Jean Baudrillard - Simulations and Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — precession of simulacra — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

Read the full essay here.

Ellen Harvey - Local Landscapes (2004)

Ellen Harvey - Local Landscapes (2004)

Site Specific installation for the Project in Los Angeles.

Harvey's Local Landscape (2004) was made as a site specific installation without having visited the gallery. Asking the gallery to send her high res images of the buildings interior and exterior, Harvey then made three photo realist paintings of the details. The walls of the gallery were wall-papered with the images of the exterior of the building and the paintings were hung on top.

Jonathan Monk - A Poster Project

Jonathan Monk A Poster Project 2011







A Poster Project at Eastside Projects, Birmingham



Devised as part of Book Works' touring exhibition Again, A Time Machine, Jonathan Monk's A Poster Project is an instructional piece whereby each venue is presented with 2 posters: A Daniel Buren-esque striped poster (at each venue), and a vintage piece from the artist's own collection (different at each venue). The gallery must then fly post the posters somewhere outside the gallery and photograph them in situ. A run of posters featuring a picture of the original poster in its new location is then produced and distributed in the exhibition space.

Monk's work often builds on, parallels and pastiches the practices of other artists, especially those involved in late '60s conceptual art. With Monk, however, utopian ideals and notions of genius are subverted to a more playful, tongue-in-cheek approach, interrogating the everyday and the commonplace.

  

Having just ended its run at Birmingham's Eastside Projects, Again, A Time Machine will now tour, reinventing itself each time, to:

Motto, Berlin, 6th May to 2nd June 2011
The Showroom, London, 14th June 2011 to 19th May 2012
Spike Island, Bristol, 16th September to 9th October 2011
White Columns, New York, 23rd October to 19th November 2011

Daniel Buren - Affichages Sauvages

Affichages Sauvages - 1968 - Present

 In the late 60's Buren's Affichages Sauvages appeared sporadically across eight countries and eleven cities. From Paris to New York alternating green and white or red and white stripes were pasted over advertising billboards.

Concerned with only working 'in situ' Buren collaborated with curator Seth Siegalaub in 1969 to produce a different work each day for the duration an exhibition. Whilst billboards were gradually filled with his trademark stripes the Parisian gallery Yvon Lambert had its front shop window covered in the same motif whilst it remained closed for the duration of the show.

David Batchelor - Found Monochromes

David Batchelor Found Monochromes  

Ongoing 1997 -

Read interview

Matt McCormick - The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal

the subconscious art of graffiti removal (excerpt) from matt mccormick on Vimeo.

16mm/Digital video – 16 minutes – 2001





McCormicks film highlights the similarities between the subconscious act of graffiti removal with past cannons of painting such as Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and the Russian Constructavists. Whilst full of bombastic comments about its role and placement in art McCormick raises an interesting question between the difference in funding for 'anti-graffiti' campaigns and for the arts. 

Robert Rauschenberg - Erased de Kooning

Robert Rauschenberg Erased de Kooning 1953

Book page from Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan De Kooning, An American Master, in this PDF, linked here. 

Mike Kelley - Shall We Kill Daddy?

"...When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which already will have been promised to the literary catacombs.
But we won't be there . . . At last they'll find us - one winter's night - in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They'll see us crouched beside our trembling airplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.
They'll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by hatred: the more implacable it is, the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us."

Filippo Thomas Marinetti

From "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," 1909

Asked to write an article for a catalogue on the work of Douglas Huebler, Mike Kelley poses the question 'Shall We Kill Daddy?' and queries the trend of young artists to subvert their predecessors. It is well versed that art always seeks to expand the status quo and push at the limits of acceptability, but has this tradition of progression become as much of a predictive stereotype as the work it seeks to undermine?

The full essay can be found here.  

Maurizio Cattelan - The Fat Is On The Table

Maurizio Cattelan We Are The Revolution 2000

The Fat Is On The Table, Maurizio Cattelan on Joseph Beuys
First published in Tate Etc, Spring 2005
beuys is dead
beuys is also uniting love and knowledge
beuys is more present in a desert freak
beuys is sponsored by museum für moderne kunst
beuys is appointed professor of sculpture at the düsseldorf academy of art
beuys extends ulysses by two chapters at the request of james joyce
beuys is surely not a sartre follower, but of course there are many parallels
beuys is mentioned next to steiner
beuys is back in town
beuys is back in belgium, in berlin, US, active in germany
beuys is the contemporary artist responsible for the popular notion that politics is an aesthetic activity that anyone can engage in
beuys is inspired by steiner
beuys is not so reactionary as to deny the existence of the entire art history repertoire
beuys is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential post-war german artists
beuys is the identification with everything from mythological figures and historical personages to writers and artists
beuys is a mythical figure in the art world, however
beuys is particularly significant in the light of his introspective research on the possible reunification of human and natural life
beuys is in the creation of the social sculpture
beuys is either loved or hated
beuys is considered one of the most
beuys is widely regarded as one of the most important german artists since world war II
beuys is demanding sun instead of rain/reagan
beuys is more like an evangelist
beuys is famous for an extraordinary body of drawings
beuys is such an obvious candidate; he started making art following a breakdown that was a result of his experiences in world war II
beuys is represented in depth in dia’s permanent collection
beuys is
beuys is among the most famous of today’s artists
beuys is one of the most famous performance artists
beuys is valid because wolfgang laib shares his belief in the transcendent power of art
beuys is another sculptor that
beuys is one of the major figures in post-war german art
beuys is known for his shamanistic artist’s persona
beuys is among the world’s most comprehensive
beuys is in these digital photographs represented not by him directly
beuys is a real people’s artist understood by a professor
beuys is megjelent a kövek mellett és hamarosan heves vita bontakozott ki közte és a közönség között
beuys is a 1972 lithograph in which the essential feature is that of beuys as everyman
beuys is elvesztette
beuys is átvett és ami interszubjektiv jellege miatt nem volt
beuys is called to account by his presumptive offspring
beuys is veel materiaal verdwenen
beuys is questioned by the activities of maclennan
beuys is instructive
beuys is very important in mail art
beuys is understandable
beuys is known to
beuys is not completed by his death
beuys is i was never secure and happy in the world of galleries from the very beginning
beuys is and how it is pronounced
beuys is cleverly recontextualised in
beuys is of course enormously interesting
beuys is l’eminence grise of community building as an art form
beuys is interested in the proportions between crystal and amorphous states
beuys is able to evoke the experience of the past
beuys is a magnificent
beuys is based on three stages
beuys is a special case because of the build-up of a curious sense of obligation to respond positively
beuys is the generation of my father
beuys is talking about the much wider concept of creative potential
beuys is regarded as one of the most significant personalities of the past
beuys is steeped in the struggle of world war II
beuys is a big influence right now
beuys is unavoidable
beuys is purely a decorative artist
beuys is hype
beuys is cited as the great collaborator of the twentieth century because
beuys believed everybody was a potential artist
beuys is on e-bay
beuys is a mythical figure in
beuys is one artist i wanted to ask you about
beuys is one of the biggest art world phonies of recent years
beuys is probably unique in the history of art
beuys is supposed
beuys is a very controversial sculptor
beuys is grounded in a tradition of narrative sources that is often absent in american art of the same period
beuys is hardly a household name in the history of twentieth-century art
beuys is the great shaman of twentieth-century art
beuys is represented with his monumental work created shortly before his death, lightning with stag in its glare
beuys is best known for declaring “everyone an artist”; koons seems to declare that everyone is a consumer

Joseph Beuys - How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare

Performance - 1965
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare was performed as part of his first solo exhibition in November 1965. The audience watched the performance from the outside of the gallery through its large store front window.

With his face covered in honey and gold leaf Beuys cradled a dead hare in his arms and whispered quietly to it about the drawings on the walls of the gallery. Well known as regarding him self as a shamanic figure, Beuy's work is dense with material and symbolic references. For example the honey is to represent the bee as being part of an ideal society of co-operation and brotherhood, whilst the gold is to connect himself to a masculine principle of strength and a synergy with earth.

 “Gold and honey indicate a transformation of the head, and therefore, naturally and logically, the brain and our understanding of thought, consciousness and all the other levels necessary to explain pictures to a hare... The idea of explaining to an animal conveys a sense of the secrecy of the world and of existence that appeals to the imagination. Then, as I said, even a dead animal preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their stubborn rationality. “The problem lies in the word ‘understanding’ and its many levels which cannot be restricted to rational analysis. Imagination, inspiration, and longing all lead people to sense that these other levels also play a part in understanding. This must be the root of reactions to this action, and is why my technique has been to try and seek out the energy points in the human power field, rather than demanding specific knowledge or reactions on then part of the public. I try to bring to light the complexity of creative areas."