our literal speed

They're Turning Out the Gallery Lights...

2009-04-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

The Size Queens would like to state that "Reading Rosalind Krauss" is a pro-"reading Rosalind Krauss confection." Extremely pro.

the newly eventized landscape of academic belonging feels so right except when it feels so wrong

2009-04-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

From Scene & Heard...

2009-03-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

It makes sense that CAA, like any academic conference, replicates educational structures: Sessions, like classes, are held at intervals: 9:30 to 12:00, 12:30 to 2:00, and 2:30 to 5:00. Those fond of endurance art might stick around all day; after a few hours I was ready to go. Thursday proved to be the most salient, at any rate, not only for the thousands becoming citizens in the West Hall but also for the 450 eager minds packed into what was clearly the blockbuster session: “What is Contemporary Art History?” Following a round of intriguing opening remarks, the panelists, all from California schools––Pamela M. Lee, Richard Meyer, Grant Kester, and Miwon Kwon––mostly preferred to discuss (what else?) teaching, primarily the professionalization of their students, courses, and dissertation topics. It wasn’t long before I wondered what might be transpiring next door at “Attention Must Be Paid,” featuring artists Sharon Lockhart and Lynn Hershman-Leeson, but exiting this session, amid the many people parked in the aisles, proved to be more difficult than the usual touch-and-go act one learns to develop at the conference.

Serving as a response to CAA in general, and perhaps that didactic session in particular, was Our Literal Speed’s version of a paper, which they delivered on Friday. “Timid and opportunistic, our generation of critics and historians has bred an aversion to experiment,” offering instead, they noted, “minor texts” and “minor ideas.” Switching between two speakers, OLS fervently and yet vaguely argued that contemporary art historians continually attempt to achieve the “first-est with the most-est.” This thought resonated nicely with a talk between Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie on Saturday, during a day of free panels organized by the Feminist Art Project. When asked about her students, Bowers mentioned that she was more interested in a “familial model of health” than metaphorically killing the generation before or creating competition––a novel idea, to be sure.

A Harshly Negative Review of OLS

2009-03-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

Katy Siegel’s Friday morning session “An Age of Extremes” ended with a performance by Our Literal Speed, a twosome intent on using the format of the oratory paper as a dismantling of the academic conference. The stylish duo doesn’t call their work performance but rather claims that they create “media pop operas” or “pedagogical concept albums” (I know, you can roll your eyes, it’s totally okay). From what I gathered from their convoluted discussion on contemporary criticism, the duo thinks that studio art practice and art history are one and the same (yes, I’m pretty sure Benjamin Buchloh explained this in 1990 in his famous essay on Conceptual art and even before that, this notion was enacted in the 1970s by Marcel Broodthaers). The essential problem of Our Literal Speed’s polemic is that, in fact, not all art history is mired in institutions. Since the dawn of the sixties and the alternative exhibition space, art historians have been free to be cultural critics, sociologist, psychologists, and yes, even artists. Performing a tired trope about the administration of art that is dressed up in hipster glasses and long legs is not the least bit provocative. The talk was phony, misinformed, and said truly nothing about the state of our “dull culture.”

After that panel I was more then ready to seek out some books on performance art, works that I felt might assuage the true infuriation I felt (and I am aware that such a reaction might, in fact, point to a successful provocation by the group, but I also kind of doubt it). Thus! I was more then pleased to find at the book fair a recent text on performance by the artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena. His work and, surely his writing in Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Criticism, and Pedagogy, I reasoned, could redeem these awful feelings.

A Review of OLS in Los Angeles

2009-02-27T16:31:00.000-08:00

“PROFESSIONALISM IS A HATE CRIME”

It’s always commendable when people try to efface or challenge the monolithic professional rigor of CAA. Even when those challenging presentations amount to nothing more than a recursive “Let me show you just how wrong your practice is by practicing that practice in front of you” joke by imitation, I commend people for doing it. I like to see the business of art history made fun of beyond gentle insular chiding. That’s the context for my reaction to Our Literal Speed, a group of artists presented as a “media pop opera” who do self-referential art historical performances (this is the content that I divined from skimming their website - mocking professional mandates of the field, pedagogy, etc etc) and who presented the last “paper” at Katy Siegel’s panel this morning, “An Age of Extremes.”
Siegel’s premise was that contemporary artists wrap their practice around “extremes” in order to neutralize the dialectics typically evoked in public or media discourse: disaster/salvation, boom/bust, protagonist/villain, and so on. After watching the well-groomed Chris Bennet’s well-delivered paper on Alighiero Boetti (whose quote about Boetti’s “high times with hardware” was well-played - thank you, Chris, along with fellow emerging Arte Povera scholar Claire Gilman, for bringing this movement out for further scrutiny), Our Literal Speed advanced on the podium and played recordings of rock music over speakers. They alternated between a lineup of comely suited presenters, who, among other things, mentioned “the strategic logic of the breakthrough” that dominates art historical scholarship. The breakthrough is something with which Siegel is not unfamiliar (her dissertation was on the modernist phenomenon of the artistic breakthrough), which was another recursion that I appreciated. And I hate to be the kind of person who says things like this, but Our Literal Speed’s presentation frontalized some of the things that I’ve always thought about Buchloh and other contemporary art history superstars: that they favor artists whose work reflects back on art history in some way - in other words, they like artists whose work points to the work that they themselves like to do.
Anyway, there was no question-and-answer session afterward, which I’m going to interpret as Siegel’s attempt to neutralize the peacocking that typically goes on during those after-discussions. And even though the presentation was overblown and favored, as a friend said, “style over substance”, my nerd-brain interpreted it as a searing portent projected on us all.

Our Literal Speed Manifested at the College Art Association

2009-02-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

CAN A WOMAN?

[Adam Klein and Michael Mullen]

performed by the Size Queens

Can a woman have a nervous breakdown anymore?

Like Gena Rowlands once did
At that birthday party for her kid
Like Gena Rowlands did
Married to Peter Falk

Cat Power and Kristin Hersh and Kiki Durane
Are the only women I know who can go publicly insane
Can a woman have a nervous breakdown anymore?

Like Carrie Snodgrass did
As a housewife blowing her lid
Like Carrie Snodgrass did
With Richard Benjamin

Can a woman have a nervous breakdown like they used to do?

Like Catherine Deneuve
Who saw the rabbits in her brain
Repulsed by the rot and the razors
She went quietly insane

Can a woman have a nervous breakdown?

Like Gena Rowlands once did
At that birthday party for her kid
Can I dig up little graves
For candles and balloons?

Like Jill Clayburgh once did
Sewing those valiums in her hems
She was dancing as fast as she could
Making documentary films

But Cat Power and Kristin Hersh and Kiki Durane
Are the only women I know who can go publicly insane

Can a woman have a nervous breakdown?
Can a woman have a nervous breakdown?
Must she marry Peter Falk
To be free?

Break down

A Warm Evening in the Early Fall in Grant Park, Chicago

2008-11-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

Moscow, The Garage Center for Contemporary Art

2008-09-18T03:59:00.000-07:00

MEDIOCRE CONFERENCE + MARKET COLLAPSE= CAUSE/EFFECT?

Artforum's Generous Assessment....

2008-06-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

“The messy, unresolved productiveness – at times brilliance – of ‘Our Literal Speed’ lay in its complicated challenge to the neutralizing assumptions about a ‘community’ constituting an artwork peddled by and after relational aesthetics.”

– ARTFORUM, Summer 2008

Reflections of a ZKM Participant

2008-03-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

Now that I have a bit of distance some
impressions continue to reverberate. I was aware that part of the desire
for the OLS project (at least as we interpreted
things) was to question the normative
representational and formal strategies of art
history, criticism, theory, and practice. In our
presentation we chose to reproduce and fragment a
working process that engaged themes of the
conference without explaining that process as a
narrative or argument. I came to see pretty early
on that not only presentational norms, but the
performative conditions of all aspects of the
conference were being questioned, both in the
presentations and the discourse (or lacks
thereof) surrounding them. It was quite an
adventure, and for me an interesting antidote to
the "artist talk" (ordered around a selection of
works) or "formal paper" (pursuing a theme,
antecedents, and arguments) that I usually
present. Even knowing that these norms were being
explicitly framed and questioned, the lack of
formal zones of discussion (until the end) was
actually rather disquieting. Yet this instability
was productive in that my responses and those of
other participants did find more informal, less
regulated spaces of articulation.

I think some people expected to respond to, and
hear explication of the presentations. It seemed
some were more comfortable than others with being
left without specific guidance and formal
explanations of the form of the event. Overall, I
felt this lack of structuring (where
intentionality is not stated and reinforced at
regular intervals) was actually productive in a
different modality. For instance, I had a feeling
that some participants approached the event as a
stage or frame for interventions "about" the
question of performance in art discourses and
practices. Others enacted many of these questions. In
other words, the questions were performed, not
merely stated, or presented as subject matter. I
thought there was an admirable "play" in the mix
between presentations that addressed the stated
themes, and others that produced questions and
problems around those very same themes. A
particularly rich moment for me was when during
The Weather Underground's presentation where the
civil rights movement as performance came up. (In
many ways the global anti-war movement, the BPP,
Yippies, RAF, or TWU itself, could also be framed
similarly.) What I find intriguing about this
notion as it arose was the way it mirrored the
earlier draft of your OLS statement, but
resonated more because it came from a different,
specific, (and unexpected) perspective. (By the
wya, I don't know if it was intended, but the
appearance of Bernardine and Bill directly after
the highly theatrical and difficult to sit
through Tino Sehgal interview was prescient. It
was the perfect shift of register. Just when I
thought possibilities for politics and contention
were evacuated into bland, cynical,
neo-conservative musings on "consumer choice"...
The politics and people "outside the space" of
the conference became legible. I also really
object to the idea that marketplace values have
unproblematically supplanted politics in the art
world - or anywhere else that matters. Markets
are in no way democratic. They regularly function
to produce and reproduce all kinds of
inequalities.)

The diverse presentations, their forms, and their
differential impacts I found truly stimulating.
Perhaps for other participants these gaps and
differences created problems of genre
instability, but for me those breaks were the
most specific opportunities for shift and
challenge that the event made legible. I was
especially struck by certain repetitions and
re-versioning around the practice of Art &
Language in particular. As someone with a less
than comprehensive knowledge of their work, it
was not only a chance to delve a bit deeper, but
it also embodied the complexities both in their
practices and attempts to present and re-present
such a conceptual / visual / scholarly /
performative hybrid.

If I might make a few concrete suggestions as to
form, it might be interesting to have a daily
roundtable next time, or perhaps to begin with
perspectives, reflections, and revisions of the
ZKM events when we next convene in Chicago. (It
might also be fun to close on a destabilizing
note next time…)

Our Literal Speed is Adult Culture

2008-03-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

ADULT CULTURE

[Adam Klein and Michael Mullen]

performed by the Size Queens

Whatever happened to adult culture?
When we went out and saw “Oh, Calcutta!”
And Marlon Brando wrestled with butter

Whatever happened to adult culture?
When we could send the kids down to the den
To get fingered on the ping pong table

Whatever happened to adult culture?
We used to have martini parties with our friends
And there was no embarrassment at the end

Yahoo! Adult culture!

Whatever happened to Jacqueline Susann?
You used to do so much with your hands
And the Love Machine ran

Whatever happened to getting together
Telling the kids to go wherever
And giving them a few pennies for the Seven Eleven?

Remember how we used the bean bag chair
While the children were sleeping upstairs
And I threw my head back without any care?

Yahoo! Adult culture!

Whatever happened to Erica Jong?
I never had a fear of flying before
You used to have a cocktail in one hand
And in the other a bottle of seconal

Remember when we could banish the kids
To the pool, to the pool
And never worry if they went to school?

Yahoo! Adult culture!
Whatever happened to adult culture?
When we saw “Hair” for the first time
I really let my hair down, baby
And we really got it right

Whatever happened to adult culture?
The kids grew up and they became like vultures
Tearing the meat right off our wild nights

Yahoo! Adult culture!

Whatever happened to those summer pools
Where we could send the kids out without any rules?
Remember when we paneled the den
So the kids could go down and get fingered again

On the ping pong table?
Well we were once able
To take our minds off them
To take some time from those vultures

Yahoo! Adult culture!

RP Said It Best

2007-08-10T09:35:00.001-07:00