OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

Wattis Institute, Tuesday, July 7, 2009

I went to the Wattis Institute at CCA (California College of the Arts, in San Francisco) on Tuesday to see the opening of the latest installment of the “Passengers” exhibition, which seems to have been up for years now without ever losing any of its ungraspability and alterity. Someone must have a map of how “Passengers” works (possibly lean, saturnine supercurator Jens Hoffmann, b. 1974) but as for me, I’ve never understood it except that it’s modular, like the furniture in an old IKEA ad. It’s been up so long that now it’s known (jocularly?) as the “Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers.” Anyhow there’s always something new going on, and this time around it’s both new and old at the same time.

Jens Hoffmann (left) interviewing Mario Garcia Torres (right) at opening of Passengers exhibition Tuesday

Mario Garcia Torres (b. 1975) is a Mexican-born, Los Angeles based artist and writer with a healthy interest in interrogating the myths of conceptual art as they grow and twine in the shadow of specific time-based practices.  (You can read Chris Fitzpatrick’s Art in America interview with MGT here.) (more…)

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9 at Leo Castelli, Alen Saret, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Francis McKee, Frequency, Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers, Mario Garcia Torres, Paul Smith, Rafael Ferrer, Raimundas Malasauskas, Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Wattis Institute

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This post was co-written with curator Joseph Del Pesco.

On May 22, Artforum and e-flux announced to their Art & Education mailing list the launch of the Art & Education Papers archive,  “a free online platform for the publication and exchange of texts on modern and contemporary art.” They continue, “At a time when the distribution of many forms of knowledge remains confined to small conferences, private seminars, or specialized academic journals, we believe that the broad distribution and exchange of ideas is key to increasing dialogue in all aspects of art production, criticism, and history.” The notice concludes with a call for papers: “either new or already existing (published or unpublished, recent or older) scholarly articles from around the world…Texts may be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc… All submissions will be considered for publication on the website.”

To say this is an interesting development would be an understatement. Yet the import of this move is still unclear – and indeed the call has been sitting in our inboxes, provoking no definitive action and yet impossible to file away. On the positive side, this archive promises to be one antidote for the cloistered nature of academic publishing, and a healthy rearrangement of existing hierarchies. Existing databases of this kind, such as JSTOR, have clunky interfaces and search engines, and are available only to those at participating institutions. They could use some competition. This archive also proposes to be far more open, and to make available research that is now out of print or difficult to access. Yet it is hard to imagine sending off our work at the behest of a mass email. And there are troublesome questions (familiar enough from the debate on file sharing of music and movies) about what effect such an archive might have on existing publication strategies. (more…)

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Add new tag, Art & Education, Artforum, Carlota Fay Schoolman, e-flux, Lawrence Lessig, Papers Archive, Richard Serra

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