Lara Schnitger, Untitled (2009)

Lara Schnitger
Untitled, 2009
Cotton and wood
110 x 68 x 42 inches
AK# 6945
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Fantastic sculpture from Schnitger’s current exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery. A delicate feat of tent-like engineering shrouded in drip-dyed, midnight blue silk, it goes beyond merely suggesting the figure to evoke a fully formed character, reflecting Schnitger’s interest in theater.

Lara Schnitger, Untitled (Cats), 2009

Lara Schnitger
Untitled (Cats), 2009
Mixed Media
75 x 92 Inches
AK# 6933
Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist My newest and long-awaited book purchase. 640 pages.

Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist

My newest and long-awaited book purchase. 640 pages.

Lee Lozano, Clarification Piece (1969)

Lee Lozano, Clarification Piece

1969. Carbon paper transfer with ballpoint pen and colored pencil on paper, 11 x 8” (27.9 x 20.3 cm). The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift (purchase, and gift, in part, of The Eileen and Michael Cohen Collection). © 2009 Estate of Lee Lozano

Museum of Modern Art, New York, Accession # TR12112.1237

What stood out for me here were the words “All write-ups of pieces are drawings,” suggesting the continuum of writing and drawing that lies at the heart of so much language-based art work.

Rodney Graham, Halcion Sleep (1994)

Rodney Graham, Halcion Sleep, 1994, 26 minute video, variable dimensions.

Went to a talk featuring the wonderful artist William Leavitt, who referred to himself as a “narrator.” Came home thinking about narrative and Gérard Genette, which led me to…Rodney Graham.

Tingri

Tingri Ellie Monahan—work of art, daughter of Lara Schnitger and Matthew Monahan

Lara Schnitger at Anton Kern Gallery, New York, 7 May – 20 June, 2009

Matthew Monahan at Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, 22 May – 27 June, 2009

Tim Griffin on Ray Armantrout

Tim Griffin’s review of Ray Armantrout’s Versed

“Armantrout ably frames a highly mediated world using its own language, even as she deftly employs quotation marks and overly familiar diction to delineate those voices we “receive” in contemporary culture, leaving open and in perpetual play in her compositions the question of where the real begins and the (pre)fabricated ends, or where the poet emerges and where she disappears.”

N. E. Thing Company

This is so great: a hockey team sponsored by N. E. Thing Company. Though I’m a longtime fan, I did not know about “the team” before seeing it as part of Lucy Lippard’s archives.

Carl Andre, From Map of Poetry @Autobiography (1966)

Carl Andre, From Map of Poetry @Autobiography, 1966

Just as Carl Andre’s sculptures are “cuts” of elemental materials, his writings are condensed expressions, “cuts” of language that emphasize the part rather than the whole. Andre, a central figure in minimalism and one of the most influential sculptors of our time, does not produce the usual critical essay. He has said that he is “not a writer of prose,” and the texts included in Cuts—the most comprehensive collection of his writings yet published—appear in a wide variety of forms that are pithy and poetic rather than prosaic. Some texts are statements, many of them fifty words or less, written for catalog entries and press releases. Others are Socratic dialogues, interwoven statements, or in the form of questionnaires and interviews. Still others are letters—public and private, lengthy missives and postcards. Some are epigrams and maxims (for example, on Damian Hirst: I DON’T FEAR HIS SHARK. I FEAR HIS FORMALDEHYDE) and some are planar poems, words and letters arranged and rearranged into different patterns. They are organized alphabetically by subject, under such entries as “Art and Capitalism,” “Childhood,” “Entropy (After Smithson),” “Matter,” “My Work,” “Other Artists,” and “Poetry,” and they include Andre’s reflections on Michelangelo and Duchamp, on Stein and Marx, and such contemporaries as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Damien Hirst.

Carl Andre’s writing and its materiality—its stress on the visual and tactile qualities of language—takes its place beside his sculpture and its materiality, its revelation of “matter as matter rather than matter as symbol.” Both assert the ethical and political primacy of matter in a culture that prizes the replica, the insubstantial, and the virtual. “I am not an idealist as an artist,” says Andre. “I try to discover my visions in the conditions of the world. It’s the conditions which are important.”

— James Meyer, Intro to Carl Andre, CUTS: Texts 1959-2004

Dieter Roth, Black page with holes (poetry machine) (1961)

Dieter Roth, Black page with holes (poetry machine), 1961

Diter Rot developed this piece as a contribution to the Fluxus publication An Anthology, which appeared in 1963. When the book was first planned in 1961, he sent to George Maciunas a black page with holes in it and the following instructions for use:

Please take the sheet with holes in, but do it like this: take any printed matter, for instance pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage cut in size of fluxus make the holes there in to through, put in to fluxus, loose (as the black sheet) would have been; loose, i mean : don’t take black sheet, take pages of book, catalogs, logocats, folders, posters, newspaper, emballage, tricotage camouflage, cut as fluxus in size, make the holes therein, put into it fluxum, i mean put the loose sheet then into fluxus.

In other words: the black page is intended as a master for perforating found printed material through which changing views will then be available. On publication, An Anthology included a “white page with holes” but not the associated printed matter.

courtesy medienkunstnetz