NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Assassins...

Photo: Zahid Hussein/Reuters. At the funeral of Benazir Bhutto, supporters thronged the route to the white marble mausoleum in Garhi Khuda Baksh. More Photos >

 

via SHOBAK [e-list]; posted by Naeem Mohaiemen, Fri Dec 28 08:47:29 CET 2007:

Assassins, A South Asia Story

Since 1971, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) has framed much of its political reality in opposition to the idea of Pakistan. Some things I have heard over the years: "We will never allow Bangladesh to become Pakistan", "Why did we bother leaving Pakistan if we are going down the Islamic path as well?", "Thank god we're not with Pakistan", etc.

The scars of the 1971 genocide run deep. Periodically wounds flare up, such as when Islamist groups with ties to death squads in 1971 claim it was "civil war" not "genocide". 

My khalato bon (cousin) has direct memories of 1971 and even refuses to eat dried fruit or nuts if she discovers it was imported from Pakistan. She once said to me "Pakistan, ota ekta desh holo naki?" (Pakistan, is that even a country?). This reminds me of the (urban legend?) of post-WWII Jewish consumers who refused to buy the Volkswagen. There is of course little comfort from our nationalist defenses. Yes we are not Pakistan, but it would not take much to tip
the scale. It is only geography (non-adjacency to Afghanistan, no stake in Kashmir) that rescued us from Indo-Pak nuclear brinkmanship and American-Soviet pawn moves. Tariq Ali once wrote that Pakistan was the "used condom" from the Afghan war that America had fished out of the toilet after 9/11.

With yesterday's assassination of Benazir, again the Pakistan shadow over Bangladesh. Palpable jitters on the Dhaka streets. How long before Bangladesh gets engulfed by similar syndromes?

Meanwhile, two blog entries..

Assassins, A South Asia Story 

Assassination Alley
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Infernal, dark as the grave

(the credits alone are a work of art...)

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I'm a little startled myself, but it's been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of "Sweeney Todd" comes above all from its bracing refusal of any sentimental consolation, from Mr. Burton's willingness to push the most dreadful implications of Mr. Sondheim's story to their blackest conclusions.

"Sweeney Todd" is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end, but you don't see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear -- some of the finest stage music of the past 40 years -- is equally infernal, except that you might just as well call it heavenly.

[A.O. Scott, for the NYTimes]

The NY State of Things

David Hammons
African-American Flag, 1990
Dyed cotton fabric
Courtesy of Ellipse Foundation -- Contemporary Art Collection

via NYTimes, Art Review | 'New York States of Mind'

Never Mind the Map: Sometimes New York City Is More of an Idea
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: December 21, 2007

Oh, say can you see? With its red and black stripes and black stars on a green field, David Hammons's beautiful "African-American Flag" hangs high over the central exhibition space of "New York States of Mind" at the Queens Museum of Art.

Thus placed, the flag seems more than an elegantly mordant comment on race in America. It reads as the symbol of a separate country, a land where conservative American values are inverted, where liberal tolerance and reckless creative ambition thrive, and where dissent is valued as highly as consent. A country called New York City.

It is this view of New York that the curator Shaheen Merali wanted to frame when he organized this exhibition for the House of World Cultures, in Berlin, where he leads the department of exhibitions, film and new media, and where the show was on view earlier this year.

"The metropolis of New York differentiates itself from the rest of the United States in dialectical opposition," announces Mr. Merali in his opaquely worded but politically obvious introductory wall text.

The show, which includes about 30 artists who live in or have lived in New York, is too small, narrow, uneven and confusing to live up to its grand idea. Focusing on cerebral, tendentious works, it comes off as more didactic and ideological than imaginatively adventurous. What's more, it seems less about New York than about the trendy interests of the international curator set.

Still, this is an interesting, provocative exhibition. If you want to have a lively argument about the true nature of New York art, it’s a good place to start.

[read on...]

Happy Holidaze

Photo via flickr (Courtesy of Haiku Heidi)

See you next year...

Rebranding Skid Row

Top: The Whitehouse Hotel, rooms $9 to $54 a night. Bottom: The Bowery Hotel, rooms $425 to $1,200 a night. Photographs by Michael Edwards (NYMag) 

via murketing (AKA Rob Walker ):

Bowery branding

December 19th, 2007

New York Magazine ran a story recently on the redevelopment of the Bowery — all the new luxe hotels or whatever. They had a writer spend one night in an SRO, and the next night at one of said luxe hotels. At the SRO, he encounters a guy named Paulie, who is sweeping up:

This isn't just redevelopment as usual, Paulie says as he sweeps. That's because the Bowery isn't just any neighborhood. "It is like 42nd Street. Like Harlem. Names that mean something. Those places you don't just rebuild. You’ve got to rebrand them. The Bowery is being rebranded."

I'm amused that even the guy who sweeps up at a Bowery fleabag is comfortable with "rebranding" as a concept.

I was also amused by the story's subhead, which refers to the Bowery as "America’s greatest skid row." I think I missed the issue of Conde Nast Traveller where they ranked all the "skid rows."

Read the NYMAg piece:

Down and Out and ... Up and In on the Bowery
From the Whitehouse Hotel, the street's last SRO, to the door (manned by red-coated doormen) of the Bowery Hotel is only 35 steps for a reporter—but a giant leap into the rebranded, denatured future of America's greatest skid row.
By Mark Jacobson
Published Dec 10, 2007

 

Only Re-connect

Thomas Hannich. Crocheted laptop by Joana Vasconcelos.

via NYTimes:

Handmade 2.0
By ROB WALKER (AKA murketing )
Published: December 16, 2007

The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called buyhandmade.org in late October. "I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me," it said, and you could type in your name to "sign" on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done so. "Buying handmade is better for people," a statement on the site read in part, and "better for the environment," because mass production is a "major cause" of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.

The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist group, but actually the consortium's most prominent member was the online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills itself as "your place to buy & sell all things handmade." Etsy does not fulfill orders from an inventory; it's a place where sellers set up virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales. While eBay rose to prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.

Maybe you're interested in a "random music generator" called the Orb of Sound ($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs, near Seattle. Or the "hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters" sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las Cruces, N.M. Or the "Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle" ($5), made by a woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.

Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is, it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the unsentimental notion of the profit motive.

On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying 300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web 2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. "Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost," the Handmade Pledge site asserts. "Buying handmade helps us reconnect." The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past. [read on...]

See also (via murketing):

Handmade 2.0: Links of interest

Catherine Opie and One Laptop Per Child

via Modern Art Obsession, 12/12/07:

MAO Art Buy of the Month by Famed Photographer Catherine Opie

OK.. my little MAO-ettes.. this one is almost too good to believe...but yes..

It's totally legit..and such a deal plus you get to help a great charity!

There's this amazing charity called.. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Here's more about the OLPC charity.

The charity's mission is to provide a means of learning, self-expression and exploration to the nearly 2 billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. They look to provide a laptop to help connect and educate children...so what could be better then that??

Well.. how about also getting a one of a kind signed 11" x 14" color photo from one of America's most sought after photographers for just a $500 donation (aka.. a tax deduction).. ??

Actually it's a $400 donation and for $100, and you'll get a signed photo.

FYI.. a typical editioned Catherine Opie photo of this print size would sell easily for over $3,000 in a gallery...plus these are all unique! Not bad!  Here's more on Catherine Opie.

So Catherine Opie created a project of 100 images where she took photo's (both landscapes and portraits) of the artist's neighborhood of Los Angles and Three Rivers as a backdrop for the OLPC laptop.

Dr. Quiz and I saw a few examples of the photo's at the Luminaire Studio during Art Basel.. they were all pretty cool.

So, the only catch is you can't choose your exact image.. it's a surprise which one you'll get.

First, you just have to register at this website.. and then you can make your $500 donation here, and you'll get your unique 11"X14" Catherine Opie photo. Then they send you an invoice.. your pay, and they send you the package with the Opie Photo.

For those having trouble with the Luminaire Site.. Just call or contact :

ANGELA PEREZ: 305.576.5788 OR ANGELA.PEREZ@LUMINAIRE.COM  or

Monique Brendel : monique.berndel@luminaire.com

and tell them MAO sent you.. for more info on this Charity Print Offer.

OK.. my little MAO-ettes.. this one is almost too good to believe...but yes..

It's totally legit..and such a deal plus you get to help a great charity!

There's this amazing charity called.. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Here's more about the OLPC charity.

The charity's mission is to provide a means of learning, self-expression and exploration to the nearly 2 billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. They look to provide a laptop to help connect and educate children...so what could be better then that??

Well.. how about also getting a one of a kind signed 11" x 14" color photo from one of America's most sought after photographers for just a $500 donation (aka.. a tax deduction).. ??

Actually it's a $400 donation and for $100, and you'll get a signed photo.

FYI.. a typical editioned Catherine Opie photo of this print size would sell easily for over $3,000 in a gallery...plus these are all unique! Not bad!  Here's more on Catherine Opie.

So Catherine Opie created a project of 100 images where she took photo's (both landscapes and portraits) of the artist's neighborhood of Los Angles and Three Rivers as a backdrop for the OLPC laptop.

Dr. Quiz and I saw a few examples of the photo's at the Luminaire Studio during Art Basel.. they were all pretty cool.

So, the only catch is you can't choose your exact image.. it's a surprise which one you'll get.

First, you just have to register at this website.. and then you can make your $500 donation here, and you'll get your unique 11"X14" Catherine Opie photo. Then they send you an invoice.. your pay, and they send you the package with the Opie Photo.

For those having trouble with the Luminaire Site.. Just call or contact :

ANGELA PEREZ: 305.576.5788 OR ANGELA.PEREZ@LUMINAIRE.COM  or

Monique Brendel : monique.berndel@luminaire.com

and tell them MAO sent you.. for more info on this Charity Print Offer.

The Story of Stuff

Christmas got you down? all shopped-out? you're being driven a tad homicidal as the New Year approaches? Try The Story of Stuff as a restorative. (thanks Amy!)

The Met Launches blog.mode!

via Flavorpill:
   
Comme des Garçons by Junya Watanabe, Ensemble, fall/winter 2000–2001, Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

blog.mode: addressing fashion

When: Tue Dec 18 - Sun Apr 13 (schedule)

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Ave, 212.535.7710)

Price: $20

Details: Event Info

Fashion is a relative newcomer to the reputable Metropolitan, but now the Upper East Side institution is stepping into the fracas of the fashion blogosphere. The museum is displaying 40 new acquisitions from its Costume Institute in blog.mode: addressing fashion, and — hold onto your chapeau — inviting the public to comment on the pieces through a blog on its website. While the armchair fug-sters do battle for most catty remark, the Met's sincere curators intersperse relevant art-historical commentary about such highlights as a 1983 black Comme des Garçons jersey dress and a 1947 Adrian piece featuring a Salvador Dalí design. While the high-class items are undoubtedly worthy of the Met's collection, it's the public dialogue that merits close scrutiny.

– H.G. Masters

via Artnet news, 12/19/07:

MET GETS INTO BLOG MODE
  While the average citizen "might shy away from commenting on the merits of a Juan Gris or a Henry Moore," notes Metropolitan Museum Fashion Institute curator Harold Koda, they have no such compunction when it comes to fashion. Thus, the Met’s first blog -- located at http://blog.metmuseum.org/blogmode/ -- invites the public to comment on the new exhibition in the Costume Institute galleries, a presentation of 65 recent acquisitions dubbed "blog.mode: addressing fashion," Dec. 18, 2007-Apr. 13, 2008. Comments can be registered at the Met's website, or on what is called a "blogbar" of eight computer terminals in the museum galleries. So far, remarks seem to be confined to "fabulous" and the like, though one contributor notes that 99 percent of the costumes in the show are for women, "reinforcing the idea that women are the peacocks and men should be looking on or not seen at all."

One of the many interesting items in the exhibition is the "Remote Control" Dress (2000) by Hussein Chalayan (b. 1970), a cast-plastic form with side and rear flaps that open to reveal pink tulle. According to Met curator Andrew Bolton, who co-organized the show, Chalayan is one of several contemporary designers who is beginning to issue his designs in limited editions in order to encourage collectors.
                

 

Ivin Ballen: Constructing the Readymade

reBlogged via ArtCal, The Zine:

Ivin Ballen, 50/50 at Winkelman Gallery       

By Joshua Johnson | Features, Reviews | December 18, 2007

            

Ivin Ballen, Untitled (Cubes), 2007, Fiberglass, aqua resin, acrylic,
27 x 27 x 4 inches.
Courtesy Winkelman Gallery.

50/50
Ivin Ballen
Winkelman Gallery - 637 W. 27 St., New York NY
29 November 7008 - 5 January 2008

The more modest materials of artistic practice occasionally come under the purview of the artist and are elevated to the status of art. In the 70s, when Rauschenberg was short on materials, having just moved from New York to a small island near Florida, he looked around his studio and saw the clutter of packing supplies and other detritus. He took immediately to what was at hand, and the Cardboards, a series of works made from simple cardboard boxes, were born.

New York artist Ivin Ballen was also struck with a similar revelation: while transporting several of his earlier works across country, he looked in the back of his car and found the works, wrapped in plastic and cardboard, transformed.

Ballen set about investigating this new vision, and while his paintings are immediately reminiscent of those shocking Duchampian works of Raschenberg, they are anything but ready-made. Ballen's process involves building a maquette from humble materials, casting them in fiberglass or resin, and painting them with trump l'oeil finish.

At first glance the effect is convincing, and without close scrutiny the objects appear to resemble so much contemporary art (see: Unmonumental at The New Museum) with their wacky assemblage construction. Upon inspection the paintings reveal elements of their process. "Tape" impresses rather than exudes, depths become protrusions, and the whole is a negative of its model. This reversal is characteristic of Ballen's work—here the ready-made is actually the constructed—and more Étant Donnés than Fountain.

Ballen has an loving relationship with the mimetic properties of his objects but isn't content to merely copy the surfaces of his models. Grape Mine, a vaguely H-shaped work, has a perspectival painting of two crossing L beams on one of its barrel shaped protrusions. The image raises the epistemic question of which representation is closer to reality: that of the painted beams, or the sculptural elements that imitate the objects from which they are cast.

Both are an illusion, of course, but Ballen deftly suspends his paintings in the interplay between the reality of the object and its image. These works may be anything but ready-made, but they represent the ready-made by quotation. They function as a comment on the tradition of appropriation; do we really perceive the object (a urinal) or do we see the veneer (Fountain), which is art?

Further fluctuating this distinction, is the work Speakers (2-way). This sound hybrid piece produces a sort of feed-back loop, which grabs sounds from outside, themselves a sort of ready made, and projects them into the gallery space to a transformative effect. The music alters the environment of the gallery, which in turn alters the work.

The alteration that Ballen first saw, that of his art transformed by packaging, is a reminder that what masks a thing may be more powerful than what is beneath. 50/50 is a show that examines the porous boundary between perception and artifice, producing a number of fine distinctions along the way.