Category: Culture

going through the debris

Eighteen Brooklyn College MFA students were not only dispossessed of a graduate thesis exhibition when the New York City shut it down and padlocked the doors in downtown Brooklyn. On Saturday, five days after their school itself had precipitously, foolishly and cowardly removed all of their art from the gallery, hauled it away in open trucks and dumped it back on the campus, they were permitted to enter the hall where it had been unceremoniously dropped by campus workmen.
There they discovered that much of the art, the product of months of work and the focus and culmination of their graduate studies, was missing and a good percentage of the work that was there had been damaged or destroyed irreparably.
This is a large excerpt from the press release which appears on the students’ site:

At 9am yesterday [Saturday, May 13] students arrived at Roosevelt Hall on the Brooklyn College campus prepared to inspect their work together. The students were surprised to find that Mr. Little had ordered the officers to allow students access only one at a time. This caused the process to last until 6pm yesterday afternoon.
Under the supervision of Brooklyn College CUNY security officers and with the aid of Graduate Deputy Karen Giusti, students found their work improperly packaged in garbage bags, much of it irreparably damaged and some pieces missing.
Carrie Fucile, who built a 7′ x 8′ x 10′ wooden house as part of an installation, could find barely a trace of the large structure among the two rooms in which the work was stowed. A few pieces of the dismantled installation were used as packaging for other works of art, others were later located out by the loading dock for raw materials and trash.
Marni Kotak could not find over 10 original drawings, the video documentation of her live performance at the show opening, and most of the elements of her 10′ x 20′ site-specific installation. She found two chalkboard drawings irreparably destroyed. Tamas Veszi could not find his entire site-specific installation, and could only find two damaged paintings and three destroyed sculptures. Neither Fucile, Kotak nor Veszi were allowed to adequately document their site-specific works prior to their demolition.
Augusto Marin’s large folding chair and wall sculpture and Yejin Jun’s foam and pins sculpture were found in pieces, and the work of John Aveluto, Megan Piontkowski, Susan Dessel, Carla Aspenberg, Pamela Gordon, and other artists suffered damages. Most of the approximately $20,000 worth of digital equipment utilized for the exhibition was found jumbled together in large boxes or trash bags without the proper carrying cases. Several artists also reported missing personal items such as a video camera, DVD players, and original personal documents.

I know that at least one of the students has very recently removed all his work and materials from his Brookly College studio, “because the school is starting to scare me”.
This college is sounding more and more like the school from hell. Anyone who has an interest in exorcising its demons should get involved before the damage becomes irreversible. An academic institution cannot survive on a formal accreditation certificate alone, and when enough incompetence is involved, even a valuable piece of paper can be lost.

There are additional pictures on the Plan C site.

[image, which I believe is of Augusto Marin looking at his work, from Plan C]

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Glen Fogel is showing a new magical video [no title given] at Momenta which sort of documents Christian rock warm-up bands at the Billy Graham Crusade in Flushing Meadows Park last summer. There is absolutely no sound, but the imagery which he assembles, in sandwiching layers of waving believers between himself and a giant screen projecting the acts, produces a mesmerizing music of its own, complete with the unavoidable creepy ostinato of zealotry.
Two points of information unrelated to each other: One, the ghost image in the still shown above is in the moving video itself; and two, I thought it more than curious, considering Graham’s own racism, that his [acolytes?] all appear here to be people of color.

Elise Engler Rapture 2005 pencil, colored pencil, gouache, watercolor on paper 22″ x 30″ [installation view]


[detail]
It’s been a good five-week run, but “Tax-onomies“, Elise Engler’s show at Cynthia Broan closes tomorrow. Unfortunately however the actual “rapture” of our sophisticated fighting machines and and somewhat less sophisticated wars will continue.
Engler’s inspiration for the title of this show of beautiful, painstakingly-crafted drawings is an accounting of the materials the government purchases with our tax dollars, but there is much more than hard weaponry in her inventories. From the press release:

Larger works in progress are symbolic depictions, with names and ages, of each of the over 2500 Iraq War coalition casualties and over 13,000 Iraqi civilian casualties, a small fraction of the unknown actual number.

The image at the top is one of a number of more recent drawings:

The exhibition also includes a new series of works on paper that portray newspaper clippings, internet flyers and other sources of information, with related drawn and painted elements. Articles from New York Times are meticulously recreated in pencil and gouache, the surrounding painting portraying a more editorial, depiction of stories such as funding for jet fighters, Rudy Giuliani dancing in drag, NYC Emergency Preparedness advice, and arrests made around Times Square during the Republican Convention.

The truly obscene caption below the pencilled reproduction of a NYTimes photograph reads: “The Raptor, the most expensive fighter jet in history at $259 million per plane, may be scaled down as the Pentagon tries to offset Iraq war costs.”
[The price of the [F-22] Raptor has since gone up. At the moment the estimates are closer to $350 million per plane. Somewhere I just saw a reference to the Air Force asking for 339 of them. As they say, pretty soon we’ll be talking about real money.]

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Mark Schubert Penguin Pusher 2006 mixed media 47″ x 24″ x 26″ [installation view]


Mark Schubert Wheelbarrow Rose 2006 mixed media 63″ x 21″ x 22″ [installation view]

Monya Rowe is showing five “life-size” [my phrase] sculptures by Mark Schubert in a show titled, “Yard Work”. Delicious, even without what felt to me like a visual reference to ice cream. In fact the media the artist uses is somewhat less digestible: the press release tells us that “Most of the materials can be seen in a suburban yard: wheelbarrows, plastic lawn chairs and lawn ornaments.”
A really smart lawn wouldn’t want to live with these ornaments.

Donald Judd’s Untitled, 1990 (90-2b Menziken) left, and Untitled, 1991 (91-5 Donaldson) right

We really had intended to see the display at Christie’s of the 26 Donald Judd works which the Judd Foundation had decided to de-accession, but we had completely forgotten about going until we ran into Tony Feher just as we arrived at ART ROCK yesterday. He told us we had a few minutes before the doors closed, in a certain way and for all practical purposes, forever. We thanked him and ran off towards 6th Avenue.
We passed on last night’s auction itself, but only because the current configuration of our walls (works competing with each other salon-style) just wouldn’t be able to offer a proper setting for the work. Oh, and were those estimates in the six and seven figures? Where are people putting this stuff?
I had captured this one image before a guard politely asked me not to take pictures. I was then so intimidated that I didn’t even point my camera toward the (sparkling-clean) 21st-story windows to bring back images of the many roof gardens still decorating the higher planes of Rockefeller Center three quarters of a century after it was begun.
This stuff has now been sold, so I didn’t think a peek at some of the merchandise could do any harm now.

“WERSUPPOSEDTOACTIMPRESSED” is Wayne White’s cheeky contribution to ART ROCK 2006, which opened on the plaza above the golden Prometheus in Rockefeller Center last night. The sign hovers just in front of and above the central pavillion of an art fair which is more than a match for its elegant surroundings. There’s great comfort in knowing that White was chosen to represent Clementine, the gallery which is behind this wonderful midtown visitation, now in its second incarnation. Presumably Abbie and Elizabeth are cool with their artist’s delicious sarcasm.
But the show is impressive, both for the fact that they’ve pulled it off – again, and for the quality and frequently the great fun of the art which awaits the huge variety of people who pass through the plaza at Rockefeller Center each day.
The show continues through May 21.
Here are some more installation images, adding up to only about half of the sixteen artists shown:


Kristof Kintera on the right and Susan Giles on the left, both details


David Noonan


Stephen G. Rhodes detail


Sanford Biggers detail


Shannon Ebner detail


Larry Mantello detail


Brody Condon detail of video still


Karin Weiner detail

outraged students try to retrieve their art from a truck bed before being stopped by NYC police: Is this how a real school treats its graduate students? Is this the role of a real city?

The show of Brooklyn College students’ MFA thesis work was supposed to have continued for another few weeks, so there was obviously no scheduling urgency for the space inside the Parks Department building in downtown Brooklyn, but in a surprise, cynical and totally dishonorable move early this morning school authorities rushed over some open trucks and ordinary workers (not art handlers) to haul away the original art created by its own students. This was going on at the moment the students were supposed to be meeting with the school Provost, Roberta Matthews. Much of the artwork was damaged, some of it apparently beyond repair.
Plainclothes police officers were on hand for the operation, apparently to ensure that the use of force would remain the monopoly of the college and the city.
Meanwhile our mayor, who likes to consider himself a conoisseur of art but who plays the role of philistine as well as any Wall Street bonus boy, seem to believe that art is only for museums – or for billionaires looking for an expensive hobby. “Nobody’s suggesting that anybody shouldn’t be allowed to exhibit art,” Mr. Bloomberg said, mimicing the nonsense disconnect of words uttered last Friday* by the College’s own Provost. Bloomberg continued, “The issue here is this is not a museum.” Is he being serious, or just cowardly?
The NYTimes has a story today, but the graduate art students themselves have added some pictures and another statement to their dedicated site.

Pictures supplied by the artists:




Statement issued by the artists:

As per the Press Release listed in a post below, yesterday Brooklyn College removed our work from the War Memorial without our consent.
We were set to meet with Provost Roberta Matthews at 9am. As we were about to go to the meeting, we got calls from fellow students who were guarding the space saying that Brooklyn College trucks were there and had begun dismantling and taking out the artwork. We had to turn around and rush down there.
When the professors who are supporting us got to the Provost’s door they were told the meeting was cancelled.
The PR for Brooklyn College has spun this as if we agreed to this and as if it was a benevolent gesture. Unfortunately some of the press has picked up on this and is sending out inaccurate information. We never agreed for them to move this work and were never given a chance to discuss anything with the college. We have agreed to nothing regading [sic] this space they have proposed to us.
No one can describe how it feels to see the fruits of all of your labors taken down and dismantled in the span of hours.

I confess to an honest but naive sense of disbelief that this thing could have gone this far, but my fear now is that even in New York we have become so inured to the idea and practice of unresponsive government that no one [except Norman Siegel] cares enough to resist anything any more. Small-town moralist and Brooklyn parks commissioner Julius Spiegel should have been overruled immediately, Provost Roberta Matthews should have been removed days ago, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg should at least be ridiculed without mercy for the remainder of his days on earth.
Where at least are all the other arts institutions in a city which loves to bask in a golden aura of the illusion of culture? And where are all those bloggers who now are, who think they are, who are said to be, so important? How rich or how famous an artist do you have to be to deserve freedom, or at least the claim to freedom? Okay, at the very least, when can you begin to get some attention if the custodians of the institutions of higher education and of the government of great cities physically trash your art – your own property (to use the only word which some will understand)?

*
“Brooklyn College has a long tradition of educating fine artists. Throughout, the administration of the College has supported our students’ rights to freedom of artistic expression.” [excerpt from her statement announcing the removal of the exhibit]

[first image, Robert Stolarik from the NYTimes; others from PLAN C(ENSORED)]

Paul McCarthy’s mixed-media installation “Bang-Bang Room” (1992) in the former Jewish School for Girls.

Now I wish we were there. Barry and I don’t like travelling in the pursuit of art fairs and I was going to try not to think about the Berlin Biennial too much, but Roberta Smith’s report makes it very hard to do so.

They have come up with something that perhaps shouldn’t work but does: an unusually poetic show that forms a kind of rebus about the arc and tumult of life itself. Its humanistic content makes it almost old-fashioned, evoking some of the Sturm und Drang of postwar figuration. Yet the art on view actually moves back and forth between Conceptual and more Romantic and Expressionist sonorities.

Even under normal circumstances Berlin is a big temptation for both of us, so missing out on the [fourth] Biennial now feels like a big mistake. Besides this fair seems to be as comfortable in its scale as it is lively in its components and inventive in its venues.
Maybe we’ll catch it some other year, when we have to leave New York for our Berlin exile.

[NYTimes caption below image from Paul McCarthy/Hauser & Wirth via NYTimes]