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.

The League Of Resonance

Latest Maling project.

The League of Resonance seeks out the intangible and barely perceptible. We detect vibrations that form the backdrop to the mythical narrative of daily life. We situate ourselves in places of intrigue, we listen, we talk, we connect and we hum. In collecting and combining the resonance of individuals: their stories, perceptions and rituals, we unravel the backdrop to this myth. Together we create a new sound. This sound is The League of Resonance.

Luke Hand

I first met Luke in 2008 after being introduced to his apparently now dormant musical project Dizzygiggles by a mutual friend. I gave him a copy of The Mishukis' Everyone's Too Stupid and he reciprocated by sending me a double-sided CD of his songs ingeniously fashioned from two CDs hand-glued together, with a personalised sleeve written on what appeared to be toilet paper. Since my old toploader died I can't play it anymore, but it's still a treasured possession.

Back then he was, like me, working in a market research callcentre; these days he's studying Sound Art at RMIT. Last year he produced an audio collage intended to convey the ambiance of a football match which was played over the loudspeakers at the MCG as part of Sports Club 2: The Arena for Next Wave.

More recent projects include calculating the metrics of a bag of chips, painstakingly re-rendering page one of the September 12, 2001 edition of the New York Times at 8x life-size in colour pencil, producing an album of original sound pieces based on The Telegraph's laughably pretentious track-by-track review of the new Radiohead album, etc, etc, etc, etc. His phone seems to be a fairly significant tool of his practice, which of course we like.

Marina Abramović

(Via Duncan.)

Wikipedia:

Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art". Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

Year of the Rope by Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh

(Via Twyllan Mynodal.)

Intro to interview here:

No two artists are more central to a discussion of the Life/Art Experiment than Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh. For years, on opposite coasts, they had each cordoned off whole sections of their daily lives and called them art. When we heard that they were working together on a one-year piece, it seemed like a natural. When we heard they had vowed to spend a whole year in New York City tied to each other with a piece of rope, it seemed perfect—yet hardly possible. Alex and Allyson Grey were artists married to each other, and just as obsessively concerned with coupling at the intersection of art and life. In June 1984, while the Hsieh/Montano piece was still in progress, High Performance asked the four artists to meet for a conversation about it.

Nate Hill

(Via Kev.)

I have no words.

Simon Pericich

Melbourne-based sculptor; DF's former housemate.

I remember the first time I went to their house on Johnston St in early 2007, the studio was full of weapons he was making from found objects, which I thought were frikken awesome.

Also especially liked: Lost Dog and Your Best Friend.

Joshua Sofaer

Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation.

From Perform Every Day:

In a world of natural look makeup where people spend hours putting on various different applications in an attempt to look like they are wearing none at all, is it any wonder that there is some confusion over what reality might really be?

Part of this confusion is to do with performance; how to discern ‘what is’ and ‘what is performance’? From the global ramifications of party and nation politics to the esoteric world of live art, from the tragic spectacular of international terrorism to the undergraduate drama student, from the stock-market to soap-opera, from high performance drugs to performance studies – ‘performance’ is the modus operandi of contemporary culture. It seems now that there is only performance.

Do not despair!

If we begin to understand the things we take for granted in our everyday lives as constructs of performance in and of themselves, if we relish these everyday performances for what they offer us, then there is hope. We become the audience of our very own private theatre.

Also: Any Questions; Seven Reasons Why Live Art Gives Great Value.

Robin Hely

Whatever his shortcomings as a human being, he's undeniably an amazing artist. And his sociopathy and his genius kind of go hand in hand.

"As an artist, I have a big problem," he said to me once. "I don't really like art. I just love fucking with peoples' heads."

Yeah.

"Interventionist performance art", he's calling it now. Previously known as "interactive public theatre". I still like "reality art". Whatever it is, it's something else.

Interesting review of "Sherrie". Origin of the spycam. Missing Person --> Who Is Robert Henley?. Oh, and then there's this. Changed my life, y'know.

I miss the evil bastard. He's never dull.

(Previously.)

realityhacking.com

Link.

Blurb:

By taking a perspective usually limited to looking at art in the museum to the everyday world I interact with existing public situations. The consequences of these encounters are interventions or temporary installations which are often abandoned. In this process the artist subjugates himself to the act of perception by being anonymous.

Yes.

Shannon Holopainen

(via Freakley.)

Live Art

From the UK's Live Art Development Agency:

Disrupting borders, breaking rules, defying traditions, resisting definitions, asking awkward questions and activating audiences, Live Art breaks the rules about who is making art, how they are making it and who they are making it for.

Live Art practices have proved to be especially equipped to meet the complexity and sophistication of contemporary audiences’ values, identities and expectations. Live Art questions assumptions and defies expectations about who an audience can be, what they might be interested in, and the means by which they can be addressed.

Live Art occupies a huge range of sites and circumstances, from the institutional to artist led interventions; from actions in galleries and performances in theatres, to artists working outside of the constraints of official culture, within civic or social spheres, in challenging and unexpected sites, or at the points where live and mediated cultures converge. Some may experience Live Art in a gallery, others in a theatre, and others still as an occurrence in some unusual location or a process in which they are involved.

Live Art can also span extremities of scales – from intimate one on one encounters, to civic spectacles, to the mass participation of virtual events. Wherever they may take place or whatever shape they may be, Live Art practices are concerned with all kinds of interventions in the public sphere and all kinds of encounters with an audience.

Live Art offers immersive experiences, often disrupting distinctions between spectator and participant. Live Art asks us what it means to be here, now. In the simultaneity and interactivity of a media saturated society, Live Art is about immediacy and reality: creating spaces to explore the experience of things, the ambiguities of meaning and the responsibilities of our individual agency.

Live Art is on the frontline of enquiries into what our culture is and where it is located, who our artists are and where they come from, what an audience can be and how they can be addressed.

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.

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.

Gabrielle De Vietri

(Via Freakley.)

Various works showcased on noise.net.

The Relationship Contracts (well, the two I've seen) are beautiful.

(If these existed outside the realm of Art, they'd make life a lot simpler. But much less interesting..)

Audio interview, mostly about the Ideas Catalogue.

From statement:

Through my work I aim to address common personal, social, and artistic problems. My source material originates in the overlapping codes of behaviour in social, professional and legal interactions and transactions. Departing from flawed givens, misleading texts, and habitual human behaviours, I attempt to locate alternatives, however absurd.

...While my works are mainly text-based, they often expand to incorporate their contexts in performative or sculptural ways...

My central interests lie in a desire to affect and redirect our social imaginary, which disciplines the way in which we lead our lives. I intend to communicate the purpose of my works to individuals rather than masses, broadening and diversifying the way in which their social imaginary functions, and in turn affecting the way in which they think and behave. This public outlook makes for artworks which are frank, moralising, social, and instructional.

Strangers & Intimacy

(Via Rob Hely.)

Strangers & Intimacy was an interactive performance work staged at West Space in Melbourne in early 2005.

The project began in September 2004 when eight artists were assigned a pen pal living in a city on the other side of the world. On the first day of September they all wrote a four line letter of introduction to their foreign pen friend. Over the four months, between September and December they continued writing letters to each other each week.

The development process was interesting enough all by itself..

Part One = Letters - The strangers meet via hand written letters, they reveal themselves, become intimate, share pasts, stories, memories and daily life.

Part Two = Melbourne - They establish a working relationship upon meeting at West Space in Melbourne, they stand face to face, sort through all the material, share ideas and create performances.

Part Three = Glasgow - The artists then travel together to Glasgow, the temperature drops, the poles shift and new intimacies form.

.. but what sounds really interesting (from the account related to me yesterday) is the actual performance, which - probably appropriately - isn't described at all on the page linked above.

Lynn Hershman

(Via J.)

Specifically: Roberta Breitmore.

ROBERTA BREITMORE was, for 9 years, a private performance of a simulated person. In an era of alternatives, she became an objectified alternative personality. Roberta's first live action was to place an ad in a local newspaper advertising for a roommate. People who answered the ad became participants in her adventure. As she became part of their reality, they became part of her fiction.

Yes.

On Kawara

(Via Em.)

From Wikipedia:

On Kawara (born December 24, 1932) is a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City since 1965. He has shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.

Since 1966 he has made a long series of "date paintings" (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background. Other series of works include the I Went and I Met series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life, another series of postcards, I Got Up At, rubber-stamped with the time he got up that morning, and a series of telegrams sent to various people bearing the message "I AM STILL ALIVE".

Much like the Today series, Kawara uses a number of days followed by date the work was executed as his life-dates. So the piece entitled Title at the National Gallery of Art has Kawara's life-dates as 26,697 (January 27, 2006) which, when calculated, place Kawara's birthdate at December 24, 1932.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

See also:

Other, related works in his oeuvre confirm the existentialism at the heart of his metaphysics. For example, in 1970 he began intermittently to send telegrams to friends and professional colleagues that always contain the same message: I am still alive. Once a medium of urgent news, the telegram has become almost obsolete as a means of communication. Normally it announces timely or memorable events, such as unexpected deaths, but Kawara's messages invert these customary practices: given that everyone is assumed to be alive until the contrary is announced, Kawara's reassurance that he is still living seems gratuitous—absurd. Moreover, even though it was true at the moment it was sent, it may not be so by the time it is received.

Imbued in equal measure with humor and pathos, these terse missives nonetheless offer testimony to a fundamental state: consciousness, a precondition to all other forms of being. Although destined initially for the attention of a single recipient, they were immediately understood to be a form of conceptual art and hence soon exhibited or published in catalogues and monographs on the artist.

Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.

No.

Yes.

(Update 20/10/07: I'd never heard of On Kawara when I posted this. Not consciously, anyway.)

Relational Aesthetics

Sez Wikipedia:

The term 'relational aesthetics' was coined in 1996 by French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to characterize artistic practice in the 1990s.

Bourriaud explores the notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls 'relational art'.

According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

A relational artist might, for example, convert a gallery space into a temporary stand for serving coffee, with the addition of background music, suitable lighting, books to read, and comfortable chairs. The artwork here consists of creating a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."

In relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption. Bourriaud believes this collective encounter can be both democratic and microtopian. These intersubjective encounters may literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece.

Yes.