The Transborder Immigrant Tool is Intriguing - as are dead Popes ;-)

Ricardo Dominguez

PANKABESTIA: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima
Anonymous Gallery @ Collective Hardware
169 Bowery (off Delancey), New York
November 20, 2009 - January 1, 2010
curated by Spy Emerson

“Pankabestia: Punk Beasts of the Swimming Cities of Serenissima” is an exhibition about the crew members, the individual artists that supported Swoon’s “Swimming Cities” projects, and it is about my own personal experience as a crew member of the “Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea” and the “Swimming Cities of Serenissima.”

Both daunting projects were based on Swoon’s giant multimedia floating sculptures, beautiful rafts built from trash. As a group, we made these great, impossible situations happen.

James Kalm sneaks into the Gagosian Gallery on the “down-low” to take a brisk tour of this recent group of paintings “Horizontal Tracking Shots” by Mike Kelley. Kelley uses the theatrical device of the “set” or “backdrop” as a coloristic ground on which to place his eccentric imagist paintings. These large planes of uninflected designer colors place the applied paintings into a context with high formalism, creating a complex dialog between the abstract and the eccentric.

December 17, 2009. It might be a sign of the season, but I just heard about the Krampus, a demonic figure engineered to coerce obedience and contrition. Scary stuff, although no worse than some of the art commissars, press agents and museum functionaries I've encountered out there. But please do not fear. They are just dressed up bogeymen. They might shake their chains and make grim noises, but they're only as fierce as you let them be, and they will all eventually pass on.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Press conference: 1pm CET, Frederiksholms Kanal 4, Copenhagen
Contact: Margaret Matembe, margaret.matembe@enviro-canada.ca, +45-23960186
Coverage: Click here, or click throughout press release for specific links
Videos:
Canadian announcement (hi-res download)
Ugandan response (hi-res download)

Derrida's remarks center on cinema, popular journalism and academia, but without much of a stretch they can be applied to the "manipulative, utilitarian" nature of the "Internets", to the expedient assumption that a "readymade discourse" exists, that online "content" can somehow be produced at the snap of a finger. I could "elaborate" on this point, just not right now.