she would only appear

furtively. i mean she was already dead, so what was the point of presenting herself in plain view? it would only create a scene and what good would that do her? territories are hard enough to claim for the living, who knows what efforts had already been expended in order for her to claim “here”.

theft, quote, copy, readymade, appropriation, or simply legal fictions?

“Our sympathetic co-experiencing of the other does not mean we fuse the I-for-myself with its viewpoint or experience. Indeed, we can never be outside of our own experience (or as Habermas would say, outside the horizon of a lifeworld); we can only be outside the experience of the other. Boundaries or zones are fundamental to both the self and its discourse but they are also passable both in the imaginary and the real. For Bakhtin, “there are events which are in principle incapable of unfolding on the plane of one and the same consciousness and which presuppose two consciousness that never merge.” p. 40.

“Such a transposition, or sympathetic co-experience, Bakhtin notes, is not a copy of one to another but a “fundamentally and essentially new valuation, a utilization of my own architectonic exposition in being outside another’s inner life” (1990, 103.)” p. 41. nielsen greg m. the norms of answerability: social theory between bakhtin and habermas

if we think of theft as the refusal to acknowledge property claims, the erasure of ties of ownership, or conversely, as in the oncomouse case, the privatization of what was once communal (in this instance the labour of many people) how do we position art works that perform a “copy, quote, appropriation…” of another’s labour or gesture? where do we locate the boundary that separates, and in transgressing certain boundaries (as implied in the word theft) where do we position the work in relation to property laws? and could it be the inherent “passability” of boundaries, their very fluidity, that underscores the violence of property laws and our communal adherence to their fiction found therein?

Matériaux gratuits, cont. :: Free materials, cont’d

…et parfois, le matériel est même livré gratuitement à mon courriel! c’est le plus beau jour de ma vie!

…and sometimes, the material is even delivered for free to my email! It’s the happiest day of my life!

To pick up on previous biblical references… in this case,  the giver knows to whom he gives and the recipient knows not from whom it is that he takes (but has a pretty good suspicion!) if in this case, the gift is not offered because the recipient is in need of said gift, especially given the ubiquitous nature of the offering, is the giver less meritorious?

Matériaux gratuits :: free materials

La densité et le motif all-over du texte imprimé constitue un matériau intéressant pour produire des blocs de courte-pointes de papier. Aussi, c’est un matériau produit en vaste quantité et très facile à obtenir; à l’occasion, il est même livré gratuitement à ma porte. Je le collectionne et le transforme depuis quelques années.

The density and all-over motif of the printed text offers an interesting material for the production of paper quilt pattern blocks. This material, produced in vast quantities, is very easy to obtain;  at times, it’s even delivered for free right to my door. I have been collecting and repurposing it for a few years.

I can show you many examples produced already; I have made quilt blocks out of many different printed outputs, including many pages of various erratic laser printer outputs, a copy of the full page of a Sherbrooke newspaper listing the names of all the people reached by karen spencer’s dream letters, including my name. It’s interesting how much time I spent looking for my own name in the long list of tiny printed names… maybe because I also collect occurrences of my own name as material?

tino sehgal and oncomouse

“Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has evidently turned collecting criteria on their heads. He sells his performance art pieces by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are delivered literally by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to photograph or video his “constructed situations”. Yet they sell in editions of four to six for $85,000 to $145,000 each, according to The Art Newspaper.” http://www.ft.com

in order to sell something, it is necessary that the “something” be considered private property, as in the “something” is not owned by everyone. whether this something be immaterial like tino sehgal’s spoken instructions or dupont’s patent on onco mouse, both “products” rely on the legal structure of ownership of labour. what is sold is not “the mouse” or the “body of the performer” but the privatisation of a set of instructions that produces something “in the world” – a performance, a mouse.

artists who are mimicking the new systems of capitalist structures such as copyright of immaterial labour, need to think through the full scope of their collusion with the market.  if sehgal believes himself to be thwarting the system of the market as he himself suggests, perhaps he needs to question his methods a bit more rigorously?

…effacement de joceline chabot

…Effacement
Nous sommes tous confrontés aux contraintes du temps. Organiser la vie selon l’espace-temps est fastidieux et nous naviguons tous d’une activité à l’autre de façon plus ou moins harmonieuse en déblatérant sur la vitesse à laquelle le temps file. Les contraintes augmentent proportionnellement avec la quantité d’obligations (famille/étude/travail/passion) et pour certains artistes pour qui le travail alimentaire occupe un espace-temps déraisonnable, il y a inévitablement conflit dans l’agenda. Conflit parfois sans issu.
L’idéal serait d’effacer les frontières entre toutes ces activités.

 

does not leak, is capable of keeping firm boundary delineation

gold, used to be the “money-form” of commodities (before the delinking of gold by nixon in 1971)

below (in italics, as in underlined) is marx’s analysis of gold as money-form.

it is interesting, is it not, that gold is capable of both divisibility and solidness…i.e. gold, once divided, can keep its shape. stay within its bounds. once a given amount is decided upon it can be fixed, its boundaries are clear. commerce, i.e. the exchange of commodities, also likes clear, fixed boundaries. if i buy a commodity, lets say a suit, i want the whole suit, not just a portion of it, nor do i want the threads to be frayed, the pockets to be ripped open, or the buttons to be missing. clear boundaries here. no blurring, no holes, no parts missing…the contours of the suit are clear, precise, easily distinguishable. blurring boundaries are messy and blurred boundaries demand our time, the time it takes to distinguish one contour from the other. we want to sort the confusion out, put things in their proper place. make the product presentable for the buyer. but not everything respects boundaries: air, oceans, rivers, gases, bacteria, ideas, viruses, animals, languages, refugees, migrant workers, illegal immigrants… but commerce don’t like that so much, these things that cannot be contained, packaged, owned. who owns the air? …who decides who is to pay for air pollution caused by one country that goes over the border into another country, who can package these things that leak from one place into another? languages that contaminate other languages, ideas that pass from one person to another?

the furtive, as a procedure, often blurs boundaries, erases links of ownership, jumps over or under time frames, digs up graves, disobeys orders, sneaks through, disguises itself, tricks the bystander, intertwines you in its complicity, and steals. in short, the furtive, as a procedure, is counter commerce. i.e. counter private property, i.e.suspect, i.e. policed…and hence furtive.

“The truth of the proposition that, “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver,”6 is shown by the fitness of the physical properties of these metals for the functions of money.7 Up to this point, however, we are acquainted only with one function of money, namely, to serve as the form of manifestation of the value of commodities, or as the material in which the magnitudes of their values are socially expressed. An adequate form of manifestation of value, a fit embodiment of abstract, undifferentiated, and therefore equal human labour, that material alone can be whose every sample exhibits the same uniform qualities. On the other hand, since the difference between the magnitudes of value is purely quantitative, the money commodity must be susceptible of merely quantitative differences, must therefore be divisible at will, and equally capable of being reunited. Gold and silver possess these properties by Nature. “ Marx, Capital. p. 63

nitraM-tniaS

Vie de Saint-Martin de Simone Martini (XIVème Siècle)

Corrected/updated upside down by Painterman

 

One winter day, while stationed in Amiens, Gaul (modern-day France), as Martin approached the city gate, he saw a half-naked man shivering with cold and begging alms from indifferent passers-by. Having nothing but his cloak, Martin drew his sword, cut the cloak in two, and gave half to the beggar.

Un jour d’hiver, pendant qu’il était stationné à Amiens, la Gaule (la France actuelle), que Martin s’approcha de la porte de la ville, il vit un homme à moitié nu grelottant de froid et de la mendicité l’aumône des passants indifférents par. N’ayant rien, mais son manteau, Martin tira son épée, le manteau coupé en deux, et en donna la moitié au mendiant.

…Twat station

Documenting the furtive word play : does not interfere with metro function, nor interrupt the passengers commute, but it did amuse me for a brief moment. Could not capture the repetition of the word for the length of the station, which, when pronounced quickly, sounds like a helicopter in flight.

Document d’un jeu de mot avec le nom de la station dont le nouveau sens, vulgaire, ne semble ni nuire avec le fonctionnement du train, ni interrompre le trajet des passagers. Le geste m’amuse. Dommage que je n’ai pu capter la répétition du mot tout le long de la station dont le son rappellerait le bruit d’un hélicoptère en vol.

from scarfs to pockets

maimonides, moses and al-nakawa, israel ibn, the degrees of jewish benevolence. hebrew union college, new york, 1988.

(i guess they didn’t have pockets…)

erasing ties to ownership, the thief and the sage.