Artists Unite Issue

Latin Jazz and Brazilian Group Annette A Aguilar and StringBeans will be @ the Garden Cafe (good Food, wine, Beer and good prices) this thursday with a stellar Quintet which includes Eddie Venegas and Rob Thomas,Two Violinist who are on top of their field.

And joining on Bass is Ruben Rodriguez and Nicki Denner on Keybd.  StringBeans is a three time LAtin Jazz Ambassadors who continues  sharing  their music right Here in INwood(Upper Manhattan)

Annette A Aguilar Percussionist and Leader is a long time resident of Inwood who has worked hard  KEEP GOOD LIVE LAtin Jazz Uptown.
We hope to see you!

When THURSDAY AUGUST 2nd
TIME 7:30pm -10:30pm
WHERE: GARDEN CAFE OUT DOOR PATIO 4961 Broadway(bet 207th & Isham)NYC  212.544.9480
COVER: NONE But $15min per person

THE Annette A AguilarStringBeans and StringBeans QUINTET
Nicki Denner KeyBD,
Rob Thomas Violin
Eddie Venegas Violin /Trombone
Ruben Rodriguez BASS
Annette A Aguilar perc leader
Support It LIVE

www.aguilarstringBeans.com

by Joy Leftow

You avoid me because
you know I know
your secrets
the thoughts that make you ill
I know how you feel

Sometimes you utter nothing
at all & the tv gets louder
to drown the sound
of my words, my voice
a discarded memory
of what’s left unsaid

We don’t discuss
what I think is wrong
as I record the trail you forge
with the sound of your voice
hollow in my veins
while I follow you from room
to room echoing your thoughts
fill the room’s silence
I hear thunder clap
in the distance

You say the echo is loud, too clear
and I bisect & categorize
each of your thoughts
while my unsaid words
follow the curve of your hips
As you move to and fro worrying
I’ll disparage what you say

I listen, record your flow
of your words, you want me
to share my  observations
I do; For you they only personify
my excellent clinical skills

your firm lips cover my unspoken words
a poor excuse, a moment in time

Your eyes hold back tears
you stare and ensconce your soul
why should you share
to recreate the pain
I don’t exist for myself or you
your mind’s eye is a reflections in glass
and none of it is real

A “collaboration” of Ai Wei Wei and Nature, via Artkrush, where you can read about this work, currently on view at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany (Ai Wei Wei, Collapsed Template, 2007, Photo: Julia Zimmermann)

Also available for the curious is a 5-minute (!) rundown of Documenta on YouTube.

Will books go the way of celluloid film? Or is a book more like a print? I pondered it after receiving this “pass it on” request from curator Katherine Carl. Is book-based culture coming to an end? Wasn’t the computer supposed to eliminate magazines, but instead spawned the tech publishing sector? Do the Spanish librarians know something I don’t know??????? Seriously, here’s a call for collaborations to anyone who has worried, not about the death of book publishing, but the death of culture carried by those libros.

~~~

THE LAST BOOK

(A Project by Luis Camnitzer, sponsored by the National Library of Spain)

Open call for collaborations

The Last Book is a project to compile written as well as visual statements in which the authors may leave a legacy for future generations. The premise of the project is that book-based culture is coming to an end. On one hand, new technologies have introduced cultural mutations by transferring information to television and the Internet. On the other, there has been an increasing deterioration in the educational systems (as much in the First World as on the periphery) and a proliferation of religious and anti-intellectual fundamentalisms. The Last Book will serve as a time-capsule and leave a document and testament of our time, as well as a stimulus for a possible reactivation of culture in case of disappearance by negligence, catastrophe or conflagration.

Contributions to this project will be limited to one page and may be e-mailed to lastbook.madrid@gmail.com or mailed to Luis Camnitzer, 124 Susquehanna Ave., Great Neck NY 11021, USA. The book will be exhibited as an installation at the entrance of the Museum of the National Library of Spain in Madrid. Pages will be added during the duration of the project, with the intention of an eventual publication of an abridged version selected by Luis Camnitzer, curator of the project.

This call is open and we hope that it will be resent to as many potential contributors as possible.

Anyone with the late afternoon free this Wednesday might want to drop by the opening celebration for the new mural at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center.

Wednesday, July 18,  3:30-6:3:30 PM
Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital
of New York Presbyterian
Department of Pediatric Physical Therapy
3959 Broadway, CH5 (between 165th & 166th Streets)
Room #532 Ramp                   Refreshments

For more information go to www.anthonygonzalez.com

by Pamela Popeson

“Work out of your work. Don’t work out of anybody else’s work,” is Richard Serra’s counsel to artist/interviewer Mark Simmons in the Coagula Contemporary Art Journal. Sound, supportable, and credible advice as we come to see in a new retrospective of his work currently showing at MoMA: Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years.

Serra also likes to say that work comes out of work, that you don’t just wake up one day with an idea; ideas come from the work and from working, though he credits outside events, like participating in Yvonne Rainer’s performance art and reading Thoreau, with having led him further. He names the experience of walking in the shipyards with his father as a child and visiting Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane with having informed his sculpture, though in the case of Borromini he says he arrived there having already formulated a set of questions regarding his own explorations. Serra has admired Donatello’s ability to express volume, and while living in Florence he made daily visits to his bronze “David” and to Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel frescoes.

The artists of the Renaissance did the same. Donatello worked with Brunelleschi, and the two visited Rome together to view and study the ruins. They both knew and worked with Ghiberti. Bernini was Borromini’s supervisor at the Palazzo Barberini and took him under his wing, recommending him for other projects, though the two later competed for the same commissions. They all crossed disciplines; besides vying for and receiving architectural competitions, they studied mathematics and science.

And like the Florentines, Serra studied and trained under other masters and worked side by side with the other young art lions of his (and our) time. He studied literature at UC Santa Barbara with Huxley and, as a painting student at Yale, worked with and for Josef Albers. He knew Phillip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and Frank Stella in the early 60’s. His New York friends included Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson. Philip Glass and Jasper Johns helped him install his pieces, and Serra speaks of Donald Judd taking him under his wing because “he liked what he was up to.” What Serra and these other artists were up to, like the Florentines before them, was extending the language of art beyond anything known or imagined.

In 1967 Serra made a (now famous) list of transitive verbs and began experimenting with his materials — industrial rubber and lead for the most part — as physical manifestations of those verbs. The first on the list is “to roll”; the last is “to continue.” Transitive verbs are those that need a direct object to complete their meaning, and there are several pieces in the exhibit directly relating to those explorations. The most exquisite example is “To Lift” (1967). By lifting a sheet of vulcanized rubber (from one point), Serra completely reinvented it and the space it inhabits. And he continues to challenge and reinvent objects and forms and space. Before our very eyes.

The big bonus of a retrospective is that you can see the development of an artist’s body of work, see how one series of explorations or experiments might lead to another, see exactly what “working out of your work” looks like. There are 27 pieces in the exhibition, installed throughout the museum in two main galleries (6th and 2nd floors) and the outdoor Sculpture Garden. The earliest are selections from his series in rubber dating from 1966, and the most recent — three large rolled steel installations entitled “Band”, “Torqued Torus Inversion”, and “Sequence” (2006) — were made specifically for this show, or rather specifically for the museum’s 2nd floor Contemporary Galleries.

The exhibit begins on the 6th floor, and as you enter the first gallery you also “enter” Serra’s sculpture “Delineator” (1974 -75). The piece consists of two large hot-rolled steel plates each 1” X 10’ X 26’, one placed directly on the floor in the center of the room and the other positioned on the ceiling, centered above and perpendicular to the one on the floor. Whether you choose to walk onto and across the floor plate, placing yourself under the one suspended on the ceiling, or around the perimeter of the plates, the room is completely reordered by their presence. Perceptions of form, mass, gravity, and space are called into question. And that’s just the beginning. With the large steel works on the 2nd floor and in the garden, Serra continues pushing the bounds of our knowledge and understanding of mass and our relationship to space geometrically. Everything changed when sculpture first came off the pedestal and into the same space as the viewer. Now Serra has moved things much further along by implicating the viewer.

John Adams said “When a great question is first started there are very few, even of the greatest minds, which suddenly and instinctively comprehend it in all its consequences.” Perhaps that was the issue with “Tilted Arc” (1981), Serra’s 120’ x 12’ steel sculpture commissioned by the Arts-in-Architecture program of the U.S. General Services Administration and installed in downtown Manhattan in Federal Plaza, only to be removed and destroyed by the government.

The main objection, as I recall from reading the paper at the time, was that “Tilted Arc” was a nuisance to workers in the building because they liked to walk directly across the plaza and now had to walk around the sculpture to cross it. The other objection was that litter collected along the base of sculpture, when before it could blow across the plaza. The number of people in favor of keeping the sculpture who testified at the public hearing (other artists, curators, art critics, and art historians) was twice the number in favor of its removal. Nevertheless, the jury of five voted 4 to 1 to remove the work. Serra appealed, unsuccessfully, and on March 15, 1989 (under the cloak of darkness) federal workers cut the piece into three sections and hauled it off to a scrap-metal yard. It’s still unclear (at least to me) how and why this happened and exactly who was behind it. What is clear is that they were unable to comprehend what he was up to.
Serra’s sculpture may bear the distinction of being the only work destroyed by the government but he is certainly not alone in the “they were unable to comprehend” department. In the documentary film “Mondrian, Mr. Boogie-Woogie Man”, Piet Mondrian tells us that he almost gave up painting because the only pieces he could sell were flower illustrations. (We also discover Mondrian was a jazz fan and serious dancer, with actual footage of him cutting a “boogie-woogie” rug.) For Mondrian to have quit would be unfathomable. The consequences would have been staggering, too frightening to consider. Luckily he persevered.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Serra said that “in order to persevere you have to be obstinate, be marginalized, and, depending upon your personality, stay away from the sociability of the art world.” Fortunately for us, Serra is all that and more, and he continued — and continues — to work from his own work.

“One rejoices that these men felt no embarrassment at being persistently, at times awkwardly serious, according to their natures,” writes Catherine Drinker Bowen in “Miracle at Philadelphia”, her narrative about the framers of the Constitution. She reminds us that the Constitutional Convention proceedings were constantly in danger of being shut down because resistance to forming a Union was so great. Another close call, perhaps of a different stripe, but a powerful illustration of the importance of working from your own work.

Serra also tells Rose that he “is not here to teach you.” Nevertheless, he does teach us about space and form and gravity and mass, and, perhaps more importantly because his work involves us directly in the experience of the restructuring of sculptural perceptions, we learn about our own relationship to space and form and gravity and mass. We also learn by the authenticity of his actions through his work the value of being true to your nature. One rejoices.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years is up until September 10, 2007. Visit www.moma.org for hours, etc.

To view the “online exhibit”: www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra/

The exceptional exhibition catalogue includes interviews with Serra and the exhibition co-curators, Kynaston McShine, MoMA’s Curator at Large, and Lynne Cooke, curator at the Dia Art Foundation, both of whom have had longstanding relationships with Serra.

Video walk-throughs of the galleries at MoMA with curatorial commentary and time-lapse footage of the exhibition installation can be found online at youtube. Video downloads of the Charlie Rose interviews can easily be found online, as can Serra’s verb list and numerous print and video interviews with the artist. The Coagula Interview by Mark Simmons is at www.coagula.com/serra.html.

images:
“Band” 2006, weatherproof steel Overall: 12′ 9″ x 36′ 5″ x 71′ 9 1/2″ (3.9 x 11.1 x 21.9 m), plate: 2″ (5.1 cm) thick. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle”

“1-1-1-1″, 1969, Lead antimony, four plates, each: 48 x
48″ (121.9 x 121.9 cm), pole: 7′ (2.1 m) long. Photo: Jenny Oku

“To Lift”, 1967 Vulcanized rubber 36″ x 6′ 8″ (91.4 x 200cm). Photo: Peter Moore

“Sequence” 2006, installation view. Shown: “Torqued Torus Inversion”, 2006, weatherproof steel; “Band”, 2006, weatherproof steel. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle.

“Sequence” 2006, installation view. Shown: Sequence, 2006, Weatherproof steel; “Torqued Torus Inversion”, 2006, weatherproof steel; “Band”, 2006, weatherproof steel. Photo: Lorenz Kienzle

An article in today’s New York Times describes a new development in the music world.

I like popular music. Hell, I even played it. I used to go to concerts of performers I liked. I’ve even gone two nights in a row to catch someone I really liked.

Sadly, now that I’m a grown up, I can almost never justify paying the ticket price required to see anyone I’ve ever heard of. Usually, it goes something like this: Wow! Bjork is playing in my neighborhood at a brand new venue!! What, the tickets are $200? Ummm, I guess I’ll just read about it in the Times tomorrow.

The new development, according to the Times, is really not going to get me into listening range; it’s about how performers are doing small shows (a good thing), but at prices about the same as what I just paid for a used car. For instance, Prince (who’s a pretty cool guy, politically speaking), is playing a hotel club in Hollywood for $3,121 per couple (which included dinner). If you were one of a lucky 70, you could get a standing room ticket for $31 — oops, no that would be $312.10 (no dinner).

In the Hamptons this summer, there’s a series of a handful of concerts with Prince, also featuring Dave Matthews, Tim Reynolds, Billy Joel, James Taylor and Tom Petty for the series price of $15,000. But don’t worry, you can’t even buy them for that price; you have to be invited to buy them for that price.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate musicians who want to make a living. But like the Italians who protested Streisand’s concert ticket prices, I’m sick of a structure that asks obscene amounts of money of average people, effectively showing that our affluent society is becoming more and more
striated.

I guess the silver lining is that the only musicians I can afford to see live are those who are up and coming; and they need my support more than Tom Petty anyway.

But I’d much rather see more of the treat my buddy Jason Gubbiotti and I had a handful of years back when we caught P.J. Harvey at a small local club for the same price as any local band.

Artists Unite has been gearing up for some new physical activities in northern Manhattan, including a collaboration with the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, where we’re identifying local artists for an exhibition in the Center’s lobby space.

Up now is a show of two locals, Robin Raddatz, whose paintings are on display, and Anthony Gonzalez, whose drawings are on view.

The center is located on Fort Washington Ave. between 183rd and 185th (directly next to the uptown exit of the 181 St. stop on the A train.

Tonight at 6pm [Noon, New York]: WUNP // The United Nations Plaza Radio Network
Listen Live - next broadcast July 10, 2007 // 6PM CEST [Noon, New York]
On the Air — 95.2 FM (Berlin)
Via Internet: http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/radio.html

July 10, 2007 // 6:00pm CEST
Hosted by neuroTransmitter

with Special Guest:
Brandon LaBelle - Radio Territories

Together with Brandon LaBelle, we will be experimenting with the limits of the WUNP broadcast and discussing contemporary conceptual radio practices relating to location and urban realms. The act of transmission brings forward the tensions and promises embedded within locational and situational exchanges and imaginations, placing the ethereal expanse firmly on the ground. Following such perspectives, this broadcast will speak of and trace the radiophonic interactions between, above, and below the sonic and the social, looping in and out from the studio to the city, starting with the recent publication, Radio Territories, as a vehicle for enacting and examining radio’s medial reach.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer based in Copenhagen and Los Angeles. He co-edited the compilation Radio Territories and is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art.

WUNP is a radio station produced by neuroTransmitter  (Valerie Tevere + Angel Nevarez) for United Nations Plaza. WUNP is a portal for broadcasting audio works and conceptual radio projects. Over the course of the summer and fall of 2007 WUNP will be on air across Berlin (95.2 FM) and beyond through internet stream on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays beginning at 6 PM CEST (Berlin) through November.

from Netherlanders Piek Arts Group:

Express your freedom from convention

Express your freedom of expression

Transcend location

Be part of the Now:Here:This art spark

16:00 GMT Friday, July 6

Submit work to websubmission@artistsunite-ny.org. See How to Participate on the Now:Here:This page for details and check out the most recent exhibitions.

image: a little bird told me (detail), by Jaymee Dever from Now:Here:This June 15, 2007

That’s the question on Amir Parsa’s mind. Queens Museum of Art invited him to find out, so this Saturday starts a series, Poets in the Gallery, in which poets read from their works in the setting of the Museum’s galleries in the exhibition Generation 1.5. The show considers artists who emigrated from their homelands during their teen years, making their experience somewhere between that of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Artists include Shirin Neshat, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Emily Jacir, Nari Ward, Lee Mingwei, Pablo Helguera, Ellen Harvey and Seher Shah. The poets are also Gen. 1.5-ers. Parsa, who’s from Iran, reads July 7th. Mónica de la Torre, from Mexico, reads July 21st. Preceded by a cocktail hour. More on the series here or by calling (718) 592-9700. To get there from Manhattan, take the 7 train. (Don’t miss the graffiti as you come above ground at the Courthouse station, but stay on until Shea Stadium!) The museum is also famous as site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.

Soprano Beverly Sills died yesterday at age 78. “Bubbles” was a Brooklyn native who stopped singing before her voice stopped for her. A role model of flexibility and not resting on one’s laurels, she moved on to chair the boards of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera and directed New York City Opera. I was nostalgic to note that she regularly appeared on mainstream TV, such as the Tonight Show; you have to be a cell-phone salesman on Britain’s idol show to accomplish that now.
Hy Zaret wrote the lyrics to the song “Unchained Melody,” which despite the title, held the attention of numerous listeners and dozens of artists who performed and recorded the song. My favorite version comes from Joni Mitchel. She couches it in a tale of growing older; reminiscing about playing the song on the jukebox “one more time…” Zaret was 99 years old.

Hey, I’m free for a change, it’s Sat., 5pm; could go to chelsea, but will I fit anything in??!!I used the one-street strategy. The Gursky show at Matthew Marks provided the anchor. While there is more at 22nd Street that I haven’t seen, the four mural-sized prints of pit crews were impressive alone. Jerry Saltz wonders if Gursky is out of ideas, but I think it’s more and more of the same idea. Luckily for all concerned (especially the party that paid $3.3M for Gursky’s convenience store photo) it’s a good idea. The pit (Boxenstopp) photos are like narratives, or pre-Rennaisance multi-planar icons; they contain a couple of cars under service by piles of brightly suited crew members, sexy girls — whom one imagines are racing-calendar stars, and a second story window filled with spectators watching the crew. With so many participants in the photos, I was drawn into the various stories in each area (something I’m playing with in my own work). These are too big to justify at 300 pixels wide, so try going to the Matthew Marks website or make it to Chelsea if you can.

In nice contrast to Gursky’s oeuvre is Thomas Flechtner’s show at Marianne Boesky. The Swiss photographer has given us two series here. The first is a set of lightboxes in which cherry blossoms are used as abstract veils over micro-environments (branches). The effect is odd; first I balked at the blown-out exposures, then I integrated the separate stories. As in Gursky’s dense works, you hunt out the individual areas of detail and look for subject. Flechtner’s second series, Sites, depicts man-made land formations, such as flower farms and embankments. I have been resistant to digital images blown up beyond their clarity to achieve punch from large scale, but these, which were a bit broken down on the edges up close, convinced me to just stand back and enjoy. Unlike Gursky, these geometries were naturally occurring.

(detail from above; note, proportions are distorted)

Back at Matthew Marks, there is a selection of photographs of Swiss team Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ Equilibres, gravity defying sculptures — sometimes in collapse — made from common household objects. These were really fun to look at. The exhibit also includes a film of the artists working out some of the kinetic sculptures they crafted out of the same materials. (Some of the photos below are taken off-angle to avoid reflections off the glass. All the images are the same size, about 8×10 inches, regardless of materials). Note the aerosol can spray in the detail photo at the top.

Speaking of kinetic sculpture, at Andrea Rosen, Erika Hoffman has consulted on the curation of a show of 50’s and 60’s kinetic works. This show is like watching an old sci-fi movie; charmingly naive but still incredible. My favorite work was by Hartmut Bohm, a grid of white squares that “jiggled” due to magnetic variations (I resisted the task of photographing a white grid, but here’s the label).

Metro Pictures is showing Yuri Masnyj’s sculptures and paintings, both which use as subject matter a bookshelf of additional art and culture references.

Barbara Gladstone & Team are about to open Banks Violette’s show (July 6). For now, the gallery only offers reflective surfaces to make authors’ self portraits.

Silverstein Photography has an intriguing show called First Contact: A Photographer’s Sketchbook, showing the photographer’s process of choosing an image from contact sheets. Here, two dozen classic photos from Magnum photographers and others are paired with the contact sheets from which the photos were selected. The contact sheets in the pictures below are largely unreadable, but give you an idea of the caliber of work in this show. An exception is the sheet by Man Ray, which is a gorgeous work of abstract art as it stands.

Not bad for an hour… Landing in Chelsea after galleries are closed can be a sad, lonely affair. But even with only an hour, I got all that art. And when the galleries are open, you get the added plus of seeing the colorful gallery visitors, too…

~ ~ ~

images: street signs, self portrait, and youths and pink guitar, by Peter Ferko; installation shots from Sakura and Sites, Thomas Flechtner; movie still and photo details by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Other images as noted on labels.