SanArt

Cancel all leave on 9th October 2009. It’s just over a week to ‘One Foot In The Grove‘ which sees last years standout event ‘Mutate Britain’ set up camp in London again. Heading West this time its taking over one of the original graffiti hotspots to be found in the UK – the point where the Portobello Road goes under the Westway. Mutate’s blog promises 12000 square feet of street art, sculpture and installations featuring: Joe Rush / Obey / Alex Wreckage / Fark FK / Dotmasters / Pete Dunne / Zeus / Snub / Cyclops / Sweet Toof / Best Ever / Part2ism / The Krah / Nick Walker / Teddy Baden / Dr D /Bleech / zadok / Giles Walker / Remi Rough / Bortusk Leer / Blam / Pure Evil / Milo / Andy Seize / Carrie Reichardt / Milk / Dora / Dep / Alex Fasko / Stickboy / Mr Insa / Mac1 / Miss Buggs / Strappa / Josephine / Mr Wim / Swarm / Misecellany / Joe Black / Auction Saboteur / Busk / Bonsai / Rabodiga / Probs.

Now that is a line up!

You can watch the second teaser video here:

And here’s a few bits of recent street work from some of the artists in the show:

Teddy Baden

Part2ism & Miscellany

Bortusk Leer

Mutate Britain – book them and they will come

Lawrence N. Shustak, William Mahin, Lette Eisenhauer, and Charles Simon Atop Giant “Mountain” Construction in The Courtyard, a Happening by Allan Kaprow, New York City, 1962, from the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [more]

Hauser & Wirth is creating three editions of Allan Kaprow’s Yard happening to celebrate the gallery’s arrival in the United States. At 32 East 69th Street — where Kaprow first installed the work, when Martha Jackson Gallery was housed at that address — they’ve teamed with William Pope.L, who has piled tires on the floor and recorded a monologue that drones from speakers around the space.

It’s an epic event, though it’s tame compared to some of Kaprow’s more baroque performances, such as Courtyard, which he staged in 1962 in Greenwich Village at a rundown hotel. Onlookers were provided with brooms to move debris about as a woman (swaying to rock and roll jams on a transistor radio) climbed a massive mountain, was photographed by two faux-paparazzi, and was then consumed by another mountain that descended from a neighboring building. Those, at least, are the details on which most people that claim to be there (or claim to have known people who were there) agree.

Performance — existing only for fleeting moments and surviving only in secondary forms (photographs, memories, recordings) — almost inevitably invites the creation of legends, mistakes, and fabrications. Looking into Courtyard, it’s amazing to see Susan Sontag, Hans Richter, and numerous art historians being unable to agree on one of the most rudimentary details of the event: where it happened.

First, Sontag in “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition”:

When the Happening is more purely spectacle, and the audience simply spectators, as in Allan Kaprow’s The Courtyard, presented in November, 1962, at the Renaissance House, the event is considerably less dense and compelling.

It was at the Renaissance house, she says. Dadaist Hans Richter, who must be considered the Henry Clay of the avant-garde for his longevity and sheer omnipresence in his field, was living in New York at the time and disagreed with Sontag:

The “Happening” I went to see took place in the enormous courtyard of a skyscraper, the Mills Hotel in the Village. This is the biggest “flophouse” in the world, twelve hundred little rooms for the poorest people, who still have to pay 50 cents a night.

Richter is sure it happened at the Mills Hotel. Art historian Jeff Kelly, meanwhile, shares a belief cited by quite a few people who study Kaprow, writing something completely different:

Fittingly, the final Happening of 1962, Courtyard, took place over Thanksgiving weekend in one of the inner courtyards of the Greenwich Hotel, at the time a transient hotel in Greenwich Village.

As performance art continues to enter the canon in the form of the Performa biennials in New York, MoMA’s new focus on collecting and showing work in the field (with all of the wonderfully tricky legal issues that entails), and the upcoming retrospective at P.S.1, it’s fun to remember just how intensely some of these works resist easy preservation, how — as time passes — our understanding of these is events is becoming foggier, more complicated, and more a product of our collective imaginations.

Banksy.co.uk has recently been updated with new work which has led to some frantic hunting around London to find several pieces not previously seen before. The KFC head piece (Islington) and the roller warden (Lewisham) are known to have disappeared already but the ‘Eat The Rich’ anarchist slogan reworking has been found alive and well in Deptford.

AOTS link: Banksy Eat The Rich

Shok1 has also been busy again – this time with a new piece in the Stockwell halls of fame. Loving this style seen earlier in the year at the Cans Tunnel, Alexandra Palace and on a rooftop in Shoreditch.

Shok1 – Stockwell

Shok1 – Stockwell Detail

Shok1 – up on the roof

Güllüo?lu, Vi?neli Baklava with Sour Cherry, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

• Nan Goldin slide show.
• Vasily Kandinsky slide show. [via Winkleman]
• Charlie Finch dislikes Dave Hickey. [via Two Coats]
• Roberta Smith visits Chelsea.
  
• Koons: Yacht decorator becomes collection curator. Wagner: suicide by banality.
• The Herzog film school returns. [via C-Monster]
• A contemporary art mecca in Brazil [via Greg.org]
• “Sotheby’s raised more at a single sale of rare wine in Hong Kong this summer than at all of its London wine auctions combined all year.” – Wall Street Journal
• Stalker, stripper, sleeper, spy.
  

Untitled (plate tectonics) is a sound installation consisting of a series of phonograph records which play the sounds of exhibition spaces in New York City. Visitors are encouraged to then play these recordings on multiple turntables in the exhibition space, creating a new composite environment from the overlay of room noise.

/ / / / /
Description by Carson Chan, co-director, PROGRAM Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations:

By installing excavated stones from New Jersey in a gallery, Robert Smithson, in the late 1960s, revealed the dialectic between abstract and actual locations. Sometimes in containers, sometimes piled, the stones in the gallery represented a far away location without resembling it. Something of New Jersey, Smithson maintained, was held in those rocks and their displacement resulted in the expansion of the original site, both physically and conceptually. The Site Non-Site dialectic, as Smithson called it, feels particularly familiar today as our daily lives are continually reshaped by place-defying technologies in communication, information and travel.

With Untitled (plate tectonics), Andy Graydon similarly explores the physical dimensions of location in contrast to its perception. After obtaining the ambient sounds of eleven “natural” art locations in New York – museums, fairs, galleries – Graydon cut the recordings onto unique acetate phonograph records, dubplates, that allow visitors to reshape PROGRAM’s gallery space with sound. Environment is used as a material. Replaying the sounds of these New York institutions as they intermix with the ambient sounds of PROGRAM, space is at once extended and collapsed. Dubplates, for the music industry, are used in mastering studios before the final master. They are meant for temporary use, they deteriorate over time. The sounds recorded on their surface begin to dissolve after about fifty plays.

/ / / / /
Artist’s statement:

What is a visitor to the Met doing when she views the Greek sculpture garden almost exclusively through the LCD panel of her camera? What kind of experience is being produced? It is a familiar lament that our culture is losing its ability to attend, to look with engagement at art and at everyday experience. But that lament overlooks a compeling fact: the visitor is composing.

In those photos, sounds, or videos, the art and the surrounding space are collapsed together (i.e. onto a picture plane) and rendered plastic, malleable, in a sense modular. Most importantly they are incorporated into the world of the viewer, rather than the reverse. In this sense there are few more democratic gestures in an exhibition than to point a device and make a recording, not to preserve a record of the place, but to impose upon it a unique continuity, a contour of one’s own experience; to sculpt with it.

A museum or exhibition space aims to present a coherent itinerary of (largely visual) experience. Sound tends to tell a different story, revealing places and intervals that are disruptive, distracted, intense, or diffuse, but rarely discrete. Indeed, sound abhors discretion. It can only exist through disruption and agitation. Sound is inclusive and immersive: if you hear it, it is vibrating you. This helps to explain the conflicted relationship contemporary art exhibition has had with sound work, in which playing pieces on headphones has become the favored way of taming sound into an ideally discrete sound-object.

With this in mind, Untitled (plate tectonics) works with the exhibition space (both recorded and present) not as a resolved environment for the reception and contemplation of works, but rather as both an impulse (as in electrical energy) and as a material, a moldable substance useful in the creation of other ideas, further experiences, alternate places.

Allan Kaprow / William Pope.L, Yard (to Harrow), 1961 / 2009. Photos: 16 Miles [more photographs]

Allan Kaprow, “Yard”
Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
New York, New York
Through October 24, 2009
[more photographs]

Francis Bacon, Pope Innocent X (Study after Velázquez). 1951, oil on linen. This is indeed a study of the rather innocuous portrait of the Pope that Diego Velázquez painted in 1650. Bacon was so drawn to it that he did many studies of it, but with the Pope screaming as if in extreme pain. What or whom is he screaming at? Or was Bacon merely fascinated with the concept of a Pope screaming? That’s been a matter of dispute since 1951. This painting has become such an icon that, like “Whistler’s Mother,” it’s become known to most people by a name other than its own (you might have heard it referred to as “The Screaming Pope”). As Life Magazine simply put it in their 1992 eulogy of Bacon, “He painted despair.”

Francis Bacon, Painting I. 1946, oil on linen. Some have considered this to be his uncontested masterpiece; after all, it includes everything his paintings were known for. Blood, meat, brutality, despair, mystery, the token figure in black, etc. What’s weird about this painting is that it began as a painting of a chimpanzee hiding in the grass; Bacon took a few turns in his painting process, probably asked himself “Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I did this….”, and voilá, a symphony of darkness and misery in oil paint.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, chronotopes & dioramas, 2009. Photos: 16 Miles [more photographs]

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, “chronotopes & dioramas”
Dia at the Hispanic Society
Audubon Terrace, Broadway between 155th and 156th Street
Through April 18, 2010
[more photographs]

Banksy heads North after his recent visit to Croydon with a great street version of ‘No Ball Games’ appearing in Tottenham in the last day or so.

It’s in a much higher traffic area and right under a CCTV mast (which typically is facing the wrong way). It’s already created a lot of local interest with the local paper taking an interest and residents already getting together to stop the council buffing it.

More views of ‘No Ball Games’ near Seven Sisters….

And finally here’s the (different) canvas version displayed at the recent ‘Bristol Museum Versus Banksy’ exhibition

AOTS link: Banksy No Ball Games