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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • From: Triple Candie
        Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:55:15
        To: XXXXXXX@utahmoca.org
        Subject: exhibition preparations


        Dear Aaron,


        The boxes are on their way—expect them in about a week. There are four containing the ten scrap-wood sculpture-props; a box with dollar store purchases for the barter case (dried prunes, socks, a toy car, etc.) and the paint can bottoms, some with a good two inches of dried paint; a tube of posters; two cardboard cases each containing five wood-framed drawing-surrogates; a cardboard flat with the “a few known campsites” map; and another box containing object labels (mounted on Foam Core); two-dozen miniature reproductions of the goddess paintings; four Lulu-printed copies of the Securities Exchange Commission deposition; a custom-made puzzle; a wallet with a newly designed Banker Art Museum logo; mounted color-prints of the museum in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, LaVerne, and Salt Lake City; and a headless, ceramic angel with a broken wing.

        Please tell David and the rest of the staff not to open anything before we get there. We spent weeks making the sculpture-props but we expect they’ll be in pieces when they arrive and that we’ll need to spend at least an afternoon gluing them back together. We also anticipate that at least one of the drawing-surrogates will slip out of its frame (they are spray-mounted to wood backboards but aren’t glazed). Let us be the ones to discover and address these mishaps. Your registrars will freak. Of course, all the materials only need to survive the exhibition; afterwards, we’ll ask you to return a few items that we might use in future shows—the angel, the bird—and the rest you should either discard or recycle.

        Have you heard any word from the artist? We share with you a mild anxiety that he will find out about the exhibition and try to stop it, putting your director in an awkward position and this whole thing will become a big “conversation” about our desire for curatorial sovereignty and the museum’s need to act in what it deems “the best interests” of local artists. From everything we’ve been able to uncover, the artist seems to have a pretty relaxed attitude. Actually, we think he’ll appreciate the visibility. Even when the S.E.C. was lavishing negative attention on him in the late 1990s, he told the S.E.C.’s attorneys that he was flattered by the amount of research they’d done on him. On his website and in his self-published retrospective catalogue, he boasts of the S.E.C.’s findings more than $250 million of his art is in U.S. corporate collections—though, naturally, he claims the figure to be much higher.

        Triple_Candie_I_make_everything_small

        Anyway, this has been a fast, fantastic journey. It is hard to believe that only four months ago we were knee-deep in our research on Paul McCarthy’s Upriver Skool when we stumbled into Siren Bliss’s rabbit hole. Thank you for letting us change course. It might open up a new line of inquiry for us—a deeper investigation of artists like Bliss who despite their origins and training within the conventional, institutionalized art world, have departed from it, not to abandon art-making altogether or to go into seclusion (like Cady Noland) but to set up their own art infrastructures that exist outside of but parallel to the art worlds we know much better. In our early research, people we contacted who knew Bliss when he was still going by his birth name, Michael Whipple, wrote him off as a Scientology freak. The more we heard statements like that, the more we became interested. And when we learned about his multiple personas, his bartering millions of dollars of art for corporate stock, real estate, cars, etc., his setting up more than a dozen museums dedicated to his own work, and his mind-boggling production—80,000 works of art!—he became an irresistible subject.

        Back to the show: David now has the introductory wall text and can cut the vinyl. He also has the 3-minute faux-documentary that needs to be looped (it is Peter in our basement playing the role of Bliss in his studio). We’ve written the press release and sent it to Danica, whom we imagine will forward it to you for a quote. David also mocked-up one of the recycled-wood stands for the sculpture-props and it looks great. We’ve asked him to proceed to make the rest of them. Oh, and a note about the surrogates in general: the objects are about 1/3 the size of Bliss’s originals and while they capture their overall spirit they really do not resemble his works. This is intentional. By contrast, the drawing-surrogates are accurate re-drawings of the originals but at the wrong scale. This is all stated in the object labels, but we wanted to be clear with about that with you in advance.

        Looking forward to finally meeting you on the 3rd (hard to believe that we’ve communicated for seven years without actually meeting!). You are kind to offer to drive us up to Spiral Jetty. We’ll see. One of us did our graduate work on Smithson, but over the years our collective interest in him and his work has eroded considerably (as it is meant to). We’d rather spend the time poking around Mondo SLC.

        Warm regards,

        S+P

        Triple Candie (Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett) curated two street-level gallery spaces in Harlem from 2001 to 2010. The exhibition referred to in this fictional email—titled Of the Siren and the Sky — was on view at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art over the winter.

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      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery