via e-flux:

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program supports individual writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 USD.

Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply in the following categories:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Books
• New and Alternative Media
• Short-Form Writing

We regret that due to legal constraints we can only fund U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and holders of O-1 visas. For guidelines and additional eligibility requirements, please visit http://www.artswriters.org.

ART WRITING WORKSHOP

In partnership with the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section, the Arts Writers Grant Program offers applicants consultations with leading art critics. For more information, please visit http://www.aicausa.org.

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

Download a .pdf of the press release

Press related to the artist:

Samantha Fields in Artweek

Samantha Fields

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.

http://www.performingrevolution.org/about

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

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

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:

David Bowie performing Quicksand at The Capitol Theater as part of MTV’s short-lived live series on The 10 Spot.  Seems like the best place to get this kind of programming on American television these days is Later… With Jools Holland, on Ovation.

16 Beaver Group wishes more art were instrumentalized to serve radical politics … but it’s not.  And so, because we are all complicit, we should go and watch a dozen or so films screened this Sunday, recontextualized “to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.”  Here is the information from their website:

http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/

What: Site a specific film performance
When: Sunday 1.24.10
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 8:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all
This sunday will be the third in a four-part series investigating the role of abstract and affective processes in a contemporary revolutionary politics, featuring performance and experimental film and video. The evening, as did our last two events, mixes lecture elements with screenings in order to recontextualize select works from the experimental film and video canon, and set them to work for an idiosyncratic, political activism.

Continuing our investigation of linkages between politics and abstraction, tonight will examine the critical category of narcissism.

Using Harari’s text on the late Lacan, and Krauss’ seminal essay from the first October on Video – The Aesthetics of Narcissism as touchstones, this sunday we will investigate the complex interaction between “narcissism” and the political. In previous evenings abstraction has been considered according to Bataille’s categories of the informe (formlessness) and the sacred, and Agamben’s analysis of The Open, with the political necessity of keeping open the spaces exemplified (and intensified) by the abstract Image as a primary theme. Here narcissism (the mirror) figures as a kind of short-circuit, which tonight’s performance-based videos evocatively display. Performance/improvisation – as a strategy of conceptual liberation, as a tool for creating radical intuitive (abstract) spaces, versus a kind of “mimetic narcissism” – as a product of radical devolution. The work of surrealist Jacques Vache (and the fourth dimension of (h)umour) and Duchampian irony will be utilized. Krauss’ essay will be considered but creatively reconfigured in order to take video performance out of its historicized context and set it to work for political activity.

Works to be included tonight (Jonas’s hypnotic meditation on self-reflexivity and alter-ego Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, Trecartin’s synaptic, digitally manipulated psychedelia What’s the Love Making Babies For?, Charles M. Jones’ classic short Duck Amuck, and Joe Gibbons’ acerbic take on emergence Sabotaging Spring, among others) will be employed to develop the theme.

In order to refigure video performance strategies to their purely abstract/structural dimension, performance works tonight will be interposed with the work of
Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito.

___________________________________________________
2. Films to be screened

Joan Jonas Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy 15 min.
Takashi Ito Venus 8 min.
Chris Burden Big Wrench 16 min.
Takashi Ito Box 4 min.
Leslie Thornton She Had He So He Do He To Her 5 min.
Takashi Ito Ghost 6 min.
Ryan Trecartin What’s the Love Making Babies For? 20 min.
Charles M. Jones Duck Amuck 7 min.
Takashi Ito Drill 5 min.
Tony Oursler Selected Early Work [excerpt] 10 min.
Takashi Ito Spacy 10 min.
Joe Gibbons Sabotaging Spring 15 min.

This is a particularly entertaining episode of Paul H-O’s longstanding documentary series, now being considered an important and unique document of the ’90s New York art world, Gallery Beat.