untitled (convertible hair) 2007
These very healthy-looking sunflowers seemed to be enjoying the breeze while standing inside their tiny triangle of a park on Horatio Street this afternoon.
Author: jameswagner
GUANTANAMO DELENDA EST!
our shame and ignominy abstracted as a color which has become familiar to the entire world
This post is part of a series begun on May 21, 2007, which will continue until the U.S. concentration camps at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere around the world have been razed.
And from Iraq, a related story:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq.
. . . .
Interestingly, weve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government the vast majority are inspired by money, said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. The primary motivator is economic theyre angry men because they dont have jobs, he said. The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education.”
Spreading the blessings of the American corrections system to needy people everywhere.
[fabric color swatch, otherwise unrelated to Guantanamo, from froggtoggs; second image by Benjamin Lowy via the NYTimes]
they’re totally okay with this weather
Some of our friends seem quite happy with the kind of weather that makes me pretty miserable. I snapped these happy guys on 10th Avenue in front of the Red Cat late Wednesday afternoon. It had rained lightly all day, and although it wasn’t as warm as it is today, the humidity must have hovered around 100% when I passed them at six o’clock.
For the floriculturally challenged, the common names for these blossoms are, from the top, Impatiens, Hibiscus and Morning Glory.
Scot Kaplan parks on West 24 Street
Scot Kaplan Artist’s Park 2007 mixed media, dimensions potentially variable [installation view]
[detail]
We can never have too much park – or too many artists – and an “artist’s park” sounds like a good thing to me, even if it’s smaller than a nightstand. I came upon this piece by Scot Kaplan on the south side of West 24 Street while bouncing from one gallery to the next two days ago. Maybe it’s also some kind of homage to the Beuys basalt pieces two blocks south on 22 Street. The sod looks like it just got there, but I did spot a small piece of cellophane and one bird feather lying on the grass.
The galleryese verbiage in the caption below the photo is mostly my invention.
I really hope this thing’s a permanent installation.
“Substance & Surface” at Bortolami
Mike Kelly Carpet 7 2003 acrylic on carpet, mounted on wood panel 46.25″ x 64.25″
Paul Lee Untitled 2007 cotton towel and ink 46″ x 41″ [installation view]
Jim Lambie Y-Footo 2002 mattress and silver vinyl tape 72″ x 38″ x 5″ [installation view]
Bortolami’s main space is devoted to “Substance & Surface“, a group installation of work by a [baker’s] dozen artists working here with monochromatic (and overwhelmingly colorless) non-traditional materials. The artists are Ghada Amer, John Armleder, Bozidar Brazda, Piero Golia, Thilo Heinzmann, Gregor Hildebrandt, Mike Kelley, Jim Lambie, Paul Lee, Glenn Ligon, Lovett/Codagnone, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Donald Sultan and Eric Wesley.
It’s a beautiful show, beautifully installed. For this profane acolyte the experience may have ben a bit like what some people feel inside an austere house of worship.
“Slava Mogutin & Justin Beal” in the back room at Bortolami
Slava Mogutin Joey San Francisco, 1999 archival C-print mounted on aluminum 30″ x 20″
Slava Mogutin Yellow Billboard Moscow, 2004 archival C-print mounted on aluminum 30″ x 20″
There’s nothing about this installation on the gallery’s site, so I’m not sure about its status or (perhaps more importantly for visitors) its dates. I’m referring to an intense show of some work by Slava Mogutin and Justin Beal which I saw in the small room at Bortolami almost two weeks ago. Since I’m unable to call to the gallery office at this time of night, I’m going to assume it will remain up until August 31, when the show in the larger space closes.*
These ten photographs by Mogutin, sweetly-badass Russian poet and American visual artist, were made over a period of the last seven or eight years. I’ve seen some of them before, but I enjoyed the intelligence, the humor, the sophistication, the intimacy, the eroticism and the beauty in all the work on those walls as much or more than I have ever enjoyed his art before – which is to say, a lot.
Unfortunately I missed capturing an image of either of Beal’s elegant floor sculptures, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of this artist’s work. The furniture-size pieces at Bortolomi are composed, as they often are, in a mostly-monochromatic construction with at least one transparent element and any number of other re-configured common objects.
*
UPDATE: The gallery has now told me that “back room” will be open until August 28.
UPDATE on Deutsche Bank fire
It seems that the tangled story at which I could only hint in my Tuesday post, “Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?”, has caused some serious bustle around the city desk at the NYTimes.
The lead story on the front page reports that the firm whose creators picked the Ayn Rand hero John Galt for its corporate name was a paper corporation with no employees. It had been assembled to insulate or hide its “integrity”-challenged owners and officers from the view of its clients, the people and officers of the New York community. This is the company which was given the lucrative contract to perform one of the most hazardous and certainly one of the most visible jobs in the city if not in the entire country.
Two firefighters died fighting a fire inside the building last Saturday, probably as the result of criminal negligence.
Meanwhile, inside the same section of the paper we learn in another story that the New York Fire Department hadn’t inspected the Deutsche Bank building’s standpipe or sprinkler system since 1996, in spite of the fact that twice-monthly inspections were mandatory for buildings under demolition. It seems the department was also aware that the sprinkler system was not working. Some have argued that the FDNY was unwilling or unequipped to enter a building permeated with the toxins that had necessitated its condemnation, but since demolition began firefighters had been in the building on at least two occasions for reasons unrelated to the standpipe or the sprinkler system.
[image of the two firefighters from NYFD via Gothamist]
“Greener Pastures, Permanent Midnight” at Moti Hasson
Joy Garnett Storm 2006 oil on canvas 60″ x 78″
Joy Garnett Road 2007 oil on canvas 30″ x 35″
Regular readers of this blog already know how much Barry and I think of the prolific and innovative painter Joy Garnett, who continues to re-invent and re-ignite the found contemporary pictorial world. Garnett has two oil paintings in “Greener Pastures, Permanent Midnight“, a beautiful small group show at Moti Hasson which continues until September 1. They’re both terrific, but the smaller and darker work, “Road”, is equally as dazzling as the larger and more fiery, “Storm”.
The other artists in this spare installation, curated by Ingrid Chu, are Dike Blair, Franklin Evans, Emilie Halpern, and Katie Holten. Each of them would warrant a good look for their individual merits, but I only have images of two more pieces here.
Franklin Evans FF originsoflove02 2006 ink and watercolor on paper 20″ x 13″ [installation view]
Emilie Halpern Lightning #4 2006 thermoplastic, aluminum wire and mirrored acrylic 75″ x 113″ x 40″ [large detail of installation]
“Purple Hearts” at Jen Bekman
Spc. Sam Ross
21 years old, 82nd Airborne, was wounded May 18, 2003 in Baghdad when a bomb blew up during a munitions disposal operation, leaving him blinded and an amputee. After many, surgeries, Ross was sent home to western Pennsylvania where he lives alone in a trailer, in one of the poorest counties in the state.
Photographed October 19, 2003 in the woods near his trailer in Dunbar Township, Pennsylvania.
“I lost my leg just below the knee. Lost my eyesight. I have shrapnel in pretty much every part of my body. Got my finger blown off. It don’t work right. I had a hole blown through my right leg. You know, not really anything major. I get headaches. And my left ear, it don’t work either.”
“I don’t have any regrets. It was the best experience of my life.”
Cpl. Tyson Johnson III
22 years old, 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, was wounded September 20, 2003 in a mortar attack on the Abu Ghraib prison. He suffered massive internal injuries and is 100 percent disabled.
Photographed May 6, 2004 at his home in Prichard, Alabama.
“Most of my friends they were losing it out there. They would do anything to get out of there, do anything. I had one of my guys, he used to tell me, ‘My wife just had my son. I can’t wait to get home and see him.’ And you know, he died out there. He sure did and I have to think about that everyday.”
“I got a bonus in the National Guards for joining the Army. Now I’ve got to pay the bonus back and it’s $2999. The Guard wants it back. It’s on my credit that I owe them that. I’m burning on the inside. I’m burning.”
There is nothing like this “summer show” anywhere in the city, if not the entire country.
Jen Bekman’s current exhibition, “Purple Hearts” neither seeks nor requires an introduction. You may already have seen the book, but walk into the gallery’s very neat pocket space on Spring Street on the Lower East Side before this deceptively-quiet installation closes on August 30. You will leave speechless, if not gasping for breath, while trying to understand how we got to this, and where do we go from here?
Nina Berman began this powerful body of work several years ago . Unfortunately her young portrait subjects had beaten her to it.
The gallery has scheduled a book-signing, reception and talk with the artist on Wednesday, August 29 from 6 to 8pm. Because of the gallery’s small size, those who are interested in attending, or in reserving a book, are asked to rsvp [info@jenbekman.com]
[images from Jen Bekman]
Ayn Rand linked to Deutsche Bank skyscraper tragedy?
skyscrapers have very complex lives
I’ve just read that the name of the sub-contracting company in charge of the demolition at the Deutsche Bank building is the John Galt Corporation. Who is John Galt? I immediately recognized the intriguing literary/political reference within the firm’s name, and, regardless of what we eventually learn about the ultimate responsibility for the death of two firemen this week, the connection is likely to continue the fictional character’s complex association with corporate greed and laissez-faire capitalism .
ADDENDA: I’ve turned up these few bits on the John Galt Corporation by searching Google and its cached links:
The firm is located at 3900 Webster Avenue in The Bronx [718-654-5300]; its principals are former executives of the Safeway Environmental Corp., a firm with its own history of problems; Galt’s work at the Deutsche Bank site was already causing injury and incurring fines before this week; and finally, World Trade Center-area neighbors had expressed serious concerns about the firm’s qualifications since early last year.
[image from wikipedia]
