Lil Buck & Yo-Yo Ma

(Thanks, Robin!) Some surprisingly similar moves here (click the ad bar along the bottom and it eventually goes away).

Spring/Break Art Show (NYC Armory Week)

Spring/Break Art Show was a new, curator-driven "this can be a fair," located in Old School, NoLIta and featuring projects by 23 curators; and it may have been my favorite of the shows I saw during Armory week. Among the curators were the fair's founders Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, Natalie Kovacs, Patrick Meagher, Eve Sussman, and Chen Tamir. The theme was "Apocalist: A Brief History of The End." The show also has a Facebook page with some photos here; Artinfo has an article with some good photos; Vernissage TV has a 6.5-min. video tour here; and my photos, such as they are, are here.

As usual, I'd have liked to have had more time here – everything I saw seemed to warrant it – but the evening ran out before I made it through the whole thing. Out of the works I saw, some faves were:

1. An installation featuring work by Eve Sussman – the labelling was a bit confusing to me, so I'll quote it: "Eve Sussman, Waiting for an Icon, 2012. Crazy Daisy, 2012, 3 channel site-specific video round with Patricia Thornley, Jeesu Kim, Leslie Thornton, Bat Or Kalo. Eve Sussman's site-specific work at Old School is inspired by a stained glass artwork she has brought back to life, animating it with the projections of several singers attempting the title song from the film Pull My Daisy. The musical rendition of the Neal Cassidy [sic], Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac poem was featured in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's 1959 film." You can view the 26-min., classic Pull My Daisy at Ubuweb; the title song lyrics actually modify those of the poem; both are weird and suggestive; and the melody is wonderfully discombobulating and, I'd say, hard to sing. Sussman's projection onto stained glass was flanked on each side by projections of video'd windows through which you sometimes spied a young woman, apparently washing dishes or the like – the "glass" was frosted, except for a circle framing the young woman's head (see here for the layout).

2. Sp33dGuided Art Tour by Dora Budor + Maja Cule was a charming, thoughtfully goofy, iPhone-narrated tour with guide and guidee cuddled awkwardly on one Segway, purportedly touring the art in the show but in fact limited to the courtyard and an attempted trip around the block, although in my case we turned back after a close call involving a tree root and a fence. The artists explained they'd always wanted to try a Segway; me, too! The tour launched from a room featuring twin projections of Earth, positioned like views through a pair of binocs, except the planet spun differently in the two views; but I think this was a separate work.

3. In Sea of Fire by Fall on Your Sword (2012), an antique piano had been hooked up to video equipment in such a way that, in its default mode, the video showed one of those fake statue guys dressed up like the Statue of Liberty; but when you pressed one of the organ keys, this was interrupted by a clip from a disaster movie, with each key seemingly triggering the destruction of the Statue by a different, apocalyptic means – bombing, a tidal wave, alien invasion, etc. It was, simply, awesome. Trailer here; but it's nothing like being able to trigger a Liberty-annihilating tsunami with a key stroke.

I also saw a piece in which purported art objects were incorporated into an improvisational, audience-participatory art performance, which was a lots of fun; apologies that I can't say who deserves credit, except I think it may have been hosted by ArtLog? (I've requested more info and will update this if I get it.)

(Posts on other 2012 Armory week art shows here; three more to come.)

Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry

Photos of some of those with whom she shared stares here. (Thanks, Julie!) From Abramovic's 2010 exhibition at MoMA, The Artist is Present.

The Whitney Biennial

The show was mobbed, though I went on a weekday. I left with fewer photos than I'd have liked; you can see 80+ here.

Pieces I wish I'd shot but didn't include LAST SPRING: A Prequel, by Gisèle Vienne with Dennis Cooper, Stephen O’Malley, and Peter Rehberg; Green Room by Wu Tsang; Sarah Michelson's Devotion Study #1–The American Dancer; and RP47 by Lucy Raven. I also really enjoyed Werner Herzog's video installation, Hearsay of the Soul, with its powerful audio of music from his film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

My photos also don't do justice to many of the works, e.g. Sam Lewitt's "self-organizing" installation comprising magnets, fans, and a pool of sticky-looking ferrofluid; or Nick Mauss's installation, which included, in addition to the twin-doored vestibule he built and "painted" with sewn fabric, a number of not-obviously connected objects: a small projection plus works by Andy Warhol, Gary Winogrand, Ellsworth Kelly, Charles Demuth, Ira Delaneaux [sp?].

Additional informative audio and bits of visuals re- the exhibition are available at the Whitney's site; more images at PaperMag.

(Image left: detail from installation/performance set by Georgia Sagri.)

Roberta Smith has a glowing review in the NYT, with an excellent slide show here. A couple of aspects she identifies are that (1) the biennial includes lots of modes of art, including an impressive array of time-based works in video, music, dance, and performance as well as painting, sculpture, and installation – without particularly privileging any of them (although I don't recall much photography, unless you count photographs used in larger works, such as Dawn Kasper's installation, which comprised the entire contents of her living quarters/studio); and (2) the show is artist-centric, in that it focusses to an unusual degree on artists' processes and in some instances had them curate other artists into the exhibition.

These aspects seem so sensible and right that I confess I didn't notice them 'til I read Smith's review after seeing the show; and I'm glad she praised them. (Now that I think of it, even the cover image for the biennial {above right} seems to reflect an ambition to make the museum a more transparent vessel for its contents.) And I did notice, as I think Smith also mentions, that the written explanations of the works were unusually helpful.

I personally wish that more of the video had been easier to see. With respect to most of the videos as well as performances, each was only presented at certain times and for only a few days during the run of the exhibition, making it impossible to see all unless you can return multiple times over a 13-week period.

I saw only a few minutes of Wu Tsang's Wildness in his Green Room installation (video embedded below), which was packed.

I also saw the dance performance choreographed by Sarah Michelson. The set and costumes were relatively simple (you can see a few images and another review here), and for the vast majority of the near-90 minute piece, four or less of the same 4 dancers walked rapidly backward in mostly counter-clockwise circles, all more often than not tracing the same basic movements and path while separated by a more or less fixed distance, with occasional pauses that seemed necessary in order to give the dancers much-needed breathers. During the latter part of the performance, a 5th dancer wearing a (race-?) horse's head strolled through, lingered briefly – observing? – and left. The audio consisted of the same, musically interesting but short loop throughout, without any variation in instrumentation, tempo, or volume, etc. – except that, at the beginning of the piece, there was additional audio of a relatively brief conversation, seemingly between Michelson and a male artist, with the male doing most of the talking, mostly about feeling uncertain whether he'll manage to come up with anything much for his current commission; plus other bits of Michelson's voice near the end, enjoining the dancers to "make it very beautiful" and then relating a story of God's other child Marjorie, in which I'm afraid I got a bit lost, between acoustics that were, for me, less than crystal clear, plus being by then fairly stupified by the monotony.

(Image right: detail from collage by Robert Hawkins.)

All in all, I enjoyed this biennial and found it well done and rewarding of time and attention, though it could perhaps have been more exciting.

Here's the trailer for Wildness:

The Wedding Project

You may have seen an earlier post in which I warned I'd be on hiatius for while in order to work on a big project.

Well, Phase 1 of The Wedding Project was a participatory/performance/screenings event, in which a real wedding occurred (my own).

I made two one-hour videos for the project, one for guests to watch and the other to be projected onto their backs, and I and my sig. other and 80+ friends made or scavenged costumes, props (including 200 wedding veils and more than 650 flat paper flowers) and set decor (including thousands of yards of used videotape), shot lots of video and photos of the event, and threw a big party.

I'm interested in, among other things, the blending of the real and the artificial. In this project, a real marriage between two individuals serves as a metaphor to explore larger historical, sociological, psychological, epistemological, and metaphysical contexts – including the bond that, for better or worse, has in some sense always existed among all of humanity but that now, by virtue of the internet, is becoming much more intense, or at least more quickly and thickly interconnected.

There's a website for the project with a lot more info here, and I've just put some photos of the event here.

I'm now engaged in Phase 2, which means editing the video shot at the event and otherwise mashing up product for an exhibition.

So I'm afraid I need to make myself sparse here again for the next month or two. Thank you for your patience!

Report #1 from Prospect.2 New Orleans: The Music Box

Prospect New Orleans is an international art biennial founded and directed by Dan Cameron, former Sr. Curator of the New Museum and Director of the New Orleans CAC. Cameron conceived the event as a way to help bring visitors back to the city after Katrina.

Prospect.1 in 2008 was more or less spectacular (see posts here); Prospect.2 was delayed a year for lack of funding and is smaller but still worth the trip.

The Music Box, A Shantytown Sound Laboratory: 
Phase one of Dithyrambalina is a local, "satellite" project and is not to be missed. Unfortunately, I couldn't get in for the season's last concert, but the artists were kind enough to let me visit the next day; more pics and vidis here.

The project began when the New Orleans Airlift acquired a barely-standing, late 18th century Creole cottage, which promptly fell to the ground. The group asked artist Swoon to take a look. For some time she'd been dreaming of a musical house; so the artists decided to use the remains of the cottage to create a collection of experimental shanties that could serve as prototypes for instrumentalities in a larger house they hope to build.

Audio recordings of shantytown concerts are available here.

The Music Box was curated by Delaney Martin with assistance from Swoon and Theo Eliezer and was created by those and other artists including Taylor Lee Shepherd, Jayme Kalal, Quintron, Taylor Kuffner/Zemi17, Ross Harmon, Ben Mortimer, Nick Yulman, Angeliska Polacheck & Colin McIntyre, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Elizabeth Shannon, Ratty Scurvics, Rainger Pinney & Jonah Emerson-Bell, Micah Learned, Aaron Kellner, Andrew Schrock, Jade Brandt, and Myrtle Von Damitz III.

Last in this post below is a really nice vidi by grossymmetric about The Music Box. Nola.com also has a good video interview with Swoon about the project. More info on the project here.

Prospect.2 New Orleans runs through January 29, 2012.

Two more posts on the biennial to come.

Temporary Hiatus for Big Project

I'm working on a multimedia art/reality project that will consume my every waking moment for the next several weeks. I'll reveal more when it's done.

Until then, please bear with my silence; and check back here around the end of September! I promise, I shall return! With good stuff!

(And if you live in Dallas and would like to help, pls contact me.)

(And b.t.w., no, I don't believe the world's ending any time soon. It may be the end of the world as we knew it; but I believe we're on our way to re-creating a better version – I'm working on it, and send my love to all others who are, too.)

More "After Hours with George Quartz"

The artist sometimes known as George Quartz is a former Good/Bad Art Collective member and CentralTrak resident and shows at Cris Worley Gallery, and he also operates under the personas of La Maladie Tropicale and Jock Ewing.

I find his "After Hours with George Quartz" operation very interesting (previously, briefly blogged here) – he does a live-taped, "talk show"/ performance art -type of work that's like Dick Cavett meets The Twilight Zone. The next one is this Friday.

At the one I saw, the "guests" learned who they were supposed to be at the same moment they were announced to the audience, and none bore any physical resemblance to the celebrity they were to impersonate (e.g., "Joe Namath" was a black female). The "celebrities" were of the 70's-ish vintage emulated by the show.

The ensuing, improvised interviews were sometimes boring, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, usually opening with discussion of the celebrity's career and personal life (about which the guests, mostly young-ish, often knew little or nothing) and culminating with questions such as, "Liz, what is Beauty?", or "George, what is Art?"

Meanwhile, "Quartz" has most of the trappings of a live-taping tv show going on, including a talk show band and a monitor facing the audience that flashes "APPLAUSE" at the appropriate times. And the video actually produced from this performance is beyond-true to 70's or earlier production values (excerpts from the resulting "show" can be viewed on Quartz's vimeo channel).

In short, this is great, wacky parody; but there's a lot more than that going on.

The next Quartz taping/performance will be at the Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff, Dallas, at 10PM; more details here (together with links to visuals). Be part of the audience, and you might end up on "tv."

Trespass/Parade

Looks interesting:

Trespass: First a Parade, Then a Party

* * * * *
On Sunday, October 2, 2011 the streets of downtown Los Angeles will erupt in a parade of local artists and residents, complete with music, dancing and performance. The parade is the culmination of Trespass, a collaborative project between Arto Lindsay, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and West of Rome Public Art (WoR). They have commissioned 40 Los Angeles based artists, including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Rubins and Sterling Ruby, to produce a statement—their call to action, pleasure and reciprocity. The statements have been printed on T-shirts in English and in Spanish, and will be worn as part of the parade and sold via the West of Rome website. . . . This project has been created to coincide with Pacific Standard Time, a collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions across Southern California coming together for the first time to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene, which begins October 2011.

On Monday, October 3, 2011 Trespass will reach its climax with a blow out benefit party for WoR at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Fantastic and transgressive Los Angeles iconic underground figure, Miss Vaginal Davis will shape our journey into the night. The rhythms of Trespass will permeate into the evening as musician Arto Lindsay will perform a unique piece composed for the occasion. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija will engage the audience in a continuation of the collective experience of social awareness stemming from the parade.

More at www.trespassparade.org.

"Kill the Workers!" by Janice Kerbel

" . . . is a continuation of Kerbel’s interest in theatrical performance. There are no actors or sets; the dramaturgy and plot are portrayed solely through the various intensities, colours, light beams and directions of the stage lighting. The protagonist of the play is a spotlight that goes on an epic odyssey to abandon its serving role and be seen as a light in its own right instead."

Part of an exhibition of Kerbel's work July 1 – September 11 at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany.

AUDiNT: Dead Record Office at Art in General

. . . (NYC). This sounds really interesting; wish I could go. "The artists [Jon Cohrs, Toby Heys and Steve Goodman] relay the evolution of the project as follows:

For the past 60 years, AUDiNT have been conducting research, rituals, and experiments into the opening of the 3rd ear, a dimension that is opened when sound, ultrasound, and infrasound are simultaneously deployed in a precise schema of sequencing, duration, and amplification. The 3rd ear forms a conduit for the channeling of voices and frequencies allowing communication between the living and the dead, sanity and insanity and between disparate locations in space and time.

Ever since AUDiNT's defection from the U.S. military at the end of WWII, our mission has been to submerge the frequency-based phenomenon that had been accidentally discovered by the Ghost Army (when they deployed 3 turntables to fabricate deceptive soundscapes intended to deceive the Nazis as to the true numbers and whereabouts of the allied forces). Wishing to keep this powerful sonic weapon out of government and military hands, AUDiNT's founding members smashed the original battlefield discs, and split the waveformed content of the original master recordings into small packages of sound which were then discretely embedded into sound effects and stereo fidelity records.

Throughout the following decades AUDiNT were responsible for the mass production of the test tone record and special effects vinyl—a collection that ended up in flea markets, thrift stores and church bazaars, forming what is known as The Dead Record Network. It was through the Dead Record Network that we distributed these encrypted recordings as an open secret, ensuring that, in the future, the vital bits of analogue information concerning the ultimate vibrational weapon discovered during WWII would remain in a fragmented social circulation.

Adapting to the tactical battlefields of the 21st century networks, capitalizing on the viral dynamics of digital networks, we are systematically uploading our research archive that has been compiled throughout the past 60 years (while probing the hauntological power of sonic weaponry). This ritualized uploading of the spectral archive aims to create a prospective archive of waveformed affect that is propagated throughout the living dead networks of our communication systems. This tactical shift - to open up our archive to the public - relates to our new mandate of arming the mass populace with the efficacy of sonic weaponry so that it does not become the sole preserve of the military-entertainment complex. With its dark science and sonically dissonant content, AUDiNT's Dead Record Office is the enshrined location from which this viral transfer begins.

(Emphasis supplied. In an interesting line from Macbeth (Act iv, scene i), the eponymous protagonist exclaims to the three witches, "Had I three ears, I'ld hear thee.")

The installation will be on view June 17–July 23, 2011, at Art in General, 79 Walker St., with an opening reception Fri., 6/17 6-8pm and a special program, "The Martial Arts of Sonic Hauntology," on Mon., 6/13, 7-8:30pm.

Inside View

More here. (Thanks, Ben!)

Bloomsday at The Reading Room

"Bloomsday" is celebrated annually in Dublin, New York, and elsewhere on June 16, the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday celebrations sometimes feature a walking itinerary reproducing that of the book's main character, Leopold Bloom, as well as readings from the novel, which has been acclaimed by some critics as the greatest ever written.

Per Wikipedia, an unabridged reading in 1982 ran nearly 30 hours; but Bloomsday Dallas will last just a few. The celebration will begin at 6 PM with a screening of Harrell Fletcher's video art piece, Blot Out the Sun (wrangled by moi), which was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In Fletcher's video, service station employees and patrons read lines from the novel concerning death, love, social inequality, and the relationship between individuals and the universe. This will be followed by readings from the novel by Jeff Whittington, Charles Dee Mitchell, and Diane Orr.

In addition, Jennie Ottinger's "book" sculpture, Ulysses, will be on view, courtesy of Conduit Gallery. The work is part of her larger library project, which was shown at the 2011 Volta Art Fair in NYC.

Bloomsday Dallas will take place on Thurs., June 16 at The Reading Room, 3715 Parry Ave. (between Exposition and Commerce), from 6 - 10PM.

More at The Reading Room.

UPDATE: Below is scholar Frank Delaney's rap tribute to Joyce (thanks, Karen!):

Bloomsday at The Reading Room

This post has been moved here.

Artsmarter at the Modern

. . . on April 29 and at William Campbell on April 30 (both in Fort Worth, TX):

Low Lives

First, I've been laying low, blog-wise – dealing with some family issues – thanks for your patience. That aside . . . .

The following vidi is one of a number of performance videos on Low Lives.



Low Lives describes itself as "an international exhibition of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. . . . Low Lives is not simply about the presentation of performative gestures at a particular place and time but also about the transmission of these moments and what gets lost, conveyed, blurred, and reconfigured when utilizing this medium." Looks like the next exhibition/broadcast dates are: April 29, 2011: Low Lives 3 Exhibition-Day 1 - 8:00pm – 11:00pm (U.S. EST) April 30, 2011: Low Lives 3 Exhibition-Day 2 - 3:00pm – 6:00pm (U.S. EST).

UPDATE: You can find Low Lives 3 here.

Music from a Tree

(Thanks, Ben!)

"After Hours with George Quartz"

At CentralTrak last night; loved it. Impossible to do it justice in few words, but call it the Twilight Zone of talk shows. I think they really were taping it, and hope to see the results. You should definitely try to catch it if/when it returns.

More visuals here.

UPDATE: Edited "tv" taped excerpts from this performance can now be viewed on "Quartz"'s vimeo channel.

EVERYTHING IS OK

(Thanks, Ben!) More here.

ART WORK: Readings

A few photos here (thanks, Ben!) Again, a great turn-out. This was the last of the three events in the ART WORK in dallas series inspired by Temporary Services' ART WORK newspaper project.

Thanks again to Undermain Theater for their support for the actors' fees, to Mark Ridlen, a.k.a. DJ DeLuxe, for the "audio surprise," to my collaborators at S.M.U. and CentralTrak, and to everyone else who worked so hard to make this series a success.

(You can also see visuals of the symposium here, and of the exhibition here. You can download a complete copy of the ART WORK newspaper issue here. For more info about the ART WORK project, see here. For more info about the ART WORK in dallas series, see here.)