While teaching Surrealism these last two weeks, I found myself  repeating the phrase “1+1= 3” to explan what arises from juxtapositions of the unexpected and the unconscious. Of course for the Dadaists, it was all about the embrace of pure nonsense, but Wm Burroughs and Brion Gysin were my inspiration, their idea of the third mind via the cut-up, basically. I’ve also been enjoying the darker side of the random lately (big surprise, ha!) as employed by the Random Darknet Shopper,  the botnet project recently launched by the artist collective, !Mediengruppe Bitnik. It seems a ripe moment for such stealthy initiatives in art, and I love that it bought ten pills of ectasy, lol. Anyway, here’s my latest dump, er, I mean, image essay:) Get a cup of tea or a beer, its a loooong one, the longest yet, I think! And there’s weirdly a lot of art in it. ENJOY!

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I came across this 2001 interview I did with Monica Bonvicini in just that way, by accident, and it took me down memory lane. It was for Artforum online, and I came across it googling artists engaged with architecture and gender. Kind of a sweet surprise, as I’d completely forgotten about it (big surprise, ha)! It reminded me of my trip to LA that year, where I saw the show we discussed, though sadly I can’t remember where:(

Here it is as a link, the cut-and-paste below is easier to read, and includes better images, only one of which, sadly, represents the installation I saw. There weren’t anymore online. Its a great work, though, one that made me think again about Bonvicini’s intrepid use of gay S & M imagery at a time when it was still outre or at least before harnesses became a catwalk staple.

Consider it my version of throw back Thursday, and if you want to know more about her work, Phaidon did a great book on the artist, and I threw in a few more pics of other, later work. HAPPY FALL!

Monica Bonvicini talks to Jane Harris about architecture and the iconology of construction workers.

For several years now, Monica Bonvicini has been something of a heckler, taking aim at the granddaddy of all aesthetic boys clubs: architecture. In her 1999 Venice Biennale work, I Believe in the Skin of Things as in That of Women, the Italian-born artist turned Le Corbusier’s well-known comment on its head, vandalizing the facades of a boxlike room she had built and covering the broken walls with graffiti.

Quotations from other famous male architects, such as Auguste Perret and Adolf Loos, were juxtaposed with obscene words and caricatures of naked men holding square sets, masturbating, or gazing at bejeweled women. Eternmale, 2000, installed at the Kunsthaus Glarus, featured slick white chairs and tables designed by Willy Guhl (from bent panels of Eternit, a mixture of cement and cellulose), an electric-blue carpet, ambient music from porno films, a video monitor displaying a burning log, and Picasso’s Tête de Femme (Head of a woman), 1963. A parody of a playboy pad from the 1960s, the room offered the ultimate guy space for chilling out, seducing chicks, and refueling the testosterone.

Bonvicini’s sense of humor is incisive and often chilly, sort of like Bruce Nauman on dry ice. Her themes—the libidinous charge of architectural space and the often sexist presumptions that underlie its theory—are considered with critical distance but are tweaked empirically by her lifestyle. She has spent over a decade dividing her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, two cities very active in the promotion of new architecture, especially the latter, where the buzz about building a new Berlin has been as loud as the cement mixers and drills, not to mention the hoots and hollers of construction workers whom women cross the street to avoid.

These Days Only a Few Men Know What Work Really Means, 1999

For Bonvicini, construction workers are, on the one hand, laborers who toil with no glory; on the other, purveyors of aggressive masculinity. But it is precisely the complex class and gender issues they embody that make them interesting to her. In Fuckeduptimes, 1999, Bonvicini interviewed bricklayers, asking them questions like “What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands?” and hired them to build minimalist structures in limestone.

This past May and June, Bonvicini presented a number of works at the inaugural exhibition of The Project in Los Angeles. One of these, These days only a few men know what work really means, 1999, delved into the contradictory symbolism of construction workers. The piece explores the psychosocial dynamics of advertising billboards, which the artist has overlaid with images of gay sex and quotations taken from the simultaneously public and private world of Internet chat rooms.

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

Jane Harris: Tell me about your piece These days only a few men know what work really means.

Monica Bonvicini: I find it interesting that construction workers are so popular in gay erotica, but, at the same time, are well known for their extreme heterosexual behavior. There are other connotations in the piece as well. When I first showed it at the the Art Basel fair in 1999, I used portable aluminum walls that belonged to the fair, and kind of mocked the idea of an art-fair “statement.” The metaphor of a bunch of construction guys fucking each other (images I found in a gay porno magazine), and the misspelled quotations I took from the Internet, were hard to digest for quite a number of viewers. And then there are the two black-and-white pictures of Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, both of whom are literally wearing their own architecture in the form of models. But as you say, I had been working with construction materials, on construction sites, and with construction workers for a while.

JH: You did a piece at the MIT List Center for which you made an impenetrable structure from chain link, cinder block, and Home Depot wood trellises. Aren’t you working with Home Depot fences for another work, Turning Walls, 2001?

MB: The piece at the MIT group show was Turning Walls—the same piece I am showing in Grenoble.

Monica Bonvicini, Built for Crime, 2006, SculptureCenter, New York, Broken safety glass, bulbs, 5 dimmer packs, lan box, 4′ x 40-1/2

JH: I really like BEDTIMESQUARE, 1999. It’s a realization of a drawing you did some time ago, isn’t it?

MB: Yes. BEDTIMESQUARE was based on a drawing from the series “Smart Quotations,” 1996. The work relates to a piece of Carl Andre’s. Because of the industrial materials and the inflatable mattress in the middle, it is, metaphorically speaking, like sleeping in a Minimal sculpture. The bed, along with the window and the wall, are classical representations of feminine space. You know, the history of the bed is very interesting.
JH: Especially in performance art. Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci all used beds or bedlike structures to draw connections between the body and the institutional frameworks in which it operates. So did Valie Export. What are you working on now?

MB: I just opened the show at Le Magasin in Grenoble. I’m also preparing a public art project for the Aussendienst in Hamburg, which deals again with the language of commercialism and its relation to art. I’m going to produce billboards developed by Scholtz & Friends, one of the biggest advertising companies in Europe, for buses and subway stations in Hamburg.
JH: Will you use construction-worker imagery again?

MB: Maybe. Why not?

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

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I remember being told that morning at school we had to go home early. It was a very sunny day. I stayed with my friend Beth because my mother was working, and watched the clouds herd angrily. We played and played in the days that followed while the adults panicked. I have so many wonderful memories of playing in snow.

My family lived on a court with a giant power plant behind it such that it was wide open fields. So we had all the snow inside the court piled up into a hill that we sled on, played king of the hill, or my favorite, dug tunnels through. And in the back, the fields turned to ice made for a perfect skating rink, place to play ice hockey, though the ski-mobiles, which my mom found obnoxious (along with pools), cut up the ice more and more as they became popular.

Its weird to think about that power plant now knowing its electromagnetic radiation may have contributed to my dad’s health/MS (multiple sclerosis). I picked wild strawberries out of those fields, grew pollywogs, and watched nests of baby rabbits thrive, and I’m mostly ok, lolz, but who knows.

Anyway, glittering and transient like the snow, the new year has arrived, and rather than ignore my citizens, I thought I’d share the random photos on my desktop at the moment before I file them away or delete. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. Consider them a visual stream-of-consciousness, a chance poem of the 21st century.

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Traditional prose is becoming passe, it would seem, reading my student papers, and being plagued by the rampant plagiarism throughout. Though it is entirely understandable. All the information they need is free and there for the taking, and there are no standards (a student recently told me that every source she went to for her Juan Gris research conveyed the same repackaged information. Stealing other people’s writing has become a form of appropriation, and while I do not like it, the counter attitude seems to have grown increasingly lax. We accept it because we expect it. Someone told me I should use one of those search engines that detect plagiarism, and I had to explain you pay for those, and students, especially mine as I teach a lot of computer art as well as fine art students at SVA, probably know how to get around the algorithms they use, anyway.

Off to bed she goes.

(and that’s Joyce Carol Oates on Boxing, a review of Camilo José Vergara,a feature on photographer Vivian Maier, and a review of Barbara Koppel’s documentary film about Muriel Hemmingway and her family, just in case you wondered…)

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(And btw, all my posts are now copyrighted, so you must credit them if you share. And leave a comment, if you please.)

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Jane Harris (me):

Wm. Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955), and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) are two great books I’ve never finished. I found myself absolutely stunned by the brilliance of both, and read quite a bit of each, but they went the way of the bedside stack. I hope to finish The Waves on some long weekend retreat full of unfettered quiet and focus; The Recognitions, I think, one doesn’t have to finish to appreciate, but maybe that’s lame..?

David Wallace-Wells, editor, The Paris Review:

I hate answering that question about what major books I’ve overlooked or put down because the answers always strike me as shows of false humility—I don’t want to imply that I’ve read most of the important stuff, or that I’ve finished most of the big books I’ve started! The era in which one person could ably cover the canon in one lifetime died with John Stuart Mill, I think…”

Barry Schwabsky, poet, art critic:

I am extremely persistent. I can only think of Pynchon, both V and Gravity’s Rainbow. And I’m not sure if they’re great, but let’s say they can’t be pretty good–they are either total failures or great. I did succeed with Vineland and, of course, The Crying of Lot 49. They are definitely not great, just pretty good.

David Shapiro, poet, art critic:

I like the idea another way: What are the books that are themselves unfinished in some sense–and books that were unbuilt, like Milton’s unwritten book on Arthur or the Odes that Frank O’Hara might have written if he had survived into old age And perhaps we could think of poems better left unwritten like Fascist propaganda poems that my mother hated so much–bombing children like a rose was her peak of hatred. Great books for me are now almost completely reread and rereread. One never finishes the Encyclopedia number ll–or the Zohar, poorly translated many times– or Riegl poorly translated 20 times–or Meyer Schapiro, still being edited…Or the conversations unfinished between Meyer Schapiro and myself–and the density of the Koran, which I love; and the lost poems: the lost poems of Rimbaud in Africa; the lost dreams of those who think they can decide how much a reading is complete. “There is never all of any visit.” And there is never all, for example, in the Jewish tradition, of the great sea of the Talmud—Turn it, turn it, they say. Does anyone really think they know the Ramayana without becoming another person…The great paintings poems and frescoes are all inexhaustible and that is why we honor them. If you have only read the Wasteland a few times, read it a l000 times, then memorize it, then recite it to the air and friends…Imagine thinking that one had a complete reading of Hegel’s Phenomonology or the books of Pessoa I notice growing in Portugal’s stores…The greatest anthology the French say is one you read for yourself…I keep hoping for another meeting with Jasper Johns so that my present sense of him is unfinished indeed–If you don’t hear the Grosse Fugue a hundred times, you won’t know it…No music, no poems are ever finished,,,In my childhood I learned the facts of life from an inordinate amount of reading including the Penelope soliloquy…was that completion…Pollock: How do you know you’re finished with a painting; how do you know when naming love is finished? There are many trivial ways to answer Pollock, but at that moment I think he was being a rare pantheistic visionary…I LOVE endless works that cannot be completed except by pedants.,.If you’ve heard all the hundred cantatas of Bach, call me up I have so many questions…Good poets read diligently the infamous best works; great poets read what they need to grow and know….

Jim Lewis, novelist:

Right now, I’m afraid, the most important book I haven’t finished — the one that really looms over me — is the one I’m writing. There are many many books that I haven’t completed reading…yet, and many more that I haven’t started. But I’m not sure that “finishing” is really the point. I agree with Shapiro, mostly: I’ve read a lot of books: I don’t think I’ve finished any but the bad ones.

Luc Sante, writer:

Books that can’t be read sequentially but only dipped into at greater or lesser intervals for refreshment, or at random as fortune-telling props: The Anatomy of Melancholy, Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, The Arcades Project.

Books that might join that category but that I keep thinking I will sit down and read all the way through one day before long: Manuscript Found In Saragossa, The Man Without Qualities.

Books I’ve broken my teeth on time and time again but haven’t given up on quite yet: Pierre or the Ambiguities, Crowds and Power, The Recognitions.

Books I’ve pretended to have read all the way through but actually haven’t: The Confidence Man, the U.S.A. trilogy, Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnameable.

Books I’ve been saving for a rainy day: Lucien Leuwen, Parade’s End.

Books I’ve flat given up on: Auto-da-Fe, Ada, Miss Mackintosh My Darling.

Yawning gaps in my education: the nineteenth-century Britons (besides Dickens), the nineteenth-century Russians (besides Gogol), Henry James.

Susan Orlean, writer:

Tristam Shandy! Have started it ten times! I will never finish it!

Dale Peck, novelist:

Well, after Mr. Shapiro’s comments everything else feels superfluous (sorry, Jim). It’s true, though, that you never finish some books: I’ve taught Howards End six times, and even though I rediscover many passages like old friends, I always find something fresh in it too, something I didn’t even remember being there despite all the times I’ve been through the text and written about it, not to mention the couple of hundred student papers I’ve had to slog through as well.

Somewhere in Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters the music critic Reger derides people who attempt to read the entire oeuvre of this or that great author (I think Nietschze is the writer in question, but wouldn’t swear to it). He says that he himself has only read a single page by any number of great authors, because, if a writer is truly great, then he or she should be able to fill one page with enough material—ideas, emotions, linguistic flourishes, what have you—that it can absorb even an active mind forever. Moreover, Bernhard says (through the mouth of Reger), if the writer is truly great than that single page should represent the whole of his or her artistic expression, so that, if you’ve taken the time to truly read that page, then you’ve in essence read everything by the writer.

I’ve trotted out that excuse to justify my not finishing any number of books, some of which I’ve loved (Against the Day, Tristram Shandy, Poe’s Collected Stories), some of which I haven’t (The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Proust), but of course it doesn’t address one of the main reasons we do finish books, namely, pleasure, and with that in mind I can admit that there are a few unfinished books that hang over my head like a scolding specter: The Thousand Nights and One Night is the one that comes immediately to mind. When I first discovered it a decade ago (in the Mardrus-Mathers translation, which, unlike Richard Burton’s and many others, doesn’t edit out the sex) was one of those revelatory books for me, but my edition runs to four volumes and 3,000 pages, and after making my way through the first two I was worn down, and skipped ahead to read the Sinbad stories and call it a day. I admit it: I got tired. Fidgety. There were so many other books I hadn’t even cracked yet. Plus real life distracted me, even though books—especially books like The Thousand Nights—are supposed to distract us from real life. I guess what I’m saying is that it felt like a failure on my part, and every time I go on vacation I think that that’s the book I would bring with me, if only it weren’t so damn big.

Of course, it’s not always long books that go unfinished. Somehow I’ve never made it all the way through the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, even though it’s barely a hundred pages long. I think in this case it’s just too beautiful, and there’s the knowledge that once it’s done it’s done. There’ll be nothing else to discover—only rediscoveries, which have their own pleasure, but don’t carry that electric thrill of first reading.

Then there are the books I still haven’t even started yet, but that’s a whole other story, and I’ve rambled on long enough.

FROM BOOKFORUM .COM: “On Janestown, the blog where ‘naval-gazing meets the cancan,’Jane Harris has rounded up an eminent group of authors, editors, and critics to write about the great books they haven’t finished reading. And while there are many of the expected difficult authors on the list—Pynchon, Musil, Gaddis, et al—there are also some eloquent quips about reading in general along the way; for instance, critic David Shapiro writes that ‘Good poets read diligently the infamous best works; great poets read what they need to grow and know,’ or our favorite, by novelist Jim Lewis: ‘I’ve read a lot of books: I don’t think I’ve finished any but the bad ones.'”

http://www.bookforum.com/paper/archive/201008

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