Joseph Nechvatal | School of Visual Arts, New York (original) (raw)
Books by Joseph Nechvatal
punctum books, 2022
During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, with the dread of viral death in the air, a... more During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, with the dread of viral death in the air, artist Joseph Nechvatal finished his second book of poetry, titled Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No!
The mythopoeic mélange of Styling Sagaciousness is intended as a complicated forensic fairy-tale, suitable for Nô theater, which keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration, a ghostly appearance-disappearance act that turns on the nub of our narcissism concerning our death – that strange, incurable, and deeply irrational affliction we all share. Putting identity aside, Nechvatal’s poetry tests the limits of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering our self as the sumptuous physicality of total negation. As such, Styling Sagaciousness delivers an airy irrational punch of needed nonsensical negation by tying together insouciant informality with a visceral camp irony: at turns hip and flamboyant and morally outrageous.
Pentiments Records, 2021
Joseph Nechvatal's The Viral Tempest art booklet published by Pentiments 2021
Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from w... more Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. We live and love in a culture where surveillance/intrusion is tied to our drive for self-revealing everything (an anti-private-life culture of curiosity, egotism, solitude, fear, voyeurism, exhibitionism and resentment — where the feeling is that nothing could or should remain unknown to us).
The sex farce poetic overindulgence of Destroyer of Naivetés takes inspiration from the books of Jean Genet, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, drawings by Hans Bellmer, film/performances of Bradley Eros, and the erotic scribblings of Giacomo Casanova, Georges Bataille, Petronius, Vladimir Nabokov, Marquis de Sade, Yukio Mishima, Ovid, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Kathy Acker and I Am a Beautiful Monster by Francis Picabia.
Joseph Nechvatal‘s digital paintings conjure up an enigmatic world of an almost dreadful depth that signals the dynamic critical intricacy of a contemporary practice engaged in the fragile wedding of image production and image resistance. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations are often made up of an oddly excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) and expressions of political ire that address the global influence of the viral form. Nechvatal brings a subversive reading to computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding surveillance and the erotic. His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. In 2011 he published Immersion Into Noise (Open Humanities Press/MPublishing) and in 2014 he helped to steer and edit punctum’s Minóy book + cassette + CD project.
My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated t... more My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness.
Papers by Joseph Nechvatal
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Book Review of 𝕽𝖆𝖒𝖒:𝖊𝖑𝖑:𝖟𝖊𝖊 : 𝕽𝖆𝖈𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝕿𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖗 at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
3am magazine, 2024
Book Review of Inside the Spiral The Passions of Robert Smithson
Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered, 2024
Patrick Frank on Joseph Nechvatal from his 2024 book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered... more Patrick Frank on Joseph Nechvatal from his 2024 book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art , 2024
Review of the Fernanda Eberstadt book Bite Your Friends
September , 1981
Meat (September 1981 Colab Potatoe Wolf video sampler ~ approx. 60 min) containing Nuke Me, Nuke ... more Meat (September 1981 Colab Potatoe Wolf video sampler ~ approx. 60 min) containing Nuke Me, Nuke My Dog (1981) ~ videotaped, video edited, and produced by Joseph Nechvatal ~ with performance by Ilona Granet in Joseph Nechvatal’s 18 N. Moore Street studio and with a reading by Michael Parker.
Containing in this order: "Welcome to the Eighties" produced by
Christof Kohlhofer, sets by Kohlhofer, Tom Otterness; robot skit by
Robin Winters "World War III Show" produced by Alan Moore,
machine gunning by Moore "Nuke Me, Nuke My Dog" produced by
Joseph Nechvatal, performance by Ilona Granet; reading by Michael
Parker "Super Vista" a super-8 film produced by Cara Perlman "Cave
Girls" produced by Cara Brownell and Julie Harrison with Kiki Smith
and Ellen Cooper "The Fun Show" produced by Mindy Stevenson
"Complaint Against Stupid Audiences" produced by Jim Sutcliffe
"Anybody's Show" produced by Ulli Rimkus with Christof Kohlhofer
and Liz X "Reptile Mind" produced by Alan Moore with Bobby G.,
Gregory Lehmann, Ellen Cooper, Kiki Smith and Jim Sutcliffe "No
Man's Land" produced by Bruce Tovsky with Jeanne Quinn with Nina
Connoly.
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Review of André Masson's There Is No Finished World show at Centre Pompidou-Metz France
Artforum, 2024
Artforum Critics’ Pick of the André Masson retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Review of Robert Ryman at Musée de l’Orangerie
Leonardo, Oct 1, 2001
This essay is an investigation into the immersive cultural consciousness that emerges from an imm... more This essay is an investigation into the immersive cultural consciousness that emerges from an immersive “optic” central to virtual reality. There seems to be a correlation between immersive ideals and desires for extrasensory, distributed disembodiment, meaning a loss of cognitive body-image involving the expansion of boundaries. Immersive art fulfills the prosthetic task of artificially facilitating such an unrestricted state. The desire to exist in an anti-mechanistic state of expansion is temporarily and symbolically realized in engaging immersive art. In virtual immersion, conventional optic models may be surpassed.
Orbis Tertius Press, Jun 30, 2024
'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even' is the 2024 stripped-down edition of '~~... more '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even' is the 2024 stripped-down edition of '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~ vibrator, even' that was published in late-2023 by Orbis Tertius Press as an A4-scaled art book in voluptuous colour. By stripping the book of its colour text and its forty-two colour images—and by reducing its swank size down to a petite pocket edition—Orbis Tertius Press has facilitated a more laidback dissemination into the enchanted global mist of broadminded readers.
Originally written in 1995 during Joseph Nechvatal's artist-in-residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even' is a semi-autobiographical farce that, in parts, captures the birth of the internet, New York City cultural life in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the sex life of an American painter in Paris in 1995. Incorporating a broad range of Western (pop) culture references—from art to music to literature—Nechvatal places us in the midst of an esoteric cacophony of myth and colour and sound and sensuality as the buzz of a nascent internet sounds the opening of doors and minds.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G: an anthology of artists' writings, theory, and criticism, Susan Bee & Mira Schor eds., Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 354-355, Dec 27, 2000
Nechvatal, J. 1988. "Reorganized Meditations on Mnemonic Threshold" In M/E/A/N/I/N/G Contemporary... more Nechvatal, J. 1988. "Reorganized Meditations on Mnemonic Threshold" In M/E/A/N/I/N/G Contemporary
Art Issues, No. 4, November, 1988
Republished in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: an anthology of artists' writings, theory, and criticism, Susan
Bee & Mira Schor eds., Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 354-355
Punctum Press, Nov 7, 2015
Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from w... more Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. We live and love in a culture where surveillance/intrusion is tied to our drive for self-revealing everything (an anti-private-life culture of curiosity, egotism, solitude, fear, voyeurism, exhibitionism and resentment — where the feeling is that nothing could or should remain unknown to us).
Orbis Tertius Press, Jun 30, 2023
Afterwords for novella ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even
SoundBlog, 2024
Review of Le mariage d’Orlando et Artaud, même (2024) audio art installation by Joseph Nechvatal ... more Review of Le mariage d’Orlando et Artaud, même (2024) audio art installation by Joseph Nechvatal at La Générale Paris 14
punctum books, 2022
During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, with the dread of viral death in the air, a... more During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, with the dread of viral death in the air, artist Joseph Nechvatal finished his second book of poetry, titled Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No!
The mythopoeic mélange of Styling Sagaciousness is intended as a complicated forensic fairy-tale, suitable for Nô theater, which keeps slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration, a ghostly appearance-disappearance act that turns on the nub of our narcissism concerning our death – that strange, incurable, and deeply irrational affliction we all share. Putting identity aside, Nechvatal’s poetry tests the limits of form and stretches the bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering our self as the sumptuous physicality of total negation. As such, Styling Sagaciousness delivers an airy irrational punch of needed nonsensical negation by tying together insouciant informality with a visceral camp irony: at turns hip and flamboyant and morally outrageous.
Pentiments Records, 2021
Joseph Nechvatal's The Viral Tempest art booklet published by Pentiments 2021
Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from w... more Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. We live and love in a culture where surveillance/intrusion is tied to our drive for self-revealing everything (an anti-private-life culture of curiosity, egotism, solitude, fear, voyeurism, exhibitionism and resentment — where the feeling is that nothing could or should remain unknown to us).
The sex farce poetic overindulgence of Destroyer of Naivetés takes inspiration from the books of Jean Genet, Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, drawings by Hans Bellmer, film/performances of Bradley Eros, and the erotic scribblings of Giacomo Casanova, Georges Bataille, Petronius, Vladimir Nabokov, Marquis de Sade, Yukio Mishima, Ovid, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Kathy Acker and I Am a Beautiful Monster by Francis Picabia.
Joseph Nechvatal‘s digital paintings conjure up an enigmatic world of an almost dreadful depth that signals the dynamic critical intricacy of a contemporary practice engaged in the fragile wedding of image production and image resistance. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and animations are often made up of an oddly excessive concoction of ambiguous sexual body parts (morphed from both sexes) and expressions of political ire that address the global influence of the viral form. Nechvatal brings a subversive reading to computational media by presenting an artistic consciousness that articulates contemporary concerns regarding surveillance and the erotic. His book of essays Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009. In 2011 he published Immersion Into Noise (Open Humanities Press/MPublishing) and in 2014 he helped to steer and edit punctum’s Minóy book + cassette + CD project.
My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated t... more My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness.
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Book Review of 𝕽𝖆𝖒𝖒:𝖊𝖑𝖑:𝖟𝖊𝖊 : 𝕽𝖆𝖈𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝕿𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖗 at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
3am magazine, 2024
Book Review of Inside the Spiral The Passions of Robert Smithson
Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered, 2024
Patrick Frank on Joseph Nechvatal from his 2024 book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered... more Patrick Frank on Joseph Nechvatal from his 2024 book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art , 2024
Review of the Fernanda Eberstadt book Bite Your Friends
September , 1981
Meat (September 1981 Colab Potatoe Wolf video sampler ~ approx. 60 min) containing Nuke Me, Nuke ... more Meat (September 1981 Colab Potatoe Wolf video sampler ~ approx. 60 min) containing Nuke Me, Nuke My Dog (1981) ~ videotaped, video edited, and produced by Joseph Nechvatal ~ with performance by Ilona Granet in Joseph Nechvatal’s 18 N. Moore Street studio and with a reading by Michael Parker.
Containing in this order: "Welcome to the Eighties" produced by
Christof Kohlhofer, sets by Kohlhofer, Tom Otterness; robot skit by
Robin Winters "World War III Show" produced by Alan Moore,
machine gunning by Moore "Nuke Me, Nuke My Dog" produced by
Joseph Nechvatal, performance by Ilona Granet; reading by Michael
Parker "Super Vista" a super-8 film produced by Cara Perlman "Cave
Girls" produced by Cara Brownell and Julie Harrison with Kiki Smith
and Ellen Cooper "The Fun Show" produced by Mindy Stevenson
"Complaint Against Stupid Audiences" produced by Jim Sutcliffe
"Anybody's Show" produced by Ulli Rimkus with Christof Kohlhofer
and Liz X "Reptile Mind" produced by Alan Moore with Bobby G.,
Gregory Lehmann, Ellen Cooper, Kiki Smith and Jim Sutcliffe "No
Man's Land" produced by Bruce Tovsky with Jeanne Quinn with Nina
Connoly.
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Review of André Masson's There Is No Finished World show at Centre Pompidou-Metz France
Artforum, 2024
Artforum Critics’ Pick of the André Masson retrospective at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Review of Robert Ryman at Musée de l’Orangerie
Leonardo, Oct 1, 2001
This essay is an investigation into the immersive cultural consciousness that emerges from an imm... more This essay is an investigation into the immersive cultural consciousness that emerges from an immersive “optic” central to virtual reality. There seems to be a correlation between immersive ideals and desires for extrasensory, distributed disembodiment, meaning a loss of cognitive body-image involving the expansion of boundaries. Immersive art fulfills the prosthetic task of artificially facilitating such an unrestricted state. The desire to exist in an anti-mechanistic state of expansion is temporarily and symbolically realized in engaging immersive art. In virtual immersion, conventional optic models may be surpassed.
Orbis Tertius Press, Jun 30, 2024
'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even' is the 2024 stripped-down edition of '~~... more '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even' is the 2024 stripped-down edition of '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~ vibrator, even' that was published in late-2023 by Orbis Tertius Press as an A4-scaled art book in voluptuous colour. By stripping the book of its colour text and its forty-two colour images—and by reducing its swank size down to a petite pocket edition—Orbis Tertius Press has facilitated a more laidback dissemination into the enchanted global mist of broadminded readers.
Originally written in 1995 during Joseph Nechvatal's artist-in-residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even' is a semi-autobiographical farce that, in parts, captures the birth of the internet, New York City cultural life in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the sex life of an American painter in Paris in 1995. Incorporating a broad range of Western (pop) culture references—from art to music to literature—Nechvatal places us in the midst of an esoteric cacophony of myth and colour and sound and sensuality as the buzz of a nascent internet sounds the opening of doors and minds.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G: an anthology of artists' writings, theory, and criticism, Susan Bee & Mira Schor eds., Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 354-355, Dec 27, 2000
Nechvatal, J. 1988. "Reorganized Meditations on Mnemonic Threshold" In M/E/A/N/I/N/G Contemporary... more Nechvatal, J. 1988. "Reorganized Meditations on Mnemonic Threshold" In M/E/A/N/I/N/G Contemporary
Art Issues, No. 4, November, 1988
Republished in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: an anthology of artists' writings, theory, and criticism, Susan
Bee & Mira Schor eds., Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 354-355
Punctum Press, Nov 7, 2015
Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from w... more Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. We live and love in a culture where surveillance/intrusion is tied to our drive for self-revealing everything (an anti-private-life culture of curiosity, egotism, solitude, fear, voyeurism, exhibitionism and resentment — where the feeling is that nothing could or should remain unknown to us).
Orbis Tertius Press, Jun 30, 2023
Afterwords for novella ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even
SoundBlog, 2024
Review of Le mariage d’Orlando et Artaud, même (2024) audio art installation by Joseph Nechvatal ... more Review of Le mariage d’Orlando et Artaud, même (2024) audio art installation by Joseph Nechvatal at La Générale Paris 14
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2024
Art Review of the Alberto Giacometti / Ali Cherri show Envisagement at Foundation Giacometti Paris
Whitehot Magazine, 2024
Art review of the Lacan, the Exhibition: When the artist precedes the psychoanalyst show at the C... more Art review of the Lacan, the Exhibition: When the artist precedes the psychoanalyst show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2023
Book Review: The Last Slogan by Nicolas Ballet and Jean-Pierre Turmel (on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge)
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2023
Art Review of Mark Rothko Retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation 8, avenue du Mahatma Gand... more Art Review of Mark Rothko Retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation
8, avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, Bois de Boulogne, 75116 Paris
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, 2023
Review of Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus
It’s Psychedelic Baby music magazine, 2023
Joseph Nechvatal Interview conducted by Klemen Breznikar (2023) at It’s Psychedelic Baby music ma... more Joseph Nechvatal Interview conducted by Klemen Breznikar (2023) at It’s Psychedelic Baby music magazine
Review of Eros Hugo: Between Modesty and Excess (Entre pudeur et excès) at the Maison de Victor H... more Review of Eros Hugo: Between Modesty and Excess (Entre pudeur et excès) at the Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris
by Dalila Honorato, Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, Marily Argyrokastriti, Iakovos Panagopoulos, Iouliani Theona, Giorgos Nikopoulos, Theodore Kabouridis, Roberta Buiani, Katerina Karoussos, Lila Moore, Nikos Dimitrios Mamalos, Antonia Plerou, Yorgos Drosos, Konstantinos Tiligadis, Francesco Kiais, Maria Athanasekou, Joseph Nechvatal, Marne Lucas, Kostoula Kaloudi, john thrasher, Despoina Poulou, and Karolina Żyniewicz
Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science 2017, 2018
The conferences "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" include theoretical presenta... more The conferences "Taboo-Transgression-Transcendence in Art & Science" include theoretical presentations and artists' talks focusing: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality - as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art.
Hyperallergic, 2020
An article by Joseph Nechvatal Hyperallergic Blogazine What can we learn from the exponential u... more An article by Joseph Nechvatal
Hyperallergic Blogazine
What can we learn from the exponential unleashing of viral codes, as they circulate and duplicate beneath the surface of your cultural and physical world?