By now, you’ve probably seen or heard about the super-hyped new reality series Work of Art put out by Bravo TV. I don’t watch TV or follow much on mainstream media, but this got me buzzing with curiosity.  And recently on WNYC (yes, the radio) I heard an interesting and unexpected interview with Sarah Jessica Parker showing this other side of her being an art enthusiast. So that partly explains why she co-produced Work of Art and also why (other than it being a reality show) it has that Sex and the City flavor. When I got the news that they combined reality TV and art together, I was both shocked but excited. How “real” is it?  The pitch is nothing new: competition-driven, opportunity-of-a-lifetime, artists becoming contestants playing this game, and one winner gets to have it all. Sounds a bit silly, but it must take a lot of guts to push yourself out in front of those cameras many hours a day, especially strange if you’re an artist used to working in solitude. Ultimately it is rewarding since the winner gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum and cash. After all, the show is made for public broadcast entertainment but how much reality is it really? I guess it’s also up to the individual artists as well. As Jerry Saltz puts it “maybe being sick to one’s stomach comes from whatever it is that drives someone like me to even appear on a reality-TV show at all.” This crazy New York art world is a whole reality in itself and that’s what drives us to be thrilled by it.

(circa 1924, courtesy nycsubway.org)

If you haven’t already noticed the MTA has just put out the new subway map to replace the previous one, which has constantly been updated for the past 10 years. This new map shows more defined routes compared to the previous map, which had a lot of unfinished business. The new map that launched this month  is graphically cleaner with finer attention paid to the color scheme, although I think the bright blue is a tad loud. The New York Subway system must be the oldest in the world, you can witness this history at the Chambers Street station, where you can still feel the grit of New York’s past times. Updating the map is a sign that the city is putting an effort for these improvements, and evidently they are enhancing some of the stations, albeit at a slow rate. I think there are still lots of technological advancement that we can learn from other cities such as the London Undergound, which has a superior information design navigational system (online and onsite), and Berlin with its time table that is precise to the second, and other cities in Asia such as Tokyo and Hong Kong that are admirable for their service to riders. And perhaps even Barcelona, that gives riders an ad-free commute.

The NYTimes did a great article comparing the map of MTA’s present and past here.

(above top: Anne Eastman, Untitled, 2009.  above: Vince Rourke, 132 Hedron 2000)

Summer vacation seems to have started a bit earlier in the Chelsea gallery world than the rest of us. This past Thursday, it was nearly empty in Chelsea. The weather was perfect for gallery hopping, but I suppose that the beach is more exciting than looking at art.  I randomly walked into ATM gallery to be caught by surprisingly fresh work. The group exhibition appropriately titled Summer Survey are works by Anne Eastman, Virginia Martinsen, Noam Rappaport, Miguel Angelo Rocha, Eric Sall, Peter Sutherland, and Vince Rourke. You may already be familiar with some of the names, such as Peter Sutherland who is renowned for his photographs. Here he shows his recent video Ice Cream and Tacos (2010). The works are a dry yet interesting showing of urban minimalist grit and raw that is usually more of an LA thing than in Chelsea, NY. I really enjoyed this off-the-beaten-path of a Summer Survey.

Summer Survey at the ATM goes on until July 15.

Flyfire Team: Carlo Ratti, Assaf Biderman, Carnaven Chiu, E Roon Kang,
Caitlin Zacharias, Shaocong Zhou

An idea based gallery show with no tangible objects, everything in the exhibition SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures can be found online. The group show which is on now at GAFFTA Gallery consists of fifteen awesome and innovative projects chosen from MIT’s SENSEable Cities Laboratory that aim at posing questions and creating sustainable solutions to our rapidly evolving cities. The Copenhagen Wheel is just one solution that encourages sustainability and mobility by being a bicycle wheel that can turn your pushbike into an electric bike and communicate with your smart phone about traffic patterns and pollution levels along your route. However, the wheel was not at the gallery, in fact none of the projects had a tangible component, they were represented by wall texts, photos and a looping video. Everyone should be familiarized with MIT’s SENSEable Cities Laboratory, however, trekking all the way to GAFFTA Gallery to do so seems rather unnecessary when you can just flip your laptop open to http://senseable.mit.edu and see the whole show and much 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)

(images courtesy Regina Rex)

In the days of Minimalism, artists tried to make objects that were totally empty of meaning. Simple and pure in form, these objects would speak to all, recognizing no linguistic borders. However, as this program congealed into a kind of formal orthodoxy, many artists of the following generation spoke about ‘taking the forms of Minimalism and corrupting them with meaning.’ Their aesthetically (and conceptually) messier incarnation came to be known as post-Minimalism, and it is a tradition of particular interest today as artists continue to deconstruct the foundations of Modernism. For its inaugural group show, artist Eli Ping organized MIN. at Regina Rex, a new space started by twelve individuals in Bushwick Brooklyn. MIN. takes a look at seven artists who pick up the Minimalist format once again but use it to explore the troubled relationship between language and object-hood.

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Photo: Hans Schabus Klub Europa, 2010

Marlene Haring, Marlene Haarig oder In meiner Badewanne bin Ich Kapitän! (Marlene Hairy or In My Bathtub I am the Captain), 2005
Kriech- und Badeperformance / crawling and bathing performance  (Courtesy the artist)

(all images courtesy Rob Beschizza)

While the NY Public Libraries are under the stress of budget cuts, the nation’s Library of Congress has been busy digitizing its collections with a grand vision for the future. The Library of Congress houses the largest database in the world with original manuscripts, ancient books, renaissance-era maps, audio/video files, and historical artifacts. I came across an interesting photo essay by Rob Beschizza revealing some interesting facts about what is going on behind the library’s preservation department.  It is both interesting and exciting to see how they are handling cultural artifacts using intelligence from specialists (perhaps researching from other countries as well) to realize a whole new digital culture, hence a different way of researching and learning.

My hope is that as they develop, they will preserve the traditional values of a library, as a powerful resource and cultural establishment, going into the future to advance digitally. As Eric Hansen, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division puts it, “You can learn about a culture from how it builds and stores things.” Browse the LoC’s digital collection online.

(Geoff Marslett’s Mars, US, 2010)

BAM Cinema Fest opens tomorrow!  The new program boasts a mixture of interesting picks from marked time periods with eclectic titles such as Ben Chace’s Wah Do Dem (with Norah Jones) and award-winning director Ken Wardrop’s His & Hers, and how about Cane Toads: The Conquest in 3-D..!  Most of the selected 18 new features are also NY premieres as part of the new festival.  These along with a delightful program of Shorts (check out Clay Liford’s My Mom Smokes Weed), director/artist Q&A’s, outdoor screenings, and a nice wrap-up closing party are enough to start off your summer film marathon.

See the Program Here