NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Seminal Fem

reblogged via Anonymous Female Artist (a.k.a. Militant Art Bitch), Tuesday, February 06, 2007:

Nothing More To Lose

Advantage of Being a Woman Artist
Working without the pressure of success.
Not having to be in shows with men.
Having an escape from the art world in your four freelance jobs.
Knowing your career might pick up after you are eighty.
Being reassured that whatever kind of art you make it will be labeled feminine.
Not being stuck in a tenured teaching position.
Seeing your ideas live on in the work of others.
Having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood.
Not having to choke on those big cigars or paint in Italian suits.
Having more time to work when your mate dumps you for someone younger.
Being included in revised versions of art history.
Not having to undergo the embarrassment of being called a genius.
Getting your picture in the art magazines wearing a gorilla suit.

The Guerilla Girls, 1989.

Not a fucking thing has changed.

But lots of stuff has happened since I last posted. Judy Chicago's seminal work, The Dinner Table, has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum and will be installed in its very own gallery, as part the the very new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The Center is slated to open in April of this year. Wahoo!

According to the Brooklyn Museum, along with The Dinner Party, " a computerized study area, a biographical gallery, a gallery space to accommodate a regular schedule of feminist art, and additional space for the presentation of related public and educational programs.

I know that lots of you do not like The Dinner Table. However, I am old school went to college in the golden era of feminism, in a time when it was still okay for male faculty to fuck their college students, or refuse to grant tenure to women. [read on...]

Reexamining Appropriation: The Copy, the Law, and Beyond

This promises to be a fascinating program about appropriation and visual art. This panel is part of the annual College Art Association conference, but because of the interest in the topic, it will open to the public and held at the New York City Bar Association, at 42 W. 44th Street. The panelists are art historians/critics and lawyers, including the Hon. Pierre Leval, who first articulated the "transformative" test critical to all artists confronted with copyright infringement claims. 

Reexamining Appropriation:
The Copy, the Law, and Beyond

Friday, February 16, 10:00 am - 12:30 pm
New York City Bar Association
Great Hall
42 W. 44th Street
(between 5th and 6th Avenues)

A discussion of appropriation and visual art in the context of historical precedent and recent developments in copyright law.

[This event is free and open to the public.  Registration is not required, but if you plan to attend, kindly email [email protected] to help us ensure there are enough seats] 

Inappropriate? Copying in the Renaissance
Lisa Pon, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University

The Reign of the Quotation–Appropriation and Its Audience
Johanna Burton, Princeton University

From Appropriation to Postproduction
Jaimey Hamilton, University of Hawai'i, Manoa

Appropriation v. Piracy, Round Two?
The Hon. Pierre N. Leval, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel, Google

Chairs:
Martha Buskirk, Montserrat College of Art;
Virginia Rutledge, Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP

The M/E/A/N/I/N/G of Feminist Art

Mira Schor, Book of Pages, mixed media on rice paper, 1976, c. 12 x 20 x 1"

via email:

M /E / A/ N /I /N /G Online

February 2007

Feminist Art:
A Reassessment


Edited by
Susan Bee
&
Mira Schor

A forum
including writing and images
by
artists and art historians
from three generations
http://writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/04/

Irina Aristarkhova, Susan Bee, Emma Bee Bernstein, Johanna Burton, Ingrid Calame, Maura Coughlin, Bailey Doogan, Johanna Drucker, Carol Duncan, Mary Beth Edelson, Joanna Frueh, Vanalyne Green, Mimi Gross, Susanna Heller, Janet Kaplan, Tom Knechtel, Judith Linhares, Lenore Malen, Ann McCoy, Adelheid Mers, Robin Mitchell, Carrie Moyer, Beverly Naidus, Rachel Owens, Sheila Pepe, Nancy Princenthal, Carolee Schneemann, Mira Schor, Joan Snyder, Anne Swartz, Faith Wilding, and Barbara Zucker.

Mary Ellen Carroll: Me Like Black

Mary Ellen Carroll
ME LIKE BLACK curated by Peter Fleissig

February 3 – March 31, 2007

POWER HOUSE
45 G.E. Patterson
Memphis, Tennessee
901.578.5545
hours: Thursday-Friday,  3-8 p.m., Saturday 12-5 p.m.

"There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown" is the first line of the writer,  traveler, mystic and thinker Elias Canetti's seminal work, Crowds and Power. This tome on the social aspects of human nature posits that those who are not seeking power are wearing perplexing disguises.

Carroll's new body of work makes use of the city of Memphis not only as a
physical original but also a cultural, social-political and economic original as
well—a site of authenticity. The city is known to the rest of the world as the
home of Elvis, the civil rights movement and FedEx; but these institutions have become so globally ubiquitous that they are disassociated from the city of Memphis itself.  This 'invisibility' expands physically into the marketplace and generates  the copy, the fake, the imitation, the impersonation—all of which duplications can also be considered originals unto themselves.

Nothing truly exists until it is written about or photographed; hence, in Carroll's view, our symbiotic relationship to the media. This relationship is something that everyone from Yves Klein to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. has understood. Using duplication as a process and as a number game, Carroll's work will make a link to the power relationship that Elias Canetti pointed out between the individual and the crowd, one will utilize disguise and limit the effects of touch.

All of the works in the exhibition have the subject of impersonation as their conceptual and philosophical basis. Included in the exhibition will be ME LIKE BLACK,  two neon signs that are inverted mistakes that reference the 1960s book Black Like Me by white journalist John Howard Griffin, a civil-rights activist and friend of Dr. King who disguised himself as a black man and chronicled the experience. (This book had a particular effect on Carroll when she read it as an eleven year-old, taken from her sister's college bookshelf, inspiring her to darken her skin in a similar manner.)  Four new silkscreen paintings produced with Brand X Editions will be shown from Carroll's One Star Press publication and the larger body of work All of the Men Who Think They Can Be Me, titled Three's a Crowd. A double self-portrait from the series You and Me is based on the difference between how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others. A photograph titled Crowds and Power uses Canetti's book and the title as both its subject and object.

During the week before the exhibition's opening, the performance Whatever It Takes, an impersonation of the escaped Haley, the female polar bear that FedEx relocated from Chicago to the Memphis Zoo, will take place at the Power House. On the opening night Carroll will become the subject and object of the artwork during a special performance.

Sold! (by JPEG alone)

Tom Friedman's mixed-media work "Circus, 2006." This piece, and many others works in Mr. Friedman’s fall show, were sold before the exhibition opened, in large part through the use of digital images.

via NYTimes:
Art
You've Seen the E-Mail, Now Buy the Art
By JORI FINKEL
Published: February 4, 2007

[...] It was Mr. [Tom] Friedman's first outing with Gagosian after years of showing at the much humbler Feature Gallery in New York, and the exhibition sold out, with works priced up to $500,000. But most of the buyers did not see the installation. They did not personally see the pieces at all. Gagosian sold out the show before it opened, in large part through a flurry of e-mail messages and digital images.

When asked at the opening if the show had really sold out in three days, Deborah McLeod, the gallery's director, replied, "More like three minutes."

It's another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone. For the Friedman show, Gagosian set up a private section on its Web site, accessible only by a password sent via e-mail message to select collectors. More typically, gallery directors send off e-mail messages with JPEGs — a format for digitally storing and transmitting images — to potential clients.

As with so many aspects of the art world, industrywide figures do not exist. But anecdotes abound. Howard Read of Cheim & Read in Manhattan said the gallery sold by JPEG alone "about a third" of its current show: paintings of Mexican-American laborers by the California artist John Sonsini, with prices from $25,000 to $65,000. [read on...]