SAMANTHA FIELDS
FROM A SAFE DISTANCE
MARCH 2-7, 2010
RECEPTION MONDAY, MARCH 1, 6-9 PM
300 EAST 57th ST, #14F, NY 10022
CURATED BY CECELIA STUCKER
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Press related to the artist:
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Middle: Through the Looking Glass
Source: Frieze Magazine Issues
February 15
From tableaux vivants to Photoshop, the philosophical and optical enquiries of Pietro Roccasalva inevitably return to painting2010: A Small Odyssey
Source: Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest
March 10
Pae White, Smoke Knows, 2009. (Photograph by Fredrik Nilsen) 2010, Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari’s Whitney Biennial, is essentially a. […]State Historical Museum Opens "The Year 1812 in the Paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin"
Source: Recent News on Artdaily.org
MOSCOW.- The State Historical Museum opened the exhibition "The Year 1812 in the paintings by Vasily Vereshchagin", a gift given to the museum in 1812. […]The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be
Source: Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net - CULTURE AND POLITICS AFTER THE NET
March 10
ByM. Beatrice FaziTackling the conundrum of the future's relationship to the present through the prism of digital culture, this year's Transmediale fe. […]BAM Silent Auction to Launch March 18
Source: Art Fag City
March 10
POST BY PADDY JOHNSON Walead Beshty, 3 Sided Picture (MBY), January 11th 2007, 2008, Valencia, California, Fujicolor Crystal Archive, Color photograph. […]N1BR: Issue 6
Source: n+1 -
March 7
Ken Burns---Charles PetersenTo vacation like a king, in a land no king can own, is nonetheless to expose the poverty of everyday democratic life. A tr. […]Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward
Source: Slashdot
March 11
An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth — is ce. […]Go See – Os Gemeos Galleria Patricia Armocida, Milan, through March 25, 2010
Source: AO Art Observed™
March 9
Os Gemeos, Rinha, 2010 On show at the Galleria Patricia Armocida, Milan, is the much anticipated “Nos Braços de um Anjo” (In the Arms of an Angel. […]Marjorie Perloff
Source: Ubu Web
New Critical Calendar
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- More events coming soon…
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Artists From The Gallery
TONIGHT at Kim Light/Lightbox - Samantha Fields: From A Safe Distance
Comments
Robert Musil on monuments
Robet Musil was a writer plagued by low demand throughout his literary career, though The Wall Street Journal coronated The Man Without Qualities as one of the three best novels of the twentieth century (the others being Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time).1 I was looking at a collection of some of his of short stories, essays, and briefer articles, Volume 72 of “The German Library In 100 Volumes”, and came across his essay Monuments (Die Denkmale), written in 1932, the thesis of which is the “conspicuous inconspicuousness” of monuments. Here is just a passage from that essay, which, though it focuses on the fate of monuments, bears relevance to contemporary public art and exhibitions with “open air” components such as Documenta, or inSite San Diego/Tijuana.
Everything permanent loses its ability to impress. Everything that forms the walls of our lives, so to speak the stage set of our consciousness, loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness. After a few hours we no longer hear a constant, bothersome noise. Pictures we hang on the wall are sucked up by the wall within a few days; it happens very seldom that one places oneself in front of them and looks at them. Half-read books which one has shelved in the magnificent rows of books in one’s library will never be read to the end. For sensitive people it is sufficient to buy a book whose beginning they like, but they will never thereafter pick it up again. In this case the process is aggressive, but one can also pursue its inevitable course in the higher feelings, and there its is always aggressive, for example in family life. The firm possession of marriage is distinguished countless times from inconstant desire by the sentence: Must I tell you every fifteen minutes that I love you? How much greater must be those psychological disadvantages to which the permanent is exposed in phenomena of brass and marble!
If one is well-disposed towards monuments, one must inexorably draw the conclusion that they make claims on us which run against our nature, and satisfying them calls for special arrangements. If one were to make warning signs for trucks as inconspicuous in color as monuments it would be a crime. Locomotives, after all, whistle shrilly and not timidly, and even mailboxes are painted in attractive colors. In a word, monuments today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort! Anybody can stand quietly by the side of the road and allow glances to be bestowed on him; these days we can demand more of monuments. Once one has grasped this thought — which thanks to certain cultural currents is slowly making headway — one can realize how backward the art of monuments is compared with the contemporary development of advertising.
Articles which mention Die Denkmale:
The Monument Is Invisible, The Sign Visible - Werner Fenz - October #102
Monument: antimonument - Jeremy Melvin - Architectural Review (Oct 2002)
Commemorative Monuments - Lisa Moran - presented at Dublin City Council 2007
Sources- http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_08_009654.php [↩]
Today, Feb 27 - After Communism - panels at Columbia University
Part of the Performing Revolution in Central and Eastern Europe Festival, here are today’s goings-on at Columbia:
After Communism: Achievement and Disillusionment since 1989
February 26-27, 2010
Panel schedule: Friday at 2:00pm, 3:45pm, 5:30pm and 7:15pm | Saturday at 2:00pm, 3:45pm, 5:30pm
Presented by The Harriman Institute at Columbia University in association with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, and Austrian Cultural Forum.
This multi-day symposium brings together public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural figures, and academics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess the global meaning of the 1989 revolutions in East-Central Europe and their aftermaths. Speakers will discuss the changes in our understanding of the Communist system and the sources of its collapse, and the age of “post-communism,” a condition whose contours and duration remain unclear.
Facebook Bans Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
We don’t often re-blog, but today via the Deep Europe mailing list SPECTRE, we received an interesting and unsettling (but overall unsurprising) story from the web existentialists at moddr_labs in Rotterdam:
Rotterdam, 18th of February 2010
Facebook excommunicates WORM because of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine
It is with great sorrow that we announce that Facebook Inc. has decided that WORM, the producer of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, will be excommunicated from Facebook.
The initiative to build the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine came from Moddr_, WORM’s media lab. By threatening WORM, Facebook is trying to take down the Suicide Machine.
The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows users of - among others - Facebook to commit ‘social network suicide’. Facebook threatens WORM with further legal action if WORM doesn’t stop targeting the FaceBook platform via the SuicideMachine. In addition, it has now also demanded that WORM immediately deletes its own Facebook profile (WORM_Rotterdam). According to Facebook and its lawyer, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has violated Facebook’s Terms of Service and with that WORM has forfeited it’s right to keep using the platform. WORM does not want to engage in a fight over this matter with Facebook. The idea behind the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was to be able to ‘unfriend’ in an automated fashion and to make users of social networks aware that they should always be in control of their own data. Facebook won’t allow for this control and is also not willing to enter into this debate. We are pretty much done with that and are left with no other choice than to commit online suicide ourselves. The conditions and attitude of Facebook leave no other option as far as WORM is concerned.
WORM deeply regrets the current situation. The web 2.0 Suicide Machine was never intended to target Facebook as such, but meant as a tool for people who, for whatever reason, are tired of their online life. Facebook wants all access to their service, personal data of their users included, to run via their own ‘connect’ platform. In this way, Facebook can set, interpret and change its own rules as it sees fit…
The excommunication of WORM illustrates that data freedom and net neutrality of users is merely an illusion on many social network sites. Not only is it not allowed for people to unfriend (in an automated manner), but companies also have the power to expel users they do not like. Facebook shows that a user only has the rights that Facebook grants it.
Facebook claims all rights. WORM does not want to continue living in this 2.0 world. Which is why we say goodbye to all our friends. We wish you all the best.
No flowers, no speeches.
moddr_labs,
WORM, Rotterdam
worm.org
moddr.net
www.suicidemachine.org
JPEG Riff on Nature
Paul Kolker
Paul Kos
Alejandro Cesarco - Here Comes The Sun - 2004
Lois Weinberger - Spontaneous Vegetation
John Gerrard - Lufkin - 2009
- n55 - City Plant Farming Module
Finnboggi Petursson - Centre - 2005
Joost Conijn - Wood Car - 2005
Matthew Buckingham
non-art image - will find source
4chan.org atheism meme, nth variation
Lara Favaretto
Mark Curran - The Breathing Factory, Leixlip, Ireland - 2006
Adam McEwen
Thank you.
-Paris
Value and the Exhibition Experience
February 19th, 2010
By: Paris Ionescu
Topics: Art in General, Featured Article, Politics, The Art Market
By: Paris Ionescu
Topics: Art in General, Featured Article, Politics, The Art Market
It is becoming more and more popularly acknowledged that the art exhibition as a specific experiential format has played a large role in enabling art’s maintained, perhaps rising status, often more so than then content of the artworks within. In a paper delivered at Serpentine Gallery in 2009, Dorothea von Hantelmann argued that the exhibition format, from the salon to the biennial, has ‘performed’ a crucial favor (the word favor being my particular elaboration on her idea) for art, of creating a psychologically empathetic relationship between audience and artwork, in which the audience has an expectation of democratic subjectivity, and therein affords the work automatic value. There is plenty of precedent, of course, to the idea that meaning in art is constructed at least partially by the expectations the audience brings to the work, going back at least to Hans-Robert Jauss’ reception theory of the 1960s. It has become fashionable, at least in curatorial circles, to place emphasis on the role of the curator in helming the viewer’s experience with an exhibition - and to remind others, as Boris Groys notably has done, that the word curate originates from the Latin verb, curare, to heal, it is a more specific development to examine how the multiple experiential characteristics of the exhibition as a device in itself, can perpetuate art’s economic, political, and social status.
In view of this, selfportrait will launch a new project, beginning next week, that aims to respond to the often overlooked experiential nuances of the contemporary art exhibition.
Recommended Reading:
The Triangulation of Value - Nav Haq - Afterall 23
Politics of Installation - Boris Groys - e-flux 2
Reception History, from U. Toronto
Doug Wada - Untitled (Bags, Winter) - 2008 - oil on linen, from Look Again at Marlborough Chelsea
Julian Jaynes and the Bicameral mind
I thought it would be worth it to respond to Stephen Wuensch’s work on Dematerialize: Behavior Mod and the Destruction of Meaning over at http://behmod.blogspot.com/, with the work of Julian Jaynes:
“Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.”
Artforum June 1962
It will be another two years until Artforum turns 50, but someone posted this shot of an original June 1962 copy on my facebook wall and I thought it was worth sharing.
photo c Simon Summerfield
Here’s a passage from senior editor Eric Banks’ reflection on the inaugural issue:
“ARTFORUM IS AN ART MAGAZINE published in the west–but not only a magazine of western art. We are concerned first with western activity but claim the world of art as our domain.” With this declaration of manifest destiny and a blurry, mysterious, uncaptioned cover image–a shadowy Jean Tinguely thingamajig that looks like a Jurassic Park escapee in repose–Artforum came into being in June 1962 with a forty-six-page issue weighted heavily toward exhibition reviews, which bookended a feature section titled “Forum.” The design was a bit quirky– heavy-stock burnt orange dividers literally segregate the parts of the magazine–but the Pisani Printing Company’s foray into art publishing had begun.
Artavazd Peleshian
February’s Artforum features an essay by Scott Macdonald on the genius Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, who developed a technique of shooting documentary montages using a Telephoto lens, so that the actions of the subjects are more candid. A few of his films — most of which have never received a US release partially due to the isolation of countries behind the iron curtain until 1989 — have been uploaded to Youtube.
His films are the kind that evoke such a profoundly wise spirituality that you don’t really want to watch them on Youtube, or in the context of a blog, but nonetheless:
Life (Kynaq), 1993
2/3 - Tonight at X Initiative
Press release:
BRING YOUR OWN ART
X INITIATIVE TO EXHIBIT ALL ARTWORK DELIVERED WITHIN 24 HOUR PERIOD BETWEEN 11 AM FEBRUARY 3RD AND 11 AM FEBRUARY 4TH 2010
BRING YOUR OWN ART is a 24-hour marathon that will take place at X Initiative from February 3rd to February 4th and will be open to everyone. Artists, galleries, curators, collectors and art lovers are invited to come to X and hang their own artworks with no
restriction. BRING YOUR OWN ART is literally a free for all – a temporary occupation that will start on the second floor of X Initiative and expand to the upper floors as more and more art works are delivered and hung on the exhibition walls.
A celebration of the chaotic energies of art and a joyful subversion of hierarchies, BYOA is a spontaneous gathering that offers a DIY platform where any kind of art can be exhibited in
a museum-quality space. Inspired by Walter Hopps’s experimental Thirty-Six Hours, an event that the legendary curator organized in Washington in 1978, during which he installed anything anybody brought that would fit through the door, BYOA is a festive occasion that fosters unusual collaborations between artists, art professionals and dilettantes, while offering an alternative to curated group shows.
During BYOA, on the ground floor, X Initiative will make available a simple stage and basic PA system for bands, musicians and DJs. Performers are welcome to play any kind of music for 30 minutes each.
BYOA is a collaboration with the Fine Art Adoption Network (FAAN), an online network originally commissioned by Art in General that connects artists and potential collectors (adopters). Adopters acquire an artwork without purchasing it by soliciting the artists through FAAN. The artists choose to whom they will give their work. At BYOA, artists can exhibit work they are making available for adoption through the FAAN website, in addition to whatever other work they choose to exhibit. For more info, visit FAAN at www.fineartadoption.net. To post work for adoption, please contact info@fineartadoption.net.
BYOA marks the end of X Initiative, an experimental program for contemporary art, which was founded in March 2009 and will end its activities at 548 West 22nd Street on February 6th,
2010. Founded by Elizabeth Dee and directed by Cecilia Alemani, X Initiative has functioned as an exhibition space and gathering spot for the global art community, with a goal to inspire new possibilities for experiencing and producing contemporary art. Since its beginning, X Initiative has hosted 12 exhibitions and more than 50 events such as panel discussions, lectures, performances and screenings.
BRING YOUR OWN ART RULES OF ENGAGEMENT:
- Free access for all, doors open on February 3rd at 11 AM
- No advance registration required
- 30.000 square feet space to occupy (2nd, 3rd, and 4th floors @ X Initiative)
- Participants can bring any kind of art they like
- Participants need to come with their own tools (X Initiative can only provide two ladders)
- The works will not be insured: X Initiative is not responsible for any loss or damage to works
- The space will have security guards
-All works must be deinstalled and removed from the premises by February 4th at 2 pm. All
works not removed by 2 PM on February 4th will be disposed of.
Location:
X Initiative, 548 West 22nd Street,
NY 10011, www.x-initiative.org
Date:
From Wednesday, February 3rd, 11 AM to Thursday, February 4th, 11 AM
SELECTED PERFORMERS INCLUDE:
Black Lake
Big Game
Black Waterfall and Bobby Service
XOX
Crippler
ALEXCALIBUR
Light Asylum:
- aaaarg.org
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- Art Observed
- artbabble
- Bidoun
- Brian Holmes
- ByStory
- cms.MIT.edu
- diarch.net
- Edge.org
- Farimani
- Frieze Magazine
- greylodge
- How’s My Dealing?
- hyperallergic
- Independent Collectors
- indexhibit
- installationart.net
- Lev Manovich
- Medien Kunst Netz
- mute magazine
- nettime
- radicalart.info
- Seth Godin
- Slashdot
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- The Independent Gaming Source
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- UbuWeb
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