Sarah Hromack

Photo

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:47:59 -0500

My very old (and very talented) friend, Drew Moody, has released...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:15:25 -0500

My very old (and very talented) friend, Drew Moody, has released a new serial novel, That Time We Said Those Nice Things that “follows the adventures of a 30-something year-old fellow on the cusp of adulthood or total ruin”—which is pretty much every 30-something year-old fellow (and lady!) I know, come to think of it. His work has resonated with me since we were both undergraduates at MICA, and I’m glad to see him channeling our collective existential angst (it’s still there!) so wisely.

When he’s not drawing, Drew works as Lehmann Maupin’s head preparator—he’s been there for years. Drew is the quiet, smart, reliable, highly observant sort who gets it done every time while making mental notes along the way. The man never blinks, I swear. These are his stories and if they don’t resonate with anyone who’s served time in Chelsea … Well. Open your eyes at your next opening!

If SOPA passes, you can kiss UbuWeb goodbye. An effective plea...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:32:00 -0500

If SOPA passes, you can kiss UbuWeb goodbye.

An effective plea by UbuWeb to stop SOPA legislation. Yes, many (if not most) of us—including Congress, obviously—”don’t understand the Internet,” but I find that non-technical people think about technology most rationally when its use value is articulated in relationship to their own perceived (or actual!) needs and routines.

So, non-Internet-understanding, hands-in-the-air-throwing, esoteric-documentation-loving art world: How would you feel if, all of a sudden, the videos, audio files, and texts that you’ve grown accustomed to accessing for your personal research and lectures—because admit it: you all crib from Ubu—were relegated back to their musty archival homes the Real World over? That would be inconvenient now, wouldn’t it? Yes. It would be.

“This font was inspired by Monica Lewinsky” —Paul...

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:59:00 -0500

“This font was inspired by Monica Lewinsky” —Paul Chan, “Wht is a book?”, the New Museum, 10 December, 2011

Blogging About Books on Christmas Eve (or, Catching Up on the Backlog While Home for the Holidaze)

+ Paul Chan’s new essay, A Lawless Proposition was published on e-flux following two recent talks at the New Museum, “Wht is Lawlessness?” and “Wht is a Book?”. While I missed the former, I was able to catch the latter, a relaxed, self-effacing account of Chan’s experiences as a newbie publisher that felt less like a lecture than a public conversation with lots of “chiming in” from the audience. Gratifying.

+ The Guggenheim is indeed the first museum to release a digital exhibition catalogue for Maurizio Cattelan: All (along with a slew of titles from its back catalogue). Am I experiencing a moment of good-natured professional jealousy? Why yes, in fact, I am. Related: Do recall the 54th La Biennale di Venezia iPad catalogue (2010) and Badlands Unlimited/Creative Time’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: a Field Guide (2011). Also, the Getty Foundation’s OSCI Project.

+ Take This Book is a Kickstarter-funded—seven more days to go—history-in-the-making of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, written by LadyJourno Melissa Gira Grant. A first excerpt from the project was recently published on Rhizome. Back that book up!

+ Bookish Things to See ASAP: At MoMA, Scenes from Zagreb: Artists’ Publications of the New Art Practice, organized by library Bibliographer David Senior (on view through February). Especially looking forward to the publications of Dimitrije Bašičević Mangalos, whose manifestos were some of my favorite works in the 2004-5 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. (I was the curatorial assistant—the Wrangler of the Checklist never forgets!) The curator of that exhibition, now-MoMA curator Laura Hoptman, wrote a book that I suspect would make an apt companion to Senior’s presentation, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. It was published by MoMA in 2002, just as we began working on the International, and functioned as an English-language introduction to Eastern European practices of the late 20th century. Related: Projects by Grupa O.K. (a.k.a. Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska)

Untitled, a film on the AIDS epidemic by Jim Hodges, Carlos...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:51:00 -0500

Untitled, a film on the AIDS epidemic by Jim Hodges, Carlos Marques da Cruz, and Encke King (and distributed for World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art 2011 by Visual AIDS) will screen in the Whitney’s lobby—along with scores of other institutions nationwide—today.

"What’s the second credit crunch? It’s the content crunch. It’s when the lights go on at the end of..."

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:51:00 -0500

“What’s the second credit crunch? It’s the content crunch. It’s when the lights go on at the end of the party, and you notice the smoke machine and mirrored walls, that the beautiful people you’ve been dancing with have grey skin and cocaine confidence and that the great DJ was just someone’s iPod on shuffle. It’s when it becomes clear that meaning in your work only resides there on credit, and that all the chatter around your career has been about everything but the art itself.”

- You are reading Dan Fox’s Frieze missive from 2008, Debit or Credit, which resurfaced on the Twitterzverse today. Right now. Then, you’re settling in to watch The Wire boxed set straight through—because that’s what you (and me, and all of us) should’ve been doing in the first place.

An Acceptable Approximation

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:16:00 -0500

… is the title of an essay I wrote—in the first person, no less—for Never Odd or Even, a book designed by Project Projects and featured in the exhibition We would provide complete darkness, curated by Alfons Hug and Sarah Demeuse for the Goethe Institut. Contributors include myself, Heike Baranowsky, Alejandro Cesarco, Angie Keefer, Christoph Keller, Adam Kleinman, Kitty Kraus, Jorge Méndez Blake, Carsten Nicolai, and Project Projects. The exhibition opens on 1 December from 6-8:00 pm at the Institut’s Wyoming Building; Cabinet will host a related event on 7 December. (details)

The volume will be surreptitiously inserted throughout the Goethe Institut’s collection—amidst volumes slated for de-acquisition and the Institut’s current, circulating stacks, where those who find it shall carry it into the world. A bibliographic intervention, if you will.

An excerpt:

The differences between paper and e-ink; the gallery, screen, and stage; or the library and database are clear enough, in material terms. Where things become genuinely disconcerting, I believe, is when we—when I—fail to control my own behavior in relationship to the Internet, allowing it to serve as an acceptable approximation for physical experience itself. When I catch myself feeling convinced, even momentarily, that I know something of an exhibition or performance based on the amount of documentation I’ve perused online, or when I feel judgments beginning to form in my mind based on first-hand reports gleaned from various social networks.

A graphical call for an artists’ union. (Daniel Blochwitz/...

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:10:18 -0500

A graphical call for an artists’ union. (Daniel Blochwitz/ dis magazine)

After blogging-for-dollars for years, I de-installed stat...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 15:21:00 -0500

After blogging-for-dollars for years, I de-installed stat tracking software on every domain I own. If you work online for a living, can I tacitly suggest that you do the same where you can and free your mind accordingly to think about content for what it is—not what it’s worth? #protip.

I do have a minor obsession with online “trailer”...

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:58:00 -0500

I do have a minor obsession with online “trailer” videos made to promote things that are not films. Artist Joanna Neborsky made this piece (music by Cleaning Women) to announce the publication of Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1, a printed compendium of the online magazine designed by Project Projects. Visual Good Times are Had By All here, but it also manages to craft a clear message around Triple Canopy’s larger mission, which extends well beyond the Internet.

TC editor Molly Kleiman and I shared a panel with the Art Institute of Chicago’s Liz Neely at last week’s Museum Computer Network conference ; it was called Beyond the Blog: New Waves in Digital Arts Publication (because that’s how conference panel titles work, OK?). I, like many of us, have been following TC since its launch in 2008, yet the academic side of me relished hearing Molly talk about the inception of the magazine, from its whiskey fueled conceptual stages (as any conceptual stage worth its weight damn well should be) to its digital brass tacks. “Slow Down the Internet” was the editorial team’s founding credo.

I launched my first blog, Forward Retreat, in 2001. Back then, Joy Garnett, Kriston Capps, Greg Allen, Tyler Green, Tom Moody and a scant handful of others writing about the arts were my online contemporaries. Some came before us and many came thereafter. I have always assumed the position that one should devote a level of close attention to what one publishes on the web. The rise of social media has made it more difficult to maintain that imperative—I struggle with it a lot internally, in fact, even as I participate. Yet I believe that Triple Canopy is giving the Internet a run for its money. So … Triple Canopy memberships for everyone, this holiday season? Consider it.

Another Yvonne Rainer GIF (and also, a reading)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:58:00 -0500

Badlands Unlimited’s Minister of Information just issued this GIF, designed for Yvonne Rainer’s reading at St. Marks Bookshop on December 6th. Her new book, Poems, was recently published by Badlands in print and e-book form, the latter of which features awesome embedded performance documentation; audio recordings of Rainer reading her own work; and an interview between she and BU publisher Paul Chan. Emoji!

Yvonne to Marina: Deal With It

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:13:00 -0500

I happened to post Jeanette Hayes’s Marina Abramović GIF from Dump.fm a few days before Yvonne Rainer publicly denounced Abramović’s plans for MOCA’s fall gala, which happened on Saturday. “Don’t you think this dust up calls for a ‘Deal With It’ GIF, too?” I said in a note to Jeanette, who I hoped might make one to mark the occasion. Yes, it most certainly does!

While finishing my presentation for this evening’s...

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:04:00 -0500

While finishing my presentation for this evening’s #ArtsTech Meetup—Digital Fundraising! The Whitney, Kickstarter, and Big Duck! 7 pm at Pivotal Labs!—I realized that Austrian net art duo Ubermorgen had changed the splash page of their website, ubermorgen.com, to feature this GIF. Imagining myself navigating there during my talk (UM designed CLICKISTAN, the net artwork-cum-video game I’ll be showing and telling about) a wry smile escaped my lips: Pwned.

In fact, the file is Ubermorgen’s contribution/intervention to Occupy the Internet, an online exhibition of obvious intent launched a couple of weeks back on fffff.at. Nice work, Hans and lizvlx.

This day calls for a little stern Eastern European wisdom...

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:24:00 -0500

This day calls for a little stern Eastern European wisdom (delivered by someone other than my own reflection in the bathroom mirror).

Via Dump.fm/Jeanette

Occupation Sketchbook, by David Kearns (Paper Monument)

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:38:00 -0400

Occupation Sketchbook, by David Kearns (Paper Monument)

Just found the torn-off cover from the November 2009 issue of W...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:21:00 -0400

Just found the torn-off cover from the November 2009 issue of W Magazine buried beneath a pile of papers in my desk drawer. Prescient!

On Digital Fundraising: join me at the #ArtsTech Meetup on November 9, 2011.

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:39:00 -0400

Are you interested in digital fundraising? You don’t say.

Join me, my Whitney Museum colleague Briana Lowndes, Cindy Au of Kickstarter, and Farra Trompeter of Big Duck for a conversation on that very topic on November 9th at 7 pm, hosted by the inimitable Julia Kaganskiy at Pivotal Labs. I suggest registering now, while we’re here, talking about it.

Bri, the Whitney’s Membership and Annual Fund Manager, is the primary liaison between Membership/Development and the Whitney’s web team (and also a ninja, I suspect). She and I will tell the tale of CLICKISTAN, the online videogame commissioned by the Whitney in 2010 from the Viennese artists Ubermorgen as the Museum’s first microdonation fundraising effort in support of its Annual Fund. Brace!

Book-as-Content Management System?

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:45:00 -0400

Book-as-Content Management System? :

“It’s a book as content-management system, a new design for reading, etc.” says Triple Canopy of its first anthology—#olds!—Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, designed by Project Projects and available for pre-order now. If PP designed it, that book-as-CMS must purr like a kitten.

Speaking of the 3rd Athens Biennial, Monodrome: Paul...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:41:20 -0400

Speaking of the 3rd Athens Biennial, Monodrome: Paul Chan/Badland Unlimited’s Phaedrus Pron will be adapted for the stage—time and date TBD, apparently—whose set was designed by Andreas Angelidakis, who has a Tumblr.

andreasangelidakis:

The Styrofoam Order: Installation for Paul Chan’s / Badlands Phaedrus Pron project. Just added some gold branches to a styrofoam column, and here is the tree under which Socrates fell for Phaedrus

Walter Benjamin meets the Little Prince? Nicholas Bourriaud...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 23:02:00 -0400

Walter Benjamin meets the Little Prince? Nicholas Bourriaud curated the 2011 Athens Biennial, which opened today—the only possibly illuminating point of fact that explains the conceptual premise for this promotional video.