Discourses in Contemporary Art Improvisation and the everyday Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction

1. Discourses in Contemporary ArtImprovisation and the everydayNicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction

2. Recommended reading….. • Nicolas Bourriaud – Postproduction, 2001 • Henri Lefebvre – Clearing the Ground, 1961 • Maurice Blanchot – Everyday Speech, 1962 • Lucy Lippard - Escape Attempts, 1973 • Stephen Koch – Stargazer, 1973 • Micel Maffesoli – Walking in the Margins, 2002 • Maurice de Certeau – The Practice of Everyday Life, 1968 • Gregroy Crewsdon, American Standard, 2002 • Ben Higmore, Everyday life and Cultural theory, 2002 • Alison and Peter Smithson, The As Found, 1989 • Gabriel Orozco, On Recent Films, 1998 • All of these texts can be accessed in full on the MAFA blog

3. REPROGRAMMING EXISTING WORKS &INHABITING HISTORICIZED STYLES AND FORMSArmieder sees modern art as a whole as constituting a bygone genre we can play with, the way Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville, John Woo, or Quentin Tarantinotake pleasure in abusing the conventions of film noir.

4. Fresh Acconci
by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy

1995, 45 min, color, sound



5. Light Conical Intersect, 1997, Pierre Huyghe

6. Untitled (portrait of Ross in LA), 1991Felix Gonzalez-Torres175 lbs Fruit Flasher Candy, size variable

7. Scatter Piece, 1968 , Richard Serra

8. Untitled, 2009 , Roger Hiorns

9. Relieved Production Cycle, 2007

Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerpen
26 April - 26 May 2007

10. Pools - Sans Souci (Miami), 2003, 152,5 x 152,5 cm 
Pools - Bel Aire (Miami), 2003, 122 x 122 cm

11. Xavier Veilhan La Foret, 1999

12. Robert Morris, Untitled, felt, dimensions variable, 1968 Xavier Veilhan La Foret, 1999

13. Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho, 1993

14. Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho, 1993

15. Kendell Geers, Shoot, 1998-99

16. All these artistic practices, although formally heterogeneous, have in common the recourse to already produced forms. It is no longer a matter of starting with a "blank slate" or creating meaning on the basis of virgin material but of finding a means of insertion into the innumerable flows of production. The artistic question is no longer: "what can we make that is new?" but "how can we make do with what we have?” Artists today program forms more than they compose them: rather than transfigure a raw element (blank canvas, clay, etc.), they remix available forms and make use of data. It is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. To learn how to use forms, as the artists in question invite us to do, is above all to know how to make them one's own, to inhabit them. Artists actively inhabit cultural and social forms.

17. THE FLEA MARKET: THE DOMINANT ART FORM OF THE NINETIES the dominant visual model is close to the open-air market, the bazaar, the souk, a temporary and nomadic gathering of precarious materials and products of various provenances. Why has the market become the omnipresent referent for contemporary artistic practices? First, it represents a collective form, a disordered, proliferating and endlessly renewed conglomeration that does not depend on the command of a single author: a market is not designed, Secondly, this form (in the case of the flea market) is the locus of a reorganization of past production. Finally, it embodies and makes material the flows and relationships that have tended toward disembodiment with the appearance of online shopping. A flea market, then, is a place where products of multiple provenances converge, waiting for new uses. An old sewing machine can become a kitchen table, an advertising poster from the seventies can serve to decorate a living room. Here, past production is recycled and switches direction.

18. Everything NT$20 (Chaos minimal), 2000, Surasi Kusolwong

19. Euro Blinky Market, 2006, Surasi Kusolwong

20. SUPER DISCOUNT, 1998, Jens Haaning

21. DEEJAYING AND CONTEMPORARY ART: SIMILAR CONFIGURATIONS The pitch control allows one to control the speed of the record: 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon. Angela Bulloch dubs Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky. Pierre Huyghe presents an interview with John Giorno and a film by Andy Warhol side by side.

22. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (One Revolution Per Minute), 1996,

23. Pierre Huyghe, Third Memory, 1999. 
Double projection, beta digital, 9 minutes 46 seconds. 
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

24. What we usually call reality is a montage. But is the one we live in the only possible one? From the same material (the everyday), we can produce different versions of reality. Contemporary art thus presents itself as an alternative editing table that shakes up social forms, reorganizes them, and inserts them into original scenarios. All cultural and social structures represent nothing more than articles of clothing that can be slipped on, objects to be experienced and tested,

25. Navin Rawanchaikul, Shakespeare in Taxi, 2001

26. Navin's Sala, 2008

27. Speech Bubbles - Philippe Parreno (1997)

28. Speech Bubbles - Philippe Parreno (1997)

29. La DS. 1993, Modified Citroën DS, Gabriel Orozco

30. Horses Running Endlessly. 1995, Gabriel Orozco