bout one hundred years ago, the introduction of scrap metal, spoons, and flotsam and jetsam, made its way into high art via the work of the Cubists, then Dadaists, then Surrealists. Fluxus, that hurly burly movement of the 1960s, gave keys, can openers, shoe horns, and telephone wires another chance to feature in high falutin’ artworks. And we had lists. Conceptual artists, from Mary Kelly to Dan Graham, Roman Opalka to Stanley Brouwn, itemized their doings, their comings, goings, birth and even death, in notes and performances, records, drawings, and books. A nice re-run of these movements occurred some time back. In the 80s, then 90s. Meg Cranston. Rirkrit Tiravanija. Jason Rhoades. Lists and every day stuff. Fluxus met sculpture. So now, there is Mark Hosking. This man has seen a lot of art, and in his Evening Rise, it’s clear he is a poet is an artist is a conceptual artist is a fisherman. And he knows how to make a book. The good thing about Mr. Hosking is that with all that art history he quite slyly cites, the book he makes might just be interesting to the guy on the pier. That sweaty dude over there, in the baseball cap and baggy shorts, with the styrofoam box that’s got bloody swill in the bottom. The guy who just lost his reel to a dog shark, and the blues are running, and he sees the guy next to him pulling them in. Our guy might just reach into his fishing box, and pull out Mark Hosking. And make himself a line out of that rope lying right there, and a hook out of that key, and a lure out of that pair of sunglasses someone stepped on…
CORNELIA LAUF, Rome.
Peter Nagy is an artist and co-founder, with Alan Belcher, of Nature Morte, one of more successful galleries in New York’s East Village during the 80s. Anyone not dead, tied down by cheap rent or enslaved to a job fl ed the Big Apple in the early 90’s after the city collapsed into a miasma of corruption and crack. Peter went to New Dehli, and eventually reopened Nature Morte there. Afterart News recently asked him a few questions about life after the East Village. Here’s what he has to tell us.
runo Serralongue’s artist book Rapport de Forces, a collage of photographs taken by the artist and selected journalists‘ texts, starting in the 80s and including very recent work, introduces an open narrative about the union workers’ struggle in Korea and calm but unambiguous use of violence by global capitalism. From the beginning the reader is launched into the story, from recent news about big dismissals in Daewoo Motors in Piping during the process of “reconstruction” of the company, through the personal story of Yu Man Heyong, which has a role of subjective frame that opens a larger picture: “Caricature of the Korean worker as Europeans would imagine him, highly disciplined, works even while on strike … never taking off his union vest … having offi cial working day time 3-4 hours longer than his colleagues in Europe … working 14 years in factory…not married … recently fi red … on strike in a front of factory gate for a fi ve months without success… he is struggling not against liberal! Capitalism, but to save national pride and prevent selling of his company to the nasty Americans”. This personal story is not only a comment on yellow emotionalism in the bourgeois press, but also a personifi cation of working class destiny in countries in transition. The “colorful” reality of a Korean transition is portrayed from the uniformed offi ce skyscrapers and shopping malls to 24 gravestones of workers who committed suicide as a closing chapter of the book. In the portraits of novelist Kim Sung Ok and movie director Park Kwang Su, whose art was often related to worker’s movements, we should maybe look for elements of artist identifi cation and artistic statement. Combining history, news, observations, archival and new material, Bruno Serralongue is creating another way of disseminating information. It is less about chasing the facts and endless reconstruction of truth, and more about the art world adopting different tactics in order to challenge its social sphere. In an environment marked by overwhelming news industry that fabricates “objective” facts and images, artist Bruno Serralongue creates inevitably “subjective” and imperfect, but nonetheless r eal, reports that move the emphasis from the production to exploration of mechanisms of observation of images and stories.
n the work of the Austrian artist Peter Kogler we see the realization of a utopia or, at the least, the realization of said “realization.” The infinity there represented by various elements, the purely geometric forms which are always slightly deformed and which transform into half-geometric half-organic fi gures in a chain of images digital of an ant reproduced and multiplied to infi nity, of a brain and its stylized representation…all these elements are montaged in rhizomatic structures, sometimes psychedelic, in networks that cover museum walls during the Documenta X or people public building facades with a parade of giant ants. Utopia is thus the representation of infi nity through this construction of a network that covers the entire world, an idea which is rendered by the materiality of Kogler’s work: his geometric and organic figures, concrete and abstract, are generated by computer according to absolutely random chance. But it is also rendered by the subject of his work: the labyrinths extended in a space unknown to the spectator; the ants that, in their multiplication, invade public space, metro stations, the city and its communications networks; these half-organic half-geometric forms come to resemble each other as the pages turn in a paradoxical movement that gives place to their own original scene, the division of cells in a biological laboratory. As the pages fl ip by the reader-spectator can appreciate the numerous references hidden but present in Kogler’s work, hot round forms that, in spite of their dimensionality, look like Brancusi sculptures or even the lightning that rips Barnet Newman’s paintings that we find in digital form. But what is most striking, perhaps, is the eternal reproduction of the same element, the same form, fi gure, image that places Kogler’s work in the minimalist tradition. Minimalism discovered the power of repetition that generates eternity. Utopia in Kogler’s work follows this search for eternity generated, today, by infinite chance and the ungraspable logic of the computer. Repetition of the same, which is nevertheless contained by the covers of the book that resemble, in a surprising movement of chaotic synthesis, all the elements that separately people the pages of the book.
kip’s a scrapper, & never more so than in his onestar press book, “Cleaning in China.” He is nude in the photo on the book’s cover in a pose reminiscent of Jack Pierson’s “Youth”, as he often is in his performance pieces. Skip takes himself literally as an artist. First degree is his M.O. From the time he started fi lming himself jumping off garage roofs in California to his recent skinny dip in an industrially polluted lake in China and by way of the Bermuda triangle, Skip has remained true to his fi rst love, the elegant proposition that art is anything an artist does. Skip became an artist in the era of late 80s/early 90s California conceptual art; he’s not the only one still ready to crucify himself for the cause, and he’s getting the word out in his own determined fashion. Hence his well-known & brief manifesto, which concludes: “What is common to all my work is Skip. Skip is the artwork. The act of doing, my actions, my choices.” Talk about living sculpture. The images from “Cleaning in China” are all from Skip’s recent trip there, which is now fi rmly part of the Arnold mythology. Many of these images were shown in other formats at the galerie frédéric giroux in Paris: scenes along the road, many ends of meals, the famous bathing scene, shots of Skip. There’s a lot of chewy work for critics here, and maybe Skip isn’t quite as literal-minded as I make him out to be. He’s like your weird younger brother who ends up as a famous scientist. Or artist. It’s good to know Skip’s got his tent set up wherever he is, and that he’s busy making art, living his life with a purpose.
is a dog book that tries to be more than a dog book! An intermix of dogs, art and politics! To view dogs as myth, symbol, aesthetic musings and in scenes of casual and/or extreme tension such as the extremities of state violence. Images are jittered and fractured visually and informationally, concrete and irrational. After all, the dog is a great player in our worlds.
ancy Spero and Leon Golub are too well known to need much introducing here. They have been important figures in art and political circles at least since 1964, when they returned to NYC from Paris at the height of the Vietnam War. Today international interest in their work is high. The Eupatrids are rolling out the red carpets, and there is rock-solid succès d’estime among the rank and file. The more you know about Leon & Nancy, the more you want to find out, and here they have generously agreed to answer a few questions for afterart news readers.
ere’s afterart news #2. Welcome back, and thanks for the warm reception you gave our first issue. Turns out culture vultures of many stripes are hungry for a quality art paper that’s free, doesn’t spout party line and focuses on developing international cultural and social tendencies. As you can see, we’re most excited by hybrid styles, borderline activities, fried brains, crossover artists, networks, the constantly mutating potential of the internet and the frontier of public and private spheres. We’re in English because any project like afterart news with international distribution has to be in English, unless you can afford an army of translators. We’re based on the onestar press network because it provides us with what is actually a meta-network of pre-existing artists’ networks, like a multi-galaxy universe with exponentially infinite possibilities. Want to make it into the pages of afterart news? It’s simple: publish a book with onestar press. Everybody else did, or knows someone who did.
