Bas Jan Ader, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, 1971 [Video Art]

Bas Jan Ader, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, 1971.

A classic for Sunday.

Hans Haacke, Cultural Production, and Tishman Speyer in Stuyvesant Town

The previous quarter's issue of October addressed the question "In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?" to a series of thinkers.  The variety of answers is pretty remarkable.  Hans Haacke, in one of the more straightforward answers offered in response, discussed the Peace Tower of Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the 2006 Whitney Bienniel and some of the work at the Storr-curated 2007 Venice Biennale before concluding:

Cultural production should indeed be a "socially and politically communicative, transgressive, or critical activity." It requires professionalism of the highest level.

Haacke's most recent show was at Paula Cooper at the beginning of this year. It featured some recent work and one of his best older pieces, Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, which looks more terrifyingly prescient each day and lives up to the polemic he wrote for October. 

The New York Times is reporting today that Tishman Speyer has been using a private investigations service and three law firms to find residents in Stuyvesant Town, who are breaking the terms of their rent-stabilized leases, falsely accusing a large percentage of them in the process. In effect, they're reversing the direction of the research that Hans Haacke completed on Manhattan real estate in the 1970's - which famously led him into a showdown with the Guggenheim in 1971 (of which Sol Goldman... is a part).  Tishman Speyer's behavior in Stuyvesant Town is, of course, just one part of a much larger picture, and - I'm more pessimistic than Haacke (and Chomsky, apparently) - it's troubling to survey the lack of any sort of critical resistance within the American (or international) academy or art world on foreign and domestic issues in this election year.

Works cited: Hans Haacke, "[Untitled Response]," October 123 (Winter 2008), p.82
Photo: Paula Cooper Gallery

Television Interventions 1 / Video Art 11 - David Hall, Tap Piece (1971) [Excerpt]

Embedding is disabled for David Hall's Tap Piece, so you need to click through to view it.
Nicky Hamlyn in the short-lived Coil Magazine explains the project:

In 1971 David Hall made ten TV Interruptions for Scottish Television which were broadcast, unannounced, in August and September of that year (a selection of seven of the ten was later issued as 7 TV Pieces). These, his first works for television, are examples of what television interventions, as they came to be known, can be.

This is the first post in a series of television interventions. To come: Stan Douglas, Chris Burden, et al.

Video Art 9 - Vito Acconci, Centers (1971) [Excerpt]

Is over six thousand YouTube views (in about eighteen months) for a classic of early seventies video art a lot or a little? The full video runs for about twenty minutes. Acconci's position does not change.

The guy who uploaded all these classic Acconci clips deserves a prize.

Works Cited: Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," October 1 (Spring 1976), p. 50-64.

Video Art 6 - Vito Acconci, Remote Control (1971) [Excerpt]

"I can't hear you very well, I can see you, but I feel like you're here, but you're talking so softly."

Video Art 2 - John Baldessari, I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) [Excerpt]

Another Baldessari video. Who knew that he oriented the paper (and wrote the lines) as if he was drawing? The full version runs 32 minutes, 21 seconds.

Video Art 1 - John Baldessari, I Am Making Art (1971) [Excerpt]

It must be exciting to tear apart a whole new medium just as you and your generation are creating it. The full version is just under nineteen minutes.