WOOD TWO by Blackwood Gallery

Previous pages: Darsha Hannah Hewitt, Nobility Solid State Walkie-Talkie-Front (from series Electronics from the Trash) (2012);

A COMPENDIUM OF THE BLACKWOOD GALLERY'S EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS IN 2010 AND BEYOND, PLUS OTHER MATTERS EDITED BY CHRISTOF MIGONE 2012

Paola Savasta, Couches for some readers (2012); Amy Lockhart, Lady from front (2011)

SECOND PART-CATALOG, SECOND PART-MAGAZINE, SECOND PARTANNUAL REPORT. SECOND TIME AROUND THE PROBLEMS ARE ALL FIXED. OR WE FAILED AGAIN. BUT BETTER. WOOD TWO. WOOD TOO. THE FIRST WOOD COVERED TWO THOUSAND AND NINE. THIS ONE COVERS TWO THOUSAND AND TEN. WITH SOME SPILLAGE ONTO TWO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN. WE SPENT THE REST OF THAT YEAR AND THE BETTER PART OF THIS ONE ON ASSEMBLING AND EDITING THIS RETRO-, INTRO- AND PRO-SPECTIVE BOOK. THE COVER OF THIS ONE IS GREEN. STILL ON PAPER. THE BLACKWOOD TREE REMAINS CUT, FALLEN, THINNED AND FLATTENED FOR THE SAKE OF THE PAGE. NOT AS REPLETE AS THE FIRST WOOD. OR AT LEAST NOT AS FRENETIC. BUT WE HAVE GONE FURTHER AFIELD FROM THE KERNEL OF THIS PUBLICATION SERIES, WHICH IS TO PRESENT, DOCUMENT AND REFLECT THE EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS PRODUCED BY THE BLACKWOOD GALLERY. THIS TIME THERE ARE LONGER TEXTS, MORE MATERIAL TO RUMINATE ON. A PROFUSION OF THREADS ARE FOLLOWED PAST THEIR INITIAL TRIGGER POINTS IN OUR GALLERY SPACES. THERE IS EVEN A TEXT REVIEWING A PUBLICATION PRODUCED BY ANOTHER GALLERY. A NUMBER OF COMMISSIONS TOO, SPECIFIC TO WOOD TWO, ARE INCLUDED. ALSO, WORTHY OF NOTE, AN APOCRYPHAL TONE DRIFTS THROUGH SEVERAL ENTRIES (AT BOTH CONCEPTUAL AND CONCRETE LEVELS). THEY MINE THE FICTION OF THE FACTUAL ALL THE WAY TO THE FACT OF THE FICTIONAL. STRAWBERRY FIELDS. THE FIRST WOOD SPECULATED ON THE EVENTUAL APPEARANCE OF WOOD TWO. WHETHER IT INDEED EXISTS NOW OR NOT IS NOT FOR US TO DETERMINE. IT IS IN YOUR HANDS NOW. 11

SEPT. 11, 2010 - MAY 1, 2011 DAVIS BUILDING BERNIE MILLER BILLBOARD/ LIGHTBOX, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MISSISSAUGA CURATED BY CHRISTOF MIGONE

Karen Henderson photographs time. She utilizes finely focused strategies to capture time's passing. Her enterprise, as Goethe alludes, is subtly yet resolutely empirical. Time, image, and location conflate in a work rendered fully viewable only once the four hours it condenses have been factored in. The image functions as a scanner of time, from left to right, from 5pm to 9pm, from day to night. The instantaneous moment usually associated with a photographic image is stretched until it is able to effuse a duration considerably longer than an instant. Slow and enduring is the operating paradigm for this photographic method. The complexity of the seemingly straightforward image lies in its layered shifts. The aforementioned temporal layer is adjoined by at least three additional layers. First, the self-referential image reduces the scale of what 14

it represents in order to fit into itself. In other words, the framing enables the concrete wall surrounding the billboard to be absorbed into the image. Second, there is a doubling where the fluorescents which produce the artificial light in this image now light the image of themselves. In fact, their unrelenting constancy (in contrast to the fading natural light that produces the pan referenced in the work's title) produces a brightness that obliterates the image. The fluorescents therefore shine through a pure white series of pixelless horizontal strips of Plexiglas; in short, they constitute stripes of non-image within the image. Third, the four hour light shift arrested in the image coexists within a twenty-four hour cycle exterior context of shifting shadows and mirrored angles. During the day, the billboard clearly announces its self-referential specificity. At night the

There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with its object that it thereby becomes theory. Goethe¹

piece glows like a beacon, still in slow mode but commanding an undeniable presence. These three distorting effects operate akin to a mise en abyme—an infinite interplay of reflections that incite the passersby to become passersthrough. Through the surface lie the tubes and the wiring, and also an alternative absorption technique: one where slow inference and consideration is favored over rapid bite-sized Tweets. Subtle seepage insinuating itself amidst the hurried ambulations provides the viewer with an excuse to stay stuck in place and let the days and nights pan across one's timeline.

1 Goethe in Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography” , Screen, Spring 1972, Vol. 13 No. 1, 22. 15

1. FOLLOWING THE PERIPATETIC AXIOM

2. FOLLOWING AN ABSTRACT PROMISE

At certain times I have preferred walking that is to say walking with my feet to talking that is to say walking with my mouth—but in the end it is the same thing.

Following the doubling tactic set up above, what follows are two versions of the abstract and what each promises. Two abstracts embedded in the concrete of the essay, providing descriptive information not found elsewhere in the text; dual synoptic entries to the rest of the text, which thereby presage its unfolding. The former introduces the Derridean wordplay that prompts a philosophy of following— what I am dubbing, the sequitur principle. The latter version was written at the behest of the conference convener and shifts the focus to a set of considerations beyond the Following Following Piece.3 1) Initial draft: In the Following Following Piece (Montreal, July 8, 2008 to June 2, 2010), Mastroiacovo exhaustively researched every instance in which images of Acconci's Following Piece (1969) have appeared in print.4 She then drew these items, rendering the iconic images, following the layout, keeping text indicators such as page numbers, titles and captions but excising any text extraneous to Acconci’s own. The drawing hand follows the performer's footsteps. This artistic take on bibliographic research opens a discussion on the legacy of conceptual art broadly stated. It also focuses discussion on the Following Piece and how this seminal piece has propagated in publications on performance art, relational aesthetics, architecture and surveillance. In Following Following Piece, the transpositions from furtive performances to documents to historicizing prints and then to framed fac-not so-simile durational drawings for exhibition are all at play as they each inflect their unique alterations on the mimetic process. Derrida's 2006 essay "The Animal That Therefore I Am" opens and subsequently riffs with a word play based on the fact that in French je suis can mean either I am or I follow. The conjunction of the verbs 'to be' and 'to follow' offers a springboard to an ontological reading of Acconci's piece (and by extension of Mastroiacovo's additive documentary intervention) in relation to the now doubled Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am / I think, therefore I follow). 2) Revised abstract: Taking Acconci's Following Piece (1969) as a point of departure, and passing by Mastroiacovo's Following Following Piece (2008-2010), I will address the genealogical and ontological implications at play in several recurring conceptual practices. From furtive performances to idiosyncratic bibliographies, from renegade citationality to disjunctive lineages, the current field is densely populated

Serge Daney¹

The inertia engine of language dictates that one word inevitably follows another, lines thereby accumulate, paragraphs fill pages, and so on. Its built-in structuring principle is a powerful funneling force for thoughts that are in and of themselves less prone to hold form, at least for any graspable length of time. As a veritable machine that exteriorizes thought, language follows thought as a fulfillment of its task of providing form. It is always a step after. An articulated concept is already a translation of itself, a concept that precedes its naming. The epigraph by Serge Daney comes from an essay on Robert Walser, where it is also used as an epigraph. Here it is again again: "At certain times I have preferred walking that is to say walking with my feet to talking that is to say walking with my mouth—but in the end it is the same thing." This time it is self-consciously repeated in order to highlight the doubling, the plethora of pairs which serve as fuel for the Sequitur Principle that I will be road testing here. Walser's legendary walks (not to mention the rich lineage of intellectual and artistic walkers: Kant, Satie, Alÿs, etc.) are not the subject at hand except as a entry way into an ambulation that conjoins feet producing steps and mind producing thoughts with feet producing thoughts and mind producing steps. In his recent book Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking, Dieter Roelstraete quotes de Certeau's statement that walking could preliminarily be defined "as a space of enunciation."2 I take this to mean that walking opens an active discursive space, one where standing still on the sidelines is not an option. As it manifests, here and now, I will principally will be following Vito Acconci's Following Piece and Thérèse Mastroiacovo's Following Following Piece as instances of conceptual practices with ontological and epistemic reverberations.

with the ever-widening scope of hyper-referential tactics that deny origin, abrogate expression and swallow its source materials whole. The result is a panoply of unrecognizable forms masquerading as facsimiles. The stark dichotomies, amplified here for polemical purposes, conceal what would be more accurately described as nuanced and fine-tuned projects following tactics that do not push, but nudge. They are panegyric acts that also prick to deflate aura and artifice. One step forward and backward at the same time. It is too early to say whether I will fulfill any of the promises, or fully explore any of the leads outlined in either abstract, but the question of promise is the one that I would like to turn to now, for Derrida in the aforementioned essay points to Nietzsche's opening of the second essay in On The Genealogy of Morals which posits the following query: "To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?"5 Stripped of its moral tinge (not without interest, but deferred here), we can interpret a promise to be akin to a plan, a structural principle, a task, a parameter, an instruction, an imperative, a command, an auto-command. A speculative future is addressed and conjured. This is the modus operandi of conceptual practices writ large. Setting out a course of action, the piece performs itself, only requiring, as per Sol Lewitt, an automaton for execution. The work is structurally determined but performatively undetermined. Acconci decides to abdicate decision—once the follower is picked, his path is out of his control. Acconci in his "Additional Note" (on Following) from 1972: "Out of the body. What I wanted was to step out of myself, view myself from above, as an observer of my behavior."6 John Cage's compositional strategies of determined indeterminacy or purposeful purposelessness find echo here. Whereas Acconci is often reduced to a psychological profile (even by himself ), he also did considerable work removing himself from the equation (the 1972 note quoted above moves in that direction). Also, for instance, included in the Halifax portion of "Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965-1980" exhibition, an Acconci proposal for NSCAD's Mezzanine Gallery titled Accessibilities outlines the following: "The Nova Scotia show will be used as a copying device: Schemes of the work - verbal descriptions, diagrams - will be sent to Nova Scotia. Each piece is intended to be duplicated - I would like someone [else] to perform the piece, using my descriptions and whatever medium I have used. The piece will then exist both in original form and in duplicate."7 While I would debate the implied hierarchy between original and copy, after all, "the history of art is the history of copy rites,"8 suffice to say that the doubling staged here is a revealing example of Acconci removing himself from the equation—speculatively, at least in part because of the pedagogical context.

3. FOLLOWING A PEDAGOGY Merleau-Ponty in one of his posthumously published working notes to The Visible and the Invisible asks: How does one artist learn from another, of whom he makes copies—to be himself, learn himself in the other, with and against him. To sketch, is not to produce something from nothing, that the drawing, the visible work are but the trace of a total movement of Speech, which goes unto Being as a whole, and that this movement contains my expression as well as that of other artists. We dream of systems of equivalencies, and indeed they do function. But their logic, like the logic of a phonematic system, is summed up in one sole gamut, they are all animated with one sole movement, one sole contraction of Being. What is needed is to make explicit this horizontal totality which is not a synthesis but Wild perception—The Immediate— Cultural perception—learning.9 The anxiety of influence which too easily slips exponentially to an anxiety about the anxiety of influence is not the route we need to take with this, rather, it is the learning through copying, citing, appropriating, and referencing that is articulated as an integral component of any and all production as opposed to a mere optional technique or methodology. Novalis outlines a concise and somewhat more enigmatic version of this: "Theory of Irritation. All stimuli must be only temporary, a means to educate, an incitation to auto-activity."10 The irritant is the trigger, the starting point, the point of no return. Both quotes hint at imaginings of a pedagogy that does not necessarily require institutional legitimization nor acknowledged sourcing. After all, Benjamin reminds us in Convolute N (the section of the Arcades Project on the theory of knowledge and progress) that, "this work has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage."11 Indeed, in both versions of Following we have a montage, albeit stuck, stuck on repeat. Mastroiacovo describes what her project entailed as "the process of drawing as a feedback loop, repetition with anomalies."12 With Acconci, the action recurs, everyday, a different take of the same action. The target changes but the hunter follows the same guidelines: 21

Vito Acconci Follow-Up To Following Piece (1969) © VITO ACCONCI/SODRAC (2012)

remain inconspicuous and only follow the engagement in the public realm. With Mastroiacovo, in what Derrida would dub a "dictated dictation," there is a kind of "learning by heart that no longer names pure interiority [but] refers to a certain exteriority of the automaton."13 The learning here is by way of the rote action of an extrospective fingerwalker, a freehand copyist (or scrivener if an allusion to Bartelby is useful). The labor involved incites an ingestion of the piece, through a kind of metadrawing. In the bibliographic sourcing, the work is not in the least without quotation marks, it is its antithesis. A giant set of quotation marks loom over the project. So large that the anomalies pinpointed by Mastroiacovo can insert themselves with ease (the most glaring of which are the nine unfinished or failed drawings that have not been excised but are included in the exhibited series of fifty-three drawings). She has become a slow scanner with digits. Each copy is (paradoxically) unique, because the hand is never faithful. The originality of her project is its lack of originalityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; how it convincingly dissociates essence from the original.14 The sources are mass produced tomes, they are eminently reproducible and thereby accessible. They are not signed, limited or numbered. The drawings perform a pre-Gutenberg mode of reading, or at least of gaining access to reading through the act of copying. This anachronistic mode of copying reminds us of how teaching and studying used to correlate. This mode of learning can be correlated to the type of copying that Schwartz depicts as occurring "s/t/r/o/k/e/-/b/y/-/s/t/r/o/k/e/" as opposed to all-at-once, as with scanners and photocopiers.15 This former method is more laborious, and Schwartz recounts how this activity was comparatively disparaged and relegated to the "second sex."16 Learning (copying to memory) that is not instantly gratified, but is osmotic is made subordinate. However, this depiction can be resisted and subverted, especially in the realm of art where production need not equate with productivity. Interestingly, in an interview where Acconci was asked his thoughts on Mastroiacovo's Following Following Piece, he responds with a brief deflected discussion on works by students that have restaged his performance in various ways. His answer mentions the case of a student asking for his permission to follow him. In an earlier answer, he mentions that Sophie Calle had also asked him for permission, and his reply to her was that the piece was "up for grabs."17 The answer is telling because it thrusts agency and authorship on the student or any artist engaging with the frame outlined by the piece. In other words, the frame is empty. The original has vacated the premises and presumptions of ownership. The pedagogy here is heuristic, no prior approval is necessary. The door has been left opened.

4. FOLLOWING A FALLOW Before we forge ahead any further, it is time we retrace our steps. On October 2nd 1969, the day preceding the start of the twenty-two days of the Following Piece and part of the same event, Street Works IV (in fact at its opening), Acconci performed Standing: "For the duration of the opening I stand in one spot by the traffic light at 65th Street and Madison Avenue." In an additional note he states: "By standing at the traffic light, I am 'opening up' the opening: bringing it into the street, down the block. Standing one's ground."18 Much can be said about this steadfast refusal, the enacting of Bartelby-like inaction, the embodiment of a silent sentinel, a non-participating witness. Amongst the bustle, the fallow spotter is more likely to be conspicuous as he obstructs flow like a traffic cone. It is tempting to read Standing, where the opening is invested and explicitly doubled (I am opening up the opening), as a means to prepare the street for what we will follow the next day. But it would probably be more accurate to see it as a pause, for Acconci had done quite a few street actions earlier that year that involved following as an active component. Namely, in August 1969: Two activity situations using streets, walking, watching, losing where the first was An activity situation using streets, walking, slow walking, watching, losing and the second was An activity situation using streets, walking, standing still, watching, losing.19 And in April 1969, for Street Works II, he embarked on A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Running.20 Lastly, in March 1969: A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing for the first edition of Street Works.21 There is no need to enter into details of these precursors at this juncture, but we can generally glean from them that in these "situations" he used the movements and locations of passersby as cues for timing and placing himself in relation to them. Everything here is anonymous and quantified; it is about surreptitious tracking and using pedestrians as locators, spacers, markers. Pedestrian traffic is deployed as an aleatory compositional tool. A mere list of works that have entered through the door opened by the Following Piece would not be productive. Plus it would be misleading to portray the derivations as exclusively stemming from a single source. Adrian Piper's Catalysis series is but one of a number of notable other contemporaneous street works that continue to also wield considerable influence. That being said, there are cases that are instructive in how the follower/followee pairing 23

is re-considered. The Sophie Calle and Vera Greenwood projects push the structure towards narrative and detective ends.22 Their tone is not dissimilar to Janet Cardiff's walks where the spatio-temporal doubling enabled by the timed and precisely placed playback, locates and activates the visitor within the work following a kinetic path on one level, and a dramatic arc at another.23 The visitors observe themselves as both followers and followees. They track the work, the work tracks them. With works by Diane Borsato (Touching 1000 People (2003)), Sylvie Cotton (avec ensemble (2005)), and k.g. Guttman (Escorte (2009 - ongoing)) the compositional ethos shifts.24 Rather than to follow, the verb becomes to accompany. The movement is not behind, but beside. The action is touch or converse. Anonymity is not fully erased, but diminished. The encounter becomes central to the account, it no longer consists just of times and places and plain description, it moves from sketch to story. A reader may arguably find a nascent humanness emerge from the performances summarily described in these last lines, whereas before a base animality was prevalent. My contention is that it would be facile to subscribe to a dichotomy laid at such an essential level. It would close a door that has already been left (doubly) open.

5. FOLLOWING A DOOR Following an open door. Acconci's opening upon an opening leads me to the uppercase 'O' of Open that Rilke introduces in the Eighth Elegy (though notably, the preceding elegy ends with the phrase: "Incomprehensible being, spread wide open")25 as a way to conceptualize a distinction between human and animal: "With all its eyes the animal looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are as if reversed and set like traps entirely around it, encircling its free exit."26 The reason this might prove useful is in a closer examination of the duo featured in the Following Piece. On one hand, we have Acconci as predator tracking his prey. On the other, there is Acconci as household pet who follows his temporary master. While both versions are in stark contrast, both draw an unrelenting invisible line between both bodies. The work's concept devises and conjures the line; its parameters are set and taut. Now, in The Open, Agamben swiftly disabuses us of Rilke's notion of the Open (or at least he complicates it) through Heidegger's caveat that this line of thinking leads to "a monstrous anthropomorphization of the animal and a corresponding animalization of man."27 Heidegger categorizes the animal as being in a state of captivation which causes an "essential withholding of every apprehending of something as something."28 In this state of nonknowledge the animal would certainly not be able to conceptualize, only able to follow. The performer in the Following Piece is captivated by the concept, unable to let go, on auto-pilot, a mono-solo-tracker; the horizon is reduced to the dot of the one being followed. But, expectedly, it is hardly as simple as this, and Agamben's reading of Heidegger follows him to a place where a claim can tentatively be acticulated: "perhaps the openness of the human world can only be achieved by means of an operation enacted upon the not-open of the animal world."29 This operation is characterized by Heidegger as a "fundamental attunement" (Stimmung)30 and while the musical etymology of the word Stimmung (Stimme - voice) might not be the primary intended element, accenting it here does conveniently prolong the Cagean thread that underscores the discussion.

6. FOLLOWING A TUNING Following Piece is a work tuned in re-, the prefix of return, rewind, repetition. Mastroiacovo's project is predated by Acconci himself through two instances. One, is relatively well known and documented: in the month following the Following Piece he wrote letters to a selection of art world luminaries each recounting a single scene of following, spaced exactly a month apart. For instance, on November 9 in a letter addressed to Walter DeMaria, Acconci recounts the October 9 following and designates the letter as a "Private piece for Walter DeMaria" and as a "particular activity re-activated for Walter DeMaria."31 The re-activation is re-staged thrice, each time a month apart from the preceding activation. Each time addressed to contacts in a broadening geographical area. City series: November: "The particular activity re-activated for..."; Nation series: "The particular activity and its previous re-activation re-activated for..."; World series: "The particular activity and its two previous reactivations re-activated for..."32 To conceive of documentation as reactivation is akin to devising a performative archive where a moment's post-mortem condition is not consigned to a file but is the springboard to an endless afterlife of citational possibilities. In one exemplar, Mirza/Butler's film The Exception and the Rule (2009) cites Acconci's piece within a narrative accompanied by stills. The images are ambiguous, but the voiceover anchors and frames what is on view. The site is Mumbai and the targets being followed are strictly policemen. Issues of authority, agency, power that were only latent in the original are foregrounded in this variation—the politics become charged when the anonymity and randomness of the targets are compromised.33 These follow-ups to Following Piece were preceded with one even more immediate than Acconci's own textual reactivations: once Acconci realized that the piece and the Streetworks event had ended but he did not have any images, he did an impromptu restaging of the work for the sole purpose of producing documentation of a work that technically had already finished.34 The cheat is constructive for it literally spills the work over itself into an open that has a forward propulsion that would suit Kierkegaard's definition of repetition, which is that for it to be authentic, it must be "recollected forward."35 Finitude here has looped into the infinite.

7. FOLLOWING A FAMILIAR PATH Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my own father beyond this tree.”36 A striking way to open a 925 page saga, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans begins with this repetition, a familial line locked in a closed groove. The intensity of the scene is further amplified by the recognition that this is a cyclical passage of which this is just the most recent iteration. One way to consider the duplicitous documentation of Following outlined in the preceding section and which is the default way to encounter the piece, is to view it as a splice over a cut or break that is henceforth marked but also smoothed over. In that instance, the violence of the cut can be tempered by the curation of the splice. The reconnection, the repair sets up the conditions of possibility for genealogical continuities even as discontinuities lurk and abound. One scaled-up formulation of such transitional phases is Benjamin's prophesy about prophesy in the 1935 Exposé: "Every epoch not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming precipitates its awakening."37

8. FOLLOWING A TRACK OF SOUND TO THE FINISH Finally, Cage observed that "almost everywhere in the world now silence is traffic."38 The ubiquitous urbanscape has produced a de facto perverted definition of silence, one constituted by a noise floor of humming transformers and turning engines. Let us now turn to Foucault's genealogist, who is described as someone who "listens to history" and, significantly, someone who "needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin."39 The paradigm of a unique origin stands in opposition to the incessant f lux of noise that irrupts, inf lects and intermingles. A bed of sound as opposed to a single trajectory—traffic is a collective notion. Which brings us back to Kierkegaard, adding him to the mix: "If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise."40 What the Sequitur Principle has attempted to sketch here, in all its provisionality, is the richness of even that empty meaninglessness, that state of profound animality, for it contains the kernels of generative repetition. In the case of the Following Following Piece it obviously requires the deft hand of a scanner to activate. But more crucially, it requires a willingness to pass through the referential (reverential) work. When the dissemination of the referent (Acconci's Following Piece) has produced such an ample bibliography, the digestive process entailed will be considerable. The theoretical and the technical method deployed in the series of fifty-three drawings is a muted hermeneutic blended with a mimetic mechanics. In its gallery presentation Following Following Piece resembled a line, also one charged with static. The kind of static that is parasitical and noisy, it is an endlessly recombinant line, a followed line to follow. The line drawn is a noisy affair. Saturated and suffused, the line goes far against the grain of honed perfection, hence the inclusion of the unfinished followings, the thwarted drawings. They hang along with the rest in order to further distort the replay. In time, the line circles back onto itself.41 To conclude, a different kind of din: in the seminal tome The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, David Bourdon (one of the addressee of those private follow-ups to Following Piece) incensed by Acconci's work, sounded off the following: "Aesthetically, it seems to me, it does 26

not add up to very much. But sociologically, I suspect, it is of dire importance."42 That importance is confirmed in Following Following Piece, which, given the historical record outlined here, could more accurately be named Following Ad Infinitum Piece. Through this cumulation, the piece is amplified and looped to a level we cannot help but hear. Hearing footsteps, aurally and mimetically, paying attention to the steps that they trigger in others, defines the sequitur principle. Not just a tracking of artistic influences but an ontology—to be is to follow, to be is to copy. This is not an argument for a determinism that entraps and paralyzes, quite the opposite. The following meanders, the copy is never exact. Taussig describes the mimetic faculty (following Benjamin) as "the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other."43 Difference and variation run rampant. And they are at play from the onset, at the level of authorship: "In a certain sense, all my books are co-authored. I am the sole author of none of them, I might not even be their author at all [...] Virtually all of my books are born of the desire—no, the need—to continue the work of authors I love."44 The words that we use are not ours, but we arrange them to say what we think. Or at least we try. In other words, what follows may follow but cannot be fully determined.

Serge Daney in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "Towards a Promenadology and about Peripheries", Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, New York: The Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, 1996, 63.

Jacques Derrida, "Che cos'è la poesia?" in Points... Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, 295.

Michel de Certeau in Dieter Roelstraete, Richard Long: A Line Made by Walking, London: Afterall Books, 2010, 13.

Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying, Harvard University Press, 2010, 23-29 and passim. The dissociation I attribute to the project is mine alone, Boon is referenced here because he leads a thorough discussion of essence and essencelessness in relation to the original and the copy in this section and throughout.

Schwartz, 223-224.

Schwartz, 224.

Acconci in interview with author. Published in this volume, 43.

Acconci, Diary of a Body 1969-1973, 74.

Acconci, 50.

Acconci, 26.

Acconci, 20.

"Suite Vénitienne" (amongst other works) in Sophie Calle, Double Game, Paris: Violette, 1999, 76-121. Vera Greenwood, L'Hôtel SofiCalle, Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2001, passim. Greenwood's project consisted in following Sophie Calle while doing a residency in Paris in 1997.

This essay was first presented on November 27, 2010 at the Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada International Conference, convened by Barbara Fischer and organized by the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery.

The full title of the exhibition was: Following Following Piece (Montreal, July 8, 2008 to June 2, 2010) Arranged According To Page Numbers (Mississauga, January 12 to March 6, 2011). Thérèse Mastroiacovo's project was presented at the Blackwood Gallery and curated by the author. See pages 26-37 in this publication.

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1989, 57. Reference: Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 3.

August 30, 2010.

Vito Acconci, Diary of a Body 1969-1973, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2006, 82. Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980 was first presented from September 11 to November 28, 2010 at the Blackwood Gallery, the Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and the University of Toronto Art Center. It was curated jointly by Grant Arnold (Vancouver Art Gallery), Catherine Crowston (Art Gallery of Alberta), Barbara Fischer (Justina M. Barnicke Gallery), Michèle Thériault with Vincent Bonin (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal), and Jayne Wark (Nova Scotia College of Art and Design). Organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery, in partnership with the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Concordia University) and Halifax INK. The Acconci piece is also cited in Garry Neill Kennedy, The Last Art College, MIT Press, 2012, 72. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy, New York: Zone Books, 1996, 248. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, 261. Or The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwesterns University Press, 1968, 211. Novalis, Le Brouillon Général, trans. Olivier Schefer, Paris: Editions Allia, 2000, 34 [No. 72]. Translation by the author.

Janet Cardiff in Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works, with George Bures Miller. New York: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, 2002. Some of the walks are credited to Cardiff only, others to both Cardiff and Miller.

Diane Borsato in Stephanie Springgay (ed.), Diane Borsato, Art Gallery of York University, 2012, 12-13; Sylvie Cotton, je préfère tout, Compton, Québec: les îles fortunées, 2006, unpaginated; k.g. Guttman in Claude Cosky (ed.), Ça et là, This & There, Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2012, unpaginated.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, trans. Louis Hammer and Sharon Ann Jaeger, Old Chatham, NY: Sachem Press, 1991, 69.

Rilke, 71.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attel. Stanford University Press, 2004, 58.

Agamben, 53.

Agamben, 62.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999, 458 [N1, 10].

Martin Heidegger in Agamben, 62. Also see 97 fn. 11.

Acconci, Diary of a Body 1969-1973, 108.

Correspondence with the author, email

Acconci, 133.

The fact that not only is the citing uncredited but the action itself is apocryphal, and these are not revealed as such in the film, amplifies the complexity at play. The scene concludes with the narrator saying that these chase sequences are "related to the distinction between making political films and making films politically." Indeed, a fuller consideration of this fabrication would recognize this deployment as a sobering self-reflexive awareness on the part of the filmmakers of the trappings of the image, in particular in how it assembles history. Also, how the internal logic of the film mixes epistolary, oneiric, dérivelike moves to get to an open-ended praxis.

Acconci in interview with author. Published in this volume, 42.

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/ Repetition, Princeton University Press, 1983, 131. Full quote: "Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is recollected forward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward."

Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, New York: Something Else Press, 1966, 3.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 13.

John Cage in Miroslav Sebestik, dir., Écoute [documentary film], Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992. Accessed June 21, 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcH nL7aS64Y&feature=player_embedded. Cage goes on to say that the quality that he appreciates of traffic, this noisy silence, is that it is always different. Whereas he claims that listening to a recording of, say Mozart, is always the same.

Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, 144.

Kierkegaard, 149.

This is not mere metaphor, but reflects the actual arrangement of the drawings for the exhibition. The drawings, arranged according to page numbers, started in one corner of the main Blackwood gallery space, continued in the e|gallery (located in a different building) and returned to finish at the corner where they started.

Bourdon in Gregory Battcock and Robert Nickas (eds.), The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984, 183.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge, 1993, xiii.

Giorgio Agamben in Leland de la Durantaye, "Friendship and Philisophy: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben," Cabinet, Issue 45 (Spring 2012), 54. 27

In the Following Following Piece (Montreal, July 8, 2008 to June 2, 2010), Thérèse Mastroiacovo has extensively researched instances in which images of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) have appeared in print. She then drew these items, rendering the iconic images, following the layout, keeping text indicators such as page numbers, titles and captions but excising any text extraneous to Acconci’s own.1 The drawing hand follows the performer's footsteps. The translation is meticulous, yet still idiosyncratic and replete with anomalies. This artistic take on bibliographic research opens a discussion on the legacy of conceptual art broadly stated. The current field of conceptual art practices is densely populated with an ever-widening scope of hyper-referential tactics that deny origin, abrogate expression and swallow its source materials whole. In Following Following Piece, the transpositions from furtive performance to photographic document to historicizing print and finally to framed fac-not so-simile durational drawing for exhibition are all at play as they each inflect their unique alterations on the mimetic process. The drawing series obviously required the deft hand of a human scanner to activate. But more crucially, it required a willingness to pass through the referenced work. When the dissemination of the reference has produced an ample bibliography, the digestive process will be considerable—the Following Piece has propagated in publications on performance art, as well as in other disciplines, including predictably, surveillance. The theoretical and the technical method deployed by Mastroiacovo to produce the series of fifty-three drawings is a muted hermeneutic blended with a mimetic mechanics. 30

Current conceptual practices often favor such nuanced and fine-tuned projects; projects following tactics that don't push, but nudge. They are panegyric acts also intended to prick lineage, to deflate aura, and debunk artifice. One step forward and backward at the same time. In its gallery presentation, Following Following Piece formally resembled a straight line, but not a clean one for it was charged with static. The kind of static that is parasitical and noisy—it was an endlessly recombinant line, a followed line to follow. The line drawn is a noisy affair. Saturated and suffused, it goes as far against the grain of honed perfection as to include unfinished followings, thwarted drawings. They were left hanging along with the rest in order to further distort the replay. In time, the line circles back onto itself. Following Following Piece is a work tuned in re-, the prefix of return, rewind, repetition. - Christof Migone, curator

1 The excision tactic extends one step further to the mode of presenting it in this publication. The drawings are absent, muted, the bibliography is thereby foregrounded. Whether this is an artistic, editorial or curatorial conceit (or combination thereof ) is left deliberately dangling in echo of some of the other content here where similar spurious strategies have held sway.

PAGE 11. Vito Acconci: Hoofdlijnen & Verschijningsvormen. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1978.

PAGE 12. Walk Ways. New York: Independent Curators International, 2002.

PAGE 13. Vito Acconci: A Retrospective, 1969 to 1980: An Exhi bition Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, March 21-May 18, 1980. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980.

PAGE 14. “Approaches to a Path.” Public Art Review Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall/ Winter 2000).

PAGE 15. [Unfinished Following]. The Power of the City, the City of Power, ISP Papers. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.

PAGE 25. Dialogues in Public Art: Interviews with Vito Acconci ... [Et Al.]. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.

PAGE 28. Performance by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979.

PAGE 29. Performance by Artists. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979.

PAGE 30. “People SpacePerforming Myself through Another Agent.” Avalanche No. 6 (Fall 1972).

PAGE 31. “People SpacePerforming Myself through Another Agent.” Avalanche No. 6 (Fall 1972).

PAGE 38. [Unfinished Following]. “In Pursuit of Acconci.” ARTFORUM Vol. 15, No. 8 (April 1977).

PAGE 38. “In Pursuit of Acconci.” ARTFORUM Vol. 15, No. 8 (April 1977).

PAGE 38. [Unfinished Following]. Vito Acconci, Contemporary Artists. New York: Phaidon, 2002.

PAGE 40. [Unfinished Following]. Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2008.

PAGE 40. Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2008.

PAGE 41. Street Art, Street Life: From the 1950s to Now. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2008.

PAGE 58. Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. London: Tate, 2003.

PAGE 64. “Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric of Presence.” October Vol. 91 (Winter 2000).

PAGE 68. “Endurance Art.” Performing Arts Journal Vol. 18, No. 3 (September 1996).

PAGE 70. Francis Alÿs. London: Phaidon Press, 2007.

PAGE 76. [Unfinished Following]. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 76. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 77. [Unfinished Following]. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 77. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 78. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 78. Vito Acconci. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2001.

PAGE 79. Vito Acconci. Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2001.

PAGE 79. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 80. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 81. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 82. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 83. Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body, 1969-1973. New York: Charta, 2006.

PAGE 84. Conceptual Art, Themes and Movements. New York: Phaidon, 2002.

PAGE 107. Perform. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

PAGE 108. “The Crimes of the Flaneur.” October Vol. 102 (Fall 2002).

PAGE 117. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger, 1973.

PAGE 119. The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

PAGE 126. Body Art/ Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

PAGE 184. The Art of Per formance: A Critical Anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984.

PAGE 196. Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio. Nantes, France; Barcelona: Musée des beauxarts de Nantes; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2004.

PAGE 197. Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio. Nantes, France; Barcelona: Musée des beauxarts de Nantes; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2004.

PAGE 203. [Unfinished Follow ing]. New York, Down town Manhattan, Soho: Ausstellungen, Theater, Musik, Per- formance, Video, Film: 5 September Bis 17 Oktober 1976: [Katalog]. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1976

PAGE 203. New York, Downtown Manhattan, Soho: Ausstellungen, Theater, Musik, Performance, Video, Film: 5 September Bis 17 Oktober 1976: [Katalog]. Berlin: Akademie der KĂźnste, 1976

PAGE 212. New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001.

PAGE 216. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.

PAGE 220. Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Artâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Meaning in Contemporary Society, 1970s-1990s. Litchfield, Connecticut: Art Insights, 1996.

PAGE 260. Performing the Body/Performing the Text. New York: Routledge, 1999.

PAGE 341. Art since 1940: Strategies of Being. London: Laurence King, 1995.

PAGE 402. [Unfinished Following]. Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M IT Press, 2002.

PAGE 403. [Unfinished Following]. Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M IT Press, 2002.

PAGE 404. Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M IT Press, 2002.

PAGE 405. Ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M IT Press, 2002.

PAGE IIII. Sculpture: From Antiquity to the Present Day: From the Eighth Century BC to the Twentieth Century. New York: Taschen, 2002.

Christof Migone (CM): I want to begin our discussion on the Following Piece (1969) by asking about the context of the piece, the Street Works Number 4 event by the Architectural League of New York. Vito Acconci (VA): Street Works was formed by four people: John Perrault, who was a New York poet. He survived by doing art criticism, and shortly after became art critic for the Village Voice. Another member was New York poet Hannah Weiner. Then there was Scott Burton, and the fourth was Eduardo Costa. They organized a series of events that would take place over a two or three day period. In different places in New York, out of the way places... but now I can’t remember what I would even mean by that. Because I think some of them were in Soho, but this was just before Soho became an art neighbourhood. I don’t really remember what the Architectural League of New York did exactly. They had a space in the upper sixties on Park or Lexington Avenue. I think the purpose was to exhibit and discuss architecture, though it was obviously looser than that. I think that after the first two or three Street Works they wanted to make it part of their program. So there would be an exhibition in their space for approximately a month, and one month was October 1969, which determined for me the length of my Following episodes. The show was going to be from Oct. 3rd to Oct. 25th. At that time, the notion of showing didn’t seem like something I was interested in doing. So that Oct. 3rd to 25th would set up the time during which I would do this everyday. CM: From the moment you started, did you already have in mind the follow-up to the Following Piece, the series of private pieces you did the following month that you framed as “re-activating” the Following Piece? VA: I’m almost certain that I didn’t. I’m almost certain that the idea came somewhere around Oct. 20th to 25th close to when it was going to be over. As you know, my thinking process—especially then, but also now—mostly comes from word play. So I thought, if I had done the Following Piece could this be extended, could there be a follow up to Following Piece? But no, it wasn’t planned before. CM: And getting into the Following Piece itself. I know you’ve resisted bringing out the psychological aspects of it, but… VA: I mean obviously there were psychological elements. I tried to treat it as a series of facts: People on the street in New York. I pick one. I latch myself on to this person. 42

And I had the luxury of doing that because it was in New York. In other words, I doubt if I was ever noticed while I was doing it because everybody is following somebody in New York. You know, I certainly didn’t follow somebody at three o’clock in the morning. I also realized a psychology of mine was involved. I don’t know if I planned this at the beginning, it could be checked by looking at the list of all the Following events, but they were all done very much as if from afar. You know: women in yellow sweater, in front of such and such a store or on such and such a street, turns corner etc. I’m almost certain that I made a point not to follow women as much as men because I wanted very much not to be noticed. CM: Right. VA: I mean if this had been a few years before—while I was at the graduate school in Iowa City—if I had done it there, it would have been totally different thing. I’m an aggressor on somebody, somebody’s action. In New York, I thought I could be dragged. I had been used to thinking of myself as a writer, so this was a way to get myself up from my writer’s desk, out into the world. It gave me some kind of atlas; it gave me a kind of directory. And again, I might by this time be so used to saying some of these things that they might be true, but there might be ten or twelve other things that might be true too. CM: It’s good that you brought up your past as a writer. You seem to be saying that what’s important for you is not only for the writer to get out of the chair, and go to the street, but to go to the street and use it as a text. It was not about abandoning the page but about finding it somewhere else. VA: In the mid-sixties I went to the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa from ‘63 to ‘64. At that time, the most important writer, the most important influence for me was Alain Robbe-Grillet. The most important movie that I had seen at that time—and I think it still remains the most important movie to me—was written by Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). CM: Given Marienbad and its sense of space, and given the Following Piece, obviously your stage is the street. Your current architectural work must also take the street into account all the time. VA: My work takes Marienbad into consideration because I think it probably made me realize—even though I know I didn’t realize this at the time—that architecture is just as much about, or more about, time as it is about space.

I mean the kind of architecture that is the opposite of architecture magazines. It’s not an image, it’s not an icon, it’s that first scene of Marienbad. With the camera aimed at the ceiling and the corners of the two walls of this Baroque hotel. It’s about a trajectory. CM: Even though I’m sure it’s more of cumulative process, but are there in recent years moments in your present work in which elements of the Following Piece reappear in relation to questions of flow? VA: That’s harder for me to say. It’s harder for me to say because I continue to give a lot of talks, and all these talks begin with a few poems and then Following Piece, so it’s almost like I’ve set up this kind of method. But the piece comes up sometimes in the studio because the people around the table are usually designers or architects who often don’t know the piece. Also this touches on notions of the difference between intruding on somebody’s space and what I thought I was doing. It was not so much about taking this person’s space but where this person is going to take me. The time of the piece was set up by the duration of a show. I know one of the things that interested me when I was starting to think about what I was doing was maybe where this potentially could take me, you know, what happens if I follow somebody and this person goes to an airport? It did not occur to me at that time and I had nothing like a credit card. There would be no way I could follow that person. But then I probably would transfer to someone closer to home. I thought, this person could take me, or not this person but a number of people together, could possibly take me throughout New York. They could take me to places I didn’t know. Places I would never think of going there myself. Though it seems strange, I had no idea the Situationists existed then. And I’ve talked to some people of my generation and we were certainly aware of Dada and we were aware of Fluxus but not the Situationists. It was not until, I know very specifically when, in 1979 a San Francisco Press put out a Situationist anthology. That was the first time I ever come upon them. CM: So even the films hadn’t been screened? VA: Not to me, but they must have been available. I’m sure the Anthology Film Archives (or really, its predecessor the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque) must have had that stuff. But I didn’t know about them and, again, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know about them, but I think there were people who did. I think more academic people. I remember once talking in passing to David Ross, who at one time was the Director of the Whitney, and he said

he knew all that stuff back then, but I certainly didn’t. I wished I had because it would have informed what I was doing. I wonder if I had known about it would I have even done Following Piece? CM: In the essay “The Crimes of the Flaneur” (October, Vol. 102, Autumn 2002, 101-122), Tom McDonough writes about the Following Piece in connection to that at the same time as the piece Benjamin’s writings on the flâneur were being re-discovered. VA: Now, did I know Benjamin then? I don’t know. I’m not sure if I did. I mean the whole flâneur notion of Baudelaire is something that I know I was aware of, I just don’t know when. CM: Would you say that the Following Piece is the kind of antithesis of the flâneur, because there is no personal will involved? As you said you’re placing in the process of being dragged and what ensues is an aimless meandering. VA: The meandering, yeah, definitely. I wish—there must be a way to trace when I first came upon Baudelaire. I’m not sure I knew that stuff till the 80s. Or late 70s. Same for Semiotext(e), I’m not sure when was I first aware of that press, certainly mid-70s. CM: Speaking of kinds of influences, it seems that there could be a way of looking at lineage as a process where one thing triggers the other. I have found that in your talks you often present a piece as addressing a specific question. The resulting piece might leave the question unresolved—or a certain failure occurs—and that impediment causes the next piece. In retrospect, is this what happened as well with the Following Piece? VA: Probably. Although I wish I could think of some specific examples when I felt that something didn’t go far enough and therefore it lead to something else. At the time, when I was thinking of Following Piece, I had a kind of companion piece in mind that wasn’t done until the year after. The way I was thinking about Following Piece, I was the receiver of somebody else’s action. So then I thought, can I do the opposite? Can I intrude? It wasn’t done until a year later, probably because an occasion hadn’t come up. And this other piece [Proximity Piece (1970)] was done just about exactly a year later connected with the show called Software (1970), that was curated by Jack Burnham at the Jewish Museum, which was at that time much more involved with contemporary 43

stuff. I don’t know if the title Following Piece was given to it beforehand, because there were earlier titles, I doubt if in the first description it was called Following Piece. It was probably called and this makes my unawareness of Situationists even more startling, they were all titled things like A SITUATION USING… such and such. And that was very important to me. I hated the idea of titles. On the one hand, I desperately wanted this to be art; but on the other hand, I felt so alien to art and I wanted it to be something else. So, my thinking was that since I was going to do something in the middle of everyday life, this doesn’t have a title the way, a short story or a novel has a title, or an art piece has a title. It simply takes something from the millions of everyday occurrences and pinpoints this one situation. Unfortunately I don’t know if I have all of those early titles for Following Piece. CM: You were about to talk about Proximity Piece (1970). VA: For Proximity Piece, for the duration of the Software show, I would be at the museum, ideally everyday all day. I don’t think I did it everyday or all day. Unlike Following Piece, I didn’t note or describe each act, each activity and I don’t know why, maybe because I didn’t do it as often as I wanted. I would stand next to or behind a person at one of the exhibits—and I have to phrase it that way because this wasn’t necessarily a show where people looked at something on a wall or on a pedestal. There were some works involving sound, some involving early attempts at using a computer, so I would stand next to or behind the person closer than the accustomed distance, so that that person would move out of my way—or that person could respond by moving me out of his or her way. I know that the way I revealed this was that there was a little index card—which I almost know I don’t have—that was placed somewhere in the Museum, but certainly not framed. It was something that maybe people noticed. The way, I thought it would work would be, a person who visited the show, then talks to a friend saying: I was at the Museum today and this really strange thing happened. I was standing there and this guy just stood too close to me… And the fried might say: Hey that happened to me too! (laugh) I wanted the piece to be distributed by means of rumor. CM: Right. I think in both of those cases there is that experiential conveyance of the piece: A direct connection and then the more widespread part is its documentation. I’m curious in both of those cases about the role of the photographer and how you arranged that. VA: In Proximity Piece sometime during the show, probably 44

towards the end, I asked somebody to come and be around when I was doing it, but it certainly was not done each day. Following Piece, I specifically thought I don’t think I can have a photographer here because if I’m following a person, then there is another person following me. So I had no photos of the project until the project ended and I realized that things in art don’t count unless they’re visual. But there was a very simple solution to this. All I had to do was walk out on the street with a person with the camera and it looks like I’m following someone. You know, someone took a few photos and it’s of the same person here and here but it was totally fake. But not fake in the sense that the person being followed knew about it. CM: So in, the piece continued even after it ended. VA: Yes, yeah, yeah. (laughs) CM: In the video interview you did with Willoughby Sharp, he asks why he was the recipient of the private version of the piece. Then at one point he says “I have been following people for years!”, as if he felt that he had been targeted by you sending him the documentation and you were kind of outing him. VA: Ah, I don’t remember that interview specifically enough but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring it up. CM: You followed the Following Piece by a series of works that re-activated it in the form of a note addressed to a specific person which recounted one instance of following which had occurred exactly one month before. And the re-activation was itself re-activated two more times on the same date for the following two months. VA: It was for distribution. I was being my own publicity agent. And I think there were three versions. One New York version, I sent something to everybody in New York; the United States version, sent things to people outside of New York; and then what I call the “world” version, but it was only Europe, I think. Each of these was sent specifically, yeah. That’s the follow up to Following Piece, the particular activity reactivated for a mix of critics, curators, artists. In other words, they were sent very specifically to people who I thought could possibly talk about it to others. CM: Is there a sense with that piece—and perhaps with Seedbed (1972) as well—where the perverse aspect of it was amplified to such an extent that you want

to resist that interpretation of you as the predator, or those kinds of readings of it? VA: Again, I thought I couldn’t be a predator in New York. I mean it was so much on my mind that this was a play. Again, when I was starting to do activities my biggest question was: Now that I’m here, that I’m in real space, now that I’m not on page space anymore—when I was on page space I felt, I can’t say I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to go from top of the page to bottom and from left of the page to right. Page space is like framed space. Street space was more open. There are highways and byways you know. There are turns; there are intersections. So the biggest question for me is: what is giving me a reason to move here? And everything I’m saying might be based on the notion of: I don’t want to recognize, or I don’t want to admit that I am intruding on another person’s space. Except I really don’t think I was. I think I was using it as a way to say: I’m here, where should I go? If I focus on a person, I go where that person goes. CM: And one of the parameters of the piece is that there is a very distinct directive that you have given yourself that you be in public space but not private space. VA: Yeah, it would stop before I went into private space. CM: There is an obvious practicality to that. But it is interesting that in some ways even though the space of the city is more fluid, like you say, as opposed to the page or the gallery, there is that limitation of public/private. Maybe I’m being too reductive, but you often talked about a throughness. It seems like it’s a kind of recurring image that you are seeking, also in your architectural work, this interest in passing through. VA: That is exactly how I was thinking about it. I was talking a little awhile ago about Last Year at Marienbad, and again I’m sure I couldn’t have used those words then, but architecture is about going through architecture. CM: Right. Now to get into the idea of following as lineage I alluded to earlier. There are many people doing work which is very clearly inspired by your own work. How do you react when you encounter those instances? VA: Well when Sophie Calle did her piece [ed. note: various works between 1979 - 1981 by Calle featured

following as a central strategy], I don’t remember what year, but she called me to ask me permission. I said “You don’t need to. Thank you for considering that, but I would think it’s kind of up for grabs.” She very much did the psychological version. CM: Yeah, it is a good example of that. VA: There’s also a film version. Christopher Nolan, the guy who has now become the Batman director, his first movie is called Following (1998). And strangely I haven’t seen it and I keep forgetting about it. I should see this. I think it was already after the Sophie Calle piece. Which I think became much more famous than my piece. CM: The Sophie Calle? VA: The Sophie Calle. CM: That’s hard to say. Now to speak specifically about the Following Following Piece that Thérèse Mastroiacovo in Montreal is doing where she is taking any instance of the Following Piece appearing in a book where there is a photograph of the piece and then redrawing the spread where it appears. It is kind of a cataloguing, a documentarian project, that has an obsessional quality, given that the drawings are quite meticulous. And although not rendered exactly like a facsimile, there’s that attempt to be, factual, I guess is the word. VA: There have been a lot of versions. I’ve come across a lot of student versions. There was a person, in grad school at Pratt, maybe in 2000, who apparently was doing all these pieces based on Following Piece. She also wanted to follow me. But she would ask permission and I thought: I don’t know if that’s really the way (laughs). Do you really want to do it that way? (laughter). CM: Yeah, that seems counterproductive. VA: Yeah. But, over the years, surprisingly often, if I’m giving a talk, some student comes up to me and says that ‘I tried to do a version of your piece…’ And maybe it makes sense. Just as I thought of myself as a writer, now I’m possibly doing something else… And the best way to begin is to follow what people do anyway. There’s some kind of influence. I literalized it. You know. I would have a different influence each day (laugh). I guess maybe students gravitate towards it, because it seems like you’re always, you’re always copying somebody, whether you realize it or not. So here is a way to make it obvious. 45

Vito Acconci Following Piece (1969) © VITO ACCONCI/SODRAC (2012)

CM: I think there’s that, and I think you speak about having this everyday occurrence where you are following people but you are not conscious of it. Just the act of you becoming conscious of it makes it into a piece. VA: Yeah. CM: Which goes back to what you were saying earlier about resisting giving it a title as a work, as opposed to a situation. It almost seems as if the Following Piece is the flip side of that, you are actually calling it a piece and including the word “piece.” VA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that happened to all those pieces then. They all started out by not being called a piece and then, I don’t know, I shrugged my shoulders and gave in. CM: How do you think back on those attempts to get into the art world and were they already foreshadowing your exit from that world? VA: I always had a resistance to the art world. But I also thought this was the world where whatever kinds of stuff I was doing I couldn’t think of any other world where this could be done. At that time what I loved about— at least the idea of art— was that art was this non-field field. Art was a field that was beginning to have no inherent characteristics of its own except for the fact that it was called art. So art was a field to which you could import from other fields. I certainly wasn’t thinking then of leaving the art world, though I don’t know if I knew what I wanted my position to be, but I don’t think I had this in mind. I don’t think I had in mind that this would be a temporary place to be because at that time I couldn’t imagine what I would do if I wasn’t doing some activity in that world. I didn’t want to do something that would last. I didn’t want to do an activity that would result in, you know, a sculpture—something that was apart from me. I mean that started to change when I thought of installations. Not that I was the person who invented installations. And also, ‘installation’ is the vaguest art term that has ever been invented. If this was a time where I was entering the art world was I already thinking—I didn’t phrase it exactly like this—but was I already thinking of an exit. Was it a temporary thing? I don’t think I knew. At that time, I disliked certain things about galleries from the very beginning. But at that time I really valued what seemed to be the openness of art. That art was a try out place. But that’s art as an activity, not art as a business. CM: And, I mean not necessarily to put you in that position but, for instance, what’s happening with MoMA 48

now with the Marina Abramovic show [Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present, MoMA, March 14 - May 31, 2010] ? VA: Well I do feel a kind of opposition—not that I would want to stop anybody from doing it. I thought other people had such a different notion of performance. We were so desperate to figure out what makes us different from theatre. And when people started to call it performance, I had such a resistance to the term because to me performance was a theatre word. Though I had to desperately find a way, find something that made performance make sense. I’m not so sure if those of us who at the time were doing work like this were calling it performance. I don’t know if artists then were so eager to find a category for it, and also you realize that these categories are going to be made by curators, by writers etc. But I stared to love one meaning of performance, perform in the sense of perform a contract. And I thought that’s exactly what this stuff is; I say I’m going to do something, now I have to live up to this, I can’t turn back. That I loved. CM: So in terms of the business side of art and the historification of performance in the theatrical sense— which is what we could say is happening at MoMA now… would you ever see that as a route you would take? VA: I couldn’t, no. I mean, even then, there were some pieces of mine that were repeated, but over a period of time, like Seedbed was done for a number of days over the period of this two weeks show. Aside from that and a performance that turned out to be the last performance I ever did, The Ballroom Piece (1973) in Florence, where it was done for three days. I never repeated a performance because it seemed to me that if I repeated a performance the second time, the first time then would have been a rehearsal, for the second time and it wouldn’t have made sense if it was rehearsed. And this was supposed something that I didn’t know if I could do. And I think it was very significant that towards the end of my time of doing performances that a lot of them involved talk and they involved talk more to myself than to an audience because I think I was making a desperate attempt to convince myself to do something. I can give you some specific examples pieces of mine that I thought were the most important pieces, like Claim (1971). Claim was a three-hour piece because I had done some reading on attention and how you might convince yourself. And most research said that anything approaching self-hypnotism could never happen in the first hour, it probably needed that second hour, and by the third hour it would start to dissipate. And during that first hour, I knew exactly what was happening. I was using the words

I thought I would say to myself. Things like: I’m alone here in the basement, I want to stay alone here, I don’t want anyone to come into the basement with me, I’ll stop anybody. But what I was really thinking was: I have to get out of here, this is horrible, this is the worst piece I’ve ever done, this is embarrassing. But there was no way out. I mean the only way out was the stairway, so by the second hour I kind of convinced myself. And the same thing happened with Seedbed. The first three hours of Seedbed I thought: this is awful, I got to get out. I mean I hated being there, but then I got used to it. So it was kind of…

person, but it’s almost a literalization of what an idea is. An idea allows me to do something. But I don’t know if I want to be so childlike, I don’t know how to recognize an idea but I can recognize that this is my Father (laughs).

CM: Self-fulfilling?

VA: I don’t know though because I think you do need the tracking. It might not necessarily be a person but I always felt like, can you do an action without a theory? Do you have to have an idea first and then the idea allows you to do it? I don’t know. Bernadette Mayer, who coedited 0 to 9 magazine with me, was going to a psychiatrist at the time we were working on the magazine and when she described acts of mine, the psychiatrist said I had a thought disorder. Apparently what people generally do is they feel and then they do something, they feel and then they think something. I did the opposite. I didn’t feel I had to think first and only then could I feel—but I don’t really know if that’s true.

VA: Yeah. CM: I just recently saw a reference to what seems to be a kind of precursor to the Following Piece where Terry Fox mentions what may have been your last poetry reading where you walked from your apartment to the place were the reading was supposed to be and apparently you phoned… VA: I thought of it as a performance not a reading. It was June of ‘69. It was an evening of performances including film and music at Paula Cooper Gallery, which was the first gallery that had a space in Soho. I think her space was on Wooster Street. It was called Points, Blanks. I estimated how long it would take me to walk to the Gallery, so that at the beginning of this night of performances I would be approximately one hundred blocks away on 100 Street and Broadway. And I would walk down Broadway and every ten minutes call the Gallery and announce where I was so that between other people’s performances the gallery attendant would say: “At such and such time Vito Acconci called, said he was such and such a place.” I remember being so horrified and flabbergasted when somebody told me afterwards that at one point Yvonne Rainer yelled out, Tell him to get a taxi (laughs). CM: So your voice wasn’t put on speaker, it was conveyed by the… VA: Yeah, it was conveyed by someone else. CM: Returning to Claim and its relationship to Following Piece… VA: Claim for me is almost the reverse of Following Piece. I keep coming back to that notion that I didn’t know how to move until I could be tied into something. That doesn’t necessarily mean I have to be tied to another

CM: Perhaps another way of looking at that need or desire for that exterior impetus, would be through a distinction between human versus animal, where the animal needs something to track, needs an instinctual trigger whereas the human figure is supposed to be individualistic and governed by will.

CM: Did you ever do therapy? VA: No I always thought it was like having a paid friend. CM: A paid listener. VA: I remember when I started doing work there was a soap opera at that time, at the end of the 60s, early 70s, and each episode was a psychiatric session. I remember this guy that wrote a number of books named Thomas S. Szasz, all strongly against the notion of therapy. Also, I grew up a Catholic. I went to confession. CM: That’s all you need. And they’re not paid. VA: Yeah. I remember the notion of a paid consultant, I mean it shouldn’t have horrified me, but I always have a little bit of…. CM: Resistance. VA: Yeah. CM: Well I think this seems like a good place to stop. VA: Yeah. 49

What becomes history is to some degree determined by what is archived. Julie Ault¹

he archival footnotes had been transplanted, as it were, from their usual marginal location to the centre of the body and incorporated into the text. The sources themselves played a part in the plot. This act of inclusiveness assigns an entirely revolutionary status to archives. Such an operation served to repatriate sources, which by convention are deported to the end (foot) of the entire text, invariably alienating the archive from the body.2 Vincent Bonin’s contribution to Documentary Protocols (1967-1975), the ambitious bilingual exhibition catalogue released in 2010 that he edited with Michèle Thériault, is the most recent attempt to answer AA Bronson’s call to arms nearly thirty years ago: “Someone sometime must write a really good history of Canadian art in the 60s and 70s.”3 The immediate impetus for Bonin’s text was a two-part exhibition that he conceived and developed at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal, Documentary Protocols I and II, mounted in 2007 and 2008. Documentary Protocols was conceived as a corrective to what Bonin views as the pervasive “methodological shortcomings” of recent curatorial engagements with the archive—a lack of precision signaled by the near total absence of this term in its plural form in the prolific discourse which it has spawned.4 Given this challenge to dominant discourse, the Montreal-based curator’s deployment of the term “documentary” is liable to be misleading. The archival turn in contemporary art is frequently marked by a presentation of photographs or videos that, despite their documentary function (standing in for ephemeral actions or events), nonetheless approximate the visual attributes of traditional museum objects sufficiently to support an accumulation of surplus value. Going against the grain, Documentary Protocols mainly assembled textual byproducts of the administrative infrastructure developed by artists in Canada from 1967 to 1975. Although Bonin’s claim that “it would have been possible to by-pass the actual display of the documents by presenting them directly in the publication”5 is somewhat exaggerated, it is notable that his selection of materials for display and subsequent reproduction are characterized by a minimum of non-textual properties. These are artefacts that, by virtue of their almost entirely 52

non-visual character, exemplify Lucy Lippard’s influential thesis of “dematerialization”, having resisted the logic of commodification to which, according to Lippard herself, most non-object-based practices of the 1960s and early 1970s had succumbed as early as 1973.6 Entombed within the vaults of museums and university libraries, the materials curated by Bonin have, almost without exception, been overlooked by researchers—not to mention the market—for nearly four decades. This is not to suggest that Bonin proposed a naive opposition between textual and more conventional “documentary” formats, or that he wasn’t aware of the value generated by the transfer of archival materials from their respective institutional repositories into the white cube of the university art gallery. Indeed, “Documentary Protocols” is above all a meditation on the “co-opting” of archives in recent international projects that implicates Bonin’s own curatorial endeavor as the first instance of such a project in Canada.7 Catherine Moseley notes that “as conceptual documents age, they become perceived as precious.”8 Bonin’s strategy, developed for Documentary Protocols II, of making available photocopies of selected items exhibited in the display cases for consultation on adjacent shelves, underlines the fetishization that results from the presentation of objects under typical conditions of gallery display, no matter how de-emphasized their visual characteristics. The promiscuous contiguity of relatively scarce archival objects and disposable reproductions was both a democratizing gesture and one that draws attention to the symbolic gap in which cultural capital is generated. This dual purpose was achieved by foregrounding the information content of the documents. Bonin’s decision to restrict all didactic commentary and

bibliographic data to leaflets—thereby presenting archival objects and their photocopied surrogates alike without conventional interpretive frameworks—involved visitors in the interpretation of objects, a role usually reserved for the curator. Positioning visitors as researchers implicated them in the scholar’s “appropriation” of the archive as part of a “chain of production where access to collective heritage becomes a service transaction.”9 In its conf lation of spaces ordinarily segregated (reading room and exhibition area), the hybrid plan of Documentary Protocols II recalls Martin Beck’s exploration of 1960s, “artists’ initiatives seeking to explore and create new spaces for the presentation and distribution of artworks.”10 By transferring non-art objects into the gallery space, the exhibition instantiated a logic of “decompartmentalization” for which the practices of Beck and sometime collaborator Julie Ault are paradigmatic.11 Yet, Bonin’s approach must be distinguished from that of Ault, for whom non-art objects generally function as documentation of events (exhibitions, protests, etc.)12 Bonin’s deployment of archival objects, on the other hand, brought to light the administrative protocols informing the constitution of the archives. At the same time, the project contests the institutional containment of those archives today. Nevertheless, Ault’s stated goal of bringing to light “the paper trails of defunct groups” resonates with Bonin’s materialist project.13 Bonin’s catalogue essay also responded to an ongoing dialogue about the history and politics of artist-run centres in Canada initiated by Bronson’s seminal memoir and provocation, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat” (1983), and extends to recent materialist histories such as Clive Robertson’s formidable Policy Matters (2006) as well 53

as more concise statements such as Ken Lum’s essay, “Canadian Cultural Policy: A Metaphysical Problem” (1999)14 Like these earlier efforts, “Documentary Protocols” is motivated by the “fear that we are losing sight of our roots.”15 Yet, its approach to the thematic of artist-run centres as “conceptualism’s colonization of its own critical reception”16 is distinguished from earlier analyses on the basis of its archival focus, sociological methodology and, above all, by its refusal to admit the defeat of conceptualism’s administrative project. Despite its unique contribution to the discourse on artist-run culture, to date Bonin’s project has received inadequate critical attention. This essay attempts to rectify this situation by exploring the consequences of Bonin’s thesis that “to interpret these archives ad hoc methodologies must be established.”17 Bonin’s insistence that archival artefacts generated by the self-administration practices adopted by artists during the 1960s and 70s be treated as “objects of analysis,” rather than evidence for “a thesis or retrospective fiction,” echoes the work of artist-curators such as Ault.18 Indeed, in an interview with me, Bonin claimed his questioning of what he terms “the ontology of curation” is derived from artistic practices, particularly those of Ault and Beck.19 Yet, Bonin’s project must be unambiguously distinguished from what Hal Foster has termed the “archival impulse”20 animating a range of recent artists’ projects. Far from the “idiosyncratic probings” of an artist like Tacita Dean (whose projects consistently trace subjective links between documentary artefacts), and equally removed from the poststructural decenterings effected by a curator such as Okwui Enwezor (who showcases archival projects that disturb “the integrity of and confidence in the archive as a site of historical recall”), Bonin’s methodology is closer to the “logic of stricture” deployed by Jacques Derrida in such texts as “Tympan” and Glas.21 That is, Bonin substitutes a Derridean strategy of close reading in place of a “logic or dialectic of opposition.”22 (As such, his methodology must also be distinguished from Foucauldian approaches to the archive popularized by Enwezor, Charles Merewether and Robertson.) And yet, Bonin has insisted in discussions with me that his work rejects poststructural techniques. Notwithstanding these protests, the curator’s catalogue text—though far removed from the delegitimizing tactics of Enwezor—unleashes a series of displacements: “The gaps between the documents reproduced in Documentary Protocols were, for me, as important as what was published,” Bonin has stated.23 More contradictory still, Bonin emerges from a close reading of his text as an exemplary representative of the “artist-as-archivist”—albeit one in a band apart from the Shandean figures studied by Foster and Enwezor.24 In 54

this last respect, Bonin approximates the ambivalent status of his current research subject, critic-curator Lucy Lippard, as an artist whose “medium is other artists.”25 Pursuing this analogy with Lippard further, we can specify that Bonin establishes a critical practice that applies conceptual principles derived from the work of artists. The artists who inform Bonin’s work do not seek to undermine collective confidence in archives as sites of cultural authority, but rather to foreground how authority itself is produced and contested in an ongoing circuit of political activity. Rather than contesting the authority of the archive through deconstructive moves, Bonin “undermines a given archive’s ‘house arrest’” by bringing together materials from disparate archival fonds.26 Through physical displacement and juxtaposition, Bonin opens up the contents of archives to renewed public scrutiny, dissemination and critical reuse. Resonating with this curatorial strategy, Bonin’s catalogue text proposes a methodology that recalls Ault’s technique of “bringing together investigatory methods and writing styles ordinarily not joined” to produce a dense layering of information, objects and perspectives.27 Such a multivalent but resolutely materialist project is bound to remain perpetually attentive to the fundamental ambivalence and muteness of documents, and to the multiple political trajectories to which they become harnessed.

Thresholds of Visibility In this essay, I read Bonin’s catalogue essay as an attempt to constitute his curatorial practice as an intertextual system that fulfills theorist Gérard Genette’s description of the “paratext”: the sum of those elements and practices at the threshold of the work that ensure its intelligibility as such.28 According to Genette, such elements typically include an author’s name, a title, a preface—in short, everything that is required to enable a text to become legible to a public. While physically interior to the material carrier of the text, these elements reference the larger system of texts exterior to the singular document in “the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.”29 Because of its marginal location, we are never certain whether this textual fringe is, strictly speaking, internal to the text at all, or whether we have already entered the space of the “off-text.”30 For his part, Bonin displays a remarkable attentiveness to how framing devices such as inventories and computerized catalogues function as paratexts by mediating access to archival fonds, thereby “inflect[ing] the interpretation of […] documents.”31 One such liminal element that is particularly

relevant to a paratextual reading of “Documentary Protocols”—a text with margins swarming with “side notes” that function beyond mere reference—is the footnote.32 Genette has analyzed the history of annotation as well as its function in terms of the addressee of the note. Being optional to the reader, Genette concludes that this addressee does not necessarily coincide with the reader. Rather, the note may be “addressed only to certain readers: to those who will be interested in one or another supplementary or digressive consideration.”33 In a sense, annotation addresses a reader who will constitute the discourse of the text as a system of intertextuality. Jacques Derrida’s witty deconstruction of annotation practices, “This Is Not an Oral Footnote,” complements Genette’s analysis of the footnote as a component of the paratextual apparatus when he concludes that, “annotation in the strict sense in no way differs from intertextuality. It is intertextual through and through, from the moment we understand ‘text’ in the classical sense as a notation representing one discourse propped on another.”34 For Derrida, as for Genette, the footnote frames a discourse as a text constituted by a series of (permeable) “boundaries.”35 Following the examples of Derrida and Genette, I approach the profusion of marginal notes in Bonin’s catalogue text as an intertextual system, one that brings into representation the boundary the curator crossed when transferring artefacts from the archives into the space of the gallery as a threshold of meaning. The footnote, Bonin observes, is central to the production of “discursive hierarchies”: a “segregation” of sources from the body of the text that his own inclusive editorial structure was explicitly designed to undo.36 My foregrounding of the “minor text” of the marginal note functions, in turn, to assist Bonin in his operation of “providing equal visibility” to the profusion of texts— archival, primary, bibliographic, etc.—which the authorcurator has spread out on a single plane for his reader.37 At a staggering 157 marginal notes, a comprehensive review is hardly feasible here. Instead, I have grouped selected references into provisional constellations intended to facilitate the work of the reader in tracing connections, both within Bonin’s labyrinthine text and by linking it to broader networks of discourse and practice. As such, this text is constituted as an “epitext”38 to Bonin’s essay that both stands apart from and refers back to the discourse that it propagates and extends. The supplemental tactics presented here are liable to give rise to questions similar to those posed by Brien Brothman in a text cited by Bonin: “One might wonder at times whether the present text is a ‘book review […], a ‘review article’ of several writings […], or an ‘article’ per se: what distinguishes one writer’s ‘work’ or ‘text’ from another’s?”39 This text is also offered as a gift. That is, it attempts to fulfill the obligation imposed by its host text to instigate

what Miwon Kwon has described in another context as the “circuit of obligation and reciprocity” proper to a gift economy.40 The gift economy set in motion by “Documentary Protocols” was underlined by Bonin in an earlier epitext to the exhibition and catalogue, in which he stated that, “I saw my work as a trigger for more research on the period and for making the documents I was studying more accessible to researchers and the public at large.”41 In making public the documentary findings of the “continuous research process”42 that provided the framework for his curatorial and publishing projects, Bonin established an alternative circuit of exchange with readers, one that demands reciprocation through the intertextual labour of debate and dissemination. Through sharing, the giver of the gift thus solicits rival texts in the interests of producing a “public.”43 “You need to return the gift,” Bonin reminds readers.44 “And this is the problem: it’s really hard to quantify what you have to return.”45 In choosing a pubic destination as the “address” of his project, the curator has recycled tactics deployed by the very generation of artists that constitutes his research subject—artists who, as Julie Ault describes, sought “alternatives to ‘art as merchandise.’”46 This essay is intended to aid and abet the curator in undermining the “domiciliation” of the archive by diverting its address to new destinations, and new recipients, in the public domain.47

"Artist-run Margins"48 On first reading, “Documentary Protocols” is a history of artist-initiated groups in Canada from 1967 to 1975. Bonin studies the institutions created by artists in pursuit of a “paradigm of self-determination”49 during this period by analyzing archival fonds that today preserve material evidence of artists’ administrative labour then. This historical narrative is reflected in the marginal notes to Bonin’s text— a mere portion of which constitutes nothing less than a comprehensive literature review of artist-run organizations in Canada during the timeframe selected by the curator. Despite the summative character of Bonin’s reading of previously published sources, he succeeds in proposing a highly original narrative. Bonin’s innovation emerges from his focused reading of the theme of self-administration as a provision of service in texts by Lucy Lippard and Clive Robertson, in addition to intertwined themes of self-determination, communications technology and federal policy found in the work of Bronson and Lum. In her critical assessment of Conceptual artists’ adoption of “ways of producing art that were analogous to other forms 55

of labour” in the emergent service economy of the 1960s, Helen Molesworth notes a correspondence between the strategies adopted by Conceptual artists and “the dream of an integration of the realms of art and life” that fuelled the historical avant-garde.50 This same aspiration infuses the representation of art as service in the work of Lippard. “Another idea that has come up often recently that interests me very much,” Lippard writes in the preface to Six Years, “is that of the artist working as an interruptive device, a jolt, in present societal systems.”51 Lippard cites the serviceoriented Artists’ Placement Group (APG) to illustrate her vision of the artist as social catalyst. The critic-curator’s chronicle of Conceptual art also foregrounds the vanguard, Vancouver-based service provider N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. (NETCo)—an entity that epitomized the fusion of art and everyday life. Lippard’s discussion of APG and NETCo parallels Bonin’s broadening of the focus on artist-run centres found in Robertson’s text to include such artists’ groups as NETCo and General Idea (which Robertson relegates to the status of precursors to the fully-fledged artist-run institutions of the late 1970s).52 Whereas Bronson’s focus is on “artists’ activity outside of any institutional structure”53—thereby situating his text squarely within a discourse of alternative spaces, to which both Ault and Robertson subsequently made significant contributions—Bonin follows Lippard in exploring how artists of the 60s and 70s overcame cultural isolation by “offer[ing] services to members of their communities.”54 The significance of this manoeuvre lies not only in its blurring of clear distinctions between the institution and its other, but also in its riposte to Benjamin Buchloh’s influential critique of what he termed the “aesthetic of administration” that characterized Conceptual art.55 Buchloh has posited that the aesthetic vocabulary of Conceptual art was “structured much the way [the middle] class’s social identity is, namely, as one of merely administering labor and production (rather than producing).”56 Buchloh’s denunciation of Conceptual art’s deployment of administrative structures and techniques—for which Sol LeWitt’s practice of hiring third parties to execute ideational works is paradigmatic—largely fuelled the search for genuinely alternative spaces and collective structures of self-governance found in the work of Ault and others. Bonin argues that Buchloh mistakenly equates administration with capitalism: “to ‘administer,’” Bonin clarifies in “Documentary Protocols,” “[…] can function in various contexts without explicit reference to capitalism’s modes of reproduction.”57 “Documentary Protocols” thereby refuses to draw a direct link between the structural logic of the archive and the growth of post-industrial capitalism. Robertson had earlier argued in favour of seeing “the project of turning art from a commodity to a service […] as a useful 56

adjustment.”58 For Bonin, as for Robertson before him, the provision of service is not necessarily commensurate with an inequitable service economy based on dematerialized “games between people.”59 Service can also take the form of community service, he reminds us. Bonin thereby recuperates the critical potential of administrative projects such as the Vancouver-based Image Bank, whose administrative apparatus—though thoroughly non-capitalist— may have thwarted adequate scholarship in the wake of Buchloh’s censure of bureaucracy. “Documentary Protocols” portrays the services offered by artists in Canada as preeminently communicationsbased. This assessment echoes Bronson, who proposed that the network of artist-initiated groups in Canada answered a need for “decentralized communication” in a country located at the margins of empire.60 For Bonin, the communications services provided by artists attempted a “short-circuiting [of the] network of third parties (critics, curators, art dealers),” to whom responsibility for narrating and legitimating cultural experience had traditionally fallen.61 Here again we find parallels between Bonin and Bronson, who explicitly characterized artists’ pursuit of self-determination as a “method of bypassing the gallery system.”62 To Bronson’s McLuhanesque celebration of the media of communication as fulfilling “a dream community”, Bonin appends a Derridean meditation on “the very limits of the utopia in which there is a neutral access point to information.”63 In addition to locating “the end of utopia” as a historical rupture, Bonin explores the geographically-fixed address of the correspondent in the eternal network as a material factor that limits the transformation of hegemonic circuits of communication—notably, the postal system—into a “parallel communications tool” in the service of a “peer community that functioned as a counterpublic.”64 When artists attempt momentarily to obliterate geographic and cultural borders,” Bonin observes, “the coordinates of their organization’s head office is the only marker left of the existence of a point of emission and reception of messages.65 Although the traces left by the communications process are indeed highly dematerialized, Bonin emphasizes that ideological contradictions nonetheless inhere in the “address” of the sender.66 For Bonin, these contradictions are exemplified by the North Vancouver address of the N.E. Thing Co.: a suburban home that simultaneously functioned as a corporate headquarters. Appearing on all promotional documents disseminated by the Company as a result of its aggressive communications strategy (which included an early adoption of Telex and telecopier technologies), the address of NETCo’s “Seymour Plant”67—as co-presidents Iain and Ingrid Baxter punningly dubbed their home office—conveys an unresolved tension between

private and public identities. Bonin’s relentlessly materialist reading of the postal system responds to Bronson’s representation of NETCo and other artists’ inhabitation of communications systems as “a very Canadian thing.”68 Bonin agrees with Lum in reading this McLuhanesque vision of Canadian identity (a cultural “mosaic”69 welded together by technology) as a creation of federal policy. Bonin and Lum alike attribute the emergence of a “nationwide network of art collectivities” in Canada, not to any inherent property of media (as Bronson does), but rather, to policies instituted by the Trudeau government.70 Lum identifies the 1971 Multiculturalism Policy as the defining document of the cultural infrastructure, the bureaucratic logic of which became insinuated into the affairs of artist-run centres. Bonin’s narrative, on the other hand, hinges on the creation of cultural programs in response to the specter of popular unrest that accompanied record youth unemployment in the early 1970s. Programs such as the 1970 Opportunities for Youth (OFY), the 1971 Local Initiatives Program (LIP), and the 1973 Explorations Program, crystallized what Bonin terms the “‘cybernetic’ social democracy” of the Trudeau era.71 This carefully argued narrative about the decentralization of federal programs in response to an expanding service sector represents Bonin’s original contribution to the unfolding narrative of artist-initiated activity in Canada. “Documentary Protocols” underlines tensions between the emancipatory rhetoric of Liberal politicians, such as Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier, and “the control mechanisms looming under the guise of this utopia,”72 without ever losing sight of the non-capitalist potential latent within an administrative paradigm of self-determination. The resolutely economic focus of Bonin’s reading of government policy and its impact on artists’ groups is derived from American histories of Conceptual art—notably the work of Helen Molesworth—that explore the entanglement of poststudio strategies adopted by 1960s artists and the rise of postindustrial labour during the same period. To this narrative Bonin adds an emphasis on the role played by government agencies in responding to the effects of an emergent cognitive economy in Canada. But Bonin rejects Buchloh’s analysis of bureaucracy as a mere symptom of capitalism: he recognizes that administrative structures could be other/wise. Although Bonin’s text echoes Robertson’s recuperation of the non-capitalist potential of selfadministered structures, it de-emphasizes comparisons between artist-initiated groups and social movements advanced by Robertson and Ault, without losing sight of the close relationship between the peer networks sustained by those groups and the emergence of counterpublics. Yet, for Bonin, it was precisely the critique of

artist-run structures mounted by feminists (who noted that women, for the most part, continued to perform subaltern functions even within alternative spaces) that spelled the end of utopia in the mid-1970s. In Bonin’s narrative, the emergence of social movements, beginning with feminism, shattered the cybernetic “dream of a transcanada art scene” articulated by Bronson.73 Different forms of self-governance appeared in the wake of these critiques—configurations that fall outside the scope of Bonin’s project and await adequate study elsewhere.

The Political Economy of Documents A second thematic constellation that emerges from the margins of Bonin’s text engages an interdisciplinary literature on the political economy of information. Bonin frames his chosen period of study as “a parenthesis of sorts,”74 one marked by the convergence of an expanded tertiary sector and a re-skilling of the artist in response to rising levels of post-secondary education and the introduction of automation into industrial production processes. This framework echoes Helen Molesworth’s 2003 exhibition, Work Ethic, which proposed that the appearance of ideational practices mimicking managerial labour in the mid-1960s coincided with the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to one grounded in dematerialized services. Vincent Mosco has argued that the services which drive postindustrial societies are shaped by the “use of information as a commodity.”75 The appearance of “information [as] a new form of capital”76 in the 1970s short-circuited the dream world of information that fuelled earlier conceptual projects, which “attributed an intrinsic social value to the concept of information.”77 Bonin summarizes this process, with reference to the work of Ève Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, as the appropriation of artistic critique by the discourse of human resources management.78 However, it is not the tertiary sector’s co-optation of Conceptual art that interests Bonin, so much as the initial process of acculturation that transpired in the contact zone between artists and government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bonin’s sociological approach to the archival economy of documents answers Robertson’s proposition that, “research that participates in a sociology of culture is useful for an art history that wishes to map the ‘question of culture and democracy as a factor influencing the development and rationalization of artistic practice.”79 By way of introducing 57

his project, Bonin references a sociological literature on the “ordinary writing”80 generated by encounters between citizens and institutions. The intrinsic reflexivity of these transactions provides a model for Bonin’s own exploration of the, “parallels between strategies adopted by artists to create new platforms for information exchange and the programs aiming to decentralize culture initiated by the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”81 The analysis of artist-run organizations as extending state structures of governmentality presented in “Documentary Protocols” also transfers Jon Agar’s findings on the “material culture of bureaucracy” within the British civil service to the Canadian context.82 Agar’s analysis of “the interplay of discursive and material technologies” that produced a technocratic paradigm of government in Great Britain parallels Bonin’s history of the emergence of cybernetic metaphors of self-regulation in the discourse of Canadian cultural officials such as Gérard Pelletier.83 Ken Lum’s critique of Canadian artist-run structures as instituting a “cradle to coffin scenario”—in which a Canadian artist could, in theory at least, avoid critical evaluation by non-artist experts at every stage in their career “in the name of a non-hierarchical system of artistic measurement”— is also central to Bonin’s analysis.84 To wit, Bonin fills a gap in Lum’s analysis by specifying that the “destination” of documents generated by this system of peer review is domiciliation in an institutional archive, which itself is circumscribed by a regime of cultural heritage defined by principles of self-determination.85 The “passage of an archival fonds from one address to another” marks the “house arrest” of the de-localized correspondence network with which artists’ groups had sought to short-circuit the “‘destinal’ institution” of the postal system.86 In the narrative of artist-initiated structures in Canada, Bonin refuses to accept a condition of house arrest as the final word. Drawing on Brien Brothman’s Derridean insight that “language never arrives at a final destination,” Bonin’s curatorial staging of the archive insists that “despite the archive—because of the archive—nothing, no presence, ever arrives at its destination”87 The destination of Bonin’s archival project thus coincides with the unstable addressee of the paratext in the writing of Genette. “Our destination is the archive that subverts and contests the limits,” to invoke Brothman again.88 Bonin thereby re-routes the address of archival documents to new destinations in the public domain. Rather than questioning the archive’s “staging of objectivity,”89 Bonin troubles the institutional limits of the archive in order to draw attention to “uses that actually increase the value of the commons.”90 This dynamic resonates with John Frow’s analysis of the aporetic status of information as both gift and commodity. Frow complicates prevailing articulations of the political economy of 58

information that ascribe a straightforward commodity status to information. He argues that the value which information accrues in capitalist economies is inseparable from its relationship to the commons. Indeed, information is frequently mistaken for a gift in information society discourse (that often promotes the Internet as an unrestricted commons) and draws much of its value from that misrecognition. It is precisely the interplay of gift and commodity relations that produces the asymmetries which generate value in an information economy: “the public domain is a ‘device that permits the rest of the system to work by leaving the raw material of authorship available for authors to use.’”91 Building on these insights, Bonin exposes contradictions in the representation of the archive that are ordinarily expressed as oppositions; in particular, he underlines how archives support the generation of capital even when established as non-capitalist structures. Bonin’s representation of the archive thereby approximates the “library model” as it figures in Frow’s writing as “a counterpart to the regime of commodified information. [A]lthough it does not by any means entail a straightforward dichotomy of gift and commodity forms,”92 Bonin’s motivation in undertaking this Derridean exploration of the archive is to challenge representations of the document as a “supreme form of evidence”93 circulating in many projects associated with the archival turn in contemporary art. Eschewing representations of the archival document as either commodity or evidence, Bonin reveals the ontology of the document to be poised in the margins of an asymmetrical economy that generates wealth through the interaction of private property and the commons. The implication of this move for artist-run projects is clear: selfdetermination is achieved at the cost of a purchase on the information economy.

Working with Objects In keeping with the spirit of “democratization” that fuelled Conceptual artists’ formation of institutional archives,94 Bonin emphasizes the “anti-materialism” of the documentary traces left by that project.95 Somewhat paradoxically, the curator’s disinvestiture of the aesthetic values that these documents might otherwise accrue—through strategies that underline their status as “unmediated information”96—is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be an artistic project. A close reading of the curator’s references reveals that key decisions responded to the work of other artists. The “counter-archival” tactics epitomized by the work

of The Atlas Group—the fictitious non-profit foundation created in 1976 to “document” recent Lebanese history— are representative of a broad tendency in contemporary art that sets out to challenge the authority of the archive through destabilizing maneuvers motivated by fantasy and reminiscence.97 To these approaches Bonin counterposes the materialist strategy of exposing archival materials in order to bypass the secondary circuits of interpretation that facilitate the production of surplus value. This concern for accessibility of information is inspired by the communicationsbased work of first-generation Conceptual artists. Rather than spinning new fictions with the intent of unraveling established cultural mythologies,98 Bonin invites viewers to scrutinize the institutional narratives embedded in primary documents themselves. In line with German artist Maria Eichhorn’s investigation of Seth Siegelaub’s and Bob Projansky’s appropriation of legal conventions in order to re-negotiate the artist’s share in economic transactions,99 Bonin is interested in the legal and institutional functions of documents, rather than their aesthetic attributes or any subjective associations to which they may give rise. Bonin’s framework might also suggest comparisons with artist Susan Hiller’s practice of “working through objects.”100 However, there is no place in Bonin’s work for the sort of personal associations that sustain Hiller’s archaeological investigations. Bonin’s practice would more accurately be characterized as working with, rather than working through, documents. The practice of Vincent Trasov and Michael Morris, acting under the aegis of Image Bank and Western Front, of “amass[ing] documents as an artistic strategy in unto itself [sic]” provides a more meaningful point of comparison with

Bonin’s project.101 What such an emphatically non-visual methodology might look like is evident from the curator’s homage to Mel Bochner’s 1966 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, in which the Conceptual artist assembled Xerox copies of drawings solicited from contemporary artists, interfiled with non-art diagrams, into notebooks that he made available for consultation on plinths in the gallery of the School of Visual Arts. Documentary Protocols similarly presented “photocopies […] in binders placed on pedestals installed in the centre of the space.”102 The primary inspiration for Bonin’s curatorial project, it must be emphasized, is not the work of an artist, but the critical practice developed by Lucy Lippard in dialogue with the strategies of Conceptual art. “Documentary Protocols” builds on Lippard’s de-emphasis of the object in Six Years through documentary and bibliographic tactics that bring to light tensions inherent in an administrative paradigm whose dematerialized techniques coincided, to some extent, with the features of an emergent postindustrial economy as well as the cultural and economic control mechanisms of a decentralized government apparatus. Yet, Bonin never succumbs to the loss of faith that characterizes Lippard’s postface to Six Years. Instead, “Documentary Protocols” affirms the residual emancipatory potential of non-capitalist forms of administration. Like Lippard’s chronology, “Documentary Protocols” attempts to bypass third-party discourses by making available primary sources, while remaining attentive to the politics of narration incidental to this strategy. Bonin is always conscious that documents do not speak for themselves. It is this awareness that “Documentary Protocols” communicates through paratextual strategies of annotation. 59

Julie Ault, “For the Record,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 3. Brien Brothman, “The Limits of Limits: Derridean Deconstruction and the Archival Institution,” Archivaria, no. 36 (Autumn 1993): 213. AA Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-run Spaces as Museums by Artists,” in From Sea to Shining Sea, eds. AA Bronson, René Blouin, Peggy Gale and Glenn Lewis (1983; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 167. Ken Lum offered this less inspiring rejoinder fifteen years later: “To wit, the complete absence of any book that critically and theoretically addresses in a historically comprehensive manner developments in Canadian art over the last thirty years.” Ken Lum, “Canadian Cultural Policy: A Metaphysical Problem,” apexart, http://apexart.org/conference/lum.htm. Vincent Bonin, “Documentary Protocols (1967-1975),” in Documentary Protocols = Protocoles Documentaires (1967-1975), ed. Vincent Bonin with Michèle Thériault (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2010), 20.

Ibid., 21.

Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (1973; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 263.

one to refer to an absent context and the role played by diverse protagonists.” Ibid. 13

Ault, “For the Record,” 12.

Clive Robertson, Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture (Toronto: YYZ, 2006); Ken Lum, “Canadian Cultural Policy.” See also the following Master’s theses: Diana Nemiroff, “A History of Artist-run Spaces in Canada with Particular Reference to Véhicule, A Space and Western Front” (M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 1985); Gail Tuttle, “The Intermedia Society (1967-1972) and Early Vancouver Performance Art” (M.A. thesis, University of Victoria, 1994).

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25. Martin Beck, “Alternative: Space,” in Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 251.

Ibid., 2.

Ibid.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 51, 54.

Genette, Paratexts, 320.

Ibid., 324.

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 197, emphasis added.

Genette, Paratexts, 2.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25.

Derrida, Archive Fever, 204; Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25.

Baldwin in Robertson, Policy Matters, 2.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 59.

Genette, Paratexts, 344.

Ibid.

Brothman, “The Limits of Limits,” 206.

Vincent Bonin in Adam Lauder, “Documents of Self-Administration: A Conversation with Vincent Bonin,” C Magazine, no. 108 (Winter 2010): 36.

Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 3-22.

Miwon Kwon, “Exchange Rate: On Obligation and Reciprocity in Some Art of the 1960s and After,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Molesworth (Baltimore, MD; University Park, PA: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 85.

41 21

Okwui Enwezor, “Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (New York; Götingen: International Centre of Photography; Steidl, 2008), 19; Jacques Derrida, “This Is Not an Oral Footnote,” in Annotation and Its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 203; Jacques Derrida, “Tympan”, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxiii-xxv; Jacques Derrida, Glas (1974; Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

Bonin in Lauder, “Documents of SelfAdministration,” 35.

Ibid.

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002), 12.

Bonin in Lauder, “Documents of SelfAdministration,” 36.

Ibid.

Derrida, Archive Fever, 2; Julie Ault, “For the Record,” 6.

Derrida, “This Is Not an Oral Footnote,” 203.

Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.

Bonin in Lauder, “Documents of SelfAdministration,” 42.

Laiwan in Robertson, Policy Matters, 15.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 18.

Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” 5. 50

Peter Plagens in Lippard, Six Years, xv.

Helen Molesworth, “Introduction,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Molesworth (Baltimore, MD; University Park, PA: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 18, 26. Writing in reference to Canadian West-coast collectives of the

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 21.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 22.

“[A]udio-visual or textual archives allow

Ault, “For the Record,” 11.

Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Michèle Thériault, “Exhibiting Research,” in Documentary Protocols = Protocoles Documentaires (1967-1975), ed. Vincent Bonin with Michèle Thériault (Montreal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2010), 6. Bonin notes the “shift in value” that occurs when artefacts are displaced from one context to another. Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 20. Catherine Moseley, “A History of an Infrastructure,” in Conception: Conceptual Documents 1968 to 1972 (Norwich: Norwich Gallery, 2001), 162.

AA Bronson, “Introduction,” in From Sea to Shining Sea, eds. AA Bronson, René Blouin, Peggy Gale and Glenn Lewis (1983; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 8.

1960s and 70s, AA Bronson has similarly noted that, “The division between art and life is truly lost in this orgy of creative arising.” AA Bronson, “From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-initiated Activity in Canada,” in From Sea to Shining Sea, eds. AA Bronson, René Blouin, Peggy Gale and Glenn Lewis (1983; Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 10. 51

Lippard, Six Years, 8. Similarly, in an earlier interview with Ursula Meyer (reprinted in the preface to Six Years), Lippard speculated that “art may eventually function in a different context altogether.” Ibid, 7.

Robertson, Policy Matters, 15.

Bronson, “Introduction,” 8, emphasis added. Bronson’s emphasis on the alterity of artists’ projects is in permanent tension in his writing with his contention that artists in Toronto—the city that served as his home base during the years of General Idea’s activity—“were constructing an art scene, not an alternative.” Ibid, 12.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 18.

Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105-43.

Ibid., 128.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 27.

Robertson, Policy Matters, 2.

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1973; New York: Basic Books, 1999), 336.

Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” 165.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 26.

Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” 165.

Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” 164; Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 22.

Middle of a N.E. Thing Co. Landscape, eds. Nancy Shaw, Scott Watson and William Wood (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993), 15. 68

Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” 165.

Lum, “Canadian Cultural Policy,” n.p.

Ibid. It must be acknowledged that Bronson is also attentive the role of cultural policy in facilitating the growth of artist-initiated groups; however, Bronson celebrates the “inspired and future-oriented” policies of Trudeau and his predecessors precisely for their McLuhanesque recognition of the decentralizing effects of electronic media. Bronson, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” 13.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 47.

Ibid., 45.

Bronson, “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat,” 165.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 18.

Vincent Mosco, “Introduction: Information in the Pay-per Society,” in The Political Economy of Information, ed. Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 3, emphasis in the original.

Gareth Locksley in John Frow, “Information as Gift and Commodity,” New Left Review 1, no. 129 (September-October 1996): 89.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25. See also: Eve Meltzer, “The Dream World of Information,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 115-35.

55; Lum, “Canadian Cultural Policy,” n.p. 85

Brothman, “The Limits of Limits,” 210.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 51; Brothman, “The Limits of Limits,” 212.

Brothman, “The Limits of Limits,” 210, 211.

Ibid., 213.

Ibid., 214.

Frow, “Information as Gift and Commodity,” 105.

Jessica Litman in Frow “Information as Gift and Commodity,” 103.

Frow, “Information as Gift and Commodity,” 101.

Darsie Alexander, “Reluctant Witness: Photography and the Documentation of 1960s and 1970s Art,” in Work Ethic, ed. Helen Molesworth (Baltimore, MD; University Park, PA: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 53.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 25. Catherine Moseley similarly underlines that “the conceptual document as a product of, or conduit for conceptual art, enabled its wide dissemination. This created a simultaneity or democratization of cultural experience, and signified a clear eschewal of the unique or rarefied art object, autonomous from society, and of the possessive individualism of the creative artist.” Moseley, “A History of an Infrastructure,” 157.

Moseley, “A History of an Infrastructure,” 167.

Ibid., 165.

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 56. See also: Ève Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006).

Charles Merewether, “Introduction/Art and the Archive,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2006), 17.

Robertson citing Jonathan Harris, Policy Matters, 3.

Ibid., 42.

99 80

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 28.

Maria Eichhorn, “The Artist’s Contract: Introduction,” in The Artist’s Contract, ed. Gerti Fietzek (Köln: Walther König, 2009).

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 42, 49.

Ibid.

Ibid., 38.

Ibid., 51.

Jon Agar, The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

William Wood, “Capital and Subsidiary: The N.E. Thing Co. and the Revision of Conceptual Art,” in You Are Now in the

100

Susan Hiller, “Working Through Objects,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether (London; Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery, MIT Press, 2006), 45.

Ibid., 7.

101

Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,” 52.

Lum in Bonin, “Documentary Protocols,”

102

Ibid., 23. 61

The isolation was very real, and was certainly geographical, but it was also... how should I put it? Spiritual, I guess. And in the long run, very much self-imposed. Now, when I think about it... hmmm... let's say that instead of either bemoaning, or even celebrating some sort of “marginality”, we wanted to really reject the whole thing... art history, and all that... if you reject the centre as being a centre, then there can't be any margin, really... the page isn't really there, it's invented by people who like to see their names typed out, black on white, in some book.1 Geographic isolation is only one measure of cultural distancing from metropolitan centers. It is inescapably obvious that most artists the world over live in art communities that are formed by a relentless provincialism. Their worlds are replete with tensions between two antithetical terms: a defiant urge to localism (a claim for the possibility and validity of “making good, original art right here”) and a reluctant recognition that the generative innovations in art, and the criteria for standards of “quality,” “originality,” “interest,” “ forcefulness,” etc., are determined externally. Far from encouraging innocent art of naive purity, untainted by “too much history and too much thinking,” provincialism, in fact, produces highly self-conscious art “obsessed with the problem of what its identity ought to be.” 2 (Art) has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of being ineffective in reality.3

In 1975, after several years of working together, a group of unknown artists in rural southwestern New Brunswick realized one of their last collective artworks, Inside Joke Piece. It consisted of "an undocumented series of communications from participant to participant of a single joke, the 'content' of which is unknown to all those except for the participants."4 The function and reception of Inside Joke Piece, which given its hermetic nature was practically non-existent, mirror to a certain extent, the function and reception of the movement that produced it, which I will be calling at the risk of oversimplifying, "Charlotte County conceptualism." The fact that, until recently, no-one had ever heard of this ultra-peripheral movement is perhaps evident, but nevertheless bears expounding upon, not least because the desire to remedy this state of extreme peripherality constitutes the initial raison d'être of my project.5 64

In recent years and in many areas, both inside of the academy and out, there has been a resurgence of interest in movements and events previously forgotten about or simply not deemed interesting enough to merit study and reflection. Of course this fixation with the "marginal" is nothing new, and is in some sense the felicitous progeniture of Marxism, feminism, gender studies and psychoanalysis being integrated into art history and comparative literature programmes over the past few decades. And so with this in mind, I throw my own worn towel onto the heap of already closely picked-apart details of past events and actions in the world. However, a slight qualification is in order. As you may have noticed in the title of this article, I have eschewed the term "marginal" for that of "para-marginal". The word "marginal" is first attested in the late 19th century, unsurprisingly from "margin," as in the margin of a page, itself from the Latin "margo," meaning edge or boundary.6 So, when we speak of things that find themselves at the margins of art history, we are evoking phenomena that are essentially as far from the centre of the page as possible. But they still are, of course, inscribed somewhere on the page. The reason that I chose "para-marginality" is that my subject was not to be found on any page and could not therefore, to my mind, be deemed marginal. Until recently, it had been quite far from the page, though in the past year, I might optimistically say that Charlotte County conceptualism is beside the page, or perhaps in a nearby drawer. Hence: para-marginality. But even something far from the page can have its own paratext—and though the para-marginal is outside of the page, its paratext might be found on it, which is I suppose, what I am trying to reify here. It must be said that in researching the past activities of this milieu, I am in some sense, de-paramarginalizing them, or at least beginning a process of possible de-paramarginalization. Certain questions come to mind: What effect will this have? How will it change things said and done in the (relatively) distant past? Can the fact of recounting this history become part of the history recounted, and if so, how? These are some of the questions I hope to address in this article. Improbably (or not), a key might be found in the ideas of Harold Marcuse. Improbably because he is the grandson of Herbert Marcuse, member of the Frankfurt school and celebrated "Father of the New Left," whose ideas had considerable currency among the members of the Charlotte County group (as was the case with many young idealists at the time). The younger Marcuse, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, offers on his quite attractive website a definition of reception history, that is, "the history of the meanings that have been imputed to historical events, (tracing) the different ways in which par-

ticipants, observers, historians and other retrospective interpreters have attempted to make sense of events both as they unfolded and over time since then, (and) to make those events meaningful for the present in which they lived and live."7 So, it is as some sort of desultory "retrospective interpreter" that I will sketch out a brief overview of this milieu, as well as certain openings onto how it might make meaningful in some way the activities and lives of these people, as well as the present in which we now find ourselves, and the possible relationships between the two. One preemptive opening—a concept that I feel obliged to refer to—is that of the elder Marcuse's non-repressive society.8 The group in Charlotte County had read Eros and Civilization (1955) early on, and the idea of escaping from Freud's compulsory repression and all that it entails within modern capitalism became paramount, inspiring them to found the Whistle Cove commune, which became the headquarters for their activities throughout the early 1970s. It is here that the work of "non-repressive sublimation" would take place, in different forms, over a period of about five years. To begin with, it is important to understand where and how this group saw the light of day—so an overview of the context in which they emerged is in order. Charlotte County is located in the southwestern part of New Brunswick, bordering the state of Maine. Though most of the territory is covered by coniferous and mixed forest, it contains three small towns and a few coastal villages and parishes, with a total population of around 20,000 in the late 1960's (which hasn't grown substantially since). In most of the county, fishing and aquaculture have dominated the local economy for the past century since the advent of the railway and the end of shipbuilding, though the town of St. Andrews is a tourist destination and St. Stephen's economy is largely fueled by the Ganong chocolate factory (who claim to have produced the first chocolate bar in Canada). By and large, the area is relatively economically depressed as well as ethnically and linguistically homogeneous. Charlotte County also bears the dubious distinction of being, in some sense, the birthplace of colonialism in Canada—more specifically, Île Sainte-Croix in the Passamaquoddy Bay (or Dochet's Island, as it is referred to by locals), where Samuel de Champlain spent his first winter in 1604.9 How did a conceptual art movement, such as it was, germinate in this context? The answer is complex and unlikely to be retrieved in its entirety from the oubliettes of participants' memories and the scattered documentation I have been able to get my hands on. I have, however, been able to put together bits and pieces of the Charlotte County saga from interviews and the archives in Brenda Haddon's basement.10 Though probably not the most consequential aspect of

the movement's history, the first component of the narrative is the fairly amusing "genesis story"11 recounted to me two summers ago by Donald Gullison, the one-time leader of the group: In the Fall of 1969, the New York conceptualist and then-inert gas-sculptor Robert Barry drove from New York to Halifax, where he would participate in David Askevold’s Projects Class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. It was during this stay at NSCAD that he would realize the now-celebrated Decide on a single common idea piece (1969). On his way to Halifax, Barry entered Canada at the international border crossing between Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Understandably tired after ten hours of driving, he decided to stop for the evening at the Busy Bee Motel on Highway #1, leading out of St. Stephen towards Nova Scotia (it is still in operation). Before turning in for the night however, Barry complained of a blocked drain and subsequently became involved in a conversation with the janitor of the motel, Randall Gullison. During the discussion, the janitor became perplexed, then intrigued when Barry spoke to him of his art practice—though it is unclear exactly how the subject was raised. When learning of the Inert Gas Series, Gullison contended that he himself also executed on a regular basis activities wherein the imperceptibility of the action and its aftereffects became the locus of the action’s meaning and affect, such as in his habitual emptying of the motel’s liquid waste into the nearby Passamaquoddy Bay. The next day after Barry's departure, Randy discussed the meeting with his cousin, Donny Gullison, and this seems to have been the seed for the birth of the "movement," such as it was, or at least the fertilizer, as Donny had already had already become interested in Henry Flynt and Fluxus while studying philosophy at University of New Brunswick in Fredericton the previous year.12 The other members were not entirely unaware of current events either; Brenda Haddon had briefly studied at NSCAD in the mid-60s, and George Firlotte, the other core member, had already come into contact with the young, but seasoned art-worker Laird Hamilton. So, consequently (though in a relatively surreptitious manner) the influence of Robert Barry's visit was felt for several years following through the activities of the small group that was, for its most active years, loosely based out of the Whistle Cove commune on Grand Manan Island and headed by Donny and his partner, Brenda Haddon, originally a movement artist who had operated a very short-lived school of Steinerian Eurythmy in Black's Harbour. We will come back to Brenda, as she was perhaps in retrospect, the most significant member of the group, not least because she became and still is its archivist, and in the wake of the mental illness, prolonged drug use, alcoholism, and regular old senility of the other founding members, the de facto custodian of its collective memory. 65

1. Universe House, late 1970s; 2. Brenda Haddon, George Firlotte, Donny Gullison, Live Random Airborne Systems remake, 1975; 3. Donny Gullison, Old Sow piece, 1973; 4. George Firlotte, Pissing in the river series #1, 1972; 5. Brenda Haddon, Foreign Body piece, 1973; 6. Marcusian Dulse, collecting Action #3, 1972

The founding of the commune on Grand Manan (a fairly large and sparsely-populated island about 30 km from mainland Charlotte County in the Bay of Fundy) less than two years after the meeting with Robert Barry was, in effect, the first perceptible collective gesture posed by the group. Previous to that time (Fall 1969 - Spring 1971), their activities were mostly limited to beer and marijuana-infused discussions in the Gullison family basement, with occasional late-night forays into ephemeral interventions and imperceptible actions in the surrounding woods. Sometime during this intermediate period, self-designated leader Donny Gullison met one-time NSCAD student and Ohio native Laird Hamilton, purportedly at a large outdoor gathering and percussion jam near Moncton.13 Laird's presence was to be decisive in the founding of the commune, which, during the first summer in 1971 was concretized by the construction of Universe House on a plot of land thought to be owned by Brenda Haddon's cousin (though it later turned out to be crown property). Laird had previously been involved in the founding of a commune on Lasqueti Island, in British Columbia, and brought back with him the work ethic he had developed there growing marijuana and building temporary shelters. The group's central activities were effectively the growing and harvesting of marijuana in nearby wooded areas of the island, as well as the gathering of the dulse found plentifully along its shorelinesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Grand Manan is still known for its abundant supply of the edible seaweed. Both crops were sold during periodic visits to the mainland, providing the money that was used to buy the collectivelyowned necessities and staples they weren't able to grow, hunt, or gather. What incited this group of individuals to move from the context of a damp basement to an art workers' commune based out of a spherical house? To quote Donald Gullison, "We (the 'Whistle Cove Group') were pretty influenced by Marcuse, Laird brought us a couple of his books in '71... we really saw the synthesis of dulse-collecting, heavy potsmoking and land art as being the ultimate manifestation of the non-repressive society; that is one (loosely quoting from Eros and Civilization) 'based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.'"14 The first manifestation of this "fundamentally different experience of being" was, arguably, the construction of the aforementioned "Universe House," the spherical building that would serve as the group's headquarters over the following years. Its form was inspired by roundhouses such as the Logan house in Laird's native Ohio, initially designed to stand up to the weather conditions in the Midwest wind corridor. The base structure was made from curved poplar tree-trunks shaped into a spherical form and 67

then covered with a mortar made from low-grade concrete mixed with clay and mud from the unattractive beaches near Whistle Cove. At this time, in the summer of 1971, the core group consisted of Donny Gullison and his cousin Randy (who had made the initial contact with Robert Barry), Brenda Haddon, George Firlotte, an American and member of the Passamaquoddy nation from Indian Township, Maine, and on-and-off NSCAD student Laird Hamilton. Other artworkers, commentators, and hangers-on drifted in and out of the project over the next four summers, notably, Moncton-born future-cyberneticist Yves Malenfant, the Acadian Peninsula-based acoustic sound sculpture collective Mayonnaise Eyeball, para-literary theorist Alain PoirierFinney, performance artist "Boomerang" Gillespie, and many others.15 George Firlotte joined the group some months later than the Charlotte County-born members, hailing from the Passamaquoddy village of Indian Township, a few kilometers from the river separating Charlotte County, New Brunswick from Washington County, Maine. He had attended art classes at the University of Maine at Farmington, where he purportedly met Laird Hamilton at a sit-in for the rights of migrant workers in the state, though both concede that there were very few such workers at the time. Within the group, Firlotte heightened awareness of current political issues, including the non-recognition of the Passamaquoddy nation by the Canadian government (still unrecognized to this day as a First Nation in Canada)—they realized two undocumented performances, a sit-in and flag-burning, at the traditional site known as Indian Point in St. Andrews, now an RV park. Firlotte also was peripherally involved in A.I.M. (American Indian Movement) activities, and purportedly met Jimmie Durham at the A.I.M.-sponsored seizing of the Mayflower replica on Thanksgiving Day, 1970 in Plymouth, Massachusetts.16 As the most active member not from the region, Laird's presence also deserves particular attention. He had initially read about the group in an ad in Vancouver's Georgia Straight soliciting unpaid artist-producers.17 Having already helped found a small co-operative art commune on Lasqueti Island in B.C., Laird joined the core group of the Gullisons, Haddon and Firlotte, who, being geographically close, had already made contact at Laird's suggestion— Laird knew Firlotte from the aforementioned sit-in at the University of Maine, Firlotte's alma mater. Together they established the small dulse and marijuana-harvesting operation that would become the economic base for the commune. As Laird Hamilton told me in an interview last year: "I was 23 years old or so. I think as a NSCAD student, I was able to get credit for doing work (on Grand Manan) during the summer... I recall a fellow named Dale organizing a 68

few happening-like events, one of which entailed a crude attempt to make Pollock-like marks in the field with an old VW beetle (which is) a lot harder than it sounds."18 Dale appears to be another cousin of Donny Gullison, who stayed at the commune for the first summer and whose artistic activities mostly consisted of happenings which appear, in retrospect, to be a precursor to modern-day mud bogging in New Brunswick (also known as mud racing, mud running, mudding, or mud-drag) which has somehow lost all of its avant-garde aura—an interesting example of the avant-garde to popular culture shift.19 Dale Gullison left the commune after the first summer to pursue a real estate career in the Moncton area. But, digressions aside, Laird Hamilton seems to have been able to bring together the diverse ideologies present at the commune, uniting them under the umbrella of a somewhat anarchic (though well thought-out) cooperative approach to communal life: These were words we lived by—and some of us still hold onto this ideal: 'By refusing to be formed into a factor or a function in a bureaucratically organized system (even if it is an intelligently organized system), the artist is not denying the social necessity of the tasks and functions. He is asserting his will to take part in all the activities that affect him, and he is denying anyone's right to decide for him, think for him, or act for him. By struggling to destroy the institutions which obstruct his participation in the conscious creation of his social-economic environment, the artist presents himself as an example for all men who are ruled, decided for, thought for, or acted for.'20 The utopian flame could not burn indefinitely, however. After four relatively productive summers and three winters that Brenda Haddon qualifies as being "probably comparable to those in the more poorly insulated Siberian gulags, temperature-wise and psychologically speaking."21 The commune, such as it was, was closed down by the Fundy Isles Housing Authority early in the Fall of 1974. The insalubrity and unsafe structure of Universe House was cited, as well as outstanding possession charges against Donny. Following the shutdown of the commune at Whistle Cove, the group dispersed, moving back to the mainland of Charlotte County. The Gullison’s found sporadic employment at the fish-packing plant in Black's Harbour, George became more involved in political activism, and Laird founded an art-work compound near Moisie, on Québec's North Shore near Sept-Îles. Brenda, who had returned to work at the municipal

library in St. George, bought a small A-frame on the Digdeguash Basin and founded the Digdeguash Documentation Centre. This would be the group's de facto headquarters for the remaining years of their active production. During this time they realized two particularly noteworthy pieces, both collaborative. The first, in 1975, was a poorly documented remake of Hans Haacke's Live Random Airborne Systems (the original from 1967 consisting of photographic documentation of "seagulls retrieving bread thrown on the water"22) at Oven Head, near the Digdeguash Basin, realized by the three core members and inspired by "the unbelievable number of seagulls near the dump."23 The second, from the same year—the artwork mentioned at the beginning of the article, Inside Joke Piece, consisted of an "undocumented series of communications from participant to participant of a single joke, the 'content' of which is still unknown to all those except for the participants."24 When I interviewed Donny Gullison last summer, he said, "we wanted to make a piece that was completely immaterial and unknowable to those not directly involved, that is, those creating the content of the piece, which is to say the person-to-person communication involved...but also for it to be funny, but again only to those involved... nobody else could get the joke because nobody else could hear it..."25 Brenda Haddon also esoterically stated, "it wasn't just the idea of working with immateriality per se so much as it was really working with consciousness itself as our base material."26 So, going beyond mere dematerialization, the Charlotte County group explored the possibilities of what I might qualify as de-manifestationism, integrating not only the renunciation of the material form but also the rejection of the possibility of artistic documentation directly into the structure of the work. Though, as art historian Leah Modigliani states: What is undeniably real about the (Charlotte County group, as well as) many (other) artists and non-artists of this generation is the preoccupation with traversing all boundaries, spatial or otherwise, and transcending geographical, physical, or perceptual limitations. Again and again, (these) artists appear linked by their desire to resist being pinned down, even at times courting the ridiculous in their attempt to do so.27 However, despite any attempts at pinning down that myself or anyone else might be doing now, in retrospect, those involved in the Charlotte County scene in the early seventies did remain, unlike many of their counterparts elsewhere, relatively unbound by "the invisible apron

strings [connected] to the 'real world's' power structures."28 Whether the apron strings were those of the commercial art world and art dealers, or, as was more often the case in Canada, institutions such as art schools and artist-run centres. Nonetheless, be it because of their relative geographic and intellectual isolation, their naïveté, their idealism, or their lack of desire in partaking in the so-called "real art world," by 1976-1977 all the members of the original core group had discontinued their art practices, though Brenda Haddon, continued, à la Lee Lozano, to produce textual documentation of ontological investigations into everyday life— perhaps an extension of her previous forays into Steinerian movement-art displaced into the realm of the imperceptible, or that of the post-corporeal. Laird also continued in his role as art-worker on his self-built compound near Sept-Îles. Oddly enough, all of the original members also suffered from varying degrees of mental illness over the next few decades, and the one-time primary spokesperson of the movement, Donny Gullison, was committed to, and spent the next 20 years at the Restigouche Psychiatric Hospital in Campbellton. So, from our point of view in the 21st century, what was particular about this group, and how does it make their activities interesting enough to write about forty years later? The artists from isolated Charlotte County were limited geographically, and as a consequence, some would say, intellectually, and artistically. The form that their work took was thus, from a certain point of view, especially in hindsight, provincial in character—that is, "characteristic of people from the provinces; not fashionable or sophisticated, or limited in perspective."29 As Terry Smith states in his 1975 article, "The Provincialism Problem": "Provincialism (in contemporary art) appears primarily as an attitude of subservience to an externally imposed hierarchy of cultural values. It is not simply the product of a colonialist history; nor is it merely a function of geographic location."30 So, if we are to believe Terry Smith, it is more the attitude of those "in the provinces" that defines their provincialism, rather than their grasp on the short end of the historical or geographical stick. It was, unquestionably, the contingencies of this end of the stick that the Charlotte County group were given, but how they wielded it perhaps saves them somewhat from the label of "pure provincialism." The provincialism exhibited by the members of the group was quite particular, and it is perhaps especially for this reason that they warrant examination in the present day. The members of the Charlotte County group were indeed somehow able to turn the role of ostensible aesthetic subservience around, and, formalizing their attitudes in a manner proper and specific to their context, able to make the disadvantages of their geographic location work in their 69

favour (for example, living in proximity to a dump allowing them to realize a quite particular kind of remake of Hans Haacke's Live Random Airborne Systems, effectively changing the piece into something entirely different). This work is perhaps an example of the "highly self-conscious art" that Terry Smith identifies as being one way of acknowledging and responding to one's own provincialism, an art that becomes both a conduit for, and a détournement of, what makes a given community distinct. The Charlotte County group did, of course, replicate to some extent the form and style of works being produced at the same time in larger centres. However, it is perhaps unfair to oversimplify this question, seeing as concurrent approaches to art-making using dematerialization and social critique as their principal leitmotifs might possibly arrive at similar results, aesthetically speaking, without one necessarily being in a relationship of complete mimetic subservience to the other. As opposed to occupying this sort of obsequious position in relation to the art world at large, the Whistle Cove phenomenon can perhaps rather be described as an artistic barachois. For those unfamiliar with this originally Acadian term, it is used in eastern Québec, Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces to describe a coastal lagoon separated from the ocean, usually by a sand bar. The barachois is usually fed by a spring or fresh water stream, but salt water also enters during high tide. Therefore, the water is usually brackish, which is to say with a salt content somewhere between fresh, and sea water. So, like the work produced in Charlotte County, much of the character of the water, or the "saltiness," as it were, comes from the larger body, flowing in at high tide from the "outside," but the essence of the body comes from somewhere inland, perhaps a small, isolated stream fed by a spring between two rocks by the side of the road. The result is an admixture of the powerful outside influence (in which it is much easier to float, it must be said) and the humble particularity of the local fresh water spring (whose water, it must be said, is much more drinkable).31 What is my place, as a pseudo-historian in all of this? I can try to stay afloat, I suppose, but granted the water analogy might have its limitations. I can perhaps instead hope to fill the role of Harold Marcuse's "retrospective interpreter"—one that creates the meaning of past events, rather than simply recounting them. At the top of his aforementioned web site on Reception History, Marcuse quotes from the well-known tale from the Indian subcontinent of the blind men and the elephant: "Each blind man perceived the elephant as something different: a rope, a wall, tree trunks, a fan, a snake, a spear..."32 It is perhaps a crude metaphor, but nevertheless a befitting one, though the visually impaired are less numerous. In this instance, the history of events and actions in Charlotte County is the elephant, and I am, obviously, one of the blind men; which 70

is to say, I am necessarily by the nature of my role as an outsider and as a recounter of history, handicapped by the contingencies that these positions imply. However, besides being something like blindness, the exact nature of this handicap cannot be entirely clear to me. Marcuse elsewhere on the page quotes from George Steiner, stating that, "no storyteller is in a position to anatomize his own innermost impulses and, often subconscious, motivations. Nor is he an authorized judge of his readers' and audience's reaction. Hence the adage which bids us to trust the tale, and not its teller."33 I cannot disagree, in the sense that the person least qualified to accurately elucidate upon what I am doing in studying this group would have to be myself. However, even if you don't trust the teller, you can perhaps trust the tale, though—excuse the anthropomorphism—the tale is itself a kind of teller, with its own unreliable memory. But "what counts are not objects, mere signs and traces, but the nature of the relationship to the past, and the ways that the present uses and reconstructs it."34 It is in this way that I am, despite the obstacles and contingencies of time and memory, constructing a relationship with the past, a relationship that will perhaps eventually overshadow the contents of the past described. This past is created by the present, through the ways that those in the present moment communicate its contents. It finds its seed in the memories of those that were there and how they recount it, and how they recount it to those who in turn, re-recount it—a process whereby every present moment becomes a space wherein the past is created, for better or for worse. It is this that I am hopefully reifying here, and even more hopefully, as Harold Marcuse put it, "imputing meaning" to the historical events, though I do not necessarily claim to fulfill the second part of his definition, which is to "make sense" of the meaning imputed to these events.35 That task will fall to a future generation of para-marginal historians, if such a thing will be possible in the future. That is, assuming that it is even "possible" at the present time. As art historian Leah Modigliani states: "By alluding to the communal development of a narrative comprised of misinformation, [examining the Charlotte County group] challenges us to consider the veracity of history, and in doing so, serves as a rich example of ... [an] aesthetics of the impossible. Of course, such an aesthetics might simply be called a mythology, which is nothing new in the history of art."36 And, as if to reply to Harold Marcuse's ultimate call for historians to "make events meaningful for the present in which they live," she concludes: "It is a symbolic promise of an impossible gesture bound to the rigour, rules and regulations of much conceptual art that continues to offer psychic redemption for creative individuals working today."37

Brenda Haddon, from unpublished interview with Leah Modigliani, 2011, 2.

Terry Smith, The Provincialism Problem, Artforum, vol. XIII, no. 1, Sept. 1974, 56.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, 1955, 72.

From unpublished description, archives of Brenda Haddon.

From Simon Brown, Conceptual Practices in Charlotte County, New Brunswick 1969 to the Present Day: Overview of a Para-marginal Milieu, paper presented at the Traffic: Conceptualism in Canada conference, University of Toronto, 2010.

Ernest Weekley, Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, Courier Dover, 1967.

Harold Marcuse, Reception History: Definition and Quotations; http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/ marcuse/receptionhist.htm

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, 1955, 55.

Peter Fisher, History of New Brunswick, New Brunswick Historical Society, 1923, Nabu Press, 2010; and website "Heritage Charlotte": http://www.heritagecharlotte.com.

As is discussed in greater detail later on, Brenda Haddon is the group's archivist.

Paraphrased from interview with Donald Gullison (unpublished), 2009. Archives of the author.

Interview with Donald Gullison (unpublished), 2009, 4. Archives of the author.

Gullison, 3.

Brenda Haddon interview with Leah Modigliani, (unpublished), 2011, 3.

Gullison, 3; from Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, Beacon Press, 1955, 5.

Leah Modigliani, "Collaborating on Conceptual Art, An Aesthetics of the Impossible", C Magazine, Toronto, issue 110, Summer 2011, 8.

Lippard, 264.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2000, Houghton.

Terry Smith, The Provincialism Problem, Artforum, vol. XIII, no. 1, Sept. 1974, 54.

See Pascal Poirier, Glossaire acadien, Presses de l'Université St-Joseph, Memramcook, N.B. 1953 and Dan Soucoup, The New Brunswick Phrasebook, Pottersfield Press, 2006.

Harold Marcuse, Reception History: Definition and Quotations; http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/ marcuse/receptionhist.htm

George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., University of Chicago Press, 1981, 172.

Pierre Nora in Pim den Boer & Willem Frijhoff (eds.), Lieux de mémoire et identités nationales, Amsterdam, 1993, 10.

Harold Marcuse, Reception History: Definition and Quotations; http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/ marcuse/receptionhist.htm

Modigliani, 8.

Based on telephone conversation between the author and Alain PoirierFinney, 2011.

From interview with George Firlotte (unpublished), 2010, 2. Archives of the author.

I have sadly been unable to locate this document— ads also appeared sporadically in Montreal's Logos magazine, and, given the lack of culturally-oriented periodicals in New Brunswick, in local papers such as Moncton's Évangeline and Saint John's Telegraph Journal.

Interview with Laird Hamilton (unpublished), 2010, 3. Archives of the author.

For example, see the website of Ultimate Offroad organization, based out of Baxter's Corner, N.B. http://ultimateoffroad.ca.

Hamilton, 3. Paraphrased from Roger Grégoire and Fredy Perlman, Worker-Student Action Committees, Black & Red, Detroit, 1970.

Brenda Haddon interview with Leah Modigliani, (unpublished), 2011, 2.

Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Praeger, 1973, 62.

From unpublished description, archives of Brenda Haddon.

Interview with Donald Gullison (unpublished), 2009, 3. Archives of the author.

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1. TRAJECTORY. In its trajectory from pivotal conceptual and body art performance piece to its photographic documentation and dissemination, and on to its lithographic manifestation two years after that, the late Dennis Oppenheim’s Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn (1970) traveled from Jones Beach in Long Island to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. In this way, it became one piece in the larger puzzle of the border-crossing history of Canadian conceptual art. The work also found its way to Mississauga thirty-eight years later when the Blackwood Gallery hosted the Halifax component of the retrospective exhibition, Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada, 1965-1980.1 It was during the 1971-1972 academic year that David Askevold asked the New York-based performance artist Vito Acconci to coordinate the innovative Projects course at NSCAD while he was on leave. Acconci decided to invite a number of visiting artists to the school and he turned to his friend Dennis Oppenheim to fill one of these five week slots. This is why Oppenheim came to Halifax in the spring of 1972. The visit to NSCAD also led Oppenheim to a further collaboration with the Lithography Workshop. The idea was to produce a limited edition of fifty prints by a number of emerging artists and to sell them at fifty dollars a piece as a way to raise money for the school. In Oppenheim’s case, he decided to get further exposure and dissemination for his photographic diptych, resulting in the transposition of Reading Position into the medium of lithography. Given this repurposing of artistic media, the lithograph might be viewed as Oppenheim’s “third degree burn.” In this light, the photograph would be understood as a second-degree burn—both as a physical trace of the referent and as a documentation of the first-degree, a.k.a. the real. 2. THE DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT. The facts are simply stated in this photographic diptych’s caption that also reads like some sunbaked recipe. “Stage 1 and Stage 2. Book. Skin. Solar Energy. Exposure time 5 hours.” Oppenheim’s image shows us the cameraless photographic record of a body artist exposing himself to the sun and, in this way, becoming-red and becoming-photogram (as Deleuze might refer to this process). The light-sensitive layer here is of course the reddening skin instead of the developing paper. With its allusions to “pigment” and “exposure time,” Oppenheim’s oft-cited statement about the piece resonates with allusions to painterly and photographic modes of inscription. “The piece has its roots in a notion of colour change. Painters have always artificially instigated colour activity. I allowed myself to be painted, my skin becomes pigment. It could regulate its intensity through control of 84

the exposure time.”2 But what is the status of this particular photograph— or, for that matter, all of Oppenheim’s photographs—given the fact that the artist thought of himself first and foremost as a sculptor? In reviewing his numerous published remarks on this subject, we find Oppenheim’s tendency to attribute the locus of the work of art to the performance or action itself (whether it be classified as land art, body art, or conceptual art). This view is coupled with a real anxiety about whether the photograph could serve as anything other than a documentary “residue.” In a 1993 interview, Oppenheim restricts and limits the photograph in this way. “They were there simply to indicate a radical art that had already vanished. The photograph was necessary only as a residue for communication.”3 One recalls that the chemical definition of a residue refers to the material that remains after a distillation or evaporation. This is a nice way to put it considering that we are dealing here with the dematerialization of the art object or with art as idea (as Joseph Kosuth among others dubbed conceptual art). Giving the photograph this secondary status when placed in the gallery or museum setting, it is reduced to the material trace that remains after the distillation or evaporation of the work of art (ephemeral performance, remote site-specific installation, or disembodied concept). From this perspective, the photograph can only function as a subservient document in relation to the work of art. In other words, the photograph always signals that something has been lost. Oppenheim’s contention that the photograph operates as an “abstraction” and therefore is somehow reductive implies a loss of the authenticity that can only reside in the original artwork, or in the performance itself. In his interview with Patricia Norvell, Oppenheim argues against the presence of the photograph in the gallery as a cure-all for land art. “And I think the photograph is a kind of panacea of the earthworks—terrestrial and conceptoriented art or the written word. I mean, there’s a certain loss; there’s always a loss through abstraction. I mean, what’s wrong with leaving the artwork where it is? [Pause] Leaving the piece done… Just do it, do it without trying to spread it around.”4 Nevertheless, this rhetoric of containment is at odds with other published statements by Oppenheim and it did not stop him from doing exactly the opposite—producing photographic and lithographic copies like Reading Position that disseminate the original performance piece and that take on an independent life of their own. Let us recall those other occasions when Oppenheim spoke with great appreciation about the role of photography and its “richness of meaning” in a world where “art has moved away from its manual phase.”5 Is Reading Position to be considered strictly as the documentary residue of a vanished

performance or as a dangerous supplement that achieves an importance of its own on account of its photographic performativity? This tension reminds one of Jacques Derrida’s remarks on the two senses of photographic invention in Copy, Archive, Signature (2010). In the case of Oppenheim, it is possible to say that even as he wants to assert photographic “invention as a discovery or a revelation of what is already there,” there is a return of the repressed in the form of “invention in the sense of production, creation, productive imagination.”6 In other words, photography is the dangerous supplement and the second-degree burn that replaces and supplants the first degree. The photograph refuses to stay put as the mere documentation or reproduction of the performance—it has to become performative in its own right. In this light, it is not surprising to learn that this diptych has become an important and even canonical work of Conceptual photography. This is in part because the work can be viewed as an emblem for photography itself. In other words, we look to Reading Position (with its calculated burning and exposure) as a meta-reflection on photography’s being in the world. It hearkens back to Nicéphore Niépce’s primal sun pictures or heliographs in the 1820’s because it is the sun that is literally writing on Oppenheim’s body, in a scene recorded by the camera and its seconddegree burn. This two-part image reminds us that photography is always about exposure and that means being exposed in exteriority, being in a relationship with the outside. In this case, it is literally an “ex-peau-sition” that we witness, as the skin (peau) and the film are exposed to and touched by the sun in order to produce this brand of light writing.7 Jean-Luc Nancy has written parenthetically about reading and writing as follows: “(Or one has to understand reading as something other than decipherment. Rather, as touching, as being touched. Writing, reading: matters of tact.)”8 Oppenheim’s sun worshipping picture entitled Reading Position for a Second-Degree Burn allows us to be exposed to reading and writing as matters of tact (touch) and tactics (matters of arrangement). 3. LAYERS OF HUMOUR. In reviewing the interpretive readings of Reading Position for a Second-Degree Burn, it is rare to find anyone willing to affirm its many layers of irony and humour. The art critic Thomas McEvilley offers an exception when he writes about the work in connection with another of Oppenheim’s early body-oriented performances, Material Interchange (1970). This other work is similarly documented via two photographs representing two stages: “Stage #1. Fingernail lodged between gallery floorboards. Stage #2. Splinter from gallery floorboards lodged under

skin.” McEvilley writes, “This type of understated gesture repeats and entrenches itself in Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) in which Oppenheim lay in the sun for five hours bare-chested except for an open book lying on him. There is a humorous interplay between the ideas of leisure and sunbathing on the one hand, and self-endangerment and sacrifice on the other.”9 To state this in another way, Oppenheim’s Reading Position becomes an occasion for laughter because it exposes the pleasure of sunbathing to the pain of sunburning as well as the close proximity or the fine line between them. The piece is ultra-sensitive to this (infra)thin-skinned difference and it is on this wavering border that one is exposed to its visceral humour. In referring to the work as an “understated gesture,” McEvilley aligns Reading Position to the deadpan sensibility of such comedic conceptualists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha. If it is to be viewed as understated, it is because Oppenheim’s Reading Position plays with a surplus of energy—specifically, the power and force of solar energy that can burn (or worse) if (and when) the artist allows himself to become overexposed to its rays. There is something black about this mass of reddened pigment lying before us. Our sunburned body artist reminds us that we are fragile and mortal beings that can be broken, maimed, or even flayed and that the friendly sun can turn into a fiery demon if it is not taken in moderation. A Nietszchean laughter breaks out here in the face of death, mortality, and finitude. From this mordant perspective, Oppenheim’s horizontally prone position reads cadaverous as much as it lies dormant. Oppenheim takes up his (reading) position as the fall guy who engages in an intentionally masochistic performance that may have not come off as particularly funny if it had been carried out to further degrees. Another level of humour lies in the way Oppenheim plays with the conventions of “before” and “after” images. The “after-image” that produces this exemplary case of sun writing or heliography replaces the sunbather’s tan line with a rectangular book line. Such a vision becomes a social embarrassment for the one who has fallen asleep in the sun and now looks somewhat ridiculous. This context also recalls the playfulness of the first part of the title and its ironic redeployment of the proper way to read. For this (non)Reading Position turns out to be one wherein he is written (and burnt) by the sun except for the outline of the frame left by the book that has offered him shade and that has left him a textual space of “white writing.” This is certainly a tactical move and the book at hand (appropriately entitled Tactics) shields the rest of Oppenheim’s body from “becoming-photogram.” The emptiness of the frame and the creation of this negative space allies Oppenheim’s work with conceptual art’s fascination with (often humourous) Buddhistic thoughts about nothing and the impossible. But 85

Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn (1972) COURTESY OF THE LITHOGRAPHY WORKSHOP, NSCAD UNIVERSITY PERMANENT COLLECTION AND THE ARTIST'S ESTATE.

there is also humour in the way that this conceptual artistic slacker and beached hippie in the process of taking a fivehour break is somehow still able to produce or execute art in the Duchampian tradition. Oppenheim affirms the passivity of the piece when he says that it “was a kind of inversion or reversal of energy expenditure” and that “the body is placed in the position of recipient, exposed plane, a captive surface.”10 As in the playfully performative documents and lazy studio “works” of Bruce Nauman during this same period, there is a great degree of désoeuvrement in Oppenheim’s (in)action and inactivity. Such “idleness worshipping” is a vital part of conceptual art as a comedic practice and it can be read in terms of both “unworking” and “inoperativity.”11 In this way, Dennis Oppenheim’s Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn generates an ingenious and ironic twist on the idea of the working studio artist. But this laid back brand of labour should not lead to any naïve conclusion that the conceptual artist is somehow getting off easy or lightly. Instead, Oppenheim’s Reading Position for a Second Degree Burn offers bodily, photographic, and lithographic proof that in lying down on the job the conceptual artist always gets burnt.

The first stop of the touring exhibition Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980 was presented at the Blackwood Gallery, the Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, and University of Toronto Art Center, September 11 - November 28, 2010. It was organized and circulated by the Art Gallery of Alberta, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and Vancouver Art Gallery, in partnership with the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Concordia University) and Halifax, Ink. Traffic was curated by Grant Arnold, Catherine Crowston, Barbara Fischer, Michèle Thériault with Vincent Bonin, and Jayne Wark (Wark curated the Halifax portion).

“Dennis Oppenheim Interviewed by Willoughby Sharp,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971), 188.

Dennis Oppenheim, cited by Alison de Lima Greene, “Dennis Oppenheim: No Photography,” Spot, Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 1993), 5.

Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, ed., Recording Conceptual Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 24.

Oppenheim cited by Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 184. The original source of the interview is Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson, “Discussion, 1968, 1969” in Avalanche 1 (Fall 1970), 48-59.

Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 44.

This playful connection in French that ties the skin to the rhetoric of exposure is taken up by Jean-Luc Nancy in his interview with Chantal Pontbriand in Parachute 100 (2000), 14-31.

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus,” in The Birth to Presence, trans. Claudette Sartiliot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 198.

Thomas McEvilley in Alanna Heiss, Dennis Oppenheim: Selected Works 1967-1990 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 27.

“Dennis Oppenheim Interviewed by Willoughby Sharp,” Studio International 182, no. 938 (November 1971), 188.

For the fascinating dialogue about désœuvrement and the ways in which it addresses the question of community, see Jean-Luc Nancy’s La Communauté désœuvrée (1982) and Maurice Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable (1988). The English versions of these texts are Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 2006).

presume everybody has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek, and means “the soul” (that’s me, I’m all soul) and sometimes “a butterfly,” which latter meaning undoubtedly alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas. As for Snobbs–any person who should look at me would be instantly aware that my name wasn’t Snobbs. Miss Tabitha Turnip propagated that report through sheer envy. Tabitha Turnip indeed! Oh the little wretch! But what can we expect from a turnip? Wonder if she remembers the old adage about “blood out of a turnip,” &c.? [Mem. put her in mind of it the first opportunity.] [Mem. again–pull her nose.] Where was I? Ah! I have been assured that Snobbs is a mere corruption of Zenobia, and that Zenobia was a queen–(So am I. Dr. Moneypenny always calls me the Queen of the Hearts)–and that Zenobia, as well as Psyche, is good Greek, and that my father was “a Greek,” and that consequently I have a right to our patronymic, which is Zenobia and not by any means Snobbs. Nobody but Tabitha Turnip calls me Suky Snobbs. I am the Signora Psyche Zenobia. As I said before, everybody has heard of me. I am that very Signora Psyche Zenobia, so justly celebrated as corresponding secretary to the “Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Association, To, Civilize, Humanity.” Dr. Moneypenny made the title for us, and says he chose it because it sounded big like an empty rumpuncheon. (A vulgar man that sometimes–but he’s deep.) We all sign the initials of the society after our names, in the fashion of the R. S. A., Royal Society of Arts–the S. D. U. K., Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, &c, &c. Dr. Moneypenny says that S. stands for stale, and that D. U. K. spells duck, (but it don’t,) that S. D. U. K. stands for Stale Duck and not for Lord Brougham’s society–but then Dr. Moneypenny is such a queer man that I am never sure when he is telling me the truth. At any rate we always add to our names the initials P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A. T. C. H.- that is to say, Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Association, To, Civilize, Humanity–one letter for each word, which is a decided improvement upon Lord Brougham. Dr. Moneypenny will have it that our initials give our true character–but for my life I can’t see what he means. Notwithstanding the good offices of the Doctor, and the 90

strenuous exertions of the association to get itself into notice, it met with no very great success until I joined it. The truth is, the members indulged in too flippant a tone of discussion. The papers read every Saturday evening were characterized less by depth than buffoonery. They were all whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the “fitness of things.” In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low–very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics–nothing which the learned call spirituality, and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as cant. [Dr. M. says I ought to spell “cant” with a capital K–but I know better.] When I joined the society it was my endeavor to introduce a better style of thinking and writing, and all the world knows how well I have succeeded. We get up as good papers now in the P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A. T. C. H. as any to be found even in Blackwood. I say, Blackwood, because I have been assured that the finest writing, upon every subject, is to be discovered in the pages of that justly celebrated Magazine. We now take it for our model upon all themes, and are getting into rapid notice accordingly. And, after all, it’s not so very difficult a matter to compose an article of the genuine Blackwood stamp, if one only goes properly about it. Of course I don’t speak of the political articles. Everybody knows how they are managed, since Dr. Moneypenny explained it. Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor’s-shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the “Times,” another the “Examiner” and a third a “Culley’s New Compendium of Slang-Whang.” Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done–nothing but “Examiner,” “Slang-Whang,” and “Times”–then “Times,” “SlangWhang,” and “Examiner”–and then “Times,” “Examiner,” and “Slang-Whang.” But the chief merit of the Magazine lies in its miscellaneous articles; and the best of these come under the head of what Dr. Moneypenny calls the bizarreries (whatever that may mean) and what everybody else calls the intensities. This is a species of writing which I have long known how to appreciate, although it is only since my late visit to Mr. Blackwood (deputed by the society) that I have been made aware of the exact method of composition. This method is very simple, but not so much so as the politics. Upon my calling at Mr. B.’s, and making known to him the wishes of the society, he received me with great civility, took me into his study, and gave me a clear explanation of the whole process. “My dear madam,” said he, evidently struck with my majestic appearance, for I had on the crimson satin, with the green agraffas, and orange-colored auriclas. “My dear madam,” said he, “sit down. The matter stands thus: In the first place your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. And,

mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia!” he continued, after a pause, with the most expressive energy and solemnity of manner, “mark me!–that pen–must–never be mended! Herein, madam, lies the secret, the soul, of intensity. I assume upon myself to say, that no individual, of however great genius ever wrote with a good pen–understand me,–a good article. You may take, it for granted, that when manuscript can be read it is never worth reading. This is a leading principle in our faith, to which if you cannot readily assent, our conference is at an end.” He paused. But, of course, as I had no wish to put an end to the conference, I assented to a proposition so very obvious, and one, too, of whose truth I had all along been sufficiently aware. He seemed pleased, and went on with his instructions. “It may appear invidious in me, Miss Psyche Zenobia, to refer you to any article, or set of articles, in the way of model or study, yet perhaps I may as well call your attention to a few cases. Let me see. There was ‘The Dead Alive,’ a capital thing!–the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body–full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the ‘Confessions of an Opium-eater’–fine, very fine!– glorious imagination–deep philosophy acute speculation–plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote the paper–but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper, over a rummer of Hollands and water, ‘hot, without sugar.’” [This I could scarcely have believed had it been anybody but Mr. Blackwood, who assured me of it.] “Then there was ‘The Involuntary Experimentalist,’ all about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and came out alive and well, although certainly done to a turn. And then there was ‘The Diary of a Late Physician,’ where the merit lay in good rant, and indifferent Greek- both of them taking things with the public. And then there was ‘The Man in the Bell,’ a paper by-the-by, Miss Zenobia, which I cannot sufficiently recommend to your attention. It is the history of a young person who goes to sleep under the clapper of a church bell, and is awakened by its tolling for a funeral. The sound drives him mad, and, accordingly, pulling out his tablets, he gives a record of his sensations. Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a

note of your sensations–they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to the sensations.” “That I certainly will, Mr. Blackwood,” said I. “Good!” he replied. “I see you are a pupil after my own heart. But I must put you au fait to the details necessary in composing what may be denominated a genuine Blackwood article of the sensation stamp–the kind which you will understand me to say I consider the best for all purposes. “The first thing requisite is to get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before. The oven, for instance,–that was a good hit. But if you have no oven or big bell, at hand, and if you cannot conveniently tumble out of a balloon, or be swallowed up in an earthquake, or get stuck fast in a chimney, you will have to be contented with simply imagining some similar misadventure. I should prefer, however, that you have the actual fact to bear you out. Nothing so well assists the fancy, as an experimental knowledge of the matter in hand. ‘Truth is strange,’ you know, ‘stranger than fiction’-besides being more to the purpose.” Here I assured him I had an excellent pair of garters, and would go and hang myself forthwith. “Good!” he replied, “do so;–although hanging is somewhat hacknied. Perhaps you might do better. Take a dose of Brandreth’s pills, and then give us your sensations. However, my instructions will apply equally well to any variety of misadventure, and in your way home you may easily get knocked in the head, or run over by an omnibus, or bitten by a mad dog, or drowned in a gutter. But to proceed. “Having determined upon your subject, you must next consider the tone, or manner, of your narration. There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the tone natural–all common–place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or curt, which has lately come much into use. It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can’t be too brief. Can’t be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph. “Then there is the tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional. Some of our best novelists patronize this tone. The words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning. This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think. “The tone metaphysical is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them. Talk of the Ionic and Eleatic schools—of Archytas, Gorgias, and Alcmaeon. Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure 91

and abuse a man named Locke. Turn up your nose at things in general, and when you let slip any thing a little too absurd, you need not be at the trouble of scratching it out, but just add a footnote and say that you are indebted for the above profound observation to the ‘Kritik der reinem Vernunft,’ or to the ‘Metaphysithe Anfongsgrunde der Noturwissenchaft.’ This would look erudite and–and–and frank. “There are various other tones of equal celebrity, but I shall mention only two more–the tone transcendental and the tone heterogeneous. In the former the merit consists in seeing into the nature of affairs a very great deal farther than anybody else. This second sight is very efficient when properly managed. A little reading of the ‘Dial’ will carry you a great way. Eschew, in this case, big words; get them as small as possible, and write them upside down. Look over Channing’s poems and quote what he says about a ‘fat little man with a delusive show of Can.’ Put in something about the Supernal Oneness. Don’t say a syllable about the Infernal Twoness. Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything–assert nothing. If you feel inclined to say ‘bread and butter,’ do not by any means say it outright. You may say any thing and every thing approaching to ‘bread and butter.’ You may hint at buck-wheat cake, or you may even go so far as to insinuate oat-meal porridge, but if bread and butter be your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say ‘bread and butter!’ I assured him that I should never say it again as long as I lived. He kissed me and continued: “As for the tone heterogeneous, it is merely a judicious mixture, in equal proportions, of all the other tones in the world, and is consequently made up of every thing deep, great, odd, piquant, pertinent, and pretty. “Let us suppose now you have determined upon your incidents and tone. The most important portion–in fact, the soul of the whole business, is yet to be attended to–I allude to the filling up. It is not to be supposed that a lady, or gentleman either, has been leading the life of a book worm. And yet above all things it is necessary that your article have an air of erudition, or at least afford evidence of extensive general reading. Now I’ll put you in the way of accomplishing this point. See here!” (pulling down some three or four ordinary-looking volumes, and opening them at random). “By casting your eye down almost any page of any book in the world, you will be able to perceive at once a host of little scraps of either learning or bel-espritism, which are the very thing for the spicing of a Blackwood article. You might as well note down a few while I read them to you. I shall make two divisions: first, Piquant Facts for the Manufacture of Similes, and, second, Piquant Expressions to be introduced as occasion may require. Write now!”–and I wrote as he dictated. “PIQUANT FACTS FOR SIMILES. ‘There were origi92

nally but three Muses–Melete, Mneme, Aoede–meditation, memory, and singing.’ You may make a good deal of that little fact if properly worked. You see it is not generally known, and looks recherche. You must be careful and give the thing with a downright improviso air. “Again. ‘The river Alpheus passed beneath the sea, and emerged without injury to the purity of its waters.’ Rather stale that, to be sure, but, if properly dressed and dished up, will look quite as fresh as ever. “Here is something better. ‘The Persian Iris appears to some persons to possess a sweet and very powerful perfume, while to others it is perfectly scentless.’ Fine that, and very delicate! Turn it about a little, and it will do wonders. We’ll have some thing else in the botanical line. There’s nothing goes down so well, especially with the help of a little Latin. Write! “’The Epidendrum Flos Aeris, of Java, bears a very beautiful flower, and will live when pulled up by the roots. The natives suspend it by a cord from the ceiling, and enjoy its fragrance for years.’ That’s capital! That will do for the similes. Now for the Piquant Expressions. “PIQUANT EXPRESSIONS. ‘The Venerable Chinese novel Ju-Kiao-Li.’ Good! By introducing these few words with dexterity you will evince your intimate acquaintance with the language and literature of the Chinese. With the aid of this you may either get along without either Arabic, or Sanscrit, or Chickasaw. There is no passing muster, however, without Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek. I must look you out a little specimen of each. Any scrap will answer, because you must depend upon your own ingenuity to make it fit into your article. Now write! “’Aussi tendre que Zaire’–as tender as Zaire-French. Alludes to the frequent repetition of the phrase, la tendre Zaire, in the French tragedy of that name. Properly introduced, will show not only your knowledge of the language, but your general reading and wit. You can say, for instance, that the chicken you were eating (write an article about being choked to death by a chicken-bone) was not altogether aussi tendre que Zaire. Write! ‘Van muerte tan escondida, Que no te sienta venir, Porque el plazer del morir, No mestorne a dar la vida.’ “That’s Spanish–from Miguel de Cervantes. ‘Come quickly, O death! but be sure and don’t let me see you coming, lest thepleasureIshallfeelatyourappearanceshouldunfortunately bring me back again to life.’ This you may slip in quite a propos when you are struggling in the last agonies with the chicken-bone. Write! ‘Il pover ‘huomo che non se’n era accorto, Andava combattendo, e era morto.’ That’s Italian, you perceive–from Ariosto. It means that a great hero, in the

heat of combat, not perceiving that he had been fairly killed, continued to fight valiantly, dead as he was. The application of this to your own case is obvious–for I trust, Miss Psyche, that you will not neglect to kick for at least an hour and a half after you have been choked to death by that chicken-bone. Please to write! ‘Und sterb’ich doch, no sterb’ich denn Durch sie–durch sie!’ That’s German–from Schiller. ‘And if I die, at least I die–for thee- for thee!’ Here it is clear that you are apostrophizing the cause of your disaster, the chicken. Indeed what gentleman (or lady either) of sense, wouldn’t die, I should like to know, for a well fattened capon of the right Molucca breed, stuffed with capers and mushrooms, and served up in a salad-bowl, with orange-jellies en mosaiques. Write! (You can get them that way at Tortoni’s)– Write, if you please! “Here is a nice little Latin phrase, and rare too, (one can’t be too recherche or brief in one’s Latin, it’s getting so common–ignoratio elenchi. He has committed an ignoratio elenchi–that is to say, he has understood the words of your proposition, but not the idea. The man was a fool, you see. Some poor fellow whom you address while choking with that chicken-bone, and who therefore didn’t precisely understand what you were talking about. Throw the ignoratio elenchi in his teeth, and, at once, you have him annihilated. If he dares to reply, you can tell him from Lucan (here it is) that speeches are mere anemonae verborum, anemone words. The anemone, with great brilliancy, has no smell. Or, if he begins to bluster, you may be down upon him with insomnia Jovis, reveries of Jupiter–a phrase which Silius Italicus (see here!) applies to thoughts pompous and inflated. This will be sure and cut him to the heart. He can do nothing but roll over and die. Will you be kind enough to write? “In Greek we must have some thing pretty–from Demosthenes, for example. Anerh o pheugoen kai palin makesetai There is a tolerably good translation of it in Hudibras ‘For he that flies may fight again, Which he can never do that’s slain.’ In a Blackwood article nothing makes so fine a show as your Greek. The very letters have an air of profundity about them. Only observe, madam, the astute look of that Epsilon! That Phi ought certainly to be a bishop! Was ever there a smarter fellow than that Omicron? Just twig that Tau! In short, there is nothing like Greek for a genuine sensationpaper. In the present case your application is the most obvious thing in the world. Rap out the sentence, with a huge oath, and by way of ultimatum at the good-for-nothing dunderheaded villain who couldn’t understand your plain English in relation to the chicken-bone. He’ll take the hint and be off, you may depend upon it.” These were all the instructions Mr. B. could afford me

upon the topic in question, but I felt they would be entirely sufficient. I was, at length, able to write a genuine Blackwood article, and determined to do it forthwith. In taking leave of me, Mr. B. made a proposition for the purchase of the paper when written; but as he could offer me only fifty guineas a sheet, I thought it better to let our society have it, than sacrifice it for so paltry a sum. Notwithstanding this niggardly spirit, however, the gentleman showed his consideration for me in all other respects, and indeed treated me with the greatest civility. His parting words made a deep impression upon my heart, and I hope I shall always remember them with gratitude. “My dear Miss Zenobia,” he said, while the tears stood in his eyes, “is there anything else I can do to promote the success of your laudable undertaking? Let me reflect! It is just possible that you may not be able, so soon as convenient, to–to–get yourself drowned, or–choked with a chicken-bone, or–or hung,–or–bitten by a–but stay! Now I think me of it, there are a couple of very excellent bulldogs in the yard–fine fellows, I assure you–savage, and all that–indeed just the thing for your money–they’ll have you eaten up, auricula and all, in less than five minutes (here’s my watch!)–and then only think of the sensations! Here! I say–Tom!- Peter!– Dick, you villain!–let out those”–but as I was really in a great hurry, and had not another moment to spare, I was reluctantly forced to expedite my departure, and accordingly took leave at once- somewhat more abruptly, I admit, than strict courtesy would have otherwise allowed. It was my primary object upon quitting Mr. Blackwood, to get into some immediate difficulty, pursuant to his advice, and with this view I spent the greater part of the day in wandering about Edinburgh, seeking for desperate adventures– adventures adequate to the intensity of my feelings, and adapted to the vast character of the article I intended to write. In this excursion I was attended by one negro-servant, Pompey, and my little lap-dog Diana, whom I had brought with me from Philadelphia. It was not, however, until late in the afternoon that I fully succeeded in my arduous undertaking. An important event then happened of which the following Blackwood article, in the tone heterogeneous, is the substance and result.

Imagine a pitch-black space. Immersed in absolute darkness, you cannot see your own hand, you have no idea of the size of the space that you are in, and your sense of time is completely lost. One's typical dependence upon an encounter anchored by eyesight is replaced by an amorphous and immersive environment. This presentation strategy is not only ideally suited for sound art, it is also a radical engagement of the senses by way of complete deprivation of the visual. This concept was initiated by Marvin Green and John Oswald in 1976 and has had many iterations in cities across the world since. Titled in opposition to the name of the festival it was a part of, No Images was the first Toronto presentation of this unique performance experience in many years. The audience was led into the space by ushers with flashlights before the darkness descended. Not recommended for claustrophobes. 96

Alexis O'Hara, Gear (2009)

Annie MacDonell, Untitled (for No Images) (2010)

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Alex Snukal, Untitled (No Images) (2012)

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Alex Snukal, Untitled (No Images) (2012)

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Alex Snukal, Symphonic Poem for 100 Strobe Lights (Print Version)

The first two-hundred frames in the animation, enough frames so that each of the 100 strobes â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;firesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; at least once.

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Alex Snukal, Symphonic Poem for 100 Strobe Lights (Print Version)

The first two-hundred frames in the animation, enough frames so that each of the 100 strobes â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;firesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; at least once.

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Jennifer Chan, Save for Web (2011)

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n the summer of 2009, the Blackwood Gallery presented its first ever off-site exhibition. Titled The Projects: Port Credit, it presented creative stagings and reflections on the myriad futures to be imagined in Port Credit, Mississauga. The second edition of The Projects: Port Credit took place in the summer of 2010 and it built on the first by shifting the site of the exhibition from an empty architect's office to a condo showroom. From an empty shell where plans are no longer conceived to an overdetermined space where plans are foregone conclusions. The ten invited artists participating in The Projects insinuated themselves into the showroom and the surroundings of the building in ways ranging from anodyne to grating. But to intertwine remained the shared modus operandi. In other words, they favored understatement; they poked cunningly rather than crudely. The ten projects presented did not point in a single direction; they each proposed idiosyncratic paths and developed unique slants. Some of the areas under scrutiny were commuter trains; bicycle routes; commemorative displays; architectural models; resonant frequencies; water parks; public sculpture; vanishing chairs; descriptive language; and graffiti on glass. Throughout, there was a clear intent and conviction that contemporary art in Port Credit has a place in the daily fabric of the community. Imagine, if you will, a cultural boom to accompany the construction boom. Imagine this formidable pairing, yes, but let's also act on its translation to realization. In this context, The Projects ideally functioned like a timely prod, an inciting nudge, a flash forward in that direction. 113

Adam Bobbette & Seth Porcello This space and that over there right here, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s celebrate! (2010) 116

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Fedora Romita regarding (2010) 118

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Peter Flemming Vibrations and Waves (2010) 120

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Derek Sullivan Proposal for a painting to occupy bars, restaurants, libraries, universities, offices, dining rooms, board rooms and museums around the world (after Poul Gernes) (2006) 122

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Derek Sullivan Proposal for a painting to occupy bars, restaurants, libraries, universities, offices, dining rooms, board rooms and museums around the world (after Poul Gernes) (2006) 124

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Gwen MacGregor The Joint Federal/Provincial Public-Private Partnership Proposal for a Port Credit Water Park (2010/2011) 127

Jessica Vallentin The Acts of Genna Davis (2010) 128

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Cheryl Rondeau, 43º33’27”N 79º35’24”W : Port Credit (2010)

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Cheryl Rondeau, 43º33’27”N 79º35’24”W : Port Credit (2010)

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Sarah Febbraro No Place Good Place (2010) 134

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Claudio Ghirardo CONSIDER (2010) 136

Sonja Hidas Large Items (2010) 137

Sonja Hidas Large Items (2010) 138

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What size is the present, here, right here? We are lived by our models. Have you ever felt like you are living in a very big architectural model? Like you are the model of the little model people that occupied your exact place now but at a smaller scale? The old starch factory smokestack is being carried off in an ambulance. Things are out of place, or are we in their place? The old starch factory smokestack is imploding right over there amidst celebration. The future is as big as the building across the street and as small as the bathroom, here, right here, in the showroom. The past too is getting bigger and smaller at the same time. And it appears to be in the wrong place.

For The Projects, I created a flower memorial/“garden” on the fence that surrounds the outside of the exhibition site. Saturating the fence with wreaths and bouquets of mostly artificial flowers transforms the public space and acts as a symbol to consider the notion of loss and growth in an area undergoing rapid development. Beautiful and gaudy, No Place Good Place intends to draw people in and act as a possible site of reflection for the Port Credit community.

I took the invitation to make work responding to a condominium showroom as an opportunity to experiment. I combined some ideas from previous research in solar powered "lazy" machines with recent explorations in the mechanics of sound and resonance. I decided to make use of two elements in situ: the Plexiglass display panels (which depicted the floor plans of the different condo models) and the halogen lights of the showroom. I then prepared a collection of small devices and circuits which were temporarily affixed to the lights and display panels. Solar cells stole power from the overhead lighting to run the sound circuits, each circuit carefully tuned to a resonant frequency of its corresponding pane of plexiglass. Vibrating electromagnetic 140

coils placed close to magnets mounted on the panels produced subtle acoustic tones, turning the panels into diffusion surfaces. This was an attempt to coax sound from unlikely, or even unwieldy, materials. The overall effect was of a soft choir of changing dissonances and intermittent, arrhythmic pulses.

As an artist living in Port Credit for the past few years, I am curious to know how local residents approach art: What do they consider to be art? What is their experience with it? Are they open to various artistic processes? Do they consider art part of their cultural environment? My intervention will take place on the windows of the FRAM building and will therefore be visible by the passersby driving or walking along Lakeshore and Hurontario. Consider will utilize graffiti and quotes by Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk who was devoted to poetry and social activism, and Joseph Beuys, a 20th century artist who was deeply committed to humanism and social philosophy. I want to engage the public with ideas and thoughts about the possibilities for art within their everyday environment.

The Region of Peel’s waste management guide catalogues large items, such as furniture and appliances, as a “specialty collection." Under special allowances, these items are acceptable for curbside collection. The installation Large Items, consisted in temporarily converting a spot on a parking lot into public art by occupying it with a set of appliances inscribed with text-based interventions. The text meditated on domestic life and discussed public art within the issue of the development of culture in Mississauga. Forty-eight hours after the opening, the installation was stolen. A police report was posted on site and a contour line was drawn to record the vanishing. The mystery of Large Items remains unsolved. Will this event provoke not only discussion but also active lobbying for a greater presence of contemporary art in public spaces? One can hope.

To better utilize Lake Ontario as a Port Credit asset, a new office was established by the federal and provincial governments to research the feasibility of transforming Port Credit into a water park. Unfortunately, insufficient interest from private sponsors and an unwillingness of both levels of government to proceed with the idea on their own, resulted in the suspension of office hours. An artistic rendering of the concept was, however, posted outside the office and is still available upon request.

In the centre of the FRAM Building Group's presentation site sits an image of an aerial view that captures the company’s rejuvenated Port Credit properties. From this perspective, an observer can perceive the spatial relationships among the buildings, trees, roads and sidewalks. Visitors can accurately determine what they see visually and through language produce a description of each property that can easily be communicated to a potential buyer. Another feature of the presentation site are three video screens embedded in a wall, their primary function is to present and communicate an accurate description of the architectural concepts designed by the company. Romita repurposed them in order to screen a series of videos produced with the participation of members of the Port Credit community. During video recording sessions, participants were shown a photograph and they were asked to describe what they observe in as much detail as possible and to describe it for as long as possible. This piece is an exploration of the potential for and the limitations of description and observation. At the time of the recording, participants did not know that the photograph they were describing was a magnified image detailing the cemented ground on which they were sitting, directly below the entrance to the FRAM head office.

For The Projects: Port Credit, Cheryl Rondeau proposed a new local cartography through the creation of a meandering cycling route that retraced history and borders. The artist revisited these frontiers and boundaries in an effort to examine the transition from then to now and old to new. Rondeau remapped a configuration of the old Village, physically and kinetically linking it with the various communities and requisite components that comprise Port Credit as it is now known. The project mined history, it embedded the former within a current geography and thereby emphasized the process of ongoing change. A detailed map highlighting the artist's exploration, including statistical information and historical references, was made available to visitors of the exhibition. A bike tour was organized on the day of the opening, bringing cyclists to the exhibition site after touring through a selection of locations on the artist's remapped Port Credit. In addition, the project includes a virtual element in the form of a blog where the artist chronicles her cycling explorations and tribulations: www.cherylrondeaucycles.com

A collection of chairs, functioning as a sitting area in the exhibition. Visitors are encouraged to use them, to move and sit on them as they please. At the close of each day they are collected and placed together in an informal cluster, ready for the following day. The eight chairs were designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in the 1950s, and subsequently this design (known as Model 3107) became one of the ubiquitous chairs of the post-war era. Official production by the Fritz Hansen company has produced well over five million of them, and this does not take into account the countless knock-offs

in circulation. Twice in Model 3107's history, Fritz Hansen has approached artists to design a palette for these chairs. Verner Panton introduced a psychedelic palette of bright solid colours in the late 1960s. In the 1980s the company had Poul Gernes contribute a palette, a strange collection of pastels. At the time, Gernes' work was often in the form of murals and colour schemes for interiors, and I was struck by the way his painting practice was able to vanish with the interior scheme of a building. The step of introducing his palette to a design chair with worldwide distribution ultimately generated a painting that was passively consumed throughout the world in the various interiors within which it was included. This passive or invisible painting is the basis for my project. I photographed Gernes' palette and then had paints mixed to match how his colours appear on a photographic negative. I posit my palette as a possible one for the Fritz Hansen company to use, extending the vanishing of Gernes' painting by further hiding it.

Genna Davis' project was to stage a series of events that would occur in/on/ around the GO transit system, with a particular focus on the trains and stations in the section of the line that runs between Union Station and Port Credit. The events were centered around notions of social and spatial activation. They were ephemeral, sometimes even undetectable, performances that resided outside of the usual “performance” cues provided by a gallery space. Because of this, the events were able to come across as “real” experiences for those that happened to witness them. By orchestrating these shared experiences Davis hoped to create a new level of awareness and a questioning of social codes. Ranging from the subtle to the obscure, these events were always connected to everyday actions. Remnants, traces, fragments of these grassroots (non)performances were made tenuously present in the exhibition space. 141

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The problem of architecture is not to be seen from outside, nor to live inside. It is in the dialectical relationship interior-exterior, at the scale of urbanism (houses-streets) and at the scale of the house (interior-exterior). Guy Debord¹

The most extreme and inf luential proposals in the history of modern architecture were made in the context of temporary exhibitions. Beatriz Colomina²

While the problem of presentation is a central concern for any research in epistemology, metaphysics, and aesthetic philosophy, its correlative actualization in mass culture, by way of the architecture of the showroom (also now often publicized as the ‘Presentation Centre’) has received only scant attention. This essay initiates an archaeology of the showroom—with specific regard to the peculiar space of presentation that contains both the model suite and the model building in relative proximity—as a speculative provocation regarding the presentation space of model domesticity and model urbanism in contemporary mass culture. Our intention within the context of a preliminary investigation such as this is to delimit the role of the model in the political-economic reproduction of our current social reality. In his most recent monograph, The Possibility of Absolute Architecture (2011), the architect and theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli contends that the history of the city and the history of urbanization are antithetical processes that deploy opposing spatial logics of organization, with equally oppositional political assumptions and implications. For Aureli, “Both the idea of architecture and the idea of the city as defined through the categories of the formal and the political are mobilized against the ethos of urbanization, the ‘managerial’ paradigm that, with the rise of capitalism, has characterized our global civilization since the twilight of the so-called Middle Ages.”3 Aureli explains, “Urbanization is here understood […] as the ever-expanding apparatus that is at the basis of modern forms of governance” that are characterized by “the absorption of the political dimension of coexistence (the city) within the economic logic of social management (urbanization).”4 While Aureli’s position is worth discussing at greater length, not least because of the clarity and subtlety of his project, what matters for us is the recognition of these two antagonistic forms-of-life— architecture and the city, and urbanization.5 On the side of urbanization, one model has crossed a threshold of total ubiquity within the metropolitan centers of North America, despite the recent 144

real estate collapse. What cultural precedents prepared the way for the rise of the showroom as the icon of urbanization within this model society? At least one possibility should be immediately excluded: the showroom as model being confused for reality. Of course, it is easy to mistake certain models for the real thing, as 17th century theorists slowly forgot that the clock was a model of cosmic relations of the sun and the earth, and began to claim instead that the movement of the planets where merely actuated by a divine force (God as watchmaker) and left to operate according to their timeless mechanical laws.6 Such cosmic-scale errata are quite avoidable in the showroom, however, since all potential buyers are given ample evidence that the models are only models. Or, could the idea that an urban artifact is only a model be at the very center of the problem of understanding the uncanny success of the showroom? Perhaps if we can inhabit, speculatively, the center of this problem by assuming the model as an active and operative construction within the social field, we would, as so many advertisements promise, be home by now.

leaning coyly over the barrier designed to protect the sanctity (i.e. model-ness) of the U.S. model kitchen, berated Khrushchev about the communist treatment of women, remarking, “What we want to do is make easier the life of our housewives.”8 If history can in fact be said to repeat itself, this compulsion is perhaps most clearly discernable in the moments of geopolitical strategy that enlist the role of women as a specific concern whose demands for greater ease and comfort can only be met by the ideologies of imperialism and capitalism. Yet, the debate quickly moves beyond the scope of Nixon’s feminist concerns, turning instead the question of American property ownership and the problem of affordability:

ARTIFACTICITY, DOMESTICITY, URBANIZATION

Here the model spreads out, exceeding itself to draw into the conversation relations of credit, real estate, ownership, and the elastic boundaries of the all-important middle class. In addition to connecting the model to the mortgage (i.e. deathgrip), what the so-called kitchen debate brings to the fore is the need to model a domestic reality as a form that can be infinitely reproduced and realized for the majority of the urban populations living under either of the ideological constellations of the Cold War. Despite the conclusion of that war and its attendant logic of model domesticity, the residue of the model kitchen can be found in any presentation suite, where modern day condo sales representatives lean just as casually against the in-built furnishings to suggest, the causal ease of their body language amplifying the cool rhetoric of their salesmanship, that the available units will deliver a calm and pleasant, if neutered and commodity-driven, context for coupledom. Meanwhile, the feminist concerns Nixon first uttered in Sokolniki Park continue to echo through the poignant locution, ‘Happy Wife, Happy Life.’ This familial four word sales pitch is the slogan for a lifestyle of boxed heteronormative banality: the long sought after indexical indicator of successful libidinal domestication. If we are willing to travel even further into the history of this model society to construct our series of urban artifacts, a second confrontation offers another compelling image of the life of the model. In this instance, the protagonist is neither Nixon nor his fabled American housewife, but Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; the confrontation takes place between his model as an image of possible experience and the all-toocredulous public for whom the consumption of the image was

If you’re not in some series, even a completely fictional one, you’re lost. Gilles Deleuze7

To claim that a given urban artifact has a set of precedents is to establish a series within which its artifacticity can be contextualized typologically; with respect to the showroom, this series extends in two directions, in one to the 1:1 model, and the other to the model as an image. The first moment in the series can be dated: July 24, 1959. While the event is now a key moment in the story of model domesticity, it is safe to say that the patriarchs of the Cold War—Richard Nixon, then Vice President of the United States, and Nikita Khrushchev, then Soviet Premier—were quite unlikely candidates to debate the merits of domestic advancement in the kitchen. However, the scene of their verbal tiff (mostly regarding the relative value of the technocratic organization of food preparation and its attendant hygienic maintenance and efficient management within that most consequential and productive space of domestic life) affords us the opportunity to reflect on the potential of the model suite as a political-economic icon of culinary modernity in the context of Cold War militarization. As is well known, in the spectacular setting of the U.S. Trade and Cultural Fair, hosted in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, Nixon,

Nixon: Let me give an example you can appreciate. Our steelworkers, as you know, are on strike. But any steelworker could buy this house. They earn $3 an hour. This house costs about $100 a month to buy on a contract running 25 to 30 years. Khrushchev: We have steel workers and we have peasants who can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.9

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commensurate with realization. According to architecture theorist and historian Beatriz Colomina’s prescient analysis, we understand that the value of the model within architectural modernism is related to its circulation within both architecture and popular publications. An especially convincing case argued by Colomina is that of Mies, whose success as a father and founder of the Modern movement occurred despite his inability to realize, in any inhabitable (i.e. built) form, the key projects that contributed to his ascension within the canon of Modernism. Colomina explains that, in particular, Mies’s 1922 project of the Glass Skyscraper “where the model is made to look like a building that has already been constructed, with light, reflections, greenery, and adjacent existing buildings” was photographed “so as to give the impression that the building is living, removing all traces of it being a model and carefully blurring the lines between object and its background.”10 This operation repeats the logic of model representation deployed in Mies’s photomontage of his project for the Friedrichstrasse skyscraper competition in 1921. For Colomina, “These drawings and models were not simply documents of projects to be built. In fact, Mies could not have built any of them at the time, even if given the opportunity.”11 As with Mies, the transient artifact of the contemporary showroom relies on the convincing deployment of models as images capable of inspiring and securing the capital investment from potential condominium owners needed to finance the project its investor-owners hope they will one day inhabit. Held in suspension between the model suite interior and the model of the building as a whole (almost always already set into its projected, albeit typically flattened, urban topography), the image of the model accelerates the project of urbanization through its uncanny ability to secure the capital necessary to realize, in physical reality, the process of gentrification it projectively represents.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE EQUIVOCATIONS Power is confidence in obedience. Nitzan and Bichler 12

Yet, if the showroom is a strange hybrid that draws together model suite and its attendant ideology of domesticity and model building with its mass psychological connotation of mastery and control, what does this space of presentation tell us about this—our—model society? To answer this question is to first inquire into the political-economic forms that order and organize space and society, which gives a series of urban 146

artifacts their most coherent logic, and allows the consideration of type regardless of scale. From this perspective, a necessity for the coherent understanding of these spatial forms is the avoidance of a false dichotomy between political organization and economic order. According to political economists’ Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, this assumed separation between politics and economics can be traced back “to the emergence of industrial capitalism during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Classical political economists, siding with the rising bourgeoisie against the ancien régime, promoted a novel idea: the ‘free market’.”13 According to Karl Polanyi’s analysis in The Great Transformation (1944), the idealized purpose of the ‘free market’ was to create a separation between civil society and its adjacent institutions, such as the family, community, and state.14 Nitzan and Bichler go on to note that, for “Adam Smith, free markets operated as an ‘invisible hand’, a mechanism which he claimed automatically allocated resources to their most efficient use. But in order to be effective, the invisible hand had to be left alone. The call for laissez-faire was therefore a call for the depoliticization of production and well-being.”15 Nitzan and Bichler refer to the split between the political and economic registers of human life, following from Adam Smith, as the delineation of the vertical and the horizontal: “The vertical dimension revolves around power, authority, command, manipulation and dissonance. Academically, it belongs to the realm of politics. The horizontal axis centres around well-being, free choice, exchange, and equilibrium – the academic preoccupation of economists.”16 The key result of this separation from the point of view of analysis was the inability to develop a sufficient theory of capital. More specifically, what was lost was a theory of capital that could explain how capital accumulates. What is most important for an archaeology of this model society is to stress that, like building, “Production is always a societal activity.”17 Accordingly, the role of production in the accumulation of monetary wealth must be understood within the context of a broader social reality where accumulation has consequences. In this regard, “capital could be likened to a ‘mega-machine’, somewhat along the lines suggested by Lewis Mumford.”18 Here we see the model in a form capable of organizing the larger social whole for the purpose of reordering social reproduction itself. Nitzan and Bichler agree with Mumford inasmuch as the model can be likened to the project of architecture itself: Tracing the long historical link between technology and power, Mumford argued that early machines were made not of physical matter, but of humans. In the great deltas of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India, the first feats of mechanization were achieved through the formation of giant social organizations. The visible

output of those early mega-machines were massive public works, such as palaces, citadels, canals, and pyramids. These, though, were largely means to an end. […] indeed, according to Mumford, the true purpose of the ruling king and priests was the very assembly, operation, and control of the mega-machine itself.19 Extending this concept to the contemporary business world, they go on to explain, “we can argue that the earlier elite association of kingship and priesthood has now been replaced by a coalition of capitalists and state officials, overseeing a new mega-machine named capital. The visible ‘output’ of this new mega-machine is profit, but that is merely a code of power. What is being accumulated is neither future utility nor dead labour, but abstract power claims on the entire process of social reproduction.”20 Their point here could not be more important, nor more frequently misunderstood by economists and political thinkers alike: the power that is accumulated is not indexical to dead labour or machines, but is related to the relative control to shape the social field itself. For us, Nitzan and Bichler’s analysis leads to several important questions: How can model society be understood according to this refined political economic analysis? Does the model—the showroom—share an operating logic with the mega-machine described by Mumford? And, emphatically, can we imagine a way to confront the social reproduction driven by the model-machine?

THE HYPERSTITIAL ECONOMY The generative power of models lies in the degree to which they afford opportunities to be equivocal about questions of identity, to elide or blur the extent to which you are positing an underlying continuity of force or matter (a homology of substrate), and the extent to which you are reasoning analogically. And every time you permit a trepidation between those very different fundamental claims (“as” and “is”), every time you allow for an oscillation between the referents, important thinking happens. D. Graham Burnett 21

If the model can be understood as an exemplary urban artifact of what Aureli calls a ‘device of urbanization,’22 is it also possible that the model could be deployed as a means to undermine this process? For Aureli, “urbanization indissolubly

and structurally links the motivations for upgrading human life in the urban environment to the possibility of enabling a fertile ground for the reproduction of the labor force and its control, or governance.”23 So, for Aureli, although “urbanization is the suppression of the city’s political character in favor of power” that is specifically managerial in its application, one can go even further with the argument: “that the notion of urbanization presupposes the fundamental substitution of politics with economics as a mode of city governance to the point that today it is reasonable – almost banal – to ask not what kind of political power is governing us, but whether we are governed by politics at all – that is, whether we are living under a totalitarian managerial process based on economy, which in turn uses different political modes of public governance ranging from dictatorship to democracy to war.”24 While this claim might seem to cut against the grain of our discussion of Nitzan and Bichler’s analysis of power and political economy above, Aureli is quick to add, “of course, an economy acts politically, but its politics ultimately aims to establish economic criteria as the primary organization of the human environment.”25 This is to say, pace Nitzan and Bichler, the organization of the human environment through the model of capital organizes the social field itself so as to maximize the power for shaping its reproduction. As a contemporary intervention that attends precisely to the processes of social reproduction as much as to this model society and the political-economic power that seeks to reproduce it, we might now consider Adam Bobbette and Seth Porcello’s This space and that over there right here, let’s celebrate! (2010) within this hyperstitial archaeology. The piece was included in the group exhibition Port Credit: The Projects (2009), curated by Christof Migone for the Blackwood Gallery in the remarkable postindustrial waterfront ‘redevelopment’ West of Toronto in the southern part of Mississauga. We would be wrong to assume that “Port Credit” is merely a pseudonymous reference for an imagined urban waterfront that is almost as obsessed with development as it is with the eradication of its industrial heritage. As the mouth of the Credit River on Lake Ontario’s northern shore, Port Credit is as real as any other model society: 43°33′7″N 79°35′4″W. For their intervention at the sales center for North Shore, a condominium development by FRAM Building Group, Bobbette and Porcello call on the viewer to join them in a convivial event related to multiple proximal demonstratives, at least, that is what they do with the title of the piece. By abandoning the interrogative form that would refer to quantity, nature, class, purpose, or name, they instead double, and then redouble terms, which demonstrate only proximally, suggesting a situation of heightened confusion and multiple scales. And, this is precisely what their model intervention creates: surrounding the model of the condo tower, they reintroduce architecture and the city, including mobile 147

industrial chimneys, overlapping opaque and translucent housing facades, strangely unscaled animals, including dinosaurs, toy cars and other ephemera, and a menacing admixture of model-building debris. As the quadrilemma posed by the proximal demonstratives in the title already indicates with precise ambiguity, the model intervention renders the model condo ‘problematic’ by amplifying its scalar distortions, adding a variety of new scales, confusing temporalities, and insisting on the juxtaposition and commingling of aspects of the city which urbanization tries to partition, both physical and socially. The twisted iconography of the industrial past are now free to roam the site of gentrification, divorced from their previous functional determinations, they playfully haunt the scene. But if there is an allegory to be found in this impossible model, it is perhaps the hyperstitial staging of the contest between the architecture of the city and urbanization.26

CONCLUDING REMARKS: TOWARDS A MODEL OF PERPLICATION To return to the epigraphs which afforded this abbreviated archaeology its initial direction, for Colomina, the exhibition—as much as its ubiquitous and populist progeny, the showroom—operates by betraying its ephemerality through the paradoxical substantiation of an efficacious image of urbanization. This, in fact, is precisely the reason that Debord, with his suspicion of architecture already manifest in his polemic of 1959, suggests that the tension between interior and exterior realizes the essential capacity of architecture as a problem. Regarding the perverse model of Port Credit realized by Bobbette and Porcello, it is their emphatic presentation of an ephemeral model of architecture becoming-problematic to which our concluding observations are here directed. As we noted above, This space and that over there right here, let’s celebrate! offers a deranged and ludic repetition of the very processes of urbanization. A strategy of this sort, “a weaving together of a multiplicity,” to use John Rajchman’s phrase, can be understood as a Deleuzian strategy of ‘vicediction’ that is primarily, “concerned with a kind of depth that is not a ground […] but rather the ‘groundless’ depth of an intensive space in the extensive one that includes or frames it.”27 For Bobbette and Porcello, the model is designed to exceed its extensive frame through the multiplication of scales which explode the logic of ordered presentation. As 148

Rajchman explains, “perplications thus are the foldings that expose an intensive multiple complexity in the fabric of things rather than a contradictory framed one; they unearth ‘within’ a space the complications that take the space ‘outside’ itself, or its frame, and fold it again.”28 They perplicate the showroom. While Rachjman’s capacity to elucidate these concepts is located well beyond reproach in his brief but exemplary text Constructions (1998), given the recent deluge of seemingly effortless ‘Deleuze and X’ publications, it is worth clarifying our interest here in Deleuze’s anti-model —the fold [le pli]. For Deleuze, modes of ‘Complication’ are signaled by “the state of chaos which retains and comprises all the actual intensive series which correspond to these ideal series, incarnating them and affirming their divergence. This chaos thus gathers in itself the being of the problems and distributes it to all the systems and fields which form within it the persistent value of the problematic.”29 There is no doubt that this aspect of chaotic imbrication is clearly evinced by the model manipulation of This space and that over there right here, let’s celebrate! However, this model also moves beyond the logic of complication by intensifying the confused temporalities and latent admixtures of urbanization to a point where the ideality of their anodyne image crosses the threshold of seduction to become monstrous. That is, and in precisely Deleuzian terms, to become problematic. In this regard, This space and that over there right here, let’s celebrate! relates comportment to the model that Deleuze calls ‘Perplication’, or, the “state of Problems-Ideas, with their multiplicities and coexistent varieties, their determination of elements, their distribution of mobile singularities and their formation of ideal series around these singularities.”30 In fact, and perhaps most importantly, for Deleuze, ‘perplication’ “designates something other than a conscious state.”31 While the epistemological aspirations of the model might appear to us at first as merely benign projective cues, Bobbette and Porcello undermine the unconscious emulation of the showroom by denying its intellectual apprehension as model. To displace the model from its semiotic occupation as ‘object to be emulated’ toward an operation of perplication thus requires a repetition of the various problems of temporality within the city, both as a model and in the model, as a way of redoubling the excluded forms of the polis as excluded. Thus, as a work of perplicating vicediction, we can see how This space and that over there right here, let’s celebrate! not only includes, but by way of its disturbed redoubling and feral repetition, emphasizes the architecture of the city which urbanization works incessantly to erase. While the essence of urbanization does its best to make the various specters of the city inessential, Bobbette and Porcello impel the model pathologically by insisting on the intractable political economic struggles that both inform and deform the architecture of the city.

Guy Debord quoted in the Introduction to Architecture Between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Beatriz Colomina, “Media as Modern Architecture,” Architecture Between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 58-76.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), 11.

Aureli, 13.

For an elaboration of the political logic of forms-of-life, see Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010.

Jonathan Solomon and D. Graham Burnett, “Masters of the Universe,” Models, 306090 Books.

Gilles Deleuze quoted in Simone Brott, “Deleuze and ‘The Intercessors’,” Log 18 (Winter 2010), 135-151.

The debate originally appeared in edited form in the New York Times, 25 July, 1959.

Ibid.

Beatriz Colomina, “Media as Modern Architecture,” Architecture Between Spectacle and Use, edited by Anthony Vidler (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 64.

Colomina, 65.

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder. RIPE Series in Global Political Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, “Capital Accumulation,” Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, edited by Ronen Palan (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), 67. Notably, the typical distinction in North American research between so-called ‘socio-economic’ dimensions, slavishly separated from the so-called ‘political’, prevalent in almost every available analysis both popular and academic, evinces the persistence of this problematic separation.

Nitzan and Bichler, 67.

Ibid.

Rajchman, 18.

Ibid., 82; my italics.

Ibid., 82.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 280.

Ibid.

Deleuze, 280.

Ibid.

Jonathan Solomon and D. Graham Burnett, “Masters of the Universe,” Models, 306090 Books.

On the device, see Aureli, 11. It should be noted that our commitment to a political economic analysis would distinguish our reading of such a device from Aureli’s own analysis. Where he suggests that the role of the device of urbanization is the creation the best conditions for the reproduction of the labor force, we would contend that these devices are precisely designed to create the best conditions for the ‘accumulation’ of “abstract power claims on the entire process of social reproduction”; see, Nitzan and Bichler, 82.

Aureli, 11.

Ibid., 11-13.

Ibid., 13.

While a number of important precedents could be named here, two key allegorical strategies worth remembering for their insurrectionary character would include: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties, Fake Estates (1973) and Rob Kovitz’s Pig City Model Farm: A Handbook on Architecture and Agriculture (Toronto: Treyf, 1992). Matta-Clark intervenes directly in the real estate market by purchasing thirteen parcels of land that are unusable due to their peculiar form, which is generated from changing property regulations and thus a kind of material abstraction of the absurdity of property. Kovitz, for his part, creates a textual collage that weaves the human aspirations for utopian efficiency (especially of Charles Fourier) with its more perfect realization in the pig farm. For both Matta-Clark and Kovitz, as for Bobbette and Porcello, the purchase of their commentary requires an oblique angle of approach; they amplify the most odious aspects of the processes of financial speculation and efficient planning, respectively, and thus recuperate their logic in a hyperstitial, or allegorical condemnation.

John Rajchman, Constructions (MIT Press: Cambridge and London, 1998), 18.

This essay would not have been possible without the support of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, through the Walter B. Sanders Research Fellowship (2011-2012). I would also like to thank the staff at the Canadian Centre of Architecture for their generous assistance while navigating the archive of Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as Seth Porcello and Adam Bobbette for their convivial correspondence throughout my research for the essay, and Meredith Miller for her prescient comments on earlier drafts of this text. 149

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hree sites. Three stages. Three locations. And one event intertwined the three. First, in one location, a cottage was demolished. Second, the cottage was reconstituted in our two gallery locations as a temporary display that functioned simultaneously as an architectural autopsy, a time capsule, a resuscitation, a dump display, a scavenger manual, a surgical dismantlement, a reverse gentrification, a study of inefficiency, 152

an erased erasure, and a memento mori. The second stage enacted a delayed forgetting, it forestalled the inevitable discarding, it impeded the third unknowable stage of oblivion from ever occurring. Christine Swintak and Don Miller intervened in the course of a campus in the midst of a growth spurt; they balanced the equation whereby, as new buildings break ground and emerge, others fade underground. The cottage in question, the Thomas Cottage, was a small late 19th century building that sat in the middle of the UTM campus and pre-

ceded the establishment of the campus and even its predecessor, Erindale College. The artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; methodically took apart the dilapidated and maligned cottage and not only staged a slowing down of its destructionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;they also animated and transformed it into a chimerical entity. The cottage placed in a post-mortem state and no longer listed in the property registry, thereby entered the realm of sitelessness. Robert Smithson described his nonsites as "maps of material" that not only delimit space but also "involve a consciousness of time."1 Swintak

and Miller provided a similar sensitivity to this continuum. The layered histories of the cottage, from the banal to the apocryphal, were present in both gallery spaces. Their tripartite rant (good cop, bad cop, no cop) anthropomorphized the cottage in order to address it as the subject of their ire, their desire, and their baffled silence in the face of this anachronistic presence. The installation presented a portal to a pastoral past, but also reflected its university-based gallery setting as a white cubed cog in the knowledge industry. Neither narrative was ideal-

ized or demonized; in other words, the project acknowledged the fissures and fractures inherent in architecture. The invisible structures of society are made manifest in the structures of our buildings. In Georges Bataille's pithy and peculiar definition of architecture, he argues that the human form is but an intermediary stage of evolution towards the more advanced and authoritative form of buildings (he focuses on monuments in particular).2 In short, architecture not only speaks volume, it also speaks power. Consequently, with a conviction that

was both resolute and risible, Swintak and Miller perverted the conventions and dubbed the cottage a sovereign. In honor of what would otherwise have been an unnoticed demise, they produced an installation that proclaimed The Cottage is dead! Long live the Cottage!

1 Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. (Berkeley: California University Press, 1996) 236. 2 Georges Bataille, EncyclopĂŚdia Acephalica. Trans. Iain White. (London: Atlas Press, 1995) 35-6. 153

154

YOU ARE WANTED YOU SHOULD BE TREATED WITH RESPECT YOU WILL ALWAYS EXIST YOU ARE A WITNESS YOUR GOODNESS WILL BE REVEALED YOU HAVE A PRESENCE YOU ARE HUMBLE YOUR GRACE IS APPARENT YOUR WOOD IS SOUND YOU ARE WEL COMING YOUR SYMMETRY IS SUBTLE YOU ARE AN ENTITY YOU HAVE A HISTORY PEOPLE WOULD BE GLAD TO LIVE IN YOU YOU HAVE CHARACTER YOU HAVE AN ESSENCE YOU ARE VISIBLE YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE A PART OF THINGS YOU DON’T NEED TO WIN AWARDS YOUR EFFICIENCY IS OF ANOTHER KIND YOU ARE A PIECE OF WORK GOOD COP

THE COTTAGE LOCATED IN THE MIDDLE OF CAMPUS ACTUALLY PRECEDED UTM AND HAS SERVED SEVERAL FUNCTIONS OVER THE YEARS INCLUDING THAT OF A STUDENT RESIDENCE AND MOST RECENTLY A STORAGE SHED FOR JANITORIAL AND HOUSEKEEPING SUPPLIES SURROUNDED BY AWARD WINNING ARCHITECTURE THE COTTAGE WAS SLATED FOR DEMOLITION TO MAKE WAY FOR NEW DEVELOPMENT

YOU ARE UNWANTED YOUR CURTAINS ARE UGLY NOBODY WILL LIVE IN YOU EVER AGAIN YOU ARE A STORAGE SHED FOR BROOMS AND PILLOWS YOU ARE DIRTY YOU ARE OLD YOU ARE NOT WORTH REPAIR ONLY A SKUNK LIKES TO LIVE IN YOU YOU ARE TOO SMALL YOU ARE IN THE WAY OF NEW DEVELOPMENT YOU HAVE NO APPLIANCES PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE YOU YOUR PAINT IS FADED YOUR LOOK IS DATED YOUR ACCESSORIES LOOK CHEAP YOUR FIXTURES ARE BROKEN YOU ARE INVISIBLE YOU HAVE WON NO AWARDS YOU ARE NOT CONTEMPORARY YOU DO NOT FIT IN WITH THE NEW BUILDINGS YOU ARE INEFFICIENT AND INEFFICIENCY IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH YOU ARE NOTHING BAD COP

NO COP 155

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THE UNWANTED Peeling it back to the blackest of black; a little investigation is always in order. Slated for demolition, to be knocked down in one fell swoop, the excavator would have barely warmed up. But we are warmed by working; sleeping in the cottage while gutting it offers no such luxury. 157

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Seth Scriver, Exploded Drawing (2011)

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LEAP OF FAITH The groundspeople ask us who we work for, and we tell them we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know. We practically live in the cottage now, and it is our work. But as we work, we remove it. To move a house by hand. Through snow, over ice, on frozen ground, for weeks both day and night we carried it. Then interns joined us, amongst others.

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Christof Migone (CM): Location!Location!Location! arose out of circumstance, out of opportunity, out of necessity. Namely the imminent demolition of the Thomas Cottage. Building a response out of the contingent; is this a recurring strategy, or even an ethics?

CM: The green screen may be one of the remnants of these initial ideas (the portals in "The Talk Show", "The Other It"), or maybe its use came about once it became clear that eviscerated cottage needed additional structural support at both ends.

Don Miller (DM): I'm not sure that necessity enters into the project, as we could have done nothing and left the cottage to the skunks and the wrecking ball. In the contingent you find that which lies beside the truth. It is a peripheral perspective. Instead of staring straight at the thing you are trying to answer, or question for that matter, I find it more interesting to look at it a little askew. As a result your intentions are challenged and habit traps can be avoided. Whether it is an ethics, I couldn't say, but it keeps things fresh and the unknown close.

DM: This comes under the moniker 'DO WHAT WE GOT'. When we were not allowed to take much of the structure to the gallery we wanted to come up with a way to differentiate easily the old from new. Because the cottage had been renovated previously there were standard sized studs in its make up, so we wanted to show the three stages: original, renovated and brand new. We chose a colour that was easy to differentiate and that referenced the liminal states associated with chroma-key green.

CM: There was a pre-history to L!L!L! in terms of the projects we started off conjuring from Fall 2008 onwards, are they worth discussing or even mentioning in this present context of a conversation revisiting the project? DM: I have no idea. 174

CM: The local lore was awakened by this project. As a consequence, a commonly inconspicuous strata of the campus population (facilities, security, ...) became activated. Usually architecture is static by the time it starts its social life, how does this dynamic change when architecture-in-action is concurrent to conversations?

DM: We created a delay. The usual process of demolition and clean up is practically instantaneous. Moving the cottage to the gallery by hand in a shopping cart slowed down the process of destruction, so that conversation became possible. CM: There was a post-mortem to L!L!L!, another Location! was added if you will. Where is it now, how was it installed and how is it being used? DM: The cottage is levitating in a northern poplar forest. As of now the project is incomplete. CM: I believe this was the first instance of your duo as collaborators being acknowledged in the authorship of the piece, was this a watershed of some sort, or simply an expression of the fluidity of authorship for these kinds of collective enterprises? DM: It was an inevitable outcome of years of jamming together. CM: The discussions around the dead skunk had

practical concerns but also seemed to ramify exponentially. Did it become an emblem of the bureaucratic hoops that had to be negotiated? DM: The skunk was just one more point of discussion in a long list of what we would be able to use/not use. CM: I'll let Plato from the Timaeus have this one except that I'll turn it into a question by adding a question mark at the end: "...and a third Kind is ever-existing Place, which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have birth, itself being apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning by the aid of non-sensation, barely an object of belief; for when we regard this we dimly dream and affirm that it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupying some place, and that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the Heaven is nothing?" DM: According to Plato's statement/question I would have to say that The Thomas Cottage is nothing!! 175

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THE OTHER ITS In the new location, some things didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t quite connect. As we demolished the original cottage, we found newspapers dating from 1931-32 under the pine flooring. They were carefully collected and amal- gamated into one newspaper which was displayed in a separate gallery on top of a cut out of the sub-floor that it was found on. 177

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The influential, provocative and often radical artmaking practices of Vito Acconci have earned him international recognition. Acconci has been a vital presence in contemporary art since the late 1960s; his confrontational and ultimately political works have evolved from writing through conceptual art, bodyworks, performance, film, video, multimedia installation and architectural sculpture. Since the late 1980s he has focused on architecture and design projects.

Adam Bobbette is a researcher and designer based in Toronto whose work addresses the politics of the contemporary urban landscape. He is especially concerned with the histories of experimental and minoritarian architectural practices, participatory design, and the ways in which the tools of architectural and landscape design can contribute to community organizing and the autonomous production of culture.

Simon Brown was born amongst cows, grew up amongst trees and now lives amongst people, buildings and machines. His interest is sparked by the most banal aspects of life as well as the most abstruse manifestations of its essence.

Jennifer Chan is an artist-curator who shows in online and offline exhibition spaces. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Art Video at Syracuse University and has a BA in Communications from University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. She recently exhibited in the Low Lives International Livestream Performance Festival, BYOB at Gallery 180

TPW and BarmecidalProjects.com. Her research explores the value of amateur aesthetics and questions ways of curating after the popularization force of the internet. She works with performance, installation, text, video and web-based media.

Ryan Driver is a Toronto-based musician who plays, writes and sings music in spirals and swirls through the void of everythingness. Quiet absurdity, free improvisation, psychedelic reinterpretation of jazz ballads, and performance as a soloist and in a multitude of peculiar ensembles using a variety of instruments and aesthetics have long been his main foci. He is a prominent figure in the catalogue of the Rat-Drifting record label.

Sarah Febbraroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art practice incorporates performance, video, installation, photography and drawing. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008 and has exhibited her work in festivals and galleries throughout the United States and Canada. She often invites people to collaborate or participate in her projects, which have included neighbourhood talk shows, public dance classes and YouTube collaborations. She currently lives in Toronto and works as the Community Arts Programmer at Oakville Galleries.

Peter Flemming is an artist who makes machines. He sees the machines he makes as the electro-mechanical equivalents of short stories. Instead of words, sentences and paragraphs, he uses bolts, batteries, metal and custom electronics. These machinic texts create tension by mixing natural and

technological systems. His work has been shown across North America and Europe. Flemming currently resides in Montreal, where he teaches electronics for artists at Concordia University. He has held workshops in electronics and programming at artist-run centers around the world.

Wanting to draw comics when he was young, Claudio Ghirardo attended the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Inc. in Dover, New Jersey. A trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York during his first year of school completely changed his perspective on art. Upon returning to Toronto, Ghirardo began working as a freelance illustrator while exhibiting his art on the side. While attending the 2007 Venice Biennale, Claudio saw the wall drawings of Dan Perjovschi and realized he wanted to use the same strategy for his drawings. Presently working full-time as an artist, Ghirardo divides his time between paintings and installation drawings.

Karen Henderson is a visual artist working in time-based media, photography, sculpture and site-specific installation. Her work often comprises many versions of a subject, separated by nothing more than time, so that the work is both itself and a record of itself. Karen grew up in Scotland, leaving there to attend the Central School of Art and Camberwell School of Art in London, England from 1982-86. After this, she moved to Canada where she completed her MFA at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in 1988. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Toronto, Ontario, and has exhibited work in Canada and internationally at various galleries including the Art Gallery of Ontario; The Power Plant; Hallwalls in Buffalo New York; and The Nunnery in London, England.

Darsha Hannah Hewitt is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. She has presented her work and taught electronics workshops across Canada, in Mexico and Europe. In 2011, Darsha was awarded an international work stipend from The Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst in Oldenburg Germany. Her practice is based on experiments she does with amateur electronics and trailing-edge communication technology. Her artwork consists of electro-mechanical sound installations as well as technical drawings and videos that playfully subvert the “how to” and “step by step” formats prevalent in do-it-yourself (DIY) electronics culture.

Sonja Hidas was born in Montreal and studied Illustration and Design at Dawson College. Hidas has a multilayered art practice that includes painting, installation work, sound art and publications. Hidas has received numerous grants and awards from the City of Mississauga, Ontario Arts Council, and more recently, for her public art events presented under the HotBox platform. She is an appointed citizen member of the Celebration Square Mississauga Committee and serves as a community advisor for the Blackwood Gallery. Hidas exhibits regularly and her works can be found in collections in Canada and Asia.

Louis Kaplan is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media in the Graduate Department of Art at the University of Toronto. His books include American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2005); Laszlo MoholyNagy: Biographical Writings (Duke, 1995);

and The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer (Minnesota, 2008). The latter was nominated for the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association. With John Paul Ricco, he co-edited Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy, a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture in the spring of 2010 and contributed the essay “Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Recasting of the Photographic Image.” Other recent articles and essays have appeared in Cabinet; History of Photography; PMC: PostmodernCulture; and Prefix Photo.

Jacob Korczynski is based in Toronto, where he is currently an Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of York University and leads a satellite reading group of If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution. He has curated projects for the Dunlop Art Gallery, SAW Gallery, Vtape, and Gallery TPW, and his writing has appeared in Prefix Photo, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Fillip. A former member of the Pleasure Dome collective, he was also the co-curator of Print Generation and From Instructions, the 22nd and 23rd editions respectively of the Images Festival.

Adam Lauder is W.P. Scott Chair for Research in e-Librarianship at York University, where he is developing an online catalogue raisonné of the work of IAIN BAXTER&, the IAINBAXTER&raisonnE. He is editor of a book featuring new work by BAXTER&, H& IT ON (YYZ, 2012). Lauder has also written a chapter on Bertram Brooker that appears in The Logic of Nature, The Romance of Space: Elements of Canadian Modernist Painting (2010). He has contributed articles to Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine and Millions. 181

Amy Lockhart is a filmmaker, animator and artist whose artwork and award winning films have been exhibited and screened internationally. Lockhart studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and has been a resident artist at Calgary’s Quickdraw Animation Society; Strutts Gallery; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and The California Institute of the Arts. Her work has received international acclaim and been collected by public and private art institutions and film festivals across the globe. Lockhart has received a fellowship from the National Film Board of Canada and support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Annie MacDonell is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a variety of media, including photography, film, installation, sculpture and sound. She has exhibited and screened film works across Canada and internationally, and was longlisted for the 2012 Sobey Award. Most recently, she has had solo shows at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Mercer Union, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of the IMAGES festival and the AGO’s Toronto NOW series. Annie MacDonell is represented by Katherine Mulherin Projects, Toronto.

Gwen MacGregor is a Toronto artist working in installation and video. Her art reflects her close observation of time and how its passage shapes small dramas or uncannily familiar situations. In 2001, her work was presented in the Present Tense project series at the Art Gallery of Ontario. MacGregor's work has also been shown in many exhibitions across Canada and in Mexico City, London, Prague, Venice, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Paris, Madrid, 182

Berlin and Sydney, Australia. In 2003, she was the recipient of the Friends of the Visual Arts, Toronto, Artist of the Year Award. In 2004, she participated in the Canada Council International Studio/Curatorial Program in New York. Her work is in a number of collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Bank Collection. She recently completed an undergraduate degree in Cultural Geography from the University of Toronto.

Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s work is about art itself as an idea, artistic process itself as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for reclassification at any given time. The varying degrees of openness create space in-between, a space that gives way to meanderings, processes, and procedures. Her work is situated here, in a space of potential created in the middle of existing structures. It is this—this large, large thing stated so, so plainly—that makes her work both familiar and unknowable. She has produced works in a wide range of media including drawing, sculpture, video, performance and photography. Her works are often formally independent of one another, and appear determined from an internal logic that lead to idiosyncratic ends. Mastroiacovo received a BFA from York University (Toronto, 1994), and an MFA in Open Media from Concordia University (Montréal, 1999).

Mba Fabrications Inc. is a Canadian company operating within the fine art production industry. Founded by President Donald Ian McCaw in 2010, the company creates two dimensional wall decor from its state-of-the-art facility in Brampton, Ontario. Mba Fabrications Inc. has differentiated itself by bringing modern business

practices such as market research, brand management and labour scalability to an industry little changed since the Renaissance. McCaw’s insistence on prudent financial controls and exacting operational efficiencies has established a firm foundation for future growth.

Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer. He co-edited the book/CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writing has been published in Aural Cultures; S:ON; Experimental Sound & Radio; Musicworks; Radio Rethink; Semiotext(e); Angelaki; Esse; Inter; Performance Research, etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has curated exhibitions and events since 1990. Recent curatorial projects include, Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010 - Zone C), and numerous others for the Blackwood Gallery. He has performed throughout Canada, US, South Korea and Europe. His installations have been exhibited at the Banff Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Gallery 101, Art Lab, eyelevelgallery, Forest City Gallery, Studio 5 Beekman, Mercer Union, CCS Bard, and Optica. A monograph on his work, Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Trou. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body, has just been published. He is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.

Don Miller is an idea-based visual artist, intuitive carpenter and poet who lives near Shelburne, Ontario. Miller works in a number of media including performance, video, installation, experimental architecture, snow sculpture and written word. He also works with stone, steel and wood to generate income to fund his artistic pursuits; his creative endeavours tend to infiltrate his life, and his life tends to infiltrate his art. Though the majority of his projects are produced independently, outside the gallery network, Miller has also presented performances, videos, readings and interventions at Ghost Ship (Amsterdam); York University (Toronto); Knock on Woods (Holland); Pleasure Dome/Cinecycle (Toronto); Engine Gallery (Toronto); Tranzac (Toronto); and Anna Leonowens Gallery (Halifax). His projects include an ongoing series of sensory deprivation and/or sensory enhancement snow caves, a large one of a kind frankenhouse constructed from numerous century old barns, spoken word performances at various venues, and creating what he terms "a strategy for living." Don received a BFA in 2002 from NSCAD University.

Pablo de Ocampo is a curator living in Toronto where he is the Artistic Director of the Images Festival. Prior to his post at Images, Pablo resided in Portland, Oregon where he helped to found the experimental film screening series Cinema Project and was the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center.

Alexis O'Hara is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal. Her practice exploits allegories of the human voice via electronic improvisation, video and installation. Her eclectic perfor-

mances have been presented in a variety of contexts in Slovenia, Austria, Mexico, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Canada and the USA. She has shared the stage with such diverse artists as Diamanda Galàs, Ursula Rucker, Henri Chopin and TV on the Radio. SQUEEEEQUE, her sound installation, toured Germany and France in early 2010.

Undisciplinary artist, Mary Margaret O'Hara is a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design who typecast herself with her 1988 album Miss America. All over the creative map, if there is such a map, she loves drawing, painting, her original calligraphy, free improv, hosting her brother's events, making people laugh and cry, acting in and composing for theatre and film, doing wordless backup for singers and musicians, making noises on the fly, off the cuff, and out of the ballpark, composing for film and being with her brothers and sisters. You know who you are.

residency at the Banff Centre. She has exhibited in solo shows at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and SleepwalkerProjects as well as in group shows at Western Front; Xpace; YYZ Artists' Outlet; Spin Gallery, Gallery 1313; and Latitude 53.

Cheryl Rondeau is a visual artist who works with both still and moving imagery to transform moments of transition and the quotidian into the monumental with the intent of exposing influences and mechanics that mediate representation and identity. Born in St. Catharines (Canada), Cheryl Rondeau studied art at York University, the Ontario College of Art & Design and has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social/ Cultural Anthropology from the University of Toronto. Her work has been included in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including Festival international du film sur l’art (Montréal); Mediawave International Festival of Visual Arts (Gyor, Hungary); Scope Art Fair (New York City); and Museum of Modern Art (Bogota, Colombia).

Seth Porcello is a researcher, designer and audiophile based in Charlottesville, Va.

Fedora Romita is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice includes performance, interactive drawing projects, video, installation and a dance/ choreography collaboration. Her work concentrates on process and can be understood through its construction over time. She received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Sculpture Installation. Her work has been included in festivals such as Nuit Blanche Toronto, and she participated in the Future of Idea Art

Paola Savasta currently lives and works in Victoria, British Columbia. She works in painting, sculpture and installation to explore ideas of the consumer, systems of desire, modes of display, and their relation to space. Savasta was born and raised in Mississauga and received her undergraduate degree from the joint Art & Art History program between the University of Toronto and Sheridan College (2010). She is currently a Masters of Fine Art candidate at the University of Victoria. She has exhibited at KWT Contemporary (2011) and XPACE Culture Centre (2011) in Toronto, and Deluge Contemporary Art (2011) and Legacy Art Gallery in Victoria (2012). 183

Seth Scriver lives and works in Toronto. His drawing, animation and sculpture work has been exhibited across America, Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany, Spain and Italy. Currently, he and Shayne Ehman are finishing their collaborative work Asphalt Watches, a feature length flash animation about a true cross Canada road trip. Seth has two published books: Weird Woods, accompanied by personalized Letraset, published by Third Drawer Down (2008), and Stooge Pile published by Drawn and Quarterly for their Petit Livres series (2010), which was nominated for a Doug Wright Award.

Alex Snukal is an artist and musician who lives and works in Toronto. Snukal performs regularly as part of Awesome, Animal Monster, and New Feelings. Recent projects have included Souvenir Pressed Pennies (an installation for No Melatonin during Nuit Blanche); Symphonic Poem for 100 Delay Pedals (as part of Toronto Free Broadcasting); and Me and Julio down by Diter's Dung Hole (an edition for Nothing Else Press).

Employing formal and textual elements that frequently contradict and alter relationships with one another, Derek Sullivan draws upon overlapping histories of modernist design, abstraction and conceptual art to unsettle notions of meaning and authorship. Sullivan uses drawing and sculpture, in addition to producing various ephemeral conceptual projects, to explore his interest in reinterpreting familiar forms to open up new areas of inquiry. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including P2P at Casino 184

Luxembourg (curated by Le Bureau), and Citizen, Denizen, Resident at Tatjana Pieters, Gent, Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions include Jessica Bradley Art + Projects; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Galerie Florence Loewy, Paris; and White Columns, New York. Derek Sullivan holds a BFA from York University and an MFA from the University of Guelph.

Christine Swintak is a Toronto-based visual artist who works in a number of media including performance, intervention, installation and multimedia. She has exhibited at galleries, festivals and museums across Canada and internationally, including HMK Mariakapel (Holland); Model Niland (Ireland); DCR Guest Studios (Holland); YYZ Artist's Outlet (Toronto); Toronto Free Gallery (Toronto); Nuit Blanche (Toronto); Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); ArtCity Festival of Art and Architecture (Calgary); Khyber Centre for the Arts (Halifax); Dalhousie University Art Gallery (Halifax); and Rockefeller Centre (New York). Swintak has also presented numerous independent public interventions and relational happenings in places like Shelburne, Amsterdam, Banff, Vancouver, Teslin, New York, Salt Lake City, Death Valley and Los Angeles. Her projects include building a full-scale ship through collective improvisation; running an election party campaign for the Irish underworld; transforming a dumpster into a luxury boutique hotel; promoting urban quicksand pits; creating a symmetrical frontispiece out of two mirrored rooms; attempting to give a shed a consciousness; and producing a series of impossible project proposals. Swintak received a BFA in 2003 from NSCAD University and is committed to continual selfdirected research.

Etienne Turpin is the Walter B. Sanders Research Fellow (2011-2012) at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, where he is completing a study of the relationships between architecture, landscape, geology and philosophy titled Terrible is the Earth. He is a founding editor of the architecture, landscape, and political economy journal Scapegoat (www.scapegoatjournal.org).

Jessica Vallentin was born in Cayuga, Ontario. She has recently completed a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and a Diploma in Art and Art History from Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning.

Abramovic, Marina 46 Acconci, Vito 18-24, 25, 28, 38-47, 178 Agamben, Giorgio 22, 25 Agar, Jon 56, 59 Alberro, Alexander 85 Alexander, Darsie 59 Alÿs, Francis 18 Artists’ Placement Group 54 Askevold, David 63, 82 Atlas Group, The 57 Aureli, Pier Vittorio 147 Ault, Julie 50-53, 58

Baldessari, John 83 Bartelby (Melville) 21 Baudelaire, Charles 41 Bataille, Georges 151 Beck, Martin 58 Bell, Daniel 59 Benjamin, Walter 13, 19, 23, 24, 25, 41 Bernadette Mayer 47 Bichler, Shimshon 144, 145, 147 Bobbette, Adam 109, 112-115, 138, 145, 146, 178 Bochner, Mel 57 Boltanski, Luc 55 Bonin, Vincent 50-59 Boon, Marcus 25 Borsato, Diane 22, 25 Bourdon, David 24, 25 Bronson, AA 50, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59 Brothman, Brien 53, 56, 58, 59 Brown, Simon 60-69, 178 Buchloh, Benjamin 54, 55 Burnette, Graham 145, 147 Burnham, Jack 41 Burton, Scott 40 Butler, Brad 23

Cage, John 19, 22, 24, 25 Calle, Sophie 21, 22, 25, 43 Cardiff, Janet 22, 25 Chan, Jennifer 106, 107, 178 Chiapello, E`ve 55 Colomina, Beatriz 142, 142, 144, 147 Costa, Eduardo 40 Cotton, Sylvie 22

Daney, Serge 18, 25

Dean, Tacita 52 de Certeau, Michel 18, 25 Debord, Guy 142, 146, 147 Deleuze, Gilles 82, 142, 143, 146, 147 DeMaria, Walter 23 de Ocampo, Pablo 92, 181 Derrida, Jacques 18, 19, 21, 25, 52-54, 56, 58, 83, 85 Driver, Ryan 93, 178 Duchamp, Marcel 85 Durham, Jimmie 66

Eichhorn, Maria 57 Enwezor, Okwui 52, 58

Febbraro, Sarah 109, 132, 133, 138, 178 Finney , Alain Poirier 69 Firlotte, George 69 Fischer, Peter 69 Flemming, Peter 109, 118, 119, 138, 178 Foster, Hal 52, 58 Foucault, Michel 24, 25 Freud, Sigmund 63 Frow, John 56, 59

General Idea 54 Genette, Gérard 52, 53, 58 Ghirardo, Claudio 109, 134, 138, 179 Greenwood, Vera 22 Gullison, Donald 69 Guttman, k.g. 22, 25

Haacke, Hans 67, 68 Haddon, Brenda 69 Hamilton, Laird 69 Heidegger, Martin 22, 25 Henderson, Karen 10-15, 179 Hewitt, Darsha Hannah 3, 179, 186 Hidas, Sonja 109, 135-137, 138, 179 Hiller, Susan 57, 59

Kant, Immanuel 18 Kaplan, Louis 80-85, 179 Kierkegaard, Søren 23, 24, 25 Korczynski, Jacob 92, 179 Kosuth, Joseph 82 Kwon, Miwon 53, 58

Lauder, Adam 49-59, 179 Lewitt, Sol 19, 54 Lippard, Lucy 51-54, 57, 58, 59, 69, 85 Litman, Jessica 59 Lockhart, Amy 1, 180, 188 Locksley, Gareth 59 Long, Richard 18 Lozano, Lee 67 Lum, Ken 52, 55, 56, 59

MacDonell, Annie 93, 96, 97, 180 MacGregor, Gwen 109, 123, 124, 125, 139, 180 Marcuse, Herbert 69 Mastroiacovo, Thérèse 18, 19, 21, 23, 26-37, 180 Mba Fabrications Inc. 70-79, 180 McDonough, Tom 41 McEvilley, Thomas 82, 85 Merewether, Charles 52, 59 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 19, 25 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 143, 144 Migone, Christof 5, 9, 12, 13, 16-25, 28, 39-43, 46-47, 92, 108, 145, 148, 172, 173, 180 Miller, Don 148-177, 181 Mizra, Karen 23 Modigliani, Leah 67, 68, 69 Molesworth, Helen 54, 55, 58 Morris, Michael 57 Mosco, Vincent 55, 59 Moseley, Catherine 51, 58, 59 Mumford, Lewis 144

N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. 54 Nancy, Jean-Luc 82, 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19, 25, 83 Nitzan, Jonathan 144, 145, 147 Nolan, Christopher 43 Nora, Pierre 69 Norvell, Patricia 82, 85 Novalis 19, 25

O’Hara, Alexis 93, 95, 181 O’Hara, Mary Margaret 93, 181 Oppenheim, Dennis 80-85

Polanyi, Karl 144 Porcello, Seth 109, 112-115, 138, 145, 146, 181 Projansky, Bob 57

Rainer, Yvonne 47 Rajchman, John 146, 147 Rilke, Rainer Maria 22, 25 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 40 Robertson, Clive 51, 53, 58, 59 Roelstraete, Dieter 18 Romita, Fedora 109, 116, 117, 139, 181 Rondeau, Cheryl 109, 128-131, 139, 181 Ross, David 41 Ruscha, Ed 83

Satie, Erik 18 Savasta, Paola 2, 181, 187 Scriver, Seth 158, 159, 182 Schwartz, Hillel 21, 25 Sharp, Willoughby 41, 85 Siegelaub, Seth 57 Smith, Terry 69 Smithson, Robert 150 Snukal, Alex 93, 98-105, 182 Solomon, Jonathan 147 Stein, Gertrude 23, 25 Steiner, George 69 Sullivan, Derek 109, 120-122, 139, 182 Swintak, Christine 148-177, 182

Taussig, Michael 24, 25 Thériault, Michèle 50, 58 Trasov, Vincent 57 Turpin, Etienne 140-147, 182

Vallentin, Jessica 109, 126, 127,1 39, 182 Vittorio Aureli, Pier 142, 143

Walser, Robert 18 Warner, Michael 58 Weiner, Hannah 40 Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann 12, 13 Wood, William 59

Perrault, John 40 Piper, Adrian 21 Plato 173 Poe, Edgar Allan 86-91 185

WOOD TWO A COMPENDIUM OF THEBLACKWOOD GALLERY'S EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS IN 2010 AND BEYOND PLUS OTHER MATTERS

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Editor: Christof Migone Editorial assistants: Julia Abraham, Juliana Zalucky Copy editor: Rosemary Heather Texts: Simon Brown, Louis Kaplan, Adam Lauder, Christof Migone, Edgar Allan Poe, Etienne Turpin Graphic Design: Matthew Hoffman Printing: SONIC PRINT, Markham, Ontario Photo credits: Toni Hafkenscheid, except for: Karen Henderson pp. 16-17; Cheryl Rondeau pp. 132-133; Christine Swintak pp. 152-154, 156159, 162-165, 178; Sandy Plotnikoff pp. 166-177

Director/Curator: Christof Migone Exhibition Coordinator: Juliana Zalucky Collections Manager & Archivist: Julia Abraham, Joanna Sheridan (2009-2010) Outreach Coordinator: Jenna Edwards, Joanna Sheridan (2010-2011), Carly Anderson (2009-2010) Installers: Michael Beynon, Eric Glavin, Seth Scriver, Ryan Urquhart Graphic Designers: Karen Kraven (The Projects: Port Credit); Thérèse Mastroiacovo (Following Following Piece); Christine Swintak (Location! Location!Location!). Volunteers, Interns & Work-Study Students: Anais Bae, Palak Butala, Lorraine Carreon, Meaghan Froh, Shannon Goodhead, Nives Hajdin, Stephanie Hagendorn, Ebony Jansen, Krista Keller, Mairin Kerr, Ridhima Khurana, Laura Krick, Curtis MacLean, Kristie MacDonald, Anna Marszalek, Diana Merta, Sally Min, Marisa Mohammed, Sidra Mukhtar, Hakim Nguyen, Kristie Robertson, Madhulika Saxena, Melina Sevilla, Ricardo Segura, Nicole Schlosser, Joanna Simpson, Heather Stainback, Alicia Triantafillou, Faai Udomkaewkanjana, Jessica Vallentin, Jenny Vu, Angie

Wang, Martina Wegener, Michelina Williamson, Alysha Woolner, Heae Young, Lucy Zhang and Susie Zmyslowski. Advisory Board (2012): John Armstrong (Chair), Sonja Hidas, Kajri Jain, Louis Kaplan, Vikas Kohli, Laura Krick, Johnson Ngo, Louise Noguchi, David Poolman, Michael Spaziani, Alison Syme.

ISBN 978-0-7727-8211-3 1. ART, CANADIAN--ONTARIO-MISSISSAUGA--21ST CENTURY-EXHIBITIONS. 2. ART, MODERN-ONTARIO--MISSISSAUGA--21ST CENTURY--EXHIBITIONS. I. MIGONE, CHRISTOF, 1964II. BLACKWOOD GALLERY. N6496.3.C3M58 2012

The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the financial support of: The Canada Council for the Arts; Ontario Arts Council; Ontario Trillium Foundation; Port Credit Community Foundation; FRAM Building Group; Conseil des arts et des Lettres du Québec and CUPFA, Department of Visual Studies UTM; UTM Student Housing & Residence Life. The exhibitions & projects were made possible through the support of the following partners and individuals: Janis Alton; John Armstrong; Corrine Carlson; Facilities Personnel; Christina Giannone; Frank Giannone; Rebecca Gimmi; Images Festival; Innis Town Hall; Louis Kaplan; Christopher Lengyell; Amish Morrell; Dale Mullings; Pablo de Ocampo; Diane Pracin. BLACKWOOD GALLERY UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MISSISSAUGA 3359 MISSISSAUGA RD. N., MISSISSAUGA L5L 1C6, ONTARIO, CANADA T. 905.828.3789 BLACKWOODGALLERY.CA

709.7109'0512074713535 C2012-904895-X PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE USED OR REPRODUCED IN ANY MANNER WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT IN THE CONTEXT OF REVIEWS. THE PUBLISHER HAS MADE EVERY EFFORT TO CONTACT ALL COPYRIGHT HOLDERS. IF PROPER ACKNOWLEDGEMENT HAS NOT BEEN MADE, WE ASK COPYRIGHT HOLDERS TO CONTACT THE PUBLISHER. COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY THE BLACKWOOD GALLERY AND CONTRIBUTORS. THE BLACKWOOD GALLERY IS A PUBLIC GALLERY BASED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MISSISSAUGA AND IS PART OF THE DEPARTMENT OF VISUAL STUDIES.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION WOOD TWO: A COMPENDIUM OF THE BLACKWOOD GALLERY'S EXHIBITIONS & PROJECTS IN 2010 AND BEYOND, PLUS OTHER MATTERS / EDITED BY CHRISTOF MIGONE. INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

Following pages: Amy Lockhart, Lady from behind (2011); Paola Savasta, Couches for some readers (2012); Darsha Hannah Hewitt, Nobility Solid State Walkie-Talkie-Back (from series Electronics from the Trash) (2012) 187

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