Notes and Queries

The New New Alphabet

2008-07-22T10:23:00.004-04:00

The New New Alphabet is typeface devised by Ryan Gander and produced by graphic designer Rasmus Spanggaard Troelsen. The typeface is an addition to famed Dutch designer Wim Crouwel’s typeface New Alphabet Three (1967), based on a dot-matrix system and intended to be easily read by computers:

Perhaps its best known usage is in this Joy Division album cover.

The New New Alphabet was made with the intension of being printed over Crouwel’s original version, with the purpose of making it more legible, but in turn less stylised.

It's available (for mac) to download from the following link:

www.thenewnewalphabet.info/newnewalphabet.zip

Standard Sizes in Time Out New York

2008-07-14T16:15:00.002-04:00

Standard Sizes, my curated group exhibition at Andrew Kreps, was reviewed in last week's issue of Time Out New York. The show is on view until July 18th.

Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities is an Artforum Critics Pick

2008-07-06T11:47:00.002-04:00

Frederick Kiesler
THE DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster Street
April 18–July 24

In looping curves and obsessive scribbles, the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler’s fluid line skitters from sheets creased with folds to lined notebook paper to thin cardboard, mapping a deliberate course between touch and vision, between the body and the outside world. Frameless and exhibited on a sinuous table designed specially by nARCHITECTURE, Kiesler’s drawings are presented as a stream of the interconnectedness, or “correalism,” that preoccupied the antifunctionalist architect. “Drafting is grafting vision on paper. . . . Blindfolded skating rather than designing,” Kiesler wrote in an article for Art News in 1960. In fact, texture, not structure, is Kiesler’s principle concern, and in this show one finds bleeding ink blotches drawn in loose spirals, dry tempera brushed in thick calligraphic ellipses, egg shapes outlined in sweeping gestures, and womblike forms traced and retraced so many times as to cause undulations in their paper support.

Kiesler’s drawings do not suggest specific models for utopian living but rather probe what it means “to dwell” or, in Heidegger’s phrase, “the manner in which we are on the earth.” Studies of human perception, plans for fantastic vision machines, and diagrams detailing the birth of new objects displayed alongside exhibition designs for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery and renderings of Kiesler’s famous, though never realized, Endless House attest to the artist’s desire to track the process by which man and his art come into being, determined not by teleological functionalism but by the nature of the human spirit.

— Emily Verla Bovino

2008-06-16T17:10:00.006-04:00

Standard Sizes
A group exhibition curated by João Ribas
Andrew Kreps Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
June 14 - July 12, 2008
Web Site

The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Standard Sizes, a group exhibition curated by João Ribas.

Standard Sizes surveys a diverse group of artists over several generations whose work resists the notion of art as the product of an expressive subject--the radically individuated self largely equated with the figure of the artist. In place of this vestige of Renaissance self-fashioning and the affectations of Romanticism, the exhibition presents works that look to standards and formal procedures to displace the idea of expressive subjectivity as the domain of art.

If the figure of the visionary artist was once emblematic of the emancipatory idea of the 'individual' in a society where it had not yet fully emerged, this notion is deradicalized by the democratization of subjective expression today. As a result of this abiding 'selfness,' it seems more pressing to understand the structures and standards built into the parameters of 'expression' and the production of meaning itself.

By foregrounding an effect, rather than the affect, of meaning, Standard Sizes looks to practices that solicit content from standards or procedural form, cede subjective control through generative systems, or that elicit meaning from iteration, standardization, or repetition. Ranging from work based on standard formats and materials, to the rhetorical use of tropes such as the expressive brushstroke, the works in the exhibition looks to the implicit, if now obscured, values and norms present in standardized form. This is to evince how frames dictate content, how the values assimilated in standards belie whose feet and fingers are measured to arrive at consensus, and to discover meaning by way of slippages in the process of standardization.

Standard Sizes takes its departure from Pierre Menard's line-by-line rewriting of Don Quixote; the standardization of canvas sizes in the French Academy; the Kuleshov effect's suggestion of affect from juxtaposition; Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages; CMYK color; imperial units of measurement; lorem ipsum text, based on a dark passage from Cicero; standard paper sizes; modernism as a rhetorical vernacular; stochastic music and seriality; cinematic aspect ratios; T.S. Eliot's poetics of 'impersonality'; generative algorithms; as well as the possibility of meaning in the difference produced by repetition.

Artists included in this exhibition: Ricci Albenda, Kjell Bjorgeengen, Kerstin Brätsch, Martin Creed, Liz Deschenes, Morgan Fischer, Rachel Harrison, Imi Knoebel, Camilla Low, Allan McCollum, Brian O'Connell, Blinky Palermo, Richard Pettibone, Josh Smith, Matt Sheridan Smith, and Sturtevant.

Image: Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled, 2006, Newspapers, 24 x 14 x 0.75 inches

e-flux video rental opens in Lisbon

2008-05-27T08:30:00.000-04:00

The latest iteration of the e-flux video rental has opened in Lisbon, for which I've selected films by Lutz Mommartz, Bodil Furu, Oliver Ressler, Nik Gambaroff, and Matt Sheridan Smith.

Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian

EVR
A project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda
Opening: May 21st, 19:00

May 22 - June 18 2008
Tuesday - Sunday 12 - 6 pm

Avenida de Berna, 45
1067-001 Lisboa
Level -1 of the Foundation Headquarters

Gulbenkian Foundation and Maumaus are pleased to present e-flux video rental in Lisbon.

e-flux video rental (EVR) is a project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, comprising a free video rental, a public screening room, and a film and video archive that is constantly growing. This collection of over 750 works of film and video art has been assembled in collaboration with more than 100 international artists, curators and critics.

In the 1960s and 70s, artists were drawn to working with video in part because it was cheap to use and easily reproduced and distributed. But video art has become increasingly assimilated to the precious-object economy of the art market. EVR is a poetic exploration of alternative processes of circulation and distribution of video art, and it is structured to function like a video rental store, except that it operates for free. VHS tapes can be watched in the space, or, once a viewer fills out a membership form and contract, they can be checked out and taken home.

Orignally presented at a storefront in New York, in 2004, EVR has traveled to venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Seoul, Paris, Istanbul, Canary Islands, Austin, Budapest, Boston, Antwerp, Miami and Lyon. Following the its stay in Portugal, the project will travel to Brazil and Argentina. After these final venues, having outlived the technology that made it possible (VHS video tape players), the project will be permanently archived with the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut and Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, in 2009.

Every time EVR is installed in a new city, local artists, curators and writers are invited to serve as selectors, choosing artists whose work is added to the collection. In addition, a special program of screenings of works from the EVR collection is part of the project. In Lisbon, the program will continue with the selections from In keeping with this, Maumaus and Gulbenkian Foundation have invited Miguel Amado, Jürgen Bock, Ana Pinto, João Ribas and Ricardo Valentim to select additional videos for the collection. [Read on..]

Easterlin Paradox etc.

2008-04-07T08:30:00.001-04:00

In a now famous 1974 paper entitled "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence," economist Richard Easterlin suggests that, counterintuitively, happiness on a national level does not increase with wealth----that is, once what are deemed to be 'basic needs' are met. Known as the "Easterlin paradox", this proposes that government policy should not focus on GDP or economic growth but rather on other indices of quality of life (such as Nicolas Sarkozy's initiave to add happiness to measurements of French economic growth) .

Now a new study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the Wharton business school at the U. Penn, claims that based on the analysis of data spanning over half-a-century and 132 countries, richer countries do tend to be happier...

2008-03-25T08:30:00.000-04:00

Writing on the responses to the current Whitney Biennial, AFC's Paddy Johnson gives a nod to the series of exhibitions---Dice Thrown, Aspects, Forms & Figures, and In Defense of Ardor---I curated at Bellwether last year:

The question Lacayo and many others have on their lips is whether the unofficial Biennial theme of “lessness” amounts to much in the end. Not that this is necessarily the case of nay sayers, but I’ll admit that if the only thing I’d seen taking this approach was The New Museum’s Unmonumental and The Whitney’s Biennial, I’d probably have a fairly grim outlook on the prospects for art. Certainly these shows have given me pause, neither effectively displaying the work or necessarily even finding the best of it. By contrast, New York’s commercial galleries have been more successful this year launching unmonumental-esque shows. While the large size of the Biennial undoubtedly makes the job a little more difficult, Bellwether’s brilliantly organized three part exhibition series curated by Becky Smith and Joao Ribas could be no better testament to the success seen within the commercial world, as was Gagosian’s Beneath the Underdog, curated by artists Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen last spring. Notably New York Times critic Holland Cotter named this show one of the best gallery shows of the year. (Read more)

Sterling Ruby: Chron in The New York Times/New Yorker

2008-03-21T08:30:00.002-04:00

Sterling Ruby:Chron currently on view at The Drawing Center is reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times today:

Sterling Ruby is one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century. That’s only eight years, of course, but the claim may stick. He makes obstreperous, richly glazed ceramic vessels that suggest charred remains; totemic sculptures webbed with mucousy, macramélike drips of resin; large, dark collages dotted with constellations of tiny images of artifacts; and drawings, photographs and short videos. Read more

And from this week's New Yorker:

STERLING RUBY
Artists like Ruby, whose art shifts from sculpture to photography to collage, drawing, and painting (in materials like spray paint and nail polish), can be difficult to pin down. This survey does the trick by focussing on Ruby’s use of line during the past five years. Themes range from the political to the social to the abstract—but the fulcrum is drawing. Photographs of words carved on trees rhyme visually with etched Formica benches. Ruby remains a cipher, but the show makes a strong case for considering his work as a coherent whole. A concurrent exhibition of Ruby’s ceramic works, which bridge the gap between fairy tale and science fair, are on view at Metro Pictures. Through March 27. (The Drawing Room, 40 Wooster St. 212-219-2166.)

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Artforum

2008-03-20T20:30:00.002-04:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings, which I curated at The Drawing Center, is reviewed in the current issue of Artforum. (Click on image to read)

2008-03-13T15:10:00.004-04:00

"None of the alternatives to the gallery can reach a sizeable audience. Yet, given today's homogenized world, there has never been a deeper, more immediate need for wide-spread sowing of relevant new ideas. So there are two ways to go: if the artist would work the long revolutionary tail and address the working-class only, never mind the galleries, get out in the streets and do it. If, on the other hand, all possible creatures are worth your trouble, use the galleries and never mind: the row to hoe should be rooted-in your 'radical' works not their 'radical' system, for our muddled 'radical' critics have confounded buyers' terms with sellers' standards." Jo Baer, Radical Attitudes to the Gallery, 1977

2008-02-26T23:25:00.008-05:00

Civilization represents itself in a storeroom of objects, memorized obstacles to function. Favorite object of the bourgeois: SELF. In communism the disappearance of the self and the destruction of the object go hand in hand. SELF: a fallacy a posteriori; at the moment of action the self disappears completely. It resurfaces during unproductive states of repose, an occasion for the luxurious recuperation from function. Just like the object. The self is the pension and savings of the undynamic rentier. Both self and object are supposedly capable of guaranteeing certainty, immutability. The world as tautology...

Carl Einstein, 1921

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings on Artforum.com

2008-01-25T12:31:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is a Critics' Pick on Artforum.com

Alan Saret:Gang Drawings in The New York Sun

2008-01-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret, Three Circles Rules & Free Sweep, 1967. Colored pencil on paper. Photo by Cathy Carver.

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is reviewed in The New York Sun.

Click here for previous reviews in The New York Times, Time Out, and The New Yorker

2008-01-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

Raymond Tallis writes on the "intellectual revolution" sparked by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides [the subject of his forthcoming book] in Prospect:

One attraction of Parmenides is that you can read his complete surviving works in 15 minutes. His arguments are set out in On Nature, a rather prosaic poem of which only 150 lines survive. The heart of his case is in Fragments 3, 6 and 8, where he sets out a worldview that even by the standards of philosophy is, as Aristotle said, "near to madness." His central argument is so quick that if you blink, you will miss it.

It goes as follows. That which is not, is not. "What-is-not" does not exist. Since anything that comes into being must arise out of what-is-not, objects, states of affairs and so on cannot come into being. Likewise, they cannot pass away, because in order to do so they would have to enter the realm of what-is-not. Since it does not exist, what-is-not cannot be the womb of generation, or the tomb of that which perishes. The no-longer and the not-yet are variants of what-is-not, and so the past and future do not exist either. Change, then, is impossible. Equally, multiplicity is unreal. The empty space necessary to separate one object from another would be another example of what-is-not. And since things cannot be anything to a greater or lesser degree—this would require what-is to be mixed with the diluting effect of what-is-not—the universe must be homogeneous.
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Pascal Dusapin discusses his sixth opera Faustus, The Last Night on the occasion of its production in Lyon last year.

2007-12-12T00:09:00.000-05:00

One of the first things most visitors to the Museum of Modern Art confront is the grand onanistic spectacle of Auguste Rodin’s Balzac. A bronze slab of inchoate emotion---one contemporary reviewer called it a “huge, shapeless, uncouth mass”--- the towering figure of the novelist, hands tucked under a massive robe, is less about verisimilitude or resemblance than sheer vitality, a tribute to what Rodin termed Balzac’s “intense labor”. It explains the high-headed posture of defiance, the figure’s phallic, almost ecstatic lean.

This monument to creative virility takes on added emphasis with the passing of another grand onanist, this one of American letters, the late Norman Mailer. True, that title seems more apt for the masturbatory egoists of the novels of Philip Roth, but these have, as of late, gone from the oddly-timed and largely infantile erections of the past [Portnoy’s Complaint] to pathetic incontinence [Exit Ghost], through the murky waters of some clichéd middle-aged decline. But Roth’s fiction brilliantly mines the tension between Eros and Thanatos, as that of between eroticism and ethics, while Mailer turned his own virile expressivity into a kind of obnoxious self-love---the most masterbatory and malignant of all love affairs.

That Mailer sometimes looked to drugs, and often to personal bravado, in order to reach the heights of Hemingway-esque authenticity is merely to be ignored; that he wrote about it is exhausting. Above all, Mailer has become, unwittingly, an emblem of the post-60’s liberated self, a figurehead of the culture of narcissism. Imbedded in this saccharine, therapeutic ideology is the illusion of art as a solipsistic product of subjective experience, and thus something seemingly autonomous and sui generis [from this it gains its beloved authenticity]. And ultimately its self-reflexive obsession: it was Mailer’s conceit to often link his self-declared ambition---made of equal parts immodest assurance and the chastened sense of gaining it alone—with his own self-indulgence as self-analysis. Often the two went hand in hand. Let us not speak ill of the dead any longer, but Mailer was primarily a chronicler of the self, an egoist perhaps on par with Wordsworth, the most sublime egoist of all by Keats' assessment.

The idea is of course particularly pervasive in our culture, even if not perennial: it can be dated to the Renaissance emergence of individual creativity, in the form of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and the fetishized idiosyncrasies attributed to Leonardo in particular [and eventually culminating in the Beethoven cult of the 19th century]. Not surprisingly, the artist’s well-known follies and eccentricities---the Italian term for them was "pazzia"---served as the impetus for one of Freud’s most contentious psychoanalytic case studies [into Da Vinci’s homosexual inclinations.] The grandfather of the radical self and its foremost interpreter, who largely equated onanism with homosexuality, seem perfect bedfellows.

But in Mailer’s era we’ve moved from the utopia of collective politics to the age of spurious self-examination, arriving at the artist as a crumpled mess of narcissistic satisfaction and superego anxiety. If the New York art world is suffering from anything at the moment---and some say it’s simply from too much money---it’s from the theatrics of the ego. This pervades late capitalism throughout, this prominence of a performed self that turns self-expression into ‘lifestyle’. Let’s not speak ill of the living any longer either, but a lot of ‘art’ at the moment seems to be too easily, and simplistically, equated with the pseudo-authentic expression of a self.

This expressive self is tyrannical. Freed from its Victorian shadows by the Freudian revolution, it quickly became the consumptive center of social life. The ‘self’ came to dominate the twentieth century, from the birth of psychoanalysis to the apotheosis of mass-consumer society: the selling of ways to express individuality. More insidiously, the liberated self became equated with the very idea of democracy. As capitalism directed products to the innermost desires of this newly liberated self, so democracy, in its infinite possibility of choice, is supposed to give the self its foremost expression.

It has even been formalized and objectified, culminating with what Yves-Alain Bois called “the autographic brushstroke that had marked the birth of the modernist tradition beginning with Impressionism.” The mark thus becomes a visual analogue for the “fluxes and refluxes of the mind,” to borrow from Wordsworth.

But have there ever been so many outlets for the expression of the self than in today’s democratization of voices [YouTube, blogs, MySpace, Flickr)? Then why should the artistic self be any more relevant than the mass of other expressive monads? Perhaps because they are more ‘authentic’---that is, more virile, more intense, more selfish, more filled with ardor?

It proves an enticing fantasy. One perfect example of its manifestation is the persistent need to bring biographical narrative into discussions about the work of female artists. This insipid habit of revealing the self consists of reverting to a produced mythology in place of serious critical discussion—a kind of ad hominem critique imbued with condescension. It plagues female artists in particular. Think of the way Eva Hesse and Isa Genzken entrain pejorative gossip. That is one of the perils of our incessant fascination with the self, and with the correlative idea of creative madness as the concomitant of genius. Do we really believe, as Proust claimed, that “everything great in the world comes from neurotics”?

Also at MoMA is an example of a rejection of this all-consuming, expressive self, however. In 1913, Duchamp took three pieces of thread, each exactly one meter in length, and dropped them freely onto the surface of three separate pieces of canvas. The resulting artwork, 3 Standard Stoppages, "opened the way," Duchamp claimed, "to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art."

Or put it another way, to end on a quote from Gabriel Josipovici writing about Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus":

"Why is that a composer such as Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later Beethoven, no less industrious a composer, could only write nine? Quite simply because Haydn did not feel he had to start from scratch. What he had to do was fill a form, a mould. That he filled it supremely well, far better than any of his contemporaries except for Mozart, is neither here nor there......What happens with Beethoven is that the development section [of a sonata] grows out of all proportion to the rest, till it overwhelms the whole, its growth synonymous with the expression of the composer's demonic creativity. Even today Beethoven's symphonies stand in the public imagination for the most powerful expression of an individuality we posess but few have it in us to express. Unfortunately, after Beethoven composers were left with nothing to hold on to except their individuality, and, without Beethoven's dynamism and optimism, this gradually led, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an art less and less time-driven, more and more prone to stasis, dreamines and disintregation. The composer at the start of the twentieth century, an Adrian Leverkuhn or an Arnold Schoenberg, was thus caught between repeating forms he could no longer believe in and trusting a subjectivity which was growing daily more problematic."

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in Time Out NY

2007-12-03T08:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret, “Gang Drawings”

In 10th-century Japan, a new phonetic shorthand, kana, evolved as an alternative to Chinese script. Unsuitable for business transactions because of its informal nature, but singular for its ability to convey great emotion, kana became the lexical choice of poets; it is the language in which The Tale of Genji, the oldest recorded romance, is written. To walk into the Alan Saret exhibition, “Gang Drawings,” comprising works on paper and wire sculptures spanning the ’60s to the present, is to experience a similar divergence of his work from the language of Minimalism and witness the creation of a new set of morphemes that form the basis of his unique and exceedingly expressive visual vocabulary.

All of the drawings in the show were made by pulling, pushing, dragging or shimmying fistfuls of colored pencils across the page. The resulting groupings of lines connote landscapes, hair clots, scattered grasses; all are clearly part of an experimentation with the drawn mark as base unit of visual language, an effort mirrored in titles that often consist of made-up words. Saret’s contribution to Postminimalism is the simple marriage of process to the infinitely variable hand gesture, and is elegantly epitomized in one of the earliest dated drawings in the show.

Called Half Circles and Sweep Circuit (1967), the work may be a nod to Saret’s interest in architecture and engineering. The ingress and egress of marks to and from a sort of racetrack form is balanced sublimely by the sensitivity of stroke, and the ever-so-slight violence of surrounding staccato traces. This willingness to probe the roots of a way of communicating still registers with freshness and force today.—Tova Carlin

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in The New Yorker

2007-11-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

ALAN SARET
The mechanics of Saret’s “Gang Drawings” are deceptively simple: a fistful (a “gang”) of colored pencils produce clusters of synchronized, multihued marks. The images, which evoke swarming paramecia or swirling cosmic dust, project a joyous, concentrated energy—Saret’s habit of using the word “ensoulment” in his titles feels earned. (Two sculptures of tangled wire, the artist’s signature medium, recapitulate the gang forms in three dimensions.) Dating from 1967 to the present, the drawings are a testament to Saret’s stature as a pioneering post-minimalist and to his history as an art-world maverick. Through Feb. 7. (Drawing Center, 35 Wooster St. 212-219-2166.)

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings in the New York Times

2007-11-16T08:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings is reviewed in the NYT Times today.

Alan Saret and Kirstine Roepstorff at The Drawing Center

2007-11-07T20:30:00.000-05:00

Alan Saret: Gang Drawings
Curated by João Ribas

Alan Saret, Three Circles Rules & Free Sweep, 1967. Colored pencil on paper. Photo by Cathy Carver.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, November 8, 6-8 pm.

From November 9, 2007 to February 7, 2008, The Drawing Center will present Alan Saret: Gang Drawings, the first major museum exhibition of the pioneering artist’s work in nearly two decades. Saret is an important figure in the history of Post-Minimal art and was a vital part of the SoHo alternative art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition will trace the evolution of Saret's process-based experimentation with drawing, including approximately thirty “Gang Drawings,” made with fistfuls (“gangs”) of colored pencils swept across the page, spanning from the late 1960s to the present. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, Alan Saret: Gang Drawings aims to reveal Saret's influence on a generation of postwar American artists and his contributions to the alternative arts movement, and will feature never-before-seen work from Saret's personal archive.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Papers 73, a 16-page edition of The Drawing Center's publication series featuring essays by Klaus Kertess , Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit , and Johanna Burton, critic and art historian, as well as color images of works in the exhibition.

There will be a free Gallery Talk on Saturday, December 1 at 4:00 pm with curator João Ribas.

Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle that Changed—The Time
Curated by João Ribas

Kirstine Roepstorff, One Dictator, 2007. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard, 67 x 43 inches. © Kirstine Roepstorff, courtesy Peres Projects, Los Angeles Berlin . Photograph by Hans-Georg Gaul.

Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, November 8, 6-8 pm.

From November 9, 2007 through February 7, 2008, the Drawing Room will present an exhibition of new work by Berlin-based artist, Kirstine Roepstorff. Featuring the artist’s signature use of the medium of collage to confront the tension between political identity and individual desire, the exhibition will consist of twelve works ranging in size from 8 x 10 inches to a labor-intensive 12-foot installation mounted directly on the gallery wall. It's Not the Eye of the Needle that Changed--The Time will be the artist's first solo museum exhibition in North America .

Through a working method that Roepstorff calls “approprio-arranging,” the artist sews, glues, pins, and weaves together photocopies, fabrics, glitter, paper, and images appropriated from magazines and newspapers to construct a poetic, post-feminist narrative. Roepstorff's work addresses issues such as the failure of collective social projects, consumerism, and contemporary gender politics.

The exhibition will be accompanied by Drawing Papers 74 featuring an essay by art critic Daniel Kunitz and images of the new series of works.

On Saturday, November 10 at 4:00 pm, there will be a gallery talk with the artist in the Drawing Room. Admission is free.

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in the NY Times

2007-10-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper is reviewed in the NY Times today.
For reviews in The New York Sun and The New Yorker, click here and here.

William Anastasi: Raw in Artforum

2007-10-10T08:00:00.000-04:00

William Anastasi: Raw is reviewed in the current issue of Artforum.

The show was previously a critic's pick by Cecilia Alemani on Artforum.com:

William Anastasi
THE DRAWING ROOM, THE DRAWING CENTER

40 Wooster Street

April 21–July 21

Issue (detail), 1966/2007, plaster, 156 x 4 1/2 x 1/4".

Located at the intersection of Minimalism, instructional art, and process-oriented practices, William Anastasi’s works find endless formal possibilities in the most prosaic materials. This exhibition explores the expanded notion of drawing through re-creations of seminal pieces from the 1960s that transform the room’s physical characteristics either gently or dramatically. Issue, 1966/2007, consists of a four-and-a-half-inch-wide vertical strip that cuts a gallery wall from floor to ceiling. By chipping away the superficial layers of paint and plaster with chisel and hammer, the work strips the wall bare and turns it into a kind of archaeological site, revealing the gallery's countless lives. The debris is neatly organized on the floor, arranged to resemble a loose continuation of the line cut from the wall. Untitled, 1966/2007, is the result of simple instructions: “With a small cup soberly pour one gallon of paint against a wall as near the ceiling as possible.” A thick, slimy line of black enamel cleaves the wall in two. A delicate balance between material and shape is achieved also in whowasit youwasit propped II, 1965, in which one aluminum beam perches precariously atop another in an unstable ballet that resembles Richard Serra’s syntax but is deprived of that artist’s aggressiveness. Anastasi injects levity into these everyday raw materials, creating a vibrant symphony in which lines, surfaces, and matter resonate in unison.
—Cecilia Alemani

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New York Sun

2007-10-04T08:30:00.000-04:00

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper at The Drawing Center is reviewed today in The New York Sun.

Jon Kessler: Works on Paper in The New Yorker

2007-10-03T22:07:00.000-04:00

Expanded Cinema in Art Review

2007-09-26T08:30:00.000-04:00

2007-09-03T20:21:00.001-04:00

"At the moment politics are more dangerous to young writers than journalism.....because writers now feel that politics are necessary to them, without having learnt yet how best to be political....writers function in a state of political flux, on the eve of the crisis, rather than in the crisis itself; it is before a war or a revolution that they are listened to and come into their own and it was because they are disillusioned at their impotence during the war that so many became indifferent to political issues after the peace" Cyril Connolly in 1938.
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On the Iron Law of Oligarchy, From Political Parties; A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy written by Robert Michels in 1911:

"Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly. The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective positions of the leader and the led. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed."

Read the book here.
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"Over the last twenty years there has been a systematic campaign to eliminate any figure of the worker from political space. "Immigrant" is a word that came to be used at a certain moment in this campaign. For example, one of the first Mitterand governments, the Mauroy government, during the major workers' strikes at Flins, at Citroen, at Talbot, said that these workers were in fact immigrants who were not really integrated into French social reality. The category "immigrant" has been systematically substituted for the category 'worker', only to be supplanted in its turn by the category of the 'clandestine' or illegal alien. First workers, then immigrants, then illegal aliens. If we insist that we are actually talking about workers--and whether they have worked, are working, or no longer work, doesn't represent a subjective difference----it is to struggle against this unceasing effort to erase any political reference to the figure of the worker."
Alain Badiou in a 1998 interview.
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Alexander Cockburn on "Whatever Happened to the Anti-War Movement?":

"America right now is ‘anti-war’, in the sense that about two thirds of the people think the occupation of Iraq is a bad business and the troops should come home. Anti-war sentiment was a major factor in the success of the Democrats in last November’s elections, when they recaptured Congress. The irony is that this sharp disillusion of the voters owes almost nothing to any anti-war movement. To say the anti-war movement is dead would be an overstatement, but not by a large margin. Compared to kindred movements in the 1960s and early 1970s, or to the struggles against Reagan’s wars in Central America in the late 1980s, it is certainly inert."
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This film portrait of Stravinsky en route to Berlin brought me back to a passage from Memories and Commentaries, by Stravinsky and Robert Craft:

"World War II had broken out in Europe when Stravinsky next entered New York harbour in September 1939 on a ship overcrowded with refugees. The steamer, the SS Manhattan, sailing from Bordeaux, was so thronged that he was obliged to share a cabin with six others, even though all seven had paid for private accommodation. Toscanini was on board, too, but they did not meet. The fiery Italian has refused to enter his cabin, since it also bunked six other passengers. Apparently he slept in the lounge. (More than thirty years later, one of Stravinsky's cabin mates, from Cleveland, returned a shirt that the composer had loaned him during the voyage.)
Unaware that Stravinsky was not seeking asylum in the country---he had a return ticket in his valise---the Immigration official who interviewed him asked the most startling question of his life: ' Do you want to change your name?' When Stravinsky laughed, the official said, "Well, most of them do.' Stravinsky himself, of course, had not remotely supposed that his intended stay for a few months would last until 1951. "
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Expanded Cinema is finally back with a post on Alexandr Hackenschmied [of a rare film of his to have survived World War II]. Recent posts include Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, and Joris Ivens.