T’ai Smith When the topic for this issue was initially formulated—to investigate the processes of work in distinction from the product—the call for papers asked: How can we understand work, not as a “task” geared toward a final product-object, but as a process whose “products” may be multiple, unidentifiable, or ephemeral? The purpose here was twofold: to reevaluate the ways in which we analyze or describe the activity called work, and to consider artistic practices that are often unrecognizable within critical methodologies focusing on the final product or representation. The idea was to concentrate on the operations of practice (such as the way in which an apparatus is employed, or a body incorporates habits or rituals), in order to situate the temporal space of work. After receiving the articles, it became apparent that the dialogue generated by the texts concentrated less on this notion of “work” than on the corporeal or dynamic relation between subjects and objects, environments, or activities. Thus the title of this issue, “To incorporate practice,” draws on the textual play implicit in the infinitive “to …

Catherine de Zegher It may seem precursory to begin my essay with an image that has been haunting me since September 11, but in a concise way it prefigures many issues I will write about. It is an image of a work by the Chilean artist and poet, Cecilia Vicuna, who has been living in New York for many years. The work dates from 1981 and shows a word drawn in three colors of pigment (white, blue, and red—also the colors of the American flag) on the pavement of the West Side Highway with the World Trade Center on the horizon. It reads in Spanish: Parti si passion (Participation), which Vicuna unravels as “to say yes in passion, or to partake of suffering.” Revealing aspects of connectivity and compassion, the word spelled out on the road was as ephemeral as its meaning remained for the art world. Unnoticed and unacknowledged, it disappeared in dust, but becomes intelligible in the present. This precarious work tells us how certain art practices, in their continuous effort to press forward a …

Jaleh Mansoor From 1919 until a night in early October 1937, when Allied bombing destroyed the Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters continuously composed and manipulated this assemblage. The project, variously categorized as an architectural undertaking,1 as “Schwitters’ most important collage project,”2 or as a performatively elaborated sculptural program,3 entailed the ceaseless manipulation of the artist’s Hanover studio. Stretching vertically and horizontally to adjacent rooms, it eventually resulted in an all-encompassing environment. The internal space was transformed by the aggregation of found materials, objects, and sculptural forms affixed to the architectural structure. Alternately, Schwitters cut into and removed portions of the material pile-up he had amassed, as well as pieces of the architecture to which they were connected. He finally cut4 through the ceiling and floor to extend his work outside the original armature of the building. The expanse of Merzbau, developing and changing over a period of eight years, never cohered as a unified, architectural space or sculptural object. It came to formation, rather, as the site of Schwitters’ practice of continuous, and non-coded, production and destruction. Merzbau emerged as a function of a …

T’ai Smith In 1926, one year after the Bauhaus had moved to Dessau, the weaving workshop master Gunta Stölzl dismissed the earlier, Weimar period textiles, such as Hedwig Jungnik’s wall hanging from 1922 [Fig. 1], as mere “pictures made of wool.”1 In this description she differentiated the early weavings, from the later, “progressivist” textiles of the Dessau workshop, which functioned industrially and architecturally: to soundproof space or to reflect light. The weavings of the Weimar years, by contrast, were autonomous, ornamental pieces, exhibited in the fashion of paintings. Stölzl saw this earlier work as a failure because it had no progressive aim. The wall hangings of the Weimar workshop were experimental—concerned with the pictorial elements of form and color—yet at that they were still inadequate, without the larger, transcendental goals of painting, as in the Bauhaus painter Wassily Kandinsky’s Red Spot II from 1921. Stölzl assessed the earlier, “aesthetic” period of weaving as unsuccessful, because its specific strengths were neither developed nor theorized. Weaving in the early Bauhaus lacked its own discursive parameters, just as it lacked a …

Margot Bouman Over the summer of 2000, the artist Paul Pfeiffer, with his collaborators John Letourneau and Lawrence Chua, videotaped a flock of chickens on a farm in upstate New York. Using three still cameras, they followed the birds’ lives twenty-four hours a day: beginning with incubated eggs purchased from a local supplier, through hatching at around seventeen days, to the flock’s move to its outdoor pen, and ending when the chickens reached adulthood, on the seventy-fifth day.1 From April 15 to June 28, 2001, Paul Pfeiffer’s Orpheus Descending—the work that resulted from this footage—was simultaneously shown on two of the information plasma screens and video monitors found throughout the public thoroughfares of the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center complex. The first, a PATHVISION information monitor wedged between a Hudson newsstand and a Quick Card machine [Fig. 1], was located in the mezzanine defined by a bank of nineteen escalators and the New Jersey PATH train turnstiles [Fig. 2]. The second was a plasma screen that placed the video between directional signage and advertisements promoting …

Leena Maija-Rossi The following two advertisements were published last Fall, soon after September 11th, on the art world e-mail list e-flux.com: Before you travel to the fall art shows in Europe, brush up on the latest news in contemporary art with the new issue of tema celeste. In case you forget to buy one before you leave, come visit our booths at Art Forum Berlin and FIAC and we’ll bring you up to speed.1 Tap into Flash Art’s latest on the pulse of Contemporary Art. This October we offer… on location reportage on the First Yokohama Triennial, the inside story on the upcoming Bienal de Sao Paulo, and the latest batch of Young British Art in this issue’s Aperto… Also, in this issue, read off-the-cuff responses to the September 11th tragedy and its impact on Contemporary Art.2 The first of the two announcements did not reflect the tragic event and its aftermath at all. Maybe it had been written well before, maybe the copywriter didn’t have a chance to react. However, when I read it on the …