NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Prevailing Climate @ Sara Meltzer

Joy Garnett: Red Heat (Strange Weather #20) 2006

"Prevailing Climate"
@ Sara Meltzer Gallery
curated by Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak

opening reception Wednesday, July 12, 6 – 8pm
July 13 - August 18, 2006

artists:
Eric Anglès
Andrea Bowers
Margarita Cabrera
Anthony Discenza
Christoph Draeger
Joy Garnett
Boukje Janssen
John Jurayj
Catarina Leitao
Joan Linder
Anna von Mertens
Jason Middlebrook
Yumi Janeiro Roth
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
Type A

Sara Meltzer Gallery
525-531 West 26th Street
NYC [USA]
http://sarameltzergallery.com/

more info about screenings and events (including eteam, Andrea Bower, Carlos Motta, + others): screenings and public programs; press release [PDF] 

Sara Meltzer Gallery is pleased to present Prevailing Climate, a group exhibition curated by Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak. The exhibition will be on view July 13 through August 18, with an opening reception on Wednesday, July 12, 6 – 8pm. Gallery summer hours are Monday through Friday, 11am – 6pm.

Prevailing Climate examines two meanings of climate: the average course of a location’s weather conditions and the feeling or atmosphere that characterizes a period in time. Using severe weather and natural disasters as points of departure, Prevailing Climate comments on the various consequences of man's actions on nature and society, and in doing so, examines the tragedy, fear and distrust that connects our history, politics, consumerism and mass media.

Based on documentary photographs culled from the Internet, Joy Garnett's apocalyptic paintings evoke romantic landscapes that explore the conflict of culture, technology and politics through a decontextualized media lens. Using disaster photos from newspapers as the basis for somber, gray-scale paintings that feature anonymous human figures, Boukje Janssen awakens the deep psychology of the original images' subjects that may be lost in the overload of images in the mass media. John Jurayj combines imagery of war-torn Lebanon taken from journalistic images and personal travel and employs a variety of painterly tropes to investigate territory, genealogy and displacement, creating a disequilibrium interlaced with exuberance, melancholia and political disturbance. Jason Middlebrooks landscapes are in-depth examinations of land as sites loaded with symbolism and history, reflecting in particular, on the devastating effects of land development on indigenous plant, animal life and human life.

Questions of empowerment and participation are at the core of Andrea Bowers' artistic practice. Imbued with social, political and feminist critique, her video projects, drawings, photography and sculpture are reminders of the continued struggle for rights in anticipation of the political landscape of the future. Crafting simulated consumer goods out of soft vinyl sewn together with long, uncut lengths of thread, Margarita Cabrera explores the economic gap between those who manufacture consumer goods and those who purchase them. Yumi Janeiro Roth transforms everyday objects into forms that contemplate our relationship with material culture and the language of design vis-à-vis function. Domestic objects such as kitchen towels, for example, have been altered so as to serve as distributors of information and propaganda in our fear-driven and safety-prepared society. Catarina Leitao offers a refuge from the urban environment in her Artificial Retreat Devices (A.R.D.), portable tents designed to satisfy the desire for escape. Color and audio simulate a natural experience in order to provide a superficial retreat.

Anna von Mertens' hand-stitched works depict the rotation of the stars during violent moments in history, functioning as a memorial, landscape and as a study of astrological forces. More importantly, von Mertens reminds us of the deep psychological impact that history has on our lives and yet, the cycle of nature is oblivious and imapssive to its violence. Christoph Draeger, Anthony Discenza and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky reconstruct images from the mass media to investigate the ways in which information is dispersed. Draeger collects images and translates them into a variety of media including video, photography and painting. His "disaster jigsaw puzzles" suggest that the media conveys disasters to the public in the form of entertainment. Skvirsky appropriates and transforms media coverage of victims of war and natural disasters into cinematic compositions that critically investigate media's intentions and cultivation of our interpretation of events and their implications. Discenza culls visual material from commercial film and telvision, reorganizing, compressing and collapsing original information into a moment of simultaneous destruction and reification.

Questioning the nature of authority, Type A's photograph "Ours/Theirs" exposes and imitates the subjective meaning of the Prime Meridian. By creating their own "line" and documentation of evidence, they expose the arbitrary nature of Greenwich Mean Time and the "civilized" world’s measure of time and space. Joan Linder's pen and ink drawings explore and claim the sub-technological process of observation and mark making. Her series of images of bound bodies, void of human presence, are suggestive of power play as a tool in both sexual and political practices. Eric Anglès' quarterly publication is a blank broadsheet newspaper that is circulated via placement in arbitrary sites and on a free subscription basis. Lacking content of images of any kind, the publication instead bears only the marks of the printing process itself, a nod to the potential fpor information to stand in for knowledge.

Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression

Censoring Culture:
Contemporary Threats to Free Expression

Edited by Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva

Published in conjunction with
the National Coalition Against Censorship

ISBN: 978-1-59558-050-4

paperback $19.95 / £12.99 / $23.95 CAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS
+ EXCERPT

Contributors include:
Amy Adler, Judy Blume, J.M. Coetzee, Alexander Galloway, Hans Haacke, Dee Dee Halleck, Michael Harris, Marjorie Heins, Randall Kennedy, Ruby Lerner, Laurence Lessig, Judith Levine, Lowery Stokes Sims, Eugene Thacker, Siva Vaidhyanathan...

via The New Press :

In private, museum people have told me that self-censorship is indeed the order of the day. But it is quite rare for an official to speak about it in public. Self-censorship occurs behind closed doors. There are practically no whistle-blowers.
—HANS HAACKE, CONCEPTUAL ARTIST KNOWN FOR HIS SOCIALLY AND POLITICALLY ENGAGED ART

If your idea of censorship is an anonymous bureaucrat in a government office exercising prudish control over "offensive" art and speech, wake up and smell the conglomeration. Censorship today is just as likely to be the result of a market force or a bandwidth monopoly as a line edit or the covering of a nude sculpture, and the current system of new technologies and economic arrangements has subtle, built-in mechanisms for suppressing free expression as powerful as any known in other centuries.

In Censoring Culture, the nationally known author of the ArtSpeak books and the head of the National Coalition Against Censorship's Arts Program bring together the latest thinking from art historians, cultural theorists, legal scholars, and psychoanalysts, as well as first-person accounts by artists and advocates, to give us a comprehensive understanding of censorship in a new century.

Robert Atkins is an award-winning art historian, activist, and bestselling author of ArtSpeak and ArtSpoke. From 1987 to 1997, he wrote a biweekly column on art and politics for the Village Voice. A co-founder of Visual Aids, he lives in Palm Springs and San Francisco. Svetlana Mintcheva is the director of the Arts Program of the National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of fifty nonprofit organizations devoted to freedom of expression in the arts. She lives in New York City.

via The San Francisco Bay Guardian,
May 31 - June 6, 2006 - Vol. 40, No. 35:
Censorship is xxxx xx xxx
A new anthology looks at how we silence others and ourselves
By David Moisl

REVIEW "The ultimate dream of censorship is to do away with the censor," says Svetlana Mintcheva in Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, a collection of essays, interviews, and roundtable discussions whose contributors range from Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and hacker-culture explicator Douglas Thomas to fiction writers J.M. Coetzee and Judy Blume.

Mintcheva, director of the NYC-based National Coalition Against Censorship's arts program, is alluding to self-censorship, and its ability to operate at a perilously imperceptible level — sometimes even flying under the radar of the people doing the censoring. She and her coeditor, art historian and author Robert Atkins (ArtSpeak, ArtSpoke), hope to expand our notions of censorship, elucidating its many forms and thereby making its presence more visible.

The first section of the book deals with economics, touching on the US culture wars and the contentious issue of arts funding. Conceptual artist Hans Haacke defines the wars as "the conflict between those who would like to keep this country an open society versus one regimented by self-proclaimed defenders of 'values.'" Taxpayers do not wish to fund art that offends them, or so the '90s argument went, and now, says Atkins, the United States is one of the least generous arts funders per capita in the industrialized world.

This situation leaves art makers scrambling for private funding, which can bring along its own set of problems, including a market-driven ideology that calls into question the worth of art that's not turning a profit. In "Market Censorship," New Press founder André Schiffrin discusses the situation of booksellers: "The market, it is argued, is a sort of ideal democracy. It is not up to the elite to impose their values on readers, publishers claim, it is up to the public to choose what it wants — and if what it wants is increasingly downmarket and limited in scope, so be it. The higher profits are proof that the market is working like it should."

Elsewhere, the book focuses on censorship disguised as the protection of children, and a political hypocrisy that lies therein: "With poverty, homelessness, lack of health care, and the diminishing quality of public education threatening children's well-being," Mintcheva points out, "it is striking that so much political energy should be harnessed shielding children from the sight of a bare breast, the sound of a four letter word." What qualifies as protection is highly subjective, and the recipients are rarely asked to speak for themselves. The editors try to rectify that situation with a roundtable discussion among a group of teenagers.

Other topics in Censoring Culture include the harmful effects of intellectual property laws, the demise of alternative spaces for modern artists, and the ways in which military research contracts silence dissent at universities. Perhaps most sobering is an interview with Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas, whose File Room is an interactive archive of global censorship incidents. As one might expect, the book’s contributors generally place great importance on media literacy and critical thinking, on teaching people to face what’'s difficult and controversial, rather than shielding them from it. And Muntadas's initial motivation was the belief, shared by Atkins and Mintcheva, that greater visibility would serve as an impetus for change. However, he soon experienced the limits of the "if only people knew about this" approach. Our hypermediated world allows for an unprecedented degree of access to information, but, he says, we may be mollified by oversaturation: "Today, it seems that even if we are arguably successful in getting visibility for key political issues, little changes tangibly."

via Diacritic.org, April 15, 2006:
Facing Up to Modern Censorship

There are two extremely insightful articles on Alternet about phenomena of modern censorship. Both articles concern Robert Atkins, the co-editor of "Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free  Expression". The first article "Facing Up to Modern Censorship" is an interview and the second is an excerpt from the Censoring Culture book. Both attempt to drill deeper into the dynamics of modern censorship and away from the common flat perception of censorship being solely a repressive tool used by the state. It expands the culpability to the very artists, institutions and corporations that we commonly believe to resist censorship. I've cut and pasted excerpts from the two online articles below as they relate to my own concerns about the issue of censorship.

IMAGINING CENSORSHIP
Censorship has always been a dirty word. (It derives from the Latin for "census taker" or "tax collector," designating one of the most reviled citizens of the Roman Empire.) In the legal sense, censorship is the governmental suppression of speech. In a broader sense, it refers to private institutions or individuals doing the same thing, suppressing content they find undesirable. 

The classic image of the censor depicts a narrow-minded and prudish bureaucrat blind to the transcendent flights of the imagination we call art, burnishing his red pen or his stamp and inkpad with perverse pleasure. This portrayal renders the censor as the very opposite of the creative artist. But censorship often operates more subtly than that, sometimes disguised as a moral imperative, at other times presented as an inevitable result of the impartial logic of the free market. No matter how it may be camouflaged, however, the result is the same: the range of what we can say, see, hear, think and even imagine is narrowed.

CENSORSHIP, ART, AND POLITICS
"Censoring Culture" expands the notion of censorship beyond the acts of removing a photograph from an exhibition or canceling a performance to include a much larger field of social conditions and practices that prevent artists' works of all kinds from reaching audiences or even from being produced. The narrow collecting purview of a museum, for instance, might be irremediably problematic for contemporary painters if no museum in their country collected work by living artists.

OR: Is this a book about politics as much as it is about art?

RA: You can't have one without the other. Artists are both a reflection and a mirror of the social conditions around them -- which is why there is change in art. You couldn't have an artist like Andy Warhol critiquing consumer culture prior to the late-19th century. As an art historian, I believe that the arts are firmly embedded in their moment, and the possibilities for artists are totally tied to the social conditions around them. The idea that artists are visionaries ahead of their time is silly. When an artist's observations are acute, they may be there before anybody else, but they're limited by social and political phenomena.

OR: If artists are canaries in the mine, what are politicians?

RA: I think politicians are always the slowest to react -- it's the squeaky wheel theory. No politician will go out on a limb for anything unless he feels his constituency is affected. While I don't believe artists are visionaries -- it seems like much too strong a word for me -- it does seem that artists and politicians are at the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to quick responsiveness.

CENSORSHIP AND LOCALITY
In Vietnam, seeing censorship in the most simplistic terms is easy. All exhibitions, gatherings and publications must have a permit. It's not rare to actually see articles and images from abroad gone over with a thick black marker (go to the library at the French Consulate in HCMC and pick up a contemporary art photography book and you will see what I mean. Nipples and groins obscured: from coarse black strokes to impressively drawn black underwear and bras).

Sources
Alternet. Facing Up to Modern Censorship
Alternet. Censoring Culture

Wikipedia, The European Graduate School, and Linkage vs Spamming

European Graduate School. Jean Luc Nancy exploring the Quality Control Mechanisms of Wikipedia. European Graduate School June 11, 2006. Image source.

One day after the New York Times published an article about revisions to Wikipedia's 'anyone can edit' policy, a newsgrist reader writes in about a crazy flame war raging on Wikipedia over the entry for the European Graduate School, questioning its existence and branding its links as mere self-promotion and bio-link spamming. I wonder: how do you distinguish hyper-linking from hyper-promoting?

The reader explains:

...Lack of media coverage ironically prevents unconventional graduate program in media studies from validating its existence to Wikipedia. The European Graduate School claims to employ a host of art/culture and critical theory luminaries [...] but can't prove it. The school's entry in the online encyclopedia may be deleted.... It's a little disturbing that a school that presumably regards the mediasphere with an extra critical eye is in the limelight for bio-spamming. (Unless someone *not* affiliated with EGS is responsible for the prominent mentions of it in Butler, Zizek, etc., bios on Wiki.) I'm rooting for EGS, but at the same time...ew. Anyway, it's over for now-- Wiki kept the entry. Hopefully someone will add that adorable photo of J-L Nancy and the gang!   

Link to the Wiki flame war/discussion;
Link to the EGS Wikipedia page, now approved;
Link to the EGS site.

via NYTimes:
Growing Wikipedia Refines Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: June 17, 2006

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.

Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)

While these measures may appear to undermine the site's democratic principles, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, notes that protection is usually temporary and affects a tiny fraction of the 1.2 million entries on the English-language site.

"Protection is a tool for quality control, but it hardly defines Wikipedia," Mr. Wales said. "What does define Wikipedia is the volunteer community and the open participation."

From the start, Mr. Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view.

The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.

"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."

The administrators are all volunteers, most of them in their 20's. They are in constant communication — in real-time online chats, on "talk" pages connected to each entry and via Internet mailing lists. The volunteers share the job of watching for vandalism, or what Mr. Wales called "drive-by nonsense." Customized software — written by volunteers — also monitors changes to articles.

Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.

Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. [read on...]

Locative Media, Perspective, Flight

reBlogged via Rhizome.org:

Floating Points:

Locative Media, Perspective, Flight

The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet.

Another key development was the GPS drawings of Jeremy Wood in 2000 in which he discovered that by tracing his movements as he drove or walked with GPS that he could form shapes formed by the sequence of plotted movements. Other projects worked with Geo-Annotation which placed a comment or reflection on a physical location (similar to what hikers for years would do at posted signs on certain trails). Then came the project 34 North 118 West that was the first locative narrative.

34 North 118 West was a mapping of a four block area of Los Angeles where the primary non-passenger rail yard and related infrastructure at the turn of the last century and the original grand passenger station of Los Angeles (La Grande station) once stood. The majority of the buildings are the same but have changed in usage in time, state of disrepair and who has come to live and work in them in waves of development and housing.

Other buildings were destroyed over the years and only the ghosts of historical information and personal accounts remain. The project created a "narrative archaeology" as the layers in time were to be agitated into being. In one place would be narrativized data from 1936 a few hundred feet from a spot before a building that triggered something from 1910.

Now groups such as the C5 collective are doing work such as the GPS mapping of the entire great wall of china and then placing the coordinates in another location. This type of work creates a layered commentary and plays with form and semiotics as well as referencing the Situationists who developed absurd commentaries like a walk through the streets of Paris following a map of another city… Continue reading Floating Points: Locative Media, Perspective, Flight and the International Space Station by Jeremy Hight with Alexander van Dijk, Hz Journal, #8, June 2006.

Originally by jo from networked_performance at June 20, 2006, 10:46, published by Marisa S. Olson

Posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006, 8:22 am

Treelines Reviewed

via StrangeWeather.info:

June 23, 2006
Sculpture @ Abington Art Center, naturally

via The Inquirer, Fri, Jun. 23, 2006:
This sculpture park is a natural
At Abington Art Center, works have an affinity for the outdoors.
By Edith Newhall

There is no better time than summer to explore sculpture parks, and the Abington Art Center has one of the more abundantly natural ones around.

Yes, there are manicured lawns graced by works by such well-known sculptors as Ursula von Rydingsvard, but you will also come across sculptures in its woodlands, all of which are close to trails. The park's sculpture tends toward organic and natural forms - von Rydingsvard's included - not the minimal or hard-edged, which sets it apart from most other sculpture parks.

Abington Art Center's latest exhibition, "Inside/Outside: Treelines," organized by the center's curator, Amy Lipton, underscores its predilection for the natural. Each of the artists - Joy Episalla, Robert Lobe, Thomas Matsuda, Jason Middlebrook, Chrysanne Stathacos, and Steve Tobin - has an obvious affection for nature and natural materials that can be seen in the large works installed in the sculpture park and in the smaller works in the center's galleries.

The outdoor pieces generally make more of a statement, the indoor exceptions being Lobe's large hammered aluminum sculpture, which seems to swoop out from the wall it is mounted on; Tobin's roomful of "Exploded Clay" pieces, 13 large potlike forms that contain pools of hardened, aqua-colored glass; and Matsuda's wall-mounted segments of burned tree trunk and graphite drawings on handmade paper.

Middlebrook, Episalla, and Stathacos outshine the others outside, mainly because you don't commonly encounter whimsical works like these in a sculpture park. By contrast, Tobin's cast-bronze tree roots, Lobe's aluminum treelike form, and Matsuda's five sections of a burned tree trunk, arranged soldierlike in a line, have a more formal, even mournful, presence.

Middlebrook's three wood-and-rope squirrel bridges are strung between trees on various parts of the property, and are winsome and funny but also reference monochromatic painting. Each bridge's wood slats are painted in gradations of one color: yellow, orange or green.

Stathacos' meditative Refuge, a Wish Garden consists of a real tree at the bottom of the front lawn that she has surrounded with sand, benches, and baskets filled with strips of cloth, rocks, sticks and flowers. You can draw in the sand with a stick, pile up rocks, or tie fabric to the tree, as numerous visitors appear to have done.

The least likely outdoor work is Episalla's large scrim photographic mural printed on semitransparent vinyl mesh. Hung between two trees in the woods, the mural depicts a vastly enlarged color picture of the Grand Tetons that Episalla found in her late father's office; it is a bit like a mirage or an English folly.

The mural will be interesting to see in November against a barren backdrop of leafless trees, as Lipton points out, but it's plenty amusing now.

Abington Art Center, 515 Meetinghouse Rd. Jenkintown, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays (Thursdays to 7 p.m.), 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays. (The sculpture park is open daily during daylight hours.) Indoor exhibition through July 29; outdoor installation through Nov. 22. Information: 215-887-4882 or www.abingtonartcenter.org.