NEWSgrist - where spin is art

NYC 2008 Art Fairs best and worst

Sculpture of the Dolls: Detail of an installation by Jennifer Burkley Vasher. Photos + more commentary via C-Monster 

While NEWSgrist Central skipped the long art fair weekend and escaped New York for Montauk, our moles, Emily Postal and D. Nightshade (a.k.a. the infamous "underbelly") were out exhausting themselves at the fairs. These intrepid correspondents gave us most of their impressions in person; we crunched them into the following:

NYC 2008 Art Fairs best and worst:

Best art (in general) – Pulse
Best location/display – Pulse
Priciest Art – Armory
Safest Art - Armory
Some art even we could afford – Pulse
Some art we could afford but wouldn't want – Scope
Worst Art (in general) - Volta
Heavy on painting – L.A. Art Fair
Nicest art dealers – Pulse
Snottiest art dealers – Armory
Chattiest art dealers – Volta
Best  Café Food – Armory
Best Lounge Area - Volta
Best bathrooms – Volta
Worst bathrooms – Pulse
Best programs – Scope
Best car transport service – Scope (Zip car Prius)
Worst car transport service – L.A. Art Fair
Best front desk service - Volta
Worst front desk service – Red Dot (wouldn't let us in with our Armory Press Pass like every other fair did)
Didn't make it to – ArtNow Fair (since it was the sister fair of Red Dot, we didn't bother); Bridge, Diva and Chelsea Hotel
Most sorry we missed – Scope's Lower East Side Gallery tour

Whitney Bi: Problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations...?

via Carol Diehl's ArtVent, 3/28/08:

Impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial

Posted by Carol Diehl at 11:22 AM

 

Random quotes from the publicity information about the artists in the Whitney Biennial:

...It is the problematizing of expectations and formalisms through destruction and transformations that is the heart of the continuing project... (Todd Alden on Mika Tajima/New Humans)

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...invents puzzles out of non sequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial... inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion... (Trinie Dalton on Amanda Ross-Ho)

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...Thomson's inherently conversational practice both gamely Pop-ifies its often antiaesthetic historical precedents and resituates that generation's thought experiments in the social realm. (Suzanne Hudson on Mungo Thomson)

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...features dozens of strips of junk mail spliced together and “stacked” in two zigzagging towers as if piled atop a desk: it is a conflation of art space and work space whose subtle allusion to the increasing corporatism of the art world is tempered by its intricate polychromatic delicacy... (Lisa Turvey on Frances Stark)

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... Bove's "settings" draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings." (Jeffrey Kastner on Carol Bove)
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...creates space for the articulation of intention...(Suzanne Hudson on MK Guth)
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...This early work's active impediment of a unified spectatorial vantage point has led the artist to investigate, in his words, "a variegated relationship between painting - a practice whose ossified discursive and speculative value I want to mark with its various economic and technical support systems - and the contradictions of discursive engagements that subsist largely outside the site of display, but which are value-producing sites nonetheless."... (Suzanne Hudson on Cheney Thompson)
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...acknowledges the elusiveness of her practice in a conversation... "There is this great movie title for a film with Leonardo DiCaprio called Catch Me If You Can... about a con artist who always manages to escape. All artists are sort of like con artists." (Suzanne Hudson on Fia Backstrom)

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The Whitney Biennial is inconsequential except in how it isolates, as Jerry Saltz put it, "the current art school moment" (he would know, having visited more art schools than just about anybody) - and therefore the ways in which such schools are failing would-be artists. The very homogeneity of the show is a tip-off. Instead of aiding students in finding their singular voices and helping them to develop the methods that best put them across (here I'm not referring necessarily to traditional art techniques--although they are part of the mix--but whatever vehicle allows an artist to reach his or her fullest expression) schools rarely teach skills outside of the mouthing of terms and art references. Hence the emphasis on what Saltz termed "Home Depot displays." Not that great art can't be inspired by the local hardware store - Dan Flavin did a pretty good job of it - but in this case, easily available, cheap materials attached to lofty ideas are taking the place of mastery. I read once that more people graduate from art school each year than made up the entire population of Florence during the Renaissance. When schools stay in business by convincing everyone that by investing a couple of years and many thousands of dollars they can become an artist, there’s no room for true critical evaluation.

The most succinct summing up so far comes from an Associated Press review with no byline in the Baltimore Sun, which also notes the "unmistakable art school feel":

New art, even the most seemingly inscrutable, has the job of engaging with the culture around it, moving and affecting it in some way. Showcasing work that rehashes common themes and styles seems an odd path for a biennial to take. When the mundane fancies itself novel, it becomes nothing more than slightly irritating.

 

Fireside Angel: Dominic McGill @ The Armory

Photo: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

via NYTimes, 3/28/08: SLIDE SHOW: The Armory Show, (Art Review: Smooth and Safe at Pier 94, by Roberta Smith)

Dominic McGill at Derek Eller.
At the Derek Eller booth, the manic master draftsman Dominic McGill meditates on modernism past and future, while adding collage to his arsenal in "Moloch." In this enormous, new, volcanic drawing-collage, the words of Baudrillard, Santayana, George W. Bush and many others collide and combust around a fiery newsreel-like cluster of magazine images, all red. Their shape is based on the flailing monster at the center of Max Ernst's "Fireside Angel," which was inspired by the rise of Franco. Mr. McGill has mustered a commensurately apocalyptic tone. He makes the end seem near, and for much more than just art fairs.

STOP-LOSS is opening this FRIDAY March 28th across the country

STOP-LOSS is a new movie by Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don't Cry) about an Iraqi war hero, Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe). [read previous post with NYTimes interview ] After returning home after his duty, against his will, the Army calls Brandon back to duty in Iraq via stop-loss policy....

Sound Off is a blog-like portion of the movie's official website; the film's producers gave cameras to soldiers and their families - they make videos and post them to the blog, people who saw the movie post, and the director, Kimberly Pierce, responds... pretty amazing.

Sunday BMA Panel: Beyond the Waves, Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations

via BMA :

Beyond the Waves

Panel: Beyond the Waves, Feminist Artists Talk Across Generations

3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m.

Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Forum, 4th Floor

Presented with feminist cooperative gallery A.I.R. as part of a month of events sponsored by Art W, this panel features feminist artists and critics Carolee Schneemann, Mira Shor, Brynna Tucker, Susan Bee, and Emma Bee-Bernstein, and explores connections between generations of feminist artists.

@ The Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at The Brooklyn Museum

Free and open to the public.

The Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY        
          Telephone: (718) 638-5000; TTY: (718) 399-8440
Subway: Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum

Susan Bee is a painter, editor, and book artist living in NYC. Bee has had four solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery and has been a member since 1996. She is co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke, 2000) and co-edits M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Granary Books has published six of her artist's books. She teaches in the School of Visual Arts MFA in Art Criticism and Writing program. Her website is: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bee

Emma Bee Bernstein is a photographer and writer. She has a BA from the University of Chicago in Visual Arts and Art History. She wrote her thesis on feminism in contemporary photography. She has shown her photos at A.I.R. Gallery, the Smart Museum in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. The New York Times featured her work in Vita Excolatur, a University of Chicago erotica magazine. She has written about feminism in M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Bernstein is currently co-writing with Nona Willis-Aronowitz, GirlDrive, a book on young women and feminism, based on their cross-country roadtrip.

Carolee Schneemann is a multidisciplinary artist who ransformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Painting, photography, performance art and installation works shown at Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and most recently in a retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York entitled "Up To And Including Her Limits". Film and video retrospectives Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Film Theatre, London; Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Cinematheque; Anthology Film Archives, NYC.

She has taught at many institutions including New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Bard College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recipient of a 1999 Art Pace International Artist Residency, San Antonio, Texas; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1997, 1998); 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship; Gottlieb Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, Portland, ME. Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association, 2000.

Schneemann has published widely; books include Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (1976), Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979, 1997). Forthcoming publications include Imaging Her Erotics, from MIT Press. A selection of her letters edited by Kristine Stiles is also forthcoming.

Mira Schor is a painter and writer. Her honors include awards in painting from the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, and the 1999 College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.

Schor participated in the CalArts Feminist Art Program’s project Womanhouse. She frequently addresses feminism in art and issues of gender representation and power relations in her painting and her critical writing. Schor is the author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture and co-editor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory, and Criticism (both from Duke University Press) and of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online at http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/. Her essay "I am not now nor have I ever been..." appeared in the February 2008 issue of The Brooklyn Rail. She teaches in the MFA Program in Fine Arts at Parsons The New School for Design.

Brynna Tuckerlives and works in Brooklyn, NY as an artist, independent curator, and as Career Counselor/Internship Coordinator at Pratt Institute. She studied Sculpture with a minor in Art History at the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth (BFA, 1999) and studied Fine Arts and Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY (MFA/MS 2001). She is currently working on a photographic project called tentatively called Brooklyn Block Portrait stemming from her previous project called Cracks in the Concrete Jungle, a series of site-specific works throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Her recent exhibitions include w25thbtwn10thand11th, a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, NY as part of her 2006-2007 Fellowship. Her recent curatorial projects include Artists in Contested Spaces which happened November 2006 at Pratt Institute, as part of the Art in the Contested City Conference.