Art Basel is hosting a series of salon-style discussions running as part of the larger art fair from June 19 to June 22.
Exploring a range of topics spanning the contemporary art scene, the Salon programme features dozens of prominent artists, gallerists, curators, art historians, publishers, poets, architects, collectors, and critics taking part in the often informal presentations.
Finally on June 22 there’s a talk on ‘Revolt of Language with Marcel Broodthaers’ that includes writer behind ‘Faith Money Love’ and the recent COOKIE!publication Jan Verwoert.
The read the room / you’ve got to group show is taking place at Birsfelden, Switzerland’s SALTS space, running June 19 to July 21.
Drawing inspiration from the artists-architects-poets group the Reversible Destiny Foundation and pulling a quote from founders Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ The Mechanism of Meaning, the exhibition comes as part of curator and poet Quinn Latimer‘s The Printed Room begun in 2013.
The structure of a thing is both its skeleton and its cage, the bones around which the meaty content settles and the enclosure under whose provisions it sprouts. Structure gives shape; it creates the contours within which meaning is born, casts the shadows of context across the plain.
In her 1976 essay ‘Why I Write’, Joan Didion declares that the meaning of a sentence lies in its arrangement, its structure. A decade before Didion, philosopher Marshall McLuhan, in his seminal essay ‘The Medium is the Message’, states that the meaning of anything lies in its medium, at the time referring to the expanding cultures of television. Exactly twenty years after Didion and almost thirty after McLuhan, the Internet as we know it was born and the structure of language, that of the very cultures that produced it, was once again irretrievably transformed.
“This anthology is an attempt to question the discrete borders of the poem as object, and to welcome the ways in which the poems within act as springboards to other lives, languages and politics. The poem is the textual residue of the encounter.”
I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best Launch & Event Reading. Image courtesy Harry Burke.
The encounter of which Burke speaks is that of our existence, of our lives; a poem is the ashes that remain after all else has been alchemized and spent. As graphic designer David Rudnick said in a recent interview: “Art is the zip file of hundreds of thousands of human lives.”
Perhaps this better explains the reasoning behind the book’s title, adopted from Sophie Collins’ cento poem ‘perfection’ (found within the anthology), which in turn borrows the line from Mimi Khalvati’s ‘Overblown Roses’. When Sophie Collins elsewhere in ‘perfection’ writes that “nothing was perfect or as it should have been”, it as though she is stating her case, literally and figuratively. Nothing in language is perfect or as it should have been; all is fluid, dynamic, conglomerate, its actors merely vessels through which the structures of language are perpetuated.
Nowhere is this more true than on the Internet and its seemingly bottomless ocean in which all content floats as anchorlessly as debris. Here, the invisible structure is paramount, creating the context for its content, the systems of information distribution and creative production by which culture is created. To understand the poetry born of the Internet, one first needs to understand the medium as the blueprint of culture.
As Burke considers in his introductory essay, following the leads of Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff before him: “the focus of avant-garde writing after the widespread introduction of digital editing and reproduction tools is not on the production of “original” writing, but in the managing, parsing, organising and distributing of pre-existing information”. Given the exponentially increasing reserves of recorded text, the true parameter of creativity becomes not in creating new or new-seeming content but rather “negotiat[ing] the vast quantities that exist”.
Echoing Perloff, Burke offers up the cento-like approach of which creative culture on the Internet is made as “the most avant-garde cultural producer in the digital age”. After all, if everything is sacred, then nothing is. **
The concrete underground rooms of Berlin’s Alte Münze, accessed through heavy bank vault doors, provide an aesthetically crude backdrop for raw reflections on money and emerging forms of social engagement, both online and off.
With the building and venue name literally translating to “old mint”, it’s a fitting location for an exhibition set to interrogate the insidious relationship between capital and art, the increasingly widespread “capitalisation of the social sphere”, and dispersed and precarious monetary relations giving rise to the so-called ‘creative class’. The conceptually dense Surplus Living exhibition, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff of km temporaer and London-based poet and writer Harry Burke,features the work of 19 artists and contributions, in a group show tackling the theme from assorted angles, ranging from the acutely literal to abstractly analytical.
Surplus Living exhibition view. Photo by Trevor Good. Image courtesy km temporaer.
Britta Thie’s images of a group of young, pale white models (herself included), lounging nonchalantly, replicate the visual language of advertisements in a starkly banal counter-gesture to some of the more abstract pieces in the show. Hung in the middle of one of the rooms, the women in the photos watch from all angles as visitors circle the outer perimeter, quieting critique with a simple gaze from the commercial ‘other side.’
The collaged, densely packed ink-on-paper scrawls by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, on the other hand, provided concrete, theoretical reflections on the role of the artist within a capitalist art market. The tiny print of ‘The Meaning of Everything’ (2008) offers innumerable insights, notes and observations about the politics inherent in the production and consumption of art, saturated with references to political theorists like Marx and Lenin and delineated like a cognitive flowchart marked by arrows and equal signs.
The Russian collective of artists, critics, philosophers and writers, Chto Delat?, screened the 37-minute long film ‘Tower’ (2010) from their Songspiel triptych. Mostly set around a boardroom table, with a comically large rotary telephone in the centre, the story is based on real documents of Russian social and political life, as well as an analysis of the conflict that has developed around the planned Okhta Centerarchitectural development in St. Petersburg. The narrative is interspersed with varying political reflections by a chorus of Russian citizens: xenophobic workers concerned with a takeover of migrant labour, bourgeois businesspeople supporting development in the name of a “New Russia,” and revolutionaries calling for a “communist skyscraper!”
The exhibition is broadly divided between these poles. Here, it presents either a tongue-in-cheek reproduction of commercial imagery, construed in an ironic repositioning putting our everyday experience of advertising into stark relief as in Thie’s piece –but also Yngve Holen’s sculptural work ‘Sensitive 2 Detergent’ (2012) and Josephine Meckseper’s video ‘Mall of America’ (2009) –or more academic and researched musings on particular political events and theories.
Constant Dullaart’s ‘Rave Lecture’ performance at the openingmanaged to playfully merge these positions. Around 10pm the lights in the foyer were turned off and the room was suddenly infused with the loud penetrating beats of Dullaart’s BRIC Mix –a selection of euro house club mixes from the so-called ‘emerging’ economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Dullaart’s manifesto ‘Balconism: Balconisation not Balkanisation’ was projected on the wall, set to the pace of the BRIC mix. In a strange juxtaposition, the quickly moving words offered a considered and articulate critique of online proprietary systems and the myth of the Internet –as well as select examples from the outside world, like Zuccotti Park as a locus of privately-owned ‘public space.’
Dullaart’s critique, set in the framework of a highly commercialized, fast-paced Euro disco, reflected the wider aim of the show. To varying degrees, all the contributions to Surplus Living aimed to question the way in which even forms of enjoyment and social interaction (like the rave or the exhibition itself) are sadly permeated with economic and commercial concerns. **
Berlin-based project space km temporaer is presenting group exhibition, SurplusLiving, in collaboration with London-based writer Harry Burke at Alte Münze, opening on March 14 and running to March 23.
Curated by Burke and km temporaer intiators Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff, the event brings together the work of 18 artists exploring the function of commodified experience and the role of art production in a continually expanding market.
The first time I encountered Paul Kneale’s work in real-time was via Skype at Harry Burke’s Poetry Reading at Test Centre in London. After some messing around with connections, Kneale’s face appeared, large and projected on a white wall, live from Tel Aviv and reading (“Profiles unfold. Viagra online. Fuck Google.”) over field recordings of the city, to an audience warmly received and largely familiar.
With that in mind, it makes sense that an interview with the mostly London-based globetrotter, originally from what he describes as a “blighted factory town” of Canada on the US border, should be carried out live via Google Drive. In Paris to organise the Pleasure Principles group exhibition, along with artist Raphael Hefti, there’s no indication of the Canadian accent in script, just a tendency to omit apostrophes in elisions and using double sentence spacing. It gives interesting insight into the processes of the person and his practice.
“Bold, semi-bold, matt, eggshell, off-white, raised, embossed, laser-cut,” suggests Kneale jokingly when deciding whether to use italics or bold text to differentiate my questions from his answers. We eventually settle on the latter to fit the aqnb format, Microsoft Word’s ‘Replace All’ coming in handy when it comes to his preference for using two, rather than one, hyphen in reinforcing a point.
Beyond that, there’s a fluency to the way Kneale communicates through writing that one imagines is difficult to replicate in speech. That’s not that surprising considering the role of the written word in his work, from his fore-grounding text in his exhibitions to co-founding Rotherthite’s Library + art space, with Hefti and fellow artist Megan Rooney.
Not so much a curatorial project but a space for fostering “a plurality of styles and positions” from invited artists, the focus of Library + is as much on meeting new people and being social as it is on art discourse: “[It] was basically that we had a free space in this old library, so why not paint the walls and floor and invite people to do something?” That’s part of the reason the February half of the two-part Pleasure Principles –developed and executed at the invitation of La Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette –will feature Kneale and Hefti’s friends and peers from around the world making the trip to the French capital to take part. More importantly though, this set of artists, including Rooney, Max Brand, Harry Burke, Quinn Latimer, Bonny Poon, Sam Porritt, Bea Schlingelhoff and Jesse Wine, will already “have the nice bars and galleries figured out” before the second lot of participants –invited by the first –arrive in March.
As with Library+, there’s no strict curatorial directive to Pleasure Principles beyond exploring “the role of pleasure in both artistic production and communities today”. It’s a process to be considered in dialogue with its participants who’ve been largely left to their own devices: “we trust the people we’ve invited and get to have the pleasure of seeing what they do.”
Photo by Raphael Hefti. Image courtesy of Paul Kneale.
Why the plural?
Paul Kneale: Insofar as our shows at Library + have always involved performances and dinners and acted as a shared space, as well as presenting great works, I think this element is very important to keep everything from being too professional and boring. No last-train takers allowed. But especially, with regards to Paris, there is this very ripe, well-known bohemian artist history from the last century –but what’s been happening there lately?
We thought it would be interesting to explore this there, shifting the context from London. And, of course, ‘pleasure’ today can mean a lot of different things. We’re taking a critical look at things, that’s the plural, but from an embodied position. There’s no remit or assignment for the people we’ve invited. They’ll come up with something way better than we could instruct them to.
So then, do you think that that focus on ‘pleasure’ is something central to this idea of the “bohemian enclave”; hedonism as alternative to resistance?
PK: Yes. In a basic way, art is an alternative lifestyle. Or maybe the things that are involved in making art produce an alternative lifestyle as a side effect. It’s related to the time-frames and scenarios that you move through, but also the people you’re attracted to –free-thinking, fun, experimental –it’s not at all about a type, but a certain kind of openness.
I think when people who share certain characteristics get together under a shared thing, like art, the so-called ‘hedonist’ attitude might be evident. But I would like to reframe it from being a ‘resistance’, in some Marxist sense. I think it is, rather, this organic thing. I would frame a nine-to-five job and watching reality TV as the resistance –resistance to life!
Have you thought about the area in Paris and how art scenes or communities rise and fall generally? Or specifically to where you’re based in London?
PK: The area of Paris, the Marais, is of course a very upmarket area, full of shops etc. It’s also right next to the Pompidou, which I think has been a very strong institution, at least not afraid of the new. I don’t think this area was ever the centre of ‘bohemian Paris’. But the historical coordinates that did produce that period –the waning of the French empire, combined with social liberalism, are significant in understanding that area.
I think the situation in London is quite different today. It’s more of an against-all-odds struggle to persist in a place that’s a crossroads for the rest of the world, due to everything from a lot of airports, to the flow of international money, to a lot of good schools.
Our particular area, Rotherhithe, is at the excretory end of this city. It’s mostly council flats in desperate need of repair and a new condo boom, which just creates bedroom communities for the city. So I think we occupy some kind of liminal space there. It’s a little bit accidental. To me that’s a key characteristic of the scene in London –a kind of scrapping –making quick use of an opening in the otherwise hard-plated economic and urban fabric; a kind of guerilla tactics.
So, I suppose that area of London is a sort of microcosm of that intensified social stratification that’s happening on a global level.
PK: You see that here, definitely. There’s a good flow of people blowing their money at the gambling shop, just a hundred metres from some very expensive high-rises. I think we occupy, again, some space that isn’t really involved in either, but is obviously in the same fabric.
Why, because a library is a shared public space? It makes you think of the fact they’re disappearing, to a degree having been made redundant by internet usage, and what the implications are about the online’s effect on that very social stratification we’re talking about.
PK: I think the disappearance of the libraries has more to do with the fact that the current government has declared war on the poor. The building now is just a brick shell with no heating, on a street that no one wants to patronise because it’s falling apart. I think what we do here is able to happen both because of and in spite of that.
That’s a good point, especially when you consider these art hubs that are made possible in areas where the rent’s low, which more often than not are the neglected ones. Isn’t that what the ‘pleasure principle’ is in a way –‘no pleasure without pain’?
PK: The Freudian Pleasure Principle is something like that, very simply put, the drive to avoid pain. But it’s also important the ‘how’ of that drive. That’s what’s specific to every time and place. I think art is very powerful in expressing this relation, in ways that don’t have to speak the language of the corporate state or media.
It strikes me that you mention speaking the ‘language of the corporate state or media’, because it’s pretty apparent that a lot of art is and has been adopting that very lexicon in implicit critique. Even you use Clip Art on your Pleasure Principles website…
PK: I think the way this relation is negotiated is an important issue for a lot of artists I know and respect. I don’t think there is anything like a consensus, which is also good! It’s naive to think you don’t exist within all these state structures. Of course you do. Smashing the state isn’t the point of art. Or rather, it’s a very ineffective method if it is. I think the microcosm of art is much more potent at the level of the interior life of its audiences. And, of course, those people are social beings.
Image courtesy of Paul Kneale.
So it’s relevant that you’re working with friends and peers for Pleasure Principles then. Not only in relation to artists as these social beings, but also this organic emergence of art communities.
PK: It was natural to invite people we had already worked with, or that we knew as friends. Since we’re not curators it wouldn’t make sense to invite strangers just because we liked their work. But within that, the people you know has a logic –we’ve been really lucky to meet a lot of amazing people in London, often standing outside of a project space in light rain drinking a tall can.
I think if there’s some praise I would give to social media, it’s that it can help people with a shared interest to find each other IRL. So we’re building on that. But in the second part of the project in March, everyone who’s been invited for the first part gets to invite someone else again. So that’s where the network goes outwards and new people come in, with maybe a degree of remove, which I think is also very important to things growing and staying sharp.
I was going to say there’s a danger in that kind of insularity that social media can also promote, a disconnection from differing perspectives.
PK: Hopefully we have a good mix. Because of the aspect of friendship and geography that’s in play, we have people involved who do nothing but make things from clay, alongside poets and performance, artists and painters. I think it’s conscious there, to not be insular.
We’ve always found it boring when people just surround themselves by work that reinforces their own positions. I’m sure that, within the people we’ve invited, there would be some disagreements about very basic art premises. But I think that’s what keeps it interesting and hopefully it’s an opportunity for some of those antagonisms to be tested and pushed forward. **
With so many artists working with the web, the status of the object in art has become increasingly pertinent. To some, the very idea of a digital object is inconceivable, to others, an aspect of materiality implicit in the wider sustenance of a network counts. But for some, the idea of data that can be transformed from mp3s to wav files, and still take on a unique status as an item, is forming. Not only in terms of a commodity such as a track, image or video owned by Vevo, but an almost ‘immaterial material’ shared and customised by hundreds in a complex system of exchange between authors and contexts.
At Banner Repeater’s recent Appropriation Beyond the Object exhibition,there’s a screensaver built by artist Scott Mason that flashes bright-green text on a black background. At points phrases like “odds”, “leftwing” and “control the” are highlighted in red. In-between, there are stories about love, chewing gum and karaoke. Elsewhere “Valley” and “geeks” is crossed out. One constant, however, is a sense of unending flux. Every few seconds a different part of the image flickers, as a chunk of text is removed and replaced. No part stays settled and the narrative is almost impossible to follow, as parts re-appear from a never-ending story.
The Moment between Creativity and Commodification, is in fact Scott Mason, Harry Burke, Annie Davey, John Hill, Pedro Neves Marques, Sally O’Reilly and Frances Scott’s work, in what is essentially a collectively written piece that takes the form of a live media file displayed on a monitor in an exhibition space. To many, the answer to the question, “where is the object?” would be simple, i.e. “it’s the screen”. And let’s not be too conceptual here yet. They’re not at all wrong.
Even in post-internet art, a theory that argues we’ve gone beyond ‘cyberspace’ and ‘real space’ as opposites, into a place where both are one and the same, there’s an acceptance of physical screens as a pose to the content displayed on them. But what about the online object itself? Does it exist? And if so what can it tell us about not only physical objects but the fundamental ways in which something becomes more than a ghostly terabyte lost in the machine?
In the most radical hypothesis, every single electron that makes up the endless stream of data across the webforming into pixels of letters you read, are objects. As in a much-cited BBC News report, every time you enter a Google search, 0.2g of carbon dioxide is produced; a physical connection, as well as an environmental one that simply can’t be ignored. It’s a reality that brings the very reasons for digitally produced arts existence, as one of the cheapest materials available on the market, into question.
For now, however, let’s focus on a hypothetical cyberspace, in which objects are created through an interaction between user and software. Are mp3s, WMVs and Jpegs objects, and, if so, why? It seems obvious that a song, starting at 0:00 seconds and stopping at 3:35, is produced as one item that can be uploaded, downloaded and shared as a single, tangible entity. But it wasn’t always so. Tracks were found as part of other objects like CDs, cassettes and vinyl records; laser cut, written or pressed into what became an object. The Net then, has made it possible to atomise content into what can more tangibly be seen as singular objects. A digital video file, by this logic, is also one item in a folder to be uploaded or downloaded, even at the length of an entire Hollywood Blockbuster.
Video artist Erica Scourti’s work, in which audio is pressed onto visuals from spliced clips of found footage on YouTube, gives a better understanding of this type of object in art. Key words in her work are typed into search engines such as “woman” and “nature”, while yielding stock footage files that can be ripped and edited into new entities; further disseminating into others work. “In ‘Citizen Choice’ made earlier in 2010, I used stock video paired with audio taken from positive affirmation podcasts” Scourti explains, “this is a clearly appropriative work, directly ripping off the original images and audio files”.
Scourti sees video mpegs as a material to work with. They are an “existing language provided by the stock as the starting point for [my] re-performances”. These are ‘collaborations’ as such, engaging with existing clichés and representations of life – “especially women in nature”, she comments, “which are socially encoded and not purely my own”. Afterwards the works become freely available on YouTube, well-tagged and distributed, once again becoming stock, ready to be appropriated.
In contrast, however, ‘Women Nature Alone’ (2011)attempts to re-use the visual and textual language of stock footage. It shows the infrastructure, which allows it to be easily circulated, such as the banks of stock images stored at the The Getty, and the meta-data (titles, keywords and captions) which enable their movement. It’s a new way of working that reflects a new value for images based on velocity, swarm, circulation and wide distribution, rather than scarcity; a phenomenon, brought on by networked technology, raising questions about the value of artworks. “Is the most widely seen artwork the most valuable, and does this depend on its ability to be easily understood?” asks Scourti. “And what happens when artworks as images are circulated with no indication of their original context or meaning?”
It’s an acceptance of the immaterial nature of the web, a utopian free-for-all in many ways and one that writer Harry Burke, in the context of his contribution to Mason’s work ‘Creativity and Commodification’ describes as “liberating… in the sense of sending a short bit of text off and then seeing what different forms and directions it got morphed into”. But Burke disagrees that he had no control: “injecting 300 words into it seems like quite an insertion of narrative or more like memory or desire perhaps”.
Others however, in a system of exchange, relinquish all authorship, and allow for metadata only as a trail with which to track back, if that. Wikipedia, a hypertext document that relays a user from one source to another, in a web of data with no foreseeable end, acts as an open source site that can at any time be extended, copied or edited by thousands of users. It’s use of CreativeCommonsmedia and voluntary staff gives it a free-form structure with a vast array of information and little sense of ownership.
When it comes to raw text, this system of exchange within Wikipedia is utopian. Based on an alternative economy, in which the only monetary costs are technical and administrative, the sentences are nothing more than data produced collaboratively. An authorless material to be worked with refined and improved, as with Scourti’s stock footage. Both only become objects when boundaries are placed. It could direct commoditisation, such as the case when publisher Zendot proposed to print hundreds of Wikipedia articles into volumes. It could be a simple claim to authorship, as is the case with Scourti and Burke’s work. The technical architecture that hosts data, or frames of reference around data, give others a sense of ownership over a meme they might not have even created.
It’s at the point when someone makes a claim to a digital service or piece of data, it seems, that it becomes a digital object, in much the same way that offline, no one would argue that a collage was a form of theft unless someone had ownership over the manipulated imagery. The moment, then, that someone claims data is their intellectual property, placing boundaries around that data, is when a text, image, video or CAD file becomes an object.
No longer will they be found on open source sites such as Wikipedia, unless they are provided at the discretion of an individual. Artist-led DIS Magazinealso has its own stock library of images, meant to disturb the stereotypes found in mainstream sites, such as Getty Images, but you have to pay to use or modify the content. It is subject to availability. Furthermore, to be archived or displayed, the owned data is reliant on physicality, be it the materials that run the power, or the objects on which they are displayed.
At first, this might seem inconsequential but you only have to consider the worthlessness of physical currency in post-war hyperinflation, stacked in wheelbarrows and nothing more than a piece of paper embossed with logos and illustrations, to consider how easily an object can simply become a fuel, ready to be chucked into the fire. Bitcoins are the new currency, and their worth as objects is similarly reliant on a collective consciousness that deems them to be of worth. Text, like an artwork, can mean absolutely nothing if it does not resonate with an audience. If no one makes a claim to it or places value in it, it may as well not exist at all. **
