Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. All photos from Christian Marclay: The Clock; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Everyone I know who saw Christian Marclay’s Clock raved about it. The 24-hour sequence of film clips, most with a view of a clock face, is more action-packed than I’d imagined it would be. The focus is as much on the events surrounding the passage of time as on the instruments we use to measure that passage. In this way, The Clock isn’t about clocks at all, and often is only circumstantially related to temporality. What it’s really about is film technology, the nature of story telling, nostalgia, and the absurdity of life.

First things first: you don’t need to watch all 24 hours. I say this with the arrogance of someone who saw only two hours; and I say it even though I am constitutionally drawn to finishing things I begin, even though I believe there is a qualitative difference between doing something for a little time and doing that same thing for a long time. I recognize the irrationality of my confidence in grasping Marclay’s epic after experiencing only 8 percent of it. It is also true that some people insist that one period of Clock watching—10:00 am to noon, for instance—is qualitatively different from another—4:00 to 5:30 pm; or 1:00 to 2:00 am. Such natural enthusiams are proof of Marclay’s achievement, even if they are tinged, perhaps, with nostalgia; that is, influenced by the memories and narratives we fabricate as a fortress against the passage of time. But there is a way in which every period—whether period equals segment formed from connected scenes, hour, or length of time I sat in the theater—is always the same.

Christian Marclay, video still from The Clock, 2010; single-channel video with stereo sound, 24 hours; courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Everyone admires Marclay’s craft. He strings together thousands and thousands of moments from cinematic history, transforming fragments into a whole or, more precisely—since few witness the complete opus—into a series of “scenes” that somehow tell a story none of them originally set out to tell. He invites the sound from one fragment to extend seamlessly into the soundscape of the next. He conjures such segues with images as well, fading not into a double exposure, at least not during my two hours—11:15 am to 1:15 pm—but into a double exposure of associations. (And he goes beyond film editing techniques such as shot-countershot to produce this illusion of continuity from one fragment to the next.) Buttressing the whole composition is the beat, beat, beat of the clock—digital, analog, mechanical (even a sundial!)—whose relentless tick-tock presence comprises not only a visual metronome but also the false sense that we are experiencing the passage of time as linear, as complete, as fully accounted for. What a delightful fictional device! On its face, the clocks prove that time exists; beneath this facade, the seconds don’t add up, revealing the artificiality of the whole overlay of minutes and hours.

But mostly what Marclay achieves is a continuous recollection not of films we remember having seen—although there is plenty of that—but of films that we feel we’ve seen, even though we haven’t, as if the whole history of film comprised our collective (sub)consciousness. You and I are there. It appears to be no accident that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art gallery in which The Clock plays through June 2 is a darkened theater, evoking something of what I imagine as the hushed, almost religious, original cinema experience. The ritual begins outside the sanctuary. Here, I experience a different sort of time. That’s part of the Clock experience too, the period of waiting. People wait for hours. Many will wait longer than I will have watched (the price of redemption, I guess). Eventually, I am called and guided by one of the two ushers ministering the sanctum to one of the pre-seating, standing-room places at the back of the theater. I hug the wall for 30 minutes with a dozen other initiates. Before us spreads not only the screen but also the heads of visitors silhouetted against grainy film clips. Finally, having withstood these trials of endurance, I am called for a second time. I shiver as I follow the darkened profile of my usher down one of the two aisles, past row after row of three-seat couches, toward the promise of the epiphany.

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Last year, Theaster Gates and a team of collaborators took over a run-down building in Kassel, Germany called Huguenot House, renovating the space for performances and creative interventions as part of 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, the artist’s contribution to dOCUMENTA (13). It was a fitting gesture considering the restorative origins of the first dOCUMENTA in 1955, which reintroduced modern art to Germany after years of banishment under the Nazi regime. Building off his work at Huguenot House, Gates has returned to his native Chicago with an outstanding installation in the atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago titled 13th Ballad.

Theaster Gates, Double Cross, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, White Cube, and Kavi Gupta. Installation view, Theaster Gates: 13th Ballad, MCA Chicago, 2013. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Gates’s installation enhances the atrium like no installation I’ve seen in the same space. Normally a sun drenched thoroughfare, the spacious multi-story glass reception area directs patrons to the two galleries on the main floor or to the café overlooking the museum’s sculpture garden. With Gates’s additions, the space is transformed into a kind of secular church, though perhaps ‘transform’ isn’t quite the right word. Augmented with thirteen pews repurposed from the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel, an altar, and a giant double horizontal axis cross, the installation calls attention to the already cathedral-like quality of architect Josef Paul Kleihues’s entrance, while also referencing the migratory history of religious communities. Gates’s work fits so well within the museum architecture, one might think Kleihues himself commissioned the installation.

According to museum literature, the row of pews was recently removed from Bond Chapel as an inclusive gesture to open floor space for Muslim students to pray. Here, the pews offer a place to rest, reflect, or gather and discuss the work in the adjacent galleries, as a group of students was doing on the afternoon I visited the show. The slightly worn edges of the benches suggest a history of use from their previous life. Similarly, Stage Floor (2012), an assemblage of white rectangles hanging on a nearby wall is still dusty and stained from recent activity. Evidence of time and use places Gates’s objects within a continuum of purpose, serving as a reminder that everything has a past and could have a future when given the opportunity. This connection to accumulated history, purpose, and reactivation is reminiscent of the artist’s past work, particularly, Dorchester Projects (2009), an extensive undertaking in which Gates converted abandoned buildings in his South Side neighborhood into an artist residency, library, soul food kitchen, and community space.

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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 HELP DESK on twitter: @BeanGilsdorf

I have recently been the lucky recipient of an unprecedented amount of small, but not insubstantial, payments. Some are for arts writing and editing, others are one-time grants, art sales, and various art-world related odd jobs. All have been issued through W-9s and will show up come tax time as 1099-MISC income. None have been taxed. I do have a regular 9-5 job that gives me a more stable income and provides for my room and board. This new, supplemental income will mostly go toward studio rent and art supplies. I understand I should set aside a portion of these funds for the state and feds, but where do I start?

First, congratulations! Nice job on your grants and sales, and good hustle on the art-related income. Second, I can’t believe you came to me for advice that involves numbers. All I can recall about Algebra 1 was that my teacher had a glass eye, and there is honestly a question in my mind as to whether I ever once attended Algebra 2. My strongest memory related to arithmetic doesn’t even have to do with numbers: one summer in college I took a remedial math class and the guy who sat next to me wore a Stone Temple Pilots shirt every day.

Now that I’m wiser and more mature, I shove art-related receipts into an envelope and then hand the whole thing off to an accountant while hyperventilating.

If that’s not enough to scare you away, read on, because I’ve unearthed information that will help us both.* To start, I contacted a friend who is an accountant in a museum, and she backed me up about hiring an accountant: “The best advice I can give you is to seek the counsel of a professional tax accountant who specializes in artists and freelancers. He/she will be able to really analyze your situation and give you advice that is current to state and federal tax law.” It may seem like a cop-out to point you to a professional, but the U.S. tax code gets changed every year; so depending on the specifics of your situation, it may be better to hire an expert who can captain your little financial tugboat through the choppy waters of deductions, exemptions, withholdings, etc.

Llyn Foulkes, Who's on Third?, 1971-73. Oil on canvas, 48 x 39 inches

My friend sends you some more advice: “The quick and dirty is this: reduce your exemptions at your day job and save your receipts on all expenses related to your practice. Review the W-4 you submitted to your employer and resubmit it with fewer exemptions. Many people I know who freelance and have day jobs take zero exemptions on their W-4.  A Certified Public Accountant can help you determine the best exemption rate for your situation so that you neither owe nor get a refund, which is the best possible outcome. You want that money in your pocket, as you earn it.”

She also pointed me to the book Legal Guide for the Visual Artist, by Tad Crawford. Chapter 20 deals with taxes on income and expenses, and though I glazed over somewhat in a tax-vernacular-inspired stupor, I actually learned a few things that we can both bear in mind:

First, “[t]he artist realizes ordinary income from all income-producing activities of the artist’s profession” [italics mine]. Ordinary income (what you’re earning with your many jobs) is taxed at a higher rate than capital gains income (when you sell stocks or real estate), up to 35%. This tidbit is important for two reasons: one, you can estimate your own tax and set that money aside so that you don’t get caught short when April 15, 2014 rolls around (since you file W9s and claim all your income as a good citizen should, the IRS will tax you on all of it). Two, if you lump all your art-related income together, you’re less likely to claim a loss after you subtract your deductions (see below), which means you’re also less likely to have to prove to the IRS that what you do is a profession and not a hobby.**

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Continued from last week’s From the DS Archives, today we feature an article written by Daily Serving’s founding mother, Julie Henson. Both Henson and her husband Seth Curcio have been the directors of Daily Serving from its beginning, while working and maintaining their own artistic careers. Henson just finished her part of a new exhibition at San Francisco’s Southern Exposure titled Reverse Rehearsals in which she and twelve other San Francisco-based artists and writers work in conversation with one another over the course of a month to reconstruct the concept of story-telling. The show is on view through June 1st. In this week’s featured article, Henson reviews a group show at Eli Ridgway Gallery of San Fransico-based artists whose featured work narrates in a different manner: through physical exploration and fascination with nature.

This article was originally published on October 24, 2011 by Julie Henson.

Carleton E. Watkins. Mendocino River, From the Rancherie, Mendocino County, California, c. 1863/68. Albumen silver print from wet-collodion glass negative.

Standing on a hillside gazing into the Pacific Ocean, one can’t help but to be overwhelmed by the beauty and ruggedness of the landscape. Rolling hills, steep cliffs, and thick forests bring to mind epic stories of western expansion and the conquering spirit of those who have traveled here, a spirit currently under investigation at Eli Ridgway Gallery. Better a Live Ass than a Dead Lion brings together a group of San Francisco artists that restlessly explore our romance with both narrative and landscape alike, weaving together stories and dreams of uncharted lands and undiscovered peoples. The love for exploration needs no real truth here; each work presents a small part of a tale bound together by the love of the land.

Elisheva Biernoff. Inheritance, 2010. 80 slides of endangered wilderness areas projected onto mist from a humidifier housed in a plywood and fabric enclosure.

When entering the room that houses Elisheva Biernoff’s Inheritance, 2010, one’s eyes instantly begin to play tricks. Picturesque waterfalls and mountains go in and out of focus. Images dissolve and reconstruct themselves against a backdrop of fog, flashing in and out rhythmically with the subtle sound of a the slide projector. Just as 19th-century photographer Carlton Watkin’s images create mythic space, Inheritance reinterprets fabricated lands at the edge of our perception. Encased in fog, the images rest on the verge of becoming clear, allowing memory to fill in where our vision can’t.

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As part of our ongoing partnership with Beautiful/Decay we bring you the painted photographs of Claire Falkenberg. Falkenberg, who lives in Brooklyn, exhibited her work in a solo show entitled Threshold at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto earlier this year. The article was written by Larissa Erin Greer and originally published on May 23, 2013.

Claire Falkenberg, Cloud, 2010. Oil on C-print, 29 x 30 inches

With a toxic mix of oil-based paint, the surfaces of artist Claire Falkenberg‘s large-scale photos are transformed into mysterious and eerie clouds. The ominous, milky clouds obscure the space directly in front of the photographer, delaying the viewer’s ability to understand what lies just under the surface of each picture plane. This inclusion is generous, because it offers another layer of surface detail to the viewer who is willing to inspect the ghostly swirls of oil paint. The slick, snapshot-style images of trash slowly begin to reveal themselves—vanishing almost entirely at the center, and bringing into question just exactly what Falkenberg has chosen to cover up in her series.

Claire Falkenberg, Moon, 2010. Oil on C-print, 30 x 30 inches

Read the full article here.

What does one eat in times of crisis? Leftovers. Of the bourgeoisie. Or, but that depends on your political stance, and the degree of hunger, perhaps the bourgeoisie itself. The current exhibition at de Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam, which concludes this year’s curatorial program, was conceived after the six student curators encountered a bundle of paintings during a visit to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The paintings were labelled ‘Bourgeois Leftovers’ and the students, as it turned out, were hungry. So they took the paintings, and used them as a starting point.

I met with one of the curators, Srajana Kaikini, to talk about the show.

Georgia Haagsma: These works came here under quite random circumstances. What attracted you to the leftovers?

Srajana Kaikini: During our visit to the Van Abbe Museum and the tutorial with Charles Esche [Director of the Van Abbe Museum], he told us about his policy to be a transparent museum. The museum’s collection is open to the public so visitors can see how it operates. This is how we were able to see the Mondriaans and Picassos up on the wall but how we also encountered this pile of works labelled ‘Bourgeois Leftovers’ on the floor. The works kind of came to us, but with a very definite meaning already attached to them.

GH: So, the Van Abbe Museum wasn’t planning to do anything with these works?

SK: No, because there were other things that were more important for the museum’s narrative at the time. There were other factors they wanted to address in their exhibition, regarding the Museum’s context and the current Dutch context in general.

Bourgeois Leftovers - exhibition overview

GH: Do you know how they came up with ‘Bourgeois Leftovers’?

SK: The pile we originally found was bigger, it consisted of 73 works, mainly portraits and landscapes. For the museum, to call them ‘leftovers’ wasn’t a conscious decision of rejection. It was more to suggest that they could wait. Charles Esche, who came up with the name on the label, doesn’t seem to give any judgement to the word bourgeois, but it was certainly that word which attracted us to the works. If it wasn’t for that word, we probably wouldn’t have noticed them.

GH: Wasn’t Charles Esche surprised that you showed this interest?

SK: No, he was actually very happy and encouraging of the gesture.

GH: Even though the works are completely taken out of context?

SK: Yes, I think that in itself adds a layer, which gives the works more value. I mean, the crux of the exhibition was to displace these works by showing them in a contemporary art context, and to see what the status of these paintings would be in a contemporary scenario. We wanted to see how the specific academic language in these paintings corresponds with the contemporary art language today.

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Mixed media—that creative collision of materials rarefied and commonplace, refined and raw—is, one might say, something of a given in the contemporary art world. The Hirshhorn’s Over, Under, Next: Experiments in Mixed Media, 1913-Present is a fascinating and provocative overview of this now-ubiquitous, once-incendiary mode of art making. Such an illuminating look back prompts one to see the present anew, and considered in the light of past work, present art making often acquires still-more intricate, interwoven layers of meaning.

Among the many contemporary artists who embrace a mixed-media approach, David Altmejd produces work of an especially evocative, mesmerizing force. Thus, in the spirit of revisiting the present in light of the past, we delve into the DS archives to bring you Margaret Zuckerman’s David Altmejd: Interior Labyrinth.

This article was first published on June 13, 2012 by Margaret Zuckerman.

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An installation of what could be alien specimen in massive and intricately constructed tanks occupies the sun-soaked space in London’s sleek Stuart Shave Modern. The structures are made by Canadian-born sculptor, David Altmejd, (b.1974), an internationally acclaimed artist who is known for his frightening, strange and beautiful works – works that often involve decapitated werewolves, glittered kitsch, crystal caves, decomposed yeti, mirrors, mysticism and supernatural transformation. Being a particularly big fan of monsters – Altmejd’s figurative sculptures have always drawn me in. Mysterious and imbued with a supernatural energy, his past works have always evoked fear of the bodily grotesque paired with the seductive beauty of gruesome glamour. The artist has continued his shamanistic oeuvre and has again presented an exhibition at Stuart Shave that is exquisite, strange and delightfully puzzling. In walking around the large tanks, the perplexity evolves: the works are at once a landscape, a maze, a game and a creature. Those used to confronting half-decayed hairy and fanged monsters at Altmejd’s exhibitions may a bit disappointed in the boo factor. He transforms everyday materials into odd network of sculptures using thread, gold chains, Perspex, and bits of wire, and while there isn’t anything too scary, there is one thing that is hairy – coconuts.

David Altmejd, La gorge (detail), Plexiglas, resin, coconut shells, chain, thread, acrylic paint, metal wire, 231 x 177 x 457.2 cm, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist and Stuart Shave Modern

In the first room, La gorge (2012): milky, multi-colored blobs pour out of the puzzling halved coconuts and through canals of a clear, labyrinthine, stepped structure. Set in a massive vitrine, the work looks like a frozen mechanical maze through which mystic substances flow. Like plasma – there is energy impregnated in this gluey waterfall of numinous fluids. The nonsensical coconut contains these colorful potions; the often-farcical object transformed into a mystic egg filled with a witch’s brew. The sprawling Perspex palace of cascading steps leads from an apex down towards low lying pool, then, perhaps suggesting this is an enclosed eco-system, the substance that pours from above is simultaneously pulled up again in cloud-like blobs. Is this work, called ‘the throat’, the mouth of a river, a flowing ravine or funnel of a machine? Walking around this strange space, one feels a sort of energetic succession in motion, one as elaborate, complex and nonsensical as Fischli and Weiss’s Rube Goldberg contraption in The Way Things Go (1987). Gold chains crown this river like chandeliers from above, tracing the flow of energy through the tank while liquids finally disappear through holes in the plinth below. This suggests the landscape is part of never-ending series of compartments beyond, through which fluid will continue on. Moving, seeping, globing these substances pour, some as red as blood.

David Altmejd, La gorge, Plexiglas, resin, coconut shells, chain, thread, acrylic paint, metal wire, 231 x 177 x 457.2 cm, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist and Stuart Shave Modern.

In the second gallery, another large vitrine encloses a second form: an angelic, swan-like wisp made of a plethora of pulled pink threads. Each thread creates one line and curling striations made by a thousand come together into rounded forms. It is alien, ghost-like, taking over the space like an overgrown spider web. Walking around the enclosure, the threads create a shimmering effect and vibrate like a kinetic artwork. Much more organic in form and motion, the webs radiate from a center tube, and lines of threads seemingly contract and expand like musculature into a multi-layered transparent core. It is delicate, intricate and elegant, albeit a bit ominous in the dramatically lit and darkened room.  Although Altmejd’s works seem like landscapes, mazes or machines, the name of the second work Le ventre, (the belly) reveals the underlying theme, that the tanks, in fact, encapsulate depictions of body parts, on display like a scientific specimen. The swan’s neck becomes the arch of the J-shaped stomach organ and the movement is revealed to be through that of a digestive tract. The whole of the exhibition shows parts of the interior labyrinth of an unfamiliar creature, tracing the biological system through various compartments – some machine like, some organic and all bizarre.

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