Conde and Beveridge

Working Image: Canadian Labour Artists Carole Conde and Karl Beveridge

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The House of Dreams, 19 October 2005 to 8 January 2006 - Serpentine Gallery, London

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Make yourself at home Tuesday July 12, 2005 The Guardian At Rirkrit Tiravanija's new show, you can cook a meal, crash out on the sofa - even have a bath. Is it taking audience participation art too far, asks Adrian Searle A very long time ago, I spent a night alone locked in the Serpentine Gallery. I passed the hours rewriting a catalogue essay for a show I was curating there (it had been accidentally deleted from the gallery's computer). The deadline loomed, and so did the Serpentine's ghosts, not to mention the armies of ants that infested the building. I made myself a midnight snack in the gallery kitchen and, towards dawn, hunkered down in a sleeping bag improvised from a roll of bubble-wrap ...

Everything2.com

Role of the garage in suburban American culture: on Everything2.com

Lefebvre's three spaces

"For Lefebvre it was important to distinguish between “spatial practice” properly speaking (the process of the production and reproduction of space, as well as the relationship of society to space); “representations of space,” or conceptualized space (the “space of planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers”); and “representational spaces” or spaces that are “directly lived,” overlaid on actual physical spaces, and appropriated symbolically." Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 12.

MA Fine Art, degree show

Meeting Point Leeds MA Fine Art, University of Leeds - September 6-9, Lifton Studios

Oxford English Dictionary

garage, n. 3. Special Comb. garage sale U.S., a sale of unwanted used goods and possessions, usu. held (in the garage of) a private house; cf. yard sale s.v. YARD n.1 6(c). 1966 Daily Union (Sacramento) Family Weekly Mag. 17 July 12/2 A couple..held a *garage sale on three consecutive weekends and..sold out..countless items. 1982 Chicago Sun-Times 21 Sept. 16/1 You can sell just about anything at a garage sale including bowling trophies or a single boxing glove if you know how.

Sample from second draft

I'm having some technical difficulties uploading my second draft to my webspace on Villanova University's server; because Leeds Uni's computers don't have Microsoft Frontpage. But the full second draft will be posted sometime probably Monday. Here is a sample paragraph: In 1973, while still a postgraduate student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), New York born artist Martha Rosler held a garage sale. Of course, the garage sale is a common feature of the suburban American landscape—whether in southern California or other parts of the United States. However, instead of the garage sale being held in its logical location, i.e. a garage or suburban yard, Rosler’s garage sale was held in the student art gallery at UCSD. This gallery gesture was entitled the Monumental Garage Sale, it was: Advertised as a jumble sale in local newspapers but also as an art event within the art community, this work took the form of house-hold sale where second-hand goods – clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewellery and personal letters and mementos – were displayed on racks and tables and sold off over the course of the exhibition. A gesture of this kind is a participant in the wider critical stances towards systems and systemizing, characterized by the 1970s international art scene. Rosler’s Garage Sale provokes the spectator to rethink what gallery and everyday spaces are, and the schism that has been occurred between them. Commodities are indeed being sold in the gallery during the garage sale exhibition, however, these everyday objects are not “art” as object in the same sense as one of Marcel Duchamp readymades—at least in terms of the art market or auction block. The objects participate in Rosler’s installation/performance as material exchanges—and are vital ones at that. Instead of art as object(hood), it is rather art involving objects. Rosler navigates a unique territory consisting of both dematerialism and materialism. The Garage Sale is critical to the art object itself as ‘transcendental’ and the gallery as a space for transcendental art objects. Rosler Garage Sale gesture presents a interesting dilemma for late-capitalism in art galleries, where basically products are for sale (it was indeed a fully operating garage sale!), however, the products one is buying are not necessarily “art.” Art is happening, things are being sold, but not being sold as art (as a sacred object). The gesture is really the art, the spectators/museum goers who are shopping in the garage sale and the collection of objects; but not the objects themselves, Rosler’s gesture is unlike that of Duchamp readymades, the latter of course could be sold for millions. Rosler saleability—of objects—is a bit of merely small change for a shirt, a vinyl record, etc. What I would argue is occurring in Rosler’s performance piece is a dematerialization; consequently, coexisting with an artwork whose materialization is essential to its existence and the issue of commodity fetishism in her work, i.e. the exchange of goods for cash that occurs in any garage sale.

The Freedom Center?

Drawing Center Pulls Out Of "Freedom" Center "The small but established downtown museum was to have shared a spangled new building near the memorial with the International Freedom Center, a still-unborn institution that is trying to coalesce out of murky good intentions. Pressured by families of the 9/11 victims, Gov. George Pataki and a coterie of cringing officials at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. tried to force both institutions to declare that their exhibits would not be used as a platform for anti-American views." The Freedom Center agreed, and the Drawing Center said no thanks. Newsday 08/12/05 Summary copied from ArtsJournal.com Click here for the Drawing Center's website

Field for the British Isles

Anthony Gormley, Field for the British Isles (at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2005)

Dissertation progress update

Sorry there hasn't been many posts lately. At the present moment I'm just revising more of my draft, into a final draft--which will be posted in probably a week's time. I'm also thinking of sending an email off to the ICA, and to ask them some questions about the London Garage Sale exhibit they held back in June/July (the reason why I choose to write about Martha Rosler in the first place). Sidenote: I highly recommend anyone to head on over to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to the Longside Gallery there for the Anthony Gormley installation, his "Field for the British Isles." I saw it two years ago when it was at the British Museum. It's one of those artworks that shocks you visually; not in the negative sense of the word, but more sublime. YSP is located right next to the Bretton Hall campus of Leeds University.

Dear Marta reply

Martha Rosler emailed me back the interview. I'm quite happy with how it turned out! However, I will not post the interview until I post the final dissertation on 1 September 2005 on this blog (but only with Rosler's permission and approval of any editing).

Vladimir Tatlin

Vladimir Tatlin, Tatlin's Tower, Model for the 3rd International Tower, never built (1919-1920)

Henry VIII's Wives

Tatlin's Tower and The World (2005) "Two posters designed for artists' group Henry VIII's Wives. They were included in their work for the 'Populism' show, on display at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Vilnius, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo and Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main ... Henry VII's Wives are rebuilding Vladimir Tatlin's 400 meter tall Monument to the Third International, in pieces and until the whole tower exists, spread around the world." The gallery that represents the international artist group Henry VIII's Wives is Galerie Iris Kadel in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Dear Martha

Here is the list of interview questions I emailed Martha Rosler, for my dissertation. I contacted her the other week at Rutgers University and she agreed to an interview.

1. Since you were still in your MA program at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD) during the staging of the Monumental Garage Sale in 1973 (is this correct?), what was its reception academically at the UCSD, among the professors and that university art environment?
2. Did you intend the Garage Sale to always be presented in a gallery setting, would a suburban yard or garage be just as affective? Interestingly, however, in many of your interviews and writings you state how for a while your artistic practice operated in opposition to the containers for the mainstream art world. (I’m referring here to your 1996 statement, republished in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology.)
3. How did you come up with the concept of the Monumental Garage Sale? At the time, how did your artistic practice and your thought process develop leading up to it?
4. When you were an MA student at the UCSD, whom were you reading? Had you begun reading Henri Lefebvre at that point? (You cited that Lefebvre was an influence of yours, in the 1999 interview with Benjamin Buchloh for your book Positions in the Life World.)
5. Since the Garage Sale has been restaged over the past 30 years now, how have you noticed the work’s reception alter since the first show in 1973?
6. At the time of the 1973 Monumental Garage Sale, were you familiar with Arman’s Le Plein (Full Up, 1960) or Jannis Kounellis’s Dodici Cavalli Livi (Twelve Horses, 1969)? Or, what did you think of those gestures in relation to yours afterwards? In general, what were you artistic influences when you were a postgrad student?
7. Have your garage sales been held outside gallery spaces since the inaugural 1973 version? According to my research, it has been held at the following locations: UCSD, Lamelle Gallery (San Francisco), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), New Museum (NYC), Generali Foundation (Vienna), and most recently the ICA (London). Is this correct?

Some short technical questions:

1. When did you return to NYC after your studies at UCSD?
2. Was the 1977 Traveling Garage Sale at Lamelle, in the “garage” of the gallery or the gallery itself? (I’m referring here to the text for Traveling Garage Sale in your Positions in the Life World.)

More Martha Rosler links

E-Flux : Martha Rosler: London Garage Sale New Museum: Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World

One blog created 'every second'

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati. BBC News: 2005/08/02 10:06:02 GMT In its latest State of the Blogosphere report, it said the number of blogs it was tracking now stood at more than 14.2m blogs, up from 7.8m in March. It suggests, on average, the number of blogs is doubling every five months. Blogs, the homepages of the 21st Century, are free and easy to set up and use. They are popular with people who want to share thoughts online. They allow for the instant publication of ideas and for interactive conversations, through comments, with friends or strangers ...

Museum as heterotopia

"This is in many ways the essence of the Heterotopia outlined by Foucault in his work ‘Of other spaces’ (1967). If a Utopia is a non-place, outside of the bounds of real-time and real-place, that cannot be pointed out on a map (Heaven, Shagri-La, Valhalla, The happy hunting grounds, Hell, Elysian fields) Then a heterotopia is a real-time, real-space human construction, that can pointed out on a map but that is in someway outside of human tangibility and perceptions of time, space, geography. Foucault himself gives the key example of a Heterotopia as the Museum. Foucault describes the modern museum as “the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes… a place of all times that is itself outside of time.” (Foucault, 1967) The museum seeks to dissolve notions of time and geography by creating a non-place (or at the very least a metaphysical space that is beyond place) A space where experiences may be had in the present and in-situ of a real-location manifesting the experience, but where those experiences are not ‘of that time’ and often geographically misplaced. " NOTE: This quote was found through Yahoo! search engine on another blog, archived on the University of New South Wales server. Author unknown, refer to link below.

Excerpt from Lefebvre's obituary

"The events of May 1968 in France and the upheavals throughout Europe and North America seemed to Lefebvre to vindicate all that he had been arguing. The Stalinists and structuralists seemed to him unable to understand, sympathize with, or even communicate with the insurgent students, whereas Lefebvre saw the students as the victims of social and intellectual alienation, and as the agents of his long term programme of social liberation leading to the creation of the Total Man. As a professor at Nanterre, where the student movement was sparked off, he had a grandstand view of the early days of the May events: Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of his students. His study of the causes and origins of the events (translated in English as The Explosion) remains one of the most influential. Both the innovative political methods and slogans such as 'imagination has taken power' echoed Lefebvre's own concerns. They also echoed the imaginative anarchism of the situationists, grouped round Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, who had long appealed to Lefebvre. His work was one of their theoretical sources, though his relations with them were often turbulent. In many respects, the 1970s were the Golden Age of French Marxism. Lefebvre's many works reached a much wider audience during this period, and began to be translated into English as well as other languages (especially in Eastern Europe). He and those with whom he had worked during the late fifties and sixties (Morin, Chatelet, Axelos, Goldmann, Castoriadis, Fougeyrollas and others) became the senior figures of the non-communist Marxist revival. Reprints of Lefebvre's shorter accounts were snapped up, though his own energies were turned principally towards a series of innovative studies in urban sociology, in which he argued that the organisation of the urban time and space to fit the lived experience of its citizens and residents could become the focus for a renewal of direct democratic relationships in modern society." Source: "Henri Lefebvre, 1901-1991" in Radical Philosophy (Spring 1991).

John Roberts

John Roberts articles from Radical Philosophy: Philosophizing the Everyday: The philosophy of praxis and the fate of cultural studies (November/December 1999) Art, Politics and Provincialism (March/April 2001) On Autonomy and the Avant-Garde (September/October 2000) John Roberts is a Senior Research Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Wolverhampton. His most recent book is The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (Manchester University Press, 1997).