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Richard Aldrich Manon de Boer Troy Brauntuch Matthew Buckingham Moyra Davey Thea Djordjadze Aurlien Froment Rachel Harrison Charline von Heyl Ull Hohn William E. Jones Elad Lassry Blinky Palermo Rosalind Nashashibi Laure Prouvost Steve Roden Emily Roysdon Rosemarie Trockel NOVEL with Ed Atkins Marc Camille Chaimowicz Sergej Jensen Sam Lewitt R.H. Quaytman Josef Strau Paul Thek TIME AGAIN May 9 July 25, 2011

Curated by Fionn Meade Texts by Richard Aldrich Moyra Davey Jacob King William E. Jones Isla Leaver-Yap Fionn Meade Steve Roden With a special contribution by NOVEL Ed Atkins Charles Atlas Barry MacGregor Johnston Mark Leckey Josef Strau Emily Wardill

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4. 6. 18. 22. 24. 26. 28. 30. 32. 34. 38. 40. 42. 44. 48. 50. 52. 54. 56. 60.

FOREWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TIME AGAIN Fionn Meade Richard Aldrich Manon de Boer Troy Brauntuch Matthew Buckingham Moyra Davey Thea Djordjadze Aurlien Froment Rachel Harrison Charline von Heyl Ull Hohn William E. Jones Elad Lassry Rosalind Nashashibi Blinky Palermo Laure Prouvost Steve Roden Emily Roysdon Rosemarie Trockel

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TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW: THE FORM OF RADICAL REPETITION Isla Leaver-Yap WHEN ADJACENT WORKS CONVERSE Steve Roden OPEN LINK IN NEW TAB Jacob King BERLIN 1961 William E. Jones TIME AGAIN AND AGAIN (2001) Richard Aldrich EXCEPTS FROM NOTES ON PHOTOGRAPHY & ACCIDENT Moyra Davey

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72. 77. 84.

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NOVEL A special contribution to Time Again

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FOREWORD & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As an organization dedicated to contemporary art, we are often expected to predict the future. SculptureCenters reputation is built in large part on our ability to identify new talent, champion aesthetic innovation, and show the way forward, and we embrace these challenges wholeheartedly. Time Again, an exhibition of work spanning disparate media by artists of multiple generations, puts the future aside for a moment and asks us to consider the present not as a temporal condition but as a space in which then and now converge, replay, reverse, enact, and unfold. Curator Fionn Meade has reframed a conversation in contemporary art about how we think about memory, repetition, history, and identity, not in order to freeze time in a snapshot, but rather to refocus our attention on agency. This exhibition and catalog have been made possible through the commitment, encouragement and generosity of many people. First I want to thank Fionn Meade, our Curator, who has organized an intelligent, fresh, and, I believe, radical exhibition and written a compelling and insightful essay for this catalog. Curatorial Associate Kristen Chappa, and Curatorial Intern Misa Jeffereis, have been instrumental in coordinating the exhibition and production of the catalog. We are also grateful to the 4

lenders who have shared works from their collections, and the galleries who facilitated loans and assisted with logistics and communication. We are honored to include in this volume texts and essays by an amazing group of artists and writers. The varied forms of their participation have made this a richer publication. A special thank you is due to Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams of NOVEL for their special contribution to the exhibition and to this book. We also express our gratitude to Chad Kloepfer and Jeff Ramsey whose considerable talents have provided an elegant and thoughtful design for this book. SculptureCenters exhibitions and programs have beneted from the ongoing support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs as well as the Lambent Foundation advised by the Tides Foundation and the Kraus Family Foundation. This support, along with that of our dedicated and forward-thinking Board of Trustees and many individual donors, has enabled us to continue to pursue an ambitious program and connect artists and audiences. This particular exhibition was supported by a generous contribution from Jeanne Donovan Fisher who has been a loyal and consistent supporter of our thematic and group exhibitions.

Finally, on behalf of the board and staff of SculptureCenter, I want to thank the artists who have contributed work to the exhibition as it is obviously their brilliant insight and creative agency that drives our work. Mary Ceruti Executive Director

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TIME AGAIN Fionn Meade Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution1 Exploring the language of repetition, Time Again brings together works that destabilize conventional ways of seeing and considering what is past and what is present. Engaging gesture, image sequence, material affect, and displaced narrative, the works on view create disjunctions with the way the time of the present is experienced, challenging our understanding of what it means to be contemporaries. Archival and historical settings are re-animated within the exhibition only to be undone, insisting on a gestural and affective working method. History is not engaged as stable and singular, nor is it a place of redress or amendment. Rather, it is an unfolding place to be occupied, used, redirected, and put back in motion. Contoured development and progress is replaced with the desire to be re-regarded, touched and felt. This is a place of lag, slip, and detour where the performing body and political subject present themselves via acts of estrangement, reversal, ritualized behavior, and fragmentation.2 In its insistence upon a temporal register, Time Again occupies a time-place akin to what Pamela Lee 6

has termed the middle condition an engagement with medium as a mode always and already in between, rather than a parameter based primarily on material properties or spatial considerations.3 Under the inuence of such a condition, images and objects act as sequences and durational constructs, adhering to each other and playing up associative possibility. Here, abstraction reasserts a longstanding dialog with the place of iconography through modes of projection, superimposition, doubling, and the difference and variation that lies within repetition. Identication is allowed back into the act of viewing, in looking and looking again. In Matthew Buckinghams Image of Absalon to be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001, a public that may never have existed is addressed through the artists fragmented portrait of the 12th-century Danish warriorbishop Absalon, the quasi-mythic founder of the city of Copenhagen. Comprised of a single 35mm slide that depicts a 1901 equestrian sculpture of an axe-wielding Absalon rearing up in battle, the heat from the slide projector slowly dissolves the image over the length of the exhibition. The accompanying text describes the contested history surrounding the sculptures placement in the central Hjbro Square of Copenhagen, and how Absalon used the wealth he plundered during the territorial expansion of numerous military campaigns to fortify what is now Copenhagen, as well as his commissioning of the

rst written history of the Danish people, the Gesta Danorum or Deeds of the Danes. The slow fade of Buckinghams time-based treatment of icon and image destabilizes the xed nationalistic origin myth that Absalon sought to impose and which the monument commemorates. Left with an increasingly insufcient image, the viewer is asked to reassemble a more ambiguous historical understanding, and occupies the space that Buckingham has termed (after Walter Benjamin) the vanishing point of history.4 From this view, the present moment is conceived as the point where history vanishes, reversing the notion of history as receding somewhere behind us, in a time that no longer exists.5 To reconsider past events and materials is to restage those events in the present in order to think about the here and now. It is in these efforts that the vanishing point surrounding us is revealed. Manon de Boers lm Attica, 2008, for example, captures a refracted consideration of the infamous 1971 prison uprising in the form of a musical performance. Composed of a single tracking shot, the blackand-white lm captures a rendition of two 1971 compositions by American composer Frederic RzewskiComing Together and Atticathat responded to the politically charged events at Attica Correctional Facility in New York in the fall of that year. Following a violent takeover triggered by inmate demands for better conditions, Governor Nelson Rockefeller

ordered an armed retaking of the prison, which resulted in 43 casualties, national controversy, and political fallout. In de Boers lm, the basic canon structure of the title composition is performed by a quartet appearing before a white sheet. Moving slowly past the performers, the ten-minute shot blurs slightly as it proceeds to trace the contours of an empty industrial building, coming back into focus via a mirrored (and therefore reversed) reection of the ongoing performance before eventually returning to its initial point of view. As the lead performer utters staccato words taken from a letter written by one of the leaders of the uprising, the historical event reverberates within the sustained duration of de Boers auditory and visual echo. In William E. Jones video Berlin Flash Frames, 2010, the force with which repetition can undo context and open up interpretation is directly archival. Parceling out footage from an unedited lm produced by the U.S. Information Agency and found in the U.S. National Archives with the provisional title Berlin 1961, Jones video features distanced shots of the Berlin Wall under construction by the U.S. military alongside a propagandistic scenario featuring a main actor on stage sets and in the street. Devoid of sound, the proximity of a historical barrier under construction and a silenced piece of propaganda is exploited to expose gestural afnity. A journalistic photo-op of then Mayor of West Berlin (and future Chancellor 7

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of West Germany) Willi Brandt and an African delegation visiting Checkpoint Charlie is countered with an in-the-eld shot of German citizenry waiting in line for relocation to what is now West Berlin. Moving between highly constructed scenes and seemingly offhand footage, Jones emphasis on the footages ash frames (whereupon a sudden are of light occurs in between shots) begins to take precedence. The overexposed frames are coupled with the idiosyncratic dipping motion of the cameraman at the end of takes, which provide a rhythmic repetition in Jones editorial sequencing, collapsing context and preventing an explicit or discursive reading. As Jones writes within this publication, a wall is constructed, but so is an image. The narrative certainty of the wall as a clearly conceived historical signier is thus displaced and unsettled. In its place, a time, Berlin 1961, and the fabrication of image, boundary, and worldview. The indirect portrait of Cairo observed in Rosalind Nashashibis lm This Quality, 2010, is likewise a tightly framed view of a city, sequenced via observations of likeness and variation. Opening upon a young woman with lucid, pale eyes seated before the camera, sounds of trafc, voices, and birds punctuate four different close-ups. Recalling the format of Warhols Screen Tests, 196466, the womans placid gaze is refocused outward to a variety of striped fabric car covers found in the streets of 8

Cairo. Ranging from light blue to vibrant pink and purple to grey offset by brown and burgundy to completely tattered, the variety of covers take on a subdued anthropomorphic humor. The banter of a sidewalk caf, the furtive glance of boys passing before the camera, an afternoon call to prayer, the varying strides of passersby unfold around a makeshift yet universal sign of abstraction hereby made familiar and human.6 Evoking what Gilles Deleuze termed the out-of-eld principle of the moving image, that which refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present, Nashashibi allows the city and the presence of history in through focusing on a seemingly arbitrary signier.7 In dwelling upon a covering up, the place of Cairo opens into a disjunctive yet familiar space where similitude and recognition replace the imposed abstraction of a mapping of streets and delineated districts. The out-of-eld principle evoked by the self-conscious gaze toward the camera and the subsequent leap from car to cara mode aptly called eyeballing by Nashashibi in a separate lmbetrays an awareness and anticipation before the camera that Giorgio Agamben identies as denitive of cinema, namely a reinscription of gesture that calls attention to its vitiated cultural status. As he writes: In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss.8

For it is the sphere of the rehearsal, outtake, and episode that differentiates cinematic time from theater, ritual, and bourgeois custom. Existing forever alongside a time of whole and unitary performance, cinema both mourns and ridicules linearity, duration, and continuity. And yet, as Agamben further intimates, perhaps it is exactly the phenomenological gap opened by the moving image that maintains a reserve of mimetic capability for our contemporary time that was long exhausted in the still images embedded subservience to logo, slogan, and column.9 In Emily Roysdons Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 2001 2007, the still image serves to respond to and redirect the late artists work Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978 79, itself a partially borrowed stance. In a series of twelve photographs Roysdons female friends wear a David Wojnarowicz mask in various sites around New York, forcibly comparing the two times. Fashioned from a seemingly photocopied mask of the French poet, Wojnarowiczs original version of the pote maudit poses in late 70s urban New York. Scenarios are taken from Wojnarowiczs routes through the citybuying a ticket at a porn theater, riding a grafti-laced subway car, in bed with a lover, shooting up in a derelict squat. Roysdons sequence, on the other hand, irts with the isolated gure of the tragic poet while also leaning toward a queer collective memory. The mask is passed around and mnemonic

gesture is shared.10 In both projects, the masks underscore an implied but fragmentary narrative, extending the out-of-eld into a cinematic sequence of still images. The dynamic of a mask acting as an immobilized gaze that withholds identity while immediately proposing an affective identication with persona is choreographed repeatedly in Rosemarie Trockels work. With the ceramic wall sculpture Mars, 2006, for example, the immobilized gaze is meant to be the return of ones own visage. But when a viewer looks closer to nd their reection, the luminous platinum glaze disperses light and gives back a blurred impression. The mirror on the wall does not play according to the rules of identication, refusing to return a stable representation, offering instead the tiny deportations and tactile gleam of a cracked surface. Trockel exposes the social codes and clichs that underscore our need for empathic identication while also giving form to the lack that arises in its place. Her video Goodbye, Mrs. Mnipaer, 2003, is a pantomime that explores the psychologically fraught role-playing that can emerge between artists and gallerists, studio and market concerns, and private and public selves. A rst view introduces the distanced view of a Modernist lakeside bungalow with wall-sized windows and the articial sound of waves lapping against a shoreline, while a second more voyeuristic view reveals two women reviewing a series of portrait 9

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paintings propped against the glass. The two womenone in bikini and heels, the other in a bathrobeare wearing photocopied masks bearing banal facial expressions. After the woman in bathrobe departs with a handshake, the scene is repeated with a suited man wearing sunglasses. Reduced to empty gestures, Trockels facsimile personae parody the Urscene of making a deal as the video ends with the dealer character pacing back and forth gesticulating into her cell phone. In place of an explicit critique, role-playing reveals a rupture, as the desire to seize a stable representation of the self becomes a masquerade. That the purchase of an artwork can become a social occasion for disguise and assertion of power is nothing new. Indeed, the dissembling guise of an artwork acting as an extension of social reach is ancient. In the Vedic tradition of Hinduism, for example, it is an avatar that cloaks the manifestation or appearance of a deity. An avatra of the deity Vishnu, for example, might take the form of a boar-like creature or a half-man, half-lion, appearing as an unlikely shape-shifter that paradoxically restores cosmic order. Today, the term avatar also conveys an online username, persona, or virtual self, while also being the title of the highest grossing Hollywood lm to date. Rachel Harrisons Avatar, 2010, plays off a concatenation of these associations and more. Bright drips, whorls, and washes of paint color a pedestal 10

that plays host to a draped piece of camouage clothing and a framed picture. The shape-shifter within the frame is a half gure made up of a cutout torso of the heavy metal singer and reality television casualty Ozzy Osbourne collaged over the body of a tattooed native on a river raft. Harrisons skewed perspective puts a quasi-semiotic dynamic in motion as cast-off consumer products and popular imagery are recombined to both imply and defer symbolic meaning. In Troy Brauntuchs Stamps, 19752007, a reliquary of analog avatars is comprised of a collection of handmade rubber stamps. Deployed in his collages over the past 30 years, the assembly of efgy-like forms are placed within an alcove and shown alongside a selection of collages from the same period. Together, they expose the source/image relationship in Brauntuchs work that ranges from public and historically charged imagery to sentimental images taken from personal experience. As with the opacity of Brauntuchs cont crayon on canvas works, the anonymity of everyday life colludes with historical imagery from various periods to offer a spectral view of experience. Brauntuch challenges the viewer to look and look again, mimicking the efforts to conjure an image from memory. Memory tricks and sleight-ofhand procedures populate Aurlien Froments installations and performances, a focus that includes an abiding interest in mnemonic devices of the past. Rabbits, 2009, is a silent

video that shows two hands demonstrating how to tie a bowline knot, accompanied by subtitles that recount the procedure. The text invokes the traditional maritime rhyme of a rabbit circling a tree before he dives back into his hole, a gesture that illustrates a technological memory, reconstructing the movement of a nautical past and the story that still adheres to it through embodied information. In the protean practice of Steve Roden, painting, drawing, lm, and sound and sculpture installations transpose performative actions, as well as literary and art historical references, into an idiosyncratic, scorebased approach to generating abstraction. In his silent lm striations (stones and clouds), 2011, Roden performs an intimate eulogy to his grandmother. Through improvised interactions with unnished stone carvings and images found in her sculpture studio upon her passing, striations recalls New York School composer Christian Wolff s 1968 score: Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds (and colors); for the most part discretely, sometimes in rapid sequences. For the most part striking stones with stones, but also stones on other surfaces (inside the open head of a drum for instance) or other than struck (bowed for instance, or amplied). Do not break anything.11

Layered together with cutout images of landscapes surrounding Henry Moores public sculpturesan orienting inuence for his grandmothers artistic practiceand direct drawing onto the footage, Roden converses with deeply personal yet unfamiliar objects, enacting a gestural and silent threnody. The playful silence of Thea Djordjadzes Deaf and Dumb Universe (Gerst), 2008, positions the pliable nature of paper-mch, plaster, and clay objects against a framework that references the design style of international modernism made skeletal and absurd. Undermining the look of sleek and functional design, the support structure displays talismanic curiosities that appear coarse and unnished as if awaiting further transformation. Mute yet entreating, Djordjadzes forms resemble the residue left behind after a ritual or cryptic game. In contrast, the plaster relief forms of Ull Hohns Untitled, 1988, are coated with a dark brown gloss that gives them a still responsive, malleable appearance of just having set. Reminiscent of John Millers fecal reliefs, Hohns tactic is one of pacing movement between forms rather than a collapse of products into sameness as in Millers work. The viewer is invited to observe the variation of each tablet-like piece in Hohns sequence, drawing out a visceral response. Ull Hohn (19601995) studied with Gerhard Richter in Dsseldorf before moving to New York in 1985, and 11

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the reliefs are part of his efforts to re-occupy the place of painting and abstraction as a mode of critique within the highly contested gender and identity debates of the moment. His insertion of a linforme painting style into post-conceptual approaches demands a reconsideration of the terms of institutional critique prevalent at the time. A generation before Hohn, Blinky Palermo (1943-1977) inserted his own provisional formalism into the problematic place of advanced abstraction in the painting, sculpture, and design dialog. Borrowing from the continued auratic potential of an icons placement, Palermo animated geometric abstraction as a mode of possible institutional critique while also luxuriating in the facture of its surface pleasures. As Lynne Cooke writes, In contrast to the approach to seriality explored by his generationby Ryman, say, or even Donald Judd (who famously described it as one thing after another)Palermo allows repetition to encompass difference to the point where it strains that very notion, morphing seriality into a cryptic mode of sequencing.12 In Projektion, 1971, Palermo presents an image of a two-paneled red and blue Stoffbilder (cloth painting) transposed into a photographic slide projected onto a window surface so that it appears to adorn a building facade opposite. Shown as a four-color, offset print, Projektion compresses Palermos sequencing procedure into a single enigmatic image. The language of 12

abstract painting is untethered, extending itself into photography, architecture, and beyond. This tacking back and forth between styles is familiar to Richard Aldrichs stagecraft. Ranging from gestural abstraction to incipient portraiture, from dusty-hued patinas and faint washes to crudely collaged canvases and densely layered corners, from monochromatic stand-ins to cut paintings, Aldrichs image repertoire evinces a whimsical amusement and quizzical remove. Neither parodic nor engaged with endgame dialogs regarding the oft-heralded demise of painting, Aldrichs gamesmanship is joyful but nonetheless harmonized with doubt. Angie Adams/Franz Kline, 2010-2011, nds Aldrich quoting in equal parts jest and earnestness the spontaneity of a bygone era, while Zig-Zag Cubism, 2011, parcels out the remnants of one of his own compositions for wry commentary on failure. Aldrichs work is propelled by the readings between compositions and second thoughts that take on a ruminative ambience. Evincing a shallow, palimpsestlike approach, Charline von Heyls paper works insist upon unexpected encounters between digital reproductions and archaic precursors such as hand-carved woodcuts, stencils, lithographs, and screen prints. Perceptual tricks of abstractionreceding depth, the inversion of a gestural underpainting perceived as overlayare paired with an acute understanding of popular iconography as outline, shadow,

and apparition. Resistant to facile representation, von Heyl emerges with paintings and prints that negotiate a roughhewn symbolism. Untitled, 2011, uses acrylic, spray paint, charcoal, photocopy, lithograph, and silkscreen on mylar and paper to collage together a fragmented, oscillating visual narrative of descent, re, and retinal quiver that borrows whatever it desires, holding the viewer hostage to its erasures and repetitions. Laure Prouvosts It, Heat, Hit, 2010, likewise assails the viewer with seduction and dismissal as her video inter-cuts a barrage of fast-paced moving images (taken by the artist) with textual directives and warnings that beseech the viewer to stay with the frantic pacing. Cooing one moment with placid words and entreaties only to rail against the viewer to pay attention and remember everything the next, Prouvosts narrator is both sinister and comic, while close-up imagery (a swimming frog, car wheels burning rubber, needles in a mouth, red hot coals, to name a few) and percussive commentary bear out an intense lyricism that contradicts the contemporary malaise of a surfeit of information images. Making an unforgettable poetry of emphatic repetition, gestural affect, and confrontational address, Prouvost replaces narrative expectation wholesale with editorial acuity and associative imprint. Similar to Claude Lvi-Strauss description of the bricoleur who always references some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog

straying, or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle,13 peripheral discord is brought into syncopated focus in Elad Lassrys pictures. Building a recursive kinship between once utilitarian prompts and the exhausted staging of product and audition scenarios, Lassry evokes the loss of image efcacy in our increasingly cross-referenced, sortable digital age. Context, source and circulation are ghosted into background concerns. Placeholders meant to be readily legible lapse into a stuttered motion as the conventions of studio photography are collaged and recast. Unmoored from illustrative delity a shift accentuated by the pull toward sculptural objecthood in their framing and deliberate left to right pacingLassrys image sequences depart from the marketing diegesis of advertising and Hollywood public relations that it trades upon. Erstwhile protagonists, often collaged from or modeled upon Lassrys predilection for 1970s pop culture ephemera provoke a range of moods and expressions decoupled from plot and target audiences. Lassry trafcs in a secondary register of lesser fame, familiarity, and circulation to uncanny effect. Moyra Daveys photographic work evokes a very different critical trajectory even as it relies upon associative sequencing and a decontextualizing of familiar settings. Prone to a matter-of-fact intimacy and diaristic approach, Davey mines the behavior of domestic space and 13

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1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell (H. Holt and Company, 1911), p. 17. 2. In this regard, Time Again relates to the gap of meaning in Freudian parapraxis where convention and expectation lapse into errancy, revealing an involuntary disclosure, an anomaly, an overturn, a haunting. 3. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (MIT Press, 2004), p. 5152. 4. In a 1935 letter to Max Horhkeimer detailing the approach taken in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes: The issue this time is to indicate the precise point in the present to which my historical construction will orient itself, as to its vanishing point. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 509. 5. Mark Godfrey offers a keen and thorough consideration of many of Buckinghams works and his engagement with the writings of Susan Buck-Morss and Walter Benjamin in The Artist as Historian, October, (Issue 120, July 2007), p. 141172. 6. The improvised signs that arise in navigating the density of a city recall both Michel de Certeaus notion of spatial stories in his essay Walking in the City (The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984) but also Sigfried Kracauers incisive comment that the position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its surfacelevel manifestations than from that epochs judgments about itself. Sigfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 75. 7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986), p. 17. 8. Giorgio Agamben, Notes on Gesture, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (Verso, London and New York, 1993), p. 137. 9. Ibid., p. 140. 10. As art historian Johanna Burton writes, Roysdons desire to inhabit another time and/or another artist is layered, and it exceeds the subject it evokes: Roysdon occupies Wojnarowicz and is simultaneously occupied by himnot to mention pre-occupied with him. Johanna Burton in New York, Beside Itself, Mixed Use Manhattan: Photography & Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (MIT Press, 2010), p. 201.

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urban routine. 50 Photographs, 2003, for example, is a bloom-like sequence of images that peers into the worn languor of melancholia and fetish. Close-up and distanced views frame much-loved objects and the residual underpinning of daily life: a bare light xture, an empty liquor bottle, stacks of analog stereo equipment, books and records everywhere, the needle of a record player, the recurrent imposition of a pillar, a hallway scorched with sunlight, dust under a dogs paw. Tracing the cultivated acts of reading, listening, and collecting, Daveys photographic space is an interior removed from the vrit promise of street encounter or gurative subject. 50 Photographs is not staid but associative in recording a pre-digital view of absence and the material afnities of a life unfolding. As George Baker writes, Davey shows us that an attachment to loss of the photographic medium to its own losshas become a space of possibility for contemporary photography. Far from a pathological xation, such melancholia should be understood as a space of opening (an open wound, if you will).14 Perhaps less a wound than a space of attentiveness, the gaps in between images as much as the pictures themselves convey a state of mind, a mood, and a structure of feeling. In the spirit of analogy and return within the exhibition, Novel, a project founded by London-based editors and curators Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams, organizes a display of 14

work within Time Again. A publication project that takes up experimental writing as a parallel practice to art-making, Novel draws on politics, poetry, theory, and storytelling to explore the possibility of a new critical ction. Each iteration of the project is accompanied by what its editors call the ctioning of a scenario that includes a display of artworks, readings, and screenings. Here, that scenario takes the form of Novel revisiting past collaborations with Ed Atkins, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Sergej Jensen, R.H. Quaytman, and Josef Strau. Inviting the artists to present works that play off of repetition and return, Novel acts as a speculative force within Time Again, meanwhile editing a special section of this catalog. In reconsidering his text, The Non-productive Attitude (previously published in the exhibition catalog Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne, ICA Philadelphia, 2006), Josef Strau alights upon a willingness to return to ones own work at the risk of uncertainty and doubt, but also with the possibility of gaining experiential exposure. As he writes in his piece What Should One Do, the only way or step out would become the productivity of confessional selfexposure. Thus the only way out is in the space between the self and others, in the vanishing point of history that one must enact, in the object that looks back, in the image that moves, in the words that open space, in the time that is again, here and now.

11. Christian Wolff, STONES, in Prose Collection, 196874 (Frog Peak Music, 2007), p. 9. 12. Lynne Cooke, Introduction, To the People of New York (Dia Art Foundation, 2010), p. 17. 13. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966), p. 19. 14. George Baker, Some Things Moyra Taught Me, Frieze, (Issue 130, April 2010), p. 1920.

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RICHARD ALDRICH Angie Adams /Franz Kline, 2010 2011 Oil, wax, and vine charcoal on cut linen 84" x 58" Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York

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RICHARD ALDRICH Zig-Zag Cubism, 2011 Collage and china marker on linen 84" x 58" Courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York

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MANON DE BOER Attica, 2008 16mm lm, black & white, sound, 10 minutes Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels

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TROY BRAUNTUCH Stamps, 19752007 Rubber stamps Dimensions variable Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Photo: Lamay Photo

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MATTHEW BUCKINGHAM Image of Absalon to be Projected Until it Vanishes, 2001 Slide projection and framed text Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

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MOYRA DAVEY 50 Photographs, 2003 14 C-prints: 12" x 17" 36 C-prints: 8" x 10" Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

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THEA DJORDJADZE Deaf and Dumb Universe, 2008 Installation view, 5th Berlin Biennial Courtesy of Sprth Magers, Berlin/London Copyright Thea Djordjadze Photo: Uwe Walter, 2008

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AURLIEN FROMENT Rabbits, 2009 HD video, color, silent, 5:41 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Motive Gallery, Amsterdam Photo: Aurlien Mole

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RACHEL HARRISON Avatar, 2010 Wood, acrylic, jeans, and pigmented inkjet print 74" x 36" x 36" Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

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CHARLINE VON HEYL Untitled, 2011 Acrylic, spray paint, xerox, lithograph, silkscreen, and charcoal on mylar and paper Grid of 12 works on paper, each: 24" x 19" Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York

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ULL HOHN Untitled, 1988 (detail) Oil on cast plaster and wood 7.75" x 12" x 2" each, from a series of 8 Courtesy of Algus Greenspon Gallery, New York

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WILLIAM E. JONES Berlin Flash Frames, 2010 Sequence of digital les, black & white, silent 8:18 minutes, looped Installation view Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Photo: Fredrik Nilsen In Mathew Bradys Studio, 2010, Sequence of digital les, black & white, silent 3 hours, 21 minutes, looped Installation view Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

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ELAD LASSRY Laminated Structure (For Her and Him), 2009 Silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame 14.5" x 11.5" x 1.5" (framed) Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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ELAD LASSRY Laminated Structure (For Him), 2009 Silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame 14.5" x 11.5" x 1.5" (framed) Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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ROSALIND NASHASHIBI This Quality, 2010 16mm lm, color, sound, 4:33 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Tulips & Roses, Belgium

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BLINKY PALERMO Projektion (Projection), 1971 (detail) Four-color offset print on offset cardboard 15.75" x 15.75" Edition of 150

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LAURE PROUVOST It, Heat, Hit, 2010 Video, color, sound, 7:20 minutes Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London

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STEVE RODEN striations (stones and clouds), 2011 Ink and 16mm lm transferred to video, color, silent, 6 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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EMILY ROYSDON Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 2001 2007 12 black & white photographs 11" x 14" each Courtesy of the artist

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ROSEMARIE TROCKEL Goodbye, Mrs. Moniper, 2003 Video, black & white, sound, 5:40 minutes Courtesy of Sprth Magers, Berlin/London

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ROSEMARIE TROCKEL Memorial Day, 2008 Mixed media 26.75" x 22.75" x 2" Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York

ROSEMARIE TROCKEL Umbrella, 2008 Mixed media 26.75" x 22.75" x 2" Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

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TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW: THE FORM OF RADICAL REPETITION Isla Leaver-Yap In London, a man sits in a coffee shop on the corner of Old Compton and Frith Streets. His loyalty card is stamped each time he orders a cappuccino. Three stamps later he gazes out of the caf window and looks across the street, where he spies a group of young, attractive media types mingling, drinking coffee and chatting to one another. To the man, it appears as if the people are playing parts in a television advertnot a specic commercial, but just some advert with beautiful people having fun. In their gestures and their movements, how they throw their heads back when they laugh; they dont have to watch other beautiful people laughing and hanging out on TV. They could be those people themselves. See? Just like me, he thinks, completely second-hand. This incident, a re-described scene from British novelist Tom McCarthys Remainder, is the opening gambit in a game of re-enactment, where the unnamed protagonist discovers and plays out his obsession with the form of the repeated gesture. From his recurring orders of coffee (in a single sitting he orders no less than six cappuccinos) to the casting of casual passersby into the genre of

commercial advertising, the protagonists fascination with repetition spirals into an 8million re-enactment of a traumatic event he cannot remember but which he hopes to recall through its reconstruction. This is the satirical extreme of repetition compulsion: the characters usual impulse to remember is substituted for the compulsion to repeat. But perhaps this misremembering is not so different from repetition: it is repetition of a sort. Kierkegaard writes, Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Yet McCarthys character constructs, without memory, a disingenuous repetitiona version without an original. The protagonists re-enactment is built upon suspect fragments: a crack in a wall, the smell of liver frying, an ice-hockey mask. Abstract and motile symbols such as these, which lack the narrative of memory, turn the re-enactment into a double decoy: it is not only a surrogate of but also a diversion from the mans absent memory. As the character notes, his experience is completely second-hand; it is always indirect and severed from the point of origin. Although setting out to reconstruct a prior experience, the re-enactment ends up creating an alternate. Even in its reconguration, the re-enactment is, by dint of the characters amnesia, an event without comparison: a radical repetition. 65

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Radical repetition is thus not the product of appropriation or inuence, but repetitions attempt to usurp the characteristics of the original object. It is pure imitation: an imprint whose mark signies the absence of the initial object. Unlike the re-enactment that consciously reects its precursor with a kind of reverence, radical repetition nds itself in altogether different territoryone that dissents from the intentions of the original. Remarking on the aims of his practice, German artist Peter Roehr states the original function of objects should be totally forgotten. An artist in Frankfurt in the early 1960s who also worked a day job at an advertising agency, Roehrs attitude has a heightened awareness of the early tactics of modern advertising and its goal to create images of desire in place of the object that it promotes. Using audio and visual footage culled from industrially produced television and radio commercials, Roehr repurposed the material into a hypnotic series of looped repeating works, thus replicating the objective of advertising within his own practice. What interested me was not the literary content of the scenes, but rather the elapse of movements which, when starting up again where they had left off, yielded a movement-network, says Roehr. I attempted to gauge the length of the complete strips such that the lm ended when this network threatened to dissolve and the movement took on its character. 1 66

Movement in place of content, gesture in place of functionthese things are integral to but not unique in Roehrs work. Such use of repetition to derail the original intention of the image or text is evident throughout the practice of an artist like Joan Jonas, but it is also the working principle in Rosalind Nashashibis lm Eyeballing, 2005. Eyeballing uses radical repetition to disregard the objects it displays and reassemble them according to the artists vision. Using the camera as a transformative machine, Nashashibi nds faces in the fabric of New York City, using repetition as a form of emphatic insistence. Framed within Nashashibis lens, rudimentary faces (two eyes, and a mouth) are found in adjacent windows and a shop awning, in electric sockets, re hydrants, bath taps, and plugs. As a result, the city is reinscribed with a new series of images anthropomorphically activated by the camera, images which refuse to dissipate into the passive architecture from which they emerged. 2 As Roehrs lm montages and Nashashibis Eyeballing make clear, repetition that continues in disregard of its original is radical because of its ability to establish a vacuum around the concept of origin. Deleuze discusses the theater of repetition in such terms, where repetition occurs without an intermediary. It speaks in a language before words, with gestures which develop before organized bodies, with masks before faces, with specters and phantoms before

characters. Deleuze describes the apparatus of repetition as a terrible power. 3 This, then, is a terror that not only reects the loss of the historical moment, but also heralds the uncertain embrace of a new instrumentality. It is the menace of Jack Torrances working manuscript in The Shining, that breaks with narrative to endlessly repeat All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy; it is the multiple titles the White Knight invents for the ballad sung to Alice on her journey Through the Looking Glass; it is the process that gives room for functioning linguistic fossils like the dead metaphor, where metaphor (which seeks to prevent the uctuation of symbols) has become disconnected from its literal meaning, and yet the phrase persists through repetition and ritual, nding alternative operations. But above all, it is the point where ritual acquires agency through its archaism or misremembering, and is transformed from the socially practical world that saw functional reasons for its invention, into the symbolic and abstract realm. This is the radical repetition central to the work of artists such as Jonas and Roehr, who seek a vernacular based not on historical knowledge or its appropriation, but on the repetition of gestures that propose an alternative logic to that of historically established forms of communication and representation. Indeed, Jonas Glass Puzzle, 1973, is a work riddled with repetition in the abstract. Considering once again the notion of Roehrs

movement-network, Glass Puzzle presents a severed re-enactment that although featuring only two physical bodies, nonetheless presents the specters of the surrogate, the decoy, and the diversion. An 18-minute blackand-white video, Glass Puzzle shows Jonas in the presence of her doppelganger, played by the artist Lois Lane. Shot in Jonas loft and set against paper backdrops and monitors, Jonas and Lane enter an anti-narrative game of mirrors and echoes by using shortcircuit television loops, reections of themselves on the glass surface of the monitors, and basic copy-cat movements. Their informal gestures (folded arms, covered faces, crossed legs) suggest a state of rehearsal, of pre-event actions being trialed. But as the video plays on, the constant reenactment of these gestures gain the momentum of ritualistic performance, a dumb shadow play that brings to mind critic Boris Groys denition of ritual, where he argues re-enactment is the revelation of a truth ultimately impossible to communicate. 4 The fact that Jonas gestures are based on those featured in EJ Bellocqs notorious Storyville photographs of prostitutes (c. 1912), although intriguing, does not explain the dumb potency of the womens gestures. Divorced from its initial subjectBellocqs photos of women waitingthe repetition has attained an altogether more mythic appearance, an unlikely menace akin to Deleuzes masks before faces, and gestures before bodies. Jonas gestures have seemingly forgotten their source, 67

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1. Peter Roehr (Kln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1977), p. 80. 2. A similar tactic of emphatic insistence through repetition is used in a number Nashashibis other lm works, including the re-lming of Eyeballing in Bachelor Machines Part 2 (2007) and the maverick repetition of a rubber frog in Footenote (2007). Nashashibis recent lm This Quality (2010), shot in Cairo, depicts a series of parked cars covered with striped fabric. But in contrast to the anthropomorphism of Eyeballing, the artist describes each car as a sightless face, as the fabric stretched around the machine turns it into a face but also seems to hood the car so that it is conspicuously hidden. 3. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004) (rst published 1967), p. 12. 4. Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction e-ux journal, no. 4, March 2009.

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instead nding an alluring space of reected narcissism in which to play, repeat, play, repeat. Radical repetitions promise of release (of the image from the object, or the gesture from the body) is suggestively utopian. But this is not Thomas Mores utopia as an ideal paradise, but closer the Greek Noplace, where the space of inscription is emptya vacuum. It is in this vacuum one nds the version without the original, the pure imitation. Radical repetition erases its precursor, thus taking the place of meaning and inscription. Rehearsal, re-enactment, and reuse need not be default markers of indexicality, reverentially deferring to the apotheosis of an original. Instead, these repetitions take on a new vitality as is evident in McCarthys re-enactments, in Roehrs movement-network, Jonas ritualistic mimicry, and Eyeballings persistence of vision. Here, we nd a space of emphatic insistence and gestures towards a new radicality.

WHEN ADJACENT WORKS CONVERSE Steve Roden After touring Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964 77 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in January 2011, Steve Roden imagined the following conversation between the works on view. blue disk and staff (blaue scheibe und stab, 1968): so you are called buttery 2 you know, every time i hear the word buttery, especially in german, i cant help but think of walter benjamin, who wrote about catching them in nets as a child, as well as aby warburg, who spoke to moths and butteries, telling his troubles to them. he called them his seelentierchen, or little soul animals. i wonder how many viewers have stood here quietly, sharing their troubles with us buttery II (schmetterling, 1969): yes, being pinned to the wall i have heard a lot of things from a lot of different people but of course, not only troubles blue disk and staff: looking at your form, that long stem with one wing, looks a bit broken or incomplete it is no wonder you are unable to y from the wall. with only one wing you can only y in circles, like spinning a boat with one oar have you ever thought about the fact that both of

us are made up of two pieces? one of which is a large long stem buttery 2: yes, of course, weve been staring at each other for some time, and certainly ive noticed the similarity of our body forms, but we also have our differences you are resting on the oor, leaning against the wall, while i am fastened to the wall feeling somewhat crucied. to me, it seems a bit ironic that you are coated entirely in blue like a painting, yet rest upon the oor like a sculpture; while i am painted in such a way that my colored edges can only be perceived when moving around me like a sculpturewhile i hang upon the wall like a painting blue disk and staff: hmm well i must say the way your red edges are only revealed from the sides, reminds me of the time i rst visited texas in the late summer, when little black grasshoppers reveal a tiny bit of hidden bright orange when they jump into the air. from where im resting now i can see your edges as bright red outlines; but if someone would drag me to the wall that faces you straight on, your red lines would disappear, and reappear only on the wall as a faint red aura. it is a beautiful dull reddish glow that follows your stems outline. because i am entirely wrapped in blue, my own edges tend to disappear, as my sides and faces have a tendency to fuse into a single at visual plane buttery 2: something else that i nd interesting is that you can glean more 69

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about my color and form by moving away from me; while i can only begin to see the pattern and repetition of your blue when i am close enough to touch you. sometimes i wish i were a bit more mobile, so i could place my wing upon my stem, reach over to you, and touch your blue with my black. having looked at you for so long, i would really like to feel the texture of your blue tape-lines repeating beneath my ngertips. i have watched how your disk and staff appear as at smooth monochromes from afar, but the repeated lines, when seen close up, seem to speak so much of activity and repetition, of handwork and wrapping, existing somewhere between the obsessive intuitive repetition of tramp art and the scored repetition of someone like sol lewitt. i also hope you wont be offended if i tell you that your forms remind me a bit of don quixote blue disk and staff: ha ha yes, i have been told that before. also, because of the feeling of elongation, some have told me i am suggestive of a giaccometti. that may be true in terms of my form, but in terms of my surface, the inconsistent pressing of giacommettis thumbs and ngertips hardly resemble my own blue ridged contours, which were built through a continual addition of lines your contours, on the other hand, seem more organic, like at edges handscraped into curves. i keep thinking how my surface is covered in rigorous repetition, while yours is covered in 70

subtle imperfection it has taken me ages to notice the very thin, very faint incised white scar near the top of your stem. is it a marker for the height of your wing? or a key suggesting one must mine your surface for other subtle marks and imperfections? because i remain blue at all times, i think my lines suggest the surface of the sea, my skin an ocean of tiny consistent waves. sometimes your red edges emanate such a deep colored glow, you seem lled with blood i wonder if from your vantage point i ever seem lled with water have you noticed that being wrapped in tape gives me a kind of forlorn feeling, a little bit like a broken arm in a cast? buttery 2: yes, well you know blue is not just the name of a color blue disk and staff: yes, of course but since we are talking intimately, i want to ask you about your form. i hope you wont be offended, but i have wanted to ask you this for some time from my view it seems as if you are missing a wing; but now that we have been talking, i wonder if, perhaps, you are a silhouette with one wing situated behind the other. when i see you as having one wing, i feel sad that you are unable to y, but when i see you as having two wings closed upon each other, i see you in a kind of space of anticipation, poised to y away at any moment. this duality of suggestion sometimes makes you seem incompleteyour balance feeling slightly offbut at the same

time, you seem visually right. i believe that the arrangement of your parts are somehow more sophisticated than mine and their forms a bit more complex buttery 2: well, i have often wondered about a similar tension between the complete and incomplete, as well as balance and imbalance, in my own appearance clearly we are surrounded by works that suggest both presence and absence at the same time. in you i see a tension that seems to exist between order and happenstance, and i hope you wont be offended if i tell you that your disc seems less placed than recently fallen it seems to be so much more bound by gravity than my buttery wing. also, you maintain a kind of casual-ness, while i maintain a kind of stiffness and immobility. you seem to be resting or sleepingas if within a pause, awaiting some ritual or battle or other usefulness. my own existence is less like a tool, and more like an icon continually immobile, static, a graphic at rest i am an object of perpetual stasis, while you seem to contain a perpetual potential for motion as if you are waiting for a call to duty and one more thingdid you notice when one looks at you straight on, they see your staff and disk meeting on the oor, and your visual form resembles a lowercase b? blue disk and staff: yes, and when i look at you straight on, you look not only a bit like the mast of a small sail

boat with a tiny ag, but i can see your stem and wing suggesting the visual form of the number 4. buttery 2: well that means that, seen together reading from left to right, our forms form b4 or before. blue disk and staff: i think youve strayed a bit too far toward the interpretive deep end, but just now, while you were talking, i was watching people walk between us. seeing them next to you made me think that, even though we are tall, we are relatively human-scaled. our surfaces, which are far from perfect, reect a kind of humanness, as their scars, carving, and wrapping reveal a visual history of our forming. our stems are thin and tall like a person, while our second parts could be held in someones hands. watching people stop and stand before us, seeing them move slowly around your sides and surface to see the red reveal and disappear, or intimately stooping down to see the linear contour map of my surface, it seems we converse with our audience rather quietly buttery 2: yes, i think we slow them down, perhaps in relation to john cages words: to sober and quiet the mind i really do think we do that for people particularly if they spend enough time looking at us.

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OPEN LINK IN NEW TAB Jacob King Rachel Harrisons sculpture Avatar, 2010, is a plinth whose surface has been decorated, or rather, painted in a variety of bright colors and gestural styles (ranging from drips to scrawls to washes and Gerhard Richter-ish wipes). On one side of the column, a torn out photograph has been hung at eye-level in a black frame. It shows a tall and skinny tattooed native standing on a wooden platform in a misty jungle, but he or she is unidentiable, as a cutout photograph of a shirtless Ozzy Osbourne clutching a microphone has been pasted over torso and head. A pair of forestcamouage pants rest on the top of the column, with the legs draping down two of its sides. Amidst an area of the column covered with eshy pink paint, directly below one pant leg, a circular hole has been drilled through its surface. Avatar forces its audience to look not just from many different positions, but also in multiple ways, each of which re-orients its viewer. We might approach the sculpture as a vandalized column, and imagine what kind of surface lurks beneath the bright paint; we might recognize it as a support and look at the pair of pants which sit upon it; we might see it as a surface for a series of abstract paintings that point to the selfassertion of an artists hand; we might encounter it as a display device for 72

an image (the framed photograph); as a cage or container (the hole acts like a peephole); or as a form of architecture in which to move and play (like a glory hole). David Joselit has described Harrisons work as an allegory for a Google search; he writes that it is only when things are divorced from their customary associations but left untransformed by their new setting that they can genuinely be searched for. 1 As physical embodiments of networked screens, he argues that her sculptures model four different modes of search: the unidirectional (the lure of the mesmerizing screen), the circumferential (a feedback loop), the labyrinthine (the pursuit of something hidden and sought after), and the evacuative (what he describes as a kind of entropic data dump). But if Google is like the research librarian that answers your query by directing you to a website or image, Avatar does not present any linear relationship between search term and result, sorted by relevance, whereby the viewer might seek to recognize some object or book within a heterogeneous eld. Rather, the sculpture constantly interrupts itself. In attempting to look in and around the image of the native in the jungle, one runs into Ozzy Osbournes mannered pose instead. 2 If, following Joselits reading, Avatar appears to model multiple modes of search simultaneously like a search whose results have been opened in multiple windows, which might in turn lead

elsewhere perhaps it reects on the fragmenting and hyperkinetic demands (the staccato quality of scanning and browsing) that such topographies place on our frayed capacity for paying attention.3 Through a Periscope In Suspensions of Perception, the art historian Jonathan Crary describes how the study of attention developed in late nineteenth-century Europe amidst both accelerated economic exchange and a rapidly expanding scientic discourse preoccupied with measuring and disciplining its objects. Analyzing works by such artists as Edouard Manet, Georges Seurat, and Paul Czanne, he argues that each models processes of attention and distraction, often formulated as a question of how to focus on one input amidst a eld of competing stimuli, creating a dialectic of binding and disintegration.4 In contrast to this binary model, the contemporary neuroscientist Michael Posner describes three separate attentional networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control. The alerting network helps a subject maintain a state of high sensitivity to incoming stimuli, while the orienting network magnies selected information from sensory input. Executive control monitors and resolves conicts that might arise among thoughts, feelings, and responses. Arguing that each of these networks acts independently and can be localized to certain regions of

the brain, he writes that all neurons are selective in the range of activation to which they will respond, so the role of the attention system is to modulate this selection for those types of stimuli that might be most important at a given moment. 5 The practices from the 1960s and 1970s often grouped together as minimalist privilege the former two terms in Posners framework, stimulating the viewer to a heightened state of alertness by orienting him or her towards a highly discrete form (often presented in such a way as to minimize any competing claims to the viewers attention). 6 Produced amidst the exploding consumer economy of postwar America, works by Donald Judd or Robert Morris, for example, are often said to draw close attention to [their] materials and construction as a means of countering the fragmenting effects of spectacular culture, fostering a somatic awareness, a phenomenological attention to the here and now. 7 In the argument offered by Morris in 1966, Minimalist sculpture reduces the variables of shapes and surfaces stripping away internal relationships and interesting content so as to make it possible for the viewer to trace his or her unfolding relations to a discrete object: The better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewers eld of vision One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various 73

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RACHEL HARRISON Avatar, 2010 Wood, acrylic, jeans, and pigmented inkjet print 74" x 36" x 36" Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

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positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context. 8 Morris work confronts its viewer with an immediately recognizable gestalt (the cube or column) to be read against an unfolding experience of the work; the shape of the cube held in the mind, but which the viewer never literally experiences, is an actuality against which the literal changing perspective views are related. 9 It is not difcult to imagine one of Morris columns concealed beneath Avatars surface, either dressed up in drag (with a mask and bad makeup), or camouaged (a reading which the work itself suggests as it wears a pair of camo pants).10 However, the column does not appear to be camouaged in the traditional sense of being hidden from view; if anything, the sculpture actively draws attention to itself (forest camo pants certainly dont help it blend in amidst the white walls of a Post-Minimalist gallery or museum). Painted in bright colors with disjointed parts, Avatar deploys tactics more like the legendary razzle-dazzle camouage used by the Navy in World War I whereby ships were painted with brilliant colors in various patterns and shapes. Rather than try to conceal or disguise a vessel, this technique was intended to distract the enemy and make it more difcult to determine the size, speed, direction, and type of vessel. Norman Wilkinson, credited with conceiving the Dazzle technique, explains:

The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in ring position, but to mislead him, when the ship was rst sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difculty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked. 11 Avatar performs like the razzledazzle ship, actively orienting the viewers attention not towards but rather away from any stable perception of a constant shape. With a hole drilled into its side, it seems to invite its viewer to peer inside and see that nothing denitive is underneath, to realize that the sculpture is hollow and composed instead of a series of prompts. Conceived in Posners terms, Avatar stages a conict within the sensory input, replacing the problem of how to attend to one discrete form with a question of how to attend to multiple forms simultaneously or how to rapidly move between forms. Replacing the known constant of the gestalt with an open-ended search, it demands that the viewer constantly perform a double-take: to look closely at the sculptures parts (re-orienting from part to part) while also scanning

USS Charles S. Sperry (DD-697) shown here in dazzle camouage, June 1994

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1. David Joselit, Touch to Begin. in Rachel Harrison, Museum with Walls (Annandale on Hudson, New York: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2010), p. 237. 2. As John Kelsey observes, Harrisons sculpture is happily distracted. cf. John Kelsey, Our Bodies, Our Shelves, in Rachel Harrison, Museum with Walls, p. 237. 3. Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making us Stupid, in The Atlantic (July August 2008). 4. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 5. Michael Posner and Steven Peterson, The Attention System of the Human Brain, Annual Review of Nueroscience, Volume 13 (1990), p.31. 6. For example, DIA: Beacon, the so-called temple of minimalism, is framed as an escape from the distractions of New York City, with few visitors in relation to its capacity, and approached by many via a scenic train ride along the Hudson River. Hal Foster has aptly noted that the experience of Dia: Beacon is not dissimilar from the sublime landscapes of Hudson River School paintings, aimed to stimulate a singularly intense perceptual experience. cf. Hal Foster, At Dia: Beacon, London Review of Books, Vol. 25 No. 11 (5 June 2003), p. 29. 7. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 187. 8. See Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture: Part II, Artforum 5, No.2 (October 1966): 20-23. Reprinted in Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p.15. 9. Ibid., p.16. 10. In comparison, the dimensions of each column in Morriss Untitled (Two Columns),1961, for example, are 96" x 24" x 24", whereas Avatar is 74" x 36" x 36". 11. Norman Wilkinson, quoted by Tim Newark in Masters of Disguise, The Financial Times, March 16, 2007.

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for overall qualities (like texture or color) that might transcend its dislocated parts. If, like the minimalist object in the face of a fragmenting postwar consumerism, Avatar could be said to foster a phenomenological attention to the here and now, it does so by both implying and foreclosing a knowable structure around which to orient, producing instead an alertness that solicits, redirects and divides its viewers attention.

BERLIN 1961 William E. Jones Berlin Flash Frames derives from original camera rolls of 16mm lm in the National Archives of the United States. The US Information Agency commissioned two cameramen to shoot this material around the time of the construction of the Berlin Wall. The USIAs ofcial mission (in the words of its website) is to explain and advocate US policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign cultures, i.e., to make propaganda. If this footage from Berlin became a specic propaganda lm, I have not found it yet, but I am sure I have seen some of the shots in various newsreels and other USIA productions. One of the cameramen responsible for this footage, Riecke (no rst name given), photographed dramatic scenes featuring a handsome, darkhaired actor in a studio. This actor appears briey with a hand-held slate in front of his face, something unlikely to happen in candid documentary footage. The slate identifying the take is not a clapperboard. No synchronous sound was recorded during production. The only sound accompanying this footage could have been voiceover narration and music. Spectators were never meant to hear the voice of the actor, who may not have been German. Behind the actor, there is a map of Eastern Europe; on it the outline of Czechoslovakia is visible. In a reverse shot, a map of the German

Democratic Republic appears above and behind a pair of men costumed to look like bureaucrats. The conversation staged on this set is meant to be understood as taking place in a government ofce in East Berlin, somewhere an agency of the US government would not have been allowed to shoot. In the context of a newsreel, spectators might have believed this scene as a faithful representation of a man applying for relocation from the Soviet Zone of Occupation to one of the western zones. In its unedited state, the scene reads as false. The process of falsication becomes most obvious around the ash frames. A ash frame is produced when the mechanism of a lm camera slows down just before coming to a complete stop, thereby overexposing a bit of lm stockoften no more than an eighth of a secondin between takes. As a camera is turned off, actors often relax, or extraneous gures enter the frame. These unguarded moments revealing the workings of dramatic lmmaking are not intended for a spectators gaze. Seeing them casts the whole endeavor in doubt. For this reason, a professional editor would have immediately cut out and set aside the ash frames in this material. By the prevailing aesthetic standards of 1961, they were of no use whatsoever. The handsome actor also appears in exterior footage of crowds waiting to submit paperwork to ofcials in West Berlin. They may have been applying for housing assistance or 77

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for relocation to the Western part of Germany. The actor approaches people in line to ask for directions and advice as a way of making conversation. The bystanders in these scenes were not performers and were not supposed to have been aware that they were in a lm, though some noticed the camera and looked directly into it. A few of these patient souls bought the performance of the actor who approached them. Others probably took him for a spy. Thrusting actors into real life situations has been a consistent strategy throughout cinema history, mainly in comedies, but it is perhaps most appropriate to compare these scenes from Berlin in 1961 with other scenes shot in Germany a few years later by Edgar Reitz for Alexander Kluges Abschied von gestern (Anita G.), a. k. a. Yesterday Girl (1966). Anita G. (played by Kluges sister Alexandra) interacts with people in the world who may or may not be aware that she is a ctional character. In Kluges hands, the strategy has an effect of estrangement, producing a shock reminding us not only that we have been watching a movie, but also that movies are a part of the real world, and that the people who make them must take a stance toward it, whether they acknowledge this or not. Signicantly, Yesterday Girl was shot with direct sound. Unlike the cameramen of the USIA, Kluge allowed his actor to have a voice. Politicians spend their careers among groups of people who may or may not be aware of how much they 78

have in common with handsome actors. Representations of politicians combine elements of the ctional and the non-ctional; their public appearances are all potential photo opportunities. One such photo opportunity appears in the USIA footage. Willy Brandt, then mayor of West Berlin, later Chancellor of the Federal Republic, takes a group of people to see Checkpoint Charlie. They ask Brandt questions, and he responds with emphatic earnestness. Once again, there is no sound. A politicians main asset, the voice, was not recorded. (Did Brandt realize that there were no microphones present?) Only this group and the cameraman Riecke heard what Brandt had to say. It is highly unlikely that any nished lm made from the footage would have communicated the substance of the interaction or would have acknowledged it as anything but for show. In the work of a second cameraman, Jrgens, the lm of Berlin in 1961 becomes something closer to a documentary. Jrgens shot exterior scenes, and due to sunlight leaking through the eyepiece of the camera, his ash frames are generally brighter and of longer duration than Rieckes. Jrgens are also more complex, due to his habit of dropping the camera slightly as he released the button that engaged the motor. Over and over, as a ash frame begins, there is a brief downward tilt, creating a few frames (about a quarter of a second) of motion blur. The distortion has a dreamy quality. It looks as though the

scene is being wiped away, only to be restored almost instantaneously in the next take. This unintentional formal effect, no more than an annoyance to the lms editor, was what originally attracted me to the footage. The frames on either side of these peculiar ash frames are just as compelling, if more prosaic. Among the subjects of these shots are soldiers of the occupying forces, including American GIs grinning in close ups; Berliners going about their business at the boundaries between occupation zones; and most important for the lmmakers to capture, workers building the Berlin Wall. This last sequence has the quality of surveillance footage. The lm shows that at one time, it was possible to reach out and touch people on the other side of the wall, as American and Soviet soldiers could have done, if they hadnt been armed and on alert. The East Berliners building the wall remained aloof while doing their work. As soon as they realized that they were being lmed, they quickly turned away. The workers knew that they were going to be in a Cold War movie, and they were reluctant to cooperate with its production, because they also knew that this particular movie would present them in an unattering light. They may even have sensed that things would end badly for their building project. If this was the case, they knew more than their bosses, as workers often do. The Berlin Wall separated not only two different economic and political zones, but two different

historical times. The city of West Berlin became the shining example of The Free World, a capitalist showplace entirely surrounded by the territory of the German Democratic Republic. But the city was always on life support, even after the celebrated Berlin Airlift. It needed help from the generous Western Allies and the Federal Republic in order remain open for business, but its value during the Cold War was never economic. West Berlin was a symbol, a propaganda tool, and an immensely successful one. How could the administration of the GDR not have known that the Berlin Wall, though effectively stopping the brain drain of the professional classes to the West, would ultimately be a publicity debacle of tremendous proportions? They saw things in terms of another historical narrative, and the image they presented to the capitalist world was of little concern to them. They had no way of knowing that by the end of the 20th Century, it would be the only world that anyone but the most besotted idealists could imagine. The silent document I have described, labeled Berlin 1961 in the collection of the National Archives, has little accompanying description, thus it gives rise to speculation. In an attempt to understand it, I have watched the lm many times. The footage reveals more with each viewing, though what it reveals is not what the sponsors of the lm intended. A wall is constructed, but so is an image, an image with a political use: propaganda. 79

WILLIAM E. JONES Berlin Flash Frames, 2010 Sequence of digital les, black & white, silent, 9:18 minutes looped Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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TIME AGAIN AND AGAIN (2001) Richard Aldrich Oh, but here; oh, right here. Between these two trees. We were standing between two pines. Their spent cones were all over the ground, their tips pointing up, looking kind of like ngers. There was a bit of snowfall the past couple weeks, though not enough to weigh the branches down; they held up just ne. This is where we left them two. He had a pained look on his face and I kind of just looked to the side, not wanting to acknowledge his anger, or the fact that we might be in some sort of trouble or predicament. There were ve of us earlier, not on a trip really, not even a short hike, just out for the morning, just out to see the trees or the sunrise or a set of animal tracks. Not even did we bring a canteen. But now he is jumping up and down, really overreacting, really making me nervous. I am feeling a tinge of cold, kind of like anger or fear. He is jumping up and down and waving his arms in arcs. Earlier we were in a room; there were these old antique tin men and women that were on the oor, laid out to form some sort of narrative, abstract it may well be but nevertheless a narrative. It was kind of like a diorama and there was music playing and blue wall hangings that were meant to represent the sky cloudless, of course, like we want a 84

cloudless day because that seems it would play a better role as far as the tone of our narrative. Or, conversely, we may want the background to be dark and stormy, as narratives are usually quite easy, because you make them up as you want them to be. We stayed in this room for a while. The tin people were not in too much detailmostly it was a sort of oxidation or stain that made out any facial details or physical characteristics though each one was unique in and of itself: in other words, they werent cut from any mold. From a distance they were quite interesting. No real narrative could be discerned really, though, I thought, as in some global narrative that all could understand. I knelt to the ground in order to get a more level view. The blue sheet the skyilluminated the tin people nicely. It served as a nice backdrop and reminded me of a blue screen, the kind that they use with special effects. This seemed good to me too. I mean, what with the sort of uidity of this whole thing, it made sense that the backdrop, too, could be ever changed. When I thought about this, I realized that it never said anywhere that the blue was actually the sky: Iwell, wejust assumed this. Later I told this to my mother and she said that if there is one thing she should have taught me, it was never to assume. She said she assumed she had told me that, and then kind of grinned. She is always making those sorts of jokes, even still today when I call her on the phone, something witty. And there

was music playing but it seemed to be coming from outside. It also was the perfect mood music, especially right there. I think even the people who ran the place, though they werent in the room then, told us that they too thought that it t well. On the lake the sails of the boats were fewer and fewer. Theyll never reach the moon! We were quite excited and jumping up and down, even, dare I say, pumping our sts in the air. Our faces were red and our cheeks large. Out of breath we laughed and held our stomachs. We watched the sails, mostly canvas colored, but every now and again wed see some home-done painting or design. Usually pretty rough. These people had no needor desire, I might addfor any commercially manufactured sail. It wasnt decoration, you see; if it was anything, it was marking. In the identity sense. That is, something like, I am the horse rider. This is on to which we were laughing and bawling. I still was standing but two had fallen to the ground, doubled over, as if caught by some malady, but no sickly malady, of courseit was hysterics. A passerby later told me he thought we must have been drunk. It might have seemed that way, but no, we werent drinking a thing, I told him with a grin. Our hair had grown long with the time spent there, and we hoped not to go back and feel more in a hole than before. I walked a straight line to the edge of the bank. A man, a sailor in every sense of the wordturtleneck,

boots, everythingwas startled as I noisily clambered up to the edge of his boat (docked, of course). Do you charge the normal fare of two dollars for a ride to the other side of the bank? I wasnt sure if he could even be chartered, but my friends had given me the task of nding out. He looked at me and at the sun behind me and, gauging the time left in the day, replied, Two per person, of course. Of course, I replied. It was fun to be a part of the game, of the rigmarole: Of course. Of course, if this were an everyday thing, Id be as sick as the next person. His daughter, also a sailor, emerged from the great depths that must have been the ships (sailboats) gully. I smiled to her, trying to maintain our innocence as passengers, as way of a hello. We havent been able to pay the rent this month, she said. I asked why not. Two dollars, only two dollars, the river is tightening; it is constricting along my fathers neck; his jugular vein bulges in the moonlight; the stars show his bloodless ankles that hang limp off the edge of the boat. I fear he shall greet his doom prematurely by way of suicide in the sea, the black sea. She said she had no friends and mostly just looked onto the river and shed in sections that swirled as so to form a more conducive environment for the bluegills, catsh, and other swimmies. I offered to pay an extra bit, which she declined: He is a fair man, and would of course have taken a larger fare had the river been 85

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wider or more treacherous, but as it stood, our group could have likely crossed with a pladoon and a line. As she spoke, I looked over her shoulder at her father pulling in the line. My friends had boarded too, and we had all stopped laughing now that the gravity of the situation made itself felt. Between them there were murmurs of getting off and sticking around a bit longer, but it felt ne and the ashes were such that one could deal with them. But because of my roots, I suppose, I said we must go back. Is it an adventure you had been on? the daughter asked. She wore overalls and had worn skin and pretty eyes; her smile exposed itself frequently, albeit for only a snap of an instant. She spoke colorfully, as if shed learned to speak not from her father or mother but from a book of old times. Her hair was thick with the moisture of dirty river water that is splashed into the air. Oh, our people . . . [colorful language] we are just beginners. I studied to be an engineer, and no job was there for me. oh our people we are just beginners I studied to be an engineer and no job was there for me I wear armor of gold yet beg for bread in the markets the streets mud cakes my ankles and my calves strain from the miles I walk oh our people we are just beginners I studied to be a poet 86

and my brother joined the military my writing arm broke from too much talk and the love it fueled my memory oh our people my brother died on the rst day in the eld the eld was strewn with mud and dead bodies our belts carried our personality our belts carried our personalities. We wrote this together as we set out back to town. Shed do a verse and then I one. I asked if she really had a brother in the military; she said no, but that she felt that she was her brother in the army. I thought that a bit shallow, poetically speaking, but then thought her skin seemed very rough, very masculine, while her eyes and lips were very feminine. So maybe the split into male and female was not even her idea, but her bodys, so she just went along with it, as I suppose most good poets would. She asked if I had studied to be a poet. I said no. She said we both liked lying and winked. Before I could reply to that, she said she wished to write poetry that followed no rules, that usually when she came across something she didnt like, she often had a hard time explaining why, but that she had this vague notion that what led to her awkwardness was that it always seemed to follow some sort of standard rule. And that she sometimes thought that the only real way to gauge somethings worth was to count how many rules it had broken. I said that maybe

some rules were harder to break, or could be broken in a real big way, and that maybe that would deserve more points (in the judging). She agreed with that. As quickly satised as I was, I turned around to look off the edge of the boat and then behind me to my friends, who sat huddled in the port bow. They had gotten a blanket and were all underneath forming just one large amorphous body with odd bumps and turns. The daughter caught my distraction and, for fear of her interpreting this as a waning of interest, I asked her if she wrote poetry. She replied that she did but would never call it that, that she merely had to pass the time somehow and so wrote descriptions of her surroundings along the river. I said, Isnt that the rst rule you should break, not writing representational poetry? She said I misunderstood her whole point, though she didnt seem too put off by this. How have I misunderstood? I countered. She replied that thinking that there is actually a rst rule to break is the rst rule you must break. I sat onto a largish rock that seemed at enough to be a suitable seat and tried to enjoy my surroundings. My friend had settled down a bit, even apologized for going a bit overboard, and we decided that we should just sit here for a while and wait for our comrades return, and if after some as-of-yet undetermined amount of time they hadnt shown up, wed head off alone and hope they could make it back to our boat. We

wished that there would be some way to contact the sailor or the daughter or the wife and tell them to keep an eye out for our comrades and, I suppose, ourselves as wellit wasnt as if we were totally comfortable in these parts. But for now, a bit of procrastination, a bit of unaccepting of the immediate situation that is our reality, seemed like an okay idea. Wed be sitting on a wood oor. There was one small, very short table that served more or less as an armrest. It was actually quite comfortable, and when I was propped against it I felt as if I were posing for a photograph. I ran my ngers in between the cracks of the old wooden oors. The repetitiveness of the music made it easy to hum along with and made you feel like youd been there awhile. The others made jokes about maybe moving the tin people around, either just as a formal venturethat is, to make, for example, a circle or a straight lineor maybe to try some kind of scene; a nativity scene was one suggestion. I thought that seemed a little silly but didnt say anything. I heard footsteps and it was the clunk-clunk of one of the owners. The hardwood oors served as spectacular sounding boards for the mans heavy boots. I never saw him because the two ofces from which he was going from one to the other, were at the north end of the room, myself being at the south end and laid out facing south as well, so he became an inadvertent part of the music and the whole scene. These were the parts that 87

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I could not control: his heavy walk and my friends chatter. Furthermore, the owners walk resonated in my brain afterward, long after he had passed through. Its existence was suddenly a possibility and my mind was free to inject it anywhere it felt was necessary for it to go. I would almost say it is like the phantom leg of a World War II veteran, still itching long after its amputation. Part of it, too, though, I suppose is that since there was really so little in this environment, anything that made the slightest sound or movement really had a booming effect. Interestingly, my friends chatter, I suppose due to its constant drawl, seemed to drop out of the picture, and it wasnt until they stopped, when the owner came throughthey were fearful, I suppose, that they were being too loud and were to be reprimandedthat I even realized just how little all their noise was really making. As it turned out, the walking was intended to move us along. Time had gone by quite fast while we four were there, and, seeing as how we had only gotten there late in the day, there wasnt much time to be had by. We gathered up ourselves and, giving the room one last look, bid good-bye to the two proprietors and headed back out into the world.

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EXCERPTS FROM NOTES ON PHOTOGRAPHY & ACCIDENT IN LONG LIFE COOL WHITE: PHOTOGRAPHY & ESSAYS BY MOYRA DAVEY (YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008) Moyra Davey Ampersand The ampersand in Photography & Accident is to remind me of Virginia Woolf, who made regular use of the symbol, writing for instance of her habit of reading with pen & notebook. There is a nerie of reading that can be linked to the nerie of a certain kind of photographing. Both involve drift, but also purpose, when they become enterprises of absorption and collecting. Walter Benjamins Arcades project was a superlative nerie, a long, digressive list of notes and citations. It was a surrealist-inspired collection, but with a nihilist twist, what Hannah Arendt called a refusal of empathy. The historical quotes were intended to stand alone, a tacit protest and stark witness to Benjamins despair over what was taking place in Europe in the late 1920s and 30s. Benjamin and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries. They committed suicide within six months of each other in 194041, at the height of personal hopelessness and Nazi terror. Reading Reading is a favorite activity, and I often ponder its phenomenology. As I write this essay, the reading I do for it is a mitigated pleasure. Sometimes it feels like a literal ingestion, a bulimic gobbling up of words as though they were fast food. At other times I read and take notes in a desultory, halting, profoundly unsatisfying way. And my eyes hurt. I remember Lynne Sharon Schwartz in her book Ruined by Reading, writing of letting Cagean principles of chance and randomness determine her reading. Ive never read John Cage, but since Im writing about accident I determine that now is the time and begin with a book I nd on the shelves called Notations, a collection of several hundred pages of composers musical scores, and notations on these notations. I open the book at random. Someone has written: I mix chance and choice somewhat scandalously. I copy this phrase into a notebook, a perfect encapsulation of my own desire for contingency within a structure. I decide to allow chance elements, the nerie, as it were, of daily life, to nd their way into this essay.

Notes Roland Barthes spoke of his love of, his addiction almost, to note-taking. He had a system of notebooks and note cards, and Latinate names to designate different stages of note-taking: notula was the single word or two quickly recorded in a slim notebook; nota, the later and fuller transcription of this thought onto an index card. When away from his desk he used spring-activated ballpoint pens that required no fumbling with a cap, and wore jackets with pockets that would accommodate these tools. He maintained friends who would not question his habit of stopping, mid-walk, mid-sentence, to quickly note a thought. Barthes: When a certain amount of times gone by without any notetaking, without my having taken out my notebook, I notice a certain feeling of frustration and aridity. And so each time I get back to note-taking (notatio) its like a drug, a refuge, a security. Id say that the activity of notatio is like a mothering. I return to notatio as to a mother who protects me. Note-taking gives me a form of security (La Preparation du Roman, 1979). Reading and thinking about note-taking gives me a form of security, a thrill even, so I will indulge myself a little further and add here advice from Benjamins list, The Writers Technique in Thirteen Theses: Item #4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is benecial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable. Item #5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens. (One-Way Street, 1928.) Hannah Arendt on Benjamin: Nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of pearls and coral. Words, Pictures Sontag: A photograph could also be described as a quotation, making a book of photographs like a book of quotations. And Barthes speculated that the haiku and the photograph have the same noeme, the same essence. What each reveals, unequivocally, is the that has been.

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Light Writing This is the Greek origin of the word photography, and Eduardo Cadava reminds us that Henry Fox Talbot, author of The Pencil of Nature, used the expression words of light to describe his rst photographs. In Camera Lucida Barthes gives us a possible Latin equivalent for photograph: imago lucis opera expressa, an image expressed (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light. Reproduction & Type There is a seduction to the editorial use of photographs: surround almost any image with type and it takes on an allure, an authority, provokes a desire it might otherwise not have. What is this appeal, exactly? The seduction of language, of the symbolic? Is it that, as Benjamin and Brecht speculated, photographs are more at home with, even in need of, words? In one of the grad programs where I teach, students are required to write a thesis about their work and process. I notice that their photographs become vastly more interesting to me after I read what theyve written about them; I like seeing their images shrunken and recontextualized, embedded in paragraphs of descriptive text. Malcolm: The dullest, most inept and inconsequential snapshot, when isolated, framed (on a wall or by the margins of a book), and paid attention to, takes on all the uncanny signicance, fascination, and beauty of R. Mutts fountain.

Consumption The nal reason for the need to photograph everything lies in the very logic of consumption itself. To consume means to burn, to use upand, therefore, the need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more (Susan Sontag). Periodically, but infrequently enough to be surprised by what I nd, I go through boxes of photographs and contact sheets made as long as twentyeight years ago. My latest foray into the archive was sparked by a need to nd specic negatives for a piece that never went beyond the contact sheet stage. In my memory the negs were 35mm color. When I nally uncovered them, they were medium format, black and white, and fewer than I imagined. Nonetheless, I was very happy to nd them; I am always happy and reassured when I nd something that has been lost. And in the process of searching, I ipped through hundreds of contact sheets of my baby, wondering how I could possibly have taken so many pictures of him in the rst few years of his life (a veritable compulsion is how it strikes me now). Still, these were the images I wanted to look at, pore over, scrutinize. Dipping into the archive is always an interesting, if sometimes unsettling, proposition. It often begins with anxiety, with the fear that the thing you want wont surface. But ultimately the process is a little like tapping into the unconscious, and can bring with it the ambivalent gratication of rediscovering forgotten selves. Rather than making new pictures, why cant I just recycle some of these old ones? Claim found photographs from among my boxes? And have this gesture signify resistance to further production/consumption?

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Psychoanalysis Nineteen thirty-nine was also the year of Freuds suicide in London following his ight from Nazi-occupied Vienna the previous year. Unlike Benjamin, who was forced to abandon his cherished library when he left Paris, Freud had been allowed to bring his collection of antiquities with him to England. But by then he was in unbearable pain from cancer of the jaw, and induced his own death by morphine with a physicians assistance. Janet Malcolm has written extensively on psychoanalysis. In some ways she is at her most dazzling when she uses psychoanalysis as a lens through which to view the world, as in this passage from the essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem, PA, on the irascible documentarian Chauncey Hare: Hare takes the cameras capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield to interpretation. Here Malcolm puts her own artful spin on Benjamins famous allusion to the cameras ability with its devices of slow motion and enlargement to reveal hidden and unseen truths: It is through photography that we rst discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.

Lost As Im writing I start to remember, or think I remember, reading that Benjamin (or was it Barthes?) wrote about clocks in photographs, the idea of a picture recording the exact moment of its taking. I ip through books, hoping Ive made a mark. But the thing I was looking to nd remains lost. I feel unlucky. I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. Where something is lost, redirect energy, follow the drive, the chance and ow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that Im often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (its tempting to call this the studium of writing). It has a something from nothing quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture. October 15 Read. Read something else. Go back to the rst thing and see how it is changed.

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MOYRA DAVEY Details from 50 Photographs, 2003 14 C-prints: 12" x 17" 36 C-prints: 8" x 10" Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

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Barry MacGregor Johnston, Psychic Curfew Emily Wardill, The Diamond (Descartes Daughter) Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore Charles Atlas, Blue Studio: Five Segments Josef Strau, What Should One Do Charles Atlas, Blue Studio: Five Segments Ed Atkins, Deant Delight: The Freedom of the Dilettante
Barry MacGregor Johnston Psychic Curfew (installation view at Orange County Museum of Art, Orange County, CA), 2010 Mixed media installation, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (video still), 1999 Video, color, sound, 15 minutes Courtesy of the artist, Gavin Browns enterprise, New York; Galerie Daniel Bucholz, Cologne; and Cabinet Gallery, London 2011 Mark Leckey Charles Atlas and Merce Cunningham Blue Studio: Five Segments (video stills), 197576 Video, color, sound, 15:38 minutes Courtesy of Charles Atlas and Vilma Gold, London

2 THE DIAMOND (DESCARTES DAUGHTER) Script This is a stand in for Francine, Descartes Daughter, who never washed up on the shores of Sweden. She is a twelve-year-old girl playing a Nintendo Wii under a strobe light and dressed in a home-made version of the costume that tienne-Jules Marey dressed his subjects when conducting Chromophotography. I ASK HER Do you remember a scene from a lm where there is a diamond in a room protected by lasers? I SAY I remember watching a lm with this scene when I was your age. There is a diamond in a room protected by lasers which criss-cross the darkness. The thief has to dodge these lasers because if he breaks their beam, he will set off an alarm and be caught. The thief would then lower a robot hand through to grab a hold of the jewel. The robot hand was steadier than his hand. I remember the scene but do not remember the lm. I asked other people if they did. I asked my friends, my family, I asked in the lm shop near my home. I even asked Yahoo. I was told to look at: Mission Impossible, I + II Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve The Thomas Crown Affair Entrapment The Pink Panther The Thief The Man with the Golden Gun Diamonds are Forever MacGyver None of these lms had the scene as I remembered it, so I decided to remake it myself. Only, this scene would be made in such a way that the people present on set would be constructing rather than attempting to avoid the security system protecting the jewel. There would be a diamond in the centre of a room which was spot-lit. A single laser beam would cross the space. It was like the room that I could remember from the lm that I could not nd. And then, because I shot my lm on lm it became an object in the space just as the diamond is an object in the space. My lm became a diamond. And I wondered too, if the diamond might become a mouth--refracting words as a crystal would refract light, off in different directions and separated into many colours. DESCARTES DAUGHTER SAYS Orange Puce Acid yellow Scarlet Green Red Yellow Red Lilac Blue Turquoise Violet Red Magenta And turquoise Pale green Amber Maroon All in the dark I SAY Or perhaps the words themselves would scatter. DESCARTES DAUGHTER SAYS Opposite you dont have to pay Pyramus What do we want Ive seen a lot look like Himself In de branding Authors claimed Rolls deep Deep toughie Riko Top ranking Cardigans from days gone 3tbps for grilling Because he can jig Following our conversation The girl was beginning to enjoy it But his paralysis Lapsed devotees. Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat Steven I SAY But who would speak these words? Not Descartes second daughter who would only, if able to speak at all, only repeat prerecorded phrases that were chosen to sound like someones idea of a little girl:

4 DESCARTES DAUGHTER SAYS I would like a sweet Hello, my name is Francine I SAY Or perhaps she would speak in logic experiments that resembled the format of Laurence Weiners famous Declaration of Intent (1968): (1) The artist may construct the piece. (2) The piece may be fabricated. (3) The piece may not be built. Perhaps Descartes Daughter was Conceptual Artist A Conceptual Artist And would speak in the format of logic experiments: An Ant is able to carry much more than its body weight Preoccupation with weight loss has been proven by scientists to make a person less intelligent Intelligence is an unquantiable quality Therefore, an ant carrying a person who is on a diet is of indeterminate intelligence Warhol claimed not to not have a self Oprah Winfrey says that you have to love yourself in order to be loved No-one loved Warhol A persons image of their own life is often very different from the reality A picture is not a description with words Therefore, words. Unfortunately, the answer to the riddle was an image. But that image was remembered to be different from the way it had originally existed. Descartes Daughter spoke in these logic experiments which were rational to the point of being irrational. The whole world was Descartes Daughter, washed up and stunted. Performing actions that were thought up with a machine in mind. Answering the same questions over and over again. Repeating actions with mini conclusions. Descartes Daughters face is blown up to 19ft across. Her handwriting is produced by a computer but stylised to look as though it were hand written with a faint blue fountain pen. And her sex is fantastical and hairless. She is a Readymaid spelt M-A-I-D. Her technological make-up would have worked just as well if it were housed in a at board but she has been formed into the shape of a human being who resembles an attentive 15-yearold girl. He felt that this would People had become machines but machines were better because they were more reliable. (PAUSE) tienne-Jules Marey and his breaking down of people into frames, still images, allowed that human movement be analysed. In the science of industrial management his method of decomposition and his subject, human motion, were used in America to control the production and efciency of the labor force.

5 be the last time he would travel. The philosopher Rene Descartes had been summons by Queen Christina of Sweden, who wanted to know his views on love, hatred and the passions of the soul. He had been in communication with the Queen for some time but did not want to be part of her court. He felt, he said, that thoughts as well as water would freeze over in Sweden. But Christinas wish was his command. Filled with foreboding, he packed his bags, taking all of his manuscripts with him. Descartes Daughter, Francine, had died at the age of ve of scarlet fever. He told a friend that her death was the greatest sorrow of his life. However, he was travelling, he told his companions, with his younger daughter Francine; but the sailors had never seen her and, thinking that this was strange, they decided to seek her out one day in the midst of a storm. Everything was out of place they could nd neither the

6 philosopher nor the girl. Overcome with curiosity they went into Descartes quarters. There was no one there but on leaving the room they stopped in front of a mysterious box. As soon as they opened it they jumped back in shock. Inside the box was a doll, a living doll, that moved just like a little girl. Descartes had constructed the doll himself out of clockwork and metal. It was indeed his progeny but not the one that the sailors imagined. Francine was a machine. When the ships Captain was shown the machine he was convinced that it was some instrument of dark magic--responsible for the bad weather that had hampered their journey. Descartes daughter was thrown overboard. I expected the thief to be a man; perhaps it was a girl. I had only seen a robotic hand after all, steadier than a human hand.

WHAT SHOULD ONE DO What real feeling of freedom. Now nally I seem to be allowed ofcially to write real stupid, as I always wanted to and as I was sometimes even told to do. No big expectations now. Like being an artist. Isnt it one of the earliest learnings while slowly learning about the difculties to become a real professional artist, that your work needs at least a little injection of stupid in order to make it a good work, in order that it can achieve a certain amount of communication value. Like just look at the wall rst and then describe its lines of broken color for instance. Which wall is it and write where it is. Be stupid. Isnt it good for the text and for the reader if it is stupid? Yesterday I went down to the city. It is Florence, Italy by the way, and I went to the bookshop. What else? I felt everything turned wrong with me and my works. The young Italians were populating the river cafe in the late spring sunny day. Sensual, good looking and relaxed. I just came from Germany and even the dogs look human here. Even the older ones smiled into my pale face and I said, I just came from the apple store and they told me my computer e morte. She said, morte? And smiled. But at the bookstore later I took the Kerouac book out and opening in the middle, watching out for help by the mysteries of coincidence I found my I Ching of the day, and the text said: never rewrite anything, write as quick as you can. I was typing and typing, Kerouac said, and my friend came in and said, hurry up lets go, the girls dont wait. And I wrote quicker then ever before and did not lose a minute and got to the bus with him for the party and he looked at the written papers and said this is the best you ever have written. But I, me in Florence, Italy, I turned the book back and left for the bus. I was living in an artist house in Florence and searching for a cigarette, I entered one of the empty studios, which was still empty yesterday. Lots of pencils were scattered around everywhere, on the table on the oor, a few pieces of destroyed pieces of paper in between. I

10

searched all parts for the cigarette, but was astonished by the hidden language of all these half done objects, so much, that they felt like almost speaking to me as good art I guess should do, as I moved around in the deserted production sphere of another artist. There was one instrument like a complicated saw or metal cutter, looking like a precision instrument, but then there was one piece particularly, an old red brick on the oor, but it was bound by some black thick ribbon, leather like and the ribbon, was scattered in a weird direction on the oor as if it was a dogs leash. It was not just meaningful in a sexy way, it was like really meaningful in an existential way, like saying everything has to be bound to something to make any sense. The day before I was at a fashion shop and when I left the changing room all three people in the shop, the owner, the daughter of the owner and the artist stood there and looked at me, as if their tools fell off their hands. They stood like specially positioned chess gures and the feeling touched me as if I was a chess gure too and so I made one more step out into the room, and I felt like a chess gure moving the rst time out into the open eld and being suddenly trapped in the gaze of three much stronger gures. It was a gothic fashion shop and while waiting and looking around without touching rst I had decided to choose myself, not just waiting, and I chose two things. One was a long skirt. It was made of strong heavy pinstripe velvet and had two sweet little buckles, one on each side and a long zipper on the back. And now wearing it, I just felt really strange in the middle of the shop so much squeezed and exposed in between everybody. Even trying to describe the situation I am in on that day of quick writing it does not help to solve the mystery to recover a text, the text just written a few days ago and which is in fact still in the human memory almost word by word. So let me go ahead, with what I would write instead. What happened after the fashion shop visit and its embarrassing moment between the shelves in front of the gothic changing room.

11

I decided to leave as quickly as possible and my expression of denial to buy the sweet long skirt was leading me quickly into a discussion with the owner and her lazy daughter, whose order to take it with me I absolutely could not refuse. It was not that expensive and so I went with the most beautiful content of a bag to the bus and again as in the situation of presenting myself wearing the skirt I felt interestingly strange. Though denitely not bad at all. At the bus station I hoped the bus would not arrive for awhile, as I feared the closeness of other people, kind of feared being exposed to them, although the huge powerful dark skirt was hidden in my bag next to the dead computer. I should add that Florence is one of these cities where taking a public transport vehicle is always a very pleasant experience even when it is really crowded, as these good looking people behave so smooth and gentle around each other with the greatest politeness but still look at each other deep and sensual. I almost was at the point of not nishing the strange skirt dressing moment story here and keep the embarrassment for myself alone. But as the non-productive attitude text is, as many other texts, just a declaration of embarrassment as well, and as I am not able to really recover its story from my memory, I should rather nish with the changing room affair. The moment when I turned back into the soft negligent atmosphere of the gothic changing room, a man, another third person working in the shop quickly rushed towards me while I actually wanted to let the violet velvet curtain fall between me and the shop space and to nally undress from the comfortable but embarrassing pin striped skirt experience. He was looking very soft Italian but still working class in his whole attitude and asked me if it does not t well or if there would be any problem with it and he asked it in the most common way as if I just tried on my usual Levis trousers. The shock of this encounter with him did not nish my weird strange new feelings about wearing a gothic skirt with buckles and strange belts and very charming looking metal D-rings. In fact, the opposite. It was like

12

another further step of embarrassment pleasure as he started touching me on the hip and around as if trying to nd out if everything ts well just technically and that way for sure he must have discovered my embarrassment. But instead of showing disgust and as well instead of showing any fun in the situation he just turned round saying, it is alright, really no problem, an expression which I later in the bus thought, healed me from all inhibitions and restrictions, or actually revealed them nally to me. It was like thinking, what a forgiving sweet and warm universe do I live in since the moment I left the store. Excuse me to mix this maybe most profane sensual experience with any spiritual narrative, but I was, while pondering the experience of a classic personal liberation situation, obsessively remembering the story of Jacob, the father of Josef and the very strange paragraph, which is called Jacob is wrestling with the angel. Jacob often escaping something, once is escaping his enemy and his most oppositional gure, his brother Esau. Once, when it becomes night and he is eeing away in order to hide again, he meets an angel and the angel wants to ght with him. Therefore in order that Jacob cannot run away, the angel touches his hip, and Jacobs certain nerve of the hip for moving his leg is somehow lame and he cannot run away and has to ght with him, and then Jacob ghts with him the whole night and when it becomes slowly day again the angel leaves him, but says, from now on you are not Jacob any more, from now on you will be called Israel. Anyways, while writing the non-productive attitude I felt quite productive in fact and it seemed to be such a long time away when I was doing what I understood as non-productive experiments. Experiments, because instead of doing so, I had on the contrary an almost theological belief in the redeeming qualities of productivity. But as someone, maybe someone like a nature scientist, who is trying to prove the existence of some hidden quality, I believed that in order to prove its central quality, I would rst have to exclude this quality of productivity from its context and see what happens without

13

it. It is stupid to ask what is an artist and even more so, what is art, I thought kind of navely, but it could be interesting to ask, if one or I would be an artist even without making any work or any object. Could one still call this existence an artist? Or, as I learned later, isnt the artist who does not provide any productivity not slowly becoming the disparate person who is left by all his virtues, slowly falling apart and corrupting slowly all of his self soon as well? And isnt the one artist, even not so talented, but never leaving the ways of productivity the one who will stay strong and alive until his last days? It is no pleasure to meet these artists who arent able any more to talk about their interests or about their production, fall instead into the traps of gossiping, the traps of obsessive control behavior or even into deadly envy? Still I questioned the old mechanism, that the only way to prove or even to detect the existence of an artist is his evidence of productivity. So the question was how to detect an artist in the millions of other people even if he or she is not showing the evidence of productivity. I was interested in this experiment too seriously, probably because of being a bit too young too late, particularly in the idea of being the scientist who uses himself for his experiment, as I thought that was what art is about, proving something by putting your one self into danger and exposing yourself badly with it. If you focus a few years on this situation of course you stop worrying about productivity, but you sacrice your credibility for the rest of your life. For sure in Germany. But you might develop great qualities like fear and certainty of onrushing doom at any moment. And you can never see yourself anymore on any upwardly mobile trajectory. Even in case you actually are. The only way or step out would become the productivity of confessional self-exposure. Josef Strau

14

16 DEFIANT DELIGHT: THE FREEDOM OF THE DILETTANTE Ed Atkins There is no method, and there is no authority. Paul Feyerabend, Experts in a Free Society // Specialismalong with its cabal of synonyms: expertise, connoisseurship and masteryis the dominant administration of capitalist hegemony; it is crucial to the ideology of labour, professionalism and the generation of capital itself. In this essay, I intend to reappraise this pre-eminence of specialism via the writing of Paul Feyerabend, whose writings on the dangers of specialismin terms of immaturity, narrow-mindedness, andvia Aristotleslavery; will contrive a broader examination of the problems of specializationeconomic as well as spiritual. From here I will begin to develop a possible alternative to specialism in the strayed gure of the dilettante. Beginning with the dilettantes apocryphal conception in the sybaritic gentlemens clubs of the 18th century, I intend to explore the process of defamation that the gure of the dilettante underwent through its relatively short life and why, with a view to rejuvenating that primordial dilettante: a person who takes delight in knowledge entire and of itself. // The philosopher Paul Feyerabend spent a great deal of his life arguing against the ideological primacy of expertise. He argued that an expert, by denition, is someone who decides to devote herself to excellence within a particular area at the expense of development in others. In this sense, he sees the expert as immaturenaive to the full compass of life because of their blinkered devotion to a specific area. 1 Like an adult restricted to the diet of an infant, the expert has an underdeveloped knowledge of what might be considered peripheral to their particular speciality. The complications that a diversity of interest might effect are pre-emptively screened out in order that the specialists focus remains sharp specialist. This deliberate restriction does notFeyerabend is careful to mentiondebar an enjoyment of tangential interests, but these forays are restricted to the condescended arena of pleasure and private life. Such subsidiary interests bow out of sight of their specialty, conceding their inefficacy in so doing. The specialists research practice operates within a structured (scientific) methodology. Furthermore, the categorical framework implicit within any particular
1 P.K. Feyerabend, Experts in a Free Society in! Knowledge, Science and Relativism: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, J. Preston, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 113.

17 science is necessarily organised restrictively so that empirical data can be generated. Although empiricism here seems mandatory for gathering data, ironically it cannot function without the illusion!of holism, albeit lexically contrived. The imminent threat of variation may therefore be stemmed by the designation of the anomalous, thereby maintaining a chimera of precision via an invisible, specialist grip. Feyerabend uses the example of language to clearly elucidate paradoxical empiricism that appears through restrictive specialism. His chosen example (an introduction to a book entitled Human Sexual Response) is demonstrative not only because it illustrates the restrictive language of a particular specialism (in this case, socio-biology), but also the potentially dangerous and dehumanising effect of such an avid monological discourse when applied to its subjects. Such effects are exemplified in the following extract cited by Feyerabend: In view of the pervicacious gonadal urge in human beings, it is not a little curious that science develops its sole timidity about the pivotal point of the physiology of sex.2 Feyerabend states that this is no longer human speech. This is the language of the expert. Importantly, he also notes the conspicuous absence of pronominal subjecthood in this writing. Coupled with the extraordinarily excessive use of technical terminology (pervicacious?),! this creates a potential schism between the authors and their readers: either by permanently excluding those who are not fluent in this stylised language; or by invoking an exclusive coterie of specialists who, in a Sisyphean gesture, continually delineate their territory with barbs of impassable language, separating themselves from the uninitiated. The riddance of the pronominal self (I or, in the case of the example, we) is also the banishment of subjectivity itself, again with the aim of achieving a (paradoxical) form of objectivity. Objectivity is revealed to be the jurisdiction of Method and academic specialism: Feyerabend continually afrms that this objectivity is the great impasse, dividing the specialist from the layperson. One exemplary schism opens when specialists are consulted over and above laypeople in order to advocate, generate or justify government policy, underlining a meritocratic, rather than democratic, ideologyhowever, this is perhaps itself suggestive of a freedom from the tyranny of a specialist hegemony of knowledge. Feyerabend cites Aristotles notion of balance and a sense of perspective as a condition to being free. Here, every area of knowledge available to him is given its due, and allowed to converse with every other, regardless of

Ibid,. p.115.

18 their apparent practical or fantastical application. Emotional knowledge is as important as more classically intellectual or academic forms of knowledge: an interest in ballistics does not necessarily supersede an interest in bees, despite a professional investment in the one or the other. Here lies one of the other problematic delineations of specialism: it is almost always allied with professionalism, and thereby a necessary seriousness that accompanies economic obligation. There is an assumptive transparency to these accepted relations, returning us to a political determinacy of capitalism. Expertise in a eld correlates with pay and power, incentivising the need to specialise and de-incentivising the needor even the desirefor breadth of knowledge. Economically, it has long been assumed that an ever-increasing delineation of speciality within the professional sphere is the most productive model. The success of Adam Smiths principle of the division of labour concerns success predominantly through speed of training and production. However, there are many failings of this model, particularly in its latter-day, ever more complicated subdivision of areas: labourers are less and less exible because their skills are less transferable as they become more specic in their application. Moreover, there is a distinct danger of unemployment should an industry fail or become outmoded. This is particularly evident in the rapidly progressive sector of technology: a production line manufacturing a complicated piece of machinery might consist of twenty different professional specialists, each performing an individual, highly specialised task. If that industry becomes unstable or changes its manner of production even in a minimal senseits workers are ill equipped to adapt. The level of training received is directly proportional to the work that is its goal, and therefore does not necessarily stray beyond. This is economically sound because it manages, in the most restrictive way, roles within an industry; clearly delineating boundaries, in terms of money, and also knowledge. Administered ignorance, in the form of specialist education, perpetuates division, not only in labour, but also in society at large. Conversely, the experts at the other end of the scale might perpetuate error in order to maintain tenure, power. And to mark a distinction where Feyerabend does not, the financial and emotional success of a specialist seems entirely contingent upon whether or not they had a choice in specialising; or whether, under acute nancial pressure, they were compelled into it. At root, it is important not to underestimate the vital role education plays in determining specialisation. The privilege of professional choice is bestowed upon those who have relevant qualifications (as recognised by the respective administration) and a sufciently specic knowledge base, accrued through education that is both state legislated and privately intoned. Although Feyerabends image of a specialist is an intellectually immature individual, this immaturity occurs, ironically, and in the case of scientists, mathematicians, and other bona de expertsafter! the particular decision to specialise has been made. Growth is stunted from that decision: the specialist area continues to swell while its periphery wastes away. Feyerabends specialists are academics (he draws particular attention to the problem of academic tenure within his essay Experts in a free society3, and it often feels like he has a particular reader in mindperhaps Imre Lakatosi), and he clearly presupposes at least some of the privileges required to be able to choose a specialisation. Karl Marx dened the necessitated choice of the labourer, and the symptomatic segregation of society as alienation, with those workers becoming spiritually depressed as a result of their enforced reduction to the status of mere machines built for one specic purposeii. He also suggested that a complete, balanced life within his communist society was itself a transcendental state of labour, with people expressing themselves through a variety of creative work, rather than the restrictive course

19 of specialist and repetitive labour. To clarify, it is clear that there are at least two different and potentially oppositional areas of specialisation: specialisation that occurs through choice and leads to nancial reward and coveted power from expertise; and specialisation which is necessaryagain for nancial reward, but not for power, respect or expertiseand which is not chosen but is initiated previously to an inevitable professional specialisation, in the recesses of primary education, social standing and aspirational potential. This latter version of specialisation is superficially differentiated from the former by being predominantly economically manifested, whereas the former predominantly intellectually. They share a common epistemology (grounded in incentives of power and wealth), but also a common rejoinder: specialisation is a distinctly problematic paradigm of knowledge production and social position, which runs the risk of perpetuating ignorance, meritocracy and social schism. It seems clear that a critical and resistant alternative should be sought. // The word dilettante rst appeared in English in the early 18th century, directly imported from the Italian word of the same spelling, which describes a lover of music or painting; one who takes delight in the arts (from the Latin dilettare

Ibid,. p.112.

20 meaning simply to delight). Initially, the term was used exclusively in this earnest and positive sense. It wasnt until the latter part of the century that the now dominant and pejorative use of the wordto cynically describe a devoted amateur; a supercial interest in the arts entered common parlance. Over a similar period, The Society of Dilettanti grew in inuence and notoriety. Set up by the infamous rake Sir Francis Dashwoodiii, The Society of Dilettanti was initially founded as a dining club for an exclusive coterie of young noblemen who had been on the Grand Tour. Over the next twenty years however, the club became ever wealthier, and subsequently grander in aspiration. It sought to correct and purifyiv the collective aesthetic appreciative capacity of the English people, and played a major part in the founding of The Royal Academy. The denigration of the word!dilettante!from its denition of a genuine appreciation (even!love) of the arts, to a barren, idle and affected!admiration!of the arts, coincides with the rise of The Society of Dilettanti. It could happily be attributed, at least in part, to their arrogance in attempting to act as aesthetic corrective to a philistine populous, and their sordid reputation as a troupe of drunks, philanderers and occultistsv. It is also worth noting that membership was made up solely of noblemen, whose power and wealth were hereditary, and sustained through cultural hegemony. A century before the mass industrialisation and rural exodus of England, the ruling-class exercised their control through, not only economic or military might, but more importantly, through an invocation of cultural capital4. A lack of interest in society coupled with their inveterate interest in the arts, the occult and classical antiquity, leads one to the conclusion that their ultimately privileged position (as distinct from that relatively meager privilege enjoyed by academics and scholars) allowed them to sidestep the problem of specialism altogether. No choice had to be made because there was no harboured aspiration to achieve a (non-existent) higher position within society; greater respect and power (cultural capital was, as EP Thompson noted, the primary source of power in the 18th Century 5 ); or more money (which was inherited and for them, to all intents and purposes, unending). Operating at this blas pinnaclerather than at its basethere is no call for expertise because none of the common incentives to specialise are present. If a specialists immaturity (in Feyerabends sense) stems from a selective pursuit of excellence in a narrow eld at the expense of all others; then the immaturity of the members of The Society of Dilettanti (as evidenced in their obsession with all things esoteric and unreal) is endemic. That professional specialism is of little or no personal relevance to the 18th century dilettante seems clear, but the particularities of the historical moment that gave birth to the henceforth pejorative dilettante are certainly important in order to locate an equivalence in more recent times. The word!dilettante! has today lost its historical particularity (inevitably, with the specific contingencies of rulingclass existence in the 18th century inevitably falling by a post-industrial wayside), but has nevertheless retained its pejorative cast, having never been able to reclaim that lost, afrmative etymology in the intervening years. I would like to suggest that the persistence of the gure of the dilettante as a person who desultorily follows a branch of the arts or knowledge [] for amusement onlyvi is directly linked to the growth of capitalism as the dominant ideology and the previously mentioned economic success of Adam Smiths system for the division of labour. Capitalist professionalism is the ideological and lexical glue that bonds specialism with the economy, and simultaneously excludes the possibility for dilettantism to be revived without its pejorative tarring. However, if we can establish that this pejorative termthough rooted in a genuine resentment for a decrepit and bloated rulingclass who could afford to maintain both a Kantian disinterest and a

21 genuine indifference to the fine artsis maintained today through an insidious and assumptive connotation related more to not being a specialist than being a genuine dilettante, then we might begin to unearth a positively-charged antonym to specialism. Firstly, it is worth divesting!dilettante!of the spurious synonyms that are presently afxed to it. Amateur (which comes complete with its own fractured etymological and sociological history), is a particularly stubborn euphemism, often happily used interchangeably with dilettante. There are, however, signicant differences. The gure of the amateurvii is dened in opposition (whereas the dilettante is dened in affability) to the always-already superior gure of the professional, who defines the conditions of the amateurs existence: one cannot, for example, be an amateur matchbox collector, because there is no professional equivalent.! Amateur! operates as a prex, a conditionjust as! professional! doesthat marks a division of skill, time and money. Where the dilettante is uninhibited, the amateur is cast into shadow by their counterpart, the professional. And although any residual amator!(love) within the amateur might decry the nancial incentive in the practice of the pure pursuit, it is also bluntly true that all professionals were once amateurs viii. Similarly to those of the dilettanti, the origins of the modern amateur are to be found in the ruling-classes of the

4 P. Bourdieu,!The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature!(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 5 E.P. Thompson,! The Making of The English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963).

22 18th century, and the inceptions of leisure time. Originally the denition of an amateur was contingent upon a class-system that predates the middle-classmeaning that amateur pursuits were the sole prevail of the rich. At rst, the oppositional relationship of amateur to professional was less apparent, due in main to the fact that those gentleman amateursix that availed themselves of leisurely pursuits only recently made professional, were not financially motivated, and therefore did not desire to progress to professional status. The amateurs subsequent attachment to social and economic liberation and mobility during the 19th century goes some way to explaining why it entered favourable parlance. The modern amateurx is now regarded as a serious individual (serious being an important qualifier, and one that the delight of the dilettante clearly lacks), either because they desire professionalism, or because they have chosen a particular area within which to attain a high level of skill or expertise. In this sense, the amateur life runs in parallel with that of the professionally specialist life; and although an individual can certainly engage in more than one amateur pursuit, each is defined by a particular level of investment; a seriousness that describes a chosen pursuits importance above the myriad others. Furthermore, such seriousness, import and devotion require time: patience and practice are needed to become good enough to be an amateurto be distinguished from the novice or the dabbler.xi The dilettante, on the other hand, does not appear on any hierarchy of skill, devotion or seriousness; on the contrary, dilettantism is an approacha methodologythat might be employed across a variety of disciplines and interests. The skills acquired in progressing to the level of amateur blacksmith will not provide any advantageous skills when subsequently embarking on the pursuit of, say, amateur cricket; on the contrary, the means of approachthe intellectual welcome that the dilettante extendsis necessarily and denitionally the same regardless of practical distance between areas. ! Ultimately, amateurism stands firm under the banner of specialism and alongside professionalism: allied and constituted by one another through mutual aspirational motivation, the one buoys the other with platitudes of devotion, seriousness and authority. Amateurism is guilty of the same immaturated ideology of which Feyerabend accuses the chosen professional specialist: both opt for particular expertise and power at the expense of progress in other areas. The financial incentive in amateurism, although disguised by its apparent antonymic relation to professionalism, is produced by that very collusive relationship amateurism abets professionalisms adherence to capitalism by providing practice. By contrast, when stripped of its ruling-class vestige, dilettantism is originally and fundamentally (going back to its positivist pre-history) disconnected from any hegemony of knowledge; it is instead, and crucially, dened by its blind embrace of varietyhomogeneously treating everything as heterogeneous, worthy of consideration or perhaps, that sneered at delight. This homogeneous delight does not, however, stem from an ulterior, nancial incentive: it cannot support the capitalist ultimatum of choosing a specialism. Neither does it actually preclude differentiation, because it makes uniform the supposed affectation of interest and knowledge, and extends them. It is also worth noting that a uniformity of enthusiasm for anyor everything, does not preclude the idea that the homogeneous level of investment by the dilettante is low; on the contrary, the opportunities afforded by a breadth of consistently maintained interests might, according to Feyerabend, prove to be antidotal to the immaturity of specialism: [No subject] can demand exclusive attention, and each of them must be pursued with restraint. This restraint cannot be achieved abstractly, by devoting oneself to one subject and thinking that there may be a limit to it [but] it must be supported by the concrete experience that goes on outside

23 the limit [] it is this concrete experience which prevents him from becoming a slave [] You can be a free man, you can achieve and yet retain the dignity, the appearance, the speech of a free man only if you are a!dilettante.6 ! Prejudice and intellectual bigotry are the dangerous potential side effects of specialism. More importantly however, as mentioned earlier it is freedom that is truly lacking in Feyerabends specialist; specifically, an Aristotelian freedom of equanimity and perspectivexii. That this balance might only be achieved via the intellectual generosity (and arguable vacuity) of the dilettante, has repercussions outside of Feyerabends strident assault on academic and scientic method. As noted earlier, there is a crucial difference to be drawn between two types of professional specialist: those who chose their specialism in order to accrue expertise, connoisseurship and power; and those whose choice was involuntary or made because of necessity. The incentive to specialise that is ideologically and nancially proffered by capitalism, can be more accurately considered an order, in the case of economically disenfranchised members of society. The resistant alternatives that dilettantism might offer are unavailable,

Feyerabend, p.117.

24 simply because capitulation to participation in a minutely divided labour force is the only financial viability. Issues of intellectual freedom or Aristotelian perspective and balance do not enter into itthe pervasiveness of capitalism means that in order to make moneyor indeed surviveone must engage in its economic model. The intellectual immaturity symptomatic of professional specialism is both affect and effect of capitalisms insidious success. The exclusivity perpetuated by the specialist (as above) via linguistic, denitional authority (educational or devotional trophies), essentially serves to reify the dominant hegemonic and economic structures, leaving little potential for movement between disciplines and authorities, much less between chosen specialists and those for whom specialism has been administered or enforced. In order for dilettantism to become a viable alternative to specialism, it must become both nancially and spirituallyxiii. // The original Society of Dilettanti were dilettantes of particular cultural products: supercial aesthetes dabbling in the artistic and philosophical currencies of a Europe on the cusp of the Enlightenment. Crucially however, they were not practitioners of their interests: with a few notable exceptions (Joshua Reynolds, for example), The Society of Dilettanti were spectators, commentators, philanthropists and tastemakersand not artists, musicians or writers. It is interesting to note that dilettantism has its roots in an experience of culture and knowledge of creativity, but that the Dilettanti were aesthetes in a theoretical sense. A Kantian definition of beauty as the experience of a disinterested pleasure rhymes cynically with the practices of the noble, cultural capitalists of the 18th century. The very notion that the manner in which one experiences real beauty in art is through!disinterested!pleasure would certainly have afrmed the connection that they made between artistic appreciation and power: disinterest assumes the nonvested position of the non-creator. As mentioned earlier, the conditions of professional specialisation are economically motivated, and the primary condition for 18th century dilettantism was a lack of this motivationxiv. According to Aristotle, all paid employment absorbs and degrades the mindxv, which is presumably to say that a golden carrot dangling before the free person is ruinous. This serves to underline the nobilitys status as custodians and sole appreciators of the most rened aesthetic experiences. Giorgio Agamben, however, in his book! The Man Without Content, underlines the shift that Nietzsche argues for in his!Genealogy of Morals: a move away from an aesthetic of the spectator whose investment in the work is quintessentially objective and disinterestedto that of the creator, whose sacrifice and motivation is often extraordinarily! interested xvi. It is here, I believe, that we find the source of the dilettantes associated supercial and triing nature: the dilettante was a spectator, a steward, an observer and a critic; whereas the specialist was a creator, disbarred from the central role of spectatorial epistemology:! disinterest. Leaving behind the class-based scaffold that supported these possible definitions however, we are merely left with the residual social accrual of interest and disinterest, labour and management. If Nietzsche is right, then the move towards an aesthetic of the creator accompanies a social shift away from the class castes and blood colours of the 18th century, and towards a blurring, if not a!reversal!of class delineations, as the middle bleeds across the social corpus, and leisure becomes no longer the sole domain of the nonprofessional, disinterested wealthy. In order to progress the notion of the dilettante, however, it is important to separate it, at least partially, from this perceived spectatorial and power-oriented conception. With the post-industrial middle-class comes a number of complicating economic and social factors: the victory of capitalism over communism meant that, as previously mentioned, capitalist ideology was, and is, ascendant, meaning an economy of specialism might prevent a culture of hybridized spectatorship

25 and creativity from emerging in the middle-ground of the middle-class. There still remains the problem of dilettantisms innate disinterest in nancial gain because it is an!effect! of that gain, and perhaps cannot precede it. In order for dilettantism to lose this position of privilege, it must acquire a creative and laborious interest at its heart. The reexivity of postmodernism might begin to provide an answer to this problem. Reflexivity, as a sociological constitution, was rst posited in the early 20th centuryxvii, but became particularly associated with postmodernism in the centurys latter decades with the reemergence of (post-)Marxist sociology; and specifically the appearance in the 1970s of identity politics. Through this sociopolitical corrective, a perceived growth in the public awareness of selfhood, of identity, emerged. Self-reflexivitythe ability to objectively assess oneself (a decidedly tautological concept in such rhetoric)provides the self with a secondary, spectatorial, and even custodial perspective of itself. For the specialist, it potentially opens up a knowledge of themselves from outside their specialism; from outside their ideologically constituted limits. This externalized assessment is spectatorial, othering, and dilettante, grounded on an external (superficial), essentially disinterested social position. Aristotles free man, updated to a contemporary context, is asked to maintain objectivity,!in particular with reference

26 to himself. Specialism tempered with objectivity, with self-reexivity, allows an unprivileged dilettantism to enter the subjective fray, albeit as an observer of the self. In this way, it may be possible for dilettantism to temper specialism, and for it to enter into a creative and professional dialogue with specialism. Importantly, identity politics has also worked as a restorative to history: one of the dening characteristics of postmodernism was its ironical and absurdist appropriative mandatewith particular recourse to modernism, but also to pre-modern epochs such as The Enlightenment and The Renaissance. Previously immutable, infallible epochs became, refracted through a lens of contemporary life, inauthentic, mythical. Strategic uses of historical anachronism, genre collapsing, or the blurring of documentary and ctionxviii, were all tropes in the arts that emerged from the fierce experimentation of modernism, but were subsequently realised and mitigated by a postmodern doubt often expressed through pastiche of historical hubris. The performance of previously expert roles as now anachronous clichs questions the certainty, the assurances of truth that a particular coterie of specialists might assert. Expertise is particularly absurd if the subject within which one is an expert is effectively made redundant by a new, even more precise truth. This risk of redundancyand subsequent pasticheis made more galling in the terms of the administered specialist. Without choice, a professional specialism can be consigned to the unnecessary overnight, with those associated specialists left in a purgatory of useless knowledge. For certain postmodern practitioners howeverxix, redundancy, failure and anachronism became emblematic of the precariousness of truth and of specialist knowledge in ones own time. By learning a particularly specialist area of knowledge, and superimposing it over another, one could expose the metaphorical (mal-)content of that specialism. The transference of a specialist area of knowledge from truth, via redundancy, to metaphor, is the proof of Feyerabends skepticism of specialist ideology, particularly regarding that of the sciences. The moment in which dilettantism becomes vital in this correcting process is in the overlapping of specialisms; the knowledge of and in a specialism (enough to understand and perhaps employ its methods) whilst remaining essentially detached from itin observancein order to be free, but to also bear witness to that freedom. // Thus, because it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in his jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor. Antonio Gramsci,! The Prison Notebook
NOTES // i Lakatos was a close friend of Feyerabend, despite having almost completely opposing views on scientic method and the ideology of scientic truth. Their correspondence from the late sixties onwardswhen Feyerabend was lecturing in America, and Lakatos at LSE in Londonhas been published under the title, For and Against Method,!a play on the title of Feyerabends most famous book,! Against Method, published twenty years previously. ii Marxs concept of alienation is one of the most crucial humanitarian aspects of his theory. Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition: My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life. (Marx, 1844) iii Dashwood was an Etonian who worked for a brief stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer under William Pitt The Elder; but who is best remembered as the rake that founded an array of exclusive members clubs in London, apparently for the practice of rather risqu hedonisms. iv Often quoted though seldom cited, the correct and purify tenet is described as the essential gist of the societys mythical manifesto. It also points toward conceptions of a philistine populous, posited by Dave Beech and John Roberts as the spectres of art and aesthetics: the philistine is insensitive and brutal; the denitional other of art and aesthetics. The role of the philistine, they argue, is as a ghost that haunts aesthetics. Through questioning the ontology of the philistine, Beech and Roberts can appraise issues of privilege, power and symbolic violence that about in the autonomous work of art (Beech & Roberts, 2002). [T]he philistine doesnt invent arts negations, rather it produces them out of an inversion of arts false afrmations. (ibid., p. 299.) The philistine might provide a link between the specialist and the dilettante, whether constituted empiricallywhich would be tantamount to a social grouping, a category; and thereby a specialist delineationor theoretically, which would treat the philistine as ideological, situating the problem elsewhere, which would seem to be dilettantish (ibid., p. 44). v Dashwood also founded The Hellfire Club, notorious as a haunt for those of upstanding social status who wished to indulge in deviant or immoral behaviour. The motto of the club was,!Fay Ce que vouldras (Do what thou wilt). !

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vi The OED goes on to describe the dilettante as a person who studies a subject or area!supercially, as not thorough, triing, and!amateurish. vii Curiously,!amateur!has an etymological root that is as sweet as that of!dilettante: the Latin,!amatorone who loves. viii Robert A. Stebbins, in his article for The Pacic Sociological Review entitled,!The Amateur: Two Sociological Denitions,!draws up an interesting if rigid system that casts the amateur as a mediator between the public and the professional; a functionally interdependent relationship (1977). ix Amateurs who practiced their pursuit for the love of it, played avidly and often to the highest standards without making the leap to professionalism. This is because they did not require the funds that professionalism would bring as a reward, being as they were invariably gentlemen in the rst instance. Nevertheless they were often highly respected individualsperhaps the most famous amateur of them all was W.G. Gracean amateur cricketer who is widely regarded as the greatest cricketer in history. x Stebbins term. As differentiated from previous historical paradigms of the amateur (1977). xi As differentiated by Stebbin (1977). ! xii In his essay,!Experts in a Free Society, Feyerabend quotes Aristotle on the degrading aspects of specialism: Any occupation, art, science, [] which makes the body, or soul, or mind less t for the practice or exercise of virtue, is vulgar; therefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to deform the body, and likewise!all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind. There are some liberal arts quite proper for a free man to acquire, []!but only to a certain degree, and if he attends to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the same evil effect will follow. (Feyerabend, 1999 p. 118) Nietzsche describes the slave as being the dictate of consensus: Nowadays it is not the man in need of art, but the slave who determines general views: in which capacity he naturally has to label all his circumstances with deceptive names in order to be able to live.(Nietzsche, 18712 p. 165.) xiii Nietzsche seems to suggest that the spiritual liberty of asceticism has the!potential for dilettante interpretation (one ne day [they] decided to say no to any curtailment of their liberty, and go off into the desert; quoting Buddha: freedom is in leaving the house); but becomes overcome by an animalistic acute sense of!smell that abhors [] any kind of disturbance and hindrance [] to power, action, [] and in most cases, actually, his path

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to misery. In asceticism the philosopher merely sees an optimum condition of power, afrming his existence and his existence alone. (Nietzsche, 1887 p. 77.) xiv It is interesting to note some alternative translations of the term le dsinteressement (as used by Kant): as well as disinterest, it might also mean selessness or self-sacrice. Although the 18th century dilettante may not fit these two saintly descriptions, the potential for dilettante dsinteressment to be a seless activity provides a striking counterpart to the obvious ego in the power sought through expertise. xv As quoted by Feyerabend, but taken from Book 8, part 2 of Aristotles!Politics. xvi Agamben, quoting Stendhal, underscores the seemingly interminable promesse de bonheur (the promise of happiness) which an experience of beauty might hold for the creator. This promise, in its interminableness, is binary to the unknown loss of Freuds melancholia; the mourning of which is impossiblejust as the happiness in Stendhals promise is impossible for the artist. xvii The Thomas theorem, formulated by W.I. Thomas is 1928, held that the subjective interpretation of an action causes the action; and that objectivityand thereby truth per seis irrelevant. xviii Authors such as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Gilbert Sorrentino took on the experimental mantel of modernists such as Beckett, Joyce, Perec and Abe, but confused and worried them. Dazzling tropes combined with Arthurian idiom; interviews were scuppered by cut-up; game shows littered with philosophy. xix Conceptual art of the seventies often described the fallacies of truth through illusion: Linguistic constructions of truth often rebuked observable reality (Robert Barrys Inert Gas Series, for example); or tautologically proved itself (Kosuths Five Words in Red Neon).

Edited by Alun Rowlands and Matt Williams www.novelpublication.org NOVEL draws together artists writing, texts and poetry that oscillate between modes of ction and criticism. A cacophony of voices, which is the primary condition of writing, seeks to break the habitual methods of representation and productions of subjectivity. Disconnected from any unitary theme these texts coalesce around writing as a core material of a number of artists exploring language and ction. This ction acts as a speculative force, no longer dened by what is said, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but perhaps as a mode that exists parallel to the visual. Here, art writing is an apparatus for knowledge capture, informed by theory, lm, politics and storytelling; writing as parallel practice, different, tangential; writing as political ction; writing as another adventure on the skin drive', renegotiating unfullled beginnings or incomplete projectsthat might offer points of departure. Amidst the insinuated narratives and materialized visions there is a concern for writing and the impossibility of ction which is at stake. NOVEL asks us to think of writing as something distinct from information, as at least one realm of cultural production that is exempt from the encompassing obligation to communicate. NOVEL is distributed through events, readings and screenings which are staged at venues that become the loci for reading, furnished with artworks and related lms that augment the ctioning of a scenario. This scenario will be the summation of multiple experiences and anxieties that demands new forms of critical ction. These new strategies require an active protagonist, a polymath who can amalgamate them with uency. Fiction is not made up, it is based on everything we can learn or use; a zone in which all sources of knowledge are valid.

Ed Atkins Charles Atlas Barry MacGregor Johnston Mark Leckey Josef Strau Emily Wardill

AGAIN

TIME EXHIBITION CHECKLIST Richard Aldrich Zig-Zag Cubism, 2011 Collage and china marker on linen, 84" x 58" Collection of David A. & Barbara L. Farley Angie Adams/Franz Kline, 20102011 Oil, wax, and vine charcoal on cut linen, 84" x 58" Collection of David A. & Barbara L. Farley Manon de Boer Attica, 2008 16mm lm, black & white, sound, 10 minutes Courtesy of Jan Mot, Brussels Troy Brauntuch Stamps, 19752007 Rubber stamps, dimensions variable Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Hay Maker, 1987 Rubber-stamped ink and gouache on paper, 19.75" x 16.75" (framed) Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Head and Candelabra, 1987 Rubber-stamped ink and white pigment on paper, 14.75" x 12.75" (framed) Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Untitled, 1987 Photograph and rubber-stamped ink on paper, 13.125" x 20.25" (framed) Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York 3 Figures, 1988 Rubber-stamped ink on paper, 6.25" x 8.75" (unframed), 12.75" x 14.75" (framed) Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York White Light Study, 1979 Paper, newsprint, photostats, cardboard, and tape Triptych: #1 and #3: 23.5" x 18.75" (framed); #2: 16.75" x 19.75" (framed) Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Matthew Buckingham Image of Absalon to be Projected Until it Vanishes, 2001 Slide projection and framed text, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York Moyra Davey 50 Photographs, 2003 14 C-prints: 12" x 17", 36 C-prints: 8" x 10" Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York Thea Djordjadze Deaf and dumb universe (Gerst), 2008 Wood, paint, clay, reclay, paper-mch, and plaster, 31.5" x 67" x 28.3" Speyer Family Collection, New York, courtesy of Sprth Magers, Berlin/London Aurlien Froment Rabbits, 2009 HD video, color, silent, 5:41 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Motive Gallery, Amsterdam Rachel Harrison Avatar, 2010 Wood, acrylic, jeans, and pigmented inkjet print, 74" x 36" x 36" Cranford Collection, London Charline von Heyl Untitled, 2011 Acrylic, spray paint, xerox, lithograph, silkscreen, and charcoal on mylar and paper Grid of 12 works on paper, each: 24" x 19" Courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York Ull Hohn Untitled, 1988 Oil on cast plaster and wood, 7.75" x 12" x 2" each, from a series of 8 Private Collection William E. Jones Berlin Flash Frames, 2010 Sequence of digital les, black & white, silent, 9:18 minutes looped Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles Elad Lassry Laminated Structure (For Her and Him), 2009 Silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame, 14.5" x 11.5" x 1.5" Collection of Carlo Bronzini Vender Laminated Structure (For Him), 2009 Silver gelatin print on C-print, painted frame, 14.5" x 11.5" x 1.5" Collection of Carlo Bronzini Vender Julie Christie, 2008 Silkscreen on magazine paper, walnut frame, 14" x 22" x 1.5" Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Drinks, Cheese, 2008 Foil on magazine paper, 14.5" x 10.5" Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Rosalind Nashashibi This Quality, 2010 16mm lm, color, sound, 4:33 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Tulips & Roses, Belgium Blinky Palermo Projektion (Projection), 1971 Screenprint on paper, 15.75" x 15.75" Private Collection

AGAIN Laure Prouvost It, Heat, Hit, 2010 Video, color, sound, 7:20 minutes Courtesy of the artist and MOT International, London Steve Roden ear is for sees (line and horns), 2007 Pencil, ink, watercolor, and collage on paper 19-part drawing series, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects striations (stones and clouds), 2011 Ink and 16mm lm transferred to video, color, silent, 6 minutes Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects one stone. and arcs and ears, 2011 Sound installation Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Emily Roysdon Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 20012007 9 black & white slides, 3 embroidered photographs, 11" x 14" each Courtesy of the artist Rosemarie Trockel Goodbye, Mrs. Moniper, 2003 Video, black & white, sound, 5:40 minutes Private Collection, courtesy of Sprth Magers, Berlin/London Mars, 2006 Ceramics and platinum, 23.25" x 29" x 5" Private Collection, courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York Memorial Day, 2008 Mixed media, 26.75" x 22.75" x 2" Private Collection, Boston Umbrella, 2008 Mixed media, 26.75" x 22.75" x 2" Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

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TIME NOVEL ARTISTS Ed Atkins Impulses to Reanimate a Dead Alsatian (collectively), 2010 Ink on paper, ferric tape, tape recorder, and silkscreened poster, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London Marc Camille Chaimowicz Shoe Waste?, 1971/2005 5 hand-printed silver gelatin prints, 9.8" x 15.9", 8.5" x 15.9", 11.7" x 14.4", 15.9" x 10.8", 15.7" x 9.3" Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London Steven Claydon Osmium and Wolfram, 2008 Wall drawing/print, dimensions variable Courtesy of Kimmerich Gallery, New York Sergej Jensen Untitled, 2011 Fabric, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; and White Cube, London Sam Lewitt Portfolio (Monograms 2 of 2), 2008 Portfolio with ink and graphite on paper, ink on paper, carbon paper, 4" x 5" negative in plastic sleeve, 3 color photocopies Portfolio: 17" x 22", plinth: 34" x 35" x 22" Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York R.H. Quaytman Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 (A Woman in the Sunyellow), 2010 Oil, silkscreen, and gesso on wood, 24.75" x 40" Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York Josef Strau Untitled, 2011 Mixed media, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York Paul Thek Untitled (1 to 1), 1982 Acrylic on newspaper, 21.75" x 27.75" Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody

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MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ Pages 1, 17, 64, 89, 105: Shoe Waste?, 1971/2005 5 hand-printed silver gelatin prints 9.8" x 15.9", 8.5" x 15.9", 11.7" x 14.4", 15.9" x 10.8", 15.7" x 9.3" Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London SculptureCenters exhibitions are supported by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Bloomberg; Lambent Foundation advised by the Tides Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Foundation; Pollock Krasner Foundation; and contributions from our Board of Trustees and many generous individuals. All rights reserved, including rights of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. SculptureCenter and the authors Published by SculptureCenter 44-19 Purves Street Long Island City, NY 11101 t: 718.361.1750 f:718.786.9336 info@sculpture-center.org www.sculpture-center.org Library of Congress: 2011927526 ISBN: 0-9703955-6-6 Design: Kloepfer Ramsey Editor: Fionn Meade Printer: Shapco, Minneapolis, MN

AGAIN SculptureCenter Board of Trustees James L. Bodnar, Chair Fred Wilson, President Sascha S. Bauer Jean Grifn Borho Allen H. Brill William G. Dobbins Robert K. Elliott Arline Feinberg Tom Otterness Lisa Schiff Elaine G. Weitzen SculptureCenter Staff Mary Ceruti, Executive Director Frederick Janka, Associate Director Fionn Meade, Curator Kristen Chappa, Curatorial Associate Katie Bode, Operations Manager John Emison, Visitor Services Manager Erin Pierson, Development Associate Morgan Edelbrock, Chief Installer