NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Fine Art Adoption Network: Conversation with Adam Simon

 

Some time back I posted something about The Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN), Adam Simon's online commission for Art in General. I promised my readers an interview; well here it is at last (conversation conducted over the course of the spring & summer, by email):

NEWSgrist: hi Adam,

I'm about to head off to work, where, wonderfully, I found a copy of the Mauss [The Gift] in my library's stacks. I will read some during quiet moments today and get back to you about it, maybe... In the meantime, tell me how you came to think of FAAN as a concise "project" (at your leisure of course) -- or how you started to think about giving and exchange vis-à-vis our habits here in the hub of art world commerce?

Adam Simon: I've always split my focus between my studio work, which is mostly painting, and projects which deal with how art is disseminated. From what I can tell, you seem to have a similar split focus. The Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN) refers directly back to Four Walls, the exhibition space/artists forum which Michele Araujo and I started in 1984 and I later co-directed with Mike Ballou. Both FAAN and Four Walls were propelled by a certain degree of frustration. With Four Walls it was frustration at the lack of live sites for dialogue between artists, particularly ones that were also exhibition sites. With FAAN it was my realization that a surplus of good art somehow coexists with a scarcity of people owning art. I also had to remove a couple of large, early paintings from my mother's house in Boston because she was moving and I didn't want to store or destroy them. That was the immediate impetus. By the way, thanks for referring me to Paul Chan's audio project. I like the way it resists definition as either a service or an artwork. I think of FAAN that way except that, as an artwork, FAAN is extremely collaborative. At this point it is being shaped by a lot of people.

Yes, I'm beginning to feel it taking off, or taking shape... Today I had my first actual handing-off of a painting to a fellow named Eben who is a writer and teaches English at CUNY.  He is the first of 6 adopters, and actually first emailed me from AiG during the opening. He later came to the fair use conference and said hullo after my panel. Today he came up to the Met where I work, we got sandwiches and sat in the park and talked for maybe an hour and a half. Then I got him a button to go see the Kara Walker show / extravaganza (speaking of things shaped by many people!). I'm feeling very "high" -- one has the power to shape a "transaction" differently once money and market values are taken out of the equation. There seems to be a fast-track to genuine discussion... somehow, several layers of the usual bullshit vanish from the moment the adopters open themselves up in their letters; that is what they seem to do, and maybe what it takes; that is the intimate level at which the exchange is taking place...

I remember Eben from the opening. He was interesting. I remember he said that he wanted contemporary art for his students to be around.  After I said that to you yesterday about FAAN being shaped by a lot of people, I saw that you had used your homepage to invite comments from artists and adopters on what they think FAAN is all about. As far as I know, yours is the first instance of a FAAN homepage being used for something other than the artists' images and related text. I like it. At some point, during all my promotional claims about how FAAN would be this or accomplish that I realized that no one, including me, had any idea what would actually occur.

Eben is lovely; he gave me a short story he'd written after we finished lunch. :-) Funny, your webmaster (John Weir) emailed me right after I posted that "hey FAAN people" thing – he said he thought it a nice way around the lack (so far) of an interface for such an interaction and wanted to know if there was anything else I might need (!) - I told him I had given away my last artwork for adoption that day and my homepage seemed so sad and bare!

I guess also it's an almost unconscious impulse for me to do something like that... all those years yammering on list-serves and, more recently, blogs; I assume that online communication must go in both directions. In any case, it occurs to me that FAAN has only just begun -- it could keep going and going, and morph and develop into -- who knows what?!

Fantastic.

Well, it's definitely going to get bigger. I guess it's natural to fear that something will be lost as that happens. I'm hoping that the idea is simple enough so that the flavor will last. Maybe it is possible to instill a different model in the minds of the general public. Artists are thought of by many as hucksters and overnight success stories. If the public has to reconcile that idea with multiple acts of random generosity, well, that might be significant.

Adam,

Sorry to leave this conversation for a few days -- things have been hectic! I managed to squeeze in a lovely 45min beer at my studio with my second adopter, a shy, scholarly looking architect gent. I also squeaked into an opening Saturday where Carrie Yamaoka has a piece, where I happened to be introduced to your brother!

It seems to me that people pine after new models, even if they get confused. I love "multiple acts of random generosity." Okay, dashing off again. More soon. I think FAAN could grow into a giant and longstanding many-armed giant... Joy

"PARTY": Actors at Work @ the Ohio Theater

"PARTY"
August 12,  9-12 pm
Ohio Theater
66 Wooster Street
New York City
Admission: 50 cents
(Equity members and industry professionals admitted free) 

On August 12 CiNE concludes its yearlong performance project,
ACTORS AT WORK, with "PARTY" at the Ohio Theater.

In ACTORS AT WORK, the latest in a series of post-theatrical interventions, CiNE filed performance contracts for union actors to go to their day jobs.  In the process, the line between "job performance" and "performance," workplace and theater, vocation and day job is both clarified and hopelessly blurred.

Jeff Biehl in WORD PROCESSOR

"PARTY," the concluding event, features documentation & photographs from the ACTORS AT WORK productions of BABYSITTER, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, and PILATES INSTRUCTOR, among others. It also features alchohol, good conversation (presumably), music by THE CHILDREN…, and a roughly even mix of people who are really acting, and people who are acting genuine.

ACTORS AT WORK is a co-production with SoHO THINK TANK

CiNE is is an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to examining the conditions of spectacle and spectatorship. Recent work includes Messalina (SPF Festival) , 'Night, Motherfucker (Gavin Brown's Passerby), Babylon is Everywhere (Drama League), and Re-Public (Theater magazine).

THE CHILDREN... is the new music project from downtown theater and indie-flim veteran Michael Wiener, and composer/producer Jim Coleman, formerly of Cop Shoot Cop. Featuring projections by Joel Fendelman.

This Delicate Monster

This Delicate Monster
a pop fable by Michelle Handelman

Screenings:

Thursday August 10 at 8:30 pm
Le Petit Versailles Garden in the East Village
An evening spectacle with Live performances, video projections and organic delicacies served.

Le Petit Versailles Garden
August 10th  8:30-11pm
346 East Houston Street, NYC. (btwn Aves B & C)
Admission: FREE

and:

Monday August 14 - Friday August 18, Opening Mon 6-8pm
P.P.O.W. Gallery in Chelsea
Selected photos and videos from "This Delicate Monster" in "Risky Business" a group show curated by Dana Dale Lee about play and risk. 

P.P.O.W. Gallery
555 W. 25th St., NYC

August 14-18, Opening Aug 14 6-8pm
tel: 212/647-1044
Gallery Hours M-F 11a-5p.

www.michellehandelman.com
www.filmlinc.com
www.ppowgallery.com

Like Deck Chairs on the Titanic

"That the latest American plan for victory is to reposition our forces by putting more of them in the crossfire of Baghdad's civil war is tantamount to treating our troops as if they were deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the networks led with the story every night, what Americans would have the stomach to watch?"

via Op-Ed Columnist [TimesSelect]:
The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 30, 2006

AS America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle's gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won't catch anyone saying it's Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks' evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a "shame on you" e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC's "World News." The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki's short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war's progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike "Law & Order" episodes, don't hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It's a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. "It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror," said Fox News's Bill O'Reilly on July 18. "I mean, it's summertime." Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don't know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It's a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration's initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam's mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We’ve been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But it's the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. [read on...]

Dada: Crazy Beautiful

A Victim of Society, 1919
photo: Courtesy of the Estate of George Grosz/ Licensed by VAGA, New York

Dada
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
Through September 11

via Village Voice:
Crazy Beautiful
Mayhem was their antidote to a world gone mad
by Leslie Camhi
July 28th, 2006 4:04 PM

What would our lives would be like if Dada's radically anarchic aesthetic had taken over? Would people be proclaiming abstract sound poetry on street corners? Would they wander about, like the notoriously free-spirited Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, bizarrely arrayed in pilfered goods and castoffs—a bra made of two tin cans tied with string, rows of curtain-ring bracelets pinched from Woolworth's, a bustle of electric lights? Perhaps they'd hole up, like Kurt Schwitters building his Merzbau, an installation cobbled together from bits of urban and natural detritus. Perhaps every public gathering would become a provocation.

Dada Triumphs!, a 1920 photocollage by Raoul Hausmann, includes a map with the word "DADA" emblazoned across the northern hemisphere, announcing this movement's vast territorial ambitions. In fact, though Dada's reach extended well beyond the heart of Europe, it stopped far short of world domination. "Dada" focuses on international networks of peripatetic artists responding maniacally to the twin debacles of World War I and the unrelenting pressures of industrialization. Dada began during wartime, among artists who had sought refuge in Switzerland and a still-unaligned United States; by 1924 it had fizzled, sacrificed to the internecine Parisian struggles that gave rise to Surrealism, its more popular successor.

Today, the ghosts of Dada must content themselves with a single province: the art world, which remains largely under the sway of Marcel Duchamp, Dada's sly patron saint and most elegant prankster. With a curatorial nod to chaos, the show boasts two separate entrances, signaling Dada's dual origins: the raucous, proto-performance-art soirees at the Café Voltaire in Zurich, and the radical experiments Duchamp conducted while in exile in New York.

Enter through Zurich, and you hear archival recordings of someone loudly declaiming nonsensical syllables and encounter Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp's fantastical marionettes for an 18th-century play that the Dadaists had updated to reflect their own psychoanalytic preoccupations. The effect is both charmingly artisanal and—due perhaps to the ineffable nature of performance—elusive. Enter via New York, and you're confronted with Duchamp's readymades, those industrially produced objects that, once removed from their contexts, acquired the status of aesthetic icons, and now suggest a sort of Big Bang theory of contemporary art.

Either way, there are plenty of pleasurable surprises, like the Baronness's airy portrait of Duchamp—a temporary assemblage, surviving only in a photograph, of a champagne glass topped with a clock spring and feathers. And there's enough to still jar your senses. Dada, after all, had crawled out of the trenches; several of its male artists had been wounded in combat or suffered from shellshock. Others, like the German political satirist John Heartfield, feigned insanity to avoid military service, and the habit, once adapted, became hard to shake. Mayhem was their antidote to a world gone mad; they aimed, in the words of poet/provocateur Richard Huelsbeck, for an art that would "let itself be thrown by the explosions of last week."

Perhaps because last week, the drumbeat of war was gaining momentum, Berlin Dada's highly politicized interventions seemed particularly apt: Hannah Hoch's photomontage of two paunchy Weimar officials in their bathing suits, or George Grosz's magnificently grotesque portrait of the German Republic's president, transformed through photomontage and collage to evoke the mutilated visages of veterans filling Berlin's streets. Also wonderful are the movies on display, bidding belated adieu to the 19th century, like Hans Richter's hilarious Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927), in which a bunch of men chase vainly after their bowler hats. And the entire show evoked a deep nostalgia for bohemia, which the forces of capital long ago pushed to the margins of our urban centers. Artists now go to graduate school to have experiences that were once available in Greenwich Village. Would that we could bring them back.