The Perfect Object: Circulating the Fine Art Adoption Network (article from the Brooklyn Rail)

Art objects have long been the centerpiece of many a tale of intrigue. There are innumerable stories replete with counterfeiting, stealing, high stakes trading, and political maneuvering à la the Barnes Collection, any one of which could (if it hasn’t already) be made into a fast-paced Hollywood blockbuster.

This is not one of those.

It’s an account of a network of people moving through never-before-codified social interactions in a way that doesn’t harm anyone, isn’t meant to disrupt the market, and doesn’t lay claims to a grounding in theory, Marxist or otherwise (though ideas like Marcel Mauss’s gift economy and Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural heritage have been applied to the organization post-creation). This is the Fine Art Adoption Network (F.A.A.N.): a quiet, consistent online space where a less moneyed collector such as myself can use her love of art as a kind of currency, and an artist who wishes to engage in a more wholesome type of exchange can find pleasure in gifting a select work. At least, that’s one experience of it. Every interaction is different. Institutions and more traditional collectors also frequent the site—it’s really up to the individual artists to choose who, if anyone, gets to own their work, and why.

The Brooklyn-based painter Adam Simon started F.A.A.N. in 2006, after receiving financial backing from the then-new commissions program at Art in General. Simon prefers to look at the network not as some sort of intentional social sculpture but as a natural outgrowth of his work as a painter. The idea that this kind of social project is historically at odds with an object-oriented studio practice seems to weigh on him, but the ease with which F.A.A.N. fits into today’s art world reflects the waning ghettoization of forms. In a sense, it is the perfect performance document. By imbuing art objects with the essence of a progressive social experiment and performative life event, an object transcends, even further, the materials with which it was created.

Simon doesn’t talk in these grandiose terms, however. He’s pragmatic, down-to-earth, with the kind of intelligence that naturally sorts through all the muddled motivations and systematic pitfalls in a place like the art world and comes up with solutions that can only be defined with words like “simple” and “good.” There have been and are highly visible artists participating in F.A.A.N. (notably Amy Sillman, who set a precedent by refusing a major museum’s bid for adoption in favor of an artist named Peter Ferko, who runs the nonprofit Artists Unite and who wrote to her: “I sleep. I dream of heads moving across a canvas. One is obscured by an orange square…”) But there are also a lot of good artists on F.A.A.N. (as there are in Brooklyn and all over the world) who, as Simon remarks, “will never really sell a lot of work and never really show up in the history books.” It occurred to him at some point, that “when they look back on their lives, they’re going to see their epiphanies in the studio and they will have some objects that they think are really great, but they’re also going to look back on a lot of social interaction—that’s a really big part of being an artist. It’s a lot of talking.” A big part of F.A.A.N. is facilitating a certain kind of heavily invested art talk—whetted by the potential of actual art ownership—between artists and a diversified, less exclusive set of collectors.

Screen shot with snap shots. Cover image for Adam Simon’s book Fine Art Adoption Network, published by Art in General. Photo by Adam Simon.

When I went to Nancy Brett’s top floor SoHo loft one morning to pick up the painting that I had requested for “adoption” on F.A.A.N. via an email exchange with the artist, natural light was flooding the large space; the works on the white studio walls had me a bit stunned. I knew before I arrived that I liked her abstract, organically grid-based paintings, but my immediate and emotional attachment to her body of work surprised me. The name of the network, like the language many collectors use to describe their art pieces—“members of my family,” etc.—started to make a little more sense.

Brett and I had what felt like a very delicate, respectful conversation about the process as we acted it out. She described how nice it was to hear someone directly saying that not only did she like the work, but that she wanted to have it in her life: “Because that’s what I would hope for my work. Since it’s not going to be in my life anymore, that it would be somewhere where it would be appreciated. I think you assume that when something is collected in a gallery, but you don’t really know what someone’s reason for collecting it is. You don’t know if they want to have it in their life, which is the biggest commitment of all, much more than the expense of it. Incorporating it into your mentality, your consciousness; it changes your life in some way.” We also talked about New York and Los Angeles, and what it means to be a parent, an artist, and a woman. I told her I liked her shoes. We talked about how great the idea of veganism is, but how difficult it is never to eat cheese. She carefully wrapped up the painting, and gave it to me.

Simon tends to describe the origins of F.A.A.N. as a solution to a storage problem: too much good art in the world without a useful enough system of distribution in place. He refers to the vault that Al Held had carved in the side of a mountain to hold all the paintings he had in his possession at the end of his life: “Even if you’re successful, you still accumulate a lot of objects.” And he self-deprecatingly exaggerates his anxieties about the burden his own paintings may become for his son some day. But F.A.A.N. is not about moving large volumes of work; it was created with a huge respect for each individual object, and the process takes time, energy, and real emotional investment for all parties involved. It’s not a process that makes sense in the (art) world as we know it, but maybe we’re all just unnaturally accustomed to bureaucracy, competition, and padlocked doors. When I left Brett’s studio that day, painting in hand, the air just beginning to taste crisp in that late morning, mid-September New York way, I felt lighter for my new possession, and pleasantly, hopefully, confused.

Original article HERE

A Soft Space, Label Free - Review of Raimund Hoghe in the Brooklyn Rail

How easily a display of difference can fall into becoming—or at least appearing—exploitative at one extreme, and didactic at the other. The space in between those equally dangerous poles, though, holds great promise; one fulfilled by the tender, quietly physical depictions of self and other by Raimund Hoghe and Faustin Linyekula. Though their evening length performance Sans-titre (Untitled) at Dance Theater Workshop was by no means a complete extension of this perfect moment, the highly selected, minimal movements and actions these men engaged in were mostly spot on. Hoghe has talked in the past about his works and their attention to unusual forms of beauty—he shows variations on the human figure, not to shock or offend, but rather to open us up to new expressions of human fragility as achingly, pleasingly aesthetic. It’s all a bit much to take in emotionally: the balance comes from extra slow pacing and highly edited small, precise physical action.

Hoghe has an untraditional body for a performer, and as the show begins he gives the audience time to get to know this body and get used to him in shared space. He walks slowly, along with Linyekula, across the stage, covering most of the area before any more real action happens. This isn’t the first dance piece to ever start slowly and methodically, but the particular kind of slowness experienced here is distinct. It’s not boring, though I’m sure more than one mind wandered a bit. But this kind of individual mental wandering seems built into the experience, or at least doesn’t seem to be in direct opposition to it. Hoghe lines the perimeter of the stage with pieces of white printer paper and it is a beautiful ritual; it is pure visual pleasure caught up with the difficulty his body has bending over to drop the paper down and Linyekula’s less repetitive actions that happen simultaneously inside the in-progress frame.

After introducing us to his small body and prominently curved spine through his humble parade around the space, Hoghe’s participation stays peripheral for much of the first half of the show. He stands with his back to the audience and then lays face up for a while in the back-center of the space. Linyekula approaches a pile of small, smooth rocks at the front of the stage and, at first, lines them up from the front to the back of the stage in an action that recalls Hoghe’s white paper placements. He moves, bending at the waist and dropping his head’s weight toward the ground, swaying with control and grace, yet charged with animal-like momentum. He rises onto his toes, but his legs curve as if he has no knees. Once he removes his shirt, we can see this body as a specimen of ideal anatomy; we see every muscle and bone. When he moves to the front of the stage after gathering the stones, we can see his breath and the subtle and not-so-subtle flexing of his spine even more clearly.

The two performers are meant to represent different cultures, but more basically than that, they are there as individuals in their quite obviously different physical forms. The politics of cultural representation come from Hoghe’s European perspective, and though I was not personally offended by the depiction of an African body within the aestheticized European frame, the point of view is less racially sensitive than we’re used to in progressive dance in this country. It takes a certain amount of belief in the intentions of the artist here, and an acceptance of his use of difference to create new beauty from forms that are both archetypal and original. It’s tricky, with works like these we’re always left thinking about whose image is not seen: a woman with a deformity, for example, or the truly emancipated black male form. Total inclusiveness, however, is not a requirement for art to hold great meaning, to be truly good, or to be beautiful.

The essence of each performer’s movement becomes representative of them; there is little in the way of virtuosic dance, though it is more than obvious that Linyekula is capable of technical perfection in many forms. His body is shown to be incredible, and a strong contrast to Hoghe, but not “better,” necessarily. At one point, Hoghe takes off his shirt, lies down on his belly, and Linyekula places stones along his curved spine. Small, unexplainable movements that follow this—sliding the rocks along the floor away from him, for example—contain all the emotion of the most dramatic acting or danced movement. Every small action is charged. You wait for it a long time, past the point of interest even, and then still feel it quite deeply. Linyekula places his arm around Hoghe and Hoghe returns the gesture; they walk slowly to the front of the stage and then simply look at the audience. They have done little, but contained a lot in a relatively short period of time: moments of transcendence, the occasional drop in momentum, nakedness, imperfection, and one man’s sensitive vision of a softer, more tender humanity.

Original article online HERE

Light and Movement in a Bushwick Loft- Review of Anna Sperber in The Brooklyn Rail

It is possible for site specificity to take over a performance to such an extent that an awareness of place becomes, in a sense, the subject of the work itself. There was no denying the Bushwick-ness of Anna Sperber’s Naomi, performed the evenings of September 9 – 11. It was shown in her loft space called Brazil, a small room with an exotic name that floats precariously above Flushing Avenue as if continuous with the night sky. Bushwick itself felt its most romantic from this vantage point; it is a place that at times feels alive and raw, a reincarnation of some murky image our collective memory holds of an early ’80s SoHo. But there is more remoteness here: it is an extremity far enough away from the source of the city’s pulse to be cold in moments, even depressing.

There must have been less than 20 chairs in the audience, pushed as far up against the back wall as possible and facing a many-windowed corner. The dance started with looking outward; in the dark, dancers walked the perimeter of the space and then paused to gaze stoically or longingly out the windows. We are here, they acknowledged.

Later in the performance, individual dancers spent some time ignoring the windows and either turning and balancing independently in the center of the room or standing right up to the audience and looking beyond us, as if still gazing out of a window. But the dancers kept coming back to the open borders of this loft that seemed at once claustrophobic and dangerously open. A small room with big windows set high in the sky: limbs dangled outside; heads leaned out in unison; a stage light shone onto a building across the street.

Other lights were at play inside, both soft and sharp; sometimes it was just the streetlights outside in this industrial stretch of city that naturally lit the small space. Constant shifting had the piece crossing back and forth over the line between convincingly high dramatics and trying too hard. If the site-specificity was the star of the show, Joe Levasseur’s collaboration with Sperber on the lighting provided good enough support.

In danced movement, there was indeed a slow build from pedestrian movements into a progression of disparate solos and group actions that stayed miraculously disconnected from each other in a space that should have made any real distance impossible. One dancer writhed and twisted on the floor, others played with costumes, putting on and then loudly dropping to the floor their heavy, bejeweled, cropped jackets. The girl in me delighted at the sparkle of these garments in the changing lightscape. There were many moments of beauty, but amidst them, I had the nagging sense that one more edit might have brought these charged particles into something more cohesive, secure, and meaningful.

Original article online HERE