RE: FIGURING MEMORY

An essay by A. Gargett on my works created while in New York...


RE: FIGURING MEMORY – THE ART OF KRISTEN ALVANSON
_ A. Gargett

“I look at you and think of the evening I first met you, and you’re not that person anymore. I mean, the elements are the same, but you’re different. Look at me right now.” Christy lifted her long arms right up in the air, still holding the dripping spoon, asking me to take in all of her. “I will never be this person again. When we walkout of here today – when tomorrow morning comes – I will be somebody else, not exactly the same as I am right now. Maybe that’s all dying is.” Ethan Hawke – Ash Wednesday

Quirky, yes. Offbeat, certainly; but more than that, with its mixture of media and its oblique take on the very act of being an artwork, the paintings of Kristen Alvanson imply that their creator’s vision is wrested from the world rather than being at home within it. In an era when so much art strives for the ready-made statement – in reality provoked by the times but seeking nonetheless to be provocative of them – Alvanson’s work remains carefully stated. The working is always shown; an art of passion in which the terror of – and desire for – abandonment, is expressed with consummate cool.

Alvanson’s art is an art of presences and resonances, acts and allusions. Perhaps it is viable to start with memory. With memories that are positioned before our eyes. What here has been remembered? How does the painting work to remember? It is not that these paintings simply turn around the interaction of memory, histories and representation, it is more accurately, that these themes present what comes to be framed within the paintings as their own apposite topos; and within that topos, their presence is intricate and complex. At work within the field of the painting they source the paintings with their work. What this means is that the paintings draw on and develop the resources that inhere in memory, history and representation. The specificity of their work, however, is connected to what occurs when these elements are themselves put to work. In this, their supposed determinations – the already given particularity of memory, history and representation – no longer control, and even though these elements need to be understood as encompassing, and enacting, the material presence of tradition, what is enacted takes the form of an active questioning rather than a painterly or interpretative “fait accompli”. It is that their movement into work is traversed by a questioning of memory, history and representation. This questioning comes to be at work in the frame and thereby forms an integral part of the work’s work. This questioning is no mere idle speculation; it is rather a questioning that, once acknowledged, forms a resolute part of the present.

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dESIRE for Sale

dESIRE #005000

As part of the dESIRE Project I am both capturing and selling my dESIRES. dESIRES are sold in units (1 unit equals 100 consecutive desires). Individual units are recorded in the following way: dESIRE 000001-000100, dESIRE 000101-000200, dESIRE 002201-002300 or dESIRE 005401-005500, for example.

For each unit the purchaser is buying 100 of my intangible dESIRES as well as the 100 color photographic representations of these dESIRES. The photographic representations will be included on one CD-Rom Disk. Each unit is unique and includes original intangible desires and original color photographic representations, therefore, the unit will not be duplicated or sold as copies.
Current Market Value of 1 Unit of dESIRE = USD $100. Order Now because the price of a Unit of dESIRE is about to increase. 

For more information and to order check the desire section of my website: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/market.html

updated del.icio.us tags

Adela Jones Alain Badiou Alex Fradkin Anders Weberg anti-copyright Archaeology Architecture Archive Art Artaud Avant-garde Blog CA Carey Young Cinema Curating Decay Deleuze Desire Drapery Dublin Eric Alliez EXHIBITION link.of.thought Fabric Fictional Authors Fractal Ontology France Frozen Tears Gallery Garrett Phelan Gean Moreno Germany Graffiti Graham Harman Gregor Schneider Hyperstition Iain Hamilton Grant Immaterial Independent Installation Jo-Anne Balcaen Joachim Schmid John Russell Journal Juliet Jacobson LA Legal Contract Les LeVeque Machine Magazine Mark Wallinger Mary-Anne Breeze Matthew Buckingham Mehrdad Iravanian mezangelle Michel Serres Minimalism Narration Nathaniel Mellors Network Past Present Future Now Philosophy Photography Poetics Politics Post-continental Projected Personae Pseudonyms Quentin Meillassoux Rachel Rampleman Ray Brassier Reza Negarestani Robin Mackay Romain Meffre Régine Debatty Schizophrenia Sephen Gill Sex Spacepolitics Spain Spielhaus Morrison Sweden TEXTural Theory Thomas Duzer Time Trinie Dalton Turner Prize UK Urbanomic Vermin video installation Weizman Yves Marchand

Garden of Spellbinding Paths

'Unknown Deleuze': COLLAPSE Volume III

'Unknown Deleuze' – COLLAPSE Volume III will be published in mid-October and is now available for advance purchase online at http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php

A note from editor Robin Mackay: Collapse Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze' contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London earlier this year.

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to put Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of philosophy, we submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought itself still remains enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major themes. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuze along with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin Meillassoux, John Sellars, Éric Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell & Hecker, Robin Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian, J.-H. Rosny the Elder, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHN SELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aîon
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Speculative Realism

dESIRE #004000

In an effort to continue the exploration of desire (commerce, customer dynamics, propagation of desire), my dESIRES are now available for sale online. For more information about the dESIRE Project check the following: http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/market.html 

The Art of Nothing: Immateriality and Intangible Art (PDF to read on medieval studies, intangible art and modern law)

Update: Fozen Tears 3 New York City Book Launch

DEXTER SINISTER VS. FROZEN TEARS III

Launch of John Russell's FROZEN TEARS III – THE TRINITY
Thursday, June 21, 2007
A two-part event:
7.30-9pm installation and book launch
at Dexter Sinister
38 Ludlow St. (at Hester St.)

9-11pm performances/readings
organized by Mark Beasley for Creative Time
205 Club
205 Chrystie St. (at Stanton St.)

INCLUDING READINGS/PERFORMANCE BY:
HILLARY RAPHAEL
GENESIS P ORRIDGE
TRINIE DALTON
ILANA HALPERIN
ROXY PAINE
MARK HARRIS

Book published by Article Press; see http://www.frozentears.co.uk
With support from the British Council

More about Dexter Sinister: http://www.dextersinister.org

Vs. is an ongoing monthly series curated by Creative Time at 205 Club.

Book Launch Parties for John Russell’s anthology Frozen Tears III

The third volume in the Frozen Tears series presented by John Russell is launching soon, over 900 pages of cutting-edge works by writers and artists including:

Dennis Cooper, Damien Hirst, Stewart Home, Stephen Barber, Paul Buck, Jesse Bransford, Kristen Alvanson, CCRU/Orphan Drift, Reza Negarestani, John Cussans, Patricia McCormack, Enrico David, Andrea Mason, Hillary Raphael, D. Harlan Wilson, Lorenzo De Los Angeles III, Kevin Killian, Cedar Lewisohn, Casey McKinney, Neil Mulholland, Paul Noble, Kenji Siratori, John Espinosa, Jeffrey Vallance and more...

If you happen to be in LONDON, NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISO or DEATH VALLEY(?) don’t miss these book happenings...

LONDON: Thursday May 31st 7-9pm - at Koenig Books, 80 Charing Cross Road – readings/performances by Paul Buck, NO BRA, Stewart Home, Cedar Lewisohn and Andrea Mason.

NEW YORK: 21 June - starting with launch at Dexter Sinister bookshop (38 Ludlow Street) - then moving to the 205 Bar on Lower East Side where Frozen Tears III will be the focus of the first of a series of new monthly events called ‘Vs’ curated by Mark Beasley for Creative Time - http://www.creativetime.org.

SAN FRANCISCO: July (date tba) at SF Camerawork - with readings/performances by Donal Mosher and Kevin Killian.DEATH VALLEY: tba

For more information visit: http://www.frozentears.co.uk/

Immaterial Art and Treasures of Indulgences

SPACE (Juraj Carny, Diana Majdakova and Lydia Pribisova) and Cesare Pietroiusti have created Evolution de l’Art, a gallery for contemporary art which only sells artworks that are immaterial, with no physical residue, and it does not release certificates of authenticity, nor statements or receipts. Evolution de l’Art is representing, on a non-exclusive basis, artists whose artwork is, at least in the case of some specific projects, alien from any physical-material component. There are no other limitations or requisites for represented artists in terms of medium or technique. Purchases can be made at the headquarters of the gallery (Lazaretska 9, Bratislava) or through their website.

The immaterial art I have created to date has included receipts of sorts (dESIRE) and certificates (Dreams) to document the art. So I was interested in the fact that Evolution de l’Art decided not to include a physical ‘item’ associated with the sale of an intangible piece of art. I thought I’d like to create something for the gallery, so I decided to offer my 'Days in Iran for Sale' at $100 per day.
The idea of immaterial art is identical to the medieval history of the Catholic Church and Christian papal theology in regard to indulgences. It was only during this time that Johann Tetzel, the father of intangible art, could embed his outlandish artistic projects with the abstruse foundations of Christian theology and reading of scriptures. Pieces of lands from heaven and post-mortem years of purgatory were sold, documented with the names of buyers and systematically archived. This is this highest state of intangible art – trading and investing in the celestial dominions. Since in Catholic theology the human is a reeking infinity of sins and heaven is a boundless piece of land, the potentiality of artistic creativities of such intangible trades is limitless.
Check the gallery website for more information: Evolution de l’Art

Adding to the Mental Contagion

Mental Contagion is an arts and literature Internet magazine published on a monthly basis fittingly named after Exquisite Corpse— "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau” — a technique developed during the surrealist movement and is based on a parlor game. Seeing only a small segment of what a previous person draws, collaborators add to a composition in progress to create a strange and often ridiculous image. Preceding these visual "mash-ups" or what some have referred to as "intellectual MadLIbs" was a literary technique, prompting each contributor to add a phrase, seeing only a segment of the previous phrase. Surrealist poet and art historian Nicolas Calas said that the completed work revealed the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group." Often, similar themes and images would appear in the completed compositions, and this is what visual artist Max Ernst referred to as a "Mental Contagion.”

For my addition to mix, you can see May’s issue where they have featured my work in the Exhibitionist section
http://www.mentalcontagion.com/index.html

dESIRE #003000

http://www.kristenalvanson.com/new/desire.html

Reza Negarestani Seminars in London

MACHINES ARE DIGGING: ON POROUS EARTH AND EMERGENCE

and

UNDERCOVER SOFTNESS: POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE OF DECAY

for more information check here http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/

KRISTEN ALVANSON WEBSITE ANNOUNCEMENT
www.kristenalvanson.com

The interactions of things, the undulation of entities in the space, the art of stitching events together, or in a word, cosmogenesis of all kinds requires abundant sewing work and notions artistry.

American Artist Kristen Alvanson, who relocated to Iran in 2006, has created a new website Artistry of Notions and Cosmic Drapery highlighting her current projects including Middle Eastern focused Maskh Project, Graveyards and Lumpen Orientalism as well as a section on the artist’s forthcoming book entitled ‘Lessons in Schizophrenia’ and her dESIRE Project.
Maskh Project – the connotation of the word maskh in Farsi is more than metamorphosis; it includes experiencing limits of one’s identity or existence usually with the assistance of new independent vehicles of material and abstract articulation, as in the case of spirit possession. Maskh project is a visual compendium of drawings diagramming Alvanson’s metamorphoses in the Middle East in the form of spells and maps.
Graveyards project as a psycho-geographic exploration of Middle Eastern graveyards, entombments and post-mortem spaces escapes necromanticism or fascination with ruins by illustrating the cognition and encounters with space and time – and consequently the twofold of dwelling and thinking – in the Middle East.
Lumpen Orientalism gathers the fragments of a lost civilization, the decaying parts of a once breathing animal. Named after a term suggested by China Miéville, Lumpen Orientalism is a photo-blog engendering an anomalous fascination with the Middle East in a similar way to the mongrel techniques of Gilles Deleuze, H. P. Lovecraft, Gaëtan Clérambault and William Beckford for tackling this enigmatic monstrosity – the Middle East.
Lessons in Schizophrenia is the artist’s forthcoming book, based on real events which led her to leave the US for the Middle East in a cataclysmic process. It includes an introduction by the Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani entitled Epithemic.
The dESIRE Project is an ongoing investigation on desire which includes artistic components; it is an attempt to reach concrete but not necessarily corporeal definitions of desire by tapping into its obscure formations. dESIRE Project is intertwined with the mathematics of natural numbers, countability / uncountability, pimp as a nomadic dissipater, stock market, legal contracts, intangibility and expendability of desires. Alvanson’s dESIRES, both intangible and their photographic representations, are for sale on the Market section of her website.

Visit the website here: www.kristenalvanson.com.

COLLAPSE Volume II

Collapse II will be published at the beginning of March 2007. I have contributed a photo/diagrammatic essay on Middle Eastern graveyards to this issue. Please see Urbanomic's announcement below for more information on the other contributors and on how to order a copy of the journal.

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce that COLLAPSE Volume II will be published at the beginning of March 2007.

The second volume of Collapse resumes the construction of a conceptual space unbounded by any disciplinary constraints, comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, and involving them in unforeseen and productive syntheses.

Collapse Volume II features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and cinéastes, and searching interviews with leading scientists. Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical philosophical problematics – the status of the scientific object, metaphysics and its 'end', the prospects for a revival of speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency – both through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.

• Ray Brassier (Middlesex University, author of the forthcoming Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction) gives the first full-length exposition and critical examination in English of Quentin Meillassoux's important book Après la Finitude, which mounts a radical critique of post-Kantian philosophy on the basis of its inability to account for the literal meaning of scientific statements concerning 'arche-fossils' existing anterior to the possibility of their phenomenal manifestation.
• Building upon his thesis in Après la Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux (ENS, Paris) proposes a reprisal of Hume's problem of causation from a radical ontological perspective. By affirming the absolute contingency of natural laws, Meillassoux argues for a revival of a realistic metaphysics which he calls ‘speculative materialism’ and brings to light a powerful new ontological concept of time.
• In an extended interview, Roberto Trotta (theoretical cosmologist, Lockyer Research Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society at the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University) describes in detail his work as a scientist engaged in surveying the 'arche-fossil', and discusses the ways in which the cross-disciplinary nature of the search for dark matter – an intense collaborative endeavour involving mathematics, astrophysics, theoretical modelling and statistics – anticipates the problematic status of its objects. The interview reveals how the process of determination of this field of research on the ‘outer edge’ of science, bounded equally by technological, probabilistic and logical constraints, raises questions as to the status of scientific thought and problematises its very conceptual foundations, thus emphasising its continuities with traditionally ‘philosophical’ concerns.
• In 'On Vicarious Causation' Graham Harman (American University in Cairo; author of Tool-Being and Guerilla Metaphysics) puts forward a new realist 'object-oriented' metaphysics which, refusing the primacy of human experience and in defiance of post-Kantian ‘philosophies of access’, seeks to speak for the abyssal depths of 'the objects themselves'.
• In an interview with Paul Churchland (U.Cal, San Diego) the brilliantly iconoclastic philosopher of mind and science reiterates his commitment to eliminative materialism, exploring its broad consequences for science and philosophy, and remarking key research outcomes and philosophical problems which have influenced its development.
• Clémentine Duzer & Laura Gozlan present a series of stills taken from their film Nevertheless Empire, an expressionist science-fiction noir of pestilence, biopolitics and desire.
• Artist Kristen Alvanson's photo/diagrammatic essay on the ontotheology of the Middle-Eastern graveyard examines what differences in burial practices propose as to the philosophical thinking of space and of dwelling and examines the consequences for our image of thought.
• In a continuation of his unrivalled radical questioning of the ultimate bases of the 'clash of civilisations', Reza Negarestani details, through a searching analysis of Islamic and Western theologies, how the absolute exteriority of Allah in Islam results in a particular conception of temporality, different vectors for the propagation of faith, and an immanent apocalypse which cannot be reduced to a chronological moment or a possibility of unification.

Order or subscribe at :http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php

COLLAPSE Volume II
Edited by Robin Mackay
March 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 330pp
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-1-2

RAY BRASSIER
The Enigma of Realism
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Potentiality and Virtuality
ROBERTO TROTTA
Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil (Interview)
GRAHAM HARMAN
On Vicarious Causation
PAUL CHURCHLAND
Demons Get Out! (Interview)
CLÉMENTINE DUZER & LAURA GOZLAN
Nevertheless Empire
REZA NEGARESTANI
Islamic Exotericism: Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility
KRISTEN ALVANSON
Elysian Space in the Middle East

Forthcoming Issues: Concept-Horror; Unknown Deleuze; Geophilosophy.

COLLAPSE is now available in the following fine bookstores: Vrin, Paris; ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) bookshop, London; Tate Modern bookshop, London; QI, Oxford; Blackwell, Oxford; Nikos Books (11th & 6th) and St. Mark's, New York; Floating World Comics, Portland OR; Gleebooks, Sydney, Australia.

yours,

Robin Mackay
(Editor)

http://www.urbanomic.com