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Bad at Sports presents Episode 169: Edward Winkleman

via email alert:

Episode 169: Edward Winkleman

THIS WEEK: Gallerist, blogger, straight shooter, and tough-love
proponent Edward Winkleman. Ed tells it like it is and gives some much
needed advice for the young artist.

Edward Winkleman is vastly different than Babe Winkleman, although
both are highly respected in their fields.

NAMES DROPPED:
Ed Winkleman; Plus Ultra Gallery; Winkleman Gallery; Joshua Stern; Art
Blog LA; The Met; Guggenheim; Rockefeller; Klimt; CalArts; Robinson
Crusoe; Louise Bourgeois; Larry Gagosian; Becky Smith; Bellwether;
Tony Fitzpatrick; Paul Klein; Leo Castelli; Damien Hirst; Saatchi;
Takashi Murakami; Annie Leibovitz; White Cube

DIRECT DOWNLOAD:
Bad_at_Sports_Episode_169-Edward_Winkleman.mp3

OUR WEBSITE:
http://badatsports.com

CONTACT US:
badatsports@gmail.com

Warm Regards,
The Bad at Sports Editorial Team

CritiPop: Alexei Shulgin Interviewed

via Rhizome:

Interview with Alexei Shulgin

By Brian Droitcour on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm


Image: 386DX performance at Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2000. (Photo by Jenny Marketou)

Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugge! t of criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop", an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour

Your recent exhibition was called "CritiPop." Could you explain where this label came from, and what it means?

We spent a long time thinking about what to call the exhibition. Media Art 2.0 no longer fit. We had moved away from media art and no longer wanted to be associated with it. Eventually, we singled out the most important feature uniting the works: critical communication contained in a popular form, with shiny plastic, bright colors, primitive interactivity, a resemblance to consumer goods, glowing LED screens and so on. Thus, "CritiPop" was born. Its effect is akin to that of advertising or propaganda: vivid, universally recognizable images that conceal a subliminal message.

There is a striking amount of texts and manifestos accompanying "CritiPop." Are you concerned that the critical component of your work won't be read without them?

Almost all these texts were written in the years preceding "CritiPop," for exhibitions in our gallery. So, it was natural to include them. But basically you're right. We had to introduce the viewer to the context, because our works are easy to read on the superficial level of real-time, eye-candy effects, brightly polished plastic and impressive animation.

Image: Installation view at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (Photo by Anton Akimov)

Moscow critics often frame the history of Russian art after perestroika around artists like Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who worked with actions and other ephemeral forms of art during the chaotic 1990s and turned to object-based practice during the relative stability of the Putin administration. Your career follows a similar trajectory. Do you think this is a fairly accurate description of what happened? Why did you abandon net.art and begin to produce objects in collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev?

I think there are similarities here, but also significant differences. Unlike Kulik or Osmolovsky, who always worked on the territory of institutionalized contemporary art, I was working on the internet, which in the 1990s was an open zone for experimentation. I had become disgusted with the world of museums and galleries, where I spent quite some time in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, thanks to perestroika and the boom for Soviet art. I even decided to stop being an artist for a while.

The term net.art came later. In the mid-1990s you could make art on the internet without getting stuck in a particular context. The internet itself was the context. Eventually even net.art was institutionalized. But it did not create its own economy; only JODI could survive as internet artists, thanks to the generous grant system in the Netherlands. But net.art disappeared simply because the internet developed. As soon as a large number of people obtained access to the internet, net.art became meaningless. It dissolved in the mass of blogs and platforms. You could say that net.art invented and investigated methods and technologies used in Web 2.0.

Image: Alexei Shulgin, Natalie Bookchin, Blank+Jeron, Introduction to Net Art, 1994-1999

In the early 2000s I saw some creative potential in software art, which could be called the heir to net.art, and organized with Olga Goriunova four Read.me festivals, as well as the repository Runme.org (along with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean), which is active to this day. While working on Read.me, I noticed that software art was following the same path to demise as net.art -- it was gradually becoming absorbed by media culture and new IT products, by digital banality. That was when I began to work with Aristarkh Chernyshev. Our first project, in 2003, was Super-i Real Virtuality Goggles . But that wasn't my first material project after net.art. In 1998 I made 386 DX, the singing computer, and I've given 100 concerts around the world with it.

Web 2.0 marked the end of net.art, as it had to compete with the glut of ideas published on Livejournal and other sites like it, and thus introduced a crisis of originality. Moreover, the inability of political activism to affect policy -- the main shock here was the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- cast doubts on its reasons for existence. That brings us to the mid-2000s. With the strategies of the 1990s facing a crisis, we created Electroboutique as a laboratory for studying new strategies in art. We wanted to create media works that were plug-and-play and zero-maintenance. Furthermore, we wanted to distance ourselves from media activism, which had hit a dead end. Since art equals consumption in the conditions of the unipolar capitalist world, we decided to make a commercial object. We put protest and critique in its body. That's how we arrived at our style, which we called commercial protest. Then we added exciting shapes and sound. And that's how we got CritiPop.

MORE »

Five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact

via FlashArtonline:

INTERVIEW:
PAUL CHAN
Maurizio Cattelan

 

Flash Art 262  October 08

 

SOME THINGS JUST STICK IN YOUR MIND

MAURIZIO CATTELAN: You look great.

Paul Chan: Thank you.

MC: Before we start, I would like to give you

something.

PC: What is it?

MC: Five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact.

PC: I don’t know what to say…

MC: Think of it as a gift.

PC: I know what to say now. Thank you.

[Five long minutes pass]

MC: How do you feel?

PC: Aroused.

MC: Isn’t that strange, me too!

PC: I don’t think it’s strange. It’s just nice.

MC: Why do you think that happened?

PC: Silence and attention have a way of

heightening all the senses.

MC: It’s true. You even look a tad taller.

PC: It might be the new pants.

4th Light, 2006. Digital video projection, 14 mins. Courtesy

Greene Naftali, New York.

MC: Should we start? You gave a talk recently in New York at The New School. It was advertised as an artist lecture. A lot of people showed up and I think they expected you to talk about your work and show pictures and videos and so on. But you didn’t do any of that. Instead, you delivered a speech. What was the title again?

PC: “The Spirit of Recession.”

MC: That’s right. You talked about how the global economy is a form of religion and

how secularism isn’t secular at all. And how art can be connected to what a recession is in the religion of world economy. Something about art being a lyrical farewell. Is that close?

PC: That’s close.

MC: It was very provocative. People were really upset.

PC: How upset?

MC: There was a fist fight.

PC: No. Where?

MC: After the lecture, two blocks down from the auditorium.

PC: Why were they fighting?

MC: Don’t really know. I was leaving the talk and suddenly found myself in a small crowd of people watching something. And that’s where I saw two young guys punching and grabbing at each other on the sidewalk, screaming about you and something about the economy and art and the recession.

PC: That makes no sense.

MC: Fighting never makes any sense.

PC: Did you try to stop them?

MC: No. I just watched.

PC: Did anyone try to stop them?

MC: No one needed to. They got tired after a while and stopped themselves.

PC: Isn’t it nice when things stop themselves?

It’s the only form of justice we have left today: when a wrong stops because it is

too tired to go on wronging.

MC: Can you elaborate?

PC: Sure. But first, tell me what you did after they stopped fighting.

MC: I went to eat something, I was starving.

PC: Unusually so?

MC: Yes, now that I think about it.

PC: Do you always feel starved after artist talks?

MC: I usually feel confused. But I think it was more the fight.

PC: You were really hungry after watching the fight.

MC: Yes.

Clockwise from left: Score for 7th Light, 2007. Mixed media on paper, 35 x 28 cm; 6th Light, 2007. Digital video projection, 14 mins; My birds... trash... the future, 2004. Two-channel digital

projection installation, 16 mins. All images, courtesy Greene Naftali, New York.

PC: Why do you think that is?

MC: I don’t know. Maybe confl ict makes me want to eat?

PC: But you didn’t join the fight, you didn’t physically participate, right?

MC: That’s right.

PC: So, watching the fight was strenuous enough to make you feel famished.

MC: Yes, I would say so. It took energy to try to pay attention and make sense of it.

PC: I see. So the hunger was the feeling of having to replenish the energy used in sensemaking. But why do you think it took so much energy? You said you were starving, right? Or is that part of your dramatic fl air?

MC: Drama does not interest me. But I wasn’t exaggerating.

PC: So why so much energy expended just to watch a fight?

MC: Why are you so interested?

PC: It’s a good question. Maybe I can answer you once this is over.

MC: That’s a very Delphic answer.

PC: I don’t know what Delphic means. Does it have something to do with dolphins?

MC: No. It means something that is needlessly obscure and a bit mystical.

PC: In that case, I disagree with you.

MC: Maybe we need another five minutes of eye contact.

PC: Thanks, but no thanks. I’m still aroused from the last one.

MC: Do you still want to know?

PC: Sure.

MC: When I look at something that interests me, or intrigues me, I can feel myself following its movements or the way it plays. That’s how something becomes expressive, when it invites me into itself so that I can follow its course, without telling me where I’m supposed to end up.

And when I choose to do it, the following takes up a lot of energy.

PC: It’s as if once you became interested in watching the fight, you stay interested by internalizing the movement and shape of the fight, to fi gure it out, or at the least, to take pleasure in it.

MC: Something like that, yes. But there was no pleasure in it.

PC: Why did you keep watching then?

MC: I don’t see physical fights over art everyday. It caught my attention. I was curious.

PC: Someone wrote once, “curiosity is the pleasure principle of thought.”

MC: Who wrote that?

PC: Hillary, I think.

MC: You’re joking.

PC: Maybe it was Napoleon, I don’t remember. Whatever the case, you followed the

fight from the inside, so to speak, drawing from your sense experience an inner expressive model of what was happening right in front of you. And all that energy you needed to replenish by eating was used because it became in.

MC: That is the nature of thinking.

PC: It’s very physical, isn’t it? The mind is a muscle.

Left: Paul Chan and Christopher McElroen, Waiting for Godot, 2007. View of the performance in New Orleans. Presented by Creative Time, New York and the Classical Theater of Harlem, New York. Right: A Season for Sade 1, 2008. Fabric and charcoal on paper, 223,5 x 145 cm.

MC: You’re saying even though I was not physically in the fight, the fight was physically inside me?

PC: To imagine the course of experience outside ourselves unfolding as if it was the

course of our own inner life, without succumbing to the easy graces of pre-determined concepts, is when thinking becomes most reckless and alive.

MC: Are you saying that thinking is like a form of parroting the world?

PC: Yes, but without the bird and the funny voice. Some people call it mimesis.

MC: Do these people have college degrees?

PC: The ones who use it poorly, yes.

MC: How does this relate to your work?

PC: I’m not sure it does. But drawing more generally from all this, maybe we can say that art is the emphatic shape of thinking experience made by no-body.

MC: Can you talk more about this?

PC: Of course.

(Maurizio’s note: At this point in the conversation, Paul says he has to make a call from the payphone outside and excuses himself from the table at the ESPN zone sports bar and restaurant where we are talking. He never comes back. I receive an email two days later from Paul thanking me for the conversation and the nice lunch. I reply that the conversation had just started and that it would be great if it continued at a sports bar of his choosing. The email bounces back, as do others I send later. And I have no phone number for him. The interview is printed as is. I would like to extend and continue this conversation with you, Paul, if you like. We can talk about any number of things that have nothing to do with thinking or fi ghts. I know you are also fond of animals and basketball. My email address is maurizioisatwork@aol.

com. Email me and let’s keep talking!)

This interview is part of an ongoing project in which Maurizio Cattelan interviews contemporary artists for Flash Art.

Maurizio Cattelan is an artist based in New York.

Paul Chan was born in Hong Kong in 1973. He lives and works in New York.

Margaret Atwood: Payback

via NYTimes Sunday Magazine:

Questions for Margaret Atwood
In the Red
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: September 26, 2008

As one of Canada ’s most esteemed novelists and poets, you are about to deliver a series of public lectures on a seemingly nonliterary subject, “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth,” which is also the title of your latest book. Your timing is perfect. Well, I didn’t do it on purpose. It’s not my fault. I didn’t make those banks collapse.

I thought maybe you made the banks fail in order to help your book sales. I didn’t even consider it. When I came up with the idea two or three years ago and planned out the lectures, this was not on the horizon. Everybody was happily buying subprime-mortgage vehicles.

So what led you to take up the subject of debt? Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent.

Are you saying we should view her as a pioneer of deficit spending? You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.

What about you? Have you ever carried credit-card debt? No. I am very picky about that because you have to pay such large sums in interest. There’s a little bit of Scrooge in all of us, but apparently not enough in some.

Right, there’s a lot of Madame Bovary out there now, with people blithely sliding into debt. When did that shift happen? I can actually tell you. When the credit card came in. It made you feel richer than you were. The credit card in its present form — a piece of plastic that arrives in the mail — didn’t come in big until the early ’70s, as I recall.

I read somewhere that the average American household now has nearly $9,200 in credit-card debt, which is not a small amount. No. A great many people are spending more than they are earning.

How would you compare household debt to the budget deficit run up by the federal government, which is now more than $400 billion? Sooner or later, the householder has to pay up or declare bankruptcy. The federal government, on the other hand, has what they think of as an infinite source of money — namely, you. You can’t say, “I’m not going to pay my taxes.” You’re a cash cow.

Why do you think the Bush administration has spent so extravagantly? They’ve been allowed to get away with it. Nobody has held them to account and whoever did was called not patriotic and a bad person. So, Spend-O-Rama.

In 1985, you published “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a much-discussed classic set in a future in which the U.S. government has come to be controlled by right-wing fundamentalists. Do you feel you anticipated the likes of Sarah Palin? Ha. You can order action figures of her now.

Do you own any? No, I am afraid of what the actions would be. Read the book by Antonia Fraser called “The Warrior Queens .” You will see that no woman ruler has been successful if she has been an advocate for women at large. Not one, ever. It’s the Thatcher model, which is, “All women should stay home and take care of their babies except me.”

On the other hand, Palin is tapping into Madonna iconography by appearing in public with her infant. The Virgin Mary was known for being modest and demure. She is not a gun-toting mama. I’m sorry.

Well, thank you for your time and insights. I feel indebted. Next time, you have to let me interview you. Then the debt balance will be even.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY DEBORAH SOLOMON

Louise Bourgeois @ Film Forum thru July 7

Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine, 2008, still from a color film in 16 mm, 99 minutes.

via Artforum.com, FILM 6-25-08:

Spider Woman

by Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine (2008) tenderly untangles the personal and public lives of the esteemed artist, and clocks in at just over an hour and a half -- as if to offer a minute for each of her ninety-six years. The film is the third and final production by the Art Kaleidoscope Foundation, a nonprofit established in 1990 by Marion Cajori (1950–2006), who began work on this film in 1993 with codirector Amei Wallach and editor Ken Kobland. Its premiere at Film Forum precedes a presentation of Bridgette Cornand's documentary video trilogy at Anthology Film Archives, and both coincide with Bourgeois's full-career retrospective at the Guggenheim.

Like Cajori's previous features about Joan Mitchell and Chuck Close, which provide unusually candid interviews, this atmospheric portrait of Bourgeois bypasses the dryness of most art documentaries. It resembles instead a work of art in its own right, no doubt fueled by the uncanny sight of an artist revisiting her ideas from over forty years ago with vivid clarity. The film's three sections are titled after Bourgeois's sculptural installation I Do, I Undo, I Redo, 1999-2000, and explore several of her major themes, including memory, trauma, and identity. Although difficult to encapsulate, the best précis of Bourgeois's career is offered near the end of the film by Tate Modern curator Frances Morris, who notes, "For me, the first encounters with Louise were really as a historic figure, a classic modern twentieth-century artist. Subsequent encounters with her were as a contemporary artist.... She's the only figure in twentieth-century art that I see in both these contexts.... As she's become physically older and, in a way, more ambitious, her work has become more universal."

Other interviews with curators, such as Robert Storr and Deborah Wye, offer personal glimpses of their relationships with the artist. Wye emphatically states that she was "totally taken" and "in her power" when she first met Bourgeois; Storr compares Bourgeois to a vampire sucking up psychological energy. ("But most of the time she's putting energy out," he concedes.) However, the most scintillating bons mots are offered by the doyenne herself, and there are enough here to fill up a pocket-size inspirational book. These weave through the film as she gleefully describes and lovingly caresses her works, like little children. A few gems: "The purpose of sculpture is really self-knowledge"; "The artist has a privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious"; and, in response to a question from her longtime assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, "You have to read between the lines when I talk."

Although Bourgeois's joie de vivre is infectious and at times downright endearing (as when she rides in a Cadillac or wears a fluffy, hot-pink coat), viewers are reminded how her works have shaped -- and have been shaped by -- the art world. Never fully embraced by Dada, Surrealist, or Abstract Expressionist circles, she stopped showing her work in the early '50s, only to gain late-career success in the '80s, when "Greenberg formalism was on the way out." As Gorovoy aptly puts it, "My generation was interested in narrative.... Louise had been mining that area for a long time."

Not long after Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" plays on the sound track, the moody and meditative film concludes with a montage depicting an invasion of sorts: Bourgeois's massive bronze spider sculptures parked in front of art institutions around the world. Bourgeois notes that her spiders have been her most successful subjects and represent her mother, yet the film makes a stronger case that the artist is her own most successful subject and is the "mother" of generations of artists, particularly those working with feminist themes. As two members of the Guerrilla Girls argue, "Whether she likes it or not, she's our icon."

Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine runs at Film Forum from June 25 to July 7. To view the trailer for this film, click here. Brigitte Cornand's La Rivière Gentille runs at Anthology Film Archives July 8–20.