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Meet the Season 5 Artist: John Baldessari

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.

Who is John Baldessari and what does he have to say about systems?

John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931; he lives and works in Venice, California. Synthesizing photomontage, painting, and language, Baldessari’s deadpan visual juxtapositions equate images with words and illuminate, confound, and challenge meaning. He upends commonly held expectations of how images function, often by drawing the viewer’s attention to minor details, absences, or the spaces between things. By placing colorful dots over faces, obscuring portions of scenes, or juxtaposing stock photographs with quixotic phrases, he injects humor and dissonance into vernacular imagery. For most of his career John Baldessari has also been a teacher. While some of the strategies he deploys in his work—experimentation, rule-based systems, and working within and against arbitrarily imposed limits to find new solutions to problems—share similarities with pedagogical methods, they are also intrinsic to his particular world view and philosophy.

On the subject of systems in art, Baldessari talk about the liberating potential of systems (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

Usually, I seem to start I think my emergence in the art world was linked with conceptual art, minimal art, but I never quite totally subscribed to it. I thought it was a little boring. But there were a lot of things I did want to shed, and one of them was being tasteful. The idea of using systems, which was in a lot of that work, appealed to me where I could let this taste emerge as I worked. Because, you know, it’s sort of like toilet paper on your shoe.

What’s a system? I think my idea is this: not so much structure that it’s inhibiting or that there’s no wiggle room, but not so loose that it could be anything. It’s like a corral around your idea, a corral that you can move—but not too much. And it’s that limited movement that promotes creativity. Did I just say something profound?

What happens in Baldessari’s segment in Systems this October?

“I’m always interested in things that we don’t call art, and I say why not?” asks John Baldessari. Filmed in his Venice, California studio, the artist consults with his assistant on a color-coded group of maquettes for Raised Eyebrows / Furrowed Foreheads (2008), a series of photographic bas-reliefs. “One of the reasons I gave up painting is because it’s all about being tasteful,” he explains, “I just decided to be very systematic about it and use the color wheel.” Throughout a segment that features over fifty pieces, including works in the inaugural exhibition of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA (2008), Baldessari assails conventional wisdom about art and meaning. “Words are just a way we communicate. Images are a way we communicate,” he asserts, “I couldn’t figure out why they had to be in different baskets.” In the installation Brick Bldg, Lg Windows w/ Xlent Views, Partially Furnished, Renowned Architect (2009) at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, Baldessari humorously reconfigures an entire brick building by noted architect Mies van der Rohe. “Aesthetically, I always look for the weak link in the chain,” he says, comparing his method to “a corral around your idea…limited movement that promotes creativity.”

John Baldessaei "<u>Two Person Fight</u> (One Orange): With Spectator," 2004. Three dimensional digital archival print with acrylic paint on sintra, dibon and gatorfoam panels, 84 x 79 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

John Baldessari "Two Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator," 2004. Three dimensional digital archival print with acrylic paint on sintra, dibon and gatorfoam panels, 84 x 79 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

What else has Baldessari done?

John Baldessari received a BA (1953) and MA (1957) from San Diego State College, continuing his studies at Otis Art Institute (1957-59) and Chouinard Art Institute. Baldessari has received several honorary doctorates, the most recent from the National University of Ireland, Burren College of Art (2006).  He has participated in Documenta (1982, 1978); the Venice Biennale (2009, 2003, 1997); and seven Whitney Biennials, most recently in 2008. His work has been shown in more than 120 solo exhibitions and 300 group exhibitions. A major retrospective will appear at the Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2009-10. John Baldessari was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.

Where can I see more of Baldessari’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

John Baldessari is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris. His work can be seen in the exhibition John Baldessari: A Print Retrospective from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—Legion of Honor in San Francisco through November 8; at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, from September to October; and at the Tate Modern in London where a major retrospective titled John Baldessari: Pure Beauty is on view October 13th, 2009 until January 10th, 2010.

What’s your take on Baldessari’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!


Hybrids

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Vesna Jovanovic, "New Mitosis," 2008. Ink spills, graphite, pencil. Courtesy the Artist.

In an exhibition currently on view at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, artist Vesna Jovanovic both courts and antagonizes the intersection of art and science in the role of the medical illustrator. In this traditional division of labor, science provides the content and the standards of representation, while art serves as the means of communication. Where other artists have inverted this relationship by employing scientists and scientific techniques as means for producing novel artifacts [such Eduardo Kac’s transgenic organisms or Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portait (1998)], Jovanovic works within scientific conventions of realism to explore how they have been internalized and how they might be transformed by artistic practice.

This year’s exhibition of Anatomy in the Gallery, on view until October 16, juxtaposes work by students and faculty from the University of Illinois – Chicago’s Biomedical Visualization program with Jovanovic’s series of drawings based on ink spills, Pareidolia. ‘Pareidolia’ is a psychological term for the common tendency to perceive order or significance in random visual or auditory stimuli, like seeing the shapes of animals in clouds, or faces in the moon. Jovanovic uses ink spills, like rorschach tests, for exploring the ways in which scientific imagery and concepts reside in our collective unconscious—where, it seems, medical instruments, chemistry equipment, organs, and blood vessels grow and mutate into monstrous chimeras.

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Eva Sutton, still from "Hybrids," 2000. Installation on LCD flat-panel.

I had the opportunity to see selections from Pareidolia, along with pieces from Jovanovic’s Hybrid series, in another scientific venue, the Gordon Center for Integrative Science at the University of Chicago last May. In Timekeeper (Self Portrait) (2007), inkblots are replaced by medical images that reflect a lifetime of the artist’s ailments and injuries. In the shadowy images produced by x-rays and MRI scans, Jovanovic discerns, through a process that could also be likened to pareidolia, a kind of physiological unconscious. The result is an anachronistic cyborg composed of new and old machines, human and animal parts, a body that is at once imaginary and hyper-real.

As I looked at Jovanovic’s hybridized versions of herself, I was struck by the contrast with other artists’ works I’d encountered previously, in which the idea of hybridization was associated with irreversible deviation from familiar standards of personal or species identity. This tendency is prominent, for example, in Eva Sutton‘s Hybrids (2000) a faux-type specimen painting that suggests an Audubon illustration – or a genetic engineering experiment – gone terribly awry. Sutton’s scientific realism is a carefully orchestrated aesthetic illusion. The image is actually displayed on a computer monitor  (complete with an ornate gold frame), which the viewer can manipulate to combine parts of the animals in ways that could never take place in a nature that “takes the shortest path” and “makes no leaps.” With the click of a mouse, Sutton indulges the viewer’s “eternally irrepressible drive to intervene in nature, which is a fundamental characteristic of being human.”

Vesna Jovanovic, "Timekeeper (Self Portrait)," 2007. Medical scans, ink, graphite. Courtesy the Artist.

Vesna Jovanovic, "Timekeeper (Self Portrait)," 2007. Medical scans, ink, graphite. Courtesy the Artist.

Is it the possible expression of this irrepressible drive that arouses horror at the intersection of art and science? Is this what must be held in check by the division of labor between the scientist and the illustrator? If Sutton’s work tantalizes and cautions us about a fantastical future, Jovanovic’s comparably restrained hybrids locate those fearsome possibilities closer to home, as we come to see in  the most accurate scientific images strange chimeras of ourselves.

New Flash Points topic: Systems

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Two Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator, 2004. Three dimensional digital archival print with acrylic paint on sintra, dibon and gatorfoam panels, 84 x 79 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

John Baldessari, "Two Person Fight (One Orange): With Spectator," 2004. Three dimensional digital archival print with acrylic paint on sintra, dibon and gatorfoam panels, 84 x 79 inches. © John Baldessari, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

In celebration of the fifth season of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, premiering this fall on PBS, the current round of Flash Points topics correspond to our four thematic episodes: Compassion, Fantasy, Transformation, and Systems.

Lastly, after a series of illuminating posts on Transformation (thanks to our fabulous guest editor Hrag Vartanian), we conclude this series with Systems. The Systems episode features artists who realize complex projects, whether through acts of appropriation, accumulation, collaboration, or creating projects so vast in scope as to elude comprehension.

L: Shapes from Maine: Shapes Copper Cookie Cutters, 2005/2008. Polished copper, 5 1/2 x 3 2/3 x 1 inches each, each unique, formed in copper by hand. Produced in collaboration with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly's Copper Cookie Cutters, Trescott, Maine. Photo by Lamay Photo, © Allan McCollum, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. R: Stadia II, 2004. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photo by Richard Stoner, © Julie Mehretu, courtesy the artist and The Project, New York.

Left: Allan McCollum, "Shapes from Maine: Shapes Copper Cookie Cutters," 2005/2008. Polished copper, 5 1/2 x 3 2/3 x 1 inches each, each unique, formed in copper by hand. Produced in collaboration with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly's Copper Cookie Cutters, Trescott, Maine. Photo by Lamay Photo, © Allan McCollum, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. Right: Julie Mehretu, "Stadia II," 2004. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photo by Richard Stoner, © Julie Mehretu, courtesy the Artist and The Project, New York.

Keeping with Flash Points tradition, we always highlight a key question to consider over the course of a topic’s run. To this end, we ask:

Can art transcend paradigms?

Additional questions to ponder include:

  • How and why do artists use systems?
  • Why do we find comfort in some systems while rebelling against others?
  • What new forms of grammar and logic do artists invent in today’s supercharged, information-based society?

Throughout this time, we’ll publish in-depth posts about the artists profiled in SystemsJohn Baldessari, Kimsooja, Julie Mehretu, and Allan McCollum— as well as feature musings from our roster of guest writers, extending the theme beyond the series to real world networks, matrices, conventions, and subversions.

Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck, 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.

Kimsooja, "Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck," 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.

Help us start the conversation by leaving a comment below. Feel free to note other artists whose work addresses the topic of systems — we’d love to collectively envision a broader landscape of how it is considered in contemporary art practice. And save the date for the premiere Systems episode which debuts nationwide October 28, 2009 on PBS!

Barbara Kruger interviewed by Richard Prince

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Barbara Kruger, 1981, photo montage.

Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a vintage BOMB interview relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, we stepped back into our archive looking for a piece by John Baldessari only to find this portfolio of his work from 1986. But since we promised you an interview, we stepped back further in time to find this conversation that correlated to Baldessari’s work instead. In this interview from BOMB Issue 3, Summer 1983 (26 years ago!), Richard Prince and Art21 artist Barbara Kruger ask each other the same question that result with some varied responses. Read the full interview here.

Richard Prince: What about all these recorded conversations we hear about these days?

Barbara Kruger: Presidents, interview, things like that?

RP: Yes.

BK: Well, in most cases recording seems to offer both the curiosity of replication and the resoluteness of evidence.

RP: Does this have anything to do with the pictures we’re looking at?

BK: Yes. I think in some ways their definitions are interchangeable.

RP: Fiction feels good and recanting causes stress. Like lying, in the physiological sense, the telling of a true story is an unnatural act. Do you think fiction has anything to do with replication?

BK: Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.

RP: Some people think that things that sell the most are the best. How do you feel about being seduced by popular culture? Or are you?

BK: Being socialized within similar constructs of myth and desire, it is not surprising that most people are comforted by popular depictions. Sometimes these images emerge as “semblances of beauty;” as confluences of desirous points. They seem to locate themselves in a kind of free zone, offering dispensations from the mundane particularities of everyday life; tickets to a sort of unrelenting terrain of gorgeousness and glamour expenditure. It you and I think that we are not susceptible to these images and stereotypes than we are sadly deluded. But to have some understanding of the machinations of power in culture and to still joyously entertain these emblems as kitschy divinities is even more ridiculous. And for women it’s an extreme form of masochism.

RP: The fact that we use things that have possibly been observed or unconsciously collected by people other than ourselves…things that have previously been available to anyone who cared to use them—that kind of thing, given these conditions, do you think your work is produced or reproduced?

BK: Well, given your criteria it would seem that all work can be called reproductions to some degree since it incorporates certain styles or codes which preceded it. I think the difference lies in the acknowledgment of previous production within the work. This acknowledgment can function as a device which removes the “original” image from naturalness, perhaps suggesting either an implicit or explicit commentary. In my work I am interested in an alternation between implicit and explicit, between ingratiation and criticality. I also think about assumption, disbelief and authority, but there are no “correct” readings. Only reproductions and possibilities.

RP: A while ago we talked about “cool”. I remember saying something to the effect that “cool” was a prehistoric style. A little like being a dinosaur.

BK: If you think about words like primary and secondary, you could say that cool is mired in the secondary address. It is self-conscious without the presence of cameras and tape recorders. It has internalized their promises and threats. It is totally subsumed by style. Often, its repertoire is composed of gesture. It is celibate, but in an emergency it can fake pleasure pretty well. Its language is not of words but a kind of physical short handing; a verbal withholding. It wants you to think it’s detached. Do you think a lot about style?

RP: I’m misinformed about style. I always thought it had to do with being able to wear the same kind of a jacket for ten years. I don’t know. What I wonder is…is it possible to have style and be unreasonable at the same time?

BK: I think unreasonableness can mean any number of possible locations nearer or further away from the idea of reason. Because many of these positions are already coded, their shock value is tempered by style. A lot of times the idea of transgression really turns on a romantic conception of otherness; of a rebellion already tolerated. You know, the charming rogue, the picaresque cuteness of the bull in the china shop and in the art world, badness invades the atelier. Driving limos through heavy neighborhoods to look at the graffiti. Unstylish unreasonableness may be limited to the categories of the insane and the unpleasant (the poor, the unbeautiful, the unempowered). The non-romanticism of these kinds of otherness makes them unsightly and “vulgar” considerations for the polite company of international bohemia.

Read the full interview in BOMB Magazine here.

Fabricating the DNA Fingerprint

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Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol”  Figure was produced with the DNA of bacterial plasmid pET-11a.  Enzymes used to process the DNA are listed in each column.  Image produced December 06, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Vanouse's “Latent Figure Protocol" was produced with the DNA of bacterial plasmid pET-11a. Enzymes used to process the DNA are listed in each column. Image produced December 06, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

The most exciting moments of the intersection of art and science, for me, are when artists’ use of scientific materials and methods reveal new aspects of their media. Genetic evidence is becoming increasingly important in both winning and overturning criminal convictions, yet the methods used to produce this evidence have been found to be inconsistent and subject to error and manipulation. In Paul Vanouse’s Latent Figure Protocol (2007), artistic self-reflexivity is transformed into an imminent critique of the methods of DNA fingerprinting. While such fingerprinting is conventionally used to create an image that uniquely identifies a person, Vanouse uses the same molecular biological techniques to create images that are – literally and figuratively – generic. For example, a copyright symbol is created as an apt “portrait” for an industrially produced microorganism whose genome has been patented.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” Performance still: explaining DNA imaging process. ARS Electronica 2007, OK Center, Linz, Austria. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” performance still explaining DNA imaging process. ARS Electronica 2007, OK Center, Linz, Austria. Courtesy the Artist.

Latent Figure Protocol is a live demonstration of the process of producing these images, which Vanouse performed most recently at Exit Art. Video documentation of the experiment is now available online. His presentation mirrors that of a professional scientific research paper, including a detailed description of his materials and methods, images and diagrams of the results, and a discussion of the implications he draws from the data. Vanouse’s reserved performance ironically deploys his own technical expertise in the service of the critical goal of the project which, in his words, is “to downgrade the scientific authority of the ‘DNA fingerprint’ to the status of a ‘portrait’ (an association aided by my own status as ‘artist’ rather than ‘scientist’).”

The force of the artwork lies in Vanouse’s sophisticated and unconventional use of DNA testing techniques. He summarizes his methods as follows:

The “wet-biological” techniques used in the Latent Figure Protocol were researched throughout 2006 and are based in restriction digestion of DNA samples and gel electrophoresis. The LFP imaging process relies upon knowing what size DNA is required for each band to move at the proper speed to make the correct image. This is essentially doing molecular biology IN REVERSE. Usually, scientists use imaging techniques to determine an organism’s genetic sequence, whereas LFP utilizes known sequences in online databases to produce “planned” images.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” This demo image shows other possible subjects, issues and images to be undertaken in future instances of the LFP. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” 2007. This demo image shows other possible subjects, issues, and images to be undertaken in future instances of the LFP. Courtesy the Artist.

By “doing molecular biology in reverse,” the artist uses a known DNA sequence to investigate the unknown potential for genetic fingerprinting to be used to construct both legal and cultural definitions of human identity. What’s fascinating – and deeply worrying – about Vanouse’s ability to create the image of a copyright symbol or Che Guevara using the techniques of DNA fingerprinting is that law enforcement agencies could be doing the same thing. A study published last month in Forensics Science International-Genetics reached the same conclusion by different means; as The New York Times reported: “DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show.” The unintended intersection of scientific and artistic motives here demonstrate the importance of deploying artistic strategies of self-reflexivity, defamiliarization, and reversal to reveal latent possibilities within the means of scientific knowledge production.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” Installation at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

Paul Vanouse, “Latent Figure Protocol,” 2007. Installation at CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, 2008. Courtesy the Artist.

Vanouse’s Latent Figure Protocol makes a visually and scientifically compelling argument for standardizing the techniques used to create DNA fingerprints in state and federal laboratories and for making these standards public. Recognizing the value but also the malleability of scientific evidence, last year the Supreme Court issued a ruling that requires scientists to defend the legitimacy of their methods in court. The capacity to examine critically those methods may lie in the creative and technical ingenuity of artists like Vanouse.

Pictures at the Met

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Richard Prince, "Untitled (four single men with interchangeable backgrounds looking to the right)," 1977. Mixed media on paper. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

As summer officially winds down, I can’t help but note that 2009 marks one very significant anniversary that seems to have been somewhat underappreciated, if not totally overlooked here in New York. I’m not talking about this the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s historic exploration of the New York region, which also seems to have slipped by with relatively little fanfare. While perhaps not of this same scale, the underappreciated anniversary to which I’m referring does, nevertheless, mark an occasion that forever changed the course of art history. It is, after all, one hundred years ago this year that the first Futurist manifesto was published—a seismic proclamation that signaled the coalescence of a group that would alter the landscape and the trajectory of modern art (this group’s lessons and legacy are still being assessed). Although a major exhibition is irculating around Europe at the moment to observe the occasion, here in America, the centenary has been greeted with a somewhat muted response by institutions from which one might have expected a more robust commemoration (MoMA, wherefore art thou?).

While there was no centennial celebration to be found, one of the better commemorative exhibitions in New York did in fact highlight another group of radical, young artists whose lessons and legacy are also still being absorbed. I’m referring to the The Pictures Generation: 1974-1984 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier this summer. This exhibition, however, felt a bit like the anniversary that wasn’t, as it commemorated and expanded upon Douglas Crimp’s landmark Pictures show. But it did so, somewhat peculiarly, two years after the thirtieth anniversary of that now legendary exhibition at Artist’s Space in 1977 (to be fair, it was the thirtieth anniversary of Crimp’s important article in October magazine, a broad articulation of his argument in which he also discussed the work of Cindy Sherman, who was not included in his original exhibition).

Face-to-face once more with some of the most iconic images from the so called Pictures generation, it struck me that few moments in the history of art match the late 1970s for its wide-ranging and sustained critique of those institutional systems through which meaning is manipulated and, more importantly, produced. Certainly the Italian Futurists and various strains of Dada vigorously attacked the mechanisms of power and the conventions of representation, and articulated a radical new vision of what art and life should be. Likewise, the 1950s witnessed Jasper Johns’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s devastating assault on both the painterly gesture as an index of authenticity and originality, as well as the mythology of the abstract expressionist artist.

But the generation that came of age in the 1960s internalized its era’s incredulity towards institutional authority, artistic or otherwise, while growing up in a culture of mass consumption increasingly dominated and defined by images. It was up to this generation to employ the appropriative and quotational strategies inherited from the likes of Johns and Rauschenberg in order to investigate the insidious economy of representation in visual and consumer culture.

The Pictures generation was, like the Futurists had been seventy years earlier, a youth movement, but one that deftly understood that the most devastating way to effect a critique of a mass media system that no longer seemed to simply be representing the world around them but rather determining it, was to transact in it on its terms. In retrospect, this might be one of the most important legacies of the Pictures generation—namely their collective ability to operate within the insidious systems of meaning production in order to challenge them, and to do so without simply substituting irony for aesthetics and acumen. The work of Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Laurie Simmons demonstrate this rare balancing act. The art of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, two slightly later artists who inherited the lessons of the Pictures generation, also succeeds in finding that rare equilibrium between commenting upon and unabashedly embracing the systems of representation in contemporary culture. The current generation of artists, or at least those included in the recent Younger Than Jesus show at the New Museum in New York, seems to be in the initial stages of coming to terms with those same lessons (and increasingly muted legacy) while working in an ever more image-dominated world.

Alas, while the Pictures generation may not have opened up entire new worlds for exploration to the scale that Henry Hudson did four centuries ago this year, some 30 years ago in New York, they did demonstrate perhaps more plainly than any generation before or since that in contemporary visual culture, one must deal in the mechanisms of power in order to effect a critique of them—and that is an anniversary worth celebrating.

Meet the Season 5 Artist: Kimsooja

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.

Who is Kimsooja and what does she have to say about systems?

Kimsooja was born in 1957 in Taegu, South Korea; she lives and works in New York. Kimsooja’s videos and installations blur the boundaries between aesthetics and transcendent experience through their use of repetitive actions, meditative practices, and serial forms. In many pieces, everyday actions—such as sewing or doing laundry—become two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. Central to her work is the bottari, a traditional Korean bundle used to wrap and protect personal belongings, which Kimsooja transforms into a philosophical metaphor for structure and connection.  In videos that feature her in various personas (Needle Woman, Beggar Woman, Homeless Woman), she leads us to reflect on the human condition, offering open-ended perspectives through which she presents and questions reality. Using her own body, facing away from the camera, Kimsooja becomes a void; we literally see and respond through her. While striking for their vibrant color and density of imagery, Kimsooja’s works emphasize metaphysical changes within the artist-as-performer as well as the viewer.

On the subject of systems in art, Kimsooja talks about blurring conceptual systems from art and life in her work (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

When I was doing sewing pieces, I considered all the women’s activities—sewing, cooking, laundry, pressing, cleaning the house, shopping, decorating—as two- and three-dimensional or performative activities. I wanted to appreciate that aspect and reveal the artistic context. So my work was all, in a way, related to women’s activity, but then it was also linked to contemporary art issues. I’d been working a lot using femininity and female activities, but I never considered myself as a feminist. The only thing I can agree to is that ‘feminist’ is part of ‘humanist’. So I don’t even participate in feminist shows—because that really simplifies and limits my ideas. I refuse to be in a specific ism. But my practice can be perceived in different isms—like conceptualism, globalism, feminism, minimalism. My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art, so that’s also one reason my practice is quite broad and diverse—to reach that complexity and comprehensiveness.

What happens in Kimsooja’s segment in Systems this October?

Kimsooja’s segment opens with a series of videotaped performances in crowded cities around the world, titled A Needle Woman (1999-2001). In the videos, the artist is shown from behind, her form acting as an unmoving axis on the horizon. Comparing her body to a needle that threads through space and time, she explains that her conceptual “system is very much rooted to the practice of sewing” and that she discovers “artistic questions and answers from our daily life activities.” Discovering that bottari—a traditional Korean bundle—could be used as minimalist sculpture, the artist later explored autobiographical and cultural aspects of the form in works such as a tour of South Korea in Cities On The Move–2727 km Bottari Truck (1997) and an installation of hanging bedsheets belonging to newlyweds in A Laundry Woman (2004).

The segment focuses in depth on two recent site-specific works. Lotus: Zone of Zero (2008) in Brussels consists of 2,000 fuchsia lotus lanterns with a soundtrack of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants. To Breathe–A Mirror Woman (2006) is an intervention at the Crystal Palace in Madrid in which rainbow-colored sunlight, diffused through diffraction grating film applied to windows, is reflected in a mirrored surface applied to the floor while a pre-recorded performance of the artist’s rythmic breathing—A Weaving Factory (2005)—fills the space. Says the artist on her ethereal and genre-bending work: “My intention is to reach to the totality of our life in art.”

Kimsooja. "Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck," 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.

Kimsooja. "Cities On The Move - 2727 km Bottari Truck," 1997. Single channel video projection, silent, 7:33 minute loop. © Kimsooja, courtesy the artist.

What else has Kimsooja done?

Kimsooja  earned a BFA (1980) and MA (1984) from Hong-Ik University, Seoul. Kimsooja has received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2002), among others, and has been an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center, New York (1998); P.S. 1 Museum, New York (1992-93); and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2006); Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall, Sweden (2006); the MIT List Gallery, Cambridge (2005), and other institutions. Kimsooja has participated in international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005, 2007); Yokohama Triennial (2005); and Whitney Biennial (2002).

Where can I see more of Kimsooja’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

Kimsooja maintains an extensive website of her work.

What’s your take on Kimsooja’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Krzysztof Wodiczko interviewed by Giuliana Bruno

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Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB contributor relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, inspired by Kimsooja’s videos and installations, we’re revisiting the work of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. Instead of an interview this time, we’re giving you a short video clip of a BOMBLive! conversation that took place before an audience of 75 people at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, NY, on October 27, 2007. In addition to being a great event, it was significant as it marked the launched of BOMB’s “In the Open: Art in Public Spaces” series and also the occasion of our first-ever collaboration with Art21, who screened their Season 3 segment on Wodiczko as a prelude to the conversation.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C632pslZLlQ]

In this short excerpt from the longer video, author and theorist Giuliana Bruno and the artist discuss his video installations at Hiroshima and elsewhere. You can watch the full 15-minute BOMBLive! video here.


Meet the Season 5 Artist: Allan McCollum

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.

Who is Allan McCollum and what does he have to say about systems?

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles in 1944; he lives and works in New York. In his twenties, McCollum briefly considered a career in theater, then attended trade school to study restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. In the late 1960s, he began to educate himself as an artist. Applying strategies of mass production to hand-made objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time. Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, comprised of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility.

On the subject of systems in art, McCollum describes how he creates low-tech combinatorial systems to generate projects on a massive scale (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

The Shapes Project (2005) is the first computer project that I’ve done. It’s all done with Adobe Illustrator, and I learned only the things I needed to know to do it. I don’t know how to program or create any kind of database that generates anything. What I do is very simple, like what I’ve been doing in combinatorial projects for twenty-five years or even longer. All my projects have had combinatorial elements where I’m taking a vocabulary of parts and putting them together to make something else, which is very computer-like, but there was never a computer involved before.

What I’m doing is incredibly simple. It’s childlike; anyone could do what I’m doing. The hard part is having the patience (and a boring, compulsive personality) that allows me to keep doing it over and over and over again. So from four shapes I can make around 200-or-so million unique shapes. But there’s another system where I use six shapes. Once you start using that, you can produce 60 billion shapes. This is consistent with wanting to make a shape for everybody on the planet. I had to come up with a system that not only created enough unique shapes for everyone on the planet, but I wanted there to be enough (even in fifty years when there are billions more people) to play with and experiment with. So I went way overboard.

What happens in Allan McCollum’s segment in Systems this October?

Allan McCollum’s segment begins with his uncle Jon Gnagy’s 1950s television program Learn to Draw. Crediting his uncle’s demonstrations as an early influence, McCollum says “whenever I design a project it’s in my head…that I would be able to show someone else how to do it.”

Describing his aesthetic motivation with the paradox of “wanting to try to work in quantities…and make things that are singular and unique at the same time,” the viewer travels with the artist and his team of studio assistants to the 28th São Paolo Bienal (2008) for the installation of Drawings (1988)—1,800 hand-stenciled, graphite pencil works. McCollum describes devising “a system that would produce a shape for everybody on the planet.” To make The Shapes Project (2005), the artist developed a set of unique forms that, when fully combined, results in 60 billion individual shapes. McCollum later collaborated with four remote home businesses in Maine, whom he only talked to via email and phone, to produce collections of silhouettes, rubber stamps, wood ornaments, and copper cookie cutters. The resulting Shapes from Maine (2009) at Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York consists of over 2,200 individual hand-crafted objects, each its own one-of-a-kind shape.

Allan McCollum. Shapes from Maine: Shapes Copper Cookie Cutters," 2005/2008. Polished copper, 5 1/2 x 3 2/3 x 1 inches each, each unique, formed in copper by hand. Produced in collaboration with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly's Copper Cookie Cutters, Trescott, Maine. Photo by Lamay Photo, © Allan McCollum, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

Allan McCollum. "Shapes from Maine: Shapes Copper Cookie Cutters," 2005/2008. Polished copper, 5 1/2 x 3 2/3 x 1 inches each, each unique, formed in copper by hand. Produced in collaboration with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly's Copper Cookie Cutters, Trescott, Maine. Photo by Lamay Photo, © Allan McCollum, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.

What else has McCollum done?

Allan McCollum has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, most recently at the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include  Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006), among others. Allan McCollum lives and works in New York.

Where can I see more of McCollum’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

Allan McCollum is represented by Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. The artist also maintains an extensive website of his own works.

What’s your take on McCollum’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Harrell Fletcher interviewed by Allan McCollum

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Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB contributor relating to a Season 5 artist. This week, we’re switching it up again and featuring an interview by an Art21 artist instead. In BOMB Issue 95, Spring 2006, Allan McCollum spoke with Harrell Fletcher about his project at Domaine de Kerguéhennec Centre d’Art, Bignan, in France. The conversations fits neatly into the Systems theme for this week, as well as being one of our favorite recent interviews to appear in BOMB. We hope you like it as much as we do!

Harrell Fletcher, The Report, 2003, xeroxed publication. All images courtesy of the artist, Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Harrell Fletcher, "The Report," 2003. Xeroxed publication. All images courtesy the artist, Christine Burgin Gallery, New York, and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco.

Allan McCollum: I enjoy that the meaning of your work doesn’t reside in any one piece. In fact, looking at any one piece you might pass over it; they’re often so simple and easy to describe. But looking at project after project (the number seems to go into the hundreds), and then your Learning to Love You More website with a couple of thousand more projects, a certain set of values comes through. You’re not trying to produce singular masterpieces, and almost all your work is about people other than yourself. A lot of the things that we expect an artist to do, you do backward. It constantly takes me by surprise.

Harrell Fletcher: It’s about having a set of natural proclivities. I see the structure of how an artist is supposed to operate, but some of those things don’t feel comfortable to me. In graduate school, I started realizing that I did not have to follow the normal course.

AM: How did you perceive the “normal course” while you were in school?

HF: It’s so concentrated in graduate school; you see all of these people going into their studios, spending hours and hours making objects or paintings. And it’s supposed to be about isolating themselves. Maybe they have a wall of inspirational clippings from magazines, but that’s the extent of their interaction with the world.AM: Where did you go to school?

HF: I went to Humboldt State University for three years, the San Francisco Art Institute for one year, and then the California College of Arts and Crafts. I was coming from a photography background, and that led to going out in the world and finding things to document. But even then I was frustrated by the system in which art was shown. I wanted to make booklets of photographs and hand them out on the street rather than try to find a gallery to show them.

AM: I never would have guessed that your impulse to do these projects came from photography.

HF: I’d become interested in new forms of documentary and I just started making books. They were almost like making an exhibition—I could hand one to someone and they’d get the entire idea.

AM: In the same way a photographer can put together a book of photographs.

HF: Except I was making one-of-a-kind works. I made about 30 of them. Then I started making Xerox books, and that led to the various publications I make now, newspapers, small books, etc.

AM: What happened to those early books?

HF: I still have them. They’ve never been shown. This relates to your first comment about seeing my work best as an overall set. In graduate school I was doing an independent study with Larry Sultan and whenever he would ask to see work, I’d give him these books that I had made years before. At one point, he was like, “Why aren’t you showing me any new work?” And I said, “I’m trying to make you into my ideal viewer. I want you to be prepared before I show you anything new so that you know exactly where I’m coming from.” It was as if I were trying to show him 30 exhibitions I’d done, all contained within these books.

AM: So much of your work seems to have been done for what might be called a fairly narrow audience. Like your piece Some People from Around Here, those big eight-foot signs along the highway in the small town of Fairfield, California, blown-up painted plywood cut-out portraits of local people. Clearly, the chosen audience was the local townspeople.

HF: About a million people a week commute past Fairfield to the Bay Area. That was the audience. Also the local people who were represented on the billboards, and their friends and neighbors. The local people had this thrill of suddenly seeing a person they know, or maybe a person they see every day, being treated the way they’re used to celebrities being treated. The excitement for those local people was knowing that I wasn’t just making it in their backyard for their friends to see, but for all those people who don’t know them. That’s the difference between a normal citizen and a celebrity: people who don’t know them personally can still recognize a celebrity’s face.

AM: You’ve got images of the project on the Internet. That’s where I saw it, in New York City, 3,000 miles away. I’m a part of the “art world.” So, now you’ve got an art world audience looking at the works, as well. All artists have to think about their audience, but it’s especially complicated with you when you work with local people in these small communities.

HF: At the time the piece was done, I didn’t know that would happen. I was trying to make work that would function without special art knowledge so that people could access it in a direct way, which might also be incredibly complex based on their own personal history and associations. At the same time, as an artist I have knowledge of the history of art, and that goes into the work too. There are multiple readings, but sometimes having too deep a reading takes you away from the actual experience.

AM: What do you mean, the actual experience?

HF: That first encounter with something.

AM: The first encounter of “us” in the art world, or simply the first encounter?

HF: For anyone. David Hammond says that the art world audience is the worst one, partly because they’re overeducated and partly because they’re too conservative. They have expectations and immediate cynicism or they try to dig into it too deeply right away.

AM: But people who don’t study contemporary art are just as likely to have an impoverished way of looking, a knee-jerkOh, that’s just elitist,’ or ‘My kid could do that.’

HF: Especially if the work that you’re presenting to them seems like something they could have made themselves. I’ve tried to make projects less about my own personal aesthetic, which might appear to be a my-kid-could-do-that approach because that’s an aesthetic that I like. But I give the work a certain level of technical proficiency so people feel that it’s validated. The portraits on the highway are not hyperrealistic, but they’re not sloppy either; people can’t automatically say, ‘I could do that.’

AM: I see, because they couldn’t do that. (laughter)

Read the full-length BOMB interview here.

Meet the Season 5 Artist: Julie Mehretu

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The above video is excerpted from the Season 5 episode Systems, premiering on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings). Systems features four artists — John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu — who invent new grammars and logics, finding comfort in some systems while rebelling against others in today’s supercharged, information-based society.

Who is Julie Mehretu and what does she have to say about systems?

Julie Mehretu was born in 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; she lives and works in New York. Mehretu’s paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings’ wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu’s delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.

On the subject of systems in art, Mehretu talks about the difference between rational and organic methods of working (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something. The action or behavior—or what happens organically and intuitively, rationally and spiritually, or majestically—in a world is a very different thing than what can happen in our effort to understand it. So there was more of an impulse to use those approaches, trying to make sense of these two sides of myself in the earlier work. And I developed a whole language and body of work that evolved from that investigation. But the thing that kept it all together and that keeps me going is the painting—making the pictures—and drawing. In getting lost in doing that, language is invented. And that shows you something you never thought you would know about yourself or understand.

What happens in Mehretu’s segment in Systems this October?

“Trying to figure out who I am and my work is trying to understand systems,” says Julie Mehretu, shown working with her assistants in Berlin on seven large canvases for a show at Deutsche Guggenheim (Fall 2009). “The thing that keeps me going is the painting,” she says, “and in getting lost in doing that a language is invented.”Mehretu’s abstract compositions reference modernist architecture, Google Maps, Coliseum-like buildings like those found in Stadia II (2004), and defaced structures—like the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan—which became the inspiration for Vanescere (2007).

The segment captures the artist at a moment of upheaval, both in her life and in current events, working on the biggest project of her young career: a 21 by 85 foot long mural commissioned by a major financial institution in Lower Manhattan, to be completed during the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Characterizing the task before her as “absurd,” she wonders “can you actually make a picture…of the history of capitalist development,” from the early maps of the Silk Road to the evolution of the marketplace as it exists today?

Julie Mehretu. "Stadia II," 2004. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photo by Richard Stoner, © Julie Mehretu, courtesy the artist and The Project, New York.

Julie Mehretu. "Stadia II," 2004. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 108 x 144 inches. Collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, Gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photo by Richard Stoner, © Julie Mehretu, courtesy the artist and The Project, New York.

What else has Mehretu done?

Mehretu studied at University Cheik Anta Diop, Dakar (1990-91), earning a BA from Kalamazoo College, Michigan (1992), and an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence (1997). She was a resident of the CORE Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1997-98) and the AIR Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001). Among Mehretu’s awards are the Berlin Prize (2007), from the American Academy in Berlin; a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2005); and the American Art Award from the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005). Her work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007); Detroit Institute of Arts (2006); Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis (2003); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003), among others. Mehretu has participated in the Sydney Biennale (2006); Carnegie International (2004); Bienal de São Paulo (2004); Whitney Biennial (2004); and the Istanbul Biennial (2003).

Where can I see more of Mehretu’s work between now and the Art21 premiere this October?

Julie Mehretu is represented by The Project in New York. Her work is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition Between Art and Life: The Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Collection (through January 3, 2010) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego as part of the exhibition Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (September 26, 2009 through January 31, 2010). An exhibition of prints is being mounted by the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis this fall. Works filmed in-progress in Mehretu’s segment premiere at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (October 17, 2009 through January 10, 2010).

What’s your take on Mehretu’s inclusion in Season 5?

Tell us what you think by leaving a comment below!

Julie Mehretu interviewed by Lawrence Chua

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Welcome back to BOMB in the Building, where each week we’re featuring a BOMB contributor relating to an Art:21 Season 5 artist. This is our final week before the official premiere of Season 5. We’ve had a great time digging around in the BOMB Archive these past few months, and hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have.

Artist Lawrence Chua interviewed Julie Mehretu for BOMB Issue 91, Spring 1995. “At the heart of Julie Mehretu’s paintings is a question about the ways in which we construct and live in the world,” he wrote five years ago. “I think of Mehretu’s paintings as going a long way toward articulating the disjunction of life as it’s lived today: as we circulate across reality and its mediations, constantly trying to reconcile daily experience with the peculiar light emanating from the end of the world as we know it.”

We can’t think of a better statement with which to end this portion of our “BOMB in the Building” series. Enjoy!

Congress, 2003, ink and acrylic on canvas, 71 × 102”.

Julie Mehretu, "Congress," 2003. Ink and acrylic on canvas, 71 × 102”.

Lawrence Chua: To what extent are the paintings a critique? We’ve been talking a lot about current political events. . . .

Julie Mehretu: I don’t look at the paintings necessarily as critique. In fact, I’m not so interested in being critical. What I’m interested in, in painting at least, is our current situation, whether it be political, historical or social, and how it informs me and my context and my past. I am trying to locate myself and my perspective within and between all of it. I know I keep on going back to that, but it’s like, here’s a war and here’s the way that we’re treating the war, and how we’re experiencing the war. I was looking at some great Martha Rosler pieces recently, the Bringing the War Home photocollages which she began in the ‘70s. They are her images of advertisements invading the interiors of new homes, new homes designed for living in new worlds, but through the windows you can see soldiers fighting the Vietnam War. There are these interesting juxtapositions of what’s happening and what we experience. Of course there’s much more inherent critique in those pieces.

LC: That sounds metaphoric in a way that your paintings are not, which is what gives your work its power. We live in a moment that is obsessed with the Real. There’s this disjunction between physical daily life and the kind of extremely mediated reality we glimpse on reality TV or Fox News. Maybe it’s that disjunction that is being lived out in your paintings.

JM: When you’re writing, is it important to you to make that bridge between a situation that is happening right now and the eternal process of working and creativity?

LC: I begin with a structure and I try to have as clear an idea as possible about the structure and the way characters are going to move through that structure and the events that are going to propel them. The structure becomes set in a context, whether it’s the nineteenth century of Vanity Fair or the twentieth-century Gulf War. That context will influence language, rituals, actions, but I try to maintain the structure I set out to build. Colm Tóibín taught these writing workshops where he had the students begin by reading three Greek tragedies. His basic premise was that you could trace all Western narratives to these three tragedies, Electra, Antigone, and Medea. The truth of those relationships, those responses, are a part of our consciousness. So maybe a good writer is writing the same stories over and again. The context may make it a bit more relevant to the moment, but it’s not as if a mother killing her child isn’t incredibly relevant to current political events.

JM: The structure, the architecture, the information and the visual signage that goes into my work changes in the context of what’s going on in the world and impacting me. Then there’s this other subconscious kind of drawing, this other activity that takes place, that is interacting with everything that is changing, and it’s the relationship between the two that really pushes me. And why abstraction? There are so many other ways to make paintings about these conditions that I’m drawn to. But there’s something that’s hard to speak about that abstraction gives me access to.

LC: More and more I shy away from actually describing the physical characteristics of the characters. They almost become abstract figures that operate in a narrative. With the last extended piece of writing that I did, for instance, I was interested in how to completely absent race. I was interested in what kind of person the police were actually looking for on the occasions that they’ve stopped me. You know, what did that guy who robbed the grocery store that you mistook me for look like, exactly? Did we share some common historical reality? How do you begin to talk about the characters without using police language, or this mediated language that is ultimately unreliable, to identify them? For me abstraction is liberating. I read Chester Himes’s prison novel, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, and it is never really clear whether the characters are white or black even though he claimed they were white. He plays this funny game with them, their racial markers, their identities. That was one of the challenges for me in writing the last manuscript. How do you create these characters whose gestures are real and similar to the gestures that you live with in daily life without the burden of this mediated racial identity, while at the same time acknowledging the importance of race in shaping your reality? And now, I don’t want to do traditional area studies for my Ph.D. because what I’m interested in doesn’t just happen in Southeast Asia, it happens in Europe and it happens in the United States.

JM: Yeah. Even though I collect and work with images in the studio they don’t enter the work directly. Instead I’m trying to create my own language. It’s the reason I use the language of European abstraction in my work. I am interested in those ideas because I grew up looking at that type of work, but also not taking any of it at face value. It is as big a part of me as Chinese calligraphy or Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts. The more I understand any kind of work the more I see myself conceptually borrowing from it. Going to the Met and seeing particular paintings over and over inevitably becomes a part of my language. Abstraction in that way allows for all those various places to find expression.

LC: I wonder if that’s because language doesn’t come to us naturally because of each of our specific historical contexts. English or European abstraction is just not second nature to either of us. We meditate intuitively or self-consciously on whether this is the right word or the right gesture to use in this situation.

JM: I want to shy away from talking about your situation, my situation, as being more privy to a certain kind of understanding—

LC: I totally agree with you, but why are we more conscious of these uses of language? You were talking before about collecting images . . .

JM: Newspaper images.

LC: Right, and saying that to use them wouldn’t be as liberating as abstraction. Yet someone like Matthew Barney refers to some of the things we have been talking about. He also has a historical trajectory that he draws on where he’s not comfortable accepting a word or gesture at face value, and the discourse produced around his work isn’t reducing it to being about a potato famine.

JM: It’s the same reason that being from Addis Ababa and having lived in say Harare, Dakar, Providence, Kalamazoo, Houston, is not the point of departure for my work. There’s that desire to exoticize, but I don’t know if exoticize is the right word.

LC: That response is a kind of exoticization, but it’s a very sophisticated one. It’s certainly not as crass as it was in the 1980s, but it’s still a mediated version of our experiences: a kind of police report, or APB on our lives.

JM: I think the work is about trying to make sense of what is happening outside of that mediated reality. There are more and more of these complicated situations and I think we all exist in them, or at least I know I do, where I come from two different realities and I’m trying to locate myself. That was the point of departure in all the work, trying to make sense of the version of history and reality that my whole family in Ethiopia is living in, and another one that exists here with my parents and my grandmother and yet another one that I experience.

LC: Yes, but it’s that third part of the equation that is so crucial because it throws everything off kilter.

JM: Totally . . . (laughter)

LC: Like, there’s Ethiopia and there’s Michigan, but what about the Australian outback in your trajectory? Or, we understand why you were in southern Thailand when the tsunami hit or in New York City on 9/11, but tell us again why you were in Beirut?

JM: Right. (laughter) I think it’s that I’m seeking how to nurture that process of working in the studio while allowing other things to happen. Because the most interesting realizations happen there and that’s why I just want to work on only drawings right now: to allow for that kind of freedom and let those new kinds of languages and new marks arise to articulate a different picture of what’s happening in the world that, even though we’ve talked about it so much, I still feel really confused by.

Read the complete interview here.

Gastro-Vision: Breaking Bread

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"Yours in Food, John Baldessari" Book Jacket. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

John Baldessari, "Yours in Food" book jacket image. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Gastro-Vision is a new monthly column dedicated to all things food in contemporary art and visual culture. This month’s post also falls under the Flash Points topic, Systems.

Yours in Food — by Season 5 artist John Baldessari — had, like many other books, been on my Amazon wish list for a couple of years. When I stumbled upon a used copy at Biography Bookshop in Manhattan (note: across the street from Magnolia Bakery) this summer, what had before appeared fun and frivolous seemed a requisite purchase.

Flipping through, I found provocative images of food, dinner tables and eaters, appropriated from film and video as is characteristic of Baldessari’s work. A group of young men wearing overalls and plaid shirts seated for a meal of mashed potatoes, milk and other ostensibly hearty foods suggests a rural working class family. The face at the head of the table is covered by one of Baldessari’s signature colored dots. In other images, a banquet table procession of porcelain dishware and brass candelabras, flanked by women in sequin dresses and pearls, speaks to high society. A picture of stainless steel cafeteria trays and husky men in denim blue shirts hints at a prison scene. Baldessari inserts his hand again in a candid black-and-white shot of a lodge-like dining scene; a series of white circles obscure the faces of white males, suggesting homogeny and self-segregation. On the book jacket (above), jarred pickles and olives, ketchup, a stack of white bread, and what resembles a can of Cheez Whiz, call to mind the all-American pantry. Between these vignettes, Paul Auster, Peter Schjeldahl, David Bryne, Lynne Tilman, Tim Griffin and other notable writers share tales of love, loss and toast; poverty and onion pie; Thanksgiving gluttony; and other reflections on “taste.” Yours in Food is, on the whole, a study of the shared meal, or “breaking bread.”

"Don't Perish Dinner #3. Courtesy the artists.

"Don't Perish" Dinner #3. Courtesy Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring.

"Don't Perish" Dinner #3. Courtesy the artists.

"Don't Perish" Dinner #3. Courtesy Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring.

“The act of sharing food and drink with others is…an enduring source of aesthetic inspiration,” writes Stephanie Smith, curator of the forthcoming exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art, “Today, the shared meal has become a compelling artistic medium.” Every so often it also inspires a whole curatorial thesis. For the exhibition Don’t Perish, recently at Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte in Manhattan, curators (and practicing artists) Joseph Montgomery and Jesse Willenbring invited friends and strangers to look at work with them “over a meal.” This group show, dinner series, and food-drive in one–an alternative to passive viewing–involved nine potlucks at the gallery spread out over four weeks. Similar to Baldessari, Montgomery and Willenbring demonstrate how the shared meal is itself a system, or paradigm by which to engage viewers in a concept and body of work. Montgomery says:

We had anywhere from 15 to 30 people per night. Tuesday nights were very crowded. Saturday nights on the smaller side. Conversations changed the work…Everything was not original; conversations were repeated [and] similar dishes cooked, but the act of being there again and again brought strength and endurance to the show…All the smoke, smells, looking, colors, breath, and words were absorbed, polished into the art, tables and shelves.

Montogomery and Willenbring mounted a similar project in 2008, a tribute to Rirkrit Tiravanija entitled Rose Colored Glasses. Works were installed around a dinner table, “dispersing the focus from the singular provider to multiple sources of food and art in one space.” But the curators were disappointed with the outcome. “The idea of potluck did not seem to translate into a workable and sustainable method of sourcing generosity in aesthetics,” says Montgomery. Don’t Perish was an attempt to fix these “deficiencies.” Dinnertime chatter, collective reflection and a bit of food philanthropy brought the exhibition to its full potential.

"Don't Perish" Installation. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

"Don't Perish" installation. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

Joe Baer, "Hiccup", 1964. Gouache on paper, 4 x 4 in. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

Jo Baer, "Hiccup," 1964. Gouache on paper, 4 x 4 in. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

The process for selecting objects began with the understanding that Montgomery and Willenbring would spend almost 150 hours over 30 days in the gallery “wrestling with installation, hosting dinners, eating and drinking.” And so, they set themselves up for “prolonged exposure.” Think Slow Food come to contemporary art. “Abstract and conceptual works,” according to the curators, “lent themselves particularly well to durational viewing.” Peppering the long white cube were two miniature drawings by the minimalist artist Jo Baer, titled Hiccup and Garden. Further down this wall hung a piece of blue velvet fabric by Alison Fox titled Untitled/Smurfblue. Given the framework, I want to read Fox’s grid-adorned blue sheet as an interpretation of a picnic blanket or tablecloth with a nod to Barnett Newman and Sol Lewitt. Conscientious of generational references, a Pat Steir painting was installed next to a Sherrie Levine piece, and across from a work by Alexandra Olson. Montgomery says, “A guest that comes multiple nights might, for example, be consumed by the layers of Carrie Moyer’s piece [during] the first dinner, and move on to the pours of her antecedent, Steir, the next [time].”A mushroom sculpture by Cosima von Bonin; a staid string and nail piece by Carol Bove; a color field C-print by Roe Ethridge titled Dust Cover; and Hilary Berseth’s Programmed Hive #7, a three-dimensional sculpture of honeybee comb mounted on board, were also include in the display.

"Don't Perish" Installation. Left: Right: "Dust Cover," 2008. Roe Ethridge. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

"Don't Perish" installation. Top left: Roe Ethridge, "Piranha," 2008. C-print, 38 x 30 in. Top right: "Dust Cover," 2008. C-print, edition 2 of 5, 55 1/2 x 42 in. Courtesy Leo Keonig Inc. Projekte.

On the flip side of dining and digestion was an emphasis on hunger and responsibility: a series of white shelves functioned as an impermanent food pantry, “making generosity visible” through the display of donated food. The presence of non-perishable goods in the gallery signaled the problem and absence of food elsewhere. (The Feeding America Network, made up of more than 200 food banks and food rescue organizations, distributed nearly 2 billions pounds of food and grocery products in 2005 to more than 25 million Americans. At the same time, the USDA estimates 96 billion pounds of food are wasted each year in the United States.) Donations to Don’t Perish—a prodigious 400 pounds when it was all said and done—were given to the Food Bank for New York City. Looking at the statistics, I had to wonder, what now? How will the curators continue this (very timely) dialogue of responsibility post-exhibition? Montgomery said:

“…Acknowledging influence is to engage responsibility as a known quantity in the art world. Processing these shows takes a long time. Now we wait. If we communicated something about responsibility, the person or persons who engaged in the conversation will perpetuate it themselves. That’s what responsibility is, right? Influence then action, right? We are excited to see if and how that might grow.”

But wait, there’s more. The curators’ eating and feeding endeavors also included a weekend farm stand outside the gallery (located in an area of Chelsea where the pickins are slim). Many farmers didn’t have time or resources to help with the project, says Montgomery. But the farmers that did participate were “sympathetic to or had first hand knowledge of the art world.” They said, in splendid metaphor, “Growing food is hard, but understanding art is also hard work and we want to help set up the dichotomy.”

John Baldessari is featured in the Season 5 episode “Systems,” premiering Wednesday, October 28 at 10pm (ET) on PBS. Stephanie Smith’s aforementioned exhibition, Feast: Radical Hospitality and Contemporary Art, is scheduled to open at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, October 2011.

Scenes from a Globalized Art World

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Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

I’d like to start my guest blogging with Art21 by bringing up a series of questions surrounding globalization and artistic representation. My primary research interest is in the art market and the forces that shape it. With a background in cultural studies, I tend to approach the market through multiple lenses—analyzing it through its cultural, economic, and social contexts and impacts. In the next few weeks, I hope to present some interesting talking points surrounding this very issue, explore how arts communities are built, and feature artists working in exciting, new ways.

Not only can art expose the norms and hierarchies of the existing social order, but it can give us the conceptual means to invent another, making what had once seemed utterly impossible entirely realistic.

— Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Artforum, October 2009.

Last week, the San Francisco Art Institute hosted a panel discussion titled, “Global Art in the Downturn.” Panelists included Hou Hanru and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. My first question upon coming across the announcement was, what is the definition of “global art”? This is exactly the question that was first addressed by moderator, Dominic Willsdon of SFMOMA. The agreed-upon definition during the panel discussion was that “global art” included the genres and forms of art that are more popular across the globe, and that it is work presented in biennials, art fairs, and internationally-known institutions, and publications.

There are no set terms or definitions or categories for the levels at which artwork is produced, but what became clear to me in my two years of researching art world ecosystems for my master’s thesis is that artists make conscious decisions about how they want their work to be seen and by whom. At the same time, their agency is limited or co-opted by other art world players, such as curators and dealers who control access to major institutions and exhibitions.

There is no doubt that globalization, or the more nuanced French term mondialisation, has affected the art world as a whole—from the expansion of new markets, to the ability for artists to more easily travel, explore, and present a wider range of ideas, or to the proliferation of biennials and art fairs. How, then, does defining “global art” as the work endorsed by the international art community affect how non-endorsed works or artists are read within a globalized art scene?

During the panel discussion, both Hou and Christov-Bakargiev reflected on their roles as curators of biennials. Hou was the curator for the 10th Biennale de Lyon and the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, and Christov-Bakargiev curated the 2008 Biennale of Sydney and is artistic director for the upcoming Documenta 13. Each feels the desire and need to ensure local artworks or cultural groups are integrated in these international exhibitions, but each also agrees that those works are viewed through a different lens. While biennialization has been blamed for creating pressure for artists to create works that appeal to a Western aesthetic as a result of the mainly-Western curators that direct them, it also has allowed for cities like Havana and Istanbul to host exhibitions that showcase local or regional artists and create value for a non-Western aesthetic. One must think about the makeup of the audience for biennials. Who is looking, who is judging, and what are the expectations?

Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002. Photo courtesy of Werner Maschmann

Documenta11, Kassel, 2002. Photo: Werner Maschmann.

With the release of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth, which follows their highly-influential book, Empire (2000), globalization is again at the forefront of a debate about how aesthetic judgments are made and how cultures are being shaped by them. In the October issue of Artforum, Okwui Enwezor discusses the effects of Empire on the art world. Specifically, Enwezor discusses how the book influenced the way he decided to approach being the artistic director for Documenta11 (2002), which he felt was historically, “one of the epicenters of the imperial regimes of cultural control; it constituted (along with the old circuitry of the museum institution) a type of cultural sovereignty that brooked little tolerance of the hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges to which Hardt and Negri would gravitate.” Enwezor’s curatorial approach to Documenta11 is still discussed today for the successful multiplicity of ideas and cultures he was able to cull together. Enwezor gathered a team of six curators to organize programs and exhibitions in Berlin, Lagos, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Vienna.

With Christov-Bakargiev at the helm for Documenta13, what should we expect? Her usual “smuggling in of chaos”—referring to the inclusion of artworks that may not fit into the term “global art” or of artworks that challenge certain ideologies or hierarchies—as she describes it?

I will leave you with a series of questions that I hope can be discussed in the comments.

This socio-economic moment demands introspection and a reassessment of the hierarchies and modes of organization and presentation in the art world. With the global economic downturn, should we expect to see less market-endorsed artists and more experimental or previously overlooked work to enter into international exhibitions? Will there ever be comfort in a truly multiplicitous diversity? As Hou argued during the panel, “all places want to be part of the global map, but they don’t want to necessarily be part of a monoculture.” Is that the path on which globalization has put us? Can art transcend the paradigms set by the political and market structures that permeate the art world?

Making It Happen

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Blogalogue Mania Sweeps the Nation!

I have “email balls.” I sit behind my computer screen, protected by a Gmail-cloak of anonymity and I email whomever, whenever, whatever. I landed my first job out of college by emailing a woman I saw on a NY street style blog to compliment her on her killer heels; three months later I was interviewing to be her personal assistant. After finishing a book I recently enjoyed, I did a quick Google search for the author’s contact info and sent a light-hearted message asking for career advice; shortly thereafter I found myself at Stumptown coffee with two espressos and the author/artist Luis Camnitzer. In short, I will email anyone, anywhere—from my cousin in communist Cuba to scholars at the tops of their fields—without fear or trepidation.

And it’s all very ironic, because in real life I’m a bundle of nerves. Most days I barely have the courage to let my Starbucks barista know that I keep asking for my tea with sweetener and she keeps making it for me without. Friends seriously jokingly call me a hamster because, like said animal, I’m small and anxious and if you picked me up you’d feel my whole body shake with worry. Thankfully, unlike said animal, I do not urinate in the same vicinity of where I sleep…but I digress. Email enables me to inhabit a bolder version of myself, opening up a number of opportunities that I might have never pursued in the flesh…and it is this facet of my personality that has factored heavily in the direction I want to take in my time here with Art21.

It all started one day, not so many moons ago, when I was riding the train into NYC and my gaze settled upon a particular advertisement poster. It might have been a poster for Reuters or Bloomberg or some other financially-minded whatever; that part doesn’t matter, because what I got from the poster was that I don’t know the difference between “systems” and “networks.” This bothered me, because I generally consider myself quite good with words, yet I could not arrive at one simple, distinguishable difference between “systems” and “networks.” Before getting off the train I made a note about my quandary (toot toot! SAT word!) and carried on with my business.

A few months later, when it came time for me to be Art21’s blogger-in-residence, I had a sudden epiphany. I had watched the Art21 Systems episode and was reminded of my still-open-ended question regarding “systems versus networks.” I began to ask a few friends what their take was on the dispute, and the reaction across the board was one of shrugged shoulders and convenient subject changes. Dismayed (but not disheartened!) by my lack of results, I carried on with more resolve, asking most everyone I knew and utilizing almost every resource available to me. Still, I had nothing.

In hindsight, I was skirting around the heart of the matter by only working with the people and resources that were directly related to my life. In not going further, expanding my search to people and resources beyond my immediate means, I wasn’t really taking the matter head-on. To get some insight into my query, I had to work through my networks and move through my systems to move on to other networks and systems. I had to let the machine lead me by the nose and simply hope that I came out wiser on the other end.

After figuring that much out, I did what I did best: I grabbed a hold of my big ‘ol email balls and started sending out emails to lots of artists—some that I knew and others that I didn’t know (Cory Arcangel, if you’re reading this, call me). I devised a plan to start with one artist, speak with them about what their take was on the great “systems vs. networks” debate, and then have that artist pass me on to another artist from their Rolodex (is that reference too dated to use in a blog post?), at which point the process would repeat itself.

My goal is to have a conversation with each of these artists about the topic of systems and networks, and simply observe how the conversation, and maybe even my opinion on the matter, progresses from start to finish. I imagine that the end result will be a fabulous dialogue about systems and networks that was ironically achieved by working through systems/networks, and there will be lots of clapping and fist-pumping and cheering, “NICOLE IS THE BEST! NICOLE IS THE BEST” and maybe at the end of two weeks, someone might bake me a cake and offer me a key to the city—I don’t know. These are just my thoughts. Either way, what follows is probably the most exciting blogalogue (yes, that’s “blog” and “dialogue” combined) that you ever did read about systems and networks, and it’s all thanks to one tiny little email and one giant set of email balls.

Until next time, Art21-ers, keep your spam filters “on.”

First up is Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir of the duo Eco Art Tech. You can learn more about Eco Art Tech by visiting their website, located here.


EcoArtTech Reflections…

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gang_tattoos_2sfw

My conversation with Eco Art Tech left me feeling a wee bit in the throes of an existential nihilistic crisis. Were systems and networks so radically out of our control? Was I always going to be tossed around between one system/network and another, breast tissue full of DDT and a culito full of flame retardant? Dear lord, I pray not. Sounds awfully uncomfortable.

On the one hand, Cary and Christine did have a point…no one asked me to be born, and certainly no one is asking me if and when I wanna die (although if there is an option for that I’d appreciate that we make the death-date sooner rather than later.) At this stage in my life and career, I could kinda get behind communism (in theory) and yet I’m probably the biggest capitalist piggie you’ve ever met. Or maybe I’m an anarchist? I do like the idea of a life sans-parking tickets…The point to all this being that whichever systems and networks I am a part of are largely unaffected by my participation in them. Is human existence that impotent? Certainly Man has accomplished great things over the spectrum of time, but is all that pennies in comparison to what could be..?

Cary and Christine seemed to have such an upper hand over systems and networks. By accepting the infinite power and ubiquitous place in our lives that systems and networks have, EcoArtTech seemed freed up to engage in more subversive dialogue with the systems and networks they were (in)voluntarily a part of–an enviable position to be in.

But our chain of blogalogues forges on, and up next is ETeam. Perhaps they’ll have a different perspective on the situation—one that tears me from this existential nihilist malaise before I up and tattoo my moneymaker to resemble the centerfold of a National Geographic magazine for no other reason than “why not?”

Blogalogue, Part 2: About ETeam

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montage

ETeam is comprised of Hajoe and Franziska. They were introduced to me by Cary Peppermint, who met them at an exhibition they all participated in, called Ebay. ETeam’s work includes mainly long-term projects, wherein time is just as much an artistic component of the final result as anything else… Just look at 1.1 Acre or International Airport Montello.

To learn more about Hajoe and Franziska, visit their website here.

However, one of ETeam’s projects spoke to me above all the rest: a dumpster created for the virtual reality world Second Life. After viewing ETeam’s Second Life dumpster project (read the blog here) and having viewed Art21’s Season Five segment on Cao Fei, I thought it was only fitting that the three of us should meet in Second Life, at the dumpster, for our interview. Second Life, for many, is more than just a fantasy get away; it’s a chance at an ideal life in an Utopian society. It’s hard to really negatively judge another avatar’s looks when half of the population is running around as robots or monster/people hybrids. In Second Life, you can have any occupation you want, any day of the week; own any piece of water-front property that you’d like; any first name you’d like; even have as many relationships with as many different partners as possible (if that’s your thing, of course).

Artists have been interfacing with Second Life in unique and interesting ways, but what struck me most about ETeam’s approach, and what always seems to strike me about art that deals with Second Life, is that ETeam was imbuing this utopian ideal with a small piece of dirty reality. Dumpsters represent progress and the maturation of our societies insofar as there are more benefits to sequestering waste to a limited area away from where people spend their lives. On the other hand, now that society has matured to a point considerably removed from the days when poo and disease-ridden corpses were flung about (Ring Around the Rosie, anyone?), the very same landmark that represented social progress has now come to signify social irresponsibility. Dumpsters, or more specifically landfills, pose a real threat to both environment and society alike. No one wants to live near a landfill (clearly) but at the same time, the amount of garbage produced by the average American home is making the demand for more and more landfills increasingly high. Beyond this, landfills also produce toxic emissions, the two most concerning ones being hydro and atmospheric emissions. Through atmospheric emissions, landfills have largely contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer. Furthermore, landfills can leak into nearby streams or simply be absorbed into the ground, and eventually end up in YOUR drinking water or polluting our freshest sources of water below the Earth’s surface. (Read more about the environmental implications of landfills here.)

The flip side of all this horror and ugliness is that under the growing threat of global warming and Al Gore, our society has been inspired to right the wrongs of landfills. Many institutions are experimenting with running their facilities off of landfill emissions, and efforts to increase recycling are at an all-time high. It would almost seem that we’ve come back full circle, and the problem of the landfill will soon enough shed its skin, as human horror to come to signify human progress once more.

All this, of course, reminds me of Eco Art Tech’s Eclipse, 2009 project, and our discussion of “pretty pollution.” (Listen to our conversation here for a refresher.) I couldn’t help but wonder (yes, that’s a SatC reference)…Would ETeam have a similar opinion on networks and systems as EcoArtTech? Are we all so imbued in the system/network that this whole project will only produce one definition of systems and networks, repeated over and over again?

Blogalogueing with ETeam

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three2

Preface: The following conversation took place in Second Life, at ETeam’s Second Life dumpster. I am Salty Clarity; ETeam is Lothar Apfelbaum and Tempo Strom.

Tempo Strom is Online
Lothar Apfelbaum is Online

Salty Clarity: Hi guys!
Lothar Apfelbaum:
hi Salty
Tempo Strom:
hi there
Lothar Apfelbaum:
glad you found your way here
Salty Clarity:
as you can tell i’m not great with second life yet
Salty Clarity:
So then how about we get started? do some pictures mebbe afterwards, or if you wanted to even during?
Tempo Strom:
😉
Lothar Apfelbaum:
we’ll do some pictures inbetween…
Salty Clarity:
That sounds good. Man it took me like
Lothar Apfelbaum:
it’s easy
Salty Clarity:
20 minutes to just focus in on my avatar
Salty Clarity:
who, by the way, doesn’t have panties. soo…just a heads up.
Salty Clarity:
lol i need to find her some under garments.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
no problem…
Salty Clarity:
but anyways. So, where I left off with Cary
Salty Clarity:
was he was explaining how he first got to know you guys
Salty Clarity:
which was through 1.1 acre flat screen
Salty Clarity:
Do you wanna talk a little more about that project?
Tempo Strom:
sure
Tempo Strom:
we can give a brief summary
Tempo Strom:
it was also the first piece of land we had ever bought and owned
Tempo Strom:
it was 2002 and we found out that you can buy land on ebay
Tempo Strom:
and really cheap
Tempo Strom:
we placed a bid and a couple hours later we were the lucky owners of 1,1 acre desert in utah
Tempo Strom:
for $450
Tempo Strom:
that’s how it started
Salty Clarity:
Wow!
Tempo Strom:
then we had to figure out what to do with it.
Tempo Strom:
we developed a 5 step plan for one year and after this year we wanted to auction the land off again
Tempo Strom:
during this year we did a couple of things with the land, a residency program and a trainstop inn.
Tempo Strom:
the trainstop inn was our attempt to improve the infrastructure of the land
Tempo Strom:
by stopping one of the nearby running trains.
Tempo Strom:
I guess that’s the quick version of this project
Salty Clarity:
And so were you presenting this at a convention when you met Cary Peppermint of Eco Art Tech?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
1. buying 2. finding 3. temporary use 4. improvement 5. selling the land
Tempo Strom:
No we were both in a show at Pace University
Salty Clarity:
Ahh ok
Tempo Strom:
the title of the show was ebay
Tempo Strom:

Salty Clarity:
Ha!
Tempo Strom:
there was a talk and presentation at one point and that’s where we met.
Salty Clarity:
Ok, so now that we’ve given a bit of background on 1.1 Acre Flat Screen, would you like to also say a little bit about where we are?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
we are at the SL Dumpster.
Tempo Strom:
4096sqm full of trash
Tempo Strom:
slowly decaying
Salty Clarity:
Which is another project that you can learn more about here
Salty Clarity:
And now getting to the heart of the matter…
Salty Clarity:
How do you define systems, networks, and systems vs. networks?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
when I think of how I would make a drawing of a system, I would draw a circle.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
When I would make a drawing of a network, it would be several dots, connected by lines.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
The system seems to be a closed form, whereas a network seems to be more open.
Tempo Strom:
a system is something I can understand or create. a network is a different animal
Tempo Strom:
I am not sure I understand how to create a network, but i can be part of one
Tempo Strom:
much easier
Tempo Strom:
I think a system has a function and a network can just happen
Salty Clarity:
Lothar, do you agree with Tempo? Does that fit your idea of systems and networks?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
In general yes…even though I am not sure if I really understand most of the systems I know of
Salty Clarity:
That’s a good segue into my next question.
Salty Clarity:
So where do you both, individually and as eteam, see yourself in these models?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
in which models?
Salty Clarity:
Systems and networks
Salty Clarity:
Are you part of a network? Are you part of a system? If so, which?
Tempo Strom:
we see ourselves as participators and as creators
Salty Clarity:
And which of these include you both voluntarily or involuntarily?
Tempo Strom:
a network is including us, mostly voluntarily
Tempo Strom:
a system can enclose us involuntarily, but that again leads to a challenge which we seek in our work
Tempo Strom:
so the boundaries of restricting systems can be a “help”
Lothar Apfelbaum:
they can be a good starting point
Salty Clarity:
So my impression is is that you see networks as more….organic?
Tempo Strom:
yes
Salty Clarity:
But systems have restrictions. And these restrictions inspire you as artists.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
yes, they grow based on the need of the individual parts
Tempo Strom:
the network
Salty Clarity:
Read my mind
Salty Clarity:
So does your work then primarily focus on systems alone? Or do you ever engage networks in your work the same way you engage systems?
Tempo Strom:
networks are more of an anarchistic nature so much harder to utilize
Lothar Apfelbaum:
We usually start with the system, because it’s a more abstract approach
Lothar Apfelbaum:
one can think broader about a subject, or a method with some distance
Lothar Apfelbaum:
for example, a village
Lothar Apfelbaum:
is that a system or a network?
Tempo Strom:
it has a bit of both
Lothar Apfelbaum:
yes, the people in the village are the dots, that are interconnected
Lothar Apfelbaum:
they might form a ring.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
If this ring is closed… the network of people in a small village becomes a system.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Something abstract…
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Sometimes the network ring follows the layout of the village.
Salty Clarity:
This discussion almost leads me to believe that you feel removed from systems, or at least the systems you engage in your work. Is that correct at all?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Yes, we approach them as strangers.
Salty Clarity:
Or do you seek out systems that you deliberately are not a part of, like with Acre 1.1?
Salty Clarity:
Err, sorry other way around–1.1 Acre
Tempo Strom:
I think it is a mix of both
Tempo Strom:
entering a system we are not part of and we don’t understand
Tempo Strom:
helps us to ignore certain things
Tempo Strom:
at the same time this allows us to introduce a new system
Tempo Strom:
a system within the system
Tempo Strom:
this allows for a more precise set of parameters
Salty Clarity:
And all the while your place is on the outside? Or does it change when you introduce the new system?
Tempo Strom:
we walk the line
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Ideally the systems overlap.
Tempo Strom:
if it is a circle we walk a circle
Tempo Strom:
or a square
Salty Clarity:
What would you say to someone who says you can never really exist outside of a system?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
I would ask: how much impact does the system has on you?
Tempo Strom:
that’s true
Salty Clarity:
Which is rather convenient for me since that was my next question for you guys! Ha! But go on…

salty_lothar

Lothar Apfelbaum: Of course we are part of multiple systems and networks, most are made by others and we follow the established rules of these systems
Tempo Strom:
but you can live outside many systems as we discovered
Lothar Apfelbaum:
… but that doesn’t mean, we can’t create our own systems within the bigger systems and get other people to understand its logic
Tempo Strom:
touring small villages
Salty Clarity:
We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on how you both engage systems
Salty Clarity:
But how do you feel these systems act upon you and, more importantly, your work?
Tempo Strom:
I feel we are mostly listeners
Tempo Strom:
to these systems we don’t create
Salty Clarity:
When you go in to the village, there’s going to be a reaction that may or may not affect your place within the circle/square/whatever
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Other systems make us curious.
Salty Clarity:
So it’s a very passive approach, then, to systems?
Tempo Strom:
yes and that’s the time issue
Tempo Strom:
most of our projects take a long time
Tempo Strom:
since we cannot just show up some place and expect
Tempo Strom:
to be allowed in the system
Tempo Strom:
Imagine you were given a new computer system you have never used before
Tempo Strom:
it is similar to your old one, yet totally different
Tempo Strom:
in this case you have to relearn the same functions you knew before
Tempo Strom:
we have to do the same
Lothar Apfelbaum:
it’s like you being new in Second Life.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
You are flying around, asking questions, trying to figure out this world.
Salty Clarity:
Yes. It’s taking me lots of time to integrate into the system, and I think i’m mostly just pissing off people as I go along, lol.
Tempo Strom:
that’s the trial and error stage.
Tempo Strom:
if you are lucky
Tempo Strom:
you will meet someone who likes you
Salty Clarity:
Sounds like you’re familiar with the “trial and error stage?”
Tempo Strom:
not just like mercy
Tempo Strom:
but different
Tempo Strom:
and then you understand the system
Salty Clarity:
When do you know you’ve reached the point when you’re out of the woods, you’ve entered the system just about as much as you can?
Tempo Strom:
we never know the trial and error stage extends.
Tempo Strom:
we will know when things happen
Lothar Apfelbaum:
When you set up a certain goal…and you find a way to reach it, a way to make things happen, using the means of the system.
Salty Clarity:
Is there anything else you’d like to add about your thoughts and feelings on systems and networks, or even your own work as it relates to what we’ve been talking about?
Tempo Strom:
this system is quite difficult to navigate in terms and interview. I wasn’t sure which question I was answereing at what point
Tempo Strom:
and so we might gave you some riddles
Tempo Strom:
to think about.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
What do you think about SL? Is it a network or a system for you?
Salty Clarity:
Hm.
Salty Clarity:
You know, I set out on this whole thing because one day I saw this advert on the train
Salty Clarity:
and I realized I couldn’t really definitively say what the diff between systems and networks is
Salty Clarity:
and while I think you guys definitely touched upon a lot of things that resonate with me
Lothar Apfelbaum:
What was the ad?
Salty Clarity:
I still dont know
Salty Clarity:
Mehhh something for like Reuters
Salty Clarity:
I think it was Reuters
Salty Clarity:
about how like
Salty Clarity:
they get news to you faster
Salty Clarity:
Second Life to me
Salty Clarity:
because I’m still so much of an outsider
Salty Clarity:
Is a system
Salty Clarity:
I dont have my heart in here like a lot of people do
Salty Clarity:
And I think for them this is their network
Salty Clarity:
It’s a great question, though. What do you guys think?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
True… so a network has a heart and a system has a brain?
Salty Clarity:
Yes. I like to think of life as being very much like the Wizard of Oz, lol.
Salty Clarity:
I feel as though
Salty Clarity:
Systems might have an agenda, whereas networks–because I do agree that they grow organically
Salty Clarity:
networks arise out of chance, like..haphazardly
Salty Clarity:
But who knows. Maybe my interview with Kristin will convince me otherwise
Lothar Apfelbaum:
That’s what great about systems.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
That they are designed to make it easier to navigate through life.
Salty Clarity:
Interesting…
Lothar Apfelbaum:
On the other hand there is a certain path you have to follow…
Lothar Apfelbaum:
a path someone else has designed for you.
Salty Clarity:
It’s like how
Salty Clarity:
having unlimited options can be more oppressive than restricted options
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Right. Do you think networks are human, or human driven?
Salty Clarity:
Reminds me of the artist Art21 covered in season one Andrea Zittel who wore the same outfit everyday for a month or something
Salty Clarity:
hm.
Salty Clarity:
Human or human driven? I’m not sure I get the full scope of what you mean…Clarify, please?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Maybe “human” is the wrong term.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Maybe I wonder, if we conceive networks as something “natural”.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Like a species that develops under certain conditions

allthree

Salty Clarity: I mean honestly, when I think of the word “network” I think of that damn linkedin website
Tempo Strom:
linkedin is useless IMO
Salty Clarity:
Which is odd…and prob a great commentary on where contemporary society’s head is at in terms of networks
Tempo Strom:
facebook is fun
Salty Clarity:
linkedin is so cold
Salty Clarity:
but no one uses the word “networking” in facebook
Salty Clarity:
linkedin actually uses the word “network” in the invites
Tempo Strom:
social networking site?
Lothar Apfelbaum:
because it’s naturally there
Salty Clarity:
it’s certainly implicit
Tempo Strom:
but isn’t network this business term, too
Salty Clarity:
Yeah, and “network” i think in that context
Tempo Strom:
and as such it is a career term
Salty Clarity:
has more properties of a system
Tempo Strom:
and boring
Salty Clarity:
that a “network” as we’ve discussed it
Tempo Strom:
agree
Tempo Strom:
so how many different networks do you know?
Salty Clarity:
but you know…i keep coming back to linked in. i think i dont regard facebook as my social network as much because…
Salty Clarity:
i dunno, for whatever reason i just think of it as my friends. it’s like having your friends on your AIM buddy list

tempo

Salty Clarity: but with linked in
Salty Clarity:
there’s a measured action there, i consciously promote a different version of myself, you know…Nicole Sansone the super professional who doesn’t ever swear
Salty Clarity:
and I consciously send out those cold, bland invitations to people whom I know in formal settings
Salty Clarity:
I wouldn’t add someone on facbeook as my friend if they were just my co worker, but i might be more inclined to do so on linked in
Salty Clarity:
Are you asking how many networks i belong to on facebook??
Tempo Strom:
and does linked in work for you?
Salty Clarity:
Its all the language with those sites, the linguistic system
Salty Clarity:
Ehh
Salty Clarity:
you know
Salty Clarity:
Im trying to make linked in work for me
Salty Clarity:
I got the recommendations, I update the status
Salty Clarity:
I try to make it seem all cool and neato
Salty Clarity:
I’m so young in my career
Salty Clarity:
and my network is so young
Tempo Strom:
to me it seems it is a formal showcase of networking
Salty Clarity:
that it doesn’t really work for me.
Tempo Strom:
ps all networks are young
Salty Clarity:
Like that site fame game?
Tempo Strom:
linked in in particular
Salty Clarity:
That site is the root of all evil. Shameless!
Tempo Strom:
fame game i don’t know
Lothar Apfelbaum:
me not either
Salty Clarity:
I dunno, my dad is on there and his network looks pretty settled in their careers…lol.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
I don’t even know linked in
Tempo Strom:
lol
Salty Clarity:
Oh fame game is a social network site
Salty Clarity:
I suppose
Salty Clarity:
but you get ranked on how “famous” you are
Salty Clarity:
and like..
Salty Clarity:
it keeps track of parties you went to
Salty Clarity:
and pictures you were in with other fame game people
Lothar Apfelbaum:
how high you climbed up on the new Olympus?
Tempo Strom:
of fame game
Salty Clarity:
Are you asking me???
Tempo Strom:
sure
Salty Clarity:
Oh no no no
Salty Clarity:
I’m not on fame game
Salty Clarity:
I’m fairly certain you have to register an acct
Lothar Apfelbaum:
So, do you think, once it turns out, that a certain network works… it automatically turns into a system after a while?
Salty Clarity:
I think these questions are all
Salty Clarity:
inextricably linked with questions of humanity and human nature
Salty Clarity:
like that “Friends” episode about whether or not you could actually do something that was entirely altruistic
Salty Clarity:
And I mean…I’m inclined to say you can’t.
Salty Clarity:
So I think that networks will become systems
Lothar Apfelbaum:
I am asking that, because I think because to be part of a network you have to maintain your part in it
Lothar Apfelbaum:
constantly…
Salty Clarity:
if we think of systems as many parts working together to form a whole entity, working towards a goal
Salty Clarity:
Great point
Lothar Apfelbaum:
but you can be part of a system passively
Salty Clarity:
You have to keep up with the Jones’s
Salty Clarity:
Aha…
Salty Clarity:
See, now I agree with that as well
Salty Clarity:
But I feel like I just contradicted myself
Salty Clarity:
with the definition of a system that I just put out
Lothar Apfelbaum:
in which way?
Salty Clarity:
My definition of a system really rested on the fact that all these individual parts worked together toward a goal
Salty Clarity:
But I do agree that as part of a system, you’re part of a closed-model
Salty Clarity:
There was something to be accomplished
Salty Clarity:
you’re in that circle
Salty Clarity:
so if you’re not gonna move around the circle
Salty Clarity:
the guy racing around behind you with push you forward
Salty Clarity:
like race cars
Salty Clarity:
So i suppose
Salty Clarity:
that you can allow the other members of the system to push you around, and you can passively participate in the system
Salty Clarity:
but what suffers as a result
Salty Clarity:
is the goal of the whole system. Maybe then there’s a question of…can other members of a system decide who stays and who goes?
Salty Clarity:
Which might be pigeon-holing me into taking about systems only as they relate to human lives
Salty Clarity:
talking*
Lothar Apfelbaum:
That depends on the rules of the system. If you are Homeland Security you can decide who can leave and who can stay
Lothar Apfelbaum:
for example.
Salty Clarity:
I suppose if you’re in the digestive system
Salty Clarity:
You decide what stays and what goes
Salty Clarity:
Not in it.
Salty Clarity:
I mean if you were a stomach or a large intestine
Salty Clarity:
Equally as ridiculous but it fits the logic a bit better, haha.
Lothar Apfelbaum:
🙂
Tempo Strom:
i prefer to be a stomach
Tempo Strom:
not my area of expertise
Tempo Strom:
;
Lothar Apfelbaum:
I have another question for you.
Salty Clarity:
Yeaa …gastroenterology is not, and would not, be my deal either.
Salty Clarity:
What’s your question, Lothar?
Tempo Strom:
it’s in the making
Salty Clarity:
Oo that’s a bit intimidating
Lothar Apfelbaum:
Can a system work for only one person?
Salty Clarity:
They say no man is an island…
Salty Clarity:
Hm.
Salty Clarity:
Yes
Salty Clarity:
What about daily habits? Wake up, brush your teeth, get dressed
Salty Clarity:
Or no…
Salty Clarity:
Because someone had to make that toothbrush, those clothes…
Lothar Apfelbaum:
is that your system?
Salty Clarity:
Certainly the wake up brush your teeth part
Salty Clarity:
Though for me next usually comes coffee
Salty Clarity:
Do you think that a system can work for only one person??
Lothar Apfelbaum:
I was thinking of a serial killer…how he takes people apart…
Lothar Apfelbaum:
that system might only work for him alone
Salty Clarity:
But serial killers follow a profile
Lothar Apfelbaum:
or her
Salty Clarity:
People passively participate in that system
Salty Clarity:
by falling into the criteria necessary for the serial killer to choose them
Lothar Apfelbaum:
good point
Salty Clarity:
I mean its a grim and morbid thing to say and obviously I can talk about this with a big healthy distance
Salty Clarity:
Before we go too much farther
Salty Clarity:
Though I almost hate to kill the magic here because I’ve really enjoyed this conversation
Salty Clarity:
I just want to get a few words on how you guys know our next artist, Kristin Lucas
Lothar Apfelbaum:
There is no single occasion. Kristin popped up on various networks and systems
Tempo Strom:
and we just met over and over again
Tempo Strom:
and got closer and closer
Salty Clarity:
maybe the system pushed you all into a network
Tempo Strom:
untill we all arrived at that little town
Tempo Strom:
in nevada
Tempo Strom:

Salty Clarity:
Nevada??
Lothar Apfelbaum:
At the International Airport montello, a system of it’s own
Lothar Apfelbaum:
http://www.internationalairportmontello.com/
Salty Clarity:
haha! Reminds me of that line from 30 Rock, where Jack says
Salty Clarity:
With real estate there are no rules. It’s like check-in at an Italian airport.
Tempo Strom:
haha i like that!
Lothar Apfelbaum:
that’s exactlly how it is:)
Tempo Strom:
nice closing remark
Salty Clarity:
lol, can’t go wrong with Alec Baldwin.

ETeam Reflections…

0
0

time-management-clock

In case you didn’t notice, ETeam did a pretty good job of turning the tables on me. It would seem that systems and networks are tricky and unpredictable that way…

ETeam’s take on systems and networks was a fairly big departure from that of EcoArtTech‘s. EcoArtTech seemed to accept the role of systems and networks and try to use it to their advantage, while ETeam gave me the impression that they were still in the process of learning about systems…Almost as if there were too many systems yet to be discovered for them to really make any definitive statements about through their work.

It was also interesting to note how much consideration was given to time in relation to our discussion of systems and networks. ETeam placed a particular emphasis on how time was the key to entering new systems, whereas EcoArtTech’s approach seemed to be more that systems and networks were thrusted upon you. I don’t know if EcoArtTech would agree or disagree with ETeam’s position, but I thought it important to note how each artistic duo considered systems/networks differently right out of the gate.

I feel as though the spectrum for answers on the great systems vs. networks debate has been opened up with this last conversation. I wonder where Kristin Lucas will fall in next…

Blogalogueing with Kristin Lucas

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0

ksl2_twitter_sm

Leave it to a web artist to push the boundaries in interview formats! Keep reading to experience mine and Kristin Lucas’s systems vs. networks conversation, Twitter style…

Nikksters: How do you define systems and networks? What’s the diff between the two?
ksl2: Systm n Netwrk not easy 2 dstnguish; they r compatibl, multifactd, structurs dependnt on connectvty. Depend on context could mean same thng.
ksl2: a couple more thoughts…
ksl2: Netwrk implies physicality (hardware) and functionality where system is rooted n ideology n abstraction. You “network”, you do not “system”.
ksl2: and…
ksl2: Network can turn off your electricity; System can ruin your credit.
ksl2: System can have Network in place; Network can have an operating System.
ksl2: next question

Nikksters: so are they interchangeable? can systems and networks morph into each other, i.e. systems become networks and vis versa?
ksl2: They can mutate, maybe not into each other like shape shifters or dopple gangers.
ksl2: i think doppleganger might be one word!
ksl2: They can share many of the same characteristics. You have to activate to know the difference sometimes.

Nikksters: Wut systems/networks do u feel u r a part of? Which of these systems and/or networks do u feel u r part of voluntarily/involuntarily?
ksl2: State, bank, service providr, buyr, insurd, account holdr, frequnt travelr progrm, list serv, direct mail target, user group, faq, audience,
ksl2: of public radio, news, music, movi reviews, Internt, news audience, social netwrks, blogs, traind artist, teachr, cat ownr, vegetarian, CSA,
ksl2: political affiliation, fan, family, friends, family-and-friends plan, arts community, patron, gallery, colleagues, nomads, early risers…
ksl2: Some of the best thriving networks don’t have names; in the naming something is lost.
ksl2: Feelings are often mixed about my participation in these relationships. Both inactive and active connections can be felt.
ksl2: Seems one is either ‘on’ or ‘off’ grid. No n between. Activity is activity, small or grand; u r there, Network thrives on yr participation.
ksl2: more coming…
ksl2: Gray area. There is a trade off. To benefit from a system/netwrk, u oftn have 2 involuntarily join othrs. There are concessions that u make.

Nikksters: How do you feel your work interfaces and/or addresses systems and networks?
ksl2: N – is this adequate for response?

Nikksters: do you mean is twitter working?? i’m marking all of these as favorites so they line up one over another
ksl2: Sorry for some reason I just got your updated question now…
ksl2: My art practice involves working from differing vantage points includ those within the system, to define a relationship, to find loop holes.
ksl2: By going through proper channels, I am exposing how the network functions within the system.
ksl2: Refresh led to a philosophical discussion with a judge. Self as node in search of new node, vantage point; Court as feedback system.
ksl2: In Simulcast I used a paper mache satellite dish to scan the netwrk, establish new nodes, find new ways to talk about what is already known.

Nikksters: Do you also feel that systems/networks have an effect on your work? You affect the system/network–does it work both ways?
ksl2: It usually effects you more than you effect it.
ksl2: Systm/netwrk is a medium, and a sculptural process – th results of whch r unpredictabl bcuz th underlyng structur an participnts may change.
ksl2: It is n my natur to be restless, to feel alive. This is what attracts me to systems/networks. Change is my lifeblood.
ksl2: You could say it is a givng medium, 2 givng at times.

Nikksters: Well, do you have any other things you’d like to say about networks v. systems? Bc otherwise I’m set!
ksl2: This was pretty fun. What if I think about it and send a tweet if I have another thing to add for clarification.

Nikksters: Cool! So before we go, can you just xplain how you know our next artist, Lee Montgomery?
ksl2: Lee is a member of neighborhood public radio (npr). I spread an independnt media virus ovr their airwavs n ran a triag clinic at th station.
ksl2: It wasn’t pretty. Lee was infected too.
ksl2: But there were benevolent and malevolent sides to the virus 🙂

Nikksters: positives & negatives to most everything. it’s the nature of the beast. thx 4 joining us, kristin, & keep us posted on future projs!
ksl2: Okay, will do. Important questions.Blog

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