Jean Arp used seashells and blood; Jean Dubuffet, butterfly wings and glue; Bruce Conner, nylon hosiery and nails.  Joseph Montgomery uses nonesuch provocative materials in his assemblages, part of the show Velveteen, now on view at Laurel Gitlen, the polished, new gallery on the Lower East Side.  Instead, he uses what one would find in the garage of the average do-it-yourselfer–canvas, clay, lacquer, oil, sheet metal, and plastic—weaving, painting and affixing them on panels averaging 12.5”x 10.5” x 3” deep. Less noteworthy than the use of found, masculine materials, is the skill with which the artist successfully unifies disparate textures using high value colors.  His work solicits a calm and restrained response uncharacteristic of a medium which has been disturbing audiences for a century since the advent of the first modern collage by Picasso in 1912 and “God”, the first modern assemblage by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1918—a work which featured plumbing fittings.

Historically, assemblage has mixed substandard materials to yield a kind of anti-art which  pasted, pressed, glued, nailed, cut, stapled and painted “found”, previously intact, and everyday objects into new, expanded forms. Montgomery’s assemblages (called paintings by the gallery) have much in common with two-dimensional abstract paintings such as Robert Motherwell’s Western Air (1946) and Gertrude Greene’s Monumentality (1949), only re-imagined as three-dimensional relief sculptures.  The stronger precedent can be found in Jean Pougny’s (Ivan Puni) 1915 Suprematist Sculpture which might account for their “strange familiarity”.

Velveteen’s locus of inquiry in sculpture continues with minimalist sculptures made of shims, or tapered pieces of wood.  On one end of the continuum are Large Shim: 13 and Large Shim: 7,  two 10-foot tall wall-mounted, natural, red cedar shims in varying widths.  The strong wedge shapes, suggesting exclamation points minus the dots, share the enthusiasm of Hisayuki Mogami’s 1962 curvilinear pine sculpture Laugh, Laugh, Laugh.

The most muscular of the shim series is Image One Hundred Thirty, a protruding, black lacquer wall sculpture of cedar shims arranged as alternating wedges and suggesting charred wood.  Additionally, three similar wall sculptures use cedar or cardboard constructs mimicking shims with faux wood finishes or covered in white paint.

On the other end, two large marbles marked with the deep indentations of a marble saw rest on the floor.  The found objects pulled from a Vermont stream have much in common with the wall sculptures, although they predate them, temporarily filling in the gap where the “paintings” did not yet exist, the artist wondering if their “resemblance” to the paintings suggest that all images are “just waiting to be found”.

All images courtesy Laurel Gitlen

Anna Shteynshleyger, Masha, 2002. © Anna Shteynshleyger, Courtesy the artist.

Perspectives 2012, opening on January 20 at the International Center of Photography (NY), is the second installment of an exhibition series that focuses on innovative artists working in photography and video. These small group exhibitions highlight the individual ideas and achievements of an engaging and eclectic group of talented artists. The aim of the series is to stimulate conversations about contemporary art and to showcase outstanding artworks that might not otherwise come to wide attention.

Chang The Jiang Family. Left: Fuzhou, China, 2004; Right: New York City, 2008. © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos, Courtesy of Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos and Chi-Wen Gallery, Taipei

Perspectives 2012 includes works by three artists—Chien-Chi Chang, Greg Girard, and Anna Shteynshleyger —who explore what happens when tight-knit cultural communities are transplanted to unfamiliar geographic locales. Each artist is represented by a group of prints selected from a much larger body of work.

Greg Girard, B-52 (Memphis Belle IV), Andersen Air Base, Guam, 2008. © Greg Girard, Courtesy the artist and Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver and Toronto.

“Each of the photographers in this exhibition brings a highly personal vision and sensibility to the subject they have chosen,” said ICP Curator Christopher Phillips, who organized Perspectives 2012. “It is only when we step back that we realize they are all exploring aspects of one of the most distinctive social phenomena of our times.”

Perspectives 2012 is on view from January 20, 2012 through May 6, 2012

BMW Guggenheim Lab exterior view from East 1st Street, NYC (Photo: Paul Warchol)

Last winter I stood on a cold subway platform and told Y about my new crush: David van der Leer. “Who is he?” she asked, distracted. She was peering down the dark tunnel, hoping to see train lights headed our way. It was one of those very snowy late nights in New York, and we had fallen victim to the slow timetable of weekend trains. I don’t know, I said. Some curator at the Guggenheim. Y turned her gaze on me. “You don’t even know who this dude is?” she asked. I shrugged and told her I liked what he’d been curating. She shook her head. Who falls for someone’s curation?

In van der Leer’s case, lots and lots. Google him and up comes one article and interview after the other profiling either the assistant curator himself or the shows in which he’s had a hand. The man has fans. That’s how I came across van der Leer—reading an admiring write-up about the Frank Lloyd Wright show he’d assisted with and then later when I was researching Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based art collective he brought to New York last spring. Then, one warm, rainy night last June, a friend and I happened upon Pedro Reyes’s Sanatorium, the first in the stillspotting nyc series van der Leer oversees. The pop-up exhibition was held in a high-ceilinged storefront in MetroTech—that curious, liminal area of downtown Brooklyn—and it featured men and women in lab coats offering spiritual and physical ministrations beneath fluorescent lights. The severe sterility of the space recalled hospitals, a nice counterpoint to the typically warm and busy aesthetic of New Age therapies. (Think here of the myrrh-scented, cluttered woo-woo shops along Bleeker, and you’ll know what I mean.)

Like elements of the Futurefarmers exhibition, stillspotting nyc roams outside of the Guggenheim’s famously curved walls. The transient and mobile quality of the installations is replicated in the BMW Guggenheim Lab, an ambitious, multidisciplinary arts showcase that will travel to nine cities around the world in six years. It launched in the East Village last fall, when the public could choose from myriad happenings—lectures, block parties, tours of toxic sites—offered by the lab, which claimed “comfort” as the topic under its microscope. It next travels to Berlin, where the lab will appear in a different incarnation in May. (Plan ahead now; Berlin is lovely in the spring.) Stillspotting nyc also continues apace this spring, extending the migratory reach of the Guggenheim, perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of van der Leer’s curation thus far. I spoke to him about his efforts with the lab, which he co-curates with Maria Nicanor, and his curatorial approach and found out why so many find the curator worth profiling.

BMW Guggenheim Lab site before construction (Photo: Kristopher McKay)

CL: Why did you choose comfort as the first topic for the BMW Guggenheim Lab to study?
David van der Leer: We were looking for themes that are slightly emotional, that people can respond to without having a big knowledge of the themes you would normally associate with cities. Domestic space is usually related to comfort, so when people hear “comfort,” they immediately think of a fluffy bed and all that kind of stuff, but not necessarily about what comfort means in a city. If we ask people very specifically what’s “comfort” in a city context, they usually respond, “Oh yes, a park along the river,” but what does it mean when you start to confront those notions?

CL: Tell us about where the lab will be traveling.
DvdL: It’s important for us to go to bigger cities and cities all around the world. Smaller cities are also interesting, but I think that’s a different project. For instance, I’d love to do a project on suburbia, but this project is built to look at metropolises around the world. Berlin is a little smaller, but, all in all, they’re quite big cities.

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“I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to … If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.”

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CL: How do you think a larger city versus a smaller city or the different regions informs the themes of each two-year cycle?
DvdL: Some of the bigger issues in cities, such as transportation and housing, become a little more sharp in even bigger cities, so that’s why it’s interesting for us to look at the biggest places. I think it will differ from city to city and will be based on what the lab team does. In New York, it was fairly abstract because the team decided to look at the city as a system. In Berlin, it will be a very different project, much more practical. Also, the public programs around it will shift and change.

CL: Urban issues seem to be of programmatic interest for curators. There was the Global Cities show at the Tate Modern in 2007 and last year the Festival of Ideas for the New City organized by the New Museum. Why or how are urban issues a curatorial concern?
DvdL: One of my frustrations if you look at this type of show is you get a lot of photography. You get a lot of diagramming and maps, and they give you a sense of the reality of cities. They almost want to say, “Okay, we understand the city,” whereas I think the complete opposite. All of those tools are very valuable and helpful, but I don’t think we understand cities at all.

I think it’s important to approach it from another end, which is why we created a project that was much more about people than about the data that’s all subjective anyway. We created a project where people would be the core element of all the conversations, and at times there are poetic moments.

Diagram illustrating one venue of the BMW Guggenheim Lab

CL: What makes you say we haven’t figured cities out?
DvdL: I don’t think we can know what a perfect city is. We know how to create utopias on paper, but utopia has never materialized. You get driven by how a city is organized, and here especially the grid system creates a fairly anxious city. You never stop. It has to do with city form and the organization of cities.

CL: You mentioned poetry a little while ago, and you’ve referenced it in previous interviews. The poetic or lyrical seems to be valuable to you. How does it show up in your curation?
DvdL: I think it’s nice when things aren’t necessarily catered to a conclusion or an answer. I like it when projects are more layered, and people need to find their way through it.  It’s basically way-finding, which I think happens with the lab, as well as in stillspotting. Futurefarmers, too. You run into things you may not have expected. That can be fairly poetic.

CL: Why is way-finding a preferred approach for you, and what do you think it offers visitors?
DvdL: Everything is so direct in how we live our lives that, for something to really have an effect, you sometimes have to do the opposite. More intriguing can be super effective. For instance, with stillspotting, we’re running two years of programming on stillness around New York. Normally, you would start off with numbers—”Noise is bad for this reason”—and we’re using that type of language, but we’re trying to get people to go to one or three or perhaps all of them and realize, “This is something I could find myself, too, without necessarily having to make drastic changes in my life.”

CL: You’re so focused on the internal architecture of the visitor. Can you speak to that?
DvdL: Things can be so, so direct. It’s fairly easy to get people to have an emotion, but these projects are less direct in terms of information. They can go to the core in a different way. For instance, with stillspotting, I could’ve made a show with fifty objects all nice and beautiful, and it would’ve been a nice and quiet show. But I think as soon as you take something out of the museum and place it in an urban context, it becomes a very different animal. It becomes something that people can respond to. In the museum, it becomes abstract. If we had done the same installations at the museum, it would have been impressive but not as effective.

CL: How do you judge effectiveness?
DvdL: Getting some emotion out of people. When you’re emotional, it’s sometimes easy to learn something, and that’s something we’re trying to get at. People respond very positively and sometimes very negatively, but I like that there is some sort of response to things. Otherwise, the type of show you referred to earlier is important and interesting, but it’s very difficult to respond to it. You pick up some information, and that’s usually it.

CL: So how would you advise someone interested in becoming a curator?
DvdL: I’m the worst example actually, because many curators are probably art historians and often know for a long time that they want to be a curator. I’m trained in urban and architectural theory and then worked for architects and ended up here not entirely by accident, but it was some sort of accident. What I’m trying to say is for some curators there’s definitely a path and it’s very logical, but it can have a little bit of a twist.

CL: Right, you don’t have the same perspective.
DvdL: Well, I share many of the same perspectives, but I’m less driven by objects. In many cases, curators are forced to think about objects. That’s the nice thing about our projects. They’re either about discussions or emotions, and often an object is a part of that but it doesn’t have to be so romanticized.

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Cielo Lutino is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor covering culture, urban, and technology topics for clients including Econsultancy, NYU-Polytechnic Institute, and Bloomberg Businessweek, where she is a weekend editor.

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All images courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

He delivers what one studio visitor described as a “luminous experience” by blending formalistic techniques which distort the subject “beyond recognition” and are indeterminable in advance with elements of a category of occult photography known as supernatural; the Oxford Companion to the Photograph describes supernatural images as those which “more or less show what an observer present during the exposure could have seen” and more important, do not show ‘the invisible’.

Subsequently, two of the images, Reading the email telling me Oscar had died and The sun setting on Riley’s birthday, with Hannah screaming in the background capture the emotionally charged moments selected, but they are not representational. The viewer must create the narrative, and in some ways, according to Farwell, the photograph. The image is beyond recognition even though the camera, minus lens, produced an “aide-mémoire”.

The installation ranks high in mischievousness, hiding what was once in plain sight and then coaxing the viewer to complete the final image.  With no two final results alike, Die Transfer Process will have succeeded in engaging audiences in a creative process using a space no larger than the one found on their cell phones.

Mike Kelley, Mall Culture, 2000 Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 138 inches, Courtesy of Prism Gallery

In the 1970’s, a typical suburban youth wouldn’t conceive of declaring a new art movement. A more natural mode of rebellion would be to start a band. At Prism Gallery in West Hollywood, Mike Kelley curates the first retrospective of work by the original artists in Destroy All Monsters. “Return of The Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977,” presents Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw as members of an experimental band and art collective. This expansive exhibition highlights a rich archive of prints, drawing and photography, including several mural-sized paintings, which commemorate influential figures in their collaborations.

The collection of ephemera conjures a vision of the quartet tinkering in the basement of an old Victorian. They’re making lewd noises while inventing mutations of pornographic models and comic book characters. In 1970’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, the four artists manipulated tropes of a band to unleash a ritualistic, “combination of accident, fumes and frenzy.” These are words Kelley uses to describe Jim Shaw’s method of spray painting on collage. In the spirit of Dada, DAM employed found material to disassemble pop-culture, pre-existing social structures and contemporary art critique. For example, in a performance project called Futurist Ballet, Jim Shaw created flyers advertising fake lectures, which were posted around the University of Michigan campus. When a few colleagues would get duped into attending, “D.W. Janson on Zoroastrian Symbolism in Duchamp’s Large Glass,” they would be confronted with a loosely planned, guerilla performance. Destroy All Monsters did not ignore the boundaries of conceptual art or music genres, but it reacted to them. The structure of a band also gave its members a contextual grounding for their individual practices.

Installation View, Courtesy of Prism Gallery

There is no soundtrack in the gallery to distract from the visual rhythm created by the cacophony of images. This two-story exhibit displays Xerox collages, pages from zines, photography and drawings, vaguely divided into quadrants dedicated to each artist. The quantity of archived ephemera produced from 1973-1977 is oddly disproportionate to their limited notoriety as a musical group. Kelley redefines DAM, instructing us to view the experiment as a visual art collaboration, rather than as a band. The show is less like a retrospective than the long-delayed realization of a youthful ideal, the mature culmination of the group’s vision.

Mike Kelley, Untitled (Allegorical Drawings), 1976/2011, Pigment prints on German Etching paper, 14 x 9 1/2

Today, music and concepts of memory continue to play a key role in Mike Kelley’s practice. He produces soundtracks for many of his video installations, including, Exploded Fortress of Solitude, a solo exhibition at Gagosian earlier this year. Destroy All Monsters developed Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara and Jim Shaw as artists by allowing them the freedom to react with messy spontaneity to the changes in their world. A Kurt Vonnegut quote comes to mind: “It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems. This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry— or laugh.” DAM gave these artists permission to do both.

A 312 page catalogue from, Return of The Repressed: Destroy All Monsters, 1973-1977, is available at Prism Gallery.

Event date: Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Location: Netil House, 1 Westgate Street, London E8 3RL
Time: 7:00pm – midnight
Organizers:
Sonel Breslav, Editor, Artcards London
Tom Trevatt, Editor, Incognitum Hactenus
Admission: BYOB, £2 suggested donation

The programme includes:
INCOGNITUM HACTENUS presents:
Lions
Simon Clark
Gandt
a/tt(a)c
and a screening of Re-Animator, 1985, dir. Stuart Gordon – based on a ‘Herbert West, Re-Animator’ a short story by H.P. Lovecraft

Incognitum Hactenus is a new quarterly journal featuring writing on art, horror, and philosophy. Conceived as an ongoing investigation into each sphere and its crossovers, the journal publishes new work by leading international scholars, artists, filmmakers, curators, musicians, and designers. With a focused interest in that which finds an affiliation with horrific contemporaneity and the exposure to radical thought, Incognitum Hactenum reveals the twisting of contingency (that which comes from outside) as it produces new monstrosities. We aim to tear asunder the fleshy belly of the established and expected. Editors: Caryn Coleman and Tom Trevatt.

THIS IS TOMORROW
Online Magazine and comprehensive archive of contemporary art based in London. International contributors review exhibitions in London, New York, Venice, Berlin, Paris, LA, and Vienna.

LIME HEADED DOG

ALASDAIR DUNCAN

LAURIE INNES
Spoken/sung monologue from his work in progress; ‘Alan Turing Did Not Die In Vain

Rachel De Joode, Seeing the Future, a skype-performance, 2011

A young, naked man stares at us, reacting in real-time via webcam; his image is projected onto a typical artist’s canvas and easel a few meters away. Every few minutes he speaks to us. Sometimes I hear what he says, “a woman walks across the room” or “the man with a blue jacket just moved towards the back”. Other times the Internet connection is too weak and his words become fragmented. But the audience understands he is watching us. We continue standing in front of him immobilized, it is awkward and the tension is real.

This performance entitled “Seeing The Future” by Rachel De Joode was a highlight of the opening at The Future Gallery last Friday. The event celebrated the sixth edition of PWR PAPER, a “phuturist” publication focused on art and design. The performance transported the character “Brennan” who is ten hours ahead of us back into the gallery space. Drawing attention to the collapse of present and future time De Joode’s concept seems fitting considering the name of the gallery and PWR PAPER’s tagline.

PWR PAPER , 2010-2011

PWR PAPER publications are usually one large, newsprint foldout and feature artists from the post-internet arts community. Friday’s event saw the launch of a bound book with over one hundred and fifty pages of artworks and writings.  Featuring more than twenty-six artists, the exhibition also included work by Aaron Graham, Andreas Banderas, Ben Schumacher, Carson Fish-Vittori, Martin Kohout, Oregon Painting Society, Sarah Hartnett and Travess Smalley. Many of the exhibiting artists regularly contribute to PWR PAPER. This publication and exhibition bring together an expansive group of artists, intermingling “phuturistic” perspectives on technology and culture.

Art Basel Miami 2011:

Saving the mothership for last, but not least. Here is a quick photo-journal of myself racing against the clock on the closing day at the Convention Center.

Photo Credits: Brinson Renda

Here are a few photo’s from the Wynwood Walls and Mamushka’s in Midtown.

Photo Credits: Brinson Renda