photography © courtesy Sam Davol

Pop-ups–boutique, market or museum have entered the psyche of hip New Yorkers, but if you are really lucky, you will have experienced the pop-up library known as the Uni Project.

Part-library, part-performance space, the Uni Project, a portable library kiosk with curated cubes, popped up on a stretch of waterfront at the Gantry State Park in Long Island City, Queens on the first day of fall. The blustery weather wrestled with the portable bookshelves and seats, but passersby, especially the short, cute variety with parents hovering close by, intuitively browsed, read and celebrated books, played games and explored portable worm bins for indoor composting.

photography © courtesy Sam Davol

The objective of Leslie and Sam Davol’s non-profit initiative is to unite a community through reading and learning. By partnering with the Queen’s Library and the Friends of the Hunters Point Library on the locale which will be the dedication site for the new library branch on October 5, 2012,  they gave the emerging neighborhood in Hunters Point, directly across from the United Nations on the East River, a taste of the future library branch.

Writer David St.-Lascaux shares, “When I was a child, bookmobiles brought the wonder of books – which are, after all, doors to learning about everything, the telling of our stories, and the magic of imagination – to my neighborhood. Now the Uni Project promises to bring the wonder of books to children in the nurturing company of their parents and caregivers. The Uni Project is truly a kinder-garten where books are the earth in which young minds flower.”

photo © courtesy Allen Joseph Epstein

With the help of local community leaders, their self-aware family members, and volunteer librarians, the founders of the Uni Project clearly understand that libraries are communities and about communities.  Unifying communities with books is a worthwhile cause.

photo © courtesy Allen Joseph Epstein

Piet-Jan van Rossum with Paul Clipson (Photos by Louie Metzner)

Subtwine – Entwine’s speakeasy-like downstairs space that has hosted musical-artists-in-residence such as Toucan (as profiled in the New York Times), video art exhibitions curated by CoWorkers Projects— for a limited time is home to the West Village’s only ongoing experimental sound art event, KINEMATIC Thursdays. Presented by Yulia Topchiy of CoWorker Projects, Kinematic Thursdays is curated by Helen Homan Wu of Opalnest. This is such a unique series of events blending video art, experimental music and sound art that I asked Helen for a bit of the backstory.

Noveller

Heike Baranowsky 'Monfahrt' (courtesy of Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin)

Helen founded Opalnest to provide exposure for artists — artists who work with time-based media — that do not necessarily fit into the typical art gallery structure here in the U.S.  She explains that in European cities like Berlin, interdisciplinary contemporary art such as sound art is a robust, thriving genre regularly reviewed and written about by theorists in the same manner of the traditional fine art disciplines of painting or sculpture.

Gill Arno

Opalnest produces events both locally and internationally. Recent projects include satellite events for the New York Armory Show (including an event with Audio Visual Arts for Passing Stranger, an East Village “soundwalk” created Pejk Malinovski, narrated by Jim Jarmusch), a group exhibition of new media artists in Hong Kong, and an experimental sound art event in Mainland China. The daughter of a classical musician (father, flute) who spent her childhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Helen steeps herself in the worlds of contemporary (and often interdisciplinary) video and sound artists, frequenting gallery openings, music and sound performances at venues like Roulette,  Issue Project Room and The Kitchen, and regularly schedules in-person studio visits.

Paul Clipson

Why create this sound exploration showcase at Entwine? Helen thrives on mixing diverse artists and audiences, creating events that cross boundaries, offering innovative, of-the-moment art that engages, startles, delights and surprises. Helen also mentioned that as Subtwine is a somewhat under-the-radar spot (and literally, under Entwine) at the nexus of the West Village/Meatpacking District, it feels organic to the overall Kinematic experience.

JUNE 14 – JULY 19, 2012
7:30pm Thursdays
Subtwine @Entwine, 765 Washington Street

Check here for a complete schedule and links to the participating artists.

I am excited about the potential of In Protest, an event organized in tandem by the Kadist Art Foundation and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, to be held Wednesday, May 9^th at 7pm.

Artists have been asked to design posters with a specific or abstract political message to be given away at this one night event. The list of artists includes many whom I instantly associate with politically charged practices such as Rigo 23, Martha Rosler, and Natasha Wheat and many whose posters may help recast their interests in a more political light.

The artists are Zarouhie Abdalian, John Baldessari, Amy Balkin, Dodie Bellamy, Charlie Dubbe, Amy Franceschini, Doug Hall, Kevin Killian, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Shaun O’Dell, Rigo 23, Piero Golia, Jordan Kantor, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Mungo Thomson and Natasha Wheat.

Questions of art praxes’ political potentials and limitations are constantly swirling, all the more so in these highly charged times of active protest movements. The world has yet to come to terms with the revolutions recently transpired or those still afoot. And the future is less than settled in nations whose ‘completed’ revolts in the Arab Spring have left them in a terrible and dangerous state of flux. A military government is still in control of Egypt and in advance of elections, vying political factions are falling victim to massacres such as the one in Cairo on May 2^nd.  Closer to home (and much tamer despite the press’ over emphasis on its outlying criminal element) we have our local Occupy, revitalized in its May Day general strike. In each of these protests and in the more everyday ones (usually in the grand tradition of labor struggles, but also against abortion and pro or against various political personalities and parties) the arts play a major role, both as means of message production (signs, banners, et al.) and as a foothold for giving the myriad people some cohesiveness (ex. the various strains of music performed and DJed).

During a March 31^st talk at the Kadist curator Nato Thompson, whose excellent exhibition Living as Form is about to finish its satellite run in SF, discussed various ways in which art could engage with a wider audience, purpose and potential, noting (I’m paraphrasing) the worst thing we could do is commission a bunch of posters. But is such a curatorial proposal so untenable? In the introduction to Dorathea von Hantlemann’s excellent How to Do Things With Art (2010), she describes her theme as, “How does art become politically or socially significant and what preconditions must be fulfilled in order to enable artworks to attain such significance?”

In Protest will raise these questions anew, confronting Thompson’s challenge and interrogating Hantlemann’s question. Each artist will address both the specific audience in attendance and the vitality of their medium (the poster and art as a whole) in the context of the museum and the wider political conversation. And we,  the viewers,  will walk away with works of art.

On Tuesday, October 18^th, free103point9, PAJ Publications, Issue Project Room and Electronic Music Foundation will celebrate the publication of Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves by Galen Joseph-Hunter with Penny Duff, and Maria Papadomanolaki (PAJ Publications: 2011). This event will feature performances from Todd Merrell, Kabir Carter, Terry Nauheim, Lázaro Valiente, Joel Chadabe/Milica Paranosic. Performances begin at 7 p.m.

PROGRAM INFO:
Transmission Arts: Artists & Airwaves Brooklyn Book Celebration
(http://free103point9.org/events/3657)
Oct. 18, 2011: 7 p.m., free
Issue Project Room
At the Old American Can Factory
232 3rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11215

ABOUT THE BOOK
In this ground-breaking look at a new art genre, Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves brings together a genealogy of 150 artists and artworks—and more than 250 images—from 1921 to the present that encompasses performance, video, radio theatre, sound art, media installation, networked art, and acoustic ecology. Here is a fascinating account of the ingenuity and creativity of artists who have made new discoveries in broadcast, public works, performance composition, sound, and text, stretching the boundaries of both transmitter and receiver. At a time when public access struggles with corporate control of the airwaves, artists have combined activism and communications technologies to represent alternative worlds on the electromagnetic spectrum.

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.

Musicians commenced by playing simple instruments, some made of paper or wood, sensitizing the ears of the audience as sandpaper discs were rubbed, conch shells and megaphones blown, whirly tubes twisted, and bullroarers whipped. In sharp contrast to the stationary stone sentinels scattered throughout the Arctic, which are believed to have been used for navigation and for which the work is named, the audience, unencumbered with fixed seating, was free to walk, sit, or lie on the hardwood floor.  Exhibiting interest in the musicians, their eyes tracked them as they slowly walked, instruments in hand, from the hall’s center to hallways and staircases of the first and second floors.

Over 70 percussionists, similarly scattered throughout the Armory, advanced the performance with thunderous noise – frighteningly strident at times; beating multi-tiered cymbals, tom-toms and tam-tams with increasing intensity, sound rising into the balloon shed, musicians engulfed by an ever moving audience that listened, looked, and learned kinesthetically.

A softened light via clerestories synchronized an approaching dusk with piccolos, glockenspiels and triangles, twinkling as they summoned night. Anticipation of the end of yet another day grew as did recognition of transformation.  Adams had not only found the music “in the armory” but the spirit of communitas as well.

© 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.

Introduced by Deborah Landau, Director of the Creative Writing Program
at NYU, she asked Jackson to describe the stylistic departure
represented in his new collection Holding Company (2010), which is a
long sequence of poems which are ten lines each. The poet spoke of the
intensity of writing poetry that was “not constructed” and came “from
the self” before launching into reading from his third volume of
poetry.

Jackson admitted to nervousness performing in front of his students as
well as having become addicted to ten line poems before reading from a
prepared list of poems that informed the 10-line structure of Holding
Company, including Jewel-Tongued, Manna, Fever, Designer Kisses,
Picket Monsters, Strangers and Not Strangers and More Feeling.  He
continued reading selections from Hoops: Poems (2007) then returned to
Holding Company for the penultimate “On Removing the Wedding Band”
which included strikingly sentimental worlds like reverse, lost, undreaming,
empty in an surprisingly unsentimental poem.

Asked to talk about the lyric sequence poem, Jackson suggested that it
is “as distinctive as [the] American long poem and talked about the
“non-linearity of how we live” and the fragmentation of our lives”,
and that he wants to go back to the narrative poem, adding that the
lyric poem “stops time” and the narrative poem “pushes time”.

Jackson spoke of working with musicians on future projects before
concluding with the optimistic “Leave It All Up to Me”.

(Color Photos: Jenny Duffy, B/W Photos: Rameen Gasery)

Artcards Featured Event: Low Tide Chorus is tonight! We will all be there, so come say hello.

7-10PM at The Invisible Dog
$12 / pay at door

(indigo poster editions: HatnDesign)

Photos by Jenna Duffy for Artcards Review

© 2010 Spike Lee/Courtesy of www.ammobooks.com

© 2010 Spike Lee/Courtesy of www.ammobooks.com

© 2010 Spike Lee/Courtesy of www.ammobooks.com