Thursday, July 9, 2015

Reading Diary, Summer Session. Berlin 2015.


Line Beyond Drawing
Angeliki Avgitidou 

Pitman, Joanna (2007). They call him the wanderer

Richard Long “a walker, landscape Artist””, highlights his relationship with Landscape. Since 1960, he said he chooses each landscape where to walk for the way it will enhace his work.He uses local materials for his exhibition, like mud even if its not the best quality he is interest in local materials, drawings, photography, finger prints, rivers, tides, stones, slate. Its his pleasure to do everything himself, his walking, his foot steps, his fingerprints, his mud works, it’s a way of being responsible for his work. He believes that the large open spaces out on the country side are not suffering from “global warming”, its not his concern. He likes Japanse culture because they are great walkers and understand naturally his wok.

Martin, Patrick (2011). Performative tactics and the choreographic reinvention of public space

It talks about how public spaces are being use by Artists, and how “public space” is more align with the “temporal” than with the “spatial”. Contemporary Art practices: person-hoos and place-hood are disappearing, the reinvigoration of performative practice settings also coincides with the increase in public spaces: more controlled, aestheticaly sterile and depopulated. 
Tino Seghal: influenced by Neuman and Graham, touches provocative notions relevant to the current moment: borders between public and private space, documentary and fictional approaches, references to historical precedentsmaterial-immaterial components in a work of Art, lived and scripted experiences. Turbulent critical political, quite, calm mannered, controlled.

Harrell Fletcher; analyses existing cultural texts via collaborative dielogueto forge an entire new contextual framing “ Blot out of the sun” 2002, with the owner of a car repair gas station recreated the Joyce novel “Ulyses”, vacillates between the poignant and the comic. In this video re-routes Ulysesninto the midst of one of the most ordinary situations imaginable: the automotive garage with its ever-mysterious, prosaic, compressed air, gas pums and hydraulic lifts

 Jane Tsong: Social space interns of particular sites initiate a playful poetic and incisive form of performative practice, “The comfy City” citi stools chairs abandon.revolvs every day and became artistic intervention. His working methodology incorporates an active and attentive engagement with reciprocity between art and life, and her investigation of public settings, however poetic, beca strong political statements.

 Sharon Hyes: not interested in hr work
Toby Huddlestone, questions old style protests

Mark Boulos & Francis Alys, “All that is solid melts into the air”: Documentation approach, Anti-Journalism documentary, Anti-Empirical”Sometimes doing something Poetic can became Political, sometimes doing something political can became Poetic”, he encounters a relation between the Art World and the Political World. Video “The Leak” 1995 (dreap line): identity, stylistic, Poetic. After 10 years “The dripping” in Palestine border: became: historical narratives, it followed Palestine conflict 1948 map, 24 km, 58 lt paint, Journalism style as spoke by Artist, Cultural action, pragmatic situations.
Rikkrit Tiravaija, “Day for Night”. Now-then. Vietnam Irak
The yes men. mock “New York Times” (a million fake copies) stated in bold on pg 14 “The Irak War Ends”. “Ideas improve the meaning of the words participate in the improvement” PLAGIARISM IS NECESSARY. Progress implies it, and replaces it with the high idea” Debord, 1983
Martin lives n open question the success or failure of artworks with some interest in or commitment on public intervention whether coming from the activist/protest angle or the art/performative direction.
he concludes saying that artists are reinventing and reconfiguring their approaches to the public arena, space, sphere, even abates, blogs, streaming video virtual chats or social networking sites. he goes on stating that the primary challenge to be dress by artists is how to orient new senses of structure within a context placeless-ness. Precarious surprising productive coexistence between: life-art, fact-fiction, novelty-reiteration.

 McGarrigle, Conor (2010). The Construction of locative situations: locative media and the Situationist International, recuperation or redux? 

Locative Media: media devices used by Art: preservative, context aware (GPS, Mobile, etc)
SI: Situattionist International: Unitary Urbanism, Psychogeography, revolutionary and Political.
Psychograography: the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. Debord
The constructed situation: "Our only concern is real life, we care nothing about the permanence of Art or of anything else" Debord
Revolutionary Programme: Sadler said about SI: ..."was so ambitious and uncompromising that is condemned itself to failure"...

2- Locative media as a situationist Practice: contemporary relevance, nature of the influence (SI to locative media) The construction of situations (the best for contemporary artists since there is no specific descriptionn), "To lived independent of the Artist"

Locative Art: 
Shepard: "Tactical Sound Garden" kit : plant sound gardens in real space, real common people: active livers (Debord idea) SHARE AUTHORSHIP BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE AUTHOR.
Yanh: "you are not here": Bagdad through New York, Gaza through Tel Aviv, Maps overlap: POLITICAL QUESTIONING
McGarride: "Joyce Walks": remap routs of James Joyce "Ulyses"
Stalbaum & Silva: "walking tools"
FUTURE SITUATIONS: RECUPERATION: "Soundwalk" "Cicmobile" "Berlin mover guide" "Situationist Nostalgia" 

Mottram, Jack (2007). Drawing on nature: the art of landscape

Richard Long: the act of walking is his medium

A User's Guide to Detournement, Guy Debord & Gil Wolman

This is a Debord Article, he states: Art is no longer a Superior Activity> extremist innovation is the only way. NEGATING THE NEGATION.
A- Minor Detournement: the detournement of an element with no importance
B-Deceptive Detournement: also clled Promitory-Proposition. is the detournement of a intrinsically significant element.
The 4 laws:
1-It is the most distant D element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and NOT the elements that directly determine the nature of THIS impression. 
2- Symplify Detournements since the main impact of a D is directly related to the conscious recollection of the original contexts 
3-Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply
4-Detournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least effective
Proletarian Artistic Education
The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery, the 1st step to Literary communism
the 2 main applications: 1- metagraphic writings and 2-the perversion of the classical novel.
The ultra-detournement: to operate in everyday life 


The image of the environment. "Legibility">cityscape, Clarity of legibility>beautiful City, Size, Time, Complexity.
The City by being perceived by its inhabitants.
Visual Sensations: Color, Shape, Motion, Polarization light. OTHER SENSES OF PERCEPTION: Smell, Sound, Touch, Kinesthesia, gravity, Elctric magnetic Fields. 
LOST: Over tone of utter disaster. 
Recognize Patterns: Practical emotional importance to the individual (comes from the past)
Clear Image: enables us to find easily & quickly.
Good environment Image gives a sense of emotional security. Harmonies relationship between one and the outside world. (Fear comes with disorientation), Legible environment also heightens the potential depht and intensity of human experience.
CITY: POWERFUL SYMBOL OF A COMPLEX SOCIETY
If visually set:: strong meaning.
structure & Identuty>Environmental>1-Identity,2-Structure,3-Meaning
Its posible to separate Meaning from Form?
IMAGEABILITY (Stern called it:Apparency): quality of an Image to Evoke. Connote: fixed, limited, precise, unified, regularly ordered. SENSOUS DELIGHT: meaning of expressiveness: Rhytm, Simulus, Choice.
Image Development: OBSEVER<>OBSERVED
THE CITY IMAGE AND ITS ELEMENTS: physical, perceptive objects only analized:
the 5 elements: 1-Paths, 2- Edges, 3- Districts, 4-Nudes, 5-Landmarks
and then goes on describing each element (I have all in my notebook) and finishes the chapter saying that the elements can't be separate in a city and gives examples  of the interconnection of the elements based on observations of Boston, New Jersey and Los Angeles


Describes the work of the following Artists:

Guillermo Kiutca (1961, Bs As)
Lordy Rodriguez (1976, Manila)
Kathy Prendergast (1958, Dublin)
Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994, Turin)
Marlen Creates (1952, Montreal)
Joyce Kozloff ( 1942, Somervillle) 

Cornelia Parker ‘meteorite lands on wormwood scrubs’, 2000 

Describes the work of Cornelia Parker: she marks real maps with a real meteorite hit up. "the map is not the territory 'weaned new maps if we are going to make sense of the world" CP 

Article: “Mapping the Urban Homunculus” by Steve Dietz

The article wants to describe how maps not only locate us but they became the way of express one self, interrelate with others, communicate understand our system and in some cases to create.

Article: “This is the house the Rachel built …” by Andrew Graham-Dixon

Artist Rachel Whiteread cast a real Victorian house, filled in with concrete and then took out the cast (the house) what remain is the negative space inside the emptiness now is the object, the piece is the space where people had lived ones, theme: dead. For me the amazing part of this project is something that is not mention in the article: the fact that she gave body, tangible form to the emptiness, to the space, she made a visible form from an invisible space. 

Article: “Wandering Through Time: Francis Alÿs’s Paseos and the Circulation of Performance” by Chloe Johnston

Francis Alys's Paseos and the circulation of Performance. "Paseos" Urban pedestrian wanderings. He transforms walking from prosaic to poetic. Passes are Journeys



I read this interview, its very interesting. Nothing to comment at this point. 

The Artist as Curator – Breaking the rules
Merete Rostad

Marco de Michelis, Art as a Way of Thinking

"The true Artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths" Bruce Neuman.
De Michelis suggest to coincive the aspects of reality that art aids in making visible, they relate to life itself to the power that art can exert upon it, he says.. The "Mystic" nature depends on this ability to transform our life experience.
Art becames a form of knowledge.
Then goes on describing the difference in Art before and after WW2, and how now the different arts are overlapping their boundaries, borrowing elements and pricipals to each other. 
Giles Deleuze: "Philosophy, art and science come into relations for mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons"
He claims that this a contamination of practices. He says : the signifivcance of these mutual interests lies precisely in the ambiguous asymmetry of this relationship. When the  protagonists of the dialogue move beyond the disciplinary confines to finally change their very status the process suddenly became devoid of interest.
Bretchian statent: "something is missing" he explains, implies that humanity remains aware of the imperfection of the world in which it lives, and that the desire to imagine its transformation and improvement to the point of a condition of impossible perfection is an ineliminable element of our culture.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: the arts, asa critical process and tool for interpreting and transforming everyday life, cannot be isolated in separate territories, this flow from one expressive form to another, making any distinction between art and no art, between individual and craftsmanship and anonymous mechanical technology, senseless, while consenting each stage in the process to improve its understanding and to significantly come closer to the totally of life.


Derya Ozkan & Oda Projesi, Art’s Indecent Proposal: Collaboration. An Attempt to Think Collectively 

Amazing project, it was a tranformative experience to me to read this article, to be able to be in the middle of this conversation between the collective artists of Oda Projesi project, being able to read how they think together, how the are in constant change of thought, re writing the meanings of the words:  empathy, concepts, theories, questioning capitalism, authorship, translation, mimicry,  signature of a project, representation, presentation, marketing, relationships, micro-situations, staying always in the process-proposal mode, changing organically with the neighbor, neighborhood, space, temporal dimension, political art, gestures, resistance acts, curiosity, collaboration, aesthetics, ethics, risks, mistakes, self-other, experiences, urban space, empowerment, dynamics, environment, theorization, over-theorization.  To me was a transforming experience to read it. I had never being in Istanbul before I read this paper, now I can say I was there.
DONE, a pain for my eyes!!!!!!  

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Curating in the Twenty-First Century  

Orbits start saying that from all the possibilities of coping Globalization in terms of curating Eduard Glissant told him to use the idea of modalite: finding a way of engaging with the global dialogue which produces differences every day.
Friedman has a great inspiration for his curatorial work: how to bring organizations, how to have different shows with in the show, how we can invite people to curate shows with in the exhibition and not control them.
"The best of the world is when anything happens, you have the right to your own idea".
He say he likes small environments for exhibitions, his first "The kitchen", many artists did something to this kitchen, and then an exhibition within the exhibition was propose inside the refrigerator. 
Similar to "The Kitchen" after he did the one at Federico Garcia Lorca last house in Granada, from a conversation with Cy Twombly he tried to bring Poetry with visual Arts together, many Artists were invited to intervene in Lorca's house.
So these house exhibitions are somehow archipelagos or, rather,"kind of" one island.
From Konig he learned: the craft of curating, how to do a book how to do an exhibition. He entered the dialectic of big-small by doing this big exhibition "The broken Mirror"
After he went back to small, leaving in a Hotel room, he was doing exhibitions on the room 10 meters square.
Aligherio Boetti introduced him to Glissant.
"Cities on the Move", Secession Building, Vienna, focused in Artists from Asia, it was, as well the 100 years anniversary of the building.
With Josef Ortner, the founder of Museum in progress and Katrin Messner they did "The Billboard Project", it became e traveling show, he, then could apply Glissant idea: "play the game and enter the global dialogue". Cities on the move was different each time not a show going from A to B to C, it became a time line of growth, of organicity and of change.After Vienna went to London, were they add a chamber of torture of architecture: the exhibition was an apotheosis and an apocalypse, an exhibition of permanent transformation, it was not a representation of a city but it became the city, a performative space "polyphony of cities"
May ways of curating in the XXI C. Joseph Beuys talk about expended notion of art: ART NEVER FOLLOWS CURATING: CURATING HAS TO FOLLOW ART and if curating follows art the an expanded notion of Art necessarily leads to an expanded notion of curating. Boetti: "It's very boring we are always invited to do the same things, to do a Biennale exhibitions, gallery shows, museum shows..."
With Julia Peyton-Jones at the Battersea Station with the Serpentine Gallery, did the "China Power Station", 1st chinese contemporary art and architecture in London. to create an exhibition with one possibility surrouded by other possibilities.
Followed "Indian Highway", 1st Indian exhibition in London, in this the venue was a street, Exhibitions can became a form of URBANISM
IT IS IMPORTANT THET WE THINK OF CURATING AS A FORM OF URBANISM.
Middle East exhibition at Edgeware Rd in London. Similarly as with the Lorca House, Artists come and work there, and reconvert spaces.. "Utopia Station"  the idea of Hybrid work space.
"Marathons", Stuttgart: the idea was to map a city by having interviews, events, and discourse nonstop for 24 Hours.
Experiment Marathon: Free speech in our neighborhood, statements manifestos, conversations .
Exhibition as laboratory.
By reading this paper I undertand how important for a curator is to be flexible, to be in constant dialogue with new situations coming and not expected and used the unexpected as new material and transformation, constant change.


Becky Shaw, Who’s Driving? The Artist as Curator  

Shaw ask whether artist-curator models maintain conventional artist-curator relationship or offer something different.
She sys that a good curator is the itersection between artist and audience.
She goes on the artists being curated by a curator or by an institution and how many artists  prefer to became artists curators. she also mentions the differences on paper work in terms of contracts.
Then talks about the Curator, the artist-curator and the artist who uses curatorial precess.
she ask the same questions to an Artist-curtor Kristen Laver, Ceri Hand Curator at FACT and Kelly Large an artist who uses curatorial processes to form her work.
Conclusion: all of them describe that the relationship is never concrete and always shift. that the fact that one has to be the one working with the control of the media puts one or the other in a more/less power position. 
She says that we are moving closer to the recognition that art is never produced by one personART AS WE KNOW IT IS PRODUCED BY A COMLEX WEB OF ACTORS AND THE FURTHER WE GO TOWARD RECOGNIZING AND UTILIZING THIS THE BETTER.
CURATOR-ARTIST RELATIONSHIP AND ITS POWER RELATIONSHIP MUST BE RECOGNIZED AND ARTICULATE AS PART OF THE WORK CONTEXT.

Paul O’Neill, The Curatorial Turn, Part 1 

1960s Siegelaub: "demystification", demystify the hidden structure of the art word.
1990s curating became a potentiasubject for discussion, critique and debate. incorporation: to the exhibition more discursive, conversational, and geopolitical discussion. The neocriticacurator usurped the evacuated place of the critique.
Exhibition as a medium. Group exhibitions as texts. New verb "to curate" new adjective "Curatorial": Cultural Industries . Exhibitions are subjective political tools, Institutional "utterances" within a larger culture industry. "The Biennal phenomenon" , large scale international exhibitions global artistic practices.The activity of the curator made manifest through such exhibitions  is articulated by being identity-driven: overly politicized, discursively global and fundamentally auteured praxis prevails. Their main theme: GLOBALIZATION ( while questioning the ideological underpinning of the exhibition itself as a part of the process. BIENNIAMILIZATION, standarization of exhibitions :absorbed the difference between center and periphery. No contradiction nor conflict, just a product, no transformation. "Jet set Flaneur": a international curator  . "The rise of curator as creator" has also gather momentum, curator a job title. Within curatorial discourse the curator operates as being the domain of artistic practice. Each exhibition is in dialogue with next one as well as with the world it claims to reflect.


Paul O’Neill, The Curatorial Turn, Part 2

Curator as Meta-Artist, Artist as Meta-Curator
Watching claimed in 1987 that curated exhibitions are linked to Duchamp ready made aided, artworks aided by a curator: display, manipulation, environment, lighting, labels made them such. In cases where there is a lack of communication between the art world and the audience a curator is necessary.Storr rejection of curating as an artistic practice is a debate since late 80s.
Curator as Meta-Artist idea from the 90s when the curators claimed them selves the status of the GENIUS traditional in Art History 
The Artist as Meta-Curator 
Visual effect, display and narrative: curated exhibition.
Curatorial knoledgeis now becoming a mode of discourse with unestable historical foundations.
He concludes that the Gap between curatorial criticism and curator-led will only widen further, due to the opposition to each other. 



Writing – as
PhD workshop on art and writing
3-5 August 2015, Uferstudios, Berlin
Katy Macleod & Geoff Cox


Katy Macleod & Lin Holdridge, ‘Writing and the PhD in Fine Art’, in Michael Biggs & Henrik Karlson (Eds.) The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, London & New York, Routledge, 2014.

Reading done, Ill comment later.

Henk Borgdorff, chapters 3 & 6, in The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, Leiden University Press, 2012.

Reading done, Ill comment later.

Katy Macleod & Neil Chapman, ‘The absenting subject: research notes on PhDs in Fine Art’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Chris Smith (Ed.) Vol. 13, Issue 2 June, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

 New models of presentation of research.
Including: Theory of art practice, might involve: fiction, re-use of literature re-invention of theoretical source. 
Reading done.

Strategies for Survival
Lee Miller + Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley

Robinson, Andrew (2011). In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia 

Reading done, Ill comment later.

Robinson, Andrew (2011). In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power.

Reading done, Ill comment later.


MPhil Intro MPH
Sarah Bennett

Haraway, D (1991) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of Nature London: Free Association of Books pp183-201  

Even though I find this topic more than interesting, not only because of my gender but, also because Im interesting in gender, my last performance name is: "Gender and Patterns:an unanswered question", this reading for my was extremely difficult to follow, it took me forever, think that the style of the writing is in a way in contradiction with the content. I think the style is rather masculine. I can't point with my finger why I have this perception.