The only rule in this series is that the links cannot be new or new-ish.  I was motivated by three factors for this link series:

1. our obsession with newness
   
2. the fact that learning about art is a wonderful process (in fact the process is really the goal: collector Sam Wagstaff once compared his collecting to a game of idiot’s delight), and not everybody should be assumed to have been following art on the web for the past ten years.
   
3. Eric Hobsbawm’s beseachment: “protest against forgetting.”

THE LINKS

• 2006 interview with William Powhida about his academic background and relationship with theory
• On Curating Journal – Issue 1 – 2008 (.pdf)
• Holland Cotter reviews “Beneath the Underdog”, curated by Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen (2007)
• Okay, this last link is actually really new, but I just thought of a connection/contradiction between the above review, in which Lowman and McEwen co-curate a show, and THIS sound-off by Tom Moody, which distances McEwen from Dan Colen and his “world” (which I would take to include Lowman), even though they both have stuck chewing gum onto canvas.

http://arttattler.com/commentarydashsnow.html

This website is excellent.  Why does it only get 1.5k – 2k visits a month?

Dash Snow and Dan Colen, Nest, Deitch Projects 76 Grand Street, July 26-August 18, 2007

via arttattler.com

I’m not criticizing OMA outright for sending this takedown notice, which I screen-capped from aaaarg.org, where it was publicly posted. I’m simply wondering whether anyone would contribute any thoughts to help me understand how this fits into current trends among intellectually oriented organizations and authors as far as perhaps allowing their copyrighted content to exist on certain websites, such as greylodge.org, aaaarg.org, etc.  Is Rem being totally justified, or a bit Dick Chenney-esque, as one commenter put it?  Koolhaas is definitely a ‘gimme-the-loot’ type of architect, although in my understanding his designs often subvert capitalistic icons.

“To make sense of what is and has been meant by documentary, we need to examine it from three perspectives. As a historical construction, it must be situated within the framework of its contemporary discourses, practices and uses … As part of a larger system of visual communication, as both a conduit and agent of ideology, purveyor of empirical evidence and visual ‘truths,’ documentary photography can be analyzed as a sign system possessed of its own accretion of visual and signifying codes determining reception and instrumentality… Last, we would want to examine the position of documentary photography within the discusive spaces of the mass media (and more recently, within the discursive spaces of the gallery and museum) in order to grasp the role it plays, the assumptions and attitudes it fosters, the belief systems of conforms.”

-Abigail Solomon-Godeau

Annika Eriksson’s Staff At Sao Paulo Biennal (video 1/5, 2002), effectively acts as the conclusion to The Greenroom: Reconsidering The Documentary And Contemporary Art at the Hessel Museum. No, better yet, it acts as the credits. The 12-minute work, projected at near life-size onto a gallery wall, occupying its own room, features [literally], in a single frontal shot, the more than thirty people who each play an integral role in the production of the art exhibition. When I say the art exhibition, however, I am not referring to Greenroom, which curator Maria Lind conceived as an attempt “to explore where the land lies for documentary practices within contemporary art.”¹ Rather, I mean, and I believe Eriksson means, the art exhibition in general, as a social, cultural, and economic product. But this is my interpretation. In fact, the people depicted, who one-by-one step into the frame and introduce themselves – their full names, and their roles in the exhibition – then step into the background, have each been employed to produce the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennal, perhaps South America’s most internationally regarded regular art event. How is it exactly, if the premise for Eriksson’s piece is ostensibly so simple and, relative to many other examples of documentary (art and not art), unmediated, that one can form such an interpretation? It is possible, naturally, because of a contemporary understanding of documentary and artistic practices and the discourses surrounding them; it is also possible because of assumptions about the mechanism of the camera, and in this case the digital video medium; further, it is fostered by the physical situation of the work within a museum exhibition and academic setting. These preconditions are loosely reflected in the three criteria for understanding documentary set forth by Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and we should consider, among other things, how Annika Eriksson’s Sao Paulo engages with them. As always, we should keep in mind the triangulated tension between words, pictures, and presentation.

(more…)

In an art world championed by monumental sculptures and large-format prints, Elizabeth Peyton, painter of small oil portraits and aquatint street scenes, would seem an unlikely success. But such is the mystery and romanticism that shrouds the elusive artists’ career; one that begun in a Chelsea hotel room and continues now in the monumental white box of The New Museum’s main gallery. Almost fifteen years and over a hundred paintings later, there’s still much to be resolved.

In looking for answers within Peyton’s work, we’re forced to contemplate her subject matter which ranges from historical figures (Napoleon, Ludwig II of Bavaria) to more recent celebrities (Kurt Cobain, Jarvis Cocker) to friends and family, many of who are famous in their own right, including the artists Matthew Barney and Piotr Uklański and the designer Marc Jacobs. The later are the most interesting, for what at first appears as systematic star fucking on closer inspection becomes a meditation on the temporality of life.

A portrait of the rapper Eminem, casually titled Em, finds the celebrity in a contemplative, vulnerable state, uneasily positioned against a monotonous grey backdrop while a portrait of the Oasis front man Liam Gallagher and Pulp rocker Jarvis Cocker captures a private moment between two very public figures. The people that populate Peyton’s paintings are not always famous, as in Spencer Walking, in which a friend walks into a bustling city landscape, but even as so they are cast in an iconic light surrounded by figures like Walt Whitman and Keith Richards.

Such romantic a notion could only be fostered by a gallerist like Gavin Brown, Peyton’s long time collaborator who has been known to allow his artists free range within his Chelsea space (even letting the artist Urs Fischer dig a crater into the marble of his gallery’s floor.) Peyton met Brown in 1995 while living in New York, a recent SVA graduate and Brown an aspiring gallerist on the brink of buying his first space. Peyton’s first show was mounted in a small room in The Chelsea Hotel, which Brown had rented allowing visitors to request a key at the front desk. The iconic locale, where Bob Dylan wrote Highway 66 and Dylan Thomas died of alcohol poisoning, is a monument of artistic death and rebirth, which provided the perfect setting for Peyton’s faded icons.

But here, finally on display in a museum, they seem out of place; naked without setting and bare without context. Against white walls, Peyton’s work looses its figurative duality but engages in an irony that so very fitting for her work. Spaced against the walls, lit from overhead, every piece, every fleeting moment seems to live forever.