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Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies, Freshly Copied

After I posted about Sigmar Polke’s photocopied masterpiece Daphne, Mondo-Blogo emailed the great news that Corraini has republished Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies. I have the original Original Xerographies in a box somewhere; it’s more handbook-ish than I remembered–which is a nice way of saying I’d forgotten about it, but it looks kind of relevant and interesting now:

An original xerography is the result of an image which is moved on the plate of glass of the copier, so that it reproduces both the image and its movement. Therefore, it doesn’t consist in a mere copy, but on the contrary in an original, which is obtained through a process exploiting the whole potential of the copier. Hence it not only reproduces but produces images as well.
From this starting point Munari develops his studies and experiments about working rules of copiers, originally published in the series Quaderni di design curated by Munari himself for Zanichelli (1977).
Each factor of the copying process (with the copiers available in the 70s), from its reading limits to the concentration of the toner, is deeply and systematically examinated and experimented by Munari in every aspect and possibility. The result is a series of samples (“copies”?) that, following his research method both strict and creative at the same time, do not aim towards a specific purpose, but want to collect as many data as possible in order to describe almost every potential of the machine, including its most surprising and unexpected possibilities.

Buy the new edition of Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies for like $17 [amazon]

Beginning With Anne Truitt’s Japanese Works

I hear blogging is out, everyone’s tweeting or facebooking now. While I don’t quite buy it, I am finding that I’m more likely to keep something I find interesting in my browser tabs for months rather than post it straightaway.
I will now attempt to clear those tabs to the general amusement and edification of my readers:

Soon after her first solo show at Andre Emmerich, Anne Truitt followed her then-husband James to Japan for several years. While there, she experimented with making sculptures from aluminum. She showed them at Emmerich, I believe in 1966, but was not pleased with them, and rather famously destroyed them all before her mid-career retrospective at the Corcoran in the early 1970s. Had them all crushed like a soda can. All but two, apparently.
According to Kristen Hileman’s catalogue, there was an aluminum Truitt in the collection of the Trammel Crow corporation, which could not be found, and another in the collection of a Connecticut collector whose name escapes me [and my Truitt catalogue is in our other apartment, alas.] Anway, that one was apparently damaged or destroyed by exposure, it’s not clear.
I’d never seen images of these lost works, but then suddenly, I stumbled across one on the excellent Los Angeles-based art and space blog, You Have Been Here Sometime.
It turns out to have come from the official site, annetruitt.org, which is a great thing to know about. The piece is called Out and dates from 1964. There are other Japanese works, and also installation shots from the Emmerich show. More geometry and fewer right angles than in Truitt’s later work, enough to make me wonder if the artist had issues with form, not just paint, light, and color, as she explained.

All The Vermeers In New York

A little-known, early Vermeer, the CC145 Concrete Cutter, was apparently on exhibit on Bleecker St this week.
@averybrooks’ twitpics]
Vermeer CC155 [vermeer.com]

‘Waking Up, It Was The First Thing I Saw’

Thanks to Paul Schmelzer at Eyeteeth for pointing to Bob Nickas’s great 1999 interview with Maurizio Cattelan. Good times.
I really wanted to focus on his experience with painting, so this excerpt starts kind of in the middle of the story of Maurizio not having enough time to do a show at de Appel in Amsterdam, so he breaks into the Galerie Bloom, steals everything in it, and exhibits it instead:

BOB: Whose work did you take?
MAURIZIO: Actually we took everything from the gallery …
BOB: Like the fax machine and all the stuff in the office?
MAURIZIO: Everything. We rented a van, and just filled it up.
BOB: This was in Amsterdam?
MAURIZIO: Yes, at de Appel. They wanted me to do a piece in a week. But I’m not used to working so quickly. So I thought the best way to get something that fast was to take the work of someone else.
BOB: That’s a new take on the readymade. [indeed, the show was called “Another F___ing Readmade” -ed.]
MAURIZIO: Well, when you don’t know what to do …
BOB: But didn’t the people at de Appel ask, “Where did all this stuff come from?”
MAURIZIO: The story finished quickly, because the police came and there were problems …
BOB: Were you arrested?
MAURIZIO: No. This is why I did the piece in Holland.
BOB: [laughs] Imagine doing that in New York.
MAURIZIO: It took a while for everyone to calm down, but then we became very good friends and they even asked me to do a show with them.
BOB: But that’s your ultimate punishment — you had to figure something out for another show.
MAURIZIO: Yeah, it’s true.
BOB: Crime doesn’t pay.
MAURIZIO: But I can tell you about the worst punishment I received. Once, I was talking with a collector, and he said, “I really would like to have a painting made by you.” And I thought, “Yes, let’s take this opportunity for once to see how difficult it would be to make a painting.” So I said, “Send me a canvas and some colors and I’ll do it.” He said, “Whatever you want to do, it’s fine for me.” A week later, I received a white canvas — that’s probably still in my apartment — and it was the most horrible nightmare for a year. It was there every morning. Waking up, it was the first thing I saw. After a year, I gave up.

Maurizio Cattelan with Bob Nickas, 1999 [indexmagazine.com]

Vinyl Wrapped Art Car Update

First, the good news: The Jeff Koons BMW Art Car ran in Le Mans!
The bad news: it totally sucked and crapped out after just a few hours. I know how it feels, Jeff. I once helped organize an all-female driver race team in Le Mans that crapped out after just a few hours, and had to swap a borrowed engine overnight, which the Lloyd’s guy said was covered, no problem, and then when the car wrecked, another insurance snake said there was no coverage, so we and our sponsors were gonna have to eat it, and it devolved into an international lawsuit, all because of this one insurance crook boyfriend of one of the drivers, what a disaster. But an absolute blast nonetheless, so a glass to Koons.
Now more good news: it’s only been a couple of weeks since I put out the call, and already, an artist has deployed the latest digital printing & vinyl wrapping technology to create his own art car!

And the bad news: it was Damien Hirst. Before we complain about people cut-n-pasting inaccurate press releases from Rush Limbaugh’s wedding singer about “Hirst spin painting” a new Audi A1 “in his studio,” let’s make one thing clear: Uh, no.

And one more thing: no matter what you think about Jeff Koons or his artwork, you gotta admit, at least his vinyl wrapping crew can match a seam. [via designboom, and propagating fast]
And finally, the good news: I got my fine copy of the first issue of Eye Magazine, and now I can read all the details about that Make Your Own Psychedelic Art Car In 4-Hours With These Stickers! article.
The bad news: Yes, it was Peter Max.

Perfect Lovers (Forever), By Tobias Wong

I only met Tobias Wong a couple of times, but it took me aback to see so many people I do know were described or quoted in Alex Williams’ NY Times piece as Tobi’s friends.
Tobi liked to give other artists’ and designers’ work a sardonic or critical twist. But the first photo in the Times’ slideshow featured a work that was different, an idealistic, almost geekily romantic “fix” of an iconic Félix Gonzalez-Torres sculpture.

Perfect Lovers [actually, Perfect Lovers (Forever) (2002)] is a remake of Félix’s “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1991, a pair of identical, white wall clocks which begin in sync, but which invariably diverge over time.
For his new and improved version, Tobi attached a radio receiver to each clock that syncs it with the official US Atomic Clock. They’ll stay in sync within a second over a million years.

Félix made at least six of his pairs of clocks, which, if they weren’t exactly self-portraits, referred to him and his partner Ross Laycock. Tobias’s references the white version [on a wall painted light blue], which is now in MoMA’s collection, dates from right before Ross’s death, and is listed in Félix’s catalogue as unique.
Before that, in 1990, Félix made “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) with black clocks in an edition of three. The date given for those works is 1987-1990, which is probably to account for the existence of earlier work.
White Columns has a pair of white clocks hanging behind the desk, officially undocumented, it seems, which were included in a 1988 exhibition as coming from an edition of three.
And at the time of Félix’s death, a 1987 work [officially listed as “additional material,” not work] titled Perfect Lovers, was in the collection of his former partner Jorge Collazo. It consists of a pair of wall clocks, signed, titled, and numbered, “1/3”.
Knowing that Félix made Perfect Lover clocks for all his boyfriends [sic] throws a layer of complexity onto the typically poignant interpretation of the work: yes, they’re identical and in sync (for now), but they’re also mass produced. And replaceable. You can pick one up at the corner. Of these conditions, the one Tobias chose to “fix” in his version was the eventual slipping out of sync.
as always, an update: Turns out there is also an AP of the 1987-90 edition. And the Renaissance Society in Chicago has reportedly left their locally made exhibition copy of “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), made in 1994, up in their offices. And in 2007, Glenn Ligon wrote in Artforum that he still had the “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) he made in 1996, soon after learning of Félix’s death.

Say Amen, Yves Klein!

I may have something to write later about Yves Klein, I don’t know. Peter Schjeldahl summed up what I’d already noticed, that the art discourse is very uncomfortable–or at least largely silent–on the topic of Klein’s apparently deep or abiding religiosity/spirituality. I thought that again at the Hirshhorn discussion when Kerry Brougher would actively ignore or steer the heavily spiritualist, cosmic comments made by the artist’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay.
But that’s not important now. What I’m fascinated by at the moment is the very end of this 1959 recording of Klein himself speaking at the Sorbonne. I can’t quite tell what this is–I found it at Ubu.com, but the slightly loopy text and original mp3 rip appear to come from Waxidermy–a commenter calls it a conference on “L’Architecture de L’Air,” but the quote below matches an artist’s text of the same name published in Mon Livre. So it’s likely he just read his texts.
Klein’s talking about the “monochrome propositions” he showed at the Galerie Apollinaire in 1957 and how, though they’re identical, each one is received differently by the public. Then the kicker:

l’observation la plus sensationelle est c’est des acheteurs. Ils choississent parmi les onzes tableaux exposés, chacun le leur et ils le paient chacun le prix demandé–et les prix sont tous différents, bien sûr.
The most sensational observation is of the buyers. They chose among the eleven paintings shown, each to his own, and they each paid the price demanded–and the prices were all different, of course. [my translation]

Then the crowd oohs and roars in approval, Hallelujah! It’s like a good old-fashioned tent revival there in the Sorbonne.
On the one hand, there’s Klein’s presentation of the prices, the transactions, the market interaction, as somehow central to the concept of Klein’s monochromes, as dispositive evidence of–what? I’ll go with the artist’s privilege to characterize his own work and its attributes, of his collectors’ readily accepting [indulging?] his value/price-related constructs. The market, of course, has been the other third rail [sic] of art history. Does the market still honor Klein’s price differentials for these monochromes, I wonder? Somehow I doubt it.
But it’s the other hand, the audience reaction itself, that has me thinking. I made the preacher reference because it seems germane to Klein’s charisma and penchant for showmanship. But the give & take also makes me think of a [possibly peculiarly French?] appreciation of rhetoric as spectator sport; the crowd wasn’t enthralled by the monochrome paintings, per se, so much as by the deftly argued [and proved! by the market!] monochrome propositions. Klein ran the market gantlet and survived with his propositions intact.
The oohlalas reminded me a bit of Ridicule, Patrice Leconte’s classic film of the court at Versailles, where wit and mastery of small talk and jeux de mots are essential to social/political/cultural success.
And the existence of Klein’s art in that time and that milieu made me wonder about the historical popular context contemporary art inhabited in the US. What was the perception and reception of art in post-war America? Today we bemoan art’s loss of primacy as a touchstone of cultural expression, and the decline of art appreciation among the general public. The art world has become, we’re told, too insular and self-absorbed, abandoning its common touch and the concerns and interests of real people. But is that how it went down?

One specific example: I wonder what the role of LIFE Magazine was in shaping the broader view of art, and of influencing artists’–and the art world’s–views of themselves? Surely there are worthwhile dissertations on this topic, either written or in process.
The New York-based LIFE seemed to operate as–or at least consider itself–both a kingmaker and a tastemaker. But LIFE seemed to want it both ways: to declare a trend from its privileged vantage point, and then to proclaim its empathetic bafflement on behalf of John Q. Public. LIFE’s 1949 anointing of Jackson Pollock as “America’s Most Important Living Artist” began a decade of incredulous coverage of Abstract Expressionism as THE American Art.
Just yesterday, I found a 1965 article about Buffalo’s Festival of The Arts Today, a remarkable assemblage of avant-garde theatre, music, film, art, and dance, that drew an equally remarkable, diverse-sounding crowd of over 165,000 people in a remote city whose population at the time was just over 500,000:

Can this be Buffalo?
The far-out Festival of the Arts Today was as full of come-ons as a county fair, running from a nude dance number to orchestral works with popping paper bags, to four bizarre plays by Ionesco, to kinetic art that often looked like pinball machines on a jag. Buffalo took it all–the hokum and shocks included–with healthy curiosity and good-humored appreciation, proving how refreshing the arts can be when approached for genuine enjoyment instead of for genuflection.

How well did LIFE’s editorializing about far-out hokum and county fair come-ons capture the persepctive of the people who attended the Festival, and how much of it was projected upon them from Manhattan?
The photo next to this paragraph showed a pair of nuns standing in front of a Larry Poons painting at the Albright-Knox:

Walking Man? What Walking Man?

Alberto Giacometti’s figures look the way they do because he tried to capture what he called, “The moment I see them” and the way “they appear in my field of vision…” Arthur C Danto said this accounted for “the somewhat ghostly feeling of his figures, as if they were persons whose bodies had been all but erased.”
These ideas of figures, distorted, hovering on the edge of perception were very much in my mind when I found the incredible-looking sequence of [self] portraits of a man in the Google Street View panos of the Binnenhof, the Dutch Parliament complex in The Hague. The guy is almost certainly a Google Street View worker who accompanied the new Google Trike as it scanned and photographed the pedestrian-only area.

By walking alongside the Trike, the guy ended up inserting himself into thousands of photos, and basically every stitched-together panorama. The stitching algorithm, though, often tried to erase him, or replace his photo with a better [i.e., unobstructed] image of the same spot. The result is a series of fragmented collage portraits, disembodied heads, hairdos and limbs.
I gathered full-sized screenshots from every pano, focusing not of the site itself, but on the guy, and then I bundled them into a book, which I titled, after Giacometti, Walking Man. That was in mid-April.
As I’ve been tweaking the book the last few weeks, though, I found that several of the Binnenhof panoramas have been removed from Google Street View, including all the coverage of the inner courtyard, and every one I illustrated in my blog post.
Google has been getting heat in Europe for its Street View datagathering practices. I’d suspect that investigations in Germany and across the EU–and now even in the US–for surreptitiously collecting personal data across wi-fi networks is a bigger issue for them than ye random blogger’s artbook-ish attempt to fit Street View into critical history of street photography. And yet.
Google had already had the Binnenhof in the bag when they announced the Google Trike last summer, and invited the public to suggest where it should shoot first. Whatever else it was, this seemed like a canny move designed to deflect any possible political heat from the Street View effort: we’ve already got the Parliament on board, who wants to be next?
Now, though, it seems like someone, either within Google or within the Dutch government, or both, is actively deciding it doesn’t want people to examin either the Binnenhof OR the Street View process too closely. And that includes Walking Man, whose portraits are being all but erased.

Muybridge Had A Posse

Now before we get too far, let me state for the record that so long as there’s no thievery or lying involved, but appropriate credit or consideration is, I got no problem at all with a man who takes another man’s photograph, tweaks it a bit, and re-presents it as his own.
That said, I am blown away by the awesomeness of Tyler Green’s investigative interview with photography curator Weston Naef that questions the attributions of many early photographs in the Eadweard Muybridge retrospective at the Corcoran.

Naef has a pretty compelling, I’d almost say irrefutable, argument that before 1872, Muybridge published many photographs under his name [or his brand, really, since the questions arise about the period from 1866-1872, when Muybridge worked under the name Helios Studio] which were actually taken by others, including his friend and frequent business counterpart, the great Carleton Watkins.
Green and Naef cite specific examples of Muybridge photos slotting right into the missing slots in Watkins’ photo sequences. There are even cases where the shots are identical.
The implications for the Corcoran’s show–the first Muybridge retrospective ever–and the history of photography are pretty significant. Which doesn’t necessarily take away from the exhibition or the catalogue, though Philip Brookman’s account of Muybridge’s career will certainly come in for revision.
I saw the show on opening day, and it is fantastic, an incredible accomplishment, and a wealth of wonderful photographs and stereographs. It was the show and the catalogue that catalyzed Naef’s preliminary research, and the whole thing opens a very interesting window on the development of photography in the US, and especially in California, in the 19th century. There’s much more research and analysis and discovery to be had here. And it’ll be interesting to see how the show changes on its next incarnations at Tate Britain and SFMOMA.

But I know what you’re all thinking: what does this mean for me? And by me, I do mean me, not you. Well, it means that now I don’t know who made one of my favorite oddball images from the Corcoran show, a stereograph from Woodward Gardens, an early zoo/amusement park in San Francisco. It shows a slightly generic garden scene, but the focus is on a mirrored garden ornament–in which the photographer’s own self-portrait is visible. That thing looks so much like a vanguard satellite, or a satelloon mockup, I am powerless before it. And now I find out it might not be Muybridge at all.
The intro to the 3-part interview: The Newest Eadweard Muybridge Mystery [modern art notes]
Looks like they picked the wrong week to name their otherwise awesome exhibition catalogue: Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change [amazon]
The Corcoran show runs through July 18. [corcoran.org]
note: detail of the mirrored garden orb from UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, via Calisphere [thanks for that, too, Tyler]

Found The Kocher Studies Building!

Looks like I picked the wrong end of North Carolina. While I was bumming around the Outer Banks, Mondo Blogo was surely doing The Lord’s Work in the mountains. Black Mountain College, to be precise, or what’s left of it.
He and his mom [!] visited Camp Rockmont, the Christian boys camp on the shores of Lake Eden, which absorbed BMC’s homebrewed modernist buildings after the school closed. There are great photos of A. Lawrence Kocher’s 1940-1 Studies Building, a low-slung, low-key, low-budget International Style marvel of corrugated metal siding and ribbon windows. Including this one, which features the old re-bar cross or somesuch.
If you can piece it together from the BMCProject website, the architectural story of Black Mountain College is as fascinating as the art and curriculum. Kocher, the editor of Architectural Record, was the last-minute replacement for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He was also the collaborator on Albert Frey’s first building in the US, the 1931 Aluminaire House, which bears a strong family resemblance to the Services Building.
After discovering that building and pulling it online last summer, I stumbled across a Black Mountain College mystery, a cool, little, unidentified plywood building that I speculated might have been by Kocher. It turned out to be Paul Williams’ Science Building, built in 1949-50 with the help of students Dan Rice and Stan VanDerBeek.
Is there a beautiful, comprehensive exhibition and catalogue for Black Mountain College? Because I really think there oughta be.
Black Mountain Madness [mondo-blogo]

Found The Warhols?

Last fall, I was looking for a way to paper the art world with giant versions of the awesome PDF wanted posters the LAPD Art Theft Detail had created for Richard Weisman’s stolen Warhol Athletes Series paintings.

So I created a tongue-in-cheek Kickstarter project to print up a thousand posters. But satirical altruism for cagey Bel Air collectors wasn’t a big draw, and then mysteriously, Weisman dropped his insurance claim, so his company withdrew the $1 million reward offer. [Which you’d think would make the posters all that more collectible. But anyway. I have my proof, I’m content.]
Weisman, who commissioned the series in 1977, said he was not interested in subjecting his family to the invasive scrutiny of the insurance investigation. And it’s not like he’s really missing the works: he and his family still owns several sets of the paintings, and he has donated several more to museums and sports halls of fame.
Bring it up to the present, and the LAPD still lists the works as stolen. But a couple of weeks ago, the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan wrote about a couple of art theft blogs, including Art Hostage.
Had we only known. Barely a week after the heist, Art Hostage chief Turbo Paul had the case all sewn up: “Not Stolen, A Domestic Kidnapping !!!!!”
Which, when combined with Weisman’s subsequent actions, makes it sound like he knows who, if not exactly where, and doesn’t want to pull that thread.
Now if only there were a break in the Pebble Beach “Pollock” case….

Daphne, As Photocopied By Sigmar Polke

I didn’t follow Sigmar Polke’s work closely. At least not consciously.
This excerpt from Reiner Speck’s essay about Polke’s 2004 artist’s book Daphne is awesome, even if it sounds a bit like someone’s been huffing toner at the end:

An oversize anthology of sources of visual inspiration, a photocopied book that paradoxically reveals the artist’s hand, a sketchbook for the machine age–Daphne runs and runs, is caught by the photocopier, and runs some more, only to be bound in the end.
Created directly by Polke himself, Daphne is a book with 23 chapters illustrated in large-format photocopies. Each “copy” of the book differs, as each has been photocopied and manipulated individually, pulled from the machine by the hand and watchful eye of the artist.
Process is revealed, over and over again. Motifs accumulate page after page, as do small graphic cycles. The printed dot, the resolution, the subject, and the speed all determine and are determined by the apparently unpredictable and often impenetrable secret of a picture whose drafts are akin to the waste products of a copying machine.
Even if the motifs in this book provide but a brief insight into the artist’s hitherto secret files and archives, it is still a significant one.
For the first time, we witness an artist’s book with such an aura of authenticity that Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” bears consequent re-reading.
Produced in a limited edition of 1,000 “copies,” each of which has been numbered and signed by Sigmar Polke.

A thousand copies of a 440 page book [40 pg essay, 400 images], each one manipulated by the artist? How long does that take?
Let’s assume, for logic’s sake, that he made 1000 copies at a time for each A3 page [16.25×11.5 in.], manipulating it around the surface of the copier as the copies fly. The Konica Minolta Bizhub Pro 1050 commercial copy/printing system had a maximum speed of 105 pages per minute. But that’s only for letter-size, and it wasn’t introduced to the market until October 2004. [Newer Bizhub Pro models are up to 160 ppm.]
Which means that the 2003-4 state of the copying art was probably around 50-60 larger pages per minute. Say 50, and we have a nice round 20 minutes of copying time per page, 133 hours of copying. That’s 16.67 8-hour days of nothing but copying. Add in lunch, breaks, maintenance, and you’re looking at three weeks, easy, standing there at the copy machine. Let me repeat the word “copying” again, just for emphasis. Copying.
Now imagine coming up with a suitable repertoire of moves for a page on a glass plate. I mean, how varied can you really get? Do these process-centered motifs and tricks emerge from the book, too? If they could be projected sequentially, like the frames of a movie, the 1000 copies of a single page would compress all of Polke’s moves into a 42-second clip. If the movies for two pages were screened side by side, would they reveal randomness, an identifiable bag of tricks, or perhaps Polke’s carefully choreographed handjams?
Surprisingly, the least expensive copy of Sigmar Polke’s Daphne is on Amazon. $675 [amazon]
More images from Sigmar Polke’s Daphne at Stopping Off Place [stoppingoffplace]
[Inadvertently] Related: Nouveau manuel complet du fabricant et de l’amateur de photos
update: oh no/yeah, it’s a “new york trend”! [thanks, andy]

We’re All David Salle Now

So funny, last night at the Brooklyn Museum, Andrew Russeth was saying as how some late Warhol paintings look remarkably like David Salle.

Villaca Caja, 1929, at Galerie Hopkins-Custot
And I was flipping through The Art Newspaper’s Basel daily edition, and saying this Francis Picabia painting at Hopkins-Custot looks remarkably like David Salle.
Day 3: Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool, on his pick of Art Basel [tan, pdf]

On Ian Wilson’s Art Objects

Ian Wilson’s conversation-based art practice reminded Ben of the introduction to Asif Agha’s 2006 book, Language and Social Relations. An excerpt:

…It is therefore all the more important to see that utterances and discourses are themselves material objects made through human activity — made, in a physical sense, out of vibrating columns of air, ink on paper, pixels in electronic media — which exercise real effects upon our senses, minds, and modes of social organization, and to learn to understand and analyze these effects. It is true that that utterances and discourses are artifacts of a more or less evanescent kind (speech more than writing). But these are questions of duration, not materiality, and certainly not of degree or kind of cultural consequence….

Definitely worth reading the whole piece at Ben’s site, and noting the 60s art context in which Wilson was operating, where artists were actively seeking to supplant the commodified physical object of art with its unbuyable, unsellable concept. In interviews I’ve seen [quoted in Anne Rorimer’s 1995 MoCA catalogue, Reconsidering the Art Object], Wilson talked about his Oral Communication series as art as “speech itself,” and “art spoken,” a construct which evolved from his earliest pieces, Time [begun in 1968], which seemed to be about the process of conversation itself.
But that was also 40 years ago. A lot of non-material art has been made, bought, and sold since then, and I wonder how Wilson’s contemporary continuation or revisiting of these Oral Communication works differs from the originals. And how it differs from any sort of conversational situation which involves one party paying another for the…the what? the time? the privilege? the experience? Is it like a shrink? Or could the payment come from outside the conversation, and in advance? UBS is proud to present Ian Wilson in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist?
Speech Objects [emvergeoning.com]

The Art World Has An Attention Span Of A Gnat

I’ve long admired Ian Wilson’s conversation-based art works, though for years I’ve wondered if selling conversations as art doesn’t complicate one’s daily interactions with people, sort of a conceptual version of how doctors always get hit up for medical advice at parties.
As Sarah Douglas reports from Art Basel, though, it seems Mr. Wilson has solved the problem, by having all the conversations he wants, and only selling the documentation. His invoice/certificates are like the commemorative photos on Splash Mountain, available after the fact for your purchasing convenience:

[Wilson’s work] consists of a small room in which the artist conducts half-hour conversations on the heady subject of “the absolute” with anyone who makes an appointment for the privilege. “Oh, that’s very Tino Sehgal,” remarked one fairgoer. “No, no, it’s very Marina Abramovic!” countered another.

Holy crap, people. Could they even find enough people in Basel capable of sustaining a 30-minute conversation on one topic? The guy’s been doing this stuff since before Tino Sehgal was born.
Circles, Nudity, and the Carnivalesque Rule at Basel’s Art Unlimited and Statements Sections [artinfo via @andrewrusseth]