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Source: Personal screenshot
INTRODUCTORY RELEASE 25 Waverly Place New York, NY, 10012 On view December 14th, 2016. The press release in a contemporary neoliberal art market context is a tool of a mind-numbing institutional cycle. The press release as a form has professional specifications, it requires the listing of a location (physical or otherwise), an opening date, the pleasure in presenting the art it advertises. Its traditions for dissemination and display are many; in digital form it is posted on a gallery or museum’s website, sent to subscribers via email listservs, published on an art magazine’s homepage; in physical form it is displayed in the space where the art is shown, presumably on a desk, behind which the face of a well-manicured unpaid twenty-something stares at you, the visitor, then back to their iPhone screen. This unpaid laborer probably wrote the very release you are about to pick up. They abide by conventions of language for this form, investigated in an essay written by Alix Rule and David Levine titled “International Art English” which investigates the “lexical, grammatical, and stylistic” features of a language most traceable through the press release (Rule, Levine). The linguistic manipulations of the press release has long been theorized. Art critics and theoreticians such as Dan Fox for Frieze or Peta Rake for C Magazine add analytical layers to already existing critiques on the press release, performed most notably by art collective BANK in the 1990s in Great Britain.
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Hito Steyerl writes “International Disco Latin” in response to Rule and Levine’s essay, making pointed critiques towards the dubious usage of English in American and international art contexts, making note of the necessity to understand the efforts and historicity of the authors as a part of a vast globalizing capitalist art industrial framework (Steyerl). Y our Everyday Art World by scholar Lane Relyea seeks to define the conditions of such an industry, noting the symbolic form of the network and how it fundamentally shapes quotidien operations. Relyea’s analysis will be crucial to understanding the current physical, financial, and social conditions that art operates under, in peripatetic networks rather than systems, and how the press release plays a role in this landscape (Relyea 24). The contemporary manifestations of this textual form called the press release can be found across many different levels of institutional output: a blue chip gallery, a university-owned gallery, a cooperative space, a small outpost of a blue chip gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side or in Brooklyn’s Bushwick, a cultural space with specific guiding ethical principles, a digital art collective, a pop-up in a flex storefront. In any of these spaces, the press release acts as a primer for viewers, net for interested buyers, an informational tool for critiques, even as an analyzed literary form. The intentions of a press release are nuanced and depend on context. The analysis of individual forms of a press release, a digital release, an email release, a physical release, and more, is but one approach. At times, a press release exists in multiple forms, across multiple spaces. In its mobility between forms of presentation, display, and reception, I seek to question how the accessibility of a press release relates to the steeply-priced commodity it advertises, along with how its language and conventions serve its multiple functions.
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Source: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/80wse/projectspace/2016/10/marzsaffore
+ THE ACTION LIVES ON Project Space, 80 WSE 80 Washington Square East New York, NY 10013 October 12 - October 15, 2016 I begin my analysis with considering two press releases for + The Action Lives On. This project was photographic documentation of an action, held on October 11th, 2016, nationally recognized as Columbus Day in the United States, calling for decolonization of the Museum of Natural History, hung in the Project Space Gallery at 80 Washington Square East, a gallery owned by New York University. This is the practice of Marz Saffore, a Masters student in New York University’s Art Department. The implications of voicing this critique aimed specifically towards a colonial project marketed as a tourist attraction within the university, a similarly fraught institution could
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be dangerous. Dialectics of the authority and the subject within an institution are such that power is constantly shifting and untrackable. Saffore was given the space to effectively archive this action at the mercy of institutional processes that, as Lane Relyea details in Your Everyday Art World, have been forced to transfigure alongside a constantly redrawn art world. The presentation of this project seeks to reinscribe a university, historically a colonial project, as a space of radical ideas and knowledge. The press release made available online makes clear this intention that NYU seeks to align itself with decolonization projects, while participating in global neo-colonialist practices at the very same time. It also intertwines this effort with the operations a commercial gallery, albeit non-profit organization, Artists Space, which has been hosting Decolonize This Place for the fall of 2016. From the release on NYU Steinhardt’s website: + The Action Lives On discusses the birth, climax, and aftermath of an art action. Facilitated by MTL+, it specifically focuses on the Anti-Columbus Day Tour, which addresses the erasure of narratives and exploitation of indigenous people as well as people of color. This art action takes place at the American Museum of Natural History, however, these issues plague institutions worldwide. #decolonizethismuseum + The Action Lives On also serves as a satellite hub for Artists Space's Fall show, Decolonize This Place. Located at 55 Walker Street in Chinatown, it is an action-oriented movement space focusing on indigenous struggle, black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. #decolonizethisplace Every fall, the second year MFA candidates each have the Project Space at 80WSE Gallery for one week. These shows precede their MFA thesis exhibition which takes place the following Spring.
This online release is thus reifying institutional structures and strategies, despite the first three paragraphs’ purposed grounding in critical dialogue. The final two sentences remind us of where this act of documentation is contained. In contrast, the physical release given at the show is in the form of a pamphlet, an artifact from the documented action at the focus of the show. The online release’s accessibility can be contrasted with that of the pamphlet, a precious and indispensable document. This release is an archival object, the online release a tool of institutional functionality. The dual releases do not reference each other, yet exist in discrete company. The pamphlet itself proposes a restructuring of institutions, namely the Museum of Natural History. It maps out an alternative tour of the museum, and redefines the Hall of Peoples as an axis for racist practices of relegating Indigenous African, Asian, Australian Aborigine, and American Cultures to the realm of ethnographic display. Additionally, the pamphlet details demands for removal of colonizer Theodore Roosevelt’s statue from the museum’s facade, and calls out the Metropolitan Museum of Art of upholding Eurocentric traditions of visual art display. Engaging with these traditions of display, named by numerous anthropologists from James Clifford to Alfred Gell, both press releases practice the naming of places across New York’s geography. This introduces the discourses,
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especially prevalent in metropolitan centers in the United States like New York, surrounding gentrification and its relationship to colonization. The proliferation of art spaces in urban environments, specifically those rhetorically focused on anti-gentrification and decolonizing work, has shifted the focuses of galleries, museums, and universities towards replicating these discourses.
Source: Personal scan
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Source: Facebook.com/catalina.granandos
LAS HIJAS Northwest corner of Broadway and E 10th St. New York, NY 10012 On view 24 hours a day November 14th, 2016 - December 13th, 2016 The press release form in relation to a show, Las Hijas, in NYU’s Broadway Windows exhibition space, exists purely via digital platforms. The show was advertised in the weeks leading up to its display, and continues to be advertised via a recirculated press release each week. From NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions weekly events email listserv, they provide this text as their press release: Within the context of violence in Mexico, women have been main targets of an extensive web of human trafficking and straightforward sexual violence. The overwhelming number
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of women murdered, raped and sold into sexual slavery in the country has depersonalize and silenced the suffering and identity of these women. This project is designed as a space of confrontation where the violence in these women’s stories is lost by the shockingly amount of drawings and individual voices are rescued through embroideries made by a collective of Mexican women.
Las Hijas has different conditions of display, and the accessibility of it, 24 hours a day, but only from a frontal view, is reflected in the consistent and steady advertising performed by this weekly email release. But what this release does not tell us is the guerilla tactics behind this display. Originally pitched as a show of watercolors, the artist elected to include embroideries from a collective of artists in service of what the press release details, an upholding of individual voices. This was done extra-institutionally, without approval. In this case, it is of interest to consider the possibility of the press release to obfuscate processes behind the show’s mounting. In the context of an educational institution, this action has a certain risk, similar to the acts of artist Marz Saffore in the previous press release. The press release does seek to posture this show as “space of confrontation,” an intriguing interest to question in relation to the presence of the release in one’s email inbox. The exposure to this release is time-based, not necessarily on demand. We cannot easily annotate or engage with it. Furthermore, the brevity of this release, perhaps by design, leaves the intricacies of these intimate pictures and embroideries unspoken. The release is, when the show is ended, too gone from view. How does this transience also speak to the mode of viewing the show, as a passerby on the streets? I am questioning the ability of this release to communicate the weight of meaning, the gravity of the situation for these brutalized women, and how it corresponds with the public display of this show. But as a tool of institutional art codes, the press release here does not seek to sell these representations of trauma. Here, as reflected by the immediacy of
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dissemination and viewing, arguably presents a press release of sorts to be the show itself. The show must act, to random passerby, as an advertisement for itself, utilizing the vinyl text and explicit language to perform the job typically relegated in a contained art space to that of a formal press release. To allow the show to clarify itself in this way is a radically different form of the press release, and sees it through the lens of Edwards’ “Mixed Box” text as, tautologically, an artwork itself.
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Source: http://john-russell.org/Web%20pages/Artworks/Exhibitions/Bank/A_fbny.html
FAX-BAKS London and New York 9th September 1999 - 16th October 1999 In light of “Mixed Box,” and its engagement with the archive, I now arrive at the interest in considering what happens to a press release when the products it advertise are removed from their space, their showtime concluded, their memory documented, or not. Ideally, the press release in the archive exists across documentary forms. In the case of BANK, it is an example I wish to engage with as an object of study but also an analytical lens. If we consider it a work similar in purpose to “International Art English,” albeit with a more ironic bend, we can also critically understand what it seeks to perform in manipulating the art commercial press release. The two press releases we will analyze are themselves unconventional in relation to traditions of press release formats. They do not operate in the restrictive and banal formalities of International Art English or its discontents, but instead utilize frankness of tone and clarity in purpose. The cruel irony of BANK’s Fax-Bak that critic Dan Fox identifies in his 2006 article in Frieze about satire in contemporary art also communicates shreds of truth. The act of marking old press releases of exhibitions past and responding to a text typically a monolith address to the reader is a significant act against the numbing circuits of contemporary art dissemination even before the time of the post-Internet boom. The relevance of the archive to the BANK project is intrinsic due to its age, and the exclusivity of display of these releases on former collective member John Russell’s personal website. Both releases for the BANK Fax-Baks shows, in New York and London respectively,
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are made available and set almost identical intentions. An additional paragraph can be found in the New York show press release, where BANK members detail an aesthetic evaluation that eventually arose in the creation of Fax-Baks. This attention to the aesthetic quality of these note-taking and diagramming practices, is as Peta Rake notes an art practice in itself. The marking up and archiving of releases under the guise of art practice can be potent, and “Private Acts” lauds BANK’s usage of the release, a “under-appreciated but overexposed portion of the art world” (Rake 36). See the release for the New York iteration of the show:
In the case of the London show, a different tone emits from the text, one of slight arrogance if anything. I am reminded of the tone taken on by Alix Rule and David Levine in “International Art English,” and the analysis devoid of details on sociological conditions of the producers of the press releases they critique. BANK explicitly calls out those who write the releases, assuming that rich and powerful gallery owners would have their releases written at their own hand. As Hito Steyerl proves in “International Disco Latin,” we must
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consider the question of who is writing these releases if we engage with what these writers say at all. In this way, the BANK project is hegemonic in its assumptions on correct grammatical styling and linguistic quality, something that both press releases admit unabashedly. If we are to consider art’s bearing on neoliberal policy, as Naomi Salaman does in her essay on art theoretical discourse and neoliberalism, certainly this imagining of an ideal linguistic presentation of art is a fantasy that enmeshes itself nicely in the homogenizing functions of neoliberal thought. In other words, the normalization of Eurocentric norms such as correct English style and content services neoliberalism. This assertion is silencing, and yet it still lives in the archive, preserved into a future that perhaps BANK imagined to be more learned in conventions of English grammatical structure. See the London show’s release, from the same year:
After the show ends, where is press release to go but to live on in the memory of the viewer, or in BANK’s case, in their art practice. This is a way for it to sustain itself. These two shows and corresponding releases engage with this question through literal means in the art shown, artifact press releases of shows past, and through metacritical means with each respective show’s own release, preserved on former collective member John Russell’s
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personal website. Contrasted with the effervescence of Las Hijas’ release, or the physical dissolvability of + The Action Lives On’s pamphlet, Fax-Baks occupy space in a personal, digital archive. The site itself is convoluted in its organization and presentation, and allows for a shift from Lane Relyea’s hyper-organizational and trackable networks that discourses and information about contemporary art travel.
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Sources: http://www.eastofborneo.org/articles/your-everyday-art-world-glasgow-to-los-angeles
CONCLUDING RELEASE 25 Waverly Place New York, NY, 10012 Opening Reception: December 14th, 2016 On view December 14th, 2016 The multiplicity of visual and literary packages that comprise marketing and advertising strategies in a contemporary art network cannot be neatly synthesized. Yet we can still engage with the conventions and deviations existing under the guise of the “press release” and study not what they say about their products but the form itself, as an integral part of a powerful and financially entangled contemporary art machine. Thus examples like Las Hijas’ weekly email release, or + The Action Lives On’s dual online and physical pamphlet release, while operating outside tradition still find themselves within the network of contemporary art dissemination and discourse. No matter who is tasked with drafting up these textual webs of banal globalized language, the consumption of these texts still drags on. Critics propped in office chairs digest the paragraphs via museum websites, viewers slip folded copies into their coat pockets to be left for weeks unattended, gallery owners straighten printed stacks on
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reception desks in a futile quest for containment. These press releases exist for consumption, but for whom is worth noting. Where are the buyers, rich collectors and patrons, institutions of note, to gather information and collectibles in relation to the press release? Perhaps we should look behind the desk, at price lists, phone calls, email chains, or in auction houses, conference rooms, five-star hotel bars. These are the places of commerce, zones a press release never seeks to touch. Between the critical discourse surrounding art and the exchanges of capital that sustains it are the seismic cracks into which the press release falls, banal, neglected, but misunderstood.
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Works Cited Edwards, Elizabeth. “Mixed Box.” Photographs Objects Histories: on the materiality of images, 47 - 61. Routledge: 2004, London. Print.
Fox, Dan. "Poisoned Pen." Frieze.100 (2006): 31-2. P roQuest. Web. 3 Dec. 2016. Rake, Peta. "Private Acts: Note-Taking in the Margins of Art Criticism." C Magazine Summer 2013: 33-8. ProQuest. Web. 3 Dec. 2016 . Relyea, Lane. “Your Everyday Art World.” MIT Press: 2013, Cambridge. Print. Rule, Alix, and David Levine. “International Art English.” Triple Canopy June 2012. Web. Salaman, Naomi. “Art theory – handmaiden of neoliberalism?” Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2015, 14:2, 162-173. Web. Steyerl, Hito. “International Disco Latin.” e -flux May 2013. Web.