a r t d o e s n ' t h a v e t o m a t c h t h e c o u c h

Visiting exhibitions has taken up quite a substantial amount of time the week or so, therefore it feels appropriate to begin with a quick assessment of what’s been seen and learnt. First on the list was The Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea which was showing a three channel video installation by Guido van der Werve and a couple of Roger Hiorns’ copper sulphate creations. ‘Nummer zestien, the present moment’ is a selection of three films all which appear to be depicting a different state of mind (and body). All three films are set against the same stark, black background, removing any sense of time and space; all comprehension can only be achieved through studying the individuals within the films. Each group of people are of 3 ages, young (20-somethings), middle aged and old; all are performing essential tasks for humanity to survive e.g. sex, eating, drinking etc. The lack of anything recognizable, other than human bodies, brings on the idea of non-space or space which exists but is not investigable by humans. The 3 levels of consciousness would fit these specifications – id, ego, and superego. The films are accompanied by a piano in the centre of the room; there in no one playing the piano yet there is sound coming from within it. We then learn that Van der Werve is also a classically trained concert pianist and composed the musical score herself, a paean written in twelve parts in the twelve major keys. The piano is acting as a surrogate for the artist in this first film in which he does not physically appear. The repetition of the number twelve runs all the way through the piece; there are also twelve acts in each film and the camera motions (synchronized through all three screens) during these acts follow the schematic line drawings of the twelve zodiacal constellations. The film is strictly structured on several axes of time and one forms an abnormal relationship to time once coming into contact with the piece. ‘Liquid Pictures’ at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery was another place we found ourselves; to put it briefly, time, more so than narrative, was on display. The show — named in honor of MTV’s 1990s Liquid Television program of experimental animation shorts — features Leah Beeferman, Melissa Brown, Erica Magrey, and Adam Shecter. Four walls for four artists in a darkened room. Erica Magrey’s ‘Tag Sale Cosmology’ was a favourite; adapted from an interactive, retro-looking web platform it features Magrey interacting with handmade and found objects as if playing her own game. Some of the items, ranging from the ordinary to the oddly unidentifiable, are physically present in the gallery too, challenging the real vs. virtual bifurcation. The surreal scenarios, all of them non-sequiturs — why is Magrey sleeping on three sides of a rotating triangle clock? — dare us to laugh.

Pope.L and Will Boone occupied all three rooms of the Andrea Rosen gallery and the quality of the works appeared to undulate from piece to piece. We are fans of Pope.L’s previous, interventionist, public art works such as ‘ATM Piece’ where he attached himself to an eight-foot length of Italian sausage to the door of a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan wearing nothing but a skirt made out of dollar bills. But the works on show were very catered to the fact that we were in a Chelsea gallery, insinuating the necessity for the work to be sellable products, this did of course facilitate the production of a beautiful publication handout #youwinsomeyoulosesome. But the installation of his film, ‘Syllogism (T-Version)’, seemed to still have the same intelligent yet rebellious touch. Boone’s “Gate” paintings are supposedly expanding on the subjectivity of perspective and the concurring of ideas of security and confinement. A painting doesn’t appear to be the most appropriate methodology to go about this. How the information is communicated could very much be part of the piece; surfaces can blinds ones reading of something’s content. However, if that’s the point, it feels like a classic case of ‘fuck that point, make something good instead’. Purely by coincidence we were walking past Chamber, a design gallery, and our eyes were caught by a variety of contraptions including what appeared to be a self-sustainable micro ecosystem. We then found out the photographer and film maker Andrew Zuckerman’s vision was to bring together objects that each engage the relationship between humans and the natural world. It brings on that strange feeling one gets when standing on the beach looking at the ocean; the world is so much vaster than ourselves.

‘BLACKBOXING’ was an exhibition centered around a black, enameled aluminum, tete-a-tete by Donald Judd, created in his lifetime. Minimalism isn’t usually something we consider within art practice but is undeniably incredibly to experience within a space/place. The use of industrial materials is very commanding and is all but alien to the world of functional furniture. It’s an I/O device, just as it could be argued that every object of human creation, even a cellphone, is an I/O device. The French sociologist Bruno Latour argues that ‘When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.’ Blackboxing foils understanding; it is that which we cannot grasp as we consider an object’s function or complicate it with meaning; it is the ineluctable enigma of uniqueness. It doesn’t fit neatly into art that we want to make and at times we question whether it’s good at all but it’s undeniably beautiful.

The 2013 Venice Biennale was the first place we saw ‘Ravel Ravel Unravel’ by Anri Sala and were very impressed with every aspect of the piece. Sala returned with a solo show at the New Museum, presenting a huge number of works, however none of them came close to his masterpiece. There were a number of drums which were presented upside down on the ceiling – an interesting thought but seemed slightly gimmicky and didn’t feel inline with the rest of his thinking. But once we got to the firth floor you forget about all that. The sounds of orchestra and piano buffet you, while the two videos – one above the other – each presents a close-up of a giant left hand playing the piano. Even the walls and ceiling seem exaggerated: They’re covered with two-foot high wedges of foam that mute echoes. The music is Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D, which was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist (and brother) who lost his right hand in World War I. The hands on the screens belong to the pianists Louis Lortie and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who each performed the concerto with an orchestra, using scores with tempos altered by Sala slowing or accelerating different parts. Their hands are chasing each other up and down the keys, moving in and out of sync, finishing each other’s passages. The accompanying video, ‘Unravel’, is an attempt to straighten out the ravel, or tangle, created by ‘Ravel Ravel’. Installed in a smaller, lighter room next door, ‘Unravel’ shows the DJ with a record of each performance, trying to sync them up. In contrast to the pianists’ sparring hands she gently taps or pushes the discs, stops them completely or sets them spinning, sometimes with slurring sounds. Synchronization is fleeting and impossible to sustain, but it is invigorating to follow the fierce concentration. The two versions of Ravel’s music cannot be reunited, but here, we experience Sala building art upon art and even lives upon lives.

There have been several artist talks which have been eye opening in one way or another; Peggy Ahwesh is artist and film maker who uses narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, synch-sound film, found footage, and digital animation. Her films take interesting forms and tell thoughtful stories which is why when her ‘artist talk’ was basically just her showing four of her films with a brief introduction we were somewhat disappointed. We were there to listen to an artist discuss their judgments and intentions of their work not to enable me to do what I can do sat in bed. For our YouTube theory class we’ve been required to do some reading by Lev Manovich, so when we was giving a talk it seemed like a good idea to attend. His visualizations of data were pretty extraordinary; huge undulating graphs of all the photographs uploaded to Instagram over a few days – going from light photos taken during the day to dark photos taken at night and back again. This method of measuring the emotions of a country based on how much they smile in these photos was also a noteworthy aspect of his talk. Most of what he said with regards to data collection was difficult to understand on account of the subject matter and speed at which he was delivering the information. Eyebeam organized a talk titled ‘MVR’ (pronounced “mover”) which was a series of individuals introducing their projects. They were exploring the potential for an innovative dialogue about the relationship between the body and technology; it includes assistive technology, games, performance and wearables. Amelia Winger-Bearskin, artist and co-founder of the Stupid Hackathon was the most entertaining talk, all was eye opening but her notions of the utilization of technology were the most interesting when considering out own thoughts.

BHQFU was hosting a talk where Eva and Franco Mattes were speaking so we took a trip over there to see what they had to say. They began by describing their practice – something we’ve tried to do in the past but never managed it in such a concise fashion; they’re obviously interested in the Internet and all that it has to offer but they’re work is very different from that of the net artist (aesthetically and conceptually). Their work is not about the surface of the Internet but about its politics – surface was the word that defines most net art. Listening to them talk about their work was hugely rewarding, even if what they were saying wasn’t always particularly new because of our awareness of their practice, but something that was new was the links between the pieces. For example, ‘No Fun’ is a film of an online performance in which they simulated a suicide and filmed viewers’ reactions. What Eva and Franco realized was that the audience’s reactions were in fact more provocative than the image of the suicide. This lead them to create ‘Emily’s Video’; a compilation of reactions to “the worst video ever”, which was later destroyed. The video is shown on a monitor facing away from the entrance to the gallery – the enables visitors to see real time reactions to the video before they watch is themselves. Another strand from ‘No Fun’ was their most recent piece ‘Dark Content’ which is a series of videos about Internet content moderators. The connection is simple; ‘No fun’ was taken down and the curiosity of who took it down led them to building this new work. These links are beautifully simple and appear to be a very rewarding method of creating work.

‘Who Owns Digital Social Memory’ was the titled of an event on at The New Museum which we attended. There were a number of interesting individual involved in similarly interesting activities. But the most exciting person to talk was actually a man called Nathan Jurgenson. This is because when we go to these talks, we’re less focused on wanting to learn about someone giving a voice to someone to a certain type of person and more captivated when people talk about the ideas surrounding a subject. This doesn’t mean to say that people Kim Drew’s numerous social media personas, promoting the visibility of black artists isn’t tremendously important it just isn’t at the front of our minds when attending these discussions. Nathan’s position on the notion of digital social memory was that in archiving something, we give that something value. This is a given, the things we choose to document or keep a note of are more important to us. He then went on to introduce the idea that if we were to go through this process with everything, would anything be important or would it all just achieve the same level of significance. This built up to his final point of instead of thinking about what should be archived but instead what shouldn’t be, the complete opposite question the rest of the panel had been asking.  

There are a fair few new ideas we’ve got floating around at the moment too. One which is completed, and can be found on the website, is ‘All Art Begins With Shopping’. It’s a film involving six vloggers going on a trip to purchase ‘art supplies’. If we consider the material of paint to be a readymade then is a painting a readymade also? If not a painting then at least an assemblage? ready mades are defined as ordinary, manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified; now if that's not a painting then we don't know what is! Vlogs also contain interesting subject matter, mostly due to the type of person who is more likely to make them. Advertising works the same way with ‘art supplies’ as it does with everything else – ‘if that guy can do it with these exact materials why shouldn’t I be able to?’ Art is also begins with fairly affluent people; it’s far more rare to see poorer people learning to become artists because of the uncertainty in the monetary return. People with money mostly believe that they can buy their way into anything, and mostly they can and if not it definitely helps, but more frequently in more creative industries there’s a ceiling with respect to how far money alone can take you. We’ve been considering the idea of place cards with the name of all the people who attended the last supper. But when reflecting on this we realised that name tags is a slightly more critical perspective to take when constructing this scene – the idea is that events in history that we believe to be coincidental are not at all and instead are composed very carefully. It continues to happen to day; the price of various milk and bread increases and it just happens that Mr. Tesco, Mr. Co-op and Mr. Sainsbury’s all bumped into each other at the golf course the week before. The nametags give this a business-like side too – there’s a corporate element to the church and to religion itself that people tend to turn their backs on. It’s an institution run on money, just like any other. We have also written and are in the process of having illustrated a children’s book. It’s about a white crayon that feels useless until she is united with black paper. Art history paper toss is another idea in the mix; having a stack of A4 paper print outs of art history ‘masterpieces’ and then having a bin and a fan (just like in the real game) to throw the paper into. We also wanted to try to break some world records – this particular idea was born from the desire to be try things which we’re not prepared for or skilled in. it’s a slightly more humorous method of presenting this idea since attempting to eat a 12inch pizza in 41.31 seconds is fairly entertaining already, without the added bonus of never having tried it before. We also thought of submitting performance art pieces into the world records, for example Vito Acconci – longest time to point into a camera, or longest amount of time to spend wanking under the floorboards. It brings these works into a different frame, they are no longer art but durational acts of desperation.  

To finish up, the Pratt experience is slightly improving but in general is as pigeonholed as ever. Some aspects, however, are so bad they’re good, an example being that a guest lecturer is an art lawyer – obviously someone who really knows a lot about the art world as opposed to say an artist; they won’t really know anything, if they did they’d have as much money as the lawyer does. 

d o e s g o i n g t o p r a t t m a k e y o u a p r a t ?

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.