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As a lead-up to the Headless Conference, co-organizer Ginny Kollak shares her essay “Putting the capital in decapitation” which is excerpted from the brochure accompanying the exhibition “The Office for Parafictional Research Presents Headless: Work by Goldin+Senneby” on view through March 21 at CCS Bard. The Headless Conference is a mini-symposium for this exhibition.

Goldin+Senneby is the identity-resistant “framework for collaboration” established by Stockholm-based artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby in 2004. An interest in capitalist logic and networked culture guides their investigative practice, which explores juridical, financial, and spatial infrastructures through performance and role-playing, invented (and often virtual) realities, writing and publishing, and public interventions.

Headless (2007–) is the artists’ ongoing analysis of the shadowy realm of offshore finance. The subject represents a nearly perfect encapsulation of Goldin+Senneby’s many preoccupations, but perhaps its most relevant feature is its provocative and strategic use of masking, secrecy, and withdrawal. The system is evasive by definition: its procedures allow a company’s assets to be protected from taxation or other bureaucratic regulation, and the identities of its owners and their true business practices can be concealed. In spatial terms, examining an offshore company can be thought of as encountering a space that shifts readily from an impenetrable barrier to an empty void—like a hologram, it appears and disappears according to the perspective from which it is viewed. From a moral standpoint, offshore’s slippery visage is just as apt to inspire bored yawns as righteous indignation: one man’s exploitation is another’s tedious paperwork. Still, like most unknown territories, offshore triggers mainly sinister readings. A more anthropomorphic understanding might conceive the offshore company as something monstrous—a decentralized, elusive body that moves without any visible means of control—a headless organization.

Headless Ltd is a real company registered in the Bahamas, one of a number of sun-soaked former British colonies in which the offshore financial industry flourishes. The company is the focal point for Goldin+Senneby’s multivalent inquiry, whose numerous manifestations—texts, performances, interventions, and illustrations—take place in the open and behind closed doors.

2010, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari’s Whitney Biennial, is essentially a Whitney Biennial calibrated for the times: small at 55 artists and altogether humble. This humility, and the fact that one needn’t contend with an overwrought curatorial concept, allows viewers a more cogent experience than past, sprawling, thesis-driven Biennials could offer. Several works, rooms and motifs make good impressions. Not many are impressive enough to make an indelible impact—but a few are. Judging by the past couple decades, the task of this biennial of American art seems insurmountable, and there is no urgency to fault this edition for hitting the target and missing the bulls-eye. While the levelness here is exciting as an indicator of a playing field for post-boom artistic production, the devil’s advocate wonders, perhaps unfairly, if there isn’t something ultimately more exciting about a splashy Biennial that fails stupendously.

In the absence of an overarching conceit, why not start with a premise that did precede itself a bit: the third floor as a dedicated space for film and video. Considering the continued expansion of film and video practices throughout the art world, the idea seemed gimmicky at best—easily the curators could fill a floor, but why ghettoize? Then, come February 25, visitors stepping off the elevator and onto floor three were greeted by a tapestry by Pae White, freezing a frame of interlaced wisps of smoke in a vast expanse of fabric. Mercifully this is not a plain LCD screen (as it turns out, the floor showcases a variety of mediums), but as a piece that meditates on materiality, medium and time, it serves as an excellent banner to welcome visitors to the area of the exhibition that is most concentrated on media. The projects therein attending to these matters soar.

Among them is Erika Vogt’s Secret Traveler Navigator, a small dark room featuring a 16mm projector and two abstract, figurative drawings reminiscent of the images that manifest in the film. Onscreen, silhouetted players gesture with ambiguous instruments both blunt (wands and other prostheses) and delicate (a drawing compass). They are recorded, projected and re-recorded, back and forth between video and film. Other simple deviations—for instance, a mirror held before the camera during a joint recording/playback session, thus reflecting projected light onto the shadow cast by the mirror—collapse layers of ritualized mark-making and physical processing into the finished film, which imparts a heavy, hollow feeling of magic.

So, The Rhizome Team is getting together for our weekly staff meeting around 3ish tomorrow. (Our staff meetings are catered by the fine folks at Le Cirque and sometimes start fifteen minutes late to allow the wine to breathe and the caviar to chill)* One of the things on the agenda tomorrow is to decide which of the fabulous favicons that you have created to pick as the winner of the FAVICONTEST. This means you have around 24 hours left to contribute your own design for our new favicon. Even if you don't have the urge to submit your own creation you should definitely take a look at what folks have been able to come up with so far. Thanks again to everyone that has submitted, and keep em coming!