This just in from Liza Bear:

Informed Man 1986 82x116"

Joseph Nechvatal February 26th, 2012 interview by Taney Roniger

First published on Taney Roniger's blog http://www.concatenationsblog.org/2012/03/interview-with-joseph-nechvata...

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."

Thomas Lee Murrin (February 8, 1939 - March 12, 2012)

Tom Murrin, 2008. Photo by Joseph O. Holmes

It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of performance artist and writer Thomas Lee Murrin who, surrounded by his wife Patricia and friends, died on March 12, 2012 of complications from cancer. He was 73.

Tom Murrin created non-traditional theater as both the Alien Comic and then later as Jack Bump and tirelessly supported generations of younger artists. Tom will be missed not only by his family and friends, but also by the greater New York performance community who celebrates Tom’s humorous, heartfelt artistry and shares his passion for non-traditional theater created freely and without restrictions.

*** R.I.P. Tom Murrin 1939 - 2012 ***

PERFORMANCE SPACE 122'S SPRING 2012 GALA

St. Ann's Warehouse
38 Water St., DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY

6 PM Cocktails & hors d'oeuvres with DJ JOHNNY DYNELL
7:30 PM Performance
9PM Dessert & silent auction
10:30 PM Afterparty at SUPERFINE

Sponsorships from $25,000 - $1,500
Single tickets from $350

Click here to purchase tickets.

For more information or assistance
http://www.ps122.org/performances/spring_gala_2012.html
Lori Vroegindewey
lori@ps122.org
212.477.5829 ext. 302

Lego space shuttle takes off in Lauda-Königshofen and reaches an altitude of 32 kilometers. A project by 18 year old Rumanian student Raul Oaida.

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.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Ersatz Whitney 2012 website now online, announcing the Biennial's break with corporate sponsors Sotheby's and Deutsche Bank.

http://whitney2012.org/

The 2012 Whitney Biennial held a well attended media preview today and also allowed Sotheby's auction house, one of the exhibition's major corporate sponsors, to host a private preview reception this evening.

Also today, a hoax website appeared online, http://whitney2012.org/, seemingly a direct intervention by art hacktivists, possibly the Yes Men or Arts and Labor, a “working group” of Occupy Wall Street.

It announces that the Biennial has broken ties with both Sotheby's and another corporate sponsor, Deutsche Bank, and returned their money. Reasons cited are the lockout of unionized art handlers and secondary market speculation by Sotheby's, and mortgage fraud by Deutsche Bank.