http://bemydemon.org/choons
Unitednationsplaza
is an art school as an exhibition and an exhibition as a free university.
Poser.
"Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.unitednationsplaza is organized by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Tirdad Zolghadr."
Not a new practice of mine, I 'accidentally' bought a ticket to the inaugural weekend for unp. I arrived in Berlin on Friday morning and left on Monday morning of the same weekend. My experience at the conference was confusing and uncomfortable at moments but I am glad to have witnessed whatever it was.
UNP is in a white 3/4 floor building- an awkward appendage added last minute to the back of a grocery store in eastern Berlin among the towering monsters of buildings that stand up to represent the look and feel of communist mass housing. It looks like Moscow.
And there we were, sitting on white boxes and bleachers, a stadium of homogenous semi-European art groupies. I sat behind Liam Gillick once and eventually adapted myself to his comb over. I like Liam Gillick. He is charismatic and humorous. I think his success has come from his ability to communicate his ideas in a light hearted, sometimes condescending way. This way, we are lured into the jibberish and included in large metaphors (Construcción de Uno) all the while knowing that we are participating in his dialogue. He is a professional art cowboy.
NOTES TAKEN AT UNPWe are post-
studio
After studio,
They drink?
Post-utopian
After nowhere,
They drink?
This came out of a conversation I had with Liz, who I met on the airplane going to Berlin who was also attending unp. She said all the artists involved in unp were post studio sociopath alcoholics. She might have used different adjectives.
I found the lack of organization and structure of the 'meetings' or 'panels' as nothing was very prompt and there was not enough space to accomodate the audience. I found myself thinking that if this THING had been held at THE WHITNEY it would have gotten somewhere by now.
On Saturday I started to jot things down. Liam Gillick was talking about his Construction of One project.
I liked the ideas he spoke about a 'local' sized group working together to complete a product- in his example, a car. He spoke of a class of middle men, creating discourse about what is going on that has been placed in the process to extend the timeframe of the 'project'.
I was interested in the ideas he had about the function or disfunction of the artist. That we are architects of our own construction which is our own culture and sociological systems.
FAILURE (of current 'culture producers')
articulacy- problem. artist is assumed to be articulate.
dependency on system to have meaning.
trial of teachers
assumption of human spirit
Dominant culture
Flaneur/Wanderer vs. President of the Academy
"to produce is a passion, to consume is a taste"
I thought we would confront the idea and commodification of failure. Instead there were lots of examples given of modes of being an artist and how they are all quite fragile, temporary and highly problematic.
I loved the poetry of talking about failure in or near a location that keeps its head down with a sense of guilty failure. And in a sense, what we were doing was failing as it was going. But perhaps it was not as glorious a failure as it could have been if there were bigger chances taken.
When I get unbored with these topics I will type up Diedrich Diedrichson's more coherent argument.
More radical=More death
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