between old objectivity and naive conceptualism

This is the last week of Zofia Rydet's exhibition at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. We are concluding it with a symposium Between Old Objectivity and Naive Conceptualism, on Rydet's Sociological Record series, which takes place on the 8 and 9th of January. 
Photographing people in Poland in their homes or on their doorsteps, Rydet produced a massive archive of about twenty thousand negatives of faces, interiors, objects and pictures. The project consumed her entirely, to the extent that she never managed to give it a final shape – neither in the form of a book nor an exhibition. There was always another place she wanted to visit, more people she wanted to photograph. Due to the fact that Zofia Rydet’s project has never been shown in a sufficiently broad selection, it has remained shrouded in myth. The aim of the symposium accompanying the exhibition Zofia Rydet. Record, 1978-1990 is to change exactly that, by bringing the "Record" to use again, both as an object of interpretation as well as of photography theory; by contextualizing and interpreting Zofia Rydet's magnum opus from different points of departure, and thus making it available for further reflection. The artist herself was unresolved about how to define her work. Is it a piece of art or science – or perhaps, above all, a testimony of its time?

#makinguse 4

The Green Bloc by Maja Fowkes uncovers the history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. David Crowley recommends the book: "Measuring progress in tons of wheat or coal, the communist authorities in Eastern Europe treated the natural environment as little more than a resource to be ruthlessly exploited. But, as Maja Fowkes shows in her pioneering book, environmentally minded artists in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in the 1970s found highly creative ways of testing official indifference to the effects of industrial modernity. Most of their artworks and actions were ephemeral, leaving few traces either in the landscape or in art history. The Green Bloc is a deeply researched and vividly written act of rediscovery. " 

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A text to be activated, one of protocols by ESTAR(SER)/ The Order of the Third Bird. 

"The document reproduced here emerged in a sheaf of polyglot Nachlass attributable to Marton Bialek (1889-1966), a Francophone Transylvanian priest, orientalist, and explorer who almost certainly had ties to practicing communities of Birds in Ottoman and French Mandate territories during the interwar period. The small holograph sheet appears to represent a “protocol for sustained attention” of a sort familiar to initiates of the Order: instructions lay out a sequence of mental “postures” by which the practitioner is directed to give attentive presence to a given work of art; possible effects and ramifications follow. This brief text would thus seem to shed light on a distinctly Buddhistic strain of Bird practice in use among initiates of the Order working in Paris, Turkey, and the Levant in the early twentieth century. Interestingly, however, much earlier sources may be in play: “The Exercise of the Trochilus” appears on a scrap of foolscap pinned to Bialek’s elaborate translation/summary of three highly syncretistic manuscript scrolls he claims to have found in Chinese Turkestan during service with the third Aurel Stein expedition (1913-1916). Composed in a largely illegible aggregate of central Asian scripts, the “Rülek Scrolls”—at least on the basis of Bialek’s redaction—outline a remarkable and exigent technique for attaining psychosomatic/metempsychotic union with a material, human-made object. This ritual process, comprising elements of both acute danger and unbearable rapture, begins with close meditational attention to the object, and transits through episodes of mental transmigration, of near self-loss, and of (ideally) temporary metamorphosis. Paraphrase is quite impossible, but a full publication of Bialek’s manuscript is currently underway. Until then, it is hoped that the present text—apparently a preparatory exercise devised by Bialek to assist practitioners in readying themselves for one phase of this demanding encounter—will be of interest and use to the relevant persons." 

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This is an issue #21 of PALAIS magazine (published by Palais de Tokyo, Paris), which is devoted to the extravagant exhibition Le Bord des mondes from 2015, dealing with the”coefficeint of art” beyond art. The editors write: "By exploring territories that lie outside the art world and bringing to light unique gestures that give way to new forms of creation, the exhibition “Le Bord des mondes” aims to renew and expand the field of our artistic attentiveness.” 

#makinguse 1

We are up to our shoulders with Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times, a new project which will open at the Warsaw MoMA on the 19th of February 2016. From today until the opening (or maybe even afterwards), we will be uploading posts on the books which are related to the project. Making Use. Life in Postartistic Timesthe is engaged with the various ways of migrating from the field of art to daily life and in the reverse direction—from life to art. It addresses one of the fundamental postulates of  twentieth-century avant-garde movements—the mutual penetration or even fusion of art and everyday life. The first book is quite obvious, it is Toward a Lexicon of Usership by Stephen Wright. Wight (who has accepted the position of the "shadow curator") - whose writngs was a point of departure for this exhibition - postulates a deconstruction of “conceptual edifices” that have provided the foundations of institutionalized art since the nineteenth century. As counter to this edifice, Wright proposes a model of art that implements its own potential—imagination-driven and conceptual—through the process of making use. Such postulates operate on a 1:1 scale, akin to a map that begins to overlap with the actual territory that it represents. Wright is looking for strength in the weakness of art; the theorist disputes Kantian “purposeful purposelessness,” the need to replicate existing systems, the rigours of ownership and authorship, and the haughtiness of so-called “expert” culture.

conceptiforms

Conceptiforms. Concrete Poetry 1967 - 2003 is an unique monograph of Stanisław Dróżdż, which was due to be published in 2003, six years before the artist's death. The whole material, which is based on the idea of transfering (back) the concrete poems from the white cube to the book, was left untouched and unchanged. Now it's out, hundred of pages full of letter fences, questions marks and hour-glasses. 

2016

chance meeting on a dissecting table...

This one comes from the latest issue of WIRE magazine, a drawing by Matthew Avignone. By the way, we have listened to a lot of gorgeous new music this year: Julia Holter, Holly Herndon, Ian William Craig, Joanna Newsom, Jenny Hval, S. Araw Trio, Micachu & the Shapes, Circuit des Yeux, Matana Roberts, Heather Leigh, Grimes, Joan Shelley, Natalie Prass, Hieroglyphic Being, Oneothrix Point Never, U.S. Girls and loads more. It's been a rich and generous year, at least when it comes to the soundscape. 

hasior's photonotes

Two excerpts from the legendary Władysław Hasior’s Photo Notebooks - the series Matter, 1970s. Hundreds more will be uploaded tomorrow at the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art's website. 

holmes/ wright

One day in Paris...