Sal Randalph has done A Good Thing by wrangling Mr Randall Szott to do an interview. Randall until recently ran a great blog called Leisure Arts. All three of us (Sal, Randall and myself) share artistic and theoretical touchstones.
I met Sal for the first time when I was in New York back in November. She took me to a nice little organic place near her studio on the lower east side and I had a bowl of soup and a cup of tea. It was rather expensive and Sal only had a coffee. We spoke passionately (I fear I sometimes ranted) about the things we were excited about at the time: things you might expect like the legacy of conceptual art and Allan Kaprow and re-enactment; but also unexpected stuff, eg: Sal has become convinced of the importance of Donald Judd.
Amongst a million other activities, Sal periodically works on a project called “Free Money“, in which she, quite literally, gives money away to people. They sign up for an appointment and then they meet at a cafe and have a chat, but the first thing that happens is Sal gives them the cash. Then the conversation can go wherever it needs to or wants to. There is no need for the person to hang around, Sal is not “buying their time” or anything.
I should point out that our meeting in New York was not an instance of Free Money.
But it was a great meeting, we were excited penpals who finally connected in the flesh.
After we left I realised we had not “split the bill”. In fact, Sal had paid for most of it, even though her small coffee probably constituted a quarter of the total. I felt strange about this. I worried that Sal might think I was trying to get out of paying my fair share, having just heard of her tendency to give away cash. Like somehow we had played “Free Money” without any advance agreement on the idea.
Neither of us has not mentioned anything about it since, even though we have exchanged several friendly emails in the interim.
See the funny things money does to a man?
(thanks to Charles Schultz for this drawing, and to this page for some motivational thoughts: “What separates the losers in life from the winners is that the winners press on.” Yikes. )
Liz Pulie, erstwhile publisher of Lives of the Artists Magazine mentioned to me recently that she was interested in giving up.
How can I explain? It’s been a while since she put out an edition of her mag. Has she given up production? Not really…it’s just that…like my Bilateral Blog, enthusiasm and energy to write comes in irregular bursts, and it can seem like things are getting stagnant, or that the whole project is set to collapse during the quiet times.
Continue reading ‘Giving Up’
the freezer was getting stinky
our icecubes smelled like fish
there were some frozen bones and heads in there
the remains of meals eaten too far from garbage day
it would have been too soon to put them in the bin
so we froze them
but months pass and the freezer becomes an icey trash can
and i wonder - i ask lizzie
how can something frozen give off smell?
i suppose
she says
things are always melting
at their surface
but this doesn't seem right to me
how can something melt if it's below zero?
all of which simply shows
we know nothing
much
about smell
"It is by the manipulation of materials that we come to know those materials, that is, to know a part of our world, and this is also how we come to know how to do various things with materials. That is, knowledge is, paradigmatically, the skilled making that is the primordial meaning of 'art'. And of course: in this process, we also come to know various propositions, for example, those embodying procedures for the further development of skills. We come to be able to describe, say, clay, and the vessel made of clay, with a depth and an appreciation that only arises in thorough and involving experience. And this in turn ramifies into our experience of the vessel thus made, and of similar vessels: as we understand more, our experience of use is enriched. Indeed, the experience of making a vessel may lead to a cherishing of vessels and their makers, an understanding of and respect for persons and things that could not arise by other means."
p 131 - Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, State University of NY Press, 1995.
The idea of art and the aesthetic as a separate realm distinguished by its freedom, imagination, and pleasure has as its underlying correlative the dismal asumption that ordinary life is one of joyless, unimaginitive coercion. This provides an excuse for the powers and institutions that structure our everyday life to be brutally indifferent to natural human needs for the pleasures of beauty and imaginitive freedom. These are not to be sought in real life, but in art, whose contrast and escape from the real gives us human sufferers temporary solace and relief. By thus compartmentalizing art and the aesthetic as something to be enjoyed when we take a break from reality, the most hideous and oppressive institutions and practices of our civilization get legitimated and more deeply entrenched as inevitably real; they are erected as necessities to which art and beauty, by the reality principle, must be subordinated. Still worse, those rigid and cruelly divisive institutional realities then further justify and glorify themselves through the high art our civilization produces in trying to transcend and escape them. Art becomes, in Dewey's mordant phrase, “the beauty parlor of civilization,” covering with an opulent aesthetic surface its ugly horrors and brutalities. These, for Dewey, include class snobbery, imperialism, and capitalism's profit-seeking oppression, social disintegration, and alienation of labor.
-from Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, UK, 2000, p24.
(referring to John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934)
Ian Milliss has just uploaded his new website. True to character, it’s information rich, but lacking in images. I like this a lot.
Ian is a legendary Aussie conceptual artist and an inspiring activist, having been involved in the defence of Darlinghurst’s Victoria Street squats in the early 1970s. There are some terrific articles about all his activities at the site.
Here are a few of my faves:
- New Artist. Around this time, Milliss stopped exhibiting art altogether. This document gives an idea why…(1973)
- The Barricades. In which he takes an aesthetic approach to describing the construction of barricades at Victoria Street. (1974)
- Don’t moan, organise! (with apologies to Joe Hill) by Ian Burn and Ian Milliss. In which Burn and Milliss call for the restructuring of the Sydney Biennale along artist-run lines. (1979)
There really is a lot of great stuff on Ian’s site. It will become essential reading for many of us involved in art and activism, and who are interested in finding new ways to be artists (rather than just content providers to an existing system).
in preparation for a workshop accompanying the erwin wurm show at the mca, i am compiling a few links for "DO IT YOURSELF" and/or instructional artworks.
the DO IT manual:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/0_manual.html
and erwin wurm's contribution with some cute drawings:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/artists/w/W002/W002.html
101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself, by Rob Pruitt:
http://www.e-flux.com/projects/pruitt/index.php3?num=1
fluxus performance workbook, compiled by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn (315kb pdf document, to download right click the link and "save target as" or "save link as"):
http://www.performance-research.net/documents/fluxus_workbook_print.pdf
any suggestions to add to this list welcome!
………….
update:
margie suggests:
Henry Bursill's Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall [Originally published by Griffith and Farran in 1859!!]:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12962/12962-h/12962-h.htm
and also from Margie:
assignments galore (and they're fun) from Miranda July et al:
http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/index2.php
A great intro to “Participatory Action Research” by Yoland Wadsworth
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/ari/p-ywadsworth98.html
excerpt here:
………………..
We are looking for our daughter’s shoes in the early morning scramble. We review previous ‘historical data’ (memories of earlier experiences!) as part of planning our ‘research design’. We generate several hypotheses and move quickly into the ‘field’ to involve other participants and gather new data to test them! We use some observational anthropology. Two brief interviews with daughter and sibling result in reports of failed hunches! (they weren’t in their cupboards or on the back verandah!); we engage in further open-ended interviews with the entire household population. Then secondary analysis of the previous day’s timetable generates a further hunch (Sports Day!: shoes replaced with runners) and an additional round of observation reveals: shoes in school bag!These trivial microcosms contain a structure which reliably:
* commences - ironically - with stopping. That is, we do not begin to inquire until we actually suspend our current action because of the:
* raising of a question; which then provokes us to go about:
* planning ways to get answers - ways which will involve identifying and involving ‘questioners’, ‘the questioned’ and an idea of for who or for what we desire answers;
* engaging in fieldwork about new, current or past action in order to get answers and improve our experiential understanding of the problematic situation;
* generating from the ‘answers’ an imaginative idea of what to do to change and improve our actions;
* the putting into practice of the new actions (followed by further stopping, reflecting and possible ‘problematisation’).
just a quick note about four things:
http://www.massobs.org.uk
"The Mass-Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain.
It contains papers generated by the original Mass-Observation social research organisation (1937
to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981."
http://intheconversation.blogs.com/art/
great lil blog about uncollectable art processes and "social architectures"
http://www.hostelprojects.org/about.htm
"Hostel is an organization dedicated to the support and presentation of artwork in public and social space. We have a particular focus on supporting artists who wish to research or execute work in cities other than those in which they live." [thanks to Lisa for the ref.]
http://www.variant.randomstate.org/22texts/Dezeuze.html
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, by Anna Dezeuze, published in variant. An account of how "art" and "the everyday" might (or might not) intersect, via Danto, Warhol, Fluxus, Tiravanija, Bourriaud… [a pdf of this essay is here]
This caught my attention: terminus projects.
…here are some key statements which interested me, from their "about" page:
-"Terminus Projects is an independent organisation that initiates site-specific projects of artistic and cultural relevance."
-"we commission artworks, performances, seminars, publications and events which reflect on the experiences which transform our perception of time, space and place."
-"Pioneer innovative and alternative sites for presenting contemporary works and ideas."
-"Instigate collaborations and exchange between practitioners, academics, and local communities on a national and international level."
Thus far, terminus projects seems to be presenting artist's video works in the sydney underground train video advertising network - these videos will pop up while commuters are waiting for trains, in between the product ads and the ads masquerading as "news."
It could be that terminus may begin to operate a bit like an Aussie version of Artangel. Which would be great. The organisers seem to be very professional, able to attract funding for ephemeral/site specific projects, and somewhat entrepreneurial, without being just about self-promo. They're young too.