NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Sasha Archibald's Air Kissing

via Tyler Green's Modern Art Notes (MAN): [an excerpt]

Q&A on anti-art world art with Sasha Archibald

About 10 days ago some friends and I were discussing how much institutional critique-style art we'd seen lately. My blogging compadre Ed Winkleman shows Jennifer Dalton, I recently mentioned Filip Noterdaeme on the blog, and so on. I thought I might do a week's worth of posts on this kind of work. Then someone said: 'You don't have to. There's a show of it that's about to open.' True: Brooklyn's Momenta Art is featuring Air Kissing: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art About the Art World. I asked curator Sasha Archibald if she'd chat with me about it.

MAN: Who is the father of some of this work? Ed Ruscha? Michael Asher? John Baldessari?

Sasha Archibald: Those influences definitely. You can cast a wider net and include Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. I attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and they definitely have a particular course of study that's unique to that program, which came about in the late seventies and has stayed pretty much the same since then. The big names talked about there are Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and that generation. So in terms of my interest in doing this show, those are the more immediate influences.

You keep mentioning institutional critique -- I don't know if I classify the show as institutional critique. I think of institutional critique as a body of critical theory that stemmed from various movements in the late '80s, early '90s, generally termed "cultural studies." I see it as limited in time. I don't think it's irrelevant, but I think the conventional strategies of institutional critique are shopworn. I'm not sure they're as successful now as they were in the past. I know Fred [Wilson's] work best... he has gone from working in museums where there's a great degree of resistance to what he would come in and do... to where his approach is solicited, welcomed, celebrated.

Earlier you mentioned Jennifer Dalton: I don't think of what Jennifer Dalton is doing as institutional critique exactly, but maybe that's just my training.

MAN: Oh I think they are. Dalton, William Powhida, Elmgreen & Dragset as exploding the idea of institutional critique beyond bricks-and-mortar institutions, and are expanding those ideas and taking them to the entire system, to the entire art world, be it the market or whatever.

Archibald: But William [Powhida's] doing really well. [That's a detail from Powhida's Possible Show Titles.] I looked at his works list from a show in San Francisco and the show had sold out. [Correx from TG: Actually it didn't. Sorry about that.] Then I went to the Schroeder Romero show here in New York and every work but one had sold. And while I was there the gallery attendant was clearly courting a collector and the collector had pulled up a chair to one of his paintings, was reading the painting and slapping her thigh, laughing out loud and totally enjoying herself. I told William, and he took great delight in this, in the irony of the collector being crapped on and enjoying it. But you have to wonder if there's an actual "critique" going on, when there's such viable commercial value. The art world is very savvy now -- savvy enough to know it's better off embracing criticism than resisting it.

MAN: Why does institutional critique have to be commercially unacceptable?

Archibald: I guess my notion of critique is that it has to be unpalatable. It needs to come from a voice that's outside enough and disrupts the ordinary course of things. Maybe that's a more avant garde notion of what change is, but people should resist critique. It shouldn't be welcome. If it's painful to address, the institution's impulse is to ignore or deny or say it's not art, not snap-it-up. If it's as radical as it should be, critique hurts. [At left: Carl Pope.]

[Read on...]

Don't Forget! World AIDS Day: Postcards from the Edge benefit sale

via Visual AIDS >blog:

Postcards From the Edge 2007 Benefit for Visual AIDS
Hosted by James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues)

Preview Party
Friday, November 30 from 6:00 - 8:00 PM
$75 admission includes one raffle ticket. Additional raffle tickets $20.
One Lucky Winner will select any postcard that evening!
Participating artists attend free.
Sneak peek only -- NO POSTCARD SALES.

Benefit Sale
Saturday, December 1 on World AIDS Day from 12:00 - 6:00 PM &
Sunday, December 2 from 12:00 - 4:00 PM
$5 Suggested admission

Over 1,000 original postcard-sized works of art.
ONLY $75 EACH. Buy four cards and get one free. Cash, check or credit card

for list of participating artists go to the Visual AIDS >blog

J.X. Williams Interlude

via MYSpace:

...Hollywood has dealt J.X. a rough hand and we need to give his cinematic work the attention that it deserves. Without the help and support of the filmgoing public, many important films may end up lost forever.

For the uninitiated, here is a rare clip from French TV that ran on the legendary director last month. 

[via Wikipedia: J.X. Williams is a pseudonym used by several different authors during the 1960s for many adult novels. Parisian Passions by Ed Wood employed this pseudonym, and it had been used by author Victor J. Banis, among others. More recently, J.X. Williams has appeared as the name of a film director on such films as Peep Show, and The Virgin Sacrifice.]

Doomed Vessel: In Search of Shackleton

Fuerza Aerea de Chile via European Pressphoto Agency. A picture taken by the Chilean Air Force shows the Explorer, which struck an iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean.

via NYTimes:

154 Flee Sinking Ship in Antarctic
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 24, 2007
A small, historic cruise ship with an imperfect security record was listing dangerously after it struck ice in Antarctic waters today, with 154 passengers and crew members evacuated in a flotilla of lifeboats and inflatable boats, the cruise operator and coast guards said.

Late into the day, the small red and white ship — named the Explorer but known affectionately as “the little red ship” — was listing steeply to starboard, nearly on its side, awash in ice floes and steely gray water. The vessel — on an expedition to trace the doomed route of the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton — sent out a distress signal in the middle of the night (5:24 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time) after it began to take in water through “a fist-sized hole,” said Dan Brown, a spokesman for G.A.P. Adventures, the Toronto-based tour operator that owns and operates the ship. He said the “running assumption” is that it hit an iceberg. Water began to trickle into a cabin and eventually flooded the engine room, causing the ship to lose power.

The accident occurred well north of the Antarctic Circle in an island chain that is part of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts close to South America and has seen sharp warming of temperatures in recent years.As the satellite distress signal was being picked up by coast guard stations in Britain; Norfolk, Va.; and Ushuaia, Argentina, the ship’s 100 passengers — 14 of them American, 24 British, 17 Dutch, 12 Canadian and a smattering of other nationalities— were awakened and told to don warm clothes and life preservers, said Mark Clark, a spokesman for Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which was one of the first authorities to receive the distress signal. They clambered down ladders on the ship’s side to board lifeboats.

Mr. Clark said they were taken aboard a small research vessel, the National Geographic Endeavour, that was nearby, before they were transferred to a Norwegian cruise liner, the Nordnorge. But Mr. Brown said open lifeboats bobbed in the frigid waters for four hours before the Nordnorge could help them.

Jon Bowermaster, a travel writer and filmmaker who was lecturing on the National Geographic Endeavour, said by satellite phone: “We arrived just exactly alongside the Nordnorge. There was a long line of black rubber Zodiac boats and a handful of orange lifeboats strung out and it was very surreal because it was a very beautiful morning with the sun glistening off the relatively calm sea. and all you could think was how relieved these people must have been when they saw these two big ships coming over the horizon. They’d been in the lifeboats around four hours, but cold. the water temperature is not quite freezing and wind chills in the 20s, Fahrenheit.”

Shackleton's Endurance trapped in the Antarctic ice (c. 1915).

Passengers on the Endeavour prepared hot tea and gathered blankets, and a section of the ship was dedicated to emergency medical care. Luckily, there were no emergency cases.

In February 1972, the Explorer, then operating for a Norwegian line as the Lindblad Explorer, ran aground close to the same spot, in similar circumstances. Amid the heaving seas, all her passengers then — mostly Americans — had to be rescued by the Chilean Navy.

On Friday, it was not immediately possible to reach the Explorer’s passengers, who had paid somewhere between $8,700 and $16,700 for the 18-day adventure expedition. Mr. Brown said they were being taken to King George Island in Antarctica. He said there was confusion about where exactly they would be taken from there.

“The Chileans think they are taking them to Chile, the Argentinians think they are taking them to Argentina and the Brits are talking about taking the British passengers to the Falklands,” he said.

The Chilean authorities said the passengers were being taken to the Chilean Air Force base on King George Island, the President Eduardo Frei Montalva Base, and later the commander of the base was quoted as saying that the Norwegian ship had arrived at the shore of the base around midday, but the passengers had not been able to disembark due to bad weather conditions.

Mr. Brown said the company had not yet been able to speak to anyone on board, but some radio stations had managed to speak to the captain of the Nordnorge, and he had reported that “everyone is healthy, uninjured and comfortable,” Mr. Brown said. Their families are in the process of being notified about the accident, he said.

According to the BBC, First Officer Peter Svensson told Reuters: "We were passing through ice as usual. But this time something hit the hold and we got a little leakage downstairs.

"No one was hysterical, they were just sitting there nice and quiet, because we knew there were ships coming." [read on...]

Market Crash...

via email...