Everything Is Collective

Work from Deliberate Operations 1 [2].

“‘DELIBERATE OPERATIONS reflects the EIC’s view of how it conducts considered and sustained operations in space and sets the foundation for developing other fundamentals, tactics, techniques, and procedures. These operations are designed and/or spontaneously realized to reveal or conceal certain features of the environment. This volume serves as a record of those interactions and a guide to other practitioners…” – Everything Is Collective

Latifa Echakhch

Work from her current exhibition at galerie kamel mennour.

“On the occasion of her third solo show at galerie kamel mennour, Latifa Echakhch will exhibit in the new space on the rue du Pont de Lodi. In line with the works presented at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 2012 and for the Marcel Duchamp Prize at the FIAC in 2013, the artist once more mobilizes the idea of a ghost show, deserted by both audience and performers after some uncertain disaster. The sky has fallen into the large downstairs room, as though having wormed its way in through the high glass roof: it is a theater backdrop painted azure blue and dotted with clouds that has slipped to the floor like a dress left at the foot of the bed. Standing before this crumpled, unfinished canvas that is too large for the space, one’s thoughts turn to the skies of 17th century paintings, to Nicolas Poussin, and to the golden age of theater. A melancholic sense of non finito hangs over the abandoned scene. The walls are hung with paintings. Blue ink has seeped capillaries into the white canvas like some kind of vibrant sap, creating coralloid arborescences or a tight network of branches. As in most of her ink works, Latifa Echakhch initiates a minimal procedure, then lets time and the materials do their work—in this instance, the “phthalo” ink, developed in the 1930s from the chemical compound phthalocyanine, whose deep blue recalls the artist’s stencils. Due to this part of the process that is given over to chance, these images might almost be called “acheiropoietic” (or “not made by human hand”), a category in which we also find the Veil of Veronica and Chinese scholar’s rocks. All Around Fades to a Heavy Sound… is the title of one of these spectral works. The collation of all the titles creates a story—a story about a walk, about the narrator’s wandering in a forest that is reminiscent of the first verses of The Divine Comedy, though the text also evokes “the latest landscape”. Perhaps a decomposing sky glimpsed through the foliage of a strange blue forest. ” – galerie kamel mennour

Aiden Morse

Work from his oeuvre

“It takes talent to make an articulate and humorous spectacle of the absurd. Aiden Morse, experimental artist from Tasmania, has deliberately juxtaposed the characters of his photographic dramas as objects of accident and compositions of intent. Morse confronts us with the paraphernalia of brand addictions, emulating the focus on material objects of desire, but stirring discomfort with, as he calls it, “an innate sense of wrongness”.

It might be a kind of plastic grotesque that best describes the experiments of Aiden Morse. Bizarre and hypnotizing, his disembodied limbs, suspended gestures and perpetually glistening skin leave the barely sensed note of revulsion. His projects are child’s play feigning sobriety. Though his work exists primarily in the digital realm, Aiden Morse is beginning to find expression in Melbourne’s art community, using his insatiable taste for saturated color and garish consumer artifacts as his medium”

text via WBM

Cultivated Variety

At Konstanet by Marten Esko and Epp Õlekõrs

“With the recent furor over art writing, namely the coinage of the term ‘International Art English’ and the ongoing crisis in art criticism, a focus has been put on how to evaluate, judge or examine art through and with the means of text. But another piece of textual output, which often accompanies the notorious press-release, and which, in some circles, carries out a stronger judgment than any form of criticism has somehow, in most cases, been left aside. This previous sentence is, of course, referring to the artist’s curriculum vitae – the sum of everything an artist has accomplished, an international art world passport, or more accurately a breed certificate, according to what, art world or art market professionals make the judgment of value.

But this form of text is not in any way connected with art criticism as a discipline, yet, in a peculiar way, does it actually originate from what could be called the ‘field of art’. Supposedly, the first person to create a professional CV was Leonardo Da Vinci in 1482, when he outlined his experience in rock flinging and creating lightweight bridges. In comparison to criticism evolving as a textual means of expression of the ideas concerning art in the broadest sense, the CV has its history in the field of employment, as could also be seen with Da Vinci. Simply put, it is a bureaucratic means for evaluating one’s accomplishments and qualifications in a compressed textual format, which leads to a possibility to attain seemingly objective, yet still judgment-based results.

Here the main question is, ‘to whom are these seemingly objective results meant?’, or more directly, ‘for whom does the artist’s CV exist?’. It seems unnecessary for the ‘common’ audiences contemplating the works in the exhibition context, for it adds nothing, in the artistic perspective, to the presented work. Yet it is always present, mainly because it provides information about the primary (external) context of an artwork – the artist. But still, this information is not meant for the average visitor; it is not a short biography but a CV. Therefore, the answer to this previously stated question about its aim is, with some generalization – the market.

Would this mean that the art market is the employer for the artists, who tirelessly try to push their CVs through the gates of the art world and the art market? Looking at the market–artist relationship through the employer–employee relations of power, casts doubt on the independence of an artist and raises the question about future growth of the amplitude of market influence. The change is taking place already, as a certain segment of professional art has its primary output aimed towards fairs or the auction houses, thus, making the exhibitions seem as side-effects or formalities that have to be dealt with in order to gain future validation.

This skeptical position, however, correlates with the institutional theory of art, which, simply put, suggests that the ‘final decision’, if something is a work of art or not, is made by the art world’s institutions, however when we look at the way CVs function, institutions, in a wider sense (e.g. museums, galleries, biennials, professional journals, art magazines, fairs) are also the ones who comprise ‘objective’ criteria for the judgment. By being associated with certain institutions – via an exhibition, a nomination or an article written about – develops this background, by which, firstly the artist and then his or her work is evaluated. The problem lies in this previously stated sequence, which has initiated a shift from evaluating an artist by what he or she produces to assessing the production according to its author.

Finally we come to the question of the title of this exhibition. There is more to it than matching initials, for ‘cultivated variety’ refers, in the sense that something, for example land, is altered to suit the needs of the owners, to an artist who has been cultivated to suit the needs of the art world and of the art market. The 23 artists, whose CVs are included in this exhibition, are the only ones listed in the ArtReview’s 2013 Power 100 index. These artists comprise the crème de la crème of today’s contemporary art world, but the fact that, from the ‘ranked list of the contemporary art world’s most powerful figures’ less than a quarter are actually artists, speaks for itself.

This exhibition is not an ironic commentary on the already established personae, as it is not suggested that these artists themselves are the cultivated varieties, on the contrary, they are the parent plants from which many can be produced. One could imagine the gallery space as a repository of rare and valuable sources (e.g. plants or artists) which satisfy the current market demand while, at the same time, making an influence on the future generations and leaving their marks on history. For this exhibition, CVs also take on the role of artworks, as they are meticulously crafted compositions – masterpieces in the art world’s commercial landscape.

Therefore the exhibition works rather as a skeptical hypothesis on the growing influence of the art market and on its relation to the future of the art world. The dominance and predominance of the market and its further influence on the actual production of art, is that what is in question here. How far reaching will the influence be and what precisely will follow, is yet to be witnessed, but these developments should not in any case be overlooked, for they might turn out to be the actual course alterers.”

Beatrice Marchi

Work from “Che cattiva Katie Fox” at Gasconade, Milan.

““Che cattiva Katie Fox” [How mean Katie Fox is!] is the first solo exhibition by Beatrice Marchi; and is the first exhibition hosted within these walls to be worthy of the sequence of hashtags: #dance #sex #art #pop #tech.

Ça va sans dire, Beatrice is a woman of choice; and the determination and inventiveness entailed in her creative process prove this—a process manoeuvring through and across several media (from photography, to installation, to music production), but never embracing any of them a priori. Beatrice’s artworks in fact display a pronouncedly camp attitude: if this stems from a sheer celebration of ambiguity as a value, or from a more programmatic attempt at bypassing medium specificity are questions which the works make of the viewer… By the way, in order to prevent that the artworks’ nature remains a taboo and so facilitate their ‘communication’, we would invite the viewer to agree that those in the show, for example, are: an RnB song (Never Be My Friend, 2014), pillowcases (Occhi tristi, 2014), puppy dresses (Squirry, Foxy, 2014), and frames for daydream images (B.B. Blue, Mandy & Sandy at the Beach, 2014).

The exhibition’s protagonist is Katie Fox: an avatar, a Basset Hound dog, a younger sister, a fantasy character, a samaritan girl, a pop star, a jeune fille, a mistress, and so on. Her different incarnations furnish a set of case studies, to be exploited for testing logics and dynamics behind the exercise of moral judgment and its affecting the perception of the social context we belong to. Why for example are the behavior and the sensitivity of certain characters, such as children and animals, free from moral judgement? And why in others, such as teenagers, do they take on excessively moralistic attitudes? As with children and animals, nature ignores culture, for teenagers love can only be followed by hate— and in between there remains only opportunism, the role playing which leads one to pretend to love or hate..The artworks in the show distil aesthetic languages which mass culture has apparently digested, but have nevertheless conserved an intrinsically radical feature which allows for any of their ‘formalizations’ which lack a true communicative need to instead assume grotesque tones. For example, cinema, comics and video games have liberated fantasy fiction in the adults world; young women dressed up like mermaids inhabit the limbo between a carnival mask, typical of a child’s imagination, and an alluring outfit, which betrays an awareness of the seductive power of a mature body. To continue the argument: today the sound of RnB is universally recognized within the vocabulary of pop music; an RnB song, in which male voices mimic female voices, themselves replicating an overblown chat conversation between hot-tempered teenagers, suggests that mishmash of a cravingbfor social redemption and schmaltzy emotivity which RnB embodies—that’s how we ball out. And we won’t carry on into discussing the sexual deviations of BDSM practices, and the blend of pleasure and pain.

Beatrice Marchi’s artworks seem to imply a vision in which art is trapped in its own commenting strategies and ‘cynical’ interpretation of social phenomena; art itself dishes out a plethora of judgements, which do not restrict themselves to aesthetic categories—its area of jurisdiction, one could say—but overflow into the reign of morality. Artistic language betrays indeed a tendency toward affectation: it is often mischievously cryptic, self referential, boastful, and again moralistic; it tends to repress any vision of art as a scenario of sharing and collaboration, and celebration of the wide emotional spectrum encompassed by human heart… Even this text isn’t free from this criticism: it pursues assertiveness, in order to legitimize itself and the subject it depicts—unfortunately, it won’t ever be strong enough to present these artworks as the creations of a woman in the prime of her life, a failed lap dancer, and probably our BFF.” – Gasconade, Milan

Gedi Sibony

Work from his oeuvre.

“With his sensitive handling of hollow-core doors and commercial carpet, Gedi Sibony is one of several young Biennial artists doing exciting things with sculpture. “I have a family history with these materials; my father was a contractor,” says the 32-year-old New Yorker. His playful transformations of crude elements—like foam insulation surrounded by silver-painted twigs—have led critics to compare him to Richard Tuttle, though he’s also inspired by Bruce Nauman’s early sculptures and Rauschenberg’s Combines. In 2004, Sibony made his solo debut at the Lower East Side gallery Canada; since then, he’s made ArtReview’s list of top emerging artists and turned up in group shows all over town. “He has an eloquence in his economy of means that is really exceptional, especially in New York, where there is a lot more bombastic work,” says SculptureCenter curator Anthony Huberman.” – New York Magazine

Nora Schultz

Work from parrottree-building for bigger than real @ The Renaissance Society 

“The Renaissance Society presents a solo exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist Nora Schultz from January 12 to February 23, 2014. This is Schultz’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, as well as the first show curated at The Renaissance Society by new Chief Curator and Executive Director, Solveig Øvstebø.

Assimilation to environment defines Schultz’s artworks from their genesis. The artist sources the materials she works with by scavenging around the site of exhibition. In this case, she manipulates found objects pulled from, among other places, the hardware store, the Renaissance Society basement storage, and a newspaper read during installation. She frees these “things” by disassociation, estranging them, removing them from their context so they can become: forms, colors, lines, themselves. The installation transforms these objects once again; in the gallery, her works layer themselves and each other, fully taking advantage of three dimensions, constantly redefining their parts in relation to one another. Elements stand, hang, and print on one another; each piece frames another, reweights another, depends on another. Language then intrudes: Schultz’s titling, her statements in interviews and conversations, the ephemera (posters, texts) she releases alongside the exhibition, and the words written on the things themselves, subject them to external references, altering their meaning ever further. And then, of course, there is the work’s reception throwing everything into new relief yet again. In this way, the artist suggests an art that is a predicament, a shifty, evasive, and radically unsettled state for a group of transitory objects and ideas. This work is ‘finished’ when it is shown, but only at that moment, in that place; everything will finish again and again.”

Michael Sellam

Work from Science, fiction, culture, capital.

“Our civilization develops a logic of contingency, the possibility for each thing to be different. How the notion of matter is open to an economy and a thought shape at a time when everything is programmable ? Experience through art Relations tensions between science , fiction, culture and capital development , in fact, some artifice. there is may be necessary to produce a new aesthetic that is neither representative nor abstract or conditional , but constitutes a time when, more than any other , we build a world which includes our demise as a possible and coexist or chaotic forms and ordered traffic : ideas, forms , atoms, energy, genes, information .

The exhibition is conceived as a heterogeneous group which deals , among other things, flowers, tensegrity , sexual differentiation , casting hard drive , smoke, aliens, roundtrip , garment Egyptian strings, panels twin cork , forest impossible, intensive an extremely slow machine and albino alligators programming.” – Michael Sellam translated via Google.

Only Real 

At Public Works Gallery

Works by Peter Jellitsch & Theodore Darst

“Peter Jellitsch & Theodore Darst work within simulated realities and spaces using both analog and digital processes. Both artists observe, process, and transcribe intangible elements onto perceptible representations. Jellitsch is concerned with the physical process of visualizing the invisible virtual structures that are prevalent in everyday life. For his Data Drawings, he uses his studio’s Wifi bandwidth to generate data that becomes the basis of his hand-drawn diagrammatic landscapes. Darst creates imaginative digital environments with their own internal logic, resulting in self-governing visual systems. Collaging fragments of personal narratives through the endless variables of the digital interface, he makes his realm visibly possible to the viewer through his video works and installation.”

Ken Okiishi

Work from “Gesture/Data” at Pilar Corrias, London.

“Ken Okiishi takes up and troubles the vocabulary of the media that he uses. His works hover over and within the relationships between matter and memory, perception and action of a digitally networked culture. Using video, performance, and installation he creates moments when language and images begin to fall apart. As Okiishi subverts the material claims of the media, the glitches that occur illuminate spaces for the production of something other than what has already been.

For gesture/data Okiishi brings together a new set of HD flatscreen television works and wallpaper. The series gesture/data considers the formal properties and the traces of sources of stored memory, along with the new ways we have of reading memory and images through gestures. The video layer of the flatscreens contain two types of footage, the first being old home VHS tapes of recorded television shows that Okiishi has corrupted further by re-recording over parts of the tape with new digitally broadcasted television. The general breakdown of the magnetic particles in the VHS tapes, combined with the transfer of the footage to USB for playback, has resulted in a glitchy, colour-rich layer of video that jitters between 1990-present. The flatscreens themselves become an abstract support surface that hovers between the VHS footage and the interference paint, which Okiishi applies directly on the screen while the video is playing.

In the second type of video footage Okiishi looks at moments of rupture, in being and language, of a space that is a digital void. The video is a HD recording of a BARCO TV screen running a standard blue void as it fails to register a signal from a media input. As the camera scans over the screen the proto-pixels of the monitor fly out and hover in “honeycomb” formations of various intensities, qualities, and ranges of blue. Adopting the cinematic/video technique of chroma-key or “green screen” Okiishi paints over the blue video in chroma green and blue paints—a gesture that brings the digital void further forward to the support surface of the flatscreen.” – Pilar Corrias