As Arts Editor for the journal, I'm proud to present David Humphrey's "Ike and Me" in the special Cold War issue of Cultural Politics. Upcoming issues will include artist projects by Nancy Spero, Paul Chan and Sarah Trigg... please stay tuned. Free sample copies can be requested through the Berg website.

Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition.  In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky.  It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.    Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA 

reBlogged via Minneapolis City pages, june 3, 2008:

Bedside nursing, firearms and doll repair: welcome to the Reanimation Library.

Filed under: Uprooted

UPROOTED is a series of profiles of Minnesota-raised artists, writers, politicians and musicians who are doing what they do in some place that is not Minnesota.

From the catalog of the Reanimation Library. For a slideshow of images, click here.

When Andrew Beccone left Minneapolis for New York City in 2003, he had pretty much exhausted the rock band thing. He had traversed the country by van a dozen times or more, sweating and stinking and drinking and being broke playing drums with beloved locals Mickey Finn and Capital!Capital.

On the eve of his departure, Beccone took his drums to a friend who managed a warehouse. The drums were shrink-wrapped to a pallet and fork-lifted high onto a shelf for storage. He was a drummer retired and free to pursue a most unlikely path: He was headed to New York City to start a library.

But first: library school.

"Many people who go to library school, myself included, think that open access to information is a vital component to democratic society and that being a librarian is a noble profession," he says. "At the same time, I was incredibly attracted to these strange images that I was finding in old, outdated books." He told every student and professor he met at the Pratt Institute of his plan: to open a library of unusual images plucked from decades-old reference books, technical manuals, and other such genres of specialization. The library would be called the Reanimation Library.

"Most of my professors and fellow students just gave me a blank stare," Beccone says. One professor pulled him aside after class. "This is really interesting," said the prof, "but you're not actually going to do this, right? I don't know how you're going to do it."

Long story short: he did it. He started a library. Which, by the way, almost nobody does.

The shelves of the Reanimation Library (Photo: Andrew Beccone)

Beccone, who is the librarian for the art world powerhouse Marian Goodman Gallery by day, rents space for "a reasonable rate" from the Proteus Gowanus gallery in Brooklyn. He's been invited to speak about his library to classes at NYU and Rutgers. The library's carefully curated catalog of roughly 600 books is browsed with frequency by artists, designers, videographers and, not too long ago, seven blindfolded playwrights.

The latter was part of a project called "Dewey's Nightmare" wherein seven playwrights were blindfolded and led into Beccone's library with the assignment of picking a book at random. With whatever they selected they had seven days to write a short play to be performed together at a fund raiser for the McSweeney's affiliated youth-writing center 826NYC.

When Eric Sanders, the project's creative director, met with Beccone about the project, Beccone warned him: "You realize there aren't any novels here?" he said. "And you realize that you might end up with a play called Atlas of the Human Brain in Section, right?"

Exactly, came Sanders' response.

A few other titles, to give you a sniff of the collection:

Sex Lives of Animals Without Backbones (1976)
Swine Science (1970)
A Guide to Gymnastics (1968)
The Gun Digest Book of Exploded Firearms Drawings (1982)
Bark Structure of North American Conifers (1954)

A blindfolded playwright selects a book for the Dewey's Nightmare project. (Photo: Andrew Beccone)

You don't have to go to Brooklyn to see it--you can browse some of the collection online. A listing of the books is there with a selection of some of the many thousands of images. The image gallery won him a hat-tip from the internet curiosities blog Boing Boing, which won his website 100,000 hits in 24 hours.

"Beccone's collection is so unique and odd I thought it would be perfect," says Sanders, who was impressed with Beccone's quality-control. "There has been a sort of junk shop curiosity movement over the last 10 years in indie culture--with things like Found Magazine--and I think there is a misconception that Beccone is just taking random trash and calling it a collection, but he's vetting everything and treating his library like its the rare books collection at Harvard."

An image from the collection. For a slideshow of images, click here.

There is a guru for "outsider" libraries like Reanimation: Rick Prelinger. The Prelinger Library in San Francisco is the ultimate outsider library. Prelinger didn't go to library school before starting his library of 40,000 items organized in a system of Prelinger's invention, intended to force the kind of browsing you just don't do too much of in modern computerized libraries.

Prelinger visited the Reanimation Library recently and liked what he saw: "It's not huge but everything is there for a reason." He speaks of the "gestalt experience" of libraries like his and Beccone's--browsers come to get their hands dirty and to experience the collection, not merely grab and run.

For the gestalt-types, Reanimation provides a reading room with two scanners. Visitors are encouraged to connect the scanners to their laptops and take what they want. For the lo-fi, there's a photocopier.

Sure, Beccone says, you'll find all the oddball images you can stomach spending a few minutes on Google. But there are still people out there who long for the labor of the hunt. And from that hunt have come paintings, visual art, poems, video animation and at least seven plays.

"What he's doing," says Sanders, "is making you reconsider the notion of what value is. If you treat something not just as a curiosity but as a valuable tool, then is becomes a valuable tool--because Andrew afforded it his respect."

For your browsing pleasure:

- The Reanimation Library Online
- Our slideshow of Reanimation images
- The Prelinger Library blog
- Beccone recently came out of rock retirement and joined Nature Music

Posted by Jeff Severns Guntzel at June  3, 2008  7:26 AM

A visitor to Van Gogh's bedroom in Second Life. Versions of the original painting are in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris

via The Art Newspaper, May 22, 2008:

Copyright, conflicts of interest, and how to deal with Uncle Sam

US museum lawyers met last month to discuss the most pressing issues they are currently facing

Martha Lufkin | 22.5.08 | Issue 191

Over 200 museum employees, lawyers and interested parties convened in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the 36th annual conference on Legal Issues in Museum Administration in April.

The course, which brings legal know-how to museums without lawyers on staff, is offered by the American Law Institute-American Bar Association, and is co-sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution with the cooperation of the American Association of Museums (AAM).

In an address on the state of museums, AAM president Ford W. Bell told the group that museums are facing challenges including tight government budgets, a perception that charities serve the rich and negative press about perceived abuses at certain museums. The conference discussed new ways of dealing with intellectual property in the digital age, museum policies on corporate governance and conflicts of interest under increasingly probing government scrutiny.

The Second Life syndrome

Sharon Farb, associate university librarian at UCLA Library in Los Angeles, said that as museums put more images and content online, more users will ask to use it; she advises that museums not require licences for everything. Instead, they should make clear on their websites which content can be reproduced without permission, and should post all licence forms for those objects which require them. Virginia Rutledge, Vice President and General Counsel of the non-profit Creative Commons, San Francisco (CC), described the CC licence which piggybacks on existing copyright law to let copyright holders "signal when it is just fine" for a user to copy, or even alter, a work. The New Museum in New York, for example, uses CC licences to permit copying. The CC website posts six different licence forms to choose from, and tells you how to mark your content so users will know what copyright rules apply (http://creativecommons.org).

As web users find new applications for museum images, including those possibly obtained without permission, how should museums respond? Phoenix lawyer Connie J. Mabelson described websites which regularly violate copyright laws, although the usual copyright enforcement steps still apply. At Second Life or similar sites, virtual art--the hard copies of which may be owned by real museums--is being bought and sold by paying participants for virtual money, which can be exchanged for real dollars.

Visitors create an avatar which can enter a virtual, 3-D rendition of a famous bedroom scene painted by Van Gogh or buy furniture inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's designs. If the original work is protected by copyright, Ms Mabelson asks, should a museum take steps to enforce it, or do the virtual reworkings fall within a "fair use" exception to copyright infringement? (Perhaps the issue will be debated at Second Life's virtual bar association, which does exist.) Ms Mabelson advises that a museum's fair use policy should address what the museum should do if a museum image appears on a wiki, an online site where any user can add content.

The museum comes first

Recent scandals over alleged misconduct by top US museum officials have caused museums to review their conflicts of interest policies regulating board members and employees. Conflicts arise when a trustee's duty of loyalty to the museum is compromised, says Lori Fox, acting vice president, general counsel and secretary at the J. Paul Getty Trust; she advises that museums have a well-written conflicts of interest policy that defines the trustees' duties, prohibits potential conflicts, and provides a way to resolve them.

For example, conflicts can arise if a trustee collects art that the museum might collect; trustees should be forbidden to buy deaccessioned art, or to use inside information for their own benefit, such as to buy an artist's work before the museum announces its purchase of art by the same artist, which could drive up prices. Museums should also require annual disclosure forms from trustees and some employees to identify possible conflicts, including asking about the trustee's art acquisitions and whether the trustee has received gifts from museum staff or anyone the museum does business with. For example, trustees may seek favours from museum staff, such as asking a conservator to restore a privately owned manuscript, which would take the conservator away from his duties. While this may be a way to cultivate donors, the Smithsonian Institution prohibits using staff time and services for private uses.

When a conflict with a board member arises, the trustee's interest in a possible transaction should be disclosed and the trustee must be excluded from the decision, which the board's audit committee or even the state attorney general can be asked to review. The board must still ask whether the proposed transaction is in the museum's best interests, which it might be, says Frederic Goldstein, general counsel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Each situation should be reviewed on its facts: while an exhibition of a trustee's collection of local maps by a small museum may increase the collection's value, the benefits to the museum and its community may be so great that the display is still in the institution's best interests.

Government scrutiny

Congress is seeking to stop perceived abuses in the non-profit world, and is using the tax law to do so. The new revision to the annual tax return for non-profit organisations, Form 990, seeks significantly more information about how museums are run. Organisations will first file the return for tax years beginning this year. The form "shows the government's increased role in governance and conflicts of interest", says Marsha Shaines, deputy general counsel to the Smithsonian Institution. The information that charities provide on the forms will be publicly available. The museum must summarise its missions and activities, changes in its programmes and its achievements of its exempt purpose.

New questions about governance and management mean that the museum should have policies in place before the form is filed, Ms Shaines advises. For example, the form asks whether the board and committees contemporaneously documented their meetings during the year, whether the organisation has a written conflicts of interest policy, and whether officers, trustees and key employees are required to disclose annually any interests that could give rise to a conflict. The form asks whether the charity enforces its conflicts policy, and whether it has whistleblower protection and document retention and destruction policies. Museums must further disclose whether they determined director compensation using an independent review and comparability data, and contemporaneously substantiated their decision-making process. The form also requests the dollar details on first class travel, travel for companions, and housing allowances for directors and trustees.

While it is not clear whether the Internal Revenue Service will be able to process all this information, the public and press will now be able to review it.

Don't get political

US charities are prohibited from participating in political campaigns, and cannot attempt to influence legislation. The rules are complex, and stiff penalties can apply. For example, museums cannot tell people to urge their congressmen to vote in favour of art funding.

A conference participant asked anonymously if a museum can host an exhibition on the anti-war movement within the Democratic Party? Under the law, a "facts and circumstances" test applies. The test is used to determine whether a non-profit is participating in a political campaign, and one factor could be how close in time the activity is to the campaign. The anti-war exhibition could raise an issue if it includes present-day events and differentiates between political parties. Both political parties should be covered, or the subject should be restricted to the past, says Marcus Owens, a lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC. "If you think a political statement is going to pop out of a visiting artist's mouth at a lecture, you might want to start the programme with a disclaimer."

The 2008 course book "Legal Issues in Museum Administration," containing licence forms, conflicts of interest policies, employee standards of conduct and other materials, can be obtained from ALI-ABA at www.ali-aba.org or tel: +1 800 253-6397

[Link]

< Untitled, 1990s/2008, photocopy on paper.

New York

fierce pussy

PRINTED MATTER INC.
195 Tenth Avenue
April 5–May 24

fierce pussy was a New York–based collective of queer women that emerged in 1991 from the ferment spawned by ACT UP. Promoting lesbian visibility and self-defined identity, fierce pussy helped politicize the urban landscape by wheat-pasting posters, distributing stickers and T-shirts, and "renaming" a number of New York streets after lesbian heroines.

Their low-tech aesthetic is exemplified by photocopied posters, which have been reissued in a book published by Printed Matter and are exhibited there above vitrines of related ephemera. Members' childhood snapshots are emblazoned with words like MUFFDIVER and DYKE; the phrase LESBIAN CHIC MY ASS is illustrated with a bathroom-stall-worthy rendering of an ass followed by the words FUCK 15 MINUTES OF FAME. WE DEMAND OUR CIVIL RIGHTS. NOW. Contemporaneous groups such as Queer Nation, Dyke Action Machine, and the aforementioned ACT UP pioneered an activist appropriation of the slick language of advertising, taking a cue from Situationist détournement and the work of Barbara Kruger. fierce pussy's posters share aesthetic kinship with the more punkish 1979 publication Durhing Durhing by Joseph Wolman (founder, with Guy Debord, of the Letterist International), in which random faces are overprinted with Marxist-inflected words.

This kind of contextualization, however, distances the work from the queer bodies that made it, and queer bodies are still not visible enough. Riding that wave of lesbian chic, The L Word now epitomizes self-defined lesbian (with little mention of gender-queer or trans) identity. fierce pussy's book, the most vital part of the exhibition, opens with reprints of three nearly twenty-year-old posters comprising a more diverse spectrum of identities, among them dyke, butch, pervert, femme, feminist, and queer. The pages are detachable and reconfigurable. Just add wheat paste.

—Amoreen Armetta        

Four programs will take place in the lower level conference room on Sunday, March 30th, at 11:00 AM, 12:30, 2:00 and 3:30 PM.  Lectures are free with regular fair admission, no reservations required.

Bloggers, you'll get in free as members of the press if you show a printout of your most recent post.

Sunday, March 30th
11:00 AM

Bloggers and Their Impact on the Art World.

There's now more art coverage in the blogosphere than in conventional publications. Do we handle this responsibility with conventional journalistic standards or something that's faster and looser as befits an instantaneous medium? How do we manage the formidable network that has developed around and because of us? Where do we go from here?

Moderator:
Joanne Mattera, painter, Joanne Mattera Art Blog.

Panelists:
Edward Winkleman, Winkleman Gallery and Edward_Winkleman blog;
Carol Diehl, painter and critic, Artvent;
Paddy Johnson, blogger, Art Fag City;
C-Monster, freelance writer whose identity will be revealed at the event;
Sharon Butler, artist/writer/professor, Two Coats of Paint.

[continue to full program schedule]

Park South Hotel, 122 E. 28th Street, between Park and Lexington. Look for the "Art Bloggers @ Red Dot" sign in the lobby to direct you to the conference room.