One the eve of the closing of Misha Ilin’s meta-meta exhibition, Ilin and scholar Colby Chamberlain host a conversation that will contextualize the artist’s instruction-based practice with its historical precedents. By detailing the principal elements of Ilin’s publication, namely the instruction table and the 65 instructions contained within, the conversation will immerse the audience in diverse methodologies for acquiring, structuring, and articulating knowledge by focusing on parallels between Fluxus founder George Maciunas’s charts and Ilin’s instruction table as organizing systems for instruction-based practices. Maciunus and Ilin both utilize design aesthetics and advance a structured categorization of instruction art forms—including word and graphic scores, manuals, and scripts—that reflect both artists interests in autodidacticism (and, perhaps, their experience of cultural relocation) and their ability to organize acquired knowledge with an unconventional yet insightful logic.

This program accompanies the launch of Misha Ilin’s meta-meta: book of instructions (WPA, 2023). The documentation of this discussion as well as other evidence of it created during this program will become a part of the meta-meta exhibition on view October 14 – November 18, 2023 at WPA’s Project Space.

About the Participant

Colby Chamberlain (he/him) is faculty in residence at the Cleveland Institute of Art and previously taught art history at the Cooper Union and Columbia University. His scholarship has appeared in publications including ARTMargins, Art Journal, caa. reviews, Grey Room, and October, and he contributes frequently to Artforum as a critic. His book Fluxus Administration is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.