Author: jameswagner

Cory Arcangel Untitled (After Lucier) 2006 Mini-Mac [still from installation]

Cory Arcangel left Oberlin six years ago with a degree in Technology in Music and the Related Arts and his visual art has almost always incorporated disparate musical elements. His current show at Team however would look and sound absolutely right installed inside any one of the city’s more serious schools of music. That is, if any one of these institutions was adventurous enough to encourage and present the kind of vibrant New Media work which could attract new and larger audiences to an endangered art form.
Actually, the piece represented in the image at the top of this post is totally silent, something of an exception in the exhibition which currently fills the gallery on Grand Street. Its subject however is very much the concept of musical performance and its structure relates to the work of one of our most revolutionary composers of “serious” music. Fellow blogger Joshua Johnson explains:

Untitled (After Lucier), 2006, confronts that specific issue [the dilletante’s ignorance of the technical devices of much of today’s art] head-on; Arcangel appropriates the strategy of avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier’s 1970 piece I am Sitting in a Room, in which Lucier continued to re-record a recording of himself reading “I am sitting in a room…” until the recording became an abstract sonic portrait of the space he was recording in. Untitled (After Lucier) examines the implications of compression, by continuously digitally re-compressing a video of the Beatles famous Ed Sullivan appearance. As the video compresses it becomes more and more abstract– a visual representation of the process of compression. Essentially, Arcangel asks us to question how the experience of culture is transformed by the container it is presented in. When a video is uploaded to Youtube it is modified by the technology, and thus takes on the characteristics of the “room” in which the viewer experiences it.

Ah, music to our eyes.

RELATED POST: “Cory Arcangel opens Team’s new SoHo digs”

Peter Corrie Untitled 2006 one of a suite of drawings, some with artist’s frame, from “No Time Swan”, mixed media, various sizes [installation view]

“Dangling Between The Real Thing And The Sign In The Window“, the group exhibition which Barry and I curated this month, continues at Dam, Stuhltrager through November 13. The latest news is that the show now has a dedicated website with images (via flickr) of all the works included and information on all of the artists.
Older news, which should be welcome to adventurous and impecunious art fans but still only familiar to those who have already visited the gallery and looked at the checklist, includes the fact that there are unique pieces available for as little as sixty dollars – “UNKNOWN ARTISTS AT UNHEARD PRICES”

Note: We’ve just added to the site some additional, detailed images of some of the works.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya The Difference Between a Memory, a Portrait, a Resolution parts 1, 2 and 3, three separate digital prints, each 30″ x 40″ [installation view]


Lise Kjaer Untitled, Breathe cutout paper letters, dimensions variable [installation view]

Hey, although I can’t make much of the press release (I think it’s something about giving us leave to complete the artist’s work by making of it what we wish), most of the pieces in this show are pretty striking. “When Fathers Fail” at Daniel Reich is worth a visit even if you’re academically defenseless.
The show has been extended until November 1.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s construction, “554-5251” completely transformed the main gallery space at P.P.O.W. last month. We had first seen her handsome work in March, 2005, when it represented this gallery at ARTROCK.
From the press release:

In her upcoming exhibition at P·P·O·W, Sarah Oppenheimer continues to explore the malleability of the constructed environment. Oppenheimer engages with the problem of ‘mutable architecture’ as explored by the work of architects such as Yona Friedman, Peter Cook/Archigram, and Cedric Price. Rather than create utopian prescribed spaces, Oppenheimer considers the building material as a socially engaged starting point. She begins with the typical 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood and by using CNC routing to bend it, she transforms the once contractor cladding into a stable structural support.

John Shimon & Julie Lindemann Barry (in Ghostly Prince Costume), Ladysmith, Wisconsin 2003 pigment print on canvas (from 8 x 10 transparency) 50″ x40″ [installation view]

Although John Shimon and Julie Lindemann’s show at Sarah Bowen closes tomorrow, I’m sure they’ll be back.
The work is very strong on its own, but what distinguishes these artists’ accomplishment from so many other documentary or pseudo-documentary projects are the substantial clues located in the press release. In the end however it may be the sensitive, multi-media installation itself which reveals the most about what the separate images may only imply.
Excerpt from the press release:

Sarah Bowen Gallery opens the fall season with an exhibit of photographs and projections titled “It Takes One to Know One” by Manitowoc, Wisconsin artists John Shimon and Julie Lindemann. As a collaborative team, their work elegantly captures the flavor of the landscape and the quiet, melancholy realities of American rural and small town life. Their highly stylized photographs simultaneously evaluate and elevate their subjects as portraits of obscure Midwestern denizens, unnervingly comfortable with their small town identity, are rendered in inappropriately substantial platinum.
As photographers, the artists establish a subjective historical view; they become involved in situations, and respond to them. Their early captivation with Depression-era FSA photos, Edward Steichen’s masterful gum prints, anonymous snapshots, and Robert Frank—who gave them the impulse to photograph everything in their path—has led them to a “new timelessness” in contemporary imagery and themes. Prints from large-format negatives rendered in gum-bichromate and platinum-palladium will be shown with tintypes, film shorts and full-color inkjet prints. The installation outlines the artists’ exploitation of and preoccupation with process to unfold an anomalous narrative, swollen with experience.

Shows like this are the best kind of advertisement for the importance of the outer-borough gallery scene and for the fertility of creative communities beyond what we think of as our cultural capitals. Who knew what treasures were hiding in Manitowac or Sheboygan County, Wisconsin? This area in the northeast of the state is the American Heimat for both of my parents’ huge extended German families; although I believe none of them have made a splash or a ripple in the visual arts, maybe I should have stayed in better touch with my 95 first cousins – or at least their progeny.

Timothy Marvel Hull The Mask of Katherine 2006 gouache, graphite, ink and ribbon 15″ x 19″ [installation view]

The world which surrounded the early twentieth-century mystic G.I Gurdjieff is only the starting point for a beautiful multi-media installation by Timothy Marvel Hull at Klaus von Nichtssagend. This wonderful Williamsburg show closes this Sunday, but for those who won’t be able to get to Union Avenue there are some great images on the gallery website.


Timothy Marvel Hull [detail view of installation on north wall]

Scott and Noah

We stopped by the very informal K48 benefit held at John Connelly Presents last night, just in time to catch these two provocateurs blocking some of the hot merchandise lining the walls. Shoulda taken more pix, but another, temperature kind of hot got to me.
Lyon is camped-out, literally, inside a gallery space on Bond Street until October 24. He’s making stuff while we watch; he loves visitors. We haven’t gotten down there yet ourselves, but hope to visit soon.