Intro

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I’m Jan Allen I’m acting director at the agnes Etherington Arts Center I want to

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welcome you all to the 2013 reader-friendly Kaufman lecture this is

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series of public talks bring scholars of national and international stature to

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Queens University each year through the generosity and vision of dr. Nathan

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Kaufman and his family over a decade ago that they created an endowment in the

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name of reader-friendly Kaufman who was a passionate advocate of our education

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they created a wonderful opportunity to learn about and reflect on the broader

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social dimensions of our history and visual art over the years we’ve had a

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amazing range of thought provoking lectures on topics spanning from the

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Holocaust era art restitution through the history of England’s first public

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art gallery the story of the Thompson collection and artists contemporary

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artists engagement with the subjects of war artificial intelligence and surveillance today we’re in for a treat

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with our guest Anthony Elms who has come to us from Philadelphia several members

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of dr. Kaufman’s family are with us here today and I want to thank them in particular for their generosity and

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making this part of our program possible unfortunately dr. Kaufman is not with us

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except in thought he will be expecting a full report I also want to thank the art

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center staff especially public programs officer Pat Sullivan and our administrative coordinator Kate you XO

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for helping to organize today’s events and I want to offer my personal welcome

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to Anthony Elms our Kaufman lecture I have asked however silly for ten our

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curator of contemporary art to provide a closer introduction of Anthony Elms but

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first I need to introduce Sylvie and this is as I mentioned when we were planning her first sort of public moment

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although she’s been joined the art center staff at the beginning of this year she’s a curator

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historian a writer and editor she was editor-in-chief and executive director and editor of art papers for many years

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she led that atlanta-based publication from being a regional publication to a

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global thought leader she was curator the 5th Quebec City biennale in 2010 so

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she’s been very active while doing her editing her international networking at

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a very highest of levels she kept her hand in curating I first got to know her

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when she was curator of contemporary art at the ottawa art gallery in through the late 90s she was educated at the

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university of toronto the université Laval and Duke University and has received many national and

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internationally significant grants and awards and she’s quickly become energetic and transformative member of

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the art center team so I hope you’re all getting to know her I have no doubt that you are actually and you will be seeing

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the impact of her work in our programs before passing the mic to Sylvia I want

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to make a short technical note for you following the lecture Anthony Elms has

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kindly agreed to field questions from the audience and because our presentation is being videotaped today

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we’re going to ask questions to use microphone and they’ll be available for

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you and also to begin by identifying yourself clearly for the record after

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our Q&A I hope that you’ll join us over at the Art Center for refreshments and

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conversation I’ll pass the mic now to Sylvie and again thank you for coming

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Thank You Jan and thanks to everyone for its choosing to spend this beautiful day

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with us today most of all thank you anthony for spending for accepting our invitation in spending yesterday on

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planes trains and automobiles to travel from philly to share your ideas with us

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we really appreciate it it’s a pleasure and an honor to welcome you here to the agnes Etherington art center and to

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queens university Anthony Elms joined the Institute of Contemporary Art in

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Philadelphia in December 2011 he works at the ica as associate curator prior to

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that he was in New York for a short while working with perform 11 the New York City vastly important performance

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festival that happens every two years and prior to that he was in Chicago as a

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curator of gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago last fall he was

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selected as one of the three curators for the next Whitney biannual the

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biennials that americans love to hate so he has a nice challenge but the 2014

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edition faces a few additional challenges it’s the last biannual to

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invest the brower building so people will be looking at it attentively with that idea in mind and also it’s a

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biannual that’s curator curated by people who don’t live in New York which is also an additional challenge in

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parallel to all of his institutional zand endeavors Anthony’s also maintained

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an independent practice as an artist a critic a curator and an editor publisher

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for example one exhibition which was called Sun raw else a turn and Chicago’s

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afro futures underground 1954 1961 was a

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real labor of love and commitment that went on then to travel to other institutions across the u.s. all of

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these independent projects have provided him with platforms to pursue his engagement with printed matter with the

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fam publication in the widest expanded field we wanted to invite Anthony here today

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because this practice I think uniquely exemplifies a number of the crucial read

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recent developments in curatorial practice I also wanted to bring him here to begin a conversation hopefully that

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will be going beyond the stock conversation with Queens and Kingston

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because you know Anthony was one of the rare riders who in my prior job as

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editor I would always be very surprised by his work so I was very excited when

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he would propose an eye dr send up send me a text i was excited because i knew it would be challenging and I knew that

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both myself and the team and an hour expanded readership would learn a lot in

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the process so I knew that this was publishing his text was publishing something that mattered and so on this

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note I’d like to welcome Anthony

Welcome

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right okay great move thank you for the

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invitation thank you too so V thank you to everyone having seen what some of the

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topics of were of past talks I feel a little bit of a fraud but it’s just some

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shows I’ve done it’s just some things and some stuff I also um I’ll just as a

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preface say that I usually really carefully edit and write and script out

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my lectures and for the first time I’m trying to go between notes and add living because I usually try to not give

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overviews of what I do but be completely specific and so there might be some

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please hold in and you know join me but there might be some you know like a

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little I don’t know well hit a pothole

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here and there like that one that I just sort of hit the word didn’t come to my head anyways

Sun Ra

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I’m going to start in return again and again two quotes during this talk the

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first one is from jazz composer and bandleader sort of afro futurist Sun raw

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and it’s from an interview that he gave in the mid 80s and son Rob was born 1914

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died in 1993 and he’d been born Herman Blount in Birmingham Alabama but for

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most of his life he claimed that he was an extraterrestrial and from other planets and that he was eternal and that

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he wasn’t human and this was something he always sort of came down to and interviews of demanding that he was

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actually from elsewhere and was here to teach us humans something so in an

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interview quote sun ra’s not a person it’s a business name and on the

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certificate it’s a business certificate which was gotten in New York City they didn’t notice that I didn’t have down

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there what my business was they stamped it notarized it and they filed it so therefore it’s a business name and my

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business is changing the planet so I have legality behind me end quote and it

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actually was a business certificate he turned himself into a business this is a

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picture of the exhibition and it was built out of a archive of his materials

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that we found in a basement in Chicago and sun raha had moved from Birmingham to Chicago to start a large band and

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then had a series of sort of small groups between like five people in 15

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people that would all live together collectively and at one point he left Chicago to go on tour and when they got

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to Montreal people thought that um he had been booked into a rock club and

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when they played the first night the promoter said oh I thought you were a rock band I didn’t know you’re going to

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play God’s music and cancelled the week the rest of the week of their run but they have been doing this as a way of

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sort of getting across the country and across the north American continent and so they didn’t

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have money they went down in New to Newark New York and never came back stayed with a band members family and

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just accidentally never went back to Chicago so they left all these materials in Chicago and I guess when I think of

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me an interested in printed matter and ephemera I can’t see like I’m interested in books per se even though i buy too

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many and I’m not necessarily interested in ephemera like ticket stubs letterhead

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and things like that like per se like for a sort of tactility but I’m

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interested by the traces that they leave behind and this will come back again and again and again and so the show was a

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large part like the sort of cases of letterhead that they had developed advertising tear sheets that they sent

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to record labels letters with them record heads and then these sketchbooks

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for billboards and on the left-hand page as a cosmic Research Center that they

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were going to build with space communications on the third floor Department of sound and the second and

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then the sort of wisdom reading and cultural foundation on the main floor and of course none of these things were

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ever developed but one thing which is why I keep coming to materials like this

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and one thing that the show was important for which I will think of maybe one of the first times even though

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I’d done lots of shows before this I was a honest to gosh curator it’s because to

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think about Sundra and to think about this quote where he you know son was not a person it’s a business name and my

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business is changing the planet we can see it as a lark conceit of sort of a joke to sort of make fun of this idea

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that he’s from outer space but then he left all of these very real tangible pieces of material to try to prove it to

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try to make it a reality and to try to actually change how people saw him and how the things around him were running

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so this exhibition was largely made out of things that would be sort of hopefully interesting visually to people

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but also thinking in terms of showing them how they sort of ran this sort of

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other world on a shoestring bait you know dime so we had

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album cover is that they had done and they would do the album covers themselves like print them as woodblock

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prints and they would have printing press blocks made so if they did a three-color cover they would print them

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all by hand they worked out with a the letters with detail how they had talked to RCA records and convinced RCA records

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that they only had to print 20 copies of a vinyl LP at once so they could keep 60

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titles in print and they can only print the number of copies that they wanted and that they needed for any particular

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concert or any particular tour and so it’s like these sort of like scrappy ways that they sort of really did create

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their own universe and create their own sort of world that they can move out from so at the same time that I did that

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show and I should say that I worked on that show with a jazz scholar John

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Corbett and with a poet Terry caps Alice because we all felt that the show was

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large enough that it needed people from different you could say disciplines to work on it we needed we wanted Terry

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capsules because she’s a poet and she could think about the word play that was in a lot of sun rose materials John

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Corbett was the actual scholar from jazz who sort of knew the tradition at word son world was coming from and musically

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like how the music business work and that was from the art world and could deal with the ephemera and sort of display and think about the printing

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techniques that were used for the materials and so we saw that like we all took on a different aspect of the show but then came together to make it happen

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and then similarly and this is just a little sliver of it we curated a show or

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i curated a show with another art historian I shouldn’t say another a art historian Huey Copeland and it was based

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around artists who had sort of come out of Chicago a band influenced by Sun raw and sort of taken some of his tactics

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and so this is just a brief sliver of the show showing a sculpture by wing chimu to neon sign by matt hatter banner

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that had been made by my to puree and then a sort of photo collage by an artist fatima to gar and we were looking

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for like how like his sort of influence sort of expanded beyond him and kept going further and further

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out and it’s through things like Sandra and through sort of thinking through

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questions of Sandra or questions that I started getting more and more interested in actually doing contemporary arts I’d

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been a book publisher I’m going to speak a fair amount about book publishing even without showing any images of the books

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I’ve published just to sort of say like how so I do think there are ways that

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the book publishing has heavily influenced the kinds of things I look for an introduction to that there’s a

Feminism

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quote from an interview by art history and Rosalind Deutsch and she’s talking about feminism and what feminism means

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to her and what it can mean she said

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quote it has stressed the necessity of psychic and subjective as well as

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material transformation the question of the relation between the psychic and the

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social may be difficult to assimilate to conventional notions of activism but that doesn’t make it quiet test we

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shouldn’t dismiss it because it’s politically inconvenient end quote and I’m not sure if the word quietest is a

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actual dictionary definition term but I really like this notion of the quietness

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and the quietest of a practice and that just because you can’t make the links

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directly doesn’t mean that they don’t actually sort of live in the materials that are around us and that there aren’t

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something that the materials around this mean from this sort of quietest psychic

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and social and material transformation

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this is an exhibition I did maybe coming out of my interest in books it was a

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exhibition of a Chicago artist Andy more this is the entirety of the exhibition

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he’d worked seven years on making this basically what’s an illustrated

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manuscript of a book that’s nine hundred and some pages it was a whole sort of

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narrative in a story that he sort of came up with a sort of parallel

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autobiography for himself and the reason it’s displayed on this table this way is because that map of a constellation

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actually is a fold-out for the book and it’s a 12 foot by 7-foot piece of paper

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that folds out of the back of the book and we decided to do this one show like one painting by him this folded out map

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of the stars it was really so the strange solitaire show where it can only

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really accommodate one to two people at a time because books are sort of strange objects and trying to sit there and read

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and it was maybe not like a little like a blockbuster show but it was interesting that people would come and

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spend an hour with the book and try to they might not read it cover to cover some people didn’t come back weekly and

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sort of dip in and out and it sort of invited the sort of attempt to sort of come in and sort of lowly go through

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this handmade hand bound book that had been made it was this large unruly sort of object

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so I’m going to like the quietest of what I think of as like books because books like this they’re only good for

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one person at a time they have covers they flop open if you put them on a table or they just sit still i’m also

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going to pair that in my head to what i think of as the non quiet activity of

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distribution and public display and so I

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think it’s important to think about distribution and it’s important to address it sort of head on because books

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are some of the most easy things to ignore it’s certainly printed ephemera they’re meant to only last a couple days they come in and out of fashion they

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come in and out of printing they sort of go and they cycle we don’t necessarily think about having to keep them or

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having to store them but books are very rarely one copy in one edition and so

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the material of a thought doesn’t transform just because one copy out there in the world has been dog-eared or

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cut up or discarded the material of the one copy might obscure the breadth of

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experience its hand by that same thought in a definite copy at any one moment I might be holding a copy waving it around

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and somewhere else I’m sure there’s another one that’s being scanned there’s another one whose contents are being

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pirated for sharing online another’s being underlined for a class another might be discarded as just simply inane

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and badly written and another cup of copy might actually be hoarded for value in a library and never touched so the

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distribution of that one thing that one thought in one form goes into various contexts and simultaneously is arguably

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that’s sort of like different contexts of one thought it can be like the most amazing and good thing that something

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like capitalism has ever made easy and without you even having to pick up if

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you don’t pick up the book it doesn’t do much it keeps tables level it keeps the dust in place but there are thousands of

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copies of that one book that are out there doing their quiet non-work one at a time and so insisting that the psychic

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can take on the social scale of the contents and a thought like a bit of

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word a bit of wordplay theory and idea and image a snippet of a song

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can actually be physically tripped over and physically encountered on many shelves in many tables in many different

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places if you’re not careful can’t even cut your finger it can get staying that can get mutilated it can be inconvenient

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and heavy to move if you have too many thoughts collected and it’s not just that one thought one idea one book

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equals one voice because as a sort of dissonant singing in a sort of conversation that happens by all the

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hundreds of copies that are sending different tunes through the same song you can think of them as sort of

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variations all the different ways that someone will read a book ways that someone will take it into a different context from an academic context to

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maybe a poetry reading there’s a thousand different ways of that one thought sort of functions in different

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areas and likewise as that thought gets used some voices echo more than others

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and some need voices to help them more than others do and that’s where a

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curator comes in an interview the

Multiple Formats

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American sculptor Ellen McCullum responded in his use of sort of multiple

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formats and multiple ideas in doing reproductions quote it doesn’t even

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necessarily make sense this idea that the beautiful things should only be available in small numbers yet in the

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art world we seem to accept this limitation without much question and quote it’s just a brief view like

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another sort of quiet show I did it was literally just a case of small tiny

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collages by an artist k Rosen who never really shows her collages she’s usually known for wall paintings such as this

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that are sort of word plays and well not sort of really work place she studied

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she has an English degree PhD she didn’t go to art school and she slowly came to painting because of her love of language and how language just looks on the page

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and how the way that it looks says a lot about what it does and what its function is so for the show we just I decided to

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sort of step back and not have her too many wall paintings which is what she’s known for but one wall painting

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and then we show that a tiny monitor a little video that she made one point and then a series of 16 collages that

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rotated twice during the show so a total 32 were shown over the time it was to

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invite people in to see like these smaller sort of book pages and where she sort of gets her ideas from finding them

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out in the world actually by just being attentive to how books are normally printed so the real way that I came to

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curating was through this organization white walls which I still print artists books with and it’s an organization that

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was founded in nineteen seventy-seven in Chicago and since its inception white

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walls has been dedicated to the publishing as a publishing as an exhibition venue in scene itself is

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printing visual projects and experimental writing poetry essays performance documentation photography

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image tech works adaptions of film video or site based work all for makers for

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whom the printed page becomes both a material and a subject in the form and so it was always important that white

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walls saw itself is dealing with any material that might actually be in a proper art museum or a proper art

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gallery as well that it was pulling in all these things that artists were making of course fairly early on poetry

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sort of the sort of given the boot by the organization for only visual artists and then over the sort of 30-some or

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almost four years at which white walls has been active there’s remains like a dedication to fulfilling an artist

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public project to the artists specifications so there’s a lot of commissioning and a lot of working in

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one-on-one dialogue with artists I’ll within sort of reasonable limits because

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we want the books to be not expensive formats but things that could be sold for thirty dollars or less like

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traditional paper buttocks just to give an idea like if these names mean anybody

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thing to anybody some of the artists that have published have included Dan Peter men who makes mostly public art

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projects Adrian Piper he does whatever she does Jeremiah Gomez Pena who’s

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mostly known for performance and artists Stephanie Brooks who’s similar to my BK Rosen perhaps in her wordplay Robert

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Baer a first generation conceptual artist Zoe Leonard who’s a photographer John giorno

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who’s a poet Robert Blanche in who is sort of an art world gadfly prankster

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goat island a performance group k Rosen

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was actually published by the organization which is how I met her and recently we’ve been doing more books and

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those in fed by a California sculptor Edgar Arsenault all the collected writings of a New York sculptor Dyke

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Blair activist writings by Greg Berta wits who’s an activist poet video maker

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so the collected works of a group named haha which only worked in the public

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sphere Sylvia Kapowski a new york artist of the sort of late 80s Early 90s

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learning group which is a group that try to do things out in the field social practice work in Scandinavia Sarah Z

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Temporary Services who worked with a prisoner to sort of come up with a compendium of all the things that

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prisoners invent in their cells to make their lives a little better a Swedish sound artist Carol Michael von Hasse

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woof and then Canadian Video Maker Steve Frankie we’ve published his writings and

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we I co edited a book with him and so this is sort of a summary of where that

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organization is right now I’m just going

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to say the whitewalls the journal ceased completely in 2003 and for me it’s because publishing really changed and it

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seemed that books were the way to be quiet bit louder because for example of that list of artists not lots of them

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are people that you would think of the selling thousands and thousands of copies of a book and we were publishing

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this journal people weren’t really buying it like libraries were buying it people here and there but it was a

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really sort of mainstream you know bear stream and what we usually happen is

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people would ask us for issues like years later year when some of the artists became famous and so looking at

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that I thought well books actually sit on bookshelves longer than journals journals have a shelf life of like six

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months where a book is never out of date as long as you have copies if I printed a book in 2003

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and people don’t want that book until two thousand seven we can afford to sort of wait it out and we can the book is

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still new and people order it because they want it as opposed to the journals that just kept sort of collecting

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collecting and collapsing on me until we saw that it was really a way to like use

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the book as a way to navigate what few funds that we had and what little outreach we had we could sort of play a

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waiting game with our activities and make them reach larger than our actual which was like me and a volunteer or

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group of six people trying to make this happen on a day-to-day basis so often

Quantity and Distribution

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you know my friends in the curatorial realm that don’t understand why I’m sort of still interested in editing books at

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night and carrying the boxes myself and trying to arrange for distribution myself and all this work that I do

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personally for white walls why I’m still interested in it and why I still work on that side instead of just doing things

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through the museum and I think it’s actually because of what I do in museums too because I’m interested in two things

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that are hard to think about quantity and distribution so to get back to this

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idea like the quietest when you publish anything in a multiple format postcard print even a photograph a book vinyl

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record poster CD video tape DVD the most

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prevalent condition is the most overlooked in the trouble is because there’s no way to actually address what

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happens with that quantity without this speaking as I’m going to do in dangerously oversimplified terms once

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the published materials have a place in time with production what’s the idea is physical there’s hardly any one thing

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that you could say about the range of situations which any individual edition finds itself and rarely with a quantity

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of something do you have more than a few token copies in the same location what can be said with authority is that by

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publishing books in press runs of around a thousand or more and releasing books through conventional distribution

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channels the sprawl of the quantity allows the artist projects to sort of be at play in the field as opposed to

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just on display once and without committing to a single market nor committing to a single interpretive

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framework we can allow that thing to sort of have its multiple lives and you

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know you can go through the writings and Karl Marx Adam Smith not even Sigmund

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Freud all these people that try to figure out what objects mean for us have written so much about quantity it’s sort

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of something that’s just hard to get around and hard to think of what that quantity does one of the things that

Kingdoms of Algal and Varga Land

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quantity can do is confuse people this is another exhibition I was involved in

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the inauguration of the council general of the kingdoms of algal and Varga land

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there are two Swedish artists who have claimed themselves king kings joint

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kings of the country of algal and var girl and you can get passports they have

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had counsel counsel generals opened in cities around the world and their

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country as they see it as they laid claim to the digital territories the

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state that you find yourself in when you’re between waking and sleeping

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they’ve declared that the all the dead are citizens of Ogle and varga land when

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pressed on that they’ve said well none of them have revoked their citizenship and then they’ve also claimed like the

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spaces that are between any borders on States so they try to look at those weird grey zones that sort of exists

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between countries and they claim all these states now what they have been doing not that they’re recognized by the

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UN or anything is like they occasionally have these displays these events these concerts they have a national anthem

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flag logos they have various they do have actual functioning embassies but

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what they do do is they use passports postcards advertisements for their airline diplomatic decrees that they

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send out postage stamps envelopes a national dish and they use like all the

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physical markers that we see around us of what a country is and they’ve just slowly and slowly been making this

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country physical by all the beings of a country without the actual land and they’ve done this and they’ve

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you like had it for moments i get the venice biennale in places like this we’re like they’ve sort of engaged in a

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exhibition section documenta where they staged a little like spaces for themselves have you say there might be a

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bit of an absurd humored some of the projects i’ve been involved in up to now you could say and all i guess i could

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say is that there might be a value and exhibitions of not getting it right but getting it wrong in an interesting and

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engaging manner and thinking of like working through these issues of a sort of questions of small and efficient and

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how that can implicate sort of many people out there so white walls again to

Distribution

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think about publishing and think about now myself is like a curator what i think about it’s like when organizing events performances and exhibitions a

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curator or administrator can pretend that thinking about how to distribute the ideas and the materials as an

32:32

afterthought because you got the object on display you’ve got the gallery lights on but you can’t ignore distribution

32:38

when you’re sitting on boxes dozens and dozens of boxes weighted down with thousands of copies particularly after

32:44

you’ve accumulated sixty some individual titles and each has the their unsold copies until because distribution is

32:51

what makes a publication of space and how you manipulate printed matter is well known you pick it up you move it

32:58

you set it down you read it you give it away it’s a gift it claims to you as you move but no one printed copy is that

33:05

entire story so the dispersal allows for the mistreatment of the materials and

33:10

most certainly in the case of books records and printed ephemera they get lost but these published projects end up

33:16

as platforms placemats coasters doorstops headrests and shades as well perhaps they often get tossed aside

33:23

somebody marks them up somebody steals one and it’s the sly sort of tactical ways the distribution allows for very

33:30

public gestures in very quiet ways I still have connections to a personal one

33:36

the original idea the story the poem the picture and I think of it as like

33:42

allowing an institution to behave briefly for a little bit more like an intervention than an institution

33:48

and I’d like to think that that’s how I actually ended up sort of curating with like a fascination of how you distribute

33:54

these ideas to the public so in an it’s

Plastic Arts

34:00

an equation that I’m also still grappling with and I keep returning again and again to sort of pan national

34:07

publishing concerned extra sinister which are actually a sort of graphic design firm / artist group and they

34:14

wrote a couple years ago quality is merely the distribution xpect of

34:20

quantity in quantity is merely the distribution aspect of quality and I’m

34:27

still not sure how these two equations sort of fight with each other and these two positions sort of balance each other

34:32

but I knew that the crucial question is in sort of figuring out how that distribution of material appropriately

34:38

balances between quality and quantity and how you find the quantity in the

34:45

small qualities that might exist in allow different quantities to sort of exactly exist that sort of makes any

34:52

sense likely it doesn’t so for example to think through one of the ways that

34:59

they think about quality and quantity this is a project I carried with them called the plastic arts it was in three

35:06

galleries three rooms and it was 18 panels of vinyl wall text two prints in

35:12

a painting painting there’s the other print and the vinyl wall labels told one

35:21

story in the story that it told was about the process by which they made the font that this piece is made from and

35:27

the font is called meta the difference between the two and then interspersed

35:35

with that and you can sort of barely barely see it but the reason why the image sort of waivers is because they

35:42

have embedded within this description of how they made their font the same quote

35:48

three times by William James which is about plasticity and how the strength of

35:53

a form isn’t that it breaks or doesn’t break but how much material can still

35:59

hold of its own integrity as it’s breaking and like as the form sort of

36:05

shift it’s like where that shift happens that you see whether or not the material breaks if it’s a clean break and changes

36:10

into something else say if you’re kind of painting into and it breaks in half you’ve got like a bad painting on your

36:17

hands suddenly but there are other forms are a little bit more looser and allow for like some play that’s not that

36:23

something like a book might be stronger than a painting but the plasticity of it’s sort of strength is that the words

36:30

can be read out loud they can be printed they can be printed in different formats they can be exerted and it’s like the

36:37

plasticity of how that form sort of navigates its different things that shows you like a strength of the

36:42

material that’s used why they did it three times is because meta the

36:48

difference between the two is not really a font but it’s a computer program with just a series of equations and every

36:54

time they enter the equations into their or every time they enter information into this equation that they built a

37:01

different form comes out so meta the difference between the two is a font that they don’t know what it will look like when they output it and it has an

37:08

infinitely variable set of variables depending on the numbers that are entered into the equation and so they

37:16

were doing this at the same time that they were also presenting the same essay as a book and they’re presenting the

37:23

same essay in Italy as a lecture and so like they were interested in like the plastic arts and thinking of this form

37:30

is like a variable and this as it was on display in Chicago was just one version of the many versions and these paintings

37:38

and two prints were just reminders of hoping to draw people in even though

37:43

they weren’t spoken about it all in the wall text to remind people of the plastic arts as in painting photography

37:51

drawing printmaking and that they are a value

Extra Sinister

38:02

as I mentioned extra sinister is a sort of publishing concern to think about why

38:07

they are important to me and they’re in my current show I’ve worked with them on three shows now four shows is because

38:14

what I like about them is that they transform what can be plainly transformed they do books they do journals they do a website they do wall

38:21

text they make plaques a recording a broadcast metal signage neon exhibition

38:27

presentations paper ephemeral vinyl LPs all these things are formats not

38:32

artworks per se but formats and not coincidentally these formats can have a

38:39

material touch and they’re also industrial produced and or distributed and so it’s like this sort of like one

38:45

thought multiple formats multiple different types of distribution they’re

38:51

interested in whatever in whatever kind of material can offer an opportunity for an engaged and handling and formalized

38:57

release interest in that point where something in flux becomes something in public that up opportunity is always

39:05

manifested in the sort of multiple multiplication the distribution of multiple copies a book a lecture a wall

39:13

vinyl 18 panels of all vinyl all at the same time and they think about this economy of what happens when you make

39:19

public making multiple trying to explain the situation appropriately for its

39:25

different frames for its different sort of oak growths they change tone they

39:30

change style they change context but not their message and it’s that ability to

39:38

exist simultaneously and ordering disorder again and at every level of valuation in between that allows an

39:43

opportunity for the unexpected engagements maybe that sort of just brief moment and for like in that brief

39:50

moment it’s sort of exempt issues of athletics or politics outright as commonly applied to art objects it

39:57

allows the item to be judged simply as a thing and once you get into its thinness that’s all it can take to change your

40:03

perception of what you’re actually dealing with there in front of you at least I would hope and I think that’s

40:09

kind of what the skill can be a format and quality and quantity as goes out quantity equals opportunities

40:16

opportunities equal places to enact quality I also think that if you think

John Miller

40:27

about museums as being keepers of materials it’s a way in which so

40:32

institutional archives which always miss lanes sort of can be made up for because

40:38

surely somebody has saved the format in some format in some presentation to that

40:45

I think of a statement by the artist John Miller relative to the cultural value of artworks and a comment that he

40:50

made so in the course of discussing artists books quote we tend to presume

40:58

and as an artist I’m inclined to presume that the relevance of artwork should be long range if anything it should become

41:05

more relevant as time goes by and therefore qualified to be preserved but this might not be the case and quote in

41:14

as cynical as I can seem and sort of like I do think his assessment is kind

41:19

of correct as we all know there’s very few winners in the art world and there’s lots of people to get left behind and

41:25

don’t get in the Big Show’s but I would like to think that sort of attending to

41:30

sort of like the quietest of something like books or publications allows to

41:35

sort of the cast aside to not be irrelevant even if they are irrelevant to the major archives and the major

41:41

exhibitions I like to think that a Miller’s assessment that having enough physical copies out there of some point

41:48

guarantees that the ear irrelevant and the marginalized and all those others that sort of might not qualify to be

41:54

preserved at any one moment do find a space even if that space might be small compromised private uncomfortable or

42:01

imperfect they can be somewhere in a basement just waiting to be found

42:14

some video still from curing clinic I

Francis Stark

42:20

don’t know how to add room through this yet because I’m still making it up as I

42:25

go along like you could say this is an exhibition of mine that’s up now through July 28 with the ICA and why I say I’m

42:32

sort of making it up as I go along is because once exhibitions open it seems like that’s the moment when you actually

42:38

find out what they mean and I’m still learning what this exhibition means I haven’t sort of like sat on it and

42:44

decided what it is but they’ll try to do

42:50

something with it this is entering the show this is sort of what you would see

42:55

if you do that sort of naturally entering in a space and looking to the left then you would look to the right

43:03

and you would see this which is a full-scale costume by the artist Francis

43:09

stark and it’s one of three sort of sculpture outfits that she’s made that

43:14

are to her scale that she wears for performances where she discusses her addiction to online chatting in the form

43:23

of an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone the wall labels for the show

43:28

very rarely described the exhibition or the piece but they often sort of go

43:34

outside the pieces the things that I couldn’t stop thinking of and so just as an introduction I guess I’ll read the

43:40

wall label because this would be the first wall label you would read and it says Francis dark in the title of the

43:46

piece the inchoate incarnate after a drawing toward an opera but before

43:52

libretto even exists that’s the full title after a drawing because there’s a

43:59

drawing of this form toward an opera because she intended to make an opera that she’s never actually written before

44:04

libretto even exists that the bridle still somewhere in between and then

44:11

underneath it I have a quote from Roland bharath we have not talked enough about

44:16

the profoundly narcissistic and erotic value of clothes that includes all

44:21

fashions however paradoxically i would say that there is not any figure of fashion which

44:27

is erotic in itself a body which is completely covered can be deemed as erotic by society arata scism is linked

44:35

to the contrast in norms of anyone society taking off clothes is not erotic

44:41

in itself I’ve partly standard with that quote it’s a shame I should be wearing

44:47

that costume right now because it’s made out of tulle fabric and like piled wool

44:52

and it has like this delicate sort of gold stitching that keeps the whole thing together and it’s very quite like

44:58

a seductive object that just can’t help but sort of suck you in and so I thought

45:03

like to set this off like let’s think about how these things are that sort of seduces that bring us in and what these

45:09

materials that we sort of surround ourselves with our so then you looked

45:14

around on the walls an advertisement by Dexter sinister for a watch which is

45:21

right here to anybody wants to see I can show later when I ask them to be in the

45:26

show they had made this watch I said great how do we show it they said well you’re going to wear it for the entire length of the shell oh okay wasn’t

45:34

prepared to be implicated myself a video by the artist clinic sort of turned the

45:41

side a pile of clothing by well used to be toronto-based but now he’s well he

45:48

been in his pair of space but Scott relevan originally from Toronto photographer Aaron Leland polish painter

45:55

Polina Alaska and then finally there was the wall text there I’m just going to

46:03

read the main wall text because it does sort of maybe be the easiest summary I’ve found yet for the show fashion is

Fashion

46:13

an industry a seasonal cycle an economic indicator a luxury a trifle and

46:19

necessity and a symbol of class for this exhibition these possibilities are

46:26

eschewed in favor of the fact that fashion is also according to British novelist jg ballard quote a recognition

46:34

that nature has endowed us with one’s too few and that a fully sentient being should wear it’s nervous system

46:40

externally end quote and looking for the nervous system Warren externally

46:46

examples are brought together from outlandish costumes to self published magazines jewelry to sculpture

46:52

performance to painting commercials to photography video and a season’s fashion

46:57

collection the works tactically adorn the body with a distinctive set of sense

47:02

of pose the exclusive province of neither the advertisement nor the runway an adder attitude perfumed by immense

47:10

mediation unsteady social sphere and a reflection of a self don’t forget when

47:18

the word fashion is spoken the word narcissism follows close behind but don’t fret / American novelist Wayne

47:25

coastin bombs pithy reminder narcissism isn’t eat evil its ordinary it’s self

47:32

evaluations of the workplace profile pictures for social media and looking at yourself in the mirror before you leave

47:38

the house oscillating between branding self-recognition sexuality political

47:43

uniform and economic indicator our adornment always reflects a chosen position in and with society and that

47:50

position projects what we value narcissus didn’t think he was transfixed

47:55

by his own reflection in the pond but rather a beauty the likes of which he had never seen before so told time and

48:02

time again that ours is a narcissistic age how do we as fully sentient beings positively reveal or covertly enact

48:09

desires before the distorted mirror of time

Museum Time

48:17

so this exhibition came about really fast within six months which in museum

48:23

time is nothing at all I got hired and they said here’s the date for your first

48:28

show give us the checklist in six months it’s like oh okay thank you how does the

48:34

computer turn out and as I often start

48:39

territorially things I’ve always drag things along with me and I think it’s important to trust the things that you

48:44

dragged along with you and so given this quick moment I was like well what do i

48:50

do now i need a show i need an idea and i need do studio visits and a checklist fast since i read it in the 90s I’ve

48:58

been fascinated by this quote of jg ballard I’ve always liked jg ballard he’s one of like those writers that I always go to for he’ll tell me what to

49:05

do and this quote I’ve never understood a recognition that nature has endowed us

49:12

with one skin too few I can understand that and a fully sentient being should wear it’s nervous system externally it’s

49:19

like okay like sentience to like feel things more than you sort of Reason them but like nervous system externally how

49:26

you touch the world but I decided now’s the time and this is the first museum

49:31

show I had and so being someone that had always been maybe accused of doing things that were so small difficult to

49:38

deal with text heavy I decided what could be more sort of tactile than

49:43

clothing fashion pictures of people so for example you know Frances Starks

49:50

dress that she wears this collage which is actually sort of a narcissist collage

49:56

so on the one level hand is I gotta sort of figure that she’s collage out of

50:03

clothing that she used to wear and mailing that she’s received at her house and then when she cut out the form to

50:09

put on the canvas the cutout becomes the reflection that’s in the little display

50:14

there on the right I photograph from a runway show that Zoe Leonard took in the

50:20

mid 90s

Clothing

50:25

this video which is just Karen clinic having collected all of her favorite scenes of Kate Moss from various

50:32

interviews with Cake Boss this pile of clothing by Scott relevant is when he got sick of making these small scenes

50:38

that he was known for around Toronto these small collages he decided to take the paper that he always used to make

50:46

those collages and make three sets of outfits that were similar to the clothes that he wore every day and sort of use

50:52

that as a sort of getting out of that artwork and so this is sort of like him literally sort of leaving his artwork as

50:57

outfits behind the three photographs are artists Erin Leyland who spent nights as

51:07

a mannequin in a store window and had hid a camera with a shutter release in the window and when people would

51:12

recognize that she was a person to not a mannequin would take the picture right as like they were caught some window

51:18

shopping and then that’s one of a couple paintings that I had by paulina Alaska that she made of these fashion tear

51:24

sheets that the polish government circulated as ways of trying to stem the

51:31

side the tide of a Western fashion coming into communist Poland and there were communists approved fashions to

51:38

wear and then what I saw sort of like one of the first things I knew I was

51:44

going to do in the show when I had this idea my first thought was like fashion fashion designers but then my second

51:50

thought was like well all of my important curatorial friends were telling me fashion stupid and dumb cheap

51:56

and exclusive and just a trifle why are you interested in this and I thought

52:02

like well we’re not sitting here at the coffee shop naked so there’s something somehow we’ve decided these clothes that

52:09

we’ve bought and somehow they mean something to us so how can I sort of circumnavigate the sort of desire to

52:15

just quickly sort of slough off fashion as being important and I decided to look for things that might be as impractical

52:21

or as inventive is what we would consider halt runway designs I can’t be worn every day but maybe that were worn

52:28

everyday or were meant for life so for example these are five of 32 masks that

52:34

remain from 80s rapper and graffiti artist in New York REM LZ who had been friends with

52:42

Basquiat and came up in sort of same time rambles they slowly got more and more sore a paranoid stopped going out

52:48

and he made all of these identities for himself and he saw himself is not one identity but 32 identities and when he

52:56

gave interviews when he was photographed he would still perform on stage with bands he would choose which identities

53:02

were going to speak that night and those are the identities that would appear and they all had different characteristics

53:08

different songs different superpowers different relationships to like some of them were his dark side some of them

53:14

were his good side some were simply the transcribers for the middle so there’s I

53:19

mean not that it really matters but those record wrecks on the left then Reaper Grimm wind vane the insane and

53:29

then chimer and so I brought these out because they’re made from Tonka trucks

53:35

Tupperware bottle caps old clothes plastic that he modeled himself other

53:40

masks and they’re like these large collages like sort of really quite

53:46

intricate and these were worn everyday by him like four he died in 2010 and so

53:52

from 85 to 2010 every day he wore these things he was never seen without one of these outfits and they weren’t actually

53:58

sort of fantastical despite the fact that they might look impractical or something like they were part of his

54:05

life and what his life was about and

Mirrors

54:10

there was also of course like a mirror photograph by Zoe Leonard and I did try

54:17

to sort of develop the show is sort of like stupid little narratives so you’d see sort of clothes and their proper state clothes on the floor the mirror

54:24

that maybe you would want to check yourself in as you put the clothes on to think through the ways look like the show could sort of come together in

54:30

artworks while not crafting them into a narrative or making them have different theories than they didn’t have in and of

54:36

themselves they could start to think of like a way that clothing is used and so it comes around in a space sort of like

54:45

the main part of the gallery just after the r-mo Z so for example there was a

54:50

self-published magazine by Bernadette corporation that was the first thing and that you saw we went in which is a

54:56

fashion magazine they ran for three years and that we also made available on an iPad so that people could actually

55:02

read these rare books and I’m sort of what I think it was like a dandy umbrella because it’s a cheap Street

55:10

side umbrella the artist sad you can’t really see it but has sequined the umbrella by my sewing sequence into the

55:17

entire surface and then edit a top hat so you look good in the rain two

55:23

photographs by the author hilton halls another painting by pauline eliska sort

55:29

of sleeping bag envelope and then a fashion line done by the artist Seth price in collaboration with a fashion

55:35

designer tim hamilton two canvases which are actually textiles that were produced

55:40

by an artist Carissa Rodriguez in the same sort of factory outside and trip

55:47

that makes fabrics for designers like margiela and Ralph Simmons and Reyes

55:52

high-end people people t-shirt by Linda

55:57

Bengal is that we’ll get into cuz it’s a little complicated and then to collages by Belgian on me von Croy Colvin that

56:04

use fashion images

56:10

another shot of that seems you can see the sort of paulina painting a little bit maybe clearer sort of my guy in a

56:15

sort of ski glasses and a sort of knitted sweater and one thing that I

56:23

definitely wanted for the show was subscribed to have all the different ways that we sort of consumed fashion to be a part of the show so there are

56:30

photographs there are advertisements there are videos actual clothes accessories magazines paintings

56:39

snapshots as well as I composed photos like it was all meant sort of come

56:45

together and then one thing I did do as well as have something like this which

56:50

is genesis breyer p-orridge for people who don’t know genesis breyer p-orridge was a performance artist then a male

56:57

artist who sort of mailed his materials out to the world then he formed a group throbbing gristle which is considered

57:03

the first industrial electronic group in the world in the mid 70s and then has

57:12

gone on to form like several groups after that and has recently been sort of modifying he now requires that he’s

57:20

referred to as she because he’s not becoming he’s not having simple gender

57:26

surgery to become a woman but his wife who sadly died recently they were both

57:31

going under modification to become in between to become both male and female together like they both wanted to meet

57:38

in the middle and being penned erogenous and so for him for her now him now her

57:44

what I found interesting was like this was like not just fashion fashions always been important to Genesis Genesis

57:51

has always attended to like the accouterments that are on the body but like the skin itself becomes something

57:56

that sort of broad cats broadcasts and gets used and so in that scope this display of 33 items in a scarf is not

58:04

actually items of artwork that Genesis makes who does make a lot of artwork but our personal jewelry and personal rings

58:12

and earrings and necklaces and belts that Genesis wears on a day-to-day basis and it’s actually the stuff that’s been

58:18

made for genesis by followers by herself one of the members of the bat

58:26

of Genesis man does not like silversmith and so they make their own jewelry and

58:31

so it’s all the things that Genesis actually uses to sort of be Genesis and to be this form other displays

58:45

this was maybe a little thing and of course i sadly don’t have videos to share because the artists temperament

58:52

non-story but there were commercials in the video room by a group in his

58:58

invented and i was interested in having commercials made by them for two reasons a because it is in Vanunu’s a group were

59:06

known as art photographers in the early 90s gave themselves over to the fashion world and have basically become the

59:12

fashion photographers for the fashion world now working for all the magazines but then have started making video

59:20

commercials now that they’re sort of have such a sort of studio behind them and so I was fascinated like they’re no

59:26

longer artists you on one level you could say but having sort of given themselves over and so I had two

59:32

commercials that they did for Yves Saint Laurent and then a commercial they did for Vogue Paris and so I felt like if

59:39

you’re going to do fashion you can’t avoid branding you shouldn’t be sort of afraid to be branded yourself or to so to get messy with what logos me but I

59:47

was also going to get messy with logos i was going to pair that as I did here with again two masks that are by an

59:55

Egyptian artists in the dare acidic who makes all of the stage accoutrements

1:00:00

we’re not all anymore but many of the stage accoutrements for a Hungarian black metal vocalist a tilaka char and

1:00:08

so these are items that are sort of go out and they’re usually on tour with the band and only because the band’s not

1:00:14

touring for a year is why sort of Attila brought them back to brought them to the States for me to show and so these are

1:00:21

masks that are made for their it airs and then this fleshy thing thats hanging is a sort of cast resin logo of the band

1:00:29

but they always use on stage and so I sort of have like the sort of degraded logo with the sort of gloss logos behind

1:00:36

it the logo that’s you know carted around and used a sort of a piece of meat again it’s like the more sort of

1:00:42

ephemeral and just out there the videos are great i mannequin trembling and

1:00:49

there was a series of photographs by a writer Hilton all’s who’s written a lot about style

1:00:55

and one reason why i like curating chose to is because i can have an excuse to go

1:01:01

to hilton halls and say you’ve written about style I respect you what can you tell me about styles I’m about to do the

1:01:06

show what will I do wrong and Hilton can respond and say well for 20 years I’ve

1:01:11

made photographs did you know this i said no i didn’t know this and so for the second time ever he’s showing

1:01:19

photographs in his like 25 year like professional history and we’re sort of

1:01:25

pulling out some photographs than he did collages by another artist Wardell milan and then similarly a sort of book and

1:01:32

series of portraits by an artist john miller or a rosenberg and polina elska

1:01:37

and just as a i know i’m getting to the end here but i want to say i am going to

1:01:43

the end holy cow well maybe i’ll end

1:01:49

with that so for example this is another case like this is a book that we produced for the show it’s um when I

1:01:54

talked to the artist John Miller he said I don’t know why you’re asking me to be in the show I’m not interested in

1:02:00

fashion and I said well you’re you’ve done sculptures with people the people were close don’t you think that’s

1:02:06

something he’s like I don’t think so so I left the studio visit a little dejected and then he sent me an email

1:02:12

the next day and he’s like by the way did I mention that myself and aura his wife ten years ago designed children’s

1:02:21

fashion do and don’t book with our daughter and allowed her to choose her fashion rules and the publisher declined

1:02:28

to print the book I was like funny enough John no you didn’t mention that book and even though I didn’t know it

1:02:33

that’s why I’m I guess that’s why I’m here I sensed that something was there and so it was also like an enjoyable

1:02:39

thing to sort of bring out these works sort of people are sort of not known for and that haven’t sort of previously

1:02:45

exhibited but I want to you can’t really see it

1:02:51

here this I picture for shoes that hilton took for himself another close-up

1:02:59

of briar purchase stuff then there’s a large installation by a Serbian artist

1:03:05

of shoes maybe this will be in a cup of proper image for this quote and this is

1:03:11

a text that hilton roped and that’s presented in the show as if it’s a piece and I think it summarizes pretty much

1:03:19

what I always hope for to get to lose and shows and one reason why the show

1:03:26

strong to me it’s a little confusing but hopefully it’ll pay out moments after

1:03:37

the memorial they stepped out into less complicated air it was warm for an early winter day the atmosphere was gray and

1:03:44

humid and still despite the traffic sounds and the people movement beyond

1:03:49

clutching his friends hands the man said I’m glad you were there they looked at

1:03:55

one another one man was chewing gum and the one who wasn’t long for some of his

1:04:01

own they decided to cross the avenue to get a stick but before that the man who

1:04:07

wasn’t chewing gum was stopped by another man he was a tall and brown as

1:04:12

the gum Lewis one and he said excuse me but aren’t you blank the man without gum

1:04:19

nodded his interlocutor continued you may not remember me but I’m blank we met

1:04:27

many years ago through a third like it was maybe 20 years ago and you were

1:04:33

wearing the same shoes you’re wearing now and I just have to say how much I liked them and what you do the man

1:04:41

without gum but with the shoes looked down at them they were saddle shoes the

1:04:47

first saddle shoes he had ever bought for himself and he knew the man who complimented him was referring to his

1:04:53

previous pair of saddle shoes saddle shoes that were a gift from a friend looking back as he looked at the man who

1:05:00

admired them he remembered how after his friend had presented him with the saddle shoes he sat at another desk

1:05:07

at the newspaper they both worked out then and polished them for him such was

1:05:12

the work in the emotion of that day years later the backs of those shoes broke down and as he crossed eighth

1:05:19

Avenue one day the o is grateful and chai recipient of his friends largesse in saddle shoes saw a variation of those

1:05:26

same saddle shoes in a shop window and put them out of his mind almost at once he could not replace the memory of his

1:05:32

friend slowly rubbing oil into those first pair of shoes ever despite the fact that they hadn’t seen this friend

1:05:38

for many years he hadn’t seen this friend for many years he went to an organic food shop and he thought about

1:05:45

the shoes they would not leave him alone what was he supposed to do with his

1:05:50

memory of love and care in the necessity of new shoes would he have to buy his own shoes forever when did buying new

1:05:58

shoes why did buying new shields feels all he was cheating on the old shoes his friend the man who bought him

1:06:05

the first pair of saddle shoes was sacred and yet he needed new shoes shoes

1:06:11

that reminded him of his friend and yet carried him into the future so he bought

1:06:16

the new saddle shoes and as he crossed the Avenue right now in search of his stick of gum he realized that the person

1:06:22

he and his present friend had just memorialized was one of the few people who knew something of his old saddle

1:06:28

shoes and already that day hope and death stuck to the shoes of his new pair just like gum I think that’s as good of

1:06:38

an end as any I would come up with I have no idea how to answer questions I

1:06:46

know I didn’t really get into the Whitney that big beast that amount

1:06:57

Thanks that was very interesting I’m Miriam Kaufman and I don’t actually have

1:07:03

a question but I want other people to so I thought I’d get up and say something and when I thought I would get up and

1:07:08

say is that what I was knitting and designing as we talked as you talked is

1:07:17

part of that plasticity you’re talking about so there’s now going to be a piece of fashion designed and knit while you

1:07:26

were discussing curating this this thing

1:07:32

about that’s kind of about fashion mm-hmm so that’s I mean that’s good i’m

1:07:38

a that’s exactly what i’m thinking about and that’s I mean I guess like in a larger sense i do think i mean like this

1:07:45

of course I shuffle pieces of paper so i get them lost but like the story of all’s I mean why it seemed like sort of

1:07:51

an ending point it’s like I like you know like an object has two things stuck to that one person knows half the story

1:07:57

another one sees it from another story no I guess we forget we always get hung

1:08:03

up about the artists intention and the artists desire and the artists and I think like objects or strange things

1:08:08

when they’re released into the world and I’m interested in trying to do something

1:08:14

with the very complex things that objects do when they leave an artist studio or a production studio or even

1:08:20

when you buy a bottle of water where you carry it or where it’s not appropriate to carry it to and it’s I mean maybe

1:08:27

I’ll just use this as a thing like a letter that I’ve another letter that I’ve been thinking about recently and

1:08:34

this is actually something I am thinking about in terms the Whitney is a letter by an artist Jimmy Durham who for those

1:08:42

who don’t know as a Native American artist who refuses to step foot in

1:08:49

America anymore for various political and sort of social reasons and has lived throughout Europe decades now and he

1:08:56

wrote and everything Jimmy does artwork so he wrote a letter which is just a letter to a friend but also been

1:09:03

shown as a work of art once after he sent it to the front and the letter says

1:09:09

simply the fact that we have so few position possessions give us a gives us

1:09:16

a kind of terrible freedom same kind of freedom that any other animal has and maybe that is why we surround ourselves

1:09:23

with hundreds of things we pretend that we own them and we pretend that we can hide in them everything in the world has

1:09:32

a kind of integrity each metal like iron for example has its distinct qualities and it’s always true to itself dogs

1:09:41

might be loyal friends to humans but they have integrity to themselves that being true what can we say that we

1:09:47

actually own if iron owns iron and each dog owns itself we own just our bodies

1:09:54

if one feels to need to make a sacrifice them the soul proper offering is one’s

1:09:59

body because you have nothing to give with yourself and I said I think it’s

1:10:05

sort of like a beautiful way of sort of thinking about how to also be a generous viewer Genesis generous citizen a

1:10:12

generous thing hi Catherine rambha I

1:10:19

really enjoyed your talk I felt very stimulating so my question is very simple but it’s just a sort of prompt to

1:10:25

hear more ideas I’m just wondering if you had unlimited support and limited

1:10:31

finances you know what would be that ideal show that you would curate now or

1:10:38

what’s that idea that you think oh I would love to do that I’m from the

1:10:45

Midwest and I’m sort of a like a ruined a Lutheran as long as so I don’t think

1:10:50

there’s any six days unlimited resources and I’ve never took cotton that’s not that’s not something I’m prepared to

1:10:56

like even conceptualize but maybe I

1:11:03

would answer that by saying that is

1:11:08

where I come from so I guess I kind of think what I actually find is the most interesting thing to do it like I love

1:11:14

my job I’ve loved my jobs in the past I mean there’s been times I’ve moved on from various fiscal or personal reasons

1:11:21

but I’ve loved them all in different ways and found ways to engage myself in them and I think it’s less a question by

1:11:27

thinking like what the dream position is and it’s more I find it’s always fascinating to think through limitations

1:11:34

and so even like with this show that i just did at the ica which is huge and the second largest budget I’ve ever had

1:11:41

to work with for an exhibition and the only other time I’ve had a larger budget was when I was working on someone else’s

1:11:47

exhibition not my own it’s like

1:11:52

fascinating to like look at the space to look at what you have to look at your audience to look at the what you can

1:11:59

reach and figure out how to make up the richest experience and those are

1:12:05

actually the things that not to sound like easy or something but that actually

1:12:10

dreams to me so yeah I would love to

1:12:15

have been given the Whitney Biennial by myself but I mean but I love that building and I’m happy just to be

1:12:21

working with a floor about it happy to just be thinking about one third of it because I love that building so much in

1:12:27

the Whitney’s moving from that building and I can’t believe that I’m one of three people that gets to have a statement of how they leave that

1:12:34

building one thing I’m am working on right now which is something I’ve wanted to work

1:12:39

for do for about eight years this was an artist writer Christopher Knowles who’s

1:12:47

I should know this experts I think he’s 57 yeah he’s autistic and so he’s never

1:12:56

quite had a career and he obviously doesn’t sort of professionalize himself as a way of like actually dealing with galleries himself and museums himself he

1:13:04

has family that have always taken care of him he’s done typing’s of poetry and

1:13:10

text he’s done audio pieces videos theater pieces paintings drawings and

1:13:16

through his career he’s often collaborated with Robert Wilson and the fact like the Opera Theater person and

1:13:24

like Barbara Wilson like half of Robert Wilson’s pieces in the 70s you know the entire libretto or half into librettos

1:13:30

by Christopher Knowles and I’m just excited to actually have a space that’s large enough and you know it has like

1:13:37

the climate control into the trains and the stuff to finally sort of deal with

1:13:42

this work and get this work as a survey and not just sounds like the little trinkets they’ve been here and there the

1:13:48

things have been given to people and the things that have been shared with people but I’m actually happy to sort of be pulling that together and so and that’ll

1:13:57

happen and there’ll be another dream job that have or another dream thing that occurs to me while I’m working on that

1:14:02

one it’s like you know some of the smallest books that I’ve done with two

1:14:07

thousand dollars have been my favorite projects it’s not about the dreams about

1:14:14

what you do with the situation and how you meet the artist in how you make that stuff sort of physically matter

1:14:27

so I have a question speaking of limitations and vitrines I would like to

1:14:35

have your thoughts on what happens to distribution when it ends if it does by

1:14:43

artists books in art ephemera entering a public collection well that’s

1:14:52

complicated someone level one thing acceptable unless there’s only one example of something left i would say

1:14:58

the distribution doesn’t really end it just might end locally for that one particular object is at that point i

1:15:06

mean for example i have a collection of about a thousand artists books that i didn’t intend to start collecting but i

1:15:12

just started collecting because i would be used bookstores and find things for twenty bucks that were actually

1:15:18

thousand-dollar books that were just like in the wrong place in the wrong state of the united states that were in

1:15:24

the wrong book store in the wrong town and who knows how they got there but and then I’d sort of give them a different

1:15:31

life so but i would say that um like for

1:15:38

example one reason why like this little

1:15:44

image of like these three magazines these magazines like you find them online for like six hundred dollars each I wanted them in the show because i

1:15:51

thought they’re the one of the best projects that artist group has ever done this fashion magazine that they ran but

1:15:59

i didn’t want them just in a train so we had an ipad we have an ipad in the lobby that has them as ebooks available and so

1:16:07

I think you know books are pretty onion

1:16:12

topping is dumb in the wrong way but books are pretty dumb objects you like a painting can be up on the wall and

1:16:18

untouched and do its job like a book and of attorney doesn’t do much a book in at library not being accessed doesn’t do

1:16:25

much and so I think the trick is once

1:16:31

the distribution has gotten them into these public institutions how do the public institutions deal with that how do they make them public in the

1:16:38

70s I mean I know that ms I know the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s library and it used to collect two

1:16:44

copies of artists books and it would drill a hole in one so they could hang it in the downward for people to put

1:16:50

through and then have one in the library you like Christine exact and that’s how

1:16:56

they dealt it at that time there’s a fantastic show of Russian avant-garde books at MoMA maybe it was right before

1:17:03

MoMA in New York moved and in that exhibition they had everything in

1:17:09

betweens but then every like four of the trains they had computer stations with

1:17:15

books from those vitrines digitized so that you could sort of flip through them and so I think you know flipping through

1:17:22

a computer screen isn’t the same thing as having the book in your hands particularly when someone has made something that might use the paper stack

1:17:29

or might use the ink quality and embossing and quality in it but these

1:17:34

are ways that they can actually be made available I mean lots of museums are sitting on poster projects that they

1:17:39

never put on display from conceptual art even though they were considered artworks by the artists so I think less

1:17:48

about the objects and it’s more about the curator then what the peculiar is being inventive enough to make them

1:17:57

somehow my name is Julian Brown I have a

1:18:02

question about restrictions I’d like to go back to question the question before the last one everybody has to work with

1:18:09

restrictions of one sort or another and the question is for a curator doing work

1:18:15

work such as such as you’re doing which restrictions give you the likely to lead

1:18:22

to the most creative solutions that restrictions of money or restrictions of

1:18:27

space personal limitations or perhaps ethnic restrictions there’s a whole lot

1:18:34

of restrictions which of those restrictions is most likely to lead to a very creative result I think as a

1:18:41

curator alive who would say the financial restrictions are the most eating nutritious or nutritious I guess

1:18:53

the restrictions have become maybe the most engaging are like the ones that you just make for yourself I think as long

1:19:01

as you don’t turn them into rules of behavior so for example one of the

1:19:09

things I did decide with this show was that it was going to be all figurative work somehow like the figure might be

1:19:15

loosely alluded to but everything and it was going to be a person be something

1:19:20

that goes on a person be something that drapes a person be something that’s used by a person like as a I can act like an

1:19:27

actual tool or something I’ve usually avoided figurative work than everything

1:19:33

in my power to avoid figurative work I very rarely worked with photographers and so there were just like things I was

1:19:40

like okay the new limitation is like you have to do this you can’t stop looking for things that interest you until you

1:19:48

actually get into that space so like with a show like this there’s lots of artists that have worked with the

1:19:54

industry of fashion and like how it’s actually distributed and how its produced all the sort of things that I

1:20:00

usually geeked about and I was like none of that works going to be in the show it’s going to be all things that are

1:20:06

your clothing or depict clothing or the depict bodies or the depict people doing claims and so it was

1:20:14

like a weird limitation that I just made for myself and I was like I have to

1:20:19

stick to it no matter what I’m interested in everything has to somehow you know come into this little sort of

1:20:25

grouping I think like those on the restriction because like you know what

1:20:30

happens I think in the best situations is that you’re a smart enough worker but

1:20:36

you come to the job with the limitations and then you realize in your mind what

1:20:41

those limitations let loose and you know how to play with them select the

1:20:47

limitation that you build from yourself from the actual real situation is what becomes sorry engagement

1:20:57

hi my name is Christine Connelly I really enjoyed what you’ve had to say

1:21:02

about curating in relationship to this notion of the conversation with the

1:21:08

artist which of course is what keeps a lot of curators going and I think you’ve

1:21:14

partially answered my or anticipated my question when you talked about ways of looking at books by having them

1:21:21

available digitally I wonder if you have other thoughts on how to use technologies in ways that might extend

1:21:29

that experience of the conversation with the artist and the other half of that

1:21:36

question I suppose is do you see the status of printed objects books and so

1:21:43

on shifting you know given that we are increasingly into a you know paperless

1:21:50

digital mode of communication yeah it’s

1:21:58

too much is in the first ones like I should preface and say don’t be fooled

1:22:03

by this thing that’s in front of me like I’m practically a Luddite I don’t really know I’m not very good with digital

1:22:11

formats at all I can barely work microsoft word barely and all the time

1:22:19

people are going this is what it can do in like oh look at that it merged documents so I yeah I tend to rely on I

1:22:29

guess you could say like I try to engage myself with artists who are interested in these questions or in organizations

1:22:35

that are interested in it so I rely on I mean most of the things I’ve curated

1:22:40

I’ve actually been collaborations with other people or when you work on an artist’s commission you’re basically

1:22:46

collaborating the artist what’s going to happen and so I’ve been involved in radio plays and

1:22:53

things and come some film shoots and so I guess I try to like try to be smart

1:23:00

enough to ask like the dumb questions that makes the person that actually knows how to do this stuff respond a

1:23:06

little bit better so I don’t personally have thoughts about like digitizing that

1:23:12

much and how to use it works like I barely read online I barely have a online existence really it’s a truly

1:23:19

online experience or advanced experience in terms of paper I kind of feel like

1:23:27

you know years ago CDs killed vinyl

1:23:32

records and then in terms of like the music geek or the music buying community

1:23:38

it might be smaller than it used to be but vinyl records for moni many record labels now out sell the CDs which you

1:23:45

can just get like on iTunes or get on something like online amazon or you just buy the tracks that you want so the

1:23:52

vinyl has come forward for the people that the object matters geo Jeff comes

1:23:57

back and I think that’s I mean it’s sad the same book stores closing and it’s sad to see things like that happening

1:24:04

but I think books aren’t going anywhere and like the new the for example at the

1:24:10

new york artist book fair and that’s held every year ps1 it increases its

1:24:17

attendance by about a third every year and so in last year i actually went and

1:24:24

only stayed there for an hour because it was so hot and so crammed i was just i know a lot of these publishers I’m just

1:24:30

coming back you know I’m not even trying to fight this crowd and so I think it might be smaller and

1:24:38

you like obviously like there’s like the hiccups that happen when like an industry is made at this scale and has

1:24:44

to go to a different scale as soundly going to be winners losers things at

1:24:50

home on the wayside but and I also think you know books to think about formats

1:24:58

formats weren’t always the most important the format of something wasn’t always what its actual existence was

1:25:05

like I have to admit I’m not too sad about the death of newspapers because I

1:25:12

feel like you know at one point printed piece of paper was the best way to get

1:25:17

information about what was happening at that moment out like it was cheap it was cheap paper it was cheaply produced it

1:25:24

could appear the next day but now there’s better ways for that news to actually now of course that doesn’t mean

1:25:32

that content is always so good at the same time but I think like so it makes

1:25:37

sense that newspapers would die different books have different reasons for living like a novel can be right on

1:25:43

the Kindle but most art books can’t be right on a Kindle but some art book publishers have been releasing picture

1:25:50

books and if you want the book that has the good reproductions you buy the book and if you buy the e-book version it

1:25:55

might have links to videos and links to transcripts and links to other things

1:26:01

that can sort of make the in like this information that’s within a richer and

1:26:06

so they find the waste for their objects to have these dual alikes it’s like I think it’s being important to that sort

1:26:13

of format this is I mean books are really going to go anywhere just too

1:26:19

many people who put them on their shows and his gifts and handing over like a kindle

1:26:24

doesn’t always feel you know good that’s a gift you can’t inscribe it you can’t

1:26:30

least not yeah um my name is Mary Smith

1:26:35

and the other day I listened to a historian give a lecture called the deep

1:26:41

history of people and things and one of the stories he told was about the

1:26:46

Franklin expedition that went up to the Arctic and of course it was a tragic end

1:26:53

to it but as they’ve discovered people who are there were some members of the

1:26:59

crew that tried to head away and look look for a way to save themselves and

1:27:06

they took things with them and I just thought it was interesting since we’ve talked a little bit about books that one

1:27:14

of the people took with him a copy of the novel The Vicar of Wakefield which

1:27:21

was very popular at that particular time but the idea that he would have taken

1:27:27

this book which would perhaps have had no real use to save his life took it

1:27:33

with him and years and years later it was discovered by people of course it

1:27:40

was frozen into the tundra so it was perfectly preserved I mean it’s why i’m

1:27:48

in art like who could explain these objects or why they attract you know us but they don’t really do anything we

1:27:55

can’t use them they obviously use them for something obviously it’s just not

1:28:00

typical useful again hi I’m Rebecca Cowan there’s been a lot of talk about

1:28:08

artists books at this talk and I just wanted to tell everyone that there is an

1:28:13

exceptional exhibition in Douglas library of artists books by book artists

1:28:21

in Eastern Ontario so if you want to head across the street you’ll get a

1:28:27

chance to see some of this stuff great okay last

1:28:35

chance burning question thanks very much

1:28:41

thank you

1:28:48

you

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