The Uninvited, 2016

Monocles, exhibition press release and checklist

In the fall of 2016, I was invited to participate in an exhibition at EFA Project Space, entitled Apparatus for a Utopian Image. This exhibition took form as a game played between Czech- and New York-based artists, as well as visitors to the gallery. The basic rules were as follows: First, the exhibition curators selected works by the Czech artists for the initial installation at EFA. These works were presented on apparatus-like structures, which solicited responses from the New York artists and interaction from members of the public. For instance, one structure had a label maker.

Next, New York artists paired off with Czech artists. In some instances, a Czech artist had asked for a specific response to his or her work. Regardless, the New York artists' contributions appeared throughout the show in the weeks following the opening. Shortly before the closing, the Czech artists came to town and created responses to our responses.

My contribution took both public and covert forms. Publicly, I told EFA Project Space that I would install five monocles throughout the gallery to "aid in magnification." These monocles functioned as red herrings for my second, covert contribution. A few days after the opening, I interleaved press releases and checklists for a shadow exhibition into the existing stacks of press releases and checklists in the gallery. My show, The Uninvited, not only claimed to be occurring in the gallery at the very same time but included invented artworks by EFA staff and Apparatus artists.

The Uninvited can best be described as a critique of some of the blindspots of Apparatus for a Utopian Image. While I respect the curators' vision, I felt the need to prod the convivial and rule-based proceedings of the exhibition by looking to artistic practices and actions that reveal the art world to also be marked by conflicts, hostilities, barriers to entry, and stratified publics. The creation of this website is the first time that I have publicly acknowledged my authorship of The Uninvited.

Apparatus 2.0, a 2018 exhibition at Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, developed from the previous exhibition; in this case, New York-based artists were asked to collaborate directly with Czech-based artists to produce an exhibition in CCA Prague’s library-cum-exhibition space.

A few months before the exhibition, I initiated a Google Drive folder, entitled “The Unreliable Library,” that was then developed in conversation with Magda Stanova, David Court, and Alena Kotzmannova. Together, we imagined the possibility of a decentralized, unsystematic, and unreliable library, where expectations may go unfulfilled—or be fulfilled in ways that one cannot anticipate.

My contribution is a “card catalog” for “The Unreliable Library,” which takes form as a deck of antique French playing cards with my handwriting on their backsides. With this gesture, I am referencing the 1791 French Cataloging Code: France’s first concerted effort to establish rules for cataloging libraries. The code advised inscribing the blank backsides of playing cards with bibliographic information. Within three years, 1.2 million playing cards were employed for this purpose … but eventually, other standards for card cataloging became dominant.

I’m interested in the unfulfilled potential of this historic card catalog, in that it could be used for bibliographic purposes and also to play a game of cards. And so, for this exhibition, my card catalog is always played as a game of cards—between the gallery attendant and one-to-three visitors.

My game is loosely based on “Apples to Apples.” On the backsides of the cards are different words, written in standard librarian handwriting, that suggest aspects of a cataloging or storage system. In a given round, the dealer draws at random two cards from the red suits, and the players must collectively decide the best black suit cards to complete the word system. This is a non-competitive process, with players reviewing one another’s cards as they go.

Once the cards are played, the dealer asks the players to interpret the word system that they’ve created. How might it function? What could it be used for? What, for instance, is an “opaque digital virus alibi?” An “informal paper prison loan?” Conversations can range from the speculative and dystopian to the sobering and practical, thus providing various perspectives on the present. When a conversation has run its course, a new round begins.