Franklin Furnace’s Goings On
May 30, 2006
CONTENTS:
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1. Coco Fusco, FF Alumn, in TODAY’S NY Times, and tonite at CUNY, 7 pm
2. Bob Holman, Purgatory Pie Press, FF Alumns, at Bowery Poetry Club, TONITE, 6 pm
3. Jaroslav Andel, FF Alumn, at Municipal Art Society, TONITE, 6:30 pm
4. Andrea Fraser, FF Alumn, at Orchard, NY, opening June 4, 6-8 pm
5. Julia Mandle, FF Alumn, at The Field, June 1, 6:30 pm
6. Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, FF Alumn, at The Lab, SF, June 9, 10
7. James Siena, FF Alumn, new edition at Dieu Donné Papermill, NY
8. Ken Aptekar, FF Alumn, launches new website, www.kenaptekar.net, and more
9. Micki Watanabe, FF Alumn, in Atlantic Art Walk, Brooklyn, reception June 2
10. Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga , FF Alumn, in sonambiente, Berlin, June 1-July 17
11. Nora York, FF Alumn, at Joe’s Pub, June 15, 7 pm
12. Sonya Rapoport, FF Alumn, in Leonardo, Vol 39 No.2 2006
13. Suzanne Kuffler, FF Alumn, at Gallery AA/B, Boston, opening June 2, 5-8 pm
14. Peggy Diggs, FF Alumn, at Mass MoCA, opening May 27
15. Ken Butler, Larry Walczak, F FAlumns, at Supreme Trading, Brooklyn, June 2
16. Jon Brunelle, FF Alumn, at Collective Unconscious, June 2, 10 pm
17. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stacy Makishi, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, Lois Weaver, FF Alumns, at University of London, England, June 15-18, 2006
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1. Coco Fusco, FF Alumn, in TODAY’S NY Times, and tonite at CUNY, 7 pm
Dear Friends
My new video, OPERATION ATROPOS, will screen in NYC tonite as part of the exhibition Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict.
Date: Tuesday, May 30
Time: 7pm
Location: Martin Segal Theater, CUNY Grad Center, 365 Fifth Ave at 34th street.
I hope you can make it!
Coco
And
from today’s New York Times:
Critic’s Notebook
Coco Fusco’s ‘Operation Atropos’: Fantasy Interrogation, Real Tension by Holland Cotter
To some people political art means protest art: slogan-slinging, name-calling, didacticism, an unaesthetic thing. But in the trauma-riddled early 21st century, after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, with a continuing war in Iraq, political art can be something else: a mirror.
At White Columns in Chelsea, the artist Harrell Fletcher has photographically reconstituted a museum display he saw on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City last year. The pictures in the original display documented the Vietnam War — known in Vietnam as the American War — as seen from a Vietnamese perspective. Mr. Fletcher presents the images as he found them. They are beyond horrific.
New paintings by Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read in Chelsea are silkscreen reproductions of recently declassified United States government documents related to Abu Ghraib prison and to the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and to interrogation procedures used at both. The words, unaltered except for magnification, add up to a stupefying archive of official violence.
Interrogation is also the subject of “Operation Atropos,” a new video by Coco Fusco, which makes its East Coast debut tonight at the City University of New York Graduate Center. (The screening accompanies the center’s exhibition “Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict,” organized by the Whitney Independent Study Program.)
The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Columbia University, was preparing a performance piece in which she assumed the character of a female interrogator at Abu Ghraib. She realized that to continue the work, she needed training in interrogation techniques. Through an Internet search she found a source of instruction: the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Program run by a private concern called Team Delta, based in Philadelphia.
The organizers of the program are former members of the United States Intelligence Agency and self-described specialists in the “psychology of capture.” In its original form the course was used to train elite soldiers to resist interrogation if captured, and to extract information from political prisoners. Reconceived for the private sector — police officers, private security personnel and psychological researchers are among the clientele — the program is a grueling four-day immersion in methods of physical and mental persuasion, with the participants playing both captive and captor.
The course is offered only to groups, so Ms. Fusco solicited volunteers to join her. Six women, three of them former Columbia students, accepted the invitation. (It cost about $8,000 for the group; Ms. Fusco picked up the tab.) She also arranged to have the course videotaped, with the artist Kambui Olujimi as director of photography.
As the 50-minute video opens, Ms. Fusco is reading aloud from a briefing that laid out the ground rules for the ordeal ahead, clearly amused by the portentous language: “You will experience physical and psychological pain.” The women share a piece of secret information they will do their best not to reveal under duress.
The course begins. The women are riding in a van through the woods in the Poconos when masked men stop them at gunpoint and direct them to strip to their underwear for a search. The women’s clothes are exchanged for Day-Glo orange coveralls; their heads and faces are covered with blackout hoods. They are led, handcuffed, through the woods.
The make-believe nature of all this is periodically reinforced as “enemy soldiers” drop out of character to be interviewed about their work. Even so, a sense of real tension starts to build. Mr. Olujimi’s darting, probing, camera work helps to create it. So does the sustained image of the women being pushed, prodded, forced to their knees, yelled at and insulted by the all-male interrogation team.
At one point, an interrogator explains to the camera that a particularly effective technique for breaking down resistance is to make a captive think that unless he or she yields information, another prisoner will be harmed. When this situation is simulated, one of the women in the group starts to cry. The psychological pressure is working. Fiction translates into emotional fact.
Another woman also starts weeping. But it turns out she is doing so deliberately, using the ploy of feminine vulnerability to avoid divulging her secret. The ruse works. Later, when the women are relaxing after their stint as prisoners, Ms. Fusco confesses that she had had to stop herself from laughing at some of the dialogue her interrogators delivered. As the film ends, she and her colleagues take turns interrogating their former captors, learning to do to others what has been done to them.
So what kind of political art is this? It isn’t moralizing or accusatory. It’s art for a time when play-acting and politics seem to be all but indistinguishable. “Operation Atropos” is reality television with the cracks between reality and artifice showing. It’s in the cracks, Ms. Fusco suggests, that the political truth is revealed.
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2. Bob Holman, Purgatory Pie Press, FF Alumns, at Bowery Poetry Club, TONITE, 6 pm
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery @ Bleecker, NYC
Tuesday May 30, 6-7:30pm
Parade of Postcards
Past Present & Potential
Purgatory Pie Press Postcards
Publications + other Produce
performed by:
Holly Anderson, Vyt Bakaitis, Lisa Blauschild, Bob Holman, Emmy Hunter, Georgia Luna, Ianthe Jackson, Marc Nasdor, Aimee Record, Marshall Reese, Jim Tolan
EK Smith Museum + Peter Evans, Dikko-Emcee Tromboniac
and
Proteus Gowanus -Friday June 9, 6-8
543 Union St @Nevins, Brooklyn-
R train to Union, F train to Carrol
Fibonacci Flower
by Susan Happersett
Book Launch
& Postcard Readings
by Peter Cherches & Hal Sirowitz
thank you,
Esther K Smith
purgatorypiepress@gmail.com
www.PurgatoryPiePress.com
letterpress artistbooks & limited editions
212-274-8228
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3. Jaroslav Andel, FF Alumn, at Municipal Art Society, TONITE, 6:30 pm
Jaroslav Andel in conversation with Kenneth Frampton: THE NEW VISION FOR THE NEW ARCHITECTURE
2006/05/30 06:30 pm
Tuesday, May 30, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
The Municipal Art Society’s Urban Center Books presents THE NEW VISION FOR THE NEW ARCHITECTURE; Czechoslovakia 1918-1938: Jaroslav Andel in conversation with Kenneth Frampton. Author, Jaroslav Andel and theorist, Kenneth Frampton illuminate this era when both architects and photographers pursued beliefs in social and technological utopias and saw themselves as creating a new world. Dr. Andel is currently artistic director of DOX, Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic. Kenneth Frampton is Ware Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, New York. Programs are free, but seating is limited. Please RSVP to rsvp@mas.org or call 212-935-2075, specifying the event’s name and date.
Please RSVP to rsvp@mas.org or call 212-935-2075, specifying the event’s
name and date.
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
at 51st Street
New York City
The New Vision for The New Architecture: Czechoslovakia 1918-1938 by Jaroslav Andel
The new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which only opened on 6 April 2006, has already ruffled many feathers amongst cultural critics. It has provided a terrific opportunity for conservatives to damn modernist architecture – especially system-built housing – as the hand-maiden of totalitarianism in the 20th century. More liberal folk have emphasised the brighter, lighter, more transparent world which modernist design ushered in, a harbinger of the Habitat and IKEA lifestyles espoused by so many today. The pages of British architectural magazines and broadsheet journals have been filled with ‘For’ and ‘Against’ opinion forums, as if this were any proper way to ask the question as to what modernism in architecture and design had really achieved.
This wonderful book on the impact of modernist ideas in architecture in Czechoslovakia between the wars helps to ask the question in an entirely different form. It does it in two distinct ways. Firstly, it is not a book about architecture per se, but about how photographers perceived the impact of the new architecture as part of a new vision of the modern world, bursting with new forms of technology, power, and public democracy. Young photographers, heavily under the influence of the Russian Constructivists or artists such as Moholy-Nagy, found in the dizzying heights, volumes and spaces of modern buildings, a new way of representing space and human endeavour.
Many of the photographs are taken, characteristically, at an angle, looking upwards diagonally, creating an energy and dynamism to the image that they perceived inherent in the ‘poetry of construction’ itself. This was a world in which the planner, the civil engineer and the architect were the heroes of a new world order. Even the photographs of modern plumbing are highly aestheticised and symbolic: Freud would have relished them.
Most of the photographs are devoid of people, and are exercises in visual and architectonic style. An exception is the series of bird’s-eye view photographs of crowded open-air café terraces, evoking a new age of leisure and public sociability. Andel’s introductory essay on the relationship between photography and modernism is a model essay in every way, as are all of his brief introductions to each new section. There is still much to be written about the relationship between architecture and photography – a subject of continuing controversy – and this book makes a terrific starting point for such a debate.
The New Vision for The New Architecture is also highly relevant to current controversies about the political legacy of modernism in that it is divided into a number of sections, each dealing with a specific building type or genre, principally: exhibition sites, trade fairs, department stores, cinemas, airports, utilities buildings, offices, schools, sanatoria, spas, swimming pools, cafés, family houses, churches, crematoria. As a result, one can see at a glance that the question to be asked is not whether modernism was good or bad, but how it was entirely related to the development of a wholly new set of building types, brought into being by the growth of public welfarism and social democracy, which simply hadn’t existed before, and around which it achieved many lasting successes. Visit the Open-Air School in Amsterdam or The School on the Sound in Copenhagen, for example, both over seventy years old, and you will be struck immediately by how modern and enduringly delightful they remain.
Many of the Czechoslovakian buildings pictured in this book seem equally modern. The selection by building type reinforces this key point that modernism was ideally suited to the early days of the cult of hygiene and bodily improvement. Such architecture only came into its own on a bespoke basis; once it became a standardised formula, regardless of local conditions and circumstances, functionalism went badly astray. The nadir of modernism is by agreement the large tract housing estate built to provide an existenzminimum for the working classes, released from inner city slums. However, many of these outlying estates, cut off from the services and opportunities of the city, became social monocultures, which eventually turned in on themselves, becoming dangerously territorialised. As Andel points out, the concept of the genius loci was anathema to the new architecture, and once it began to ride roughshod over local histories, traditions, topographies and social cultures, it was doomed. He also rightly notes that early modernism was as much about individual lebensreform – diet, cleanliness, physical well-being, group activity – as it was about dirigiste Marxist notions of mass social change.
This is a beautiful book, filled with beautiful images. But it is also a thoughtful book, intelligently structured and rigorously edited. It opens new windows on the rather sterile debate about modernism that in Western Europe is fixated on the catastrophic failure of standardised mass housing, and ignores the many success stories in the creation of a whole new range of buildings that we now take for granted. In the 1930s Czechoslovakia was in the forefront of new thinking about architecture, design and the application of new technology, and this book is a wonderful evocation of that period and its many social and cultural achievements.
Reviewed by Ken Worpole on 11/04/2006
Further Information
ISBN: 3039390422
ISBN-13: 9783039390427
Publisher: Scalo
Publication Date: 31/03/2006
Binding: Hardcover
Number of pages: 280
URL: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/3039390422/marksbookrevi-21
RSB-ROBOT
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4. Andrea Fraser, FF Alumn, at Orchard, NY, opening June 4, 6-8 pm
Reality/Play
organized by Moyra Davey
Exhibition Dates: June 4 – June 30, 2006
Opening: Sunday, June 4th 6-8 pm
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday, 1-6
Martin Beck, Pradeep Dalal, Andrea Fraser, Mitchell Goodman, K8 Hardy, Sowon Kwon, Joshua Lutz, Angela Marzullo, Kim Miller, Jennifer Montgomery,Ulrike Müller, Claire Pentecost, Jeff Preiss, R. H. Quaytman, Fabienne Radi, Hugo Radi, Jason Simon, Shellburne Thurber, Union Gaucha Productions, JoAnn Verburg, Therine Youngblood
Screening and discussion:
On Thursday, June 15th at 6pm, Fifty Minutes, a video by Moyra Daveywill be screened, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker and Gregg Bordowitz.
PLAY
When I told some friends about the idea for this show at Orchard several of them recommended Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, an erudite work about the centrality of play in culture. The most inspiring and ludic part of the book (for me) is a short passage concluding the author’s introduction in which he cautions the reader not to expect from him expertise on every aspect of his subject. A writer, he maintains, must sometimes be a “raider” in fields insufficiently explored or studied, the desire to write overtaking the exigencies of learning, Huizinga explains: “To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question. I had to write it now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.” This impatience, even urgency around writing that Huizinga alludes to, is a testament to the sustaining powers such creative work affords, and it is a form of sustenance inextricably linked to pleasure and forms of play.
Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text says:”The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body,” I’ve long puzzled over that cryptic line, from a longer, even more cryptic passage in which Barthes talks about pleasure in relation to writing (and reading). He says this pleasure comes not from language, but from the mother tongue, thereby denying the symbolic of language and privileging the imaginary of the mother’s body. In that same short paragraph he mentions, parenthetically, a psychoanalyst, three writers and a painter, all leads I could pursue if I wanted to decode the mystery of that line: “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body,” But I suspect the line is not meant to be decoded, and for now I want to write (even if I also don’t want to…)
Writing (especially its beginnings) is a heart-quickening thrill precisely because it engages that area of anticipation and dread, desire and fear, the teetering on the edge of a gulf that Virginia Woolf described in relation to the novel. (Non-fiction was straightforward for Woolf: she started an essay with the certainty that “sooner or later a net of words…(would] come down on the idea” and allow her to compose her text, but a novel was something altogether more fraught, its outcome by no means guaranteed.) The gulf is the threshold moment of knowing that something might be created, plucked from non-existence, or not. It is also the moment where pleasure and gratification abut work, and the thrill has to do with putting something at risk, as in a game of chance. There is no desire without law, as Lacan would say.
But getting back to Barthes, here’s one more thing, from a an interview he gave in 1977, that begins to inflect and illuminate the cryptic, poetic line about the writer and the body of the mother: “When we attach a lot of importance to certain networks of friendship it is because we’re always trying to reproduce the utopia of a childhood space, that of the child playing around its mother. Ultimately, in an affective relationship, whether or not it’s amorous, we always simulate a certain maternal space, a space of security which is, why not say it, a gift space.” This evocation of a maternal radius extending into adulthood, into the grownup life of Barthes the writer, also suggests its reverse, the forceful pull backwards, reminding me of Melanie Klein, who said that all art-making is a form of reparation with the mother, and emboldens me to take (almost) literally Barthes’ idea about writing and the body of the mother. Barthes via Klein leads me to intuit a space of loss where one can in turn lose oneself to a love of making.
What does all this have to do with an exhibition at Orchard? To close, this time via Winnicott: what matters in the play of children is “the preoccupation…the near-withdrawal state…akin to the concentration of older children and adults” (when they are writing, or taking a photograph or editing a video, for instance, and possibly experiencing that sense of unbounded time known as ‘oceanic’). These notes, mostly on writing, but equally relevant to all forms of art making, literalize ideas around demand and play. They exemplify a certain kind of intense engagement and absorption that artists and writers avail themselves of, participate in, and on occasion find therein: pleasure, bliss, wonder, agency and perhaps a place that harks back to, conjures, the “space around the mother”.
Moyra Davey
Orchard
47 Orchard St.
NYC , NY 10002
212-219-1061
contact@orchard47.org
Rhea Anastas
Moyra Davey
Andrea Fraser
Nicolás Guagnini
Gareth James
Christian Philipp Müller
Jeff Preiss
R,H. Quaytman
Karin Schneider
Jason Simon
John Yancy Jr.
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5. Julia Mandle, FF Alumn, at The Field, June 1, 6:30 pm
Howdy, folks.
Starting this weekend, Laboratory Theater’s excellent new piece MAGIC MONKEY DANCE COMPANY will be performed a total of six times at the Brick Theater’s $ellout Festival. You don’t want to miss this show… Orangutans, Opera, Psychotherapy, and Exotic Ballet! What could be better? (info below)
Please come soon and come often.
Also, I’m doing a panel discussion at The Field on Interdisciplinary Collaboration, along with Paul Lazar of Big Dance Theater, Julia Mandle of Julia Mandle Visual Performance Art, Mei-Yin Ng of MEI-BE Whatever, on Thursday, June 1 at 6:30pm. Sign up for that online at www.thefield.org
Love, Corey
LABORATORY THEATER’s
MAGIC MONKEY DANCE COMPANY
Directed by Yvan Greenberg
Featuring Corey Dargel, Sheila Donovan, Oleg Dubson, & Alexis Macnab
presented by The Brick Theater in The $ellout Festival
Six performances only, and seating is limited
Sat 6/3 @ 7pm; Sun 6/4 @ 1pm; Tue 6/13 @ 8pm;
Tue 6/20 @ 7pm; Sat 6/24 @ 6pm; Thur 6/29 @ 7pm
Tickets: $10, available at the door or through
www.theatermania.com / 212-352-3101
The Brick Theater is located at 575 Metropolitan Ave. (btw Lorimer & Union) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn Subway: L to Lorimer / G to Metropolitan
www.bricktheater.com / www.laboratorytheater.org
Laboratory Theater’s MAGIC MONKEY DANCE COMPANY is an operatic primate fantasia, chronicling the life of an orangutan named Kusasi. This animal epic tells of his beginnings as an orphan, his rise in dominance over a jungle kingdom that – due to the logging industry – will soon disappear, his struggle with panic attacks and bouts of depression, and the psychotherapist who would try to save him. The piece is performed in English and Orangutan with simultaneous English translation.
Kusasi’s story is told through a commingling of television “Nature” documentary, Kafka short story, therapy scenes from “The Sopranos”, and exotic jungle ballets from the repertoire of Kusasi’s internationally renowned, all-orangutan dance company. MAGIC MONKEY DANCE COMPANY plays out the archetypal conflicts of man vs. nature (science vs. nature, psychology vs. the unconscious).
“…ironic, weird, experimental, anti-dramatic, and compelling work…” -Alisa Solomon, The Village Voice
“Inane, insane, mundane…esthetic purity under the guise of the absurd.” – Amanda MacBlane, New York Press
Laboratory Theater is a Brooklyn-based experimental theater ensemble dedicated to collaborating on the creation of original, interdisciplinary work for the theater. Each member of the ensemble is an active participant in all aspects of the work, from the creation of sound and video scores to dramaturgy and the writing of texts. This allows for an in-depth and organic working process shared by the ensemble as a whole. Laboratory Theater is committed to integrating complex uses of sound and video with live performance, but places primary focus on the presence of the performer and his/her relationship with the audience.
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6. Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, FF Alumn, at The Lab, SF, June 9, 10
Check out the premiere of Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa’s video/performance piece, DIMENSION OF IS: A SPECTACULAR FUTURE, in collaboration with many talented Bay Area Artists. DIMENSION OF IS is an expansive world of science fiction, visual soundscapes, performance and fabric installations in which artists revisit the history of world’s fairs and speculate about the (d)evolution of America as a super power beyond earth.
The Lab presents
(a)eromestiza and SpaceSuperStar in
DIMENSION OF IS: A SPECTACULAR FUTURE
in association with the National Queer Arts Festival and the United States of Asian America View a video clip and details on the website at www.spacesuperstar.com
June 9&10, at 8PM. The Lab is located at 2948 16th Street (@Capp), in San Francisco.
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7. James Siena, FF Alumn, new edition at Dieu Donné Papermill, NY
James Siena at Dieu Donné Papermill
New edition in handmade paper from the studio at Dieu Donné Papermill. More information is available online at www.dieudonne.org.
Two Perforated Combs
Stenciled pigmented linen on pigmented cotton base
10 x 8 inches
Edition of 50
Dieu Donné Papermill is pleased to feature the Collector’s Series, a new annual edition of handmade paper prints by renowned contemporary artists which benefit the artist residency programs at Dieu Donné. The first installment in this annual series is a new edition by artist, James Siena. In collaboration with Artistic Director Paul Wong, Siena found ways to adapt and translate his own unique drawing style to produce a handmade paper edition of fifty entitled, Two Perforated Combs.
Annual subscription dues are $750. Initial subscription is on a first-come, first-served basis and is good for a lifetime as long as subscription dues remain current. Subscription is non-transferable. Once the subscription list reaches 50 people, a waiting list will be formed. All proceeds benefit the programs at Dieu Donné Papermill. To become a subscriber, please contact Peter Russo at (212) 226-0573 x 302 or e-mail peter@dieudonne.org. More information is available online at www.dieudonne.org
James Siena
Born 1957 in California
Lives and works in New York, NY
James Siena is represented by Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York. James Siena received his BFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1979. Siena’s work has been featured in over 55 group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. The recipient of multiple honors and awards, James Siena has been awarded The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (1994), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award (1999), and an award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2000). Siena lectures and teaches at numerous institutions throughout the United States, including the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (1999, 2002); Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2000); School of Visual Arts, New York (2003); San Francisco Art Institute (2003); and the Cleveland Institute of Art, OH (2004). Siena’s work can be found in several public collections including: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philip Morris Collection; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Source: www.pacewildenstein.com.
ABOUT THE COLLECTOR’S SERIES
The Art and Gallery Committee, a panel of collectors, curators, members of our Board of Directors and Dieu Donné staff, at Dieu Donné Papermill, select one artist annually. The artist creates an edition of fifty handmade paper prints, available to Collector’s Series subscribers. This year marks the launch of the program.
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8. Ken Aptekar, FF Alumn, launches new website, www.kenaptekar.net, and more
Happy to announce the launch of my new website: www.kenaptekar.net
Stop by and visit when you have a moment!
And if you’re in NYC, come on over and see the real thing now at JG CONTEMPORARY, JAMES GRAHAM & SONS on Madison Ave. at 78th Street anytime Tuesday-Saturday, 10-5:30. Up through June 10th.
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9. Micki Watanabe, FF Alumn, in Atlantic Art Walk, Brooklyn, reception June 2
Hi all,
I will have some drawings (some brand new, some old) in my friend’s adorable shop for the Atlantic Art Walk. http://atlanticavenueartwalk.com
She is kicking off the weekend with an artist’s reception this Friday June 2nd
6-8pm. @ Layers 394 Atlantic Ave (near Bond)
Hope to see you!!!
xoxo micki
http://atlanticavenueartwalk.com
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10. Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga , FF Alumn, in sonambiente, Berlin, June 1-July 17
From June 1st through July 17, the Public Broadcast Cart will be traversing the streets of Berlin to produce edited broadcasts for Tesla Radio. The performances will be part of the sound art festival, sonambiente. sonambiente berlin 2006 is summer in berlin set to music for the eyes and ears. Installations, objects, performances, happenings visual art, sound art, video, new media, radio art, film: from June 1st to July 16th, for the second time since 1996, over 40 internationally known artists and some 20 up-and-coming art school talents make the metropolis reverberate with sound.
http://sonambiente.net/en/index_c.html
Ricardo has also revamped the project’s website, adding to the site lots of info that others may find useful, such as how to build your own cart. Keeping with the goal of the project as a tool for civil empowerment and to generate discussion surrounding increasing control of dissemination media by very few wealthy private entities the site is intended as an informational repository surrounding radio transmission in the hands of the public:
http://www.ambriente.com/wifi/index.php
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11. Nora York, FF Alumn, at Joe’s Pub, June 15, 7 pm
Nora York
To Sing
New Concert Work
Furtiva Lagrima (Secret Tears)
Thursday June 15th 7pm
at
Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater
The new concert invention Furtiva Lagrima (Secret Tears) is singer composer Nora York’s embrace of the classical and baroque operatic repertoire. Selections from Puccini’s Tosca, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Handel’s Rinaldo, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and Bizet’s Carmen will be reinvented through York’s singular imagination. York makes entirely new inventions by collaging and juxtaposing “the operatic standards” with pop, country, jazz and her own original music, taking great care to respect the musical integrity of her source material.
York illuminates both repertoires with an ensemble of both classical and popular players — Andrew Schwartz on bassoon, bass baritone vocalist Kevin Burdette, Jamie Lawrence on harmonium, Dave Hofstra on bass and Steve Tarshis on guitar.
http://www.joespub.com
20 Dollars
By Phone : 212-239-6200
On the Web : www.telecharge.com
Table reservations: 212-539-8778
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12. Sonya Rapoport, FF Alumn, in Leonardo, Vol 39 No.2 2006
Sonya Rapoport image is on the front cover and her art autobiography is featured inside,
DIGITIZING THE GOLEM: From Earth to Outer-Space by Sonya Rapoport has recently been published by MIT Press in the LEONARDO JOURNAL.
Sonya Rapoport, a multi-media artist, traces five decades in coalescing art, science and technology. She provides a personal history in a scientific context that leads her from painting and abstract expressionism to computer assisted interactive installations and web-works. Throughout she uses the golem, her self-described avatar, as means to question and explain the autobiographical evolution of her iconography, choice of media, and style. Her journey includes the influences on her inter-disciplinary art expression in which anthropology, chemistry, botany, religion, and topics of gender and trans-culture are intermittently treated parodically, humorously, and mystically.
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13. Suzanne Kuffler, FF Alumn, at Gallery AA/B, Boston, opening June 2, 5-8 pm
What’s the ‘last taboo’? Aging and mortality – the topic of RESIDUE whose artists Erica H. Adams, David Akiba, Suzanne Kuffler, FF Alumn, and Jocelyne Prince worked unaware of each other while engaged in personal concerns that are universal, yet, often overlooked by contemporary culture and its institutions: We believe the impact of a life matters.
RESIDUE, curated by Erica H. Adams and hosted by GalleryAA/B -Art Advisory/Boston,
535 Albany St, #3B, Boston, MA, runs from June 2 through June 30, 2006,
Thursdays and Fridays 12-5:30pm and by appt. Opening Reception Friday, June 2nd, 5-8pm.
RESIDUE collects and connects all that we know as human, through memory and material to ask: what do we value or cherish? What legacy do we leave behind?
Reflecting on the past, to face our future, Adams, Akiba, Kuffler and Prince’s monumental and intimate works include unique prints, photographs, assemblages and glass: Large scale, unique prints by Erica H. Adams form a national portrait made from family photographs revised over time. Two U.S. epochs – the Fifties and 21st Century – link personal, political and temporal to comment on social realities. Adams recognizes her open-ended process of inquiry that uses recycled imagery that will ultimately, be washed away by time, nature and culture. What remains?
A suite of ten re-photographed picture I.D.’s taken of David Akiba between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four, frame a lifetime of roles Akiba considers ‘an intimate record of aging and attitude’. An after-image effect renders identity beyond the public or private and all material.
Suzanne Kuffler’s hand-sized assemblages reconstruct an infrastructure of memory, from fragments and a network of holes, towards the possibility of future narratives. Built with slivers of photographs and other materials she houses these contingent worlds within open mesh containers. Kuffler hopes these works will acknowledge memory loss and foster its restoration, towards a legacy of meaningful human connection.
Back-lit panels with the appearance of corroded daguerreotypes, are the actual residue of Jocelyne Prince’s family face cloths burned- out through glass sheets and risen to the surface. Prince’s family of reliquaries meditates on the fate of bodies and what constitutes a legacy.
For more information please: email artadvisory@verizon.net or call
Gallery AA/B director Jennifer Wood-Patrick at (617) 574-0022 or visit www.artadvisoryboston.com. Gallery AA/B, 535 Albany St., # 3B, Boston, MA, 02118 -T 617-574 0022
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14. Peggy Diggs, FF Alumn, at Mass MoCA, opening May 27
I’m going to have two installations in Mass MoCA’s upcoming summer show, AHISTORIC OCCASION. It opens Saturday, May 27, in North Adams, MA.
One project, RECOLLECTION 2, consists of 300 glass jars, each with one item from someone’s past; significant or insignificant, the label briefly tells of this object’s place in someone’s life. (Ex: “This is some water from the creek near my house which they said that Lillybet drank.”) The majority of the jars is from my father’s house as he was dying and as his house had to be cleared out for sale; but 15 other people contributed to this second version of the project, each revealing very different value systems and concerns.
The second and bigger project, HERE & THEN, is a new interactive piece about North Adams itself. This project is the first to be situated “off campus” in the shopping district of the town. For this, I took photos around the town of public places, some of which were recommended by social workers, residents, and local historians; some photos were contributed by The North Adams Transcript newspaper; and some were culled from the collection of 19th century and early 20th century photos in the collection of Paul Marino of No. Adams. Each photo is bolted to a 10′ high piece of fiberglass screening. The public is asked to look around at the photos of places portrayed and to contribute any experiences they have had at any of these sites; for this, manila shipping tags with strings are provided for writing on. Each contribution is then safety-pinned onto the screening above or below the relevant photo. My aim is to overlay private experience onto public space, and to see those spaces by the end of a summer’s worth of written stories as being the stages we live our lives on, mundane or catastrophic, ordinary or momentous.
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15. Ken Butler, Larry Walczak, F FAlumns, at Supreme Trading, Brooklyn, June 2
eyewash, Williamsburg’s migratory gallery presents…
BIG STUFF! new Brooklyn installation art
at Supreme Trading, North 8th & Driggs Ave. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
OPENING RECEPTION-Friday, June 2, 2006 7-10PM
PERFORMANCES-Friday, June 2, 2006 10-12PM
exhibiting artists:
Peter Barrett
Thomas Broadbent
Mark Esper
David Kramer
Bob Seng & Lisa Hein
Eung Ho Park
performances include-
My M.F.A. (Misery in Fine Arts) by Lisa Levy, a multi-media performance ending with Lisa interviewing people in Central Park at ‘The Gates’
Voices of Anxious Objects with Ken Butler. Ken unveils new instruments & guests in this 45 minute super set
Confessions of an Art-failure by David Kramer. David shares stories of the trauma of modern life & the contemporary art world in his sobering monologue about his dysfunctional life
A Eulogy to Williamsburg by William Powhida. Narrative insult artist Powhida rants on about his inability to cope with a changing neighborhood, naming names and pointing fingers
Free art-looking, free booze & free performances in eyewash’s throwback to a different time in the Northside of Williamsburg when such occasions were a regular thing…
FOR MORE INFO–www.supremetradingny.com, www.eyewashart.com
eyewash is a migratory gallery that collaborates with other art spaces or sometimes inhabits non-art spaces for unique exhibitions, screenings, performances and other events. eyewash was founded in 1997 by Larry Walczak who curated BIG STUFF!
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16. Jon Brunelle, FF Alumn, at Collective Unconscious, June 2, 10 pm
The Psychasthenia Society
Jon Brunelle, Daniel Vatsky, and Mad EP
at Collective: Unconscious
with guest artists Aerostatic
Friday June 2 10 pm
Collective: Unconscious
279 Church Street, Tribeca, Manhattan
(near Canal Street train stops)
Admission: $5
Information: 212.254.5277
The Psychasthenia Society returns to Collective: Unconscious on June 2, with Daniel Vatsky’s video mixes backed by music from Mad EP and guests Aerostatic. New stories, too, with ’50s detectives and galactic explorers taking on the MTA. The Psychasthenia Society, hosted by Jon Keith Brunelle, presents storytelling, video, and music mediated by portable electronics, featuring some of the best work by New York artists whose instruments are laptop computers. http://www.psychasthenia.com
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17. Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Stacy Makishi, Karen Finley, Coco Fusco, Lois Weaver, FF Alumns, at University of London, England, June 15-18, 2006
Queen Mary, University of London, East End Collaborations and the Live Art Development Agency present Performance Studies international (PSi) 12: PERFORMING RIGHTS
Thursday 15 – Saturday June 18 2006
All events take place at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS
Full programme details and bookings www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk < http://www.psi12.qmul.ac.uk>
PERFORMING RIGHTS is a festival of creative dialogues between artists, academics, activists, and audiences investigating relationships between human rights and performance, and reflecting the creative strategies that artists are employing to effect social, cultural and political change.
A Programme of performances, interventions, declarations, lectures, presentations, installations, residencies and special events.
A Manifesto Room for debates, presentations, experimentations and screenings.
A Library of Performing Rights housing resources, research facilities, digital and web based interactions.
A Conference bringing together artists, activists, thinkers, curators, policy makers and representatives from international cultural agencies and academic institutions.
Contributors include include Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, Rabih Mroué, Bobby Baker, Stacy Makishi, Monica Ross, Curious, Gustavo Ciriaco, Luiz De Abreu, Leibniz, Karen Finley, Clod Ensemble, Chumpon Apisuk, Chris Johnston, Coco Fusco, Naeem Mohaiemen, Juan Chin, Yara El-Sherbini, Adrien Sina, Richard Dedomenici, Oreet Ashery, Reem Fadda, John Jordan, The Otolith Group, Wrights & Sites, Wan-Jung Wang, Nicole Wolf, Larry Bogad, irrational.org, Chris Johnson, The Clod Ensemble, Tetine, Shahram Entekhabi , People First, Powerhouse, Lisa Wesley & Andrew Blackwood, James Leadbitter, Milan Kohout, Rising Tide, Graeme Miller, Hilary Ramsden, Lois Weaver, Rebecca Collins, Chris Berry, Aubrey Meyer, David A Bailey, Platform, Ali Zaidi, Nela Milic, Brian Holmes, Almir Koldzic, Aldo Milohnic, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Paul Heritage, Daniela Labra, David Williams, Karen C Faith, Sara Raza, Adrien Sina, Nayse Lopez, Lia Rodrigues amongst many others.
Register on line now for the PSi12: PERFORMING RIGHTS Conference.
Performance tickets and Day passes will be on sale from 24 May 2006.
Please note: The Manifesto Room, Library of Performing Rights, Conference Plenaries, and all installations and daytime performances are free with a Day Pass or with a conference registration ID. Conference registration and Day Passes do not include performance tickets which must be booked and paid for separately.
Performing Rights is supported by Arts Council, England; LCACE; Queen Mary, University of London; Live Art Development Agency; Crucible; Joy Tomchin.
www.thisisLiveArt.co.uk
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
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