
Tom Comitta: SENT
A web-based artwork and document
Published by Invisible Venue in collaboration with SOMArts, San Francisco
As part of All Good Things... curated by Justin Charles Hoover
Available online, from April 2014
SENT 2014 is a web-based conceptual artwork by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist Tom Comitta, produced in collaboration with Invisible Venue. It is available as a two-volume print-on-demand book, sold separately at cost, and/or available as a free 1,100+ page digital download. SENT is both an artwork and a form of documentation for All Good Things..., a group exhibition of time-based sculpture and performance at SOMArts Cultural Center in 2013. SENT presents a compilation of e-mail exchanges between participating artists and curator Justin Charles Hoover. It is an encapsulation of exchanges that ultimately resulted in a series of temporary, ephemeral artworks by a wide range of artists. Offered as a form of documentation, SENT echoes the trace digital format of the ephemera it attempts to convey. Additional texts by Tom Comitta and Christian L. Frock.
For this project, Comitta reflected on British artist Tacita Dean's film Craneway Event 2008, an artwork-cum-document produced in collaboration with American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, which follows rehearsals for a site-specific performance by Cunningham's dance company in a former Ford assembly plant designed by Albert Kahn. In the resulting film, ephemeral details surrounding the rehearsals -- the cast of afternoon light through the windows, for example -- as well as the rehearsals are given equal consideration. Whereas Dean's film documented practices leading up to the event, SENT documents the language of organization surrounding the exhibition. Redactions left marked in place, as requested by participating artists or the organization, offer visual interludes within the text. These strangely compelling marks reflect on the ways in which documentation fails to encapsulate an experience, while simultaneously creating new forms of memory from trace impressions.
Tom Comitta is a poet and multimedia artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 2011 - 2012, Comitta facilitated a series of urban interventions in bookstores under the auspices of the SF Guerrilla Opera Company. Unscripted performances engaged a group of performers in the extended oral reading of books selected at random in big box bookstores on the verge of liquidation. Moving from bookstores into the streets, one performance involved Comitta's durational reading of leaked US Embassy cables on the day of Julian Assange's extradition hearing -- over a 12-hour period. In an earlier collaboration with Invisible Venue, Comitta created a set of instructions titled "How to Stage a Guerilla Opera," as part of an online group project called Open Source, which features artist-written instructions for creative intervention in public space, designed for distribution via social networks. More recently, Comitta has presented his work in public poetry reading events at Mellow Pages Library, Unnameable Books, Milk and Roses (all Brooklyn, NY), and L'etage (Philadelphia, PA). Comitta is the publisher of
calmaplombprombombbalm.com. His recent web book titled ◯ is published by Ugly Duckling Presse (
www.uglyducklingpresse.org).
All Good Things… was a group exhibition of time-based sculpture and performance at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, November 22 – December 21, 2013. Exhibiting artists included Shalini Agrawal, Maurico Ancalmo, Jeremiah Barber, Kristin Cammermeyer, Chris Fraser, Dustin Fosnot, Tom Comitta in collaboration with Invisible Venue, Kate Gilmore, Allan Kaprow (facilitated by Jeff Kelley), Paul Kos, Anya Liftig, Midori, Gay Outlaw, Mitzi Pederson, Phil Ross, Doni Silver Simons, Berndnaut Smilde, Heather Sparks, John Steck Jr., Chris Treggiari, Michael Zheng and the California College for the Arts’ Center for Art and Public Life. All emails in relation to the exhibition between participating artists and Justin Charles Hoover, SOMArts Cultural Center Curator and Gallery Director, have been included in this document, titled SENT, unless requested otherwise, in which case some material has been redacted.