A To Z of Artist Led Activity: Queneau to Ztohoven

Q is for RAYMOND QUENEAU

Raymond Queneau was a French writer best known for his deployment of a variety of experimental approaches to the novel, with such playfully devised works as Exercises In Style and Zazie In The Metro quickly winning large readerships and high positions in the pantheon of the post-war avant garde.  It’s his role as one of the founders of the OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘workshop for potential literature’) in 1960, alongside the mathematician Claude Berge and the chemical engineer and Pataphysician François Le Lionnais, that wins Queneau his place here, however. Dedicated to creating texts within often absurdly difficult constraints - most famously, Georges Perec’s La disparition (1969), a novel written entirely without use of the letter ‘e’ (a feat even more staggeringly matched by his English translator, Gilbert Adair, in his 1994 rendition of the text, A Void) - OULIPO’s roster has included many from far beyond the usual shores of literature: during its half century of activity to date, the OULIPO has counted Marcel Duchamp, British architect and translator Stanley Chapman, graph theorist Pierre Rosenstiehl and mathematician-poet Jacques Roubaud as members, alongside more conventional literary figures like Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Perec and Queneau himself.

Many OULIPO members have connections to the Collège de Pataphysique, an institution founded to further the pseudo-scientific philosophy of Père Ubu creator and proto-Surrealist Alfred Jarry, and while OULIPO projects are usually in line with Jarry’s absurdist spirit, its productions also have a collectively subversive edge, often suggesting parodic revisions of other – more conceptual and academic, but not necessarily more serious - philosophical investigations into language, aesthetics and meaning.

R is for RESEARCH PROJECT (98 WEEKS)

98 Weeks Research Project is a Beirut-based artists’ project space founded by Mirene and Marwa Arsanios in 2007, currently based at Naher Street in the Mar Mkhael area of the city. It includes a library, exhibition and studio spaces, and also presents ongoing programmes of talks, discussions and public events (organised by Cecilia Andersson). Its exhibitions tend towards the site-specific and exploratory, and draw on international currents, as in Arts Floreaux in March 2010, when three US artists – Colin Whitaker, Peter Currie and Rachel Hines - transformed the space into a flower shop, while for the most recent exhibition, in October this year, the Iranian/German artist Setareh Shahbazi showed works under the title I Am Glad that Things Have Changed. 98 Weeks has also hosted workshops with international figures such as Francis Alys and taken part in several major art fairs in Europe and the US, but the project balances its international interests with regular investigations and retrievals from Beirut’s local history by such speakers as the publisher of Al Furat and collector of Lebanese regional art Abboudi Abou Jaoude. Archives of Lebanese cultural magazines and artworks from the 1930s to the present day are held in the project’s own continuously developing Reading Room, and further information on 98weeks activities is available at: www.98weeks.blogspot.com

S is for SALON D'AUTOMNE

The first Salon d'Automne (a phrase meaning ‘Autumn Salon’) was organised in 1903 by a group of painters who would later be regarded as the core of the Fauve group, notably George Rouault, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain and Albert Marquet. Established in response to rejections of innovative works by the official Paris Salons of the time, and - like the legendary Salon des Refusés of 1863 that brought the work of the Impressionists to light - the Salon d’Automne became known as a key forum for the early display of fresh directions in art, showing work by painters of the calibre of Cezanne, Gauguin and Picasso during its early years, and after the First World War adding influential painters like Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque, and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi to its exhibition regulars. Still running today, more than a century on from its inception, the Salon d’Automne is now an institution in its own right, every bit as official as the Salons it first challenged. Yet its early years can certainly claim some of the responsibility for forging the Modernist myth of official exclusion as a marker of significance in art: a tradition reinforced by such legendary episodes as the rejection of Duchamp’s Fountain from a 1917 exhibition by the New York Society of Independent Artists, and which continues in the tendency for public interest to immediately coalesce around banned or publicly reviled works, as when the Tate displayed Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII in 1976, or a widespread media circus stirred up debate about the work of Damien Hirst, Marcus Harvey and Tracey Emin during the run of the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in 1997. In the new millennium what controversies there have been seem ritualistic and contrived (the regular Stuckist protests at the exclusion of painting from Turner Prize shortlists being one example) and have largely failed to generate the kind of traction on wider public interest achieved by so many of their forerunners.

 T is for TORONTO COMMUNITY VIDEOTEX

Founded in 1983, Toronto Community Videotex (TCV) was an organisation created initially to facilitate artists’ access to the Telidon system, an early precursor of the World Wide Web. It encouraged the creation of electronic works within a kind of arts-lab context, assisting in the development of a new aesthetic (one that to some extent built on the interest in cybernetics of an earlier generation, including the Independent Group in the UK) with roots in systems-based and scientific conceptions of art rather than the more traditional humanities. TCV changed its name to InterAccess in 1987, and pioneered the use of Macintosh systems, multimedia production and dial-up networks for artists, while in 1995 – as the internet began its rapid growth once domestic access became widely available - the facility relocated to larger premises with on-site gallery space, a change that led to a greater emphasis on finished works for display rather than the systems and programming that had produced them. In the most recent chapter of its history, InterAccess relocated again, and since 2005 has occupied a building in Toronto’s Queen Street West district. InterAccess remains devoted exclusively to electronic media art, though inevitably, while the futuristic vision of the early 80s continues, it runs in parallel to the ongoing curation of the long history accumulated by the institution. Former director Dana Samuel’s 2006 exhibition This Must Be The Place: Vera Frenkel, David Rokeby, Nell Tenhaaf and Norman White, for example, looked back at the legacy of four Canadian pioneers of interactive, virtual and electronic art with close links to the organisation’s past, while 2010 saw both Jessica Field’s technically advanced and fully operational robot zoo Field Studies and Frederic Lavoie’s more conventional gallery-scaled video works on show. www.interaccess.org

U is for UBUWEB

Set up by the American conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996 as an online hub for a variety of avant-garde productions, both historical and current, UbuWeb began life as a kind of distribution centre for experimental literature and concrete poetry, placing out of print and new works by established but often little-known literary figures within reach of readers, but during its 15 years of operation to date has expanded in both scale and remit (in line with the increasing capacity of the web to deliver video and audio to users) to include underground films, documentaries, sound art, archive radio broadcasts and many other kinds of  unclassifiable audio-visual material in a vast open-access archive, unaffiliated to any particular institution, and free to all users.

Key elements of the site have included Ubu Editions, an online poetry publishing venture, and UbuWeb: Outsiders, a section crystallised around Otis Fodder’s 365 Days Project, which added found texts, oddball audio and other examples of Songs in the Key of Z style material to the site – one work for each day of the year 2003, with the exercise repeated in 2007. As Damon Krukowski noted in a 2008 Artforum piece on Goldsmith’s archive and its relationship to his own work as an author and editor, “it's an almost blind enthusiasm for words and sounds that powers UbuWeb. Goldsmith may be a provocateur, but he is also a fan - exactly the sort of obsessive, crate-digging fan familiar to the world of radio...UbuWeb is free - free of charge, free of copyright, free of institutional and governmental oversight, free in as profound a manner as Alfred Jarry's Ubu himself. It is pataphysics...” The archive remains available to users worldwide, continues to expand, and can be accessed at: www.ubu.com

V is for VORTICISM

Founded by Wyndham Lewis and associates around 1912, and named by Ezra Pound in 1913, Vorticism was the first – and arguably only, prior to 1945 – British art movement to fully embrace Modernist principles, and Lewis himself suggested that Vorticism might be seen as an independent home-grown alternative to such European movements as Cubism and Futurism. Embracing abstraction, machine aesthetics and hyperbolically energised sloganeering, Vorticism coalesced around the work of sculptors like Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein, and briefly sympathetic painters like William Roberts, David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth, Helen Saunders and C. R. W. Nevinson – many of whom went on to work in styles quite distinct from those adopted during their Vorticist periods. Although short-lived as a movement, lasting around three years from its foundation to its dissolution, the legacy of Vorticism in the context of British art and ideas has been disproportionately large: the two issues of the Vorticist magazine, Blast, produced in 1914 and 1915, not only contained early works by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford and T.E. Hulme, their typography both imitated (and mocked) the established avant-garde features of the publications of F.T. Marinetti and others in Europe, and Lewis’s polemics – offering columns of random things to be ‘blessed’ or ‘blasted’ at his whim – went on to exert considerable influence, despite Lewis’s fall from political grace with the publication of a book in support of German National Socialism in the mid-1930s.

The Fall’s Mark E. Smith has been particularly vocal in his acknowledgment of influence from the Lewis of Blast, The Enemy and such 1920s novels as The Apes of God and Rotting Hill, and many others in art and popular culture draw on approaches directly traceable to the contrarian mode established in the pages of Blast during the First World War.

W is for WHITE COLUMNS

White Columns is one of New York's oldest surviving artist-led venues, founded in SoHo around 1970 by Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark (initially under the name of the 112 Workshop, after the street number of the first storefront location) and renamed White Columns in 1979. The venue has changed its location several times since then (it is currently based on the border of the West Village and Meat Packing District) but the many changes of address have never broken the continuity of purpose, and White Columns remains a space committed to the presentation of exhibitions, projects, talks, screenings and events on a not-for-profit basis, its programme unified only by its broadly experimental nature.

In the 40 years since its foundation, White Columns has hosted early shows by many major New York and international figures, including Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith, William Wegman, John Stezaker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andres Serrano, John Currin, Jack Goldstein and Sean Landers. Alongside its exhibitions, White Columns also maintains a curated but open registry of around 600 artists without gallery representation in New York (see: http://registry.whitecolumns.org/ ).

X is for LES XX

Les XX was a group of twenty painters, designers and sculptors, formed in 1883 by the Brussels-based lawyer, critic and publisher Octave Maus in response to the rejection of a work by James Ensor from the Antwerp-based Salon l’Essor in 1883. Through the following decade, The XX (also known as Les Vignt)  held an annual exhibition and placed their own works alongside those of a further twenty international artists, invited to participate by the group’s members. Among those taking part in these exhibitions between 1884 and 1893 were Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh. The group was closely associated with the magazine L'Art Moderne, created in 1881, and edited by Maus with Edmond Picard and Emile Verhaeren, a journal best known today for its championing of artists associated with Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, such as Felicien Rops, Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Berthe Morisot, James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Paul Signac. Alongside these core activities, Les XX also hosted a range of events designed to present art, music and poetry as a unified body of work. Performances of music by composers like Gabriel Faure and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov by the Ysaÿe Quartet were part of the group’s programming from around 1890, and in the same year the poet Stéphane Mallarmé was invited to lecture on the work of his close friend, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Les XX shed its first identity in 1893, but continued in a similar vein under a new name, La Libre Esthétique, for another five years.

Y is for YNKB

YNKB – abbreviated from Ydre Nørrebro Kultur Bureau - was founded in 2002 as an artist-led project in the Ydre Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, an area well known in Denmark for its large immigrant population. The choice of location was intended to signal a deliberate strategy of operating outside what YNKB members consider traditional ‘elitist’ centres of culture, and since its inception, the collective has operated on a model of serial collaboration. In some ways, YNKB are representative of the many attempts by artist led groups in recent years to redefine art in terms not of cultural production or making, but as a collective research project, in which dialogue and participation are considered the means of drawing potential audiences into the process of creating work. While process is central to YNKB’s activities, the group also maintains a project space for meetings, exhibitions, discussions, screenings and workshops, and alongside its own programmes extends itself to regular work with other organisations, in Denmark and abroad. Recent projects have included the creation of a Situationist cinema with students at Dar al-Kalima college in Bethlehem, a People’s Museum in the Palestinian village of Birzeit (in conjunction with Parfyme) and an ongoing series of exhibitions, events and discussionsunder the title Let’s Remake The World, a project designed to consider art’s potential role in the initiation and support of movements towards progressive social change. www.ynkb.dk

Z is for ZTOHOVEN

Ztohoven are a group of artists based in the Czech Republic who have become well known for a series of high-profile interventions, mainly targeted on raising questions about the purpose of advertising and surveillance. Most famously, six members of Ztohoven were prosecuted in 2007 for an action they called Media Reality, in which they hacked into the broadcast signal of a weather forecasting channel on Czech TV and inserted images of a mushroom cloud rising above the picturesque Krkonoše Mountains. Although there are some parallels between Ztohoven’s various actions – such as their 2009 project to insert question-marks and warnings of possible violations of the viewer’s subconscious into advertising hoardings on the Prague Metro system, or Citizen K, in which members rendered themselves faceless as a counter to increasing levels of state and private surveillance – and the activities of US-based groups of ‘adbusters’, there’s a very specific resonance to these actions in the post-Communist context, where Ztohoven’s interventions can be read less as straightforwardly anti-Capitalist, in the normal Western sense, and more as a series of strategies designed to highlight disturbing continuities between the surveillance, control and ubiquitous propaganda deployed by Communist agencies prior to 1989 and their continuation in only superficially modified forms under the new management of Neo-liberalism. Ztohoven’s own statements draw parallels with Michel Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon, an architectural system devised by the British social reformer Jeremy Bentham to facilitate the control of prison populations by largely unseen authorities: “When it comes to the efficiency of the Panopticon”, they note in a statement issued on 16 June 2010, in connection with the Citizen K project, “it does not matter much who owns the apparatus, or what the motive behind its use might be: the Panopticon itself is the machinery of an exercise of power in the service of creating and maintaining inequalities”. Ztohoven continues to operate at the time of writing, and its activities are documented at:  www.ztohoven.com/