Optimundus, the new show by Jos de Gruyter and Harals Thys 

at M HKA closed yesterday.

In January 2014 it will be shown in Kunsthalle Wien.

New Jacobin issue Assemply Required 

B. Wurtz and Triple Canopy

History Works 
April 14 – 25, 2013

Opening reception:
Sunday, April 14, 6–8 p.m.

Screening at 155 Freeman Street
of Wurtz’s early film work and discussion with Josh Tonsfeldt and Hannah Whitaker: 
Wednesday, April 17, 155 Freeman St., 7-9 p.m.

See also

and also

Mark Rappaport on The Secret Life of Objects

from Rouge, issue 13, April 2009

Malvina Reynolds - Carolina Cotton Mill Song

Oh I love to get into my clean bed

With its sheets so fair and white,

And when I am in my clean bed,

I sleep thru most the night,

And my dreams are hardly troubled

By the worrying of my mind

For the workers who die of the brown lung

In the mills of Caroline.

Chorus:

Oh the mystical people, they think they are wise,

With the smooth on their faces and stars in their eyes,

But the truths of this system are spoken and sung

By the workers who bear the brown lung.

Oh it’s Burlington and Cannon

And the names we wives know well,

Who advertise the sheets and towels

And give us the old soft sell,

And they’d rather buy the government men

With promotions here and there,

Than pay out company profits For to clean the cotton mill air.

(Chorus)

Oh some people talk of the yin and yang

And walk in a kharma daze,

As though the influence of the stars

Could change mill owners ways,

But the people who work in the cotton mills

They know how the world is run,

And they need some help of an earthly kind

To live their time in the sun.

(Chorus)

Oh the mystics they wear the blue jeans

But their heads are in the stars,

For they do not know how the denim is made

Nor the years of workers’ wars.

And my place is not in an ivory tower

Or seeking some power divine,

But it’s out on the bricks with the union folks

At the mills in Caroline.

(Chorus)

In the Orozco Room at the New School, the conversation on Neomaterialism with cultural critic Noam Yuran focused on brands as these things that are actually made of money, and on money as a social relation that is both material and non-material thing, and on TV as the social factory where brands are being made, and on the production of scarcity through advertisements, and on the Ipad as the emblem of our relation to materials in a reality in which everything can be bought only to find its way to the garbage…..

Over the last four decades we have witnessed processes of dematerialization in various fields: money has been dematerialized with the dissolution of the gold standard, commodities have been dematerialized with the ascendance of brand names, and art practices were dematerialized by the emergence of movements such as conceptual art. Taken together, these processes can serve as a starting point for rethinking materialism. Rather than render the concept of materialism obsolete, they force us to ask whether we are finally able to understand what materialism was really about.

The conversation was organized and presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, as part of its 2011-2013 curatorial focus theme Thingness, and in conjunction with the center’s New School class Art & the Political.