Dick's Art Blog

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“A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these ‘readymades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. The choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste in fact a complete anaesthesia. One important characteristic was the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the ‘readymade.’ That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal. Sometimes I would add a graphic detail of presentation which, in order to satisfy my craving for alliterations, would be called ‘readymade aided.’ At another time, wanted to expose the basic anatomy between art and ‘readymades,’ I imagined a reciprocal readymade: use a Rembrandt as an ironing board! I realized very soon the danger of repeating indiscriminately this form of expression and decided to limit the productions of ‘readymades’ to a small number yearly. I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit forming drug and I wanted to protect my ‘readymades’ against such a contamination. Another aspect of the ‘readymade’ is its lack of uniqueness. The replica of the ‘readymade’ delivering the same message. In fact nearly every one of the ‘readymades’ existing today is not original in the conventional sense.” (Marcel Duchamp)

“In later years he insisted that there was ‘no beauty, no ugliness, nothing particularly aesthetic’ about the readymades, so whatever the criteria for selection, aesthetic taste was to play no role. Nothing would distinguish a set of canonical readymades from a set of nondescript household objects, set out for purpose of garage sale. Nothing would prompt ordinary persons to think of them as art – which is part of what makes them intoxicating, conceptually speaking, as art. Without references to the readymade, neither the art history of the twentieth century nor [the] contemporary philosophy of art can be grasped. Each of the readymades has generated whole libraries of interpretation. The typewriter cover, for example, introduced the idea of ’soft sculpture’, and the pun that ‘Underwood’ makes with the French expression sous bois – a traditional genre of landscape – must have been irresistible to Duchamp’s spirit of linguistic play.” (Arthur Danto)

“I really enjoy the brutality of the ready made, and the way some objects make it and others don’t… just the sheer choice fascinates me, and the why… it’s like somehow reading a symptom in a complex or not so complex disease or ailment.. We are trained to look at things on walls so I utilize this trick.” (Tao Wells)

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Tao Wells – Byron the Bulb

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Brian Stonehill

Pynchon’s Prophecies of Cyberspace (excerpt)

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Perhaps the clearest prophecies of cyberspace occur in what a subtitle in the final Part of Gravity’s Rainbow calls THE STORY OF BYRON THE BULB. You recall the scene: Pfc. Eddie Pensiero has been ordered to give a haircut to an unnamed but very garrulous Army colonel from Kenosha, Wisconsin, while Eddie’s friend Private Paddy McGonigle hand-cranks a generator to power the electric light bulb overhead. Pynchon’s narrator tells us,

Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel’s head here is the same identical Osram light bulb that Franz Pokler used to sleep next to in his bunk at the underground rocket works at Nordhausen. [...] But the truth is even more stupendous. This bulb is immortal! It’s been around, in fact, since the twenties, has that old-timery point at the tip and is less pear-shaped than more contemporary bulbs. Wotta history, this bulb, if only it could speak — well, as a matter of fact, it can speak.

And so we get the aforementioned STORY OF BYRON THE BULB, who gets into trouble with the international light-bulb cartel by not burning out when he’s supposed to. The other light bulbs notice his unusual longevity, and compare it to other cases they’ve heard of on what Pynchon calls, with a capital G, the Grid.

Other light bulbs can recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to know magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. (650)

So “the Grid” is a kind of webspace, the global circuitry not of T-1 lines and telephone links but the primordial power grid itself, adopted for the sake of this fantasy to the needs of instant communication. In the style of a recent New Yorker cartoon, you might say that on the Internet of this prophecy, nobody knows you’re a light bulb.

As Byron the Bulb’s hours of use continue to climb, threatening to throw all the capitalist averages out of whack, the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies — whose author knows we can spell that one out for ourselves — the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies sends out a Berlin agent to unscrew Byron. The other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. (650)

Well, such a global information network operating “at something close to the speed of light” was not even taken seriously as science fiction when Pynchon let Byron the Bulb shed his light, but clearly, in retrospect, the episode was prophetic, and now every bulb in Europe — or every wired monitor screen in the world — does know what’s happened.

Interestingly enough, Pynchon mentions prophecy itself at the end of Byron the Bulb’s story, for it is Byron’s fate — like that of so many e-mail addicts — to have access to all the information in the world, yet be able to do little with it:

Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible now — the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t last long — they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. (654-55)

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Much of Tao Wells’ art (particularly his blackboard works) develops on and complicates concepts initiated by Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture.

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“I would like to declare why I feel that it’s now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being – and how this new discipline – which I call social sculpture – can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking… Here my idea is to declare that art is the ‘only’ possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that [they] can develop [their] own capacity… And therefore, in short, I’m saying, all work that’s done has to have the quality of art. We can see later about developing a proof for this by thinking about these problems.” (Joseph Beuys, 1974)

“I think art is the only political power, the only revolutionary power , the only evolutionary power, the only power to free humankind form all repression. I say not that art has already realized this, on the contrary, and because it has not, it has to be developed as a weapon, at first there are radical levels, then you can speak about special details.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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“I work in the field of art, and you know how during a period of Marxist ideology, fewer people are inclined to believe in the power of the culture as a whole: they believe in the revolutionary potential of economics, class struggle theory… Therefore it’s time to show that art means the power of creativity, and it’s time to define art in a larger way, to include science and religion too.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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“I mean that the idea of art has to be changed. And you have to look for the spring point, where the creative principle begins. Art as it’s now understood is a special kind of creativity; there are others, like philosophy or electricity. But it’s very simple to see that all these activities are necessary for (designating) things in the world. An electrician, a physicist or a doctor has to form the problems he finds in the world, yes? But if you want to provide a fundamental analysis of these problems, you have to develop a special kind of consciousness-science. And then you find that the human body isn’t only located in a physical context, that [it] isn’t only incarnated in the physical world between birth and death… [its] thinking springs from another source… and I am saying that artists working in the West and East and Far East, cannot arrive at a good result unless they look first to the point from where creativity springs. And you see culture related to freedom, because culture implies freedom. There can be no repression from ay point.” (Joseph Beuys, 1973)

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Tao Wells’ sculpture Tower of Light was inspired by the philosophy of Paul Scheerbart, who proposed that the Earth should be covered in glass architecture, harnessing the natural quality of light. His work is relatively difficult to find in English. Enjoy!

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“Let me protest first against the expression ‘world war’. I am sure that no heavenly body, however near, will involve itself in the affair in which we are embroiled. Everything leads me to believe that deep peace still reigns in interstellar space.” (Paul Scheerbart, in Walter Benjamin, On Scheerbart)

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“The surface of the Earth would change greatly of brick architecture were everywhere displaced by glass architecture. It would be as though the Earth clad itself in jewelery of brilliants and enamel. The splendor is absolutely unimaginable. And we should then have more exquisite things than the gardens of the Arabian Nights. Then we should have a paradise on Earth and would not need to gaze longingly at the paradise in the sky.” (Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture)

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“We live for the most part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is in a sense a product of our architecture. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced for better or for worse to transform our architecture. And this will be possible only if we remove the enclosed quality from the spaces within which we live.

“This can be done only through the introduction of glass architecture that lets the sunlight and the light of the moon and stars into our rooms not merely through a few windows, but simultaneously through the greatest possible number of walls that are made entirely of glass —coloured glass. The new environment that we shall thereby create must bring with it a new culture.” (Paul Scheerbart,  in Gertrud Olsson, Paul Sheerbart’s Utopia of Coloured Glass)

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Government funded New Zealand art critic John Hurrell’s recently reviewed the show Comb a Schooner Like A Comet at Newcall Gallery, including work by Tao Wells. Here is the opening section (largely relating to Tao Wells’ work) reproduced in its entirety.

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“Seeking work that was opinionated, inclined to agitation and direct, the Newcall curators for this exhibition have approached nine artists who according to the blurb, have practices oriented towards ‘activism or confrontation.’ At the same time, the curators are sensitive. They are cognisant of Free Will, that of the artists and their own in selecting them. So nothing can be assumed in terms of product.

“That last bit is crucial because this is not really a placard waving show – though Tao Wells’ invitation of audience participation in placing photographs (with the word WAR) of the gallery neighbourhood in the gallery neighbourhood, and Ralph Paine’s large wall of paintings and drawings on paper, come closest to that lack of nuance in that their subject matter is obvious.

“Wells’ project involves a box of 24 photocopied images of the gallery and the streets around it over which is placed WAR in bold yellow caps. He asks the viewer to either stick them up inside the gallery and/or outside, or to sell them as books. A couple ended up on Newcall walls, including one of some colourful birds placed over a power socket, folded so the word WAR was hidden. I didn’t spot any outdoor versions, except an Obama /Bush hybrid on the front door.” (read the rest of the review)

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On the 14th of January the experimental arts magazine White Fungus launched their 11th issue at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City. Campbell Kneale played, Tao Wells performed – it sounds like something I remember from Adam Art gallery, only in New York. And nothing pleases me more to know that the White Fungus team have brought what they do to yet another city in the world (they are currently based in Taichung City, Taiwan).

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“It was packed, Chelsea already peppered with openings was gently introduced last night by White fungus Gang, to an unpretentious crew whose delivered experience you love to hate while reviewing every second of the moments fame; to go back and suck all the marrow from its bones.

“High Lights, David Watson, sonic brilliance is too easy, this is a mountain of torrents, a flooded valley of bite sized bits melt in your mind moments of precious delirium, one man Bag pipe, another guy doing something I couldn’t see… any way Single tonal blasts that ripple and unfold through the gallery like Fucking Vikings taking the shore.

“Tao Wells, mad last bash of thing, came in and Insulted us all with a ‘Hey fuck up!” literally yelling at people to either shut up or “get the hell out of the gallery”. We were then left with this J.c Penny guy sitting on the floor of a divided by gender room, waiting tenaciously pensive with pen and paper, to finally break the tension with a shirtless dance gesture.

“Six acts in one night is a tiring bore, but not last night, the acts came and tumbled by like finely tuned cards, fluffy dominoes leaving the final act, the curtain crusher. Campbell Kneale Our Love Will Destroy the World, just that. Just that come on give us a juicy metaphor, take a cathedral set it on fire, mike up the pipes of the 2 thousand old organ, hear the bursts in exquisite detail while sitting in the pews. yeah it was loud, violent. all over your ear drums played as they say they are, Brain Drums. Thank You White Fungus. I am 20 pounds lighter or heavier.”

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(originally posted on I Know Everything)

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