Lewis Stein “Works from 1968–1979” at Essex Street, New York, October 29 – December 22, 2017

Henri Bergson, Quel est l’objet de l’art ?, June 3, 1936

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

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

For 10000 gestes, I envision a choreographic forest in which no dancer ever repeats any of the gestures, each of which will be shown only once and will vanish as soon as it has been executed, like an ode to the impermanence of the art of dance. This shower of movements, which could have been a data project generated by lists of digital parameters, will be instead generated in an artisanal way, using the very bodies of the performers, in an absolutely subjective way. (…) 10000 gestes constitutes a choreographic anti-museum aiming to explore the means of escaping the instinct and the strategies of preservation at work in the activity of a dancer… It will be matter of exploring the possibility that one gesture is never completed by another, and that, if 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 25 dancers come in contact, each still executes a gesture distinguished from those of others through the exclusion of any symmetrical movement: in this piece, it is impossible to shake someone’s hand. The collection thus constituted is also an anti-collection, since no choreographer worthy of the name would risk incorporating 10000 gestes in his or her score, and this totality cannot be comprehended other than by the idea that generated it. – Boris Charmatz about his work ’10 000 gestes’ (2017)

wfw weekend #430

Silvia Federici. Undeclared War: Violence Against Women

V.S.O.P, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Paris, September 9 – October 12, 2017 via Contemporary Art Daily

wfw weekend #425

Thomas Julier at Tithe Hall Ernen and Youth Club Ernen, July 9 – September 24, 2017 via contemporary art daily

The author must give up on aping genius. Rather show the author as ape, the author as idiot. Don’t have the hubris of being the comedian. You are the straight man in this farce; the universe is the funny man. So don’t be silly, cute, crack jokes, or play coy, but allow hilarity, a cleansing painful laughter that splits your sides and your heart. Follow your own foolishness like tracks upon the sand. – Lars Iyer, Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss (a literary manifesto after the end of literature and manifestos), The White Review , November 2011

Thomas Nagel. What is it like to be a bat?

Seth Price. Redistribution

Saâdane Afif, The Fountain Archives, 2008 – ongoing, http://thefountainarchives.net