Friday, February 20, 2009

No More ArtStorm



Richard Connelly from the H Press has the scoop:

LAST PRESS RELEASE EVER!
Due to high overhead expenses and a desire to keep things new and exciting, the artist run gallery has decided to cut costs and move to a more "underground" approach to showing and promoting art and music in Houston. While a permanent space to show art has become, at least for the time being, a luxury the board members can't afford, ArtStorm continues to work tireless to keep bringing fresh, new ideas to the community. Unfortunately the exhibitions included in the advanced calendar have been postponed as the group had to opt out of our lease unexpectedly.


via Spaced City



wonder if this has anything to do w/ 2 board members leaving a couple of months ago?



plus... what does this mean for the future of Caroline Collective, whose website is not around anymore? musta been a glitch, site is back up!

The Scoop From BOX 13

courtesy the curator of Disturbance of Distance, Eleanor Williams!

George Smith at G Gallery- It's So Short!!!



Check out George Smith at G Gallery; and I dropped a review of Labyrinth II on artforum.com, so check that out too!

On view thru Feb 24

Jumping In the Morning!

Olafur Eliasson in Op Art Revisited


Andreas Gursky's Atlanta


Julian Opie


Yay! From a trip to Buffalo over New Years, my pics from the Albright-Knox (where they let you take pictures in the museum) are up on Jumping In Art Museums today!




Plus+++ more pics from Op Art Revisited...

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even more!

check out my review of Gateways at the Burchfield-Penney across the street
HERE

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Weekender



Live! from PantsuitLand: "Disturbance of Distance" at Box 13 Artspace from Skote on Vimeo.
Disturbance of Distance
Box 13 ArtSpace
Curator/artist talk Thursday, Feb. 19, 7 pm



Pulled from the Vault: Prints from Anya Tish Gallery
Museum of Printing History
Opens Thursday, Feb. 19, 6-8 pm


B. Moss
B. Moss: Diagnostic Landscapes
Joan Wich & Company
Opens Friday, Feb. 20, 6-8 pm



Ron Hoover Memorial
Station Museum of Contemporary Art
Friday, Feb. 20, 6-8 pm



Scott Turner Schofield
Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps
Diverseworks
Feb. 20 & 21
performance at 8pm



Claire Fontaine: Call + 972 2 5 839 749
para/site
Opens Saturday, Feb. 21, 5-7 pm



WHEELS AND TIRES
Art Car Museum
Opens Saturday, Feb. 21, 7-10 pm



New York Times Spit Balls July 12, 2000
Al Souza: More Is More
Moody Gallery
Opens Saturday, Feb. 21, 6-8 pm

and on Sunday?

last day for

Perspectives 164
Stephanie Syjuco:
Total Fabrications
Contemporary Arts Museum
Through February 22, 2009

come take contentless content away, before it goes awry

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

NOT a Pun

Deer Cupcakes (Houston, Tx)


Reply to: andreacanalito@gmail.com [?]
Date: 2009-02-17, 6:22PM CST


Please check out my website. I have some things that may interest you and more to come. Come just to look, or if anyone is interested, I might be willing to sell some of the work or deer cuppy cakes for a fair price.

andreacanalito.com

Brother, Can You Spare A Private Endowment?


R. Allen Stanford, before he almost bankrupted eight Caribbean nations


Ugh. Not only is the national hate-on for Bernie Madoff and corrupt New York about to refocus itself on Houston and R. Allen Stanford, but arts orgs across the south are gonna get punched in the mouth. For once, I am very glad that the rich's blindness to art in Houston prevented Stanford from doling out dollar bills to DWorks, Lawndale or the Art League. The MFAH did get burned though. Artnews takes it from HERE:


NEW WALL STREET SCAMMER HAS ART TIES

Another week, another giant scandal shaking the U.S. financial system -- and possibly the art world.

This time out, the heat is on Houston financier R. Allen Stanford -- Forbes’ 205th richest man in 2008 -- who the Securities and Exchange Commission is charging with "a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world," connected to his $50-billion Stanford Financial Group. For his part, Stanford has been quoted as saying that the charges are the result of "disgruntled former employees."


And here’s the best part -- in the art world, Stanford’s charitable foundation has recently been promoting something called the Stanford Financial Excellence in the Arts (SFEA) Award, designed "to recognize and reward local arts organizations that demonstrate exemplary fiscal management of their resources." The brief for this self-styled "Right-Brain Award for a Left-Brain World" crows that "by rewarding fiscal responsibility, it encourages and develops arts organizations' ability to manage their finances in order to mirror healthy, for-profit corporations, making for a better bottom-line for the nonprofits." Let’s just hope none of the recipients took that "mirroring" advice too literally.


Last year, Stanford partnered with the local Dallas arts council to dole out $45,000 in unrestricted SFEA grants. The Dallas Museum of Art took the top $20,000 honor at a ceremony on Nov. 13, 2008, with awards designed by area glass artist Diana Chase.


In Charlotte, N.C., the Carolina Raptor Center, a nature preserve, beat out the McColl Center for Visual Art and the Mint Museum for 2008’s top $20,000 award.

In Florida, Stanford handed out $20,000 to the Sarasota Orchestra in December, as well as modest grants of $2,500 to the Ringling College of Art and Design and Ringling student Kayla Carlson.


The Stanford Group’s arts activities, however, go considerably beyond the SFEA award.


Stanford Financial Group has a partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, where it sponsors the "International Collectors’ Circle" and annual "POP" fundraiser. Stanford was also key sponsor of the Miami Art Museum’s exhibition "Work in Progress."


Another long-time Stanford Financial beneficiary is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where the firm was behind "Constructing a Poetic Universe," a showcase of Latin American art collected by tire magnate Bruce Halle and his wife Diane.



EEK!

Monday, February 16, 2009

Press Releezzee


Amy Blakemore (American, born 1958), Swing, 1992.
Gelatin silver photograph. Private Collection


HOUSTON, TX.- Houston-based Amy Blakemore takes photographs in order to explore the ways in which memory both records and transforms visual information. Employing the camera as subjective tool, Blakemore has compared the activity of photography to the process of gathering broken bits and lost objects discovered serendipitously during long walks. "Instead of picking up stuff," she states, "I leave with a flat, squared-off record of things and people in space." Amy Blakemore: Photographs 1988 — 2008, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from May 9 to September 13, 2009, surveys Blakemore´s mature career with a carefully distilled selection of 36 works, ranging from early black-and-white street photographs to her lushly colored portraits and landscapes.

Originally trained in documentary traditions, in the mid 1980s Blakemore embraced the highly idiosyncratic Diana camera, black-and-white film, and the informal format and compositions of snap-shot photographs. At the same time, however, she brought to her practice a rigorous sense of composition and masterful printing techniques, drawing a nuanced range of tones and an exceptional degree of resolution from her negatives.

Britt Tears Up Schulze

...and with good reason! I concur.

Character assassination masquerading as a review

I don't think for a minute that art made in response to a tragedy should be given a pass from criticism because of the artist's good intentions. But Troy Schulze's attack in the Houston Press on Paul Villinski's Emergency Response Studio (on view at Rice Gallery through March 1) is bizarrely unique in that it finds no fault with what Villinski actually made -- a post-Hurricane Katrina FEMA-style trailer converted to a solar-powered mobile artist's studio -- but serves up one assault after another on Villinski's motives.

Emergency Response Studio.jpg


CHECK IT HERE

youboobamerica


U oh H put out this video about their upcoming "bobrauschenbergamerica"




but this one is better


bobLINK

unattractive in both content and execution




That's an apt description of bloggerwars. Me and Britt from the chron had a dustup over the weekend about the Equivalence show that just closed at the Glassell.

Britt wrote a review that lauded it.

I wrote a sophomoric rebuttal with all the teenage angst I could muster. So did Britt!!! LOL

So in response to THIS, I must say that all the "bloody bits of bone and smeared gray matter" in the gallery were in my imagination.

I imagined walking through the gallery with someone who liked the show as much as Britt did, and then I saw my imaginary me have a daydream of being beaten with a cudgel in the back of the head, my arms hanging limp as I am held up by the collar with a fist. As I slump forward the museum guards watch from the wings, my head tilts forward and bobs with each soft thump of wood softening the back of my skull, separating plates with a quiet crack, the pitter-patter of droplets spraying across the wall following each successive blow.

As the blood flow grows thick, puddling around my knees in dark black masses, John Baldessari comes to mind. And Mel Bochner. And Sherrie Levine. The pine baton, slick with blood, spills the soupy contents out of the crushed skull with each blow, the hand on my collar grips and regrips to hold my body partially aloft, the wet shirt harder to hold every second. Bits of bone, soft slugs of brains and matted hair still clinging to shreds of scalp fly across the room, viscous red droplets trailing down the wall.

I am all for conceptualism, and I do not mean to be a populist by insisting that conceptualism be interesting, but boring shit gives me hallucinations.



BOOOOOOORING! (Baldessari)


Please don't separate the old people from the younger clap-trap, Britt. Baldessari, Bochner and Levine all graduated from universities and talked a good talk on their way to the history books but they're still snake oil salesmen when they put boring shit on walls.



BOOOOORING! (Bochner)


A valid point Britt, that I misinterpreted your notion of "working in a similar vein" as referring to artists "translating", but you meant "abstract artworks based on color-palette samples of other artworks"- which I do agree totally suck balls.

The variety in the show intrigued me at first, and I did not read the essays, but the luster soon wore off as each element was more disappointing. The guard told me not to eat the popcorn. It was from days ago. I watched the vid of Talking Popcorn, and it was deflating and stupid, like a sham shaman divining words from a babbling brook. Even Anri Sala’s vid Intervista is not interesting- quiet and poorly edited- though you are correct that it does not deserve the scorn that the rest of the show deserves.

Britt continues: "She... fleshed out her translation analogy in her essay, describing how the various artworks correspond to different types of translation and offering a way to look at them that in some cases might not have occurred to the artists themselves. I've seen plenty of thematic shows that had to go through a lot more contortions to make their cases." This is not a glowing endorsement, just an acknowledgment of successful sophism. Art writers are sophists, and I am one too, but it is better to be fun than pedantic.

It is true that I was just bored and wanted to lash out. I'm OK with that. Are you OK with liking insider, snooty, anti-visual art?




BOOOOORING! (Levine)


bonus: this is a comment on the original Chron article ROFL

ignacious wrote:
The description of this exhibition borders on being pretentious claptrap. The art on display is very 'contemporary' - that is, self indulgent - and is unattractive in both content and execution.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Death Does Dallas


Eric the Trick



Gerald Peters Gallery in Dallas is taking the long walk out of town, but not without a little kerfuffle along the way. Titus O'Brien has railed against the stupidity of the gallery's worst artists since last year when some of the shit blew up, but he takes a parting shot at Eric Trich (aka Eric the Trick) this weekend with a little recap and some disturbing news about the lengths that the Trick's manager went to in order to somehow keep credibility:




Months after my initial post on Glasstire about Trich, Siros appears out of nowhere, going nutsoid on the phone with anyone he could think I might be associated with, including galleries, the paper, the university where I was teaching, on and on. I really got under this guy’s skin.

...

The more I looked into Siros and Trich’s claims, the more bullshit I found, till I felt I was nearly suffocating in it. I documented all this thoroughly in blow-by-blow daily reports on Glasstire.com. Gerald Peters Gallery was clearly complicit in this not-very-well-crafted con. I guess none of them ever thought anyone else would look carefully enough to sus it out. “Spend money on the printing! It’ll look so slick, who would question the claims of genius, or that Elton John is a collector?” If only they had just kept their claims a bit more modest…


By the way, you can no longer find those stories in their original context on Glasstire (though they are still here, on this site.) After those letters threatening legal action, not much was heard from them 6 months later, when Siros called Rainey Knudson, Glasstire founder/owner, last November and said my (admittedly pretty pathetic) investigative reportage had cost him “millions of dollars” [if true, which I doubt, justice lives], demanding once more that the stories be removed. She refused. Then, losing his cool, he shrieked he’d kill her if she didn’t comply. She hung up and called the cops, as I once had. Once more, they said there was nothing they could do.

So she took my posts down (this one too, which was briefly posted [on Glasstire] by another editor there before being pulled).




FYI- to any artists out there who have never had a show and are thin on talent, here's how you write a press release to fool the masses in Dallas, who are stupider than the average bear (via Art&Seek) "[Insert prestigious org. you've made a large donation to] will present "[your name]: omg!" a collector's art exhibition. [you, the artiste], a 21-year-old native of the Dallas area, is an extraordinary contemporary artist who debuted in October 2007 with his sold-out show "I Do Not Exist." [note: show doesn't have to exist]

"[your name]: omg!" will feature paintings and sculptures created under his mentor, [insert sugar daddy]. [The artist's] work is included in the collections of numerous prominent art patrons, including Barbara Hunt Crow, Margaret Crow and Priscilla Beshears, all of Dallas, as well as collectors in Iran, Dubai and Japan. Works for "[your mane]: omg!" are on loan from the collections of Bill and Heather Esping, Brad Johnson, Mark Murphy, R. Keith Nordin, H.I.H. Princess Sarvenaz Pahlavi, and Jeff and Jan Rich, as well as the private collection of SGA Enterprises and a private collection in London. [The artist's] second solo show, "[some combination of patriotic and populist themes] held in July 2008, was also a sellout." [note: None of the collectors actually own any of your paintings, the show never happened either]


Now, I may be inviting some fat fuck to send me death threats by posting this, and so is Titus. Then again, I have been through the Fire Swamp.

Just So Ya Know...


Jianping Fan, Guangzhou, China


PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON KY
1145 PM EST FRI FEB 13 2009

…POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN JACKSON HAS RECEIVED CALLS THIS
EVENING FROM THE PUBLIC CONCERNING POSSIBLE EXPLOSIONS AND…OR
EARTHQUAKES ACROSS THE AREA. THE FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION HAS
REPORTED TO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT THAT THESE EVENTS ARE BEING CAUSED
BY FALLING SATELLITE DEBRIS. THESE PIECES OF DEBRIS HAVE BEEN CAUSING
SONIC BOOMS…RESULTING IN THE VIBRATIONS BEING FELT BY SOME
RESIDENTS…AS WELL AS FLASHES OF LIGHT ACROSS THE SKY. THE CLOUD OF
DEBRIS IS LIKELY THE RESULT OF THE RECENT IN ORBIT COLLISION OF TWO
SATELLITES ON TUESDAY…FEBRUARY 10TH WHEN KOSMOS 2251 CRASHED INTO
IRIDIUM 33.

reports have a fireball lighting up the sky over Central Texas at about 11:00 this morning.

via Lone Star Times