ADRIAN PIPER
I want to consider a certain class of answers to the question, ‘What do you do?’ The class of answers I have in mind interests me because it reveals different conceptions of what it means to be committed to art, and thus different conceptions of what art activity consists in. Secondarily, it may also suggest different solutions to the problem of what it might be like to succeed in making one’s commitment even nominally intelligible to some interlocutor outside the art context. More
MEL RAMSDEN
Review of a panel discussion at Artists Space 155 Wooster Street, New York City, February 18, 1975. The eight panelists were: Carl Baldwin (moderator), Carl Andre, Rudolf Baranik, Mel Edwards, Hans Haacke, Nancy Spero and May Stevens. Linda Nochlin was supposed to attend but she apparently had the flu—too bad.
I. Perimeters of Protest had a few problems. The title itself gives us some idea: it was all about the form and style of protest rather than what it is, that is the content, the practice, what we might actually protest about. It was taken for granted that protest is something to be vaguely desired More
ARTUN ALASKA ARASLI & BAS LOUTER
25 November – 10 December, 2011
There’s a joke which involves two people. The first person walks up to the other, but upon approaching them the first person quickly realizes that the other person isn’t who they thought they were and says “Sorry, I thought you were someone else…” to which the other replied “I am”.
AMSTEL 41, 1101PV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy!
You show me the honour of calling upon me to submit a report to the Academy concerning my previous life as an ape.
In this sense, unfortunately, I cannot comply with your request. Almost five years separate me from my existence as an ape, a short time perhaps when measured by the calendar, but endlessly long to gallop through, as I have done, at times accompanied by splendid people, advice, applause, and orchestral music, but basically alone, since all those accompanying me held themselves back a long way from the barrier, in order to preserve the image. More
MS Sans
Softcover, 84 pp., offset 1/1
Edition of 500
Published by Cheap Art America
Distrubted by Textfield, Inc.
$5.00 (via Textfield)
Contributions by: Anthony Salvador, Chris Palazzo, GUNMAD, Jeremy Landman, Jiminie Ha, MacGregor Harp, Nicolas Borel, Project Projects, Sam Farfsing, Samuel Banziger, Stewart Smith and Victor Hu
“‘Getting closer to things’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction.”
W. Benjamin
All works part of a greater whole, exhibited temporarily in July, 2011.
“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism. So if there were the least certainty that one could enjoy the show, it would be worth proving to them what they are unwilling to believe and thus amazing them. But you kill yourself and what does it matter whether or not they believe you? You are not there to see their amazement and their contrition (fleeting at best), to witness, according to every man’s dream, your own funeral. In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.” — ‘The Fall’, Camus pp.75–76
(Work of mine may or may not be present somewhere on the 2nd floor)
Do you wonder if books are passe? Do you worry about that? As we were talking about yesterday, Rolling Stone hasn’t covered a writer your age in ten years.
I think books used to be real important parts of the cultural conversation, in a way that they aren’t anymore. And the fact that Rolling Stone, which is a pretty important mainstream magazine, doesn’t cover them that much anymore says a lot. Not so much about Rolling Stone. But about how interested the culture is in books. More
A documentary I just stumbled across — Quite interesting in relation to how society is dealing (or not) with discourse and conversation within the arts and raising the question as to how to continue a discourse outside of institutions.
“Habit, monsieur, vocation, also the desire to make you fully understand this city, and the heart of things! For we are at the heart of things here. Have you noticed that Amsterdam’s concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker.” – A.C.
Sylvere Lotringer: How did you get the idea to make Flaming Creatures?
Jack Smith: I started making a comedy about everything that I thought was funny. And it was funny. The first audiences were laughing from the beginning all the way through. But then that writing started — and it became a sex thing. It turned the movie into a magazine sex issue. It was fed to the magazines. Lesbian writers were finding purple titillations. Then it fertilized Hollywood. Wonderful. When they got through licking their chops over the movie there was no more laughter. There was dead silence in the auditorium. The film was practically used to destroy me.
L: Wasn’t there a trial?
S: There was a trial and I lost. Uncle Jonas’ lawyers were doing the trial, and at some point it was dropped. And if a case is dropped, it can’t be appealed. Now the movie is permanently illegal in New York. More
Robert Fillou and/und Emmett Williams
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself. Almost an “unrecognizable” world. The writer waits in ambush for these unique moments. He pounces on his little grain of nothingness like a beast of prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced. Sometimes one makes the mistake or commits the sin, shall I say, of trying to fix the moment, trying to pin it down in words. It took me ages to understand why, after having made exhaustive efforts to induce these moments of exaltation and release, I should be so incapable of recording them. I never dreamed that it was an end in itself, that to experience a moment of pure bliss, of pure awareness, was the end-all and be-all.
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence. More
The absurd always holds ‘a balance between comedy and tragedy’
People agree that a shoe is a shoe and a brick is a brick, not out of dogma or closed-mindedness but to avoid walking around with bricks strapped to their feet.
–BC
The act of looking at things innocently and unlearnedly so you can see them for what they are instead of what they are named for.
(Possible?)
Sam (MICROPHONIES) makes some intense, fast, minimal and cut up beats that hit hard…
