GREY ROOM PRESENTS:
XXX Macarena started to form at 4:30 pm on June 3, 2006 when Karin Schneider invited Jutta Koether and John Miller to take part in her performance Sabotage at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. Schneider had been included in group show called Grey Flags. She set smoke machines and instructed Koether and Miller to start playing when the entire space filled with smoke. Since then the two have performed at art venues such as NBK in Berlin, Forde Galerie in Geneva and Artists’ Space in New York. MFC-Michèle Didier & Les Presses du Réel have recently published the CD Selling Short, a recording their NBK performance. Last February Mike Kelley and Tony Conrad joined Koether and Miller for a performance at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery. This will be their third performance with Conrad.
John Miller was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954 and currently lives and works in New York and Berlin. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979. He is currently an Associate Professor Barnard College’s Art History Department. While at RISD, he played bass in a band that included J.D. King who went on to form the proto-Sonic Youth band, the Coachmen. At CalArts, he played in Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler’s band, the Poetics. The Kunsthalle Zürich will have a retrospective of Miller’s work that will open August 29.
Petit Mal (Benedict Seymour & Melanie Gilligan)
Petit Mal are Melanie Gilligan and Benedict Seymour, an artist and writer respectively, who first started to publicly release music as part of the Antifamily collective in London. The duo have been described as practicing a kind of electro-pop fusion of Chris and Cosey and Alain Robbe-Grillet, with Gilligan’s icily melancholic vocals and Seymour’s synths and piano staking out an unironic reinvention of post-punk and electro sounds. Their single “Crisis in the Credit System” failed to penetrate the charts, but is, as far as they know, the only song to predict the current collapse of capitalism as we have unfortunately known it. (Dusted Magazine)
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, A Naked Woman Riding a Spiral Graphic of Some Kind, 2009
Emma Hedditch & Ulrike Müller with Nancy Brooks Brody, Zoe Leonard, and Megan Palaima
Emma Hedditch and Ulrike Müller will use the inventory list of the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ expansive T-shirt collection as the material for a collaborative reading performance (names of participants to be announced).
To wear a T-shirt for others to read. To get the message, or ask for it’s meaning. A communication, to communicate with strangers. A signal, sent out, a call, with or without intention. To embrace the confessional. To make and be made by it. To embody and intend ones desires, politics, and alliances. Declarative. Encounters in your face, so many bodies, women, lesbians. A move towards tensions? An attraction and a question. An archive, a collection, a list. Dense absence. To reintroduce the body, our bodies, and feel both difference and affinity. To voice a relationship. How to talk about contentious feminist histories without leveling them into all-one, all-the-same? To talk about a movement, and be a movement. Be moved. What are you trying to tell me, what do I think you are trying to tell me?
Emma Hedditch
Emma Hedditch is an artist living in New York whilst participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent performances include When I Do This, Can You Feel Something? as part of If I Can’t Dance… Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, March 2009 and We Are The Signs And The Signal atWorking Documents, La Virreina, Barcelona November 2008.
Ulrike Müller
Ulrike Müller is an artist living and working in New York and Vienna, Austria. She has worked with the queer feminist collective LTTR, is the editor of Work the Room. A Handbook on Performance Strategies (OE/b_books, 2006) and currently serves as visiting faculty at VCFA (Vermont College of Fine Arts).
GREY ROOM
Grey Room brings together scholarly and theoretical articles from the fields of architecture, art, media, and politics to forge a cross-disciplinary discourse uniquely relevant to contemporary concerns.
Publishing some of the most interesting and original work within these disciplines, Grey Room has positioned itself at the forefront of the most current aesthetic and critical debates. Featuring articles, translations, interviews, dossiers, and academic exchanges, Grey Room’s emphasis on aesthetic practice and historical and theoretical discourse appeals to a wide range of readers, including architects, artists, scholars, students, and critics.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/grey