Thursday, December 24, 2009

Bonnie Marranca of PAJ Publications
PAJ Founder interviewed in
Germantown, New York

Artist Organized Art Interviews Bonnie Marranca, Founder, Publisher and Editor of PAJ Publications/PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. The interview occurred in August of 2008 in Germantown, N.Y.


Bonnie Marranca, with Robert Wilson drawing behind her, Berlin, 2009



interview by Joshua Selman

JS: How did you start PAJ logistically and why did you start it?

BM: PAJ (www.mitpressjournals.org/paj) was conceived in 1975 by Gautam Dasgupta and me while we were studying in the doctoral program at CUNY-the Graduate Center, in New York. We were also critics for the SoHo Weekly News at that time. We had the academic background, but this very lively time in the 70s was a great period for video art, the beginnings of performance art, experimental theatre—such as the work of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines. There were many so things going on . . . Meredith Monk’s work, Philip Glass, new playwrights. We were seeing all of this work, while at the same time having a very traditional theatre background in graduate school. In effect, we had both the traditional grounding and the new aesthetics that we were grappling with as critics. So you could say that we were studying the history of theatre and the repertoire at the same time that the new work was offering its critique.

It also gave us the possibility of having, at our fingertips, the scholars and translators who were really knowledgeable about the dramatic repertoire and the history of theatre. At the same time we came to be friends with several generations of artists in so many different fields. We were not happy with the criticism that was in the major theatre journal of the time, The Drama Review, because it was very descriptive and not analytical. The coverage in The New York Times and comparable magazines and newspapers wasn’t very challenging. There were new art forms, and new ways of making theatre that were really not sufficiently understood or addressed.


left: Drawing of his play Maria del Bosco, by Richard Foreman from PAJ’s Performance
Drawings portfolio series. right: PAJ publisher with the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, 2009

We had a different vision of theatre and of criticism at that time. We thought we could make a journal that could become involved with new forms of writing and could deal with the new performance aesthetics as well as having the commitment to dramatic literature. Between the two of us, Gautam and I found a printer, learned editing, production, and worked on marketing, sales, and distribution. We quickly had our own typesetting equipment and did everything in-house. So, from the start we were pretty self-sufficient. We began to hand out flyers at theatres, and worked on getting mailing lists and subscriptions in the universities and in libraries. That’s essentially how we started. The publishing house was never part of any university or organization that provided money or staff.

JS: Can you describe the development of PAJ, and its later involvement with Johns Hopkins University Press and MIT Press?

BM: We began to publish the journal and set up a non-profit 501(c)3, by the time we had published the first issue, in May 1976. Then, three years later, we began publishing books, and called the publishing house PAJ Publications. The journal was then known as Performing Arts Journal (the name was changed in 1998 to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art) We went along this way for quite a while and continued to publish books of plays and books of essays; the journal featured international coverage in essays, interviews and dialogues, new writing, performance reviews and festival reports. There was simply so much material and so many interesting things to cover that we felt we couldn’t contain it in a journal three times a year. So, we started on books and we had many of the same authors move from the journal to books as well.


left: At JFK Airport with German playwright Heiner Müller.
right: In London, 2009, at a PAJ event featuring Meredith Monk.

About ten years later, in the late-eighties, we made an agreement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the very highly regarded literary publishers, to distribute our books. That lasted for three years. One of the reasons we went to them was that we wanted to start publishing fiction. We tended to do fiction of the playwrights we knew, like Ken Bernard and Harry Kondoleon. The late-eighties was a period of great difficulty, with the so called “culture wars” and funding controversies. The tide had turned against heavy support for experimental theatre and the downtown scene, so we knew we had to figure out a way to safeguard the press.

Eventually we made an agreement with The Johns Hopkins University Press, around 1991, and PAJ became an imprint of Johns Hopkins. They distributed our backlist as well, which was about eighty-five titles by this time. PAJ Books became a series under this imprint, and JHUP financed the new titles. We commissioned forty books, including the Art+Performance series for performance and new media (with volumes on Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Bruce Nauman, Gary Hill and others. The journal was published in their journals division, but we always maintained control of our name and always owned the journal. That agreement lasted for about ten years. Then we went to MIT Press, around 2001. That’s where we remain, though MIT Press has no involvement with the books. PAJ went back into financing and publishing its own books in 2006. We have about sixty titles now in print, distributed by Theatre Communications Group (www.tcg.org)

JS: What is the editorial premise of PAJ?

BM: PAJ Publications was founded to publish, promote, and support new work, lost or forgotten works of the past, and to develop a very rigorous idea of criticism. By that I don’t mean theory, but criticism and fine critical writing—that’s what I think PAJ has been known for. In addition, there is the publication of new American drama and works of translation.



left: Living Theatre artistic directors, Judith Malina and Hanon Resnikov with the PAJ
publisher at her New York City apartment. right: PAJ publishers, Bonnie Marranca and
Gautam Dasgupta, visiting French author Marguerite Yourcenar at her
home in Maine, a few years before her death in 1987.

Looking back over three decades of books and journals, by now we’ve published over one thousand plays and performance texts, translated from twenty languages. We’ve published about one hundred and forty books and ninety journals so far. PAJ Publications is one of the major play publishers in the English-speaking world. We’ve always held the line when so much of academia and the world of the arts moved strongly toward theory. I believe very much in the primacy of the artwork, and the experience of the writer or critic, so I am not interested in applied theory. I don’t consider PAJ an academic journal. I believe it should be a kind of fine literary writing grounded in knowledge of the field and the experience of individual works. That’s been true for most of the history of the journal. Our format has been a combination of essays, interviews and dialogues, plays or performance texts, festival reports, reviews of performance.

When Performing Arts Journal changed its name a decade ago to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, it was because I wanted to have theatre and visual arts move closer together in the journal. The art world was continuing to do more performance, there were installations, video, media, photography, and all kinds of things that could be looked at in terms of performance and spectatorship. We were already covering, theatre, dance, and music.


left: Cover of Performance Histories (2008), featuring Alison Knowles performance sculpture,
Book Jacket. right: Cover of New Europe: plays form the continent (2009),
featuring artwork by German artist Bernd Trasberger.

When we started the journal, what constituted theatre or performance was rather a small world considering where the notion of performance went in thirty years. Dramatic literature is no longer the center of study in theatre. People don’t have the same interest in playwriting, but are more interested in performance. In the twentieth century, there are two histories of performance, one from the theatre world, and one from the art world, so that if you are in an art department, you study a history of performance that’s entirely different from what you would study in a theatre department. I’m trying to bring them closer together within the journal. A larger, more comprehensive history of performance ideas, that’s my main goal, and it has been for the last ten years.



Bonnie Marranca standing in a Richard Serra sculpture.

Read the full interview.

Included in the full interview, Bonnie Marranca speaks to the following:

Bonnie Marranca (www.bonniemarranca.com) is publisher and editor of the Obie Award-winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (originally called Performing Arts Journal), which she co-founded in 1976. She has written three collections of criticism: Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings, the recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Among the many anthologies she has edited are: Plays for the End of the Century; American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard; and The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books of contemporary theatre. Her writings have been translated into fifteen languages. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar who has taught in many universities here and abroad, including Columbia University, Princeton University, NYU, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, Free University (Berlin), and Autonomous University/Institute for Theatre (Barcelona). She is Professor of Theatre at The New School/Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts.

PAJ (www.mitpressjournals.org/paj) is admired internationally for its independent critical thought and cutting-edge explorations. PAJ charts new directions in performance, video, drama, dance, installations, media, film, and music, integrating theater and the visual arts. Artists' writings, critical commentary, interviews, and a special review section for performances and gallery shows are highlighted along with plays and performance texts from around the world. New features include Performance Drawings portfolios and the Art, Spirituality, and Religion ongoing series. In 2009, the journal celebrates its 33rd year of publishing.

#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 12/24/2009 08:04:00 AM

Sunday, November 01, 2009

WONDERLAND Exhibition
San Francisco Tenderloin, October 17, 2009
Curated by Lance M Fung



City of San Francisco, streets of The Tenderloin



by Joshua Selman
photo: Bay Area Event Photography

As a participating artist in the Wonderland Exhibition, I'm asking myself why a large scale contemporary art exhibit opening in The Tenderloin in San Francisco and curated by one of today’s most respected and publicized curators, Lance Fung, is titled, of all possible titles, “WONDERLAND?” The Tenderloin is a neighborhood marginalized to the point of reputation. Yet surprisingly, the title “Wonderland” correctly identifies and responds to a hidden cultural dilemma facing any group of artists approaching this historic community.


City of San Francisco, streets of The Tenderloin

Our cultural institutions often rejuvenate themselves at the expense of the disempowered. The avant garde often exploits fringe neighborhoods, brokering between corporate and vernacular cultures. This opens the door to gentrification. Yet, we find ourselves sympathetic to the impact of local material conditions. In The Tenderloin these include homelessness, joblessness, illiteracy, crime, disease and epidemics such as AIDS, hunger, poverty, drug addiction, alcoholism, lack of health care and environmental decay. In short, the untidy social effects of the “advancement” we call globalization. Locals are explained away.


Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
"Block Party" event, October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

Wonderland seems to take on a particular challenge, namely how to take local culture seriously when the dominant culture precludes difference, cultural, racial and sexual as an insidious evil. The challenge for Wonderland is to be locally inclusive and to negate the attraction/repulsion process of the global art market. Using the title “Wonderland” the dominant strategies, such as exploiting minority artists by insisting they source local street violence as their unique selling point or that they themselves signify misery remarketed, are surprisingly countered.


"Fear Head" by Roman Cesario and Mitsu Overstreet
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco

The Wonderland Exhibition also speaks to the need to reform dominant culture institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art or Lincoln Center, to artist spaces and organizations based in ethnic communities that alone address a lack of multiculturalism and tolerance. A lack which has grown since Ronald Reagan left the office of Governor of California to become President of the USA and allowed a twenty year surge of neo-conservative intolerance, which in the past eight years has become extreme in the dominant culture. Wonderland is an attempt to signal the way back to a positive progressive footing, to organize beyond the survival tactics of the past twenty years and to pick up where others left off before the heterogeneous world was cast in gray.


A resident follows the exhbition "Wonderland"
in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco

Instinctively, the artists, organizers and partners of Wonderland Exhibition, all volunteers, follow early signs of change in the air. They are taking to the streets of The Tenderloin, to engage local community, to make work which is a synthesis by artist and community. The opportunity is to finally truly turn outward, to engage with the larger society, to work with social creativity and invent new forms of organizations that suit ongoing needs of creative synthesis. They are picking up where we left off before the blight of the NEA led to the cancerous growth of the commercial gallery and auction houses. The exhibition is to push the boundaries of local culture as far as it can.

Perhaps it’s time for Wonderland. The growing weight of the nation’s social problems were paid for by independent local communities, while the nation’s prosperity accrued to the establishment arts and the military. As artists, we’ve played along with a prestige game and lost. We’ve been robbed of our social imagination, served as an inoculation against awareness and have done the hard work of self censorship to the point of obscurity. Count the projects left unproduced, the low birth rate of institutions and a general lack of experimentation as the cost of the Reagan/Bush/Helmes/Bush era. This shadow over what was once our cultural community chills us even now. But, the Wonderland Exhibition funnels volunteerism with multiculturalism allowing artists back into local community culture.


in performance: Night At The Blackhawk
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco

Wonderland celebrates the recent gains made at the NEA with a new attitude, an attempt to live, work and make art in a flamboyant and joyful Tenderloin community. During the twenty year neo-conservative era, the NEA used the Chair's veto to publicize censorship. Neo-conservatives condemned the Endowment for its attention to public impact, social need, tolerance, experimentation and a support of “public service” concepts. By contrast Wonderland celebrates the evolution of new and existing organizations, such as the Wonderland Neighborhood Association, as necessary to a fuller cultural life. The volunteer Exhibition remains nimble rather than being bogged down attracting funders.


Wonderland Symposium, with Lance Fung at the Warfield Theater, Oct 18, 2 - 4 pm
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco

Artists have an unusual potential to exercise social imagination. From Fluxus of the 1960’s to The International Artists Museum and its connection to the Solidarity Movement of 1980’s Poland, the Artists Space movement in the USA from the 1960’s to the 1980’s, the ability of artists to impact and innovate the organization structure itself has been remarkable. Wonderland celebrates a return to this type of artist collaboration in the structure of organization and is turning away from an era where the drive of existing corporations to perpetuate themselves has choked off all creative options.


Visitors at the "Block Party" event by WNA
Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

The project is coming out of the closet creatively, socially and culturally. In the past eight years a majority of Americans were forced to give up their own liberties even if they were willing to risk allowing those liberties to others described as terrorists, dangerous people of color, people with aids, homosexuals, illegal aliens, foreigners, feminists, community organizers and those criminals, the artists. Disempowered communities have found themselves profiled and marginalized, excluded, undercounted, prosecuted, silenced, bashed, spied on, controlled, unemployed, underemployed, defunded, put out of business and run out of town by a growing corporate elite. Yet, Wonderland’s agility lets it by-pass corporatism’s attack on community content and public funding using volunteerism and public service.


Visitors at the "Block Party" event by WNA
Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

Despite an era of intolerance, racism, greed, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, rabid patriotism and media based brain washing we are picking up where we left off. Wonderland is a signal from the Tenderloin community to the established art world to return to supporting difficult and challenging art and to enlarge art audiences and art concerns by engaging wider publics through their collaboration. Ahead of the curve, the exhibition calls out directly to multicultural reality.


Thomas Kosbau interaction for "Stake"
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco
Photo: Wonderland Exhibition

As artists we know we have to earn public recognition of our significance. Communities are still untrusting of what we do. The stigma that artists are fooling the public persists. For a change, this effort includes transparency, sharing power and information with The Tenderloin community.


Visitors at the "Block Party" event by WNA
Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

Wonderland is happening at a time of great chaos inside our corporations. As our infrastructure sustains shock after shock, many corporations, such as banks, insurance companies, governments and educational institutions are manipulating facts, ignoring inquiries, blaming, scandalizing and creating the false impression that things are fine while hoping they don’t get worse. For this reason the artists have chosen a new path of reliance and affiliation based on volunteerism, truthfulness about capacity and relevance to the Tenderloin community. We know we will be doing without the resources available to established art institutions, what is amazing is how much we’ve been able to do without those resources and how little compromise we’ve had to make to cultural conservatism because of it.


Chris Burch, Niki Shapiro, and Lance Fung at Boeddeker Park
Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
"Block Party" event, October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

It is not the support that makes art and art making itself is not a business. This opportunity is for nurturing young artists and for engaging works that champion those who have been discounted in their communities: the culturally diverse, feminists, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, the upstarts and those with ideas that challenge the social fabric. We simply must put an end to the corporate ice age in the art of our communities. It's an experiment that asks the public to revalidate the relationship between creativity and social change.


Lars Chellberg interaction for "Stake"
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco
Photo: Wonderland Exhibition

I've known Lance Fung for a long time. As a curator Lance is dedicated to ideas and ideals far outside the mainstream, possibly dangerous to the well being of the institution and possibly to the artist community as a whole. While the NEA was backing away from its once strong commitment to challenging work, Lance crossed sides from commercial dealing to the non-profit world of art out of a need to put experimentation ahead of survival. It is interesting that with Wonderland he has proceeded with a nearly wholesale disengagement from support funding in an effort to rekindle a call to social change at the earliest moment possible.


Layman Lee interaction for "Stake"
Wonderland Exhibition in The Tenderloin, City of San Francisco
Photo: Wonderland Exhibition

One of the benefits we hope to achieve is a mechanism to keep community support of art close to its makers of art. Because Wonderland’s projects vary specifically by the community served, by the type of art presented and by the in-kind/volunteerism pledged, they are not as easily spotted as say a "museum" or "theater," but perhaps their impact will be far greater.

Joshua Selman, Participating artist, Wonderland 2009


Participating Artists at the "Block Party" event by WNA
Site of Wonderland Neighborhood Association (WNA)
October 17th, 11 - 5 pm

The exhibition is free and open to the public from October 17th, with a symposium on the 18th, and will close November 15th. www.wonderlandshow.org

The exhibition Wonderland is a large, multi-sited event born of, and responding to the rich diversities of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The tenor of this project is truly unique, and will call upon the collaborative efforts of the neighborhood’s residents, city organizations like the North of Market Community Benefit District the exhibition’s sponsor, and a large number of cutting edge artist teams from the Bay Area and around the world. As in his previous internationally recognized projects, the exhibition’s curator, Lance Fung is dedicated to the ideas of collaboration, community and social engagement as a means of bringing the highest level of contemporary art to audiences from all walks of life.

Participating Artists: Per Åhlund, Barry Beach, Ken Beasley, Alex Beckman, Brian Bixby, Charles Blackwell, Alex Braubach, Britteny, Christopher Burch (WNA,) Roman Cesario, Lars Chelberg, Colby Claycomb, Sydney Cooper, Rick Darnell, Jaine Dickens, Christian Kurt Ebert, Jonathan Fung, Kaif Ghaznvi, Geoffrey Grier, Doug Hall, Melkorka Helgadottir, Malak Helmy, Jessica Higgins (WNA,) Noritoshi Hirakawa, Monika Jones, Mathias Josefson, Erika Knerr (WNA,) Thomas Kosbau, Layman Lee, Mark Lee, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Lauren Marsden, Jeff Marshall, Mike Maurillo, Lynne McCabe, Andrew McClintock, John K Melvin (Project Director), Regina Miranda, Ranu Mukherjee, Patricia Niedermeier, Erik Otto, Mitsu Overstreet, Kara Pajewski, Txutxo Perez, George Pfau, Leif Percifield, Christophe Piallat, Rex Resa, Brandon Robinson, John Roloff, Kit Rosenberg, Jeff Roysdan, Jorge Satorre, Niki Savage, Joshua Selman (WNA,) Stix, Owen Takabayashi, Kristin Timken, Brandon T Truscott, Thomas Watkiss, Wilton Woods, Izumi Yokoyama, Steven Zettler, and others...



#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 11/01/2009 08:14:00 PM

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Shake Out - End of Summer
Art/Music in Rockaway
Curated by Shaun Kessler, Patrick Walsh and Olivia Wyatt
Saturday August 22, 2009
192 Beach 96th street, Rockaway Beach, NY



by Taketo Shimada

During the weekend of epic waves courtesy of Hurricane Bill, surfers weren't the only ones in the part of Rockaway Beach I've come to call MoSh FroP (Middle of Shore Front Parkway - a patch of Rockaway shorefront between Beach 90th and 96th street.) Shaun Kessler, Patrick Walsh and Olivia Wyatt organized the second of their art/music shows this summer in the part of Rockaway Peninsula that is experiencing an influx of surf/hippie/art/music culture hybrid; an endearing work in progress that I love to see mature to its full potential. The show occupied a building that is going through a gut renovation adjacent to Rockaway Taco. All through the day people went back and forth from the show to the beach, which is less than a block away.


the Rockaway surfing beach is just steps away...


you can surf or swim


then get back to eat some tacos


and see art and listen to bands

The work of 11 artists were spread throughout the second floor, while 6 bands played through the evening in a small room on the first floor.


partial view of the 2nd floor, What a Feeling,
a hanging chain motif by Cat Chow in the middle


polaroid grid by Grant Worth


collage by Alex Miller


black abstract canvas by Wyatt Kahn


a Dana Bell painting Broken Leg (from a photo of Paris Hilton)



a painting by downtown music staple MV Carbon


candy wrapper Rockaway landscape by Taketo Shimada


floor installation by Robbie McDonald


a pair of twig constructions Stick Chart by Bridget Donahue


an Olivia Wyatt video Seeking the Spirit
shows little known facts about Rockaway


all through the day Blain Vandenberg and friends
took pictures of visitors in her custom photo booth


photos from the booth

It is easy to file this show away as another DIY art/music show that evokes such words as Noise or Institutional Critique, but it was much too disparate and instinctive to be pigeonholed into a curatorial schtick. For Shake Out - while also escaping the fuzzy New Age togetherness - contents were secondary to the phenomena of the series of collective action it generated, from curating to participating to spectating. This serial Summer group art shows with post-dusk performances by the ragtag lineup of NYC bands drew an astounding amount of spectators to the point where some had to wait to get inside. Considering the location and stigma attached to the Rockaway (it's faraway, has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the U.S., high crime rate) this is quite a feat.

Amidst this context, What a Feeling by Cat Chow, and Stick Chart by Bridget Donahue seemed at home and uniquely site-specific. Both employed semi-discarded material to construct loose geometry and presented casual sophistication that resisted being wall display (a la the artist-alchemist Arte Povera experiments of the 60s). Together, the artworks created an out-of-focus portrait of a future tenant.


Lazaro Valiente and his toys. He might still be playing there.


messages starting their set,


while SKINT get ready outside.


SKINT followed right after messages

As we are all aware, the fabric of NYC commercial art activity reaches far beyond Chelsea - new annexes come and go in a dizzying pace because infusions of capital come faster nowadays than the speed in which culture can grow. This pattern of gentrification known as the SoHo Effect is getting shorter and shorter. While gentrification of most of the neighborhoods in short distances from NYC is inevitable, the compression of time negates a kind of collective unfolding which SoHo of the early 60s was able to afford. It is important to note that the curators are year round residents there, and that all summer long they also organized and helped out at the organic vegetable stand that's open every Sunday.


Next morning, Shaun was busy at the organic vegetable stand
run by Elizabeth Gilchrist of Blooming Hills Farm.


Elizabeth Gilchrist and Taka

The stigma attached to Rockaway, with its proximity to the surfing beach, is what gives MoSh FroP its potential - and what differentiated the Shake Outs. They weren't statements, but more like snapshots capturing enormous cultural potential from the neighborhood.

Taketo Shimada


Artists: Alex Miller, Blain Vandenberg, Cat Chow, Dana Bell, Grant Worth, Kyle Field, M.V. Carbon, Robbie McDonald, Scott Hug, Taketo Shimada, Wyatt Kahn

Bands: Skint, Wet Ropes, Revival Times, Little Wings, Lazaro Valiente, messages


#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 9/22/2009 04:26:00 PM

Monday, August 17, 2009

Sudden Fluxus Summer ( Soudain l'été Fluxus)
Passage de Retz




by Angie Eng


Curated by Valerie Maffioletti, Vincent Normand and Jacqueline Frydman
July 13-September 20, 2009
Passage de Retz
9 rue Charlot du Calvaire, Paris
www.passagederetz.com


It's been a while since I contributed to AOA. I waited until I found the right event that would correspond with a video letter. What better project than a Fluxus exhibition. Moreover, the first historical Fluxus show in France, ever. The organizers embarrassed to admit such a fact, explained in the press release, the reason lie in the fact that the two main French Fluxus artists, Ben Vautier and Robert Filliou were little exhibited and therefore, why showcase a movement which excluded the French? Hmmm, I'm waiting for my Carte de Sejour (or 'green card') so I will not publicly comment on their reasoning.

'Soudain l'été Fluxus' (A Sudden Fluxus Summer) on display at Passage de Retz in Paris until September 20, highlights a great movement in art making and another boat I missed.

In the spirit, I respond.

Angie Eng



The many exhibiting Artists include Eric Andersen, Ay-O, George Brecht, Philip Corner, Jean Dupuy, Robert Filliou, Henry Flynt, Ken Friedman, Al Hansen, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Ray Johnson, Joe Jones, Bengt af Klintberg, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Richard Maxfield, Charlotte Moorman, Yoko Ono, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, Dieter Roth, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Daniel Spoerri, James Tenney, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Yoshi Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young and many others such as John Cage, Allen Kaprow, Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen
#permalink posted by Angie Eng : 8/17/2009 02:27:00 PM

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Andy Laties on Kurt Schwitters & Dada
Interpreting Ursonate


Lynn Book, Andy Laties and Jeff Beer interpreting Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters
at Cabaret Voltaire, Chicago 1988

by artist: Andy Laties

"In 2002 I was once again in crisis. I started writing a memoir to try figure out what had gotten me into such trouble, and I guess I was looking for an escape hatch too. This essay is an excerpt from the manuscript that was finally whittled down to my book, "Rebel Bookseller: How To Improvise Your Own Indie Store And Beat Back The Chains." The essay was written rapidly, and I didn't do proper fact-checking--I certainly wouldn't trust it on art-historical issues. At the time I didn't know about Nam June Paik's performances of "Ursonate" in the early 60s, or the influence of 19th century Romanian-Jewish culture on Tristan Tzara's invention of dada. But, for what it's worth, here's a slice."

-- Andy Laties, 2009, for Artist Organized Art
The following is excerpted from the Essay "Interpreting Ursonate" by Andy Laties:

read the full essay

...Theatrical performance demands a willingness and capacity to abandon personal identity: to place oneself at the service of the script. But every performer, in practice, produces a unique performance. Authors sometimes revolt against these arbitrary outcomes. Most authors do not attempt to rein in the performers and directors who decide to produce their scripts: it's impractical, at best, and counterproductive as well, leading generally to simple non-presentation of the work. Some, though, like Samuel Beckett, are fanatically precise and performances are strictly regulated and prescriptive...



Andy Laties interpreting Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters
Chicago, 1988


read the full essay

...Schwitters was an oddball even for a Dada. He wasn't actually admitted to the Club Dada. As I found out later, he showed up in Berlin in 1918 to demand admittance to the Club, and George Grosz opened his door to find Schwitters standing there. Schwitters said, "I am Kurt Schwitters and I've come to join the Club Dada." Grosz said "This is not the Club Dada," and slammed the door. Schwitters knocked on the door again. Grosz opened. Schwitters said, "I am not Schwitters," turned around and left.

Schwitters then formed his own art movement, which he called Merz. He was the only member...

read the full essay

...I learned afterward that Schwitters had developed Ursonate over a period of 10 years, between 1922 and 1932, and then spent the rest of his life performing it throughout Europe. The Peter Froelich show exactly followed a program Schwitters had presented in London in 1945. Schwitters had published extremely exacting specifications for how the Ursonate was to be performed. The rights to all performance were strictly controlled by his son, who generally refused permission to anyone requesting to perform the piece, on the basis of these strict performance specifications. That is: the piece had really been written for sole, solo performance by its author. A performance like the Peter Froelich one, which essentially channeled Kurt Schwitters, was acceptable, but only this approach would be permitted by the family.


A year after the Froelich performance, when I was living in Chicago, I received a letter from my high school newspaper editor friend, Laura Kelsey. She was spending the year in Munich. I wrote back, asking her if she could check in the library there for any copies of Kurt Schwitters' poetry. I didn't know if Ursonate was in print, but I did know it wasn't available in the United States; nothing by him was.

read the full essay

She sent me a complete xeroxed text of Ursonate" she'd found Schwitters' collected works in three volumes in a public library.


It wasn't until four years later, in 1984, that I actually did anything with Ursonate. Working as a children's theatre actor and improvisor--and as a jazz musician with several bands and under a number of teachers--had helped me learn how to inject my own ideas into any text, even ones like Ursonate with no coherent linguistic meaning. That is, I was interested in using Ursonate for my own purposes: as a framework for expressing my own ideas; as a template for the integration of jazz improvisation and theatre improvisation.

read the full essay

My friend and musical partner Rob Metrick was running a Time Arts performance series at Chicago Filmmakers. I asked him if he could put me on his schedule to do a performance of Ursonate, and he finagled this.


Lynn Book and Andy Laties interpreting Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters
Chicago, 1988


Ursonate was written as a solo performance piece. But I developed an arrangement for five performers: three voices and two musicians. Art Institute of Chicago instructor Lynn Book, Chicago Chamber Orchestra cellist (and classically trained vocalist) Philip Hart Helzer, and I handled vocals. Professional jazz musicians Johnsee Holt and Jeff Beer played guitar, percussion and trumpet. We arranged for Rob to rent three Dada Films: Anemic Cinema by Marcel Duchamp, Ghosts Before Breakfast by Hans Richter, and Emak Bakia by Man Ray. We planned to extend the Ursonate evening by interspersing free-jazz improvisations accompanying these films.


Brenda Webb, the founder of Chicago Filmmakers, decided to call the program "Evening of the Bearded Heart," after a famous program at the original Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916...

read the full essay

...The show was a huge success. We had a standing room only crowd, and we repeated the program a month later with similar overflowing attendance. The most exciting thing was that after the first show, a distinguished gentleman emerged from the audience and introduced himself as Dr. Hans-Jurgen Kienast - a friend of Richard Huelsenbeck, who was one of the founders of the Dada movement.


Dr. Kienast asked me a provocative question: Why had Dada become popular, now, in America? I wrote him this letter a week later (looking back of I understand there was a lot I didn't know about Dada's history in America; still I present this letter unedited to show my thinking in 1984, at age 25):

Dear Dr. Kienast...

#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 7/26/2009 05:42:00 PM

Monday, June 29, 2009

Berlusconi Meets Marinetti:
Notes From the 53rd Venice Biennale


"Swoon took her boat show to the LIII Venice Biennale Opening,
where it became invisible: so little visual impact looking out
on the open Adriatic Sea from the Giardini"



by correspondent Sante Scardillo
assisted by Leslie Hirst

Read full article

Ki11 The Bienna1e: Some years ago, Quentin Tarantino successfully challenged the notion that a movie has to last 90 minutes...not for the first time; the industry simply went back to the roots of film as an art form, and only because it seemed profitable. From a narrative point of view, I think it is better to have a story broken down in installments rather than successive installments posthumously added on to try to cash in on a franchise because people want more of the same, which isn’t always true… But I am getting carried away here: after all this is supposed to be about the LIII Venice Biennale and this is to say: the story is being parceled in different installments.



Swoon's Descent Down the Hudson

I already wrote 2 years ago about the mirthless anachronism biennials incarnate: after all, Venice invented the franchise, in the year 1895. Now, in the dim light of the financial crisis, megasurveys seem even less pro-active (or pro-creative, to make an etimologically accurate joke, no double-entendre meant) while their bent toward pro-fit seems even less probable for two reasons: the high cost of the productions, both of the event itself and the pieces produced seems an insult to thrift the times call for, while the possibility of return for the investors who foot the bills are less secure.

Unknowingly, I started writing this piece last fall. I was struck by how not one, but two shows were entitled simply: Shit. They were reportedly (and coincidentally) completely different shows and concepts. Soon afterwards, Swoon’s Descent down the Hudson on a flotilla of Coast Guard-wise unworthy ramshackle vessels and trailing multi-artist, multimedia collective in tow docked at the Trump City Piers and by contrast offered a fresh, ingenuous approach to art and art making: quite the opposite, I posited, in a piece that I never finished.



Comorans on Display Outside the Giardini Entrance

Read full article

Swoon supposedly took her boat show to the LIII Venice Biennale Opening, where it became invisible: so many boats, boat shows and showboats, so little visual impact on punters looking out on the open Adriatic Sea from the Giardini. Swoon’s was just another MIA exhibition, whereas the boats taken from the Comores Islands, in spite of being mostly a feat of cultural entrepreneurship by a former unknown vying for attention, rather than expressing true creative energy or questions of re-contextualization, had at least a visual impact. These were traditional cargo boats outlawed by the Comoran government in a radical effort at modernization, disassembled, shipped to Venice in containers that were then placed inside the re-assembled boats. And the unknown Japanese gate-crashing the wet center stage in front of the Giardini Entrance, tentatively governing his paper-made (apparently) boat complete of paper made giant red goldfish, made a comedic counterpoint, with real rescue boats falling for his antics and stopping to offer help, before realizing none was needed. It must be remarked, though, that the visual impact of a succession of battleship-size yachts walling off of the waterfront immediately following the entrance to the Giardini (and its implied display of vast economic power) takes another lion’s share: anybody walking to or from the Biennale can’t avoid it, just like in New York one has to walk through the Midtown skyscrapers to get to MoMA.

In art, like in war, today commercial battles are fought donning the cloak of defenders of ideas and civilization, and often it is a war of preemption. For weeks prior, Italian magazines and dailies had been awash in ink baptizing the new bi-yearly art caravanserai that just opened in Venice, trumpeting more shows, more celebrities, more, more… just more. The extensiveness of the media campaign is unusual, but consistent with the ethics and practice of the government in power now. Of course the media-saturation strategy is preemptive: flooding the media creates a buzz of expense account paid journalism, which creates the impression of critical acclaim before critics have even seen the show. Acceptance seems established, so the impact of negative criticism will be minimized, since it will be in dissonance with the predominant discourse. If you are well versed in Italian politics and culture, the motive is easy to find: the Venice Biennale is deemed a propaganda project of great importance and as such is being made resonate with the echo given to important government projects. Italy’s current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi knows how to do one thing and that is to stay in the eye of the media. Berlusconi, who is also a media publisher, was an Italian Socialist Party member in more recent, much less militant times, though he never was in jail, yet. Mussolini must have been consumed with envy when Marinetti, up to then a war correspondent for aesthetic reasons, scored the ultimate media coup: through his working knowledge of journalistic procedures, he landed his Manifesto Futurista on the front page of Le Figaro, The Parisian Daily, and The New York Post of its day, who published it because of the shock value of its proclamations. And that is how Futurism began. This year the centenary of this event is being celebrated, and the crypto-fascists in power now in Italy have decided to go for a second milking of Italy’s main artistic contribution to the XX century.

Read full article

So, dear reader, suspend your disbelief and journalistic expectations: what follows will be more an Alice in Wonderland meets Total Recall than Jerry Saltz reports from the Venice trenches (or moats, as the case would be). Unless Jerry decides to cut and paste from my report like he did two years ago...

copyright Scardillo 2009, all rights reserved

#permalink posted by Sante Scardillo : 6/29/2009 07:04:00 AM

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Taketo Shimada, Calder Martin
Keith Connolly & Yuji Agematsu
can we expand MUSIC? (CWEM)
At Hanne Tierney's FiveMyles
558 St. Johns Place in Brooklyn
Curator: Yuzo Sakuramoto



Yuji Agematsu, Found Objects at FiveMyles



by Alison Knowles


Making the trip out to FiveMyles last week gave me the chance to support this brave and exciting endeavor created some years ago by Hanne Tierney. FiveMyles, derived from Five 'Myles' (names of the deceased male members of her family) is located in a profoundly underprivileged section of Brooklyn serving the ethnic youth of that community. She has brought in significant culture to these deserving people by buying a large ground warehouse space without any windows and making it very attractive.



Yuji Agematsu, Found Objects at FiveMyles

'The four artists in this exhibition are both musicians and visual artists. This exhibition is presented as an attempt to explore different aspects of encounters between sound and image. With an emphasis on creative process, the exhibition, consisting of four installations, is itself an experiment into a possible unfolding of such encounters. It is also meant to be a documentation of, or status report on these artists, the first in an on-going series.'


Taketo Shimada, Work Environment Installation at FiveMyles

The place was packed, free beer flowed as the performers arrived for the "closing" of the event "can we expand music?" or CWEM. These musicians: Taketo Shimada, Keith Connolly, Calder Martin and Yuji Agematsu had a variety of instruments and installations available to look at and talk about. Calder Martin's plastic bag sculpture initiated the space as it quietly moved in the open air(the warehouse doors were open) and franks and hamburgers were cooking on the barbecue next door. Taketo's floor instruments were spread out on various rugs and colorful cloths. The longest sitar-like stringed instrument (hand made by Taketo from a length of wood with strings attached and pegged for tuning) show his interest in string resonance theory particularly of the Kirana school of Indian music. His music is heard without electric enhancement. This remarkable instrument is supported by boxes decorated by the candy wrappers he uses to make his art. Very beautiful drawings of Pandit Pran Nath completed Taketo's homage to the master. I wanted one of these drawings but learned that they were not for sale.


Taketo Shimada, at work tuning an instrument at FiveMyles

The work of Yuji Agematsu attracted me since collecting street objects is a pass time of mine in artmaking. Yuji packaged tiny portions of what he had picked up in tiny plastic bags, hundreds of them to be picked up and looked at. The street cullings were from one year of walking the same city blocks.


Keith Connolly, design process wall pieces at FiveMyles

This combination of visual art and music was a safe haven for this community and the opening and closing reminded me of the vigor of the lower East side of the 1970's. Bravo to Hanne Tierney.



Taketo Shimada (meend tanpura) Tres Warren (Guitar)
video by Kristin Mullane Shimada at Can We Expand Music
curated by Yuzo Sakuramoto




Caitlin Cook and Calder Martin
video by Kristin Mullane Shimada at Can We Expand Music
curated by Yuzo Sakuramoto




Alison Knowles, NYC

Taketo Shimada has made music with Tres Warren of Psychic Ills as Messages since 2006. Doug Mosurak of Dusted commented that the Messages 7” record released by The Social Registry “is some heavy, humid drone, pregnant with 4am electricity. Best record in the Social Registry’s singles series to date.” His work has been shown at Postmasters Gallery, Wall Space Gallery and Emily Harvey Foundation.

Calder Martin is a guitarist and visual artist and the founder of the band Vizusa. Arthur Magazine said that Vizusa’s debut LP “VizUSA is the new psychedelic simple, hard: the rock and roll of Buddy Holly bare bones with the doors of perception jimmyin' and repetitious riff milkin' of Les Rallizes Dénudés.” Calder has produced video projections at the Kitchen for Caitlin Cook and company, and live music and installations at Deitch Projects with Exceptor. His work has been shown at Emily Harvey Foundation and Participant.

Keith Connolly is an artist and musician, and is a founding member of the No Neck Blues Band. His most recent work was exhibited at Parade Space in London. In New York he has exhibited his installations and performed live events at Greene Naftali Gallery, PS 1, Roulette and the Sculpture Center.

Yuji Agematsu is an artist/photographer. For the past thirty years he has been picking up discarded things from the street and meticulously archiving them. He has worked with Tokio Hasegawa, former member of Taj Mahal Travellers, and studied yara with Milford Graves. He is also a fervent fan of Cecil Taylor and Miles Davis.

can we expand Music? curator Yuzo Sakuramoto is a New York-based researcher, translator and the publisher of the legendary, now defunct fanzine Music. He recently translated the liner notes for the Taj Mahal Travellers album, Live in Stockholm 1971 and DVD, on “Tour,” as well as Takehisa Kosugi’s Catch Wave ’97.

#permalink posted by Alison Knowles : 6/23/2009 02:23:00 PM

Monday, June 22, 2009

Easthampton Bear Fest 2009
In Hard Times Locals Come Out In Generous Support of Art


A townsman maintains a commissioned bear


by Angélica G. Huertas

Easthampton City Arts (ECA) is a local art organization that, according to their website, makes its mission to enhance “the collaborative efforts of the artist and business communities to increase economic opportunities for artists” and “the opportunities of local artists to showcase and market their work and to provide the public the opportunity to discover emerging and established artists.” Easthampton City Arts collaborates with other local arts organizations such as Art Walk Easthampton, and various local galleries.



Bear Fest benefits include “community involvement,
cooperation between artists, businesses, and local and state government”
John Polak, ECA Marketing Committee

The Easthampton Bear Fest was a public art event in which Easthampton City Arts (ECA) of Massachusetts obtained 35 life-sized fiberglass bears and paid local artists to decorate them. Once painted, the bears were made into a public exhibit, scattered and displayed throughout Easthampton. ECA received the sponsorship of various local businesses, banks, galleries, and media outlets, and is donating proceeds to public schools for arts education.


Site specific commissioned bears are found throughout Easthampton
as are many Easthampton Bear Fest branded objects

The Bear Fest has successfully integrated art into everyday life. In Easthampton, art objects are naturalized as part of the environment— a work of art graces the steps of a bank, the very capitalistic center of town, or the outside of a supermarket, where the purchasing of all of life’s necessary trivialities occurs.


Bear poses for a photo op with local children

But how does one go about soliciting monetary support for such an event? What would one have to say to these businesses to convince them that this type of event is worth the investment? Just how much money is actually available from local businesses in a small town such as Easthampton? And what can we take from the Bear Fest example for future arts fundraisers? I spoke to some of the people in charge of running the event to get some answers to these questions.

Art objects are naturalized situationally and throughout the town's environs

One of the key differences between this event and, a benefit is that Easthampton Bear Fest, paid the artists $500 each for their work rather than asking artists to donate their work The proceeds for the event were thus split between the artists, Easthampton City Arts, and Easthampton public schools, mutually and financially benefiting both the organizers and the community. In addition, the artwork was on random display in many locations in the city. According to Briana Taylor, Coordinator at Easthampton City Arts, “The main appeal of this project was that it is public art. Being an arts organization we are very interested in creating a forum in the community for art and culture, something that would bring the community together around art. The Bear form that we chose is so engaging, to both children and adults and especially an audience that might not be used to looking at art. Everyone can appreciate it.”


Bear Fest related activities augment the exhibit

The Bear Fest managed to involve local businesses in more ways than one. In addition to making donations, businesses created and sold co-branded products to coincide with the Bear Fest. Mt. Tom’s Homemade Ice Cream offered a new flavor especially made for the Bear Fest, and Opa-Opa Brewing Company introduced their Country Bear Ale. Mt. Tom’s Homemade Ice Cream in particular “has seen increased profitability over his entire business due to the Bear Fest,” according to Taylor. But Bear Fest mania doesn’t end there. Spectators were able to vote for their favorite bear, and kids were encouraged to enter a “My Bear Story” contest. Related events are being held, including a “Create Your Own Bear Story” program with actress and children’s drama teacher Ilana Meredith, slated for Saturday, August 15th at the Easthampton Senior Center.


Painted bear tracks added suspense for pedestrians hunting art

All in all, the Easthampton Bear Fest raked in an impressive $50,000. Briana Taylor expressed her pleasant surprise at the success of the event in this way: “We were hugely satisfied by the response from the community and visitors alike. Attendance at the first day event was much more than expected, we think around 5,000 people came through the City throughout the day to the different events and to see the bears. It was just fantastic.”

Artists & Bears:

Jeffrey Calvi: Madam Bearterfly, Luke Cavagnac: This Bear is Worth One Thousand Words, Sara Chalifoux: Transoceanic Bear, Amy Davis: Paddy O’Bearen, Jo-Ann Denehy: Bear Hugs, Deshria: Rubber Ducky, You’re the One, Adell Donaghue & Justin Brown: Ursa Major, Jennifer Dorgan: Garden Bear, John Casey Douglas: Astronaut Bear, Michael Fitzgibbon: Aurora “Bear”ealis, Amalia FourHawks: A Bear With A Buttoned Down Education, Gary Hallgren: Wire Haired Bear, Elsie Hasskarl: Berry Bear, Beverly Hosmer: Ted E. Bear, Amy Johnquest: Clementine (the Circus Bear), Jim Johnson: The Bearon, Heather Kasunick: Garden Party, Mary Klaes: Master Essential, Silas Kopf: Aloha Bear, Gary LaCroix: Mountain Park Bear, Jill Lewis: Williston Button Bear, Michael MacTavish: Bearly There, Leah Moses: Bumble Bear, Dianne Murphy: The Gingerbear Man, Kim Parkhurst: Three Bears, Maria Parasiewicz: Peace Bear, Crystal Popko: Hiding Bear, Marcia Reed: Ursa Great Spirit, Ruth Sanderson: Papa Bear & Baby Bear, Greg Stone: Something’s Fishy, Christopher Woodman: Bear, Bath & Beyond, Jean Zampiceni: Mother & Child at Parade


Committees & Volunteers:

Event Planning Committee: Stuart Beckley, Amy Davis, Denise Herzog, Jen Moulton, Denise M. Riggs, Kim Schmitt, Carol Abbe Smith

Marketing Committee: Stephanie Gibbs, Trace Meek, Marcia Morrison, Jean-Pierre Pasche, John Polak, Briana Taylor

School Participation Committee: Stuart Beckley, Erin Binney, Cyndy Chamberland, Francis DiMenno, Michelle Geoghegan, Kim Hunt, Rob Orlando, Susan Pepin Phillips, Susan Pouliot

Easthampton City Arts Coordinating Committee: Stuart Beckley, Cyndy Chamberlain, Amy Davis, Ellen Koteen

Co-Facilitator: Sharon Keene, Marcia Morrison, Jean-Pierre Pasche, John Polak, Denise M. Riggs, Briana Taylor

Easthampton Bear Fest
Angélica Huertas for Artist Organized Art

#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 6/22/2009 02:09:00 PM

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009
Making Worlds, Directed by Daniel Birnbaum
with Bruce Nauman, Wolfgang Tillmans and more...



John Baldassarri Project
Photo: Press CD, La Biennale di Venezia 53 Esposizione d’Arte

by artist and critic: Emilio Fantin

What should an Italian be considering during a trip from the city of Bologna to the city of Venice bound for a biennial circus of art? An Italian who is at that moment reading an article about the Italian Prime Minister's latest "conjuring tricks." An Italian who lives in a nation who's gags, jokes and public clowns have migrated into the institutional sphere using positions of power to harvest techniques of parody from progressive discourse?

No more "spaghetti" but anecdotes. This seems the sudden pleasure of politicians and pedestrians: kidding someone or kidding around at something to fulfill their heartfelt interest. They mock their own institutions, anyone's work, collective or individual suffering, murders, garbage, sickness, the dead and life itself. Dry drunks clowning for themselves and seeing the world flat as a cartoon, but dominated by "cunning," the hidden character trait of the two dimensional hero. Each little pun, caricature or gag hides the gratification of cunning, the pleasure of faking everybody out and making fast money. Everything else is useless and without application, parliaments, laws, human rights, human beings, old people, kids and, of course, useless democracies. But this Italian parody is the spectacular backdrop in front of which our clowning divas debut for this year's society soap opera, the Mediterranean Character, dangerous yet vulnerable and sometimes capable of salvation. Meanwhile in the European situation, something very different is emerging: the last elections showed that in most of the European states neo-Nazis gained a large percentage of votes from which they are at this moment extracting sizeable power and dangerous capability, but what fears could possibly lurk in the hearts and minds of Italians.

With this fleeting insight in mind I stared back at the day, scratched an itch over my eyebrow and committed myself to the carefree abandon of the great circus of tourism, 2009's 53rd Venice Biennale.

First stop: Sant Erasmo


"Sant Erasmo from the boat"
Photo: Emilio Fantin

Sant Erasmo is a beautiful island where I myself have installed a work in an ancient fortress, "Fortezza Massimiliana," for the show IsolaMondi, which is one of the collateral events of the Biennale. Collateral events, parties, meetings, openings constitute the true earth of art scenes today in Venice, where the biennial itself is just one of the shows and it might not be the most interesting one.


"Fortezza Massimiliana"
Photo: Emilio Fantin

Sant Erasmo is an example of the variety of places that constitute the residential area of Venice. It is a big island, where only six hundred people live. It is where the most vegetables and fruits sold at Venetian market are produced. It is covered with Gardens and vast green areas.


Emilio Fantin, "Inner Encounter," inflatable structure, 2003
Photo: Emilio Fantin

Second stop: Giardini e Arsenale


"Arsenale, Gaggiandre, Before the Exhibition"
Press CD, La Biennale di Venezia 53 Esposizione d’Arte



Arsenale, Corderie, Before the Exhibition
Press CD, La Biennale di Venezia 53 Esposizione d’Arte

"Venice." Here we are, and the entire city is involved in the Italian art scene's biggest carnival. I asked some folks for their impressions. Cesare Pietroiusti and Mario Pieroni said to me: "I like this vortex: happenings, openings, performances , different places and people not just the Biennale itself. What we like is the general "status," the atmosphere." A few days later, in her intervention at the meeting "il Falso Oreste" in Bologna, Francesca, a young girl, said: "...it is only this vortex that justifies operating the Biennale. Language, messages and expressions of the artists are not important: here art work functions like a merry go round in a huge amusement park."

I jump from Giardini to Arsenale from Palazzo Fortuny to Punta della Dogana, a new space restored by Pinault Fondation. At the Arsenale there are few works worth seeing; better to spend time at Giardini's international pavilions.


Bruce Nauman, Three Heads Fountain (Juliet, Andrew, Rinde), 2005 (detail)

Someone told me the choice of Bruce Nauman for the American pavilion was a political choice and a very expensive one. Here again, instead of inviting a young talent, we are put in front of another "political choice." I am known for having criticized this kind of thing and I still do, but in this case the power of the artwork outstrips that of the critic. Among all the art works that I have seen in this 53rd Biennale, those of Nauman and Tillmans really touched me. I'm very happy to have seen Bruce Nauman's work, which is clear and simple because his manner of drama and capacity for depth leaves absolutely no ambiguity. The work speaks to my heart and mind directly, through lightness, successfully liberating itself from the Biennale's amusement park culture and taking me along. Wolfgang Tillmans too, shows the beauty of simple images and colors. A good artist is able to create imagery with few things. All he needs is the courage to relate himself directly to the world, without bluffing, simply drawing on personal wisdom and humility.


Wolfgang Tillmans, Installation, 2009 (detail)
Press CD, La Biennale di Venezia 53 Esposizione d’Arte

Third stop: Palazzo Fortuny


Palazzo Fortuny Façade, Mario Merz (1925–2003) "Fibonacci Sequence," 2002
Photo: Press CD In-Finitum Palazzo Fortuny, Venezia 2009

At Palazzo Fortuny the show "In-Finitum" is a wunder-kamera immersed in smooth darkness. Art works of various ages dialog inside a beautiful context furnished with different objects, a sort of historical dialog between images and objects. The setting up of the exhibition is extravagant, curious, but it is very difficult to remember a single artwork.


First Floor, Sala Grande, Palazzo Fortuny
Berlinde De Bruyckere (1964) Infinitum 2009
Thomas Houseago (1972) Figure (Oedipus) 2008
Anonymous, Small basin with double zoomorphic resemblance
Anonymous, Portrait of Colleoni from the collection of Mario Fortuny
Photo: Press CD In-Finitum Palazzo Fortuny, Venezia 2009

The show at "Punta della Dogana" is an ostentatious display. The restoration of the old building made by Tadao Ando is, of course, beautiful, but the exhibition "Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection" is anything but. The atmosphere resembles one you might "enjoy" from the interior of a glamour yacht berthed nearby. A crude demonstration made in bad taste.

Fourth stop: Ponte dei Sospiri


"Advertisement" Ponte dei Sospiri, Venezia 2009
Photo: Emilio Fantin



"Press Office" 53rd Venice Biennale
Photo: Emilio Fantin

Around the city: Inside this huge forest of varied artistic proposals and events we wonder whether a tree, a bridge or a colored wall are works fabricated by artists or if they merely look so. In the biggest museum of souvenirs, the city of Venice, it is difficult to separate daily life from the tourist attraction, especially when every little thing trumpets an industrial parade of art. The famous "Ponte dei Sospiri" (the Whispering Bridge) has been appropriated by a huge advertisement, and is headquarters to the Biennale Press Office. I actually find it one of the best installations of the Arsenale.

In this article I will avoid reviewing individual art works of the Biennale, you can find that and reproductions anywhere, rather I prefer to relate a feeling, a "status" which can be experienced in Venice as well as in many other artistic events or festival nowadays: commoditization and slavish obedience to the rules of the culture industry and a palpable sense of the consequent loss of true research and meaning in art making itself.

This enables demagogy, a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions and expectations of the public: the Italian pavilion expresses a cliché of political thinking which affirms that art has to be subdued to the role of entertainment, castrating its capacity to generate ideas, transformations, to get to the heart of things and the heart of the people.


"Poetic Loss" casual installation at Giardini, Venice
Photo: Emilio Fantin

Why this happens is understandable. Today artistic choices and exhibitions are managed by boorish collectors and ignorant politicians. Not just in Italy, but here it is frankly due to a particularly low consciousness about contemporary art.


"Poetic Loss" casual installation at Giardini, Venice
Photo: Emilio Fantin

What we might discuss, after having seen such a "biennale," is something about the industry of culture itself, which, of course, includes the art-system. As Paolo Virno suggests, "fabricating politics" out shines the reality of work itself. The equity in verbs like creating, producing and making is cashed out. According to Guy Debord, the show is a productized form of human communication, yet it is also a staple of the culture industry. Artworks function as special devices of communication, as such they are interchangeable and adaptable to varied trends. Regardless of what they transmit, express or evoke they stand subsidiary to the culture industry. As it expands and monetizes communications in traditional sectors of the daily economy, eventually it requires the very role of the artist to be conformed to its strategy. It requires art making to sacrifice its sovereignty. The artist is scripted to the character type of independent thinker, original inventor or simply autonomous worker. Omnivorous and ravenous, involved only in its own flourishing, the show alone, must go on however.

Emilo Fantin

#permalink posted by Artist Organized Art : 6/16/2009 10:36:00 AM

Monday, May 18, 2009

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia,
1860-1989 at the Guggenheim.


Performance by Mary Beth Edelson, Jessica Higgins and Shigeko Kubota at the
Guggenheim preview reception for The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia,
1860- 1989, (AKA the Buddha show)

By intermedia artist Jessica Higgins

I was invited by Alison Knowles, to the formal dinner on January 28th and cocktails on the 29th.

Of course I was thrilled to go, not only because the topic was of personal interest to me and to my own conceptual language, but I also felt honored to see so many of the faces I’d grown up seeing and relating to together or close by in the Guggenheim. The curator had a cozy alcove set aside for The Fluxus group of which I so fondly grew up experiencing around me in a childhood wildness to which I often refer now. The scope of the show is vast and brilliant, so for the purpose of expressing my views experientially I will contain them within that room and a few steps upward toward Larry Miller's work.


Dick Higgins, A Thousand Symphonies, Performance relic of Danger Music #12,
Symphony #860 1967/97 in Three movements.

In turning the corner, Dick Higgins, A Thousand Symphonies, Performance relic of Danger Music #12, Symphony #860 1967/97 in Three movements. The bullet holes reflecting a thought of war or questions on its opposite, such a random period in my life in Vermont. A period of harsh screams, pianos and typewriters somehow abstracted into something else, my father always seemed bigger or slightly abstracted by life itself.


Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch [2nd Edition], 1973/93 silk-screens in cadmium

Close by Alison Knowles, The Identical Lunch [2nd Edition], 1973/93 silk-screens in cadmium yellow with her friends eating the tuna fish on whole wheat toast with buttermilk brought me back to such a different time. One when artists helped each other and a creative community bloomed. I find myself contemplating Joshua Selman's amazing grip on culture in the 21st century and his extensive work on ArtistOrganzedArt.org. I flip back in time to the crazy reflections of parties with genital cakes, jelly’s and gender switched wedding’s occurring mostly in big open spaces. All those beautiful faces with concepts behind each one ready to share freely and laugh. Shigeko’s silkscreen reminded me of a full moon. Later I met her sitting like a Buddha and she was smiling, which I hadn’t seen in a while. I was introduced to Mary Beth Edelson, and in a spontaneous way we all made an event. “The quirky, abstracted, pull it together” sense re-merged in a flashback.


Performance by Mary Beth Edelson, Jessica Higgins and Shigeko Kubota
at the Guggenheim preview reception for The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia,
1860- 1989, (AKA the Buddha show).Alison Knowles is handed Edelson's
camera to record the spontaneous performative event.
Performance concept by Mary Beth Edelson, 2009.


In my brief wander upward Larry Miller’s piece about his mother strongly stood out as a relation to the Fluxus room, for me one of the most important later Fluxus artists to exchange and influence the next generation of artists who ponder the movement. He stood by his work talking as only he can about all that went into the work or the people who happened to be there, an event itself. The rambling wild thoughts became a trip about hypnosis, identity and Jack Kerouac who he happened to be reading when he made the piece.

I walked back into the room and found myself drawn to the wonderful typography of Fluxus. The bold black lines and design that often draws me in and did as a child, all those boxes I associate with Maciunas and Brecht. I remember trying to sort through my own toys and being particularly fascinated by toys that came in boxes with pieces.

It was important for me to see George Brecht's Water Yam, 1963 and Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Music. Several times during my childhood and very early adulthood I visited George Brecht. The few times I met him he had such charm with such fierce ideas. One intriguing visit took place in Koln at a large dinner with Alison Knowles, myself, her travel companion, Hermann Braun and several others who had joined us. At a large bistro specialized in types of beer, a large tub arrived at the table out of which emerged the enormous head of a roasted pig with hoofs and tail decorating the rim. The body was simply missing. The pig's head was cooked and shiny, looking like it might open an eye. As the evening went by there were many rounds of Kilsch required to go with stories of friends and we talked about how it was for me working with Alison at the WDR Radio station in Koln. The laughter, smoke and faces are still etched in my memory. Alison Knowles, my mother, invited me the following day on a trip to the Cathedral, it reminded me of a lighted sand castle as we climbed arduously to the top. Decades later on return I still associated Koln with Kilsch, lighted castles and WDR Horspiels and remember the climb standing in the Guggenheim.

Being at The Third Mind also brings me back to John Cage's visits with my mother and the process of everyday life and everyday art. I saw so much of that in both of them. The outlines of life, the questions and experiences of life art, nature, food and the outlines of John's smile ... the thought of trying one of their mushrooms with concern as they looked them up in a big book ... gentle giants ... I wasn't so sure I should try them, but they smelled good and the names were so beautiful ... and John had co-founded the New York Mycological Society.


Alison Knowles, The Giant Bean Turner, 1995

Alison would later emerge from the swaying architecture carrying the beans in a way I can only begin to say how much I associate a large part of my early adolescence with constant thoughts about beans, whether in soup or in art the point was consistently pondered. She walked with her statuesque gait and appeared and disappeared being with the art she moved through her event. Somehow it had the extra-ordinary appeal of the ordinary with in it. She was just walking down the path.

I could go on reminiscing about many of the others works in this show and the amazing culture and people I was lucky enough to meet that evening. But I will save that for another time and hope this vignette offers a view of experience reflected back into the eyes of a grown child of art who later became an artist herself.


Jessica Higgins

#permalink posted by Erika Knerr : 5/18/2009 03:13:00 PM


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