Willoughby Sharp, Inside-Out, at 112 Greene Street, 1974

White Columns, the venerable downtown New York alternative arts space, celebrates its fortieth birthday this year. A retrospective exhibition, organized by Matthew Higgs and Amie Scally, the current WC director and curator, provides a necessary historical overview of its various SoHo and West Village addresses, and of the hundreds of projects and thousands of artists that have passed through its doors. From the Archives: 40 Years/40 Projects continues through February 28, 2009.

Forty years, one show from each year, is a good structure. Like any retrospective, there is a high nostalgia quotient for those who viewed the particular exhibitions when they were first mounted at 112 Greene, 325 Spring, the two Christopher Street locations or the current West 13th Street address of White Columns.

The show is decidedly archival and historical. There is some actual work - by Frank Majore, Lutz Bacher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cheryl Donegan, John Stezaker, Kathe Burkhart, Lovett/Codagnone - but mostly we find documentation of the events: press releases, invitation cards, exhibition checklists, installation photography, typed artists' statements and letters, posters, catalogs, brochures, slides, videos, photos from the openings, a short grainy film, clippings of reviews from various magazines and newspapers (some no longer being published - another lesson in ephemerality).

Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday Jan. 28, 2009 06:56 EST

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/28/prosecutions/index.htm...

Matteo Pasquinelli

http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Beyond-the-Ruins-of-the-Creative-
City.pdf

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at the
end of something - of modernism, of the American dream, of the
industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was
all around us in the ruins of the cities... Urban ruins were the

The recent specter of the Great Depression and the media centrality of the American auto industry make Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals useful for the current debate on market (de)regulation, auto unions, and the economic recession. As in the early 1930s, Detroit and the American auto industry are once again at the forefront of national news.

Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset at Victoria Miro Gallery, London “TOO LATE” exhibition.

A little too late

Only over 18s allowed in says the silver sign on the door. I was hoping that no-one was going to ask for some ID once I entered because I had left my passport at home, and have no alternative form of official ID that proves my age and indeed, who I am. I wasn’t exactly aware of what I was going to be seeing at this exhibition. I knew that it was supposedly a gallery.

Saturday morning, December 6, 2008. Were I in Miami now for Art Basel week, I would be enjoying the annual brunch at the Sagamore Hotel hosted by Cricket and Marty Taplin. I would be eating a crepe or two, sipping a mimosa, lounging poolside, greeting friends, perhaps getting a foot massage. I would go to the beach to view Olaf Breuning's oversize sand sculpture of a bikini babe with a Paul Klee face. I would certainly attend the book signing, in the lobby, of a new 350 page volume on the collection of Marty Margulies. I would bask outdoors in 75 degree sunshine, not look out my window at a semi-overcast 34 Fahrenheit.

But I am not in Miami. Not this year. I am in NYC and getting all my news second hand, through the internet. Still, I already managed to post on ABMB topics five times this week. Apparently, when not encumbered with actually having to attend the event, when sitting in front of my computer nursing a torn tendon in my ankle, when sorting through the coverage of others, I can write much more. Ironic? You can reference the results below on this site.

This will be my sixth (and hopefully last) text, and it will again respond or add to articles on other sites. Because yesterday evening, both Artnet and Artforum.com posted their first major pieces on ABMB by their respective editors, Walter Robinson and David Velasco (who has risen to the Artforum.com helm now that Brian Sholis has left for more esoteric pursuits). Two very different gentlemen. One gay, one not. One young, one not so young. One thin, one not so thin. One goes to parties and takes pictures of (seemingly hundreds of) people. The other confines himself to the Convention Center (at least in this piece) and typically snaps the artwork. One does basic "just the facts, ma'am" reportage, the other flirts with fabulosity. Yet they are remarkably consistent on one point: that things have not changed (worsened) all that much this year. The titles say it all: "Fair Enough" and "Crisis, What Crisis?"

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, New York
15 November - 23 December 2008

I enjoyed Jerry Saltz's review of the show in New York Magazine, but added the following comment:

When I saw the show, my first thought was that Cindy Sherman was being remarkably candid in depicting her female collectors. There they all are, up on the walls of Metro, the museum trustee doyennes, oil baronesses, superannuated cowgirls, Upper East Side plastic surgery queens, sexagenarian countesses and aging Foundation goddesses who have acquired Sherman photographs over the years. Or there they all are, caricatures of what she feels we think they look like. It's an homage of sorts, a jolt of recognition, bringing things full circle. John Waters seems to agree, and has been so quoted: “It’s great to see Cindy’s pictures in the same room with some of her best subjects.”

PIPILOTTI RIST
Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
November 19, 2008–February 2, 2009
Museum of Modern Art, Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor

Tuesday, November 18, 2008. Don't look now, but MoMA seems to be entering the Relational Aesthetics sweepstakes with their installation of Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters). It opens about a month after the Guggenheim's group foray into RA, theanyspacewhatever.

I missed today's press opening, but as Rist outlines the project in the attached video, she definitely envisions it as an interactive work. She wants people to "bring their bodies to the museum", to come into the huge atrium and feel "stretched". She hopes to "redirect" the institution "to the body of the visitors". Her images, loaded onto hard disk and edited into various sequences, are arranged into seven distinct programs, thrown by seven banks of video projectors, to create a seamless 25-foot-high enveloping projection that covers all four walls.

In the center of the atrium is a large round seating and lounge area, a sofa that encloses a central padded platform with additional throw pillows. Rist feels that it resembles an eye, the dark interior pupil surrounded by a larger white circle. She expects people to orient themselves in various directions and in various postures as they watch her video unfold, and cites rolling, singing and the practice of yoga asanas as particularly apt viewing responses.

The video is ten minutes long and non-narrative, condensed from an original fifty minute loop. The protagonists include one human, one pig, several earthworms and two snails, and the soundtrack - squishy, synthesized "body" sounds in addition to a more melodic portion - will be played by speakers arranged within the seating area, to better contain the work within the museum. Pour Your Body Out uses shots and sequences from a narrative feature film that Rist plans to release in 2009.

RothStauffenberg: Based on a True Story
Edition Patrick Frey
ISBN 978-3-905509-74-8