Governors Island Art Fair 2014

A series of drawings I created in collaboration with Andrea Lauermannowa are installed at Governors Island Art Fair (Weekends in September, see 4heads.org).

Here's an image of the work in progress:

Exhibition at Montalvo

I have an artwork in the exhibition L O V E : CREATIVITY, CONNECTION, COMMUNITY at Montalvo Arts Center. It was created in collaboration with Andrea Lauermannowa during my residency at Montalvo.

You can see more of my artwork at my website, www.jonmeyer.com.

The clinamen

The question is never if but rather where to locate the clinamen. In science, they tinkle in the background noise of curled up dimensions and bark at in the incompleteness of set theory. They dance in Al-jazari's Islamic clockwork machines, serving us drinks and divine fortune at the same time. Jarry rides with an invisible tribe of them, while composing imaginary plays about the clinamen who haunt Kant's transcendental. Another tribe causes Derrida to trip on the gap between words. When Plato looks over his shoulder in his cave, a surprised clinamen waves back. Old Descartes gets his fix through his pinneal gland. Meanwhile when Christians praise the blinding wisdom of God, the clinamen chortle and say he is one of us, bien sûr. Afterwards they amble away to lurk in Heidegger's impenetrable shadowy presence. Marx is overcome by the clinamen while measuring labour against labour-power. And Nietzsche? The clinamen are nothing if not tragedy! Wilde fell in love with a bellicose clinaman who previously put Rousseau in chains. In the future Neo's love of Trinity is clinamenical, this from an oracle who knows the clinamen well. Butler relates her visits with the clinawomen who live within the contingent possibilities of structure, but what will really bake your noodle is when Irigaray simultaneously disappears and births a clina Goddess. Impressed by this, Harraway invents the clinaborg. Art has clinamen outposts too, and Barthe's punctum and Krauss's negative condition of sculpture are favorite spots. Clement shouts out that Pollock paints portraits of them, though few these days listen. Epicurus no doubt would delight in all this, and award a special prize to Meillasoux for absolutizing the clinamen of hyperchaos, just before winking into nonexistence.

Nested parens to make Knuth proud

America in the 1930s-40s

Commuters in Lowell, Mass, 1941.

The US FSA black and white photos are well known, but personally I love this old and quixotic photo set of color photos from the 1930s-40s.

Twitter journalism

I am irritated by mainstream newspapers' adoption of Twitter as their primary source for quotes. You find journalists peppering their articles with stuff like this:

“I live and breathe this stuff, and I’m bored,” she wrote on Twitter.

How is this good journalism? We can all type queries into a search box and pull empty quotes like this. But how does this tell us anything new? Similarly, quoting measurements of Internet hit counts or post frequencies does not turn those numbers into real statistics. What happened to in-depth journalism? This used to involve research, interviews and analysis, so as to present newsworthy events along with carefully drawn insights and commentary. No longer. "For the record" is being replaced by "according to Google". Hey, I should post that to my twitter feed.

Update: Data from Pew research shows that, in the case of TV news, news reportage has dramatically dropped in favor of opinion shows.

Art and activism in Bushwick

Autonomous Organization is opening a free space that will be a resource center for sharing and creative economies in Bushwick. They have started a Kickstarter campaign to help raise money for the space. Worth checking out.

Smashed at LoBe

I have a piece in the group show Smashed, at LoBe, Berlin.

New chains

I saw a poster on the wall with this quote:

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains -- Rosa Luxemburg.

Later the same day I went to a lecture where Nietzsche was quoted:

"Free will" really means nothing more than the absence of feeling of new chains. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 1880.

Strange coincidence.

Pecha Kucha Berlin

I am giving a short talk at Berlin's Pecha Kucha night. What is Pecha Kucha? Around 200 people come to hear between 10 and 15 short talks. Every talk is the same format: 20 images, 20 seconds per image, 6 minutes 40 seconds. The talks cover a range of topics and are in English and German. I will give an overview of some of my research for my PhD.

Pecha Kucha #27
Festsaal Kreuzberg
Skalitzer Str. 130 • 10999 Berlin,
Einlass / Beginn: 19:30h / 20:20h,
Eintritt / Entrance: 6 Euro.

Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch is divisive. Some adore her work. Others reject it as sexist, classist, and cruel (or "torture" as Joan Acocella states in her New Yorker review). For me, if cruelty is present in Pina's work, it is there in an Artaudean sense, not a literal one (by the same token, would these people likewise say Monty Python is about torture and humiliation?). Watching Wim Wenders personally introduce his film, and listening to the interviews in the film, it is striking how Pina is surrounded by love. In one moving moment, a dancer points out (I'm paraphrasing) that Pina had watched her for more hours than her own parents had... who would watch her now? For me, it is Bausch's watchfulness that informs her work, not any desire to depict torture.

Of Wender's film I had mixed feelings. The way the interview segments cut into the dance segments often left me frustrated. Some of the interviews appear to be included for inclusiveness' sake, rather than because they inform us about a new aspect of Pina's life. I didn't like the 3D: I would have preferred to see the images brighter and clearer and without the reflections of smeary plastic glasses in front of my face. And where Pina's performances were peppered with textual elements, these were largely missing from Wender's tribute. All this said, I left the film with the same sense I have when I went to see Pina at BAM. Yes, I remain very resolutely a Pina fan.

All

What most impressed me about Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Guggenheim was the way it visually held together. It is remarkable how consistent Cattelan was over the years. Where other artists increase their showyness with their fame, Cattelan's work retains a certain scale of production throughout, speaking of a level of discipline that rubs against his reputation as a prankster. It was a forceful and utterly convincing show. And we must wonder whether 'All' is all, or if the title is just another prank. Both make sense - and this, really, is the point.

Access vs diversity in bookshops

I recently visited two of my favorite bookshops in New York, St Marks and the Shakespeare & Co on Broadway. Both shops used to have great philosophy sections. Now they have adopted the approach of presenting larger format books, and turning many of the books face-out. Consequently they now they carry a far smaller selection, barely anything beyond the top-of-the-pops. They've eliminated the one reason why I love going to bookshops: when you search for a specific title, you often find lesser-known works shelved nearby. Now, rather than a dozen books on a particular topic, the shelf only displays two or three. The bookshops appear to have ceded diversity to the Internet, and focused instead on the appearance of ease of access. It is a massive loss for readers.

LoBe - London Berlin Art Kunst

I have been selected by curator Elke Falat to be a resident at LoBe. Founded by Olivia Reynolds, LoBe is project space and gallery in Wedding, Berlin. I will be resident for the month of February, collaborating with artist Ulrike Mohr. We will create artworks that responds to the space, to each other, and to the Berlin context. There will be a gallery opening and dinner at the end of the February to celebrate the resulting artworks, which will be exhibited for three weeks during March.

For images of past exhibitions at LoBe, see their Flickr Stream.

Berlin

I've relocated to Berlin. I'll be based in Berlin while I am conducting research on my practice-based Art PhD. It looks likely that I'll be staying somewhere in Wedding, but I'm still finalizing details. For now I've rented a studio in Moabit. So cool to get back to studio time.

Portal - Process of Performance

My artwork is included in Portal - Process of Performance at the Institute for Contemporary Art Newtown (I.C.A.N), Sydney, from Aug 12 - 28.

The exhibition is curated by Stephen Truax and organized by Janis Ferberg. There are six artists in the exhibition: Colby Bird, Jon Meyer, Kevin Regan, Jason Varone, Jody Wood and Mikel Bisbee-Durlam.

Stephen Truax writes:

"Process of Performance will present five works by six artists: a VHS tape recording Colby Bird’s formal experimentation’s in sculpture in his studio, edited on the same TV-VCR on which it is presented; Jon Meyer’s performative drawing Eight hours drawing at one inch per hour with left and right hand, 2011, a drawing which was created with assistance from a unique software program the artist developed; Kevin Regan’s home-made video, widely available and presented in the gallery on YouTube, The Conversion of St. Paul, 2007, shows the artist passing out and waking up three minutes later after taking Salvia Divinorum, while his wife supervises and cleans the kitchen in the background; an illustration of a cloud, hand-painted on the wall, will rain Twitter feeds in Jason Varone’s microprojection Inclement Weather, 2010; Jody Wood and Mikel Bisbee-Durlam present a two-screen video documenting their performance of dragging one another through the streets of Bushwick, and within the controlled environment of a studio, while covered in concrete.

Representing both a unique cross-section of the wide variety of artists’ practices in Brooklyn today – with a strong focus on the artist-rich neighborhood of Bushwick – and providing an intimate view into their quotidian lives, Process of Performance serves as a snapshot into the incredible creative energy present in Brooklyn now, and reveals how even the most traditional artist is exposed to the world via the digital space. Each work is strongly connected to digital technology, and how that technology has been employed by these artists to address’s the archetype of the artist, and how the artist engages in performance in every aspect of their practice. – ST"

Going way up

My friend Sam Cuttriss and I just completed an enduro motorcycle trip from San Francisco to the Colorado rocky mountains and back. We rode 1,200 miles on dirt roads and trails, and travelled a total of 4,000 miles. A complete trip report with dozens of images is posted at AdvTrail.com.

Spiral Jetty

I made a day trip to visit Robert Smithson's 1970 earthwork sculpture, Spiral Jetty. The jetty is sometimes fully exposed. During my visit it was partially submerged in water. See link for more images.

My friends told me Spiral Jetty was down a rough narrow road, a little hard to find, with four-wheel drive highly recommended. Exciting! However, some folks have decided to "improve" the site, extending the gravel road all the way to the end and plonking a large car park literally a hundred feet from the sculpture. eliminating any sense of discovery. Smithson would have hated this. Why do institutions have to sanitize everything?

Venice Lido

On the Lido

This year I am staying in a small hotel on the Lido in Venice. It smells of jasmine, is away from the crowds, two stops on the vaporetto from the biennale, and best of all it has a small beach. At the end of each day I come back to the hotel, drop my bags, grab a towel, and walk to the beach. After a swim and a run I have a beer at the surf-bar on the beach, then return, change into dinner clothes and walk to a restaurant. The sun is out till around 7.30 so its a perfect way to end the day. My hotel is Villa Della Palme. Its fairly basic, reasonably quiet, clean, and a hundred euros a night for a double room. Time for a spritz!

The crowds in Venice

Venice Biennale 2011

Start the morning with a Caffe del Doge. It *is* worth hunting for. Almost up there with Blue Bottle coffee in San Francisco!

Crowding onto the morning vaporetto.

For me the most lasting impression from the Venice Biennale 2011 is Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's American pavilion, “Gloria”. It was a refreshing encounter. Most of the works in the pavilion resonate, and together they make a provocative exhibition. The tank piece in particular is great to talk about, look at, listen to… I want one.

Recurring themes this year: Heavy closed-loop industrial machinery (French, American, Israeli, Slovenian & Turkish pavilions); Anything plugged in; Performance everywhere but never when I was there; oh, and lots and lots of talking-head video - so much so that, at Marco Polo airport, I mistook the instructional video at the security gate for yet another artwork.

Missing this year: Any serious attempts to recuperate painting, with the exception of Seth Price’s paintings in the Central pavilion.

Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion. Maximal restraint. And really good legs. The tank piece is also theirs (see the video I posted)

Live performance in Allora & Calzadilla's American Pavilion

Impressions

Below are the words I jotted down for each pavilion as I went around – Its fleeting, unedited and flippant.

Giardini

Swiss crystal excess. Someone gave Hirschorn too much money.

Denmark. “Speech matters”. Not.

Nordic / Eriksson. Oh D&E where are you now?

Tank. Brilliant.

Venuzuela. Bassim pop tarts.

Russia. Monastryski mystery and substance, served dry.

Japan / Tabaimo. Dreamy animations with mirrors.

Korea / Yong Baek. Flower gun disaster.

Germany / Schlingensief. Egomania confronts blasphemy. I love this.

Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion - I liked the little touches, like changing the label from Germania to Egomania, and adding a 'Kino' grafitti tag on the side.

German pavilion - Christoph Schlingensief's installation is astounding.

Another view of the Christoph Schlingensief's German pavilion

Canada / Shearer. Not for me.

Australia / Armanious. Trying too hard.

Britain / Nelson. Theme park made of dust.

France / Boltanski. Trumped by the tank.

Dutch. Opera without the melodrama.

Spain. “The inadequate”. Just so.

Israel / Landau. Didactic rises to new levels and goes underground.

Poland, Egypt, Romania. Worthy, but the Romanian’s grafitti should have been applied to all three.

Romanian Pavilion (Adrian Bojenoiu, Alexandru Niculescu). The 'why not' reasons were better than the 'why' reasons on the other wall, and better than what was inside.

Central pavilion

A slightly disheveled anti-statement that made Catelan’s stuffed pigeons the best statement of all. Oh. and Nathaniel Mellors videos.

Minimalism meets relational aethetics. Norma Jeane, #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17…) (2011), colored plasticine (Central pavilion).

Arsenale

After the Giardini, on to the Arsenale. Song Dong's mirrored chinese closet doors were very Wong Kar-Wai .

Song’s cupboards are a great start. Marclay’s Clock is a great end. Turel’s space glows in the middle, though for me it was ruined by the attendant who insisted on standing right at the front, thereby destroying the effect (apparently someone had fallen off the edge).

A picture of my iPhone with Marclay's "The Clock" in the background. This was a perfect capstone to the Arsenale. I watched for about half an hour, I could have stayed all day.

Elsewhere - Picks:

Hirst deconstructed by Wu Rigen, in the Future Pass exhibit (17 on the maps). It was a fun pavilion if you like anime.

Nicole Knauer's cloud in the Future Pass pavilion.

Irwin Wurm's house, next to the bridge at Academia. The large guy with a blue top is unfortunately not part of the exhibit.

Yes, that is a block of watermelon on the floor. (Wilfredo Prieto, Future Generation Art Prize pavilion).

Karla Black, Scottish Pavilion. It is much better than it photographs.

Melanie Smith's Mexian pavilion showed incredible scope.

Nato a Venezia is thought provoking and the setting is cool. Talk to the gallery guides upstairs to learn more about this exhibit.

Also notable: Iraq / Abidin’s light saber battle. And Haiti by the waterfront: Glad to see them here.