It’s been a hard season to think of positive things, and sometimes looking back, it’s been difficult to see how or if things mattered at all. But I also look back at the year with immense gratitude, both for the opportunities I’ve had, but also for the people who helped make them possible. I’d probably still be doing a lot of what I’m doing here if no one else was paying attention; that’s how it often feels, actually. But I’ve come to know that sometimes people do take an interest in what I’m doing, whether writing, research, criticism, or artmaking, and they respond to it, react to it, challenge it, run with it, join in on it. And it makes it interesting, better, and more meaningful, and it is nice to feel that. But there are also things, some of my greatest, favorite things, that would not have existed at all without the interest, effort, and support of others.
So I’d like to give some specific thanks to some of the many people who engaged with and supported my work in 2016. Without them, these things I am so proud of would literally not have happened.
Magda Sawon suggested we do a proposal for SPRING/BREAK. “Chop Shop” began as a glib sendup of Simchowitzian cash&carry speculecting. But in the last few weeks before the show, it grew exponentially in scale, which forced some real thinking about its meaning and ambition. With Ambre & Andrew’s flexibility, and the extraordinary efforts of Magda’s posse, Chop Shop somehow became what supposed to not be: a Basel-ian boothful of investment-grade masterpieces. [Some of which are still available, btw. Get in now at 2016, pre-boom prices.]
Book deals come and go, but Jennifer Liese and her colleagues at Paper Monument offered what bloggers need most: a good editing. When PM first asked to include my 2+ years of posts about the history of Erased deKooning Drawing in their anthology Social Medium, I frankly thought they were nuts. But Jen’s vision and thoughtful editing helped me see my own writing and ideas anew, and she enabled them to reach people in an amazing, new context. I’ve never felt prouder of my writing than to have it included among the great work of so many artists who influence and inspire me already.
Mark Leckey and John Garcia included my work in shows that were totally fascinating and different from anything I could have imagined, which let me think about it and the world it inhabits in a new way. Having my satelloon sculpture be subsumed into Leckey’s autobiographically inspired installation at MoMA PS1 turns out to be a rare privilege, to be able to help realize, almost literally, someone’s memory.
And Garcia’s inclusion of the Madoff Provenance Project in his show about context’s impact on art at To___Bridges___ not only gave it a challenging context, it pushed me to figure out ways to make the project visible and understandable beyond its datalayer. This in turn helped me see how my work connects to, and was informed by, artists of earlier generations. [In this case, there’s an obvious shoutout due to Mel Bochner and his Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art, a project whose title has long resonated with my own ambivalence about calling myself an artist or what I do art.]
Sarah Douglas and Andrew Russeth at ArtNews invited me to write about one of my favorite, all-consuming blogtopics: the disappearance of the Johns flag in Short Circuit. And recently Eric Doeringer and I had a great public conversation about his work, and the early Johns/Rauschenberg era that I continue to find engrossing and misunderstood.
Collectors and supporters who engage in the oddball, time- and space-limited art projects I proposed around here literally made them happen. In the crazy-skewed art world of the moment, lowering the stakes and making and trading art for two figures feels refreshing. And most awesomely, these projects have been a catalyst for connecting with some inspiring people who share some interests, and who introduce me to their passions and practices, too. [I hope 2017 lasts long enough for me to do a book version of eBay Test Prints, btw.]
Most of all, I have to thank my wife, who is my smartest, most skeptical, yet most tireless supporter. She is so deeply disapproving of my #andiron-style art designation practice it is not even funny, but she also sees me wrestling with it myself and taking it seriously, so she does, too. And anyway, at the very least, when I’m dead and gone, and she doesn’t have to deal with a storing or tossing a studio or warehouseful of objects, she’ll come around. So thank you, and thank you all. I hope we all get through 2017 and beyond to do this again.
Tag: works
On Study for Untitled (Thick List)
I saw this picture by Rey Baniquet in a “best photos of the day” roundup at The Guardian yesterday. The caption read, “MANILA, PHILIPPINES/ President Rodrigo Duterte shows a list of police and government officials allegedly involved in the illegal drug trade during a forum with local and foreign businessmen”. The original photo’s actually wider.
Two things that struck me about the photo. One is the framing, which turned out to be taken from amid a tableful of glasses, and which reminded me of the video of Mitt Romney dissing the 47%, which was made surreptitiously from atop a catering bar. The other, more important thing is the list itself.
Googling around for more information, I kept coming across what the Philippine press called a “thick list” that Duterte had been circulating to the army, the legislature, the judiciary, implicating an untold number of people in the drug industry.
This event involved the Wallace Business Forum, a private business consulting group that advises international companies on doing business in the Philippines. Duterte spoke for two-plus hours at a dinner at the Malacañan Palace on December 12. The transcript and video of his speech are available online.
Duterte discussed the illegal drug industry, including three or four, let’s go with four million, “drug addicts,” as a national security threat. Then he mentioned the reported killings by his government:
You know, this is the drug industry. Sabi ko nga eh [I said, eh] you worry about the 3,000? Dead? A third of them during police encounters, I don’t know about the rest. And you do not worry the drug industry?
“You want a visual thing? Okay. This is the drug industry of the Philippines,” he said, as he had the list brought to him. This occurs at around 36:30.
The top of the stack is filled with a grid of headshots, like a yearbook. And like the Time magazine issue listing a week of US gun fatalities which Felix Gonzalez-Torres used to create his 1990 stack work, “Untitled” (Death By Gun) [below]. That list included 460 people.
Duterte says the list in his hand contains 6,000 people. While flipping through the list, he tosses of names and titles, mayors, judges, generals, in a way that makes it sound like he and everyone in the room knows them.
Duterte’s stack turns out not to be all photos, though. That is only the first deck. Several binder clips appear to break out the drug industry roster by region. The stack looks to be about 1000+ pages, more than two reams, for sure, maybe the clips throw it off a bit. Let’s say the ideal height [sic] is 15 cm.
I am wrestling with how, and whether, to make a work out of what is apparently an active kill list being circulated by a government. The visual, formal, even content reference is immediately clear, but the parameters are not. And neither are the possible implications.
On just a formal level, is the stack a single work, with no takeaways, or is the deck the data, which gets laid out into a larger grid, then turned into a stack? I feel like Duterte’s grasp on the entire stack gives me that answer [one work], even though it contradicts the typical Felix stack format. But of course, so did Felix, who created one stack, “Untitled” (Implosion), 1991, as a single unit comprised of 200 screenprinted sheets. So it’d be a single work. Maybe it’d be a publication. Maybe you print it out and save me the hassle.
And maybe it’s not the kind of thing that you do casually, or at least while the killings are ongoing. Or maybe not the kind of thing I should do as a white guy. Duterte’s mention of 3-4 million more reminds me of Chris Burden’s The Other Vietnam Memorial, 1991 [above], which mashed up names from a Vietnamese phone book into 3 million anonymized stand-ins for the real, unheralded dead. The people in the Philippines are real, and they have their own names.
It also reminds me of the million-who-knows people on the US’ no-fly list, about whom we know almost nothing except some part of the government deemed them a national security risk. And there are lists of known communists in the State Department, suspected homosexuals in the US Government, climate change scientists in the Energy Department, Muslim Registries, the list of lists goes on.
I tweeted yesterday that I don’t really know why I do these works; that ambivalence and uncertainty was brought to the fore by this photo. So until I think it through a bit more, I am really not comfortable right now with enshrining or recontextualizing Duterte’s “thick list” as an artwork. Even though it is, as the president himself said, a very important “visual thing.”
previously, somewhat related: Better Read #008: Death By Gun
Untitled (Satelloon), 2007, In Mark Leckey: Containers and their Drivers at MoMAPS1
via [instagram/365days_in_nyc]
I will have more to say about it because it is blowing my mind in unexpected ways, but it has already taken me too long to shout it out: Mark Leckey has included my piece, Untitled (Satelloon), in “Containers and their Drivers,” his survey at MoMA PS1.
The satelloon is incorporated into a new installation of Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD (2015), an autobiographical piece Leckey assembles through what he calls “found memories.”
The satelloon is a refabrication of a Beacon satellite, the 12-foot Mylar inflatable that was shown publicly at the US Capitol and other sites in the run up for NASA’s Project Echo. Echo 1A, which launched in 1960, was 100 feet in diameter, and was the first visible manmade object in space. In Leckey’s installation, though, the satelloon serves as a reference, I believe, to Echo II, the 135-ft successor, which launched in 1964.
Satelloons have been big around here for nearly 10 years, and I’ve been engrossed by their aesthetic power, and what can only be called their exhibition and display. They are beautiful objects created to be seen, and they have many implications.
Part of this became the subject of “Exhibition Space,” a show I organized at apexart in 2013, which was the occasion for fabricating this particular object. At the time, I was reluctant for a whole host of reasons to declare the show, and the objects in it, to be artworks. But I’m chill with it now, thanks in no small part to Leckey’s own powerful and generous practice over the last several years of curation-as-art, as well as my own subsequent developments.
In any case, a huge thanks and congratulations to Mark Leckey, along with curators Stuart Comer and Peter Eleey, and the folks at PS1, who have been a pleasure to work with. I had no idea how Mark would end up incorporating the piece, but it looks utterly transfixing, and I cannot wait to see it in person.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016
Untitled (Cowboy), 1980-84, Ektacolor, 27×40 in. image:skarstedt
In 1932, when it was still a minor filtered cigarette brand for ladies, Philip Morris sold the Canadian rights for Marlboro to Imperial Tobacco. As Marlboro grew into a globally recognized, male-targeted brand exemplified by cowboys and racing sponsorships, Philip Morris has tried to gain a foothold in the Canadian market by leveraging Marlboro’s US & international prominence. And Imperial has fought back, with both litigation and steady cat & mouse marketing.
Maverick c.1970s, image via jim’s
Imperial sells Marlboro, while Philip Morris’ cigarettes otherwise known as Marlboros have been sold using lookalike, soundalike brands such as Maverick and Matador. In 2006, “dark market” laws took effect, removing tobacco products from Canadian store displays, and forcing consumers to ask for cigarettes by name. Though they kept their distinctive-and globally supported-“rooftop” packaging, Philip Morris took off any brand name at all. Imperial filed a trademark infringement claim against these nameless cigarettes. In 2012, Canada’s Federal Court of Appeals agreed, finding that Philip Morris’s nameless, but not unbranded and not generic, cigarettes courted confusion. [Philip Morris responded by renaming them Rooftop.]
Imperial was not above sowing a little confusion itself. When they got word that Philip Morris was planning to air rebranded cowboy commercials for Maverick in the early 1970s, Imperial had art director William Irish rush out their own Canadian Marlboro Man commercial.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016, digital inkjet print, 16×24 in., ed. 2+1AP
A laconic voiceover about nothin’ much is combined with a man, more farmhand than cowboy, wanderin’ through a hilly landscape, looking for a lost sheep. The images seem as unremarkable as the US Marlboro campain was sublime. Which I guess fits a campaign whose purpose is not to seal a brand’s relationship to a particular romanticized worldview, but to cockblock it.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016, digital inkjet print, 16×24 in., ed. 2+1AP
Still, stills from the ad have a certain aesthetic appeal, and they successfully make the necessary associations, if only to ultimately thwart them. They will definitely work on their own terms as nice-sized photographic prints, which look like what they look like. In tribute to their origins, they will not be signed.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016, digital inkjet print, 16×24 in.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016, digital inkjet print, 16×24 in., ed. 2+1AP
And my favorite part of the Canadian Marlboro Man ad is also its most distinctive visual: the clunky, pseudo-subliminal product reveal. This is accomplished through a burst of edits, each only a few frames long.
Nameless (Cowboy), 2016, digital inkjet print, 16×24 in., ed. 2+1AP
Thanks to the video encoding, a couple of frames of an unfamiliar, off-brand-looking-but-not pack of cigs is superimposed on footage of a poseur-looking-but-not sheep rancher.
Marlboro (cigarette) [wikipedia]
Maverick as Marlboro [box vox]
Marlborough [sic] from William Irish [vimeo via box vox]
Why Marlboro Country ends at the border [theglobeandmail]
The Complete Agnes Martin GIFs: A Retrospective
[UPDATE: Now that the Guggenheim’s show has closed, we can call this a retrospective. I’m pleased to announce Agnes Martin: The Complete GIFs, which will remain on continuous loop, I guess.]
Oh my goodness.
“When your eyes are open you see beauty in anything.” [via]
Oh look, here is another one.
Continue reading “The Complete Agnes Martin GIFs: A Retrospective”
Untitled (Erster Blick), 2016
greg.org Untitled (Erster Blick), 2016, digital print and graphite on white bond, 38.6 x 27.3 cm (uncropped), ed. 100+20+10+6
I’m pleased to offer a limited edition, a sort of palate cleanser for Frieze London, an amuse bouche if you will, for FIAC.
Untitled (Erster Blick) is a digital inkjet print and graphite work on white bond. It is a slightly enlarged facsimile of a page from the press clippings archive of the Zentrum für Elektronische Korrelationen und Magnetismus at Universität Augsburg’s Institut für Physik.
It will be available until Thursday, October 27, when bidding opens at Christie’s Kensington for Gerhard Richter’s Erster Blick, a slightly enlarged illustration from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published on 26th July 2000. The First Open Prints & Multiples sale is scheduled to begin at 2:00PM London (1:00PM UTC), and Richter’s work is Lot 76, so perhaps a little after 3:00? But don’t dally. And don’t come looking for mine if you lose out on Richter’s, because it will be gone, and you will lose twice.
Lot 76 | Gerhard Richter, Erster Blick, 2000, offset print, 18.2×15.1cm, ed. 100, plus 20, 10 TP, 6 TP, est. GBP 2000-3000. via Christie’s
Following Richter’s offset print, Untitled (Erster Blick) will be available in an edition of 100, plus 20 Roman numeral copies, plus 10 trial proofs, plus 6 other trial proofs, marked Probe. All will be numbered, signed, and stamped. It is the artist’s intention they remain uncropped, but who knows? It’s a wild world out there.
[UPDATE: Thanks to all, and to those getting more than one, that’s fine, awesome even, but please consider others in your voracious collecting frenzies. Also, the prints will be numbered/designated in the order listed above. So if fewer than 100 prints sell before the auction, there will be no proofs. So buy early, then buy late? I really have no idea how this thing will play out.
The price for Untitled (Erster Blick) is $US20, shipped. Or it was. The edition is closed and no longer available. Thanks to the collectors and connoisseurs who purchased prints, they will be produced and delivered promptly, stay tuned.
UPDATE: Oh wow, the Richter didn’t sell [either, ha].
Previously, related: Untitled (Tanya), 2014
Untitled (George Washington’s Coffin), 2016 –
I cannot explain how I didn’t catch this when I saw it many months ago, but re-reading Steve Roden’s blog post about his return to painting after a year-long hiatus, this completely floors me:
Recently, I have also been obsessed with a photograph of two seemingly insignificant pieces of wood about the size of the inner part of a closed fist. The photograph appeared in an auction catalog, and I was fascinated to discover that these seemingly ordinary, or pathetic objects were pieces of George Washington’s coffin, and as such, their presence transcends their objectness.
Probably! But right now it is their objectness that I’m obsessed with.
Continue reading “Untitled (George Washington’s Coffin), 2016 –”Untitled (I’ll Be Your Mirror), 2016
Untitled (I’ll Be Your Mirror), 2016, 70 x 46 in., feathered mirror by Bill Cunningham
The end credits for Richard Press’s documentary Bill Cunningham New York run over Nico and the Velvet Underground’s langorous, “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”
In the 1950s, before he took up a camera and changed the world, Cunningham designed hats for his own label, William J. He also created some unknown number of objets d’art and furniture. Well, at least one piece is known. The fashion illustrator Kenneth Paul Block considered this feather-covered mirror by Cunningham to be one of his most prized possessions.
It is large, 70 x 46 inches, and has an extraordinary patina. It holds the wall like a 50s Bruce Connor or Rauschenberg. I put #painting in there, but maybe it’s #combine instead. Oh wow, I just found this photo of Merce Cunningham dancing Aeon (1961) in a pair of feathered chaps Rauschenberg designed.
Merce performing Aeon (1961) in Tokyo in 1964, photo: Yasuhiro Yoshioka/Sogestu Foundation, via walkerart
Block passed away in 2009 and his partner of over 50 years, artist and textile designer Morton Ribyat, died in March. If you’re interested in buying this work, email or call me whenever you’re ready. If you’d like to take physical custody of it, though, you’d better move fast. UPDATE: And have more than $13,000. Wow.
INFLATION UPDATE As of 2017 we know where the mirror is. For sale here for $60,000.
Sept 23, 2016, Lot 377: AN IMPORTANT FEATHER-MOUNTED MIRROR, DESIGNED AND CREATED BY BILL CUNNINGHAM [stairgalleries]
Previously, related: Untitled (Joan Collins Toile de Jouy), 2015
Untitled (redbox), 2016
Untitled (redbox), 2016, altered redbox dvd rental kiosk, ratchet nylon web straps, chain, padlock, aluminum tape. installation view via @rgay
Someone wanted a movie collection really badly. pic.twitter.com/gDnhpbmCuo
— roxane gay (@rgay) August 25, 2016
Can you claim a work if you have no idea where it is? Writer Roxane Gay snapped this great piece and posted it to Twitter this morning. The web straps immediately made me think of the straps on the previous, Untitled (Shenanigans) piece. There’s menace and violence, but it’s less political here. More Hollywood. The chains are what really make it for me.
Gay is a professor at Purdue, and that brown brick looks familiar, so maybe this was outside a McDonald’s in West Lafayette somewhere. I don’t think it’ll be up for long, but it’s enough for the CV, at least.
Untitled (Shenanigans), 2016, Installation View
It seemed so much funnier when Cady Noland did it.
Maybe not funny, but at least it didn’t freak you out. Noland’s artworks drew from the raw aesthetic landscape of late 20th century built America to shed light on uncomfortable truths about patriotism, violence, commercialism, waste, the American psyche.
But it did it in an art context. Whatever it was, or however dark or unsettling, it was still [just] art. You could walk away from it.
Or wake up from it, like a bad dream.
Now there’s a white nationalist bigot in Florida trolling Muslims, and protesting Hillary Clinton and her treasonous supporter citizens by building a lock-em-up protest cage in the back of his pickup truck. No voter shenanigans, he says on Twitter: Trump landslide or in the cage ya go.
My instant impulse, or maybe it was a coping mechanism, was to make a Noland reference. Then as I got ready to post this thing here, and declare it a work [as one does around here], I got cold feet. The reality of this person and his anger and hatred and poisonous rhetoric and not-idle threats piled up, and I reconsidered. This is literally not-helping, I feared, it is making-worse.
But after a couple of days of looking, and thinking, and seeing this guy’s gesture/threat circulate, I came to see this as important. Or at least real. Relevant. This bigot’s sculptural move was atypical, even perhaps unique, but it is a datapoint in a network, a churning system of political hate. These images are of a physical object manifesting the digital flow of right-wing ideas and imagery across Twitter and Facebook. It’s a post-Internet avatar of Trumpist America.
Looking at it, now I wonder: is this how Noland saw, how she read, how she felt, when she made her works? Did she dream of making toxic, dystopian, American flag-draped cages, only to wake up and find the dream was still there? And wasn’t even a dream?
Untitled (Gerda Taro Leipzig Monochromes), 2016
Untitled (Gerda Taro Leipzig Monochromes), 2016, Gerda Taro photos, painted wood supports, tar. image: Anne König and Jan Wenzel
On the night of August 3rd, an outdoor installation of 18 photos by Gerda Taro in Leipzig, Germany, was vandalized, painted over with tar? Or aniline black dye? The photos were part of f/stop Leipzig, an annual photography festival, held in early July. Some of the public space components of the festival apparently continued beyond that date.
f/stop curators Anne König and Jan Wenzel included Taro, a pioneering war photographer, because of the confluence of her life, her work, and the city itself. She lived in Leipzig until 1933, when she fled as a Jewish refugee. She met up with another refugee, Robert Capa, in Paris, and they documented the Spanish Civil War together until Taro was killed in 1937. Leipzig is hosting many refugees from the Syrian war right now.
The curators note that effacing the images of refugees by a Jewish photographer with tar is inherently a political act, and they are calling on the city to discuss the implications. The Taro estate, in the form of the International Center for Photography, wants her images back on view in Leipzig.
I agree with all of that, but also wish to recognize the damning bluntness of the blacked out panels. Sometimes redactions and monochromes cannot be let off the hook. Declaring them an artwork of my own is no way of assuring anything, but It feels important that they will be preserved.
The 21 panels include three texts and at least five layouts from LIFE magazine. The bottom eleven were completely blacked out, while the tops of the five tallest appear to have been beyond the easy reach of the unknown redacter. In the event this work does get destroyed, I will try to identify the Taro images under the tar.
update: I’m still thinking this one through a bit.
Pioneering war photographer Gerda Taro’s images vandalised in Leipzig [theartnewspaper]
09. August 2016 Auch Gewalt gegen Fotografien ist Gewalt [f-stop-leipzig.de]
Untitled (The Four Seasons), 2016
Untitled (The Four Seasons), 2016, four bronze Philip Johnson planters and 16 trees, in seasonal rotation. image: Paul Goldberger
Paul Goldberger tweeted this photo of an emptied out Four Seasons, and now I want those potted palm trees more than anything in the 14-hour auction I sat through the other day&night [online, obv, but I stayed until the checks arrived].
The Pool Room in spring, via wright20
Those planters canNOT be landmarked, can they? The trees certainly can’t be; they change(d) with the seasons. OTOH, given the merch they unloaded, the only way they wouldn’t have sold the planters is if they were landmarked. So Selldorf, Rosen & those food guys will keep them. Will they rotate their trees too, keeping a signature of the restaurant they booted planted squarely in the center of their new joint? We shall see.
Sforzian Boardwalk
Hillary Clinton speaking at the closed Trump Plaza in Atlantic City July 6, 2016, image: philly.com/Tom Gralsh
I missed this while I was out of town, but Hillary Clinton hit a Sforzian jackpot when she gave a campaign speech on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, in front of the closed and failed Trump Plaza Casino.
Carl Icahn owns the building now, and the vestiges of Trump’s failure are literally written on the wall, providing a readymade Sforzian backdrop.
Or two. According to Amy Rosenberg’s report at philly.com, the Clinton campaign had originally wanted to stage their event a block inland, with the casino’s de-Trumped tower in the background, but it would have blocked traffic to Caesar’s. So they wedged in to a less optimal but still effective corner of the boardwalk, the ghosts of T-R-U-M-P lingered on the classy, glassy marquee.
same, this time via Asbury Park Press/USAT/Tom Costello
If you don’t count his kneejerk tweets blaming anyone else for his business’s failures while crowing about skating out of bankruptcy with a wad of investors’ dough, Trump’s reaction came Thursday. The Press of Atlantic City reports that the traces of Trump’s name were removed “for good” from the boardwalk facade. “Black paint has been applied to cover up any mention to Donald Trump.”
Untitled (Trump Plaza Black) Nos. 1-3, 2016, paint on panel, collection: Trump Entertainment Resorts/Carl Icahn, installation photo via Press of Atlantic City
Actually, from Jack Tomczuk’s (or Michael Ein’s, I can’t tell) photos, the traces of Trump’s name were not painted over, but were covered by painted panels. Five black monochromes were affixed to Hillary’s Sforzian corner, and to the fenced off boardwalk entrance, where the ghost of Trump’s made up crest remains visible but illegible.
The exhibition will remain on view at least through November. I would be stoked if you visit it and post photos.
Untitled (Trump Plaza Black) Nos. 4 & 5, 2016, paint on panel, each in two parts, collection: Trump Entertainment Resorts/Carl Icahn, installation photo via Press of Atlantic City
Hillary Clinton takes on Trump in A.C. [philly.com]
Faded ‘Trump Plaza’ removed after Clinton appearance [pressofatlanticcity.com]
Better Read #008: Death By Gun
“Untitled” (Death By Gun), 1990, endless. collection: moma.org
We’ve come to reading the names of the dead, to intone them, as a form of memorial.
I’ve never felt Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Death By Gun) was a memorial per se, more a statement. Remembering for different ends. But following the massacre of Latinx gay people at Orlando’s Pulse night club, and the subsequent readings of their names, it occurred to me that I’d never read and did not remember the names of the people who appeared on Felix’s 1990 stack piece.
I looked for the original Time magazine article that was the artist’s source, and I couldn’t find it online. I couldn’t find it in libraries. I ended up buying an old print edition of the magazine itself on eBay. July 17, 1989.
And I transcribed the names of the 460 people who were killed in the US the first week of May 1989, the week Time chose to document, in the order Felix chose to lay them out, and had them read aloud by a computer.
Download Better_Read_008_Death_By_Gun_20160620.mp3 from dropbox greg.org [dropbox greg.org, 16.7mb mp3, 11:37]
Previously:
Better Read #007: Spinoza’s Ethica from Sturtevant’s Vertical Monad
Better Read #006: The Jetty Foundation Presents, Send Me Your Money
Better Read #005: Frank Lloyd Wright Speaks Up
Better Read #004: Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland, a Zine by Brian Sholis
Better Read #003: Sincerely Yours, An Epic Scholarly Smackdown By Rosalind Krauss
Better Read #002: A Lively Interview With Ray Johnson, c.1968
the Ur-Better Read: W.H. Auden’s The Shield Of Achilles, Read By A Machine
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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⌘S
About five years ago I began collecting dead websites. It started in 2010 with Thomas Hirschhorn, after his first website, made for the Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival in Amsterdam, disappeared from the net. The Spinoza project was the third in a series of temporary projects dedicated to philosophers.
Hirschhorn calls these “presence and production” works. Here is a 2009 interview with Ross Birrell:
“Presence” and “Production” are terms I use for specific projects which require my presence and my production. It means to make a physical statement here and now.
I believe that only with presence – my presence – and only with production – my production – can I provoke through my work, an impact on the field.
When the project is over, the programs end, the materials are dispersed, the artist moves on, and a couple of months later, the website where the entire thing had been documented disappears. Then the links go dead, the URL expires, and gets scooped up by some zombie ad network. All that remains are some jpgs illustrating Marcus Steinweg’s Bijlmer lectures.
I’d been to the first at Documenta, the Bataille Monument, in 2002, but not the Spinoza Festival, and so the website was it for me. I’d wanted to read and see more, longer. And then I discovered I couldn’t. It was gone.
So when Hirschhorn launched his second website the next year, for CRYSTAL OF RESISTANCE, the Swiss Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, I was ready. Almost. I grabbed the whole site several times, but l missed some galleries. And then it was gone.
The GRAMSCI MONUMENT site in 2013, I definitely got that one. And Hirschhorn’s project at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, FLAMME ETERNELLE, I got that one too.
When the greatest website in the world got edited into oblivion, I grabbed it from the Internet Archive and made a piece out of it last year: Untitled (Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide).
Then a few months ago I heard MOCA had deleted the informative and interactive mini-site for Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s Land Art show, so I rebuilt that one. Or I’m in process. I still have to reconnect the Google Earth links. [Google’s deprecated KML API may have led to the page’s demise.]
This is how I started posting them as subdomains, similar to found texts or found web objects. In the case of Hirschhorn, I was very aware since Venice that these were different, and very much not his work: “This website is neither an artwork, nor part of the artwork <>”, it said on the front of the site.
But wasn’t, but now it was, but of a different work. Hirschhorn’s projects required his presence and his production, and my sites had neither. They appeared the same but were the opposite.
They weren’t just for me anymore. At least I didn’t have to think so.
I do edit them, leave my mark, track changes, in the text somewhere, or the source, in ways that are invisible or imperceptible, where I imagine literally no one will ever know or care. At one point, in a more cynical mood, I rewrote the entire Gramsci Monument to be entirely about me. But the more I consider Hirschhorn’s practice, the less sure I am that the gesture works as critique. [Of him, anyway. Of me, OTOH… At least I kept a clean version too.]
For example, here is something I wrote in the source of Ends of the Earth:
Though it is still available on the Internet Archive, this is the kind of thing that should, I feel, exist within an art context. It is too off-the-cuff to imagine these two mirrors as a site and non-site, but that is an apt reference, I won’t throw it out. What ultimately motivates this repetition of the site is a bafflement at why MOCA removed it in the first place. Huge shoutout to Kimberly Drew (@museummammy) for calling this to my attention.
I just feel like I have to grab these things, even the ones that get scraped into the Internet Archive. It’s an urge that I can’t dismiss, even when I can recognize the futility of it. I have to save them.