Andrew Castrucci is laying out artworks and artifacts at the Bullet Space. Bullet Space is an art gallery in a squat. The place recently exhibited decades' worth of work by the tin can cutting recycling artist Rolando Polliti. His constructions ornament the fence of the Plaza Cultural garden on 9th Street and Avenue C, original site of the CHARAS agitations of the 1970s.

This assemblage of artworks collected by Andrew over the years reveals something about this period of Lower East Side history, and the people who squatted these buildings. The context of the early works of the ‘80s and ‘90s is the squatter struggle.

Oh yeah? Ha ha ha ha ha!

[Earlier this year I saw a great show by Paul Thek, a deceased New York artist who worked most spectacularly in Europe. The show will never come here, of course, since they loved him there. I wrote it up, and an editor sat on it until it was dead. I’ve been urged to post the notice here, so here you go. The catalogue is due out or is out from MIT Press.]

Madrid’s Reina Sophia is the last leg of a touring retrospective of Paul Thek. Notorious for his 1968 “Dead Hippie” sculpture, Thek, a New Yorker who died in 1988, is underknown. This show is tremendous, revelatory. Much of what has happened in the last 20 years he may be said to have anticipated. (While I cannot easily read the catalogues in Spanish and German – it’s coming out in English in May, I gather from the illustrations that the authors are saying that.) Most of this work is in European collections, so this most singular and syncretic of American artists may not soon be well seen in the United States.

[Caveat lector – reporter is largely ignorant of recent European history; comments welcome.]

Willoughby Sharp was a man of art, in the old fashioned sense Thomas Craven meant it. He was fully committed to every facet of a life spent waiting on the muse, wherever it would lead him, from the meanest squalor and confusion to the grandest scene of triumph.

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.

rev billy

summer exhibition at Brooke Alexander Gallery
http://www.baeditions.com/Installation%20Views/Colab%20Redux/Colab%20Red...

Colab (officially Collaborative Projects, Inc., founded 1977) was one in a string of New York City artists’ groups that started most strongly in the 1960s. Artists’ groups have had an escalating impact on the conventional art world. Today a number have roughly equal status with prominent individuals.

[Note of disclosure: I was a member of Colab, and have published on the group’s activities.]

Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar; public domain)

Upon my return from Miami Basel, I have a bad morning dream, a common one for art historians. I am preparing to participate in a panel discussion... the chair, a friendly man I know slightly (who was he?), approaches me as everyone readies: "Where are your slides?" he asks. I have none. And no notes. I don't even know the topic. "I thought this was an informal colloquium kind of thing," I reply.