Past: On Kawara

"The dates point to a specificity that immediately is lost in largess and unknown, in the inability to circumscribe a date's entirety, or one man's marking of it. This distending distance between the signifier (the date) and its lost signified (the entirety of a day) is its affective pathos. .... The desire of viewers to find dates to which they can link "significance" eases the longing for the sign to conclude, to fill with meaning."


Read full: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Paa Joe at High Museum of Art

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Deploying Museological Context. On one hand all objects require information to mean within a history and context, and on the other the deluge of history can imply that these objects' interest is their illustration or worse, artifact, of that history. Implying at worst that the objects are less than commensurate with the history that wrought them. This conflict would seem less were it not that western objects were treated as not-necessarily-requiring didactics, that we still treat the modernist myths of abstract universality well-true-enough, get to hang a Jackson Pollock without explaining the history of sublimated dick-wagging.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres at various places throughout the world

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The contract for participating asks for images of the installations and that:

"It is understood that by providing these images, you are providing copyright-free permission for their use in online and print publications related to this exhibition, and for non-commercial use by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, including on its website."

Which turns the cookies into machines for production, for producing the work, a system by which we all relate to each other through the image...

Joe Scanlan on FG-T in "Uses of Disorder":

      Most exemplary in this regard were the untitled paper and candy works, stacks and piles from which anyone could take a piece without returning it or diminishing the firsthand experience of anyone else. At the same time—and in apparent contradiction with that reception—this process of eternal deferral was a welcome panacea for a ruling class in need of a mechanism by which they could create the appearance of public generosity without having to disturb the supply chain of power....
     It demarcates a public site and then converts any events that transpire within the site into part of the work, into private property....
     But the most important characteristic of this dynamic is the refusal ... to appear powerful or acquisitive at all. This too is a kind of “wig,” a controlled ethos of casualness that conceals not only its intentions but also the act of concealment itself. The art and persona of Gonzalez-Torres thus mark an important transformation in the style and atmosphere of power, from the ordinal authority of modern capitalism to the pseudo-communitarianism of today. If the formal properties of 1960s Minimalism—hardness, geometry, impenetrability, silence—were aligned with those of the military industrial complex, then forty years later Gonzalez-Torres’s work exhibits precisely the inverse properties—flexibility, organicism, accessibility, eloquence—and yet aligns with the same thing: the dominant social order. Gonzalez-Torres’s signal accomplishment was his realization that the most expansive, pervasive way to amass power is to not seem powerful at all....
     These very features of Gonzales-Torres’s work parallel those of the Internet economy, where superficial, user-friendly atmospheres mask deeper emotional and psychological manipulations. In the startup days of any social network like BitTorrent, Facebook, or Twitter, part of the appeal is the excitement of feeling responsible for the construct by simply participating—and encouraging your friends to participate as well, since greater activity strengthens the construct and increases its functionality. How the construct can or will become profitable is a mystery to everyone involved, and this mystery is another part of its appeal. Everyone is free to pursue their own ends and these motivations are their own reward. Of course, joining the network requires surrendering your right to the value of any data your activities there might produce...
     ...although this production is mutual, the profits from it are not shared...
     One of the great unacknowledged truths in Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and in the chronic denigration of material pleasure in art in general, is that the call for nobler ambitions almost always comes from people with guaranteed incomes, of whom it can be said, if nothing else, that at least they know first-hand the evils of which they speak....
     ... who seized on the participatory aspects of his work as a kind of election to be won by the artist or curator who garners the most votes...
     That the political potency of Gonzalez-Torres’ work has atrophied but its beauty has not, however, demonstrates how timeless is beauty and how brief are notions of political access and cultural power in a technologically advanced society. It also confirms the class differences inherent in that inevitability—after all, Ars longa, vita brevis is rich people’s thinking. 

....it is dubious to maintain that Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptures are egalitarian or even generous in our time.

Past: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

"The now distance between becomes the very thing that is felt. [...] Time passes, causing eventual significance to rise and fall, events that become distant are felt against against the glaring alarm of today's violence, and the space between, the erosion and swelling of meaning, of emotion, like lungs breathing, like a tide going in and out... like candy refilling and taken."

Read all: Felix Gonzalez-Torres

“Group Show” at Hussenot

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Teenage and whether coy or sympathetic, not many want to prolong their teen proclivity, and here it is not only enshrined but endures, cast as art we don't grow out of but into. Comfort in not nostalgia but a return to adolescent states. What is true about our world is that the teenage years return as powerful forms of commodity.


see too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Kaspar Müller at Société

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Because it stirs the pot, ripples the surface of mythos, of art, content. You cannot kill content if you tried because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. So make it look good on a wall, even toilet paper.


Read all posts tagged Kaspar Müller, Ripples in the Surface

K8 Hardy at Karma International

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30 seconds of video, and images through glass, of a lifetime of outfits, enjoy your daily contemporary art.