Recently by B. Blagojević
Dear readers, I will be traveling internationally for several weeks this summer. It is my great pleasure, therefore, to announce that S.C.Squibb has agreed to act as managing editor of ArtCal Zine in my absence for much of this month and the next. S.C.Squibb has been contributing regularly to ArtCal since October of last year.
Art in General Fundraiser
8pm - 11pm Saturday 14 June 2008
100 Lafayette New York, NY
$100
This Saturday Art in General hosts a special kind of fundraiser, billing the event as "part benefit, part performance art event, and part live concert." Put together by dealer James Fuentes and featuring a host of promising live performances, the benefit takes palce at 100 Lafayette -- the much discussed, officially unopened joint venture club whose perhaps most notable founders include artist Spencer Sweeney and party punk Andrew W.K. The latter of the two's fingerprints is definitely all over the multi-story club, which is adorned with with no-smoking type neon signs encouraging visitors to "EVERYBODY DANCE NOW," party hard, and like such affirmations of the Good Life. The emerging space, which has already been host to a few private and not-so-private events, features an interesting interior, spacious downstairs dance floor, and full bar which will be serving complimentary cocktails and beer for fundraiser patrons. Tickets are $100 and go to benefit AiG's fantastic exhibition, residency, and public programs.
In Discussion: Lawrence Weiner and Andrew Blake
7:30pm Wednesday 11 June 2008
Swiss Institute - 495 Broadway 3rd Floor New York, NY
Mapping Correspondence Panel Discussion
6:30pm Friday 13 June 2008
Center for Book Arts - 28 W 27th St, 3rd Fl. New York, NY
$10 suggested donation
This Friday the Center for Book Arts hosts "An Authentik and Historikal Panel on the Phenomenon of Mail Art" in conjunction with the exhibition Mapping Correspondence: Mail Art in the 21st Century. Mail art here is a loosely defined categorical framework for work which conceptually or formally rests on its circulation through postal systems. The form naturally becomes an emblem of a kind of errant 20th century vanguardism developed contrary to high art mandates of singular, precious art objects whose exhibition and circulation remains deeply managed to this day. Mail Art in the 21st Century has mobilized dozens of artists invited to participate in the show, and who in turn invited more collaborators, to produce new original mail art works reflecting "the complex and varied meaning of the book, mapping, and social networking in the 21st century." Panel speakers on Friday will be A.A. Bronson, who is an artist and director of Printed Matter, Martha Wilson, an artist and founder of the Franklin Furnace Archive, and artists John Evans, Barbara Moore, and William Wilson. The panel will be moderated by John Held Jr.
Tonight at the Swiss Institute meanwhile, assistant curator Piper Marshall will lead a discussion between artist Lawrence Weiner and well known adult film director and producer Andrew Blake. The occasion of the talk is Weiner's new work currently on view at SI through 19 July, Water in Milk Exists. For the exhibition, Weiner worked with the Swiss Institute and cinematographer Kiki Allgeier to produce a new video work which the press release promises to challenge "both artistic and pornographic conventions."
Seeing Neighborhoods Anew: Art Institutions' Enactment of the Transnational
Hyun Sook Kim
POSTPONED 3pm Saturday 7 June 2008
$museum admission (12)
In a recent lecture at the New Museum, curator Okwui Enwezor spoke on what Peter Schledhal has cynically described in 1999 as the rise of "festivalism" – large scale, International and highly visible art biennales and exhibitions. The rise of such exhibitions, the massive mobilization of cultural workers and resources necessary for their production, and the inevitable contestations for power, influence, and autonomy of the various players involved inevitably precipitates all variety of strange fruit; the cancellation of the transnational manifesta 6 in 2006 by the government of Nicosia, for example, catalyzed the foundation of Anton Vidokle's monumental United Nations Plaza project in Berlin the following year, which was only the first of three of its manifestations thus far, each growing in complexity and collaborative scope. Enwezor, who is this year's Gwangju Biennale artistic director, theorized in his talk that these kinds of exhibitions are often born in response to traumatic moments in a nation's history; the three primary examples offered of his condition being Documenta's formation in response to the end of WWII (for what could Germany be after this but a cultural power?), the Johannesburg Biennale's foundation as a response to the abolishment of Apertheid, and the Gwangju Biennale modeled in part as a kind of 15 year echo to the unrest of the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement. These exhibitions in a sense, Enwezor suggests, negotiate a relationship between history and trauma, and produce temporary sites where international cultural production occurring in a particular locale might suspend even those deepest and most necessary tenets of national identity. It's interesting then, to consider the role of the museum and other large-scale but geographically localized (but temporally unlimited) cultural institutions and their place in civil society. If "festivalism" leads to a disruption, reconfiguration, or perhaps even an affirmation of it's host site's relationship to the past, then on what axis does one locate the quotidian operations of the museum? Tomorrow at the New Museum, sociologist Hyun Sook Kim will lecture on "art institutions' enactment of the transnational," a look at just such questions, the constituting of the local, the contemporary art institution's collapse of such locality, and the changing role of institutions with their relationship to place. This lecture is part of the Museum as Hub program, and furthermore one of the various supporting programs of Insa Art Space's Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision, currently on view at the New Museum's Museum as Hub space.
NOTE: The New Museum has postponed this event to a later unspecified date. This event listing was composed previous to this and published regardless; it will be reposted when the Museum reschedules the event.
Triple Canopy, an online publishing platform that "presents writing, art, video, and other creative projects in forms that work with and against the Internet," has just released the first four parts to their second issue, Orbiting an Absent Program. Featured is an original translation of Robert Bolaño's 1999 acceptance speech for the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize, an honor bestowed upon the Chilean writer for his semi-autobiographical novel from that previous year, The Savage Detectives – recently translated into English and steadily gaining popularity among North American readers since 2007. Orbiting... also features Victory Over the Sun, a streaming video transfer of a film by Michael Robinson, whose motion picture works on 16mm and video have been gaining increasing visibility in American avant-garde film circles. Robinson's work – part contemplative landscape film, part something else – is shot largely at the sites of various midcentury world fairs. It is introduced in Triple Canopy by curator Thomas Beard who locates the piece somewhere at the interstices of formalist media specificity, the legacy of Euro-American modernism, and the trajectory and future of media art's utopian Ur-narrative.
Also featured in this issue is Molly Kleiman's profile on a micro-nationalist separatist colony in the West Bosnian countryside, in which the writer examines both the colony's kitschy aesthetic sensibilities and the inherent threats of political and ethnic violence in its defining narrative and constituting everyday cultural practices. Another motion picture work in this issue, Brush by Keren Cytter, is the second in a "video melodrama in six parts," also presented here.
Triple Canopy manages to showcase content on the Internet in a novel and economic way. Combining a low-profile javascript controller with with a blog-like page organization, individual texts are spread across pages that can be "turned" with either a keystroke or a mouse click, while individual articles may still be linked directly, text can be copied, and much of the functionality of static, vanilla HTML websites is preserved.
Atlantic Avenue Art Walk
7 June - 8 June 2008
Various locations, Brooklyn NY
In addition to this weekend's Bushwick Open Studios and Arts Festival, a little further south the fifth annual Atlantic Avenue Art Walk also takes place, stretching across the borough in an offering of events, screenings, performances, and open studios. The Art Walk is a self-guided tour through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Gowanus, and Downtown Brooklyn along the historic avenue. All Art Walk events are free and open to the public. Readers interested should pursue the Art Walk's news and events page and the directions page.
The image reproduced above features one of the projects on view at this year's Art Walk: Shinsuke Aso's Postcard (SPAC), a long-term project that is "part installation, part performance, part micro enterprise" and will be presented at the Atlantic Gardens Storefront (535 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn) by MINUS SPACE. SPAC is an ongoing business venture as performance that produces postcards entirely from found materials and sold afterwards as cheap multiples. The project claims to derive its energy from "from the global market system, in which anything can be a source of business," becoming a double-edged allegory for the limitlessness of privatization (yes, even of discarded cardboard) and the spirit of entrepreneurship while aligning itself with a populist bend — 25 cent postcards perhaps functioning here as the least pretentious of commodities.
The Chelsea Hotel in Words and Pictures
7pm 2 June 2008
McNally Robinson - 52 Prince St New York, NY
In a city as obsessed with its own claims to an authentic, towering importance in 20th century cultural life as with a cynical emphasis on that authenticity's dispersal by the stolid grip of capital and the constant influx of would-be denizens, a few landmarks dot the city's map like fissures to an authentic bedrock somehow obscured with the passage into the new Millennium. Tonight at McNally & Robinson in SoHo, author Ed Hamilton and photographer Julie Calfee present The Chelsea Hotel in Words and Pictures, a presentation on one such historic 23rd street residence to artists both renown and . Hamilton's recently published Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, provides a kind of pop history of the site focused especially on the past 10 or 15 years. Calfee's recent book meanwhile, Inside: The Chelsea Hotel collects four years worth of photography and writing. The presentation at MR will consist of a slide show, discussion, and singing.
Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival
6 June - 8 June 2008
Various Locations
BOS Preview & Sample Sale
7:30 - 10:30pm (open bar from 7:30 - 8:30pm)
Friday 30 May 2008
Lumenhouse - 47 beaver Street Brooklyn, NY
The periphery of commercial art exhibition and production sites in this city is a constantly shifting front. Studio spaces, for instance, of artists both emerging and established dot the heavily polluted Gowanus canal on both its sides. Studio occupants catch the lunch hour takeout drift from the South Slope, while long-term development plans are underway to build a 68,000 square foot Whole Foods near the intersection of Third Avenue and Third Street. Industry City meanwhile, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, is now renting spaces to artists and developing arts organizations for a kind of tempered integration of cultural workers into the declining but still active industrial sector. Industry City developers have taken note of the wild, market-driven development cycles of neighborhoods like Williamsburg and DUMBO, the former of which is being intensely reimagined on recent subway ads the city over as the latest fledgling, luxury and culturally oriented neighborhood.
Even changes such as these however might not preclude us from suggesting that there has remained, for some years now, a kind of gravitational center for this periphery in Bushwick – at least here in North Brooklyn. Intrepid would-be gallery owners and artists seem to open new venues here each year, while a few older exhibitors calcify their rightful position in the neighborhood with strong programing. The tenor of many such programs seems more conventional than vanguard, with group and solo shows often hung that could easily be transplanted to a Williamsburg gallery without much modification (and to Chelsea perhaps with some.) Rather than launching provocations at either patrons or peer organizations, many of these galleries and spaces seem instead focused on developing interesting, ongoing programing and forging new entry paths to commercial subsistence for both themselves and the artists with which they work.
The dispersed Bushwick arts community manifests next weekend with a 3-day "self-organized art festival where anyone and everyone in the community is welcome to participate by presenting art work, organizing activities or helping to produce the event." Bushwick Open Studios & Arts Festival is sponsored by local businesses, staffed by volunteers, and promises its usual diverse range of open studios, guided history walks, weekend-long group exhibitions, performances, barbecues, film and video screenings, and probably a few parties. A week before these events, however, Lumenhouse hosts a preview and sample sale event to benefit the festival. The benefit will take place tomorrow evening, from 7:30 - 10:30, will feature an open bar for the first hour, and priced to sell donated art works for the generation of funds for the festival.
AIDS/ART/WORK
9:30am - 5:30pm Friday 30 May 2008
CUNY Graduate Center - 365 5th Avenue New York, NY
Rooms 9206/9207
$30/$20 full day registration
This friday the CUNY Graduate Center hosts a single day conference entitled AIDS/ART/WORK, exploring "the pasts, presents, and futures of AIDS art, AIDS activism, and AIDS prevention, and the connections between them." The day's events will be made up of 3 panels and a final roundtable discussion. An 'AIDS Art' Movement? will examine the potential emergence of an AIDS aesthetic, or an ongoing and developing response in both aesthetic and activist realms to the AIDS crisis, how this response has changed over time, and its relationship to avant-garde, conceptual, and representational modes of art production; Art and Activism in the Age of AIDS promises a look back at the legacy of AIDS activism and art making and its trajectory from grassroots organizing to ongoing institutionalization; Collaboration -- Problems and Possibilities promises to analyze the efficacy and history of collaborative efforts in community organizing, prevention, and education campaigns for AIDS related activist work.
An Illustrated Lecture by P. Adams Sitney
8pm Tuesday 27 May 2008
Light Industry - 55 33rd Street 3rd Fl, Brooklyn NY
$6
P. Adams Sitney, one of this continent's most important living historians and critics of avant-garde cinema, will present an illustrated lecture this coming Tuesday in Sunset Park at Light Industry. The lecture, Eyes Upside Down, a borrowed title from Sitney's upcoming book, promises a formalist reading of three short film works, each produced about a decade or so before the next, by three decidedly American experimental filmmakers: Marie Menken, Ernie Gehr, and Stan Brakhage. Sitney will relate the three short films in the program to a type of dispersed "American aesthetic" grounded in the 19th century writings of transcendentalist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, and manifesting in the work of many cultural producers since.
