Benjamin Patterson
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through January 30

By Jess Wilcox

Benjamin Patterson, Two Violins after Paik’s One for Violin, 1991, Violin, wooden board, 3 x 6 x 3 inches. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Schüppenhauer.

Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us is the expansive and scholarly retrospective that the artist’s rich interdisciplinary career merits. More than that, it also reevaluates Fluxus as an art-historical movement. As the title implies by punning on the plural subject, the exhibition complicates the persistent, if unintended, myth of Fluxus as a harmonious, cohesive group. This concept departs from the first wave of Fluxus historicization, which tended to focus around George Maciunas—dubbed the Chairman for his promotional, curatorial and at times, stringent leadership skills. If Maciunas’ strategies of establishing, marketing and maintaining the flexible but identifiable Fluxus brand seem prescient and discerning in retrospect, so too do Patterson’s shifting affiliations with other artists and collaborative projects. The comparison reveals that both collective and individual identity are fragmented, aggregate and dependent on historical circumstance.

Patterson’s gem-like early works—annotated, coded and chance-based scores—welcome visitors at the exhibition’s entrance. Many of these scores are so intricate that it is difficult to decipher the artist’s methods and processes. Yet the delicacies of the pen strokes and inked symbols, as well as various textures, weights and opacities of the papers of the drawings, beg the eye to linger. Without the logic explicated, the calligraphic quality of the hand-drawn archival documents nonetheless visualize the translation between media—what Dick Higgins called Intermedia—that characterizes many Fluxus works. Sweeping and curling register as gestural indices in Patterson’s drawn scores, hinting at the source of his concept of “action as music”.

Playful assemblages and sculptures that result from such actions occupy the majority of the gallery’s physical space. Patterson’s work bridges the histories of Fluxus and Nouveau Realism, a concurrent affiliation of artists working together, including Daniel Spoerri and Wolf Vostell who also participated in Fluxus events. An early assemblage consisting of a found light bulb placed on a grocer’s scale (Speed of Light, 1965) crystallizes the union between Fluxus and Nouveau Realism. Its title, a playful mismatch of measurement systems for luminosity, mass and velocity, borrows the language games and concept of translation between media from Fluxus, while its combination of found objects saturated with historical narrative and sentiment is indebted to Nouveau Realism.

Hinting at the administrative functions that are often cloaked but integral to Fluxus practice, a gallery nook titled An Ordinary Life narrates and documents Patterson’s activities as an organizer of experimental music performances, a librarian for the performing arts division of the New York Public Library, a music producer under the label Ben Patterson Limited and a city advocate for avant-garde performance. The exhibition presents Patterson’s 20-year hiatus from art making as a mode of working fitting squarely within the Fluxus spirit, rather than an occlusion of production or slowing of ambition. The stylistic unity between early and late objects (grouped thematically rather than chronologically), the instructional precision between the scores and the administrative pen, and of course, the retrospective format, only reinforce the message of continuity. Born in the State of Flux/us contrasts with the dominant historical account in which Fluxus peters out in the 1970s.

As the show traces Patterson’s interests, associations and collaborations, it seems to ask, “Who is the ‘us’ in Fluxus?” Considering that Patterson was the only black Fluxus artist, it becomes clear that the emancipatory politics presumed to accompany such formal inventiveness were as limited in Fluxus as those of preceding avant-garde propositions. In an interview with the curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, Patterson relates his disappointment that he was the only Fluxer to participate in civil rights demonstrations. While Patterson’s later work more directly critiques agents of power—in Pan Am (1990) the artist fixes a gas mask to one of the airline’s subway advertisements above the slogan “free breathing”—his collaborative and chance-based processes also convey a politics of pluralism and contingency. Ultimately, Born in a State of Flux/us presents a positive image of Fluxus: one with a whimsical and unfixed, but nonetheless openly inclusive “us.”

Jess Wilcox is an independent curator based in New York City.

Free
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
Through January 23

By Wendy Vogel

Free (exhibition view).

The New Museum’s group exhibition Free provides a snapshot of a transitional moment in terms of contemporary artists’ (and curators’) embrace of the Internet as platform, medium and subject matter. As curator Lauren Cornell explains in her catalogue essay, the exhibition references Lawrence Lessig’s notion of “free culture”—a philosophy touting the democratic potential of sharing and distributing information on the Internet. (Cornell’s essay, along with contributions by five other writers, descriptions of the work and a blog, can be accessed on the exhibition’s website). Featuring 21 artists and one collaborative duo, almost all of whom are emerging to mid-career artists familiar to the informed New York art audience, this discerning exhibition and its clean installation barely registers as a visual analogue of the informational free-for-all that the title would suggest. Rather, the curators’ choices, which forsake the Internet’s content overload for an experience that demands focused IRL attention, attest to the ambivalence of reconciling the experience of the Internet with the aesthetic expectations of white-cube presentation.

It’s almost a given that an exhibition broadly addressing the way the Internet has changed our daily and art-professional lives would be all over the map. While visually heterogeneous, the works included in Free can be roughly corralled into two thematic categories: those that use the Internet as content or those who use it as form. Seth Price’s Dispersion does both, and provides the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. A manifesto statement on conceptual practice in the age of the Internet, Dispersion was initially conceived in 2002 as a downloadable PDF and has been subject to multiple revisions, both of the text itself and in its presentation. Here, the screed is displayed sculpturally as Essay with Knots (2008), where the text is printed on vaccuum-formed plastic stretched over ropes to near illegibility. Dispersion is closely related to Price’s other ongoing work, Title Variable, a multifaceted project of mixes of obsolescent music genres and music criticism. Both works are distributed through multiple channels, from limited-edition records and vacuum-packed sculptures (all package, no product), affirming the art market and gallery circulation as one channel among others and embodying the Internet’s pluralistic ethos.

Works by artists who use the Internet purely as form, however, appear dulled in the austere gallery setting. Ryan Trecartin’s riverthe.net, a video-sharing site on which he collaborated with David Karp, departs from the Philadelphia-based artist’s schizophrenic and much-lauded videos that imagine a queered world created by the fractured language of hyperlinking. Although the work mirrors the Internet’s potential for instant fame by featuring “amateurs”—participants are invited to upload 10-second clips to the site with three tags—the cacophony of the live-feed projection falls flat in comparison to Trecartin’s Technicolor dreamworlds. Joel Holmberg’s work, Legendary Account (2007-10), also suffers in white-cube representation. The artist infiltrated the site Yahoo! Answers and anonymously posted probing, open-ended questions such as “When does post-coital end?” or “How possible is it to convince people you are an artist?” The questions and their earnest responses are pulled from the site as screen captures and printed on sheetrock. While this work-as-documentation recalls the strategies of conceptual art, its carefully selected excerpts and upsized display in the museum aestheticize the Yahoo! site in a way that runs contrary to the Internet’s potential to extend the temporality of such social experiments, at the same time revealing the hand of the artist whose subversion perhaps was more brilliantly played out in his webspace namelessness.

Clunie Reid, Take No Photographs Leave Only Ripples, 2009.

Not surprisingly, Free features many artists who use the Internet as a source material to extend the strategies of chance operation, appropriation and collage. Of these artists, Amanda Ross-Ho’s conceptual twists on found-object sculptures are some of the most captivating. THE SKIES THE LIMIT (LEAVE ME ALONE), 1998-2009, features a gigantic t-shirt that serves as the basis for multiple printing experiments, a form for endless permutation that mimics Price’s strategies. Seizure (2006), an eerie sculpture created from a photograph of Ross-Ho’s worktable filled with images of confiscated contraband organized into neat rows, confronts the museum visitor with material that ordinarily is restricted to underground police sites. David Horvitz’s Southern-most Inhabited Island of Japan (Hateruma…Public Domain), 2010, extends a clever republishing project called A Wikipedia Reader that references the obsolescence of digital artifacts. Tracing the journey of an image through various Wikipedia entries while combining personal footage from his own trip to Japan, this work reimagines the cut-up or conceptual poetry of previous generations in a way similar to Kenneth Goldsmith’s published works (and masterwork, Ubuweb).

As a counterpoint, Kristin Lucas, Jill Magid and Alexandre Singh stand out for their appropriation of the Internet’s ideas through older forms of public address and bureaucracy. In Kristin Lucas’ Refresh (2007), one of the show’s older works, she “refreshes” herself like an Internet browser through the bureaucratic process of changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas. Magid’s Becoming Tarden (2010), a book of semifiction that resulted from a commission from the Dutch secret service (AIVD) to “humanize” the organization, utilized her seductive strategy of infiltration similar to her work with the New York Police Department in Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy. Up to forty percent of the book was censored by AIVD, and though the manuscript in full remains sealed under a glass case, the redacted manuscripts are available for perusal in the gallery or purchase in the bookstore. Though it may seem tangential to the exhibition’s Internet theme, the work calls into question how “public” our civil organizations really are and how “democratic” our ability to access information is. Finally, Alexander Singh’s The School for Objects Criticized reimagines Molière’s morality theatre through a riotous and neurotic dialogue between politicized objects debating the value of the Internet. When I entered the installation, a toaster, a bleach bottle and cassette players debated the relative merits of YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo. The performance recognizes the ambivalence of artistic criteria, while ruminating obliquely, if sardonically, on the future of art objects in an increasingly virtual universe.

In many ways, Singh’s installation epitomizes the generational attitude of the show as one who still holds the Internet at a distance, instead of being fully naturalized as its citizens from birth. The artists, curator and I assimilated to the changes in communication and information distribution by the widespread use of technology as teenagers or young adults. As we assume positions of prominence in the artworld, we are collectively asked to negotiate new technologies against older models of presentation. In the meantime, the idea of “curating” has spread like wildfire through the Internet. With interminable amounts of data to sift through, categorize, contextualize and recombine, the curators’ tasks are part of everyday virtual existence. Free has stuck to the model of the exhibition, with its signifiers of art-world prestige, to elevate the concerns of the Internet’s knowledge economy to the realm of academic discussion and conceptual rigor. The question we might now pose is to what extent a carefully selected exhibition of well-known artists functions as a public and democratic forum, and how we might reimagine the public sphere in the future through the lens (and help) of the Internet’s “free culture.”

Wendy Vogel is Editor of ...might be good.

Christopher Ho
Winkleman Gallery, New York
Closed December 23, 2010

By Sara Reisman

Christopher K. Ho, 2010, Hirsch E.P. Rothko 2001 (No. 26), 2010, Acrylic, watercolor and guache on linen, 12 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York.

Christopher K. Ho's exhibition Regional Painting is the story and resulting artwork of an artist facing a creative block. The show brings together a performative experiment in art as life, a series of abstract paintings and a book of art-historical fiction. Each layer of Regional Painting offers intricate details of Ho's fictional alter ego Hirsch E.P. Rothko (HEPR), an anagram of the artist's name, whose project unfolds into a triangular, conceptual-critical framework.

Ho’s narrative entitled Hirsch E.P. Rothko’s Hirsch E.P. Rothko ties together each of the exhibition’s elements, which sparkle and multiply into a shimmering minimalist framework. (A .pdf of the book is available here) Ho’s fictional account tracks the collapse of his protagonist’s avant-garde artistic aspirations beginning in the summer of 2001, when HEPR finds shit smeared on the walls of the bathroom at New York art world eatery Bottino and self-consciously leaves the bathroom as potential gallerist Ed Winkleman waits to use it. Thereafter, the artist leaves New York by car for Los Angeles in search of new prospects. Immediately following a car accident on his way out west, HEPR awakens before a familiar Colorado landscape that he remembers as the Coors billboard that recently took over the view from his loft in New York City. Rescued by locals and witnessing the real Rocky Mountains, HEPR’s transition from New York to regional artist begins in earnest.

Ho's real art-as-life moment began in 2009 as he prepared for a yearlong move to Telluride, Colorado to the License Plate Shed. The shed is a readymade work of art: a steel framed structure covered in license plates that Ho rented as a live/work studio. Situated in the mountain village of Telluride, the shed frames an out-of-art-world experience that Ho conceived to make more authentically unselfconscious artwork, and is described in the accompanying novel as being “without irony, without conceptual apparatus to support it, without plans, without a project”—in other words, a return to process. The name for this site of production is coined by HEPR as the side-guard, which is "to one side of the straight line that led from the avant-garde to the rear-guard," a triangulation of critical thinking that undoes rigorous calculation familiar to many would-be New York art world players. Drawing lines between the avant-garde and the rear-guard alludes to triangles and anagrams that appear throughout the book, the architectural lines of the License Plate Shed, and in the abstract paintings presented in the gallery.

The book takes place in late summer and fall of 2001 (an anagram for 2010), at a time when New York lost its innocence in the aftermath of 9/11. In his delusions of a simpler artistic life, HEPR completely misses this event and is confused when his fellow local Telluride artists speak of a new unity and sympathetically ask him if he had lost any connections in New York. The flip side of this blind spot emerges among the local hippies with whom HEPR finds friendship. Ho’s anagrammatical pseudonym is Hirsch E.P Rothko, yet the only form of recognition by HEPR’s new pals is when he is called, in jest, Damien Hirsch, with no acknowledgment that his last name is the same as abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Both instances of disconnect read as a critique of HEPR's experience of the regional, a site where one loses touch with broader politics and lacks historical awareness.

With such an elaborate narrative, the paintings may appear as an afterthought, but as is the case with post-studio (or post-post-studio) and outsourced production, an artwork must loop back into the gallery setting in order for it to register in the art world proper. That this project winds its way back to Winkleman Gallery, instead of the local Telluride gallery at Ah Haa School for the Arts (presented as a viable venue in the book), proves that Ho has not fully embraced the art-life experiment, and, as HEPR discusses with his spiritual guide Mal, the notion of regional artmaking as an alternative model will anyway be assimilated just “like avant-garde radicality.” The books themselves are presented at Winkleman as installation objects, self-deprecatingly stacked in the margins of the exhibition, yet the narrative gives substantial and complex meaning to the recurring abstracted gods' eyes of the paintings.

The question the exhibition doesn't fully answer is: what constitutes success for a regional painter? Through his protagonist HEPR, Ho explores one formulation of a critical apparatus for producing work, which is to make art for art’s sake. As HEPR comes to terms with the regional artist's comfort with making art on his own terms and selling, we might partially assess the success of Regional Painting through its sales. Regardless, Regional Painting questions the relationship between the avant-garde and the rear-guard and whether it's possible to exist in both camps. To answer this question would require a longer local engagement.

Sara Reisman is a curator, writer and Director of New York City's Percent for Art Program.

Mark Morrisroe
Fotomuseum Winterthur
Through February 13

By Katie Geha

Mark Morrisroe, Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer 1978, 1986, C-Print, bearbeitet mit Marker, 40.5 x 40.5 cm. © Nachlass Mark Morrisroe (Sammlung Ringier) im Fotomuseum Winterthur.

Writer and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz recently remarked that while the art world was absolutely affected by the great artists ravaged by HIV, the audience that was lost due to the disease was, perhaps, even more devastating. She made such a bold statement in part to provoke. She wanted to make clear that the receiver of a work of art, an audience, is just as integral to a healthy culture as the creator, the artist. Great audiences demand great art.

I was thinking a lot about HIV and the loss of a particular audience as I visited the Mark Morrisroe retrospective at the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, Switzerland. Morrisroe was a photographer who documented the 1970s Boston punk scene and the 1980s downtown scene in New York. He died from complications of HIV in 1989. He experimented with a variety of processes and invented the “sandwich print,” a method of exposing two negatives together that produces a subdued velvety palette. He hung out with downtown legends Nan Goldin and David Armstrong and he dated photographer Jack Pierson. He made playful super-8 home movies of himself and his friends in drag. He often claimed he was the illegitimate son of the Boston Strangler. His friend, Pia Howard, once quipped, “If Mark didn’t have art he would have been a serial killer.”

In the front gallery, large prints show Morrisroe’s regard of the photograph as an object to manipulate, a marking of a time and place. He scribbled personal inscriptions, the date of the photograph or the names of the people pictured directly on the photos. In one salacious self-portrait, he mugs naked, one arm leaning against the wall of the shower. Scrawled on the side of the photo is a dedication to the art dealer Brent Sikkema: “To Brent, a little something for all those words of wisdom that you’ve been offering me all these years.”

Another gallery showcases vitrines containing the collaged and xeroxed zine Dirt, a hilarious send-up of celebrity rags created in 1975 and 1976 by Morrisroe and his friend Lynelle White. Mixing fact with fiction, the editors relayed the juicy details of underground life. One column entitled "Hot Flashes" states: “Barbarino used to be Patti Smith’s boy. Robert Mapplethorpe brought him to their apartment when he was still a hustler on 53rd and 3rd. Patti Smith thought he was adorable.” And below that, “Divine wasn’t always the beautiful and sophisticated actress that she is now. Ho ho ho. Once her name was Glen Milstead and she lived in Baltimore.”

In another issue, a photo-booth strip of Morrisroe and White is displayed above the following: “We the editors of Dirt Magazine get the impression that you our readers are misunderstanding us. We are really very cute and naïve, only pretending.” Whether its friends posing for the camera or experiments in printing, this sense of play pervades the exhibition—even when Morrisroe documents his illness. Several small photos show him lying seductively on a bed, Venus-like but gaunt from sickness. Only pretending.

Most of the photographs in the exhibition have a snapshot quality; everyone’s fabulous, sensual and languid, romantically admonishing the camera with a fixed gaze. The delicious sense of looking and being looked at is ever present. The immediacy of the photographs and the handwritten texts directly on the images creates a sense of intimacy, a kind of romanticism of the underground. Even thirty years later in a gallery in Switzerland these photos felt familiar. Such closeness creates the vital elision between artist, subject and finally, audience.

Katie Geha is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bryan Zanisnik

Artist Bryan Zanisnik lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His solo exhibition Brass Arms Upper Eyelid will open at Horton Gallery in New York on January 13. His one-person show Open Brain Case and Forceps is currently on view at Marginal Utility in Philadelphia through January 23.

For this project, Zanisnik partnered with two collaborators to examine his artistic origins. Below, he talks with curator Jess Wilcox about his “genealogy”—familial and artistic. He also teamed up with comic artist Eric Winkler to construct a comic strip timeline of his life. Click here to view it!

They say the best place to start is the beginning, so this interview will be framed as a search for origins. Since your work speaks to the construction of identity through family, another way to think of the interview may be as a genealogical survey.

Jess Wilcox [JW]: In the performances He is Not a Man (2007) and the recent Zawodniczek Summer Home (2010), you’ve taken up narratives dealing with your Ukrainian and Polish heritage. How do you see these in relation to the average coming-to-America narrative? Are there novels, television, comics and other popular media that influence you? How do you see your narrative of the American family in relation to the 21st-century version of the Great American novel and writers like Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon?

Bryan Zanisnik [BZ]: My interest in the American family narrative has been influenced by a vast number of literary and film sources: road films such as Godard’s Weekend, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Spielberg’s Duel; and coming-of-age novels such as Catcher in the Rye, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. Broadly speaking, road films and coming-of-age novels fall within the genre of the Bildungsroman—a novel or film that focuses on the psychological or moral growth of its protagonist. In contrast to the Bildungsroman, my narratives often focus on failure, humiliation and regression into one’s childhood.

Take, for example, my trip to the Ukraine in 2007. I went there to trace an ancestral story about my great-grandfather, who wrestled and killed a wolf that was attacking a group of children near his farm. It was later revealed that the children belonged to Czar Nicholas II, and because of this, my great grandfather became a great Ukrainian hero. After my trip, I came back to the United States and presented a performance where I boxed a bully from my youth dressed as a wolf. The performance merged two temporally distinct events, the heroism of my great-grandfather with the humiliation of being bullied. Unlike a typical Bildungsroman novel, I lost the boxing match badly and no moral was learned as my childhood bully brutally beat me up in front of my friends and family.

JW: Many of your performances enact psychologically nightmarish situations. The tableaux vivant freeze these moments of shame, humiliation and sacrifice, forcing viewers endure the pain with you. Here I’m thinking of When I Was a Child I Caught a Fleeting Glimpse (2009), the three-hour performance in which you lay in tattered clothes atop an enormous chunk of aluminum, with your parents watching over dressed in a combination of fire fighting gear and Christmas apparel. The title almost hints at the infamous Freudian primal scene of the child encountering his parents in flagrante delicto. How much is your work informed by Freudian psychology?

BZ: Much of my work is both a “working through” of childhood memory and identity and, simultaneously, a parody of this trope. This doubling and duality is very Freudian in itself. Freud tied the concept of the double to that of the uncanny—that which arises due to the return of repressed infantile memories. When I was nine years old, my father’s car was Molotov-cocktailed in the middle of the night, while my family and I slept safely inside our suburban home. We awoke to the explosion, and my father had us immediately evacuate the house in case it caught fire. When I Was a Child I Caught a Fleeting Glimpse is not necessarily about this childhood memory, but it is nonetheless informed by the trauma. This performance, like other works in my oeuvre, takes a specific childhood memory and expands it to an archetype by filtering it through tropes of absurd humor, existential literature and popular culture. While the title sounds very Freudian, it is actually a quote from Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb, a song I listened to endlessly as a child.

Another significant manifestation of the uncanny is in the form of involuntary repetition. In my five-minute video Repetition Compulsion (2010), my father endlessly yells “Gone!” as he and I engage in power struggles throughout my childhood home. Loosely based upon a 1914 Freudian study, my video explores a child’s attempt to gain mastery over a loss. In the video, I portray myself in a submissive role subjugated to my domineering father. In actuality, my father’s performance is dictated by my direction, and thus he is actually the one in the submissive role: again, a form of Freudian doubling.

JW: Your photographs typically occupy a non-hierarchical space. Off Season (2010), a triptych for your upcoming solo show at Horton Gallery, is collapsed almost to the point of claustrophobia and disorientation. This domestic storage space seems to come alive, fighting against its neglect. Similarly, the frenzied pace of edits in your videos, Repetition Compulsion for example, induces anxiety. In this latest series, how do form and content play off one another?

BZ: In the new body of photographs, the form is directly tied to the content of each image. Each of the photographs was shot in sections, using a panoramic head and a 100mm telephoto lens. While nothing in the photographs is added digitally, the images are stitched and reassembled in post-production, using Photoshop and a program called PTGui. There are two advantages to shooting photographs in this way. First, it slows down the process of making an image. Shooting a stitched photograph can take up to eight hours to complete, and thus the photographic process becomes very sculptural, meticulous and cerebral. Second, since telephoto lenses naturally compress space, the images appear dense, chaotic and both artificial and authentic at the same time. In Off Season, there are pieces of bread attached to twine that hang two feet in front of file cabinets. The bread, however, appears pressed up against the cabinets. This compressed juxtaposition creates a hazy yet aggressive spatial relationship, which reinforces the image’s contextual exploration of free associative memory and excessive American culture.

JW: In other works, such as Forgot What I Came Back Here For (2010) and Club House (2010), the private arena looks like the scene of a crime. What is it that is so anxiety-producing about domestic space?

BZ: When I was younger I read the autobiography of basketball legend Larry Bird. In the book, he discusses lying down as an adult and visualizing his childhood street, house and bedroom in meticulous detail. He performed this mental exercise as a means to strengthening his recollection and concentration. I think of my photographs as similar to Bird’s mental exercise, except that my images reconstruct memories that are hazy, dreamlike and alchemic, namely in their mutated and transformative nature. In reconstructing a childhood space in such a free associative manner, there is an inherent indeterminacy, anxiety and entropic subtext. This anxiety is also connected to the traumatic childhood experience of developing an identity and sexuality within the parents’ home. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wryly states, “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety.” In both Forgot What I Came Back Here For and Club House there are mundane domestic objects emerging from a collapsing hole within each room. The collapsing spaces can be read as a psychological rupture, a catharsis or even as a reference to the birthing process itself.

JW: Masculine tokens—medals of honor, rifles, baseball cards, sports trophies, poker cards and golf clubs—appear throughout your images, typically en masse. I’m reminded of the obsession compulsion of hoarders and fetishists. Does this relate to the changing status of men in society or the failure of traditional standards of masculinity?

BZ: I remember trying out for the varsity basketball team in high school and not making the cut. I was skinny and only of average height, but I loved basketball and wanted to play. Like in most high schools, there was also a sense of status and pride attached to the varsity basketball team. This status manifested itself in many ways throughout the high school, but none were more apparent than the prominently displayed trophy case outside the principal’s office. Today I look at these objects from a wry and ambivalent point of view. On the one hand I see their significance as markers of childhood success, but on the other hand, they are mass-produced and impersonal objects that often find themselves stored away in the basement or sold for pennies at a garage sale. In my photographs I use objects like trophies en masse as a comment on this ambivalence, but also as a criticism of an excessive American culture. Finally, hoarding and fetishization can be read as a form of symbolic and subconscious representation, and here objects such as trophies may speak to latent concerns over childhood loss, the phallus and the ego’s repression of fantasies.

A Reading List for Artists

By Rachel Cook

After finishing a semester of graduate school as a curatorial studies student at Bard College, I’ve realized that there should be a reading list for artists. As a former practicing artist myself with an art school BFA, I wish I had been given a better structural foundation of theoretical texts and art history methodology to complete the picture. Maybe some of this “advice” should be saved for another recommends article, with the title “A Better Way To Teach Art History to Artists.” Needless to say all these gaps in my understanding of art history and theoretical texts might have nothing to do with any of this, and have more to do with the late ‘90s and how the whole idea of contemporary art has shifted in the last ten years. From my standpoint the pedagogical methodology of the ‘90s appeared to focus on postmodernism and the rise of performance, installation, and more interactive artworks soon to be collectively known as relational aesthetics or social practice. I am guilty myself of creating work within the same style or rubric without fully understanding the term and theories behind the methodology—a symptom that I equate with many academic programs where the professors’ outdated approach and lack of perspective creates a mismatched theoretical rubric to the work that is actually being created within the classroom setting.

We rarely think of chunks of time in terms of decades anymore, but as 2011 begins and resolution/best-of lists are being created with the last ten years in mind, how can we develop a reading list for artists that might carry us into the next decade? That includes the burning question of terminology, and the current rubric or category of “contemporary art” as an art-historical period, if we can even claim it to be one. For as it exists now, it is a dumping ground for everything that is currently being made, which can’t possible continue to be classified in the same way into the next decade.

Let’s start with some of the basic modernist theoretical texts. One of my flawed favorites is Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967) where his account of minimalism, or literalism as he calls it, offered a reading of the theatricality of the aesthetic experience that opened a further discussion of phenomenology in aesthetics. Maybe he got it wrong, but he did so with such a passionate and artful piece of writing that is worth another read no matter how many times you have read it. Then there are two essays which account for a big chunk of the discussion around sculpture during the late ‘60s and all the way into the ‘70s: Clement Greenberg’s “Recentness in Sculpture” (1967) and Rosalind Krauss’ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979). Greenberg’s essay functions as a desperate attempt to maintain the lineage that he championed with Abstract Expressionism by claiming the works that should be preserved are works that contain what he referred to as “aesthetic surprise.” Krauss, on the other hand, goes through a series of negations to try and place the recent sculptural work that is being made in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, going as far as borrowing diagrams from linguistic structuralism to plot it. Both of these seminal texts get thrown around and cited repeatedly, but the original texts are worth another look in their entirety. They both point to work that was being made at very specific time periods, and each author grapples with a transition in their very argumentation. We see some of their struggle with these transitions, but what we see more clearly are how they further the discussion of modernism and reject some of its terms, taking us far beyond formalism and into postmodernism.

Next I would turn to the artists themselves: Robert Smithson’s and Donald Judd’s writings. My favorites from these two prolific artists are “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (Smithson, 1968) and “Specific Objects” (Judd, 1965). Maybe I sound like a strange formalist at this point, but as opposed to Smithson and Judd in the late sixties, contemporary artists from this decade have less of an ability or urge to hash out each other’s work within the public sphere of publications like Artforum. What I enjoy about reading each of these essays is Smithson and Judd’s commitment to advocate not only for the style of work they were creating, but also for that of their peers.

Where are the artist voices of this decade? A recent example of an artist taking over the pages of Artforum is Mike Smith’s multiple-page spread in December, “The Year in Education.” However, this written contribution by Smith is perhaps better read as a diaristic example of his pedagogical approach and collaborative methodologies. All of which is why I am suggesting a reading list for artists. I wonder whether in this new decade artists could contribute more to these questions about work, framing, style, the idea of the contemporary, the political, the recent questions of social practice, activism and many more theoretical ideas.

My hope is to unveil or demystify the structures of canon making and what curators are thinking about today. There are fewer differences between how artists and curators operate in the cultural matrix of the current contemporary art institutions than one would believe, especially contemporary curators. With that I would encourage and almost demand artists to engage in a larger theoretical discourse with emerging curators. We are your peers and your advocates. Maybe in the next decade we could find a common language, instead of the constant complaint of the curator instrumentalizing the artist’s work, or theoretical frameworks being poorly placed on group exhibitions to support a flawed argument.

So here is my suggested reading list for artists, former artists and the emerging curatorial graduate student, including me:

-The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
-Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism, co-edited by Jeff Khonsary and Melanie O’Brian and co-published by Artspeak and Fillip
-Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Henry Madoff
-High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture by Isabelle Graw
-Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture by Jessica Helfland
-Hotel Theory by Wayne Koestenbaum
-Exhibiting the New Art: 'Op Losse Schroeven' and 'When Attitudes Become Form' 1969, main essay by Christian Rattemeyer
-How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness by Darby English
-Sight of Death by T. J. Clark
-The Biennial Reader, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig Øvstebo
-The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster
-What Is an Apparatus? and other essays by Giorgio Agamben

A native of Houston, Texas, Rachel Cook is currently pursuing a Master's candidate at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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