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Saturday, July 30, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 18

Exit Art CHICKENS!!!

Exit Art rejected my Traffic proposal today.

Traffic
Due April 15, 2005

traf·fic (traf'ik) n.
1. a. The passage of people or vehicles along routes of transportation. b. Vehicles or pedestrians in transit.
2. a. The commercial exchange of goods; trade. b. Illegal or improper commercial activity.
3. a. The business of moving passengers and cargo through a transportation system. b. The amount of cargo or number of passengers conveyed.
4. a. The conveyance of messages or data through a system of communication: routers that manage Internet traffic. b. Messages or data conveyed through such a system.
5. Social or verbal exchange; communication
6. To carry on trade or other dealings

My entry was PERFECT!!!!

Friday, July 29, 2005

an anaba

I'll never forget seeing this cartoon of the Mona Lisa for the first time at the Hyde Collection. The Hyde is full of masterpieces but turning a corner and coming inches from this full-size drawing in a narrow hall... I hadn't expected it.
The Hyde is a small house museum like the Gardener and the Barnes - I think the Hydes were actually inspired to think about making their home public after a visit to the Gardener - but much further off the beaten track way up in Glens Falls, NY.
On my visit last week they had out at least one piece each by Rubens, Ingres (I think there were three out), Tintoretto, Homer, Hassam, Eakins, Renoir, Bierstadt, Courbet, Pisarro, Picasso, Whistler, Rembrandt, Vedder, Ryder, El Greco, Seurat, Ruisdael,Tiepolo, Bellows and more. The Da Vinci is not currently on display but the small Botticelli is sitting on the same table as last time. You would not believe how close you can get to these works, it really does feel like you are in someone's home. This is a stately home but small and intimate by the standards of many of today's new homes. My favorites this time were the Ingres linked to above and this little piece by John Frederick Peto - that mug is much crustier and clumpier in real life. Or maybe my favorite was Rubens' Man in Armor or Cranach the Elder's St. Helena with the True Cross, on loan from another museum in exchange for yet another Rubens. Too Much!!!
More on the Hyde tomorrow.
FYI - the Hyde is the last of the three museums I visited last week. The other two were North Adams MA's Mass Moca and Saratoga NY's Tang. If you are in the area I also recommend a visit to Williamstown MA's Clark Art Institute and Bennington VT's Bennington Museum (for it's great Grandma Moses collection).

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 17


One Day In The Garden, page 17, originally uploaded by Bromirski.
page seventeen - "she had been jealous of her brother for starting to pupate without her. It was a clear-cut case of sibling rivalry."

Michael Oatman


I saw a big Michael Oatman show at the Tang Museum when I was in Saratoga a couple weeks ago. Do you know Michael Oatman? He's very well-regarded in upstate NY, lives and works in Troy. This show at the Tang is a presentation of work from mostly the past five years, plus some new stuff.

Oatman does a lot of collage work and is concurrently included in Mass Moca's Becoming Animal show with a bunch of his collages. He has some collages at the Tang of very cute birds wearing helmets and armor and a few of warplanes arranged like snowflakes. I also like the one of a train lifting off it's trestle and spinning up into the air. I think I saw that one at an Arts Center of the Capital Region show once.

Oatman was involved in the original Factory Direct show, organized by the Arts Center of the Capital Region's Gina Occhiogrosso, as well as a New Haven follow-up. I'm not sure if he was included in the first as an artist or if he was a co-curator or what, but I know that for the New Haven show he was a participating artist. The Factory Direct shows placed artists in residence with local manufacturing industries.... similar to the Kohler program. Oatman was placed with Tower Optical - a company that makes those coin-operated viewing binoculars you find at sightseeing spots.

A Romance in Optics is the title of that Factory Direct installation/video presented here. Tower Optical made a portable one of those viewing machines for Oatman which he took to Easter Island and set up for tourists to look through. He also asked each person the question "if you could see anything, anytime, anywhere what would you most like to see?". The video is very quiet, just a kind of spooky music and muted voices and ocean, and the answers spin into view on red discs -the time when Jesus Christ lived on Earth, Peter the Great in Moscow, the eruption of Krakatoa, I'd like to see here about 2,000 years ago, I'm happy with the present, the big bang, I'd like to meet Abe Lincoln and see my grandparents. One young woman looks away quickly and says "my friend died when we were seventeen, I'd like to see what her life would have been". The best is a smiling man who points off into the distance and says "I'm going to find the red-tailed tropic bird very soon" and later in the video shows up to say "I've done it! I've seen the red-tailed tropic bird! I'm happy". I liked this video a lot. Finding a good video might be like finding a red-tailed tropic bird.

The photo above is from his 2001 piece Taken, a mugshot video of him confessing to all of the bad, unethical, illegal, immoral things he's ever done. Lots of sighs. A good one is the story of how he left a museum with a paint chip from a Picasso painting. Hey Michael, look at this.

Interview with Michael Oatman. Here are two photos of pieces in his show (photos from previous installations).

Carol Es


Carol Es, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Carol Es is the latest artist featured on J.T.'s excellent artists interview artists project. I like this pingirl.

Monday, July 25, 2005

my friends


unwantables, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

These are my two friends kidnapped from Marius Valdes' exhibition of hundreds of unwantables. They now live on my kitchen windowsill.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 15


One Day In The Garden, page 15, originally uploaded by Bromirski.
page fifteen – "The case was going nowhere when who showed up but the caterpillar! One of his segments had rolled under a petal and been overlooked during the feast. It eventually regenerated into the caterpillar who could now reveal his attacker…"

moving to Chelsea

I'm pretty sure Plus Ultra is moving to Chelsea.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Chelsea, part II

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More on Wednesday's Chelsea visit. I'll be updating this post later with more links.

ATM - I like Deki Yayoi's work. She's an artist I've been aware of for a while, since her first or second show in Japan. The stuff here was more restrained than what I've previously seen of her work but still good. She's nuts. Every little dot of color has a smiley face in it. It was interesting to walk across the street to Baumgartner after that and see Kusama Yayoi's small painting. Can't find an image of that piece but it was a lot like one of Deki's without the smiley faces. They are both nuts. Is this the first show of Deki Yayoi in NYC? If so I wish you had been able to see one of her bigger more obsessively wacked and cosmic pieces.

Tomoo Gokita was a doodler.

DCKT - How could I not see Tyler Green's show? The artists in this show do that "lots of" thing again of taking lots of something and and piling it all together until they have a bigger something - lots of soy sauce packets, lots of little tape circles, lots of little pencil circles. Maybe the difference between the three in this show and most other "lots of" artists is that "lots of" people often let the final shape seem like a more organic thing, while the three here have mostly created straight-edge boundaries to box their growths in. Dan Steinhilber is the most interesting for me.

Augusto Di Stefano was a double disappointment because not only is he a lot-of artist he is also a doodler. I thought he would be showing paintings?

The gallerists were friendly. I wandered a little too far back but all three people back there gave a warm "hi".

Lehmann Maupin - At first I thought Christian Hellmich was the missing Leipzig chick except she's not from Leipzig and I'm not sure she's a chick. My favorite works in this show were the smaller of the David Deutsch paintings. Fabien Rigobert's video and photo came in second. I liked Angela Dufresene's smaller paintings at Monya Rowe more than her large ones here.

Clementine - Wayne White is so unbelievably boring. Please, no more! David Rathman is a doodler and boring (the link is from his old cowboy work, now he's doing boxers). No more scrappy drawings, please!!! There are very few people who can do scrappy doodles and lots-of well, and more are not necessary. Give me some meat and I'll take a scrappy doodle on the side, but I don't want any more scrappy doodles as the main course. It's not healthy!! Where is the nourishment in Chelsea? I can't believe I used to want to be in this gallery. Okay, I would still do it - but it's not my first choice!!!

Cynthia Broan - Melanie Stidolph's photograph of a radiant baby was a beautiful backyard Blakean cherub. Sarah Bednarek had a subversive sofa screenprinted with terrorists among the foliage. The Una-Bomber, Hitler - I forget who exactly but all of them are historical figures. This could be in your grandmother's living room with matching curtains and nobody would ever notice. If only this fabric could be slipcovered onto something for a Bush/Blair photo-op.

I'm a big Sarah Bednarek fan. Pictured above is a detail of her piece "Ideologues and Dictators", currently on the cover of the British magazine Miser and Now. Deadpan photos of her with Mussolini's mustache, Lincoln's mole, etc.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Chelsea

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Visited Chelsea yesterday. I'll update this post tomorrow or Saturday with more links to the artists and some shows I don't have time to get to now.

Gagosian - Had two Alexander Calder mobiles in a big back room that I liked a lot. I was reminded of the James Hyde lecture and his idea of the mobile as "ruined genre". It would have been nice to see some of Hyde's Fallen Mobiles lying around.

Robert Miller - Leiko Ikemura's hazy oil on jute paintings of Yoshitomo Nara proportioned women. Ikemura and Nara both live somewhere in Germany, maybe they've influenced each other slightly? Something about these soaked in paintings also made me think of Marlene Dumas. The thinness? The moodiness? These seven works and the Stephen Westfall mentioned below were easily my favorite paintings of the day.

Robert Miller also had very good paintings by Alice Neel and Milton Resnick.

Lennon, Weinberg - The Stephen Westfall painting. Dogwood is a large vertical rectangular canvas trisected by two horizontal and two vertical red bands, creating nine white squares. The white squares are each divided further by one horizontal and one vertical black line - like windowpanes. None of these bands or lines are exactly straight or match up. They're all a little off and it hurts your eyes looking at it trying to make this marks line up as they should. I saw this shortly after seeing the Good Vibrations show at McKenzie.

Here's a Jerry Saltz essay on Stephen Westfall.

McKenzie - Good Vibrations - lots of good stuff - I liked Julian Stanczak, Barbara Takenaga, and most especially the two paintings by Laura Watt.

Sonnabend - Four large landscape c-prints by Elger Esser that had an old postcard feel. Turns out that they actually are photographs of old postcards blown up big. My favorite got taken off the wall and wrapped before my eyes!

Barbara Gladstone - The Slater Bradley and Chris Burden videos. I didn't even realize this was an old (1980) Burden video until I looked at the sheet, I thought it was something new going for a trendy look. Big Wrench is an obsessive funny stalkerish video about a truck.

Nicole Klagsbrun - The seven playful Tuttle-esque pieces/interventions by Cordy Ryman. He had pipe pieces, door braces, a pink corner "ladder", and some wall painting-sculptures (Spider Star was my favorite of those).

Feigen - I liked Craig Love's small pieces best. At first I thought the Judith Linhares painting was a Dana Schutz (and here is a discussion on Edward Winkleman's comments about Schutz which mentions Linhares).

D'Amelio Terras - My favorites here were the two collages by Corin Hewitt. Really weird.

CRG - I liked Zak Prekop's small green painting best.

Monya Rowe - I was most interested in Angela Dufresne's three paintings here. She also had some bigger paintings at Lehmann Maupin but I didn't like them as much.

303 - The Shannon Oksanen portraits were too much the same but worse of the better portraits of that same gallery's Maureen Gallace.

Margaret Thatcher - friendly staff

Marianne Boesky - closed for installation but friendly staff-person who tried to get me a cup of water.

I've had enough of doodles, doodling, and doodlers and saw way way more merchandise than art. I wish I had had time to see the Helion show and Cezanne and Pisarro at MoMA.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

I, Ninja


Ninja, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Sorry posting has been light. I decided to become a Ninja. Training has been rough, but four days later here I am - reborn!

Martin (Codename: "Blackie")

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Mass Moca

Friday I talked about Ann-Sofi Siden, the highlight of my Mass Moca visit. There are actually six different exhibitions up now at Mass Moca - it's a big place. Below are some thoughts on the four exhibits I spent time with.

Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom - Ann-Sofi Siden is only one of the thirteen artists included in this show. My other two favorite works were by Mark Dion and Motohiko Odani.

Dion's piece is a very large circular birdcage at the center of which stands an old leafless tree. All the limbs of the tree have been converted to bookshelves loaded with nature books and there are old framed photos of naturalists all over the trunk with books all round the base of the tree like Christmas presents. He's got more limbs hanging down like swingsets also loaded with books. Sawdust covers the floor of the whole thing. The best part is that the cage is filled with flying finches and you can walk in and stand there or sit on the bench provided. The finches flew all around and played. Dion had feeders all over. Lots of nice props to enjoy the birds.

Motohiko Odani had a strange beautiful sickly alluring video of a girl sitting in a tree singing a haunting cute la-la-la melody surrounded by all sorts of computer-generated nature freak activity. Ear-winged frogs hopping together in perfect circles, infinity flies, honey gloop driping from an orifice in the tree, lots of worms. The girl has yellow eyes, froggy fingers and toes, and a really sexy mouth and tongue but she looks both a little too young and a little too animal for the attraction not to feel dangerous. This short video can easily be watched several times and hearing the la-la-la song in the background while looking at someone else's piece is like a siren's song tempting you back to that more interesting mutant world.

Creature Discomfort - This is a nice collection of old works on paper from the Clark of monsters and mythical creatures - centaurs, Durer monster pigs, Breughel. One piece by Max Klinger of a fairy in a tree teasing a bear made me think of Fairy Butler and Sloth. The bear is a sloth bear (I used to work at a zoo). Nice companion show to Becoming Animal.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune - Cai Guo-Qiang has filled Mass Moca's great hall with nine Ford Taurus' flying through the space. There is something coming out of them that looks like fireworks. It's pretty and interesting when you first walk in but by the time I got to the end of the big hall the thrill had left. Another dead boring room is filled with what looks like stuffed tigers (actually paper mache) shot up with arrows. The strongest part of this show is seeing the car that was used in the making of a firework-exploding car video. He filled a car up with heavy duty fireworks - took out the seats, removed all the windows, cut a hole in the roof - and set them all off to make a video. The car is on display here and calls to mind terrorism and car bombings.

Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection - This was generally boring. The only piece I came to fully appreciate was one of David Schnell's pieces, Park, and I didn't like his other three at all. Park was his smallest - red twisty path, blue sky, washy conifers, brown in the sky. It didn't have any of that acid rust orange or the planks of his other three and seemed nicely unfinished. Corny had it right about the others - Dullsville.

I tried hard to get more into the Neo Rauch but just couldn't care too much. I did enjoy all the small hands and some of the relationships but it was too much the same all over, too flat, too claustrophobic, too drab; no place for me. These were not his newest which I understand to be better.

RELATED:

David Brickman on Becoming Animal.

Modern Kicks on his/her Mass Moca visit.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Ann-Sofi Siden

I went to Mass Moca yesterday and saw some stuff I expected to see and some stuff I didn't but was really knocked out by the work of an artist I had never seen before, Ann-Sofi Siden.

Ann-Sofi Siden is one of thirteen artists included in the Mass Moca exhibit Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom, with a sort of mini-retrospective of one of her ongoing projects, a character called QM. Siden's Queen of the Mud Museum consists of at least sixteen different videos made over ten years, all of which feature the mud-caked nude Siden as the time and space travelling character QM. One video shows QM trying to buy perfume, another at an art fair looking for art to take into space, another shows the "origins" of QM. The best by far is a 28-minute feature film called QM, I think I'll call her QM.

QM, I think I'll call her QM starts with an older woman, a psychologist named Dr. Ruth Fielding, waking up and realizing that a mud-coated animal woman is under her bed. She coaxes/drags the creature out and most of the film is spent with her studying it. The creature woman, QM, crawls around in the dirt and never speaks. It's hard to tell how much time passes exactly. All the upstairs floors of Fielding's house are covered with brown dirt and she walks around in a dirty lab coat muttering into a tape recorder. She has a video camera over her front stoop and yells at kids playing outside. She covers all her windows with books. She seems crazy and might even be imagining QM.

Felding, played by Kathleen Chalfant, is based on a real-life psychologist named Alice E. Fabian who documented her own battle with madness through tape-recordings, journals, photographs, and wall-scribblings. She made photographs of photographs and had microfiche diaries locked in safe deposit boxes. Siden had made a number of seperate QM and and Fielding pieces before deciding to have the two meet in QM, I think I'll call her QM. I can't explain all this because it is ten plus years of two ever more convoluted projects which end up meeting in this one movie. I'm not sure why in some videos QM is so articulate and in QM, I think I'll call her QM she crawls around like a lizard - something about time and space and cosmic mud.

If you go to Mass Moca make sure you schedule enough time to spend with Ann-Sofi Siden's Queen of the Mud Museum, at least an hour. That one film is half an hour long and there is much more to the project. It's worth the time, probably my favorite out of all the stuff I saw today. I'll talk about some of the other stuff tomorrow.

Here's a Daniel Birnbaum article on Siden.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Meatballs in Space

Jack Kirby Meatballs
Here you can see some of the great Jack Kirby's meatballs (in space).
Jack Kirby should be in museums. I feel a big connection between the prints of Japanese ukiyo-e artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai and Kirby - I wonder if he looked at them? Hey! Ukiyo-e is usually translated as "pictures of the floating world" and Kirby did pictures of floating worlds! That nails it!! I really like Kirby Krackle. This meatball probably comes closest to having Kirby Krackle.

RELATED: Mountain Man, Fairy Butler, and Sloth have all curated mini-exhibitions so I thought I would do the same. Please enjoy this Meatball Slideshow of work by Tom Moody, Pat Adams, Kandinsky, and Jack Kirby.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

David Shrigley and stuff


David Shrigley, originally uploaded by Bromirski.
Went to David Shrigley's website after seeing the link on Corncub's blog and later in the day happened to come across a book on him. The photo above is scanned from the book. I'm putting this up because it made me think of both J.T. Kirkland's isms and one of James Davis' Relativity pieces. The concentric-ring Shrigley painting on the page directly opposite the Shrigley above was like the concentric-ring James Davis piece hanging next to his drilled-hole piece. Odd.
J.T.'s blog has some comments on the OPTIONS 2005 show, including one by Philip Barlow - the original curator. Barlow says he wouldn't have chosen as many MFA students.
The Virginia Commission for the Arts fellowship deadline is August 1 - this year the category is sculpture. What is "sculpture"? I question sculpture. Last year someone who had never made a painting won a painting fellowship; I think I'll enter this year's sculpture contest with some of my meatballs.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 13


One Day In The Garden, page 13, originally uploaded by Bromirski.
page thirteen – “Some light was shed on the mystery by the firefly, who recalled an attraction to an illumination; a flash of light. The firefly swore that there were TWO caterpillars in the garden that night. Alas, upon cross-examination the promiscuous firefly was determined to be a less than ideal witness.”

Monday, July 11, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 12


One Day In The Garden, page 12, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Richmond Raft

If you're coming to Richmond for radius250 next week and looking for some other things to do please consider a whitewater rafting trip with Richmond Raft - I work as a guide. Yes, we have Class IV rapids!!! REQUEST ME! If you fall in I will try to save you.

Also:

Chop Suey - excellent used bookshop, great artbook selection.
Black Swan Books - another excellent used bookshop.
The Byrd Theatre - a 1928 movie PALACE. It's beautiful! Movies are only $1.99!!
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts - It's free!!
Anderson Gallery's current exhibition - Relativity. Blogged here and here with more to come.
Hollywood Cemetery - an old cemetery, spooky!
Kuba Kuba - Great food!! Cheap!!!
Edo Squid - more great food!! Noisy.

Richmonders - what else can we recommend?

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala (Literary Week!): Larry Woiwode

This is Larry Woiwode.

I chose a poem from his collection Even Tide and asked Larry if he'd write it on my painting. In this picture you can see Larry holding the book and transcribing the poem. He changed it a little bit from book to painting; the original poem was written about twenty-five years before the transcription. I'm very thankful to Larry Woiwode. Below is the poem taken from the book, tomorrow I'll post an update showing how it was edited for the painting.

I stared the stars in the face for an answer
And the moon appeared – it was no apparition,
The gold round host
In a cold sky.
It spoke:

Dark is nearer my heart than light;
I arrived, as you, out of equal circumstance,
And I, as you, reveal myself at night.
You see death has taken my face
And ages before the rest but my eye
Looking down wondering why you tremble
When you contend only with her or a her and I
With the irresuscitability of myself,
Myself, myself, and this – ambiguous sky.

BONUS!: this is the same painting Jonathan Franzen posed with earlier. Here's the finished painting.

UPDATE 7/11/2005: the last line is the only thing different on my painting, he omitted the word "ambiguous".

Friday, July 08, 2005

Sad Sack


Sad Sack, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

I am unhappy. I didn't win.

OPTIONS 2005 Artists Announced

The artists selected by Libby Lumpkin to participate in OPTIONS 2005 have been announced. Six of them are current or just graduated VCU students. Suzanna Fields is the only other Richmond name I recognize.

Bayo Abiodun
Judy Baumann
Jorge Benitez
Anne Benolken
Sheila Blake
Chad Caldwell
Kimberly Caputo
Tim DeVoe
Suzanna Fields
Lynn Galuzzo
Emily Hall
Lori Larusso
Ryan Mulligan
Mark Robarge
Lindsay Rogers
Amanda Sauer
Gary Thompson
George Tkbladze
Randy Toy
Susan Vaughan

Thanks to Lenny for the news.

Photos of Recommendation: Thumbs-Up Mandala (Literary Week!): Jonathan Franzen

This is Jonathan Franzen. This isn't a Thumbs-Up photo, but I'm posting it anyway. He was this close to doing it but before I could take the picture he changed his mind. He said that he'd posed for a few photos in which the photographer had asked him to do something strange, and he regretted it afterwards. Jonathan Franzen is very cautious.
The Corrections is one of my favorite novels; I met him before it was published but he read from some of it. I think it took him like ten years to write.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Jules Jones

A fellow Jules Jones fan and collector has sent me a link to an interview and images of his work. Make sure you click on the thumbnails to see the full image, those are just details.

I have two Jules Jones works, one small one and one big one. The small one is one of the exhibition announcements he posted last year, they were all original works of art themselves (I didn't take it from the bulletin board until after the show was over). I lucked out getting the big one too. Theresa Pfarr gave me a bunch of big stretchers she didn't want anymore and I passed some of them on to Jules and Michael Ellyson and some others. Jules stretched some canvas and made one of his biggest paintings, and one of his few works-on-canvas, and then gave the painting back to me. I think it was just too big for his small space and he is used to working on paper and rolling them up after. He couldn't deal with this big painting of his in his face all day. Thanks Jules!!!

Jules is moving to Austin TX soon to pursue an MFA, Theresa has a residency at Roswell, Mike is going somewhere too. Remember their names, they are all very good.

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Eric Deis

A Vancouver artist named Eric Deis has created a fun interactive multi-user drawing project. I was on it last night and made a drawing together with someone in Dresden. If the page gets too messy just hit refresh and it clears everything.

Daniel Buren, Inside (Centre of Guggenheim), 1971

Daniel Buren, Inside (Centre of Guggenheim), 1971. Installed for one day.

I came across this color reproduction of Buren's 1971 Guggenheim piece over the weekend. This title is different - I thought it was called Peinture-Sculpture. Maybe one title is for the piece and the other for the exhibition, like with the latest exhibition The Eye of the Storm and the big centerpiece Around the Corner? Doesn't he have another title for the gel-covered windows at the top, something like The Rose Window? Isn't it all one piece? Why the different titles?

Here's Daniel Baird's Brooklyn Rail article on Buren's 2005 Guggenheim installation.

I blogged the Daniel Buren lecture, part one here and part two here.

Whitney Biennial 2006 - Last Chance!!!

The deadline to submit work for possible Whitney Biennial inclusion is August 1 - don't say nobody told you!

12/6 - Friendsters - this is my original post with Whitney Biennial submission information and suggesting artists from all over submit their work to the Whitney's Biennial Coordinator.

1/16 - Whitney Biennial - the curators are announced!

1/27 - Artnet posts the Whitney Biennial submission information (!!!)

1/28 - Whitney Biennial II!

2/5 - Whitney Museum Seeks Biennial Coordinator - the Whitney announces it is searching for a Biennial Coordinator!

2/15 - The Whitney Is Shunning Me! - nobody will answer my questions!!

3/14 - The Face of the Lady who is Shunning me! - this is the head of the people that won't answer my questions!!

5/12 - Whitney Biennial 2006 Update - the Whitney updates the submission information on their website.

Okay, I think those are all my main posts on this. I wonder how many people reading all of those posts have actually sent in a submission? What if someone actually gets in?? I hope so, that would be great.

Submissions:

All submissions to be considered for exhibition in the Biennial should include the artist's biography or resume, a brief description of the proposed work, and between six and eight images. Recommended formats for images include slides, computer printouts, digital images on a CD_ROM, audio CDs, or VHS videotapes. We do not accept original artworks in the submission package.

Submissions may be sent to:

Biennial Coordinator
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Good Luck!!!

Monday, July 04, 2005

One Day In The Garden, page 11


One Day In The Garden, page 11, originally uploaded by Bromirski.
(Please click on the page numbers above to see enlarged images of previous pages - they are much better than the somewhat pixilated images posted to the blog)

Friday, July 01, 2005

Relativity II - James Davis and Jeannine Harkleroad


Relativity - Jeannine Harkleroad, originally uploaded by Bromirski

James Davis - James Davis is the artist whose pieces are pictured here behind the Jules Olitski pedestals. He's got three pieces in the show, two of which are very similar and one that is much more interesting. The two pieces that are both sort of dead on the wall utilize that accumulative process that is currently such a popular sculptural trope. One is a mandala on canvas of a million little colored glue balls and the other is a mandala of a million colored-pencil concentric rings. His third piece is created through a process of both accumulation and removal, it's a big rectangle of mdf board through which he's drilled(?) a number - less than a million - of various sized small holes. The brownish mdf board against the blue wall looks great and the board is hung not directly against the wall but on hooks or something so it floats a couple inches off the wall - you can peek in at the side and all of the little circles of overlapping shadow and light in that narrow space is like blasting off to warp-speed.

I think he has a show coming up at RARE?

Jeannine Harkleroad
- Jeannine's is the sculptural installation piece pictured in the yellow room above. This piece is actually the set from a performance she did at the opening. I missed the performance but I've heard about it and seen some photos. There was a person in a chicken mascot suit with a football at one end and a goal post and traffic light at the far end. Jeanine and another person were laying down inside those little houses at the top of the ramps and at the signal they sped down and crashed into one another.
I'm not sure what the performance means exactly other than that she set it up so she was doomed to fail with the little house she was in crashing into the larger house, neither reaching the goal post.
The best part of the after-performance installation is noticing the amount of care and attention to detail which went into it's construction. The vividly colored green and blue shingles on the houses are cut from paint chip samples, the yellow fringe all along the ramp depicts a mirror image print(?) of highway traffic, a small flying Jeannine cut-out is soaring above the houses. Best of all was discovering that the "wood" paneled interior of the houses is all cushioned fabric. You wouldn't know unless you touched it. Charm points everywhere.
Maybe the performance was about absurdity and futility in spite of planning and care.

I don't have any good pictures of specific works, just installation shots, so if the artists or anyone else want to send some jpgs I'll post them.