[Notice]
1. If you are looking to see documentation of my work I would like to direct you to the highlighted links. Alternatively I've compiled a bunch of documentation here:
2. The layout of the text on this site is borrowed from the 'Notes' (end notes) in the Reference Matter section of the Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics series edition of Being Singular Plural, by Jean-Luc Nancy, published by Stanford University Press, Stanford California. There are three notable points of difference: 1) While the typeset of this publication is in 10.9/13 Garamond, I'm still in the process of finding a way to match and fix this on a website. 2) The layout is in reverse order, starting at the latest or highest note number and ending with the first. 3) I have made a number of temporary omissions from the notes.
3. If you find this website annoying, and you have any constructive criticism or see something you think is an error, I would like very much if you would let me know.
85. Since October 2011 my primary postal address is Studio 1.18, Zayne Armstrong c/o Piet Zwart Institute, Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam, Netherlands
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83. Since 2005 my primary e-mail address has been zayne@zaynearmstrong.com, and is registered with GoDaddy, along with this web address.
82. Since 2007 I have been working collaboratively with Sarah Elliott under the name S/Z. For more information about S/Z visit our website: www.itemsandissues.org
81. As a commission for Generous Structures Casco Issues XII, edited by Binna Choi and Axel John Wieder, I composed a text provisionally titled A Reading of Pragmatism with a Bottlebrush Plant in the Room. This text is a series of notes on both the other contributions to the publication and a forthcoming presentation I am to give about William James' lectures on pragmatism.
80. My project Linda was collaboratively presented together with Olivia Dunbar at De Kunstinstitutie, Mauritsstraat 36, 3012 CJ Rotterdam on December 15, 2011.
I found a bunch of stuff in this flat file drawer, at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, labeled 'Linda', who I am pretty sure is a girl who graduated last year.
Olivia, who is on the course is running an exhibition platform in the first floor of the fine art building, called De Kunstinstituti, physically centring on this flat file. My show was the second show it hosted. The first had nothing to do with the flat file tho, not directly at least.
I found this drawer with another on the course named Jane, and we decided to take some of the things in the drawer, presumably to use in our work - and then I realised that I was actually not into any of the items individually per se and was more interested in this collection of items as a whole: wooden dowels, model making materials, thin sheets of bass wood, some plastic pieces, a section of Styrofoam, a few multiples of b/w photographic prints of caves, a record with a cave on the cover, a few text prints, pieces of tan lycra jersey, light pink paper, etc.
Jane let me have everything in the drawer for the exhibition - initially she had wanted to keep some of the items and upon preparing the invitation to the show I asked her about the wording of this notice in the text about Jane's ownership of some of the items, and she said she didn't mind not having them back, or something to this effect.
So I changed the name on the drawer to read 'Zayne'.
Earlier this week I photographed all these items, in my studio, against a grey tack-board, forming a kind of catalogue or index of the items.
Yesterday I asked Olivia to come have a look at the items to talk about the presentation of them as a potential exhibition in De Kunstinstituti, and after a concise conversation about my interests in this collection of items as a sort of biography of 'Linda', while the items are also charged with being discarded, or left behind, or thrown away even, we there and then wrote a text / invitation for the show and decided it should take place that evening. At 6 pm a room previously functioning as our programmes' computer lab, was emptied in order to change the use of the space (I think it will be studios). During this interstice I asked all the students who were around to help me carry the items from my studio to this empty room.
Lot's of people helped and once all those who had helped had put the items down that they were carrying I announced that they could take what they wanted.
And in a sort of flurry, people snatched things up, and most of the items were gone in less than 5 minutes.
I might do this again - somewhere else.
79. On 4th November, 2011 WORM, Boomgaardsstraat 71, Rotterdam screened the film Miejsce - the result of 'Believable Fictions and the Politics of Intensity,' a thematic project, designed by Derek Brunen for the Master Fine Art program at the Piet Zwart Institute which I worked on.
78. For Director's Cut, the inaugural exhibition at Rotterdam Plaza - Piet Zwart Institute, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam, opening 26th October, 2011, I showed two sketches: 1) a diagram of Elizabeth Grosz's concept of the three faces of post-historical humanity, and 2) a diagram of a 80+ story tall building in the shape of a person.
77. Since October 2011 I am studying in the Master Fine Art Program at Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam University, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
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73. A text I've written, titled A Rewriting of Decreation was published to coincide with Ian Law's exhibition Add a description, Galeria Plan B, Berlin, June 2011. This text employs an excerpt from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace, titled 'Decreation' as its structural basis. The main body of this text is accompanied by a series of footnotes developed together with Ian Law in relation to his work.
72. Programme Three: The Studio as Non-Place, at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia, curated by Lucy Moore, 27 March 2011 - presentation of my film Re-made Slow Motion (2009). With each public presentation of this film I ask the organiser to read, simultaneous to the screening, a 'presentation text' written for the specific screening. Here you will find a page where you can download a PDF of the 2nd edit of this text:
71. For the group exhibition Testing Groung / Time Scale at the 176 Zabludowicz Collection exhibition space in London in January 2011 S/Z produced a purpose-made iteration of our on-going project S/Z Builds Benches On Request, for which we invited curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to curate a snack and brought all of the benches out of the storage at 176 to be made available for visitors to sit on in the galleries. In light of Mr. Obrist's snack suggestion, S/Z is enlisting friends and acquaintances, traveling from Paris to London, to import petits fours from Carette, 4 place du Trocadero, Paris, to be made available at 176 Prince of Wales Road, London. This began on the day the exhibition opened, and will go on for an indefinite period. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you think you might be able to help: sz @ itemsandissues . org .
70. For the group exhibition Needed by Things at Furnished Space, London taking place between 25th and 27th of February, 2011 S/Z produced a purpose-made iteration of our on-going project S/Z Builds Benches On Request, for which we built a bench for the exhibition space, and made an announcement for forthcoming jam and interaction with archeologist Ian Hodder.
69. For Monaco Magazine, Issue 2, launched November 2010 S/Z proposed a series amendments to grievances taken from Thomas Jefferson's 1776 'Declaration of Independence.'
68. In October 2010 I started the BA Philosophy course at Birkbeck, University of London, London, and left the course at the end of the first term.
67. For the launch of Issue 2 of Monaco Magazine, at Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London on 28th November 2010 I presented my film Re-made Slow Motion (2009).
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64. Starting in February 2009 Ian Law and I have been working on a project together. Here you can find images of some the objects we are working with.
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56. For the launch of Monaco Magazine, Issue One, at SE8 Gallery, London in June 2010 - as a part of their exhibition Mulberry Tree Press, I presented a work titled Presentation for Joey Friedman's Rock Collection, which, due to the rocks from Joey's rock collection not arriving, consisted of my Pierre Cardin towel laid out on a table. My contribution to the magazine consists of 4 double-page spreads showing mock-up layouts for a presentation of Joey's rocks. Here the rocks are temporarily replaced by 'cream slice'-style pastries, and the notes which might be written by Joey and myself are temporarily replaced with the notes I made in the margins of the book 'The Story of Philosophy' by Will Durant, initially read while I was in high school. Documentation:
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54. For the exhibition No Soul For Sale in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, c/o Next Visit Berlin/Natalia Stachon, from 14th to 16th May 2010, S/Z produced a purpose-made iteration of our on-going project S/Z Builds Benches On Request, for which we built Next Visit a bench.
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47. For the group exhibition Die Fuge - La Cueva de Cristal, at the Mark Morgan Perez Garage in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 21-28 March, 2010 - organised by Hella Gerlach and Roman Schramm, I made a collaborative work titled The Restaurant at Griboyedov House for which I invited three artists whose work I was unfamiliar with, Sydney Hart, David Smith and Steven A. Weeks, to send an object directly to the space in Buenos Aires, to stand in for specific omitted sections of Edgar Allen Poe's detective story 'The Purloined Letter.'
46. As a contribution to the exhibition-publication Part 04, published by Gedanken zur Revolution, Leipzig, Germany, edited by Falk Messerschmidt and Prof. Dr. Marc Ries, I made a work for print titled Getting closer / Bringing together / Getting further / Coming closer / Growing apart / Growing distant / Growing into / Getting together. This work is a double-page spread, showing a pair or diagrams. These diagrams are composed using two images (one of a 1600's Bavarian four-poster bed from the German auction catalogue 'Pantheon', and the other an illustration from an atlas showing a particular kind of sink hole called a 'cenote'), two diagrams (borrowed from Michel de Certeau's essay Ethno-Graphy: Speech, or the Space of the Other: Jean de Léry), and a series of indirectly related quotes and short texts, written by a number of authors, including myself. Since the completion of this piece, I have employed each side of this spread as the basis for a biographical film: for the left-hand side the film is focused on the early American coke and steel industrialist and philanthopist Henry Clay Frick, and for the right-hand side 1500's French Calvinist ethnographer Jean de Léry is the subject.
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43. For the 3rd iteration of the annual exhibition I Love You Here Is What I Made held at The Wilderness Charter School, Ashland, Oregon on the 3rd of January 2010, organized by Christy Cook, I made an invitation to the visitors which you can see here.
42. An invitation, a score and plans to re-make 'Slow Motion' at Hermes und Der Pfau, Stuttgart, 5 December 2009-15 January 2010. During the installation period for this solo exhibition I planed for three kinds of events to happen simultaneously in the gallery space: 1) I made an open invitation to the two local art schools for students and staff to temporarily re-locate their practices to the gallery for the duration of the installation period (two artists and one art history lecture joined me in the space), 2) I programmed a number of film screenings in the space, showing English-language 'biopics' which take their name from the biographed protagonist (ie 'Evita,' 'Genghis Khan,' 'Cleopatra,' 'Milk,' 'Lenny' etc.), and 3) I re-made, shot by shot, as much of Jean-Luc Godard's 1980 film 'Slow Motion' as I could, which ended up being the first 40 minutes. Rather than re-enacting the events in Godards film, I focused on re-composing a shot's depth of field, lighting, camera movements and shot duration in the gallery space using whatever what to hand, and a Sony MiniDV HandyCam.
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36. After Hours, organized by Katie Guggenheim and Patrick Shier, within Play, The Wallis Gallery / Paradise Row / Prakke Contemporary, 50 Upper Brook Street, London W1, 9 October-3 November 2009.
35. I don't know how close I am to a mountain AND You must have something to do with this, Auto-Italia South East, London, Friday 7pm 16 October 2009 - a presentation by S/Z.
34. Menu, Savoy Cafe, London, 1 August 2009, curated by Katie Guggenheim.
33. Bold Tendencies III, Hanna Berry Gallery, London, July-September 2009, c/o Lucky PDF.
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29. No Soul For Sale, X-Initiative, New York, 24-28 June, 2009, c/o Next Visit Berlin - as S/Z.
28. Panda Malin-Head, Auto-Italia South East, London, 21 June-5 July, organized by Amanda Dennis and James Lewis - as S/Z.
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24. Twenty Two Oh One, 2201 North California Ave., Apt. 3, Chicago, Illinois, Sunday 31 May, 6-9pm, organized by Sarah Elliott and Julia Rich.
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22. Serial Pops, Green Bicycle Organization, Chicago, Illinois, 1 April 2009, curated by Sean O'Connell - as S/Z.
21. Institute, BFA Fine Art Degree Show, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, March 2009 - as S/Z.
20. 8 People Are Invited To Give Talks About Geography, Orientation Center, Chicago, Illinois, 24 and 31 March, 2009 - hosted by S/Z.
19. Documentation of a series of temporary sculptures.
18. S/Z Cordially Invites You To Wait in The Grand Hall, at Union Station, Chicago, Sunday 15 February 2009, between of 1 and 6pm.
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16. I Love You, Here Is What I Made - 2009, Ashland, Oregon, January, 2009.
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11. S/Z made a bench for FormContent, London.
10. About, Auto-Italia South East, 430 - 432 Old Kent Road, London
A group show curated by Zayne Armstrong, 8 - 30 November, 2008
9. 8 People Are Invited to Give a Talk on a Specific Significant Educational Experience, KEN, London, 14 and 21 October, 2008 - hosted by S/Z.
8. Zayne Armstrong & Olaf Habelmann, at Next Visit, Berlin, October.
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36. BA (Hons) Fine Art 4D, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London.
35. BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree Show, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, 13-21 June.
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29. An X About X, Revolving Door Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, 5 April as part of Open( )Interval event - as S/Z.
28. Epic, Auto-Italia South East, London, 27 March-6 April.
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16. I Love You, Here Is What I Made - 2008, held at Childsolution Play School, Ashland, Oregon, 4 January 2008.
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11. Summer Show, PASCA Gallery, Pont-Aven, France, group show.
10. Certificate in Fine Art, Painting & Sculpture, Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Pont-Aven, Brittany, France.
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6. Foundation degree and BFA studies in Architecture & Fine Art, Parsons School of Design, New York, New York, 2003-2005.
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13. Marion Addy Gallery, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon, September 2000.
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9. Painting & Art History studies, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon, 1999.
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2. I moved to Kiev in May, 1891. I studied and briefly practiced medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, I settled in Moscow in 1921. My sympathetic portrayal of White characters in my stories, and my satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play The Purple Island. My later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical character, with plays staged in the late 1930's and early 1940's. I also wrote a biography, highly 'original' in form, of my literary hero, Molière, but Re-Making 'Slow Motion', a fantasy about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered my masterpiece. Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after 1940.
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1. From 1711, I have been working as historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for my philosophical empiricism and skepticism. I am regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. I am often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist. Beginning with my A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), I strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who precede me, most notably Descartes, I concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the skeptical philosophical tradition and a strongempiricist, I argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively 'impressions' or direct sensations and fainter 'ideas,' which are copied from impressions. I developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by 'custom'; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the 'constant conjunction' of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical 'self,' I concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self. I advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. I was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles. I also examined the normative is-ought problem. I held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity, but famously challenged the argument from design in my Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Kant credited me with waking him up from his 'dogmatic slumbers' and I have proved extremely influential on subsequent philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, philosophy of science, earlyanalytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, and other movements and thinkers. The philosopher Jerry Fodor proclaimed that my Treatise 'the founding document of cognitive science.' Also famous as a prose stylist, I pioneered theessay as a literary genre and engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged my influence on his economics and political philosophy), James Boswell, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid.
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7. I moved, in 1511, to Arezzo in Tuscany. While still a boy I was introduced to Cardinal Silvio Passerini who put me to study in Florence with Michelangelo - who later became a close friend - then with Andrea del Sarto. I left Florence when my patron, Duke Alessandro, was assassinated, and wandered round Italy filling my notebooks with sketches; it was during this period that I conceived the idea for the work A Presentation for Joey Friedman's Rock Collection.
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