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Idiom
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Fair Warning: Interview with AA Bronson
by Idiom November 4, 2010
I especially like the fact that a book is inexpensive and in multiple form, and that it can be held in libraries and schools, where large numbers of people can see it on an ongoing basis; while the artwork is often purchased and exhibited privately, in someone’s home, or even put into storage. To my mind both practices have their purpose. General Idea used to describe it like this: a car can be exhibited in a showroom, but ultimately it’s life is out on the streets.
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Without Anxiety: Interview with Roger White
by Idiom October 29, 2010
I tend to look at something and wonder what it would look like painted. And I’ve definitely observed that, as the work changes, I notice different aspects of things. I think that when an art practice is running smoothly, you can get into a nice reciprocity between seeing things differently and making different things, where it’s hard to say what’s affecting what. But it’s by no means a natural or unconscious process: there’s a lot of striving, plotting, and worrying.
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Whatever Future: Interview with Alexander R. Galloway
by Idiom October 25, 2010
Tiqqun does not follow the traditional identity of the left.
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the truest that I have: Interview with Gedi Sibony
by Idiom October 20, 2010
at the moment for me the issue is separating. how they come in? all ways. how many lengths of time it takes? all lengths. i mean they share those lengths with the lengths we experience as we live. For the making of a show I have to do it with the truest that I have, which means afterwards leaving me without them. The ledge, the impossible thought or feeling is that it cannot take place again in such a direct and deep and pure way.
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No More Séances: Interview with Red Channels
by Idiom October 18, 2010
Most artists or curators present content, but don’t create a space for the audience to then respond to that content. The same goes for political presentation, in the form of speeches or lectures or panels. This one-sided presentation presupposes quietus, as you say, and we question the extent to which its audience can then commit to its politics. You might see participation in classrooms or reading groups, but these are contained, private exchanges. We’re after something both public and participatory. This is the rehearsal for revolution.
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Ubiquitous Economies, Free Kevins: Interview with Laurel Ptak
by Idiom October 14, 2010
In ‘Hackers’ there is a similar dynamic but here its the portrayal of the constant threat of the computer virus. Self-replicating, mutating, evolving, exponential, and nodal, the virus threatens information as well as maps new forms of spatiality mirrored by the internet and globalization. It acknowledges, exploits, and heightens fear around the porous and deterritorialized boundaries of the network. The computer virus can never be stopped, it can only be treated. It hovers as an invisible and ever-present threat, and as a type of surveillance, constantly instructing human behavior. Even on the level of language, the computer virus’ underpinnings are of course enormously coded, implicating the body and connoting sickness, illness and death. The term itself was notably coined in the early ’80s in parallel with the unfolding AIDS crisis.
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Restricted Spaces: Interview with Leonard Cassuto
by Idiom October 5, 2010
My idea all along has been to use first my courses and now the exhibition to refract the idea of captivity: that is, to break it up and show some of its different possibilities–such as captivity in parenthood, childhood, disability, love and social relationships, employment—in juxtaposition with each other so that we might see the applicability of the idea of captivity to a vast range of human experience, not just the case of someone who’s being physically restrained by someone else.
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Double Deceptions: Interview with Jasmin Tsou
by Idiom September 9, 2010
In Chromophobia, David Batchelor’s cultural history of color, he writes that “Western philosophy is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, or basis and superstructure, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial…if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface…How things appear is one thing; how things appear to appear is another.”
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Art and Pedgogy: Interview with Pablo Helguera
by Idiom August 24, 2010
I believe that institutions are nothing but collections of individuals. If you would agree with that, then you would need to agree that because one can be critical with oneself, of course there could be criticality within institutions too. It’s true that one lacks perspective, but at the same time internal debate is key to informing our decisions–which also applies to individuals and institutions. Otherwise we would just behave erratically being told what to do by a wide random group of opinions.
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Hard Data and Hindsight: Interview with R. Luke DuBois
by Idiom August 5, 2010
By training, I’m a composer, and so I have a different understanding of how information, technology, and politics intersect. Music is the original ‘information art’, in that at its essence music is a stream of abstract information ‘sonified’ through performance. Similarly, unless you’re singing music you’ve improvised, a capella, unamplified, and outdoors, you’re using technology to make music. Notation is literacy, spaces are architecture, instrument design, amplification, recording, broadcast: all are technology. And music, in its traditional role as a ubiquitous, ancillary art form (you usually appreciate music as an accompaniment to something else), is inherently political, as the tasks to which music are coupled infuse it with a contextual agency and subtext that you really can’t avoid.
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