Artists Unite Issue

I was walking through the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art and it crossed my mind that I could just as easily be in that Mall of America. It wasn’t that some spaces in the new Taniguchi building resemble mall architecture it was the people. Who were all these people? And what were they doing in the Modern? What were they looking for? What were they hoping to find?

For that matter what was I doing there? What was I hoping to find?

I’m not asking myself what is art but what do I want from it and what do I get from it? And I wasn’t looking for a pat art serves a purpose blah, blah, blah answer; I want a genuine personal response.

Why does walking into the Arshile Gorky gallery make me giddy? Why am I so thrilled by the Olafur Eliasson installation? Why trek uptown to the Hispanic Society for an intimate visit with the El Greco? Why was I so anxious to get upstate to see the Michael Heitzers? Why make that trip all the way out to Marfa Texas when there’s really nothing to see there but art? (true a few moments in the high desert is more than reward enough for the effort, but the Marfa thing is really an art thing) So why go? What’s in it for me?

I think it’s because these experiences have meaning or rather give meaning to moments in my own life.  Because the possibility of possibility lies in these experiences - possibility that I know exists but didn’t or can’t see on my own; possibility that I can only begin to imagine because I can’t imagine everything on my own. And because though I don’t come from the land of the ice and snow I still want to know what it’s like in the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. I do come from someplace with its own sights and sounds but even still I can’t always understand fully my own experience with out some guidance.

If I’m honest I admit I don’t really know what those Gorky’s mean – exactly, but I know in their presence I’m aware of some many layered internal landscape that I couldn’t and still can’t get to on my own. I need him to draw me a picture.

There’s more I’m sure but that’s seems like a starting place.

VENTURES
MAY MAGIC
CELEBRATE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS
INCLUDES A GUIDED WALK IN THE PARK WITH NANCY BRUNING AND BRUNCH
AT THE Y WITH AUTHOR AND HISTORIAN JAMES RENNER. FOLLOWED BY JAZZ
CONCERT WITH JAMIE FOX JAZZ TRIO
SUNDAY, MAY 4TH at 10:30AM
$15 ADVANCED PREPAID ADMISSION
$20 AT THE DOOR
$15 FOR WALK AND BRUNCH ONLY, $5 FOR CONCERT ONLY
VENTURES BOOK CLUB
THIS MONTH’S BOOK IS NINTEEN MINUTES BY JODI PICOULT
MONDAY, MAY 5TH AT 6:30PM
GROUP MEETS AT A PRIVATE HOME, CALL FOR LOCATION
INTRODUCTORY SPANISH CLASSES
START LEARNING SPANISH OR BRUSH UP ON YOUR CONVERSATION
BEFORE YOU TRAVEL THIS SUMMER
TUESDAY, MAY 6TH AT 7PM
WOMEN’S SUPPORT GROUP
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14 AT 6:30PM
BRUNCH: HOW CHANGES IN JEWISH HUMOR REFLECT CHANGES
IN JEWISH LIFE
WITH ANDY SILOW-CARROLL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF NJ JEWISH NEWS
SUNDAY, MAY 18TH AT 11:00AM
$10 IN ADVANCE OR $15 AT THE DOOR
YOU AND YOUR AGING PARENTS: A LOOK AT TODAY’S SANDWICH
GENERATION
MONDAY, MAY 19TH AT 6:30-8PM
WORKSHOP WITH SUSAN KALEV AT THE BERKSHIRE BANK (Where Pinehurst,
Cabrini and 187th st meet)
FEGS WORKSHOP
HOW TO CREATE AN AGELESS RESUME
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21ST AT 7PM
Ongoing classes in Dance It Off (NIA), International Folk Dance, Yoga, Belly Dancing, Abs & Butt-
Class Schedule 8 weeks.
Call Linda at 212-569-6200 ext 233 or email lstorfer@ywashhts.org for registration or information

Harold Wallin
New Works on Paper
May 2–31, 2008

Reception Friday, May 2, 6:30–9 p.m.

NoMAA Gallery

Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA)
The Cornerstone Center (Use North Entrance)
178 Bennett Avenue, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10040

Artists Unite LIVE! is funded in part by a discretionary grant from Councilmember Robert Jackson and by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Artists Unite receives funding from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance (NoMAA) and the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.

Artists Unite LIVE is proud to present
JAZZ COMPOSERS SERIES
The first Thursday in March, April and May

$10 admission 7:30-9:30 p.m.

KB Gallery
875 W. 181st St. (212) 543-2393.
Take the A Train to 181st St. Walk west 3 blocks to Riverside Drive.

Artists Unite LIVE presents a new series of three concerts featuring NYC based contemporary jazz composers. Each performance will include a conversation with the composer on the background and genesis of the works performed.

A reception will follow the show.
KB Gallery is an ideal setting for these intimate concerts. Recently opened by sculptor Khachik Bozoghlian, it is a beautifully designed space with a stunning view of the George Washington Bridge. For information visit www.artistsunite-ny.org.
March 6 The Allen Won Quartet
Spiritual and Spirited Saxophone music.
Performing selections from “Jewel In The Lotus”
with Mike Sarin on drums, Rave Tesar on piano
and Randy Landau on bass. www.allenwon.com

April 3 Ken Wessel and Alankar
Ornette Coleman’s guitarist plays Indian
influenced chamber jazz with Badal Roy on tablas
and Stomu Takeishi on bass. www.kenwessel.com

May 1 Stephan Crump’s Rosetta Trio
Bassist Crump with guitarists Jamie Fox and Liberty Ellman
“Here is a string ensemble for the new century!”
—All About Jazz-NewYork www.stephancrump.com

This project is made possible in part with public funds from The Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and administered by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and funded in part by New York Presbyterian Hospital Neighborhood Fund. Artists Unite is funded in part by the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.

I was sent this the other day.

What is objective art?
Is creativity somehow related with meditation?

Osho:
Art can be divided into two parts. Ninety-nine percent of art is subjective art. Only one percent is objective art. The ninety-nine percent subjective art has no relationship with meditation. Only one percent objective art is based on meditation.

The subjective art means you are pouring your subjectivity onto the canvas, your dreams, your imaginations, your fantasies. It is a projection of your psychology. The same happens in poetry, in music, in all dimensions of creativity - you are not concerned with the person who is going to see your painting, not concerned what will happen to him when he looks at it; that is not your concern at all. Your art is simply a kind of vomiting. It will help you, just the way vomiting helps. It takes the nausea away, it makes you cleaner, makes you feel healthier. But you have not considered what is going to happen to the person who is going to see your vomit. He will become nauseous. He may start feeling sick.

Look at the paintings of Picasso. He is a great painter, but just a subjective artist. Looking at his paintings, you will start feeling sick, dizzy, something going berserk in your mind. You cannot go on looking at Picasso\’s painting for long. You would like to get away, because the painting has not come from a silent being. It has come from a chaos. It is a byproduct of a nightmare. But ninety-nine percent of art belongs to that category.

Objective art is just the opposite. The man has nothing to throw out, he is utterly empty, absolutely clean. Out of this silence, out of this emptiness arises love, compassion. And out of this silence arises a possibility for creativity. This silence, this love, this compassion - these are the qualities of meditation.

I did some research (wikipedia) and Osho is an interesting guy. Sometimes known as the sex guru or the rich mans guru. It seems he was a wee bit persecuted.

He has some interesting meditation methods where for ten minutes the person jumps up and down with their arms raised, shouting Hoo! each time they land on the flats of their feet. OSHO Mystic Rose, comprises three hours of laughing every day for the first week, three hours of weeping each day for the second, with the third week for silent meditation.

anyways…

What struck me most was that my latest art pieces looked divisive and hostile.
It looked like I threw up and now want you to look at it.

Here look.

I removed the pieces from entry in to the Now Here This exhibition and set out to create a meditative piece for the show. It’s not like me to make a piece like this. My friend said “I didn’t know you felt that way” and i don’t. I told him if I wrote about a serial killer it doesn’t mean I am one but still its out of character for me.

i do stuff like this;

or this

That’s 6 places you could choose to look in 3LD Performance Center’s new production of Charles Mee’s Fire Island, directed by Kevin Cunningham. It’s hard to imagine how this play existed on a page, but Mr. Cunningham said the dialog all comes from Mee. Intrigued? Okay, I’ll elaborate…

3LD (also known as 3-legged Dog) is a state-of-the-art multimedia center deep downtown. The “theater” for Fire Island is a space the size of my suburban elementary school lunchroom, and two of the walls are covered in curving LCD screens. Imagine being at eye level next to one of those buildings in Times Square and you get an idea of the impact. The remaining two walls hold stages that are covered with a 45-degree slanted glass screen. Projections onto the screen look holographic, as do any actors who wander behind the glass.

And wander is an apt word for the nature of this spectacle. The audience wanders in and receives a key on a lanyard as a ticket stub; the hot dog cart and bar are open; you take your pick of cushion, beach chair or backjack and claim a piece of beachfront facing any which way in the middle of the room. Tubs of soda and beer dot the audience and complete the feeling of being at an outdoor picnic. Actors begin to wander about. You can pick out the more outrageous by their costumes and the less outrageous by the fact that you begin to hear soft amplified voices in the aural cacaphony and notice that the person 50 yards away is moving her mouth as she cuts through the crowd. Some of the wanderers end up in one corner of the room — in front of the tiki hut containing 10 computer monitors that are clearly firing on all chips to keep this display going — to become a band.

Once the structured part of the performance kicks in,which doesn’t require anyone to stay put; it’s still run like a picnic, the drama unfolds: we’re watching lovers quarrel and former lovers hint at why they are finished and potential lovers connect. The dialog rings true to any number of personal memories and friends’ stories, but never really resolves anything. Instead it serves as a medium to explore this amazing performance method. Much like an opera can take any story, but you watch for the singing, this is a show about audio/visual theatrical technique, and there’s a lot to enjoy.

The story takes place in layers. One layer is played out by the actors in the room. A second takes place on screen in video shot in Fire Island during the summer. The dialog is the same, so you have the sense of memory and immediacy, filmic scenery and visceral contact with actors, who might be standing right next to you with a knife in hand. A third layer is abstraction, which manifests as the clown who pranks his way through the play in pursuit of various audience members, but ultimately ends up with the waif, played by Allison Keating, who adds to the abstraction layer by appearing on the ‘holographic’ screens smashing a mountain of plates.

The casting and musical choices are terrific; players are a varied assembly of old and young, pretty boy, plain boy simple girl and exotic girl. Some cast members double up on talent: Tami Stronach acts and dances and several musicians play key roles. The choice of music, Tuvan throat singer and rock band leader Albert Kuvezin of the band Yat Kha, makes this show worth the price even if nothing else was happening. But of course there’s much, much more to take in.

Fire island is that unique venture onto new ground that has you a little worried going in and has you telling friends not to miss on the way out.

I enjoyed the Katy Moran exhibition.

Prompted by the Times article on small abstracts.

Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?

Kind of strange to see those small canvasses on a large wall.

Apparently they are abstracted images often pulled from the internet.
My question which went unanswered was does she do more than one at a time?

I find the need to have a place to absorb the excess energy which will overwork a single painting.

I did a series of watercolors by preparing the paper in one session. 20 or so pieces 9″ x 12″. I splashed and smeared and had a great time knowing I was going to be spending the next week in a hotel i took the prepared pieces and pulled them together quietly and patiently. It was a successful process involving two different states of being.

here’s a link to my finished pieces.

Is it just nostalgia to want record stores to stay open? They don’t think so. And neither do I. See what Other Music and other small record stores across the country are planning, via the New York Times.

why I don’t care

why I do care

Being a mature-er person, one has more of a sense of the limitations that life has to offer. When I was a kid, I danced, I wrote, I played music, I made visual work. Nothing mattered, there was time. Actually, there was no idea of time.

But one thing I never did was make stuff that I didn’t think was, ummm, how to call it: really important.

I picked up an LA-based art magazine tonight at an opening in SoHO ( for those of you not mature-er, a New York neighborhood that used to be really important to the arts) and read a little about the issue’s topic (artists who make films) and got kind of excited about chowing down on some non-NYC views. I only made it a few pages though. 

why I don’t care: I am exhausted by the voluminous mass of art that is clever and critical of society and ironic (I hate to be so trite as to use that word) and funny and A.D.D. and ‘hilarious.’

Contrast tangent: Venezuelan TV just ousted the Simpson’s for being ‘innappropriate’ for children. While the basis of this decision will be immediately outweighed by the fact that they put Baywatch in it’s place, there is something noble about the decision. My point: Nobility–where did it go?

why I do care

A lot of artists are so intent on making the most important work they’ve ever heard of, ever seen, ever could do. They do all kinds of things they’re no good at to be able to afford to make it, they rally friends, colleagues, and powers that be to pull shit off, they lose money in the process. They make the work.

I get so tired trying to sift through the voluminous mass of art that is clever and critical of society and ironic to get to the piece of art that is clever and critical of society and ironic and fucking brilliant. I was at an opening tonight with some curators from major institutions and funders and artists and administrators. 

And I decided to leave. I just couldn’t do the talk: what do you do, where do you work, where do you show, what are you working on. Have you seen….

There’s probably no actual logical train of thought here. It’s a rant. But it’s a selfless rant. I am not after anything more for myself. I would however, like to see something for the world. The art marketed, globally warmed, lesser of two evils governed, astronomically-stratified, no-time constrained, no-community disconnected, unaffordable-rent stifled world. 

I’d like to see nobility. I would like to see a hipster art magazine where the work was as kick-ass as the struggling artists who are making important work. I’d like to see discussion of people in the street working at XYZ so they can act or paint. I love famous artists as much as the next guy, when they’re good. But is art only about famous artists? Uch, it’s exhausting to think about positioning and marketing and publicity–on top of making work. I’m becoming more and more resigned to the impossibility of reconciling an interest in the art world and an interest in making art. Except that it’s interesting to have a dialog–even a visual dialog and galleries are an excellent place to get monologued so you can dialog with yourself.

Contrast tangent: Yoga magazines where they sell hundred dollar work out clothes made of natural fabrics and practice in thousand dollar a day resorts.

 

Okay, I’m done. I have to go make money and then make art. But first, it was fun to complain a little. 

See our video interview in the Artists Unite Member Network.

Looping the Loop: Poems and Stories
Hattie Gossett “diva deluxe …. intellectual godmother of rap artists” –Village Voice
Nicholas Johnson “poems…both hilarious and disturbing” –Martin Mitchell, Home Planet News
Carol Novack “flavor samples for all of the senses.” –Cicily Janus, at eclectica.org

Hattie Gossett is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. As a spoken word artist, she performs solo or with her Poetry Jazz band; recent gigs include the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and the Vision Festival. Alvin Alley Dance Company and Urban Bush Women dance to her words, which are preserved in the Smithsonian Institute. She is the author of Presenting Sister Noblues and is a co-founding editor of Essence magazine and Kitchen Table Press. She lives at the intersection of Harlem and the Dominican Republic and works with Seniors Helping Seniors.

Nicholas Johnson is co-founder and editor of BigCityLit.com. He has been a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of The Lyric Recovery Festival Award 2000. A teacher of creative writing at the Payne Whitney Clinic and The Lighthouse, he holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College and an ABD from the Catholic University of America. His poems are forthcoming in The Same, Heliotrope, Orbis and the Greek-American anthology Pomegranate Seeds. His chapbook Degrees of Freedom is from Bright Hill Press.

Carol Novack used to practice criminal and constitutional law and now publishes Mad Hatters’ Review. A fusionist and frequent collaborator, her writings have been published or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Fiction International, First Intensity, Journal of Experimental Fiction, LIT, Notre Dame Review, and Otoliths. Her first multi-genre chapbook will emerge this year. Her performance work is recorded on the CD Inventions : Fictions, Fusions & Poems. Her Web site is http://carolnovack.blogspot.com.

Sunday Best Reading Series
Spoken-word performances by fiction writers, poets, and dramatists

The Lounge, Hudson View Gardens
Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street

April 20th at 4:00 p.m.

Suggested donation of $7 includes one free drink and free snacks
Reception after to meet the writers

The bookseller for this event is MOBILE LIBRIS (Sharon Preiss, Proprietor)

By subway from downtown: Take the A train to 181st Street. Be at the front of the train. Walk upstairs; take the elevator to Fort Washington Avenue. Cross the little park you’ll see (Bennett Park), bearing left around the great circle. When you’ve crossed the park, you’ll be on Pinehurst Avenue. Look left. You’ll see 183rd Street, which continues into Hudson View Gardens as a private road. To your right, you’ll see a sign that says “The Lounge.”

Ask about our program of special discounts for student and other groups.

Patricia Eakins, Curator
Sunday Best Reading Series
116 Pinehurst Avenue, #C-42
New York, NY 10033

212-923-7800 x1342
212-928-4227

PRAISE FOR THE SUNDAY BEST READING SERIES
“…a sumptuous setting. The room just glowed in the late afternoon
sun, jammed with friends and members of our tribe. And the delicate,
fresh touch of the flowers set up on either side of the podium … simply elegant!
Not too much, not too little.” –Elaine Sexton, poet, author of Sleuth and Causeway

” The space, audience, and whole event was so thoughtfully put together.
The reception, especially, was great as we  all had a chance to talk.” –Suzanne Parker, poet and director of the Brookdale Visiting Writers Series

“Great to discover an ongoing literary event in upper Manhattan.” –Geer Austin, poet and Inwood resident.

“I’m  giddy and glad that an event of such caliber is happening in such a gorgeous setting
in our neighborhood. Top-flight and equal in quality to any: that’s key to me and it’s great. SO kudos and bravo to you for doing it! ”
–Amir Parsa, author Drive-by Cannibalism in the Baroque Tradition and  resident of Washington Heights.
********************
Patricia Eakins is an award-winning fiction writer. Please visit her Web site.
www.fabulara.com

I caught Al Houghton’s band, life in a blender, Friday at an unusual venue: the whitney biennial. The biennial is spread out, as you probably know. This show was part of the project Neighborhood Public Radio, which is set up as a low-power+internet radio station and performance space in the storefront a couple doors down from the whitney’s front door.The space has terrific sound and video capability to boot, and the fans enjoyed every drop of good sound including blender hits like “I am a member of the mobile wash unit.” There’s a rumor that the show will be archived at NPR’s site, but I haven’t found it yet.

Diana Schmertz
Solo Exhibit
ECHOES
April 1 - 26, 2008

Opening Reception:
Friday April 4, 6-9pm

K.B. Gallery:
875 West 181st Street & Riverside Drive.
New York, New York 10033
Contact: 212 543-2393
Tuesday-Sunday 11am-6pm or by appointment

image:
Contact, Acrylic on Canvas, 22 x 30 inches, 2008

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