NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Visual AIDS presents Tainted Love @ La MaMa La Galleria

Tainted Love
Curated by Steven Lam & Virginia Solomon for Visual AIDS. 



Tainted Love, curated by Steven Lam & Virginia Solomon. 

Featuring: Luis Camnitzer, Jose Luis Cortes, fierce pussy, General Idea, Gran Fury, Matt Lipps, Catherine Lord, Charles Lum, Ivan Monforte, Wu Ingrid Tsang

La MaMa La Galleria 
6 East 1st Street
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Sunday 1-6PM

June 4 – June 28, 2009
Opening reception: Friday, June 5 6– 9PM

EVENTS:           
Tuesday, June 9 8PM $15
THE HEAT IS ON! benefit for Tainted Love
Hosted by Mike Albo with John Oliver, Seth Bedford, The Gay Agenda, and Justin Bond
The Club - La Mama 74A East 4th Street

Sunday, June 14 4-6PM
Reading: Gregg Bordowitz, Raquel Gutierrez, & Lynne Tillman
La Galleria 6 East 1st Street - FREE

Sunday, June 21 3-5PM
Panel Discussion: Doug Ashford, Sharon Hayes, José Muñoz, with curators Steven Lam & Virginia Solomon
La Galleria 6 East 1st Street - FREE

Tainted Love offers a view of activist art that questions the idea that direct action is the only effective form of politics.  The exhibition takes its inspiration from political activity surrounding cultural production within the moment of AIDS activism, although the works represented are not strictly tied to AIDS. 

Tainted Love is presented by Visual AIDS, New York’s premier non-profit organization working between art and AIDS. Visual AIDS utilizes contemporary art to promote the message that “AIDS IS NOT OVER” through exhibitions, publications and events, and collaborations with artists, museums, schools, and activist organizations. We provide support for visual artists living with HIV and maintain a visual record of their contributions.  www.visualAIDS.org

Directions:
La Galleria is at 6 E 1st Street, New York City, between Bowery & 2nd Avenue, (212) 505-2476
F, V to Second Avenue

Picturing Michelle Handelman’s Dorian

Michelle Handelman: Dorian

April 26 - May 31, 2009
a perfect night
Sunday, May 24, 7-9 pm

Live Performances by:
Stefan Tcherepnin, synth
Nadia Sirota, viola
Flawless Sabrina, fabulous drag

Participant, inc.
253 e. houston st. (norfolk + suffolk) New York, NY 10002 

212 925 4631

http://participantinc.org

Hours: Wed - Sun 12-7

via NYTimes, ART IN REVIEW, 5/22/09:

MICHELLE HANDELMAN

‘Dorian’

Participant Inc.

253 East Houston Street, Lower East Side

Through May 31

Inspired by Oscar Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray,” Michelle Handelman’s video installation “Dorian” takes viewers on a delirious bad trip from innocence to experience to death. The surrealistic 52-minute narrative is projected onto four screens that are set up in a square with a circular, revolving bench in the middle for viewers to sit on.

A downbeat mix of “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Mulholland Drive” set to ethereal, avant-garde music, the video follows the nightmarish adventures of a young woman named Dorian, played by the drag impresario Sequinette. She first appears on the rocky banks of the East River with an old suitcase, looking like an aspiring actress just in from the Midwest. Discovered by a photographer, she is transported to a studio where she models punkish fashions.

From there she plummets into a hallucinatory evening of clubbing and riding around in a limousine in the company of various menacing, gender-bending characters. Then she is in her squalid bedroom, half-naked and drugged out. A mysterious, probably chimerical masked woman whose nude body is covered in glittery black paint hangs out with her, reading a book about Wilde. Finally Dorian confronts a vision of her dead self in the form of a scrawny, ghoulish, violin-playing old man (Jack Doroshow, who is also known as the drag queen Flawless Sabrina).

There are periods of tedium, but on the whole the film casts a captivating spell while delivering a mordant commentary on the decadence of contemporary culture.
KEN JOHNSON

Print Matters at Wired

Do go on to read the comments, as they are what make this dialogue interesting...

via boingboing gadgets, (thanks paddy):

POSTED BY Joel Johnson AT 4:12 PM Monday May 18, 2009 +

Media

death of print • wired

Welcome, Wired. We call this land "Internet"

Here's the problem with Wired: They think print matters.

Background: Stephanie Clifford warns that Wired may be about to die. Ad sales are down 50%, putting it just above Power and Motoryacht at the bottom of Condé Nast's portfolio of magazines.

I've got some relatively ancient history to share, but I think it's germane.

After I left Gawker Media, I was contracted by Condé to help the newly reacquired Wired.com develop a blogging strategy. I spent a few weeks with the Wired.com chiefs developing a battle plan and presented it to the magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. He gave it the nod—he got what I was trying to do instantly—and away we went.

Three months later the traffic to the Wired.com blogs had doubled. I cleared out writers that weren't working. That didn't always mean they were bad writers, but usually just bad bloggers—there is a difference. Even the best magazine writer may not be able to write and report in front of an audience.

Our most successful blog was Table of Malcontents, run by our friend John Brownlee (with Lisa, too!), who ran with the opportunity, creating a "net culture" blog that was the archetypal model for what we were trying to create: Smart, fast, full of personality, two steps ahead of mainstream tastes. It had a superstar team, and with hard work they were soon the most popular blog on the network behind Rob's Gadget Lab. (They also did much to make my not-so-secret motto come true: "Make Wired weird again.")

Then the magazine folks stepped in. As soon as it became clear that Wired.com's blogs might actually get some traction, the magazine started to dabble. I had structured the blogs so that each had a lead editor, something that that worked very well at Gawker. No one had a problem with that—until it meant that my lead bloggers might be telling magazine staffers what to do.

It's not unusual for print journalists to look down at online writers, and often rightly so. There are some amazing reporters and writers whose work appears in Wired, people who do the sort of storytelling that bloggers rarely have the time or skill to do.

But reporters treating their online peers like that at Wired? It was accepted without much question that the magazine side of the business—literally across the "Berlin Hall"—always trumped the online side.

I made it about six months before I felt too constrained by both the magazine and its publishers and moved on. Since then, Wired.com's grown to 11 million monthly visitors: its blogs are among the best in their fields and its tech news reportage is among the finest, online or off—successes I don't take credit for. The sheer size of that readership speaks volumes: the Times says the magazine has only 700k or so subscribers. (It's a damn shame that online advertising is devalued compared to print advertising, but that's the media world for you.)

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The "puzzle" edition last month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery.

Which isn't to say that we or anyone else who writes for money isn't doomed; we just don't have to buy paper by the ton roll, nor keep a support staff around nearly as large as our editorial staff.

Wired is great print, but if the magazine can't make money and is shuttered, taking the website down with it, I'm going to be livid. Not that making money online is easy—it's not, especially without sacrificing your ethics and your voice—but if any mainstream outlet should be able to make the transition, it should be Wired.

I fear that may be impossible, not just for Wired but for all these old brands, because they can't accept that the work at which they have excelled for years will be just as important when it's online—and online only.

P.S. No one actually ever called it the "Berlin Hall" except me.
P.P.S. The fact that it was the Times that published this piece, one of my other dear media orgs also choking and sputtering on the future, was not lost on me.

Being There: Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation

via ART REVIEW:

Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation, Winkleman Gallery, New York

By Jonathan T.D. Neil

Posted by artreview.com on 22 May 2009 at 6:09pm

White on White: The Pilot (just like being there)
15 May – 20 June

Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation, Yuri's Office, work in progress, 2009. Courtesy Winkleman Gallery, © the artist

The kind of art that Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation make often requires a bit of explanation, so bear with me: their current project, ongoing at this point, is titled White on White: A Film Noir. Devotees of art history will quickly recognise that Sussman and Rufus are once again drawing upon a significant work of past art, and in particular of past painting, as – how to describe it? Let’s call them 'datums': facts of orientation that can serve as a reference point with which to find one’s way. For 89 Seconds at Alcazar (2004), the datum was Valesquez’s Las Meninas (1648); for The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007), it was David’s 1799 masterpiece of (roughly) the same name; now the datum is Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White from 1918.

The cartography in which Sussman and Rufus engaged for their own White on White involved a kind of nomadic travel through central Asia. As Jeff Wood of Rufus describes it at one point in a dispatch from the Caspian Sea: “This is a research trip. For an art film about extreme combinations. Architectures. Economies. Landscapes. Personalities.” The Rufus Corporation website has been given over to a blog that details some of the travelers’ more bizarre and enchanting experiences, from sharing vodka in the early morning with a pair of freelance hydro-geologic archaeologists in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to bribing their way onto a train heading for Turitam, the rail stop for Baikonur, the former Soviet settlement and location of the Cosmodrome, birthplace of the world’s first space program.

The contents of the Cosmodrome are of particular importance for Sussman and Rufus. There, preserved like some eighteenth-century period room, lies the office of Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first spaceman. This is where the group’s travels reconnect with Malevich. Suprematism was Malevich’s answer to that most revolutionary of questions, What is to be done? His suprematist compositions, beginning with the quasi-mystical Black Square (1915), supplied a visual proving ground for the creation of a new consciousness, one that would free itself of all spatial and temporal limits. (The paintings trace their roots to Malevich’s costume and set pieces for Matiushin, Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s cubo-futurist opera, Victory Over The Sun (1913), a utopian space drama if there ever was one.) Malevich’s declaration in 1918 that he was “the commissar of space” led Wood to imagine Gagarin as heir to Malevich’s dream world and, eventually, Sussman and Rufus to the gates of Baikonur.

White on White: The Pilot (just like being there) thus stands as the first or pilot “episode” in this science fiction tale (all good SF is noir by nature). The centerpiece, Yuri’s Office, is a replica of Gagarin’s office. Actually, this is incorrect. What is stationed in the gallery is a full scale, three-dimensional replica of Gagarin’s office as it is pictured in a photograph that Sussman surreptitiously shot while touring the site. What this means is that the office reproduced in three dimensions in the gallery is not really a duplication of the office itself. It is a 3D duplication (the office in the gallery) of a 2D representation (Sussman’s photograph of the office) of the thing itself (Gagarin’s office at the Cosmodrome), which, it seems important to note, has been preserved to look like it did in the 1960s.

As with all such mise en abyme, this one is not without its distortions: the geometry of Yuri’s desk “recreated” in the gallery is just off square (Nicolas Locke, Sussman’s collaborator on the production of the office, told me that its inside angles come out at roughly eight-seven degrees), as is the rug, and even the ink blotter on the desktop. These details may be very small and easily missed, but that of course does not mean that they are not there and available to be seen and registered—“just like being there.”

The mock-ironic tone of that tagline uncovers what I think is ultimately central and deeply important to not only this but all three of Sussman and Rufus Corporation’s recent projects: each is deeply interested, if not invested, in certain problems, or rather mechanisms, of reference. This may seem obvious at the outset given their choice to hitch their wagon to significant works of the art historical past, but in no sense are any of Sussman and Rufus’s works simply about the paintings to which they point. Think about Las Meninas for a moment: the great achievement of that work was to shatter the barrier, to that point taken for granted, which had split pictorial from real space (indeed, it was just this revelation in front of Valesquez’s work that sent a young Richard Serra, then living in Florence, to dump his paintings in the Arno and to begin making sculpture). I like to think that 89 Seconds in Alcazar takes up residence in that moment of shattering and extends it for us so that we can magnify the points of stress between reality and representation.

Eve Sussman and Rufus Corporation, How to Tell the Future from the Past, v.2 (still from installation), 2009. Courtesy Winkleman Gallery, © the artist

Each work—89 Seconds, The Rape, White on White – holds tightly to a notion of reality (I hesitate to say 'realism') upon which much contemporary talk of 'mediation' (new and otherwise) has little purchase. White on White appears as if it will be most adamant about this. For all its oddity, for all of the directions—both spatial and temporal—in which the references point, there simply is no getting over what we might as well call the 'fact of the image' (is this not the very hinge of cinema verité?). How to tell the future from the past v.2, a three-channel video installation that captures a 72-hour train journey across the central Asian steppe (and joins Yuri’s Office in the present exhibition), attests to this undeniable reality, to its veracity. There is the landscape of Kazakhstan passing by; it’s just like being there. Only it isn’t.

The Original Fakes

Turinese band sticker, originally uploaded by brucesflickr.

from Bruce Sterling's flickr stream.