August 30, 2010. I've had the new issue of Artforum for a couple of days, but haven't thumbed through it yet. So thanks to greg.org for noticing this first.

The back cover of the magazine, since time immemorial, has been devoted to an advertisement for Bruno Bischofberger Gallery from Zurich, generally depicting a folky or bucolic scene from Switzerland in full four color bleed - and the current issue is no exception. Picking up on this art world axiom, conceptual prankster Rob Pruitt presents this as September 2010's penultimate page.

It seems Greg Allen "art directed" his presentation of RIP OFF THE BACK COVER TO MAKE THIS THE COVER by photographing it against a tabletop with a blue, green and lavender floral pattern that complements the colors of the ARTFORUM logo.

James Kalm peddles to Long Island City Queens on a warm summer weekend to view a curatorial project by Cecilia Alemani in the Rotating Gallery at the mega exhibition "Greater New York". Featuring works by Leslie Thornton, Judith Bernestein, Sylvia Sleigh and Jack Whitten "The Comfort of Strangers" presents pieces by mature artists who have worked consistently for decades despite escaping the recognition they deserve. Includes interviews with Leslie Thornton, and Judith Bernestein.

Taiwanese TV broadcasts often contain digitally animated re-stagings that summarize events from around the world. Are they attempting to gestate a new art form? Possibly. But more likely it's cheaper to have a computer geek create the images rather than shooting and/or editing actual footage from the scene, or paying for the feed of an international news service (China vs. that nagging intellectual property issue again!). Previous coverage has run the gamut from political demagogues (Sarah Palin) to celebrity culture (Lindsay Lohan), as well as British budget worries (the Queen sells her swans for meat) and the Philippine hostage crisis.

Here is their take on the "Ground Zero mosque" controversy, which combines certain clueless errors (is that REALLY where New York City is - right in the center of the state?) with weird cultural mash-ups conflating campy 1960s beach bunny films and fundamentalist Islamic dress codes for women ("Burkini Blanket Bingo"). The risibly expedient shop names - "Greg's Ground Zero Gay Bar", "Ground Zero Starbucks", "Ground Zero Deli" - lampoon (perhaps unintentionally) the reductive "hallowed ground" blinders of the anti-Muslim fear mongers.

Reckless 1984: ripped and blogged here:
http://continuo.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/joseph-nechvatal-reckless/

Cassette by Joseph Nechvatal released by Sound of Pig, SOP217, NY in 1984

A James Brown vocal cut-up morphs into a sonic punching ball, both ironic and cruel. Sword fight sounds from some Japanese cartoon are reduced to semaphoric and phoney gesticulations for several minutes. And that’s only the beginning of Reckless, a Joseph Nechvatal cassette from 1984. Yet, compared to his other cassettes, the music on Reckless is surprisingly uncluttered, even serene at times, as pauses and silences have been inserted and the music being based on one sample at a time. This is still a commentary of sorts on junk culture, Bollywood films, Japanese films, cartoons, etc. The B-side is something different altogether, basically the soundtrack from some Japanese erotic and/or snuff movie. I couldn’t decide if the woman we hear is being tortured or given pleasure, a mix of both I guess – and the label is called Sound of Pig, so you get the idea. The cover illustration is by Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956), a British self-taught artist who made automatic drawings and turned entire alphabets into diagrams called sigils, or “monograms of thought”, says Wikipedia. Fulgur Limited publisher has a lot of info on Spare, including a music page called ‘This and That’.

01 Reckless – side 1 (14:15)
02 Reckless – side 2 (14:15)

Total time 28:30

-continuo
http://continuo.wordpress.com/

from Culture Monster, the LA Times blog:

Who is parodying Jeffrey Deitch on Twitter?
August 16, 2010 | 12:25 pm

Someone on Twitter doesn't like Jeffrey Deitch, and the person has channeled his or her feelings into parody.

Last week, a Twitter account named @FakeDeitch started sending out messages that appear to mimic Deitch, the former gallery owner who recently became the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

The tweets include remarks directed toward MOCA staff, Eli Broad and Times art critic Christopher Knight...

As of Monday morning, @FakeDeitch had sent out 44 tweets and amassed a following of 119 Twitter users -- all in less than one week.

It's not known who is behind the @FakeDeitch account on Twitter. An attempt to get the user to reveal his or her identity has so far gone unanswered. A spokesperson for MOCA said that the museum has no connection with the Twitter account.

text: Whitney Museum press release

NEW YORK, August 6, 2010. An artist who defies classification, Paul Thek (1933–1988), the sculptor, painter, and creator of radical installations who was hailed for his work in the 1960s and early 70s, then nearly eclipsed within his own short lifetime, is the subject of an upcoming retrospective co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art. Paul Thek: Diver, A Retrospective, the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the work of the legendary American artist, debuts in the Whitney’s fourth-floor Emily Fisher Landau Galleries, from October 21, 2010 to January 9, 2011; it travels to Carnegie Museum of Art, from February 5 to May 1, 2011, and then to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, from May 22 to September 4, 2011.

James Kalm was given full access to record this walk through of Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, and wishes to thank the Brooklyn Museum of Art for the privilege. It's been nearly a quarter century since Andy's death, but his visage within the art world has never been more prominent. As one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century, he's been credited with everything from the founding of Pop Art to social networking to developing self promotion to the highest of art forms. This massive show is loaded with documentary artifacts and presents many never before seen works from Warhol's late "abstract" series and his collaborative works with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francisco Clemente. The exhibition was organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Scientists found this sperm whale 77 miles south of the Deepwater Horizon spill site off the Gulf Coast.

August 4, 2010. As BP and the US Government insist that the oil spill is now under control, perhaps what has really been "controlled" is public access to millions upon millions of corpses of innocent animals - birds, fish, whales - as part of an insidious cover up.

Excerpted from Karl Burkart's blog in Mother Nature Network:

Firsthand accounts and leaked photos of a secret BP processing facility - possibly for dead animals - point to a massive cover up in the Gulf. An exclusive report.

Dead Turtle remains, Ship Island, Mississippi

Sunday, July 18, 2010. Having attended Pablo Helguera's performance at Smack Mellon yesterday - The Art World Home Companion - I wanted to include something that encapsulated his humorous, ironic world view. Hence this Artoon. More of them can be found here.

As to the Home Companion, it is, in the words of its creator,

a radio program originally conceived for Condensations of the Social, an exhibition at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, curated by Sara Reisman in June-July of 2010. The project pays tribute to Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, adapting the concept for the contemporary art community. The “Estheticist” segment of the program invites public participation and offers a counseling and answering of art-related questions from listeners, in the spirit of Randy Cohen’s New York Times column “the Ethicist”.

Lil Picard and Counterculture New York
Grey Art Gallery, NYU
April 20 - July 10, 2010

Like gaseous bubbles through the stagnant green waters over tar pits, forgotten artists from the past occasionally exhibit in New York. These exhibitions can often burst with noxious fumes of archival decomposition. Of course the art works of the dead are mangled and mishandled. Their messages – or for those you don't like that phrase, the living force of their life's work – is always and already misconstrued.

This was the powerful sense I had upon visiting the exhibition “Lil Picard and Counterculture New York” at the NYU Grey Gallery. I knew Lil Picard (1900-1994) first as a curious European antique – one of the grande dames of the Fluxus circle when I was a babe in the woods of NYC. Much later, I read her writing for the East Village Other, where she was an impassioned partisan of the anti-war avant garde of the 1960s. This show filled that picture in some by showing that Lil Picard also was part of this group. She wrote as a critic, for money (in German) and for love (in the EVO), but she was also an artist. That “also” got her slapped as a Sunday painter by the professionalized U.S. avant-garde.