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.

Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s Diagram from the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Cubism and Modern Art, 1936.

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Is knowledge of art history passé? Not if you want to be an artist. Here's why, from my latest Brooklyn Dispatch from the July/August issue of the Brooklyn Rail:

Anyone who knows me, or who might have followed my ramblings over the last several years now, would be aware that I have a great interest in the history of New York’s art community. This fascination started gradually (I’m a slow learner), when it dawned on me that to understand the mystery of art, you had to know the history of art. After 30 years on the scene, it’s obvious that despite what I’d been taught in art school—that it all depends on talent, dedication, and discipline—there are other factors that play important roles in deciding, who succeeds or fails in the art world. Chief among these are the relationships and connections among artists, galleries, critics, curators, collectors, and institutions, things as simple as where you live, who your friends are, where you went to school, or where you hang out. To get the big picture, one must be able to view these associations over a broad timeline. What might appear as chance happenings today may actually be the results of decisions or actions that took place in the 1950s, the 1980s, or last year. A thorough grasp of art history and its ancillary events is required, because you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

An internet meme in its infancy? Or just slapdash emo zingers and retro 90s graphic animation conjoined in an unlikely union?

as per numerous Facebook postings:

A confederation of activists have been organizing what they call Protest BP Day II. This July 10, people will be gathering at locations worldwide to protest the past environmental record of British Petroleum (particularly regarding the ongoing oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon site into the Gulf of Mexico) and to call for an end to offshore oil drilling in the future.

Saturday, July 10, 2010
5:00pm - 7:00pm

Washington Plaza @ S. 4th St. and Roebling St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

James Kalm, like the whole city, is sweltering in summer heat, and it seems local curators are trying to lower the temperatures in galleries by presenting a couple of exhibitions showing cool abstraction. "Le Tableau" curated by Joe Fyfe at Cheim & Read is a pairing of classic postwar abstract styles that contrasts American and French examples by some of the most influential artists of the last fifty years. "Shape Language" deals with current abstraction, and the vocabulary of forms used. Several works harken back to a previous generation's pioneers of shaped abstraction like Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella. Includes a brief interview with Joe Fyfe.

Monday, July 12, 2010
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Home of Henry Buhl
SoHo, NYC
Tickets: $100

A private Cocktail Party & Art Salon
At the Home of Philanthropist Henry Buhl in SoHo
Benefiting the HomeBase Project and announcing the 18 international artists selected to participate in HomeBase V Berlin/NY

Co-hosted by former Whitney Museum of American Art director David A. Ross, actress, filmmaker and Homebase IV Director Adi Ezroni, and art patron Tam St. Armand

To purchase tickets:

www.homebaseberlin.com/hb-benefit.html

Here is the Upright Citizens Brigade's oil-spill spoof, in which BP reacts ineptly to a spilled cup of coffee.

James Kalm appreciates the efforts of the Whitney Museum and celebrity curator Robert Gober and is thrilled to bring viewers this glimpse of Charles Burchfield's "Heat Waves in a Swamp". Although classified as an "American Scene" painter during the 1930s, Burchfield was a true visionary artist. Using the humble medium of watercolor, his interpretations of the landscape and rustic urban settings, vibrate with a hallucinatory exuberance. Whether forest, field or street Burchfield's vision was open to cosmic harmonies that could overwhelm with their intensity or sometimes disturb with disquieting sinister qualities. Includes extended statements on the artist by curator Robert Gober.

Rammellzee

Rammellzee, with his wack verbosity, is under appreciated in my opinion as a theorist. I have put most of his theory writings together here to encourage their study.
-Joseph Nechvatal
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June 30, 2010. News has reached us from various Twitter accounts and other sources on the passing yesterday of legendary graffiti artist and hip-hop musician Rammellzee.

from Gawker:

Rammellzee, the pioneering hip hop artist and Wild Style star whose ten-minute-plus 1983 record Beat Bop is still fresher than just about anything on the radio, has apparently died.

His death was first announced on the Twitter page of Fab Five Freddy, who would know; and early this morning, a post went up on Rammellzee's Myspace page reading in part "...in mourning..as i type this, i'm numb from overwhelming sadness.....The Equation The Ramm:Ell:Zee has left his physical....left his pain." Details are unclear.