(Untitled)

3 great movies currently playing: (Untitled) which is a satire of the contemporary art world, Yes Men Fix The World, and Capitalism: A Love Story.

Donna Haraway @ CCA on 10.20.09

Donna Haraway will be giving a lecture at CCA next week. She wrote "The Cyborg Manifesto", "Promise of Monsters","When Species Meet"... Here's a speech on YouTube, "Cyborgs, Dogs and Companion Species", about the birth of the kennel, cyborgs, dogs and companion species, humans, machines, computer, organisms, technoscience, genetics, nature, culture, consciousness, philosophy, emergent ontologies, social relationships, societies, Michel Foucault, figure, reference, cyborg manifesto, and socialist feminism, given to the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS, Switzerland, in 2000.

Reading for Oct 14

Here's the email from Scott just in case you're wondering if he has sent you an email yet. For the PDF of Raymond Carver's "Feathers" email Scott (or me).

Scott:
For next week please read the attached short story by Raymond Carver. Please let me know if you have any trouble opening the PDF. Don't be scared by the amount of pages, it's fiction so it should be a quick read for you. Funny isn't a word often attributed to Carver, but his work can be considered a blending of humor and sadness. I'd like to spend some time next week discussing the fine line between funny and sad, so feel free to bring to class anything else you think may fit in this category. I'm also hoping to discuss the use and metaphor of the ecological as a tool for humor in contemporary art. Again, if you have any examples or something you'd like to discuss, please bring it with you. Thanks, and have a good weekend.

Montblanc Gandhi Pen

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/02/AR2009100203191.html

Or it could be yet another ironic postmodern art piece that purports to critique commodity culture and that's being sold to wealthy collectors... Top that Jeff Koons. (Also Kate Spade Store.)

"Images of Mohandas K. Gandhi, father of modern India and icon of asceticism and nonviolence, have ended up in some unlikely places before, from ads selling Apple computers to counter-culture T-shirts. But it's fair to say that the latest incarnation may be the most ironic: Gandhi, in his signature loincloth, hawking a $23,000 fountain pen named in his honor.

The Montblanc pen, unveiled for the celebration of what would have been Gandhi's 140th birthday on Friday, has prompted howls from Hindu groups and Gandhists who say the sticker price is the lifetime income of many of India's poor. The limited-edition fountain pen in 18-carat solid gold is engraved with Gandhi's image and tricked out with a saffron-colored mandarin garnet on the clip and a rhodium-plated nib. ... A billboard put up this week over Mumbai's teeming slums shows a gaunt Gandhi next to next to an image of the swanky pen, with golden threads woven around it to represent Gandhi's spinning wheel."

From: "Montblanc's Gandhi Pen Causes Howls in India" by Emily Wax, Washington Post Foreign Service, 10.02.09.

Nina Katchadourian's 'CARPARK'

Francis Alys's When Faith Moves Mountains made me think of CARPARK (in terms of the amount of effort).

From www.ninakatchadourian.com: For one day all the incoming cars were sorted by color into the 14 different parking lots at the school, resulting in the fields of colored cars. The white lot was the largest (17% of cars in San Diego were white), with red as the runner-up (13%). No one could find their car at the end of the day.

Parody of the Samurai show at Asian Art

"Lord It's the Samurai" is an online parody of the Asian Art Museum's "Lords of the Samurai" exhibition. 'The parody Web site - www.asiansart.org - closely mimics the design of the Web page that the Asian museum devoted to its exhibition - so closely that some contributors to the busy West Coast blog www.8Asians.com mistook it for the real thing...' (SFGate article "Samurai parody takes jab at Asian Art Museum" by Kenneth Baker)

Some related links

Hey everyone. Here's some links relating to the humor of politics. I've left off the Yes Men so as not to take the wind out of Nikki's sails for her presentation next week.

• Improv Everyhwere is a group headed by Charlie Todd in NYC. They call their pranks "missions" and they refer to themselves as "agents", which automatically gives their work the rhetoric of a government agency. While not all their missions seem political, I would argue that their intervention into public space often creates a political situation, whether they intended it or not. Here's some of my favorites: (Note in Frozen Grand Central an observer says "It's some kind of protest.")

Frozen Grand Central
Best Buy
Look Up More
Offshore Gambling
Human Mirror

• Here's a link to game of volleyball over the US/Mexico border that was produced for Wholphin.

• Daniel Joseph Martinez

From the Whitney site, "The work takes its name from Walter Benjamin’s coinage for a form of violence that functions as pure means, with knowable ends. The installation of 125 panels, painted in automotive goldflake and each bearing the name of an organization around the world attempting to affect politics through violent means, is part of a larger ongoing project whose open-ended mix of theory, politics, and research is representative of Martinez’s entire practice."

• Banksy
Pet Shop
Bristol Museum

• Sandow Birk • Try and go see his exhibit at Cathrine Clark before it closes on Halloween.
http://www.sandowbirk.com/paintings/the-depravities-of-war/

• Enriqu Chagoya

• Honore Daumier

• John Heartfield





• Barbara Kruger










































• William Hogarth
• Guillermo Gomez-Pena

Gays can quote the Bible too

Source: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/09/18/gay-people-can-quote-the-bible-too#comment-2266320

Images of Sandow Birk's American Qur'an...

How Asians desecrated the peace sign

Youtube humor! http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/how-asians-desecrated-the-peace-sign Reminds me of the stand-up routine involving charts and classifications. Wonder if it is funny only to Asians... and whether it is problematic in any way.

Do Ho Suh & Tim Hawkinson

Two other works relate to today's discussion on artists who worked with scale/meticulous labor:

1. Do Ho Suh's Fallen Star 1/5



A Korean style house crashing into an American mansion. Their interiors are crafted with meticulous attention to detail (more info).

2. Tim Hawkinson's Bird



A small bird made from Hawkinson's fingernail clippings. Quite amazing in person. How does he keep his works from breaking apart when moved around...

Maurizio Cattelan

Image: La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour)

Brief summary

1. Cattelan makes art that often uses taboo subjects which people react as a one-liner and do not move pass the punchline to analyze what it is saying, which is a disservice to both the artist and the viewer.

2. His works implicate the audience and enmesh them in what Tom Morton calls a 'mutual corruption', such as in Unfitted (2004), to take pleasure and being entertained, and at the same time, to think of children who are victims of one's everyday pleasures.
http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/04/chinaewaste.png

3. Many works reflect on his relationship with the art world, his entanglements with it. The art world provides him the opportunity to make work but at the same time he's frustrated by its restrictions and his lack of control:

a. A Sunday in Rivara (1992) literalizes his escape from the exhibition by knotted bed-sheets hanging down from the window.
- Vito Acconci's springboard out the gallery window is sharper

b. Unfitted (1996)

c. Finally, Wrong Gallery — can't live with the art world and can't live without it. His solution is to function within it and continue poking fun at it. Is this a defeatist attitude?

Observations and possible discussion questions

1. A point of art is to change it (what it's critiquing), and irony doesn't work.
Ironic pieces:
a. Blown Away
b. Wrong Gallery's participating at Frieze art fair

Irony doesn't work in changing what it is making fun of: do you agree or disagree?

2. Even if a piece can't change what it is critiquing, it is still worth making if it is funny and accessible to a non-art-world audience on some level. (The most interesting pieces are those that go outside the art world, such as The Ninth Hour/La Nona Ora).

What if it is only accessible to the art world elites? That provides a laugh to the art elite without changing anything. Is it still worth doing? (Thinking of post-Marxist, e.g. Lessig, as well as Hal Foster's critique of institutional critique art e.g. Andrea Fraser's).

Article: Tom Morton. "Maurizio Cattelan: Infinite Jester". The Artist's Joke (Documents of Contemporary Art).

Class readings

humor Fall09
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXew1J7bhfuiZGc3d21qZDNfMzNoZ3FtbWZkdg&hl=en&invite=CKaisy4

kippenberger001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiMTEyYjdiYzUtZDUxNS00YjhhLThkNzQtM2VlYTQwNzk0Yjcx&hl=en

cattelan001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiMTJjM2JlYjUtNGVjMS00OWU3LWE3OGUtNWE4ZWQ4ZjRlNDIz&hl=en

duchamp001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiMTM3MzViMzAtZTE4Ny00ZTIyLTg1ZGYtOTkwMGExZWE1MTlh&hl=en

Its Not Punny.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiMmM0Mzc0YjUtMmRjNC00NDdkLTg2N2ItMTkzNDFhYWM4MDMx&hl=en

magritte.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiYmJjNzQzMzYtN2ZmOC00NTExLThlNzYtNjNkYjRkZTAzODdk&hl=en

stiles oldenburg.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiYzc4ODQ3ZTEtZDU3MC00MTQ1LTk3MjMtOWI3NmY3YzVmMDcw&hl=en

hoch001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiZTYwNjRhMTItZjNjYi00N2UxLWE0ZWUtYjQzY2UxMmIxMTYy&hl=en

carrington picasso001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiMDY1NDBkNmYtNGQ0MC00YmY4LTlmMjEtMTBiZDI0MTQ3NzYz&hl=en

Isaak001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiNjRmYjdjYzEtMmEwNS00OGMzLThhNjAtNmIzN2MwZmE2NTQ5&hl=en

guerilla girls001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiOTI5MTMzYzEtNmQyNy00Yjk0LTgzYzEtMjU3Zjg4MTExNzZi&hl=en

andrea fraser001.pdf
http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B3ew1J7bhfuiYjFjMzQ0ZTctMmZmZi00MjM5LThlYzQtYjFmNWE2MWZjOTZk&hl=en

as Scott mentioned, there have been some technical issues, so let's try this to see if you all get access to ALL the readings. If not, we'll figure out something else,
Allan