NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The NY Art Book Fair: It was a Blast

A Beehive Filled With Artists' Books and Buzz
Photo: Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

via NYTimes:
Art

The NY Art Book Fair this weekend extends to two floors of the former Dia space on 22nd Street in Chelsea.
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 18, 2006

If you're worried that independent book publishing is doing a disappearing act along with independent everything else, fret not, or at least not yet. The NY Art Book Fair, which made its debut yesterday, is evidence that alternative is still vital, sexy and free. This fair may be the only one of its size in the city that charges nothing at the door. You don't have to pay to shop. [...]

White Columns — located, like Printed Matter, in Chelsea — is an adventurous exhibition space, but takes the publishing plunge at the fair with issues of the smart, photocopied-looking magazine it recently started producing, timed to its shows. A collective enterprise called Ugly Duckling Presse has assumed the mission of rescuing yesterday's artists' publications from oblivion. This press has just reprinted the entire two-year run of 0 to 9, one of the most experimental of all the mimeographed magazines of the late 1960s. What a fabulously mad thing it was, and is.

On the commercial side, Andrew Roth Inc. is one among many examples of minimum staffing and maximum multitasking. More or less a one-person operation, it juggles publishing, dealing in rare photographic books and running a contemporary-art gallery on the Upper East Side.

But for a true taste of what alternative means in the art book business, head up to the second floor and through the large display of wares by D. A. P./Distributed Art Publishers, to a section of the fair called Friendly Fire. Here a cluster of shoestring independent publishers, many of them artists and many of them young, constitute a tight little fair of their own, a kind of mini-bazaar of homemade, handmade, self-published books, zines, buttons, T-shirts, recordings, videos and DVDs. [read full article...]

On Art That Doesn't take Itself Too Seriously: Shop Talk w/ Ed Winkleman

Joe Fig, "April and Eric: August 10, 2004," 2005-2006, Mixed Media, 29 x 96 x 48

via Chelsea Now, Volume Number 1 Issue Number 8 / November 17 - 23, 2006
Chelsea Arts & Lifestyles: Fine Arts:

Talking shop with Winkleman / Plus Ultra Gallery
By Shane McAdams

Years ago, I tried to create an Internet art portal featuring developing artists and message boards, full of online galleries and virtual critiques between exhibiting artists. Long story short, it sank, and I learned a valuable lesson: artists can be skittish when it comes to technology. It occurred to me that, for all its avant garde sympathies, the art world has brought up the derriere garde in the digital crusade.

Therein lies Edward Winkleman's value. He is the proprietor of Winkleman / Plus Ultra, one of W. 27th Street's hotspots, but he may be just as well known for his art blog, www.edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com. A treasure trove of insider information and a breeding ground for heated discussion, it functions as a much needed tonic to the market-driven, glossy trade publications that have traditionally controlled the information machine in the art world.

While his blog has been a positive force, even a gift for the art world at large, it isn't a completely self-sacrificing endeavor. His high-tech side project keeps the low-tech portion of Winkleman's personal interests healthy and dynamic. As the moderator of his blog, he stays alert and involved, and his gallery has benefited appreciably. He has cobbled together a program that thrives on disparate parts that complement each other: for every Jackson Pollock studio in miniature by Joe Fig, there is a gigantic shoe by Andy Yoder; for every conceptual pinball drawing by Rosemary Fiore, there's a neo-Renaissance painting by Nancy Baker. Though little of the actual work at Winkleman/ Plus Ultra is involved directly with technology, the range and sophistication of the art at the gallery suggests that keeping plugged in has its benefits.

This week I had the chance to ask Winkleman what was on his mind:
[read on...]

Fantastic Routes, in Brooklyn

image: Sarah Trigg

via re-title newsletter, 11/22/06:

FANTASTIC ROUTES - curated by Alejandra Villasmil
Galería Galou
237 Kent Ave. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211 Tel: 917-407-2029


JANICE CASWELL - ELISABETH CONDON - CLAIRE COREY - FRANKLIN EVANS - SANDY LITCHFIELD - KAREN MARGOLIS - CARRIE SOLOMON - SARAH TRIGG - ALEJANDRA VILLASMIL

In a dynamic context driven by globalization and the accelerated changes in technology and telecommunications, artists are reacting by creating their own parallel universes, places that exist somewhere between abstraction and representation and that are visually identifiable by gestures evoking intricate routes, swirling paths, and dizzying swirls. Read on...Galeria Galou, Brooklyn

 

Launching: Cultural Politics

Dear NEWSgrist readers,

The latest issue of Cultural Politics, Volume 2, Issue 3, November, has just been published. We have also launched a website that offers glimpses of artwork, submission guidelines, tables of contents, subscription information, etc. etc.

Now wearing one of my other hats, this time as the journal's new Arts Editor, I am proud to draw your attention to the artist project for this issue: "Based On A True Story" by Canadian artist Stephen Andrews, a project about the London Underground bombings and the Kuleshov Effect.

I would be very grateful if friends and colleagues would circulate this message far and wide. Note: We are also always on the lookout for interesting, challenging, oblique, and critical articles concerned with the intersection of the cultural and the political.

Best wishes,

Joy Garnett
Arts Editor
Cultural Politics
http://culturalpolitics.org

Office Semaphore: Stretching a Tenuous Thread

John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
A view through a telescope shows coded messages in an office window.

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: November 21, 2006

via NYTimes:
Watch That Space: The Oracle of the 17th Floor {links courtesy ng}

The creators of the maritime semaphore system apparently did not have New York office workers in mind when they formulated the staccato messages used by ships and ports for basic communication. But as it turns out, the language is quite supple when it comes to conveying the universal urban condition.

There are signals for the angry: "Keep clear of me." There are signals for the frustrated: "I have received faulty instructions." And of course there are signals for the weary and the Friday-afternoon defeated: "I am dragging anchor"; "I require a tug"; "I am ending maneuvers early."

Several years ago the artist Nina Katchadourian found herself staring up at the sky full of office windows in Times Square and thinking about the faceless occupants behind them. "You think, 'My God, all those anonymous people up there, living and working,'" she said. "There’s this sense of so much detachment between interior and exterior."

With the cooperation of one of those anonymous people and the help of the Public Art Fund, Ms. Katchadourian is now trying to build a bridge — or at least, as she says, stretch a tenuous thread — between those two worlds.

Last week, on a windy plaza at the corner of Liberty and William Streets in Lower Manhattan, workers installed a heavy-duty tourist-type telescope. Its lens is fixed on a 17th-floor office window two blocks to the east, and at least once a day for the next two months the corporate lawyer who sits near that window will choose three objects from his office — for instance, a potted plant, a picture of his young son and a calculator — and arrange them on the sill. Anyone who wanders by the telescope can peer into it and see the objects, a kind of occupational variant on the famous lanterns in the Old North Church.

Then, using a pictorial key mounted on the telescope, the observer can translate the lawyer's messages and, perhaps, divine something about personality or his soul. Or at least whether the deli forgot to put mustard on his pastrami sandwich again. [...]

more about the history of the semaphore system, via Wikipedia:

An animation showing a Chappe tower Semaphore telegraph in operation. Courtesy of l'Ecole Centrale de Lyon http://chappe.ec-lyon.fr

[...] Semaphore lines preceded the electrical telegraph. They were faster than post riders for bringing a message over long distances, but far more expensive and less private than the electrical telegraph lines which would replace them. The distance that an optical telegraph can bridge is limited by geography and weather, thus in practical use, most optical telegraphs used lines of relay stations to bridge longer distances. [...]

Claude Chappe and his brothers took up the challenge [...] and succeeded to cover France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres. It was used for military and national communications until the 1850s. Many national services adopted signaling systems different from the Chappe system. For example, Britain and Sweden adopted systems of shuttered panels (in contradiction to the Chappe brothers' contention that angled rods are more visible). In Spain, the engineer Agustín de Betancourt developed his own system which was adopted by that state. [...]