Greenpoint Open Studios

Greenpoint is having another round of open studios this October 1 - 3. So if you are a local artist or just want to support them please contribute to this fundraiser.

Details:

Greenpoint Open Studios
October 1 – 3, 2010
greenpointopenstudios.org

Greenpoint Open Studios is a weekend long event celebrating a burgeoning art scene in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It is a collaborative effort between artists, organizations, businesses and volunteers to build a creative platform in which all members of the community can foster and contribute to a support system that encourages the sharing of ideas and relationships. As artist studios and exhibition spaces continue to emerge in the neighborhood we hope to facilitate the growth of a thriving art community.

Programming throughout the event include art exhibitions at Greenpoint Gallery and Yes Gallery, a one night public art festival courtesy Bring to Light, a food infused round table discussion and feel good celebrations! We will need funding (our goal is to raise $2000) to cover all operational costs from promotional material and rental equipment to refreshments and graphic designers.

We are grateful for generous donations and support from local businesses as they show their love and support for the local art community. Similarly, you funding will allow us to continue to strengthen and cultivate a growing community of artists and harness relationships, collaborations and creative dialogue.

On the Beach w/Zoe Strauss

I've been on a hiatus for a few weeks. Just painting and such, nothing exciting. One of the highlights though has been following Philly based photographer Zoe Strauss on her blog as she documents the BP disaster down in the Gulf. She's provided compelling images but has also been a sort of on the ground surrogate for me and I assume many others as we watch from afar. This is what artists do of course and it helps to have honest commentary about her inner dialogue as she engages this calamity.

Tyler Green has an interview with Zoe at Artinfo. com: Q & A One and Two.


image: Zoe Strauss

Artists Responding to the BP Disaster

I've been coming across some sites and news about artists addressing the BP sponsored disaster in the Gulf Coast. These are small actions but they matter.

The Tate Britain has recently "celebrated" 20 years of sponsorship by BP which has to be the most ill timed celebration in museum history. The sadness of this is beyond words. Platform reports on a group of artists denouncing the event and the practice of BP sponsorship. Some major names on the list are Hans Haacke, Lucy Lippard and Rebecca Solnit.

A letter today was published in the Guardian today signed by 171 figures from the art world condemning BP’s sponsorship of cultural institutions in the UK. The letter has been published on the day that Tate Britain is hosting a party to celebrate 20 years of BP’s sponsorship. [1] A group of artists under the banner of ‘The Good Crude Britannia’ are planning on protesting outside the event, and will be handing out the “Licence to Spill’ briefing to people attending the party.[2]

Arts/activist organisation Platform [3] has gathered 171 signatories from the international arts community, for a letter that says:

“As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists in the Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high profile cultural associations.”[4]

continue here

Also, I've just come across Poets for Living Waters which describes itself as a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. There is a call for entries and I thank Poet Brett Evans for leading me to the site.


image: Poets for Living Waters

Call for Entries: INDEX: Design Challenge - Designing for Education

This looks like an amazing opportunity!

Via CORE 77:

INDEX: Design to Improve Life has just opened the doors to their 2010 challenge with the theme "Designing for Education," in partnership with the children's rights organization UNICEF. If you are a student, a recent grad, or faculty, you are invited to submit in the following three areas: improved educational facilities, sanitation and hygiene, and gender parity in education.

Here's an excerpt from the brief:

According to UNESCO's 2010 Education for All report (EFA), the number of children out of school has dropped by 33 million worldwide since 1999. South and West Asia more than halved the number of children not in school - a reduction of 21 million. But the latest numbers show that 72 million children are still out of school, and if the trend continues, 56 million children will still be out of school in 2015. Equally important, besides ensuring more children enroll in school, those children already in school must get a good education.

Literacy remains among the most neglected of all education goals, and millions of children are leaving school before acquiring basic skills. In some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, young adults with five years of education have a 40% probability of being illiterate. About 759 million adults lack literacy skills today. Two-thirds are women.

The gender disparity in education is another problem in developing countries today. Even though the share of girls out of school has declined from 58% to 54%, and the gender gap in primary education is narrowing in many countries, the difference is still a problem. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, almost 12 million girls may never enroll. In Yemen, nearly 80% of girls out of school are unlikely ever to enroll, compared with 36% of boys.

Submissions are due by November 26, 2010. Click here for guidelines.

image: Cy Twombly

Twitter as Hangman

I'm for a transparent bureaucracy but this isn't what I had in mind. Social media as medieval spectacle. More death tweets at Infocult.

Tracking BP's Disaster

If you're looking for a map that really puts you there and helps with understanding this ever changing oil spill then check out the following from NOAA.

An interactive map with information about the oil spill’s trajectory, the position of NOAA’s research ships, spilled oil’s coastal location and the areas closed to shipping and more.

hat tip: Cheryl Rofer

Sigmar Polke RIP

Ok so yet another titan of the post-war era has passed. Its getting out of hand. Bloomberg reports that Sigmar Polke has lost his battle with cancer.

June 11 (Bloomberg) -- Sigmar Polke, one of Germany’s best-known artists, died last night from cancer at the age of 69, his dealer Erhard Klein said in a phone interview.

Polke, a painter, graphic artist and photographer, was “one of the most important and most successful representatives of German contemporary art,” Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said in a statement. “He was a critical, ironic and self-ironic observer of postwar history and its artistic commentators.”

Born in 1941 in eastern Germany, Polke emigrated to the west in 1953. He settled in Dusseldorf, where he studied at the Art Academy. In 1963, he founded the “Capitalist Realism” painting movement with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg. The three artists mocked both the realist style that was the official art of the Soviet Union and the consumer-driven pop art of the west. Polke moved to Cologne in 1978.

He experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.

Here's a nice slide show at the NY Times.

image: Sigmar Polke

Andrei Tarkovsky's Polaroids

I've had a love for Polaroid film since I first saw the magic unfold as a small child. In addition to a Walker Evans book, a book on Tarkovsky's Polaroid photos is among my prize possessions. A continual yet subtle influence on my painting palette. The book is difficult to find so I am very happy to learn that the works have been digitized by a Russian blog. If you are unfamiliar with the great Soviet director and his particular genius for color and light, please see the following films - Solaris, The Mirror, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice.




via: flavorwire

WC2010

World Cup starts today and the majority of the world goes nuts! Congrats to South Africa for being the host country and go team USA.

For an innovative graphic on the teams and matches, see here.

Sites to stay on top of the action (besides ESPN):

official FIFA World Cup site,
The Guardian (though a bit slow thus far),
L'Equipe (French),
TNR World Cup blog.



hattip: helmut

YOU are responsible for spills

Some irony from BP stations around the country. Climate Progress is asking people to send in more images.

Save NY Libraries - Read In

It always seems to come down to an assault on the humanities. NYC as you may know is suffering more than its share of economic woes and the cuts are coming. One thing on the chopping block is the public library system where job cuts have begun. This comes at a time where the high number of unemployed need library resources more than ever. According to the Library Journal.com the Mayor's office issued his Executive Budget, and the cuts are even worse, nearly 25 percent, representing a 30 percent reduction over two years. That would lead to perhaps 1500 layoffs (30 to 40 percent of staff), some 40 closed libraries, and drastically curtailed hours and materials.

In addition to calling elected officials, here is another way you can try and stop these cuts.

Read-in coming June 12
Library workers and advocates gathered under the Save NYC Libraries banner are backing that call with a series of actions, notably a 24-hour Read-In to be held in front of the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library at Grand Army Plaza beginning at 5 p.m. on Saturday June 12.

Details:

Start Time:	Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 5:00pm
End Time:	Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 5:00pm
Location:	Steps of BPL Central Library
Street:	10 Grand Army Plaza
City/Town:	Brooklyn, NY

From the organizers:

Come out and support libraries during the 24 hour We Will Not Be Shushed Read-In. This is going to be a unified libraries effort with readers and library workers from all three tri-li systems. We already have the full endorsement of Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Library administration. This is going to be a huge event in support of libraries.

To Volunteer: savenyclibraries@gmail.com

We need volunteers for the event, not to read though. No we need people for the hard boring work, to get petition signatures and make sure that people fill out postcards and sign petition and then sign another, then another. We need people who will work the crowd and man the tables. We need people to do the heavy lifting.

the gender and geography of (un)employment

The above employment map comes from Stuart Staniford, representing trends in the United States by county. Lot's of data and resulting questions regarding gender and geography in the US. Outstanding map design as well.



hat tip: Kevin Drum

Louise Bourgeois 1911 -2010

Yet another light has gone out. I think everyone was wishing she would continue making art into her second century. Here's a good bio from Art 21.

Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911. She studied art at various schools there, including the Ecole du Louvre, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Académie Julian, and Atelier Fernand Léger. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States and continued her studies at the Art Students League in New York. Though her beginnings were as an engraver and painter, by the 1940s she had turned her attention to sculptural work, for which she is now recognized as a twentieth-century leader. Greatly influenced by the influx of European Surrealist artists who immigrated to the United States after World War II, Bourgeois’s early sculpture was composed of groupings of abstract and organic shapes, often carved from wood. By the 1960s she began to execute her work in rubber, bronze, and stone, and the pieces themselves became larger, more referential to what has become the dominant theme of her work—her childhood. She has famously stated “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.” Deeply symbolic, her work uses her relationship with her parents and the role sexuality played in her early family life as a vocabulary in which to understand and remake that history. The anthropomorphic shapes her pieces take—the female and male bodies are continually referenced and remade—are charged with sexuality and innocence and the interplay between the two. Bourgeois’s work is in the collections of most major museums around the world.

More on the artist's life here and here.


image:Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, 1947, ink on paper, 9-15/16 x 7-1/8 in.,Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photo by Eeva Inkeri, © Louise Bourgeois.

Dennis Hopper 1936-2010

Land Art Road Trip

I've always wanted to do a cross country trip that involved exploring the wide range of land art across our country. Then a couple weeks back my friend, artist Megan Vossler, emailed saying see was embarking on such a trip with her friend Rhamy. They have a website recording this adventure called land land land ART ART ART! The duo are currently in Marfa. Be sure and check it out.


Destinations:

Arches National Park

Badlands National Park

Bonneville Salt Flats

Bryce Canyon National Park

Center for Land Use Interpretation

Donald Judd: Chinati Foundation

Michael Heiser: Double Negative

Nancy Holt: Sun Tunnels

Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty

Walter de Maria: Lightning Field

White Sands National Monument

Zion National Park

About the project:

We are two California-to-Minnesota transplants (one an artist and teacher, the other a medical resident), chronicling a road trip we will take in May 2010 through the southwestern United States. Our purpose is to record our experience of the changing landscape, through drawings, photos, video, writing and sound. We’ll also be visiting as many of the major American land art sites as we can, to see how they’re holding up 30-plus years after their completion.

This trip has been partially funded by a generous travel and study grant from the Jerome Foundation in St Paul, MN.

image: Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson

Molly's River coming to Times Square

This summer, Times Square is getting a river! Brooklyn-based artist Molly Dilworth (a hard working friend) has landed the the commission to paint the pedestrian plazas on Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets. Her piece is titled "Cool Water, Hot Island," a graphic representation of NASA's infrared satellite data of Manhattan.

from the DOT:

The artist's concept focuses on the urban heat-island effect, where cities tend to experience warmer temperatures than rural settings. The proposed design's color palette of striking blues and lighter hues reflects more sunlight and absorb less heat - improving the look of these popular pedestrian plazas while making them more comfortable to sit in. The color and patterns evoke water, suggesting a river flowing through the center of Times Square, and they also provide a compelling visual counterpoint to the reds, oranges and yellows of the area’s signature marquees and billboards.

Molly's river will begin flowing by mid-July, and is expected to run about 18 months. If you want some early Manhattan geography check out this site for an interactive map. Additional history here.



via: Gothamist

BP's shit show from Space

image:NASA

Gulf plume -live stream

Live Broadcasting by Ustream
The live footage of BP's underwater black hole is now up.

Via FDL:

Note: The video seems to be coming in and out, so if it appears to be down just give it a few minutes and a couple of old fashioned refreshes and it should come back.

I encourage you to bookmark it and monitor the leak’s progress (or lack there of) for yourself. After all, we can’t really depend on anyone else to do it for us.

volunteers wanted in the gulf coast

If you are looking for a way to contribute towards the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf, here are some options.

The National Wildlife Federation is soliciting donations and volunteers to fight the oil spill through the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana:

... We do not know the location or the extent of impact to birds, wildlife, and habitat at this time. What we do know is that we need to be ready with on-call volunteers in the event that they are needed. National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon Society, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana are building a list of volunteers prepared to help with this response.

Volunteers can fill a variety of needs, from oiled wildlife recovery, to monitoring and photographing oil movement, to providing a boat and driver for response activities. No specific training or experience is necessary, although you must be at least 18 years old to volunteer. Some tasks, such as food preparation, may require no training. Other tasks, such as washing oiled birds, may require specific certifications or skills. We encourage pre-veterinary students, veterinary technicians, and anyone with HAZWOPER training to volunteer. Anyone with experience in dealing with wildlife handling, rehabilitation, or hazardous materials clean up is also strongly encouraged to register…
[...]
Once you have registered, we will contact you as soon as opportunities arise. The severity of this spill may require a long-term and ongoing response, so if you don’t hear from us immediately, it doesn’t mean you won’t be contacted or that your efforts won’t be needed. With your help, we can meet this challenge and reduce the impacts of this spill to habitat and wildlife.

Note: If you encounter oiled wildlife, please call 1 (800) 557-1401. Please do not touch or disturb oiled wildlife, for your safety and theirs.

image: Boston.com
hat tip: Balloon Juice

Escape from New York - May 15-June 19

Escape From New York
Opening Reception Saturday, May 15, 3:00 - 9:00 PM.
Shuttle buses running from Chelsea arts district to 24 1/2 Van Houten Street across from Federici Park in downtown Paterson. Click here for a detailed map.

Our heroine runs with purpose through the darkened streets of Chelsea, looking for a way out. At every corner she's met with roadblocks. Turning down 24th Street, racing past Feuer, Boone, and Gagosian, she sees a clearing. She leaps across 11th Avenue without a thought, spotting the Hudson! "If only I can make it!" Darting through the traffic of the West Side Highway, she leaps over the concrete barrier. Herein lies the pier. Out of breath, she looks up. Spotting lights in the distance, New Jersey's glacial cliffs taunt her, their lights of shimmering color bouncing off the water's edge. A sirensong like Gatsby's eyes, she walks to the end of the path. She has no vessel. "How will she get there?"

Throughout American history, the concept of Manifest Destiny has greeted us with a newfound optimism for the future of what COULD BE versus what IS. "Go west, young man" held true for generations. Escape From New York concentrates specifically on the breaking free of long-held notions and beliefs that Manhattan only can be the center of the art world. An active experiment in reverse bridge and tunnel, Escape From New York highlights Paterson, NJ-- a historic community in transition with massive venues less than a 15 minute drive from the George Washington Bridge. Ready and waiting with open arms to help reignite a cultural renaissance, the city has given us heretofore unheard of space to showcase contemporary art in a former silk factory.

Escape From New York spotlights the work of 45 top contemporary artists. Running weekends through June 19th, the exhibition includes a broad breadth of genres-- from painting, to video, photography, installation, sculpture, performance and social media-based art. Leaving behind the cramped spaces of Manhattan, for the broad horizons of New Jersey.

For additional information, please contact curator Olympia Lambert at olympia.lambert@gmail.com, or 646.642.4393.

Participating artists:

2010 Whitney Biennial selectees
*The Bruce High Quality Foundation
*Kate Gilmore

Robert Aitchison
Robert Appleton
Man Bartlett
Adam Bateman
Jason Robert Bell
Alison Blickle
Boyce Cummings
Jennifer Dalton
Vicki DaSilva
Sumner Dilworth
Debra Drexler
Murray Dwertman
Richard Eagan
Jeremy Earhart
Agnes Eperjesi
Stephan Fowlkes
Nicholas Fraser
Angela Freiberger
Micah Ganske
Alex Gingrow
Dean Goelz
Grant Haffner
Iliyan Ivanov
Kezam
Daniel Leeb
Thomas Lendvai
Julie Lohnes
Michelle Manley
Jason Metcalf
Michael Paul Miller
Laelia Mitchell
Laurel Nakadate
Mia Pearlman
Rafael Perez
Don Porcella
William Powhida
Christopher Saunders
Robert Schatz
Emil Silberman
Sean Slemon
Peter Soriano
Tamas Veszi
An Xiao

A collaboration with the Paterson Arts Council. Click here to learn more about the city and its rich history of involvement in the arts.


(Above, Julie Lohnes, Tug of War, 2009, video still)

Business and Climate Change

I realize we're all supposed to wait for the market (whether art or financial) to reveal its wisdom and future plan for us all so it's good to read the following:

This article by Clive Thompson basically makes the case that such claims in support of climate change inaction are obsolete.

...there's one area where doubt hasn't grown—and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: the world of industry and commerce.

Companies, of course, exist to make money. That's often what makes them seem so rapacious. But their primal greed also plants them inevitably in the "reality-based community." If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming. The same applies in reverse, as the folks at Beluga Shipping adroitly realized: If there are serious bucks to be made from the changing climate, then the free market is almost certainly going to jump at it.

This makes capitalism a curiously bracing mechanism for cutting through ideological haze and manufactured doubt. Politicians or pundits can distort or cherry-pick climate science any way they want to try and gain temporary influence with the public. But any serious industrialist who's facing "climate exposure"—as it's now called by money managers—cannot afford to engage in that sort of self-delusion. Spend a couple of hours wandering through the websites of various industrial associations—aluminum manufacturers, real estate agents, wineries, agribusinesses, take your pick—and you'll find straightforward statements about the grim reality of climate change that wouldn't seem out of place coming from Greenpeace. Last year Wall Street analysts issued 214 reports assessing the potential risks and opportunities that will come out of a warming world. One by McKinsey & Co. argued that climate change will shake up industries with the same force that mobile phones reshaped communications.

via: phronesisaical

more ash cloud

Some great images of the ever moving ash cloud can be found here.

Record Store Day - Today!

Growing up, my local record store was a big part of my cultural education. Be sure to support your local today. You check on participating venues here.

The original idea for Record Store Day was conceived by Chris Brown, and was founded in 2007 by Eric Levin, Michael Kurtz, Carrie Colliton, Amy Dorfman, Don Van Cleave and Brian Poehner as a celebration of the unique culture surrounding over 700 independently owned record stores in the USA, and hundreds of similar stores internationally.

This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States and in various countries across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, djs spinning records and on and on. Metallica officially kicked off Record Store Day at Rasputin Music in San Francisco on April 19, 2008 and Record Store Day is now celebrated the third Saturday every April.

Record Store Day is currently managed by Eric Levin, Michael Kurtz, Melanie Nipper, and Carrie Colliton. Folks wanting to contact Record Store Day are encouraged to email us at information@recordstoreday.com

NOTE:
A Record Store Day participating store is defined as a physical retailer whose product line consists of at least 50% music retail, whose company is not publicly traded and whose ownership is at least 70% located in the state of operation. (In other words, we’re dealing with real, live, physical, indie record stores—not online retailers or corporate behemoths).

Iceland's Ash Cloud

Here's a satellite view of the volcano eruption Iceland.

These images come from satellites which remain above a fixed point on the Earth (i.e. they are "geostationary"). The visible images record visible light from the sun reflected back to the satellite by cloud tops and land and sea surfaces. They are equivalent to a black and white photograph from space. They are better able to show low cloud than infrared images (low cloud is more reflective than the underlying land or sea surface). However, visible pictures can only be made during daylight hours.

Coast-lines and lines of latitude and longitude have been added to the images and they have been altered to polar stereographic projection.

The visible images are updated every hour. It usually takes about 20 minutes for these images to be processed and be updated on the web site. The time shown on the image is in UTC.

via: UK MET Office

New York City expands recycling

Great news for the Bad Apple.

New York City will soon move into modern times with an updated recycling program that will increase plastic recycling, place more recycling bins around the city and add drop off locations in the boroughs for household hazardous waste. The legislation has been written and that is left is for NYC Mayor Bloomberg to sign the law into effect, which is expected to take place on Earth Day, April 22nd. New Yorkers will finally be able to recycle many different types of plastic – even yogurt containers!

via: inhabitat

Art and Money Again

A few weeks back some friends and I viewed and discussed a short doc. by Robert (2009)about the decline of art and the rise of the market. (see above). I'm nut-shelling it but that is the basic premise that Hughes argues. There are plenty of broad strokes and convenient omissions but its a generally sound argument and overall fun to watch, if for no other reason than to see old footage of the "glory days" of 1960's New York.

Anyway, Peter Plagens has apparently viewed the film parallel to our little round table and has some good observations at the National Arts Journal blog.

Hughes--for those of you who've been serving on the Texas School Board for the past forty years or who write exclusively for TMZ--is the former Time magazine star who a) probably seduced more average punters (as they say in Hughes's pre-New York-home of London) into reading about serious contemporary art than anybody, ever, and b) has famously fulminated against artists, styles, impenetrable artcrit argot, and various art-world practices. One of those in the last of the latter is what he roars against in "The Mona Lisa Curse." I disagree.

The shipping of Leonardo da Vinci's painting, the Mona Lisa, to New York for exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963 was, according to Hughes, the beginning of the descent of the art world--particularly the contemporary art world--into today's big-money morass (as Hughes sees it) of collecting for profit, naked speculation, insincere or wrongheaded or diabolical reasons behind big-time collectors saying how they just love art, undeserved celebrity for mediocre-or-worse artists, and a general vulgarity and crassness among art-world players (especially those hand-holders to the rich connoisseur wannabes, art consultants). The downward slide was supposed to have worked something like this: Showing the Mona Lisa at the Met to long lines of people who could only glimpse it from a distance for a few seconds catered to unwashed pseuds who only wanted to "get it seen"; that led to a bunch of superficial, unsophisticated people flooding into an art world that consisted theretofore of a bunch of integrity-ridden bohemian artists, several dealers more interested in determining art history than making a profit, and a few enlightened, altruistic collectors; those ambitious vulgarians, who liked the parties and the "action" as much if not more than they actually liked art, started to take over; meanwhile, the advent of Pop Art and particularly Andy Warhol and his flaunted permissiveness, propelled the takeover to warp speed and near-total control.

continue reading here

Mona Lisa Curse parts 1 - 12

Authority, Beuys and the Public Image

Useful read for those trying to place Beuys. I also recommend Joseph Beuys: The Reader.

The Boss: On the Unresolved Question of Authority in Joseph Beuys’ Oeuvre and Public Image [Jan Verwoert]

An unconditional acceptance of Beuys’ interpretive authority over his own practice has caused the discourse surrounding the oeuvre to fail to touch on a central unresolved question within it: the question of authority itself. In order to understand the significance of Beuys’ work in the context of the artistic and political debates of the 1960s and 1970s, however, it is crucial to grasp the inner conflicts and unresolved contradictions that run through it, as well as the way Beuys publicly performed the role of the artist with regard to this question of authority. On the one hand he incessantly attacked traditional notions of the authority of the work, the artist, and the art professor, with his radical, liberating, and humorous opening up of the concept of art with regard to what a work, an artist, or a teacher could still be and do beyond the functions established by tradition, office, and title. On the other hand, however, it seems that in the presentation of his own interpretative discourse, Beuys regularly fell back on the very tradition of staging artistic authority with which he was trying to break.

While he abolished the common understanding of the artist’s role and demonstrated in his own practice that an artist could be not only a sculptor or painter but also a performer, politician, philosopher, historian, ethnologist, musician, and so on, he nonetheless had recourse to a traditionally established role model when projecting an image of himself to the public through the role of a visionary, spiritual authority or healer in full agreement with the modern myth of the artist as a messianic figure. While at one moment he provoked free and open debate through perplexing, if not deliberately absurd, actions that left himself open to attack as an artist, at the next moment he would bring a discussion on the meaning of these provocations back to orderly paths by seeking the seamlessly organized worldview of anthroposophy as an ideological justification for his art practice. On the one hand, he gambled on everything that traditionally secured the value, claim to validity, and hence authority of art and artists, while on the other hand he assumed the traditional patriarchal position of the messianic proclaimer of ultimate truths.

(....)

The crucial thing, however, is that Beuys did not simply produce an aura of authority but that he also exhibited the material conditions of its production in all their crudity, and exposed the contradictions inherent in this process in all their obvious absurdity. In this way, Beuys simultaneously constructed and dismantled an aura of authority. The performance constituted an event. Its eventful qualities were, however, simultaneously also reduced to a minimum—not much happened. A man lay wrapped in a blanket between two dead hares and made strange noises for hours. The scaling down of the performance to an activity that could scarcely be perceived as an activity at all, the stretching and expanding of time, the death rattles from under the blanket, and the overall gravity of the mise-en-scène in general creates a peculiar regressive atmosphere. Very much in line with the analysis of auratic authority that Werner Herzog developed in his films, Beuys here too foregrounds the peculiar regressive pull (Freudians would call it the “death drive”) inherent in the peculiar gravitas of auratic authority—a pull that equally also creates its limitation, in that its own weightiness sooner or later weights auratic authority down and brings it to the point of collapse. And indeed, in Der Chef Beuys staged the mechanisms producing this auratic authority together with the event of its slow collapse....(more)

via eflux/wood s lot

image:I Like America and America Likes Me, 1974
_{Photo Copyright Caroline Tisdall / Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York}

Mod spot

Sharon Tandy signing with the Fleur De Lys. Quite a heavy track for the time. Hold On indeed!

internet/data 'Cloud" fueled by coal

You have to appreciate the symbolism here despite the bad news.

SAN FRANCISCO - The 'cloud' of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal, Greenpeace said in a new report to be released on Tuesday. Facebook facility being built in Oregon will rely on a u utility whose main fuel is coal, while Apple Inc is building a data warehouse in a North Carolina region that relies mostly on coal, the environmental organization said in the study."The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power," said Greenpeace, which argues that Web companies should be more careful about where they build and should lobby more in Washington for clean energy.The growing mass of business data, home movies and pictures has ballooned beyond the capabilities of many corporate data centers and personal computers, spurring the creation of massive server farms that make up a "cloud," an emerging phenomenon known as cloud computing.

via:commondreams.org

National Gallery of Art in 365 days

365 days of exploring the National Gallery of Art, one artwork at a time! sounds like an incredible project and certainly a test of stamina. If you've never been to the NGA this is a virtual treat for you. Art 2010 is a blog project on Head for Art, that’ll run from January 1 to December 31, 2010.


image:Willem van Aelst :Still Life with Dead Game (1661)

Concept Horror

Citing another case of the investigation of Horror. Check out the Collapse series at Urbanomic.


Collapse Vol. IV: Concept Horror

Editorial Introduction [pdf]
Robin Mackay

Surveying a century in which experience has taught us that man is capable of inventing ever more atrocious forms of violence and horror, is it necessary to remark that much of modern thought offers little to soothe, and much to exacerbate our disquiet? Nietzsche famously observed that the psychic well-being of the human organism is predicated, minimally, upon a drastically partial perspective, and ultimately upon untruth. Human cognitive defaults continue to cry out against the insights which modern physics, cosmology, genetics, neuroscience, psychoanalysis and the rest seem to require us to integrate into our worldview. As for philosophy, it has largely replaced wonder, awe, and the drive to certainty with dread, anxiety and finitude. Moreover, despite the diverse technological wonders they have made possible, the modern sciences offer little existential respite: There is no consolation in the claim that (for instance) I am the contingent product of evolution, or a chance formation of elementary particles, or that my ‘self’ is nothing but the correlate of the activation of neurobiological phase-spaces. Yet mundane thought, whether through obstinacy or inertia, maintains its stubborn course regardless, as if oblivious to their consequences, or at most allowing them to subsist at a safely delimited, solely theoretical level.

What if, prising the more disturbing elements of modern thought loose from their comfortable framing as part of an intellectual canon, we were to become fully attentive to their most harrowing consequences? What if, impatient with a consideration of their claims solely from the point of view of their explanatory power and formal consistency, we yielded to the (perhaps ‘unphilosophical’) temptation to experiment with their potentially corrosive effects upon lived experience? If the overriding affect connected with what we ‘know’ – but still do not really know – about the universe and our place in it, would be one of horror, then, inversely, how might the existing literature of horror inform a reading of these tendencies of contemporary thought?

via:wood s lot

summing up the MTA

A great public intervention, well done.


via Luna Park/Hrag

Polaroid is back

A few years ago Polaroid went out of the instant film biz which created a vacuum within the possibilities of photography.

Lucky for us, a couple of artists bought the Polaroid plant in Holland and started The Impossible Project, an effort to resurrect that plant and create new instant film.

They have announced their first new product - a line of black-and-white film that fits in old SX-70 and Polaroid 600 cameras. Color is next.



via: The Consumerist/Balloon Juice

@

Apparently MoMA has acquired the @ symbol for its permanent collection.

from their blog:

Contemporary art, architecture, and design can take on unexpected manifestations, from digital codes to Internet addresses and sets of instructions that can be transmitted only by the artist. The process by which such unconventional works are selected and acquired for our collection can take surprising turns as well, as can the mode in which they're eventually appreciated by our audiences. While installations have for decades provided museums with interesting challenges involving acquisition, storage, reproducibility, authorship, maintenance, manufacture, context--even questions about the essence of a work of art in itself--MoMA curators have recently ventured further; a good example is the recent acquisition by the Department of Media and Performance Art of Tino Sehgal's performance Kiss.

The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that "cannot be had"--because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747's, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @--as art objects befitting MoMA's collection. The same criteria of quality, relevance, and overall excellence shared by all objects in MoMA's collection also apply to these entities.

For more on the story and history of the symbol. Read here.

via:CORE 77

The Oldest Trees on the Planet
Tia Ghose

Pando

While Pando isn’t technically the oldest individual tree, this clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah is truly ancient. The 105-acre colony is made of genetically identical trees, called stems, connected by a single root system. The “trembling giant” got its start at least 80,000 years ago, when all of our human ancestors were still living in Africa. But some estimate the woodland could be as old as 1 million years, which would mean Pando predates the earliest Homo sapiens by 800,000 years. At 6,615 tons, Pando is also the heaviest living organism on earth.

image:“Clonal Quaking Aspens
(80,000 years old, Fish Lake, UT)
Rachel Sussman

via: Wired/wood s lot

Ginger breaks

Ginger Baker in Africa

36 Shades of Prussian Blue

For all of us who enjoy the history and use of materials, the new issue of Triple Canopy has something just for us. "Thirty-six Shades of Prussian Blue" by Joshua Cohen, collects historical and scholarly observations on the origins, production and uses of Prussian Blue: the world's first artificial color.

Cohen:

Artists in the West had no reliable blue until the early eighteenth century. Ultramarine, extracted from the blue stone called lapis lazuli, was said to have once been more expensive than gold, and Renaissance artists had to negotiate with their patrons for individual drops of blue upon receiving their commissions (ultramarine means, literally, "over the sea," because most lapis was imported from Afghanistan).

Full text here.

via: Triple Canopy/CORE77

Rest in peace Mr. Chilton

I think I'll listen to Big Star all day today.

Essential reading on the Lehman Brothers scandal

Looks like the criminality is finally seeing the light. Wonder how Geithner will survive now.

Blogs Beat the Press on the Lehman Brothers Scandal
Columbia Journalism Review
Economic Crisis, The Audit -- March 15, 2010 04:20 PM
Monday, March 15, 2010
Last Update: Mon 7:38 PM EST ...Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story--one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis. I'll go ahead and say it: If you've wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you've been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times. This on the biggest financial news story of the week--and one of the biggest of the year. These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal. The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors...

Also here:

Wray: Timmy-Gate: Did Geithner Help Hide Lehman Fraud?
Naked Capitalism
Monday, March 15, 2010
By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who writes at New Economic Perspectives

hat tip: daily kos