Feeling deceived and pessimistic after the 2004 US presidential election, Seattle artists Deborah Faye Lawrence conducted an e-mail survey asking artists, writers, friends and strangers to share their concept of an ideally perfect place, and their thoughts on the social, political and moreal aspects of this utopia. Simply she asked:”What does utopia look like to you?” The 15,000 words which she received in response to her question were then worked into her art and resulted in 26 mixed-media collages that critically and satirically speak out against injustice and apathy.

“Treating pictures and words with equal weight, it is not only what Lawrence says, but how she says it. Images shift in scale and pictoral style. Photographs, reproductions, occasionally painted illustrations and words are flawlessly integrated within an imaginary field….She lays her heart and intellect on the line in each piece. While her arguably relevant concerns are set out with communication as a goal, each narrative is laced by the sheer power of what David Hickey called to our attention several years ago- visual beauty. And that, matched with intellect and passion, is immensely satisfying.”
-Frances De Vuono, Review Artsweek, September 2006

‘Dee Dee Does Utopia’, Deborah Faye Lawrence, Published by Marquand Books, 2008

The much talked-about Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, opens in wide release this week.

Set in Romania in the 1980s, towards the end of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship, the film’s straightforward narrative explores ‘a day in the life of’ a college girl who arranges an illegal abortion session for her pregnant friend.

The way director Cristian Mungiu treats the story reveals his extraordinary talents as a writer as well as a director. His visual style –a realist technique that occasionally adapts cinematic forms of various film genres, including the thriller– and the seemingly improvised, but in fact meticulously authored, dialogue turn the film into a masterpiece that goes beyond a simplistic discussion of the pro-choice debate.

Instead of taking sides, Mungiu explores the moral implications of the characters’ decisions, as “attention is focused on choice itself- the countless choices we make every day- as the determining factor of our character and of our humanity,” notes film critic Amy Taubin.

Exploring the final game of the 2006 Soccer World Cup through 12 different vantage points, this multi-layered video-installation by Harun Farocki analyzes the spectacle of sports through technology and statistical information. The event, held in Germany, was reportedly seen by 1.5 billion viewers worldwide. Unfolding in simultaneous, real-time montage, Deep Play depicts the artist’s own footage of the game, official FIFA footage, charts of player stats, real-time 2D and 3D animation sequences, and stadium surveillance, exposing the visual, informational, and technological design of these grand social events. Deep Play, the latest installment in Farocki’s ongoing investigation into the politics of audiovisual representation, premiered last summer at Documenta in Kassel and is currently on view for the first time in the US at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. A must.

There’s an interesting combination of exhibitions currently going on at the Orange County Museum, CA. One of them consists of musically new works by the unique Joseph Grigely. Here’s a text I wrote when the same body of work was being shown at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore earlier this summer:

“We presumably know what a conversation sounds like – but what does a conversation look like?”

(Joseph Grigely)

Joseph Grigely caught the attention of the art world at the beginning of the nineties with a series of works he called Conversations with the Hearing. Deaf from the age of ten as the result of an accident, Grigely collects the chats he has with people who don’t know sign language and to whom lip reading proves difficult. Ranging from intimate displays on tables or walls to room-sized installations, the series displays handwritten notes that are exchanged between Grigely and his conversation partners at social gatherings; mostly gallery openings, bars or restaurants. The resulting series of witty and wry installations, explores the full potential as well as the numerous limitations of everyday human communication.

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Why would anyone want to go to a war-show? Why would anyone interested in contemporary art want to visit an exhibition that explores the exact same territory as that which we witness abundantly in the media on a daily basis? When talking about the war, it is all too easy to touch upon common ground: the knowledge of a continuous fiasco that is a widespread presumption. So, why raising consciousness about something that we already know everything about? And, if you decide to explore this dicey terrain, how to be at the same time critical and have an artistically compelling significance?

Here is an exhibition that proves the full potential of politically significant but poetic exhibition-making.
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The world of popular culture and the world of contemporary art both idolize the artist as superstar, a rapidly rising (or falling) hero; as a brilliant and foremost individual genius. This star-maker machinery keeps the Western cult of individuality permanently alive, which renders it continuously superior to the non-objectivity of ideas, politics and social imagination. Despite our self-declared and cultivated postmodern personas (which declared the death of the author a long time ago), we simply like to cling to the ego fetish of old-fashioned Romantic genius.

In their recent book Collectivism After Modernism, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette adventurously attack the cult of the mastermind while delving into the specific histories of collective art practice. Spanning the globe from Europe to Japan, to the United States, Africa, Cuba and Mexico, the editors have asked significant writers, curators and theorists to explore ways in which collectives function within cultural norms and social conventions. Although each of the contributors brings a highly personal and geopolitical approach to the exploration of these themes, Stimson and Sholette set forth some compelling ideas in their provocative introductory text.

The authors relate collectivism directly to modernism and the avant-garde. Indeed, when considering the historical avant-garde before the Second World War, it is clear that modernism was an attempt to develop an alternative to the then present social life by means of art. From Mondrian’s aim to struggle “against everything individual in man” to Magritte’s “L’invention collective”, modernism was directly involved with the realization of communist ideals, to affirm community and social being. The modernist dream came abruptly to an end immediately after the Second World War, when collectivism was strangled by Cold War paranoia.

In the US and Western European countries, collectivism became associated with a loss of individual will. Instead, a new kind of gathering was established in random social, urban and work related groupings. Stimson and Sholette underline the constant banishment of collectivist tendencies from these groupings, and point out their return in mass-consumed popular culture as the unnamable and dangerous “others” (in the form of aliens, animals or secret societies). A new dynamic collectivism, one of mass culture, replaced old notions related to communism. This so-called ‘collectivism after modernism’ represented the desire of artists to speak collectively and to initiate artworks outside institutional structures, delivering them straight into the world of mass culture.

Stimson and Sholette make a very clear point: despite the art world’s inability to disconnect artistic value from individual achievements, many art practices are accomplished through their collective nature. The other texts in the book illustrate this notion clearly and urgently, sometimes maybe too extensively. But that’s just a minor critique: Collectivism After Modernism is a superb provocation of the market driven art world, a statement in favor of something more social, more collective and more real than art.

More info: here.

‘Collectivism After Modernism’, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, editors, University of Minnesota Press, 2007

(This text first appeared in hART magazine.)

In her highly entertaining book Unmarketable or Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity, Anne Elizabeth Moore depicts the absurdity of “our advertising-saturated, late-capitalist wonderland”. Rooted in the DIY philosophy of the punk underground, Moore describes how it became a part of the logic of mass production and corporate culture it originally opposed. The book offers a critical look at advertising agencies who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market, and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

I especially enjoyed Moore’s systematic demystification of concepts we usually take for granted. Early on in the book, there is an interesting section about the use of the word “organic”:

“The definition of organic most of us are accustomed to describes living beings; refers to something that develops gradually and without force; and implies the use of agricultural practices reliant on naturally occurring pesticides, fertilizers, and other growing aids but without the use of synthetic chemicals. We think of “organic” as a synonym for natural, untrammeled, sustainable.
Yet the definition of organic used on food packaging is a technical and tautological one, describing a lack of synthetic fertilizers, toxic pesticides, or herbicides, and an adherence to a set of standards put in place by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to regulate the commercial use of the word “organic”. While the definition has been pared down from its original, the word has also become popular in packaging, advertising, and the media; it’s a promotional tool. (…)
So the schism between what we believe organic means (naturally occurring, created without using damaging substances or force, and eminently reproducible) and what it means in the commercial sphere (grown by aid only of other products also labeled “organic”) is vast. Marketers have done more than take full advantage of this schism. They have created it.”

‘Unmarketable’, Anne Elizabeth Moore, The New Press, New York, 2007

Update: Interview with Anne from Bookslut

What if works of art resembled objects which correlated with our everyday lives instead of occupying the distanced space a typical painting or sculpture? What if an artist placed these works of art, thus disguised, in public spaces like stores or sold them over the Internet? What if you encountered works of art on the label of a Coca-Cola bottle or received one through the mail?

These are some of the questions curator Kelly Baum tries to answer in her exhibition Transactions, currently on display at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. In the accompanying catalogue text, she explores alternative systems of distribution employed by contemporary artists. Tracing a history through 20th Century avant-garde movements such as Russian Constructivism and diverse conceptual art practices, she focuses on the works of nine contemporary artists who ignore the way works of art usually enter and circulate through the public sphere.

Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Daniel Bozhkov positions himself as an intruder/visitor/amateur who seeks to introduce new strains of meaning with fresh and provocative interventions. Most recently, he has been organizing walking tours of cities that are unfamiliar to him. Posing as a local expert with the skewed curiosity of a foreigner, he invites tour-takers to experience their surroundings anew. Named The Fastest Guided Tours of Unfamiliar Places, Bozhkov leads participants hastily through the streets, running from site to site at a high speed, to “break through the authoritarian voice of a well-informed tour guide” and invite participants to share their knowledge.

Like many works in the exhibition, Bozhkov’s tours serve as a participatory platform for human exchange and collaboration. Unfortunately, the exhibition situates these works in a strictly contemporary art context, while the catalogue points to the fact that this context has already been overthrown by the avant-garde movements that are mentioned in the introductory text: Dada and Futurism. Curiously, it does not mention the more radically transgressive uses of public space by Fluxus and Situationist artists, who explicitly situated their works outside the art world. Why should that be different for the artists in Transactions? The exhibition is necessarily bounded by the institution of exhibitions and by the museum itself.

Here for the exhibition.

Here for Daniel Bozhkov’s website.

Update: Here is another related text by Transactions curator, Kelly Baum.

Manda Bala, is a provocative new documentary directed by Jason Kohn about rampant political corruption and violent kidnapping in Brazil. Set in São Paolo, the southern hemisphere’s most populous city, it is a hybrid of deep reportage and fictional drama– or more precisely, non-fictional drama. The plot is driven by a gallery of iconoclastic characters– a frog farmer, a plastic surgeon, a kidnapper, various crime-fighters and prosecutors and a charismatic politician named Jáder Barbalho, said to have embezzled massive sums of money intended for development projects in the poorest northern provinces of Brazil. As a study in the sociology of crime at both the highest and lowest strata of society, it provides insight into the catastrophic nature of colonialism and modern survival.

Claire Bishop, a British art historian and critic, has written much debated texts on the social aspects of contemporary art in journals such as October and Artforum. Last year, MIT published her book Participation. The least we can say is that finally a strong and compelling voice has stood up; one that considers the social implications of art seriously.

In her introduction Viewers as Producers, she provides a clear overview of artistic practices that have been implementing social strategies to bring art closer to life. Much of these works are performance related, but differentiate themselves from performance art in their attempt to neutralize the distinction between viewer and producer. Instead, these works stress upon collaboration and the collective dimension of social experiences. Although most participatory art is situated in museum –or at least art world– related environments, there is also a more direct engagement with certain social institutions, or with forms of mass media spectacle.

What does the book offer? It offers a fine and elaborate selection of texts from mainly three domains: theoretical and philosophical frameworks, artistic writings, and critical and curatorial positions. In his text The Inoperative Community, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy addresses the impasse of Marxist theory and considers an attempt to rethink the community. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija introduces an incredibly challenging exhibition concept in the form of a third-person narrative; whereas acclaimed French curator Nicholas Bourriaud goes into his groundbreaking relational aesthetics.

Unfortunately, the intelligence and accuracy with which these fragments are brought together are insufficient to offer a comprehensive picture. The reader is left alone while confronted with a fragmented web of unresolved relationships between philosophy, sociology, art and community. Regardless, I recommend this book. Just don’t expect it to be the ultimate publication on the subject of artistic social imagination, but an adventurous introduction to mostly unexplored territory.