.
1.
We live in a consumer culture. Advertising is everywhere, and would not be everywhere if it did not perceive within us something closed it considered worth opening. We do not live in a democracy, we live in a corporate oligarchy. We are nervous about politics, about politicians, about most utopian options or possibilities for positive social change. For the past fifty years, whichever party has had more money, spent more money campaigning, has won the election. Facts and statistics often convince us, however much we wish they did not: it is as if our brain wanted to eat them whole. We know those in power continuously shape the truth, shape what will be considered true by the vast majority of the population, that there are two kinds of truth: the kind you read in a newspaper, or see on television, and more timeless truths, which will be equally true for future generations as they are for us today. Stating that something is timeless and true is a value judgment requiring conviction. We fear productive convictions are in short supply. History has taught us that certain convictions, taken to their absolute extreme, are terrifying. There is much talk about happiness, about development, about different ways of seeing things. There is a great deal of talk suggesting the future will be tragic. We know predicting the future is a suckers’ game. It is easier to predict the past. It is easier to predict the past than it is to remember it.
2.
The fact that a concept such as planned obsolescence exists, and is the model for so much of our industrial production, generates within me a level and intensity of anger I am simply unable to process. However, one rational trajectory for such anger is equally pernicious: to purchase only expensive, well-made objects that will last a very long time. Works of art are made to last a very long time. Their physical durability, in some sense, echoing their thematic or qualitative timelessness. If they have not been made to last, conservationists and restorers might be hired to preserve them. The term planned obsolescence is generally attributed to the industrial designer Brooks Stevens who used it as the title of a 1954 talk. Wikipedia says: Stevens defined it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.” His view was to always make the consumer want something new, rather than create poor products that would need replacing. Depression is reactionary. Depression is anger turned inwards, instead of outwards at a system that is either exploiting or casting us aside. Depression is perfectly reasonable given the other available options. A natural sense of pure joy is also perfectly reasonable. I can imagine, utilizing certain advancements in pharmacology, a kind of planned obsolescence of emotions. Your anger no longer serving you, throw it away, it is time for a new kind of anger. It is time for a new kind of anger. A moral outrage with the skill of viral marketing and the precision of Zen. It is always time.
3.
You find yourself standing in front of a door. Inside, on the other side of the door, is everything, and outside, where you currently stand, is nothing. It is a common predicament, one you have faced many times before, and like so many times before, you wonder if opening the door, going inside, actually means anything: if it has content, will give or remove energy, could be said to be taking a stand. So many things in life are empty gestures, but opening a door is never entirely empty. It is always something a bit more or less. What exactly might it mean to open this door. You know you cannot rely on past experiences to guide you, that at the precise moment of every new decision past experiences mean nothing. It is within the heart of the most tepid and timeless clichés, why always search for the undeniable.
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May 29, 2010
May 26, 2010
May 25, 2010
The work
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The work is full of bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent. It is also full of a struggle with bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent.
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The work is full of bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent. It is also full of a struggle with bad faith, hypocrisy and not being consequent.
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May 24, 2010
I often wonder
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I often wonder if people speak about me behind my back. Upon further consideration I feel that, for the most part, they do not. I of course also wonder what they say about me.
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I often wonder if people speak about me behind my back. Upon further consideration I feel that, for the most part, they do not. I of course also wonder what they say about me.
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You're only seventeen
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You're only seventeen but you need a hit
a real chart-topper not this Myspace shit
you've got the beat, the hook and your mad sick flow
then when you're nineteen there's nowhere left to go
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You're only seventeen but you need a hit
a real chart-topper not this Myspace shit
you've got the beat, the hook and your mad sick flow
then when you're nineteen there's nowhere left to go
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May 22, 2010
Meeting of Failures and its 1950 manifesto
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From Serge Berna, host of the Meeting of Failures and author of its 1950 manifesto:
They portray us as DUDS, and that is what we are.
We are nothing, we mean it, NOTHING AT ALL, and we intend to be of NO USE.
“Respectable people” harp on: ”WORK! BUCK UP! SUCCEED!” SUCCEED IN GETTING WHERE? IN DOING WHAT? IN WHAT CONDITION?
Our motto: IN ORDER TO ARRIVE, ABOVE ALL, DO NOT LEAVE.
All you, INCAPABLE, USELESS, IDLE, RAGGEDY BARFLIES!
Come and acknowledge one another and assert yourselves at the
GRAND MEETING OF FAILURES
to be held at the House of Learned Societies
8 Rue Serpente, Paris 5
15 March 1950. 8:15 p.m.
The following will discuss “The Merits of Impotence”:
Serge BERNA: left-wing syphilitic
Maurice-Paul COMTE: individual
Jacques PATRY: former Dominican
A free buffet will be served along with Madeleine AUERBACH.
Evening dress required!
.
From Serge Berna, host of the Meeting of Failures and author of its 1950 manifesto:
They portray us as DUDS, and that is what we are.
We are nothing, we mean it, NOTHING AT ALL, and we intend to be of NO USE.
“Respectable people” harp on: ”WORK! BUCK UP! SUCCEED!” SUCCEED IN GETTING WHERE? IN DOING WHAT? IN WHAT CONDITION?
Our motto: IN ORDER TO ARRIVE, ABOVE ALL, DO NOT LEAVE.
All you, INCAPABLE, USELESS, IDLE, RAGGEDY BARFLIES!
Come and acknowledge one another and assert yourselves at the
GRAND MEETING OF FAILURES
to be held at the House of Learned Societies
8 Rue Serpente, Paris 5
15 March 1950. 8:15 p.m.
The following will discuss “The Merits of Impotence”:
Serge BERNA: left-wing syphilitic
Maurice-Paul COMTE: individual
Jacques PATRY: former Dominican
A free buffet will be served along with Madeleine AUERBACH.
Evening dress required!
.
May 20, 2010
To resist the way that PR is subsuming all forms of art writing
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Clouds uses other people's money to make books. We are not trying to make money off our books, instead making them so they exist and can be in the world, as they are wished to be rather than being what the market requires of them. We practice what the artist wants in the development of art books, and we try to resist the way that PR is subsuming all forms of art writing. What is post-PR writing and publishing in an information economy? We are interested to find out what this means, and what might be possible, at least, at first, by talking about it to others.
- Gwynneth Porter, Clouds Publishing, Auckland, NZ
.
Clouds uses other people's money to make books. We are not trying to make money off our books, instead making them so they exist and can be in the world, as they are wished to be rather than being what the market requires of them. We practice what the artist wants in the development of art books, and we try to resist the way that PR is subsuming all forms of art writing. What is post-PR writing and publishing in an information economy? We are interested to find out what this means, and what might be possible, at least, at first, by talking about it to others.
- Gwynneth Porter, Clouds Publishing, Auckland, NZ
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May 17, 2010
Historically, artists have not...
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Historically, artists have not necessarily been the most astute political commentators. Perhaps the mental agility required for making art and the mental agility required for useful political analysis are fundamentally at odds.
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Historically, artists have not necessarily been the most astute political commentators. Perhaps the mental agility required for making art and the mental agility required for useful political analysis are fundamentally at odds.
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May 16, 2010
How is it possible...
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How is it possible, how is it ethical, to feel such joy in a world constantly spiralling downwards into greater and greater catastrophe, greater and more excruciating comedy.
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How is it possible, how is it ethical, to feel such joy in a world constantly spiralling downwards into greater and greater catastrophe, greater and more excruciating comedy.
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May 8, 2010
Geographic Fatalism
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Geographic fatalism: the idea that whether you are born in the first world or in the third world determines how your life is going to be.
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Geographic fatalism: the idea that whether you are born in the first world or in the third world determines how your life is going to be.
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May 7, 2010
Art Careers
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There comes a point in every artist’s career when, after having achieved a certain (not less than considerable) degree of success, the only way to move forward (from a purely careerist perspective) is to die.
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There comes a point in every artist’s career when, after having achieved a certain (not less than considerable) degree of success, the only way to move forward (from a purely careerist perspective) is to die.
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May 3, 2010
The most effective lie
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The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie.
[Unfinished.]
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The most effective lie is always the one closest to the truth. The closer the better. A dream is not true but is never a lie.
[Unfinished.]
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April 23, 2010
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview
.
Two Sentence Description
Using the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens), PME-ART will warmly welcome each person who enters the gallery. Together we will examine the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.
Short Description
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview blurs the lines between performance and installation. As you enter the gallery you are given a pad of post-it notes and asked a series of thought-provoking questions. The post-it notes with your answers are stuck onto the wall in a grid with all of the others. The members of PME-ART then attempt to understand something about everyone who enters the gallery by placing the post-it notes into categories. (Feel free to disagree with the categories your answers are put into.) By putting the answers into categories we’re trying to learn what we all have in common. To find out how we all are, and are not, a community. To achieve some sort of overview. However, because each of the answers we receive will likely be unique and complex, it will require our full creativity and humour to find categories that actually make sense. This is the challenge we have set for ourselves, an examination of the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.
Long Description
You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is about but the person who randomly phoned was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at the artist-run centre Articule so you suspect it will have something to do with art.
When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of questions (we are thinking of around six). You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on one post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.
Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. You may also not agree with a category your answer is being placed within and you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.
And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that it comes from above’.
As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.
This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the four-week span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that will question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.
.
Two Sentence Description
Using the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens), PME-ART will warmly welcome each person who enters the gallery. Together we will examine the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.
Short Description
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview blurs the lines between performance and installation. As you enter the gallery you are given a pad of post-it notes and asked a series of thought-provoking questions. The post-it notes with your answers are stuck onto the wall in a grid with all of the others. The members of PME-ART then attempt to understand something about everyone who enters the gallery by placing the post-it notes into categories. (Feel free to disagree with the categories your answers are put into.) By putting the answers into categories we’re trying to learn what we all have in common. To find out how we all are, and are not, a community. To achieve some sort of overview. However, because each of the answers we receive will likely be unique and complex, it will require our full creativity and humour to find categories that actually make sense. This is the challenge we have set for ourselves, an examination of the intersections between community, audience, data and real life.
Long Description
You have an appointment. You don’t understand precisely what the appointment is about but the person who randomly phoned was extremely charming, their ideas in and around hospitality seemed intriguing, and you have a bit of free time so, what the hell, you decide to take a chance and attend. The appointment is at the artist-run centre Articule so you suspect it will have something to do with art.
When you arrive at the gallery you are handed a pad of post-it notes and told you will be asked a series of questions (we are thinking of around six). You should answer these questions spontaneously. Your entire answer must fit on one post-it. Your answers will be anonymous. As you write down each of your answers, the post-it note is taken from you and placed on the wall. The entire gallery is covered in rows and rows of post-it’s, each one containing a single answer.
Soon you to are taken to the wall, to a specific section of the post-it note array, and you watch as post-it notes are rapidly removed from the rows and placed in smaller groupings, each grouping representing a ‘category’. You watch as your own answers are placed into different groups and listen to the explanations. You may also not agree with a category your answer is being placed within and you can certainly say so, discuss these decisions and how they are being made.
And yet as soon as one series of categories are established they are just as quickly undone, the post-it notes placed back in their original rows as the process begins again, as a completely different set of categories are tentatively set out. For example: answers that suggest ‘power comes from the self’, answers that suggest ‘power comes from working together with other people’ and answers that suggest ‘power is something we are subject to, that it comes from above’.
As this process of categorization and re-categorization is enacted, together the spectator and performers can think about how such processes are in many ways arbitrary, at the same time seeing whether or not they can also shed new light on the original questions, whether or not we can make interesting observations about the community of people who have agreed to partake in this experiment. Of course, as you watch, this process also makes you further consider your own approach to this very particular game.
This is just one of the ways people might experience PME-ART’s gallery-based project HOSPITALITY 2. We will also take the post-it notes out onto the streets, into cafes and restaurants, to parties, learning everything we can about the community of people willing to answer our questions. During the four-week span of the exhibition there will be events and discussions that will question and re-invent the project from different angles, culminating in a performance on the final evening in which we arrange and re-arrange the post-it notes in every possible combination, constantly explaining and re-imagining as we go.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview uses the simplest possible materials (post-it notes, pens) in order to examine certain intersections between community, audience, data and real life. But at the core of Gradually This Overview is a distinct paradox. On the one hand its questioning produces the widest possible range of responses, showing individuals in all of their personal eccentricity and diversity. On the other hand it attempts to categorize these answers into meaningful patterns, patterns that the extreme diversity of the answers constantly reject and defy. If we were simply to ask people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions it would be very easy to turn their answers into data. We are definitely not choosing the easy route. Instead, we are much more interested in the paradox of seeing what happens when we allow the full diversity of human response to crash into our attempt to arrive at a meaningful overview of some kind of community.
.
April 21, 2010
A short video regarding HOSPITALITY 2
.
A short video regarding HOSPITALITY 2.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview
A project by PME-ART (Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren)
Installation / Performance
April 23 – May 16, 2010
We are in the gallery during gallery hours:
Wednesdays & Thursdays: 12pm - 6pm
Fridays: 12pm - 9pm
Saturdays & Sundays: 12pm - 5pm
Performance: April 28, 7pm
Artist talk: May 2, 3pm
Finissage/performance: May 14, 5pm
At Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montreal, QC
www.articule.org
Feel free to drop by any time or make an appointment at
hospitalite-hospitality@pme-art.ca or 514-284-3113
.
A short video regarding HOSPITALITY 2.
HOSPITALITY 2: Gradually This Overview
A project by PME-ART (Caroline Dubois, Claudia Fancello and Jacob Wren)
Installation / Performance
April 23 – May 16, 2010
We are in the gallery during gallery hours:
Wednesdays & Thursdays: 12pm - 6pm
Fridays: 12pm - 9pm
Saturdays & Sundays: 12pm - 5pm
Performance: April 28, 7pm
Artist talk: May 2, 3pm
Finissage/performance: May 14, 5pm
At Articule
262 Fairmount O.
Montreal, QC
www.articule.org
Feel free to drop by any time or make an appointment at
hospitalite-hospitality@pme-art.ca or 514-284-3113
.
April 20, 2010
...
.
Yes, of course none of the questions are so simple and I certainly don't have answers (and I am concurrently terrified that I'm becoming something a bit like a "didactic Marxist professor.")
It's a tepid cliche, but I guess I just think everything is, in one way or another, political. I like what Boris Groys says when he says: art that says it is not political is in fact political in favor of the market and in favor of the current status quo.
I also like what Brian Holmes says when he says: what he likes about using the word "we" is that one never has the right to do so, it is always an attempt to call forth some collective action and some temporary collective form of agreement.
Of course I also want to be successful, In fact, sometimes I think I'm the most purely careerist person I know. So life is full of such contradictions. But I also want to struggle with them. (Though of course I also fear being a hypocrite.)
.
Yes, of course none of the questions are so simple and I certainly don't have answers (and I am concurrently terrified that I'm becoming something a bit like a "didactic Marxist professor.")
It's a tepid cliche, but I guess I just think everything is, in one way or another, political. I like what Boris Groys says when he says: art that says it is not political is in fact political in favor of the market and in favor of the current status quo.
I also like what Brian Holmes says when he says: what he likes about using the word "we" is that one never has the right to do so, it is always an attempt to call forth some collective action and some temporary collective form of agreement.
Of course I also want to be successful, In fact, sometimes I think I'm the most purely careerist person I know. So life is full of such contradictions. But I also want to struggle with them. (Though of course I also fear being a hypocrite.)
.
April 19, 2010
The word political...
.
It suddenly struck me how the word political, in circles I frequent, is so often used to mean progressive, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, etc. Of course this is only one side of the equation. Fascism is equally "political", the Christian right are also very much political, etc. This one-sided use of the term, a kind of common-usage Freudian slip, which I myself am frequently guilty of, somehow relates to the absolutely intractable nature of the situation. An inability to naturally, and therefore usefully, reflect from both sides.
.
It suddenly struck me how the word political, in circles I frequent, is so often used to mean progressive, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian, etc. Of course this is only one side of the equation. Fascism is equally "political", the Christian right are also very much political, etc. This one-sided use of the term, a kind of common-usage Freudian slip, which I myself am frequently guilty of, somehow relates to the absolutely intractable nature of the situation. An inability to naturally, and therefore usefully, reflect from both sides.
.
April 16, 2010
April 15, 2010
April 14, 2010
A novel about an actor...
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A novel about an actor who gets cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film, thinks the script is complete garbage, the premise reactionary, and hates ever moment of shooting it. Critique of culture comes as no surprise.
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A novel about an actor who gets cast as the lead in a big-budget Hollywood action film, thinks the script is complete garbage, the premise reactionary, and hates ever moment of shooting it. Critique of culture comes as no surprise.
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