SYNTHETIC WORLDS
A cartoon is the ultimate work of abstract art. The practicalities of frame animation require extreme visual simplification. Despite the sacrifice of realism, it’s amazing how easy it is to slip into this parallel universe. With a compelling narrative hook, one’s mind surrenders to the logic of the drawn world.

In The Simpsons, the society of Springfield is populated with familiar archetypes — the lazy cop, the schoolyard bully, the ruthless capitalist polluter, and the Hispanic television presenter in a bumblebee costume. A character arc lasts only as long as an episode; it has no long-term growth. In the next episode the world is reset. Everything within the symbolic order is rigidly fixed, for Springfield is a zone of platonic order.

Without the need to build sets or cast extras, the city of Springfield can also become astonishingly large and complex. It is not constrained by a television show budget for special effects, and in this sense is like a dream — anything that can be imagined can be brought into existence. A fish with three eyeballs doesn’t seem out of place. Mirroring the chaotic flux of the unconscious, there is surreal juxtaposition of references in Springfield — Jerry Lewis, Orson Welles, James McNeill Whistler, Philip Glass, and the Venus de Milo. If Seinfeld is a show about nothing, The Simpsons is a show about everything.

CUTTING & PASTING
Peter Blake is the quintessential British pop artist, and the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve is his most celebrated work. On the cover, over seventy cutouts of notable figures range from Aldous Huxley to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Lenny Bruce. The studio production techniques of pop music had reached their height with the Beatles in their late career — the three-and-a-half-minute structure could be a repository for an infinity of reference. Blake’s cover manifested this heterogeneity as the Fab Four were placed in his pantheon of historical figures.

In The Meeting, Blake paints an imagined encounter between the artists Howard Hodgkin, David Hockney, and himself.

“The image is an homage to Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet…The squatting girl’s pose is taken partly from a skating magazine and partly from classical sculpture…Monumentality and banality, a timeless present and the transient afternoon are set in serene contrast.”
—Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism?

Like the Beatles standing among the heroes of the ages, Blake puts himself (and his art) in a continuum that stretches back to antiquity. Culture too is collapsed into a high/low mishmash. The agenda, presumably, is to create a concoction of references that lead to a kind of post-modern euphoria — an ephemeral transcendence.

With Surrealism, juxtaposition had a different purpose. If Pop formed a bridge between high and low art through appropriation of commonplace objects, Surrealism made the point that objects were no more than extensions of the subjective self to begin with. To the Surrealists, juxtapositions could open a window into ourselves.

“My excited gaze was provoked by the pages of a printed catalogue.
The advertisements illustrated objects relating to anthropological, microscopical, psychological, mineralogical, and paleontological research. Here I discovered the elements of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provoked in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of sight…” All that was necessary, he realized, was subtly to modify and rearrange these images. “These changes, no more than docile reproductions of what was visible within me, recorded a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They transformed the banal pages of advertisement into dramas that revealed my most secret desires.” —Max Ernst

A VIEW WITH A ROOM
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the holodeck is an artificial reality room on the Starship Enterprise that can holographically project any environment or character. Sounds and smells are simulated by speakers and fragranced fluid atomizers. The floor of the room is a treadmill that moves in every direction so that the participant never reaches the wall.

In the original Star Trek series outer space was the final frontier, but in The Next Generation the search is also directed back at ourselves. Exploration doesn’t just orient forwards to the future, because the holodeck allows it to move sideways to alternate versions of the present, as well as backwards to the ancestral past. Before 9/11, philosophers had proposed the idea that we had entered a post-historical epoch. The Next Generation embodies this terminal velocity of the temporal. Star Trek could now be set in the London of Arthur Conan Doyle, or in the nineteenth-century American West. It is also a domain for the fantasies of crew members — a dream machine. But, like our irrational desires, it is never entirely under our control. In some episodes, crew members find themselves trapped in the holodeck room, or artificial characters become self aware and escape from the room.

STRUCTURE
Let us imagine a game that has no objective. It would exist online for anyone to play, but this game would not allow interaction with other players.
Like the old-fashioned adventure game, it would be an insular experience. The game would consist of characters you could talk to in various rooms. New rooms would be added on a weekly basis so that this online world would continue to grow. Without the chance to talk to ‘real’ people and with no definable quest, the player is left to wander without purpose.

The title screen of Terra Incognita recalls Max Bill’s geometric typeface from 1949. It is suitably revised with a chromed skin.

CONTENT
The content of the game is completely arbitrary: it will include fragments from vintage video game culture as well as banalities from every– day life, exemplars of ideals, half-forgotten memories, and futur– istic projections, both the sublime and the ridiculous. Everything will be rendered in the 16-bit vernacular of the video game to quicken loading times, and unify the disparate elements.

A map of the game is appropriated from the Surrealist Map of 1929.

The adventure game’s protocol for selecting a character is subverted. As in life, your external appearance is pre-determined. This screen merely offers a choice of personality.

The introductory sequence is an electronic ante-chamber. Random scenes, sprites and events flicker in and out of being.

Screen shots from the game illustrate the mutable form of the protagonist. As a proxy for the player, the hero / heroine is an intentionally ambiguous figure.

ESSEN, GERMANY, 1931. Young graphics student Klaus Wittkugel designs an advertisement for a fictional exhibition of photography; it takes the form of negative and positive photographic prints of the exhibition information itself, photographed again on a colored ground. Resolutely Modernist in
its typography and structure, Das Lichtbild reflects a knowing self-consciousness about methods of reproduction and a nearly pedagogical impulse to expose its own construction to the viewer. Perhaps Wittkugel is inspired by other contemporary graphics that confound the real and representational to reveal their technological origins, such as László Moholy-Nagy’s 14 Bauhausbücher cover with its cleverly flipped photograph of the catalogue’s own printing plate, or his Folkwangschule teacher Max Burchartz’s commercial advertisements and brochures that use sophisticated photomontage and perspectival shifts to represent architectural products and industrial machinery.

Other photographic works by Wittkugel from the same period seek to excite and estrange the viewer through complex optical and graphic effects. As Jan Tschichold had noted in 1928 in Die Neue Typografie, “Staged commercial photography exists at the border of fine art. Through illumination, arrangement, and framing, effects can often be achieved that have an astonishing similarity with works of art.” (1, author’s translation) Constructed out of glass lenses and paper, Wittkugel’s advertisement for a bookstore evades clear spatial readings; a second piece for a bathhouse creates an enigmatic atmosphere using projected light on multiple mirrors and glass planes.

Wittkugel’s interest in staging graphics and typography continues a thread from his prior training: in the 1920s, he spent several years dressing windows as an apprentice at a Hamburg fabric store. This formative experience laboring over window displays laid the foundation for his later transition to two– and three–dimensional constructions. In a commercial context, the shop window functions as a frame for carefully arranged assemblages of objects and graphics that must surprise the viewer. To Wittkugel the student, it may seem only natural to make the leap to treating the frame of the printed page itself like a physical window.

EAST BERLIN, GERMANY, 1950. In the nascent German Democratic Republic, Wittkugel works as the head designer for the Socialist Ministry of Information. Its mandate includes shaping consumer desires and educating the populace, who are only now emerging from the ravaging effects of World War II. Quality is a traveling exhibition designed by Wittkugel that focuses on the craftsmanship of East German products over aesthetics, echoing Max Bill’s 1949 Swiss exhibition of design, Die Gute Form (The Good Form). Wittkugel’s exhibition encourages East Germans to both produce and purchase high quality goods in their dual roles as exemplary workers and consumers.

Posters for the exhibition show a finely detailed photo-realistic rendering of a magnifying glass. With careful focus, it scrutinizes the construction of the exhibition signet and poster typography itself. This formal approach hearkens back to Wittkugel’s student experiments yet takes them one step further: here, the lens is positioned as if in the hands of the poster viewers themselves, positing an active role in the pursuit of ‘quality.’ The staged poster, rather than presenting a reflection on reproduction or an object of contemplation, becomes a site for engaged examination.

EAST BERLIN, EARLY TO MID-1950s. During the most difficult period of Stalinist aesthetic policy in the GDR in 1950–51, Wittkugel comes under scathing public critique for his “Formalist” graphic approach and his use of abstract form and typography instead of populist iconography. His poster for an exhibition on East Germany’s first Five-Year Plan employs the marching numerals of the coming five years as bold, confident sculptural figures. This offense condemns the poster to particularly bombastic scorn in the Socialist party organ, Neues Deutschland:

“An abstract, intellectual play with numbers and forms takes precedence over depictions of people and clear symbols…This ever-dominant Formalist approach to visual communication continues to find its expression in other experiments that show a hatred of mankind.” (2, author’s translation)

By the mid–1950s, the aesthetic regime has loosened enough to allow Wittkugel’s continued work within a Modernist idiom. His graphics for exhibitions, posters, and book covers are well-regarded within East German cultural circles. For one of the first academic books in the GDR on the art of the poster, Wittkugel creates an abstract, planar cover: the word “PLAKAT” (“POSTER”) is distributed asymmetrically over a single surface to create the illusion of dimensionality. Trapezoids of varied scales and colors represent the chaotic liveliness of a poster wall in a diagrammatic manner. The cover insists on being read in perspective, as a scene laid out for view.

EAST BERLIN, 1957. After over a decade of both professional success and occasional censure, Wittkugel finally enjoys his moment as the pre-eminent graphic designer of the East German Socialist republic. In 1957, Wittkugel wins the National Prize of the GDR for his work in organizing and designing the spectacular, immersive propaganda exhibition, Militarism without Masks. His subsequent work with staged graphics shows the marks of this political recognition. What started as a self-conscious means for design to reveal its own construction begins to mirror the complexities intrinsic to Socialist public engagement.

A poster announcing an exhibition of posters contains a set of posters placed within their natural context, only moments after having been hung. The posters themselves are not the “Formalist” graphics of Wittkugel’s earlier work, but rather monochromatic nationalist icons, including a heroic portrait of the East German president, Wilhelm Pieck, pastoral scenes, industrial workplaces, and allusions to 19th century German Classical literature. The image’s warm sunlight picks out two text-only colored posters, which employ a Modernist typographic language to announce the exhibition title and information. A tilted perspective and bright blue sky heroically frame the poster column and leaning yellow ladder, inviting viewers to continue the labor of wheat-pasting East Germany’s posters themselves.

From the very same year, Wittkugel’s campaign poster, Die Besten in die Volksvertretung! (The Best Ones for the People’s Representation!), calls for workers to take part in national politics. Here the action suggested in Wittkugel’s earlier works is made explicit; the human figure, previously absent and existing only by implication, is present and hard at work. The poster typography divides into two distinct levels: the stripped down sans serif typesetting in the posters-within-the-poster contrasts with the painted lettering on the wall that communicates the poster headline. The workaday sans serif has been overwritten by the people’s hand. As a locus for nationalist labor, or as an exhortative document of participatory politics, these staged graphics are no longer formal and reflective. Instead, they demand active collaboration, like the work of graphic communication itself in the Socialist state.

NOTES
1. Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für Zeitgemäss Schaffende. (Berlin: Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker, 1928; reprint, Berlin: Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, 1987), 90.
2. Hans Lockoff, “Schluss mit dem Formalismus bei unseren Plakaten,” Neues Deutschland, February 6, 1951. Cited in Sylke Wunderlich, “Plakatkunst in der SBZ/DDR 1945/1949–1969” (Dr. phil. dissertation, Universität Leipzig, 2003), 51.

ONE — I run my hand over the plate glass window. It’s cold and flecked with wintry dust. I contemplate the dust. This snow has transmuted through three states of being — liquid, gas, solid — traveled unknowable miles through the heavens, and tested the divining powers of the local weatherman. Then snow meets our atmosphere. Choked exhaust fumes and bad cosmic jokes. To dissolve snow, we spread salt on streets and sidewalks.

Salt made the Phoenicians rich, bankrolled Roman wars, and substituted as soldier’s pay during the War of 1812. Salt served as the fulcrum on which a skinny Indian man turned a cause into a movement and himself into Gandhi.

We throw it on the ground. In the United States, road salt is a billion dollar industry. Salt drops the freezing point of snow, creating dirty pools of winter muck. When snow meets salt, we are left with neither, just residue, like the residue under my window-pressed palm. Heaven-sent is now simply a piece of shit, stuck to the cold window of a dimmed and dead Hollywood Video.
 

TWO — When I was a child I was obsessed with baseball cards, small squares of cardboard bearing photographs of and information about people I did not know. I didn’t even like baseball all that much. Still I would run down to the card shop with money earned from odd jobs to hand the store’s creepy proprietor crumpled dollar bills in exchange for packets of these small squares of cardboard. The moment would quicken my heart rate, a pulse would thunder in my throat. The brief but dangerous flirtation with heroin as a young adult should have come as a surprise to no one.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

THREE — The incandescent light bulb changed the world. Its mechanism was simple if elegant, a metal filament wire heated until glowing. Reproducing it was easy. Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb — a technology extant for decades by the time he filed for the relevant patents — he merely designed one workably efficient and devised a comprehensive system to make lighting it economically viable.

The fluorescent lamp, on the other hand, does not qualify as a revolution. The Geissler tube, a mid-nineteenth century novelty of colored lights, caused phosphors to fluoresce to entertain crowds in dimly lit rooms. Many inventors, Edison included, dabbled in fluorescent lighting, but the process proved too delicate and too difficult to reproduce until after the incandescent bulb lit the developed world. In the 1930s, scientists at General Electric finally uncovered an efficient method to excite mercury vapor to produce ultraviolet light to, in turn, set a phosphor aglow.

An incandescent bulb burns hot to produce its light. To us, nourished by the sun and warmed by campfire, the hot light appears natural. A fluorescent lamp’s operation is complex, the light it emits cold. Fluorescent lamps cost more than incandescent bulbs. Their efficiency renders them, in the long accounting, a bargain. Such savings allow companies to string up fluorescent lamps in long rows and run them endlessly until they flicker and burn out. The cost of fluorescent lighting is not hidden in some unlit recess of our economy, it is exacted everywhere.
 

FOUR — “I’m looking for a Taylor Swift album.”

“What?” She raises an eyebrow.

“A Taylor Swift album, I’m not sure which one. The one with that song on it, you know?”

“Sir, this is a Marshalls.” She narrows her eyes.

“There’s the self-titled debut, Fearless, and Speak Now. I think it’s Fearless but I’m not sure.”

“If you want to buy a shirt I can help you but I don’t know shit about Taylor Swift.” She crosses her arms.

“But this was once a Circuit City. I want to pay $18 for a CD. Do they still make CDs?”

“Sir. This. Is. A. Marshalls. We sell clothes. We sell shoes and belts. We sell blankets and spatulas. We sell clothes so fast we don’t even bother to clean up the racks.” She motions her hand to the atmosphere around us.

“But I don’t see anything.”
 

FIVE — At Lowe’s in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, I once saw in person the actor who played Marlo Stanfield on The Wire. I love The Wire. I share with people all the time my belief that The Wire is the best fiction of any kind created during the Aughts. As opinions go, my stance on The Wire is a very important one to me.

After smiling stupidly at Marlo Stanfield, I wandered around Lowe’s for two hours looking for a mirror. I didn’t find the mirror I needed or any other. I left, defeated and numb, my arms free as I shuffled through a near desolate parking lot that emptied into an asphalt confluence bridging the Gowanus Canal.

The Bridge Project is a work in progress, an object of research that culminates at different times and places in visual expression. The presentation of this idea at Storefront was formally organized by two components. The first was a synchronized, four-monitor slide show, interspersed with animations, which articulated four design proposals for an inhabitable bridge spanning from Seoul to New York. The second was an animation based on an algorithm interpreting data from Suh’s history of travel between cities across the globe, in concert with mappings of ocean surface currents in real time.

The four bridge proposals encompassed divergent typologies and systems. Suh harnessed information from various fields of knowledge, including boatbuilding, oilrig construction, geopolitics, ecology, geometry, and physics. In preparation for this exhibition, Suh collaborated with architects, engineers, and designers to envision an inhabitable bridge connecting the spatial, temporal, psychological, and cultural distance between Seoul and New York.

The medley of sculptural works composing A Perfect Home which fall under Suh’s larger body of work, The Speculation Project, fulfill the requisite conditions imposed on and expected from his artworks that can easily be understood and read according to the terms set forth by each of their shapes. The contours and outlines of Suh’s sculptures create borders between this and that life — a clear delineation between spatial realities of the general integrated world and the isolated, reified world of art according to its most conservative definition. The Bridge Project collapses these lines and boundaries in multiple ways.

The Bridge Project posits a pervasive, fundamental, essential question, how in this age of virtual realities, can an artwork occupy a delineated position? The plethora and diversity of images and vantage points, perspectives and investments composing what are essentially four slide shows build ‘worlds.’ The viewer, like an avatar, circles in and out and between the screens, gathering materials rich and coherent enough to actually forge another place that for all intents and purposes has real edges and volumes that compose forms. Suh is animating a wholly other kind of materiality, strikingly differently from the steel, nylon, silk and other materials of the sculptures composing the meta-series A Perfect Home.

Given that Suh is drawing data and images from our everyday and from the annals of science, can The Bridge Project do what art in its strictest sense is meant to do? Does this project disrupt the very continuity of the world, as we know it? When you circumambulate, for instance, The Perfect Home II and Reflection or lie down within Blue-Print you are shifted out of your day to day and into another spatial, emotional, associative space. These works are understood according to a set of terms easily grasped by the art market and critics.

Art movements, as we know them well, have challenged the object and attempted through different strategies to question what we privilege in terms of a visceral, aesthetic, phenomenological art viewing experience. The bleeding of private and public, the dissolution of the object, the anti-object: these are terms that circulate and bubble up in art discourse as ways to order and structure positions and answers to these quandaries. The Bridge Project is evaluated in light of these debates and their results in sets of criteria that determine what is and isn’t an art object.

The Bridge Project as it was presented at Storefront appears to affect a kind of scopic-landscape of windows onto interstitial spaces. The bridges are systems of signs and elements that oscillate and flourish in a larger context where forms occur and operate symbiotically, holistically. With The Bridge Project, Suh reveals the inner workings of his mind, strips away veils used to clad and build three-dimensional physical, material shapes and forms, and offers information and interpretations of space, memory, and historical and environmental factors in such a way as to generate other new formations in alternate and imaginary, spatial dimensions. This is simply a poetic move from the analog to the digital.

Discuss: Critique and quest as artistic practice. “You create the mountain, and then you climb it. Not for the final peak: the challenge is the process and the journey.” —Denes, The Human Argument. Art practice as practicing utopia. “Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden ‘it should be otherwise.’” —Adorno, Commitment.

Week 2 — The artist group in action: A historical survey (Part 1)
Considering among others: Arts & Crafts, Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Wiener Werkstätte, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Surrealism, Black Mountain College, Art Workers Coalition, Fluxus, Situationism, Free International University, Artist Placement Group, Grapus, Ant Farm, and Woman’s Building.

Week 3 — The artist group in action: A historical survey (Part 2) + some contemporary issues: Collaborative Projects, The Offices ⁄ Ocean Earth, Group Material, Critical Art Ensemble, Temporary Services, and 16BeaverGroup.

Discuss: Role and influences of public art; activist art; conceptual art; site-specific art; installation art; community art; art/design as social practice; publishing as art practice; appropriation as art practice; changing vs. becoming the status quo; dematerialization of the art object; relational aesthetics; democratization process of the internet; rise of bottom-up organization; the increasingly sophisticated relationship between irony and sincerity.

PART II: COLLECTION-BASED INSTITUTIONS

Week 4 — Museum of Jurassic Technology
Established in 1987 in Los Angeles, a dark, mysterious, fantastical (un)natural history museum. “In its original sense, the term, “museum” meant “a spot dedicated to the Muses, a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.”

Week 5 — City Reliquary
Begun in 2002, a community museum and civic organization in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, offering a permanent collection of quotidian NYC artifacts, rotating exhibitions from the community’s personal collections, and neighborly events. “Standing on the corner of Havemeyer and Grand Streets, where the original City Reliquary window is still maintained, will not reveal views of the famous City landmarks. Instead, one discovers that everyday New York is already in clear sight.”

Week 6 — Junkyard Museum of Awkward Things
Since 2002, this museum in Lagos has examined the junkyard as “artistic hospital”: a place where discarded objects, fraught with political meaning in Africa, are recuperated as art: “Wear and Tear as a concept attempts to expose the often overlooked and underrated elements of the African-Urban communal life which largely influence it. The alienated situation of the African in his own society becomes tragic. There is a struggle inside him, a consciousness of living with the complications of an imposed civilisation. He can no longer go back to pick up the fragments of his father’s shattered culture; neither is he equipped enough to keep pace with the white-man’s world.”

Week 7 — Reanimation Library
Established in Brooklyn in 2005, a small, independent library of deaccessioned and other outdated books, redeemed by the merit of their images, and offered for use to artists, designers, writers, and other “cultural archaeologists.”

Week 8 — Public Collectors
Since 2007, Public Collectors seeks to make accessible the private collections of individuals: “Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.”

Research project topic due
Project 1: Collection project proposal due

PART III: EDUCATION-BASED INSTITUTIONS

Week 9 — Copenhagen Free University
From 2001 to 2007, an artist-run, Situationist-inspired school, operated out of an apartment, that sought to re-center education on discovering new ways of living: “Copenhagen Free University was established to explore and intensify the forms of knowledge and subjectivity that we see withdrawing from or being excluded from the increasingly narrow-minded circulation of the knowledge economy.”

Week 10 — The Momentary Academy
In 2005, a ten-week free school taught by artists, hosted at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco: “Classes involved practical as well as experimental subjects, and ranged from single workshop sessions to weekly meetings.”

Week 11 — The Public School
Founded in 2008 in Los Angeles and now operating in multiple cities, the Public School organizes classes suggested and taught by members of the public. But the curriculum committee — those responsible for materializing proposals into classes — is not a closed group: “Every few months one or two people should leave the committee and one or two new people should join the committee. The idea is to perpetually de-institutionalize The Public School, to pass around power like a ball, and to generate a promiscuous set of relations with the world.”

Week 12 — The School of Life
Founded in 2008 as a storefront in London, the School of Life offers courses and services “addressing such questions as why work is often unfulfilling, why relationships can be so challenging, why it’s ever harder to stay calm and what one could do to try to change the world for the better.”

Project 2: Education project proposal due

Week 13 — Trade School
Begun in 2010 as a “barter for instruction” storefront, Trade School organizes classes in which students barter with instructors. Anyone can propose to teach a class. Upcoming classes include Philosophy of Social and Economic Quality, The Secrets of Taking Amazing Photographs with Any Camera, Twitter and Facebook for Artists, The Basics of Distilling Alcohol, Feng Shui 101, and Chakra Sound Meditation.

PART IV: THE WRAP UP

Week 14 — Student research presentations

Project 3: Research presentation due

Week 15 — The Institution of the Future / Future practice
Institutionalizing the artist institution: Social Practice MFA programs at CCA, PSU, Otis, UC Santa Cruz, and annual conferences. What is gained and what is lost by this process? What new practices are now emerging?

READINGS & RESOURCES
Aberro, Alexander & Blake Stimson.
Institutional Critique: an Anthology of Artists’ Writings
Art Workers Coalition.
Open Hearing & Documents 1
Bishop, Claire.
Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art)
Bourriaud, Nicholas.
Relational Aesthetics
Thompson, Nato.
Interview with Temporary Services
Bryan-Wilson, Julia.
Art Workers: Radical practice in the Vietnam War Era
Control Magazine
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
Kester, Grant H.
Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
Kronman, Anthony.
Education’s End
Kwon, Miwon.
One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity
O’Neill, Paul & Mick Wilson.
Curating and the Educational Turn
Podesva, Kristina Lee.
A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art
Purves, Ted.
What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art
Rogoff, Irit.
Academy as Potentiality
Sholette, Gregory.
Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945
Temporary Services.
Group Work
Wallace, Ian.
The Idea of the University
Weschler, Lawrence.
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder

METAHAVEN: Why even bother defining the “conventional modes of design practice,” as what is a convention is always — if slowly — changing by habit and custom, and no two people would even agree on what such a convention would be for “graphic design,” at any given point in time, anyway. What is more, no practice can be entirely unconventional. Every practice which, for example, relies on technical protocol or standardization, either for digital production or for print, already is living by conventions. There is a huge amount of conventions and agreements that we have to take for granted before there even can be any disagreement, or unconventional behavior.

No designer is completely free in determining who he works for and what that work is. Many who you’d think subscribe to convention have not made the conscious choice to do so, but have somehow come to work at a particular place where they do the very best they can do. What you sketch out here is in fact a very large group of trained professionals doing the best they can. Occasionally we’ve taken the liberty to regard our work as a gift or favor, given to a particular agent or actor, portraying or representing that actor. Design can be an intervention. The gift is one of design’s most powerful intervention strategies, yet it is the one that is forgotten about easiest and quickest.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: Was there a particular brief for this project? How did you come to participate in Manifesta 8?

METAHAVEN: We were invited to participate nominally as artists. The only curatorial brief we got consisted of a text written by ACAF’s curators, Bassam el Baroni and Jeremy Beaudry.

The particular exhibition, titled Overscore, took place in the former post office in Murcia — a place that had been closed to the public for 30 years and was re-opened for the occasion. That said, this issue of Manifesta was suggestively titled to be “in dialogue with Northern Africa.” This gave a political air to the whole project that journalists were keen to take issue with. Such a dialogue surely did exist sometimes, but it did not mean, for example, an equal participation of African artists in all the exhibitions.

A number of curators and artists based in Egypt participated in Manifesta 8. For example, ACAF (Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum), Lina Attalah (of Take to the Sea), Mahmoud Khaled, Khaled Hafez and Sherif El-Azma. Now, months later, Egypt is seeing a popular movement that involves many of the same people we’ve been spending time with in Murcia, some of whom became good friends. We are interested for our work at an event like Manifesta 8 to voluntarily approach the constraints of commissioned design, while operating in an art context which on the face of it promises complete freedom — which, of course, there isn’t. The fruit stickers we designed all had “Manifesta” and “Murcia” printed on them. We always thought of them as an alternative campaign for the biennial.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: An introduction to Manifesta 8 describes Murcia as an “authentic melting pot” filled with “Roman architecture…Visigoth cities, Arab medinas, Baroque churches and Modernist architecture.” Beyond its built environment, in what ways does Murcia represent this idea of the cultural crossroads?

METAHAVEN: Although it may be tempting to see it that way, Murcia is not, at first glance, that much of a cultural melting pot. It has historically, like other parts of Spain, been under different rulers and different religions, and its population is a hybrid one. Like all regions that are at a crossroads of continents there is not this clear line where one culture becomes the other, but things are mixed. In Murcia and Cartagena a lot of street signs are in Arabic. And the agricultural irrigation system is in some areas still identical to the one the Moorish settlers brought there centuries ago. One of the best impressions we had in Murcia was a street festival. On this street festival in the Botanical Garden, the subdivisions and separations that still exist in this society (as in any other society) were suspended, and everyone danced with everyone. Normally though the street sellers, and other social groups, are pretty much sticking to their own network. But the networks are friendly to each other.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: Of course, Murcia’s nickname (“Europe’s orchard”) must have been a starting point for your work. Is the city still as essential to the European agricultural landscape as it was when that moniker was first applied? What challenges do regional farmers face today that they didn’t fifty years ago?

METAHAVEN: We find the idea of the orchard very inspiring — think of The Apple Orchard by Rainer Maria Rilke. The idea to create fruit labels came up very early, before we had even been in Murcia or met with the curators. Fruit has an origin. From that origin it travels in a network, between nodes of distribution, until it ends up at the place where it is eaten. We were, after arrival, also intrigued by the wild orchards that exist pretty much in every leftover piece of wasteland. The region of Murcia is still really important for the European fruit and vegetable market, but some of the production — of lemons, for example — has moved to Northern Africa and Turkey. In Murcia the heat is scorching, and in recent years the region’s water resources have come under increasing pressure by newly built villa estates and golf courses, many of which are now ghost cities after the Spanish real estate crash. There is an enormous shortage of water. Without water, the whole area is a desert.

A local activist group, Murcia No Se Vende, protests these villa developments which they assert are part of the neoliberal regime (very unpopular among the Spanish Left). They were also very critical of Manifesta arriving in Murcia. Initially, the project had the ambition to work with large fruit distributors, but Manifesta did not manage to get these companies on board. Instead someone introduced us to EDEMUR, a cooperative of organic farmers who run a self-managed business, exporting throughout Spain and to some other European countries, being the most important organic farming organization in the region. They became the partner. This has meant the world to us. EDEMUR has not just provided the exhibition installation with fresh fruit, it has also sold all of its own products with our labels.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: Signal (Murcia) proposes an alternate labeling system, one that highlights the political and ecological situation surrounding food, not just the characteristics of the food itself. How did you arrive at an approach for visualizing such a complex story? What are the advantages of using printed labels to display such information?

METAHAVEN: We love fruit labels as devices that contain information, ideas, and dreams. We do not like fruit that is packaged. The natural packaging of fruit is its skin. Unlike packaging, fruit labels do not overshadow the product. Often, all they do is convey the origin or name of the fruit, as well as a certain atmosphere. That is already enough; there is no room for a lot of narrative. So one could argue whether this is a project about information, or a project trying out a set of different moods and ideas around fruit. It tries to make you think, but it can only present the beginning of that thought. We’ve also worked with some of our ideas about currency, gifts, and favors.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: The ubiquitous Michael Pollan once claimed that “94% percent of [American] ad budgets for food go to processed food” and that “broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets.” Do you think Murcian growers have an interest in paying for improved food marketing?

METAHAVEN: They certainly have. The question is whether they have the money. You realize that the ethics of food production should change the way the product is marketed, instead of the other way around. Like if you have this organic product and you over-package and over-brand it — that runs contrary to the way the fruit is grown, harvested, and sold. We really dislike the recent celebration of authenticity and purity in organic food branding, or the appeal to urban liberal guilt (“This coffee was grown by female Nicaraguan farmers”). Food is an adventure. Organic is Sci-Fi.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: In relatively short order, the debate surrounding food production and delivery has gone from marginal concern to major force in the global zeitgeist. What do you think makes food so personal for so many people? Are you local/organic food enthusiasts yourselves? Has your perspective changed at all as a result of doing this work?

METAHAVEN: Food is personal because you eat it! It has a very basic relationship with life itself. We try to buy everything organic, as far as we can, and we are enthusiastic about that while muddling through the different attempts at branding. The best food comes unpackaged. The wild and unplanned are much more interesting than the designedly quasi-familiar and politically correct. The project has definitely changed our perspective on food, mostly by working with EDEMUR — a collaboration we hope to continue in the future.

THE HIGHLIGHTS: There is also an undeniable economical and social class distinction that’s associated with the consumption of food, especially in America. Does design perpetuate this disparity or can it be utilized to somehow remedy it?

METAHAVEN: Ironically, the irregularly shaped food as it naturally comes from the land got replaced by food that looks like an industrial product. That original food is now very much en vogue and perceived as the most expensive and elite of all foods. But looking at EDEMUR, we can see that there is a basic relation between where and how people live and what they eat. For them, organic food is not a matter of class, but a matter of culture. The remedy is already in the product itself — and design is merely there to make use of it. In general it seems that having less design on food will be better, like having the apple be carried in its natural packaging: the skin.

Amie Siegel, who makes films and video installations, has thought a lot about remaking. Two of her recent videos, both entitled My Way, create montages of passages from amateur performances of songs. “Got to go my own way,” a teenager sings to a camera in a bedroom (My Way 1, 2009). “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” a man of a certain age sings to a camera in a basement (My Way 2, 2009). The declarations of isolation and uniqueness paradoxically connect the performers to an audience and to a community of similar singers — a chorus — of which they can neither be entirely aware (since, for one thing, they have no inkling of collaborating with Siegel on her piece) nor entirely ignorant (since they must have witnessed other performances of the song). The title My Way 1 also has an autobiographical suggestion: this is Siegel’s way, charting a course through many performances to outline the type of the singer, the shape of the song, and the formal sequence of the song’s history. The unthinkable space of the work collects the entire artificial community of the performers of a song.

In two other works, Siegel puts herself in the position of the performers — as she puts it, “approaching a film, or a film scene, like a text or musical score.” The first piece that I will discuss, which helpfully calls itself a remake, carefully separates the space of the frame from the place where the material was shot. The second, which does not identify itself as a remake, runs different locations together to create a fantastic space. This manipulation of spatial divisions leads to a confrontation with the most basic pleasures and dangers of making art.

         1.
In Siegel’s two-channel video installation Berlin Remake (2005), the projection on the right shows fragments of scenes, each lasting a minute or two, from films produced by the East German State Film Studio. The one on the left shows a painstaking, shot-by-shot restaging of the same camera movements in the same places, orchestrated by Siegel decades later. The juxtaposition invites you to make a comparison, and the first thing you are likely to notice is that the spaces are so different as to make the locations almost unrecognizable.

In one episode, the left projection shows a modern subway station, clean and spacious, with unobstructed views of gleaming white walls. Well-defined clusters of people wait to board, or scramble to catch the trains, or make their way up the stairs to rejoin the city streets. The clusters suggest relationships, but they may just as easily intimate the sorts of unplanned but repeated associations that occur in daily traffic patterns, such as commuters who regularly take the same train at the same time, and travelers who find themselves walking with strangers in groups that hang together as far as the top of the stairs, or even a block or two away from the station.

These patterns are hardly at all reflected in the scene in the right projection, which shows a subway station repurposed as a hospital and bomb shelter. (The footage in this projection is older, but the place has obviously been remade in wartime for uses for which it was not originally designed.) Encountered at key moments in the camera’s doubled trajectory, certain architectural details — the stairs, the pillars, and the tracks — assert the identity of the place: we are on the same platform in the same subway system. But these details are hard to make out, because the frame is crowded with screens, medical equipment, radios, and torches. There are even cots set up on the tracks. The surfaces of the walls, when momentary gaps in the foreground allow such a deep view into the space, remain blocked by posters. And there are masses of people everywhere. Most of them seem to be camping out, sleeping, trying to sleep, closing their eyes while standing, leaning against pillars, or sprawled on the steps, with no coherence or evenness of spacing among the groups. The few people trying to navigate this space, mostly soldiers carrying bodies on stretchers and nurses with pitchers, have to pick their way through this mass of sleepers. The camera, too, feels crowded, as though it had to adjust itself to keep from intruding on its neighbors — as though its purpose were not, rather, to inspect them.

Why would you remake this shot? I think the answer has to do with transportation. Everything in this scene is moving. Most of the people are standing still, but they are going somewhere. The people in the left projection are waiting for a train that will take them away, and their future destination is visible on their faces and in the way they hold themselves. The people on the right are more patient, but they are also waiting. No train will come for them, but they will eventually be released from underground. I know this to be the case because they aren’t visible in the left projection, where the light reflected in the glossy white wall is a hole created by the long-ago movement of a person or piece of furniture.

There are two exceptions. In this sea of movement, one figure is curiously standing still. Well, not absolutely still, but moving in small circles rather than long lines. As the camera rounds a pillar, a woman appears leaning against the stair. When the camera halts, she detaches from the railing and follows an irregular path to meet it, stopping only when she is in the center of the frame and almost looking into the lens. (This abrupt shyness in front of the camera is actually the least stagy element in the scene; except in this moment, the people in both projections are obviously pretending not to notice a camera that must be staring into their faces.) Suddenly, as if frightened, she whips around, races up the stairs, finds her way blocked by a body on a stretcher, waits, turns again, goes back down the stairs, and exits.

Why do the camera and the woman, whose movements are more clearly defined than any other figure’s, appear static? Partly it’s because the doubling of the pattern turns it into an object. The ritual of the train commute is only implied, but the strange ritual of the woman finding and running away from the camera happens in full view. Mostly it’s because the camera and the woman haven’t gone anywhere. Everyone and everything else on the platform, including the furniture and the wall coverings, is there in order to find passage to another location, but the camera and the woman have reached their destination and have nowhere else to go. Years later, in 2005, they are still there, still fidgeting in place. Their job is to manage the movement of the other figures. The remake tracks movements on the subway platform, as well as the fact that the platform itself is moving. The same place defines two different spaces. This is the meaning of the title: the city remakes itself. Siegel follows an old scenario, but she has cast a different actor to play Berlin.

         2.
Siegel’s recent installation Black Moon (2010) is a remake of Louis Malle’s 1975 film of the same title. The work has three parts: a 20-minute film projection, Black Moon, that explores a military scenario that Malle’s film barely suggests; a two-channel video installation, Black Moon ⁄ Mirrored Malle, showing interviews with Siegel and Malle; and a series of photographs, Black Moon ⁄ Hole Punches, based on the standard practice in motion picture laboratories of punching a hole in the first frame of a film negative.

Malle’s film, not very well known although not quite as obscure as the fragments from the archive of the East German State Film Studio, is a work of nonsense in the vein of Lewis Carroll, set in an impossible space. The main setting is a country house that functions as a refuge from a war fought between a men’s army and a women’s army. The deranged movements of the performers register some of the peculiarities of the spaces in the house. For example, Lily, the protagonist, is able to handle a glass of milk only from a special angle, and keeps having to contort her body and stretch it the long way across a table just to reach the glass, as opposed to simply walking around the table and standing next to it. Subtle and unsubtle discontinuities between interior and exterior shots of the house suggest the geographical and architectural impossibility of the space: day outside is night inside, in a sequence of shots linked by the same musical passage from Wagner’s Tristan; sound fails to travel from outside to inside; and the garden scene viewed by Lily from a bedroom window changes by the time she has descended to enter it from the kitchen — the tableau remains in place only when she climbs through the window to confront it. There is also some suggestion that the interior of the house is larger than the exterior, as in a gothic story. For Malle, these discontinuities mark stages of psychological exploration, as Lily retreats further into her own mind.

For Siegel, the idea that inside and outside could be noncontiguous spaces is probably suggestive, since she has such a penchant for exterior shots of buildings that scenes in her work where the camera and an actor are together in a room feel surprising and eventful. (There is exactly one such shot in her 1999 film The Sleepers.) The setting in her Black Moon runs together exterior shots taken at various locations to create a fantastic space. The common thread linking the shots is architectural: we are looking at images of unfinished and abandoned housing developments in the California desert and Florida with names like “Pleasant Valley.” Instead of making the fantasy discontinuous, Siegel finesses the connections so that the different places appear to occupy the same space. A small group of soldiers — detached from a larger unit? lost? survivors of an ambush? — occupy the abandoned housing development. But they don’t occupy the unfinished houses. Like Siegel, they prefer the exteriors of buildings; they enter the houses to do radio work or security checks, but they sleep and build fires in an empty swimming pool. They seem to be on the defensive. They never fire their weapons, but they are menaced by sounds of explosions and gunfire, and sometimes by the discovery of the corpses of their comrades.

How do we know that this is a war between men and women? What if this is a women-only unit in an army that also includes some men? Or what if this army represents a nation that conscripts only women? If not for the relationship to the older film, who the soldiers are fighting would be a mystery. Siegel’s film inhabits part of the background of Malle’s film, the “civil war” between women and men. Siegel brings the women’s army out of the background, leaving the men’s army entirely off screen.

The two-channel video installation, Black Moon ⁄ Mirrored Malle, implies that the two Black Moons, Malle’s and Siegel’s, are somehow the same work. The format is similar to Berlin Remake: a 1976 interview with Malle faces a recent restaging of the same interview in which Siegel substitutes for Malle, translating his words into English. However, although the camera setups in 2010 approximate those of 1976, the locations and the movements of the two directors do not. (Both hold cigarettes and gesture emphatically with them, but Siegel makes parallel gestures with her other hand, whereas Malle’s movements are asymmetrical.) By inserting herself in Malle’s position in the interview, Siegel gets to claim authorship of Black Moon as well as, incidentally, some of Malle’s earlier works. This is also the implication of the general title of the installation. Unlike Berlin Remake, Siegel’s Black Moon does not announce itself as a remake but as the same film. The implication of identity in the face of apparent huge differences resembles Kathy Acker’s claim in Empire of the Senseless that her English translations of poems by Rimbaud are really plagiarisms.

Two elements in the installation refer to the impossibility of this fantastic space. One of them is the display of photographs, Black Moon ⁄ Hole Punches, each with a large hole punched in the center. The holes literalize the moon of the title, not as a satellite, but as a cut in reality, creating a window (through which, however, one cannot see) into something, perhaps another level of reality. The film obliquely acknowledges the discontinuous relationship between inside and outside in the odd rituals and protocols observed by the soldiers dwelling on the periphery of the houses, but these stills transpose that relationship onto frames of the film themselves. The black moon indicates that the frame, in an effort to contain some violent energy, has exploded, collapsing the outside and allowing the inside to leak out.

In the last sequence of the film, the solider who appears to command the unit looks at pages from a fashion magazine. Abandoned in the desert, the magazine is practically the only artifact of human civilization in the world of the soldiers, if you except the structures and roads of the housing development itself. That may sound like a big concession, but not if you contrast the interiors of the country house in Malle’s film; they are bulging with books, paintings, musical instruments, carpets, furniture, and other finely wrought things. If the soldiers in Siegel’s piece had a civilization, either it has been destroyed, or it was a Spartan one. It does not include anything like art, until the magazine shows up.

The magazine has the curious effect of aestheticizing the soldiers’s entire world. The pictures in the magazine show members of the unit posing in their uniforms. Thus the uniforms, weapons, and equipment become aesthetic decisions, objects to be played with, as fashion plays with the most serious subjects. The leader’s response suggests that the aesthetic, unbounded, lacking a frame between it and the world, might be more terrifying than the unseen enemy. (The myth of Odysseus binding himself so that he can experience the song of the sirens speaks to a need for protections against the aesthetic, and the peril of losing oneself in it.) We see the disturbed face of the leader before we see the images that disturb her: a two-page spread of what appear to be the scattered corpses of the entire company. The magazine represents the fantasy of witnessing one’s own death, and therefore standing outside it. It is also a mise-en-abyme locating the new Black Moon in the same space as the old one, as though each were a corner of a complete and fully extensive world.

BARBARA GRIFFITHS: After 9/11, it seemed to me that the dangers of religion shouldn’t be ignored. Most people get their version of the Bible heavily censored by the church. They don’t realize that the Bible condones rape, murder, ripping open pregnant women and dashing babies against rocks. Another reason to bring these stories to light is that they’re so horrible they’re funny.

TOM: But why turn them into children’s books?

BARBARA: Of course, they aren’t really for children. The project is a Trojan horse designed to infiltrate the bastions of righteousness. Parents might unwittingly browse through the pretty pictures, then catch sight of the text. “Oh my goodness!” they might exclaim, “this is absolutely disgusting! Who would write such stories!” The authors of the Bible is the answer, and if their moral code isn’t suitable for children, then it isn’t suitable for anyone.

TOM: Is this a fair representation of the Bible? Aren’t you cherry picking too?

BARBARA: No; this is the predominant tone of the Old Testament. The sayings of Jesus are congenial, but they too are largely fictional. How can we allow this bundle of myths to justify the banning of stem-cell research and gay marriage? How can we stand by when an American religious group is backing a bill in Uganda which promotes the execution of homosexuals?

TOM: Do you consider all religions to be a bad thing?

BARBARA: Not necessarily, but here’s the problem; religion evolved to boost insider co-operation while making it easier to kill outsiders. This used to be a good strategy for group survival, but it needs rethinking nowadays. I’m not necessarily pushing atheism, because that’s like hearing The Magic Flute, and exclaiming, “How ridiculous! The plot is complete nonsense, and it’s just not true!” Well yes, but that’s not the point. Religion’s part of human nature like art and music, and will always be with us. The social support provided by churches is admirable, and believers give more to charity than unbelievers. That raises an interesting question: if a false belief was found to benefit humanity, should it be exposed? When religion stops excluding and oppressing we might debate the idea.

TOM: If the Bible gives us a moral framework, it must have been intended as a force for good.

BARBARA: The Old Testament’s purpose was political, and it was written to help Israelite kings unite their people. A large chunk of the O.T. was forged by King Josiah’s priests in 622 BCE. As for the New Testament, it’s a confabulation of wonders ascribed to a preacher — an inflated resume designed to beat rival cults. Modern scholarship and archaeological discoveries undermine any credibility the Bible might have claimed.

TOM: Perhaps faith doesn’t have to be a bad thing in itself, and I’m not sure if it’s possible to live without it. Rationality can only take you so far. Many of the lessons of the Bible are immoral by contemporary standards, but take a look at free-market capitalism, which is based on human and ecological exploitation. That doesn’t bother us. The Bible justifies horrible things which were accepted in their day. Why attack it when we are probably just as bad, complacently basking in our own faith systems?

BARBARA: When you accept the certainties of dogma, you forgo responsibility for your own value system. Although each of us has a personal code inseparable from the culture, we can still critique it. Socially sanctioned belief in religious fairy stories sets the stage for an uncritical status quo where anything goes — Obama is a Muslim, Bush blew up the Twin Towers. Since all personal beliefs should be respected, however whacky, we’re allowed to believe in whatever we can get away with. Using religion as back-up politicians can claim (with varying degrees of good faith), “I’m right and you’re wrong,” or even “We’re good and you’re evil.” This isn’t helpful. And you can’t claim that all belief systems have equal weight and there’s no such thing as truth — some things are more true than others.

JUSTIN LIEBERMAN: Worst. Room. Ever. Platypus could barely conceal his terror. But wait. Aren’t we jumping ahead a bit? Can we start with something great that was near the beginning? R.H. Quaytman’s installation of paintings relating to the window in the room was subtle and hilarious in its insistence on an expansive context from within the frame of the image. The dedication to place seems almost impossible and simultaneously a matter of course. The use of glitter too, I can’t help but read as something just out-of-fashion enough to produce a feeling of disgust. Maybe that one was the best room? Who was the naked woman in the painting?

CA: K8 Hardy. She was posed after the figure in Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun, owned by the museum. Only the composition is reversed, as if seen in a mirror. I appreciate that the context is expansive toward other works situated within the museum rather than the Biennial (I am thinking here of how Cheyney Thompson’s piece did this last time around, among others). Pointing to the conditions of the Biennial doesn’t do much for me, but Hopper — with all his pictures within pictures and rectangles within rectangles — is a nice reference for the framing and reframing in this work. It is a good room. But I am not disgusted by the glitter.

JL: Oooh. That makes it even better. I definitely agree with you about the registration of context. Quaytman’s is historical rather than bluntly political. It opens up a sea of possibilities rather than presenting an endgame, as does an insistence on the “reality” of current conditions. It seemed like in the last Biennial a lot of artists were really trying to find ways to recoup some kind of political agency for themselves, and that led to some gestures with about as much subtlety as a sledgehammer. It continues in this one. The Hearse by the Bruce High Quality Foundation this time around was pretty blunt. It seems that certain types of gestures stake themselves on causing a rupture through desublimation. And this inevitably leads us back to ego. The desire of the artist to be the one who pulls back the curtain. It can start to seem like a pissing contest. Everyone is trying to be the smartest one in the room.

CA: Absolutely. Have you noticed how many reviews of the Biennial end in ejaculatory praise of BHQF? I don’t get it. Or I do get it and it bothers me. Everything about that piece that purports to be critical seems to me disingenuous. The appeal of BHQF is premised on a romantic notion of Americanism. Their outlaw’s song is already a mediated image. It’s a bunch of vain strutting. Peacock feathers are not the arrow you shoot into the heart of the monster of excess. They only make that monster bigger. It’s like movies about drugs — no matter how compromised the characters become or cautionary the tale, they just make you want to do drugs again. Quaytman’s historicism is certainly available to the political. Jo Nivison, an artist married to Hopper, was the model for many of his paintings, including, I believe, A Woman in the Sun. When she died she left Hopper’s works and her own to the Whitney under the condition that the museum maintain them both; they promptly discarded her work. They have even sold off some of Hopper’s work in moments of financial crisis. Institutional manipulation of history, that is in Quaytman’s work too. Without any pissing.

JL: They’ll do the same to my work, if I am lucky. More likely, collectors will just alter it to suit their purposes. All my sculptures will eventually be converted into lamps. All my paintings will become carpets. That is (unbelievably) a much more common scenario to my mind than the one you’re describing. It happens to me all the time. Meredith James told me a story about Michael Heizer’s battle with MOCA LA to have Double Negative restored, and I thought it sounded as though he had set himself up for problems in the first place by making big, complicated work whose meaning was contingent on its own preservation. I like George Brecht’s axiom: “If something breaks or is lost, replace it with something similar, or something different, or nothing at all. No catastrophes are possible.” I like this very much.

That said, it was stupid and evil for the Whitney to throw out those paintings. As far as selling off the Hoppers, that seems like the stupidity and evil of a much larger institution than the Whitney. It seems strange to throw away paintings. They don’t take up that much space. I think that the political irony in Quaytman’s work is predicated on the portability of these small, beautiful paintings that can be easily subsumed into a field of exchange. It helps to ensure their preservation. But they nevertheless insist on an attachment to place. They are funny in this impossible insistence. They are subversive. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that the place to which they are attached is the Whitney. So there is a certain opportunism there as well. There is a little bit of pissing.

CA: I make things that, sometimes small and sometimes beautiful, always have a relationship to craft that certainly inspires preservation. But it seems to me the goal is not to make works that survive with their physicality intact, but works that remain useful. Though your paintings strike me as rather coarse material for carpets. Quaytman. Opportunism? Hmmmm. Do you know that her dad is Harvey Quaytman? His work is owned by the Whitney and he was in several Biennials. One could say she was born with an attachment to that place. Now we are talking about legacy instead of pissing. But the work seems to me generous, so I am inclined to be generous with it. The artist and her work, like us all, begin from a place of compromise. The daughter of a well-known painter, a grouping of works that have to be considered within the context of the show everyone loves to hate: the Biennial. With this as a start, they recoup political agency for themselves precisely because they do not set themselves up as falsely oppositional to their origins. Instead they use those origins in a way that is expansive. And funny and subversive. Shouldn’t we talk about other works in the show though? You had, uhhhh, a strong reaction to Nina Berman’s photographs.

JL: You are right. Expansive, generous, totally great. That’s how I felt in the beginning anyway. The Berman photos. I am not taking that bait. What I will say is that every time I am with a pretty girl, I feel like that guy. The wedding photo is incredible. What about the Charles Ray flowers? I can’t remember how many people told me I was going to shocked by those, but I wasn’t at all. It does not seem to me to be out of sync with his other work. How can it be shocking for an artist to paint flowers? Reminds me of Thomas Schütte.

One thing I thought was interesting was the amount of dance. I remember a time not that long ago when it might have seemed unthinkable for choreographers like Martha Graham or Yvonne Rainer to be referred to directly. If an artist was going to engage with work like that, it was a matter of course that this reference would be third hand at least. Through Hollywood’s depiction of performance art or something. A lot of the dance videos in the biennial seemed to be returning to the source. I think I felt this way when I first saw Catherine Sullivan’s videos.

CA: I’ll take my own bait then. The gruesomeness of Berman’s and Stephanie Sinclair’s photos was abrupt amidst so much pretty painting. I don’t see this as an innate problem with the individual works — I don’t look towards art to provide one type of experience — but I do see it as a problem with the curation. It sets up a division between mediums. To take up one of your favorite subjects of late, it seems to say painting can only access “the real” through a quiet contemplation of materiality and photography by exposé — by a documentation of horrific circumstances. Even the inclusion of George Condo is undercut by the choice of a subdued work. I don’t like this. Painting can be gruesome. As for Charles Ray’s watercolors, I agree they are not shocking. If they looked more like Schütte’s work I think that would be interesting. More like an old man splashing around in his studio on a Sunday afternoon. Instead they seem to me as careful and premeditated as any of Ray’s sculptures, to follow neatly his formula of populist imagery made strange by dysmorphic construction. Regarding all the dance — yeah. The third floor was downright aerobic. Why was that all on the third floor? One of many strange pairings of like with like in the show. The references in Catherine Sullivan’s work go towards film at least as much as dance or performance though. When she uses dance it is only to point to the construction involved in any presentation of the self, while the dancers in Rashaad Newsome’s or Kelly Nipper’s videos seem to have a much more straightforward relationship to expression.

JL: This is a complex issue. I can see the reasoning, even though I don’t agree with it. Paintings have a relationship to what Yve-Alain Bois refers to as the “image of labor.” This is the way in which the rhetoric surrounding the political paintings of Anselm Kiefer or Jörg Immendorf continues today. It reacts against what is perceived as a fetishistic treatment of the political. There are a million other examples of the ways in which this results in kitsch. So the logic follows that images of destruction and violence can be “seen” only when the image of labor is not itself present. I guess that is why Luc Tuymans’s paintings are acceptable. They seem to have been done very quickly, and yet they are gruesome. Condo himself flirts with kitsch. I doubt he would discuss his work in terms of politics though. Unless it was a politics of taste. It is very difficult to reconcile having Quaytman and Condo together in a single exhibition. Condo’s painting was in a room with Robert Williams, who was also poorly served by the inclusion of a few subdued watercolors.

I think the whole show had a feeling of doing penance for past excesses. And so work that flirts with excess is being curtailed a bit. I don’t think this is totally unwarranted though. Certain ideas about excess and desublimation (like those of Bataille) seem almost non-functional now. Like they have been proved wrong by the way in which they became the rule of the culture. So now, with a few exceptions (concessions?), we have a very serious and austere Biennial. Of course, these are the vicissitudes of fashion. As soon as austerity and a “Bartleby” attitude becomes the norm, there will again be a need for a desublimatory interrogation of unquestioned ideology. If I’ve learned anything by watching contemporary art, it is that ideologies can make sudden shifts beneath the surfaces of aesthetic forms. These things are never static. I don’t mean to say it is a cycle. Just that overcompensation is inevitably the rule when group shows try to establish a zeitgeist. But I would like to point out Josh Brand’s work, the abstract photographs, which certainly take a very different approach to photography.

CA: I can see the reasoning too, but I still don’t like it. With Tuymans, I think his acceptability — or the permission he is granted to access the political without having his works decried as kitsch — has more to do with the separation his particular form of labor places between the viewer and subject than the speed of his execution. He is like Gerhard Richter in that regard — the emphasis on the photographic source, a manner of paint handling that in part veils the imagery. But no one would describe Richter’s paintings as having been done very quickly. So it is not just that the image of labor is not present in Berman’s and Sinclair’s photographs, but that their documentary form distances them from the acts they are recording. The artists did not generate these images of destruction and violence; they are just showing them to us. We understand Condo and Williams as generators of an imaginary world — they are responsible for its poor taste. Recently you asked me if I wasn’t claiming some of my writing as fiction as a way of offsetting responsibility for evil or embarrassing thoughts, but here is an argument for the reverse. It is the fictional world that the author is responsible for. You’re right that Josh Brand’s photographs don’t fit into the distinction between the way painting and photography are being presented that I just described — they are treated like painting. Which is to say they are an exploration of process that is medium specific. And, like the painting and much of the sculpture and video in the show as well, they are benevolent. If instead of a few subdued watercolors, Williams was represented by a slick oil painting of a hot babe on top of a burrito, it would not be benevolent. It is not that it is the off-season for desublimatory interrogations of unquestioned ideologies — that is exactly what BHQF is being set up as. If you are positioning yourself as an interrogator of unquestioned ideologies you can still be in the clear — your ideologies, presumably, above suspicion. It is the off-season for being wrong. It is not just a serious and austere Biennial; it is one that (with few exceptions) tries to be guiltless. Penance is the right word. I can reconcile Quaytman and Condo in single exhibition — they are both critical and they are both complicit. They are a little bit guilty. Like me.

JL: OK, but at the core of this, there is still a matter of economy. Williams’s and Condo’s work is painstaking and spectacular. The fundamental critical mistake is the particular insistence on the inseparability of the image of labor in terms of visible quantity (something which, because of their strange finish maybe, seems impossible to pin down in Quaytman or Brand, but not in Condo and Williams where process is visible) and political content. Richter evacuates the image of labor from his paintings with the smear or the blur. It cannot really be said how much is there. Et cetera et cetera. What is the author’s responsibility concerning the relationship of his or her fictional world to the real one? It may be the case that when we are conducting an interrogation of any fictional world, we find that it is ultimately still a part of the real world with everything that that entails. I guess what I am saying is that it is impossible to contain or bracket the fiction. I am attracted to the films of Lars Von Trier and the books of Michel Houellebecq. Or the performances of Tamy Ben-Tor. They are funny, and their cruelty resonates with my own feelings of resentment and disenfranchisement. They play to these feelings. Liking them is Schadenfreude. But all these things deny themselves political agency through employing a Nietzschean/Freudian insistence on the division of society and the individual. An individualistic ressentiment. Of course, one could also formulate a societal ressentiment. Maybe bohemia would fill that requirement. Quaytman’s work involves a fantasy too, but the great thing there is the way it gets out of these super-reductive traps by making the fantasy one that so closely mirrors what we would assume to be the reality. The story is the story of the work’s production, its location, and finally our experience of it. But all this is no more real than than any other possible telling. If fantasy absorbs and restructures reality, then it seems like a good idea to put some thought into the types of fantasies we produce. They have real power.

CA: But when we’re talking, not about the labor that went into producing an object — which we also have to recognize takes more forms than that of craft — but about certain forms of representation that are recognized as labor and others that aren’t, the fundamental critical mistake seems to me not to explode such distinctions. Because it is not just that there is an insistence on the inseparability of the image of labor and political content, but a political content that dictates what we recognize as labor. And I agree that it is impossible to contain or bracket fiction, but I would say it is precisely for this reason that it is also impossible to say, to use one of your examples, that Houellebecq denies himself “political agency through employing a Nietzschean / Freudian insistence on the division of society and the individual.” His book The Elementary Particles begins with the story of two brothers, both disenfranchised individuals at odds with society for sure, and ends with a story about cloning a super race. The end is a disavowal of individualism and the core of the story, the sad tale of the brothers, could be read as an illustration of its failures. But the ending is such an abrupt break from the empathetic relationship the readers have been asked to develop with the characters that I, at any rate, certainly did not get to the end of the book and think, “Oh yes, here is the solution — case closed.” I don’t want to get too sidetracked, I just want to make the point that it is precisely because the implications of any fantasy this complex are resistant to a singular read that they are always open to political agency. It is not just that fantasy absorbs and restructures reality, but that we absorb and restructure fantasy — to suit our needs. We return to the idea of the work that remains useful here. And because what we need from a work changes, the story is always the story of the work’s production, its location, and our experience of it — and these things are not stable. But wait, isn’t this a review of the Whitney Biennial?

JL: OK, you’re right, you’re right. The Whitney Biennial. This year’s Whitney Biennial was full of delightful surprises. It was a no-frills, tight-belts show. Everyone was doing their best. It is thoughtful, human in scale, and delightfully low on hype. All the art has room to breathe. Something about touchstones. It is a mixed bag. Art shows otherness. Everyone is sincere. Hooray for America. Your turn.

CA: Now you’ve got it! The premier American art exhibition. A major, temperature-taking survey of what’s going on. A cross section of contemporary art. The 2010 snapshot. It’s been decades since there’s been a prevailing style or practice in art any more than there is in ice hockey. Spectacle is out. Smaller and more fun this year. Not to be missed. I left the museum with a giant burst of happiness for the infinite creativity of America.

To: The Whitney People
From: Monument Consultancy, LLC
April 31, 2010

First things first, so let’s get right down to it. The flowers at the Metropolitan, so festive and appealing, are placed in gigantic vases near the grand staircase at the entrance. Why? To garner the most attention from the most people. If the Whitney Biennial is to include at least one automobile per exhibition, why not put those cars right by the elevator? BANG! Who cares about flowers when you’re standing in front of a big, beautiful American machine?

Success means maximizing impact: It’s time contemporary art jumped into the exhilarating, inevitable world of product placement and positive co-branding. These cars didn’t build themselves, and, chances are, manufacturers will be more than happy to subsidize their display. Think: What announces “periodical domestic production” better than the automobile? What says “American ingenuity” better than the Whitney?

• Transform curatorial habits into mutually beneficial opportunities.
• Use a symbol of American resilience and resurgence to strengthen the Whitney’s profile. And vice versa.
• Seek out diversified sponsorship options.

We also discovered inefficiencies in the display of video art, and not for the first time. For example: At what time do the works begin? Why can’t the museum place a little green light outside the room, to indicate the start time? Also, must we stand to watch them? If we sit down, are we then watching a film? We were confused on this point, and have been for some time. Why not arrange a sensible, comfortable viewing environment?

We feel the optimal display of videos is a question that should be revisited more frequently. Your institution is in a unique position not only to identify and publicize important trends in exhibition strategy, but also to initiate them. Imagine the textbooks: “Prior to the Biennial of 2012, videos were often shown in cramped, unpleasant rooms, with no seating or start times.”

• Assure your clients they are seeing the whole video, start to finish.
• Provide a satisfying viewing experience.
• Change history.

Our informal studies have shown that seeing bad art is as edifying as seeing good art. We therefore recommend replacing the survey of past Biennial highlights currently on display with a collection of historical low-to-medium lights. People already know about Edward Hopper; they would like to learn what everyone else was doing in the 1950s. Give them the mindless trends, the bad decisions, the imitations and failures.

A premium on everlasting excellence places too much pressure on the current show. We feel that the goal should be instead to release pressure. Today’s artists will feel more confident about entering history if history is full of mediocre cubist still lifes and bad, imitation de Koonings.

• Represent the fullness of previous epochs in the detail they deserve.
• Render institutional history transparent.
• Make the living feel good, not the dead.

Any periodical group exhibition on the scale of the Biennial is a quantitative as well as a qualitative phenomenon. Too many artists? Your viewers won’t know where to look. The zeitgeist goes out of focus. Too few? How will collectors know who is just about to be famous? The engines of the art market sputter, then grind to a halt.

Contemporary art combines the aesthetic richness and socioeconomic profile of contemporary classical music with the competitive and spectacular appeal of professional sports. With this in mind, we have determined that the number of artists in the Whitney Biennial should be calculated as the arithmetic mean between the number of players on a basketball team and the number of members of an orchestra.

• Lubricate the wheels of industry.
• Less is always more.
• Unless it’s less.

The term “contemporary art ” implies that art should be contemporary. With what? With the news. With what is happening in the world. With life.

But consider this: it has been statistically proven that more things happened today than have ever happened on any given day in the past. And yet, major periodical group exhibitions still occur every 2 or 3 years, at most. This made sense in 1932, when newspapers came out once a day, paintings took 6 months (or more) to make, and people slept soundly between the hours of 6 PM and 9 AM. But in 2010? Contemporary art finds itself facing a contemporaneity gap. No sooner has an exhibition been installed than the entire epistemic frame surrounding our culture has been replaced, like an empty toner cartridge.

Therefore, in order to adjust to the accelerating temporality of the present, and taking into account recent, dramatic changes in the production and reception of contemporary art, we propose that a totally new installment of the Whitney Biennial commence every 7 to 10 minutes.

• Don’t put on a 20th-century show in the 21st!
• “Contemporary” means ahead of the game.
• There’s no time like the present.