Aidan is a 5 year old boy who was recently diagnosed with leukemia. He loves to draw and he loves monsters. He sells some prints of his drawings to raise money for his bills.
Here is his Etsy store, where you can buy his prints.
Here is his blog, where you can read more of his story.
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.
Humor in art has historically been seen as being in poor taste, blasphemous, and sometimes even subversive. Thus, you can’t teach humor in art, and the fuzzy sheen of the serious will continue to be the bid of collector awareness. Whatever. The professional Brit humorist, Harry Hill, has been making these paintings recently and I can’t help but wonder if I love them because they’re funny, or if because for some reason they represent some sort of therapeutic freedom from art. Look, see and wonder.
“Versions, 2010,” by Oliver Laric is a rather brilliant illustration of the warm place we all have in our hearts for simulation and its recapitulative capacity regarding the power of the IMAGE. Additionally, “Versions, 2010,” is a newer version of “Versions, 2009.” Both are capable of supplying the visual artist and/or creative with an apropos “WTF are you doing?” moment.
Oliver Laric is also part of the [mostly online] curatorial powerhouse that is VVORK
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Lately, I’ve been personally investing a great deal of my energy into co-birthing the following collaborative entity. Legwork, via the means of its own description, is a Berlin- and Hannover-based collaborative concerned with situational articulations and circulations of meaning, ranging from figurative to discursive. Its web presence is at legwork.cc.
The collaboration will materialize through various mediums and will be centrally located (whatever that means anymore) online, through monthly issues. The first bit of writing I’ve done with Legwork is entitled, Cooking Invocation. The following summary of the piece was prepared for Legwork’s newsletter: “That the preparation of a meal should wield such discursive currency in the contemporary art world says something meaty about the status of the medium of the everyday in contemporary artistic practice. Tobey Albright prepares.” You can read the full article here.
Two additional [brilliant!] articles on hybridized choreography, situated between YouTube and Art Fairs, and a collaborative Giorgio Agamben TrendMatrix, are also held within its web pages. And if those claims alone don’t make you want to interface with Legwork, the admission that my two Legworkian collaborators, Egle Obcarskaite and Timothy Murray, have two of the more brilliant minds and engaging practices as anyone I’ve had the pleasure to play with before, will certainly persuade you. Go!
SLOW&SENSUAL:Die Ordnung from Studio Jo Meesters on Vimeo.
FAST&FRENETIC:The Let’s Colour Project.
The above videos offer two versions of commercial voyeurism that locate the processes of making things with bodies somewhere between artfully haptic meditation and frenetic swarming. Additionally, both videos offer glimpses into two incredibly ambitious projects orbiting around creative social tactics. In my humble opinion, both videos beautifully represent process and product.
Occasionally, a bit of writing comes along that strikes a chord of resonance nearly too perfect to be true. The sound of this particular resonance echos around the complicated cavern of discernment that an artist’s role operates in relation to a public [whatever that may be]. Clearly, rendering a history of an artist’s behavioral tendency to perform the responsibilities and power dynamics of an institution has an essential urgency that needs to be addressed. Thus, the essay, “Art Without Artists,” by Anton Vidokle [mentioned in admiration several times before], currently being occupied by the 16th issue of the E-Flux journal, does just this. Please read the entire essay at e-flux.com/journal. If you are involved in any activities, be them collective, collaborative or organizational, you owe it to the history of your methodology to read this essay.
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“If the artist is already expected to question the social, the economic, the cultural, and so forth, then it goes without saying that when a curator supersedes the artist’s capacity as a social critic, we abandon the critical function embodied by the role of the artist and reduce the agency of art.”
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“If there is to be critical art, the role of the artist as a sovereign agent must be maintained. By sovereignty, I mean simply certain conditions of production in which artists are able to determine the direction of their work, its subject matter and form, and the methodologies they use—rather than having them dictated by institutions, critics, curators, academics, collectors, dealers, the public, and so forth. While this may be taken for granted now, historically the possibility of artistic self-determination has been literally fought for and hard won from the Church, the aristocracy, public taste, and so on. In my view, this sovereignty is at the very center of what we actually understand as art these days: an irreducible element considered to be the ‘freedom of art.’”
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“It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled—and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment—exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves. But this is a completely wrong approach in my opinion: what most urgently needs to be done is to further expand the space of art by developing new circulation networks through which art can encounter its publics—through education, publication, dissemination, and so forth—rather than perpetuate existing institutions of art and their agents at the expense of the agency of artists by immortalizing the exhibition as art’s only possible, ultimate destination. ”
“As Group Material, Martha Rosler, and other artists in the 1980s demonstrated, curating can become a part of artistic practice just as any social form or activity can. For example, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here began as an immediate response to a lack of institutional support for an exhibition she was invited to do at the Dia Center for the Arts. Rosler felt that the best way to do something there was by positioning herself as curator/organizer—a kind of one-person institution rather than an individual artist. This resulted in a project comprising several exhibitions on housing and homelessness involving numerous artists, architects, activists, and community groups, which then turned out to be a seminal artwork that influenced several generations of artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Renée Green, Liam Gillick, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marion von Osten, and many others.”
With a number of new projects being produced [with several collaborators] these entries have been few and far between lately. However, I’d like to offer a listing of extremely interesting productions and projects to help occupy your never ending search for reflective interest.
Episode 1: He talks with Kathy Grayson of Deitch Projects and artist, critic and art historian Svetlana Alpers. I specifically enjoy Grayson’s chic-slacker performance of revealing the Deitch underworld and proposing the millionaire as mystic-misfit-support-unit [or "public servant"... otherwise known as subversive "advertising"] and the pathetic realization that she should have been “hanging out with collectors.” Perhaps this pathetic scenario is a charming little model of an imaginary class that was doomed to collapse. I do appreciate her “street art” correlation to “Green Day.”
[wpaudio url="http://tobeyalbrightandfriends.com/morewriting/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Radio_Show_Interview.mp3"]
Listen to additional episodes here.
This art news source has been given previous attention real estate in a previous post, but the consistent coverage demands a return visit. I’ll say no more.
Artist statements always seem to embody a sense of hopelessness as those that craft them absolve their responsibility in communicating with language by claiming that what they do can only be done with the only medium they feel comfortable using [i.e. the excuse 'the work speaks for itself']. In a short interview on the brilliant Best Made Projects blog, Shawn Davis explains his work to Peter Buchanan-Smith in a poetically practical way that will hopefully inspire similar approaches to the statement craft of visual artists. I’d also like to propose the following interview as a charming little explicatory metaphor [through fishing] to that complicated relationship between the pursuit of a personalized passionate activity and the abstracting process of representing it as a consumable product. Additionally, the following might make a nice little user’s manual to confronting and coping with the anxieties of producing new patterns in an over-produced and over-hyped ‘art world.’
Read the entire interview here, please.
PBS: People will spend upwards of four figures for your flies. What draws someone to spend that type of money?
SD: While it may be hard for most people to appreciate the particulars in my craftsmanship, I hope the artistry of my pieces is something anyone can appreciate. An artistic salmon fly couples beauty with danger, a poisoned apple to a fish. I try to stretch that tension to the extreme in a vision elegantly simple. It is my hope that, even if people have no idea /how/ I do what I do, one look at my flies will convince them of /why/ I do what I do.
PBS: Your flies have tremendous character. They are almost like actual living creatures. Do you improvise this as you make each fly, or have you a “character sketch” in mind before you start?
SD: Many artistic tiers crank out hundreds of different patterns per year, often in my eyes merely slight variations of each other. I try to make each fly a reinvention of the art, completely different from the last. That takes time. Often a pattern will gestate in my mind for years. Occasionally I’ll jot down some notes when I think of a unique technique, just so I don’t forget it, without any idea if or how it will eventually make it into a finished pattern. My /Fire/ fly is a great example of my creative process, which is one of constant revision. I wanted to make a fly that looked like it was on fire, but all I had was a color scheme. After tying several unsuccessful patterns based on somewhat traditional methods, I finally developed something quite new and yet refreshingly simple, forming pheasant crests and tinsel into flames that enveloped the body of the fly in strikingly flame-like fashion. One day, when I have time (that which is so elusive), I will compose a photo essay of my creative process for a piece from start to finish.
PBS: This might be a stupid question but most flies are designed to catch fish. Are yours?
Artistic salmon flies arose from early tiers’ attempts to mimic the beautiful colors in baitfish. While the art has drifted significantly from those roots, and a few of the most daring tiers have even suggested that artistic flies need no longer be functional as fishing implements, I think functionality is essential to the character of a fly. If it doesn’t catch fish, then what does it do? Now, my finished flies are permanently mounted in domes and on necklace chains and will never touch water, but I’m confident that they would meet that challenge were they put to it.
PBS: When you fish, what type of fly do you use?
Ironically, I typically use extremely simple patterns when I fish. My favorite flies are those of my own invention, and I have a few fishing patterns that have been more successful for me than the old standbys in their class. While they are infinitely simpler than my artistic creations, I’m every bit as proud of them as I am of my presentation flies. I apply my creativity every bit as tenaciously to tying practical flies as I do to tying artistics.
Popular Unrest is a brilliant film narrative underscoring popular notions of community through the failings of capital exchange and cultural over saturation. The episodic film was created by Melanie Gilligan and will be shown at Chisenhale Gallery in London, Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre in Alberta, and the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. You can watch each episode of the film here, as this is a highly recommended exercise in exchange potentialities.
I like to imagine that collapsing the economy is extremely important for establishing additional relational value structures and ultimately encouraging more sustainable ways to survive together in the 21st Century. [If you're a return-reader, you are well aware of this and are probably tired of hearing me say it.]
Cue the presciently [somewhat] well supported efforts of Temporary Services, who are comprised of Brett Bloom, Marc Fischer and Salem Collo-Julin, and have been producing exhibitions, events, projects, and publications since 1998. Their latest project is Art Work : A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, and is directly concerned with the livelihood of artists in the Untited States of America.
Their efforts to establish a professional knowledge base and platform for concrete career sustainability is an incredibly transgressive action for the fine art industry [including the aspects of it that don't involve class theatrics: Jeffrey Deitch/Biennales/Art Fairs].
Finally, an organization that helps artists do what they’re not inherently good at, because they’re mostly arrested by their own intuitive organizations.
On the projects download page, you can download the publication in various formats, making the consumption of the support-oriented information extremely easy to access.
Additionally, you can learn more about Temporary Services and the Art Work publication at Rhizome.org.
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