Sophie Calle, Paul Auster: Double Game

The New York artist on the intersections of her work with Paul Auster's Leviathon.

Personal Instructions for on How to Improve Life in New York City:

Smiling
Smile when the situation doesn't call for it. Smile when you're feeling angry, when you're feeling miserable, when you're feeling most crushed by the world--and see if it makes any difference. ... Smile at strangers in the street. Smile at the bank teller who gives you your money, at the waitress who gives you your food, at the person sitting across from you on the train. ... See if anyone smiles back at you. Keep track of the number of smiles you are given each day. Don't be disappointed when people don't smile back at you. Consider each smile you receive a precious gift.


Talking to Strangers
There will be people who talk to you after you smile at them .. Some of these people will talk to you because they feel confused or threatened or insulted by your show of friendliness. ("You got a problem, lady?") Plunge in immediately with a disarming comment. "No, I was just admiring your beautiful tie." Or: "I love your dress." ... With so many things driving us apart, with so much hatred and discord in the air, it is good to remember the things that bring us together. The more we insist on them in our dealings with strangers, the better morale in the city will be.


Feeding Beggars and Homeless People
I'm not asking you to reinvent the world. I just want you to pay attention to it, to think about the things around you more than you think about yourself. ... Stock up on bread and cheese. Every time you leave the house, make three or four sandwiches and put them in your pocked. Every time you see a hungry person, give him a sandwich. ... If you can't think of anything to say when you give the food to the hungry person, talk about the weather.


Cultivating a Spot
People are not the only ones neglected in New York. Things are neglected as well. I don't just mean big things like bridges and subway tracks ... look closely at the things around you and you'll see that nearly everything is falling apart. Pick one spot in the city and begin to think of it as yours. It doesn't matter where, and it doesn't matter what. ... Keep it clean. Beautify it. Think of it as an extension of who you are, as a part of your identity. Go to your spot every day at the same time. Spend an hour watching everything that happens to it, keep track of everyone who passes by or stops or does anything there. Take notes, take photographs. Smile at the people who come there. Whenever possible, talk to them. If you can't think of anything to say, begin by talking about the weather.

Hito Steyerl: Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War

According to the Google N-gram viewer, the usage of the word “impossible” has steeply dropped since around the mid-twentieth century. But what does this tell us? Does it mean that fewer and fewer things are impossible? Does this mean that impossibility “as such” is in historical decline? Perhaps it just means that the conditions for possibilities as such are subject to change over time? Are both the possible and the impossible defined by historical and external conditions?

According to Immanuel Kant, time and space are necessary conditions to perceive or understand anything. Without time and space, knowledge, experience, and vision cannot unfold. Kant calls this perspective “criticism.” With this in mind, what kind of time and space is necessary for contemporary art to become manifest? Or rather: What does criticism about contemporary art say about time and space today?

To brutally summarize a lot of scholarly texts: contemporary art is made possible by neoliberal capital plus the internet, biennials, art fairs, parallel pop-up histories, growing income inequality. Let’s add asymmetric warfare—as one of the reasons for the vast redistribution of wealth—real estate speculation, tax evasion, money laundering, and deregulated financial markets to this list.

To paraphrase philosopher Peter Osborne’s illuminating insights on this topic: contemporary art shows us the lack of a (global) time and space. Moreover, it projects a fictional unity onto a variety of different ideas of time and space, thus providing a common surface where there is none.

Contemporary art thus becomes a proxy for the global commons, for the lack of any common ground, temporality, or space.

It is defined by a proliferation of locations, and a lack of accountability. It works by way of major real estate operations transforming cities worldwide as they reorganize urban space. It is even a space of civil wars that trigger art market booms a decade or so later through the redistribution of wealth by warfare. It takes place on servers and by means of fiber optic infrastructure, and whenever public debt miraculously transforms into private wealth. Contemporary art happens when taxpayers are deluded into believing they are bailing out other sovereign states when in fact they are subsidizing international banks that thus get compensated for pushing high-risk debt onto vulnerable nations. Or when this or that regime decides it needs the PR equivalent of a nip and tuck procedure.

But contemporary art also creates new physical spaces that bypass national sovereignty.

Let me give you a contemporary example: freeport art storage.

This is the mother of all freeport art storage spaces: Geneva freeport, a tax-free zone in Geneva that includes parts of an old freight station and an industrial storage building. The free-trade zone takes up the backyard and the fourth floor of the old storage building, so that different jurisdictions run through one and the same building, as the other floors are set outside the freeport zone. A new art storage space was opened last year. Up until only a few years ago, the freeport wasn’t even officially considered part of Switzerland.

This building is rumored to house thousands of Picassos, but no one knows an exact number since documentation is rather opaque. There is little doubt though that its contents could compete with any very large museum.

Let’s assume that this is one of the most important art spaces in the world right now. It is not only not public, but it is also sitting inside a very interesting geography.

From a legal standpoint, freeport art storage spaces are somewhat extraterritorial. Some are located in the transit zones of airports or in tax-free zones. Keller Easterling describes the free zone as a “fenced enclave for warehousing.” It has now become a primary organ of global urbanism copied and pasted to locations worldwide. It is an example of “extrastatecraft,” as Easterling terms it, within a “mongrel form of exception” beyond the laws of the nation-state. In this deregulatory state of exemption, corporations are privileged at the expense of common citizens, “investors” replace taxpayers, and modules supplant buildings:

[Freeports’] attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny … and an array of tax advantages … Goods in freeports are technically in transit, even if in reality the ports are used more and more as permanent homes for accumulated wealth.

The freeport is thus a zone for permanent transit. Although it is fixed, does the freeport also define perpetual ephemerality? Is it simply an extraterritorial zone, or is it also a rogue sector carefully settled for financial profitability?

The freeport contains multiple contradictions: it is a zone of terminal impermanence; it is also a zone of legalized extralegality maintained by nation-states trying to emulate failed states as closely as possible by selectively losing control. Thomas Elsaesser once used the term “constructive instability” to describe the aerodynamic properties of fighter jets that gain decisive advantages by navigating at the brink of system failure. They would more or less “fall” or “fail” in the desired direction. This constructive instability is implemented within nation-states by incorporating zones where they “fail” on purpose. Switzerland, for example, contains “245 open customs warehouses,” enclosing zones of legal and administrative exception. Are this state and others a container for different types of jurisdictions that get applied, or rather do not get applied, in relation to the wealth of corporations or individuals? Does this kind of state become a package for opportunistic statelessness? As Elsaesser pointed out, his whole idea of “constructive instability” originated with a discussion of Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss’s work Der Lauf der Dinge (1987). Here all sorts of things are knocked off balance in celebratory collapse. The film’s glorious motto is: “Am schönsten ist das Gleichgewicht, kurz bevor’s zusammenbricht” (Balance is most beautiful just at the point when it is about to collapse).

Among many other things, freeports also become a zone for duty-free art, a zone where control and failure are calibrated according to “constructive instability” so that things cheerfully hang in a permanently frozen failing balance.



Huge art storage spaces are being created worldwide in what could essentially be called a luxury no man’s land, tax havens where artworks are shuffled around from one storage room to another once they get traded. This is also one of the prime spaces for contemporary art: an offshore or extraterritorial museum. In September 2014, Luxembourg opened its own freeport. The country is not alone in trying to replicate the success of the Geneva freeport: “A freeport that opened at Changi Airport in Singapore in 2010 is already close to full. Monaco has one, too. A planned ‘freeport of culture’ in Beijing would be the world’s largest art-storage facility.” A major player in setting up many of these facilities is the art handling company Natural Le Coultre, run by Swiss national Yves Bouvier.

Freeport art storage facilities are secret museums. Their spatial conditions are reflected in their designs. In contrast to the rather perfunctory Swiss facility, designers stepped up their game at the freeport art storage facility in Singapore:

Designed by Swiss architects, Swiss engineers and Swiss security experts, the 270,000-square-foot facility is part bunker, part gallery. Unlike the free-port facilities in Switzerland, which are staid yet secure warehouses, the Singapore FreePort sought to combine security and style. The lobby, showrooms and furniture were designed by contemporary designers Ron Arad and Johanna Grawunder. A gigantic arcing sculpture by Mr. Arad, titled “Cage sans Frontières,” (Cage Without Borders) spans the entire lobby. Paintings that line the exposed concrete walls lend the facility the air of a gallery. Private rooms and vaults, barricaded by seven-ton doors, line the corridors. Near the lobby, private galleries give collectors a chance to view or show potential buyers their art under museum-quality spotlights. A planned second phase will double the size of the facility to 538,000 square feet. Collectors are picked up by FreePort staff at their plane and whisked by limousine, any time of day or night, to the facility. If the client is packing valuables, an armed escort will be provided.

The title “Cage Without Borders” has a double meaning. It not only means that the cage has no limits, but also that the prison is now everywhere, in an extrastatecraft art withdrawal facility that seeps through the cracks of national sovereignty and establishes its own logistic network. In this ubiquitous prison, rules still apply, though it might be difficult to specify exactly which ones, to whom or what they apply, and how they are implemented. Whatever they are, their grip seems to considerably loosen in inverse proportion to the value of the assets in question. But this construction is not only a device realized in one particular location in 3-D space. It is also basically a stack of juridical, logistical, economic, and data-based operations, a pile of platforms mediating between clouds and users via state laws, communication protocols, corporate standards, etc., that interconnect not only via fiber-optic connections but aviation routes as well.

Freeport art storage is to this “stack” as the national museum traditionally was to the nation. It sits in between countries in pockets of superimposing sovereignties where national jurisdiction has either voluntarily retreated or been demolished. If biennials, art fairs, 3-D renderings of gentrified real estate, starchitect museums decorating various regimes, etc., are the corporate surfaces of these areas, the secret museums are their dark web, their Silk Road into which things disappear, as into an abyss of withdrawal.

Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love

Levin thought that Abramović was definitely encouraging the young woman in some way, using her gaze, and the young woman sat up. Her shoulders straightened. Her head lifted. Her complexion seemed to glow. It was as if the girl knew, wholly, without any artifice, for the first time in her life, that she was beautiful.


"You looked as if you were growing right out of yourself, becoming this strong, courageous thing" The girl stared at Jane and her eyes filled with tears."Really?" she said. "That's exactly how it felt"


You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they're inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things - the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It's no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause.


The pavements convey people and dogs, the subway rumbles and the yellow cabs honk day and night. As in previous decades, people are coming to terms with the folly of their investments and the ineptitude of their government. Wages are low, as are the waistbands of jeans. Thin is fashionable but fat is normal. Living is expensive, and being ill is the most costly business of all. There is a feeling that a chaos of climate, currency, creed and cohabitation is looming in the world. On an individual basis, most people still want to look good and smell nice, have friends, be comfortable, make money, feel love, enjoy sex and not die before their time.

Sven A. Kirsten: Tiki Style

Sven A. Kirsten: Tiki Pop: America Imagines its own Polynesian Paradise

Tiki is the manifestation of exotic visions of island culture borrowed from tales told by American soldiers stationed in the South Pacific during World War II: trees loaded with exotic fruits, sleepy lagoons, white-sand beaches, and gorgeous people wearing grass feathers as they danced half-naked during all-night orgies of food and music. Americans seized these visions and incorporated fantasy into reality: mid-century fashion, popular music, eating and drinking, and even architecture were influenced by the Tiki trend.

David King: Russian Revolutionary Posters

Calvin Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography

Duchamp, who once told William Copley that he had “developed parasitism to a fine art,” was still living on practically nothing then. The rent on his 14th Street studio was still only thirty five dollars a month. He owned one suit, which he brushed and cleaned himself. When he went to spend a weekend with Teeny in Lebanon or Teeny’s friend’s house in Easthampton, where they were often invited during the summer months, he never took a suitcase. He would wear two shirts, one on top of the other, and carry a toothbrush in his jacket pocket.

"The more I live among artists, the more I am convinced that they are fakes from the minute they get to be successful in the smallest way. This means also that all the dogs around the artists are crooks. If you see the combination of fakes and crooks how have you been able to keep some kind of faith (and in what?) Don’t name a few exceptions to justify a milder opinion about the whole “art game”. In the end, a painting is declared good only if it is worth “so much.” It may even be accepted by the “holy” museums. So much for posterity… This will give you an idea of the kind of mood I am in – stirring up the old ideas of disgust. But it is only on account of you. I have lost so much interest (all) in the question that I don’t suffer from it. You still do."

"I wanted the idea to grip the mind of the viewer like a woman's vagina grips a cock."

Marius Hentea: Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

“Always destroy what is in you.”

“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement. “

“Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”

“Thought is made in the mouth.”

“Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.”

And on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhaps
waiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive arms
stretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands to
those of the lover and the loved
passing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeet
the teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done with
impatience to make you leave quickly
man amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealed
cough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slices
globe spotted with mud with leprosy and blood
winter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and sterile
draws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerie
and holds in its hands as if to throw a ball
luminous number your head full of poetry
― Tristan Tzara, L'Homme approximatif

DADAIST DISGUST

Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:

LIFE.

Hans Richter: Dada: Art and Anti-Art

Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer’s birthplace.

Dada marches on, destroying more and more, not in extension but in itself.

Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the point at which Yes and No, and all opposites, meet; not solemnly, in the palaces of human philosophy, but quite simply, at streetcorners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

Dada is useless, like everything else in life.