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Found Art (LES): Unmonumental 31, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

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Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 30, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Sanford Biggers
Cheshire  2007
14 minutes
continuous loop
DVD projection, single channel, color, sound element

Into The Trees

The Fields Sculpture Park
Omi International Arts Center
Ghent, NY

June 21 – November 30th, 2008

Curated by Lilly Wei and Amy Lipton

The Fields Sculpture Park is pleased to present its 10th  annual summer exhibition, Into the Trees. The exhibiting artists are Polly Apfelbaum, Sanford Biggers, caraballo–farman, Elizabeth Demaray, Stephen Dean, Katie Holten, Jason Middlebrook, Alan Michelson, Cordy Ryman, Shinique Smith,Chrysanne Stathacos and Saya Woolfak.

The exhibition title is borrowed from Ernest Hemingway's novel, Across the River and into the Trees and functions descriptively. A site-specific, open-ended project, it is as much -- if not more -- focused on the idea of a fixed point and the proliferation from that point as a metaphor for the creative process as it is on environmental issues. Into the Trees is interested in how each participating artist, given a tree as a common element and initial stimulus, will arrive at an innovative, utterly individual resolution.

For Into the Trees, eight artists have been invited to select a living tree from the 100-acre site of The Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Art Center in Ghent, New York. The artists will work with their tree on a site-specific installation and must therefore take into consideration the temporality of their construction and materials as well as the natural surroundings and are asked not to harm the tree, the only restriction.

The exhibiting artists outdoors are:
Polly Apfelbaum, Elizabeth Demaray, Stephen Dean, Jason Middlebrook, Alan Michelson, Cordy Ryman, Shinique Smith, Chrysanne Stathacos and Saya Woolfak. 

Into the Trees will continue indoors as the debut exhibition in the newly completed 1500 sq. ft gallery space in the Charles Benenson Visitor Center. Three artists will make use of the gallery space as a continuation of the outdoor exhibition. Katie Holten, from Ireland, will recreate her sculpture, Excavated Tree: Missouri Native (Flowering Dogwood), a monumental tree sculpture produced and exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2007. Holten represented Ireland in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Working in video, installation and photography, the artist team of Argentinian-born Abou Caraballo and Iranian-born Leonor Farman have been collaborating since 2001 and have recently exhibited at the Tate Modern in London. For Into the Trees, they will create a new work consisting of a live video feed transmitted from the roots of a sapling planted outdoors to a monitor in the gallery, a "performance of growth" that can be watched in real time. Sanford Biggers, an artist from Los Angeles will exhibit Cheshire (2007), a video sequence where, in turn, a different black male dressed in his work uniform climbs--or tries to climb--a tree: a fencer in white knickers; a dentist in scrubs; a lawyer in a suit. Tree-climbing as a stand-in for social climbing, its darker reference is to strange fruit, depicting, according to the artist, "black men hanging out in trees, as opposed to being hung from them."

In conjunction with Into the Trees, The Fields Sculpture Park is pleased to present:

Twitchers and Cheaters, a one-person exhibition by New York artist, Nina Katchadourian.

Twitchers and Cheaters, a new work by Katchadourian will be installed outdoors at the Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi. "Twitcher" is a slang term for a birdwatcher, and avid birdwatchers frequently keep a "life list" of the birds that they have personally observed. This list is the source of great pride for many birdwatchers, since they will often travel long distances to be able to observe new birds. Ultimately, however, every birdwatcher's "life list" relies on a kind of honor system since there is no easy way to prove bird sightings, which often happen in a fleeting manner and in very remote places while the birder is alone.

Twitchers and Cheaters consists of a multi-channel video project installed into tree branches. On the monitors in the trees, viewers will see images of birds appear and disappear rapidly and intermittently from monitor to monitor. Any bird in the northeast that could conceivably land in a tree at the Fields has been included in the footage, and also many others that would be much more rare and harder to spot in this location. The images flit from screen to screen, and as such prompts a viewing experience that resembles the quick and "twitchy" experience of birdwatching itself. However, by watching the video screens in the woods, a viewer can effectively assemble a "cheater's life list" of all the birds of the northeast in the space of only few minutes.

Katchadourian's work often plays with the human relationship to the natural world and asks us to consider what we go to nature to find. Twitchers and Cheaters pokes fun at our longstanding human tendency to collect and categorize, as well as the competitive strain that we bring to activities even as pastoral as birdwatching. It also asks us to reflect upon the impatient temperament of our culture by taking our thirst for time-saving strategies to such an extreme that it turns an activity such as birdwatching, which by definition requires patience and keen observation, into something comically oversimplified and absurdly efficient.

Nina Katchadourian, Twitchers and Cheaters
The Fields Sculpture Park
Omi International Arts Center
Ghent, NY

June 21 – November 30th, 2008

Curated by Kathleen Triem and Peter Franck

For further information please contact:
Amy Lipton, Director
The Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Arts Center
518 392 4747  thefields @ artomi.org

Some tidbits from Artnet News, 6-12-08 have the look of a NYC time line... (images and xtra links courtesy of ngrist):

Announcement for the Times Square Show, 1980.
Ron Kolm Papers, Fales Library

{...Past...}

COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS REDUX
Collaborative Projects, that legendary group of New York artists who formed a nonprofit organization in the late 1970s to take advantage of the then-abundant government grant monies for the arts, is having another moment in the sun. Dealer Brooke Alexander, who showed many members of the collective during its heyday, is mounting "Collaborative Projects Redux" in June at his 3,000-square-foot Wooster Street gallery in Manhattan's SoHo district. Among the artists with works in the show are John Ahearn, Richard Bosman, Jane Dickson, Jenny Holzer and Peter Nadin, Richard Mock, Joseph Nechvatal, Tom Otterness, Judy Rifka, Walter Robinson (yes, him) and Robin Winters.

Colab is celebrated for "The Times Square Show," an exhibition held in a former massage parlor building in Times Square in 1980, as well as for "The New Cinema," a movie house on St. Mark's Place where James Nares, John Lurie, Becky Johnston, Eric Mitchell and other auteurs showed their films in the early 1980s. For images of "Collaborative Projects Redux," see www.baeditions.com

 

{...Present...}

MICHELLE OBAMA HITS THE ART WORLD
The current heroine of our political season, Michelle Obama, is the celebrant of a special art-world benefit for the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign scheduled for June 17, 2008, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. at 530 West 22nd Street in Chelsea (the following dinner is at the home of Calvin Klein). Members of the benefit committee, in addition to Klein and art dealer Brent Sikkema, are Shelby Bryan, André Leon Talley and Anna Wintour. Tickets begin at $1,000 per person; dinner is $10,000 per person. For more info, or to rsvp, contact Jennifer Tabach Gerst at jgerst @ barackobama.com.

{...Present, cont'd...}

ALBION IN NEW YORK
Albion, the big-league London gallery founded in 2004 by Michael Hue-Williams in a space-age 16,000-square-foot riverfront structure designed by Norman Foster, has come to New York. The Big Apple branch, dubbed Albion New York (not to be confused with the upstate town of Albion, N.Y.), is located at 102 Prince Street in the heart of Manhattan's SoHo district, just across the street from the tony Mercer Hotel. What's more, the gallery has David A. Ross as its director, in what looks like the first commercial-gallery job for the former head of the Whitney Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The long-term plan is to open "an architect-designed gallery which will serve as both New York headquarters and an exhibition space," somewhere in the city. In the meantime, the temporary SoHo space opens to the public with an exhibition of works by the German-Egyptian artist Susan Hefuna, June 19-Aug. 1, 2008. A smaller, concurrent exhibition by Vito Acconci features archival works and a suite of his 1992 "florescent furniture." [sic]

{...Future...}

DEVELOPERS CLAIM CHELSEA GALLERY BLOCK
The rampant real estate development in Manhattan's West Chelsea art district is quietly claiming a swath of West 25th Street. According to insiders, a massive real-estate investment firm called Cardinal Investments, whose holdings stretch from New York to the West Coast and Fiji, has bought all the buildings on the north side of West 25th Street between the High Line at 10th Avenue and the Chelsea Tower, home of the new Marlborough Chelsea, at 545 West 25th. Among the art dealers with spaces along the block are Mitchell Algus, Arario, ClampArt, Daniel Cooney, Betty Cuningham, Kent, Florence Lynch and ZieherSmith. As leases run out, dealers are being offered the chance to buy their spaces at $1,000 a square foot, pricing some of the smaller galleries at $750,000 or so.

"The whole neighborhood is being transformed," said one dealer. "I don't know if art galleries will be able to afford it in the future." The seller of the buildings, who had recently developed them as galleries, was Jack Fuchs' Whitehall Business Archives.

[more news...]

Image Via; exhibition Via

This is an excerpt from a longer post by John Perreault on what may be my favorite art-critical blog (or one of them):

Jeff Koons: Having It Both Ways [Excerpt]

 [...]

Up on the Roof

When you step out on the roof, there is a "no photography" sign that no one pays any attention to. It was difficult to get a shot of Balloon Dog, Yellow (1994-2000) sans tourists. Singles, couples and groups took turns posing in front of the obscene Koons Dog made out of stainless steel sausages or penises.

So I concentrated on the Sacred Heart (1994-2007), a stainless steel representation of a chocolate heart wrapped in foil, but in spite of its jab at Catholicism, it is a lesser work. Like the Dog, it is an Oldenburgian blowup of a popular object. Still lesser is Coloring Book (1997-2005) -- the coloring book outline of Winnie-the-Poo's Piglet, with scribbled-in colors. Unlike Dog and Heart, the Piglet is not singular enough to have much impact, though it could pass for a good joke about abstract painting.

So here's another question: How come almost anyone can tell that these blowups are not Oldenburgs?

Claes Oldenburg is never nasty. And there is always a little something that lets you know that you are not looking at a straightforward blowup, some kink or glitch. On the other hand, a Koons is bland, seems unmediated and immaculate, as if untouched by human hands -- which is not really the case. We have a friend whose artist-nephew is thrilled to work in the Koons studio, polishing stainless steel, for hours and hours, day after day.

 

     

Vote With Your Camera

While waiting for the Balloon Dog to be clear of tourists exposing frozen smiles, it dawned on me that the number of students and other art fans posing in front of the Dog indicated that this was the hands-down favorite. It is iconographic. It is photogenic. And somehow it says: I am here. I am in New York on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No one, I swear, was having his or her picture taken in front of the Sacred Heart (I did imagine that some nuns might appear at any moment), and no one was posing in front of Piglet.

As everyone knows, the snapshot is a better voting mechanism than the museum postcard. Postcard images are preselected.

The public and I agree that Balloon Dog is the winner.

But it took me awhile, because...

I once had an art administrator friend who was dating a clown. He was actually an actor who did clown work to pay the rent, specializing in making balloon figures at kiddie birthday parties in Ringling Bros. drag. I thought he was both handsome and quite jolly. His good looks notwithstanding, my art administrator friend and her Bozo soon parted ways. She didn't like it when, out of clown drag and back in mufti, he would sometimes wear his clown shoes in the streets of Soho -- to embarrass her, she thought. I fantasized that perhaps it was because he had really big feet and his clown shoes were more comfortable than his wingtips or his sneakers.

Once I rose above that particular memory, I was able to look at Balloon Dog for what it really was: a beautiful monument to bad taste.

read full post.

via re-title.com:

Critical Art Ensemble / Institute for Applied Autonomy

Seized

7 June 2008 to 18 July 2008

SEIZED examines the physical artifacts of the 2004 FBI investigation of Buffalo artist Steven Kurtz. The items the FBI seized from his home are represented here in photographs of the negative spaces they left behind: missing computers, books, notes, props from performances, lab equipment and unfinished manuscript. Balancing these empty spaces is the voluminous pile of garbage left behind by federal authorities at the Kurtz residence, providing a rare window into the anatomy of a "bioterror" investigation. Hand drawn maps, "to do" lists, and countless articles of protective clothing are set against a backdrop of several hundred energy drinks and over thirty pizza boxes. To date, none of the seized items have ever been returned.

In addition, documentation and ephemera from the Critical Art Ensemble projects confiscated by the FBI and Department of Justice are on display. Finally, we present Marching Plague -- the project the FBI attempted to stop through seizure of the research and materials needed for its production and presentation.

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
341 Delaware Ave
Buffalo, NY 14202

[...] The resulting exhibition will offer a strange amalgam -- part survey of CAE's recent body of artwork, and part exploration of an attempted bioterrorism investigation.

www.critical-art.net
www.caedefensefund.org
www.appliedautonomy.com

Also (via email):

ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 11, 2008

CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Dr. Steven J. Kurtz: (716) 812-2968
Lucia Sommer, CAE Defense Fund: (716) 359-3061
Edmund Cardoni, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: (716) 854-1694

ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal
Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Buffalo, NY--Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at
Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical
Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On
April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire
indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." This means that
even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept
as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department
of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action
has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the
dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney
Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek
any new charges against Kurtz. [Download CAE-Cleared.rtf - full press release]

more info...

via email:

 
       

For Immediate Release        Curated by NAYLAND BLAKE                June 12 – August 1, 2008 Opening reception: Thursday, June 12, 6 - 8 PM It has become a gallery tradition to invite an artist to guest curate the summer exhibition each year. This year Monya Rowe is exceptionally excited to announce Nayland Blake will curate the summer show titled The Guys We Would Fuck. "For the past year or so I've been working on a book called "1000 guys I would fuck" It's just what it sounds like: a compilation of pictures and descriptions of the men I'd go for given the chance.  A while ago Monya Rowe asked me if I would be willing to organize her summer exhibition.  We talked it over and came up with the idea of inviting lots of people to submit "Guys".  I've asked a wide range of people, friends, artists, former students and more.  I'm hoping that it will sprawl beyond the boundaries of my own peer group, in the spirit of other mail art projects." - Nayland Blake For this exhibition, a computer, chairs, printer and zine kit (available for .50 cents) will occupy the gallery space. Visitors are invited to print a different artwork each day to create a zine from works in the exhibition. More pages can be added to your zine as the show progresses. A new original artwork will be on view in the gallery - and a new jpeg on the gallery website - each day. For instance, at the opening reception, one work will be on view. The exhibition features works all in the same format of  8.5 by 11 inches on paper by Nayland Blake, Aaron Cobbett, Angel Colon, Robert Crouch, Joy Episalla, Karen Heagle, Julia Jacquette, Nina Katchadourian, Marlene McCarty, Nelson Santos, Dominic Sowinsky, Carrie Yamaoka and many other invited artists to be announced each day of the exhibition. Nayland Blake is an artist living and working in New York. He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. The gallery will resume normal hours throughout June and July: Tuesday – Saturday 11 to 6 PM We will be closed from August 2 - September 4, 2008 and will reopen with a solo exhibition by Larissa Bates.

reblogged via Visual AIDS >blog, June 9, 2008:

Strike II - Wrap Up

Yoko Ono and Tony Feher
photo: courtesy of Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images (c) 2008

The numbers are in and STRIKE II, the third annual Visual AIDS Vanguard Award ceremony and spring benefit broke records in fundraising, attendance and artists' participation! A resounding success on all fronts, we raised over $68,000, which will directly support our ongoing work utilizing the visual arts to keep an emphasis on the AIDS pandemic, as well as offer direct services to artists living with HIV/AIDS.

Amy Sadao, Executive Director Visual AIDS, Yoko Ono, and Jeffrey Deitch
photo: courtesy of Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images (c) 2008

This year, Visual AIDS was thrilled to recognized artists Yoko Ono and Tony Feher. We offer special thanks to presenters Jeffrey Deitch and Joy Episalla and  for their touching introductions to both honorees, our Co-Chairs Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Cassie Rosenthal, Jack ShainmanPavel Zoubok, as well as this year's Benefit Committee. In addition, we would like to thank DJ Little Jukka (Nayland Blake) for keeping the party rocking.

Yoko Ono, Nayland Blake, Nicholas Weist
Photos above: courtesy Aaron Cobbett (c) 2008


Click here for more information.