Goldin+Senneby is the identity-resistant “framework for collaboration” established by Stockholm-based artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in 2004. An interest in capitalist logic and networked culture guides their investigative practice, which explores juridical, financial, and spatial infrastructures through performance and role-playing, invented (and often virtual) realities, writing and publishing, and public interventions.
Headless (2007–) is the artists’ ongoing analysis of the shadowy realm of offshore finance. The subject represents a nearly perfect encapsulation of Goldin+Senneby’s many preoccupations, but perhaps its most relevant feature is its provocative and strategic use of masking, secrecy, and withdrawal. The system is evasive by definition: its procedures allow a company’s assets to be protected from taxation or other bureaucratic regulation, and the identities of its owners and their true business practices can be concealed. In spatial terms, examining an offshore company can be thought of as encountering a space that shifts readily from an impenetrable barrier to an empty void—like a hologram, it appears and disappears according to the perspective from which it is viewed. From a moral standpoint, offshore’s slippery visage is just as apt to inspire bored yawns as righteous indignation: one man’s exploitation is another’s tedious paperwork. Still, like most unknown territories, offshore triggers mainly sinister readings. A more anthropomorphic understanding might conceive the offshore company as something monstrous—a decentralized, elusive body that moves without any visible means of control—a headless organization.
Headless Ltd is a real company registered in the Bahamas, one of a number of sun-soaked former British colonies in which the offshore financial industry flourishes. The company is the focal point for Goldin+Senneby’s multivalent inquiry, whose numerous manifestations—texts, performances, interventions, and illustrations—take place in the open and behind closed doors.
By
Rhizome
on
Friday, March 12th, 2010 at
10:00 am
The Office for Parafictional Research has been established to study the implications of a body of work by artist duo Goldin+Senneby known as Headless. For the past three years, the Stockholm-based collaborators have been investigating an offshore company called Headless Ltd as part of a larger inquiry into strategies of absence, invisibility, and withdrawal. Their project, also called Headless, has emerged in a number of formats thus far, including lectures and readings, a series of newspaper interventions, an author’s personal journal, a suite of etchings, a number of critical essays, a scattering of stage-like tableaux, a documentary film, and—most importantly—a serial novel-in-progress. But Goldin+Senneby’s own position in this remains elusive, as they outsource all representations of their work to independent practitioners and dispatch spokespeople on their behalf for public events.
One such event is The Headless Conference, which shares little of the heady cloak-and-dagger suspense found in the fictional texts that the project spawns. The conference will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby's work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby's chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State University.
The Headless Conference
Friday, March 19, 2010
7:00 pm
New Museum Theater
235 Bowery, New York
$6 Members/ $8 General Public BUY TICKETS
The Headless Conference is co-organized by Brian Droitcour and Ginny Kollak as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series at the New Museum, and is supported in part by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
By
John Michael Boling
on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
5:30 pm
So... Team Rhizome™ got together yesterday to determine the winner of our FAVICONTEST and I must admit that it was intense... a little too intense. After many long hours of screaming, clawing, and hair-pulling we were no closer to reaching an agreement on which of the user-submitted favicons to ordain as victor as we were when we started. Out of this ideal-driven hate-fest, the decision was made to share the spoils and select several favicons to use for Rhizome.org. So... in the coming weeks we are going to generate a 'favicon randomizer' that will load one of the following four favicons everytime the page is loaded. So without further ado, I present the winner(s) of FAVICONTEST:
by Adam Okrasinski
by Ben Coonley
by Daniel Leyva
by night-falls.net
In closing, I would like to sincerely thank everyone who submitted a design. We were truly overwhelmed by how many good options there were to choose from and totally honored that you took the time to participate.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
1:00 pm
The Women's Audio Archive began as a series of recordings, taped by Lewandowska after leaving her home country in 1984, grown out of an interest in language as a site of cultural displacement. These recordings document public events, seminars, talks, conferences, and private conversations as valuable records of a particular time in discourse, beginning around 1983 until 1990. Lewandowska denotes this period of time as one dominated by academics and artists close to October magazine and by feminist gatherings, including the participating of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spences, Nancy Spero, Jane Weinstock, etc. In a variety of settings and institutions, as well as in private, the recordings also document talks by artists and academics such as Benjamin Buchloh, Victor Burgin, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Tom Lawson, Les Levine, Peter Wollen, etc.
The act of sound recording began as a way to address the possibilities, as an artist and in everyday life, within a new, unfamiliar environment - through observation in gathering knowledge and participation in developing relationships. Having been educated and raised in a totalitarian state and under a Communist regime, the artist maintains a sensitivity to the power of representation, to the original and manipulation of images, thereby influencing her perception of how history is constructed, who keeps the documents, and who has access to public broadcast. Moreover, the emphasis on sound, away from the image, is a conscious decision by the artist to undermine the primacy of visuality.
In establishing the Women's Audio Archive, Lewandowska seeks to create a collection and a site that would act as a meeting point where the recording conversations would participate in developing a history of women in the media-visual tradition that by its ephemeral nature can easily be forgotten. The Archive, with its attention to sound acts as an incision in the hegemony of visual culture and commodity values. It gathers sound and speech, traces debates, contributing a selective commentary.
By
Ceci Moss
on
Thursday, March 11th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Above: Laid Off from the series "Testament"
Testament is a series of collective self-portraits made up of fragments from online video diaries, or “vlogs”. The project consisted of a series of chapters, each of which focuses on a collectively told vignette, story, proclamation, or meditation on topics such as identity, the economy, illness, politics, the war, or work. Testament explores the formal and conceptual consequences of online video viewing and sharing, while analyzing contemporary expressions of self, and the stories we are currently telling online about our lives and our circumstances. Clips are edited and sequenced like streams and patterns of self-revelation and narrative that flow and dissipate over space and time. As in a Greek chorus, a choir, or a musical symphony, individuals echo, respond to, contradict, add refrains, iterations, and variations, join in, and complete solo narrations. The series reflects on the peculiar blend of intimacy and anonymity, of simultaneous connectivity and isolation that characterizes online social relations.
By
Kevin McGarry
on
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at
12:00 pm
Pae White, Smoke Knows, 2009. (Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen)
2010, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari’s Whitney Biennial, is essentially a Whitney Biennial calibrated for the times: small at 55 artists and altogether humble. This humility, and the fact that one needn’t contend with an overwrought curatorial concept, allows viewers a more cogent experience than past, sprawling, thesis-driven Biennials could offer. Several works, rooms and motifs make good impressions. Not many are impressive enough to make an indelible impact—but a few are. Judging by the past couple decades, the task of this biennial of American art seems insurmountable, and there is no urgency to fault this edition for hitting the target and missing the bulls-eye. While the levelness here is exciting as an indicator of a playing field for post-boom artistic production, the devil’s advocate wonders, perhaps unfairly, if there isn’t something ultimately more exciting about a splashy Biennial that fails stupendously.
In the absence of an overarching conceit, why not start with a premise that did precede itself a bit: the third floor as a dedicated space for film and video. Considering the continued expansion of film and video practices throughout the art world, the idea seemed gimmicky at best—easily the curators could fill a floor, but why ghettoize? Then, come February 25, visitors stepping off the elevator and onto floor three were greeted by a tapestry by Pae White, freezing a frame of interlaced wisps of smoke in a vast expanse of fabric. Mercifully this is not a plain LCD screen (as it turns out, the floor showcases a variety of mediums), but as a piece that meditates on materiality, medium and time, it serves as an excellent banner to welcome visitors to the area of the exhibition that is most concentrated on media. The projects therein attending to these matters soar.
Among them is Erika Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator, a small dark room featuring a 16mm projector and two abstract, figurative drawings reminiscent of the images that manifest in the film. Onscreen, silhouetted players gesture with ambiguous instruments both blunt (wands and other prostheses) and delicate (a drawing compass). They are recorded, projected and re-recorded, back and forth between video and film. Other simple deviations—for instance, a mirror held before the camera during a joint recording/playback session, thus reflecting projected light onto the shadow cast by the mirror—collapse layers of ritualized mark-making and physical processing into the finished film, which imparts a heavy, hollow feeling of magic.
By
John Michael Boling
on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
3:01 pm
So, The Rhizome Team is getting together for our weekly staff meeting around 3ish tomorrow. (Our staff meetings are catered by the fine folks at Le Cirque and sometimes start fifteen minutes late to allow the wine to breathe and the caviar to chill)* One of the things on the agenda tomorrow is to decide which of the fabulous favicons that you have created to pick as the winner of the FAVICONTEST. This means you have around 24 hours left to contribute your own design for our new favicon. Even if you don't have the urge to submit your own creation you should definitely take a look at what folks have been able to come up with so far. Thanks again to everyone that has submitted, and keep em coming!
*PSYCHE, we are lucky to have 3 banana flavored laffy taffys to split
By
Ceci Moss
on
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at
1:30 pm
Gene McHugh, Rhizome's former Editorial Fellow and a periodic contributor to the site, received the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts’ Writers Grant earlier this year and has used these funds to begin the "Post Internet" blog. His project aims to build a space to reflect on "...art responding to an existential condition that may also be described as 'Post Internet'–when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Perhaps this is closer to what Guthrie Lonergan described as 'Internet Aware'–a term that I’m sure I will be thinking through here sooner or later." The blog is essentially a bare-bones workspace for his loose, often train-of-thought musings on contemporary internet-based art, and covers everything from Google's Parisian Love ad to Seth Price.
Goldin+Senneby are Swedish artists. They are also characters in Looking for Headless, a novel they commissioned, a detective story involving a murder (by decapitation, of course) that has been published serially since 2007.
Co-organized by Rhizome and the Office for Parafictional Research, the event will take the form of an academic symposium on issues pertinent to the discourse surrounding Goldin+Senneby's work. Up for discussion are topics as diverse as the economic theories of George Bataille and the nature of virtual spaces built by offshore finance networks. Participants are to include Angus Cameron, lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester and Goldin+Senneby's chosen emissary; Brian Droitcour, Rhizome staff writer; Keller Easterling, associate professor at the Yale School of Architecture; Ginny Kollak, director of the Office for Parafictional Research and second-year graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Allan Stoekl, professor of French at Penn State Univeristy.
MediaSCAPES Program at SCI-Arc
Master of Design Research Degree in Architecture and Media Art
The MediaSCAPES Program supports research into contemporary practices of media, art and architecture. Student projects address interactive and symbiotic conceptions and environments at the intersection of virtual and physical space.
by Adam Okrasinski
by Ben Coonley
by Daniel Leyva
by night-falls.net
