First Friday Highlights, March 2015 (Experiential Collaboration Forever!!!)

I haven't updated about art I've seen in a while, but a couple of the shows I saw last night made a strong enough impression that I feel like remembering them here.

Andrea Morales' exhibition "Public Play" at Practice Gallery spoke to me as an investigation of the complex social dynamics involved in dating--specifically, how we perform personas within varying social contexts.  The premise of the exhibition was Morales having organised a consecutive series of dates through OKCupid and Craigslist, to be carried out within the gallery.  Documentation of her correspondences with her dates were plastered on the walls for viewers to read when they weren't acting as voyeuristic observers of the activities of the dates themselves.  The dates/ exhibition were all documented throughout the night, and the plan is for the edited footage to be exhibited at Practice for the remainder of the month.

There is so much about the concept and the execution of this piece that I love.  I love that the artist is directing and composing these interactions for the express purpose of manifesting this exhibition, while leaving room for risk, chance, play, and vulnerability (to her collaborator and her audience).  I love that live performance, the documentation leading up to the performance, and the documentation of the performance itself are all integral aspects of the piece.  I love the fact that, even though you are in the room with the artist and her dates, observing their interaction and reading their correspondence, there are elements of their conversations that do remain private/ intimate/ just between them.  Sure, you can see their body language, maybe even catch snippets of dialogue, but you remain at a distance, a member of the crowd--you can't see and hear every element of the exchanges that build the date they are on.

I only had the chance to see one of the dates--the third of the night.  When I walked in, the space was illuminated by red lights.  There was music playing, and I could see the artist and her date sitting on a bench behind parted curtains.  They were both hunched over a camera, presumably shuffling through images.  In speaking with one of the members of Practice, I gleaned that this date had actually been photographing the earlier dates, so they were looking through the images he had taken.  I wanted to make it back to the final date of the evening, which was supposed to be with a female partner, and verge on more sexually charged content, but I missed it unfortunately.

I was sorry to miss the rest of "Public Play," but I was so happy I made it out to New Boone for "Forever," a collaborative exhibit featuring paintings by my studio-mate Kim Altomare and audio commentary by Anne Pagana.  If I had to express my overwhelming impression of the exhibit in one adjective, I would use 'refreshing'--everything about the approach felt like a sigh of relief followed by a breath of fresh air.  First and foremost, the experience of seeing Kim's paintings hung and lit within the context of a gallery space was thrilling for me--so much luster and detail that is hard to recognize when they're leaning against a studio wall came suddenly alive.  It felt like the paintings themselves had been energized/ taken on a new life, and I was so filled with joy for them!  The curatorial detailing--the incorporation of a friendship bracelet-making station [they'd run out of string by the time I got there :( ]; the integration of vibrant pom poms, shimmery sequins, tinsel, streamers, and googly eyes; the coordinated vignettes built out of objects contributed by Kim and Anne's artist friends, placed to keep the paintings company; the hand-articulated signage and decorated CD-players with headphones whose color matched the vibrancy carried throughout--all contributed to the overarching spirit of friendship and collaboration coursing throughout the show.  Walking into the space, every aspect seems to squeal, "Hi! We're so glad you're here! Come be our friend! Stay a while! Look and listen and contemplate with us!"  And how can you refuse that?

Which isn't to say that the content of the work presented is necessarily light or superficial--Kim's paintings incorporate symbolic imagery that alludes to death and violence, and Anne's commentary is deeply meditative.  There is an audio track corresponding to each painting.  I didn't listen to all of them, but those I did made it clear to me that Anne's spoken words access avenues of thought that are quite serious, and speak to a genuine desire for mutual understanding within the insular context of a friendship that exists within the broader, but still insular context of art-making.  There is a sensitivity and consideration for the differences and commonalities in hers and Kim's experiences with and approaches to art and life.  There is frustration and confusion, but also serenity to the acknowledgment that not everything can necessarily be fully understood between two people.  I felt honored to be invited to listen to these meditations, and though they were focused on a personal relationship, I felt included because the concepts being considered speak to interpersonal relationships in general, and art-making practices more broadly.  I got the sense that, though these are complex and difficult territories to navigate, underlying currents of hope, togetherness, and fun can carry us through.

Looking at the show through a feminist lens, I was struck by how it sits within the context of art history, which is so frequently dominated by men celebrating, commenting on, responding to, competing with each other, usually in a very egotistical way that has a lot to do with proving who has the most "genius". The mode of collaboration in "Forever" is definitely in dialogue with that tradition, but from a much more authentic, sincere, down-to-earth perspective.   Celebrating each other does not have to be about proving anything--it can be about inviting everyone into this dynamic of mutual consideration and dialogue, of approaching things in a genuine way, together.

I think I responded to strongly to both of these exhibits because I like what they indicate about where art practice and art exhibition is heading.  There is a sense of breaking things down and exploring them from new angles that I find so empowering and exciting.  It makes me feel a sense of freedom, like there is license to explore new territories and just try things to see where they go.  As there should be.  No more musty, tired art shows ever please!

Six Years

So, I did get to see the "Materializing Six Years" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum before it closed in February.  Don't ask me why I didn't blog about it.  I was convinced I did until a moment ago, but found only this post, in which I mention that I plan to see it.  Let's remedy that... 

Not at all coincidentally, I'm now reading the 1997 re-release edition of Lucy Lippard's Six Years (this copy courtesy of the PAFA library, but I will definitely be buying my very own copy because it is clearly a thing to which I should have forever-access).  Needless to say, I have identified Lucy Lippard as a new personal hero.  She rocks.  So hard.  Some excerpts from the intro that really clinched it: 

"There has been a lot of bickering about what Conceptual art is/was; who began it; who did what when with it; what its goals, philosophy, and politics were and might have been. I was there, but I don't trust my memory. I don't trust anyone else's memory either. And  I trust even less  the authoritative overviews by those who were not there. So I'm going to quote myself a lot here, be cause I knew more about it then than I do now, despite the advantages of hindsight."

"The times were chaotic and so were our lives. We have each invented our own history, and they don't always mesh; but such messy compost is the source of all versions of the past"

 "As I reconstitute the threads that drew me into the center of what came to be Conceptual art, I'll try to arm you with the necessary grain of salt, to provide a context, within the ferment of the times, for the personal prejudices and viewpoints that follow" 

"In a de-commodified 'idea-art', some of us (or was it just me?) thought we had in our hands the weapon that would transform the art world into a democratic institution"

"Even in 1969, as we were imagining our heads off and, to some extent, out into the world, I suspected that 'the art world is probably going to be able to absorb conceptual art as another 'movement' and not pay too much attention to it. The art establishment depends so greatly on objects which can be bought and sold that I don't expect it to do much about an art that is opposed to the prevailing systems.' (This remains true today--art that is too specific, that names names, about politics, or place, or anything else, is not marketable until it is abstracted, generalized, defused.) By 1973, I was writing with some disillusion in the 'postface' of Six Years: 'Hopes that 'conceptual art' would be able to avoid the general commercialization, the destructively 'progressive' approach of modernism were for the most part unfounded. It seemed in 1969 that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting and ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken, but not recorded; it seemed that these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation.  Three years later, the major conceptualists are selling work for substantial sums here and in Europe; they are represented by (and still more unexpected--showing in) the world's most prestigious galleries. Clearly, whatever minor revolutions in communication have been achieved by the process of dematerializing the object, art, and artists, in a capitalist society remain luxuries"

"Perhaps most important, conceptualists indicated that the most exciting 'art' might still be buried in social energies not yet recognized as art. The process of extending the boundaries didn't stop with Conceptual art: These energies are still out there, waiting for artists to plug into them, potential fuel for the expansion of what 'art' can mean. The escape was temporary. Art was recaptured and sent back to its white cell, but parole is always a possibility"

"Everything, even art, exists in a political situation. I don't mean that art itself has to be seen in political terns or look political, but the way artists handle their art, where they make it, the chances they get to make it, how they are going to let it out, and to whom--it's all part of a life style and a political situation. It becomes a matter of artists' power, of artists achieving enough solidarity so that they aren't at the mercy of a society that doesn't understand what they are doing. I guess that's where the 'other culture' or alternative information network comes in--so we can have a choice of ways to live without dropping out"

I mean...Can Lucy Lippard be my life coach please? Do you think she'd mind following me around saying obscenely articulate/ significant/ inspirational things to me for the rest of my life? No? Wellll I guess I'll just have to covet her writings then...

Another potential role model for life is Christine Kozlov.  Yesterday, as I frantically copied the following affinity-inducing phrase out of Six Years into my sketchbook: "Kozlov showed an empty film reel, and made rejection itself her art form, conceptualizing pieces and then rejecting them, freeing herself from execution while remaining an artist," I mentally shoomed back to the moment I had in the Brooklyn Museum, scribbling the name CHRISTINE KOZLOV into my former sketchbook and drawing a huge box around it to affirm the dire importance of its addition, because though I'd heard or read her name before, I felt like I didn't know enough about her.  "Oh yeah," I thought yesterday, firmly drawing yet another bold box around Kozlov's name because, clearly, the first hadn't been firm enough, "I meant to look her up."  And now I had even more reason to--"freeing herself from execution while remaining an artist"??? Ummmmmmm, hell to the yes.

But a quick Googling has revealed that there is, like, ZERO information to be found on the Internet about Christine Kozlov!  She doesn't even have a Wikipedia page!  There are interviews in which people talk about her, and links to texts that feature her work or reference her as a part of the formative Conceptual times etc. but nothing remotely akin to a monograph or even a simple bio giving me basic details about the trajectory of her life and work.  The part of me that wants to romanticize everything is tempted to turn this into a poetically appropriate turn of events: It is somehow fitting for Christine Kozlov to be as ephemeral as the work she made (or intentionally didn't make), for her to be digitally untraceable, for her un-documents to go relatively un-documented, for her existence to be a nebulous, evaporating thing.  But then another part of me defiantly asserts, "NO! I need to know more about this artist with whom I am experiencing a recurring affinity, dammit!" The experience I'm having right now in 2013 seems to be similar to things she went through in the 1970s, according to what Joseph Kosuth had to say in a referential interview with him I managed to find:

"Christine and I were in art school together and had a personal relationship. She was also my best friend and we had a great dialogue. She had her particular kind of work which was very much her own and I think that we both learned a lot from each other as art students do. Then, things begun [sic] to happen and, as I was the ambitious male and a little more theoretically oriented - I was more of an activist while she was a quiet, introverted person - I was out fighting for this idea of art. At a certain moment she said something which filled me with tremendous feminist guilt (me as a feminist, not her); she said 'Well, you are doing it for both of us now' and I said: 'No, you cannot say that!' But it was quite horrible. I remember Lucy [Lippard] being in contact with her because at that point she really stopped; I tried also to encourage her and she eventually began to do work again but at a certain critical period she was quiet when she should not have been quiet, because we needed her. She was really the first woman in the Conceptual art context."

So here's the thing: for the most part, I very much identify as a "more quiet, introverted person" (especially where me and my work are concerned) and I'm struggling to do work lately, and would therefore be completely ecstatic to be able to read Kozlov's own account of her experience considering she still managed to put some wildly fantastic things out into the world for quiet, introverted people like me to stumble across, empathize with, be inspired by.  Clearly I need to do more than Google...Using Six Years as a launch point for further investigation is undoubtedly a solid place to start....

ALSO, Lee Lozano, who DOES have a wikipedia page, thank the Internet! This article in Frieze is really excellent, and has me convinced that Lozano is ridiculously appropriate for me obsession-wise.  I think she more than Kozlov is probably a role model for life.

And now, Some of My Favorite Artworks Documented in Six Years (the book and the exhibition based on it):

• Bruce Nauman, Thighing 16-mm 8-10 min color film with sound (1967) 
  
  In which the artist manipulates the flesh of his thigh with his hands for a solid 10 minutes--weird, funny, mesmerizing to watch; made me think about how bizarre it is to have a body, what it means to have flesh, what are the properties of flesh/ a body, etc.  It's very slow, which makes it even more hypnotic, and you get the feeling that you're watching him discover/ attempt to figure out this mass of meat that is his thigh for the first time--like a child discovering that it is an independent being with autonomy and motor skills, but he's not a child, which means that he is consciously inhabiting that frame of mind and performing the process of othering his own body to himself.  But at the same time, it remains a simple, direct gesture. I also loved how the title is an invented verb that perfectly encapsulates the gesture itself--manipulating a noun into a gerund; manipulating one's thigh into malleable matter. Spoke to me on a personal level; resonated with my own concerns.
• Joseph Kosuth, Titled Series (Art as Idea as Idea) (1967)        
  
  In which the artist proves that he is the cleverest fucker around, and I fully endorse it.  Dictionary definitions for things are fascinating to me and frequently serve as a grounding point when I'm feeling confused abour a particular idea, word, concept, etc.  So this is really good.  Also, only one of these definitions has to do with actual output/ product--the rest are about skill and learning and the application of that skill and learning.
• Vito Acconci, Following Piece activity, 23 days, varying durations, NYC (1969)   
  In which the artist chose a random person each day to follow until they entered a private space.  Immediate impulsive thought: "what a fucking creep!" Directly antecedent thought: "What a fucking genius!" A totally intuitive, though still systematic process/ gesture that really appeals to the narratively intrigued observer in me.
• Lee Lozano, Dialogue Piece (1969)                                                                                       For which the artwork was the act of calling people up and inviting them over to her house to have a conversation, and the conversation that resulted, which was not recorded. OK, so LL's annotation in Six Years says: "Her art, it has been said, becomes the means by which to transform her life, and, by implication, the lives of others and of the planet itself." This is my approach to art too.  This piece kind of reads as an attempt to reconcile being an introvert with knowing the importance of an active, intellectually stimulating social life.  I sympathize.  Also, I was doing a thing in this vein for a while last year, only kind of the opposite, in which I was frantically trying to document the conversations I was having with friends about an idea in order to incorporate their thoughts about the idea into the idea itself [the idea was for there to be an exhibition of the documentation of the conceptualizing of the exhibition that just keeps growing and being added to by the attendees of the exhibition, who can contribute their thoughts and suggestions, which will then be incorporated into the exhibition. I know.].  General Strike Piece (started 1969) and Masturbation Investigation (1969) are also extremely badass. I like that her pieces' only evidence are these handwritten pages documenting her intentions. The lived experience is the art, which cannot be translated into a visual or an object, so the original idea, the impetus of it, is what survives.
• Dennis Oppenheim, Arm & Wire 16-mm film by Bob Fiore (1969)  
  
  In which the artist "repeatedly rolled the underside of his right arm over some wires". The wires leave imprinted marks in his skin, records of the contact between his body and the material.  Arm and Asphalt (1969), Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), and Material Interchange (1970) are other products of the thematic investigation of the body as marked recipient of the effects of an interaction with external forces/ materials.  Resonated for me because of the emphasis on mark-making as a physical gesture/ as the remnant of a physical interaction (thinking about lipstick/the kiss)
• Marjorie Strider, Street Work (1969)
  
  Street Works I (March 15): 30 empty picture frames were hung in the area, to create instant paintings and to call the attention of passers-by to their environment. Street Works II (April 18): Same work, different area. In both of these works, most of the frames were taken home by people on the streets. Street Works III (May 25): A large felt banner (about 10 feet long) on which was lettered the words PICTURE FRAME, was hung in the area. Street Works IV (Sponsored by the Architectural League of New York, October): A 10' x 15' picture was placed in front of the entrance to the Architectural League, forcing people to walk through the picture plane. Street Works V (December 21): Taped frames were placed on the sidewalk, creating more picture spaces for people to walk through.  Reminds me of Lorraine O'Grady's Art Is... (1983), which was among my favorites in the This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s exhibition at ICA Boston this past winter.  Both involve the idea of framing life as the subject of art, but the fundamental difference in the execution is that Strider leaves the frames to do the compositional work, while O'Grady physically holds the frame, and is involved in the lived action being framed.  I think I prefer O'Grady's for that reason--she is not an absent framer of compositions to be found, experienced, interacted with by others; she is a present participant, engaging with the people who comprise the content of the framed compositions.  O'Grady's piece feels more empowering in that way--she is expressly telling people that their lives, their experiences are significant enough to be framed and documented, while simultaneously critiquing the history of art's lack of consideration and inclusion of those people and experiences. Strider's feels like an intellectual stepping stone toward O'Grady's more sociopolitically charged execution.  But I guess that can be boiled down to the difference in the climates of the late-60s/ early-70s and the 80s. 
• James Collins, Introduction Piece No. 5 (1970)                                                                                     (I couldn't find a paste-able image, but you can look at the document in Six Years here)                                                                                           For which the artist introduced strangers to each other and then had them sign a document verifying that the introduction had been made, the date, time, location and signature of both participants, as well as a picture.  Another incarnation of the idea that human interaction/ connection/ exchange is art.
• Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1 (1970)                                                                                                 Which is footage of the artist intentionally falling off the roof of a house. Fall 2, filmed in Amsterdam, shows the artist intentionally riding his bike into the river. Another piece of Ader's I really like, and which is featured in the book, is I'm Too Sad To Tell You (1971), in which he cries in front of the camera.  I like how Ader's work highlights the trickiness of performance: he's really falling, but it's not a "genuine" fall because it's not an accident; he's really crying, but it's a self-aware, performed cry because he set up the equipment and knows the camera is recording it.  How "authentic" can you be when you're framing/ composing the expression? I think about/ experience this tension a lot.  
• Christing Kozlov, Information: No Theory (1970)  
                                                                                   1. The recorder is equipped with a continuous loop tape
  2. The recorder will be set at record. All the sounds audible in the room will be recorded.
  3. The nature of the loop tape necessitates that new information erases old information. The "life" of the information, that is, the time it takes for the information to go from "new" to "old" is the time it takes the tape to make one complete cycle.
  4. Proof of the existence of the information does in fact not exist in actuality, but is based on probability.  
  I love everything about this. 

First Friday in Philly Take Two (Braving the Rain)

This past Friday, June 7, I gave it another shot.  I convinced my friend John to come with me to the 319 building before meeting our friend Vy at HyLo Boutique for a beer, coffee, cheese tasting around 7.  We stopped for food that I thought was going to be takeout Vietnamese sandwiches, but ended up being a sit-down meal because I directed us to the wrong place.  It was fine though because we had a solid prologue conversation about how frustrated I get reading theory due to the inherent hubris involved in any theorist offering an alternative solution to the problematic constructed system they are observing.  My central point was something to the effect of: "It's like, I'm with you when you're deconstructing and problematizing and pointing out the wrongness of what's going on and the fact that the rules of what's going on were invented by and are upheld by other humans, but I feel like from there, there is this disconnect where the theorist doesn't acknowledge the fact that they are just another fallible human offering another construct.  They end up saying: 'Recognize this problematic construct that misguided, fallible humans have been blindly promoting for centuries; I've got a better one for you.'  And they fail to recognize their own subjectivity and the fact that everything they are observing is filtered through their own imperfect perception.  They actually think they're better because they are embodying an idea that's more-than-human, because they've discovered a Truth, but instead of it being about the idea, it is inevitably about them and their brilliance and their contribution to history, and I can't get over the fact that the furtherance of that is extremely dependent upon problematic bullshit firmly rooted in the intertwined systems including-but-not-limited-to colonialism, classism, racism, patriarchy, eurocentrism that any decent theorist is supposed to be problematizing."  John made a point about the necessity of doing the work of sifting through the annoying dregs of each separate theory to find the nuggets of Truth in order to string together your own collage of Truth that can guide you through your life, and how it's a singularly excellent thing to be able to encounter the Truths that resonate for you and be able to keep that.  I agreed, but realized aloud that I've mostly had those kinds of moments when reading fiction—when reading novels.  That when I read theory and encounter a Truth, I don't feel impressed by it because I feel like, "Yeah, so?  I thought that thought yesterday." I don't respond well to people telling me what to think or what to look at in that kind of direct "look at what I know and you don't yet know" sort of way.  I am much more inclined to be engaged by something that leads me to my own conclusions, that asks me to look and think in a more collaborative way because that's so much more empowering and requires a whole lot more skill and finesse and subtlety than having a thought and being like "OH SHIT I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT THOUGHT—EVERYONE, LISTEN TO ME NOW!" It might be a truly brilliant thought worth sharing, but if you can't figure out how to communicate that thought in a way that engages and empowers your audience, then you're just another asshole.

Anyway, it was a good talk, and though we were running unforgivably late afterward, I'm glad we had it because the first thing we saw when walking into Vox Populi was Jess Wheelock's animation How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was maybe my favorite piece of the night.  It shows Wheelock trying to read Dale Carnegie's book, but falling asleep, from which point, a drawn animation of herself falls into a dreamy landscape of the book itself and has a surreal encounter with Carnegie himself (also a drawn animation).  It is hilarious and absurd and very smart.  My favorite moments were the animated Carnegie encouraging her to pretend to be happy so that people will feel more comfortable around her—he tells her to smile; she folds her arms across her chest and frowns skeptically, shaking her head.  So he offers her a smile-mask to hold up in front of her face instead.  Later, Carnegie rambles about his motivation for writing the book and says something to the effect of, "When I was a kid, I didn't have any friends," which made me laugh out loud and elbow John and affirm that this piece was "so great, and so appropriate to the conversation we were just having." 

Wheelock's video was separate from the "Union, Justice, Confidence" exhibition that filled the rest of the gallery.  Standout pieces included Dave Grebber's My Stassed (Red Velvet) in Gallery 2, which I would actually like to look at again when there aren't so many people around interfering with my ability to actually hear what the people in the video clips are saying.  The gist of the piece seemed to be a statement about the language of commodity-advertising as specifically applied to the virtual space that now defines our lives.  Formally, it draws you in with layers of color and moving images, and then it holds you there with campy infomercial-style anecdotes performed in a familiarly composed way (if you're someone who watches a lot of infomercial-type ads), but with the people promoting a thing you've never heard of before.  Again, I could not hear the content as much as I'd have liked to, but what I got from what I could discern is that "My Stassed" is some kind of virtual reality space that allows you to organize and keep track of your life to a vaguely terrifying extent (one participant says something about being able to watch his wife and daughter all the time via My Stassed)—it's framed as an ideal, utopic space that you can customize, but superficiality and falseness in the actors' faces makes you feel uneasy about the attractive bells and whistles that so easily drew you in.  Good.  In Gallery 4, there was a video by Stephanie Patton titled Conquer, in which a woman, presumably Patton, has covered her face and neck/ shoulders in band-aids and is ripping them off one by one.  I was queasily reminded of my own Putting My Face On and didn't really want to watch the whole thing, but I feel like I probably should go back in order to do so.

We also checked out the openings at Grizzly Grizzly: "Permanent" featuring Kim Faler and Kristen Kimler [I was unimpressed by the tiny snippet images of hubcaps pinned inside circular frames and equivalent images of columns arranged around the column in the center of the room. The "wallpaper" on the back wall also fell flat for me.  I don't know—I just felt myself asking "OK, and?"]; Tiger Stikes Asteroid: "Gillian Pears: Elsewhere" [beautiful images of pieces of cloth draped over clothesline before colored walls.  Formally impressive]; and Napoleon: "The Flame and the Flower: New Works By Marc Blumthal" [digitally abstracted images of Reagan...and some kind of manifestoish statement scrawled on the wall.  "Adolescent impulses with a pretentious title" is what I numbly wrote in pen on the notecard I took.  The downpour of rain soaked this and all other press releases to a bleeding stack of pulp at the bottom of my canvas bag, which seems appropriate to mention.] before heading out.

We got to HyLo at 8:30 instead of 7, but Vy didn't seem to mind.  Combining coffee, cheese and beer is a thing I vow to do for the rest of my life.  Walking around in the rain to the point that your raincoat ceases to even remotely serve its intended function and your shoes become squishy pools and your dress might as well be a bathing suit because it's suctioned to you like a second skin—also not so bad.  The concluding art experience of the night was accepting a feathered mask from a dude under an umbrella who was trying to hand it off to everyone walking past him.  "There's a good one" is what he said when I took it from him.  I don't know what that meant, but I wore the mask the rest of the way to the L and left it on a bench for someone else to pick up or throw away.  There were little wet bits of green feather stuck to my face, apparently. Good.

Art I've Seen Around Philly So Far

So, my first official week in Philly, my friend Maia convinced me to do First Friday in Old City with her.  I found it pretty disappointing--possibly because we kept ending up at places right as their supply of free beer and/or drinks ran out, but also because much of the artworks in Old City seem to be lacking in substance beyond either the craft of how they were made or the final presentation of them as objects.  I wasn't really paying attention to the names of the galleries or exhibitions as we strolled through because, frankly, things started to look the same to me.  I only remember the show at the Center for Art in Wood because it was full of strikingly beautiful, well-made objects.  Not particularly inspiring conceptually, but full of gorgeous things.  Similarly memorable was a more design-centric location: lots of futuristic furniture pieces and ornate glass chandeliers and jewel-like objects clearly intended for someone's china cabinet.  Shiny pretty things that I remember experiencing because they were so shiny and pretty.  If I'm being honest, Fireman's Hall Museum was my favorite venture of the evening because it houses a steam-powered fire engine (!!), which cannot really be beat if we're talking stupendous objects. 

A few days later, I wandered over to the Fabric Workshop and Museum and saw "Changing Scenes: Points of View in Contemporary Media Art," which I found much more satisfying.  I got to experience Adrian Piper's Cornered in person!!  I'd only ever seen Piper's monologue, which I consider powerful enough to stand alone.  But the piece exhibited has many more components I hadn't known about.  It seems like the way it is displayed and how the installation is titled has evolved or is at least different from how it has been displayed in the past. For this incarnation, you walk in and are confronted with an array of TV monitors arranged in a diamond.  Each monitor is sitting on a wooden stand that elevates it to eye level.  A chair accompanies each stand--not for sitting: the chairs are all tipped over on the floor so that their metal legs jut out at you.  The monitor at the pinnacle of the diamond--the one in nestled where the walls meet--has an entire table tipped against its monitor in this fashion.  Arranged on the walls surrounding the monitors are black and white portraits of African American women smiling.   I asked a gallery attendant if he knew who the women were--if there was a specific reason their particular portraits were chosen to be displayed/ if the order mattered.  He couldn't tell me.

Installation View of Out of the Corner (1990)

Piper's monologue plays first.  About halfway through, after she makes the point about the extreme likelihood of the viewer having at least some black ancestry, the chorus of "We Are Family" begins playing.  While credits roll on Piper's monitor and the music continues to play, the sixteen chair-having monitors sequentially play footage of individuals speaking the same phrase, at first one at a time, then in slowly building unison until they are speaking together in a mighty, tumultuous roar of simultaneous voices.  They say, "  .' 

I also got to see Javier Tellez's video Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007), in which six blind people encounter an elephant.  Each person's immedaite reaction to the feel of touching the elephant is integrated with additional voiceover and video of their broader meditations on their experience of being blind.  Everything is in rich black and white, and there are exquisite transitional shots of the elephant's skin close up.  It was so fascinating and so...I don't like to throw around the word beautiful, but this accessed something transcendent and human and fragile and complicated while remaining simple and straightforward and lighthearted and unpretentious, and that very much fits my standard of beauty.  It made me cry.  There's a sculpture in the same gallery that is a composite of all of the descriptions of the elephant made by the participants in the video piece--it incorporates the materials to which each of them likened the sensation of the elephant's skin and presence (a wall, tires, a coat, etc.). 

For May's First Friday, I hit 319 N. 11th St with my friend Avi.  A few years ago, I interned in that building at a gallery that no longer exists, so I knew the vibe of the spaces there would be more experimental, artist-run, collective-oriented than the Old City experience.  Vox Populi, Grizzly Grizzly, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Marginal Utility are among the spaces that live in the 4-story walk-up.  Very much still the hippest scene.  I don't know if I was in a weird mood or what, but I found myself experiencing the opposing spectrum of disillusionment--work that is mostly concept and not enough execution.  I mean, I'm obviously a conceptual art fan, and I tend to prefer work that engages me intellectually, but I couldn't manage to connect with anything I was seeing.  I felt a similar disconnected blurring effect to what I'd experienced walking around Old City--everything looked and felt the same; it was just work adhering to a different set of ideals and standards (which still didn't quite align with mine, but for different reasons).  Avi and I left feeling frustrated, bitching about the annoying cycle of people continuing to iterate ideas that have already been iterated, repeatedly, by people far more talented and capable of communicating.  This rant was not a reaction to any specific piece/ artist/ space in particular--nothing was atrocious, nor was anything stellar--it was more a general tantrum about the infuriating pursuit of contributing something creative to the world and inevitably falling short.  Feeling like anything could be "good" enough to earn a pass, but like nothing every really should.  I'm gonna blame it on a weird mood and try again in June...

Seeing Friends, Seeing Art

I'm back in PA after an excursion to Boston!  Saw a bunch of people and places and things, including the awesome exhibition "This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s" at the ICA through March 3, 2013.  Many of my favorite things were there.  There was wall text about Judith Butler!  I got to take Adrian Piper's calling cards home with me!  Inspiring things I'd never seen before included Mary Kelly's Interim Part I, Corpus, Appeal and Lorraine O'Grady's Art Is....  Familiar-looking text from Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger text/image combinations also screamed at me from unexpected points on the walls (Kruger's were near the ceiling, and Holzer's inhabited the sides of a free-standing wall).  I wanted to buy the book, but it was $50, and I needed that money for food and bus fare...onto the Amazon Wishlist it goes!

I stopped over at the New Museum on my journey home to see "Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969-1989," which closes on December 30.  It's a small exhibition of materials from the museum's Bowery Artist Tribute archive and Marc H. Miller's 98bowery.com, not quite as packed full of favorites as I'd been expecting, but still worth the visit.  The show's archive-inspired nature was evidenced by the resource room, which had various relevant books and magazines, as well as computers to access online archives themselves.  The upper back wall of that room displayed the Bowery timeline and a few Christy Rupp rats scurried around the baseboard.  In the gallery, Adrian Piper was representing again (an example from her Hypothesis Series, which I cannot find represented on the Internet...), as was my buddy Keith Harring (his studio door was in the middle of the room, and there was evidence of a project for which he left snippets of paintings all around the city).  Inspiring things I'd never seen before included Paul Tschinkel's video piece Hannah's Haircut (also nowhere to be found on the Internet...), in which a topless Hannah Wilke gives Claes Oldenberg a haircut.  Completely bizarre and captivating--he looks so fucking uncomfortable the whole time and she kisses his ear at one point.  Hannah Wilke is forever a favorite of mine--I remember seeing Through the Large Glass at MoMA some years ago and experiencing the same inability to look away (I feel my weird feelings about a normatively attractive woman objectifying her own body for an audience that might not intellectually jump the hurtle of ogling her tits, and then I get over them because she is so in control and knows exactly what the fuck she's doing and I love her for it).  Also, video footage of Charles Simonds' Dwellings, for which he carved out spaces for imaginary tiny people in the walls of crumbling buildings.  

I have to get my ass back to New York to continue my 80s-obsessed jaunt with "Times Square Show Revisited" at the Hunter College Art Galllery (til December 8) and I also need to see "Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art" at the Brooklyn Museum through February 17 (plus, you know, buy that book...)

Sweet Affinity (Ariana Reines)

There's a line from the movie The History Boys that goes "The best moments in reading are when you come across something-- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out and taken yours."  A great line because that is the best thing about, well, more than just reading.  Palpable tremors of affinity that occur during the course of reading (or song-listening, or art-experiencing, or conversation-having) are best in general because of the enormous relief of feeling understood (an agonizingly rare sensation). 

I mention this because today, I read Couer De Lion by Ariana Reines and every single sentence felt like a secret handshake.

I read the first page and immediately had to text my friend Matt, provider of the library-borrowed copy I was holding:

"Oh my god I think I'm in love with Ariana Rienes...she *knows*...

"It's like she wrote this *for me* to read.  Every single thing is the most validating truth I've ever read.  I'm like, laughing out loud on the train at how much it feels like she's read my mind"

I read the whole book on the train, laughing and nodding and shaking my head in awe.  I also texted my friend Anna who is a poet and lives in Minneapolis:

"I'm reading a book of poems by Ariana Reines right now on the train: "Coeur De Lion." It's SO GOOD, you HAVE to read it!!  They're so simple and honest and true, they make me feel like my truth could matter

"I intend to write you a whole letter about it when I get home!"

I was gonna pull some choice excerpts for this post, but I can't because the whole thing is choice excerpts.  I just have to buy my own copy and go through it and underline all of the things and write frantic notes and feel the bestness again forever.

But here's a video of Ariana reading excerpts of her dreams (!!) and excerpts from Coeur De Lion at Stain Bar in Brooklyn in 2008 anyway:

Great Things I've Seen Lately

I've had some recent sojourns to NYC, which involved some experiences worth keeping track of.

I visited the Brooklyn Museum for a job interview.  I didn't get the job, but I did see an incredible Keith Haring retrospective while I was there.  I was particularly in awe of his experimental video work (surprise surprise), which I'd never seen before or known existed in the first place.  The one that kept me mesmerized was called Machines--it's 7 minutes of a close-up on a mouth wearing red lipstick (ehem...).  The mouth is speaking lines from a text, but the sounds and movements of the mouth are disjointed.  The words spoken are over-enunciated, and the mouth pauses to pucker, smile, and grimace throughout the speech.  The meaning of the words is lost to the image of the mouth speaking them--the physicality of speech is emphasized in a way that causes one to lose track of what is even being spoken.  There is a complex multiplicity of focus, with a great deal of repetition and rhythm (fluctuation between things being in- and out- of sync, the same motions or words being pronounced over and over in succession before the sentence moves forward).  I watched it loop at least twice, and was completely overwhelmed by feelings of dislocation/ alienation/ the urge to understand, but being unable to do so, and losing track of what I was even trying to understand.  I was frustrated and captivated.  It seemed to me that there was a duality between the language of hearing and the language of seeing, and they were being held in an amazing tension.  When I stopped trying to make sense of the words he was speaking, I focused more on the saturation of the color, his sweat, his blemishes, his teeth.  I was constantly deciding where to focus, changing my focus over time, going back and forth, catering to multiple focuses at once.  The fact that it was an identifiably male mouth with an identifiably male voice wearing the red lipstick was an extra layer for me.  The words of the statement that stood out/ were repeated most were phrases that included "things," "machines," and "she said."  The complexity of a male voice giving an account of a female voice, while wearing red lipstick was pretty joyous.

There was a whole other room of videos.  One of them was called Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt--it's only 3 minutes, and it's just Keith dancing in front of the camera and occasionally kissing the lens, with rabid enthusiasm.  I loved that he was recording this kind of moment--it was full of joy, and felt welcoming, but also weirdly voyeuristic (to be watching)/ exhibitionistic (of him to have recorded), and confrontational in the way he kisses the lens--it isn't soft, it's pretty violent/ aggressive.

The Brooklyn Museum is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, so I had the chance to actually confront it in person.  For me, the most powerful aspect of the project is the "Herstory Gallery" that accompanies the table.  It's a very impressive documentation of the role of women throughout history, incorporating examples of significant female figures.  The narrative exists on walls that you can stroll among, reading the accounts.  The whole point of The Dinner Party as a project is to "bring women to the table of history," and I think the Gallery is the more impressive mechanism.  It's written like a timeline/ text book, with pictures and quotations, and it's clear how much research went into its existence.  It successfully incorporates and asserts the importance of figures that have gone ignored within the iteration of history that was constructed to exclude or reduce the incorporation of women.  It offers an alternative--a more expansive, inclusive potential model, which is undeniably an important thing.

The problem I have with the piece is the way in which the table reduces women to their vaginas, and the way the entire project uses that reduction to imply an essential "female experience,"complete with an overarching set of "female values" that exist in opposition to the "male values" that rule our society.  I'm not arguing that patriarchy is not a very real thing--it absolutely is.  A binary concept of gender has been polarizing people into opposing roles based on their anatomy for centuries, and the ideal attributes of one role have certainly been valued over the ideal attributes of the other for just as long.  It's annoying and frustrating and it's perpetuated constantly by companies and governments and individuals who are too insecure to entertain the idea that everyone would be a whole lot happier if a set of unattainable expectations weren't imposed upon them at birth.  I don't enjoy an approach that further perpetuates the notion of "inherent female values" as opposed to "inherent male values" because I find it counterproductive to the goal of everyone existing as mutually respected individual human beings, with differences and similarities that all serve to make life interesting and educational and surprising.  I don't enjoy being told that I am inherently a certain way by virtue of the fact that I was born with a particular sort of genitalia.  The experiences I have as a result of society's assumptions/ presumptions/ behaviors regarding my body are very real and certainly affect and shape the way I live my life, but that's a problem, and asserting that yes, women are innately this way and that's why we're better is still a part of that problem. *Deep breath...

I ALSO finally saw Sleep No More.  My friend Adrienne has been trying to get me to go since she first saw it when it opened in Brookline, MA, and she obsessively attended multiple times a week until she knew the whole cast.  After that, she managed to get a job working behind-the-scenes, and stayed involved after the production moved to NYC.  She managed to score tickets for us (herself, me, and our friend Emily who was visiting from San Francisco) while I was in town installing my video at BWAC and oh boy do I regret not seeing it when it was in Brookline!  Every single experience of Sleep No More is different.  It's an interactive performance that unfolds around you as you navigate through the space.  Visitors wear white masks that render you anonymous as you observe/experience the action of the cast members.  The plot is based loosely on Macbeth, and the scenes repeat three times during the three hours from when the show begins, which means that you have the opportunity to encounter scenarios and discover rooms you didn't notice during the first hour, or that you might witness things multiple times.  I'll describe my experience:

We walked into a dimly lit hotel lobby area and checked our coats, where a woman handed us each a playing card [I kept mine and have it in a little shadowbox frame on my wall].  Then we navigated through a series of dark hallways, led only by the flickering light of candles marking the dead-end walls where we needed to turn.  Adrienne made Emily and me go first because we'd both never experienced it before. From there, we spilled into what I can only describe as a David Lynch night club.  Or maybe a cheerier manifestation of the hotel bar in The Shining.  There was a woman in a shiny green dress with perfectly coiffed hair, crooning into a microphone stand on a small stage.  Cocktail waitresses in costume mingled through the smokey air, passing out small glasses of absinth.  I felt a little edgy, realizing I might not have adequately prepared myself psychologically for what was about to happen, but I felt relieved to be there with Adrienne, who knew these people out of character.  And I felt familiar enough with this kind of vibe anyway.  I've always wondered what it would be like to wander around inside a David Lynch movie...

Adrienne told us the basics of what was about to happen: one of the slicked gentlemen would announce that people holding aces [the first wave--we among them] were to board the elevator.  There, we'd be given our masks, which were not to be taken off for the rest of the night [very Eyes Wide Shut].  She told us to hang back with her in the elevator so that she could bring us to a solid starting point.  From there, she felt we should separate so that we could each follow our own journey.  The prospect of this made me nervous, but also excited.  At the behest of our accordingly coiffed leader, we were shepherded into the elevator, where we dutifully donned our masks.  The conductor said scripted things to us--generally, iterating the mask consistency and no talking rules, but also encouraging us to explore.  "Fortune favors the bold," he said as he stopped the elevator on the 6th floor.  "Everybody off," he told us, moving aside so that one person could exit.  Before anyone else got the chance, he closed the doors again and re-started the elevator [Adrienne told us later that he'd let that person out alone on the asylum floor.  Not a place I'd liked to have begun, especially alone.  A thrilling notion in its dirty-trick cruelty].  When Adrienne squeezed our hands as a signal to exit with her, she led us to the nearest stairwell.  We crossed through a graveyard that I made a mental note never to return to alone [which I did later--it was as terrifying as I'd anticipated], and down into a great hall, where a party seemed to be ensuing.  This scene introduced us to the full cast of main characters.  I was particularly drawn to one erratic character with dark eyeliner and spiky, tousled hair.  He seemed to be able to see us while the others ignored the audience. His dancing was more sexually charged than the others' and he seemed to have a manipulative power over the other characters he danced with, particularly another young gentleman.  I should probably admit here that I've never read Macbeth, so I was at a slight disadvantage as far as the plot/ character identification layer goes.  My only real option was to respond to the way things were being performed, and connect to the narrative that way.  Adrienne and Emily left the hall when the party scene shifted, and most of the cast members scattered.  Many people left at this time, following particular characters to new locations, but I decided to stay because the eyeliner-wearing fellow was still there, along with one of the female cast members.  The lighting in the room changed from bright warm yellow tones to mysterious blue/purple.  Their dancing became interpretive and intense.  The woman removed what turned out to be a wig, revealing her completely bald head.  Her shoulders and neck were mesmerizing.  I decided to try to follow her for the rest of the night.

When she exited the room, I and the remaining horde of masked visitors followed her up a winding staircase and down a hallway toward a doorway, where we were ushered into a room.  Her eyeliner friend was there, along with another woman.  All three of them had that same kind of restless, knowing energy about them.  Once everyone was inside, they gathered around a table and we gathered around them.  I was struck by how incredibly creepy it was to see more than 50 masked faces crowded together, all watching the behavior of these three people, close enough to touch them.  To be one of them was bizarre.  It felt very voyeuristic, but there was also an eerie sense of belonging about it, and a freedom to the anonymity [My photography professor liked to drive home this quote about how photography gives us permission to stare.  Well, masks do that as well].  What ensued inside that room was what I later described to Emily and Adrienne as "a bloody disco orgy."  They both knew what I meant--Adrienne because she'd seen Sleep No More hundreds of times, and Emily because she'd managed to encounter that scene too, in its third incarnation, toward the end of her experience.  "Oh good!  I was hoping you'd both get to see that scene!  It's one of the most important ones," Adrienne gushed.  "I saw it within the first 15 minutes," I asserted with a deadpan emphasis on how intense a formative experience that had been.

From there, it's mostly a blur.  I lost track of the woman I'd been determined to follow and wandered through various rooms.  I found myself in a hotel suite where there was a pregnant woman agonizing and dancing on top of high bureaus with her husband.  I entered the master suite and saw the Macbeths quarrel, and found myself back there to see Macbeth return, bloody--Lady Macbeth drew him a bath in the claw foot tub on a platform in the center of the room.  I saw her bathe later, on the asylum floor, which was how I knew she was Lady Macbeth.  There was a banquet scene back in the great hall, which became a forest of evergreens afterward. I saw a man carrying a door, and was briefly convinced that this was some kind of Hogwarts situation where the staircases moved.  Time and space were bizarre, ethereal entities that I lost track of.  I felt disoriented in my wandering, but felt comfortable in that sense of dislocation--like that was the point somehow.  I got lost and kept coming upon the same people and places.  It was extremely surreal.  I managed to see several in-between sorts of moments, when the performers were setting up for the next scene (they did so in character, making each action part of the performance).  It was strange, but I felt gratified that I was having a meta experience of the production itself, which I appreciated because I found the entire dynamic so fascinating--the requisite trust between the performers and the audience to be coexisting and navigating together; the cyclical nature of everything; the extreme intimacy but simultaneous anonymity/otherness.  There were the black-masked attendants strategically scattered to maintain some security for the performers/ offer assistance to the visitors when necessary, but other than that fact, it felt very...nebulous.  It was like having gone down the rabbit hole and entered a world that included everything decadent, lavish, covetous, alongside everything ominous, treacherous and terrifying.  Which is a captivating tension.  I felt completely ambivalent the entire time.  Ambivalence is sort of my natural state, but this was a much more intense brand, and it felt right in its ambiguity--appropriate, encouraged even.  It was a place that nurtured confusion and reveled in it, and I felt comfortable in a reality whose only concrete truth was the power of mystique.

I had expressed a fear to Adrienne before we went in about getting lost.  "How will I know when it's over?  How will I find my way out again?"  "Oh, you'll know.  And it's not like you're going to stumble into a janitor's closet or something," she had laughed.  I proved her wrong at one point by pushing open an industrial-looking door behind a curtain, which turned out to be concealing a florescent-lit storage closet.  We laughed about that later.  "Oh god, you're such an artist! You would reveal the storage closet!" It was around that point that I started to become frustrated, knowing that there were many more floors that I couldn't seem to access, feeling trapped in a spatial loop.  I wandered down a hall and walked into another room that felt like I shouldn't have found--it was completely empty and the walls, table, ceiling and floor were painted black.  That was when I noticed a black-masked attendant and silently indicated that I needed help.  She kindly directed me through a curtain that magically led back into the Lynchian lounge from the beginning.  I felt relieved and thirsty and immediately went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and stare at my reflection in the mirror for several minutes.  It was nice to be grounded in a place.  I'd left my phone in my purse, so I had no idea how long I'd been inside.  I asked someone for the time and figured out that I still had 40 minutes to wait until Emily and Adrienne and everyone else came back out.  I considered going back in, but decided against it, feeling mentally and physically exhausted enough to just revel in the air conditioning with my glass of water, watching other wayward people slowly trickle out.

It was excellent to hear Emily and Adrienne's accounts of their respective experiences once they were out.  They were so completely different from mine! Emily had had a "one-on-one," a hallowed occurrence in which a cast member chooses you and whisks you off to a secluded location.  Hers involved entering a wardrobe, where the woman told her a creepy poem about being trapped, and then left her locked inside the wardrobe, unable to go out the way she'd come.  She had to discover a secret passage that led her out in a different direction.  They were both surprised that they'd never seen me--they'd run into each other a couple times.  I told them about my bizarre in-between/ meta experience and neither were surprised, as this seems to be my way.  They described places and scenes I hadn't seen, and scenes I'd seen being prepared.  It was fun to piece together the plot and the layout of the place based on our subjective journeys, and it was great to hear Adrienne's behind-the-scenes anecdotes and tidbits--she was so thrilled to finally be able to share it with us (I mean, she had been since it opened in Brookline, but it finally meant something to us!).

A singularly unique experience that I'll probably be processing for the rest of my life

Presently Inspirational

Barbara Kruger's pro-choice art-activism:

Jenny Holzer's Truisms, circulated via billboards, marquees, projections, t-shirts, etc. 

Some favorites:  

Adrian Piper's Calling Cards:

Yoko Ono's Cut Piece: 

Why I love Marina Abromović

I've known about her work for a while, and I've respected her for a while, but only recently have I really delved into her.  I've been reading interviews, and I recently watched her Art 21, and a documentary about her MoMA retrospective.  Watching the documentary made me wish at first that I'd seen the show--to have stood, surrounded by her works, reproduced or projected, would have been incredible, and to sit across from her and share that moment would have been an irreplaceable experience in my life.  Unfortunately, I didn't become aware of the show until after it had become somewhat of a circus--a strange competition to get the chance to sit with her, which was not something I was particularly interested in at the time. 

But I'm rapidly realizing that I have so much to learn from her.  In her Art 21, she shares an anecdote about a time in her youth when she tried to convince her father's military colleagues to use their airplanes to help her make drawings in the sky.  They refused.  So:

"Very early, I understood there are certain things I can't do.  But at the same time, I had a revelation that, actually, I can use anything I want--I can use the water, the islands, the earth, the fire, the air, and myself.  And this was the moment that I decided it's completely ridiculous to go to the studio and make something two-dimensional, when I could have the entire world there for me.  And that's when I stopped painting."

I've been thinking a lot about the idea of the world as a studio, so hearing her say this was incredibly inspiring and validating for me.  That, and her sense of humor about mortality: "You can't decide when you're going to die, but you definitely can rehearse your funeral."

Her commitment to the future development of performance art is also extremely significant.  She is committed to teaching just as much as she is committed to her own practice.  Here are some more quotes from her Art 21:

"When you die, you can't take your physical goods with you, but the good idea can stay.  I am very occupied now by my legacy.  It's very important for me, the preservation of performance art, and ow it got to develop, and what is the future of performance art."

"Ive been thinking so much, 'What is the role of an artist?  What is my function on this earth anyway?'  I think that being an artist is such a huge responsibility.  In my case, I create three groups of what I call 'Artitudes'--what I have to do as an artist.  I call the first group Artist Body, and it's just very simple--it's me performing in front of the audience.  Second is the Public Body--to create objects (I call them transitory because they're not sculptures) and circumstances in which the public can actually perform for themselves and get experience.  And the third would be Student Body, and this is my function as a teacher--that actually, when you come to one point of your life, that you really have to unconditionally transfer the knowledge to a younger generation of artists.  And not only transfer it, but also help them in the development.  It's really, in a way, a kind of fair dialogue, because they give you a sense of the time you live in (because they're young, and they understand the world differently), and you give them the experience"

This level of care that she has for the the development of the medium as a whole is apparent in the way she teaches--for the retrospective, she trained young artists to re-perform her most historically significant works.  For this process, she brought the group of artists to her house for an extended workshop, during which she tested their limits (she had them practice fasting, existing in silence, entering a lake naked--all exercises to practice being present).  The artists spoke about how much they had to trust her in order to willingly participate in something like this, and how transformative the experience was.  Before the opening of the show, Marina spoke with all of them about how much she was trusting them now--that her life was essentially in their hands.  She was passing her ideas, critical moments of her life, on to the next generation of artists, removing her own ego from the experience, so that each situation could survive for a new audience.  Also, I was impressed by the fact that there are photos from every moment of her life--every incarnation of every performance; personal moments with Ulay.  Those and her video pieces are what enables her work to survive/ what enables a documentary or a retrospective of such magnitude to exist.  Her curator also said that they made editions of one photograph from each of her key performances, and sold those on the market.  An important lesson for me to keep in mind, and one I think I'm already learning for myself with this concentration on archiving and the construction of history.
Primarily, what strikes me though, is her immense generosity.  She is so generous with herself, so raw in her presentation of self.  She makes people feel because she is so open in her own feeling.  At one point in the documentary, the curator speaks about how, when he first met her, he thought, "Oh God, she's in love with me!"  But slowly, upon getting to know her better, he realized, "No, she's not in love with me; she's in love with the world."  As someone who feels a kinship to that sensibility/ propensity, I adore that description.  And that love is palpable in her work.  She makes herself so vulnerable and receptive, whether it's to an audience, or a partner, or to her own capacity for endurance.  She pushes herself to her limits, and extends beyond them.  She tests herself, and manages to exceed her own expectations.  She manages this because she believes in herself deeply.  She trusts herself deeply.

And she isn't arrogant when she speaks about her life or her work.  She's honest and genuine and matter-of-fact, and always open in her expression.  She speaks about using the pain she experiences in her performances as a vehicle that ushers her into a new level of consciousness, that it becomes almost holy, and that the power of any piece lies in the potential for the viewer to be able to harness that energy and experience it in that moment of connection, regardless of their own motivations or attitudes--in the potential to "elevate human spirit," within the performer and within the participating public.  And the manifestation of that power is evident in the faces of the people sitting across from her--in their tears, in their smiles, in their hands placed empathetically over their hearts, in their nods of reverence.  She clarifies something for them in this bizarre socially phenomenological moment that is at once incredibly intimate/ personal, and blatantly public.  At first, it seems like the fact of the audience or the line of people waiting for their turn would diminish the intimacy of the shared gaze, but it doesn't.  It actually magnifies it, and makes it visible for multiple simultaneous participants with multiple perspectives.  One experiential moment shared between her and one participant is actually a multitude of simultaneous experiential moments for every observer.  Everyone in that room is engaged.  And that energy is the most powerful thing imaginable.  

She's also just seductive as hell, and absolutely revels in it.  She talks about red being a power color that energizes her, and about her allowing herself to indulge in her love of fashion once she gained more material security after her split with Ulay.  She's so unbelievably enigmatic and charismatic and charming and gorgeous, but is also so firmly grounded in herself and in her own ambition and her own capability.  She is poised and stoic and elegant because of the unshakable trust that she's built with herself.

I want to be that. 

Music Cognition Lab

I had my first post-bacc critique earlier. I'll deal with that in a later post though. Right now, I'm excited about a website a friend just shared with me. So excited, in fact, that I feel the need to archive it here: http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/music-cognition/emotion2009.html

I love it because it provides the musical and verbal equivalents of the sounds (and the terminology, which perpetually illudes me), and because I've been meditating on the emotional structure of sound (music) for a while now. It's like another piece in a puzzle for me, one that mustn't get lost in the shuffle of websites I've bookmarked...

NYC II

Took another epic trip to New York this past Tuesday through Thursday! I was accompanied by some art history buddies, so things were on a pretty even keel, considering our mutual tendencies to devour and absorb any and all art.

We got in Tuesday afternoon and wandered over to Chelsea, where we visited a friend at James Cohan until the gallery closed. The show that's up right now, "Catch the Moon in the Water: Young Chinese Artists" was a pretty satisfyingly diverse survey of contemporary Chinese artists. My favorite piece was probably Hu Xiangqian's video/performance Xiangqian's Art Museum, which was hilarious and excellent and made me feel in good company conversationally. The piece consists of Hu Xiangqian standing in front of a microphone in a grassy patch in front of a brick wall, describing various works of art that he may or may not have seen, and which may or may not actually exist (some are well-known works that the audience could recognize, others he fabricates to sound real). It's pretty brilliant. I also couldn't take my eyes off of Chen Wei's photographs Records Hypnosis and House of Recovery. Really gorgeous. They kind of reminded me of Gregory Crewdson in a weird way.

The following day we finished up in Chelsea. The standout was Matthew Ronay's Between the Worlds at Andrea Rosen. OK, we walked into the gallery and encountered this box of black curtain. We had to circle the periphery to find the entrance, and when we did, it was like floating into an underwater cave/ forest/ dreamscape. Absolutely incredible--there were so many details to take in (screens of tiny carved wooden mushrooms; partially obscured light sources that added an undercurrent of magical/ holy energy to the space; owls that would suddenly appear on the periphery), but the thing I loved most was the simplicity of the materials. Everything was papier-mâché, fabric, carved wood, and simply applied paint. But simple choices in composition, color pallet and craftsmanship created this atmosphere that was completely engrossing. I wanted to live there.

Shows we also saw in Chelsea:
Against the Way Things Go at Gasser/Grunert (I really liked Joe Winter's piece, which investigated light and color by having viewers place pieces of colored construction paper under slightly varied light sources--2 variations of white light, 2 variations of yellow light. So, the color of the blue construction paper would look vastly different under the white light bulb than it did under the yellow light bulb, and slightly different under each type of white or yellow light. And each color had its own unique reaction. It was very simple and straightforward in its presentation, but still retained the phenomenological quality); Phoebe Washburn at Zach Feuer (she came and gave a talk at Brandeis this past semester, and I loved her/ her work. I didn't have the guts to talk to her then, and I didn't have the guts to talk to her when she was sitting in the office of Zach Feuer...); and Eraser at Magnanmetz Gallery (Shanti Grumbine's erased/ xacto-knifed newspaper pages were mesmerizing).

Later, we hit up MoMA and stayed until it closed (German Expressionists again, plus the Francis Alÿs, which was fantastic. It made me feel how I felt when I saw the Michelangelo Pistoletto show at the Philly museum, which is a feeling I still can't really describe).

Thursday was Lower East Side/ Chinatown day (because we were taking the Fung Wah back). The standout was Barbara DeGenevieve's Panhandler Project, which included a series of photos and an accompanying video. Essentially, the project consisted of her finding homeless black men and giving them food and a hotel room in exchange for their posing nude. The things involved in this piece!! I mean, race, class, gender, sexuality, exploitation discourse, the art historical history of the nude and objectification/ the gaze, on and on forever. But the beauty of the piece is the subtle suggestion of these things you need to think about in order to fully engage with it. It doesn't hit you over the head with an opinion or incite a blatant reaction outright--its ambiguity is what makes you think and feel the most.

Also:
"Lost" at Invisible-Exports (some interesting propositions, but nothing that really grabbed me); and Miriam Böhm, Rosy Keyser, and Erin Shirreff at Lisa Cooley (my favorites were Miriam Böhm's pictures of paintings, or pictures of pictures of paintings, which made me laugh while thinking about distance and remove)

The New Museum was under construction, so we got in for half price. The galleries that were open contained great things: "Charles Atlas: Joint's Array", which was gorgeous--an array of televisions all playing loops of video of Merce Cunningham's flexing and rotating joints, with a soundtrack of John Cage's ambient city sounds (touching/ poetic). There were moments when the images on a group of monitors would sync up for a brief interlude, and those moments took my breath away. Upstairs was "Ostalgia", a sweeping and eclectic survey of more than 30 artists from more than 20 countries across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics. My favorite piece was Mladen Stilinović's Dictionary--Pain, which spanned the perimeter walls of a room--each panel contained a list of words with the original definitions scratched out, replaced by the word 'pain'). There was also a video piece about Marxist educational practices in East Berlin before the wall fell--there was propaganda-style footage of a class debating the exploitative nature of capitalism, as well as an interview with a former student/ party member who moved to Hungary before the wall fell. I would have liked to have stayed to watch the whole thing, and I wish I could remember the name of the artist! We also went up to the roof balcony and reflected for a bit (actually, my fear of heights and love of sweeping views mauled each other internally, but that's kind of like reflection...), and then I agonized over which books I could actually afford to buy out of the 12 or 15 I would have liked to horde. I chose 2: Inside the Painter's Studio (which has been on my Amazon wish list forever) and Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century (which was just too apt to pass up).

And then I took the weekend to recuperate/ re-organize my studio

Phrases, Installment 1

Recently, in addition to the singular words that linger in my head, I've been writing down random phrases that pop into my mind. Sometimes I write down multiple variations. Sometimes they feel like titles, or come out of a sort of title-contemplating mindset (the first few clusters came out of me brainstorming titles for the show, for instance). Sometimes they're phrases I've heard or seen somewhere that have a kind of ring about them that makes me write them down. Sometimes they're phrases spoken from the point of view of one of my pieces. They're usually just weird or bizarre wordplay types of things that take the form of off-beat fragments and pseudo-sayings. But they're fun to think up and write down and read over from time to time, and who knows, someday maybe I'll actually use them. I'm almost at the end of my current sketchbook, and I don't want to lose them, so I'll post them here in the order that I wrote them down:

If You're a Moth, I'm the Flame

Into the Fire

Learn By Doing

Get Burned

Come Closer

Too Close for Comfort

Come Closer (Too Close for Comfort)

Enter At Your Own Risk

Danger: High Voltage
_______

Can You Hear Me?

Can You See Me?

Can You Feel Me?

Can You Smell Me?

Can You Taste Me?

Can You Love Me?

Can You Understand Me?

Can You Speak to Me?

Gan You Grow With Me?

Can I ___ You?

Can We___Each Other/ Together?
_______

Face Value

Not Enough Value

Impotence of Being Earnest

Premature Infatuation
_______

Dusty Rusty Senses

Your Senses Are Getting Dusty and Rusty

Art is Like a Tune-Up for Your Broken-Down Senses (Utilize That Shit!)
_______

Do You Hear Yourself? Maybe You Should Shut Up and Listen

What's Wrong With You?

Was It Worth It?

Why Do You Even Care?

Do You Even Care?

What Do You Want? Why Don't You Have It?

Why Do You Deserve to Be Happy?

Is Happiness Really What You Need?

At What Cost?

The Pursuit of Happiness => Chasing Imaginary Geese
_______

Trust Wisely

Believe Selectively

Interrogate Everything

Developed Doubt > Blind Belief
_______

Have You Ever Considered the Possibility that Everything You've Ever Known is a Lie? Now You Have. Welcome to the Universe of Doubt

At the End of Your Life, Will the Things You've Done Allow You to Pretend It Mattered?

At the End of Your Life, Will the Things You've Done Allow You to Believe It Mattered?

So That At the End of Your Life, You Can Pretend Like it Mattered

Was It Worth It?

When You Die, You'll Wonder if Your Life Even Mattered (Your Life is About Doing Things So That You Can Pretend that It Did)
_______

If God Loves You, You Matter (Duh)

It Makes Sense Because the Universe Has a Plan (Obviously)

My Existence Matters (Doesn't Yours?)

My Existence Has Meaning (Doesn't Yours?)
_______

Don't Disregard Dreams (Develop Dialogue)

Create Causes to Solidify Significance

Compulsively Create Content

When You're Feeling Worthless, Make Something Up

Invent Identity

Validate (Avoid the Void)
_______

Focus (Fester Faster)

Foster Focus, Fester Faster

Let Your Focus Fester Faster

See Surface; Slip; Surrender

Kant Kauses Kancer
_______

No Person's an Island

Interpersonal Relationships Matter

Make Or Break; Use or Lose => Finite, Polarizing Rhymes to Make You Anxious

If You Don't Stress Yourself Out, Someone Else Will Do it For You (Do You Want to Give Up That Control?)

Why Stress Yourself Out When Someone Else Will Do It For You?

Why Let Anything Stress You Out?

Fuck Everything

But When You Care About Something, It Starts to Have Power. The Power to Stress You Out.
_______

Can You Hear Your Brain Clicking On and Off? Scanning Through Thoughts Like the Record Collection Inside a Jukebox? 'Here's One I'll Entertain. Select. Slowly Set Into Place with a Click. Play.'

Played Out

Weird is What Makes Things Interesting, Keeps Things from Being Boring and Oppressive. Normal Doesn't Actually Exist. The People That Worry about Being 'Normal' and Structure Their Lives around the Appearance of 'Normalcy' are the Really Fucked Up Ones

Why Would People Want to Believe in God? God is the Opposite of Empowerment

'Family Values'...Sounds Like a Dollar Store. Selling a Cheap, Shitty Product that Seems like a Good Deal, but is Actually Marked Way Up from the 1¢ it took to Produce it. Brightly Colored, Wholesome. It's Un-American Not to Endorse it!

Is Delusion Really That Much Easier? Aren't You Haunted by the Unsettling Suspicion that Your Life is Totally Worthless, that You're Pawns in some Master Manipulator's Game?

All In the Family

Hunky Dory

Yessiree

I'm So Repressed, I Get Offended By Pollen
_______

Fanning the Flames

Fueling the Fire

Blowing Smoke
_______

Algae Bloom Says, 'Fuck All Y'all'

Fuck It or Leave It

Use or Lose

Make or Break

Biological Imperative

Because We're All Fucked

All Fucked Up

A Motherfucking Travesty

What a Fucking Mess

Hate Something? Change It. Transform it into its own Polar Opposite. You Don't Even Need to Know How. Science will Figure That Out For You
_______

Organ Music

Clawing at Your Own Face Because Your Skin if Smothering Your Internal Organs

Hating Everything that Touches You

Hating Everything
_______

(Whose) Fault (Line)

Concentrated Crack

Brain Crack

(Your) Brain (on) Crack

Your Brain (on) Crack
_______

What's Your Problem?

Who Do You Think You Are?

Do You Even Give a Shit?

Do You Even Care?

Do You Even Like This Shit?

Why Are You Even Here?
_______

I Made This For You

Does This Not Please the Everloving Shit Out of You?
_______

You're Totally Objectifying Me Right Now...

I'm Not Just some Commodity

I'm Not Just some Object

Fuck You and Your Gaze
_______

Stare At Me a Little Longer

Come a Little Closer

Come So Close I'm Practically Stabbing You in the Eye...There, That's Better

Step Right Up! I Only Might Make You Bleed...

Don't Make Me Cut You...

I'm Not Responsible if You End Up Bleeding

Wouldn't it be Awesome if that Really Long, Sharp Shard Stabbed You in the Eye? You Could Tell Chicks You were Literally Blinded by Beauty. I Bet You'd Get a Lot of Pussy With That Line...I'd Totally Back You Up, 'Cause I'd Be All Flattered that You Essentially Characterized Me as the Incarnation of Beauty...It's Win, Win!

Chicks Dig Scars. You Should Let Me Cut You. That's Be One Classy-Ass Scar. Just Sayin'...Bitches'll Think You're all Into Art and Shit. I'd Be Doing You a Favor, Man...
_______

You Walked All Over Me Yesterday. Well, Today, I'm Fucking Art!

You Walked All Over Me Yesterday. Well Guess What? I'm Art Now, Motherfucker!

You Ignored Me Yesterday. Do I Have Your Attention Now? (Now That I'm Art?)

Have I Earned Your Precious Attention?

Am I Finally Worthy of Your Attention?

Remember that Heineken Bottle You Dropped in the Street Last Night Because You Were Too Fucking Wasted to Recycle It? It's Art Now.

Remember that Heineken Bottle You Dropped in the Street Last Night Because You Were Too Fucking Wasted to Recycle It? Yeah, Hi Douchebag.
_____

Tread Lightly, Motherfucker

You Avoid Stepping on This Every Day

Ya Like Thorns?

Some Thorny Shit

Imagine This Shit Embedded in Your Toe

I Could Pop Your Tire Like That

You Think I'm Shattered? You Should See the Other Guy...
_______

Do You Think the Flowers Make Me More or Less Threatening?

Do the Flowers Make Me Less Threatening, or Are They Just Lulling You into a False Sense of Security?

Do You Feel Safer Because You're Looking at Flowers?

Do These Flowers Make Me Look Passive?

Yeah, I Think the Flowers Help Me Maintain a Certain Feminine Image while I put Shards of Fucking Glass in Your Face
_______

How Do You Look? (How Do You See?)

If I Were You, I'd Be Boring

If I Were You, I Wouldn't Be Me
_______

Nature Doesn't Need You

Nature Will Fuck You Up
_______

Greener Than You

Recycling is tha Shit

Recycled Materials from the Sidewalk

Sidewalk > Utrecht
_______

Nervous Breakdown

I Got Your Nervous Breakdown Right Fuckin Here
_______

Yo Man, Violence is Totally the Answer

Dude, It's Like About Nature Rising out of the Rubble of Our Industrial Ignorance. Or Some Shit...

Yeah, It's Like, Nature, Juxtaposed with the Man-Made...

It's Like, the Cycles of Nature Conquering Man's Hubris...You Know?

It's Like, a Reflection of My Own Fragmented Existence...Or Something

It Really Makes Me Question the Multitudinous Aspects of My Own Self-hood...Damn (Fuckin' Art, Man)

Aw Man, I Want a Beer Now...

I Could Totally Hang This in the Living Room--It's Really Tie the Color Scheme Together, Don't You Think, Honey? We'd Just Have to Put it out of Reach of the Kids...But Man, would that make for a Great Conversation Piece at Dinner Parties...All Our Friends will think we're So Cultured...

How Much for the One with the Flowers and Broken Glass?
_______

Gritty As Fuck

Maybe You Should Think About Yourself A Little More

Look at Yourself

Take a Long, Hard Look

Who Do You See When You Look in the Mirror?

This Is Your Face on Crack(ed Glass)

Stare Into Your Own Refracted Reflection. That is Some Deep Shit Right There...

Maybe If You Stare at Pieces of Yourself for Long Enough, Something Profound Will Happen