Paul Corio, Toga Tiger, 2009
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 60 inches

January 27 – March 3, 2012

Artists included: Patrick Morrissey, Hanz Hancock, Mick Frangou, 
Francis Farmer, William Hughes, Paul Corio, 
Karen Schifano, 
Mark Sengbusch, 
Jeffrey Mathews, Nate Ethier, 
Allie Rex, David E. Peterson, 
Joseph Bernard, 
Stacy Fisher, Tracy Thomason, 
Ian Swanson, Linda Francis.

The grid is the mother of all things terrestrial – birthed from outer space.
Gravity = Vertical. Land = Horizontal.
The two combined form a right angle. Multiply to form a grid.
This natural geometry existed billions of years before man.
Man stands upright in defiance of gravity, though is grounded by it.
He realized the equation “vertical + horizontal equals a right angle”
and applied it to everything from architecture to fashion.

Grid List presents 16 artists, 13 working in geometric abstraction, and three working quite “gridless” (Can the grid be active behind the image?). Their conceptual fodder ranges from sports, math, science, film, graphic design and video games.

The grid has been passed down from early man: from cave walls to stone tablets to Papyrus – from agriculture, architecture and weaving to the roadways and computers of today. We feel it directly as well, gravity still drops a vertical line – rain, apples and basketballs all fall to meet the horizontal land. The right angle is alive and well today as it was at the earth’s birth.

The artist draws from the imbedded and inherent grid.

Installation view

October 4 – October 29, 2011

Curated by Mariangeles Soto-Diaz

Featuring works by Melanie Crader, Matthew Deleget, Anoka Faruqee, Michelle Grabner, Brent Hallard, John Hawke, Gilbert Hsiao, Pablo Manga, Thomas Martin, Leah Raintree, Claudia Sbrissa, Karen Schifano, Karen Schiff, Jessica Snow, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Robert Strati, Ann Tarantino.

Gifting Abstraction establishes an intimate economy within Soho20Chelsea gallery in which abstract objects have not yet turned into objectified commodities. The gift economy paradigm recognizes that there is value outside market forces, and that the gift renders forces and riches of its own. One of the perplexing aspects of the gift is that while its effect cannot be quantified, its intention is generally palpable: at its best, the gift generates a sense of interconnectedness. In this exhibition, artists’ labor stretches beyond the works themselves, as connective lines are symbolically rendered through the gifting process onto a relational dimension.

Gifting Abstraction questions the idea that abstract works are inextricably bound to the marketplace and therefore to a larger discourse of individualism. Abstraction has been construed as standing in direct opposition to the “relational aesthetics” theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud: “It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows.” Bourriaud implicitly pits object-based art practices such as abstract painting – which he associates with the notion of (failed) utopias – against what he calls “microtopia,” a provisional, DIY, relational approach to art.

Installation view. Work by Karen Schifano.

June 30 – July 30, 2011

Three artists working out of the understanding that the painting is an object rather than an image carrier: Alexandra Kennedy (nz), Mario Kolaric (hr), and Karen Schifano (us) will captivate us with their subtle objective plays.

Installation view

February 14 – April 5, 2011

Artists include: Pam Aitken (au) Christoph Dahlhausen (de) Caroline de Lannoy (be/uk) Matthew Deleget (us) Daniel Göttin (ch) Billy Gruner (au) Brent Hallard (jp/us) Clemens Hollerer (a) Andrew Huston (us) Sarah Keighery (au) Roland Orépük (fr) Charles Payan (fr) Jacek Przybyszewski (pl/fr) Paul Raguenes (fr) Giles Ryder (au) Sato Satoru (jp/fr) Karen Schifano (us) Bogumila Stroja (pl/fr) Tilman (de) Richard van der Aa (nz/fr) Jan van der Ploeg (nl) Henriëtte van ’t Hoog (nl) Guido Winkler (nl)

Don Voisine, Tricoteuse, 2010
Oil on wood
17 x 18 inches

January 6 – February 12, 2011

This is the fourth January group exhibition in a series focusing on aspects of abstraction. In this instance, it is an examination of the use of planarity in painting, sculpture, and photography. Work in the exhibition ranges from deceptively simple, geometric work that consciously embraces the flatness of the picture plane, to those using complex interactions of planar forms to construct the illusion of depth, volume, and movement.

Kim MacConnel’s exuberantly colored enamel paintings use simple diamond, ovoid, and rectangular forms to create a joyful internal cadence. Joanne Mattera creates reductive yet richly colored and textured near-monochromes built up of layers of encaustic, and Steven Alexander layers colors into textured fields activated with centralized, multi-colored rectangular shapes, echoing the planar field of the painting. Don Voisine, Karen Schifano, and Brent Hallard all employ a reductive palette and strong rectilinear forms in taut and precise compositions that reference architecture but also set up internal rhythms of alternating geometries and shifting spatial depth.

The industrially inspired, complex painting of Dannielle Tegeder, with planar forms set at oblique angles, uses the interaction of planar elements to impart a sensation of deep space. Reed Danziger’s work employs prismatic volumes intersecting with both linear and biomorphic forms to suggest movement within an abstract landscape. Sara Eichner’s planar grids of intersecting hexagonal fields simultaneously impart a sense of movement and the suggestion of infinite space. Ion Zupcu uses multiple exposures in his black-and-white photographs of simply painted cubes to build up dimensional illusion, generating planar layers that seem to pulsate.

The exploration of depth is continued into the spatial realm. Don Christensen’s wall-mounted sculpture of found furniture painted with geometric shapes playfully pushes the flatness of painting into three-dimensions. Heather Hutchison creates simple forms from bent acrylic sheets articulated with crisp bands of color to achieve a similar end through more reductive means, while exploiting the translucency of the material to elegant effect. Tilman’s large floor sculpture, constructed from layered, tilting stacks of monochromatically painted board, gives the impression of a painting that has been taken apart or perhaps in the process of being assembled.

Installation view

thru October 23, 2010

“I’ve chosen artists’ work that I feel share something of a fetish with/in the production/object, particularly based on an aesthetic predisposition that can run formally, culturally, adding the social/personal. How I personally interpret this is with a Tokyo sensibility, how Japanese respond to objects and their placement, their positioned sense of worth, a cuteness, an austere vs. touch. The exhibition consists of individual pieces, multiples, or artists books, which may sit on the wall, or on shelves within the grid, mixing up the idea of ‘art object’, ‘art multiple’, and/or simply as a ‘monogram’ [a copy record of the art/practice] to bring together a whole presentation, inviting communication and contact. And that, in a nutshell, is touch.” –Brent Hallard, Oct. 2010

These things that may sit on the wall, on a table, draw attention not only unto themselves but also in proximity, of ideas, of soothers and disquietude: two grids on tangential walls, another formed by a mass of white, tabletops bunched together, anticipate a social meeting of sorts, like-minded, or in location disparity, objects intertwine ideas, engage an audience that may lead them, us, to a precipice of the inexorable… a spree, a want, desire, an enchanted moment with what is there, a champagne bubble, a twist of color, an abstract motif turned clock tower, some things something suggested… other times not… shiny surfaces, bars of color, dingle dangles that pull on the psychological purse, strings… these but a few of my favorite things… Touch is a meeting place, not always bound by the physical, though often unleashed via the temporal… a get-together, a conversation, where we can touch.

Participating Artists:
Shinsuke Aso, Kasarian Dane, Brent Hallard, Lynne Harlow, Henriëtte van ‘t Hoog, IS projects, Linn Meyers, Mel Prest, Karen Schifano, Jessica Snow, Clary Stolte, Hadi Tabatabai, Cecilia Vissers, Don Voisine, Nancy White, Patricia Zarate

Julian Dashper in New Caledonia, July 2008

August 7 – September 4, 2010

MINUS SPACE is honored to announce the memorial exhibition Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life. The exhibition marks the one-year anniversary of the New Zealand artist’s death and it will feature a single work by Julian entitled Future Call, as well as written tributes to him by more than 70 artists internationally.

Julian Dashper is one of the most significant reductive artists of his generation. He was one of MINUS SPACE’s earliest international collaborators and supporters, starting around the time of our inception in 2003. Julian has had a core presence in our project ever since. Renowned for his generosity to others, he was highly esteemed both as an artist and individual, and is dearly missed by his family, friends, and the community of artists. As evident in the written tributes to him by artists to be included in the exhibition, Julian’s practice extended well beyond the walls of his studio. He was a “husband, father, friend, partner, collaborator, teacher, mentor, and advocate”. His life and work directly impacted hundreds of artists and others around the globe. His influence and legacy will continue for many years to come.

For Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life, MINUS SPACE will present Julian’s work Future Call consisting of a single telephone installed in the gallery that is periodically called from New Zealand, which is 16 hours ahead of New York City, only to be left ringing and unanswered. Traditionally completed by Julian, Future Call will be performed throughout the exhibition by Julian’s wife, artist Marie Shannon.

In addition, more than 70 artists and other individuals from around the globe contributed texts to the exhibition, including personal notes, memories, anecdotes, criticism, correspondence, poems, and elegies:

Soledad Arias, Marcus Bering, Channa Boon, Ralf Brög, Henry Brown & Millicent Borges Accardi, Mary-Louise Browne, Vicente Butron, Melanie Crader & Mick Johnson, Christoph Dahlhausen, Kasarian Dane, Judy Darragh & Rosanna Albertini, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget & Rossana Martinez, Ali Duffey, Daniel Feingold, Linda Francis, Alicia Frankovich, Zipora Fried, Andrea Gaskin, Daniel Göttin & Gerda Maise, Michelle Grabner, Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery, Vaughan Gunson, Jenny Halliday, Lynne Harlow, Miriam Harris, Gilbert Hsiao, William Hsu, Simon Ingram, Kyle Jenkins, Ian Jervis, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, James Juszczyk, Steve Karlik, Mark Kirby, WJM Kok, Keira Kotler, Elodie Lesourd, Stephen Little, Joshua Lux, MariaMaria, Jackie Meier, Moreno Miorelli, Dane Mitchell, Victoria Munro, Geoff Newton, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, Salvatore Panatteri, Carrie Patterson, Nathan Pohio, Gwynneth Porter, Mel Prest, Linda Roche, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Rene Rusjan, Erik Saxon, Karen Schifano, Marie Shannon, Sandra Smith, Barbara Strathdee, Clary Stolte, Robert Swain, David Thomas, Mandy Thomsett-Taylor, Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg, Machiel van Soest, Erica van Zon, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Isha Welsh, Marcus Williams, Emi Winter, Rachael Wren, Patricia Zarate, and others.

Fittingly, Julian Dashper was born on February 29, 1960 (leap year day). During his career, he mounted more than 140 solo exhibitions of his work worldwide, including in New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 2001, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to be an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. A 25-year retrospective of Julian’s work, entitled Midwestern Unlike You and Me, curated by Christopher Cook and David Raskin, traveled the United States during 2005-2006, making stops at the Sioux City Art Center, IA; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, NE; and Ulrich Museum of Art, KS. Julian’s work was included in our comprehensive group exhibition MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NYC in 2008-2009. Julian died on July 30, 2009, and is survived by his wife Marie Shannon and their teenage son Leo.

SUPPORT
We would like to thank artists Marie Shannon, Victoria Munro, and Jan van der Ploeg for their tremendous assistance in organizing this exhibition. We would also like to thank all of the artists who contributed heartfelt texts to the show. MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

PRESS
Summer Group Shows, by Robert Shuster, Village Voice, August 25, 2010
Julian Dashper: It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, by Tana Mitchell, PROCESS Blog, August 18, 2010
Julian Dashper (1960-2009): It Is Life at MINUS SPACE, James Kalm Report, August 8, 2010
A Must-See, Artlog, August 7, 2010
Artlog’s Top Art & Culture Picks, Huffington Post, August 4, 2010
Be Prepared to Go With the Flow, by Adam Gifford, New Zealand Herald, July 31, 2010

Mark Dagley, Final Sequence, 2007
Acrylic on canvas, 10 x 10 inches

April 22 – May 8, 2010
Floor Talk: Wednesday, April 21, 12noon

The Engine Room
Massey University
East End Block 1
Wallace Street
Wellington, New Zealand
T: 801 5799 x62170
Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 12-4pm
web site

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the group exhibition Escape from New York at The Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, from April 22 – May 8, 2010.

Curated by Matthew Deleget, the exhibition surveys reductive strategies by 29 artists living in and around New York City. Each artist will present a single small work, as well as an open letter to the local community of artists.

Escape from New York originated at Sydney Non Objective, Sydney, Australia, in 2007, and later traveled to Curtin University in Perth in 2008 and Project Space Spare Room, RMIT University in Melbourne in 2009.

Participating Artists:
Soledad Arias, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Bibi Calderaro, Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Julio Grinblatt, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Steve Karlik, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Manfred Mohr, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Robert Swain, Li-Trincere, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer & Michael Zahn

Also on view at The Engine Room: Collective Monochrome: Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE extends a BIG THANKS to artists Simon Morris (NZ) and Billy Gruner (AUS) for traveling the exhibition to Wellington. Additional thanks goes to the staff of The Engine Room and Massey University for their support of the exhibition.

MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

Karen Schifano, Gorey, 2009

April 1-30, 2010

BLANK SPACE is pleased to present The Space Between, an exhibition of paintings by artists Karen Schifano and Paige Williams. Both Schifano and Williams’ abstract work in this exhibition focuses on transition, inviting the viewer to experience the tension within and between evocative moments. Exploring shifting spaces, both emotional and literal ? these works are minimalistic yet deceptively complex.

Karen Schifano’s Doors paintings are abstract pictures of doors and hallways: portals and gateways that look out onto what is not yet known. These thresholds to spaces of color and light, indeterminate spaces of breath and pause, invite feelings of liberation, perhaps emptiness, sometimes the ominous twinge of fear. They operate as metaphors for the transitional stages in a life, symbols pared down to their essentials and carried out in an unsentimental matter-of-fact style. Schifano’s work elicits tension between the metaphorical and the notional, evoking an emotional response, opening the door to imaginative dreaming and reverie.

Paige Williams’ paintings explore the physical and psychological disparities that exist in relationships along with the joys and tensions that arise as a result of navigating these intervals. The works are about discovery, the struggle to relinquish control and reveling in the absurd and unexpected. They are scenarios, situations and circumstances. The simultaneously casual yet conscientious quality of her forms address that which makes us human: varied degrees of elegance, awkwardness, clumsiness and grace.

Schifano earned a BA in art history from Swarthmore College, an MFA from Hunter College, and was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been shown both in New York and internationally, including recent shows at PS1/MoMA, Minus Space, and Tobey Fine Arts. Work will be included in group shows in Paris and Grenoble, France in October of this year.

Williams has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Working Space in Munich, Germany and selected as a visiting artist and lecturer at the University of Alaska. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Creativity Excellence Award in 2008. She completed her BFA at Eastern Kentucky University and her MFA at the University of Cincinnati and is currently a Professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including shows in Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Philadelphia, and Berlin and Munich (Germany).

Studio view

“I visited Karen Schifano’s Williamsburg studio in September. I knew her work from the Minus Space website, and from group exhibitions around town, including the summer group show at the Minus Space Gallery in Brooklyn the month before.

Schifano’s studio is a large, well-lit square of a space in a work-only commercial building. To orient you, if you were looking at a floor plan, I entered at the bottom left of the square. Facing me was a wall with large windows. To my left was a viewing wall, and on that wall were the two paintings you see above, with that little row of maquettes between them. Karen and I sat on chairs facing that wall…”

Karen Schifano: Fawn, you’ve often recommended books to me that are about re-thinking architecture, utopian explorations concerned with designing new kinds of spaces for living, for example, A Pattern Language, Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, and Superstudio. Can you begin by talking about what those books mean to you, and how they might help to fuel your own quest to find out, as you ask in an earlier statement, “How can we build more room into our personal landscape? How can we craft choice and consciousness into the spaces we occupy?” What do you think about being called “‘utopian”?

Fawn Krieger: Well, first, I think every living thing is essentially utopian. And I don’t think inanimate things can have visions or beliefs — that they can exist as utopian — but things can be imprinted with beliefs and visions, and can help to carry and transmit them. I think matter is sort of like a recessive gene, or a sparkplug.

I don’t see the books of mine you mention as designing new spaces for living. I see them as analyzing the psychological and cultural infrastructures of what we’ve collectively decided to call architecture. The consciousness of these particular books — each quite different — expands my sensitivity of what it means to build and inhabit space.

This question of mine you raise asks me now how it is we move from the occupation of space to inhabiting it — the difference of living at others’ expense to the choice of living WITH others, and with otherness.

HOVER (lake 5), 2005
Composite digital drawing; ink-jet print on sintra board
51 x 3 x 41 cm

KS: So is there a way of connecting these thoughts to your upcoming project in Portland? How did you come up with the idea for this piece?

FK: For my project at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, I will be making a US National Park that functions as a stageset. National Parks are one of many stages for the enacting of national identity. They are tourist destinations, which contradict their position of an untouched wilderness to one designed, however inconspicuously, for consumption. How do we make sense of the terrible injustices that are built into our American landscape? As an artist, and a sculptor specifically, I’m asking about our material history, and about how we inhabit and relate to the presence of physical truths — bodies (of land, of self, of community).

Study for National Park, 2009
Composite digital drawing on family photograph
(Athabasca Glacier, BC-Canada, 1984)

The idea for the piece was sort of woven from a number of inspirational threads. For 5 years I’ve been working indirectly with some photos I found of a cross country trip I took with my family in 1984. They reveal intense psychologies of a family structure embedded within vast American landscapes. When I got obsessed with Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) last summer, I began to think more and more about frozen moments where multiple bodies stand within immense plateaus and clearings whose scales are so profound that they kind of alienate while containing. I wanted to create a series of tableau vivants in national parks, with actors reenacting my family photographs. But then felt it compromised the very distortions of intimacy that involve immediate and physically profound scale shifts, since the audience for the work would always see it remotely, as a video document. So my challenge became one of bringing the national park to them.

Krieger with her father
Puerco Pueblo ruins
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
1984

Screenshot from L’avventura (1960)
Michelangelo Antonioni

KS: Wow, I’m amazed at the ambition of this project! Barnett Newman spoke of “the sublime” as a subject matter for the Abstract Expressionists, influenced in part by the vast scale of the American landscape. What’s interesting to me is how you want to undermine the sublime, and play with shifts of scale to reveal what’s underneath the network of mythologies we’ve created. It seems like another layer of awareness, an opening into a larger and more complex notion of our individual and group identities as Americans, at this particular time in our history. The slippery feeling of the word “utopia” connects into the notion we were all taught in school about our “Manifest Destiny”. Although utopia has a long history as a concept, it almost seems as if America reclaimed it and branded it as it’s own possession.

Anyway, I’m wondering how you’ll physically create those “immediate and profound scale shifts” in your set. And how the theatrical aspect of your work, the stage set, is different than “installation”. In both, I’d imagine, the audience becomes a kind of actor, and so moves and experiences a created sense of place and time.

FK: I am very much having a conversation with the history of painting, but I’m less interested in the sublime and more drawn to a conflicted, paradoxical kind of place, between the heroic and utter failure. The Hudson River School is where it’s at for me — both first and second generation, but especially first because it’s less aware of itself, represents a radical departure, and marks the beginning of what we now call American art history, but which of course, was made centuries upon centures after so much incredible art had already been produced on this land. All the morality and entitlement, the embedded psychologies of gender, class wealth, race; notions of “wild,” “tamed,” “civilized”…  I stand in front of the Oxbow at the Met a lot, and I am just amazed by the weight Cole asks us to carry. Those works were tourist commercials, real estate advertisements, and instructions for erasure and hypocrisy. But it also can’t be denied that they offered us a departure from Europe, from what was known, an entrance into the cinematic, the environmental, and the opportunity to define ourselves as artsts and audiences of a new era.

I think these inspirations are so big — gargantuan and impossibly awkward — which is why I like them. I don’t mean to enter into their bigness, but to squish the monumental into the scale of the body. So we could hold them, and pay attention to the sensations they surface through embodiment.

When I was in art school in the mid-90s and I’d hear about an artist who makes installations, I just didn’t feel any association. The word felt contrived to me, like something was applied to a space instead of transforming it. It wasn’t until after I got out of graduate school, ten years later, that I was introduced to stage-set-making as artwork. It came through a collaborative project called ROOM, with Wynne Greenwood. We made domestic spaces as stage-sets in which her band, Tracy + the Plastics, would perform. The introduction of the idea of the “set” created lots of new questions that just felt completely inspiring to me.

First, there were questions about audience and performer safety, which I loved immediately. Then there were questions about communication and collaboration through building, that I found reinforced the conceptual principals within my work. Then there were questions about spectatorship, witness, interaction, experience, participation, and movement. I started to choose the term “audience” over the art term “viewer”, and found that within the act of becoming audience are mini practices of citizenship. More and more, I am finding there is no distinction between performer and audience, so the spaces I build often dismantle conceptual and structural hierarchies that would otherwise support this. I don’t imagine anyone will have to “act” in National Park. They are already part of the construction without entering it.

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Installation view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

ROOM, collaboration with Tracy + the Plastics (Wynne Greenwood)
The Kitchen, NYC, 2005
Performance view (detail)
Carpet, wood, foam, paint, fabric, paper, hardware, a/v equipment
Approx. 17 x 9 x 2.5 m
Photos © Paula Court, Courtesy of the Kitchen’s Archives

KS: It seems like some of these same considerations (in terms of audience/performer and citizenship) play a big part in your previous project, COMPANY at Art in General in 2007-2008.

FK: Totally. Kristan Kennedy (the Visual Art Program Director at PICA) invited me to do a commission in Portland after learning of COMPANY — a shop as work-of-art that existed in Art in General’s storefront space for close to a year. I began COMPANY with many questions about the “stage” of consumption, about desire, longing, value, ownership, and the commerce of art. Also about inspiration — how and why and when we work directly through it and likewise, depart from it. But by the end of that piece, my questions had moved more into ideas about roles (sesame, poppyseed, whole wheat…); about moments when our subjecthood becomes objectified through our position as consumers, and when objects take on identities and assume power beyond their inanimate proportions, as a part of this same mechanism. I became interested in this transference between subject and object, and how it informs the different characters within socialized structures implicitly tied to consumption.

Because it was COMPANY that inspired Kristan to approach me, I first began my discussions with her in thinking about how we could take COMPANY to Portland. What would it mean to make a stage for American consumption that is nomadic? That’s when I began to look into the history of American tourism, all around the same time I was thinking about those people on the mountain in L’avventura, and my family’s cross country photos. My questions have as much to do with notions of domestic movement, as they do with concrete challenges, like shifting my process of making objects framed within a structure — as I did with COMPANY — into making a structure that functions as one humongous object.

COMPANY, 2007-8
Art in General, NYC

COMPANY: pastrami on rye (Line 2), 2008
Foam, canvas, spraypaint
21 x 21 x 9 cm

KS: You seem so clear and articulate about the kinds of questions you ask yourself. Are there ever times when you’re surprised or thrown off and things derail, the process is murky and words fail you? Any stories to tell here?

FK: Always. Most of the time I feel overwhelmed with what I don’t know, and fear and doubt I have the strength to enter straight into it — that is my work…at least, that is what my work is for me. I feel my job as an artist is half to undo, to unlearn, to unknow, and the other half is to be accountable for it. I’m not sure what I’d do without the murk, but the painful part isn’t so much the murk but choosing the murk over its alternative. Again and again. That’s really where the blow is.

Words always fail. That’s part of what makes them beautiful, part of what makes them as brittle, malleable, and curious to me as cement, or the yellow craft foam Jo-Ann Fabrics insists on not selling anymore in its NYC locations for some unexplainable reason. This is another plea, Jo-Ann!

When I was in my last year of graduate school at Bard College, in 2004, I felt a need to build out instead of up, and to suspend weight and density atop vacant spaces. I was thinking a lot about the history of American architectures, and questioning what it meant to build as a white American woman — what my hand in the construction of this country meant, what I was building on top of, and what I was building to support. It was at this time that I first rediscovered those childhood cross country photos. Prior to that body of work, I had been making some terrible and some not-so-terrible sculptures with cut logs, and images of founding fathers, as well as drawings of cut slabs of meat.

When these architectures began to surface, I couldn’t see their connection to my previous work, and they all looked like failures, literally crumbling in front of me. Then I realized, fortunately right before my thesis board(!), that the work was really a set of inadequate domestic foundations, expressing both potential and obliteration, and linking itself directly to the word “founding”. The connection helped me to make a larger link between sacrifice and violence, between expectation and failure, between establishment and transgression, and between consumption and regeneration. I realized, not just that these were foundations, but that I had found my voice, and titled the work FOUND.

The arrival of words to my voice, is the remnant of fighting for my own truths, all of which must be translated into language, whether it’s material, verbal, or written.

Bricks (from FOUND series), 2004
Bricks, concrete, wood
183 x 15 x 61 cm

KS: So let’s go from the verbal to making things and materials. I’ve heard that you once characterized your aesthetic as “Flinstone-ian”. I’m drawn to the accessible, hand-made, funky quality of your work, as it carries this seriously intellectual weight. Quite a tension there.

FK: It’s a strange sensation when someone asks you to define your aesthetic. For me, any response to that question will include transgression, and in this case, I was playing with the idea of ‘a canon’ of sculpture, sort of thinking about stone carving and pedestals, in relation to a canon of stone-age-ness.

Constantin Brancusi
Le Baiser / The Kiss, 1908
Plaster, 58cm high
Philadelphia Museum of Art / © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Fred’s Monkeyshines
The Flintstones
October 17, 1963 (Season 4, Episode 5)

KS: Yeah, I can see that it’s strange to look at something you’ve done after the fact and try and describe it. I know that it’s the result of your process, and yet I’m still interested in how and why your sculpture looks the way it does, why you make the choices you make. Are you also thinking through your materials? Or do you choose materials and structures after you’ve researched and thought about a project? Or both? Maybe you could lead us through “how you use your hands”.

FK: I often work in series, or chapters. This is not something I try to do, it’s just the way I work. So what happens is that there’s a whole infrastructure of ideas and feelings happening at once…an obsession with The Love Boat, orange juice, furniture mail-order catalogues from the late 60s, my father’s hard leather jacket with patchwork leather buttons, oak veneer, Holly Hobby, and having a bad cold…let’s say. These incongruous associations combine with physical, visceral urges and emotional memories that are often associated with touch and necessity, like feeling a carpet edge at home, or poking my 3-year-old-finger in cellophane packages of ground beef. They are not thoughts; they are completely of the body.

My job is to get out of my own way at this point — to trust what I lean into completely, and to trust the interconnectedness of these pulls, all without question. My aesthetic, I suppose, is really a measure of moment. During this time it’s less that I intend to keep my process private than that I haven’t even identified it as process. It’s simply living. And what happens when a system of attractions begins to weave together, is that I sort of adapt an auto-psychoanalytic approach, to make sense — or meaningfulness — of those symbols that I feel sympathetic to. At this point, my job is to take ownership of my choices, by asking every conceivable question of their properties and interrelationships. I guess the relationship between my thinking and my hands is one of roles really, of becoming. It’s as though my role shifts from child to parent, in a way.

Photo © Abe & Sofie McNally

KS: And are the materials that you work with, things that sometimes look like craft supplies or stuff from your kitchen, chosen partly as a response to those “physical, visceral urges and emotional memories”? There’s a direct, almost child-like presence to these materials and the way you put things together.

FK: The materials are another obsession happening simultaneously to the orange juice and Love Boat. They aren’t a response to necessities — they are part of them. Felt and concrete are both materials that have come up a lot in this way for me. As are leather, dyed canvas (with frayed/inside out edges), and silver mylar. It feels kind of like a craving. Like a thing that, when consumed, makes you feel whole or complete, or fully satiated. For a moment…

National Park will be on view at Washington High School in Portland, Oregon, from September 3 – October 18, 2009, as part of the Portland Institue for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival.  A recently published catalogue on Krieger’s project COMPANY can be purchased here.

Karen Schifano is a New York City-based painter

All photos © Fawn Krieger, unless otherwise noted.

July 31 – August 29, 2009

MINUS SPACE is pleased to announce our summer group exhibition Open House for Butterflies featuring work by seven international reductive artists.

Participating Artists:
Justin Andrews (Melbourne, Australia)
Hartmut Böhm (Berlin, Germany)
Michelle Grabner (Chicago)
Daniel Göttin (Basel, Switzerland)
Gilbert Hsiao (Berlin, Germany / NYC)
Victoria Munro (NYC / Auckland, New Zealand)
Karen Schifano (NYC)

We are also delighted to announce our new flatfiles and bookstore. Our flatfiles feature works by select reductive artists working around the globe, including drawings, prints, photographs, works on paper, editions, and multiples. Some paintings, sculpture, and design objects are also available. Our bookstore features dozens of publications on reductive art and ideas on the international level, including artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, journals, ephemera, and select vintage books.

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE’s programming is made possible by the generous support of The Golden Rule Foundation, as well as individual donors. We thank you!

The word “inspire” (originally meaning “to infuse with breath”) is a verb, but can also transform itself into a noun or adjective. It’s very active, and yet also implies being receptive, even demands openness, a readiness to receive, and a sharpening of perception and awareness. From one thing, there is a direct connection to another thing, a kind of touch that is nurturing, rich and full of promise. Potential becomes realization; we wake up rejuvenated, re-energized, and ready for action.

This group of inspirational flotsam and jetsam from our homes and studios is incredibly varied, running the gamut from a poetic quote to the restoration of a house, from the image of a computer desktop to strips of colored tape on a wall. In some instances, there’s a surprising leap from the image seen here to the finished work, in others there is a clear and recognizable relationship. I hope that as you are intrigued by an image, you will click on it to reveal the caption or thoughts of the artist, and then go to the individual websites linked to each name. Through a dialogue about how the mysterious process of getting from A to B or even Z unfolds for each of us, new avenues of search can open up, and we can be re-inspired by this “Inspiration Information*”.

* by Shuggie Otis

Participating Artists (left to right, row by row):

Stephen Maine | Richard Bottwin | Paul Corio | Joanne Mattera

Kevin Finklea | Billy Gruner & Sarah Keighery | Linda Arts | Erik Saxon

Henry Brown | Rory MacArthur | Melanie Crader | Matthew Deleget

Daniel Argyle | Li-Trincere | Chris Ashley | Linda Francis

Sylan Lionni | Shinsuke Aso | Douglas Melini | Brent Hallard

Lynne Harlow | Guido Winkler | Michael Zahn | Karen Schifano

Lynne Eastaway | Daniel Göttin | Simon Ingram | Daniel Feingold

VIEWLIST is our online project space where we invite artists and others to curate a visual essay of images. VIEWLIST exhibitions are experimental and usually thematic, and can include art works spanning various time periods, movements, and geographic locations. Exhibitions may also include ideas and images from disciplines outside of the visual arts. With VIEWLIST, we’ve created a venue that focuses exclusively on ideas, a kind of idealized curatorial space, where exhibition budgets, loans and acquisitions of art works, timelines, and all other logistics are set aside.

RMIT University School of Art and Sydney Non Objective present contemporary non-objective practice from MINUS SPACE New York. A survey of reductive strategies by artists living in and around New York City. Presenting a single work from each artist, as well as an open letter to the artist community affiliated with RMIT Non Objective.  The exhibition originated at Sydney Non Objective in 2007, and later travelled to Curtin University in Perth in 2008.

Participating Artists
Soledad Arias, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Bibi Calderaro, Mark Dagley, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Julio Grinblatt, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Steve Karlik, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Manfred Mohr, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Robert Swain, Li-Trincere, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer & Michael Zahn

SUPPORT
MINUS SPACE is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. Funding for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Golden Rule Foundation.

MINUS SPACE extends a heartfelt thanks to artists David Thomas and Billy Gruner for bringing the show to Melbourne! Additional thanks to Daniel Argyle for his assistance.

Installation view
Photo: Matthew Septimus

Closes Monday, May 4, 2009

The exhibition is curated by artist, Brooklyn Rail publisher, and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui. The exhibition marks MINUS SPACE’s 5th anniversary.

We greatly thank curator Phong Bui and the remarkable staff at P.S.1, the participating artists and their galleries, and our generous donors, whose financial support made this exhibition possible.

Exhibiting Artists
Soledad Arias, Shinsuke Aso, Sharon Brant, Vicente Butron, Bibi Calderaro, Melanie Crader, Matthew Deleget, Lynne Eastaway, Gabriele Evertz, Zipora Fried, Daniel Göttin, Julio Grinblatt, Billy Gruner, Terry Haggerty, Inverted Topology, Steve Karlik, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Daniel Levine, Juan Matos Capote, Salvatore Panatteri, Karen Schifano, Jan van der Ploeg, Don Voisine & Douglas Witmer

PLEASE NOTE: Our exhibition in P.S.1′s Boiler Room space closed on January 26, 2009.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 6-8pm

Wine bar and hors d’oeuvres

Gary Snyder Project Space
250 West 26th Street
4th floor, between 7th & 8th Ave.
New York, NY 10001

for inquiries please call 646 325 4581

Tickets
$25 NOS Donor
$50 NOS Patron
$100 NOS Benefactor, includes
or more acknowledgment in 2009 catalogue

Raffle
Win a DAN WALSH work
Tickets: 1 for $30, 2 for $50, 5 for $100
All other works for sale $500 and under

Artists:
Andisheh Avini, Tanya Barr, John Beech, Marina Berio, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Eric Brown, Angela Cumberbirch, Mark Dagley, Christoph Dahlhausen, Stephen Dean, Matthew Deleget, Anne Deleporte, Gabriele Evertz, Manuela Filiaci, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Douglas Gordon, Daniel Göttin, Nora Griffin, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Steve Karlik, Tania Kitchell, Karl Klingbiel, Lluis Lleo, Rossana Martinez, Norman Mooney, Matt Mullican, Scott Ogden, Salvatore Panatteri, Jan van der Ploeg, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Judy Rifka, Gary Rough, Jackie Saccoccio, Karen Schifano, Kate Shepherd, Motoe Shiratori, Jason Silva, Melissa Staiger, Tilman, Li-Trincere, Ian Tyson, Don Voisine, Jan Maarten Voskuil, Dan Walsh, Rob Wynne, Michael Zahn & Harry Zernicke

* List in formation

Special thanks to Susan Madden, John Melick and Gary Snyder for their assistance.

If you are unable to attend and would like to make a fully tax deductible contribution,
please make check payable to Non-Objectif Sud send to:

Non-Objectif Sud
560 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA

Non-Objectif Sud is a non-for-profit 501(c) (3), all financial contibutions are tax deductible
to the fullest extent of the law.

For three hours, twice a week, artist Bibi Calderaro “shows up for work” at a white formica-top desk in the café at P.S.1, in an ongoing performance of her work, PRESENT, part of the Minus Space exhibit (which has been extended through May 4). On the desk are a manual typewriter, a stack of well-worn books, and an “out-box” where Bibi places typewritten thoughts that are her responses to readings. These pages of poetic insights and musings are offered to the public to carry away with them. On the wall behind the desk is a dark spiral shape on paper, which upon closer view is a list of book titles, books that Bibi is slowly working her way through, and sharing with her audience at P.S.1. An intimidating but intriguing group of books, seemingly covering almost every topic you can imagine, this list, and the wonderful generosity of sharing her search with random strangers, is what inspired me to conduct an online interview with the artist.

Karen Schifano: What is it like to be out in a public space doing your own personal search, one that normally one does in a library or at home on the laptop, and also connecting socially and intellectually with the audience at P.S.1? Do you feel self-conscious, or exposed in any way – or do you enjoy the interactions? Any anecdotes to share?

Bibi Calderaro: I have never been able to read in the silence of the library. I need a constant but low- level noise to help me concentrate in what I’m reading. The fact that there is no formal audience helps me do my thing as well. For the most part while I read the people around me are not even aware of me performing. It is only when I start typing that they realize something is taking place other than just a casual reader by the corner, or when they go around the room looking at the art in the show that they see the out-box with my typed thoughts and might stop to ask what I’m doing. Some of these sporadic chats are long, maybe hours. A few weeks ago a lovely person stopped by for a brief time in the beginning and then came back after seeing the rest of the shows at P.S.1, pulled a chair by my side and chatted with me for more than an hour. Another time, just as I was getting ready to leave and had my last thought of the day out, a woman who had been sitting across from my desk approached me and showed happiness and gratitude for the fact that I was giving out a written piece. Then her friend got closer and upon reading my thought over her shoulder exclaimed “Oh but that’s just you!”

Throughout the development of this piece my writing has changed quite a bit. In the beginning I might have used some pronouns, where after a few weeks at work I erased them from my vocabulary almost completely, trying to condense a thought to its most abstract yet open possibilities. It is quite amazing to me that such a thought could touch someone’s core self so that that person recognizes herself in it.

KS: So what led you to the idea for this performance?

BC: I search for and aim at a more direct experience with art, both from within myself and from the viewer/spectator. I think performance was a logical development within my overall art practice. Certain aspects of my last and only performance were not fulfilling though. Although what attracts me is the impermanence of performance, I was unsatisfied with the relationship with space and context that it lacked. Having been invited to participate in the Minus Space show, it was clear to me that performance was the way to go.

One early morning I walked past a coffee-place and saw a person reading and writing by the window, no laptop involved. I immediately fell in love with the idea of going back to reading and writing without the help of an electronic device, going back to books and handwriting or typing mechanically and leaving a physical trace of the process involved in thinking, writing, languaging.

KS: Would you explore your title a bit? I remember you saying that there are three different ways of reading the word “Present”. Could you elaborate on this? In your accompanying statement for the piece, you mention Walter Benjamin’s concept of history. Can you explain what that is, and discuss why it’s important to you at this time to delve into the area of study that you’re sharing with the audience at P.S.1?

BC: I just recently thought of the possibility of ideas being able to wilt. If this is so, it is because in some level they are alive, they are born or aborted, they are nurtured or not, they die instantly or survive our many doubts, they rot if you keep them for too long without transforming them into something else (a text, a materiality, a gesture of love, an action), also if one is to tautologize them into the obvious they can refuse to go beyond the immediate. They also wilt if kept for too long with the same water —is our brain also 70% fluids? I wonder about these things as I think of the title for the action I am conducting at P.S.1: Present.

It is in the present as the elusiveness of the duration of each moment that one may rescue a thought or let it go. I wonder how an author who writes novels experiences this, and how it was in times of Cervantes, when it was all handwritten, no aids of typewriter or computers. I also delve into the possibility of the discarded thought as materiality.

To present is to allow for the thought to go forward, to give some air and light, some watering, some extra thought, to the first intuition. It also immediately involves the other, since one would not talk about presenting a thought to oneself, but rather giving it some sort of legible shape so that another subjectivity may grasp some kind of meaning from it.

It is also in the present as a gift that I think of both when the thought is brought about in whichever organ it is that it first develops, and as the thoughts being put out there as text, as a piece of work on a humble piece of paper, as part of a fluid poem with no end in sight and that is already around the world in the hands of so many people who have taken them.

Present is also a present in the form of time that enables the thoughts of others to present themselves to me.

It would be wonderful if we could live as human beings in this entangled world of words with only the present in mind. It has been and still is the practice of many to stay in touch with the present, to allow only the present to be present, and not have pre-sent thoughts about the future, near or far. But we have memories and thus we have traditions which we are free (are we really?) to follow or not. And so we have a history, a heavily loaded history with many, many words. Some of which have been set in stone, some others just on paper, and now in cyberspace. Throughout the millennia we have managed to follow some of these thoughts, interpreting and re-interpreting them with no end.

One of my aims in Present is to search for the moments in which an author has allowed his/her subjectivity —consciously or unconsciously, whether we think that’s a possibility or not— to take over their thoughts, their main thesis. The image of the snowball comes to mind, as a small thought that is translated into words, then rolls onto another subjectivity where it catches on and becomes bigger and bigger, covered by more and more snow-words. Yet this new bigger snowball is not the original snow-word, it is just there, covering it. As the snowball rolls throughout history, one can only imagine the original snow-words being kept small and nuclear within the core of huge traditional snowballs. Only in an avalanche is it possible for the original snow-words to become free of the weight they carry around as interpretations have piled upon them in snowflake shapes. This is what interests me of Benjamin’s idea of History. The way I understand him is there is always some violence involved in the uncovering of thoughts to their original. Yet, since we are not free from interpretation, we must build yet another context for these original words. It is in this process that we may find the only possibility for redemption as we take possession of one’s past. According to Benjamin we can only possess our past if we can quote it.

One of the many layers of Present is where I read texts in order to find quotes that I will use in a future performance. I have always felt an attraction for the meaning of words, their epistemological value, if we may put it that way. It has always amazed me usually how close words are to their original meaning, yet how covered this meaning is sometimes and how this drifting occurred.

When I choose the texts for the performance I am aware of the resonance each discipline may have with a present situation —i.e. economic, social, personal. I am after the original thought, the originating word for the snowballed theories that lead our lives today, in 2009, as a humanity that inhabits one world and who could have, by now, learnt to live together in peace, harmony and with respect for each other as individuals in difference. Could this be called inter-subjectivity —and can it replace globalization?

KS: Is this “snow-word thought”, the original thought, also the place where the author allows his/her subjectivity to take over their ideas? How do you tell the difference between the original thought/idea, and all of the layers that have accrued over time? Are you also thinking about the myths we live by, and how our own subjectivities would influence how we receive these ideas?

Years ago I read some of the French poststructuralist philosophers and I remember the notion that language seems to be structured by the particular time in which is it being used, and so thought is almost held captive by its context. One would have to analyze the syntax of the language itself to extricate the meanings behind the words. And we in the present, in our own particular historical context, would never entirely understand. (I may have this confused though). Anyway what kinds of ideas/books are you following – I know that the list is part of the documentation for the performance – what areas are of interest to you in this search?

BC: Areas of interest: how thought is formed, how theories are formed, how both of these are engrained or not in culture and vice-versa, what role does language play in this process, the possibilities and conditions for communication. As well, how do we as societies construct behaviors that lead to responsibility, civility, free individuals (do we?); what are the limits of individuality and what conditions are necessary for subjects to engage in inter-subjective processes, how do these extrapolate to group behavior.

Gorgias, the Greek philosopher, is claimed to have theorized in his lost work On Nature or the Non-Existent about exactly the above, saying that

1- Nothing exists;

2- Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and

3- Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.

Then again, I am still searching, curious; open to communication.

In a lecture about Kant and a re-reading of modernist art after his aesthetic theories, David Carrie, one of the panelists, ended by saying that it is usually the case that experience overthrows the system. I think this is exactly what I mean when I say that people’s own subjectivities bleed into their theories, just as they must bleed into their systems of belief. I just don’t know how it could be thought to be otherwise, even with the most deadpan, watertight theories. Could I prove this? Take it out of the realm of the intuitive and make it itself a theory? Not sure. I have in my list of future readings a category of biographies of certain thinkers. Yet, then again, these are all interpretations.

The other day I watched a PBS documentary titled “ The Ascent of Money,” where many so-called economists basically state that underlying all of the economic theories, their reasons to behave one way or the other are intuitive, have to do with their ability to read these intuitions and act accordingly than with a rational understanding of a given situation.

KS: So what I wonder, then, is what do you/the theorists mean by “intuition”? What makes it up, what determines it. How are emotions interconnected with thought such that a sense of the “rightness” of an idea is arrived at. How do you separate an individual’s particular psychological make-up from their sociological situation, and then the larger history. How do we figure out who to believe and why – would it be because we share similar subjective structures? I have a feeling that you’re looking for universals, and maybe even a spiritual foundation to our historical meanderings: the constant parts of what we call human nature. Am I right?

BC: Well, maybe. For one thing there seem to be no constants, except for the fact that all human beings have the capability of thought and feeling. But then there is the time factor which, applied to the development of civilizations, has been called history and which as well has many different ways of being approached. So let’s go word by word of your long question, and I’m not even sure I can answer or begin to unravel each of them correctly.

“Intuition”

BC: Ha! Like I can explain here centuries of thinking about it…let’s give it a try, or at least highlight what’s important for me, here. But in any case what we’re dealing with always is knowledge and how to get at it, I guess. Kant says we cannot apprehend the world in its absolute reality, that Reason is our tool for it but that it is limited and hence there is always a Concept, an Idea, which is not reachable. Bergson, a century and a half later, comes back to it. So did many other philosophers before and after him. Bergson believes there’s two ways in which an object can be known: absolutely and relatively, and that there is a method through which each mode of knowledge can be gained. The latter’s method is what Bergson calls analysis, while the method of intuition belongs to the former. Intuition is an experience of sorts, which connects us to the things themselves in themselves. Bergson defined intuition as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed. The one thing it is certain one can grasp from within through sympathy is the self. Intuition begins with placing oneself within the Duration.

It seems to me that intuition is always related to a direct experience of something, to a non-rational, first-hand, empathic approach to the thing (the world, knowledge). Other people take intuition to be independent of prior experience and knowledge. I don’t share this. I think it is infused with prior experience, knowledge and memory.

“A sense of the rightness of an idea”

BC: Ha ha ha. This I guess is absolutely related to the idea of truth and how it comes to relate to the communication of the idea, the thing, the world. Because the problem is there is a world out there and first we don’t know how to “apprehend” it, then we don’t know how to communicate our apprehension of it (remember Gorgias). Ay! It’s getting complicated and I don’t have a PhD in philosophy. So many philosophers by now have worked on the problem inherent in language and how it just doesn’t produce/communicate truth, except maybe through poetry.

Then I think of my project Present and I could, and have been, claiming that what I am doing is writing a long poem whose connection is precisely my Duration. Other philosophers have emphasized that everything is interpretation and nothing can escape it. So really there would be no possible rightness to any of these theorists’ ideas, only interpretations. How do I know whether I’m hitting at the idea the way its author intended me to? But then if all these ideas/theories are put to practical trial via their implementation in different activities, (be it physics, economics, medicine, history, philosophy, etc.) the only way we have to measure our successes in the interpretations of the former is through the results they yield. And then we correct ourselves this way or the other, usually we go in zigzags, or in opposites, I guess because our experience tells us that if A didn’t work, then B must be able to work. I mean the most I’m reading these days about the collapse of the financial world, all these theorists are saying is we haven’t been able to learn from History…

“How do you separate an individual’s particular psychological make-up from their sociological situation, and then the larger history?”

BC: There is a puddle of water that is an abyss in this. I’m not sure I can separate it, or cross it, although of course I could, I should, but I won’t.

“How do we figure out who to believe and why…?”

BC: Ha, ha ha, hahahaha haaaaaaaa (I’m falling in the abyss now, come help me please!!?). I’m not even sure it is about believing, maybe only resonating with?

“I have a feeling that you’re looking for universals, and maybe even a spiritual foundation to our historical meanderings: the constant parts of what we call human nature.”

I don’t think I am looking for universals, I think I am looking for the thought processes/emotional baggage that has brought us where we are, which is obviously always in flux, shifting, the process and its contents. So is my piece, in constant flux, since it is inherently impossible to pin down a moment, a thought, an experience, an interpretation that would include all the others. But for sure it has to do with the spiritual and with how to approach a development of sorts that could be called a history.

“Am I right?”

BC: Yes and no. I guess instead we’re having this conversation, which is much better than a right or a wrong.

Two quotes from Sebald’s Austerlitz:

“…our most powerful projects are the ones that betray in the most evident way our degree of insecurity…”

“…the growing understanding that everything is decided in movement and not in immobility…”

If words are not possible and silence isn’t either, what is the exact measure of language?

Bibi Calderaro’s collected writings from Present will be compiled and published in book form and sold in the bookstore at P.S.1. It should be available in the next month or so.

All photos courtesy of Marcelo Brodsky.

Books Read During PRESENT, P.S.1, October 2008 – April 2009

The Idea of Usury, B. Nelson
The Rule of Mars, edited by C. Biaggi
The world of Goods, M. Douglas and B Zaberwood
La potencia del pensamiento, G. Agamben
Evolution of the Social Contract, B. Skyrms
On Certainty, L. Wittgenstein
Un Coup de Des Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, Mallarmé
Le Bruissement de la Langue, R. Barthes
Teoría poética y estética, P. Valéry
The Gift, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, L. Hyde
On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Ethics and Politics, C. E. Scott
Transcending Capitalism, H. Brick
Lujo y Capitalismo, W. Sombart
The Origins of the Economy, F. Pryor
How to do Things with Words, J.L. Austin
Endgame, S. Beckett
A Short History of Ethics, A. MacIntyre
La filosofía moral contemporánea, W. H. Hudson
Agua Viva, C. Lispector
Capital Profits and Prices, D. Hausman
Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, J. Copjec
Citizen Thoreau, H.D. Thoreau
Our Immoral Soul, N. Bonder
Profit Over People, N. Chomsky
La filosofía actual – Pensar sin certezas, D. Scavino
Handbook of Inaesthetics, A. Badiou
Gorgias, Plato
Being and Event, A. Badiou
On the Name, J. Derrida
The Shorter Socratic Writings, Xenophon
Wittgenstein and the Problem of other Minds, H. Morick
Hot Thought, Thagard
A Derrida Dictionary, N. Lucy
Wittgenstein: a Life, B. McGuiness
World and Life as One, M. Stokhof
Key Writings, L. Irigaray
Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yovel
Dialogues, Jakobson + Pomorska
The Impossible Question, J. Krishnamurti
The Mystery of Capital, H. de Soto
Labyrinth, Wilson
Exploring Complexity, Nicolis and I. Prigogine
Order out of Chaos, I. Prigogine and Stengers
Fear. The History of a Political Idea, C. Robin
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn
Labyrinth of Time, K. Penderecky
The Question of Value, J. Hans
Nine Chains to the Moon, B. Fuller
Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge, P. Muna
And it Came to Pass, Not to Stay, B. Fuller
Identity and Reality, E. Meyerson
I Seem to be a Verb, B. Fuller
The Theory of Absence, P. Fuery

Installation in cafe space

Exhibition in cafe space continues until May 2009.

(Boiler Room exhibition closed on January 26, 2009.)  

MINUS SPACE
Curated by Phong Bui
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
A Museum of Modern Art Affiliate
Long Island City, NY  

The exhibition is curated by artist, Brooklyn Rail publisher, and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui, and includes the work of 54 artists from 14 countries. The exhibition marks MINUS SPACE’s 5th anniversary.

Participating Artists
Soledad Arias, Shinsuke Aso, Marcus Bering, Hartmut Böhm, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Henry Brown, Vicente Butron, Bibi Calderaro, Melanie Crader, Mark Dagley, Julian Dashper, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget, Lynne Eastaway, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Daniel Göttin, Julio Grinblatt, Billy Gruner, Terry Haggerty, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Simon Ingram, Inverted Topology, Kyle Jenkins, Mick Johnson, Steve Karlik, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Lotte Lyon, Gerhard Mantz, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Douglas Melini, Manfred Mohr, Salvatore Panatteri, Dirk Rathke, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Tilman, Li-Trincere, Jan van der Ploeg, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer & Michael Zahn

Ongoing Performance
Bibi Calderaro: PRESENT
Thursdays, 1-4pm, and Saturdays, 12-3pm, in the P.S.1 Cafe

Karen Schifano, Coming Soon, 2008
Oil on canvas, 37 x 48 inches

Exhibition poster

October 19, 2008 – May 4, 2009

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce our exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, an affiliate of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. P.S.1 is one of the oldest and largest non-profit arts centers in the United States solely devoted to contemporary art.

The exhibition is curated by artist, Brooklyn Rail publisher, and P.S.1. Curatorial Advisor Phong Bui, and includes the work of 54 artists from 14 countries. The exhibition marks MINUS SPACE’s 5th anniversary.

We greatly thank curator Phong Bui and the remarkable staff at P.S.1, the participating artists and their galleries, and our generous donors, whose financial support made this exhibition possible.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Soledad Arias, Shinsuke Aso, Marcus Bering, Hartmut Böhm, Richard Bottwin, Sharon Brant, Michael Brennan, Henry Brown, Vicente Butron, Bibi Calderaro, Melanie Crader, Mark Dagley, Julian Dashper, Christopher Dean, Matthew Deleget, Lynne Eastaway, Gabriele Evertz, Daniel Feingold, Kevin Finklea, Linda Francis, Zipora Fried, Daniel Göttin, Julio Grinblatt, Billy Gruner, Terry Haggerty, Lynne Harlow, Gilbert Hsiao, Andrew Huston, Simon Ingram, Inverted Topology, Kyle Jenkins, Mick Johnson, Steve Karlik, Sarah Keighery, Andrew Leslie, Daniel Levine, Sylvan Lionni, Lotte Lyon, Gerhard Mantz, Rossana Martinez, Juan Matos Capote, Douglas Melini, Manfred Mohr, Salvatore Panatteri, Dirk Rathke, Karen Schifano, Analia Segal, Edward Shalala, Tilman, Li-Trincere, Jan van der Ploeg, Don Voisine, Douglas Witmer & Michael Zahn

ONGOING PERFORMANCE
Bibi Calderaro: PRESENT
Thursdays, 1-4pm, and Saturdays, 12-3pm, in the P.S.1 Cafe

INTERVIEW
MINUS SPACE: The Art of Reduction, by Phong Bui
P.S.1 Newspaper, Fall/Winter 2008

PRESS
Drunkard’s Walk vs. PMU, Ethan Ham blog, December 18, 2008
MINUS SPACE at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / MoMA, Abstract Contemporary Art Blog, December 18, 2008
Top Ten 2008, by Jerry Saltz, Artnet Magazine, December 15, 2008 (MINUS SPACE is cited in #10)
The Year in Art: The Top Nine Shows (and One Event), by Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine, December 7, 2008 (MINUS SPACE is cited in #10)
Michael Brennan at 210 Gallery and P.S.1, by Paul Corio, November 16, 2008
Interview with Simon Ingram / MINUS SPACE exhibition at P.S.1, New York, Vernissage TV, November 10, 2008
MINUS SPACE, by Eva Lake, November 10, 2008
MINUS SPACE at P.S.1, The James Kalm Report, November 2, 2008
Update, Henri Art Magazine, November 1, 2008
Reductive Art at P.S.1, by Jon Meyer, October 25, 2008

GALLERY CREDITS
Hartmut Böhm courtesy of Bartha Contemporary, London, UK
Richard Bottwin courtesy of Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Metaphor Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, NY
Sharon Brant courtesy of Elizabeth Moore Fine Art, New York, NY
Melanie Crader courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Mark Dagley courtesy of Abaton Garage, Jersey City, NJ
Julian Dashper courtesy of Esso Gallery, New York, NY
Matthew Deleget courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Gabriele Evertz courtesy of Ober Gallery, Kent, CT
Daniel Feingold courtesy of Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud, Sao Paolo, Brazil
Kevin Finklea courtesy of Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY; Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Daniel Göttin courtesy of Hebel_121, Basel, Switzerland
Julio Grinblatt courtesy of Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Galeria Baro-Cruz, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Laura Marsiaj Arte Contemporanea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Terry Haggerty courtesy of Andreas Grimm Gallery, New York, NY
Lynne Harlow courtesy of Cade Tompkins Editions, Providence, RI
Gilbert Hsiao courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Andrew Huston courtesy of Elizabeth Moore Fine Art, New York, NY
Simon Ingram courtesy of Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Mick Johnson courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Steve Karlik courtesy of Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Andrew Leslie courtesy of Annandale Galleries, Sydney, Australia; John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
Sylvan Lionni courtesy of Freight + Volume, New York, NY
Lotte Lyon courtesy of Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo, Japan
Rossana Martinez courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Manfred Mohr courtesy of Bitforms Gallery, New York, NY
Dirk Rathke courtesy of Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, TX
Analia Segal courtesy of DPM Gallery, Miami, FL; Guayaquil, Ecuador
Tilman courtesy of CCNOA center for contemporary non-objective art, Brussels, Belgium
Jan van der Ploeg courtesy of Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Don Voisine courtesy of Abaton Garage, Jersey City, NJ; McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY
Michael Zahn courtesy of Eleven Rivington, New York, NY

ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Poster & Flash Animation: Level Design Studio