NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Incarnational Aesthetics opens Friday (10/23) in Chelsea

INCARNATIONAL AESTHETICS

Tamy Ben-Tor, Slater Bradley, Mathieu Briand, Coco Fusco, Rico Gatson, Michael Joo, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Molly Larkey, Nikki S. Lee, Joanna Malinowska, Rachel Mason, Alex McQuilkin, Yasumasa Morimura, Clifford Owens, Jeffrey Porterfield, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, and Cindy Sherman.

October 24 – November 25, 2009

Exhibition Opening: October 23, 2009, 6-9 p.m. with performances by Mathieu Briand, Rachel Mason, and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen.

@

New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS)
44 W. 28th Street, 7th floor (between 5th and 6th Ave.)
New York, New York  10001

The New York Center for Arts and Media Studies (NYCAMS) is pleased to announce the opening of Incarnational Aesthetics on Friday October 23, 2009. Organized by Stamatina Gregory and Jenny Jaskey, Incarnational Aethetics unites contemporary artists who use embodiment or “role play” in their work as a means of interrogating and deconstructing the public and private boundaries between self and other. More than a play-on-words or riposte to Nicholas Bourriaud's term “relational aesthetics,” it is also a kind of inversion. The wide swath of practices to which this term refers reframes public, social interactions as aestheticized space. Conversely, the work in Incarnational Aesthetics turns inward, using various strategies to represent, embody, and empathize with a specific person or entity, exploring the formation of subjectivity while testing its limits. Through performance, video, photographs, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition revisits iconic moments and underrepresented histories, and reexamines the raced and gendered politics of representation, the focus of media culture on simultaneous idol worship and destruction, and the relationship of identity to the state.

The postmodern practices of Cindy Sherman are continued and complicated by Slater Bradley, Nikki S. Lee, and Yasumasa Morimura, the artists inserting themselves into social subcultures and iconic artworks. Michael Joo, Rachel Mason and Alex McQuilkin embody the affectations of political figures and movie stars: along with the work of Tamy Ben-Tor and Molly Larkey these artists refuse and deflect simple analyses of the processes of identification. Other projects by Rico Gatson, Clifford Owens, Jeff Porterfield and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen reenact iconic moments in art and social history: Gatson becomes his ancestorsʼ racist oppressor in Flaming Hood (2000), and Owens revisits Benjamin Pattersonʼs Fluxus performance Lick Piece (1964). Coco Fusco and Joanna Malinowska take extreme measures to empathize with their characters: Fusco reenacts twelve-hour detention and interrogation of a Mexican maquiladora worker, and Malinowska treks to the Canadian Arctic in the steps of anthropologist Franz Boas. Photographic collages that document “Roberta Breitmore” (1974-1978), a performed character that was played by Lynn Hershman and three ʻmultiplesʼ, explore identity construction and precede her later agent-based works driven by artificial intelligence. Through the course of the exhibition, Paris-based Mathieu Briand invites participation in his work Identity is Property (2009) in which the artist offers his identity for sale to the public.

Sound the Mutantrumpets!

Ben Neill

Ben Neill and Bill Jones will perform at the MMiX Festival on Sunday, October 11th at Theaterlab:

NEW TECHNOLOGY • NEW INSTRUMENTS • NEW MUSIC

MMiX Festival of Interactive Music Technology

@

137 W 14th St.
New York, NY 10011

contact@theaterlabnyc.com

212-929-2545

October 8 – 11

$20 each night. $15 Students and Seniors

MAP

featuring:

Todd Reynolds
Luke DuBois
DJ Rekha
Elliott Sharp/Janene Higgins
Patrick Grant Group
Ben Neill and Bill Jones
Kathleen Supove
Jon Margulies
Joshua Fried/RadioWonderland
Dan Trueman and his Mini Laptop Orchestra
Bora Yoon
Chronotronic Wonder Transducer

Check schedule for free events and workshops

Visit the MMiX blog at themmixdown

Stay tuned for updates and further information 

via The MMiXdown:

Sound the Mutantrumpets!

October 5, 2009

Ben Neill’s Tripycal is one of those albums that looms large in my personal soundscape. Back in my publishing days, I used to wrestle with 300 page manuscripts and marathon voice recording sessions. My head was so often jammed with words and speech, that I’d escape to my office and put on Neill’s record, with it’s ambient, dub-oriented jazz that seemed to knock the text-based stress right out. And on weekend chill-out nights, I’d sometimes hear those sophisticated bass lines and spacey horn notes floating through The Cooler, that old metal dungeon of a nightclub on far West 14th street.

More than 10 years later, I have the pleasure of seeing innovative trumpeter and composer, Ben Neill perform this week at the MMiX Festival on Sunday night. Neill invented the mutantrumpet, a trumpet that’s been tricked out with extra valves, knobs, switches and electronics so that he can use the it to control audio and video components in live performance. He first introduced the instrument in the ’80s, working with synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog to create the electronic interface, and he further developed its computer capabilities during a residency in Amsterdam during the ’90s. The result is several albums’ worth of uniquely trippy, adventurous music flavored with jazz improvisation and dance-floor grooves, plus a career that includes many collaborators such as Mimi Goese, DJ Spooky, DJ Olive, John Cale, Page Hamilton from Helmet and the late artist David Wojnarowicz.

A few years ago, Ben Neill began working with photographer and visual artist Bill Jones, with whom he created Palladio, an interactive, playable movie based on the novel by Jonathan Dee.  In their performances together, both VJ and trumpeter control music and video as a single hybrid form – a truly interactive, live duet of images and sound.

Ben Neill’s latest album is Night Science, available on Thirsty Ear Recordings. Ben Neill and Bill Jones will perform at the MMiX Festival on Sunday, October 11th at Theaterlab.

- Jocelyn

"Hopeful", an exhibition by David Levine, opens @ Cabinet, Oct. 3

Photo courtesy Claire Laude/Galerie Feinkost Berlin

"Hopeful," an exhibition by David Levine.

Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn, NY (map and directions here).
Opening reception: Saturday, October 3, 6–8 pm (featuring a performance by Christian Hawkey)

Exhibition dates: October 3–24, 2009
Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12–6 pm

Cabinet is pleased to present "Hopeful," a solo exhibition by Berlin- and New York-based artist David Levine. "Hopeful" explores headshots—photographs of actors looking for work rather than publicity portraits of stars—both as genre and as material artifact. First appearing in the 1950s, these peculiar images routinely disregard conventions of portraiture: the intended viewer, who is in a position to hire the actor, is offered no environment, professional emblems, or trace of social context.

Today, New York City agents alone receive an estimated ten thousand headshots weekly, ninety-nine percent of which are routinely thrown out. What is the ecological impact of this rejected material? And how much waste—not only trashed photographs but also image CDs, demo tapes, slides, and manuscripts—does the culture industry need to generate in order to maintain its meritocratic reputation?

For the opening of "Hopeful," poet Christian Hawkey will stage a collaborative, polyvocal performance of his poem "i am writing to inform you of what i am currently doing," which draws its inspiration from Levine's installation.

A version of "Hopeful" was exhibited at Galerie Feinkost in Berlin in the summer of 2009. [Artforum Pick; Art in America Review]

About the Artist
David Levine's work encompasses performance, theater, installation, and video. His projects, which examine the premises of acting and spectacle, have been seen at Documenta XII (with Cabinet), Gavin Brown's Enterprise@Passerby, Galerie Feinkost (Berlin), Galerie Magnus Mueller (Berlin), the Goethe Institut (Berlin and New York), HAU2 (Berlin), PS122, and the Sundance Theater Lab, as well as more traditional venues such as the Vineyard, Atlantic, and Primary Stages theaters. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Bomb, Art in America, TDR, The Village Voice, The Believer, Theater Der Zeit, and Theater Heute, and he has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kulturstiftung Des Bundes, and Etants Donnes/French Fund for Performance. Represented by Galerie Feinkost, Levine lives in New York and Berlin, where he is the Director of the Studio Programme at the European College of Liberal Arts. He will be giving a presentation on "Hopeful" at Prelude 09 (preludenyc.org) on October 2. [see below]

About Cabinet
Featuring exhibitions of both contemporary art and historical materials, as well as an eclectic schedule of talks, screenings, and events, Cabinet's space was inaugurated in the fall of 2008 to extend the award-winning magazine's engagement with art and culture into the public realm. Located at 300 Nevins Street (between Sackett and Union) in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, Cabinet's space is open Tuesday to Saturday 12–6 pm and by appointment, and is fully wheelchair-accessible.

Also, @ Prelude09:

David Levine

Friday, October 2

5.30-6.15pm

MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY10016
ph: 212.817.1860

Levine's presentation will focus on unsolicited actors’ headshots and cover letters. Specific topics to be covered: the history of the headshot, the economy of the headshot, the demonic & vengeful nature of those hopeful stares, the tragic and transcendent ontology of the unsolicited submission.

[more info, directions]

Mental patient walks into a bar...

via Borowitz Report, 9-24-09:

Mental Patient Breaks into U.N., Gives Ninety-minute Speech

Breach of Security Under Review

An escaped mental patient broke into the United Nations yesterday, getting all the way to the General Assembly and delivering a ninety-minute speech.

A day after the stunning security breach, U.N. officials were still attempting to sort out how it was allowed to happen.

"We're trying not to play the blame game here," said U.N. spokesperson Carol Foyler. "The simple fact is, a legally insane man somehow got all the way to the podium, so how do we keep that from happening again?"

Theories abound as to how the mental patient made it to the U.N., with some suggesting that he may have escaped during a field trip to a county fair.

Reacting to the rambling and incoherent ninety-minute rant, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton echoed the feelings of many: "I was like, where's Kanye when you need him?"

Down to Earth @ ecoartspace

via email:

Please join ecoartspace and Solar One on Saturday Oct. 3rd for events with the Habitat for Artists Collective
and a performance piece Mothers and Daughters at Solar One by artist Chere Krakovsky from 1 – 4pm
Solar One -23rd Street and the East River, NYC

Followed by an opening at ecoartspace NYC, for Down to Earth from 6 – 8pm
ecoartspace - 53 Mercer St. between Broome and Grand, 3rd Fl, NYC

Down to Earth Artists:
Joan Bankemper, Knox Cummin, Stacy Levy, Ann Rosenthal/Steffi Domike, Susan Leibovitz Steinman, Simon Draper and the Habitat for Artists Collective, including Todd Sargood, Cathy Lebowitz,
E Odin Cathcart and Jeff Bailey.

Additional Contributing Artists:
Jacinto Astiazarán and Fritz Haeg, Lenore Malen & The New Society for Universal Harmony, Eve Mosher, Andrea Polli and Chuck Varga, Andrea Reynosa/Kevin Vertrees-SkyDog Projects and Christy Rupp