CONTEMPORARY by Heather Burrell

CONTEMPORARY: The Artist Issue

CONTEMPORARY

The Artist Issue

December 2010

CONTENT: 03

Small Spaces of Action Henriette Huldisch Revising the Space-Time Continuum: Where and When is the New World? Shamim M. Momin

09 the ARTISTS:

Burt Rodriguez Matthew Brannon Mika Tajima Gardar Eide Einarsson Matt Mullican Shannon Ebner

Handmade Versus Digital Jozef Ondrik

Credits

Small Spaces of Action Henriette Huldisch

It is commonplace that today traditional object making and post-studio work exist more or less comfortably side by side; project-based, socially invested practice is itself a fairly established category within the vastly scattered field of contemporary art. constant flux or that exist in the moment is no doubt a reaction to the enormous pressure many artist feel to produce discrete objects in order to sate the ravenous appetite of the market and cater to the increasing What is notable, however, is that many artists consider number of art fairs. Yet as they move their works out of both pursuing an auxiliary set of activities and mak- the white cube of the traditional exhibition space, these ing traditional objects for the gallery or museum to be artists do not necessarily formulate an antagonistic equally important aspects of their output. These “ex- relationship with the museum or gallery, recognizing panded practices” take various forms: performances instead the complicated ways in which many oppositional (Adam Putnam’s endurance tests, in which he subjects practices are dependent on the very thing they examine his body to constraining pieces of furniture or architec- (Okwui Enwezor has described the “parasitic relationtural spaces); publishing projects and readings (such ship” between institutional critique and the institution). as those organized by Continuous Project or Scorched Many artists’ projects incorporate a critical reflection on Earth, in which Seth Price and Cheyney Thompson are the efficacy of alternative forms of activity – express a involved, respectively); concerts (noise performances by certain amount of mistrust in perpetuating what might New Humans, or Rita Ackermann and Lizzi Bougatsos’s amount to an activist tourism – even as they seek ways art rock and performance collective Angelblood); and to foment communal networks and communication in film screenings (William Cordova and Leslie Hewitt’s small-scale settings that will have certain amount of bootleg video library or Walead Beshty’s 24-hour pre- longevity. sentation of disaster movies from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s). The impetus to produce works that are in

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Backström’s skeptical approach becomes apparent as Fia Backström embraces a number of practices beyond traditional object making that defy categorization as collaborations or performances in the making that defy categorization as collaborations or performances in the conventional sense. Her recent works made under the moniker of “Eco Art” – installations riffing on the language of affordable mass-market design as epitomized, for example, by the international retailer Ikea – were created as “hanging proposals” for work by other artists, among them Roe Ethridge, Adam McEwen, and Kelley Walker, reconfiguring their pieces as playing cards, coasters, or even a Play-Doh version. For the 2005 installation lesser new york she gathered ephemera and documentation from artists, writers, curators, and others. Mounted by the artist as a complementary section to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center’s Greater New York, a survey of the city’s art scene, lesser new york replaced the more market-friendly “piece-by-piece” presentation with Backström’s hanging strategy, employing “an approach between communist wallpaper and shopping window layout.” For Herd Instinct 360˚ (2005-06) at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Backström created installation environments for invited lectures and performances given on three Sundays over the course of two months. The artist opened the events with a slide lecture that engaged with the complexity and possibility of community; reflecting on contexts such as consumer culture, Nazi gatherings, and nostalgia for certain protest movements, she also expressed profound suspicion of purportedly activist art that recoups political move-

she insists on the importance of art but also acknowledges a measure of absurdity: “Can it be that we are in a post-community state: But how can we be beyond something, which is everything… But we cannot organize, we cannot produce, nor can we define and contain… That’s why this meeting is a failure instead of a parody … a fictive situation we may call art.” Since 2001, when he started the Sundown Salon, regular gatherings at his geodesic dome house in Los Angeles, architect and educator Fritz Haeg has pursued a set of diverse projects informed by his interest in interdisciplinary exchange and in fostering simple gestures that have potentially large repercussions. His ongoing Edible Estates (2005- ), for example, is an attack on the cherished institution of the American lawn, which is essentially a monoculture that wastes inordinate amounts of water and causes ecological damage through the use of pesticides. Haeg offers his services often with the help of local art organizations, in transforming ordinary suburban front yards into vegetable gardens; to date, he has created nine Edible Estates. Not simply an environmental project, Edible Estates facilitates community interaction, carves out a space for agency, and engenders a wider conversation about the environment and our way of life – concerns at the heart of Haeg’s practice. “A lot of people feel they have very little to say in the direction the world is going,” he notes, “and private property is one of the few things that you have control over. How you use it can demonstrate the way you’d like the world to go, in some small measure.”

ments or images as style. In her narrated script,

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Revising the SpaceTime Continuum: Where and When is the New World? Shamim M. Momin In societies not possessed of a founding myth, he idea of identity is verified less by reference to a great na(rra) tion or a territory than by the weave of relations between subjects. Needless to say, we cannot understand the poetics of relation without taking into account the idea of place. Place, however, is not understood here as territory, but as relation.

The large degree to which technological changes have helped shape contemporary reality is no longer simply evidence of a superficial fascination with “things digital” (primarily an aesthetic concern), but rather shows the transformative effect of technology on the structural operations of space and time. Manuel Castells has attributed this temporal dissolution to what he characterizes as the “space of flows,” in which information and distribution networks disorder “the sequence of events and [make] them simultaneous, thus installing society into an eternal ephemerality.” In other words, technology has brought about a rhizomatic, fragmented simultaneity in the world that has produces a sea of possibility and yet at the same time, reflects a more general crisis of meaning that is manifested in much of the work in the 2008 Biennial.

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Rosalind Krauss’s concept of “recursion” is instructive In the past science and technology have been under- here. Derived from the Latin for “a return,” it implies a stood, both by their practitioners and within the culture temporal process of moving back, although not in the at large, as fixed rigid systems (the aesthetics of mo- sense of an escapist retreat. Rather, a recursion redernity), but in recent decades this view has evolved, fers to the feedback system on which most computer toward a greater recognition of relational flow. Theories programming is based and which is applied in various of complexity and chaos proposing similar approaches ways to mathematics, linguistics, and the like: defining to the study of systems have filtered into the cultural or testing a situation or idea by repeatedly applying a imagination, although often in an interpolated form, set of rules of conditions. As a pattern for growth and much like those of quantum mechanics nearly a cen- self-correction, recursion forms the basis of many types tury ago. Understanding that the following are greatly of culturally potent communications: websites such simplified summation, “chaos theory” can be defined as Wikipedia, so successful it is often more accurate as a mans of looking at how simple things can generate than encyclopedic print publications; social networking complex outcomes that cannot be predicted by examin- and production spaces like YouTube or MySpace; even ing the parts alone (e.g., a flock of birds); by comparison, crowdsourcing, a term recently coined to describe a “complexity theory” considers how complex systems peer-production model of problem solving and task can generate simple outcomes (e.g., the single unit of fulfillment. (In contrast to the specific hire implied by the human body). These theoretical constructs have outsourcing, crowdsourcing makes a problem available enriched the reductionist method that has historically to the networked masses, producing competitive qualguided scientific examination – breaking things down ity, low prices, and innovative applications.) Ironically, into their constituent parts – by providing for greater some art historical arguments employ Krauss’s idea of reciprocity among the elements of a given system. This recursion to reinterpret Fried’s “essentializing” stance translates into a greater holistic approach: studying as the very means to “deemphasiz[e] content, theme, and individual parts in tandem with the relational effect of an expression for structure, pattern, and organization.” In accumulation of parts. The aim here is not to iterate any artistic practice, what has emerged along these lines is literal applications for these theories but through these work that is concerned not with content but with ways definitions, to point out their metaphorical application of behaving as content. The ideas behind these stratto concerns in contemporary culture. Uncertainty, re- egies inform a wide swath of work in the exhibition, sponsive contingency, and systemic subversion resonate although certain practices employ them more explicitly consistently throughout the language of post-World War than others. Mullican’s imagined world, for example, II technologies, as well as in the literature and popular builds a fragmentary order in which a model gives rise culture those ideas largely inspired, from the writings to a language of ciphers; these are used to construct a of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, and many cyberpunk physical space in which material has reciprocal effect on authors to movies, television show, and sophisticated meaning. A reflexive but expanding network, it is both video games that have internalized these developments, systemic and infinite. to cite but a few examples.

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Disassociate (2007), a collaborative installation by Mika Tajima/New Humans, engages the slippage between sculpture and performative process and – drawing on Dan Graham’s ideas about the materiality of sound – addresses how at times one can embody the other. The Often characterized as “noise,” the music of Tajima/New presentation was divided into two parts: the first a place Humans is more importantly defined by the use of sonic of “constant production, before the final thing is made,” elements in a modular format, much like the sculptural and the second of “post-destruction,” the aftermath of components. The installation Appearance (Against Type) the object itself. Throughout the show, a series of silk- in the Biennial employs flat forms and supports, similar screened movable units took on multiple arrangements, to those of Disassociate, as well as hinged A-frame morphing into, for example, architectonic investigations, panels that recall mobile announcement placards. Video a recording studio, or a chaotic landscape environment. clips of the New Humans’ past performances play behind Within these arrangements, whose true medium was louvered panels, which evoke both Bauhaus display space itself, the unit “objects” were never quite fixed: design as well as a type of predigital advertising signage at times they served as a physical support for the work that used large grids of panels which toggle between of other artists, but at other moments they became an different images. As with other objects in the instalautonomous image, sculpture, or sign. Sound events lation, the video’s structure disrupts itself, in this case that took place within the installation – collaborations with credit lines or layering patterns reminiscent of the between violinist C. Spencer Yeh and Vito Acconci, for silkscreens. By preventing unmitigated viewing, these example – turned the audience into what Tajima calls obstacles and interruptions allow the video – again, an “architecture of isolation” by using their bodies as like the rest of the installation – to avoid becoming a sound baffles. In an ongoing sonic element, the Rolling singular totality. As stand-ins for perfomance and proStones’ song “Sympathy for the Devil” was condensed duction, the installations exemplify the spatialization into a single tone, an aural analogue to the questions of time discussed throughout this essay, as well as the of compression and translation inherent within the evolution of static artistic frameworks into systems that installation’s constituent objects (i.e., the flatness of rely on constant feedback. A related project by Tajima/ silk-screening transformed into a three-dimensional, New Humans for the Biennial, staged at the Seventh Regiment Armory Building, is a film of the making of mobile construction). their performance, which, much like Price’s Freelance Stenographer, performs the idea of itself, incorporating its own processes as part of the work rather than the culmination of it. In perpetuating a serial format to disrupt the idea of performance as a singular, contained event, Tajima/New Humans embrace what they’ve referred to as the logic of the “endless remake,” a concept discussed in the next section.

The collaborations that New Humans embed in their work are representative of the second manifestation of fractured networks mentioned above, which for the purposes of this exhibition are being termed “expanded practices.” Often ephemeral in character and interventionist and renegade in sensibility, these varied activities – music performances or concerts, radio broadcasts, publishing projects, culinary gatherings, readings, lectures, and symposia, all typically in collaboration with other artists – address and issue aptly summarized by Price:

“The problem is that situating the work at a singular point in place and time turns it, a priori, into a monument… We should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences, distributed across the field of media culture… Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons.”

These collaboration are notably distinct from similar concepts of the past, idealized, shared efforts in which the individual and authorial voice was intentionally dissolved. Today they are not collectives but collective activities, and they retain the authorial mark. A better model for this is a rhizomatic network, where cells or nodes come together to form constellations of connection; in this system, as in the ubiquitous social networking websites, individual identity is not just retained, it is celeb¬¬rated through a transformative reciprocity. Each member is both the star and the audience, part of a unifying force functional only within that constellated form. The interactive relationships (among people, work, or processes) that emerge from these networks are not quid pro quo, however – the “warm and fuzzy” so characteristic of earlier efforts- but instead are frequently antagonistic, awkward, and strange: a realization of those social spaces that still “makes room for the psycho-killer.”

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the ARTISTS

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ERT RODRIGUEZ

A native to Miami, Bert Rodriguez is one of the few artists who have successfully penetrated the international art market. Pointedly subverting the concept of the artist, Rodriguez’s conceptual practice relies heavily on =process and performance. Operating largely outside traditional commercial art practices, and with shrewd yet playful wit, Rodriguez’s multifarious practice educates, amuses, perplexes, and enriches his audience while quietly commenting on the contemporary art world. For the 2008 Whitney Biennial, he conducted free therapeutic sessions inside a large white cube installed in the middle of an ornate room. In his bathroom however, stripped of his defenses, his comfy chairs and his tissues, ARTLURKER pins this slippery character to his own cold tile to find out what impact, if any, the luxury of modern man’s most modest moments have on his myriad methods. Illuminating, frightening, self effacing and often distinctly hopeless, Rodriguez’s habits appear to have absolutely nothing to do with his art, just as his art really has nothing to do with anything other than an unnaturally specific interest in his own life. Despite his many doubts he remains true to and familiar with the one person who can truly assist him, himself. The unconventionality of his work continues to attract audiences and open up new opportunities and even though his successes, in light of his vocational insecurities, may seem to the hard working unsung heroes of the art world to be nothing more than shallow drivel, we at ARTLURKER believe he deserves every scintilla of attention, that his fears wash away and that the tide mark of his ambition never coagulates like scum on the fortune of his days. Anyone who disagrees can take a page from the book of Bert and unreservedly follow the advice below.

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“I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a fruit that hasn’t been named yet, but it’s not art.”

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Apart from maybe your piece New Addition, though we haven’t studied it closely enough to be sure, we have not noticed any particular references to bathing in your work so what if anything does this have to do with anything? Shit, well I don’t know, I’ve actually been caught up with the idea that I’m not really an artist anymore. How long for? Well, I’ve always sort of felt that way but it’s recently been more established in my brain that I’m really not an artist at all. What are you doing then, just taking the piss? I don’t know you know its sort of like an apple tree has to make apples so I’m just making what I am making. I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a fruit that hasn’t been named yet, but it’s not art. What would you do if you decided to stop being an artist? That’s the thing, I don’t think I could stop making But going through the motions and not really feeling it on one hand its kind of sweet but on the other its just very evil. Right, I’ve though about that quite a bit lately and I think the way to address it is to just not make a big deal of it. You kind of already are. What I mean is if someone is going to call me an artist I am not going to deck them or renounce my status. Your approach is wholly conceptual, almost to the point that it needn’t exist. Where do you get your ideas from? Through hanging out and interacting with the world. Being at parties and whatever it is that I might be doing something will come up that will set off some kind of domino effect. It will trigger one thought that knocks into another thought and it keeps going until the whole things makes some pattern and it spells out this giant perfect idea. Its like, oh, OK, I need to do this. So you haven’t had any Archimedes moments? Yeah, I’ve had lots of pretty good ideas in the bath, because of that moment, because there is nothing else but yourself there you know. Like a lot of my work tends to come from that point anyway. I am always using myself as…not a metaphor necessarily because that’s a little corny but sort of like that guy that everybody else is, you know, I’m like the everyman or something – I want to be the Johnny Cash of the art world. How did you first come to art? I had always known about it but you always have a different idea about it when you’re younger because your family has bullshit hanging on the walls like weird flowers and things. Bob Ross. Yeah, that kind of shit. So you always assume growing up in that sort of way that that’s what art is you know, and then I’d always been a bit of a fuck off, a bit of a prankster or a class clown and when I finally got to high school my art teacher there started feeding me all this information that made me realize you can be a fucking shit head and piss everybody off or you can actually direct your energy towards something that you can actually live the rest of your life doing. At what point did you realize that art was a viable career possibility? Well, recently actually. I am only just starting to finally believe to a certain extent that I can actually do it. Up until this point I have felt that any minute someone’s going to stop me for a second and say “Seriously, just get a job, go do something, raise a family…”

Maybe through being an artist you eventually realize that you should stop. I think a lot of artists go through that. I think the problem is that there isn’t really a well defined role for the artist today. Someone like me for example who doesn’t necessarily take the formal approach but more of an esoteric and almost spiritual mystic approach to things would have been a Sharman or a witchdoctor. In the past those people were completely integrated into culture, they were a part of it and they were respected for what they did. They had a purpose. Exactly! People would come to them for certain needs and they in turn would fulfill them. But all of a sudden that changed into this thing called art and then that for a time turned into craft. At that point it became all about the form and we lost all mysticism. Art became how good you could make something and now its gone back to a sort of perverted sense of the original thing but we’re still trying to stamp them (artists) out and now the majority of what they teach in schools is just “this is what an artist does, this is how an artist performs, I am going to teach you how to do it.” It’s like miming all of a sudden, like there aren’t any real artists anymore – it’s fucked up. Well, maybe it’s because we live in a capitalist system and that our understanding of art is as a commodity based on romantic notions. Exactly, I used to think Picasso was the artist. He of course was AN artist but not THE artist, he wasn’t the architect. So you aren’t planning on quitting anytime soon? Well, that’s the thing; I am kind of avoiding the whole competition thing. I am not interested in that aspect because I don’t feel I have any. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. What I mean is that what I do can’t be competed with. Its just: “Here’s Bert, he makes this thing, there it is.” And it’s not like you’re actually being put in the ring with anyone anymore. The galleries just crop up around you so there are always people vying for your attention as opposed to you having to peddle your wares. I guess I’m lucky. I am hoping to just keep doing it and whether I am successful or not, whether people like it or not I will probably keep doing it. Well, you are already quite successful – at least on paper. I am not anywhere near the history books or anything… You have a website! I have a website, yes that’s true. I’ve got a website, I’ve got a gallery, I’ve got a significant museum. I’ve got a few feathers in my hat or stings to my bow or checks marked off but also I have never really had to figure out what success is because I’ve never had to make that choice. It sounds so corny but I’ve always just done what I’ve done and it just seems to keep opening up wider so I can do more of it. I guess that might be the key to success, to never have to measure yourself by your own or anyone else’s standards, just letting other people measure themselves by yours. Right, I don’t know what I am doing. I honestly just don’t know what I am doing and I can’t believe that there is a formula and that art schools think that there is a formula. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Can you sum up your shower in 3 words? It’s a shower.

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ATTHEW BRANNON

Born 1971 in Saint Maries, Idaho; lives in New York, New York Matthew Brannon’s work turns on the opposition—and ever-mounting imbrication—of art and design. After an early stint as a painter, he began to draw his inspiration from those printed materials that mediate everyday life in late-capitalist, early twentyfirst- century America, from posters and advertisements to promotional flyers and take-out menus. But if Brannon’s iconography conjures mass-produced, throwaway sources, his methods are laboriously handcrafted, even old-fashioned: screenprint, letterpress, and lithograph works, often executed in a limited palette and consistent in their graphic rigor. His art seems on first glance disarmingly direct. But as one turns to the text paired with his images for explication or illumination, disorder intervenes. An early series recalls the conventions of posters for horror films: in Sick Decisions (2004), the driveway leading to a stately house is cloaked by shadows cast by bare, looming trees. In place of what look to be credits in the lower part of the work, however, is a string of pithy non sequiturs: this film is “A Desperate Appeal Release,” starring, among others, “Abuse of Education” and “Misplaced Trust,” with a screenplay by “101 Unanswered Phone Calls.” In recent work Brannon pictures signifiers of contemporary metropolitan life ranging from the quotidian (an alarm clock, a tube of toothpaste, a banana peel) to the more rarefied (oysters, sushi, champagne). Here again, the straightforward quality of each depiction is offset by bewildering, quasi-poetic phrases running below it, what the artist has called a “salad of language.”

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As is often the case with the artist’s work, these items initially appear innocuous and then grow more puzzling: small sound-canceling devices, typically found in psychoanalysts’ offices, create subtle white noise that aurally isolates the viewer and bolsters a sense of privacy, and the contents of a bookshelf are just out of reach. These volumes, penned by the artist yet devoid of any identifying markings on spine or cover, evade legibility to become instead enigmatically sculptural. Negotiating this theatrical space underscores viewers’ sense of self-consciousness and throws into relief a constant of Brannon’s work—our own complicity in deciphering and completing meaning.

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IKA TAJIMA

Mika Tajima: Born 1975 in Los Angeles, California; lives in New York, New York.

Howie Chen: Born 1976 in Cincinnati, Ohio; lives in New York, New York New Humans, a collaborative founded by Mika Tajima with Howie Chen, explores

the intersecting strata of sound, installation, and performance within the context of Tajima’s visual art practice. The elements making up Tajima’s projects slip from foreground sculptures to background props, staging markers, and functional structures, their status in continual transition and production. Challenging the audience’s expectations of sculpture as a static presence, Tajima combines multimedia installations with serial performance elements by New Humans including sonically spare noise music grounded in Minimal composition and evoking a post– John Cage mayhem. A constantly changing roster of collaborators from different disciplines contributes to a relentless layering of visual and aural textures, creating a discordant dialogue. Appropriately, the web of collaboration is itself frequently the subject and object of New Humans’ cacophonous sonic, optical, and material mash-ups. The two New Humans performances that punctuated Disassociate (2007), an installation by Tajima at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York, were created in collaboration with poet-artist-architect Vito Acconci and violinist C. Spencer Yeh. This multilayered work responds structurally to Sympathy for the Devil (1968), Jean-Luc Godard’s closeup film documenting the Rolling Stones’ fractious, collaborative open studio sessions recorded just prior to the moment when the band’s first leader, Brian Jones, went absent from the group (and drowned shortly thereafter). Using the film as a reference point, Tajima notes, the installation and performances reflected the process of working together, with all of its contradictions, takes, trials, errors, and transparency of production.

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and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project.”

“It is this problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction

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The installation of sound-baffled modular cubicles in which New Humans performed—instruments included drums, bass, violin, and Acconci’s visceral, poetic voicing—was constructed as what Tajima calls essentially “double-sided paintings on wheels.” These screenprinted and roller-painted works, depicting diagrams for various modular structures (geometric manuals for stacking chairs and fractured schemata for building champagne glass towers), doubled as bulletin boards papered with related graphic work by Tajima and three invited artists joining the collaborative mix. Giving visual and aural structure to the serial elements of their collaborative creation, New Humans’ time-based performances culminate, like Godard’s film, in a structure of dissolution: in the collaboration with Yeh, Tajima hurls a stack of 1960s-era Eames chairs into a tower of glass champagne flutes, simultaneously creating an instrument and sound from the obliteration as the glass smashes to the floor. It is this problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project.

ARDAR EIDE EINARSSON

Born 1976 in Oslo, Norway; lives in New York, New York

Investigations into various forms of social transgression and arguments for political subversion, Gardar Eide Einarsson’s text-based works provoke the

critical analysis associated with reading to augment the immediate visceral experience of viewing his art. To this end, his choice of media is determined by his current discourse on communities in relation to their outsiders. Visual imagery borrowed from underground subcultures including the criminal world and leftwing militias, portrayed in a primarily black-and-white palette, gives Einarsson’s work a stylish punk sheen that evokes rebellion through its cold, hard-edged rejection of sentiment. His installations often combine paintings leaned against walls as “props,” explicit messages printed on flags or illuminated on light boxes, images co-opted from graffitii, skateboarding graphics, or punk music flyers screenprinted or painted directly onto gallery walls, videos screened on televisions, photography, and sculpture such as austere furniture centered in the exhibition space. Mining his understanding of how graphic design and advertising methods manipulate public beliefs, Einarsson appropriates logos, symbols, phrases, and slogans to recontextualize meaning, creating a tension between imagery and the action it compels the viewer to take. For his 2006 show Population One at Standard (Oslo), Einarsson referenced Russian prison tattoos, comic-book character Judge Dredd’s villainous narratives, and a confiscated forged driver’s license to consider the renegade value in aberrant society members’ ideologies. One wall panel shaped like a comic-book blurb quotes Dredd: “Odious though it was to turn myself into a tawdry attraction, I had greater goals to consider.”

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“Odious though it was to turn myself into a tawdry attraction, I had greater goals to consider.”

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In South of Heaven, a 2007 installation at Frankfurter Kunstverein, the artist again applied text to underscore ideas of authority and rebellion. What looks like ad hoc gra≈ti scrawled on one wall by an angry teenager declaring “You just don’t get it dad, so fuck off” is contextually inverted not only by a flag emblazoned with “American Liberty” hanging from the ceiling nearby but by the fact that the “gra≈ti” was premeditated, designed on a computer, then carefully placed on the wall as a formal painting. As a native Norwegian relocated to the United States, Einarsson creates work increasingly opposed to what can be seen as the hypocrisies of our current government by highlighting our national preoccupation with individual freedoms.

Hung beside it was a painting of two white triangles pointed together on a black background; though based on a prison tattoo, I’ll Never Give My Hand to the Police (2007) evades any obvious visual associations. Einarsson purposely problematizes his own work to avoid didactic, facile expressions of negativity or controversy. His use of text allows for a directness that both recalls and critiques artworks decrying political injustices made during the 1990s by artists like Barbara Kruger. By staging textual works alongside abstract objects, images, and props, Einarsson embeds his politics more deeply in his search for answers, and through Minimalist formalism he oΩers opaque or ambivalent translations of his skepticism toward established power structures.

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ATT MULLICAN

Born 1951 in Santa Monica, California; lives in New York, New York Matt Mullican’s art takes form as drawing, sculpture, video, painting, electronic media, and installation, but his contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial might be best approached under the loose rubric of performance art. Since the late 1970s he has used hypnosis in his work, and the process both informs and helps elucidate his practice, which explores the different ways we experience the subjective through media. In Mullican’s performances, which have recently taken place in settings arranged to resemble a studio and a home, his trance state can last several hours and encompass a range of behavior from the banal to the startling. Treating his psyche as a found object, he might pour himself coffee, pace the floor, grunt, sing, chant phrases (from curses to declarations about how he’s feeling), and—most tellingly—draw or paint in black acrylic ink on supports including large pieces of paper, bedsheets, and the wall itself. While Mullican’s performances call up 1960s and 1970s predecessors such as Bruce Nauman or Joseph Beuys, the graphic meandering and biomorphic whorls in his drawings of the past decade hark back to Surrealist experiments with frottage and automatic writing. These abstract geometric forms are combined with more representational, repetitive imagery: grids of letters and numbers, transcriptions of song lyrics, and childlike pictures. Mullican has long been interested in the intersection of public sign systems with personal semiotics, and in the early 1970s began producing a series of charts illustrating a fictive cosmology. Arrays of pictographic symbols that seemed to denote physical, biological, epistemological, and belief systems, the charts were executed on canvas and as sculpture and diffused in formats such as printed media and public installation.

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Encountering them with expectations of legibility and comprehensibility, viewers found instead diagrams of a nonsystemic, idiosyncratic universe distinctly the artist’s own. Installations of Mullican’s work often feature grids of his drawings hung side by side on makeshift walls in tightly packed rooms or corridors. These are spaces in which it seems possible to lose oneself, which, in a sense, the artist has done to create them. The predicate of his experiences under hypnosis is an ageless, genderless figure he calls “that person.” As he emerges in the work, “that person” busies himself with everyday routines but has his eye on the big issues; a statement in one drawing reads, “I love to work for Truth and Beauty.” Mullican’s work of the past three decades stands as an extended, and often profound, meditation on the notion of artistic subjectivity, and on the limits—and unexpected benefits—of distancing the ego from the creative self.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;His trance state can last several hours and encompass a range of behavior from the banal to the startling.â&#x20AC;?

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HANNON EBNER

‘Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language,’ wrote Robert Smithson in his 1968 essay, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind’. The same could be said now about photography. Shannon Ebner’s work is as much about the expanding and contracting possibilities of poetic language as it is about those of photography – its processes and its legacy – which are, since the advent of digital photography, both visibly dying and manifestly not dead. While a graduate student on Yale’s MFA programme in 1998, Ebner placed a portrait of her ex-girlfriend in a jar of water and left it there while she embarked on a road trip to Nova Scotia, where she hoped to track down Robert Frank. Her pilgrimage to meet an icon of American photography was also an efface- ment of the very same medium. When she returned and took the lid off the jar, the result was the blurred Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend (1998). In 2009, for Paging Walter, Ebner subjected a portrait of Walter Benjamin to the same process, submerging a photographic print in a Perspex case filled with water. The photograph’s emulsion sloughed off like dead skin, leaving behind a ghostly trace of the original print. Both works suggest Ebner has a melancholic relationship to the heritage of black and white photography, a concern also evident in her recent show ‘Signal Hill’ at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco. To most Californians, Signal Hill is a small enclave of Long Beach, named as such because the Native Americans who first settled there lit signal fires on its peak. For Ebner, it is ‘a place to receive error messages in the wild’, a fictional location for misfiring signals and for common codes to become faulty or contingent.

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In works such as Leaf and Strike (2009), she pairs a

landscape to spell words that appeared as banners on

photogram of a leaf with a black strike on a white grid,

the horizon. One of her first works in the series, Land-

combining a common symbol of the natural landscape

scape Incarceration (2003), was constructed on a dry

with the typographic symbol for cancellation, a break

lake bed in the Mojave Desert for Andrea Zittel’s ‘High

between lines of poetry, or a choice between two words

Desert Test Sites’ (2002–ongoing) and photographed

(although the label ‘strike’ suggests something more

from behind, so we see how the letters are propped up

violent). The work is a simultaneous confirmation and

with sticks. Ebner exploited the possibilities of the oth-

cancellation of what Ebner calls the ‘typographical/

erwise barren landscape by literally inserting language

topographical field’. It is both an homage to and a nullifi-

into it, creating a photograph that can actually be ‘read’.

cation of the heritage and codes of landscape photogra-

But works like these also document a performative act,

phy, as well as an attempt to develop another alphabet

using the blank landscape as a background for a con-

for the medium.

ceptual series, like Ed Ruscha did in 1967 when he drove

Even if Ebner describes herself as someone who

into the Nevada desert and threw a typewriter out the

‘stopped writing poetry’, she found a way literally to

window of a moving car, recording the results in the

insert it into photography with her best-known series,

publication Royal Road Test. Ebner’s photos incorporate

‘Dead Democracy Letters’ (2002–6), which she began

the patina of historical works like this, as well as Robert

after moving to Los Angeles. Ebner created an alphabet

Smithson’s ‘Mirror Displacements’ (1969), suggesting

of large cardboard letters, which she arranged in the

someone who has absorbed the history of Conceptual art through its black and white documentation.

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“Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.” The political content of Ebner’s work, seen in pieces such as Shrouded Monument (2008), in which the letters ‘USA’ are trapped in plastic as if wrapped in a body bag, can seem incongruous with her more conceptual interests. Though she insists they are direct responses to the politicized language of war, this inflammatory content could also be a red herring; aren’t the radical slogans and political protest signage invoked in ‘Dead Democracy Letters’ – such as Self-Ignite or Is Exploded – just as historicized aspects of the 1960s and ’70s as the images of performance art from the same era? Ebner has recently continued her explo- rations into the mutability of language and sign systems in ‘Signal Hill’ and ‘Invisible Language Workshop’ (2009) at Wallspace in New York. Both installations saw her techniques applied equally to black and white photography as to sculptural and found objects, wallpaper and video. Between Words Pause (2009) is an animated video using a cinder-block alphabet so that letters, strikes and asterisks fly past too quickly to catch what they spell out. The animation is composed of single black and white photo- graphs, so Ebner hasn’t abandoned the medium – she has reanimated it literally. Ebner’s practice can be seen as a continuing investigation into the ways a photograph can denote something different than what it depicts and, similarly, how language can be read outside of its literal possibilities. Her works speak of the dying legacy of directly representing something, as straight photography once did. But as those possibilities are constantly dying and being negated, they’re constantly being regenerated. Ebner’s combinations of words and signs echo Myles’ poetic description of ‘the tree coming back in the crack’, or what Ruscha once called, ‘No End to the Things Made out of Human Talk’.

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created by

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Jozef Ondrik

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CREDITS TEXT: Huldisch, Henriette, Shamim Momin, and Rebecca Solnit. 2008 Biennial Exhibition. New York : New Haven: Whitney Museum of American Art, Distributed by Yale UP, 2008. Print. Administrator. “2008 Whitney Biennial Artist Bert Rodriguez in Le Salon Des Beaux-Bains.” ARTLURKER. 9 July 2008. Web. <http://www. artlurker.com/2008/07/2008-whitney-biennialartist-bert-rodriguez-in-le-salon-des-beauxbains/>. Lange, Christy. “No End in Sight.” Editorial. Frieze Apr. 2010: 88-91. Altman Siegel. Web. <http:// www.altmansiegel.com/sebner/sebnerpress2. pdf>. IMAGES: Pages 10-33 All images are property of the artists. Pages 34-35 http://www.behance.net/gallery/Handmade-vs_ -Digital/485460

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