#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts.

Georgia Sagri, "Diana Speaks with Animals Again," 2012, C-print. Courtesy of the artist, Central Fine, Miami and Melas Papadopoulos Gallery, Athens.

Diogenes, founder of the School of Cynics in ancient Greece, is considered by some to be the first anarchist. Critical of society’s beliefs and structures, which he regarded as oppressive and hypocritical, he espoused a philosophy of being close to nature by living as simply as one could. The fragmented stories that have survived depict him living in a large ceramic jar in the Athenian marketplace, eating onions and figs, and acting as a constant thorn in the side of the domineering Plato, whose abstract theories he despised.

The Greek–born artist Georgia Sagri—an early participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement who was cited by Time magazine as playing an influential role in shaping its philosophy—often mentions Diogenes when discussing her own work. “He represented a rupture of the academy, of the official language of thought,” she reflected in a recent phone interview I conducted with her. “To him, there was no inside or outside—he simply lived everywhere. And the Cynics didn’t just talk, they activated their philosophy. This territory of thought was abandoned in favor of the dominant rational discourse of Plato and Socrates, whose dialectic we still live with today.”

Georgia Sagri, "Working the no work/Travaillez je ne travaille pas/Δουλεύοντας τη μη δουλειά," Whitney Biennial 2012, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Melas Papadopoulos, Athens. Copyright Georgia Sagri. Photo: Paula Court

Sagri’s own feral practice—which encompasses performative events, video works, texts, and various forms of object-making—can be seen as a continuation of these ideas, albeit tuned to a much more complex world. The first time I encountered her work was at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, in which she was an exhibiting artist. Taking over a room on the fifth floor of the Whitney for the duration of the biennial, Sagri set about creating a living “book” centered around the theme of “working the no work” (Travailler Je ne travaille pas). The project, which took some inspiration from the May 1968 student protests in France, focused on the contemporary condition of labor in the capitalist marketplace and included a set/installation that Sagri had constructed along with various actions that took place in it. The book was never intended to be published, but rather consisted of everything that took place in the space.

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Today from the DS Archives, we’d like to help you start your week off with gusto by revisiting a piece written by Bean Gilsdorf from her weekly column “Help Desk.” For most of us, public speaking can be trying, stressful and intimidating. And when it comes to lecturing about your own work, it can be all the more overwhelming. In her entry “Rock the Lecture” Ms. Gilsdorf gives some sage advice on how to navigate and successfully deliver the almighty Lecture – but her tips can be utilized in many different contexts.

The following article was originally published on November 5, 2012 by Bean Gilsdorf:

Welcome to HELP DESK, where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to–contemporary art. Together, we’ll sort through some of art’s thornier issues. Email helpdesk@dailyserving.com with your questions. All submissions remain strictly anonymous and become the property of Daily Serving. HELP DESK is co-sponsored by KQED.org.

“You’ve seen the pictures. You’ve read the tweets. New York City looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland along its waterfront. Among the many things New York City needs right now, clean up is one of them.” If you’re in the NYC area and able to help, Art Fag City has a list of places that need your assistance. Please check it out and lend a hand if you can!

An artist lecture certainly doesn’t have to be boring. The best ones leave the audience energized with a new appreciation of what it means to be an artist in a contemporary community. There are many ways to rock your presentation, and there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer, so what follows are some general suggestions that you can tailor to your style and comfort level.

Isa Genzken, "Ground Zero" installation view at Hauser & Wirth London, 2008.

This first tip is non-negotiable: above all other considerations, practice is the key to success. Whether you are a veteran at the microphone or terrified of an audience, practice will make your talk go smoothly, so once you have your PowerPoint slides in order, take the time to run through your images and talk out loud about the work—even to an empty room. Just hearing your own voice will alert you to any gaps or flaws and you can tighten up your lecture considerably by running through it a couple of times before the actual presentation. You can also use these opportunities to time your talk—no matter how good the work is, everyone’s butt starts to hurt at around the 50-minute mark, so don’t go over the time you’ve been allotted.

Another factor to consider is your audience: you’ll want to adjust your talk in keeping with who will be listening. In this case, your information should be mainly geared toward the students, so find out if they are undergrads or grads and speak accordingly. I’m not suggesting that you dumb down your presentation, but if you’re a theory geek and plan to talk about Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception, be prepared to introduce these complex ideas to an audience that may not already be familiar (which, by the way, will lengthen your talking time). No one gets excited about a presentation they don’t understand, so if you know in advance whom your audience is you can customize the information to meet their needs.

Isa Genzken, White Horses, 2008. MDF, mirror foil, tape, spray-paint, colour print on paper, 38 7/8 x 31 3/8 x 3/4 inches

Stage presence can definitely help a lecture along. To begin: stand up straight, smile, look around the room, and look the audience in the eyes. If you’re nervous, learn some breathing techniques that will keep you focused enough to get through the first few minutes—after that, the fight-or-flight mechanism will have died down and you’ll be in the zone. Also, avoid being a cadaver at the podium; during your rehearsals try to practice some natural gestures that you might make, such as holding your hands apart to indicate size or pointing to a particular area in an image. If you are comfortable on stage, you may want to get out from behind the podium a few times, because movement is dynamic and creates energy. Finally, humor is an excellent strategy for livening up a lecture. If there’s a funny point you could make, by all means we in the audience want to hear it.

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As a part of our ongoing partnership with the San Francisco-based arts publication Art Practical, today we bring you a review by Matt Stromberg of the exhibition Falling From Great Heights at Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles.

Heather Rasmussen. Untitled. (Containeryard, Liverpool, UK, January 13, 2004, flipped) 2012

Falling from Great Heights, the current exhibition at the Stephen Cohen Gallery, takes its title from a quotation by the astronomer Carl Sagan that addresses the sublime and ineffable nature of the universe: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”^I The three artists in the show, Siri Kaur, John Knuth, and Heather Rasmussen, each convey this sense of awe and wonder when confronted with the unknown and the unknowable. Interestingly, they all employ photography—a medium that is often considered to be objective—to create images that call into question the veracity of what they depict.

Siri Kaur’s selections from her series Half of the Whole (2010–13) align most literally with Sagan’s assertion. The first room of the gallery is hung salon-style with Kaur’s ethereal, abstract photographs that resemble various natural phenomena. Some of the images, which vary in size, contain patches of green, blue, and brown, suggesting views of the Earth from above, while others, in bright pink on white, recall microscopic views of the body’s interior.

Read full article here.

Since sitting down six minutes ago, my iPhone has buzzed no less than eight times. E-mail. E-mail. Text message. E-mail. Breaking news notification. Follow up text message. Reminder alarm. E-mail. Approve the attached contract to begin production. Bombing suspect hospitalized. What’s the address for tomorrow? Please send details for exhibition. Go to bank. John Doe wants to be your friend!

Installation View

Despite this electronic outburst, I am making every attempt to focus on the meditative installation in the back gallery of Ambach & Rice, and it hits a poignant nerve. The ability to concentrate on any singular thing has become an art form within itself. We are unremittingly multi-tasking, documenting, transmitting beings to which space – between thoughts or plans alike – is uncomfortable. Even in the face of social atrocities that beg for grave respite, we are cursory in our reflections because of a shared, trained inability to pause, to simply be present. Rocks & Clocks takes umbrage with this compulsion through a purposefully minimalist and elemental selection of works by Cameron Gainer, Mark Hagen, Emilie Halpern, and Mungo Thomson. On view through May 18^th, the group show confronts our collective anxieties about modern time and space in an elegant and quietly plaintive way.

Installation View

The aforementioned meditative installation – Sunrise/Sunset (2013) by Cameron Gainer – features a projected image through a sand-filled hand blown hourglass. What is initially a black wall gradually becomes a rich, citrusy sunset as the diminishing sand reveals the vista sliver by sliver. Within eighteen minutes, the last granule tumbles into the bottom half of the glass, and I am left with a stillness that is both comforting and unnerving. This artificial, static sunset has managed to seize more of my attention than the actual Los Angeles dusk does on a daily basis; not necessarily because it is more visually alluring, but because its manifestation of mortality is so precisely articulated.

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“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.”

This oft-referenced quote, by German theologian Albert Schweitzer, captures a universal truth about the human condition, but its poignancy is particularly acute for city dwellers. After all, feeling lonesome while contemplating the vastness of the ocean or looking at the night sky is one thing; feeling isolated while surrounded by a crush of people on a packed subway platform or navigating a crowded sidewalk is quite another. The presence of all of those unfamiliar bodies—millions of unconnected souls coexisting in such close contact—only intensifies one’s psychic isolation.

Newsha Tavakolian, "Look," 2012. Inkjet print, 41 x 55 in., courtesy the artist/Thomas Erben Gallery

Look, the most recent series by Iranian photographer Newsha Tavakolian, personalizes this pervasive urban phenomenon. Currently on view at the Thomas Erben Gallery, the exhibit features large format portraits of Tavakolian’s neighbors in the Tehran apartment building where she has lived for the past ten years. Though the residents have spent significant time in close proximity—riding the same elevator, sharing the same view out their wide picture windows—they remain strangers. In its relentless documentation of individual solitude, Look serves as a contemporary, Iran-specific take on a classic modernist subject: the isolation and alienation of urban life.

“I wanted to bring to life the story of a nation of middle-class youths who are constantly battling with themselves, their isolated conformed society, their lack of hope for the future and each of their individual stories,” Tavakolian notes in the exhibition’s press release.

The framing of the photographs emphasizes what is shared among their young middle-class subjects. Shot over a period of six months, the portraits are almost identically composed. Each subject sits alone in the center of the frame before large wall-to-wall windows, which give out on a view of monolithic high-rise apartment buildings. Taken at 8 pm, as evening falls and the sky darkens, the photographs are infused with a cold, bluish light. Almost half of the subjects appear to be crying.

Newsha Tavakolian, "Look," Installation view, courtesy Thomas Erben Gallery

Tavakolian’s project is driven by her desire to illustrate the difficulties of daily life in modern Iran. In response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ongoing nuclear program, the US and the UN have imposed harsh new rounds of economic sanctions over the past three years, many of which specifically target the nation’s highly profitable petroleum industry. As a result, Iran has been plagued by high rates of unemployment and hyperinflation, and soaring prices have limited supplies of basic foodstuffs and medications. Despite unprecedented access to technology—several of Tavakolian’s subjects are shown with smartphones—Iran is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world.

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I am watching the film Haywire by Soderbergh and the quality of compressed expressions reminds me of the current exhibition Envy, by Matias Faldbakken up now at Galerie Neu in Berlin. On a first viewing of Faldbakken’s work I was put off by the intellectual deference of the nearly empty showroom–the cool distancing which is so often currency for cultural glamour.  Let’s hope I am mistaken about the value of reductive selectivity within the show, that it is more about care than mystique.  Like an effective meme, I am frequently reminded of the power of selection and reduction within exhibition spaces via the Gabriel Orozco exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in 1994.  There is a presumed eloquence to the idea of having “choosen” those four, famed yogurt lids to occupy such vast art world real estate (testing the bounds of their ready-made-ness and their fiscal value per square foot), when in fact we know that it could have been any four lids prior to the hanging but that upon presentation, those four would be lionized and brought directly back into the realm of the select.

Regarding Haywire and the specificity of choosing, it is at first the crunching of bodies materially and the sexless yet erotic maneuvering of the main characters’ fighting that is striking and similar to Faldbakken. Haywire is weightless, translucent; the cinematography feels like looking through a dense shower curtain, there’s no nudity and hardly any dialog. I have the impression that Soderburg is reading past me, he knows that I can easily google his brazen protagonist if I really have to see her tits, so of course he needn’t ply me with diversions. I am imaging Faldbekken is thinking the same thing about his novels. He doesn’t have to deliver any of that creamy sauce in the gallery because he’s written it all out elsewhere.

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HELP DESK is where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling–or any other activity related to–contemporary art. Submit your questions 100% anonymously here: http://bit.ly/132VchD. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Follow us on twitter: @ArtHelpDeskI’m just about to finish my first really serious series of paintings, and I’m curious about which approach is the best for self-promotion. Is it better to go all out and submit art to blogs, magazines, post cards, business cards, etc., or is it better to play it subtly, try and meet the right people, and become that hidden gem that someone finds and then shows to the world? Is it possible that being over-exposed on blogs can be a turn off to galleries, like they don’t have the pleasure of being able to say, “Look what I found!”? (I’m talking about the galleries that like to showcase new talent rather than blue chips, the kind you get your foot in the door with as an artist.)

Apparently you missed that day in Catholic school when they taught us Matthew 5:15-16: “Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.” Notice that this verse doesn’t advise, “get thine light discovered by cunning means” or “have another man lighteth thine candle for thee.”

Philippe Parreno, La Batalla de los Patos, a documentary project with Rirkrit Tiravanija, 2003, 2013. Screenprint, printed in phosphorescent ink, 39.5 x 55.5 inches, edition of 6

Where are all these imaginary people who have ample time and inclination to discover you? I can’t imagine a single gallerist who, after curating, framing, installing, promoting, and selling a show—in addition to managing a staff, courting new collectors and arts patrons, and maybe even having a home life in the odd moment outside of work—who is going to be able to wade through the deep seas of information put out there by artists who are promoting their work, in order to find you. I hope I am making this point clear for artists who sit in their studios hoping to be “discovered”: when you hear the phone not ringing, it will be the galleries not calling.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. I wrote to several arts professionals about being found and they all said the same thing: it doesn’t work like that. One gallerist from Boston said, “I would agree with you on the ‘discovery’ idea. With all the ‘noise’ in our contemporary culture, subtlety when it comes to self-promotion is a losing idea. Years ago, before social media, [another] gallerist told me he had a rule of three: if he heard the same name from three different people he would check out the work. The more ‘buzz’ around the work the more attention it is going to get.” A gallerist in San Francisco told me, “I couldn’t agree more. An emerging artist should be doing as much as he/she can to connect with others and find exhibition opportunities. So much can be learned from showing and working with others. This is how an artist builds his/her community within the art world and an important audience for their work. From a marketing or sales perspective, it’s of course far easier for a gallery to work with an artist who has already established a positive reputation.”

Philippe Parreno, No More Reality, reunion, 2006, 2013. Screenprint, printed in phosphorescent ink, 39.5 x 55.5 inches, edition of 6

As for “playing it subtly” and trying to meet the “right people,” those are strategies likely to disappoint unless you already know influential arts professionals who have previously indicated that they are happy to promote your work. Here’s where you need to be honest about your ability to get within shouting distance of whomever these “right people” might be—I’m guessing that you’re not currently rubbing elbows with a bunch of gallerists and collectors who summer in the Hamptons. In the long run it’s better to rely on the quality of your work and your marketing than to try to strong-arm friendships with the mighty. I’d rather see you take a more sensible route, one that will keep you from dying with a note to David Zwirner clutched in your paint-stained hand.

Since your ultimate goal is to get some attention from galleries, you’re going to have to start elsewhere and build up that “buzz” that our friend in Boston is talking about. Have your work photographed by a professional. Make it easy for people to find you by having a website with a good layout and visible contact info. Email a few images and a short press release to online and print publications likely to be interested in your work. Make a Facebook page, a tumblr, or an instagram account. Contact the local papers. Sometimes you can get other groups interested—for example, if you paint trains you could send an email to the National Model Railroad Society. Don’t laugh! It’s a somewhat-facetious example but I do know artists who have made sales and built a buzz on the basis of their work’s subject matter, so brainstorm people and organizations who might connect to what you’re doing. Don’t discount any avenue you have for creating a dialogue around the work.

Philippe Parreno, From November 5th Until They Fell Down, stop animation film, 2010, 2013. Screenprint, printed in phosphorescent ink, 39.5 x 55.5 inches, edition of 6

While you’re doing all that, line up some studio visits with arts professionals—gallerists, independent curators, even arts writers. Do your homework and figure out who might be interested in your paintings. If you’re not used to doing studio visits, practice by swapping visits with art friends and/or ask a few former professors to come for a short visit so you can “warm up” and be ready for when a gallerist arrives.

In about every third column I find myself flogging the book Art/Work, and the reason is that it’s a tremendously useful resource for artists who want to be on the gallery track. Please buy a copy and read it cover to cover. You will find that it answers many of the questions that are bound to come up after the buzz starts. Get your work out there, and good luck!