Supposium @ MoMa

I'm trying to aim for brevity these days, so let's see if I can adapt. 

Yesterday at MoMa I attended the Supposium, an interactive "thought experiment," aimed toward moving "beyond default geometries of attention," which comprised "[Six Thought Experiments Beginning with 'Suppose']." That is the way the flyer announced the event and the way it unfolded. Before I describe it in greater detail, I want to thank Chris Stackhouse for forwarding the announcement to me, which allowed me to sign up and attend.

The Supposium announcement

The Supposium was a refreshingly simple but provocative and generative participatory event, of the kind I don't take part in enough, and that should be available to more people, more frequently. There were a sizable number of Bard College, MoMa people, and upstate New York art world people involved, but from what I could tell, there were also people who did not have as direct links to the principles, who included the author and critic Joan Retallack, and Adam Pendleton, very the talented young artist. 

The Supposium worked like this: Pendleton thanked folks and Retallack delivered her intro, which invoked among others John Cage, the first half involved 6 “thought experiments” based on the word and premise “suppose"—a video, by Sandi Hilal, architect and co-founder of DAAR-Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, based in the West Bank, on architectural forms and discourse in the refugee camps in Palestine; author Peter Krapp talking about simulation and the history of the “thought experiment” going back to Thales; Pendleton riffing on “suppose to choose," with detours through African American Vernacular English (AAVE); poet and critical polymath Fred Moten doing his dazzling thing, letting a long early 1950s piece by Miles play without saying anything, which made some people uncomfortable, before he provide a sideswerve of exegetical lyricism; and finally poet, critic and scholar Anne Carson presenting 73 conditional sentences (If x….,) based on a drawing of a seated figure. As they spoke/performed we were supposed to take notes in reporters' notebooks provided to us, and I did, and then after each finished we had 2 minutes to write down further thoughts, questions, etc.

We broke for 15 minutes of food and drinks. During this period I ran into a number of friends I hadn't seen in a while, as well as others I knew would be there. Then we resumed the project, and the entire room was reconfigured into a giant oval. From this we then broke down into smaller groups, mini-ovals, of varying sizes, to undertake instructions that were on the back page of a handout we all received. In my oval were poet Erica Kaufman, art historian Micah Pollack, two famous artists Lorraine O’Grady, whom I've written about enthusiastically before on this site, and Beverly Sims, Beverly’s husband Henry, and one of Pendelton’s friends, a former Bostonian named Karsten C. As a group I felt we interacted well and fluidly. One common thread for several of us involved having lived in Boston and its environs. I was one of the few who could say much positive about my time there, though it was also often quite difficult in multiple ways.

The instructions from Joan were based in part on Cagean procedure. We had to take six quotes from our notes, write them on notecards, read them to each other. Then we had to shuffle the cards so that we only had one of our cards. We ended up creating an “exquisite corpse” style piece (a cento, really). Each group performed them. Some sang; some presented multichannel-style readings; others spoke in unison; others chanted their words in sequence; one group recreated a “thought experiment” using words from the “thought experiment” presentations. I gather that the goal was for there to be more unscripted exchanges, for people to respond individually too, but perhaps there were too many of us and perhaps many people felt a bit shy. It was great nevertheless to hear all the ways people interpreted, processed and performed what they took from the presentations and the concept of “suppose.”

By then it was 6:30 pm, so everyone said goodbye but we passed in the cards and have until April 1 to return something more for a forthcoming book. I have some ideas that I plan to tinker with. In terms of the event overall I found it a wonderful way to spend a Sunday, a fascinating new mix of people to create something with, and really special for the time I had to chat with the members of my group, not least among them the amazing Lorraine O’Grady. I hope more such events are happening soon!

The room after the break

Joan Retallack, showing us how
to configure the groups

The oval, to the right of me 

The oval to the left of me

Lorraine and Karsten 

Erica and Lorraine

One of the groups (Anne Carson
and Fred Moten at left)

Emotional Outreach Project 5.0: Emotional Exercises

CROSS-POSTED AT FIELD RESEARCH STUDY GROUP A BLOG

Starting tomorrow and throughout January and February, the Emotional Outreach Project 5.0: Emotional Exercises, will be underway at This Red Door @ Kunsthalle Galapagos, in DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY. 

Emotional Exercise Card

EMOTIONAL OUTREACH PROJECT

EMOTIONAL EXERCISES

January-February 2014

Dear Collaborator:

Thank you so much for agreeing to participate in the "Emotional Outreach Project, 5.0: Emotional Exercises." Previous versions of the "Emotional Outreach Project" have comprised a series of business card-sized vouchers, which we originally distributed in 2002-2003 (in New York, Jersey City and Chicago), 2007 (in New York, Jersey City and Chicago), 2009 (in Cuba, in Spanish), and 2013 (in New York, and for the 4.0 version, in Germany, in English, German and Yiddish). The cards have been distributed free of charge and with disinterest to individuals, under various performative and temporal controls and using specified variables.

This 5.0 version of the "Emotional Outreach Project" marks a change in approach. While maintaining a focus on the emotions and affect, this new version proceeds along the axis of a different but linked conceptual approach, that of the "instruction," a perennial of conceptual and performance art, here mobilized toward the practice and goal of an "emotional exercise," similar in concept but different and distinct in its underlying ideological and belief system from the "spiritual exercises" of ancient Greek philosophers (cf. Pierre Hadot, etc.), those of the Church, particularly those of St. Ignatius of Loyola, or more contemporary versions (cf. Michel Foucault, etc.). As with the previous versions of the "Emotional Outreach Project," this version is electively participatory; the unspoken assumption is that taking a card enters one into the process of participation, collaboration and engagement.

On one side of the cards, in bold black ink, we list a series of discrete, simple, perhaps banal instructions, one per card (the total exceeding 100), which range from "Spend most of one day asking questions. Remain silent, and avoid positive or negative assertions of any sort, unless absolutely necessary (with family members, for your job, etc.). Briefly write up the experience," to "Create an imaginary word that means love, and teach it to someone else. Urge them to teach it and continue the process." Each of the instructions is simple and self-explanatory. Rather than identifying an emotion or emotions in an a priori fashion as the prior vouchers did, these allow the necessary emotions to arise from the performance of the instructions, and any subsequent actions the participant engages in linked to them.

On the flip side the cards now read:

Dear friend, thank you for participating in this emotional exercise. When you have satisfied the instructions on this card, please enclose the card or attach it to a postcard & mail it to: John Keene, Rutgers-Newark, Conklin 321, 175 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102
You may also email a copy of the card to: fieldresearchstudygroup@yahoo.com

Thus, participants, having fulfilled the instructions, should return the used cards, either by US Postal service to the name and address--or photographed/scanned to the email address--listed above.

We greatly appreciate your collaboration and participation in this project. Thanks so much, and best wishes for the holidays and New Year,

FIELD RESEARCH STUDY GROUP A
*Email: fieldresearchstudygroup[AT]yahoo.com

Ann Hamilton's "the event of a thread"

"the event of a thread"

Yesterday, with the end of the exciting but also exhausting fall academic semester nearly over and no classes or meetings scheduled,  I took a little time to see artist Ann Hamilton's much-heralded participatory installation, "the event of a thread", which is occurring in the Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, at Park Avenue and 66th Street, through January 6, 2012. If you are in New York, I would urge you to catch it before it's gone. Some artists create works that can only be described as child-like and reveal the world to us through a perspective we may have lost; others produce artifacts that are childish, and make us wonder what their point is, beyond puerility; and then there is an Ann Hamilton, who, in the event of a thread, can invoke and return to us, via physical and emotional means, some of the wonder and most pleasurable moments of childhood while also pressing us to think carefully and critically about what she's up to.

The readers and the pigeons

Roberta Smith's some what snarky New York Times review of this installation ("I don’t even know if this is art, participatory theater, a refreshing sociological experiment in how quickly adults will take up childish things, or perhaps a harbinger of the next fitness craze."--is she kidding? In light of Fluxus, Conceptual Art, Performance Art, Relational Aesthetics, she is still asking such a question?) positively highlights its most notable element, the field of giant swings, which suspend from the Armory hall's main roof, and which I can attest are tremendous fun. They are large enough to hold two or three people, and are solid enough that you can really take flight in them without fear, so long as you hold on tightly, of plummeting to the floor.  To quote Hamilton herself: 

"I can remember the feeling of swinging--how hard we would work for those split seconds, flung at furthest extension, just before the inevitable downward and backward pull, when we felt momentarily free of gravity, a little hiccup of suspension when our hands loosened on the chain and our torsos raised off the seat. we were sailing, so inside the motion--time stopped--and then suddenly rushed toward us again. We would line up on the playground and try to touch the sky, alone together."

Inside motion, time stopping, alone together, touching sky--these feelings this installation replicates, multiply. The ever-changing crowd, emptying and filling swings ensure this. But there's more to the exhibit than the vast swing set; each one is linked, by cables, pullies and weights, to a giant white silk curtain that undulates based on the motions of each swing, creating an interdependent system in which each individual participant and all collectively control the motions of the curtain, those "many crossings of the near at hand and the far away" that Hamilton was hoping to produce, "transmission[s]" and connections, but also suggesting figuratively, at least to me on a winter day far warmer than usual, our global climate system. That the curtain itself, from a distance and up close, evokes both cloud and wave, only reinforced this. Smith notes that it echoes the work of Christo and Jean-Claude, which it certainly does, and it also reminded me of Hans Haacke's Blue Sail (1964-65, in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Art) which floated like a dream in space, lifted only by fans and a counter-weight system, at the Ghosts in the Machine show at New York's New Museum this past fall. Like Haacke's piece, the curtain's metaphorical and analogic effects are immediate and enthralling.

Listening to one of the radios, with the swings and curtain behind me

The swings could have been enough, yet they hover in a larger field of ever-changing bodies, shifting interior light and ambient and projected, amplified sound, as well as a constellation of concepts and practices that Hamilton defines, obliquely but enticingly, in a free newspaper-like document that I'm glad I picked up and glanced at before writing this review.  As she has done with prior installations, this one includes seating figures at a desk, engagement with space and time, and a score.  As you enter the Drill Hall, you approach two announcers, reading from scrolls of text at a table, covered with 42 tiny pigeon cages, some of the birds in them cooing, some sleeping, several look a bit distressed; at the other end of the hall sits a scribe, dutifully writing away whatever he thinks of. All three seated figures wear thick shearling coats over denim worksuits. The announcers, actors from SITI Company, declaim from a collage-text concordance of works by authors ranging from Aristotle to Ann Lauterbach, but there are also portable radios, trussed in twine and brown-paper bags, that broadcast the announcers' declamations. Listening to one for a bit had a hypnotic effect on me. I would not suggest doing so while   swinging and trying to photograph oneself.

The swings and curtain

As I said, Hamilton provides her thoughts on the installation in the accompanying free newspaper, listing her motivations, intentions, and the projects key concepts. In a series of insightful, dictionary-like entries titled "Regarding...," authors Natalie Shapiro and Harry Reese offer their conceptual readings of each. Reese writes in "Regarding Touch,"

A knife, a watch, a motor, a stylus are able to do the same thing repetitively, the way that our hands begin and complete many different functions while remaining our hands. New hand tools and other mechanical devices have not replaced old hand tools as much as they have coexisted with them. 

Consciousness is not a verbal process and we learn through the fingers and hands in ways we cannot investigate or explain otherwise. From their start, digital technologies have depended upon the tactile environment to validate its generation, transmission, and reception. 

The tactility of visual art refers to what can be touched and let go, but not forgotten. Each sense creates its space. Tactility is not a sense, and although it often involves the sense of touch, it is the common-sense meeting place of all the senses. Constant touch however, is not tactile. Tactility refers to the gap in between an artifact and a medium. Tactility is the space of the resonant interval, what is touched and let go.

People having fun on the swings

Soundspacetimescape, what we enter, touch, exit and let go of, the complex sensorium everyone present creates and experiences at all times, sometimes with enjoyment and contemplation, but which is sharpened to its constituent elements in the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall: these are the events of a thread that Hamilton successfully pulls off. With (y)our help of course. So you must go see it and do you part, having some real fun in the process.

More photos and a video after the jump:

And Speaking of Relational Aesthetics: Youngman Hennessy

Carolina G. (thank you!) sent me the link to the video below, by Hennessy Youngman, which also appears on 1) the Gavin Brown's enterprise site as part of the Rirkrit Tiravanija commentary and 2) on Negrophonic's site, as a stand-alone March 15th post. 

(If you'd like a short refresher on Nicolas Bourriaud (1965-) or "relational aesthetics" and "relational art" you can drop in here.)

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Fear Eats the Soul

A while back, when I was still in the habit of posting regularly (and had the time and mental energy to do so), I mentioned the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in conjunction with another relational aesthetic project that was occurring at the Flux Factory. Aah, the old days! A friend of C's saw the post and ended up deciding to check out one of his events, and even mentioned it to see. But I'd never had an opportunity to experience his work live--to participate in it--until this past Saturday when that same friend, knowing of my interest in Tiravanija, hipped us to his show that's currently running at Gavin Brown's enterprise until mid-April, Fear Eats the Soul. I can't say I fully grasp Tiravanija's invocation of the English translation of the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's iconic film (one of his best, really) from 1974, Ali: Angst Essen Seele Auf, which treated the tumultuous love affair, across national, linguistic, racial, class, and cultural lines between a white working-class German woman and a brown North African immigrant laborer, especially after reading the press release for the show, but it nevertheless increased my interest in seeing what he had devised.

The show consists of several parts: one, FEAR EATS THE SOUL, is the large, transformed open space of the Brown enterprise gallery, with "Fear eats the soul" graffitied in black on the gray walls, a mini-gravesite (a hill of soil, an iron headstone laid flat reading "Fear Eats The Soul"), and other deconstructive elements placed here and there, the emptiness and ephemeral state of the space signifying, among other things, quite playfully upon the title and the idea of the "reliquary," which he has played with before. Another reprises several of his earlier performances, including the plywood replica of his apartment, this time filled with bronzed pieces referencing his 1994 show "with" (the late) Andy Warhol, which paired the latter artist's pieces (one of the Mao portraits, a Brillo box, a TV set) with pieces from Tiravanija's life.  Unlike in 1999, on Saturday, we weren't able to install ourselves and sleep on his bed, watch his TV, ruminate, be; the door was locked, the space open for viewing. The plywood structure did invite visitors through a second door, which led to a screenprinting shop, TSHIRTNOTSHIRT.COM, whose walls Tiravanija had lined with a number of phrases he has cited in the past (some of them détourned or repurposed quotes from others), and which offered $20 t-shirts featuring these phrases to anyone who requested one. When we dropped in, one of his Columbia University graduate students, the affable Nick P., was running the press. Obsessed as I am with documenting such events, I got one (see below).

But this would not have been a Tiravanija show for me if he had not performed one of his trademark moves, which was to prepare food for visitors-participants, a hallmark of his practice from his earliest performance-events, such as 1990's Pad Thai, which also took place at an earlier inpetration of Gavin Brown's enterprise, and a legendary and almost hackneyed form of the now well-known genre of conceptual art known as "relational aesthetics."  Hackneyed except in the hands of Tiravanija himself, who as part of SOUPNOSOUP.COM, in another (the main?) part of Brown's arthouse, quietly and with radiant charm (and several assistants) prepared two different soups, one a tea-lime chicken version (which led me to break my vegetarianism for a day) and the second a milder mushroom soup. I know that tea, lime juice, and a few other things went into the pot, because my trio watched Tiravanija and his trio prepare the food, the day grow brighter and chillier, and various personages, unknown to us but likely part of New York's art scene, pop in for soup and conversation.  One person I struck up a conversation with turned out to be a very important former gallerist and font of knowledge and insight, Simon Cerigo, whose wife publishes the Website ArtLoversNewYork.  To say that he regaled us would be understating matters, so I'll put it this way: I learned more in the 45 or so minutes of conversation with him about the New York (and global) art world of the last 30 years than I had in the last 25 of my own gentle investigations of the same. Or rather, I got from his conversation what no books, polite inquiries at galleries, and chats with the artists I know have provided. I lie not! At any rate, we decided not to be carbuncles, and headed out. I could not muster the courage to chat with Tiravanija, so I took lots of pictures, and smiled at him. He probably thinks I'm a crazy person, which wouldn't be so off the mark, especially as I have been sporting a baby(fro)hawk these last few days. (It's spring break!) 

I'm still thinking about the soup, the crowd, the concept, Fassbinder, New York's art world, what it might mean to be a world-famous artist reprising your earlier interventions in an art world that has grown immeasurably richer and more global since you first began your work; to be serving soup in a city in which the homeless are numerous, and what sort of "community" really is being created or engaged if the project occurs within a (private, wealthy) gallery's (open) walls; to build a plywood version of any sort of living space, again within the confines of a privat(iz)e(d) institutional space, when New York apartments are still unaffordable for the majority of its population and people of color are still losing their homes empty to foreclosure and empty storefronts are legion; to create ephemeral artworks that on the one hand defy easy commodification but are by the same token now utterly implicated and imbricated the contemporary art and economic commodification process, and which by their very nature assume even greater value at a certain level; to be making art in a gallery on the edge of SoHo when the artworld has mostly tromped up to Chelsea, which was mostly still warehouses 21 years ago, in an increasingly deindustrialized, deterritorialized, defunded city, at a revolutionary moment or moments: what does it mean and can it be summed up even in an essay or book?  I'm still thinking, remembering, enjoying. Photos below:

Rirkrit Tiravanija, at work

At work

C & Ada H (THE)

Angst Essen Seele Auf