Christian Philipp Müller

Work from his oeuvre.

“When Charles Ephrussi received A Bunch of Asparagus painted by Édouard Manet in 1880, he paid Manet 200 francs more than the 800 francs originally agreed upon — apparently because he was so pleased with the result. Pleased in turn by the unexpected increase in his fee, Manet sent his patron an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus and noted that this stalk had been missing from the original bundle. As Carol Armstrong writes in her essay “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” what the painter meant is that this small painting would make up the difference and that Ephrussi thus had now received the appropriate amount of asparagus for the amount he had paid.1

Through this “illusionistic substitution” (Armstrong) of painted asparagus for edible asparagus, Manet brought into play an “exchange value” associated with both the form of production and consumption.2 According to Armstrong, however, the insinuated “relative price of vegetables and paintings” raises fundamental questions, namely, whether an illusionary painted bundle of asparagus has a value “unto itself” or whether — relative to the valuation of the “real” bunch of asparagus — it is a matter of a “countable or weighable” articles whose value is produced by the luxuriousness of the represented object and the quality of the color application.3 Thus, Manet’s system of equivalences and substitutions did not aim to create a basis of comparison between reality and illusion, although it did set up analogies between the two on the level of taste, value, and exchange. The material value of an individual stalk of asparagus — determined by the purchase price — only increased through the symbolic relativation of the represented subject.

Over one hundred years later, the bunch of asparagus would become the object of another reflection on the processes of valuation at Hans Haacke’s Manet-Projekt in the exhibition Projekt 74. — Kunst bleibt Kunst which took place in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne on the occasion of the museum’s 150th birthday. On ten panels, Haacke documented the chronological history of collectors who had owned the Bunch of Asparagus, which had been in the museum’s possession since 1967. Each panel showed an owner and included personal information about each one. Thus, we learn that the painter Max Liebermann, barred from working in 1933 due to his Jewish heritage, had owned the still life. Other owners included Hermann J. Abs, Chairman of the purchasing committee of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, who was also the Chairman of the Deutsche Bank.

Through a simple, uncommented listing of dates and facts, Haacke aimed to make visible historical relationships that had been absent in history books. In order to prevent any possible references to the Nazi past of Abs, who had held a leading position in the economic politics of the Third Reich, the directorship of the museum instructed the exhibition curators to remove Haacke’s work from the show” – Sabeth Buchmann, Signs in Abundance

Matt Lipps

Work from his oeuvre

“Matt Lipps recently confessed to me that, during his adolescence, he owned a lifesized poster cutout of the 1990s siren and Melrose Place habitué, Alyssa Milano, which was tacked above the frame of his bed. It was an early intimation of the themes Lipps now examines in his work: the transference of desire onto images of printed media and the need to physically locate them within intimate spaces. It’s an act of totemic association, investing a massdistributed image with the deeply personal. Lipps’s work today involves cutout images – often sourced from discontinued photographic publications – that are first arranged into carefully constructed and lit still lifes, then photographed with a largeformat, analogue camera.

In earlier work – notably from his time as a graduate student under Catherine Lord’s guidance at the University of California, Irvine – Lipps drew heavily upon themes of sexuality, appropriating pictures from gay magazines for use in his pieces. During this period, in which the artist came to grips with his queer identity, his use of pornographic materials followed a sexual bildungsroman common to many – a secretive education gleaned from the pages of lessthanseemly reading material. As with Untitled (blue) (2004) – part of his ‘70s’ series – Lipps constructed miseenscènes that literally transplanted the object of lust into the domestic sphere. Propped up by small dowels and toothpicksized sticks, the cutout eroticized figure is placed atop crests of heaving bed sheets, set against a blue, seemingly nocturnal backdrop, mordantly blurring the lines between the desired and the disembodied.

With his inclusion in the 2009 group show ‘Living History II’ at Marc Selwyn Gallery in Los Angeles, and his 2010 solo exhibition ‘HOME’, at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, Lipps traded the erotic for the domestic. Included in his ‘home’ series, the large photograph Untitled (bar) (2008) is set in his familial living room. Fractured into abutting coloured panes, the suburban location is foregrounded by a jagged, crevicescarred black and white form supported by a sliver of wood. True to his photographic roots, Lipps later told me this shape was taken from an Ansel Adams monograph. In all the images from the series, the disjointed planes of familiar interior scenes juxtaposed with displaced natural forms evoke something akin to the lurking sense of Sigmund Freud’s unheimlich, or ‘uncanny’. For Lipps, the great unknown would seem to begin at home. And it is, perhaps, a personal sense of dislocation that looks to have coloured the artist’s more recent fascination with structures of taxonomy. Lipps’s 2010 show ‘HORIZON/S’ took as its starting point the nowdefunct bimonthly arts publication Horizon, which ran from 1959 to ’89. Among the photographs presented in the series ‘Untitled (Women’s Heads)’ (2010), Lipps arranges a cast of female cutouts, all at various angles of pose – seemingly random women grouped together by their shared gender. Meanwhile, in the panel of six photographs that comprise Untitled (Archive) (2010), a grand assemblage of cutouts, used in the production of the other still lifes, falls somewhere between the sitespecific sculptures of Geoffrey Farmer and Aby Warburg’s search for art historical forms in his Mnemosyne Atlas (1927–29).

Lipps’s current body of work, ‘Library’ (2013–14), continues this interest in the disruption of the archival. Similar to ‘horizon/s’, the current series began with the discovery on an outofprint pub lication, in this case a 17 volume TimeLife series titled The Library of Photography (1970–85). With issues dedicated to topics including ‘Photojournalism’ and ‘Children’, the series intended to present a concise historical and technical overview of the medium. Lipps’s interest, as he explained it to me, lies in the systematicity the series applied to the photographic act and, by extension, to the photograph itself. In Nature (Library) (2013), neatly linedup black and white cutouts of wildlife and geological formations are intermixed with images of analogue cameras being adjusted by disembodied hands. Standing on glass shelves, they are set against a background colour photograph of a cactus, saturated in electric hues of purple and cyan. In many ways, Lipps’s ‘Library’ series photographs recall the portable protomuseums of the late renaissance. Those historic wunderkammers were intended to be symbolic of their owners’ control over the natural world, heralding a nascent enlightenmentera fervour to classify just about everything. However, while for the renaissance collector the cabinets symbolized humanity’s empirical rule over nature, Lipps’s ‘Library’ highlights the subjectivity underlying such claims to universal association. In the age of the collective hashtag, in which disparate images are grouped together by a communally archivehappy zeitgeist, Lipps draws upon narratives which are undoubtedly his own.” – Frieze

Fragments of an Unknowable Whole @ Urban Arts Space.

The artists in Fragments of an Unknowable Whole see the irresolvable question of photographic meaning as a launching point for their artistic inquiries. They are not concerned with seeking photographic truth. Instead, these diverse practices complicate the idea that a photographic image is a fixed view of a “transparent window on the world.” They search for new perspectives and directions that mobilize the shifting contexts of images, opening up the possibilities of the photographic rather than reducing it to a narrowly prescribed process.

The organization of this exhibition functions in a similarly discursive manner. This project embraces the boundless nature of these practices and is careful to avoid categorizing the individual artists as working with one kind of photographic genre or another. Many of the artists included in this exhibition do not identify as photographers. While most work with a camera and lens as a part of their process, they do so through approaches that unsettle the ‘transparent’ picture space. Many of the artists featured look to additional resources for gathering information, turning to sources in which images have already been embedded: web browsers, texts, archives, found objects and materials, and even their own artwork. Regardless of their approach, each artist is working with the photographic image in provocative ways in this contemporary moment.

Perhaps the most significant common thread between these practices is how they complicate and expand the spaces of the photographic image. While the most prevalent areas of exploration are located within the broader photographic spaces—the screen space, the picture plane, the physical and material spaces—it would be impossible to situate any one artist’s approach into a single spatial context. They are more inclined to traverse the boundaries of these spaces, and in doing so open up the potential for creating hybrid forms of image-making.

Hannah Sawtell

Work from ACCUMULATOR
currently on view at New Museum

“In her work, Sawtell considers the relationship between the surfaces of images and objects, and the multiplicity of structures that underpin them. Through a variety of media—installation, video, print, radio broadcast, sound, and performance—Sawtell renders the fluidity of digital images with spatial, physical, and temporal qualities, and critically points to their function as decoy indicators for larger and dominating systems of production, access, surplus, and consumption. Additionally alluding to the repetitive nature of contemporary production, Sawtell evokes an aesthetic of industrial design through her installations and objects. Much of her influence comes from her previous work as a DJ and in running Detroit’s Planet E Label, and she often integrates noise, rhythm, and beat as part of her video works and performances.

In “Vendor” (2012), a recent work exhibited at Bloomberg SPACE (part of a two-site show also at the ICA, London), Sawtell created an installation from online images that she repeatedly encountered during her residency at Bloomberg News Agency in London. Cutting the images with live screen-based digital tools and using close-up textures, Sawtell created a space that unpacks and reveals the contemporary virtual and digital image. Frequently collaborating with local manufacturers to produce her works, another recent piece, Re-Petitioner (2013), included a set of bespoke speakers that transformed the large screen in front of them into an acoustic mirror. Exposed to an intense experience of noise, audiences also witnessed computer-generated images of the brutalist Norwegian Y-Block building in Oslo and a landscape of what she considers “pre-fossilized CGI objects” projected onto the large screen.

For the New Museum, Sawtell creates a new sculptural installation and sound work made specifically for the Lobby Gallery, and realizes a subsequent edition of her “Broadsheets” publication series.

“Hannah Sawtell: ACCUMULATOR” is on view at the New Museum from April 23–June 22, 2014, and is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.

Hannah Sawtell was born in London in 1971, where she also lives and works. Recent solo shows include Vilma Gold, London, Clocktower Gallery, New York, and two linked exhibitions at the ICA, London, and ICA at Bloomberg SPACE, London, for which she published Broadsheets 1-3, a publication distributed withBusiness Week magazine, and realized Sonic Lumps, a performance in collaboration with Factory Floor. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as “SoundSpill,” Zabludowicz Collection, New York (2013), “With the Tip of a Hat,” the Artist’s Institute, New York (2012), “Novel,” a screening for Time Againhosted by the Sculpture Center, New York (2011), “Outrageous Fortune: artists remake the Tarot,” Hayward Touring/Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2011), and “The Great White Way Goes Black,” Vilma Gold, London (2011). She is included in “Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain 2008–2013” at Tate Britain and will have solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, in 2014. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Jarman Award.”

Jaya Howey

Work from “Note to Self” at Bureau, New York.

“Bureau is pleased to announce Note to Self, Jaya Howey’s first exhibition with the gallery. Howey’s exhibition includes three new bodies of work, two modes of painting: narratives and respites, and the ceramic frame works. Howey’snarratives establish an emotionally fraught thread through the use of a rudimentary pictographic code. The respitesfeature groupings of similar symbolic icons, their communicatory function confused through layering and silhouetting. The frame works are cast ceramic picture frames that can either be attached to the paintings or left to function as distinct objects in space. Through previous bodies of work, Howey has explored how a subject can be fractured by the painterly gesture; his latest work continues this investigation resolving in a concise visual style. The new compositions push the potential of the flat, white stretched canvas as a semiotic field.

The paintings in Note to Self are composed in Adobe Illustrator and parody the language of layout which dominates our contemporary visual field. The drawn forms refer to Lettrist metagraphics and manga illustration. The compositions are arranged on screen and painted using a cut vinyl mask. An oil paint called Torrit Grey is applied with clean lines and contours that suggest the intimate point or colored-in field drawn by a pencil. The works imply the look of a doodle, laying the artist’s subconscious open for analysis.

The rebus-like narratives unfold with a view into the artist’s anxiety navigating the social context of the art world. In stick figure scenes we see a nervous artist with cartoon hands grasping a paintbrush or fumbling for a wine glass. Alongside these characters are symbols of the environs and consumables of the artist: both cliché and quotidian. In one work we see an anguished young man carving a peace-sign into his arm while an ink jet printer cranks out pages of simple shapes. The young man is not consoled by the cheery bubble tea menu above him, as the punch card from a time clock looms. The humorous, self-deprecating narratives are contrasted by the more densely abstract, patterned, silhouette works, the respites. In these forests of signs, layered shapes replicate and morph, allowing for more open interpretations. Socks, bunches of grapes and melting clocks fan out amidst abstract shapes resembling bunting, large drips and schematized script. These works create a dense scuffle of shadowy icons resisting clear identification, thus allowing the viewer to rest on an imaginative formal rhythm rather than decoding a narrative.

While the paintings play among the artist’s subconscious obsessions and allusions, the exhibition is buttressed by considered formal gestures. Howey’s chosen anti- palette of Torrit Grey is an oil paint produced yearly at Gamblin Artist Colors. Gamblin combines all the pigment dust from the factory’s air filtration system and uses this mixture as a pigmentary base. Each run of Torrit Grey is unique in its chromatic combination and because it cannot promise consistency, it cannot be sold, and is given away. The slight color variation throughout the exhibition is a by- product of this production method. The ceramic frame fragments form a figurative framework for the show. The ceramic shells have a material fragility that allude to a paradox: that any defensive mechanism is ultimately the most fragile aspect of a work. These protective shields, constructed out of brittle clay, reinforce the works’ willful vulnerability.” – Bureau

Viktoria Binschtok

Work from eclipse99

“eclipse99 is made up of clusters of photographic images built on visual and formal associations. In an ultimate response to recursive image production and use, Binschtok has turned the internet search engine in on her own artwork, opening up a conversation between herself and the computer – artist to machine. Using computer based search algorithms, Binschtok input her own photographic images to see what associated images would retur­n. From those results, she selected, restaged and manipulated the images, creating her own version once again in an effort to both complete and open up the cycle – beyond definitions of image source, result and authorship.
Binschtok closely studies developments in screen-based technology and how the visual language of communication is becoming more prominent. The growing ubiquity of ‘smart’ devices and photographic equipment has stripped away the uniqueness and mystery behind image production. Now, along with the rise in DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, photographic tools and images on the Internet are equally available to consumers. These images are viewed undifferentiated from one another, linked associatively, and bounded by the democratizing format of the computer screen. It is this equivalence toward images that Binschtok chooses to highlight – how images are so easily cut, copied, pasted, and how promotional advertising is viewed next to documentary war images or sandwiched in-between personal party snapshots, travel photography and traditional studio work.

In a parallel effort to translate the multivalent existence of photographic imagery seen on screens to the material world of the gallery space, Binschtok uses a range of printing, mounting and framing formats, specifically chosen for each cluster series. She takes advantage of the diverse possibilities of presentation format and material form such images can take and how these choices affect the reading of the image.

The title of the show eclipse99, is taken from a signature image she shot of the final solar eclipse of the last century. With this image, Binschtok froze the moment when the moon passes into the sun’s shadow. Here, eclipse99 functions as a poignant metaphor for the overlapping, hiding, replacing, altering and bypassing of objects and visual imagery she is working with. In this case, the digital C-print is made from a scan of an original analogue photograph. With the enlargement of the scanned image, details such as dust particles on the surface of the photograph are made visible. At first, the dust particles seem like planetary shapes far off in the distance, but upon closer inspection it becomes clear that these are physical objects – imperfections left intact, pulling the viewer out of the fantasy of the image and into the physical reality of the photograph.

Here, as with many other images in the exhibition, Binschtok reveals the details of her image making techniques and the functions of photography as sculptural object. Similarly, the other images from this cluster reveal visual imperfections such as the rough edges of the re-photographed collage plane window and the lens-flare on the still-life golden tool

Binschtok created each cluster intuitively using a rhizomatic approach like an expanding, organic root structure. She sees the possibility for building image associations in all directions, attesting to the multiple and non-hierarchical functions of image use today. However, with each cluster Binschtok envelops the viewer into the depths of her visual realms.” –KLEMM’S

  
Annika Eriksson

Work from “Now you see us now you don’t” at Krome Gallery, Berlin.

“Annika Eriksson is a Swedish artist living in Berlin. Over the years, she has produced a large number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Eriksson plays with the debates around the public realm and structures that regulate it, revealing the changes and how this is subject to unexpected appropriations and inversions.

The city, the camera, the dog. And what it saw. The city knows. It takes its time. It observes what’s happening. It recalls what’s been going on. It may even intuit what’s next. We can’t check because the city won’t talk to us humans directly. Still we get a sense that the places we cross every day may have a mind and memory of their own. In some places something is in the air that would suggest that much. And it’s not necessarily because these places were marked by monuments or otherwise charged with an aura of historical significance. On the contrary, it may precisely be those blank spaces in the urban fabric where a city’s consciousness would seem to linger, those spots where roads cross at strange angles, leaving sidewalks too wide and patches of ground without proper use, so that, helplessly, people may put a bench there, to hide how empty the pavement feels. It may also be fenced off pockets of the unbuilt or bombed and never rebuilt between houses or unkept bits in parks that people still visit not because there were actually nice but simply because, for whatever reason, they are still there. It is in these patches, bits and pockets that the peculiar time and tempo at which a city thinks and remembers might be sensed: Because these places are not crowed by interpretations (guided tours leave them uncommented and history looks elsewhere) the city is free to keep its senses alert and, as the planet turns slowly, accumulate awareness.

In her photo series “Reversed (Now you see us now you don’t)” and the video I am the dog that was always here (loop) Annika Eriksson taps into this particular state and temporality of urban consciousness. She addresses the non-anthropocentric dimension of the awareness a place may create of itself, at its own pace. She does so by letting different mediums channel this peculiar spatiotemporal experience: the camera, the dog and the poem. “Reversed (Now you see us now you don’t)” are black and white photo series, displayed in groups of three. They are pictures of precisely the somewhat blank, forlorn urban locales described above. More than pictures, they are testify to a camera’s automatic way of taking in the world, without composition, maybe not even entirely in focus. Crucially, all images are reversed. So what you see, quite literally is what the reflex camera saw in its internal mirror-eye, not what the person taking the picture perceived. Like the recording of a voice played backwards, the reversal adds a touch of the spooky. This is because reversed realities become eerily concrete, as this word does, when I spell it backwards: e-t-e-r-c-n-o-c, turning each letter back into itself, making an e an e, a t a t, an e an e, an r an r, a c a c, an n an n, an o and o, a c a c. What if this was how the city saw itself? Mirrored in itself, rendering space and time infinitely concrete, the literal consciousness of a place might leave words scrambled and permit itself to be uncrowded by false interpretations. We wouldn’t know. But the camera may. It is a thing, and hence partakes in the way the material world exists, by and for itself.

I am the dog that was always here (loop) summons a different set of witnesses. Live witnesses, yes, but non-human too. The video shows packs of dogs on a derelict ground in the countryside outside Istanbul. They roam around the space and do what dogs do. They keep busy, fighting, playing, sniffing each other and surveilling their surroundings. It’s lots and lots of them, big and small ones, of different mixed breeds, city street dogs, attuned to the needs of their survival and visibly in charge of this pocket of space that no one seems to own or want. On the voice-over, a speaker enunciates a text in Turkish in a smooth melodic tone, accompanied by English subtitles. It’s the dog speaking. Which dog? The dog that was always here. It says so. And you feel it too. Because what carries its speech and renders it sublimely poetic is a sense of time and place that exceeds the limits of any one living consciousness. This dog of dogs knows the city because it is the city. It has lived and died with the place, risen like its buildings, and perished with its disasters, always to return. Even though, the dog says, that it and its kin have been captured and moved out from the center to the periphery, it will persist and come back to those streets, after those who wield power over them will long have passed away. The city dog will fight back and survive the forces any police could put up. Its resilience is infinite. Because the time of the city dog knows no end. It goes in circles. Like its poem does, as it repeats and repeats, while the images change. The place of the dog? Place for the dog is a deep knowledge alive in its body like the energy pulsing through its veins that keep the dog watchful, playful and on the go. Would we know for sure that this is what the dog of dogs thinks. No, because, like the consciousness of places the dog of dogs wouldn’t use ordinary human language. But, like the camera partakes in the life of things, poetry may convey a touch of the not-altogether human, as its depth evokes more memories than an individual human could recollect. In its rhythm and melody one senses the echoes of more than one life lived, more than a single mind could contain: a collectivity of life experiences, perhaps even the living experience of a whole city. So the camera sees and the dog speaks as it roams around. As mediums they may very well be the ones to channel that peculiar collective consciousness a place might generate of itself in its very own proper time.” – Jan Verwoert

Aleksandra Domanović

Work from From yu to me

“Aleksandra Domanović used to own an international sampler of domain names: aleksandradomanovic.sk, aleksandradomanovic.rs, aleksandradomanovic.si, aleksandradomanovic.eu. It’s usually enough for an artist or other public figure to claim their name on .com, and Domanović did, but by staking out real estate in the top-level domains governed by Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, and the European Union she reminded herself, and anyone else paying attention, about the friction of states and networks, names, and domains. Domanović was born in Yugoslavia, and when it was gone her citizenship drifted. If for some of its users the World Wide Web appears boundlessly ephemeral in comparison to the permanence of statehood, in Domanović’s experience of recent history, states and domains alike are tools of control that can be surprisingly fragile and flexible.

The domains in Domanović’s personal collection, which have since expired, sketched an outline of those ideas. Her new video adds details. From yu to me is about the history of the internet in Yugoslavia, or what used to be Yugoslavia.

It’s hard to talk about the internet and Yugoslavia together. The domain name assigned to it—.yu—is a curiosity, because the country that gave it its name coexisted with it only briefly, and in that time only a small population of specialists used it. What’s more, during the Balkan war of the early 1990s, the Serbian government that claimed Yugoslavia’s mantle was disconnected from the internet by UN sanctions, and .yu was administered by independent Slovenia. From yu to me—the title describes a distance, but not a linear one measured by the spatial or temporal coordinates of maps and timelines; rather, it covers a system of overlapping forking paths.

Here are some facts about .yu and .me: In 1989, .yu was registered by a Slovenian agency just as the country seceded from Yugoslavia. After several years’ delay, it was reassigned to the so-called “third Yugoslavia” (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1994. Montenegro was issued .me to go with its new UN membership after the nation voted for independence from Serbia in 2006. Through all of this, the .yu domain stayed under Serbian control until ICANN, the non-profit that coordinates the internet’s global domain system, finally abolished the domain it in 2010. (Meanwhile, .su—the top-level domain for the Soviet Union, which was registered 1990, fourteen months before the Soviet Union collapsed—continues to exist, as domain holders lobby ICANN to keep it alive.)

There’s not really much about .me in From yu to me, though it’s noted in passing that Montenegro is making quite a bit of money from it. Domanović’s main interest is .yu. She tells its story through interviews with two women—Borka Jerman-Blažič, who registered it, and Mirjana Tasić, who oversaw its transfer to Serbia and administered it until 2007—and ends on a conversation with a curator who acquired the domain for the collection of the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, following the model of the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of @. Jerman-Blažič and Tasić share anecdotes of connection and disconnection—how they implemented a closed, national network before Yugoslavia was connected to EARN (the European counterpart to ARPAnet in the United States), the collapse of email when Slovenia was bombed in 1991, the ensuing struggle over the ownership of .yu between Slovenia and the authorities in Belgrade, and email exchanges explaining the need for new domains to match new UN memberships with internet administrators in California and elsewhere who knew and understood nearly nothing about Balkan politics.

Maps barely appear in From yu to me, and though Domanović sets up her interviews with establishing shots that show her in unheard conversation with her subjects in courtyards and corridors, she doesn’t give datelines, so there’s no way of telling whether footage was filmed in Ljubljana or Belgrade or somewhere else. Geography flickers indistinctly but networks feel solid: they come in alive in the reminiscing of Tasić and Jerman-Blažič, who worked with the massive mainframes seen in the archival footage Domanović uses, and dealt with the daily bureaucracy that accrued around them.

The stories of From yu to me are from a time when email was like the telegraph, a fast way of sending information that people used rarely because it required a visit to specialized facilities. The stories predate many of the utopian and dystopian network fantasies of the nineties—the Declaration of Cyberspace Independence, The Matrix—that imagine the web as an autonomous social space. Instead, the internet is discussed in highly pragmatic terms. There are scattered expressions of wonder at the possibilities of high-speed communications networks, but they look quaint and silly. A drowsy anchor in a beige turtleneck says: “Computers or better TV networks will soon enable us to connect with various databases from different computers,” and reads a weather report for England from an ASCII map of the United Kingdom that appears on a little blue screen.

Other than the news clips, all the archival footage in the video is fuzzy on either side and sharp in a square in the center, like a microscope slide, as if to represent the clarifying power of hindsight—a power that Domanovic is reluctant to exploit. From yu to me uses several of the standard documentary conventions—the interviews with experts, who sit in front of the camera and talk to someone sitting behind it and to the side, the use of old newsreels and other stock footage—but not its narrative form. The stories it includes don’t add up to a big, cohesive one. Facts about .yu and relationships between them can be more easily extracted from a publication accompanying the video. It has the full transcript of an interview with Jerman-Blažič, and documents such as her email requesting that YUNAC, the Yugoslav academic research network, be connected to the U.S. internet, and a heated exchange about disconnection of Serbia from the internet during civil war.

There are more details about the social spaces around states and domains in From yu to me than there are in Domanović’s collection of websites on international servers, but the video, too, is about conveying impressions of these relations rather than drawing some kind of conclusion about them. From yu to me gives a sense of the office politics and working life around an emerging technology, of the meetings and business trips to far-off places necessary to develop an instrument that connects people, that closes the distance between you and me. Those details flesh out a time before .yu was canceled, dead, preserved in a museum collection, and Domanović wants her account of that time to approximate the openness that people who lived then felt, the unfinished work on .yu when a Yugoslavia with internet still seemed possible.

To that end, perhaps, Domanović chose to feature another, unrelated achievement of Yugoslav technology in From yu to me, one that doesn’t have an immediate application to the internet, or anything else—the Belgrade Hand, a robotic arm developed in a lab at University of Belgrade in the 1960s. Domanović included both archival footage of the hand and an animated version that unexpectedly reaches into the screen, first testing the weight of an apple, then feeling its fingertips. A technology that fills the social space between bodies has become commonplace, but one that is a body still seems strange. The distance from you to me may be known but the one from us to it isn’t.” – Rhizome

Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken, and Oscar Tuazon.

Work from “Chez Perv” at Team Gallery, New York.

“Team is pleased to present a collaborative exhibition of work by Gardar Eide Einarsson, Matias Faldbakken and Oscar Tuazon. The exhibition, entitled Chez Perv, will run from 17 April through 01 June 2014. The gallery is located at 47 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome, on the ground floor. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house an exhibition of sculptures by New York-based Daniel Turner.

Longtime friends and collaborators, Einarsson, Faldbakken and Tuazon share a fascination with industrial/architectural forms and materials, as well as the potentially harmful politics they can contain. Although their respective bodies of work are formally divergent, the artists are linked via their employment of various artistic acts of appropriation – of form, iconography and ideology – to ends that are at once academic and revolutionary. The exhibition’s title is culled from that of a New York Post cover story released at the height of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandal.

Although they now live on separate continents, the artists have, in a sense, grown up together, developing their individual practices alongside and in response to one another. Einarsson and Faldbakken first met in 1999, when the latter was working primarily as a novelist, still in the early stages of his career as a visual artist. The two worked together for three years as co-editors of the periodical UKS Forum. Included in a 2003 architecture-themed issue of the magazine were interviews with Clark Richert and Vito Acconci by Tuazon and Einarsson respectively, as well as an essay by Faldbakken. Tuazon and Einarsson would both work as studio assistants for Acconci while living in New York City, as well as overlapping in their completion of the Whitney Independent Study Program. The three have also continued their conversation and collaboration with one another via their mutual representation by the Norwegian gallery Standard [Oslo].” – Team Gallery

Steciw / de Joode

Work from Open for Business at Neumeister Bar-Am.

“…We see a different means of freedom in the upper floor of the gallery space, where Kate Steciw and Rachel de Joode have set up studio for the day with the third installment of their performance and installation project Open for Business. In the attic-style studio we find the two artists –de Joode curled before the glowing screen of her computer,

Steciw floating across the studio in a state of arrangement. In the far corner rests a tripod with a camera fixed firmly in place, and on the opposite walls are the products of the day, now coming to a close. Trading roles, the two artists spent the day photographing objects, everything from clay moulds to close-ups of their hands holding various objects.

“Is that sushi?” I ask incredulously, leaning in to take a closer at one of the finished pieces displayed on the wall. “Yes,” Steciw answers matter-of-factly. “We had sushi for lunch.” The whole thing feels a bit silly and thrilling, and we all giggle, because, sushi.

Later, de Joode spins around in her chair to tell us that Open for Business is about the de-mystification of art more than anything else. That taking the process and opening it to the public acts as a means of connection, as a way to counter the insulation of artists within the cocoons of their industries.
We loop the small studio space a few more times, playing Paint By Numbers-style games with the various objects scattered across the studio, threading pieces of salmon to the disembodied fragments that span the wall, the clay mould to every echo of grey, the fingers of a hand directly back to Steciw’s own wrist.
It’s like the Internet itself, I say half-aloud, and Steciw jumps to agreement. Dynamic, hurried, leaving traces of its earlier self behind like shed skin, the studio space seems like the physical representation of the digital process…” – AQNB

images courtesy the artists and Neumeister Bar-Am