This anonymous work — the first we’ve received — is the most digital image, and informed by digital aesthetics, we’ve received. While most mail art lends itself to a handmade and analog quality, here the artist has gone to the other extreme and sent us a digital print on photo paper with no indication of context.
Art
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Online Art Space Goes Virtual Green
From ASCII sunsets to screen-flattened foliage, Artist Laurel Schwulst makes parks for the internet. In a temporary exhibition called Proposals For Future Parks shown on internet-based art space bubblebyte.org, the artist uses different media approaches, both online and off, to explore the abstract idea of a “park,” a loose term that for the artist might signify a constructed landscape that has been made for humans to experience. In this show of four parts, Schwurst designs parks that are meant to be experienced in the manner we are now most accustomed to — through screens, virtually and at a remove.
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Today’s New York Protest for Ai Weiwei [UPDATE]
At 1pm EST today near the Chinese embassy in Manhattan, out by the water at 520 Twelfth Avenue, a congregation of chairs gathered. Art worlders, community members and human rights activists came out in force, to the tune of a few hundred, to protest for the release of Ai Weiwei, the internationally-famed artist who has been detained by the Chinese government for the past two weeks without charge. Click through to check out a photo essay of the protest featuring a diverse group of chairs, Jerry Saltz and protesters young and old (plus a dog concerned for Panda Bears).
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Everyone Wants to be First
There is apparently something about institutional street art shows that move museum folk towards declarations of their firstness. Street Art at the Tate Modern in 2008 was billed as “the first major public museum display of Street Art in London” while just last winter Hugh Davies, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, glowed that he was “really proud” to be “the first (American) museum to do an international street art show of this scale and scope.”
Art In The Streets, the latest and of course much buzzed exhibition opening at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art is billed by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch as — surprise surprise — “the first exhibition to position the work … from street culture in the context of contemporary art history.”
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Julia K Gleich on Bushwick’s New Collaborative Ballet
Last night, In the Use of Others for the Change premiered at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Choreographed by Julia K. Gleich, the new ballet featured collaborations with some familiar faces on the Bushwick art scene, including Audra Wolowiec, Austin Thomas, Kevin Regan and Andrew Hurst. I spoke to Gleich today about the show, its challenges, its surprises and the differences between New York and London when it comes to contemporary ballet.
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Mail Art Bulletin: Fear of Flying
Lynn Aquaheart of Conway, Arkansas, mailed us a a small canvas in an envelope covered with objects (and an animal) that fly. Inside was a small canvas painted light blue and covered with an inspiring message. We’re not sure if she meant it as a slogan for art in general or a commentary on mail art specifically, we’re guessing the latter.
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The Internet’s Grandma Moses?
On the internet exhibition space The State, a Tumblr-based website, artist Chris Collins has published “tyepilot.com”. The text and image-based essay riffs off the artist’s discovery of a hidden cache of spam images advertising work-from-home internet jobs. Tyepilot’s images are remarkably reminiscent of the trends of contemporary internet art, recycling the visual tropes of the early internet, from bad photo manipulation to fake lens flare. The images are fascinating, but even more interesting is our fascination for the lost artifacts of the internet, and the vagueness of their sources and creators. Could finds of these semi-anonymous digital artifacts constitute the folk art of the internet age? Is Tyepilot the Grandma Moses of the 21st century?
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Mail Art Bulletin: Layers of Discovery
Since we sent out a request for mail art, we’ve received 27 mail art submissions from five countries (Belgium, Canada, Spain, the United States and Uruguay) and nine US states (Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Vermont). The work we’re featuring today gives you an inkling at how layered and mysterious the medium of Mail Art can be. Stuffed with a zine, faux currency, postcards, “stamps,” random ephemera and a personal note addressed to Hyperallergic, the latest edition of the Mail Art Bulletin is from Larry Angelo of Manhattan.
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Absence as Food Art
Last Wednesday April 6, Hyperallergic LABS Tumblr editor Janelle Grace and I attended a press preview for a collaboration between artist Paul Ramirez-Jonas and Park Avenue Spring chef Kevin Lasko called Plus One, hosted at the restaurant and presented by Creative Time Consulting. The resulting event was a mix of inspiring flavor combinations, symbolic food choices and a dash of relational aesthetics engagement with dining as experience. Delicious, but also aesthetically thought provoking. Here are both of our takes on the event, plus a photo essay. Bon appetit!
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An Elusive Photographer Caught on Film
You may have seen him on a bike somewhere in Manhattan, a flashing presence in a blue coat. Maybe he was at a gala or a fundraiser, if you happen to frequent those kinds of events. But where it’s easiest to find Bill Cunningham these days is in the pages of the New York Times, with his weekly fashion photo column On the Street picking up on the prevailing trends of that week in New York City dress. On the street, the 83-year old fashion photographer and aesthetic documentarian is tough to spot, much less pin down. It is Bill Cunningham’s own elusiveness that makes Richard Press’s new documentary Bill Cunningham New York so fascinating: the 92 minute movie is defined by its attempt to get to know a character and an artist whose work and life are completely inseparable.
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Patrick Cariou Versus Richard Prince: Pick Your Side
The art world is apparently supposed to line up behind Richard Prince. If you’re radical right now, you view intellectual property (IP) as a vestige of an archaic market strategy. You think of IP enforcement as a form of hoarding. And you think that anyone who objects, just “doesn’t get it.” And any artist who wishes to build a brand or even to get paid for serial prints (mind you, this includes some of the very radicals mentioned above!) — well, they are supposed to line up behind Patrick Cariou. If you’ve got a vested interest in a body of work, you think of appropriation artists as vermin, lazy, energy-sapping parasites. And you think that anyone who objects is an egomaniac with a crazed sense of entitlement. Want to pick a side in the debate? Here are a few things you’ll need to know.
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Graffiti’s US History & Art in the Streets: Interview with Roger Gastman
On April 17, MOCA LA’s Art in the Streets exhibition opens. The show, which was organized in roughly a year or since Deitch became director of the institution, promises to be a major exploration of street art, graffiti and skateboard culture at one of the country’s most important contemporary art institutions. Today, I spoke to one of the exhibition’s curators, Roger Gastman about his important new book, The History of American Graffiti, which he co-authored with Caleb Neelon, and the MOCA show.
