May events

Join us at e-flux for more upcoming events this month—starting with the launch of Liam Gillick’s new book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 on Tuesday, May 17 with a talk by the author; the launch of e-flux journal issue 73 on Friday, May 20 with a discussion between Kari Altmann, Julieta Aranda, Hayal Pozanti, and Brad Troemel; and the launch of Irene V. Small’s new book Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame on Thursday, May 26, including the author in conversation with Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy and an audience realization of Hélio Oiticica’s Made-on-the-Body-Capes (1968).

We look forward to seeing you on East Broadway! For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.


Book launch: Industry and Intelligence by Liam Gillick
Tuesday, May 17, 7:30pm

Liam Gillick has written a holistic genealogy of contemporary art that addresses art’s engagement with history, even when it seems apathetic or blind to current events. Rather than focus on dominant works or special cases, Gillick takes a broad view of artistic creation from 1820 to today, underscoring the industry and intelligence of artists as they have responded to incremental developments in science, politics, and technology. The great innovations and dislocations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have their place in this timeline, but their traces are alternately amplified and diminished as Gillick moves through artistic reactions to liberalism, mass manufacturing, psychology, nuclear physics, automobiles, and a host of other advances. He intimately ties the origins of the contemporary artist to the social and technological adjustments of modern life, which artists struggled to incorporate truthfully into their works.

Gillick’s book appears at the same time as two other books by artists that perhaps quixotically attempt to understand contemporary art’s place in history and contemporary context through the creation of grand narratives of very different kinds. The first is Fuck Seth Price by Seth Price (Leopard, 2015) and the second isArt and Value by Dave Beech (Brill, 2015). Price’s book is a fast-paced, complex, and often emotional account of making art under the stress of our digital and constantly mediated society. Beech has written an extremely well-researched and combative text that takes on loose thinking around the question of art as commodity and embarks on a lengthy examination of art’s economic exceptionalism.

The book launch will involve short readings from all three books by Liam Gillick in order to propose a more-total book that is a combination of the three.
 
Industry and Intelligence
Contemporary Art Since 1820
Columbia University Press, New York
ISBN: 9780231170208
192 Pages
50 B&W Illustrations
Hardcover and e-book


Freeportism as Style and Ideology?
Launch of e-flux journal issue 73 with Kari Altmann, Julieta Aranda, Hayal Pozanti, and Brad Troemel
Friday, May 20, 7:30pm

The freeport method of art storage presents its critics with a problem. Is it something new? Or something old? What could be less surprising than an international aristocracy hiding treasures in a cave someplace? Is thinking in terms of freeportism a movement towards emancipation, or away from it?
 
Following Hito Steyerl, Stefan Heidenreich argues in “Freeportism as Style and Ideology” that the freeport might be a new mode of representation, replacing the one that ruled from the end of the Bretton Woods era up until the Great Recession. Like other such modes, freeportism has a value-form, post-internet art, that is optimized for contemporary accumulation, and an ideology, speculative realism, that attempts to transform its novel configuration of forces and relations into a new metaphysics.
 
To celebrate the launch of issue 73 of e-flux journal, which includes the second half of Heidenreich’s essay, we are convening a panel to discuss the problems and possibilities of freeportism at the conceptual and institutional levels. Please join us for a discussion between Kari Altmann, Julieta Aranda (via Skype), Hayal Pozanti, and Brad Troemel.
 
Kari Altmann is an American artist, producer, director, curator/writer, performer, photographer, filmmaker, and musician. She is focused on the survival tropes and hybrid ecologies of communal fantasy images, DIY soft power, and “sharing culture.” The aesthetics of her works, in kinetic states of life and mutation, fragility and strength, materiality and immateriality, often hang in the tension of intricate forces behind the image, around the object, embedded in the content, or moving through the network. Besides her individual art practice, she is a longstanding ghost-art-director and producer for many nearby community startups, and has a history as a facilitator in different collective experiments and alternative spaces.
 
Julieta Aranda is an artist and editor of e-flux journal.
 
Hayal Pozanti was born in Istanbul and lives and works in New York City. Her work relies on “Instant Paradise,” an invented alphabet used as a personally standardized encryption system. Embedded within her shapes are bundles of mined data relating to cyborg anthropology, a framework for understanding the effects of technology on humans and culture.
 
Brad Troemel is an artist and writer living in New York. He’s the co-creator of the blog Jogging, a viral platform that featured thousands of widely shared artworks from over a thousand participants. Much of his work mixes different forms of exchange value, as his past projects have involved organic foods, cryptocurrencies, digital black markets, precious metals, and rare American coins. Since 2008 his writing has focused on how art is understood and produced in light of social media. He is currently collaborating on an Etsy store called UV Production House, which combines advertising images to create digital composites of potential products that are then shipped to buyers through Amazon Prime as parts, tools, and tutorials to be assembled. 


Book launch: Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame by Irene V. Small
Irene V. Small in conversation with Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy
Thursday, May 26, 7:30pm

The launch of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame (February 2016) will include a conversation between Irene V. Small and Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy. Following the discussion, audience members will be invited to realize Oiticica’s Made-on-the-Body-Capes (1968), an unlimited multiple the artist published in 1970.

With music selected by Béco Dranoff.

Irene V. Small  | Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame
University of Chicago Press, February 2016, ISBN: 978-0-226-26016-7

Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson. This book examines Oiticica’s impressive works against the backdrop of Brazil’s dramatic postwar push for modernization.

From Oiticica’s late 1950s experiments with painting and color to his mid-1960s wearable Parangolés, Small traces a series of artistic procedures that foreground the activation of the spectator. Analyzing works, propositions, and a wealth of archival material, she shows how Oiticica’s practice recast—in a sense “folded”—Brazil’s utopian vision of progress as well as the legacy of European constructive art. Ultimately, the book argues that the effectiveness of Oiticica’s participatory works stems not from a renunciation of art, but rather from their ability to produce epistemological models that reimagine the traditional boundaries between art and life.

Irene V. Small is assistant professor of modern and contemporary art and criticism in the department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, where she is also an affiliated faculty member of the Programs in Media & Modernity, Latin American Studies, and the department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Artforum, Third Text, October, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, among others. She is a catalogue contributor to Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium, opening at the Carnegie Museum of Art in October 2016 and touring to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy is curator of contemporary art at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. She was chief curator of the 9th Mercosul Biennial in 2013 and an agent of dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012. She served as director of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and has held curatorial positions at Art in General and the Americas Society. In addition, she has curated numerous international exhibitions at such institutions as the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), MALBA (Buenos Aires), and the Center for Contemporary Art (Vilnius). In 2009 she initiated the editorial project Murmur. She teaches at the School of the Visual Arts and is a member of the board of directors of Triple Canopy.
 
With the generous support of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).