NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell

Ah! Exactly what I needed!

via Artnet, 2/13/08 :

John Baldessari
Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell
1996-1968
Broad Art Foundation
© John Baldessari

Help Save 475 Kent: Sign the Petition

Photo: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times. Simon Lee, an artist, helped turn the building at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn into a haven for artists, but the Fire Department now says it is unsafe.   

via email:

Re: petition to save our homes/work spaces at 475 Kent. pls forward to all ...

Dear Friends  - New York, national and international arts community

we are trying to save the building where more than 200 artists, my
neighbors & lived and worked from for 10 years!

for more information:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/21/nyregion/21loft.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/nyregion/22lofts.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/nyregion/10building.html

please sign our online petition to  Mayor Bloomberg

http://www.petitiononline.com/475Kent/petition.html

please do so now. And PLEASE forward this to your friends.
We are trying to get thousands of signatures on his desk asap.

via NYTimes:

After Evacuation, Artists Begin an Effort to Save Their Haven
By CARA BUCKLEY
Published: February 10, 2008

The tale of the warehouse-turned-loft building by the banks of the East River in Brooklyn seemed a familiar one, at first.

Artists move into a decrepit building, quietly rehabilitate it, live and work there. The city eventually catches on and issues a flurry of violations, forcing the artists into the streets. Developers circle, landlords yield and sell. Condos ensue.

The roughly 200 residents of 475 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg were determined that their story have a happier ending. After all, the landlords were on their side -- an unusual alliance. So the residents tackled every violation they could at the building, an 11-story warehouse that had been home to artists, photographers and musicians for more than a decade.

But they have not been able to move back in, leaving 200 lives, and scores of livelihoods, in limbo. And one reason for the delay is a lesson learned from the deadly fire in the former Deutsche Bank building last year.

Three weeks ago, after a routine inspection, firefighters found the building's standpipes broken, the sprinkler system inoperable and heaps of matzo wheat in the basement. One of the landlords, Nachman Brach, operated a two-oven artisan bakery there seasonally, for the Jewish High Holy Days. Not only were the ovens a fire threat, the firefighters concluded, but dust from the grain could explode.

Within hours, the city evacuated the building, forcing hundreds of people out on one of the winter’s iciest nights, scrambling to find places to sleep. The oldest resident was an artist in her 60s; the youngest was a newborn.

Those who had to leave included Eve Sussman, whose video "89 Seconds at Alcázar" was the toast of the Whitney Biennial in 2004, and David Alan Harvey, the photographer. Melvin Gibbs, who played bass with the Rollins Band, lived there, as did Connie Crothers, the jazz pianist, and Vic Thrill, the lead singer of the 1990s indie punk group the Bogmen. So did Deborah Masters, whose relief mural, as long as a football field and filled with vignettes of street life in New York, is installed at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

"I have thousands of tons of sculpture in there. I would need tractor-trailers to house this stuff. And where am I supposed to get money for this in today's economy?" Ms. Masters asked at a heated meeting on Monday evening between residents and city officials. "This is a not a bunch of hipsters. These are people who do real stuff."

Stories like these rarely end well for artists. Dozens of residents were ousted from lofts in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn after the city found violations in 2000. The tenants fought bitterly with their landlord, Joshua Guttman, accusing him in a lawsuit of harassment and trashing their homes, which he denied. They eventually settled, but they had to leave. Tenants evicted in October from a warehouse at 17-17 Troutman Street in Ridgewood, Queens, have not been allowed back.

But things have gone differently at 475 Kent, as the building is known. Granted access during the day, the residents have tackled some violations: clearing debris, fixing fire alarms, replacing light bulbs in exit signs. They say the landlords have helped as well, removing the matzo wheat and having the standpipes fixed.

"The intentions have always been good on the part of the landlords," said Lillian Maurer, a sculptor and a longtime tenant who lived on the eighth floor and is now temporarily living upstate. "I don’t believe they are trying to put people out of the building."

The building does not have a residential certificate of occupancy, but that is not the immediate problem. The immediate problem that stands between residents and their homes is the broken sprinkler system, city officials said. The repair and partial installation, the city said, could take three months. So residents resolved to hasten the process. Twenty people got together and updated plans for each 12,500-square-foot floor. An architect from the sixth floor, Bart Javier, digitally compiled the data to send to the landlords' engineer, for review for the city, a crucial step in getting the sprinkler in.

The hope was that the city would allow residents back in as the system was repaired. After all, the building's floors were concrete and fireproof, and the standpipes worked again. Local politicians urged the city to bend.

But the Fire Department stood firm. In the wake of the fire in August at the former Deutsche Bank building in Lower Manhattan, where a standpipe was not working and two firefighters died, a fire official said it was too risky to let people in while the sprinkler system was being fixed. [read on...]

Joy Garnett, New Paintings. Winkleman Gallery, Feb 15-Mar 15

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 25, 2008

Joy Garnett
New Paintings

February 15 – March 15, 2008
Opening: Thursday, February 21, 6-8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tues – Sat, 11 6 pm

Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York artist Joy Garnett. In four large canvases Garnett continues her groundbreaking exploration of the malleability of instantly globalized images and how they have begun to replace written language as the markers of mankind's collective memory or consciousness.

Unlike her last three New York exhibitions, which centered on specific themes of conflict or violence, this grouping is united only by the loose suggestion of images possibly taken at precisely the same moment in very different locations around the world. Garnett circles the planet to underscore perhaps the unstoppable imperative of this new lingua franca. The images Garnett paints are culled from digital mass media outlets and then archived for sometimes months at a time, permitting their context to evaporate. Returning to the image with a fuzzy at best memory of what it reportedly documented, Garnett's process highlights the role misremembering plays in this new dubious "reality."

The optimistic rising sun in Morning in China references the economic ascent of the Asian giant, even as its smoggy landscape hints at the potential environmental disaster such rapid expanse can bring. The explosion and chaos suggested in the bright daylight of Noon points to the inescapably volatile nature that defines the seemingly ubiquitous power grabs taking place around the globe or simply the natural consequences of so much movement all at once. The South American seascape at moonlit dusk seen in Harbor (2) belies a calm similar to the Chinese morning, even as the blood red reflections hint at something sinister. And the overwhelmingly dark and massive destruction conveyed in the rubble of the World Trade Center in Night reminds us that there remains the potential for as-yet unimaginable nightmares. The first painting Garnett has been able to paint of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (despite it being the single most photographed event in human history), Night is a tour-de-force of expressionistic recollection visited upon its ubiquitous source image. It is also the only incident that's clearly identifiable among the exhibition's paintings, but as the event that only served to speed up an already insanely speedy world it has already taken on legendary status and become the central catalyst of the enhanced and panicked race to globalize.

Joy Garnett received her MFA from The City College of New York and studied painting at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her notable exhibitions include, Strange Weather at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; Image War, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2006); When Artists Say We, Artists Space (2006); Visionary Anatomies, Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition (2004-2007); and Without Fear or Reproach, De Witte Zaal, Ghent, Belgium (2003).

For more information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com

Just launched: portabledocument

Check out artist David Dodge's beautifully conceived new online interface for artist books (etc.): http://www.portabledocument.org

The project is a curated online resource for artist books, documents and projects. PDF versions of these books and pamphlets are available on the site for free download. Though viewing a book on the computer can be a challenging experience, the site does offer a chance to see work that otherwise would not surface to very many people. Eventually, the project will also take on a real world manifestation through lectures, book signings and, as of yet, other undecided gatherings.

(image above):

Our first cookbook, a visual smorgasbord by Katie Grinnan and Tom Holmes, is online and ready to accompany you on your kitchen adventures. Mix & Mingle & Mangle and happy cooking! [...]

Ludlow 38 opens on the Bowery

via Artnet News, Jan 24, 2008:

GERMANS TAKE THE BOWERY
Still more heat is coming for the Lower East Side art scene. As part of a push to expand the reach of its programming, the hip uptown German cultural organization the Goethe-Institute is opening a new satellite art space, Ludlow 38, at the eponymous address on the Bowery between Grand and Hester streets, not too far from the New Museum. While the Institute is providing the administrative support, it has tapped the Munich-based culture lab Kunstverein München to organize programming for the first year. The Kunstverein's Stefan Kalmar serves as creative director, and the space is said to be not necessarily Teutonic in focus, but rather a showcase for the kind of "social exchange" that his home institution promotes, with a focus on "collaboration and innovation." Funding is provided by the MINI.

 

Up first for Ludlow 38 is "Publish and Be Damned," Feb. 9-Mar. 23, 2008, organized by British curators Kit Hammonds, Sarah McCrory and Emily Pethick. In keeping with the democratic artistic values that the space hopes to promote, the show consists of an archive of 300 international publications, celebrating DIY creativity in a variety of forms. Expect works from the likes of Jeremy Deller, Nils Norman, Raymond Pettibon and Stephan Willats, along with less-known figures like Pablo Bronstein, Aline Bouvy, Eleanor Brown, Spartacus Chetwynd, Sonia Dermience, Stephan Dillemuth, Scott King, Cathy Lomax and Meeuw Muzak.