We are pleased to announce a two-person exhibition with New York-based artists Eric Anglès and Matt Sheridan Smith, curated by Arnd Seibert. The exhibition includes seven individual works, one collaborative work, and two short texts collected by the artists.
Eric Anglès will show four works from his ongoing series of “open editions.” The extent of production of each work is determined solely by demand. Open edition eQX consists of a wire newspaper stand filled with seemingly blank broadsheets. Each sheet of newsprint was in fact run through a printing press with empty plates, collecting only mechanical artifacts and the occasional remain from a previous print run.
These open editions are only sold according to formulas matched to particular exhibition contexts. Another work by Anglès, open edition 2RN, makes the availability and prices of the pieces on display a function of the calendar date. Individual newspapers, however, are always free for the taking.
The work of Matt Sheridan Smith parses out relationships between content, authorial control, and a prescribed form. His practice often revolves around internal or random processes that seemingly produce their own content, or that let external conditions delimit, reconfigure, or even negate any implicit or intended meaning. In his film Untitled, an image of falling snow evocative of television static is subtitled by an online text generator that assembles incoherent blocks of words drawn from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Two random noises attempt to cohere into poetic result.
Untitled (Congratulations) generates sculptural form from external conventions. The work consists of a grid of 38 glass vases, one for each day of the exhibition. Each day an identical bouquet will be delivered and placed in the next adjacent vase. Over the course of the show, the work will complete and decay simultaneously, deferring the arrival of a “finished” work and allowing the temporal and literal parameters of an exhibition to become both the content and the object of the piece.
A CHORD …now the Eroica (Heroic) is in Eb major; the choice of key was no arbitrary decision. In 1803-04 brass instrument design had yet to develop the piston valves, which allow horns to produce the full chromatic range. Due to its static air chamber, this more ancient variety, a simple twisted tube, could only produce a specific set of tones within a fixed harmonic series. One of the keys achievable in these natural brass instruments is that of Eb.
Unlike the natural brass of the time, the strings as well as the winds were able to produce a far deeper harmonic range beyond Eb, so that the thematic development of the piece could have been in any key, with the brass simply supplying accents to color a sense of arms—which was typical of the time. Beethoven went beyond such superficiality; by placing the home key in Eb, the key of the bugle, the symphony is able to discursively wed itself to the historical instrument of heraldry, signal calls and other military communications. With such a parti, the Eroica was situated in the key of battle itself, and once inside, the composer developed this metonym further by cultivating the theme from an analysis of an Eb Major chord— Eroica’s musical “field.”
A chord is a superimposed collection of pitches organized according to the number of distinct pitch classes used in its construction. Since the rise or fall of a pitch’s sonic frequency is what identifies it, a note (that is, a unique pitch) is placed in notation on a vertical axis above or below a bar. With such a relation, the structure of a chord, as all harmonies for that matter, is conceived within a vertical set. Although harmony is up/down, time in music progresses linearly so that the march from the right to the left of the page mirrors the advancement of a piece’s duration. Since most compositions last for more than one second, their scores produce a succession of notes played one after the next, thus creating the melody. When the Eroica is played out, one finds a secret and highly self reflexive program: the main eight-note bugle melody (dah-da-dah-da-da-da-da-dah) is actually the very same eight notes that comprise the first superimposed opening chord (sounded as symbolic blast by the total orchestra) strung out in a horizontal chain. Also of note is that the eight notes of the opening chord are divided in spatial terms with one respective note per section of the orchestra. From the constituents of this one second blast grow the basic set and thematic shape of the next fifteen minutes of musical development, one that often coalesces back into that same opening chord to then dearticulate and recombine its foundations yet again. This compression (and subsequent release) of the theme into just one second, beyond its allusions to explosions, boldness and sonic historicity, is Beethoven’s loudest assertion of sly efficiency. -Adam Kleinman
WILL AND VALUE …in the transition from craftsman to artist from the Late Middle Ages onward, artistic autonomy is linked to a strategy of deferral, refusal, contract-breaking and the correlate assertion of radical individual will.
Artists gain a distinction from craftsmen— from the economic and social organization of the guild—precisely by claiming values that distance their production from those of commerce. This distinction had not previously been clearly defined; in fact both are collapsed in the medieval distance between ars, as encompassing forms of making, and the metaphysics of beauty. It is the growth of urban centers in the Renaissance that necessitated new forms for organizing production, including that of the guild, whose statutes and ordinances strictly controlled the social, ethical, and productive life of both artists and craftsmen.
It was a long fight to break the hegemony of this guild model, and its implicit leveling of both craftsman and inspired artist. The most notable form of resistance, and one of the earliest, is perhaps Brunelleschi’s refusal to pay guild dues in 1434 (he was subsequently thrown in prison). Such acts of refusal, including denying the terms of commissions, turning in commissions late, or asserting ‘inspiration’ over ‘labor time,’ define the beginning of artistic autonomy as we know it. That is, partly through nonproductive subterfuge—from laziness to exercising simple aesthetic choice—artists defined a distance from craft-based production. This is a shift from fulfilling the terms and strictures of a contract, to producing from within the logic of creative inspiration. Yet whether the late emergence of radical individual will as artistic subjectivity is due to a bourgeois opposition to bohemianism, or to the older normative standards that define the social inferiority of the profession (the fact that artists earned money from manual labor), this represents a serious distance between artists, the social body, and its economic structure, and thus reflects how artistic labor had been valued.
Exacerbating the problem of artistic merit were the economics of production. This included the custom of valuing a painting according to size, the time it took to execute, the colors used, or the number and placement of the figures (as in Dutch group portraits), rather than any ideal of artistic quality per se. And instead of receiving payment for work rendered, artists would often exchange paintings for other goods, therefore highlighting the equivalent value of art with other commodities. The Bolognese painter Franceschini, for example, is said to have sold a painting in the 1700s for a box of chocolates, which he then in turn sold for 75 lire. -João Ribas
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10-6pm. Our next exhibition will be Ned Vena’s debut solo exhibition, opening on January 11th.
