NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Sarah Pickering's Explosive Debut

 
Land Mine [image source]

via Artforum Picks:

Sarah Pickering

DANIEL COONEY FINE ART
511 West 25th Street, #506
January 05–February 25

"Explosions," Sarah Pickering's debut solo show, is both as understated and as boisterous as its title implies. The British artist's eight large-scale photographs capture the pyrotechnics of various types of bombs and explosives, suspending the fiery or smoky bursts at the moment of simulated impact. The quality of each blast—land mine, smoke burst, electric thunderflash, and so on—is distinct not only in appearance but also in tone. Napalm produces a low-slung, compact gray cloud that menaces the flat, sullen British countryside; the ground burst, by contrast, emits a brilliant flash of sun and joyful rays of light that are incompatible with the quiet grassy landscape. Detonated on the proving grounds of the British military and police, the bombs are used to prepare troops for actual combat, and Pickering's images cleverly investigate "representation" and "real," and aesthetics and death, in photography and warfare. These explosions are the illusionist's light show and the soldier's shield. More subtly, however, they point to the fusing of these qualities, to misdirection's thrilling flash.

—Nicole Rudick

TALK BACK (1 message)

Nam June Paik RIP

reBlogged via Rhizome: [Permalink]

Nam June Paik passed away - January 30th, 2006, 1:26 pm

 
------ Forwarded Message
From: "elastic group"
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 13:33:13 +0100
Subject: Nam June Paik passed away

I am very sad to announce the death of Nam June Paik who passed away at around 8 p.m.( ET. 29th Jan) in his apartment in Florida. The news was brought to my attention by Ken Paik( the manager of Nam June/ Nam June's Nephew) about an hour ago. Nam June's Body will be brought to New York by tomorrow afternoon and the funeral will take place sometime this weekend.

Iris Moon Please join us for a moment of silence at the second opening of Moving Time. [More....]

See also the announcement on Paik's website, and this Associated Press article, both via MTAA.

Originally by LEE WELLS from Rhizome.org Raw at January 30, 2006, 02:20, published by Marisa S. Olson

via Artforum News:

Artist Nam June Paik Dies at Seventy-Four
01.30.06 - Nam June Paik, known as the inventor of video art, has died aged seventy-four, reports the Associated Press. The Korean-born artist died Sunday night of natural causes at his Miami apartment, a statement on his Web site said. Song Tae-ho, head of a South Korean cultural foundation working on a project to build a museum for the artist, said he learned of Paik's death from his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, in New York. Paik completed degrees in music and aesthetics in Japan before pursuing graduate work in philosophy. He made his debut in the art world in 1963 with a solo exhibition titled "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television." A stroke in 1996 left him partially paralyzed. Funeral services will be held this week in New York City.

Rikrit Tiravanija: living architectural concepts and meeting areas

reBlogged via Rhizome.org: [ Permalink ] Originally by Valéry from WiFi-ArT.com at January 29, 2006, 15:29, published by Marisa S. Olson:

Rikrit Tiravanija

January 29th, 2006, 3:14 pm

Rikrit Tiravanija is making a solo show at the Chantale Crousel gallery in Paris from January 14 to February 28 2006…

Rirkrit Tiravanija 2005
Studio view, The Land, Chiang Mai, Thailand
© Tony Huang

Chantal Crousel is pleased to present you the third personal exhibition of Rirkrit Tiravanija at the gallery. Through a series of new works created in his studio in Thailand for this occasion, Rirkrit Tiravanija challenges the current value of notions such as "liberty" and "other world." He pursues his exploration of living architectural concepts and meeting areas, refering this time to Jean Prouvé.
Link

P Su is telling the concept idea how to place the house.

Rikrit has started in Thaïland in Chiang Maï a great project called "the land" where different international contemporary artist and architect have conceived architectural unit (houses) dealing with their own aesthetics concept. This project is dealing with a kind of social utopia where art is defining a topoï where new social skills may emerge…
A community is taking care of this land and is living there you may see the result on this Link

The land foundation website is here

CLUSTER at Participant

 
L: Galaxy Clusters, Priya Natarajan
R: Man on Sculpture, Daniela Steinfeld

CLUSTER

a project organized by Katie Holten

February 10 - 12, 2006
Opening Reception: Friday, February 10th, 7-9pm

PARTICIPANT INC
95 Rivington Street,
between Ludlow and Orchard Streets on the Lower East Side
 

CLUSTER is a sporadic, ongoing project organized by artist Katie Holten. The first CLUSTER took place in Bowes Pub, Dublin in September 2002*. The current manifestation of CLUSTER will take place in a cardboard box which will be presented at PARTICIPANT INC February 10-12, 2006. The box and contents will travel to the Sundown Salon in Los Angeles (in association with Art2102), FOUR in Dublin, and el particular in Mexico City.

Participants:
Betsy Aaron (US), Jan Albers (GER), Domenick Ammirati (US), Fia Backström (SWE/US), Terry Berkowitz (US), Sarah Browne and Gareth Kennedy (IRE), Horacio Cadzco (MEX), Paul Chidester and Helen O’Leary (US/IRE), Ann Craven (US), Clémentine Deliss (UK), John Duncan (N.IRE), Jacob Dyrenforth (US), Matias Faldbakken (NOR), Maxi Geil! (US), Tue Greenfort (DEN/GER), Fritz Haeg (US), Ellen Harvey (UK/US), David Hatcher (NZ/US/GER), Geka Heinke (GER), Matt Keegan (US), Lisa Kirk (US), Elizabeth Kolbert (US), Atta Kwami (GH), Lasse Lau (DEN), Miranda Lichtenstein (US), Polonca Lovsin (SLO), Robert Melee (US), My Barbarian (US), Priya Natarajan (IN/US), Isabel Nolan (IRE), Aisling O’Beirn (IRE), William J.O’Brien (US), Ani O’Neill (NZ), Sally O’Reilly (UK), Sean O’Reilly (N.IRE), Mark Orange (N.IRE/US), Raquel Ormella (AUS), Gary Phelan (IRE), Chloe Piene (US), Amy Plant (UK), PLATFORM (UK), Wilfredo Prieto (CUB), Sara Greenberger Rafferty (US), Kirstine Roepstorff (DEN/GER), Michael Sailstorfer (GER), Stefan Saffer (GER), Joe Scanlan (US), Taketo Shimada (US), Alexander Singh (UK/US), Greg Smith (US), Daniela Steinfeld (GER), Tercerunquinto (MEX), Sergio Vega (ARG/US), Mariana Viegas (POR), and Public Works (UK), among others.

It is no coincidence that CLUSTER resembles the refuge of a ramshackle community, and you could say that it’s an excuse for a party. There's a chance Chloe Piene will perform at the opening. There will be a local broadcast of Gary Phelan’s BLACK BRAIN RADIO. Greg Smith will construct a tiny sculpture that will 'live' in an interior corner of the box.

CLUSTER will scale from the minute to the infinite: Yale astrophysicist Priya Natarajan will include images of 'real' clusters that present dark matter. Environmental issues will be questioned directly and obliquely, in works such as Elizabeth Kolbert's text 'The Climate of Man' and Joe Scanlan's Ikon Earth. A number of other pieces will employ the book form, including Clémentine Deliss's Metronome Press and William J.O’Brien's zines. Other contributions will document collaborative projects currently taking place in other cities, such as Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates, PLATFORM's activites in London, and My Barbarian's performances in Los Angeles and elsewhere.

As a spontaneous and social event, CLUSTER spreads through stories and at sites that become available. Since Katie Holten moved to New York City in 2004, Lia Gangitano (director of PARTICIPANT INC and a neighbor of Katie’s) has been hosting parties, openings, and other social occasions. As a space that serves artists through in-depth consideration and presentation while introducing work into public contexts through exhibitions, screenings, and performances, PARTICIPANT INC is an ideal location for CLUSTER.

Works included in CLUSTER can expand and grow over the long-term, and the resemblance to an organic, living structure is intentional--this is a project that has current environmental issues at its heart. The organic development of CLUSTER also seeks to facilitate the possibility for contemporary artists, writers, architects, scientists, enthusiasts, and others to develop, create, and fiddle with ideas. Some CLUSTER works are invisible, or inhabit other spaces such as rumors, posters, rooftops, holes, instructions, stories, objects, t-shirts, pubs, and gardens. Potential is unlimited.

*Previous CLUSTER events:

The first CLUSTER was a one-night event curated by Katie Holten on September 6th, 2002, held upstairs at Bowes Pub in Dublin, Ireland.

Participants: Louidgi Beltrame, John Bowman, Maoliosa Boyle, Matthew Buckingham, Lorraine Burrell, CABINET magazine, Paul Chidester, John Duncan, Leif Elggren, Vona Groarke, Jorunn Irene Hanstvedt, Carol Kavanagh, Mark Lombardy, Frank Lüsing, Susan MacWilliam, Aisling O'Beirn, Helen O'Leary, Paul O'Neill, Vanessa O'Reilly, Mark Orange, Robin Robertson, Orla Ryan, Warren Sack, Dan Shipsides, Ann Shostrom, Roman Signer, Chris Somerville, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Andy Whall, Ian Whittlesea, Keith Wilson, Knut Wold, and Enda Wyley.

The second CLUSTER took place on a flier distributed at the ICA, London as part of the I.D.E.A.London project, organized by MA curatorial students at Goldsmiths College. (Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, UK. May 9 - June 17, 2005. www.idealondon.co.uk)

Participants: Betsy Aaron, Artichoke, Michael Baers, Terry Berkowitz, Elaine Bowen, CABINET magazine, Jacob Fabricius, Joy Garnett, Ellen Harvey, David Hatcher, Carla Herrera-Prats, Lisa Kirk, Blerti Murataj, Priya Natarajan, Ani O'Neill, Gary Phelan, Carlos Roque, Taketo Shimada, and Jeremy Stanton.

You Say You Want a Revolution, Oh Yeah

via NYTimes:
Recipe for Revolution: Take 11,000 Photos
By JORI FINKEL
Published: January 29, 2006

THE next time you're stuck in traffic in downtown Los Angeles, you could find yourself in the perfect position to view Ruben Ochoa's newest work of art. A San Diego native who made his name locally by turning his family's beat-up van into a mobile art gallery, Mr. Ochoa has just completed a billboard celebrating the legacy of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. It features a photograph of Siqueiros, who was a Communist Party leader as well as a painter, making a fist, his face streaked with paint, as two characters in the corner whitewash his image - a clear allusion to the censorship of Siqueiros's social realist murals in the past. Across the top runs the phrase "Ain't that revolutionary?"

Mr. Ochoa's billboard is one of many overtly political pieces created for "An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life," a group show that opens at the Redcat gallery in Los Angeles on Thursday. For the exhibition, 17 artists were asked to respond to Siqueiros's photographic archive, some 11,000 pictures that served as source material for his murals or as documentation of his finished artwork.

[orig. Siqueiros mural]

Most of the artists lifted images from the archive to make pieces like photomontages for installation in the gallery. Three artists based in Los Angeles - Mr. Ochoa, Mark Bradford and Daniel Martinez - also signed on to make billboards. They are scheduled to be installed downtown by the end of the week.

Lauri Firstenberg, one of the show's two curators, says she views the billboards as an essential part of the show. "Siqueiros was above all a populist artist - making art for the public and positioning it in the public sphere," she said. "We always wanted to have a component of the exhibition that was not bound to the gallery but would interact with L.A.'s urban landscape."

Born in 1896, Siqueiros at one point interacted with the Los Angeles landscape himself. Driven into exile for political reasons in 1932, he took a job teaching at the Chouinard School of Art and painted "Street Meeting," the first of three California murals, on the campus. During that period he experimented with new materials (automobile paints, for example, a more durable alternative to traditional fresco materials) and new equipment (like spray guns, a faster way of applying paint than brushwork). He also seized on photography as a tool for painting, using photographs of a work in progress to help guide its composition. (Those pictures recently led to the Chouinard Foundation's rediscovery of "Street Meeting," a vision of black and white workers joining forces, which had long been presumed destroyed but in fact was buried under layers of paint and plaster in what is now a Korean church.)

Beginning in the 1930's, Siqueiros saved many of the photographs that he gathered and commissioned from friends, professionals, newspapers and news agencies. There were photographs of the murals and photographs that fed the murals, ranging from staged shots of models to documentary photographs showing class and race struggles like labor union protests in Mexico City and the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Other pictures - animals, landscapes and buildings - seem more neutral.

When Siqueiros died in 1974, there were more than 11,000 images. He specified in his will that his archive, housed at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, be made available free for public use, something like a Communist version of Corbis or Getty Images.

About half the archive can now also be viewed at the Web site e-flux.com, an arts portal based in New York. Its director, Anton Vidokle, the other curator of the Redcat show, says he thought of putting the archive online when he visited it three years ago. "I was blown away by the material," he said. "I haven't seen a group of pictures this ideological since my childhood in Moscow. Even a humble image like a drill bit is celebrated - it's seen as beautiful, glamorous, a tool for revolution."

About two years ago, Mr. Vidokle and Ms. Firstenberg began drawing up a list of international artists to approach for the show. Many were Mexican or Chicano. "It was important to work with artists who have a connection to Siqueiros," Mr. Vidokle said. "But it's not like I went into their studios and asked to check their passports."

And, as it happened, they did not so much choose the artists as the artists chose them. To line up the 17 artists in the show, more than half of Mexican descent, the curators approached a few dozen. The Los Angeles conceptual artist John Baldessari and the Cuban installation artist Carlos Garaicoa were among those who proved unavailable. "It's a sign of how busy our leading international artists are these days," Ms. Firstenberg said. "But it's also a sign, I think, of how contested Siqueiros's legacy is."

Even some artists who chose to participate expressed ambivalence. Many say they are attracted by Siqueiros's political engagement, but repelled by his particular brand of politics and his link to a failed assassination attempt on Trotsky. As the Los Angeles-based artist Rubén Ortiz Torres put it: "He's a very dogmatic character, a Stalinist who believed that power should be centralized. But my relationship to Siqueiros is like my relationship to my father, or to Mexico in general. It's not a choice between rejecting them or following them mindlessly." [read on...]

Read more about An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life.

Read more about The Siqueiros Photographic Archive.

Press Release:

AN IMAGE BANK FOR EVERYDAY REVOLUTIONARY LIFE
Guest curators: Lauri Firstenberg and Anton Vidokle
February 3-April 3, 2006 

Admission to the gallery is always free

http://redcat.org/gallery/0506/bank.php

http://www.e-flux.com/siqueiros/

Tickets & Information: 213 237-2800 

Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012 
 
An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a multi-phase project that begins as an online photographic archive, making available to the public over ten thousand 20th century images for the first time. The source for this material is the collection of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who compiled the photographs over the course of his own extraordinary life. This archive can now be viewed at http://www.e-flux.com/siqueiros 

As Siqueiros wrote, "Nothing can give the [artist] of today the essential feeling of the modern era's dynamic and subversive elements more than the photographic document." The archive -- unique in structure, content and intention -- was meant for the use of fellow artists as a means of inspiration and a source of found imagery. The contents of the archive, images from the 1930s to the early 1970s, offer cultural and social portraits of different eras and nations. The collection contains photographic documents that capture a range of events from political protest to film and theatre performances, from anti-fascist demonstrations in New York and riots in Los Angeles to moments in the Russian stage and Mexican cinema. As the title of the project suggests, the archive offers a politicized vision developed in the context of revolutionary struggles in Mexico and abroad.

The original archive from which An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is drawn, is housed at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS) in Mexico City. In the 1960s, while Siqueiros was engaged in both art and activism, he converted his house in the Polanco district of the city into a public art space. The house now functions both as a museum for Siqueiros' work and a contemporary art venue. The SAPS archive will serve as the point of departure for the second phase of the project, in which an international group of artists and writers will be invited to work with the archive's material to extend the useful life of its photographs.

The traveling exhibition begins at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Los Angeles. As a venue for experimental curatorial practice, REDCAT supports provocative new projects that showcase the work of artists practicing around the globe and down the street. In keeping with this engagement with the life of the city, artists have been invited to make proposals for new works that will be presented in the gallery as well as public interventions to be presented billboards across the city. The original archive project and its reuse by contemporary artists will thus be integrated with the dynamism of Los Angeles in a fulfillment of Siqueiros' goal to combine the historical, social and artistic.

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life is a collaboration with Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros and is made possible in part by the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Etant Donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art, e-flux, and The Puffin Foundation.