#alexander provan

[laurel-mauve]

from Objectum- Love at First Sight by Alexander Provan

so often when I read quotes from other objectums my ears hear poetry. they have so much beauty when they gush.

[floaterquoter]

The New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl hailed Hope [by Shepherd Fairey] as “epic poetry in an everyday tongue,” but to me the portrait seemed like the output of a viral-marketing firm charged with compressing a candidate into a religious icon. What was the effect besides the worshippers being satisfied and the image entering the meme hall of fame?

Alexander Provan https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/they-the-people/

[floaterquoter]

The imagination of the artist has been surpassed by the techniques of the behavioral economist, filmmaker, advertiser, pollster, lobbyist, data scientist, and social media analyst. And politicians have become mediums through which messages are tested and refined, demographics are established and tweaked.

Alexander Provan https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/they-the-people/

[04151991]

K.D. to Alexander Provan: Three Stages of Headless

The photos below are taken from a 2009 publication of Goldin+Senneby’s Headless. Right now, we can assume that the piece is nearing its completion, or entering a new phase, as triplecanopy is set to publish the first novel of Headless later this year. The 2009 publication, from their show at The Power Plant, offers a snapshot of where the project was four years ago, and raises questions about the final novel.

The publication is a collection of fiction, analysis of the project, and personal accounts. After reading through the collection, I was left with the irksome feeling about the fiction. It’s an eight-part “journal” of the fictional author Kara Donnelly (K.D.). She’s middle aged, has a job with no prospects of promotion, and has an epiphany on an airplane with The Da Vinci Code, and starts writing.

K.D., however, is entirely fictional, and John Barlow, the ‘actual’ ghostwriter, pieces her scarecrow character together from used, mundane identity markers. If anything, his own presence in the story is more interesting than K.D.’s underdeveloped dear diary style of writing. Barlow is a kind of secondary figure who is writing about Sovereign Group’s Headless Ltd. simultaneously, and specifically about K.D. (at this moment, he hits you over the head, that these entries are written by him). His presence baffles K.D. somewhat, yet she decides to make him the ‘protagonist’ of her novel.

 Any reader has light enough to shine through K.D.’s transparent character. She pales in comparison to the conceptual complexity of the whole project, yet she somehow spouts the project’s key goals: “And the truth is, once you start thinking about the offshore world, you’re already thinking about fiction anyway. Offshore is a kind of fiction. It’s not that the boundaries break down; there are no boundaries” (16). These moments are like suddenly biting into a grain of sand, yet you keep on chewing. You know that the project is so much larger, and you search for it in the prose, however, in this publication, it doesn’t surface. The satisfying complexity of the project is brought to light through the analysis of the project, and particularly the personal accounts of the work in these analysis.

At some point since this 2009 publication, Goldin+Senneby requested a reversal of roles. John Barlow’s own character shifts to the novel’s narrator and focus, while Kara slips into an enigmatic role of the artists’ fixation. Yet, the novel was nowhere complete until Alexander Provan’s introduction was published. Now, his gaze penetrates through the layers of the project; he narrates the piece from the artists’ conception down to the Barlow’s failure as a ghostwriter. Further, his writing is seductive enough that you cannot find the seams of fiction and reality; he’s woven them too tightly. The introduction leaves off with Provan entering the realm of Barlow, chasing him off a cliff, sipping his wine.

Right now, the novel has three main narrative stages: first, the simplistic K.D. stage; second, the slightly more developed Barlow stage; and now Provan, whose gaze sees all collaborators in the project, and manages to build a fictitious realm around Barlow and the artists, and weave himself into it. Will he narrate the novel? or will his role end with the introduction?  

[triplecanopy-blog]

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

–Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” 1931

Read, too: Alexander Provan’s “Headless Commercial Thriller” in Triple Canopy issue 18.

[wearingrace]

By Alexander Provan

It’s 1965 and you join a crowd of people being shepherded into a stadium in Montevideo as Bach’s “Mass in B Minor” blares from loudspeakers; once inside, you are girdled by motor bikes equipped with deafening sirens, confronted with fat ladies tumbling across the ground and couples strapped together with tape, bombarded with flour, lettuce and live chickens by a low-flying helicopter, and then, after eight minutes, set free. You take a train out of Moscow in 1981, stop at a provincial station, walk into a snow-covered field where nine other people are gathered around a flat wooden board festooned with balls of white thread, take an end and walk toward a distant stand of trees until, after 20 minutes, the thread runs out, at which point you decide to return to the board, where an artist gives you what he claims is a photograph of yourself emerging from the forest; you ponder the meaning of this experience for the rest of the day. You drive to the outskirts of Firminy, France, in 1993 and arrive at a dilapidated, half-empty housing estate designed by Le Corbusier and populated by pensioners and Algerian immigrants—just in time for the opening of an exhibition for which international artists have taken over uninhabited flats and are exhibiting statistical information about the residents and reports on the building’s poor acoustics. You attend a rally at Cooper Union in 2011 where a fashionable collective—made up of anonymous 20-something artists who operate a free, unaccredited art school—is launching a national road trip in a limousine painted as a school bus in order to ask educators, artists and students questions such as: “What are art schools for?” “What is the essence of art?”

You have just taken a brief tour of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 382 pp., $29.95). Ms. Bishop, a critic and professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, is not writing for the uninitiated—though her book, pellucid and relatively jargon-free, presents as few obstacles as possible—but it’s worth parroting the question that even many regular museum-goers are likely to ask of artworks in which people, rather thanoil paints or bronze or screens or found objects, are the medium: “Is it art?” (This also happens to be the default newspaper headline for stories about everything from artist Jeremy Deller’s countrywide discussions about the Iraq War in 2009 to paintings by orangutans and elephants.)But the more fundamental question—and certainly the more relevant one for Ms. Bishop—is different: Is it good art? Too often we ask the former question because we don’t know how to answer the latter...

...Many of these projects do seem preoccupied with “repairing the social bond,” as Ms. Bishop writes, and because of the urgency of this task “there can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of participatory art.” Thus the proliferation of free schools, reading rooms, community redevelopment projects, and—in the words of New York-based participation clearinghouse Creative Time—“open-ended series of questions and conversations.” (Creative Time might be called Art Time if not for the early Soviet avant-garde, which rejected isstkustva, or art, in favor of the more democratic tvorchestvo, or creativity.) There’s a sense that the “concrete goals” of participatory projects are often judged to be “more substantial, ‘real’ and important than artistic experiences,” Ms. Bishop observes. But they’re not, she continues,judged on whether or not they achieve actual, lasting change, by which measure most would fall very short. Why are they relieved of that burden? Because the point of reference for these projects is, ultimately, contemporary art, “despite the fact that they are perceived to be worthwhile precisely because they are non-artistic.”...

...Seeing Mr. Sierra’s works can be oddly, perversely thrilling. Ms. Bishop goes as far as to compare the situation to BDSM sex: The way we normally think about exploitation and domination is shelved and the transgression becomes enjoyable. It’s not exactly a democratic socialist paradise, but then again nothing is.