review of Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere
edited by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen
with contributions by Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Gordon Fazakerley, Jacqueline de Jong, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home and the editors
Nebula (Copenhagen) and Autonomedia (Brooklyn), 2011

Guggenheim Museum publishes the essay "Andy, Nam June and Me at the Zoo" by PAM co-founder Lee Wells as part of the YouTube Play Biennial of Creative Video. The piece discusses the relationship between online video, the Avant-Garde and 21st century video art.

I happily encourage everyone to go to the Take Blog and leave a comment. CLICK HERE TO ADD TO THE CONVERSATION

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/participate/youtube-play/the...

“Some people would never be considered, were it not that some excellent adversaries had mentioned them. There is no greater vengeance than oblivion, as it buries such people in the dust of their nothingness.” —Baltazar Gracian, as quoted in “Open Creation and Its Enemies,”Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960)

Lil Picard and Counterculture New York
Grey Art Gallery, NYU
April 20 - July 10, 2010

Like gaseous bubbles through the stagnant green waters over tar pits, forgotten artists from the past occasionally exhibit in New York. These exhibitions can often burst with noxious fumes of archival decomposition. Of course the art works of the dead are mangled and mishandled. Their messages – or for those you don't like that phrase, the living force of their life's work – is always and already misconstrued.

This was the powerful sense I had upon visiting the exhibition “Lil Picard and Counterculture New York” at the NYU Grey Gallery. I knew Lil Picard (1900-1994) first as a curious European antique – one of the grande dames of the Fluxus circle when I was a babe in the woods of NYC. Much later, I read her writing for the East Village Other, where she was an impassioned partisan of the anti-war avant garde of the 1960s. This show filled that picture in some by showing that Lil Picard also was part of this group. She wrote as a critic, for money (in German) and for love (in the EVO), but she was also an artist. That “also” got her slapped as a Sunday painter by the professionalized U.S. avant-garde.

Willoughby Sharp was a man of art, in the old fashioned sense Thomas Craven meant it. He was fully committed to every facet of a life spent waiting on the muse, wherever it would lead him, from the meanest squalor and confusion to the grandest scene of triumph.

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