- Nathan Lee
1. dust to dust 2. dry erase stratigraphy 3. untitled model for a history of light addresses its curious context: the three-paneled bulletin board as exhibition format. Rather than affix materials to the cork backing, artist Joe Winter has produced a triptych in slate, dry erase board, and cork designed as freestanding elements within the bulletin board support apparatus. Each element has been subjected to processes in the studio. Chalk was deposited on the surface of dust to dust from a single stick eroded by a fluid drip from the ceiling. This encrusted residue will be wiped clean during the exhibition. Dry erase stratigraphy features many layers of dry erase pigment and solvent that will be eliminated in stages over time. The components of untitled model for a history of light, cork and construction paper, were selectively faded by the sun. Under normal lighting conditions, the cork and paper will continue to fade slowly, ultimately dissolving the image.
The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of texts from Novels in Three Lines by the writer, anarchist, editor and art critic Félix Fénéon. Originally published in 1906 in the Paris newspaper Le Matin, these “nouvelles en trios lignes,” of which Fénéon composed 1,220, were drawn from actual events then compressed into terse, elegant micro-narratives. “Fénéon’s three-line news items,” writes translator Luc Sante, “represents a crucial if hitherto overlooked milestone in the history of modernism. Even as the entries are obsessively handcrafted, the work is in a sense the first readymade. It heralds the age of mass media, via a sensibility formed by the cadences and symmetries of classical prose; forecasts a century of statistics, while foregrounding individual quotidian detail; invites speed of consumption, while manifesting time-consuming labor of execution. It recognizes its own transience but does not concede to it.”
Joe Winter received a BA in New Media from Brown University and an MFA in Visual Art from UC San Diego. He has exhibited his work in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Great Britain, including at X-initiative (NY), Eyebeam (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Compact Space (LA), URBIS (UK), Estacion Tijuana, and the Western Front (Vancouver, BC). He has completed residencies through Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and received an individual artist grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 2009. His work has been featured on Rhizome, Artforum.com, and appears in the Phaidon/New Museum publication Younger than Jesus: The Artist Directory.
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.
