Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico responded in kind with a great list of her own.

I’m still working on my list, but while I’m in the process of pulling it together I decided I had to share one reading that I’ve been revisiting a lot over the last few days. It’s from Lawrence Weschler’s incredible book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. Chapter 15 is called “Being Available in Response,” which is also the name of a project initiated by Irwin.

The first time I read this chapter I nearly lept out of my chair — I got so excited I reread it three or four times right away.

Rather than trying to explain the project too much, though, I’ll let Irwin (and Weschler) tell you about it as they do in the book. Here’s Irwin:

“I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I’m saying it to you. I mean, I didn’t put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let’s say, up at UCLA, and you’d say, ‘Well, let’s take advantage of that. We’ll have him come up and talk to the students.’ And that’s what I’d do. Or, ‘We’ll have him come up and do a piece on the patio.’ And I would just come up and do that.

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’”

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Allan McCollum’s extraordinary Shapes project from 2005 continues this month at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery with Shapes from Maine, a collection of over 2,200 unique shapes created by McCollum in collaboration with local Maine craftspeople. In their hands, McCollum’s systematic forms become cookie cutters, wooden ornaments, rubber stamps, and cut-paper silhouettes. An interesting bit of craft conceptualism, and, if you missed the show in 2005, well worth a look. (via)

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get an advance look at the Guggenheim’s newest show, a project by Tino Seghal. While I don’t want to say too much about it — it’s something best experienced for yourself — I will say that it was remarkable and highly thought-provoking, a deceptively simple mix of walking, talking, and the Guggenheim’s remarkable architecture.

In advance of the show’s opening, the New York Times Magazine’s Arthur Lubow penned a profile of Seghal, a man whose life and art are intensely intertwined. I particularly enjoyed Lubow’s description of selling and staging one of Seghal’s works:

As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but [Director Glenn] Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,’ says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. ‘If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”

Above: Harsh Patel’s “Comedians & Musicians” and “Kim Deal.” (Click to enlarge.)

A gift is something you can’t get by your own efforts; it must be given to you. That’s how I came to receive a paint-stained package of little books by a young Los Angeles-based artist named Harsh Patel. Enclosed were a dozen or so handmade, photocopied booklets with titles like “Lee Mavers,” “Kim Deal,” “Cascando” and “Echo’s Bones.” The first two titles are the names of musicians. The latter two are titles of poems by Samuel Beckett. Each falls squarely within the fanzine genre, which Wikipedia describes as a “nonprofessional and nonoffical publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest.” And yet something more than the adulation of an admirer was motivating these zines. Their vision was cohesive, bracing, and fresh.

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Cory Arcangel took an MP3 of Iron Maiden’s song “The Number of the Beast” and compressed it 666 times. For more background on compression artifacts and artmaking, read Arcangel’s excellent essay “On Compression” [PDF]. I keep revisiting his ideas about “lossy vs lossless” and find them enormously useful. I also think one of the most infectious things about Arcangel’s art is its wit; I never seem to tire of the funny-smart one-two punch his work creates. Speaking of which, did you see the one with Springsteen and the glockenspeil?

Parsons AAS student Natalie Bonilla shares some slides and thinking about her work with the Art Metadata Project, which seeks to create an “XML-based data standard similar to RSS that would provide places for all the standard information that is usually kept on artists and their works.” Basically, ISBNs for art—smart idea. To learn more or help support the effort, visit their Facebook page here.

One more thing from the Met: if you’re in the neighborhood, stop by for the incredible Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages, on though this Sunday 23 August. And afterward, check out this talk by Edward Tufte about the show, now on the Met’s YouTube channel.

n+1’s Roger White on How Artists Must Dress:

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

(via Brian)

Three years after Real Time was published, Jennifer Bartlett first showed her mammoth painting Rhapsody at Soho’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. In the essay that opens the book designed by Harry N. Abrams Design Director Sam Antupit nearly a decade later, critic Roberta Smith writes, “Rhapsody is Bartlett’s great and imperfect epic, a visual event that unfolds in real time, real space, and above all, real thought, without ever leaving the wall.” Indeed, for some viewers the work might’ve amounted to sensory overload. Painted on steel plates primed with white enamel and grey silkscreened grids, Rhapsody uses materials derived for subway signage and assumes a similar amount of running space as a typical station: 153 feet of wall for its 987 12x12 inch plates.

When it first appeared, it took the art world by storm. A short article in Art in America notes, “The piece traveled triumphantly for two years, with stops including Documenta 6 and the Whitney’s landmark ‘New Image Painting’ show. A second museum tour followed in 1985–86,” for which this book was made, and then “like Rosenquist’s F-111, Chicago’s The Dinner Party or Serra’s Tilted Arc, Rhapsody became an art-book legend, an oversized milestone, inconvenient and unseen.” In 2006 MoMA installed Rhapsody in its atrium and produced this short video interview with Bartlett (scroll down) talking more about the piece.

But Rhapsody’s ideal vessel, in my humble opinion, is the catalog that documents it. Smith’s essay, written specifically for the book, hints that she might agree:

Rhapsody’s disjointed narrative adapts extremely well to book form. Its reconstitution here makes Rhapsody more continuously available than it has ever been—providing the chance to pore over it ad infinitum, aided by Bartlett’s own text listing the conceptual impetus behind each plate. And, actually, a handheld Rhapsody is not at all farfetched. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Bartlett works large in order to be intimate. The plates are page-size to begin with, and painted mostly one at a time. And this book’s contrasts of installation views with big reproductions of single plates underscores the way Rhapsody continually pushes viewers back for the long shot, then pulls them close for an inch-by-inch examination. This contrast should also reveal that what looks dense and rich from afar is, up close, often startingly thin, forcing the viewer to balance an overall meditative resonance with a dashed-off nonchalance, which, in keeping with Rhapsody’s mass-produced surface, makes no concession to “beauty” or “touch.”

Set in square justified blocks of Richard Isbell’s expansive Americana, Antupit’s font choice may seem a bit quirky at first, but the reader quickly adapts. It is expansively horizontal, a vista, produced in anticipation of America’s bicentennial—an occasion that calls to mind all the breath, history, and amibitions of Bartlett’s painting.

Two recently spotted catalogues. First, from Frankenstein SE, a studio founded by former Acne creative director Pontus Frankenstein, comes Ballets Russes, a centenary celebration of the fashions of the Russian Ballet by the Dance Museum in Stockholm. I love typography has some images here (scroll down).

Second, from Spin, a catalogue for the show Mythologies, which opens the new Haunch of Venison gallery in Burlington Gardens. Housed in a building that once served as home to the British Museum’s ethnographic collections, Mythologies turned the space into a giant cabinet of curiosities filled with the work of over 40 artists in “one of the most ambitious group exhibitions ever mounted in London by a private gallery.”

More on the show here. Images of the book here on Creative Review’s blog, or pick up your own copy here from Haunch of Venison. For more of Spin’s work, check out this talk by David McFarline on It’s Nice That.