NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Artists opposing the PROTECT-IP / SOPA Act

Artists opposing the PROTECT-IP / SOPA Act [petition link at bottom]

Congress needs to hear from Artists!

The PROTECT-IP act would censor the net, in the name of protecting "creativity" (read: copyright). The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites-- they just have to convince a judge that the site is "dedicated to copyright infringement."

The law could definitely pass, but it's close.

• * Artists (musicians, actors, writers, media-makers, etc) need to speak out against the law. Your statement is powerful because the corporate music and film lobbies push these laws in your name.
• * The copyright lobby say that this bill is written in your name to protect "creativity". If you're an artist that believes the government and corporations should not have the power to censor the internet in your name, you need to sign.

GO to the PETITION....

TO members of the United States Congress

We, the undersigned artists, have all been empowered by the Internet. Today, artists can reach large audiences and make a living because the Internet and digital tools have democratized the means to create, distribute, and promote our work.

We write to you today because we are concerned with S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Copyright law exists to promote the arts, but the new penalties in PIPA could be used against the new social media channels we depend on to make a living, and endanger freedom of expression.

PIPA creates new penalties against sites dedicated to infringing activity, but we worry it will be abused to attack legitimate sites we rely on. Many trailblazing social media websites could look like piracy havens to judges unfamiliar with the Internet. In the past, music and film companies have attacked many new technologies - like the VCR and MP3 player - claiming that they were tools for piracy. Recently, these same companies have sued video hosting platforms like Veoh and YouTube.

We use online video sites, file hosts like Dropbox and Mediafire, and online music communities like Soundcloud to host our work, collaborate with others, and build a community. We fund our work with services like Kickstarter and Flattr. We publish our work on sites like Tumblr, Wordpress, and Blogger. Any one of these services could be sued under PIPA.

SOPA: Where We're At (via @Techdirt)

Via Techdirt, 1/12/2012:

SOPA/PIPA: How Far We've Come; How Far We Need To Go

from the not-over-yet dept

On October 26th, I was flying from San Francisco to Washington DC to meet with folks in the House of Representatives to explain why they should be careful about making the same mistakes as the Senate with its anti-piracy bill, PROTECT IP (PIPA). We had been assured by Rep. Bob Goodlatte that Congress had heard the myriad complaints about PIPA and that the House version would take them into account. Instead, as the plane I was on flew over the Rocky Mountains, I started getting a flood of emails from people sending me the first release of the House's version of the bill, now known as SOPA (originally, the E-PARASITE bill, a name they dropped immediately when everyone started mocking it). Thanks to the wonderful innovation of WiFi-in-the-sky, I was able to sit in my cramped seat, read the bill, and write up my horrified post explaining just how much worse SOPA was than PIPA (an already disastrous bill).

The next day, October 27th, a small group of entrepreneurs, investors, innovators and creators spent the day meeting with members of Congress to express our concerns about the bill (which we'd just seen the afternoon before), as well as the whole approach to the crafting of both bills. The one thing we heard over and over again that day: "well this is the first time we've heard anything about this from the internet community."

I think it's safe to say that's no longer the case.

As I type this, I'm taking that same flight, preparing for my debate tomorrow over these bills against an MPAA representative and a US Chamber of Commerce representative, I'm sitting in that same cramped seat (actually, I think I'm on the opposite side of the plane), and thinking just how far we've come in just three and a half months.

Make no mistake: when the Senate introduced PIPA in May, it was widely assumed that this bill, and any companion bill would sail through Congress easily. Sure, some "tech-friendly" officials may express some concerns, but, as one lobbyist told me directly, "no one takes you people seriously anyway." It was this kind of hubris that we saw throughout the year with these bills. We were told repeatedly to shut up and take it, because the bills were going to pass, Obama would sign them, and piracy would magically disappear.

Instead, a funny thing happened on the way to the death of the internet: the internet woke up. While folks online may be political, it's not often that they truly get activated over internet-related issues. But in an era of bottom-up movements facilitated online, the timing was absolutely right for the massive groundswell of support from all corners of the internet to suddenly speak out in near unison to say of these bills: DO NOT WANT.

Still more to do:

At this point, it's impossible to deny that we, as a group, have had an impact. Contrary to the claims of some of the bill's supporters, we showed that this isn't just a "Google" issue. This is an internet issue. And we care about the internet and we care about innovation, and we're not going to take it lightly when elected officials, who admit they don't understand the technology, come along to say they're going to mess with it, just because their biggest campaign donors don't want to adapt to these wonderful new innovations.

But, not everyone in Congress has an understanding of what's happening online. Even with Reps. and Senators backing away from the bills, and asking leadership to slow things down... and even with Rep. Smith and Senator Leahy trying to "delay" the DNS implementation in order to get the bills passed... some in Congress still think that the outcry is minor or limited or that it's all Google.

That's why Harry Reid intends to move forward with the bill, pretending that the complaints only come from Google and Facebook... and that they're minor and easily fixed with a couple of amendments. I believe he's misjudged the internet, just as many others in Congress have misjudged the internet over the last few months. The people speaking out are not just "Google and Facebook," and they're not just speaking out for the hell of it. They're seriously pissed off at Congress for even thinking of going down this path in the first place, and simply killing the bills is unlikely to get the people online back on their side.

But there's a bigger point in the "more to do" section of this post. This isn't about one bill. This isn't about one issue. This is about an entire process. This is about the public -- not the big corporations -- finally saying "enough is enough" and making Congress recognize that crony capitalism, where subsidies and protectionism are doled out willy nilly to favorite campaign contributors, is not acceptable to the people they're supposed to represent.

This is about recognizing that the internet and the massive amount new innovation and services -- and the worldwide ability to communicate with others -- is a game changing innovation for everyone. And we're going to work damn hard to make sure that it remains open and free.

But, to do that right, this is going to take much more than stopping one bill. This is going to take prolonged effort. This is going to take an ongoing effort to make it clear that no elected official can ever again feel comfortable bragging that they don't understand the internet, as they seek to regulate it. This is about making it 100% crystal clear to those who seek to clamp down on the true engine of free expression -- the internet -- that we, the people, aren't going to be fooled with bogus claims and bogus stats in an effort to limit this wonderful platform.

This isn't over yet -- not by a long shot. But just look at how far we've come in just three and a half months, and think what we'll do in the next few months -- and years -- ahead. These bills tried to kill the "internet as we know it." But, in some ways, these bills helped birth a new kind of internet: one that doesn't let Congress screw it up without taking action.

Stop SOPA Infographic

Via:

http://sopacountdown.com/

For Immediate Release: Dana Bell / Alasdair Duncan / Don Voisine @ THEODORE:Art opens 1/14

Dana Bell / Alasdair Duncan / Don Voisine

14 January – 3 March 2012

Opening reception: Saturday, January 14, 2012: 6-8pm

@

Theodore:Art

http://www.theodoreart.com

56 Bogart St. Brooklyn - L train to Morgan stop  

MAP --> http://tinyurl.com/TheodoreArt

 

The unity of the thing remains mysterious as long as one considers its different qualities as so much data belonging to worlds entirely distinct from sight, from smell, from touch, etc.
~ merleau ponty.


Theodore:Art is pleased to present the first exhibition in our new home in Bushwick: work by Dana Bell, Alasdair Duncan, and Don Voisine.

These three artists, while creating very different work, all touch on the possibilities of communicating ideas in a space outside of language. The familiarity of signifiers – form and gesture – is offered without the reliable connection of a signified or finite meaning. A viewer is confronted with evasive focus: unspoken directions, mute expressions, opaque progressions. The potential “unity of the thing” is proffered as a semblance of infinite suggestion.

Armed with a formalist’s vocabulary, an eye for the nuances of gesture, and a tendency towards dark, absurdist humor, Dana Bell has delved into cinema’s rich history and emerged with a complex study of physicalized language. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source on its head, Bell’s reductive process transforms filmic narrative, creating a semiotic study that reveals the subtle manipulations and learned artifice within human expression, while breaking the connection between narrative arc and the nuances of gesture.

Alasdair Duncan makes “signs for the future”, stand-ins; not futurological predictions, rather they are emblems of the not yet imagined. Duncan is interested in making art that reflects an expansive, confident and optimistic outlook, that the world as it is now can be made different and better. At a time when the future is represented substantially in terms of fears rather than opportunities, Duncan’s work manifests the hope of real affirmative social and material change through conditions of possibility which exist now, but which are beyond our view from the current state of affairs.

Don Voisine’s paintings impress with a complexity and meditative quality that belie their scale. Space is defined by restrictions, controlled by borders, limited in access, via a very few well-chosen elements. Voisine creates uncanny spatial depth and structure through color, texture, contrast, and light. The layering and overlapping of black planes, both translucent and opaque, evoke both redaction and seduction without answer.

***

Dana Bell had solo shows at Dvorak Sec Gallery, Prague; Kressling Gallery, Bratislava, Slovakia and Louis V ESP, Brooklyn. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Dvorak Sec Gallery, Secret Project Robot, The Flag Art Foundation, and D'Amelio Terras Gallery. Bell received her BFA from Wayne State University and a MFA from Maine College of Art. Bell lives and works in Brooklyn.

Alasdair Duncan has had work included in numerous group shows in the UK and France, and was commissioned to make the signature artwork and signage for the 9th Congress of the New Lacanian. He is a graduate of the Royal Academy School Post Graduate program, and received a BA from Goldsmiths College. Duncan lives and works in London. Theodore:Art will present a solo exhibition of Duncan’s work in 2012.

Don Voisine’s most recent solo exhibitions include McKenzie Fine Art, New York and Icon Contemporary Art, Brunswick, Maine His work is included in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Academy Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Peabody Essex Museum and the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, MT. Voisine was elected into membership to The National Academy of Art in 2010. Voisine was elected a member of American Abstract Artists in 1997 and became President of the group in 2004. Voisine was born in Fort Kent, Maine, and moved to New York City in 1976. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

SELECTED IMAGES

For more information and images, please contact:
Stephanie Theodore at 212.966.4324 or at theodoreart@gmail.com

"A" is for Art, "B" is for Bushwick

Photo: Joy Garnett. Found Art (Ingraham St. - Bushwick) Unmonumental 593

As we prepare to launch Theodore:Art in its new space at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick Brooklyn, it's been encouraging to read articles in the art press, blogosphere and even in the mainstream media that anticipate the continued development and flowering of the "Bushwick art scene" with enthusiasm. Here are a few excerpts from recent articles starting with the latest and going back to June 2011:

 

The New Criterion: Gallery chronicle
by James Panero - January 2012

Manhattan is the center of the art world. So why schlep to the outer reaches of Brooklyn to see art? My wife has asked me that question more than once on a weekend night, standing on the platform of a subway line we didn’t know existed or waiting to buzz up to an apartment gallery beneath the shadow of a cement plant. So what brings us back weekend after weekend? It’s a good question, and to suggest that we find a pied-à-terre in Bushwick to avoid the hour-long commute back home is not the best response.

Nor does the answer have to do with the appearance of what we see in these out-of-the-way venues. Bushwick, the neighborhood that is now shorthand for New York’s alternative art scene, offers up realism and abstraction, sculpture and painting, all in equal measure. The group shows that make up the bulk of Bushwick’s exhibition program often range across several styles as if refusing to settle on a single look.

While Bushwick lacks a style, I have learned that it shares a substance, in that most of the things you see there are made to take home. Bushwick certainly did not create the commercial art market. It did not invent art that could be purchased, traded, moved, and hung on a living-room wall. Instead, Bushwick’s contribution has been to construct a commercial art scene of its own that is ad hoc and where almost anyone can participate. It offers up art that we can all purchase, trade, move, and hang on our own living-room walls.

Bushwick has gone against the grain, not by turning against the commodities of art, but by turning art into a commodity that is local, much like the many other do-it-yourself craftsmen and cottage industries that have helped this borough become a hub of innovation. By going local, Bushwick does not rail against the art establishment of museums, auction houses, mega-collectors, and celebrity Chelsea galleries. Instead it sets up a viable, alternative culture of arts patronage. Rather than produce large, high-tech, or conceptual work for museums and the rich, it offers up small objects for any wall and every budget. Here the prices asked for individual pieces—in the hundreds of dollars—could not even pay to keep the lights on in a Chelsea gallery. In Bushwick, with art clustered on row-house walls or presented in apartment galleries, the locals make it work. Bushwick’s vitality is in its collectability.

[read on...]

 

The L Magazine: 5 More Art World Trends to Watch for in 2012
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 2:02 PM

In the current issue of The L Paddy Johnson does some expert crystal ball/calendar reading, and predicts five major art trends of which we're going to see more in 2012—including, crucially, polar bear art. Reading her predictions and looking at the season ahead got me thinking about some other trends that seem likely to shape the art world in New York and beyond this year, enough to fill a list...

More Bushwick (and Ridgewood)
This was a pervasive trend in 2011, often at the expense of Williamsburg, with art spaces like Nurture Art and Momenta Art heading east in search of more affordable real estate. That's going to keep happening in 2012; already I know of one long-time Williamsburg non-profit art space that will be moving to Bushwick (well, technically Ridgewood, actually) this year and I'm sure there will be others. And then there are the incoming Bushwick project spaces by Manhattan galleries Kesting Ray and Luhring Augustine, which adds some serious art world clout to the proudly indie art neighborhood. Look for other Manhattan galleries to do likewise.

[read full list]

 

Photo: Joy Garnett. Found Art (Bushwick) Unmonumental 587

ArtFagCity: 56 Bogart: Where Manufacturing Fails Artist Communities Will Rise

by Paddy Johnson on November 23, 2011

The history of gallery migration in New York is by now well-known, even if its particulars are not. Often it starts with a single artist-friendly building, that becomes the hub for community and neighborhood development. This gets interesting when there are circumstances where the failure of manufacturing is the stimulus for the rise of arts. A case in point; back in 1971, dealers Leo Castelli, Andre Emmerich, Ileana Sonnabend and John Weber opened quarters at 420 West Broadway — a former paper warehouse they bought outright — thus opening Soho to the galleries of 57th Street. Chelsea’s early days have a similar history: the manager of 529 West 20th boasted in 1997 that “twenty-two galleries had signed up” to fill former storage space. In Dumbo, it was the long-running art support at St. Ann’s Warehouse that propelled the neighborhood to prominence.

Bushwick’s 56 Bogart St. is beginning to experience this same transformation. In the past nine months, the building has rented space to Momenta Art, Agape, Interstate Projects, Studio 10, Salon Bogart, and CCCP (Creative Curators Collective Project). NURTUREart recently moved to the building from its old location on Grand Street. Theodore:Art is slated to open next month. Both find the location across from the subway and the draw of Roberta’s Pizza compelling.

[read on...]

 

ABC NEWS: Brooklyn's Bushwick Becomes World-Class Arts Mecca
By VERENA DOBNIK
NEW YORK July 31, 2011 (AP)

Brooklyn's old Bushwick neighborhood has quickly become a new world-class arts mecca — with music, dance, sculpture and theater bursting from defunct warehouses and desolate streets where gangs still roam.

That hasn't kept artists away from the affordable, industrial spaces — ever more rare in a pricey city.

"This was a ghost town, with tumbleweeds blowing down the street five years ago," says Jay Leritz, co-owner of Yummus Hummus, a Middle Eastern-style cafe on a street filled with musician rehearsal and recording spaces.

"The streets were empty," says Leritz, "and that was the big attraction — the lack of rules, like your parents went away for the weekend and it's a free-for-all."

Born-in-Bushwick creations have reached Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top venues in the United States and abroad — even the tallest building on earth, the 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

[read on...]

 

The NYTimes Real Estate Section: Living In | Bushwick, Brooklyn
The Vanguard Alights
By JAKE MOONEY
Published: July 15, 2011

THIS sprawling neighborhood in northern Brooklyn was one of the borough’s first European settlements, and has been known for many things over its long history: for its farms, then for its breweries and factories, then for the blight and crime that descended in the decades after those employers closed.

Pages from that history are always on display for the neighborhood’s more than 100,000 residents. There are the wide streets and orderly grid of an area that was tamed by development early on. There are the mansions, churches and social halls, looking worn now, from a bustling middle period. And there are weedy vacant lots under the elevated train tracks on Broadway, Bushwick’s southern boundary, which has never fully recovered from looting and rioting after the blackout of 1977.

There are ample signs, too, of a new era, at least on the neighborhood’s western edge, where artistic and relatively prosperous newcomers have colonized an industrial zone and begun settling into the residential blocks. Many are transplants from adjacent Williamsburg.

[read on.... SLIDE SHOW]

 

Artnet Magazine: Bushwick Art Scene
FOR LOVE OF THE GAME
by Emily Nathan, June 22, 2011

These days, art is all about the money. Art galleries, art fairs, even museum shows -- people might not approve, but they know it’s true. So it should come as no surprise, in the contrary world that is the young avant-garde, that right across the East River, in the heart of Bushwick, Brooklyn, is a tight community of art spaces run by hip, happy 30-somethings who live cheap, share cold beers at sunset and show art for love.

Of the eight leading galleries in that remote Brooklyn neighborhood -- English Kills, Centotto, Factory Fresh, Norte Maar, Storefront, Regina Rex, Famous Accountants, and new neighbor MomentaArt, a transplant from Williamsburg -- six are located within five square blocks of the Morgan stop on the L train. Collectively, they set the tone for what is certain to become a greenhouse for the freshest and newest in New York art. Williamsburg, move over: Bushwick is blooming.

[read on...]

Photo: Joy Garnett. Found Art (Thames St. - Bushwick) Unmonumental 592

Chioma Ebinama interviews Stephanie Theodore of THEODORE:Art

Photo courtesy of Theodore:Art

 

56Bogart Tumblr, posted Dec 12, 2011:

THEODORE:Art

Chioma Ebinama interviews Stephanie Theodore of THEODORE:Art. Her gallery is still under construction, the tentative opening date is January 14th, 2012.

///

56B: Why did you choose 56 Bogart as you’re new location?

ST: I was in London for a couple of years and I came back [to New York] A client of mine, who is also a friend of mine had encouraged me to get back into the gallery business. I was just looking for an interesting neighborhood and inexpensive rent. As much as I am, indeed, a for-profit gallery, I want to make it a sustainable enterprise, which means keeping one’s fixed costs low. By doing that, it takes the pressure off artists. They can do the shows they want to do, as opposed to the shows that “Must sell god forbid they don’t!” I’ve already been through this. I had a gallery in the 90s. The kind of economic slow down we’re having now is similar, and also the contrast between the grand ole days of selling everything and selling nothing is also analogous to where we were in ’91 and ’92. A time like this is a really good time to take more chances, be more experimental, you just have to do it in a way that is economically sustainable.

56B: How do you feel about sharing an art space? There are so many other galleries in this building.

ST: It’s great! It makes it a destination. Contrast and variety are really what make a gallery scene, so the more the merrier. I mean I might be looked at as the old reactionary I’m afraid. But that’s okay, I think it just makes it better. Diversity can only make art better.

56B: I understand many of the artists you represent are from Europe, specifically the UK, what sort of unique perspective do you hope to bring to this art scene?

ST: That’s how it started. I went to grad school in London and was working with galleries and artists. I felt like they inspired me to give it a go. I’ve been without a gallery for 17 years. Now, I feel like I’m old enough and mature enough to do this and have control of the situation. I was giving a lot of artists their first shows and working with very young artists. But now the English artists are just the basis for getting me to do this again. I am also going to work with American artists who I feel are underexposed, who need a different context, or would like to be re-contextualized. Most of the artists I represent have been out of grad school for less than 5 years. They’re relatively emerging artists, but they’re all over the age of 30. I like late bloomers. I have a sympathy for people who are over 40 or 50 and not dead yet (…) and I like weird juxtapositions I love putting artists together where you wouldn’t expect them to be that’s my little fun.

Migration of Objects Exhibition and Sal Randolph's Bureau of Unknown Destinations open 1/12 @ Proteus Gowanus

Alabaster urn (Egypt, ca. 1940s). One of a pair. H: 5-1/2"  W: 3-1/2"

 

Migration of Objects

and

Proteus artist-in-residence Sal Randolph's

Bureau of Unknown Destinations

January 12 - April 7, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday, January 12, 7-9pm

Proteus Gowanus
543 Union Street (at Nevins)
Brooklyn, NY 11215
http://proteusgowanus.org
718.243.1572

Gallery Hours
Thursday & Friday, 3–6 pm
Saturday & Sunday, 12–6 pm

Before Christmas, I received the following invitation from Proteus Gowanus:

Proteus Gowanus would like to invite you to consider submitting an item for our upcoming exhibition, the Migration of Objects opening in mid-January, 2012. Since September, the gallery has been engaging in an exploration of Migration. Art, artifacts and books have been collected that have focused on people and creatures, the mobile inhabitants of the planet. Now, for its second Migration exhibition, we wish to acknowledge the things that drive us onward in our migrations; the materials, tools, products, waste--the expressions of our culture or simply its substrate.

Do you have an object with a migratory story? These stories may intersect with your own or it may be a story of the object’s own history, a story that may have begun before the object’s encounter with you and that will likely continue long after you part. We are especially interested in these latter aspects of the objects’ stories. These stories may migrate into the economic, the industrial, the political, the historical, the geologic, the environmental and so on....

 

Here is my story: 

Alabaster urn (Egypt, ca. 1940s). One of a pair. H: 5-1/2"  W: 3-1/2"

In the house where I grew up there was a pair of alabaster urns from Egypt.  They belonged to my mother, Hoda, who was born and raised in Alexandria. They sat on a bookshelf along with other mementos from my parents' travels. Both urns been badly broken and glued back together....The urns came to New York with Hoda and her family on the SS Vulcania in April 1946, the first ship to sail from Egypt after WWII. Ten years later, Hoda met and married my father, and they traveled to Panama and Puerto Rico in the Navy. The urns traveled with them, packed in a rug. It was during this time that my father broke the urns: he snapped open the rug and they fell, smashing into 100 little pieces. He and my mother glued them back together....I never heard the story until a few months ago, when Hoda died. My father's younger sister came and told the story at the memorial service. She was only fourteen when my parents got married; she said the story of gluing the urns back together instilled in her a love for little things....The next day, I searched my parents' house and found the urns. They were in my old room and filled with pennies. I dusted them off and got rid of the pennies, and brought them home to Brooklyn. Pale and peachy, with spidery veins of dull yellow cement, they now sit on our mantlepiece with some other things, where they catch the midday sun.

More info:

The Bureau of Unknown Destinations is part of a three month artist’s residency by Sal Randolph at Proteus Gowanus, extending through mid-April. Proteus Gowanus is an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room located on the shores of the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn. Their yearlong theme is Migration.

For updates, events, and bureau hours visit unknowndestinations.org or contact bureau [at ] unknowndestinations [dot ] org.