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-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!

“Dear Eric and Patricia.
You took my car. I am happy for you on so many levels, but don’t disguise it as anything other than a half-assed gesture. I’m sure the act probably had some stale thrill of transgression. but please believe me, without your self- promoting twittering and FBing to the Saltz page no one would have given a flying f**k about it. Please, you are human beings – express yourselves through yourselves. You will be dead soon. Drive my car – drive it back – then leave it at that.
Is this sad excuse for self promotion and self-definition what you wish to leave for future generations? I quote you as you exited the car: “We thought it was part of the interactivity.” Is this Disney? And as for the rest of the digi-witterers – no more mentions of “Relational Aesthetics” or ‘RA’ or whatever you need to call it… Leave that to the librarians, accountants, and score keepers. Its art. It has no name – just like the void, no name. Do you think that Donald Judd had ‘Minimalist’ on his drivers-license? Your incessant babble is deafening, fearful, and boring. Please cease.”
- Clipped from Art Fag City [where you'll find all the appropriate links to this operatic composition; it's as charming as the letter above] -Clipped from NYMagazine [Jerry Saltz's Thing]

Yes, I will participate in the art world’s self-congratulatory [lots of blog hype] attempt at producing a meme with [potential] pop culture exportability. I have before. And besides, how couldn’t I? So, apropos.

Minimalism Now

Feb 27, 2011

Rachel Harrison, sculptor
Miwon Kwon, Professor of Art History, UCLA
James Meyer, Associate Professor of Art History, Emory University
David Raskin, Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This panel puts the issue of Minimalism’s morphology and relevance to a noteworthy cast of scholars and artists. Harrison has exhibited internationally in leading venues. Kwon is the author of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (MIT Press, 2002). Meyer is the author of Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (Yale University Press, 2001). Raskin is the author of Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010).

For those of you still living in Berlin, please go and see this natural-pseudo-scientific-spectacle for me. It’s called “Soma,” and it’s produced by the artist Carsten Holler. For 1000 euro you can also become assimilated into the work through the cultural tourist framework of a (bizarre) art/boutique hotel. The Hamburger Bahnhof made a site for the exhibition cum theme park which consists of no less than 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, 8 mice and 2 flies.

Straight from the HB PR Team:
“Before the eyes of the observers unfolds an expansive “living picture”, a symmetrical experimental field, which is divided in two parts along its center line and which compares the ordinary world with the realm of Soma in a double-image experiment. This is an experiment, that find its completion in the imagination of the observer and whose evaluation is subject to your power of observation. On a mushroom like platform in midst of the arrangement resides a bed, where guests will have the opportunity to spend a night at the museum and to dive into the world of Soma.”

Below is a video outline of the exhibition. Please pardon the advertisement.

On a more domestic note, the Hammer museum is producing an interactive event platform titled, “Houseplant Vacation.” Participants are invited to give their houseplants a vacation, during the Hammer’s August cultural retreat for plants. Throughout the entire month, participant’s plants will be installed in the light flooded Lindbrook terrace, and presented with a series of readings, performances and musical events, for plants every Saturday from 1-4pm. The project offers a plant release waiver, in case sick plants infect others, and appears to be organized in part by machine projects. Learn more about the project here.

Cinthia Marcelle just won $!00,000 from the Future Generation Art Prize. Due to the portability of her medium, you can see a compilation of her works below, embedded from her vimeo page. In a monoculture of hyper distribution, portability is everything. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before Ms. Marcelle’s methods are assimilated by some viral advertising campaign. In the mean time, enjoy them in their beautifully pure infancy stage of your relationship with her work (mentioned as though she hasn’t been included in major exhibitions such as, Biennal de la Habana, Cuba, in 2006).

CRUZADA from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

475 VOLVER from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

FONTE 193 from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

CONFRONTO from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

VOLTA AO MUNDO from cinthia marcelle on Vimeo.

I happened upon this video on nowness, and realized that I’d never heard Jeffrey Deitch carry-on conversationally. One has to admire his gentle accessibility and progressive rhetoric. I can’t wait to see the “new model for the museum in the 21st Century” (although it sounds like it might have something to do with celebrity).

…

Furthermore, regarding the programmatic browser side of this of post, one can’t help but admire nowness’ visualization of their most favored content, below.

Having a blog is a difficult habit to adopt if you don’t have a natural proclivity for communicating through language on an everyday basis and don’t mind a little virtual maintenance in addition to your other daily organizational maintenance. Thus, blogs with massive updated delays are a very natural phenomenon. I’m guilty of it. I’m sorry. Cory Arcangel’s project, Sorry I Haven’t Posted, reposts blog posts that open with an apology. More Cory Arcangel works at his site.

The Internet medium is an awkward medium within the art industry. It has no intrinsic value other than providing a basic measurement of your advertising ROI for your site’s requests for engagement. Additionally, it’s immaterial and therefore incapable of generating monetary gain on its own, but rather directs the engaged to more traditional means [even online] of market exchange where they are able to collect material souvenirs of their online experience. Thus, net art is more directly capable of referring to art’s hidden social role as an abstract economy. After all, it’s one of the largest unmediated and illiquid markets in the [public] world.

With this said, there are Net Artists that continue to test the potential of the Internet medium. Rafaël Rozendaal, http://www.newrafael.com/, is a Dutch-Brazilian artist that has helped pioneer the “single serving site” and has developed an international exhibition reputation [e.g. "Los Angeles, Barcelona, Tokyo and London amongst others."]. Each site/work is an interactive animation that simply does what static works of art cannot: it plays with you/you play with it. In addition to each work’s share-value [i.e. the value produced by the gesture of sending a site link to a friend and them thinking "wow, that's pretty cool; so-and-so is cool for sharing this and now I will share this and create the same cool value for myself"], and an online store that sells limited addition prints of the work, Rozendaal sells the individual domain spaces as collectible works of art.

Recently, Rozendall has opened a new exhibition in Berlin, at The Future Gallery. Below is a video walk through of the exhibition. The following links will take you to the works being exhibited: TowardsAndBeyond.com, IntoTime.com, HybridMoment.com. Please note the corresponding title information for each work at the top of the browser window.