Location: Federal Hall National Memorial
26 Wall Street, New York City

Date: April 5, 2008

Time: 2:00–5:00 PM

SOAPBOX (n): a post upon which people stand and give their opinions on a topic, sometimes in quite emphatic terms.

Soapbox Event is a participatory performance created by Pia Lindman. Participants are given one soapbox each, which entitles them to one minute of free speech. They may form coalitions and stack their boxes together to obtain greater spatial presence and talk time. The spokesperson of a coalition may speak for as many minutes as there are stacked boxes. As the event evolves, boxes begin to express changing rhetorical configurations in sculptural forms.

“le vide/le pleine” In Torino (Italy), in Via XX Settembre 2M, an appointment with contemporary art

Title of the artshow: “le vide/le pleine”
Artists : Collettivo Ubique (Franco Ariaudo, Eliana D. Langiu, Domenico Olivero and Oscar Racca)
Opening: on Monday April 28 2008, from 6 pm at the Cellar of Bi-loft, Via XX Settembre 2M Torino (Italy)

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was founded in 1966 by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, to provide artists with access to new technology and to promote collaborations between artists and engineers.

Were the Whitney Biennial an entry on the police blotter of art history, of the Who, What, When, Why, “Just the Facts, Ma’am” variety, then this short text concerns its Where. Unlike other New York museums, which have recently, for better or worse, completed dramatic new building projects (MoMA’s Tanaguchi temple and the New Museum’s grey ghost on the Bowery) or made major efforts in franchising their brand overseas (look no further than the Mc Guggenheims) the Whitney has generally been stymied in its expansion plans.

Virtual Sit-In Against Nano/Bio War Profiteers!
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///please fwd and spread the action!///

This Nano-Virtual-Sit-In is being performed on the 5th anniversary of
the war on Iraq. We have chosen biotech and nanotech corporations and
organizations as our targets, because their science is driven by the war
and drives the war.

Forwarding along from our good friends at Artforum.

MAYOR BANS DEATH

Death is ... unpopular in the village of Pau, France. According to Agence France-Presse, the mayor of Pau has taken a rather different approach: issuing a decree that bans residents from dying in the village unless they have reserved a spot in the cemetery. "It is forbidden for any person not having a plot in the cemetery […] to die on the territory of the village," said mayor Gérard Lalanne, adding that there would be a "severe punishment" for offenders. "The first dead person to come along, I'll send him to the state's representative," he said.

According to AFP, the extreme measure stems from a shortage of space in the cemetery of the village, which has 260 residents. With his decree, Mayor Lalanne hopes to fight a legal ruling that prevents the current cemetery from being enlarged. A precedent was set in another French village, Cugnaux, where the cemetery was expanded only after that town's mayor also outlawed death.

Forwarding along from our good friends at Lumpen.org in Chicago.

Many of you may already be aware of the situation but for those who do not please read, pass and forward.

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An Iraqi born artist, now US citizen, Wafaa Bilal's ( http://wafaabilal.com ) work was shut down at the West Hall Art Department Gallery and will now be reopened tomorrow (March 11), but conservative public pressure threatens to close it once again.

With so little painting hung at the Whitney, it would have been a more radical gesture, and not really that much of a stretch, for the curators to have gone for broke and selected none at all. Examining what was finally chosen and how it is presented within the show might prove instructive, and not just on the changing status of painting in the 21st century, but also regarding the assertion and abdication of curatorial will.

In the current Biennial, painting seems to be handled with kid gloves, approached like a "viral" entity, quarantined from the primary form of the exhibition (installation), or else treated as installation art in its own right by being sequestered into individual, private rooms. Is this to protect other media from the "infection" of painting? or is it a belated effort to isolate and hopefully rekindle the creative spark of the medium, to counteract the "death of painting" that has been proclaimed so frequently over the last thirty years?

In preparation for, or perhaps in lieu of my own discussion of the show everyone loves to bash, here are selections from texts posted elsewhere: by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, by Holland Cotter in The New York Times, by Alexandra Peers and Carly Berwick in New York Magazine (we still await the voice of The Saltz), by David Cohen in The New York Sun, even selections from Artforum.com and Artnet.

They are randomly ordered and vehemently out of context. My original idea was to attribute each snippet, but it flows better without, and you can always look up the authors online.

Here then, for better or worse: The Great Whitney Biennial 2008 Re-Post. Feel free to add new items in Comments.