bricolage rainbow

New Site

2011-06-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

This site has moved to bricolagerainbow.com Visit now!

The women who changed the face of art | The Cutting Room | ARTINFO.com

2011-06-02T09:50:00.000-07:00

The women who changed the face of art | The Cutting Room | ARTINFO.com

Artists Space launches new venue: Artists Space: Books & Talks' on Grand St. and West Broadway

2011-05-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

May 10, 2011, 7 - 9 pm at Artists Space
38 Greene St, 3rd Floor

Artists Space: Books & Talks is an additional 2,500 square foot storefront venue on Grand Street and West Broadway. This space will in future host a bookshop – with 1,000 titles exclusively selected by 100 artists, writers and critics, each suggesting 10 antiquarian or new titles – and an auditorium, allowing Artists Space to more frequently host talks, screenings and other events.

This new venture will compliment Artists Space: Exhibitions, the original 7,500 square foot exhibition space on Greene and Grand Streets, located within two minutes walking distance from Artists Space: Books & Talks.

As a pre-opening event, Artists Space: Books & Talks will host the launch of dOCUMENTA (13)´s 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series. The first 17 notebooks will be discussed at Artists Space with some of the New York-based authors including: Susan Buck-Morss, Kenneth Goldsmith, Paul Ryan, and Michael Taussig. The evening will be moderated by Bettina Funcke, Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13) and Chus Martínez, Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), will take part in the discussion.

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) has initiated a series of publications driven by the logic of the mind-at-work, presenting, writing, and drawing scenarios that point outside the normative bounds of academic text production. In the form of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations between artists and writers, and conversations, they present models of connection-making between the private and the public, between the pre-stage of intuitions, the naming of ideas and the key-chain of arguments that provide the reader with a singular insight into working methods. The series is formed through interconnections, so that the notebooks could be described as an "interregnum," a temporary rupture in discursive intelligence; they do not direct us towards reason as such, but towards a different understanding of the role of consciousness. It is pure speculation: can one effectively transform thinking while thinking at the same time? The notebooks show us the hand trying to trace other logics, trying to travel a bit farther away from the already known in order to cover a distance between the now and the near future.

The notebooks appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and range from 16 to 48 pages in length. Contributors hail from diverse fields – art, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature studies, and poetry – and include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G.M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner.

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)'s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Chus Martínez, Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group. This series is edited by Bettina Funcke, Head of Publications.

The 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts will be launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project.

You can buy individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13. For further information about dOCUMENTA (13), including the publications, visit www.documenta.de
Forthcoming at Artists Space

Site

Video Data Bank launches new website

2011-05-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

Video Data Bank has launched a new website. Hiring web developers Fuse IQ for the re-design, the new site is now much more user friendly and has a variety of fun and functional new features. It's exciting that the nearly 40 year old 'institution/collection' will now be more accessible and transparent to the public.

Video Data Bank's site has had the same design as long as I have been using it, which amounts to something like 5 years. Like most websites, it had room for improvement. Specifically, the small images and deeply nested resources on the the previous site. Also, (I might be imagining this) but I'm pretty sure the last site had a black interface, which looked and felt bulky when coupled with the small type and thumbnail images. The white is much cleaner, and the information is much better organized in general, which leads to easier navigation. The main things that have changed include the Video Art Gallery, which features larger images and longer clips; user accounts, improved searching, a news and events section, and resources. Also, curators and programmers can now preview videos with special permission through their user account.

It's interesting how a redesign of a website can really change it's public appearance and functionality. It will now be much more user-friendly, which will hopefully lead to more video sales/rentals from collectors, collections, and institutions. Also, better-accessible archives and resources will enable future scholarship.

Judging by the design of the site, this was not a cheap upgrade. Congrats to VDB for finding a way to finance this project, which will only further the success, access, and visibility of the collection. In a moment, where institutions' web presence is nearly as essential for generating public awareness as their reputation, this upgrade comes as a great step forward!

Below is a list of new features from the site, which can also be viewed by following this link:

Whats New?
The staff team at Video Data Bank is pleased and proud to announce the launch of our new and improved website, redesigned with a fresh look and a more user-friendly experience. With the help of our developers at Fuse IQ, we've been able to improve navigation, enable online ordering, and bring our clients and artists a number of great new features, such as:

User Accounts: Create a new Account so you can login to vdb.org at any time - make comments about your favorite videos, create video wish lists, donate to VDB, or order online.
Wish Lists: Wish lists will make it easy for you to keep track of your most-wanted videos. After creating your user account, just click "Add to Wish List", choose your format & use type, and add to your wish list. Send your wish list on to others - great for faculty who need to communicate with their librarians and purchasing departments.

Online Ordering: When logged in to your user account, use vdb.org to process standard sales and rentals for most titles. Just click "Order Video", choose your format & use type, and add to your shopping cart. Check out using an institutional purchase order, or pay via credit card with our secure hosted payment gateway.

Video Art Gallery: View the latest and greatest of VDB clips in the Video Art Gallery. Select from New Releases, Featured Videos, Most Viewed, and Random Picks.

Improved Browsing and Searching the Collection: Navigating the collection is now very simple! In the Browse the Collection side bar, you can search by Artist or Title, check out the latest additions to the archive in New Releases and DVD Box Sets, scan through our Curated and Single Artist Compilations, or navigate one of our Special Collections: On Art and Artists, Videofreex Archive, Early Video Art, Kuchar Archive.

Bigger and Better Video Clips and Images: Tiny clips are a thing of the past! View full-screen, high-quality clips and images for all VDB titles in distribution throughout the new site.

Listing Style: Throughout the site, choose to view information via one of two different styles - Gallery View or List View.

Up-to-the-Minute News + Events: It's easier than ever for us to feature VDB artist news, upcoming events, recent newsletters, and VDB in the press.
Video Art Related Merchandise: Show your love for VDB! Order a copy of the essential Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews, or purchase some new VDB swag (more coming soon!).

Video Art Resources: Download essays about video art and artists commissioned by VDB, scan our comprehensive, annotated bibliography of critical writing on the history of video and media art, view links to other organizations and resources related to VDB, or check out what's available in our on-site print library.

Online Donations: As a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, VDB relies on funding from federal and state agencies, and donations from the public. Here you can quickly and easily donate to invest in the continued success of VDB's mission and programs. All donations are tax-deductible.

Curators and programmers will also have the ability to view full-length video previews, and our artists can update their contact information and check in anytime to see where their work has been previewed, screened or sold.

Note that the new vdb.org is still in the "soft launch" phase, and you may encounter minor bugs or missing information while using the site. We appreciate your patience during this time, and ask that you notify us with any problems you come across by emailing info@vdb.org. Thank you!

Ken Jacobs Interview in TimeOut Chicago

2011-05-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

The avant-garde icon will present a live work at the Film Studies Center.

By Patrick Friel

Caption:

LIGHT MOTIF Jacobs, inset, performs at the Paris Cinematheque. “The Green Wave,” background, is a DV experiment in stereoscopic imagery “without spectacles.”

Credits:

Ken Jacobs

For more than 50 years, Ken Jacobs has been a key figure in American experimental cinema, creating a steady stream of acclaimed and influential films, live moving-image works and, more recently, digital videos. He is best known for his seminal Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), which expands a 1905 film into a feature-length exploration of its form and images, and the decades-in-the-making, seven-hour epic Star Spangled to Death (2003). But even those familiar with Jacobs’s filmmaking might be astonished at the sheer number of live works he’s done over the years, including shadow plays, his amazing Nervous System setup (in which two projectors and a rotating shutter allow for near-forensic investigations of film material) and the Nervous Magic Lantern, a simpler but no less amazing device that hearkens back to 19th-century technology. The NYC-based filmmaker, 77, will perform a work with the latter on Thursday 5. We e-mailed him about
his first appearance in Chicago in three decades.

You’ve been doing live-projection works almost as long as you’ve been making films. What first interested you in these more ephemeral kinds of “cinema”? How and why did you start?
With my first money for a film projector, in 1954, I bought a Kodak Film Analyst for examining 16mm film at various speeds—going backwards and forwards. Occasionally, friends would sit in on these studies, which I never thought about as performance.… In 1975, teaching in Binghamton [New York], I mentioned an idea to a fellow artist-teacher, Dan Barnett: using both of the department’s stop-motion projectors to hold sequential frames on screen from two prints of a film, polarized, and viewing them with polaroid spectacles.… Dan was enthusiastic and we tried it. And it was a dream come true. The scene suddenly appeared in deep space. Space was a turn-on for me. This led to my first public film performance, The Impossible: Chapter One, South’wark Fair.

The Nervous Magic Lantern and Nervous System performances seem to come from the same interests that led to Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son: a fascination with early cinema, exploring the material of film and transforming and abstracting reality, but heightened by the possibility of creating 3-D. Do you see them as related?
My interest in [the 1905] “Tom, Tom” came about because it seemed such a disaster; the primitive film-making was showing all over it. It showed its age. Now and again I saw a character look into the camera, looking at me 60 years later. The role fell away and here was a human. I was touched by this and that got me into chasing down the reality of what is this strange ribbon of images called film. Four of the five chapters of The Impossible utilized and further investigated scenes from “Tom, Tom.” I would be coming up with different techniques but the impulse to create crazy 3-D events was consistent.

Can you describe a bit what the Nervous Magic Lantern is and what audiences can expect?
The Nervous Magic Lantern has got to be the strangest thing I ever attempted. It came to me in a dream, and made no sense. No projector has ever been more basic: a light, a lens, a shutter and some space between light and lens for me to fool around. Images are vastly 3-D and going through impossible changes. I’m enjoying it with audiences as long as I can before it’s declared illegal.

Jacobs and his wife, Flo, will present one of his Nervous Magic Lantern works, Time Squared, along with two digital videos, at the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago Thursday 5 at 7pm.

Mark Fisher to lecture at Cooper Union

2011-05-03T14:18:00.001-07:00

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE AND NYU’S ASIAN/ PACIFIC/ AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM present 2 talks by Mark Fisher: On Hauntology/ Capitalist Realism

From Fisher's website:

What are grey vampires and how do they retard the insurrectionary potential of digital discourse? How does Derrida’s notion of hauntology contribute to an understanding of dubstep artist Burial? Is ‘Basic Instinct 2’, routinely derided as a cine-atrocity, a Lacanian reworking of Ballard, Baudrillard and Bataille in service of the creation of a “phantasmatic, cybergothic London”? What is interpassivity and in what ways has it come to define the corporatized incarceration of modern academia?

Over the last decade, Mark Fisher has established a reputation as one of the exhilarating cultural theorists in Britain. A co-founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University – and described by Simon Reynolds as the academic equivalent of Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kurtz – he brings together psychoanalysis, political analysis and speculative fiction to create an extraordinary body of rogue scholarship, a theory-rush with few parallels.

Fisher is the author of ‘Capitalist Realism’, the editor of ‘The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson’ (both Zer0, 2009), and writes regularly for Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly, The Wire and Frieze, as well as maintaining a well-known blog at k-punk.abstractdynamics.org. He teaches at the University of East London, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the City Literary Institute.

The Colloquium for Unpopular Culture and NYU’s Asian/ Pacific/ American Studies program are pleased to be hosting Fisher’s first talks in America.

http://pontone.pl/pontones-special-guest-mix-k-punk-the-metaphysics-of-crackle/

--

MARK FISHER, THERE ARE NON-TIMES AS WELL AS NON-PLACES: REFLECTIONS ON HAUNTOLOGY

WHEN: Wednesday 4 May 2011, 6:30pm
WHERE: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square [East 5th and Bowery]
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

“Through their generic and transient qualities – workstations devoid of personal effects, relations with colleagues as fleeting as those with passengers on a commuter journey – many workplaces now resemble non-places, either literally, as in the case of a hotel, corporate coffee chain or out-of-town supermarket, or symbolically, in the form of temporary assignments for faceless employers (dis)located in anonymous buildings, where the worker-commuter then follows the same global timetables, navigates the same software applications and experiences the same sense of placelessness, the feeling of being mere data in the mainframe.”

So writes Ivor Southwood in his analysis of precarious labour, ‘Non-Stop Inertia’ (2011). In the last decade, the proliferation of corporate non-places has been accompanied by the spread of cyberspace-time, or Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality. It’s no coincidence that, as this unmarked time increasingly came to dominate cultural and psychic space, Derrida’s concept hauntology (re)emerged as the name for a paradoxical zeitgeist. In ‘Specters of Marx’, Derrida argued that the hauntological was characterised by “a time out of joint”, and this broken time has been expressed in cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present. Sometimes accused of nostalgia, the most powerful examples of hauntological culture actually show that nostalgia is no longer possible. In conditions where pastiche has become normalised, the question has to be: nostalgia compared to what?

James Bridle has recently argued that “the opposite of hauntology ... [is] to demand the radically new”, but hauntology in fact operates as a kind of thwarted preservation of such demands in conditions where - for the moment at least - they cannot be met. Whereas cyberspace-time tends towards the generation of cultural moments that are as interchangeable as transnational franchise outlets, hauntology involves the staining of particular places with time - albeit a time that is out of joint. In this lecture, Fisher will explore the hauntological culture of the last few years in relation to the question of place, using examples from music (Burial, The Caretaker, Ekoplekz, Richard Skelton), film (Chris Petit, Patrick Keiller) and fiction (Alan Garner, David Peace).

--

MARK FISHER, DEPACIFICATION PROGRAM: FROM CAPITALIST REALISM TO POST-CAPITALISM

WHEN: Thursday 5 May 2011, 6:30pm
WHERE: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square [East 5th and Bowery]
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

“It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world - better to say the alternate world, our alternate world - as one contiguous with ours but without any connections or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.” (Fredric Jameson, ‘Valences of the Dialectic’)

In his 2009 book ‘Capitalist Realism’, Mark Fisher started to explore some of the affective, psychological and political consequences of the deeply entrenched belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. After 1989, capital seemed to enjoy full spectrum dominance of both global space and the unconscious. Every imaginable future was capitalist. What has been mistaken for post-political apathy, Fisher argued, was a pervasive sense of reflexive impotence in the face of a neoliberal ideological program which sought to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives of business. The subject of post-Fordist capitalism is no passive dupe; this subject actively participates in an ‘interpassive’ corporate culture which solicits our involvement and encourages us to ‘join the debate’. As Fisher argues in the book, education has been at the forefront of this process, with teachers and lecturers locked into managerialist self-surveillance, and students induced into the role of consumers.

In the eighteen months since ‘Capitalist Realism’ was published, the neoliberal program has been seriously compromised, but capitalist realism has intensified - with austerity programs pushed through on the basis that it is unthinkable that capitalism should be allowed to fail. At the same time, this new, more desperate form of capitalist realism has also faced unexpected challenges from a militancy growing in Europe, the Middle East and even in the heartlands of neoliberalism such as the UK and the US. Now that history has started up again, and Jameson’s “baroque sunbursts” flare brighter than they have for a generation, we can begin to pose questions that had receded into the unimaginable during the high pomp of neoliberal triumphalism: what might a post-capitalism look like, and how can we get there?

Fisher will argue that the Left will only succeed if it can reclaim modernity from a neoliberal Right that has lost control of it. This entails understanding how the current possibilites for agency are contoured and constrained by the machinery of what Deleuze and Foucault called the Control Society, including cyberspace, the media landscape, psychic pathologies and pharmacology - failures to act are not failures of will, and all the will in the world will not eliminate capitalism. It also entails recognising that neoliberalism’s global hegemony arose from capturing desires which it could not satisfy. A genuinely new Left must be shaped by those desires, and not be lulled, once again, by the logics of failed revolts.

Rudy Wurlitzer retrospective at Anthology

2011-05-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

I Went to Anthology on Saturday for the Wurlitzer retrospective, where the film Glen and Randa was followed by a Q&A between long-time friends and contemporaries, Robert Downy Sr. and the honored screenwriter himself, Rudy Wurlitzer.

The Q&A started with Downey thanking Anthology for finally doing an interesting retrospective, one that he would actually want to attend. Which I suppose was a compliment. Although I think it was also his attempt being humble, seeing as his own films are featured at the canonizing institution with high frequency.

Interesting anecdotes included stories about Hal Ashby, and how easy and inclusive of a director he was, how crazy and brilliant Sam Peckinpah was. (There was a story about Wurlitzer bringing Bob Dylan to Peckinpah's hacienda in Mexico introduce the two before 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.' With each step the two took towards the hacienda, sounds of broken glass and gunshots were heard, and followed shortly by maids fleeing. When the two finally entered the director's bed-quarters, he was standing in front of the mirror naked, pointing a gun at his 'image.' Wurlitzer said that Bob Dylan knew he liked him because he thought Peckinpah was the real deal.)

Another story was about how Antonioni refused to work with Wurlitzer because he couldn't bear to look at Wurlitzer's scrubby clothes. Desperate to rectify the solution, Wurlitzer agreed to allow Antonioni to take him shopping. The agreement culminated in a ridiculous shopping spree, for which Wurlitzer was billed $20,000 in Italian suits with matching orange scarves/sock combinations and the like. And the film still has yet to be produced. The two old friends had a good laugh over that story.

The night ended with Bob Downey saying that he hopes for more retrospectives at Anthology that focus on screenwriters as opposed to directors.

Churner and Churner gallery screens a Kuchar Brother pairing

2011-04-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

The Secret of Wendel Samson (1966, Mike Kuchar) (Above and below)

Encyclopedia Of The Blessed (1967-69, George Kuchar) (above)

Two very different George and Mike Kuchar selections were screened Friday night courtesy of the Film Co-op and a 16mm projector borrowed from Light Industry at the new space Churner and Churner on 10th Avenue. Curator and Archivist Leah Churner has become an expert on the Bronx-born twins-cum-avant-garde filmmakers. She has had a hand both in physically preserving the Kuchar's works, and regenerating interest of the brothers' work through exhibition. (Read her article 'The New Flesh' on the brothers here.)

The space: clean, nice floors, good size, and most importantly; excellent location. From the website:

"Churner and Churner combines solo shows by emerging artists and art-historical public programs, connecting contemporary artists with historical influences. Between exhibitions, the gallery becomes a venue for week-long events, including film and video screenings, long-duration performances, and installations."

The gallerists: two brilliant sisters, Rachel and Leah Churner. While Altscreen already beat me to a very nice write-up about the sisters' new space and tonight's screening, I wanted to add that I am really excited that this space opened in Chelsea, because it is just the type of DIY lifeblood that is needed among such corporate-gallery-institutions. And I say this mostly because of Leah and Rachel's respective backgrounds and interests. The gallery website states,

"Rachel Churner has worked in academic, nonprofit and commercial art spaces, including Peter Freeman, Inc., New York; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; and the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. Now completing a PhD in Art History at Columbia University, Churner has published catalogue essays on Little + Furgason, Robert Mangold, and Nina Katchadorian; written for Artforum and Artweek; and served as the managing editor of October magazine. Advising on special projects is Leah Churner, a film and video curator whose programs have appeared at the Museum of the Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry and X-initative, and who was formerly the archivist at Electronic Arts Intermix. Their combined experience in various art worlds lends a theoretical underpinning and broad cultural attunement to the gallery’s program."

I am so very excited to see what kind of programs and exhibitions are produced through Churner and Churner's new space, and welcome the gallery into my repertory of frequented institutions!

Churner and Churner Gallery
205 10th Ave (between 22nd and 23rd Street)
New York NY 10011
212-675-2750 info@churnerandchurner.com
hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10 - 6 pm

Barbie Video Girl

2011-04-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

I need this ASAP.

Always wanted one of these as a kid, but never had one. Used my parents' Panasonic shoulder camcorder instead to make SWV and Juliana Hatfield home music videos. Maybe someday I will transfer them and upload them. They're pretty good..

In fourth grade, I had to earn straight A's to get a Talkboy. By the time the quarter was over, they were all sold out, and we went on a wild goose-chase trying to find one. Much to my dismay, the thing did NOT work as well as the one in Home Alone 2. It was kind of a piece of garbage actually. Overall, the experience was a character-builder for sure.

Sorta Power/ Kinda Crust/ Vaguely Wave

2011-04-26T08:57:00.000-07:00

What I did with my tax return

2011-04-21T12:57:00.000-07:00

William Powhida print from Jen Bekman

(don't worry, I bought the reissue)

(also the reissue)

orig (lame)

Did not buy this, but it would be awesome if someone did.

MIAP Program Offers New Summer Course on Copyright and Intellectual Property

2011-04-21T12:18:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so I really wish I could take this course. MIAP friends sneak me a syllabus for some self-directed study!

Copyright Law for Cultural Institutions 3 credits, July 25 August 5 2011, M-F 9am-12pm (plus an additional hour of online activities each day)

Instructor: Rina Pantalony

This graduate-level course addresses the intellectual property issues and related ethical ones that surround the management, preservation, and dissemination of cultural material (such as paper records and their digital surrogates, museum objects, film, video, and other ephemera) in collecting institutions. The course is designed for current students and also for professionals who already work with cultural objects, providing either a refresher or an upgrade to existing knowledge and practice.

The first step in the registration process is to reserve a space in the course. You can do this by contacting the MIAP Coordinator, Alicia Kubes at tisch.preservation@nyu.edu or 212-998-1618 . After this step is complete, NYU students will be able to register through Albert. All other students will get instructions from the MIAP Coordinator by e-mail.

Any questions about the course or the registration process should be addressed to the MIAP coordinator.

Full Course Description:

With the advent of new technologies, content producers, aggregators and those who manage collections and related ephemera are faced with a number of legal and ethical issues concerning the use of their own works, those of others and in providing access to collections of such works to their patrons and other third parties. Because of the complexity of intellectual property rights, the answers to many such legal questions are not always apparent. Managers of collections are often faced with the need for a risk assessment that takes into account ethical considerations in order to allow a project to move forward.

What are the various legal rights that may encumber cultural material? Who holds these rights? How may they be cleared? What are the extraneous issues that must be given consideration in clearing them? How do these rights affect the subsequent long term exhibition, distribution and hosting of the works once they enter into the collection of a museum or archive? How can these issues be managed effectively? What are the international considerations in dealing with content, created in one jurisdiction, but exhibited or distributed in another? What are the legal considerations in such circumstances and what may be the cultural or ethical considerations?

The issues discussed in this course are the subject of a publication, by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), authored by the instructor, Rina Elster Pantalony, where the publication will serve as one of the primary texts for the course.

Students will be required to analyze existing collections, examine the intellectual property issues, present findings within existing standards of practice in the field, and use electronic means of communication to compare and contrast findings. All students will be required to participate in assessing risk, preparing intellectual property assessments and discussing their analysis of existing content by posting their findings to a Wiki exclusively developed for the course and hosted by NYU.

The total cost for this 3-credit course including tuition and fees is $3490

Edge of the Wedge

2011-04-21T11:30:00.001-07:00

"In Watermelon Sugar the Deeds Were Done and Done Again as My Life is Done in Watermelon Sugar."

The Wedge
Severed Heads
Edge of the Wedge Theorem
In Watermelon Sugar

Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise (1938 – 1979) at Boo-Hooray

2011-04-20T08:38:00.001-07:00

Boo-Horray gallery on West 23rd St will present Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise from May 10 - May 29 curated by Johan Kugelberg (JOHANN KUGELBERG!!!) and Will Cameron. The larger project will also encompass a Sound Installation (at 265 Canal St) and a Film series at Anthology (on May 12th) featuring the film and video works by Ira Cohen and Piero Heliczer. The exhibition marks the first overview of the artist, poet, percussionist, and composer active in New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and Kathmandu from the 1950’s through the 1970’s. Best known as the original drummer of the Velvet Underground, MacLise’s lifework included music, calligraphy, performance art, poetry, drawings, plays, and limited edition artist’s books.

The exhibition website states:

On Summer Solstice 1979, MacLise died from hypoglycemia in Kathmandu, and was cremated in the fashion of Tibetan Buddhist funerary rites.

A suitcase of Angus MacLise’s artwork, publications, and manuscript as well as more than 100 hours of recorded music was left with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela for safe-keeping thirty years ago. This extraordinary time-vault is the foundation of the exhibition, with additional materials drawn from private previously unseen collections and archives.

The 521 West 23rd Street exhibition features manuscript, calligraphy, ephemera, photography, artwork, memorabilia, posters and handbills illuminating MacLise’s multi-faceted career through a narrative of original artifacts.

The 265 Canal Street Suite 601 sound installation, the premiere exhibition at Boo-Hooray’s new Chinatown space, features previously unheard recordings from the 1960’s and 1970’s featuring Angus MacLise performing alongside notables such as: Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, John Cale, Billy Name, Terry Riley, William Breeze, Piero Heliczer, Jack Smith, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker among others. Each day one may experience a unique set of curated programs of MacLise’s music. Every day is different.

Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 8pm, Anthology Film Archives are hosting an evening of film and video works by Ira Cohen and Piero Heliczer. At the center is the underground classic, The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (Dir. Ira Cohen, 1968), showcasing the music of Angus MacLise. The program will also include works by Heliczer featuring MacLise, and Marty Topp's portapak video from the Ira Cohen Jefferson St. loft (1971-72). Boo-Hooray are also pumped to announce the world premiere of Heavy Canon, directed by Ira Cohen (1968/2011). This film is comprised of unseen 16mm footage shot in Cohen’s Mylar Chamber and scored with the music of Angus MacLise.

“Angus MacLise was the Velvet Underground's first drummer. He withdrew when he found out that at a paying job he had to start and stop playing when told to. No one told Angus to stop playing. So the job of a working musician was impossible for Angus, and he taught us all a lesson about purity of spirit.” -- Lou Reed

Co-curator Johan Kugelberg describes Angus MacLise as the American Henri Michaux:

MacLise was a collaborative partner in the early 1960’s with art groups and individuals such as Fluxus (George Maciunas, Yoko Ono), Theatre of the Ridiculous, and Jack Smith. As a poet, MacLise began publishing in partnership with high school friend Piero Heliczer in the late 1950’s, establishing the Dead Language Press in Paris, widely acknowledged as one a most significant small artist book presses of the 20th Century. Together with his wife, artist and underground press illustrator Hetty MacLise, he edited issue No. 9 of the magazine-in-a-box, Aspen, considered a hallmark of American publishing.

La Brune et Moi

2011-04-11T21:27:00.000-07:00

Filmed in 1979, screened once in 1980 to a small crowd on the Left Bank, and lost until 2005, I'm sad to say that my 2011 tastes were underwhelmed with this one.

French director Philippe Puicouyoul lifted the story line (Business man falls for a young girl and vows to fulfill her dream of becoming a punk rock star) from Frank Tashlin's (also crappy) 50's Rocker flick, The Girl Can't Help It (1956) for this dumb 1980 "feature", which pieces together a lot of justly forgotten French new-wave musicians. Pierre Clementi, best known as Catherine Deneuve's lover in Belle de Jour, provides some amusement as the business manager of punk manque Anoushka, but the movie fell solidly into the "Rot" category. At least it was short!

The Bands:
Ici Paris
Artefact
Astroflash
Edith Nylon
The Questions (really known as Les Lous)
The Party
Marquis de Sade
Dogs
Go-Go Pigalles
Taxi Girl
Les Prives

Aluminum Music at the Kitchen's 40th

2011-04-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

In celebration of their 40th Anniversary, The Kitchen is hosting a party that will be based on a memorable bday-bash-cum-fundraiser in June of 1981 at a Times Square Megaclub. "Dubbed Aluminum Nights, the marathon event saw a capacity audience of many hundreds — including, all seem to recall, Mick Jagger backstage — enjoy a diversified array of the downtown sounds being nurtured at the crossroads of The Kitchen’s music program. In 2011, as part of its 40th anniversary season, The Kitchen presents a distilled refraction of the Aluminum Music performed over that memorable weekend." Site

The Vasulka archive has a pdf of the original event here, which is pretty impressive.

The 2011 'Aluminum Music' event is described on the website:
On Friday, April 15, Industrial music pioneer Z’EV demonstrates his hypnotic, ritualized solo percussion music on a shared bill with cherished No-Wavers, Bush Tetras. Saturday, April 16, features the pairing of former Kitchen Music Director (and Aluminum Nights co-curator) George Lewis’s electroacoustic anthem Homage to Charles Parker (1979) featuring Amina Claudine Myers (piano/organ), Reggie Nicholson (percussion), Matana Roberts (alto saxophone), and Richard Teitelbaum (synthesizers) with the epic disco-minimalism of PeterGordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, featuring contributions from Kitchen alums Ned Sublette (guitar) and Peter Zummo (trombone).

I'm confused about this program for a couple of reasons. The concept of "re-doing" a party from 1981 odd enough, but then quickly just becomes depressing. Especially because most of the artists I would want to see are not participating (compare the 4 page list on the Vasulka's website to the description above). But also, some of these artists might suck really bad now. I love Bush Tetras, but I mostly like them for their musical and visual aesthetic--two things that can not ever be reproduced. So, it becomes sort of... nostalgic and banal. I'm going to give this a fair shot, but this has really never bode well for me in the past. And then you run the risk of remembering a less than perfect version of what is being re-hashed. Case in point: Wire. I saw them a few years ago when my friends opened up for them at Irving Plaza, and it was terrible. I can barely listen to them now. This is really no different. Of course there are exceptions like The Clean or The Raincoats.. and I'm not saying I wouldn't go nuts for a Velvet Underground reunion.. but generally speaking, it doesn't end well.

Also: wasn't the spirit of the original 'Aluminum Music' party contemporary artists and musicians, which attracted the glitterati A-list celebs? What will this show attract? I understand to convey a sense of authenticity, it might be confusing to add young bands or artists, but it just seems really contradictory. I love the Kitchen, and think Nick Hallett is brilliant, but sort of confused about this one.

EAI in Times Square! MTV 44 1/2 , EAI, and The Times Square Alliance Partners to Celebrate Video

2011-04-08T12:06:00.001-07:00

This is so exciting! Instead of pontificating as usual, I think it's best to simply re-post the info from EAI's website. Video documentation to follow!

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) celebrates its 40th anniversary with a special project for Times Square. In partnership with the Times Square Alliance and MTV, EAI brings artists' visions to the MTV 44½ LED Screen. Marking EAI's 40 years of support for moving image art, EAI in Times Square celebrates video art's rich history of creative intervention in one of the world's most dynamic media landscapes.

EAI partners with the Times Square Alliance and MTV to present artists' video in the astonishing visual landscape of Times Square. From April 13 to 19, EAI will highlight the remarkable creative media interventions of artists on a spectacular scale. Works by Vito Acconci, Dan Asher, Phyllis Baldino, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Shigeko Kubota, Takeshi Murata, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Stuart Sherman and William Wegman will be seen daily on MTV 44½'s large-format LED screen.

Drawn from EAI's archive, one of the world's leading resources for media art, the videos will play at the top of each hour, between noon and 4pm and between 6pm and 11pm. On Saturday, April 16 and Sunday, April 17 the complete program (25:16 min) will also play at noon.

Spanning the 1960s to 2011, the works range from bold animations and visual poems to witty performances and vibrant electronic experiments. Nam June Paik's rarely seen Hand and Face (1961) is one of his earliest media works; Dara Birnbaum's 30-second Artbreak was commissioned for broadcast by MTV in 1987. Shigeko Kubota brings a profusion of electronic cherry blossoms to the heart of Times Square, while Martha Rosler eyes domestic labor in a suburban backyard. William Wegman's dogs perform a timeless duet.

Each day's program will begin with Takeshi Murata's EAI 40th Anniversary Intro (2011). Linking video art's history to the digital present, this piece was specially commissioned by EAI for its 40th Anniversary programming. Murata's video can also be viewed online here.

Much as early video artists sought to "slow down" television and "talk back" to the media, these creative interjections will challenge viewers to reconsider their visual expectations of Times Square and experience it in new ways. Encountered on MTV's large-scale LED screen, these visions will engage the public not just as consumers, but also as active viewers.

Program Schedule
Noon Takeshi Murata, EAI 40th Anniversary Intro (2011, 1:05 min)
1 pm Shigeko Kubota, Rock Video: Cherry Blossom (1986, 3 min)
2 pm William Wegman, Dog Duet (1975, 2:37 min)
3 pm Martha Rosler, Backyard Economy I (1974, 3:20 min)
4 pm Stuart Sherman, Chess (1982, 30 sec)

6 pm Dara Birnbaum, Artbreak, MTV Networks, Inc. (1987, 30 sec)
7 pm Vito Acconci, Three Frame Studies: Push (1969-1970, 2:59 min)
8 pm Nam June Paik, Hand and Face (1961, 1:25 min)
9 pm Phyllis Baldino, Suitcase/Not Suitcase (1993, 36 sec)
10 pm Gary Hill, Objects With Destinations (1979, 3:41 min)
11 pm Dan Asher, Artificial Illuminations: Calligraphic (1997, 55 sec)

EAI in Times Square is part of an ongoing series of events and projects marking EAI's 40th anniversary year. For more information about upcoming and past programs in this series, please click here.

About the Times Square Alliance
Times Square Arts presents temporary cutting-edge art and performances in multiple forms and media to the 360,000 to 500,000 daily visitors to New York City's Times Square, making it one of the highest profile public arts programs in the United States. Since its inception three years ago, Times Square Arts has featured works by a diverse group of more than four dozen prominent and emerging artists. The Times Square Public Art Program is made possible in part by the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. www.TimesSquareNYC.org/arts

About MTV 44½
A standout among the large electronic displays in Times Square, MTV 44½ captures the eyes of viewers with unique programming, live tapings, special events, concerts, and MTV-branded creative that breaks through the clutter in Times Square. www.mtv445.com

EAI: Celebrating 40 Years
Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art and digital art. EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI's activities include viewing access, educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art: www.eai.org

Electronic Arts Intermix 535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10011
info@eai.org t (212) 337-0680 f (212) 337-0679

This project was made possible by the generosity and support of MTV 44½. The Times Square Alliance and EAI thank MTV 44½ for their ongoing support of the arts.

Lucy Lippard lecture at SVA

2011-04-08T10:35:00.002-07:00

SVA's Art Criticism and Writing MFA Director, David Levi-Strauss Introducing the Lecture

The Art Criticism and Writing MFA program at SVA sponsored the brilliant curator, "critic", writer, and activist Lucy Lippard last evening. The talk, titled "Ghosts, the Daily News, and Prophecy: Critical Landscape Photography" examined the role and effectiveness of photography in generating responsibility for place. Much of the lecture was extracted from her most recent project "The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society." The Manhattan native moved to New Mexico a few years ago, and is active with city planning and watershed restoration. Always an activist, it comes as no surprise that Lippard is heavy into land use issues, and artworks as activism.

I am still processing the pithy lecture, but I expect that it will be made public soon at this website. (the other lectures in the series are here as well.)

Very interesting to me was that her talk made no argument, nor did it actually 'critique' any art work. It was more a presentation of landscape photographs which illustrated a discussion about local and global power relations, the role of art, and the deconstruction and de-contextualization of visual knowledge. Early on in the talk, she disclaimed the distinction between being a critic and an advocate of art. She identified with the latter, but accepted the former. She flat-out rejected being a theorist. To Lippard, being a theorist marks a sort of hardening of the veins. A very even-keeled, approachable, scholar, I am happy to report how refreshingly human she was, for such a prolific genius.

Dara Birnbaum at EAI

2011-04-08T10:35:00.001-07:00

Marking the occasion of a new comprehensive catalog and retrospective on the prolific ouevre of Dara Birnbaum, a selection of the artist's early performance-videos were screened at Electronic Arts Intermix on March 30th. Editors of the new publication, Karen Kelly and Barbara Schröder introduced these early black-and-white, performance-based videos, which preceded her single channel works. Unlike the later works, which appropriated and critiqued mass media and TV culture, these direct, unmediated, and tautological performance-based works shed new insight by introducing themes recurring throughout her later work.

"In many of these works, Birnbaum appears on camera as the performer, investigating through the body intense emotional or psychological manifestations while also foregrounding the relation of the camera/viewer to the subject/performer. Such works reveal an unexpected link to the body-art and performance-video practices of artists such as Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman. Other early works incorporate disjunctive tactics and pop-cultural content, pointing to Birnbaum's later editing strategies and engagement with television as source material." (EAI program notes)

Following the screening, Birnbaum appeared in conversation with Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI, and participated in discussion with the audience.
I found Dara's citation of Vito Acconci's influence in the 1970s fascinating. Having never seen these early videos, I wouldn't necessarily have anticipated this parallel, although given their common interest in Architecture, the epistemologies of video space, and camera-viewer-performer dynamics, it makes sense. I would have expected a much stronger bond with say, Joan Jonas, who Birnbaum cited only after an audience member asked about her connection to pioneers in feminist video. She also cited early influence by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. (The latter whom she co-wrote a text on video/architecture in the early 80s if I'm not mistaken.) As well as the theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, of course.

The question that resonated most with me was from EAI's Josh Kline, who asked the artist how she had conceptualized and weighed her role as a director in these early works. Since these works rest on a combination of the technical parameters of the cameras and the concept, he wondered to what extent she had directed the various players. Surprisingly, she admitted very little responsibility, saying that it was mostly a collaborative effort with her making aesthetic decisions.

Ladies Birnbaum and Zippay will also be in conversation at White Columns April 14th for the Second installment of the Skowhegan Conversations Series, (an ongoing series of collaborative dialogs between Skowhegan and White Columns)

The retrospective that was the impetus for the new catalog, is being exhibited at S.M.A.K., Ghent, in 2009 and Museu Serralves, Porto, in 2010. Hopefully after those two venues, it will come to New York!

Bits of Broodthaers

2011-04-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

La salle blanche, 1975

Delving into a post about Broodthaers is out of the question here, because I generally don't spend more than a few minutes on posts. And there is SO much to say about the prolific artist.

I found this image of his tombstone, that he designed, and wanted to post it. Broodthaers died in Cologne on his 52nd birthday. He is buried at Ixelles Cemetery in Bussels.

Dance Capsules: Walker Art Center acquires Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection

2011-03-30T10:30:00.001-07:00

Robert Rauschenberg, set piece for "Minutiae," 1954.
Photo by Herb Migdall, 1976.
Courtesy Cunningham Dance Foundation.

Minneapolis. I think I might be able to do it. I could live there if I could work or study at the Walker, with their AMAZING collection to keep me intellectually stimulated. That city isn't bad, from what I recall. This comprehensive acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company's collection only makes it that much more appealing.

E-flux writes:

The Walker Art Center and Cunningham Dance Foundation (CDF) announce the Walker's acquisition of a comprehensive collection of artist-made set pieces, costumes, painted drops, and props, created for the internationally renowned Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC). Over the course of his nearly 70-year career, Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) redefined the visual and performing arts through pioneering collaborations with leading artists, designers, and musicians. More than 150 objects created by such artists as Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, John Cage, and Frank Stella will arrive at the Walker this year and be displayed for the first time beginning in November 2011. The placement of these works at the Walker supports a key goal of CDF's Legacy Plan—ensuring the preservation and ongoing accessibility of the Company's singular collection of 20th century art.

The acquisition of major works from the MCDC collection aligns with the Walker's cross-disciplinary collecting strategy and its mission to present contemporary art in a multidisciplinary context, in order to foster an understanding of the nexus between artistic disciplines. The acquisition marks a major landmark in both the museum and dance fields, making the Walker a new center for research and scholarship of Cunningham's work, and presenting a new model for preserving works created by multiple artists in support of a single choreographer's artistic vision.

"The acquisition of these works is groundbreaking for the Walker and for the museum field at large, affirming our longstanding commitment to bringing together diverse artistic practices to form a cross-disciplinary blend of programs," said Walker Executive Director Olga Viso. "We enjoyed a lasting relationship with Cunningham beginning in the early 1960s and look forward to inspiring future generations with programs, exhibitions, and new scholarship devoted to his legacy of innovation and collaboration."

The Walker will present its first installation of works from the collection in November 2011, in an exhibition focusing on Cunningham's creative collaborations with major artists. This exhibition coincides with MCDC's final engagement at the Walker, to be presented November 4–6, 2011, as part of the Company's farewell Legacy Tour. The engagement continues a relationship that began in 1963, when MCDC was first presented by the Walker. The performances will be the company's first actually held inside the Walker (all past MCDC performances have been off-site or outdoors).The Walker will organize additional exhibitions exploring Cunningham's collaborations with artists over the next three years.

The Walker is acquiring more than 150 objects dating back to 1942, when Cunningham began his distinguished 67-year career. During that time, Cunningham choreographed nearly 200 dances, most of which involved significant collaborations with leading visual artists who contributed unique set pieces and costumes. Notably, the collection contains Robert Rauschenberg's combine Minutiae (1954/1976) and his costumes for Antic Meet (1958), Frank Stella's set pieces for Scramble (1967), and the mylar pillows from Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds installation used for RainForest (1968), and works created independently by John Cage, Cunningham's life partner, that were ultimately incorporated into MCDC dances. The collection also includes set pieces and costumes created in the Company's later years by a younger generation of artists, including Ernesto Neto and the fashion designer Rei Kawakubo.

To complement the acquisition and aid in ongoing scholarship, CDF will grant the Walker access to "Dance Capsules"—digital packages of archival materials which are being developed as another part of the Legacy Plan. Each Dance Capsule contains documentation of a Cunningham work, including performance videos, sound recordings, lighting plots, décor images, costume design, Merce Cunningham's choreographic notes, production notes, and interviews with dancers, and will serve as an invaluable supporting resource for Walker programming and the public.

The acquisition is a gift of Jay F. Ecklund, the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, Agnes Gund, Russell Cowles and Josine Peters, the Hayes Fund of HRK Foundation, Marion Stroud Swingle, Kathleen Fluegel, Barbara G. Pine, and the T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2011.

Janet. and her uncanny obsession with her breasts

2011-03-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

For a long while, I have been trying to find a beat up "Janet." tour shirt. My ebay search for such a 90s relic is what generated this post. Although it probably started earlier in her career, Janet Jackson's 1993 album "Janet.", released under the Virgin label really propelled her into a full-fledged sex-symbol, and seemingly foreshadowed her now ubiquitous obsession with own her ti-tons. Before "Janet." she was already a pop-star and an icon with "Control" and "Rythm Nation" two records that mark the beginning of Janet's forage for her own identity, separate from the Jackson family. It was in 1993 that she finally shed her good-girl "All in the Family" image and pursued crafting her own career apart from her pop-royalty heritage.

The image found in the liner notes for "Janet." album, was a cropped version of the photograph above, which also appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. The pic, shot by Patrick Demarchelier, featured a relaxed and confident Janet whose bare breasts were being held by her husband (at the time) René Elizondo, Jr.

After "Janet." came "Poetic Justice," her filmic debut, which was panned. This didn't make one bit of difference to me as a 10 year old, renting the VHS from Blockbuster. I thought it was cinematic gold, and held it over all my friends that they weren't allowed to rent it. Plus there's this:

Amid the media hurricane that came along with defending Michael from child molestation alligations, as well as denying Latoya's public claims that the Jackson parents abused their children, mixed with her own high profile success; Janet started getting a little weird... and really into her boobs.

She also thought it would be a good idea to be in the sequel to the Nutty Professor remake?

Hey, check out my boobs!

The peak of all this funny business was undoubtedly at the 2004 Superbowl halftime, where the Janet performed with Justin Timberlake, who tore half of her bra off exposing her left breast. The two performers both apologized, claiming it was a "Wardrobe Malfunction." The photos evoke an original sin connotation, with Janet looking shamed and irresponsible, while J-Tim looks guilty and unapologetic.

"What does this mean for boobs?" you might ask. From Lil Kim, to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, to Janet Jackson the United States is oddly conservative regarding breasts, which only further fetishizes them within our cultural fabric, and results in a tightening of FCC regulations. It's ironic, given the overwhelming support of breast cancer/ (I prefer the term "breast health") awareness in this country. Culturally, America needs to turn this fear-respect relationship to breasts into a love-respect relationship. Now I'm really ranting, this was supposed to be a funny slide show, and has now turned into an (probably) ill-informed cultural proscription. I'm sure some scholar somewhere has theorized about this in a more coherent manner.

One thing about Janet is that she never stays out of the public eye for too long, so it probably won't be long now before she resurfaces, boobs waving in the spotlight.

The Andy Monument

2011-03-26T12:34:00.001-07:00

The New York Public Art Fund will present a tribute to Andy Warhol in Union Square this spring, a short distance from where the Factory once stood from 1968 until the artist's death in 1987. The second Factory (the White Factory as opposed to the Silver Factory, which was located in midtown from 1962-1968) was just around the corner from Max's Kansas City at 33 Union Square West. It was also the site where Valerie Salonas’ assassination attempt occurred and where Interview magazine was launched.

Sculptor Rob Pruitt created The Andy Monument as a tribute to the late artist, who publicly signed and gave away copies of Interview magazine at the street corner where the monument will stand beginnning March 30th, 2011.

Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume says that, "The figure is based on a combination of digital scanning of a live model and hand sculpting, its surface finished in chrome, mounted on a concrete pedestal. It depicts Warhol as a ghostly, silver presence: a potent cultural force as both artist and self-created myth." As Rob Pruitt observes, "Like so many other artists and performers and people who don't fit in because they're gay or otherwise different, Andy moved here to become who he was, to fulfill his dreams and make it big. He still represents that courage and that possibility. That's why I came to New York, and that's what my Andy Monument is about." '

Really looking forward to this, and hope that the Public Art Fund can manage to make the sculpture a permanent presence to remind passerby's of the once-cultural/historical significance of the now Sephora-ed and Babies-R-Us-ed out strip.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
' You know the song "New York, New York," and how for year after year people have come to New York to "make it." One of the most important examples of that is Andy Warhol, who spawned a generation of people who think they can make it here in this city. Andy Warhol embodies the spirit of the city that still draws people. Every day a thousand more kids come to New York propelled by his legacy. And even if the decades pass and Warhol becomes a vaguer and vaguer character, there will still be something here that's directly linked to him - this pilgrimage, or calling, coming here from the Midwest, Eastern Europe or South- East Asia, to make it big, to be an artist. I think there should be a destination in New York to mark all those journeys.

There are hundreds of monuments to politicians in the New York City, but I can’t think of any monuments to artists, and other figures who actually represent the lived experience of most of the people who live here. When I was a teenager, I visited Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde are buried. I was struck by the throngs of people that came to visit the tombs of their idols. When Andy Warhol died, his family had his remains sent back to Pittsburgh, where he was born, and so no such marker for him exists in New York. So a public statue of Warhol has a sense of righting a wrong.

Andy, like so many other artists and performers and people who don’t fit in, moved to New York to be himself, fulfill his dreams and make it big. That’s why I moved here, and that’s what my Andy Monument is about. Of course it could be argued that someone could just go to the Modern and look at his Soup Cans, but I think there is something to being truly out in streets of New York, to have something you can visit at 4:20 in the morning with your friends.

I will be unveiling the Andy Monument at the North-West corner of Union Square on Wednesday, March 30 at 6:00PM. I hope you will be able to join me to celebrate one of our own. '

Rob Pruitt
New York
March 2011

Takahiko Iimura

2011-03-15T14:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty stoked to check this out, and I have been hearing good stuff about this new space. I didn't make it to the opening, which appropriately happened during the "supermoon," but this guy did and blogged about it.

I was introduced to Iimura's work through my research on an exhibition and publication with Electronic Arts Intermix, called Vital Signals:Early Japanese Video Art (2010). The work included in the exhibition was Camera, Monitor, Frame from 1976.

Additionally, there will be a screening of Iimura's Early Experimental and Conceptual videos, and a benefit fundraiser with donations towards Red-Cross relief efforts in Japan.

Microscope Gallery
4 Charles Place, Brooklyn NY 11221 Tel: 347.925.1433
E-mail: info@microscopegallery.com www.microscopegallery.com
Hours: Thurs to Mon. 1-6PM

Mar 19 - Apr 11, 2011
Opening Reception:
Sat Mar 19 6pm - 9pm

Takahiko Iimura
BETWEEN THE FRAMES
installation, digital drawing, video, and other new & evolving works by the film & video pioneer

Verbatim from the gallery's site:

TAKAHIKO IIMURA
Between The Frames
w/ live 16mm projection performance of the ever-changing “Circle and a Square”

Microscope Gallery is honored to present the first Brooklyn solo exhibition of the film and video pioneer Takahiko Iimura. Between The Frames is a comprehensive exhibition featuring works made from 1975 to the present, many of which are constantly evolving. The new suspended installation “400 frames” uses ink drawings from 1975. A new print series “MA: The Stones Have Moved” are made from digital drawings related to his 2004 animated video of a Zen garden in Kyoto of the same title. Also on display: Iimura’s famous 1993 “funny faces” silkscreens and video game installation based on Derridda’s “Differance” dealing with physicality of language “AIUEONN Six Features“, never-before-seen sculptures made from 16mm film loop and more.

Iimura has been working with the moving image on film since the 60s and video since the early 70s. After moving to New York in the late 60s became involved with the avant garde scene along side Yoko Ono and Nam Jun Paik and is recognized as one of the most important Japanese artists today. His work is shown widely with numerous solo shows including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Paris, Reina Sofia National Museum, Madrid, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. Iimura currently lives and works in Tokyo and NYC.

“His [Iimura’s] Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema’s minimalist and conceptual possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else. To review all of Iimura’s work…is an important occasion for all who are concerned with the development and pleasure of cinema as an art.” — Jonas Mekas

Please note: Takahiko Iimura is generously donating his proceeds on the sale of sculptures from the series One Second Loop (= Infinity) to the American Red Cross for relief efforts in Japan. Additionally, Microscope Gallery is donating 15 % of the sales of all works of the exhibition.

from video-installation AIUEONN SIX FEATURES, 2′ 30″ (vers. I), 7′ (vers. II), col, sound, 1993

Notes on the screening program (verbatim from program note):

For many years, Japanese experimental film was Takahiko Iimura.
- Malcolm Le Grice, Time Out, London.

In connection with his current exhibition BETWEEN THE FRAMES, Takahiko Iimura brings a selection of his earliest film and video works to the gallery. The evening will be divided into two parts: “60 Experiments” with four 16 mm films made between 1962 & 1964 including his famous AI (LOVE); and “Early Conceptual Videos”, six short video works that contributed to the birth of conceptual video art. A Q&A will follow the screening.

60s EXPERIMENTS
Original 16mm films

Kuzu (Junks)
1962, 10min., b/w, music by Takehisa Kosugi
It’s a mixture of [dead]animals, pieces of [broken] furniture, industrial waste, kids playing. I didn’t have in mind any of the kind of historical perspective, nor was I trying to make an ecological statement. I was showing the new landscape of our civilization. My point of view was animistic. I tried to revive those dead animals metaphorically and to give the junk new life. – - Takahiko Iimura (from “An Interview with Taka Iimura”, Scott MacDonald, Journal of the University Film Association XXXIII, 4, Fall 1981)

Ai (Love)
1962, 10min., blown up from 8mm, b/w, music by Yoko Ono
“I have seen a number of Japanese avantgarde films at the Brussels international Experimental Film Festival, at Cannes, and at other places. Of all those films, Iimura’s LOVE stands out in its beauty and originality, a film poem, with no usual pseudo-surrealist imagery. Closest comparison would be Brakhage’s LOVING or Jack Smith’s FLAMING CREATURES. LOVE is a poetic and sensuous exploration of the body…fluid, direct, beautiful.” – - Jonas Mekas, Film Culture,1966, New York

On Eye Rape
1962, 10min., b/w, silent, Co-Pro. Natsuyuki Nakanishi
The second film (On Eye Rape) was made with footage I picked out of some trash. It was originally an educational film which recorded a plant growing out of the ground. The content isn’t important. I punched almost all the frames with a puncher. I made big holes so that when it was projected, people could barely see what was originally in the frames. I didn’t punch every frame; there was a lot of flicker from the holes. People got very annoyed and complained. They were afraid they would get hurt by the light. That film was called, in English, On Eye Rape (1962). In fact, I had also inserted (a few frames of) *some porno shots. Pornography was forbidden in Japan; It’s still forbidden…. [...] *ps. This is in fact subliminal shots against censorship.” – - Takahiko Iimura (from “An Interview with Taka Iimura”, Scott MacDonald, Journal of The University Film Association XXXIII, 4, Fall 1981)

A dance party in the kingdom of Lilliput
1964, 12min., b/w, sound
A surper-real comedy with Sho Kazakura. The film is divided into a number of very short scenes or chapters, each with a title at random. We see him lame in a crowd, see him running up stairs, see him absolutely naked, watch him urinate, etc. An anthology of discontinuous happenings and events.” – - T I

“The movie may well be one of the first ‘Conceptual’ film ever made anywhere in the world. It was a rather slow, but clerly defined daily motions of Kazakura, a mysterious underground figure of Japan, who is still unknow in Tokyo, yet has a strange presence in his remote area of Japan, KYUSYU Island.”
- – Nam June Paik, 1987

(Total 42 minutes)

EARLY CONCEPTUAL VIDEOS

After coming back from New York in 1969, I began video production in Tokyo. Working in experimental film since the early 1960s, I first combined the art of film with video, thus making a kind of flicker effect in video in two pieces: “A Chair ” (1970) and “Blinking” (1970). These videos are experiments in perception, and are very minimal formally, consisting mostly of a single object. “Time Tunnel” (1971) is an attempt at time travel in a very conceptual sense. The video combines a repetition of the countdown leader of film, which runs the numbers 10 to 1 , with the feedback effect of video. The result is a tunneling of the numbers in time. ”Man and Woman” (1971) shows the full body of a man and a woman shot from above, in the posture of the drawing of a man by Leonardo Da Vinci, without movement. They are shown alone as well as together one over (or under) the other, narrating in words their positions at the same time. “Visual Logic (and Illogic)” (1977) shows the visual logic (and illogic) of various signs in letters and simple forms on paper combined with limited camera movement and voice-over narration. These early videos constitute the very early experiments of a particular “conceptual video” that almost no other video artists had ever tried at that time. – - Takahiko Iimura

A Chair
1970, 6min., b/w, sound

Blinking
1970, 2min., b/w, sound

Time Tunnel
1971, 5min., b/w, sound

Man and Woman
1971, 2min., b/w

Visual Logic (and Illogic)
1977, 8min., b/w, sound

(Total 23 minutes)

Maria Lassing "Films" at Friedrich Petzel

2011-03-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Known mainly for her paintings, (specifically, her 'Body Awareness Paintings') Chelsea's Friedrich Petzel Gallery has organized an exhibition of the Viennese artist Maria Lassing's videos. These lesser known works were created in New York, where the artist resided for 12 years until 1980. During her stint with the city, it makes sense that she became friends with video artists Dan Graham and Vito Acconci, judging by the content of the program. Where their styles (and medium) are wildly different, one can appreciate the common thread of philosophical discourse engaged by Lassnig's films, and many early video artists.

Ten short films, plus an eleventh (Kantate-created in 1992) comprise the exhibition, in FPG's clean and simple ground floor space on 22nd Street. Integrating live-action, stop-motion animation, found photography as well as early green-screen technology, these nuanced works, like her paintings, illustrate the artist's interest in self-representation, where psychoanalysis, feminism, and phenomenological discourses enter her lexicon as well. Often humorous and satirical, each work I watched informed the other works being screened. By the end of the screening, an interconnected web of images, styles, and concepts had been constructed; and I'm still thinking about a lot of these relationships, a week later.

H BOX a nomadic video art screening room 2011 program

2011-02-22T07:09:00.001-08:00

H BOX at MUDAM (Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam Luxembourg).
I.M. Pei architect design.
Photo by Andres Lejona.

Thinking back to 2008, I remember how excited I was about Zaha Hadid's Mobile Art Unit, which came to NYC-- Central Park to be exact-- for the Chanel Exhibition. Ideologically, this concept was ripe with potential, but ultimately, it failed content wise. Going beyond it's haute-couture breathren Chanel, Hermes has a foundation set up, which funnels profits into stimulating the cultural economy; focusing on supporting young artists and designers in the beginning of their careers, and soliciting responses to pressing issues in the global economy in which the luxury brand operates. H Box (Could have come up with a more creative name) is one of these endeavors. Curated by international media impressario Benjamin Weil, H Box has been commissioning four artists a year to produce single-channel video for the collapsible screening room since 2006. The mobile unit, designed by Didier Daustino travels around the world, and the works are updated on a yearly basis.

H Box is more successful than Zaha Hadid's Mobile Art Container in terms of form and function. The Mobile Art Container, which so far has only been used for the Chanel exhibition, could be a utilitarian space for exhibiting contemporary art, but to my knowledge it has only been used to show art in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. The list of cities that H Box has travelled is too lengthy to list here. Beyond the collapsible and modular design-- which makes for cheap travel, the selection of the work is apt and concise. Hermes had the foresight to use an actual curator that understands the connection between contemporary art, commerce, and creative stimulus. Chanel's exhibition was "curated" by a French fashion editor, Fabrice Busteau; who functioned more as a PR person and runway art director than Fine Arts curator.

The show had one foot in commercial and promotion, and the other in runway imagination; but there wasn't a hint of creative inspiration. I left feeling like I was supposed to want to buy into their visual branding aesthetic--but couldn't because there was clearly a us vs. them divide throughout the show. It was clear that at no point was the exhibition or the works therein intended to inspire creative or independent thought. Intentional or not, I felt undercurrents of brainwashing (the show was narrated and viewers had no option on this front) and outlandish marketing schemes (each work supplanted the male gaze, so common in traditional Art History, with a feminine desire for social mobility and mindless consumption.)

H Box is smaller and therefore more concise. Focusing solely on video; a distributable, disposable, and portable medium; the content of the show is appropriate for the parameters and concept of the project. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: The content of the videos speak to a larger curatorial mission, extending beyond flagrant and distasteful product placement which is both respectful and respectible.

According to e-flux, "21 videos by artists from all over the world have been produced, and H BOX has screened in major museums and art centers in Europe and North America (USA and Mexico). It was also presented at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008 and will travel to Beijing and Guangzhou later in 2011. The H Box itself is an object that blends a screening room, a travel kit, and a modern curio cabinet of sorts. It creates a specific context for the viewing of exciting new works by artists who, for the most, have lived and worked in numerous places, and often have a multiplicity of cultural references and bases."
www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org

2011 H BOX program
Rosa Barba
(Born in 1972 in Sicily, lives and works in Germany)
The Empirical Effect, 2010
16mm transferred to HD Cam
20min.

Ali Kazma
(Born in 1971 in Turkey, lives and works in Turkey)
Taxidermist, 2010
Digital Video, color and stereo sound
13 min.

Mark Lewis
(Born in 1958 in Canada, lives and works in Canada)
TD Centre, 54th Floor, 2009
Single screen projection 35mm and 4K transferred to 2K
6min. 18sec.

Julika Rudelius
(Born in 1968 in Germany, lives and works in Netherlands)
Dressage, 2009
HD video transferred DVC pro
8min. 40sec.

Nikhil Chopra and Munir Kabani
(NC: Born in 1974 in India, lives and works in India)
(MK: Born in 1976 in India and works in India)
Man Eats Rock, 2011
HD-CAM mastered tape
20min.

Omer Fast
(Born in 1972 in Israel, Lives and works in Germany)
Sunday Morning (Part III of the Tunnel), 2010
HD video with sound
5min. 30sec.

Hwayeon Nam
(Born in 1979 in Korea, lives and works in Korea)
Do not harm your ghost, 2010
HD video transferred HD-CAM, color and stereo sound
17min. 56sec.

Wang Jianwei
(Born in 1958 in China, lives and works in China)
Zero, 2010
HD video transferred to digital beta, color and stereo sound
18min.

Curator: Benjamin Weil
Benjamin Weil has worked on the H BOX project since its inception. Working in close collaboration with the Hermès team, he has conceptualized the project and participated in its implementation. Since the beginning he has also selected the artists whose work have been commissioned (to date H BOX has commissioned 21 works in its 5 years of existence).

Architect: Didier Fiuza Faustino
Didier Fiuza Faustino is an artist and architect. In 1996 he set up the Laboratoire d'Architecture, Performances et Sabotages (l.a.p.s.), and in 2002 founded Bureau des Mesarchitectures.

Fondation d'entreprise Hermès
The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès was founded in April 2008. Within the framework of its support for contemporary artistic creation, it sets the programme schedules for six art spaces worldwide (Brussels, Tokyo, New York, Singapore, Seoul, Bern) and produces their exhibitions. This ensemble of galleries devoted to contemporary art and photography has been completed by H Box, dedicated exclusively to showing video art all over the planet. The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès is also committed to several project sponsors in the spheres of solidarity and culture.
www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org

Rirkrit Tiravanija - "Fear Eats the Soul" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

2011-02-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

March 5 - April 16, 2011

From the Press Release:

Rirkrit Tiravanija will open a new exhibition at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Taking its title from the Fassbinder film Ali - Fear Eats the Soul a story of love bridging the existential divide, the show will feature, amongst other elements a T-Shirt Factory and a soup kitchen. His preoccupation with time will be overarching. Space and memory will fuse while the stomach demands a focus on the present moment.

Tiravanija's first exhibition in New York - Pad Thai - was over 20 years ago. Since that point Tiravanija has consistently defied expectations of the form, and status of the work of art. He has upended cultural conventions of audience and its role, challenged ideas of the utility in the art object, and revealed the boundaries between art and life to be illusion.

Photo documentation of the first iteration of "Pad Thai"
Paula Allen Gallery, 1990.

Tiravanija changed the paradigm of art making twenty years ago and that change began with the challenge and simple temptation of food. He released the pungent aromas of spices and fish sauce into the white cube, made a crack in our perceived freedom to reveal a new liberty of open and unending possibilities. The sensual and messy reality of food preparation and consumption were literally displayed before us. In one spoonful he swept away notions of the timeless masterpiece and the instant cultural artifact. In its place he proposed a new exhibit, and a new artifact: Ourselves, in each other’s company, eating. This was a cultural displacement that put an uncomfortable and thrilling frame around chopping, frying, stirring, slurping and doing the dishes. It exploded our ideas of sculpture to include even our digestive tract. With this meal, and their remains, Tiravanija reintroduced us to time - and our fundamental relationship with it that today we would prefer to forget. In all his works since Tiravanija has focused our attention back to time. Real time. Lived time. He has shoehorned its inevitability back into our cultural language.

In 1992, he made Untitled (Free). The body of the gallery was stripped and laid bare. Its inventory, its files, its doors, its blinds, its people - everything it contained - were stuffed into the main exhibition space in pragmatic rows. In the office was an improvised kitchen with a fridge, a gallery door as table for a preparation, burners, rice cooker, pots, tables and stools. The days of the exhibition passed unremarkably. Groceries were bought and refrigerated. Meals were cooked and eaten. Visitors came to see. Then came back to eat. The tall second floor windows of the office, free of blinds, wrapped round the corner of Greene and Spring streets. Depending on the weather each day, the office would be flooded with that particular light of New York in the Springtime. Rather than being circumscribed by the gallery, Free leaped out through the windows and into the open air.

In 1994, Tiravanija made/curated a two person show with his other half, Andy Warhol. It was a hybrid retrospective of sorts for each artist. Tiravanija created a binary set up of three pairs of work, with one work by each artist in each pair: A Mao and a stack of beer bottles; a Brillo box and a wok; a bed and a pile of books and movies. Each pair created a metaphysical and cultural bridge across time and space from one world to another. Each side looking at the other in the mirror and being disgusted at themselves. One side surface and mediated, the other dirty and touched, but both steeped in melancholia and necrophilia.

In 1999, he made a plywood twin of his apartment on E7th Street, with working toilet shower and kitchen. This is an apartment he has lived in for more than 30 years and its contours and spaces are known to him intimately. The' apartment' in the gallery was well used (as was another version in Germany the year before). It was open 24 hours a day and birthdays were celebrated, beds were slept in, baths were taken and meals were cooked and eaten. It became a vessel for two months of unedited and diverse human activity. Was this doppleganger a chance to walk in his shoes? To live his life? Or perhaps an existential recognition of the impossibility of knowing anyones human's experience apart from our own, no matter how closely we rub up against them. It was no place like home.

This work, like many others he has made using architectural space, functioned as a form of reliquary. Enormous fetishes or lived photographs that could replay moments on a new stage attempting to aggregate that human experience although knowing they will fail. Like much of his work these spaces posed a question - where is art (our culture) contained?: Within the object? Or within the memory of those who pass through it? It has been argued that language was first acquired by humans simultaneously to the development of hunting and cooking. Around the fire food, time and space came together to create an environment where cooperation in survival gave birth to human relations. In Tiravanija's view these moments are still present with us today. There are still real opportunities to develop our language and to create ourselves. We make new temples to us, our greatest creation.

Tiravanija is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld along with previous retrospective exhibition at the Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also President of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok-- where he maintains his primary residence and studio.

For more information please contact - Hannah Hoffman, Parinaz Mogadassi +1 212 627 5258, hannah@gavinbrown.biz, parinaz@gavinbrown.biz

Gavin Brown’s enterprise

620 Greenwich Street

New York, NY 10014

Tu – Sat 10a – 6p

The Future is Now Media Arts, Performance and Identity after Nam June Paik

2011-02-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

From the Tate Liverpool's website:

Nam June Paik, in collaboration with Norman Ballard
Laser Cone
Photo: Stefan Arendt, LVR / Medienzentrum Düsseldorf

Friday 18 February 2011, 10.00–17.00

In an era of reality television and the continual rise of the web, The Future is Now examines the legacy of Paik’s thinking and practice with a focus on performance and identity, situated within current debates around new technologies, ubiquity and human experience. Through innovative web adventures and conversations chaired by Will Gompertz, Arts Editor at the BBC and previously Director of Tate Media, speakers and performers including collaborators of Paik, contemporary artists and theorists, consider how artists are constrained or liberated by a constant re-imagining of the future. Participants include Roy Ascott, Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, John Hanhardt, Kristin Lucas and Marisa Olson.

Programme

10.00-11.00 Exhibition viewing: Nam June Paik
11.00-11.15 Satellite performance - Jeremy Bailey
11.15-11.30 Welcome - Will Gompertz
11.30-12.30 Keynote & Q&A – John G. Hanhardt
12.30-13.00 Performance - Anton Lukoszevieze
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-14.15 Satellite performance - Kristin Lucas
14.15-15.15 Keynote - Roy Ascott in conversation with Mike Stubbs
15.15-15.30 Satellite performance - Marisa Olson
15.30-16.00 Presentation - Ruth Catlow
16.00-17.00 Panel Discussion & Q&A

The event is followed with a performance by squib-box in the FACT bar from 17.00

Please note this event will take place at FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ.

In partnership with FACT
Generously supported by Mr Yongsoo Huh

With additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation and Picturehouse at FACT

Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) and ISEA2011 Istanbul

FACT
£35 (£30 concessions), booking required
Price includes lunch, refreshments and entrance to the Nam June Paik exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Conference tickets can also be purchased from the FACT shop. Please leave your email address when booking a ticket and you will be contacted to pose a question in advance to conference speakers.

For tickets book online
or call 0151 702 7400.

Roy Ascott is an artist and theorist whose research is invested in cybernetics, technoetics, telematics, and syncretism. His international exhibitions range from the Venice Biennale to Ars Electronica. His retrospective exhibition, The Syncretic Sense, was shown at Plymouth Art Centre in 2009, then in Korea in 2010 at the Incheon International Digital Art Festival, and opens in London at SPACE in April 2011. His theoretical work is widely published, translated, and referenced. He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium, an international platform for art, technology and consciousness research, based in Plymouth University, with nodes in Milan and Zurich. He has held senior academic positions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Vienna and Toronto, and is an Honorary Professor of Aalborg University, Copenhagen, and Thames Valley University London. He lectures world-wide. He has advised media art institutions in Australia, Europe, Japan, Korea, South America, and the USA. He edits Technoetic Arts and is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo.

Jeremy Bailey is a Toronto-based new media artist whose work explores custom software in a performative context. Powered by humour and computer vision, his work wryly critiques the uneasy relationship between technology and the body while playfully engaging the protocols of digital media (Greg J Smith, Rhizome). His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally.

Ruth Catlow, artist and co-founder/director (with Marc Garrett) of Furtherfield a grass roots, dynamic, creative and social nerve centre - online and in physical space at the Furtherfield Gallery (formerly HTTP) in North London - where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a visionary culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas. Ruth works at the intersection of art, technology and social change with a focus on ecological themes, infrastructures and processes. She contributes to publications, books and conferences and has participated in exhibitions at CCA, Glasgow; The Baltic, Gateshead; Limehouse Town Hall, London as well as galleries in Zagreb, Madrid and Detroit and has work featured on DVblog, the Rhizome Artbase and The Digital Kitchen. Ruth runs Digital Art and Design degrees at Writtle School of Design, part of Essex University.

John G. Hanhardt is senior curator for media arts, Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Since beginning his career at the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, he has curated film and media arts at the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Kristin Lucas is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist working with video, installation, performance, and interactive Web projects. Lucas addresses the complexity of our relationship to the digital realm, such as its effect on human psychology and regimes of thinking. Reversing a popular concept of infusing humanity into machines, Lucas maps technological concepts into her life, making evident their presuppositions and flaws, and raising questions about the gap between virtual and lived realities. Her artwork is represented by Postmasters Gallery and videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York.

New York-based artist Marisa Olson has presented at Tate Modern, BFI, Centre Pompidou, 52nd International Biennale di Venezia, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/ Montevideo, the Sundance Film Festival, and at numerous other arts venues and internet websites, the latter especially as a founding member of Nasty Nets, the original "internet surfing club." She has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation (Paris), the New York Times, the Village Voice, and magazines like Oyster, SOMA, Paper, and Planet. She has also written essays and reviews that have appeared in Flash Art, ArtReview, MUTE, Wired, Afterimage, and numerous internet weblogs, including Rhizome, where she was previously editor and curator. She has also curated projects at the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, the Performa Biennial, and SF Camerawork, whose Journal, Camerawork, she also edited. Marisa studied History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and is now Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase.

Paik's iconic performance pieces will be re-animated and re-imagined by pioneering cellist and artist Anton Lukoszevieze, and by composer-artist co-operative squib-box, alongside performances of works by other Fluxus artists and pieces inspired by Paik. Works revisited include One for Solo Violin, Random Access, Pop Sonata and the Fluxus Champion Contest. Produced by Third Ear.

Martha Rosler at EAI

2011-01-20T08:14:00.001-08:00

Last night, Electronic Arts Intermix presented "Martha Rosler: Kitchen Theatre" to a very full house. The selection of Rosler's videos ended with the premiere of most recent project, which documented the re-performance of her 1975 work, 'Semiotics of the Kitchen,' the first work screened in the program. The original work, which features Rosler before a static camera listing off an alphabetized list of cooling utensils, as she "demonstrates" the objects' use with gestures, which depart from the traditional gestures associated with the tool.

The 2011 performance, held at Whitechapel in London, documented an open call, where women convened and re-performed the iconic video within the gallery space. A revolving cast of twenty-six women participated in the live restaging of Rosler's script. The 2011 work traces their auditions, rehearsals, and finally, the public event.

The program also celebrated Rosler's forthcoming publication The Art of Cooking, a rediscovered manuscript created by the artist on the rhetorics of cooking and art production, made up almost entirely of quotations from cooking manuals and books on gastronomy.

The program:

A budding gourmet
1974, 17:45 min, b&w, sound

Semiotics of the Kitchen
1975, 6:09 min, b&w, sound

The East is Red, The West is Bending
1977, 19:57 min, color, sound

Semiotics of the Kitchen: an Audition
2011, 10:26 min, color, sound

Susan Hiller Retrospective at the Tate Britain

2011-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

February 1– May 15, 2011

This major survey exhibition at Tate Britain will focus on a selection of Hiller's key works, including many of the pioneering mixed-media installations and video projections for which she is best known. It will be the largest presentation of her work to date, providing a unique opportunity to follow her exploration of dreams, memories and supernatural phenomena across a career of almost four decades.

Emerging as an artist in the early 1970s, Hiller’s output has taken many different forms. Her works however often derive from a similar process of collecting, cataloguing and restaging cultural artefacts and experiences. This exhibition will bring together key examples of this practice, with which the artist highlights the subjectivity of perception and imagination. Enquiries/Inquiries 1973-5, for example, exposes the inconsistencies found in comparing an American and a British encyclopaedia, while Magic Lantern 1987 uses converging projections of coloured light to create after-images in the mind’s eye. On other occasions, Hiller’s work excavates hidden layers of cultural history, whether as recordings of extinct languages or as collections of British seaside postcards. In the mixed-media installation Monument 1980-1, the viewer is invited to sit on a park bench and listen to a tape of the artist’s voice, while looking at photographs of a neglected Victorian memorial. In bringing together these diverse works, the exhibition will allow visitors to survey the many ways Hiller’s unique approach has been used to explore meaning, memory and perception.

The exhibition will also focus on Hiller’s interest in the subconscious or unconscious mind. From early in her career, she explored these themes by collecting the memories of dreams and by using ‘automatic writing’, performed as a continuous stream of consciousness. This investigation into the undercurrent of human thought or vision was later expressed in installations such as Belshazzar’s Feast / The Writing on the Wall 1983-4. Sitting at the heart of the exhibition, it takes the form of a living room environment, in which a glowing TV screen shows images of a burning fire, accompanied by a mysterious, hypnotic soundtrack. More recent work continues this interest in visionary and supernatural experiences, such as Psi Girls 1999, a five-screen projection featuring clips from Hollywood movies about young women with telekinetic powers, and the compelling audio-sculpture Witness 2000, in which a cloud of hanging audio speakers offers the visitor hundreds of accounts of extraterrestrial encounters.

Susan Hiller was born in Florida, USA in 1940. She studied in Massachusetts and New Orleans, receiving a PhD in anthropology before becoming disillusioned with academia. She moved to London in 1969 and began her career as an artist, first exhibiting her work in 1973. She continues to live and work in Britain and has been the subject of many exhibitions, including at the ICA, London in 1986; Tate Liverpool in 1996; and BALTIC, Gateshead in 2004.

The exhibition is curated by Ann Gallagher, Head of Collections (British Art), Tate, with Sofia Karamani, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue published by Tate Publishing.

Larry Clark's 'Tulsa' recently found by the artist, and will be exhibited for the first time in the US at Luhring Augustine

2011-01-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

While most of Luhring Augustine is dedicated to the group painting exhibition of contemporary American and European artists appropriately named Untitled (painting) (including Tauba Auerbach, Bernard Frize, Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, Josh Smith, Daan van Golden, Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool, and Heimo Zobernig); the remainder of the gallery has been dedicated to screening Larry Clark's 1968 silent 16mm film Tulsa.

Larry Clark- Tulsa, 1968
16 mm film, transferred to DVD
64 minutes, silent
Film still (c) Luhring Augustine, 2011

Untitled (painting) showcases conceptual, process-driven works which employ variations on traditional and non-traditional painting techniques within the wider field of contemporary abstract painting. The gallery's site generically states that "This exhibition is a snapshot of this moment in art making and offers an opportunity to contemplate their work together."

Untitled (painting)
Installation views (c) Luhring Augustine, 2011

Despite the half-assed contextualization for the centrifugal force of the exhibition, I am ecstatic that Tulsa is on view. Especially because the film was recently found by the artist, and this will be it's first public screening in the US. It's really too bad that Luhring Augustine couldn't wait to exhibit the film alongside other works from Clark's oeuvre. Especially since the gallery recently co-organized his retrospective Larry Clark Kiss the Past Hello, which marked Tulsa's maiden voyage at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. On the occasion of the retrospective, an artist's book of work from 1962 to 2010 has been published by Luhring Augustine with Simon Lee Gallery, London. The publication is comprised of two soft cover books and poster in box with texts in both French and English ($60).

Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London; 2010

Made in Tulsa in 1968, Billy Mann and others from Clark’s seminal 1971 book, Tulsa, come to life in this 16mm black and white film footage. Much like the iconic photographs, the footage offers a glimpse into the group’s daily drug rituals. Clark shot the film on a rented Bolex camera and the film demonstrates his early interest in narrative filmmaking and directing.

Grove Press, 1971

When it first appeared in 1971, Larry Clark's groundbreaking book Tulsa sparked immediate controversy across the nation. Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared.

Larry Clark publications available for purchase via gallery website

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Tel: 1-212-206-9100 Fax: 1-212-206-9055
Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 6pm
info@luhringaugustine.com

MoMA presents a program of live performance and dance in collaboration with the exhibition 'On Line: Drawing Through the Twentiety Century'

2011-01-11T12:18:00.000-08:00

Trisha Brown

Xavier LeRoy

Ralph Lemon

I can't wait!!! What's with the bizarre times though? Expect reviews.

eFlux writes:

The dancing body has long been subject matter for drawing, as seen in a variety of works included in the exhibition On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, currently on view in The Museum of Modern Art's sixth-floor special exhibition gallery. These documentations show dance in two dimensions, allowing it to be seen in a gallery setting. But if one considers line as the trace of a point in motion—an idea at the core of this exhibition—then the act of dance and performance itself becomes a drawing, an insertion of drawing into the time and three-dimensional space of our lived world. In conjunction with the exhibition, and as part of MoMA's ongoing Performance Exhibition Series, a program of live performance and dance is presented in the Museum's Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. All performances are included with Museum admission.

Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company
Sticks (1973); Scallops (1973); Locus Solo (1975); Roof Piece Re-Layed (2011, based on Roof Piece, 1971)
January 12, 15 & 16, 2:00 & 4:00 PM

Performance 12: On Line/Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci
Selected untitled works, 2004–09
January 17, 19 & 20, throughout the day

Performance 13: On Line/Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Violin Phase from Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982)
January 22 & 23, 2:00 & 4:00 PM

Performance 14: On Line/Ralph Lemon
Untitled (2008), with Okwui Okpokwasili
January 26, 29 & 30, 3:00 PM

Performance 15: On Line/Xavier Le Roy
Self Unfinished (1998), in collaboration with Laurent Golding
February 2, 5 & 6, 5:30 PM
Reservations are required. See MoMA.org/performance15 for details.

Organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art, and Catherine de Zegher, former Director, The Drawing Center, New York, with Jenny Schlenzka, Assistant Curator for Performance, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art.

On Line and the accompanying performance series are made possible by MoMA's Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.

more info at MoMA's blog

Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines 10 at the New Museum

2011-01-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

In her ongoing series Whispering Pines, most often presented in the format of video, Shana Moulton adopts the guise of Cynthia, a feeble-spirited hypochondriac/agoraphobe that experiences vivid hallucinogenic fantasies within an absurdist (and---) setting created by the artist herself. This world combines a thrift-store/ gift-shop aesthetic with consumer culture, fad remedies, and new age kitsch. While the complex subjectivities regarding the obsolete objects and marginalized material culture may drive the narrative and simultaneously confine and liberate Cynthia, her environment as a whole resembles the opposite; a sort of Blue's Clues, Kid Pixian construction.

Effectively, this pitting of formal cinematic qualitities against pop detritus renders an innovative space for experimentation. Here, she brings together the "real" and the "virtual," calling each into question. Through the ascension of the Cynthia character via these various objects, as viewers, we gain access into Cynthia's psyche as well as her exterior reality.

For the performance at the New Museum on January 9, Moulton collaborated with composer-vocalist Nick Hallet to transform the work into a hybrid electronic-opera, with live sound controllers and instrument manipulation performed by Hallett, along with soprano opera singer Daisy Press and harpist Shelly Burgon. In the video works from this series, Cynthia is typically green screened into this fabled world, but in the live interactive media performance; Moulton incorporates multi-channel video installation (on three surfaces), real-time video, live animation, and green-screen compositing. Occasionally, Cynthia appears within the virtual videoscape, but most often, she inhabits the real video environment, acting in accordance with the pre-conceived image.

Hallett's pop- infused libretto and Daisy Press' vocals play a central role in the live performance, reflecting Moulton's visual aesthetic sonically. Since Cynthia never speaks, sound manipulations and songs represent her inner psychological processes, which suits the dream-like narrative, rendering a mediation that yolks at and reinforces the relationship between melodrama and pulp culture.

Some highlights
-I still can't get these songs out of my head. They were annoyingly catchy and almost too well placed.
-At the end of the performance, Cynthia puts on a peanut butter face-mask and covers herself in birdseed. This gesture is loaded with signification; conjuring childrens craft, obsolescense of our generation's youth culture, and most importantly a sort of social priming that allows us as humans to immerse ourselves within (and quite literally buy into) consumer culture. I think it also speaks to the recent marketing capitalization on neo-hippie idealism through the whole pseudo-green-living "movement" and how this fad has permeated America amid a culture of Snuggies and Sketcher's shape-ups.

“Whispering Pines 10 playfully demonstrates Cynthia’s loss of power to chic ideologies of self-empowerment, as Moulton’s character, mute, is subsumed by a digital video backdrop and kitschy pop librettos....The pained narcissism of incessant healing and grooming is masked as a heroic journey to wellness, for which seclusion is a necessary step.”
—Kareem Estefan, BOMB

“[Moulton's] relation with this character is somewhere between irony and pure love. You can never quite tell how much of it is mockery and how much of it is sincere appreciation for this aesthetic and style; and that's what makes the works so interesting, because Cynthia is a ridiculous person who is completely out of control of her environment...and we sort of sympathize with her and we laugh at her and we laugh along with her.”
—Michael Connor, Radiovisual

“The audience—complete with art stars and downtown celebs—loved the show and I can understand why. There’s a lot to enjoy from the piece and it is clever and amusing...the music was absolutely delightful.”

—Andy Horowitz, Culturebot

Shana Moulton was born in Oakhurst, CA and is a Brooklyn-based video, installation, and performance artist. Shana attended school at University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, De Ateliers, LMCC, and Harvestworks; she was also a New Commissions artist at Art in General in 2009. Moulton has exhibited and performed at venues such as The Wexner Center, Migros Museum, MoMA P.S.1, The Kitchen, Performa 09, Electronic Arts Intermix, the Andy Warhol Museum, and Socrates Sculpture Park. Her work has been reviewed in the Village Voice, Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, the New York Times, Artnet Magazine, and Flash Art.

Nick Hallett is a NYC-based composer, vocalist, and cultural producer. His music has been performed at Joe’s Pub, ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, Le Poisson Rouge, and The Stone. Nick held the first RE:NEW RE:PLAY artist residency at the New Museum in May 2009, creating a four-part series of concerts connecting the voice to visual performance art, and he composed original music for the November 2009 Performa biennial in a concert at Town Hall. After organizing a performance for the Joshua Light Show at The Kitchen in 2007, Hallett became its music curator, collaborating with its founder, multimedia artist Joshua White to contextualize his pioneering approach to live cinema for contemporary audiences. With Zach Layton, he co-directs the celebrated Darmstadt new music series at ISSUE Project Room, which convenes a month-long Institute in the late spring and a festival of “Essential Repertoire” in the autumn. As a vocalist, he has performed the works of Anthony Braxton, Susie Ibarra, Meredith Monk, and Matthew Welch, among others. From 2000 to 2003, he led the band Plantains, a new wave-cabaret act incorporating electronic music and video, collaborating with Ray Sweeten and Seth Kirby, a recent retrospective of which was just released on I, Absentee.

Daisy Press was born into a performing family as the daughter of two musicians. Recently she was praised by the New York Times for her “winning subtlety and understatement” in her rendition of George Crumb’s new folk-based song cycle “Unto the Hills” at Miller Theater with the acclaimed group So Percussion, and then again for her “calm naturalness” for her performance of early and late Webern song cycles. Previously, she has sung in the works of Steve Reich, including “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Drumming,” which she has also performed as a guest artist at Juilliard. She was singer-in-residence at the Bang on a Can Marathon for two years. Press has performed Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” (the studio recording of which is soon to be released on Cantaloupe records) and has served on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music, where she received her masters degree. Having been raised on a rock-and-roll tour (literally under the stage), she can occasionally be spotted performing at Irving Plaza with the preeminent Neil Diamond cover band, Super Diamond.

Rewind the BETAMAX of life: Nam June Paik at Tate Liverpool and FACT by Peter Merrington

2011-01-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

I was gearing up to blog about this exhibition, when I ran across this piece by Peter Merrington:

By Peter Merrington on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 at 10:00 am.

Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard,  Laser Cone, 2001/2010
 Installation view at FACT (Foundation for Art Creative Technology) Photographer: Stephen King

Nam June Paik (1932 – 2006) is an artist fabled for what he has achieved, as the instigator of video art, the pioneer of media art and through his influence on the indebted MTV generation. It's as if his career is almost made for the retrospective exhibition. His work is bound to his legacy, and his influence is hard to encompass. The importance of this legacy asks two parallel questions, how to preserve, present and document but also how to react, trace and respond. Both are targeted through a new joint exhibition of Paik's work at Tate Liverpool and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), the first major retrospective of his work since his death in 2006 and the first exhibition of his work in the UK since 1988.

Tate presents a comprehensive chronicle of Paik's movements through the avant-garde, in performance, composition, television and sculpture. There are TV sets, robots and Buddhas, mixed with historical documentation, vitrines filled with exhibition programs, posters and photographs and timelines drawn on walls, which denote his many collaborators and read like a roll call of the most influential artists of the 20th century - John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Joseph Beuys and Merce Cunningham.

In contrast to the Tate, where you can look and listen with historical meticulousness, at FACT you are given a remote control. Here you are encouraged to relax, in an archive lounge, and browse a collection of his video works at leisure. Or lie back underneath Laser Cone (1998) and be dazzled.

The show’s split nature, across two venues, pays tribute to the very legacy that it seeks to explore. In some ways, FACT, as an organization that has grown over the last 20 years through commissioning and presenting new media and video, is indebted to Paik’s original exploration of new technologies.

Nam June Paik’s story is played out right through the exhibition. Born in Seoul, Korea in 1932, he studied art, philosophy and composition in Japan and Germany. Later, he was greatly influenced by encounters with John Cage and George Maciunas, from whom he took up the fluxus agenda. He made one of his earliest video works in the shop where he bought the first portable video recorder, the Sony Portapak. He shot a simple fluxus action, buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt. He also paid homage to Cage’s 4’33, in Zen for Film, a silent, 8-minute, blank film.

Nam June Paik, Zen for Film, 1964/1965

Through his meditations on the potential elegance and grace of the video medium, Paik embraces and plays with nature, from simply placing a magnet on top of a television to representing various natural forms on screen.

Egg Grows, No. 4 (1984) is a sculpture made of a live video of an egg, replicated on 8 individual monitors, each placed next to a monitor of greater size. The on-screen eggs get scaled up and angled over at each repetition. This simple and coherent setup is mirrored in the mesmeric, One Candle (1989). The fleeting image of a candle flame is produced by three projectors, all running off the same video camera pointed at a burning candle. The red, green and blue light of the projectors shows ephemeral flickers of candle flame as it slowly burns itself out. The spiritual quality of the work reflects Paik’s interests in Zen Buddhism, evident in much of his work. His drive towards beauty is enhanced by the dichotomy of the real flame and the projected image. The three very large, now obsolete projectors look like giant boulders propped on the floor and create an amusing contrast of scales with the small and delicate candle flame.

Nam June Paik, Egg Grows, No. 4, 1984
Photo: Helge Mundt
Nam June Paik, One Candle, 1979 - 1992

Paik is most successful in expressing the beauty of the video medium in his Moon is the Oldest TV 1965 (1992 version). Paik created a transcendental space, an installation in a backed out room, only lit by light emitted from eleven televisions, arranged on plinths, in an arc. The group of screens flow across the back of the room, each filled with an image of the round moon. As an object of continuous human obsession and gaze, the moon serves well to illustrate Paik’s mastery in harnessing the potential of the video image and taking the television screen into undeveloped territory. The televisions themselves fade into the darkness of the space and all that remains is the haunting light that they emit.

Like his close collaborator, Joseph Beuys, Paik deeply believed in the power of art to positively influence society. He possessed a potent vision of the potential of video as essential democratic media with the ability to unite and connect people. On New Year’s Day 1984, Paik presented the first international satellite installation to over 25 million viewers, linking New York, Paris, Germany and South Korea. Good Morning Mr Orwell (1984) was something of an avant-garde art variety show featuring Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Merce Cunningham, and Charlotte Moorman with her and Paik’s TV Cello. For Paik, it was a response to Orwell’s dystopian vision of the use of totalitarian television control in 1984. His spirit and enthusiasm for connecting communities follows through his trademark vivid, cut and paste, slash edits and video synthesis.

Nam June Paik, Good Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984

For all the glowing, vibrant light and color often on show, it is a quiet, muted object that sits in the center of the gallery at Tate that gets to the heart of Paik’s legacy and purpose. Rembrandt Automatic (Rembrandt TV) (1963/1976) is a television set resting on its screen. The television, face down, becomes an alien object; its function stripped, unnatural and ambiguous. The muted form is left with no content but the brand name visible on the back, titled, Rembrandt Automatic. It resonates further in the historical context of the works shown at Tate, where the age of the equipment originally employed by Paik adds a retro appeal. The rates at which the objects take on obsolesce and a museum piece quality is very evident. This collision of art and technology, a chance object, exemplifies what Paik achieved so brilliantly, he was a champion and conqueror of the everyday, right from his fluxus roots to his laser extravaganzas, he foresaw a future of technology that was ubiquitous and fantastic, as he wrote, “without electricity, there can be no art.”

Peter Merrington is an artist and writer currently based in Liverpool.

Merce Cunningham: Legacy at Joyce

2010-12-20T07:28:00.000-08:00

Sometimes inevitable, the ephemerality of art is a blessing and a curse. While it can be difficult to think about an expiration or even death of a work of art, it simultaneously ensures it's integrity. This is especially the case with dance, because it is so difficult to preserve. Video documentation is often subjective, and may end up misleading future performers or choreographers; causing an unintentional departure from the original intent. Plus, so much is contingent on the personal relationship between choreographer and dancer. Remove any part of that equation and the issues begin to surface.

While conceptual performance artists like Tino Seghal may deal with this on a conceptual or even farcical level-- by mandating that no documentation may be created, and that the re-performance of his works must completely rely on oral knowledge transmission from dancers or the artist himself-- the issue remains that video documentation and labanotation (a linguistic and illustrative notation for dance) most often do not suffice for contemporary dance works.

As great contemporary choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch leave our physical realm, their works may be put at risk for evolution or atrophe. Merce Cunningham's Company has taken specific measures for his live performances with the 'Legacy Plan,' which has been created to celebrate the artist's career and life by performing them on one last tour, but also to set a finite end to the physical life of the individual works.

As outlined in the Legacy Plan, the Company will disband following this final tour.

from Merce.org:

A cornerstone of the Cunningham Dance Foundation’s precedent-setting Legacy Plan, the Legacy Tour is a celebration of Cunningham’s lifetime of artistic achievement and a testament to the choreographer’s enduring genius. Launched in February 2010, the two-year tour offers audiences around the world a final opportunity to see Cunningham’s choreography performed by the company he personally trained. The Legacy Tour will showcase 18 seminal works from throughout Cunningham’s career—including the revival of seven dances from past Company repertory—and will highlight the collaborations with artistic innovators such John Cage, Jasper Johns, Radiohead, and Robert Rauschenberg that characterized Cunningham’s creative life.

Currently encompassing some 40 cities, the Legacy Tour will bring the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to new destinations around the world and includes performances at venues throughout Europe and the United States that have been pivotal in showcasing the Company for the past 50 years. The Tour will culminate with a New Year’s Eve performance in New York City—MCDC’s home since it was founded in 1953—on December 31, 2011, with tickets priced at $10.

Come March 22-27, New Yorkers will have the extraordinary opportunity to see Cunningham's choreography performed by the final group of dancers he personally trained in a repertory program that has not been seen in New York for decades. This profoundly moving engagement will include two Cunningham masterworks — CRWDSPCR and Quartet, and will conclude with Antic Meet, an iconic piece, not seen since 1969, that captures the exuberant and collaborative spirit that existed between the choreographer and Robert Rauschenberg. This will be the final Joyce season before disbanding in December 2011 at the end of the two-year Legacy Tour.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company's first Joyce season, taking place in 1984, featured a ten‐day series of Cunningham's signature Events, in which Cunningham and his dancers performed to live music by company musicians John Cage, Takehisa Kisugi, and David Tudor.

Labanotation pics:

Anika

2010-12-19T22:06:00.000-08:00

Courtney Love called....

photos by Filip K

Along with many other records from this year, Anika's self titled debut album released earlier this month proves that a 23 year old can make a record in 2010 that sounds like it was created in the 70s or 80s. Many listeners could feasibly confuse this record as a reissue from that time period because of the production quality and analog equipment. It's buzzy/fuzzy/and very wave-y. Her often dissonant and androgynous voice sounds like Cosey Fanni Tutti meets Ann Steel. Born of a German mother, her voice has a thick accent that has caused many writers to draw parallels between the young singer with Nico. (Which is mentioned almost immediately in every review I have read)

For her debut record, Anika pulled together a sophisticated selection of songs, covering Yoko, Dylan, the Pretenders, Skeeter Davis and Twinkle to name a few. It will be really interesting to hear her own arrangements and songwriting capabilities, even though this curated selection of lost-pop-treasure is a conceptual musical feat in its own right. And ballsy as hell for a debut record.

Anika interview

rehearsal video

yoko ono- yang yang video

times review

Anika - I Go To Sleep by stonesthrow

2010 Best of LIst

2010-12-10T15:23:00.001-08:00

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti- "Before Today" 4AD
Circle Pit- "Bruise Constellation" Siltbreeze
Street Chant- "Means" Arch Hill
The Whines- "Hell to Play"MEDS
Anika- S/T EP, Stones Throw
Tamaryn "The Waves" Mexican Summer
Night Jewel- "Am I Real" EP- Gloriette

Singles:
The Babies- "Caroline/All Things Come to Pass"-Wild World
The Jameses- "The Haunted Rider and Rat People"
German Measles- "Color Vibrations"- Wild World
Cosmetics- "Soft Skin"- Captured Tracks
Crystal Stilts-"Shake the Shackles"- Slumberland
Pink Reason- "Desperate Living" EP- Almost Ready

Reissues
Kryssma
Dolly Mixture- Everything and More
V-3 boots
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
Voice of the Puppets 7" (Sing Sing)
Black Tambourine (Slumberland)

next year:
Crystal Stilts
TNV
Horseshit
Pink Reason
Sic Alps

BFI Gallery, London presents Yvonne Rainer

2010-12-07T08:33:00.000-08:00

eFlux writes:

This November the BFI Gallery presents an exhibition dedicated to the work of the legendary American dancer, choreographer and filmmaker, Yvonne Rainer (b.1934) whose practice is amongst the most influential on the newest generation of video makers and choreographers alike. In the last few years there have been a number of important publications on her work and museum shows dedicated to her but this is the first time she has had a gallery exhibition in the UK.

The BFI Gallery show features Rainer's installation, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (2002) to be shown for the first time in Europe and installation format projections of two of Rainer's most recent choreographies (as she has returned to dance in the past ten years), filmed by Babette Mangolte; RoS Indexical (2008) and AG Indexical with a Little Help from H.M. (2007).

Although she is renowned in the world of art because of her innovative contribution to contemporary dance, Rainer is also remarkable because of her involvement with cinema later in her career, and her work is punctuated with references to both the history of dance and cinema. This exhibition concentrates on the reception and transformation of ideas in her work, such as those of choreographers Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine, composer Igor Stravinsky, thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Sigmund Freud, and filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst.

IN THE CINEMAS AT BFI SOUTHBANK
Lives of Performers, 1972 (90 min)
Film about a Woman Who …, 1974 (90 min)
Kristina Talking Pictures, 1976 (125 min)
Journeys from Berlin/1971, 1980 (125 min)
The Man Who Envied Women, 1985 (125 min)
Privilege, 1990
MURDER and murder, 1996 (113 min)
Please see www.bfi.org.uk for more details

IN THE ATRIUM AT BFI SOUTHBANK
An excerpt of Yvonne Rainer's Lives of Performers, 1972, will be shown continuously in the Atrium.

IN THE STUDIO AT BFI SOUTHBANK
An accompanying curated screening programme in the BFI Studio takes place over a weekend in December. It features a presentation of Rainer's Five Easy Pieces, alongside video work by contemporary artists who work in the style of choreography for the camera. The artists are: Yael Bartana, Johanna Billing, Katinka Bock, Jonathan Burrows, Mircea Cantor, Köken Ergun, Michel François, Laurent Goldring, Sonia Khurana, Florence Lazar, Bea McMahon, Natacha Nisic, Adam Roberts, Anri Sala, Beat Streuli, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Su-Mei Tse, Uri Tzaig.
4/5 & 11/12 December.

ABOUT YVONNE RAINER
Yvonne Rainer was born in San Francisco in 1934. After training in modern dance in New York from 1957, she began to choreograph her own work in 1960. She was one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theatre in 1962, the genesis of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Rainer made a transition to filmmaking following a 15 year career as a choreographer/dancer (1960-1975). After making seven experimental feature films - Lives of Performers (1972), Privilege (1990), MURDER and murder (1996), among others - she returned to dance in 2000 via a commission from the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation for the White Oak Dance Project. Her most recent dances are AG Indexical, with a little help from H.M., a re-vision of Balanchine's Agon, RoS Indexical, a re-vision of Nijinsky's Rite of Spring and a Performa07 commission, and Spiraling Down, a meditation on soccer, aging, and war. Her dances have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Vienna, Helsinki, Kassel, Berlin, and Sao Paolo. A memoir—Feelings Are Facts: a Life—was published by MIT Press in 2006. Rainer is currently the Claire Trevor Professor in Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. She lives and works in California and New York.

The Yvonne Rainer Project is curated by Chantal Pontbriand.

Exhibition Contextualizes Kineticism as precursor to post-object art in New Zealand

2010-12-07T07:51:00.002-08:00

Points of Contact:
Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica
11 December 2010 – 27 February 2011

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Corner King and Queen Streets
Private Bag 2025
New Plymouth
New Zealand
www.govettbrewster.com

Points of Contact joins a number of recent surveys that challenge the European and North American art historical paradigm, proposing and examining instead parallel and specific art historical trajectories outside these centres, in both their local and global dimensions. As opposed to traditional Art Historical canons which typically preempt Minimalism or Formal American Abstraction, this exhibition places Kineticism as precursor to post-object art in NZ.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery presents Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica, an exhibition that traces the historical and conceptual connections between New Zealand artist Jim Allen (b.1922), a significant figure in the development of post-object practices in New Zealand, and two of his greatest influences: expatriate experimental filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye (1901-1980) and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980).

In 1968-9, while head of the Sculpture department at Elam School of Art, Allen traveled to London and New York to visit art schools and respectively encountered the works of Hélio Oiticica and met Len Lye. Interested in kinetic sculpture Allen visited critic and curator Guy Brett in London shortly after the publication of his book Kinetic Art. Allen saw much of the work by Oiticica that went into the Whitechapel Experiment, stored in Brett's apartment leading to this exhibition. Oiticica's series of Bólides and Parangolés, penetrable environments and capes, tents and banners designed to be worn or inhabited while moving to the rhythm of samba made a deep impression on him. On that same trip, Allen also met Lye in New York. Lye had been a pioneer of experimental film in the 1930s in London, and went on to make kinetic sculpture in the 1950s and 60s after moving to New York.

Absorbing these and other influences, Allen's 'environmental structures' and performances staged upon his return marked a radical departure for the artist and established him as the primary figure of post-object art in New Zealand in the late 1960s and 70s. In his pedagogical role at Elam College of Art, Allen lead a new generation of artists to new post-object concerns with space, movement and spectatorship.

Along with significant works by Lye and Oiticica, Points of Contact reassembles for the first time the works of Allen's seminal 1969 Small Worlds exhibition at Barry Lett Gallery in Auckland. The reconstruction of the two environments Space Plane 1969 and The Water Pillow 1969 completes a series that were instrumental to the artist's development. The exhibition also features a restaging of one of Allen's most emblematic performances, the 1974 three-part performance Contact. The ephemeral nature of post-object art, which emphasised processes over material objects, has meant that much of this work has disappeared and exists only in photographic records and first-hand accounts. None of Allen's works of this period remained but the rare exception New Zealand Environment No. 5 (1969) which was acquired by the Govett-Brewster. Allen's works are strongly linked to the direction and origins of the Govett-Brewster, founded in 1970, and its strong history of supporting the avant-garde art of this period.

Points of Contact examines the connecting threads of influences of post-object art in New Zealand led by Allen, which unlike its American counterpart derived not from minimalism but from kineticism, an art form focused on movement and light. As Wystan Curnow, Christina Barton, John Hurrell and Robert Leonard in the introduction of Govett-Brewster's 1999 exhibition catalogue Action/Replay state, "The emergence of post-object work in New Zealand coincides with the emergence, not with the supercession, of formalist abstraction as in New York. That is to say, the local post-object moment was not notably mediated by American practices. … If there is a connecting thread, and a group of practices that replaces minimalism as a transition to the post-object, it is kineticism, focused on movement and light."

Call for Graduate Applications

2010-12-07T07:51:00.001-08:00

Over the last three months or so, I have noticed an unusual amount of emails from Graduate programs soliciting calls for applications. I swear that I have received at least three a day for the past couple of months... from every MFA and MA program in the country, practically. They usually come from eFlux or Art&Education; but occasionally they come straight from the program itself. I can attribute this to two possible reasons. That I have recently finished grad school, and most likely, the shady-ass lending firms that I have taken loans from have sold my personal information off to god knows what kind of corporation, who has released my info to various internet ad agencies. (This of couse is shit logic, because if I recently spent upwards of $50,000 on higher education, why would I want to go back to school and do that again?? Maybe some people with rich parents also take out loans? Doubtful.)

Or, more likely; is that there has been a significant drop in students enrolling in arts Grad-programs due to the poor economy in the United States (I should also add that all of the Call for applicants are schools within the US). When I decided to attend grad school initially, it was because I could not find a job in the arts, and I thought that obtaining a graduate degree would put me at an advantage. I thought that I would be able to get a high enough paying job that I would be able to pay off my loans. Or that I would be able to get some financial aid or scholarship money. WRONG.

6 months after finishing school, I am saddled with $60,000 in debt, a shitty part-time job at the Brooklyn Museum earning $13,500 a year, with no insurance or benefits of any sort. Not to bitch or whatever, but higher education in no way is connected to bettering your chances at a better paying job, or career satisfaction. While graduate school seems to promise to simultaneously build networks of professionals and lay the groundwork for one's career before one enrolls, young people ESPECIALLY IN ANY ARTS RELATED FIELD should be deeply critical of what they are actually getting from this extremely expensive endeavor. (The reason I say particularly in arts related fields, is because higher ed in the arts almost never offers financial scholarship, where the sciences typically offer full-ride tuitions AND stipends)

Prospective students should think about alternate ways to obtain these elements before signing their promissory note, and financial future away to the banks/government. If it's commoraderie; there are ways around that. Criticism is more accessible than ever now, and thanks to sites and blogs like artfagcity, rhizome, artforum, and hyperallergenic, not only is is easy to find out about events in the art scene around the world, the internet has helped break down geographic barriers, allowing people in different locations to experience (on some level) exhibitions, performances, and lectures in other places.

With the rise in social media, an increased stress on financial wellbeing, and general access to like-minded individuals/ common interests, I wonder if students are realizing that they no longer NEED an MA/MFA to move forward with their career in the arts.

In September 2009, Roberta Smith wrote a piece for the New York Times, called Artists Without Mortarboards (also pasted below just in case), wherein she laments the recent "professionalization and academicization of the art world" epidemic. While she attributes the recent financial viability of being a career artist to a grossly inflated art market, she also points to the importance and artistic capital of circumnavigating the 'system;' or figuring it out on your own through alternative routes and economic means. I wonder if this massive drought in academic enrollment in higher education is somehow reflective of a renewed value placed on D.I.Y. action in the face of economic hardship.

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

Artists Without Mortarboards

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: September 9, 2009

IN an often quoted remark the Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman once said, “Aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for birds.” I wonder what Newman would make of the overflow of M.F.A.-bearing would-be artists pouring out of art schools and universities these days. Maybe he’d say, “An artist without a graduate degree is like a fish without a bicycle.”

The professionalization and academicization of the art world has been lamented for some years, but lately they have become epidemic. The recent inflated art market has created the illusion that being an artist is a financially viable calling. Meanwhile art schools and universities — which often provide tenure (safe haven) for artists who may be taken seriously nowhere else — expanded to accommodate the rising number of art students and are now thoroughly invested in keeping these numbers high.

In this context the growing interest among art schools and universities (mostly abroad so far) in offering a Ph.D. in art makes the blood run cold. It also seems like rank, even cynical commercial opportunism. It’s too soon to tell, but I’d like to think that the economic downturn is doing serious damage to this trend and maybe even put budding artists off graduate school entirely.

This brings me to a project that could make the coming season especially exciting: the unaccredited, free art school that the artist collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation started Friday in a downtown Manhattan space lent by a benefactor it has declined, so far, to identify. Whoever shows up will have a hand in the formation of Bruce High Quality Foundation University, which is being made up as it goes along.

The Bruces, as the members of the five-year-old group are often called, guard their anonymity fiercely. But they are generally known to be a band of artists, all male, some of whom became friends while undergraduates at Cooper Union in the late ’90s, when Hans Haacke, one of the fathers of institutional critique, was still teaching there.

Like any small group with a good idea, they benefit from the fact that the art world is in many ways one of the least regulated occupational spheres on the planet. As a result it is unusually susceptible, on a local level, to being altered and improved by the actions of a few good men or women.

This has recently been proved by started-from-scratch ventures as modest as Orchard, a Lower East Side collective-as-art-gallery, and Pocket Utopia, an alternative space of nearly two years’ duration that the artist Austin Thomas oversaw in a Bushwick, Brooklyn, storefront until this spring.

More ambitious examples of proactivity include “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” the new bootstrap international biennial willed into existence by the independent curator Dan Cameron last fall, and this summer’s “Plot/09: This World & Nearer Ones” (on view through next Sunday), which inaugurated an international survey of public art that Creative Time will stage every four years on Governors Island, just off Manhattan’s shores.

If the Bruce High Quality Foundation University thrives, it could prove an even more valuable addition. Until now the group has been best known for a sharp, well-aimed and unusually entertaining form of institutional critique. In 2005, when a shard of parkland was being pulled around New York Harbor — the posthumous realization of Robert Smithson’s 1970 drawing “Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island” — the members pursued it in a tiny skiff carrying a small model of one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s orange “Gates,” which had filled Central Park earlier in the year. (The title of the Bruce piece, playing off Wallace Stevens, was “The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing But the Thing Itself.”)

In “Public Sculpture Tackle,” a continuing work begun in 2007 and documented in video, one of the Bruces hurls himself against, clambers up or hangs from various pieces of public sculpture around Manhattan, all the while outfitted in quasi-Matthew Barney quasi-football gear. The foundation has also made a site-specific film, “Isle of the Dead,” that charts the death and zombie-dominated resurrection of the art world and is one of the best works in “Plot/09.”

These efforts are fine as far as they go, but now the Bruces are trying to add to a tradition of artist-initiated schools like the Art Students League, 134 years old and going strong. The group has cited as inspiration the Summerhill boarding school in Britain, founded by A. S. Neill in the 1920s, where children and teachers have an equal say in all decisions.

The Bruces’ new direction was indicated last July when four of the group’s members gave a lecture-performance called “Explaining Pictures to a Dead Bull” at the Harris Lieberman Gallery. The title paid homage to Joseph Beuys’s famous performance, “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare,” while addressing a post-boom, dead-bull art universe. Although accompanied by a series of amusingly pertinent or impertinent slides, the lecture was entirely serious. It diagrammed the links among contemporary art, the market and the art schools producing M.F.A.’s who are burdened by debt but largely naïve about the workings of the art world. It ended with the question: “How can we imagine a sustainable alternative to professionalized art education?”

Bruce High Quality Foundation University is one such imagining. Whether it becomes “the thing itself” remains to be seen, but even as “the idea of the thing” it strikes a blow where one is seriously needed, against the big business of art schools. The university’s first course, which is meeting weekly, is titled Bring Your Own University (B.Y.O.U.). In other words, all those present will “design and implement the administrative policy and curriculum.” Whatever happens, this latest move by the Bruce High Quality Foundation adds inspirational heft to its motto: “Professional problems. Amateur solutions.”

RoseLee Goldberg and Doryun Chong honored at Independent Curators International for 35th year anniversary

2010-12-01T08:48:00.001-08:00

This year, ICI will honor two curators whose insightful work reflects this approach to curatorial practice, RoseLee Goldberg and Doryun Chong. You know RoseLee will be rocking some bad ass leather pants, as per usual.

RoseLee Goldberg, Director of PERFORMA, is the recipient of the fifth Agnes Gund Curatorial Award for outstanding achievements in the field. Goldberg is honored for her seminal study, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (1979), a leading text for understanding the development of the genre; and for her work in developing new platforms for the presentation of experimental practice, in particular her vision in the creation of PERFORMA. ICI looks forward to working together with Goldberg on an exhibition and a curatorial training program in 2011.

Doryun Chong, Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, will receive the first Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award, which has been inaugurated to reflect ICI's commitment to supporting international curators early in their careers. Chong is honored for his multiple, global understandings of artworks and their contexts, including his groundbreaking lexicon on Huang Yong Ping's complex web of meanings, intentions, history, conflict, and culture. In addition, he is being recognized for the recent exhibitions he has curated and co-curated in a range of venues nationally and internationally, including Brinkmanship: Park Chan-Kyong and Sean Snyder (REDCAT, 2010) with Clara Kim; and Brave New Worlds (Walker Art Center, 2007) with Yasmil Raymond. As part of the award, Chong will receive a research grant and develop an ICI public program in 2011. An interview by Executive Director Kate Fowle, focusing on his practice to date, will be featured on ICI's website.

The formal presentation of the awards will be made by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of PS1 Contemporary Art Center, at ICI's 35th Anniversary Party on Thursday, December 9, 2010, at Park Avenue Armory, New York. Alix Pearlstein will be presenting a new performance work in honor of RoseLee Goldberg.

About Independent Curators International (ICI):

Founded in 1975, Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, and training opportunities for diverse audiences around the world. A catalyst for independent thinking, ICI connects emerging and established curators, artists, and institutions, to forge international networks and generate new forms of collaboration. Working across disciplines and historical precedents, the organization is a hub that provides access to the people, ideas, and practices that are key to current developments in the field, inspiring fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

Headquartered in New York, ICI is a small non-profit with an expansive purview. In 35 years of operation it has organized 116 traveling exhibitions, as well as numerous events, publications, and training opportunities for diverse audiences around the world, profiling the work of more than 3,700 artists. The shows have been presented in 590 museums, university art galleries, and art centers in 48 states and 25 countries worldwide, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan. Experienced by nearly 6 million people, the exhibitions and events have attracted extensive local, national, and international press, and are placed in a critical framework through accompanying catalogues and books published by ICI.

Video Mix Tape #3

2010-09-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

Dolly Mixture track that some A-Hole won't allow to be embedded....

Parisienne Commercials

2010-09-20T19:15:00.000-07:00

Between 1990-2001, leading Swiss cigarette brand 'Parisienne' commissioned a series of commercials by internationally renown film directors. I'm not entirely clear why, but the company specified that the directors use the brand's original name, 'Parisienne People,' in this series, which were screened in previews in Swiss and French cinematheques before film trailers. Aside from the stipulation that each commercial use the former name of the company, each director was given full creative freedom over their commercial, thereby encouraging distinctive aesthetics and directorial styles. I would like to do more research on these commercials, however, there seems to be little information on the topic online. For now, here are the commercials, hopefully I can return to these at some point!

Not in chronological order:

Highlights from DJ set last night

2010-09-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

There is a sweet video for this song, but the embedding has been disabled. Go here to see it.

Insert Jim Shepard- "Voices of Men" 7" here. OBVIOUSLY not You-Tubable.

Googlin' the Rose

2010-08-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Video Mix Tape #3

2010-08-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

Download:

Download:

Download:

Download:

Institute of the 21st Century announces two new iterations of Hans Ulbrich Obrist's 'Interview Project"

2010-08-17T08:11:00.001-07:00

"We cannot understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we do not have a look at other fields of modern life." Alexander Dorner, via HUO's Interview Project at Eyebeam, 1998.

The Institute of the 21st Century announces two new iterations of Hans Ulrich Obrist's ongoing Interview Project, an ongoing series of published and video-recorded interviews between the curator-extraordinaire and various artists, curators and cultural theorists.

via eflux:
For the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, Director and 2010 Pritzker Prize winner Kazuyo Sejima invited Hans Ulrich Obrist to realize two new projects: the NOW INTERVIEWS, six days of live public interviews and VENIC VENIC, an exhibition of Cedric Price as well as the launch of an online interactive website dedicated to the visionary architect. The NOW INTERVIEWS and VENIC VENIC will be on view from August 29 – November 21.

NOW INTERVIEWS
From August 22 through 27, Obrist will develop what he calls "a portrait of an exhibition" encouraging viewers to consider the diverse practices of all the participants in this year's Biennale, which Sejima has united within the theme "people meet in architecture." Located in the Arsenale designed by SANAA, the exhibition of the NOW INTERVIEWS will be installed on a series of monitors for the duration of the Biennale. In addition, the 2006 Serpentine Gallery 24-Hour Interview Marathon archive will be shown in its entirety. The NOW INTERVIEWS are curated by Karen Marta.

The NOW Interviews mark the first project organized by the Institute of the 21st Century in an effort to preserve and share Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Interview Project. The Institute hopes they are not just an exciting event in the present, but a gateway to understanding and supporting the project.

VENIC VENIC
Organized by the Institute of the 21st Century, the exhibition which is co-curated by Samantha Hardingham and Hans Ulrich Obrist honors one of architecture's most influential figures, Cedric Price (1934 – 2003), whose work continues to inspire young architects as well as generations of artists. Price's conviction that architecture should be flexible enough to allow the occupier to adapt the building to serve the needs of the moment reflects his belief that time, alongside breadth, length and height – is the fourth dimension of architecture.

The exhibition features the launch of an interactive website developed by the Staatliche Hochschule for Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. The culmination of a yearlong project, the website (huoarchive.hfg-karlsruhe.de) comprises hundreds of individually edited video-clips which can be used to generate a live, albeit fictional, conversation between Cedric Price and the user.

The Institute of the 21^st Century is dedicated to promoting experimental modes of collaboration and patronage for the arts. Officially launching in 2011, the not-for-profit initiative’s first objective is to preserve and increase public access to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing project and archive online. Led by Bettina Korek, the Institute’s mission is founded on Obrist’s commitment to creating a living advocacy of art history through a participatory model.

"A twenty-first-century museum will utilize calculated uncertainty and conscious incompleteness to produce a catalyst for invigorating change whilst always producing the harvest of the quiet eye."

Fast Forward 2: The Power of Motion at ZKM – Center for Art and Media

2010-07-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

A sequel to the 2003 exhibition at ZKM, Fast Forward 2 will present a selection from the Munich-based video and contemporary art collector Ingvild Goetz from Munich, which has expanded significantly over the last 7 years. Known for Video, Film, and Media Art, ZKM does some of the more challenging shows; with regard to their exhibition design, curatorial concepts and pedagogy (see installation photos below). As an inverse of the 2003 show, this exhibition will be concerned with the effects of deceleration as a condition of the accelerated pace of postmodern life. The exhibition will focus on contemporary video installation and video projection that have been created since 2000, with 35 artists from various countries of origin.

Curated by:Peter Weibel, Gregor Jansen, Andreas F. Beitin, and Ingvild Goetz, Stephan Urbaschek

Installation view 1 (above)

Installation view 2 (above)

Mary Reid Kelley, Sadie The Saddest Sadist, 2009, 1-Kanal-Video, © Mary Reid Kelley (above)

Matthew Barney, CREMASTER Cycle, 2007, 5-Kanal-Video-Soundinstallation, © Matthew Barney (above)

Mike Kelley, Woods Group, 2005, 4-Kanal-Video-Installation, © Mike Kelley (above)

All photos courtesy of Onuk

Participating artists:
AES+F, Francis Alÿs, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Ulla von Brandenburg, Christoph Brech, Ergin Cavusoglu, Paul Chan, David Claerbout, Nathalie Djurberg, Stan Douglas, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rodney Graham, Isaac Julien, Jesper Just, Mike Kelley, Kimsooja, Jochen Kuhn, Óscar Muñoz, Marcel Odenbach, Hans Op de Beeck, Ulrike Ottinger, Mary Reid Kelley, Robin Rhode, Julian Rosefeldt, Aïda Ruilova, Wilhelm Sasnal, Christine Schulz, Laurie Simmons, Frank Stürmer, Fiona Tan, Ryan Trecartin, Yang Fudong, Zhao Liang

Suburban Lawns

2010-06-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

My friend got this record recently, and I found this video shortly after. SL were from Long Beach, CA, and it seems like they were equally involved with both the SF and LA post-punk/ new wave scenes. Front woman Su Tissue seems so normal and twisted.... Woah! She's looks so wholesome, but tightly wound. Definitely a different type of front girl than their contemporaries.

On New Wave Theater TV show in LA:

I can't find a video of them playing on SNL, but if I do, I will add it.

For shits and gigs, I'm throwing their wikipedia page up bc it's interesting:

The brainchild of CalArts students William "Vex Billingsgate" Ranson and (Minneapolis born) Sue "Su Tissue" McLane, Suburban Lawns formed in Long Beach, California in 1978 out of the ashes of previous incarnations Art Attack and The Fabulons, recruiting Huntington Beach natives Richard "Frankie Ennui" Whitney and Charles "Chuck Roast" Rodriguez, as well as John McBurney (aka "John Gleur").

1979 debut single "Gidget Goes to Hell" (released on their own Suburban Industrial label) gained the band notoriety when its Jonathan Demme-directed music video was shown on Saturday Night Live.

Their sole album, Suburban Lawns, produced by EJ Emmons, was released in 1981 on I.R.S. Records, featuring New Wave radio favorite "Janitor." Gleur departed during the recording of the Richard Mazda-produced 5-song EP Baby, released in 1983, and the band folded shortly afterward.

The lyrics of "Janitor" were derived from a real-life conversation between Sue McLane and friend Brian Smith. According to Brian, the two were conversing in a loud room when they first met:

"She asked me what I did for a living. I said 'I'm a janitor,' and she thought I said 'Oh my genitals.' [Richard Whitney] overheard this and wrote the song."

After Suburban Lawns folded, Whitney and Ranson formed a new, short-lived band called The Lawns, while McLane attended Berklee College of Music, where she studied piano.

In 1982 McLane recorded a solo album, Salon de Musique. She also played the role of Peggy Dillman in Demme's 1986 comedy movie Something Wild opposite Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels Ray Liotta. and

A Suburban Lawns poster is seen in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, hanging on the wall in the bedroom of the character Damone

Su Tissue in "Something Wild"

The Geeg on Talkshows

2010-06-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

G.G. on Springer

G.G. on Geraldo

Moon Duo - Ez Street Ext

2010-06-25T09:43:00.000-07:00

Video Mix Tape #2

2010-06-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

Songs that reflect my current temperament:

Video Romp Mixtape #1

2010-06-01T23:41:00.000-07:00

Abramovic Documentary

2010-05-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Gary Hill, George Quasha, and Charles Stein at EAI

2010-04-28T10:50:00.000-07:00

A screening and conversation was held last night at Electronic Arts Intermix in celebration of the new book An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings. A panel consisting of Gary Hill, George Quasha and Charles Stein (authors of the publication) illuminated and discussed a selection of Hill's early single-channel videos, such as Around & About, Sums and Differences, Happenstance (part one of many parts), Tale Enclosures, and Why Do Things Get in a Muddle (Come on Petunia). Hill, Quasha, and Stein have collaborated for the greater part of the last three decades on this book and as artists. This created a formidable atmosphere where the three fluidly reminisced, shared memories and theoretical outlooks alike. At one point Charles Stein random broke out into semantic gibberish, concluding that through abstract primal expression, he could in fact create his own system of believable linguistics which convey a message. (A perfect segway into Hill's 1985 work Tale Enclosures where Quasha and Stein are taped performing rhythmic chants.)

Quasha gave a brief intro about the book, describing Stein and his efforts as enabling the "Further life of the work."

"Our primary interest is in what we call the further life of the work, which we have defined as an extension of the creative energy and interest that the work itself actually projects through its own instance. We will have more to say on this subject in the Prologue and elsewhere, as it speaks to something in Gary Hill’s work itself, as we see it. In short, we intend that our writing about his work contribute to the very possibility which the work opens up. The theory is that critical alignment with a work brings that work out, brings it forward to possible participation. The further life is also an active dialogue with the ongoing work itself."

I couldn't agree more with this perspective. The articulation and recognition of critical engagement and dialogue as a way of extending and facilitating a work's future agency is rarely specified, eventhough it is implicit in the act of writing. The articulation of this notion means a lot.

Much of the book's contents, including the forward by Lynne Cook, can be found here.

(above) Around &About, 1980

(above) Happenstance (part one of many parts), 1982-3 (made with a Rutt-Etra Video Synth!)

(above) Sums & Differences, 1978

(above) Tale Enclosure, 1985

(above) Why Do Things Get In a Muddle? (Come On Petunia), 1984

(all images courtesy of EAI)

I was also interested Quasha's belief that all concepts are working towards defining a principle, the latter of which cannot be quantified or defined, but only approached through various avenues and forms of access. A conversation with Quasha after the event revealed an interesting video project that he is conducting, entitled "Art is." His website describes the project:

"In this ongoing video work of speaking portraits begun in 2002, I put this impossible, but inevitable, question before other artists, poets, musicians…. Result: a close-up of the normally private space of art definition. To date some 800 artists of all kinds–sculptors, painters, filmmakers, video artists, poets, composers, performance artists, and so on–have been recorded in eleven countries and twenty-four languages. This ongoing and constantly changing work in multiple series- Art is- Music is- Poetry is- has been exhibited primarily as installations, but now online as single-channel works. This is just the beginning–and by it’s nature it will always just be beginning. The is the space of saying the impossible–a mission always in need of a poetics."

art is [Vol. I] from George Quasha on Vimeo.

Videofreex Documentary

2010-04-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

Another interesting aspect of the Tuesday night screening at Light Industry was the realization that a documentary about the Freex is in the works. The filmmaker Jon Nealon was present in the audience, and seemed quite excited about the project. I recently received this email from him:

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who signed up for the Videofreex documentary mailing list the other night.

We've been working on the film for a while now - gathering videotapes, conducting interviews, etc.

And we were quite happy to see the turnout for the screening of tapes at Light Industry on Tuesday.

The Facebook page goes live toady. If you are on Facebook - please become a fan. Just type in 'videofreex' in the search bar.

We posted a short video of the beginning of the restoration process back in '05.

Please spread the word. Building up a network is crucial to the success of independent films these days.

Thanks again,

Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin
The Videofreex Documentary Project

Videofreex at Light Industry

2010-04-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

Last night, Light Industry screened a selection of works by the early video collective, Videofreex shot from 1969-1974. It was followed by a q&a with some of the founding members of the video collective, and the curator, Dara Greenwald. Perhaps the most interesting (and troubling) thing about the night was the realization that only a small percentage of the Freex' original footage has been preserved.

Chicago's Video Data Bank, the holders of the collection, has posted a complete listing of existing Videofreex footage. The table indicates that only 48 titles out of a collection of more than 1400 have been preserved; or cleaned, migrated and transferred from its original format, which are mostly obsolete. Individuals may sponsor the preservation of these works for $400 per title.

The Videofreex collective used video to engage with, document and stimulate activism. Although there certainly are aesthetic particularities to the tapes, the artistic qualities of the material was not their primary concern. The art was not in the means of documentation, but the social and political interactions and dialogs that the Freex facilitated. The tapes are often long and anti-climactic, which makes them somewhat undesirable to show in museums, galleries, or festivals. This being the case, the tapes have little market value, making it difficult to secure funding for preservation. Their cultural capital, however, is invaluable, and hopefully will be enough to influence individuals to sponsor preservation.

From the site:

The archival collection of Videofreex titles consists of around 1400 videotapes
on a variety of formats. Most of these formats are obsolete (1/2 ” open reel,
3/4 ” Umatic, 1 ” open reel, etc.) They are also quite old for videotapes, and
often require cleaning or other special handling before they can be re-mastered
to modern formats, or be made available digitally. This is usually an expensive
process, and there are currently not enough funds to preserve the entire
collection.

We prioritize titles for preservation based on written information sources
(titles, notes on the tapes, etc.), dialogue with the Videofreex, and other
research. If you are interested in a specific tape that has not been
preserved, you can help out by paying for its preservation. This usually costs
$400, and you will receive a DVD of the title for personal or educational use.
Additional rights for footage use can be negotiated. It should be noted that
the results of the preservation are not guaranteed, it is possible that the
tape has been damaged during its lifespan, or has degraded due to storage
conditions. Most of our results however have been positive.

The following is a list of titles taken from the labels on the tapes in our Videofreex
database. Please scroll through it, or use the search function of your browser to find
specific keywords. To find out more about any of these titles, please contact us.

Fassbinder Freaks Take-Over MoMA

2010-04-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

I was super disappointed on Monday afternoon, when I ditched work to go see Fassbinder's 1973 TV series "World on a Wire" and was denied. And I don't usually back down so easily. However, the MoMA's Administration entrance (not the main one) was packed- and i mean packed- with throngs of Fassbinder fanboy types. It brought back memories of the Devo conventions (called "the Devotional") that we used to go to in high school. Seeing as the screening lasted almost 3 hours, I inquired about stand-by. The visitor-assistant pointed to a line of maybe 70 people and said, "sure, go ahead. there's no guarantee tho." At that, I threw in the towel.

From MoMA's site:

Originally made for German television in 1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s visionary science-fiction thriller World on a Wire has only been shown in America once before, in 1997, as part of a comprehensive Fassbinder retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. MoMA’s Department of Film recently participated in a restoration of the film, and we are proud to present the luminous new 35mm theatrical print. Working from the original 16mm negative and a digital transfer, Juliane Lorenz, director of the RWF Foundation, and Michael Ballhaus, the film’s original cameraman, supervised the making of the new print. The restored film had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February of this year, and will now become part of the Museum’s collection.

World on a Wire is an extraordinary work—prescient, fluid, eccentric, and as wildly compelling as any of Fassbinder’s other masterworks. Made a quarter-century before The Matrix (1999), which touches on similar issues, Fassbinder’s film is an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 American novel Simulacron-3, also known as The Counterfeit World. As the director described it, World on a Wire is “a very beautiful story that depicts a world where one is able to make projections of people using a computer. And, of course, this leads to the uncertainty of whether someone himself is a projection, since in the virtual world projections resemble reality. Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with the old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.”

The Amps "Pacer" Reissue

2010-04-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

Freaking finally! I have been searching for an original copy of Pacer for the greater part of my teenage and adult years. Plain Recordings recently announced that they will be reissuing The Amps' only record from 1995 on 180 gram vinyl. The release date is May 11th.

From 4AD:

"During a hiatus between Breeders records, Kim Deal formed The Amps. Pacer was recorded quickly and is raw, punky and spontaneous - it's full-on garage rock, with Deal's most immediate and bracing songs since Pod. see also : The Breeders / Pixies"

Pre-order it here.

Hologramming

2010-04-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

CNN introduced the concept of "Hologramming" during the 2008 elections. For now I am just dropping these videos, but I want to return to them to discuss why this concept of hologramming is so interesting and hilarious.

Will.I.Am: unfortunately, I couldn't embed the better version. (Thanks, alot "ARTLOVERRR," you terd.)

A fashion crowd applauding at a holographic Kate Moss:

A different view:

Fractalzzzzzzz

2010-04-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

One thing that I love about Fractals, besides how serious their makers take them, is the music. It never ceases to amaze me how RETARDED it is! Check out this clip posted by "Fractal God" entitled CHAOS. The music is so incredibly nerdy. It's like mixing all genres of awful/awesome. At one point it sounds like "One-Winged Dove" but then segways into a wood-nymph journey of discovery.

Fractal videos seem to be split between trance music and classical music. I suppose this is the creator's attempt to situate their work within an elevated classical canon, and to emphasize the tie between math/science and high art.
[Here, I was going to post a video called, "Odyssey" demonstrating this point, but it seems that the user disabled the embedding function, which further proves my point of how serious some of these people are about fractals.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOfTrePsPX8&feature=related

Fractal Journey:

Arthur Clark on Fractals:
This is amazing. A veritable who's who in Math.

I want to remind everyone that fractals basically have no use in terms of applicability; they can be used to described geometric shapes and icons with infinite precision, but have little if any correlation to reality. They are empty icons that have been appropriated as a visual language that somehow signify universal truths about how the world works, because they involve the Mandlebrot set, an infinitely quantifiable mathematic equation that can be visualized and infinitely expanded, while maintaining a similar pattern. In the documentary, they go so far as to claim that the Mandlebrot set is the "thumb-print of god."

to be continued...

Some Recent Obsessions

2010-04-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

Here are some spoils from my internet adventures. (Also known as videos that I have found while procrastinating at work, or with my thesis writing). I am learning a lot about early computer art at the moment, so hopefully a more comprehensive post on the topic is forthcoming. For now, here are some nuggets:

(Thanks Craighead)

Lindsey Buckingham Appreciation Society

2010-04-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

Normally, I don't care for cover bands. But something about this approach has won me over. It seems like the band is only a fragment of a larger project. Lindsey Buckingham is more than a pop-star, it's a concept, a philosophy, an aesthetic, and a style. And if not, it should be. Or maybe this is just another cheese-dick coverband, and I am projecting my own view of what it "should" be on to it.. see for yourself:

http://tlbas.tumblr.com/

Stephanie Davidson

2010-03-31T09:06:00.000-07:00

Her painting and drawings are pretty meh, but check out these great gifs. There are about 15 pages of these gems.

Amazing aura gif sequence

Hello from Ohio

2010-03-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

Columbus, Ohio's Sword Heaven played their last show on Sunday March 27th at Death by Audio in Brooklyn. Drummer Aaron Hibbs is moving to New Dehli, India for the near future. There will definitely be more Sword Heaven shows, but knowing Hibbs, there is no telling where his future--or travel escapades-- will lead him. The band never disappoints, each show they play embodies a certain progression, peak and denoument; appropriately sanctioning itself as a succinct and contained experience in time. In my mind, none of their shows run together, they each constitute their own entity, which is part of the genius of the experience. Eventhough there is no substitute for seeing Sword Heaven live, I attempted to capture some of the essence on video at the Brooklyn show.

Sword Heaven pics

Download:

Download:

Download:

Download:

The "Museumification" of Performance Art

2010-03-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

IT’S HISTORY NOW: PERFORMANCE ART AND THE MUSEUM
A Panel Discussion About Current Performance
Presented by Performa’s Not For Sale Series

Last night, Performa’s educational series Not For Sale presented It’s History Now: Performance Art and the Museum, a panel discussion that examined the long history of performances presented in museums, from commissioned performances to artist-driven actions and protests, and attempted to explain the many reasons for the current performance boom.

Performance is in the middle of an extraordinary resurgence in popularity, with performance-based exhibitions currently on view at several major New York museums and galleries, a rapidly growing interest in performance programming at art fairs and biennials, and entire departments devoted to performance at The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and beyond. Panelists discussed whether it is possible for museums to accurately re-present radical historic performances, many of which were specifically intended to be anti-institutional. They also asked if the function of the contemporary art museum itself has changed so radically that it welcomes such organized anti-institutional approaches.

Panelists for It’s History Now included Alexander Alberro, Chrissie Iles, Martha Rosler, and Glenn Wharton, Conservator in the Department of Conservation at The Museum of Modern Art. Respondents included Eungie Joo, Curator at the New Museum, and Adam Pendleton, Artist. The panel was introduced and moderated by Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg.

The ever brilliant Chrissie Iles started the talk off by presenting a large @ symbol, which was acquired earlier this week by MoMA. This, insofar, launched into her central argument that museums have collected performances, but they have done this by collecting photographs, videos, installation, documentation, writings, and other secondary media formats. Here, I noticed Martha Rosler roll her eyes dramatically at the mention of Cindy Sherman's photos acting as an object-based indexing to version of the performance that the photos document. This notion of the haptic, which Iles signaled to, was further discussed through her analysis of James Lee Byer's "The Perfect Smile" and later Valie Export's Action Pants: General Panic (1969). That documentation of these performances provide one with a window into the performance, but the museum's way of re-performing these works adds a whole other layer of theatricality to the original concept of the work. Iles stated that:

“Performance challenges categorization, which was originally its point. But museums are about archiving, categorizing, and indexing. It’s not always an easy fit, but maybe what’s interesting is the way in which the past is reframed in the present."
Martha Rosler began her lecture by letting everyone know that she was going to disregard the time constraints. What followed was a defamatory, hostile accusation of museums as being guilty of elitist tastes, privileging certain histories over others, and commoditizing once radical art works in the process. She argued that museums force artists to succumb to their "model" when re-presenting subversive works, an assertion that I believe to be a gross generalization. A purist, she believes that such works have no business being re-performed, collected, housed, or documented within museums, because she considers institutions to be sites that facilitate revisionism.

There were many issues with her argument-- the most obvious one being the hypocrisy of her own work being presented within institutions. At one point, she praised the archive as the appropriate place for historically significant works of art. The issue with this is access and therefore agency; a tremendous amount of work goes into archival research, whereas a stroll through the MoMA's media gallery might only take 25 minutes. Generally speaking, the work, whether original or re-installed, will reach a greater amount of people through the museum setting, allowing greater visibility within cultural and historic memory. I wanted so badly to discuss these issues in greater detail, because of all of the contradictions they implied, but I didn't want her to continue along her tirade.

I guess, generally speaking, I see a performance entering a museum as a beginning to a new life, as opposed to the end of one. Of course individuals within the museum owe the work a huge amount of maintenance, investigation, and contextualization througout this lifetime. Inevitably, we must accept that the work will change with time. Therefore, now is the time to document what elements of performance works can be elastic, and which must be finite. Inviting the unexpected around art is afterall, what makes performance interesting.

Marina Abramovich at MoMA

2010-03-23T07:25:00.001-07:00

Queens of Noise

2010-03-22T08:03:00.001-07:00

All in all, the Runaways was pretty decent. Of course there were problems with it, but this much is inevitable with Hollywood films looking back into a specific time period. Dakota Fanning plays a seriously great drug addict towards the end of the film. Especially considering that she is still only 16 and comes from a long line of athletic stars. (mother a tennis pro, her father played baseball for the Cardinals, Grandfather played American football, and her aunt is an ESPN reporter). I also found out in the first paragraph of her wikipedia page, Fanning is currently the captain of the varsity cheer-leading squad at her high school. (Weird!?)

Actresses exploiting themselves, you say? Well, that is fitting, seeing as exploitation and selling an image was the concept behind the formation of the actual band the Runaways. Somehow the cheapness of content in Hollywood screenwriting seems fitting for the story. As does the mass distribution and targeted audience: dudes and teenage girls.

Donatella Versus the World (Again)

2010-03-11T18:17:00.000-08:00

I don't claim to know much about high fashion, but I do love aesthetics and imagination. When my best friend Beth Murphy told me about Donatella Versace reviving the dormant "Versus" label from the 90s, I had flashbacks to ads scotch-taped to my suburban wall, such as this one:

A bit of internet-spelunking revealed that the new advertising face for Versus will be none other than Georgia May Jagger, the 17 year old Bardotian daughter of Mick and Jerry Hall.

Versus, the young Versace line originally launched in 1989 and designed by Donatella Versace under her brother Gianni's supervision before it was discontinued in 2005. Donatella divulged that "It was the first collection that my brother Gianni let me work on, on my own, so it's very precious to me."

The line, which targets "Young Hollywood," or women between 20 and 30, is currently being sold in the new Versus showroom in Milan. Don't really see "Young Hollywood" in these designs so much, but I love them anyways. Wait, umm... is that because I am a young woman between 20 and 30....? Damn you, consumption and desire!

Next two are my favorites:

While we're on the subject, see also: nymag article on Gilt Groupe

If only: Bruce LaBruce in Berlin

2010-03-11T17:07:00.000-08:00

PERES PROJECTS BERLIN
Schlesische Strasse 26
January 30–April 24

Ever since seeing Otto, and LA Zombie, I have been smitten with Canada's Bruce LaBruce, who has seemingly transformed from a DIY queer-zine-making/gay porn star to a fully matured cineaste. I would love to see how his work translates in gallery space. And what a fun project, to create an exhibition around his work! I really hope that the exhibition embodies a sense of humor, parallel to his films. There's so much potential to mine in this regard!

A Review:

Francois Sagat, the star of Bruce LaBruce’s latest film and a series of monochromatic silk-screened portraits in his exhibition “LA ZOMBIE: The film that would not die,” has a gladiator physique and tattooed scalp that on first glance seem at odds with the usual flesh eater’s starved silhouette. But the French-Arab gay porn star’s sensitive face sets him apart from his role as the unseeing zombie obsessed with satiating unquenchable desires.

In the director’s sixty-five-minute film, LA ZOMBIE, 2010, Sagat appears as both an uncommonly comely homeless man scavenging for trash and an electric-blue zombie who finds murdered men and then penetrates their wounds with his massive pointed penis. After he ejaculates blood, the men are resurrected as fellow zombies. The young man who picks him up hitchhiking in the opening scene and whose heart he pumps after a fatal car crash sits on the wreckage lovingly and mournfully watching Sagat dress himself to leave him. The moment establishes Sagat as a romantic character, akin to the melancholy vampire rather than the amoral and greedy zombies who typically inhabit the genre.

By transforming Sagat into a mutant of his genre, LaBruce humanizes the actor and creates an odd but compellingly optimistic view of mankind. Those familiar with George A. Romero’s films will be particularly aware that we might be in the throes of a zombie society that mindlessly devours everything in sight. Even our appetite for Twilight and other vampire-themed pop is evidence of rampant consumer lust. But Sagat’s sensitive zombie seems to possess greater depth and existential self-awareness, more even than the mortal businessman whose dead body he defiles."

Ana Finel Honigman for Artforum

Seeing as I just went to a General Idea screening last night that was introduced by fellow gay-vid-art-Canuck A.A. Bronson, and I just came across these photographs taken by Bruce LaBruce, here is that too...

bricolage rainbow

New Site

The women who changed the face of art | The Cutting Room | ARTINFO.com

Artists Space launches new venue: Artists Space: Books & Talks' on Grand St. and West Broadway

Video Data Bank launches new website

Ken Jacobs Interview in TimeOut Chicago

The avant-garde icon will present a live work at the Film Studies Center.

Mark Fisher to lecture at Cooper Union

Rudy Wurlitzer retrospective at Anthology

Churner and Churner gallery screens a Kuchar Brother pairing

Barbie Video Girl

Sorta Power/ Kinda Crust/ Vaguely Wave

What I did with my tax return

MIAP Program Offers New Summer Course on Copyright and Intellectual Property

Copyright Law for Cultural Institutions 3 credits, July 25 August 5 2011, M-F 9am-12pm (plus an additional hour of online activities each day)

Full Course Description:

Edge of the Wedge

"In Watermelon Sugar the Deeds Were Done and Done Again as My Life is Done in Watermelon Sugar."

Dreamweapon: The Art and Life of Angus MacLise (1938 – 1979) at Boo-Hooray

La Brune et Moi

Aluminum Music at the Kitchen's 40th

EAI in Times Square! MTV 44 1/2 , EAI, and The Times Square Alliance Partners to Celebrate Video

Lucy Lippard lecture at SVA

Dara Birnbaum at EAI

Bits of Broodthaers

Dance Capsules: Walker Art Center acquires Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection

Janet. and her uncanny obsession with her breasts

The Andy Monument

Takahiko Iimura

Maria Lassing "Films" at Friedrich Petzel

H BOX a nomadic video art screening room 2011 program

Rirkrit Tiravanija - "Fear Eats the Soul" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

The Future is Now Media Arts, Performance and Identity after Nam June Paik

Martha Rosler at EAI

Susan Hiller Retrospective at the Tate Britain

Larry Clark's 'Tulsa' recently found by the artist, and will be exhibited for the first time in the US at Luhring Augustine

MoMA presents a program of live performance and dance in collaboration with the exhibition 'On Line: Drawing Through the Twentiety Century'

Shana Moulton's Whispering Pines 10 at the New Museum

Sponsors

Rewind the BETAMAX of life: Nam June Paik at Tate Liverpool and FACT by Peter Merrington

Merce Cunningham: Legacy at Joyce

Anika

2010 Best of LIst

BFI Gallery, London presents Yvonne Rainer

Exhibition Contextualizes Kineticism as precursor to post-object art in New Zealand

Call for Graduate Applications

RoseLee Goldberg and Doryun Chong honored at Independent Curators International for 35th year anniversary

Video Mix Tape #3

Parisienne Commercials

Highlights from DJ set last night

Googlin' the Rose

Video Mix Tape #3

Institute of the 21st Century announces two new iterations of Hans Ulbrich Obrist's 'Interview Project"

Fast Forward 2: The Power of Motion at ZKM – Center for Art and Media

Suburban Lawns

The Geeg on Talkshows

Moon Duo - Ez Street Ext

Video Mix Tape #2

Video Romp Mixtape #1

Abramovic Documentary

Link Romp 1

Audience Experiments: Contemporary Art in the Age of the Spectacle

Did you know MoMA has a blog?

Xavier Le Roy lecture

Kim Gordon: Performing/Guzzling

30 Days Artist Series

Gary Hill, George Quasha, and Charles Stein at EAI

Videofreex Documentary

Videofreex at Light Industry

Fassbinder Freaks Take-Over MoMA

The Amps "Pacer" Reissue

Hologramming

Fractalzzzzzzz

Some Recent Obsessions

Lindsey Buckingham Appreciation Society

Stephanie Davidson

Hello from Ohio

The "Museumification" of Performance Art

Marina Abramovich at MoMA

Queens of Noise