Massiv Analog Academy

CLAIRE FONTAINE A Paris-based collective. In 2004 they took their name from a popular brand of French school notebooks, declared themselves a "readymade-artist," and began producing works that appropriate the techniques of others (Nauman, Duchamp, Warhol, Gonzalez-Torres, Wall, etc). Their current Reena Spaulings Fine Art (RSFA) exhibition "Footnotes on the state of exception" questions the link between contemporary art production and the war economy. "Foreigners Everywhere (Arabic)," 2005, is a neon sign in Arabic, and translates the phrase "foreigners everywhere" (or perhaps, more poetically: "all my life i wander this earth alone, until the day i finally come home to the place where i die"). This sign provoked a lot of resentment and hostility amongst conservative Jewish neighbors when first exhibited at RSFA in NY. "Giorgio Agamben Brickbat," 2006, displaces the Agamben book to the gallery floor, where it’s pages have been replaced by common bricks. The book and the neon are related in terms of their invocation of the war on terror.... This piece is presented here for the first time. "371 Grand", 2006, is a small sculpture based on a process typically used by criminals or government spies to illegally cop keys. These are the keys to Reena Spauling’s original, Grand Street/NY gallery. A communist gesture of putting private property in common, or the logic of appropriation taken to its criminal extreme.

KLARA LIDEN Liden’s works deal with the politics of public space and property in the contemporary metropolis. Based in Stockholm and Berlin, recently showed her video "Paralyzed" (in which she dances and strips on a commuter train) at the Berlin Biennial. Represented exclusively by RSFA. The video "Bodies of Society" 2006, was filmed in Stockholm, soundtrack by Liden. She beats up her own bicycle in an apartment there. Originally presented at RSFA, in "Economy Class," her second solo show. The video "Under Mattan," 2006, was filmed during the installation of "Economy Class" at RSFA. The artist enters the gallery and disappears under the carpet, crossing the space of the gallery and the camera’s frame invisibly.

KARA WALKER Walker, based in New York, is well-known for transforming the genteel 18th-century art of cut-paper silhouettes into scathing, racially charged installations. In this animation, "8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker", 2005 the question of desire within racism deepens her investigation into the problematics of representations of race.

KIM GORDON Lead singer of the band Sonic Youth. "Untitled", (2006). Glitter and acrylic on canvas with sticks. These works recall the 1970s glitter paintings of the late French artist Robert Malaval.

SAM LEWITT Lewitt is an artist and writer based in New York. He is a co-founder and co-editor of ‘Scorched Earth,’ the twelve-issue magazine in which the question of drawing’s place in theory and practice is addressed in dialogue with artists, critics and historians. In "Darkness Elsewhere", a set of offset lithographs, Lewitt continues his work with subtly detourned graphic sources, displacing the specificity of the referents, inserting false advertisements, and turning these forms back onto those digital technologies that tend towards the reduction of all representations to mere information.

MARTHA ROSLER Rosler’s contribution, a photograph of a road sign seen at night that reads THIS IS A TEST DISREGARD MESSAGES resonates both with (as one would expect of Rosler) the state of democratic public space in the United States under the Bush administration, as well as perhaps less expectedly, with the pedagogical conceit of the exhibition; the ambiguity in this found poem could be taken for a totalitarian command, a declaration of anarchic strategies of resistance, or a hope for the production of knowledge through education rather than the transmission of knowledge down the one-way street of the master-student authority relation.

WYNDHAM LEWIS (1882-1957) Lewis was a British artist, writer and publisher, infamous for his vicious satirical work. His text, "Code of a Herdsman", was written shortly before the first world war. With a subtitle of sorts appended to his text for this exhibition, his text combines the ideological impetus behind Daumal’s novel and the thematic of the pedagogical situation.

WYNNE GREENWOOD + K8 HARDY A feminist collaborative who have shown and performed frequently at RSFA in NY. Hardy is also known as editor of the radical transgender and dyke ‘zine LTTR. Greenwood is also known as Tracy and the Plastics, a performance art and video project. "New Report," 2004(?), is a faux-TV news program made by radical dykes. Among the hot events covered in this program: a burning bra, a depression, running tap water.

LEE WILLIAMS A mysterious persona who emerged recently within the context of Reena Spaulings and Scorched Earth on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She is the 4th female Lee after Krasner, Bontecou and Lozano, and also an inversion of William Burroughs’ pseudonym William Lee. Her drawings are made with a limited palette of materials and techniques: pencil, felt tip pen, ruler, sometimes matches, can be made by anybody, and often are.

SCOTT LYALL Lyall is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. Lyall, a former student of Michael Asher in California, scanned an image from an Asher catalogue, of a piece in which Asher photographed a white section of wall in a gallery and represented it on its walls. 20 years after its publication, the printed page had yellowed with age, and Lyall subjected the scan to 3,600 randomizations of the color shifts in the image. The consequent image, which appears at first glance to be entirely blank, eventually reveals the indignities of time that Asher’s reproduction had suffered.

AMY GRANAT NY-based artist and filmmaker known for her interest in the legacy of experimental and underground cinema. She frequently curates experimental film programs under the name Cinema Zero. Her film, "Ghost Riders" (2006), is shown here paired with her collaboration with Emily Sunblad.

AMY GRANAT & EMILY SUNDBLAD Granat has recently collaborated on an ongoing series of short, silent films with the artist and gallerist Emily Sundblad (co-founder of Reena Spaulings Fine Art in NY). "Tap," 2006, features the artists tap dancing with painted faces in the space of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. This is one in a series of films representing the artists performing simple, cooperative activities, such as pumpkin carving, drinking, driving. Sort of like old Gilbert & George films.

BREYER P-ORRIDGE Since 2003, Genesis P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) has been producing art in collaboration with Lady Jaye. Their PANDROGENY project is both a collaborative experiment and an evolutionary option. As a result of their committment to becoming 2 parts of one creative entity, Jaye and P-Orridge are both present in all their work and are obliged to name this third being...BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

Massiv Analog Academy
CLAIRE FONTAINE , Kim Gordon, Amy Granat, Wynne Greenwood, K8 Hardy, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Sam Lewitt, Klara Liden, Scott Lyall, Martha Rosler, Emily Sundblad, Kara Walker, Lee Williams