American Standard

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Reece Terris, American Standard, 2004

“American Standard is an installation that featured fifteen functional urinals arranged in a pyramid formation on the wall of the men’s washroom in the Alexander Centre studio at Simon Fraser University.  Transforming the facility into a public indoor fountain, water overflowed from the uppermost urinal and splashed its way down through the formation creating a deluge of water flooding the sunken floor. Visitors enter the space via tiled stepping stones, providing access directly to the sink and preexisting toilet, leaving the facility fully functional and open to both sexes.
American Standard draws upon the ‘readymade’ and confronts its art-historical underpinnings (recalling Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Fountain), while imparting more than pure reference, as it extends beyond the object-oriented readymade into an architectural space. Rather than demonstrating how context produces meaning within objects, American Standard presents an environment in which objects re-contextualize their space, revealing architecture’s dependence on standardized form and socially assumed function within even the most private of public spaces.”

Cut-up as a magical process

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“What Bill [William S. Burroughs] explained to me then was pivotal to the unfolding of my life and art: Everything is recorded. If it is recorded, then it can be edited. If it can be edited then the order, sense, meaning and direction are as arbitrary and personal as the agenda and/or person editing. This is magick. For if we have the ability and/or choice of how things unfold—regardless of the original order and/or intention that they are recorded in—then we have control over the eventual unfolding. If reality consists of a series of parallel recordings that usually go unchallenged, then reality only remains stable and predictable until it is challenged and/or the recordings are altered, or their order challenged. These concepts led us to the realization of cut-ups as a magical process.”

– Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Thee Psychick Bible)

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Nonfunctional Satellites

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Nonfunctional Satellites, by Trevor Paglen

“Developed in collaboration with aerospace engineers, the nonfunctional satellites are space-worthy sculptures designed as small, lightweight satellites that expand to become large, highly reflective structures. Placing one of these objects into low-earth orbit would create a visible “sculpture” in the night sky, visible from the earth below after sunset and before dawn as a bright, slowly moving, flickering star. The sculpture would remain in orbit for several weeks before burning up upon reentry through the atmosphere.
These designs are responses to the question of what aerospace engineering would look like if its methods were decoupled from the corporate and military interests underlying the industry. The nonfunctional satellite recasts the old question of “art for art’s sake” within a different context, asking whether we can imagine something like “aerospace engineering for aerospace engineering’s sake.”

Cyanotypes

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Thomas Mailaender is showcasing a new series of his cyanotypes at Ditto Gallery in London.
The cyanotype process (characterised by its cyan-blue hue) was developed as a means for blueprinting. Mailender utilises this technique to print images taken from his Fun Archive, a personal collection of absurd and anonymous pictures intuitively pulled from the Internet. Using this archaic and outmoded process to reproduce images from the modern digital age creates a dialogue about the validity and authenticity of images, and their place as artworks.

Exhibition Kickstarter

Krystal South organized an exhibition on Kickstarter:

“I’ve created this Kickstarter campaign to experiment with new form of art exhibition and approach to selling work. I’ve asked 11 artists to create new works that fit into the Kickstarter format. In response, they have each designed a custom artwork through online retailers in editions of 10, and assigned a value for these mediated works. ”

 

Art without Education

As artists, curators, and writers, we are increasingly forced to market ourselves by developing a consistent product, a concise presentation, a statement that can be communicated in thirty seconds or less—and oftentimes this alone passes for professionalism. For emerging artists and curators there is an ever-increasing number of well-intentioned programs that essentially indoctrinate them into becoming content providers for an art system whose values and welfare are wholly defined by its own logic of supply and demand.

Anton Vidokle, Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art, 2013

Oh Dracula

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In 1974, at the Utah Museum of Art in Salt Lake City, Chris Burden climbed into a “chrysalis”-like sac and had himself installed in between some of the museum’s exceedingly random 18th century paintings, with candles placed at his head and feet. And there he hid all day.

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Nick Cave and The Museum of Important Shit

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“Nick Cave, the musician best known for his work with The Bad Seeds, was inspired to help create this online museum during the filming of his quasi-autobiographical documentary 20,000 Days on Earth. Cave, along with directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, began thinking about the nature of memorabilia, inspired by his own experience at a Nina Simone performance of yesteryear and a wad of chewing gum.”

More here.

Ways of Something

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“Ways of Something”, is a contemporary remake of John Berger’s BBC documentary, “Ways of Seeing” (1972). Commissioned by The One Minutes, at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and compiled by Lorna Mills, the project consists of one-minute videos by fifty eight web-based artists who commonly work with 3D rendering, gifs, film remix, webcam performances, and websites to describe the cacophonous conditions of artmaking after the internet.
Watch the online premiere of the first part here.