So we’re here! Been in New York for nearly 3 weeks now and it’s been a fairly tough time adjusting for a number of reasons. On entering our respective bedrooms we learn that there is no light, no wifi and that the other room shared by three people is also the kitchen. So that situation took some getting used to. We then realize that in the United States the term ‘Fine Art’ actually refers to painting and drawing as opposed to the more umbrella-esk notion that we employ in the UK. So the initial couple of weeks were spent in classrooms, which if we hadn’t known better would resemble something that we would think of as hell. Three hours of talking through painting techniques and brushes and whether we believe that we have a ‘spiritual connection to paint’ all of which at the beginning we found amusing but it did begin to drain most our souls. A further aspect, which we found confusing was the huge amount of spoon-feeding that appeared to go on; home work being given out every week to do a painting of your cat or something equally ludicrous. And if you miss 3 classes then you fail the class entirely. This is such a bizarre way to treat people who are paying for a service. If we were to consider a coffee shop; the way it works is you go to the counter ask for your triple venti half sweet non-fat caramel macchiato and then once they’ve made it you’re able to sit with it and decide to what degree you are going to engage with it. If you see fit you can take a sip and decide you don’t want it and throw it away and order something different or you can drink it slowly because it’s kind of hot and you want to savour it. But no one is going to come up to you and tip the thing down your throat like you’re a baby without any teeth or knowledge of your own motor skills. These people are 21 years old and are being asked to ‘bring in 3 photos of things which mimic nature’. This is the place creativity comes to die. We are never going to be even remotely dissatisfied with CSM ever again. However, despite this rocky start we have been able to get onto some graduate courses and some slightly more appropriate ones, even if it did involve signing up to a class titled ‘Objects Seminar’ only to find out it was entirely catered to jewellery students.
Even within such a toxic environment we’ve somehow managed to come up with some new works and ideas. We’ve finally put to use the social media comments we’ve been saving up all this time with a new piece titled ‘wash away the pain(t)’. The comment utilized for this particular piece is someone observing the existence of Kazimir Malevich’s piece ‘Black Square’, a work that acted as a sign of a new era of art (Suprematism). It stood for nothing and everything, simultaneously. He had a theory that absolute truth can only be realized through pure feeling and pure feeling could not be experienced utilizing articles from the physical world. So he was starting from scratch, a new way of painting that everyone should follow, a kind of cleansing, one that could only come about whilst engaging with this particular thing. We related this to objects in the real world and with the idea of cleansing thought a towel is an interesting, even transportive object. The goal of washing oneself is to become clean, not to become wet and in order to counteract the bio-product (the wetness) a towel is used. We thought that this was an appropriate metaphor when discussing Black Square. We also had our own agenda of perhaps slightly promoting this notion of the removal of this paint-because-it’s-art mentality. This was over 100 years ago and Duchamp came even before that so why do people continue to paint because they believe that’s how art is made?! This perhaps wasn’t the best piece to show to the class when we the class was asked to bring in work for a crit. Even in the graduate sculpture class there was some tension when examining the ideas we were attempting to convey. In some ways this is almost a piece of fan art; we love Malevich even with his questionable methodologies. It’s also a question proposed to the art world and the Internet world; here is someone who obviously doesn’t understand the piece and is trying to ascertain what’s going on but thinks the only way to do so is over by analyzing it. So it’s also a poke towards the people making this inaccessible work to perhaps maybe think about people looking at it and maybe people want to engage with it but can’t because there’s no way of accessing it. We’ve also thought of a pun that at some point we’d like to exploit for the title of a work but are fighting the urge to make it a one liner. ‘Lads on Tor’ is something we’ve been thinking about for a while and initially we were just going to have us looking round in a Jon Rafman-esk style photo with the Tor browser open on a laptop surrounded by beers. However this didn’t quite seem to be what we wanted so will return to it at a later date. After the crit with the sculpture class, we thought it might be fun to, on the day of the crit, choose something at random in the building as we were on our way in and say that this was our work. It could be a pile of boxes, it could be a piece of paper crunched up into a ball but we would have to think about the connotations of this before since doing it would be fairly duplicitous and potentially cause some anger due to this deceitful nature.
For the group piece at CSM we video called home and acted as the Maître D' welcoming and explaining what to do for the viewers. This was a pretty bizarre experience to be put on a plinth and talk to people about a work that we had only been involved in via verbal communication as opposed to being a part of the physical making. We’d engaged in discussions in how the work was going to look and how certain aspects would work but it’s so different being unable to participate in the production. It felt like a successful piece/event; people enjoyed being able to participate and receiving a certificate of said participation.
Before coming out here we contacted an artist duo that we hugely admire, named Eva and Franco Mattes, asking whether or not it would be possible to assist them in any way with regards to their artistic practice. Amazingly they said yes and our first task was to use the online forum 4chan to get people to make 2 works for them to be sent to a gallery in Paris that was having an exhibition for images created with reference to playing cards, the suit of hearts and the joker to be precise. This was something we found hugely exciting and difficult; 4chan users are notoriously difficult to impress. We tried a variety of techniques from telling the truth about people asking us to do it to lying and saying it was an assignment for class. None of this worked so finally we had an idea to post a photo of a hard drive which a piece of text saying that we were giving this to our girlfriend for valentines day and asked them to fill it up with images (preferably jokers and hearts). This time we got 150 images (mostly of bizarre memes and peoples genitals) but thankfully near the top some people had actually posted original images that they had created meaning that our job was done! It was really interesting to think of this idea of crowd sourcing, especially on 4chan. Just the notion of asking someone to ask someone else to do something for you is funny and falls right into place with their practice, full to burst with pranks administered with sincere messages.
We also managed to drag ourselves out long enough to go to a few gallery shows, the first being the Greater New York at PS1. Aggregately I’d suggest the show was great but there were some serious inconsistencies with the work on show; some of it being very engaging and thoughtful such as David Hammons’s glorious black-and-red-striped ‘African American Flag’ or Charles Atlas’ video, ‘Here she is ... v1’, which shows a juxtaposition between the seriousness of Lady Bunny’s politics and the artificial nature of her look. Other work proved less inviting and thought provoking. Cameron Rowland is an artist who we had never encountered before but is one that won’t be forgotten quickly; his room offers up two makeshift pass-thrus (the revolving doors used to guard products and employees from customers at bodegas) and a box of copper piping. Something we found fascinating was that collectors can only rent, never own, said box, bringing up concepts of value with respect to materiality. The Whitney was the next gallery on our list and especially Rachel Rose’s new video installation. The film is an illustration of the story spoken by astronaut David Wolf. A previous show of hers was at the Serpentine Gallery and was similarly about the limits of the human body and was tempered with an uneasy, anxious sense of detachment. This fixation on the disembodiment astronauts feel in space is clearly influenced by Gravity and Interstellar. Riffing on the astronaut explorer’s tale of the extreme dark and light in space, Rose has removed the blinds and replaced them with a scrim on which her film was projected, and through which the city view can be seen. By doing this she brings together both the light from the video projection with the natural light streaming in, so the viewer feels a sense of oscillation between a virtual space and the real world beyond it. Penelope Umbrico’s show in Chelsea titled ‘Silvery Light’ was of serious interest to us. She had employed the photographic archive of the Internet and crowd sourced images of the same thing, the moon. The website she utilized for this work is Flickr, which is also the resource for Umbrico’s well-known work, ‘Suns from Sunsets from Flickr’ (2006-ongoing), that addresses the ubiquity of amateur sunset photographs uploaded to the photo-sharing website. Her latest project, ‘Everyone’s Photos Any License’, looks at a similar photographic cliché. Taking a clear photograph of the moon requires slightly more expertise and specialized photographic equipment than a snapshot of the sunset (a smartphone won’t do). However, Umbrico discovered there are over one million nearly identical, technically proficient images of the full moon on Flickr, and thousands of these images are copyrighted by Flickr users. The irony of this is brilliant. The photographs with the ‘All Rights Reserved’ license then required permission from 600 photographers to use their photographs in the installation. The result, ‘Everyone’s Photos Any License (654 of 1,146,034 Full Moons on Flickr, November 2015)’, is comprised of each of these photographs individually printed and mounted to the wall. The work is accompanied by a multi-page attribution text, Credits, compiling the names, credit line, image title, and licensing terms for each photographer, and any technical details about the image that the photographer provided on Flickr. One of the most thoughtful aspects of the exhibition is a folder marked ‘Rejections’. It’s sat on the front desk, away from any other art works, and could be very easily over looked but when one goes through it what’s inside is all the people, and their emails explaining why, who wouldn’t allow her to use their images in her piece. Since this is a hugely process based idea we believe it perhaps could have been highlighted slightly better due to this being a key part of this process. Yoko Ono’s ‘The River Bed’ was very spiritual in nature which we feel is always quite problematic and hard to relate to but none the less her instructional works gave us an idea for a piece where we display all the things artists get you to do during an exhibition. This could include any participatory action from drawing a line on a wall to having a conversation. It’s fun to consider ones own practice as a part of that of a famous artist and vise versa. The thing that makes it theirs is that they told you to make it but you made it under their instruction so there’s a question regarding authorship when both parties are artists. The final show was ‘From Minimalism to Algorithm’ which was contemporary and historical painting, sculpture, performance, and musical composition that proposed a new through-line for art-making during the past half century. Minimalism was a strange subject to consider when viewing these works because stereotypically one thinks of Donald Judd or Carl Andre – artists who usually involved themselves in correlating with the era’s industrial production and increased weight placed on the presence of the individual. This idea is rarely thought of when considering technological material and this was definitely an aspect we took from this.