Contents for December 05, 2016
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1. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9XECErMlc
2. John Baldessari, FF Alumn, now online at www.artcar.bmwgroup.com
3. Frank Moore, FF Alumn, on KPFA radio 94.1, Berkeley, CA, Dec. 8
4. Katherine Behar, FF Alumn, at CUNY Graduate Center, Manhattan, Dec. 7
5. Josh Harris, FF Alumn, now online at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLca1ZWSzIzNXJoRVU/view and more
6. Marina Abramović, FF Alumn, at 92nd St. Y, Manhattan, Jan. 25, 2017
7. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Dec. 15
8. Rev Billy, FF Alumn, at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan, thru Dec. 18, and more
9. Eileen Myles, Christopher Wool, FF Alumns, now online at nytimes.com
10. Blue Man Group, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, now online
11. Edward Albee, FF Member, in the New York Times, Dec. 1
12. Donna Henes, FF Alumn, at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Dec. 21
13. Billy X. Curmano, Beatrice Glow, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, now online at hyperallergic.com
14. Tehching Hsieh, FF Alumn, at Venice Biennale, Italy, March 13-Nov. 26, 2017
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1. Lorraine O’Grady, FF Alumn, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9XECErMlc
Dear All,
Just spent a week in London participating in Simone Leigh’s incredibly successful and important residency at the Tate Modern. On the first day, I assisted Simone with the “Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter-UK” workshop. Later in the week, I did an extended (2 hrs. instead of l hr.) version of “Ask Me Anything About Aging” the performance I debuted for Leigh’s previous residency at the New Museum, NYC, on August 4.
Can’t tell you how surprised I was – as well as pleased and proud – to see this gift from Anohni on my return. “Marrow,” the video I lip-synched for her recent Hopelessness tour, has just been uploaded to YouTube:
My thanks to Anohni for her dangerous and desperately needed work. It’s been a privilege to be a small part of her project – which seems so simple at first, but then layer by layer reveals how the many mutually reinforcing “isms” are buffeting and driving us to perhaps an unavoidable end. Stay strong.
Much love,
♥ Lorraine
personal/archival website
http://lorraineogrady.com
gallery artist page
http://www.alexandergray.com
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2. John Baldessari, FF Alumn, now online at www.artcar.bmwgroup.com
World premiere of BMW Art Car by John Baldessari at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2016
www.artcar.bmwgroup.com
Tumblr / #BMWArtCar
On the occasion of this year’s Art Basel in Miami Beach, the BMW Art Car by John Baldessari celebrated its world premiere. The 19th vehicle of the BMW Art Car Collection was designed by the American master of conceptual art and revealed in the presence of the artist himself, Ludwig Willisch, President and CEO, BMW of North America, and Jens Marquardt, BMW Motorsport Director, at the Botanical Garden of Miami Beach. John Baldessari’s BMW M6 GTLM, a race car with a speed of up to 300 km/h, depending on the race track, and 585 hp, will be on public display until the closing of Art Basel.
“I have done only one work in my life involving a car before, and that was an image of a car. So for the BMW Art Car project, I entered uncharted territory, not just in terms of the subject, but also moving from two- to three-dimensional art. A challenge I did enjoy! The ideas all came at once: for instance, the red dot on the roof, so you can see it from above, FAST on one side and a picture of the car on the other side. I like the ambiguity, having two-dimension and three-dimension at the same time. Considering the car as an icon of contemporary life, my concept turned out playfully satirical, but it also highlights some of the trademark ideas that I use. So you can say, the BMW Art Car is definitely a typical Baldessari and the fastest artwork I ever created!” -John Baldessari
For the 19th BMW Art Car, John Baldessari as the legend of an entire LA art scene drew on his famous artistic trademarks. Designing the car, this American artist turned to well-known stylistic devices and created an iconic work which unites his creative practices of the past 50 years in a unique manner. As a committed minimalist, he worked with the colours red, yellow, blue and green and with his monochrome dots, he left his familiar colourful marks on the M6 GTLM as well. Baldessari’s ironic play on the multi-dimensionality of the race car as an art object is most obvious in the graphic reflection of the car in profile. And with “FAST” as a central typographic element the artist boldly transports the power of the BMW Art Car to its outside and makes it visually accessible for the viewers both at the race track and the museum.
Following the 40-year tradition of BMW Art Cars, John Baldessari’s “rolling sculpture” will then prove itself on the race track of Rolex 24 at Daytona on January 28 and 29, 2017. Bill Auberlen (US), Alexander Sims (GB), Augusto Farfus (BR) and Bruno Spengler (CA) will take turns in driving the BMW Art Car next year.
Since 1975, a total of 17 international artists have been creating BMW Art Cars on the basis of contemporary BMW automobiles. In November 2015, BMW Group announced two artists to create the next BMW Art Cars at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In addition to American artist John Baldessari, multimedia artist Cao Fei, one of China’s most important contemporary artists who just received the CAA Artist of the Year award, is currently designing another vehicle for this legendary collection. The world premiere of the 18th BMW Art Car will take place during the summer of 2017. With their works, Cao Fei and John Baldessari will be joining the ranks of renowned artists such as Alexander Calder, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
For further information available at: www.press.bmwgroup.com
Video footage: www.press.bmwgroup.com/tv-footage
Press contact:
Dr Thomas Girst
BMW Group Corporate and Governmental Affairs
Head of Cultural Engagement
T +49 89 382 24753 / presse@bmw.de
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3. Frank Moore, FF Alumn, on KPFA radio 94.1, Berkeley, CA, Dec. 8
Frank lives!
Linda Mac & Michael LaBash feature shaman performance artist Frank Moore’s work
Barb Golden’s Crack O Dawn radio show, KPFA 94.1 Berkeley
Thursday, December 8 @ midnight (Friday morning)
Linda Mac & Michael LaBash will continue a yearly tradition as guests on Barb Golden’s experimental music/interview radio show, Crack O Dawn. They will be talking about the late shaman performance artist Frank Moore, and the new web video series, “Let Me Be Frank”, about Frank’s life and art. And much more! Including music by Frank Moore from his jams & his Cherotic All-Star band. Plus Linda and Michael will be playing some readings and audio selections from “Let Me Be Frank.”
From the 1980s until his death in 2013, Frank Moore was an almost annual guest on Crack O Dawn, usually for the full three hours of the show. This will be Crack O Dawn’s Xmas show, on which Frank was also a frequent guest. Frank would often read from his poetry and other writings, talk deeply with Barb, sing or have music jams, and field lively phone calls from listeners. Linda and Michael will continue the tradition!
Call in if you are awake!! 510-848-6767
It is an FM station in the Bay Area, but you can listen to it online.
you can listen on their site from this link:
https://kpfa.org/
or here:
http://tunein.com/radio/KPFA-941-s34653/
The call-in number is 510-848-6767
http://www.eroplay.com/events.html
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4. Katherine Behar, FF Alumn, at CUNY Graduate Center, Manhattan, Dec. 7
I am thrilled to introduce Object-Oriented Feminism at home in New York. The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a conversation about OOF featuring a brilliant line up of interdisciplinary speakers: Irina Aristarkhova, Katherine Behar, Johanna Burton, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ashley Dawson, Piper Marshall, R Joshua Scannell, and Rebekah Sheldon.
This conversation with Irina Aristarkhova, Katherine Behar, Johanna Burton, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ashley Dawson, Piper Marshall, R Joshua Scannell, and Rebekah Sheldon explores object-oriented feminism (OOF), a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses-like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism-that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Approaching all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, OOF foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, fomenting unseemly entanglements between things when objects come together in practices like art, science, activism, and everyday life; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims and instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being “in the right” by being “wrong.” The discussion centers on a new discipline-expanding volume, Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press), which seeks not to define object-oriented feminism, but rather to enact it by bringing together contributors from a variety of fields and practices including sociology, anthropology, art, science and technology studies, English, philosophy, and everyday life.
Object-Oriented Feminism NYC Book Event
Wednesday, December 7, 2016, 7:00-8:30 PM
The James Gallery
Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, First Floor
New York, NY 10016
More info: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/object-oriented-feminism
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5. Josh Harris, FF Alumn, now online at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLca1ZWSzIzNXJoRVU/view and more
Josh Harris FF Alumn and founder of Pseudo Programs, Inc. releases 1997 interviews with Taylor Mead and Quentin Crisp, at the following links:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLca1ZWSzIzNXJoRVU/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLcN0EtZnhkdmtNbTA/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLcMWR6NXNNLW5WUkE/view
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzpaN1KMvfLcM0hpRVdoRTRiMFk/view
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6. Marina Abramović, FF Alumn, at 92nd St. Y, Manhattan, Jan. 25, 2017
Since the beginning of her career in Belgrade during the early 1970s, Marina Abramović has pioneered performance as a visual art form, creating some of the most important early works. The body has always been both her subject and medium. Exploring her physical and mental limits in works that ritualize the simple actions of everyday life, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. From 1975-88, Abramović and the German artist Ulay performed together, dealing with relations of duality. Abramović returned to solo performances in 1989. She has presented her work at major institutions in the US and Europe, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,1985; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990; Neue National Galerie, Berlin, 1993, and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1995. She has also participated in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel (1977, 1982 and 1992). Recent performances include The House With The Ocean View at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York in 2002, and the Performance 7 Easy Pieces at Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2005. In 2010, Abramović had her first major U.S. retrospective and simultaneously performed for over 700 hours in The Artist is Present at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Using herself and the public as medium, Abramović performed for three months at the Serpentine Gallery in London, 2014; the piece was titled after the duration of the work, 512 Hours. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for the video installation and performance Balkan Baroque. In 2008 she was decorated with the Austrian Commander Cross for her contribution to Art History. In 2013, the French Minister of Culture accepted her as an Officer to the Order of Arts and Letters. In addition to these and other awards, Abramović also holds multiple honorary doctorates from institutions around the world. Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields. The institute inhabited its most complete form to date in 2016 in collaboration with NEON in As One, Benaki Museum, Athens. Marina Abramović will sign copies of her book, Walk Through Walls, following the talk. – See more at: http://www.92y.org/Event/Marina-Abramovic?utm_source=Mail2&utm_campaign=eCRMTALKS120116&cmp=1&utm_medium=Email_eCRMTALKS120116&cluid=harley@franklinfurnace.org#sthash.sIgz1UKY.dpuf
Wed, Jan 25, 2017, 7 pm
Location: Lexington Avenue at 92nd St
Venue: Kaufmann Concert Hall
Price: from $32.00
– See more at: http://www.92y.org/Event/Marina-Abramovic?utm_source=Mail2&utm_campaign=eCRMTALKS120116&cmp=1&utm_medium=Email_eCRMTALKS120116&cluid=harley@franklinfurnace.org#sthash.sIgz1UKY.dpuf
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7. Brendan Fernandes, FF Alumn, at The 8th Floor, Manhattan, Dec. 15
Please Join Us at The 8th Floor
Thursday, December 15
from 6 to 8pm for
Brendan Fernandes and Jess Wilcox: Still Move
Location: 17 West 17th Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues)
RSVP: media@sdrubin.org
The launch of Brendan Fernandes’ forthcoming monograph Still Move, published through Black Dog Press in London, will feature a conversation between Fernandes and curator Jess Wilcox, followed by a reception. For the last five years, Fernandes has explored how stillness and static gesture can be powerful tools of resistance. Informed by his training in ballet and modern dance, the artist routinely explores the role of the body within social and political spaces, questioning and breaking down the notion of hegemony. Inspired by choreographic vocabularies relating to labor and endurance, the work demonstrates his interest in responding to histories of avant-garde dance and its relationship to visual art. Taking on numerous forms, he builds on an effort to negotiate a complex sense of both individual and cultural identities within performative acts.
Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from the University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Art and Design New York, Art in General, Musee d’art Contemporary de Montreal, The National Gallery of Canada, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Mass MoCA, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Art Gallery of York University, Deutsche Guggenheim, Bergen Kunsthall, Stedelijk Museum, The Sculpture Center, Manif d’Art: The Quebec City Biennial, The Third Guangzhou Triennial, and the Western New York Biennial through The Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Fernandes has been awarded many highly regarded residencies around the world including The Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space (2008), Swing Space (2009), and Process Space (2014) and invitations to the Gyeonggi Creation Centre at the Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Korea (2009) and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2011). He was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award, Canada’s preeminent award for contemporary art in 2010 and was on the longlist for the award in 2013 and 2015. He was a 2014 recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and Fellowship. A national Canadian tour of his work recently concluded and has culminated in the monograph Still Move produced by Black Dog Press in London in Fall 2016. He is currently Artist-in-Residency and faculty at Northwestern University in Department of Art Theory and Practice.
Jess Wilcox is the Director of Exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens. Previously she worked at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized public programs and projects including Between the Door and the Street, a performance initiated by Suzanne Lacy; A Butterfly for Brooklyn, a pyrotechnic work by Judy Chicago; and co-curated the exhibition Agitprop!. She has curated shows at Abrons Art Center, ISCP, and SculptureCenter, among others. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and a M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
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8. Rev Billy, FF Alumn, at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan, thru Dec. 18, and more
GATHER!…after the year of living hate
Performed by Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir
Joe’s Pub at the Public
425 Lafayette Street
212-967-7555, publictheater.org
Through December 18
and
The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/in-these-terrifying-times-reverend-billy-is-a-preacher-heaven-sent-9401971
In These Terrifying Times, Reverend Billy Is a Preacher Heaven-Sent
By Joseph Cermatori
December 2, 2016
“We’re living through a time of great…difficulty,” Reverend Billy intoned from the stage at Joe’s Pub last Sunday afternoon. “Do you know what I’m talking about?” Of course we did: Three weeks after Election Day, our country is still reeling. Not only from a campaign season of unfathomable ugliness and cynicism – a “year of living hate,” as the Reverend calls it – but from its aftermath, in which “living hate” is quickly becoming our new normal.
It’s what some might call a come-to-Jesus moment for the American left, but Reverend Billy is urging us to come together instead, to stop hand-wringing and start direct action. For nearly thirteen years, he and his Stop Shopping Choir have combined music and performance in protest of corporate evils like Walmart, Disney, and Monsanto. But they are not stuck in the Bush-era concerns that inspired their formation: Their most recent stop was at Standing Rock, to spend five days with the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance. Now they’re back in the city with GATHER!, a series of rollicking Sunday-afternoon church services continuing for the next three weekends.
Not content merely to entertain, they’re out to save souls the old-fashioned way. In just over an hour, the Stop Shopping Choir very nearly brought the house down with a handful of original gospel songs about climate change, mass extinction, consumer greed, and murderous racism. The performance I attended, which fell between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, included several liturgical rituals: an infant baptism, the canonization of an undocumented woman and her two American-born daughters as Saints of the Church of Stop Shopping, and the reading of a litany of names of slain black men, from Emmett Till to Eric Garner.
But it’s Reverend Billy’s homilies that bind the service together, just as they tie the protest movements of our time – Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, climate justice – into a dense, interconnected knot. Far from preaching to the converted with didactic, bumper-sticker-ready platitudes, he instead poses questions: What will you do now? How much would you risk to save others’ lives? What new forms of resistance can we imagine? His message resonates with the words W.H. Auden wrote on the eve of World War II, during another “age of anxiety” – “We must love one another or die.” GATHER offers a fresh injection of that radical love, reinvigorating its audience to continue the fight.
GATHER!…after the year of living hate
Performed by Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir
Joe’s Pub at the Public
425 Lafayette Street
212-967-7555, publictheater.org
Through December 18
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9. Eileen Myles, Christopher Wool, FF Alumns, now online at nytimes.com
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10. Blue Man Group, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, now online
The article linked below includes a color reproduction of the flyer for the Blue Man Group performances at Franklin Furnace from 1990:
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11. Edward Albee, FF Member, in the New York Times, Dec. 1
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12. Donna Henes, FF Alumn, at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, Dec. 21
Join Mama Donna Henes, New York’s own Urban Shaman, for her 42nd Annual Winter Solstice Celebration happening at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, at dawn on Wednesday, December 21st. Celebrants will gather at Bailey Fountain at 7:00am and the celebration will begin at the 7:11am sunrise.
Let us drum up the sun and celebrate the dawning of light in the Northern hemisphere.
Let us reignite the fire in our hearts and shine our spirit on the whole world!
42nd Annual Winter Solstice Celebration
SUNRISE SOLSTICE CEREMONY
With Mama Donna Henes, Urban Shaman
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21st
Event begins 7:00 AM EST
Sunrise: 7:11 AM EST
This is a family friendly event. Kids and dogs are welcome.
Please bring drums, percussion instruments, and lots and lots of spirit.
RAIN, SNOW OR SHINE!
Grand Army Plaza
at the Fountain
Park Slope, Exotic Brooklyn, NY
Free!
For info: 718-857-1343
cityshaman@aol.com
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13. Billy X. Curmano, Beatrice Glow, Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful, Martha Wilson, FF Alumns, now online at hyperallergic.com
Enacting the Text: Performing with Words
Hyperallergic review
*** Please note that the exhibition closes on December 12th.
“The Documents Left Behind from Live Performances”
By Megan N. Liberty
Link: http://bit.ly/2g83ehY
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14. Tehching Hsieh, FF Alumn, at Venice Biennale, Italy, March 13-Nov. 26, 2017
Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Tehching Hsieh
Doing Time
March 13-November 26, 2017
Palazzo delle Prigioni
Venice
Italy
Taipei Fine Arts Museum is delighted to release further details of Taiwan’s contribution to the 57th Venice Biennale 2017 by the artist Tehching Hsieh: an exhibition entitled Doing Time.
Hsieh is now mounting the most comprehensive exposition of his work to date. Seen by many as an influential figure in the history of conceptual and performance art, Hsieh’s renown emanates from an astounding series of One Year Performances in the early 1980s: “rule-based” works conducted at the limits of human endurance. These performances explored self-discipline, physical alteration, notions of freedom, visibility and the nature of human relations. The exposure of his work, and the discourse accompanying it, has proliferated with the turn to performativity and “durational aesthetics” in contemporary art, and the increasing entry of works of performance into major museum collections.
Individual documentary exhibitions of Hsieh’s One Year Performances have previously been shown in China, Germany, Brazil, the UK and the USA. His work has also entered the collections of Tate Modern, London and Hong Kong’s M+. But Doing Time promises to be the first occasion that several of Hsieh’s year-long works will have been seen together in their fullest forms, as well as revealing previously un-exhibited early works performed in Taiwan, that shape the aesthetic concerns of his later epic endeavors.
Hsieh’s acclaimed Time Clock Piece will form one part of the exhibition: the artist punched in to a worker’s time clock on the hour every hour for an entire year. On each occasion he took a still image on a 16mm camera of his standing to attention beside the clock. Sleep deprivation was pitted against the demand to be upright and visible. His ordeal resulted in one of the most uncanny and compelling performance artifacts made by an artist: a six-minute film of Hsieh’s tremulous body floating beside a whirling clock, wracked by an immense wave of time.
Hsieh’s preoccupation with freedom and constraint is equally evident in his Outdoor Piece, also exhibited in Doing Time, where he spent a year on the streets of Manhattan without taking shelter of any kind. His ability to roam freely came at the cost of physical degradation, vulnerability and the violence of the law. Many of the materials from his year outside will be exhibited, including minutely detailed maps of his daily wanderings and stark photographs of the solitude of life on the street.
A person of profound actions and succinct words, Hsieh explains the philosophy behind his art making: “Life is a life sentence. Life is passing time. Life is freethinking.” The title Doing Time not only refers to Hsieh’s investment in long durations, but his personal philosophy and creative history: in an earlier performance he spent a year in silence locked in a cage.
Curator Adrian Heathfield argues that Doing Time is “far from being a straightforward historical exhibition.” “Hsieh’s works,” he says, “all question the relation between the lasting document, the archive and the event of performance: the ways the past can linger within the present.” Hsieh’s meticulous, often excessive documentary materials gathered over the duration of each year of work will be assembled into overwhelming installations. Heathfield also stresses what he calls the artist’s “forceful address to contemporary conditions.” Hsieh’s art, he argues, “was incredibly prescient in the understanding that the technologies of capitalism would capture and accelerate life itself, turning sentient experience into productive labor.”
Heathfield sees the significance of Hsieh’s oeuvre as arising from his art world outsider status and his years as an illegal immigrant in New York. His work constantly invokes the qualities of migrant experience: subjugation, precariousness and the struggle to survive. “The performances speak to and from the life of those who have nothing, in common,” Heathfield says. Of Hsieh’s tireless endurance of physical abjection the curator asserts, “each of these works is about forms of bare existence in which resilience is pitched against adversity, and the fugitive qualities of life are valued in their passing.”
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
