Photos: Gabriella Radujko

In an extraordinary performance of “Inuksuit” at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, composer John Luther Adams turned noise into “site-determined” music.  Describing the Armory as an environment like no other, Adams accepted the challenge of scaling a performance, which originally premiered outdoors at the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies, for the “pristine emptiness” of the 55,000 square foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Continue Reading More »

10 lines on 10th Street, February 10th

© Erin Patrice O'Brien

Poet Major Jackson read before an adoring, largely student crowd at
NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on West 10th Street, but
more importantly, shared insights about the joy of writing something
aesthetic and finding the “music underneath [a] poem”, which he
suggests, “makes the themes of the poem incidental”.  Very important,
really, because Mr. Jackson gave poets in the audience what poets in
an audience always want—tools, clues, and insights about how to write
corporeally and spiritually about a world we alternately live in and
transcend. Continue Reading More »

Take a leap, 2009. Photo by David Allison © 2010 Sheila Makhijani

Agnes Berecz’s December 2, 2010 lecture/slideshow On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century, coinciding with the MOMA exhibition through February 7, 2011 and part of the Brown Bag Lunch Series gave maximum attention to the most minimal unit of drawing—the line.  On Line, explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing.” Continue Reading More »

Excavations Non Objective, Michael Filan’s solo show of abstract paintings are on exhibit as part of the Intercultural Church’s 50^th anniversary celebration through the end of August, 2010.  Filan uses brilliant enamel paints, which he refers to as light, the intensity of color serving as his “mystical guide”.  Dripped, poured and sprayed on recycled monoprints, with paper pulled away in some areas, exposing the work beneath it, a new genre of painting is brought forward, fueled by curiosity and impulse.

These handsome “pictures of nothing,” Kirk Varnedoe’s coinage for abstract art, are brushless and daringly drippy inventions which have been skillfully curated by Frank DeGregorio on free-standing, staggered walls with negative space above and below the paintings, allowing viewers to mix’n’match paintings in groupings from a variety of angles with great affect.

Enthusiasts of abstraction will see the influences of de Kooning, Frankenthaler and the lesser known Morris Louis, and more importantly, the quiddity of the art form in the delightfully, joyful gallery space known as the Treasure Room.

CF000313 (Chris Jordon, 2009)

Exit Art tackled the notion that “global environmental struggles are creating an aesthetic” by mounting the photographic exhibit Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty on the main floor and hosting the SEA Poetry Series No. 4 in its cozy subterranean digital theatre on July 27, 2010.

The photographic highlights pictured here include Chris Jordan’s Midway Project, 2009, which documents the devastating impact plastic pollution has had on Midway Atoll albatross chicks in collage-like compositions, and Susannah Sayler’s Glacial, Icecap and Permafrost Melting XLVII: Cordillera Blanca, Peru, 2008 documenting a vanishing glacier, juxtaposing the limitations of attempting to capture geological time pitted against human time, capturing stasis as a positive state. Continue Reading More »

Double Rainbow as Lazy Tongs: Poem on the Occasion of the 15th Annual Poetry Walk Across For Poets House

I walked across a bridge tonight,
a poet among poets, in line and abreast
east bound toward Brooklyn
with mighty bridge as pathway
Say poet, are you lonely, are you hungry
Pray poet, are you frightened, are you sorry
Play poet, dance at mid-bridge and kiss her
Stay poet, calm this gathering, this gay poetry crowd
Clasp the hand of humanity for poetry
aboard these lazy tongs
reaching with anchored heart
before the collage called city
Tell the story of elders, culture and space
tell it true without restraint
Speak of personal or general
river beneath you
loosening or guiding

This is a call to all poets… or follower of poets
to walk the bridge of poetry
then turn
and start again.

June 2010/Gabriella Radujko

Related article here
Read more on Marianne Moore’s description of the Brooklyn Bridge.

(Above photos: BenYakas/Gothamist)

Liquid Door, the first solo exhibition in the U. S. by artists Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi, has many moving parts, but a permeable membrane, the liquid door is its center piece.  The liquid door refers to the fragile interface which unites man with the sea, namely, a surface between air and water, formed by the air pressure present in an underwater dome called the Starfish House as realized by Jacques Cousteau in 1965 as an experimental underwater dwelling.

Isola and Norzi pay homage to the Cousteau and six crew members known as “oceanauts” in a multi-faceted archaeological exploration of the roles of human imagination, storytelling, and fiction in creating meaning through the Liquid Door project, rooted in a 1995 cargo ship journey the artists made to Alexandria, Egypt. While the “real show” took place at a tank in the New York Aquarium, a living, albeit fabricated environment which stands for a conceptual looking glass, Art in General recently hosted an opening for an exhibition which featured Cousteau’s documentary film Le Monde Sans Soleil, coincidentally reclaimed by the Italian artists in an East Village bookstore.  The film treats audiences to scenes of domesticity which play out in the Starfish House which include the oceanauts enjoying multi-course meals and cigarette smoking.

Additionally, the exhibition included archival, C-prints from the Coney Island Aquarium with images of Norzi submerged in the aquarium outfitted with a sculpture representational of the liquid door, an acrylic aquarium, and other “relics”.  Princeton Professor D. Graham Burnett gave a talk about the historical context of exploration in the 1960’s when there was debate about whether the future of self-contained living environments would be underwater or in space.

The New York Aquarium will feature a Liquid Door Tour on May 25, 2010 for members.  Ultimately, the art project will recreate such a door on the very site where it started, aboard the ruins of the Starfish House, situated on the floor of the Red Sea.