Parasite 1997-1998: "It's always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be moving"

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PARASITE 1997-1998: “It’s always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be
moving”

by

Rebecca Matalon

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Rebecca Matalon

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank my thesis committee members for their support, insight, and patience
during the development of this project. It was an honor and pleasure to work with Roski
faculty members Connie Butler and John Tain, and I extend my deepest gratitude to you
both. This document and the larger project of finding my critical voice would not have
been possible without the sustained dedication and insight of my primary reader and
mentor Rhea Anastas. You have inspired in me a radical, political, and feminist stance
and have been a guiding voice for nearly ten years. I owe much to your belief in my
critical abilities. A sincere thanks also to Roski faculty Noura Wedell, who has
continuously gone above and beyond normal duty in her willingness to debate and
discuss this project.

Additional thanks are due to Jacqueline Bell and Katherine Bray, my colleagues and
allies in the M.A. program; Dwayne Moser, Graduate Program Coordinator, Roski
School of Fine Arts; Brent Phillips at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New
York University; curator and art historian Sébastien Pluot, who generously shared with
me primary documents in the early stages of this project; and finally, the artists who have
been willing to share their time and memories—Martin Beck, Andrea Fraser, and Ben
Kinmont.

I am grateful to the unyielding support of my family—Dan and Mom you have made this
possible in countless ways. And lastly, to Ben and his humor.

iii

DEDICATION

To Mom, Nanny, and Lew.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract v
List of Figures vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARASITE 7
Chapter 2: SUPPORTING: PARASITE IN PRIVATE 22
Chapter 3: DOCUMENTING: RECEIVING, REVISING HISTORY 36
Chapter 4: PRESENTING: RE-STAGING Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other
Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) 46
Conclusion 61
Bibliography 68

v

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the activities of the New-York-based artist-run organization
Parasite (1997-1998). Dedicated to proposing alternate economies for project work—a
mode of contemporary artistic practice that is often interdisciplinary, context-specific,
and involves labor in excess of material production—Parasite aimed to create support
structures outside of the museum and commercial gallery system. While motivated by
concerns particular to the 1990s, for Parasite, project work related primarily to a history
of minimalist, conceptualist, post-studio, and site specific critiques of the 1960s and
1970s. The revolving group of twenty-five artists included Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Mark
Dion, Andrea Fraser, Michael Clegg, Renée Green, Ben Kinmont, Christian Marclay,
Nils Norman, and Jason Simon, among many others, During a period of less than two
years, Parasite sustained a private practice of weekly meetings; organized programs in the
form of artist lectures, roundtables, screenings and exhibitions at two Lower Manhattan
art organizations; and built an archive of historical and contemporary materials related to
project work. The recent recovery of this archive, officially named the Parasite Document
Collection, has allowed for an in-depth reconsideration of the activities of the relatively
unknown self-organized collective.
Looking to Parasite’s three primary aims of “supporting, documenting, and
presenting” project work as self-defined categorizing frameworks, this essay addresses
the group’s initial private self-conception as an artists’ advocacy group (support), the
Parasite archive and the history traced therein (document), and the group’s re-staging of
Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily
Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) in 1998 (present). This study asks, what modes of
vi

production and reception did Parasite propose and how might these modes correspond
and/or diverge from dominant forms of critical interpretation and valuation of artistic
works?

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Installation view of Services from “Parasite at The Clocktower,” 1997 12

Figure 2. “Parasite Minutes, Meeting 7/9/97” 13

Figure 3. “PARASITE: Three-Month Pilot Project,” undated 14

Figure 4. “Parasite at The Clocktower: Scheduled Events,” undated 17

Figure 5. “Parasite at the Drawing Room: Calendar of Events,” undated 18

Figure 6. “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997 25-26

Figure 7. Ben Kinmont, “Agency Project; an informal discussion with Parasite,”
November 12, 1997, The Clocktower Gallery, (P.S. 1), New York, New York 28

Figure 8. Michael Clegg, Mark Dion, Martin Guttmann, Andrea Fraser, and Julia Scher,
“Project Artist Questionnaire,” January 2, 1994 29

Figure 9. Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler, Services: The Conditions and Relations of
Service Provision in Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic Practice. Meeting of the
working group, Kunstraum der Universität Luneberg, January 22-23, 1994 31

Figure 10. Installation view from “Parasite at The Clocktower Gallery,” 1998 37

Fig. 11. Art Workers’ Coalition, “13 Demands,” communiqué, 1969 39

Figure 12. Brochure, “The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street
presents Parasite,” 1998 49

Figure 13, Figure 14. Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not
Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art, 1966. Installation: The School of Visual Arts,
New York, 1966 50

Figure 15. Installation image from Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966-1973 at
The Yale University Gallery, New Haven, 1995 51

Figure 16. Installation image from Mel Bochner: Projets à l'Etude, 1966-1996 au Cabinet
des estampes du Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, 1997 51

Figure 17. Installation view of “Parasite Presents Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and
Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966),” the
Drawing Center at The Drawing Room, 1998 53

viii

Fig. 18. Ben Kinmont, “The Materialization of Life into alternative economies,” Printed
Matter, New York (April 12 – May 11, 1996) 57

Fig. 19. Ben Kinmont, cover of The Materialization of Life into alternative economies,
(New York: Antinomian Press, 1997) 58

Fig. 20. Kinmont, back page, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies,
(New York: Antinomian Press, 1997) 58

Fig. 21. Kinmont, pp. 20-21, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies,
(New York: Antinomian Press, 1997) 58

Introduction

The story of Parasite, an artist-run organization based in New York City in the
late 1990s, begins with a collective desire to think critically about artistic production.
From issues such as artists’ advocacy to archiving, it is a story of collective position-
taking that is critical, aesthetic, and activist in orientation. A self-organized and
collaborative working group of artists, Parasite emerged in July of 1997 with the
intention of providing an alternative framework for the support, production, and reception
of project work.
1
During a period of less than two years, Parasite sustained a private
practice of weekly meetings, organized programs in the form of artist lectures,
roundtables, screenings, and exhibitions at two Lower Manhattan art organizations, and
constructed an archive of historical and contemporary materials related to project work.
Moving through these multiple forms and functions was a questioning of artists’ rights,
autonomy, authorship, divisions of labor, and the construction of historical narratives.
Posed within the framework of an artist-generated and artist-supported site of reception,
one that brooked no argument for disinterested production, these questions signal Parasite
as a claim for the continued critical potential of artistic practices, and more precisely,
artists’ self-organizing.
Over a year and a half of activity, more than twenty artists participated in Parasite.
Identified as working within the general rubric of project art—a mode of artistic practice
that is often interdisciplinary, context-specific, and involves labor in excess of

1
“PARASITE MINUTES,” July 9, 1997; Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration;
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. And, “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997;
Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Libraries.
2

materialproduction—artists Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Michael Clegg, Andrea Fraser,
Renée Green, Ben Kinmont, Christian Marclay, Nils Norman, and Jason Simon formed a
core contingent. Many of these artists as well as additional Parasite members (including
Tom Burr, Christian Philipp Müller, Silvia Kolbowski, Mark Dion, and Fred Wilson) had
previously worked together, exhibited together, and lines of critical interpretation
frequently placed (and continue to place) their practices in parity.
Emerging in the mid 1980s (many out of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Independent Study Program), Fraser, Ault, Beck, Clegg, Green, Norman, Simon, Burr,
and Müller formed part of a larger community of artists associated with New York dealer
Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts, Co. (1986-2004).
2
Beyond the geographical
context of New York, these artists shared a dedication to critique-based practices.
Referred to variously as practitioners of “Kontext Kunst,” (context art), “neo-
conceptualism,” “site-specific art,” or as a third generation of institutional critique, these
artists worked across disciplines.
3
Subverting field-specific boundaries they integrated
activities associated with ethnography, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, design,
and art history. Projects manifest variously in the form of site-specific installations,
performances, video works, art criticism, curated exhibitions, scripts, and critical
analyses. These activities often involved extensive primary research conducted in relation

2
A list of Parasite artists that exhibited at American Fine Arts, Co. (AFA) includes but is not limited to
Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Dennis Balk, Christian Philipp Müller, Tom Burr, Michael Clegg (as Clegg &
Guttmann), Nils Norman, Renee Green, and Silvia Kolbowski. See “A.F.A. Chronology,” in Colin de
Land: American Fine Arts, ed. Dennis Balk, (Brooklyn: powerhouse Books, 2008), 250.
3
“Kontext Kunst” developed from an exhibition organized by Peter Weibel at the Neue Galerie im
Künstlerhaus in Graz, Austria in 1993. “Kontext Kunst. The Art of the 90s,” included work by Parasite
members Burr, Clegg (as Clegg & Guttmann), Mark Dion, Fraser, Müller, Julia Scher, Simon, and Lincoln
Tobier. The premise of the exhibition was an apparent focus on methods of ‘contextualization’ within
recent artistic practices. Weibel proposed the work of the above artists, as well as others, revealed the social
as well as ideological conditions of its making. See Peter Weibel, Kontext Kunst: Kunst der 90er Jahre,
(Cologne: DuMont, 1993).
3

to a specific site and/or history and materialized less as singular objects than as temporary
events.
While many of these artists received substantial institutional recognition both
prior to and in the years following Parasite, the group remains relatively unknown (unlike
the individual practices of such members as Fraser, Green, and Dion.) This is most
concretely a result of the temporary misplacement of Parasite’s archive, which includes,
in part, documents generated by the group such as internal meeting minutes, mission
statements, press releases, audio recordings of discussions, and ephemera related to their
public programs. But I want to suggest that it may also be a condition of the type of
activity Parasite engaged in and the very multiplicity of this activity as it collapses
categorical and disciplinary distinctions between artistic, curatorial, and critical practices.
If Parasite engaged in a form of collaborative practice it was not one concerned
with collective authorship as makers. Less a physical site than a critical context, Parasite
held no permanent residence. Public projects were developed according to individual
artists’ interests and often organized by one or two members. Participation and social
engagement may have been generated through both private and public activities but
Parasite was not set towards merging artist and audience. Rather, it was a context for
artists continuing to produce work independently, a space to reclaim authorial intention
and redirect lines of interpretation for its member’s practices and project work at large.
Public programs organized often concerned the work of Parasite’s own members.
Internally, participation was determined on a by-invitation-only basis, extended only to
artists, and meetings were closed. While it is hard to deny a sense of collective self-
historicization, failing to address the historical relevancy of such activities distorts the
4

value of reflexivity in the production of meaning and value for works of art.
4
Further, it
occludes a consideration of the functions and interests artworks serve as commodities and
the ways a critical and reflexive address of these conditions may destabilize dominant
meanings. This is to say that Parasite’s clear self-interest is not reducible to the
promotion of economic value for their individual practices. It is a historically specific
artistic and political position-taking. One that signals the responsibility of artists in
shaping and constructing meaning for their work and a responsibility towards the ways
both these ideas and activities circulate and are used.
Despite initial goals of establishing an artists advocacy group, Parasite was indeed
a context primarily serving its own members’ interests and not those of a more “general
public.” But in the varying activities undertaken the group may have also proposed
modes of production and reception of artistic works and their historical narratives worth
considering. (Particularly from a contemporary vantage point wherein the historicization
of the 90s is currently underway in the form of thematic curatorial exhibitions, critical
anthologies, and new scholarship on the decade.)
The title of this text “It’s always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to
be moving,” appears in the gutter of an otherwise blank page of a 1996 publication by
Kinmont.
5
Although drawn from an earlier project, it can be taken to characterize both
Parasite and the experience of conceptualizing Parasite: the shiftiness and multiplicity of
the group and the struggle (and potential failure) to pin Parasite down. Acknowledging as

4
Parasite members were aware of the potential criticism of presenting their own work and the appearance
of exclusivity. See “Parasite Minutes,” July 17, 1997; “Parasite Minutes,” July 22, 1997; “PARASITE
Minutes,” October 8, 1997; and “Parasite Minutes,” March 11, 1998 all in Parasite Archive; Box 1;
Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Libraries.
5
Kinmont, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies. (New York: Antinomian Press, 1997),
26.
5

much, this essay addresses Parasite’s private and public activities, their forms and
functions, with the hopes of identifying the modes of production, reception, and
distribution proposed.
In a statement that served to publicly define the group’s pursuits, Parasite is
constructed as a “context for supporting, documenting, and presenting project work.”
6

Using these three terms and activities as self-categorizing frameworks that correspond to
three contexts (or parts)—the space of private meetings, the archive, and public
programs—this text seeks to consider how Parasite’s modes may relate to or differ from
conventional forms of receiving, interpreting, and presenting artistic works and their
meanings. This study looks first to the preliminary conception of support proposed in
working drafts of mission statements and internal meetings. Moving next to a
consideration of the historical narrative outlined in the Document Collection—its form,
function, and contents. And finally addressing the group’s public re-presentation of Mel
Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant
To Be Viewed as Art (1966). How might these activities relate to or diverge from
traditional forms of interpretation and representation of artistic works? What forms of
historical analysis do they propose and how might they be understood in opposition to a
valuation and classification of artistic works and positions as passive objects of history?
How does Parasite’s production and reception of history, also apparent in the practices of
individual members (Fraser, Green, Ault, and Kinmont among others), differ from earlier
challenges to discrete disciplinarity also concerned with the integration of activities
previously considered the domain of critics, curators, arts administrators, and publishers,

6
“Parasite Mission Statement,” public information sheet distributed at the Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1 in
New York, undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Parasite Mission Statement, 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.
6

etc.? And, further, might this activity be seen in relation to or as a response to broader
economic, social, and political conditions of the 90s?

7

Chapter 1:
A Brief History of Parasite

As a result of Parasite’s limited critical reception, it is first necessary to provide a
brief history of their activities. The chronology outlined below is drawn from the existing
literature on the group, interviews with former members, and most substantially
Parasite’s archive.
7
It is partial and fragmentary.
8
While documentation of public
programs is minimal, the archive meticulously catalogs the group’s internal debates in the
form of transcribed meeting minutes. Memories have faded and conversations with
several former members often resulted in conflicting accounts. This account of Parasite
emerges through these varying perspectives, the archive, and in the limited critical
writing on the group.
***
In July of 1997 ten artists gathered at a Lower Manhattan apartment. The meeting
served as the initial formation of Parasite. The meeting came out of a collective
dissatisfaction with the art institutional (museological as well as critical) reception and
production of project based artistic work, a perceived lack of support for such practices,

7
Literature: Silvia Kolbowski, “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Parasite…,”
Documents, n. 14 (Winter 1999): 23-31. Diane Shamash, “The Strategic Archive,” Documents, n. 14
(Winter 1999): 16-22. Sébastien Pluot, “Parasite, in the meantime,” unpublished essay, translated from
French by author, 2011. Sébastien Pluot “You May Add or Subtract From This Work,” [text distributed in
coordination with the exhibition “Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher
D’Arcangelo (1959-1979),” (September 10 – October 16, 2011) at Artists Space (New York), 2011].
Multimedia: Andrea Fraser, Silvia Kolbowski, Sébastien Pluot and Jason Simon, “Parasite Discussion,”
(October 12, 2011), Artists Space Web site, 1:44:23. http://artistsspace.org/programs/parasite/ (accessed
June 21, 2013). Interviews: Martin Beck, interview by author, New York City, NY, November 21, 2012.
Andrea Fraser, interview by author, Los Angeles, CA, October 5, 2012. Ben Kinmont, interview by author,
Pasadena, CA, February 12, 2012. Archive: “The Parasite Archive: 1966-1999,” Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries (New York). A selection of materials comes from the personal
archives of Fraser and Beck, the latter given to the author by Pluot.
8
Archival information on public events is often limited to schedules produced in advance.
8

and a desire to renegotiate the terms and conditions in which project artists worked.
9

Since project work tended to be produced in relation to a specific site or situation, it did
not often circulate beyond a single location. While much project work inevitably took a
material form, these objects or installations belied the amount of labor involved and/or
were understood to be merely one component of a larger project. Two definitions of
project work authored by the group assist in identifying Parasite’s positioning of project
work:
Project work can be distinguished from other forms of artistic activity in
that it entails labor and/or production at a particular site or for a particular
situation. Much project work is interdisciplinary and context specific, and
does not necessarily result in a permanent physical product.
10

Project-based art or project art is a form of artistic activity that is
interdisciplinary and context sensitive. It takes a critical stance and does
not necessarily take on a permanent physical form. It can be distinguished
by a tendency to circulate in complex ways and is thus often not confined
to traditional exhibition spaces.
11

Both working definitions of project-based practice circulated publicly. Arguably, the
former (and earlier) version appears relatively neutral. In comparison, the second
emphasizes the type of project work engaged by Parasite and its members as implicitly
critical. Yet, both place project work as a form of negation in the sense that it involves a

9
“Parasite Minutes,” July 9, 1997, Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales
Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
10
“Parasite Mission Statement,” (undated), document given to author by curator and art historian Sébastien
Pluot from Martin Beck’s archive. In an as yet unpublished text on Parasite, Pluot dates this document to
September 1997. However, a similar articulation of project-work appears in an annotated draft of Parasite’s
mission statement dated July 22, 1997. The date on this document corresponds to editorial changes made
by Fraser and Norman on July 22. I believe this document to be the original outlining of Parasite, authored
by the two artists and presented at the group’s first meeting. See “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997; Parasite
Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Libraries.
11
“Parasite Mission Statement,” public information sheet distributed at the Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1 in
New York, undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Parasite Mission Statement, 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.

9

knowing refusal and critical complicating of institutionally defined systems of circulation
for artistic works. What is clear, however, is a construction of project work not along
ideological lines but as a methodological practice. It was an outlining of an artistic
activity and the practical implications, effects, and conditions of this type of labor. This
strategically permitted participation by artists addressing varying social, political,
economic and historical issues.
As conceived by its founding members (Tom Burr, Clegg, Dion, Fraser, Green,
Kinmont, Simon Leung, Norman, Simon, and Lincoln Tobier), Parasite was to serve as a
space (restricted to artists) to not only contend with these conditions but also to create a
self-organized, collaborative, and critical context to “support, document, and present”
project work outside of the museum and commercial gallery system.
12
To this aim, the
group met weekly. Early meetings held at members’ apartments focused on defining the
conceptual and structural parameters of Parasite—the group’s public as well as private
aims and activities, long-term goals, possible audiences, and relation to a legacy of
similar conceptualist and post-conceptualist artistic positions and practices. Questions
concerned whether the group should take on an advocacy role and provide financial,
technical, and legal advice to project artists; the benefits of having a permanent physical
space versus working from within existing organizations; or whether Parasite need have a

12
“Support,” “document,” and “present,” first appear together as central terms (and activities) in Fraser and
Norman’s annotated, “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997. As I propose, this document may in fact have been
written as early as the beginning of July and serve as Parasite’s original statement of intent. “PARASITE,”
July 22, 1997; Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special Collections, New
York University Libraries. For a questioning of Parasite in opposition to existing art institutional structures
such as galleries and museums see “Parasite Minutes,” July 14, 1997 and “Parasite Minutes,” July 22, 1997
both in Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.

10

public presence at all.
13
While many of these issues remained unresolved it was decided
that the organization’s first public manifestation take the form of a temporary occupation
of an existing local institution—as the group’s name suggests, a parasitical intervention
acknowledging the need to work from within.
14
This decision was reflected in an early
and internal working mission statement outlining Parasite’s aims and activities.
Parasite aims to establish a discursive context for project work and related
issues. As a secondary (or para) site for projects undertaken at other
locations, this discursive context will be developed initially by a variety of
activities undertaken from within ‘host’ organizations. Through these
activities Parasite aims to challenge existing modes of the presentation and
distribution of art and to develop new modes of individual and
organizational participation in artists’ projects.
15

The space of private meetings, public presentations, and the archive were to serve as
three differing yet interrelated corrective contexts in which to implement a critical self-
reflexivity, tied to both aesthetic and discursive legacies, as a means of contending with
then-current conditions of artistic production.
Over the summer of 1997 additional artists joined (Ault, Beck, Kolbowski,
Müller, and Christian Marclay) and debates regarding an institutional identity
continued.
16
These early internal meetings also included presentations by Parasite

13
Ibid.
14
“Parasite Pilot Program,” (undated), document given to author by curator and art historian Sébastien
Pluot from Martin Beck’s archive. (This document is also held within the Parasite Archive at the Fales.)
And, “Parasite Minutes,” July 22, 1997, Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration;
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
15
“Parasite Mission Statement,” (undated), document given to author by curator and art historian Sébastien
Pluot from Martin Beck’s archive. In an as yet unpublished text on Parasite, Pluot dates this document to
September 1997. Pluot, “Parasite in the meantime,” unpublished essay, translated from French by author,
2011.
16
In conversation with Ben Kinmont, the artist identified the following participants as “core” members:
Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Michael Clegg, Andrea Fraser, Ben Kinmont, Nils Norman and Jason Simon.
Reviewing meeting minutes it is clear that Renée Green and Christian Marclay also had a sustained
presence in the group. A “full list” of members active at some point between July 1997 and November
1998 is as follows: Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Dennis Balk, Judith Barry, Tom Burr, Michael Clegg, Mark
Dion, Andrea Fraser, Julia Fisher, Aki Fujiyoshi, Renée Green, Ben Kinmont, Silvia Kolbowski, Simon
Leung, Christian Marclay, John Menick, J. Morgan Puett, Nils Norman, Christian Philipp Müller, Julia
11

members. As many of the artists were producing work abroad, this allowed for members
to share past projects and projects in process not readily accessible to their peers. The
presentations promoted an exchange of ideas, experiences, and relations with institutions
not typically supported by a competitive, market-driven art world. Yet, by the fall internal
presentations all but ceased.
This was in part due to and coincided with Parasite’s first public presentation.
Starting on November 1 and extending through January 1998, the group took over several
rooms at the Clocktower Gallery (P.S. 1) in Lower Manhattan.
17
Here Parasite continued
to hold private weekly meetings and organized public events in the form of artist
presentations, screenings, roundtables, and an exhibition. The group also began to
assemble an archive of materials related to project work including but not limited to
artists’ projects identified as historical referents from the 1960s forward, individual
members’ previous projects and proposals, as well as transcriptions of Parasite meetings,
mission statements, presentation notes, and press releases. In addition to the Parasite
archive—a collection of primary documents officially named the Parasite Document
Collection—a Xerox machine was installed to facilitate free reproductions. A selection of
member-driven presentations featured recent projects by Kinmont, Fraser, Green, Dion
and Müller, and Burr. Thematic roundtables addressed historical and contemporary

Scher, Lincoln Tobier, Ron Wakkary, Fred Wilson, Dan Wiley, and Florian Zeyfang. Ben Kinmont,
interview with author, Pasadena, CA, February 12, 2012.
17
In mid February 1998, Parasite was offered an extended presence at the Clocktower in the form of an
office. While the exact duration of the group’s stay is unclear, it appears that they did indeed continue on
under the guise of the institution’s “Studio Program” through the summer of 1998. However, it does not
appear Parasite organized any additional public programs and their exact use of the space is uncertain.
Correspondence between members and meeting minutes held in the Parasite archive refer only to the initial
invitation and terms, and later, Clegg’s review of incoming residency applications—which was one of the
terms outlined. Letter from Michael Clegg to Parasite members, undated, Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting
Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
12

practices of archiving (organized and moderated by Ault and Beck) as well as
international and mega exhibitions (organized by Green).
18

Fig. 1: Installation view of Services from “Parasite at The Clocktower,” (November 1, 1997 – January 1998, the
Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1).

18
Outlines of Ault and Beck’s program, “Archives: history, tools, practice,” (Dec. 13, 1997) list varying
participants including Christian Höller, Beck, Brian Wallis, Barbara Moore, John Lindell, Valerie Smith,
Fraser, Clegg, and Wilson. While a calendar of events lists the event as a two-part discussion it is unclear if
a second roundtable occurred. “Archives: history, tools, practice—Part 1. Roundtable discussion,”
(November 21, 1997), document given to author by Andrea Fraser. “Archives: history, tools, practice
(undated), document given to author by Sébastien Pluot from Martin Beck’s archive. An outline of Green’s
“International Group Exhibitions, Part 2: Venice Biennale, Sculpture Project Münster, Documenta,”
(January 7, 1998) lists as speakers Müller and Diane Shamash with respondents Barry, Burr, and Fraser.
There does not appear to be an outline of a prior event though the calendar lists “In a Glocal Time: A
Discussion Series on International and Mega Exhibitions.” “International Group Exhibitions, Part 2,”
document given to author by Andrea Fraser. “Parasite at The Clocktower: Scheduled Events,” undated;
Parasite Archive; Box 4; Parasite at the Clocktower; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York
University Libraries.
13

Fig. 2: “Parasite Minutes, Meeting 7/9/97,” Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales
Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
14

Fig. 3: “PARASITE: Three-Month Pilot Project,” undated; Parasite Archive, Box 1; Meeting Minutes and
Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

15

Starting in January, documents originally collected in association with Fraser and
Helmut Draxler’s 1994 Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in
Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic Practice (1994-95), were displayed along the
gallery walls and soon after included within the Document Collection, representing the
bulk of historical materials.
19
The exhibition concluded with a discussion and reflection
on Services between Fraser, Judith Barry, Clegg, Green, and Wilson—all of who
participated in the prior project.
20

During this period, Parasite members became all too aware of the subsumption of
the group’s private identity to its public function. Within numerous weekly meetings the
group addressed the desire to re-instate a discussion group or shift towards a reading
group. Yet meetings continued to focus almost exclusively on the concerns of
organizing—running the Clocktower space, reviewing exhibition invitations, developing
the Parasite archive, and preparing for their second public project.
On February 2, 1998 “Parasite at The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room,” opened.
Public events again included artist lectures by Parasite members Ault and Beck, as well
as guests Peter Fend, and Ursula Biemann and Martine Anderfuhren, and a presentation
on the artists’ collective REPOhistory (1989-2000). Parasite’s expanding archive was
again installed alongside a Xerox machine.
21
But the central event was the installation of
Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily

19
“Parasite at The Clocktower: Scheduled Events,” (November 1997) document given to author by
Sebastian Pluot from Martin Beck’s archive. [This document is also contained within the Parasite Archive
at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.]
20
Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic
Practice was “a ‘working-group’ exhibition realized” first at the Kunstraum der Universität Luneberg in
1994. Also realized at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, 1994; Kunstverein München, 1994; Depot, Vienna 1994;
Sous-sol, Ecole supérieure d’art visuel, Geneva 1994; Provinciaal Museum, Hasselt 1995; Parasite at the
Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1, New York 1997 and Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, 2001.
21
“Parasite at the Drawing Room: Calendar of Events,” undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Folder 92;
Parasite at The Drawing Center; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
16

Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) from March 7 - 21.
22
Originally exhibited at the
School of Visual Arts, Parasite’s re-staging marked the first time since its original
presentation some thirty-two years prior that Bochner’s project was exhibited in New
York. While the
work had recently been included in two retrospective exhibitions (in 1995 and 1997) and
reproduced as a book, “Parasite Present’s Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings…” was the
first re-installation of the work to correspond in form to the SVA display—presented in
an otherwise empty gallery. In addition to the re-staging, Parasite organized a private
conversation with the artist (held in advance of the exhibition) as well as a public
discussion.
23

Parasite’s term at the Drawing Room served as their final public program. While
many additional projects and exhibitions were proposed within the space of private
meetings none were realized.
24
A proposal for a roundtable concerning scholar Miwon

22
“Parasite at the Drawing Center’s Drawing Room: Press Release” (February 1998) document given to
author by Nova Benway, Curatorial Assistant, The Drawing Room. An original draft generated by Parasite
exists in the Parasite Archive at the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
The official release incorrectly refers to the presentation of Bochner’s Working Drawings as the “first time
this installation has been presented publicly since 1966.”
23
The schedule of events lists a public artist talk and this program is also referenced in a recording of the
conversation between Bochner and several Parasite members. However, there is no additional mention of a
public talk and it is unclear whether the event occurred.
24
A selection of proposed but unrealized programs include a panel on African-American artists (Rick
Lowe, Carl Pope, Danny Tisdale, Lonny Graham, and Michael Bramwell) engaged in project work and a
perceived shared “desire to communicate with and create works for (mostly black) communities by Wilson;
an intervention into the Museum of Modern Art’s archive by Fraser; and a screening of Gregg Bordowitz’s
“The Suicide,” (1996) proposed by Nils Norman. Email from Fred Wilson, “5 artists in a million man
march,” February 6, 1998, Parasite Archive; Box 4; Correspondence 2 (January – February 1998); Fales
Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries. “MOMA Proposal,” undated, document
given to author by Andrea Fraser; and “Parasite Minutes,” December 3, 1997, Parasite Archive; Box 1;
Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Libraries.
17

Kwon’s conception of site-specificity led only to numerous internal discussions on how
to organize such an event and debates as to who to invite.
25

Fig. 4: “Parasite at The Clocktower: Scheduled Events,” undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Folder 91; Parasite at the
Clocktower; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

25
The idea to organize an event concerning “site specificity” was articulated as early as October 23, 1997
during Parasite’s weekly meeting. “Parasite Minutes,” October 23, 1997, Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting
Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. This idea was
formalized into a proposal for a roundtable discussion on “site specificity related to OCTOBER Issue w/
Miwon Kwon and others,” by Judith Barry on January 14, 1998. “To: Parasite, From: Judith Barry,”
January 14, 1998, Parasite Archive; Box 4; Correspondence 2 (January – February 1998); Fales Library and
Special Collections, New York University Libraries. Although absent from the weekly meeting, an outline
authored by Barry was distributed and discussed during the July 14 meeting. “Parasite Minutes,” January
14, 1998, Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and Administration; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries. While there was a general consensus to pursue the program,
resulting in continued conversations throughout the spring, no such event was ever realized. An audio file,
titled “Parasite Meeting on Site-Specificity, etc.” dated June 3, 1998, records the artists in attendance
(Beck, Tobier, Fraser, Simon, Ault, among others) debating the practical concerns of organizing such a
discussion as well as the group’s failure to put ideas to action. In conversation the artists proposed to shift
focus, away from “site-specificity,” as a central concept, to a broader series of discussions on terminology,
why it matters, and Parasite’s relation to specific terms such as “site,” “project art,” “pedagogy,” and
“critique.” “Parasite Meeting on Site-Specificity,” June 3, 1998; Parasite Archive; MS 333.0017; Box 6;
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
18

Fig. 5: “Parasite at the Drawing Room: Calendar of Events,” undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Folder 92; Parasite at
The Drawing Center; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

19

Following the closing of the exhibition on April 4, the group continued to meet on
a weekly basis, returning to a consideration of the group’s function and identity and
beginning work on a Parasite website. In July of 1998 the group held a retreat in Dover
Plains, New York. Individual members led discussion on topics such as urbanism,
cultural policy, globalization, and the digital.
26
After the retreat the decision was made to
begin work on a Parasite publication to include primary documents (meetings minutes,
mission statement, drafts of presentations), a chronology of the group’s activities, artists’
writing, as well as critical texts on concerns relevant to project work. Yet, by November
the group unofficially dissolved.
Parasite’s archive was later presented at the Swiss Institute, New York in 2000
and in 2001 at Shedhalle, Zurich. After this presentation, the archive went missing for
around a decade, until roughly December 2011.
27

***
Although the narrative of Parasite presented above, as a chronology in time,
suggests decisive structural and ideological shifts in the group’s practice and self-
conception, in actuality Parasite was a series of turns and returns. If issues of advocacy
defined Parasite in formation and were later abandoned as a central goal, they re-emerged
at various moments throughout the group’s period of activity. As a way of writing
history, chronological accounts tend to propose definitive and precise trajectories. They

26
Various meetings were dedicated to planning the Parasite retreat and proposing structural forms to take.
Yet there does not appear to exist a document listing the exact program of events. The most explicit
elaboration on potential presentations is articulated in an audio recording of a June 3, 1998 conversation.
“Parasite Meeting on Site-Specificity,” June 3, 1998; Parasite Archive; MS 333.0017; Box 6; Fales Library
and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
27
Parasite Document Collection included in “Independent Groups, Artist-Run Initiatives and Individual
Practice: The experience of Attitudes (Geneva, Switzerland) and Parasite (New York) as part of Nomads &
Residents, 2000 at The Swiss Institute; and in “Never Look Back” at the Shedhalle Zurich in Switzerland
(June 1 – July 22, 2001).
20

suggest a forward motion, an additive process through which events and ideas may be
read in sequence to reveal a concrete progression. Casting Parasite in this light, the very
fragmentation, multiplicity, and simultaneity of their concerns and activities fade away.
28

The practice of reflexivity integral to the group’s activities and debates is similarly
obscured.
There are distinctions to be made between the nature of the group’s private and
public activities and the issues addressed therein. The majority of events organized at the
Clocktower focused on recent practices (and projects) and social, cultural, and economic
conditions specific to the 90s: the expansion of the global art market and the effects of the
digital revolution and “new storage technolog[ies]” on the production of history, among
others.
29
At the Drawing Room, projects such as the Bochner re-staging and Ault’s
presentation of Power Up (April 2, 1998), concerning the (equally activist and aesthetic)
work of Sister Corita Kent and Donald Moffett, addressed issues of concern for
contemporary critical practice through a more historical lens.
30
Yet, the sequence of these
events does not so much constitute an advancement as does it demonstrate the multitude
and interrelation of questions posed by Parasite. Questions posed by the group privately
as well as publicly and at various points throughout their activity. While what follows
does indeed move chronologically through time, chronology is less a concern than a

28
“In multiplicity what counts are not the terms or the elements, but what there is ‘between’, the between, a
set of relations which are not separable from each other.” Gilles Deleuze, “A Conversation: What is it?
What is it For?” in Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), viii.
29
See “International Group Exhibitions, Part 2: Venice Biennale, Sculpture Project Münster, Documenta,”
January 7, 1998, outline of program organized by Green at the Clocktower, document given to author by
Andrea Fraser. Martin Beck, “History and Context,” (roundtable presentation for “Archives: History,
Tools, Practice,” the Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1, December 13, 1997). Parasite Archive; Box 1; Beck,
Martin (1997); Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
30
“Parasite at the Drawing Room: Calendar of Events,” undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Folder 92;
Parasite at The Drawing Center; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
21

condition—of contextualization, of Parasite’s peripheral status, and, most notably, of
Parasite’s own rhetorical ordering of “supporting,” “documenting,” and “presenting.”

22

Chapter 2:
Supporting: Parasite in Private

Parasite is an artist-run organization committed to supporting, documenting, and
presenting project-based artwork. Parasite aims to establish a discursive context for
project work and related issues. Through these activities Parasite aims to challenge
existing modes of the presentation and distribution of art and develop new modes of
individual and organizational participation in artists’ projects.
31

The excerpt above conceptualizes Parasite as self-organized, collaborative,
critical, and aesthetic in orientation—less a physical site than a context. Generated from
weekly private discussions over the summer and fall of 1997, the description of Parasite
was collectively authored and served as Parasite’s public definition. It claims for Parasite
a discursive function, marking discourse as the form and object of production, one that is
reflective and generative, material and immaterial. Here discourse is marked as a means
of corrective speech—a contestation of existing modes and a proposal for new forms of
producing and receiving artistic works. But, beyond meanings produced by the content of
these statements, it is helpful also to consider their form. They signal an investment in
articulating an organizational identity through rhetoric, a desire to concretize proposed
action through language.
Yet, the value of these excerpts in considering Parasite extends beyond the terms
as stated. One of a series of drafts, what is omitted here and the adaptations between this
text and prior articulations are of equal import. For instance, this statement makes no
explicit reference to Parasite’s internal activities nor does it differentiate between the
more public and private functions of the group. While support is identified as one of three

31
“Parasite Mission Statement,” public information sheet distributed at the Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1 in
New York, undated; Parasite Archive; Box 4; Parasite Mission Statement, 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.

23

primary aims, its forms and functions are less definitive. It is only through early working
mission statements and meeting minutes that the parameters of Parasite’s private practice
emerge. These documents and the issues they emphasize, many jettisoned not only in the
official statement but also in practice, provide a more substantial conception of the group
in formation. One that, as I will show, is explicit in its self-positioning in relation to a
larger legacy of self-organized, collaborative, and activist-oriented practices, while also
implicitly related to broader economic, social, and political conditions of the 90s.
If Parasite’s official mission statement obscures the exact nature of “support” to
be engaged, an earlier drafting is more explicit. In a July 22 document, annotated by
Fraser and Norman—all three of Parasite’s primary activities (support, document,
present) are given greater clarity. Presenting is elaborated as “presenting project
proposals, projects in process as well as documentation of projects completed at other
sites.” Collecting: “collecting and providing access to contemporary and historical
documentation relating to project work.” And supporting: “developing support structures
for project artists.”
32
These three aims are further elaborated in individual paragraphs. In
“Developing Support Structures,” Parasite proposes to serve its members by providing
“information on public art and other competitions, grants and funding sources; technical
and legal advice; assistance in project administration; and the distribution and sale of
project related publications and other documentation.”
33
Placing advocacy as a primary
aim to be realized through collective action, this original statement constructs Parasite as
a context to not only consider but also put into practice alternative economies for the
distribution of project work. A context to counteract self-marginalization by providing a

32
“PARASITE,” July 22, 1997; Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.
33
Ibid.
24

non-compromising means to sell work as well as a space to address artists’ rights and
forms of agency.
While the July 22 draft emphasizes advocacy in the form of administration,
education, and distribution, early meeting minutes suggest the majority of Parasite
members were less interested in this form of support. Rather, there appears a seeming
consensus that Parasite serve as a support by simply providing a space for participants to
share projects, an “opportunity to see each other’s work.”
34
It was in this vein, as an
artist-generated, self-supporting network, that Parasite’s private activities were oriented
in the early months. Yet, it is worth considering these dual ideas for support as, together,
they cast Parasite as a context to support its member’s individual practices. Here
collaboration is not conceived in terms of collective authorship but as a strategic, if
historically unsupported, means to create a wedge within a field oriented towards and
determined by market interests.
It bears mention that the interest in advocacy and professional development as a
form of practice in the 90s precedes Parasite. In effect, the artists’ group bookends a
larger period in which multiple Parasite members sought to construct alternate working
models in response to both a growing interest in project work and the dominant lines of
interpretation for this kind of activity.

34
Dion, “PARASITE MINUTES,” July 9, 1997; Parasite Archive; Box 1; Meeting Minutes and
Administration; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
25

Fig. 6a: “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997; Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.

26

Fig. 6b: “PARASITE,” July 22, 1997; Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; July 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.
27

While institutional support for project work was minimal within the U.S., it was
in demand abroad.
35
Artists were rarely financially compensated for the amount of time
and labor invested and forced to travel in perpetuity from one site or situation to another
in order to make a living. These conditions, among others, lent an urgency to questions of
autonomy, agency, and self-marginalization as many artists invested in a project-based
mode of practice sought to renegotiate the terms of participation.
After leaving his galleries in 1995, Kinmont began to produce his own contracts
for ownership and exhibition of his increasingly ephemeral projects and resulting
archives. Research into other artists’ contracts led to Promised Relations; or, a few
thoughts on artists’ contracts (1996-97) an exhibition including Marcel Broodthaers,
Edward Kienholz, Yves Klein, as well as Seth Siegelaub and Bob Projansky, among
others. For Kinmont, these artists were “using the contract as an artwork or as a means to
clarify an element in the distribution of their work.”
36
And later, in the months prior to
Parasite’s founding, Kinmont received funding from Creative Time (New York) to
investigate the possible development of an agency to represent project artists.
37

35
Programming at sites such as the Shedhalle in Zurich, the Kunstraum der Universität Luneberg, the EA-
Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Neue Galerie in Graz, among many
others, as well as independently organized group exhibitions including “Project Unité” (Firminy, 1993) and
“Sonsbeek 93” (Arnhem, 1993) focused on project based work.
36
Kinmont, Promised Relations; or, a few thoughts on artists’ contracts, 1996-7. AC Projectroom. Project
description from Prospectus 1988-2010 forty-two works by Ben Kinmont. (Sebastopol: Antinomian Press,
2011), 51. Also available online: http://www.benkinmont.com/projects/promised.htm (accessed May 24,
2013).
37
“As a companion to the Antinomian Press I was interested in trying to write a business plan to start an
agency to represent project artists. A year or two later Anne Pasternak of Creative Time agreed to provide
some funding for me to pursue this idea and see if it would be viable. Unfortunately, the only financial
structure which I could see as successful was not one in which I would ever want to participate so the
project ended without issue. Through it, though, I began to contemplate the independence of project artists,
their marginality (both forced and sought), and the necessity for freedom within an art practice. I was also
28

Fig. 7: Ben Kinmont, “Agency Project; an informal discussion with Parasite,” November 12, 1997, The Clocktower
Gallery, (P.S. 1), New York, New York. Parasite Archive; Box 5; December 1997; Fales Library and Special
Collections, New York University Libraries.

struck with Anne’s disappointment in my decision.” Ibid., 53 and online at
http://www.benkinmont.com/projects/agency.htm, (accessed May 24, 2011).
29

v

Fig. 8: Michael Clegg, Mark Dion, Martin Guttmann, Andrea Fraser, and Julia Scher, “Project Artist Questionnaire,”
January 2, 1994, Parasite Archive; Box 4; Project Artist Questionna

30

Three years prior to Promised Relations, Clegg, Dion, Fraser, Martin Guttmann
and Julia Scher developed a questionnaire relating to issues of concern for project-based
artists. Mailed in January 1994 to over forty artists the five believed to engage in project
work, the intention was to use information gathered to eventually develop a general
contract.
38
While only one recipient replied, the document reflects an attempt to generate
standards of practice between artists and institutions in response to individual and
collective needs and desires.
39

At the same time, Fraser and art historian Helmut Draxler began work on a
preliminary outline for “an exhibition and topic of discussion”
40
relating to the visible
emphasis on project-based work within recent practices (both artistic and curatorial).
Calling for the “need to collectively establish guidelines for project work,”
41
the proposal
developed into a “working-group discussion” between curators and artists and an
exhibition documenting these conversations as well as materials presented therein, held
first at the Kunstraum der Universität Luneberg in 1994. Fraser and Draxler hoped the
project might develop into a series of bi-annual meetings. While Services failed to
formalize into a continued context, the aims as well as the organizational structure of the
program served in many respects as a model for Parasite. If the “working-group” was
imagined as an alternative space of exchange and advocacy, it was also conceived as a

38
Clegg, Dion, Guttmann, Fraser, and Scher, “Project Artists Questionnaire,” January 2, 1994; Parasite
Archive; Box 4; Project Artist Questionnaires; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Libraries.
39
On October 12, 2011, Artists Space (New York) hosted a discussion on Parasite featuring Fraser,
Kolbowski, and Simon and moderated by Sébastien Pluot. During this conversation Fraser noted that only
Dan Graham had replied to the 1994 questionnaire. Andrea Fraser, Silvia Kolbowski, Sébastien Pluot and
Jason Simon, “Parasite Discussion,” (October 12, 2011), Artists Space Web site, 1:44:23.
http://artistsspace.org/programs/parasite/ (accessed June 21, 2013).
40
Draxler and Fraser, “Services: A proposal for an exhibition and a topic of discussion,” in Games Fights
Collaborations: The Game of Boundary and Transgression, Art and Cultural Studies in the 90ies, eds.
Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stroller, and Ulf Wuggenig, (Germany: Kunstraum der Universität
Luneberg, 1996), 196.
41
Ibid.
31

space for “producers to address each other as producers”
42
: a context to share practices
and projects while thinking critically about both the conditions of production and the
broader social and political effects of artistic work.
43

Fig. 9: Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler, Services: The Conditions and Relations of Service Provision in
Contemporary Project-Oriented Artistic Practice. Meeting of the working group, Kunstraum der Universität
Luneberg, January 22-23, 1994.

In an interview published in 2003, Fraser marks Services as one of the first in a
series of projects in search of “an alternative to the art world structures that marginalized

42
Andrea Fraser, “Services: A working-group exhibition,” in Games Fights Collaborations: The Game of
Boundary and Transgression, Art and Cultural Studies in the 90ies, 213.
43
Of equal relevance are Fraser’s Preliminary Prospectuses: For Individuals, For Corporations, For
Cultural Constituency Organizations, For General Audience Institutions (1993). These documents were
both practical and performative, functioning as contracts explicitly outlining services to be rendered by
Fraser. See Yilmaz Dziewior, ed. Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003, exh. cat, (Cologne: DunMont
Literature und Kunst Verlag, 2003), 154-160.

32

post-studio work.” Parasite, the artist asserts, was “the last gasp of that effort.”
44
In a
recent conversation, Fraser echoed her earlier remarks, positioning Parasite as “the
culmination of a series of events, conversations, and initiatives” centered around the
attempt to collectively “deal with some of the practical issues” of project based work and
“move away from the market and the kind of commodity life of the artwork.”
45

Considering Parasite in relation to these earlier individual and collaborative
projects, the forms and functions of support gain clarity. They emerge in opposition to
structural, social, and economic relations imposed by the field of cultural production, a
field, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu suggests, that is governed by a “collective
repression” and disavowal of economic interests:
46
One that is also defined as a “site of
innumerable struggles” between producers, competitive struggles for the authority and
power to legitimize works.
47
In this sense, the demand for standards of practice, the
collective working-through of both ideological and economic terms of production for
project work, and the proposal for a self-supporting community of artists is also a
provocation. It is a belief in the effective and affective potential of critique and the
transformative possibilities of collective action.
But it is also a form of artistic activity that, in the case of Parasite and the
individual projects outlined, is also a return to artistic positions and practices of self-
organizing and activism from the late 1960s and 1970s equally invested in revealing and

44
Yilmaz Dziewior and Fraser, “Interview with Andrea Fraser,” in Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003.
Ed. Dziewior. Catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition “Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003,”
at the Kunstverein in Hamburg (September 13 – November 9, 2003) and the Institute of Visual Culture,
Cambridge (November 23 – December 28, 2003), (Cologne: DuMont Literature und Kunst Verlag, 2003),
98.
45
Andrea Fraser, interview with the author, October 5, 2012.
46
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods” in The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, (Columbia University
Press, 1993), 74.
47
Ibid., 78-79.
33

destabilizing institutionally defined parameters of production, distribution, and reception
of artistic works. A return that is also an expansion as it works from prior models of
organizing such as the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC, 1969-1971), Artists Meeting for
Cultural Change (AMCC, 1975-1978), Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG, 1969-) and
Women Artists in Revolution (WAR, 1969-1971), among others, to address a set of
differing conditions in the 90s.
48
If groups such as the AWC, GAAG, and WAR
galvanized around discrimination against artists of color and women artists, holding open
meetings and protesting against the exclusionary policies of institutions such as the
Museum of Modern Art as well as its ties to the Vietnam War, it was in relation to
divisions of labor, autonomy, and a market-oriented valuation of artistic practice that
Parasite worked.
The turn or return to conceptualist and post-conceptualist critiques and forms of
political opposition within artistic practice began with force in the late 1980s. At times
these contemporary returns appeared as “unreflexive and noncritical”
49
recuperations of
conceptual art as style or as ideology divorced from context. Apparent in Parasite’s
practice, and in the practices of Ault, Green, Fraser, and Kinmont, was a more analytic
and interpretive mining of marginalized or unwritten histories through primary research.
Parallel to this re-investment conceptualism within artistic practice was a broader art
institutional resurgence of interest in the period. Exhibitions such as “L’art conceptuel,
une perspective,” (Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, France, 1989) as well as
“Reconsidering the Object Of Art: 1965-1975,” (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los

48
For an extended analysis of the AWC see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the
Vietnam War Era, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2009). For a
consideration of New York-based alternative and activist art groups see Julie Ault, Alternative Art New
York: 1965-1985, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
49
David Rimanelli, “Openings: Andrea Fraser,” Artforum 29, n. 10 (Summer 1991): 106.
34

Angeles, 1995), “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979,”
(Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998), and “Global Conceptualism: Points
of Origin 1950s-1980s” (The Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999), provided
retrospective and at times expanded assessments of the techniques and artistic positions
that had led to a radical reordering of the traditional parameters of art.
50
At the same time,
scholars such as Kwon, James Meyer, and Alexander Alberro engaged work on a revised
accounting of the historical moment of conceptualism, moving beyond a consideration of
the movement in relation to its relative success or failure.
Yet it is worth considering distinctions between Parasite’s reception of this legacy
and the concurrent work on conceptualism carried out in the form of thematic exhibitions
and in critical scholarship. A project of contextualizing, revising, and expanding, Parasite
proposed a shift in emphasis. This shift—towards a valuation of conceptualism as a series
of still-relevant critical attitudes and positions—allowed the group to more clearly trace
the continuities and discontinuities between a prior moment and their own historical
context. If institutions and historians tend to hold pride of place in producing historical
analyses, constructing value and meanings for works of art, Parasite and many of its
affiliated artists re-framed this task as both a method and subject of artistic practice. The
very construction of art history was marked as a process and site for artistic intervention.
While Parasite’s private structure and the aims it proposed to serve drew from

50
See L'art conceptuel, une perspective, (Paris: Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1989); Anne
Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975, (Los Angeles: The Museum of
Contemporary Art ; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles, Out of Actions:
Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art ; New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, (New York: The Queens Museum of Art, 1999).
35

conceptualist era collectives and critiques, the return to and expansion upon a historical
legacy as a form of artistic practice was made material in the Document Collection.

36

Chapter 3:
Documenting: Receiving, Revising History

On December 13, 1997 Ault and Beck organized a roundtable discussion on
histories and practices of archiving within the art field. Part of Parasite’s larger “Parasite
at The Clocktower,” program, the event (“Archives: history, tools, practice”) was
intended as a critical reflection on models of archiving and a context to consider the
group’s own “proposed archive formation.”
51
In a series of presentation notes, Ault and
Beck mark the Document Collection as a form of “activist archiving,” a conscious,
knowing, and critical practice comparable to “earlier models for archives and registries
formed around women’s art or political art.”
52
Here Parasite’s archive was constituted as
a disruption, an intervention in art’s history that claims project art as a category and more
precisely, an under-recognized category. Ault and Beck’s positioning of the Document
Collection as an activist practice is worth considering. It both articulates “an awareness of
history” and an awareness of the processes of history’s construction, proposing archiving
serve to make visible artistic positions and practices previously excluded.
Materially, Parasite’s archive traces a genealogy of historical and contemporary
practices related to project work. Yet, this history is not hierarchically constructed. As a
type of archive, the Document Collection proposes a collection of statements, events, and
positions dispersed across time and place be read for their multiple relations, points of
rupture, and shifting contexts. It is an arrangement that was conceived to be in perpetual
formation and to implicitly, and self-knowingly, entail the inclusion and thus exclusion of
certain practices and discourses.

51
Ault and Beck, untitled and undated document given to author by Andrea Fraser.
52
Ibid.
37

Fig. 10: Installation view from “Parasite at The Clocktower Gallery,” with Parasite’s Document Collection on display.
Courtesy Nils Norman and The Dismal Garden.

Originally presented as a single four-drawer industrial filing cabinet, the archive
is a non-chronological series of folders, arranged for the most part alphabetically. Its
contents range from exhibition catalogs, art journals, posters, ephemera, correspondences,
artists’ writing, press releases, news paper clippings, audio and video recordings, among
other materials. Files on individual artists, collectives, exhibitions, and institutions span
from the mid-1960s to 1998. These include individual files on Parasite participants as
well as documents generated by the group—meetings minutes, internal correspondences,
press releases, drafts of mission statements, as well as recorded conversations.
Historical materials, the majority culled from documents generated by Fraser and
various participants of Services, range from files on artists such as Hans Haacke, Michael
Asher, Louise Lawler, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Martha Rosler, and Daniel Buren to
organizations like the AWC, AMCC, WAR, and Political Art Documentation/
Distribution. The contents and number of documents in individual files, which for the
most part include only Xeroxed materials, are nonuniform. While Buren is represented by
38

a series of letters to Lucy Lippard
53
from 1969 and 1971 and a schematic drawing
displaying the “GOOD” and “BAD” procedures for affixing his striped paper works,
Asher’s file simply contains selected texts from Michael Asher Writings 1973-1983 and
Works 1969-1979.
54

Within the historical materials, emphasis falls strongly on the activities of activist
organizations from the 1960s and 1970s, most notably the AWC. The four file folders
trace the organization through both primary and secondary materials. These include
newspaper clippings related to artist Takis Vassilakis’s removal of his work from the
Museum of Modern Art—a pivotal intervention that would lead to the official founding
of the AWC—a copy of the organization’s thirteen demands submitted to the museum,
protest fliers designed by Joseph Kosuth, and internal correspondence between MoMA’s
Director, Bates Lowry, and his staff, among others.
55

53
Although beyond the scope of this essay, it is worthwhile to consider the haunting presence of Lippard
within Parasite’s archive and larger practice. Lippard’s seminal practice moves through the individual and
collective practices of Parasite and its members. As an activist involved in the AWC and dedicated to
feminist organizing her name appears with frequency in historical documents contained within the archive.
In addition, Ault and Beck’s outlining for the roundtable on archives contains a quote from one of
Lippard’s compilations of writing, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art (1995).
Moreover, Lippard’s construction of conceptual art as a dematerialized mode of production is referenced in
individual Parasite member’s practices. A 1996 exhibition and book by Kinmont works explicitly from her
conception of dematerialization, proposing instead a “Materialization of life into alternative economies,” as
the title of the project suggests. Fraser’s article “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory,
and Rendered in the Public Sphere?” October, v. 80, (Spring 1997), also held within the archive, contains
explicit reference to the “dematerialization of art.” Yet, curiously, there is no file dedicated to the curator,
writer, and historian.
54
Letters from Daniel Buren to Lucy Lippard in file on Daniel Buren (November 26, 1969; October 23,
1971; November 23, 1971); Parasite Archive; Box 4; Folder 18; The Fales Library and Special Collections,
New York University Libraries.
55
Parasite Archive; Box 3; Folder 22 and Folder 23; Art Workers Coalition Documents, 1969 and Art
Workers Coalition Documents 1970-1971; The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York
University Libraries.
39

Fig. 11: Art Workers’ Coalition, “13 Demands,” communiqué, 1969. Parasite Archive; Box 3; Art Workers Coalition
Documents, 1969; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.

40

The more contemporary materials, while continuing to catalog individual artists’
projects, emphasize European exhibitions and select institutions dating roughly from the
mid 1980s.
56
In the form of posters, press releases, exhibition catalogs, and related
ephemera, these materials tend to represent previous projects of Parasite’s members.
They also include critical texts and exhibition catalogs reflecting lines of interpretation
the group found problematic, as in files containing Kwon’s then-recent article “One Place
After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” (1997) and Mary Jane Jacob’s Culture in
Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago (1995).
57

56
The significance of the European focus bears mentioning, as it reflects two conditions formational for
Parasite: the general lack of support for project-work within the U.S., specifically within New York, and
the simultaneous boom in institutional commissions abroad. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, a
consideration of Parasite in relation to a European context, specifically in relation to such sites as Stephan
Dillemuth and Josef Strau’s Friesenwall 120 and Shedhalle, Zurich, is much needed.
57
Kwon’s article, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” was published several months
prior to Parasite’s founding in an issue of October also containing conference documents from Fraser and
Draxler’s Services as well as Fraser’s text “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and
Rendered in the Public Sphere?” Seeking to distinguish contemporary site-specific work from its
emergence in the late 1960s and adaptations in the 1970s, Kwon’s text extended a line of interpretation
apparent in James Meyer’s “The Functional Site,” published in the fall of 1996 in Documents, n.7. While
both texts sought to contend with shifting notions of site by looking to the work of artists such as Wilson,
Dion, Fraser, and Green (among others), Kwon’s article conflated the conditions of site-specific practice
with artistic intentionality. Critical of both the increased tendency towards “nomadic” practices and the
surge in re-fabrications and re-locations of work from the 1960s and 1970s, she proposed both failed to
“circumvent the problem of commodification.” Finding Kwon’s analysis to problematically misconstrue
and misinterpret their individual practices and site-specific work in general, Parasite hoped to organize a
roundtable on the issue. In an email regarding the proposed roundtable, dated February 18, Green expresses
a “wariness of a discussion featuring Miwon [Kwon], or a focus on her October [sic] article.” Citing “the
fact that she makes sweeping authoritative claims about exhibitions she didn’t even see and for which it
also seems she didn’t adequately research or footnote, doesn’t encourage me to want to expend breath on
what was written… I’m more interested in reframing the terms of discussion and that has been my
impression of what it’s possible to do in Parasite.” Green’s sentiments were echoed by multiple Parasite
members leading to the development of an extended list of possible respondents for a discussion including
Benjamin Buchloh, Helen Molesworth, Maureen Sherlock, Reginald Woolery, Lynne Tillman, Rosalind
Deutsch, Gregg Bordowitz, and Meyer among others. In a document titled “Site-Specificity Reading List
Suggestions,” dated February 25, 1998, Kwon’s article is listed as one of multiple texts. Although an
official roundtable never occurred, the inclusion of Kwon’s text in the archive and its place on a group
reading list suggest Parasite’s dedication to an informed debate in reframing critical interpretations of
project work. See Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October, v. 80 (Spring
1997): 85-110. Although published in 1995, Jacob’s exhibition took place in Chicago in 1992-1993 and
involved numerous community-based projects across the city, including one by Dion. In meetings minutes
concerning the unrealized Parasite Publication, the exhibition catalog for Culture in Action is positioned as
problematic and as a model to work against. See Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson, Eva M. Olson,
Sculpture Chicago (Organizer), Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago, (Seattle:
41

Although at the time of Ault and Beck’s roundtable the Document Collection had
only just begun to form, Parasite presented the archive in their main programming room
at the Clocktower. Displayed amid a set up of couch and chairs (rearranged for public
programs) and with a Xerox machine in close proximity, the archive was intended to
serve as a resource for research. With many of the historical documents sourced from
MoMA’s archives or directly from the personal collections of artists, it allowed for an
engagement with and duplication of materials otherwise inaccessible or difficult to find.
In this sense, the Document Collection countered the normative conditions of distribution
within an art economy in which “ownership” depends on financial wealth.
But the archive also signaled a shift in value. It proposed the re-evaluation of a set
of historically marginalized politically and socially vested artistic (and activist) positions
and their often ephemeral material legacies at a moment in which such practices were
seen to have failed to bring a sustained challenge to the commodity status of art. Here
Parasite asserted the need to reframe a dominant narrative in which the idealistic aims of
conceptualist practices and their subsequent naturalization proscribe their historical
validity as a mode of critique. It also proposed an expansion of the definition and
parameters of artistic labor, denying distinctions between making, thinking, arranging,
organizing, and interpreting.
While Parasite’s challenge to such divisions of labor articulates a refusal to
participate in a market economy, to produce work-as-commodity, it also invokes an
aesthetic history of similar challenges to market criteria brought by certain conceptualist
era practices of production and critiques of the institutions of art. In the 1960s, the
practices of so-called “minimal” artists pushed the disciplinary boundaries of art by often

Bay Press, 1995).
42

engaging industrial materials to investigate scientific and mathematic systems,
additionally calling into question notions of authorship and originality through
prefabrication and outsourced production methods. By the end of the decade and
continuing through the 1970s, conceptual artists worked to expand a definition of artistic
labor, asserting primacy of idea or process over form, and integrating activities
previously considered the domain of critics, curators, arts administrators, and publishers,
etc. Magazine pages became a “primary site” for production in the form of artists writing
as well as more experimental text and image interventions. These were often conceived
not as supplementary to artistic practice-proper but rather as works in and of themselves.
Starting in the 1970s artists were not only working against the institutional legitimation
of value as determined within the spaces of representation and display (the gallery, the
museum, the art journal, the magazine), but as maintained by a network of social,
economic, and political systems governing such sites.
In this sense, Parasite’s claim for the use value of certain artistic positions was
perhaps also a response to the ways this history was materializing (economically,
materially, as well as ideologically) within new institutional contexts. If the Document
Collection performed a critical, aesthetic, and discursive recovery coincident with a
broader refocus on conceptual art, it was one invested in considering artistic intention
through primary sources and proposing alternate historical readings. It was also an
assertion of the value of this history and reflexively, in the inclusion of documents
relating to Parasite and the group’s members, the value of their own collective and
individual practices.
43

In the outline for “Archives: history, tools, practice,” the organizers posed the
following questions in relation to Parasite’s archive:
How do we materialize a research space for activities that are ephemeral,
scattered, not normally grouped under one heading? In what ways and
with what consequences will we be articulating a field, subject, network,
accumulation of ‘project work’? … How might an artist-self-organized
archive differ from other institutions’ archives and organizing processes?
…What will be the context for the Parasite archives and what context will
it cohere as a formation itself?
58

These are Ault and Beck’s questions, but they also point towards a crucial aspect of
Parasite’s larger practice, namely a persistent self-reflexivity that suggests not only a
consciousness of historical precedents but of the larger implications and consequences of
artistic activity. For if Parasite performed a critical, aesthetic, and discursive recovery
coincident with a broader refocus on conceptual art, it was one simultaneously invested in
considering artistic intention, addressing the shifting context in which the work now
manifest, while thinking through the very process (and effects) of writing art history.
In “History and Context,” a text written and presented by Beck during the
roundtable, the artist offers a definition of “context” that I propose to be of equal
relevance as a conceptualization of Parasite’s archive. “Context,” he writes, “is not an
institutional structure alone, not a political constellation alone, not a discourse alone but a
complex multidimensional field of points, events and practices, always interacting,
productive and changing.”
59
Considered along these lines, the mode of reception
proposed by Parasite’s archive gains clarity. Rather than a narrative tracing of past to
present, a cataloging of static objects, the archive’s contents are cast as critical

58
Ault and Beck, Untitled and undated document given to author by Andrea Fraser.
59
Martin Beck, “History and Context,” (roundtable presentation for “Archives: History, Tools, Practice,”
the Clocktower Gallery, P.S. 1, December 13, 1997), 6. Parasite Archive; Box 1; Beck, Martin (1997);
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries
44

interventions capable of impacting the artistic field. In this sense, the Document
Collection emerges as a context for an artist-produced reception and, reflexively,
valuation of art history, one that made no claims of neutrality. Materializing a history in
the form of artists’ writing, production notes, activist manifestos, as well as critical
scholarship on project-based practices, Parasite suggested these multiple and formally
divergent documents collectively contribute to the production of meaning, denying
authority to a single voice. For if Parasite performed a critical, aesthetic, and discursive
recovery coincident with a broader refocus on conceptual art, it was one simultaneously
invested in considering artistic intention, addressing the shifting context in which the
work now manifest, challenging a hierarchized structure of legitimization, while thinking
through the very process (and effects) of writing art history.
Approaching Parasite’s archive from a decade-plus distance, Ault and Beck’s
questioning of context is of equal relevance for critical interpretation. The shifting
context in which one now comes to the Document Collection reflexively affects its
potential meanings. After its inclusion in an exhibition at the Shedhalle in Zurich, the
archive was misplaced for a period of ten years. Recovered in 2011, it is now held within
the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University (New York). At the
Fales the Document Collection is distinguished from Fraser’s larger Services archive.
Moreover, the larger “Parasite Archive” now also contains the administrative files of
Kinmont, Parasite’s acting treasurer. No longer held within the original industrial filing
cabinet but rather merged with the Fales larger collection, its formal and aesthetic
characteristics have shifted. While it once called to mind what in 1990 Benjamin
Buchloh, reflecting on the diverging practices and influences associated with historical
45

conceptual art (here 1966-1975), refers to (at times pejoratively) as “an aesthetic of
administrative and legal organization and institutional validation,” aesthetic and
conceptual parallels to previous archival practices (the activities of Art & Language in
general and their Index projects come to mind) are now evidenced only through
photographic documentation.
60

Beyond representing one aspect of Parasite’s practice as an object produced by
the group, the archive is now also the very means by which the group emerges. Facts are
scattered, fragmentary, and at times conflicting. The multiple drafts of Parasite’s mission
statement, many undated and all varying in content, complicate any attempt to define the
group by their own terms. Meeting minutes provide a chronology but the issues and
debates discussed are at times oblique, reduced to single sentences that leave much
unanswered. In many ways the contents of these transcribed notes are unremarkable.
They reveal an organization struggling to simultaneously create and represent itself,
perpetually chasing its tail in attempting to put Parasite’s proposed aims and activities to
action, and all too aware of the subsumption of ideology to administration.

60
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions,” in L'art conceptuel, une perspective. Catalogue for exhibition at the Musée d'Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France (November 22, 1989 - February 18, 1990) and in October, v. 55
(Winter 1990): 119.
46

Chapter 4:
Presenting: Re-Staging Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things
on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art

Mel Bochner: What interests me is what your response is. If there’s a value to
this work—or to any work as far as I’m concerned—it’s a use value. The more
uses that can be made of any idea the more interesting the idea is, the broader the
way in which it can be understood.
--Excerpts from “An Excerpt of a Discussion Between Mel Bochner and Parasite,
February 27, 1998”
61

Primary materials contained within the Document Collection relating to Parasite’s
re-staging of Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not
Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) (March 7 – 21, 1998) are minimal. A file
folder for the event is limited to a copy of a brochure produced and distributed in
coordination with the exhibition and a press release issued by the Drawing Room. No
photographic documentation exists within the archive. There is, however, an audio
recording of a conversation between Bochner and several Parasite members held on
February 27. In addition to these three documents—brochure, press release, and
recording—weekly meeting minutes and email correspondences between group members
regarding the conception, organization, and production of the event allow for a more
nuanced understanding of the final form the exhibition took.
These primary materials provide an initial means by which to consider the event
and exhibition both in form and context and to question what meanings may be produced
by Parasite’s presentation of Working Drawings… as a primary experience in physical
space as well as a private group discussion. Although the work was mounted within the

61
Brochure distributed in coordination with Parasite re-presentation of Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings
and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, 1966, (March 7-21, 1998).
The Drawing Room, The Drawing Center, New York City. “The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room at 40
Wooster Street presents Parasite,” (March 7-21, 1998); Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; March 1998;
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
47

institutional frame of the Drawing Center, Parasite had taken over programming at the
recently opened outpost. Thus, Working Drawings… was not only re-staged, this re-
staging was marked both conceptually and linguistically as a project produced by
Parasite. Didactic wall text announced this, as did the institutional press release, and the
brochure.
How might these meanings may relate and or differ from extant critical readings
of Bochner’s project including scholarly analyses as well as then-recent re-presentations
of the work in the form of two retrospective exhibitions on the artist’s work in 1995/1996
and 1997, respectively, and as a publication produced in coordination with the latter? I
want to propose that Parasite’s two spaces of reception, discussion and exhibition, present
readings of Bochner’s project that may reflexively point towards larger questions posed
by the group regarding conditions of production and reception of both historical and
contemporary critique-based practices in the 1990s.
Bochner mounted Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not
Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art as an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in
New York in 1966. Displayed in an otherwise empty gallery, the work manifested as a set
of four identical loose-leaf binders mounted atop four table-height white pedestals. Each
binder contained a corresponding series of 100 Xeroxed documents culled from
Bochner’s artist-peers as well as practitioners from a range of disciplines outside the field
of art. Arranged alphabetically, the materials included preliminary sketches, proposals for
projects, diagrams, a fabrication bill, architectural plans, among other “drawings” that
“weren’t necessarily ‘works of art.’”
62
In addition to the various contributions from Sol

62
James Meyer, “The Second Degree: Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not
Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art,” in Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966-1973. Published in
48

LeWitt, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Carl
Andre, and Bochner himself, to name only a few, as well as those from engineers,
architects, biologists, etc, Bochner would bookend the volumes with a floor plan of the
gallery and a diagram of the Xerox machine, respectively.
63
Here Bochner proposed a
radical reordering of the boundaries of artistic production; Not only were the documents
merely traces of the working processes of production, their status as originals was further
complicated by the artist’s use of photocopy technology.
Although Working Drawings… received few if any reviews at the time, the work has
come to hold a rather iconic status within a history of post-minimal and conceptualist era
practices of production.
64
In a sense, the belated critical reception of Bochner’s project
began with force in the 1990s following Benjamin Buchloh’s now seminal text,
“Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of
Institutions,” first published in French in L'art conceptuel, une perspective (1989) and
later in English in the Winter 1990 issue of October.
65
Working Drawings… is mentioned
only in brief. And yet, Buchloh’s assessment of the project as “probably the first truly
conceptual exhibition (both in terms of materials being exhibited and in terms of
presentational style)”
66
has become less a proposal than a statement of fact.

conjunction with exhibition of same name at Yale University Art Gallery (October 4 – December 31,
1995), (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1995), 95.
63
The exhibition came about in response to a request that Bochner organize a Christmas-time show of
drawings. Due to funding restrictions, framing the vast array of documents was not possible, nor, as
Bochner would learn, was photographing them. Instead, the artist would use the Art History department’s
recently purchased Xerox machine to re-produce and standardize the individual assorted documents within
the framework of an 8.5 x 11 inch sheet of paper.
64
First published reference to the project I have found appears in Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The
Dematerialization of Art,” Art International (February 1968), 34.
65
Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of
Institutions,” in L'art conceptuel, une perspective. Catalogue for exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de
la Ville de Paris, Paris, France (November 22, 1989 - February 18, 1990) and in October, v. 55 (Winter
1990): 105-143.
66
Ibid., 109
49

Fig. 12: Brochure distributed in coordination with Parasite re-presentation of Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and
Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1996), (March 7-21, 1998). The Drawing
Room, The Drawing Center, New York City. “The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street presents
Parasite,” (March 7-21, 1998); Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; March 1998; Fales Library and Special Collections,
New York University Libraries.

50

L to R: Fig. 13 and Fig. 14: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be
Viewed as Art, 1966. Installation: The School of Visual Arts, New York, 1966.

The scholar goes on to note, “While one should not overestimate the importance of such
features [i.e. the type of documents presented, their form as Xeroxes, etc.] (nor should
one underestimate the pragmatics of such a presentational style), Bochner’s intervention
clearly moved to transform both the format and space of exhibitions.”
67
Buchloh’s signal
declaration rightly places Bochner at the forefront of what became a more wide scale
recasting of tradition medium-specific boundaries of artistic practice in the form of the
exhibition and publication as a primary site now mainly associated with projects initiated
by dealer Seth Siegelaub in the years following.
Yet, despite Buchloh’s rejoinder against overemphasizing the content of the
binders and reflexively de-emphasizing the presentation (i.e. the work in total), a line of
interpretation has tended to privilege a materialist and/or phenomenological reading of
Working Drawings… (the material components and spatial organization) in relation to the
artist’s larger practice. Here the artist’s interest in seriality as a method (vs. style) that
reflects the will towards a pre-determined system of ordering is situated as a crucial

67
Ibid.
51

consideration and the crux of the projects potential meaning. Yet, Bochner’s articulation
of the potentialities and logics of a serial order was not fully formed at the time of
Working Drawings…. In effect, this line of analysis privileging seriality reads the work in
relation to a text authored by Bochner and published in Artforum a year following the
SVA exhibition as well as the artist’s later temporary installations and wall works.
68

It is against this interpretation that I want to situate Parasite’s presentation. An
initial means of identifying meanings both highlighted and added by the group’s program
is to further address the state of the reception of Bochner’s Working Drawings… at the
time of the 1998 exhibition. I want to focus on the two retrospective exhibitions (at the
Yale University Art Gallery in 1995 and at the Cabinet des estampes du Musée d’art et
d’histoire, Geneva in 1997) and the publication of Working Drawings… as a book,
looking both at the way the work was situated spatially and conceptually.

L to R: Fig. 15: Installation image from Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible 1966-1973 at The Yale University
Gallery, New Haven (October 4 – December 31, 1995). Fig. 16: Installation image from Mel Bochner: Projets a
l’etude, 1966-1996 at the Cabinet des estampes du Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (February 27 – April 13, 1997).
Both images from Mel Bochner, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be
Viewed as Art. Geneva: Cabinet des estampes du Museé d'art et d'histoire; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther
König; Paris: Picaron Editions, 1997.

68
See Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” Artforum, v. 6 n. 4 (December 1967): 28-33. Also included in
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. (Cambridge and
London: The MIT Press, 2000), 22-27.
52

At both sites, the four pedestals and binders were presented alongside alternate
works including Language is Not Transparent (1970), a chalk on paint wall drawing, and
36 Photographs and 12 Diagrams (1966), a set of silver gelatin prints and pen-and-ink
drawings of varying permutations of stacked-wood cubes, respectively. In each case
Working Drawings… was read through its relationship to other works by the artist. These
displays also emphasized the material components (binders, documents, sculpture stands)
as primary.
There is one extant image of Parasite’s installation of Working Drawings…. It
appears in Silvia Kolbowski’s article “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know
About Parasite…,” first published in German in Texte zur Kunst (September 1998) and
later revised in English in Documents (Winter 1999).
69
The installation photograph
captures a near identical rendering of Bochner’s seminal 1966 exhibition. The four loose-
leaf binders lay open and mounted atop four table-height rectangular white pedestals
within the Drawing Room. The pedestals are aligned in a row and placed at a distance
from the bare left and rear-gallery walls.
In the Parasite presentation, Working Drawings… was not framed by alternate
works but rather as a single work in the gallery. Parasite’s fidelity to the format of the
original installation is meaningful—it proposes that the work is more than the sum of its
parts and emphasizes meaning as tied to the total environment created. But it also
suggests that crucial to the re-staging of the historical work is a concern for artistic
intentionality and that part of this intentionality was the relationship between the site and
material components.

69
Silvia Kolbowski, “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” Documents, n.
14 (Winter 1999): 23-31. Essay originally published in German as “Was Sie schon immer über Parasite
wissen wollten ... ,” Texte zur Kunst (September 1998): 94-103.
53

Another significant difference between Parasite’s presentation and the two prior
exhibitions is the condition under which the work was presented, namely under the
auspices of an artists’ group and not an institution. Although the work was mounted
within the institutional frame of the Drawing Center, Parasite had taken over
programming at the recently opened outpost. Thus, Working Drawings… was not only re-
staged, this re-staging was marked both conceptually and linguistically as a project
produced by Parasite. The didactic wall text announced this, as did the institutional press
release, and the brochure.

Fig. 17: Installation view of “Parasite Presents Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper
Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966),” the Drawing Center at The Drawing Room (March 7 – 21, 1998)
from Silvia Kolbowski’s “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” Documents, n. 14
(Winter 1999).

54

A further means of proposing differences between Parasite’s presentation and
extant analysis of Bochner’s project is to look at catalog texts for both previous
exhibitions. A key here is scholar James Meyer’s “The Second Degree: Working
Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as
Art,” first published in the Yale exhibition catalog and re-printed in the catalog
accompanying the Cabinet des estampes publication. Crucially, an abbreviated version of
Meyer’s text was also re-published in the Parasite exhibition brochure, which additionally
included excerpts from the internal February 27 conversation between Bochner and
several group members. The parallel of the two is meaningful as they present radically
divergent forms of writing and analysis (a scholarly catalog text and an artist interview)
as well as emphasize alternate aspects of Working Drawings….
Three photographs included in the brochure picture the original installation. In
one image three men stand hunched over individual volumes (the fourth pedestal remains
out of view) placed in the center of the white box gallery. Meyer’s text rightly
emphasizes the scale of the sculpture stands as prohibitive of prolonged reading of the
materials. Coupled with the relative illegibility of the schematic drawings, mathematical
notations, and architecture plans, this unease is crucial to his analysis of Working
Drawings.... Here Bochner’s enforced discomfort is linked to a Brechtian notion of
estrangement and further rendered as articulating a materialist model of formalism
wherein a “laying bare of constructive and semantic techniques” directs the viewer to
“engage in a broader project of critical analysis and social transformation.”
70
Meyer finds

70
Meyer, “The Second Degree,” 103.
55

Bochner “frames the work, then frames the frame [sic]. In the course of these
transformations, the ‘object’ itself is lost.”
71

Yet, what is perhaps most compelling about the excerpt of Meyer’s text is what
has been omitted. In the full version, in addition to calling attention to the work’s
demands on the viewer—to read and see simultaneously, the impossibility of this task,
and the subsequent reveal of these conditions— Bochner’s play with seriality, in both
form and content, becomes crucial. Meyer notes, “Bochner transformed systemic method
into an object of reflection, a cause.”
72
And, “The Working Drawings… revealed how
artists were employing different schema described in ‘The Serial Attitude.’”
73
Here
Meyer proposes the work reflects a theoretical framework not yet fully formed at the time
of the SVA exhibition.
In comparison, the Parasite conversation excerpts point towards a consideration
that assess the work’s historical context in the 1960s, including the practical as well as
ideological conditions that led to the work’s formation, while ultimately setting out to
reflexively distinguish the contemporary context within which the work was to then
appear. The primary concern with seriality shifted towards a series of topics that were
largely unaddressed in the previous restagings and in the broader critical analysis of
Working Drawings….
Conducted on February 27, 1998, the conversation with Bochner at the Drawing
Room was attended by Ault, Beck, Fraser, Green, Kinmont, and Marclay, among others.
The private roundtable with the artist provided a context to consider the relationship
between Parasite’s activities and Working Drawings… and outline points of

71
Ibid., 104.
72
Ibid., 97.
73
Ibid., 98.
56

correspondence as well as divergence. Marclay suggested that while Bochner’s project
sought to contend with “the traditions of artistic practice,” Parasite worked as “a reaction
to the market, to institutions, to the gallery, [and] to the environment in which we’re
asked to produce.”
74
Bochner echoed this assessment, noting:
What we were doing at the end of the 60s was politicized, but more in
terms of considering new possibilities for how art could exist: media,
duration, permanence, audience. The tendency in your generation has been
to focus on the social aspect of the situation—the institution, place, town,
gallery, collector. Those are very logical questions about the kinds of
relationships that evolved out of that period.
75

Distinguishing the varying historical conditions allowed for a more reflexive
consideration of what meanings Bochner’s work might have for the group, its individual
members, and a more “general” audience three decades after its original presentation and
under the auspices of an artists group rather than an institution.
A crucial issue raised in the conversation, and largely unaddressed by the
previous re-presentations and in the broader critical analysis of Working Drawings…,
regarded Bochner’s role as both curator and artist and the point at which the project
became less of an “exhibition of other artists materials.”
76
Here the space of exhibition
and the adoption of the role of curator by artists were proposed as a further site to
“generate a discursive practice that exists outside of all other types of conforming
discourses.”
77

74
Excerpted in “The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street presents Parasite,” (March 7-
21, 1998); Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; March 1998; Fales Library and Special Collections, New
York University Libraries.
75
Ibid.
76
Fraser in “Parasite Discussion with Mel Bochner,” two audiotapes dated Feb. 27; Parasite Archive; MS
333.0014 and 333.0015; Box 6; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
77
Unknown Parasite member, Ibid.
57

For several of Parasite’s members, the question of curatorial practice as a form of artistic
activity was crucial to their own work. In 1996, Ault organized Cultural Economies:
Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement (February 26 – April 6, 1996) an exhibition
surveying alternative art organizations in New York City. Also mounted at The Drawing
Center, the project sought to concretize a history existing for the most part in archival
fragments that was central to a legacy of oppositional attempts by artists to work outside
mainstream cultural institutions. The same year Kinmont organized “The Materialization
of Life into alternative economies” (April 12 – May 11, 1996) at Printed Matter. Both a
book and an exhibition of the same name, the project brought together five artists
identified as proposing “alternative economies as part of the distribution of content of
their work.”
78
The exhibition included works by Joseph Grigely, Paula Hayes, On
Kawara, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

Fig. 18: Ben Kinmont, “The Materialization of Life into alternative economies,” Printed Matter, New York (April 12 –
May 11, 1996).

78
Kinmont, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies. (New York: Antinomian Press, 1997),
25.
58

Clockwise from top: Fig. 19: Ben Kinmont, cover of The Materialization of Life into alternative economies, (New
York: Antinomian Press, 1997). Fig. 20: Kinmont, back page, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies.
Fig. 21: Kinmont, pp. 20-21, The Materialization of Life into alternative economies.

59

In conversation with Bochner, Fraser questioned the rather iconic status of
Working Drawings… within art discourse in relation to its veritable absence from the
space of exhibition and what this discrepancy might reflect. Along similar lines, Green
suggested that Parasite’s presentation might act to challenge the way the work had
previously been framed within art history, working against the hierarchical divisions of
labor between critics, curators, and artists, by actively participating in the production of
discourse. Yet, it was Bochner himself who pointed towards a fundamental aspect of the
re-presentation and Parasite’s larger practice when he posited “use value”
79
as of primary
concern: “What interests me is what your response is. If there’s a value to this work—or
to any work as far as I’m concerned—it’s a use value. The more uses that can be made of
any idea the more interesting the idea is, the broader the way in which it can be
understood.”
80

While Bochner’s project was a less decisive intervention into established
disciplinary and professional boundaries, it was marked as a model for the relocation of
value through artist-generated discourses. Kinmont proposed that this relocation of value
related “[t]o why Parasite is developing a document collection [sic]; to present things that
galleries can’t sell and museums don’t show.”
81
Green suggested a further area of
correspondence between Working Drawings… and Parasite’s re-staging and larger aims:
Taking over spaces to present what we’re interested in is especially
important in terms of the roles assigned to artists, curators and critics—
roles that tend to become hierarchized. It’s a way of taking back some
power. But it’s also about considering how ideas circulate and what that

79
Bochner, “Parasite Discussion with Mel Bochner,” two audiotapes dated Feb. 27; Parasite Archive; MS
333.0014 and 333.0015; Box 6; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
80
Ibid.
81
Kinmont in “An Excerpt of a Discussion Between Mel Bochner and Parasite, February 27, 1998,” from
the brochure “The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room at 40 Wooster Street presents Parasite,” (March 7-21,
1998); Parasite Archive; MSS 333; Box 5; March 1998; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York
University Libraries.
60

circulation means. Can they circulate without being mastered by someone
who’s claiming the right to own them?
82

Here Parasite’s representation and the collaborative gesture of re-staging come into focus
as a means of proposing the work and the ideas it represents are multiple. It privileges a
return to historical work in the form of a primary experience rather than as reduced to a
category or as emblematic of a moment in time. It is a performance of historical analysis
that proposes multiplicity over singularity but always in relation to a primary source.
Parasite’s presentation promoted a model of discursive reception and production of
Bochner’s project distinct from traditional forms of analysis undertaken in critical writing
and curatorial practice. It asserted that discourse is not only produced both aesthetically
and dialogically, but that these forms hold the potential to function as spaces within
which to produce a counter discourse: spaces to subvert dominant discursive
determinations, acknowledging the limits and conditions of these determinations as well
as its own, while proposing new ways of imagining history.

82
Green, ibid.
61

Conclusion

On October 12, 2011—roughly fifteen years after Parasite’s founding—Artists
Space (New York) hosted a discussion on Parasite. A conversation with curator and art
historian Sébastien Pluot, three former Parasite participants—Fraser, Kolbowski, and
Simon—were “invited to revisit questions raised during their discussions in the late
1990s.”
83
Seen through the lens of each artist’s own practice, Parasite again emerged as a
fractured and fragmented set of positions.
While Parasite continues to exist on the periphery, the Artists Space event marks a
moment in the group’s otherwise minimal art institutional reception. There appear to be
roughly six articles referencing Parasite.
84
Four, written between 1998 and 2000, include
Kolbowski’s “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” a
text by Diane Shamash included in the same issue of Documents in which Kolbowski’s
article appeared (revised in English), an online review of Working Drawings… at the
Drawing Room posted to Nettime (an internet mailing list), and a text by Doris Berger
from Kunst Bulletin (April 2000). The majority are reviews under 500 words or reference
Parasite only in brief. Yet all four elide the group’s multiple aims and activities,

83
Artists Space event announcement, http://artistsspace.org/programs/parasite/ (accessed June 4, 2013).
84
Silvia Kolbowski, “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” Documents, n.
14 (Winter 1999): 23-31. Essay originally published in German as “Was Sie schon immer über Parasite
wissen wollten ... ,” Texte zur Kunst (September 1998): 94-103. Diane Shamash, “The Strategic Archive,”
Documents, n. 14 (Winter 1999): 16-22. Robbin Murphy, “Parasite Group at the Drawing Center,” e-mail
to Nettime mailing list, March 23, 1998, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9803/msg00099.html (accessed June 22, 2013). Doris Berger, “Das Parasite Archiv im SINY,” Kunst
Bulletin (April 2000): Sébastien Pluot, “Parasite, in the meantime,” unpublished essay, translated from
French by author, 2011. Sébastien Pluot, “You May Add or Subtract From This Work,” [text distributed in
coordination with the exhibition “Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher
D’Arcangelo (1959-1979),” (September 10 – October 16, 2011) at Artists Space (New York), 2011].

62

precluding a consideration of the divergences as well as correspondences between private
and public functions.
Although one of the more substantial contributions, Kolbowski’s “Some of
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” written after she withdrew
from the group, focuses almost exclusively on the group’s definition of project-work,
problematizing its ambiguity.
85
In the text Kolbowski suggests that crucial to an analysis
of the group is a consideration of “why it came about at this time, and in this place.”
86

She proposes an investigation of the “phenomenon of ‘project work,’” as an initial step
towards such a determination. The artist and writer is apt to place the model of practice
contemporary “project work” promotes, (i.e. “commissioned or self-initiated installations
and performances, documentation of corollary or primary material, and research”
87
),
within a larger legacy of site-specificity, post-studio practice, and institutional critique.
Yet, despite emphasizing the significance of “project work” in relation to Parasite, she
does not address its adaptations and transformations over time. In focusing almost
exclusively on the term (while failing to address is fluctuating definition within the
group), Parasite’s activities are all but overlooked. There is no description or analysis of
projects undertaken within the context of Parasite; mention of the group’s activities is
restricted to a single summary listing in footnote.

85
Kolbowski resigned from the group in September 1997. In a fax sent to Parasite the artist cites the
group’s “reluctance to articulate an overt stance (or stances) with regard to the political particularities of
project work as a format or approach” and “the proposition that the group would begin by representing
current members and their work…skirt[ing] the issue of history.” For Kolbowski, the preliminary emphasis
on contemporary practices belied the “importance of history/genealogy to the work of Parasite.”
Kolbowski, “Resignation Letter,” September 15, 1997, document given to author by Andrea Fraser. Many
of Kolbowski’s critiques outlined in the resignation letter were later addressed in her article on Parasite.
See Kolbowski, “Some of Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Parasite…,” Documents, n. 14
(Winter 1999), 23-31. Essay originally published in German as “Was Sie schon immer über Parasite wissen
wollten ... ,” Texte zur Kunst (September 1998), 94-103.
86
Kolbowski, Documents, 24.
87
Ibid., 25.
63

More recently, Pluot has also contributed to a narrative on Parasite in two texts. In
an unpublished text from 2011, he provides the first critical account to conceptualize the
group in full—addressing both their private and public activities and capturing the group
in its very multiplicity. Pluot’s contribution is significant in relation to a history that
remains for the most part unwritten.
The recovery of the Document Collection in the months following the Artists
Space panel and its donation to the Fales has allowed for an elaborated tracing of the
group’s aims, activities, and debates through primary materials that both describe and
reflect upon the projects and discussions generated. Yet, while these documents have
allowed for a rigorous review of the artists’ group, it is a review predicated on Parasite’s
own historicization. In this sense, the story of Parasite is also the story constructed by
Parasite. It is a story that is as much about a working through, critically and aesthetically,
of concerns relevant to process-based, temporal, interdisciplinary, and context-specific
modes of artistic practice, namely “project work,” as it is a story of collective process in
action.
Dispersed across disciplines, pointing to multiple histories and temporalities, and
impossible to define in relation to a singular categorical framework, to place Parasite as
an object of analysis is, in a sense, to seek to question how to locate the group
aesthetically and critically. But it is also to question how to constitute or render, through
language, a collaborative practice that includes not only the production of events and
exhibitions but also debates and discussions. How to materialize Parasite, to give it form
and depth in its multiplicity, within and through a discursive framework that tends to
64

function as a practice of fixing, of naming, of calling into being by placing within time
and space: a practice of validation by classification and comparison.
If there has been a surge in interest in collective and pedagogical practices,
starting in the 1990s and continuing to this day, the lines of interpretation do not rightly
cohere to Parasite’s practice. In effect, starting in the late 90s “project work” increasingly
came to be replaced by terms such as “relational aesthetics” and “social practice.” The
practices associated with these terms and their critical analyses, which are both critical
and complimentary, often posit participation and community-engagement as primary.
Articles and books by curator Nicolas Bourriaud, and scholars Claire Bishop and Grant
Kester have focused on the turn (or return) to a conception of practice wherein dialog,
collaboration, and social engagement define a renewed dematerialization of the art object,
as well as notions of authorship and originality.
88
Here collaboration between artists
and/or between producers and audiences is often conceived as holding the potential to
redefine “art’s relationship to the social.”
89
Or, positioned in opposition to art-as-object,
recast as a series of encounters and negotiations capable of reshaping “inter-human”
connectivity.
90
The work of art is seen as a “dialogical” and performative process, “a
locus of discursive exchange and negotiation.”
91
The artists, collectives, and projects
focused on in critical writing on “social practice,” “relational” art, and “dialogical”
practice—whether positioned as protagonists or antagonists—often overlap. (Particularly
in the writing of Bourriaud and Bishop.)

88
See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the
participation of Mathieu Copeland, (Les Presses du Réel, 2002) (English); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, (London and New York: Verso, 2012); and Grant H.
Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: The University of California Press, 2004).
89
Bishop, Artificial Hells, 3.
90
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 16.
91
Kester, Conversation Pieces, 12.
65

The descriptions of participatory, collaborative, and discursive practices outlined
above are not all entirely dissimilar to Parasite. Particularly in the emphasis placed on an
oppositional attitude towards art’s commodity status as well as the desire to locate this
issue as a subject of artistic practice. Yet, the group’s activities have remained outside of
these narratives, even when addressed towards activist, research-based, and
interdisciplinary forms of production, and, more significantly, even when addressed
towards the practices of individual Parasite members. It may be necessary to consider
how the group’s absence from such narratives affirms Parasite’s indeterminacy. Pointing
towards the impossibility of categorizing Parasite within a single historical framework or
in relation to an individual discourse. In this sense, the way to read Parasite may not be
for its coherence to other forms of collaboration within its historical context. If Parasite
does not correspond to contemporaneous forms of collectivity it is partially because the
group not only engaged a methodology of critical practice tied to a specific historical
legacy but placed these practices as a subject of their own work.
Six years following Parasite’s dissolution, Fraser, Müller, and Simon again
collaborated as three of twelve partners in Orchard, a three-year for-profit gallery based
in New York’s Lower East Side.
92
A group of artists, filmmakers, curators, critics, and an
art historian, the cooperative was committed to historically-based criteria, presenting and
restaging historical works and reconsidering previously marginalized practices through
exhibitions, performances, artists talks, and discussions that parallel Parasite’s own

92
A full list of Orchard’s members includes Rhea Anastas, Moyra Davey, Fraser, Nicolás Guagnini, Gareth
James, Müller, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, Simon, John Yancy, Jr., and Anonymous. The
gallery opened on May 11, 2005 and closed on May 25, 2008. My familiarity with Orchard stems from an
internship held over the summer of 2006. For more information on the project see texts by Branden W.
Joseph, John Miller, Melanie Gilligan, David Joselit, and Andrea Geyer and Ulrike Müller in “Orchard
Dossier,” Grey Room, n. 35 (Spring 2009): 90-127. A publication, Being the Opposite: Texts, Dialogues,
Letters and Scripts from Orchard, containing critical writing produced in conjunction with the exhibitions
and programs of Orchard is forthcoming.
66

activities. Yet, if Parasite sought alternate economies of exchange, proposing to function
in opposition to the commercial gallery system and enacting an organizational structure
unmoored by an architectural frame, Orchard’s embrace of a commercial structure signals
a diminishing belief in the efficacy of “alternative.” While this is one of various
divergences between the two cooperatives, they also share a mutual investment in self-
reflexivity that suggests a desire to think critically about the working dynamics of
institutions, activities and effects often concealed, and the way we participate in these
structures. In a sense, an article by art historian David Joselit reflecting on Orchard
characterizes the later project in a way that is equally accurate in considering the Parasite.
“For what Orchard grew from was a living and open-ended form of institutional
responsibility—the responsibility to interpret the goals and exigencies of one’s own
institution (or institutions) that change or develop over time and that consequently resist
precise specification as an object of critique.”
93
What Joselit points towards is Orchard’s
commitment to a reflexive consideration of their institutional identity and its larger
economic, symbolic, and geographic effects alike. In this sense, Orchard expanded
Parasite’s attempt to lay bare (if selectively) the internal workings of the group through
the Document Collection.
Parasite was not a gallery nor was it a not-for-profit alternative space. Rather, it
was a site for an artist-generated and artist-supported reception, a context to think
critically about artists’ responsibility in the ways ideas and objects circulate
economically, socially, politically, and institutionally. What runs through Parasite’s
private debates, public presentations, and crucially their self-conception, in both form and

93
David Joselit, “Institutional Responsibility: The Short Life of Orchard,” Grey Room, n. 35 (Spring 2009):
110.
67

content, is an attention to the very act of writing history, of placing practices in context,
considering the way we receive artistic practices and positions of the past and present,
and their larger generative implications for a future.
If crucial to Parasite’s practice was a consideration of what alternate meanings
and forms of historicization may be produced through artistic practice, how and for
whom, how might this reflexively be brought to bear on future interpretations of the
organization? As Joselit notes, “The responsibility of those whose medium is archives
(including artists, critics, and art historians) is to construct them with care.” How might
Parasite’s activism—archival, social, aesthetic, and political—inflect the ways of reading
and interpreting the group responsibly?

68

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Various materials collected from The Parasite Archive: 1966-1999, The Fales Library
and Special Collections, New York University, New York.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This essay examines the activities of the New-York-based artist-run organization Parasite (1997-1998). Dedicated to proposing alternate economies for project work—a mode of contemporary artistic practice that is often interdisciplinary, context-specific, and involves labor in excess of material production—Parasite aimed to create support structures outside of the museum and commercial gallery system. While motivated by concerns particular to the 1990s, for Parasite, project work related primarily to a history of minimalist, conceptualist, post-studio, and site specific critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. The revolving group of twenty-five artists included Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Michael Clegg, Renée Green, Ben Kinmont, Christian Marclay, Nils Norman, and Jason Simon, among many others, During a period of less than two years, Parasite sustained a private practice of weekly meetings

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Creator Matalon, Rebecca (author)

Core Title Parasite 1997-1998: "It's always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be moving"

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 08/02/2013

Defense Date 08/02/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1966,activist archiving,alternative economy,analytic intervention,Andrea Fraser,archive,archives,art activism,Art History,Art Workers' Coalition,artist-run,AWC,Ben Kinmont,Christian Marclay,Christian Philipp Müller,Clocktower Gallery,collective,conceptual art,conceptualism,counter practice,critical art practice,document collection,Drawing Center,Drawing Room,Fred Wilson,institutional critique,Julie Ault,Mark Dion,Martin Beck,Mel Bochner,Michael Clegg,Nils Norman,OAI-PMH Harvest,Parasite,Parasite 1997-1998,Parasite archive,Parasite Document Collection,performative discourse,post-studio,project art,project work,Renée Green,re-performance,re-presentation,self-organized,Silvia Kolbowski,Simon Leung,site-specificity,Tom Burr,Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Butler, Connie (committee member), Tain, John (committee member)

Creator Email matalon@usc.edu,rebeccamatalon@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-311588

Unique identifier UC11294843

Identifier etd-MatalonReb-1936.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-311588 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-MatalonReb-1936.pdf

Dmrecord 311588

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Matalon, Rebecca

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA