Thanks to the internet, Photoshop, and new software and codes, source material is virtually infinite, infinitely reproducible, infinitely transformable, and remembered forever, with the potential to be archived and documented in the virtual realm for eternity. What are the implications of this newly expanded sense of temporality and lack of materiality (in many cases) for art makers who experiment with these mediums, and for their viewers and critics? How do artists work through, or with, notions of labor and laziness that are part and parcel of the phenomenon of the internet? How has the internet has affected curatorial practice? Guest Respondents: Jon Cates, Eric Fleischauer, Mark Hereld, Friedhard Kiekeben, Dan Quiles and Daniel Sauter explore these questions and more.
There appears to be a growing return to the book amongst younger artists, writers and thinkers. This move towards the material and physical may be in reaction to the vastness and immateriality of forms of cultural production in the Second Life era. This discussion centers around definitions of the publication as art object, as curated exhibition, as micro-archive, as well as phenomenological aspects of the publication—its tactility, personable and intimate dimensions, and the unique one-to-one relationship between reader/viewer and object. Bookmakers, editors, curators and scholars have been invited to this discussion to share their experiences as we ponder the significance of recent evolutions in the book as object, curatorial challenges the artist book provokes, and the future of the medium.
Guest Respondents: Brandon Alvendia, Simon Anderson, Doro Boehme, Michael Golec, and Paige Johnston
The ancient art of cartography has mysterious and storied resonances of ignorance, journeys and discovery; idealized and paradisiacal utopias; Cartesian desires for quantifiable knowledge; and colonial powers and empires. Today, contemporary artists across the globe employ mapping and diagramming in their creative practice to incredibly diverse ends. Bourriaud locates this practice as characteristic of a new era in art in his curatorial essay on the “altermordern”; for the curator, it reflects our age of invisible but enforced borders; multiple passports; global culture and nomadism. Beyond the obvious socio-political qualities in the art of making a map, however, there is also the fundamental act itself of making connections, of stringing ideas together visually and spatially. Guest respondents: Bret Bloom, Scott Carter, Adelheid Mers, Deb Sokolow and Sara Schnadt explore the political, social, personal and ontological dimensions of the map.
Art projects begin to feel like dissertations; loaded with multivalent cultural, political, and historical references, this type of practice often doesn’t result in a traditional art object, but instead exists in performance, in conversations, in recreations of office spaces or archives within a gallery. Contemporary strains of this type of practice have had high visibility in Chicago recently, with exhibitions by Liam Gillick and Jeremy Diller at the MCA in the fall, and the knowledge-questioning investigation by Aspen Mays about to open at the Hyde Park Art Center; these examples will be touchstones for the conversation.
Guest respondents: Frances Whitehead, Patrick Bobilin, Allison Peters & Aspen Mays
The Work of Gambling Historians: Oblique Glances at the Present
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Image: Eric Fleischauer, Assigned + Recommended Reading, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist.
2010 Schedule:
The Doctoral Artist: Research and Art Practice Tuesday, January 26, 7:00 p.m.
Cartography 2.0 Tuesday, February 23, 7:00 p.m.
Curating the Page Tuesday, March 23, 7:00 p.m.
Art in the Age of Infinite Reproducibility Tuesday, April 20, 7:00 p.m.
Join threewalls this winter for the 2010 SALONS series, The Work of Gambling Historians: Oblique Glances at the Present, a special series curated by Ania Szremski. Held on Tuesday evenings at 7:00 pm, SALONS feature guest respondents in round table discussion with the public about currents the contemporary visual arts.
The pictures of race horses crossing the finish line in The Truth Will be Known When the Last Witness is Dead from Walid Raad’s Atlas Project show the horse’s nose right before, or right after, crossing the finish line—never at the exact moment that the horse wins. This project eloquently demonstrates our inability to capture the precise moment in which we live; we need temporal and critical distance for lived experience to coalesce into something recognizable. Perhaps because of this very difficulty, there is an inevitable anxiety to understand, define and delineate the present.
The Work of Gambling Historians is a discussion series that intends to take a sidelong glance at the present moment in cultural production, while remaining cognizant of the fact that these glances will inevitably result in blurry, distorted visions. The series is inspired by a perhaps contentious intuition that technological developments over the past two decades have produced an epistemic shift in terms of our relationship to the concept of “knowledge.” A cursory glance at contemporary art production may reveal certain trends related to this hunch: today, we see art practice steeped in personal or scholarly research, that is often archival in nature, and that doesn’t necessarily result in an end product; a turn to the map and diagram to connect ideas and reveal the patterns hidden under experience; and a resurgence of interest in the publication, parallel to a voracious plundering of the possibilities of the internet and new technologies. The Work of Gambling Historians proposes to investigate this evolution in contemporary ways of receiving, processing, and ordering information, and how this evolution is made manifest in artistic, curatorial, and critical practice.
threewallsSALONS are an ongoing project that invites creative producers and thinkers into the gallery for an open-forum discussion about currents in contemporary visual art and culture. SALONS pose a discussion topic, gather a few key contributors and then open up the floor for discussion between those actively engaged in the 'question' and anyone and everyone who would like to come and be apart of the conversation. This year’s series was curated by Ania Szremski, a dual MA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy. This project was funded in part by The Presidential Urban Engagement Grant distributed by SAIC.
Discussions are gently moderated to keep the discussion flowing.
Join threewalls Thursday, February 5th at 7 pm for Hive Brain (contemporary collaboratives and their open source future), a SALON featuring: Death by Design, Temporary Services, Material Exchange and more. Moderated by Elizabeth Chodos of threewalls.
Art with a Hive Brain is a conversation with local visual arts collaboratives about practicing as a group, team or partnership, the relinquishment of singular authorship, the idea of open-source creativity and recent popularity of collaborative practices in contemporary art. Members of Chicago’s art community are invited to collectively examine and confer about these topics and more over drinks and snacks in this, the third of threewalls 2008/09 salons.
threewallsSALONS are an ongoing project that invites creative producers and thinkers into the gallery for an open-forum discussion about currents in contemporary visual art and culture. SALONS pose a discussion topic, gather a few key contributors and then open up the floor for discussion between those actively engaged in the ‘question’ and anyone and everyone who would like to come and be apart of the conversation. Discussions are gently moderated to keep the ideas flowing.
Join threewalls Thursday, December 4th at 7:00 PM for The Artist in the Field (The rise of the residency and the return to nature), a SALON featuring Sarah Workneh of Ox-Bow; Abby Satinsky of InCUBATE andHarold Arts; Joe Jeffers, Emily Green and Nicholas Wiley of Harold Arts, for a discussion about the artist residency. Moderated by Elizabeth Chodos of threewalls.
