art writing & related
Past Made Present: On Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Photostats
on the illicit pleasures and melancholy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's work, and the many resonances of his Photostats, collected in a gorgeous edition by Siglio Press
“…what does it mean to consider an online exhibition of physical objects now archived in a physical catalog while I am reading a PDF of the catalog in DropBox? These many degrees of removal from the works and the online exhibition don’t feel like distances at all but rather like I’m retracing their discontinuous existence while reimagining their varied articulations. The no-longer existing imaginary institution documented in Institutional Garbage has vanished but not entirely –nothing on the web ever disappears completely.”
Je est un autre: David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York
“‘The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness–he explores himself, he tries out all the poisons on himself and keeps only their quintessences’ So wrote a Paris-based Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to his friend Paul Demeny in 1871. Nearly one hundred years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the artist David Wojnarowicz followed a parallel path on the streets of New York.”
Art, Life, and Lurking: Barbara Browning’s I’m Trying to Reach You
"Writers sit habitually before their keyboards (or with a pen and paper at the ready), and in doing this attempt to isolate moments from life and reframe them on the page. Another way of understanding the performative in the literary is through John Cage, who said that literature, “if it is understood as printed material, has the characteristic of objects in space, but, understood as a performance, it takes on the aspects of processes in time.” The blurring of time and space, and of art and life, are central to Cage’s conception of art, that “art should not be different [from] life but an action within life.” An action as habitual as brushing your teeth can become art if a certain conscious attention is paid to it.”
On being lost in language in Bordeaux, detox, and LaToya Ruby Frazier
“French runs in subtitles below, and I wonder how the native French speakers surrounding me are processing this combination of image and language? How does their perception of this scene differ from mine? I feel no distance from their language in the dark, curtained room. I watch the film play three times through, feeling the need to scribble down phrases: “When you’re done we’ll take a nice picture,” the practitioner says. Also, ‘Most of the time it’s the mucousy things.” Says the mother: “That’s an uncomfortable feeling.’”
On Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation
“During a particularly charged moment in Tom Finkelpearl’s What We Made—his dialogic exploration of the type of socially engaged art he classifies as social cooperation—performance artistTania Bruguera disavows the Duchampian gesture of removing the urinal from the bathroom. She calls for a model of art making that is both useful and intellectually engaging, “that integrates human activity and everyday life in a different way,” and reinstates the urinal-as-artwork to its original function and milieu.”
Unlikely Connections: Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs
“Kraus shows that the contemporary world is linked by unlikely connections–a world where prison laborers make computer keyboards that generate profits for a corporation that funds a foundation, a foundation which, in turn, supplies mosquito-netting to an African country to prevent malaria on a grand scale. Tracing such disparate connections is an art unto itself. With technology, distance has collapsed, and with physical distance, other barriers and demarcations, too. Commercial products now mimic conceptual art, in that ‘far more creativity goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves.’”
Keeping The Past Present: Shadowed!
“One could consider Rothenberg’s show, her larger body of work, and especially her art in Shadowed!—the recently published elsetimeexhibition catalogue—through the prominence of shoes, their traces, where they’ve been worn, and where they’ve been left.”
Anatomy of a Break-Up, On Sophie Calle’s “Take care of yourself”
Sophie Calle took the arrow’s course upon her lover’s spurning and transformed her misery into art. As obsessive as Barthes, she explores and classifies love from the perspective of the break-up. Her lover ended their relationship in an email that closed with the line, “Take care of yourself.” Her exhibition now showing at the Paula Cooper Gallery is her response.
The Artist’s Exit: A Postscript to Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present
“Although I had watched Abramović sit for hours (though not face to face) I’d never heard her speak. In fact, I’d barely seen her move. The way she held her pose with her shiny face gazing forward, she resembled a wax figure from Madame Toussads. Abramović sat quietly with strength, but when she finally spoke, she spoke with command–her husky voice issuing words in an Eastern European accent.”