And Speaking of Relational Aesthetics: Youngman Hennessy

Carolina G. (thank you!) sent me the link to the video below, by Hennessy Youngman, which also appears on 1) the Gavin Brown's enterprise site as part of the Rirkrit Tiravanija commentary and 2) on Negrophonic's site, as a stand-alone March 15th post. 

(If you'd like a short refresher on Nicolas Bourriaud (1965-) or "relational aesthetics" and "relational art" you can drop in here.)

Rirkrit Tiravanija: Fear Eats the Soul

A while back, when I was still in the habit of posting regularly (and had the time and mental energy to do so), I mentioned the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in conjunction with another relational aesthetic project that was occurring at the Flux Factory. Aah, the old days! A friend of C's saw the post and ended up deciding to check out one of his events, and even mentioned it to see. But I'd never had an opportunity to experience his work live--to participate in it--until this past Saturday when that same friend, knowing of my interest in Tiravanija, hipped us to his show that's currently running at Gavin Brown's enterprise until mid-April, Fear Eats the Soul. I can't say I fully grasp Tiravanija's invocation of the English translation of the title of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's iconic film (one of his best, really) from 1974, Ali: Angst Essen Seele Auf, which treated the tumultuous love affair, across national, linguistic, racial, class, and cultural lines between a white working-class German woman and a brown North African immigrant laborer, especially after reading the press release for the show, but it nevertheless increased my interest in seeing what he had devised.

The show consists of several parts: one, FEAR EATS THE SOUL, is the large, transformed open space of the Brown enterprise gallery, with "Fear eats the soul" graffitied in black on the gray walls, a mini-gravesite (a hill of soil, an iron headstone laid flat reading "Fear Eats The Soul"), and other deconstructive elements placed here and there, the emptiness and ephemeral state of the space signifying, among other things, quite playfully upon the title and the idea of the "reliquary," which he has played with before. Another reprises several of his earlier performances, including the plywood replica of his apartment, this time filled with bronzed pieces referencing his 1994 show "with" (the late) Andy Warhol, which paired the latter artist's pieces (one of the Mao portraits, a Brillo box, a TV set) with pieces from Tiravanija's life.  Unlike in 1999, on Saturday, we weren't able to install ourselves and sleep on his bed, watch his TV, ruminate, be; the door was locked, the space open for viewing. The plywood structure did invite visitors through a second door, which led to a screenprinting shop, TSHIRTNOTSHIRT.COM, whose walls Tiravanija had lined with a number of phrases he has cited in the past (some of them détourned or repurposed quotes from others), and which offered $20 t-shirts featuring these phrases to anyone who requested one. When we dropped in, one of his Columbia University graduate students, the affable Nick P., was running the press. Obsessed as I am with documenting such events, I got one (see below).

But this would not have been a Tiravanija show for me if he had not performed one of his trademark moves, which was to prepare food for visitors-participants, a hallmark of his practice from his earliest performance-events, such as 1990's Pad Thai, which also took place at an earlier inpetration of Gavin Brown's enterprise, and a legendary and almost hackneyed form of the now well-known genre of conceptual art known as "relational aesthetics."  Hackneyed except in the hands of Tiravanija himself, who as part of SOUPNOSOUP.COM, in another (the main?) part of Brown's arthouse, quietly and with radiant charm (and several assistants) prepared two different soups, one a tea-lime chicken version (which led me to break my vegetarianism for a day) and the second a milder mushroom soup. I know that tea, lime juice, and a few other things went into the pot, because my trio watched Tiravanija and his trio prepare the food, the day grow brighter and chillier, and various personages, unknown to us but likely part of New York's art scene, pop in for soup and conversation.  One person I struck up a conversation with turned out to be a very important former gallerist and font of knowledge and insight, Simon Cerigo, whose wife publishes the Website ArtLoversNewYork.  To say that he regaled us would be understating matters, so I'll put it this way: I learned more in the 45 or so minutes of conversation with him about the New York (and global) art world of the last 30 years than I had in the last 25 of my own gentle investigations of the same. Or rather, I got from his conversation what no books, polite inquiries at galleries, and chats with the artists I know have provided. I lie not! At any rate, we decided not to be carbuncles, and headed out. I could not muster the courage to chat with Tiravanija, so I took lots of pictures, and smiled at him. He probably thinks I'm a crazy person, which wouldn't be so off the mark, especially as I have been sporting a baby(fro)hawk these last few days. (It's spring break!) 

I'm still thinking about the soup, the crowd, the concept, Fassbinder, New York's art world, what it might mean to be a world-famous artist reprising your earlier interventions in an art world that has grown immeasurably richer and more global since you first began your work; to be serving soup in a city in which the homeless are numerous, and what sort of "community" really is being created or engaged if the project occurs within a (private, wealthy) gallery's (open) walls; to build a plywood version of any sort of living space, again within the confines of a privat(iz)e(d) institutional space, when New York apartments are still unaffordable for the majority of its population and people of color are still losing their homes empty to foreclosure and empty storefronts are legion; to create ephemeral artworks that on the one hand defy easy commodification but are by the same token now utterly implicated and imbricated the contemporary art and economic commodification process, and which by their very nature assume even greater value at a certain level; to be making art in a gallery on the edge of SoHo when the artworld has mostly tromped up to Chelsea, which was mostly still warehouses 21 years ago, in an increasingly deindustrialized, deterritorialized, defunded city, at a revolutionary moment or moments: what does it mean and can it be summed up even in an essay or book?  I'm still thinking, remembering, enjoying. Photos below:

Rirkrit Tiravanija, at work

At work

C & Ada H (THE)

Angst Essen Seele Auf


Nick P. at work on (my) t-shirt

The way things go

My secret motto

Simon Cerigo

Reprise of Tiravanija/Warhol (originals 1994)

Yours truly, with his soup

The tea-lime chicken soup

Paintings: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Six Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1987) chalkboard-style paintings, under the title Tuxedo, from the Paris Review's Spring 1983, No. 87 issue. When I recently came across these images, I wondered if I, during my final year of high school and first year in college, might have seen them when they first appeared, and realized that although I would scour magazines and journals like The Paris Review in search of--I don't know what? Something I hadn't seen before? Something important and adult and considered important and adult? And even carried ariound photocopies of poems, stories and interviews I found in its pages, I did not see them.  Or perhaps I could not see them--yet. It would be a few year later, while in college, that I became aware of the young black painter that people were calling a genius; who was appearing in the New York Times with Andy Warhol; whose work represented an apotheosis of the then-still-condemned and ubiquitous popular, public genre known as graffiti (art). The Radiant Man was still blazing brightly.

I love the simplicity of these works, how they present Basquiat's mature style in distilled form. They suggest the simplicity of someone sketching, chalk or spraypaint can in hand, but their compositional density and complexity shows how thoroughly Basquiat's mind (and genius), his networks of reference and relation, were at work.  Please click on the images to see them at full size and also to see all six.

Also in this issue and accessible online: interviews with Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Heinrich Böll. Enjoy.

GOP Trifecta Today + Super R-Type Event @ Green Lantern Gallery

The 2008 candidates' tax cut plans

Because of the high risk of incivility ("be civil" a friend sometimes reminds), I have refrained for some time from posting political commentary on here, saving that for short bursts on Twitter or other channels, but I must say, the GOP hit the foulest trifecta today: they killed a Senate vote to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, they defeated a Senate bill to provide funding for 9/11 first responders, and they forced the Senate Majority Leader to table the DREAM Act.

On top of this, I listened to "reasonable" Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee tell his NPR interlocutor that not only did the country need not worry about the huge deficit-increasing effects of the Bush-GOP tax cut gimmicry overall ($4 trillion to the Treasury over the next decade), which was going to magically create jobs after having not done so for ten years, nor worry about the effects just of the cuts for billionaires ($700 million), but in fact, any future attempt to reset the tax rates to Clinton levels (which were quite low) or any other higher level would amount to "the largest tax increase in history."

You heard that--"the largest tax increase in history"--it's going to be trotted out like a sick show pony over and over and over as soon as the time is right.

On top of this, the payroll tax cut will reset in a year, meaning it either will be kept low, starving Social Security's trust fund or raised and labeled a "tax increase." Mind you, they are going to use these both to bash the Democrats' heads in throughout 2012. I need not say who is going to suffer the worst as a result of this, but he currently occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But what can you do, he's beyond listening or reasoning, it appears. I asked the question a while ago: when did this president become a self-identified "Blue Dog," and did anyone else realize we were putting a Republican in the White House?

***

Tonight I ventured out briefly into the cold and snow (it's on again) to catch the second (and last?) in the Super R-Type word-based art series, curated by a d jameson at the Green Lantern Gallery's The Corpse Performance Space, in Ukrainian Village. (Some Chicago neighborhoods have such vivid names.) The lineup included painter and graphic artist Keiler Roberts, School of the Art Institute student Hyojin An, and poets Amira Hanafi and (publisher) Rachel Araujo. Roberts narrated a tour through her witty and engaging autobiographically based graphic work, which she said she turned to after years as a more conventional painter, though she did say that she still painted and drew. Her husband (and daughter, then still on the way) made an appearance in the works, which I plan to check out. One aspect of her work that I particularly liked was her use of blogs as creative devices to enable kinds of word-text pairings that are not that possible otherwise, and it intrigued me to think about these projects (she has started 2-3 blogs, from what I can tell) in relation to her graphic work/comics.

Hyojin An, a native of Korea, devised pictograms as a means of dealing with her struggles with the English language and American signage. These were humorous but also underlined how even knowledge of a second language, in written form, can prove baffling given the complexities of idiomaticity, conventional and everyday usage, and so on. In the second project she displayed, she had created large quasi-ID statements saying on the top half, "I, ________, am [ ] a foreigner here in _____", and on the bottom half allowing the self-identifier to write whatever she or he wanted, especially in her or his native language. She mentioned that she took photos not only in Chicago, but overseas (I think she said Singapore, but perhaps also South Korea). Though I did think immediately of similar projects based on self-identification, both formal and more contingent and popular (the sorts of quickly drawn up IDs people have used, for example, on Chatroulette or other sites), I enjoyed hearing her talk through how she had come up with this project. She invited us to come create one, but I wasn't feeling so ready to do so. You can download them from her site, though. One other fun and funny project An created was a Facebook profile for "Foreign Er": do visit it to review it for yourself.

Concluding the evening and event were Hanafi and Araujo, who read together and in complementary fashion. Hanafi's project derived from culling Oxford English Dictionary entries related to "fucking," while Araujo's selections were drawn from her interest in human anatomy and her conceptualization of what might happen if one's right brain somehow ended up in one's crotch.  They did create a dialogue that did raise the heat, especially Araujo's pieces, though both were less graphic--in the sexual sense--than I thought they might be.  But then, had they were not allowed to project the old porno film clips, taken from the waiting rooms in Parisian brothels of an earlier era, that they had wanted onto the screen, but the gallery's picture glass front posed too much of a vice-squad risk. (Daley's Chicago is pretty liberal, but not that liberal, especially outside of certain neighborhoods.) Not even the falling snow provided enough cover. It did, however, make driving back north treacherous, and yet I'm here posting this, so I got my dose of mind food and it all worked out in the end.


Photos!


Green Lantern Gallery's Devin, opening the event

Before the event

Series curator a d jameson

The cover of one of Keiler Roberts' graphic pieces/comics

A frame of Keiler Roberts' comics (it resembles Alison Bechdel's style a little here)

Some of the art in the gallery

Between presentations

Spectators/attendees

Keiler Roberts chatting with an attendee

Hyojin An showing her images

One of An's pictographic signs

One of An's foreigner identity sheets

Curator jameson displaying his foreigner identity sheet
 
Curator jameson and An displaying prints of the foreigner ID sheets

Rachel Araujo and Amira Hanafi

Man and cloth mountain (this is not the name of this artwork, to be sure....)

Artist Richard Hunt @ Th!nkART Salon

@ Courtesy of Th!nkART

On Friday evening I ventured south to Th!nkART Salon to catch the secaond of three openings (spreading the festivities out over several evenings is a great idea) of acclaimed artist Richard Hunt's (1935-) new exhibition of sculptures, drawings and lithographs, "A Force of Nature." Hunt holds a special place for me, because he was perhaps one of the first internationally renowned African-American artists I ever met in person, when, two decades ago at the invitation of the Dark Room Writers Collective to which I belonged, he, composer T. J. Anderson Jr., and my late predecessor at the university, the incomparable Leon Forrest, graciously agreed to participate in a program, which included a viewing of Hunt's work, a reading by Leon, and snippets of Anderson's operas, including, Soldier Boy, Soldier, for which Leon wrote the libretto, at the historic African Meeting House on Beacon Hill in Boston.  It was a remarkable event, not least because we had no money whatsoever to host any of these already very distinguished artists. But they presented their work (Hunt was teaching that year at Harvard, while Anderson was teaching at Tufts University) and later broke bread with us, offering all us young writers and artists, yet again, an example to follow in our own lives and work.

I thus was really excited both to see Richard's work and to say hello to him, and fortunately he hadn't left, so we had the opportunity to chat for a bit. Among the things we talked about was Cuba, which he visited a decade back, during what would have been the end of worst years of the very difficult Special Period (of economic privation) and the changes that were underway, visible already when I was there a year back. We also talked about some of his new and current projects, and as the photos below demonstrate, his sculpture and visual abstractions on paper have only gained in sensuous power and expressiveness since I first encounted years back. At 75 he is also continuing to create the public projects for which he's gained worldwide recognition. If you are in Chicago, I recommend checking out the show before it ends, on December 10, 2010, and also visiting the downstairs exhibit, if it's open, which features Adam Clement's geometric abstractions, in colored pencil with acrylic finish, on paper. (And, let me also give Th!nkART another shout out, as it hosted the reading of Italian poets, organized by poet and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, in conjunction with the literary journal Aufgabe, that introduced me to Maria Attanasio and the other incredible contemporary poets....)

Some photos (enjoy)!:


The opening's crowd

Hunt's "Totem," in cast bronze

Some of Hunt's lithographs on display

The gallery owner chatting with Hunt's daughter

One of Hunt's works on paper

Another of Hunt's works on paper

Th!nkART's DJ

Hunt (on right), chatting with Larry, a fan

In the downstairs gallery, Adam Clement's work

Downstairs gallery

Clement's "Holes"

Clement's "Untitled"

September Comings & Goings (Artists, Fat Beats, Almanacs)

While on my way from one place to another, I happened upon a corner display of colorful, witty series of vernacular paintings and decoupages in SoHo that stopped me in my tracks. After a little bit of conversation, I learned that the pieces were the work of Patrick-Earl.com, who works in a range of media and whose deceptively simple imagery contains more than its sly share of political and social commentary. (That it was on display outside an empty storefront in SoHo only flavored my impression.)

I particularly liked the LLC-Storefront assemblages (I couldn't afford one on this go-round), which are visible along the bottom row of the two photos right below, but I did get a tiny $20 painting that had a delightful image (Gordon Park's famous "American Gothic, Washington, D.C.") collaged in. (Check out his hat in the photo below too; it's part of his Shotgun series, just as t-shirt was part of his Ties series of paintings.) All of the pieces I saw offered stories, both readily apparent and more complexly embedded in them, a few of which Patrick-Earl expounded on for me.

Do check out his site; all his pieces are for sale, at reasonable prices for original artwork in New York.

Patrick-Earl's display, in SoHo


The display from another angle


Patrick-Earl and an admirer of his work

---

Though a fan of hiphop music, I never spent that much time in Fat Beats, the legendary underground hiphop music store on 6th Avenue, but I did stop in a few times over the years, and would often encounter the self-distributing, aspiring rappers as I passed below its windows on my way to NYU's campus, or in the opposition direction towards the PATH station on 9th St.

Like so much of 1990s New York City, and especially the West Village, Fat Beats has now closed its doors, in part because of the economic shifts in the music industry and because of the still-too-high cost of renting in Great Recession-era New York City. The store's closure underlines the impression I had of the very rocky state of affairs in NYC, despite all the official pronouncements. Just a few weeks ago I was on 8th Street, once the shoe bazaar to rival them all, and lighted up and lively well into the early hours, and not only was the block between 5th and 6th Avenues eerily dark, but it was somnolent as well. Yes, NYU has yet to start back up, but that wasn't a problem 5 and certainly not 10 years ago....



A crowd milling about outside Fat Beats, on 6th Avenue, in the West Village, during its final day(s)

---

For several years (including this summer!) I have been working on several books, one of them a novel, and it's entailed original historical research, among others. (I admire Edward P. Jones's genius and daring, but I am not he....) Among the books that I had been trying to get ahold of were Boston (or Massachusetts, or even New England) almanacs from the earliest years of the 19th century, without having to physically travel to the various libraries (Boston Public Library, Harvard's library, American Antiquarian Society, etc.) that have copies.

Let me be clear that I am quite fond of Boston and would visit in a heartbeat, but I've been trying to limit my travel whenever necessary, given my already peripatetic existence).  A bit of searching online led me not only to a number of online volumes, scanned in by various universities and colleges around the US, in partnership with the Google, but also to the find below, which cost...$10, + postage! I haven't authenticated it, but it appears to be an original almanac, from 1804, with writing from some period shortly thereafter. The text correlates closely with other almanacs from that area and that year, and the inscriptions are fascinating in and of themselves. Someone used the book to do quite a bit of sums, though reading the currency conversion chart at the back, you'd have needed a piece of butcher paper not only to convert foreign (British, Spanish, etc.) money into the amounts legislated by Congress only a few years before, but, as other almanacs have shown me, between the various US states, which had their own sometimes quite divergent currencies.

Since I have the online versions I don't have to use it, but I thought it was quite cool that this little treasure was available, online, for a song. (And perhaps texts of this sort usually sell for almost nothing, but as I'm quite unschooled about such things, I was surprised.)


New-England Almanack, from 1804


Pages of the 1804 Almanack


Pages of the 1804 Almanack