NEWSgrist - where spin is art

PLAYVISION: Fusing Sound, Video, Art & Music

World Financial Center Inaugurates New Performance Space
with Cutting Edge Installation-Performance Series Fusing Sound, Video, Art & Music

PLAYVISION

NEW YORK - The World Financial Center Arts & Events is inaugurating a new 200-seat performance space in its Courtyard Gallery, 220 Vesey Street, that will be dedicated to innovative and experimental visual art, performance art and music.

"The new performance space opens with an installation-performance series with artists who fuse sound, visual art and musical performance entitled PlayVision," said Debra Simon, Artistic Director of World Financial Center Arts & Events, the largest arts program in Lower Manhattan. "The inaugural series is curated by composer/performer Ben Neill and features a roster of leading international artists who are working in this exciting field."

Composer Ben Neill and video artist Bill Jones launch the new space Wednesday, May 3, at 8:00pm; video artist Christian Marclay and the trios of Elliott Sharp and Okkyung Lee Wednesday, May 17, at 8:00pm; The Books Wednesday, May 24, at 8:00pm; and Tmema (Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) Wednesday, May 31, at 8:00pm.

PlayVision performances are free, ticketed events. Tickets will be distributed two per person on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 5pm in the Winter Garden on day of show. Seating is limited.

Download full info and bios: WFCPlayvisionPR.pdf

May 3
MUSIC CONCERT
BEN NEILL + BILL JONES

Ben Neill is a composer/performer and designer of the mutantrumpet,
a unique acoustic/electronic instrument. Along with his visual collaborator Bill Jones, Neill has developed a "playable" form of cinema in which he plays video images live. For this show Neill presents XIX, a new series of music/interactive video pieces based on samples of 19th century music and art, featuring bassist John Conte and drummer Jim Mussen.

May 4 - May 27
VISUAL ARTS
RODNEY GRAHAM
REVERIE INTERUPTED BY THE POLICE
Thursday–Saturday, 2–8pm

Rodney Graham, best known for his short films and visual work which often incorporate sound and original music, is active as a songwriter, musical performer and internationally renowned visual artist. Graham's production skills rival those of Hollywood films, but it is his use of looping, repetition and enigmatic narratives that make his work as provocative as it is seductive. In the New York City premiere of A Reverie Interrupted by the Police, Graham portrays a handcuffed prisoner performing John Cage-style piano music while guarded by a policeman.

May 17
MUSIC CONCERT
CHRISTIAN MARCLAY
feat. ELLIOT SHARP trio + OKKYUNG LEE trio

Christian Marclay has created a remarkable body of artistic work that explores the intersection of sight and sound. In his recent piece Screen Play, a collaged film serves as a projected score to be interpreted by two trios led by Elliott Sharp and Okkyung Lee. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described the work as "an extraordinary evening of looking and listening."

May 24
MUSIC CONCERT
THE BOOKS

The Books, one of the most original bands to emerge in recent years, "remain at the bleeding edge of pop innovation, even if it is more hummable than you'd expect," writes Billboard Magazine. Their eclectic mix of folk, electronic, low tech and digital sounds is immediately compelling and highly unique. In performance they seamlessly integrate sampled film and video with their musical show, creating an intimate, lyrical experience from wide-ranging source material.

May 31
MUSIC CONCERT
TMEMA (GOLAN LEVIN + ZACHARY LIEBERMAN)

TMEMA is the collaborative team of Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman. Working together since 2002, Tmema develops interactive performances and installations, web-based information visualizations and experimental software systems. Among the pieces performed are The Manual Input Sessions, a series of audiovisual vignettes probing the expressive possibilities of hand and finger gestures using a combination of customized interactive software, analog overhead projectors and digital computer video projectors.

CiNE: Re-branding the Public Theater (sans theater)

In their newest portfolio, the CiNE collective de- and re-constructs New York's Public Theater to suit the exigencies of contemporary reality; a reality in which theater plays no role.

By overhauling the Public's branding, their marketing, their fundraising, their architecture, and their content, RE-PUBLIC makes crucial points about the necessary relationship of complicity to public culture in 21st- century America.

CiNE was founded in 2003 to examine the conditions of spectacle and spectatorship across a wide range of media. Its membership includes writers, artists, designers, researchers and accountants.  Recent and ongoing initiatives include 'NIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER at Gavin Brown's Passerby; MESSALINA at SPF; and ACTORS AT WORK, debuting in August, 2006.

RE-PUBLIC was published in THEATER (Duke UP) 35:3.

Available for download at http://www.cineinitiatives.net/CiNE_Re-Public.pdf

Tune-in to Nerve Theory: "...no privacy at the speed of light"

Kunstradio, a radio art program of the ORF, Austria's national broadcaster, is featuring a weekly series of radio miniatures by Nerve Theory throughout 2006.

The series is called "H5N1: there is no privacy at the speed of light."

Nerve Theory is the corporate identity of Bernhard Loibner and Tom Sherman.

Nerve Theory's latest work focuses on the bird flu virus, H5N1, and the hysteria surrounding the inevitable global influenza pandemic. Loibner and Sherman use the idea of the evolving, mutating H5N1 virus as a launching pad for a series of scary, strangely funny statements about the world we live in. Imagine a world where artists write and deliver the news. Loibner and Sherman are not scientists, but they are experts in observing and describing media viruses and a delivering broad spectrum of living, evolving ideas.

Listen for this sound logo: "H5N1: there is no privacy at the speed of light." This logo will mark updates on the journey of the H5N1 virus as it mutates into a mix of creatures that violate our privacy and threaten our lives. Nerve Theory's H5N1 radio miniatures will pop up from week to week in Kunstradio's regular programming throughout 2006.

Kunstradio is now infected. Check your own status. Tune-in to Kunstradio.

An archive of Nerve Theory's H5N1 radio miniatures is available at:

http://www.kunstradio.at/2006A/H5N1en.html

Peace Tower By Night: this Saturday

Peace Tower By Night
with words and music by Irving Petlin, Arnold Mesches, John Weber, Apeshit, Japanther, John Giorno, Momus, New Humans, and Nora York, among others...

Saturday, April 29 at 6:15pm

Mark di Suvero and Rirkrit Tiravanija share a belief in art's potential for effecting social change. Peace Tower (2006), a reconception of the Artists' Tower for Peace that was first created in 1966, stands in the Whitney Museum's Sculpture Court and involves the work of over 150 artists. As critic Jeffrey Kastner has stated:

Both a pragmatic attempt to provide a platform for an increasingly widespread oppositional movement and a utopian gesture aimed at promoting unity among its diverse adherents, the Peace Tower proposes at least one intriguing answer to the question of how art has been, and might again be, made during a time of war.

Join us at the Peace Tower for an evening of music, readings, and performance.

Free!  No reservations necessary. Come early as space is limited.

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021

General Information: 1 (800) WHITNEY

Book Launch for Austin Thomas: Perches and Drawings

Book Launch for:
Austin Thomas: Perches and Drawings (2006)
published by Grinnell College's Faulconer Gallery, with essays by Roger D. Hodge, Jeffrey Kastner, Shamim M. Momin, and Daniel Strong. 88 pages with 78 color photographs.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006, 6 to 8 PM
@
Michael Steinberg Fine Art
526 w. 26th Street, #215
more info.
TEL: 212.924.5770
FAX: 212.924.6232
INFO@MSFINEART.NET

Austin Thomas: Perches and Drawings is the first monograph on Austin Thomas's work documenting her work to date (2006).  The volume includes four insightful essays by Roger D. Hodge, editor of Harper's magazine, Jeffrey Kastner, senior editor of the Brooklyn-based cultural journal Cabinet, Shamim M. Momin, Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Branch Director and Curator, Whitney Museum at Altria, and Daniel Strong, Associate Director and Curator of Exhibitions, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College. 

Using Thoreau as a starting point, Roger D. Hodge describes the progression of Thomas's work from the retelling other people's stories in Stones I've Known (1999) to building platforms, Perchance (2004), for stories to take place.  Jeffrey Kastner discusses Thomas's work in terms of the provisionality of her "perches," while Shamim M. Momin's essay takes the form of a travelogue and Daniel Strong muses on the backyard deck and his personal encounters with Thomas...

High Desert Test Sites: May 6 & 7

A project of A-Z. For more info visit:

http://www.zittel.org/
http://www.highdeserttestsites.com/

The "November" Matrix: Art, Theory, Criticism, Palaver

via Artnet News 4/26/06:

"NOVEMBER" SKEWERS CRITICS
  Is the influential October magazine, the flagship journal of art theory, a spent force? The editors of the newly released November certainly seem to think so. The 46-page inaugural issue of the parody mag offers a savage send-up of the widely copied, jargon-heavy style of October, via, among other things, contributions from "Lukács G.C. Hechnoh" (an analogue of neo-Marxist critic and frequent Artforum contributor Benjamin H.D. Buchloh), who provides a text sternly condemning "Ikea’s Historic Amnesia," and an essay by "Rosamund Kauffmann" titled "A Picturesque Stroll around Jeff Koons’ Porcelain Pink Panther," employing the fragmentary, French-interspersed style of Rosalind Krauss. The publication concludes with Hechnoh, Kauffmann and stand-ins for fellow October heavys Yve-Alain Bois ("Jean-Luc Salive") and Hal Foster ("Chip Chapman") engaged in a roundtable discussion on the perks that roundtables afford neo-Marxist intellectuals.

Responding to an inquiry from Artnet News about where fans might pick up the spoof, the editors of November wrote that, "The matrix of NOVEMBER's current distribution is constructed largely from the result of aleatory scatterings and (re)inscribed focus groups in an attempt to maintain the dialectical tension between preserving a revolutionary aura of objecthood in this age of debased mechanical inauthenticity and self-reflexively complete the text's projected feedback loop by having others recognize our own editorial subjectivity." They did, however, suggest that parties interested in obtaining a copy could write eleventhmonth@gmail.com

Sharing is Daring @ Harvard

reBlogged via Rhizome.org :

Sharing Is Daring: CC art show in Boston opens on April 27

April 23rd, 2006, 1:44 pm

   

Elizabeth Stark of Harvard Free Culture reports that Sharing Is Daring -- a terrific art show featuring works offered under Creative Commons licenses -- is ready to rock with an opening reception on April 27.

Harvard Free Culture presents Sharing is Daring, a showcase of new & derivative artworks released under flexible licenses that allow for sharing & remixing. The exhibition will feature a range of graphic, photography, video, and multimedia works by:

~ Abram Stern ~ Matt Vance ~ Elton Lovelace ~ Brian Zbriger ~ Suburban Kids with Biblical Names ~ Shanying Cui ~ Ben Sisto ~ Tim Jacques ~ Rebecca Rojer ~ Greg Perkins ~ Ryan Sciaino ~ David Meme ~ Matt Boch & Claire Chanel ~ selections from the 100 Second Film Festival ~

Please join us for our opening event on Thurs., Apr. 27, 2006 at 8pm at the Adams ArtSpace, Harvard University, Plympton at Bow St., in Cambridge, MA. Food and drink will be served.

For more information, visit sharingisdaring.com.

Originally by Eric Steuer from Creative Commons Blog - rss at April 20, 2006, 11:09, published by Marisa S. Olson

The Donald Judd Auction: A Most Beautiful Survey

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
An untitled piece by Donald Judd at the Christie's presale show: a free-standing piece from 1988.

via NYTimes: Critic's Notebook
Christie's Presale Show: Light and Space Enough to Really See Judd
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: April 24, 2006

For the next two weeks, New York has something it may never have again: a small, unpretentious single-artist museum devoted to the achievements of the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd.

This museum has been rather hastily assembled by an unlikely entity: Christie's New York. Its unlikely setting is two floors atop the Simon & Schuster Building, around the corner from the auction house at Rockefeller Center. The show is, in fact, the presale exhibition of 35 Judd works offered for sale by the Judd Foundation, established by the artist's estate in 1996, two years after his death. Everything on view is to be sold to the highest bidder on May 9, the final day of the show.

The works, which date from around 1970 to 1993, form a haphazard, partial and sometimes redundant survey of Judd's sculpture. They are clearly pieces that the foundation, which is in dire economic straits, has decided it can do without.

So I'm as surprised to be writing the following as you may be to read it: This exhibition is the most beautiful survey of Judd's work ever seen in New York, and the first to be displayed under conditions of space and light that the famously demanding artist might have found satisfactory. Christie's has made an unusual effort with this display, stripping the light-flooded space — there are windows on four sides — to its bare-bones cement surfaces. Judd's son, Flavin, who has some of his father's sense of proportion, had a role in planning both the raw-looking interior and the spare installation. And in the end the pieces work fairly well together, illustrating Judd's thinking about the box — the basic of unit of his art — as it moves between wall and floor, and from single-unit to multi-part pieces.

The conditions of the sale have been reported. Christie's is said to have guaranteed the foundation around $20 million, which it needs to pay off debts and establish an endowment; maintain the 16 buildings it owns in New York and in Marfa, Tex.; conserve the collections and library amassed by Judd; catalog his archives; and start converting his extensive unpublished writings into book form. His legacy, as complex physically as it is intellectually, is a national treasure that should be much more accessible to the public.

It has been argued that this sale, in releasing so many works at one time, could deflate the Judd market and that a slower, private, more dignified weeding process would have permitted more pieces to be placed in public collections.

Yet Judd might have viewed the sale with a certain pragmatic equanimity. I worked for him briefly in the early 1970's, mostly on his catalogue raisonné. He remarked more than once that one purpose of his smaller, portable sculptures was to make money to pay for larger projects.

The foundation Judd mandated in his will is a very large project. He might even have liked the bold gesture of one big, widely publicized get-it-over-with auction. Besides, he famously hated museums, especially American ones.

Questions will always remain about whether the foundation exhausted all fund-raising possibilities before setting this course. And only time will tell if the influx of money can solve problems that may be more than simply financial. Adding peripheral heat to the discussion is the spectacle of Christie's promoting this presale show as the largest exhibition of Judd's work in this country since 1988, the year of his second retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. First auction houses supersede galleries, then they move in on museums? Christie's has even provided an Acoustiguide.

Christie's has indeed behaved like a museum — or at least in a way more museums should act. Basically, it has put art before architecture in an uncluttered display that makes the work optimally visible. The presentation is undoubtedly a fantastic sales tool, but it is also a temporary gift to the city, one that every museum professional should see.

Judd went to Marfa because he found the conditions under which New York museums displayed contemporary art to be deplorable. His point remains a good one: art cannot be fully understood if it is not fully experienced. And if not fully experienced, it cannot meet one of its chief responsibilities: to give subsequent generations of artists something to build on. Looking at the Christie's show, New York can finally see what Judd meant. It makes his case with his art, on his home turf, in the city that nurtured his genius.
[read on...]

It's Showtime at the Smithsonian

via NYTimes:
Filmmakers and Others Petition Against Smithsonian's Showtime Deal
By LORNE MANLY
Published: April 18, 2006 [excerpted]

As the recent coupling between the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks continues to roil the documentary film world, more than 215 filmmakers, television executives and academics have signed a letter demanding that the Smithsonian, a publicly financed museum, not only reveal financial details of the joint venture but also abandon it.

The signers of the letter, delivered yesterday to a Smithsonian official, include the filmmakers Michael Moore ("Fahrenheit 9/11"), R. J. Cutler ("The War Room") and Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"); the actress and writer Anna Deavere Smith ("Twilight: Los Angeles"); the law professor Lawrence Lessig; and Jacoba Atlas, a senior PBS executive.

The uproar was set off last month when Showtime and the Smithsonian announced the creation of Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture for original television programming on scientific, cultural and historical subjects whose first service would be an on-demand cable channel beginning this December. As part of the deal, Smithsonian Networks was to get the right of first refusal on commercial documentaries that relied significantly on the museum's archives, curators or scientists.

The underfinanced Smithsonian has argued that while the agreement might restrict some commercial filmmakers from selling their handiwork elsewhere, it would affect only a limited number of projects. [...]

[...] the idea of a public institution's granting preferential treatment to a commercial entity has alarmed many in the documentary and academic worlds, who worry that the venture will discourage independent filmmakers from taking their projects to other outlets or from putting their work on the Internet on a noncommercial basis.

The letter states that it is a troubling prospect to require independent filmmakers, video bloggers, historians or educators who make nonincidental use of the Smithsonian's collections or staff to offer their projects commercially to "this new business venture."

Such a requirement, the letter says, is "an anticompetitive practice that is extremely troubling." Put together by the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization, the letter was sent to Lawrence M. Small, secretary of the Smithsonian..

"Closing off one of the most important collections of source materials and limiting access to staff," the letter adds, "will have a chilling effect on creativity, will create disincentives for digitization of the collections for access by all Americans, and violates the mission and purpose of the Smithsonian Institution."

Also angering the letter writers is the secrecy about the contract details, which the Smithsonian has declined to publicize for competitive reasons. "It just doesn't seem to be the way a public trust should operate," said Carl Malamud, a senior fellow and chief technology officer for the Center for American Progress, who has spearheaded the letter-writing campaign and a Freedom of Information Act request for contract details. The letter writers also demand that the Smithsonian hold public hearings before it undertakes any similar efforts in the future. [read on...]