ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

From ArtReview.com:

Though Otto Piene’s Light Ballet works pick up from Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator (1930) and Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mécanique (1924), they have something to say about the ‘black box’ phenomenon which arose in the mid-twentieth century around the issue of radar.  This was a new kind of imaging technology, one whose inner-workings were no longer visible (a la the mechanics of film).  For Moholy-Nagy’s open and transparent structure Piene substituted the perforated drums and chrome globes of Lichtballett (1961) and Hängende Lichtkugel (1972) with their abstract magic lantern plays. One can still ‘get’ how they work, but the mechanism is no longer the point; ‘output’ is. The low violet glow of Electric Anaconda’s timed argon lights (the piece dates to 1965) attests to the presence of forces working behind the scenes, below the threshold of our senses, and beyond our control.

The ‘raster’ in Piene’s titles for his late-’50s paintings—Rasterbild, Untitled (Raster-Rauchzeichnung)—means ‘grid’, but it opens the door to the raster of television’s cathode ray tube. ZERO, the group Piene co-founded with Heinz Mack in Düsseldorf, was billed as a reaction to Germany’s expressionist heritage, but it was more forward thinking than that, and less purely formalist. With fire, soot, and pigment Piene generated hazy screens and coronas of static, forging haunting material analogues for the new technology’s largely invisible vocabulary of form. His work offers a key to that troublesome lock between art and technology, and it’s only just beginning to turn.

Image: Otto Piene, Lichtballett (1961) & Electric Anaconda (1965); installation view from Sperone Westwater

Otto Piene
Light Ballet and Fire Paintings, 1960-1967
Sperone Westwater
6 April - 22 May, 2010

A link to my interview with Olaf Breuning at Museo Magazine.

It’s a bit lengthy, but the conversation was very relaxed and freewheeling; Olaf is a generous and gracious interlocutor.  The interview was conducted during the run up to his Metro Pictures show, which, as the record shows, was very well received.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Demonstration Drawings and Kathleen Henderson’s What if I could draw a bird that could change the world? opened last week at The Drawing Center, and along with them, the first two of TDC’s fully redesigned ‘Drawing Papers’ catalogues are now available.

The Demonstration Drawings catalogue contains two excellent essays: one by Joao Ribas, TDC curator, and one by David Rieff, New York Times Magazine contributing writer and author most recently of Swinning in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother’s illness.

No. 80, Kathleen Henderson’s What if I could draw a bird that could change the world, contains an extensive interview between Nina Katchadourian, curator of TDC’s Viewing Program, and the artist.

The minds at Rhizome consistently make me proud.  Here they’ve linked to a YouTube video of Goldstein’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975).  Goldstein is an underappreciated member of the ‘Pictures’ group; it’s excellent to see him getting the play, and the reach, he deserves.

You can read my article on Naomi Harris and her new book, America Swings, in the new issue of Art Review, either in print or on Art Review:Digital.

I’ll post the pdf to my Articles page once I get a free moment.

If this isn’t the best defense of Facebook, I don’t know what is:

Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky.

If there is a problem here it’s that the notion of the “cognitive surplus” that Shirky promotes privilege the idea of pure production over consumption or, more favorably in my view, observation. Shirky likes very much the idea of people doing and making as opposed to watching, and I think that’s a good point; but isn’t one of the issues that we run into the stratification of these kinds of making and doing? It’s a different kind of sociability, to be sure, but the original technology for that sociablity was the city itself, and we have yet to perfect it; in other words, gin might still have a place in the system, even if TV doesn’t.

We’ve initiated a new series of discussions over at AWS called “Considerations.” The first one asks readers and commenters to consider Tino Sehgal’s work.

From my own perspective, there’s an interesting copyright issue–i.e. none of Sehgal’s work is fixed in a tangible medium in any way, either the work itself or documentation of it–which means that it stands solely as an idea. You can’t copyright an idea, of course, so Sehgal’s claim to authorship, or ownership, of any of his works, relies almost exclusively on the strength of his own personality, or identity, insofar as these are recognized by others. In fact, one could argue that that strength is a function of its recognition by others, which would seem to resonate nicely with his work–i.e. they pressure that moment of a viewer’s recognition that what they are seeing, or participating in, is not just some random encounter with other people in other places.

Great behind the scenes look at how David Byrne’s Playing the Building was fabricated, courtesy of Rhizome and Justin Downs.

This short piece by George Dyson from Edge.org is one of the more interesting things I’ve read on the possibility of artificial intelligence and the troublesom metaphor of the brain as a massively parallel computer.

It may seem sacrilegious to say for someone who has invested so much time and energy in the academy, but this piece by Charles Murray in the WSJ, which argues for the replacement of the 4-year, BA-track college education with certification tests of every variety, makes no little bit of sense. One wonders what administrations will muster as a defense, undoubtedly something along the lines of: “College campuses foster communities of critical thought and creative production which certification testing could never possibly quantify.” True. But then again, that’s an argument of thinking for thinking’s sake, and though I’m sympathetic to the idea of finding realms of experience that cannot be instrumentalized by career or market forces, it would seem to me that “college,” especially at the undergraduate level, has already lost out on that front. Why else would so many people (myself included) find themselves returning to the academy for “advanced” degrees, and there finding the intellectual engagement they either missed or squandered over the course of that first four year try?