Sarah Hromack

E-Books and the Museum Machine →

This isn’t a ploy to see how many times I can jam the word “museum” into a headline in a given day! It’s link to a field report on this year’s Museums and the Web conference that I wrote for for Triple Canopy!

People don’t read in museums.

— 

To be fair, Benjamin H. D. Buchloch didn’t aim this flip dismissal toward the general museum-going public at Sunday’s U.S. premiere of The Forgotten Space, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s documentary on the so-called containerization of global capitalism-at-sea. More precisely, his frustrated response was directed at the fact that Sekula, longtime photographer and documentarian of late capitalism, has yet to see a major exhibition of his work in a U.S. museum. Buchloh attributed this in part to the fact that well, yeah, people don’t read in museums and Sekula’s photographs are sometimes accompanied by long, didactic texts (i.e. they make actual, measurable demands of the viewer-reader’s time and intellect).

I won’t lie: sitting still in the Cooper Union auditorium for the film’s entire one-hundred-and-twelve minute run time (plus the attendant post-screening discussion with Buchloh, David Harvey, and Sekula, patched in via Skype) felt like nothing less than an actual, measurable demand of many things—mainly, the allergy attack that I actively battled for a good, solid ninety of those minutes.

Things that make demands—art, ideas, people—are hard to market, and Buchloh’s most obvious concern was that this film be seen at all, given Sekula’s demonstrated disdain for commercial culture. As Sekula noted his film’s rejection from the Sundance Film Festival, I leaned in toward my old friend Ben, a career academic and longtime writer on the artist’s work who regards my engagement with the Internet as a source of mild amusement. “I have the answer,” I whispered. “Tumblr.”

We locked eyes. His blues went blank. I was vindicated.

Coming soon: Art Micro-Patronage is the brainchild of San Francisco friends Eleanor Hanson Wise and Oliver Wise, founders of art subscription service The Present Group. Art-Micropatronage is described as “an experimental online exhibition space featuring monthly curated shows of digital, new media, and intermedia work. As visitors navigate through the exhibitions, they will be encouraged to become micro-patrons of the arts, associating their appreciation of the works with small monetary values. Only patrons will be able to view the exhibitions once the show is over and they will receive a link and image as recognition for their generosity.”

This project poses a lot of possibility as a means of engaging with the still-developing realm of online micro-patronage; it is also a distinct consideration of online curatorial practice, too, as AMP backs proposals for web-based projects with curatorial stipends and development funds. (Interested parties should sign up on the website for more information on the curatorial program—the parameters of which, I might add, are wonderfully open.)

Finally, it’s really great to see Eleanor and Oliver work toward launching AMP, as I’ve been continually heartened by the agile quality of their projects since The Present Group came online in 2006. TPG has grown and changed over the years, employing the Web in various ways—including their own Web hosting service—as a means of supporting artists. The methods and metrics of success for this project aren’t entirely unclear, which makes it even more compelling from an experimental standpoint.

Never, ever underestimate Bay Area Internet, folks.

A Midnight Bit on the History of the Book-as-Tactile-Experience:

Up late as ever, working on a series of interview questions about electronic book publishing and thinking about the tactile differences between various publications, from artists’ book to the iPad. A conceptual predecessor to e-book controversy-to-come, Marcel Duchamp’s Please touch (Prière de toucher) was designed for the cover of Le Surréalisme in 1947, the catalogue that accompanied the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, an exhibition organized by Duchamp and André Breton at the Maeght Gallery in Paris. As legend (and also, the National Gallery of Australia’s website) has it:

“Duchamp collaborated with Italian-born painter Enrico Donati on the design and production of the catalogue cover. Donati, based in New York City at the time, purchased 999 pre-fabricated foam and rubber breasts, otherwise known as ‘falsies’, from a warehouse in Brooklyn. Once in Paris, he and Duchamp undertook the protracted task of hand painting each readymade to more naturally resemble the female anatomy. Discussing the creative process, Donati recalled a conversation between himself and Duchamp: ’I remarked that I had never thought I would get tired of handling so many breasts, and Marcel said, ‘Maybe that’s the whole idea’. Maria Martins, with whom Duchamp was having an intimate affair, is said to have modeled for the work. The completed breasts were adhered to a circular piece of black velvet and affixed to the cardboard slip-cover of the catalogue.”

See also: Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the Readymade by Janine Mileaf. [Dartmouth College Press/ Google Books]

Whitney.org designers Linked By Air just launched this cheeky take on the fish screensaver for Paralellograms, an online publication/collaborative project that invites artists, writers, and designers to develop responses to a given image found online. New projects are published at the beginning of each week. Like!

Linked by Air are exceptionally articulate in positioning their practice of design-as-social-form. Check out their blog for more on this and other projects, including an excellent news site built in collaboration with Art Asia Pacific and others to inform the public about the (ongoing!) imprisonment of Ai WeiWei.

“What is an exhibition catalogue or an artist’s e-book – or rather, what could they be – when materially bound to a physical format rife with implications, commercial and otherwise? Art e-book publishing invites institutions and artists alike to imagine a new and different future for these forms while reconsidering their historical and ideological positions. Clearly, that future is now.”

Off the Page, a piece on digital publishing I wrote for the May issue of Frieze magazine, is now online.

Another thing that happened while I was waiting for the G train this morning: the “enhanced e-book” version of Paul Chan/ Badlands Unlimited’s Waiting for Godot: A Field Guide went on sale for the iBook and Kindle. I wrote about this book in my piece, and it is—well, it was designed by Artforum art director Chad Kloepfer; features video documentation of Chan’s Waiting for Godot production; and is simply stunning.

NB: Thanks to Joanne and Rhizome for the reblog! Same goes out to Joy and Newsgrist!

UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we’re still going strong. We’re lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we’ve consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution.

— Happy fifteenth birthday, Ubuweb. A roiling call to action by Ubu leader Kenneth Goldsmith, published on the Poetry Foundation’s website today.

“In the past, states used to torture to get this kind of data. Now, all they have to do is just get on Facebook.”

I’m amassing a summer reading list as a carrot (of sorts—there are many carrots) to help move me through the development process on a major project at work. On the nerdier end is Columbia law professor and ‘Net Neutrality’ term-coiner Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire; and journalist Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, both of which were recently—and very smartly—reviewed by Steve Coll in the New York Review of Books. Yesterday, Dissent’s Mark Engler weighed in on the subject with a piece, The Internet as a Tool for Repression, illustrated by RSA’s recent animation of a talk by Morozov.

I’ll withhold judgment until I read both books, but I do think that the level of performativity in this video is both striking and amusing—to me, Morosov is mirroring the super-hyperactive “up with Internet!” spirit so prevalent among cyber-Utopians which, as history (and human psychology … and politicians) suggests, is a more effective way to make bad news more palatable. LOLZ.

My general distaste for New Yorker cartoons rivals that of cats (save for a short, highly discriminate list of those I have known and loved personally: Rah, Geronimo, Yuki, Punk, Disco, any and every one of Eve Batey’s rescued kittehs). All of this kvetching to simply announce that Cory Arcangel launched a new Tumblr, What a Misunderstanding!, which may or may not rival the confessional aggregator Sorry I Haven’t Posted. New Yorker cartoons. Cats. Neurotic apologies. The Internet. I see a contingency here.

Also, his exhibition, Protools, opens at the Whitney on May 26th.

what-a-misunderstanding:

What a Misunderstanding! New Yorker “Caption This Cartoon” contest always captioned with the phrase “What a misunderstanding!” Updated every week automatically by Cory Arcangel

The showplace of this literary confusion is the newspaper. Its content is “material” which refuses any form of organization other than that imposed by the reader’s impatience. This impatience is not only that of the politician who expects a piece of news, or of a speculator who awaits a tip: behind them hovers the impatience of whoever feels himself excluded, whoever thinks he has a right to express his own interests himself. For a long time, the fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers.

— I’m the first to advocate for the reading of primary texts (fully, footnotes and all); I’m also one to caution against the excerpting and/or displacing of said texts out of context. So, go. Go download Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer (this version ran in the New Left Review, back in 1970). Read it.Then, tell me if you don’t still feel a little wishful cheap thrill—no matter how much Benjamin or Adorno or _____ you’ve read, OK?— while imagining what the Frankfurt School would have done with the Internet.

It’s about divided attention as a new strategy of attention. I’m not being a cyber-futurist, every idea here can be found in the 20th century history of avant-garde art. Whether it’s concrete poetry and the web or split screens and divided attention coming from Warhol, that’s what Ubu’s all about.

All of that, which was pushed aside in favour of Picasso and the MoMA narrative of 20th-century art is now back with a revenge informing us how to interact with the web and how to be digital. It’s all there. As much as I love Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) is not going to tell us anything on how to live in the world today.

— 

Frieze Magazine | Comment | Kenneth Goldsmith

Tomorrow Museum/Rhizome editor Joanne McNeil’s interview with Ubuweb founder Kenneth Goldsmith, published on 4/20/2011, Frieze.com

(via jomc)

Some days—namely, research-intensive days wherein I’m left trolling the Web—simply demand an art historical GIF.

[David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967), GIF’d up by Stephanie Davidson, file maker to the Internet and art world alike.]

Sleeping Soldiers (2009) is the single-screen version of a work made by photographer and director Tim Hetherington who was killed in Misurata, Libya, yesterday while documenting the conflict there. The first version of this work was made in 2007-8 while Hetherington was following a platoon of US Airborne Infantry based in the Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan; an original, three-screen version of the project was exhibited in the New York Photo Festival in 2009. Magali Charrier designed the sound, which is jarring to my civilian ears, but probably not so foreign to the auditory memory of my veteran father.

Even more striking is the way in which Hetherington’s Vimeo page has become an overnight memento mori, serving as a meeting ground for a growing pool of commenters and admirers, most of which never knew him as a person in the world, I am sure. This piece, along with Diary, a video essay on his experiences as a war photographer, were viewed only a handful of times prior to his death—unsurprising, as Vimeo is often used by film and videographers as a third-party host. While there is certainly a bit of crossover between documentary photography and the art market, especially of late, I can’t claim any deep knowledge of whether or how Hetherington’s practice fits into that matrix.

While Facebook is our culture’s virtual go-to for memorializing the dead online, I’m heartened by the ways in which other spaces—one whose social networking capabilities are of secondary use—spontaneously accommodate grieving communities. This page is about Hetherington’s work, after all.

My fear isn’t that the Internet has enabled us to share our most private selves with an unknown public; nor is it that we’re constructing those meta-narratives on an hourly, even momentary basis. What I fear is that in doing so, and in championing the act as such, we are establishing a social imperative in which those who choose not to divulge—or to do so differently, or more slowly—are cast as social retrogrades.

Here’s a couple of lines from an essay I’ve been working on for some time, which considers the sense of “knowingness” that dominates social exchanges whose locus lies online. It’s also about privacy, and a simple struggle for communication between people. Furthermore, now that I think about it: material history and the passage of time. But I digress. Soon enough, for this one.

One more thing: Emily Keegin produced the image above. She, like many of us, is someone who manages to juggle the professional—photo editor by day—and the practical, as a studio photographer who uses her own image in her work. She gets it.

Goodbye to All That

Who Cares?
What Knowledge is being produced here?

Such were the first two lines of inquiry posited to me during graduate school and thus dutifully scrawled atop the distinctly Marxist syllabus I recently unearthed while sorting through the endless dump of books, notebooks, papers, folders, and other printed ephemera that I can’t quite seem to shred into oblivion, no matter how many years and thousands of miles we’ve managed to traverse together. Perhaps even more helpful, if no less kind, were the preemptive remarks delivered by another professor during those first weeks: “Nobody is going to care about the work you produce here. It will sit in the library; no one will read it, ever.” As an ardent realist, her words didn’t put me off. Others, however, were mortified. (That was years, mind you, before our student loans matriculated. Also: I haven’t so much as glanced at my thesis since I submitted it for publication in the Spring of 2007. Not once.)

I was reminded of these little truisms from my past earlier today, as Rob Storr’s final column for Frieze magazine made its way around the Internet. In a reflection on his own relevance, as well as that of art writing in general, Storr tells it like it is, as he sometimes does: “[In] the hierarchies of power, critics – like squid – are agile bottom feeders. Predictably many of my academically accredited colleagues will recoil at that statement but it is the cruel, Darwinian truth and neither high-flown rhetoric nor exalted teaching posts can save us from it. … And we write in order to exert that most elusive and ephemeral of things: influence. Being part of the dialogue is what drives us; figuring out how to give our ideas weight and our words bounce is the political, intellectual and literary challenge confronting us whenever we set to work.”

As someone who truly despises reading art reviews as much as I do writing them—there, I said it—I’m deeply appreciative of those who call the practice into question. A while back, I was briefly enamored with James Elkins’s What Happened to Art Criticism (2003, Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago), which preceded The State Of Art Criticism (2008, Routledge). There are writers and thinkers outside the field, of course, whose work performs an active critique of art criticism through its very form. Zadie Smith’s recent piece on Christian Maclay’s “The Clock,” published in the New York Review of Books is a distinctly literary example of writing about art wherein the author actually writes around the work, suggesting a critical path that the reader must forge for his or her own self. It’s a slower, more circumspect form—not criticism in the traditional sense by any means, but perhaps equally incisive.

Other examples? I can think of a few, including an essay by Rebecca Solnit on Ann Hamilton whose name I—nor any of my GChat contacts who are online at this given, including the person who first introduced me to it—absolutely cannot recall. (It is not São Paulo, Seattle : a document of two installations. That, we are collectively sure of.)

Anyone else?