Summer Mondays at e-flux

Every Monday evening from July 28 to August 25, e-flux will host a series of live presentations on themes loosely based on the archive of the Agency of Unrealized Projects (AUP), a project initiated by e-flux and the Serpentine Gallery, devised by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, and Julia Peyton-Jones.

Come join us for a drink this summer in celebrating the semi-productive, unproductive, and the failed with the following invited artists: Camel Collective, Rita Sobral Campos, Tyler Coburn, Casey Jane Ellison, Tamar Ettun & The Moving Company with Tamar Muskal, Hanns Eisler Nail Salon (H.E.N.S.)—Arlen Austin and Jason Boughton, Susan Howe, Tan Lin, Nuno da Luz, Leila Nadir + Cary Peppermint (EcoArtTech), Liz Rywelski, Caroline Woolard, and more to be announced.

For more information or to subscribe to our local mailing list, contact magdalena [​at​] e-flux.com and check this page for updates. Summer Mondays at e-flux is organized by the e-flux staff.

On the Agency of Unrealized Projects
Unlike unrealized architectural projects, which are frequently exhibited and circulated, unrealized artworks tend to remain unnoticed or little-known. But perhaps there is another form of artistic agency in the partial expression, the incomplete idea, the projection of a mere intention? The Agency of Unrealized Projects seeks to document and display these works, in this way charting the terrain of a contingent future.

For the occasion, AUP’s online archive has also expanded its collection to include new (unrealized) submissions by Stijn Ank, Bastiaan Arler, Nicolas Barrette, Maximillian George, Jochen Gerz, Cecilia Guida and 42 Contributors, Nicky Hamlyn, Maymay Jumsai, Maria Karachristou, Miklos Legrady, Joel Leibowitz, Allison Malinsky, Claire Manning, Ingrind Mayhofer, Alex McKenzie, John Kenneth Melvin, Jugoslav Mitevski, Viiic Keer Ossttappph, Douglas Park, Jonathan Parsons, Daniel Castellano Reyes, Gabriel Rico, Anja Christine Ross, Lisa Rovner, Frances Scholz, Sean Scully, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Logan Sisley, Scott Sorli, Sarah Steiner, Youssef Tabti, Sebastian Tedesco, and Carolyn Wirth.

“No Such Archive Exists”
Monday, July 28
7:30pm

Unrealized archives may range from collections of work that either are or may be hidden away, collections of so-called “useless” materials, archives that should but do not yet or cannot exist, and archives that for one reason or another have been destroyed. The evening questions what constitutes an archive and in what ways (or in what locations) systems of collected information may or may not be considered “realized.”

The evening begins with Susan Howe reading from her book Pierce-Arrow that generally concerns the checkered career and sad manuscript history of the philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce. Images from the Peirce archives are a part of the reading.

Tan Lin will screen “The PdD Sound” and other videos, and talk about ephemeral and fragmentary reading practices inside the short and long archive. He will add a few comments on indexing, crawling, and reading as a search function.

Rita Sobral Campos will bring the evening’s presentations to a close by screening a group of 16mm short films from her most recent project, “Frederik.” This series follows the dealings of Frederik and the five Heresies that appear before her to defend their view of the Universe to its most minute detail. The narratives unfold in a labyrinth of plots that draw on philosophical and historical contexts, physics, neuroscience, and popular sci-fi. The works will be screened with live musical accompaniment by Ben Model.

Conversation and drinks will follow.

Rita Sobral Campos works with primarily text-based projects that span across a wide range of media including film, photography, and sculpture. Her most recent project, Neon Medieval, was shown at Andreas Huber Gallery, Vienna. She has participated in Tournament d’objet, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013); Sunday Sessions, MoMA PS1, New York (2012), Short Stories, Sculpture Center, New York; Poetic Things That are Political, Museu Chiado, Lisbon, (2011); and Dockanema Film Festival, Maputo (2010). Collaborations include Artists Reading with Isla Leaver-Yap (2012) andUNCLEHEAD with Alexandre Singh (2008).

Susan Howe is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism. Her recent collection of poems, That This, won the Bollingen Prize. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. She has collaborated with the musician/composer David Grubbs on Thiefth, Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecture. Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000 and 2006. In 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin, and was recently an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Her word collages were exhibited in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Tan Lin is the author of over ten books, most recently of Heath Course Pak, Insominia and the Aunt, and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking. He is the recipient of a 2012 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, a Getty Distinguished Scholar Grant, and a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writing Grant to complete a book on the writings of Andy Warhol. He is working on a sampled novel, Our Feelings Were Made By Hand. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at New Jersey City University.

“APP LAWS”
Monday, August 4

This series of workshops and performances looks at the laws governing our interpersonal and interspecies relations, and applications that stand to shift them. The evening calls on the audience—a group often only looked to for applause—for their participation in realizing this work and in questioning what the work is that needs to be done.

The night will begin with Camel Collective‘s Opening Address. Shot among the residential buildings in Ørestad City south of Copenhagen, the film presents four figures dwarfed by largely empty housing developments—signature pieces of architecture and the grandchildren of Bauhaus design. Four voices read from “Opening Address to the Second World Congresses of Free Artists,” a text that questions the “educational turn in art” and its emancipatory horizons, the roles artists play as creative labor, and Camel Collective’s own relation to contemporaneous anti-austerity protests by students. The text appropriates elements from the first “Opening Address” by Asger Jorn, delivered in 1956 as part of the Congress organized with Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio in order to state their ideological differences with Max Bill’s Bauhaus. This video takes its structure from Straub-Huillet’s film, Toute la révolution est un coup de dés [Every Revolution is a Throw of the Dice] (1977), which accompanies this piece.

From here the Hanns Eisler Nail Salon (H.E.N.S.) will examine contending political and legal valences of the term “class” in a public conversation, “Class War/Class Action.” H.E.N.S. will assess the historical emergence of the class action lawsuit as a surrogate form of collective organizing coincident with the repression and dissolution of trade unionism and other class and identity-based forms of mass struggle. Participants will examine a series of recent US Supreme Court decisions which have dramatically undermined the power of the class action lawsuit as a vehicle of collective redress. A few lucky participants will be empowered to mediate their relation to class struggle through use of an Antonin Scalia sock puppet.

Throughout the evening, BFAMFAPhD‘s Census Report will be available for interaction on computers, and printed information about the project will be provided for visitors to take away. Concerned about the impact of debt, rent, and precarity on the lives of creative people, the group’s contributors make media and connect people to existing organizing work. Census Report by Vicky Virgin and Julian Boilen uses the Census Bureau’s 2010–12 American Community Survey to visualize the poverty rates, rent burdens, and occupations of artists in New York City.

In the e-flux kitchen, EcoArtTech will lead an OS Fermentation Workshop—part of their new series of social sculptures that work collaboratively with local communities (human, bacterial, and ecological) to resuscitate historic food practices and to facilitate recovery from what they call “industrial amnesia”—a slow-cooking class, healing ritual, and spiritual revival of human-microbial collaborations. At the workshop, the artists will work with participants to create long-lasting, living foods and alcoholic tonics—unfinished products that not only are delicious and sustainable but also nurture our immune systems while providing a visually striking, carefully managed decomposition and death that will unfold for weeks after their initial creation before they can be eaten or imbibed.

Tamar Ettun & The Moving Company—Tyler Patterson, Tina Wang, Lyndsey Eugene, Maia Karo, Adrian Galvin, and Lisa Park—will celebrate the end of the evening using Ettun’s musical sculptures to create a multi-media performance. Movers will manipulate sculptures with movement and sound, inviting the audience to participate in the performance and “writing” of the piece. In this event, movers, movements, and sounds build on one another and accumulate, leading to the work’s climatic disruption.

Conversation and drinks will follow.

Camel Collective‘s (Anthony Graves, Carla Herrera-Prats, and Lasse Lau) ongoing interests are centered around representations of labor and pedagogy and the institutional relationships between artists and other forms of creative production. Camel Collective’s work involves archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies associated with painting, printmaking, and photography, to explore and narrate ways in which the individual and the collective overlap and destabilize one another. Many of the tactics the group employs can be correlated with the strategies of portraiture of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) period, and the use of social types as a means of describing social relations, ideologies, and the forms and tempos of life for the precarious and aspirational subject of contemporary neoliberalism.

Co-founded in 2009 by artists Jason Boughton and Arlen Austin, the Hanns Eisler Nail Salon (H.E.N.S.) collective has included legal professionals, workplace organizers, artists, and cultural workers. H.E.N.S. has presented projects for Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, the Hessel Museum, Exit Art, Scaramouche, Temp Gallery, the New Museum, Ludlow 38, the School of Visual Arts and Unique Styles Hair and Nails, as well as running its own space in downtown Brooklyn. Currently H.E.N.S. has embarked on the creation of Comrades of Socktown, a five-part children’s television show for grades three through six designed to facilitate the dismantling of capitalist hegemony within three generations.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective of artists, educators, curators, art historians, designers, makers, statisticians, and computer engineers who want to understand the relationship between our lives and the bigger picture. We ask questions about equity in the arts using the Census Bureau’s 2010–12 American Community Survey (ACS), and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. On our website, visitors can download our datasets, make media with us, and connect that media to lived experience: BFAMFAPhD.com Core Group: Susan Jahoda, Blair Murphy, Caroline Woolard; Media Contributors: Vicky Virgin, Julian Boilen.

New media art duo Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint have worked collaboratively under the name EcoArtTech for over a decade, together exploring the environmental imagination in the afterglow of modernization (from nature and built spaces to the mobile landscape and electronic environments). Their projects have taken the form of architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, and scholarly articles and poetic essays, earning awards from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Franklin Furnace Fund. They have presented their work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, 319 Scholes, Smackmellon Gallery, Exit Art, U.C.L.A., M.I.T. Media Lab, ISEA 2012, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Tamar Ettun is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist from Jerusalem, Israel. Ettun received her MFA in 2010 from Yale University, where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. Ettun studied at Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy, where she graduated with honors. Ettun’s numerous exhibitions and performances include: NADA NYC with Artis (2014), Performa 11 presented by RECESS (2011), and Empty Is Also, in collaboration with Emily Coates for Performa 09 presented by the X-Initiative (2009). Ettun has been honored by several organizations including MacDowell Fellowship, Abron’s Art Center, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund, Socrates Sculpture Park, America Israel Cultural Foundation, The World Performance Project, Artis, Yale School of Art, RECESS, and Triangle Workshop Residency. Ettun is currently working towards mastering the skill of opening a sardine can using only her teeth.

“Shapes and Skins: Unrealized Avatars and Alter Egos”
Monday, August 11

Artists and writers have long employed the construct of an alter ego, pen name, or other form of camouflage in order to explore outside the limits and expectations of an existing identity. The guises that these artists work under allow them to consider different facets of contemporary society within an environment increasingly infused with social media.

The evening begins with artist Liz Rywelski, discussing her project TIME SHARE, a performance and play on a consumer model within a time share sales experience as seen through basic design principles of the Alternate Reality Game and the basic principles of Consumer Theory.

Toni van Tiel and Griet Menschaert of the artist collective Tweetsculpture will present an interactive talk about their project, a Twitter account where users contribute unrealized and often poetic ideas for sculpture.

The evening will close with Webcam Stand Up: Comedy with Casey Jane Ellison, a live stand up performance via video chat with artist and comedian Casey Jane Ellison. Art and tech surprises await you.

Conversation and drinks will follow.

Casey Jane Ellison, inventor of the comedian avatar, born and raised in Los Angeles, bicoastal bisexual, artist and comic. As an artist, her work has been commissioned by MOCA in Los Angeles and she has presented videos and animation at the New Museum, MoMA PS1, and the Museum of Art and Design. She recently launched her own cult and accompanying t-shirt line. Casey hosts OvationTV’s Touching the Art.

Liz Rywelski addresses issues of identity as defined through an increasingly overzealous consumer culture where self-image is determined by the purchases one makes. Rywelski has worked in a variety of mediums, including photography, performance, installation, web-based media, and games. Recent exhibitions include Portraits from the Gerald Mead Collection, Daemen College, Amherst (2014); Echo Art Fair, Buffalo (2013); RETURN POLICY, University of Buffalo, New York (2013); LIKEARTBASEL, Workshop Collective, Miami (2013); and Suite 6 Portrait Series, Dis Magazine (2011).

Tweetsculpture is a group of five artists and writers from the Netherlands and Belgium (Toni van Tiel, Wijnand Veneberg, Griet Menschaert, Dorien de Wit, and Ronald Saeijs) who collectively contribute to a Twitter account under the name Tweetsculpture. The contributors anonymously generate ideas for sculpture works that are either nearly or entirely impossible to realize, offering them up to the public realm.

“‘This Literally Happened’: A Night of Storytelling”
Monday, August 18

These artists trade on impossible, unrealizable half-truths in order to weave a story that is often more truthful than reality. Or they don’t.

The evening begins with artist Heather Guertin, who will read an excerpt from her unpublished novel-in-progress, Not Yet Titled, Cambodia.

The evening continues with Sophia Cleary’s Female Figure II, a solo performance that cultivates sensitivity to an emotional body by acknowledging a persistent tension between performer and audience. In this “solo,” Sophia Cleary will share and misconstrue personal information about herself through the format of a lecture. The content of these lectures extends from musings about her experiences in psychoanalysis, to critiques of the work of contemporary artists such as Jordan Wolfson, to questions concerning the performer’s responsibility to her audience and vice versa. Note how the quality, dynamic, and nuance of a voice can both underscore and undermine the words that are uttered.

The evening will close with Allison Brainard, who is waiting to hear back about a grant to which she applied to create a SUPER DANCE. The ambitious proposal for this SUPER DANCE can only be realized with the aid of funding, technology, and special effects. It is a performance that cannot exist in reality, only on film and in dreams. In this evening’s low-tech, high-visibility forum, Allison will present the pre-funded work-in-progress.

Conversation and drinks will follow.

Allison Brainard is an artist living the dream in New York City. Her work blurs the boundaries of experimental dance, theater, and performance, and she always has a sense of humor. In the past, she has worked and collaborated with Marina Abramovic, Ryan McNamara, Patty Chang, Martha Rosler, and Carolee Schneemann. She has performed in many venues in Manhattan and Brooklyn including Abrons Art Center, Judson Church, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU).

Sophia Cleary is a performance artist based in Brooklyn. She is the founder and coordinator of the works-in-progress series “REHEARSAL,” and is co-editor of Ugly Duckling Presse’s performance annual publication, Emergency INDEX. Cleary has worked with Neal Medlyn, Ann Liv Young, Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron), Vanessa Anspaugh, Alexandra Bachzetsis, and the Kate Bush Dance Troupe. Her latest project is playing drums in Penis, a feminist punk band co-founded with Samara Davis. Cleary has presented her work at various New York venues, including the Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project, and Dixon Place.

Heather Guertin is a painter and writer and has performed stand-up comedy in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Moving between these media, she addresses human nature’s tendency toward self-actualization through various methods. Preparation and rehearsal are followed by the creative act with potential for mistakes and improvisation. Her upcoming solo exhibitions include Brennan & Griffin in New York in September and Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. Last year, Guertin published a novella, Model Turned Comedian, with Publication Studio and Social Malpractice Publishing.

“Fail, Fail Better!”
Monday, August 25

Our last evening in the Summer Mondays series is based on the notion of failure—on lame ducks, bungles, flashes in the pan, and lead balloons—and will discuss its nature through ideas, exhibitions, and theories.

The evening begins with curator Natasha Marie Llorens who will give an experimental lecture about Failing to Levitate, a recent project she co-curated with Kerry Downey at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space. From the press release, a line written months ago that describes this talk’s intention: “Failure here is not an end—it is a space that opens up after an idea or an experience has exhausted itself, after balloons deflate and the smoke clears. In this space, together, we hover in not knowing and struggling to listen.”

Last spring, artist and writer Tyler Coburn received an unusual invitation: to write a press release for an exhibition that didn’t exist. The following August, that exhibition would appear at Where, a shipping container in Bushwick. Run by artist Raphael Lyon and art historian Lucy Hunter, this project space is primarily accessible by means of a surveillance feed; Coburn, like the general public, will have to trust its veracity. Coburn’s press release imagines an “interpassive” exhibition, both in structure and content. For his presentation at Summer Mondays, he will consider interpassivity as a failure to perform established subject types, and how the terms of cultural authorship and exhibition making may decenter accordingly.

To close the evening, Nuno da Luz will present a diaporama on the subject of Zetetics, the science of research as devised by Polish engineer and inventor Joseph T. Tykociner (1877–1969). After retiring from forty years of researching electromagnetic radiation, sound-on-film, and piezoelectricity, Joseph Tykociner devoted himself to the systematization and collection of all the information he could find on the theory and practice of research, including the creative process. He envisioned a new science that would be able to discover gaps in knowledge and formulate new problems, in order to foster the growth and expansion of human knowledge.

Conversation and drinks will follow.

Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York. This fall, Coburn will participate in the Shanghai Biennale, curated by Anselm Franke, as well as exhibitions at The Hayward Gallery, London; Artspace, Auckland; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; S1 Artspace, Sheffield; and others.

Natasha Marie Llorens is a writer and an independent curator based in New York. Upcoming projects include Prove It To Me at REVERSE Gallery in Williamsburg and Frames of War at Momenta in Bushwick. She holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from Bard and is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at Columbia University. Her research is focused on violence and representation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Nuno da Luz is as an artist, graphic designer and publisher whose work circumscribes both aural and visual in the form of sound events, installations, and printed matter, mostly distributed through the publisher ATLAS Projectos and the record label Palmario Recordings. In 2011, he published Zetetics, a taxilogy of Pictorial Knowledge, a book on the science of research.

Upcoming exhibitions at e-flux:

We, The Outsiders
September 5–November 1, 2014
Lutz Mommartz, Eduardo Navarro, Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, Agnieszka Brzeżańska
Curator: Chus Martinez

The Unmaking of Art
November 21, 2014–January 24, 2015
An exhibition based on a lecture by Walter Benjamin
Collections: Museum of Antiquity, Rome; Museum of Modernity, Paris; Salon de Fleurus, New York