Mel Kendrick: Markers
Mad. Sq. Art. 2009
a project of the Madison Square Park Conservancy
Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, New York
September 17 - December 31, 2009

September 18, 2009. Attended an opening yesterday evening for Mel Kendrick's Markers, five striated, black and white, monumental concrete sculptures that will sit in totemic splendor on the main lawn of Madison Square Park for the rest of this year.

They represent both the first public art project for Kendrick, and also incorporate a new materiality - cast concrete - for this formally innovative artist who has previously adhered to one of the more traditional practices, that of a slicer, carver, gouger and gluer of wood.

Miami Compendium: Dialog, Diaspora, Directions

by Onajide Shabaka

Event: September 12, 2009

Miami Compendium: Dialogue, Diaspora, Directions
The African Influence in Contemporary
Part 1 of a 3 part series

An investigation into the influence of the African diaspora on art and artists in Miami (South Florida) would seem a natural fit for a large population from the Caribbean and the southern United States. The organizer, Marvin Weeks, asked a number of people he felt qualified to speak on the topic, including several scholars, an anthropologist, several artists and a museum curator. We each brought our particular perspectives to the table, mostly speaking in broad sweeps and generalities.

The constant flowering of bohemia is not a construct of advertising, nor of the whims of a dozen infamous gallerists. It is the generational engine of youth culture, alive and well, striving at the border of the mainstream, throwing out its various statements while at the same time contributing to a community that has registered a similar creative echo for at least 25 years.

Bushwick is the locus of new creative energies, the same ones that are active in many other parts of Brooklyn, especially its neighboring wards of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. This year saw the emergence of its first official celebration, The Bushwick Biennial, brainchild of NURTUREart gallery director Benjamin Evans, in collaboration with Austin Thomas of Pocket Utopia, Chris Harding of English Kills, and Jill McDermid of Grace Exhibition Space.

By Brian Holmes at the posted on [iDC] listserv.

"How do you get capitalism into the psyche, and how do you get
the psyche into capital?" asks the philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux.
Drawing on key insights from Gramsci, Simmel and Benjamin -- and
radicalizing the work of film critic Christian Metz in the
process -- Jonathan Beller gives this quite astonishing reply:

Duke Riley
Those Who Are About to Die Salute You
Naumachia - Live Roman Naval Battle
Queens Museum of Art: Launch Pad Artist-in-Residence Program
Thursday, August 13th, 6 - 9:30 pm

August 15, 2009. This event promised to adhere to historical precedents from the Roman Empire, at least as filtered through the popular imagination of Hollywood films like Ben Hur: bread and circuses; pomp and revelry; the heady Coliseum drama of thumbs up and thumbs down; the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; reenacted maritime battles staged in a shallow reflecting pool; "death" by baguette or balloon sword, catapulted watermelon bomb and tomato projectile; an orgy of flotsam and jetsam; an outdoor food fight seasoned with the anarchic spirit of a college toga party. And the added promise that all of this estival mayhem was being done in the name of art.

[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.

Viral Art: consciousness in concurrency with mutation http://thefishpond.in/himanshudamle/2009/viral-art/
by Himanshu Damle

The War Against Preterrorism: The ‘Tarnac Nine’ and The Coming Insurrection
by Alberto Toscano

I. The Case*

QUESTION: “Who the fuck’s [artist] Chris Brown?”

The sun blazes down. The sea chops seductively against the walls of the sun-bleached facades of a city built on water. The sun sets and people get dressed up in designer clothes to venture on their networking spree.

Freephone Art Project offers the deported a chance to phone home

LATimes

4:00 PM, May 21, 2009

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/05/freephone-project...

A group of Master of Fine Arts students and recent graduates from UC San
Diego are busy organizing the Freephone Art Project, an unusual art