Jesse Malmed's¹ Clique² and Claque³

(with instructions by Alberto Aguilar and Alex Bradley Cohen, Alex Chitty, Annelies Kamen, Breanne Trammell, Ben Balcom, Chris Reeves, Devin T. Mays, Kate Bowen, Kelly Lloyd, Michael Milano and Elisabeth Smith⁴)

December 10, 2022 – March 3, 2023
Opening: December 10, 4–7 pm

Folio⁵ is pleased to present Clique and Claque, an exhibition by Jesse Malmed. Malmed is a mainstay of the Chicago (and now Wisconsin) artworld, an intensely clever, novel and observant artist whose work finds humor through mimesis like water with a dowsing rod. He is a curator whose curatorial spaces are often resistant to becoming so, a concrete comedian, a connector of people. For Clique and Claque, Malmed has continued in this vein by inviting twelve of his collaborators to each provide him with instructions for producing a new work. Not necessarily bound by specific media, the work in this exhibition highlights Malmed’s deeply ingrained commitment to the conceptual power of art, social engagement and humor⁶.

A clique, a claque, a series of siblings you can’t drive like but who maybe can drive love; comrades, collaborators and fellow travelers; small steps in the write direction. When you google a gaggle or dress up for a dressing down, that’s just good posturing. Jesse Malmed has spent enough time in Wisconsin now to claim it as a home and in so-saying, there’s a certain excitement to how accents move. Are you talking a little faster? Is Green Bay making you think more of Green Day? Have yinz shiksas had your eyes on a new Whitefish Bae? Fresh from another lively semester as Adjunct Deantist of Provident and Concommitant Studiousness in the Milwaukee Talkie Department⁷, Profesto Jetski brings you a kook’s dozen ideas and objects, sounds and sights.⁹

Eleven¹⁰ artist-friends—collaborators and comrades—were asked to send Jesse instructions to make a work. These range in their specificities, forms and approaches and are yielding a ranging strangeling of an exhibition, including drawing, sculpture, sound and video. To parlay the warped pedagogical impulses of the show, much of the materials are drawn¹¹ from creative re-use centers¹² trying to ameliorate and redirect some of the excesses and effluvia of academia and adjacent¹³ fields.¹⁴

Specifically: I’m asking you to give me instructions for a work that I’ll make for the show. These instructions can take many forms — like fluxus event scores, like the Art by Telephone exhibition, like choreography like blueprint like screenplay, like a preparatory sketch, like karaoke, like puppeteering, like etcetera, like etcetera — which will be exhibited alongside the finished works. Instructions can be highly specific, generatively koanic, epistolary, recipish. I’m quite quite open and excited about all kinds of possibilities, with the backsy-forthsy sense of power and collaboration and the capaciousness of friendship and the improvisation/composition continuum on full blast. What do you want me to make us?¹⁵

Jesse Malmed is an artist, curator and educator living and working in video, performance, text, installation, events, occasional objects, their gaps and overlaps and Chicago. His works play in sub- and counter-cultural histories, like a joke that's a poem that's a song covering itself, a shadow puppet interfering in the broadcast beam, having deja vu for the first time, or watching a time travel sequence in reverse. Engaging with a range of publics, his entanglements and propositions include instigating the poster platform Western Pole, co-driving artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show, directing the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming with ACRE TV and the Nightingale Cinema, hosting the Artists' Karaoke Archive, permanent guest hosting contemporary art radio show Bad at Sports, slinging wares and wears via Jetsy Merchblatt, and recording and assisting the kindergarten a capella noise ensemble Huskies Floorchestra. He attended Bard College and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches alongside Chicago Public Schools and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. www.jessemalmed.net / @marmblatt¹⁶

Opened in September 2022, Folio is an artist-run gallery and bookstore dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art, graphic novels and zines in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Through various channels–including exhibitions, public programming, workshops, and a bookstore–Folio aims to highlight artistic excellence, interdisciplinarity, and social engagement. The space aims to engage both emerging and established artists, with an emphasis on artists with serious practices who are dedicated to critical thought and experimentation.¹⁷

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Mikey Rae.¹⁸

1. b. December 10, 1983, Santa Fe, NM

2. a narrow exclusive circle or group of persons; especially : one held together by common interests, views, or purposes; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “clique,” accessed November 24, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clique.

3. a group hired to applaud at a performance; a group of sycophants; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “claque,” accessed November 24, 2022, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/claque.

4. (Chicago, Berlin, Milwaukee, Oxford, Seattle, etc.)

5. 1922 University Ave, Green Bay, WI

6. i.e., a joke

7. FVANG, UWM8⁸

8. Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

9. Or, as they say, sited works.

10. (well, sort of ten but also definitely twelve)

11. (on but also)

12. (official and unofficial)

13. (do they call them adjunct?)

14. Malmed, Jesse, “Clique and Claque PR Draft”, November, 2022

15. Malmed, Jesse, “a request dressed up like an invitation / Clique & Claque”, Personalized Massish Email, November 7, 2022

16. Malmed, Jesse, “Artist Bio”, August 9, 2022

17. We also have a website, folioartandbooks.com

18. (1986-2022)