NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 230

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 230, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 229

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 229, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Shred the Love

via c-monster:

Get Ready to Shred. And many other happenings at #CLASS.

Published by c-monster on February 26, 2010 in C-Monster, Conceptual, Galleries and New York.

Ready to go all Ollie North on your art and other meaningful pieces of paper. (Image courtesy of Steve and Jaime at Brooklyn Street Art.)

There is all kinds of goodness going down at the #CLASS show at Winkleman Gallery in the coming week and I’m hoping you join us. On Saturday (as in tomorrow), William Powhida will be leading a gallery walk/slush in Chelsea, Mira Schor will be reading from her essay On Failure and Anonymity and blogbuds Barry Hoggard and James Wagner will be talking all about collecting. On Sunday, there will be hanging out, Battleship and artsy talk in Second Life. And, next Wednesday, at 2pm, I will be assisting my partner-in-crime, El Celso’s performance of Art Shred, in which he will dispose of several dozen works of  art, meaningful love letters and one-of-a-kind family photos. If you haven’t submitted anything for shredding, no worries: walk-ins are welcome. I’ll personally be disposing of a raft of love letters from someone who I once had a kind of intense mind-meld with. Yes, it will be wrenching to see them destroyed.

Plus, a list of other #CLASS related projects and information:

• Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Class and Art.
• The #CLASS livestream channel.
• An Xiao’s Photoglam.
• Artists: Ed Winkleman will now see your art.
• Find everything you need to know about the show at #CLASS.

Plus, a small video preview for Art Shred: [Link]

There was a time we thought we were nothing without America.

Bruce High Quality Foundation We Like America and America Likes Us 2010 vehicle and educational implements, dimensions variable [detail of installation]

via James Wagner:

BHQF's "We Like America" at Whitney 2010 Biennial

I feel good about the Whitney 2010. While I like excitement, I resist hype like the plague. This Biennial has been accompanied by neither, which at the very least gives visitors a better chance to experience the individual works for themselves, and unencumbered with a theme. There is some very good, even awesome work on the three floors of the exhibition I saw at the preview (the floors not devoted to favorites from earlier years), but for me none of them had so fundamental an impact as the Bruce High Quality Foundation installation, "We Like America and America Likes Us".

In "Art Class", a 2007 piece published on Artnet, Ben Davis had described Picasso's "Guernica" as "the most successful political image of the 20th century". His argument was that isolated artistic gestures cannot resolve social contradictions "without any social movement backing them up to give them force", continuing:

This does not mean that art or artists cannot play any political role; it is just that some model besides the middle-class one of "my art is my activism" is necessary, one based on concrete solidarity and practical action. Picasso’s Guernica is the most successful political image of the 20th century. Guernica, in fact, embodies the fact that art’s political value is determined in its relation with mass struggle, not in its individual content -- the imagery of the painting, moving as it is, is completely drawn from a vocabulary of forms Picasso had already developed in previous work. Yet, during the Spanish Civil War, after its appearance at the Spanish Republic’s booth at the 1937 World’s Fair, Guernica was literally removed from its stretchers, rolled up and toured internationally to win support for the Republican cause. In England, visitors brought boots to send to the front.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation seems to be taking a different route with its own institutional, social and political critique, probably one more suited to our own politically-lethargic times. Bruce's confrontations with our own tropes have been found just about everywhere: on our streets, our waters, our public plazas, even inside the galleries and expositions of the system they speak to.

I have to confess to a penchant for political art, and to a number of years spent in sort of a groupie relationship to this arts collective, and yet "We Like America and America Likes Us" is one of the most affecting works, in any genre, I've ever encountered. Where do we bring our allegorical boots?

We are all wounded, wrapped in felt. Are we inside an ambulance or a hearse? What is to be done?
Like much of what Bruce does, it's not conventionally "beautiful" - except as truth is beauty, and yet the incredibly elegiac recorded remembrance of "America" which accompanies the fast video montage of heterogeneous clips projected onto the tall Cadillac windshield is riveting, and profoundly moving.

I don't know the length of the loop (and there was no indication on the museum's wall text); but for all I know it could be as long as the melancholy story it tells.

Especially for those who will not be able to visit the Whitney, I have some excerpts. The text, recited by a luscious, soothing female voice, begins:

We like America. And America likes us. But somehow, something keeps us from getting it together. We come to America. We leave America. We sing songs and celebrate the happenstance of our first meeting – a memory reprised often enough that now we celebrate the occasions of our remembrance more often than their first cause.

And a little later I listened as the gender pronouns slithered over each other in ecstasy, and in sorrow:

We wished we could have fallen in love with America. She was beautiful, angelic even, but it never made sense. Even rolling around on the wall-to-wall of her parents’ living room with her hair in our teeth, even when our nails trenched the sweat down his back, and meeting his parents, America stayed simple somehow. He stayed an acquaintance, despite everything we shared. Just a friend. We could share anything and it would never go further than that.

No one really knows how love begins. A look on his face one time after we’d made love – a text message too soon after the last one. When did we become a thing to hold on to rather than just something to hold? We didn’t know America was in love with us until it was too late. Maybe we couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. America fell in love with the idea of us, with some fantasy of us, some fantasy of what America and us together would be, before we had a chance to tell him it could never work, we weren’t ready for a relationship, we weren’t comfortable being needed, we didn’t have the resources to be America’s dream.

It wasn’t easy letting America down. As we stuttered through our rehearsed speech we watched the change on her face. We could see the zoom lens of her attention clock away. We could feel ourselves receding back into the blur of the general population.

The last lines are:

There was a time we thought we were nothing without America. When she left, we realized all the excuses we’d been making. All the problems we’d been trying not to address. We drunk dialed our memory of America just to hear what we were thinking. We worked late and we told ourselves we had to, that the work came first, that this was an important time in our lives and that love could wait. Just wait a little longer and we’d fix everything, we’d say. Solving the America problem, our lack of attention, our disinterest in sex, our never being home, our thinking of her as a problem – it would have to wait.

Sharon Butler: The Many Paintings of the Whitney Biennial

"Roland Flexner expands the definition of drawing by creating intricately detailed works of ink on paper using only his breath, chance, and gravity as tools."

via Two Coats of Paint:

Friday, February 26, 2010

A 2010 Whitney Biennial biopsy

In their opening remarks on Tuesday, the 2010 Whitney Biennial curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari confessed that they approached the selection process (gasp) open-mindedly, without a preconceived theme. Fortunately, the exhibition itself faithfully reflects their intent, presenting a resonant sampling of contemporary art practice. That is not to say that the show selection is thematically unfocused or ungrounded. To the contrary, much of the work manifests a rediscovered attention to physicality in various ways: in its preoccupation with human vulnerability, in its juxtaposition of figuration and geometry, or simply in its palpable materiality. Notable examples include “H.M. 2009,” Kerry Tribe's double film projection about an epilepsy patient who lost his short-term memory in experimental brain surgery and Nina Berman’s arresting images of former Marine sergeant Ty Ziege, who was severely disfigured in a suicide bombing in Iraq; R.H. Quaytman’s series  “Distracting Distance,” which riffs on the physical act of perception; and Susan Frecon’s huge minimalist paintings, which embrace the labor intensity of making an art object that is intended to last.

Other work has a more tangential but still evident connection to the body. A case in point: the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s projection of a sardonic video on American history onto the windshield of an old hearse. The overarching emphasis on the body, combined with provocative content, signals an optimistic new direction that reframes two enduringly important aspects of contemporary art: the senses and the visual, as opposed to merely the cerebral; and collective optimism, as distinct from unbounded egos.

Unlike the last Biennial, which offered very few canvases, 2010 features paintings around every corner. In line with the broader theme of physicality, the inclusion of so much painting signals the importance of sustained physical engagement and a renewed interest in the lifespan of the art object. Here are images from each of the eighteen painters included in 2010--an impressive, thoughtfully curated  exhibition.

[continue...]

The Brucennial - harder, better, stronger?

Photo: Mike Appleton for The New York Times. 
Alli Miller, left, putting up the finishing touches of her installation at the democratically arranged Brucennial 2010.

via nytimes:

Art Review | Brucennial 2010

Who Needs the Whitney? They Have Their Own Show

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: February 25, 2010

If the 2010 Whitney Biennial is too lean, clean and demure for your taste, you might try an alternative, the Brucennial in SoHo, which features 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 disciplines, and is, for good measure, the most important survey of contemporary art in the world. Ever.

Well, that’s what the news release says. And there really is a ton of art shoehorned into the Brucennial’s 5,000-square-foot street-level quarters on West Broadway. The show is the brainchild of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, a five-artist collective focused on reshaping the art world as we know it by placing some of its more conspicuous functions, like education and the organizing of exhibitions, into artists’ hands.

Making such change doesn’t require, as you once assumed it did, staying clear of the art mainstream. Just the opposite: the collective is happy to show in commercial galleries, and it contributes a major piece to this year’s Whitney Biennial. Nowadays change means doing what the mainstream does, but doing it differently.

The Brucennial, in its third year and at its first Manhattan site, is by this point well established, but it claims no permanent home. (The SoHo space, which extends over two floors, is on short-term loan from an art collector and real estate titan, Aby Rosen.) And in almost every way the show remains, by design, a pick-up affair.

If the selection process for the Whitney Biennial is super-stringent, getting into the Brucennial is a breeze. To be sure, there is an invitation list: the collective asks some favorite artists, as does the young dealer Vito Schnabel, son of Julian, who is the official handler of this year’s edition. Mostly, though, word just gets out, and people turn up with their work.

The democratic spirit is also reflected in the messy, larky, charged-up look of the show. The installation feels less organized than artfully disorganized. The walls are hung salon-style and filled top to bottom. I was there during the helter-skelter set-up, and saw how it worked. If a new painting arrived, and it was big, a bunch of small ones already up got rearranged, no muss, no fuss. But neither size nor quality guaranteed advantageous positioning. Nor, for the most part, did celebrity, of which there are many representatives in this supposedly nonestablishment (if not anti-establishment) show.

Among celebrated artists with work on the walls, I noted David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Ron Gorchov, George Condo, Donald Baechler, James Nares, and, unsurprisingly, Julian Schnabel. That they were interspersed with younger colleagues was nice, but that they were there at all was a surprise. Purely in terms of star power, the Brucennial puts the 2010 Whitney show in the shade, making its roster look like a list of strivers still outside the blue-chip loop.

So where does the Bruce High Quality Foundation stand in relation to that loop? That may be the big Brucennial question. The word these days is that it’s impossible for artists to take an effective critical position outside the socioeconomic system called the art world. The system is all-encompassing. It absorbs all resistance. The very notion of alternative anything is a romantic illusion.

This means that if your defining goal is to change that system — open it up, tangle its wiring, expose its codes — you have to work from within: but really work, take what you find and seriously do something to it to make it your own. On paper, the 2010 Brucennial, which is subtitled “Miseducation,” seemed poised to do that, but it doesn’t. It’s fun, it’s cool, it has some good stuff, but it felt, at least in preview, like the average Bring-Your-Own-Art bash crossed with a Whitney Biennial of, say, 25 years ago.

Still, these Bruce High Quality people are smart. Their hearts and brains are in the right place. I’m counting on them to rethink (again) the whole positioning thing and do the 2011 Brucennial in — to quote the show’s Web site (www.brucennial.com) — a harder, better, stronger way. No joke.

“The Brucennial 2010: Miseducation” runs through April 4 at 350 West Broadway, between Broome and Grand Streets, SoHo, with projects also on view at Recess at 41 Grand Street.

Joy Garnett: China Three Gorges Project opens March 3, Roger Williams University School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation

River (5). 2008. oil/canvas. 26 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York

China Three Gorges Project
A cycle of paintings and works on paper by Joy Garnett

March 3 – 31, 2010

Roger Williams University
School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation [SAAHP]
One Old Ferry Road, Bristol, RI 02809

Artist's lecture: Wednesday, March 3, 6pm
The DF PRAY FOUNDATION LECTURE THEATER (ARCH 132)
7pm: Reception SAAHP Exhibition Gallery [Link]

The paintings and drawings presented in the exhibition, ‘China Three Gorges Project,’ are an artist’s response to The “China Yangtze Three Gorges Project,” the monumental and controversial public works currently under construction in China’s Yangtze River valley. The largest hydropower-complex in the world, the Three Gorges Dam has taken several decades to build, engendering the razing of villages, the submersion of factories and toxic waste dumps, the flooding of arable lands, and the displacement of over one million inhabitants. Evacuation mismanagement and ballooning construction costs have raised the specter of government corruption. In recent years, as much of the industrialized world has increasingly turned toward new forms of renewable energy that foster sustainability and environmental stewardship, and even as China claims leadership in this nascent global green movement, the Three Gorges Dam continues to broadcast signals of conflicted priorities. All told, construction of the dam has come to represent China's worst environmental nightmare and a monument to obsolete ambitions.

Close to 100 official public relations photographs that document the transformation of the site can be found on the Three Gorges Development Corporation website: http://www.ctgpc.com. Starting with images of the river valley in its pristine state and moving through the various stages of construction, these photographs attempt to signal the project’s inevitability by offering us a semblance of continuity, positioning the deconstruction of the landscape and construction of the dam against the backdrop of the ancient Chinese landscape. But rather than evoke the centuries-old tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the photographs veer towards soft-focus calendar art kitsch, Socialist Realist-inflected construction sites, factory interiors, and sci-fi laboratories, unwittingly evoking China’s part in the mass production of cheap consumer goods and dated notions of ‘futurist’ techno-utopias. 

As a visual response to this cycle of propaganda, the works in the exhibition chart the methodical evisceration of the river valley, rendering the image of the landscape, once immutable, as a fragile substrate to be broken up violently in a triumph of engineering. Through these two linked bodies of work, paintings and drawings, this embattled landscape is apprehended through gestural interpretations of the public relations photographs. The paintings, numbering thirteen altogether, utilize the Western medium of oil on canvas to reinvent the candy-colored source images as expressionist tableaux, while the works on paper, numbering sixty-three in total, exhaustively track the deconstruction of the landscape, eventually verging on complete abstraction.


Exhibition Checklist:
Paintings: oil on canvas. Drawings: Sumi ink on paper. All works completed 2008-2009.

Full series:

Paintings

Drawings

Installation shots to come.

River (5). 2008. oil/canvas. 26 x 36 inches. Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York

China Three Gorges Project
A cycle of paintings and works on paper by Joy Garnett

March 3 – 31, 2010

Roger Williams University
School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation [SAAHP]
One Old Ferry Road, Bristol, RI 02809

Artist's lecture: Wednesday, March 3, 6pm
The DF PRAY FOUNDATION LECTURE THEATER (ARCH 132)
7pm: Reception SAAHP Exhibition Gallery [Link]

The paintings and drawings presented in the exhibition, ‘China Three Gorges Project,’ are an artist’s response to The “China Yangtze Three Gorges Project,” the monumental and controversial public works currently under construction in China’s Yangtze River valley. The largest hydropower-complex in the world, the Three Gorges Dam has taken several decades to build, engendering the razing of villages, the submersion of factories and toxic waste dumps, the flooding of arable lands, and the displacement of over one million inhabitants. Evacuation mismanagement and ballooning construction costs have raised the specter of government corruption. In recent years, as much of the industrialized world has increasingly turned toward new forms of renewable energy that foster sustainability and environmental stewardship, and even as China claims leadership in this nascent global green movement, the Three Gorges Dam continues to broadcast signals of conflicted priorities. All told, construction of the dam has come to represent China's worst environmental nightmare and a monument to obsolete ambitions.

Close to 100 official public relations photographs that document the transformation of the site can be found on the Three Gorges Development Corporation website: http://www.ctgpc.com. Starting with images of the river valley in its pristine state and moving through the various stages of construction, these photographs attempt to signal the project’s inevitability by offering us a semblance of continuity, positioning the deconstruction of the landscape and construction of the dam against the backdrop of the ancient Chinese landscape. But rather than evoke the centuries-old tradition of Chinese landscape painting, the photographs veer towards soft-focus calendar art kitsch, Socialist Realist-inflected construction sites, factory interiors, and sci-fi laboratories, unwittingly evoking China’s part in the mass production of cheap consumer goods and dated notions of ‘futurist’ techno-utopias. 

As a visual response to this cycle of propaganda, the works in the exhibition chart the methodical evisceration of the river valley, rendering the image of the landscape, once immutable, as a fragile substrate to be broken up violently in a triumph of engineering. Through these two linked bodies of work, paintings and drawings, this embattled landscape is apprehended through gestural interpretations of the public relations photographs. The paintings, numbering thirteen altogether, utilize the Western medium of oil on canvas to reinvent the candy-colored source images as expressionist tableaux, while the works on paper, numbering sixty-three in total, exhaustively track the deconstruction of the landscape, eventually verging on complete abstraction.


Exhibition Checklist:
Paintings: oil on canvas. Drawings: Sumi ink on paper. All works completed 2008-2009.

Full series:

Paintings

Drawings

Installation shots to come.