Artists Unite Issue

This morning I was thinking about health care reform, and the vociferous opposition to it in the form of people, many armed, showing up to disrupt town hall meetings on the subject. I thought about those who would say it’s not wise for an artist to publicly express an opinion about this issue, because he or she could risk alienating collectors or others who may bear some power over them. Then I went back to thinking about those fearful, raging people who are so afraid that providing health care for the over 50 million uninsured people in this country is somehow going to infringe upon their own freedoms, especially their right to carry weapons. Who are these people who hate so much? Oh yeah. They’re the same people who hate gays and and anyone of color (especially in the Oval Office). They are the same people who want to wrest the right of reproductive choice from women, and who are suspicious of artists and anybody who doesn’t fit into their mold.

Americans for the Arts has joined with 20 national arts organizations to issue a statement calling on Congress for health care reform, and “to fully recognize the rights of individual artists and arts groups in the health care reform debate.” I want to exercise those rights.

So, when I got dressed this morning, I pulled from deep in my drawer a T-shirt I got after going on the AIDS walk many years ago. It was imprinted with words and an image by the late artist David Wojnarowicz, who was one of the legions of talented people the art community lost too early because people tolerated a screwed up system for too long. I pulled on my T-shirt and got on the crowded subway for the long ride downtown. On my back, his words seared:

If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS…” says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what his official looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastika’s that wear religious garments over their murerous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples lips; the religious types outside st. patricks cathedral shouting to men and women in the gay parade: “You won’t be here next year–you’ll get AIDS and die ha ha” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an anti-violence bill that includes ’sexual orientation’ as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line a very thin line and as each t-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into non-violent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america seems to understand and accept murder as a self defense against those who would murder other people and its been murder on a daily basis for eight count them eight [nine, ten...] long years and we’re expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and heathcare officials that had better get bigger dogs and higher fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

I took more than a moment to remember all those who were gone like Wojnarowicz and Keith Haring, and countless others who were willing to Act Up to save lives. It’s not just about AIDS now, nor was it then, really. Think about it.

Tomorrow I will have to resurrect another ancient T-shirt, one emblazoned with an image by the late Keith Haring, and bearing the ever-so-relevant words: IGNORANCE=FEAR, SILENCE=DEATH.

[originally published on Sky Pape's blog, "Drawn Together: Sky Pape's Drawing and Fine Art Blog"]

[Text from my T-shirt: copyright Estate of David Wojnarowicz. Audio of David Wojnarowicz reading at The Drawing Center in 1992, shortly before his death.]

[images from top: David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Peter Hujar), 1989, silver print, 30-1/2" x 24-1/2"); David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Face in Dirt", 1990, silver print, 28-1/2" x 28-1/2", both copyright Estate of David Wojnarowicz and courtesy of PPOW Gallery. Keith Haring, "Ignorance=Fear", 1989, poster, 24" x 43-1/4", copyright the Estate of Keith Haring, courtesy of The Keith Haring Foundation.]

My thoughts have returned to the superiority of first-hand over virtual experience. By this, I mean looking at original artwork as opposed to viewing it on a computer monitor, taking off your iPod and going to hear live music, attending a dance performance, a play, a poetry or book reading, and yes, even just kicking yourself outside to move your legs, smell the flowers, and hear the birds sing.

The in-person experience and meaning of a large-scale work of art cannot be conveyed by a jpeg any more than looking at a picture of a gourmet meal can compare to savoring it oneself. Any more than typing XOXO is like kissing and hugging someone you love. This is the problem. Seeing or reading something on-line is not an acceptable substitute for real experience, yet the more we get sucked into it, the harder becomes to pull away, unplug, and venture out into the physical world, where engaging with people and art and nature can be challenging and even messy, and slightly risky because you can’t just click and instantly transport yourself somewhere else.

I recognize the irony in writing about disconnecting oneself from the computer and other electronic devices, and then posting it on my blog. Well, life is full of little ironies, including the one about how computers were going to save us all scads of time and make us all so much more productive (except for those Facebook and Twitter junkies who get themselves fired).

When psychiatric diagnosis-like terms such as “Information Anxiety” (coined by Richard Saul Wurman who created the TED conferences) and “Nature Deficit Disorder” start showing up, it’s time to acknowledge there’s a problem. “We must keep in mind that information or raw data is not knowledge. Individuals achieve knowledge by using their own experience, distinguishing the important from the irrelevant and making critical value judgments.”

[Note: Extra reading - You also might enjoy Nicholas Kristof's NDD-related article "How to Lick a Slug" if you missed it, and Brad Stone's NY Times article, "Breakfast Can Wait. The Day's First Stop Is Online."]

Today, people spend less time looking at a work of art itself than they do looking through the viewfinder of their digital cameras so they can snap a picture to post online to show others what they’ve seen - when they haven’t even really looked at it! This NY Times article by Michael Kimmelman hit it dead on:

“Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover…”

“…The art historian T. J. Clark…has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.”

“Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we’re any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.”

I could go on, but I realize this post has just exceeded 600 words, and I don’t want to strain anyone’s techno-abbreviated attention span. More importantly, it’s time to begin my weekly 24-hour, technology-free, official Day Off, so I want to get away from the computer as much as I want you to do so too.

So that’s it until next time, but ’til then, let’s all do something to get out there and remind ourselves there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby.

[article reposted from "Drawn Together" - Sky Pape's Drawing and Fine Art Blog. Please visit it for more!]

I received a link today to this 2006 televised performance of a piece by Merce Cunningham’s long-time collaborator John Cage. I then learned of Cunningham’s death and heard highlighted on Brian Lehrer’s show Cunningham’s process of not choreographing to music (music appeared in his pieces at dress rehearsal). So I thought this performance of 4′33 was an apt tribute, albeit unintentional. Cunningham was at the forefront of his craft and of the world of art to the end. His website, www.merce.org broke ground by streaming webcasts of rehearsals; he planned for the disbanding of his company two years after his death, pre-settling artistic questions about how to carry on his work.

Sky Paper recently twittered about an attempt to flag public art around the city. Here’s what I’ve seen lately, on a phone booth on Bleecker Street. yeah now…

take your first chance to see new york’s newest perspective. It’s beautiful. The rest of my pics are here:

http://artistsunite.ning.com/photo/albums/high-line

A site called UniversityReviewsOnline.com just posted a list of 100 best scholarly art blogs. It makes a good anotated reference list if you’re looking for someone to check out or follow; it also breaks blogs into some interesting categories, including news, criticism, and artist community — where you’ll find Artists Unite.

Like So Many Things… 

(but so very unlike most of what’s out there in viral video garage band land)

In 2001 BMW set the bar for short indie film work on the internet with the magnificent series “The Hire.” And then they came back and hit it high again with the 2002 edition   really setting us up for a big fall. How exciting was that? It seemed like a promise of great things to come but instead it’s mostly been Jackass style hi-jinx, family pet, and frat boy part-tee videos, or uploads of that guy doing his jig or the Complaint Chorus since then. Some things better than others, but still basically nothing more than visual garage band land - “uh-huh, that’s great, good for you, yeah and oh hey, are you gonna finish those fries” stuff. Nothing nowhere near what “The Hire” was about – which is inspired short feature filmmaking.1

Probably there’s been some good video work out there on the so called “viral video” scene that is trying to break away, but I’m not finding it. Luckily IFC has also been on the lookout for good work for their website programming and they found something: “Like So Many Things…,” a new online video series by This Thing Films. “Like So Many Things…” is smart and funny, beautifully shot and edited, well acted and well directed with good writing - seven “webisodes” that are spot on and spot on for the internet.

The series follows Lucy and Karl, two lonely, but young and game, hearts who meet at a bar on a Friday night. We meet them when Karl (played by Greg Keller) runs out of the bar looking for Lucy (played by Marin Gazzaniga) with an offer to walk her home.

Okay, they just left a bar; they’d been drinking; figure reason and sound judgment, or at least common sense standards, have dropped far out of sight. That leaves them thinking they maybe got something here and neither wants to let go of the possibility of a possibility so they’re off and running, or rather lurching and stumbling about, in pursuit of the connection.  The filmmakers run that thread through the seven episodes of timed and chanced meetings of this idiotic, pathetic, funny, charming and dear duo with great success.  Episode 2, Future Days, Future Nights, begins on a wonderfully comical moment as Lucy and Karl run into each other on the street and stand on opposite sidewalks shouting their conversation over and through the traffic. It’s as hilarious as it is touching and sad and you find yourself shaking your head wondering what’s wrong with these two while hoping like mad that they can get it right.  You recognize them; they’re familiar in fact that could be you out there – or me. Could be, that is, if our lives are so much more together.

As the story takes turns, leaps here or bounds there, and suggests, hides, or reveals itself the filmmakers are right on it, with nary a misstep, and like good short film making the pieces have the tease that slips in from nowhere lands a punch, or a slap, a soft caress or a kiss, and then just as just when you thought you were getting on to it; it slyly slides out of your life.

(1 The Complaints Chorus is good, but it’s the choral work that inspired, not the filmmaking, and this is true of most of the good video work on the internet - the good part isn’t related to video/filmmaking, and that’s what we’re talking about here; that’s what we’re wanting.)

* Carol Ann Duffy
* The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

Ms Duffy makes sarcastic use of phrases such as Tony Blair’s “education, education, education” and Gordon Brown’s “moral compass”.

Duffy is the first female poet laureate in the post’s 341-year history.

The poem aims to attack the effect of politics on idealism.

Call for artwork:

Artists Unite Creative Venues: Projection Show
June 25-27

When is a wall not a barrier?

Artists are invited to submit video or still images of work in any medium. The work will be projected onto a prominent building wall in northern Manhattan (the exact location in Washington Heights/Inwood will be announced once approval is finalized). 

Please submit work that considers the concept of wall — barrier, community, container, environment, canvas, etc. — in ways that transcend the cynical. The exhibition aims to create an instance of inspiration and wonder, using scale, wit, abstraction, analogy, and inquiry. The exhibition will simultaneously be exhibited online and remain as an archived exhibition at www.artistsunite-ny.org

Washington Heights/Inwood is a diverse community with a prominent Latino population and many visual and performing artists. The exhibition will be viewed by the general public over three evenings and coincides with the Uptown Arts Stroll, a month-long celebration of the arts in Northern Manhattan.

The exhibition will be drawn from invitations by the curators and through submissions.

To submit work for consideration, join Artists Unite’s member network if you haven’t already (http://artistsunite.ning.com) and upload submissions according to directions below. IMPORTANT: in the tag field for each photo or video, enter the word “wall” (Work without this tag will not be seen as a submission). Then send an artist statement and resume to websubmissions@artistsunite-ny.org.

• Photography or still images of other media: At the member network site, click on the tab Photos and then on the link “Add Photos.” Upload up to 6 images for consideration. Images should not exceed 2MB.
• Video: At the member network site, click on the tab Video and follow the upload procedure. Videos should not exceed 50MB and should be no more than approximately 1 minute in length and without sound.

Deadline for submission is Friday June 12 at midnight. Selection notifications will be made in approximately 2 weeks.

Curated by Anthony Archibald J. and Peter Ferko

Send questions to websubmissions@artistsunite-ny.org

While I like the social networking tendencies of web 2+, I don’t really have time to keep up with it. And there’s not too often I feel like I’m missing out. There are far too many facebook entries that sound like what I might hear from school kids as they gab with each other walking up the street to a field trip (I want some candy, billy’s a jerk, I’m tired of this walk, monica’s cute). Of course it’s all made up for by the terrific opportunities to reconnect with a long lost friend, or to hear about a great event or cause, or to find out your colleague is in Bali and forgot to tell you.

So I was relieved to hear about the study by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski that found that Twitter is less of a conversation than a personal publishing platform for a select few. That means I don’t necessarily have to start following more people as the average user only tweets once per 74 days and 90% of the tweets are coming from 10% of the tweeters anyway. Now that the pressure’s off, I’ll go tweet that I’ll be tweeting you in about two months.

Of course artists will find uses for tweeting. Publishing, experiments in community and events, virtual this and that. That would be something to follow…

Here’s the study announcement: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

Gain valuable experience this summer as an intern at Artists Unite. Artists Unite is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to explore innovative collaboration and to make opportunities for artists to make work and for people to view art and performance. This is an excellent opportunity for a student of arts administration or for artists looking at ways to make projects a reality. To learn about our organization, please visit our web site at www.artistsunite-ny.org and our member network at http://artistsunite.ning.com.

Duties include:

• Maintenance of facebook, web and other media, including writing
• Assistance with production of summer exhibitions (coordination with artists, work with vendors)
• Public relations (arranging distribution of materials, searching for press coverage)
• Help with web site/social network integration

Qualifications:

• Familiarity with web and social networking
• Good writing and communication skills
• Graphic design/art skills a plus

Dates of internship: two sessions: June 1-30; July 1-August 31 (it is possible to do both sessions)

Hours to be arranged. June session approximately 10 hours/week; July-August session approximately 5 hours/week.

There is no pay for this position.

Please send cover letter and resume to peterferko@artistsunite-ny.org

Social media has drawn together a group of international artists to New York for Aequitas, an exhibit of art based on childhood experiences.

Artspace OSA in New York City and the virtual community of Second Life will host a joint exhibition of international artists: paintings, digital work, and virtual world installations during the month of June 2009.

Artists can be a solitary lot but with the advent of virtual worlds and web 2.0 they are finding each other and communicating in the way they know best: making and exhibiting art together. This disparate group of artists, having never met face to face, nevertheless finds a common ground in exploring their childhood for art.
Sowa Mai, also known as the artist Stephen Beveridge, conceived and planned this exhibit as an extension of the relationships he had formed in the Second Life virtual world with artist/avatars from different time zones and cultural backgrounds.
The exhibit in Washington Heights, New York City will display paintings and digital work by the human artists. An exhibit in the Second Life virtual world will consist of (art) installations and scripted objects by the human artists’ avatar counterparts. Both exhibits are based around the theme of mining childhood experience for art.

Dekka Raymaker Andrew MacLachlan Penumbra Carter Beth Olds Nebulosus Severine CM Pauluh Sowa Mai Stephen Beveridge David Ferrando Banrion Constantine Robert Garlick Elif Arat

Aequitas
Artspace OSA
June 1 - June 30, 2009
Reception Friday June 19th. 6:30-8:30
178 Bennett Ave @ 189th St, NYC
1 train to 191st Street | A train to 190th Street

Second Life Version
Caerleon Art Collective
June 26 - July 3, 2009
Reception June 26th. 6:30-8:30slpm
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Art%20Collective2/108/48/24/

Contact:
Stephen Beveridge
212 928 8351
SowaMai@gmail.com