Franklin Furnace’s Goings On
January 31, 2006
CONTENTS:
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1. Paul M. Gulielmetti, In Memoriam
2. Nam June Paik, FF Alumn, In Memoriam
3. Bill Beirne, FF Alumn, in Rotterdam, TODAY and tomorrow.
4. Judith Sloan, FF Alumn, at Maryland Institute College of Art, Feb. 2-Mar. 12.
5. Ron Athey, FF Alumn, in Glasgow, Feb. 12-19.
6. Stefanie Trojan, FF Alumn, at Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, Feb. 1-28
7. Jerry Kearns at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, opening Feb. 9, 6-8 pm
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1. Paul M. Gulielmetti, In Memoriam
With deep sorrow, Franklin Furnace extends condolences to the family, friends, colleagues and clients of Paul Mr. Gulielmetti, who died on Christmas Eve, 2005. Paul will always be rememberd for fighting for tenants rights, especially under the Loft Law.
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2. Nam June Paik, FF Alumn, In Memoriam
With deep sorrow, Franklin Furnace mourns the passing of Nam June Paik, FF Alumn. Roberta Smith wrote the following in today’s New York Times:
Nam June Paik, 73, Dies; Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers
Nam June Paik, an avant-garde composer, performer and artist widely considered the inventor of video art, died Sunday at his winter home in Miami Beach. He was 73 and also lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Paik suffered a stroke in 1996 and had been in declining health for some time, said his nephew, Ken Paik Hakuta, who manages his uncle’s studio in New York.
Mr. Paik’s career spanned half a century, three continents and several art mediums, ranging through music, theater and found-object art. He once built his own robot. But his chief means of expression was television, which he approached with a winning combination of visionary wildness, technological savvy and high entertainment values. His work could be kitschy, visually dazzling and profound, sometimes all at once, and was often irresistibly funny and high-spirited.
At his best, Mr. Paik exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive. In recent years, Mr. Paik’s enormous American flags, made from dozens of sleek monitors whose synchronized patterns mixed everything from pinups to apple pie at high, almost subliminal velocity, could be found in museums and corporate lobbies.
Mr. Paik was affiliated in the 1960’s with the anti-art movement Fluxus, and also deserves to be seen as an aesthetic innovator on a par with the choreographer Merce Cunningham and the composer John Cage. Yet in many ways he was simply the most Pop of the Pop artists. His work borrowed directly from the culture at large, reworked its most pervasive medium and gave back something that was both familiar and otherworldly.
He was a shy yet fearless man who combined manic productivity and incessant tinkering with Zen-like equanimity. A lifelong Buddhist, Mr. Paik never smoked or drank and also never drove a car. He always seemed amused by himself and his surroundings, which could be overwhelming: a writer once compared his New York studio to a television repair shop three months behind schedule.
Mr. Paik is survived by his wife, the video artist Shigeko Kubota.
Mr. Paik got to television by way of avant-garde music. He was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea, into a wealthy manufacturing family. Growing up, he studied classical piano and musical composition and was drawn to 20th-century music; he once said it took him three years to find an Arnold Schoenberg record in Korea. In 1949, with the Korean War threatening, the family fled to Hong Kong, and then settled in Tokyo. Mr. Paik attended the University of Tokyo, earning a degree in aesthetics and the history of music in 1956 with a thesis on Schoenberg’s work.
He then studied music at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Freiburg and threw himself into the avant-garde music scene swirling around Cologne. He also met John Cage, whose emphasis on chance and randomness dovetailed with Mr. Paik’s sensibility.
Over the next few years, Mr. Paik arrived at an early version of performance art, combining cryptic musical elements — usually spliced audiotapes of music, screams, radio news and sound effects — with startling events. In an unusually Oedipal act during a 1960 performance in Cologne, Mr. Paik jumped from the stage and cut off Cage’s necktie, an event that prompted George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, to invite Mr. Paik to join the movement. At the 1962 Fluxus International Festival for Very New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr. Paik performed “Zen for Head,” which involved dipping his head, hair and hands in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and dragging them over a scroll-like sheet of paper to create a dark, jagged streak.
In 1963, seeking a visual equivalent for electronic music and inspired by Cage’s performances on prepared pianos, Mr. Paik bought 13 used television sets in Cologne and reworked them until their screens jumped with strong optical patterns. In 1963, he exhibited the first art known to involve television sets at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.
In 1965 he made his New York debut at the New School for Social Research: Charlotte Moorman, a cellist who became his longtime collaborator, played his “Cello Sonata No. 1 for Adults Only,” performing bared to the waist. A similar work performed in 1967 at the Filmmakers Cinematheque in Manhattan resulted in the brief arrest of Ms. Moorman and Mr. Paik. Mr. Paik retaliated with his iconic “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” two tiny television screens that covered Ms. Moorman’s breasts.
Mr. Paik bought one of the first portable video cameras on the market, in 1965, and the same year he exhibited the first installation involving a video recorder, at the Galeria Bonino in New York. Although he continued to perform, his interests shifted increasingly to the sculptural, technological and environmental possibilities of video.
In 1969, Mr. Paik started showing pieces using multiple monitors. He created bulky wood robotlike figures using old monitors and retrofitted consoles, and constructed archways, spirals and towers, including one 60-feet tall that used 1,003 monitors. By the 1980’s he was working with lasers, mixing colors and forms in space, without the silvery cathode-ray screen.
For his 2000 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, Mr. Paik arranged monitors faceup on the rotunda’s floor, creating a pondlike effect of light and images. Overhead, one of the artist’s most opulent laser pieces cascaded from the dome in lightninglike zigzags — an apt metaphor for a career that never stopped surging forward.
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3. Bill Beirne, FF Alumn, in Rotterdam, TODAY and tomorrow.
Bill Beirne with Yuri Leiderman at the 35 International Film Festival
Rotterdam
01/31/2006 – 02/01/2006
“Honorable Brothers”, an experimental video with Bill Beirne, as the Parachutist, A Non-Combatant Aesthete and Yuri Leiderman as Lenin with Magic Bread will be screened as a part of Cine Fantom club at the 35th International Film Festival / Rotterdam / Jan.31 – Feb 3 2006.
The 40 minute video / silent w/chapter titles, traces the journey of Beirne and Leiderman they wander through the mountains, marches and villages of the Rhone Alps form St. Julian Molin – Molette to a high ground at Crusol, an ancient ruin across the Rhone from the city of Valence. The work, inspired by the fourteenth century Chinese novel “Outlaws of the Marsh” by Shin Na, revised by Lou Guan – zohng, updates the adventurers of the original heroes who, using magic powers fought corrupt lords from their base the mountains of Liangshan. Chapters 14, 18 and 22 of Honorable Brothers will not be screened.
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4. Judith Sloan, FF Alumn, at Maryland Institute College of Art, Feb. 2-Mar. 12.
Judith Sloan, FF Alumn, and Warren Lehrer’s Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America traveling exhibition opens at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore Maryland
MAJOR MULTIMEDIA EXHIBITION AT MICA Portrays the largely invisible lives of new immigrants and refugees
Crossing the BLVD:strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America ,
an Interactive Traveling Exhibition
with Photographs by Warren Lehrer and Sound stations by Judith Sloan
Runs Thursday, February 2 – Sunday, March 12 in Decker Gallery, with an
Opening Reception on Thursday, February 2 from 5 – 7 p.m.
Information: 410-225-2300
Crossing the BLVD Events:
Thursday, February 2, 5 – 7 p.m.
Decker Gallery, Fox Building (1303 Mount Royal Avenue)
Opening reception for Crossing the BLVD
Friday, February 3, 7:30 p.m.
A Lecture by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan
Falvey Hall, Brown Center (1301 Mount Royal Avenue)
Lehrer and Sloan discuss their respective and collaborative artistic works that blur the boundaries between documentary and expressive forms in books, exhibitions, sound, and performance. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Multimedia Performance: Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens ina new America with Sloan and Lehrer
Thursday, February 23 – Saturday, February 25, 8 PM;
Sunday, February 26, 3 PM
Baltimore Theatre Project (45 West Preston Street)Tickets are $16 and $11 for students and senior citizens
For more information, call 410-752-8558 or visit www.theatreproject.org <http://www.theatreproject.org/>
For full project information: http://www.crossingtheblvd.org
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5. Ron Athey, FF Alumn, in Glasgow, Feb. 12-19.
http://www.newmoves.co.uk/PageAccess.aspx?id=306
I’m performing in Glasgow at the NRLA on Feb. 12, followed by a week-long performance workshop at the Winter School, see link above. thanks,
Ron Athey, FF Alumn
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6. Stefanie Trojan, FF Alumn, at Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, Feb. 1-28
VIDEOTHEKA, a mobile video art archive: 01. 28. Februar 2006
Open daily from 10am – 5pm
Project presentation: 02. February, 7pm
At the Ursula Blickle Lounge, Kunsthalle Wien Artistic directors: Aldo Giannotti and Stefano Giuriati
Speaking:
Jessica Wyschka, Project director, Kforumvienna
Dr. Gerald Matt, director of the Kunsthalle Wien
The Project VIDEOTHEKA has been an exhibition cycle between 2004 – 2006 that was shown in Vienna, Prato, Bratislava and München and is now shown outlined at the Ursula Blickle Lounge in form of a mobile video art archive.
VIDEOTHEKA is a progressive research, archive and exhibition project of contemporary video art, presenting collectives in which the artists have the possibility to not only show one representative work, but additionally give a synopsis on there work and show there latest or most significant productions. The basic on which VIDEOTHEKA is build is the enquiry of different methods that artists perceive, within the medium, to express there individual ideas.
The exhibition concept was to not only show single works on classic widescreens but supplementary offer research terminals, each representing one artist, give the chance to the visitor to discover other productions of the artists seen in the collective and get a more complete impression of their artistic language.
Viewers were invited to make themselves at home, sit at the terminals, wonder around the room and select videos according to there personal preference.
VIDEOTHEKA presents one artist per day in February in following order: Yuri Ancarani, Claire Angelini und das Laboratorium Geschichte, Lena Bröcker, Philipp Bröcker, Mária Corejová, Elastic group of artistic research, Andrea Faciu, Peter Fuxx und Andreas Winter, Aldo Giannotti, Stefano Giuriati, Udine Goldberg, Franka Kaßner, Leopold Kessler, Catherine Ludwig, Ursula Mayer, Élise Mougin, Seraina Mueller, Gregor Passens, Simon Reitstätter, Bertrand Rigaux, Mike Sale, SchleuserNet, Karl-Heinz Ströhle, Sergei Sviatchenko, Stefanie Trojan, Michael Vogel, Susanne Wagner, ZimmerFrei.
Kforumvienna
Reindorfgasse 18/6
A – 1150 Wien
+43 650 322 53 06
office@kforumvienna.com
www.kforumvienna.co m
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7. Jerry Kearns at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, opening Feb. 9, 6-8 pm
Jerry Kearns exhibition “Forever More” at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, opening February 9th 6-8pm
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
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