REVIEW: Art in America "Slummer Nights"

My  review of "Slummer Nights," curated by Sadie Laska, at CANADA gallery.

disco party 9-5

Seth Price's bumpin 8-hour work mix here. Tests at my "day job" are already in process.

Seth Price: I didn’t have a particular use in mind. I was thinking about work days, where different sets of working hours represent different kinds of work and different cultural areas: a union job, an office job, an art gallery, a boutique… But it’s true, I liked the fact that the track could be played perfectly, start to finish, during an 8-hour work day, so yes, a work mix, why not.

-from an interview with Boško Blagojević, here.

Dispersion and Jogging.com

I saw David Joselit deliver a lecture on the subject of dispersion and circulation last winter.  He began by asking: How do we produce value and meaning in a world of overproduction? He answered with the following: The only way to derive "meaning" from art is by "moving it"*:

Joselit described how we now rely on an "epistemology of search" to identify value in art. And this value has been untethered from material and assigned to the amorphous bonds that combine unlike objects (telecommunications, human relations).  Rules for this epistemology are as follows:
1. images multiply
2. value is produced by circulation
3. objects are constituted (ie: an object d'art is designated a 'work of art').



With this in mind, I am reminded of a  new crowd-sourced curatorial project on jogging.com:

Jogging will now enter an experimental mode of image distribution called Positive Feedback. ..... 

.......We ultimately hope for the entire blog to become a self-regulatory process, allowing viewers the chance to both create content and vote on the relevance of that content to Jogging’s brand for inclusion. When this end is reached, Jogging will become the first artistic ‘being’ to be associated with an anonymous and endless number of identities– a form of production we feel makes the most efficient use of the possibilities our digital location provokes and is most relevant to the blog’s political aim of encouraging a decentralized system of distribution (and creation) for art.

I am looking through the anonymous images on Jogging.com since the project has been initiated: sliced Jpeg of two baseball hats against one another and two different colored woods. A totem pole with a bear carved into it, fitted with an airline head-rest. Barbara Streisand's home. They are so full of signifiers and so empty at once that they are exhausting, which is good.Value is not derived from these because they are contemplative and significant but if I, and enough people "Like" them/reblog, their value increases.

As surely the makers know all too well, the project is the successful envisioning (as a online curatorial project) of what was discussed in an AUDC (Sumrell/Varnelis) essay,  "Revenge Against Objects" in 2006. Post-modern society, they write, no longer has need for material culture. Of course,  "All objects are now wild signs, free-floating signifiers unable to represent anything specific themselves, part of the mechanism of circulation, which has become a goal in and of itself."

Benjamin Crotty and Gabriel Abrantes

   Poor boy falls for daughter of Chinese neo-colonialists in Angola,  

with the arcs, score, and stilted dialogue of Hollywood narrative film. The improbable is now plausible. 

Liberdade, at the Palais de Tokyo (23 mins). 

Svetlana Boym

#4, A Critic, an Amateur, from Notes for an "Off-Modern Manifesto":

If in the 1980s artists dreamed of becoming their own curators and borrowed from the theorists, now the theorists dream of becoming artists. Disappointed with their own disciplinary specialization, they immigrate into each other's territory. The lateral move again. Neither backwards nor forwards, but sideways. Amateurs' outtakes are no longer excluded but placed side-by-side with the non-outtakes. I don't know what to call them anymore, for there is little agreement these days on what these non-outtakes are.

But the amateur's errands continue. An amateur, as Barthes understood it, is the one who constantly unlearns and loves, not possessively, but tenderly, inconstantly, desperately. Grateful for every transient epiphany, an amateur is not greedy.

More here.

Coming Up!

Paul & Linda in various guises. (Thanks Michael!)
 See also: "Notes on the Paul McCartney Shadow Canon" by Mark Owens, in #20 Dot Dot Dot.