Peter Puklus

Work from his oeuvre

“Dreamlike symbols, mock-ups, installations, ready-mades – with Handbook to the Stars, Peter Puklus compiles documentation in photographs of a sculpture experiment reminiscent of the form-and-light exercises of the 1920s avant-garde. For Puklus, Handbook to the Stars is an attempt to visualize the infinitely flexible and tricky associative capacity of our brains. He chose not to leave his studio during the making of this series, but to commit himself body and soul to his vision and observations, in the company of trash and bric-a-brac, in complete isolation from the outside world. Following inner voices, he reveals and gives body to deep, unknown, invisible relationships and conspiracies. This project has also been published in book form.”

via Foam

Felix González-Torres

Work from his oeuvre.

“González-Torres was known for his quiet, minimal installations and sculptures. Using materials such as strings of lightbulbs, clocks, stacks of paper, or packaged hard candies, his work is sometimes considered a reflection of his experience with AIDS. In 1987 he joined Group Material, a New York-based group of artists whose intention was to work collaboratively, adhering to principles of cultural activism and community education.^[5] Along with the other members of the group — Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Karen Ramspacher, and Tim Rollins — González-Torres was invited by the MATRIX Gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1989 to deal with the subject of AIDS.^[6]

All of González-Torres’ works, with few exceptions, are entitled “Untitled” in quotation marks, sometimes followed by parenthetical title. (This was an intentional titling scheme by the artist).^[7][8] Of González-Torres’s nineteen candy pieces, only six, by their parenthetical titles and ideal weights, can be readily interpreted as portraits. Of these two are double portraits of the artist and his lover, Ross Laycock; two are portraits of Ross alone; one is a portrait of Felix’s deceased father; and “Untitled” (Portrait of Marcel Brient) (1992) is a portrait of the artist’s close friend, French collector Marcel Brient.^[9]

The most pervasive reading of González-Torres’s work takes the processes his works undergo (lightbulbs expiring, piles of candies dispersing, etc.) as metaphor for the process of dying. However, many have seen the works also representing the continuation of life with the possibility of regeneration (replacing bulbs, replenishing stacks or candies).^[10][11] Other readings include the issue of public versus private, identity, and participation in contemporary art.^{[12]” – Wikipedia}

Steve Roggenbuck

Work from his oeuvre 

“LD: You recently posted AN INTERNET BARD AT LAST!!! (ARS POETICA) on YouTube about your vision of poetry on the internet. You talk about the importance of poets harnessing social media as a powerful way to change the life of someone else, anywhere in the world. Why is it so important for you to share this message at this time?

SR: the importance of sharing this message now is that our whole society is currently struggling to determine the role of these social platforms. corporations are trying to learn how to make money from them, families are trying to learn how to stay connected through them, everyone is asking “what value can there be in a 6-second video?” and it’s all moving so fast, Vine blew up to 40 million users in its first 7 months. but the poetry world has largely been ignoring social media, mainly just using twitter and facebook to post links to standard, plain-text poems. my message is this: if our job is to move people with our language, these platforms give us endless and powerful new ways to do that. the tools to make our language visual and auditory have been democratized; the ability to maintain actual relationships with hundreds of our closest readers across the world is now a reality. i have no publisher, i’ve only been working at this for ~3 years, and my poems reach thousands of people each. i think social media represents the biggest set of new opportunities for poetry since the printing press.

LD: The democratization of communication and language is apparent in the content of your work too—if someone came across your YouTube channel they could think you are a motivational speaker or maybe a Belieber. You could kind of be both those things, but you seem removed from being either. As a poet, would you differentiate yourself from the Belieber subculture (for example) and how they utilize social media to communicate? I guess I’m asking if you feel more connected to links to plain-text poems or to hashtags written by Beliebers? Additionally—are pop culture and humor also democratic tools to share poetry with a wider audience?

SR: in terms of the style of writing, like the sense of humor and the care put into imagery, i stil relate more to old-school poets: i stil passionately work to keep my sentences interesting and new. in terms of social media usage, i relate more to the beliebers. much of the poetry world has a knee-jerk reaction against anything that can be considered “self-promotion” or “marketing,” and that’s a huge limitation on community building. beliebers don’t have that reaction, so they jump right into the pursuit of cross-connection and network building, the whole #teamfollowback thing, shouting each other out, etc. the strength of the belieber community on twitter is unreal. for a while Lady Gaga had more “followers,” but if you looked at the number of RTs and faves, her community was never nearly as engaged as Justin’s

also yeah i think humor is a tool to share poetry with a wider audience, although there’s already been a long history of funny poetry if you know where to look. my early favorites were e.e. cummings and charles bukowski, and they both have a lot of funny poems. the flarf movement is probably the funniest thing that’s happened to poetry; sharon mesmer and k. silem mohammad, for example, are very funny flarf poets i’d recommend.

LD: Ok, so using terms from the marketing world—was Vlogtober^[1] a successful content-driven campaign for you?

SR: overall vlogtober didn’t work well for me. it was too much. i was touring and constantly working on the next video–i didn’t have enough freedom to follow my excitement on new ideas or stay connected with my comunity on a personal level. i’d like to do shorter bursts of extreme focus like that, but a whole month was too much. in terms of whether it worked for marketing.. i dont think it was a big success–none of the videos from that month have gotten over 10,000 views. i was too focused on quantity, maybe the quality kinda dipped? on the positive side, i was able to add a lot of variety and depth that i sometimes miss when i’m just creating a couple videos per month.

LD: You seem to be implying that you equate view counts or retweets as a measure of success for a piece of work. Do you consider your work “successful” only via internet metrics or do you think about the importance of your poetry on other terms?

SR: “success” to me is making peoples lives better. i do care about quantity as part of that, i want to reach a lot of people. but the quality of the impression is also important. and there’s a lot to consider in “quality” of impression. does the piece simply make a person smirk once, or is it really going to shake them, make them reconsider their life choices, or really shape their identity? numbers can be misleading; some sites are optimized to get clicks and even shares, but their content is kind of just filler, it doesn’t have much effect on you. the most accurate measure of success i have is the folder of screenshots i keep where people have told me, “your outlook has changed my life,” “your work has meant so much to me,” etc.. in those cases i know my work has mattered because people felt strong enough to tell me directly !

LD: Did touring for an extended period allow you to decide on future plans and what you want your focus to be? Was it during this period that the idea for Boost House^[2]came into being?

SR: yes! i noticed from all those different settings on tour, i really like doing my work in party-like environments, places that are busy with activity and many friends at once. if i’m doing work alone in a quiet space, i sometimes get lonely. i like to have my social life interwoven into my work experience, and vice-versa, so i’m never lacking either. in mid-2012 i came up with the idea of starting some kind of vegan co-op house with my writing friends, and gradually the other details of boost house came after that 🙂

LD: Are you worried Google will monetize or sell your videos while you end up with no intellectual rights?

SR: it’s frustrating that youtube can identify when i use copyrighted music, and they put adverts before those videos, to give money to the record labels, etc. i’ve been trying to warp the music i’m using now, sometimes reversing it or slowing it down, so i can keep them ad-free. ultimately the only people who “own” the work is the viewers tho.. once it has reached them, and they’ve seen it, it’s moved them, impacted their day or even their personality.. that’s the artwork i think. the video is not the actual artwork for me. something like that. the impact the videos have had on people already is real and significant, regardless of wat happens to the actual videos now, they could all get deleted, and their impact is still seeping pretty far into the world :)” –Interview via Rhizome Artist Profile

Takuro Kuwata

Work from “Flavor of Nature” at Salon 94, New York.

“Japanese ceramic techniques and aesthetic principles, both traditional and experimental, form the foundation for Takuro Kuwata’s otherworldly objects & vessels. His creations push the ancient medium to a riotous extreme, dancing between pop and Kogei (traditional craft). Kuwata presents contemporary textures and colors, inspired by the world around him.

Riffing on the classical tea vessel, Kuwata plays freely with an intense chromatic repertoire: blue, red and gold are a favored palette—quoting Yves Klein and Yayoi Kusama with whimsy and sophistication. The vivid colors paired with the metallic glazes provide an at once rustic and futuristic update to the more austere wabi sabi aesthetic of traditional tea ceremony wares.

Kuwata also turns up the volume on Ishihaze or “stone explosion”. By adding stones to his clay mix, when fired, they puncture and burst through the clay, as if a tooth growing out of place. In his hands, the shrunken, crackled glaze of the Kairagi technique brings to mind exploded prehistoric eggs or plants dipped in metal. Kuwata actually adds powdered platinum and almost pure gold on top of the cracked white glazed and refires it. In other works, the cracked mercury surface breaks on top, and spikes of the metallic substrate pierce through the surface, to melt at the bottom. Kuwata has pioneered the incorporation of needles employed in the construction of kilns, using them in the ceramic works to catch the glaze on its slide down, creating a textural marvel and mystery. Some of the sculptures are functional; others stand as abstract totems—their origin and time slipping from East to West, past to future.”- Salon 94

Ryan Perez

Work from Three Sisters.

“In the series Three Sisters, Perez has titled each work after a ship on Columbus’ maiden voyage to the Americas. The studio constructions in these three photos are comprised of floral-patterned fabrics, reflective foils, plastics — reworkings of inexpensive, mass-produced goods that likely made their own voyage to the Americas, but across the Pacific. Photographed in black-and-white, these works provide a sublime contrast to their more ostentatious B.O.G.O. Vision companions. Moreover, Perez’s intent here feels darker, more bitingly sardonic and less ludic. Naming these works after the ships whose voyage was the harbinger of global trade (and exploitation) to come, may thus strike the viewer as a — perhaps morbid but no doubt relevant — joke, which also signals the fact that this New World in question is now clearly making way for the next one.” – Yautepec Gallery

Ryan Gander

Work from “Make Every Show Like It’s Your Last” at Frac île-de-France / Le Plateau

“The FRAC Ile-de-France/Le Plateau is presenting Make Every Show Like It’s Your Last, the first solo exhibition of the British artist Ryan Gander in a Paris institution.

Making the most of an extremely effusive imagination, Ryan Gander does his utmost to offer us works—using any type of different media—which tend to re-visit the conceptual art arena, not without wit.

Proposing wind at the Kassel dOCUMENTA, producing a remake of one of the key scenes in Julian Schnabel’s biopic about Jean-Michel Basquiat, presenting sealed boxes whose contents are seemingly described by texts on the wall, associating images, captions and comments in a discursive style…, art—and in particular that art whose favorite subject is art itself—is, for him, a huge playground where the right thing to do is to redefine constantly the rules in order to play new games.

In this context, the basic author/work/viewer triptych does indeed represent the point of departure of works aiming precisely, in this reflexive manner, at experiencing all its motives.

As an author, Ryan Gander regularly appears in his works. When self-portraits are not involved—proposed without the slightest complacency, and very often borrowings of self-mockery—he gives us a raft of biographical data like so many elements informing what is being presented to us. But over and above this autobiographical form, which does not shrink from tipping over into a certain romanticism, it is above all to his thought processes that he invites us.

With Ryan Gander, the work usually appears like a form of enigma to be solved. However, far from a simple solution to be found, it is indeed the status of the work, its role, which is a matter of revisiting: as it happens, the real “exhibits” proposed to us by the artist are to be seen as such, but also as the vehicles of a narrative, as the agents—confused and active at once—of a way of thinking that is deliberately on the move.

As for the viewer, we might say, unafraid, that he is the essential factor in the arrangement. Everything is addressed to him, and it is through his presence that the whole approach is justified. Everything is done for his perception to be called upon, his attention attracted, and his intelligence stimulated.

At Le Plateau, among the very latest works produced, which will each tend to be incorporated in these three perspectives—makeshift shelters made by the artist’s child that have become marble sculptures, a parallelepiped in darkness with an undefined function, a pair of eyes in the wall reacting to the visitor’s slightest movement—there is one that clearly responds to this latter objective: a so-called advertising campaign organized by the British Ministry of Health / Department for Business, Innovation & Skills aimed at encouraging imagination among the populace.”- Xavier Franceschi

via Mousse Magazine
 

Sara Cwynar

Work from her oeuvre.

“…Arianne Di Nardo: The title of your latest series, Flat Death, is a term many may recognize from Barthes’ Camera Lucida. How did this concept inform your methodology; moreover, the themes at play in your work?

Sara Cwynar: For Barthes, the other punctum, the “prick” of the photograph is time, what he calls the “that-has-been” and its “pure representation” in photographic form – how a photo can palpably show you what was – bringing it back to life, while also showing you what is no more. The image produces death while trying to preserve life. I really like this idea for two reasons: first, in relation to resurrecting refuse and re-presenting it in photographic form; second, in terms of how all photographs work.

Barthes suggests this defeat of time is much more tactual in historical photographs; that “This punctum is more or less blurred beneath the abundance and disparity of contemporary photographs.” He wrote in the ’70s, and I wonder how this idea relates to our contemporary experience with images – not so much as individual objects but as a steady stream, largely undifferentiated from one another. It seems an important idea to rediscover. I also thought about this in relation to the supposed death of printed photographs; what does it mean that even the physical reproduction of the thing in the past is gone, that it increasingly never existed, but only passes on by screen? Barthes proposed that the photographic object could be destroyed, yellowed, dead, like anything else. Which is a nice metaphor.

The process began by materializing these ideas using a mix of contemporary and antiquated objects and images: decontextualized stock photos, digital and analog processes, resampling both objects and printed photographs in order to bring them forward and show they existed. At the same time, I wanted to remind the viewer that the originals are gone, and I was thinking about the effect these images might have on a shared visual consciousness.

I interact for hours and hours with found, saved, and collected images and objects in the studio. I hope that my work method might carve a space for dialogue on the ways that images work, on questioning aesthetic tropes, on spectatorship, on the reading of visuals. How many objects and images get discarded in the constant process of generating new ones? These concerns have come to the fore of my practice, after working for the New York Timesand other editorial or commercial jobs, where I made the same type of pictures that I’m trying to mess with here….” – Lavalette

Quayola

Work from Captives (1)

“Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures, a contemporary interpretation of Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”.

The work explores the tension and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. Whilst referencing Renaissance sculptures, the focus of this series shifts from pure figurative representation to the articulation of matter itself. As in the original “Prigioni” the classic figures are left unfinished, documenting the very history of their creation and transformation.

Mathematical functions and processes describe computer-generated geological formations that evolve endlessly, morphing into classical figures. Industrial computer-controlled robots sculpt the resulting geometries into life-size “unfinished” sculptures.”

Chris Fraser

Work from In Passing.

“…”In Passing is the most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, it’s the most ambitious project the artist has ever attempted, and it is, I hope, one of the most successful projects ever executed at Disjecta,” reflects Curator-­‐in-­‐Residence Josephine Zarkovich. “Chris is so deserving of the opportunity to exhibit internationally—it’s wonderful to see him go from the show at Disjecta to Venice.”

Chris Fraser’s work isolates and brings attention to the miraculous and mysterious qualities of light as it moves through architecture—powerful forces that usually go unnoticed in a space. His site‐specific, large‐scale structures act as modified camera obscuras, producing room‐sized abstract canvases painted with refracted streaks of light.

Born of careful study and meticulous experimentation, Fraser’s work takes the viewer to a moment of the sublime, where the way in which the eye perceives light is manipulated to dramatic effect. At his core, Fraser is not a sculptor as much as he is a photographer—he uses his understanding of color theory and optics to control what the viewer sees and, as Erica Levin writes of his work, “…remake(s) our relationship to the camera, and to the everyday production of images.”

Regarding In Passing, Fraser notes: “Disjecta presented me with the rare opportunity to work spontaneously and without limitation. I was given the resources, both in terms of material and labor, to pursue a project on a grand scale. My only obligation was to honor the scale of the gallery. The show developed out of a project I had shelved a couple years ago for lack of space. But it alone was not enough to fill Disjecta. At a certain point, I was forced to entertain each wild idea. In this way, I built a show that was as much a surprise for me as I hope it is for the visitors.”…” – Disjecta

Alex Fischer

Work from Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules at O’Born Contemporary.

“Alex Fischer’s latest body of work counter-poses the primordial origins of biology against today’s dominant technology-based vernacular. In earnest, the artist acknowledges through his practice elements peculiar to the time of his being. Put in alternative terms, Fischer concedes that the acts of being and becoming are wholly different now than at any time in our recent or distant past.

Dry Pixels and Wet Molecules poses a valuable and contemporary question using sensory terms—can the digital reconcile with the physical? The works of art comprising this materially varied exhibition reveal themselves as both answers to and instigators of this question. Through digital manipulations, sculpture, and installation, Fischer convinces his audience that technology is not simply an imbricate to the physical and the palpable but rather supersedes both.

The multi-modal moment in which art-making has found itself produces what could be called “moist media”, a curious but worthwhile corollary to the McLuhan’s “cold media” of days past. Absorbing this idea, Fischer wedges himself between the dry, cold of the pixel and the wetness of biomolecules. Ultimately suggesting that we are living in a post-digital world, the artist exposes a tactility and precision with his imagery that in effect surpasses the daily surroundings we perceive with our own eyes and bodies.” – O’Born Contemporary