Post-Script_PP
Post-Script
““It is not a question of knowing whether this interests you but rather of whether you yourself could become interesting under new conditions of cultural creation””
Archive
Protest/Occupy
“Sorry Mom but the rich need to be taxed, Educate yourself, Waterboard the bankers, Unison, Something needs to change, Peace sign, Love, S.O.S, Stop fraud to the Americans, MSX, Educate the public, American Dream not American Scheme, Let the health of the planet guide us, not the wealth of the 1%, We are not collateral damage, Why should I dream to be middle class 2? Human Rights! We have rites why should the rich be more important- Olivia. Fun education not world domination. Corporations are the biggest welfare recipients! Peace + Love. End the wars. 99% How ya owe China B! South Florida Smash HLS end corporate oppression of all species. We are all the working class, Light. End Iraq! Peace with a peace sign upside down. Stop the Fed! People before profits! Wi R turning the tide towards love. We need the jobs in the USA not overseas! Fix what’s broken, I want my future, Love one another, Occupy Protest, Miami, FL"
"Padon manman, men rich la bezwen papye ekri, edike tèt ou, Dwat Bankye yo, Inison, Yon bagay bezwen chanje, Lapè siyen, Renmen, SOS, Stop fwod Ameriken yo, MSX, Edike piblik la, Ameriken rèv pa Ameriken Scheme, Se pou sante a nan planèt la gide nou, pa richès nan% nan 1, Nou pa domaj kolateral, Poukisa mwen ta dwe rèv yo dwe klas presegondè 2? Dwa Moun! Nou gen rezon poukisa moun rich yo ta pi enpòtan - Olivia. Edikasyon plezi pa dominasyon mond. Kòporasyon yo se benefisyè yo byennèt pi gwo! Lapè + renmen. Fen lagè yo. 99% Ki jan yo dwe Lachin B! Sid Florid Smash HLS fini opresyon antrepriz nan tout espès yo. Nou se tout klas la ap travay, Limyè. Fen Irak! Lapè ak yon siy lapè tèt anba. One Stop Fed a! Moun anvan pwofi yo! Wi R vire mare a nan direksyon pou renmen. Nou bezwen travay yo nan USA a pa aletranje! Ranje ki sa kase, mwen vle lavni mwen, youn renmen lòt, Okipe Pwotestasyon, Miami, FL
"Lo siento mamá, pero los ricos deben ser gravados, Edúcate, Waterboard los banqueros, Unison, Algo necesita cambiar, Signo de la paz, Amor, SOS, Detener el fraude a los estadounidenses, MSX, Educar al público, Esquema del sueño americano no estadounidense, Dejemos que la salud del planeta nos guíe, no la riqueza del 1%. No somos daños colaterales. ¿Por qué debería soñar con ser de clase media 2? ¡Derechos humanos! Tenemos ritos, ¿por qué los ricos deberían ser más importantes? Olivia. Educación divertida, no dominación mundial. ¡Las corporaciones son los mayores receptores de asistencia social! Paz + Amor. Termine las guerras. 99% ¿Cómo se debe a China B? South Florida Smash HLS opresión corporativa final de todas las especies. Somos todos clase obrera, Luz. ¡Fin a Iraq! Paz con un signo de paz al revés. Detener a la Fed! ¡Gente antes de ganancias! Wi R cambiando la tendencia hacia el amor. ¡Necesitamos los empleos en los Estados Unidos no en el extranjero! Repare lo que está roto, quiero mi futuro, ámense los unos a los otros, Occupy Protest, Miami, FL "
Autographs, Carved aluminum with factory painted finish. Subject: Autographs/Signatures. Location: Florida International University. (PS-SIGNFIU12)
Selection of Plates. Incised aluminum. 1. Secrets and Confessions (Chicago Loop Pedway) 2. Open process (MCA Chicago) 3. Dreams (Florida International University)
View More ➞
Exhibitions and Residencies
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University
Miami, FL
Curated by Klaudio Rodriguez
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University presents its first Artist in Residency program featuring Michael Genovese with P.S. (2008-2012). P.S. a process-focused project, that has taken place in Florida, Texas, California and Illinois, collects the spirit and attitude of Americans. In this iteration of the original project, students are invited to carve their thoughts, views and ideas on blank surfaces placed in social spaces throughout the university¹s campuses. These reflections and ruminations capture the essence of the individual, community, and university as a whole. This unedited information, which mirrors a range of perspectives during a time of change, are studied in content, form and function as a starting point for the creation of new work by Genovese.
With our diverse university community and in conjunction to FIU's World Aheads initiative, the project seeks to engage the university and outside community through this highly collaborative project. The artist will work with groups, acting as a mentor, facilitator, and collaborator. The overview of the project will include plates, quotes, and documentation from previous locations. It will pose questions about contemporary American issues that are rooted in art, history, and the social sciences. The lecture will also address the process of art making in today¹s information filled landscape, emphasizing on cognitive human experience and its merge with industry and technology. Other topics will include the artist¹s role in contemporary society, its post-war history and future.
View Project ➞
Installation view of P.S. at the Patrica and Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2012
Installation view of P.S. at the Patrica and Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2012
Installation view of P.S. at the Patrica and Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2012
Installation view of P.S. at the Patrica and Phillip Frost Art Museum, 2012
Institutionalized
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Chicago, IL
Pedway
Chicago Cultural Center
Chicago, IL
Secrets and confessions 2, (PS-Ped12) Incised aluminum with baked enamel finish, 2008
Chicagoans in Transit
We Came, We Saw, We Interacted, We Collaborated & Contemplated
Proximity Magazine, Imaginary Cities
by Erika Mikkalo
A wedding party strides through the pedway beneath the Cultural Center to my car, and as chauffeur, I’m kicking myself that I failed to decorate it with the shaving cream of humiliation, pink crepe, cans on strings, and then we’re held up waiting again, so I’m engaged in a raging internal debate on whether or not to walk ahead and feed the parking machine or wait for everyone to catch up, when a neon rectangle registers in my peripheral vision. The others arrive. Mike Genovese- Pedway project, the sign announces. I march on and admire the art. “So how did you get this gig?” I ask. The Artiste proceeds to tell me. Apparently the city has been finding projects like this since 2003. Previous participants have wielded chainsaws, displayed paintings and found object collage, and built wishing trees to to donate to hospitals. (I did see a wishing shrub on the periphery of a museum of small wooden wooden churches in Moscow. There were two bushes of hopes and dreams, actually one for males and one for females. The one for men was conveniently path side. The one for women was amp a steep incline littered with jagged boulders. If you tied a rag or ribbon to a branch, you were permitted to wish. I did not have any bows one at the time.) Genovese’s installation included a large word painting- Zora Neale Hurston’s “All my skin folk ain’t all my kin folk’ in black script on a field of mint green. I am green with envy. I commend him on the communitarian aspects of his work and consider incorporating the frame “Bakhtinian polyphony” next time I apply for a grant. I once saw an Italian group perform at the MCA, and one participant painted on the the side of a horse that they’d brought out on stage. “How can I get that work?” I thought “Standing on stage in a pretty dress painting cryptic things on the side of a horse?” Actually, I have five words of Lating, so for all I know, the performer was whitewashing “Whoa, Wilbur!” On the side of the stallion, but I have no doubt she had sound theoretical and semiotic reasons for doing so: this was on the stage at the MCA. Last semester, a student, “K,” wrote in her journal that artists are just “people who want to get out having real jobs.” Even if this is the case, perhaps they render a public service by demonstrating that such a thing can be done. In addition to several enamel panels and an Internet station, the space houses an elotes cart. I suggest the groom accept it as a wedding gift. The public is invited to participate in the manufacture of pieces by engraving on one of the enamel panels on display, red or black, all silver beneath. Perpetual optimist, I engrave “Who gets the privilege of disappointing me next?” In a heart in the lower left of the largest red one. “For Lovers” is emblazoned on the colder block above. Actually at this rate. I’ve been so consistently disappointed that I’m ll talk. I am fully cognizant of the fact that my appearance may be a profound let down to others. If K were were present, she’d doubtlessly accuse the artist of getting others to his work for him and then attempting to profit from it instead of sweating and being tormented in a dank and lonely garret like artists are supposed to, I recently discussed the Pedway Project with a coworker, Martin Reyes, when I noted everyone had doodled and graffitied all over the white table plastic cloth that had spruced up the break room for twenty-four hours before vandalism kicked in. Re-contextualize: perhaps I could mount it and display it as a collaborative process-oriented commentary on the proletarian aesthetic of this particular subgroup of the city population. The hot sauce stains represent the irrelevance of individual interests in the face of organizational structure, the perpetual struggle to maintain identity under the symbolic violence of any institutional hierarchy. I feel a grant application coming on. Don’t get me wrong: the ideas are good, the work is good, and Mike showed us a good time - the bride had two glasses of wine and whittled away at one of the panels, putting down her bouquet of fresh mint sprigs, daughter balanced on hip. I forgot to ask her what she carved, “Power to the People,” perhaps. And awls for all.
"We all we got"
MCA 1-6, Incised aluminum with baked enamel finish, 2008
Layers of neon pink and green paper painted with bold letters are plastered over the gallery wall like flyers that accumulate on urban buildings or discount signs at grocery stores. These attention-grabbing colors, created from unmixed sign paint, draw the viewer to concise yet open-ended, multilingual thoughts about society. Zora Neale Hurston's observation,"All my skin folk ain't all my kin folk,"and the artist's own mantra, "We all we got," are written in Korean, Urdu, German, French, Spanish, Polish, and Bosnian on these humble posters. In the engravings displayed nearby, the two quotes reappear alongside further social commentary and unknown names tangled within baroque patterning. Where the signs are bright, outgoing, spontaneous, and fragile, the intricate engravings on tar-colored sign substrate are dark, inward, laborious, and relatively permanent. While the signs evoke grassroots advertising, the engravings evoke dangerous and secret forms of expression, such as scratchings on trains and buses, in bathroom stalls, or on desks at the back of a classroom. Executed during his residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (January 15-February 24, 2008), these text-based works draw on familiar modes of communication encountered at stores or on the street in order to capture contemporary voices.
To better record language that is alive, Genovese created this set of signs and engravings in collaboration with visitors and staff at the MCA. Avoiding static dictionary definitions, he enlisted native speakers at the museum to translate the phrases he ultimately painted on neon posters. Likewise, the intricate engravings produced during this residency were built up from messages carved by museum goers. Because of his insistence on a human element in his work, Genovese's interaction with everyday life as art has a sincerity that is lacking in the innovative contributions of Marcel Duchamp and Pop Art to this terrain. While Duchamp appropriated ordinary objects, Genovese, creates his pieces with his own hands. While Pop artists tended to aestheticize the vernacular, Genovese's work is grounded more in a collaborative process than in an aesthetic. Genovese effectively resurrects Josef Beuys' conception of "social sculpture" whereby social interaction is a work of art and every person is an artist ”without the utopian promise Beuys championed. Though his works often involve painting, then, it is clear that Genovese's medium is not strictly paint, nor is it simply industrial sign materials; he also works with the abstract media of language and human interaction.- Antonia Pocock for “We all we got” Solo Exhibition at Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, iL (200
Northern Illinois University School of Art and Design
ArtLab Residency
Writ Deep: craft and the embedded word
Jack Olson Gallery, Northern Illinois University School of Art and Design
Curated by Shannon Stratton
Fortuna, Incised aluminum with baked enamel finish , 48 X 60 inches
Rather than looking to the history of language art, Writ Deep is an exploration of the relationship between craft and text as a unique affinity between forms. Where the use of text in art has historically been to push the boundaries of the field - including operating as an anti-art form or advocating for an anti-aesthetic - text and craft share a longer history where text is anything but anti-craft.
Craft that employs text lends language a physicality: a tangible , as opposed to metaphorical, body. Craft and text is an obliging re-unification of body and mind as the abstract is made manifest both materiality and methodologically. In Writ Deep the idea of the embedded text connects the work of Michael Dinges, Michael Genovese, Carol Jackson and Rebecca Ringquist whose processes of scrimshaw, engraving, weather tooling, and embroidery and appliqué (respectively) are rooted in craft traditions. Each of these artists is invested in these forms as their chosen medium, as opposed to utilized them strictly for a singular metaphor, and each employs text as a major mark in their work.
To embed something means to plant it firmly and deeply in surrounding mass. In the case of text and craft, the word is surrounded by material that supports, informs and contextualizes it in a way that the page alone cannot. In a craft/text relationship, the material substrate becomes a body for the text to inhabit, not just a supporting surface. Through methodologies like engraving, etching and embroidery, text impregnates the material, creating a resolute bond that literally alters or changes the substrate through a kind of scoring or scarring of the surface - actions that call to mind a body as it might be scratched and scarred through use or through decoration. Scars are telling reminders of a body’s history; in the case of text, materiality and craft, the connection between method of incision and the substrate itself becomes one that is partially dependent on the material’s narrative and partially dependent on the narrative inherent to the process.
The artists in Writ Deep all work with a styles so, in addition to their share use of text nd textual markings, their work could be described as drawing. Text functions as both the written word as well as sign, a subject for a drawing that resides between the second and third dimension. Drawing text tie these practices to graffiti, dairies/sketchbooks and marginal notations, subjective forms of writing and reflection that are linked to craft because of its subjective and Amateur associations. The melding of Amateur craft forms, common materials and writing in each of these practices’ underlying political essence results in work that ranges to avoid irony while still maintaining sharp wit.
…
As opposed to the defacement or appropriation of mass-produced goods, Michael Genovese’s engravings make the act of defiant marking precious by installing a pristine surface on which he invites anyone to leave their imprint. Providing the stylus and a substrate (aluminum with baked on enamel), participants are encourages to write and draw in Genovese’s plates- their markings via a series of notes tat are then re-inscribed onto polished tablets. Through his process, the public engravings act as live, organic drawings while the record historicizes them immediately - lending immediate weight to unedited, everyday reflections and conversations.
…
In all of these practices, the hand is a visible agent. Its potential for precision as much as for mistake remains palpable, as edits or alterations are necessarily visible. The nature of the embedded text is the impossibility of emendation on the part of the author or the inability of the substrate to ‘heal’ over the mark. For Genovese and Dinges, the act of engraving includes marks that might be obliterated through further engraving; for Ringquist and Jackson, the cutting and repositioning of texts and marks might be required, causing the document to shrink and heave as it is re-pieced.
This palpable crafting of document emphasizes a laboring over the message taxis increasingly lost, not only by post-industrial manufacturing practices, but by web 2.0 communication strategies that stress rapid fire commentary, character length, and - importantly - an unsettling ability to continually delete and revise. Writ Deep call attention to an investment or persistence in communication; a steadfast desire to leave a mark, a message that says more than “I was here,” but claims “I was here, and I meant it.’
Shannon Stratton is a writer and curator based in Chicago, Illinois where she founded and is current Executive and Creative Director of three walls, a non-for-profit visual arts residency and exhibition project space. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber Material Studies, Art History, Theory. And Criticism and Arts Administration.
New Work Miami 10
Miami Art Museum
Between Here and There; Process
Modern and Contemporary Selections from the Permanent Collection
Perez Art Museum Miami
"Like Ingrid Calame, whose drawing is seen nearby, Michael Genovese uses marks made by others as starting points for his work. He allows other people to mark his black enameled scribe plates sometimes by making them the focus of group activities or by leaving them in public spaces where people inscribe them with graffiti. He then transcribes- in two or three different languages- all the words on the scribing boards, engraving them into highly polished metal “tablets.” Though translation implies accessibility, Genovese purposely records the words in such minute letters that they are unreadable. His tablets thus become paradoxical Rosetta Stones, containing information in several languages yet accessible to no one.” These particular scribing boards were made by a group of students in MAM’s Brick by Brick after-school program." -Peter Boswell, Chief Curator, Miami Art Museum
Confection, O.H.W.O.W
Miami
Installation view of Secrets, General, Confessions at Confection, OHWOW, Miami, FL
