h a s i t f i n i s h e d y e t ?

Last week we watched Symbiopsychotaxiplasm; it is a bizarre film that dances to and fro over the lines of fiction and documentary. It documents a behind the scenes view of the making of a film titled ‘Over the Cliff’, a couple enacts a break up over and over again while the crew film, we are led to believe that this is real. However the actions of the tyrannical director, William Greaves, make the viewer begin to question the authenticity of the events that are occurring. Greaves appears to be playing a part as ‘the director’, he is sexist, confusing, and acts as a catalyst for drama within the film crew. At the beginning of the film Greaves instructs the man behind the camera to “film the film being filmed”, not the events within the film, but the events occurring exterior to the film, whether it is the film crew, a bird flying in the sky or a even a passing car. From that point on the viewer beings to notice that Greaves’ decisions are erratic and slightly unrealistic, however the reactions of the crew members and actors remains extremely believable. The woman playing the leading role seems to be constantly on edge, unable to adjust to Greaves bizarre decisions; at a point later in the film Greaves even decides to change the film to a musical, and at the frustration of the crew, requests that the actors sing all their lines. The crew members voice their anger with Greaves, complaining that the film is directionless, that he is a bad script writer and suggest changes to the plot that Greaves ignores.

The footage begins to cut between the crew in action (filming the actors and conversing with Greaves) to a discussion between the crew about Greaves. The viewer senses that a mutiny is afoot; in their discussion they question the directors competence and ask themselves what they believe the purpose of the entire exercise is – perhaps he is doing this on purpose. There is much confusion as to what exactly is going on, yet one crewmember has a prescient view of what is happening in that moment—that their on-camera discussion concerning Greaves and his movie—is, in fact, their “function” in the film. As a result the viewer begins to thoroughly question the ‘authenticity’ of what they’re watching; if Greaves is willing to trick his crew will he also trick his audience? The film is a brilliantly layered view of an event viewed from multiple angles via the people’s reactions. For arguments sake, lets that that Greaves masterminded the entire thing; the reactions of the crew were real, the original film was real and the chaos was real. In relinquishing total control he transcended to a completely new level of ‘author’. Greaves is the creator of a documentary that documents the documentation of the filming of a film thus capturing something far more authentic than the idea of a film itself, in short, Greaves recorded reality. A bizarre, twisted form of reality that’s forced through ill-fitting holes into spaces it has never previously occupied. But what is the film wasn’t ‘real’? If the crew were actors also does the film still hold the same sort of power? Well, if there is one thing to take from Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, is that the ‘real’ doesn’t matter, in fact to record a successful documentation of reality, one must perhaps relinquish their own ties to reality as they perceive it. Without the fictional ‘director’ played by Greaves there is no reaction from the crew and there is no Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and without Symbiopsychotaxiplasm there is no discussion formed about reality after watching the film. Consquently in creating a possibly false reality within the film, Greaves creates a very ‘real’ discussion of reality exterior to the film regardless of whether the film told the truth. As Oliver Laric says in ‘Versions’ 2010 “Every lie creates a parallel world, a world in which the lie is true”.

There is has been a recent rise musicians that question the reality of the album, when is an album finished (real)? What should one consider to be the true version of a piece of music? – an album version, a live version, the sheet music or a remix? Or if there is any ‘reality’ that can exist at all. Kanye West’s new album ‘The Life of Pablo’ has already existed in many different forms; this began with its many title changes, from ‘So Help Me God’, to ‘SWISH’ to ‘Wolves’; each of these titles creates an unheard potential album. Again we return to Oliver Laric’s versions when he states “All outcomes exist simultaneously but do not interfere further with each other, each single prior world having split into mutual unobservable, but equally real worlds.” By using a similar behind the scenes-style method of communication to Greaves, Kanye manages to create multiple personas for the album, and this is continuing! After tweeting many track-listing alterations in the run up to its release including a live streamed album launch show at madison square gardens where West played a version of the album in it’s entirety only to announce the next day that he was adding/removing/reshuffling the tracks. Kanye continues to update the album on TIDAL (the only place where it is available) by adding verses, swapping songs and changing the artwork. He recently announced that there will not be a physical version of ‘The Life of Pablo’, there will only be updates on TIDAL, a never finished project with no official release date, or should we say REALease date??

While Kanye West’s project is by far the most blatant and interesting example of the decline of the ‘real’ or ‘finished’ other musicians are still toying with similar ideas, albeit with less conviction than West. Kendrick Lamar recently dropped a surprise new album ‘Untitled Unmastered’ which consists of ‘unfinished’ rough cuts of songs that have never quite made it onto ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ or have been recorded since then. Kendrick has now started editing the tracks on ‘Untitled Unmastered’; ‘untitled 07 | 2014-2016’ has been repacked and released as a single on iTunes, with the name “untitled 07 | levitate.” He shortened the track; on the album version, the “untitled 07” lasts more than eight minutes, and is broken up into three distinct sections, with three separate beats. This latest version, though, is just under two-and-a-half minutes long, highlighting only the first piece of the original album version. All the songs were originally untitled and, in their messy nature, seem to contradict the overproduced, heavily perfected nature of the music industry. Lamar acknowledges the ability that music has to never be the ‘real’ thing; a live version will never sound like the studio version, and vice versa. If the two strive to become each other they will only end up chasing each other’s tails. But that leads us to ask what is this album? Is it an album at all? Its neither live or perfected in a studio, the songs feel live, and are untitled yet one is still able to skip from track to track, and therefore have a favorite ‘untitled’ track. With no directional song titles, no grand proclamations, and no album promotion the audience is left nothing to deal with but the music. As with ‘The Life of Pablo’, ‘untitled unmastered’ is neither here nor there; it struggles with the ‘finished-ness’ of products designed for consumer culture.  

Before David Bowie died he commissioned the Instagram page @instaminiseries to make a music video series for ‘Blackstar’ on Instagram, named ‘Unbound’ the 16 part series posted four times a week with 15 second “visual interpretations of his songs, with no limits or preconditions on his part”. @instaminiseries picked their own snippets of songs from ‘Blackstar’ and made videos to accompany it. As viewers we experience an odd style of narrative here; while we already know the progression of the album we are not aware of the narrative in the videos, which, in this case take priority over the order of the music on the album, the series doesn’t stay true to the ‘reality’ of the album track list, because it simply has no need to! Due to its habitat (Instagram) the viewers will be drip fed these little snippets mixed in with the rest of their content on the Instagram feed, while there is a narrative within the videos, they are also designed to be consumed in small chunks, the order of the music doesn’t matter, it’s the continuation of producing small segments of entertainment consistently that takes priority. It could be argued that as a work commissioned by David Bowie this series is perhaps the last thing he ever did, the last unreleased ‘reality’ from his life. The last rock unturned. ‘Unbound’ ended two days ago and in turn so did David Bowie; let’s hope he had more things hidden up his sleeves waiting to become a reality. But we all know that you don’t really need David Bowie’s permission to carry on using his work. Naturally same applies to everything ;) 

Access @instaminiseries here

i k n o w y o u ' r e n o t ( r e a l ) b u t w h a t a m i ?

The recording of the speech is now online under the title ‘Where Are They Now?’. On receiving the final version, to say we were surprised would be accurate. The guy who recorded it was a voice over actor, adverts being something that frequently appeared in his feedback. This meant that instead of a casual, friendly tone (similar to one you might hear when listening to a speech of this nature) what we were presented with was an emotionless, detached one. This is a huge part of employing people to do things for you – messages aren’t conveyed, as they were initially intended. It also reflects the nature of something like an advert – the people in adverts don’t care about what they have to say and probably not about the product either. So this means that parallels begin to form between how art dealers/collectors might feel when bidding on ‘important’ works of art. They’re buying into the idea of it as opposed to the objects themselves. The question is then, is work by a ‘famous’ artist inherently conceptual due to what they stand for? People are interested because of the idea of the artist not the actual work but just the fact that they are who they are. This has links to branding – people know who Picasso is and they know his work is valuable and is therefore a worthwhile investment. The added factor that listeners hear fictional projects and artworks but in real situations is perhaps makes people consider the idea of ‘truth’. Artists are fabricators/liars/makers/creators/falsifiers/inventors by definition; they bring things into the world that did not previously exist. For something to be ‘true’ does it have to have physically happened in the tangible world or can it manifest as a story or conversation? For example, does someone saying they love you ‘count’ as much as them buying you a million roses? Putting art inside the turbine hall at Tate Modern is one way of having a show at Tate Modern but another way is just to tell people you did, and then inside their head, you have.

c o m b i n e d o p p o s i t e s

The Guggenheim has a Fischli and Weiss show on at the moment that we’ve been waiting to go to for a while. It naturally includes their masterpiece ‘The Way Things Go’, a 30-minute film shot in their studio involving meticulously arranged junk including stepladders, tires and a flaming bale of hay produce spectacular chain reactions. Beginning at the top we were reminded that there’s more to their partnership than simply indulging in whimsy and irony, though they do plenty of that. The circular relationship between labor and what it creates takes static form in a series of sculptural scenes depicting tools and materials – drills, hammers, screwdrivers, stacks of plywood, plastic containers filled with paint – scattered or piled, as if someone had just left them in a studio. Though they look completely real, they’re made of painted polyurethane resin. Authenticity reaches astonishing levels in a piece from a series of cast-rubber sculptures: a spinning record turntable playing music. Even a close examination can’t reveal the secret to how it was made, which is as good a metaphor as any for why we work in the first place – not just to survive but to compensate for that clichéd, unanswerable question: Why are we here? That mystery is treated as a sublime joke in a series of photographs, in which disparate objects (shoes, utensils, bottles, chairs) are balanced on top of each other like Jenga blocks of nonsense. Each image depicts an implausible equilibrium, in which elements try to create order from random encounters with the ordinary, which is to say life itself, a puzzle absent of rhyme or reason. This might reflect their way of working; if there was only one of them, they might go from black to white and back again, infinitely. But because there are two, they’re forced to meet in the middle in this grey area of combined opposites.

There was a work in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, which made us think back to Susan Collis’ ‘pre-install’ works. It’s wallpaper, which is a photograph of some drywall, all prepped and awaiting its final surface coating. Actual sheets of drywall were digitally photographed and printed allowing the wallpaper to pick up minute details that make it nearly impossible to distinguish from actual drywall. It carries this same suggestion of ‘unfinished-ness’ when in actual fact that’s the entire point of its existence. The museum is filled top to bottom with beautifully made objects, all of which one would love to add to their home-ware collection.

‘De Materie’ was a fairly bizarre ‘opera’ we saw today too. It was this absolutely monumental performance, a highly imaginative sequence of non-narrative tableaus with stunning visual imagery to help convey some sort of meaning to the whole thing. There were some questionable references to Mondrian (involving a Mexican wave of his notorious colour scheme) but there were also numerous floating zeppelins, tents, pendulums, and a flock of sheep so you win some, you lose some.

a m o d e l o f a n a r t

The first place we visited today was the Center for Book Arts. If you're into bookbinding or letterpress printing, you'd love it without a doubt. It's just a little hole in the wall studio, but it's also feels very much part of the book arts community. You come through the door into this huge open loft space with all these machines that look kind of like torture devices, but are actually typographical equipment. The work itself was slightly too decorative and less about the idea of ‘the book’ but about its physical qualities.

We returned to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Marcel Broodthaers exhibition. The show includes around 200 sculptures, films, photographs and poems. What drew us to Broodthaers originally was the total impenetrability of the work. He created an installation in his house that he entitled the Musée de l'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, or Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. This was a fictive entity in that the museum had neither a permanent building nor a collection; nonetheless, Broodthaers elaborated it in about a dozen further installations. Evidence of the museum's existence (apart from its title) ultimately encompassed specially created objects, films, and art reproductions as well as ephemera such as wall labels and signage. So, here’s a guy who just decided to make his own museum, which is exactly what we all do today on the Internet. Every blog/Facebook/Instagram is just someone making his or her own museum. Broodthaers did it because he could – he didn’t ask permission. And we think this attitude emerges from poetry because in poetry you don’t need to ask permission. No one really cares, unlike in visual art or architecture where things cost a lot of money. Poetry functions in the same way Broodthaers did. He understood the economy of language. He kept it taut and conceptual.

Going to see the exhibition of architectural models at MoMA gave us a thought for a potential piece; public art works one would use for an architectural model. For example if you were designing an outside area and there was going to be some art there, is that something you can buy for your model? Is there a standard ‘public art’ piece that can be purchased and attached to your design? We could maybe design the packaging and make them ourselves, giving them the appearance of mass production but actually they’re unique.

t h a t s o u n d s l i k e a c u l t t o m e m a t e

The Museum of Arts and Design was on today’s agenda. The exhibition ‘In Time (The Rhythm of the Workshop)’ featured the work of filmmakers Andreas Bunte, Denis Côté, and Daniel Eisenberg. The ideas uniting all the films was the desire to turn the lens on manufacturing and the ways that material, bodies, and value are shaped by industry. All three films scrutinise the act of making, and position viewers to consider the labor of manufacturing as carefully as they would other skilled forms of production. Spare and elegant, these films also harness their form, a time-based medium, to capture the tempo of the workday, process as durational performance, and objects of labor as measures of time. 

Introducing the films and keeping time in the background is ‘The Speed of Markets’, an installation by Varvara & Mar, consisting of seven metronomes set to follow and translate into rhythm the real-time trade volume of the stock markets. The Speed of Markets sets the labor depicted in the films against the ticking of the metronomes (which frequently creates a chaotic tempo) and grounds the market’s abstraction of tangible goods and services back in the material. The complex interdependencies between humans and tools, tools and objects, and objects and humans build a shared, ambient melody that emerges across the films’ soundtracks and the metronomic rhythms. Meant as a poetic opportunity for reflection, ‘In Time’ is also a meditation on the choreography of fabrication, the dignity of labor, and the unexpected ways material becomes immaterial.

Another museum we visited today was the American Folk Art Museum. The show we visited was particularly bizarre; it was entirely made up of Masonic objects. If you’re the sort who believes in conspiracy theories and thinks the world is being secretly run by Masons and the Illuminati, this show may not be for you. And if not then we’d still recommend you should check it out all the same. On view are items used in and related to the rituals of Freemasonry and Odd Fellows, and needless to say, they are rich in Masonic symbols – the Blazing Star, the Masonic Eye, the Square and Compasses – that are at once mystical, surreal and spooky. But more importantly, these objects are amazing examples of folk art with roots in the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, thanks to people like Washington, Franklin and Monroe, all of whom were Masons. The show plumbs the still-secretive nature of a society that’s had a more significant impact on history than most people realise, even if they don’t rule the world. It’s also interesting to think that before the age of mass production, the artist who painted a portrait or embellished a piece of furniture might have also decorated a parade banner, an apron, symbols on a chart, or a backdrop for a fraternal lodge. The iconic art and objects showcased in ‘Mystery and Benevolence’ relate the tenets of fraternal belief through a powerful combination of highly charged imagery, form, and meaning. The exhibition explores the fascinating visual landscape of fraternal culture through almost two hundred works of art. The strangest/scariest aspect of it is its pretentious nature; something that theoretically has its roots in charity and altruism yet in reality it’s all about malevolence and power.

s o a k i n g i t a l l u p

Today we went to the Brooklyn Museum and finally witnessed Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’. The installation is an enormous triangular table, 48 feet on each side, set for 39 important women, from goddesses to historical figures. Chicago calls them her "girls." Each place setting includes a ceramic plate and a table runner that symbolize the woman's achievements. The table sits on a porcelain ‘Heritage Floor,’ which features the names of 999 other important women in gold paint. The sheer scale of it reflects the pride that Chicago has in her ‘girls’; the vastness of the installation and the psychedelic swirls of color gave us an idea of what it must have been like to be a feminist back then. It's a spread-eagle declaration of arrival. We realize the importance of ‘The Dinner Party’ within its time frame but it still seemed relatively dated and didn't seem relevant to the feminist topics we tend to consider (although these are also dictated by our life span); balancing work and family, and young women thinking it's okay to starve like their favorite celebrities. For us, the whole piece is a list; the scale didn’t seem relative to the work and the materials didn’t feel like it mirrored what the work attempting to say about exclusion or elitism. A list of women who should be invited to a fictional dinner party is more interesting but perhaps it required more substance to gain attention at the time.

There was also a show titled ‘This Place’. It’s an exhibition with hundreds of photographs and document life on one of the most contested stretches of land in the world: Israel and the West Bank, where Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, Bedouins and Africans, among others, often live tensely side by side, and the threat of violence is never far away. Though none of the images could be considered ‘news photographs’, they are rarely less than striking. It was refreshing to see photography that is engaged and concerned with its subject matter. A particular strong piece was by Fazal Sheikh. His aerial views of the Negev are beautiful, even abstract, until you realize that they are scarred by shell craters, signs of military maneuvers, the ruins of ancient villages and recent evictions. Looking at them has them is similar to reading history’s palms, a future you can’t predict and a past that has already occurred. The photographs can be used as a kind of archaeology. It’s a pause along a continuum; it holds within it everything that you need to access, but one also needs a ‘trained eye’ to unravel what it is you are looking at. Each of the locations captured in the ‘Desert Bloom’ images is locatable on a Google Earth timeline. Detailed within the captions are the coordinates of the space; this feels important so that the viewer can go to that exact site on Google Earth, which is public, and view for themselves what has happened to that space.

t a k e a s t e p b a c k a n d e n j o y t h e v i e w

Today’s activities mainly revolved around a few gallery visits in Manhattan. There was an exhibition of works by Marcel Broodthaers at Alden Projects. As an ex-poet, Broodthaers made art about shifting alphabets, and the latter was sometimes associated with literary inspiration: stolen letters, messages in bottles, and industrial poems to name only a few. In his publicity and open letters, modes of address are constantly upended and shifting; there is a constant evolution of their narratives. The strong point of this exhibition is its attempt to map out the very particular places and the very particular times in which Broodthaers’ work originally functions and some of the very particular people, events, and conditions to which his work so pointedly responds, addresses, and invites us to consider.

On Stella Rays had a show titled ‘I Pledge Allegiance’, of which the most interesting aspect to us was a brick wall positioned a few feet from the gallery wall. This meant that the viewer could, if they felt the need to, take a look behind said wall and discover that it was in fact fake, and constructed entirely from painted wood. The back of this wall was also poorly ‘finished’, assumedly on purpose, in an attempt to emphasis the sense of the façade.

Larry Bamburg had a solo show at Simon Subal gallery. One of the works involved a slice of mulberry trunk, which Bambury had instructed to be photographed as accurately as possible, matched tone for tone and color for color. In order for the wood to continue to match the photograph, he lodged it in a vacuum-sealed box with controlled heat and humidity. Doing this was intended to reduce the rate at which the stump would decay. This means that the normal state of things got reversed: Bamburg's diptych is about nature trying to stay true to a photo, instead of vice-versa. Something else that’s maybe important to consider is how the rings within trees measure stuff. Growth rings record the age of a tree, but they can also register catastrophes: changes in climate, fires, floods. Even sunspots leave their mark. The growth of a tree’s swirling internal structures is always molded by external stimuli.

It was also the opening night of our show at Green Point gallery which was pretty bizarre. Seeing the towel next to maybe 35 paintings was something we’d never really considered and made it look particularly weird. Also, our work wasn’t hung in the way we might’ve liked it to be, too high and fairly messily draped over the rail. Also all the other works had a sign next to them, stating the artist and title, but ours has left blank for an unknown reason. We proceeded to write on ours just incase any good came of it. But in spite of all this it was still up and in a show in New York so I guess it can’t be that bad!

p l e a s e d o n t s t e a l o u r i d e n t i t y

Finally made an effort to Repo man after accidentally watching the remake, Repo Men, and never correcting the mistake. It’s basically about a 20 something named Otto who works as a repo man. And that's about it. The movie chronicles all his bizarre adventures and strange people he meets. Our favourite aspects were the street scene hijinks and the funny and pretty crude dialogue. One of the best scenes has to be when Otto comes home to find his parents smoking weed on the couch zombie-like in front of the TV listening to a Christian evangelist. While this is all happening, Otto goes to the fridge and proceeds to eat out of a blue and white can labeled ‘Food’. It reminded us of the recent exhibition we went to, Maryam Jafri’s ‘Economy Corner’. Displayed in the gallery were consumer goods, which all had similarly blank packaging, devoid of colour and imagery. Some other great scenes were when a dead rat is thrown into a woman’s car and doesn't accomplish its purpose at all; the money in the presents that Otto throws out the window opened by the tires of another car, provoking us into sighs of disbelief; the ‘I left a book of matches’ line that diverts Otto's friend at the petrol station; Miller by the ashcan fire contemplating the disappeared from the future and ‘the lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything (still unsure what this means); and the punk criminal act of ‘Let's go get sushi and not pay’, (another amazing line being ‘let’s go do some crimes’). It took us a while to realise the irony/knowing-ness of the whole thing; we underestimated it due to its age.

We’ve taken some steps towards finishing ‘Temporary Allegiance’ – a work which is a flag made out of both our visas, one each side. We didn’t know how ‘cool’ the American government are about you blowing up your visa and printing it onto a 3 x 5ft flag, so to combat any potential mishaps we decided to censor our details. This also falls neatly in line with ideas of leaked documents or other sensitive information that requires secrecy. Something to reference here might be James Bridle’s film ‘Every Redaction’, a short film documenting every redaction, page by page, of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. Our work is slightly less politically evident/motivated but there are some comparisons. While we’re on the subject of flags, we also managed to purchase the plain/white flag we need for ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’.

We’ve been thinking about something to do for this for a while and today concluded with using the format of a Christmas cracker joke. We also thought about fortune cookie and maths exam where all questions are about us (if Jim has three oranges and Sid has two how many to they have all together etc. etc.) these works will still hopefully get made but for now we’re focusing on the Christmas crackers. We want to incorporate what they’re about within the subject of the text – crackers are, allegedly, about celebration and being cheerful and togetherness. The inventor of the cracker, Thomas Smith, began by selling ‘Christmas bourbons’. The first stage step in the evolution towards cracker-hood was when he started including poems or mottos with the sweets. Perhaps we could think about this as some sort of context for the work. The setting is also important; has it been discarded, left on the floor, or is it in a wallet, next to a photo of a loved one. The text should mirror or conflict with the setting. A floor-bound piece might read, ‘And they lived happily ever after, without each other.’ This would encapsulate the cheesy nature of the Christmas joke but with a seemly tragic, just kind of not, twist leaving the reading unsure of how to interpret the work.

The ‘wrapped art’ piece is now underway; we’ve created a structure and collated some boxes in a variety of shapes and sizes. We’ve purchased a huge amount of bubble-wrap and some tape, which should all be coming tomorrow (Amazon in New York is totally awesome, if not slightly scary). All the pieces need to be wrapped in brown wrapping paper and taped up before being bubble-wrapped and taped a final time. The information on the invoice/delivery note is still something we need to consider, research into what ‘real’ ones look like might be a place to start.

s o m e o n e b u y u s a p u z z l e

We completed another video today; currently titled ‘The Olympic Men's 2000m Final’. This is the video we created using the format of the sweeping/dust film since it’s more involved with the idea of repetition. In viewing the completed film, there’s a huge amount of build up; it’s split into twenty clips and only one is the full 100m sprint. The build up then reflects the fact that events of this nature are not only about what they profess to be about. This can be applied to countless other ventures, with positive and negative connotations.

Today we decided that for the display of ‘The Best 4 x 4 x Far’ we wouldn’t use a flag with the Union Jack on it. This is because the work is about any patriotic activity, as opposed to merely those performed by the British. Instead we would employ a blank/white flag to act as its own signal. An idea brought on by James Bridle’s ‘A Flag for No Nation’, a work where he creates a flag using the same material as used on space missions, by the Taliban to shield them from US drones, and given to refugees coming to the Greek islands. This ‘plain’ flag is not plain at all by soaked in history and meaning, all rendering it unassigned to any particular part of the world or people. 

Watching time-lapses of jigsaw puzzles being made has also taken up part of our day. It reminded us of how cool/complex/utterly peculiar these puzzles are. They make excellent presents. They are silent, calming and can (kind of) be combined with a little light social life and they are cheap compared with other amusements. Puzzles may be done slowly but they cannot be done badly, which is one reason why they appeal to small children who start with pegged pieces and graduate to television spin-offs. Unlike adults, who start with the edge, they go straight to the drama; the recognisable objects within the picture. With regards to an artwork it could be displayed completed or incomplete; one shows the full image, the other perhaps just a fragment. We could also create one ourselves (printing an image of our choice onto a jigsaw puzzle) or use one we found to suit whatever purpose we assigned to it.

We’ve been noticing a lot of children’s bikes and even kid’s tricycles which have been locked up on gates or lamp posts. There’s a strange comparison between adult activities and those conducted by a child. Why should this be abnormal? A child doesn’t want his bike stolen just like anyone else. Perhaps it’s kid’s taking things/possessions seriously; the fact that a child might come along, unlock it and ride away just seems ridiculous. Finding out why this happens is key to our interest in its occurrence; the decisions around it could potentially lead to something even more enigmatic. The speech we ‘commissioned’ was also delivered today. It’s very entertaining and exactly what we wanted for the piece. We’ve put in an order for the recording so hopefully that’ll be completed in a few days.

Loren Cornel gave an interview with Latitudes in 2013 and we just came across it today. She speaks about the importance of a continued dialogue between institution (museum/art gallery) and visitors. The experience shouldn’t end when they leave the building and should be (and continue to be) facilitated by Internet resources. The lack of this, she says, is out of respect to the tradition of employing printed matter (catalogues, press releases) within the walls of the organisation. This was 3 years ago and we’ve obviously come on leaps and bounds since then but this remains something to be considered. Another well-considered point she made was on the topic of the ‘death of print’; suggesting that it’s a rather hysterical attitude towards the current shifts in publishing and reading. It would be more beneficial to think about how online publishing coordinates with print instead of replacing it. The basis of the article is about introducing user-friendly content into the art gallery world. Facilitating the continuation of interaction is key if there is to be a community aspect in this ever more connected world.

b e t h e r e o r b e s q a u a r e

We came across an interesting residency today; one that revolves entirely around an iPhone 4. Each artist occupies the device for a period of two weeks then returns it. In this time they are expected to create a minimum of 5 works or one substantial project whilst maintaining an online presence on the residency’s Instagram page. This appeared to be a fun/innovative method of conducting a residency so we applied – keep your fingers crossed! While on the subject of exhibitions we got were accepted to partake in the People's Choice Salon show at Greenpoint Gallery (be there of be square), ‘Wash Away the Pain(t)’ is the work that will be on show. There are also prizes awarded which do actually sound desirable; the winner receives $200 and a solo show at the space, runners up get a group show with each other. Either would be a great chance to gain more experience showing work in the area.

The work that we previously called ‘The Key to Success’ began production today. The title is more of a potential than a definite because of events that occurred during the filming. As we’ve previously mentioned the film was going to consist of hiding the keys to a locked ‘petty cash tin’ within the keys we purchased from the Internet. We were doing some tests and we genuinely lost the keys, which opened the tin, in the mass of other keys. The camera was still rolling at this point and so it captured the genuine frustration of us being unable to locate the key. We thought that this video was as interesting, if not more so, than the more performative one we had planned, due to its authenticity. It was also a funny accident; we were attempting to make a relatively serious piece of art about the nature of success but ended up losing the crucial element required to make the statement. It was decided that this film would go along side the other two, a kind of ‘making-of’, behind the scenes, the bloopers. It falls into a similar category as the dust idea; it’s the extra bits that aren’t included as a part of the ‘finished’ thing but is a byproduct of its construction. We thought the set up of this could be the same setting as we’d filmed it; the camera on a tripod in front of the desk, the box (and potentially pile of keys) on the desk. The camera would show the ‘making-of’ film and then perhaps on the wall behind the ‘actual’ one would be projected.

To proceed looking into the labelling/wrapping/packaging of art we just decided to look at some images online to get a feel for the materials/general aesthetic. We realised that if we were going for something sculptural, we’d need to have some sort of internal structure in order to wrap it up – not that this is an issue, just something that needs to be addressed in time. A Ryan Gander work that reflects the ideas in this is his series, ‘Alchemy Boxes’. These are self-styled time capsules for which the contents are enumerated in a text on a nearby wall. As the box is sealed, it is impossible to confirm its contents without destroying the work. This inevitably prompts the question: are you looking at the object or the idea of the object? It’s this level of mystery/narrative that we’d like to capture in our own piece.

The IRL version of ‘You've Got Your Arm In The Head Hole [The Label's Sticking Out]’ was set up and photographed today. To prop up the projector we went with a chair/desk to continue the educational referencing. Making some movements with ‘A Lover’s Online Discourse’ too – using a hay-net looks like it would be easy to suspend something over the laptop. Fake rocks were then also something we’re looking into. This would continue the indication of some sort of confusion; what on the surface appears might harm the laptop wouldn’t actually do much damage at all.

b e h i n d t h e s c e n e s

Took a brief trip to the MoMA today and was fun to see some big names doing what they do best, along side some others we hadn’t heard of. Song Dong had a film on show titled ‘Broken Mirror’. We encountered it at the perfect time; we could see a road with cars driving and people walking but after a few seconds a hammer came into shot. The hammer proceeded to smash what we had previous thought to be the scene but was merely a reflection. This method was then repeated a number of times in a variety of locations. Sometimes the mirror would smash, other times it would only be chipped, once it just flew out of his hand the moment the hammer came into contact with it. Even though the ‘reveal’ had disappeared for the audience in the gallery, it was obvious that passers by were not aware of what was going to happen. The shock on their faces was still very real. It’s a piece, which seems to be questioning the reality of film and the illusions it can create. 

 

‘Grosse Fatigue’ is a visual essay by Camille Henrot about the history of the universe, a big topic but she tackled it well. Something that interested us was how there were obvious clips which were filmed by her to fit with what was being saying and then there were clips which could have ben filmed by her but also looked very similar to content you might find on YouTube. The film is pure speculation and could perhaps be a reference to how we look to the Internet to solve our lack of knowledge, confirmed by the layout/screen-based aesthetic of the film. On Kawara’s book ‘One Million Years’ is a continuation of his aim to make viewers aware of their place in history and to give the passage of time a kind of materiality. His interest lies in how our society uses dates to grasp time's elusiveness. The book is in two volumes, the first, ‘Past’, is dedicated to ‘all those who have lived and died,’ and covers the years from 998,031 BC to 1969 AD. The second book, ‘Future’, is dedicated to ‘the last one,’ and begins with the year 1993 AD and ends with the year 1,001,992 AD. Portions of the books have been read aloud in locations around the world and the recordings of this made up part of the installation. Alfredo Jaar’s piece ‘Lament of the Images’ was also something that got our attention; it began with a number of stories from around the world, dealing with issues of photography and representation. Before making the work, he had photographed the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994, but no one cared for the imagery he had captured. This set him on a task to find new ways of representing the image, new ways for them to achieve the attention they deserve. When encountering the work, one is met by a blinding white light, mirroring to the blindness of the individuals viewing the original photographs. The work is about the absence of images and this phrase ‘let there be light’, describing not only a thirst for literal visibility but also knowledge of the truth.

We managed to get Fiverr working which is great news. The person we employed to write the speech should get back to us within a couple of days and then we can send it to another individual to record it. There’s a big list of purchases/activities that need to be carried out before things are finished; there are quite a few works being finalized. Today we also applied for a couple of exhibitions around the area with, ‘Wash Away the Pain(t)’ and, ’12 Angry Men’, so hopefully those are received well.

Had a chance to listen to a Freakonomics podcast today, the subject of which was a junior U.S. Senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker. It was nothing aside from an uplifting listen; he appeared to be bringing hope, intelligence, and humility back into politics. People in the U.S. need to become more aware of him and embrace his work. (listen here)

Since the work regarding the dust is semi-concluded, just requires us to purchase/obtain a vacuum cleaner, we were wondering whether it’s still necessary to contact artists to clean their spaces. Perhaps it’s more interesting to think about the idea of the label in another context. Still using the idea of a narrative and a value attached to the activity/item based on this ‘label’. It brings us back round to the art which cannot be seen or is promised but never feels as if it’s been received. Susan Collis is someone to reference here; her exhibition ‘Down to the Mother’ first appears as either the aftermath of a show just been or the beginning of one to come. Screws left in the wall, a broom propped up in a corner, a paint smeared piece of wood on the ground. We are then informed that the screws are solid gold and the ‘paint’ is actually a mix of diamond and amber. The viewer is promised art but on entry might feel misled until taking a moment to consider what the space actually has to offer.

Michael Asher's exhibition at the Claire S. Copley Gallery in 1974 also inspires this moment of realization; the piece was to remove the wall that separated the gallery from the office, exposing the galleries business operations. This could come in the form of a queue inside the gallery which lead only to the next room or back into itself. Art packaging seems to fall into this too, bubble-wrap, gaffer tapped cardboard all accompanied by a palate – suggesting a delivery of some sort. This could be considered sculptural at first until one takes another look to find an invoice/delivery receipt containing information about the work. The information could be assigned to a fictional artist, but employ the ‘actual’ real of the work or could be allocated to us, something to figure out.

w h o ' s w a t c h i n g w h o ?

We managed to get into the city today and see a number of shows; unfortunately they were not as successful as we might have hoped. Our research on the exhibitions was thin and we paid the price in the form of rooms filled with paintings. We even returned to Bea Schlingelhoff’s exhibition as Essex Street in order to remind ourselves that there are people undertaking thought provoking activities. That being said, we found Maryam Jafri’s ‘Economy Corner’ a brilliant mix of funny and intelligent. Inside was a bizarre number of objects and photographs of similar objects. On display were consumer goods, from beer to peanut butter, which all had similarly blank packaging, devoid of colour and imagery. They are supposedly ‘generic goods’ from late 70s America. It reminded us of our ‘art packaging’ idea and the ideas about labeling we’ve recently looked into. There are links to Warhole’s ‘Brillo Boxes’ and potentially even Schrödinger's famous cat; the outside of a box can’t always predict what’s within. (‘Schrödinger's Art’ is definitely a name we need to appropriate to a work when it’s applicable)

Piero Manzoni and his 1961 piece ‘Artist’s Shit’ is a reference to be made here – packaging is everything in this work. This flows smoothly into the work we’ve been doing/potentially will be doing about dust (unfortunately the gallery trip meant no sourcing artists to email but hopefully this will take place tomorrow). The dust piece will only be presented through some sort of documentation and so this is crucial when considering how the work is received. We’ve done some thinking and decided not to show the film since we didn’t think it was applicable to the subject matter. Instead we’ve thought about using a vacuum cleaner and presenting that as the work itself; the vacuum cleaner full of the excess on the work of others. This would be presented along side a piece of paper/document stating the time and date that the area was cleaned, like the Manzoni and Schlingelhoff.

It’s almost impossible to use a vacuum cleaner without considering Jeff Koons’ monopoly over them. He’s been quoted saying that he chooses vacuum cleaners because of their anthropomorphic qualities; it’s a breathing machine. This becomes a ‘mash-up’ of our art making methods and his; we enjoy giving the creative control away to people/things that aren’t always considered artists. A vacuum cleaner isn’t an artist but Koon’s has attempted to give it life as an artWORK and we are continuing his quest by making it an artIST. Documenting something as ‘nothing’ as dust can certainly be linked to Yves Klein’s ‘Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle’ The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space (the Immaterial Zone), taking the form of a cheque, in exchange for gold; if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw half of the gold into the Seine. The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses. An immensely complex work dedicated to presenting capitalist trading strategies to illuminate idea about the indefinable, incalculable value of art. The layers of documentation are key to the work’s survival; without them it exists in a very different way.

We did enjoy the layout of the sweeping video and so we’ll keep it in mind for another piece that’s more about the idea of parts/segments. A film of making a cup of tea or setting up some Ikea furniture would fit into this. We reflected on how we thought the layout appeared CCTV-esque and we ended up watching video made by the ‘Surveillance Camera Players’. They’re a protest group who perform exclusively to public surveillance cameras, with disapproving undertones. They act out and range of routines directly in front of these cameras in an attempt to de-dunk the classic myth, that only those who are guilty of something are opposed to being observed by unknown eyes. There’s a whole series of Ted Talks on the topic of surveillance (here). It reminds us of our favorite line from Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, ‘The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.’ Speak of surveillance can only be polished off by Sophie Calle’s attempts to prove her own existence by asking her mother to hire a private to document her movements on a certain day. Our fondness of lying is definitely tickled by Calle’s practice of deliberately constructing ‘evidence', creating a question of the nature of all truths. There’s definitely something in this collection of ideas – perhaps photographs of us standing in view on every New York City webcam (?). We’ll continue thinking.

Compass festival was discussed again today and we perhaps landed on a winner; a lecture/talk about our trip to New York. It would be filled with anecdotes that didn’t necessarily take place and facts that aren’t exactly true. We even considered hiring people to ‘play’ us (lies being told by someone who they aren't even about) but were unsure how this would go down in the field of live art as technically it’s live but the ‘artist’ isn’t present. We’ve still got some time to think about it.

t h e k e y t o s u c c e s s

After renting a camera and tripod we spent most of yesterday sweeping the studio to collect dust. As of yet we are relatively undecided on the format, but we really wanted to sweep the room while everyone's work was still up. Cleaning the room post-crit, post-term has an element of stealth, or at least invisibility. The idea of people returning to a clean studio space is reminiscent of your parents cleaning your bedroom when you're at school, it carries notions of unrecognised and generally underpaid work that keep companies ticking over behind the scenes eg. Caretaker, Janitor, Gardener, Parent (mother). In terms of documentation, we filmed the process of sweeping the space, which we have now edited into two videos both suited for different methods of presentation. The first version involves a selection of short clips edited to form a loose narrative, enter>sweep>leave, this process would be looped indefinitely, thus staying in tune with the idea of recycling; art from art. The viewer is then able to drop in and observe a section of the process, rather than the process as a whole, this mirrors the selection process that artists and curators undergo when selecting work that is shown to the public – as apposed to the work that is deemed unworthy, or un-finished – the dust. The second version of the video has more of a voyeuristic theme; the unedited videos of us sweeping each section of the room (of which there are 6) are played simultaneously side by side. The set-up was inspired by our recent collaboration with Sarah Harvey, in the video she made for us the six videos all shared one screen. This, grid-like set-up reminded us of televisions displaying CCTV footage; when these are shown in films it is implied that someone is sneaking onto someone else’s property, and most importantly, someone is watching. We thought it would be interesting to exploit the idea of persistent surveillance; CCTV cameras pry into secret areas of society, they dip into little pockets of secrecy and intimacy retrieving the elements of life that many would want to turn a blind eye to. The street fights, burglaries, assaults, and fails of life – the dust.

Now we have the dust from the studio floor and some documentation, we need to start thinking about how the dust will be displayed or if it needs to be displayed at all. Given that the general idea that the objects to make art surround you constantly we thought that it would be funny to project the dust into a ‘gallery view’ stereotype – in a pristine cube, or a gold frame. The collection of dust and elevation of it to a position of value holds traditional value too, when people are cremated, their ashes are commonly put in an urn and subsequently take pride and place on the family mantelpiece. Similar to the final episode of the Royle Family, one of the saddest and most touching storylines in British comedy; Nana is cremated and her urn is placed atop the television that she spent so much of her life watching. No longer is she the participant, but the subject; it is only when she is placed upon a pedestal that the family sit and watch her.

The possession of a decent video camera means that we are able to film some ideas that have been brewing for the last few weeks; attempting to break world records and a performance involving hundreds of miscellaneous keys we purchased online. Named ‘The Key to Success’ we are planning to hide the keys to a locked ‘petty cash tin’ within the keys we purchased, the performer will then fish through the key pile attempting to find the solitary key that will open the tin. When the tin is unlocked the performer will proceed to put all the incompatible keys into the tin, lock it and walk away. We are going to film this process twice, with two different subjects, the videos will then be shown side by side, suggesting that the two are in competition to open the box. Inevitably this competition is only apparent when one of the performers completes the task, for it is only then that the viewers will realize the whole process. Obviously we don’t expect people to sit through the entire video, meaning that the ones who see the tin opening are lucky, mirroring the luck of the performer to find the correct key – this may take 5 minutes or an hour. The entire process pick>test>repeat is representative of a struggle to be successful, or at least what society considers to be successful; successful individuals are ‘compatible’ with this construct while the ‘incompatible’ ones are hidden away within boundaries controlled by people in power – the compatible ones. On a more intimate level this process also reflects personal analysis of the self in relation to others; we often pit ourselves in competition against our peers. The act of locking the ‘bad’ keys away is the same idea that becoming successful renders you problem-less; shows like X-factor and Big Brother promote this notion. DJ Khaled projects similar messages; within his endless bragging on Snapchat Khaled often references “the major key” or “the key to success”; these generally involve Khaled giving life advice with the gold key emoji as the only ‘text’ within the Snapchat.

In terms of other work we have read the final draft of ‘The White Crayon’ to a group of kindergarten children, due to the lack of images they were asked to use their imagination to draw their interpretation of the characters. The kids loved covering big pieces of black card with white chalk, using hands and most of their bodies. Once covered they used water and brushes to create new pictures and patterns, they were interested that once the water dried the card went back to white not black it's original colour. This process started to get us thinking about performances involving children’s activities such as drawing/painting sessions and book readings. This can be done in schools and nurseries but could also be placed in to a show; one of the ideas raised was of the our parents coming in to do a book reading, or perhaps getting the children to review the book when it is made, thus acting as the target market and honest critics, a combination that any company would dream of.

The reaction drawings from the children are scruffy and inaccurate, these lead us to think about funny stories that parents tell about their children making a mess with art supplies. We have started to compile YouTube videos of parents telling their children off for making a mess. General examples of these are kids who have drawn on the walls, spilt glitter everywhere or covered themselves in paint. The parents then make funny videos where they shame the child in question; “Ok Timmy, can you tell everyone what you did?”. Most of the time the children’s reactions to this are very funny, we found one child who insists his puddle of paint on the kitchen floor “is beautiful” and he made it because of its “beauty”. Not only are these videos funny but also they show the massive difference between childhood and adulthood, specifically the way in which they interpret the world – a child may see an accident as “beautiful” where a parent would see the accident as time consuming and therefore they assess the child’s mess in a monetary way – the labor cost to themselves of cleaning up the child’s mess. The presentation of this idea is something that we have yet to properly assess, our initial thoughts was to make a screen recording of us opening these ‘mess videos’ on top of each other, so the little video clips fill the entire screen thus degrading the visual and audio qualities of video as a whole, and more importantly, making a mess.

We have been thinking about the possibility of running a stall at a summer fete; these events are typically attended by families and it would be a good chance to stage some of our ‘art games’ that we’ve been thinking about. Art paper toss and art bingo are games where the audience either win or throw away Google searched images of famous art works. Another work that has been in the pipe-line for a while can be loosely described as ‘impossible balances’; we want to hire someone to make videos of us balancing things on top of each other using visual effects software such as Flame. The aim is to create a visual truth that’s obviously a lie ie. A lie that people only know to be fake through their knowledge of the world – one is aware that a chair can’t balance on top of a wine glass regardless of whether the video shows it. Hito Steyerl described post-production as “pimping pixels”. The world can be understood but also altered by its tools, visual effects tools in particular are tools of creation for image and world.