179 Canal

January 17, 2010

Among other things, the exhibition “Moving Shapes and Colors” is about experiencing images through screen and networks. Short loops andalgorithms in the displayed works are reminders of the code behind pictures, reversing the old idea of geometric abstraction as a window to an invisible world. The show closes January 17 with “Loving Shapes and Colors,” an event conceived by the group BFFA3AE that gives the same idea a different spin. A live recording of a performance is chroma-keyed and broadcast simultaneously in different part of the gallery, embodying the split identity of the object of perception and its source. Systems of viewing are fluid and chameleon–puzzles to be solved collectively.

“BFFA3AE are standing at the east end of a road before a small brick building.
Around them is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and runs
south, down a gully. A wide path leads northwest.”
–BFFA3AE (Micaela Durand, Daniel Chew, Matthew Gaffney, and Maximiliano Ferro)

LINK

The Metropolitan keeps a substantial part of its contemporary display in an awkward position: a horseshoe-shaped suite of galleries between the first and second floors. On the floor plan of the visitor’s guide, the area becomes a ghost hovering at the rear of the museum, and even the physical presence of the gallery hugging the south stairwell gives an impression of instability: Its ceiling is rutted with runners for moving walls and lights, underscoring the transience of the shows its hosts.

Pablo Bronstein has used his time in that gallery to show a series of large-scale ink and gouache drawings that reflect on museum architecture and the notions of art and display it facilitates. First and Second Installation of Precolumbian Objects at the Metropolitan Museum (all works 2009) comprises two arrangements of sculptures on preposterously ornate, three-tiered walls, with sphinxes and hulking male caryatids that distort the room’s scale and balance. It comes off as a smirk at the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, the upper stretches of which are adorned with heterogeneous fake columns and functionless squares of crossed bars. Those very designs appear in Six Affordable Neo-Georgian Futures for the Metropolitan Museum as decorative patterns on architectural drawings of squat, conjoined facades expanding on the Met’s present shape. The plans, laid horizontally on tables in the center of the room, seem to speculate on what might have happened if Philippe de Montebello had been succeeded by Prince Charles. In the gallery’s back corner, The Departure of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt imagines an epically oversize version of the Met’s prized shrine being carted out of the desert by horses and slaves. As the viewer approaches the drawing to examine the details of the tableau, set under an inky wash of lightless sky, he can’t help but glance left and notice, in the shadows behind a partition, a door marked STAFF ONLY. Accident or not, the juxtaposition precisely articulates the humor and tension that make the exhibition strong—the fantasies of romance and grandeur prompted by the museum, and their abrupt encounter with its mundane realities.

LINK

Published in Artforum, January 2010

Making a gallery debut that looks like a retrospective can be a risky endeavor, especially when the artist is not yet thirty. But Tigran Khachatryan’s video remakes of great films constitute an idiosyncratic history of cinema and revolutionary thought that is best considered as a whole, while his aggressive political stance makes virtues of low production value and raw frankness—a productive foil for the monographic survey format. The opening credits for his Brother of La Chinoise, 2005, are written in dry-erase marker on the wall of a bathroom; the artist attempts to reconstruct the ideological conflict of Godard’s 1967 film by posing stone-faced for the camera, as slogans and speeches stream past in subtitles. Stalker, 2004, is a jumble of reenacted vignettes that strip down Tarkovsky’s drama to a parodic polemic about belief and doubt in the possibility of radical change. Khachatryan puts the viewer to the test with his version of the scene where the Stalker’s daughter telekinetically pushes glasses across the kitchen table; where Tarkovsky constructed an illusion of smooth motion, Khachatryan makes the objects skip forward in a series of visible, jerky edits.

The Beginning, 2007, the show’s most compelling work, is based on Armenian director Artavazd Peleshian’s 1967 short, a montage of documentary film and photography that reflects on political upheaval in the half-century after the October Revolution. Khachatryan has intercut video of skaters and anarchists sourced from the web into Peleshian’s collected footage of militant violence, and he timed the original soundtrack’s gunshots and explosions to punctuate scenes of boys falling off roofs and other stunts gone wrong. Inspired by Peleshian’s ambition to create a montage of ideas rather than images, Khachatryan has constructed clashes that leave the viewer with anxious questions. Are the bone-crunching mishaps of today’s punks a metaphor for collapses of revolutionary ideology? Can a revolution only be sustained through chaos? Peleshian’s Beginning finishes with hope, lingering on a young girl’s bold stare, but Khachatryan closes his remake by repeating earlier footage of a mob and slaps “The Beginning” over the end–a portentous suggestion of history stuck in a loop.

By comparison, Man with a Video Camera, 2009, is a dry exercise, hewing so close to the original that one wonders if it turned out shorter than Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera only because Khachatryan got exhausted after doing little more than thirteen minutes. The artist inserts himself and his Panasonic into the early sequence of a prole waking up on the street to find himself getting filmed, in a hammy application of the Kuleshov effect; he adds science-fiction footage of robots and monorails to Vertov’s montage about Moscow’s burgeoning public transportation network. Whereas The Beginning excites with the insight that cheap recording equipment and video-sharing sites have hyperbolically embodied the collective vision and camera mobility that directors like Vertov yearned to achieve, Man with a Video Camera takes agency away from the crowd and gives it back to Khachatryan. Here, montage is a style, not a statement. Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat, 2009, however, takes a different direction. The series of prints combines text from a 1924 sexology manifesto with blown-up digital snapshots, coarsely pixilated and tinged yellow, giving the impression that the posters were composed with a few clicks in Photoshop. The commandments are redolent of Lenin’s moral paternalism, while the photos are lazy scenes of the artist and friends hanging out. Are we to see the complacent leisure they depict, like the accompanying slogans, as reactionary? Or are they offered as proof of the contemporary body’s relative freedom? Like The Beginning, Khachtryan’s Commandments splices past and present in a way that opens both to reinterpretation.

March 19, 2010

“I was still living in Gibraltar, working through my notice at Sovereign Trust, an offshore management company. [...] One of thousands of companies that Sovereign manages is called Headless. It was incorporated (i.e. registered) on the Bahamas through our Gibraltar office. Headless is a strange name, and it got me thinking.

Then we got a call from Goldin and Senneby, two Swedish artists. They said they were looking into Headless Ltd. This definitely was strange. Companies like Headless are not really ‘open to investigation,’ so I didn’t really understand Goldin and Senneby’s angle here.”

–In Search of Story: A journal in eight parts by K.D.

Goldin+Senneby are Swedish artists. They are also characters in Looking for Headless, a novel they commissioned, a detective story involving a murder (by decapitation, of course) that has been published serially since 2007. In it, Goldin+Senneby appear as shadowy figures, remotely controlling the action as it unfolds in exotic locales like the Bahamas and Gibraltar–glamorous but bureaucratic hubs of the offshore finance industry.

“While they implicate art institutions in the narrative they enact, G+S are ultimately interested in how the virtual world of global finances performs a sleight of hand to fictionalize the boundaries between public and private interests, in order to make them disappear.”

–Gregory Burke, director of The Power Plant, Toronto

The lectures, documentaries, and didactic displays that have accompanied the presentation of Headless at art institutions share little of the heady cloak-and-dagger suspense found in the fictional texts that the project spawns. “The Headless Conference” is no exception to this rule. Co-organized by Rhizome and the Office for Parafictional Research, the event will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby’s work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby’s chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State Univeristy

“I have to say, the timing is good, if probably accidental, ’cause there will have to be a political engagement within offshore in the resolution of the financial crisis. So having Headless running parallel in the next couple of years to whatever effort governments will be making to try to address these things, will create some interesting parallels and crossovers.”

–Angus Cameron in an interview with curator Kim Einarsson

The Headless Conference is organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak.

We would like to thank the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies for their support of this event.

LINK

WATCH VIDEO

Moulton gets inspiration for episodes from her finds rather than “casting” them in predetermined storylines. Objects drive the plot. Wonder at a thing’s appearance can be a narrative hook that doubles as a more conventional dilemma, and ultimately offers a key to an episode’s insight. At the beginning of Whispering Pines 3, Cynthia is composing a diary entry about her runaway cat and a newly acquired knickknack that baffles her with its twisted script. “I found a wonderful wall hanging today,” she says in a voiceover. “I really like its texture. But I can’t understand what it is trying to say.” Next Cynthia is in a forest, chasing her cat with a butterfly net, when she spots her wall hanging, turned on its end in the gnarl of a tree. Cocking her head, she can suddenly read it: “Towels?!” Back in her armchair, Cynthia fingers a plush cat’s head nestled in her collar as she sits beneath the “Towels” sign. She’s content. But the viewer feels uneasy. Did Cynthia ever have a cat? Or did she misplace a toy that she equates with the living thing it represents? And now that she knows what the wall hanging says, shouldn’t she put it where it presumably belongs–above a towel rack? Consideration of the wall hanging leads to a conclusion of its ridiculous redundancy–it’s a sign meant to index a nearby object that can easily be identified by its appearance, while the sign itself is ornate to the point of illegibility. The real referent of the “Towels” sign is not towels, but domestic comfort. Moulton arrives at this idea by giving the wall hanging the power to send Cynthia home, and matching it to the cozy act of stroking a pet–even as she retains the aura of strangeness around it with the abrupt cut from forest to house, and the unsettling sight of Cynthia nuzzling a disembodied stuffed animal.

In one interview, Moulton said her tutors at De Ateliers in Amsterdam asked her if she was trying to make children’s television. Indeed, the flashes of magic in a pastel-hued, innocuous suburban setting give Whispering Pines a faint resemblance to late-twentieth century escapist fantasies for tweens –”Out of This World” and “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” come to mind. Those heroines, however, deployed supernatural powers to fix problems with boys, friends, and parents, whereas Cynthia exists in a social vacuum. Her concerns are limited to her problems and her belongings, and the latter, not Cynthia, possess the magic. Whispering Pines blends Nickelodeon abracadabra with the consumer’s faith that purchases–home decor, skin care products, self-help books–will make life better and happier. But, as Cynthia’s mute bewilderment reminds us, agency lies in the objects, and the results are never what Cynthia or the viewer might expect — like the off-brand pore-cleansing strips that conjure a singing Sphinx in the bathroom mirror. And for all her attempts to improve her life, Cynthia, like a sitcom character, registers no net change from episode to episode (a fact reinforced by the non-chronological numeric sequence of some episodes). Sure, the products aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, but this is far from a critique of the market and its sham promises. It’s just a way to keep the slate blank for further explorations of the subject’s relation to her surroundings.

Perhaps because plot points bring changes in Cynthia’s environment, those writing about Whispering Pines have sometimes described them as moments of fluctuation between reality and fantasy. But can we really call the settings that bookend an episode “reality” just because they look like a house, and thus fit easily into a familiar there-and-back-again narrative structure that would make Cynthia yet another Alice or Dorothy? What kind of reality is it if a woman wears a hemorrhoid cushion in her dress? Variations in the videos’ visual texture also suggest a greater complexity. After composing a floral arrangement from Crystal Light beverage powder and plastic branches in Whispering Pines 8, Cynthia ascends a ladder that sprouts from it, like Jack climbing his beanstalk, to a rave. What she finds there isn’t a fairy tale, but the closest Whispering Pines gets to cinéma vérité: a poorly lit warehouse with spirited dancing. The soundtrack also gets more “real”: A full-bodied remix of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” replaces the thin MIDI version of it that accompanied Cynthia’s home floral arranging. There are no constant visual codes. In Whispering Pines 9, even as Cynthia sits at home watching television, she is green-screened into the setting (the shimmering contour of her body gives it away), just as she was in the mystical cat-hunt scene in Whispering Pines 3 described above. The action in Whispering Pines isn’t split neatly into dreaming and waking, although there are often straightforward suggestions of those activities. Instead, it’s a single, rippled reflection of our reality, and how objects, media, images, and ideas bleed together in ways that cannot be accounted for by obsolete–but still often invoked–categories of the “real” and the “virtual.”

“I am more than my physical body. I am limitless,” intones an audio book that Cynthia listens to in Whispering Pines 4. The storylines and visual effects of Whispering Pines visualize relations where an object, an image of it on paper or a screen, a memory of it or an idealized notion of it share equal standing in a subject’s perception. That philosophy is realized largely through the use of readymades, but editing and narrative add dimensions beyond the scope of sculptural assemblage. The mobility of video circumvents the white cube’s isolation to allow for diverse viewing environments (some episodes of Whispering Pines, by the way, can be viewed here, here, and here), while the prominence of found objects, with their recognizable grain of off-screen existence, mean Whispering Pines isn’t a detached, external representation of our reality, but an extension of it.

These ideas were strikingly manifest in a performance Moulton gave last fall at Art in General. After an attempt to imitate the elegant, dark-skinned women on TV by balancing a jug on her head ended in shattered pottery, Cynthia danced beneath highly ornate pots that floated as projections on the screen above her head. Then she vanished behind a curtain, as a video projection told the rest of the story. Audiences have another chance to see Cynthia on stage this weekend, when Whispering Pines 10 premieres at The Kitchen. Perhaps Moulton’s most ambitious project yet, the new installment of the series is an opera conceived and created in collaboration with Nick Hallett, a composer, musician, and curator. To complement Moulton’s videos and sets and Hallett’s score (with singers vocalizing Cynthia’s internal monologues), Whispering Pines 10 involves interactive sound objects that the collaborators devised during a Harvestworks residency. Skechers Shape-ups, wired to produce sound, will expand the Whispering Pines repertoire of objects enhanced to reveal the layers of being beyond their physical shape.

LINK

179 Canal

December 11, 2009 – January 17, 2010

Narratives, performances, personalities, and politics are fine for screenings, but who likes catching a sequence of events at a random point and watching from middle to middle, while standing up? The best videos to show in a gallery are impersonal (i.e. abstract), on short loops, and rooted in the equipment on which they are shown, to minimize the difference between following the movement of images over time and contemplating an object in space. Most of the works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” meet most of these criteria; if they all met all of them it would be dull.

A discussion of abstraction in contemporary video needs a vocabulary beyond Plato and Aristotle, Malevich and Tatlin, invisibility and objectivity. This work involves code and electron guns, things that trouble stale dichotomies of abstract and concrete, and are troubled in turn by fallacies about the immateriality of digital information. It sounds dry and wonky to talk about an animation as a manifestation of data. But the outcome, with bold lines and CMYK palettes, triggers associations with pyramids, pentacles, and glow sticks. It’s the legacy of nu rave, rest its soul. The selection of works in “Moving Shapes and Colors” is designed to aggravate these issues, not resolve them.

Works by Elna Frederick, Sabine Gruffat, Duncan Malashock, Kelli Miller, Ilia Ovechkin, Damon Zucconi

LINK

Published on Rhizome, November 4, 2009

The metaphor of the brain as a database (or, if you prefer, the database as a brain) flatters and anthropomorphizes the machine more than it explains the mind. Gray matter doesn’t seem to be organized in a way that makes the storage and retrieval of information easy; rather, the classification and categorization that characterize the database are pre-digital technologies invented to manage the ever-increasing amounts of information that civilization requires citizens to master. Cicero used a “memory palace” when delivering orations. As he spoke, he would imagine moving through a house where each room and object represented points he needed to make in his speech and the supporting evidence he needed to make them. The antithesis of such memory systems might be the dream, the mind’s nightly refresher that reconfigures the day’s events and data in disjointed, symbolic narratives. Both the memory palace and the dream are based on irrational elements: subjective experience, arbitrary connections, and word play. That the memory palace is created under the thinker’s deliberate control only highlights the conscious mind’s eagerness to do what the unconscious mind does automatically. Even as Cicero publicly performed the constructs of reason, his brain was circumventing them.

Last July, in a New York University faculty residence on West Houston Street where Picasso’s sculpture and I.M. Pei’s architecture face off in a courtyard invisible to Google Earth, Alexandre Singh delivered an installment of his Assembly Instructions Lectures, a series of talks illustrated by a pair of overhead projectors. After introducing his audience to Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary who taught the memory palace technique to Chinese officials to convince them of the superiority of Western (and by extension, Christian) thought, Singh launched into a detailed recounting of a dream he supposedly had, in which Ingvar Kamprad, founder and principle shareholder of Ikea, announced that the master floor plan implemented in every Ikea store around the world encodes a classification of all human knowledge. For instance, the arrangement of shoes, hangers, and sweaters in a display closet, as Singh demonstrated, represented the kingdoms and phyla of life on Earth. What’s more, the Ikea system of Singh’s dream world does not merely encode–it controls. If something changes in a store–say, a new couch model is introduced for the new season, or a passing child moves a prop coffee-table book around a fake living room–the fabric of reality is altered.

Singh’s talk fleshed out the dim awareness of elaborate systems that one senses in dreams but can hardly recall or convey when awake. As the Ikea thread developed, it snaked in and out of the spotlight–perhaps following the “long natural way,” the meandering path of the Ikea floor plan that makes consumption leisurely and fun while forcing shoppers to view all of the store’s merchandise–and subplots emerged along multiple tangents. Singh argued that brown, not white, was the sum of all colors as he turned over transparency sheets scanned from pages of John Ruskin’s book Modern Painters, where “brown” had been pasted over names of all the colors. Piero Manzoni, the artist who canned the essence of light, made a cameo when Singh’s Dante-like narrator found him sleeping in Ikea’s mattress section. Shortly after, Yves Klein appeared in a bed next to him.

Singh will give the lecture again on November 11 at White Columns, on the third night of a four-part series organized in conjunction with Performa 09. This Monday’s offering, “The Alkahest,” is a sprawling epic that relates golem tales and abstract painting to myths of the creation of the world. Storytelling is the backbone of Singh’s work; several of his exhibition projects were spawned by his thousand-page book, The Marque of the Third Stripe, a fictionalized biography of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. It is probably not uncommon for artists to experience a sense of futility when they set about making objects, when “it’s all been done.” Artists like Singh give heft to their works by imbuing them with symbolic power in the context of narratives of their own making. Singh uses many sources, but professes a fondness for surfing Wikipedia. In an interview with ArtReview, he said: “The Surrealists made an art of finding drawings in the grain of wood. I think I do the same finding stories in the grain of Wikipedia.” The superficiality and transience that make the user-generated encyclopedia a dubious resource for research are boons for a creative reader like Singh, because they make room for drawing new, unlikely connections.

The idea of Wikipedia–or more broadly, the internet–as a restless data set that denies autonomous spaces for myth and history, news and fiction, offers one perspective for considering Singh’s work. The slippery transparency sheets he uses as slides make for a satisfying dramatization of the flat flipping of web pages on a screen. His unbound books become legible for his audience when the overhead projector’s beam of light transforms their horizontal pages into images on the wall–a low-tech, small-scale, fairy-tale version of the mass media beaming content to the people. Of course, the internet metaphor fails to provide an exhaustive reading of the Assembly Instructions Lectures. There is a lot more going on, and all real and imagined similarities between the overhead projector and more sophisticated broadcast media vanish in the striking moments when Singh exploits his chosen medium’s unique physical properties. In the Ikea lecture, as he layered images of equestrian statuary on top of each other to illustrate the conventions of that genre, the darkening filmy buildup of transparencies offered silent “proof” for the thesis that white light is one of the components of brown.

Singh’s work is now on view in another format. “Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick)”, at Harris Lieberman Gallery through November 14, includes some of the visual aids from the eponymous lecture as framed collages hung on the wall. They are arranged in an order that tells loose tales while simultaneously visualizing potential fallacies and pitfalls in the construction of knowledge. It is divided into three sections, each devoted to a way in which supporting evidence can be combined to achieve a conclusion. “Linear association/causation” is illustrated by a simple progression: a bucket (A) is left outside in the rain (B), and then the bucket full of rainwater (C) is swarmed with mosquitoes (D), which bite the head of a man (E) who succumbs to mental illness (F). “Cross-linear association/causation” occurs when two of the events are connected outside of linear temporality. When (A) and (D) meet, the sight of buckets makes a woman feel itchy, while connecting the dots from (B) to (F) results in psychic unease whenever it rains. “Tangential association/causation,” the concept represented on the gallery’s third wall, is the logic of false etymologies and accidental similarities. The orange, as Singh’s diagram posits, is related to gold by its consonance with the Latin aurum, and thence pirate’s bounty. The resemblance of the orange’s pithy, veiny sections to the hemispheres of the brain evinces its links to inner organs. Other such revelations pile up in a pyramid of errors to yield the final story: “Every winter FLORIDA-FACED Pirates Slaughter and Bathe in the ORANGE JUICE and entrails of SANTA-CLAUS so that the SPRING may COME AGAIN.”

The trappings of logic are all over these collages. The letter Omega marks the final element of each set. “Beta” and “-iii” are dim reminders of high-school math assignments. But added to Singh’s encyclopedic mix of cutouts–Disney’s Snow White and Hindu temples also figure prominently in it–the letters become ritual symbols. It’s no accident that the full title of the related lecture rhymes “Tangential Logick” with “Tangential Magick.” Framed in the narrative of an opium eater’s wandering, hazy mental state, logic and magic are equal opposites, two systems of transfiguration that take one thing and turn it into something else. If Singh’s tales seem to side with magic, it could be because they are balancing out the privileged position of logic. Both are effective and fallible in his explorations of how the creative faculty eases friction between data and consciousness.

LINK

Published in Artforum, October 2009

In 2003, Andreas Angelidakis presented “Neen World,” reconstructions of buildings that the architect had designed on the Active Worlds platform so that internet artists belonging to the self-branded Neen group could meet there and chat. The real estate in Active Worlds—as in the newer, more popular Second Life—tends to channel users’ McMansion fantasies; Angelidakis’s pavilions, on the other hand, blatantly disregarded real-world requirements. In this they were like the sketches of many inventive architects, but unlike their analogues on drafting tables, they actually framed a community’s collective behavior, albeit online. This year, Angelidakis joined Angelo Plessas—another member of the lapsed Neen network and his partner of ten years—to help build the Angelo Foundation, a project in which Plessas reuses imagery from his web animations in performances and installations. Now Angelidakis’s architectural ideas have shaped the website www.theangelofoundationheadquarters.com, where old and new works by both artists share a scrolling gray plane beneath a dusky sky. A video capture of the web site was projected at “Headquarters,” a gallery exhibition that served as a temporary center for the Foundation.

“Headquarters” felt domestic, like a simulation of the studio of two artists who live and work in one home. Old chairs wrapped in gold foil and potted plants, both real and fake, furnished the spaces between displays of sculptures and architectural models. Plessas’s pieces show a fascination with the brain’s habit of finding likenesses of faces in accidental arrangements of markings; his neon signs and clay sculptures are disembodied faces amid Angelidakis’s uninhabited buildings. In Future Is Fake, 2008, two white arrows and a red triangle form a neon grin. Two collages thinly pile cutouts of iconic shapes—stars, crowns, arrows—at points corresponding to eyes, nose, and mouth. The artist’s reconfigurations of discrete entities in paper and neon reflect his work with Flash, which he uses to code web animations; the widely used object-oriented language manipulates two-dimensional graphic files with a series of commands that unfold over time or in response to viewers’ clicks. Angelidakis’s contributions to the exhibition also indicate origins in software. His three-dimensional prints of trapezoidal towers are nearly identical, indicating his copy-and-paste process of producing several versions from a single module.

Angelidakis’s variations with no final draft and Plessas’s rearrangements of limited elements both suggest dynamic systems. Similarly, their collaborative sculptures stand in for fluid structures: The Bank of Angelo, 2009, is a triangular stack of foam-board “Angelo money,” a kind of microeconomy; Plessas’s Notice Board, 2009, bears announcements for a robot poetry reading and a cross-dressing fest that presuppose the existence of a community. The Angelo Foundation is so named not only because Plessas wanted to parody self-aggrandizement, but also because a foundation can be an exhibition space and/or a dematerialized system that subtly influences art-world processes through loans, grants, parties, and so on. This summer, the diffuse, foundation-like nature of Plessas and Angelidakis’s collaboration was particularly evident because of concurrent displays at Jeu de Paume in Paris—where a projection of www.theangelofoundation.com was shown in a reading room—and at Rebecca Camhi. If in 2003 “Neen World” was a gallery representation of an online creative community, today the many simultaneous manifestations of the Angelo Foundation represent an attempt to construct a network of mutually influential events in a gallery, in a museum, and on the internet—a personalized microcosm of the real, wired world.

For anyone who has found pleasure in the dancing, drinking, and melancholy of Mark Leckey’s collage films—or the witty lyrics of his bands, JackTooJack and the defunct donAteller—it was a surprise when the British press labeled his work esoteric and over-intellectualized following his receipt of the Turner Prize last year. Perhaps the work featured in the exhibition of nominees, Cinema in the Round, lost something in the translation from a performance to a gallery installation. Leckey’s staged lecture wove Felix the Cat, Philip Guston, and The Titanic into an idiosyncratic history of art and film. Mark Leckey in the Long Tail, a new talk that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London earlier this year, takes the same approach and extends his argument into the twenty-first century, using examples and props to visualize how an internet-based economy has changed distribution, demand, and creativity. Its U.S. premiere, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, will take place at the Abron Arts Center on Oct. 1, 2, and 3. – Brian Droitcour

You’re a professor of film studies at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt. Is preparing lectures for students anything like researching The Long Tail?

The school is the reason I started doing these lectures—Cinema in the Round was the first one—because I was in this intense, information-gathering environment and needed to find an outlet for its excesses. I was thinking too much about the why and what for of art.

Do the histories you tell in your performative lectures intersect? Felix the Cat makes an appearance in The Long Tail as he did in Cinema in the Round, but is his role in the history the same?

All the stuff I make is cumulative, in that sense it’s like The Long Tail itself. It’s an aggregation, a body of work. Part of The Long Tail takes place in my flat, which has always been in my work as my stand-in. Felix is a stand-in for my fascination with moving images. For me, he embodies the magical properties of technology. Felix was the first image broadcast by television in an experimental transmission in 1929. The Long Tail talk started with a photo of a small wooden Felix the Cat doll surrounded by machinery, which I found on a site about the history of television. The talk is an investigation of that image.

It seems like it wasn’t as common for artists to talk about research as a part of their work ten years ago, when you made Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, as it is today. How do you feel about its increased importance?

I am ambivalent about it. I think there is a tendency that’s developed out of “relational aesthetics” to approach art as this adjunct of social or political studies, gathering information into a kind of visual essay. Saying that, it’s exactly what I do.

The internet has made working with found footage more common, not only among artists but also among amateurs and hobbyists who just want to make something funny for themselves and their friends. How has the internet changed the way you conduct research? Do you spend more time browsing?

That’s all I do. That’s why I started thinking about The Long Tail because I’ve became increasingly doubtful about me gathering materials online and alchemically transmuting them into objects or editions in a gallery, into artworks. And like I said, it’s an increasingly common practice among artists and, yes, a lot of those “amateur” found-footage gags are much, much better. The second episode of “Autotune the News” blew me away when I saw it, more than anything I’ve seen in a gallery this year.

The Long Tail is the title of a 2006 book by Wired editor Chris Anderson, in which he uses the term to describe the situation in which distributors like Amazon and Netflix can cater to all niches without operating at a loss. Does your lecture enter a dialogue with Anderson’s book or did you take his imagery and metaphor and spin off in a different direction?

You’ve said it—it’s a dialogue with the concept of The Long Tail. I’ve used it as a very extended metaphor. The “long tail” for me is the means of production to broadcast yourself, and what happens when everyone’s a potential broadcaster, transmitting their innermost thoughts around the world. At the same time you’ve got spokesmen like Anderson and Clay Shirky talking—sometimes directly—about love, as a means of production, a congregation of amateurs building the Tail from within. So I see it as a long tail of desire.

Parts of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore can now be found on video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Did you have anything to do with this? Do you believe in making your work freely available to leverage the value of your live performance?

The art world doesn’t work like that. It has no concept of free. Value is inherent in the artwork. Being online probably devalues Fiorucci as an edition. I don’t know yet. It took me a couple of years of forging personal relations to get all the footage to make it—and now the best clips I used are up online, freely available. So I have a different relation to found footage now, actually I have a different relationship to any material now, because whatever I want is magically always there, online. I got asked if I minded before they put it on Ubuweb but I have nicked so much off them it would seem churlish of me to refuse to say the least. I like this idea of stigmergy—of contributing to marks already made—and I think of myself as being in a continuum.