JJPEET [BOOK REPORTS]
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Transcript of JJPEET [BOOK REPORTS]
jj peetbook reports
JULY 16 TO AUG 09
HOMELY’Sexhibitions and icecream entertainment
HOMELY’S presents
HOMELY'Sexhibitions and icecream entertainment
jj peet - book reports
Homely’s is pleased to present “Book Reports”, a publication and a mini-
exhibition of four artists books by JJ PEET. JJ PEET’s, prolific, performance-
based practice yields ceramic-centric sculptures, paintings, drawings, books
and videos. Dystopian visual culture fragments are grabbed, cut up, re-marked
and re-contextualized. Through JJ PEET’s shaman-like “brain to hand to object“
process, shady financial shenanigans, border-less religious wars, tragic Old Master
tableaux and flowers blooming under barbed wire skies are healed, as it were,
into permanent physical form. Through relentless collecting, witnessing and annotating of images, JJ PEET’s
books offer concise notes on his transformative ideas and insight into his
ambitious, urgent practice, that asks how we — as viewers and humans — come
to understand and possibly affect our condition in relationship to the broader
question of “post-internet” image culture. JJ PEET’s practice takes the position
that (artists) might indeed, thorough a focused mode of “brain to hand to object“
production, affect outcomes and offer possibilities of subjective resistance. “Book Reports” includes four artist books: “Vacant American” (2015): a
contemporary American road trip through Brussels and the American West;
“Shiview” (2014), a compilation and exhibition of images of extreme violence
found online, with details of bloody Old Master paintings at the Louvre and
ultimate redemption through Courbet’s “Origin of the World”; “Ceramics
Manifesto” (2014), an occupation and transformation of a found copy of the
“Communist Manifesto” into a ceramic receptacle of JJ PEET’s ideas about
ceramics and sculpture and “HandHandDevice” (2015), a further outline of JJ
PEET’s ceramic output, through his “Proxy Cups”, “Decoy Cups”, “Brickvaces”
and “Viewers” project-components.Recent solo exhibitions include The Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX (2015);
Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA (2013); On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2012,
2010, 2009); Gallery Diet, Miami, FL (2013, 2010). Recent group exhibitions include
Satan Ceramics, Salon 94, New York, NY (2014) and Public Art Fund, New York,
NY (2011). These exhibitions received numerous reviews, in publications such as
Art in America, Artforum, ArtPulse, Art Review, Bomb, Frieze, The Last Magazine,
Modern Painters, The New Yorker and TimeOut NY. JJ PEET received his MFA
from Yale University School of Art in 2006 and his BFA from the University of
Minnesota in 1999. He currently teaches ceramics at Columbia University and the
92nd Street Y in New York.
JJ PEET - “BOOK REPORTS“ July 16- August 09, 2015
Shiview
(2015)
Artist Book20 pages
4 x 6 .5 inches
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JJ PEET
BOOK REPORTS
The Vacant American
(2015)
Artist Book
4 x 6.5 inches18 pages
The Ceramics Manifesto
(2014)
Artist Book
18 pages4 x 6.5 inches
Book Reports
HandHandDevice
(2015)
Artist Book
8.5 x 5.5 inches24 pages
Shiview
(2015)
Artist Book20 pages
4 x 6 .5 inches
The Ceramics Manifesto
(2014)
Artist Book
18 pages4 x 6.5 inches
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“Floating on the grass of doom
finding my due course. The
viewing opticles are wide open,
the recepticle for reception is
collecting all info the vacant
american”
“Magic happinstance time
connections, its about paying
attention, kinky moments on the
planet knoting the moment in
memory, fucking stop...”
“The Vacant American is a_Way.
It is a Way of Collecting information, it
is A_Way of Looking at our world and
taking a stance on our current state
of the planet as Humans or Lifeforms,
this will be done by first traveling to
locations: drive, train, bike, fly, walk, the
moments collected on these journeys
will be filtered and processed, theses
will than lead to production. “
JJ PEET’s book “The Vacant American” is
a series of notes, handwritten, or typed,
connected to the series of drawings and
photographic images inside. Drawings,
like annotated codes - an old-fashioned
radio-like device, JJ PEET’s umbrella-
like logo, folded paper, geometric
form. Tools, or devices, photographed
under red light.
The “Vacant American” is a viewfinder,
through which the narrator implicates
himself into the image-based post-
internet landscape.
From the “Vacant American” taxi sign in
California, to an image of a single classic
statue in Europe, to his own image,
shaman-like, in motion, across the
borderless greater “America” he travels
through, a magnanimous roaptrip of
“happenstance /magic/happenmagic/
magicstance”.
Vacant American
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The “Vacant American”
as a model
The Vacant American as a model for the
condition of “America” as all of the above:
a borderless, slippery state of witnessing,
somewhere between what is seen and what is
the vacant, the partially absconded present.
The Vacant American as a mirror of America
of here today and the America that slips away,
decaying in layers within and without borders.
The Vacant American as a verb, The Vacant
American as continuous “becoming”.
The Vacant American has no fixed residence,
except through the images he witnesses, the
coded drawings he makes
The Vacant American as a persona in motion
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“...there will be Vacant American I,
Vacant American II and so forth. and it’s
not...it doesn’t have to be in America,
it’s the world, basically...”
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“Sometimes it tends to be
bloody, other moments
flowers rise”
“there are many ways to
pay attention, a viewer is
our way. are a way of payin
fucking attntion, shiview,
shiview news.”
Shiview
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Shiview is a way of seeing , a collection
and an exhibition of images, a witness
and pro-active position on the
collecting, dismantling and occupying
of images in the “post-internet” era.
Shiview is a viewer, a viewfinder and a
exhibition of historical dots and points
of reference of images originating
from the world, the world of the
computer screen, the notepad, the
art historical canon and the shared
beheading video. Shiview bears
witnesses the equalizing effect of the
flattening of physical experience into
the rootless, endless sea of jpeg’d-at-
a-loss information.
Shiview takes a position in the
compass of our amoral mass of
images. It registers that these images
have been seen. It registers that the
authorship lies in the massing of these
images and in the fucking up of them
into something greater.
HOMELY’S: So tell me a little bit more
about this Shiview book
JJ PEET: So shiview news is like...it’s
a way of viewing the world...I try not
to view the world that way but a lot
of people do view the world that way
where it’s like, you know, excess and
overcome and take what you need and
fuck the rest, that sort of deal...
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so i started to make these viewers, these
cameras...some of the viewers were
considered funny and like clown-news
and some were considered Shiview and
Shiview is like...
related to...one of the cameras that I
made..with a gigantic blade coming
out of it and that was sort of the object
version of this...and what do we do with
this sort of weapon...
And we’re...people, beheading other
people and then they are shooting a
video of it and they are capturing the
image...so that is a total shiview point of
seeing things.
I sort of embody or encompass a point
of view that may not be my point of
view....but it is...I think about that and I
filter that point of view through my own
being and my own work so shiview news
is fucking heavy...but it’s also about
paying attention...
...there are lots of points of view in
here so this first page is like...a viewer
as a whole, a point of view, a way of
collecting information...time collector,
capture device, filter, a shiview, a flower
view, a way of seeing, so there’s lots of
like, all these different points of view
and shiview is one point of view...and
it’s fucking heavy duty...and it’s like sad-
ness and it’s been going on through our
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time...and we have been seeing that
through a lens or thorough painting or
through sculpture or through media that
way so this is my way of re-collecting
that information, putting it back to the
world and then filtering it through my
own hand
HOMELY’S: So in a way...I’d almost
describe it as an image exhibition...you
know how there is that Joy Division song
“Atrocity Exhibition” which is of course a
direct reference to JG Ballard’s Atrocity
Exhibition book. “This is the way, step
inside”. Except that in your case we are
stepping outwardly onto this world of
images that end up re-contextualizing
into a re-worked, blended narrative.
...it’s different of course, but it’s almost
as if you’re a blender and you put
information in and you mix it and it
comes out...
It’s so interesting to consider this
process in light of what we come to
see as the so-called “post-internet” art,
where there is a sort of refusal to take
a position when it comes to receiving
and witnessing images. What I find most
fascinating about your work is that you
insist on taking a position, even if that
positioning means that you are dragging
images onto a ceramic/bodily physicality
that eludes them by definition of their
“virtual” condition.
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The Ceramic Manifesto documents the transformation of a found
copy of the “Communist Manifesto” into a ceramic receptacle of
JJ PEET’s ideas about ceramics and sculpture. “The Contemporary Ceramics Manifesto is a way. A
life form thinks, this thinking may come from the gut,
or the brain it moves to the hand into the clay. The
clay is the direct material, the transpher of the hand
into clay will lead to the creation of the object To the user gut to hand to object.”The (found) book’s writing was crossed off with a sharpie pen and
a partition cut out, where the “brain to hand to object” ceramic
part was inserted into. There is a brief introduction into the Proxy
Cup, a “Transfer of life form into a functional vessel” and the
“Viewer”, a half-ceramic-half-functioning camera that registers
the images that inform JJPEET’s worldview. The Viewer is “a hole,
a point of view, it is a way of collecting information, time collector,
The Ceramics Manifesto
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capture device, filter, a shiview, a flowerview, a way of seeing” and
the VOP “vitrified objects held in one’s pocket”. The Ceramics Manifesto embodies the basic premise of JJPEET’s
practice, to bring into lasting, durable form, elements of
contemporary culture and lived, ephemeral experience through
an active engament of content, performance and material, into
petrified, energized-through-gut-to-hand, object.
“This book is ... a lot about how I use material ceramics
and what ceramics means as material...it’s the communist
manifesto that my neighbor was throwing away I made
it into the contemporary ceramics manifesto and within
that I blocked everything out and I made a piece of
porcelain, petrified that and I put my manifesto in there
so brain to hand to object, so that’s my manifesto for
ceramics... it’s the best material we have for making
sculpture in my point of view...”14
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The “Handhanddevice” book outlines the purpose, definition and hierarchical value of the four important sculptural outcomes in JJPEET’s sculptural/ceramic practice:
• The Proxy Cup• The Decoy Cup• The Brickvace • The ViewerIt is a detailed companion to the Ceramics Manifesto, featuring precise descriptions and images of these four categories of production.
HandHandDevice
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JJ PEET: So the proxy cup is the basic for all that
stuff...that is where...I take a ball of clay and start to
pinch it into a cup form and when I am doing that I
am transferring my life form into that vessel
PROXY_CUP_------------------------------------
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DECOY_Cup------------------------------------“a DECOY_Cup first and foremost is a PROXY_CUP_ inbedded with in is a VITRIFIED PORCELAIN BLADE
TO THE USERThe Decoy Cup is a way,Water, Defend, or End”
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THE BRICKVACE---------------------------------“TO the USER_BRICKVACEBRICKVACE - a FOCOLIZED BRICK, into VACE.BRICK holds the WEIGHTVACE holds the FLOWERBRICKVACE”
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ViEWER_---------------------------------“a VIEWER is a HOLE, a POINT of VIEW, IT is a WAY OF COLLECTING INFORMATION, TIME COLLECTOR, CAPTURE D-VICE, FILTER, A SHIVIEW, A FLOWERVIEW, A WAY OF SEEING.”
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“book reports”
Thanks to jj peet and
on stellar rays gallery
Text, design, production,
artist interviews
Manuela Leal
Homely’s Exhibition and
Icecream Entertainment
Summer 2015
New York, N Y
HOMELY'Sexhibitions and icecream entertainment
jj peet - book reports