This past Monday, 21 April, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment against University of Buffalo Professor and Bio-Artist Steven Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble. The ruling comes as a happy suspension of the legal persecution Dr. Kurtz has been suffering since his 2004 arrest and subsequent targeting by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, first on suspicions of "bioterrorism" charges, and later reduced to mail fraud and wire fraud charges for the acquisition and transport of certain legally available biological lab equipment and some few hundred dollars worth of harmless bacteria culture. At the time Kurtz was developing an installation called Free Range Grains, which allowed participants to test food for the presence of genetically modified organisms. While the prosecution may yet appeal the judge's decision, and consequently take the case up to a higher federal court, Judge Arcara's ruling was welcome by Dr. Kurtz and his legal counsel and may yet be a signpost for a just resolution to a terrific mobilization of law enforcement against a symbolic and precedent-setting target. To learn more about Kurtz's work or his legal battles, please visit Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund.

Iraqi American video artist Wafaa Bilal's recent exhibition at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, Virtual Jihadi, was closed by the University's administration a day after its initial opening on 5 March 2008. A conservative commentator on the state payroll called for protests to Bilal's exhibition before its opening in the pages of the Troy Record, citing a work based on an incendiary video game exhibited in a university art gallery. The offending work, a video in which Bilal depicts himself as an Iraqi civilian radicalized by his brother's death and driven to join an Al-Qaidea in Iraq cell as a suicide bomber, positions the artist's character in an interactive video game called The Night of Bush Capturing, an Islamist détournement of Hunt for Saddam, an American first person shooter in which a protagonist U.S. soldier makes his way through a virtual world populated by stereotypical Iraqi men in an Odyssean journey to "hunt" and kill former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. RPI cited concerns that Balil's work may make use of university resources to "provide a platform for what may be a product of a terrorist organization or which suggests violence directed toward the president of the United States and his family." Following the censoring of the exhibition at the university art gallery, Balil seems to have been blacklisted from campus and denied access to university buidlings, despite being RPI's current artist in residence and being assured by the university president that he remains a welcome member of the community regardless of the recent controversy. Balil describes this and more in a recent video interview.

If the chauvinism of the Hunt for Saddam seems underrepresented here, it's likely because it is; reading about it today calls to mind similar popular jingoistic interactive Internet memes and flash animations authored and circulated shortly after September 11 and following the path to war in Iraq, in which players were given a chance to symbolically drop bombs and mark the bodies and homes of an endlessly regenerating population of animated stand-ins for an abstracted and heavily racialized enemy. As Brian Holmes writes, Balil's recent work has been concerned primarily with suggesting potential strategies for representation and sympathy with the Iraqi civilian, a figure often ignored in the popular media depiction of Iraq as a Manichaean arena of pro-Western freedom-fighters and regressive Islamic militants. In a war waged on all fronts — despite President Bush's assurances that sacrifices of the civilian population in this country at least need not be asked — the symbolic plays an ever important role to those geographically and emotionally alienated from the material realities of war.

Bilal's video, Virtual Jihadi, will be on view at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy through 4 April 2008. You can see another one of Bilal's recent web performance projects here.

Artist and writer Deborah Fisher's new publishing project, SELLOUT, launched earlier last week. The blog features an eclectic series of posts on the practical side of economic survival as a fine artist in an often corrosively unsympathetic art world. SELLOUT is comprised on Fisher's musings on everything from juried review applications to professional community building. Often peppered, like her writing on Art Cal and elsewhere, with Fisher's wry humor, the new blog becomes as much an individual narrative as a kind of artist's personal finance blog.

Simply reading about it on the Internet doesn't exactly communicate the feeling one gets when walking past the site of the new New Museum, located on the corner of Bowery and Prince and conveniently on my way as I traveled downtown to see the new Aïda Ruiolva video at Salon 94 Freemans. The museum is at this point swarming with activity as it prepares for debut exhibit Unmonumental, a curious show of mostly senior and mid-career artists delineated by a narrow set of media distinctions. Perhaps the feeling related shouldn't be so spectacular when taken in context to the largely complete process of gentrification on the Lower East Side, but something still feels particularly unique when seeing the vanguard institution and the much lauded architectural work of Sejima and Nishizawa tower over the neighboring buildings, or the smartly dressed art admins photographing the building from outside as a small throng of older Bowery bums linger just 100 or so feet off. The newly commissioned artwork by Ugo Rondinone set to adorn the front of the museum for the opening will surely add to the spectacle, as described on Curbed.

PAWNSHOP
e-flux - 55 Ludlow street, New York NY
1 October 2007 through early 2008

Last month e-flux's Ludlow street location was transformed into a pawnshop as exhibition space, a new project by artists Liz Linden, Julieta Aranda, and Anton Vidokle. For the transformation, some sixty contemporary artists were solicited to contribute works to be pawned — that is, exchanged for a cash value, and kept for 30 days before being offered for sale — which tomorrow become available for purchase to patrons of the pawnshop. The artists who have contributed works include both senior and mid-career artists, some with active collector bases, so much of the works currently on view could well be removed from the space if collectors descend upon the location as it becomes a commercial art distrubution venue. The location has also been aesthetically transformed into one vision of a contemporary American pawnshop, outfitted with pegboard walls, a conventional retail window display, florescent-lit display cases, and an awning that eschews any indication of a commercial or institutional exhibition space.

This functional aesthetic framework does more than recycle an economic model of money lending, barter, and exchange, but also creates the potential for turning unsuspecting patrons into art spectators as they casually wander in to browse the wares. Herein lies the strength of the exhibition, which is complemented further by e-flux's quiet LES location. The historical and critical precedents for this type of relational work are abundant. Nicolas Bourriaud used the model of the flea market to describe a certain strain of 90s art practice in Postproduction. What Bourriaud fails to mention in his text, however, are the artists who set up shop years prior, like Martha Rosler. Rosler provides perhaps the clearest historical prototype to PAWNSHOP with the garage sales she organized in contemporary art spaces in the 70s and later reproduced in the 80s. While Rosler advertised her garage sales both in local general-interest publications and specialized art journals, e-flux's PAWNSHOP lies in wait for unsolicited patrons to enter and engage with the staff on hand, negotiating the established commercial protocol of the pawnshop and the art object. This human element, PAWNSHOP's staff, animates the exhibition and playfully vulgarizes, or, one might even suggest democratizes, the often stiff and financially exclusive world of contemporary art collecting with the contextual application of a well-established and populist economic form.

PERFORMA 07
27 October - 20 November 2007
New York NY - Various Locations

The Second Biennale of Visual Art Performance launches tomorrow night at the Guggenheim with Franceso Vezolli's
Cosi’ e (se vi pare) or Right You Are (If You Think You Are) a new play — currently sold out, the subject of some controversy as reported on Art Fag City — especially commissioned for the event. Artcal Zine will cover various highlights of the Biennale as they happen through the close of the exhibitions and performances in Novemeber. This weekend also features the launch of video artist and musician Ronnie Bass's PERFORMA TV project — an alternative distribution venue for Peroforma participants and spectators that promises to increase the possibilities of dispersal and archival of content via a live Internet video feed.

Recommended this weekend is Nathalie Djurberg's newly commissioned stop-motion film Untitled (Working Title Kids & Dogs) playing at the Zipper Theatre in Hell's Kitchen ($18) in which packs of children battle packs of dogs, with live music and performance to accompany the screening. Also recommended is Stapelung (stack) John Bock's new five-channel video sculpture opening Saturday on the ground-floor of PS1.

The Joker: Richard Prince at the Guggenheim

The New Yorker's head art critic Peter Schjeldahl pens a review of the massive Richard Prince retrospective currently going on at the Guggenheim. Schjeldahl bares some rather conservative teeth; he seems as enthused about Prince's 80s media-crit and appropriation work as if little has happened since, but admonishes the artist for his more recent expressive painting and art about art. Opening with an anecdotal story about Prince's refusal to exhibit in the decisive 1977 Pictures show in response to the curator's dogmatism, Schjeldahl relates the story perhaps as some cue to the artist's defiant, and later juvenile, sensibilities. So why does Schjeldahl mind the new work so much? Perhaps he feels a little uncomfortable with the exhibition platform offered to such a decidedly contrary artist, who at one point, happily without representation, had to be convinced by Barbara Gladstone that he might benefit from working with an art dealer. Or maybe he simply doesn't have a taste for the artist's new output. His text-pieces and "joke" art do after all seem uncomfortably similar to some more recent output by Mel Bochner and Sean Landers. Or, perhaps, the critic simply doesn't see the utter hilarity in those hideous, "vulgarized" figure works, evocative of de Kooning only in the most sarcastic sense.

A few weeks ago a new mural entitled, "Time Flies: A History of Bushwick" was unveiled at the corner of Woodbine and Knickerbocker in the heart of Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood. The 400-foot painting wraps around a corner and gives the site a warm inviting presence that most street corners in the area lack.

Created by artists and students from the Academy of Urban Planning, El Puente Academy, and Groundswell Community Mural Project, the mammoth project was under the direction of muralist Joe Matunis and continues a tradition that has long been a Bushwick tradition — community murals.

In 1992, an earlier mural stood at this otherwise quiet corner and symptomatic of the time, it confronted issues of drugs, crime and social justice--which grappled this community.

Fast forward to 2007 and Bushwick has changed from the front lines of the city's drug wars to the next up-and-coming neighborhood. While the new wave of highly-educated hipsters homestead in this north Brooklyn neighborhood, "Time Flies" is one of the first public efforts by the predominantly black and Hispanic citizens of Bushwick to articulate their own thoughts about the neighborhood's future.

Paper Tiger Television - 25th Year Anniversary
7pm & 9pm, 15 & 16 October 2007
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue (at E. 2 St) New York, NY 10003
$8

In celebration of their 25th anniversary, progressive downtown media organization and one-time public access channel Paper Tiger Television hosts two nights of programming at the Anthology Film Archives. Over the years, PTTV has helped hundreds of New York media activists, students, art historians, video artists, and others produce videos with various goals and for various audiences. They are mostly known for the culturally critical documentary tapes with a certain PTTV-look that eschews slick production values for a sense of artistry and play. Recommended tonight at the 7pm screening is sociologist Herb Schiller's 1981 tape Herb Schiller Reads the New York Times: The Steering Mechanism Of the Ruling Class, which delivers on its titular promise. The video is an early manifestation of a video "reading" genre that PTTV pioneered. The form is one in which an intellectual or artist performs a critical, something theatrical, reading of a popular cultural publication, usually with the intention of deconstructing the language of the text and exposing the transparent constitutive ideologies in the process; Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs made a tape reading Rolling Stone for the series in 1982, Martha Rosler reading Vogue in 1982, Alex Cockburn reading the Washington Post in 1983, Noam Chomsky reading the New York Times in 1986.

Tomorrow's show at 7pm focuses on tapes dealing with race and class in New York, and includes Tompkins Square Park: Operation Class War, a 1992 documentary on the now deeply entrenched class divides of a then-gentrifying Lower East Side. The 9pm program features several tapes centered on LGBTSTQ perspectives, including Fenced Out, a 2001 documentary on the legal struggles for Christopher Street Pier, a long-established safe-haven for lower-income and homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, Two Spirit, transgender and questioning youth of color and an important 60s historical site of the modern gay liberation movement.

Welcome to the ArtCal Zine — ArtCal's new, artist-run publishing effort. Here you'll find reviews of New York shows, features, editorials and interviews by an expanding group of artists and art writers. We'll also be featuring New York event listings that don't exactly fit into ArtCal's exhibition database but are worthy of note.