Necrophilia at Reena Spaulings

I just went to a performance of Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether and Ei Arakawa at the uber uber hip downtown gallery reena spaulings. It was so dusty. Dusty and dead. Granted, the name of koether/gordon’s show was “dead again”- a low budget and negative-aesthetic quasi-consideration of the death of painting, punk, and performance. In Europe I recall lots of graffiti that said “Punk is Not Dead” except sometimes the english was funny in places like Prague so it said “Punk is Not Death”! Or is it?
According to these artists it is I guess. Live concert recordings of Dan Graham’s 1970s punk band blasted and people rolled around on a piece of pink carpet and staged self-conscious “punk”esque actions, like knocking into a chair and falling down “drunk”. Abject materials abound in this anti-market commercial gallery, and the performance extended that- plywood, plastsic sheeting, staples, contact-improv, black and brown thrift store costumes, and DON’T wash your hair or else you are the MAN.

Panty Painting

Have assistants make a very large canvas.

Have assistants clip out images from popular magazines and porn that depict women’s underwear.

Create collage with clippings.

Have assistants paint an exact copy of the collage onto canvas.

Fire assistants.

1960s Sound Art

Ingest a lot of drugs.
No, more than that– a LOT.

Pick up musical instruments.
Make sounds.
Record.
Make sure the recording ends up in the hands of an academic somewhere.
Wait for 30 years to pass, get famous.

Recipe for Contemporary Art #1

Ingredients:

Cardboard, Paper or other flat, degradable material

Glue or adhesives

Cutting Tools

Diagram of a car

1) Find a cool car

2) Make an exact copy of it using a material that could not be used in an actual car

3) State that your car challenges spectators to be observers rather than drivers.  Also explain that you are articulating the intangible memory of “car.”

Sharjah Biennial- the inconvenient truth

Just as the UAE prepares to become the hypertrophic cultural capital of the middle east,
the 8th Sharjah Biennial kicks off this month, around the theme of “Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change.” The curatorial statement, studded with the usual gloom and doom about our fucked-up world and wondering if perhaps, maybe, art can create positive change, struggles self-consciously about what the hell an exhibit about ecology is doing in a former desert turned into a golf course by oil profits. Contemporary art, ever the status symbol for the filthy rich, ever the political placebo for freedom. Oh, and “no Israelis allowed.”

Cohan and Leslie Gallery’s press release of Tim Lee: shame!

The following is a press release by Cohan and Leslie gallery about Tim Lee’s solo show. Afterwards is our response:

Tim operates within the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment in order to offer a complex inquiry into the connection between highly charged socio-political movements and their transformative impact on the artistic avant-garde. With sources ranging from Alexander Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Bruce Nauman and Public Enemy, the artist combines the templates of varying artistic entities into one cohesive body of work – including video, photography, sculpture and painting – in order to glean a greater (or askance) knowledge of each.

In Party For Your Right To Fight, Public Enemy, 1988, the artist simultaneously re-visits the conventions of early video art as practiced by Bruce Nauman in the late sixties, and Public Enemy’s landmark hip-hop album “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” from 1988. Lee’s two-channel video installation features the artist’s head reciting the rap lyrics of Public Enemy while flipped upside-down and spinning in both clockwise and counter-clockwise directions as the camera records the performance in a stationary position. By actively re-engaging the strategies of one artist while immersed in the vicissitudes of another, the combination of two autonomies – classical conceptual art and radical black empowerment – flattens both philosophies in order to gain a deeper understanding of each. Accompanying the video is a large-scale two-sided mirror that features the title of the song. With the text appearing in transparent type within the reflective mirror, the entire structure is turned, flipped-over and reversed sideways so that the words appear to be illegible, thereby formally upending the promise of a social revolution.

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art militant’s response:

To the author(s) of the press release for Tim Lee’s second solo exhibition:

I object to your press release. Although I doubt you are trying to be offensive, and are, in fact, simply moving along the well-worn groove of pompous and meaningless promotional art writing, I feel moved to object.
You are just doing your job and I’m sure that you are well rewarded by displaying your ability to “talk the talk.” But please give your audience some respect. We are not all so weak-minded and conformist as to be dazzled by a few hyphens, slashes and parentheses.
If you cannot write about Tim Lee’s work without phrases like “the loose confines of an artistic-social laboratory/studio experiment” or “combines the templates of varying artistic entities,” then I suggest you take a closer look and not worry so much about employing empty phrases whose purpose is to bewilder, whilst conveying your trendy vocabulary and impressive academic pedigree. I have an impressive academic pedigree too, so I can decipher what you’re saying. But do we have to talk in our own language like this? Or can we just talk?
I know what the purpose of a press release is and that it is not an analytical piece of writing, a critique, or an investigation. It is a description, designed to lure a large audience, preferably one that will further the artist’s (and gallerist’s) career. Fine. You don’t need to promise radical revelations (a deepened understanding of flattened philosophies?) or recycle tired sound bytes (ah- so the art world again weeps for the false promise of social revolution). I ask you to cease such irresponsibility. The artist, your audience, and your integrity deserve at least that.

Thank you,

Your Editor at Large