Art I Like

Artist's Shit by Piero Manzoni

Tate online:

In May 1961, while he was living in Milan, Piero Manzoni produced ninety cans of Artist's Shit. Each was numbered on the lid 001 to 090. Tate's work is number 004. A label on each can, printed in Italian, English, French and German, identified the contents as '"Artist's Shit", contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May 1961.'

In December 1961 Manzoni wrote in a letter to the artist Ben Vautier: 'I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. The fingerprint is the only sign of the personality that can be accepted: if collectors want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there's the artist's own shit, that is really his.'

It is not known exactly how many cans of Artist's Shit were sold within Manzoni's lifetime, but a receipt dated 23 August 1962 certifies that Manzoni sold one to Alberto Lùcia for 30 grams of 18-carat gold.

Robert Guth

Old friend from high school (also by coincidence a mutual friend of Freakley's).

He is to blame for first introducing me to the term "relational aesthetics" in 2007 whilst telling me about his PhD project, which involves mounting events at which he hands out loaves of self-baked bread in exchange for whatever participants think they're worth, documenting the exchange, then exhibiting the documentation and the objects received.

From recent FB event blurb:

"Bring whatever you think a loaf of bread is worth down to the SmithDick venue in the bus interchange and swap it. It’s up to you – a toaster or tea cup, an old TV or maybe even a piece of art. We won’t question your sense of value; if you say it’s worth BREAD then it is worth BREAD.

Besides the joy of BREAD why is this happening? Why is this art, not a bakery? Robert makes artworks that encourage the viewer to think about the value of their time, stuff and money. He likes baking bread and has found a way to use his passion as part of his art making and PhD project at the ANU School of Art.

This artwork is part of his research in to how participants (people who like BREAD) value objects and participation. You may be documented and chatted to when you come down for your BREAD."

Canberra Times article about above event. Piece by Robert about the project.

Tracy Emin

"A poster she photocopied and put up around her home when her cat Docket went missing became an object collected by people, but was excluded by Emin from her canon."

Nate Hill

(Via Kev.)

I have no words.

Hiromi Tango

(Via DF.)

Absence was a performance installation mounted in the Degraves St Subway as part of last year's Next Wave.

Japanese born, Brisbane based artist Hiromi Tango is inhabiting Vitrine at Platform in the Campbell Arcade subway throughout the 2008 Festival. During her time there her objective is to hand-stitch collected ‘feelings and voices’ and develop a collaborative sculpture with the theme of ‘absence’. Her personal engagement with the site, situation and the community that passes will determine the final outcome of the artwork.

In 2006 and 2007, Hiromi undertook 18 months of research in Hong Kong, New Zealand, the USA, Japan and Australia, which involved meeting people, listening to their stories and recording her interactions. Hiromi also received photos, personal letters, writings, drawings, diaries and personal items from the people she met. For the past six months Hiromi has been hand-stitching these stories and objects, while considering the authors’ absence.

Absence will contribute to a more critical understanding of how artist and public engagement is defined, and how the artist can intervene into a particular space, potentially generating unexpected moments of intimacy and tension.

How much of the exchange is me and how much of it is you? Is it possible to understand each other?

"During the month Vitrine was transformed into a site of incredible dialogue and culminated in Hiromi staging her own funeral."

Jason Maling

From website:

From drawing and durational process, through to live workshops and public performance, Maling's work can best be described by the term ‘Live Art’. It extends through a broad range of media and is characterised by a formality of composition with a fluidity of outcome. Often appearing game-like, the roles of players and the rules of play continually evolve through individual and collective expressions of what is 'allowed’. The results can be as simple as a broken tool or as elaborate as a sprawling narrative. It’s about the space between what could happen and what did.

Of particular note: Project George.

Sophie Calle

(via J & Freakley.)

Official site.

From the Tate Britain's catalogue piece on 1998 show The Birthday Ceremony:

Sophie Calle is fascinated by the interface between our public lives and our private selves. This has led her to investigate patterns of behaviour using techniques akin to those of a private investigator, a psychologist, or a forensic scientist. It has also led her to investigate her own behaviour so that her life, as lived and as imagined, has informed many of her most interesting works.

...

The Birthday Ceremony draws our attention to the way in which we construct our identity around secret rituals (from forms of self-indulgence to forms of self-denial) and surround ourselves with objects and activities that give meaning and substance to both our private and our public lives.

Description of Maria Turner, from Paul Auster's "Leviathan":

I found her a little scary, perhaps even perverse (which lent a certain excitement to our initial contacts), but as time went on I understood that she was ... an unorthodox person who lived her life according to a set of bizarre, private rituals. Every experience was systemized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations...

Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly described as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don't think she can be pigeonholed in any way. Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any particular medium or discipline. Ideas would take hold of her, she would work on projects, there would be concrete results that would be shown in galleries, but this activity didn't stem from a desire to make art so much as from a need to indulge her obsessions, to live her life precisely as she wanted to live it. Living always came first, and a number of her most time consuming projects were done strictly for herself and never shown to anyone.

"Calle's work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. As she descibes (below), the form of the final product - the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees - is the least significant part."

Interesting June 2007 Guardian article.

I think so.

I Feel Better After I Type To You

From Lot 49:

Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released, there's a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything - only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author's series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

AOL user 23187425's "stream of consciousness soliloquy" has now been turned into a book by Superbunker (Superbunker being "a framework for conducting and disseminating cultural research... operating as a cross between a think tank and a decentralized federation of neo-alchemical laboratories..").

I want one.