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