Sluice magazine 2016 / Exchange Rates Bushwick

Autumn 2016

UK £7 EU €8 US $9

Sluice

DEEP WATER WEB

Steven Ball and John Conomos

10 September - 16 October 2016 Saturday and Sunday, 11am - 5pm Private View: Friday 09 September, 6-8pm Furtherfield Gallery, McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park, London N4 http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/deep-water-web http://furtherfield.org | @furtherfield | info@furtherfield.org

Artist-Run Europe Practice / Projects / Spaces

Publication launch—Summer 2016 onomatopee.net | pallasprojects.org | artist-run.eu

Exchange Rates Sluice_magazine is proud to partner with the second biennial international collaborative exposition of galleries and projects in and around Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC. The Exchange Rates expo was first staged in 2014 as a result of discussions between Paul D’Agostino of Centotto and Stephanie Theodore of Theodore:Art (both Bushwick-based galleries) and Sluice_ a London artist/curator-led multi-platform initiative. As the expo was born out of exchange and is defined by exchange we thought it apt to preface ER2016 with an exchange from the expanded team responsible for developing it.

Paul

D’Agostino: What’s the what? The where? The for whom?

The when?

Karl England: When disparate, diverse galleries and projects act collectively in a temporary coalition to create something bigger than the sum of their individual parts. Where a shared DIY ethic acts out on a global stage. The Exchange Rates expo confronts the questions of how does the art world work for us and what do we want from the art world?

Sluice_talks Manick Govinda p. 13 Kasper Pincis p. 31 Dallas Seitz p. 41 Laura Davidson p. 51 Nick Scammell p. 79 >>

ER2016 gallery profiles p. 66 >>

Tash

Kahn: To eschew the pretentious in favour of the genuine. I want to be able to create networks and develop connections through discourse.

It’s about feeding each other with new ideas and collaborating. Little tentacles spreading outwards so as to establish new environments in which to experiment with new ideas.

K:

The workplace, especially for artists, is one of post-Fordist precariousness: a stitched together existence of self-employment; multiemployment; decentralised working environments, zero-hour contracts, non-unionised labour etc. The artist/curator-run art world is defined by its preoccupation with exploring ways in which art in a post-romanticised world can function and find agency.

T: And it needs to be. Artists have

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to think that way because they are the foot soldiers of culture. All the really exciting stuff starts at that grassroots level and learning how to survive is integral. Lack of funding forces artists and DIY spaces to think left-of-centre just to keep going. And the work is often more exciting as a result.

Are You a Failure?

Alistair Gentry p. 80 >>

The Self-Precarisation of the Subject Sarah Charalambides p. 10 >>

E

The International Bushwick Exposition

R e g n a h a c t x e s E

Notes on Assemblage John Ros & Tash Kahn Charlie Levine p. 42 >>

P: Was art ever Fordist? If not, how can it be post-Fordist? If it was Fordist

Rosanna van Mierlo: Money is not the driver: it’s always the challenge of trying to make something happen, whether through making a magazine, staging an expo, a fair or whatever. I enjoy the exchange of ideas, the banter. We all know that the art world is saturated, but this also provides a challenge: to create a conceptual format that pushes the boundaries and becomes more than just words on paper or just another expo or fair, but rather a manifestation of collaboration.

at some point, might it now be even more so? Hyper-Fordist? Was Ford merely an artist overseeing so many studio assistants? It seems that art is always and ineluctably the cumulative whole of all things it has always been, which is both axiomatic and a possible reason for us to never consider art to be post-anything. Perhaps art exists to consistently posit the pre- of everything. Avant-gardists would surely agree, though they might prefer to be called avant-gardians, which nonetheless sounds much less progressive.

Also slightly martial. Was Ford avant-garde?

R: It is a little like a virus, spreading and affecting its surroundings by merely being there, transported through touch and being open to be changed, whether you like it or not.

K: Many artist/curator-run and emerging galleries focus on the local, either as part of a socially activist remit or simply due to a lack of funds.

The limited financial resources of many grassroots projects often precludes them from entering the national and international playing field. Exchange Rates encourages us to consider what other resources we have and deploys them to maximum effect. Collectively we can leverage ambitious projects to make an impact. Collective DIY – do it yourself together, or as Furtherfield formulated it: ‘DIWO’ (‘Do It With Others’).

Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett Furtherfield Karl England p. 14 >>

P:

The Collective DIY, that’s interesting. DIY approaches to certain activities destined for an audience make them also DIYFO (Do It Yourself For Others), so Exchange Rates is a kind of DIYFOWO. You know, writ large.

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Exchange Rates K: The words ‘globalisation’ and ‘commodity’ are seen through a financial prism as dictated by capitalism. On the ‘left’ the idea that globalisation is anti-community seems to almost be taken as a statement of fact. But globalisation is not capitalism, capitalism uses globalisation for its own ends, likewise commodities, it’s in the interest of for-profit business for everything to be valued via the market. This expo questions these value systems, and posits alternative priorities, those of cultural capital, social capital, experiential and intellectual capital. Exchange Rates asks what is being exchanged? What do we value? It presents the local on a global stage because only by exposing yourself against the world stage can the local be defined. Much of the rhetoric emanating from the Republican Presidential campaign in the US and via the newly #brexited UK is highly isolationist, but there’s a whole world out there and it’s more important now than ever that we engage with it.

Collaboration and its Discontents Karl England p. 62 >> Supplement Phillip Newcombe p. 19

>>

K: As a platform the Exchange Rates expo aims to nonthematically allow the space for individual artists and galleries to breathe. How is art perceived by different people in different contexts?

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Ben Street: And how do these contexts come into play - not just as new frames for the work, but as generators of meaning in and of themselves? Maybe the exchange is the work.

P:

Exchange Rates does indeed help us to place greater value on the various non-capital ‘capitals’ you suggest – and all together and all at once, and all under the aegis of art. Yet what we’re also doing is producing very specific things that do not exist in the absence of working collaboratively: exchanges.

This is not a throwaway thought.

Only once things have been exchanged does the thing called the exchange come into existence.

It is a noun that depends upon collaborative, i.e. co-working agents to engage in its verbal act for it to come into describable being.

The International Bushwick Exposition

Duck Amuck Ben Street

p. 18

>>

K:

All the stakeholders have their own agenda, which is why Exchange Rates is an unstable coalition, brought together for a fleeting moment, ready to fall apart in an instant. This is not an indictment but a srength. Exchange Rates is a critique of the calcifying risk averseness of the institution.

The creative conservatism of the commercial space. The ambition limiting control of state funding.

ER2016 is confrontational and challenges the various positions held by all of its participating galleries as well as the positions it finds itself adopting.

P: Also, how do common themes arise out of disparate activities? Or how do common activities suggest operable themes out of disparate interests? If painting-centric galleries, for instance, come together in Exchange Rates, where do they find common thematic ground? If concept-driven projects work together for ER, what then become their media of mediation? It was so pleasing to see how these things played out in the first expo in 2014, and it has been interesting to follow certain projects that have continued to explore these questions together since being introduced to one another through paticipating in the previous expo. The real virtue of ER is that it both creates new partners for exchanges that might then continue to bear fruit on their own, and serves as an impetus and broader platform for exchanges that might’ve happened anyway.

Miniscule Bites Rosanna van Mierlo p. 36 >>

P: Agendas can also be so rigid as to hold a stake in the heart of creativity,

and creativity can be vampiric by sucking the lifeblood from those who possess it, and by being passed along to those who are bitten by it. Creativity is also in some way immortal. Daylight? Garlic? Crucifixes? Not sure.

How might this pertain to zombie formalism? Also, I used to know a very pretty girl with real fangs. There exist clutches of people who have fangs implanted and live according to the ways of vampires. Is that creative? Is it DIY? I have a friend from Transylvania who works all night and sleeps most of the day. Truths from lore, sure, but what I’m getting at is this: liber librum aperit. That, for me, is Exchange Rates in a nutshell.

B: And finally, how is all this expressed and mediated. And how does the means of delivery affect the public’s experience of the art?

How do the structures we create to deliver and present the art affect its perception? What role does networked media have to play in disemination and articulation?

Smartify

p. 7

>>

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Cover image Brett Brubaker Acknowledgements Guy Nicholson Sarah England Daniel Devlin Lindsay Friend Katja Chernova Alex Meurice Nikisha McIntosh Cathy Lomax

Submissions Tell us what you want to write about, and if you haven’t worked with Sluice_ before please include an example of previous writing, together with a short bio to editor@sluice.info

Publisher Creative Director Editor Features Editor Photo Editor Contributing Editor Design Production

Sluice_ Karl England Tash Kahn Rosanna van Mierlo Charlie Levine Ben Street Karl England Imago Sluice NYC.indd 1

01/07/2016 12:52

Exchange Rates

Welcome to the future of art – where the word digital is redundant.

‘The word digital means everything and nothing, focusing on it is the biggest distraction of a generation’ wrote Tom Goodwin in the Guardian in December 2014.

He suggested that, like electricity in the 19th century, soon the Internet would be so pervasive that it would become ‘an ambient assistive layer that provides data for everything’.

I read this article in Buenos Aires’ airport, waiting for my flight back to London after running education programmes at Argentina’s National Gallery of Fine Arts for nearly two years. I’d been worrying, perhaps rather arrogantly, that without me there, guiding Texan tourists or Argentine school kids, there would be no one to share the stories of the artworks. Yes, they had labels in Spanish, but I wouldn’t be there to draw out conversations – to make the art relevant and meaningful.

Reading Goodwin’s article blew my mind. I imagined a ‘digital me’ giving tours and started a blog listing my gallery Top 10s. But, as with so many blogging dreams, merely putting content online does not guarantee followers, so I left it there.

and 100 emojis translate into visiting a physical gallery? Or conversely, how often do I look at a physical artwork and think: ‘Let me search that exhibition hashtag in case someone I know has thoughts to share?’ I never do that.

Goodwin’s idea stuck in my head – integrated digital experiences. So when I met SMARTIFY co-founders Thanos, Nick and Ron – techy art lovers building the fastest art image-recognition technology, I had to join them. Music lovers have Spotify – they can discover, share, build playlists – art lovers need the same.

SMARTIFY is more than the digital version of the wall label, audio guide or gallery print out. We’re a Londonbased social enterprise founded on the belief that the primary value of art is making meaning. For Exchange Rates we’ve built an app that uses high-speed image recognition to scan artworks on display and instantly deliver engaging commentary … we’ve even added a map!

Anna Lowe Partner Development Manager, SMARTIFY

download the app from smartify.org.uk or at these app stores:

Fast forward to 2016, when half the world’s population can be found online and annual data transfer rates reach one zettabyte. Like many art lovers I use Instagram to follow ‘gallerinas’ and curators, like Sluice_’s Charlie Levine, to find out what artworks she’s looking at. I’m consuming, sharing and responding to art in a personal way, online. But how many of those double-tap-likes

Scan any gallery logo and selected artworks in this magazine, at the expo or anywhere online

Uncover the stories behind the galleries and artworks during the expo itself.

Follow the maps, view the videos, discover the ideas that connect the expo’s participants

HERZOG DELLAFIORE LOST IN THE FOG OF NEO-FORMALISM AN EXHIBITION OF

RECENT PAINTINGS

OCTOBER 5 — 29, 2016 These new works are a continuation of his paradoxical practice [...] at once enraging in their obfuscatory haze of technical indifference and weirdly satisfying in their absolute polarizing nonsense.

Peter Hopkins — Artist and Gallerist

279 Meserole Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206 / L Train to Montrose Ave opening hours: 12PM - 6PM / info@sracka-pohlmann.com

Gallerie 531

X-Position

Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury Isadora Amézaga Crorkan Liberty Antonio Sadler Neus Toras Tamarit Karen Piddington Emmely Elgersma Alex Simopoulos Emilia Maryniak Samantha Harvey David Zamorano Olivia Strange Demeter Dykes Denise Ackerl Kofo Williams Symeon Banos Marta Wlusek Sally Gordon Caro Streck John Flindt Candice Yap Peter Evans Adam Walker Chel Logan Ana Pastor Sarah Hill Yuwen Hung Nazanin Mo

12/5 Susak Expo 2016 Curated By Natalie Anastasiou,Chel Logan & Kagweni Micheni

R e g n a a h c t e x s E The Bushwick International Exposition Partners & Sponsors

bfpcreative

The Self-Precarisation

of the Subject

Sarah Charalambides

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The restructuring of production that accompanied the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism was followed by radical economical, political, social, cultural and ideological changes. This transformation included the rise of individualist modes of thought and behaviour and a growing culture of entrepreneurialism. As a result of the promotion of the self-optimisation of the individual, creative and cultural production have become increasingly unstable, insecure and flexible. For many cultural producers and creative workers everyday life is marked by structural discontinuity and permanent fragility. It is difficult for them to distinguish between the labour market, self-improvement and social life.

As such, the new living and working conditions under neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism have resulted in increased precarisation. This is basically the starting point of my research, investigating feminist art practices and methodologies that in turn, interrogate processes of becoming precarious.

Precarisation can be seen as a form of domination, which is not necessarily based upon the direct exercise of violence but rather in the active production of submission. There are two components that I am particularly interested in: self-precarisation and the feminisation of labour. These components function as two lenses through which I can address certain issues and problematics in the precarity debate.

The feminisation of labour refers to a general tendency in the current logic of capitalist production. It is related for example to the effect of ‘female subjectivity’ in the process of change in work. This includes the exploitation of women’s ‘natural’ qualities such as endurance, patience, submissiveness and unconditional commitment. Notably, the feminisation of labour goes beyond the precarity of just women or people who identify as women. It describes the changing nature of employment where precarious conditions – having to involve your whole personality and identity in your work – have become widespread for everyone.

Self-precarisation refers to the voluntary acceptance of precarity. The term that was coined by political theorist Isabell Lorey, who stresses that there is a certain ambivalence to precarisation. She states that in a governmental perspective, precarisation can be considered not only in its repressive forms, but also in its ambivalently productive moments, as these emerge by way of techniques of self-government. I agree with Lorey that we cannot speak only of an overpowering and totalising ‘economising of life’ coming from the outside.

Many creative workers and cultural producers have entered into a precarious situation of their own accord.

They have chosen their own living and working situations and arrange these relatively freely and autonomously.

They also consciously chose the uncertainties and the lack of continuities under these conditions. I myself also chose this kind of life after I graduated from art school and started working as a graphic designer. I’ve been working freelance and been self-employed for eight years now, and I’m enjoying it. But three years ago I started to draw attention to the social context in which I have to position myself as I am being increasingly conventionalised into role models of economic privatisation.

In the current context of austerity, unstable, insecure and flexible working conditions are no longer perceived as a phenomenon of exception, but are instead in the midst of a process of normalisation. More and more people are being forced to become self-employed and govern their own working lives. According to Lorey, this normalisation of precarisation has a certain potential as well. It comes with a new and disobedient form of precarious subjectivities, specifically self-governing precarious subjectivities. However, when it comes to the actual implications that self-precarisation has for cultural producers and creative workers, what can this notion

offer in terms of hands-on methodologies that could help in dealing with these situations or politicise them or even change them? How can modes of subjectivation that are so ambivalently positioned between self-determination and obedience be conceived as activism? This is the question that I’m asking myself.

Most of the case studies that I look at in my research are self-organised feminist collectives that take the subjective and personal experience of precarity as a starting point for their art practices. These groups take interest in process-based, collaborative, non-hierarchical and transdisciplinary ways of working. And they do this through procedures of articulation between theory and praxis, research and action. Often, they use the mechanisms of the interview to talk between themselves and others about precarious living and working conditions. Communication – exchanging experiences, reflecting together – is crucial for these collectives, not only as a tool for diffusion but also as primary material for politicisation. Interestingly most of my case studies are activist projects rather than artworks. The collectives I look at are interested in using their work as tools for people to focus on the self-awareness that they have about their own oppression, rather than presenting their work within an art context. I guess they want to avoid any kind of aesthetisation of precarisation.

One of the groups that I look at is a Berlin based collective called Kleines Postfordistisches Drama (Small post-Fordist Drama). Lorey was also part of this group.

Other members include filmmaker, artist and researcher Brigitta Kuster; artist, curator, teacher and researcher Marion von Osten; and artist and researcher Katja Reichard, who is also running the thematic bookshop Pro qm in Berlin.

KpD’s video Kamera Läuft! (Camera Rolling!) from 2004 looks at how in the new conditions of governance, cultural producers seem to willingly subordinate themselves to the dispositions of power, by aligning to the neoliberal model of labour through the adoption of entrepreneurial selfpractices. For this project KpD interviewed 15 cultural producers living in and around Berlin to learn about the everyday lives, desires and perspectives of those whose workday is extremely flexible and largely autonomous.

The interviews were transcribed and transformed into a script. Nine professional actors were hired to play out the problematic small ‘work/life’ dramas occurring for flexible workers in creative and cultural contexts. Throughout the video we see the characters waiting, rehearsing, preparing and performing auditions before a casting panel in a fictional production setting. In Kamera Läuft! there is a double layer at work – it’s about being watched and being self-aware. KpD chose this framework for their video project during a time when reality television casting shows like Idols became popular. These shows are about demonstrating virtuosity and can be seen as the ultimate

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example of the neoliberal economising of subjectivity, in which issues of performativity and self-promotion are taken to extremes. It sheds light on structures within contemporary society’s competitive character that rely heavily on a theatrical exhibition of your individuality.

In Kamera Läuft! we see the characters constantly moving and oscillating between positive and negative aspects of self-precarisation. I personally feel there is always this danger that self-precarisation becomes a loop that you are stuck in. When you think you have gained freedom and autonomy there is again this moment where you are exploited by capitalist relations. Indeed, capitalism wants you to be this entrepreneurial, competitive subject and wants you to take charge of your own chores as much as possible. But somehow I believe that this constant looping of selling your soul to the devil while simultaneously taking charge and gaining agency has a kind of potential.

I don’t know yet know how, but perhaps self-precarisation could become a kind of methodology. This is why Lorey’s understanding of self-precarisation can be helpful for me, as she refuses to believe that precarisation only has destructive consequences for those who think they have successfully appropriated precarious working and living conditions in a counter-hegemonic way. For my research I also investigate different social and political movements which address the exploitation of free labour in the creative sector and the art world, e.g. the transnational EuroMayDay mobilisations and the Precarious Workers Brigade from London. A lot of people think these were just temporary movements, that they were not able to sustain themselves and disappeared rather quickly. Sure, these kind of initiatives come and go but the knowledge they produced still circulates. People are using it, adding to it, transforming it. The material is being picked up in different ways and as such I don’t think movements like these necessarily failed. It is more like an organic process that is exposed to improvisation and open to encounters, a process in which traditional understandings of failure and success do not fit in anymore.

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Currently I’m working on a critique of Maria Eichhorn’s recent exhibition 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours at Chisenhale Gallery in London. This show aimed to alter the typical operation of labour in the art world. Following a site visit to Chisenhale in July 2015, Eichorn organised a discussion with the Chisenhale staff in order to explore their working lives. Then, at Eichorn’s request the gallery staff withdrew their labour for the duration of the exhibition. None of Chisenhale’s employees worked during this period and the gallery and office were closed, implementing leisure and ‘free time’ in the place of work. At the heart of the project was a belief in the importance of questioning work – of asking why, within our current political context, work is synonymous with production, and if, in fact, work can also consist of doing nothing. Many people wondered to what extent this withdrawal from work and suspension of activities could alter the precarious position of Chisenhale

and its staff within neoliberal post-Fordist capitalism.

At first hand, the action of instigating inaction does not seem to be the most effective way to raise the subject of precarisation of contemporary labour conditions. The exhibition did not really intervene in the actual power relations that are in place in a gallery system. Instead of producing a kind of transformation Eichorn’s commission remained a symbolic gesture, a temporary pause in the ongoing exploitation of cultural capital.

I’m not sure if this is necessarily the biggest problem of this project though. What is much more problematic is the fact that Eichorn did not reflect on her role as commissioned artist and the place of Chisenhale within capitalism, as an interface whose function consists in organising the global flows of artists, artworks and capital. While Chisenhale is the site of critical discussions of neoliberal post-Fordist transformation processes, the gallery is also an important player in the game of cognitive capitalism and increasing precarisation tendencies. So why did Eichorn only focus on the regular, contracted, and permanently employed staff members of Chisenhale Gallery? What about the volunteers that help with events, the freelance technician that sets up exhibitions, the art student that does a six-month curatorial placement?

Even though this project makes a radical demand from the gallery – to entirely close for five full weeks whilst continuing to pay its employees – it neglects to consider the implications for staff on zero-hours contracts or those without contracts at all. Presumably, these workers have more intimate relationship with notions of precarious labour, internalised debt and imposed value systems that Eichorn’s project seeked to question. The artist could have been more aware of the different consequences of her request for different members of staff. If you want to address precarisation in the art world, you should take into consideration different dimensions of insecurity and exploitation. You cannot challenge existing structures of labour whilst ignoring your own complicity within the very oppressive structures that you seek to subvert.

Sarah Charalambides is a PhD candidate in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Departing from an inquiry into the current de-politicised state of unstable, insecure and flexible working and living conditions, her research investigates feminist art practices and methodologies that interrogate precarity in neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism.

Sluice_talks

Glittering Images Manick Govinda

Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars Camille Paglia Pub. 2013 by Vintage

I want to present George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith in context with Camelia Paglia’s book Glittering Images, as a journey through art from Egypt to Star Wars. Paglia describes herself as a dissident feminist and is incredibly critical of contemporary feminism as well as brilliantly critical of how academia, the arts, humanities and art schools are becoming dominated by heavily theorised, post-structuralist Marxism and feminist queer theory.

According to Paglia, this limits the appreciation of art. Paglia is a motor mouth and a loudmouth, she is opinionated and she writes that way too: Glittering Images is a dizzy, giddy voyage through the history of art as told by a selection of twenty nine images.

What Paglia is really good at is saying: Ignore the theory.

Ignore the highfalutin, obtuse academia and just look at the work. About Revenge of the Sith she controversially said that it’s probably one of the greatest works of the 21st century. Normally we look to literature and the fine arts to judge ‘great’ art, but Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media marks the end of that era: the supreme artists of the half century following Jackson Pollock were not painters but innovators that embraced technology. She says that the decades that bridge the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century is seeing the fine arts and visual arts shrinking to insignificance and that the only cultural figure who has had the pioneering boldness and world impact that we associate with the early masters of Avant-Garde Modernism is Lucas.

I think that is a very bold and controversial statement to make, but when I think about what my daily appreciation of culture and arts consists of it is very much box sets, Netflix, devouring mass media, and then I occasionally go to art exhibitions, as part of my job, and I write about art and I have opinions.

@manick62 Head of Artists Advisory Services & an Artists’ Producer at @artsadm. Campaigner at @manifestoclub This text is an edited transcript from a recent Sluice_talks event called ‘10 minutes on...’ during which speakers were invited to talk about one thing that has informed their practice. The full recorded talks are online: sluice.info/talks

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RUTH CATLOW

MARC GARRETT Karl England talks to the artists and founders of Furtherfield

Furtherfield is an artist-run gallery, commons and online network that has been a leading force in the field of technology, social change and art since 1996. With Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett at the helm, today Furtherfield’s physical hub is in Finsbury Park, north London in the form of two spaces – a gallery and a commons/ lab. Sluice_ caught up with Ruth and Marc to discuss how networks affect behaviours and how behaviours shape networks 15

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Both Sluice_ and Furtherfield share an interest in the network as an informal decentralised infrastructure and how it can be utilised to promote a DIY art culture. Last year you staged an exhibition called ‘The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies’ which dealt with this area and how technologies including the Blockchain could impact creativity.

Ruth So Blockchain is like the new protocol for the Internet. You had the web, then you had ubiquitous computing, then mobile phones, then an emergent shift into the Internet of things, supposedly making our fridges and digitally networked consumer goods smarter. The Blockchain is enabling the marketisation, the monetisation of everything through these various networks, and because the network as a whole is now entwined into our physical lives it’s a doubleheaded creature. On the one hand you have a lot of people who came from a kind of libertarian and capitalist tradition who are super excited because it gives them a way to route around the state and big banks, to do international trading and exchange without the state involved, without taxes, without regulation and those kind of things.

There’s a lot of democracy-led hype around it all and they’re playing on that to suck us all in, which is very interesting.On the other side, it’s also frightening, because it’s promising to automate out all of the difficult social interactions. So all the things we find tough, messy and boring, all that stuff that produces a lot of friction is seen to be suddenly necessary to edit out of our lives.

There’s a fantasy that by automating everything it will allow us to be able to live lives of leisure, but really when has technology ever done that for

us? Regarding how it affects art culture, critics of these corporate companies say that it’s essentially just adding art-market values and its systems onto the Blockchain.

Rather than examining what this is catalysing in the world, or what it does to society, or what it does to our social relations. It’s just reproducing the same mechanisms again.

We work with a company called ascribe for the Sluice_screens copycopy prize. They ascribe copyright information to online artworks via the Blockchain.

They recently partnered with Creative Commons – the copyleft platform. The whole copyright vs copyleft issue (whereby software or artistic work may be used, modified and distributed freely on condition that anything derived from it is bound by the same conditions) is an important one for artists as producers of culture, but also for how society will access culture in the future.

Some would say utilising the Blockchain in this way actually enables an increasing fencing in of the Internet for corporate gain, that peer-to-peer networks and the decentralised web is crucial to a free Internet and that the Blockchain deployed as an identification tool is a harbinger of a more controlled Internet.

How do you feel about these developments?

Marc My concern is more to do with who actually ends up gaining control of these tools and whether they work to serve the privileged over less-supported artists and art organisations. When we did the ‘Cryptoeconomies’ exhibition it presented artworks that revealed how we might produce, exchange

and value things differently in the age of the Blockchain. Even though it was shown under the longer-term project called ART/DATA/MONEY, art markets were just a small part of the richness of what was presented. From our perspective, it’s about taking away power from those who rule our lives, and then redistributing that power to others. The point is: if your values are existing within power systems based on hierarchies then that is the way you’re going to act – because you’re in that vehicle that acts like a hierarchy, rather than stepping out of it and evaluating that relationship.

Advocates of their position would assert that the Blockchain simply enables retention of ownership, so the artist can then either sell or give the work away. I think they would say as a tool it’s neutral, the users are the ones that weaponise it.

R What appeals to us are at grassroots level: communities, networks and decentralised groups and systems that allow us to find our own artistic voices on our terms, individually or collectively. We’re faced with mechanisms that exploit our data, redistribute it to other unknown parties, and we’re not in control of it. There has been a belief that new technologies are solutions, which is an illusion. This mythology has been so strong because so many tech-dominated groups have claimed the word ‘innovation’ is only about hi-tech. This is not true, ‘innovation’ is something a lot deeper, and is certainly not just about technology and markets.

Despite this hierarchical aversion, as a tool, social media does provide a genuine peer-topeer means of communication

though doesn’t it? Sluice_ was born via connections made through Twitter, because suddenly connections were non-hierarchical, they’re much more meritocratic in that if you’re interesting you can make connections regardless of location or status.

M We use social networks all of the time. However, it can distract us from investing knowledge and time back into our own communities. If this happens, before we know it – our existence is then owned, and or controlled, by a private company.

Led by Instagram social media is becoming ever more enclosed.

Propriatorial walls are being raised via the app-lification of the web. Who refers to ‘surfing the web’ these days? As a DIY initiative I feel it’s important to create and control our various platforms, online and off. But a lot of artists I meet will say: Why bother? People don’t make their own websites these days. Why develop a bespoke site when you can livestream your exhibition?

Make the corporate platforms work for you!

Expediancy is your friend.

M We come from a culture where collaboratively building things with others is part of a progressive experience, and it helps you connect with others beyond the interface. That’s why we have always said we are engaged in art, technology and social change.

R The platform is made by the people who use it. Back in 2006 we did a project called DIWO which was a mail-art project, and it explored exactly these issues: the relationship between mail-art – which was all about breaking down the gate-

keeping into the gallery system, that was its main function – but also with focus on the transmission and reception of the art and that it happened between people rather than being lodged in an object. So when we did the ‘Do It With Others’ exhibition, which was moving things on from the DIY punk thing, it was about moving that into the network-led space. It was a remix, reappropriation, about art happening between people in the social space.

Furtherfield has a physical gallery space, do you maintain that because in some ways the institution of the gallery validates the work?

M There are over a hundred languages spoken within a mile of here and they all come to the space. When we had a drones exhibition a few years ago we had workshops which were about mapping where components of drones come from so people could know what collaborations are formed around drone technology, because certain parts of actual combat drones are illegal in certain countries – they’re classed as a weapon – but if you take a part of it and all the parts are built in different countries, you can then assemble it and sell it legally. so you’ve got Iran making one component, America, Germany, England: they’re all collaborating in building drones that are killing people in Afghanistan.

R This workshop was a really good example of the kind of events we like to do alongside our exhibitions because it gave people a sense of the kind of networked culture we’re living in, of how power is shifting and moving and how easy it is for people to take advantage – aided by highspeed networks.

M Because now people are going

through a stage of acceleration where they can’t comprehend the dominance of technology over their own lives. If you open that door to everyday people – let alone artists – the conversation is interesting, it’s beyond the art, but it’s part of the art. One of the biggest problems, culturally and politically, is that the conversation is too abstract, it is too remote, there’s no ownership: by being physical we can allow people to take ownership of the conversation, they return – there’s a legacy – and out of all that you build values. For instance, they might not like one show because it’s too techy, but they might like a permacultural 10-week workshop. We don’t work in absolutes, we’re a living assemblage where you’ve got people on various platforms, reviewing art and activism and technology, you’ve got a physical space here at Furtherfield Commons, which encompasses workshops, and you’ve got the gallery space which the art world recognises because they recognise the word gallery or the word art. But actually it’s an infiltration – we’re trying to expand what art is rather than close it down.

furtherfield.org An online community for all things Furtherfield, including netbehaviour and neterarti; communities for sharing and evolving critical approaches, methods, ideas and stuff for practices in art, technology and social change.

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Duck Amuck is an 8-minute long animated cartoon, produced by Warner Brothers and directed by Chuck Jones, and released in 1953. Erased de Kooning Drawing is a 65cm x 25cm work on paper, made by Willem de Kooning and unmade

by Robert Rauschenberg in 1953.

In Duck Amuck, the much-loved cartoon character Daffy Duck appears in a sequence of disconnected narrative settings, each one a cliché of the form (the barnyard, the snowy slopes, the castle, the desert island, and so on), from whose rapid transmogrification the cartoon’s manic comedy derives. In Erased de Kooning Drawing, a drawing made in Willem de Kooning’s densely expressive and much-loved style, depicting forms related to a notorious series of paintings of women, has been laboriously rubbed out with a sequence of erasers by another hand, that of the much younger artist Robert Rauschenberg.

In Duck Amuck, narrative cues – backdrops, props, costumes – prove perpetually unreliable, causing escalating consternation for the central (but not sole) protagonist. In Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg spent two months removing every last trace of de Kooning’s drawing, erasing with a mark similar to de Kooning’s jagged gesture – but in reverse. As Duck Amuck proceeds, Daffy Duck’s confusion turns apoplectic, as the unseen animator toys with the sound of the film: when he strums his guitar, the corresponding sound effect is that of a machine gun, then a car horn, then, as he smashes it to pieces on the floor, a braying donkey. To make Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg visited Willem de Kooning’s studio, presented the older artist with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and asked to have one of his drawings, explaining that he was planning to completely erase it. About halfway through Duck Amuck, after Daffy pleads for some scenery following a sequence with a blank white background, a pencil appears from out of the frame and draws in a wilfully clumsy, perspectivally inconsistent setting.

About halfway through Rauschenberg’s visit to the studio, de Kooning agreed to donate the drawing, albeit reluctantly, explaining his choice later by saying, “I wanted to give him something I’d miss”. In Duck Amuck, Daffy glowers at the monochrome cityscape and says, boiling with frustration, “Now how about some colour, stupid?” De Kooning’s original drawing, the basis of Erased de Kooning Drawing, was a dense mixture of graphite, coloured crayon, oil paint and charcoal. A paintbrush appears and slaps paint over Daffy’s body, which appears as a wild mixture of polka dots, block colours and stripes; furious, Daffy shouts, “Not me, you slop artist!” Erased de Kooning Drawing was completed

by Robert Rauschenberg’s then-partner, Jasper Johns, who suggested the title, inscribed the label, and helped mount and frame the work. Then the pencil reappears, eraser-end first, and rubs Daffy out completely, except for his beak and eyes. On the reverse of Erased de Kooning Drawing is an earlier drawing by Willem de Kooning, a means of proving the act authentic.

“Well, where’s the rest of me?” says Daffy, irritated. “You see how ridiculously you have to think, in order to make this work?” says Robert Rauschenberg. At the end of Duck Amuck, the animator is finally revealed: it’s Daffy’s old nemesis Bugs Bunny, who sits at a desk in an animation studio; he looks over his shoulder at the viewer, waggles his eyebrows, and says, benstreet.co.uk “Ain’t I a stinker?”

Erase Duck Ooning ‘Not me, you slop artist!’

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Ben Street

Sluice_talks

Species of Spaces Kasper Pincis

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces Georges Perec Pub. 1974 by Penguin

Perec was born in Paris in 1936 and died quite young – just 46 – in the month I was born, March 1982. For most of his working life he was an archivist, but as a writer he managed to write a whole novel without using the letter ‘e’. To use up all the leftover e’s he wrote a short text entitled ‘Les Revenentes’ where ‘e’ was the only vowel used. It was when I read this that I realised I was more interested in the form of things than real narratives. I cared more about the form of the work than the story being depicted. In the book he starts with the page, so he makes this a page about the page.

In 2006, I made a slideshow that had a slightly nonsense voiceover in Swedish. No-one was supposed to understand it, so if there happened to be any Swedes in the room it didn’t work as it was just supposed to be a comforting voice that made you feel like the work was about something.

I think I’ve got slight obsessive-compulsive tendencies. I never felt I really knew enough about something to make a worthy piece of art, but Perec’s book throws all that out: it encourages a sense of playfulness. I think the confidence in simple, little details that point towards larger truths is key to his writing.

In one chapter he points out that the distance from the earth to the moon would be the thickness of a cigarette paper, folded in two 49 times. That is representative of the way that he uses the small and everyday to point to larger, more profound ideas.

@kasperpincis Artist and museum art handler, with a fondness for typewriters and photocopiers… and ellipses…

The full recorded talks are online: sluice.info/talks

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Today began like most, but in all honesty, in fact not like any other, but I suppose this could be argued for all days. Right down to each singular moment on this specific day a slight, yet very palpable, difference within each moment was leaving me ill at ease. Collectively these moments seemed to be building towards something, not something ominous but rather turbulent water at the mouth of a small dam. To calm my growing angst, rather than default to my use of whiskey, I kept repeating the famous quote of Heraclitus: “You can’t step in the river twice.” I had heard it used in a movie and could not shake it from my mind.

As you may or may not know, water is one of the five elements in both Chinese philosophy and medicine; for the Chinese water represents contemplation, calmness, (re-) consideration, observation and reflection much the same as it did for W.H. Turner and his paintings, but not at all like Herman Melville’s novel about

that ferocious whale. A lot of the metaphors are significant but the most poignant is flying over time zones at mach .82 (700 knots) on a 747 airliner.

If oceans are traversable so are moments. “Today began unlike most”, where in fact this day, (today), was not actually this day at all … but one early last February that began on a cold, grey, wintery morning in Beijing and later rehabilitated in the heated climes of Vietnam. My wife Jean and I landed in Ho Chi Minh City, quickly catching a small commuter jet to the far-off island, Phu Qoc, lavishly surrounded by the Sea of Thailand. This bean-shaped island can be found about 40 km off the south-western corner of Vietnam and is approximately 48 km wide and 30 km long. It has a sordid and unfortunate history as a prison complex. It was built by the French in the 17th century and later run by the Americans and South Vietnamese.

Islands are the best place for prisons and have always been the natural choice when it comes to separating society from its most dangerous and infamous beings. One of the world’s most famous prison-islands was the penal colony on Devils Island off the coast of French Guiana.

California’s Alcatraz is a roadside motel in comparison. That speaks loudly of how cheap I can be. (Having stood in Al Capone’s jail cell, I can attest.)

Due to its proximity to Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot) laid claim to Phu Qoc

and after Saigon fell, continued to use it as a prison, as well as a strategic military location. In 1978 the Vietnamese proudly reclaimed it from this vile era – but on this day, Phu Qoc was and had been (for the last year and a half) on its way to opening itself up to the tourism trade or what I call ‘eco-terrorism’.

We (my wife and I) had decided weeks earlier that taking a break from teaching and making art was imperative. One might ask oneself – why on earth would anyone need to take a break from art? Those who think art-making mirrors the life of a hipster really have not been paying attention. If they explored the issue they might learn that artists have job descriptions that vary from artist to artist (much as any other description of employment). Like any other occupation artists, too, must make decisions on how they want to be deployed into the economy.

Sometimes the occupation itself becomes an artwork.

When our boots hit the ground (sneakers, tarmac) it took a few moments to shake Hollywood from my brain. Given the palm trees and old military planes in hangars, if I hadn’t already been aware, I might have thought that the Viet Cong was still in theatre. But of course moments cannot be copied and pasted. This island like so many, is lost between the folds of past, present and future.

That was penultimately my focus.

Departing the small airport we were brought by air-conditioned Ford to the modest but lovely Daisy Resort.

Straightaway (I have not used that expression since 2006) Nguyen, our concierge, inspected our appearance then instantly set us up with a cabin on the far edge of the grounds. He promised that (if we stood high up

on our toes) we overlooked the gulf.

Nguyen is the guy to be in with as he is the man-in-the-know. For example, if someone were to chat him up, on a good day he would tell you where to get the best motorcycle for a tour and where to find places where not one tourist footprint can be found.

According to him, Phu Qoc’s recent tourism was aimed at the Russians and Chinese, but I imagine that even the French and Americans were welcome at this point (even though the Vietnamese refer to the Vietnam War as the American War and there are French cafés from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh). Nguyen also told us that Daisy Resort had been recently opened, almost a year ago to the day, by villagers who were given the money by a guy who grew up there but now ran a business in Bangkok.

The next morning Nguyen eagerly set us up with a motorcycle and a simple tourist map. We were GPSless and once again my anxiety was palpable (only by Jean) as there are verifiable instances that demonstrate my unusual talent for getting lost; to be accurate we were on an island, on a Honda 4-stroke motorcycle with bottled petrol stops every 400 metres. Getting lost at this point was a challenge I could not back down from. The broken compass in my head spun wildly; in the past it has led me on untold adventures in many countries and situations. The simple roads of Phu Qoc quickly became a challenge even though Jean assured me that there were only a few roads on the island (she had read the map) and we had no way of getting lost.

Immediately I took it as a challenge.

I noted each and every other road branched off towards the ocean and eventually to fishing villages. We thought we might head north, but I

took the first of many lefts and other wrong turns and ended up facing south. Getting lost is an art form not to be messed with – flâneurs of 19thcentury Paris would concur.

In order to move my narrative forwards I must digress. In 2006 I was mulling about in London, not really knowing why I was there except for the fact that I was at university studying for an MA in art, which I secretly disguised as Curatorial Research. Why was it there? This school’s occupation was to act as gatekeeper for its posterity and to launder money; Francs, Euros, Dollars and Yuen. The bit I mentioned earlier, or thought I did, regarding a hiatus from art, also related to artists figuring out how they fit into social and financial economies. An unexpected pleasure was meeting those international colleagues who had been off, or were not from, the island of London. Not to slag off London, every island has its merits. One of these visitors was a well-travelled bloke and, without intending to, loomed above the rest.

Maybe not above us, but off to the side, an aesthetic voyeur; Herzog Dellafiore was then and is now, an elusive guy, sometimes wearing a grey trench coat. When we did meet, he would sit (sometimes right down on the ground where he stood) and make us Turkish coffee while recounting stories of a woman on an island, a gypsy woman who read the coffee grounds at the bottom of numerous cups of Turkish coffee. He told this story repeatedly.

Of course it and other tales made him quite popular, at the same time making him infamous with others on the MA track. For me, such lies made him worth hanging around and, to be frank, he was far more

interesting than any of the courses being offered at the university.

I realised Herzog’s process of art-making was, in fact, to use himself as both brush and canvas – he was all about him, but as Joseph Beuys, not Joesph Kosuth.

Not being from the Mediterranean, I soon began to like his stories more than his coffee. In one tale he had his coffee grounds read by the gypsy and he tried to learn how to do it himself. He said that the gypsy woman’s pinpoint accuracy was unattainable for him, as he believed she was foretelling an island in his future (one without our Daisy Resort).

Furthermore, she spoke of this place as having a magical history filled with tumult. It included strategic military positioning, expensive yachts and Hollywood stars. Even hockey, the ice sport.

Dellafiore was indeed at the top of his game. In a sanctimonious voice he would blather, “I will start an art exposition on this island and simultaneously reflect the state of the international art market contrasting it with desires of true artists, the ones that make art in and for itself”. I thought that the phantom gypsy had done something to his brew. No sooner did I feel my attitude shift towards him, than did he invite myself and a large handful of international artists to join him on a tiny island in the Adriatic, somewhere off the coast of Croatia. He said the island was so far out it required a catamaran to get to. Real or not that sounded a lot like Oz. Please allow me yet another temporal leap, a shift if you will, to Vietnam, to our hut on the edge of Daisy Resort and far from the Gulf

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of Thailand. Before we departed to Phu Qoc we were in Ho Chi Minh City (I forgot to mention that) for some days (my penchant for getting lost in geographies is almost equalled by my lack of attention to time). While there I was determined to find the best coffeeroasting house. Coffee has always been my hobby, I am happy to admit that I am quite addicted to anything related to coffee. I have brought bags of it from Italy and Indonesia.

Once I had five kilos of freshly roasted beans, one being kopi luwak coffee. In case you have not been following the trends of world gourmet coffee, to make kopi luwak a civet (cat) must eat the unripened green coffee cherries then shit out the beans. The process changes the levels of acidity; apparently the cat’s digestive process removes the beans’ bitterness and adds amino acids. As far as I am concerned the only thing it added was more money to the price.

We headed north up the island, on our way to fishing villages not mentioned in the tour guide nor by Ngyuen. This turned out to be the right decision: my getting lost took us on yet another quixotic trip. As we rounded a bend in the uneven road and crossed a bridge (which aggravated my back pain) we spotted a large, 3D advertisement right in the middle of a desolate, clear-cut field. The field looked as if napalm had just been dropped on it. This gigantic advertisement had text that was printed in a deep red and the metal shapes spelt out GRAND WORLD. It was positioned on a small, grassy hill and was surrounded by dull grey fields dotted with clean-cut island trees. I had no option other than to

stop and investigate this aesthetic monstrosity. That decision proved beneficial in more ways than one as the motorcycle was overheating (we were beginning to doubt Ngyuen’s expertise).

The more I looked at GRAND WORLD the more it had an impact on me. I was mesmerised by it.

Clicking my camera like a man possessed, I photographed it both front and back. A lone man about 47 years of age, dressed in a white dress shirt and blue slacks, was working a pickaxe, digging at what fertile soil remained. It was if he were the last man left on a prison chain gang. He seemed to be laughing at my curiosity as he leaned to rest.

His world was anything but grand, but there he stood, right beside GRAND WORLD. After about 20 photographs, with deep respect, I walked over to him to ask some questions. It did not come as a surprise that his English was very poor. To date I had only learned hello, thanks and goodbye in his native tongue so our communication was limited. I said hello and, with added gesticulation and pantomime, tried to ask what he was doing. All the English he could muster was “hello – is golf game”. Assuming he had never seen a game of golf and certainly did not know the finer points of how a field should look, not to mention how white and pretentious the whole thing is, I said thank you, goodbye and walked away. I made my way back to Jean and the cooling engine of the motorcycle; it was good to get back on the road.

Eco-terrorism pays great dividends in the short term and the damage is often not discovered for generations. If it ever opens, GRAND WORLD may or may not be

on a grand island, but the golf course will certainly be Disney-esque. There are a phenomenal amount of islands like Phu Qoc on this planet (Indonesia lays claim to one thousand) and each is its own economic petri dish.

Doubtless there are battles between traditional values vs. 21st-century ones across most of them. Being on an island is not a figment of their collective imaginations; it is like Martin Scorsese’s film, Shutter Island, reality is what you make it and the generous staff at Daisy Resort were making our reality quite comfortable.

On this day things seem upside down and backwards – if it were a song, “it’s a grand world after all” would be the chorus line. Nguyen was earnest and convincing in our conversations and supported the island’s aspirations, but I maintained that they were being fuelled by a generous dose of innocence. I suppose this is not Herzog Dellafiore’s prophecy for his Adriatic island. He also had visions of grandeur, though I suspect his naivety was quite staged.

At a SUSAK Expo, Herzog claimed he would do exactly what he set out to do, but he would rarely say more than that. From what I could tell at the time, although I would soon learn more, his vision seemed like the H.G. Wells’ novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, which philosophically examines human constructs of pain, cruelty, identity and so on.

On Dr. Moreau’s island, marooned psychologist Edward Prendick embarks on an experimental hybrid by vivisecting then splicing animal/ humans together. Although it was all in my head, Herzog’s vision was placing artists under a microscope as if to make a collection of them into some kind of artwork. All that

said, please keep in mind on this day not like any other, I am just back from a very excruciatingly hot trip on a barely-functioning motorcycle.

Sporting a damaged back that would take months to heal and after hours of acupuncture from a cranky old doctor (but a highly recommended one) in downtown Beijing.

Even though I had cooled my suspicious nature, I could not forget the conversations we had in London, Herzog and I. He was interested in some kind of hybrid event that would splice together unlikely suspects: art biennale or art exposition-goers (arguably the elite of the art establishment) and those that make art for (arguably) more altruistic reasons. He kept repeating his story to me, that he wanted a place (an island) where a reckless atonement aimed at artists horny for status and bling combined with artists who were Situationists, and made earthworks. He also had plans for a cultural event with others who made perishable aesthetics. From his self-appointed throne, he was planning to conjoin selected artists much in the same way that Wells’ protagonist, Edward Prendick, joined animals and humans into one being.

They both had quixotic dreams of reformatories on faraway oceanic outposts that would obfuscate them from the masses’ penetrating eyes.

Ironically both he and Dellafiore hailed from London.

It was not until I was in Ho Chi Minh City Airport (with internet again!) that I was able to check my backlog of emails, most of them from my online chess opponents and the odd one that pertained to either someone else’s art or mine. As it turned out Herzog was inviting me to Susak (yes, that Croatian island)

to participate in his art expo. The expo was to be about earthworks.

My first email to him explained an idea to construct a bamboo sign that said GRAND WORLD. I later thought that was too heroic a gesture caused by imaginary scorn from the guy working next to the original. Herzog confirmed that it was a silly idea and told me to think about it further (of course he had no idea how difficult a day I was having). It was not until I was in Beijing that I emailed him back to say that GRAND WORLD would be at SUSAK Expo and instantly he sent back a winking emoticon. Later that night I was back to my usual habit of reading some kind of theory before bedtime (I never do get a proper eight-hour sleep). Felix Guattari wrote: “…Contemporary social transformations happen on a large scale by a relatively progressive mutation of subjectivity.” (p.21, Chaosmosis.) Days spent on Susak are not like any other – they are transformative, whereas people on Phu Qoc are watching it transform.

GRAND WORLD travelled with me from one island to the other, across five time zones rolled up in a tube. The book I was reading during those flights left a sentence in my head: “In a certain way of looking at things I too can appear as a thing.” susakpress.org/susak-expo/2016

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Miniscule

Intimate Narratives Of Appetite “The termite focuses on the tiny, the ornery, the wasteful, the stubborn. He is metonymically determined.”

Mavor, Carol. Black and Blue. Duke University Press, 2012. p.97

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In her book Black and Blue, Carol Mavor quotes Manny Faber’s figure of the termite as a way to differentiate between what she calls ‘white elephant art’, i.e. the heroic, useless, empty and prizeworthy, and the tender, inquisitive and detailed approaches of the termite.

‘Termite’ art practices revolve around an axis of desire, presupposing desire as an eternally unfixed state of being – always moving, always changing, always ‘eating their own boundaries.’ Using the works of Chris Marker and Faber as examples of such ‘termite activity’, Mavor

Rosanna van Mierlo

presents the termite as a generative force, not merely a creature of destruction. I suppose the termite is interesting to me because of its unfavourable position; neither food nor pet nor farm animal they are merely perceived as a pest. Their appetite for wood is a direct threat to the suburban dream, lined with white picket fences and decorated with oak furniture these wooden foundations are buried deep in traditional values.

Where white-elephant art is contained by its own artistic worth, termite art relates to the worthless, the undesirable and the useless. It is essentially anticapitalist. White elephant art forms are revered in dichotomous relation, approached from the outside with a clear definition of object-subject. They live

Bites

asleep in fixed states, eternalised in the stillness of marble and the tranquility of the museum walls, with their strict policies of what can and cannot be touched.

They remain there, forever unchanged, under merciless fluorescent lights. Termite art, on the other hand, is all about touch and movement. It is constantly one step ahead of us, leaving only traces behind – tiny black marks on wooden table legs; small pellets of wood in the corner of the room. This type of artistic production approaches the object from the inside, eating away with a thousand tiny mouths, expanding in every direction until the structure is left forever changed, and you might not even notice. The object you thought you knew is now hollowed out: deep blackness lives inside it. Mavor suggests that termite art is essentially engaged with the void, enamoured and trapped by the melancholic desire for what used to be or what could still happen, unable to be satisfied with the present state of things.

As an example Mavor brings up the deconstructive architecture works of Gordon Matta-Clark. Yet these works still adhere to the monumental: their ‘termite’

Photo courtesy: Crystal Bennes

influences don’t really cut deeper than the surfaces Matta-Clark breaks through. They are still exotic, static and finite. The other work she mentions is the FOOD movement Matta-Clark was involved with from 1971. Often wrongly ascribed to him alone, FOOD was a collaborative project that involved many artists in many different capacities, not least co-founders Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard. FOOD operated without clear hierarchies and without a set plan of development. It just happened, out of sheer desire for something. In the FOOD movement I see a more accurate performance of the termite, one that is not related to the termite as a creature that ‘digs’ but rather one that ‘eats’ which I argue is eventually based in an intimate desire for participation, social relations and collective practices. In what follows I aim to expose the termite nature of the FOOD experiment in three areas: as a capacity to form attachments that originates in the stomach, as a breakdown between stable identities due to introjection and by reimagining eating as an act of social exchange and intimacy.

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The Heart In The Gut “Put another way, we could say that the belly is physically alive to the infant. The first mind we have is the stomach-mind.”

Elizabeth A. Wilson, ‘Underbelly’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Culture 21, no. 1. 2010. p.204

In ‘Underbelly’ Elizabeth A. Wilson displaces desire from the heart to the stomach. In a way ridiculing the age-old saying that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Wilson sidessteps gender-biased notions of who is giving or receiving love, and instead proposes the gut as uniformly assigned to the origin of desire.

Our humanity lies in our ability to love and to respond to love. The infant’s human identity is formed through negotiations that pre-exist understanding through language but take in the world through the mouth, the throat, into the stomach. Feeling around blindly, the infant’s hunger is communicated as a cry for its mother; a desire that presents itself as a gnawing feeling that demands address. “The hunger pangs of the infant’s stomach are crucial to the development of mind and the capacity to be attached.” [Underbelly p.204] Following Mavor, we can see that the stomach is also a dark void. It is where things go to disappear, to change beyond recognition. Like the termite, we take the world on firstly through the mouth, by nibbling and gnawing away at it.

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Mavor’s description of the termites’ chewing activity as a distinctly careful and loving subject-object relation stands in surprising contrast with the usually violent or shameful attitudes we keep towards the act of eating. Fine dining has gone to great lengths to recreate eating as an enlightened activity; supplying smaller and smaller portions, napkins to prevent the food from going where it shouldn’t go, an array of knives and forks to keep the hands as far away from the food as possible, music and soft lighting to accompany the experience and strict rules on what is to be eaten when. This anxious attitude towards ‘proper’ food indicated a fear of eating the ‘wrong’ thing, or eating it in the wrong way. The infinite curiosity with which children approach their food – often even playing with it – is replaced with a scrutinising fear of what we put inside our bodies, reflected in dietary regimes, phobias and lying to waiters about niche allergies. Enjoy food too much and you’re branded

gluttonous, enjoy it too little and you must be suffering some bodily disorder. The desire and subsequent attachment, as described by Wilson, are cause for suspicion.

Desire is always a negotiation of a limit, an act of trespassing if you will. Desire always exists at a distance at first, before it can be resolved by fulfillment and sink back into unconsciousness. The mouth is nothing if not a limit between the outside world (that which we can see as different from ourselves) and the private, inside spheres (which we cannot fully understand). The mouth is a sensory organ through which we explore the world, in taste, temperature and meaning. Mavor’s termite embodies not the immediate breakdown of inside and outside worlds, but its slow disintegration, an infestation of the proper body. This fear is heightened by the bodily associations that termites (and insects at large) call to mind; thinking about them brings about a physical shudder, a ‘crawling of the skin’, a physical manifestation of revulsion and expulsion. [see Stephen Loo and Undine Sellbach, ‘Eating (with) Insects: Insect Gastronomies and Upside-Down Ethics’, Parallax 19, no.1. 2013 p.12–28] The abject object that enters the body brings about a physical contraction; the body tries to shake the bad thing off, albeit metaphorically. A ‘material sign’ creates an intense, bodily response for which the reason may yet be unknown to us. [see Mavor, ‘Black and Blue’, p.124]

I Won’t Eat Anything With A Face “But bucca is puffed up cheeks; it is the movement, the contraction and/or distension of breathing, of eating, of spitting, or of speaking.”

Jean-Luc Nancy, Ego Sum (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 162.

We are all held up by tensions, I suppose. Anxiety, depression, overwhelming feelings of happiness or even just the rather tepid feelings of minor irritation; tension, in its many shapes, continuously tugs at us ever so slightly. Although the FOOD movement most likely started at a dinner table, at someone’s house, or at the pub on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon, most readings point to a night in October 1971, when a group of friends, one of whom was Gordon Matta-Clark, gathered under the Brooklyn Bridge to roast a whole pig. The images that exist of the event show a group of people, almost all men, hanging out between the waste and water,

clad in sullen colours that give the whole act the grim atmosphere of mystical ritual. It is almost as if eating a whole body, whatever it is, is somehow different than eating just a piece of it. “I don’t eat anything with a face,” my friend said. Somehow this is more of a murder than what usually happens around the safe edges of the dinner table. This feels like a crime scene on the outer fringes of the city.

By displacing the act of eating from the safe environment of the clean, warm home to an outside area that smacks of despair and a loss of control, the group, in a way, establishes itself as outside of society’s norm. They are outlaws. They flirt with the idea of a brotherhood as they sharpen their knives. Brotherhoods are always infatuated with blood rituals and, if read with Freud, are entrenched in the accursed ‘family feast’ in which the father’s murder and underlying threat of cannibalism are cause for the subject’s schizophrenic identity formation.

Man, riddled by guilt, fear and grief over this heinous act, can never again exist (or eat) without inhibition.

[Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey Routledge, 2001]. Post primordial feast, the lines between what is proper and improper, inside and outside; male and female indicate not only a division between good and bad but also inherently announce the possibility of failure. “[…] the initial division of body/breast into good and bad opens onto a paranoia that the good may not be good.” [Sara Guyer, “Buccality,” in Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis, ed. Gabriele Schwab. Columbia University Press, 2007, p.85. ] Derrida is fully aware that the act of eating is, in essence, problematic of paranoia and that division of good/bad inherently leads to missteps, mistrust and misuse since it never relays responsibility, only judgment. Thus the infant or schizophrenic ‘tears apart’ the good object for fear that it is deception and that, beneath its apparent goodness, evil and destruction lurk. Paranoia lurks at the root of any dichotomous system of value. Derrida finds a solution in this question of ethical responsibility with the imperative of ‘eating well’, which encompasses within it the inextinguishable violence that remains part of nourishment and hospitality. [Ibid.,p. 82] In short, even this display of ‘cruel’ and ‘uncivilised’ eating can still be ethical at its core by embracing buccality as a relation to the other prior to the self that is ordered by the mouth and not the face. [Ibid., p.93] Viewed as such, the scene can be interpreted in a different, more constructive way; as the start of something new for which a sacrifice might

be needed, but is acted out within ethical awareness.

Mavor’s description of the termite as distinctively tender is not only surprising but also – deliberately or not, I wonder – joins concepts of buccality (chewing, feeding, gnawing) with a certain loving affection and a sense of homing. Nourishment and hospitality are joined in an unsuspected agent; that of the insect, culturally branded as pest or plague, for which we bear none to little sympathy. “[…] the association with the semiotic suggests the abject may also be productive of new relations upon encounter with other bodies and their instincts.” [Loo and Sellbach, ‘Eating (with) Insects: Insect Gastronomies and Upside-Down Ethics’, p.20.] It is this tenderness that fascinates: the slow and steady nibbling that resembles a lover’s impulse, a secret murmur that is paired with some light biting of the ear. The termite, with its insatiable hunger and by lack of a ‘human’ face exists before language [Guyer, ‘Buccality’, p.91.] and, as such, before the origin of human subjectivity so devastating in the primordial feast narrative. Its ‘faceless face’ is the non-human’s questionable birthright. It is pure mouth; blind desire.

It acts before the question of ethics, on a bucal instinct that is about movement and desire before consciousness but as a way of being.

This tenderness of the mouth that both eats and loves makes a return in Mavor’s description of the work of Anne Hamilton, who turns her mouth into a pinhole camera. Her lips act as the shutter, each time they close the subject (her son) is hungrily ingested in a performance of what Mavor calls: “Aim inhibited eating.” [Mavor, ‘Black and Blue’, p.101.] Hamilton’s politics of tenderness are a reflection of the processes of introjection; the subject of love and desire is taken into the body in an act that is simultaneously embracing and violent. The image shows psychoanalysis’ terrifying mother from a first-person perspective, a subject motivated by a multifaceted form of hunger: a mouth without a face.

Making A Home Any collaborative movement or alliance is rooted in a form of exchange, whether it is money changing hands, words being uttered, or signatures drawn. Relationships are fabricated through the rituals of exchange, but this exchange is usually distinctly dichotomous and linear.

Stock rates go either up or down, money is transferred

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over the horizontal planes of tables or cashier counters.

Contracts are signed on dotted lines to seal the deal.

There is no room left for error or a little trailing off.

Photo courtesy: Laura Mott

After its initial kick-off under the Brooklyn Bridge, the FOOD movement settled down in more traditional form as a restaurant in downtown Soho, a meeting place for artists to cook, eat and meet each other. Carol Gooden, Tina Girouard, Gordon Matta Clark and others dreamed of facilitating discussions, creating network opportunities and mobilising the artistic community.

Less performed as a ritual and more constructed as a social space in which everyone was invited to partake, FOOD’s value as a work of art might be hard to discern.

Amalgamating the social stratas of the family home with those of the café and the artist’s studio – Matta Clark made works there – the space defied singular classification yet demonstrated a certain sense of movement. People traversed and destroyed borders between the public and the private, the personal and the professional, as they walked in and out, dragging their lives over the doorstep. The void, as described by Mavor as an almost mystical emptiness – or lack of – of a deep, deep black, makes an appearance here in the hungry mouths of the artists attending. Their opened lips indicate a desire for attachment, connection, some sort of gratification. The soft chewing sounds remind us of the termite chewing through the foundations, all the while making a home for itself. The chewing becomes a form of nesting, of feeling like you’re a part of something.

The space will be hollowed out eventually – and it was, in 1974 – but the movement didn’t die. It simply moved on, for that is the nature of the hungry collective.

rosannavanmierlo.com

The images in this article were taken at Sluice_2013. They depict ‘The Caff’, a project by artist/curator Crystal Bennes, which drew inspiration from the FOOD project. crystalbennes.com/portfolio/caff-an-artist-run-restaurant

The Last Sitting Dallas Seitz

Sluice_talks

Bert Stern was the last photographer to take photographs of Marilyn Monroe, six weeks before she died.

Bruno Latour said: “Connecting images to images, playing with series of them, repeating them, reproducing them, distorting them slightly, has been common practice in art even before the infamous ‘age of mechanical reproduction’. ‘Intertextuality’ is one of the ways in which the cascading of images is discernible in the artistic domain – the thick entangled connection that each image has with all the others that have been produced, the complex relation of kidnapping, allusion, destruction, distance, quotation, parody, and struggle.

Even the simplest connection is so important for a definition of an avant-garde that, once a type of image has been devised, it is no longer possible for others to produce it in the same fashion.” [Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, pub. 2002

by MIT Press. p 35-36.]

I think that is what is interesting about these prints.

If you don’t know the history of these images: they were ones that she crossed out. They came out in 1982 and I was deeply hurt by them. As a ten-year-old boy I secretly dreamed that Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were my parents. I believe that through some type of timeshift, some type of time travel, I am the illegitimate son of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. The images upset me because they were images of my mother, who I thought of as Norma. And I thought my mom looked so beautiful yet, for some reason, she didn’t like these images. They were taken for Vogue and, at the time, they would have been classed as very racy. Yet there was this screen of chiffon scarf that my dad Arthur had given her, enough, she felt, to cover her nudity.

The book is called the Last Sitting, which alludes to the last supper and presents Marilyn as Mary Magdalene.

Taken only six weeks before she died, the images are almost a prediction of death.

Marilyn Monroe: The Complete Last Sitting Bert Stern Pub. 2000 by Schirmer/Mosel @SeitzDallas Artist and Senior Lecturer, University of Arts London The full recorded talks are online: sluice.info/talks

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Notes on Assemblage Tash Kahn and John Ros Every day since the beginning of 2016 Kahn and Ros have been sending each other photographs of their home cities (Kahn in London; Ros in New York) via text message. Each image responds to the one before and is inspired by the urban and the forgotten or overlooked. The images create a conversation on form, function and colour within the city grey.

Charlie Levine

@thisladypaints johnros.com thetaletellers.com

TEN YEARS AGO YOU’D WAIT IN THE RAIN FOR A CAB. THE INTERNET CHANGED THAT. TEN YEARS AGO YOU’D WAIT FOR A VACANCY AT A HOTEL. THE INTERNET CHANGED THAT. TEN YEARS AGO YOU’D WAIT ON HOLD TO ORDER TAKEOUT. THE INTERNET CHANGED THAT.

WHY ARE YOU STILL WAITING FOR A GALLERY EXHIBITION?

CONTACT INFO.SHHHIM@GMAIL.COM FOR MORE INFORMATION +1 718.386.2863

Sluice_talks

Close to the Machine Laura Davidson

Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents Ellen Ullman Pub. 1997 by Picador

Ellen Ullman was a software engineer in Silicon Valley when Google would have been a meaningless word, never mind a verb. Before Zuckerburg was even in high school. As much as this context makes Ullman’s mediations a historical account of sorts, for me there is an importance to be attached to this text. It comes from a time when the Western world was amidst an immense cultural shift: the Second Coming of the Industrial Revolution. Ullman’s book Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents poses a rare viewpoint, coming both from the author’s position as a woman in a field dominated by men as well as from her position as a human being trying to figure out how to make machines useful in our messy, irrational and complex lives. While reading Ullman’s book it feels like their approach to writing software was really abstract, completely removed from reality and context. Ullman refers to being trapped in this mindset: “I can disappear into weird patterns of logic, I could stay in a world populated entirely by programmers.”

The term ‘filter bubble’ has been used to describe the way social media platforms limit future information by replicating what we have already been exposed to, what is most popular across the network or what our friends like. These platforms prioritise the content we view based much on what we’ve already looked at.

Once you’re in a filter bubble, it becomes difficult to escape. The Internet reflects back to us our own inner eccentricities. This describes a culture of endless solipsism. I am reminded of The Mirror of Venus by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, where a group of woman surround a pool of water to look at their reflections.

What might have been a niche concern when Ullman’s book was published now has become a societal phenomenon. As such, Close to the Machine has become an important document articulating a threshold moment in Western culture.

@LauraElDavidson Writer and reviewer // contemporary art // digital culture // as old as the Turner Prize The full recorded talks are online: sluice.info/talks

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Susak Expo Via Chelsea Salon Natalie Anastasiou - Chelsea Ma Fine Art Kagweni Micheni - LCC Documenting Chel Logan - Chelsea MA Fine Art Joshua Y’Barbo - Chelsea Salon

We were given the opportunity to curate, document and exhibit in an arts expo on an island where the only people that would attend would be the artists and a peppercorn (130 approx.) population. Susak Expo was the brainchild of one Daniel Devlin, a self-confessed anti-artist and confidence trickster.

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The premise of the conquest was to get three creatives from the postgraduate community of UAL – through Chelsea Salon – and undertake the curating and documenting of a show.

The only slight catch in the plan was its undercurrent; the whole shebang was based upon ‘failure’. What could possibly go wrong?

To start with even the organising had its mishaps – emails were sent to the wrong people with the right information (or vice versa), and getting the work and Sluice_ magazines (the official catalogue of the Expo) to Susak island required a train, a plane, a bus, a taxi, a catamaran and a tractor (driven by a man called ‘Captain Salty’).

We selected artists from the post-graduate community under the premise that the work had to be of a certain size (for transportation) and of an ephemeral nature. But we were approaching a situation where we had no idea of the gallery space, how long we had to show the work and how we could make each piece count. Thinking on our feet and flying by the seat of our pants was essential, as was responding appropriately. The whole exercise really pushed the idea of contemporary

art and the way in which it could be presented in, as well as connected, to its immediate environment.

We displayed the work around the island: some of it in the gallery; some outside. Some of it was interactive and became a part of Susak folklore. Video work was shown at various intervals during the week (7-16th of May, 2016).

Members of Chelsea MA Fine Art visited the island mid-week to collaborate with us and make work whilst there.

The sense of freedom for an artist on an island with no agenda or evident rules was akin to a Zenlike experience. Creativity flourished untethered and unhindered. Connections were made with artists from across the world (Italy, Bosnia, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, U.S.A., Mexico, U.K. and Argentina) and the collaborative aspect was high.

On the Thursday evening, Natalie, Kagweni and myself helped curate and showcase other artists as part of an island Arts Trail which began in the harbour and then stopped at intervals to take in site-specific work. This all culminated in an exhibition at Gallerie 531, where video, sculpture, two-dimensional and performance work by UAL students was shown. The evening involved all the visiting artists, as well as some of the locals. It was like a procession of creativity and live music.

There was a sense of community on the island that could not be ignored, everybody ate communally and engaged in critical discourse over meals or drinks. No element was left untouched and conversation included the art world, personal practice, funding, industry frameworks and the joy of making.

There was no hierarchy within the daily structure and involvement within projects felt very free.

Finding Daniel’s Office in the middle of a field near the edge of a cliff took several failed attempts but these journeys brought stories which were just as, if not more valuable than the actual work itself. It posed a question – which area of your practice do you focus on: Process or Product?

Rancière would approve.

Chelsea Salon is an ongoing project started in 2009 and established in collaboration with Joshua Y’Barbo and Laura Carew. Chelsea Salon advances art and pedagogy practices associated with the educational turn and promotes current student, recent alumni and professional artistic and research practices through multiple platforms.

Chelsea Salon approaches the educational turn as artists (as apposed to an educational practitioner) by using the performativity and disruption commonly associated with contemporary art practice to appropriate pedagogical methods and tools with the intention of creating extra-curricular and extra-institutional spaces. Chelsea Salon is the subject of a practicebased PhD project at Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Graduate School, which proposes theory of interstitial pedagogy (educational exchanges in spaces between structures).

Chelsea Salon developed from the salons at Chelsea College of Arts, an extracurricular activity encouraged by the MA Fine Art course director, Brian Chalkley.

Sponsorship for Chelsea Salon has been provided by the EXTRA: UAL Enhanced Postgraduate Student Communities Fund. chelseasalon.myblog.arts.ac.uk

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Exchange Rates

Collaboration and its Discontents

Karl England Taking artist and curator-led projects from across the globe to a small corner of Brooklyn forces all involved to confront issues of geo-specificity. What this means and how it manifests will differ dependent on local geo-socioeconomic circumstances, theoretical focus etc. In 2014 one commentator interestingly responded to the inaugral expo by suggesting the work failed to portray its origins: “All the art could have been made in any of the festival’s locations, and definitely anywhere in Bushwick [...] The ideas of locality and place played an uncertain role, this [...]

Exchange Rates advocated for Bushwick’s cultural traction, but perhaps only at the level of globalised marketing.”

Joseph Henry artfcity.com/2014/10/28/benign-diplomacy-thebushwick-international-reviewed

The piece went on to lobby for an art that specifically confronts rampant NYC gentrification - i.e. an art that addresses the context it is dropped into. This point warrents examination. One or two of the projects that year did draw from that well, but actually the expo is conceived of as non-thematic, until a theme emerges via the free and varied expression of the constituant parts. The expo aims to bear the weight of expectations thereby granting the constituent galleries the freedom to programme work to their own individual concerns.

As a non-thematic project the expo indicates its broad concerns via its title.There are several rates of exchange at play here; there is clearly a financial component to putting art on an aeroplane but the limiting constraints that financial access has on creativity is exactly what the expo is designed to a/ draw attention to and b/ circumnavigate.

As a self-reflexive project of cultural exchange the expo invites us to dwell on the nature of the art world and what we can expect to get from it. The exchange is activated between organisers and participants, host galleries and visiting galleries, artists and spectators, and all configurations therein. As referenced in Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells, Guy Debord’s critique of the alienating effects of capitalism in The Society of the Spectacle strikes to the heart of why participation is crucial and why it’s at the heart of the ER2016 expo: “It rehumanises a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production [...] participatory art is perceived to channel art’s symbolic capital towards constructive social change [...] it is tempting to suggest that this art arguably forms what avant-garde we have today: artists devising social situations as a dematerialised, anti-market, politically engaged project to carry on the avant- garde call to make art a more vital part of life.”

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Claire Bishop Artificial Hells Verso 2012 p.11-13

The International Bushwick Exposition Similar to the siphonophore which appears to be a single organism, but which is actually a colony composed of highly specialised individual animals, when artists and curators self organise and work in concert, a complex and amorphous creature is bought into being. Direction, focus and purpose may differ from person to person but as a combined entity the constituant parts actuates as a Hydra-like coalition.

The intention for the Exchange Rates expo is for galleries from disparate environments to be paired based on similar concerns and then to develop a conjoined exhibition for the expo as a result of consequent virtual exchanges (email, Skype etc). But as with any project a certain amount of pragmatism is required and points of connection between host and visiting galleries is sometimes oblique at best. How each gallery or project approaches the developmental stage of the exchange is crucial to the results: “Considered from one perspective as a cosying up, where the Venn diagram has an overlapping collaborative centre, and implying a mutually beneficial relationship, an exchange space is rightly seen as a wonderful thing full of shared values, common aims, an almost utopian paradigm.

However, with all international exchanges, there can be hidden ‘baggage’, communication misunderstandings, unperceivable cultural divides controlled by seemingly unseen forces. Left un-acknowledged this can corrode and corrupt the environment that could be so enriching and energising.”

DOLPH (London) are sidestepping a formal pairing (and the potential for creative conflict) for a more relaxed free-form programme of studio and gallery visits to discuss ideas, working processes and more. A reworking of the dérive, or goalless ‘drifting’ as employed by the Situationist International, their exchange goes beyond the gallery and consists of engagement with/in the community: “During these exchanges we hope to highlight the rich complexities and vagaries of an artist’s creative process, and develop links for future collaborations in both the US and UK. The ambition for this project is to forge relationships that can continue long after the expo has ended.”

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Exchange Rates

Whereas Tiger Strikes Asteroid (New York) and Scotty Enterprises (Berlin) have leveraged the preexpo developmental exchanges. Over the course of the year TSA conducted remote ‘studio visits’ with Scotty Enterprises to select the work of the exhibition.

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Both galleries share similar programmes and organisational structure, with the one exception that Scotty Enterprises has a group approach to curating, while TSA takes turns with one member curating per exhibition cycle. In the exchange, this process will be inverted, as TSA members will work to collectively select the pieces for the expo.

Other galleries take a far less-involved approach which often results in something more like a temporary cohabitation, these exhibitions can inadvertently throw up some of the more intriguing exchanges, as different philosophies and aesthetic priorities are thrown together (think ‘funny foreigner trope’ from any number of US sitcoms personified by galleries incomprehensible to one another). However it’s a mistake to think that vastly differing geographical starting points will result in vastly diverse concerns. Financial precarity in the arts is universal, as is consideration of the affect different structural models have on art production.

Aesthetic concerns and conceptual struggles are fairly standardised across the world, and to expect otherwise is a case of exoticising the ‘other’, and in a world where the West has colonised the rest it’s pretty rich to then be surprised when cultural differences are too subtle to notice from a cursory drive-by. Which raises the question of whether expos and fairs are fit for purpose in the first place. studio1.1’s show will present work that brings its own context into question, asking: “Does art’s place within the art world preclude an existence in the real one, and whether the gallery ultimately closes any dialogue between artist and viewer, fostering dogma rather than creative confusion.”

And then some work confronts this cultural colonialism head on: Owen James gallery (New York) is presenting three artists, all of whom live and work in Manila, Philippines. All three artists create vibrant collages from a combination of local and imported material – from American comic book panels to vintage Filipino mass media with vintage American fair – that explore conversations about gender roles and Isabel Santos / Dreimal / 2014 power, the effects of colonialism and national identity.

The International Bushwick Exposition Whilst Grey Cube Projects from Columbia will be enacting a site-specificity that aims to establish a dialogue between space and the artists’ processes.

Cultural and geo-political commentary may result from these interventions but do not necessarily precede it.

The point being; we may project our concerns onto artworks from different cultures – but to do so is to reduce the work to cyphers for our own preconceptions.

Andres Moreno Hoffmann / Akashá / 2014

The Exchange Rates expo shares an affinity with Conditional Art, i.e. it materialises conditionally to the physical and conceptual structure of the expo. So perhaps most fitting is this meta offering courtesy of Campbell Works, who riff on the idea that cultural exchanges such as this are often a catalogue of near misses. Campbell works are seeking to add to the fog of incomprehension by introducing actual fog to the expo.

“So to assist our ability to recognise the unseen we aim to hinder our ability to see by obscuring sight-lines and create an environment that has at its very core the atmosphere where indiscernible difference can no longer be the only thing hidden. As we enter the fog we alter our mindset to one that is open, awake and aware of the unseen, and who knows what is lurking there.”

Siphonophorae 7 by Ernst Haeckel – Kunstformen der Natur (1904) Siphonophorae Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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Exchange Rates Point the SMARTIFY app at any of the gallery logos for more information about the galleries, their whereabouts, what they’re doing for Exchange Rates, the exhibiting artists and so on.

At the expo point the SMARTIFY app at the artwork itself for additional information about the artists.

110 Troutman St Brooklyn, NY 11206 The Bushwick Community Darkroom fosters an environment of creative development for photography lovers of all levels. bushwickcommunitydarkroom.com

L&L / CUPCAKE empowers artists to create sustainable professional opportunities by organising exhibitions, artist residencies, events and community projects. lookelisten.net

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Seen Fifteen Gallery is a new space in Peckham, south east London, dedicated to contemporary photography, video and installation art. It launched in 2015 with a series of pop-up exhibitions in the stripped-out shell of two derelict Victorian houses. In January 2016 they moved into a new gallery and studio space in the Bussey Building. seenfifteen.com

14 Kossuth Place Brooklyn, NY 11221 The Buggy Factory is a lovingly restored and appointed 19thcentury buggy factory and barn, located in the heart of Bushwick, Brooklyn. thebuggyfactory.com

An art space in Hoboken, NJ. PROTO exhibits new work in all media by emerging and mid-career artists, assembled by the gallery or by guest curators featuring artists from the NYC region as well as artists from across the USA and abroad. proto-gallery.com

Grey Cube Projects is a transdisciplinary space for artistic creation, founded with the aim of becoming a platform to promote knowledge exchange whilst strengthening contemporary art practices. Experimentation, participatory dialogue, and multilateral cooperation, which are the foundations for all Grey Cube projects. Grey Cube Projects is located in Bogota’s Art District in Colombia. permanentears.blogspot.co.uk

The International Bushwick Exposition

229 Cook Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 ODETTA exhibits works by midcareer artists. Special interest is given to contemporary painting, glyphs, Color Field, Buddha Mind, Minimalism, playfulness and encyclopedic obsessiveness. odettagallery.com

12ø is an artist-run space and collective based in Stoke Newington, London. Founded in response to a lack of alternative and inclusive opportunities outside of institutions. 12ø hosts and creates projects concerned with engagement, experimentation and exploiting both with what we do and don’t know.

12ocollective.com

Centotto Gallery hosts art exhibitions and critical discussions in the living room of a shared loft, since 2008. centotto.com © Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap

The Dorado Project is a New York / North Jersey-based project space and compendium of select local, national and international contemporary art. With a focus on emerging artists and innovative works, The Dorado Project seeks to unearth and weigh the very best of arts’ rich reserves. The Dorado Project: mining art. sharing gold. thedoradoproject.com

250 Moore Street Brooklyn, NY 11206

Saturation Point explores the developmental lineage of artists whose work has at its source the legacy of generative, systems and geometric practices. An online forum for reviews, interviews and articles, and a curatorial project that organises exhibitions and discussion events. saturationpoint.org.uk

DOLPH is an artist-run project based in London, UK. DOLPH asks artists to share the personal stuff, to tell the story of what makes them tick and present it all in an intriguing exhibition. DOLPH is also an ongoing conversation, and for Exchange Rates DOLPH will roam NYC talking to artists about life, the universe and everything. dolphprojects.com

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Exchange Rates 56 Bogart St. Brooklyn, NY 11206 A contemporary gallery and consultancy, presenting exhibitions by emerging and established artists from the UK, EU and the US. Theodore:Art offers a window of opportunity to discover promising artists early in their careers. theodoreart.com

56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11206 Fresh Window gives the viewer a sense of marvel at everyday situations, beyond the mundane into the extraordinary through the work of innovative and critical artists. freshwindow.org

56 Bogart Street Brooklyn, NY 11206 BLAM creates synergies between artists in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. The bicoastal, multiplatform spaces showcase a wide range of artists and curators blamprojects.com

BARTHA CONTEMPORARY A contemporary art gallery focusing on emerging and midcareer artists from Southeast Asia and the USA. The gallery is located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY. owenjamesgallery.com

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A London artist-run organisation with a passion for supporting emerging and under-represented artists whose work shares a message for the present and a vision for the future. lighteyemind.com

Bartha Contemporary was founded by Swiss-German couple Niklas and Daniela von Bartha in January 2000. The gallery relocated to its current space in Fitzrovia, London in early 2012. The programme has a strong emphasis on non-figurative and conceptual contemporary art. barthacontemporary.com

SAGE came together through informal studio visits to show and discuss their work. SAGE formed in 2009 as a response to adverse economic realities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a 2,000 sq ft, two storey, gallery space. 2016 sees SAGE reform. sageprojects.blogspot.co.uk

The International Bushwick Exposition

1329 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237

286 Stanhope St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Transmitter is a collaborative curatorial initiative based in Brooklyn, NY, focusing on programming that is multidisciplinary, international and experimental. transmitter.nyc

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is a network of artist-run spaces whose goal is to expand connections and build community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects and curatorial opportunities. tigerstrikesasteroid.com

SARDINE’s modest size is a key asset in the construction of contemplative, intimate, carefully curated exhibitions and immersive, sitespecific installations. sardinebk.com

IS-projects was founded in December 2007, since then IS-projects has initiated exhibitions and therefore meetings between artists, art-lovers and collectors.

Iemke van Dijk and Guido Winkler, both artists, transform their house twice a year into an exhibition space. IS-projects organises group shows, connecting artists from The Netherlands with artists working abroad. is-projects.org

Scotty Enterprises is an artist-run project space for contemporary art and experimental media, in Berlin, Germany. scottyenterprises.de

© Mapbox, © OpenStreetMap

1329 Willoughby Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237

VI Dancer is run by Elliott Cost, a recent graduate of the California College of the Arts. A small project space based in San Francisco, CA it is intentionally low-key and slightly under the radar. vi-dancer.net

Et al. is a gallery directed by Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour. Founded in 2013 by Facundo Argañaraz, Im, and Harbour, Et al. is located in the basement of Union Cleaners in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The gallery serves as a site for exhibitions and experimental events, working with its select roster as well as other local and international artists, writers, and curators. etaletc.com

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Exchange Rates

299 Meserole St Brooklyn, NY 11206 ArtHelix intends to create a meta-art space, a place where art is not only displayed and offered for sale, but also where it can be openly discussed and challenged, a hub or ‘helix’ from which culture can be reimagined. arthelix.com

An artist-run studio and exhibition space in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It has been running since 2010. butterprojects.info

An artist-led, entirely not-for-profit gallery space set up in 2003, situated in Shoreditch, London, UK. studio1-1.co.uk

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Sračok & Pöhlmann, founded in 2006 operate between London, Susak and New York. Their shows often explore contemporary cultural values, and eschew the bombastic tactics of other galleries for a more subtle approach. sracok-pohlmann.com

An independent, not-for-profit, artist-led work and project space in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. A place for making, doing and sharing. thepenthousenq.com

Vane represents the work of a number of artists both from across the UK and abroad. Often in collaboration with other galleries. vane.org.uk

An ongoing examination of working methods and organisation, presenting alternatives to the more established art scene. The working platforms are made according to context. tifinger.dk

An artist-led organisiation which explores and promotes current trends in British painting through group exhibitions, talks and publications. contemporarybritishpainting.com

A flexible programme of art, design, and music, Wasserman brings together artists of all disciplines. Through collaborations and programming that generates interest, curiosity, and commerce, Wasserman is to become one of the many threads in the vibrant fabric that is Detroit, USA. wassermanprojects.com

The International Bushwick Exposition Š Mapbox, Š OpenStreetMap

109 Ingraham St #102 Brooklyn, NY 11237 ART 3 shows work that contributes to contemporary discourse. The program at ART 3 is multidisciplinary, conceptual and process oriented, showcasing emerging and mid-career artists. art-3gallery.com

Saturation Point explores the developmental lineage of artists whose work has at its source the legacy of generative, systems and geometric practices. An online forum for reviews, interviews and articles, and a curatorial project that organises exhibitions and discussion events. saturationpoint.org.uk

119 Ingraham St Brooklyn, NY 11237 Brooklyn Fire Proof is a creative spaces company based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, incorporating gallery spaces, studios and sound stages. brooklynfireproof.com

Based in Northumbria University in Newcastle, UK, Gallery North is a contemporary art gallery showing both home-grown talent and international artists. gn.northumbria.ac.uk

The Epodium Gallery has presented contemporary art context-sensitive to New York and Munich since December 2013.

The services of Epodium include also the management of corporate collections and cultural events for public institutions. epodiumgallery.com

A not-for-profit, small-scale, artistrun gallery in London, UK. Through exhibition, Vacuous provides artists with space for experimentation, in a critically engaged, non-commercial environment. vacuousgallery.com

A London-based, artist-led gallery. A collaborative curatorial partnership of two artists, Campbell Works acts as a meeting point for new ideas and aims to explore contextual relationships between art, spaces and people. campbellworks.org

A curatorial collaboration, gallery and studios in Manchester exploring artistic production through a series of collaborative exhibitions, inviting artists and curators to challenge their ideas and ambitions. collarmcr.com

A New York city based curatorial consultancy. MADE helps emerging collectors discover and acquire art through its curated, limitedengagement exhibitions held in intimate, inviting venues in the USA and abroad. made-art.com

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Not that long ago I attended a lecture by Miško Suvaković (a contemporary aestheticist, art theorist and conceptual artist who teaches Theory of Art and Theory of Culture in Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade) where he talked about value in art, and how mechanisms for its valuation have developed throughout history. He began the lecture by comparing works of art, identifying which ones were more or less valuable and discussing how we recognise and value them.

At the end of the lecture I asked him if art is something that can’t be valued quantitively – something either has art value or it hasn’t. And if something is considered to be art, you can’t say it has more or less art value compared to another work. Obviously I’m talking in terms of spiritual and immaterial value.

I asked him if he thought art could exist outside the art historical value system and if something being recognised as art is all that is required to gain value as art? He gave the conventional answer you would expect from an art historian: “Everything is subject to different points of view and conventions, and art value does not exist outside of it.”

Tomislav Brajnović

Maybe we were not talking about the same thing – I was referring to the idealised concept of art – an intrinsic spiritual quality that exists even if the work is not seen and/or recognised, and that exists outside the accepted aesthetic value system (a system which is completely wrong because it is based on material value relating to the work itself and doesn’t consider the artist’s ethical view of the world and the influence of other art in creating the formative context in which we are immersed and which led us to destruction and to the brink of extinction).

This is in line with what Daniel Devlin talked about when he invited me to take part in Susak Expo 2016 – to be on the edge of the main focus and interest, outside media presence and visibility. Does a work of art exist if there is no audience? Is a work of art a work of art if no-one sees it?

We live in times when artists must use all kinds of media (news and social) and be visible in order to gain a minimum of power in order to act in society, obviously, that is the case if the artist believes that she needs to act in order to make art. [see Art Power, Boris Groys, MIT Press] Perhaps the dramatisation of the necessity to act forced Daniel to come out from the RADAR’s shadow by exhibiting the project online and in real time.

In that sense, I wonder how much the island as a protected and isolated oasis can reflect the dramatic times we live in, that is, how can we transmit that kind of message from the island? I’m interested in the connection between the island and the mainland where all the drama takes place.

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On the other hand, the islands are now becoming the points of connection and drama for the migrants who come by sea to seek refuge in the ‘stable’ European continent.The sea, usually associated with the romantic yearning for distance, infinity, freedom and the promised land is now in contrast with the harsh reality of reaching an uncertain continent.The performative character of this project emphasises the fragility of art and places the artist in an improvised situation with no institutional support. The artist finds themself in an unfamiliar situation, left on their own devices with limited resources attempting to distance oneself from the elitist participation in fancy projects and to show her ethical identity of man-island.

S

Everything on the facing page was written before my first and only experience of Susak. The continent described in the text to the left, in relation to where we positioned Susak, is America. I don’t know if it was by chance or intentionally referencing the connection of the people from the island who ended up on that much bigger island which is also accessed by sea, but every evening there was a live Skype link between artists on Susak and ArtHelix gallery in Brooklyn.

Observing us from their centralised standpoint, the people of ArtHelix perceived us as the embodiment of the peripheral, of the exotic. Their questions reflected the romantic aspirations towards isolation and beauty, towards an idealised place where artists can express autonomously their own aesthetic, pure and detached art.

A few days ago, I updated by Facebook status to: Engaged artist, aged 52, searching for a deserted island to have a holiday. One of my colleagues commented: “What is an engaged artist? And what kind of engagement?” Maybe the best way to answer her question is by asking “What is a disengaged artist?” An engaged artist is one who immerses himself into the environment and context and reacts to it with the aim of changing oneself and the world. This kind of artist bears the burden of others; doesn’t shy away from responsibility; does not compromise, is one who listens, who finds answers, who commiserates, one who searches for the form through which he can express and make visible to others what she has experienced.

Susak Expo

Engagement is not exclusively political even though it is integral to it. An artist’s engagement is any kind of action leading to the good of the community.

In this case (refering to the FB status) it is also a poetic category contrasting the idea of the desert island which would be, in that imagined poetry, a place without context, free from obligations and the evils of this world. In this island situation, the artist would be just an artist without the ‘engaged pain’ in the chest.

Translated into reality – which is not poetic – the Desert Island is not an idyllic place to escape to but a place for powerful awakening to the horrors of the mainland, core of the sorrow and tears caused by the evils of the world. It is certainly not the fringe (periphery) of New York and the Art World – a destination for fancy holidays and selfies with the purpose of provoking envy.

This enlightenment is only possible for those who are conscious of their own frivolousness. Susak is this kind of island — an island with an enlightened man. brajnovic.com susakpress.org/susak-expo/2016

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TOUCH THE CURRENT_ Connection error. Problem with network. Please try again.

Make sure a firewall is not blocking access.

The server ‘God is love’ may not exist or it is unavailable at this time.

Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, then try again.

This connection is untrusted. What should I do? I understand the risks.

Get me out of here!

Bad connection. 404 Sorry, page not found.

BBC World News homepage headlines.

Retrieved from bbc.co.uk/news/world accessed June 27th 2016

The live newsfeed collects the past into a receptacle of the contemporary, serving our volatile times punctually and coherently in the form of dependable routine. Corporate narratives strewn amidst the severe polarisations of current society go mostly unnoticed. Binging on the 24hr live feed, no space is left to imagine other futures.

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘After the Future’ page 29. Retrieved from libcom.org/files/ AfterFuture.pdf accessed June 2016

…page 29.

The context of my understanding of present historical and cultural dynamics is the transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine than a mother. In this transition, a mutation of the conscious organism is taking place: to render this organism compatible with a connective environment, our cognitive system needs to be reformatted. This appears to generate a dulling of the faculties of conjunction that had hitherto characterised the human condition…

Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each element remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they conjoin; they become something other than they were before their conjunction. Love changes the lover and a combination of a-signifying signs gives rise to the emergence of a meaning that does not exist prior to it. Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality. In order to connect, segments must be compatible and open to interfacing and inter-operability. Connection requires these segments to be linguistically compatible. In fact the digital web spreads and expands by progressively reducing more and more elements to a format, a standard and a code that make different segments compatible. …

Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect and continuous. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction. These discrete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards. The digitalisation of communication processes leads on the one hand to a sort of desensitisation to the curve and to the continuous flows of slow becoming, and on the other hand to a becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states and to the sequence of discrete signs. Interpretation follows semantic criteria in the realm of conjunction: the meaning of the signs sent by the other as she enters in conjunction with you needs to be understood by tracing the intention, the context, the nuances and the unsaid, if necessary.

The interpretative criteria of the realm of connection on the other hand are purely syntactic. In connection, the interpreter must recognise a sequence and be able to perform the operation required by general syntax or the operating system; there is no room for margins of ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the intention be shown by means of nuances.

I shut my laptop and glance over at the Mona Hatoum booklet distributed at the entrance of her exhibition at Tate Modern. I recall the work in which she made the sense of relation tangible, charged, like electricity, by the sense of two connected people being apart. I flip through to the page in which the work is transcribed into a blurb: Accessible online tate.org.uk/monahatoum-room-guide

Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance, 1998

This video is constructed from images of Hatoum’s mother in the shower of the family home in Beirut. The Arabic writing overlaying these images like a curtain or veil represents her mother’s letters from Beirut to the artist in London. The soundtrack consists of an animated conversation between Hatoum and her mother overlaid with Hatoum’s voice reading a

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translation of the letters into English. For Hatoum, as much as the work portrays the emotional intimacy of the relationship between mother and daughter, it also speaks of exile, displacement, disorientation and a tremendous sense of loss as a result of the separation caused by war.

The audio-visual layers eloquently portray her intimate stratification of identities, formed by the interactions occurring in between the cracks of her fragmentation. She speaks of “literal closeness, implicit distance”.

Home, exile; Mother, daughter; Autobiography, artistic invention; Private, public; Body, other. The gaps in between are the experience of distance, and become a formative field of tension created by separation. The rest of her works in show repeatedly tap into this powerful relational web arranging all things, from small domestic objects to global geopolitics. In electricity she found the perfect medium to express its essence.

Tate Modern room guide leaflet, Mona Hatoum exhibition 4 May – 21 August 2016.

Mona Hatoum, Homebound 2000

Homebound consists of a combination of kitchen utensils and household furniture, connected to each other with electric wire, through which runs a live electric current. A programmed dimmer switch makes the bulbs flicker and fade up and down. The crackling, buzzing sound is the amplified hum of the fluctuating electric current which adds to the sense of threat. A barrier of steel wires protects the viewer from potentially lethal electricity and also creates a caged-in environment. The title plays on ideas of domestic confinement or house arrest.

In Homebound, normative domesticity is a mix of confinement and threat of electrocution. The baby’s cot is lethal to the touch. An inanimate and seemingly neutral scenario is revealed as an enclosure structured by such high-tension energies as to kill. Yet in Light Sentence, the animal cages are open.

All images of Hatoum’s work are copyright of Tate Modern, 2016

Mona Hatoum, Light Sentence 1992

The installation is made up of square wire-mesh lockers which have been stacked to create a three-sided enclosure above human height. They resemble animal cages, and also relate to uniform and box-like architecture.

The single lightbulb that hangs in the middle of the structure moves slowly up and down like a search light, casting constantly moving gridded shadows that create a sense that the room itself is moving.

This is one of Hatoum’s earliest installations. Subverting the clean lines, industrial materials and grids of minimalist art, Light Sentence introduces traumatic and political themes. The title plays on the idea of a lenient term in prison.

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Civilisation is still seduced by the freedom of confinement. Sinuous curves of contemporary architecture, seamless streams of HD video, neoliberal careers for the self-exiled optimists are just a low-cost, e-ticket

away. Shimmering veneers of dissociation and alienation, these spatial, informational and economic structures administer a mass anaesthesia that finds refuge in the virtual. The concurrent homologation of communication, relations and culture confirm once more the accuracy of the medium as message. Critical creativity peers deep into the flaws of technological smoothness and the stable geometry of infrastructure. Artists work for the resurgence of sensory perception, the ‘sensors’ of our hyper-partitioned society. Political space created by art yearns for a re-establishment of agency, and originates its fieldwork in the ever dominating realm of the visual.

This is where the current can be felt by some. In our touchscreen digit-centric age, is it exactly the tactual that we are depriving ourselves of? Is TOUCH the necessary sense for breaking into direct action in society, in a shift from representation to action, performance, reformatting, and forming anew?

Panorama: The Orlando Nightclub Massacre …It’s America’s worst nightmare: an armed gunman on the rampage.

But what is it like to be caught up in the carnage of a mass shooting?

Panorama tells the story of the Orlando massacre from the people…

How the Orlando attack will affect Pride in London …Orlando has made people realise there is still a need for events like Pride. Michael Salter, chairman of Pride In London; “Orlando especially resonates with people in London, considering it was only…”

Orlando gunman phone transcripts released …Partial transcripts of phone calls have been released between police and the Orlando gunman Omar Mateen who killed 49 people in a nightclub. Mateen spoke in Arabic and called himself an Islamic…

Sex in Strange Places: Turkey …hundred ISIS fighters are believed to live in hiding. Here she meets a

young woman who was sold into sex slavery by ISIS fighters. Covered from head to toe in black, she desperately wants to share her…

Thames Isis addresses spark PayPal confusion …PayPal customers with addresses containing the word ‘Isis’ fear their accounts are being blacklisted.

Residents of streets such as Isis Close say payments were halted or delayed due to “keywords…

Newsday: EU Emergency Summit on Brexit …EU leaders are holding an emergency meeting in Brussels on Britain’s decision to leave the Union.

We speak to a fan from Iceland as the Scandinavian nation has qualified for the quarter-final of the Euro cup…

Brexit: What happens now? …The UK has voted to leave the EU – a process that has come to be known as Brexit. Here is what is likely to happen next. The story so far: At exactly 06:00 BST on 24 June it was confirmed that the UK…

Charlotte Cirillo recently completed a master’s degree in London, at Goldsmiths’ Visual Cultures department, on the subject of virtual imagery as a vehicle of destructive anthropocenic forces.

The scattered collection of her past has formed her creatively amorphous identity, and feeds her ongoing research on global systems and the forms of consciousness arising from them.

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Sluice_talks

Água Viva Nick Scammell

“The next instant, do I make it? Or does it make itself?

We make it together with our breath.” [Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, Pub. 1973 by New Directions, p. 3] And here we all are, breathing together. Água Viva is supposedly narrated by a painter who turned to words as an alternative medium. It is a book with no narrative, no plot, no characters: nothing happens. Instead it tries to capture and apprehend the present, to hold it, regard it. It’s an impossible novel, a meditation, a confession committed to paper with a painstaking spontaneity. Água Viva means ‘water of life’ in Latin, but to a Brazilian it is a jellyfish. An organism with no digestive, respiratory or central nervous system. It ingests and voids through the same orifice and, if exposed to stress, it can revert back from Medusa to polyp. This ability to reverse its own lifestyle allows the jellyfish to bypass death. It can rebirth itself, it is immortal. At the beginning of the text the novella asks us for help in its own birth: “You who are reading me please help me to be born” [p.29], but then cautions: “This isn’t a book because this isn’t how anyone writes” [p. 6]. Lispector writes “I want to grab hold of the is of the thing” [p.3].

“And as long as the improvisation lasts, I am born” [p.87]. “I trust in my own incomprehension” [p. 47].

As if the only questions worth bothering with are those whose answers lie unfixed.

She then says it’s so hard to speak and say things that can’t be said, and here she is with Wittgenstein at the frontier of language dealing with things that are bigger than words, in an effort to speak of things beyond language. Occasionally she resembles the selfresurrecting água viva: “Will I have to die again in order to be born once again?” [p. 38.]

The novella takes her incomprehension of the instant ‘now’ and stretches it over 88 pages, each of which could be an ending.

Água Viva Clarice Lispector Pub. 1973 by New Directions @Nick_Scammell Artist/Curator/Artist

The full recorded talks are online: sluice.info/talks

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Are you a failure?

Alistair Gentry

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I’m a moderately unsuccessful writer and artist whose documentary-style work has mainly been shown in art galleries, but also on television, radio and in various public places. I’ve published short and novel-length fiction, and I’ve written for the stage as a writer and as a performer. Doing all of the things I’ve just described has added up to me mostly keeping my head above water. In 2010 I self-published a somewhat popular book (Career Suicide) about the mid-to-lower echelons that are home to most creative individuals, if they can exist at all in those occupations.

People like me, in other words.

I’m firmly in these mid-to-lower echelons and I’m quite happy there.

This statement isn’t false modesty or a deficit of ambition. I’ve worked consistently in the arts throughout my entire adult life, and that means I’m already doing better than 90% of the people who aspire desperately to do any one of the aforementioned jobs of which, very often, I’ve successfully carried on at least two simultaneously at any given time.

Unlike most artists my family background was just barely middle class, at the point where it blurred into the upper reaches of the working poor. Both my parents worked fulltime jobs – often more than full time, and usually very shitty jobs – to support us, and still only just made ends meet, except on the occasions when they disastrously didn’t. My

formal education ranged from barely adequate to disgracefully inept. I’ve slogged my way up to the pinnacle of Mount OK with no particular starting privileges apart from the intelligence I was born with. Difficult as it was and continues to be for me, it now seems exponentially harder to break in for the aspiring creative people of the next generation.

Many people might somewhat justifiably say, “Ooh, she can’t be a film director, he can’t eat paint in his studio all day, cry me a river.”

An even more extreme version of this view is perhaps even more prevalent: “I don’t enjoy my job and I didn’t get to do what I wanted with my life” goes the bitter reasoning, “So why should you?”

Of course there are also people who just fervently believe that some things, most things or everything should stand or fall based upon its market value or its mass utility.

To many self-appointed arbiters, artists who complain about not making enough money and not being supported or valued properly are whiners or losers whose work must obviously be bad or worthless if it isn’t selling, irrespective of the fact that the list of now canonical “proper” artists who got critically shit on or were commercial failures in their lifetimes is very nearly as long as the list of known artist names in its entirety up to the YBA era. Those who keep quiet as

they think they should and just go along with every screwed up thing that’s asked of them, very soon find themselves in a downward spiral that usually also ends with the exhaustion of their own finances. It seems we can’t win.

In any case, nothing will convince all the Muppet Baby versions of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman out there that some things are far too important to be run only or primarily for profit; not even the delicious schadenfreude of Rand spending a large chunk her life on the very welfare that by her own philosophy should have been withheld as punishment for her weak-minded failure to ‘work hard enough’ or be sufficiently ‘hungry’. Contrary to what some people on both sides of the argument like to imagine is a gulf between commerce and art, very often the biggest commercial or popular successes are the result of somebody – or a bunch of people – having lots of unstructured time, space and/or money to do stuff that nearly everyone else thought was pointless and unpopular at the time.

The same can be said for a good proportion of truly groundbreaking scientific research. Creativity can sometimes be monetised, but the best way to kill creativity is to cram it into a commercial workflow pipeline, head first. Creative people could and would carry on without capitalism, but capitalism couldn’t continue without creative people to feed on.

gentry-a.co.uk

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R e g n a ates xch Sluice__ / Theodore:Art / Centotto present

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• 2016 •

The Bushwick International Exposition

The second biennial international collaborative exposition of galleries and projects in and around Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 October 2016

sluice.info/er2016 #er2016expo