A five-minute video based on Port Huron Project 4: We Are Also Responsible, is currently showing on MTV’s giant high-definition video screen in Times Square on the East side of Broadway, between 44th and 45th Streets. The video plays at the top of the hour several times each day. Click here for the schedule. Thanks to CREATIVE TIME for setting this up!

I met the Helsinki-based artist couple Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in early June 2008, during the opening of Arctic Hysteria at P.S. 1, an exhibition of sixteen artists (or artist groups) from Finland. It remains on view through September 15.

I was overwhelmed by Mika Ronkainen's documentary of the Screaming Men's Chorus, a huge screen placed at the entrance to the show with a video projection of exactly what was advertised (men in black trekking over a glacier and screaming), and entranced by the flying saucer-like Futuro Lounge, a streamlined homage to utopian architect Matti Suuronen. But of all the Hysteria, it is the Kalleinen's ongoing project, their organizing of Complaints Choirs throughout the world, that has inspired my most lasting affection and ongoing participation.

Although I knew he was also a painter, the Manny Farber I first encountered in back issues of Film Culture and in collected writings like Negative Space (1971) was a brilliant, spirited, clear-eyed, iconoclastic, no-nonsense film critic. Essays like "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962) were lean, mean, superbly on target and amazingly prescient, celebrating B-films and maverick, marginal auteurs long before they became de rigueur among cineastes. He was an early champion of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton and Don Siegel, and penned some of the first American appreciations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman and other 70s European avantgardists.

What does it mean for the Tate to endorse Street Art and the Street for art?

Street Art has, for as long as it has existed, been frowned upon by institutions, the critics disdain it's integrity and art professors grit their teeth at the students who go to art school and practice street art for their work.

The only place street art has had a dominant place in academia is its relation to the social world in humanities; The crime relevance to society and how the media has taken this sub-culture and taken its soul for advertising purposes.

This media trend also relates and somewhat explains the art worlds new acceptance with this art form.

We generally try to avoid stepping in it, and perhaps even talking about it, but some shit is so good it cannot be passed over. It demands our attention, refusing to be ignored. According to a recent news item in Artforum.com, an immense inflatable sculpture by American artist Paul McCarthy, as big as the side of a barn and installed in an outdoor summer exhibition at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, was recently torn from its moorings during a violent storm. Strong winds propelled it over 600 feet, forcing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it came to rest in the front yard of a nearby orphanage.

And here's where fact, once again, proves stranger than fiction. The McCarthy piece, entitled Complex Shit, is fashioned to look like a huge pile of doggie doo. To borrow from the vernacular, you just can't make shit like this up.

This past weekend and the weekend before that the #2 Uptown subway turned into the #5 Downtown at Bowling Green. While the logic of this escaped me I endeavored to be a good old-fashioned New Yorker, didn't question, followed the signs and found myself headed back to Brooklyn instead of my job at Herald Square making me late. The second time it happened I duped a then very irate man into following me onto the #4 and buried my face in my crossword puzzle until I could escape his wrath. Hey, man, I'm late for work, too! And my job is more important than your job ... Isn't it obvious from my black suit? Didn't you ever watch the X Files?

By Eduardo Navas

gallery@calit2
http://gallery.calit2.net
Atkinson Hall
University of California, San Diego

August 6 to October 3, 2008
Closing Reception: October 2 at 6 to 8 PM