive. It is not a location for action, but instead provides an infinite suspension of critical moments—the opposite of performance. This is its “just-around-the-corner-ness”—a permanent interplay of micro-critical expressions within the context of a “setting.” Projects arch suspension and repression are the dominant models. There is anxiety about who controls the reshaping of the stories of the recent past. The discursive framework has been predicated upon the rejection of the idea of a dominant authored voice. Clear-cut, authored content is considered to be politically, socially, and ideologically suspect. However, there is still the feeling that stories get told, that the past is being reconfigured, and that the near future gets shaped. There is a constant anxiety within the discursive frame about who is doing this, who is marking time. The discursive is the only structure that allows you to project a problem just out of reach and to work with that permanent displacement. Every other mode merely reflects a problem, generates a problem, denies a problem, and so on. The discursive framework projects a problem just out of reach, and this is why it can also confront a socio-economic system that bases its growth upon “projections.” In the discursive art process we are constantly projecting. We are projecting that something will lead to something else “at some point.” True work, true activity, true significance will happen in a constant, perpetue realized that expose a power relationship with the culture. They achieve this through an adherence to parasitical techniques: destroying relations of production through a constant layering of profoundly differing and contradictory aims. Somehow it might be possible to bring together small groupings and create temporary, suspended, semi-autonomous frameworks. It is possible that we have seen a rise in the idea of parasitical relationships to the point where they have reached a fluid state of acceptance. We may have reached a moment of constant reoccupation, recuperation, and aimless renovation. Maybe the discursive makes possible a parasite without a host—feeding off copies of itself, speaking to itself, regenerating among its own kind. – Liam Gillick, Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The Discursive, e-flux, January 2009
3 July 2018 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on I believe that the emotional makeup of people is a system not unlike the circulatory system or the muscular system. And if you can make a film that not only lays bare that system but is itself constructed out of those things, it would be an incredible thing to witness and to feel. – Francis Ford Coppola in conversation with Brian de Palma, Filmmakers Newsletters, May 1974
1 July 2018 - hyperlink, text - Comments Off on 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