Cycle, 2018
aluminium, steel, rubber, plastic, UV-print, 14 x 85 x 60 cm

image courtesy of the artist and Pina, Vienna

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Cycle (2018) is part of the solo exhibition entitled ZAHN–AUGE–FUSS–Kindheit–Teenager–Baby–Senior–Junior–Dame–Herr–KNIE–BRUST–ARSCH–ARSCHLOCH–DARM–UTERUS–Mutter–Vater–Haare by LUCIA ELENA PRŮŠA. The exhibition is on view at Pina in Vienna until July 20, 2018.

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exhibition view, JOHN BALDESSARI
seen at Mai 36, Zürich
on Friday, June 29. 2018
image © we find wildness

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exhibition view, PHILIPPE PARRENO
seen at Gropius Bau, Berlin
on Saturday, July 7, 2018
image © we find wildness

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all images:

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Trinity: Present (Phase II) by JUTTA KOETHER is taking place in a three-story house also called ‘Trinity’ in Philadelphia. This location is currently hosting one of the experimental exhibition initiatives created by Bortolami Gallery in New York.

Using the idea of the Trinity as its organizing principle, the exhibition develops in three parts: Past, Present, and Future. The previous phase, Trinity: Past, focused on the paintings KOETHER made from 1995 onward, evincing her identity as a German artist who moved frequently between her homeland and the U.S., specifically the distinct Cologne and New York City art scenes.

Trinity: Present comprises a succinct survey of JUTTA KOETHER’s black paintings from 2001 to present. KOETHER’s Volume paintings, a series of works she made in 2001, some of her earliest experimentations with black paint, are dispersed throughout the house.*

Trinity: Present (Phase II) by JUTTA KOETHER is on view at Bortolami Artist / City in Philadelphia until September 9, 2018.

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*excerpt press release Bortolami Gallery, April 2018

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Suicide Sutra, 1973
7’22”

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Suicide Sutra (1973) was written by JOHN GIORNO (born 1936) and appeared as a piece on his Dial-A-Poem phoneline which he founded in the late Sixties. People could ring in and hear poems by many writers, among them WILLIAM BURROUGHS, PATTI SMITH, ED SANDERS, ALLEN GINSBERG, JOHN CAGE, JIM CARROLL and LAURIE ANDERSON. Over a million calls were logged in the five months it ran in New York.

You can still hear some of the readings here.

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JAY CHUNG & Q TAKEKI MAEDA, New Images
exhibition views at House of Gaga, Mexico City
from March 27 to April 28, 2018
all images courtesy of House of Gaga, Mexico City

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From March 27 through April 28, 2018 House of Gaga in Mexico City presented a solo exhibition by JAY CHUNG and Q TAKEKI MAEDA entitled New Images.

The exhibition was accompanied by a short essay that is available to download here. The following words are an edit from the press release provided by the gallery.

(…) Millenarian sects are religious, social, or political groups and movements formed in the expectation of a major transformation in society. In addition to early Christianity, doomsday cults, and Bolshevism, the art movements known as the historic avant-garde (e.g. Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism) exhibit properties of millenarianism insofar as the artists associated with these movements worked in anticipation of a radical upheaval of bourgeois aesthetic norms and values. As is true for all millenarian sects, the predicted avant-garde revolutions never came to pass. Nonetheless, the artistic formats and principles developed by the avant-garde were taken up by later artists, being recycled in the works of the Neo-Avantgarde during the postwar era and again in today’s globalized contemporary art world.

There are many ways millenarian sects cope with the failure of their predictions. Display System: Suicide, Affirmation, Mediation (2018) divides the gallery’s exhibition space according to designations for three of these: suicide, affirmation, and mediation. The first, suicide, is usually associated with doomsday cults such as the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate, and is the most violent of the three responses. But not all millenarian sects resort to such extreme ends. Others will instead proclaim their prophecy has in fact been fulfilled and simply affirm the existing state of affairs. In this second case, the failure of their prophecy paradoxically becomes the main evidence that the promise has arrived. Mediation, the third and most complex of the responses, involves a set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its nonappearance. Concrete predictions become metaphors, actions become rituals, and the sect becomes institutionalized, perpetually deferring expectations to some distant horizon.

Of the three sections comprising Display System, only one is used in the exhibition, with suicide and affirmation remaining empty. On the wall of the third section, mediation, the artists present a series of photographs of sharks, all ‘Untitled’ (2018). In the sphere of contemporary art, the most well-known use of the image of the shark is ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’, a purportedly “shocking” sculpture by the artist DAMIEN HIRST, who rose to prominence in the early 1990s as part of a highly publicized group known as the Young British Artists. It could be said that HIRST’s sculpture, having been so widely disseminated in the media, is so notorious that even today any work of contemporary art featuring a shark or sharks would inevitably be linked to HIRST’s, regardless of the fact of any actual or intended connection. In the photographs on display here, sharks are depicted, alive and swimming, in a tank at a public aquarium, for city-dwellers the most mundane of environments in which to view the animal.

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LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN, Case 1: Can / Can’t, 2018
inkjet print mounted on Dibond, 31.5 x 15 cm

image © we find wildness

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Case 1: Can / Can’t (2018) is part of the series Disputed Utterance (2018) that has been presented earlier this year at Mor Charpentier in Paris.

In Disputed Utterance (2018), LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN presents a series of charcoal drawings and photographs that mimic the linguistic process of palatography, a method used to identify which parts of the mouth are used when making different sounds. It involves painting a mixture of charcoal and olive oil on the tongue or the roof of the mouth and having that person pronounce a specific word. The trace of the phoneme is then printed on the speakers’ palate in charcoal. ABU HAMDAN uses these images in order to tell different narratives of what in legal cases is referred to as a ‘disputed utterance’, a trial where someone’s culpability or innocence is hinged upon conflicted claims over a recorded word or phrase*. 

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*press release Mor Charpentier, April 2018

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LAURIE PARSONS, A Body of Work 1987, exhibition view at Museum Abteiberg, 2018
image courtesy of Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
photo: WILHELM SCHÜRMANN

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1988: A one-person show at Lorence-Monk Gallery, of objects collected over the course of a year. They are placed directly on the floor around the perimeter of the room in the order in which PARSONS encountered them. A pile of charcoal, a weathered coil of rope, a battered suitcase, a yellow nylon noose, an uprooted log, and more. She later describes one particularly cryptic object, from 1987, as “an inverted triangle formed by three lengths of a bed frame with the two longer sides crossed at the bottom, which is titled V, to recall the Thomas Pynchon novel.” No one, if you hadn’t already guessed, buys anything.

Intent on opening up a greater engagement with viewers, Parsons shifts from gathering individual objects to large sections of the landscape. Field of Rubble, 1988, is drawn from a fifteen-hundred-square-foot plateau beside the Hudson River where rubble mixed with such oddities as “packets of soy sauce, keys, butts of lottery tickets,” the artist recalls. “I spent weeks collecting the detritus, to later entirely cover the floor of a gallery.” My immediate take is SMITHSON, entropy, non-sites, and a freewheeling spirit of adventure more `60s than `80s-a search for realism through the thing itself. About a year later, a worker at a storage facility will go into her unit, open up some of the containers, and, finding what seems to be merely gravel and grimy trash (in actuality, Field of Rubble), throw all of it away. – BOB NICKAS, Artforum April 2003, https://www.mutualart.com/Article/Dematerial-girl/7273E213EF40AE0C

American artist LAURIE PARSONS (born 1959 in Mount Kisco, New York) was active with a number of exhibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then transitioned away from the art world with consistent and determined gestures of commitment toward something else. A significant body of work was made in 1987 and shown in separate exhibitions at Lorence-Monk Gallery in New York in 1988 and Galerie Rolf Ricke in Cologne in 1989, after which the entire exhibition was purchased by a private German collection. Recently rediscovered and acquired by Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann, it consists of found objects, mostly from around Parsons’s New Jersey studio—detritus from roads, natural and industrial wastelands. The words “a body of work” invoke PARSONS’s terminology in a title-less exhibition that, interestingly enough, did not contain the word “installation.” The artist’s avoidance of this word is probably a key to understanding her attitude. The status of the found objects was shown as-is. As things from the street. Each one individually. Valuable in its origin and strong in its presence, “as strong as a work of art.” (L. Parsons)

The manner in which PARSONS used the re-exhibition of these ordinary objects to call attention to their context signaled the start of her transition away from the art object and the art world to the everyday object and everyday world. It was an act of rebellion and growth that (to borrow Lucy Lippard’s sentence about the “dematerialization of the art object” in the 1960s) could be described as a “dematerialization of the art career.” Her next exhibition at Lorence-Monk Gallery in 1990 included all the baseline logistics of an exhibition including focusing the lights, paint touch-ups, normal activity and hours of operation for the gallery and staff, a press release and even an exhibition announcement card. However, the artist did not contribute anything additionally; no objects or actions filled the space, and the invitation card featured a completely blank area above the printed gallery name and address. PARSONS further opened up and entangled the conventional demarcations of art-making at the occasional gallery and institutional exhibition over the next two or three years: working as and with gallery interns (Andrea Rosen Gallery 1990-91), museum guards (New Museum, New York 1992-93), local towns, hospitals and schools. Around 1994, PARSONS quit her work as an artist altogether and has since been employed as a social worker for people living in homelessness and those with mental health disorders. She has avoided any reference to her own art for many years. – press release Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach

A Body of Work 1987 by LAURIE PARSONS is on view at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach until September 2, 2018.

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As yet untitled 7, 2018
glass, glue, metal brackets, paper
46 × 60 × 20 1/2 in; 116.8 × 152.4 × 52.1 cm

image Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. photo: FLORIAN KLEINEFENN

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The German word Icht means any thing, or any such thing. The word has nearly vanished in modern language, having survived only in Nichts—nothing, (or no-thing), which was formed out of the two words in (meaning no) and icht (any such thing) as in-icht. If we subtract the T from Icht, the Ich remains—the German equivalent to the I. Embedded and included in Icht, in any such thing, is the I, the inherent I of any such thing.

The subtracted T is also the mathematical nomen for transcendental numbers, numbers that have been first suspected to exist by the mathematicians Leibniz or Euler, who wrote that there must be numbers that exceed algebraic calculation, numbers that are impossible to grasp. Known transcendental numbers, proven to exist in the middle of the 19th century, are at the same time rare—the most famous being Pi—and supposedly many, but yet unknown, and mathematicians seemingly wait for them to spring up somewhere. As a rule they are irrational.

“The mathematical proof of the transcendence of numbers allowed the proof of the impossibility of several ancient geometric constructions involving  straightedge, and including the most famous one, squaring the circle.” (Wikipedia)

Transcendental numbers are also performative numbers, that extend while we calculate them. They resemble double mirrored images, waving at us from infinity, a glassy contingency, transparent, because approachable–you can always start on their path, but you will not see the end–, yet caught in themselves and in their own rules. On their way they never connect, but like the number Pi they sometimes play with connections, or emulate them. They sometimes seem to hide in known series of numbers, faking known results of calculations but then wander off on their own unruly path towards infinity.

The known transcendental numbers stem from spatial operations like squaring the circle, or calculating the space under a curve, calculations which recall social operations. When they are used—again in mathematical terms—within the “ratio of integers,” they are used in their imprecise approximations, by negating their performativity. How familiar «ratio of integers» sounds. A ratio of a whole, into which performativity cannot be squeezed.

HENRIK OLESEN’s exhibition at Gallery Chantal Crousel is not a linguistic operation at which this text may seem to hint, but what lies in the practise of opposing concepts, of mirroring them into their embedded infinity. It is about things opposed to bodies, as is sculpture at its core, adding an irrational that very simply distorts space. I also see them in the concepts of the Ichts, these Is in their bodily presence sent into the incalculability of time, where their existence performes as a screen for projections, identifications and feelings, being reminded of what Walter Benjamin writes about the I, and especially the I in the novels of Proust and Kafka: He writes: “When Proust in his Recherche du temps perdu, and Kafka, in his diaries, use I, for both of them it is equally transparent, glassy. Its chambers have no local coloring; every reader can occupy it today and move out tomorrow. You can survey them and get to know them without having to be in the least attached to them. In these authors the subject adopts the protective colouring of the planet, which will turn grey in the coming catastrophes.”

While HENRIK OLESEN knows, that the protective coloring of the planet is vulnerable, and especially today again, he is proposing communities, love, and friendship, as irrational agents, as incalculable Ts, and as traces on the outside, as well as traces of the making of the self, within its self-mirrored image. — ARIANE MÜLLER, press release for the exhibition HENRIK OLESEN, 6 or 7 new works presented at Chantal Crousel, Paris.

The exhibition 6 or 7 new works from which the work presented above was part of, was on view from April 28th to May 27th, 2018 at Chantal Crousel Paris.