The Great Refusal: The Neo-Avant-Garde Then and Now

Friday, 21 May, 8:00–10:00 PM

As with our previous treatment of post-modernism, in the following session we shall approach the notion of the neo-avant-garde not merely as a historical designation or a particular theoretical fashion, but as an attitude and orientation towards the present that inspires artistic practices today, practices that position themselves critically and aspire to the legacy of refusal for which the avant-garde stands. Our discussion shall center on the manner in which the contemporary artistic concerns framed by Seth Price’s “Dispersion” and David Joselit’s “Painting Beside Itself” renew the set of problems and issues addressed – according to Hal Foster’s account in “What is Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?” – by artists in the 1960s. These texts shall serve as a springboard to further interrogate what it might mean to refuse to be an apologist for what exists.

In addition to Alexi Kukuljevic and Gabriel Rockhill, New York based artist Sean Paul will also be present to facilitate the discussion.

Download Hal Foster PDF (2.2 MB)

Download David Joselet PDF (280 KB)

Download Seth Price PDF (4.8 MB)

ABOUT THE MACHETE GROUP
The Machete Group organizes workshops, mini-seminars, reading groups, screenings and other events open to the public that have as their general focus the intersection between artistic practice and its theoretical articulation. The guiding proposition of the Machete Group is the claim that practice without theory is empty and theory without practice is blind. The goal of the center is to engender a rigorous and open atmosphere outside a strictly academic context that encourages autodidacticism, a willingness to question all forms of mastery and specialization, and the desire to think critically about artistic practice in an historically, socially and politically astute manner.

Monthly workshops run by Alexi Kukuljevic and Gabriel Rockhill with invited artists and intellectuals organized around select writings and works of art.

Download Machete May 2010 (PDF)

ÉTIENNE DOLET, Margin of Utility: DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL IMAGINARY/ ALEXI KUKULJEVIC, Calming the Rage of the Wounded and Defeated/ AVI ALPERT, Legendary History, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ryan Trecartin/ THEODORE TUCKER, Administering Picasso/ MANYA SCHEPS, Make it Rain on Dem Unpaid Interns

Download Rachel Mason CV

Friday, 14 May, 8-10pm 2010

LIKE THAT WOULD EVER HAPPEN #1:
A Film Series Presented by Hiding Place and Marginal Utility

A CONSTANT SCORE

Please join Hiding Place and Marginal Utility on Friday May 14th for a night of film and music, A Constant Score, organized by Jonathan Thomas. The event will begin at 8pm with a screening of Anthony Stern’s San Francisco (1968), followed by a screening of Pierre Clémenti’s Visa de censure no. X (1967-1975), followed by a set of a live musical interpretation of the early, hand-painted films of Segundo de Chómon by Zugunruhe Sound (Aaron Igler) and Threadsuns (Clint Takeda). All projections are digital, dancing is optional.

Anthony Stern’s San Francisco is one of the key works of the British avant-garde cinema of the late-1960s. It is a 15-minute voyage, set to the Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” that palpitates through the single-frame, hand-held procedures associated in the American underground cinema with figures such as Marie Menken and Jonas Mekas. Stern, first a painter who started in film as an assistant to Peter Whitehead, articulates light and color and motion in the spirit of Lázló Moholy-Nagy (or of Harry Callahan’s photographs of Detroit in the 40s); he stretches and stops and smears film time, treated here as a psychoactive sculptural material.

San Francisco will be followed by a screening of Pierre Clémenti’s Visa de censure no. X (1967-1975, 43 min). Like Stern’s film, Clémenti’s is set to a constant score, in this case progressive rock recorded in 1975 by Ivan Coaquette and others performing as Delired Cameleon Family. Best known as a performer, Clémenti was a traveling intersection of radical artistic energies, committed as he was to the possibilities of communion as a viable artistic method. In this, his first film, composed of parts that were shown at Galerie Claude Givaudan in Paris in 1967 (a gallery that mounted a Duchamp exhibition during the same season), Clémenti plunges his project into the Dionysian arena of chromatic vibrations.

And when it comes to color, Segundo de Chómon was one of the cinema’s most significant pioneers. Working in the magical mode of Georges Méliès during the first decade of the twentieth century, often in collaboration with director Ferdinand Zecca, de Chómon’s work upon film with a brush is transformative, sometimes pyrotechnic. On Friday night his films will be joined by Zugunruhe Sound (Aaron Igler) and Threadsuns (Clint Takeda).

Jonathan Thomas is a two-time alumnus of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, has an MA in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, and teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In addition to exhibiting artworks, he has contributed writings to October, Art Journal, caa.reviews, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. He’s curating a film program for Midway Contemporary Art, in Minneapolis, this June.