couchprojects

Over the year I have been “germinating” a project about paranoid delusions inspired by the Internet and video games and/or fantasies about the Internet’s powers. A popular example being the car thief who behaved as though he was in the middle of a Grand Theft Auto video game.

Yesterday’s “On the Media” featured Chris Suellentrop whose article in this month’s Wired describes how virtual football games like Madden NFL are emulated in real games instead of the reverse.

Well, the Broncos are on the 13-yard line, their own 13-yard line.

[GAME HUBBUB]

The quarterback drops back to pass. He heaves this somewhat desperation toss downfield. It gets deflected into the air –

[CHEERS]

- lands into the outstretched arms of a Bronco’s wide receiver, Brandon Stokley, who streaks toward the end zone for the winning touchdown.

[LOUD CHEERS]

And that was an amazing play, known as the “immaculate deflection.” But more remarkable than the funny bounce is that Stokley cuts right across the field horizontally and lets about six seconds drain off the clock before meandering into the end zone, because no one was near him to tackle him. And, at that moment, for a certain brand of football fan, the video game-playing football fan, you were, like, holy cow, did he just pull off a video game move?

When I asked Stokley that question directly, he said, yeah, of course that was a video game move.

Last week I attended David Joselit’slecture at NYU entitled “Against Meaning,” the Gelitin exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery and Jeffrey Valance at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Background to Joselit lecture:
Information is networked, the hierarchical system consists of nodes that are interconnected. Removal of one node will lead to regeneration of connections in other parts of the network. (ex: Al-Qaeda terrorist network, MasterCard database, google database). The networks are enmeshed to such an extent  that recent cyberattacks on Google allegedly conducted from China pose a National Security threat to the U.S.

Joselit began the lecture with the ways value is attributed to art.

Value=scarcity

Joselit used the example of a Picasso painting, the one of a kind, the object.
In his exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Jeffrey Valance created latrines for kitsch objects such as Tiki Soap-an-a-rope, pasties from a Las Vegas dancer, boxer briefs, etc. Each object is accompanied by a two paragraph narrative description of the artist’s relationship to the object. Unlike Duchamp’s readymades, Valance uses the sculptural container and text to apply sentimental value to the mass produced object.

Jeffrey Vallance Coral in the Shape of Tiki 2007 Mixed media 9 1/2 x 6 3/8 x 3 3/4 inches 24.1 x 16.2 x 9.5 cm

Installed throughout the gallery’s main space, Vallance’s ‘Relics and Reliquaries,’ are sculptures that irreverently sanctify seemingly banal objects of personal significance to the artist in small intricately crafted cabinets that recall traditional Catholic reliquaries. A single broken Christmas light is lovingly enshrined in a small box crowned with a cross; a ’soap-on-a-rope’ in the shape of the Polynesian God Tiki reclines in an intricately carved vessel lined with velvet. Each reliquary is installed with a corresponding plaque that gives the reason and context for its importance to Vallance.

However, art is not scarce. (i.e. the size and number of international art fairs, artists who use mass production such as Warhol and Sherrie Levine)

The artist is scarce –
When the art object is easily mass produced, the artist “process” becomes the scarcity. The artist is valued as a service worker. This occurs when the artist is invited to make “site-specific” work.

(This is not a real HSBC advertisement, but refers to an inside joke between a friend and me explained below.)

I attended the Gelitin show at Greene Naftali. The Austrian installation artists were blind-folded and building a sculpture in the space. Audiences were invited to watch the artists throughout the process and witness the construction. The blind-folding element was brilliant. Not because it raises the audience’s suspense for their personal safety like many of Gelitin’s haphazard constructions (normally insurance waivers must to be signed before entering). Instead, the blindfolds objectify the artists as service providers, or site-specific art-workers. The blindfolds prevent the artists from interacting directly with the audience, they can not see what they are doing nor anyone in the room. In addition, they are dressed in lingerie and stilettos, a facet that insures the gaze of the audience is directed to them as objects and not the art object they are creating.

The inside HSBC ad joke being that my friend thought the actual sculpture they were making was “old fashioned.” An apt point.

Information=Information

Dan Graham, Figurative, 1965

Value=Meaning
David Joselit  introduced the concept of data in conceptual art with the slide above of Dan Graham’s magazine advertisement entitled “Figurative” from 1965. The numbers represent a found receipt and the placement was determined by the editorial. The data on the page is only data, but in its juxtaposition between a Warner bra ad and a Tampax ad suggests many other readings (masculine vs. feminine.) The title leaves this open as well.

From this work, Joselit went to the idea that information changes from state to state and meaning moves with the object. Examples in contemporary art:

• Appropriation (LHOOQ, Duchamp’s appropriation of Mona Lisa)
• Reenactment (Marina Aabramovic’s  reenactments “Seven Easy Pieces”)
• Avatar (Pierre Huyghe’s No ghost just a shell)
• Platform (Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Pavilions, relational aesthetics)
• Workshops
• Form defined by the program, profile, silhouette (Rem Koolhaas, OMA)

To be continued after next Joselit installment Feb. 16.

I have been offline for a week as I began my residency at the Center for Book Arts. Instead of being in my studio and sitting at my computer day after day editing and “researching,” I learned to handset type and use the press. It was fun and exhausting.

Influenced by my medium, my source materials and subject matter became historical, “dead” things- quite literally. I chose to research séances at the White House, which happens to be a subject matter rich with material.

I discovered a New York Times archive where Harry Houdini was the key “prosecutor” in a hearing to regulate clairvoyants. Houdini’s assistant testified in court that a spiritualist by the name of Mrs. Jane Coates had told her privately that she held séances with President Coolidge’s family as well as four senators on Capitol Hill.

I decided to letterpress the headline in a style as close to the original format as my beginner stages would take me.

I have found many more leads to the séance subject matter including the Lincolns, the Reagans, the Clintons. Ironically, after he proclaimed in court that all séances were gimmicks, Houdini’s wife held séances at his grave, confirming my suspicions he was jealous of their market share.