Artists and Writers, and Artists Writing, and Artists on Writing, and Writers on Art, and Artists and

Writers between Art and Writing, and Artists as Writers, and Writers as Artists, and Art for Writers, and Writing to Artists.

project by Marcus Civin

Saturday, July 18
12-3 pm

Sea and Space Explorations
4755 York Blvd, Los Angeles, CA


Join us for something between a poetry reading, an artist talk and an art history lecture.

This afternoon of conversation and presentations will ask: how do artists and writers form relationships between the verbal and the visual? Are there parallel trajectories, mutual problems? More specifically, how do artists and writers approach language and history? ... How can various languages (political speech, scientific language, art theory, etc.) inform and lend form to contemporary art and writing? Also, how might various histories (histories of artists and writers, American histories, activist histories...) directly influence production or lead towards necessary abstractions. What is the language of a fading color? We will imagine certain subtexts, fantasize a few found photographs, and reconstruct some body language... through art and writing."


Guest Speakers:

Andrew Printer
Ginny Cook
Kenny Berger
Kristine Thompson
Maggie Nelson
Marcus Civin
Vanessa Place


Bios:
Andrew Printer was born in Hong Kong and raised there, Texas and rural England; he now lives in California where he is pursuing an MFA at UCI. His practice encompasses photography, performance, video, object-making and writing, all of which engages the shimmering, mutable, perplexing nature of his post-gay identity.

Ginny Cook received her BA in Art History from Emory University in 2000 and her MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. Most recently her work was included in Light & Wire at Circus Gallery (Los Angeles) and Complicity: Contemporary Photography and the Matter of Sculpture, at Rena Bransten Gallery (San Francisco). Cook is also co-founder and co-editor of MATERIAL, a journal of artists’ writings. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Kenny Berger is an artist and writer who lives in Los Angeles. He teaches art theory and criticism at the USC Roski School of Fine Arts.

Kristine Thompson lives in Los Angeles with her cat Zami. She makes photographs and works in a photography museum. Her visual art and writing often deals with death, myth, and romanticism. She recently spent a year in Germany as a D.A.A.D. fellow (but still doesn't like sauerkraut).

Maggie Nelson is most recently the author of two works of nonfiction: a critical study about poetry and painting titled Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007), and a book about her family, criminal justice and media spectacle titled The Red Parts: A Memoir (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2007). She is also the author of numerous books of poetry, including Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir). Her next book, a work of creative nonfiction about the color blue titled Bluets, is due out this October from Wave Books. A work of art criticism titled The Art of Cruelty is also forthcoming from WW Norton. She has been a contributor to Artforum as well a recipient of an Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at CalArts.

Marcus Civin just finished his MFA in Studio Art at UC Irvine. Recently, Marcus’ writing and drawings have been published in David Brazil and sara larsen’s Oakland-based Try! magazine, and at digitalartifactmagazine.com. Marcus performed a new piece, Bounty, at LAXART in Los Angeles, as a part of Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites. Some of the texts from this performance are on view at compactspace LA until July 23, 2009, as part of Monster Mongers and Retailers of Other Strange Satellites 2. Marcus is currently teaching an Artists and Writers course to undergraduates at UCI, and preparing a performance/sculpture, collaboration comedy, Johnny Angel, with Sandy de Lissovoy for Perform! Now! in Chinatown, Los Angeles, July 25, 2009.

Vanessa Place is a writer, lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella; the post-conceptual novel La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2), and, in collaboration with appropriation poet Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Duckling Presse (December 2008)). Her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality will be published by Other Press in 2010. Place is also a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and is a co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”

"Fondu Aesthetics" and/as "Relational Aesthetics": Its Un-Doing and Aftermaths

Nicolas Bourriaud first coined the term "relational aesthetics" in his 1996 exhibition at the CAPC and its attendant catalog "Traffic" – but it was fully articulated in a series of essays, which were first published in "Documents sur l'art," and then published in France titled "Esthetique relationnelle" in 1998, which was translated into English in 2002. Without a doubt, "relational aesthetics" took the "art world(s)" by storm -- many taking it up as a crucial and new theoretical insight and practice, while others critiqued it for is art-historical amnesia, participation in neo-liberal ideas and capitalist agendas, nepotism, and its lack of taking into account various feminist and queer interventions that have created other "relationalities" in the art world(s) and beyond -- for example see empyre's ongoing discussion for the month of July, 2009 on "queer relational": http://turbulence.org/blog/2009/07/03/empyre-july-2009-queer-relational); and see the numerous critiques launched -- as well as a series of upcoming panels at the College Art Association in Chicago. Indeed, "relational aesthetics" is still being reckoned with in the "art world(s)" and beyond.

Bourriaud defines "relational aesthetics" as "a set of artistic practices that take place as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context -- rather than an independent and private space or discrete art objects as such" (15). He goes on to explain "relational aesthetics," "relational art," and what it (ostensibly) does; he states, "relational art is not the revival of any movement, nor it is the comeback of any style. It arises from an observation of the present and from a line of thinking about a fate of artistic activity. Its basic claim -- the sphere of human relations as art work venue ..." (44). More importantly, Bourriaud states, relational artists consider "inter-subjective and interaction neither as fashionable theoretical gadgets, not as additives (alibis) of a traditional artistic practice. It takes [relationality] as a point of departure and as an outcome, in brief as the main informers of their activity" (44). Indeed, as Bourriaud has articulated, "the artwork is presented as a _social interstice_ within which these experiments and these new 'life possibilities' appear to be possible. (45)" I argue that Michael Ano of ASAP and Kate Hers took up Bourriaud's theory, rethought it, and democratized it; thus, they expanded its terms, conditions, and trajectories -- all the while "camping it up."

On July 12, 2009, Michael Ano and Kate Hers organized "Fondue Aesthetics," which was an instantiation of "relational aesthetics" (otherwise) -- as well as a "participatory aesthetics," or emancipatory re-thinking of "relational aesthetics." For this event, the "Hess brothers" (Nic and Joshua, who are both Swiss, and thus parodying Bourriaud's deployment of Rirkrit Tiravanija's art practice) taught and made "authentic swiss fondu." All participants grated cheese, cut bread, as well as mixing other ingredients, poured wine, and drank and ate.

Without a doubt, it was a relational (and participatory) event and/as aesthetics. To draw from -- but also alter -- Bourriaud's theory, there was an activation and engagement with art (as a "techne") that instantiated and made evident "the sphere of human relations _as_ art work ..." (44; emphasis mine), and what took place at "Fondu Aesthetics" fostered and nurtured art as a practice of inter-subjective relationality and interaction between friends and others who would become friends, and, as Bourriaud has stated, relationality is "a point of departure" (44). This "departure" is worth thinking about because it did not leave, but rather it gathered together friends, acquaintances, strangers, and passer-bys.

That day I was to give a brief talk on Bourriaud's theorization of "relational aesthetics" and the critiques that have emerged, but as I saw, as well as participated in, the fondu making and eating, the conversations, the meandering and intricate conversations between close and superficial relationships (and I am implying no hierarchy) that ranged from gossip, to politics, to art, to the likes and dislikes of new books and movies, I realized that a form of "relational aesthetics" was _taking_ place in this space. I did not want to interrupt this event, these conversations that were taking place with a talk on what we kind-of already know, and what we were all already doing. I thought hat it would be best to have this relationality continue by skipping my talk (and no one seemed to mind. Indeed, the precarious role of the art historian: others do it better, and life makes better artistic statements).

That day I learned that "relational aesthetics" -- if we still want to call it that -- can, and does, take place on a daily basis: at lunch, over the phone, at the dinner table, walking down the street, in a gallery, in a supermarket. In sum, "relational aesthetics" takes place in and as life itself. I realized that this _was_ "relational aesthetics" -- but one without all the trappings of the gallery, art-historical histories, and institutional affirmations. It was _one_ (among many, to be sure) modality of an "aesthetics of existence," to draw from Michel Foucault. Yes, life and interaction is an art (a techne), and friendship is probably the highest form of "relational art" and "relational aesthetics." So, "relational aesthetics" was (and does) take place without the need of the art historian, critic, and/or curator -- let alone the gallery and/or museum. "Relational aesthetics" is something anyone can do, at any time, anywhere, anyway, and everyone, in fact, has enacted it. And, I argue, "Fondue Aesthetics" proved my position, my insight -- which is to say that the relationality and relationships we have are always various, multiple, and in and of the world, which is always to say with and for others -- relationally. Finally, "relational aesthetics" thought otherwise is an "aesthetics of existence." I think we need more of this in the world we inhabit, and more than this we need to nurture and cherish such aesthetics.

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
Art History and Visual Culture
Otis College of Art and Design