Category: art

In the NYT, Edward Lewine talks to some collectors of video- and projection-based art to find out what it’s like to actually live with work that demands both attention and extra hardware.
I know collectors who have flatscreens propped all around the house and long shelvesful of viewing copies of their work; whatever they have playing when you visit, you still read and assess the spines of their VHS’s the way you would their book collection.
And although we have some TV’s that we’ve archived because the artist considers them integral, sculptural elements of the piece, there are other multi-channel pieces where we’ve gotten rid of all but one or two flatscreens (which now double as our TV’s) until we need to exhibit it again as per the artist’s original schematics.
But then there’s the projected piece, where I’ve duped 100 slides off of the dupe of the master that the artists provided [the slides burn out after a few weeks of constant projection]. And then I still have to scour ebay for good old slide projectors, because they sure don’t make’em like they used to.
PS what’s up with the Kramlich’s built-for-video Herzog & deMeuron house in Napa? Haven’t heard much of that lately.
Art That Has to Sleep In The Garage [nyt]
Watch an excerpt of Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt’s 1969 film, Swamp, which gets mentioned in the piece. [robertsmithson.com]

One of my top picks of 2004 for film/video art, Sleepwalkers, by the British collective Inventory, will be included in the first ever US installation of their work at White Columns. It opens Friday 17 June and runs through 23 July.
Sleepwalkers was filmed at an “Americana” festival in the UK, where Britons gather to celebrate such high-minded touchstones of American culture as monster trucks, RV’s, and big rig tractor trailers with huge, pimped out sleeper cabs in the back. If White Columns’ a-rockin’, don’t bother knockin’, just go on in.
Other People’s Projects: Inventory [WhiteColumns]
Previously: My 2004 Video Art Top Ten Seven

Why, copyright, for one thing. And a quaint, lingering fixation on outmoded technology for another.
Kim’s St Mark’s location got busted by the NYPD, the Feds–“everybody was here,” says one nonbusted employee–the other day, who confiscated all the computers and arrested four employees.
Although the store has been a speakeasy-type outlet for bootleg copies of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and Todd Haynes’ Barbie doll classic, Superstar!: The Karen Carpenter Story, neither Barbara Gladstone nor Christine Vachon–as intimidating as they are–was behind the raid.
No, it’s an even scarier outfit–yes, it’s possible–the RIAA, who patted the NYPD on the head in a statement given to MTV. Apparently the problem was the store’s brisk mixtapes business, which, according to the RIAA, were largely “urban in nature.”
And speaking of urban in nature [sweet segue, right?], artist Janet Cardiff’s audio/photo walking tour of Central Park, which was commissioned last year by the Public Art Fund, was so popular they’re bringing it back again this summer. The piece, titled “Her Long Black Hair,” can be experienced by picking up a CD player, CD, and stack of photos at a kiosk on Central Park South, Thursdays through Sundays until Sept. 11, only between 10 and 3:30.
I guess we should be only slightly thankful the original equipment–a Victrola in a wheelbarrrow and a watercolor set–didn’t work out. It’s nice to know that Cardiff’s work is so popular, but it’s too bad there’s no easier way to distribute a 45-minute piece of audio and a handful of images to large numbers of people…a Magical Media Mover– call it the MMM for short–and some kind of player for it, a 3MP… Oh, I give up. Never happen.
Police Raid Video Store in East Village in Piracy Case [nyt]
Police Seize 50 Cent, Jay-Z Mixtapes In Raid On NYC Store [mtv, 50 Cent? You mean the guy who launched his career via mixtapes? Someone’s hatin’ the game here.]
Read info from 2004 about “Her Long Black Hair,” by Janet Cardiff,, which is being restaged June 16-Sept. 12 [publicartfund.org]

Good Morning, Cicely! Whether that’s Cicely Brown or Cicely, Alaska, only time will tell. WPS1 is broadcasting live from a party barge near the Arsenale, site of the Venice Biennale.
The web audio programs will should be up within a couple of hours days, max, of their actual creation, so if you’re the other [*cough*] art world groupie not in Venice at the moment , you can still follow along online someday.
But who cares what you think if you’re not in Venice, anyway? And if you are, you won’t care, because you’ll be gettin’ your WPS1 on over the air, via one of the 10,000 free WPS1 fixed-frequency radios being distributed to the masses of VIP’s. (And you’ve probably expended too much energy trying to get it upgraded for one of the 5,000 VVIP radios, which, although they look less cool, still, in an irrational way you can never adequately explain to your parents over Thanksgiving dinner in that leafy suburb you fled with disdain, signal your ascendance into the top third of your class, 67th percentile, which if you think about it, is barely passing. Hope they’re grading the art world on a curve.)
Anyway, by pumping out a low-power FM signal on the ground [sic] in Venice, WPS1 is making a play to become the local radio station for the art world’s small town. Entertain yourself with the notions of artmacher flashmobs and storming the Arsenale if you like, but it suddenly reminds me of Chris, the DJ on Northern Exposure, who later packed it all in, changed his name to Aiden, moved to the city, and hooked up with a neurotic sex columnist.

WPS1 Live Venice Broadcast Schedule [wps1.org, most of Monday’s shows are up. must be one helluva party on that barge]

Good Morning, Cicely! Whether that’s Cicely Brown or Cicely, Alaska, only time will tell. WPS1 is broadcasting live from a party barge near the Arsenale, site of the Venice Biennale.
The web audio programs will should be up within a couple of hours days, max, of their actual creation, so if you’re the other [*cough*] art world groupie not in Venice at the moment , you can still follow along online someday.
But who cares what you think if you’re not in Venice, anyway? And if you are, you won’t care, because you’ll be gettin’ your WPS1 on over the air, via one of the 10,000 free WPS1 fixed-frequency radios being distributed to the masses of VIP’s. (And you’ve probably expended too much energy trying to get it upgraded for one of the 5,000 VVIP radios, which, although they look less cool, still, in an irrational way you can never adequately explain to your parents over Thanksgiving dinner in that leafy suburb you fled with disdain, signal your ascendance into the top third of your class, 67th percentile, which if you think about it, is barely passing. Hope they’re grading the art world on a curve.)
Anyway, by pumping out a low-power FM signal on the ground [sic] in Venice, WPS1 is making a play to become the local radio station for the art world’s small town. Entertain yourself with the notions of artmacher flashmobs and storming the Arsenale if you like, but it suddenly reminds me of Chris, the DJ on Northern Exposure, who later packed it all in, changed his name to Aiden, moved to the city, and hooked up with a neurotic sex columnist.

WPS1 Live Venice Broadcast Schedule [wps1.org, most of Monday’s shows are up. must be one helluva party on that barge]

The late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres is well-known for appropriating minimalism–the Establishment for his generation–and for imbuing that movement’s self-consciously impersonalized, content-free, manufactured forms with deeply resonant emotional, biographical, and political metaphor.
So it is again with the next generation, I thought, when I saw Land Marks (foot prints), photographs by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.
Gonzalez-Torres made several works, including a billboard and a series of black & white photographs, of sand churned over with footprints. They’re legible but barely, approaching a very painterly monochromatic abstraction. They speak of human presence, multiple people, and activity, but they’re only sentimental in their impermanence.

Without knowing their intentions, I don’t want to draw any hard and fast parallels, but Allora and Calzadilla seem to be referencing these works in Land Marks. They stake a claim to the iconic forms of a looming, preceding giant, and ratchet up the work’s content, from the personal and identity themes of the 80’s and 90’s to larger, more explicity political activism.
In Land Marks, the artists put political messages on the soles of shoes, which were then worn by protestors infiltrating the beaches of Vieques while the US Navy was conducting weapons tests. When protestors tripped the Navy’s sensors, the tests would have to be halted; eventually the military agreed to abandon testing and its base on Vieques altogether. These photographs are documentation of repeated messages being directed specifically at the military security guards on the island; they’re a form of psychological counter-operations meant to disrupt or unsettle the larger, vastly more powerful opponent. And on top of that, they’re pretty badass.
Land Marks are on exhibit in a group show of the same name at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris through 18 June. Allora & Calzadilla also have work in the Venice Biennale opening next month.
“Land Marks” [crousel.com]
Insurgent Inquiry: The art of Allora & Calzadilla [adbusters.org]
Paul Schmelzer also interviewed A&C on his weblog [eyeteeth.org]

Right after their installation, End Station, opened at the Bohen Foundation (415 West 13th Street, Tu-Sa 12-5), I did a back and forth email interview with Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset for the NY Times. The paper ended up reviewing the installation and not using this piece [I’ll get you, Roberta Smith! And your little– oh, never mind.], so here it is in its entirety, cleaned it up a bit, but with all my essay questions in their full, self-important glory.

Continue reading “Elmgreen + Dragset + Me: The Not-Fit-To-Print Interview”

the 2+ month gap between posts on banker/nude male swimer Dana Vachon’s blog/: $650,000
Vachon’s last post, an interview with Christo & Jeanne-Claude: priceless.

After a couple of months of interviews and trying to wrap my head around the question of why there were no expensive women artists, I read Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1972 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” It was tremendously prescient and helpful; many of the explanations people had given me for why women’s art wasn’t, in fact, undervalued–or why it shouldn’t be selling for more–were identical to the rationales Nochlin laid out–and then demolished–thirty years ago.
When I spoke with Prof. Nochlin, she was much more optimistic, though; from where she sees it, in the art history world–she’s a professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and is co-curating an upcoming show of feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum with Maura Reilly–things have improved dramatically since she wrote “WHTBNGWA?” The number women making and showing art have increased; curators and critics and historians are paying them equal (or requisite) attention; and she never hears her current crops of students qualify a work based on the artist’s gender, now it’s really about the work.
So you’ve come a long way, baby, I guess.
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin