Breyer P-Orridge, Red Chair Posed, 2008 | p 15 / 16 | Dead Flowers, ed. Lia Gangitano | Published by Participant Inc. & VOXPOPULI

Posted by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator

“I want to be with you” I said, to which my friend replied something to the effect of, “ewwwwwwwww!” We were talking about what you might say to someone you’re really into to express your longing. My friend took issue with the word “be.” He thought it sounded too bodily, as if “being with” someone was parasitic and the phrase was too close to “I want to be you,” like wanting to crawl inside someone’s skin sci-fi style. I assure you this is not what I meant. I think of “being” in terms of being on the same page, the same emotional space, getting lost in the love cloud, getting physical, hanging out, you know, the BROAD definition of intimacy. Still he might have been on to something… 

Today on a field trip to Powell’s, the Resource Room Committee was in search of few specific things. One of them—Dead Flowers—is an anthology of writing from various artists and curators that documents an exhibition of the same name. Curator and Director of Participant Inc., Lia Gangitano says of the exhibition, “In an effort to understand a genealogy of influences reflective of the role of the non-commercial, non-institutional space I often look at to artists who seem to have inspired, or instigated their existence.” She goes on to explain that the exhibition, which features thirteen artists, was organized around the work of actor/director Timothy Carey and was made for VOXPOPULI, an independent artist-run space in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was drawn to the book because Charles Atlas, Paul Thek, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge are all included, and it is no secret I have massive art crushes on all of them. You might say, I want to be with them… in an intimate curatorial way.

Genesis’ chapter links back to this concept of being, in h/er essay s/he runs through the beginnings of COUM Transmissions, an artist and performance collaborative that operated from 1969–1976. Founded in Hull, Yorkshire, by Genesis, COUM’s other members included Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and Chris Carter, who together went on to found the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle in 1976. H/er retelling of their move from commune to commune and COUM’s move towards a development of a rigorous, yet morphing set of artistic ideals is nothing short of revolutionary.

Genesis credits the beginnings of COUM’s philosophy as coming from their creative lives within two major communes: Exploding Galaxy, which was founded by David Medella in 1967, and Hoho Funhouse which followed soon after. In one passage Medella is quoted as saying, “I felt a deep dissatisfaction towards all art, all art that derives solely from one single person, and is determined by one person’s ideas and wishes.” Madella had hoped that Exploding Galaxy would usher in a flexibility in art making, community, and perhaps a dynamic new culture that could mean anything and could include anyone.

Genesis goes on to talk about h/er belief that the origins of art come from magic, first through devotion and then through illustration and then finally manifesting as commodified objects and experiences. So too does s/he describe the evolution of COUM: first as ritualistic, then as performative, and finally as an accepted art world being, in constant need of retooling and examining. The influence of the institution had changed them as much as they were changing it. 

“Everything about COUM is nothing, everything about COUM is false, and everything about COUM is true.”

The collective pushed against the institution using transgression to test the boundaries of comfort. Genesis looks back at this time as important and talks about the value in constantly “redesigning” oneself. The artist uses the pronoun “we” throughout h/er essay in reference to COUM, but also to refer to h/erself. After marrying Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge in 1993, Genesis and Lady Jaye began a project to become Breyer P-Orridge, a single pandrogynous entity. They became each other and are now one.

In the final words of the beautifully stirring afterword, Gangitano quotes Genesis as saying, “the most transgressive thing right now is intimacy”. She believes it is still true, as do I. Let’s just be together!

]]> http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/19/what-were-reading-dead-flowers/feed/ 0 http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/13/book-tour-nyc/ http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/13/book-tour-nyc/#respond Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:27:14 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/pica/?p=2809 Continue reading →]]> At the beginning of January, a group from our staff flew to New York for the winter flurry of activity surrounding the annual APAP conference and a chance to visit our friends at Under the Radar, COIL, and American Realness. While there, a few members of our little Resource Room Committee went rogue, ditching out of performances to search out some of the newest archives and book spaces around Manhattan.

We’ve had our library up-and-running ever since 2000, but it seems there’s been a recent proliferation of institutional collections and reading rooms at alt spaces across the country. A lot of this boom likely stems from the long (and growing shadow) the Internet casts over our lives. How do we get individuals to engage with the physical spaces we’ve created and not just our organizations’ websites? Where do books fit in the new order?  It’s clearly on a lot of minds. The New York Public Library even hosted a panel today dedicated to the future of art book publishing. Artist-run spaces and projects just might be imagining some of the possible answers to these questions.

In New York, we met up with former PICA staffer Rachel Peddersen, who is currently at work on The Kitchen‘s digital archive. She gave us a very *top secret* peak at their new system, with which they are trying to document all of their events from their 40-year history through video, sound, programs, photos and more. It’s incredible to think that an institution that has presented everyone from the Beastie Boys to Vito Acconci to Charles Atlas to Laurie Anderson could make that content available for viewing online. It inspires dreams for our own archive….

From there, we dropped by the Goethe Institut (3rd floor, elevator, no building signage! We’re not the only ones!), to check out their The Ends of the Library project. As a multi-artist residency exploring the future of book collections, we were interested in seeing how the artists had interacted with a small collection, hoping that it might push our thinking around our own Resource Room Residencies.

The most compelling part of the project we caught was a font called Human Readable Type. Download the file and it creates a new keyboard layout for your Mac that outputs regular typing as a series of dingbats, Greek letters, and other alternative characters that resemble Roman letter forms. In practice, the font can’t be read by web bots and other recognition software, confounding the very databases that the project is in dialogue with. Sometimes working with archives as a material means working against the functionality of those tools.

Our group took a quick detour to see Amy O’Neill’s show at the Swiss Institute, where we fell in love with a clever cover to a simple little publication.

And then we finally wound our way back to visit Artists Space’s new Books & Talks storefront. Artists Space expanded operations to this library/bookshop/gathering space so they could better accomodate all of the critical thought that artists are generating: publications, symposia, screenings, lectures, and research projects like the W.A.G.E. survey. The shelves are filled with their own institutional publications, interspersed with selections by a group of 100 artists and curators who were each asked to choose 10 titles. It’s an eclectic collection with fascinating through-lines and juxtapositions.

Let’s just say we felt at right at home there, but ready to get back and re-explore our own idiosyncratic library.

Kristan Kennedy: Let’s start from the beginning. I was thinking back on how this arrangement came to be. In some ways you have been “in residence” at PICA for a long while. Even though our former offices were limited in their access, you visited often…

Alex Felton: (laughs) Yeah, I found a way in.

KK: Yes! You found a way in, you were an occasional fixture, an active loafer. You stayed there to do your own work, steal wi-fi, read, maybe observe… And then, of course, there were all of the times you visited me in my office at Washington High School, when we were getting ready for exhibitions. Wherever we moved, you moved with us. We are used to artists interrupting us—it might even be what we live for—but the “work” of art or that of art administration can often be messy. Sometimes we try to hide that from artists because we’re on display in the space of an office, otherwise the curtain is lifted and we are just crazy people obsessively emailing, trying to make impossible stuff happen.

On one of your visits I was panicking trying to find 100,000 matches for Claire Fontaine. I asked you why you would possibly want to witness me working, that it was boring and complicated and painful… I was in the worst state of mind.

AF: Right. What did I say?

KK: You said (and I am paraphrasing!) that you like to be around the work of making art happen, because even in its most complicated or banal moments it made you hopeful that art was WORTH working for. That made me remember something I had almost forgotten, but had no real proof of: that we are all in it together. So that was the impetus in inviting you. You had already made yourself…

AF: …at home.

KK: Yes, at home, but also you were someone who embodied the role of an artist within an institution: to keep us on our toes, to keep it real. With PICA’s move to a more permanent and accessible home, there became a mandate to invite artists and audiences to infiltrate our space. In a sense, to sanction the voyeurism and make it official.

AF: (laughs) Uh, what’s the question?

KK: (laughs) Oh yes! The question! The title of your project, I don’t want to work, but I love the work place, seems to encapsulate with some brevity the long, drawn-out story I just told. But there seems to be something more to this infiltration—what does it represent for you?

AF: Well, this particular work place, and the three places I’ve seen PICA “play out” in is a place that is different from most uninviting art institutions. You are all working artists who are here facilitating other people’s projects. PICA became for me a place to sort of lurk around. It’s not that I don’t like working; I don’t like my day job. But, in a workplace like this, I guess I am doing my preferred work. The phrase occurred to me while I was at my other hangout, Publication Studio, where they are always in the midst of something frenzied, fixing problems, making things look good. You all spend your time preventing the client/artist from ever knowing what you had to do to make things happen.

I don’t know what’s wrong with people that they don’t want to know the business of facilitating art, like they can’t handle knowing that someone had to scrape it together on their behalf. I’ve scraped together plenty of projects. I have realized that seventy percent of making art and consequently exhibiting is about getting the wall painted white, right? It becomes about preparing a space, about finding a space, and being in that space. Space, space, space!

What I get out of hanging around these workplaces is a stimulating environment where people are invested in similar pursuits. This lends import to whatever I’m picking away at. More so than trying to be anonymous at a cafe somewhere. Invariably, I become invested in your work as well as my own. Without official tasks, but in the proximity of tasks, I take on an advisory role. Before that, I was always wondering what my role was, wondering if I was wanted in the art world.

KK: (laughing) I think that some art organizations can be fearful of acknowledging the very humans who make the objects they display. And..

AF: (interrupts) that makes you afraid of them.

KK: Afraid?

AF: Hmm, you know, that sort of “church of art” kind of thing. The design is so slick, the building so imposing—it erects a wall and you are afraid to email them and say, “Hey, I am this guy…”

KK: You’re not supposed to find them, they’re supposed to find you.

AF:  Right. And never mind getting a window into how they work… I am reminded of that Andrea Fraser article that Patrick [Leonard] forwarded to me, about how an institution “facilitates” as a practice. I am also reminded of that time Believer Magazine printed the budget of an independent film. There you have a 20 million dollar budget and you see where every dime goes. It was astounding to relate to that amount of cash, to understand that all of that invisible work comes at a cost, that twenty million dollars is a “small” budget.

KK: It is always shocking to me how much production costs for even the simplest exhibitions or installations. Every little nail and every tank of gas and every human hour comes at a cost. There is all of this garbage surrounding a seemingly simple act of letting something exist somewhere for the public to see.

AF: Is that how art is “of the world”? There is geo-politics at play: the price of a barrel of oil affects how a painting gets from one place to another. I just spent thirty dollars on magnets for this project and the experiment did not work. How do we figure in all of the work that never gets seen. The work that does not WORK.

KK: Well, more than any other trade, artists are in the business of trying things out with no certain end. Anyone else involved in the production of things would never get something off the drawing board unless it had a defined purpose and value and an assurance that there was desire or need for it.

AF: They run all of this math before they even develop a prototype.

KK:  What has been interesting about the residency is that in a way the tables have turned; sure, you are observing us and reacting to this space and our habits, but we also get to observe you. The Resource Room is now part studio, with an accumulation of paint cans, packages, and sketches of ideas butting up against the library shelves. Here the trial and error of your current project is laid bare. I can see you trying to execute something that seems resolved as an idea, but in actuality is a struggle with materials and time.

AF: Sometimes I wish I had someone to do that for me, to just pay for this, figure this out, call whomever, but in other cases I don’t want any help. I want to find out on my own that it doesn’t work. I mean it’s related to this idea of professionalism/anti-professionalism, work-place/no work, and play-acting mixed in with reclaiming something that came natural to me as a kid. There was a lot of junk in my house when I was growing up: baskets with saved toys that were filled with knots and strings and I would sort of busy myself with figuring out where each lace looped back in on itself. 

My actions here and in the studio are play-acting. I imbue some object with a purpose other than what was intended and I spend so much time in an imaginary space where my actions have no real-world consequence. I remember running a paintbrush over objects at my home pretending I just created it in some other painted world or thumbing through all the books telling myself I just absorbed all its information, the whole story.

KK: What about this concept of making things? As I read your essay and Anthony Hubermans’ piece from Afterall that you reference, I kept thinking about the idea of resisting definition or understanding and how that applies to how artists reveal their practice.  I detest the word “create,” and a lot of artists that I know won’t use it to explain away what they are doing. It might be easier to say “we create” because there is a mystery around that, a mysticism… When we say we are “working” or “making work” it almost begs for an explanation: how many hours, to what end, what is the value, the use… And then here we are, backed against the wall, trying to define a working practice that does not necessarily subscribe to that blue collar ethic, but is rather masquerading as such. How do you describe the labor of the mind as work?

AF: While I was looking for a day job to make money so I could still make art, it occurred to me that maybe I’m only good at being me and that I just need to be paid for that. But that does not exactly fly with people, like the archetypal Midwestern dad who is skeptical of art. “It does not have a practical use.” So perhaps that is why we call it work, it defines it for other people.

KK: Yeah, if you say that you are playing or just being you, the act is selfish and it doesn’t put something out into the world of value other than your own enjoyment. There is no way of gauging what that is worth.

AF: Right, but we do live in a world where information is accepted as capital and we have “knowledge workers.” I may want to look that up in Wikipedia again. Um, yeah, Wikipedia says that knowledge working is, “non-routine problem solving that requires a combination of convergent and divergent creative thinking.” They “think for a living”—some sociologists say they “direct manipulation of symbols to create an original knowledge product or to add obvious value to an existing one.” So they are creative thinkers, their product is knowledge, innovation, whatever. This definition includes so many people whose job it is to move information around and so everyone is a knowledge worker. Maybe this definition includes what artists do as well.

KK: Well, I think that what’s interesting about thinking about information and how we process it as a culture— not just as artists or curators—is that it’s almost universal now. We’ve reached a place where as a society there is less interest in really knowing a thing or a text or a concept through direct experience or learning and more of an instinctual and associative practice of pulling information to form a …

AF: Synthesis.

KK: YES! A synthesis.

AF: A “WORKING” synthesis.

KK: Knowledge workers add “obvious value, or known value” to things through their research. We have the ability to effortlessly pull from seventy-five different sources almost instantaneously to justify every thought, idea, and image need we have. We don’t have to know about any of it, we just have to have it at our fingertips to be able to access it. If we get proven right or wrong…

AF: By an iPhone…

KK: It almost doesn’t matter. That correction just becomes a part of the story, another footnote in a series of footnotes and anecdotal evidence. We don’t need to have been on the Great Wall to understand the Great Wall; we can take a virtual tour of it, look at photographs of it, and read about it in five seconds. There is no longer a need for encyclopedic knowledge since you can find your own path to the information or images that help you understand something. We have cut out experience in that equation. I wonder what your thoughts are about that, about the associative gathering of information and how it relates to what you make.

AF: Well, I always used films as I was growing up as a way to see outside of Nebraska, so I’ve been at it since before the Internet could offer so much more of a bricolage experience…. Associative thinking is available to everybody, but I wonder if it’s as much of a mania for everyone. It makes me crazy making these comparisons, these leaps to find the common link between all things.

I imagine doctors and lawyers and knowledge workers are making fewer intuitive leaps (you know Malcolm Gladwell probably wrote a book about it). The associative process they are going through is more based in fact than the imaginative process of an artist. I wanna cram ‘pataphysics and Alfred Jarry in here. This sort of pseudo-science of imaginary solutions, that’s the realm that we are working in. Another reference could be this Rob Giampietro article in The Serving Library Bulletin called “I Am a Handle.”  He explains a ‘pataphor with this example: lightning as a weather event is a fact and the notion that Zeus is up in the clouds throwing out those lightning bolts is metaphor, the whole pantheon of mythic Gods and their interrelationships is a ‘pataphor. So, it suggests, to me anyway, like, a level above metaphor, or beyond metaphor. The network of metaphors that make up an artwork or a series of works are like the characters of a personal mythology. As an artistic statement they are providing some kind of imaginary solution that seems woefully off-topic in the harsh light of practical reality. In that Huberman thing he mentions Glenn O’Brien writing in Parkett that an artwork can serve to detract from a previous understanding.

KK: Yes!

AF: Right?!? Art sort of resists interpretation. An artwork can produce confusion, but that may be because it’s also made within a state of confusion and that this associative drive kind of works so deep that the combinations are even confusing to the maker. You know when I make something that I am excited about I say to myself, “What the fuck? How did that come out of it?” I know that I am onto something, but it is less important to me to define what that something is.

KK: Trying to attribute meaning to certain art works does seem like an impossible task, but one that we constantly pursue. Artists give us clues, but once the thing is in front of us, it is our responsibility to “work” to get it, to understand it.

AF: Right.

KK: This relies on some serious participation by the viewer or, as Huberman calls it, curiosity. It’s like it has to pique curiosity and if it doesn’t, then it isn’t worth knowing and if it does, then that is the action, that’s all it really needs to deliver. We need to get closer to believing that a work explaining itself is not paramount to the work being good…

AF: Right, it’s really just some promise that it might make sense…someday.

KK: It sets the viewer on the path to information seeking. It encourages a cyclical investigation of the unknowable.

AF: Yeah, but it’s pretty clearly a fool’s errand, trying to know the unknowable—you know it’s unknowable, but you’re going to try to know it anyway? Like, why continue that? I don’t know. I don’t want to get too deep about things I don’t even know about. I watched a movie about it—Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein—and what I gather (cause I can’t understand Wittgenstein), is that he says something like, “Mathematically, I proved it. Mathematically, language is insufficient to talk about life or philosophize.” So,  boom, philosophy is dead! And yet we don’t give up, we keep talking around things because the exercise is enough.

KK: We also keep creating non-verbal experiences or objects that try to encapsulate or illuminate philosophical concepts. HA! That is my wonky math. So lets pull out of the deep dark caverns of the mind right now. I just wanted to ask you some really simple things like what have you been doing in the Resource Room and why are you doing it?

AF: What have I been doing here? Well, I mean, I did my taxes the first day, I watched a staff meeting… The thing that piqued my interest was the discussion about how to work the thermostat and what it should be set at for everyone’s optimal comfort, which still has not been achieved.

KK: I won’t ever be happy or satisfied with that discussion. It’s like a hothouse in here! We should be growing orchids. Why was it so interesting to you?

AF: There was a pause in TurboTax and I just suddenly realized what was being said, and I guess that it linked up to  a conversation that happened at the Multnomah County Library, where I also work. The tiny bureaucracy that is PICA was linked to the bigger bureaucracy of the bigger workplace. I realized it was equally important, equally quotidian in either setting, but you know here at PICA whatever the thermostat lands on is the optimal temperature for the facilitation of “art work.”

KK: Somehow that makes the conversation sound more exciting.

AF: I am here blithely working in the Resource Room in the face of all of the PICA staff’s work. I have been piecing together a bibliography inspired in part by Tim Young, who is the librarian at Bienecke at Yale who did an annotated bibliography of comic books starting in the 1800s that was published in Weekday II. I’m making my own annotated bibliography as a way to represent my particular, circuitous route through information, specifically the information available and not available at PICA in your collection of books and in the archive. I procured an Inter-Library Loan from the library in Forest Grove since they had a Roland Barthes book that I needed. In it he writes about journaling and the advantages/disadvantages of recording one’s experience in this way. I have included a piece from Walter Benjamin about playing around with his books, and that linked into Michael Taussig’s work from the first of the Documenta pamphlets where he is talking about the complications in keeping a journal as an anthropologist. That is just one section of a strange stream of thought that starts with that kind of confusion/delivered curiosity found within an artwork or within this Resource Room.

KK: So you have been pulling this material from all different sources and keeping a running bibliography in order to define or illuminate what exactly?

AF: I want to practice a kind of deliberation and put forward a consideration of the thinking process. It is a kind of journaling of idleness. Maybe for now it is a kind of political stance, just to occupy somewhere, occupy something. Now I’m just thinking about Zucotti Park, but that’s not what I was trying to say… I want idleness to gain respect.

KK: But is it really idleness?

AF: It appears as idleness.

KK: Yeah, it is like a front for something else. You have described the residency to me as lurking around the workplace, but that is contradictory to what’s actually happening here. Your presence is a riddle, you are playing in a sandbox of your own making, but that “playing” is a cover-up for the “hard work” of an artist.

AF: You got it!

KK: Yeah, (laughing) I got it. You keep leaving bits of evidence of your presence here. Even a shift in a book’s placement on a shelf is a signal of activity, learning, inquiry, choice. But where do those clues lead?  Is it to incite the practice of investigation in others or is it to justify your own lurking as an art form within the institution?

AF: I mean, it has to be some sort of self justification. It is kind of packing everything within those riddles and some of my pathological self deprecation, right? Sure, it’s for others, too—it is sort of an encouragement. Because I am trying to keep it working like a library, there is the idea that all of this is here to just be shared. The books and other items that I am deciding to lay out on the tables are less directed than what a true librarian would do, and it is a little more like saying, “Hey, this is some of what I am thinking about.” You may not arrive at the same end point as I did, but you’ll see the symbols and you will have your own kind of entry.

KK: Lets talk about some of the things that you are putting on display. You have a selection of books from the collection and they range from artists’ monographs to exhibition documents—some of which you have annotated with Post-it notes—and you have a book that you got out of Inter-Library Loan from another library that is now temporarily placed in our collection and there is some signage of your own making that features xeroxed images off the internet…

AF: My signage is riffing on the kinds of things I see at my job at the Central Library, although I am eliminating any of the “useful” or contextual information they might include. The Library recently made an entire display of the books that reside on the bottom shelves. It was meant to increase the circulation of these forgotten books, to keep them from being weeded out just because the alphabet had worked them to the bottom. My images are a similar device, but what they are pointing to is not known, it may not even be important. There is an image of this logo I have made up for the Resource Room—a little guy scratching his head with a floating question mark hovering above him—and I have included an image of a japanese girl in a bikini posing in the library stacks, and another one of an illustration of a robot. They are the kind of random clip art that might accompany one of the didactics I am referencing. Here the clip art stands alone, it becomes the information.

KK: That’s funny that you mention that thing about the bottom shelf, we are in the process of trying to figure out what it means to have a library within an art organization. What is the use, how do people find what they are looking for, what kind of books should we collect? As a contemporary art organization, should we cast off books that are over twenty years old? Do we want to keep it perpetually new, because we are not an organization that is particularly interested in collecting, but rather reflecting the “now”? Part of inviting residents to mine from the collection is to see how they might subvert the library. How you and others might adapt its use to make it more or less useful for a public case. When I look at the images you selected like the hot chick in a bikini, it operates as a sly statement about what makes a library compelling, it pokes at the whole persona of the sexy librarian.

AF: It’s trying to promote teen reading or something base like “reading is hot.”

KK: Having a real live bikini model in here might drive attendance… The image also points to the whole ridiculousness that an image of this even exists in the world and that it is yours for the taking.

AF: It also is from Japan…

KK: Right, there is a love of the absurd there, I mean have you read about pillow girlfriends! Fascinating. What is this collaged image all about?

KK: It is from the Documenta 11 book that led me to reference Sarat Maharaj’s writing in my bibliography project, the image is of a Ken Lum piece, a mirror with images stuck within the edges of the frame. Lying in front of this sign is a good pairing of books—one of the Walker Art Center collection and the other of the Rubell collection. It reminded me of a pile of riches. I also have a copy of Mike’s World out on the counter. I did not know much about his work, but it reminded me of the guy that Experimental 1/2 Hour had on a recent episode, the one who runs on treadmills, makes blended juices, and paints…

KK: John Kilduff, from Let’s Paint, Exercise & Blend Drinks!

AF: Yes, him! It was funny to see him on the show because my little brother in Nebraska had found that guy’s YouTube videos and passed them onto me years ago and I was just like, “This is strange,” but it reminds me of the work in this Mike’s World and the cover of the book is the same color as this Nils Norman book and I find him interesting.

KK: So it’s about making a display of books that is just as associative as the kinds of things you put together to make your own work or writing or thinking happen? Some of it is formal—color, shape, size—and some of it is conceptual, like stacking like ideas together and some of it is about…

AF: Being younger than Jesus, older than God.

KK: Yeah, talk about that…

AF: Well some of that it’s meant to throw you off the scent. This Younger than Jesus catalogue and the Museums by Artists book were originally paired for those same formal reasons: their covers are very similar in design and they are both bright yellow. Then I realized the artists in either one were of different generations—the implication being that in identifying artists younger than 33, everyone else just got old as fuck. You know, maybe that’s just because there is a certain acknowledgement in trying to present an idea in this way that you are most likely not going to end up at my same conclusion.

KK: Which is why it’s not explained. We had that conversation about how to document your residency and we came to realize pretty quickly that you had no desire to write down a list of every book that you pulled. But I did, because I had this idea that someday that knowledge would be useful. What if in the future we need to understand your work and this very arrangement of books is the thing that marks an entire trajectory.

AF: (laughing) Right. It’s at least as important as an ArtForum top ten list.

KK: It’s how your tastes figure in to what you make as sculpture or video or installation, and how to value your taste—a legitimate part—of your art practice. It will probably be the last thing recognized, because it’s easy to say, “Your sculpture is good,” and for someone to want to buy it. It’s harder to say, “Look at the totality of Alex’s thinking,” and try to sell that.That’s what I feel that this residency is about: revealing the intelligence of your sculpture and trying to attribute value to the choices that you have decided to make that may seem inconsequential to some but seem absolutely connected and essential to you as an artist to me. Like, when I came in today and I walked from the back of the space to my desk and out of the corner of my eye I saw two magnets on our coffee table, one of them being a question mark, which linked back in my head to the logo/drawing you developed of the little man. Suddenly, you are interjecting all of these question marks into the corners of our office. You are asking us to consider the mundane. The other magnet is of that famous Portland promotional poster that says “Expose Yourself to Art” where I think it’s Bud Clark flashing a public sculpture of a naked lady downtown in an effort to add this sense of humor to the idea that it’s a civic responsibility to invest in culture. Now that I am sitting here closer to the table, I can see the magnet with the question mark is actually a magnet from the Multnomah County Library, which is also where you work, but now it’s also inexplicably linked to our own Resource Room, to our meager Library that doesn’t participate in the Dewey Decimal system. But we are associated now with it because of your inhabiting the space. You have left the mark, their mark, and now we are all together in the same place. That forms this pictorial sentence in my brain about the relationship of all of the things at play here.

AF: Mmmmm, that is good.

KK: It also brings up magnets as this curious material that I have seen you struggling with for a few weeks.

AF: I should have never gotten science involved.

KK: HA! Are you trying to make a bulletin board? What’s happening with the magnets?

AF: It is sort of a bulletin board, I think. I’ve continued on with it just because every time I have failed, I’m reinvested because I simultaneously figure out more about what it is supposed to mean if it ever succeeds. And that is supposed to serve as this mutable work, an open work. Umberto Eco actually talks about that never-finished state. How do you collect something when the artist’s hand is so important? That the cockeyed placement of a xerox won’t be maintained if you ever remove it from the wall. So I start to see it as a way to plan out the exhibition that will happen here in a couple weeks. I also realized that it is a replica of your programming calendar in Angela’s office. I was unconsciously mimicking the work I associate with your festival.

KK: Oh, our janky handmade calendar was a reaction to not having a traditional office whiteboard, so we tacked up a piece of paper to the wall with Post-it notes that we could move around. It is a visual of all of the performances and as soon as we put it up it “becomes real”. We can’t live without it and it has become a way for the rest of the staff to see that we are “working” too, that these artists and projects that exist in our minds have substance and will soon be in our midst. It is interesting that you picked up on that particular adaptation; it is the same as your desire to just be in the presence of information with unclear goals in mind.

AF: Yeah. I have been reacting to the stuff of PICA and adapting the space where I can see a certain need.

KK: What are the ways that you are doing that now?

AF:  It has been about reacting to this triad of performativity that I mentioned the other night over burgers. When I am working in my studio alone I imagine this invisible audience. Within the office/library/gallery here I can see what it is like to have an actual audience. I don’t know if people are taking notice exactly, but there is the performativity of the petulant artist, like leaving my supplies around—a paint roller, a pile of papers, my calling card. The second part of the triad is the idle patron, who gets to come in and be a voyeur to my activities,and to the collection of books. And then there is the role of the dutiful librarian that maintains access to it all.

KK: In this case are you performing all three? Or two out of the three?

AF: In doing the bulletin board thing?

KK: All of it…

AF: Oh, all of it? Here? It’s all three. Always. To the point where I should probably focus more on one thing at a time. A typical day here is fifteen minutes of emailing and talking about acquisitions and fifteen minutes on tumblr, an hour reading and trying to remind myself what I have been thinking about the past week, and then some more time re-organizing or making things. I am always in a state of losing track, but it’s because I am so susceptible to interruption, so suggestible I guess, that anything that I pick up falls under that purview.

But yeah, making the library kind of work also… I lost my train of thought again. Footstools? Chairs? Oh yeah! Yeah, doing that work of the librarian, realizing that the shelving, the main shelving, ends at a point and picks up with these movable lower shelves, but not in a reasonable way so you didn’t know where the call numbers started up again. I reorganized the shelves and put them in a particular order and in doing that I was stuck with this leftover furniture that was in the way. So I stacked them and made them into a sort of sculpture. Also in sitting around all day I kept wanting to put my feet up and that is how I came to inserting footstools. I plan on making this hanging file folder structure of bent metal, sort of a take off on those Mies van der Rohe chairs over there at the communal table. All of this stuff I am bringing in—the magnets, the books, the footstools—became an excuse to do some internet shopping, I guess. A byproduct of that activity is that I like getting stuff delivered here. “Alexander Felton C/O PICA.”

KK: (laughs) Yeah, that makes it all feel very important.

AF:  So, yeah, it is about making the space work for me. I was smoking a cigarette out on the porch (don’t tell Mom) and had nowhere to put it and just an hour before, Morgan Ritter had visited and said, “I just made this big ass ashtray.” So I commissioned her to make one for the PICA deck. It all just came together. It is about aestheticizing use.

KK:  But it is only through your process as an artist that those things become artful and not just practical. I stack and rearrange the chairs all the time out of frustration, but it is hardly sculpture.

AF: And then there was the time that Erin [Doughton’s] daughter Lucy came to the office for an event. I was on the floor with all of these supplies laid out, the fragments of this failure of a bulletin board thing/installation. I was attempting to hang it on the wall and it kept falling all over the place. And Lucy asked what I was doing. I told her I was making art. She asked, “Why is it art?” and I just replied, “Cuz I said so.” I was trying to just get out of explaining it in this frustrating moment, but she accepted that as a legitimate answer. It was enough for her.

When I first learned about this residency, I immediately began thinking about what I could do and I came up with something that I don’t know if anyone would have time for. Even our interns could not handle it in a timely fashion.

KK: What is it?

AF: It was to make a catalog of everything in here, but organized in a vernacular way or in a way that renders it useless really, not so searchable, and encourages instead this sort of stumble. You know, for all of the talk about sharing and the ethos of the library that I grew up with, I have that impulse to make anti-information as well, something that stands in the way of knowing. So I told my Dad (who is a librarian) this and he was like, “You know that that makes me crazy to think that you would try to confuse a patron.” And I had to tell him that is the work of the artist, or that it is my interpretation of the work of the artist. In a way, it was the same thing I tried to justify with my answer to Lucy.

KK: Yes, you can tell him that is what I hired you to do, then he will understand.

AF: I think that I will hang stuff on the shelves, too. All of it will come together in a one day show called As the World Churns.

KK: Sounds good.

AF: I have also been making a really strange papier-mâché-on-canvas rendering of that cartoon I used for the PICA website announcing the residency. It said, “You wanted me on my day off, You got me on my day off,” and it is of this cranky lady in her slippers and robe.

KK: I think I might be that lady! Bizarre!

AF: Haha, yeah, fucking weird. But everyone who comes in and sees it is like, “Awesome.” [Alex] Dolan was crazy for it. Like the pink now continues and defines her head and I’ve been working on painting in, kind of like a similar yellow, similar green, whatever the colors are that define her arm, whatever the field of color that it is in. I keep imagining it hung in front of the video archive shelves, because I want to highlight that corner of the Resource Room where all of the cords and shit is piled up. So much shit that has no other place!

KK:  Can we get back to magnets for a second? I want to get a legit answer in this interview somehow. (laughter) You talked about wanting to make this system, to make this thing to mimic our programing calendar, but the other part of it (even though you could make that in five seconds by hanging up a piece of paper and doing whatever you want to), it seems …

AF: (Interrupts) Overly complicated?

KK: No, it seems that there is no other solution. You are resolute that it must be hung with magnets. Not only that it must be affixed to the wall with magnets, but that all the material must be able to be moved around with magnets. But my question is why magnets? Why this suspension?

AF: I don’t even know anymore how I got to that. I mean, I think it…well, no I do!  Well, it’s this material, that Cinefoil stuff, it’s a heavy aluminium foil that has something kind of artificial about it. I guess maybe just because I am always using paper which feels more corporeal.

I once spray glued these photocopies onto this material; it was just a recipe for chicken and dumplings that was floating around my house-studio and I had to just get it out of the way. I started looking at it and now that I have hung it up on the wall it is “Art”. So that was the first time those materials met and I wanted to do it again. It’s metal, so I thought it must be magnetic and it’s not. I’ve been trying to force it to be magnetic with this magnetic paint, which has made it so heavy. The magnets are because it is impermanent. It has to be hung with magnets because it’s kind of just, I don’t know what the word is, it’s kind of just operating under the same principle—the whole, the display mechanism itself, is impermanent.

What does that mean? You know, maybe I will know in a couple years. I started to touch on this earlier and it relates to the way that the artist makes something in a state of confusion and synthesizes these things and makes this product that is not elucidating for anybody, but, in the end, it at least tells the artist something about themselves. Those things that I made even five years ago, or older student work, those animations I used to make… I have realized I’m still talking about the same thing: that information overload or just the way that information flows that I’ve been talking about that since I was eighteen, since I was twenty. Here I am, back at it, or maybe I’ve always been at it and I didn’t see it until now. As a young artist, I can’t help but keep attacking that problem and that, as I’m finding out, is my bread and butter, the thing that may carry me on for years. So I don’t know what it means. I just know that it needs to happen. The end!

KK: Yes! The end!

One such human is Marco Kane Braunschweiler who, along with his co-director Martine Syms, runs the art space/bookshop, Golden Age. Marco helped me pick out some new books for the PICA Resource Room, and we became fast friends. I expect to write a full report of my spring adventures, flying from Atlanta to Berkeley to Chicago for various conferences and panel discussions, but until then, here is an interview with Marco. I love spaces like his, and we are lucky to have Reading Frenzy, Monograph Bookwerks, Stand Up Comedy and Fourteen30 here in Portland, all of which have tightly curated selections of artist books and publication. Each one represents a different point of view and Golden Age has their own special focus. Be sure to check them out on the interweb, or the next time you are in the windy city. —Kristan Kennedy

Kristan Kennedy: Tell me about Golden Age, how and why did it come into being?
Marco Kane Braunschweiler: Golden Age started in 2007. Martine Syms and I (Co-Director of Golden Age) wanted to build an art economy that was not dependent on wealth.  We also wanted to bring our international community to Chicago and share the amazing work in Chicago with the rest of the world.

KK: You told me you fell for books while working in a shop in Nebraska, when you described it, it reminded me of that bookstore in The Never Ending Story. Might that be what it looked like? Tell me about how you came to love very new books, from loving very old books…
MKB: I grew up outside of Omaha, and was very interested in learning about the world beyond what I saw. Consequently I would often visit the Antiquarium, the aforementioned bookshop and record store. It was owned by an older man who was very interesting. Whenever you went into the long, winding, labyrinthine bookshop, he would be in the front talking with many different types of people at length on subjects ranging from global finance to world politics. They had many different types of books, but I was mostly in the art and literature sections, searching for first editions and the like. It was a treasure trove and a large, focused goldmine for any autodidact. That exposure meant a lot to me and taught me to love the search for knowledge. In a sense, Golden Age is that search extended to the Chicago and international art communities. It’s a place where people who dig deep (“passionate obsessives” as we call them) can come together.

KK: When I came in to the space, I loved how finite the collection was: one simple table, a few shelves. I suspect that has something to do with the size of the space, but also must correspond to your taste, and desire to represent a careful selection and not an exhaustive survey of books and things. How does the aesthetic/ design of the space match what it contains?
MKB: Golden Age is small because it is focused. Each month the selection changes entirely. The publications are an entry point to the artists exhibiting in the space; you see a monograph from Agnes Martin and a sculpture from Megan Plunkett in the same room and you can make the leap and better understand an artist who’s work you’ve never seen before. Also, as I said, one of the original goals, and the reason we have low priced books and edition, is so anyone can buy them.

KK: Also, I have been dying to ask what made you choose a podium instead of a table and a chair for the shop’s ‘desk’? Preacher/Teacher vs. Shop Keeper?
MKB: When I’m at Golden Age, I like talking with people. When you’re in a chair behind a concrete desk with a glass top, it’s difficult to hold a conversation, so we stand on a small, rolling metal desk. I think it’s definitely close to a teacher; I mean, we’re mission driven and have an educational focus.

KK: I have to thank you again for your help in selecting books for our Resource Room—it was hard to resist buying every thing you picked up. Part of what “sold” me was your enthusiasm for what was unique to the region and—even more so—unique in the world of books or an artist’s body of work. Would you mind giving our constituency a rundown of what I got and what you think makes the books important or rare?
MKB: You had a lot of really solid set of publications. I thought of your choices as a tour of Chicago starting with Can I Come Over to Your House, then moving through the city by way of Temporary Services’ Public Phenomena and ending deep in our community with a selection of books published by Golden Age like Megan Plunkett’s High Noon I, Karly Wildenhaus’ Twice Removed and Derek Chan’s Cries and Whispers from the Salt Song Trail, excellent publications overall.  All these publications are published in very small editions and their images and text are not available online. Having a copy means you are part of an exclusive community of developed thinkers.

KK: I already know the answer to this question, but, I ask it for the benefit of all who might travel to Chicago: what is your favorite breakfast spot?
MKB: NUEVO LEON! Have the mole sauce and the homemade flour tortillas!

We just added a raft of new exhibit catalogs and small press books and zines to the Resource Room. Check out what’s new:

Dan Gilsdorf, Ad Absurdum
Weekend Leisure, Karaoke List by Song, List by Artist
Ralph Lemon, Sunshine Room
Sing-a-long with Rufus Wainwright Songbook
Has Art? from Lawrimore Project
Yemenwed, Episode 3
Grant Barnhart, A Red Thing Shutters Shut, A White Closet Moth is not a Queen
George Johanson, Seven Decades of Painting
Kristan Kennedy, Portland Art Museum Artist Talk Zine

New DVDS include PMMNLS from Mel Ziegler, Joseph Park, Laurel Nakadate, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Kenneth Goldsmith; a talk between People’s Biennial curators Jens Hoffmann and Harrell Fletcher; and TBA:10 performances by Blackfish and The Extreme Animals.

We’re open 10-5, Monday through Friday. Come visit and we’ll show you around.

Our Resource Room just received an infusion of fresh books, CDs and DVDs from TBA Festival alumni and artists from around the world. Stop by and check out what’s new!

From France:
French Connection: 88 Contemporary Artists, 88 Art Critics
FRAC Alsace Catalogue des Acquisitions 2003-2007
PALAIS Magazine: Fresh Hell/Carte Blanche à Adam McEwen

From Spain:
Victoria Civera: atando el cielo

From China:
Shouting Truth – A contemporary art exhibition

From here:
Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture (Henry Art Gallery)
ABSTRACT (Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College)
Ruby Sky Stiler: Inherited and Borrowed Types (Publication Studio/PICA’s TBA:10)
Holcombe Waller: Into the Dark Unknown

DVDs include TBA:10 performances:
Radoslaw Rychcik/Stefan Zeromski Theatre – In the Solitude of Cotton Fields
Maria Hassabi – SoloShow

TBA:10 Chats and Salons:
Anissa Mack
TBA In a Nutshell
Beth Morrison
Mike Daisey and Jean-Michele Gregory
Conor Lovett of the Gare St. Lazare Players
Maria Hassabi, Danielle Kelly + Noelle Stiles, and Jonathan Turner of Yemenwed
Storm Tharp and Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Ronnie Bass, Gandalf Gavan, and astrophysicist Ethan Siegel
Nature Theater of Oklahoma

and the recent lecture by Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne.

Browse these new materials, and our entire collection when you visit our Resource Room at 224 NW 13th Ave, Suite 305, Monday through Friday, from 10am – 5pm.