he guy who commissions an oil painting of his dog will tell you he is buying art, as will the collector who buys, say, a Koons. But they obviously aren’t at all buying the same thing. There is a gaping Wittgensteinian black hole loose in the art universe and it’s business a susual. Our readers know what we think. This conceptual black holeis getting bigger at internet speed, dissolving received ideas about art like sugar cubes in hot water. We’reon our own, and anything goes. That’s why artists’ networks like onestar’s have become so important. When configured correctly, they structure artistic nodes & networks into meta-networks and render them widely accessible. Globalization is good for art, but without artists’ networks institutions and galleries control too much of the territory. In the black hole, subversive internet-enabled networks are creating hybrid forms of expression that reanimate critical questions about private/public spheres, originality, representation, etc. Artists’ networks are creating alternatives at every stage of an artist’s process, including distribution. So art lover, get Koons to sign that dog painting and we can have it our way.
Richard Dailey
This issue is dedicated to the late Abbie Hoffman.
nestar press in collaboration with les Abattoirs de Toulouse and Galerie Pietro Spartà is pleased to announce the publication of Jurassic Pork II by Alain Séchas. Our readers know Alain Séchas because he (as well as being a fine artist) is the official cartoonist here at Afterart News. On the occasion of his recent installation at the Palais de Tokyo -Jurassic Pork II- Philippe Dagen of Le Monde published a review in that paper 10/04/05). Our special correspondant Lupy Chlew responds below. 
hen a performing artist, a musician, or an actor is about to enter on stage, pre- cisely when he/she is about to play, act or perform, this very fraction of a second is the moment when EVERYTHING happens. The rest is all about anecdote and only exists to help us try to realize or understand that all important transitional moment. If you want to capture this essential moment of high drama, the transition from private person to public performer, you should be standing at the exact intersection of wing and stage. And in order to understand that point of view, you should in fact be following the artist and checking the only perceptible place where the drama or the absence of drama manifests itself at the intersection where life joins death -: physically deep in the eyes of the artist, actor, performer. This moment embodies the fine line between two coded moments, the backstage preparation and the live act. This should not be confused with stage fright. This moment should be compared to the blaze of an idea which, most of the time, is impossible to transform into reality and maybe into a work of art. The artist knows that half of his/her activity is about adapting and trying to under- stand what was the essence of that blaze of thought or spirit, to give it a body that the rest of us can apprehend and appreciate. The other half of an artist’s life is about procrastination and preparation. The next and fi nal step is the signature. In cinema the space between two scenes in the process of editing is where everything happens, invisible and at the same time ultra visible the gutter that once was glued with scotch tape for film and now is the one pixel line on the computer screen. The work of Annika Ström is all about this uncatchable moment and place. Annika Ström is, with or without her consent take your choice prolonging that moment in front of us. Please follow her eyes, if you are ready you might find yourself transported to infinity.
n the cover a dated image at once moving and cruel, that of a chimpanzee manipulated by men in white jackets getting ready for several experiments. At the end of the book a sentence without head or tail, «Give me orange, eat orange… », closes this collection of images. 9+1=10?, the last book by the artist Mircea Cantor, starts with a question and ends with a command. 9+1=10? is a transitional book, a stage in the work of Mircea Cantor between his previous research and his exhibition at the Gulbenki an Foundation, « If you walk faster it will rain less hard ». There the artist exhibits the video entitled NIM where an apeseeks to answer addition problems in a kind of amusement park in Thailand. The commands refer to NimChimsky, a chimpanzee trained by Herb Terrace, a researcher at Columbia University in New York, who has taught Nim Chimsky to communicate in American sign language such elementary sentences as Apple me eat, Banana Nim eat, Banana me eat, Drink me, Nim eat. 9+1=10? is also and first of all a collection of historical archived images from the recent history of man and space, of man in space. Spatial architecture, satellites, rockets, radar, archival images, an iconographic ensemble from the 1970s brought together by the artist are at the heart if this book. Between documentary and science fi ction, Mircea Cantor unveils his own imagination in relation to space travel and the glorious epoch of bygone utopias mixed up with the image of man and prisoner/guinea-pig and his own foolishness. 9+1=10? shows without commentary the traces of a fantastic epoch when everything was still possible.
queeze together the pages of Heidie Giannotti’s book a tale of a maiden or two + an animal streak and look at it sideways: that’s where you’ll see markings that resemble wood grain. (She might call it an animal streak.) Flip the pages of the book with your thumb front to back, back to front and the grainy moiré pattern springs to life, shifting rhythmically up and down, back and forth, from one page to the next, from thick to thin to blurry to positively cinematic stripes. (She might call it a minimal streak.) The undulating linear tracks activate the book’s interior architecture, which is built to house a streaming surplus of fi gurative images and colloquial speech. Small talk, tall talk, all talk all the time. (Check the index at the back of the book. The entire text is crunched into a stack of subject headings and type faces that read like a long shorthand prose poem composed of phrases caught in passing, snatched out of context, and salvaged in fragmentary form.)
