Tom Sachs
Space Program: Mars
Park Avenue Armory
66th Street and Park Avenue
produced by the Armory and Creative Time
May 16 - June 17, 2012

May 16, 2012.

asstrOnOmnical affected autOmata, 2011

"Chelsea Walk: How to Succeed in Art Criticism Without Really Trying"
By John Perreault
May 8, 2012

from
http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2012/05/chelsea-walk-how-to-succeed-i...

full cover of Immersion Into Noise

Cum on Feel the Noize
by Jamie Allen

Published at continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58

Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise, Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1.

In a season marked by the Whitney Biennial, with art fairs and benefits for non-profit art organizations in great profusion, with the blandishments of high toned connoisseurship spiced with high octane commerce, with Spring in the air and Winter never really having arrived, with a powerful burgeoning thirst for the eternal verities, what could be better than an art show hung in a local watering hole, an exhibition that hopefully combines the hip with the possibility of a nip?

Such seems to be the rationale of local kneipe VON when they brought in artist/musician/polymath Emil Memon to organize a show during Armory Week. They were not alone in their attempts to end run the business and the busy-ness of art during this crowded moment. VON is down the street from Salon Zurcher, which provided a compact alternative to Armory hoopla by showcasing seven women artists from seven galleries. And VON is just a few blocks from both the Spring/Break "curator-driven art fair" in the Old School at Mott and Prince and also the second edition of BHQF's Brucennial, which gathered the work of 500 artists in a former theater at Bleecker and Sullivan.

Like all of these modest, downtown, indigenous and socially integrated projects, The Von Show happily avers that History is Made at Night. It goes to bat for the home team, but with an international roster of artists that provides an object lesson in "think globally, act locally."

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Omnipresence, Overdrive

Elisabeth Sussman at the media preview (speaking for herself and co-curator Jay Sanders): "We share a common problem. We know exactly what we want to do, and we want to do everything all the time.”

Everything is just about as hard to do as Nothing. Together they form a daunting dialectic, a binary of either total presence or total absence, total immersion or total negation, the one essentially necessitating its opposite. It seems a reasonable starting point for the alternate filling/emptying of a museum with images, sounds, light and action. With an emphasis on exploration and process, on film programs for each artist screened for one week, dance companies in residence for two weeks, itinerant musical and fashion performers, a polymorphous pursuit of recombinant activity, the 2012 Biennial exists on the heady continuum of Be Here Now/Be Here Never/Be Here Always. It's the Baba Ram Dass of exhibitions and would happily Catalog the Whole Earth if you let it. With artwork that generously bleeds into realms of the organic, the scientific and the encyclopedic, this Biennial is also the closest in recent memory to connote a contemporary Wunderkammer.

Joseph Nechvatal's Computer Virus Project
Balancing Art and Complexity: Joseph Nechvatal's Computer Virus Project
by Stéphane Sikora

Introduction

Still from Alexander Schellow's Untitled (Fragment)
Must be the Season of the Witch: a Review of the 11th Biennale of Contemporary Art at Lyon, France: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

review of Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen
with contributions by Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Gordon Fazakerley, Jacqueline de Jong, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home and the editors
Nebula (Copenhagen) and Autonomedia (Brooklyn), 2011

A sprawling exhibition now at Museo Reina Sofia (through October 3, 2011; then traveling), “Magnetized Space” looks at the work of the junior partner of the Brazilian Grupo Frente. Pape was a co-founder of that 1954 initiative with the better known Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.

Towards an Immersive Intelligence

A review of Joseph Nechvatal's "Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality 1993-2006" Edgewise, New York, 2009, 93pp.

There was once this cave full of your most beautiful dreams

by Erik Empson

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