Edited by Lorenzo Giusti, Nicola Ricciardi

Texts by Sara Abram, Claire Bishop, Gail Cochrane and Pier Paolo Peruccio, Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, Lily Díaz-Kommonen, Cecile B. Evans and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Claudio Germak and Stefano Gabbatore, Lorenzo Giusti, Boris Groys, Michael Grugl, Cecilia Hurley, Massimo Lapucci, Gianfranco Maraniello, Christiane Paul, Domenico Quaranta, Sanneke Stiger, Hélène Vassal, Malene Vest Hansen

“The web is no longer a virtual zone, an alternative to reality, as it was defined for a long time, but a concrete place in its own right, an extension of the world, an actual dimension on par with the other spaces in which we live. This condition has influenced every sector of artistic production, not just new media art or other specialized fields. Nowadays, every medium appears to have been transformed by the existence of the internet and the possibilities offered by digital technology, and inevitably this condition has influenced not only our ways of working but also exhibition spaces themselves, museum first and foremost, substantially affecting the forms in which art is conceived, created, and enjoyed.”—Lorenzo Giusti

The reader is a curated collection of essays by art critics, philosophers, curators, designers, researchers and conservators, whose considerations address the transformations in the contemporary landscape of fruition and production of art.
Museums at the post-digital turn is named after an international symposium organized by AMACI (the Association of Italian Contemporary Museums and OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni).

Link to publication page: https://www.moussepublishing.com/?product=/museums-at-the-post-digital-turn/

8 volumes
960 total pages
Italiano / English
Soft cover, 16.5 × 22 cm

Guide: 78 critical essays by Nicola Ricciardi
Volume 7 [Here, Now and Elsewhere]: Text by Nicola Ricciardi

Published for the exhibition “Ennesima. An exhibition of seven exhibitions on Italian art,” curated by Vincenzo de Bellis (La Triennale di Milano, 26 November 2015–6 March 2016), the seven volumes of the publishing project “Ennesima” interpret and investigate the multiple, extensive thematic content covered in the exhibition.

They are joined by the Guide to the exhibition, introduced by a critical essay by the curator of “Ennesima” Vincenzo de Bellis (“Why Ennesima? Genesis of an exhibition born agnostic”) and subdivided into seven thematic chapters, like the “Ennesima” show itself. Every work (over 170 by about 70 Italian artists who have reached the international spotlight from the early 1960s to the present) is illustrated with a photograph and a critical profile on the artist, all of which have been written by Nicola Ricciardi.

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“Here, Now and Elsewhere: Site-Specific and Thereabouts” is a book on the works by four artists who have frequently tackled this operational method and who were invited to intervene within “Ennesima. An Exhibitions of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art”.

The book opens with an essay by Marco Scotini, which deals with the subject of site-specificity, beginning with the idea of localization and then extending it beyond territorial confines. Nicola Ricciardi, on the other hand, is the author of the critical piece on Alberto Garutti’s work. Garutti has made for “Ennesima” a new version of Temporali (Storms), the first to use the existing lighting system of the exhibition space. Other contributors include Lorenzo Benedetti, Letizia Ragaglia and Eva Fabbris.

Link to publication page.

Above him, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of a cryptic alphabet; the landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.

- J.G. Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” (1964)

Foreword. 

For reasons yet to be determined, when I first stood in front of the new series of paintings by Kour Pour in his Inglewood studio—staring at that intriguing jungle of camels and demons, sailors and dragons—I was immediately reminded of the far-out incipit of Ballard’s “The Terminal Beach”, quoted above. Later, on my way driving back across Los Angeles towards the Depart Foundation, the palm trees lining the roads reverberated that previous vision. Things got even funkier when, as a traffic light imposed its routine stop on Sunset Boulevard, the car paused in front of a shop window packed with books and magazines. The neon sign above the door read “Book Soup”. Enthralled, I took a left turn and parked, after which two odd things happened: the first was that I was fined $23 for parking with my wheels straight on a sloped road (perhaps only odd to me, an out-of-towner born and raised in a city as flat as a pancake); the second was more Ballardian odd, and ended up profoundly influencing my reading, understanding, and handling of “Samsara”—the exhibition by Kour Pour that I’ve since curated. The instant I entered the bookstore, on this day of coincidence, my eyes fell on the acid colors and gigantic lettering on the cover of Simon Sellars’ “Extreme Metaphors,” the (incredibly good) complete collection of interviews that Ballard himself granted between 1967 and 2008. Probably in an attempt to come to terms with the previous “Terminal Beach” epiphany—but also secretly hoping it could somehow help me decipher Pour’s “cryptic alphabet”—I started reading straightaway. Shortly my eyes stopped on a particular passage, from a 1967 interview with George MacBeth:

MACBETH: I think this element of layers also comes out in the density of some of the stories — the way you seem to link together references from a wide variety of fields. I quote if I may, as an interesting example, one passage from “You and Me and the Continuum,” which is the kind of passage that recurs in a number of these stories:
Captain Kirby, M15, studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick-set man in an Air Force jackets, unshaven face half-hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse section through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, 7-year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) an antero-posterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity 1500 cc.; (6)a spectro-heliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium; (7) left and right handprints showing massive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Dr. Nathan he said: “And all these make up one picture?”

BALLARD: Exactly. They make up a composite portrait of this man’s identity.

Exactly! —I echoed, thinking of the Persian motives, the Greek symbolism and the Japanese iconography (to name just a few such elements), which make up one of Pour’s paintings. The more I kept reading, the more I noticed several points of contact between the artist’s work and the ideas shared by the writer: the landscape as a formalization of space and time, the incumbent information overload, the death of the authority of both the past and future, the idea of escaping or cheating time. Now, 6 weeks and 650,000 words of “Extreme Metaphors” later, I’m sitting at my desk with the ambition of demonstrating that reading Ballard, and science fiction in general, might be an unusual yet extremely useful tool with which to unpack Kour Pour’s practice—even if it wasn’t at all his intention to begin with. But that’s part of the game, I suppose.

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Let’s start with the exhibition at Depart Foundation. “Samsara”, which is Kour Pour’s first solo show in Los Angeles, comprises a series of paintings and related installation works that continue the artist’s well-known “carpet series”. In the first iteration of the series, historic examples of carpets were appropriated directly from auction and museum catalogues and then meticulously reproduced on large canvases; in the new works the artist has created original compositions that juxtapose sets of imagery—hunters and gatherers, religious icons and mystical creatures—which are stripped from their own temporal context by the use of today’s technology. Exploiting Google Images, clip art CD-ROMS, and Photoshop, Pour re-contextualizes the images onto canvas, through months of painstaking labor and the use of tools form the past including broomsticks and paint. Cue: first Ballardian moment—it is hard to deny the visual echo of Ballard’s claim that the future and the past are by now inevitably rolled into the present; to quote his 1970 (!) interview with Lynn Barber in Penthouse magazine (!!), “People have annexed the future into the present just as they have annexed the past into the present.” Nonetheless, Pour’s operation is more nuanced, and in fact (from one science-fiction reference to another), the works in “Samsara” are much closer to what William Gibson called a “pre-distressed antique futurity.” I first heard this term from a younger colleague of Ballard and Gibson, Bruce Sterling, during one of his famous keynote speeches on atemporality, this one at Transmediale in 2010, which could be loosely summarized as follows: if you have a genuinely avant-garde idea, you should write about it as if it were being read twenty years from now. Or, in Sterling’s own words: “You have to strip away the sci-fi chrome, the sense of wonder. You want it to be antique before it hits the page or the screen…No longer allow yourself to be hypnotized by the sense of technical novelty.”

So what is Kour Pour’s “avant-garde idea”? It is my opinion that, if many artists of his generation are posing questions about the information overload of our society in the present day, Pour’s more concerned about its future consequence: the effect of such an overload on the writing of History. To paraphrase Sterling again, “History is a story,” and there’s a huge difference between writing down the story of, say, the fourteenth century—“to just ask yourself ‘what happened in the fourteenth century?’”— and asking the atemporal question: “What does Google do when I input the search term ‘fourteenth century?’” Pour seems to take this even further to ask: “how does Google affect the way the fourteenth century will be read about 50 years from now?” Instead of focusing on the futurity of a possible answer, the artist “strips away the sci-fi chrome”: he takes Google out of the picture and articulates his thoughts with an antique vocabulary. Paradoxically, in order to peer into the near future, Pour’s research starts from the present—that is, in front of a computer screen—and slowly moves backward: first, he obtains silkscreen prints from a Photoshop file, which he meticulously hand paints over, before applying an electrical sander to mimic the passing of time (a process that resembles the “aging” method used by forgers of antiquities). The final result is a work of art that, from a distance at least, looks like it may be a couple of centuries old. It’s like reading a passage from Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik”, where time collapses on itself and objects of the future (as it was imagined in 1969) regress into objects from the (writer’s) past: videophones turn into Bakelite phones, space rockets become propeller planes.

It is worth pointing out that this time-shift within the paintings is not uni-directional: when the artificially-aged works are shown in a gallery, photographed and posted on Instagram, the same re-contextualized imagery is once again within the online realm, viewed on a computer screen, returned somehow to its beginning and yet not quite as it was before. This temporal back-and-forth—this circularity—has been another key aspect of Pour’s work from its very first iterations: his original “carpet series” was sourced from images found in a Sotheby’s catalogue; today, the designs of those Persian rugs can be seen once again in auction catalogs, but this time within the “Contemporary Art” section—and so the circle is closed. Also of note is the fact that the transition from the original references to their painted likenesses is not merely a process of facsimile; this is no “Frankenstein mashup” where elements of past, present, and future collide together in a sort of semi-random collage: there’s a hidden pattern. As Pour admitted, talking about his selection process, “new elements keep entering, one thing often leads into another and it’s hard to choose in what order it arrives; but there’s a specific progress in it.” Cue: second Ballardian moment—similar to the writer’s words on his early short stories, the individual elements in Pour’s paintings are as chapters in a much longer narrative that is evolving at its own pace. To quote Ballard, “they do not evolve in a sequential sense, in the sense that the events of, say Moby-Dick evolve one after another; they’re evolving in an apparently random sense, but all the images [the fragments of the story] relate to one another…. they reinforce one another and produce something larger than the sum of their parts.” As the eyes of the viewer move across the surface of Pour’s paintings, they meet with those of a Chinese dragon, striding beside a Roman soldier, then move onto the smile of a Ganesh beneath the grim glance of Osiris. But here, the sum of these twos is five.

So whose narrative is this? Just as the Sanskrit word Samsara has subtly different meanings in different belief systems, Pour’s work is purposefully left open to interpretation depending on the cultural entry point of the viewer. Actually, the by-stander “collaborates” in the creation of meaning (which is precisely what I’m doing right now); the work creates its own story from someone else’s history. The question remains: does the current surplus of information mean that in the future it will be impossible to conceive of History as a dominant narrative that claims to possess universality? By sourcing material from different locations, traditions and time periods, the large canvasses, with their warp and wefts, act as nets gathering information without an apparent hierarchy. As in any classic science-fiction novel from the late Sixties, the plot of the paintings is non-linear, often switching abruptly from the future to the past to the present. Take Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”, for example: it might seem as if the disarray of events in the book is taking place not at the level of fabula (the raw material of a story: the chronological order of events as they actually occur in the time-space of the narrative universe) but at the level of syuzhet (the way a story is organized: the order of events as they are selected, arranged, and manipulated by the narrator). But that’s okay, because “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a science-fiction novel. Thus the narrator faithfully represents the events in the (dis-)order in which they occur: the same is seen in Pour’s paintings. Another canonic example of non-linear science fiction is Ballard’s seminal “Atrocity Exhibition,” and if can throw in a third Ballardian moment here, it could be interesting to revisit the words of the author when he explained the reason behind that book: “We live in quantified non-linear terms—we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did.” Ballard made these observations in 1967; fifty years after, we’re still living that same present. The (digital) clock has effectively stopped. The post-Internet paradigm—so in vogue amongst artists from Pour’s generation—was buzzing way before the Internet itself spread; the social structures it altered were transformed in both psychological and physical spaces even before the Internet as we know it had been created. And this is why Pour’s use of bygone tools and aesthetic is absurdly timely: because the paradigm itself belongs to the past, which is also why Ballard matters in this context. If, as a writer of science fiction, Ballard’s ostensible line of work was to collate the future, he seriously undermined the job description by telling Carol Orr in 1974 (in one of the most striking interviews included in “Extreme Metaphor”) that there is actually no future, that “the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now.” He concludes by saying: “You can have tomorrow today”. Kour Pour’s paintings are a gentle reminder that Ballard’s today is actually our past.

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Afterword.

This brief text is packed with a number of quotes in a modest attempt to mirror the operation at play in Pour’s paintings; the choice to focus on science fiction writers alone is likewise calculated. If one reads just three of the books mentioned above—Ballard’s “Atrocity Exhibition,” Dick’s “Ubik”, Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five”—one would find represented precisely the three dimensions that I believe are fundamental to understanding and appreciating Pour’s practice: atemporality, circularity, and a non-linear narrative. Interestingly, those three books were all published in 1969—the same year the first two nodes of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol) were interconnected in Menlo Park, California, which is just a five-hour drive north from Sunset Boulevard. As a matter of fact, Samsara, in one of its many different meanings, stands for a continual, repetitive cycle.

Link to publication page.

160 pages
Italian/English
Hardcover, 14 x 21.5 cm
ISBN 9788867491971

Nicola Ricciardi, ed.

Texts by Barbara Casavecchia, Luca Cerizza, Michele D’Aurizio, Massimiliano Gioni, Luca Lo Pinto, Nicola Ricciardi

“This book arose out of the desire and ambition to translate the first fifteen years of Patrick Tuttofuoco’s densely visual artistic practice into words. But there is a second important motivation behind this initiative: the belief that the rhetoric that has been used to date in describing Tuttofuoco’s aesthetic adventure is too polarized between the pre- and post-2008 periods of his work, and that what is now needed is a tool of interpretation aimed at knitting together these two dimensions that seem antinomic, but upon closer observation are complementary and share the same investigative impulse.” – Nicola Ricciardi

Portraits, Portraits, Portraits represents an attempt to weave two time frames together into a single fabric, to delve into Tuttofuoco’s artistic language and bring to light a shared lexicon. As the title makes clear, portraits are the leitmotif that has been chosen to map out the artist’s practice: a potential key to interpretation, not intended to be definitive, but which aspires to stimulate and suggest a reading of the work stripped of circumstantial preconceptions. Each of the contributors responded in their own way to this initiative, yielding the choral polyphony that is fundamentally important to Tuttofuoco himself. It is up to the reader to decide whether these ideas hover separately between the lines, or come together to form, page by page, the portrait of an unexpected portraitist.

Link to publication page.

A catalog—published in 2014 by Berlin’s Node Center—that aims to reconstruct the (hi)stories behind the exhibition “Faraway, So Close!”, which was part of the official program of the 7th Berlin Biennale.

Excerpt from “Digging Up The Harbor” by Nicola Ricciardi:

The current reality is shaped by images, words and forms provided by a variety of media that often lack the slightest shadow of depth. We are fed everyday by jumbled fragments of truth that help us to understand the world more rapidly, nonetheless more approximately. We are overwhelmed by a continuous flux of overlapping stimuli: like the angel Cassiel warns us in Wim Wender’s “Faraway, So Close!” —the movie that named this exhibition—nowadays people are besieged by new lies every day. Ever louder, baser and more intrusive lies, which dull their senses… so they’re unable to hear the message . Has the incapacity to “hear the message” influenced our capability to understand its meaning?
Maybe we shouldn’t confuse the abolition of the profundity with the abolition of the meaning itself. What happened is that, once profundity was  lost, meaning shifted to inhabit the surface of things. It is as if the tumultuous waves of the sea (of information) have somehow shaken the buried harbor where the secret meaning was kept safe – and now that mysterious treasure has floated up to the shore, where it suddenly appears broken and fragmented but also distributed and spread throughout the surfaces of the world. Today, the ability to reconstruct the meaning no longer means an ascetic descent into the depths of the earth attainable only by an elite few, but a collective ability to recognize patterns in the fabric of reality. This exhibition, in a way, recreates this passage, this shifting, this journey.

A publication published by CCS Bard concurrently with the exhibitions “Deviance Credits” and “And Now a Word from Our Sponsors” at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York.

Abstract:

The year 2014 started with an article in my email inbox: a commentary from the Village Voice forwarded by a friend of mine on January 1^st. The piece was wrapping-up the year just passed, which, according to the journalist Christian Viveros-Fauné, had ended very much as it had begun – with money at the center of an increasingly rotten art world. Interestingly, the article also featured the text of an email sent by a prominent public relations company to the Voice, kindly suggesting a “profile piece” on Peter Hort, son of Susan and Michael Hort, who hosted the annual Welcoming Brunch of the Armory Show in 2014, one of the leading contemporary and modern art fair in New York City. The email ends like this: In regular finance, if you have insider information about a stock, it is illegal to invest in that stock. In the art world, it is not only legal – it is done regularly. Peter Hort, along with his wife and family, are the people who create the insider information.

There are certainly far more scandalous examples of the shadiness of the art world. Still, this email is important proof – that, in New York City especially, “art is no longer just art, but crooked finance,” the kind of crooked finance that today is not merely accepted among otherwise reputable folk, but encouraged. The Village Voice goes on: A year-end wrap-up of art in New York City would be meaningless without mentioning the single greatest transformation to have struck the visual arts globally: namely, that the art market has turned into one big corrupt casino, a place where price fixing, market manipulation, bribery, forgery, theft, and money laundering have become as popular as risky mortgages were in 2007. The evidence of this transformation is everywhere, if one cares to look. There are scandals, court cases, indictments, and suspiciously skyrocketing auction records.

The situation is clear, but often the reaction of those in the field is simply a shrug. If it’s true that there’s a growing number of scholars looking more closely at the weight and influence of money in contemporary art – most notably, Olav Velthius and Noah Horowitz – it is also true that most art professionals insist there is no need to further scrutinize a market that prompts few consumer complaints. This strange exceptionalism that the art world has carefully managed to cultivate produces the application of gentlemanly sporting rules rather than laws. Still, the situation has changed over the course of the last 20 years. The complexity of dealing with the financial strings attached to support of the arts is growing exponentially alongside the number of individuals of great means who have been recently involved in the art world. This new crowd of patrons can’t understand why there’s a genuine resistance to the way private funding shapes the production of art, and its meaning. The lack of any form of regulation creates a favorable climate for these individuals, as it distorts what is accepted as common practice by having few official policies in place. All of this casts a reasonable doubt, and raises the issues I plan to address in this brief text: has self-monitoring kept pace with the increasing treatment of art as a commodity?

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Abstract:

“When I use soft materials to create solid looking objects it’s like an examination of sculpture in general.” This book blends the images of Danish artist Tove Storch and the words of S.M.A.K. curator Thomas Caron, whose conversation with Storch is scattered throughout the book. The publication introduces the reader into a minimalist universe made of metal structures mixed with delicate materials such as silk and paper, and informed by dualistic relationships between strength and fragility. The final result  offers the fresh take of a young emerging artist on a historicized yet still very actual topic in art history: the modernist sculptural gesture.

Link to publication page.