Hasta La Ideas

“Paraconceptual” art in Susan Hiller’s new comprehensive book

Both intimate and cosmic in scope, as described by critic Lucy Lippard, Susan Hiller’s ruminative multimedia works are the result of a career change from anthropology to art forty years ago. The U.K.-based artist, thinking of her discipline as “value-free,” experiments with sculpture, photography, painting and more, letting the subject dictate media to give her abstract theories form.

A through-line in Hiller’s works is what she calls “paraconceptual”—combining conceptual underpinnings with paranormal studies. But the resulting mysticism, unlike many of her contemporaries, isn’t the point. Whether through hundreds of postcards or video installations, Hiller’s appeal comes from her studious, almost scientific, approach.

Often taking years to research a project, Hiller’s interrelated obsessions include themes ranging from cultural erosion (how Nazi street names were replaced with “Jew Street”) to looking at the suspension of disbelief through our reactions to supernatural phenomena. This broad conceptual scope was recently the subject of a survey at Tate Britain, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalog, now available stateside.

The book includes a thorough sampling of work, including the more intensive and thought-provoking pieces like “Homage to Joseph Beuys” and “Painting Blocks,” which were completed over the course of decades. Others—”From the Freud Museum” and “Enquiries/Inquiries“—similarly are the upshot of several years of closely observing her subject. One of the earlier artists (and at 71, one of the oldest) to incorporate the Internet in her practice, her use of current technology, like her overall approach to materials, is not just a medium but part of the message.

The exhaustive book explores the U.S.-born artist’s contemporary work through previously published essays, interviews, papers, lectures and images. “Susan Hiller” sells online from Amazon and Tate. U.K. customers can also go to Amazon U.K..

The U.S. Open of art: Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance pairing tennis and technology

Think branded interdisciplinary content is a recent phenomenon? In 1966 a unique project was hatched when conceptual artists and Bell Labs engineers collaborated on a series of live installations inside a National Guard Armory in New York City. One of those, “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg, pitted artists—including minimalist painter Frank Stella—against each other in a live game of tennis with rackets wired to switch the stage lights on and off and produce an aural musical score. Their movements were projected on large screens by infrared camera, giving the performers and the assembled crowd of 300 a ghoulish glow inside the cavernous armory

By all accounts electrifying, now 45 years later an exhibit at Seventeen gallery in London will showcase Swedish documentary maker Barbro Schultz Lundestam’s reexamination of the seminal moment in conceptual art history. She takes the audience back to those evenings in NYC with the principles involved explaining how they pulled it off and the effect they had on the actors and spectators. Check out a trailer for the 34-minute film here.

The 1997 documentary is also available for sale on DVD, but for those near London, the installation runs through 8 October 2011.

A few words with one of the secretive figures behind the client horror story blog

Web designers, those anonymous talents who help make sense of the sheer volume of white noise out there, are the unsung heroes of the digital age. The transition for many businesses is rarely seamless though—irrational behavior coupled with an unhealthy dose of old-fashioned racism is expressed by many of these Clients from Hell.

Consider this one:

Client: I want more ethnic people, I feel as if there are too many “white” people.
Me: I see only one picture with Caucasian people in it—you want them gone?
Client: Maybe you could just give them a tan? Or make them more “thuggish?”

Or another:

“I got this email once from some lawyer in Nigeria and when I opened it and clicked the link, the same email was sent to everyone in my contact list. I thought, hey, this is a pretty smart and simple marketing technique. When I send out this email to the 4,000 people, I want it to automatically forward to everyone in their contact list. Can you have this done for me by tomorrow?”

The Clients from Hell blog has been cataloguing these types of exchanges since 2009 and came out with a book late last year, offering a humorous form of therapy for the tech community and a rare inside look at the petty and downright insane requests to which they are often subjected.

Cool Hunting tracked down “Vincent,” a web designer in the 18-25 demographic, who is part of the shadowy team of disgruntled designers that have been running the site and recently published a 150-page book.

Cool Hunting: Which anecdotes do you find the most disturbing? Most amusing?

Vincent: The only anecdotes I find truly perturbing, actually, are the ones where the person who’s sent it (the “me” speaker) is jeering and maligning someone for not knowing something they couldn’t have possibly known. That’s not the spirit of jest, y’know. When it comes to poking fun at someone for being technologically ignorant, the tone ought to be spoofy, if not just a bit frustrated. When it comes to the real slimy characters, the ones we hear about who casually employ misogyny and racism as business models, those are the guys that you can really sink your teeth into—they deserve it.

CH: How did the Clients from Hell communities develop?

V: The way most communities develop. We settled around a body of water, or some other lush, food-bearing area and proceeded to erect houses and practice agriculture, until the crop-yield became sufficient enough that we could support guilds and artists, forms of governments, kleptocracies at first and then monarchies and then democracies. Then we abused that democracy and sold our interests to foreign investors and got mixed up in a few wars. 😉

Do you see different patterns in different countries and regions?

It’s mostly American, Canadian and English submissions, I think, with some Aussies peppered in. I always love getting submissions from people whose first language is clearly NOT English. Their delivery and word choice is incredibly awkward, but you can tell that they find what they’re saying really funny!

What kind of submissions are unpublishable and can you describe why?

Ha ha, well the aforementioned submissions where the English is horrid but the emphasis is still punchy (e.g. “And then he ask me make Sunday work for only same prices!!!”) are generally unpublishable. And we get a surprising amount of submissions where someone has clearly read one of our earlier posts and has a very similar story, so they send that. We can’t publish the same joke twice, though, I feel like telling them.

As a design professional, is the relationship getting better, worse, or does it remain the same?

I’d imagine that as the generation that grew up alongside computers begins to grow up and take over companies, that the client/designer dynamic will be less of a comedy of misunderstandings.

What effect—if any—do you think the CFH phenomenon has had on your profession?

Very little. The people that ought to be learning from it aren’t, unfortunately, the ones reading it.

How long do you reckon the CFH site will continue? Is their a clear goal aside from making a mint?

As long as there are fresh injustices or some fresh ignorance at which we can laugh or roll our eyes, there will be a CFH. If, one day, all the client relationships everywhere magically become harmonious and right, then we’ll retire it.

From Ennio Morricone to Cults, our mix of music for getting ready and looking back

Fall is all about motivation, preparing for the season ahead by taking stock of summer’s bounty. While melancholy at times—Bon Iver’s childhood memory “Michicant,” “Harvest Breed by Nick Drake—there’s plenty here to get you going too, from Little Richard’s “Midnight Special” to Kelly Rowland’s seductive “Motivation.”

Listen now

A petite guide to NYC’s secret “deep” history

Relatively innocuous and informative guidebooks exist for nearly every city on Earth. Generally alike in form and function, a good one tends to be a necessity in a foreign land but they rarely offer unique insight or dynamic perspectives. The new project from Smudge Studio and Friends of the Pleistocene literally goes deeper into one of the world’s most complex cities in a fresh way. Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York explains what may not be obvious about the Big Apple’s roots, going nearly back to the Big Bang.

Focusing on 20 different sites throughout the five boroughs, the guide explains various connections to geological history—from taxi paint to the sandstone and limestone walls protecting the Federal Reserve Bank’s stash of supernova-born gold. Another favorite fact is about the stone from Indiana adorning Rockefeller Center formed out of 340-million-year-old aquatic fossils.

The book is filled with a lot of interesting—and for the layman relatively obscure—information that gives the reader a new lens through which to view the urban landscape. In an age where human’s impact on the globe rivals that of massive geological forces (except at a much faster rate), it’s fascinating to examine the results of unimaginable swaths of time as they fit into and shape our surroundings. The book is available for pre-order, shipping 9 September 2011.