We Have the Technology: The Conditions of Art and its Experience in a Would-be Age of the Technological Sublime

Slyce contributes an essay to this volume–deriving from the 2018 Verbier Art Summit with the theme More Than Real: Art in the Digital Age–that analyses our moment and its infatuation with the technological sublime. He examines drives towards Virtual Reality in light of both an earlier moment of technological innovation through Walter Benjamin’s writing on 19th century photography and then signal examples of 1960s practices coming out of post-Minimalism and Conceptualism that explored new technologies while not succumbing to their forces or distanced modes of production. Starting with two signal cultural products of the 1980s in a song by the avant-rock band Pere Ubu and then David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Slyce considers the conditions of making and the experience of virtual reality as art now, some five years before it is imagined–at least by the corporate powers standing behind VR–when ‘we’ will all own at least two such devices. The book, published by Koenig Books, was launched at Moderna Museet in Stockholm on June 1, 2018

Werner Büttner and the Melodic Tactics of Subversive Affirmation: an Introduction

An introduction to the work and practice of Werner Büttner included in Werner Büttner: Coincidence in Splendour, a retrospective monograph on the artist's painting practice from the late 1970s to present. In this shorter text, Slyce contextualises Büttner's practice amongst his contemporary German painters with which he worked and operated alongside

Adventures close to home

The essay ‘Adventures close to home’ was published in the catalogue to accompany the internationally touring exhibition ‘Elixir: The Video Organism of Pipilotti Rist’ at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, both in 2009. Consciously deviating from the tone and domain of the standard catalogue essay, Slyce’s text offered a complementary and parallel perspective to the show, providing a framework of ideas with which to structure one’s experience of the exhibition. Slyce tested the conventions of the catalogue essay. The writing was based on 36 hours of interviews with Pipilotti Rist conducted in New York, London and Zurich. This extended conversation shaped the perspective and position of the text, linking closely to the conception and making of Rist’s work. Slyce’s interviewing method is centred on exploring the specific characteristics of an artist’s practice, i.e. how an artist might think, speak, read, write and conceive of their wider activities as resources for the making of their ‘art’. Slyce juxtaposes this approach to practice with one that would focus more narrowly on the set of art objects produced by an artist. His interviews with artists are typically conducted as dialogues that draw on critical analysis, intuitive apprehension and appreciations of what constitutes their practice. These are continually tested throughout the extended conversation. The catalogue was launched at the opening of the exhibition at the Museum Boijmans (2009). Slyce has given lectures about his methodology at the Christie’s Education MA in Modern and Contemporary Art and Art World Practices programme since 2009

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe

Size Matters! (De)Growth of the 21st Century Art Museum, Verbier Art Summit 2017

'Size Matters' was the subject set by Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam, for the inaugural session of Verbier Art Summit in 2016. Slyce lectured in response to Ruf's account of the inflationary forces driving public institutions in response to growing audiences. His talk aimed to bring the topic closer to the production of artists and explore how 'size' can obscure and collapse a central concern within artists' practices regarding 'scale': "Size determines the work; scale determines the art." Robert Smithson. Verbier Art Summit is positioned as a 'Davos of the art world' and aims to create an international platform "for high-level dialogue by bringing together influential art world stakeholders that are looking to have a real impact on the art world." In January 2017 the Verbier Art Summit took place across four days with a focus on 'Size Matters!'. Invited speakers included Beatrix Ruf, Rem Koolhaas, Tino Sehgal, Tobias Madison, Mark Fisher, Cissie Fu, Constantijn van Orange, and Christoper Kulendran Thomas. The 2017 Summit is captured and extended in a publication edited by Slyce and SMA and jointly published by SMA, Walter Koenig and Verbier Art Summit. Slyce contributes an essay as well as editing the publication. Content includes essays by Rem Koolhaas, Tino Sehgal, and Prince Constantijn van Oranje. Additional essays in the edited volume will come from Sir Nicholas Serota, Benjamin Bratton, Cissie Fu, Dave Beech, Daniel Birnbaum and Tobias Madison

The Fox Journal, Nos. 1–3 (reprint)

This project is a reprint of the artist-run journal The Fox, issues No.1, 2 and 3, originally published in New York in 1975–6. Slyce proof-read and edited all three re-typeset issues of the journal and wrote the essay, ‘The Fox: An intervention for our moment’, which contextualises The Fox and its legacy for current practice and activism. The Fox critically addressed the social dimensions of art practice during a crucial political and cultural conjuncture of the 1970s, in the wake of Conceptualism and its absorption by the museum and market. Editors included members of Art & Language in the UK and New York; there were contributions from Adrian Piper and Martha Rosler, who were among key practitioners mapping the limits of contemporary practices. The reprint project put this largely untapped resource back into circulation for current practitioners, who share much with the original moment of the journal’s production. Both periods can be characterised as social and economic times of boom and bust when artistic practices negotiate spaces for production beyond the studio and standard commercial platforms for exhibition, distribution and social engagement. The publications were launched at Unit/Pitt, an artist-run space in Vancouver, 15 November–21 December 2013. Slyce received funding from the RCA to conduct research at the J. Paul Getty Museum, which holds The Fox archives. Since 2008, Slyce has lectured widely on the legacies of post-studio practices and Conceptual art at the ICA, Chisenhale Art Place and Tate Modern. He delivered lectures on ‘The Fox’ in 2011 and 2012 to the MA course in Modern and Contemporary Art and Art World Practice at Christie’s Education in London and New York and Goldsmiths MA Fine Art, Curating and Critical Studies in October 2013

A conversation with Dan Graham

The telephone has always struck me as an ideal medium in which to converse with Dan Graham—his timing and use of the rhythms of speech on the phone rarely fail to surprise and impress. When one interviews Dan, you really just need to keep out of his way—you wind him up, and off he goes. On the phone, even during an informal conversation, he has the uncanny knack of anticipating its end and is able to cut-out the prolonged farewell by interjecting, when somehow you least expect it: 'O.K. Bye!' For more than 50 years Graham has shaped a practice that encompasses curation, writing, pavilion architecture, video, photography and performance in a trans-media mode. Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942, but only because his father went to university there (Dan grew up in New Jersey). He loves rock and roll and idolises Ray Davies, even naming his pavilion atop the Hayward Gallery, which overlooks the Thames in London, Waterloo Sunset (2002–03). Ray approved. From 1964 to 1965 Graham was the director of the John Daniels Gallery in New York where he showed the work of then emerging artists: Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre. His diagrammatic schemas, photo-text pieces and magazine inserts from the 1960s are among the signal works of conceptual art. During that period, his practice started to include critical writing on art, architecture, television culture and music and his performance pieces began to explore self-awareness, subjectivity, architecture and group behaviours. In the 1970s, his work started to incorporate mirrors and surveillance cameras as it addressed the social function of architecture and television in mediating between the public and private, or external and intersubjective realms. Since the 1980s, Dan has explored the freestanding pavilion and the power of two-way mirrors to extend this investigation. Here we talk about his first solo survey in China Dan Graham – Greatest Hits (7 November 2017–25 February 2018), which is showing at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. The interview took place before the show opened

Something out of the ordinary

The essay ‘Something out of the ordinary’ was originally written for the Camden Arts Centre to accompany Allen Ruppersberg’s solo show in 2008. Slyce’s essay examined the everyday as a resource for Ruppersberg’s art, drawing on research in and around Ruppersberg’s practice as a central figure in establishing conceptualism on the West Coast of the USA. Slyce contextualised Ruppersberg amongst the leading figures exploring post-studio practices and creating an ‘art of the everyday’ that adopts the archive as not only a resource but also as the material from which art might be made. The essay was republished in the catalogue Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take (2010), which accompanied Ruppersberg’s exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California (12 September–19 December 2010). For this publication, the essay was integrated into a catalogue that Ruppersberg designed as an artwork in itself, modelled on a 1956 edition of a California and Las Vegas travel guide called The Guest Informant. Slyce’s essay, along with texts by other authors, including the guest curator Constance Lewallen and the cultural critic Greil Marcus, were superimposed over the original pages of the travel book. Slyce gave a lecture about Ruppersberg’s work in relation to experimental film in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of the symposium ‘Double Agents: Wallace Berman and Allen Ruppersberg’ held at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and organised in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre in November 2008

A World Drawn: An Introduction to the art of Julian Opie (for a Polish Audience)

Essay in a monograph associated with the exhibition Julian Opie: Sculptures, Paintings, Films at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, 18 October 2014 to 25 January 2015. Slyce attempts to re-examine the lineaments of Opie's practice for a new and broader audience. During which, he calls attention in the writing to the processes of its commissioning and early request to do so for a 'Polish audience'. He attempts to bring to light some of these often invisible moves in the commissioning of catalogue essays, while also re-examining Julian Opie's practice in light of its established reception in Britain

Vitamin P3 – Oscar Murillo; Yelena Popova

Slyce has contributed entries for the artists Oscar Murillo and Yelena Popova to this third publication in the series. As well as a contributing writer to the series, Slyce was invited to join a group of "distinguisded critics, curators, museum directors and other contemporary art experts to nominate artists who have made significant and innovative contributions to painting.