𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐓𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐨 𝐁𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐞

Evil, ephemera, anti-ecstasy (Notes / September 24)

Installation view, Leslie Eastman, The Cave, The Flood (2024)

ULTRA has a lot of new subscribers. Welcome.

Jenny Holzer. Consider this a welcome mat.

While a few other pieces are in edit, here’s a selection of notes and draft thoughts.

(If you want more of a classic… try this or this.)

You see, ULTRA was never primarily about creating art content.

It was intended as a set of personal notes, as I explored work from beyond the boundaries of current fine art thinking and practice. Finding the most interesting and uncompromising practitioners and ways of making and telling.

In that sense, it was intended to simply follow an organic series of conversations and experiments; the content would simply be the exhaust fumes of that process.

This is still true, but it has also become about the importance of witnessing. Things are getting turbulent out here. We should keep good notes.

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Evil Art

The Cave, The Flood –  Leslie Eastman (2024) - main image

I experienced this 𝔢𝔳𝔦𝔩 art. Did you?

Not that I would call it that. I mean, I didn’t call it that, someone else did, many imbeciles, though the people who made and showed it seemed lovely…

…though scoundrels often do.

In lived experience, it was… surprisingly, incredibly delicate.

Fabric, and light.

If you know ULTRA, you know I don’t care much for meaning. My primary response to art is sensory aesthetic experience.

I pursue transcendence.

And it turns out the natural home of this sculpture is an image, glowing red and malevolent and hopeful on the feed.

Stripped of context it’s eerie and wan; with a criminal record it’s a bomb, salient in the economy of attention.

In person, its quiet craft tangles in you somehow. It whispers.

People called this propaganda. I don’t notice; if this is propaganda you dislike, then you should make propaganda too, for what you believe. Just make sure your propaganda also has aesthetic grit. Let it rip up polite conversation and press itself into your psyche, and if people don’t have the sense to make their own meaning from it, push their faces into it, and when you make it, in its texture, up close, let it remind you that it too is delicate.

I saw a photo of this work and then experienced it; I read what they said about it and then forgot it. Even now its softness lives in this duality for me. The felt sense, and the image. The reputation and the spirit.

Originally posted on Instagram.

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Tino Sehgal, Kiss (2010).

Grasping the ephemeral

Image capture, the permanent shelf life of the internet, the commoditisation of visual creation through AI… all of these can devalue the transient felt experience of art.

And so ephemeral art has always been a fascination for me. I had the chance to talk to an expert in the topic who directed my curiosity as follows:

Tino Sehgal innovated performance art through maintaining a strong line of transference; the performance of any single piece was carefully passed between artists, in the fashion of a guild. Unbound to any context or location, the sale of a piece, its transmission, even to a gallery, including its contracts, was all completely verbal.

Adam Linder took a different tack; through choreographic services that were leased to galleries and institutions, protecting their commercial continuity (and meaning their value — always a tricky topic with performance art — could increase with time and economic inflation).

More soon… And am always open to more suggestions and clues.

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Anti-ecstasy

I went to a favourite gallery recently.

The work was well-presented, but was all aesthetically barren.

What happened?

Was it bad art?

Or was I a bad audience?

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Artists to follow

Adele Warner (2024)

Paintless painter, Eva Dixon

Animalistic female desire, Lydia Pettit

Classical transhumanism, Sage Morei

Cybermancy, Adele Warner and Gigi Malherbe

Conceptual self-portraiture, Anna Karvounari

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