to hell with subtlety
it bores us
tunnel under things, make things, liberate things, survive
we are ugly
we occupy the basement
(where we make shit,
and refuse to be immaterial labor)
tunnels must be dug
long-live insect-bolshevism
(but have you ever heard of insect politics?)
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We Are Not A Surplus (we’re a plus)
(Gif graphic with the group names of several hundred artists’ collectives) ______________________________________________________
THEMM!’s 191 St. Subway Tunnel Proposal (2023)
THEMM! proposes to replicate the tunnel graffiti recently painted over by the city as precisely as it appeared before the buffing. In this way our collective will be able to work collaboratively with the D.O.T. to negate their erasure of the existing tunnel artwork, as well as to work with and satisfy as well as show respect for the community and its desire to have left the site alone.
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ABC No Rio in Exile (2022):
Summer School: Art, Education & Radical Resistance
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Covid Era Collaborations with G. Sholette (2020 – 2021)
“The Future of Pedagogy:
Survival Is Not Enough”
(hover to magnify – click to enlarge image)
Craftlove & Sholette 2020
Working in (virtual) collaboration with artist Gregory Sholette, photomontagist Agata Craftlove of the collective THEMM! co-envisions a post-Covid cyber-classroom hovering between the future, present and the past in which (left to right) Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paulo Freire, Joseph Beuys, and Audre Lorde –all AI avatars designed by REU: Radical Educators Underground– gather to teach a student Zoombody by asking: what new, old, or repurposed learning tools are necessary now for realizing a post-social pedagogical commons? We imagine a supra-individual agency capable of mutating successfully within the hybrid classroom. We say: swarm the future with the agency of the past! Survival is Not Enough!
Columbus is Dead: Long Live Duchamp!
“I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty,” so Marcel Duchamp lamented in a letter to artist Hans Richter. His other “readymades” met a similar fate. When he grafted an inverted bicycle wheel onto the seat of a plain, wooden stool Duchamp transformed both wheel and stool into a useless object: the perfect deviant artifact for goading high culture’s
contrived and pompous mannerisms. Until it wasn’t. Duplicates of the wheel can be found in most major museums today. As we watch the toppling of monuments around the world, THEMM! also recognizes that one generation’s heroes are destined to be the sacrificial readymades of the next. We hereby offer a solution to both the petrification of Duchamp’s work, as well as a means for dealing with the fractured remains of Christopher Columbus statues, already beheaded, or soon to be so, by protestors infuriated with white supremacy and systemic racism. THEMM! calls for the fusing the two works together. The resulting synthetic post-memorials offer governments a formula for dealing with the shattered remains of other effigies due to monumenticide, but also a means of decolonizing Dada from its internment in the toxic mausoleums of the art world. COLUMBUS IS DEAD: LONG LIVE DUCHAMP!
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“Overcommons with Greenberg”
for
(for PALETTEN: Sweden)
Double City, 2026, a city shaken by a series of Sars/Covid pandemics which has divided society into those with, and those without immunity. Thanks to a collaboration between an unnamed museum and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), pre-plague era art critics are transported into a public spaces resembling Greek open air theater. From within the safety of a quarantined plastic confinement system an audience can question these past pundits using their mobile devices. On this occasion, we find formalist critic Clement Greenberg pontificating (fairly pedantically) about the failure of aesthetics and the immorality stemming from non-autonomous works of art (think perhaps Pasolini’s Salo)…his audience is not so convinced.
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“The Day After… COVFEFE 2063”
“Disengage! Fucking Disengage. Do it Now!”
Richard Ångström force-quit the anachronistic USB link, jerking it out of an elaborately decorated bronze data port. A puff of steam escaped from the empty slot. “Shit, shit, what if the board had caught me this time?” Just then, what had been a steadily inflating ballon-dog gif popped, scattering bits of pixelated confetti in all directions. One squiggly animated shred of paper fell and then appeared to blow directly into the foreground. It quickly filled Ångström’s metascreen…READ MORE
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Installation Projects (2020)
“Fungi – Fone”
HRW Assemblage
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2012: Karl Lorac’s Suprematist Island from 15 Islands for Robert Moses
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March 22 2019
The Paris Review‘s Daniel Penny reports on the De-Colonize movement with sketches by Agata Craftlove of THEMM! :
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/22/the-artist-activists-decolonizing-the-whitney-museum/
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THEMM! a finalist for the Creative Time Open Call 2019
Hey friends, so as it turns out we made the Creative Time Open Call second round shortlist with this project:
Utopia Repair Emporium
Utopia Repair Emporium is a live (and live-streamed) space of conversation framed as a public mystery story/installation/performance piece. It unfolds several times a week within an obsolete, low-budget technology repair shop (or perhaps it is street kiosk) in which both invited guests and members of the public bring their “broken” gadgets (anything from old Walkmans, to Amazon Echos, but also -use your imagination- lamps, books, houseplants, harmonicas or worn-out shoes) for repair, however, the expert “service crew” always manage to detect mysterious, SETI-like emanations coming from the items.
Once decoded, these messages serve as conceptual prompts that continue the narrative and inspire lively conversations, debates and improvisations focused on what is to be done as we face the challenging current topics in the arts, politics and contemporary culture. The “archaic” technological setting, together with the “expert” manipulation of strange and obsolete props helps distance guests and performers from both a high cultural institutional framework, but also from the historical “now,” in order to better consider both the future, and the larger sweep of the “archive from below,” a resource that is filled with a surplus of possibilities, hopes, as well as failures for bringing about a better, more compassionate and democratic society.
Here is a bit of project theorysplaining: So we know how Martin Heidegger theorized that when humans encounter a broken tool or a piece of malfunctioning technology the potential emerges for us to become exceptionally aware of our being in the world to a degree of intensity normally not permitted by smoothly functioning gadgets, patterns and routines. Right. Within this pause or tear in our normal regimen new possibilities are glimpsed.
Given that the proposed utopia repair shop is itself a sort of malfunctioning machine filled with unexpected transmissions and accidents of awareness, the project’s participants will engage in topics ranging from technology and its discontents, or what Douglass Rushkoff calls “present shock,” to questions involving surveillance, privacy, fake news, broken pipelines one Indigenous land, inventing media tactics, artificial stupidity and just how a society can approach political consensus at a time of deep internal divisiveness, or what environmentally neutral technologies will break our dependency on petroeconomics. Those present in each episode will direct the precise nature of the conversation while the repair-resistant props amplify the unguarded space of self-reflection, critical understanding and social dialogue.
Outcomes: When our “technicians” diagnose our guests/patrons failing device and extract its ghostly communication the owner has the option of having repairs carried out (undoubtedly a catastrophic choice), accepting the failed technology as the true meaning of the device, or turning the gadget into something else, for example inverting its use (a radio becomes a humidifier, a walkman turns into a flashlight) or perhaps having the object donated either as is or in transmuted form to a worthy cause such as immigrant rights advocacy or penal reform. And now that the damaged goods are works of art their newfound cultural capital might even give them a new lease on life.
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February 14 2019
Look what Agata found in the Imaginary Archive:
The New Spirit of Enterprise Culture in a Bare Art World
Or
Were they already there all along?
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November 9 2018
Agata’s fast sketches from the Decolonize This Place demonstration in the lobby of the Whitney Museum shot with her smart phone camera.
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(8/8/2018: Karl is busy in his underground studio)
Speaking of boring, but in an interesting way I hope, these past couple of weeks I have been hiding from the greenhouse gas thermal attacks outside down in my studio beneath the old Peace Pentagon and trying to produce a sculptural work that invokes the trope of social realism yet is not about an inspiring speech or valiant military action – think of Isaak Brodsky’s 1930 portrait of Lenin revising a speech on a fabric draped chair in Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg– but is based instead on a photo I was sent of a rather humdrum and non-heroic meeting -the last meeting to date in fact – of the activist group Gulf Labor Coalition. This was, according to sources, the gathering that took place around a large wooden table covered with coffee cups and laptops in an NYU classroom just before the (ultimately failed) negotiations with Guggenheim Museum board members later in the day on February 2016 in their downtown Manhattan office. Anyway, right now I am trying to get at something about the intrepidness of banality and repetition, or maybe it is really about the idea that so much of what we see as activism in fact takes place in not-at-all dynamic settings where the hidden labor behind the public or climactic event is hashed out. I can tell you too that the process of making a bas relief from clay (I use Van Aken sulfur-free Plastalina) is far far more complicated than rendering by drawing on paper. Instead of being able to represent a volumetric object (such as a person) using lines or tones with the relief you literally have to apply layers of material – thick or thin – and do so at precisely the right depth and angle to achieve a sense of optical realism, or close to it anyway. Sometimes the difference between what works and what does not is paper thin. There is a curious parallel between the process and its subject matter. At least that is how it feels. And as a friend pointed out, with obvious though unjustified flattery, that based on some jpgs I sent him there is something of Munch’s 1915 “Death Struggle” about the piece thus far. Though in truth I am not at all certain how it will finally be finished-off. Here are some images of the work in progress:
SUMMER OF 2018
(Homage to Donald Moffet)
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March 12 2016
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GULF LABOR
February 22 2018
Agata’s recent love letter to Gulf Labor Coalition
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ART
Karl contributes to Todd Ayoung’s exhibition:
A Project for a Revolution in New York
Set of Figures: Conceptual Art 1972 directly illustrates Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectic at a standstill (or at least my interpretation of this concept).It consists of three miniature sculpted “action” figures based on three canonical works of conceptual art : Hans Haacke “Visitors Poll” (1970); Dennis Oppenheim “Parallel Stress” (1970); Daniel Buren “Sandwich Men” (1968).All three images were reproduced as illustrations in Ursula Meyer’s 1972 book Conceptual Art (E.P.Dutton).
Consider the fact that most early conceptual art works are temporary events, often completely dematerialized in form -to use Lucy R. Lippard’s terminology- and therefore can only be revisited in a different form, as a document, text or photograph that freezes and captures an expired action, performance, or idea. Conceptual art photographs are often made in an informal and “artless” way like a snapshot or a forensic image whose aim is merely to convey information. To re-materialize these banal documents and artless images as small plastic resin figures therefore captures and somehow arrests all over again what is essentially not apprehendable: the fleeting singularity of an event-object such as a temporary conceptual art work (or perhaps a revolution in New York?), transforming these into conventionally low-brow form of a collectible statuette resembling a Christian Botanica figurine.
Karl Lorac’s “Set of Figures” is included in the upcoming exhibition: A Project for a Revolution in New York curated by Todd Ayoung with a catalog by Jelena Stojanovic baseda site-specific group exhibition based on the eponymous novel by the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and it will be on view at the Tompkins County Public Library, Ithaca, NY: February 5 2016
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Karl is also busy these days, he is working on a series of bas relief stations of struggle based on the work of Gulf Labor Coalition and Global Ultra Luxury Faction GULF, but also referring to the opening scene of The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss (Die Ästhetik des Widerstands) in which the author discusses the ancient Greek Pergamon Alter that depicts epic battles between Gods and Giants in terms of the underground Communist workers battling the rise of the Nazi Party in Berlin in 1937. Here is the first panel in progress:
“All around us the bodies rose out of the stone crowded into groups, intertwined, or shattered into fragments, hinting at their shapes with a torso, a propped-arm, a burst hip, a scabbed shard, always in warlike gestures, dodging, rebounding, attacking, shielding themselves, stretched high or crooked, some of them snuffed out, but with freestanding, forward-pressing foot, a twisted back, the contour of a calf harnessed into a single common motion.” Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Page one, Volume One.
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And Agata has a new book project
stains, spills debris
DOWNLOAD AT: Agata_Craftlove_Stains_spills_&_debris.sm.2016
More booklets from THEMM!
(Now at home in G. Sholette’s Imaginary Archive: )
Interview with a Coyote by TJ (2013)
Adorno: Thesis on Jokes by Agata Craftlove (2013)
Black Mask Trash Book by Karl Lorac (2013)
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Primary Forms: Agata Craftlove collage, 2012
Hesse, Bentham, Haacke, Reich, Malavich, FAA, UPS, ___, Aquarium:Moscow
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Karl Lorac for IWT (2012):
Post-Fordist Relief (click for more)
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Agata Craftlove: Songs & Rants
an-eye-for-an-eye (2020)
Songs For Government Agencies (2011):
Pussy Riot Mashup
Homeland Security
“We Are Scott Walker”
Pharaoh Ant: Invasive Species
(for the USDA)
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Dueling Bugles for Aaron Burr Society:
Agata Craftlove, 2012
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Other THEMM! Stuff:
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Occupy Whitney-B
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THEMM! in print: WITNAS #7
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THEMM MANIFESTO:
WE ARE WHAT ?
CONTACT: lorac@themm.us
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Agata Craftlove (born Lyubov Hyimichna Chumak 1978) is a Queens-based sound artist, graphic novelist, photomontagist and founding member of THEMM!, a collective of three intergenerational artists –Craftlove (she/her), Karl Lorac (he/him), and TJ “topjesus” (it/that)– whose hand-crafted sculpture (Lorac), artists’ books and street art (TJ), drawings, montage, experimental thrash songs and excerpts from her ongoing novel Double City (Craftlove) have appeared in exhibitions at Momenta Arts, ABC No Rio (in exile), Queens Museum of Art, The Cooper Union Art Gallery, Gallery 400 in Chicago and the Pori Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland, as well as in the journals WITNAS number 7, May 2012; Shifter 21, 2014; The Paris Review, March 22, 2019; Paletten (Sweden) Oct. 10, 2020. They describe their collective as akin to the ink squirted by a fearful yet clever squid which confuses predators with a false target.
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2012: Karl Lorac’s Suprematist Island from 15 Islands for Robert Moses
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Agata Craftlove
eye-for-an-eye: what do you want to see? (2020)
Songs for Government Agencies (2011):
Pussy Riot Mashup (for V. Putin)
We Are Scott Walker (for the GOP)
Pharaoh Ant: Invasive Species (for the USDA)
Homeland Security (for G. Bush Jr.)
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Occupy Whitney-B(
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