alienated.net

Following is curator Kaegan Sparks' introduction to the catalogue of TAPEWORM: a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination). For the majority of people in the world who haven't actually seen the book, here's the /ubu editions digital edition of the tapeworm foundry. A full-colour illustrated PDF of the catalogue is attached to the bottom of this page.

The event itself was also well documented. Participant John Carroll posted a Flickr stream of the event, and my own Flickr set of the event is here. "Return to the tapeworm foundry," a discussion with Al Filreis, Kenneth Goldsmith and Kaegan Sparks, appears on the PennSound Podcasts page. Steve McLaughlin, a former Penn student now studying in Amsterdam, built this "correct but unauthorized" edition of the tapeworm foundry. All of it warms the cockles of my seedy little heart.

Penn students and graduates in the exhibition:

Grace Ambrose
Arielle Brousse
John Carroll
Cecilia Corrigan
Ned Eisenberg
Kimberly Eisler
Thomson Guster
Sofie Hodara
Jamie-Lee Josselyn
Joyce Lee
Robin McDowell
Brooke Palmieri
Nick Salvatore
Manya Scheps
Artie Vierkant
Vladimir Zykov

With assistance from James La Marre and Trisha Low. Curated by Kaegan Sparks.

À l'infini

curator's introduction by Kaegan Sparks

John Lennon once told a reporter, "Yoko got ideas like other people have diarrhea. It's like she's got diarrhea of the mind." It's true that ideas came to me like I was tuning into some radio from the sky. So I was always frustrated that I couldn't realize most of my ideas. But by instructionalizing my artwork I was, in effect, delegating the final outcome of it to others … now, I could just write instructions. It freed me.

-– Yoko Ono [1]

The divorce of idea and production was a liberating impulse, an abrupt redefinition of the work of art that cultivated a collaborative spirit and sensitivity to whim—a culture fertile for the birth of Fluxus in the sixties. Reducing art to its mere mention in words suddenly rescued many a discarded brainchild, restoring it to a perpetual, public status as an abstract possibility open to re-appropriation. As Henry Martin articulates in his introduction to George Brecht's Book of the Tumbler on Fire, a "heterospective" compilation of his own instruction works that he called an exhibition in book form:

"Music after all has little place for noise, literature little room for word salad, none of the sciences of the transmission of information are very tolerant to any of the forms of static. Fluxus, with a suitable disorder in its techniques, was a wild-goose chase in everything ephemeral." (p 18)

Likely cousins to this school of thought, Allison Knowles and Yoko Ono carried on the instruction-work vanguard with their respective event scores and instruction paintings, or "exchanged menus in the air." [2]

As with many other hallmarks of modern art, the instruction piece can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp. In 1919 he famously directed his sister to construct her own wedding gift by suspending a geometry text book from a balcony and leaving it to be tousled by the wind. His notes titled "Speculations" included lists of phrases like "buy a dictionary and strike out all the words that can be stricken." Duchamp is said to have commented: "These notes all had something in common: they were always written as an infinitive. 'A l'infinitif' means doing things, finally doing that, which I never did." [3] Like Ono, Duchamp was relieved to shift the creative process from hand to the mind, in all its infinite burgeoning.

In devising the syntax of an exhibition, a curator is allowed a curiously similar capacity to instruct and construct a system of his own. Presaged by Harald Szeemann's 1969 show When Attitudes Become Form, the Großausstellung or "great exhibition" model has transformed curatorial praxis into a generative enterprise. Instead of arranging a preexisting palette, a top-bottom exhibition scheme allows an artist-curator to commission work according to a conceptual recipe. Hans Ulrich Obrist's recent do it! project, an ongoing and expansive exhibition staged online, on television, in catalogue form and museums internationally, reinforces the notion of curator-as-instigator. The artworks constitute an evolving dialogue between artists producing and fulfilling sets of instructions, dispersing the curator's architectural role and making him the activator of an organic system. Any exhibition of new work entails an element of chance in its composite, but here open formulae for individual pieces amplifies the indeterminacy—the synapse from phrase to substance is vast. What to make of an idea? It is precisely this provocative gamble that has made the notion of an embryonic, unrealized piece such a staple of twentieth century conceptual art.

Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry inherits this historical vein in a text faithfully formulaic yet unusually compelling in its fruition: a single rambling, unpunctuated sequence of possible projects, ranging from quirky and absurd to highly ambiguous and allusive, all highly informed by the avant-garde of the twentieth century. tapeworm's fabric is pure prospectus. The mini-premises that comprise it, linked by the pulsating conjunction 'andor,' compose a run-on rhizome of countless other projects.

Some of the schemes are mischievous andor farcical ("compose a love poem called charged particles in which each line consists of a single word ending in the suffix ion...andor take a cow that damien hirst has cut in half and then use it to make a squishier equivalent of a humongous potatoprint"). Some intimate a specific preexisting work, contemporary ("encode it in a helix of dna" -- Christian Bök, Xenotext Experiment), or historical ("drift aimlessly through the streets of the city for days on end" –- Situationist International). Some are more vague, often using "it" without an antecedent, leaving the notion open: "figure out a way to do it without metaphor," "write without your fingers blushing," "eclipse the differences."

TAPEWORM as an exhibition challenges a group of artists to realize Wershler-Henry's language. Like performances of written music, each piece is simply one nuanced rendition of the general prescription. The text is less parameter than catalyst; contributors act not as blindly contracted executors but interpreters. While the thrill of the writing is in its fanciful possibilities, its actualization, in recruiting external energy to flesh out what the author did not, engenders a new dimension. the tapeworm foundry is self-sufficient on the page, and yet, as anyone who's stood before the field of delicate lead traces that comprise a Sol LeWitt wall work can testify, sometimes the impact of conceptual work lies indeed beyond the equation.

Of course, there is some tentative risk involved: is this defective reasoning—is the language medium a crucial constraint? One may doubt whether this conceptual pivot defeats the charge of the source piece, whether the very presence of the works dilutes the reading of their formulae. Will the pieces live up to their terms, or pale compared to the power of their suggestion? In describing do it! and its precursors, Bruce Altshuler highlights the provocation of a viewer's simultaneous "awareness both of what is and what might have been" [4] -- it is precisely this clashing of imagination and product that sustains the exhibition. Furthermore, the work is never finished. As Wershler-Henry's subtitle and looping of text (the last term connects back to the beginning) seem to imply, instruction pieces provide an inexhaustible stimulus -- the creative virus will live on.

Introduction notes

1 Yoko Ono, “Mix a building and the wind: An Interview of Yoko Ono by Hans Ulrich Obrist,”
www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/notes/notes

2 Yoko Ono, “To the Weslyan People,” Grapefruit, unpaginated

3 Bruce Altshuler, “Art by Instruction and the Pre-History of do it!,” e-flux.com

4 Quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Some fragments on the history of do-it-yourself art,” e-flux.com