Matias Faldbakken's Untitled (Book Sculpture) in Oslo and at Documenta 13

Matias Faldbakken, Untitled (Book Sculpture), 2008/2012. Photos: 16 Miles (except where noted) [more]

Since Documenta only arrives every five years, hopefully it's okay to spend the next year or so writing about it.

One of the more unusual moments came in Kassel's Youth Library, where Matias Faldbakken had installed his Untitled (Book Sculpture) (2008/2012), throwing dozens of books from their shelves onto the ground. For the 100 days of the exhibition, the poor children of Kassel had to wade through the pile on the ground to find some volumes. Faldbakken also staged the work in the City Hall Library, though I sadly didn't make it there. (Contemporary Art Daily has an epic selection of installation shots of that iteration.)

The dating of the piece—2008/2012—was interesting to see. It turns out that it was first staged in 2008 at Oslo's Deichmanske Public Library, the largest public library in Norway. Kunsthall Oslo's director, Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, helped to arrange that presentation (pictured below) and wrote extensively about the experience. The backstory is awesome.


Untitled (Book Sculpture), 2008, at the Deichmanske Library, Oslo. Photo: Vegard Kleven

Eeg-Tverbakk and Faldbakken pitched the idea to the library and naturally did not expect an especially positive response, given that books could be damaged when they were thrown onto the floor, but the library agreed to it. And not only did they agree, they proposed making the project even more dramatic. Writes Eeg-Tverbakk:

[Library administrators] later suggested expanding the act of vandalism to include a much larger section of the collection, which Faldbakken rejected on artistic grounds. He was predominantly interested in the staged act of vandalism as a concentrated image, rather than a comprehensive state of affairs.

Not only did the library eagerly take up the project, but some patrons "in sympathy with the plight of the Library took matters into their own hands and began tidying the books and placing the back on the shelves again—only to find the pile on the floor again the next day." Only in Scandinavia. How great looking is that? It's scatter art realized through vandalism, a González-Torres-style pile that requires you to be a member of the institution to take away the souvenir.)



Furthering confusion among the public, the piece was unlabeled at the Deichmanske Public Library, as it was in Kassel. Faldbakken asked librarians to tell people who asked about the mess: "It is somewhat unclear how this happened, but we have been told by the management that it will be taken care of shortly." That response is maybe as good as the piece itself: art requiring its host to lie to its users.

The Oslo library's head, Liv Sæteren, wrote a news release that it planned to issue in case there was a controversy over the project. (One wonders how often organizations do this?) It was never used, but it makes a pretty great case for the piece:

[The books] are still there, the thoughts are still there, the content is still there - but the system has been demolished and we have to search in new ways. In this light, we can see Faldbakken’s sculpture as a highly topical comment on the idea of a new library space.

It's a playful, slightly sinister attempt to imagine a reordering of knowledge, to be sure, but it also highlights the library, that sleepy and staid institution, as a site that can be contested, where very real conflicts can get played out (and have been played out in the past). I don't know how Norwegians felt about the work when they saw it back in 2008, but I know that in the center of Germany last summer, as part of an exhibition that was, in part, concerned with the unresolved, unresolvable traumas of World War II, those violently scattered books looked horrifying.

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2013

Paintings by Michelle Grabner, sculptures by Tony Matelli at Green Gallery, Milwaukee, at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, January 26. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

Every once in a while, a plane rumbles overhead at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which is set in the Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport. Sounds stressful, I know, but it's actually sort of romantic. The vibe at the fair is so supremely relaxed that the air traffic just reminds you that you're in exotic territory, that you're on vacation. Things are different here! There were just 70 exhibitors at the fair, which ran January 24 through 27, so you could see it all in a few hours. Such a pleasure.


Paintings by Grabner at Green Gallery.

Milwaukee's Green Gallery installed a handful of Tony Matelli's little metal weed sculptures along the walls of its booth, below some tasty, modestly scaled white paintings by Michelle Grabner. A special bonus: a handsome little book of her work from 2009, published by Poor Farm Press, could be had for $5. (One of Matelli's weed pieces is on view in the "Garden" section of the great "Monsalvat" show at Bureau, which I reviewed recently for The Observer.)


The Lucie Fontaine-curated booth of Anat Ebgi and Various Small Fires, both of Los Angeles.

Some other highlights: a meaty painting of a crab-claw feast by Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento, a tight little painting on a photograph of some nude men by Aura Rosenberg and two heartbreaking printing plates by Ryan Foerster at Shoot the Lobster, a fabric piece—imprints of belts against a rich blue—by Travis Boyer at Vogt Gallery, Thomas Kovachevich abstractions at Callicoon Fine Arts, a painting hung with various figures and objects by Tom Thayer at Derek Eller.

Anat Ebgi and Various Small Fires shared a striking booth that the rambunctious Lucie Fontaine outfit organized, filling the walls of the booth with a grid made of hundreds of little red dots. Check out that sumptuous red carpeting. Ambitious stuff. Plus (and this is a perfect marker of what a nice feel ALAC has), both Callicoon and Vogt had paintings by Sadie Benning. More images below.


Anat Ebgi and Various Small Fires.


Detail of a sculpture by Zak Kitnick at Clifton Benevento, New York.


Simryn Gill at Tracy Williams, New York.


Thomas Kovachevich and Sadie Benning at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.


Cardi Black Box, Milan.


Ry Rocklen at Untitled, New York.


Aura Rosenberg at Shoot the Lobster, New York.


Ryan Foerster at Shoot the Lobster.


Mark Flood at Peres Projects, Berlin.


Hansjoerg Dobliar and Travis Boyer at Vogt Gallery, New York.


Marcia Hafif at Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York.


Tom Thayer at Derek Eller Gallery, New York.


Joshua Abelow at Brand New Gallery, Milan.

Virginia Overton in "Emergency Cheesecake" at the Whitney

Virginia Overton, in "Emergency Cheesecake," organized by Wade Guyton and Jay Sanders at the Whitney Museum, New York, November 30, 2012. Video: 16 Miles [more].

The tension grew quickly during Virginia Overton's performance on November 30 in the lower-level courtyard of the Whitney Museum as part of the one-night-only "Emergency Cheesecake" event organized by Wade Guyton and Jay Sanders. She stood on a little raised stage, just a few yards from where John Knight installed Curb Appeal (1966/2012)—his mysterious hood and rain chain—along the Breuer Building's bridge during the Whitney Biennial earlier in the year. Wild country music, a wailing fiddle, played in the glassed-in space as the crowd watched. Overton plugged electrical cords into a Vlasic pickle, and presented her handiwork to the crowd. Nothing happened. She looked a little bit embarrassed, not sure what to do. Overton, a master of tough, hyper-minimal, and slyly humorous work, was turning herself into a circus clown, performing—failing to perform—for a packed house. Pretty endearing, terrifying stuff. The song reset. What were we waiting for? But then the magic arrived.

Brunch Treats, Francis Alÿs, John Armleder, etc. [Collected]

Exterior view of Murray Guy, New York, with the lens for Zoe Leonard's camera obscura, 453 West 17th Street, 2012, at center. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

• Martin Bromirski went to Tokyo and had "brunch treats" at Misako & Rosen. (Go to the neighboring posts for more reports from Japan.) [Anaba]


• A look at Angela Merkel's monochromatic blazers. [The Spectacle of Tragedy via Greg.org]


• Former Los Angeles MOCA chief curator Paul Schimmel appeared on the Modern Art Notes podcast to talk about his "Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962" show. [MAN]


• Francis Alÿs's Reel-Unreel (2011) film, which screens at David Zwirner in November. [Strangemessenger]


• Kiki Kogelnik at Der Kunstverein in Hamburg, through December 30. [This Is Tomorrow]


• Kogelnik at Simone Subal Gallery, through October 28. [SSG]


• Here's a John Armleder sculpture at his great Swiss Institute show, "Selected Furniture Sculptures: 1979–2012," along with a nice music mix. The show is open through October 28. [And a Half]


• For his 1974 show at Claire Copley in Los Angeles, Michael Asher removed the wall separating the exhibition space from the office. Here's the installation view. [Art & Education via Strangemessenger]


• Michael Asher's Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979, written in collaboration with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. [Ubuweb]


• Self promotion: an article about the sudden explosion of gallery-filling installations around town. [The New York Observer]

Susan Philipsz, 'Study for Strings,' at Documenta 13

Excerpt of Susan Philipsz, Study for Strings, 2012, at Documenta 13, at the Kassel Hauptbahnhof, Kassel, Germany. Video: 16 Miles [more]

It's been a month since Documenta 13 ended its 100-day run in Kassel, Germany, and it feels, on the one hand, a little bit late to be writing about it. It's history. At the same time, it was so massive and so filled with various projects—its publications component alone included a series of 100 notebooks and three hulking catalogues—that I suspect many will be sifting through their memories and all of that material for a long time. I will be.

The Kassel Hauptbahnhof, the entrance for most people arriving to the show by rail, seems like a logical place to begin talking about the show. It's a sprawling station, and dates back to the very middle of the 19th century. During World War II, it was used to ship people to concentration camps. Much of it was damaged during the war, and reconstructed in a more modern style in the 1950s. (The Documenta 13 website has nice, short summaries of many of its exhibition sites.)

In the intervening years the Hauptbahnhof has since been replaced as a hub for international train travel by the Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station, about a seven-minute tram ride away. Except for the main, central part of the Hauptbahnhof, which has a few restaurants and bars, most of it was deserted throughout the day. Relatively small, nimble trams glided on a few tracks facilitating local and regional travel while rows of tracks sat largely empty.

At the very far end of the waiting platform, a few minutes' walk away from the main station, Susan Philipsz presented one of the shows best moments, a very spare sound piece arrayed across 24 speakers. Here's her explanation from a pamphlet that Documenta printed about the work:

I have asked a viola and a cello player to play their parts of Pavel Haas’s Study for String Orchestra. However I have recorded them playing each note separately so that each of the notes comes from individual speakers, which I’ve installed out on the train tracks. The effect is that the composition is fragmented, incomplete and scattered over a wide area. Expanding and extending the recordings into the space has the effect of abstracting the individual notes from the composition as a whole. The beginning is reminiscent of industry or the sound of trains moving along the tracks. The middle section is more melancholic with individual notes calling across to each other and finally the pizzicato seems to animate the cables above the tracks.

Haas was held captive at the Theresienstadt camp, in what is now the Czech Republic, along with many of the people who were sent there through Kassel. An orchestra at the camp presented the Study in 1944 during a visit from the Red Cross. The composer was later killed, and the manuscript was lost, but the work has since been pieced together with the individual instruments parts. And here it was, splintered and reassembled again, on the tracks in Kassel.

Philipsz's roughly 13-minute version of the piece was played 20 times a day, on the hour and half hour from 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. When I went in the middle of the afternoon in mid-August, only a few people were on the platform. (Though many of the main Documenta sites were packed with people, place off the main drag tended to be relatively quiet.)

It started right on time, and though it was occasionally partially drowned out by announcements from various speakers along the tracks or a train or tram slowly lumbering into the station, it was never quite obscured by other sounds. Everyone lingered silently, listening as a few fleeting fragments of the past slipped through into the present.

Olivier Mosset, Jeffrey Schad, and Vincent Szarek at Shoot the Lobster - Brighton Beach

Olivier Mosset, Jeffrey Schad, Vincent Szarek at Shoot the Lobster - Brighton Beach, May 13. Photo: 16 Miles

Daniel Buren may be the most conventionally successful of the BMPT gang, mounting very serious, large-scale installations around the world over the past few decades (he appears to have a pretty grandiose one at the Grand Palais in Paris for Monumenta at the moment), but it's Olivier Mosset who seems to be having the most fun, doing handsome exhibitions at Leo Koening and Mary Boone while also regularly popping up in fun and unusual group shows. (As for the other BMPT guys, Michel Parmentier passed away in 2000, and Niele Toroni has kept a fairly low profile, at least beyond Europe, though Grand Openings gave him a nice tribute last summer.)

Best of all, Mosset has been doing all of those shows this while collecting and riding a bunch of custom motorcycles. After poking around motorcycle sites for a bit, it seems like he's developed a cult following in the biking community also. (Check out the SouthSiders blog for a nice selection of photos of him and his bikes, including a pretty tough one of him stopped in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tuscon. Is that a Virginia Overton truck?)

Two Sundays ago, one of his bikes—check out the Arizona licence plate—appeared at the newly christened Shoot the Lobster - Brighton Beach, at 425 Oceanview Avenue, the latest outpost of Martos Gallery's project space, which is headquartered on West 29th Street but has also done shows in Miami.

Billed as a three-person affair with Olivier Mosset, Jeffrey Schad, and Vincent Szarek, the exhibition actually consisted of only that bike. All three of the artists were responsible for it. Schad handled the work on its mechanics and Szarek did a really subtle paint job that looked a delicate, intricate bit of lace along the top of the bike. Classy work. (Shoot the Lobster has great photos.)

One more Mosset biking note: an old Spencer Brownstone press release notes that Mosset can be seen in Downtown 81 "making a drive-by salutation to Jean-Michel Basquiat," so look out for that the next time you wach it. (Sadly, Netflix isn't streaming it anymore.)

A Performance by Thomas Kovachevich at Show Room

Video excerpt of a performance by Thomas Kovachevich at Show Room, New York, March 22, 2012. Videos: 16 Miles [more]


Stills of a performance by Thomas Kovachevich at Show Room, New York, March 22, 2012. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

There were faint gasps in the audience as Thomas Kovachevich began his performance on Thursday night at the Show Room gallery on the Lower East Side. How could one help it? It was an utterly beguiling sight. Kovachevich sat in front of a large, low metal table holding a shallow bed of warm water, onto which he had carefully floated a thin sheet, a film of some type. Then he had sprinkled a few small, thin slices of paper on top. And somehow, against any simple explanation, they were moving. They spun themselves into pipes and slowly slinked across the film. They crept forward and rolled like waves, paused momentarily, and leapt an inch or two.

Meanwhile, Keith Connolly, of the No-Neck Blues Band, played drones from an array of speakers, knobs, and a tape deck at the far end of the gallery. These sounded at first like long bowed chords on a cello. But then squeaks and clacks entered, and the drones grew deeper and became almost metallic. One moment it was soothing, the next sinister, as it had been when Connolly started the show, standing on top of a cymbal and working it across the floor with his feet, beating it up, falling silent only for the pouring of the warm water onto the table, and for Kovachevich to deposit those papers.










Video excerpt from later in the performance.



As the slices of paper that Kovachevich had set down worked their way to the edge of the mat, they slipped into the pool and went still, soaked with water, no longer picking up the minute evaporation that apparently animated them. Looking intently at the table, audience members could see the drama unfold in front of them, or they could look up to one of the gallery walls, where a video feed showed a gigantic close up of the table, turning each of the papers' tiniest gestures into brutal, vital movements. But Kovachevich's attention was squarely on the action taking place in front of him.

Speaking reductively, the performance was, in some sense, a hands-off, automatic version of the Circus or a free-floating, aleatoric take on The Way Things Go, those works' narratives substituted for open fields of possible events. Instead of acting as entertainer (Calder) or obsessive micromanager (Fischli/Weiss), Kovachevich served as a chemist—or, perhaps, a sorcerer—who starts the magic and then stands aside, almost becoming a voyeur like everyone else (he did very rarely adjust the lights from a tiny console at his side). He knew that those sheets of paper would pulse and roll, but everything else about their actions was up in the air—until, at least, they slipped one by one into the water and went cold. An assistant eventually brought the performance to a close, placing a large sheet over much of the pool, as if completing a burial.



Though the performance is long over, Kovachevich's work at Show Room is still literally moving right now. He has affixed long pieces of tape and grosgrain ribbon to three of the walls to make long sets of stripes that change shape based on the humidity in the room. As Roberta Smith explained in The New York Times on Friday:

"When the air is dry, the tape curls around the ribbons, fogging their colors of pink, orange, yellow or blue and suggesting delicate versions of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes. When the humidity rises, the tape relaxes and flattens, revealing the ribbons’ hues at full cry." 

What the crowd witnessed on Thursday evening was a single accelerated manifestation—a dramatic précis—of the slow, humble processes that undergird Kovachevich's heartbreakingly nuanced art.

Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina at Friedrich Petzel, Round 3

Installation view of Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, March 10, 2012. Photo: 16 Miles

They did it again.

On the evening of Saturday, March 10, a large crowd was gathered outside the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea, and there appeared to be an opening reception taking place inside the smaller of its two spaces. Which was peculiar, since Stephen Prina's current show—his seventh with the gallery—was set to run through April 28.

Stephen Prina and Wade Guyton, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, March 31, 2011. Photo: Petzel Gallery

Inside, Prina's exhibition had disappeared, replaced with four paintings and a poster. It seemed to be almost an exact replica of the show I saw on March 31, 2011, at the gallery and another show that took place February 5–27, 2010, there. This was the third in Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina's ongoing collaborative exhibitions. Here's an explanation I wrote of the project back in April, about the second show, which lasted for only that single day, March 31:

"Guyton fired up an inkjet print and then handed it off to Prina, who unloaded a can of spray paint in the upper-left corner, its contents streaking down to a puddle on the floor in a staging of his PUSH COMES TO LOVE (1999-). A third collaborator, designer and writer Joseph Logan, created the bright-green exhibition poster."

On Saturday night, Guyton's trademark canvases were the same bright, brilliant green as that nearly year-old poster—roughly the same color as nice, cheap mint ice cream. Admittedly, at the time, the reappearance of the green was pointed out to me by someone else. (In the first show, for the record, the poster was the same light pink color as the paintings in the second show: the poster in each case points forward to the next exhibition; it's a trailer for the next set of paintings.)

Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, February 5–27, 2010. Photo: Petzel Gallery

Last year, the various gestures (the one-day show, the almost exact replication of the material), however clever, felt insular and exclusionary to me: why even bother with an exhibition? In this third iteration, though, the whole enterprise became a great deal more interesting, like David Letterman repeating the same line again and again and again during a show—maybe varying the inflection slightly. It hits different each time, and it can become funnier and richer.

An artist at the reception likened the one-night-only exhibition to the projects that Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine staged under the name A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything in the early 1980s, which usually took the form of brief, typically one night, exhibitions or events. Art historian Gwen Allen provided some background in her recent Artists' Magazines book:

"In addition to exhibiting their work in private lofts, they organized outings and social gatherings. They invited some people to the ballet on a Sunday afternoon; they served glasses of Dubonnet at the tiny painting studio of a deceased Russian émigré named Dmitri Merinoff… These events left little residue outside of invitations and memory traces, and occasional documents published in small-circulation artists' magazine[s]…"

For Levine, it was a way of creating a structure apart from the mainstream art industry:

"I think it was a way of distancing ourselves from the art world. In those days I didn't think the art world was the real world. Very naive, but attributable to our collective youth—a kind of Holden Caulfield hangover."

In contrast to the autarkic structures that Lawler and Levine were attempting to create, Guyton and Prina are, of course, working squarely within the art world, using a Chelsea gallery for their fleeting shows. They are established figures.

However, what art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau wrote of A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything holds true for the Prina/Guyton exhibitions: "The activities, events, and objects produced…collectively and individually functioned to foreground the mechanisms of cultural production, exhibition and reception." (It's a description that seems to anticipate the "transitive painting" that David Joselit identifies in his 2009 essay "Painting Beside Itself.")

Guyton/Prina's exhibitions may be insular and exclusionary—even a bit sinister—in its operation, but they succeeds precisely because of those attributes. (Yes, it helps that the paintings, especially these mint ones, are stunning.)

In terms of production, to follow Solomon-Godeau's formula, Guyton and Prina work as "unsynthetic" collaborators, as Michael Sanchez put it in Texte zur Kunst, performing their actions separately, like Basquiat and Warhol. (Prina apparently did his part in front of a small audience wearing gas masks, including Guyton, according to Scene & Herd, on Thursday evening—a sort of private, performative, very literal vernissage of the exhibition.) And they shorten the length of a show dramatically in this case, wedging it into the middle of another exhibition's run. (The previous two collaborative exhibitions took place in between Petzel shows.) The message is clear: a Guyton/Prina collaboration can break out at any moment, alighting at the gallery when one least suspects it, like a bug in a computer program that suddenly brings a system to a momentary, temporary halt.

The brutally short time frame carries very specific threats: you might missed the show because you're otherwise involved the evening it takes place, or perhaps even worse, you just might be out of the loop, not knowing it was going to happen at all. Some of the visitors on Saturday were told about the show by the gallery or the artists, while others found out second, third, or fourth hand. The project foregrounds and embodies the network by which ideas and rumors are spread in the art world. Friends tell friends. Word gets out. You hope you hear about it.

The Prina show has since been reinstalled just as it was before the Prina/Guyton show, but traces of the collaborative work remain. On the walls, paint is visible, leftover from Prina spraying the corner of the canvases and poster, and on the floors, pools of paint have accumulated after dripping down the length of the Guyton-printed canvases. Those pools and sprays of paint are indexical reminders of the one-night stand, and the fact that the Prina/Guyton paintings are gone, likely on their way to (very lucky) collectors right now. (The gallery even took some new installation shots of Prina's show that show the change.)

During the Guyton/Prina exhibition, posters like the one hanging on the wall in the show (sans spray paint) were given out for free to visitors. There was even a bounty of rubberbands to protect rolled posters as they were carted off. No doubt they are now hanging on quite a few walls in apartments and offices around the city—and around the world. (The opening took place a few yards from the Independent fair.) This time, the poster's background color was an intensely dark, almost black shade of purple. It's gorgeous. The paintings next year, one hopes, will measure up.

"A Choral Reading" (1972) by Gerald Ferguson at Canada

Excerpts of 26 people reciting Gerald Ferguson's A Choral Reading (1972) at Canada, New York, February 11, 2011. Video: 16 Miles

"Someone said Gerry’s life is like trying to get through February in Nova Scotia, it’s really what Gerry’s work is," artist and curator Luke Murphy told Paddy Johnson early this month, referring to the pioneering Canadian conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson (a lifelong resident of the province), who died in 2009, and whose work was recently on view at the Lower East Side's Canada gallery. Ferguson's 1972 work, A Choral Reading, certainly seems to fit that description, requiring intensive labor to create—plenty of hard work to forget about life.

To make A Choral Reading, Fergus set his 50,000-word Standard Corpus of Present Day English Language Usage Arranged By Word Length and Alphabetized Within Word Length piece—its title pretty much sums up its contents—for 26 voices, one voice for each letter. (Amazon has a listing for the work with some nice background information.) Murphy again: "I mean, what else are you going to do in your French village in Nova Scotia–which is really way bleak?"

But it's also February-beating material when it's read aloud. When it was recited on Saturday, February 11, by a group of readers at Canada, the room was warm, the crowd convivial. It was easily one of the most pleasant, unpretentious performances or readings I have ever attended.


Performance stills. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

The published version of Ferguson's Standard Corpus includes 20 sections, for words with one letter up to those with 20. At the reading at Canada, the 26 performers read through the first seven sections. Every person speaks at the same time, so each movement begins with a cacophony that gradually gives way to a few people reciting words for quite a while.

The readers completed the first three sections—one-letter, two-letter, and three-letter words—in less than 90 seconds. The remaining four sections took about 30 minutes, with P, R, and especially S putting in lengthy performances. Readers varied their tempos, and words spilled into, through, and over each other. Some tripped over words and charged on. Though most kept a low profile, dutifully reciting their lists, a few embraced the moment with a bit of theatricality. R, a gentleman in a dark red shirt and lime-green glasses, spoke boldly at times.

It's a hard piece not to love. Built on a ridiculously simple premise, it spirals out in weird ways, random words rubbing up against one another. One man in the audience closed his eyes and listened, while some others whispered to each other, one ear on the action. As the piece fell down to four, then three, then two voices reading seven-letter words (the last few moments are recorded on the video above), most everyone became quiet and watched. S brought it home with "systems." And then there was applause.

There are artist names sprinkled throughout the thousands of words—I heard Ryman, Suvero, and Tuttle, who are part of the same generation as Ferguson, men born in the 1930s. Unlike those artists, though, Ferguson never achieved widespread acclaim, despite being among the first generation of North American conceptual artists and appearing in Kynaston McShine's famed "Information" show in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art. (The press release and checklist for that show, with notes about Furguson's [sic] work is available on MoMA's site.)

It's not just an art-historical problem. The market has also not been kind to Ferguson, Canada co-owner Phil Grauer made clear to Johnson. "That painting," he said, referring to an early work, "that’s from 1968 and it’s like $18,000. I sell paintings by 33 year olds for that much. The show is very painful like that." It takes a lot of work to bring under-known artists into a canon (and to boost their prices). But one way to start in the case of Ferguson would be to stage a few more of these readings. All you need are 26 art students—or just 26 people who can read. Once the work is over, one is left with a nice-size group for a party, and plenty of camaraderie to go along with it, enough to trounce February in even the least hospitable places.

Bontecou at FreedmanArt, Cesarco Apes Broodthaers, Mekas, etc. [Collected]

Installation view of Lee Bontecou, "Recent Work: Sculpture and Drawing," at FreedmanArt, New York, through Feb. 11, 2012. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

• Arthur C. Danto quoting Donald Judd on Lee Bontecou, in an article headlined "A Tribe Called Quest": "The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other." [The Nation]

• Alejandro Cesarco reproduced the stationary that Marcel Broodthaers made for his 1969 Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles. [Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution]

• "Nothing out of the ordinary, / from one day to the next." An poem from the early 1970s by Jonas Mekas. [Art Blog Art Blog]

• Martha Rosler talks about the movies. Her all-time favorites: Alphaville and Kiss Me Deadly. [Cynephile]

• Robert Morris sentence-diagram drawings for Merce Cunningham. [Eponanonymous]

• "Bob made it, but Jasper made it art." Edward Meneeley on Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, maybe). [Greg.org]

• "What about your cell phone? Do you leave it on when you work? Do you like getting calls or texts in the studio?" Nick Lemmin interviews Grayson Revoir. [Lemminsonline via West Street Gallery]

• The Lion Queen. [Ms. Jen Bekman]

• "It seems silly to feel sorry for successful artists, or for rich people in general, but in the end, there is no attitude to strike that can beat the house." — Katy Siegel on Damien Hirst. [Artforum.com]

• "American dream." [PANI]

Bjarne Melgaard in "Grisaille" at Luxembourg & Dayan

Bjarne Melgaard installation in the bathroom of Luxembourg & Dayan, New York. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

On one wall of Luxembourg & Dayan's fourth-floor bathroom, where he built his latest installation, Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard hung a letter that he wrote late last year to murderer Teodoro Baez, who is serving a life sentence in Pontiac, Illinois, for killing two people with a samurai sword after a dispute about drugs. Baez's had been sentenced to die, but he was spared last year when Illinois abolished the death penalty.



In his letter to Baez, Melgaard introduces himself as "a contemporary artist" and explains that he is working on a show at a New York gallery. "I own several letters and drawings of yours," he explains, adding that he included those works in a group show he curated at Maccarone last year, "The Social Failure," a one-week addendum of sorts to his well reviewed exhibition "After Shelley Duval '72 (Frogs on the High Line)," whose artist list included more than two dozen murderers, including Ted Bundy, Phillip Jablonski, and John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer who is believed to have killed more than 33 young boys and who took up painting after his arrest.



Melgaard's exhibition was actually not Gacy's first time participating in a contemporary art show: that credit goes to—as far as I know—Mike Kelley's 1988 piece Pay for Your Pleasure, which included some 40 painted banners that depict various artists and intellectuals paired with an unsavory or just simply uncomfortable quotations. For instance, one from Oscar Wilde: "The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." (Google Books has the complete list of the quotations from a Kelley anthology.) An artwork by a mass murderer—the person changed based on the location—came at one end of the installation.



Here's Christopher Knight explaining how that worked:

"At the 1988 debut of 'Pay for Your Pleasure' in Chicago, a painting by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy was shown in the hall. At the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which owns the installation, a drawing by 'Freeway Killer' William Bonin has been displayed. And, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here, in the compact, 12-year survey of the L.A.-based artist's work that has been traveling in Europe since April, the corridor leads to a blocky portrait-bust, created in cement in 1977 by Glasgow gangster Jimmy Boyle. The piece gets made wryly site-specific, as the murderer's art changes with each location in which 'Pay for Your Pleasure' is shown."

Peter Schjedahl wrote about it too, back when he was at 7 Days and it was on view at Metro Pictures.

But back to Melgaard's letter. He goes on to tell Baez that he is "interested in establishing a correspondence," and asks if he is willing to "collaborate to the extent you are able" on an upcoming exhibition. It's Pay for Your Pleasure the sequel, apparently, in which the artist throws himself into even more twisted, abject ethical and moral situations. It sounds like a pretty horrendous idea—the artist taking Jerry Magoo's comparison of him to Slipknot to some horrific extreme—but we'll see how it all pans out. (Melgaard, for the record, has an installation opening at Karma on January 19.)

The piece at Luxembourg & Dayan, though, was pure Melgaard, the superb overload of ideas and form that everyone has been rightfully swooning over for the past few years all shoved into a tiny bathroom: chalkboard walls scrawled with messages, pictures of Baez, a sink filled with Diet Coke cans, empty prescription bottles (labeled for Melgaard, no less) and pills, obscene drawings, a photograph of a ferocious-looking jaguar. All wonderful.

Besides serving as a stellar advertisement to encourage visitors to toss an installation into that unused bathroom they have, Melgaard's work was there as part of the gallery's "Grisaille" show, whose news release noted that grey "connotes estrangement, gloom, neutrality, rigor, seriousness, objectivity, gravitas, elegance, neutrality, depression, practicality, and calm." Which are all words one could associate, in various places, rather handily with Melgaard's installation. Hovering now in this in-between space, will the artist know—will we know?—when he crosses over into something else?

Yorgos Sapountzis: From Simone Subal Gallery to the Bowery to the Manhattan Bridge

Yorgos Sapountzis performing as part of "Head Zest, New Walls," at Simone Subal, December 18, 2011. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

It sounded like a large metal object was crashing down the stairs of the building that houses the Simone Subal Gallery, at 131 Bowery. A group of perhaps two dozen people in the second-floor space looked at each other—was it starting?—and a few headed toward the stairs. The rest followed behind them.

A few minutes earlier, Greek artist Yorgos Sapountzis (whose exhibition is on view at the gallery through January 22) had gone in the in the same direction, after handing out simple fabric capes (teal, yellow, forest green, red) and tall, thin metal poles to some in the crowd. I received a brown cape and another piece of fabric—"Hold his," the artist said in a soft, deep voice, as he moved to the next person—but no pole.

Sapountzis was now at the bottom of the stairs, holding strings that were looped through two large square sheets of metal. He opened the door and the crowd streamed outside behind him, some wrapping their capes around themselves to block the cold. It was freezing, perhaps the coldest it has been so far this winter.

The artist set off south on the Bowery, walking quickly and dragging the metal sheets behind him, which cracked and clanked and crashed occasionally into a garbage can or a parking sign. Shoppers, store owners and people waiting for buses watched him as he darted around those strolling the sidewalks, gingerly maneuvering his sharp sheets with him.

At the corner of Bowery and Grand, he suddenly stopped and faced the caped masses, staring them down. He was wearing a black hooded jacket, grey pants and scuffed white sneakers, and he held a hammer in one hand, duct tape and string in the other. He was breathing heavily, and looked a little menacing. He crouched down and began beating the metal with his hammer, punching sharp indentations into the panel with each blast. Then he was off again, marching down the Bowery. 

He stopped outside a branch of the Chinatown Federal Savings Bank. Someone was waiting for him there: a man wearing a long jacket, knit cap and gloves—all black. He had a hammer in his pocket, and a dark beard like the artist's. The two men faced each other and, in unison, enacted a series of movements—waving one arm, then the other, as they stepped about and then squatted, grabbing their ankles. 

The metal panels were handed off to two members of the audience audience, who looked surprised. Where were we heading? What were we being made to do? (There was one hint: the announcement for the event had included a ghostly image of the Manhattan Bridge, which was still a few blocks south.) The new member of the entourage set us marching further south, as Sapountzis collapsed onto the ground. He appeared moments later, sprinting down the street.

More men were waiting along the path—outside another store and on a triangle near the exit ramp of the Manhattan Bridge—and at each rendezvous the same ritualistic movements were repeated before the marching resumed. After the last meeting, Sapountzis and his three associates headed up toward the Manhattan Bridge, past a dark police van, to an enormous expanse of cement—I had no idea it was so big—that leads up to the bridge, just east of the Bowery.

The crowd members formed an arc around the performers, keeping their distance as the four men performed their movements once more. A young child—probably just a few years old—broke from the group and approached the men as they moved, trying to make sense of it. As this occurred, the police van (one seems always to be present at the base of the bridge) drove off: nothing to see here, apparently.

All four men huddled together, and then the three who had joined along the way violently attacked a metal sheet with their hammers. It was deafening, so loud that many stepped back or held their ears. Meanwhile, Sapountzis was going wild, darting about with a tape measure, running it behind and around the crowd. What was he trying to build?

The artist disappeared behind the tall stone columns at the bridge's mouth, followed only by the brave child, and took a makeshift flag—made by taking two metal poles and capes from the crowd—to the edge of the roadway, waving it in madly, broadly, even leaping from the ground as he waved it. Cars streamed off the road behind him. Then he dropped the flag, walked over to the crowd, and it ended with applause. Fabric and metal and hammers were scattered across the cement field.

The evening was, in some sense, a reminder of the possibilities that are present in public in any city, even one in which public space is becoming increasingly regulated, regimented, and corporatized. Writing a week later, it all still feels like a wonderful and unlikely success: a small team of people in ridiculous costumes moving through the city with hammers, steel panels and poles—everything that one would need to build a modest, temporary encampment—entirely uncontested by the police, just yards from one of the city's landmarks, and about half a mile from both the headquarters of the NYPD and City Hall.

What would have happened if the police had arrived, if they had asked Sapountzis—or, even more intriguing, someone blindly following along—what was going on?

But perhaps that line of questions lends an air of danger to the performance that was not quite there. There was nothing nakedly illegal about the gathering, though the number of people involved brushed up against the 20-person limit for a permit-less public assembly in a New York City park. (It's not exactly how one would define the space where the performance peaked and concluded.) I suspect that Sapountzis must have at least considered the possibility that the police would have dropped by. He would have been crazy not to do so. But they never arrived.

Writing in January's Artforum, sociologist Saskia Sassen argued that this year's Occupy movements can be understood as a masterful remaking of Zuccotti Park, a site rich with corporate interests, as a new territory, in full view of the camera. "People becoming present and, crucially, becoming visible to one another can alter the character of their powerlessness," Sassen writes.

Sapountzis's work was bound up with issues of the public and private, and the control of space in urban areas, that are not dissimilar from those raised by Occupy Wall Street. However, in contrast to the media spectacle of the OWS protests, it addressed its audience, and the city itself, on more intimate, specialized and even obscure terms. We were all visible only fleetingly, unable to offer an explanation.

With many Occupy encampments across the United States now without a permanent home, the energies they channeled have been rendered more diffuse. Fittingly, Sapountzis's work seemed to follow this organizational logic, asking what small groups can accomplish in the streets today, and what plans, however provisional, can be hatched by a handful of people with shared interests, or just four men and some willing participants.