Press Release:
AMP Tracks is pleased to present The
Black & White Show, an exhibition at Collective Hardware (169 Bowery at
Delancey) curated by Meghan Carleton and Amandine Lesaffre Freidheim and
sponsored by Daniel K, the prestige diamond jewelry house.  Void of
color, the exhibition explores the graphic clarity and dynamics of
black-and-white art by emerging to blue-chip artists.   The Black &
White Show will be on view from September 10 to October 3, 2009.  The
gallery will be open from noon to 7pm daily.  An opening reception will
be held Wednesday, September 16th from 7-10pm.

Artists of all eras have used the black-and-white palette to explore the
power of contrast. The simplicity of this use of medium brings forth the
potential for dramatic and vivid expressions. As the two values compete
for the eyes’ attention, stark and evocative forms emerge, in a powerful
accentuation of imagery. This exhibit will highlight the range of
possibilities of this basic yet bold representation.

Featured artists include:  Vik Muniz, Kara Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Andy Warhol, Irving Penn, Darren Almond, Ryan McGuiness, Brody
Neuenschwander, Frank Stella, Evan Gruzis, Will Ryman, Barbara Kruger,
among others.  The exhibition will debut works by Rodofphe Gombergh and
Sandrine and Riccardo Barilla-three European artists exhibiting in New
York for the first time.

From 17-20 September, 2009, the Bergen Biennial Conference will take place.  It’s about time the status of *the biennial* is critically examined by the pool of people most likely to be charged with the task to direct them.  I hope there is plenty of sedition, because it’s needed.  As Dan Fox, senior editor of Frieze, lays it down, perhaps some biennials, Venice in particular, should be postponed for a few years, like a crop left fallow so that new seeds can have a chance to grow.  These shows tend to flatten difference, as Jennifer Higgie writes; and when they are curated wrongheadedly, partly because cultural politics, and economics dictate that they need to pander to as many people as possible, you get vague, catch-all themes like Fare Mondi and Plateau of Humankind. Where do these titles get us as a civilization?  Nowhere.

Here is the conference’s statement, from their website:

As scholars and curators have recently acknowledged, the history of exhibitions is both one of the most vital and, paradoxically, ignored narratives of our cultural history. And given the increasing role of biennials and other perennial exhibitions of contemporary art in contemporary culture, it seems all the more necessary to critically examine them today. The impetus to do so now comes in response to the Bergen City Council’s plans to establish a biennial for contemporary art in Bergen, Norway, for which the Bergen Kunsthall has taken up the task of organizing an international conference and think tank to study and discuss the status of the biennial as an exhibition model, and also to launch a debate concerning the plans for a biennial in Bergen.

The Bergen Biennial Conference will bring together an international group of curators, critics, artists, and thinkers so as to benefit from their discussions of their findings, and create the occasion to reflect collectively about the practice and potential of biennials as institutions. Poised to be one of the most extensive examinations of the biennial phenomenon to date, the conference aims to identify and explore existing ‘biennial knowledge’ from different regions of the world and will be made up of three days of lectures as well as seminar style workshops with young and leading professionals in the field. It will be complemented with an extensive publication, The Biennial Reader, including existing seminal texts on biennials from around the world as well as newly commissioned texts.

201 Mulberry presents NOW WHAT, featuring a bunch of artists we have worked with in the past.

August 26th
From 6-10pm

Featuring Art by:
Jack Greer
Brendan Lynch
Louis Eisner
Patrick Griffin
Tom Forkin
Isaac Brest
Alex Perweiler
Evan Robarts
Alex Olson

Curated by Alex Olson & Jack Greer

201 Mulberry is actually Openhouse Gallery, of the pop-up commercial art venue ilk.  I am curious about how spaces such as these play into critical discourse.  Are they a no-no for the Ranciere-reading part of the art world?

These are all via the wonderful site arttattler.com, except the last, which is from contemporaryartsemar.

Since this is the first “move” or “gesture”, the prompt here for tomorrow’s JPEG wrestler is a straightforward and fun one:

I like Angela Dufresne’s paintings because they appeal to me visually, triggering what I think are personal visual tastes and associations.  In other words, I’m not touting her work displayed here as great or important as a fact, and I wouldn’t try to explain why everybody should like them (though they don’t offend my sensibilities as a critic either), because I don’t believe that’s the case.  In particular, I choose painting as the medium, and I’m not afraid to come out and say that as a twenty-two year old “new media native”, I have had, at least thus far, a tepid, distant relationship with most of the painting I have come across.  I tend towards thinking of most painting as irrelevant…

(as in “what is it doing for anybody? it’s (maybe temporarily) comatose, it can no longer affect any change, it’s been rendered impotent by the jpeg and the rate at which media is consumed today, it perpetuates the dominion of the artwork as a commodity that belongs, by its very physical dimensions, in rich and exploitative people’s apartments, as Bourriaud says. there are too many self-centered painters.  the world needs scientists and activism and research projects and generally more drastic measures than painting!”)

…a term I admit needs much better definition than it currently has in the context of art.  Nonetheless, when I do walk into a gallery or museum and see a painting that strikes me, I know the reasons have little to do with what the painter might have achieved in the work as a painting, but with the peculiar sentiments that arise in me.  In the case of Angela Dufresne, there is whimsicality, loneliness, ether, and the sense that I am looking at something outside time; these paintings remind me of dreams I haven’t necessarily even had but imagine I could, whereas many other painters might try very hard to evoke a dreamscape and never speak to mine in the least.  Peter Doig gets my dreams, and so generally speaking do Kathy Grayson, David Hockney, Liu Wei, Luc Tuymans, and many other completely unrelated painters.  These painters momentarily transport me somewhere that I focus on tenaciously like trying to remember a phone number belonging to a beautiful woman who is calling it to you from the window of a departing train in Nice.   If a painting does that for me, all else is — on a personal level, not necessarily a critical one –  redeemed.

So, my prompt for tomorrow’s invited poster is: artwork that speaks directly to you and your peculiarities, which you feel personal emotion towards, yet which you might not otherwise expect many people to like, at least not for the same reasons.

“Drawing when I was a kid was an escape for me, and now as an adult it’s a profession. I always draw. I’ve always drawn. I love the line that comes from the hand, it’s real power. Now my favorite kinds of drawings are the sketches I make to plan the works from. They’re the most personal. I got a B.F.A. in sculpture, which was the closest thing in the college catalogue to a drawing degree. I was never inclined to painting, it seemed too messy, too slow. I also have a major in art history, those are my weapons. My drawings are like sculptures, when I draw with graphite I smudge it with my fingers, move it around physically, it’s like clay. Painting is painting on the surface, covering up, where drawing is putting the picture into the paper like a photograph.”

Robert Longo in interview with Richard Price, Robert Longo: Men in the Cities, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, p.94-100.)

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994

For some, Carl Sagan’s studied beseechment that the definitive eventual choice for humanity boils down to spaceflight or extinction, might stand as an existential mode of living; *the meteor*, whether it comes in ten thousand years or barrels in out of nowhere and kills us all tomorrow (extremely unlikely as that may be), is a metaphysical device which can, if we are willing, frame and color everything for us … including art.

When viewed through a pale-blue-dot-ist lens, many questions and perspectives could arise with regard to the art historical canon, contemporary art practice, and even art’s role in society, or, perhaps better said, in the cosmos.  I sometimes am convinced of the severe notion that all art practice should be judged to some degree by whether it, in whatever way, acknowledges the vulnerability of our situation which Sagan describes so lyrically, yet so frankly.  Should art serve as propaganda for organizations like SpaceX, Lifeboat, and The Space Renaissance Initiative?  The idea sounds absurd, but doesn’t the level of absurdity depend on how centrally we put Sagan’s ideas on our mantle of feelings and politics that influence our criticism of art?

Please reply with examples of artwork or art related discourse that in some way respond (knowingly or unknowingly, directly or abstractly) to the excerpt from Pale Blue Dot as if it were a prompt.  I’m thinking of things like pieces from the After Nature show at the New Museum, which was, appropriately, informed by the films of Werner Herzog.

Here is a screencap from spaext.com, which to me is an interesting case study of something I feel intuitively should be classified as an art project, though it isn’t.  It involves a call to action through visual multimedia propaganda with a specific political agenda.  It is backed by the potential for a strong aesthetic impression to say the least.

Update Aug 19:

via e-flux –

Michael Baers
Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 4 of 4 (Guest-Starring Annika Eriksson)

Lee Wells of Perpetual Art Machine invited us to this awesome looking event this coming Thursday:

“THOSE ABOUT TO DIE SALUTE YOU”
from the latin “Moritori te selutant”, attributed to prisoners addressing Emperor Claudius prior to the naumachia to which they had been fated. –52 AD

HISTORY
In times of economic difficulty, Roman emperors would host violent spectator sports to placate the masses. The bloodiest and most decadent of these was the NAUMACHIA; prisoners were forced to engage in full-on naval warfare within a flooded Roman amphitheater. Variations were re-popularized in empires throughout European history, always coinciding with instances of over-indulgence at the brink of financial and societal collapse.

Duke Riley will flood one of the remaining structures from the former World’s Fairgrounds in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and host a Naumachia.

Art dignitaries (amongst other participants) will be forced to battle from boats representing the five boroughs of New York City. All of the boats are made directly from materials recovered from the abandoned World’s Fair Ice Rink and trash from the park.

The Naumachia will include work by Jade Townsend and Kitty Joe Sainte-Marie and performances by Lara Allen and Rebecca Goyette. There will be a pre-game show featuring Hell Bent Hooker.

To get there by Subway, take the 7 train to Mets Stadium/Willets Point. Walk down the boardwalk into the park and follow signs to the Queens Museum of Art.

The event and the booze is free but there is a mandatory toga dress code. Togas will be provided for those who don’t have their own. Also, you may want to bring your own flask because the free booze will go quickly.

This Monday, everybody’s favorite downtown New York post-Marxist reading group, 16 Beaver, is holding a post-Marxist seminar on the post-Marxist causes of the economic crisis.  I will attend this, and then I will self-flagellate. No, seriously, 16 Beaver’s Monday Night series is excellent, and they’re doing work most of us are too complacent and/or fearful to do.

Here is the info, from the 16 Beaver mailing list:

What: Lecture / Discussion
When: Monday 08.10.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
When: 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all

This summer Loren Goldner and Howie Seligman have been running a weekly
reading seminar on the origins of the financial crisis, its relations to
Marx’s critique of political economy as well as some of the frequently
blackboxed aspects of contemporary global finance. Some of you may recall
our event in the spring with Loren and we are happy to have him back with
Howie.

For this upcoming Monday, we transfer their self-organized seminar into
our space and ask them each to give short presentations on the causes of
the economic crisis. Howie will deal with the financial meltdown from a
‘wall street/investment’ point of view and develop some of what was
contained in a recent talk he gave at Bluestockings.  Loren will speak on
the classical Marxist theory of the causes of the crisis.

We will use the discussion period to open to questions that are raised by
their presentations and to consider the current “status” of the crisis in
light of all recent attempts to convince the public that the worst has
been averted.