Simon Starling
Inventar-Nr. 8573 (Man Ray), 4m - 400nm, 2006
(detail)
80 6x7cm black and white transparencies, 2x Gotschmann Slide Projectors, Kodak Dissolve Control Unit, CD and Player
Duration 8mins.

Simon Starling at Casey Kaplan, Chelsea, NYC, until March 24.

I first saw the steamboat slide show on v2v. Thanks, v2v makers!
Go and see it at the gallery anyway if you can, it's a marveleous show.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, it does. The art market and art fairs have gone into overdrive. The most interesting one to me is Art Basel Miami and all the other satellite art fairs that are presented in Miami at the same time. The two most prominent spin offs are SCOPE and NADA (new art dealers association). Here in New York there are three main art fairs in February, the Gramercy International, SCOPE and DIVA (digital international video art). As an artist, I’ve participated in several art fairs here and in Europe. They are fun in an odd way. The fun part is that there is minimal curating. Contemporary galleries are invited if their artist are of a certain style or the gallery is so prestigious that having it participate ensures that other galleries will pay their fees for their booths. After all, an art fair is a cash business. It’s also a sort of simulation (ala Jean Baudrillard) of the art world, a snap shot of the current market.

Painter Charline Von Heyl recently described Americans' disconnect between the personal and political this way: "While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up, our inner lives aren't altogether messed-up." The current art world, awash in money and success, is shot through with a similar disconnect.

To some, the art market is a self-help movement, a private consumer vortex of dreams, a cash-addled image-addicted drug that makes consumers prowl art capitals for the next paradigm shift. This set seeks out art that looks like things they already know: anything resembling Warhol, Richter, Koons, Tuymans, Prince, and Wool could be good; any male painter in his thirties could be great. To others, the market is just a jolly popularity contest, or as New York Times reporter David Carr put it about having his own blog, it's like "a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention."

I attended this year’s College Art Association conference in New York last week. In a room mobbed with hundreds of women, an exciting panel took place as part of the Feminist Art program. It was organized by Suzanne Lacy with her guests Martha Rosler and Nato Thompson. (Lacy is the social sculptor who wrote about “new genre public art” ten years ago; Rosler is an internationally famous political artist; Thompson is the curator who organized the Interventionist show at Mass MOCA, and is soon to move to Creative Time in NYC.) Here are my raw notes with interpolations in brackets.

Ever since I first saw Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit in San Francisco in the late 1980s, I knew I had stumbled across a major form of alien intelligence: a heady mixture of manic inventiveness, political commitment, formal mastery and pop cultural sensibility, not encountered elsewhere on this planet. Though the lines can easily be drawn to collage master and fellow San Franciscan, Bruce Conner, Baldwin’s work is unmistakably Baldwin. Both are San Francisco anti-institutions of long standing. But Conner’s decades of imaginative leaps into the film cultural void seem classicist at this historical juncture by comparison. Baldwin’s work has a DIY down and dirty aesthetic, which never gives in. Baldwin’s love affair with celluloid is always tempered by the knowledge of its status as a disease-carrying organism—the central means by which the spectacle is disseminated. Nor does Baldwin fetishize film over video. It is the spectacle against which and in the midst of which he makes his stand. And while no one would ever confuse Baldwin’s work with that of Debord or Viénet, there are commonalities of interest in the anarchist work of demolition. The difference is that Baldwin has a genuine passion for pop culture. He never positions himself outside it, but always inside, punching his way out through the super-collision of the shots he slams into one another for the entire durational dance of each one of his films. Instead of giving up on montage because of its authoritarian past, he forces it to mutate under Xtreme pressure.

THE BFA FINE ARTS AND ART HISTORY
DEPARTMENTS AT SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS (SVA)
PRESENT “DIGITAL DIVING: A CUT AND PASTE
UPDATE”—A PANEL DISCUSSION

Tuesday, February 27, 7pm
School of Visual Arts
209 East 23 Street
3rd-floor Amphitheater
Free and open to the public

#[:rebloging:]

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_[night.m]Aires of[rom] the GeoGraphs_
06:18am 17/02/2007
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1._Tha Dinna Partaye_
trapped.inna.blood.red.haughtiness. walls stretched.with.gales.of.[ova]blown.s[creech(ia)]tatus.laugh_barkin. glasses.shift_tinkling+s[ocial_front]pillage. wimmen.shot[hru].in.foul.fashionestas+whipped.peroxide.frenzies

love_potionJoin our invisible network of tactical gardeners by preparing your own love_potion made from borage, an herb that reputedly drives away sorrow, uplifts the spirits and when shared with others nurtures compassion and peace. Follow the potion recipe, find out how to grow your own borage, download the glorious ninth sound and visuals (or make your own) and put together a love_potion DIY installation.