April 9, 2008

Why it's difficult to leave New York, despite frustrations

Today alone, the street artist Swoon speaks at Parsons, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips speaks at Columbia, short-story master Tobias Wolff reads at 192 Books, artist Dara Friedman lectures as part of the Public Art Fund's series at the New School, artist Rachel Harrison lectures at Hunter College, a panel discussion on writing and the environment will be held at the New School, and the bands No Kids and Dirty Projectors play at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. I won't attend any of this, though, because I'm going instead to the opening of Sergej Jensen's new exhibition at Anton Kern gallery. Keywords for this post: "New York," "bounty."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 4, 2007

Bergen, Norway

Taken June 27, 2007.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link. | TrackBack (0)

July 19, 2007

Testing, testing. 1, 2, 3 ...

The beach at Greenwich, CT, June 2007.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 25, 2006

Municipal Art Society may move

According to this article tucked away in the city section of yesterday's paper, the Muncipal Art Society, the primary tenant of the "Urban Center" at Madison and 51st, may soon move. (The site is home to Urban Center Books, one of my favorite architecture-and-design bookstores, and an exhibition gallery.) I suspect that the space, if vacated, will likely only be affordable for private owners/developers, which is a shame. I rather enjoy walking through the small plaza created by the ring of six brownstones, which is animated by diners at a restaurant and which is just-enough removed from the bustle of Madison Ave. to seem tranquil, especially in the evenings, when it is lit up by hundreds of tiny lights. Ah, well.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 20, 2006

"Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)

Given past experience with panel discussions, and common assumptions one brings to them, I didn’t have the highest hopes for one titled “Criticism and the Arts,” held last night at Hunter College. It featured Joan Acocella (of the New Yorker, Greil Marcus (author, most recently, of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, Alex Ross (of the New Yorker and the weblog and forthcoming book The Rest Is Noise), and Mark Stevens (of New York magazine), four eminent critics one must respect no matter one’s opinion of their opinions. Thankfully, the panel was moderated adroitly by Wendy Lesser (of the Threepenny Review), and the brisk pace—two questions from Lesser to all four panelists; two more questions thrown open to them generally; three or four questions from the audience—engaged until the end, when it was “time for wine and fizzy water, so you’ll feel this is more of a conversation than an opportunity for us to talk at you.”

I found it somewhat surprising that I generally agreed with what all four critics said, though whether that surprise is rooted in disappointment that I’m affected by the same factors that influence their work (and no longer am independent firebrand, however self-styled) or pride that I can claim similar methodological concerns remains to be determined. Acocella came off as the seen-it-all chronicler (an aside: I've been particularly taken with her recent writing on books, notably this introduction to Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity; Ross the obsessive stylist and last-ditch proselytizer for an increasingly marginalized art form; Marcus the storyteller who sneaks autobiography into each ruminative, "mystical" association; and Stevens the skeptic—both about the use of an institutional “we” and attendant overidentification with one’s platform and an art market seemingly out of control. There were few insights about criticism in the abstract, but plenty about these writers’ practice.

Continue reading ""Criticism and the Arts" panel (a longish report)"

Posted in Art, Books, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

September 19, 2006

McElheny, Sikander, and Saunders win "genius" grants

Josiah McElheny and Shahzia Sikander are the visual artists among this year's MacArthur Fellows, otherwise known as the "genius grants." Short-story writer George Saunders and musician John Zorn also won the award, which takes the form of a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 a year for five consecutive years. See the full list here and read the New York Times article here.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 15, 2006

A considered response to my talk

One attendee of my talk yesterday offered a lengthy consideration of what I said. Among other points was this, which I feel is worth sharing and which he kindly allowed me to post:

You suggested "one should live by the creed of verbs", and even that "doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in the terms, even potentially opening up the opportunity for radical—and instructive—role switching." The problem with these statements is that they fail to account for the hierarchy implicit in their own articulation, a hierarchy made all the more acute when such statements arrive from the other side of a lectern. What one has said here is "i renounce my own authority", and yet one performs this renunciation from the very position of authority that one seeks to renounce, and all the while retains ones symbolic title. Here the success of a renunciation of authority depends in advance both on the listeners belief in your authority to make this renunciation, and their granting you the space in which to perform it. However instructive such a gesture might be, and indeed your efforts to be forthcoming were, i think, honest and instructive, it falls far short of being 'radical.' Rather, such a gesture is more or less in keeping with the ambivalent attitude necessary to "get by" (your own words) in an art world where "to develop small communities is about the best we can hope for." Doubtless, this regrettable state will persist, until we are truly prepared to "live by the creed of verbs" and unequivocally assume positions of social antagonism, inviting the risks that come with them, not only in the hope of someday achieving something better, but in the belief that, in acting now, we will have already done so.

And here is the part of my response that pertains to the above:

This too is well stated, and true. Knowledge of this is perhaps why I threw in a last-minute "take everything I say with a grain of salt." It's usually a point I try to make at the beginning of a talk, but, as I did mention at the outset, I was deliberately getting around my comfort zone yesterday. The only thing I can really say is that by "performing" my ambivalence I can show people who aren't necessarily as ensconced in art-world institutions just how difficult it can be to move among them. I don't claim ultimate radicality for this move, but I suspect, given how many lectures I've attended, that it is nonetheless rare. I really do wish that I had been warned (so to speak) about these things five or eight years ago, when I was just starting out or in school. The corollary to this is that I hope what it is I do outside the space of the lecture—the zine-making, the sharing of resources, even engaging in conversations like this one—will help the community in a way that could be perceived as "radical" when placed in the context of the art world at large. As you note, no doubt I'll have to continue playing the game. There are two reasons: It's only by doing so that I have the privilege of speaking to a group such as the one yesterday, and it's also the only way I know (right now, at least) of making a living. So I do a lot of work, and admit that that work holds up a number of institutions that I think should be reformed, and in the meantime create as much of what the writer Gregory Sholette calls "dark matter"—essentially noninstitutional creativity and production—as possible. Until I'm more able to commit to that "dark matter," which will take a combination of fiscal security and, for lack of a better word, chutzpah, this is the state I am in.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 5, 2006

Writers don't often make a living from their writing

Perhaps this one can be filed under "totally obvious," but this week's signandsight.com magazine roundup points to this article in Le Nouvel Observateur, which is glosssed.

French sociologist Bernard Lahire demonstrates once again that the life of a writer is a difficult, laborious business, in his empirical study "La condition litteraire." He talked to over 500 French authors about their circumstances and financial situation. As Bernard Genies relates, first and foremost, the writers spoke of their "monumental frustration. Because the modern writer simply doesn't exist. Or better: to exist, he has to be something else." Lahire quotes Paul Fournel: "No one asks a filmmaker: 'And how do you make your money?' But with a writer it's the first thing people want to know . . . I've heard it a thousand times." Many have to earn their livelihood in "sideline jobs" like teaching, journalism or translation, because earnings from book sales are often pitiful: "In 2003, 44 percent of the respondents didn't earn a penny with their writing. 9.3 percent earned less than 200 euros, 6.6 percent less than 5,000 euros, and only 9.3 percent topped the 10,000-euro mark."

This is, of course, both reassuring (I'm not alone!) and depressing (We're all broke!). I am incredibly lucky to publish as much writing as I do—thank you, booming art market—but have made nowhere near enough money to support myself by doing so. When people ask what I do, I answer, "I edit other people's writing about art. And I write about art as well." Anyway, this blurb offers me the opportunity to send readers back to the National Arts Journalism Program's The Visual Art Critic, a report published by the organization in 2002 that maintains its ability to fascinate despite the time-sensitive nature of the survey data it is based on.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 1, 2006

A talk about the erotics of pain or best typo ever?

Title: Torture, Photography, and the Limits of the Sexular
Category: Talks
Date: Thursday, October 26, 2006
Time: 6:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Jurow Hall, 31 Washington Place, 1st Floor
Open to public?: Yes
Phone: 212-992-9540

Complete Description:
Judith Butler

Sponsored by the NYU Center for Religion and Media; co-sponsored by CSGS.

UPDATE, 9/12: According to a friend who received the CSGS department's autumn calendar, this is indeed the best typo ever. The correct title of the talk is "Torture, Photography, and the Limits of the Secular."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

August 31, 2006

The Kitchen's fall season

Kudos to Debra Singer and her staff: The Kitchen solidifies its waxing reputation as the go-to venue for great experimental music, art, dance, and literature with its fall schedule, which I just found online. The season includes performances by Carsten Nicolai, Matthew Shipp, Alarm Will Sound, and Ikue Mori; screenings and events organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome.org and Amy Granat of Cinema Zero; the New York presentation of the Christian Jankowsky exhibition that debuts at Lisson Gallery in London next weekend; an exhibition of works made by Peter Welz in collaboration with the choreographer William Forsythe; and literary readings organized by the magazines A Public Space and Esopus. More info here at the Kitchen website. I suspect I'll be attending events there at least three times a month from now until the end of the year.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

August 28, 2006

One more holding-pattern post

I'm back in New York and recovering from twenty-one hours of travel. In the absence of new material in this column, I've added two new MP3s to the site. The songs are fairly emblematic of the music I listened to while in the redwood forest. Right-click and "Save As" at the bottom of the middle column. More soon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

August 23, 2006

A few photos from San Francisco

I'm enjoying San Francisco immensely. I walked at least ten miles yesterday, up and then back down seemingly every hill in the city. I got a mild sunburn. I ate Japanese food in Alamo Square, looking at the "painted ladies" that starred in the opening credits of Full House. I took one of my writers out for dinner. My next mission is finding a great burrito. No more posts today, but I will have one or two tomorrow. Additional photos here.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

July 14, 2006

Hiatus

It's time for one of this site's intermittent, regular-reader-alienating periods of inactivity. Back soon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

July 10, 2006

Cacti in a greenhouse at Wave Hill

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

June 26, 2006

PSA: Yale University Press summer sale

Yale University Press just announced a fifty-percent discount on a wide range of its titles, including many exhibition catalogues produced in conjunction with museums like the Metropolitan in New York. Though the sale runs until September 30, the books are offered on a first-come, first-sold basis.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

June 21, 2006

A chance encounter

Taken at the corner of 52nd & 5th.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

June 19, 2006

Around the web #13

I foolishly keep links and notes for potential posts in my computer's e-mail program as a drafted message, and late last week I lost nearly a month's worth of material. Here are a few links I've cobbled together since:

- Momus laments the folding of Relax, a magazine that I purchased and enjoyed for years despite not being able to read a word in it.

- At Beatrice, Jeff Chang and Simon Reynolds—responsible for Can't Stop Won't Stop and Rip It Up and Start Again, two of the best music books of 2005—discuss their books and much more. Here's part one; here's part two.

- At n+1, Paul Maliszewski offers an appreciation of the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, who died May 18.

- Todd at From the Floor asks whether or not we really need video guides for art exhibitions, and I can't help but laugh at the fact that the exhibition in question is titled "Remote Viewing."

- In response to Christian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, Girish Shambu offers three "cinephiliac moments" off the top of his head.

- This weekend, while catching up with magazines I was too busy to get to when they landed in my mailbox, I came across this engaging Adam Gopnik essay on William Dean Howells.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 25, 2006

Lapse

This site is in the midst of another posting lapse of indeterminate length, due to other obligations. I did manage, however, to update BrianSholis.com with a selection of recently published texts.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 14, 2006

Temporary hiatus

I've spent most of the past week in Berlin and Frankfurt, and apologize for the lack of posts. I expect to resume posting by the middle of this week. There are many photos from the trip posted here.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 3, 2006

Two small, good things

From the May 2 press release—not yet online— announcing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts' "Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative":

However, in order for writers to do their best work and for its impact to be felt broadly in the culture, the infrastructure of the field must be reinforced and the importance of writers' work recognized and rewarded.

The Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative takes a two-pronged approach to this task: one aimed at improving the viability of independent, progressive art publications through capacity-building grants and one aimed at sustaining the work of individual arts writers through project-based grants.

Related: Frieze magazine announces £2,000 international art writer's prize.

Posted in Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 14, 2006

A Venn Diagram

A low-grade digital snap of a page from David Shrigley's forthcoming Who I Am and What I Want.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 10, 2006

Finally!

After several months of planning, procuring materials, and procrastination, I've finally built two large new bookshelves. Here are the artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and surveys, from The 20th Century Art Book to Thomas Zipp. Another (slightly larger) shelf is in my home office and is filled with books on the history and theory of art, architecture, and design. Thanks are due to Eric for recommending spring-tension pole design and to Apartment Therapy, which featured the design I eventually chose.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 9, 2006

Wanas Foundation, Sweden

I just returned from a three-day trip to southern Sweden. Two days were spent at the Wanas Foundation, a sculpture park on the grounds of a medieval castle; Sweden's largest organic dairy farm is also on the premises. Here are a few pictures:

A few of the farm buildings; the two on the right-hand side have been renovated and are used for temporary exhibitions

Looking across a small lake nestled behind the castle from inside a Dan Graham pavilion

There are a few more pictures here.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 8, 2006

"Utopia Station" at Princeton, Pamela M. Lee on the World Social Forum, and Slavoj Zizek in the LRB

On Thursday, March 30, I ventured down to Princeton’s campus for the latter half of “Utopia Station,” a two-day seminar devoted to the concept of free speech. As the press release had it: “We meet to examine this question and to move it.” I was interested in how this program of “talks, screenings, messages and images” would function in two ways. First, as part of a larger, two-year project at Princeton focusing on the study of utopia and dystopia in history, and second, as part of the larger “Utopia Station” project, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and which has manifested itself variously since then.

Molly Nesbit, who is the ostensible ringleader of the project (despite the fact that it was conceived with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a host of other artists, curators, and critics), emceed the affair. Her first words were aimed at disarming potential critics, specifically the capital-H Historians in the house who have been treated to eighteen months’ worth of serious academic papers on the topics at hand, and emphasized the experimental (if not quite provisional) nature of the mixed-media presentations on that day’s docket. The program itself was impressive, but almost from the start technical difficulties plagued the presenters and unexpected absences shortened the proceedings. Princeton’s computers did not play some of the artists’ DVDs properly: We saw only half of a video by Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno, and what footage we did see was punctuated by glitches and moments without sound. Obrist had left after Wednesday’s presentation, and neither Immanuel Wallerstein nor Martha Rosler could attend; Nesbit read short notes from all three. The dwindling audience murmured.

And yet there were rousing presentations. Liam Gillick, who was on stage with Carolee Schneeman and Rirkrit Tiravanija at the outset of the afternoon, outlined in eleven succinct points many problems with using the words “free” and “speech” in this context. (Unfortunately he read too quickly and there was no opportunity to discuss what he said.) A twenty-minute phone call to Michael Hardt, in Seattle, was illuminating, as the critic and theorist outlined his collaborative working process with Antonio Negri as well as the contours of the project now holding the duo’s attention. (A subsequent, pre-planned call to Negri was met with an answering machine.) Edouard Glissant delivered a rather poetic paper envisioning one particular type of utopia, translated on the fly from the French by a young woman who would have benefited from having more time to prepare her words. At the end of the evening, and with the help of an audience member’s laptop, we were treated to two short videos by Thomas Bayrle and a preview of the third part of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest film cycle.

If judged on the terms it set out for itself, the second day of “Utopia Station” was not a success. Several speakers referred to the marathon discussions sparked by the first day’s presentations; Thursday was marked by its lack of interaction. Although I did not talk to any Princeton historians in attendance, it seemed to me that the attempt to shoehorn this presentation into the wider seminar mostly served to point out the deficiencies in “Utopia Station.” Having not attended the opening of “Utopia Station” in Venice three years ago, I was unable to ascertain fully the relationship of Thursday’s presentation to the original, though being at Princeton was certainly more intriguing—despite the imperfections—than my encounter with the rather inert remnants of the original on site in Venice two months after the Biennale opened.

Three years on from its initial viewing, there’s little more to be milked from the same cast of characters discussing (more or less) the same topics. But the connections that can be fostered by its drawing power are many. Despite my disappointment with the outcome of this “Utopia Station” event, the day trip was salvaged by an encounter with Bayrle and his wife on the train ride back to New York. He offered further thoughts on the films we saw, and on the works now on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and clearly warmed to having four young interlocuters—teaching for twenty-odd years at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt has not dimmed his passion for pedagogical discourse. It was a great conversation . . . one that I wish would have taken place in the auditorium at Princeton.

* * *

At one point Molly Nesbit mentioned hearing Michael Hardt speak at Porto Alegre, which was a reference to a presentation he gave at the World Social Forum when it was held in that Brazilian town. Pamela M. Lee has an article on the WSF in the current Artforum. From that article:

Arguably, the relative merit of the WSF's activities is measured less by the concrete implementation of policy than by the kinds of relationships the gatherings produce—a proposition that would seem to raise the question, How might this other world look? What role, in other words, would the visual in general (and art more conditionally) play in the WSF's production and facilitation of a "world process"?

And later:

Indeed, what drew the greatest share of attention at the opening rally and elsewhere were not so much the classic signifiers of revolutionary politics, which fell just this side of perfunctory or routinized, but the circulation of media itself. In countless occasions that mimed something of the feedback-loop logic of the old Sony Porta-Pak, one saw participants videotaping, filming, or photographing other participants who, in turn, were doing exactly the same thing. This was a kind of global mirroring process in which capturing the act of mediation—whether the ad hoc TV stations scattered around the forum's dispersed sites or the live projections in the more heavily subscribed sessions—seemed the most vital form of representation of all. What was at stake seemed not so much a clearly consolidated image of this media (that would be CNN territory, after all), but rather a sense of its potential mobility.

Slavoj Zizek has an article on a related topic, though his is not refracted through the lens of art. "Nobody has to be vile," excoriates the "liberal communists" who have imported values championed at the World Social Forum (held this year in Caracas, Venezuela) to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, specifically Bill Gates and George Soros. To wit:

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility, ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead, Davos can become Porto Davos.

And later:

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today.

Posted in Art, Miscellaneous, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.

March 19, 2006

New Feature: MP3 of the Moment

Here in New York, you have to pick your battles, so to speak. You can't be an art buff, a film geek, a music nerd, a theatergoer, a balletomane, and an opera fanatic; there just isn't enough time in the day. My life is filled with art, writing, music, and the events attending to those three passions. The rest I experience haphazardly at best. In acknowledging this I have just frozen my Netflix account, which was perhaps a losing venture for me from the start.

My three regular readers will see that I have removed the "From Netflix" listing at the bottom of the middle column on this site. In exchange I have added "MP3 of the Moment," which features a randomly selected song from my hard drive and which will change once or twice a week, as the desire strikes.

The first selection is JK Broadrick's remix of Pelican's "Angel Tears," taken from Australasia, the band's debut full-length. Broadrick, as you may know, was behind Godflesh and Napalm Death, and has recently begun recording music under the moniker Jesu; Pelican is a new-ish instrumental metal band from Chicago. (Coincidentally, I knew two of its members ten years ago, in high school.) The original version of "Angel Tears" is a plodding, eleven-minute behemoth, all chugging guitars and (two-thirds of the way through) double-bass-drum attack. Broadrick works solely with the initial melody, adding an ethereal synthesizer "chorus" that hovers behind the music and some echo/reverb to the guitars—essentially giving "Angel Tears" the metal-meets-Slowdive sheen of his current recordings. To my mind, it's an utterly stunning cocoon of noise. Due to bandwith usage concerns, please right-click and download the file rather than playing it directly from my web server.

A few related links: Pelican's record label, Hydra Head Records; reviews of Australasia; Jesu's homepage; and an informative review of Jesu's self-titled album.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Music. Found always via this permanent link.

March 9, 2006

DIY Art Project #1

In the spirit of Rob Pruitt's 101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself and e-flux's DO iT:

1) Find a company that produces stickers.

2) Re-create the circle-and-arrow "You Are Here" design from New York City subway system maps located on train platforms. Change wording to "Others Are Here."

3) Send to company for printing.

4) Affix one sticker with arrow pointing to a randomly chosen station on each map.

Posted in Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 1, 2006

Welcome / Around the web #8

For those of you coming via today's spring arts preview in the Observer, I offer an immediate caveat to Choire Sicha's characterization of me as a blogger: The majority of my time is happily spent editing the content specific to Artforum magazine's website, www.artforum.com. I also write for it, as evidenced by a diary entry about my recent trip to Stockholm currently on the site's front page. When I post here, it is furtively, often late at night, and often little more than links to other articles, essays, and sites I have been reading. Here's another batch:

- James Wood continues beating the drum for realist fiction in this article for Prospect. It is the shortest and most accessibly written article he's yet penned on the topic. (Wood also has a long review of Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses in the current LRB. Link here.)

- As widely noted, Malcolm Gladwell has started a blog.

- Here is an interview, conducted last summer, with the writer Richard Stern, whose collected short stories I am slowly working through (and enjoying).

- Here is a (somewhat low-quality) video trailer for a documentary about Matthew Barney that is to be released (I believe) later this year.

- A new-to-me Scandanavian design magazine titled Forum features excerpts of many of its articles, including stunning pictures. One of my favorite profiles is of the Danish Minister of Culture's recently revamped offices.

- I seem to choose a freely available article or two from every issue of the NYRB for recommendation; from the March 9 issue, I recommend Alan Hollinghurst's review-essay about Lytton Strachey's letters.

Posted in Around the web, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 22, 2006

Stuart Bailey

Speak Up, a design website, yesterday posted a lengthy interview with my friend Stuart Bailey, a graphic designer in the loosest sense of the term. (Link found via Design Observer.) Stuart is the editor and designer of dot dot dot, a magazine to which I am contributing an essay, as well as one of the designers of Metroplis M, a longstanding Dutch art magazine. Here are a few excerpts.

On moving to New York:

At best [the Dutch] economy maintains a healthy tradition of support, manifest in the healthy presence of young one- or two-person practices, an abundance of small-scale, experimental, low-attendance events, with a budget embedded in every other funded project for printed matter or public art, etc. That’s nice to be around and involved with for a while, and I’d be stupid to think I’ll be able to keep up the sort of work I’ve become used to in New York, which is the opposite situation of large studios, an established art scene directed by money, and little official support for marginal activities as independent publishing.

But in the end, of course, there’s also way more crap produced over there, a lot of waste of materials, time and energy, with people taking advantage of the easy ride. It breeds a certain lethargy, and a certain lethargic kind of art and design. There’s exactly the same imbalance of good/bad rigorous/slack relevant/irrelevant inspired/uninspired work as anywhere else in the world—but in far greater quantities. Like swallowing too much sugar, you can only take it for so long before you get sick, and that took me five years. So, as the cliche goes, the head-on brutality of the situation in New York comes with some sense of relief, and I think that’s why I’m here. I’m also looking for an escape route from graphic design.

On his definition of graphic design:

I’ve tried to explain elsewhere how I don’t really see graphic design as deserving of being treated as an independent, navel-gazing discipline. It exists entirely in relation to other subjects. There’s nothing mysterious about this, it just took me a while to realise it. To look at it from another angle, though, I suspect what I’m really against is what that term “graphic design” has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of “graphic design” is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman.

Explaining the editorial vision of dot dot dot:

During one of those frequent resurgences of manifesto-fashion we’d be asked “what do you stand for?,” “what’s your position?”, and it seemed obvious to us that whatever we publish is what we’re interested in. So that’s what we believe in, if you like; it would be more accurate to say we publish material we think worthy of sharing, and that includes the way in which it is presented.

Lastly, summarizing an exercise conducted with students at USC:

The implication of this in terms of graphic design is that any piece of work could be designed in (at least) 99 different ways, using a graphic vocabulary rather than a textual one (or, obviously, both). I’m interested in learning, or teaching, how to be able to recognize and use those different styles in a manner appropriate to each new piece of work, starting from zero every time. That’s exactly what graphic design and modernism mean to me. The sort of work I like and aspire to make is based on this pluralism, intelligently drawing from the whole spectrum of style rather than sticking to one slavishly.

Posted in Around the web, Art, Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 16, 2006

Stockholm: Initial impressions

The city stretches across fourteen small islands, and the wind running along the water gathers so much force that it drives you inside. (Hence my being in my hotel room killing ninety minutes with some old Joan Didion essays from the NYRB rather than out exploring further.)

Unlike, say, Berlin, where one can feel intimidated just walking down Unter der Linden, Stockholm and its buildings are incredibly well proportioned. It is undeniably lovely to walk along its streets.

There must be more hair salons per capita in Stockholm than in any other metropolitan area in the world.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 13, 2006

Gratuitous snow photo

A view of 7th Ave. in Park Slope yesterday morning. I walked a mile—each way—in three-foot-high snow drifts to make my first-ever shift at the Park Slope Food Coop.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

January 13, 2006

Harmonic Convergence

If you widely read enough, connections start popping up in the unlikeliest of places. To wit, a quote from this article in Slate:

Shrimp is, in fact, the most-consumed seafood in the United States. According to the National Fisheries Institute, the average American ate 4.2 pounds of the curved critters in 2004, up from to 2.2 pounds in 1990. How did shrimp surpass canned tuna, the longtime seafood champ, and become the nation's favorite marine nibble?

Koerner goes on to credit a "shrimp-farming revolution." There is one factor, however, that he neglects to credit. See this article in the New York Post:

A wacky "flying shrimp" stunt a Long Island woman claims killed her husband was inspired by a Jackie Chan comedy, a court heard yesterday in the opening of a $10 million lawsuit against the famed Benihana restaurant chain.

Toru Hasegawa, the head chef of a Munsey Park branch in Nassau County, said his staff began the popular practice of winging hot shrimp into diners' mouths after the release of the Chan flick "Mr. Nice Guy" in 1998.

Obviously the fact that we no longer take the time to put shrimp on plates has led to our ability to consume ever-increasing amounts of the decapod crustacean.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

June 13, 2005

A pulse...

Sorry for the lack of updates here. Since the last post, I have traveled to Oslo and Bergen, Norway, Chicago, and Columbus, OH. I have written two diary entries and several Critics' Picks for Artforum.com, accepted an additional job that begins in the autumn, and written a few more reviews. (All are archived online at BrianSholis.com.) The increased workload continues for at least another week or so, but I'll post again in due time. In the interim, I will be keeping my list of recommended exhibitions up to date; it's in the right-hand column under "Worth Seeing."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 11, 2005

BrianSholis.com updated

BrianSholis.com now includes a review of a group show at Maureen Paley Interim Art (Artforum link here; BS.com link here) and a diary entry about a panel discussion held at the Guggenheim (Artforum link here; BS.com link here), the two most recent pieces I've written for Artforum.com.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 9, 2005

"In Search...": Now with pictures!

I frequently carry my digital camera and often use it to snap pictures of art, friends, street scenes, and crowds at openings. I've just signed up for a Flickr account, which means I can share some of these with you. First up, a batch of photos showing the Guggenheim's current Daniel Buren installation; another batch showing what Kutlug Ataman's Küba installation looks like in London; photos taken last year at the Kai Althoff survey's second stop, the MCA Chicago; two photos taken last August during a New Humans performance; and miscellaneous pictures from my recent trips to Berlin and London. I will periodically link to new pictures and sets as I continue to travel and see exhibitions, performances, and other events.

(Obviously, some of these pictures were taken surreptitiously. I share them out of a desire to increase the exposure for the artworks, exhibitions, and projects depicted. If for any reason you need me to remove the pictures, please contact me at the e-mail address listed in the "About This Site" category.)

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

May 4, 2005

Current enthusiasms

- Dundas, Ontario-based producer and DJ Koushik Ghoush's Be With CD, which adds four new tracks to two earlier EPs. The title track and the earlier "Battle Rhymes for Battle Times" are stupendous. If I had a porch, I would put these songs on repeat, buy a rocking chair, make lemonade, and enjoy. The disc is out on Stones Throw Records, and it's a perfect blend of the label's blunted hip-hop beats and the warmer, live instrumentation of fellow Canadian Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Manitoba a.k.a. Caribou), who has his own new record out. Be sure to check out Koushik's DJ mix on the Stones Throw site.

- Toffee waffles ("Stoopwafflen"). Thanks Alex!

- This interview with Christo and Jeanne-Claude (via Greg.org)

- The Times Literary Supplement, to which I've just subscribed, and which in its current issue (dated April 29) runs a letter from Glenn Lowry disputing claims made by James Hall in his February 25 review of the new building and the collection's installation.

- Fra Angelico's Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven, 1423-24. I saw this at the National Gallery in London three weeks ago today and cannot stop thinking about it. The picture on the website does not do any justice to its radiance.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 29, 2005

An update

I have updated BrianSholis.com, adding my review of Mark Lewis's recent solo exhibition, published in the May issue of Artforum, and my Artforum.com "picks" of two current shows: Frances Stark at CRG in New York (AF link; BS link) and Jim Lambie at Sadie Coles HQ in London (AF link; BS link).

Also, Afterall issue 11, which contains my feature essay on Rachel Harrison, has hit newsstands in London; it should appear Stateside shortly. I will update this post with a link to the archived version on my site once it is complete. (UPDATE 4/30/05, 9PM: Here is the link.)

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 22, 2005

Letter from London

Dear friends,

I am very fortunate to travel as often as I do. Because I enjoy making written observations of the places I visit, I decided to try my hand at stringing together a few notes and sharing the result with you. I hope you are neither annoyed by my unsolicited message nor surprised that I consider you a friend. This is a letter from London.

On the overnight flight from New York, I sat next to Roberta, the ultra-petite principal dancer for a Brazilian ballet company, and laughed with her as she rifled through receipts—Miu Miu, Joseph, Prada, &c.—totalling seveal thousand dollars. "How could I spend so much money?" she asked, chuckling at herself. Given how little fabric it must take to make an outfit to fit her, I had to wonder as well. Her peals of laughter wore thin, however, as she enjoyed the genital-joke Ben Stiller vehicle Meet the Fokkers while I made a doomed attempt to get a few hours' sleep in my not terribly comfortable coach-class seat.

My early-morning arrival in London was by no means auspicious, but my sullen demeanor was immediately overcome by the joys of people-watching on the rush-hour tube ride into the city. After over a dozen subsequent rides criss-crossing this swollen megalopolis, my earliest observation remains true: Each subway car must, by law I presume, be populated by at least one of the following: An incredibly tall and thin brunette girl, in her early 20s, with an artificial tan, garishly colored eye shadow, and form-fitting black dress pants made of a stretchy material; a scruffy-faced and wild-haired man in his late 30s wearing a rumpled gray suit with chalk-white pinstripes and a white shirt with at least two buttons undone; and a chatty elderly woman who inevitably makes an obscene joke. On this first ride in to the city center—there is no "downtown" here—the Irvine Welsh character was staring at the shopgirl, and the elderly lady to whom I had given my seat, upon noticing my bags, offered to let me sit on her lap.

Continue reading "Letter from London"

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

April 18, 2005

Overheard in New York

At the ICP's Larry Clark exhibition Friday evening: "Oh my God, that schlong is hideous!"

A Guggenheim visitor leaning over the parapet Saturday afternoon: "Oh my God, I'm gonna barf!"

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 26, 2005

Art dreams

Here's a random one. I've never tried to make art, save for a required elective class during my freshman year of high school, yet about once a month I have fairly vivid dreams about art of my own design. This morning, right after the "ice hockey pick-up game with the (invented) sons of two art dealers" dream and right before the "trying to wash my hair in a public water fountain in a foreign country so I could go to a surprise birthday party, all the while being bothered by a food vendor in a language I didn't understand" dream, the somnambulist me created an entirely new--and quite stunning, I thought--body of work for a painter whose work I like. It will be interesting to compare my dream to her next solo show.

An artist friend in LA recently recorded her dreams for an entire year, made miniature maquettes of all the artworks therein, and then placed the models in a dollhouse-scale rendition of her childhood home.

Does anyone else have these kinds of dreams? Have any non-artists been inspired to try and make what they invent in their sleep?

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 20, 2005

Connections

Continuing this thought: will someone please read Ian McEwen's new novel Saturday, which is getting its first Stateside review attention this weekend (see here, here, and here; the UK review pileup can be found here), and compare it to Robert Gober's new show at Matthew Marks? Thanks.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 16, 2005

Los Angeles connections

Something I'd like to read: A comparison of Sarah Morris's film Los Angeles and Bruce Wagner's new novel The Chrysanthemum Palace (review coverage here, here, and here). From what I've gathered by watching the film and reading a dozen reviews of the book, they both peek behind the scenes of a Hollywood-centric version of the city. Who would I assign it to? David Thomson, perhaps, author of two somewhat related books, and who was recently interviewed at length by Robert Birnbaum.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

January 18, 2005

A necessary pause

This site is on hiatus until further notice. I'm going to try and read The Magic Mountain and Moby-Dick, the new translation of Agamben's State of Exception and some old exhibition catalogs. I'm going to focus on a half-dozen or so pending freelance projects, which will hopefully beget a few more. I'm going to write about my upcoming trips to Berlin and Los Angeles. I'm sure I'll be back—I enjoy reading blogs and online journals too much not to have one of my own—but it may be a while.

One question before I go. Proust: CK Scott Moncrieff or Lydia Davis et al? Suggestions to the e-mail address listed under 'About this site.' Thanks.

See you upon my return.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

December 18, 2004

2004 top sixteen list

In response to Tyler Green's post at Modern Art Notes calling for lists compiling top exhibitions, I'm posting a Top 16 "anything goes"-type list. In no particular order, here are sixteen exhibitions, essays, albums, and films that won me over in 2004.

- William Gass, "On evil: the ragged core of a sweet apple," Harper's, January 2004. My best friend pointed this essay out to me not long after it was published in January, and I've re-read it almost monthly since.

- Matthew Greene, "she who casts the darkest shadow on our dreams", peres projects, Los Angeles. I had the pleasure of meeting Matthew in New York in January, working with him in Paris in June, and being duly impressed by his solo debut at peres projects in Los Angeles on Halloween weekend. Instead of exhibiting minor variations on the paintings that brought him attention in galleries and at art fairs throughout the year, he chose to push forward and exhibit works that indicate the breadth of the fields he is exploring. Click here for a brief review I published on Artforum.com in November.

- Kai Althoff, "Kai Kein Respekt," ICA Boston and MCA Chicago. I first visited Althoff's gesamtkunstwerk in June in Boston; I made a pilgrimmage, and brought a friend, in August. I've since seen the show twice in Chicago and will see it a third time next week. It's likely that there will never be another US survey of his work, and I am glad to have bathed in the aura of his singular vision five times. One of the top five solo exhibitions I have seen since I began to look closely at art. Click here for a brief review I published in June on Artforum.com.

- Anne M. Wagner, "Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture," Grey Room 14, Winter 2004. This essay, along with David Zwirner's presentation of "Bingo" this past spring, renewed the interest in Gordon Matta-Clark that led me (in 2002) to watch consecutively every film and video he ever made. The essay is a pitch-perfect example of strong academic art historical scholarship: measured, logical, thought-provoking, and even willing to throw a few elbows at other scholars. I respect anyone whose attention span allows them to focus on a single subject for so long; I respect even more those who inspire me to attempt to do the same.

- Tim Hecker, "Mirages," alien8recordings. This is Hecker's third full-length record presented under his own name. "Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again" (2001) and "Radio Amor" (2003) were—for lack of a better term—haunting amalgams of digital static, found sound, and processed analog instruments, all suffused with an air of melancholy seemingly born of a Canadian winterscape. "Mirages" is his smoothest work to date: Unmistakably a Hecker record, from harsh opener to languid closer, and a perfect antidote to everyday stresses and his most seamless record yet. 

- "A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958-1968", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and "Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-1970s", Los Angeles County Museum of Art. These two shows (along with, to a lesser extent, "Singular Forms" at the Guggenheim) showed us what critical fuss is all about. It's time to unearth the 1960s, and there's a gold mine joke in here somewhere: Both shows presented plenty of gems for our inspection.

- Diedrich Diedrichsen, "The Primary: Political and Anti-Political Continuities Between Minimal Music and Minimal Art," in A Minimal Future?: Art as Object 1958-1968. A slightly idiosyncratic and highly personal survey of—you guessed it—continuities between minimal music and minimal art. The essay introduced the highly useful term "psychedelic gaze" to my vocabulary. I have Artforum.com colleage Michael Ned Holte to thank for insisting I read (and re-read) this essay. I urge you all to do the same.

- Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou. Like Rivers and Tides, the Andy Goldsworthy documentary, with fight scenes. Absolutely beautiful.

- Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, and Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox, both published by Counterpoint Press. Two great books with orange covers from the same press in the same year? It can't be a coincidence. Sontag and Kael is the only book I've read twice this year. By his own admission, Seligman loves Kael and reveres Sontag. It makes for a slightly uneven book, but the questions he asks of each writer's body of criticism will inevitably lead to a fruitful self-examination in any practicing critic. O'Brien's memoir-through-music was the most pleasurable read of the past twelve months, as he takes as much pleasure in writing (he is a poet, critic, and the editor of the Library of America to boot) as he does in listening.

- The Futureheads, "The Futureheads," 679 Recordings. This band came out of nowhere and out-Franz Ferdinanded Grammy nominees Franz Ferdinand in September at Roseland. Their self-titled album, while a few tracks too long, contains just as much energy as their live show. If you're having trouble getting out of bed some winter morning, this is the record for you.

- David Wojnarowicz, "Rimbaud in New York," Roth Horowitz. One of my favorite gallery-going experiences is being introduced to well-known works with which I was previously unfamiliar. With over a dozen never-before-exhibited prints, this show was a revelation even to those who were familiar with the "Rimbaud in New York" photos, and the inclusion of several diaries in the exhibition had the unexpected (and pleasant) side effect of leading me back to Wojnarowicz's writing.

- The Animal Collective. This prolific and amorphous group continues to fire off beautiful record after beautiful record. This year's "Sung Tongs" is a step forward from last year's "Here Comes the Indian," which was already delightful. Not to mention the Campfire Songs side project (my favorite release yet) and individual releases by Panda Bear and others. Great live shows too.

- "Philip Guston", The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition was only on view for four days in January (and I saw it repeatedly throughout November and December 2003), but apart from being a timely, necessary retrospective, it is also a strong example of what the Metropolitan does best. It never gives enough space to traveling retrospectives and is too staid to feature artists still at mid-career: What results are not-quite-complete retrospectives of Modern masters (Guston) and surveys of stalwarts (Thomas Struth, Vija Celmins) that are a pleasure to behold (and easy on the feet). Celmins's print retrospective held there in late 2002 was one of the most illuminating exhibitions I have ever seen.

- EN/OF series, Bottrop-Boy. This series comprises limited edition 12" records by experimental electronic and improv musicians paired with artworks made by contemporary artists. The first release, dated 2001-02, featured two cut and dyed felt sheets made by Liam Gillick and "White Cube Jazz," a collaboration between Ekkehard Ehlers and Joseph Suchy. Earlier this year, Tim Hecker (mentioned above) was paired with Stan Douglas. My admiration for this series is entirely abstract, as I do not own any of the editions, but I've heard several of the musical compositions and they're of unfailingly high quality.

- "Before the End (The Last Painting show)", curated by Olivier Mosset, Swiss Institute, New York. Originally presented at Le Consortium, Dijon, this spring, this show was a tightly-wound "Missing You" card From Mosset to a generation of painters who left painting behind in the mid- to late-1960s. Click here for a brief review I published on Artforum.com.

- Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in "Spin Alley" after the Presidential Debates. Look this clip up online. It makes me wish I owned a television.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

December 17, 2004

Update

In the last ten days, Artforum.com has published my 'Scene & Herd' diary entry on the NADA art fair (click here to see it at Artforum's site; it is archived here) and my brief review of Gabriel Vormstein's exhibition currently on view at Casey Kaplan (click here; archived here). I'm working on a handful of freelance writing projects that are keeping me from posting too frequently, though I have it in my mind that I should try updating more often. We'll see how it goes.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

December 5, 2004

Back from Miami

Scene & Herd is now online. I'm back from Miami. More soon. For the moment, here's Roger Sale on Irving Howe (the quote appears in Morris Dickstein's article on Howe in the new Bookforum): "Only the best critics are generous enough to find the right words for their authors."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

October 11, 2004

Around town, around the world

The Frieze Art Fair looms large over this week’s art world calendar, leaving dealers, collectors, curators, and critics barely enough time to re-pack after their return from the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. The fair opens to the public on Friday, so it’s safe to assume that the best events take place on Wednesday and Thursday. With a degree of cross-institutional synergy that would make any 1990s marketing manager proud, galleries and museums across London have coordinated events with the fair. On Monday Tate Modern hosted the press preview of Bruce Nauman’s “Raw Materials,” the newest in its Unilever-sponsored commissions for the building’s turbine hall; the opening reception is Tuesday night. Also on Tuesday, collectors who do not want to fight crowds for the right to purchase a new Marcel Dzama drawing—whose catalogue raisonné may eventually prove more daunting to compile than Andy Warhol’s—can head to Timothy Taylor, while Stephen Friedman presents drawings by London-based Scottish artist Paul McDevitt.

Going head-to-head with Frieze events, Sadie Coles opens a show of new work by Simon Periton and Modern Art presents the debut UK solo by New York resident Barnaby Furnas. After your mid-week buying spree, relax on Friday evening with the opening reception of “Expander,” a group exhibition presented at the Royal Academy of Arts. When you return to your room at the City Inn Westminster Hotel, don’t be alarmed by the message scrawled on your bathroom mirror, as it may have been put there by Monica Bonvincini, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Trisha Donnelly, or Richard Prince. It’s part of “I’ll Be Your Mirror” organized by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, which means that even if it’s uninteresting, it's legal. Click here for a list of official talks and projects sponsored by the fair.

Elsewhere, the Orange County Museum of Art presents its California Biennial to the public beginning Tuesday; on Wednesday, Wade Guyton and Bojan Sarcevic talk with Will Bradley on the occasion of “Real World,” an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, and Craig Seligman talks about his book Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me at the New School in New York. On Thursday, Washington and New York museums do a swap: the Ana Mendieta exhibition, which premiered at the Whitney, opens at the Hirshhorn, where it was organized by Olga Viso, while the Romare Bearden retrospective organized by the National Gallery opens to the public on Madison Ave. Friday marks the start of “The Artist as Public Intellectual,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the Friends of the Secession. It features Roger M. Buergel (the thin-mustached curator of the next Documenta), Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Hirschhorn, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, and Mignon Nixon among others.

Tired yet? There are still gallery and exhibition openings to note: Trisha Donnelly at Casey Kaplan in New York on Friday; Hernan Bas at Sandroni Rey and Dave Muller at Blum + Poe in L.A. on Saturday.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

Jennifer Higgie on why we write

In her Editor's Letter at the front of the new Frieze, Jennifer Higgie makes public her internal dialogue about why she writes about art. It contains a concise explanation of my reasons for writing last month about Thomas Scheibitz's new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar: "I write for the same reason that I read novels or look at art: either to decipher something I don't understand or to be reassured....Looking properly at something and then writing about it, especially to deadline, tends more often than not to be an act of panic tempered with an interest inspired by incomprehension." Schiebitz's last exhibition in New York piqued my interest but didn't entirely convince me. I see so much art that my typical response to this feeling is fairly passive: I file the mental images away for later retrieval. Yet when his new show began to preoccupy my mind similarly, I forced myself to interrogate why. Without a constraint—my deadline—I probably would have deferred thinking thoroughly about his work once again. Instead, I tried to make an assessment as a means of explaining the work and my reaction to myself. To quote Higgie again, anxieties appeared: "...do these words and these objects or gestures ultimately nourish the art work or yourself or the world....Do they avoid being prescriptive....Do they at least try to reveal some of the multitudinous tones that litter the world unacknowledged....Do they make anyone less lonely?" My review, a scant 218 words, may not do any of these things. But Higgie's conclusion, which I second, allows that "Even making a mess of it and repeatedly getting it wrong is preferable—at least it's an assertion of something alive: fallibility." You try not to be fallible in responding to a work of art—like the artist tries not to be fallible during the act of creation—and hope that there is something of merit in the connection sought by the act of writing.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

October 8, 2004

New article in Flash Art

My essay "(Re)Making History," on recent artworks by Carol Bove and Andrea Bowers, has now been published under the title "Creative Resistance" in the October issue of Flash Art. Click here to read it online at BrianSholis.com.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

October 5, 2004

Around town, around the world

I've imported the data I backed up to my external hard drive and am (almost) fully back in business. This weekend's trip to Chicago was fruitful, but before I talk about that, here's some information from the calendar:

Wednesday brings the opening of LFL's second show of the season, which features LA-based artist Rob Thom (associated with Black Dragon Society) and Justin Liberman, who, if memory serves me correct, just went through the Hunter MFA program. In this week's Village Voice, Jerry Saltz reviewed Phoebe Washburn's second solo, which just came down at the same gallery. Also in New York on Wednesday, Jennifer Pastor's The Perfect Ride, a three-part artwork she has spent many years making, will go on view at the Whitney (the opening reception takes place later in the month) and, at 4:15, Linda Alcoff presents a paper titled "Identity Politics: A Defense" at CUNY's Graduate Center.

Out in LA, Glenn Phillips, a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, presents a selection of Brazilian video art made between 1973-1983. Click here for the Getty's October schedule, which includes more information about the event.

In London, LA-based painter Lari Pittman presents new work at greengrassi and Tate Modern opens "Time Zones: Recent Film and Video," which has a spot-on selection of young artists who are just now receiving their first US museum exposure (Yael Bartana opens a show at MIT List Visual Arts Center next week; Yang Fudong is showing 5 Films at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Anri Sala is getting some of his first US museum exposure at the Art Institute via James Rondeau's focus exhibition series, etc.). It seems, from afar, that Jessica Morgan, formerly of the ICA Boston, is really hitting her curatorial stride at the museum.

On Thursday in London, the Hayward Gallery opens "Eyes, Lies, & Illusions," which "explores a treasure house of optical wizardry, from magic lanterns, shadow theatre, tricks of perspective and anamorphic images, to kaleidoscopes, flipbooks, zoetrophes and other early forms of animation" and includes contemporary artists. Across town at the Whitechapel, Chris Kraus talks about the LA art scene on the occasion of her new book Video Green. Stateside, Thursday brings the opening of "Plan 9," Steven Parrino's new exhibition at TEAM Gallery and a discussion between Brian Eno and Todd Haynes at CUNY's Graduate Center. Up in Boston, the MIT List Visual Arts Center opens exhibitions by John Coplans, Cerith Wyn Evans (in conjunction with the MFA Boston), and the aforementioned Yael Bartana.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 28, 2004

Hard drive failure

...back next week. Sorry for the delay!

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 27, 2004

Survey of arts blog readers

Todd Gibson of has created a survey designed to help those of us who write about art online find out a little more about those of you who read what we have to say. I filled it out—it takes about five minutes—and would recommend you do the same. Thanks!

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 25, 2004

A brief interruption

You may have noticed that this website was unavailable for some time over the past day or two. Never fear, the technical snafu has been fixed. Now we just have to get past the editorial snafu—birthday celebrations and some pressing work deadlines—and we'll be just fine. Expect posts to resume on Monday.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 23, 2004

Around town, around the world

Not too many gallery exhibitions open in the next few days, as most now have their September shows on view. Museums' schedules, however, are almost never aligned, and so there are plenty of openings worth mentioning. A big one that I failed to mention was last night's opening of a Boris Mikhailov retrospective, featuring 500 photographs, and a new Lucy McKenzie installation at the ICA Boston.

In New York, Iona Rozeal Brown opens her second solo exhibition tonight at Caren Golden Fine Art, which inaugurates its new space on West 23rd St. Also tonight, at 6:00, is a screening of "Alvaro Siza: Transforming Reality," a new documentary about the Portuguese architect. It takes place in the Parsons auditorium at 66 W. 12th St.

Turning elsewhere, tonight the traveling survey "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast in Contemporary Art" opens at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco and the Chapman Brothers talk at Tate Britain, London.

Tomorrow two big exhibitions open: the annual "Printemps du Septembre" in Toulouse, France, curated by Pascal Pique and artist Jean-Marc Bustamente, and "Nancy Spero: Weighing the Heart Against a Feather of Truth," the artist's first retrospective, at the Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. It is sad that Spero's husband, the artist Leon Golub, will be unable to share in her achievement, as he passed away in August at age 82. Elsewhere tomorrow Rosemarie Troeckel opens an exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, "Kulturkammer," a solo exhibition of work by John Bock, opens at the ICA in London, and "Nothing Compared to This" opens at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. The latter exhibition is marked by its lack of wall labels, its playing of ambient music in the exhibition space by musicians like Brian Eno, and its concept-driven 24x24" fold-out brochure designed by my friend David Reinfurt of the firm O-R-G. Friday also marks the 25th anniversary of my birth.

Saturday brings a couple of big-name openings: the touring Donald Judd retrospective, organized by Nicholas Serota for Tate Modern, lands at the Kunstmuseum Basel; the 26th Sao Paulo Biennial opens; and  Althoff's mid-career survey opens at the MCA Chicago. I wrote about the Althoff's debut at the ICA Boston, where it was organized by new Chief Curator Nicholas Baume. What I didn't say then is that it is one of the two or three best solo exhibitions I have seen since I moved to New York over three years ago and began looking at art in earnest. To that end, I made a second pilgrimmage to Boston in August explicitly to see the exhibition a second time, and will be fortunate enough to see it twice more at its Chicago venue. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Elsewhere Saturday, "Fashination" opens at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm; "Power & Persuasion. Avant-garde European Graphic Design and Photo-montage" opens at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow, "Real World: The Dissolving Space of Experience" (featuring Katy Grinnan, Wade Guyton, Christina Mackie, Bojan Sarcevic, Paul Sietsema, and Hiroshi Sugito) opens at Modern Art Oxford; and John Neff and Sally-Ann Rowland (who has a solo show at ZieherSmith in New York right now) open at Western Exhibitions in Chicago. Last but not least, critic and curator Jan Avgikos speaks at 1pm on Hanne Darboven at Dia:Beacon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 19, 2004

Around the web and around the world

Here is a Sunday post meant to mention a few shows and websites that I missed on Friday and Saturday.

First, today's openings in New York: Beth Brideau is opening this afternoon at Southfirst, who will celebrate by having the first of their autumn Sunday Readings; Rita McBride's "Exhibition" and two group shows open at SculptureCenter. And elsewhere: Lothar Baumgarten's "Carbon" opens at the Dallas Museum of Art (which has a pretty new website); a solo show of new work by Scottish artist Martin Boyce, titled "Dark Reflections," opens at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany; "Performative Architecture" opens at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig; Shahzia Sikander's "Nemsis" and "Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition" both open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut; and "Some Forgotten Place," the newest Matrix series exhibition, opens at the Berkeley Art Museum.

I know it seems like I am linking to way too many exhibitions, but believe me when I say that this is an edited list. There is far more out there, and I believe that each exhibition I link to is likely to have some merit. My criteria is simply: "Would I be interested in seeing it?"

Also on Sunday: For people in LA: Hans-Ulrich Obrist will be signing his new book of interviews at MOCA beginning at 2pm.

Now, to pick up a few things I missed: Cecily Brown just opened an exhibition of new paintings at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin; Tacita Dean opened an exhibition of new work at Frith Street Gallery in London; Steve McQueen has just opened a slide-projection-and-audio piece at the South London Gallery; the Yves Klein retrospective has just opened at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Finnish artist Mari Sunna's second solo at The Approach in London has just opened; and, last but not least, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneux has just opened a show at Galerie Kamm in Berlin.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 11, 2004

We're trying to locate ourselves

It seems I'm not the only one giving thought to the meaning and implications of criticism. Stephen Mitchelmore has just posted to InWriting.org a consideration of the topic through his favorite lens, Maurice Blanchot.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 10, 2004

Around town, around the world

What to do with tirelessly collected information? Share it!

The openings continue tonight: Iran do Espirito Santo at Sean Kelly, Justine Kurland @ Gorney Bravin + Lee (the  forest photographs are really lovely), a group show at Nicole Klagsbrun, Wim Wenders at James Cohan, a group show at Greene Naftali (it opens 9/18, 12-9pm), Zachary Wollard at Massimo Audiello, Marc Handelman at Lombard-Fried, Annika Larsson at Andrea Rosen, Pipolitti Rist at Luhring Augustine, Eugene von Bruenchenhein at Feigen,  Wolfgang Staehle at Postmasters (whose Berlin Pan, 2003, is one of the better works in a show of SVA alumni at their 601 W. 26th St. galleries), Neil Jenney/Ree Morton/Sylvia Plimack Mangold at Alexander and Bonin, An-my Le at Murray Guy, a pinata party at GBE Passerby, Johannes Wohnsafer at Casey Kaplan, Richard Long at Sperone Westwater, a group show and two new White Rooms at White Columns, and Terry Richarson at Deitch. If you live in Brooklyn and are too lazy to cross the river, you can attend openings at Priska Juschka and Pierogi.

The intrepid among you will note that I put this in geographic order, north to south, and can make an anal retentive street-by-street list in your datebook like I do.

Never fear, friends in faraway places: Abraham Cruzivillegas is opening at Roberts + Tilton in LA, as is Irit Batsry at Shoshana Wayne, Anne Collier at Marc Foxx (who I saw on 20th St. last night...he better hurry  home!) and Dario Robleto at ACME. Or, if you're in Chicago, you can attend the opening of Sterling Ruby's new exhibition at 1R Gallery.  Those of you in London can attend Doris Salcedo and Damián Ortega's openings at White Cube, David Shrigley's opening at Stephen Friedman, Tobias Rehrberg and Paul Noble's openings at the Whitechapel, or a rare screening of Anthony McCall's Long Film for Four Projectors at Tate Britain.

Farther afield? How about the opening of the group show 'Slow Rushes' at the Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Lithuania ("SLOW RUSHES: Takes on the documentary sensibility in moving images from around Asia and the Pacific"), or the festivities for the 2004 Gwangju Biennial, in South Korea.

And there's more! Don't say I'm not looking out for you.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

September 8, 2004

Another reason Paris is amazing...

This report in The Guardian describes a fully-functioning underground cinema and restaurant housed in an underground cavern. Amazing enough, right? Even better: It was a secret society of sorts, and the authorities didn't know about it. Here's the meat of the story:

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said.

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

July 15, 2004

www.BrianSholis.com is live

Today marks the launch of BrianSholis.com, an online archive of my published writing. It also marks my last day at the gallery at which I have worked for the last three years and the beginning of my career as a freelance writer. I'm off to Chicago and Los Angeles for vacation, but I will report back with reviews, news, quotes, and links very soon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 10, 2004

Award for art criticism

Nathalie Chicha mentions a new prize for art criticism (link to rules and related article by one of the judges) co-sponsored by the Guardian and Modern Painters magazine. I plan to enter.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 8, 2004

Whitney Biennial website now online

The Whitney Biennial website is now live, a few days ahead of the exhibition's opening to the public. I contributed twenty-four essays to the catalogue, all of which are on the site. (When clicking on individual artist's names, the essays attributed to 'BJS' are mine.) Tomorrow night is the first of two opening receptions and after-parties. As much as I'm looking forward to congratulating all of the artists in the exhibition that I know or wrote about, I'm definitely looking forward to the end of the hoopla so I can concentrate on new projects.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

March 5, 2004

More online broadcasts of art discussions

Here is a link to the panel discussions held during the Frieze Art Fair last October. They are saved as MP3 files available for streaming or download.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 20, 2004

Dale Peck makes a good point

Dale Peck, who has garnered too much attention for his "hatchet job" reviewing style, is apparently ready to publish his last negative review. It will appear in the April/May issue of maisonneuve, though of course its introduction is posted online now to drum up publicity. His popularity (or infamy) has allowed him the column space to consider the role of the critic at length in each of recently published reviews, and this one is no exception. But he makes a good point when discussing overly close analysis:

Exegesis at this level is less interpretation than parallel narrative, and sometimes it can be hard to tell if it expands a text’s impact or diffuses it through too many tangential, anachronistic, esoteric associations. Or, to put it another way, whenever I see a critic taking such liberties I’m not sure if I’m in the presence of genius or insanity, but I sure do laugh a lot. Which is, I’m pretty sure, the intention: among other things, the humor of a Paglia or Wayne Koestenbaum or Dave Hickey makes conspicuous the subtle, easily ignored dramatic irony that informs all criticism. The idea that art—an enterprise whose primary function is to reveal the members of a culture to themselves—cannot be understood by that culture without Virgilian assistance would seem, on the face of it, absurd, and this particular brand of exegesis, while often way off the mark (if not simply off the wall), nonetheless acknowledges its supplemental relationship to the text in question; its humor is inviting, yet also invites its own dismissal.

I'm not familiar with Paglia's writing, and would put Hickey in a different category. To Koestenbaum I would add Bruce Hainley, Dennis Cooper, and David Rimanelli. My response to their art criticism exactly mirrors Peck's: I often laugh, I roll my eyes at unnecessarily obscure references, and then manage to forget content while remembering form. Hainley's January 2004 Artforum article on Sue de Beer is a case in point: I do not remember his main argument(s), but do remember that a parenthetical aside mentions something about how an art world that gives birth to her type of video art might parallel the shift from Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games to interactive computer games. When that's all you remember about a three thousand word article, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss. So I often chalk it up to some kind of gay ecstatic scribble that my straight mind isn't privy to, wherein the critic takes a very camp approach to crafting sentences. Is this an unfair judgement? I can't tell, but I can't shake it either...

(Link to maisonneuve article first seen at MaudNewton.com.)

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 19, 2004

Why this is not a (good) weblog

I had a good run of one-post-a-day activity, but that's going to drop off considerably for the foreseeable future as I take care of work. More soon.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 12, 2004

Susan Sontag: in case you missed it...

On October 12 last year, during the Frankfurt Book Fair, Susan Sontag was awarded the annual Friedenspreis (peace prize) from the German Booksellers Association. The event was little reported in American media, so you may have missed her acceptance speech. Here is a copy.

An excerpt:

Continue reading "Susan Sontag: in case you missed it..."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 9, 2004

Tate webcast archives

Apropos of Terry Teachout's recent post announcing that the BBC has begun to make available on the web selected material from its sound archives, I would like to point out a similar venture by the Tate. Look at Tate Audio & Video for a schedule of upcoming live webcasts and an archive of artist talks, guest lectures by critics and writers, panel discussions, and symposia that relate to Tate programming or took place at the museums. Of particular interest to me: artist talks by Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Hirschhorn, Francis Alys, and Michael Snow; Stephen Melville's lecture (and discussion with Christian Bonnefoi and Laura Lisbon) titled "Painting Present"; the 2001 conference titled "Thinking the City"; and "Capital Seminar 1: Gift".

Does anyone know of other institutions that make available their archives in this manner? If so, please forward them to me and I will amend this post to create an index of archives.

Related: This article discusses BBC plans to begin extensive arts coverage on television. (Link via Artforum.com)

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 3, 2004

Barenboim and Ozick on political responsibility for artists

Daniel Barenboim, head of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin since 1992 and co-author of a book with the late Edward Said, is profiled in this article. (Link via ArtsJournal.) Barenboim is a model for the politically engaged artist, speaking out repeatedly against the Israeli government whlie also engaging in activities that work to bridge the gap between Israelis and Palestinians (such as teaching classical music classes in the West Bank and conducting a youth orchestra comprised of children from both sides of the divide.)

It is difficult, especially in times of conflict, to recede fully into the comfortable lair of "art for art's sake," and often equally difficult to find a noble expression of political views within one's art practice. Whatever you think of Barenboim's politics, his activity is to be commended because it engages his twin practices--classical music performance and political activism--as separate but equal strands of his life. Holding the two in balance strikes me as the appropriate course for myself as well.

The article also occasions an opportunity to quote from Cynthia Ozick's essay "Public Intellectuals," which I re-read last night in her collection Quarrel & Quandary:

"History isn't only what we inherit, safe and sound and after the fact; it is also what we are ourselves obliged to endure."

"The responsibility of intellectuals includes also the recognition that we cannot live above or apart from our own time and what it imposes on us; that willy-nilly we breathe inside the cage of our generation, and must perform within it. Thinkers--whether they count as public intellectuals or the more reticent and less visible sort--are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence."

I suspect that most thinkers, and artists and writers, fall into the "more reticent and less visible" category when it comes to pressing political matters, but I think Barenboim would appreciate the way Ozick imparts a culpability for thoughts and actions to us all.

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

February 1, 2004

Artforum and Isaiah Berlin

Reading the very long "Global Tendencies: Globalism and the large-scale exhibition" roundtable discussion in the November 2003 Artforum led me back to Isaiah Berlin's "The Pursuit of the Ideal", collected in The Proper Study of Mankind. (The link will hopefully take you to the first page of the essay via Amazon.com's "Look Inside the Book" feature.)

"Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what [Giambattista] Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space."

"It is what I should describe as pluralism--that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising and deriving light from each other...."

"Claims can be balanced, compromises can be reached: in concrete sitautions not every claim is of equal force....The best that can be done, as a general rule, is to maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices--that is the first requirement for a decent society."

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

January 12, 2004

The week ahead

Please double-check to confirm dates and times. This subjective list is accurate to the best of my knowledge. Some events require advance tickets. If you have an event you'd like to see listed, please e-mail me with the information.

Continue reading "The week ahead"

Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.

December 31, 2003

Gottfried Semper

Here is the introduction I wrote for the third issue of KnitKnit, a zine compiled and edited by my friend Sabrina Gschwandtner. It prefaces a selection of Gottfried Semper's writings on textiles.

Gottfried Semper, 19th century German architect, theorist, and polymath, possessed a postmodernist sensibility at the earliest stages of the modern era. A body of critical writing nearly unmatched in nineteenth century arts-related letters buttressed his buildings, including the main building on the campus of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, the town hall in Winterthur, Switzerland, and the Imperial Forum in Vienna. This eclectic epistolary output includes ruminations on architecture’s relationship to textiles and, specifically, fashion; Semper viewed the architecture of classical civilizations through the lens of then-current research on the architecture of citizens’ dress.

It is now de rigeur to link fashion and architecture—see recent issues of many theory-heavy culture magazines or any feature article on clothing designer Hussein Chalayan—but the radicalism of this notion during the middle third of the nineteenth century cannot be unde