Nicolas O’Brien, one of the artists in the current Art Micro Patronage show, “Can’t Touch This” curated by Karen Archey, also writes a column entitled Hyperjunk on the Bad at Sports blog.  He was kind enough to include us in his most recent post, ”Hyperjunk: Observations on the Proliferation of Online Galleries,” a thoughtful survey and analysis of current online galleries.

However, there are a couple of points in the article that caught our attention, specifically in regards to our project.  In the spirit of keeping the conversation going, we’ve included some responses below:

 

If an ideal environment of an artists working online lies within the personal computing web-browsing experience, then why the need for relocating these works into another specific website/framing? What is “more accessible” about an online gallery then an artists personal website? Are the tropes from the traditional gallery system still playing too significant a role in the way in which net-art is being presented?

 

With Art Micro Patronage the idea of the curated group show is central.  We’re trying to encourage criticality about what is happening online by hiring curators to bring together artists whose work explores similar themes.  The internet is incredibly diverse and far flung which makes the process of synthesis and curation that much more important.  I trust some institutions and curators to do the research and outreach to bring to my attention artists whose work I may not have been exposed to otherwise, but also to highlight what is happening more broadly.  So maybe it’s not the works themselves that are rendered more accessible, but rather the connections between them.

To favor one system over the other, or to underscore the supposed ignorance of major cultural institutions for not having more net based art, can position the artist, work, or community as having ingrained entitlement due to its novelty.

 

I’m not sure I agree that it deserves entitlement due to its novelty.  In the late 90′s and early 2000′s there were quite a few institutions that were collecting and attempting to show net art.  But most gave it up.  At that point there was an exuberance about the novelty of anything and everything that was happening online.    However now I believe we’re at the point where the technology has caught up and the novelty has died down, and because it is so ingrained in our culture, the work that is happening online in a cultural context deserves critical attention.  It was in part the recognition that artists working online isn’t novel at all that motivated us to do this project.

Further, we hope to continue expanding the idea of what is considered “netart”.  We intentionally found curators working in diverse parts of the artworld in order to cull different works and types of shows.   For example, our next show curated by Dena Beard highlights the work of primarily social practice and conceptual artists who use the web to document their more ephemeral practice or as a site of exchange.  While these may not be “net artists”, the internet is an important part of their practice.

We love it!  In honor of their fiftieth issue, “Printed Matter,”  Art Practical is embarking on a new venture that rethinks how their editorial work could reach an audience and enter their homes and lives.   Each month for 6 months a different artist will choose an article that resonates with them from the AP archive, create an offset limited edition print in response, and send each subscriber a postcard, the print, and the original article.  It is limited to 150 subscribers and costs $150 for the six month subscription.

Learn more about AP’s Mail Art Subscription>>

From the site:

In conjunction with “Printed Matter,” and in honor of our fiftieth issue, we want to encourage you, our readers, to think about the value that exists in both the undifferentiated and ready access to information, ideas, and archives that online publishing grants and about the intimacy of a hand-addressed envelope intended for a single individual. In some sense, to consider how Art Practical might arrive in your mailbox.

We’re excited to announce the next artist for TPG’s Subscription:  Julia Goodman

images courtesy of Klea McKenna of In The Make

Julia earned her BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies at Tufts University in 2001. She began making paper in her backyard in 2003 and completed her Master’s in Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts in May 2009. Since graduating she spent the summer in Inverness, California at the JB Blunk Residency and the fall in New York, completing a studio internship at Dieu Donne papermaking studio. In 2012, Julia looks forward to two artist residencies, one on a small farm near lava flow in Hawaii and the other at “the dump,” through Recology San Francisco. Her work has exhibited widely throughout California, and in New York, Washington DC, and Gothenberg, Sweden. Currently, Julia is living and working in San Francisco.

Joe’s Links:

---

LISTENING:

Artists using Sound:

Ubu Web:  Ubu Web is an amazing reference for both recorded sound and film/video.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller use sound to make their work.  One of my favorites was a project they did in Berlin

Writers Reading their own work:

T.S. Eliot reads the wasteland.

John Giorno: I love the way Giorno uses his whole body when reciting his work.

Audio Archives:

Stanford University’s Archive of Recorded Sound has a very nice list of links to archives all around the internet – many of which allow streaming and/or downloads.

I had fun going to Michigan State’s Vincent Voice Archive and searching by year.

Don’t miss the Library of Congress’s audio site either.

The Internet Archive’s Audio Archive:  A plethora of stuff here too – check out their collection of 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings.

Radio Diet:

Most nights I fall asleep listening to Coast to Coast Radio:  Find it on your am dial.

Vinyl Lovers:

Mississippi Records: These people love vinyl and release amazing records.  I don’t know where they find some of this stuff, but I’m really glad they do.

LOOKING:

Russian Prison Tattoos:  Lots of really difficult and disturbing images.  Particularly fascinating to me are the translations of the texts that appear in the tattoos.

Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise:  My original idea for TPG was a kind of audio riff on Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise -  revisiting early works to create something new.

A Mornings Work:  I was introduced to this book of medical images from 1843 – 1939 about fifteen years ago and it has continued to fascinate and haunt me ever since.

Artists Using Text:  So many great artists have used text in interesting and important ways.  A few of my favorites are:

On Kawara
Yoko Ono’s Instruction Paintings:
Ed Ruscha
Kay Rosen

Philip Lorca diCorcia:  I saw a show of diCorcia’s work while I lived in Chicago.  The mystery, tension, beauty, and narrative quality in these photographs have been an influence on the way I think about making images.

Casper David Friedrich:  The way I approach landscape in my text drawings has been shaped by Casper David Friedrich’s stubbornly romantic and utopian vision.

READING:

Independent People:

Halldor Laxness   I had already made more that one drawing with shepherds in it when I read Halldor Laxness’s Independent People – he creates visceral images that are both heartbreaking and mind blowing.

Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan:  I recently reread this and couldn’t help but feeling like it must have had an impact on the way I use text to create images.  I wish I could do it half as good as Brautigan.

 

---

TPG’s Links:

A brief history of Conceptual Art on Records: “Basically, any work in which the process of creation or the intention motivating the artist is obviously more important (to the artist and the listener) than the results it created belongs to conceptual art. One good example is DJ Christian Marclay’s Record Without Grooves (Ecart Editions, 1987), a virgin LP. The same artist also released Footsteps (Rec Rec, 1990), a one-sided LP of recorded footsteps.”

The Sound of Art edited by Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City: The Sound of Art is a limited edition vinyl LP composed of sounds heard in New York galleries, museums, and project spaces over the last five years. Inspired by classic DJ battle records, it features forty tracks of diverse sounds culled from art video, performance footage, and kinetic sculptures. This is not an easy listening record. It’s an audio document and a tool to create new sounds and new work.

The Thing Quarterly Issue 13 – Matthew Higgs & Martin Creed:  Issue 13 is by visual artist, writer and curator Matthew Higgs and visual artist Martin Creed. The issue consists of a 12 inch vinyl 120 gram picture disk with Mathew Higgs on one side and Martin Creed on the other. The record contains one track by Martin Creed entitled ‘My Advice’ with words and music by Martin Creed.

People don’t like to read art  a show at Western Exhibitions in Chicago Il

“The Storyteller” Curated by Claire Gilman, Margaret Sundell at ICI: “an exhibition that focuses on artists who use the story form in contemporary art as a means of comprehending and conveying political and social events. Significantly, unlike their postmodern predecessors, the artists in The Storyteller neither take the idea of documentary truth as an object of their critique nor do they abandon fact for fabulation. Rather, they enable individuals (whether themselves, their subjects or their audience) to construct the story of their unique participation in historical processes, thereby presenting these events in a new and unexpected light.”

Bodies of Work by Seth S. Ellis: Ellis wrote a series of four fictional versions of the art he didn’t make in 2011. Each story was sold in the gallery as a chapbook, for a quarter apiece.

Molly Springfield: “recent and ongoing projects explore the invention of calotype photography in the 1830′s, conceptual art of the 1960′s and ’70′s, the proto-history of the Internet, Google’s book-scanning patents, the history of how drawing is taught, and the ways that marginalia reveals relationships between readers and texts. All of these efforts explore, to varying degrees, reproduction versus originality, seeing versus reading, and technology versus labor.

 

 

To begin writing about Joe Hardesty’s work for Audio/Visual, the latest edition of The Present Group, I began by holding my test pressing of the new issue: examining the forms within the stiff cloth-covered record case, the sheaves of paper printed with elegantly composed text, sliding the record itself out of its paper sleeve—considering the package as an object. I appreciate the simplicity of this set and see Hardesty’s philosophy and austere sense of materials at work here. Hardesty’s newest work revolves around time- and text-based experimentation, while utilizing a strict economy of form; there is a sense of tight control in the way the record is put together, in both the text printed on the sleeve and in all of the material choices evident in this edition.

The feeling of experiencing a highly mediated work grows stronger in listening to the elegantly executed tracks contained on Hardesty’s record. I’d prior listened to the tracks as mp3s that showed up in my Dropbox folder one day, which was an even stranger encounter than perusing Mr. Hardesty’s website or having this elegant package in my hands. Before the record had even been pressed, I listened to the rising and falling of a stranger’s voice, in headphones, one Sunday morning, via raw audio tracks. Listening to the tracks and knowing a record would be on its way soon, I felt anticipation in knowing that this object would bring about a new dimension to the work. If drawings were once seen as the preparatory work, a lesser-finished product than the studio painting, then listening to Hardesty’s raw audio tracks was akin to listening to drawings, with the clean white record itself serving as a highly controlled final product.

I also explored the work of Joe Hardesty as images online: hand-drawn text that appears to describe the act of creation or the process of another work in progress. His work is photographed in gallery settings or tightly cropped into drawings, mediated further by a laptop screen on which I view them. Hardesty states in his description of the Text Drawings series that he wants to make “the act of imagination… both visible and entertaining.” It is also his clear intent to mediate the acts of making and looking; and to control the experience of time and material for his audience, with precisely rendered text drawings and even more so with these audio tracks. Hardesty, most expressly with the record produced as Audio/Visual, Issue 19 of The Present Group, holds his audience captive in giving them his renderings of the created world around him.  In each audio track, he is seemingly describing a work of art in front of him, but he denies visual access to his listening audience. He uses quite plain language that captures quotidian scenes such as grey cobblestone warmed by sunlight in the opening track, Finest Looking; and more bizarre and grotesque ones, such as anthropomorphic safari animals being observed by a group of obese spectators who are eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, in Lions. With a satisfying economy of language, Hardesty gives the impression that a finished work exists, and he acts as the sole agent of such works. It remains a mystery where or if a finished work exists at all, outside of his text and audio renderings.

Joe Hardesty:  Vikings  2009  Pencil on Paper  27.5” x 39.5”    image courtesy of the artist

Similar to Washington, D.C.-based artist Molly Springfield, there is an aspect of deception in viewing Hardesty’s visual, text-based work. Springfield has spent years creating meticulous drawings of seminal texts, in photo-realistic renditions of photocopies of those texts. Her work brings up a similar tension between text and image; she brings to light the evidence of a hierarchy but then turns it on its head. Hardesty too plays this game with his pronouncements of the works he wishes the viewer to experience through him. He acts as mediator whether he is creating works that describe another work, or reading the poems that populate his drawings.

Molly Springfield:   Page 5   Graphite on paper   11 x 17 inches   image courtesy of the artist

An evolving thought occurs to me as I’ve been learning more about Hardesty’s work: I’m struck by how poetic, restrained and spare it is in its material considerations, but upon continuous listening and viewing there is a great sense of playfulness even in light of how tightly executed and controlled his finished works may be. The forebearers of Hardesty’s practice include poets and artists such as Sol LeWitt, Bruce Connor and Mel Bochner, as well as Ian Hamilton Finlay and other concrete poets who drove the conceptual art and concrete poetry movements of the 1960s. All of these artists investigated their own means of mediating artistic and linguistic experiences, as does Hardesty in the audio tracks accompanying this essay.  All of the aforementioned artists work with the ideas of language and time as material; each of them, even in experimentation, exhibits great control over their material. Hardesty, much like his predecessors, serves his listeners the experience of looking, but in a manner wholly controlled by the artist himself.

Hardesty, in giving us these text drawings in the form of audio tracks, pressed onto vinyl, is dictating the terms of our engagement with the work. The record begins: “This drawing looks down a steep hillside street paved with grey cobblestones…” Suddenly, I remember how time seems to slow down when listening to a record… how it holds your attention, without headphones, without a practical way of rushing from points A to B while still listening. I must stay close and flip the record when it is time and I realize that this is exactly how Hardesty meant for me to experience his sound works.  Hardesty, in every aspect of artistic execution, smartly wields the controls.

Eleanor Hanson Wise and Oliver interview Joe Hardesty about his recent issue of The Present Group, Audio/Visual

Frosted horse breath in the misty Belgian countryside, the morbidly obese enjoying KFC while taking in a centaur hunt, a lovingly rendered portrait of Jimmy Carter.  These are some of the images the listener is called to imagine in The Present Group’s nineteenth issue by Joe Hardesty.  Audio/Visual is an edition of 100 white vinyl records containing 44 spoken vignettes performed by the artist.  What began as immaculately executed text drawings are transformed  into an intimate auditory journey through the sublime, the grotesque, and the fantastical.

JOE HARDESTY is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.  Primarily making drawings on paper, Joe’s recent work has begun to investigate the use of sculpture, film, and recorded sound.  His drawings have been featured in a solo exhibition at Western Exhibitions in Chicago and a wide range of group shows in the US, Germany, Belgium, Austria, and China.   Joe was the 2008 recipient of the Gelman Travel Fellowship, which provided support for him to live and work for 1 year in Berlin, Germany. His drawings are included in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.

This year we combed through our back catalog and picked out what we think are great gifts for your hard to shop for loved ones.  These people don’t fit into categories most often associated with gift guides, so we thought we’d give them a little love.  Hope you enjoy it.

If infographics or spreadsheets are your lover’s passion, this poster by Ingrid Burrington may be a good fit.  Parsing out  Missed Connection Posts in New York City, this hand silkscreened poster is fun for everybody to read.   At only $20, it’s a steal. >>

You know the type.  While others check out the bar at a party, you find him at the bookshelves.  $65 >>

 

If the person on your list most enjoys walks in the woods or staring into a fire, this might be the present for her.  Presley Martin’s performance leads us gently into a place where we can let go and let the forces of nature do it’s bidding.  $55 >>

Does this person constantly keep you updated about the latest in tablets, phones and other gizmos?  Then this piece is for them.  Aaron GM’s interactive video will keep them guessing technically and fill their minds with a whole new meaning of data overload.  $75 >>

 

This do-gooder has asked you to skip material gifts this year.  A membership to Art Micro Patronage fits this bill quite nicely.  Not only are you giving the recipient a 6 month pass to experience all sorts of innovative digital art, but you’re also filling the stockings of a whole slew of artists to boot.  $60 >>

 

Always on the lookout for interesting classes, museum shows, and new experiences, this person loves to learn about the world and the creative people in it.  A subscription to The Present Group Art Subscription Service gives them food for thought throughout the year, filling their life with wonderful works from artists of all varieties.  $150 >>

 

Click image for the downloadable pdf of the zine put out by the Artists of the 99%.  Along with contributions from Christian L. Frock, Julia Bryon Wilson, Elizabeth Sims, W.A.G.E, Art Workers Coalition, and the Beehive Collective (among others), Joseph del Pesco‘s State of the Arts posters are highlighted.

 

 

 

You took it down, but we put it back up. You locked it up, but we broke it out. You are the gatekeepers, we are the gatecrashers. Expect us. -@0DayArt

We were recently sent word that 0-Day Art had downloaded and torrented all the videos in our first Art Micro Patronage exhibition “Material Motion” curated by Sarah Klein. Here is their statement from the .NFO:

0-Day Art supports artists being paid for their work. However, we do not
believe in approaches to the monetization of art that result in the works
being taken offline or access to them being restricted. We have archived
these videos so that they will be available to the widest possible audience
in perpetuity, freely distributable to all.
	
                  SUPPORT THE ARTISTS THAT PRODUCE QUALITY ART!
         IF YOU ENJOYED THESE VIDEOS, PLEDGE!  NET ARTISTS DESERVE SUPPORT!

This is wonderful and a testament to the beauty of the internet…. And it only took 1 day!

I’d like to use this as an opportunity to think through a few of the questions we’re dealing with in this project. First off, I hate to disappoint, but AMP is not really locking up these work from the internet. A quick google search shows that all but 1 of the videos are freely available on video sites or the artists personal websites. It is not a requirement that works in AMP shows be “exclusive” content (whatever that even means on the internet).

For us it’s a question of respect. We feel it’s important that artists have control over their work. As artists, we have a hard time accepting an ideology that takes that control away from creators. We all know that you can infinitely reproduce a digital work of art but the question is should we? I can imagine an artist trying to encourage donations by presenting an exclusive work on AMP. And if the exclusivity was successful, wouldn’t torrenting it hinder that artist’s ability to support herself via her work? Is it enough to simply command a downloader to “PLEDGE”?

I worry that the desire to make all online artworks forever available to everyone is just another manifestation of the idea that “exposure” or attention is all artists (or any of us producing online content) should really want. This is an idea promoted by people who are already making a living off that “sharing”, the Facebooks, Googles and even PirateBays of the world. Are we all unpaid workers for these entities?

Whether or not you agree that restricting access to works online is a good practice or not, I think we can all agree that there is a real scarcity for artists working online. It’s a scarcity of money and time to continue creating. The truly precious resource for artists is their potential for future work, thought, and experimentation. AMP is a system designed to address that very real limitation by putting dollaz in pocketz.

What started as a few vague ideas about the possibilities of micro-donations mixed in with questions about “collecting” digital artwork is now a full-blown, beautifully designed, web application for supporting online artists.

Art Micro Patronage is an experimental online exhibition space enabling you to view and support artwork that is ideally experienced on the internet. Built on the generosity of people like you, AMP is a vehicle for a new generation of art patrons, who are willing to associate their appreciation of great work with

actual dollar amounts, no matter how small.

We’re extremely proud, and also curious if anyone will use it.  So please, check it out. Each month we’ll present a new online exhibition.  And while you’re there, become a micro-patron of the arts by giving a small donation to the artists who pieces you like.

 

How many Billboards? was a large-scale urban exhibition debuts 21 newly commissioned works by leading contemporary artists, presented simultaneously on billboards in Los Angeles in February and March 2010.  It was organized by MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer with co-curators Lisa Henry, Dr. Nizan Shaked, and Dr. Gloria Sutton, and public art consultant Sara Daleiden.

Authentic Movement is an expressive improvisational movement practice that allows a group of participants a type of free association of the body. It was started by Mary Starks Whitehouse in the 1950s as “movement in depth”.

An introduction to Performance Art

A discussion of Action Art:  “The purpose of this text is to discuss the phenomena of actions, especially the type of action that is found in what is known as the “art world”. (1) In the following text this special kind of action is named action art. Central questions to this discussion are: 1. How should action art be categorized? Is it a special kind of theatre or dance? 2. Are there similarities between action art and other forms of human activities? 3. And finally, what is the intention of the use of action art as expression?”

Tom Marioni – A conceptual action artist, who has created a large body of work in drawing and printmaking. He is very influenced by simplicity and many of his prints are created through repetitive activity with a Zen-like concentration on the mark-making.

David Ireland – Conceptual sculpture artist who is most well known for creating site-specific installation pieces where much of his work is guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics. Here is an interview with Ireland in Art Practical. Ireland has shown in many great museums, this is an exhibition Ireland had at the Oakland Museum of California.

Jason Rhoades – Conceptual installation artist well known for his colorful energetic installations. Here is an article about him in the Guardian newspaper.

Will Rogan – Mixed media artist who works with photographs, video, sculpture and installation. His use of material examines the potential for beauty, manipulation and function in art making.

Tom Friedman – Conceptual sculpture who works with everyday material and found objects such as toothpicks, sugar cubes, fishing line, playdoh and much more. Here is good article about Friedman in Arts Editor.

The questions that emerge when watching multiple, virtual Aaron GMs perform in the spaces of an apartment are those I might ask when attempting to understand a stranger speaking and gesticulating in a foreign language. What is he trying to convey, if anything? Why? What relationship do his words, or murmurs, have with the space he inhabits, and to his movements?

With tight, fluctuating hand gestures and repetitive spoken words, Aaron is seen busily occupying five areas of a domestic interior. He seems to be mapping out a kind of disjointed narrative on a kitchen surface, on blank walls and in the air, with some degree of urgency. This is not, however, a story of any linear kind. Instead, Aaron lists and repeats words, in a monotone, and, maddeningly, the narrative goes nowhere. The interactive feature doesn’t help. Viewers, by moving their cursors to the right or left of the screen, can navigate a circular path around the apartment to observe Aaron perform in the five spaces he occupies. Investing viewers with agency further confounds the expectation of locating some narrative progression, making the experience all the more circular.

At times, Aaron has an aspect redolent of an obsessive compulsive, or a malfunctioning robot, reduced to a limited repertoire of physical and linguistic vocabulary. Yet, there is also a sense of intense concentration, of careful method and study to Aaron’s actions. The inclination to subject these collections of human expressions to some order is, for me, irresistible. It is tempting, too, to grasp for familiar media that the performer’s body language recalls. The precision and restraint in the movement of his hands, for instance, conjures sign language, or the art of mime. I imagine a round red ball will materialize between his fingers fleetingly and disappear again. By the couch, he employs a leg to create sculptural spaces, thereby adding another layer to the expression of his voice and hands. But Aaron’s work ultimately defies categorization. After a long period of time struggling to discern patterns in the video, it occurred to me that there might be no narrative here at all—that Aaron’s actions are not an effort to communicate with his audience through any known language.

Indeed if there is a conversation underway here, Aaron is having it with himself. Viewers are silent witnesses to the performer’s outward expressions of internal thought processes. The nature of these expressions suggests the workings of an unconscious mind: his speech takes the form of unorganized and repetitive (and sometimes undecipherable) references and fragmented phrases. In other words, the kind of unmitigated and mundane references and images I find myself scrawling onto a page through automatic writing. In the corridor, for example, Aaron lists a hodgepodge of celebrity names (“Mena Suvari”), brands (“Tylenol,” “Sprint”), television programs (“Entourage”), media-popularized phrases (“trickle-down effect”) and abstract images (“invisible string”) among many others. In the kitchen, Aaron is fixated on describing (what sounds like) a “walk”. The word is repeated over and over again in slightly different phrasal variations. At the same time, his hands negotiate the spaces around him thoroughly, using them as reference points for his nonsensical narrative.

Through this outpouring of everyday references, Aaron’s words absorb weight (not in the sense of meaning, but in the sense of physical presence) and rhythm. With every repetition, the words become less and less meaningful, and take on a material quality of their own. Aaron’s actions are, perhaps, best approached as a multilayered inquiry into human interaction with space; using his body and his voice, Aaron creates space, acts on it, measures it, inhabits it, brings textures to it. He bounces words and sounds off walls and surfaces, and uses his hands to frame and define them, as though to affirm proof of their physical presence. This is where Aaron’s title springs to life. Using his voice to draw forms and reinforcing them with corresponding movements, the artist effectively employs his body to assert the present moment.

The ubiquity of Aaron’s references matches the ordinariness of the apartment setting he inhabits. If we accept (as hard as it is to do), that his words don’t contain meaning, just as we cannot draw any intellectual sustenance from the commonplace white walls and modern furnishings of the apartment, we can begin to approach Aaron’s actions simply as the building of shapes with his arms, and legs, and voice. By using the tools of language to occupy and create space, viewers may fall prey, as I did, to the urge to decode Aaron’s unfamiliar mode of expression through traditional channels of communication. The artist challenges us to unlearn, for a few moments, the trappings of language, and find the message in the medium. Liberated from the cognitive processing of language, I found something far more stable: the tangible, physical occupation of space.

---

Tess Thackara is Senior Reviews Editor at Art Practical, an online arts journal to which she also contributes writing. She holds a BA degree in English Literature from Trinity College, Dublin, and has completed internships at Phaidon Press, and McSweeney’s—where she contributed research to Dave Eggers’s creative nonfiction work, Zeitoun. Her photography has been exhibited in London, and she recently produced a short documentary film about artists Richard and Judith Lang.

5 improvisations within the mundane to affirm the present moment by Aaron GM is The Present Group’s eighteenth piece.  The edition of 100 usb drives contain an interactive video of Aaron performing in 5 locations within a domestic interior.  Users may navigate through the 360 degree experience by moving their cursor back and forth and resting where ever they like.

One way or another, Aaron GM’s work is about presence.   When we first encountered his performances we took him to be lost in a single moment, repeating and playing with sounds and movements.  They were reminiscent of the joyous and strange songs we find ourselves singing at the end of a long car trip, only in physical form.  But in our interview with Aaron, he explained that he didn’t consider himself lost in his performances, but supremely present, internalizing and translating the environment into his own personal form of expression.   Either way, his movements and use of language creates and invigorates the space and the public around him in a way that both challenges and invites the viewers in.

Aaron GM (b. 1978 in Washington D.C.) lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at both San Francisco Art Institute and UCLA. Recently he exhibited a solo presentation at the NADA Art fair in Miami Beach (2010). Other Recent solo exhibitions include capezio (2010) at ltd los angeles, Timeshares (2009) at Parker Jones Gallery in Los Angeles, and sales calls (2008) at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver. Aaron has shown in group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

First edition out while being parents.  Harder than we thought.

Organized by Threewalls, Hand-in-Glove is a four day conference for independent visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. It is a way to start a national conversation on grassroots creative activity happening outside of traditional institutions and spread the word about innovative organizing models that could be useful to artists and organizers.

Featuring keynote speakers AA Bronson and Nato Thompson, a pretty amazing lineup of panelists from around the nation, parties, food experiences, and tours around the city of Chicago, the weekend will not be lacking.

Oliver and I be speaking on the panel entitled Fundraising and Organizing Strategies, a pragmatic discussion on how to raise funds, solicit support, and implement experimental programs. As a group of artists, independent organizers and nonprofits, we’ll re-imagine the possibilities for creating a healthy, mutually- supportive arts system and designing programs that promote collaboration and community spirit.

Details:

Hand in Glove Conference
October 20th – 23rd
Geolofts, 3636 S. Iron St., Chicago, IL 60609

Panels: click here to view explanations and participants

Keynote lecture with AA Bronson and Nato Thompson
Local Arts ecosystems
Unconventional Residency Programs
Archiving artist-run histories
Fundraising and organizing strategies
Closing Remarks and Discussion with Ted Purves, Sarah Workneh, and Bryce Dwyer

The Headlands Center for the Arts had its Summer Open House on Sunday.  Here are some of our favorites.

Christine Swintak

Jillian Conrad

Aideen Barry This stop motion video explored issues of domesticity.  It was pretty great.

Aideen Barry (again)  artist book with little animated projections

Nathan Lynch

Paolo Salvagione, Orbit

Mucklate is very sweet.

You many remember TPG 14 Map(256+128)³ by Mattew Cella. There were five “golden tickets” within the edition; they are printed on a golden aluminum alloy instead of the regular silver. Matthew sent us a sample of what five lucky subscribers received. Mucklate. Here are the ingredients: white chocolate, dark chocolate, caramel, chocolate cookie, one skittle, one gummy bear head and artificial colors. It was quite a surprise when opening a box to a colorful mound of a chocolate covered cookie!