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:
The Incidental Person
Curated by Antony HudekJanuary 6 to February 20, 2010
291 Church Street
New York, NY 10013 USAOpening reception: January 6, 6-8 pm
With projects by: Ron Bernstein, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, Luca Frei, Will Holder, Marysia Lewandowska, Gianni Motti, Brian O’Doherty, Joachim Pfeufer, Keiko Sei, Barbara Steveni, Megan Francis Sullivan, Neal White, and faculty and students from Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice Concentration: Katy Asher, Katherine Ball with Alec Neal and Matthew Warren, Jennifer Delos Reyes, Harrell Fletcher, Constance Hockaday, Ariana Jacob, Hannah Jickling & Helen Reed, Laurel Kurtz & Sandy Sampson, The Print Factory, Eric Steen, Michelle Swinehart, Lexa Walsh, Jason Zimmerman
Press release from: http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/hudek.htm
The late British artist John Latham (1921-2006) coined the expression “the Incidental Person” in the context of Artist Placement Group, known as APG, which he co-founded in 1966 with Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan. Contrary to most artist placement schemes, APG emphasized process, interaction and the artist’s independence in relation to the host institution, rather than any short-term tangible outcome. Like an unbiased observer or a third-party mediator, the Incidental Person placed through APG in industry, government, education or the non-profit sector would negotiate the terms of the invitation from the institution in question and adapt the nature of her or his intervention accordingly. This incidental function, as Latham explained, “is more to watch the doings and listen to the noises, and to eliminate from the output the signs of a received idea as being of the work.” Latham stresses the incidental person’s approach, that is, a certain position or attitude vis-à-vis the context in which she or he is placed. In other words, the identity of the incidental person is secondary to the effect she or he has on a given situation, for the aim of the incidental person is not to be anything in particular but instead “to generate maximum public involvement, and maximum enthusiasm which goes with the involvement.”
It is high time to pay renewed attention to incidentality as an effective approach to pressing societal issues. Away from the rudimentary right/left or liberal/conservative labels that paralyze governments and polarize communities, the incidental attitude is one of self-reflexiveness and acute, humble awareness of the complex networks of local pressures that inform a specific time and place. We like to assign tags to artists who engage with problematics that exceed the confines of the so-called “art world”, such as socially- or politically-engaged, relational, performative, etc. But these qualifiers only serve to quarantine the curious thinker-doer further from society at large, reinforcing the myth of the artist as exempt from participating in the “real world.” The incidental person, by contrast, sees no alternative between “art” and the activities that regulate social coexistence, such as talking, playing, eating, reading, teaching and listening. Indeed, “art” itself — as a word corresponding to a distinct class of objects or actions — dissolves, becoming just another term for the disposition of someone whose incidental relation to the context in which she or he intervenes is simultaneously internal and external: internal to the context’s unique dynamics, but sufficiently external to it to be able to see its relevance to broader questions of “life-practice” or “the everyday” (but such phrases, too, are merely expedient equivalents for something even more incidental).
In recounting the origins of APG, Barbara Steveni has said that the initial incident occurred when Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri, who were staying with her and John Latham to prepare an exhibition in London, needed some found material. Despite the late hour, Steveni offered to collect whatever she could find at an industrial site beyond the city limits. Sifting through debris while the factory was in full activity, she experienced a “eureka” moment, as she put it: “Why aren’t we here? Not to pick up buckets of plastic, but because there’s a whole life that we don’t touch. This is what people go on about — academics, artists, politicians — but they go nowhere near it.” This exhibition includes projects by people who attempt precisely to “touch” what is “out there”, who, while meticulously attentive to the context at hand, refuse to hew to such distinctions as art/non-art, art/life or art/politics.
Antony Hudek
© 2009
Press release from hortongallery.com
Seven Easy Steps
Video Series, curated by Amanda Schmitt
Monday, January 4, 7:00pm
Video Series continues: February 16, March 29, May 11, June 15The third installment of Seven Easy Steps, a seven-part video series, will provide the appropriate equipment and creative stimulus in order to attain Technological Innovations. Featured video artists include Philippe Blanchard, Joost Conijn, Adam Frelin, Desirée Holman, Mads Lynnerup, Catherine Ross, Jared Steffensen, Keith Telfeyan and JD Walsh.
Seven Easy Steps is a video screening series that will empower you to take the steps towards achieving happiness and leading a successful, fulfilled life. People feel happy when their desires are fulfilled. The series will continue with videos that offer the sacred guidance that will lead them towards Spiritual Ecstasy; supply the necessary information to make Scientific Discoveries; the titillations and delights that blissfully lead to Physical Pleasure; and finally the expertise, skill, and ingenuity that guides them towards producing Artistic Masterpieces.
Screenings will be held at Horton Gallery (located at 504 West 22nd Street, Parlor Level, New York, NY, 10011). Schedules for individual screenings will be released each month.
Seven Easy Steps features video work by Ronnie Bass, Larry Carlson, Antoine Catala, caraballo-farman, Leidy Churchman, Martha Colburn, Cecelia Condit, David Coyle, Adam Cruces, Benjamin Dowell, Erica Eyres, Susana Gaudêncio, Joel Gibb, Kate Gilmore, Koen Hauser, Mae Hymn, Avi Krispin, Juliana Leite, Julie Lequin, Mads Lynnerup, Erica Magrey, Shana Moulton, Katarina Riesing, Michael Robinson, Liz Rosenfield, Catherine Ross, Melanie Schiff, Kelly Sears, Andrew Steinmetz, Jennifer Sullivan, Keith Telfeyan, Richard T Walker, JD Walsh, and Bryan Zanisnik, among others.
504 West 22nd Street, Parlor Level
New York, NY 10011
I am unsure whether Ross Douthat’s argument in yesterday’s New York Times — that we are collectively unable to deal with the existential solidity of liberal democracy post-1989, and so have developed a self-inflicted case of paranoia — is a strawman he has set up for himself because he wants to believe in that solidity. Tomorrow, before The Prompt (kunstverein.us), I will be going to an exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum, which I hope will help me appraise Douthat’s assessment.
Here is the vital info from their website:
The AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM and the KUNSTHALLE WIEN in cooperation with the CZECH CENTER, the HUNGARIAN CULTURAL CENTER and the ROMANIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE present
1989: The End of History or the Beginning of the Future?
Video Art Comments on a Time Shift
As its fall focus, the Austrian Cultural Forum presents the video-based exhibition 1989: The End of History or the Beginning of the Future? Featuring 15 films from international artists, the show is on view from November 2 to 24, 2009. It will include two panel discussions pertaining to aspects of repression and revolution, politics of memory, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the hopes and delusions connected to the alleged end of history.
The official opening reception takes place on November 11, 2009 from 6–8PM at the ACFNY, 11 East 52nd Street (between Fifth and Madison) with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Austria, Mr. Michael Spindelegger. Admission is free.
1989: Twenty years ago, who would have dared to hope that the dictatorial regimes of Central and Eastern European communism would be swept away one after the other in the wake of mass protests? Within a few years, democratic constitutions and market economy structures were introduced. However, this process also caused pains, clashes and heated conflicts about the directions for the future and the interpretation of the past. The “annus mirabilis” 1989 became a historical mark from the perspective of ideology, culture, and mass psychology. Eric Hobsbwam´s “short twentieth century” came to an end. Even if most of the dividing lines within Europe have been dissolved by now, many borders still haven’t disappeared in people’s minds. Nationalistic ideologies, xenophobic and racist movements have surged alongside European integration and globalization. While new neighbors – long separated by the Iron Curtain – have begun to learn about each other, they have also started to experience new problems of migration and acculturation. The selection of films for 1989: The End of History or the Beginning of the Future? was guided by asking how artists, and in particular video artists, have reacted to these changes.
“Cave Paintings” at Gresham’s Ghost, curated by Bob Nickas, doesn’t know it, but it does abstract painting a disservice. Why? Its premise involves a direct reference to “the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting.” This is actually a concept selfportrait would like to reinforce, because it uses anthropological tools and context in order to examine abstract painting as the enduring medium it is, for better or worse. In this way, it inadvertantly sacrifices its own quality by presenting abstract works that are less interesting than both the physical space (the sub-basement of 511 W 25th street) and the shows analytic concept … this is a strategy that is utilized in curating of the highest caliber. As Duchamp imparted to Walter Hopps: “never let the work get in the way.” More recently, regarding Manifesta 6, Mai Abu ElDahab wrote, “in order to succeed, this project must fail by the existing standards of the exhibition industry.”1 The problem is that, with the exception of a couple of paintings, for instance, Jules de Balincourt’s and Richard Aldrige’s, the work seems like a non sequitur to the program. Jules de Balincourt often manages to defy painterly stagnation and fogeyish gamesmanship with political, but not ham-fistedly so, figurative works such as Ambitious New Plans and People Who Play and the People Who Pay, and here he ekes out some relevance in a semi-abstract painting of a pink cavernous space, something like the belly of a giant sea creature in Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (which is definitely an artwork). Richard Aldrich at least invokes the imagery of cave painting. So, to a lesser degree, does Chris Vassell. Other works don’t answer to the very broad and provocative premise asking, I think, regarding what abstract picture-making using paint can be observed as enduring throughout the history of civilization, and in which ways the meta-narratives been most successfully been manipulated by the artists who still see the medium as worthwhile. I don’t think this is what Bob Nickas intended. The child mannequin, conceived by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, which is relocated through the space daily, innovatively (and kind of creepily, which is a flaw, the kid should’ve looked more awestruck and less like something out of I am Legend) prompts us to reflect on nomadism and its relation to the beginning of painting, as well as on a refreshed, childlike gaze given to us by the anthropological methodology set forth here.
Even James Kalm, former “Kitsch Artist”, prolific essayist, and now YouTube critic among other things, asks rhetorically at the end of his video pod on the show: “is painting alive or dead? I don’t know.” the video:
Note that “Cave Paintings” as it is currently hung is installment one of what will be a two-part show. Here is the pr:
Gresham’s Ghost is pleased to announce its third exhibition, “Cave Painting,” organized by Bob Nickas, which brings together works by forty artists who are engaged with picture-making manifested within a painting practice. This show follows another with the same title that was presented in Berlin at PSM Gallery in June 2009 that evolved as a result of Nickas’s research for his book, Painting Abstraction, to be published in October by Phaidon Press. The project was initiated with months of studio visits in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Most of the artists in the exhibition are also included in the book, which aims to open up a wider sense of how abstract painting can be understood today. The title, “Cave Painting,” is a direct reference to the origins of picture-making, visual story-telling, and the beginning of painting. Expressionistic works are seen alongside those that are formally reserved; hand-painted pictures are shown in counterpoint to those that have their basis in mechanical procedures; the range of works accounts for both predetermined result and pure chance. Over the course of the show, a collaborative work by Richard Hoeck and John Miller, a child mannequin, will move each day to a different position in the gallery to “look at” and further animate the paintings — a strange, nomadic figurative element within the space.
The first time I experienced one of Bill Viola’s full-room installations was at the exhibition of Bodies of Light (2006) at the ARoS, in Aarhus, Denmark. The atmosphere was stark, moody, infernal, and immediately enveloping. My initial sensation was one of disorientation, but I soon recognized I was feeling something else too: fear. At first, little other than film grain and hints of strange light volleying from some unknown source appeared on the high and wide screens around me. The room was irregularly shaped, and odd dihedrals became illuminated as the light shifted. Suddenly, on a screen to my left, bubbles. More bubbles, and disturbances emanating from the murky depths. Then, a thunderous plunge. A human body began to descend, head first, in the smooth and slow motion one associates with some mystical transfiguation. The body seemed relaxed as it sunk; it’s pose was symmetrical and alert, and it did not struggle or welter. But the figure was unrecognizable, its back turned, its head shrouded by hundreds of upward shooting, displaced bubbles. On the screens around me, asynchronously but all alike in character, bodies began to determinedly take similar plunges. Often, in experiencing a work of art that is mysterious and does not reveal itself right away, I end up with a different interpretation than the artist might have intended. But in the case of Bodies of Light, the association between imagery and impression was unmistakable: this was death. And though, dependent upon religion, culture, and the peculiarities of one’s life, death will be imagined uniquely by each of us, there was an undeniable sense that this particular interpretation, was the right one. This was what death would be like. Bill Viola was a man who knew death, and had produced a simulation of it with perfect pitch.
Bill Viola, Bodies of Light
Tomorrow, at James Cohan in Chelsea (533 West 26th Street), a larger, more encompassing show of Viola’s work, also with the title Bodies of Light, opens. Here is an excerpt from the press release:
October 23 – December 5
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present its fifth gallery exhibition by internationally acclaimed American artist Bill Viola. The exhibition opens October 23rd and runs through December 19th, 2009. For over 35 years Bill Viola has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, greatly expanding its scale, creative scope and historical reach. He has created video films, architectural video installations, flat screen pieces, sound environments, electronic music performances, as well as works for television broadcast, opera, and sacred spaces. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions. They employ state-of-the-art technology and are distinguished by their emotional power, precision and direct simplicity.
The exhibition spans two decades and includes the New York premiere of Pneuma (1994/2009) a video/sound installation, and several flat-screen pieces from the Transfigurations series, Viola’s newest body of work, which originated with Ocean Without a Shore, created for the 15th century Church of San Gallo during the Venice Biennale in 2007.
via ATM’s website:
Peter [Sutherland], who you might already know from his debut show at ATM, Blame it on the Dog and Andrew [Sutherland] an amazing sculptor and image maker bring together works which speak about the breaking down between high and low art forms and their meanings. One example of an equalizer is the Internet and how anyone can be a star overnight on u-tube. This looks like it’s going to be interesting!
The opening will be the October 22 from 6-8 pm and will run through October 31. So it’s a short one!
Yeni Mao - The Bust (photo via NYARTS website)
Yeni Mao was in last month’s selfportrait.net organized show, Mapping The Body.
Yeni Mao was recently interviewed for NYARTS Magazine.
Yeni Mao is contributing a big installation to SYSTEM:SYSTEM, an ambitious group show opening this Friday at 21 Monitor Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Here, then, is the press release for that show, minus the handsome graphic design of Random Number’s website:
system:system
A failing economy has decided the recent fate of 21 Monitor Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Formerly a nun’s convent, the grand three-story house now stands uninhabited due to the declining membership of St. Cecilia parish and its sister school. Rather than let the building fall into disrepair the parish has found ways to breathe new life into it through a rotating schedule of film shoots, screenings, dance performances, and art exhibitions.
Taking its cue from the friends-of-friends network that has allowed access to 21 Monitor Street, system:system is a three-day event that reflects on the nature of associations between parts of a whole. The title is a play on the term “complex systems,” which are characterized by their connections and tendencies toward unpredictable behavior. The organizing of this event evokes these qualities and embraces the small world phenomenon of strangers being linked through minimal degrees of separation to form a dynamic structure.
The unoccupied nun’s living quarters will now showcase work that experiments with the building up and/or breaking down of systems: mathematical, scientific, social, economic, and otherwise. Much like the social and economic factors responsible for this event, the behavior between the separate elements—artistic interventions and performances—will result in an atmosphere of emergent interconnectedness. The act of creating artistic content in a temporary context will feature prominently, remaining true to the fluid way in which these works were executed.
Curated by Adam Henry and Christina Vassallo
Abby Manock, Adam Henry, Anya Kielar, Arthur Ou, Chris Dorland, Curver Thoroddsen, David Brooks, Derick Melander, [dNASAb], Emily Mae Smith, eTeam, Ethan Breckenridge, Francesca DiMattio, Gandalf Gavan, Garth Weiser, Ian Davis, Inna Babaeva, Jeff Konigsberg, Johannes VanDerBeek, Kai Vierstra, Lisha Bai, Maria João Salema & Lee Wells, Marius Watz, Matthew Monteith, Matthew Schenning, Melissa Brown, Meridith Pingree, Mike Hein, MiYoung Sohn, Nika Sarabi, Peter Kirn, Phil Vanderhyden, Saira McLaren, Skyler Brickley, SOFTlab, Studio Mode, Suzanne Song, Tom Brauer, Yeni Mao
This show also has Lee Wells in it, who is da man.
Get thee to a nunnery!
In other news:
A major study has just been published documenting 21 years of studying adaptive changes in E. Coli bacteria. In E. Coli time that’s 400,000 generations. I’m thinking somewhat loosely right at this moment, about generations — as they occur for bacteria, humans, and on a geologic, and finally a cosmic timescale — and it is reminding me of a few artworks:
Adrian Piper - Everything #10 (2007)
Ben Fry - On The Origin of Species: The Preservation Of Favoured Traces (2009) (Click to launch)
Liz Glynn - 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project (2009) (Liz Glynn, please fix your website or join selfportrait so I can study your good art)
Alexandra Mir - First Woman on the Moon (1999)
Antti Laitinen - Stones
Chris Ho - Lesbian Mountains in Love (2008)
Christian Philip Muller - Passe Immediate (2006)
Gordon Terry - A Refusal of the Materialist Insistence on Surface and Plane
Valery Grancher - It Has Been
Lara Favaretto
Tonight, October 15th, Margaret Thatcher Projects, the gallery with the most effortlessly ironic name in all the world, reopens in its newly renovated ground level venue, at 539 West 23rd street (btwn 10th and 11th), with an opening reception for Bill Thompson (not the mayoral candidate).
Here is the release:
BILL THOMPSON
SHIFT
October 15 – December 12
reception:
Thursday, October 15
from 6-8 PM
Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce the opening of Shift an exhibition of new work by Bill Thompson. From curvilinear and cloud-like to pointedly flexed and bowing, Thompson’s colorful wall structures combine painting and sculpture into a unique minimalist art form.
The sculptures included in Shift begin their lives as solid blocks of urethane, which Thompson outlines with sweeping sketches before hand-grinding the pieces into their final eccentric and individual shapes. Shift introduces several new “species” of Thompson’s work. In striking contrast to the fluid organic forms to be exhibited, one of these, the “Horn” species, attempts to stretch the constraints of its material form — jutting and rising out from the structure in four pointed corners. Each work is given a unique identity both in form and hue, such that no single color is repeated in Thompson’s sculpturally diverse oeuvre of work. With their luscious sheen, these monochromatic pieces act as unique lenses, engaging and reflecting their surrounding environment. The exhibition will present the first floor sculpture created by the artist.
Bill Thompson, Toro (2009) - 24" x 20" x 7" Urethane on polyurethane block
This is Bill Thompson’s first solo exhibition with Thatcher Projects. His works have been internationally collected and exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Institute for Contemporary Art at MECA, Portland; the List Visual Art Center, M.I.T, Cambridge; The New York Public Library; and the Song-Eun Art and Cultural Foundation, Korea, among others. Thompson was the featured artist in the May 2009 issue of art.es, a contemporary art magazine published in Spain.
In today’s New York Times, Roberta Smith gives a double review of Anselm Reyle at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, and Bernadette Corporation’s show at Greene Naftali. As she sees it, the shows define the two extremes of a “fuzzy dichotomy” that appears to exist in contemporary art (at least in Manhattan), essentially between shiny stuff, and cerebral stuff. Sometimes, of course, the shiny stuff can have intellectual gravitas, and the ostensibly cerebral stuff can actually be slick and condescending. I usually find myself in discipular agreement with Roberta Smith, but she is too forgiving with both of these offerings. Of Bernadette Corporation I can’t say much as I haven’t seen the show, but it seems one could look much further (away from fashion!) afield into the array of contemporary art practice to find that which is truly of the no-money-thanks intellectual ilk. Bernadette Corporation’s work may be mysterious, antagonistic, and unique, but it is also featured in Purple Magazine.
Reyle’s work at Gagosian represents an entrenched formalism (still globally popular in artmaking and art collecting) that has not left Modernism, and that unfortunately believes resolutely in a restricted mode of image and object making that looks dated. It is the kind of work, that Claes Oldenberg would likely say, “sits on its ass in a museum.” Now, Reyle apparently embraces criticisms that his work aims for light entertainment. Smith notes, not dissmively but matter-of-factly, that his product amounts mostly to “exceptional high-end lobby art,” and does not dissapoint in that regard. But read the following description of a — get this — untitled work of Reyle’s from the Saatchi website:
“Reyle reclaims the cliché and the kitsch to create his own brand of ‘authenticity’, meeting the shifting aspects lifestyle and art industry demands. Untitled reworks Brancusi’s Africanism, creating an exotic ‘primitivism’ in space age funkadelic purple.”
-anonymous Saatchi she-goat sieve holder
My current view, which many I have spoken to find unpalatable and depressing, is that gleaming, superficial, highly expensive to produce work, needs to justify its continued production with some thoughtful, powerful, and updated theory. Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word (1975), criticized not just the avant-garde, Warhol, deKooning, Pollock, Newman, et al. but the art critical triumverate of Greenberg, Steinberg, and Rosenberg, for having transformed art from a visual experience into the manifestation of theory, writ (usually) large on a gallery wall. Why haven’t the myriad ingenius critics and theorists since them had the power to diss work like this out of the mainstream? It’s not that it smacks on Reyle or Gagosian’s part of pandering to sources of what Smith astutely calls “lucre” — which William Tynsdale translated as “filthy profit”, from aishkron kerdos in his version of the Bible — its that work like this further sends the nearly empty word ‘art’ down the gyre of impotence in the face of image, object, and idea making that popular culture (not just creative popular culture, but politics, science, journalism, hobby, and business) generates with astonishing consistency.
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