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]
Category: art
WPS1: Northern Italian Exposure
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]
WPS1: Northern Italian Exposure
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]
Don’t Book That Spiral Jetty Trip Just Yet
Recent record flooding in Utah has raised the water level (elevation, that is) of the Great Salt Lake to a five-year record high of 4,198 feet, enough to submerge the Spiral Jetty and scuttle any art world latecomer’s summer pilgrimage plans.
With mountain runoff, the lake is expected to keep rising through July.
Meanwhile, the rest of the artworld is in Venice, which is also sinking. Coincidence? I wonder.
Floods pump life back into lake [sltrib, thanks, dad]
Don’t Book That Spiral Jetty Trip Just Yet
Recent record flooding in Utah has raised the water level (elevation, that is) of the Great Salt Lake to a five-year record high of 4,198 feet, enough to submerge the Spiral Jetty and scuttle any art world latecomer’s summer pilgrimage plans.
With mountain runoff, the lake is expected to keep rising through July.
Meanwhile, the rest of the artworld is in Venice, which is also sinking. Coincidence? I wonder.
Floods pump life back into lake [sltrib, thanks, dad]
Seeing Cy Twombly Naked
Actually, when I saw Cy Twombly, he wasn’t naked, and neither was I. I’d gone to Houston for work, right after graduating from college, and I had an extra day, so I set out to find this Rothko Chapel I’d heard about. No luck, or maybe it’s that low-slung grey clapboard building. With the blackboard Twombly in the lobby. Holy moley, what is this place?
It was, of course, the Menil Collection, and while I was standing in front of one of my favorite paintings, a tall, elderly man came around the corner from behind it and stood there, too. I looked at him, then at the painting, then back. “Excuse me, are you Cy Twombly?” “Yes I am.” I babbled something—I was obviously clueless but well-meaning–and he was gracious, then he left.
I later learned he had come to do an interview for the exhibition catalogue of “Rauschenberg: The Early 1950’s,” a tremendous show which was organized by Walter Hopps at the Menil, and which traveled to the Guggenheim. (Remember when the Guggenheim used to have good shows?)
I was reminded of this incident by the article in the Times about the panoply of Twombly shows in Houston at the moment. The artist told of a Menil guard who came upon a French woman standing naked and transfixed in front of a large Twombly canvas.
A Celebratory Splash for an Enigmatic Figure [nyt]
Buy Hopps’s 1991 Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s catalogue for –sheesh, $255?? [it’s that and more–up to $400 on abebooks]
On Land Marks
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]
Elmgreen + Dragset + Me: The Not-Fit-To-Print Interview
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 Gates, for the sake of argument, fine: $20 million
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.
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
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
Olafur Eliasson: West of Rome, East of LA
Who’s the must-have light installation artist in Los Angeles these days? If you answered, “James Turrell,” pack up your Uggs and get out. In Pasadena this week, Olafur Eliasson debuted a modernist hill houseful of installations and interventions, organized by his Italian gallerist, Emi Fontana.
Check out pictures and descriptions at arcspace, or pour yourself a glass of whine at artforum diary, which features largely content-free Olafur soundbites and bitching about the opening’s lack of valet parking. Or go yourself, until May.
Olafur Eliasson: Meant to be lived in [arcspace.com]
LA Residential [artforum diary]
ACFWLF
The soft, supple opening to Charlie Finch’s latest column on Artnet:
We first met Laurel Nakadate in 2001, right after she received her MFA from Yale. While in New Haven, Laurel lived in a single-room occupancy apartment house full of lonely, homely, aging single men whom she proceeded to bait and cocktease mercilessly in her video work.
By “we,” I think he means “me and my lonely, homely, single hand.”
Critic, art world svengali, and breast man Charlie Finch sticks his own hand into “perky, dewy” video artist Laurel Nakadate’s career, apparently without realizing that he’s already soaking in it.
If someday she comes out and says her work is about a young artist who graduates from Gregory Crewdson’s Yale and tries to get ahead in the art world, I will die laughing. And give her the Turner Prize.
Nakadate’s show is up at the otherwise redoubtable Danziger Projects through May 14.
Danger is Her Game [charlie finch on artnet]
To Do: White Columns Benefit Auction, 4/16
There’s a lot of goodlooking work that’s been donated to White Columns’ 2005 benefit auction: nice pieces by Verne Dawson, Peter Doig, Rachel Harrison, a pointless-but-nice T-shirt by Payne/Relph, a wheel-thrown ceramic pushpin by Mungo Thompson.
Silent and online bidding is on right now, and some lots will end with a live auction on the night of the 16th.
White Columns 2005 benefit auction
That Che Image And The Guy Who Made It
For an exhibition in Dublin, Dutch artist Aleksandra Mir interviews Jim Fitzpatrick, the Irish artist who created the stencil-like poster of Che Guevara. It’s a fascinating story of copyright, revolution, and appropriation, told by someone who’s been largely invisible, even though he made one of the most widely known–and widely copied–images of the last 50 years.
Some interesting tidbits:
– Fitzpatrick originally made 1,000 two-color posters, with the stars hand-colored yellow.
– Several hand-printed early variations–and one painting–made for an exhibition went missing somewhere in Eastern Europe.
– Che was Irish. Irish Argentinean.
– After cutting off negotiations with Fitzpatrick, A US company, Fashion Victim, bought the rights to the underlying picture from the photographer’s heirs and now enforces a trademark–while producing Che clothing in Honduran sweatshops.
– There was an Amsterdam rebel group called ‘The Provos.’
Not everything is always Black or White. [aleksandramir.info]
Jim Fitzpatrick’s website