Unlawful Logics

'Rules of Crime', closing Saturday, November 13th at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, marks retired net artist and practicing Anarchist Heath Bunting's first, perhaps unexpected, exhibition in a major museum. Comprised of works made with fellow Briton Kayle Brandon, the show provides visitors access to tools for understanding and transgressing geopolitical and personified boundaries. 'BorderXing' documents the duo's tactical trespass of international borders. With user-supplied start- and endpoints, 'BorderXing' generates not only possible routes connecting A and B, infiltrating country lines in between, but also the criminal details of how to complete these journeys undetected. 'The Status Project' is an in-development, online database amassing all human statuses -- legal, professional, recreational -- their antecedents, and the channels to and from one and the other. Identities are parsed in lists of cascading declaratives. For example, I am born, I am not dead, I am literate; therefore I can be a writer; and later I could become a practitioner of the arts. These sequences can also be structured to provide trajectories for qualifying and transforming more traditionally invariable statuses, like nationality, gender, and mortality. The compositions and consistency of Brandon and Bunting's diagramed identities are not unlike code. At times, they are similarly, strangely, poetic, and with proper knowledge, susceptible to hacking. - Kevin McGarry