This just in from Liza Bear:

In a season marked by the Whitney Biennial, with art fairs and benefits for non-profit art organizations in great profusion, with the blandishments of high toned connoisseurship spiced with high octane commerce, with Spring in the air and Winter never really having arrived, with a powerful burgeoning thirst for the eternal verities, what could be better than an art show hung in a local watering hole, an exhibition that hopefully combines the hip with the possibility of a nip?

Such seems to be the rationale of local kneipe VON when they brought in artist/musician/polymath Emil Memon to organize a show during Armory Week. They were not alone in their attempts to end run the business and the busy-ness of art during this crowded moment. VON is down the street from Salon Zurcher, which provided a compact alternative to Armory hoopla by showcasing seven women artists from seven galleries. And VON is just a few blocks from both the Spring/Break "curator-driven art fair" in the Old School at Mott and Prince and also the second edition of BHQF's Brucennial, which gathered the work of 500 artists in a former theater at Bleecker and Sullivan.

Like all of these modest, downtown, indigenous and socially integrated projects, The Von Show happily avers that History is Made at Night. It goes to bat for the home team, but with an international roster of artists that provides an object lesson in "think globally, act locally."

Lego space shuttle takes off in Lauda-Königshofen and reaches an altitude of 32 kilometers. A project by 18 year old Rumanian student Raul Oaida.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Omnipresence, Overdrive

Elisabeth Sussman at the media preview (speaking for herself and co-curator Jay Sanders): "We share a common problem. We know exactly what we want to do, and we want to do everything all the time.”

Everything is just about as hard to do as Nothing. Together they form a daunting dialectic, a binary of either total presence or total absence, total immersion or total negation, the one essentially necessitating its opposite. It seems a reasonable starting point for the alternate filling/emptying of a museum with images, sounds, light and action. With an emphasis on exploration and process, on film programs for each artist screened for one week, dance companies in residence for two weeks, itinerant musical and fashion performers, a polymorphous pursuit of recombinant activity, the 2012 Biennial exists on the heady continuum of Be Here Now/Be Here Never/Be Here Always. It's the Baba Ram Dass of exhibitions and would happily Catalog the Whole Earth if you let it. With artwork that generously bleeds into realms of the organic, the scientific and the encyclopedic, this Biennial is also the closest in recent memory to connote a contemporary Wunderkammer.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Ersatz Whitney 2012 website now online, announcing the Biennial's break with corporate sponsors Sotheby's and Deutsche Bank.

http://whitney2012.org/

The 2012 Whitney Biennial held a well attended media preview today and also allowed Sotheby's auction house, one of the exhibition's major corporate sponsors, to host a private preview reception this evening.

Also today, a hoax website appeared online, http://whitney2012.org/, seemingly a direct intervention by art hacktivists, possibly the Yes Men or Arts and Labor, a “working group” of Occupy Wall Street.

It announces that the Biennial has broken ties with both Sotheby's and another corporate sponsor, Deutsche Bank, and returned their money. Reasons cited are the lockout of unionized art handlers and secondary market speculation by Sotheby's, and mortgage fraud by Deutsche Bank.

Feb. 27, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MASSIVE LEAK REVEALS CRIMINALITY, PARANOIA AMONG CORPORATE TITANS
Dow pays "strategic intelligence" firm to spy on Yes Men and grassroots activists. Takeaway: movement is on the right track!

WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs (see below), also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists. (Bhopal activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, that led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.)

Many of the Bhopal-related emails, addressed from Stratfor to Dow and Union Carbide public relations directors, reveal concern that, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the Bhopal issue might be expanded into an effective systemic critique of corporate rule, and speculate at length about why this hasn't yet happened—providing a fascinating window onto what at least some corporate types fear most from activists.

Alterazioni Video presents "The New Cinema Event"

Sunday February 26, 2012
3:00–6:00 PM
THE SHACK
inside
The MoMA PS1 Performance Dome

Featuring international guests from around the world,
video screenings, live music, tequila boom boom.

Interview conducted by Michel Bauwens and Neal Gorenflo