Circulation, Distribution, Dispersion

In November we’re holding a workshop at Goldsmiths around circulation, distribution and dispersion of artwork.

I want to think about artworks that make claims about not being circulated. My interest in this area stems from my own work, but I want to use the opportunity to research things other people have done. Because of the nature of the subject I don’t anticipate sticking exclusively to examples from art, but I hope to draw some conclusions that have relevance to art.

Most of the work I’ve found on this subject is around event-based art. A starting point could be the dissemination of happening-type work Allan Kaprow calls “lifelike art”. In his 1966 lecture How To Make A Happening he urges us to “happen” in the real world and not in art, and not to put on shows for audiences. He differentiates between the happenings and the instructions or descriptions of them, saying that the latter are not art, “just literature”. Nevertheless these happenings enter an art context and find an art audience through this “literature”, or informally through anecdote.

Contested Ground

Yesterday and today I have been at the 176 project space. There was a lot of activity as the exhibition and events were on for only two days, and there were as many people with cameras and notepads producing responses and documentation as there were straightforward visitors. I was one of the notepad people, contributing to the ‘fanzine’ which was being printed in a side room where there were also a couple of sculptures and a film projection. People would come in and think we might be a performance, sitting at our tables with desk lights close to our pages.

The brief for contributors was “to document and write about the activities occurring over the weekend. Any style of writing is accepted but the output needs to be immediately produced and printed to appear in the ‘publication’ that is being produced onsite.” Everything offered was accepted, and individual texts were laid out in separate piles on tables so people could take away whatever caught their eye. A more selective publication is planned in the longer term.

Art Market

When my sister and I were quite young (I was six probably, and she would have been seven or eight) we spent a whole day making small saleable items out of paper and rubber bands and card and plasticine and sellotape, including very possibly some sculptures made entirely of sellotape, which were a speciality.

Then out in the garden we put up some tables and arranged on top of them all the things we’d made. By now there were dozens because many of them were variations on a theme and so didn’t need much time or effort to make in a good quantity, and some were very carefully made, and there were some things in groups and some things on their own, and then we put prices on all of them and called our parents down because there was a summer fête.

Careerism

“Minimalism and postminimalism agreed on one thing: eliminate pictures. Painting took to a pure territory, while the new art forms expanded the realm of art to every conceivable issue and strategy. The scene seemed wild, but there were simple rules all along. You were given a white room in a Big Art City for a month. You had to do something in that room to generate attention beyond that month. You had to be written about, bought, or at least widely discussed. Then you would get to have the white room again for another month, and so on. If you did this enough, you had what was called a career. This generated what is perhaps this century’s biggest art movement: careerism.“

For a Practical Avant Garde: excerpt from a paper by Dushko Petrovich, n+1

Art is Dead etc

Anton sent me a link to this article about a couple of Russian exhibitions in London at the moment, which bring up questions of the post-WW1 ‘Art is Dead’ movement to abolish art. Here are the beginning and the final three paragraphs, but the whole article’s worth a look.

Die Kunst ist Tot, es lebe die Neue Maschinenkunst

From Russia, Royal Academy and Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Hayward Gallery.What would a world be like without art? And why did the most talented artists of the period immediately after the First World War end up advocating the abolition of art altogether?