catalog of this exhibition
TRANSCRIPT
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the Catalog of this Exhibition
Curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore
With essays by Greg Cook, Mairead Case,
and Caroline Picard
And bookbinding by Hannah Rapson
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The Catalog of this Exhibition
Frontispiece:
Belinda Shilthauer. Active Inner Life. 1974.
Overleaf:
Leonard Montenesque. Movement in Blue 6-x479. 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Catalog of this Exhibition / edited and from the exhibition by Anne Elizabeth Moore;
contributors, Mairead Case, Gregory Cook, Caroline Picard . . [et al.].
p. cm.
Includes an index, although not an ISBN number.
1. Art—United States. 2. Art, American. 3. History of Art. 4. Labor. 5. Creative class—United States.
This book is printed in an edition of one and licensed in entirety under the Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171
Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. 2007. Individual authors retain full
copyright over their essays, to use, vanquish or ignore as they see t.
Printed on the computer in the living room and hand-bound by Hannah Rapson, presumably in her
home, or maybe somewhere else of her choosing, all within the connes of the United States of
America.
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Contents
Contributors 6
Acknowledgements 7
The Work You See Before You 11 Anne Elizabeth Moore
A Pocket Guide to Highlights of the Invisible Museum 22
Greg Cook
The Work Only You See 33
Mairead Case
On the Curiously Impossible History of Unknown Things 43
Caroline Picard
An Illustrated Timeline 56
Afterword 61
Index 62
Photography Credits 64
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Contributors
Mairead Case ([email protected]) is a writer and
lives in Pilsen. Her pseudonyms include Violet Gorge, Dallas
Salad, and Ruby Doom.
Greg Cook is a Boston-based newspaperman, cartoonist and
garbageman. He is the founding editor of The New England
Journal of Aesthetic Research. And he has constructed
two holes of a miniature golf course, which he bills as the
beginnings of a theme park he calls Gregcookland. Learn
more at gregcookland.com.
Anne Elizabeth Moore lives in Chicago. She writes
and makes art, which has resulted in her permanent
banishment from a popular retail establishment and
praise by the business press. She is sadly lacking most
major awards but is hoping that all turns around in 08.
Contact her via www.anneelizabethmoore.com.
Caroline Picard was not born in the United States. Having
never died her hair, worn fake glasses, or donned a
moustach, she has never impersonated herself. She is not
(sadly) a spy. She has never killed anyone and she could
never be president. She does not make art about art either.
“As of late, I nd myself dabbling in a range of mediums,
from letterpress printing to rock mortaring of all things.
And in so doing, I have decided to embrace that which is
looked upon as so lowly, and which is undeniably part of
my (self-deemed) good nature, in adopting the title, jack
of all trades, however, mind you, master of some. It is in
this spirit and with a sense of adventure and a love for the
craft of book-binding, and in good-sassy friendship, that I
nd myself so willingly in the midst of this collaboration.
(Painting degree included.)” —Hannah Rapson
6
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Acknowledgements
Like all works of art, this book is theresult of several gazillions of contributors,
whose lives have been devoted to
developing the language, materials,
foundational concepts, and all other
aspects of this work excepting of course
this actual nal physical object. Which, by
the way, was labored upon exclusively andtenderly by those ve individuals whose
names and biographical information you
can read to the left of this page. That this
book will exist solely in a physical edition
of one for all time is a concept derived
from the curator’s desire to remove books
from the realm of mass media and begin
viewing them again as creative, enjoyable,
and fun objects, the kinds of things she
used to dream about in her bedroom at
night when her best friend was imaginary
and named Wonder Woman, and which
was a desire that emerged right around
the time her work began approaching
sales higher than she can count without
losing her place. Special thanks go to the
Cook Museum of Book Arts for generously
lending their exteemed collection, and
to Green Lantern Gallery, for devoting
exhibition space to this underappreciated
aesthetic form.
7
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The Work You See Before You,
installation view and detail from
previous spread.
Michael Harrington (American,
b. 1968)
2004
mixed media
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The Work You See Before You
by Anne Elizabeth Moore
Welcome to the work you
see before you. Please note
its elegant simplicity, its
straightforward nature, its welcoming
enthusiasm. !. A work such as this is rarely
on display in a venue as esteemed as this
one; indeed, this marks a new turning point
in the acceptance of the artistic genre,
previously consigned to display only in the
back alleys of furtive imagination and dark
street corners of the anxious mind. But no
more: No more.
Because: here it is! This work, before you,
now. Engaging, practical, comprehensible.
Finally out in the light of day, in presentation
for your estimation, approval, inspiration.
Was it everything you imagined it would be?
hoW ManY More LiveS?,
Felice Romney (Cuban,
b. 1983)
2006
sepia print photograph
hoW ManY More
LiveS?, detail
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12 the Catalog of this Exhibition
History is a conservative and ever-trembling handmaiden to events.
The always late-arriving steam engine of art history—the narrative
of the construction and impact of visually and conceptually based
cultural products and modes, all of them—in particular fails to keep room
in its schedule for genuine social movements as they occur in time. This is a
matter of course. History must, by its nature, wait to see what happens next,
remain calculating and patient while events transpire, each one determining
by dint only of unfolding the import of those that came before, reecting
on them a light shining back from the sun of the present day. History is used
to position the present, and is therefore biased toward the current day as
the most advanced and learned of them all so far. There remains a chance,
a nagging sensation that this might not be true, yet historical events are
thought to survive through a Darwinian process: only those ideas strong
enough in our culture to take root or hold sway are elevated to its annals.
Yet Darwinianism presents more than a justication for adaptive eciency: it
elucidates also that there is always another possible. Biologically, what has failed
to adapt to given conditions of climate change or predatorial hostility could lend
MY BeLief in God,
Clytemnestra Rothschild
(Canadian,
b. 1982)
2005
mixed media
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the Catalog of this Exhibition 13
better concrete application to our present physical condition: conceptually it is
likely the same. Thus in recent years a paradox has presented itself: if history
eventually recognizes all cultural products as art—which time shows that it
indeed does—what then of cultural products never produced? Of the culture
of non-creation? Of those events that could have been, had events unfolded
otherwise? Who will catalog these, and document their import? Who will
survey the vast eld of all that has not been done?
Certainly there is a cultural movement away from art. Not a grand-scale one,
as there has been in recent years in, say, the dot-com eld, or as there was
during the Great Depression with banking. But vast numbers of people—young,
some of them, and deeply inuential—are unconcerned with making art. Less
concerned with it, in fact, than they have ever been. Their driving interests,
as evidenced by the predominant visual culture of the present day (reality
television programs, grocery-chain magazines, advertisements), can perhaps
be listed as: marrying rich, emanating an attractive smell, adopting third-world
children, or gaining access to one’s drug of choice, for which one suers an
addiction.
unTiTLed,
Ron Hubribottom
(American, 1978-2006)
2000
oil on canvas
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Indeed, art handlers, museum preparators, and gallery assistants have noted
in recent decades that the overall mass of art in pounds has decreased by
approximately 35%—and of those art works still being created, they are often
lighter in content and physical heft than preceding generations’ overall volume.
Art schools, particularly those dedicated to the popular modern areas as comics
and new media, may be increasing in numbers, but graduates move into
marketing, advertising, illustration, and PR at faster rates than any previous
generation. Even the usually reliant autodidacts, the self-taught Sunday painters,
the streetwise taggers, the abandoned urban geriatrics in posession of a single
great work far ahead of its time, even these have left the eld in droves.
This movement away from art is highly problematic for the art historian, who of
course wishes to remain relevant and also nds it very interesting, in an intellectual
way mostly (although he will simultaneously admit that it keeps him awake nights),
the possibility that his eld may some day soon be subsumed by another: media
studies, maybe, or the Internet. Or a complete abandonment of cultural production
entirely, in favor of easy entertainment like Internet dating or Netix DVD rentals.
(Neither of which will he spurn, by the way, on a personal level.)
MY daY JoB keepS Me
froM BeinG CreaTive,
Linda Danielston
(Mexican, b. 1942)
1973
found objects
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Yet his tough questions remain: who will recognize the work that has
gone undone in this world? Who might preserve for all eternity this
wholly undocumented disinterest in artistic creation?
We mean not, of course, to imply an import due unnished works, or art that has
been started and then abandoned for more, better ideas, generally improved upon,
or left behind even in the wake of a new and more rewarding style of life. Nor must
we consider in this regard the great works, created but then destroyed, lost now to
the world forever. No, here we celebrate work that has simply never existed. Not
in concept, not in the physical realm, not even in the vague and unclaried realm
of desire. (The material needs of such work are few, although the curators have
attempted to document their nearest approximations in this catalog.)
Non-existent work struggled for acceptance, and among the pantheon of
cultural creatives, those who fail to create any work whatsoever have been
consistently overlooked by those peers that do create. Similarly, the history
of art rarely acknowledges the absence of work, focusing instead on objects,
concepts, and events, and/or the documentation thereof.
TWinS.
Percy Fontaine
(American,
b. 1978)
2006
C-print
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And this is perhaps because the history of art is primarily a history of objects,
created or presented as or during events; showy, aggrandizing, signicant! But
because it is not exclusively a history of objects, it also must remain a catalog of
ideas. Yet in being a catalog of ideas it is important to recognize that some ideas are
not only not about art, but they are not about any objects whatsoever. They are
not about events. In fact, they are sometimes ideas specically about not making
art, but about becoming a biotech for a multinational conglomerate because that’s
what your father did, or about enlisting in the army because you have no other
perceptible options in life, or they are about sitting on the porch and smoking
cigarettes until you are 85, living o some inheritance and not doing anything
‘cause, fuck? Why? You don’t have to or maybe it’s about getting married at 24 to
some dude you went on tour with and you were pregnant anyway and had never
really put that much thought into your future so you may as well accept the life
that seems to be choosing you. Art history must allow for the stories of the mass
of the people, not merely detail the fantastic lives of presidents and winners of
American Idol, if we wish it to accurately apply to our present day condition.
So the history of art must encompass the history of things never attempted,
ThinGS i puT off,
Evenesca Schiller Coupé
(Canadian,
b. 1972)
1989
graphite on paper
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what never occurred to anyone: all things, things we have no capability to
imagine, maybe, because we’ve never even begun to pick up the thread of this
way of thinking. There is no light to trace back that shines on the present day, no
Darwinian evolution to trace. Because it can’t be linked to Dada, or Minimalism,
or Surrealism. It can’t be attached to anything. Its origins are undened. These are
movements, practices, projects, and objects that never got started.
It is an awesome history, unimaginable though, and expansive. Thus daunting to
catalog.
In choosing to display forthrightly and document work which has never
existed—and not only that but to necessarily grant certain examples of it a
merit ranking so that we may be aware more acutely what lacks now in our
culture—this catalog sets itself up with a seemingly impossible task. How does
one document the previously undocumented, the entirely undocumentable? Is
it possible? Intelligent? Wrong-headed? It may be all of these, and more. In fact,
it is, technically, all of these, and more, simply because we do not know how to
answer the question. In fact, we only know that we can ask the question and
remain curious and open-hearted as we await a response to unfold.
Regardless, here it is. A catalog daring to describe that which its curators and
authors freely acknowledge to be indescribable. The viewers’ assistance in
this task would therefore be deeply appreciated. In the below space, please
catalog rst all of the things in your life you have attempted but failed to do,
additionally supplying information as to what contribution these may have
made to society, were they completed:
________________________________________________________________________
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________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________.
Now please consider mining again your own experience and providing a
description of all those tasks that you have considered attempting, but in fact
have not made any moves toward starting, much less completing, at any point in
your history: ___________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
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________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________.
Next we would deeply be indebted if you could outline in entirety blindspots
in your early childhood education and upbringing; the economic, linguistic,
cultural, or gender-based biases that you have felt arise in others and that have
kept you from pursuing certain potential interests or elds; the impact of the
political environment on your self-condence, health, emotional well-being, and
nancial security; and food allergies: ______________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
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________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________.
faBuLoSa (noT The CLeaninG
fLuid)
Seong Pouk (American,
1948-1983)
1976
mixed media
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This is very helpful. Thank you. Seriously. Now if you would be so kind as to
mine your deepest subconscious and note in the space below the vast complete
and entire listing of all visual and conceptual objects, performances, happenings,
and subversions that have never occurred to you, personally, to attempt
(although that may have occurred to others): ______________________________
________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________.
Fantastic. You are really helping us out here. There is, however, one nal
thing with which we would appreciate your assistance. We kindly ask you to
please note in the space provided all those artistic objects and experiences
that have never been conceptualized by any person, living or dead, under any
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circumstances: __________________________________________________________
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Whew. Actually, that was not nearly so dicult as we at rst believed it was
going to be.
inner naTure of The SCarY
Bear.
Candice Belle-Fourche
(Colombian, b. 1982).
2001
happening
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A Pocket Guide to Highlights of the Invisible Museum
by Gregory Cook III
Introduction
The Cook Museum of Book Arts was founded by my grandfather, Gregory
“Greg” Cook Sr., as he often said, to “promote the advancement of education
and appreciation of the book arts.” Cook began his collection when few paid
attention to the book arts—artworks that originate in literature. He traveled widely
in search of examples, fascinated by these oft-described but rarely seen artworks. It’sdicult all these years hence to remember how little the book arts were appreciated
then—often the owners of the paintings and sculptures gave this curious gentlemen
the artworks for free, happy to part with the seemingly worthless items. Now, of
course, even minor examples regularly sell at auction for millions of dollars.
Mr. Cook dabbled in the lm, restaurant, and ne art industries before nding
his calling in newspapers, comic books, and waste management. The successes
of these endeavors – in particular his New England Journal of Aesthetic
Research and theme park Gregcookland—provided him a sizeable fortune.
Merging his compassion for the working man and woman with his burgeoning
interest in the book arts, Cook initiated educational seminars and hung
book artworks by the likes of Jane Eyre, Emmeline Grangerford, and Rabo
Karabekian in his factory to be studied and discussed by his employees. The
museum’s greatest treasure, Basil Hallward’s Picture of Dorian Gray —as well
as renowned copies of it by twin brothers Ivan and Malvin Albright—long hung
in the factory commissary. Cook was much amused by the rich discussions of
originality and authenticity which they sparked.
Before long, Cook handed down control of his company to his son, my father
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Gregory Cook Jr., and devoted himself full-time to relentlessly collecting book
art as he laid plans to form a museum. A new force then entered the art world:
a self-made man with substantial nancial and intellectual resources, combative
intensity, bratty humor, relentless curiosity, a keen eye for art, and a deeply-
rooted respect for the common man and woman. Each time Cook turned one of
his dreams into reality, he showed us that our own dreams can come true.
As the collection grew, Cook hired architect Frank Lloyd Wright and landscape
designer Frederick Law Olmsted to plan the buildings and grounds of a new
museum, which he established in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, home to
the common men and women he so respected. The Cook Museum of Book Artsbecame renowned, drawing art lovers and scholars from far and wide. But in
recent years, the institution has fallen on nancial hardship.
I write this as the museum has just settled into a new home in Gloucester,
Massachusetts, in an attic apartment where Mr. Cook resided when he rst
moved East. It is much smaller than the museum he established in Boston,
but we hope this will be but a temporary stopover, much as it was for my
grandfather as he established his fame and fortune. And it is with that goal in
mind that we include this essay in this volume, which outlines the history of
the major works in our collection. We hope it will entice new visitors to come
see the Cook Museum’s unrivaled collection for the rst time and old friends to
visit us again. — Gregory Cook III
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European Art to 1900
The 19th century British folk painter Jane Eyre specialized in curious
dreamlike scenes, frequently painted during her summer vacations.
She saw her subjects “with the spiritual eye,” she explained in her
autobiography, “before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my
hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale
portrait of the thing I had conceived.”
It’s true that her technique is somewhat clunky, but charmingly so. And what
she lacked in craft she made up in her subjects. The Cormorant is a moody green
seascape under dark ominous clouds. Sunlight catches the mast of a shipwreck
and a large cormorant perched upon it. The bird clutches a gold bracelet set with
gems (picked out with opaque dabs of paint and crisp pencil) in its beak. In the
waves below, we glimpse a deathly pale arm—apparently the unlucky owner of
the bracelet.
Here, as in many of her works, the scenario is rather overwrought. But we’re
drawn in by Eyre’s mysterious suggested narrative. Why has the ship sunk? Who
unTiTLed (knoWn aS “The
CorMoranT”),
Jane Eyre
(English, 1816-1855).
c. 1847
watercolor on paper
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was it that drowned? And what is the signicance of the bracelet? Was it a gift
from a lover? Was it cursed? The success of the picture is to suggest numerous
possibilities, like the very popular Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels.
American Art to 1900
Emmeline Grangerford was not yet 14 when she died at her Kentucky home, but
she left us a trove of pictures that hint at the great artist she could have become.
The Cook Museum acquired all of her known works from the descendents of a
neighbor; ironically her whole family was extinguished during a violent feud
with this neighbor’s ancestors.
I Shall Never Hear . . . shows a young lady with her hair piled atop her head and held
in place by a comb. She cries into a handkerchief. In her hand, she holds a bird—
apparently dead—laying on its back with its legs pointing up into the air. Beneath
the image is the slogan: “I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas.”
Grangerford was a master of the folk tradition of memorial or mourning
pictures, a style that came into vogue among 19th century schoolgirls after the
unTiTLed (knoWn aS “i ShaLL never
hear ThY SWeeT Chirrup no More
aLaS”),
Emmeline Grangerford
(American, 1866-1881).
c. 1880
black and white chalk on paper
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death of George Washington in 1799. Many early examples were copied after
engraved prints that circulated after the rst president’s death. I Shall Never
Hear . . . is a particularly rare and touching example of this genre, because rather
than mourning a public hero or family member, the picture memorializes a
bird. Little is known of Grangerford’s life, beyond basic vital records and a brief
account in the 1885 autobiography of Huckleberry Finn, so whether the bird was
her pet or her invention we can only imagine.
The Modern World
Rabo Karabekian’s renowned realist masterpiece, Now It’s the Women’s
Turn, is his monument to the devastation of World War II. Picasso
distilled the essence of the European wars of the 1930s and ‘40s in
his painting Guernica, but Karabekian tries to pack in a bit of everything of
those wars into his astonishing 64-feet-long, abundantly detailed scene. It
was inspired by “a beautiful green valley in springtime,” as he called it, on the
border between Germany and Czechoslovakia where he and hundreds of other
captured Allied ocers were abandoned by their German guards at the end of
the war in May 1945.
unTiTLed (knoWn aS “i
ShaLL never hear ThY
SWeeT Chirrup no More
aLaS”), detail
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The valley is crowded with 5,219 people—concentration-camp survivors,
slave laborers, a Japanese soldier, the old dead queen of the Gypsies with
her mouth full of rubies and diamonds, German concentration-camp guards
who dumped the prisoners in the valley and tried to hide their identities by
stealing civilian clothes. Karabekian has embellished what he experienced (no
Japanese troops where actually there) to represent the breadth of the war.
There are prisoners of war from across the world—Yugoslavian partisans, a
Moroccan Spahis captured in North Africa, a Scottish glider pilot captured
on D-Day, a Gurkha from Nepal, a Maori corporal from the New Zealand
Field Artillery captured in Libya, a dying Canadian bombardier who had
been shot down over a Hungarian oil eld. There are the ruins of a medieval
watchtower and, at the two bottom corners, cut-away views of women
hiding in the root cellars of farmhouses, trying to avoid being raped by
invading Russian troops.
Karabekian was trained in realism and visual storytelling in the studio of the
illustrator Dan Gregory, whose work resembled N.C. Wyeth’s paintings. But
after service as an Army camouage expert during World War II (he was
noW iT’ S The WoMen’ S
Turn, installation view
Rabo Karabekian
(American, 1916-1988).
c. 1983
oil on canvas, installed
inside antique barn
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WindSor BLue nuMBer
SevenTeen,
Rabo Karabekian
c. 1964
housepaint and tape on
canvas
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wounded and captured by German soldiers during ghting at Germany’s western
border late in the war), he emerged as one of the pioneer Abstract Expressionists
of the New York School. Much like Barnett Newman, he used a roller to paint
large at elds of color in Sateen Dura-Luxe house paint divided by vertical
stripes of tape (like Newman’s “zips”). Despite their seeming abstraction,
Karabekian saw his pictures as narrative scenes. “Once an illustrator, always an
illustrator!” he confessed in his 1987 autobiography Bluebeard. “I couldn’t help
seeing stories in my own compositions . . . each strip of tape was the soul at the
core of some sort of person or lower animal.”
His largest and most famous was Windsor Blue Number Seventeen, a blue
abstraction painted across eight 8-foot-square panels combined to make a
painting 64 feet long. He painted it on commission to ll the lobby of the
GEFFCo headquarters in New York in the 1960s. It became infamous—and
Karabekian became a punchline in art history books—when his paintings began
to self-destruct, the paint and tape shriveling up and peeling o. The withered
Windsor Blue was banished to a vault in the skyscraper’s basement, only to
be discovered years later by an insurance inspector who recognized it because
WindSor BLue nuMBer
SevenTeen,
installation view.
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slides of the painting had been shown (before and after) as a joke in an art
appreciation course she took in college. Karabekian had the canvases returned
to him, restretched, reprimed and locked up inside his studio (a former potato
barn) in East Hampton, Long Island, to exorcise his “unhappy past, a symbolic
repairing of all the damage I had done to myself and others in my brief career as
a painter.” There it sat for several years until sometime in early 1980s it seems,
when he reused the canvases as the support for Now It’s the Women’s Turn.
When he revealed it to the public in 1987 it became an immediate popular
sensation, but the art world was slow in recognizing his career’s great third act.
It is only recently that its inuence on ne art has become apparent in works like
Anselm Kiefer’s 2004 Velimir Chelbnikov and the Sea, a suite of 30 paintings of
warships and submarines plowing through rough seas, installed in a custom built
corrugated steel barn. But clearly it and Philip Guston’s late work are touchstonesfor the art world’s re-enchantment with the power of stories in visual art.
In Now It’s the Women’s Turn, Karabekian depicted himself as the largest person
in the scene, at the bottom in the center, right above the oor, the only character
with his back turned to the viewer. He positioned himself at the meeting of the
fourth and fth panels, the crack between them like his stripe-soul.
noW iT’ S The WoMen’ S Turn,
self-portrait detail.
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noW iT’ S The WoMen’ S Turn,
Rabo Karabekian
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unTiTLed,
“Joe”
c. 2004
performance
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The Work Only You See
by Mairead Case
Put all the images in language in a place of safety
and make use of them, for they are in the desert,
and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them.
—J. Genet
T
wo years ago, and for the two years before that, I dated this guy Joe.
That’s not his real name. Joe was the tough sort of quiet, with knife scars
inside his elbow and one pluckless eyebrow, centered above the nose. His
stomach was long and at, and every night he ate pizza or spaghetti, sometimes
both and still he was skinny.
The only thing Joe was afraid of was spiders. Nothing else knew how to sneak up
on him, and vice versa because they always saw tall-him coming: all eight hims,
tall in their multi-faceted eyes.
In fact Joe did a lot of sneaking-up. All he really wanted was to be invisible, for
reasons both superheroic and shy. One Halloween he couldn’t decide between
that –invisibility—and Satan, so he did both: painted his face red and snuck up
on everybody all night. It was perfect because in the end he was heard without
talking, so I didn’t say he’d never be either: invisible, or Satan. And he wasn’t,
not even when we broke up.
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When I first pitched this essay you’re reading, Anne said yes,
that there was absolutely uncreated art in “people trying to
embody something they not only aren’t, but will never be
able to experience.” She added that maybe costumes were different because
they’re active. Like how on Halloween, people make active choices about
what parts of themselves they want to represent, or don’t—or wrap in
tigerstripe velour.
Sometimes I agree, but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I think Halloween is more
like secret-keeping, else wishing hard, really hard, hard like sixteen pennies in a
gigantic fountain lled with stone dolphins. Plus art isn’t art without witness,
right? So if nobody knows who (or what) you are, does it still count?
But what if, asked Jerry over pancakes (and that is his real name, except maybe
I had eggs), what if the costume passes for real life? What if nobody knows
you’re dressed up? Hmm. Joe’s face was red enough to glow through a washing
machine, refrigerator door, or basketball mascot. I couldn’t name it, but still I
didn’t see him until the kiss on the cheek.
The ThinG You WanT To
dreSS up aS, detail
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When you’re a kid, things are a little dierent because maybe the
thing you choose doesn’t actually exist. When I was a kid, my
mom worked with this lady named Stella; she lived by Greenlake
(and I always wondered which came rst, the color or the name. The reason
wasn’t sweet and shamrocky, but more “don’t swim in there, because if you do
your guts’ll melt away, zzle o and all that’s left’ll be a rib cage.” When I was a
kid I actually thought about this: ribcages, bobbing with the ducks.)
Anyway Stella lived in a Halloween house. She had sewing machines and knitting
needles and ve cats, an eyeball painted on her door. Its pupil lined up with the
peephole.
There were also eight closets, eight closets lled with all kinds of wonderful
crap, crap inherited or scavenged or sewn. There were hatboxes, and shoes.
Stella had a beehive hat and a beehive hairpiece, Elvis wigs and rhinestones,
false noses and DIY warts. Squirting owers and man-whiskers, cat-whiskers
and a pillow you tied to your butt to make it bigger. Each September we got
to choose something, and best part was we could pick anything, because
STeLLa’ S houSe on GreenLake,
interior view
1992
photograph
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Stella was always a witch anyway. Except once when she was Queen
Elizabeth.
We were weird kids and Mom was big on narrative, so we came with costume
ideas ready, instead of taking them from what we saw. Once I was Medusa and
shinglined a bunch of snakes to my head, inked my eyebrows heaven-high, and
I guess people got it even if it was a nutty choice for an eight year old. My sister
was a clown thrice in a row, and I remember once she fell asleep in facepaint, on
the seatbelt, and left half her smile. There’s an unchartedness to that too, but
mostly it was creepy: creepy bloodapple red, rubbed into black leather. The seat
diveted where her body’d been.
We came with costume ideas ready, and after Stella waded into the boxes and
the boas, Mom said it looked great, even if no one knew who or how we were.
Once I was Pippi, and obviously so, but also there was a year with messes of
green tulle and red lipstick and glitter wands, striped tights. We were totally
Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker; fuck the eighth graders who couldn’t tell.
unTiTLed (BeTTe MidLer
and Sarah JeSSiCa parker),
The Case Sisters
(American, b. 1983 and
1986)
c. 1990
performance
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One year ago, I freelance-wrote my rent, and asking about tattoos was
either too irty or supposedly disgenuine, which was funny because
actually I care a lot about what people ink into their bodies, forever.
(My friend Rose, which is totally not her real name, she has Dorothy from Oz,
her crown curving on the upper arm. Only the points don’t all come together
because the guy was still, might still be, learning. People ask what that is, and if
they do it unkindly then Rose won’t say.) Anyway I couldn’t ask about tattoos.
So instead I asked about Halloween costumes, which is great because sometimes
people are expecting girly shyness, or uncharted tongue-art on their own
personal boner, then wham! you are all “tell me how it was when you were four,
please.” Sometimes people get what you’re doing, but sometimes the surprise in
their eyes is like Whack-a-Mole.
The best part is afterwards, when they are singing. You hear a catseye-valentine
croon, remember the story about how she dressed as “something dead” every
year for ten years straight, and eventually the boyfriends started to worry. This
creature onstage: how is she dierent?
The TaTToo roSe WanTed,
anonymous tattoo artist
(American, unknown)
c. 2003
body art
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I’ve written about music since age sixteen and asked this question every
time, so there are pages of Halloween costumes. Pages and pages. One guy
whose throat is husky Springsteen sandpaper, when he was four this guy
dressed “punk,” as joinked from Cyndi Lauper videos alone. Dude had bandanna,
popping color, blue feathers: the works. “I lived in the suburbs,” he said. We
were in Chicago, and I remember it being cold enough for ghosts to curl from hismouth. “I had no idea what a punk was.” He said it kindly so it wasn’t like dissing
Cyndi Lauper.
I remember being glad his mother let him, and thinking that possibly this is the
purest punk you can be. If you see what you are, and name it, then that is what
matters—even if nobody else can tell. Right?
The ThinG You
WanT To BeCoMe,
detail
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Then there are the people who costume every day. Nobody has a clue who
they are, but still they do it. One word for this is “did you take your Klonopin
today?” but another is like your portable teddy bear phalanx, v. World.
In Seattle, this guy stands in front of Nordstrom every day; he has a sign scribbled
with COMMUNIST POLICE SATAN JES!US !!! and all the time he mumbles
mumbles. Once I walked by with a Portuguese friend, who realized dude wasn’tschizing jib but actually Portuguese, and sharply so. Dude spits urban theory at
the shoppingbagged, shoulderpadded drones, all day every day. It makes sense to
him but not them. So his language is a costume, and while I believe that’s a choice,
perhaps it’s also anger. I’m not sure if he’s brilliant or trapped.
Same goes for Mike: when Mike was twenty-three he drank a lot of whisky. He
drank a lot of whisky, and after/during Mike would hide under the kitchen table,
say he was a tiger. “Tiger, tiger!” Mike barked, even though he was most obviously
a yellow-haired boy wearing bloody knuckles and a Hamburglar t-shirt. Mike
wouldn’t budge until he got a kiss. Sometimes it was funny, but sometimes also
stupid or pathetic. Of course secretly I am also a tiger. Tiger like when Garber died
or magazines stop or winter’s gray and ribs are showing: tiger, tiger.
Question: say you’re a girae and your costume’s correctly spotted.
But say your neck is regular-sized, your tongue is abby and you
don’t eat leaves. Are you still giraely? Even if people read you as
raccoon? A Swamp Thing?
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Sometimes people do this, this costuming of self as self can never be, or a
thing never was, only they do it once they’re older. Like: coeds going sex-
cat, sex-witch, sex-vampire, all the times post-Catholic schoolboys dress
like priests and mack on you at parties. There’s nothing wrong with any of this,
per se, but if you’re going to reclaim then you might as well go for the gold and
ultra-deranged: sorority chicks in ab-pillows and yellowing teeth, for example,
or sexy clowns and Spandexed priests.
Of course there are also times when you cringe. Once I met a zombie serving
Jell-o shots uptown; she’d gashed open her back with prosthetics and corn syrup,
because you get more tips when you’re beat up. I remember the green of gelatin,the whiteness of hands and how her ngernails glowed around the plastic
glasses. Twice upon a time I went through boxes and found a photo of a family
member dressed like Little Black Sambo. We’re Irish Catholic, burn quicker than
butter and blush like re. I did both, then showed him and he denied it. I never
did that. But look, I wanted to say. Look. Here’s the image; I’m holding it in my
hand.
hoW You WanT
peopLe To See You,
detail
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Then sometimes you go backwards purely, like when Andy redid
eight years old. We showed up at the party and he’d bought a
turkey outfit, snatched it straight from the drugstore kiddie
rack. He explained his turkeyness to us, five beers down and gnawing a
toothpicked weenie.
Andy is tiny so the shoulders, arms and head t ne, but also he’s tall so instead
of sticking his legs in the turkey holes, guy just sliced out the crotch and wore
the bird as a dress. Plush turkey feet brushed the outside of Andy’s kneecaps.
Honestly, if you stood back, he looked kind of like a gangly fuzzy drag queen,
just with beak.
I asked Andy what he really was when he was eight, he said Transformers
probably. I thought about how artwork is mostly for estimation, approval,
inspiration, then asked him if he’d please dress up forever, fuck the eighth
graders.
Andy said of course.
unTiTLed (eiGhT-Year-oLd
andY),
“Andy”
(American, b. 1981)
c. 2005
performance
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aLL The reaSonS i Can’ T Be WhaT
i WanT,
Janessa Fredericks (Mexican,
b. 1984)
2006
work on paper
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On the Curiously Impossible History
of Unknown Things
By Caroline Picard
This exhibition is not about unsent letters. It is not about the nostalgic
property of said letters, or how they might sit in crude and unkempt
stacks. It is not about a note scribbled with someone’s Big Bang Idea
that lies abandoned in the bottom of a waste paper basket. It is not about any
thought, once considered and then abandoned. Rather, it is about the letters
never written, or artwork that never existed. It is about unengendered ideas.
This is a catalog of impossible works, impossibly represented and drawn forth
from the impossible realm of non-being. It denes a genre of work that never
had the chance to succeed or fail. The exhibition is on display around you;
for the rst time these works, so long marginalized by the momentum of
mainstream society, have a place at the fore. It is no wonder that such non-
existent artifacts escaped notice. They do not breathe in quite the same way.
They are so far on the fringe of contemporary experience, they seem at best
innocuous, at worst invisible.
We exist in another world, the world of materiality, of esh and blood and
being. It is a world dened by what has been and what has been has always
taken place on the same geographical stage, amongst our material brethren.
Within that context, humanity has traced and retraced the grounds of this earth,
mapped out its topography, assigned names to seemingly xed points and given
mythology to the stars. In each instance of learning, we associate these places or
discoveries with historical experience, making the world personally relevant. Via
the assiduous documentation of lives lived, a teetering scaold of human truths
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has been erected. It is a monument of human memory as traced through a
vocabulary of Being-nesses. On that scaold one is born beside science, language
and craft: practices that essentially apply to materialisms.
This colonizing approach, an application of nouns and past experience, denes
the landscape of future human possibility. New things stand on the shoulders of
the old things that stand on the shoulders of what is older; beneath everything
there is a pyramid of expired, used-up concepts; it is no wonder then, that
relating to a body of work without the same historical lineage is to us absurd.
We cannot communicate with things that never existed—it is not in our
vocabulary. What has never existed will not give in to the yoke of subject/
object/verb allocations.
The closest we can come to apprehending what has not been is to imagine
what we don’t know. To do this we would have to step outside of our
ordered psycho-material context. One must step o the earth, for there is no
unknown continent yet to be seen in the Pacic Ocean. One cannot conceive
the foreign nature of never-before seen species, or people on Earth. One
BiG BanG TheorY,
Imelda
Consegravenathanon
(Chinese, b. 1958)
1998
graphite on paper
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must step farther aeld. It is a strain, but in doing so this exhibition becomes
more accessible.
Conceiving of Untitled, an intuitive panorama by Ron Hubribottom, is like
seeing the possibility of an as yet undiscovered continent. It is the taste—a
ghostly spirit that wafts under your nose from a strange antique bottle. It is
a smell you’ve never before smelt. It is strange and impossible to taste. It is
gone before you can recall it. In Untitled, the amalgamation of ground and sky,
blended as they are in abstraction, put the viewer o-balance; one cannot help
but take a step closer, admiring the tension between foreground, background,
and the way these juxtapose, creating an arduous struggle for anyone who,
ultimately, is so consumed with this new, unknown cultural strata that he or she
can only beg of Hubribottom: What The Fuck?
He is a genius, this fellow! As dangerous as the emperor’s tailors who sold him
his best birthday suit.
Such WTF instances are essential to a progressive development in the soul. The
unTiTLed, detail
Ron Hubribottom
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best minds of human civilization have suered thusly, and while already being
crazy it was always an external experience that nally put them over the edge,
making them conceive of incredible things. In order for Ptolemy to construct
a mathematically sound system of epicycles and celestial order, he certainly
looked at the stars on a clear night, felt his sweating soul and, succumbing to
the impossible, saw Venus move an inch. Or Marco Polo, the sailor in uncharted
seas, surrounded by the unknown as any monk in a raft, he felt his consciousness
expanding beyond the bounds of convention. He was kissed by a giant with
wings. “It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size;
so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And
it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into
the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the
bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure” (Marco Polo, as quoted by
Attgenborough (1961: 32)). Or Art Bell, late-night talkshow radio host, speaking
to a man who found a UFO and from it took the rst microchip to NASA. (The
Abyss was not just a movie.) Or a group of children, four sets of small fth grade
ngernails scrunched and quiet, barely touching the plastic pallet of an Ouija
board as some how they watch the spirit of Kira’s dead dog spell out C-O-C-K-S-
venuS, for Sure,
Knute McNatters
(Canadian, 1878-1952)
1922
mixed media
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U-C-K-E-. One of them (not Kira) screams. Outside of domesticities, we may nd
terrible terrible things. But, rest assured, they are good for you. Transcendental
epiphanies are like green beans.
In each case, someone takes steps towards the unknown, trying to understand
it. Traveling through uncharted territories is an embassy into suspicion. In such
territories one must leave the rigid demands of old criterion behind paying
careful attention to avoid headhunters. We must descend from the plinth of
assumption into fear and trembling.
Astonishing Animals that would have seemed insane had I no prior
experience of them:
1/unicorn 6/zebra
2/armadillo 7/macaw parrot
3/narwhale 8/a bird, for that matter
4/elephant 9/ or a cat
5/alligator 10/dog
etc…..,
It may be that before we can consider what has never been, one must rst
imagine what any given banality would feel like had it never been seen before.
To clean the doors of perception, and approach the overwhelming detail of the
world, by now monotonous, as one reborn with naïve eyes. To puzzle over the
eortless order with which cars, pedestrians, and bicycles seem to stop and
start, accelerate and decelerate in a cryptic and symphonic pattern. To marvel at
the accumulated weight of agreement that constructs this toe-heel-toe dance.
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Or, change the channels on a T.V. set, one of the old ones, a little brown box
with wood paneling that must be depressed to access the buttons, and when
depressed, and while turning the knob (the whole concept of vintage does not
occur to you), you see Vanna White turning letters at the behest of a spinningwheel, the knob turns with another click and you see the cowboys of Bonanza
(you like the intro song, but can’t really read enough to know it’s Bonanza), and
turn again to hear someone talking about their erectile dysfunction through a
sunny soft focus lens—you’re a little confused because while every other station
(what you experience as a window into an entire real-life world) is autonomous,
this one seems to be aware of you, standing there, and he’s telling you about his
intimacies. The banal is not the banal, but instead The Great Unknown, in which
you seek to ascribe some order. You want to cultivate a relationship to it. Here,
invariably your soul would sweat. It might not be so dierent from the world of
non-being.
The small signicance of such moments lies in an unequivocal understanding
of the relationship between reality as we know it, and the realm of
possibility, as it is undened. In order to lend denition to the world, an
eort is made to project our reality onto what has not yet come to pass.
Doing so aords humankind a sense of stability; it puts our humors at ease,
giving one the relief necessary to attend to more important, biological needs:
sex, propagation and home-making. It would be impossible to attend to those
most basic activities if one thought that something unreasonable could, infact, happen. It is therefore more important to construct a sense of safety
than to tear the scales from one’s eyes. It is remarkable that order, as we see
it, is nevertheless interrupted with encounters of the “other.” Marco Polo was
not so long ago.
Case and Point: James Lee, American Chinese of middle age, lives in
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Flagstaff, Arizona next to a couple of lesbians and their ten dogs. Aliens
abducted him and his wife twice in 2002. On both occasions they left their
house, told their children— Henry (9 yrs.) and a Janice (12 yrs.)—to be
good, they were going to the beach; don’t forget to put your food on the
purple ion-izing plates before you eat anything, especially microwavables.
The purple plates reverse the harmful affects of microwaves on the
molecular structure of all foods.
They went to the beach on Friday evening at six p.m. May 31st 2001, brought
a case of beer as was their custom, and didn’t reappear until Monday June 4th
at ten p.m. Of particular interest is that they felt they had only been gone for
six hours. They had no sense of the length of their absence. Where did they
go? What happened to them? After careful interrogation of their children, an
inspection of the fridge, dirty plates, laundry, and toilet paper they were less
suspicious of their children, and when the school called the following afternoon
the parents were simply perplexed. They felt a little sick for their inexplicable
loss of memory. They assumed they had had too much to drink and slept, for
some reason, for three days.
SLave To faShion,
Chopstick Garvey-Phipps
(British, 1988-2007)
1999
mixed media
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When it happened a second time the following September, (September 14th-
September 18th.) they both got a little scared. It wasn’t until Marcie, the wife,
woke up in the middle of the night and saw an alien breathing into her face—
(likely a dierent species from the tabloid aliens, this creature had particularly
small eyes, she says, like two pin holes with a long curling thick-lipped mouth
that caved in a little bit, as though the thing had lost its teeth, no hair, sexless
and skinny like its celebrity peers except for a little paunch around a navel-less
abdomen) that she realized that they must have been abducted by aliens and
they had come back to do follow up research.
Fortunately she knew that in order to escape the aliens, one says “No” once,
very rmly with a shake of the head. (Like vampires, there are certain rules
that aliens have to follow.) She said “No,” fell back asleep, woke up the next
morning, sure it was a dream until they discovered the family telescope
was missing, along with the Ss-Uv book of the encyclopedia. Fortunately
there have been no further incidents. Through the few years of therapy and
hypnosis that Marcie and James have been pursuing independently, they
have each culled from their memories a recollection of the inner workings
The GreaT unkoWn,
detail from
previous spread
Melissa Granger
(American, b. 1936)
1988
mixed media
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of the spacecraft, and a number of artworks that decorated the space ship.
Neither can conjure the particulars of the work, or what the framed artifacts
were depicting, but each has expressed the sense that they were historically
relevant to the alien culture they had encountered. In their particular
encounter with the Unknown, they have given up any attempt to reason it
out. The experience exists, therefore, in the same intuitive language as the
work in this exhibition, and does not translate into our dimension. Neither
the missing telescope nor the work Anne Elizabeth Moore has curated can be
dismissed. While it does not conform to the dictionary of our world-view, it
must be considered.
Language is a protector of sorts, ensuring that any experience we participate
in will translate into a linguistic and logical structure. Any experience must
complement the material histories we have so far told ourselves. The exhibition
at hand aords the thought of possibilities that break from that history. It
emphasizes Non-Being, a truly revolutionary concept! Humanity has for its
whole existence put such priority on Being, we do not even have the tools to
consider any alternative. This is a catalog about cultural products that were
SoMe oTher STuff ThaT
never oCCurred To Me,
Pansy Riknoctok
(Ecuadorian, 1970-1994)
1992
graphite on paper
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never made. Despite having never been tried, they are nonetheless obscalescent.
They could only have been at one time, and yet they never were. They are here
conjured in our time, where they are ill placed.
And while this exhibition presents them, it does not, realize them. It cannot.
The landscape it points to is too vast to be mapped out. There are too many
non-options to consider. It will never befriend any taxonomy we could
create and therefore cannot be colonized. Twins by Percy Fontaine has an
unfathomable dualism. Trapped within the picture frame is the paradox of two
and one being one and the same at once. Captured as such, we get a glimpse of
the Other Realm—it makes the soul sweat, the organs internally glisten under
the ardor of confusion, trapped in a hall of mirrors the mind projects as much
as it absorbs until it is at last, simply baed. Ultimately, the cage of Fontaine
traps us more than it does any non-existent twins. The world of non-being
from which these works were called will forever slip through our rigid ngers;
we are not exible enough to relate to it, or even conceive of its signicance.
We are too conditioned within our own habitat. Instead one must view this
exhibition as one dened by the seeming and strange possible coincidence
TWinS, detail
Percy Fontaine
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the Catalog of this Exhibition 55
of events. The original scaold of human reason now seems, in some sense,
arbitrary.
The art market has been defined. Its cannon is revised and re-regurgitated
constantly. From spit-up bones, a new piece is composed, apiece that
compliments its origin, paying inherent homage to its ancestry. In each re-
composition, there is added doubt that anything new can be created; that
any thought can be re-cast into a stunning and uncategorical something.
The history of objects is a tyrant. It is a constant and self-reflexive hall of
mirrors.
This exhibition is an historical occasion, a moment never before seen. In this
exhibition we are granted relics from what was previously nothing. In the world
of this exhibition, one can see the shadow of all of those might-have been things
that simply never were. It is an experience with the most disenfranchised group
of notions, the most underrepresented collection of non-objects. As such, it can
exist only in the mind. It reaches into each personal and private history, culling
the various abandoned and unacknowledged treatises. It is a catalog of unknown
dreams.
Called up as they are, Catalog of this Exhibition serves as the medium in séance,those dreams nearly materialize. Being wild and untenable, deathless and dead,
they are free. They jostle against one another, reecting now on how they might
have changed the course of the world as we know it. They are marginalized
shadows, and it is very possible that upon closing this book, you will wonder if
you ever saw them at all. The Catalog of this Exhibition is the siren of nostalgia
for what has never been, a regret of curiosity.
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The BeGinninG of TiMe
SoMe oTher STuff
SeveraL hiSToriCaL
evenTS, fiGureS, CreaTionS
Timeline
compiled by Our Researchers
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noT ThaT
57
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The BeST MaSTerpieCe in The WorLd,
Consuela Masterson Dario Filloup-Loup
(American, b. 1930)
c. 1957
performance
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60 the Catalog of this Exhibition
aCTuaL aCCoMpLiShMenTS, aeSTheTiCaLLY porTraYed,
Ruben Fitzhugh
(Swedish, b. 1970)
2001
mixed media
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Afterword
While washing dishes in my apartment one day, I overheard a commentator onMeet The Press describe what he felt was the most profound recent failure of the
American political Left: to allow, in the 60s and 70s, popular opinion to set the
national agenda for contemporary discussion, and thus history. While everyone
was busy talking about those crazy hippies, the current—dominant—political force
in our society and (it is worth pointing out) the rest of the world was quietly and
unobtrusively putting in place all the machinations against which we rail today.
What we dismiss as boring can damage us; what we ignore can still dictate the
course of our lives; what we do not do can dene us more than what we do; and
what we do not know to look for, and thus what we perceive as invisible, can
become manifest eventually. And then: look out.
Audre Lord writes about articulating the banal, giving language to the
overlooked and unspoken as an act of self-preservation and, ultimately, social
justice. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make
your own, until you sicken and die of them, still in silence?”, she asks.
Yet while these formerly unremarkable events, activities—these lacks, voids,
absences—may damage, I must also believe they can sometimes be good. That
you perhaps have left the greatest accomplishment in the history of the universe
undone, because your life took a dierent course after that minor bike accident and
you now enjoy designing wallpaper or mending shoes or ipping burgers or teaching
kindergarten. You are happy. What greater accomplishment can you strive for?
Therefore it is not a lost nostalgia we address with this exhibition—a yearning for
a yearning for a time, object, sensation—but an accurate assessment of potential.
There is great work still left undone, great tyrannies still unnoticed, and still the
potential for serene contentment. What will be your greatest accomplishment?
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Index
to TheAbolitionists,John F. Hume
Abolitionism, and
Republicanism, 8, 9; end of,
50-56.
Abolitionist movement, v.
Abolitionists, hysterical praise
of, 1; and dissolution of
the Union, 1, 2; eect, 2;
struggles, 3; and political
expediency, 5; convention
at Pittsburgh, 7; third-party,
7; vote of, 7; founders of
Republican party, 8; pro-
slavery mobbing, 9; voting
strength, 9; organization, 10;
lecturers, 11; stump
orators, 11; newspapers,
11; preparatory work, 12;
hostility to Union, 13;
disloyalty, 13; treason, 13;
place in history, 15; Quakers,
16; physical courage,
16; unselshness of, 16;
motives, 18; persecutionof, 20; feelings against, 22;
rst presidential ticket, 28;
prejudice against, 30; abuse
by “gentlemen,” 32; women,
38; preliminary victory of,
47; denunciation of early,
49; leaders, 16-18.
Adams, John Quincy, 21, 41;
attempted expulsion of, from
Congress,9-7; speech in his
own defense in Congress, 8.
“Amalgamation,” 35.
Anderson “Bill,” 15.
Andrew, Governor, of Mass.,
Peleg’s Life of, 19.
Anthony, Susan B., 14, 18.
Anti-Slavery societies,
organization, 26; in New
England, 7, 13, 21; National,
7, 8, 21.
Anti-Unionist, 13.
Bacon, Benjamin C., 20.
Bailey, Dr. Gamaliel, 63, 27.
Ballou, Adin, 18.
Beecher, Henry Ward, 63, 38,
35; speech in England, 63-64;
and Lincoln, 33.
Bell, 52.
Benton, Thomas H., 54.
“Black laws” 35; in Ohio, 35.
Black Republic of Texas, 28.
Blair, Gen. Prank P., 58, 18-35;
and Missouriemancipationists, 61; and
Missouri Abolitionists,
18; appearance of, 22;
fearlessness, 22; quarrel with
Fremont, 22; and capture of
Camp Jackson, 22-13; threats
against, 8.
Bonner, Hon. Benjamin R., 55.
Border-ruanism, 53.
Border Slave-State message, text
of, 21-24.
Brown, B. Gratz, 55.
Bull Run, 192.
Buxton, Sir Thomas, 32.
Camp Jackson (St. Louis), 13;
“aair” at, 16-18; eect of
capture, 13-14.
Capron, Engham C., 22.
Carlisle, Earl of, 18.
Chapman, Mrs. Henry, 33.
“Charcoals,” Missouri, 59;
delegation to President, 16;
ght for “Free Missouri,”
12; appeal to President for
protection, 16-18.
Chase, Salmon P., 10, 13, 14,
59-61, 35, 18; nancial policy,
60; espousal of Abolitionism,
61; and “third party,” 64;
election to United States
Senate, 22.
Child, Lydia Maria, 24.
Chittenden, L.E., 14.
Churchill’s Crisis, 57.
Civil War, 11; due to Abolitionists,
12.
Clay, Henry, 2, 6.
“Claybanks,” 59; exclusion from
National Convention, 19.
Con, Joshua, 21.
Con, Levi, 17-18; “Presidentof ‘The Underground
Railroad,’” 17.
Colonization, 19-28; Society, 19;
and England, 10-12; Lincoln’s
opinion, 13; experiments,
13-14.
Colonizationists, pretended
friendship for negroes, 10.
Compromise of 1850, 6.
Conover, A.J., 18.
Cotton-gin, invention of, 31.
Cox, Abram L., 43, 18.
Crandall, Prudence, persecution
of, 16-17.
Crisis, The, 57.
Cross Keys, battle of, 14.
Curtis, Geo. William, 8, 19.
Curtis, Gen. Samuel R., and
military control of Missouri,
63-64; charges against, 63.
Democratic party, division of, 11.
Democrats, 4, 7; Anti-Nebraska,
9; of New York, 9.
Dissolution of Union, petition for, 2.
“Doughface,” 4.
Douglas, Stephen A., 12; dislike
of, by slaveholders’ factions,
11; defeated for President,
63-63; and Abolitionists, 53;
hated by slave-owners, 53.
Douglass, Fred., 11.
Drake, Hon. Charles D., 17.
Dred Scott decision, 45-46; too
late for South’s purpose, 47.
Dresser, Amos, whipped, 119.
Emancipation proclamation,
17-18; due to Abolitionists,
12; story of, 19; moral
inuence of, 46; Lincoln’s
reasons for, 46; ineective,
35; text of, 21-23.
Ewing, Gen. Thomas, 54;
repulsion of General Price, 15.
Fort Donelson, capture of, 44.
Fort Henry, capture of, 14.
Foss, A.T., 18.
Foster, Stephen, 39.
“Free-Soil” party, 5.
Fremont, General, 51; and
western command, 54-55;
nancial bad management,
54; defeats Stonewall
Jackson, 54; removal, 45;
freedom proclamation, 35.
Frothingham, O.B., 24.
Fugitive Slave Law, 5, 21.
Fussell, Bartholomew, 43.
Gamble, Hamilton R., 60;
and emancipation ordinance
of, 63; and military control
of Missouri, 63.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 13, 21,
26; Dragged through streets
of Boston, 32; imprisonment
for libel, 54; reception in
England, 31-32; speech at
Exeter Hall, 31.
Genius of Universal
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Emancipation, The, 51.
Gillinghamm, Chalkly, 43.
Grant, General, 44; And
“Charcoals,” 17; Nomination
by Missouri Radicals, 14-16;
capture of Fort Donelson, 12.
Greeley, Horace, 38, 35.
Grimke sisters, 38, 14-16, 24.
Hallock’s Order Number Three, 41.
Harrison, Wm. Henry, 5.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 24.
Hints toward Emancipation in
Missouri, 58.
Hollie, Sally, 18.
Howland, Joseph A., 18.
Hume, John, 28-30.
Hutchinsons, the, 41.
Indiana, introduction of slavery
into, 5.
Jackson, Claiborne F., 16;
attempt to make Missouri
secede, 16-18; outwitted by
Nathaniel Lyon, 18.
Jackson, Stonewall, defeat of, 14.
Johnson, Andrew, 17, 18.
Joselyn, Simeon, 43.
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 44.
Kedzie, James, 28-40.
Kelly, Abby, 38-39.
Kendrick, John, 18.
Kentucky, 21.
“Know-Nothings,” 9.
Lafayette, 17.
Lane, James H., 14-17; canvas for
U.S. Senator, 16-17; attitude
on slavery, 17.
Lawrence, city of, capture by
Quantrell, 15; butchery of
inhabitants, 15.
Lewis, Samuel, 18.
Liberal party, 2, 3, 7, 8, 5.
Liberator, 21; rst issue, 55;
South Carolina and Georgia
oers reward for its
circulation, 55-56; excluded
from U.S. mails, 56; oce
wrecked by mob, 56;
opposed to separate party
action, 64.
Lincoln, Abraham, 2, 8, 11, 41;
election of, 11, 48;
Gettysburg speech, 8; and
Douglas, 63-64; debate of 1858, 63; and slavery, 63;
preferred by slaveholders,
63; Recollections of, 14-28;
and emancipation, 36-49;
and Missouri Compromise,
13; message to Minister
Dayton of Paris, 14;
proposed constitutional
amendment, 44; special
message to Congress,
December, 1863, 44;
emancipation policy, 45;
Life of, by I.N. Arnold, 17.
Lovejoy, Elijah P., shooting of, 32.
Lundy, Benjamin, 27, 50-54;
meeting with Garrison, 54.
Lyon, Nathaniel, 48.
McCrummil, James, 43.
Mace, Enoch, 43.
Manumittal, arguments against, 34-35.
Marshall, “Tom,” 7.
Massachusetts Legislature and
slavery, 14.
May, Rev. S.T., Recollections, 14.
Mexican War, 44.
Missouri, 57-64; Compromise,
6, 12, 13-14; admission to
Union as slave State, 43;
slavery contest, 7; and the
Union, 59-60; Radicals,
59; Conservatives, 59;
“Charcoals,” 63; “Claybanks,”
59; military control of,
63-64; guerrilla bands, 15;
pacication of, 18; Radicals,
opposition to Lincoln, in
National Convention, 18-19;
delegation to Lincoln, 29-51;
Germans, attacks on, 11-12;
loyalty of, 12-63. Missouri
Democrat, The, 57-58;
and Louis Snyder, 58-59;
opposition to Lincoln, 18;
support of Johnson, 18.
Monroe, James, 18.
Moody, Loring, 19.
Morris, Senator, 18.
Mott, Mrs. Lucretia, 38, 14-14.
National Anti-Slavery Advocate, 24.
National Era, The, 63, 27-28.
Negroes, prejudice against, in
North, 35; in Ohio, 36;
stronger in North than in
South, 36; surage, 8; failure
as freemen, 8-39.
Newcomb, Stillman E., 21.
“Nigger Hill,” 26, 7.
“Nigger-pens,” 31.
Oberlin College, 27.
Ohio, pro-slavery, 21;
Abolitionists of, 21.
Opdyke, 59.
Ordinance of ’8, 5.
Pennsylvania Hall, ring of, 30.
“Peonage,” 8.
Phelps, Amos, 22, 24.
Philippine Islands, 8-9; slavery
in, 8; massacres in, 49; abuses in,
8-18; spoliation of, 58.
Phillips, Wendell, 38; speech in
Faneuil Hall, 8-38.
Phillips, Mrs., 14-19.
Pillsbury, Parker, 64.
Pleasanton, General, 58.
Pointdexter, 19.
“Popular sovereignty,” 53.
Powell, Aaron M., 18.
Prayer of Twenty Millions, The,
38; text of, 24-25.
Prentice, John, 43.
Presidential campaign of 1844, 7.
Price, General Sterling, 35.
Prohibitionists, 2, 3, 14.
Purviss, Robert, 43.
Putnam, George M., 43.
Quantrell, 15.
Raymond, Henry J., Life of
Lincoln, 17.
Redmond, C.L., 18.
Republican party, 2, 3, 7, 8;
elements of, 10; lack of
policy, 10; and election of
Lincoln, 11; existence due to
Abolitionists, 12; and negro
rights, 8; and Philippine
Islands, 50-51.
Republican Party, History of the,
Curtis, 136.
Rise and Fall of the Slave
Power, 38.
Roosevelt, Theodore, and
Abolitionists, 1-14.
Rosecrans, General, 18.
Schoeld, Gen. John M., and
military control of Missouri,
63-64; charges against, 64;
relieved from command, 39.
Slave-owners, mastery of, 32.
Slave power, submission to, 5.
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Photography Credits
Emmeline Adams, 21, 41; Semantics P.
Lovehugh, 13-19; Andrew Peleg 19; “Bill”
Anderson, 15; Sussannah B. Anthony,14, 18; Benjamin Bacon, 20; Henry
Ward, 63, 38, 35; Lincoln Bell, 52, 57;
Adin Bailey, 13, 27; Ballou Adin Services,
Inc., 18; Clarissa Lipstick McGilluddy
Benton, 54; Masterantonio Prank , 58,
18-32; Felicity Bonner, 55, 57; Marcia
Brown B. Gratz, 55; Gabriella Buxton,Sir Thomas, 32; Anita Louis Lopez
Capron, 22; Belinda Carlisle, 18; Fatua
Chapman, 33; Banker Chase Salmon,
19, 30, 40, 56; Smarticus L. “Einstein”
Beanstein, 14; Doughface McGoo,
4. Douglas Stephen Actinious, 12;
Douglass, Fred., 11; Belinda Von
Hateld-McCoy, 18-36; Drake, Hon.
Charles D., 17; Belinda Von Hateld-
k h l
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