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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Passport reviews Trickling...or maybe Ebbing in.

I've been hoping to get some kind of review from someone who attended the performance of Robert Whitman's Passport in Beacon and Montclair, NY on Apr 17 and have heard nary a peep from anyone other than a few museum employees.
Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City was there.  Today, she posted some images from the scene to the website, saying that she's still weighing her reaction to the work...

.....I just found one review of the performance on artreview.com by Jonathan T.D. Neil.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Most Beautiful People in Poughkeepsie

Yep, that would be them, Angelika Rinnhofer and Billy Name.

Angelika and I visited the home of Billy Name last week to have a chat with that man of myth for the Dead Hare Radio Hour
You can listen to Billy's Dead Hare episode here:


A selection of Billy's photographs from his days documenting life in Warhol's Factory are currently on view at the Albert Shahinian Fine Art in Rhinebeck, NY ( 22 E Market St.) through May 22.  Billy will be giving a talk at the gallery on Saturday April 30th during a reception taking place from 5-8pm.  These particular photos on exhibit were originally included in an exhibit curated by Emma Lavigne entitled "I Am A Cliche - Echoes of the Punk Aesthetic" which was part of the 41st Rencontres D'Arles Photography event last year.

I'll be capturing audio from Billy's talk which I expect will join portions of our conversation with him last week for the radio show. 

 Considering he's the man responsible for making the Silver Factory silver, I couldn't resist snapping a few images of the shiny-backed insulation on Billy's back porch, from which one can see the Mid Hudson Bridge, the color of which he claims inspired the choice of decor for Warhol's studio.


Billy's roommate.  I didn't catch his Name.

By chance, Flavorwire recently published a "where are they now" item on Andy Warhol's surviving Superstars, including Billy.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Eye Candy Friday: hi yo, i've got plenty of time

Not much to say. Just something to loooook at. The listening isn't bad either. This video by Michael Bell-Smith comes via Art Fag City.

Art Tape: Live With / Think About from Michael Bell-Smith on Vimeo.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Observing the Loss of two carriers of our sight onto the world.

Our friends at Fovea are among those mourning the deaths of two photojournalists in Libya yesterday.  Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington died yesterday after when a mortar hit a group of international journalists traveling with rebel soldiers in Misrata, Libya.  According to the Wall Street Journal, another photographer, Guy Stevens, along with seven rebel fighters and a Ukranian physician were also killed in the attack.  Initially, Hondros had injured in the attack and died later in the day.Another photographer, Guy Stevens was injured and in stable condition.


 FOVEA_FRIENDS 
Devestating news of the death of Tim Hetherington in Libya today, and prayers for Chris Hondros: 



 FOVEA_FRIENDS 
hearts are heavy across the photo community today..some of Chris's photos filed earlier today... 

 As can be seen in the second twitter link above, Hondros had filed photos of rebel fighters making fighting and moving through and occupying building earlier in the day.
Chris Hondros' work, along with that of Todd Heisler and Suzanne Opton was featured in Fovea's second exhibition entitled, It's Our War,  in 2007 and all three photographers partook in a panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibit.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Panel talk on the Role of Art and Media in Hudson Valley communities, today in Poughkeepsie

The Dead Hare Radio Hour is among the sponsors of a panel talk happening today from 5:30-7 on the role of media and contemporary art in communities.
It's happening at the Cunneen Hackett Theatre at 12 Vassar St in Poughkeepsie, NY
I'll be moderating the talk. and the panelists include Kiese Laymon from Vassar College, Karen Michel of Marist College, Edward Summers of Marist College, Decora of the Readnex Poetry Squad, Nichole Fenichel Hewitt and Maria Marewski of the Children's Media Project, Matthew Slaats my Dead Hare co-host and director of Pause and Leonard Nevarez of Vassar College.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Meet yer Maykr: Charlotte Schulz - Listen to the studio visit, 4/19/11@ 5pm on 91.3 FM WVKR, Poughkeepsie, NY.

 Charlotte Schulz and Peter Iannarelli talking seriously.

This Meet yer Maykr installment, focusing on the work of Beacon, NY artist Charlotte Schulz has an added element: audio.
 One of the drawings on the wall of Charlotte's studio.

In fact, this Meet yer Maykr is an audio studio visit which will be heard on The Dead Hare Radio Hour on WVKR 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie NY.  My conversation with Charlotte, and fellow Beaconite artist Peter Iannarelli who joined us will be aired on Tuesday April 19th at 5pm on WVKR, 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie, NY.  If you can't pick up the station, you can listen to the live stream at wvkr.org.
As usual, the podcast version of the show will be available to listen to and available for download on iTunes later in the evening of April 19.
Listen to the conversation with Charlotte here and now:


Check back here soon for more images and details on our visit to Charlotte's studio.

Images from the installation Object Lesson, curated by Karlos Carcamo at Para/site in 2005.
courtesy, the artist, via: charlotteschulz.com

There are more images from the Para/Site exhibit on Charlotte's website, 
and here is the Object Lesson press release.


One of the paintings from 2000 that was included in Charlotte's exhibit of paintings at the 
Van Brunt Gallery in 2009.


 A detail of Charlotte's untitled work for Windows on Main St., 2006

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Dead Hare Radio wants your review: Robert Whitman's Passport

If you have an inclination to view Robert Whitman's Passport this weekend, you'll have to head down to New Jersey; the Beacon portion of this simultaneous two-city performance is sold out.  There seem to be tickets available to view the work from Montclair, though.  The work will be performed tonight and tomorrow at 8pm.
Those of us here at MAYKR and our sister media outlet, The Dead Hare Radio Hour, will not be able to experience the work, but we are interested in hearing responses from those who were able to witness it.

If you're attending Passport and wish to share your reaction to it, give us a call on the Dead Hare Hotline:  (480) 442-7311
Give us a 15 or 30 second review...or leave your information so we can speak about it in the near future.
You can also leave us an email at deadhareradio at gmail.com or leave a comment here or over on the Dead Hare blog.

The double edge sword of curating....

....Indeed, the curator can seemingly has the power to create life but at the same time is subject to the passions of an artist who refuses to be ignored...

The number of submissions facing Dorsky curator Brian Wallace last month as he embarked on selecting the participants of this year's Hudson Valley Invitational exhibit.

The Dead Hare Radio Hour episode from this past week (Show #4) features interviews with Greg Slick and Karlos Carcamo, former directors of the former gallery Go North, in Beacon, and current curators of the Illustrious Mr. X exhibit on view at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz.  At the end of  Show #3, Matthew and I spoke with a gentleman claiming to be the very Mr. X that Greg and Karlos claim to have invented.  Someone's not telling it straight.

Matthew and I also spoke with Dorsky Curator Brian Wallace on the history, present and maybe the future of the museum.
(The next evening I attended a talk on the SUNY New Paltz campus about Marc Chagall's time spent in the Hudson Valley during WWII and the grass roots efforts afoot to have a Chagall in the Hudson Valley exhibit at the Dorsky in the near future.)

During our conversation with Brian he mentioned the travails of the curator having to reject sizeable number of artists, possibly incurring their eternal scorn.  Part of this made it into the interview.  The theme for this year's invitational is Beauty.  It's funny that last year's exhibit, guest curated by Thomas Collins had the notion of Praxis, the joining of critical theories with practical applications, as an organizing principle and very, very few people submitted for it.  This says something interesting, though I'm not exactly sure what, perhaps that most people don't know what Praxis is and how it might apply to their work...or they're aware that their work simply doesn't fit that particular paradigm.  But apparently, many many people think they know something about beauty, and that their artwork obviously has something to say about it...

For those who might be rejected in this or any other exhibition selection process, I encourage you not to lose heart.  In fact, I found a helpful guide that you might apply in your future endeavors to catch the eye of some looksome curator.
As a service to artists everywhere, Hennessy Youngman put together this step by step tutorial for impressing curators.



Somethings to keep in mind, particularly when submitting for next year's Dorsky invitational. I'll just say here that I will not be responsible for any sort of fatal attraction-type stalking of Brian Wallace or any other curators perpetrated by unstable, overly ambitious artists..

Friday, April 15, 2011

Looking back at Looking at art, March 2011

It's funny, I had to go down to Chelsea to find out about a gallery in Beacon that I hadn't even heard of. Back in March, hitting some galleries in Chelsea,  I ran into Amy Lipton on 11th Ave.  She told me about the place called Estuary Gallery, located over at the loft project off of Rt 52.  Amy said she tried to go to the opening of the inaugural show in the previous week, but couldn't find the place (it can be confusing to navigate that area if you're not familiar with it, especially at night.)

At the Josh Smith Show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, I met Jerry Saltz, who was marvelling at the great awfomeness (my word, a cross of awesome and awful) of Smith's work - which has provided me with at least a couple of hours of entertaining conversations.  Peter Acheson and I caught his previous exhibit from last March at Luhring Augustine.  His latest painitngs seem to be striving more for awesomeness than awfulness (something I'm not sure could be said of previous groupings) - aside from those stop signs;  I was challenged by Mr. Saltz to put something that awful in my next show.  That will be priority one, next show I have. 

Some Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine.



I also met Phong Bui, editor of the Brooklyn Rail who was at the Augustine with the artist Joel Shapiro.  I spoke with Phong about recording an interview with him for Dead Hare Radio.  I once had dreams of bringing the Rail up to Beacon for distribution.  It entailed a convoluted human chain of that would somehow get a couple of bundles of the paper to Beacon through happenstance convenience.  Of course that never developed.  I was actually capturing ambient sounds during my walk through the galleries and created a sound collage for show #3 of Dead Hare Radio.

Let's see....what did I see?  Some unexpected and weird videos - in 3D by Gary Hill, “of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment,” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY through April 23.

I know how this feels:  Terence Koh at Mary Boone.

I watched Terence Koh edging his way around a mound of salt on his knees at Mary Boone.  Some black and white reliefs of Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks, I believe.  A Tara Donavan at Pace(?) that was a bit too prim for me.  Also, Richard Butler had a show at Freight and Volume.  I'm back and forth with his work, but I'm digging some of his new larger heads.  I could be wrong, but I think I heard Richard has moved into that building where the unfound Estuary Gallery is located.  
A few Richard Butler pieces from his Freight and Volume show:





Eye Candy Friday: Misdirectionals

I can't remember when I learned about the Dazzle Camouflage that was used for British and American navy vessels in WWI and WWII, but I do remember my surprise and thrill at the discovery of it.  You'll see these images repeatedly online, along with other contemporary incarnations of the concept.  For some reason, the newer and alternative (non naval) implementations of the Razzle Dazzle paint schemes don't have the umpphh that the forms overlayed onto these vessels have. The ships themselves are visually stunning canvases on which to deploy the patterns.  There are many references and links to a RISD site that accompanied an exhibit about Dazzle Camou, constituted by material donated by RISD Alum, Maurice Freedman, who was a camoufleur in Florida prior to attending RISD.  
The graphic patterns of the Dazzle paint schemes are particularly appealing to me currently.  I'm relating them to the repetitive graphic qualities of road signs which have been becoming more an more fascinating to me in recent years and which have been finding their way into some of my paintings, but more on that later..



The French Cruiser, Gloire



The Mauratania in Dazzle paint, via: merchantnavyofficers.com

Monday, April 04, 2011

The Dead Hare Radio Hour, Marching on into April

We're coming up on show #3 of the Dead Hare Radio Hour and I haven't even mentioned show #2 yet.

So Last week's show (#2) focused on the recently closed exhibit at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College called 150 Years Later: New photography from Tina Barney, Tim Davis and Katherine Newbegin. The show features interviews with Loeb curator Mary-Kay Lombino, photographer Katherine Newbegin and Zach Russo (Dead Hare Intern) and Emily Kloppenberg who were both captured in one of Tina Barney's photos.

Dead Hare Radio Show #2

This week's show features interviews from Fovea Exhibitions in Beacon, NY.  I speak with Fovea co-founder/director Stephanie Heimann and Lori Grinker, whose work is currently on view in the exhibit, Nothing Like My Home: The Iraqi Refugee Crisis.  A panel talk accompanying the exhibit is scheduled for Saturday, April 9.  Matthew and I also interview a mysterious Mr. X who claims to be the Illustrious Mr. X whose life is the subject of the current exhibit at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, curated by Greg Slick and Karlos Carcamo.
Check it out, the show airs live on Tuesdays, 5-6pm on WVKR, 91.3 in Poughkeepsie, NY, and it's available whenever you want it online and via iTunes.

Friday, April 01, 2011

Eye Candy Friday: Lost? Never. Just Found, pt 2 *with bonus audio.

This week's ECF is a belated stream of consciousness addendum to the ECF of the week before last  in praise of the found object.
Our recent Art Book Club (ABC) selection was W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images; a really astute investigation of images (totems, fetishes, idols) and their presence and power society.  It's well worth a read, or two.  It's one of those reads that asserts itself as framing overlay for how you (I) relate to images.  I also surmise that it's a book that due to the subject and structure is timeless in its relevance; it added a layer of insight and reflection on recent events in Egypt, Libya, Japan and the National Portrait Gallery and more distantly Iraq, as well as the even more quotidian visuals we encounter without noticing.
Mitchell articulates the essence of the found object in a way that I meaningful and recognizable, noting the very finding of which is, by nature a 'fortuitous circumstance'. 
What better place, though, to locate the roots of the found object than in the foundling, a poor, orphaned creature that might just amount to something.  The moment of finding the found object is the moment when one feels oneself to be pregnant or about to adopt something (which comes to the same thing).  This is, I think quite distinct from the moment of finding the lost object (fetishism) or the sublime object of ideology (the idol), neither of which are capable of surprising anyone or of binging newness into the world.

The excerpt above, paired with a portion of  a conversation I captured between Angelika and Peter Iannarelli as part of the Beacon Art Salon's Contemporary Artists on Contemporary Art series, in which Peter talks about his penchant for claiming authorship of found objects..even when those objects aren't lost crystallized the thought in my head that in some way, the studio is a place where conditions can be set in such a way as to create an instance - one that approximates that sensation of an object found.



I don't work in an overly determined manner in the studio.  In fact, I leave a lot of room for randomness and automatism in the pursuit (unconsciously) of the found object.  I don't think he'd agree, but when I visit Peter Iannarelli's studio, I see the mechanism found object cloning at work.  But then, we're all just trying make personal discoveries...
So, slightly appropos of nothing other than through the stream of consciousness and fortuity of time, we come to the visual portion of your Eye Candy Friday serving.
Today's images come from the pre-MAYKR photo archive that I happened to be perusing through recently.  I came across these images of an installation that Peter Iannarelli did in his studio at Spire Studios back in 2004, when Spire was still very much the beating heart of Beacon's art life (to my mind).  This installation probably stands as the high water mark of  Peter's Walmart phase.  His studio was bedecked as a crazy post  big box rave, complete with strobe lights streamers and giant shopping bag windsocks.  Come to think of it, if I'm correct, it was a rave that sported only the sound of oscillating fans and rustling plastic.  I was a majorly cool visual experience, and I treasure these photos of it.  I feel fortunate that I uploaded these images two weeks ago since my external hard drive crashed to the floor last week, and possibly along with it, a substantial chunk of the unpublished MAYKR photo archive (along with a boatload of other data).  I haven't yet had the stomach to really try to investigate what might be salvageable.



















BTW, if you're looking for other treats in the  found object category, look no further....yes, indeed, look further, but don't miss looking at......than Joy Garnett's Unmonumental series of images.