Contents for July 03, 2017
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1. Jeremiah Barber, FF Fund recipient 2015-16, at CUE Art Foundation, Manhattan, July 18-20
2. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at Future Tenant, Pittsburgh, PA, opening July 7
3. Barbara T. Smith, Hannah Wilke, FF Alumns, at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, opening July 8
4. Dianne Arndt, FF Member, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=mx9ayah6CYM
5. Irina Danilova, FF Alumn, at Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan, July 5
6. Glenn Branca, Spaulding Gray, Louise Lawler, Tom Leeser, Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, at Harvestworks, Manhattan, opening July 7
7. Ann Carson, Pope.L, FF Alumns, receive VIA Art Fund Award 2017
8. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, June 29
9. Diane Torr, FF Alumn, in The Guardian, June 29
10. Mark Berghash, Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, FF Alumns, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, opening July 14
11. Nao Bustamante, FF Alumn, at Ballroom Marfa, TX, opening Aug. 25
12. Agnes Denes at Documenta, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece, thru July 16
13. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Dolceacqua Arte Contemporanea, Italy, opening July 22
14. Susan Fleminger, FF Alumn, at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, opening July 6, and more
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1. Jeremiah Barber, FF Fund recipient 2015-16, at CUE Art Foundation, Manhattan, July 18-20
Jeremiah Barber: Exhabitations
Installation- July 18 – 20, 2017. 10am-5pm
Performance- Thursday July 20, 2017. 7-8pm. RSVP via Eventbrite
CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street, New York NY 10001
Exhabitations is an installation and performance by San Francisco-based artist Jeremiah Barber. The exhibition culminates in a one-night performance, titled If Only My Own Person, which takes place in complete darkness–an endurance work in which the artist bounds horizontally into the air with a paper body replica. An occasional burst of light illuminates the apex of the jump, leaving the floating after-images of an attempt at levitation in the audience’s eye.
Barber makes minimalist, body-based works that dredge up the struggle of seeing the self with clarity. Artifice, trickery, and the reversal of gravity are at the heart of these works, on view in the gallery from July 18-20. In Barber’s performance, he appears as a character who desires certain knowledge of the body where none can be found. In the performance Dreamburn (2012) Barber suspends a paper body replica above a pool of water and, lying below, sets it on fire. In Para/sel/llel/ves (2016) suspended fragments of paper body parts fall slowly towards the surface of a pool, soaking up water and collapsing. In these works the performer is on the path of transcendence, but finds the vehicle of the body to be unreliable.
Exhabitations is inspired by a scientific study in which Swiss neuroscientists accidentally triggered an out-of-body experience in a patient who was being tested for brain tissue damage. Their discovery showed that the temporal parietal junction gives a neurological explanation for what would otherwise be considered a mystical experience. In Exhabitations, Barber presents the body as the anchor that holds us from our dreams and visions of ourselves.
Biography
Jeremiah Barber is a visual and performance artist who studies transcendence through absurdity and humor. Tackling the impractical object and the impossible task, his performances explore the body as heroic, ephemeral, and lucid. He has created pieces for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center, and has exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, and The LAB in San Francisco. He is a former member of Marina Abramovic’s Independent Performance Group. Barber received an MFA from Stanford University, and has been a resident at the Cité Internationale de Arts in Paris, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and San Francisco’s Recology. In 2015 Barber was awarded the prestigious Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by The SHS Foundation, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and general operating support from the New York State Council on the Arts.
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2. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at Future Tenant, Pittsburgh, PA, opening July 7
Night Fever examines the aesthetic legacy of disco through a diverse multigenerational group of local and national contemporary artists who engage with the bygone era of mirror balls, disco divas, and transformative nights of dancing. While disco and its cultural impact have often been brushed off as too artificial, too commercial and too kitsch, Night Fever will emphasize Alice Echol’s assertion from Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture that “disco…broadened the contours of blackness, femininity and male homosexuality.” The artists in Night Fever use disco to create a rich dialogue about the communities, performances and self-fashioned identities that emerged through the music and clubs.
On view July 7th – August 13th, 2017.
Opening Reception on Friday, July 7th, 5:30-10:00pm.
Curated by Emily Colucci. Featuring the work of Scott Andrew, Androxx, Hilary Harp and Suzie Silver, Gabriel Martinez, Adam Milner, Devan Shimoyama, Pacifico Silano, and Bradley Wester
Fri, Jul 7, 20175:30pm
Sun, Aug 13, 20179:00pm
Future Tenant 819 Penn Avenue Pittsburgh, PA, 15222 United States
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3. Barbara T. Smith, Hannah Wilke, FF Alumns, at Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, opening July 8
Impermanence
July 8th – August 19th
Opening Reception: July 8th, 3 – 5 pm
Cirrus Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Impermanence – a group show featuring works by the artists Barbara T. Smith, John Coplans, and Hannah Wilke. The exhibition probes the themes of change and transformation, using the body as a common site for discussing our human state of flux. The exhibition debuts a new print edition by Barbara T. Smith, Signifiers. Throughout her career from the early 1960’s until today, Smith has explored feminine identity and the use of the body as a language to communicate ideas beyond ourselves as well as human nature, our physicality and mortality. With Signifiers, Smith has continued her tradition of using her body and new technology in order to explore the passage of time. Smith’s work is highly personal and self-aware. She invites the viewer to see images of her hands as the subject, as well as the process by which the work is made. With Signifier 1 we can see an image of Smith from her 1960’s Xerox portraits, veiled behind her hands from the present day. The powerful presentation of her aged hands in these works builds upon her larger investigation into the enduring strength and fragile nature of identity and humanity.
Like Smith, John Coplans’ photographs show the passage of time as it manifests in the body as it ages. The four works included in this exhibition keep with Coplans’ career-long treatment of the body as both subject and object. Selected from a series that was created over a 20-year span, these self-portraits present parts of his body in stark, black-and-white detail. These photographs are closely cropped, mapping his joints and skin with a thoroughness and attention to detail more akin to how one would document a monument or art object rather than one’s own body. The result is a frank scrutiny of the temporariness of the body as it relates to artistic traditions of display.
For Impermanence, Hannah Wilke widens the consideration of our temporary state. Hannah Wilke is best known for her works exploring feminism and sexuality, frequently using her body as her template throughout the 1970’s, and in the 1990’s, she chronicled her body’s changes while undergoing cancer treatment in life-size, full color photographs. Courtesy of the Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, selected photographs from Wilke’s Intra Venus Series, her final project before her untimely death from lymphoma in 1993, bravely confront the temporality of youth and health while challenging feminine ideals of representation with humor and courage. In addition to the photographs on display, two artist catalogues will be available–the original exhibition catalogue Intra Venus, and A Breathed Yes, a posthumous compilation of art by Wilke and poetry by her sister, Marsie Scharlatt, which Wilke proposed in the 1970’s.
Barbara T. Smith lives and works in Los Angeles. Cirrus is delighted to once again show Smith’s work. Our first exhibition together was in 1971 when the artist first installed her enormous fiberglass environment Field Piece at Cirrus in Hollywood. Throughout her career, her work conveyed powerful representations of her fears and anguish over
the conflicting pulls of being a wife, mother, and artist. These highly personal and intimate works are indicative not only Smith’s use of the body as an artistic medium, but also the emergence of both feminism and performance art in Southern California. Smith’s recent solo exhibition, The Smell of Almonds: Resin Works, 1968 -1982 at Andrew Kreps Gallery in NY travelled internationally and her work has been included in the following exhibitions: Out of Action: Between the Performance and Object, 1949-1979, Los Angeles, 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capitol, WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution, which traveled extensively including shows at PS1, New York and Pompidou, Paris, Installations Inside/Out: 20th Anniversary Exhibition, The Armory Center for the Arts Pasadena, CA, and the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in Southern California in 2011 including The State of Mind, Orange County Museum of Art, and Under the Big Black Sun at MOCA/LA. Her work has been reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles and New York Times; Frieze; Art in America; Artforum; Der Lowe; Die Lowen; and Avalanche; among others. Her work sits in the collections of the Hammer (Field Piece), LACMA, MOCA, and The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.
John Coplans was born in London in 1920 and was educated in England and South Africa. In addition to his practice as a visual artist, his career has encompassed teaching (University of California, Berkeley), writing (as a founding editor of Art Forum), curating and advocacy for contemporary art. As Senior Curator for the Pasadena Art Museum (1967- 1970) he curated Serial Imagery, a seminal exhibition featuring works by Warhol, Kelly, Duchamp, among others. He received two John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships and four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. authoring numerous books and articles on art criticism, and curating and advocacy for contemporary art. His art museum positions included senior curator of the Pasadena Art Museum from 1967-1970 and director of the Akron Art Museum from 1978-1980.
Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), a pioneering feminist conceptual artist, worked in sculpture, drawing, assemblage, photography, performance and installation. Innovative and controversial throughout her life, Wilke is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work, and her place in 20th century art continues to be established since her death. . Wilke received many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA Grants, and she taught art at the School of Visual Arts, New York, gave workshops as a visiting artist, participated in panels and conferences about women’s art, and lectured extensively. Intra Venus, the group of monumental photographs documenting her final illness and treatment, was exhibited posthumously at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1994 and traveled to Yerba Buena Arts Center, San Francisco; Santa Monica Museum; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, Greensboro, NC; Woodruff Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Nikolai Contemporary Art Center, Copenhagen; and the Tokyo Museum of Photography. Intra Venus received First Place Award in 1994 and 1996 for best show in an art gallery from the International Association of Art Critics (U.S. Section). Since her death, Wilke’s work has been exhibited at Solway Jones Gallery, Los Angeles, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London, and in major museum exhibitions including WACK! at MOCA and elles at Centre Pompidou. Wilke’s work has been included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, MOCA, LACMA, the Whitney, the Hammer, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, and many other national and international collections.
The exhibition opens on July 8th and will remain on view until August 19th , 2017.
Contact: Jean R. Milant
Gallery Hours Tues-Sat, 10am-5pm
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4. Dianne Arndt, FF Member, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=mx9ayah6CYM
Please watch this three-and-a-half minute video by Dianne Arndt, FF Alumn with Gene Jacobs, Mick Walsh, and Lauren Petty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx9ayah6CYM
thank you.
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5. Irina Danilova, FF Alumn, at Anthology Film Archives, Manhattan, July 5
Two of my shorts will be screened at the Another Experiment by Women Film Festival, on Wednesday, July 5th, at Anthology Film Archive, at 6pm. http://anotherexperimentbywomenfilmfestival.com/
Irina Danilova
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6. Glenn Branca, Spaulding Gray, Louise Lawler, Tom Leeser, Joseph Nechvatal, FF Alumn, at Harvestworks, Manhattan, opening July 7
Harvestworks
Imagining Tellus #28: Heard in LA
A speculative audiocassette: an archaeological artifact of the present.
July 7-13
Reception Friday July 7, 7 pm
http://www.harvestworks.org/july-7-13-nyeaf-imagining-tellus-28-heard-in-la/
Open to the public: Weekdays noon – 5 pm
Saturday July 8th and Sunday July 9th by appointment
Harvestworks 596 Broadway #602, New York NY 10012 Phone: 212-431-1130
Subway: F/M/D/B Broadway/Lafayette, R to Prince, #6 to Bleecker
IMAGINING TELLUS #28: HEARD IN LA
Envisaged back in 1981 as an audiocassette publication, The Tellus Project, produced and curated by Carol Parkinson, Joseph Nechvatal and Claudia Gould, is now considered a historic and significant archive of New York’s leading “downtown” experimental sound, noise, performance and spoken word artists. The tapes included works by Sonic Youth, Louise Lawler, Elliot Sharp, Glenn Branca, Tom Cora, Fred Frith, and Spaulding Gray among others. Assembled as a series of twenty-seven audiotapes, each tape was titled with a number and a theme that reflected their sequential release and the curator’s research and intention. The tapes were compiled and distributed to their subscribers, bimonthly through the mail. Imagining Tellus # 28 references and pays homage to this important project as an imagined twenty-eighth tape titled: Heard in LA. As curator, Tom Leeser reaches beyond the project’s original focus to current artists working within the vibrant and active experimental soundscape of Los Angeles. These new works will not be published as a cassette however, rather they will be exhibited at Harvestworks in New York from July 7-13 as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival. Afterwards they will be archived and available for streaming online at viralnet.net. Imagining Tellus # 28 includes emerging and mid-career artists that are exploring new forms of digitally produced sound works extracted from interdisciplinary practices that fuse poetry, electronic composition, improvised music and performance into an assemblage of beautiful antagonisms. Heard in LA will inject the original collective spirit of Tellus into an alternative archive for future reference.
This project is a collaboration between the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and Harvestworks.
Curated and Produced by Tom Leeser Harvestworks
Executive Director: Carol Parkinson
Project Management: Tyler Calkin
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Neela Banerjee, Matt Barbier, Scott Benzel, K. Bradford, Dan Bustillo, Tyler Calkin, Scott Cazan, Provisional Collective, Louis Coy, E.E.L., Carmina Escobar (with the Banda Filarmonica Maqueos Music, the Maqueos Music School, and Yulissa Maqueos), Sarah Fylak, Jacob Goldman, Ulrich Krieger, Gregory Lenczycki, Parches + Tim Tsang, Free Radicals (Jen Hofer, Rob Ray), Jason Richards, Sara Roberts and the Readers
Chorus, sadubas (Robin Sukhadia and Ameet Mehta), Christina Santa Cruz, Stephanie Cheng Smith, Thomas Sturm, Jack Taylor, Daniel Watkins, Ebony Williams
ABOUT NYEAF: The New York Electronic Art Festival was created to provide a responsive public context for the appreciation of cutting-edge electronic artwork through concerts, workshops, and exhibitions of the highest quality across the arts and technology spectrum. Attendees will get an overview of how technology is being used in various artistic disciplines, and have the opportunity to take part in a discussion about how these technologies will continue to shape contemporary art practice. This year’s festival will be a showcase of exciting interdisciplinary work and serve as a catalyst for discussions and collaborations between artists, scientists, and the public. A Harvestworks 40th Anniversary Production.
At the reception for “Imagining Tellus # 28 Heard in LA” on Friday, July 7th, 7pm at Harvestworks, a sound project we did in collaboration with Harvestworks as part of their New York Electronic Art Festival will be on exhibit at the Harvestworks space at 596 Broadway #602 from July 7-13. Matt Barbier and I will be workshopping a new project for video, euphonium and electronics on the night of the reception. Tom Leeser
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7. Ann Carson, Pope.L, FF Alumns, receive VIA Art Fund Award 2017
Spring 2017 grantees
viaartfund.org
VIA Art Fund is pleased to announce that it has awarded grants totaling 310,000 USD during the first half of 2017 for contemporary visual arts projects, directly supporting over 50 artists, writers and curators and 9 visual arts organizations and platforms. The selected projects stand out for their generative spirit, meaningful impact and pioneering vision beyond the confines of traditional exhibition environments.
VIA President Bridgitt Evans, stated: “We are thrilled to fund over 300,000 USD in grants to support new work by groundbreaking artists and independent organizations for projects that may not otherwise have come to fruition given the current state of public funding for the arts. Each of these innovative projects is exemplary of our guiding principles of artistic production, thought leadership, and public engagement; and represents the enterprising and visionary spirit we work tirelessly to champion. I wish to thank our partners, who continue to demonstrate immense generosity and philanthropic commitment to the VIA mission, and look forward to our next round of grants this fall.”
Among the spring 2017 grant recipients for Artistic Production were William Pope.L’s sound installation and performance for documenta 14 taking place in both Athens and Kassel; a site-specific nomadic installation in Los Angeles by artist Jose Dávila for the Getty Foundation’s PST: LA/LA initiative presented by LAND; a residency and performance by artist Ann Carlson taking place in the Gallatin Valley, Montana presented by Mountain Time Arts; and the first ever US retrospective exhibition of German artist Charlotte Posenenske opening Fall 2018 at Dia:Beacon.
Incubator grants totaling 45,000 USD were awarded to support New York organizations Independent Curators International and Triple Canopy and New Orleans based Antenna. The recently created Incubator grants category supports small to mid-size nonprofit organizations whose activities are rooted in programs, publications and/or projects that embrace innovation, experimentation, progress and risk; champion new and diverse artistic voices; and cultivate new avenues of thought leadership within the field.
Complete list of VIA Art Fund spring 2017 grantees:
Artistic Production grantees
Dia Art Foundation, for the exhibition Charlotte Posenenske: A Retrospective, and the accession of the produced works into the Dia Art Foundation permanent collection
documenta 14, for Whispering Campaign by William Pope.L, presented at both Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany.
LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), for a public outdoor installation by Jose Dávila as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative
Mountain Time Arts, for a performative project and installation Symphonic Body / Water Work by Ann Carlson with participation of Gallatin Valley residents
Storm King Art Center, for the site-specific installation The Oracle of Lacuna by Heather Hart
The Walker Art Center, for a public performance and exhibition of Daniel Buren’s Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile and the accession of work into the Walker’s permanent collection
Incubator grantees
Antenna, New Orleans
Independent Curators International, New York
Triple Canopy, New York
About VIA Art Fund
VIA Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit philanthropic arts organization founded to cultivate and support Visionary Initiatives in Art. VIA’s core grant-making values are Artistic Production, Thought Leadership and Public Engagement. VIA supports the production, exhibition, public dissemination and institutional acquisition of ambitious, rigorous and challenging works of art. Past grantees include artists, curators, art production platforms, nonprofit arts organizations, institutions and publication initiatives. VIA’s membership is composed of a network of over 50 individuals and private foundations based across the United States. For more information, please visit viaartfund.org.
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8. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, June 29
NY Times
ART & DESIGN | ART REVIEW
The Expansive Provocateur Pope.L, in Smaller, Potent Doses
By ROBERTA SMITHJUNE 29, 2017
The esteemed multidisciplinary artist Pope.L is having a moment. His contribution to Documenta 14, the prestigious international exhibition in Kassel, Germany – and this year also in Athens – is the slyly subversive “Whispering Campaign,” featuring performers who walk the streets of both cities, confiding in strangers the artist’s elliptical yet biting aphorisms about race and color. Last month, Pope.L’s “Claim (Whitney Version),” a beautiful vexing installation featuring an enormous pastel-colored room festooned with slices of baloney, received the Bucksbaum Award as a “boundary-breaking” work in the recent Whitney Biennial.
And now there is a modest but not to be missed show of 18 “Proto-Skin Set” paintings executed on scavenged paper – including newsprint, posters for cigarettes and kitty-litter bags – at the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery on Madison Avenue that offers a new key to this complex, always challenging artist.
Pope.L started these art-smart, streetwise works mostly in the late 1980s or early ’90s, sometimes returning to them over several years. All but one are being exhibited here for the first time. They compress onto finite surfaces the essence of an unruly career spanning primarily performance, installation, video, sculpture and theater.
Pope.L’s provocative performances in particular mix issues of art, the body, language and race into thorny, mind-bending tangles. Most famous may be “The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street” begun in 2000 and executed in many arduous segments where the artist donned a Superman suit and dragged himself, penitent-like, along Broadway – the Great White Way – from Manhattan’s southern tip into Harlem. The piece, best known from startling photographs, can read as a brutal enactment of marginalization, specifically of the exclusion of many black men, regardless of talent or strength, from America’s still far too “white way” of life.
Large and dense, the works at Mitchell-Innes & Nash are tangled and mind-bending and also surprisingly painterly. They show Pope.L in extravagant moments of experimentation, using painting, several drawing styles, collage and assemblage, found images and words. In them he works, with detours and sidetracks, toward the distillation of his spare, more purely linguistic “Skin Set” works. (One example is here, and says “White People Are Gas,” which typically raises questions. Are they “a” gas – incredibly amusing; “like” gas –
The robust painterliness of the “Proto-Skin” works should come as no surprise. Pope.L’s performances and installations have an imaginative, visceral involvement with materials of all kinds, starting with his own body. And his attention to painting, which he studied in college, has always been keen. He cites Robert Ryman’s all-white paintings as inspiration for his own use of white, which has included covering himself with mayonnaise or flour, playing his brown skin against the pervasiveness and invisibility of whiteness in society.
The “Proto-Skin” works are agitated. They vibrate. Everything counters everything else, starting with the continual play of black against white and including the contrasts of brushwork, scratchy drawing and materials, among them hair, dog fur, rubber bands, a stuffed animal, plastic dolls and peanut butter.
Their apparent improvisational air is dispelled by close attention. Little has been left to chance. The frames are cursorily painted white, so that warmer tones of wood show through. (It’s like the flour on Mr. Pope.L’s body and implies that, historically, whiteness is sketchy, provisional.)
Pope.L is a poet and as usual language is sharply present. A large roughly painted rendering of a rumpled white dress shirt and black tie is titled “Portrait AKA The American Dream Is to be Able to Think,” written across the top edge. It seems kind of optimistic. Lower down, the conclusion may be slightly obscure, but it’s not sanguine: “In Clear Acrylic Polymer.”
Wordplay is frequent. “Mal Content” centers on a newspaper image of the young Malcolm X, smiling quietly. Is this Malcolm before he became a highly effective activist? The image is surrounded (trapped or protected) by a field of peanut butter that may remind you that Malcolm X was light-skinned; it is a mulatto-like color.
The bumpy black-and-white surface of “Jap” evokes Jackson Pollock and Alfonso Ossorio, while a bent spoon affixed to its surface evokes the early 1960s gray paintings of Jasper Johns. On a grainy copy of a torn news photograph Pope.L has written “Jap” – Mr. Johns’s nickname in his youth. But that word is also a racial epithet, of course, and the photo is of a woman’s furious face from a well-known image of an anti-busing protest in Little Rock, Ark., at the dawn of the civil rights movement.
The show reveals that Pope.L’s drawing gifts include several cartoon styles. “Yet Another Excuse,” a light, linear work, is dominated by three sets of male genitalia surrounded by what cartoonists call “action lines.” “Wordy Advertisement,” a much-abused poster for Kent cigarettes that indicts smoking, whiteness and pollution includes a small deft ink sketch of smokestacks like the desert landscape in the “Krazy Kat” strip created by George Herriman (1880-1944), the mixed-race cartoonist and one of the great artists of early American modernism.
Every work in this show sustains an extended reading of process, motif and meaning that is something like a performance. A broadened understanding of Pope.L’s talents, sources and achievement awaits at the end of every one, like a gift.
Through July 14, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Manhattan; 212-744-7400, miandn.com.
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9. Diane Torr, FF Alumn, in The Guardian, June 29
The complete illustrated article appears at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/jun/29/diane-torr-obituary
Text only follows below:
The Guardian
Diane Torr obituary
Drag king and gender activist whose performances and writing blazed a trail in feminist theatre and lesbian culture
Stephen Bottoms
Thursday 29 June 2017
A true original and provocateur, the performance artist, drag king and gender activist Diane Torr drew on working-class roots in Scotland, dance training in Devon and the creative crucible of 1970s New York to become a pioneering figure in female-to-male gender-crossing. Through her performances, participatory workshops and generosity of spirit, Diane, who has died aged 68 of a brain tumour, had a transformative effect on the lives of generations of fellow artists and cultural outsiders, in both Europe and the US.
Diane’s singular importance in her field is documented in her book Sex, Drag and Male Roles (which I co-authored with her, 2010), and Katarina Peters’s film Man for a Day (2012), which explores the impact of her workshops for a diverse group of participants in Berlin. Diane did not let drag define her, however: throughout her life she remained restlessly curious in her other creative inquiries – in dance, film and the visual arts.
A border-crosser in every sense, Diane was born in Ontario, Canada, but grew up in Aberdeen, before moving to London as a teenager with her family. Her mother, Jane (nee Esson), was a housewife and her father, Charles, a mechanical engineer. Diane found her father to be an oppressive figure, and eventually ran away from home to escape him. As a consequence, she was sent for three years to a reform school in Bristol, the Crescent school for girls. Despite its strictly vocational remit, she insisted on her right to study for academic qualifications. Returning to London aged 19, Diane threw herself into the radical counterculture of the late 1960s, working in support of various causes, including Release, an underground organisation that provided guidance to young people arrested for drugs offences.
She studied dance at Dartington College of Arts, in Devon, from 1973 to 1976, before moving to New York, initially to study with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Yet the strictures of modern dance proved less alluring than the city’s punky, do-it-yourself downtown performance scene, and from 1978 Diane began making experimental movement pieces for loft spaces, clubs and bars in the East Village. She was also a founder member of the a cappella art-punk group DISBAND.
Having overstayed her student visa, she survived by working cash-in-hand as a go-go dancer at New Jersey strip clubs, a role she critiqued in one of her early performance pieces. In Go-Go Girls Seize Control (WOW Festival, 1981), she recontextualised erotic dancing within the downtown art world, giving a voice to fellow strippers. At a time when the women’s movement routinely condemned sex workers, and writers such as Andrea Dworkin were loudly critical of pornography, Diane’s overtly sexualised self-expression was controversial. A performance at Amsterdam’s Melkweg in 1982 ended prematurely when the audience rioted.
Still, her brazenness proved influential in the early development of the Women’s One World, or WOW, Café, which she helped to establish. From 1983, at this women-only performance space in the East Village, the erotically charged work of artists including Torr, Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Holly Hughes brought about a revolution in feminist theatre practice.
Diane’s 80s works focused increasingly on questions of gender identity: Arousing Reconstructions, with Bradley Wester, at Danspace Project at St Mark’s (1982), explored androgyny, while Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Queens, with Chris Koenig and Lizzie Olesker, at BACA Downtown cultural centre (1986), drew on Michel Foucault’s research into the 19th-century hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin.
From 1989, Diane began experimenting with physical movements and gestures that would permit her (at 1.6 metres, 5ft 3in tall) to pass as male in everyday encounters in the city. Together with the transsexual make-up artist Johnny Science, she developed “drag king workshops” in which women were trained in male character roles before venturing out into the city. The workshops were initially taught at the Lexington Avenue salon of porn-star-turned-performance-artist Annie Sprinkle, but demand for them quickly took off all over the US, and subsequently in Europe.
Initially run by Diane as a subversive form of empowerment for women of any background, the workshops became influential in the emerging popularity of drag kinging in lesbian subculture. Diane herself developed a whole gallery of male characters, from the hyper-realistic to the comic-grotesque, and performances such as Drag Kings and Subjects at the PS 122 theatre (1995) translated her gender experiments into theatrical form. Her TV appearances on daytime talk shows including Donahue (NBC, 1991), Jerry Springer (NBC, 1993) and Montel Williams (CBS, 1995) brought drag kings to a still wider audience.
Diane always retained a strong sense of Scottishness, hosting riotous Burns Night suppers in New York, and in her performance Ready, Aye Ready (a standing cock has nae conscience), based on Robert Burns’s bawdy poems, at the East Village theatres La Mama and PS 122 (1992). She moved home to Glasgow in 2002, from where she was able to further capitalise on interest in her work in Europe. That year, she co-curated the month-long, multi-venue go drag! festival in Berlin, with Bridge Markland. She subsequently undertook residencies as far afield as New Delhi (2006).
Having received an MFA degree in 2004 from Bard College, New York, Diane taught as a visiting lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. Her final theatre show, Donald Does Dusty (a homage to her younger brother Donald, who had died of Aids in 1992), played at Summerhall during the Edinburgh fringe in 2015. The following year, shortly before becoming ill, she presented a talk for TED (the Technologym Entertainment and Design network) on performances of gender.
Diane is survived by her daughter, Martina, with Marcel Meijer, whom she married in 1983 but lived apart from after 1992, and by a brother, David.
Diane Torr, artist and gender activist, born 10 November 1948; died 31 May 2017
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10. Mark Berghash, Charles Clough, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, FF Alumns, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY, opening July 14
50 in 50: FIFTY WORKS FOR FIFTY YEARS
New exhibition is part of year-long series of projects that celebrate the Burchfield Penney’s 50th anniversary, highlighting outstanding acquisitions to its growing collection
On View Friday, July 14 – Sunday, September 24
Significant new acquisitions from around the country generously donated by artists and private collectors to the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State will be featured in an exhibition of new works to mark its 50th Anniversary. The 50 in 50: Fifty Works for Fifty years exhibition will commemorate the institution’s growth that further diversifies its growing collection.
“We launched this initiative with the strategic vision to acquire 50 major works of excellence that would serve the community in years to come,” said Anthony Bannon, Ph.D. “We surpassed our goal with 62 acquisitions, thanks to the generosity of artists, collectors, gallerists, and The Center’s patrons. Each will build our collection in meaningful ways.” The exhibition will also celebrate Bannon’s final achievement as executive director and his last five years with The Center. He had previously served as it second director from 1985-1996.
The vibrant community of artists represent a broad spectrum of ages, backgrounds, styles and mediums. The 50 in 50 collection ranges from 1849 – 2017. It touches on every decade from 1890 to now. “Among the incredible artists who understand the significance of the Burchfield Penney and what it does for artists and culture are Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman and a score of other emerging talent and those that have gone elsewhere-from California to Vermont,” said Scott Propeack, associate director and chief curator. “Like the Burchfield Penney, 50 in 50 showcases work in every medium-sculpture, craft art, photography and painting- some of everything that we stand for and the versatile bandwidth in which we participate in.”
With the work of Charles E. Burchfield alone, five collectors charitably stepped forward with donations. Acquisitions also include gifts from the estates of Stan and Judy Lipsey collection and Annette Cravens, Artists showcased in the exhibition include:
Peter A. Arvidson (b. 1962)
Brendan Bannon (b. 1970)
Patricia Layman Bazelon (1933-1995)
Howard D. Beach (1867-1954)
Mark W. Berghash (b. 1935)
Diane Bertolo (b. 1953)
Harvey Breverman (b. 1934)
Linda Brooks (b. 1951)
Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967)
Letterio Calapai (American, 1902-1993)
Ellen Carey (b. 1952)
Rosemarie Castoro (1939-2015)
Charles Clough (b. 1951)
Virginia Cuthbert (1908-2001)
Ani DiFranco (b. 1970)
Seymour Drumlevitch (1923-1989)
Nancy Dwyer (b. 1954)
Evans & Powelson [Oliver B. Evans & B. F. Powelson]
Glidden Pottery, designed by Fong Chow, Alfred, NY (b. 1923)
Bonnie Gordon (b. 1941)
Harriet Greif (1924-1988)
John M. Hanford
Duayne Hatchett (b. 1925)
Wayne Higby (b. 1943)
Bryan Hopkins (b. 1967)
Sandor L. Landeau (1864-1924)
Alexander O. Levy (1881-1947)
Harvey K. Littleton (1922-2013)
Robert Longo (b. 1953)
William C. Maggio (b. 1939)
Dennis Maher (b. 1976)
Mark Maio (b. 1955)
Roy M. Mason (1886-1972)
Franc Root McCreery (1908-1957)
Roberto N. Muffoletto (b. 1947)
Joseph Orffeo (1926-2013)
James G. Pappas (b. 1937)
John Pfahl (b. 1939)
Joseph Piccillo (b. 1937) 3 works
Walter A. Prochownik (1923-2000)
Ann Rhoney (b. 1953)
Ann Rosen (b. 1948)
Kathi Roussel (b. 1959)
Joseph Scheer (b. 1958)
David Schirm (b. 1945)
Richard Seehausen (b. 1951)
Cindy Sherman (b. 1954)
Claire Shuttleworth (1867-1930)
Peter Sowiski (b. 1949)
Peter D. Stephens (b. 1958)
Jacqueline Tarry (b. 1963)
Michael E. Taylor (b. 1944)
Andrew Topolski (1952-2008)
Victor Trabucco (b.1949)
Anne Turyn (b. 1954)
Martha Visser’t Hooft (1906-1994)
“The exhibition expands The Center’s representations by touching the achievements of important cultural centers from Hallwalls, CEPA, Art Institute of Buffalo, The Albright Art Schools and schools of higher learning in Western New York. It traces the leadership work by photo-pictorialists in Buffalo and the Roycroft Movement in East Aurora. Art in craft media is represented, as is important book illustrations, suites and portfolios,” said Bannon. “The second oldest extant daguerreotype is a treasure included along with the little known paintings by a renowned singer, songwriter and poet who shapes culture today. Artists working from abroad along with artists who are dedicated to remaining in Western New York provide the impact of diverse approaches to understanding, as does the exhibition seek out diversity in many other ways. Frankly, we learned a great deal from this group of creators and we are delighted to be able to share these generously presented works.”
About the Burchfield Penney Art Center
Established in 1966 on the campus of SUNY Buffalo State, the Burchfield Penney Art Center is dedicated to the art and vision of renowned American watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967) and the distinguished artists of Western New York State.
The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. In 2008, the Burchfield Penney expanded from its location in Rockwell Hall to a new $36 million freestanding facility in the heart of Buffalo’s Museum District. Designed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, Architects, the museum includes more than 84,000 square feet dedicated primarily to galleries, as well as education and program space and an outdoor year-round space for three screen video and sound.
It is home to the world’s largest collection of artwork, documentary archives, and ephemera by Burchfield and a collection of more than 8,000 works by more than 1,000 artists. Its lead collections include photographers Milton Rogovin, Marion Faller, Clara Sipprell, David Moog, sculptor Charles Carey Rumsey, film artists Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, intermedia work and archives by Robert Longo, and archives and objects about Artpark, Roycroft movement and the Rehn Gallery in New York City.
The Burchfield Penney was the first LEED certified art museum in New York State and was featured by travel editors of the New York Times as one of the “44 Places to Go in 2009.” For more information go to, www.burchfieldpenney.org
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11. Nao Bustamante, FF Alumn, at Ballroom Marfa, TX, opening Aug. 25
Tierra. Sangre. Oro.
August 25, 2017-March 18, 2018
Opening: August 25, 6-9pm
Ballroom Marfa
108 East San Antonio Street
Marfa, TX 79843
United States
ballroommarfa.org
Rafa Esparza with Carmen Argote, Nao Bustamante, Beatriz Cortez, Timo Fahler, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Star Montana
Ballroom Marfa is pleased to announce Tierra. Sangre. Oro., an exhibition envisioned by artist Rafa Esparza. The program will include new installation, performance, and sculptural work from Esparza alongside collaborations and contributions from artists Carmen Argote, Nao Bustamante, Beatriz Cortez, Timo Fahler, Eamon Ore-Giron, and Star Montana.
Esparza’s work manifests primarily through performance and sculpture, in a territory where the two mediums combine and hybridize. The artist uses adobe brick-building as a process-centered site for personal, cultural, ecological, and political investigation.
In residence in Marfa from June through August, Esparza will produce new work and conceive of a site-specific installation that is particular to the landscape and cultural context of the Big Bend region and northern Mexico, where adobe building is prevalent.
For this project Esparza will transform Ballroom’s architecture using the adobe bricks that are central to his work. While making these interventions, the artist will explore, in his words, “the visibility of Brown people in Marfa.” Esparza will work with his father, who taught the artist how to make adobe, as well as with people from his community and local adobe craftsmen to produce bricks and install the project.
Esparza’s adobe architecture provides the ground for presentations by the artists he has invited to join him in Marfa as he “expands the idea of a Brown laboratory.” New and existing work will be presented amidst structural additions to Ballroom’s facade, galleries, and courtyard, creating spaces for the artist’s “laboratories for dialoguing, thinking, working and making together with my peers.”
Esparza addresses and excavates the history of colonialism; labor and economic value scales; queer culture and masculinity; as well as personal and familial legacy. He sets traditional materials, inherited processes, and ephemeral choreographies up against institutional structures and the historical narratives of Western sculpture, land art, and performance. The exhibition is a continuation of Ballroom Marfa’s mission to commission internationally-relevant artworks and performances that respond to and engage with our community and environment.
Tierra. Sangre. Oro. is organized by Ballroom Marfa’s curator and interim director, Laura Copelin.
For more information on this program, please contact press@ballroommarfa.org.
The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Moody Foundation; Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; Jeff Fort and Kristina Van Dyke; Adam and Melony Lewis; Ballroom Marfa Board of Trustees and Ballroom Marfa members.
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12. Agnes Denes at Documenta, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece, thru July 16
Agnes Denes’s monumental scupture, The Living Pyramid, composed of wood, metal, and several tons of earth, grasses, and wildflowers, will grow and evolve throughout documenta 14 in Kassel. Limited edition books, a major work on paper, and a digital video projection by the artist will also be exhibited in Kassel at the Palais Bellevue. A selection of Denes’s works on paper and mylar from the 1970s and 1980s will remain on view in documenta 14 at the Athens School of Fine Arts through July 16, 2017
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13. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Dolceacqua Arte Contemporanea, Italy, opening July 22
THREE SUN SLIDES and three brushfires
22 July – 6 August 2017
Friday – Saturday 15:00 – 18:00 and by app.
Dolceacqua Arte Contemporanea (DAC)
Strada di Monte Abelio
13035 Dolceacqua (Imperia) Italy
tel: +39.327.1338828 // +33.(0)6.6620.7261
dac.dolceacqua@gmail.coms
opens Saturday 22 July from h15:00
inaugurazione sabato 22 luglio dalle h15:00
Three long and thick sheets of plywood extend from the edge of the windowsills deep inside the room. They are painted in shiny yellow enamel. Underneath, they are each painted with a matte color, blue, red, green (the colors of the proscenium of Hermetic theatre before Shakespeare). A small triangle is cut off from the bottom of each sheet, turned over and glued in reverse above the gap of its removal. On the opposite wall there are three digital photos printed on heavy cotton paper. The image is of brushfires. A triangle is cut from the bottom of each and relocated up near the top of the image. The things in the room and the room itself change endlessly in the shifting light.
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14. Susan Fleminger, FF Alumn, at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, opening July 6, and more
SMALL WORKS
Trestle Gallery
Curator, Bill Carroll
July 6-27
Reception: July 6, 7-9pm
Trestle Gallery
850 Third Ave. ( 30-31 Street)
Sunset Park, Brooklyn
( R or N train to 36 Street)
and
BROOKLYN
on the Jersey Shore
July 28- August 11, 2017
Artists Talk: Saturday, July 29, 3:30-5pm
Reception: Saturday, July 29, 5-7pm
Long Beach Island Foundation for the Arts and Sciences
120 Long Beach Blvd , Loveladies, New Jersey
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
