Untitled

Untitled This fall, Im covering the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, titled Untitled. Now more than ever, the divide has formed in contemporary art: those concerned with formal aesthetics and those concerned with the political. The work of Flix Gonzlez-Torres stands at the intersection of these two schools. See: Untitled (Passport) Untitled (Passport), 1991, courtesy of BAK You are invited to take a page from a stack of blank paper. As a specific object without specific form, this stack transforms into a process. Its nondescript. minimal! sexy. But this visual identity lends itself to a political identity: the idea of a blank passport: no borders. no nations. no laws. You might be present, but your identity is absent. (Oh, and what about the droll role of paper within economic systems.?) Questions of macroeconomics are very close to my heart. Most recently, I was involved in an exhibition at the New Museum: Ostalgia, surveying contemporary Soviet art. Our conceptual point of departure was: Soviet economic and political repression as creative catalysts: The New York Times review: For some artists repression had a psychological upside. If what you were doing was censorable, you could trust you were doing something right; heroic, even. With colleagues at the opening reception of Ostalgia, building designed by SANAA Thomas Schutte, Three Capacity Men, 2005 Visitors have been baffled by a certain piece: during their walk through the galleries, they encounter performers lining up in random queues!?! Little do they know, its an anonymous performance by Roman Ondak: Good Feelings in Good Times. (Because lining up in a soviet state was simply a sign of inefficient resource allocation, its relevence is amplified by current economic questions of pareto inefficiency, x-inefficiency, etc.) I feel that theres something devious in staging an anonymous performance, (how do we call it art, if it doesnt announce itself?); theres something unresolved. like stacks of blank paper. But thats the beauty of the untitled. Its interpretation is always becoming what it will be. Terribly honored to have worked with curators Massimiliano Gioni and Jenny Moore on the New Museums Ostalgia. The 2011 Istanbul Biennial: Untitled is curated by Jens Hoffman and Adriano Pedroso.