NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 199

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 199, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

LEARN TO READ ART: A History of Printed Matter @ PS1

LEARN TO READ ART: A History of Printed Matter

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's Fall Exhibitions Opening
Date: Sunday, October 25, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter presents a comprehensive overview of Printed Matter, the artists' bookstore, focusing on the philosophy established by its founders in 1976. The exhibition radically questions the notion of art as an elitist structure, and proposes an art conceived along democratic ideals, a low-cost art that travels out into the world through the distribution systems usually reserved for books and periodicals, or popular music. Featuring more than 100 international artists, Learn to Read Art explores the artists' desire to create with the idea that art is both intimate, and for everyone.

Printed Matter's emphasis has always been on books; however, artists have moved in many directions, experimenting with everything from periodicals and vinyl records to posters and postcards. The exhibition also includes more expectable editions, such as photographs, which, if we think about it, were originally intended to be low-cost reproducible media. And then there are somewhat less expectable formats, such as the skateboards by Liam Gillick, Ari Marcopoulos and Mark Gonzales.

The exhibition follows the organization from storefront to storefront over more than three decades, featuring installations by Lawrence Weiner, Josh Smith, and Jenny Holzer. Josh Smith's book of 473 numbered silkscreened leaves is housed in a pair of wooden book covers, themselves made from the table on which the silk-screening was done. Spread out on the walls in the exhibition, they become an almost delirious cacophony of repetition.

The number of artists who have helped support Printed Matter is astonishing: editions by John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, Larry Clark, Liam Gillich, Jenny Holzer, Terence Koh, Barbara Kruger, Christian Marclay, Jack Pierson, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Scott Hug, Felix Gonzales Torres, Christopher Wool and many more animate the rich history.

An architecture of book-shaped platforms by Gareth Long contains the project and provides seating, display, and storage for the project.

Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter is organized by AA Bronson, President of Printed Matter, and produced in cooperation with the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany. Its New York presentation is part of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's new programmatic series Free Space.

New Issue: CULTURAL POLITICS, Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009

Photo courtesy of Paul Chan, Creative Time and Green Naftali Gallery, New York.

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 3, November 2009, which is a General Issue.

Official Website

Subscribe

Submission Guidleines

Visit Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org

Please feel free to circulate.

Best wishes,

The Editors

+++

Cultural Politics
Volume 5, Issue 3
November 2009

CONTENTS

“Turkish Delight” in Vienna: Art, Islam and European Public Culture
Nilüfer Göle on how the European aesthetic realm becomes a battleground of intercultural and intercivilizational conflicts as well as a domain of borrowings and mixings between ‘native’ and ‘Islamic’ values, thereby creating a transnational public sphere.

Class Struggle and Displacement: Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
Matthew Flisfeder argues against cognitivist film scholars, such as David Bordwell and David Carroll, and for the relevance of Slavoj Zizek in the field of film criticism and theory. 

Waiting for Godot in New Orleans [check it out @ http://culturalpolitics.org]
New York based artist Paul Chan discusses and illustrates his staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans as a series of site-specific performances and creative response to the city’s ongoing dysfunction and its inhabitants’ collective tenaciousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Recursive Mode: Space, Time and the Hypercommodification of Culture
Robert Hassan argues that ‘evolution’ in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society, forms that no longer have the space or time to evolve either dialectically in response to capitalism, or organically as newly independent developments. 

Wreck, Restoration and the Work of Carrying On: History on Vivan Sundaram’s Boat-Works
Tania Roy examines the installation artwork of Vivan Sundaram, one of India’s foremost contemporary artists, as an aesthetic response to the rapid political and cultural transformations that marked the 1990s by way of experiments with site-specific, inter-medial installations.

Book Reviews

Can Theory Save Us?
Martin Parker considers Mark Featherstone’s Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought, an intellectual history that runs from Aristotle to Zizek

Reevaluating Greatness in the Time of War
Marek Bartelik analyses Aaron J. Cohen’s Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917, a history of Russian art prior to the October Revolution.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

About Cultural Politics
“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition.  In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky.  It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.

 

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.

Closings (14th St.) 214

Closings (14th St.) 214, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).