Abramovic Documentary

ART 16X9

In this piece for FLY16x9, Abramović sat down with director Howard Silver, as she was preparing for her MoMA retrospective, to discuss her life's work, as well as her thoughts on the future. Check out Fly 16X9's other videos.

Link Romp 1

Inspired by a publication that I read last week that compiled disparate diary entries by Anias Nin and wove the snips into a kind of free associative, reconstructed narrative,coupled with my fascination with lists, trails, and aggregation; I decided to start a new series, entitled Romps. The idea is to gather a list of links, texts, images, concepts, etc. and allow for resonance within that cosmology.


http://e-flux.com/journal/view/144

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/books/18silence.html

http://www.mobileacademy-berlin.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/19dowd.html?src=me&ref=homepage

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/fashion/20scavenger.html?ref=arts

Audience Experiments: Contemporary Art in the Age of the Spectacle

The Contemporary Art Forum presents timely and innovative programs (lectures, conversations, and performances) that address pressing issues in contemporary art, and are developed out of discussions with MoMA curators. Participants include artists and designers, critics, curators, and scholars, among others.

This conference explored current experimental theater and performance art practices with special consideration of the audience and spectator. Participants included Andrea Fraser, artist; RoseLee Goldberg, curator and Director of Performa; Hannah Hurtzig, theater director; Shannon Jackson, Chair and Professor, Department of Performance Studies and Theater, University of California, Berkeley, David Levine, artist; Charlie Todd, Director of Improv Everywhere; and Bill Wasik, Senior Editor of Harper's Magazine and the inventor of the flash mob. The program was organized by Pablo Helguera, Director of Adult and Academic Programs, Department of Education, MoMA.

I attended Audience experiments with my former Master's thesis advisor, Glenn Wharton; who is the head Time-based Media Conservator at MoMA. Not knowing what to expect, we were both amazed by the participatory nature of the "lecture," as all of the panelists treated the evening as a performance of a lecture, as opposed to a lecture itself. Very meta. Of course there were degrees of seriousness to this performance, ranging from Roselee Goldberg (who acted like a "normal" panelist) to Andrea Fraser adopting several different guises; (one of which got naked and told MoMA to "kiss her ass") to David Levine who consciously did not prepare at all. Levine's segment was focused on the dynamics of knowledge transmission, and how that traditional lecture dynamic reveals what audiences expect and how they behave within that context. All of the performances lead to the idea that audiences and institutions should question accepted traditions of audience-lecturer paradigms, and be more open and experimental.

Did you know MoMA has a blog?

Last night I attended an event at MoMA, where someone brought up the fact that most people were unaware that MoMA has a blog. I have seen their behind the scenes with curators sites, as well as web forums related to specific exhibition sites, but I guess that I was also unaware that there was a specific blog. Titled "Inside/Out," the blog has been somewhat slow starting up, and slightly unfocused (seeing as the behemoth preeminent museum has such a broad scope of work in their collection, as well as diverse event programming, departments, staff etc.) I checked it out, and found this recent post, which is pretty cool:

Bottoms Up! Fluxus Wallpaper

Posted by Gretchen Wagner, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books

Yoko Ono. George Maciunas. Fluxus Wallpaper. c. 1973. Offset. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift

During recent months, Fluxus has begun making waves in MoMA galleries. This past October, Fluxus Preview opened on the fourth floor and continues to provide a sampling of the diverse activities carried out by artists engaged with a rebellious approach in the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, true to Fluxus’s irreverent sensibility, derrières—hundreds of female asses—have taken over a space on the third floor of the Museum. The work is Yoko Ono and George Maciunas’s Fluxus Wallpaper, which repeats black-and-white close-ups of a human behind from floor to ceiling.

A still from Ono’s Film Number 4 (Bottoms), this wallpapered image is of one of the (allegedly) 365 individuals who walked for the artist’s camera in London during the early 1960s. As Ono once described Film Number 4, it is “like an aimless petition signed by people with their anuses”—a collective mooning in support of the absurd. Maciunas took one of these signature back ends, possibly Ono’s own, and printed it in fashion that enabled the provocation to occupy any receptive surface.

The wallpaper is part of The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, acquired in 2008. It is currently on display in conjunction with the exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

Xavier Le Roy lecture

Xavier Le Roy in 'Self-Unfinished'

Why do there have to be so many awesome things going on tonight? I can't go to this, but it will definitely be interesting:

Lecture by Xavier Le Roy
7.30pm, Friday 7 May 2010
Martin Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY 10016
Admission FREE - first come first served

Self Unfinished:


The Right of Spring:


Xavier Le Roy was originally trained as a biochemist and then became a dancer. But he has made his mark on the world as a choreographer. Le Roy is often called a "conceptual choreographer" but what some might consider a brainy approach to dance is focused on the body, a heightening of the awareness of all of the senses, and the staging of the relationships between what is heard, seen, gesticulated or projected in the experience of performance. (From the Sculpture Center website)

Kim Gordon: Performing/Guzzling

Looks like Kim Gordon has been a busy little bee lately, with her show uptown at Glenn Horowitz and now the release of her new book, "Performing/Guzzling" (Rizzoli/NYC and Nieves/Zurich) at KS Art at 73 Leonard St. in Tribeca. The shows overlap by one day. Lest we forget, beloved Kim is an art world darling.

Tonight, May 7th from 6-8, there will be a performance celebrating the publication and exhibition opening.

Quoting from the press release: On Friday eve May 7, 2010 7 pm Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, as Bad Adult, will perform "The Promise of Originality", an exploration of where the floor and wall meets the body and other incantations. Kim Gordon: Performing/Guzzling as exhibited at KS Art is an extension of the work presented in the artist book of the same name, newly published by Rizzoli/Nieves. The show includes her initial large scale Noise Paintings, names taken from experimental noise acts, as well as a series of newspaper paintings featured in the book. Also incorporated will be recent sculptures rethinking the artist's roots in California minimalism.

30 Days Artist Series

THIRTYDAYSNY is a temporary free and public exhibition and performance space located at 70 Franklin St. in Tribeca. Hosting music, performance, comedy, scholarly symposia, screenings, and workshops, the space is truly interdisciplinary and dynamic in its approach.

I have been thinking about the idea of temporary exhibition structures ever since X-Initiative closed in February. For me, it was a central part of last summer. Whether it served as a spot for meeting after work, hearing talks, seeing screenings, or chilling on the roof with a beer; the space was a magnet that will be sorely missed.

Though THIRTYDAYSNY only lasts a month, it is similar in the fact that here we have this presence of a (kind of) institution (in which people tend to invest varying levels of trust) and then it just vanishes. In this regard, the structure becomes ephemeral in the same way as a work of art, which has the capacity to change the way in which people think about, and the very concept of "the institution." The more temporary exhibition sites become manifest in our cultural vernacular, the more people will begin to question what exhibition sites are, what its purpose should be, and what it means for ideas/performances/artistic practice to manifest within physical space de-markated as temporary "site."

Part of me also thinks that for any institution to truly stay abreast to what is contemporary and what is current, they need to exist temporarily. Otherwise, at some point they inevitably risk turning into The New Museum. Bureaucracy and politics prevail, and the original intention and founding principles are obfuscated.

I digress. This post was supposed to be about how THIRTYDAYSNY's website posted a video on Ed Halter and Thomas Beard of Light Industry, but I got carried away. Check out the site and the video.

From the THIRTYDAYSNY website:

"THIRTYDAYSNY is a celebration of the merger of arts and culture. The challenge was building out, organizing, managing, and presenting a live gallery space open to the public for one month in the heart of New York City. The gallery is curated by Family Bookstore, and the accompanying Thirty Days NY website is headed by Dallas Clayton. The completed Thirty Days Gallery, located at 70 Franklin Street, Tribeca, will feature weekly performances, symposiums, and showcases from contemporary artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers from all over the world."

Thirty Days Artist Series: Thomas Beard + Ed Halter from Thirty Days NY on Vimeo.