Add-Art Show

I have artwork in this Add-Art online show, along with 3 other artists:

http://add-art.org/6811/shows/merchandise-you-are-not-what-you-own

What is Add-Art?
"Add-Art is a free FireFox add-on which replaces advertising on websites with curated art images. The art shows are updated every two weeks and feature contemporary artists and curators."
http://add-art.org/about/


What the curator (my wife, Anu) wrote about my pieces for the show:

Stephan Vladimir Bugaj uses found photography from the mid-20th century as the basis for exploring the construction of identity. Images from the “Good War” (World War II), a conflict that sent the artist’s family into permanent exile, are manipulated to emphasize the deterioration of cultural memory in an age of superficial access to information. The more data we have, the less we know or remember. Reduced to symbols, the people in these images have lost their voice to the forward march of history.

(note: Some of the images are actually from the WWI "War to End All Wars" era, as well.)

I am interested in several things when doing this kind of rephotography and photomanipulation work. One is the idea, horrifying to me, that people will discard family photos and relegate their ancestors to the dustbin of history. Many of the photos I work from are scans of photos that have been sold-off on eBay or at flea markets. The very idea that someone would willingly toss away a portion of their own personal history for a few bucks amazes and appals me. They've not only lost their voice to the forward march of history, but also to indifference or disdain from their own descendants. I like to imagine lives and personalities for my subjects, though I know I'm certainly quite far from the truth.

Some of the images are of more well known people, not just anonymous players relegated to permanent obscurity. These people interest me especially because the general public's lack of interest in history makes them so easily misunderstood. As symbols, they are subject to preconceived notions by all but those history buffs who may recognize them. In the Add-Art show, I've slipped into the mix a couple of these folks, including Kurt Gerstein. Gerstein's photo, with the SS lightning runes on his collar, will lead most people to immediately assume he is a villain in the drama that is human history. But the truth is much more interesting.

Indeed, even the anonymous soldiers in the show are a window into our own preconceptions. The Germans and Russians must certainly, to many Americans, simply be evil. In reality, though, only a small percentage of people are truly evil. We have no idea whom among them were party members, which were brutal killers, and which were just folks who wanted to serve their own tribe and keep their friends alive long enough to share another round of beer (or vodka). So most people look only at the symbols on their uniform and ask a single question: ally or enemy?

But these soldiers were ultimately the same as any other soldiers: they ran the gamut from idealists swept-up by nationalism to conscripts fighting for nothing more than survival to brutal killers consumed by bloodlust, and everything between. What you think of each individual image says a lot about you, but very little about the truth of the people in the images. Their truth has been lost, and replaced by our assumptions. War is "necessarily" dehumanizing, but its divisive effects last long after the war has concluded, clouding our view of the past, and shaping our future.

The entire series is called Processed and Filtered. In our information-saturated, high-tech media age, everything we know has been processed and filtered. First-hand observation and independent corroboration of opinion masquerading as information has become seen as not merely unnecessary, but passe. Knowing the truth of anything is even more difficult than it has ever been -- the exact opposite of the original promise of mass media technology. We know little or nothing of the truth behind these images, only seeing them through the filters I've applied digitally, and that society has applied memetically. They are an homage to notions of truth and knowledge that were never actually realized, but have since become utterly lost even as ideals.

Save Nimby

I have a space here. Without your help, me and lots of other people like me will no longer have our DIY art space. Even as little as $20 can help.

Nimby needs your help

NIMBY, the very cool art colony in Oakland where I rent a space, has been through a lot financially and emotionally. The space needs financial support to keep going, especially due to the trouble their fundraising events have run into due to complaints from new fancy-loft neighbors who are trying to gentrify the area and run-out the artists, businesses and lower-income people who were there first.

Here is a missive that was just sent out by the NIMBY crew:

While NIMBY is financially sound as an art space - we need the greater community to once again step up and help us through this crunch. NIMBY is setting many precedence for art spaces as we go through this process with Oakland. We are dotting every i and crossing every t, creating a solid foundation for future art spaces to build upon.

Watch our short video, lend your support if you can, and please pass along this message. It is your support that makes this all possible.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1362561841/nimby-industrial-art-and-diy-space

How to lend your support:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1362561841/nimby-industrial-art-and-diy-space
PayPal: NIMBYLLC@yahoo.com
Tax Deductible Donations - email rachael@nimbyspace.org

Keep up with NIMBY:
NIMBY Announce List - http://www.nimbyspace.org/contact/
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=171530301726#/pages/NIMBY/171530301726
Twitter - NIMBYSPACE
(And as always more detailed updates on our progress can be found at http://www.nimbyspace.org)

If you can help, it'll be appreciated by a number of Bay Area artists, art lovers and Burning Man devotees: those who have spaces at NIMBY, those who attend the NIMBY events, those who enjoy the projects constructed at NIMBY, and those who are trying to follow in NIMBY's footsteps and get other arts venues up and running.

Art Show Pieces

I am happy to say that prints of these two pieces are currently hanging (framed together) as part of a show of personal artwork done by technical artists at work:





They are digital photomanipulations, both working from WWII source imagery.

Theater Weekend

This weekend turned out to be theater weekend.

Friday night we went to "The Execution of Precious Memories," a contemporary dance, vocals and music performance by Blixa Bargeld (of Einstuerzende Neubauten), Nanos Operetta, and the Kunst-Stoff dance company at Project Artaud. The hour-long performance featured interpretations, both spoken and sung, of memories submitted by the general public, accompanied by music and dance. Blixa's vocalizations, and the music by Nanos Operetta, were engaging throughout. Especially compelling were the pieces during which Blixa actually sang, making the text feel much more poetic than if it had been read. The other vocalists were not as consistent. Their performances were good, though not as dynamic as Blixa's, and therefore unable to elevate some of the uninteresting and poorly composed memories that were, for reasons unclear to me, included in the piece. Unfortunately, the least successful part of the performance was the integration of the dance with the text and music. While Nanos Operetta did a fine job of providing an exciting, interpretive score, the Kunst-Stoff dancers seemed to be dancing an entirely different piece of work. None of their movements corresponded to either an apparent interpretation of the text, nor the energy of the music. The rhythm and movement patterns of the dancers remained relatively constant throughout, despite changes in tempo and dynamics in the music, and different ideas and emotions being expressed in the text. It was worth going to hear the music, and about half the text, but the dance and remaining text were sufficiently unsuccessful that I felt they made a potentially excellent work merely pretty good.

Saturday night we went to the closing night of Thrillpeddlers' Shocktoberfest 2008 show. Featuring Grand Guignol style theater, and a vaudevillian performance of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody accompanied by a player piano, it was a silly, enjoyable evening that was capped by a very well done black-lit Spook Show, as the closer to the third and final play (which was also the best of the three). While not nearly as polished and intellectual as Project Artaud, the Hypnodrome is another local theater worth supporting, and the Shocktoberfest shows are enjoyable Halloweentime diversions, complete with beer and popcorn. Modernized interpretations of turn-of-the-century French Grand Guignol plays are performed, as are contemporary texts written in a similar style. The Vaudville meets fetish scene stylings of the troupe are, of course, very San Francisco and quite amusing. While you won't get high art from this venue, it is definitely a place to go for a good time.

On Sunday we stayed away from Theater and instead went to see Disney's Bolt in 3D. It was a lot better than I had expected, and I actually enjoyed it (though I would much rather have seen a full 90 minutes of the world presented in the opener). Furthermore, the Disney Digital 3D presented on the Dolby 3D system actually looked good, and didn't give me a splitting headache. The Dolby system is a notch filtering based technology that doesn't require a silvered screen, rather than a polarization based technology that does. It also isn't the traditional headache-inducing red-blue anaglyph technique. I'd seen an R&D demo of notch filtering based 3D at SIGGRAPH a few years ago, and it looked very promising. Now that promise has been fulfilled. And Disney's use of it was not over-the-top. The separations were all motivated, and mostly restrained, making for something I've never had before: a relatively pleasant 3D viewing experience.

High Desert Test Sites

Anu and I spent the weekend in the Mojave Desert at the High Desert Test Sites event, an arts weekend in the greater 29 Palms - Joshua Tree - Pioneertown not-exactly-metro area. It's a pretty fascinating region of the state, both in terms of the alien landscape and the odd cultural mix of military families, hermits, hippies, and reformed hipsters. Not surprisingly, the best food in the region is Mexican, and if you venture out there I recommend stopping at pretty much any mom and pop Mexican joint for all your meals.

Tromping around in the desert was enjoyable (rent a car if you go out there, because dirt roads abound, and your car will surely be the worse for wear), but the art presented by this art weekend mostly ranged from nonexistent to unsuccessful. There were, however, two actually successful installations.

The "Time Traveling Hooker," a character created by Ann Magnuson to bring life to multiple site-specific installation and video works, was far and away the best work directly connected to the HDTS event. Installed in room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, where rocker Graham Parsons died, it is a musing about life and death, and a person's place in the world, embodied in the life and death of this particular celebrity. But I felt it wasn't really about Parsons, but rather about reflecting on what in life would bring someone to an isolated, lonely place like Joshua Tree, and how incredibly unglamorous it is to die alone in such a bleak, desperate surrounding as that room.

The Noah Purifoy Foundation, though not actually directly connected to HTDS, was also interesting. A collection of "naive" art junk sculpture, this permanent site is worth visiting if you travel to the Joshua Tree area. The work is not quite the pinnacle of found object sculpture, but a lot of it is interesting, and the architectural scale pieces are particularly compelling in how you can interact with them. Also, this installation definitely feels appropriate amongst the farm equipment, seatainers, and other homesteader detritus throughout the region.

Most of the rest of the work was forgettable, or no longer present when we arrived, except for two pieces which fit into my category of "if they were better, they could have been good." Marnie Weber and the Spirit Girls were a campy, theatrical performance art band which suffered primarily from Weber's uneven vocals and often pointless lyrics. Had she stuck with her Will-Shatter-esqe vocals, the schtick would have worked perfectly, but attempts to sing wandered into Nico territory, and beyond. The instrumentalists, however, were all quite talented and some of the compositions were imaginative and energetic.

The other near miss was Yoshua Okon's "White Russians," in which attendees were invited into the home of local residents to drink White Russians and subsequently be accosted by a melodramatic performance of stereotypical redneck behavior. It was culturally insensitive, and the deliberately uncomfortable atmosphere of the performance was overshadowed by the inherently uncomfortable social situation. Had the piece focused on a cultural meeting between the local so-called "rednecks" and the art crowd, facilitated by the artist as cultural conduit, it may have been quite interesting. I was certainly up for chatting with the locals and exchanging cultural perspectives, but the situation was not designed to facilitate this, and the staged "fight" that broke-up what social interaction did emerge was a failure as agit-prop (but certainly a success as an irritant). I didn't learn anything about challenging cultural stereotypes, prejudice, or bridging the city-country / red-blue divide. Rather, it reinforced things I already knew: pompously self-assured artists often wind up being culturally insensitive in the very way they claim to be critiquing, and people shrieking is annoying in an annoying way, not a provocative way.

While I wasn't impressed with most of the art, I did enjoy the mid-desert scavenger hunt aspect of having to drive around all sorts of unusual (to me) desert environments, spread across quite a large area, to find the installations and performances. That aspect alone made HDTS worth at least one trip, and to be fair, almost all of the art (that was still there when we got there) was sufficiently amusing to add to the experience rather than detract from it.

The Upside Of The Downturn

As the world falls apart around us, or so the newspapers and television pundits claim, perhaps there is some upside to the downturn. My hope is that it will be better art, music and writing.

The 1980s (the late Cold War Era, the Reagan years) brought with them a treasure trove of angry punk rock (which started to rear its wonderfully ugly head in the mid 1970s, during the post-Viet Nam Ford and then Carter years), and literary and cinematic dissections of the "me generation" and the ever-present Cold War. During the Clinton Years, however, anti-establishment culture got co-opted and eliminated by mainstream media. Some of it survived, but its prominence has been nothing like it was in the 70s and 80s.

Maybe now that we're on the brink of economic cataclysm, we'll see not only a less poppy reinvention of punk rock and other 1970s-80s counterculture, but also a return of 1930s era artistic trends as well. The 30s of the Great Depression also brought with them a lot of great culture including: films like Duck Soup, literature by folks such as John Steinbeck, and in the art world, late Surrealism.

Great struggles often lead to great art. While I'm not exactly thrilled about the struggle part, perhaps at least we can enjoy the side benefit of some great art.

Steve Kurtz: Tactical Art

Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble spoke at Berkeley last night, and it was a very interesting, engaging lecture titled "Art and Discipline." If you have the opportunity to see Kurtz deliver this lecture, I highly recommend doing so.

Kurtz only briefly mentioned his four year ordeal with the Department of Justice (this is also a good article about it), and only as a single exemplar of his overall thesis that the role of art is to push back against the social mechanisms of what he's termed "expression management."

Expression management is the Foucaultian "discipline" in the talk's title, and includes not only the obvious external forces such as censorship and persecution, but also the more subtle external and internal "microfascisms" of socially emergent behavior stimulated by mass inculcation of accepted "dos" and "do-nots" that leads to self-censorship and autogenous persecution.

Kurtz gives interesting examples such as a harmless performance art prank designed to attract the local constabulary: a grown man playing with Hot Wheels and Green Army Men and listening to a boom box with relevant sounds. Doing this in any tourist or commercial district never failed to attract the Police within five minutes, but at Daytona Beach led to outrage amongst citizens that the Police were planning to arrest the guy that CAE had to terminate the performance before someone assaulted an officer.

To me, that was the most successful instance of that series of performances in that it caused average people to realize, without any propaganda or guidance from the CAE performer (who remained silent), that the power of the Police to arrest someone for being inoffensive (but abnormal) is both absurd and dangerous. It was heartening that the polity responded to the persecution of someone on the grounds of harmless "weirdness" with outrage rather than approval.

He went on to describe the results of some of CAE's more deliberately provocative projects, including inadvertently causing Halifax Police to believe it was under terrorist attack by placing digital readouts on the ferries which apologized for the raw sewage in the harbor as part of the Halifax Begs Your Pardon project.

The most interesting example he gave, however, was the response of the city of Leipzig to the Marching Plague performance. Kurtz uses this experience as an example of both autogenous persecution and the possibility of a different social response to threat than the one prevalent in the U.S.

In staging this mock bioweapon release in front of the U.S. Embassy, what Kurtz found was that his own internal microfascisms were causing him to attempt to derail his own project by listing things he was sure they wouldn't be allowed to do: march and then assemble in front of the embassy, then use a city tower to release the smoke with the (harmless) biological sample in it, and then bring skin samples from the participants to a lab for testing.

What he found instead was that the Leipzigers, despite Germany's decades longer ordeal with terrorism (from not just Islamists, but also neo-Nazis and Communists), were quite willing to support the project. When the sponsoring Leipzig arts institution asked, the city gave them use of the tower, and permission to march to and in-front of the embassy, with no fuss. The biological laboratory in the city was equally obliging.

Certainly nobody sane would say Europe is some kind of utopia, but the interesting thing is that the Leipzig response to these "threats" is more sensible than even Kurtz' own internalized initial responses. By being rational and using sensible metrics for threat assessment, the Leipzigers correctly judged that this was a free-speech performance, not a security threat, and responded accordingly. The Leipzigers figured out what Kurtz pointed out to the audience: terrorism is real, but statistically uncommon. Most people, even the socially provocative ones, are not terrorists.

Here in the U.S., we rely on security theater, and over-response, such as erroneously clamping-down on photography. I myself have been literally run out of town in Rodeo, CA, with a Police cruiser less than 5 feet from my bumper, for taking photos of the local refinery. Yet, construction permit filing requirements mean that blueprints of the facility, much more useful to an actual terrorist, are likely publicly available (though perhaps not fully up-to-date).

These responses aren't just ineffective, they are very dangerous to core freedoms such as those of expression, inquiry, association, and privacy. Kurtz' work asks people to consider this, and to do what little they can do at an individual level to find a way to preserve freedom in the face of expression management both internal and external.

David Maisel: Library of Dust

A friend of Anu and I, David Maisel, has a great show up at Haines Gallery, San Francisco . The series is called Library of Dust, and there is also a book available from Chronicle Books.



This amazing photo series reflects upon death, material nature, and the ongoing dichotomy between forgetting and remembrance through images of copper canisters containing the cremains of mentally ill patients of the Oregon State Mental Hospital whose remains went unclaimed after their deaths.

Over 5000 such canisters exist, dating back as far as 1913. Exposure to the elements, and chemical interaction with their contents, has caused a number of the canisters to corrode in often very aesthetically pleasing ways. The corrosion not only reflects the decay and demise of the former person resting within, but reminds the viewer of the relationship between ourselves and the material chemistry of nature.

The patterns that emerge on these canisters are intriguing natural shapes, which often hint at one of Maisel's other major bodies of work: aerial photographs. The corrosion on these canisters exhibits similar geometries to the earth, whether it be a natural coastal formation, or a strip-mined pit. Comparative aesthetics helps link the canisters to Maisel's prior works, and to the larger relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Simply taken at face value, the photos are stunning and evocative. Anyone with an interest in materials will be instantly enthralled. However, once you discover the contents and history of these canisters, the work takes on whole new dimensions of meaning -- making this a wholly successful project at every level of artistic practice. All of Maisel's work is excellent, but for me Library of Dust is a marquee series that evokes a litany of both personal and political philosophical musings, but which also succeeds simply as technically and aesthetically masterful photography.

If you get a chance to see the work in-person, I highly recommend doing so. Otherwise, or in addition to doing so, I also highly recommend the beautifully produced book of the series.

Totoro Forest Project

The Totoro Forest Project is a fund raising effort being spearheaded by Pixar artists Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, and Ronnie Del Carmen. The goal is to raise money to help preserve Sayama Forest near Tokyo, Miyazaki's inspiration for Totoro's forest in his classic film My Neighbor Totoro. I was lucky enough to win, in the online auction, this work, "Blind to Fear" by Clayton Stillwell:



This work, along with many others from the auction, will be on display at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum from Sept 20th, 2008 through February 8th, 2009.

Though the auction is now long over, there is a book of the work available. Proceeds from the book will also go to the forest fund. Keep an eye on The Totoro Forest Project Blog for information on how to purchase the book when it becomes publically available.

The Lights Flickr As They Fade

I'm finally making good on a promise to myself to show my photo work outside my photo club (which I've been absent from for a long time) and circle of friends, and to try to do more with it in terms of both artistic growth and more professional exhibition venues.

I'm still not certain what I think of Flickr as a service (I don't like their un-customizable display interface, but there are some good things about them, like having an API, and the community aspect of groups), but I've decided to make use of it until I find something better or roll my own for my photo portfolio at bugaj.com website that I keep stalling on re-launching. I am, however, enjoying being able to organize and present my photos on-line.

My next step is to locate a good printer to work with, so I can create a portfolio and at least two full-scale works to present to galleries and nonprofits for show consideration. Thus far I've had no luck whatsoever finding a printer who does archival quality digital printing (preferably lightjet, but perhaps giclee) onto a vellum, frosted/translucent film, or a similar material. (If you know of a place, let me know.)

In my Flickr travels, I also found Diego Bauducco's Picto Browser, which lets you displa Flickr images in a Flash app for embedding in a blog post or other site. It's simple, yet effective. Here is my "atmospheric" images set from Flickr in Picto Browser (if you're using NoScript, you need to allow db798.com to have script access):

This set of images encompasses both some of my semi-abstract very soft focus work, as well as nice environmental atmospheric effects. Unless otherwise noted, all these effects are in-camera using one or more of: environmental atmospherics, defocus, and slow shutter + slight motion (but generally not enough to be a "motion" shot). It's more of an emotional / mood description than a technical one, anyway, but several of my favorite shots are in that group.

Check Out My Sister's Theater Troupe

Bridging That Gap is a blog by the members of the Theater Why Not? troupe, of which my sister Katrina is the Artistic Director.

Theater Why Not?
Katharine, Troels, Katrina, Ravi

I've seen her work in-person in New York, read her writings, and discussed some of her performances with her. She's very good. I am very picky about theater performances (and known to walk out on boring ones), and simply seeing my sister isn't enough to make me like one -- so when I say her work is interesting and compelling, I mean it. So, if you happen to be in Canada, Ireland, or one of the other places they're showing up to perform (check the blog) then go check them out.

HCA 08 Auction

The 2008 Headlands Center for the Arts auction was Anu's second, last, and best auction for that organization. Thanks to her hard work, and that of her colleagues, it was quite a bit more successful than their best estimates had projected. Attendance was high, the food was excellent, and the atmosphere was lively.

Ed Gilbert and Anu

Having attended last year's auction as well, I can definitely say this one had better artworks on offer and a more energetic mood amongst the attendees. Even in the current economic climate, the compelling work resulted in a very high percentage of works selling compared to previous HCA auctions.

Owen Seitel introduces the live auction

A number of folks were there that I am friendly with (besides the Headlands Staff), including artists Fred Loomis and David Maisel; curators and gallerists Kimberly Johansson, Svea Vezzone, Jennifer McCabe, and Maria del Carmen Carrión; Lawrence Lohr and Emily from the excellent winery J. Lohr; and Headlands trustees Ed Gilbert and Owen Seitel.

Lawrence and Emily

Anu and Svea

Kimberly

Jennifer and Maria Del Carmen

As I did last year, I purchased some work, hoping to support Anu and her colleagues in their endeavors. She had done a great job with programming, and I was very excited to meet and continue to get to know past and future AIRs under her tenure such as pre-Headlands friends Phillip Robertson and Shahzad Ismaily, as well as David Maisel, Fred Loomis, Zak Smith, Ken Goldberg, Will Oldham, Mads Lynnerup, Ant Farm, NPR, and many others.

I managed to win three very nice works in the silent auction:

Kathy Aoki - "Right on Schedule"

Kathy Aoki's work, consisting of cutesy Japanese pop culture images in sometimes gritty, everyday scenes, is especially popular here in the San Francisco Bay Area. My nerdy love of Japanese pop culture and construction machinery made this piece quite a natural fit for me.

Lead Pencil Studio - An Intimate Momentum

Lead Pencil Studio are nationally renowned architects and artists Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo. They are West Coast favorites, and there was a lot of twitter amongst some buyers after the closing of the silent auctions that they hadn't seen this work (hello, it's pretty hard to miss) and would have bid it up higher if they had. I found the intertwining of architectural elements with romantic figures to be oddly compelling, and enjoyed the piece on its own merits.

Seher Shah - Black Star Project (Cube 18)

I had been completely unfamiliar with Seher Shah's work prior to the auction, but Anu had seen her work at Miami Basel. Fortunately, Anu got a catalog of Shah's work at the Miami Basel show, because it is all quite excellent and I wouldn't have gotten to see it at all otherwise. Her use of either monochrome or muted color palettes, and intricate geometric detailing, often combined with interesting figurative elements, especially appeals to me. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this piece was my biggest "score" of the auction in terms of international reputation, and upon further researching her work I must say I am quite impressed with it. I'm glad to own one of her pieces.

Fred

What I didn't buy this year was a piece by my friend Fred Loomis -- I figured it was good to let someone else have a chance this time. That, and many other wonderful works that were featured this year went home with others, including a stunning piece by Matthew Cusick that I would have loved to have, but couldn't.

Matthew Cusick -- The Course of Empire (Mixmaster II)

However, this tale of a joyful, successful night ends tragically. Two business days after the most successful auction in the organization's history, Headlands Center for the Arts laid-off the artistic organizer of the event -- their Program Director, my lovely wife Anu. Her hard work, extensive connections, and great eye all contributed substantially to making this auction quite excellent (an obvious fact to anyone who had attended previous auctions, such as last year's, which happened before she had really settled-in to the job). Despite the better-than-expected returns on the auction, and an excellent (and financially net positive) programming season, financial reasons were cited for her termination. Apparently HCA is in direr financial straits than any of us had figured.

It is a shame that she will no longer be with the organization. The programming and artist roster she brought to HCA certainly piqued my interest in an institution I'd previously ignored, and I am rather difficult to please artistically. (You may think I'm biased, and to some extent I am. But Anu and I rely on each other for honest critique, so we don't cut any slack with regards to whether or not we think the other's creative efforts are engaging or not.) However, she will continue to curate, write, and otherwise engage the Bay Area (and national, and international) arts community so you'll continue to be able to attend her shows and programs -- only you'll have to do so at some other place(s).

Something Positive to Contemplate: Philippe Petit

My friend Mark Andrews turned me on to the book To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers by Philippe Petit. It is an amazing adventure tale of a life-loving funambulist who took on the World Trade Center, preparing for years before finally performing a dazzling, illegal high wire dance between the twin towers. His book, like the project it details, is part poetry and part crime caper.

Searching for more info about Mr. Petit, I found an interview in Psychology Today which has some good quotes, including this one about the WTC site: "I think they should be rebuilt exactly the same, or maybe even a little bit higher—as a rebellion against doom." This Guardian article is also interesting, but I suggest reading his book, as it is much more detailed. His devotion to art, life, dreams, and a spirited, positive rebellion against conformity really comes through int he book. The style may rankle some readers (at first it bothered me, but I quickly found it rather charming), but even so the story is quite compelling. I found the book well worth the read, especially in a time of much sadness.

The Unbearable Crappiness of Being Trendy

Conveniently located less than a half block from the Bowery Mission, ensuring your entrance and exit takes place on litter-strewn streets where you'll be accosted by one or more of the Bowery's colorfully authentic crazy, drunken vagrants, New York's imaginatively named New Museum is the latest in a series of art venues recently built or refurbished in a desperate attempt by the benefactors of American culture to prove that the American people can still build buildings. With the latest in trendy retro-minimalist design, sporting a "new"-themed coffee shop, and nestled between a pair of fully functional and therefore ironically chic restaurant supply stores, the New Museum is the logical conclusion of the last decade's best funded cultural memes. Somewhere in the mix, there's something about art -- or so I was told.

The New Museum

New Museum's building architecture is engaging when viewed from the outside, but one trend the venue does buck is the recent trend of museums whose interior architecture completely overwhelms the art inside. The lighting could be better, as the flood of over-bright fluorescence is more K-Mart than Guggenheim, but otherwise the interior is relatively art friendly. Inside each gallery, I found myself able to completely focus on the artwork rather than the architectural details. Unfortunately, this situation wasn't permanent.

For the inaugural show, the New Museum decided to curate a four-part extravaganza focused on contemporary object recontextualization art: sculptural collage, two-dimensional montage, sound manipulations, and digital works. This ambitious undertaking is compelling in idea and scope, and based on the crowds, is clearly achieving the goal of drawing visitors to the recently opened venue.

Though it has received accolades from a number of art critics who apparently haven't been in a university dorm room within the last twenty years, Unmonumental would in fact have been better titled Uninspiring. During my grueling two hour attempt to separate the "what?" from the crap, Unbearable is a word that also sprang to mind. As an onslaught of works ranging from the mediocre to the Double-Plus Ungood assaulted my senses, I soon found myself checking out the museum's stylishly cracked coated-concrete floors and exposed ceiling details.

A tour through Unmonumental is like a tour through a college dormitory. Far too many of the works seem taken straight from the aftermath of a marathon session of dropping acid and listening to Rage Against The Machine. Some works resemble the cut-up porno and Tiger Beat magazine collages, dripped-wax constructs, and Pop Tarts box "sculpture" such collegiate inspiration produces, while others merely resemble the floors and walls of the dorm after the participants have passed-out.



"Huffy Howler" by Rachel Harrison, coming soon to a dorm near you


Given the size of the show, it was inevitable that even with what seems like a curatorial mandate of "bore and/or irritate the patrons," a few genuinely compelling, professional grade works could be found hiding in the psychic shadows cast by the literal piles of rubbish surrounding them. Works such as Marc Andre Robinson's "Myth Monolith," John Stezaker's headshot cut-ups, and Kim Jones' ink drawings on photos all starkly set themselves apart from the bulk of the show by betraying the fact that those artists actually have skills. The stand out works in the show looked well thought out, planned, and (gasp) finished, unlike far too many of the surrounding works.


"Myth Monolith" by Marc Andre Robinson, flaunting its coherence

Found objects and imagery, even trash, are used in assemblage and collage work as a matter of course. The material is not the issue with this show. Rather, the problem with many of the pieces in the show is that they come off as not only Unmonumental, but also uninspired, unskilled, and undeserving of the laurels accompanying their inclusion in the first show of a new major museum. The actual piles of trash on the street in front of the museum were more thoughtfully and thought provokingly arranged than some of the work inside.

"Naive" work by "hip" artists is a trying proposition at best, but this show is not even the best of that dubious style, rather it's an insultingly "hipper than thou" collection of utterly hackneyed attempts. While some may revel in the "refreshingly unsophisticated" lack of cohesive thought reflected in many of these works, I found it frustrating that such predominantly thoughtless work is being held up as the pinnacle of contemporary assemblage work when there is so much better work out there.

Missing from the show are (as the NY Times also noticed) many of the usual suspects, including Bill Viola, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney. The bigger name draw is instead provided by lesser works from Thomas Hirschhorn and Martha Rosler, both of whose works in Unmonumental fall squarely into the "not bad, but they could do better" category. But never mind the usual suspects, if it's fresh talent the art world is hungry for there are a number of less well known artists whose superior works could have been included, such as: Winston Smith, Ala Ebtekar, Hank Willis Thomas, Chris Kuksi, Elizabeth McGrath, Jill Miller, Saira Wasim, Banker White (whose garbage sculpture at the Headlands Center for the Arts "Close Calls" show blows away any pile of trash in Unmonumental), James Gouldthorpe, and a host of others.

The audio portion of the show seemed tacked-on. Presented as ambient sound in the galleries, it reduced the contributions of the sound works to a background role at best. Like the rest of the show, most of the works were forgettable, and I have no idea who composed the ones I liked (they didn't make it very easy to find out). Noticably absent was Christian Marclay, and, less surprisingly but still ridiculous to me was the lack of any work by: The Evolution Control Committee, Masami Akita (Merzbow), G.X. Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters), Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, R/Y/B/N, Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio), or any one of a number of contemporary composers working with found and manipulated sound.

There is also an Internet Art component to the show, shown on computers in the gallery and also hosted online by Rhizome. All of the digital work, except for Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's amusing political mash-up, ran the gamut from irrelevant to annoying. Admittedly, there is very little good Internet Art to choose from, but in that case why not open it up to all digital, media, and machine art works and be able to include very good works from the likes of Jim Campbell, Gary Hill, Ken Goldberg, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, Alan Rath, Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert, Chico MacMurtrie, John Maeda, Paul DeMarinis, Jordan Crandall, Raqs Media Collective, Futurefarmers, eToy, Builders' Association, and so on?

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, "Black on White, Gray Ascending"

On the digital art front, Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries has a work being shown on the ground floor. This piece, called "Black on White, Gray Ascending," is not technically part of Unmonumental. But, despite being nothing but text and sound, it is a great piece, substantially better than ninety-five percent of the work in the main show -- digital or otherwise. Even if there weren't other pieces in Unmonumental that deserve to be seen, and there are, it would still be worth going down to the Bowery just to experience the Young-Hae Chang piece.

All in all, the best way to describe Unmonumental is to say it lives up to its name, and then some.

Burtynsky: My Industrial / Landscape Photography Idol

I first saw Edward Burtynsky's work at one of the myriad galleries on Geary St. in San Francisco. I was absolutely engrossed by the photos: industrial landscapes from China. Each piece was amazing. The color. The composition. The fascinating scenes he captures. Burtynsky is a master at capturing the horrific beauty of degenerate industrial landscapes that has for so long drawn me to them.

Chinese Oil Refinery

Burtynsky is not only a master of form, but his subject matter is chosen in such a way as to reveal the dichotomy between economic necessity and environmental decay present in all our industrial activities. Thus, his work succeeds both as industrial formalism and as social commentary.

Bangladeshi Shipbreaking

Burtynsky is, for me, a role model for both aesthetically engaging and socially relevant industrial photography. If this kind of work appeals to you, I highly recommend checking out Burtynsky's work.

The Amazing work of Chris Kuksi

Kris Kuksi is one of my new favorite artists. His work is obviously influenced by H.R. Giger and his ilk, but as this image:

shows, Kuksi also has a directly political side which is generally missing from Giger's work (which is not to say Giger is totally devoid of social commentary, but overt politics is not part of it). Kuksi's meticulous sculptures that blend Gigerian biomechanical stylings with a Gothic architectural feel are, I feel, his most compelling works. These hellish dioramas are grotesque emotional narratives, vibrant in three spatial dimensions but frozen in time.

Kuksi's work is both visually and intellectually compelling, and I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.