CCS BARD

Building from the notion that the bulletin board is not a neutral surface, but a space withpreexisting cultural meaning, vocabularies, and opportunities, Lauren Anderson adopts the CCS Bard Bulletin Board as a site in her ongoing investigation of visual culture. For The Talk, the Talked About, and the Talk About Town, Anderson has departed from the highly determined composition of Liam Gillick’s “pinboards”—now on display in From 199A to 199B : Liam Gillick in the Hessel Museum of Art—to consider the difference between these user-generated pinboards, her approach to mark making, and the naturally occurring visual mashup of community bulletin board spaces.

Anderson’s work has previously responded to or co-opted formal elements from vernacular culture, demonstrating her commitment to sites of display outside of contemporary art while still recognizing the implications and symbolic significance of those other platforms. In this way, Anderson fulfills one of Allen Ruppersberg’s fifty helpful hints for the art of the everyday: “art should make use of common methods and materials so there is little between the talk and the talked about.”¹ The materials typical of a bulletin board—cork, paper, printed matter, pins, glass, and its frame—have been employed here to formally explore the symbolic function and impact of composition in distinguishing intentionality. This spectrum of visual communication has been rendered through a range of treatments for each of the three panels of glass to emphasize the functions of aesthetic properties including color relationships, foreground, background, framing devices, visual proximity, and directness. Thus, the experiential phenomena of enticement, spectatorship, and attention economy are not only talked about, but enacted.

Lauren Anderson (b. 1983, Chesapeake, VA) resides in Chicago and received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has shown at various institutions and events including: Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan; Milwaukee International in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Favorite Goods in Los Angeles; and MDW Fair, Club Nutz, Golden Age, Roots and Culture, and Megamall, all in her current locale of Chicago, Illinois. Anderson maintains an online inquiry into forms and structures pertaining to all media and forms of entertainment titled Gone Obviously Into Cheap Romancing.

¹ Allen Ruppersburg, “Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday,” The Secret of Life and Death (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 111.

THE BULLETIN BOARD

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is the third venue to host Matthew Higgs’s (Curator and Director of White Columns) bulletin board project. CCS and Higgs collaborated to begin a bulletin board program at Bard in the fall of 2007 with the understanding that the graduate students at CCS would curate it. The bulletin board is an enclosed glass case divided into three panes by aluminum bars.