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"Delirium in art Exhibitions."
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Delirious : art at the limits of reason, 1950-1980
Addressing the maniacal, eccentric, and disorienting in artworks made between 1950 and 1980, Delirious situates a fascination with the absurd and irrational within the context of the violence and brutality witnessed during World War II as well as the rapid expansion of industrial capitalism in the 1950s. Skepticism of science and technology--along with fear of its capability to promote mass destruction--developed into a distrust of rationalism, which in the arts had the paradoxical result of extracting irrational effects from rational means.
Book
Introduction I
One phrase, the art world, appears throughout this book with great frequency and for two reasons above all. First, it designates a field of cultural practice and, second, it delimits my chosen area of critical enquiry. Most often the expression is used in commonsensical way, appearing with adjectives such as “contemporary,” “mainstream,” “institutional,” or “elite” preceding it. It was not until after my early essays were completed that I further qualified whatthe art worldactually means analytically. In 2007 I wrote: “By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials,
Book Chapter
Delirium and Resistance After the Social Turn
In just a few short years, the emerging field of social practice has gained a considerable following thanks to the way it successfully links an ever-expanding definition of visual art to a broad array of disciplines and procedures, including sustainable design, urban studies, environmental research, performance art and community advocacy, but also such commonplace activities as walking, talking and even cooking.³ Not just another cultural field or artistic genre, social practice is evolving into a comprehensive sphere of life encompassing over a half dozen academic programs, concentrations, or minors at the graduate and undergraduate levels already dedicated to turning out
Book Chapter
Let’s Do it Again Comrades, Let’s Occupy the Museum
There is an art world haunting the specter of the Occupy movement. It’s January 14, 2012. Gathered on the second floor of a café near MoMA is a cohort of conspirators known as Occupy Museums. They are stitching together a public art intervention plotted in a few simple directions: split up and enter MoMA individually … reconvene on the second floor within the Diego Rivera exhibition … point out to those present that the radical Mexican artist would have been opposed to his work being on display in such a bulwark of capitalism … initiate a General Assembly and discussion
Book Chapter
Dark Matter
What does one make of a conference entitled Marxism and Visual Arts Now (MAVAN), in which examples of contemporary visual art were all but absent and the few speakers who did address recent artistic practices hardly strayed from citing works and practices not already ensconced within the institutional art world? One possible explanation for this conspicuous absence is the understandable resignation that the progressive scholar or artist experiences when confronting a world dominated, almost without exception, by images of a triumphant, global capitalism. This gloom is unintentionally compounded by the MAVAN conference itself, in so far as it concentrates knowledge
Book Chapter
Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy
Today, the socially committed artist, writer, curator or administrator must face one very unpalatable fact—large, basically conservative institutions, including museums and universities, eventually charm even their most defiant critics and radical apostates. If the end of the Cold War (and of Modernism) has brought a new level of inclusiveness to these cultural institutions, what has become of the once defiant notion of a counter culture? Writing as a heretic, I believe that while institutional power is certainly no phantom, the “institutional function” (to rework a term borrowed from Michel Foucault’s essay “What Is an Author?”) is seldom precisely directed.
Book Chapter
On the Maidan Uprising and Imaginary Archive, Kiev
With a sharp tug the soot-covered tire slides free from a pile stacked over my head. Then another. And another. Soon I have 15 tires loosened. It’s April 22, 2014 and, along with local curator Larissa Babij, I am standing on the battle-charred northeast corner of Kiev’s Independence Square known locally as the Maidan (square). Only a few months earlier the state’s special military units and riot police confronted an assortment of self-organized militias and ordinary citizens here as they attempted, and ultimately succeeded, in ousting their corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych from office. Throughout the battle DIY barricades appeared across
Book Chapter
The death of art criticism and the rise of the art fair
The numbers, though, are just a small part of the equation. can be attributed not only to the popularity of the public spectacle as preferred experience, but also to the limitations of art criticism itself, its reach and the expansion of this thing called networking. [...]the art fair seeks to replace the curator with someone better, the ultimate salesman. Because of the drive for sales, most art critics have no place in art fairs because they do not buy art at all.
Newspaper Article
THE YEAR IN PERFORMANCE
Immersed in songs so extraordinary, I wanted a form that could rise to the occasion of telling the whole story. 3 The riotous and reinvigorating exhibition “Attention Line” (organized by Artists Space and Andrew Lampert) celebrated a motley selection of performers, artists, filmmakers, and writers who have modeled modes of resistance—to power, to capital, to any and all systems that dull art into decoration for wealthy walls. From Johanna Went’s and Tom Murrin’s “trash” theatrics to Circus Amok’s spectacularly queer pageantry; from Vaginal Davis’s outing of the erotics in American violence and the violence in American erotics to Ed Bereal’s deployment of satire as a Trojan horse for information otherwise suppressed in the media, these histories offer much needed lessons in forward thinking. 4 The great fashion editor Diana Vreeland once declared that “the eye has to travel,” and the exhibition “Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle” (Museum of Arts and Design, through February 19) would have given hers a run for its money. Since the late ’90s, the virtuoso artist-designer Matthew Flower (aka Machine Dazzle) has made his way as the great couturier for the downtown club and cabaret scenes, dressing the likes of performers Justin Vivian Bond and Taylor Mac. Flower transforms the stuff of the world—bullets, cellophane, Ping-Pong balls, cassette tapes, potato-chip bags, pages from gay porn mags—into sumptuous, sculptural, logic-defying garments that look like they could have been made by Charles James if he’d costumed the Cockettes. Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (Performing Garage) is performer Eric Berryman’s interpretation of select toasts recorded for an album of the same title, released by Rounder Records in 1976.
Magazine Article