On and off the grid:
Thinking about the essay:
Design my own question how artists living with disability or illness are somehow more something towards withdrawing
P16 CHOICE
Silence as punishment, p22
p22
Leaving because making art making her want to die, she discerned it was from 'an overdeveloped sense of responsibility' p23
'self-lacerating relationship to pride' p22
And what does withdrawal look like, completely outside of life, p24 descrip
P24
'not that interpretation is the point. (Experience is.) p25
P25
'facing the canvas, her language because plausible, even if we wonder how much we were primed' p25
Everyone else not commenting on personal things out of respect for the artist/out of what?
'In my best moments I think "life has passed me by", and I am content.' p27
The Next Hill:
http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2014-11-08_albert-york/works-in-exhibition/
P29
'I believe we live in a paradise, I really do' Albert York Quote p29
'the trepidations of seeing itself' p29
'imbricating massiveness in the minor' p31
Imbricatting: arrange so that they overlap like roof tiles
p31
P33
'not acting, not benign' p33
'he posits objects... as having inner selves that are impenetrable yet spark out aspects of what Graham Harman calles eidos: that which belongs to the shuttered real within.' P34
'Human beings easily become alienated from their own deepest needs and feelings. Learning; thinking; innovation, and maintaining contact with one's own inner world are all facilitated by solitude- p34 from Anothony Storr's book Solitude
P35
'Just two flowers, but you'll never, ever know them. You can only relay the attempt
'Maybe, for him, the notion of public viewing rendered the work unacceptably vulknerable: all those eyes discerning potential flaws, missing the achievements.
'maybe, conversely, praise felt like misreading..
'or perhaps, like [those]...who turn their pack on what they've done once they've doen it, so as to move on...and improve with the next.' p36
'sight outpacing facility' p36
'York's other apparent subject in his art is the fact that, yes, this is just paint....[thinking that shows] a frustration with the intransigence of his medium' p37
Intransigence of the medium, p37
Manufacturing Dissent
Reflecting on Posenenske
Quoting Goethe 'And time and time again they raised theory to the level of practice.'
Other Goethe quotes:
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
Quotign the artist 'though art's formal development hs progressed at increasing tempo, its social function has regressed,'
And: 'you culture vultures,so here you are all gathered together to chat and lie and talk crap so as to gain the upper hand
P47
Concepts of Distance:
Good little thing on resisting documentation by the artist but those following him relishing it to understand... p48
The relationship between ephemerality and infinity, p52
Interestingm anifesto for the future of art and being of forces and elemental
'Draw, in your mind's eye, a capricious circle. That might eb Brouwn's work: at once theoretical and defined with abundant space' p54
Brouwn 'never before have distances been so meanigless as nowadays. Increasingly more people fly long distance several times a year. The validity of the concept of distance is being still further eroded. In my work distances are rechared again. They regain meaning' p54]
In his exhbition Walking Through Cosmic Rays 'Brouwn refused to exhibit any art objects at all, so that viewers could experience the "cosmic rays"….[quoting exhibiion wall text]:
How empty is this space?/...walking consiouslyu through the invisible cosmic rays/ in this space confirms, intensifies/ the pecence of this space' p55
'Do as you will with the fact that Brouwn so frequently contrasts and ostensibly real world with an idiosyncratic inward one, an actual unit of measure with a concoted surrogate, the physical experience of distance with the imagined and subjective and, tirelessly, the possibility of:
Free movement
Self-measure
Self-governance
Self-determination' p56
Reconciling between the knowledge of the artists persona as this I SAY NO to all documentation and being known, and then knowing them personally and they are garrulous or x or y, in seeming contravention to their persona/brand/xxxx
'You decide, ona whim, to type 'Stanley Brouwn interview' into YouTube...and you're highly surprised to find something....When you find this upload [recorded without Brouwn's knowledge] it has only been viewedfifty five times. Brouwn's voice is high and friendly. He laughs. Half against your better judgement, you have ti translated; and here – having surged across your own line, established what constitues violation – you quit snoopign, quit asking.' P58
Looking because you want to know them, want explanation of their art, want to see how they engaged with media or xyz other reason
Finding something so niche but authentic and casual
Having your own line as to how far will you go looking for that which does not wish to be seen
Knowing that line
Crossing that line
Stopping your actions- at what point
How do you feel after
Very much the academic's politic in accessing any archive/document that which resists it's own form
'Try the thought experiment thought experiment that Brouwn doesn't withdraw – that he accepts interviews, that he's asked why he uses the royal cubit, why distance, why this, why that. The refusals, care and control feel indivisible from the work – are a performative aspect that never stopped but only slipped into the negative. P59
!!!!!!!!!!!!
Street Level:
This piece above from an expensive show in NY: 'The totality was...outwardly a little disappointing, overfamiliar, latently commerce-minded. And yet Hammons, who once called the overwhelmingly white, status-obsessed, hermetic art worls "the worst audience in the world," may well have intended it that way.' P62
BEING PURPOSEFULLY BAD AS A RESPONSE TO THE AUDIENCE, TOY UOR OWN GOOD HISTORY, AS A STATEMENT?
By saying no, by using found materials, by representing oppressed groups- is it all in the effort of analytical blamelessness?
'Not incidentally, such materials – barbershop sweepings, food detritus – not only contained the afterglow of life lived but were also free. Unhitching yourself from costs, controlling the means of production, unshakling yourself from crippling overheads: these, Hammons has said, constitue a route to artistic freedom' p65
In such contrast to an artist like Koons, who is usuing these materials of the everyday, of cheap culture, but the means fo production are more expensive then alchemy or nuclear fission
'In 1981 he made Pissed Off, a performance...in which he urinated on Richard Serra's imposing steel-plate sculpture T.W.U. (1980-81), an implicit commentary on the socially disengaged nature of formalist sculpture.'
Saying no to other people who are engaging with Art and it's high formal explorations and conclusions
Exhibiting by installing things in the street or as social interventions as a deliberate antithesis to exhibition in gallery with the foundation of commerce
'Hammons...had long detached himself from the art world's machinations. He had discovered that if you run they'll run after you; that although the art world considers itself top of the credibility tree, its highest branch is reserved for the figure who can play its games and still disdain it. He positioned himself there.' P67
Popular opposition
'to hide things from whites, to hold something back' p69
another reason to say no RACE
GOES ONTO SAY 'THE OPPOSITE [REVEALING THINGS TO IGNORANT AUDIENCES] arguably of the language of representation to which black art had previously...primarily gravitated. p69
'Abstraction here would become synonymous with a controlled absence, with not seeing something...
Concerto in Black and Blue (2002-03)...descending from Klein's all-white empty gallery The Void (1958) and placed it in the negative. Blacking out the lights of Doug Christmas's cavernous Ace Gallery in New York...here was blackness as anxiety and also a refusal of vision 0 a negation of art's core register, the visible.' P69
To say no so as to even avoid SEEING
On his refusing to attend parties and network: 'what the art world can take from him, in terms of his precense, is fiercely and actively attenuated...plausibly an extension of the work.' p69
'The trajectory was familiar. An artist goes through the system, receives recognition, steps away from it, and starts operating increasingly on his own terms. Meanwhile, as he leans back, the art industry leans, as if magnetized, toward him.' P70
To make enough money/noptoriety to then be able to live as you want; a model seen in those who work in corporate worls to then move to off grid and etc.
The politics of getting the unknown public to create you artwork p70
Here and Not Here:
'we find a curator writing to the artist after watching twelve hours of videotaped interviews in which Bacher asks artists, framers , and gallerists to describe her: "as if, after all those hours, I still believed there was such a thing as knowing you."' p73
Concealing her gender by issuing work under a male pseudonym, the politics for hiding being gendered
'A pluralistic approach, eu currant in the 1970s' p74
Art context
'there's an artist who, as her willful aesthetic already signals, will not be possessed or processed' p74
THIS KIND OF ART NOT AS LIBERAL BUT OUTSIDE OF THE SYSTEM, NEEDS A FORM OF REFUSAL TO DEMONSTRATE ITS OPPOSITION AND FULL REJECTION
'she melts away for five years, appearing to produce nothing at all. Whatever the actual reason, such structural absences scan as concordant with her practice.' P74
SO, refusing/withdrawing cannot be said to say anything in particular in the absolue or abstract terms, must be judged in terms of the artist on a case by case basis, seeing the ouvre and conemplating then, like macroeconomics...
'A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand' - Virginia Woolf, Orlando 1928, p226
Reusing media as a readymade
'Bacher's art is given life by her life's unpredictability' p79
There is a philosophy […] of reception at work here. Recognising up front that viewers never geta full picture, always inject partialities into whatever they see, Bacher doesn't even try to present one; what she offers instead is explicitly speckled with holes and gaps to populate.' P80
No revealing things or making a cohesive ouvre so that the audience knows the way they receive the work is mostly coming from them and not her influence.
Forever Incomplete:
1970's historical points from p84:
Countercultural revolution
Vietnam war protests
Beliefe that revolution could create a new society
This being led by artists
Going 'blank'
Mainstream art world part of the toxic administration system
Dematerialisation of art
The Rockerfeller family whitewashing its involvement in weapons manufacture for Vietnam via art
Guerilla actions
Punkish nihilism
See p86 for a copy of a flyer D'Arcangelo did for an intervention at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Labour pieces seem v interesting
Invited people to view the 'functional constructions' in a speculative threshold between labour and art, between the makers' means of subsistence and their professional practice, questioning the division between the two p87
Was invited to do a group show at NY Rosa Esman gallery and asked his space be filled with any citizen who wanted to use it, this was deined
It's about giving it back to the people
'transfer of control from the institution to the viewer' p91
Being ideologically 'blameless' as refusing to take part in the system, think not liberalist revolution but complete nihilism first.
'Once it is understood that the support of Artists Space and support of galleries and museums are one and the same, that the systems are one system, a discourse for change may be opened that will lead to tangible results, I.e., unqualified space and/or revolution' from the artist himself p90
Created a art gallery himself with a couple people and its first show was the empty gallery space which they themselves had built
'part of the difficulty of assessing him in retrospect is that everything aligns itself with a speculative design, including his death, and yet everything is also holed, left open' p91
For him, 'making means unmaking, articulation means disarticultation' p91
Hard to write him into the canon of art history as he was opposed to it all and works had forms that couldn't be pinned down so easily, Herbert calling it 'propositional reversing' p91:
From his notebook, 'It is not the paradox but the space between the two parts of the paradowx', p92,
'D'Arcangelo's own textual silence around his suicide and reasons therof, and the muddiness of his motives' is uneasy in the same way that all unanswerable profound questions are, p92
'it is noteable that he did not destroy his archive'
In the situation of an artist who was so against anything which might pin him into art administration, what remains becomes a paradox, a thought game, a fantasy, a projection of your own wishes and wondering and a forever ananswerable pursuit.
'How, his art asked and answered, do you add something that is also a subtraction, contruct the irreducible, disappear and don't? P92
Same Q's we were asking for our 'It Will Come Out in The Wash' piece, "is it possible to have less after a performance than before?
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/christopher-darcangelo/
A Realer Real:
Laurie Parsons
Withdrawing from the art world in search of the real, the authentic, that which can actually help people, see p96 re her work for helping people with the paperwork for subsidized housing, teens with psychiatric hospitalisations, not mentioning her art practice in these circles; Herbert arguing that she wouldn't have gotten there without going through being an artist first.
Did readymade works of things she found in the street, bringing them back to her studio and seeing how she felt about them all over time and in relation to each other to make works, it is the art of the everyday, the beauty of that which is discarded around us
The politics of selling: 'for Parsons...the idea that someone would pay...for thing sshe had collected on the street was wholly disorientating...For Parsons, apparently, the work remained...what it was on the street – a (literal) collection of complex discards, bristling with life and potential ambiguity, and the gallery was only a means to see it'. P98
Again theme of authenticity, morals of trade, politics of selling work that is a readymade
But also I love that for her it's just objects, not high minded, putting them in the gallery doesn't change em, putting together doesn't amalgamate them into a new thing, they just be objects man
'Parsons "exhibited" an empty gallery...at Lorence-Monk; an invite was sent out without her name on it and the artist later removed the show from her CV, as if completing a negative cycle' p98-9
NEGATIVE CYCLE, interesting, explore more.
She goes to lengths now to make sure that he rwork isn't seen, if she can help it. Why? Unpack:
To have her personal actions and community work be her name and not the objects?
Herbert: 'The artist begins on the street, what she finds there becomes art, the art becomes material goods, and when she doesn't like that, she dematerialises and segues into quanitfyable assistance' p99
?
'Ameliorative alternative' p101
Freedom's Just Another Word:
'culturally specific mayhem' p103
'The psychopath shares the societal sanctioned characteristics of the entrepensurial male' p105
'Her last voluntary exhbition appears to have been in 2001, when she contributed work to a show curated by Bob Nickas, a long term supporter and cogent analyst of her practice' p105-6
When you're an artist in withdrawal, it seems one of the reaons you may exhibit is as a favour to those who have understood you, known you as you would want to be known and accepted your overall decisions about tings
'Noland withrew [from published critical art engagement] when the zone of critique itself blurred with entertainment and vanity slag' p106
'to see her actions since "quitting" as extramural yet borderline artistic, based less on identification of a problem...than on reacting to it' p107
Noland 'said that tracking and reacting to situations in which her work is misrepresented now takes upa ll of her time' p108
Another reason to withdraw from the art world, that in the circulation of your work it is misrepresented and damaged...
'Psychopaths, she once said, act out principles latent in a culture' p109
'a "doughnut subject," whose missing centre is the artist and her stated rationale for retiring.' P109
'if the game is corrupted, don't play, or at least don't let their standards become yours' p109
'Her silence, of course, has boomeranged, only increasing attention toward her.' P109
Withdrawing is one thing, but may mean you provide conditions for exactly the opposite
The Gift of Subtraction:
'You wanted more, aware that the more you received would equate to less' p113
'the fungible nature of space and time' p113
'If it need be termed surrender, then let it be so, for he has surrendered in word, not will. He has said, "My fall will be great but it will be useful." The emperor has falled and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine and with this I am electric. I am electric.' P115 quote from a performance of Donnely, v interesting
Answering a question to her requesting her thoughts of more info on a work was answered by playing certain songs from her ipod; there's many ways fo saying no that don't exclusively use words
'the feeling persisted...that you weren't accessing a complete experience . The artist, while withdrawing, also appeared to withold something as palpable as the dark side fo the moon.' P119
'just because you can funnel something through sppech acts doesn't mean you're obliged to' p120
On resisting and resisting language
As Free As The Squirrels:
V good article published in footnote on the Donnely one.
http://renaissancesociety.org/publishing/32/as-free-as-the-squirrels/
'art by all accounts should have succumbed to its self-willed dismantling quite a while ago.'
'Donnelly is as free as the squirrels to produce art whose justification would be its mere existence. Given that meaning may be produced with or without it, Donnelly is the first to admit that no one needs her art.
In exchange, she has carte blanche to roam the highways, byways and interstellar lo-ways of thought with nary a care as to what makes sense save to her.'
'When posed before any of her work, the question of why becomes interchangeable with why not.'