Last night

. . . I had a dream suggesting that the world is a computer and my art projects are software for it.

Find a Non-Violent Action Training Event Near You

One concern w.r.t. activist efforts during the last few years is that it seems that few of us fully understand just what our rights of free speech and peaceable assembly really include and what to say or do when others try to stop us from exercising them. Also, how could those rights be affected by recent legislation (see, e.g., this, this, or this)?

I personally believe that, the more people who understand the answers to these questions, the better off we'll all be. I hope to receive answers at one of the events being organized per the following from National People's Action, re- an effort called the "99% Spring":

During the week of April 9-15, in small towns and big cities all across America, 100,000 people will come together for an unprecedented national nonviolent, direct action training. We'll learn to tell the story of our economy and what went wrong; we'll learn the history of nonviolent direct action; and, we'll learn how we can take action and create great change in this country.

You can find a training event near you, here.

This is a coordinated effort by, among others: Jobs With Justice, United Auto Workers, National Peoples Action, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn.org Civic Action, New Organizing Institute, Movement Strategy Center, The Other 98%, Service Employees International Union, Rebuild the Dream, UNITE-HERE, Greenpeace, Institute for Policy Studies, United Steel Workers, Working Families Party, Communications Workers of America, United States Student Association, Rainforest Action Network, American Federation of Teachers, Leadership Center for the Common Good, UNITY, National Guestworker Alliance, 350.org, The Ruckus Society, Citizen Engagement Lab, smartMeme Strategy & Training Project, Right to the City Alliance, Pushback Network, Progressive Democrats of America, Change to Win, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future, Fuse Washington, National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Alliance for a Just Society, The Partnership for Working Families, United Students Against Sweatshops, etc.

UPDATE: Here's a helpful article on the origins of this effort. Here's an article expressing reservations about the effort (based on the fact that its statements omit any objection to the US wars in the Middle East).

FURTHER UPDATE: I just learned that Noam Chomsky has endorsed the 99% Spring coalition .

(Note, 99% Spring is separate from but apparently congruent with other Occupiers' May 1st General Strike.)

NASA Video of Solar Flare March 7

"The sun erupted with one of the largest solar flares of this solar cycle on March 6, 2012 at 7PM EST. This flare was categorized as an X5.4, making it the second largest flare . . . since the sun’s activity segued into a period of relatively low activity called solar minimum in early 2007."

The grid did not fry, this time. More info re- the flare at NASA.

"Bridged"

This exhibition of works by DFW-area MFA candidates took place in an interesting old warehouse property at 500 Singleton in Dallas during the weekend of the "Bridge-O-Rama" Peggy Hill Bridge celebrations. The show was organized by Stephen Lapthisophon; more details at the FaceBook page for the event or at its website, 500WEST.

I shot these photos right before leaving town and unfortunately didn't include much labelling; my recollection is that maybe it was a little harder to find than usual? Sorry about that. Given what I take to have been part of the exhibition's premise of working with and responding to an existing building or place with its own character, however, it was in fact satisfying to explore the show the way you would any other place, rather than as a series of discretely identified sub-experiences.

Maybe 2/3 of the way through the show, the power went out; so, starting with P1130029.JPG (red spray-painted graffiti on a white-panelled wall), there was no light other than my camera flash or natural light.

I greatly enjoyed the allure and complexity of the piece that starts here – the piece started calling you as soon as you stepped into the building. Once you found it, it was just dam' beautiful, with lots of intriguing components. To start, what was the salt-white powder on the floor? And I liked the slyly humorous suggestion of a little old t.v. skidding to a stop with the aid of braking parachutes, like a race car or the batmobile – also implicating the velocity with which t.v.'s transmissions enter our minds, often bypassing our critical faculties to a greater degree than, say, the contents of texts (see, e.g., here). All this kept me in the room long enough to discover the aperture revealing the small painting of a cat (Schrödinger’s?), sleeping or dead, in a small, painted room very like the room in which the t.v. sat, all configured in an arrangement not unlike a diorama – was the cat run over, or dreamed, by the t.v.? or is the t.v. the dream of the cat? or did the painting represent a history or future of the room to which it was attached, or an alternate reality? is this reality semi-fractal? Among many other intriguing details and possibilities. Unfortunately, the audio was a bit unclear for me, and I never managed to decipher just what it was calling. (UPDATE: I've been informed by Randall Garrett that this installation was by Jeff Gibbons – thanks!) (FURTHER UPDATE: Jeff's told me that the audio says, "The sun will come out . . . "; more in his comment below.)

I also enjoyed the piece that starts here (in the first photo, the actual piece starts to the right of the white door) – I appreciated the combination of references to the art of meditation and the ultra-orderly science of math, and the chaos and aesthetic appeal of deterioration and trash; and I especially liked the way the audio both surprised me and drew me around the far edge into a dark corner with small light sources and more, not-fully-visible detritus – with an implication that maybe this nook was the most important part of the installation; yet you weren't sure what if anything much were there. (UPDATE: I've been informed by Ali Starr that this piece was by Matt Heller – thanks!)

And there were other fine works. This seems as good a time as any to mention that Lapthisophon has organized a pretty long series of pretty terrific exhibitions lately, and to say thanks! and that I hope he and his collaborators will keep doing interesting things here.

Moving Image Fair

Dedicated to video art, this fair was co-founded by Murat Orozobekov and Edward Winkleman. My photos here. Art Fag City has collected 7 of the vidis here, full-length though compressed; and Hypoallergic has a helpful review of this and the Independent Fair here (I expect to add a post on the Independent here soon).

Moving Image included works by 31 artists, some very well-established. As a videophile, I'd have been happy to see much more; but with so many fairs and so little time, I spent only the better part of one day there, and wished I could have stayed longer.

I was intrigued by Daniel Phillips' River Street (2012), three projections onto three large, suspended concrete slabs, shot in the vicinity of an abandon elevator tower that became his studio for the duration, and glad to see Martha Wilson's now-iconic "worst fear" in the virtual flesh, I have become my own worst fear/ Deformation (2009/1974). I'm always interested to see Valie Export's work, and her Ein Perfektes Paar oder die Unzucht wechselt ihre Haut/A Perfect Couple, or Indecency Sheds Its Skin (1986) was, among other things, a blast from her prescient past. Alex Prager's exquisitely, absurdly cinematic Despair (2010) seemed to allude to persistent dilemmas re- femininity. AES+F's Allegoria Sacra (2011) was exquisite, as was the work I saw in Venice, Last Riot (2007; see visuals starting here), hypnotically slo-mo yet possibly even more visually riveting; and I very much liked Kate Gilmore's Built to Burst and Julia Kul's Passport Reading.

I regret not getting photos of Jaan Toomik's three works, in which: (1) a man hanging from a rope strung high between two trees plunges to and through the grass beneath him; (2) a man in a wheelchair rolls himself along the bottom of a full swimming pool (Seagulls (2004)); and (3) a naked man, his genitals tethered by a rope to a stake in a muddy field, circles the stake, facing outward, with his genitals pulled backward between his legs, with apparent strain.

And there were many other fine works, mostly installed reasonably well, which is a challenge for most video exhibitors; I look forward to future iterations of this fair. I just wish it were up longer . . . perhaps the organizers should consider that, if Moving Image opened a few days before the other fairs, it could have us almost to itself on Monday and Tuesday, when so many other art venues are closed.

For my posts on other fairs or exhibitions seen in NYC during Armory week, see here (5 down, 4 more to go).

Useful Wikileaks Links

My left sidebar's getting too cluttered, so I'm moving most of the Wikileaks links into this post:

~ You can donate to Wikileaks and/or to Assange's defense fund (t.p.t.b. are trying to financially strangle WL.)

~ A website with summary updates on the status of the legal proceedings against Assange, at swedenversusassange.com.

~ A summary of The Case for Wikileaks, with supporting links PLUS (scroll to the bottom) additional useful items and things you can do to help.

~ Ten Things You Need to Know About the Infowar, including Assange's 3-Pronged Strategy per his own writings.

~ Facilities for searching the cables for words or phrases: dazzlepod, cablefinder, leakysearch, cablesearch, and leakspinsauce. UPDATE: Great summary of available facilities, with links, at WL Central.

~ An excellent documentary on Wikileaks, Wikirebels, produced by Sveriges Television.

~ Info about events and protests in support of WL, at WL Central, and a flyer you can distribute, here.

~ Some cool graphics that can help you map the areas addressed by leaked info or provide other info in visual form, here.

And you can find more posts re- Wikileaks here.

New Museum Triennial: "The Ungovernables"

Exhibition website here; a very helpful NYT review here, with a slide show with some beautiful photos; my own photos here; and Art Fag City has a good slide show here.

Among the pieces I found exciting was a video by Wu Tsang, The Shape of a Right Statement (2008; still, right, from Clifton Benevento gallery). In it, Tsang re-speaks a text I found fascinating, from the second part of a video manifesto by autisim rights activist Amanda Baggs, embedded below. Thoughout the 5 min. run of Tsang's piece, he does not blink, a feat which, for me, greatly heightened the intensity of the work.

I saw this piece before encountering Tsang's other work, including Wildness in the Whitney Biennial. Various commentators have expressed concern w.r.t. many contemporary works that one needs a lot of info extraneous to the work itself in order to begin to appreciate it. While Tsang's work draws heavily from its sources and context, for me, it's a great example of a piece that was sufficiently arresting in its own right to make me go look for that info; and I'm glad I did.

Another of my favorites was The Propeller Group's project, TVC Communism (2011), from which two pieces were shown. First was a video installation comprising synchronized video on 5 large screens arranged in an inward-facing circle. Each screen showed one individual in a meeting in which the Propeller team collaborated to develop p.r. to re-brand Communism. Unfortunately, viewers seemed to enjoy being the apparent center of the virtual attention of the Propeller team so much that, while I was there, the area within the 5-screen circle was full of chatting museum-goers, making it impossible to hear the the audio "conversation" among the characters in the videos. The second piece shown from the project was the resulting commercial ad.

It's hard to resist comparing the Triennial and the Whitney Biennial. Perhaps the main observation yielded for me so far is that there was more socially- or politically-engaged work at the New Museum. Given how much of the most exciting art made during recent years has had overtly political concerns, the relative paucity of the political at the Whitney seems striking.

Below is Amanda Baggs' manifesto:

Brucennial 2012

Self-described as “Harderer. Betterer. Fasterer. Strongerer,” the Brucennial was probably my favorite fair for quality per square inch; photos here. Legible attribution was sometimes hard to find, and I got tired of looking after a while; plus, again, I wish I'd shot more; my usual apologies for all deficits.