December 24, 2008. If you see this man crawling down your chimney tonight brandishing a butt plug, do not call the authorities. It just means you are enjoying a postmodern Christmas. As Sigmund Freud might have said: "Sometimes a chocolate Santa with butt plug is just a chocolate Santa with butt plug".

The New York Schools in Exile Occupation

12 18 08 NYC – Today two text messages directed me to go to the New School University for a press conference of occupying students at 10:30 a.m. – I had just time to gulp a cup of coffee and drag off across town. Lucky I’m staying in the Golden Apple this month. When I got there, a clutch of some 20 or 30 students were milling about in front of the New School looking nervous.

Sharpville is a website started earlier this year as "a meeting place for friends and lovers of Willoughby Sharp". It is open to participation by all: to view or add photos and videos, to participate in the discussion forum or chat room, to share tall tales and innumerable stories, to announce events. The photo above (from 1985) and the video below (from the 2007 restrospective exhibition at Mitchell Algus Gallery) are both taken from the site.

Willoughby passed away early in the morning on Wednesday, December 17, 2008, at St. Rose's Home on the Lower East Side, after a long battle with throat cancer. He is survived by his longtime partner Pamela Seymour Smith and by our fond collective memories.

WILLOUGHBY SHARP -- 1936 - 2008 -- R.I.P.

Matteo Pasquinelli

http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Beyond-the-Ruins-of-the-Creative-
City.pdf

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at the
end of something - of modernism, of the American dream, of the
industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was
all around us in the ruins of the cities... Urban ruins were the

The recent specter of the Great Depression and the media centrality of the American auto industry make Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals useful for the current debate on market (de)regulation, auto unions, and the economic recession. As in the early 1930s, Detroit and the American auto industry are once again at the forefront of national news.

One thing about the Vulture (Devouring Culture) section of the online edition of New York Magazine. When they write about art, it comes with a trendy hook, a fierce desire to stay just one step behind the young and creative. They generally hope to pin the tail on the zeitgeist.

This was again in evidence in their coverage of the recent opening of Without Walls, a group sculpture show at Museum 52, a gallery on Rivington Street, in which work by over 50 younger sculptors was exhibited, with the proviso "that the walls would not be used, and that the sculpture should be within the approximate dimensions of two foot high, one foot wide and one foot deep."

This led to a lot of small objects densely installed on the floor. And apparently it was a VERY crowded opening, with some of the work in seeming danger of being trampled by the celebratory hordes. So the New York Magazine piece naturally advanced a wild, Christmas party hook: "Artwork Goes Miraculously Un-Stepped-On at Perilous Group Show".

Three coincident events have caused me to re-examine Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go), a thirty-one minute black-and-white film by Fischli & Weiss, which follows an unmanned chain reaction of low tech events orchestrated in their Zurich studio in 1987. In its broad object humor, material pathos, fanciful appetite for destruction and commitment to an inexorable linearity of cause-and-effect, it is often compared to the "machines" of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg.

First Event. A video of the piece, owned by MoMA in New York, is installed as an introduction to the new Artist's Choice exhibition at MoMA by artist Vik Muniz, entitled Rebus. It is projected in a third floor hallway, just outside the main galleries, as a prefatory comment or demonstration of Muniz's organizing thesis, suggesting the associated "chain" of sculptures, design objects, photographs, drawings, editions, installations and paintings, drawn from MoMA's collection, which he has selected and arranged within.

While the aesthetic cause-and-effect implied by Muniz is neither as linear nor as determined as in The Way Things Go, he does create many instructive continuities and discontinuities, formal similarities and purposeful confusions between "high art" and design objects. These playful double and triple takes, engendered in the audience, inform the entire exhibition and also echo strategies of the meta- which have been the subject of Muniz's own work for years. Interestingly, another F&W piece, Things from the Room in the Back, a room-sized installation from 1999, is also featured in its own separate space.

This is a text in progress. It is an unfinished and incomplete version.

The Artist as Troublemaker
December 19, 2008 - March 28, 2009
Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd Street, New York
produced by Andreas Stadler, curated by Peter Pakesch

The Artist as Troublemaker just opened at the Austrian Cultural Forum, curated by Peter Pakesch, manager and artistic director at the Museum Joanneum in Graz. The exhibition is concerned with the "trouble" certain artists provoke in their aesthetic practice, particularly with regard to the very spaces and structures in which they exhibit, their relation to the aims and conventions of these spaces, to their parameters of exhibition, and to their self image and self definition. It centers on museums as "the focal point and testing ground of the encounter" between artist and institution, and features the work of seven artists and/or artist collectives: Günter Brus, Clegg & Guttmann, Olafur Eliasson, Martin Kippenberger, Dorit Margreiter, Diana Thater, Sofie Thorsen.

This is, therefore, another rest stop on the well traveled international superhighway of institutional critique, although with an expected (and some might say appropriate) Austrian inclination in its selection of artists and in the nationalities of its curator and venue. This dialectic of local vs. global is a delicate balance that initiatives such as the ACF or the Swiss Institute need to satisfy in fulfilling a parochial mandate while also meeting the wider demands of speaking in the various ecumenical tongues of the art world. It is a continuing issue, not fully resolved. But ultimately, for an exhibition of this sort to fail or succeed would be according to the rigor of its definitions and the intentions of its thesis, not just for the artists and work chosen but for an overarching examination of artist/institutional interplay that we might hope to find ratified throughout. If there is not a single thread concerning the sort of institution that is being questioned nor the sort of inquiries that are being posed by the artists through their practice, we might still hope to find a multivalent approach that sheds light upon a series of institutionally founded critiques.

As Mr. Pakesch has mentioned in conversation, the museum as institution is relatively young, a scant two centuries within the long, long history of art. It has come under closer scrutiny in recent years as museums attempt to redefine themselves in a new millennium, and as artists, some working in new media or with new theoretical and semiotic concerns, push against the existing walls of the institution. This pending process of reinvention is particularly relevant to Pakesch as chief officer of a large museum that showcases not only contemporary art but also craft, the applied arts, period pieces and anthropological concerns - folk art, costume, implements, Baroque sculpture and painting - as well as natural history exhibits in geology, zoology and botany. Founded by Archduke Johann in 1811 (hence its name), the Joanneum hearkens back to that (now seemingly innocent) moment when the sum total of human knowledge and endeavor was deemed capable of being encompassed and studied under one roof. As the explosion of knowledge, communication systems and productivity in the last two centuries makes this conceit feel a bit quaint, it seems the museum has already needed to confront and reformulate the limits of its original institutional imperative.

In the current exhibition we find a multi-generational approach. As with many recent efforts in the reformulation of contemporary Austrian cultural history, its "year zero" is the formative and famous examples of Viennese Actionismus from the mid 1960s. Günter Brus serves as the spiritual and practical "grandfather" of The Artist as Troublemaker, and is represented by a series of b/w photographs documenting his "actions" involving blood, semen, urine, excrement, entrails and the mortification of the flesh, an intentional and primal investigation of the limits of performance, the endurance of the body and the ability of the state to tolerate and regulate the provocative content and execution of his performances. Brus has summarized his aesthetic practice with the triumvirate of Malerei, Selbstbemalung, Selbstverstümmelung (painting, self-painting, self-mutilation).