POST CARD
Ken Solomon Steakhouse Waiters – Made With Tip Money 2006 cut paper 15″ x 20″ [installation view]
Ray Beldner 36 Squares of Cash (after Carl Andre’s 36 Pieces of Zinc, 1967) 2002 sewn U.S. currency, cork and wood squares 72″ x 72″ [large detail of installation]
Schroeder Romero just struck their very cool and very green summer show, “Money Changes Everything”, featuring works on and of paper – of [mostly U.S.] legal tender – by Michael Asente, Ray Beldner, Barton Lidice Benes, Robin Clark, Peggy Diggs, Jed Ela, Stuart Elster, Kim MacConnel, Elizabeth Sisco, David Avalos and Louis Hock, Ken Solomon, Oriane Stender, Mark Wagner and C.K. Wilde.
Author: jameswagner
“butch queen realness with a twist” at John Connelly
New York City Breakers, excerpt from TV show “Graffiti Rock” 1984 video [large detail of still from installation]
Lillian Schwartz Papillons 1973 music by Max Mathews, video [large detail of still from installation]
Anonymous Vogue Balls: Battle Ball Finals (realness with tits performance II) 2004 DVD [large detail of still from installation, itself an excerpt]
Paper Rad Furs Gone Wild 2003 DVD [large detail of still from installation]
I guess we made it just in time. But we didn’t, really. It’s gone as of yesterday, and we only saw a few minutes of the screening. “Butch Queen Realness with a Twist in Pastel Colors”, is described as an ongoing video program curated by Assume Vivid Astro Focus and it was being shown for one short month in the John Connelly Presents gallery annex.
This wonderful program should be installed permanently in theatres accessible to people everywhere in the world. Yes, I think the program would have to change over time, although perhaps it should only be lengthened, even though I understand it’s already four hours long.
Together the four works whose stills are shown above are on the screen less than eleven minutes. I wish we could go back and camp out for a while; After these last few weeks, I’m definitely ready to shut down the outside world.
what do you call it when a nation commits suicide?
Smoke rises from Khiam village after being hit by Israeli air strikes, in southern Lebanon, July 25, 2006
Israel has just killed four UN observers, apparently deliberately, and in doing so may have just dealt itself a fatal blow.
An Israeli bomb has hit a UN observation post on the border between Israel and Lebanon, killing four peacekeepers, a UN official has said.
The victims included observers from Austria, Canada, China and Finland, a senior Lebanese military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to release the information to the media.
The bomb made a direct hit on the building and shelter of the observer post in the town of Khiam near the eastern end of the border with Israel, according to Milos Struger, spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon known as UNIFIL.
Rescue workers were trying to clear the rubble, but Israeli firing “continued even during the rescue operation,” Struger said.
UN secretary-general Kofi Annan has asked Israel to conduct an investigation into the “apparently deliberate targeting” by Israeli defence forces of the UN post.
(from the Associated Press in Beirut, via Guardian Unlimited)
[image and caption from Yahoo!, the photograph of the former UN observer site captured by Karamallah Daher/Reuters]
the most dangerous war
Timothy Buckwalter [title not given] 2006 acrylic ink on paper 8.5″ x 11″
The destruction and invasion of Lebanon is very likely to spell disaster for New York, and for any other people or place rightly or wrongly perceived to be the agent of this “war”.
While it is only the latest consequence of incompetent statecraft in which these two have been joined, the rapidly disintegrating and certainly doomed U.S.-Israeli adventure in the Middle East is clearly the most dangerous in the entire history of their relationship.
Not surprisingly, Washington has already lost support the support of its allies, nations which were once vested unequivically both morally and materially in the defense of the Israeli state. Elsewhere even governments in islamic nations which in the past have been inclined to sit more or less quietly on the sidelines during conflicts in which either the U.S. or Israel has been involved now fear for their own survival. The increasing frustration and anger of their own populations threatens regimes in a virtually continous line stretching across Africa and Asia from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.
Many people who have not accepted our arrogant imperium naturally see opposition to American involvement in their own lands as a necessary crusade for self-respect, if not for cultural, even physical survival. Governments which are unable to adapt to this movement will fall, to be succeeded by regimes our own is unlikely to find quite so manageable.
The most angry members of the opposition are not likely to wait at home.
This morning on the Brian Lehrer Show [although he annoys me so much I can’t usually listen, even lying in bed waiting to wake up] I was impressed by what his guest, Colonel Sam Gardiner had to say about events in Lebanon. Gardiner, who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, predicted that if the fighting were allowed to continue it would mean that governments would fall and the new ones were likely to produce a much larger conflagration. In a brief reference to a war from another world altogether and one which wouldn’t normally come to mind in this context, he described a multi-nation [multi-people, multi-agency?] conflict initiated, not as in World War I where it began with the rulers at the top, but from the bottom up.
Although not all of us will admit it yet, the U.S. is also burdened with a government operating independently of its people. None of us has any real impact on its composition or its policies, but no one expects a revolution here, while Americans lie asleep in front of their TV sets. Those who actually do see and care about what’s happening can only “hope” for the best – for the Seagram Building of course, and for lots of other folks and stuff too.
[image, via a tip from Barry, from Timothy Buckwalter]
“terrorist targets” in Beirut
Beirut residents protested the attacks on Lebanon on Saturday
what are the cartoonists and bloggers afraid of?
Isn’t it strange that our last remaining guardians of truth, the political cartoonists and the two biggie bloggers, have been virtually silent on the biggest news story in the world today?
See Juan Cole if you want enlightenment.
[image from theangryarab, where it is not credited]
every one of us is in charge of the U.S. gulags
Benamar Benatta, in an undated Federal detention facility photograph
This sort of thing will disgrace us all forever.
NEW YORK – An Algerian man believed to be the last domestic* detainee still in custody from a national dragnet after Sept. 11 and who was cleared of links to terrorism in November 2001 [my italics] was set free this week, his lawyer said Friday.
If a nation describes itself as a democracy, just as every citizen shares in the credit for its government’s accomplishments each must be considered complicit in its crimes, both foreign and domestic. We are all prison warders and we are all military commanders.
The awesomeness of this shared responsibility would be terrifying even in time of peace, but today we are altogether incapable of dealing with it: We don’t want to face the fact that there are no civilians in America at this time, that we all look like legitimate targets to the enemies we have accumulated around the world, so let’s just go shopping.
*
a very important qualification, whose reality and significance Americans can no longer escape
[image from washingtonpost.com]
Derek Eller in summer mode
Peter Caine The Patriot 2006 mixed media animatronic sculpture 100″ x 128″ x 124″ [large detail view of installation]
Fritz Welch Props to Rez Fink 2006 wood, paper, cardboard, plaster weld, hoodie tape, graphite, etc. dimensions variable [large detail view of installation]
During most of the summer Derek Eller will be showing a group which leaves plenty of space between the aesthetics of each piece. These sexy pieces cover virtually every medium, and they seem to have little in common but their lack of commonality, and that’s enough for me.
This fine “Summer Group Exhibition” includes D-L Alvarez, Peter Caine, David Dupuis, André Ethier, Andrew Guenther, Chris Hammerlein, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Keith Mayerson, Dominic McGill, Michelle Segre, Alyson Shotz, Fritz Welch and Randy Wray.
There are more images on the gallery site, including a detail of the almost-enigmatic “Patriot”, but as there’s no statement, we’re mostly on our own. [I often like to look at what Barry and I call the “instructions”, especially when I’m totally baffled, but most of the time I can take my art straight up, as nature intended.]
“Flight Plan” at Morgan Lehman
Jenny Laden Airborne 2006 oil on panel 14″ x 22″ [view of installation]
On what was thus far one of the hottest days of the summer, any show with the tag “Flight Plan” would be welcome. The work installed at Morgan Lehman this month doesn’t disappoint the visitor looking for distraction and relief, even if the only real soaring experienced is that of the spirit.
The artists included are Brook Caballero, Dana Carlson, Orly Cogan, Sean Cavanaugh, Kirsten Deirup, Franklin Evans, Philip Knoll, Jenny Laden, Dona Lief, Jeffrey Milstein, Amy Ross, and Paul Villinski.
My capture of Laden‘s painting was pretty successful, but I obviously couldn’t include images of all the pieces here, even those that pleased me the most. Under the circumstances then I suppose it’s a little perverse of me to upload a peek at two works on paper which are not in this show but which were created by an artist who has two other drawings that are.
My image of one of the framed drawings, Franklin Evans‘s “FFnineplayers”, didn’t make the cut mostly because of my technical error with the camera. Like much of the art in this show however his delicate, condensed, heavily-worked and textured paper works must be seen in person to be appreciated. Before we left Barry and I were invited to look at two of his drawings just before they were wrapped for transport to the gallery’s Lakeville, Connecticut location where a small group show opens August 12.
This is what I saw on the table in the back of the gallery on 10th Avenue on Wednesday:
[a large detail of each of two works on paper by Franklin Evans]
ADDENDUM: Evans is curating a show at Moti Hasson, “Twist it Twice”, which opens tomorrow.
older New York
a scar in the late nineteenth-century paving stones on West 27th Street, looking west