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Newsgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.com
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Volume 3, no. 11 (June 3, 2002)
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Previous Issue:
http://www.geocities.com/newsgrist/newsgrist3-10.html
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* Do It! an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
- *Quote* a nontrivial relationship machine
- *Url/s* -]
- *Blog of Note* bgirl tells it like it is
- *All's Fair* so many art fairs
- *Bit By the Bug* Mirapaul on the Viral Museum
- *String Theory* Daniel Pinchbeck's homage to his father
- *Documenting Documenta* excerpts + links to coverage
- *Book Grist* Invisible Colors Launches at Printed Matter
- *Classified* artist seeks studio!
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*Splash*
Do It!
an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
and hosted on e-flux.com
see splash page: http://newsgrist.com
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*Quote/s*
"This Manifesta is a nontrivial relationship machine. Many give
it input, but nobody knows what the output will be. The machine
produces an open, networked field of art, a terrain of rapproche-
ment and examination. Video, performance, photography,
assemblage, installation: What is shown here is art after the
disintegration of all genres and borders. Art products from
the present day's conveyor belt – medial, networked, young."
Thomas Wagner, "A Nontrivial Relationship Machine," review of
Manifesta 4 in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 28, 2002
http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/archive.asp?doc={7ED658BA-48BA-4B5A-B3AF-AC757F02BDF7}
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*Url/s*
1.
Mez:
-]
http://www.markszine.com/301/mez/mind.htm
…………………………………………………………………..
2.
Chrysanne Stathacos: An interactive re-mix for web of "Invisible
Colors," by Takuji of KOGO*Candy Factory, Tokyo, Japan:
[Click on a face to scroll thru images]
http://www.trans.artnet.or.jp/%7Etransart/chrysanne/index.html
{see *Book Grist* below for launch of Invisible Colors
at Printed Matter on June 4th}
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*Blog of Note*
http://bgirl.net :
May 23, 2002: http://bgirl.net/archives/2002_05.shtml
So, here are some pictures of David Blaine standing on a pole
in Bryant Park.
[…images…]
Then he jumped off into a pile of cardboard boxes, blah blah
blah, blah.
Why cardboard boxes? Why not pointy sticks? Or pillows? Some
pudding, maybe? Something to make this a little *less* boring?
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*All's Fair*
Artnet News, 5/28/02
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews/artnetnews5-28-02.asp?C=1
ART 33 BASEL BLOOMS IN JUNE
The 33rd edition of the Basel art fair, otherwise known as Art 33
Basel, opens in the central exhibition halls of the Swiss city, June
12-17, 2002, boasting works by over 1,000 artists presented by
268 dealers (selected from a record number of some 900
applications, according to fair organizers). Both a huge
contemporary art market and an art-world family reunion
(according to Art Basel director Samuel Keller), the fair
anticipates about 50,000 visitors in its short six-day run. […]
AND DON'T FORGET LISTE 02
The Basel art fair is so successful that it has spawned a smaller
fair specializing in still newer art. Liste 02 is the seventh
installment of the self-described "young art fair," slated to open in
Basel, June 11-16, 2002, at the Wartek Brewery building. Liste
restricts itself to galleries younger than five years and artists
under 40 years of age. Every young gallery wants to be part of
the Liste," said director Peter Bluer. U.S. participants are
China Art Objects and Goldmann Tevis from L.A., Andrew
Kreps, Lombard-Freid, and Ten in One from New York, and
Parlour Projects from Brooklyn.
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*Bit By the Bug*
Crashing PC's in Frankfurt, the Art World's New Bad Boys
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes | CULTURE May 30, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/technology/circuits/30GEE5.html
Spread the word. A museum exhibition devoted to computer
viruses opened last week at the Museum of Applied Arts in
Frankfurt. But for visitors to the "I Love You" exhibition, which
takes its name from the virus that zapped countless data files in
2000, the danger level is low. The only wild viruses being
demonstrated are on a computer that is not online. Visitors can
activate them and crash the computer. "It's like a virus mantra,"
said Franziska Nori, director of the museum's digital-culture
department. "We constantly reboot, reboot, reboot."
The exhibition, which has a Web site at http://digitalcraft.org
traces the 30-year evolution of viruses from computer-lab pastime
to global scourge. Interactive displays describe hundreds of viruses
and show the outcome of choice examples. But because the
museum focuses on the applied arts, the exhibition portrays virus
writing as a kind of craft whose practitioners aim to shape code
into an elegantly concise, dramatically effective form. Ms. Nori
said that programmers dismiss the crudely coded Love bug despite
its wide impact. More to her taste, she said, is the Cascade virus
from the early 90's, which caused a document's letters to tumble
to the bottom of the screen. She compared it to a poem by
Apollinaire in which the words form a raindrop on the page. The
exhibition is sponsored by Symantec, the antivirus software maker.
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*String Theory*
PRINCE AT GREENE
Daniel Pinchbeck on Peter Pinchbeck
Art Forum, *Slant* : June Issue
http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id(95
WHEN MY FATHER DIED, in September 2000, he left behind
hundreds of paintings and sculptures in his rent-controlled loft on
Greene Street. The work ranges from severe wooden constructions
made in the 1960s to woozy zigzags crafted out of plaster, from
icon-size images to rolled-up canvases of vast dimensions. My
father's art went ignored, essentially unseen during his lifetime.
There were no career retrospectives, no solo museum shows, no
fanfare. His artist friends were his only audience.
In the aftermath of his life, I find myself compelled to fight his
battle for him: I think that my father's art is late-breaking news
from the last century. The work is probing and profound, abject
and obstinate, luminous and eerie, eccentric yet true to its own
internal logic. It revels in metaphysical doubt; it radiates the
belief of its maker.
Is it simply too painful for me to relinquish his belief, to imagine
that all of that effort was wasted? Or, to put a more positive spin
on it, to accept that for my father the process was its own reward?
The universe as a vast garbage heap of matter, a constant
recycling of elements, an indifference to their use or purpose
(the universe as a pile of junk).
– Peter Pinchbeck, notebook entry, 1995
My family moved to SoHo in 1968, when I was two. My father,
Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract artist who worked on an
enormous scale, commensurate with his ambition. My mother,
Joyce Johnson, was a book editor and novelist. SoHo was a failing
commercial district of cheap lofts. We were part of a wave of
artists moving into the area.
During the day, trucks rattled down the crumbling paving stones of
the old streets. Laborers yelled to one another as they hauled crates
from the trucks onto concrete landings. In the windows of small
factories, steel cutters spun, shooting out sparks.
At night the streets fell silent. Time seemed to stop. Occasionally
an alley cat screeched, or the footsteps of a lone passerby echoed
against the buildings. When I walked with my parents at night, the
stillness pressed down on us. Ghosts appeared to hover above the
old streets. It is bizarre to recall now, but SoHo in my early
childhood was marked by a strange emptiness.
The loft was an enormous cavern. Gridded windows at each
end let in a dull gray light. In those days my father made large
wooden constructions and painted colored rectangles that floated
on vast sheets of stretched canvas. Most of the space was used for
his studio. For my mother and me he built bedrooms out of
wooden beams and Sheetrock and installed bathroom fixtures and
a water heater.
When you are a child, everything belongs to a process that is both
mysterious and essential. I didn't separate the work my father did
on his paintings from the world of the streets, the rattling trucks
and rag bales, the laborers and spinning machines. I assumed my
father's paintings were necessary to the running of the entire
system. I think I believed that most fathers spent their nights and
days like he did, organizing colored shapes on enormous surfaces.
To my child's mind, his constant activity seemed to have a vital
connection to the city's mechanical processes. It was as if he were
trying to distill some totemic essence from that confused tangle of
trucks and streets and machines.
After my parents split up in 1971-their marriage destroyed by a
lethal combination of the sexual revolution, Max's Kansas City,
and my father's bad behavior-I would visit him every few weeks.
He tore down the walls that created the illusion of a domestic
interior to liberate the space. My bed was a small army cot set up
in a corner of the studio. I slept surrounded by his huge icons,
breathing in the sweet odors of turpentine and oil.
The neighborhood around us transformed like a slowly developing
photograph. The factories and loading platforms vanished one by
one. Galleries and restaurants and boutiques proliferated like new
life-forms escaped from some laboratory experiment. Once SoHo
was declared chic, the rich descended on the area. They bought
out the lofts that the artists vacated or were forced to leave. "The
zombies," my father called them.
Possessed of a rare social generosity, my father was like an
unappointed mayor of the old SoHo. He knew hundreds of people
in the neighborhood, all the original settlers, and he would often be
late to meet me as he stopped to hail each person cheerfully, then
listen to their sagas. In my twenties, when I passed through SoHo
late at night after some party, I would detour by his block to see
the light shining in his window. I would feel oddly secure in the
thought that he was up in his loft working, revolving like a planet
through his self-created cosmology of painted shapes and plaster
structures. He kept working in his loft until his death, of heart
failure, at the age of sixty-eight.
the need to believe
–handwritten note found on Peter
Pinchbeck's desk after his death.
My father did not like to talk about his past; therefore I know little
about it. He was born on December 9, 1931, in the seaside resort
of Brighton in southern England. His father, Gerald Pinchbeck, an
Irish Catholic pub keeper, left his mother when Peter was small,
vanishing forever from his life. We are rumored to descend from a
line of alchemists and horologists. In the eighteenth century
Christopher Pinchbeck, an English alchemist and clockmaker,
invented pinchbeck, an alloy of copper and zinc that was used as
false gold. In the nineteenth century the word pinchbeck came to
mean "anything false or spurious."
My father was trapped in London during the Blitz-he remember-
ed emerging from the cellar after an air raid to see that the house
across the street had been blown to bits. "After the war, everything
seemed gray. It was like all the color had been drained out of the
world," he once said. He saw an exhibit of van Gogh's paintings,
then works by the Abstract Expressionists, at the Tate Gallery. Van
Gogh inspired him to become an artist. He told me he wanted to
put color back into the world. Lacking connections, he went to
Paris, only to find that the School of Paris was dead. In the
galleries he saw shows of the New York School and decided to
move to New York.
He arrived in New York in 1960 to discover that the heyday of
Abstract Expressionism was over. He worked as an orange-juice
vendor in the Fourteenth Street subway, then as a carpenter. He
found a cheap loft on the run-down Bowery. In early photographs
he looks intent, handsome, gaunt, his work shirts buttoned to the
top button (he couldn't afford to heat his studio). His sculpture
revealed the influence of the Russian Constructivists and the
Abstract Expressionists. He found a group of artists who shared
his concerns showing at Tenth Street galleries.
His best exhibitions came in the 1960s, when he was associated
with the Minimalists. In 1966 he showed wooden constructions in
the "Primary Structures" exhibit at the Jewish Museum curated by
Kynaston McShine, which helped launch Minimalism. "I suspect
that Pinchbeck's work will shortly become known: it seems hard to
believe that work of this authority and rectitude will go undiscov-
ered for long," noted a critic in the magazine Art International in
1968. In 1971 his one-person show at Paley & Lowe Gallery
featured wooden boards of yellow, blue, and black, extending into
space "with the equivalence of a gesture or perhaps a thought," as
Carter Ratcliff wrote in Art News.
During the 1970s he painted rectangles floating in colored fields.
Despite his lack of a gallery he regularly painted works of
outrageous size: fifteen feet or longer. The paintings were
shown in some group exhibitions and in Barbara Rose's
"American Painting, the Eighties" (1979), at NYU's Grey Art
Gallery. Most of them were never shown at all.
The art world boomed and busted and then moved to Chelsea.
New generations of artists rose to the top of the heap. My father
kept working in his loft. He moved from rigid rectangles to
biomorphic squiggles, flying cigar shapes, shapes that smashed
into and interpenetrated one another. He stacked old paintings
against the walls. Sculptures made from cardboard, wood, and
plaster curled around each other on the floor-bulbous columns
and amoebic entities. Art supplies rested on long tables: power
saws and staple guns, plaster and chicken wire, tubes of paint
piled into cigar boxes. His living area consisted of a desk and a
bed in a corner surrounded by paintings-little canvases of
spinning shapes watching over him like spirit guardians.
He never lost faith in his art. He rarely lost his good cheer. Despite
his lack of success, he knew he had achieved a lot. He had come to
New York City alone, knowing no one, with nothing to his name,
and he had created himself. Painting infused his life with purpose.
He eked out a living, teaching a day or two a week at Manhattan
Community College, renting out part of the studio to a painter
friend. Living in a huge loft in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods
in the world, he was always poor, his clothes baggy, his jackets
smelling of mothballs. Today I remain amazed as well as shocked
by his purity, his indomitable effort in the face of such total
indifference.
Only the rich will survive.
-handwritten note found on Peter
Pinchbeck's desk after his death.
Over the years, I sometimes tried to imagine one moment in my
future: the moment after my father's death, when I would confront
forty years of his obstinate activity-his forceful bid for
immortality-my bewildering patrimony. What would I do with it
all? I grasped toward this crisis and then pulled back. I was left
with a blank, a mental short-out like a blown fuse.
In the last few years of his life I also felt put off, even aggrieved,
by the titanic gesture, the seemingly pointless yet relentless activity
of his incessant artmaking. His loft felt increasingly claustrophobic,
crowded with paintings and papers. Struggling for my own
survival in New York-not just a changed city, more like a
different dimension of reality from the one my parents knew in the
1960s-I tried to distance myself from his doomed dedication.
Whenever I stopped to look at the paintings, I felt I was wearing a
different lens over each eye-one brought the work too close, the
other left it too distant, so that the combined effect was a
vertiginous loss of perspective. His art had the eerie power of a
fully realized obsession. It was a self-constructed universe, a raw
cosmology of forms and totems.
He was fascinated by physics and philosophy. He read constantly–
Blanchot, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche. Books on black holes
and superstrings and chaos theory. His late works can be seen as
poetic images of quantum weirdness, molecular transformations,
the space-curving force of gravitational fields. He was seeking
some primal stratum of shape and structure suggesting planets
and atomic orbits, archaic tombs and menhirs, internal organs and
Freudian protrusions.
While the early works were rigidly ordered and flatly painted, his
later paintings include passages that break out, scumbled and
scratched surface areas that to me suggest cosmic chaos, night-lit
abysses, fever dreams, the existential confinement of the self in its
prison tower. They allow for awkwardness and grace, radiance and
revelation, mystical hope as well as mute horror. They remind me
of Henry Miller in books like Black Spring, riffing for pages on
any subject-on a walk he took as a child, on a long-lost friend, or
a florid metaphysical conceit. Miller's passages skate out toward
the edge of collapse with seemingly careless abandon, then circle
back to snare his meaning with precision. Scuffed, bohemian,
almost abject yet oddly redemptive, my father's late paintings have
that quality of a crisis confronted, a disaster averted-but just
barely.
As a critic who wrote about art for magazines like Art & Antiques
and Harper's Bazaar, I understood the forces that had condemned
him to internal exile in the art world. I saw how the art system fed
on new talent and youth-older artists who were not enshrined had
to be pushed aside to make way for the next generation. Sometimes
I see the work he left behind as an elegy to painting itself-a
farewell to the dream of heroic abstraction. And sometimes I think
that no dream is ever lost.
A blade of grass, the suspended flight of a hummingbird.
We are travelers in a land where signs elude us, and every-
thing we think or do only magnifies our sense of loss.
-Peter Pinchbeck, notebook entry, 1995
Unable to deal with his career during his life, he left the value of
his work entirely for me to define-as I always suspected he would.
It is up to me to find a place for the work. Or I can walk away, let
the work sink into the void, that vast "garbage heap" of all that is
unknown and forgotten-that gaping maw into which all celebrat-
ed enterprises eventually follow, albeit at a somewhat slower pace.
I feel myself being sucked toward the vortex of his project-his
unrecognized gift and enormous drive, his helplessness. Some of
the paintings even resemble naked beings crying for attention. It is
like a dangerous gravitational pull tugging me away from my own
work.
There is a pinchbeck quality to the whole endeavor: However
I present his work now, in his absence, is a bit of a lie-like all
texts, this essay is itself full of secret hedges, misperceptions
recalibrated as fact. It is a deeply heartfelt yet spurious exercise.
Some of our ancestors were, apparently, alchemists, and I am
aware that to make of his career something he failed to make in
his life requires a kind of alchemy. It requires storytelling, and
storytelling, like painting, is an attempt to transmute the raw stuff
of life into precious matter. With this task, whatever I do, I become
the father of my helpless father.
He once told me an anecdote about an important critic. This is
decades ago now. The critic was curating an exhibition of large
sculpture. She made an appointment to see a piece he had finished.
But the time came and she called to say she couldn't make it. He
was forced to put the sculpture out on the concrete landing. He
called a garbage disposal service to take it away. From his fire
escape he watched the men put the piece in the back of the truck.
He saw the sculpture go down the street and out of sight. His
whole career was stories like that one, repeated ad infinitum: so
many slights, so many stings.
He never had his moment. In a profound and internal process, he
made all the rejections fuel his belief. He continued to work
without compromise for nearly forty years. Once, a few years
before he died, I asked him if he would accept his situation again:
If he could go back in time and alter his style, in exchange for
exhibitions and attention, would he do it?
No, my father said. Looking back, he would change nothing. In
the end I think he was a happy man.
{ Daniel Pinchbeck is a New York-based writer. }
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*Documenting Documenta*
{an excerpt and links to full articles from the NYTimes}
His Really Big Show, By ADAM SHATZ
NYTimes | MAGAZINE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/magazine/02OKWUI.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
On a cool, drizzly spring evening, Okwui Enwezor is sitting in La
Frasca, an intimate Italian restaurant in Kassel, Germany. People at
neighboring tables, mostly fair-skinned, stare at him as if he were a
matinee idol. Enwezor, a tall, long-limbed Nigerian who moves
with balletic grace, takes this in stride, nonchalantly ordering a
bottle of Champagne. He sticks out here, and not just because he is
the best-dressed man in a small provincial city. Kassel is the home
of Documenta, the most prestigious exhibition of contemporary art
in Europe and perhaps the world, and Enwezor, the show's artistic
director this year, has become one of the town's most famous
residents. ''The Germans are very inward-looking,'' he says, when
I remark upon the startling effect he has on the room. He gazes
around him at the sea of blond hair. ''You can't really find a
cosmopolitan city in Germany, not even Berlin.''
Enwezor is one of the most influential and controversial curators
on the international art scene, but he stumbled into his profession
virtually by accident. He has no background in art history and has
never held a full-time museum job. He was born 38 years ago in a
small city in Nigeria, and his only degree is a B.A. in political
science from a college in New Jersey. While living in Brooklyn,
he made a name for himself as a poet and supported himself as a
waiter and security guard. It wasn't until the mid-90's, after he
started up a hip African arts magazine, that museums began asking
him to curate shows. Enwezor comes, in short, from a very
different place, geographically and intellectually, than most of his
curatorial peers. […]
……………….
See Also:
The Art of The New, The Art of the Deal, by Alan Riding
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/arts/design/02RIDI.html
[…]Under Mr. Enwezor, Documenta has sought to stimulate
reflection on art, politics and society across the world through
four "platforms," a kind of town meeting for people interested
in art, held over the past 18 months in Europe, India, the
Caribbean and Africa. The fifth "platform" is the exhibition
itself, which will be accompanied by concerts, performances,
workshops, lectures and movies. In one sense, then, Documenta 11
is simply mirroring the existing globalization of contemporary art.
But for art professionals like Mr. Konig, Mr. Celant, Mr.
Szeemann, Mr. Martin, Ms. David and many others who will be in
Kassel next weekend, it is evidence that Documenta is still relevant.
After all, there is no other reason to be there.[…]
…………….
What Documenta Meant to Them, by Steven Henry Madoff
[Eleven artists recall past shows]
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/02/arts/design/X02MADO.html
JOSEPH KOSUTH: "[…] I remember beginning a love affair with
Cindy Sherman at Documenta in the early 80's, and it was like
starting a relationship onstage. The huge amount of press coverage,
the TV interviews. It's psychically amazing, but it tests your
character to have to account not only for what you do in the studio
but for what your work means in the world. Documenta, more than
any show other than the Venice Biennale, forces that on you. […]"
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*Book Grist*
Invisible Colors by Chrysanne Stathacos at Printed Matter, Inc.
Reception, June 4, 2002, 5 to 7 PM
Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to host a reception in honor of
Chrysanne Stathacos' new book Invisible Colors. The reception
will take place on Thursday, June 4th, from 5 to 7 PM at Printed
Matter, Inc., located at 535 West 22nd Street, between 10th and
11th Avenues.
Invisible Colors is the first book published by Nature Morte
Books, the publishing venture of Nature Morte New Delhi, India,
and the brainchild of artist gallerist Peter Nagy.
The book presents 40 full-page color photographic portraits by
Chrysanne Stathacos of Sadhus by the Ganges, Tibetan refugees in
Dharamsala, Krishna devotees from Vrindavan, Shinto dancers
from Japan, Sikhs from Long Island, and so on. All of the
photographs are taken with an "aura camera," a biofeedback
invention used at psychic fairs to record the aura of the sitter. The
book is a result of three years of travel, photographing in bead
stalls in Rishikesh, temples in Kyoto, and wherever else the artist
was able to set up the awkward apparatus, she traveled with to
make theseunique portraits. The photographs are organized by the
color of the sitter's aura, moving through the rainbow from the
front of the book to the back.
A short essay by Peter Nagy introduces the book. Each copy
comes with a bookmark designed by the artist. The book, which
was printed in India, retails for $10.
Chrysanne Stathacos is a New York artist. Her garden installation
"Refuge: a Wish Garden," commissioned for the exhibition
"Landesgartenschau," is currently on view in Grossenhain,
Germany, as part of a massive garden exhibition curated by Heike
Strelow. Her previous book, 1000+ Wishes from The Wish
Machine project will be also available at the launch.
An interactive re-mix for web of Invisible Colors, by Takuji
of KOGO*Candy Factory, Tokyo, Japan can be found at
http://www.trans.artnet.or.jp/%7Etransart/chrysanne/index.html
[Click on a face to scroll thru images]
For additional information about the event, sales, or Invisible
Colors please contact David Platzker, Director, Printed Matter
at (212) 925-0325. http://www.printedmatter.org
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*Classified*
I need a new studio by August 1!
I would love to stay under one dollar a square foot and within a
reasonable distance from my home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn,
NY. But I will consider anything. If you know of something or
have any great ideas, please let me know.
Thanks and have a great summer,
Charles Goldman
718.622.3047 [email protected]
============================
Newsgrist - where spin is art
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