Artblog Comments

The Title is the Art

2011-07-21T13:25:00.006-04:00

With few exceptions we spend a great deal more time remembering and ruminating upon artworks we have already experienced than we spend sharing space with those artworks.

Our memories of artworks are kept in mind, 'pegged,' if you will, by experiential aspects of each artwork that stood out to us as we shared space with it: a color, form, recognizable image, icon, and so on.

By default these distinct 'peggings' of the artwork's experience become contained in the artwork's title.

When discussing artworks, we don't say for example, "I'm reminded of great sprays of pale, desaturated grayish-purple among speckles of gray of various lightnesses and darknesses."

Instead we say, "I'm reminded of 'Lavender Mist,' by Jackson Pollock."

With the passage of time and the lack of a refreshing experience of an artwork the memory of it becomes distorted. Its clearest evocation comes at the appearance or the verbalization of its title.

My piece The Title Is The Art explores this phenomenon. This piece only exists during moments of your participation. The instructions:

Click on the headline for this post, or click here.

Type your name at the top of the program window that now appears.

Click MAKE ART to generate the title of an artwork. This title is generated through the random selection of an adjective and a noun from lists of thousands of words. The artwork is instantly attributed to you through the addition of your name -- for example "The Indigenous Walrus, by Bill Gusky."

When you see a title that resonates with you, click STORE. The title is now added to a list that lasts as long as you keep the program window open.

When you are through making art, click SAVE STORED TO DOC. A window appears allowing you to save your list of stored titles anywhere you like on your machine as a Word doc. Note that if you have trouble opening the Word doc due to using an older version of Word, simply right-click on the file's icon, chose Rename, then change the file extension from .doc to .rtf, or to .txt -- although in .txt you will lose the line breaks between each saved title.

Your title artworks are instantly connected with you through your choice to generate them, through your activation of the art-making medium (the title-making program), through your choice to save an artwork, and through the use of your name.

Your title artworks become energized and their relevance is reinforced through deployment in your life: as a print-out tacked to a wall, as printed t-shirts, as signage, as graffiti and so forth. Since they are yours your title artworks can be used any way you like, any number of times. They persist in this world as your artworks.

The power of each title artwork that you create is multidimensional.

Each exists first as a container of resonance for you. Something about the title artworks you select is evocative for you on a personal level.

Second, each artwork is an entire narrative in miniature. Its elements derive from linguistic units developed over thousands of years, across many thousands of miles. Some phonetic elements stand out among the others, becoming aural or graphic protagonists that adopt a stance vis-a-vis the other elements. These conflicts become associated with aspects of each element's history.

Third, each title artwork exists on the art historical continuum that includes conceptual artworks by James Lee Byars, George Brecht, John Baldessari, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, among others, as well as Marcel Duchamp's readymades. As such, each title artwork helps bring that continuum forward. As you create each title artwork, and particularly as you deploy each title artwork in your life, you participate on a moment-by-moment level in the vitalization and evolution of that art historical continuum.

When you make a title artwork using this program you make history now.

Welcome to future history.

Bill Gusky

Flagrant self-promotion - Updated 7/20/11

2011-06-16T12:57:00.006-04:00

Busy studio times and a flood of family events over the past two months, hence the posting gap. Some flagrant self-promotion regarding upcoming events this year:

My animated video T-Town Rust Belt Queen will be on view at Litchfield County Screen Project, curated by Sue Berg, in one of various locations in Torrington, Connecticut, from June 30 - August 25, 2011.

Two of my paintings were selected for the Fourth Annual Juried Exhibition at Sylvia White Gallery in Ventura, California.

I'm exhibiting six paintings in the St. Botolph Club Foundation's Foundation on Parade exhibition in Boston, Massachusetts, October 25 - November 21, 2011.

I'm opening a solo exhibition of paintings at the New Milford Public Library April 14, 2012

My solo show scheduled to open at Chrysalis Center in Hartford September 21, 2011 has been postponed due to a building project.

Some upcoming writing projects include a review of a new Rizzoli book about fascinating multi-practice artist Charles Matton, a developing essay on contemporary non-objective painting, plus interviews, show reviews and more.

It's been a real pleasure to see the number of new followers on Scribd, where I've got a few papers and book reviews with more to come. Thanks everyone for your continued support.

Meredith Allen, 1964 - 2011

2011-03-18T01:11:00.008-04:00

It ended all too soon, Meredith. I only wish I could have known you better. Thank you for your inspiration and your generosity. Godspeed.

Hermann Nitsch: 60. Painting Action // 60. Malaktion -- at Mike Weiss Gallery 2/19 - 3/19

2011-02-19T11:51:00.004-05:00

Hyperallergic posted about this just a few days ago.

It interests me that Nitsch ritualizes the un-ironic turning back to Modernism that characterizes much of the art being made during our ostensibly postmodern or altermodern period, whether or not the artists involved acknowledge this.

Nitsch's performative ritual renders mystical Modernism's apparently inescapable gravity. Through it the contemporary turn-back is purged of nostalgia, guilt, creative confusion, maybe even the sense of creative inadequacy. On the other side of the equation Modernism itself is purged of angst, violence, a dozen drunken legacies and a few suicides, and rendered a sacrament for contemporary artists, so long as they submit to the white-robed priesthood of the market's sacred dropcloth-sanitized space.

The undeniable humor of this apparently straight-faced performance (?) can't mask the fact that religification (goofy word but follow me now) is one means of driving phenomenon deep into an unreachable past and birthing generations of agnostics who can say, much as we (most of us anyway) say about the religion of ancient Egypt, "Fascinating mythology, interesting artworks, but it's clearly of the distant past and not relevant to our time."

It's electrifying to imagine a time, perhaps not far in the future, when we can sincerely say the same thing about Modernism.

photo from Mike Weiss Gallery's website

Janine Antoni, "5Rhythms," at CAA Conference, New York February 11, 2011

2011-02-12T12:32:00.015-05:00

Douglas Dreishpoon chaired a panel at the 99th annual CAA conference titled Parallel Practices: When the Mind Isn't Focused on Art. Next to him on the dais sat Petah Coyne, Philip Taaffe, Vija Celmins, Robert Gober and Janine Antoni, an A-List panel by any measure. The topic at hand was the issue of what these highly successful artists do in their down time -- on the face of it not an earth-shattering subject but in fact a matter of fairly deep importance to those of us committed to this art-making life who are also required to deal with day-jobs, children and so forth.

The discussion was enlightening for a number of reasons, easily worth the price of admission. It was bookended however by two presentations of sorts that especially bear noting and that, for me, eclipsed the rest.

Petah Coyne came prepared with stories from childhood and from her daily life that at times only obliquely related to the panel subject, but that projected very vividly from the rostrum as part of a PowerPoint presentation she delivered in a very natural if well-rehearsed manner. She ended the segment about each work she discussed with the title of the book she most closely associated with it; obviously in her off-time she's a reader. The repetition of this closing and the arcane book titles themselves lent a very appealing oddness to her presentation, in my opinion an oddness much in keeping with the appeal of some of her works.

Her presentation at CAA for the most part added to my memory of the experience of her installation at MASS MoCA, while opening even more questions that will likely never be answered. My lasting impression is of Coyne's mastery of association between remembered experience and material.

If listening to Coyne was like looking down a tunnel bored into memory itself, lined with stories, great piles and hanks of hair, silk flowers and taxidermy, listening to and watching Antoni was like being gently shooed into moment-to-moment now-ness.

Janine Antoni was last to hold forth on her down-time activities. She started off by talking about Jung and Active Imagination, then segued into something she refers to as her obsession which she called 5Rhythms. This movement meditation practice was devised by Gabrielle Roth during the 1960's. Antoni described some of the basics, then descended the dais and, pre-wired with remote mike, gave a live demonstration while talking about each of the five rhythms.

From my notes the rhythms are Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. Each rhythm, which manifests itself in dance, is a kind of movement with its own characteristics. For example Staccato is distinguished by 'heart, breath, beat,' while in Chaos "The thinking brain drops into the body," and Antoni tells us that images come to her in Stillness.

She made it clear at the outset that 5Rhythms is a meditation and that manifesting it performatively is not really in keeping with its nature and intention. Just the same it made for a highly compelling performance, perhaps in part because Antoni is so clearly at ease with her body and, by extension, with herself. Very little if anything was self-conscious about her dance as she transitioned from one rhythm to the next, explaining very naturally if at times a bit breathlessly about the meaning of each.

What fascinated me most was the way Antoni transformed the site from a somewhat ruptured matrix of two- or three-hundred-odd spaces of disparate focuses, concerns and ambitions into a single roughly unified performance space, tattered at the edges to be sure but holding a solid core of focus, admiration, contemplation.

As proof consider that she was dancing at audience level, making viewing beyond the nearest three or four rows difficult. Yet in this audience that a half-hour before was shouting "LOUDER!" at Vija Celmins, probably one of the gentlest souls on Earth, no one stood up for a better view, sidled in close with a camera, or otherwise behaved disruptively.

By the time Antoni completed Stillness a new tone had set in, lingering well into the question-and-answer session that followed.

Jamie Stuart - "Idiot with a Tripod" (aka "Man in a Blizzard")

2010-12-30T17:17:00.004-05:00

Some of you experienced the Blizzard of December 2010 first-hand. For the rest of us, Jamie Stuart's superb short film "Idiot with a Tripod" - aka "Man in a Blizzard" - will have to suffice. Don't miss Roger Ebert's excellent blog post, which brought Stuart's film to my attention.

Xeth Feinberg - (I'm Gonna) Hang Myself By Christmas

2010-12-19T21:55:00.003-05:00

Ignore that indistinct object floating in the punch bowl as you enjoy another Mishmash Media miracle of the Christmas season.

Book Review: Asian Art Nowby Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio from The Monacelli Press

2010-11-13T08:46:00.006-05:00

Of course I'm highly qualified to evaluate a book about Asian art, because of my rich Asian heritage and the many decades I've spent traveling and intensively studying the art of China, India, Japan and so forth.

cough! cough!

OK, I wanted to review this book because I am almost completely bereft of any knowledge or understanding of contemporary Asian art. Yeah, I've got that Murakami guy down cold. Yoshitomo Nara's little kid giving me the finger from a diving board still makes me chuckle. And that guy who works with incense ash and dresses up in a meat suit has made a big impact on my life. But if you want to know more from me -- well, right now I'm drawing a blank.

In my defense I'd suggest that attempting to define the category "Asian Art" makes almost as much sense as attempting to define the category "Art from Earth."

Why attempt to define art by continent? The cultures on any given hunk of land are likely to be so diverse as to demand a breakdown that recognizes their divisions.

But in this case I'd argue that it's justified because of the centuries we've spent focusing on Western Art -- a category defined by an entire friggin' hemisphere. If that ever made sense at all it could only have been in a very small, painfully isolated world.

Well, the boundaries are gone and the world keeps growing. All these categories are breaking down in an information slushpile that we're slowly picking through. It's like a gargantuan thrift store -- YAY!!! As I gaze into my crystal ball I see a future in which categories we once defined as Western Art, European Art, Asian Art, and even Abstract Art and Painting and Sculpture, are re-sorted according to rubrics we're only now beginning to glimpse.

With this in mind if you're like me you need to own a copy of Asian Art Now, and hope to whatever deities you worship that they keep publishing as Asian Art Now 2, Asian Art Now 3, and so forth, hopefully once a year. Because if they don't this will quickly become Asian Art Then.

The reason is that Asian Art Now will help you get up-to-speed on much of the art that hasn't crossed your eyes yet through the pages of Art in America, Art Forum, Modern Painters and whatever other trade papers you subscribe to. It's fairly up-to-the-minute, and those crazy Asian artists keep pumping it out.

Chiu and Genocchio have done a shrewd job of identifying key landmarks in a teeming landscape of creative effort, and then presenting their information in clear language that's to the point, not terribly indulgent in conjecture, and sets you up for further, more intensive study on the artists they present.

The authors wisely lead off with a historical chapter that will remind you of artists nobody bothered teaching us about in the '80's, back when the world was small. Sure, there's Yoko, but there's also Sekine Nobo, Lee Ufan, Tanaka Atsuko (subject of an article in Art in America some years back), Kazuo Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Li Keran -- a continent of names that never made it into my understanding of art history.

Then it's off to the races with chapters titled Politics Society and the State, Asian Pop Consumerism and Stereotypes, and Urban Nature.

The pages of this mid-sized book are balanced fairly evenly between text and clear, bright full-color images, often two or three to the page. The occasional full-page image is sadly a bit scarce, but that's understandable in a volume of 255 pages that attempts to cover such a broad subject.

The authors wrap with A Glimpse into the Future, one which I hope holds many more editions in a series.

Asian Art Now earns three-and-a-half out of five Nara-Girls-Flipping-The-Bird for being a brisk, colorful overview of a universe of creative expression that seems poised to surround and absorb us in a world of evaporating boundaries and, let's hope, of increasing reconciliation.

This would be an obvious candidate as one of several text books rounding out a college overview course on Contemporary Asian Art.

Book Review: Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Daysby Wouter Van Der Veen and Peter Knapp -- Published by The Monacelli Press

2010-11-11T16:01:00.008-05:00

My dear Theo,

In reply to your question about the greatest disadvantage to being dead and famous, I’d probably have to identify the frequent floggings as the answer. It seems that complete and total strangers can’t resist dragging me from the grave every few years and wailing away now that I’ve bit the big one. “Let’s see how much more gold we can squeeze from the old boy.”

I suppose I wouldn’t mind it so much if more people were truly interested in the real me. But as we’ve discussed, more often than not it’s some contrived caricature of Vincent they want to know more about, some sort of pathetic insane misunderstood genius. What is it about this cartoon character that people can’t resist? It’s like that worthless yellow sponge creature that lives in a pineapple at the bottom of the ocean, all outline and no substance. Even the outlines are without value.

Very rarely does anyone ever get it right. Picasso understood me well, as did Matisse and some of the Fauves. Kirk Douglas had not a clue. As for Don McLean, let it be said that he doesn’t want to meet me in a dark alley anytime soon. My stomach churns to this day from all the grave-spinning caused by his worthless ballad.

Wouter Van Der Veen and Peter Knapp seem most assuredly to have a clue, if their book Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days is any indication. It’s one of the few times I’ve noticed the authors of a mainstream publication attempt to straighten accounts for me and set things right.

As an example allow me to submit these quotes from the introduction:

Van Gogh has often been presented to us as poor, sick, insane, depresssed, alcoholic, and hotheaded. He has usually been portrayed as an antisocial and isolated individual, as a violent misfit, filled with rage and easily carried away, who sold only one painting in his lifetime because his work was despised and misunderstood. He died a martyr, sacrificed at the altar of the ignorance of his contemporaries. ...

In reality, Vincent van Gogh was a complex, intelligent, and sophisticated artist...

He was a longtime student of the techniques of drawing, consulted texts on perspective, and kept himself abreast of the latest artistic developments of his time. He could afford to do all this because he was not in a position of financial difficulty...

This cultivated bourgeois was not mad, far from it. He was obstinate, uncompromising, drawn to the extreme in everything he undertook. He had an impossible character, an innate and stubborn sense of perseverence, and he was utterly indifferent to what other people might think or say...

Van Gogh was neither misunderstood nor ignored by his contemporaries. ...
...the privileged few who were able to view his work... were filled with enthusiasm for the dazzling work before their eyes...

Finally, (he) did not sell just one painting in his lifetime. ...

Theo, do you want to know what the greatest disgrace of a misleading caricature is? It doesn't smell. There’s no sweat, no anxiety. Those last days come back to me in memory as an aromatic melange, coffee, tobacco, liquors and sweats of all kinds: tobacco sweat, alcohol sweat, garlic sweat. The rancid alfalfa sweat of the stable man as distinct from the half-franc-perfume sweat of the Avenue Dimanche whore, as distinct from the hot summer morning old-laundry sweat steamed into overworn bed sheets. The clean glisten of exhilaration at a perfect creative moment, fresh as dew. The acrid drenching shivering perspiration just after trigger-pull.

Van Gogh in Auvers returns some of the sweat to those days as only a skilled and relentless historian’s best research and estimation could possibly perform. I can feel it in the writing, which seems to break down those weeks at times practically day by day. Its humidity steams in the section about you, Brother Theo, your tragic ending, and of your wife and son and their struggles and successes, all excellently documented with family photographs. I can also feel that sweat in the crisp, bright and sweeping photographs of my paintings that devour the generous pages of this intelligent volume. In many of these images I can feel every stroke again.

And where did the authors find this dizzying selection of artworks? Some of these paintings I’d almost forgotten about entirely. These two authors have done the work of an army of detectives to scrounge some truly obscure canvases out of collections from around the world. Had I not already known what I’d been up to, this book would have done a thorough job of informing me.

That being said, I don’t understand the presence of a little reproduction of one of my letters to you, Theo. It’s slipped into the pages almost as an afterthought, not up to the quality of the rest of the book. When I hold it to my ear I can almost hear a meeting in which some middle manager force-feeds this half-baked inclusion to the exhausted authors. Had it been Monacelli Press's intention to make a gimmicky coffee table book they’d have done better to use a rubber severed ear.

Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a truly gimmicky send-up. Maybe that’s where the Don McLean types get it wrong; they don’t carry their caricatures to bombastically entertaining extremes. I’d venture a few dozen francs for a book in which I wear a backwards baseball cap and low-slung trousers, and ride a skateboard through southern France spitting hip-hop rhymes while committing canvas crimes -- and that’s a cartoon that’s at least as good as the pathetic, insane, misunderstood genius. Wouldn’t you agree, Theo?

Thankfully, Van Gogh in Auvers is above all that, a rare book that for once adds to and clarifies the discourse rather than simply sitting on it or, worse yet, sending it even further astray. With that in mind, and fake letter notwithstanding, I hereby award the book Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days four and three-quarters out of five glasses of absinthe for outstanding research, spectacular photo-illustrations, excellent peripheral and contextual information, and, over all, for being a shining example of what a flogged-to-kingdom-come artist really wants to see in yet another book about himself.

That’s all from me, Theo. Time to begin resting up for the next flogging.

PEACE OUT -
Vincent

Olu Oguibe, Saya Woolfalk and Cary Smith at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut

2010-10-24T00:32:00.005-04:00

Would have been nice to hit the Creative Cocktail Hour this past Thursday, but the day job pretty much kicked me to the curb. So to make up for it I hit the openings tonight at Real Art Ways, a "three-fer" deal featuring Olu Oguibe, Saya Woolfalk and Cary Smith.

I'd wanted to see Cary Smith's paintings for a while now. The jpeg files online make them look ice cold, perfectly painted. By and large that's how they come off in real life. The paint is very thin, perhaps applied and wiped off or applied in very thin layers. Maybe in some cases it's applied in thin scumble or dry brush, hard to say. Their tracery of lines and shapes is robust, map-like. Perhaps the lines are made through masking, but too often it seemed like the colored paint surrounding the tracery flowed along with it, rather than being crossed by it. The sense I got was that the artist literally paints around the figures and leaves an underpainting of white exposed.

Regardless, the lines and shapes provide a super-flat architecture that supports a diagrammatic space of ambiguous depiction. There's a little bit of the sense that some meaning underlies it all, but for me this fades quickly. In the end I was left with an admiration for a very precise and finely-honed technique.

Smith's older paintings include shapes that I can only think of as slices of fruit, and there were a few examples of these at the RAW show. Here's one from the Feature Inc website that isn't at RAW:

These shapes and the lines noodling around them give me the distinct sense of kitchen decor. Imagine an overlay of text in 1950's-style lettering and you've got the makings for a snappy cookbook cover. Maybe the phallic loops are meant to charge these works with a kind of sexuality, but if that's the case the artist's frosty clinical precision would be cause for some serious shrinkage.

Smith's newer (newest?) works at RAW feature tree-like structures. Take a look at Splat #16:

Not sure if it's the sky blue along with inverted tree shape, but I'm reminded of Carroll Dunham's recent tree paintings. There's a marriage here of geometric and organic that suggests cybernetics, or perhaps a technology of artificially generated biological forms. The interplay of positive and negative shapes in these smaller paintings is more playful than in the older works.

After a pause at the awesome snack table -- and RAW knows how to lay out a spread, people -- I slipped over to a dark corner of the big gallery where a performance was taking place on a colorful black-light set of painted organic and geometric elements too numerous and varied to remember with any precision. It's like a sugary night-time haze in my memory, although tiny dots of green light projected on the ground and constantly moving stand out in my mind. The performer -- was this Saya Woolfalk herself? -- dressed in a kind of white body suit seemed to move through a series of drawn-out, carefully rehearsed movements that included prostrations and writhing. She remained in the same part of her stage the entire time I watched.

As she performed, a video played on a wall directly to the right of the stage area. The audio was perfectly terrible, playing through two crappy computer speakers left on top of the projector, roughly eight feet above our heads.

The combined effect of terrible audio, mildly interesting video, badly lit inscrutable performance and sugary-sweet stage set was the sense of being in a mall in which everyone was conscientiously engaged in pointless actions -- performer, viewers and nearby gallery visitors who weren't viewing the performance.

Woolfalk's hanging artworks were less baffling and perhaps a bit more coherent than the performance piece. They remind me a bit of paintings by Thomaselli and of contemporary folks paintings by artists whose names I can't remember right now.

A brightly lit gallery next door to the performance was hung with artworks that hadn't been created yet, dated 2011 or 2012 or something similar. These appeared as white rectangles on the sky-blue wall. Also some poor victim had been reduced to a skeleton and left on a table. Truth be told I have no idea what this part of the exhibition was about and couldn't be bothered to find out.

Olu Oguibe has apparently become infatuated with New England's stone walls. As the RAW website notes,

For me the stonewall in the gallery space is first and foremost a formal statement. It is a simple, three-dimensional line in space, a mark, if you will. It is also the ultimate minimalist gesture in the sense that the medium is not the stone but the wall itself, and my approach is to present the stonewall in its barest elemental essence, as a complete gesture, almost like a found object, without artifice.

Of course, like any other object, the New England stonewall is more than just a form in space. There is an amalgamation of geology, history, craft and metaphor inherent in the form that requires no greater intervention than to relocate the wall from nature to the gallery. In doing so, the goal is to transcend the philosophical limits set by other artists from Robert Smithson to Andy Goldsworthy, who have rearranged nature within nature in order to make art or a statement. Nature requires no such rearrangement.

I am interested in the New England stonewall as a conceptual marker, as metaphor; a metaphor for the conquest of the wild and the triumph of sedentary civilization; a metaphor for our democracy which was founded on labor, migration, individual determination, and communal vision; a metaphor for in-between spaces; a metaphor for a sense of place; a metaphor for New England itself.

By moving the New England stonewall into the gallery or museum space, and making the stonewall part of the vocabulary of conceptual art, I hope to generate a new, inclusive discourse that draws no line between aesthetic or formal concerns, and environmental, cultural, and social discourses.

Thing is, the wall Oguibe built at RAW has about as little to do with classic New England stone walls as it possibly could. I know stone walls, having tromped through the woods and farms of Northwest Connecticut for roughly eight years of my youth. They're rough-hewn, built of necessity as farmers cleared big rocks from the land. Over the years they tend to collapse through weather and abuse to resemble long piles of stones shot through with saplings and poison ivy. The stones themselves are often speckled with lichen.

Perfectly built walls similar to the one Oguibe built can be found in New England, to be sure, but they're built by anal-retentive stone masons hired by aristocrats to surround their mansions. These particular stone walls truly are triumphs of sedentary civilization, as the artist notes: the civilization of bankers and financial gurus responsible for the recent economic meltdown.

This massive wall is satire, a faithful reproduction of the great dividers the wealthy erect to provide a sense of separation from and elevation above the working class, who are hired and required to build them to right-angle perfection.

In the rather tedious accompanying video a number of doughy white people are allowed to spoof themselves by jabbering on and on about the cultural value they place on these property dividers built by people who work harder in a week than Wall Street aristocrats likely work in a year. Specific topics include efforts to preserve the walls, which come off as efforts to preserve the economically stratified status quo.

To tweak Oguibe's first paragraph above, the 'stonewall' really isn't a formal statement first and foremost, in the artist's mind; it's first and foremost a conceptual statement, the artist devouring the aristocracy's last sacred space, the public art space, with a conceptually-charged structure that aristocracy uses to separate itself from its surroundings.

And what a comic structure that is, because these walls can't really stop anything capable of scrambling over them. Hoards of angry investors and home owners still have free and unemcumbered access to the palaces of the financial elite.

REAL ART WAYS
56 Arbor St
Hartford, CT 06106
860.232.1006
email: info@realartways.org

Book Review: Richard Wright Published by Rizzoli and Gagosian Gallery

2010-10-15T20:12:00.011-04:00

The night shift: coffee nuked into sludge, East Village Radio humming low and crazy, three large paintings trilling demented dirges on the surrounding walls. Fresh mix of napthol brilliant red filling a three-ounce cup, burning through the 20th-hour haze.

Had the light not changed the tiniest bit, or had I missed the merest flicker of shadowed halogen, I'd never have noticed the hank of piano wire slipping over my throat, the gloved hand, the gray-coated lurch barely brushing my back.

Instinctively I tossed the paint over my shoulder at the intruder while seizing the razor-sharp noose with my other hand. I turned to see a gleaming red grimace of rage, napthol running down the corneas of his beady eyes.

The wire went slack for just a moment and I jerked away, but not far enough. A gloved fist hammered my solar plexus, doubling me down face-first into an up-jerked knee that whipped my head back into and through the flat white studio wall.

My chin hooked against a cross-beam and I nearly lifted my entire body off the floor struggling to pull my head from the ragged hole as the intruder grabbed my legs and gave a ferocious spine-straightening yank. Swarms of perfectly arranged dots danced in my eyes, reminding me of Untitled (22.09.05), as seen on page 31 of the nearest object my flailing hands could reach: Richard Wright, a book of artworks published by Rizzoli and Gagosian Gallery.

The neat white volume became a shield in my outstretched hands, blocking the merciless fists of my assailant and buying me precious milliseconds until my head popped free of the wall and I sprang away.

I'd only backed myself against a cabinet, but the sharp corners of the book became punishing daggars that jabbed savagely at my intruder's face and chest. He finally reeled into the gloom of an unlit corner, only to return with box cutters jammed in both fists. Arabesque slashes incised my white t-shirt and chest, creating twin scarlet blots spiked with scorpion-fish-like needles that eerily resembled the Richard Wright cover, which the book strangely fails to name in its List of Works.

The rampaging murderer reared back and paused to admire the strange mirrorlike similitude between chest and book, and that's when I frisbeed the volume, shuriken-style, at his paint-splattered face. I can only wonder at the furor coursing through his fiendish veins that helped him duck that bullet-speed blade, which then whipped around like a boomerang and returned to my waiting hands.

By that time the blood spouting from my chest had painted a design of perfect paisleys not unlike Untitled 2007 as seen on page 38 of the fairly well-illustrated book-turned-weapon. I realized this after I'd tripped the killer to the floor, leaped onto his chest and began mashing that page into his twisted face. I'd pulled the book away briefly to check that his face paint had dried enough not to stain it.

In my blind rage I couldn't have seen the foot that snaked up from behind and hooked around my neck, and I had no time for surprise as with a single merciless yank the killer tore my head back into the hardwood floor. Somehow during my brief period of unconsciousness I remembered the essays by Russell Ferguson, Sarah Lowndes and John Lowden that gave me fresh insights into Richard Wright's environmental paintings. Correlations with Mondrian and illuminated manuscripts came to mind, as well as interpretations of the mysterious Rohrshach-like design that emblazoned the book's cover.

My puzzlement over the omission of this piece's title became a life preserver that dragged me back from the cold depths of unconsciousness to see the killer standing above me, preparing to sink my own solid steel Ginsu butcher knife into my chest. A triumphal gleam shone beneath the crimson paint peeling off his face as he reared back, blade in hand, the vision shocking me into a last-ditch roll of desperation that left a hair's breadth between spine and knife.

Now, if you were to ask me why I'd had that 220-volt electrical socket built into the floor all those years ago, I probably couldn't tell you. But what I can tell you is that as hot blue bolts surged up that silver blade and across the killer's body, dancing his limbs in a wicked smoking twitching tarantella, I was grateful to see one of my more interesting art books, the one that probably saved my life, lying safely to the side beneath the flickering lights, far away from the sparks and flames that would ultimately require two and a half fire extinguishers to subdue.

"Downtown we call this guy 'the Studio Slayer,'" the detective intoned, wincing at the charred remains. "Obsessed with butchering artists whose taste in art books is highly refined. Guess you put a stop to this mad man's career once and for all."

"Well, I must admit I had a little help," I replied with a smile, dusting off Richard Wright one last time before slipping it back onto the second shelf of my studio book case.

Richard Wright earns three-and-a-half out of five broken home security systems for being fairly well illustrated, and for being somewhat handicapped by the inherent difficulty of translating environmental experiences into book format.

Nancy Winship Milliken: Pleiades Amherst, MA through November 6, 2010

2010-10-12T21:20:00.004-04:00

From the artist's website:

The object of my desire is the New England landscape, from the full sails decorating the waters of Provincetown to grazing sheep dotting pastoral Vermont hillsides. My heart sails over the rolling hills, beautiful fields and quiet bays of the Pioneer Valley near my studio. These wool felted sculptures grazing on a farm creates a landscape painting that one can walk into and feel the texture and smell of New England. The name of this show, Pleiades, refers to the seven stars in the constellation Taurus, by which sailors of old navigated, as well as the seven peaks of the Holyoke range. The process of felting not only filled my studio with the comforting smell of lanolin, it also mirrored the steady dailiness of farming. Likewise this installation, which requires vigilant maintenance against weather and time, honors the work traditions of water and land, especially the field on which it now sails.

Through November 6, 2010 -- Open viewing from the road. Group tours Sundays at 1:00. Private tours available by the artist.

Thistlebloom Farm
South East Street
Amherst, MA

Book Review: Charles LeDray -- workworkworkworkworkpublished by Skira Rizzoli and the ICA Boston

2010-10-12T18:54:00.007-04:00

Textile, the second flesh: an assiduousness to its weaving, the intensive laying-on of thread to thread that counts out instants of time while forming the material of an outer skin. The practical forms we create with textiles document human form, need, desire, modesty.

Charles LeDray's textile creations and installations echo these aspects of our lives in ways that are at times both amusing and profound. His pieces read like remnants of lives imagined yet not lived, shadows of fictive presences. In the case of his human bone pieces, authentic human remnants wrested and reconfigured toward aesthetic fictions.

Rizzoli and the ICA deal LeDray's ouvre a working class justice with Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork, a volume accompanying the ICA's touring survey of the same name. Large full-color photos pack most of its pages tightly and present the artist's work with all the clarity that's likely possible in a book this size (what, a bit less than 200 pages?).

LeDray's body of work boggles the mind in terms of obsessiveness, to be sure, but also in terms of sheer variety. Small hats, little suits, a miniature coat rack with a ratty, torn coat perfectly recreated at half-size, strange little remnants in frames, stuck to walls, installations of miniature clothing stores complete with drop-ceiling, tiny doll furniture carved of human bone -- the survey and the book could only present a sampling, but what a sampling it is.

A handful of essays at the front do a great job of introducing LeDray's work and setting it within a historical and contemporary context. In particular I enjoyed Adam D. Weinberg's inclusion of LeDray in a lineage that includes William Henry Fox Talbot, Eadweard Muybridge, Allan McCollum and Mel Bochner.

Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork earns four out of five miniature wizard hats for being a downright satisfying perusal and a terrific introduction to the work of this intriguing artist. And right now you can land it in your library for a song: a mere $27.50 at Amazon.

Graciela Iturbide: asor at ROSEGALLERY in Santa Monica, opening July 24

2010-07-07T19:46:00.007-04:00

My good friend Michelle Vick reminds me that the gifted and mysterious Graciela Iturbide is exhibiting images from "asor," a book in which she brings together a selection of surreal, seductive and enigmatic photographs from her personal archive. Most of these images have never been seen before, and from the selection on the ROSEGALLERY website this is some intriguing imagery.

Don't miss out on one of the least known yet most important events in photography that's likely to happen all summer.

ROSEGALLERY
Bergamot Station Arts Center
2525 Michigan Avenue G5, Santa Monica, CA 90404
T 310.264.8440
F 310.264.8443
www.rosegallery.net

Open Tuesday to Saturday 10.00am – 6.00pm

A Russian Suprematist treasure trove on view at the Hutson Gallery in Provincetown until July 1

2010-06-26T00:00:00.010-04:00

Late this past May some friends and I were on the Friday night gallery crawl in Provincetown when we came across this little tucked-away room lined with what looked like Russian Suprematist paintings.

This is just a sampling, with badly-compressed images. These are all original paintings on paper or board. Some are signed with initials, and some are unsigned. The dealer, Mary Feeley, told us that she'd purchased them from a former Soviet republic, but I can't recall which. The paintings were dated from 1919 to sometime in the early 1920's.

The significance for me is that these seem to be lesser-known artists, and they show the effects of the broader cultural work taking place in the young Socialist nation. These paintings mark the time, effort and focus of people caught in a whirlwind of purpose, driven by a utopian vision. They're the records of artists seeking relevance within a new regime, practicing the language of a new world order.

Head out to Provincetown before July 1 and check out this outstanding collection before it disappears again.

Hutson Gallery
432 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA 02657
telephone: 508-487-0915
email: director@hutsongallery.net

Rebecca Sugar: BRILLIANT

2010-06-24T18:13:00.004-04:00

Fascinatingly flabbergasting animated cartoon here.

Compelling comic here. -- Read this story -- catch the storytelling skills and expressiveness.

Artist/Explorer Reid Stowe completes a record-setting voyage

2010-06-23T20:03:00.004-04:00

He's back and looks great, if thinner than I remember seeing him. After 1,152 days at sea Reid Stowe sailed into New York on June 16. It was a strange and awesome thing for a guy whom John Tierney in his New York Times article characterizes as "a singular blend of mariner, mystic, carpenter, painter, sculptor and New Age philosopher."

It's good to read people taking this voyage for what it was: an extended, self-imposed purification ritual by a true believer. Performance art doesn't get more authentic than this. It's extreme in every aspect. Sheer ambition alone simply isn't enough to sustain an art piece at this level of duration, arduousness and sheer danger. I haven't spoken with Reid in many years, but I'm as convinced today as I was then that his faith, his commitment and his authenticity are absolute.

Check Charles Doane's article "Comprehending Reid Stowe: His Various Purposes" for what looks to be a comprehensive discussion of the various things Reid was trying to do in this voyage, and for images of some of the art pieces he created while at sea.

It'll be interesting to see how this achievement affects the future work of this intriguing and very unusual artist.

University of You, a new Facebook Game by Left Brain Games

2010-06-07T09:02:00.009-04:00

Full disclosure: I did a lot of work on this game. And I'm damned proud of it, too. It's a blast! Left Brain Games has made quite a few Facebook games and applications, but University of You knocks the ball right out of the park.

University of You is an awesome Facebook game that lets you build your own university. Start out with a simple layout, add a couple students from your Facebook Friends (you're not inviting people to play at this point, you're just using their names and profile pics) -- then drag them into your university's first school to get things going. Take crazy trivia quizzes to ratify your competence to administrate the different schools available, from art to business to video game development to mixology. Accumulate game currency through student tuition and use it to buy buildings, dorms, parking lots and all the crazy things a great university needs. As your university grows it can accept more students, making for more tuition and so on.

You can invite friends to build their own universities, then visit them, take their quizzes and even prank their campuses. University of You has been up since mid-May and already the buzz is growing. Search for it under Facebook Applications or Facebook Games, or just click here to get your own university growing right away!

Cyrilla Mozenter, warm snow -- Adam Baumgold Gallery May 20 - June 26

2010-05-07T22:53:00.002-04:00

Some of Cyrilla's work seems to occupy a site adjacent to Agnes Martin's and within eyeshot of Richard Tuttle's, in a manner probably more to the interest of the former artist than the latter. There's greater intimacy and literacy here than Tuttle's work, I think, in the sense that one detects a private heritage underlying all these pieces complete with its own broad, somewhat detailed mythology and even a cosmology. In the images provided some of the works come off as artifacts discovered and shared almost in a childlike way.

Adam Baumgold Gallery
40 East 75th St
Tues. - Sat. 11:00-5:30 PM
(212)861-7338
abaumgold@aol.com

Pat Steir at Contemporary Arts Center, May 22- August 22, 2010

2010-05-05T19:56:00.002-04:00

My good friend Pat Steir shot me this awesome heads-up on the panoramic installation that's about to rock Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center from late-May to late August, bracketing summer with its Niagara-tudinous thunder. Find it in its entirety below.

People, you have to get to the Midwest once in a while, and now's a great time. Those people know how to cook, OK? Barbecue like you wouldn't believe, hipster enclaves that rock 'til dawn, and art to splatter your soul and recongeal it again in better more energized form.

Here's an itinerary for you: First, Escape From New York to Paterson, New Jersey. Then swing West and stop by Pittsburgh for a few days to dig on the scene John Morris, Susan Constanse and the other wild happening artists keep blazing day and night. Then swing North and get thee to Cincinnati for the big Pat Steir installation.

Along the way are some crazy amusement parks and wild roadside attractions to help you keep it real. There, I just set up your best summer road trip. Make it happen, people! Thanks Pat Steir, great hearing from you and good luck with this awesome installation!
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PAT STEIR CREATES PANORAMIC INSTALLATION FOR CINCINNATI

AT THE CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTER DESIGNED BY ZAHA HADID

Pat Steir will transform a vast trapezoidal gallery within the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) into an immersive environment of her famous poured paint. The work will be on view from May 22 through August 22, 2010.

In Water & Stone, Steir treats the over 1800 square-foot gallery space at the CAC, located in the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art designed by Zaha Hadid, as if it were a canvas, painting the surfaces and creating one of her signature waterfalls directly on a 24-ft. tall wall at the end of the gallery. The project allows Steir to interact with a singular architectural space for the first time. The result is envisioned by the artist to be a dark, mysterious work of complex interplay between wall paintings, conventionally hung paintings, paintings conceived as three-dimensional objects, diaphanous scrim paintings, and film.

Immediately upon entering the installation, visitors encounter a wall-sized, concavely curved panoramic waterfall painting which leads them into a windowless space of blue and black. Amid the darkness, light animates three diaphanous scrims of waterfalls. On other surfaces the shifting light will reveal shapes and marks such as rectangles, moons, frets and scratches. "I hope the space becomes visually confusing," says Steir, "as visitors see images appear and disappear into a fluctuating darkness, it will be like a nocturnal underwater experience."

Water & Stone is the culmination of a long line of inquiry by Steir. Among the predecessors to this project are works such as Panorama at the Newcastle Biennale, Newcastle, England (1990); her installation at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany (1992); and Likity Split at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998).

Press Inquiries:
Molly O'Toole motoole@contemporaryartscenter.org 513.345.8404
LeAnne Anklan lanklan@contemporaryartscenter.org 513.345.8421

Contemporary Arts Center
Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art
44 East 6th Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202
www.contemporaryartscenter.org
(513) 345.8400

Jennifer Sanchez -- "news and stuff that inspires my painting"

2010-05-04T07:41:00.002-04:00

I guess Jennifer Sanchez's art blog has been around for a while and I missed it, zoned out as I've been. Visually it's superb, haven't read much of the writing yet (sorry Jennifer, time's at a premium right now). But I'll be hitting this site again for more and if you haven't done so yet you should definitely check it out.

Agni Zotis, Meditator -- April 30

2010-04-27T21:27:00.005-04:00

My good friend Agni Zotis shot me this description of a fascinating project that comes to fruition April 30th from 8:30 until 8:50 in multiple venues. See the description below for more details and check it out!
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You are cordially invited to attend Low Lives 2 a one-night exhibition of performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at numerous venues throughout the U.S.

I will perform my piece at approximately 8:30 - 8:50 pm called - Meditator -

MEDITATOR
Truth is always present.
Truth is here and now not to be created, not to be achieved nor to be sought out.
The mind seeks, desires, functions on then and there as in the future or in the past.
The breath is a continuous flow from the moment of birth to the moment of death and everything else changes between these two points.
Breath and life are synonymous as breathing is the mechanism of life.
The breath is the bridge between self, body and consciousness in space and time.

The international artists participating in this exhibition will transmit their performances live from countries including Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore Trinidad & Tobago and from the following cities in the United States: Austin, TX; Houston, TX; Nashville, TN; NYC, NY; Miami, FL; Fort Lauderdale, FL; Minneapolis, MN; Las Vegas, NV; Gunnison, CO; San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL and Los Angeles, CA.

Artists include Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Lawrence Graham-Brown, Hector Canonge, Alexis Caputo, Vienne Chan, Osvaldo Cibils, Gabrielle Civil, Marcus Civin, Chris Coy, The Bridge Club, Francesca Fini, Linda Ford, Lynne Heller, Anni Holm, Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa AKA Devil Bunny, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Michelle Isava, Tina La Porta, Elizabeth Leister, Luke Munn, Olek, Wanda Ortiz, Jacklyn Soo, Michael Smith, Sam Trubridge with Rob Appierdo & Stuart Foster, Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera, Marcus Vinicius, Martin Zet, Agni Zotis

For those of you in the NYC area, the program is co-presented by Aljira, A center for Contemporary Art and El Museo del Barrio at El Museo del Barrio- 1230 5th Avenue, from 8:00pm to 10:45pm on Friday, April 30th.
This event is free but you need to RSVP at El Museo's website: http://www.elmuseo.org/en/event/low-lives-2

The show will also be presented in the following venues and cities:
Galeria de la Raza: 2857 24th Street, SF - 5:00pm – 8:00pm
Diaspora Vibe Gallery: 3938 North Miami Ave., Miami – 8:00pm – 11:00pm
The Temporary Space: 1320 Nance St., Houston - 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Obsidian Arts: 3501 Chicago Avenue South, Minneapolis - 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Terminal: APSU- Clarksville - 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Co-Lab: 613 Allen St., Austin - 7:00pm – 10:00pm
Studio 304: 304 Boerum St., Brooklyn - 8:00pm – 11:00pm

If you're not in one of the cities where the show is being presented, you can view the exhibit live online at:www.ustream.tv/channel/low-lives-2

Hope to see you there or online.

Best regards,

Sincerely
Agni Zotis

www.agnizotis.com

Jean Baudrillard

2010-04-27T19:37:00.003-04:00

I thought he was really pushing it. His writing is breathless and clunky, no doubt damaged in the translation. It's rare that I don't have to re-read entire pages until I get what he's saying. But the upshot was that I thought he was exaggerating. Also that he has a particularly nasty grudge against Disney.

Eventually circumstances placed me in Orlando, in Downtown Disney. If you haven't been there, imagine an open shopping plaza with restaurants drawn out across a single long, winding walkway, festooned with performers of all kinds and helpful uniform-shirted attendants.

I was walking from one end to another at a brisk pace, not wanting to slow down and really wanting to leave as soon as possible. Then it struck me: I'm in the middle of a real-life Second Life.

In case you're not aware, Second Life is a popular online world where you appear as an avatar and mingle with many other avatars in unusual worlds patterned on beaches, shopping malls, upscale residences, cities and so on.

For me the one defining aspect of Second Life, outside of the pervasive porn, was its handy accentuation of outsider status. As you navigate your avatar through all these worlds you find group after group of other avatars in conversation. If you walk your avatar up to them and try to join in, with rare exception you get the cold shoulder. So I found myself moving amid spaces bounded by regard and affection, perhaps even desire, I suppose.

Also sometimes I found individuals involved in some sort of task. Sometimes it was clear that they were building some sort of structure, because you could see roof and walls being assembled as the avatar stood before the worksite, arms outstretched. Sometimes an avatar would just be dancing, oblivious to everything. You could push your avatar against the dancer and bump it around, getting no response.

I eventually got bored, dropped away and uninstalled the Second Life application.

Fast-forward a few years to Downtown Disney: now I'm walking this long thoroughfare filled with people, all of whom are locked within spaces bounded by the mutual understanding of groups of all sizes, from teen-age couples to big family reunions. Everyone was engaged in something: a conversation, a snack, a task, the watching of a performance. I walked through them as though invisible. As though my body was merely an avatar among a group of avatars. No one was engaged in anything pressing; quite the contrary, everyone was involved in the focused avoidance of anything of import. This was a mere simulation of the real world.

And yet the real world it simulates doesn't really exist. There are no downtowns like this, unless they're other simulations. Hipster enclaves such as lower Chelsea and even other parts of Orlando lay open and unprotected, subject to influences from a wide variety of sources: graffiti artists, unlicensed performers, muggers, cops, drunks, anyone in a car or truck driving through at any time - the list goes on. Downtown Disney carefully seals off real life.

As another instance of simulation within the simulation, a chamber quartet played in one corner of the thoroughfare, up on a platform studded with perfect plants and flowers. The performers were costumed in 18th-century finery, weaving electronic wail into classical compositions with computerized state-of-the-art instruments.

The effect was of a simulation of something that might have taken place during the period of time their costumes referred to -- except it very likely did not. I'd bet that there were no shoppers and plazas filled with middle-class people, pockets bulging with discretionary income, during the 18th century. This was in fact a simulation of something that never existed.

More to come...

One-Sentence Art Reviews 4/23: Amy Sillman, Marlene Dumas, Charline von Heyl, Stuart Cumberland, Ryan McNamara, Wes Lang

2010-04-24T12:30:00.013-04:00

No time for full reviews, Mom -- it's my turn to feed the class turtle.

Amy Sillman, Transformer (…or, how many lightbulbs does it take to change a painting?) at Sikkema Jenkins
The small, crude drawings and manifesto-like 'zine make me think she's getting bored, but if I had to wade through a roomful of them to get to her masterful paintings, so be it -- although if she is getting bored I'd like to see her move on because I'm sure she'd open new territory as exciting if not moreso than what she's doing now.

Marlene Dumas, Against the Wall at David Zwirner
For me these were political cartoons absent the gag and with only a little more color (except for a portrait with marvelous hair and finger-dabbed forehead that I couldn't stop looking at and a vase of purple flowers that reminded me of "The Cure" for some reason) -- saved in some cases by superb technique, not so much in others through coming off as too facile.

Charline von Heyl at Friedrich Petzel
These paintings come off to me as a bit more refined than those in the last show, with harder edges and a couple almost goofy decisions (cleanly-painted black stripe with neon green dotted core acting like a scribble but too perfectly drawn to be one?) that for the most part work well, at times seemingly in spite of themselves.

Stuart Cumberland, Gone/There at Nicholas Robinson Gallery
Carroll Dunham and Roy Lichtenstein have a love child, but probably because of my exposure to those earlier artists I want to see imagery, however indistinct, coalesce in these large paintings composed mostly of black-ish calligraphic scrawl marks framing fields of large Benday-like dots.

Ryan McNamara, And Introducing Ryan McNamara at Elizabeth Dee
Ordinary family photos and (high school? college? recent? how could you tell?) 2D art projects of a white-bread middle-or-upper-class kid who regales gallery visitors with personal stories showcasing the personal blandness and unjustified self-infatuation of a bland, self-interested culture.

Wes Lang, Smile, It's a Grey Day at ZieherSmith
Tattoos are hot hot hot but these combine-like paintings based on tattoos (painted by a tattoo artist, apparently?) felt like struggles for clarity that never quite resolves, with particular confusion due to the overt "abstract Guston" references.

Richard Ankrom's "guerilla public service" art sign project is unexpectedly assimilated after 10 years

2010-04-15T18:13:00.003-04:00

Long story short: artist Richard Ankrom, disguised as a CalTrans worker, added to an LA Freeway sign in answer to a serious, fairly dangerous traffic problem. His work improved the situation and may even have saved lives. According to Jalopnik the signage was pulled down last Thanksgiving and recycled as CalTrans placed a new sign that included Ankrom's suggested addition.

This was a brilliant, thought-provoking piece. It was relevant and it improved life for many people. Give it a moment of silence, people!

Masaru Kurose, Nancy Haynes and Alan Ebnother, at George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, May 6 - 29

2010-04-15T16:33:00.007-04:00

Intriguing things are happening at my future home in San Francisco, George Lawson's bipartite gallery whose separate rooms for painting and paper kinda remind me of the adage about mullets: Business in the Front, Party in the Back.

Masaru Kurose seems to be pulling the transparent support trick to interesting effect. Maybe I'm more sympathetic to Polke's transparency because I also acquire imagery, rather than generate it spontaneously as it appears Kurose does. Sadly I've only seen the work of both artists through .jpegs and prints. Regardless, I'm glad to see another painter questioning at least a few aspects of the paradigm of the support.

Nancy Haynes works a transparent/translucent color field, working broad gradations and slides that, from the small jpegs I've seen, suggest the use of a card or squeegee-like tool. Some are apparently framed in a flat color, hinting at an illusionistic depth without really providing it.

Alan Ebnother is into monochrome impasto, a place I find hard to resist even as I acknowledge its pitfalls.

I'd show you the images and text from George's email but it was formatted 800+ pixels wide, and wouldn't copy/paste into this narrow blogpost without an hour of re-formatting work. Sorry, George!

George Lawson Gallery
49 Geary 2nd Flr
San Francisco, CA 94108

New Haven's last for-profit gallery closes its doors for good

2010-04-15T15:49:00.002-04:00

A few times I tried to cozy up to these people and get them to look at some work. Maybe it's just as well; Hull’s Gallery One Whitney is shut down, according to Allan Appel's article "Last Picture Show" in the New Haven Independent. This leaves one of my favorite cities with no money-making art venues. I guess I'm having a hard time accepting it, because this is a big city with lots of money and an Ivy League college.

When the Whitney Avenue framing shop and gallery was launched in 2007, the economy seemed as if it could support the business.

“We perceived it as having proximity to a market segment that was not likely to walk up Chapel to come do framing with us,” said Stephen Kovel, Hull’s owner.

And it worked for a while. Lawyers and bankers, as opposed to academics and Yale-affiliated folks, were the primary customers for the paintings, photographs, collages, and occasional sculptures, like the work of steampunk artist Silas Finch.

The framing produced about a third of the revenue, Kovel said. That was typical for such a frame/gallery combination. But it was insufficient to keep up with costs.
“Framing and buying art are very discretionary,” said Kovel. When the economy softened and then grew worse, a decision had to be made.

I was never big on the "Art & Frame" paradigm. In every example I've ever seen the frames were so much better than the art. And how much framing do people really need? I haven't ever ordered a custom frame, and I can't say I know anyone who has. The tying together of contemporary art with a retail service strikes me as potentially beneficial, since it can bring more people into contact with art. But perhaps this isn't the way to do it, at least not anymore.

Christopher Makos Polaroids at Christopher Henry Gallery April 22, 2010 - May 18, 2010 -- Opening Reception: April 22, 6 - 9pm

2010-04-15T09:21:00.005-04:00

With its dynamic pop-open-from-flat design and "time zero" film the SX-70 was an advance on the 'year 2000' techno-utopian future that included lunar colonies, orbital vacations and flying cars. Needless to say that future never materialized, Polaroid has since gone the way of the AMC Gremlin and a third-party company was recently formed to create film for the fabled SX.

Now comes Christopher Henry with a show of work by that other Christopher, the Makos one. 55 specimens of SX sexiness await the peruser, and don't forget, these images are small so bring those reading glasses along. Interesting point: unlike many/most kinds of photography except perhaps daguerreotype, when you look at these images of famous and semi-famous figures keep in mind that the object you're looking at was had to literally be in the room with that celeb to be created. Kinda gives you goosebumps, doesn't it?

If I'm not mistaken, that's one aspect of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe that jacked its value up into the stratosphere.

The announcement is below -- check it out. Incidentally if you still have an SX-70 it might be fun to take photos of yourself at the opening of this exhibition and then hold a kind of recursive exhibition of your own.
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Christopher Henry Gallery is proud to present CHRISTOPHER MAKOS POLAROIDS, an exhibition of 55 original vintage SX-70 Polaroids. Much more than photographs, Makos' Polaroids are, in fact, precious artifacts - historic one-of-a-kind mementos from the 70s and early 80s, an era famously celebrated for its decadence but less often noted for its remarkable innocence. Decades before the age of flatbed scanners, digital cameras and desktop printers, Polaroid cameras had the unique ability to capture private, unreproducible moments in time - it was a seductive producer of images that developed magically before your eyes in the privacy of your own hands. Calvin Klein reminisced, “No one was afraid of being photographed back then because it was more likely a picture would end up in the back of someone's drawer than on Facebook, YouTube or the front page. So people were free, spontaneous, a little exhibitionistic. There was a sort of shared promise that things could remain a secret.

The exhibition is presented concurrent with the launch of a 180 Polaroid monograph CHRISTOPHER MAKOS POLAROIDS , published by Photology with text by Calvin Klein available for sale at the gallery.

Christopher Henry Gallery
127 Elizabeth Street
NY, NY 1001
T 212 244 6004
http://www.christopherhenrygallery.com/

Douglas Florian and Amy Wilson at Bravin Lee Programs, April 21 - June 5

2010-04-14T11:21:00.002-04:00

My good friends at Bravin Lee Programs just shot me the following notice about a stunning show coming up. Douglas Florian and Amy Wilson share a kind of childlike touch, relating somewhat to children's book illustration. I see several books by a Douglas Florian online -- same guy?

Regardless - looks like a cool show. Be there!

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		BravinLee programs 526 West 26th Street, Suite 211 New York, New York 10001 phone 212 462 4404 fax 212 462 4406 info@bravinlee.com Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm www.bravinlee.com
	ye, 2009, gouache on paper with collage, 16 x 16 inches

	Douglas Florian
	Letting In the Light
	April 21 - June 5, 2010

	Opening: Wednesday, April 21st, 6 - 8pm

	BravinLee programs is pleased to present its second show of work by Douglas Florian. Using gouache and collage on gesso-primed brown paper bags, Florian obliquely explores the natural world, referencing geology, meteorology, anatomy, and typography in tactile and often erotically charged pieces. Growth, movement, transformation, and transfiguration seem to emerge spontaneously without formula or premeditation. With painterly textural layers the revealed is played against the concealed, the calligraphic against the static, and the archaic against the contemporary in emblematic signs and sequences. A playful, childlike rawness and simplicity pervades imagery that seems both strangely foreign and strangely familiar. About his last exhibition at BravinLee programs in 2008, the New Yorker wrote, "the project was abstruse and irresistible." Douglas Florian lives and works in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions at Yeshiva University Museum and at the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, The Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and at The New York State Museum at Albany. The artist is also well known for his illustrated children’s books.

	Gallery 2
	Amy Wilson
	It takes time to turn a space around
	April 21 - June 5, 2010

	Opening: Wednesday, April 21st, 6 - 8pm


	It takes time to turn a space around (detail), 2010 watercolor and pencil on paper, 10 x 280 inches

	Click to view Amy Wilson's West Thames Park Project

	It Takes Time To Turn A Space Around, 2010, is a 10” x 280” seven panel drawing by Amy Wilson that was commissioned for her first public project. The 150’ outdoor installation is currently on view in lower Manhattan’s West Thames Park and is part of the Downtown Alliance’s Re: Construction Program. Working from the artist’s original drawing, a printed exterior grade vinyl banner was created and secured to a portion of construction fencing which surrounds a future park and playground. Wilson’s image is one of her iconic girls fixing up a field by cutting down old growth and weeds and planting flowers and trees. Although Wilson’s work normally contains handwritten text, the installation at West Thames is a version in which no text exists. At the gallery this month we are exhibiting the final version, which incorporates the narrative taken from stories and observations about the artist’s life.

	For more information please contact Meredith Rosenberg at 212-462-4404 or via email at meredith@bravinlee.com

INTROSPECTIVES -- A Cultural Perspective of Contemporary Vietnamese Art -- at GettingHome Design, Cambridge, MA

2010-04-14T11:14:00.006-04:00

My old pal Philip Clendaniel from GettingHome Design in Cambridge shot me this message regarding an exhibition of Vietnamese art. Check it out!

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You’re invited to attend a virtual art exhibition, INTROSPECTIVES, a compelling cultural perspective of contemporary Vietnamese art. Vietnam remains a country whose art is uniquely and closely related to social, economic, political, and historical influences. INTROSPECTIVES brings together a group of artists whose works reflect this changing canvas, including: Pham Huy Thong, Nguyen Bach Dan, Le Quy Tong, Nguyen Thanh Binh, and others. You can register to attend the virtual exhibition at http://www.gettinghomedesign.com/introspectives.html

GETTINGHOME DESIGN
90 Hamilton Street, Cambridge, MA 0213
Tel 617.492.2525
p.clendaniel@comcast.net

Every Painting in the MoMA on 10 April 2010

2010-04-14T10:10:00.001-04:00

Ferrin Gallery in Pittsfield, Mass at SOFA

2010-04-14T08:44:00.007-04:00

Some funky ideas below and some crazy images. And they're busy as all get-out, so something must be working -- check it out.

FERRIN GALLERY exhibits at SOFA New York

ReObjectification: ART + OBJECT
preview of group show of works in all media with links to their source inspiration

RSVP today for a general admission tickets left @ will call
info@ferringallery.com

FERRIN GALLERY
BOOTH #300
The 13th International Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art is a gallery-presented, international art exposition dedicated to bridging the worlds of design, decorative and fine art.

Ferrin Gallery presents a preview of

LOCATION:
Park Avenue Armory
Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York, NY, 10021

DATES & HOURS:
Friday & Saturday, April 16-17 - 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, April 18 - Noon – 6 pm
Monday, April 19 - 11 am – 5 pm

OPENING NIGHT PREVIEW:

Thursday evening, April 15, 2010
VIP Cardholders Preview - 5:30 - 9:00 pm -
Public Preview Gala - 7:00 - 9:00 pm - $100.00

Click HERE for a link to FerrinGallery.com

INBOOTH Artist Conversations

FRIDAY, April 16, 12:30 - 4:00
Ferrin Gallery Booth #300

Half hour discussions with artists about their work and inspirational source material in ReObjectification.

SCHEDULE:
12:30 Roy Superior
1:00 Mara Superior
1:30 Lucy Feller
2:30 Raymon Elozua
3:00 Anat Shiftan
3:30 Christa Assad
4:00 Gerit Grimm

Photo Caption: Gerit Grimm, "Cupid & Psyche", 2010

Click HERE for a overview of the exhibition ReObjectification

PANEL DISCUSSION: ReObjectification in Postmodern Ceramics

Join artists Anat Shiftan, Gerit Grimm, Christa Assad and Greenwich House Pottery director Sarah Archer for a

conversation about postmodernism in ceramics. With its rich history and ability to mimic other materials, ceramics is an ideal medium for the interpretation and re-contextualization of one object into another. Whether by direct reference, the use of found objects in ceramic sculpture or realistic rendering, artists can layer meaning into their work. The artists, all represented by Ferrin Gallery, discuss their various techniques for appropriating imagery and form in clay and the inspiration behind their choices.

Sarah Archer holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MA in the history of decorative arts from the Bard Graduate

Center, and was a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Arts and Design before joining GHP.

ReObjectification in Postmodern Ceramics
Limited to 25 participants
11:30 am Monday, April 19

VIP Lounge, SOFA NEW YORK

Click HERE to RSVP for VIP Events

Photo caption: Christa Assad, "Transformer Teapot", 2010

ReObjectification: Material

GORDON CHANDLER

Using recycled steel to create recognizable domestic objects, Chandler has spent over thirty years making mildly humorous domestic objects from "road kill" metal. John Deere tractor forgotten cast offs. Welding parts together, he turns them into parts become "Deer Heads" and steel chemical drums become "Kimonos". Scouring scrap yards and metal culled from roadsides, Chandler works intuitively to pull color and form from forgotten cast offs. Welding parts together, he turns them into chairs, quilts and iconic objects.

Chandler has made a career of ReObjectification.

Photo Caption: Gordon Chandler, "Rusty Blue", Steel Drum, 2009

Click HERE for a Link to Gordon Chandler @ FerrinGallery.com

ReObjectification: Eroticism and Sexuality

SCANDAL, SEX & ETHICS?
Traditional ceramic figurines were often used to convey "G" rated content. This format is easily uprated and updated to "R" and "X" in the hands of contemporary artists. Humorous use of the implied and obvious "tall tale (tail)" combined with "tongue in cheek" ironic wit is at the core of the work by Dean Adams, Chris Antemann and Gerit Grimm.

Photo caption: Chris Antmann, "Paradise", Detail, 2010

Click HERE for a link to Chris Antemann @ FerrinGallery.com

ReObjectification: Object

3D to 3D - architecture, object and contemporay design translated into another 3D art object is how many artists use source material. Choosing an object and then exploring meaninng, use, form and content through sculpture is how Christa Assad, Emmett Leader, Kurt Weiser, Gerardo Monterrubio, Roy Superior, Jason Walker "reobjectify" one 3D object into another.

Photo Caption: Jason Walker, "Stopping to sniff the flowers...",

Click HERE for a link to Jason Walker @ FerrinGallery.com

ReObjectification: Photography

Photographers who use digital technology to examine image and object sources include collage style compositions by Lucy Feller and abstractioninsm through still lifes by Raymon Elozua.

Photo caption: Lucy Feller, Digital Photography

Click HERE for a link to Lucy Feller @ FerrinGallery.com

ReObjectification: Art

Exploring art by another artist by literally objectifying a 2D painting or source is how Mara Superior and Myungjin Kim approached ReObjectification, Kim through dutch still life painting and Superior through a New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg.

Photo Caption: Mara Superior, "Piggy Bankers", Detail

Click HERE for Mara Superior @ FerrinGallery.com

ReObjectification Continues ....

ReObjectification: ART + OBJECT
selected works of sculpture, photography and painting showing @

Art Chicago
April 30–May 3

The International Fair of Contemporary and Modern Art
preview: Thursday, April 29, 5–8
The Merchandise Mart, 12th Floor
Chicago, IL

The complete exhibition with works by all thirty artists in all media opens @

Ferrin Gallery
May 15–June 13
reception: Saturday, May 29, 4–6
437 North Street
Pittsfield, MA

Click HERE for link to ArtChicago

“Small Voices” May 4-August 13 at Whole Foods Market Bowery

2010-04-13T18:59:00.002-04:00

Joyce Manolo brought this to my attention. Looks awesome! Get thee down to the Bowery May 4 -- what else you got going on? Rock onward people - B

“Small Voices”
May 4-August 13, 2010

Click here for press release

Works by Community Word Project
Curated by Joyce Manalo
Presented by Fourth Arts Block (FAB)

Reception and Poetry Reading
Tuesday, May 4, 2010 / 6-8PM
Whole Foods Market Bowery
95 East Houston Street, 2nd Floor

Exhibition On View
ArtUp Scaffolding Bridge
The 70 E. 4th Street Cultural Center / b. Bowery and 2nd Avenue
M: 6 to Astor Place / R, W to 8th Street / F, V to 2nd Avenue

Fourth Arts Block (FAB) presents its latest ArtUp public art program. "Small Voices" is an exhibition by young artists from Community Word Project (CWP) of poems and murals on six panels mounted on the scaffolding bridge. Whole Foods Market Bowery will host an opening reception, which is free and open to the public. The opening will include performances by young poets and an informal collaborative poetry workshop.

"Small Voices" is the first ArtUp exhibition that displays the work of bi-lingual student artists, connecting the exhibit to the East Village's rich Latino artistic heritage. Starting with small communities - a classroom, a block - CWP and FAB are using the power of art to bring children's imagination and dreams to the attention of the greater world.

CWP is a New York City based arts-in-education organization that seeks to increase the literacy and leadership of at-risk public school youth by integrating creative expression and community-building into their classroom curricula.

Note:

CWP will be hosting their 10th annual benefit, "Writing Our Future" at 6:30 on April 20th at the National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South. The Benefit will feature performances of original poetry by students from Community Word Project class arts residencies. Special guests: Poet Major Jackson and actors Dion Graham and Tristan Wilds.

To purchase tickets, click here.

Image: Community Word Project / 2nd Grade Classes, PS 132 Washington Heights, 48" x 60" mural (detail)
ArtUp is generously supported by the 70 East 4th Street Cultural Center, future home of Downtown Art and Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Company.

Billy Childish at White Columns - artnet Magazine

2010-04-13T11:26:00.000-04:00

Billy Childish at White Columns - artnet Magazine

Lauren Collins profiles aerial photographer George Steinmetz in the April 19 New Yorker

2010-04-12T08:22:00.006-04:00

My old pal Cappi Williams over at The New Yorker's PR office flew this my way and my first thought was 'who hasn't lashed him or herself to dangerous flying things for purposes of photographic exploration at one time or another?' If you're like me this article will inspire memories of endless hours spent hanging precariously from power lines waiting for the utility crew to cut you down.

----------------

George Steinmetz’s Aerial Alchemy
In “Angle of Vision” (p. 70), Lauren Collins travels to the Sahara to profile George Steinmetz, a freelance photographer famous for his exploration and aerial photography. Steinmetz takes the majority of his photographs using a motorized paraglider, which he refers to as a “flying lawn chair.” Collins writes, “He never flies for fun, but the apparatus has a back-yardish feel: picture a man with a leaf blower on his back, encircled by a metal hula hoop, dangling at altitudes of up to six thousand feet under a tomato-colored beach umbrella.” Steinmetz told Collins, “I’m a photographer who flies, not a pilot who takes pictures.” The paraglider gives him a unique advantage. Collins explains, “Cruising above a field of fairy circles in Namibia a few years ago, he spotted some grazing zebra. ‘I was able to herd them where I wanted them to be, like it was a rodeo,’ he recalled.”

Tibetan Artist Gade

2010-04-06T22:41:00.002-04:00

More...

EpiscoDisco's 1st Birthday Celebration

2010-04-06T20:52:00.002-04:00

Looks wild. If you're in San Fran Bertie, Jean and Eve want you to check out EpiscoDisco's first birthday bash. Here's the email they sent me about it. Be there!

Paradise Now and the Reverend Bertie Pearson present EpiscoDisco's 1st Birthday

For EpiscoDisco's one-year anniversary we're bringing out the big guns. Both fervent Michael Jackson fans and raging waterfalls star in Dianna Dilworth's short film "Holy Water" followed by the dark acoustic musings of Emily Jane White, all under one gothically vaulted roof

EpiscoDisco
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
From 7PM to 10PM

DJ's, Musical Performance, Art
www.episcodisco.com

Grace Cathedral
1100 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
415.869.7817

www.gracecathedral.org

The Art

For EpiscoDisco's one-year anniversary celebration we will we break out the 40-foot screen for the debut of "Holy Water", a short film from the talented Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker and journalist, Dianna Dilworth. As a follow-up to her award-winning documentary chronicling the idolatry of Michael Jackson fans during his 2004-5 court trials, "Holy Water" juxtaposes images of altars memorializing his death with personal footage from her own wedding ceremony as well as the natural sanctity of a waterfall in the Swiss Alps. These provocative pairings invite the viewer in as a voyeur to sacred spectacles and intimate ceremony, revealing the rippling degrees to which images and objects become agents of reverence and worship.

The Music

Folk singer/songwriter Emily Jane White was raised in Fort Bragg, California, a seaside town nestled in the misty, secluded woodland of the Mendocino Coast where old men tell stories about logging and young girls dream of San Francisco. Now Bay Area-based after stints in Santa Cruz and Bordeaux, White is known the world over for her smokey, rich vocal timbre that makes the perfect accomplice to her cyclical guitar lines, swooning strings and pitch-dark, Poe-like lyrics that are spun with the tenderness of a lullaby. While comparisons to contemporaries Cat Power and Hope Sandoval are frequent, White's owes musical debt to the sultry rustlings of the classic blues legends like Billie Holiday. Hear her agonize the archways at 9pm.

Paradise Now

Theology, music and art all share the aspiration to transcend the borders that language cannot. Paradise Now is a nondenominational curatorial duo that is exploring this commonality by showcasing artists who engage the awe-inspiring space within Grace Cathedral through multi-media installations and performing arts. Paradise Now is Eve Ekman and Jean Cooney.

EpiscoDisco

Recently voted one of 7×7 Magazine's 250 Things To Do In San Francisco Before You Die and anointed "unusual fun" by the SF Chronicle, EpiscoDisco is a monthly event where community congregates to enjoy contemporary art installations, live performance, drinks and DJ'ed music at Grace Cathedral. EpiscoDisco is hosted on one Saturday of each month by Reverend Bertie Pearson and curatorial duo Paradise Now.

Thank You

Thank you to all who wrote in describing your experiences with EpiscoDisco in order to keep the event going after February's
"grafitti incident". While all of your responses were candid and personal, a similar message of compassion and support emerged - ultimately convincing the Diocese that the event was too extaordinary to let go over one dirty apple. And our gratitude goes out to all attendees of past and future 'Discos, whose very presence continue to make this event strange and wonderful.

Bertie, Jean and Eve

Felicia van Bork: Water Music -- March 15 - April 30, Elizabeth Ross Gallery, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC

2010-04-04T13:23:00.003-04:00

I had the honor of working with Felicia during residencies at the Fine Art Work Center in Provincetown. There's still time to catch this show at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. Spring time in NC is awesome anyway, so take the drive! Congratulations Felicia!

________________________________________
Thursday, April 15th at 2:30 p.m.
Please join us for an artist talk and panel,
followed by a public reception celebrating the opening of
________________________________________

Water Music
a solo exhibition of monotypes by

Felicia van Bork

Evolution’s Secret 3, 2010, monotype, 22” x 30”

Artist talk and panel: Thursday, April 15, 2:30 p.m., Overcash Building, Room 220, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC.

Reception: Elizabeth Ross Gallery, Thursday, April 15, 4:00 p.m., Overcash Building, Central Piedmont Community College, Charlotte, NC.

Exhibition dates: March 15 - April 30, 2010, Ross Gallery hours: Monday-Thursday: 10am-2pm

http://sensoria.cpcc.edu/event/20>

http://www.feliciavanbork.com>

Ends and Means A group exhibition at Lennon, Weinberg April 8 - May 28, 2010

2010-04-04T11:10:00.003-04:00

Works by : Roy Dowell, Richard Kalina, Harriet Korman, Mary Lucier, Melissa Meyer, Jill Moser, Stephen Mueller, Peter Soriano, Denyse Thomasos and Stephen Westfall --

Above: Roy Dowell, Untitled #972, 2008/2009, 16 x 11-1/2", acrylic and collage on illustration board

Lots of hard edge, interesting color work, looks like a cool semi-molten slab of contemporary abstraction. Checkit -

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.
514 West 25th Street
New York, NY 10001
T 212.941.0012
F 212.929.3265
Tuesday - Saturday, 10-6 info@lennonweinberg.com

"The Hidden Wisdom X The Arsenal" at The Knitting Factory, Brooklyn

2010-01-26T21:07:00.001-05:00

My friend Dan Bina shot this my way and I want you to make this show. It's at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn. Yeah, the artists are working out all kinds of new venues. Support this effort and dig on some awesome work by some ass-kicking up-and-comers and damned-near-already-arriveds. Rocking it in the studio man, I'm with you Dan and crew, keep it coming bro - peace out B

------------------------------------------------------

Artists get creative and find alternative venues in New York's changing art economy. At the Knitting Factory's Brooklyn location, diverse works will line the walls giving fresh sights in the month of February. Organized by the folks at The Hidden Wisdom and The Arsenal.

THE HIDDEN WISDOM x THE ARSENAL:
FREE RANGE
February 2, 2010
8pm
Knitting Factory
361 Metropolitan Avenue
Borough of Brooklyn

Featuring:
Matthew Alesi, Dan Bina, CL. Bradley, Dan Cassaro, Cornrow Rider, Bon Duke, Brian Gonzalez, Erik Herter, Michael Intile, Mamiko Kushida, AJ Mapes, Amelia M. Miller, Marie-Yan Morvan, Augustus Nazarro, Steven Vega

Music:
Yonathan x Elizabeth
Sodafine x Franny & Roey

Presented by The Hidden Wisdom and The Arsenal
In association with Thunder

http://www.hiddenwisdom.info/index.php?/upcoming/upcoming/

http://bk.knittingfactory.com/event-details/?tfly_event_id=4689

www.danbina.blogspot.com

http://artblognyc.blogspot.com/

Rollstone Studios, a cooperative artist-run studio and gallery in downtown Fitchburg, Massachusetts

2009-12-13T19:07:00.002-05:00

My good friend Sally Cragin just broke the news about Rollstone Studios and its 9 resident artists currently rocking downtown F-burg Mass. If you want to check the latest from Anne Giancola, Camilo Neves, Ema Kilroy, Helen Obermeyer Simmons, Jan Queijo, Jana Morgan, Jeffu Warmouth, Leslie MacPhail, Reverend BLAMO, Rowena Bowman or from Sally Cragin herself, better high-tail it on over to 633 Main St., Fitchburg, MA 01420, or get out your cell phone and dial 978-348-ART1 for more info.

Thanks for the info Sally -- Good luck Rollstone Artists!

Every Episode of Flash Forward

2009-11-25T13:37:00.002-05:00

Here's every episode of Flash Forward:

"Why are you sawing your hand off?"

"Because in my Flash Forward I saw myself beating myself to death with this hand. And it hurt really, really badly!"

"But in my Flash Forward I beat you at Wimbledon, and that's your tennis hand! Now I'll never beat you at Wimbledon!"

"I get it now... Losing to you was why I beat myself to death with this hand!"

"Why oh why did we get this Flash Forward experience?"

"I DON'T KNOW!"

And.... SCENE

Riders on the Train -- a group show at Axiom Gallery, Boston

2009-11-06T12:39:00.003-05:00

Nance Davies' latest group show launches at Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media November 10, with a reception November 13, 6-9 pm - Here's the venue information, followed by a project description from the Riders on the Train website. Don't let this one pull out of the station without you!

----------------------

AXIOM Gallery

141 Green Street
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130

617-676-5904

Gallery Hours -- During Exhibitions only: Wednesdays, Thursdays 6-9 pm and Saturdays 2-5 pm

Press Contact -- 617-676-5904

Directions
AXIOM Gallery is located in the ground floor level of the Green Street Subway ("T") station on the Orange Line - Outbound to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain / corner of Amory and Green Streets. By Public Transportation

Take OrangeLine Outbound to Green Street, AXIOM Gallery is located in the ground floor level of the Green Street Subway.

Get Directions Using : Google Maps

----------------------

CONCEPT

In recent years, the ideas concerning ‘what art can be, where it should exist, how it should by made – by whom and for whom – have undergone radical changes. We no longer expect to find art only in museums and galleries, made by and consumed by an informed elite. Today art is off the wall, under the bridge, on the river, and in the soup and conversation! Art moves, morphs, divides and multiplies as people from diverse walks of life, contribute to and inform our cultural production. Often artist and audience 'fuse' for purposes of creating a more authentic and empathetic voice. [1]

The contemporary ‘T’ rider exists as a part of an atypical community shaped by social contingency, time / place fluctuations and indeterminate recurrences - a community transported by train and thought. This project does not assume to create community but rather to make visible, through writing, a kind of ‘already-existing-community’. Participating 'T Riders' are the collective makers of the work. [2]

SITE [ trainSPACE & consciousnessSPACE ]

The project site is layered space. Specifically – the space of the train [literal / material] and the space of human consciousness [virtual]. Riders navigate and negotiate this shared space through carefully coded behavior – often retreating to private thought. Unlike car and bike navigation, which require concentrated skill and attention, this kind of travel allows the rider a temporary suspension in time and space - an interval of unscheduled consciousness. The project seeks to frame this temporary space as a place of potential, generative thought – a fluid place for imagination - a collective nervous system. [3]

Finally, it is hoped that the creative work offered by the riding community will offer an authentic, aggregate, definition of the train riding experience through a diversity of perspectives – work that reflects and critiques the conditions of this mobile space where the rider is - at once - transported and transporting.

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT and
HOW TO SUBMIT

email: ridersonthetrain@comcast.net

"In Praise of Forces of Nature" -- a poetry reading at Chelsea Art Museum Saturday November 7

2009-11-03T20:45:00.002-05:00

My good friend Jeff Wright just shot me an email - clear your calendar for Saturday afternoon, kids. This is a 'Can't Miss' situation. Rock onward - B

-------------------------------
Chelsea Art Museum invites you to the 8th Poetry Reading in Praise of Forces of Nature with Donald Kuspit, James Mann, Cynthia Nadleman, Carter Ratcliff, Raphael Rubenstein and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

In conjunction with a solo show of paintings by Marlene Tseng Yu
FREE ADMISSION
Saturday, November 7 at 4pm
Chelsea Art Museum, 556 West 22nd Street @ 11th Avenue

Bill Gusky -- New Paintings

2009-10-24T12:15:00.005-04:00

My website's updated. Check it out. Thanks - B

Feed the Beast -- 2009 -- acrylic on paper -- 10 x 14 inches

LISA LUDWIG: THE ART NEIGHBORHOOD at Jack the Pelican Presents

2009-10-20T07:58:00.001-04:00

This looks cool -- let me know how it goes, I'm locked in the studio 'til the holidays. Cheers - B

--------------------------------------------

Opening this friday
October 23, 7 - 9pm

LISA LUDWIG: THE ART NEIGHBORHOOD

Our art world is usually competitive and insecure and not very friendly or generous to outsiders, especially artists over 40. We indulge children, but we don't usually encourage their official participation. We don't even acknowledge old people who make art on weekends. And mostly, we judge each other and don't really have very much fun. (or maybe it's me?...)

Lisa Ludwig's version of it all is very different, and it's not just her. You're not going to believe the ambition of this project...

To read more, visit http://www.JackthePelicanpresents.com/ludwig.html

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

* Visit http://www.theartneighborhood.com
* Visit The Art Neighborhood Facebook fan page
* Visit the Jack the Pelican Facebook fan page
* Call Helene DuMenil, 917-499-6304

--------------------------------------
From Jack the Pelican Presents website...
--------------------------------------

Jack the Pelican is delighted to present Lisa Ludwig's "Art Neighborhood." It's about our neighborhood. But more, it's about building a neighborhood—a new and better one, for all of us.

SHANTYTOWN
This living and organically-evolving shantytown portrait of her/our community is ripe for the time (Hello Recession Creativity 101) and, for art people, a welcome respite from the nastiness of ourselves, without an ounce of cynicism. This is a show for everyone—literally, everyone is invited to participate. Come by and see for yourself how it just keeps growing and growing...

REALLY REALLY: YOU ARE WELCOME!
Ludwig has seeded the project with a dozen play-set situations and nearly fifty of her own action figures. School children, senior citizens and 'professional' artist collaborators have contributed another hundred. These are real people, mostly representing themselves, and in fantasy scenarios that put themselves in charge of their own destinies. ...And you're invited too—Visit theartneighborhood.com and find out how to make (or commission) your own. Everyone is welcome. (For people from afar, if you cannot be on hand to act out your character, there is a network of volunteers who can operate your action figure.)

SCHOOL WOKSHOPS
• Berkeley Carroll Middle School
• Good Shepherd Services at P.S. 32
• Oasis Art and Education Center

CONTEXT
Our art world is usually competitive and insecure and not very friendly or generous to outsiders, especially artists over 40. We indulge children but we don't usually encourage their official participation. We don't even acknowledge old people who make art on weekends. And mostly, we judge each other and don't really have very much fun. (...I'm hoping it's not just me.) Lisa's in a punk band and has been active as an artist in the W'burg underground for a long time. She's been making action figures for years, but never on this epic scale.

WHEN JACK THE PELICAN FELL IN LOVE WITH LISA LUDWIG
Some of you may be surprised how intimate and personal and fun Lisa Ludwig art play can be. In November of 2007, Jack the Pelican was delighted to receive a custom play set, reconstructing the scene of Guy Benfield's performance "Mother Door Spirit Level" that had taken place several days before at the gallery. All the key characters were there in miniature. The whole thing was reduced to its essence. Moving parts (and replacement components) allowed us to replay the performance over and over again, changing it up however we wanted. It was all in cardboard just like this, but it nailed the whole thing and all of us individually. (It too will be on display.)

MUTUAL RESPECT
Imagine that we're all eight-years-old again and we're still us, but we can do anything we want, so long as we respect the golden rule. That's what this is like—a giant, joyful play. Be nice to others. Let them be nice to you.

SOCIAL MEDIA
Every figure is clearly tagged to a real person for easy connection on Facebook. Like that one? How old are they? Right there in the gallery, look them up. Oh, it's Joshua... 10 years old, he wants to be an astronaut.

ALL PROCEEDS GO TO...
The artist's proceeds from commissioned art or art sales from this project go to Making Art Work, a special program of the Carter Burden Center for the Aging. Carter Burden Center for the Aging promotes the well-being of elderly residents through a broad array of direct social services and volunteer programs oriented to individual, family and community needs. Aging Artists are encouraged to continue with their artistic endeavors and we are proud to contribute to the center. Find out more about Carter Burden Center. http://www.burdencenter.org/

SPECIAL EVENTS
Special scenarios will unfold throughout the exhibition for action figures to express themselves. For specific dates and times, visit theartneighborhood.com

10/23 OPENING NIGHT
Premier of Lisa Ludwig's "Bella Ciao" takes place in the official Art Neighborhood Theater. Filmed by Lisa Ludwig and Craig Flanagin.
10/29 WEATHER FORECAST
An event for Facebook. Behind the scenes:
1) Collaborative work with Liz & Val on installation
2) Documented/Animated Collaboration with BoSul Kim
10/31 HALLOWEEN BALL
Noon till 4pm, come and make a costume for your action figure--Cause they're going to a Ball tonight!
11/7 PERFORMANCE
Performed by The Drunkard's Wife, 7pm
11/13 TEARS AND GOODBYES
Closing reception. Plans for the future...

SPECIAL THANKS TO
Rakian Nomura, Shogun
and collaborators Liz & Val and Craig Flanagin

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit http://www.theartneighborhood.com
Or call Helene DuMenil, 917-499-6304

Visiting Provincetown? Stay at Heritage House

2009-09-06T08:40:00.003-04:00

P-Town's best-kept secret hides right in the middle of town, halfway down Center Street and three-fifths of the way to Heaven. Your hosts Lynn Mogell and Sarah Peake have turned a magnificent old captain's house into sparkling-clean, airy and well-lit luxury at rates any deck hand could afford. Complimentary breakfast might include fresh-baked cranberry muffins, Portuguese pastries, sliced melon and other light tasty delights to set your day off right.

Autumn's coming, the crowds are leaving and the time's about right for your Indian Summer visit to Cape Cod. Give Lynn a call today to make it happen.

Heritage House
7 Center Street
Provincetown, MA
508-487-3692
info@heritageh.com

Joanne Greenbaum: Hollywood Squares -- September 10 - October 31

2009-09-04T07:25:00.003-04:00

The excellent Joanne Greenbaum's sixth D'amelio-Terras solo exhibition drops September 10. I'm crazy about her work; for evidence of my Greenbaumist leanings see my previous post. Wish I could spend more time gushing about it but I'm humping my own groove here at the Fine Arts Work Center and time is precious. Congratulations Joanne! Keep on doing that voodoo that you do so well.

Image from D'amelio-Terras's website

Reid Stowe -- 1000 Days at Sea -- "Christmas Tree Effervescence"

2009-09-01T07:29:00.003-04:00

It's amazing to think that someone whose every waking moment is spent on some aspect of his own survival would have the time to make art. But art making seems to move forward even under extreme circumstances. The impulse to find meaning in the arrangement of objects and materials, in the generation of images, is apparently nearly as elemental as the survival instinct itself. See a number of historical artworks for examples.

If you'd had an experience similar to the one Reid recorded on August 20, you also might put the repairs and food-procuring on hold as you made some sort of record.

Day 850 - August 20, 2009

Wind S, 10 knots, Course NW, Speed 1 knot, Position 5*22n by 16*26w

Christmas Tree Effervescence

A few days ago before I dropped the mainsail we sailed through a night of the most amazing phosphorescence I have ever seen. Shortly after dark green lights around the schooner began flashing on and off. They were about six feet in diameter and they flashed very brightly and then slowly dimmed down. They flashed all around us as far out as I could see. Obviously the flashing lights were not caused by the schooner or our school of fish.

The lights were so bright that I tried to film them with the video camera, but once again the wonders of the sea escaped being captured by my technical devices. I knew I would have to share this in words and a painted image, so I started looking at it with the artist's mind. My limited frontal vision changed to a spherical omnipresent vision and my being spread out with it.

It was a soft silky night and all the stars twinkled in a dark velvet sky. I could feel the stars touching me. The green phosphorescence around the schooner made me feel as if I were sailing in a Christmas tree of effervescent flashing lights with neon decorative mobile fish swimming around and through me.

I knew the phenomena could end and I didn't want to miss a moment, but I had to cook and eat dinner. After dinner it was still there and I climbed to a higher vantage point to see the green flashing further out. As always this time of night my body gets tired and prayers begin.

I lay down naked on cushions in the cockpit and fell asleep only to wake up again and marvel at the magnificence and the prayers of thankfulness that go on and on.

Reid Stowe -- Zen Sailing

2009-08-03T18:20:00.004-04:00

Word comes from the deep blue sea that Reid Stowe has started a new art piece far from the sight of land. He's using an intriguing image to introduce the concept --

I'm guessing that the artwork above is made from a nautical chart from this or from one of his many previous voyages. The path it describes meanders in all directions. This is perfectly in keeping with Reid's description, which I'll excerpt here:

In the ancient orient, the story goes that when a man reached a certain age he was free to go on a 1000 day walk. This was his reward for a life of worldly duty. Now he could wander from town to town, into the nature or wherever he pleased. I often spoke of this story over the years as I tried to explain one aspect of the 1000 day trip I am on. I delved into many forms of spiritual knowledge and I kept Zen in mind.

A sailing writer called what I do "Hands off Sailing". That title is too mundane to describe such a hard won sacred act. I decided I must try to explain "The Art of Zen Sailing" and the steps I took to discover and learn. As I balanced my boats and learned to make them go where I wanted, I often used "Body English" the way a golfer uses body English to influence his golf ball. This is skill combined with an unstoppable urge to use invisible forces.

Read the entire entry at 1000days.net.

The artist has put his vessel under the control of wind and weather, influencing it only slightly through the movement of his body on board. It's a pure act, a performance streaming from a finely-tuned consciousness.

Don't settle here for the cliche of one's life as a vessel lost at sea, under control of the elements. That's way too Hemingway, way too embedded in the art historical narrative that Danto and others assure us is long past.

Consider the social identifiers that seem like an outer skin to you: your name, relationships with lovers and family members, your vocation, personal history, religion, preferences and so forth.

All of these are like a fairly idiosyncratic and somewhat beaten-upon twin-masted schooner, rolling across the waves of the South Atlantic. You need these identifiers to survive in any way that's meaningful to the rest of the world. They both invite people on board and also form a reasonable defense against the elements.

As solid and important as these socially-determined structures might seem, they aren't you; they're not who you are. Your essential being lies pure, radiant and glistening within. You can take charge, move this amalgamation of structures in the direction you desire, or you can force desire to take a back seat and allow the elements to control things and move these structures around.

This latter course requires a high degree of trust, the kind that comes from a deep-seated realization that the forces that course through your consciousness are the same ones that course through all of life, through the economy, the political sphere, through every element that touches you. They're the same forces influencing the sun, the atmosphere and the oceans, causing heat and cold, movement and calm, storm and silence.

Reid's Zen Sailing image shows his meandering course surrounded by thangka-like Buddhas or bodhisattvas. They appear as guides, each influencing the schooner's path. I also see them as guardians of a realm of security Reid has drawn himself, through his beliefs and, really, through pure faith. This small artwork is a reflection to me of the much larger one surrounding the artist, a kind of living mandala he's created on the high seas.

Is this the performance art of the new narrative?

Timothy Gaewsky -- Can You Dig It Too

2009-07-12T13:58:00.000-04:00

Newly-found art blog -- can you dig it, too?

Shunpikers -- an exhibit curated by RL Croft at School 33 Art Center, Baltimore August 7 - October 3

2009-07-09T21:57:00.002-04:00

My good friend Robin Croft invited me to participate in an exhibit in Baltimore. If you haven't Robin's website, you need to check it out. I've been a fan since stumbling upon his work some years back. I have no idea why we don't hear more about this intriguing sculptor.

At any rate the show's called Shunpiker, and it features Christine Hahn, Ken Huston, Janet Van Fleet and yours truly. I'll be showing some urethane pieces, aluminum cut-outs and drawings from the Channels series.

Here's a description of the show -- and if you're in Baltimore Friday night August 7, I hope you can stop by School 33.

Shunpiker is defined as one who travels the side roads, avoiding traffic and turnpikes.

In an effort to avoid cherry picking particular elements of artists' work to force-fit them into concocted themes, this exhibition attempts to restore the individual as the point from which all themes flow. It consciously aims to be "anti-thematic", so that the artists' individual journey is not sacrificed for the marketing strategy of a unified front. This proposition's somewhat reversed approach has been to invite underknown, veteran artists to exhibit their work, bringing with them all the arcane details of unique life paths. Since the deciding factor in selecting each artist unavoidably rests within the scope of this curator's tastes, the participants lean toward the conceptual rather than the retinal in their chosen media, favoring introspection and privacy over gnawing demands for self-promotion. This exhibition features mature artists tempered by a strong sense of individuality, who make a deliberate, noncommercial art in spite of our culture's increasing fascination with instant gratification and untried youth.

Lisa Call's blog "Make Big Art"

2009-07-05T23:25:00.004-04:00

This one's news to me. The post she titles "The Power of Responsibility" lays down the facts. Lisa's a highly successful artist, so I'll be studying her advice quite closely. I'd advise you to do the same.

Kat Payne

2009-07-03T11:08:00.002-04:00

Blew my mind to find out that one of Boston's funniest stand-up comedians keeps a blog. Twisted. Brilliant. Payne will assassinate you. Cool thing is the momentum's building. Get in early so you can say you knew her before she was on Comedy Central, before the HBO special, and before the NBC series.

Dig Nancy Ewart

2009-06-30T08:37:00.003-04:00

I like the voice of her writing.

Artists -- Get involved in the Benefit for Artist Nicole Gagne

2009-06-19T08:31:00.001-04:00

From the website:

Postcard show and sale of original postcard-sized pieces of artwork created by both emerging and established artists to benefit Nicole Gagne, a fellow artist seriously injured in a staircase collapse in LIC.

Artwork will be sold at $40 per piece. Artists who donate will get excellent exposure in a show in NYC, and collectors walk away with a great piece of original art. All funds raised will go to help Nicole with her immediate expenses.

Submission Deadline: July 23, 2009

For details clicky clicky --> http://benefitfornicole.blogspot.com/

Tim O'Donnell: "All that is art"

2009-05-11T13:47:00.002-04:00

My friend Tim O'Donnell passed me a link to his new online art project. Here's the blurb -- you need to check it out --

"Artist Tim O'Donnell has invited you to an online project. Each day Tim will post a 2-D work, photograph, and video during his spring residency on the Cape. It will be posted on the blog: All that is art."

The New Star Trek Movie

2009-05-09T08:19:00.008-04:00

JJ Abrams doesn't really love James Tiberius Kirk. He just keeps him hangin' on.

I'll tell you what I mean by that in a minute. But it bears noting that Motown's auto industry could learn a lot about making old models newly relevant from the way Abrams has taken Star Trek the Original Series and retooled it for an entirely new generation. And he did it without most of the usual cheap clip-on concepts that most screenwriters and directors have used this past couple decades:

Hip-Hop music
Characters who were originally boring now infused with dance funktasticness
Anyone on a skateboard or skateboard-like appliance
Background characters who look like cartoon characters or Muppets
Fart jokes, poop jokes, bathroom humor
Lots of swearing
Characters who originally ignored each other now sexually involved
Sassy characters who exude Jerry-Springer-audience-member attitude
Well-known comedians performing some version of their own schtick

Actually, Abrams does use one of the devices listed above, and it's a bit painful. I'm letting it slide for now; decide for yourself if it works.

It's almost, but not quite, as if Abrams had taken Roddenberry's development concept from the 1960's 'as is' and executed it using tons more cash -- the early Star Trek episodes filmed for $80,000 each, if I recall correctly from David Gerrold's book The Trouble with Tribbles -- and using early 21st-century cinema culture, referring now to cinematography and special effects in particular.

And it's even more than that. Star Trek the Original Series was developed at the end of the Modernist narrative, when great technological progress was mated with a strong faith in the ability of humankind to improve itself. The idea was, more or less, that we'd become better people as our technologies eradicated disease, starvation and war. There was a Utopian gleam, if not really a Utopian ambition, to the Modernist project. And The Original Series is a pure expression of that. This is a galaxy united in peace, with warring factions who still haven't picked up on the enlightenment making things difficult from time to time.

Well, Abrams literally blows away one of the supposedly most enlightened symbols of that Modernist world in Act I. It was quite unexpected for me, and I'm not going to blow it for you. At any rate, in doing so, Abrams hurled the entire Star Trek premise deep into the much more skeptical 21st century. And in my view he made the Star Trek premise his own.

The cast he's chosen is quite strong. Chris Pine does a convincing job owning the Kirk role, and he does it confidently enough to fling a few Shatnerisms along the way. Zach Quinto's Spock is just plain eerie in its semblance to the young Nimoy's version. I particularly enjoyed John Cho's Sulu; he pulls that role off with a seriousness that not only makes me buy into it completely, but really adds a lot to the atmosphere of the bridge. He's got military gravitas down. Karl Urban seems sometimes to be acting by the skin of his teeth as McCoy, and I'd almost fault the writing at those points where it gets too thin. And for my money Abrams plays the "I'm a doctor, not a _______" line a bit too much, reaching almost beyond the boundary of pastiche's Neutral Zone.

I have only two serious grips with the casting:

My first gripe would be with the vocal tones of key cast members. Yeah, sounds trivial. But Pine's voice has a bit of a boozed-out quality to it. Fine, he's depicted as a heavy drinker early on, but it takes the edge off of some lines in a way that I wish it wouldn't, because over all the writing's pretty good. I want to hear a more Shatnerian sonorousness. And he's always so dead-certain, too -- perhaps as would be the manner of a young hotshot, I suppose, but for me it peels away the illusion just a little bit.

Quinto's voice is just too high for Spock, in my opinion. Even when young, Nimoy's Spock got a lot of mileage out of vocal tone, or monotone. It's just a bit tough to hear excellent Spock lines from a voice that could have come out of any given member of an 80's boy band.

And my second gripe with the casting is that Abrams unknowingly touched the third rail of legitimate Star Trek productions. This law needs to be written in bold type at the top of every script he directs: In the Star Trek universe there is no Winona Ryder.

While I like the script a lot in its general thrust and in many of its particulars, things in my view got a bit out of control in several areas:

I'm seeing too much of Leonard Nimoy as the old Spock. The script's reasoning on this is fine. But Abrams flings him around a bit too much at the end for my taste. I'd have allowed his presence here to be a bit more enigmatic, a bit more ghostly. Also there are some pretty big plot holes surrounding the manner in which Nimoy first appears.
There are at least 3 times that we see Jim Kirk hanging on to the edge of an incredible drop. OK, we get it: "Kirk lives life on the edge." Move on.
The premise surrounding the bad guy character is pretty thin, in my view, although Eric Bana plays him quite effectively.

Kudos to make-up and special effects. It's the usual Star Trek Mardi Gras xenomorphology -- various combinations of wacky head on human body -- and while that always annoyed me from the point of view of realistic expectations, nowadays I consider it to be part of the brand.

It'll be interesting to see where Abrams takes the property now. Over all this was a very satisfying night at the flicks. So long as he can stay away from HoloDecks, Sherlock Holmes, Baseball, and all the crap that infested TNG -- and so long as Kirk never wears a baseball cap backwards, Spock stays off the skateboards and McCoy doesn't lay down any freestyle raps -- I should think this new iteration of Star Trek will play out well.

Nick Ferris and Rani Free: "Regrets" -- at Chacala May 13 - 14

2009-05-08T18:25:00.004-04:00

My friend Nick Ferris shot me an email about a big show he's cooking up with Rani Free -- read and be enlightened!

I’m putting on a charity exhibition next week in New York on the theme of “Regrets” which I wanted to invite you to. Since we launched the show’s website we’ve been inundated with people sending in anonymous regrets and it seems to have really struck a chord with people.

Myself and the other artist, Rani Free, have put this altogether in our spare time over the last 8 weeks, including taking all of the photography. The show comprises of photography, sculptures, video installations, audio installations, an interactive “Stage of Regrets”, a specially commissioned children’s book and also a Wall of Regrets where visitors can post their own regrets at the gallery. Myself and Rani will also be on NBC Nightly News Monday to promote the show. There are about 250 regrets in total featured in the show. The show’s website is www.nickandrani.com

It’s free to attend and proceeds from any picture sales go to charity.

Many thanks

Nick
212 224 3507

More details are below:

………………..

Regrets
Chacala
394 Broadway, 4th Fl
New York, NY 10013
The gallery is located in Tribeca on Broadway between Walker and White Street at: Chacala Art Gallery - 394 Broadway, 4th Fl, New York, NY 10013

(Canal St Station – N,Q, R, W and 6)

May 13th 12-5pm
May 14th 12-5pm

Regrets Exhibition Opening in New York May 13/14 2009.

A new art exhibition entitled “Regrets” is opening in New York for a limited run in May. The theme has captured the imagination of people worldwide with hundreds of visitors to the show’s site listing their anonymous regrets in life – from the deeply personal to the highly superficial.

As well as featuring regrets from the website, the exhibition captures the personal regrets of the artists through a variety of media including photography, poetry, short films, sculptures, audio and even a specially commissioned children’s book (Rated R). The exhibition also features interactive artwork - a stage of Regrets where people can overcome some of their regrets in life and a “Wall of Regrets” where visitors can list their own regrets whilst at the show. In total over 250 regrets (both positive and negative will be in the show)

Regrets is a fun, sad, challenging, heartbreaking and highly unique exhibition – where guests can be both voyeuristic and introspective.

The show is free to the public and proceeds from any sales go to support two very important charities - You Can Thrive and Sense.

Even more about Regrets:

“I regret not being myself. I hide myself. Always”

This is just one of the many regrets posted anonymously on the official website - nickandrani.com. As soon as the theme of this exhibition was announced, one thing became apparent - nearly everyone has regrets of some kind, but very few share them, with anyone. Until now.

As well as the unprecedented public feedback to the idea of Regrets, the artists have done a remarkable job in putting this exhibition together in their spare time in just two months. All of the works of art were produced in this timeframe. Once the show is over, a charity Regrets book will also be published that will capture all of the regrets listed both before and during the show.

If you would like more information or to talk directly to the artists, please contact us at nick@nickandrani.com. The exhibition is highly unique and for great cause, and we would appreciate all the support we can get.

The artists would like to thank the following people and companies for heir support, generosity and belief in Regrets:

Amanda Zizgen, JustCalmDown.com, Clifford Endo, Lenny Zinnanti, Rich Strait, StockChoiceToday.com, Madame X

Please note all proceeds go to some very worth causes. The two charities supported are:

You Can Thrive! Foundation supports an innovative multi-tiered quality of life program to help alleviate unnecessary pain, disability, and psychosocial that often accompanies a diagnosis of cancer, and resurfaces after treatment or during extended living with disease.
Sense is the leading national charity that supports and campaigns for children and adults who are deafblind. It provides expert advice and information as well as specialist services to deafblind people, their families, carers and the professionals who work with them.
For more information about the artists please go to www.nickandrani.com
For press enquiries please contact Nick Ferris: nick@nickandrani.com

Nicholas Ferris
Group Publisher
emii.com
212 224 3507

Reid Stowe - The Oceanic Heart Part 2

2009-05-08T15:28:00.005-04:00

Reid Stowe, The Oceanic Heart -- 2009 --

GPS markers on Google Maps describing a heart-shaped path 2,600 miles in circumference

Considering all the problems he's had to deal with alone on his twin-masted schooner, artist Reid Stowe's Texas-plus-sized conceptual piece is a triumph.

Check this latest entry from day 745 on 1000days.net:

It seems perhaps bad news has replaced our search for the miraculous and our human myths, and I am left to think we are an intellectual society in fear, with many suffering a sense of personal meaninglessness. Those who went to our website and looked at our Google map may have been surprised I am now completing a giant heart with my course in dedication to Soanya and as a gift to the world.

Stowe has stepped off the civilization-sanitized plain most Americans inhabit, where a meal is a few microwave minutes away and distractions abound.

He's dropped back deeper, to a level not usually experienced by other-than-tribal people in this hemisphere, at least not since when -- the seventeenth century? And it saturates his writing, which reminds me of John of the Cross, "The Cloud of Unknowning," and others who have sojourned long in a place where each continued moment of life seemed like a gift.

The thing is, he always sounded this way, even in writings before the 1000 Days voyage.

I've come to believe that the things you learn in your early 20's are the ones that stay with you for the rest of your life. During those years of his life, Stowe was criss-crossing the Atlantic in small sailing vessels, often solo. He spoke to me once of the way you become one with your ship -- drifting off to sleep and suddenly sensing something that needs attention high up on a mast.

Long weeks alone on the sea, your mind wrapped up in survival moment by moment, facing storms of lightning, wind and rain, and also of doubt, and yet living through all of them: there's no way that that isn't going to affect your outlook. In my opinion it was highly transformative.

Stowe learned the mystic's appreciation for life and the universe not through books, or at the feet of a guru, or because it was a really cool fad. He really didn't even try to learn it in the first place. It came to him through protracted, sometimes gruelling day-to-day experience. And it never left him.

Unlike so many similar gestures made in irony or with hypocrisy, this Oceanic Heart is real. The only question remaining in my mind is can the world accept it?

Verena Dobnik / Associated Press article published this past May 3 on Reid Stowe's "1000 Days" voyage

2009-05-07T17:51:00.003-04:00

Here's a snippet:

Also monitoring Stowe’s travels is Charles Doane, editor-at-large of Sail magazine. “I check his positions every day,” he says.

Already, Stowe “has set the record of the longest nonstop, unsupplied voyage at sea,” says Doane, adding that proof the schooner has not touched land comes from a GPS satellite system tracking the voyage, along with regular photos and videos posted on the Web.

“I want to inspire people to follow their dreams,” Stowe says. And in fact, the voyage serves as a vicarious adventure for some young virtual sailors — second-graders at a Virginia school whose teacher, Mindy Morrison, wrote to the wandering mariner that his Web site was helping them locate continents and oceans, making geography “more tangible and more importantly, FUN!”

On the newspaper's blog one of the commenter's left something that really resonates with me, partly I think from having worked with Reid all those years ago:

As I try to imagine the perspective of Reid Stowe as he sails into the fringe of our worlds, I find myself surrounded with images of classic adventure tales from my childhood; like The Little Prince by Saint-Exupery, telling the story of a lonely boy from another planet who fell in love with a mysterious rose, or the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor of the Thousand and One Nights who goes to sea to repair his fortune. I hear sounds of Rimsky-Korsakovs Scheherazade and remember how I used to fantasize about what would do when I grow up.

Reid Stowes quest is profoundly idealistic and makes a point about life and human nature.

Can I get an 'amen,' somebody?

Read the article -

Matt Sardinia

2009-04-26T16:32:00.008-04:00

I found out about Matt Sardinia while cruising the social news sites. Call the influences -- for me it looks like science fiction, robotics, movie posters --

Matt calls himself an artist and illustrator. Illustration now is such a broad field, and for me anyway, there's a lot of overlap with, in many cases, only the bogey of 'artist's intent' to discern if a work is 'fine art' or 'illustration'.

There's definitely been art in NYC galleries over the past decade that's highly influenced by illustration of various sorts-- magazine illustration from the 40's and 50's, science fiction paperback covers, sci-fi magazines from the mid-20th-century. We're doing a lot of ransacking of the past century. I think Matt's onto something. He's a young guy so he's got a lot of time to work out the kinks.

For some reason this one reminds me of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion animation. Go figure.

See more at Matt Sardinia's website.

Reid Stowe: The Oceanic Heart

2009-04-21T17:41:00.005-04:00

Today was day 729 for Reid Stowe out in the vast Pacific. He shot me an email and I wanted to pass it along -- it's called the Oceanic Heart, and it's a drawing of a heart hundreds of miles across, made with his schooner and plotted by GPS and satellite. He refers to it as a 'gift to his loved ones and the world.'

Artworks like this intrigue me in a kind of ticklish way -- ticklish I suppose because they don't fit purely and easily into any category of art or art-making. They're largely conceptual, living in the mind pretty much like any emotion or memory. And yet the means for creating them is heavy, vulgar and material. See for example Jeremy Woods' GPS drawings -- Woods has been at it for quite a while and has made a real name for himself. You have to travel to make these things, and even if you're on foot, you've got to bring things along: equipment, food, water, clothing. Hence the materiality that must accompany the concept that functions as the main part of the piece.

Reid's Oceanic Heart drawing, like the Sea Turtle and Dolphin drawings before it: layers of complication make its creation all the more interesting to me. Instead of walking about or driving on dry land, he's got to deal with ocean currents and winds that might not always favor the path he wants to take. The main piece of equipment, the schooner-as-stylus, is subject to all sorts of breakdowns, each of which must be dealt with by hand and ingenuity, using whatever is available. And making all of this even more complicated is that he's working completely alone.

The Oceanic Heart combines Reid's almost ridiculous danger and solitude with the kind of cliche'd gesture usually made by young naive lovers, carved in trees along with the tacit or written suggestion of 'forever' that both know but won't admit is tongue-in-cheek. Funny thing is, I think Reid means it.

Here's the last part of his email to me -- see if you don't agree:

Humbly I proceed because the schooner is worn out and anything could break and the sea sweeps away the plans of many men. My plans could be swept away. Rather than keep it secret incase I fail, I am taking a chance and sharing so we can all create the Heart of the Ocean together.

UConn's Undergraduate Student Government voted to move Randall Nelson's art to "a more non-public area."

2009-04-16T14:10:00.012-04:00

Hard on the heels of my last post about Randall Nelson's controversial work and the treatment it's getting at a university comes an article by Katherine Smith in UConn's Daily Campus Online Edition, a large piece of which I'll excerpt here:

After a heated debate last night, the Undergraduate Student Government passed a position of statement regarding an art display in the Homer Babbidge Library some felt was controversial.

The statement called for an art showcase by Randall Nelson to be moved to a more non-public area. Nelson's art in question includes a caged brown bird hung from a noose with the phrase "some bird get what they deserve" etched in glass over the caged bird. The other piece is an obelisk soldier's monument with various homophobic slurs of graffiti across it.

The display was scheduled to be taken down at the end of the semester anyway.

Many senators were quick to agree with the resolution, claiming the pieces to be obscene and offensive.

"This isn't just offensive…if you walk through the library and you're gay and you see the word fag you're thinking that's an attack on my character," said Multicultural and Diversity Senator Mary Lorenz. "These aren't offensive…they're attacks."

According to the statement of position, USG senators felt the art was homophobic and racist.

"How would you like to be remembered as the school with the birds hanging from nooses?" said Mansfield Apartments Senator Donald Richard.

As Randall has explained, the bird 'got what it deserved' because it's an invasive species from England, and was responsible for the displacement of many native Connecticut species. This obvious metaphor for the displacement of Native Americans, and the guilt of those who did the displacing, was clearly lost on the student government, whose members instead preferred a much more simplistic interpretation: that the artwork represents the murder of a brown human because the bird's feathers are brown.

In my opinion, such a simplistic approach to art is really not worthy of university students. But all that aside, let's suppose for a moment that the USG is somehow correct, and Randall Nelson is showing us a metaphor for an African-American becoming the victim of racism. Haven't similar subject come up in other works of art -- literature, music, theater, cinema?

When Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, was he trying to further racism against African-Americans? Was Steven Spielberg promoting anti-semitism in producing Schindler's List?

In these works hatred and intolerance are presented in sometimes gruesome detail. But the context and structure of literature and cinema make it plain that Twain and Spielberg aren't siding with the evil they portray.

Just to be clear, what I'm pointing out is the fact that the presence of an ugly act in an artwork of any kind is by no means an indication of the author's approval of that ugly act.

Visual art is often more challenging than literature or cinema, because it doesn't tell you through its dimensions -- book thickness, movie duration -- how long it takes to get the full message.

In a sculpture or painting the dimensions of character arc and story development must be dissected, compressed. They only unfold with time, consideration, and most importantly of all, openness.

In literature we talk about the willing suspension of disbelief, which is predicated on a kind of trust the reader gives the author at the outset that resolution will be provided by the last page, no matter what mayhem ensues. A similar suspension and a similar trust -- a similar openness -- is also required to appreciate visual art, particularly if the work in question is challenging.

Here's an example:

Winslow Homer's 1899 painting The Gulf Stream: is this painting...

a. confirmation that Homer was a racist because of its clear and obvious depiction of a black man mere moments away from being torn apart by a school of sharks?

b. a dramatic depiction of a terrifying situation that Homer wouldn't have approved or wished on anyone, but which was known to sometimes occur?

Ms. Smith's article continues:

"Sometimes artists cross the line but Babbidge isn't the Met or the MoMA [Museum of Modern Art]," said Commuter Senator Jason Abbott. "There are better places [for Nelson's art], it doesn't need to be in such a public place."

"This is the most controversial issue we've ever had to deal with," said College of Agricultural and Natural Resources Senator John Hogan.

Free speech is sometimes challenging. That's the point. In a free-speech environment all ideas are up for examination. Free speech in all its aspects was partly responsible for making America a world leader in the arts and sciences.

Of what use is free speech if it's only permitted in major art institutions?

It seems a shame to me that in the context of an American university -- and Connecticut's flagship university, no less -- the student body designed to provide experience in leadership and governance chose to restrict free speech, not based on an actual, clear and present offense to liberty or the well-being of others, but on the basis of a perceived offense arising from a rather obvious misinterpretation.

Perhaps these conscientious students will give Randall Nelson a chance to explain his work to them in person, prior to any movement of his exhibition. They may find good reason to reconsider their position statement.

"Monoprints of Surgical Scars" by Ted Meyer -- May 4 – June 30, NYU Langone Medical Center

2009-04-16T00:41:00.003-04:00

Ted Meyer sent me the email below about his monoprints of surgical scars, which will be on view at NYU Langone Medical Center.

For all three of my regular readers, you'll recall I'd mentioned in a previous post that I thought the concept of monoprints from physical scars *might* trivialize the experience of trauma associated with deep physical scarring, and hoped for feedback from people who had seen the work in person. No one really took me up on it, but instead what I got were in some cases ten hits a day of people looking up information on the show.

It's clear to me that Ted's tapped into something that resonates with people. I'm hoping to see the exhibition below in mid-June. Check it out yourself if you're in the city. Like the saying says, "Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong."

Good luck, Ted!

---------------------------

I will be showing a smaller selection (12 pieces) of this scar work at NYU Medical School Gallery.

Everyone is welcome to come to the opening

Monoprints of Surgical Scars
by Ted Meyer
May 4 – June 30, 2009
NYU Langone Medical Center
550 First Avenue
Smilow Gallery, adjacent to Ehrman Medical Library
Please join us for artist’s lecture and
opening reception on Wednesday, May13
6:00 – 7:30pm
sponsored by Ehrman Medical Library For more information:
http://library.med.nyu.edu/library/libinfo/events

Landfill Art

2009-04-13T21:40:00.002-04:00

My good friend Robin Croft sent me this link along with some notes:

Bill,

Thought you might be interested in this. I participated and one of my "wattle walls" is on the site. I made it clear to Ken Marquis, a very kind and well meaning gentleman, businessman, frameshop/gallery owner in Wilkes Barre, that my work has almost nothing to do with environmental concerns, though made from mostly recycled materials. He was inviting anyway, and I need to find meaningful exposure somewhere. Your latest "sculptural" efforts might find an outlet with this. Just passing it along.
--Robin

Here's the email Robin forwarded from Ken Marquis -- check it out and if you're interested, get involved:

Hello Landfill Artists,

As a result of the global art community embracing the Landfillart Project, my life is totally consumed. I am not complaining...I am exuberant about the project and find myself going to sleep and waking up thinking about it!!

There are now almost 500 artists involved covering all fifty states of the United States & forty-six countries. Artists from Switzerland, Suriname, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, Chile and Serbia have recently signed on.

A number of artists have mentioned that they are particularly proud to be a part of the largest artist initiative ever!! Over 1,000 artists worldwide will have worked on this project of re-claiming, re-cycling and re-purposing.

"Our" website is updated at least twice weekly to add the latest completed Landfillart Projects.

If you know of a fellow professional artist that you feel could enrich and embrace our project, please feel free to pass along the website www.landfillart.org and have them contact me. Please have them mention your name for immediate credibility!

A sincere "thank you" for your participation!

Connecticut Wilderness: Sculpture and Mixed Media Installations by Randall Nelson at Homer Babbidge Library Stevens Gallery and West Alcove

2009-04-13T20:52:00.004-04:00

My good friend Randall Nelson called late this afternoon to direct my attention to his exhibition currently at UConn's Homer Babbidge Library.

You may recall Randall's earlier experiences that developed from t he response to sculptures he made that featured road-killed birds. Ridiculous as that response was, and as hot as the water was that Randall was forced to cook in with a veritable alphabet soup of government agencies, well -- any ordinary rational artist would have gone into painting duck stamps or whittling tribal flutes. But Randall is no ordinary artist, and maybe he's not rational, either.

Or maybe he is rational; in fact he certainly possesses greater sense than the legislators who authored and passed inane laws that say it's OK for an ordinary Connecticut citizen to kill starlings and sparrows, but it's a criminal offense to pick a dead starling up off the road, or for a pest control company to transfer ownership of exterminated birds.

Regardless, things are a-cooking at UConn, thanks to Connecticut's controversial avian cadaver colorer. But before I get into that, here's Randall's statement about the show, as pulled from UConn's website:

“Connecticut Wilderness,” says Randall Nelson, “is an oxymoron that refers to the sense of confusion and ambiguity that prevails in our lives, and that I try to portray in my artwork through multi-layered meanings and unusual visual imagery.”

Ten of the fifteen pieces in this show are recent. “In some ways,” Randall says, “these new pieces are more difficult to create than my carved pieces. Many of them deal with abstract or social concepts--world hunger, morality, family obligations, guilt and personal responsibility--that would be almost impossible to do as woodcarvings.”

There's a dry humor that threads its way through those snippets of thought, a humor that was abundant in our conversation. And, let's face it, what sane adult can work with dead birds without laughing at least a little?

Some of the controversy now brewing over his work at UConn seems to stem from the college culture. Here are some notes from an email Randall sent me this evening.

"...it seems like anyone who walks in the door there is able to have input into which pieces can go into the show, and where they can be sited. The Vice-Provost for Student Affairs rejected one of the pieces, called Choices, because she said it is illegal to offer "unsupervised food" anywhere on campus, since it could be tampered with, then a student could decide to eat some of the art and get sick and the University would be in trouble."

You can't write gags this funny. Here's the sculpture in question, which is pulled from UConn's website:

So what the Vice-Provost for Student Affairs wants you to believe is that someone will walk up to this piece in the context of an art exhibit, pop off one of those translucent lids and eat the sculpture.

Now, I realize that not all UConn students are terribly bright. They're not all bound for stellar careers in the medical, dental or legal professions. Perhaps the VProvost is thinking of the UConn students that set fire to cars, or kill people while driving drunk, when he or she expresses a concern that some UConn students might like to eat the artworks.

But, people, if we base our entire world on the lowest, most slack-jawed, knuckle-dragging contingent, then art doesn't even come into the equation. In that lowest-possible-denominator world there's no time or inclination for intellectual engagements. There's only the dogged pursuit of the next idiotic entertainment, the next excuse to get drunk or high, the next morsel of flesh to pound one way or another to alleviate the groaning animal desires.

If the Vice-Provost really believes UConn is a microcosmic Idiocracy, maybe he or she is in the wrong job at the wrong place and time. Or, maybe UConn really is a much more animalistic place than I'd ever imagined.

Randall's emailed notes continue:

Most of the concerns are of this nature, silly complaints that are all based on the possibilities of lawsuits or insurance problems. Even the security guards have been able to demand changes in my displays.

Security guards calling the shots on artwork. Who'da thunk it?

There are other controversies going on with this work, but unlike some controversial work, its value lies in the fact that it's rich, challenging and compelling -- not to mention well worth your time.

Connecticut Wilderness: Sculpture and Mixed Media Installations by Randall Nelson
March 16 - May 15, 2009
Homer Babbidge Library Stevens Gallery and West Alcove
369 Fairfield Way
Storrs, CT 06269
(860) 486-2518
See the hours they're open here.

The Idea of North -- Cyrilla Mozenter and Michael Brennan at 210 Gallery opening April 18

2009-04-09T22:56:00.003-04:00

My friend and former professor Cyrilla Mozenter just shot me an email about this upcoming show with Michael Brennan at 210 Gallery in Brooklyn. Check it out and see if you can make the opening -- it sounds awesome! Photo above from Cyrilla's show More Saints Seen at the Aldrich Museum.
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The Idea of North

Michael Brennan - Painting
Cyrilla Mozenter - Sculpture

210 Gallery
210 24th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11232
718.499.6056

Opening Reception: Saturday April 18 3-7

Hours: Fri-Sun 12-6 or by appointment
R Train to 25th Street, Brooklyn

Sholem Krishtalka at Jack the Pelican Presents

2009-04-09T14:21:00.004-04:00

My friend Helene DuMenil is pushing the vision now over at Jack the Pelican -- congratulations on the cool gig, Helene! Check out this email she sent me about Sholem Krishtalka's show that opens next Friday, April 17, and hit the opening if you can.

-----------------------------

Hello Bill,

I wanted to let you know of our next show with Sholem Krishtalka which will open on Friday April 17th. I am including his artist statement to this email, I hope you enjoy it and that you might join us for the opening.

Artist Statement:

The title of my current series of paintings is An Opera for Drella (after Lou Reed’s Songs for Drella). It is based on a bit of gossip that I came across concerning Andy Warhol: that Warhol wanted to befriend Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (who were dating at the time). He wondered why the pair were so stand-offish with him, and he asked the documentary filmmaker Emile De Antonio (known affectionately to the Factory crowd as Dee), who told him the awful truth: that Warhol was too gay, and the closeted art power couple feared that proximity to Warhol’s swishiness would ‘give them away,’ reveal their homosexuality to their milieu of dealers and collectors. I have created an opera out of this bit of gossip, a cycle of narrative paintings whose story of unrequited love unfolds as a series of tableaux and vignettes. It is an opera of looking but not touching, wanting but not having.

The Warhol in my paintings, as well as the Rauschenberg and the Johns (and the rest of the minor characters that make up my opera) have been cast from my friends. In addition to the surface narrative, these paintings are a mapping of my social circle, my community.
I avow the use of camp as the means and the end of my opera; camp provides a theoretical bridge between Warhol’s world and mine, a means to collapse and fold the iconic into my own personal vernacular, and also to project my persona onto larger public cosmologies. Generally speaking, my work is a deconstruction (or, perhaps more aptly, a reconstruction) of my own life; it is a document of my relationships, and an attempt to create a kind of philosophy of my queerness.
-Sholem Krishtalka

If I can answer any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Best,
Helene

Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 1121
718-782-0183
646-644-6756 (off-hours)
info@JackthePelicanPresents.com

"The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage" -- Rhizome at the New Museum

2009-04-09T14:17:00.003-04:00

My friend John Michael Boling over at Rhizome just sent me an email about an interesting project. What do you think?
--------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Bill,

I wanted to contact you and let you know about "The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage" a new initiative that we have launched in homage to one of the web's great memes, "The Million Dollar Homepage". Equal parts fundraiser, art collaboration, billboard, classified ad and community builder "The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage" aims to raise 50,000 dollars for Rhizome by selling 1,000,000 pixels of webspace at 5 cents per pixel.

The Webpage builds upon Rhizome's 13-year history as a community website dedicated to internet art, while providing important funds to a non-profit organization at a crucial time. Participants are able to promote an idea or project--be it art, an organization, a band, a blog, a store, etc-- at a multitude of tax-deductible price points and, at the same time, contribute to a collaborative picture that will remain live on the web in perpetuity as part of Rhizome's archive.

As with the original Million Dollar Homepage, the success of The Rhizome 50,000 Dollar Webpage relies on the involvement of individuals from every corner of the web. It will endure as a snapshot of art, design and collaboration in 2009 and, pixel purchase permitting, help stabilize and sustain a non-profit organization in a challenging economic climate.

Pixels are available for purchase until May 28th 2009, the night of Rhizome’s annual Benefit. On this date, the page will be locked and presented at the Benefit which will be held at the New Museum in New York. To purchase pixels, or check in on the progress of the site please visit http://www.rhizome.org/50k

I sincerely hope you will take the time to visit the site, spread the word, or donate some money and receive some tax-deductible promotion for your exploits!

Best Wishes,
John Michael Boling
Associate Editor & Special Projects Manager,
Rhizome at the New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212-219-1288 x 302
jm.boling@rhizome.org
http://www.rhizome.org

Reid Stowe's still at it - day 712 and apparently going strong

2009-04-05T08:50:00.005-04:00

He's been through some seriously hair-raising escapades on his now-solo voyage: running into a freighter, capsizing, repairs high up on a mast without a net, frequent storms and squalls. And he's sounding coherent and in-charge in his blog posts, although I still don't see the Mars simulator connection he recently returned to.

For me the 1000 Days project is much more interesting as a post-modern performance -- a strange, sometimes almost satirical echo of the savage, low-tech, man-versus-wild returning-to-the-primal feats of 20th-century explorers. Without the sexiness of highly visible new technologies or a celebrity at the helm, the 1000 Days voyage is incomprehensible to a highly materialistic world that's seen it all before and is far too wrapped up in its own problems to notice. What might have made front-page headlines in 1938 is relegated now to the occasional buried newspaper article and the cluttered corners of humanity's disgorged gossip gland, the Internet.

When people finally voyage to Mars, not much attention will be paid to the tedious, hair-raising dangers found in the hundreds of days of transfer, short of an Apollo 13-like scenario. One-billion-plus earthlings will be plastered to their televisions for the fifteen minutes it takes to live-broadcast a human first setting foot on Martian regolith. Many will return for a news story or two. And then everyone will go about their business and forget everything but the "what were you doing the day that happened" experience.

Perhaps one of the greatest take-aways from Reid's long journey will be the perspective it provides us on how much, and how little, America has changed as a culture over the past fifty years.

MAYKR -- of art and artists in & around Beacon, NY

2009-04-02T23:08:00.003-04:00

For about a year now I've been out of circulation re: other art blogs. Just no time to read and stay up to date what with other things that have started piling up: new job, working on MFA, ramped-up intensive studio schedule. My loss.

I just now became aware of MAYKR, a terrific blog out of the Beacon, NY area. Apparently when I met one of the bloggers for this site I made a joke about Dia: Beacon that sounded like I don't like the place. But I'm crazy about it.

Maybe I should leave the comedy to the experts. :P

Meredith Allen: Melting Ice Pops 1999-2006 -- The Book

2009-03-30T21:56:00.006-04:00

I laughed out loud the first time I ran across one of Meredith Allen's Melting Ice Pops photos on the Internet. It's alluring and quirky imagery, comically irreverent, not to mention highly relevant in the current economic meltdown.

I jumped on it when I learned that Meredith has published this series in book form. It's too cool not to have. The price is fine -- between $30 - $50-ish depending on whether you want soft cover, hard cover with dust jacket or Imagewrap cover. It's a mere pittance.

Check the book's website for more info, then buy one for yourself and one for that special twisted someone.

Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art Presents Grey Area, a solo exhibition of new artwork by Boxi

2009-03-30T21:22:00.006-04:00

Check this missive from my West Hollywood homie Elisa Carmichael. Boxi rocks! Gotta run - Peace out B

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Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art is proud to present Grey Area, the first US solo exhibition of work by UK artist Boxi. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 from 7.00pm - 10.00pm, with the artist in attendance. Work in the show will include spray paint on canvas and MDF, sculpture, and limited edition prints, as well as a site-specific installation. The exhibition will be open for viewing through Thursday, April 30th 2009 from 1.00pm -7.00pm.

About the Artist:
Born 1974 in Kent, England, Boxi completed his studies at the London St. Martins School of Art with a BA Fine Arts degree in Painting in 1996. He has lived and worked in Berlin, Germany since 1999, joining REINKING PROJEKTE in 2007. Website: www.boxi.eu.com

"I am drawn to the incongruous narrative in figuration. My works aspire to polarize the stability of what is at first perceived to be harmless or sweet but in reality turns out to be pathetically desperate or tragic or vice versa. A dark disillusioned romanticism pervades throughout. (along with) confrontational themes, such as paranoia, disappointment, expectation, grief, mistrust and other upbeat reflections of our times.

"It is in this state of reflection, this 'grey area' of ambiguity and blurred truth that I have found myself in, a place where trends and crashes in the market aggressively threaten and pressurize social behavior. Making life-sized figures that articulate this uncertainty is a way for me to come to terms with the phrase 'of our time'."

Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art
1257 N. La Brea Avenue
West Hollywood CA 90038

"Graffiti Artists Hold Panel With Old Nemeses in Blue" -- NYTimes.com

2009-03-21T05:35:00.004-04:00

Graffiti hasn't gone anywhere, as any train ride from New Haven to NYC shows. I mean that in both senses; it's still being made in profusion, and its language hasn't really developed in any major way that I can discern. Fill me in if I've missed something, but send photos, too.

So according to Randy Kennedy at NYTimes.com, some of the big graffiti names in the late generation sat down with cops for a public meeting of the minds down at powerHouse Books in DUMBO last Thursday night.

Now I have to ask you, people: Could there be a louder proclamation that the graffiti form has been entirely domesticized?

I don't know, maybe I've romanticized the late 70's and early 80's. But the way it looks to me, the early graffiti artists cultivated a kind of contempt for authority that would have precluded any such discussions. Getting big almost looks like it was the beginning of the end.

See Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quinones in Downtown 81, for example; they're shown outside in daylight, painting a mural commission. The tameness of that scene blinds us to the precarious, nefarious origins of their craft. In that sense it may be a good thing that the flick was unavailable for as long as it was.

A quick side note about Downtown 81 -- it's mentioned only in passing when discussions of Basquiat come into play. And then what's usually noted is that "JM Basquiat appeared in a movie called Downtown 81." But Basquiat didn't just appear -- he starred. And he played himself. The sense I get from that flick and from more that I've read and heard about his attitudes at the time is that Basquiat would have been just as content becoming a movie star or TV celebrity.

Anyway, the most interesting thing that came out of this meeting of latter-day graffiti artists and the NY police for me was that Alan Ket -- aka Alain Maridueña -- used to taunt individual cops in his graffiti.

Alan Ket, a veteran graffiti artist whose real name is Alain Maridueña, asked whether the officers thought it was fair that he had been so vigorously prosecuted in a highly publicized case in which he pleaded guilty in 2007 to painting on subway cars in three boroughs.

Mr. Mona, though he had already retired by the time the case was under way, said he thought it happened because Mr. Maridueña, an outspoken graffiti advocate, used to write highly personal, and highly offensive, graffiti messages about individual police officers, including Mr. Mona and Mr. Rivera.

“Alan, it’s like poking the junkyard dog with a stick,” Mr. Mona said. “You’re going to get bit. And you got bit. And you’re just going to have to live with it.”

I kinda-sorta made fun of Maridueña for inking deals with Moet and Chandon and other big corporate names, back when he was charged in 2007. But I have to say that it's pretty funny to imagine a cop seeing his name or badge number or whatever emblazoned big and crazy on a building. That takes nads.

Now I hope Maridueña doesn't let the police have the last laugh on this one. I'd like to see him up the ante some way, do something more outrageous and taunting to show that the system can't keep him down. But he's probably too old for that now, going to court costs a lot of money and, who knows, maybe he has contracts that are hard to fulfill on Riker's Island.

Looks like the best I'm going to get is the view through the windows of Metro North, a continually changing scene full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Loren Munk's "James Kalm Report" now appears on ArtForum.com

2009-03-20T16:09:00.004-04:00

Check the link about midway down on the left.

ArtForum -- agree or disagree with it, it's one of perhaps two art publications 'of record' in the good old US of A. Establish a regular presence on it and it's like writing yourself into history. Big congratulations go out to Loren Munk.

de-classified: the human condition - Mark Andrew

2009-03-18T18:24:00.002-04:00

Mark's statement on the de-classified website:

In January 2009, I had an idea; photograph people in their homes that have placed a wide variety of personal advertisements. Although I imagined most people wouldn’t want to give up their anonymity, I rightly imagined some would be willing to. And with that “de-classified” was born.

Over the past couple of months, since I conceived “de-classified”, I’ve had the amazing experience of spending time with 50 plus people I wouldn’t have normally had the opportunity to meet. We have, for the most part, met in their homes and usually worked one-on-one creating an image of them.

The vast majority of those experiences have been both beautiful and intriguing.

When I began the project, I anticipated that by the time I got to 50, I would have captured a fairly complete representation of what was to be had. But now that I’ve hit that milestone, it is very obvious that I’ve barely touched the surface. Perhaps when I’ve completed another 200 I’ll be closer to what has become my internal true north for the project - an exhibit that represents the human condition.

Through the anonymity of personal advertisements an amazing array and spectrum of human emotions, needs and experiences shows up - love, lust, anger, fantasy, and pain are just the first few to come to mind.

The intention of combining the images with the ads hopefully will give the viewer a very intriguing view of each subject. Adding the ability for the viewer and community at large to anonymously view and comment on each pieces hopefully will ad another interesting layer.

My immense thanks to each of the individuals that agreed to allow me to work with them to create these images and expose so much of themselves.

Thank you for looking. I hope you’re pleased.

Mark

It's a rich project. Check it out.

Bill Seeks to Regulate Museums’ Art Sales -- from NYTimes.com

2009-03-18T07:46:00.005-04:00

Check the governmental simple-mindedness at play here through the words of Richard L. Brodsky, a Westchester County Democrat and a sponsor of the bill, according to this NYTimes.com article by Robin Pogrebin:

“These collections were not created as reservoirs of capital to be used for the benefits of the institution,” said Mr. Brodsky, a Westchester County Democrat and a sponsor of the bill. “You keep selling paintings to keep the doors open and eventually you have open doors and no paintings.”

Unfortunately the de-accessioning of art by museums is going to spread due to the current financial situation. These private institutions have precious few other means of acquiring funds to stay viable.

What would Mr. Brodsky have the museums do, send the guards home, stop maintenance and let the filth pile up everywhere, or rent out galleries for weddings, conventions and whatnot, making them essentially unavailable to the general public during those times?

What we don't need are more laws. You can't legislate your way out of every problem.

And we sure don't need the kind of simple-mindedness that presupposes that de-accessioning a few works will result in the loss of all works.

Consider for a moment the percentage of an art museum's collections that remains in storage at any given time. What is it -- 40%? 50%? More? To my understanding, particularly as regards prominent museums, most of their holdings are rarely, if ever, seen by the general public.

Is it really going to break Mr. Brodsky's heart if valuable works that his constituency has never laid eyes on are sold, particularly if they wind up in institutions that might actually display them?

On the other side of the argument, let's presuppose for a moment that the people in charge decide to close their museum down. Assuming it's not a government-owned and run institution, what does any legislature have to say about it? Does my sentimental regard for a painting I've seen every weekend at the Met mean that their board is obligated to keep it propped up and guarded in a clean, heated marble space with restrooms nearby, for the benefit of me and my heirs into eternity?

If a museum board decides to run the damned thing into the ground, that's their mistake to make, in my view. And if you disagree, consider the flipside: you run a museum or gallery of your own, you have a piece that's been showing there for twenty years. Now you want to sell the piece to keep from going bankrupt, and some red-faced weasel comes in waving a piece of legislation telling you that you can't.

In what universe would you tolerate that?

Unless they're owned and run by the government, art museums are private institutions. Like the rest of us, they're forced to find their own ways to stay alive in tough times. As I see it, that leaves museum administrations with the indisputable prerogative to buy and sell art as they see fit.

If Mr. Brodsky wants to offer legislation to purchase the works museums want to de-accession, that's another story altogether. America has invested trillions of dollars more foolishly than this in just the past few months. Go for it, Brodsky, old boy. Call it New York's Museum Stimulus Package.

Absent such a rescue, I'd think New York's assemblymen have more important things to attend to than tossing anvils at cultural institutions that are barely treading water.

Brian Sherwin's Second Installment of Art Space Law

2009-03-17T22:41:00.002-04:00

Check it out -

Brian Sherwin, you RAWK.

Marc Snyder and Fiji Island Mermaid Press present FREE FOR ALL

2009-03-17T07:53:00.002-04:00

This just in from Marc Snyder of Fiji Island Mermaid Press --

FREE FOR ALL
Eight artists give the online visitor their artists’ books.

March 16, 2009

The Fiji Island Mermaid Press is proud to present “FREE FOR ALL”. This online exhibition of artist’s books, found at http://www.fimp.net/freef.html invites the viewer to download and assemble the books on display. The eight artists who have created books for this exhibition are Pati Bristow, Ginger Burrell, Warren Craghead III, Marti Haykin, Adele Henderson, Robert Hirsch, Judith Hoffman, and Marc Snyder. The exhibition will remain online indefinitely.

Each book in the show is available as a downloadable file. The viewer typically prints no more than one or two pages of artwork and text, which are then trimmed, folded, and cut to create miniature books. The artists have provided instructions for the viewer for the entire process.

The exhibition explores the boundary between cyberspace and “the real world”, as the show is only finished when the visitor to the site has downloaded and assembled his or her own books. Essentially, the exhibit exists wherever someone creates his or her own collection of books.

Brief biographical and professional information about each participating artist accompanies the artist’s book in the online exhibition. Links to view more of his or her artwork are also included.

Jack the Pelican Presents Robert Ladislas Derr -- Structures and Strictures

2009-03-14T15:41:00.004-04:00

Jack the Pelican is delighted to present...

The works of performance artist Robert Ladislas Derr are spare, subdued and smart. They are also witty, dry and even sometimes funny. In “Structures and Strictures,” he features three pared–down video documentations of his performances—along with accompanying photographs.


Robert Ladislas Derr Structures and Strictures

Opening:	Friday, March 20 , 7–9pm
Dates:	March 20–April 19 , 2009
Location:	Jack the Pelican
	487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10
	Directions
Hours:	Thurs–Mon, 12–6pm
Contact:	don@JackthePelicanPresents.com 718-782-0183
ALSO:	WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE WE ARE EXTENDING GREGORY DE LA HABA'S VERY POPULAR INSTALLATION "EQUUS MAXIMUS" THROUGH APRIL 19.

In each work, Derr uses his active body to bring focus to the abstract structures and strictures of a site. Cerebral and quiet formal explorations on the one hand, they also metaphorically express the artist's existential searching for a connection with society and himself.

Concrete Intervention is a two-channel video of the artist repeatedly crawling through a pair of concrete culverts. His movements are defined by the round, constricted shape of the space. Breaking down the wider environment to a simple structure, it conveys the monotony of daily life. His repetitions allude to the daily cycle that we repeat each and every day.

In the second two-channel video Existential Dilemma , Derr and his wife appear flipping around inside the containment of adjacent cubes. Here, he's thinking about another aspect of the human condition: No matter how hard we try to be close to another human being, we will always be separated both psychologically and physiologically.

I don't give a shit about the masses is a durational video performance showing Derr in the forest, struggling to hold a headstand against a tree. Breaking a gender specific way of seeing Mother Nature in art, he identifies the art historical structure of landscape nudes that have traditionally been female. Derr is “lost in the wilderness” (a notion he borrows from Thoreau). In exile, alone in the woods and away from the distraction of the masses and their collective insanities, he literally turns his world upside-down. He is trying to remember himself.

Robert Ladislas Derr has performed and exhibited worldwide. This is his second New York solo show. Derr received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an assistant professor of photography at The Ohio State University.

A little more about "Closing In on Open Spaces," Joanie San Chirico's show opening at Ocean County Artist's Guild April 5

2009-03-14T12:10:00.002-04:00

From the artist's press release:

Joanie San Chirico's work is unique in that it incorporates painting on canvas, photography, or stitching on textiles in such a way that challenges the viewer to decipher how the work was made. More than simple paintings, she combines these media to portray natural surfaces using imagery of this planet's fragile beauty. The work depicts ordinary objects; perhaps some lichen, rocks on a beach, dead vines, images from the artist’s travels or even her back yard. The art is about raising awareness of the fragility of our environment.”

The work depicts a balance of art and nature; portraits of our vanishing landscape and archeological sites. San Chirico incorporates a combination of techniques to reflect on the past in an attempt to make sense of the future by utilizing the incongruity of hand stitching (traditional mark making) with the latest technology on linen, canvas, silk and other textiles (modern mark making).

See Joanie San Chirico's website for more info. April's a great month to visit New Jersey! Get on down to Joanie's show, then hit Seaside Heights for some serious boardwalk fun and laughs.

"Guest of Cindy Sherman" -- a film by Paul H-O and Tom Donahue

2009-03-13T22:53:00.004-04:00

Thanks to the generosity of Betsy Rudnick I was treated to an advance screening of a new film by Gallery Beat's Paul H-O. It's called Guest of Cindy Sherman.

This is easily one of the coolest, most enjoyable flicks I've watched in ages.

Paul started Gallery Beat way back in the day. He was an appealing public access TV presence that took the wind out of art's self-important sails and made things accessible. The film shows a lot of early footage of Paul cavorting in galleries, getting to know various art stars and eventually interviewing and getting to know Cindy Sherman.

She's the only one who upstages Paul in this flick, and, man, she upstages him bigtime. Her real-life self comes off as an extremely appealing, attractive adult kid. She literally glows in the footage Paul shares with us here. I could sit through hours of footage of Ms. Sherman at work. In my opinion these pieces of film alone are worth the price of admission.

The film kinda-sorta makes us all guests of Cindy Sherman as we watch her go through the process of preparing a shoot in her studio. It gives insights into her history, her family, other people in her life (Robert Longo, man, just -- you know -- take care of it, dude), other big art people at the time like April Gornik, Julian Schnabel (who ends up looking like a pompous jerk), Eric Fischl (who doesn't), Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, various A- and B-list celebs and a cast of extra-cool extras.

Another thing Paul H-O does in this big-eyed big-hearted film is that he gives some sequence to developments in the art world from the mid-to-late 1970's up to a year or two ago. A number of developments make a little more sense to me now. And as a side note, it almost seems as if Paul can't get away from the art world in spite of himself. That's a good thing, I'd say, because it's clear that this boy still has a lot to offer.

Guest of Cindy Sherman opens on March 27 at Cinema Village in Manhattan and the Santa Fe Film Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Do Not Miss This Flick!

Thanks, Paul, Tom and Betsy!

Below is copy from the email Betsy sent me.

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GUEST OF CINDY SHERMAN
Opening March 27, 2009

GUEST OF CINDY SHERMAN
Featuring Paul H-O, Cindy Sherman, John Waters, Eric Bogosian, Danny DeVito, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald, Carol Kane, Eric Fischl, Christine Vachon, Roberta Smith, Robert Longo, Eli Broad, Ingrid Sischy, Cecily Brown, and Christopher Trela

Directed by Paul H-O and Tom Donahue

In 1993, artist Paul H-O discovered a new passion when he melded his two great loves: the art world and the video camera. From that combination came the quirky, handmade public-access show, "GalleryBeat." Years later and flying high, Paul discovers one of his biggest fans is the reclusive, art world superstar Cindy Sherman. During a series of exclusive interviews, Paul and Cindy fall in love and begin a romance. Unexpectedly, the relationship forces Paul to confront issues of ego, gender and identity as he gets caught up in the aura of Cindy's celebrity. With unprecedented access, the documentary places us in the company of the great artist. Spanning over 15 years and including more than fifty interviews with art world and entertainment luminaries (including Eli Broad, Eric Bogosian, Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Danny DeVito, Carol Kane, Christine Vachon, Ingrid Sischy, Molly Ringwald, Eric Fischl and April Gornik), the film offers a unique critique of the ever-inflated New York art market and the culture of celebrity.

http://guestofcindysherman.com/

"Closing in on Open Spaces" -- Selections from the Environmental Series by Joanie San Chirico

2009-03-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

Don't miss "Selections from the Environmental Series -- a Solo Exhibit by Joanie San Chirico"
April 5 - April 28, 2009 at the Ocean County Artists’ Guild -- www.ocartistsguild.org
Ocean and Chestnut Avenues
Island Heights, NJ 08732

Reception: Sunday April 5, 2009 1-4pm
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 1-4pm

The Krasnals -- The 'black star' of Polish art scene

2009-03-08T13:31:00.004-04:00

Think these people have issues? Check this from the header of the Krasnals Group blog:

The Blog of The Krasnals group - the 'black star' of Polish art scene!We are fed up with the stagnation of the Polish art world dependent on the western art market rules. It provoked our frustration and aggression. Cynicism became more inspiring. We vomit on things or admire them. New qualities can be seen through chaos or turning things upside down. The career of W. Sasnal was the turning point, and acceptance by Christie's the painting based on Sasnal’s one and estimation at 70,000 GBP.

Interesting...

Krasnal Bansky "I am White / Barack Obama". 2008.
Oil on canvas. 70 x 60 cm

Bloxpix -- Platform Project Space at Denise Bibro Fine Art

2009-03-04T18:13:00.004-05:00

I'm thrilled to be part of the panel discussion for this excellent event. See you at the opening or on Saturday! - B

blogpix
@ Platform Project Space
Denise Bibro Fine Art
529 West 20th Street, 4W, Chelsea

March 5 - 28, 2009
Opening reception: Thursday, March 5, 6-8pm
* Blogger panel discussion, Saturday, March 7, 5pm

(above, l to r, Ben La Rocco, Christopher Davison, Sharon Butler)

Denise Bibro Fine Art is pleased to present blogpix, organized by Olympia Lambert, on view March 5 - 28th, 2009 in our Platform Project Space. blogpix brings together four of today's top art bloggers. Curators Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof, Joanne Mattera and Hrag Vartanian each bring to the table an unparalled voice and writing style. As art lovers demand more topical coverage with added visuals, once-a-month review simply cannot compete with daily feedback, as the information superhighway has become 24/7 on demand full- access. blogpix is a dedicated showcase where the digital intersects the human. 2009 finds us a nation pressed for time, fed by instantaneous information on demand. >From Twitter "tweets" to Facebook "status updates," today's internet is a rapid, ever-evolving pixelated organism made up of conjugal ones and zeroes. With the influence of art journalism's printed media in decline, the art blogosphere is rapidly stepping up to fill the void. With their curatorial choices, our blogger curators spotlight six talented artists working in a variety of mediums and genres.

Fallon & Rosof's artblog has been featured twice as one of the top art blogs in the U.S. by Art in America. Their daily coverage since 2003 from their Philadelphia outpost boasts a readership from all over the world. Not merely focusing on just Philadelphia, artblog covers exhibitions from Washington, D.C. and Chelsea, to Paris, London and Asia. Fallon & Rosof often spotlight young and emerging artists. For blogpix, they have chosen Philadelphia artist Christopher Davison. Davison's works' directly take on a relation of the body and its form, confronting the viewer with a humor that is both dark and devious in nature.

Joanne Mattera has been covering contemporary art on her blog since 2006. A well-regarded artist in her own right, Mattera's focus is on reductive art with a concentration on saturated color. For blogpix she has chosen three fellow bloggers-Sharon Butler, Steven Alexander, Julie Karabenick (editor of Geoform, a curated website which focuses on geometric abstraction), and Reese Inman, an artist who utilizes computer-programmed algorithms' law of chance to play an active role in her paintings' design and makeup. The works pulsate with energetic color and suggest motion, becoming an allegorical commentary on the electrifying nature of the continuous flow of data on the information superhighway.

A contributor to PBS' Art21 blog, Hrag Vartanian also writes for The Brooklyn Rail. Since his site's launch in 2006, Vartanian has become a leading voice through his regular column Re:Public covering New York street art on the highly acclaimed ArtCalZine. Vartanian's thought-provoking coverage combines a focus on daily linkage to industry news, as well as critical review spotlighting new and emerging artists. For blogpix, he has chosen Brooklyn artist Ben La Rocco. La Rocco's meticulously perfected surfaces combine color, motion, and shape. LaRocco's touch is at once gentle and aggressive, bringing you in to his works' celestial center.

Please send an RSVP for our panel discussion to platform@denisebibrofineart.com, or join us online March 7th at our Twitter account for a live panel feed, http://www.twitter.com/blogpix.

For more information, or high resolution images, please contact the gallery at the information provided below.

platform@denisebibrofineart.com

212-647-7030

http://platform.denisebibrofineart.com

Erin Cosgrove: "What Manner of Person Art Thou?"

2009-02-27T09:08:00.003-05:00

Erin Cosgrove seems to be as much a writer as an artist. But at least from the concepts described on her website, it seems as if she writes as though engaging the medium of the romance novel as an artist would -- from the outside and inside at once.

More interesting to me is a piece that seems to consist of writing, animation, and a large scroll: "What Manner of Person Art Thou?"

In the animation and in the scroll I see the invoking of the past as though it's contemporary, as though for whatever progress we thought we'd made we find ourselves in the nineteenth century anyway. The social situation she employs reminds me distinctly of the Shakers, that celibate religious community known to us now mainly through pieces of furniture, chairs that, to paraphrase Thomas Merton, "look as though an angel might sit on them."

Of particular note to me is the way Erin uses a combination of Leet Speak and LolCat Speak on the scroll, which otherwise is an obvious reference to the Bayeaux tapestry.

It looks to me as if she situates her art, and we the viewers, in a very apt position: regarding this vestigial aspect of the art making activity, as well as the linguistic byproducts of the technological expansion that should have solved society's ills by now, but has simply made us even more divided, less able to discern the truth, less able to actively unite or understand one another in spite of pervasive, instantaneous communication.

Check out her website.

The Jig is Up: David Nahmad, 'possibly the biggest dealer in the world,' says "Contemporary art is almost a fraud"

2009-02-26T21:13:00.017-05:00

I wonder what finally pushed him over the edge.

Maybe it was a collector who's made teaser buys in the past, who called up and asked for the thirtieth time for a split cow in formaldehyde. Or maybe it was a museum purchase of a Picasso that was cancelled at the last minute in favor of a pair of fiberglass statues of anime characters spewing bodily fluids.

Check this from The Independent:

Mr Nahmad, who is reputed to have a £2bn collection of some 5,000 paintings, including 300 Picassos, told The Independent on Sunday: “There are a lot of embarrassed people who bought art that is now not worth what they paid for it. For the past three or four years it’s been a very, very thin market, with just two or three buyers pushing up prices by bidding against each other.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people knew the game. So those people who did not know are realising it now. It’s almost a fraud. I would never advise my clients to buy contemporary art.”

To accept Nahmad's wholesale trashing of an entire art category, you'd have to ignore the inauspicious beginnings of the artists whose work he deals. There were times in all their lives when selling at any price seemed like a dream.

Mr Nahmad and his family have made billions of dollars trading art. They specialise in the works of great modern artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Rothko. He added that he doesn’t think any artist since Francis Bacon had pushed art forward. The last notable artists were Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, he said.

That's pretty funny. Slashed canvases and paintings made by having nude blue-painted women crawl on canvas -- that shoves art forward. But Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Judd, Serra, Bueys, etc etc etc -- they're all just hacks.

Because, you know, none of them would have had the absolute genius to slash a canvas or make a woman paint one with her naked body.

Nahmad continues...

“There is the real art market, with real artists, and then there is the stupid art market which uses publicity to make some artists become very expensive. That doesn’t mean they are good. Damien Hirst’s diamond skull at $100m was a stupid thing; $100m is an offence. Hirst started with $10,000 – that’s OK. But $100m? That’s ridiculous.”

I think we can probably agree that Hirst and the other members of Saatchi's visual arts equivalent of "Air Supply" are a different story altogether, true creatures of promotion and hype. But of course that wouldn't be the case with Modern art, right?

For example, Pollock's No. 5, 1948 -- it's absolutely worth its 2006 gavel price of $140 million. No manipulation or hype involved in that. True?

DeKooning's Woman III -- $137.5 million. That's not fraudulent. No way!

Picasso's Garcon a la Pipe for $102.2 mill. The list goes on and on.

Unconscionably high art prices were invented by people of Mr. Nahmad's ilk, in the very market he's trying to protect from the supposedly fraudulent contemporary art dealers. The Moderns were all little-known or unknown contemporary artists during some period of time. For that matter a number of them were considered frauds at some time during their careers.

Sure, the Moderns are more likely to sustain their prices, assuming the market doesn't suddenly flood due to desperate unloading by collectors in financial distress. Part of their market solidity derives from the fact that they've been cultural fixtures longer than is even possible with contemporary art. But another strong force in sustaining those prices is decades of hype.

Occasionally a truly contemporary artist will be featured in a big museum show, for example. But more often it's a Modern or Pop artist. Think shows in big-name museums influence art prices? I do.

Contemporary art is a much greater risk. That may be one reason that the contemporary art dealers I've spoken with have said that, at least so far as little-known artists are concerned, they recommend that collectors buy art that they really enjoy and want to own, leaving its potential investment value as a secondary consideration, if that.

Considering that valuations of the kind of art Nahmad hawks are as much the product of hype, circumstance and manipulation as the segment of contemporary art that apparently now terrifies him enough to trash the entire category, his fraud pronouncement comes off as just a bit disingenuous.

Brooklyn Museum Presents SPEAK OUT! Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take? March 21, 2009, from 2 to 4 p.m.

2009-02-26T10:09:00.000-05:00

Brooklyn Museum Presents SPEAK OUT!
Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take?
March 21, 2009, from 2 to 4 p.m.

In celebration of the second anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Brooklyn Museum will present
SPEAK OUT! Women's Visions For the Nation: What's it Going to Take? on Saturday, March 21, from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium.

The event features a keynote address by C. Nicole Mason, Women of Color Policy Network, NYU Wagner School, titled "Now is the Time: Activating Women Leaders for Collective Change;" an audience speak-out moderated by GRITtv host Laura Flanders with respondents Ana L. Oliveira, New York Women's Foundation, and Ai-jen Poo, Domestic Workers United; a performance by award-winning musical artist Toni Blackman; and closing remarks by Liz J. Abzug of The Bella Abzug Leadership Institute.

SPEAK OUT! was created by UNFINISHED BUSINESS, a think-tank founded by a core group of diverse women to identify ways of mobilizing external networks to raise public awareness about intergenerational communication, issues of race/class/gender, and the effects of current events on women and children. Participating founding members include Liz J. Abzug; Sharna Goldseker, 21/64: Strategic Philanthropy Through the Generations; Sara Gould, Ms. Foundation for Women; Mia Herndon, Third Wave Foundation; Carol Jenkins, The Women's Media Center; C. Nicole Mason; Monique Mehta, Independent Consultant; Benita R. Miller, The Brooklyn Young Mother's Collective; Elizabeth A. Sackler, Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation; and Amy Sananman, Groundswell Community Mural Project.

A reception and participatory mural project with Groundswell will follow in the galleries of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art from 4 to 5:30 p.m., sponsored by The Women's Media Center; Ms. Foundation for Women; Groundswell Community Mural Project; Women of Color Policy Network, NYU Wagner School; and 21/64: Strategic Philanthropy Through the Generations.

200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn NY 11238-6052