Congratulationson your recent show—the eflux image was brilliantly perverse, coldand banal but so delicious. The other day, I ran into Isabel,(looking even more asymmetrical than ever…I love it.) Anyway, itwas kismet; she is working on a text about the “Ephemeral Edge ofNetworks, Art and Social Distribution,” the same day that I wasspeaking to Malou Erritzøe of ME Contemporary about how we might mapa social network—nodes and ties that compose exhibitions. Sure itsmuseum fodder but we thought, why not, and managed to produce aseries of comic stick-figure drawings on cocktail napkins that wemoved to and fro, wet with whiskey and images bleeding; the blurringof direct ties became so cheeky that we laughed for hours, relayingstory after story.
Sorry, but needless to say, I had to tell herabout when we were at the art fair last month—you know the story,“So there’s a belligerent artist, a bourgie kunsthalle directorand a manic monkey in a bar...” Don’t worry I didn’t use yourname since the punch-line is “Revolution? What Revolution?”
Okay,so maybe the paradigm is lost without hand gestures, but we didimmediately segway to you in context to our project: Dear Thick andThin; a simple, but super smart, little showing of oddly relevant artnetworks organizing a hypothetical exhibition. Or as Isabel stated,“a slight suggestion of who toward what” in that intimate butraspy tone.
Slight suggestion—I don’t know, especially when wehave Wolfgang Staehle delivering Thing.Net, the veritable grandfatherof art networks and even one of the first social networks for theentire internet (late-80s BBS-class), and we have Tjorg Douglas Beer,the wild-west outlaw of art organizers with his Galerie imRegierungsviertel; and network playboy players like Joao Simoes fromTEST Lisboa and network gentlemen like Franz Stauffenberg with hisbehind closed-door methods (because listen, we all know that despitetoday’s hysteria over social networks everything still reallyhappens behind-closed doors where the world turns conversation intocommerce, intellectual properties into manslaughter motives…tak,tak.)
Anyway, dude, listen, I need you for this.
Forget your fearofsnowballnetworks where the alters actually create the egocentric system bybecoming egos themselves and are able in turn to nominate additionalalters…or a hybrid network whereegosnominate alters otherwise not listed who are then available for allsubsequent egos to see.
It is all DIRTY in at a glance (when valuesare attached) but when names and bodies of work are just throwntogether like dim sum on a dinner table…YUM. In the end,distribution is distribution, wherever we fall on the scale of highand low; we escape death by the shear numbers of association.(Perhaps?)
Am I horrible? I am ridiculously horrible.
Meanwhile,I need you to gather up some good art with interesting andprovocative ideas and ultimately a little weird and messy andconfuting.


All the rest will follow.


Let’s Skype about it. BisBald!



[FACTS]

Beginning Friday, 11 April, 2011, ME contemporary will feature works by participating artist groups, The Thing, Test Portugal, Amanda Lear's Pocket, and Galerie im Regierungsviertel. The show will run thru Saturday, 9 April, 2011.