BLOG

⇈ Date of Last Update

subscribe with RSS feed or your email address

-It’s All Over

-Bradley Wester on de Kooning

This past week I had the opportunity to see the de Kooning retrospective at the MoMA. The walk-through was everything expected: a massive cavernous vacuum of mid 20th century painterly heroics accessorized with exhibition design that felt very of the era. However, after the evening concluded, upon returning home, Bradley Wester read us an article that he’d written the year of de Kooning’s death. Immediately, everything human about the exhibition, that I was unable to find through the roaming mob of followers and wall texts, clapped its way into my memory as I backtracked my recollections in order to match up the little narrative with its things.

The article can be found at Bradley’s blog, here.

-Making Art Go Public

This “lively” discussion between Maria Lind and Jens Hoffman appropriately represents the polarities that exist between conservative and experimental modes of thinking about art, specifically in institutional settings. And do note, I say “thinking” as a way of identifying the most public aspect of art, in so far as its activity – coupled with its elusive twin sibling, “feeling” – is art’s primary most medium. Remember this when reading through the interview and be amazed at the potential of your chosen cultural behavior.

Mousse Magazine’s, TO SHOW OR NOT TO SHOW.

-NICOLEMAUSER.COM

I’ve recently finished the website for a friend, Nicole Mauser. It was made with the assistance of another friend, Seth Hoekstra, who made the custom type and kindly offered design suggestions along the way.

Wander through it, here.

-#sharkface

Cause if you don’t know now you know #sharkface.

Merry Christmas, Internet family! Merry Christmas, Internet friends! Merry Christmas, Internet strangers!

 

Content is Queen from Sergio Albiac on Vimeo.

www.jimcarreytrulife.com

Programming [a host of activities] itself is a medium that should be discursively reconsidered within the field of shifting organizational responsibility and transnominal embodiment. For the past few weeks I’ve been noting several new programming initiatives, both institutional and non-institutional, that make a strong case for being as progressive as the art and/or artists they typically champion. Below is a small compilation of a few of these programs.

-KOW ISSUE 8: GENERAL STRIKE

One of my favorite galleries [and gallery spaces] in Berlin is the relatively new KOW Berlin. The gallery’s conceptual agenda is rooted in their conviction that the social dimension of artistic practices is what makes them helpful in understanding the conditions, and in influencing the modes, of our individual and collective lives.

More specifically, GENERAL STRIKE is published as the eighth contribution to KOW ISSUES, a sequence of projects in varying formats that explore the social and political implications of artistic practices. Conception, texts, and graphic design: Alexander Koch.

From the excerpt:
“Artists are positively expected to criticize the society in which they live. Criticizing art—the market, the institutions, the role of the creative outsider in which many people like to cast them—is likewise a conventional part of what they do; in Institutional Critique, it has even become the central feature of a distinct art movement. But what happens when artists go so far as to criticize not just individual features of the art world but art as a whole?”

This is the transcendent beauty of criticality as ouroboros. I’d love to see more blogs dedicated to this theme alone.

More ✔

-REGIONALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

On Saturday, May 7th, 2011, Glasstire and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presented a panel in celebration of their 10th anniversary. The issues being discussed are apropos to many of the issues being [mostly unconsciously] projected by the artist and art collective behavior of mimetic institutionalization.

“Regionalism in the 21st Century” featured Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale; David Pagel, Los Angeles Times art critic and associate professor of art at Claremont Graduate University; Toby Kamps, curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection in Houston; and Michael Galbreth, one of the artist duo known as The Art Guys. The panel was moderated by Christina Rees, a Glasstire correspondent and director of Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.

-INSTANT CINEMA

Instant Cinema is a comprehensive platform for experimental film, video and computer art, making the best audio-visual work of artists of all generations available to a worldwide audience.

The fact that they’re presenting several Bas Jan Ader works alone should be enough reason to inquire further. The interface itself is rather beautiful and lends itself well to the question of whether or not the portability of video art will lead the way in the technological hyper-weaving of art and everyday life. Also, please read the about page.

preview.instantcinema.org ✔

-FREE PROPOSALS FOR ART SCHOOL CRITIQUE

artschoolartcritiques.tumblr.com ✔

-KURATOR

KURATOR is a combined curatorial agency and research platform at the intersection of art, technology and society. It has a particular interest in the emerging discourse and practice that links curating with programming, software and networks.

KURATOR’s core activities include projects, research and publications. 
A repository of all contents in the database can be found in the Archive section.

kurator.org ✔

-A Conversation on Useful Art #1

“It’s time to put Duchamp’s urinal back into the restroom” —Tania Bruguera

On Saturday, April 23 Immigrant Movement International hosted A Conversation on Useful Art #1, an event organized by artist Tania Bruguera as part of Immigrant Movement International, a year-long, socio-political movement initiated by the artist in Corona, Queens and presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art.

Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, presented in partnership with the Queens Museum of Art, is a long-term art project in the form of an artist-initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera will spend an entire year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighborhood of Corona, Queens, which will serve as the movement’s headquarters. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organizations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, Bruguera will examine growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants.

immigrant-movement.us ✔

Exceptionally proud to be collaborating with Nicole Mauser on a hybrid essay, in the form of an online zine, found at www.kinematiczine.com. Content is being updated throughout the month of April. The paintings themselves are simply some of the best I’ve seen lately.

Go look see!

An exceptional reconfiguration of a cultural phenomenon that ushered in the age of entrancing bliss-pop. Dare I call it inter-generational? I do. It’s the perfect background music for studio visits with potential collectors.
- clipped from basically whatever

An exceptional recording of Grandaddy Duchamp discussing “the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.” This was recorded in 1957, mind you.
- clipped from ubu web

A personal reference to a work I created in tandem with an essay titled, “Legwork is Surviving,” which is part of a larger collaboration with Legwork. The MP3 itself is a [somewhat] humorous attempt at extending the dispersive economy of Price’s work while embodying a survivalist mode of collaboration. More on this later.

“My main activity is looking, looking and more looking, and trying to listen to my subjective reactions as objectively or neutrally as possible. I learn from everything I look at, good, bad or indifferent. I follow my eye reflexively; if it is drawn toward something, I pay attention and try to find out why. You train your eye, build up a mental image bank, and constantly try to pinpoint why some things are convincing and others aren’t.

When I look at new work, my image bank goes into action. I pay careful attention to the names of other artists that flash in my brain as I look at the work. How many other artists exactly come to mind? There’s nothing wrong with this up to a point. I always loved Frank Stella’s observation that when you start out as a painter, you make other painters’ paintings, then you gradually begin to make your own paintings. I try to figure out what’s left in a younger artist’s work once I’ve subtracted the other artists’ influences. Does what remains seem original or at least promising? Is the younger artist aware of the debt and trying to get free of it? Or is that artist just unconsciously accepting received ideas and therefore making work that is generic or derivative? Obviously, the fewer names that come to mind, the greater the odds that you are looking at something fresh that you haven’t quite seen before.

And I do feel that there is a basic human drive to see something new. We don’t want to listen to endless cover bands playing Beatles’ songs, why should we look at the same abstraction or still life, the same photograph or Conceptual performance piece being done again and again by different artists with only slight variations?

At the same time, “newness” or originality are often matters of subtle degree. The new doesn’t have to be an epoch-shifting breakthrough. Just as we all have different fingerprints and handwriting, we all have a potential for some increment of originality. I am always on the lookout for a spark of necessity — a feeling that this particular artist had no choice but to make this particular artwork this particular way. That is the only way authenticity or even originality can start to emerge.”

- Clipped from a Meg Onli article [Bad At Sports], clipped from a Chandra Tiwari Q and A [New York Times]