In Terms Of

Tag: Conceptual art

  • Critical Conditions

    This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Fields and Praxes: Dino Zrnec and Marko Marković in Conversation
    Tuesday, October 20, 2015
    Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY

    The Serbian sculptor Marko Marković has expressed an interest in museum conservation departments and in the process of finding, restoring, and preparing objects for exhibition. For him, the final display is as much the work of archeologists and conservators as it is the labor of artists, artisans, and curators. In addition, Marković is not a fan of the normal exhibition catalogue for an artist, with an art historian or curator explaining the art. He would rather provide a fictional document for audiences to follow, to create something believable beyond the contemporary artist’s professional requirements to present work in galleries, to create a portfolio website, and to give talks.

    Marko Marković speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During a lecture at Residency Unlimited, Marković read a written paper while projecting images behind him. His tale started with Jeffrey Horowitz, a University of Oregon professor, who in 1985 made an accidental discovery during an excavation at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Horowitz—who may or may not be a real person—found documentation for an unfinished architectural work or broken pieces of an artwork—it’s hard to take in everything. The folder also contained a ninth-century Asian book of geometry and conflicting inventories (from 1864 and 1878) of an archaeological dig in which the Kritios Boy, also known as Acropolis 698, was discovered. Side by side Marković showed two vintage-looking photographs of identical piles of sculpture, except that one included the Kritios Boy among the rubble, and the other omitted the statue. Unless you are a scholar of archaic Greek art, it was impossible to know which image was digitally altered.

    Continuing the tale, Marković highlighted a second, more recent archaeological discovery, in 2013 in Ebla, Syria, by scholars at the University of Sapienza. A clay sculpture of a nude torso was unearthed, conserved, scanned three dimensionally, cast in plaster, and exhibited a year later. Through Greek in origin, Marković said, the work had a different stylistic appearance: hard edges instead of smooth curves. This second find was actually Marković’s own sculpture. His elaborate backstory—with real and invented facts and using found and Photoshopped images from the nineteenth century, the 1980s, and today—creates a specific way to view the work. In a later conversation, he told me that, unlike other acts of parafiction in art, his discrete sculptural creation is the primary focus, not the narrative that accompanies it.

    Pieces of painted drywall by Dino Zrnec at Galerija Galženica (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Marković’s talk was followed by a presentation by the Croatian painter Dino Zrnec, who articulated his primary interests: the conditions of display and experimental processes. Zrnec showed documents of recent exhibitions at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and Galerija Galženica in Velika Gorica, Croatia. For the latter, he transported rectangular sections of drywall—one had white acrylic paint on it, and another had white oil paint—from his studio and leaned them on the wall. He also removed a square piece of ceiling board and stretched a canvas over it, again leaning it. These material explorations remind me of what Robert Ryman and Gedi Sebony have been doing in New York. Zrnec took a similar approach in Graz. The exhibition’s curator, Katia Huemer, wrote:

    The interventions Zrnec employed in order to engage the existing structure were at once minimal and ruthless: the artist cut various shapes out of the wooden panels in the walls of the project space, stretched fabric over them, then inserted the cut-out shapes back into the incised hole. The front of the resulting canvas disappeared into the wall, leaving only a few visible hints that the “actual artwork” was hidden behind it.

    While visiting museums in New York and Philadelphia, Zrnec paid attention to how art is displayed, noting how the raised platform on which Robert Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959) rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art adds a sixth step to a five-rung ladder that is part of the work. (He is not the only one to notice the plinth.) Such curatorial maneuvers could be considered a slight shift in authorship, and Zrnec said he is thinking of ways to cannibalize the work of another artist for his next exhibition.

    Dino Zrnec, 23:30–11:13, 2013, plastic tumblers and oil on canvas, 50 x 35 cm (artwork © Dino Zrnec)

    Zrnec recounted another exhibition, which took place in an abandoned post-office building in Croatia, where he showed several paintings that had created themselves—almost. He poured turpentine in plastic cups that held surplus paint, placed them on a canvas on the floor, and left the studio. Coming back the next morning, he set the finished painting upright. Here the act of creation takes place while the artist is somewhere else.

    Both artists were on a two-month residency in New York after capturing the annual award for emerging artists in their home countries: Marković won the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award in July, and Zrnec received the Radoslav Putar Award in June. Eriola Pira, program director of the Young Visual Artists Awards, which administers the awards from the United States, joined the two for a conversation.1 She asked about the award’s meaning, but neither artist made an effort to provide a sufficient answer. Zrnec felt it was important for artists under 35 to come to New York, and Marković expects a stay in the city to “raise the level of my practice.” These responses, along with the tenor of their individual presentations, attested to a tight-lipped, unforthcoming attitude. Were Zrnec and Marković elusiveness by personality or unsure of their English language skills? Were they holding their cards close? This was frustrating at times because their conceptually oriented work demands explication

    Pira’s question about developing new artistic languages stalled. “I still think there are some possibilities within painting,” Zrnec replied. “That’s why I am practicing painting.” Marković declared that works are usually unfinished and not always bound by the exhibition. “Every project continues,” he said. “It takes time to develop” The geometric sculptural models he designs on the computer are not always built, but sometimes he draws these virtual objects on a wall or creates videos for projection. His answer made me wonder if he will deliver his Kritios Boy lecture again, with additions or changes to the story.

    Eriola Pira pulls the teeth of Marko Marković and Dino Zrnec (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Both artists articulated a strong attachment to their chosen medium—painting and sculpture—and downplayed the significance of installation, even though the exhibition space plays a crucial role in their work. For Zrnec, the meaning of his work is cumulative as it moves from the studio to the gallery and beyond. “If I were to show [my paintings] in a new space, I would transform them,” Zrnec said, “and they would become something else.” Pira prodded him further: “Your work has been described as performative. Do you agree with that?” With the paintings made with plastic cups in mind, Zrnec replied, “It’s me but it’s not me.” He reiterated his interest in situational qualities: “I always try to experiment with these very technical processes, and to think of the conditions of the work.” He also relayed a story about the limitations of studio space: “I had this small room and I wanted to make a big painting. So I decided to cut really big canvases, but I would stretch them around smaller stretchers … fold them like a very random item, a t-shirt. And then I would paint them from all sides, in different monochromes.” A single canvas might be painted while on several different sized stretchers, achieving a provisional quality. Such a painting could potentially fit over a sofa, a love seat, or a La-Z-Boy, depending on your needs.

    Marković was prompted to describe a recent exhibition with his twin brother, which focused on the Serbian architect Nikola Dobrović’s masterwork, the Ministry of Defense building, destroyed in a NATO air strike in 1999. The Markovićs had separate rooms: a project for the restoration of the building for his brother (an architect), and a room for the artist’s six-foot plaster cube made from a single modular unit in plaster, cast from an outside wall of the defense building. Marković stacked the pieces to form the work and in one corner broke a hole to allow viewing of the interior. “For an antimodernist,” Pira commented, “you rely a lot on the grid.” Marković reminded her that Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Grids” emphasized the ambivalence or irrationality of the grid.

    Painting in commercial galleries in New York has not impressed Zrnec. There are not so many painters back home, he said, and art institutions have their own agendas. Though Conceptualism and performance are the dominant postwar trends in the former Yugoslavia, he feels an affinity for Croatian artists from forty years ago. “Most of the Conceptual artists had brushes in their hands at one point in the sixties [and] seventies,”

    “Is the construction of a work the discover of it?” an audience member asked Marković toward the conversation’s close, adding, “You’re discovering what was already there.” While he didn’t quite answer affirmatively, a good way to interpret his work is as an archaeology of the future. And it’s promising that two artists are exploring strategies of presentation that are artistic in nature, not curatorial.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 I served on the jury that selected Dino Zrnec as the winner of the Putar award in June 2015. I also conducted studio visits with both artists two days after this talk.

  • Where All the Action Is

    Lee Lozano Drawings and Paintings: A Conversation with Jacqueline Humphries, Jutta Koether, and Bob Nickas
    Wednesday, July 22, 2015
    Hauser and Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York

    In her notebooks, Lee Lozano asks herself, “WILL I ‘GO BACK’ TO ‘JUST PAINTING’?”

    I first discovered the work of Lee Lozano (1930–1999) in 1997, when reading the reprint of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The descriptions of Lozano’s experientially based art from the late 1960s, including Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, and Grass Piece, were among the most compelling in the book. Because of the radical nature of these works—making art from talking, from art-world protest, and from the desire to “stay high all day, every day”—I thought everyone knew about her.1 So when Lozano was rediscovered in the early 2000s, having left the art world for good thirty years earlier in her infamous Dropout Piece (initiated in the early 1970s), I was surprised. But upon reviewing the artist’s slender exhibition history and bibliography during the eighties and nineties, her omission from the historical record was clear.2

    The first question posed by Robert Nickas, the moderator of tonight’s conversation at Hauser and Wirth, was this: When were you first exposed to Lozano? The painter Jacqueline Humphries said she first saw Lozano’s work in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed, at the National Academy Museum in 2007. Humphries had also read Siegel and Reed’s conversation about the artist, published in Artforum in 2001. The conversation’s third participant, the artist Jutta Koether, became acquainted with Lozano’s work “as a concept, as an idea” in the 1990s—through Nickas, actually. Strangely, based on her words and expressions, it seemed as if Koether had never actually seen Lozano’s work in person before tonight.

    The painter Jacqueline Humphries (center), flanked by Robert Nickas and Jutta Koether (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tonight’s conversation was held in conjunction with an exhibition of five large paintings and numerous tiny drawings from 1964 to 1966, Lozano’s fourth solo show with the gallery since 2007. Despite Nickas’s unconventional approach to curatorial work and criticism, and despite his longtime support of Lozano’s work—he organized Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961–1971 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004—he framed the discussion around clichés: the death of painting, the artist as outlaw, the inadequacy of categorization, the goodness of failure, the performative turn, and, of course, the rediscovery of forgotten artists. Doing so produced a mostly stilted, directionless talk—the speakers missed the mark, and not positively so. Maybe they just didn’t prepare ahead of time. In spite of these obstacles, the talk had numerous moments of interest.

    Koether is attracted to Lozano’s multifarious practice: her process, her being female, and her “antagonistic propositions about failure and rejuvenance [sic] of painting.” Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition created a “highly problematic proposition about Lozano” that interrupts her unified idea of the artist. “There’s not one Lee Lozano,” Nickas reminded her, briefly describing each of her five periods, such as the Tools works, the Wave paintings, and the written conceptual pieces, which came quickly over her ten-year career. Humphries said that museums often misrepresent an artist’s diverse body of work with an authoritative, streamlined version, and most artists she knows do a bunch of stuff. Well, duh.

    Why did Lozano paint, Nickas asked, when she could have done anything? “Is painting acquainted with winning [more] than any other practice?” he wondered. Looking around the room, Humphries saw something unique in the paintings that viewers, both then and now, can’t come to grips with. “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” she said. “They do something else.” Lozano wasn’t reliant on anyone, Koether conjectured. “She would want to paint because people told her not to.” Koether then launched into a meandering filibuster that barely made sense, followed by a similar monologue from Humphries. The group was at its weakest when discussing the physical qualities of the paintings in the room, yet Nickas didn’t bring the conversation back to earth.

    Jutta Koether (right) talks about rough sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In the late 1960s, Nickas claimed that Lozano interacted with sculptors and artists who worked with language—Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Graham—rather than with painters. He also positioned Lozano’s work (e.g., depictions of hammers and drills and of shapes with volumetric forms) as masculine—a gendered view that Humphries challenged. “I never knew what that meant,” she firmly stated, noting that nobody calls out men who paint pictures of women for being feminine. Nickas fumbled with a definition of masculinity as portraying toughness and violence and mentioned that Lozano, in her art and writing, had a man’s voice. Koether explained this observation as a symptom of the time. “It’s like really rough sex … all the time,” she said. “It’s brutal—it’s very hard and super desperate.” While Humphries recognizes the “unbelievable force” in Lozano’s work, the artist is also cheeky and, formally speaking, was addressing mainstream issues in American painting at the time, such as mass and scale, in spite of the radical qualities that people usually ascribe to her work.

    Nickas was refreshingly skeptical about the performative aspect of contemporary art—he said “there’s not a lot behind it”—but Lozano is the real deal, especially regarding her Wave series of paintings, one of which was completed after fifty-two consecutive hours of work. The real topic of discussion, however, was Lozano’s social relationship to the New York art world and how she integrated social performance into her studio work, which Humphries attributed to the emancipatory politics of the 1960s. Representative works are Dialogue Piece (1969), for which Lozano invited people to her SoHo loft for a conversation whose content would remain private, and Drop Out Piece, for which Lozano withdrew from the art world and eventually left New York, later settling in Dallas to live the life of an acid casualty.

    Most contentious was Lozano’s Boycott Piece (1971), which comprised her refusal to speak to women for two months—though apparently the work continued until her death. Tonight’s speakers felt uncomfortable with this resolution, which the curator Helen Molesworth has called “consummately pathological” and “incredibly disturbing,” though they understood how Lozano was critiquing institutional sexism, both within and outside the art world.3 Koether identified the problem of Lozano trying to be more revolutionary than the revolution, and Boycott Piece has affected the way she understands the artist’s entire oeuvre.

    Though Koether finds Lozano’s position to be “nonreconcilable,” I can’t help but think of other controversial artists who push moral and aesthetic boundaries, such as Santiago Sierra and Adel Abdessemed. Though their strategies and results are questionable, it’s generally a good thing to see artists like them working with contentious subject matter and pushing liberal attitudes. After all, it was Lozano who wrote “‘SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS.’”4 Nickas more or less accepted that testing limits pushed Lozano beyond painting, and beyond the art world. Humphries said we will never know her reasons for dropping out—especially since, Nickas added, “it’s a world people want to drop into.” Koether postulated that acting crazy and aggressive might be the only way out of an enduring problem of sexism.

    “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” Jacqueline Humphries said of the paintings on view (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Nickas detected rage, not anger, in Lozano’s work, based on her written statement: “I am not angry at anyone or anything but I feel rage.”5 Koether agreed, seeing rage in the tight control of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around her. Moments later, during the audience Q&A, an attendee refuted that idea. “One person’s rage is another person’s tranquility,” he shrugged, adding that, when considering the brownish-orange color in one painting, “rust isn’t rage—it’s slow deoxidization.” Koether was unmoved: “I still think they’re very angsty.” Humphries called the paintings austere, not minimal, and Nickas compared Lozano to contemporaneous Californian artists, calling her “the Light and Space artist of darkness.” Humphries concurred, stating that the works on view contain neither air nor figure-ground. Lozano had a sensibility, she continued, not a style; Humphries believes Lozano made works that she wanted to see for herself. Nickas said that one of Lozano’s goals was to “picture time and space, expanding and contracting. It’s improbable, but you just have to accept it.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101.

    2 The Lee Lozano revival can be traced back to an exhibition of her work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998.

    3 Helen Molesworth, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 65, 70.

    4 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, April 24, 1969, in Lee Lozano: Notebooks, 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2009), unpaginated.

    5 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, Book #5, December 29, 1969, in Barry Rosen and Jaap van Liere, Lee Lozano: Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Hauser and Wirth, 2006), unpaginated.

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  • Tell Me What You Know

    Mostly written in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Robert BarryWednesday, March 11, 2015
    Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture
    205 Hudson Street Gallery, Hunter College, City University of New York, MFA Campus, New York

    You know how lyrics from pop songs look trite and sometimes embarrassing when written down, but come alive convincingly when performed? It’s the same for artist’s talks. Some excel when presenting in public. If an artist is charismatic, unremarkable work becomes good and good work becomes great. The opposite is also true: interesting work can come across as ordinary.

    The renowned first-generation Conceptualist Robert Barry is one of those artists whose work—which explores speech, memory, light, time, belief, anticipation, fragility, making connections, and states of flux and change—shines when interpretations are expanded on by others. It’s not that he’s inarticulate. Far from it—the artist speaks clearly, in a straightforward manner. But there was a lack of excitement to his reflections on a six-decade career during a lecture at the Hunter College Art Galleries, held in conjunction with the retrospective Robert Barry: All the things I know … 1962 to the present. His discussion about old and new works revealed no earthshaking revelations but offered plenty to remind you of the humanity behind the brainy work you read about in art-history books.

    Born in the Bronx in 1936—and he still has the accent to prove it—Barry received two degrees at Hunter College, earning a BFA in 1957 and an MA in 1963.1 As a student, he took classes with the renowned scholar and curator William Rubin; the artist Robert Motherwell was his advisor. The art department was impressive: William Baziotes taught watercolor, Ray Parker taught oil painting, and Tony Smith taught in a three-piece suit. After Barry obtained his terminal degree, he was hired as a professor at Hunter by Eugene C. Goossen, an art critic, historian, and curator who was the department chair. Barry taught there from 1964 to 1979, a job he admitted made it easy for him to avoid producing art commodities to support his practice.

    Robert Barry speaks to an audience at Hunter College (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Like many Conceptualists, Barry started out as a painter, and the exhibition’s oldest work is a painting of gridded red and black squares, a student piece from 1962. By the end of the decade, his attitude toward art changed, and he began working with ephemeral, invisible, and nonart materials, such as typewritten statements like “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 p.m.; June 15, 1969.” He also experimented with electromagnetic waves, with pieces that triggered metaphysical thoughts from scientific concepts. “The most powerful things in the world were invisible,” Barry said regarding Electromagnetic Energy Field (1968), which is “a battery-powered transmitter encased in a nondescript metal box [that] sends out waves of energy, filling the gallery space with an invisible, immeasurable, but nonetheless real force.”2 With a sound “kind of like a whistle,” Electromagnetic Energy Field was as large as its audible range. Carrier Wave (1968–69), Barry said, blots out all other signals in the area. The artist’s father, who was an electrical engineer (and a disk jockey in the 1940s, using his own equipment), made the radio-wave boxes for his son’s art projects.3 At the time, the artist revealed, a telekinetic institute operated near the 57th Street galleries in Manhattan where he first showed these pieces, so he knew he was in the right area.

    “I used to call galleries ‘cemeteries,’” Barry said confidently, and several classic works examined art-world mechanics. When dealers contacted him for shows, he told them, “Well, right now I’m closing galleries.” His Closed Gallery (1969) was first done at Eugenia Butler’s space in Los Angeles, and also in Amsterdam and Turin. “Lock the door,” he joked. “Don’t let anybody in.” The public was notified of the negated exhibitions by postcard.

    Before the lecture, the Hunter professor Joachim Pissarro discussed Robert Barry’s exhibition in the galleries; Robert Barry is on the far left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Conceptual artists notoriously pillaged spheres of knowledge outside the domain of fine art. Barry noticed the beautiful Greek names of the noble gases, which are elements on the periodic table that rarely interact with other elements or change chemically. For one his best-known works, Inert Gas Series: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, from a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (1969), Barry purchased glass containers of these gases from a distributor that worked with schools and, with his dealer Seth Siegelaub, drove a rented Mercedes convertible into the Mohave Desert, where he laid the containers on newspaper and smashed them with a hammer. He smashed more bottles of gas at a Beverly Hills hotel. Siegelaub wanted to document things—these works are typically shown as typeset text and black-and-white photographs in frames—but Barry did not. Nearly fifty years later, the many cubic feet of neon, xenon, and other gases that he released are still floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, somewhere.

    “Barry does not work with words; he communicates conditions.” So wrote the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard. One of these conditions, based on trust and agreement, is evident a class assignment for students that Barry sent to David Askevold at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1969:

    The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.

    It’s true—nobody is sure if the secret was revealed immediately, as one account goes, or forgotten, as goes another. In a way, misinformation is part of the piece. “I’m not even sure this is a piece,” Barry conceded. “It’s about the fragility of ideas…. It’s life. That’s what life is about.” Two older works received attention during tonight’s lecture: Robert Barry Presents Three Shows and a Review by Lucy R. Lippard (1971) and Marcus Piece (1970). For the former, Lippard wrote a short essay about Barry’s work that, with a collection of index cards that described other pieces she included in other exhibitions, formed a show at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Another text-based piece quoted the philosopher Herbert Marcuse: “A place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’” Barry’s strategy was “to plagiarize his idea and make art from it.”

    Installation view of Robert Barry’s Red Cross (2008) at Yvon Lambert Gallery in 2009

    Barry’s work since the 1970s has been more oblique: collections of words that are read out loud, drawn or stickered directly on walls, appear in paintings, are cast in acrylic, or projected onto the floor. The words he chooses typically express states of being and abstract actions—and he rarely employs nouns. In the Hunter College exhibition, Barry placed transparent vinyl letters on the windows facing Canal Street. His videos are likewise impressionistic, such as one he filmed on a train and in the Centre Pompidou–Metz in France. It’s easy to understand how critics and historians tend to focus on Barry’s early work, because his production from the last thirty years requires viewers to engage more, to be active participants in shaping meaning.

    If I were conducting an interview with Barry, I would ask him about these more recent works, skipping over the 1960s stuff that many people know.4 But that is not what Max Weintraub, an adjunct professor at Hunter and the exhibition’s cocurator, did when he joined the artist onstage for a lackluster dialogue. Weintraub asked about topics already covered in Barry’s lecture, such as the mechanics of the art world, so maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. The professor asked an asinine question about blurred authorship of Three Shows and a Review: “Did it occur to you that [Lippard] was doing a Robert Barry?” “No,” the artist responded. Barry and Lippard had conversations, and her writing contribution was perfect. Weintraub did get Barry to talk more about the Closed Gallery pieces, including the one in Los Angeles that employed two old ladies from a telephone answering service in a little office on Sunset Boulevard.

    Max Weinberg and Robert Barry talk (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    An audience member asked about the difference between a serious work of Conceptual art and a joke—a great question but one left answered. Barry said he needed specific works to compare because he doesn’t like generalities. (The questioner did not give examples.) “‘Conceptual’ is a bad word,” another attendee commented. “Is there one you prefer?” “No,” Barry responded. There’s always something physical about art, he said, though using the term is a convenience and valuable because “you get into shows.” It is rare that an artist cites the benefits of labels and categories. Conceptual art is tangible in other ways. Barry urged artists in the audience that “you should get something for your labor” and “you can’t give it away.” He got over that attitude. His work is valuable.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 According to a 2010 Archives of American Art interview with Robert Barry, what is now Lehman College in the Bronx was part of Hunter College.

    2 Steven Stern, “The Quick and the Dead,” Frieze 125 (September 2009).

    3 Barry explained: “My dad gave me a hand, making up these little transmitters that sent out a signal. If you put one in the gallery, and also had a portable radio turned to that frequency, it gave off a whistle. I don’t think my dad had any idea how this connected to art or my drawing, but he had fun doing it.” Barry, quoted in Benjamin Genocchio, “A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art,” New York Times, November 30, 2003.

    3 For criticism on his recent work, see my Artforum.com review of Barry’s 2009 exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York.

  • Life Is Changed

    Tehching Hsieh
    Tuesday, March 3, 2015
    Artists at the Institute
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House, New York

    Tehching Hsieh speaks at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tehching Hsieh created among the most radical, strenuous, and bizarre bodies of work in all of art history. Only prisoners with life sentences or captured soldiers could ever relate to the parameters Hsieh set for himself for his five One Year Performances, which he described in chronological order during his lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts. Prisoners of crime or war rarely elect to put themselves in a position that isolated themselves, mentally and physically, for long periods of time.

    Speaking broken English in a thick Asian accent, Hsieh told his life story as an artist. Born and raised in Taiwan, he “jumped ship” in Philadelphia on July 13, 1974, while serving with the Taiwanese Merchant Marine (and after his compulsory three-year military service). Hsieh headed for New York, where he lived for fourteen years as an illegal immigrant as he tried to establish himself in the downtown art scene. In fact, he even made an artwork resembling a US Immigration Service “wanted poster” four years after surreptitiously slipping into the country.

    Poster for Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance (1978–79) (artwork © Tehching Hsieh)

    For his first One Year Performance (1978–79), also known as Cage Piece, Hsieh (using the first name Sam) built a mock jail cell, about one hundred square feet, in his TriBeCa loft, where he lived without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for an entire year.1 After reading the brief explanation of the piece from the digital image of a typewritten manuscript projected onscreen, Hsieh explained how he rationalized his cramped quarters: “Space—I try to create bigger…. I try to make so this corner become my home. Opposite corner become outside. So every day I can go out, take a walk, and come home.” He held visiting hours, but not many people came to visit this human zoo. For his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, he reconstructed the cell, which was displayed with documentation of the project.2

    Presenting his career chronologically, Hsieh described the second One Year Performance (1980–81), also known as Time Clock Piece, in which the artist set a goal to punch a time clock on the hour, every hour, for 365 consecutive days. Hsieh screened a video of the film he made at the time—a six-and-a-half-minute succession of single 16mm film frames taken every time he punched the clock. As the hours and days progressed, the hair on Hsieh’s shaved head grew out, and he looked considerably tired toward the end. What struck me the most was how Hsieh just stood there, in the silent room at the institute, with an expressionless look on his face, blinking occasionally as he watched the rapidly changing stills of himself from thirty-five years ago.

    Tehching Hsieh watches himself on film (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For his third One Year Performance (1981–82), Hsieh—now using his real first name, Tehching—spent the entire year without entering an indoor space. Almost. The New York City police detained him briefly, and a video clip of Outdoor Piece that Hsieh showed included footage from the day when cops dragged him into the station house after a vagrancy arrest. Again, Hsieh’s face was expressionless as he watched his younger self, screaming hysterically.

    The fourth One Year Performance (1983–84) was subtitled Art/Life or Rope Piece. For the project, Hsieh tied himself to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano, with an eight-foot-long rope. “She like to do meditation, but I don’t quite … feeling,” he joked as he showed a photograph—one of several hundred taken during the span of the performance—of a grumpy-looking next to an absorbed Montano. While Hsieh didn’t hold a job for his first three pieces, he did construction work during the fourth to make a little money, and he traveled with Montano to Philadelphia, where she taught. Many of their conversations were audiotaped, Hsieh said, flashing an image of ordinary cassettes sealed in plastic cases—intended never to be heard. Like the previous pieces, the artist never described what it was like in the midst of the performance, providing us only with basic facts—and limited ones at that. What was, for example, the significance of the start and end date of July 4?

    Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, One Year Performance, 1983–84 (artwork © Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano)

    The fifth One Year Performance (1985–86), in which Hsieh did not see, talk, or read about art, but “just go in life,” preceded the sixth, called Thirteen Year Plan or Earth, which lasted from his thirty-sixth to his forty-ninth birthday. From December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999, Hsieh stated that he would make art but not show it. He tried to “disappear” in Alaska but only made it as far as Seattle, working the same kind of jobs he did in New York when fresh off the boat. (He also sold his early paintings for $500,000 and bought a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that housed a residency program for artists.) A poster for each project is the only documentation we have of how Hsieh spent his time. Onscreen he showed digital renditions of his desired retrospective, a timeline of his work in eighteen equally size rooms, one for each year of his performances. In his proposed exhibition, visitors would walk through and become aware their own personal time, thinking about their own life experiences.

    Tehching Hsieh presented a diagram of his ideal retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, an audience member asked Hsieh which performance had the strongest impact for him? Hsieh skirted the question, explicating further his concept of separating “art time” and “life time,” the latter of which happens between performances, and of thinking about present time. “I don’t want people to see my work as document,” he said, considering the documentation as the proverbial tip of an iceberg.

    One audience member quizzed the artist about his reconstruction of Cage Piece at MoMA—some folks get really hung up on originals and re-creations—but what is more interesting to me is if that performance can be restaged under the same conditions. Ten years ago Marina Abramović covered five classic works of 1960s and 1970s performance art—by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman—in Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during the first iteration of Performa, the New York–based biennial of performance art. Can you imagine her or anyone else punching a time clock every hour for a year or staying outdoors for 365 days? Even if someone were crazy enough to redo Cage Piece, that person’s experience would be completely different that Hsieh’s.

    A thoughtful attendee asked Hsieh how he first conceived time as his medium, so Hsieh started from the beginning. Reminiscing about his early days in Taiwan, “I’m very good for abstract painting,” he laughed, “express my emotion.” After college friends who had traveled to the West described Conceptual art to him, he experimented on his own, including a jump from a second-floor window (a la Yves Klein) and exposing one hundred newspapers that were laid on the ground with paint. In New York Hsieh worked as a dishwasher from 1974 to 1978, an experience he considered a “four year wasting time experience,” during which he thought about life. “I don’t go looking for it,” he explained his realization. “I already in the situation. I just repeat wasting time one more year. I will catch it. I just create a form. I did it in a cage.” Hsieh deems himself to be best at wasting time, a time of freedom during which “freethinking” can happen. “Life is difficult, but you’re still freethinking.”

    Hsieh avoided confirming the audience’s interpretations of his work: fear and bureaucracy as form, the legal medium, and so on. Instead, he responded, “I’m more like caveman.” Hsieh’s work may concern Zen Buddhism, the penal system, and political asylum, and the artist is content to let others elucidate its meaning. Critics and historians have done a good job. Colby Chamberlain recently wrote: “By pledging to imprison himself in his studio, or to punch a time-clock at hourly intervals, or to stay outdoors, Hsieh imposed on his own body strictures that reverberated with wider regimes of control: incarceration, labor, homelessness (and, perhaps, in the case of his collaboration with Linda Montano, marriage).”3 And six years ago, Roberta Smith assessed Hsieh’s succession of performances: “For ‘Cage Piece’ Mr. Hsieh deprived himself of nearly all contact with the world. In the next four pieces he eliminated, in succession, concentration, shelter, privacy and finally art itself. In each case he altered the nature of time radically for himself and, retrospectively, us.”4 She is right—he made this work, putting himself through these strenuous activities, so we don’t have to. And neither does he: Hsieh more or less retired from making art on January 1, 2000, after concluding the Thirteen Year Plan.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Ryan Kleiner, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture,” Ryan Kleiner Digital Media Portfolio, May 13, 2015.

    Jake Peck, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture Spring 2015 UNR,” Art 350, May 7, 2015.

    Watch

    1 Hsieh does not consider the scratch marks on the wall for each passing day to be writing.

    2 For more on the MoMA exhibition, see Roberta Smith, “A Year in a Cage: A Life Shrunk to Expand Art,” New York Times, February 18, 2009; and Deborah Sontag, “A Caged Man Breaks Out at Last,” New York Times, March 1, 2009.

    3 Colby Chamberlain, “Barely Legal,” Artforum.com, March 4, 2015.

    4 Smith, “A Year in a Cage.”

  • Fun Fun Fun on the Infobahn

    The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions
    Sunday, May 11, 2014
    Frieze Talks 2014
    Frieze Projects, Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    Dana Schutz, Google, 2006, oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    In her opening remarks for “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at the art fair Frieze New York, the panel’s moderator Orit Gat remarked that conversation about net neutrality has changed in recent years. Indeed, public awareness regarding the controlling forces behind the delivery infrastructure of the web has risen sharply after two pieces of federal legislation introduced in 2011—the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—failed to develop, along with the “internet blackout” protest on January 28, 2012, and the onslaught of related op-ed pieces over the last couple years.

    Reducing the information superhighway to fast and slow lanes would no doubt pave the way to chaos on the roads on which millions of ordinary Americans travel daily. We would witness terrible bottlenecks and breakdowns, insufferable congestion and gridlock, and relentless construction work and impossible detours. If the internet behemoths have their way, Gat warned, “you will stream Netflix faster than you read the New York Times, if Netflix chooses to pay for it.” And the start-ups, the nonprofits, and all those individually maintained websites would presumably stall into obscurity. I wonder, though, how significant net neutrality is for contemporary artists, especially those who work closely with digital media. Based on this panel discussion, the issue doesn’t seem that important, but related topics—such as how the corporatization of the internet affects artists and the definition of postinternet art—are of particular interest.

    Oblique view of “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Gat, a writer and editor for Rhizome and WdW Review, quickly gave a chronological history of the web as it intersected with digital art. While working at CERN in Switzerland, the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) in 1989. Internet art grew in the early 1990s, she continued, helped along when US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly expanded online access for many citizens and businesses. Artists have influenced the web’s look and feel as we know it today much more than we realize, Gat said, and that internet and postinternet art developed simultaneously. This makes sense—thinking about Web 2.0, you can’t theorize the massive influence of Facebook and OkCupid, which launched in 2004 and run at full steam today, without considering LiveJournal and the Makeout Club, both founded in 1999 (but now puttering along). Despite the term “post,” Gat insisted, there is no art after the internet. Rather, postinternet art is a product of, and a response to, the changing digital landscape.

    The first speaker was Gene McHugh, a writer and curator known for the blog Post Internet, who spoke biographically. The mainstream migration of people to the web, he said, took place in the late 1990s, when he was in high school. “I was an internet addict,” he said. “My identity was as much online as it was a body sitting there typing.” I was relieved McHugh advocated a synthetic view of a person’s relationship to digital culture, instead of trotting out the clichéd internet/IRL divide.

    The cover of the print book edition of Gene McHugh’s Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (2011)

    McHugh intended Post Internet to explore and connect modes of digital production to modernism and the Pictures Generation—a pretentious approach, he admitted. Modernist terms, he came to realize as the project evolved, are not useful when describing the banal behavior of checking Gmail and social networks and watching cat videos. “The writing was rough, in retrospect,” he said, and also full of young fervor. For Post Internet McHugh deliberately chose the default blog settings, a kind of readymade design that he said created an awareness of the self-publication format. That sounds suspiciously like self-reflexive modernism, like Jean-Luc Godard foregrounding the act of making and watching films. The blog’s domain name contained a short string of numbers (122909a.com), and the posts contained only writing—no embedded links or photos.1 “It’s a certain way to approach the internet” that he said was characteristic of the late 2000s. “If you push it far into this banal realm, it works in an interesting way.”

    McHugh explained Guthrie Lonergan’s term “internet aware art” as meaning offline art made with the internet in mind, or art made with an eye toward how it will look online. Considering time as an element, McHugh theorized that multiauthor projects such as the Jogging and Dump.fm, as well as surfing clubs, can be understood as performance, since you can follow this activity online but in real time. He also identified Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith as artists exploring this kind of art in different ways.

    The second speaker, the artist and writer Tyler Coburn, wanted to define postinternet, and especially that nagging prefix “post.” Instead, he read a formal, polemical, and somewhat difficult-to-follow artist’s statement that addressed the art market and art history. “The current market for postinternet art,” Coburn claimed, “is nothing if not robust.” He was less optimistic about periodization, which constricts some artists and renders others illegible. I don’t, however, find it unreasonable to group together similar artists and their work for the sake of convenience, acknowledging, of course, that such categorization doesn’t always make sense at a granular level. As problematic as they might be, terms like Cubism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism simply work. As much the term postinternet makes its supporters anxious, it still allows them to slide their work into a relevant discourse.

    Regarding his own critical practice, Coburn firmly stated: “My work attempts to disenchant the dominant metaphors and mindsets at work in contemporary technology.” The reflexivity and opacity of digital infrastructure concern him greatly, as do finding a digital space outside Facebook and exploring emerging methods and practices, whatever those may be. He named Benjamin H. Bratton and Ann Hirsch as people doing critical work and cited his own project, I’m That Angel (2012–13), which took the form of a physical book and several readings inside data farms around the world, as another example.

    Readings of Tyler Coburn’s I’m That Angel at EvoSwitch in Haarlem, the Netherlands, took place June 6–7, 2013

    Christiane Paul, a professor and program director at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct curator of new media arts for the Whitney Museum of American Art, ran through highlights of a previous talk called “The Network Space,” which chronicles the transition from web 1.0 and web 2.0—in particular the move from publishing (e.g., personal websites) to participation and broadcasting (blogging)—through works of art. She mentioned Mark Napier’s browser mash-up Riot (1999/2000); Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces (2011), a fictitious dating website created from scraped Facebook profiles; projects such as Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam (1996–2003) and its commercially oriented spawn, lonelygirl15 (2006–8); and Aaron Koblin’s crowd-sourced drawings for The Sheep Market (2006).

    Shane Hope, Backdoor.Deathsys.exe Running Soon on a Death Cube Near You: Posted Two Thousand Sixty Whatever and Ever, 2007, oil on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (artwork © Shane Hope)

    According to Paul, “There’s nothing post in postinternet” art, which she described as work that is “deeply informed by networked technology” and is digitally aware but takes the form of material objects. Paul’s canon of postinternet artists includes Rafaël Rozendaal, Clement Valla, Petra Cortright, John Raffman, Evan Roth, and Katie Torn—artists who have emerged in the past few years. For me, some of the best work about the internet (using Paul’s formulation) came even earlier and often took offline forms. Seth Price’s ongoing explorations of digital distribution (since 2000), Adam McEwen’s drawings of text messages from a Nokia phone (ca. 2006–8?), Shane Hope’s rickety laptops built from painted wood scraps (2006) and his paintings of imaginary digital-device screens (2007), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s bizarre videos (2006–present), and even Dana Schutz’s Google (2006), where she sits in her studio entranced by the offerings of the almighty company’s Image Search—these artworks, made by fairly traditional and post-Conceptual artists (and not necessarily creators of digitally sophisticated forms), explore the condition of interacting with digital networks and technologies.2 On a side note, one of the most brilliant artworks of the George W. Bush era was Ramsay Stirling’s animated GIF, Enduring Freedom (2008).

    Anyway, postinternet art takes on a physical form, Paul reminded us, but whether or not a viewer understands the concept of the form (or its subject matter) is another issue. Like Gat before her, Paul noticed the increasing corporatization of the internet during the 1990s but, in slight contrast to Coburn’s celebration of sales of postinternet art, stated that the market for internet art hasn’t changed since the 1990s. How do these observations square with Rachel Greene, who ten years ago wrote that “as yet, there exists no viable or stable market for net art.”3 Furthermore, Paul vaguely described an antimarket attitude among postinternet artists, who are “savvier” in some undisclosed way. It’s not clear to me how artists working in the digital realm are making money—or not—based on these three assessments.

    Christiane Paul (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    The conversation among the panelists after their individual presentations progressed productively. McHugh argued that first-generation net artists, who had trained academically, were happy working in the margins, and that younger artists would have used paintbrushes, too, if they hadn’t grown up digital. Nevertheless, he said, those younger artists still want the white-cube experience.

    Gat complained that much digital art ends up looking the same, aggravated by the ubiquitous use of Facebook and products from Google (and Google Earth in particular). She wondered if artists are problematizing the operations of these corporations or are complicit with them. I sympathize with her wariness of the dependence on proprietary corporate platforms. If Tumblr, which allows people to use their own domain names for their microblog but doesn’t offer back-end programming access, pulled the plug tomorrow, the content for every site would likely disappear with it. Conversely, platforms are occasionally abandoned en masse by their users. Remember all those indie bands that created MySpace pages instead designing their own stand-alone websites? Well, they’re on Soundcloud and Bandcamp now, because that’s where the audience is. The question is, how much self-sufficiency should an artist relinquish to reach that audience? McHugh said that postinternet art aims for a larger audience beyond the art world. Paul doesn’t see Google taking over art with a nonexclusive right, and there are ways to combat marketing, such as, for example, by “liking” everything.

    I agree with Gat in that postinternet artists often produce consumer-friendly work which anyone can make, and that using a popular, deskilled digital process does make things homogenous. But Coburn reminded us that, whether it’s art that conforms to the New Aesthetic, a term used by the writer James Bridle to describe a certain kind of visuality, or automatic, personless photography taken by drones and satellites and affiliated with corporations and governments, this is how we view the world now. Besides, Paul added, it’s easy to argue that any style or moment can appear homogenous. For her it’s Abstract Expressionism, but for me the black-and-white photographs, typewritten texts, and maps of Conceptual art and Earthworks readily come to mind. While artists in the late 1960s were emulating science and industry—what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called the aesthetic of administration—postinternet artists are making user-end art, based not on programming and hand coding, skills the first generation of net artist learned, but rather on out-of-the-box applications. Postinternet artists—who Coburn proposed are targeting nonart audiences but needing art-world legitimation—want to have their cake and eat it too. Paul said that criticality comes from within the medium, an awkward position of which artists are aware. A curator (like herself) looks at both critical work and the stuff “riding the wave of flashiness.”

    The idea of audience intrigued me. I wondered how much contemporary digital art—especially the stuff using Google Maps or Twitter—would be interesting to your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What would highly skilled programmers and designers make of work by all the artists mentioned during this panel? Probably with the same kind of amusement that a 1970s Hollywood filmmaker would have when viewing early video art by William Wegman and Vito Acconci. Similarly, what kind of distinctions would contemporary programmers and designers make between an art-gallery video and an amateur YouTube clip? We’re now fully immersed in the world in which the gap between art and life has ceased to exist. Would avant-garde artists who championed that notion one hundred years ago be horrified or pleased with early-twenty-first-century practices?

    Tyler Coburn (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)

    An audience member had the same idea and queried the panelists about differences between avant-garde or critical artists and the general public when both use the same digital tools. The gap has collapsed, McHugh said, but artists are examining issues other than these products, such as the physical and environmental impact of cloud computing. But that is also an important topic for mainstream media, especially in states such as North Carolina, where Apple has built several solar-powered data farms. Paul said that while some artists produce interesting work from behind the curve, most of them are “by nature and statistically” ahead of the curve, waiting for the technologies to be invented for their use. Char Davies, she recalled, was a frustrated painter who in the 1980s helped create Softimage, a software application for three-dimensional image creation that was later acquired by Microsoft in the 1990s. That happened twenty years ago—which artists have done something like this recently?

    Another audience member linked the web’s founding in 1989 to the fall of communism and then asked about digital natives of technology and of “markets as the only way of organizing the world.” Is postinternet a condition, he wanted to know, and not a subgenre? “I would say absolutely, yes,” said Paul. “It’s not an art movement. It’s not an art genre.” She acknowledged that (art-historical) acceptance comes from the market, and that museums look to the market for validation. For her, artists and critical practitioners must therefore denaturalize the present condition and create suspicion, whatever that might be. McHugh wondered about the critical role of writers and curators, of articles and exhibitions. I’d say all of that is highly important to the development of both internet and postinternet art, which is still very much up in the cloud, I mean, in the air.

    In Terms Of count: 12.

    1 Funded in part by a grant from the Arts Writers Grant Program, Post Internet published regularly for most of 2010 but was then taken offline. McHugh’s collected posts can be read online or downloaded as a PDF for free, or purchased as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.

    2 For a superb essay on Schutz’s painting Google, see Steven Stern, “Image Search,” Frieze 106 (April 2007): 136–41.

    3 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 31.

    Listen

    Frieze Projects New York has posted an audio recording of this panel.