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It's very strange to go into a 10 acre indoor space filled with living plants and full scale landscape designs. Here's a slide show in quicktime. It's one of those disjunctions that occurs with modern transportation and simulation. Here's a permalink to the NYTimes article. What's really bizarre is they talk about how the Men's Garden Club of Philadelphia created a simulation of an Irish village complete with a pub.

Book Review of Jean Baudrillard’s Pataphysics

Reviewed by Joseph Nechvatal
at The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS)
http://www.ubishops.ca/BaudrillardStudies/vol4_1/nechvatal.htm

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any bigger, it does. The art market and art fairs have gone into overdrive. The most interesting one to me is Art Basel Miami and all the other satellite art fairs that are presented in Miami at the same time. The two most prominent spin offs are SCOPE and NADA (new art dealers association). Here in New York there are three main art fairs in February, the Gramercy International, SCOPE and DIVA (digital international video art). As an artist, I’ve participated in several art fairs here and in Europe. They are fun in an odd way. The fun part is that there is minimal curating. Contemporary galleries are invited if their artist are of a certain style or the gallery is so prestigious that having it participate ensures that other galleries will pay their fees for their booths. After all, an art fair is a cash business. It’s also a sort of simulation (ala Jean Baudrillard) of the art world, a snap shot of the current market.

Painter Charline Von Heyl recently described Americans' disconnect between the personal and political this way: "While almost everything in the outer world feels messed-up, our inner lives aren't altogether messed-up." The current art world, awash in money and success, is shot through with a similar disconnect.

To some, the art market is a self-help movement, a private consumer vortex of dreams, a cash-addled image-addicted drug that makes consumers prowl art capitals for the next paradigm shift. This set seeks out art that looks like things they already know: anything resembling Warhol, Richter, Koons, Tuymans, Prince, and Wool could be good; any male painter in his thirties could be great. To others, the market is just a jolly popularity contest, or as New York Times reporter David Carr put it about having his own blog, it's like "a large yellow Labrador: friendly, fun, not all that bright, but constantly demanding your attention."

I attended this year’s College Art Association conference in New York last week. In a room mobbed with hundreds of women, an exciting panel took place as part of the Feminist Art program. It was organized by Suzanne Lacy with her guests Martha Rosler and Nato Thompson. (Lacy is the social sculptor who wrote about “new genre public art” ten years ago; Rosler is an internationally famous political artist; Thompson is the curator who organized the Interventionist show at Mass MOCA, and is soon to move to Creative Time in NYC.) Here are my raw notes with interpolations in brackets.

Ever since I first saw Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit in San Francisco in the late 1980s, I knew I had stumbled across a major form of alien intelligence: a heady mixture of manic inventiveness, political commitment, formal mastery and pop cultural sensibility, not encountered elsewhere on this planet. Though the lines can easily be drawn to collage master and fellow San Franciscan, Bruce Conner, Baldwin’s work is unmistakably Baldwin. Both are San Francisco anti-institutions of long standing. But Conner’s decades of imaginative leaps into the film cultural void seem classicist at this historical juncture by comparison. Baldwin’s work has a DIY down and dirty aesthetic, which never gives in. Baldwin’s love affair with celluloid is always tempered by the knowledge of its status as a disease-carrying organism—the central means by which the spectacle is disseminated. Nor does Baldwin fetishize film over video. It is the spectacle against which and in the midst of which he makes his stand. And while no one would ever confuse Baldwin’s work with that of Debord or Viénet, there are commonalities of interest in the anarchist work of demolition. The difference is that Baldwin has a genuine passion for pop culture. He never positions himself outside it, but always inside, punching his way out through the super-collision of the shots he slams into one another for the entire durational dance of each one of his films. Instead of giving up on montage because of its authoritarian past, he forces it to mutate under Xtreme pressure.

Notes on Paolo Virno in Buenos Aires

Maribel Casas-Cortés + Sebastián Cobarrubias (part of the Notas Rojas Translation Network)

http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1170243510

Federico Geller

Virno’s visit to Buenos Aires in September 2006, invited by Colectivo Situaciones and Tinta Limon press, brought new perspectives into a public space characterized by the lack of a radical critique to the state. This absence is due in part to the notable recovery, although incomplete, of the institutional legitimacy of the state in Argentina and neighboring countries.

Scott Rigby of Basekamp talked me into coming to Philadelphia for the ICA show “Locally Localized Gravity” (through March 25, 2007). He asked me to talk about histories of collective art. I arrived late on one of the museum’s “Whenever Wednesdays,” and ran into the place, noting only the large blur of a multi-colored structure reminiscent of the Ewok village from Star Wars on one side of the large main gallery, and scattered groups of people. One bunch seemed to be dancing, dozens of folks standing on a big black-painted raised stage. Another group was squatted in a circle inside a tent on pillows talking.

Review of Richard Foreman's new mixed-media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD!: Richard Foreman's new mixed-media play WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD! Photo @ Paula Court