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Hidden City Festival 2013 site preview – Rabid Hands Arts Collective creates The Society of Pythagoras at Hawthorne Hall

dashiell farewell — Wed, 22 May 2013 05:19:07 +0000

From May 23rd to June 30th, Hidden City Philadelphia will hold its second Hidden City Festival, hosting art shows and events at nine sites around the Philadelphia area. Hidden City Philadelphia was born out of its previous festival, held in 2009. Now a successful full-time online magazine, Hidden City also hosts tours and events, and boasts a developing Community Action program. The idea of the Hidden City Festival is to mount contemporary, site-based art installations in little-known or endangered sites throughout Philadelphia, preferably with some kind of connection to the city’s heritage. For the 2013 festival, which features taglines like “Ready, Set, Explore,” and “See the City Anew,” Hidden City is hoping to offer Philadelphians the opportunity to explore unique environments, view intriguing and original art, and visit parts of the city that might otherwise escape their notice, all while engaging with Philadelphia’s rich and diverse history.

Hawthorne Hall’s unique facade

Rabid Hands Art Collective uses abandoned spaces and their unique histories as inspiration

I recently has the opportunity to visit Hawthorne Hall, one of the nine sites featured this year, for a preview showing. Hawthorne Hall, tucked inside an apartment block in Powelton, is home to a sprawling, walk-through installation piece created for the festival by Rabid Hands Art Collective.

As a group, Rabid Hands is primarily interested in overtaking abandoned or underused locations with epic installations pieces. To do this, they invite many artists with a wide range of artistic practices to come and engage with the site, co-creating installations in a deeply collaborative process. Rabid Hands creates work using discarded and found materials inside unique architectural spaces. The goal is to have the art and the space itself frame and comment upon one another in ways not possible in traditional gallery spaces.

A view of the main space in Hawthorne Hall

A major inspiration for Rabid Hands’ transformation of Hawthorne Hall is the rich history of the space. Built in 1895, the Hall has been home to dozens of organizations over the years. Notable groups that have inhabited – and thus altered, modified, and left their charge upon space – include the Irish National Foresters, New Light National Baptist Church, and the Knights of Pythias. Unique moldings suggest the space may have also been home to a cabaret theater at one point. Each of these former tenants added to the space, either physically altering it or imbuing it with new meaning by their presence and the rituals they enacted within it.

Rabid Hands is using this idea as a jumping-off point, hoping to emphasize these layers of history through their installations. To do this, the artists are forming The Society of Pythagoras, a secret society much like ones formerly housed in the Hall. Each of the artists will take on a specific role and title within the society, and the pieces they create will reflect and play off of the secretive, ritualistic practices these kinds of societies engage in.

Walking through the space, visitors will find themselves gradually initiated into the society as well, each setpiece serving as some unique kind of introduction or induction ceremony.

Various instruments and sound installations will be a part of the completed installation

Rabid Hands’ installation engages and melds with Hawthorne Hall

The sprawling interior of Hawthorne Hall is an excellent example of wabi-sabi, an aesthetic concept originating in Japan that privileges the beauty of imperfection in nature and the inevitability of decay. Wabi-sabi places this more authentic aesthetic, with its many imperfections, over the manufactured or uniform. Hawthorne Hall is both beautiful and charged with history, in large part because it’s resplendent with swaths of rust, walls of chaotically textured chipping paint, expanses of crumbling wooden rafters, and stretches of cracked cement; we can see how time and use have weathered this space, leaving indelible marks and blemishes that are both imperfect and beautiful at once.

One of the most fascinating elements of Rabid Hands’ approach is the ways in which their art does not merely exist within the space but actually merges and melds with the existing architecture, becoming a part of the space in the process. An “Initiation Chamber,” a wooden structure built into the central room of the Hall, seems to spill out organically from the fragmented roof timbers above it. Visitors can descend down clanging metal steps into a massive, below-ground baptismal fount where they will find themselves submerged in light. A twisting, stone corridor will lead to reliquaries tucked behind crumbling wooden doors. A series of carefully constructed balconies hold arcane symbols in their rusted railings. Secret doors open to reveal hidden ceremonial chambers.

It seems that in every corner of Hawthorne Hall, Rabid Hands offers new ways to engage with the space and the many layers of history contained therein. In peeling back, exposing, and engaging with these layers and thereby emphasizing the charges that history can leave upon a place, the artists allow a visitor to interact and encounter this history in novel ways, and transform this neglected space into one suffused with meaning and possibility in the process.

Crumbling, peeling walls serve as beautiful counterparts to much of the art

Rabid Hands’ work at Hawthorne Hall reflects Hidden City’s mission

The aim of the Hidden City Festival is to celebrate the power of place by offering up unique spaces for contemporary artists to transform. By allowing these artists to engage with forgotten fragments of Philadelphia’s past, the Festival hopes to inspire people to get engaged with history while simultaneously imagining new, potentially radical futures for city. By illuminating the beauty, power, and even practical use of obscure and forgotten urban spaces, new ways to interact with all corners of our urban landscape emerge. From what I saw of Hawthorne Hall and from the brief conversations I had with some of the artists involved, it seems that Rabid Hands is approaching this mission in a number of fascinating ways.

Rabid Hands wants us to experience art that engages all the senses, that is tactile, textural, and tells a story. They want to explore the positive ramifications of giving abandoned spaces new life, even if only temporarily. They want to encourage us to encounter spaces deemed “useless” and instead see new possibilities. They want us to find the beauty in dilapidation and thus come to see our constant demand for the new and the pristine as misguided. Their mission is a radical one, and fits in perfectly with Hidden City’s progressive conception of urban space.

Although very much a work-in-progress when I viewed the site earlier this month, Rabid Hands’ takeover promises to transform Hawthorne Hall into a fascinating exploration and re-contextualization of the history of that site and, by extension, our city.

The Hidden City Festival 2013 runs from May 23rd to June 30th. Festival passes, schedules of events, and Hidden City Membership information can be found here.

A Novel Melody – Kuerner Sounds at the Brandywine River Museum

maeve coudrelle — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:19:46 +0000

Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania is home to something of an Andrew Wyeth (1940–2009) cult. Touted as one of the most well-known American artists of the 20^th century, Wyeth spawned a wealth of imitators. His signature style gave rise to a seemingly never-ending procession of ersatz pastoral landscape paintings, replete with modest barns and farm animals. The latter are reproduced and displayed enthusiastically throughout Delaware County, found in many a living room or coffee shop. Meanwhile, N.C. (Andrew’s father) and Jamie (his son) maintain their own followings.

Kuerner Farm is accessible by a five minute shuttle bus ride from the main museum

Wyeth’s ubiquity tends to group viewers into one of two camps: devotees and fervent detractors. When someone’s work is so omnipresent, it is hard to reexamine it without preconceptions.

The Brandywine River Museum seeks to combat this reaction by bringing in contemporary artists to engage with Wyeth’s art and sources of inspiration in novel ways. Thomas Padon, the museum’s director, hopes to host a series of site-specific installations throughout the grounds, bringing new eyes to the historic properties and landscape under the museum’s care.

Kuerner Sounds is the first of these, a pop-up exhibition funded by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

Michael Kiley revisiting the grounds

Kuerner Farm becomes a meeting place for old and new art

“No Idea is too Ridiculous: An Experiment in Creative Practice” is the audacious name of the Pew opportunity grant that led Supervisor of Education, Mary Cronin and Associate Curator, Christine Podmaniczky to reach out to Philadelphia-based sound artist, Michael Kiley. The program encourages local organizations to take artistic risks within the constraints of a tight budget and a markedly short time frame. The Brandywine River Museum is one of six Greater Philadelphia area institutions selected to participate this year, pursuing an inventive project that will take place over a fleeting eight weeks, from its initial planning, to its inception, to its final analysis.

The barn and grounds are still in use by Karl Kuerner’s descendants

Cronin and Podmaniczky chose Kuerner Farm as a site to reexamine and enliven for visitors. Wyeth originally discovered it as a boy, when he developed a fascination with Karl Kuerner, a German immigrant and World War I machine gunner. After they became close friends, Wyeth was granted full access to the farm to paint and draw at will. He visited for almost seventy years thereafter, drawing continuous inspiration from the farm’s inhabitants and surroundings. Cronin asserts that the painter was intensely aware of the multisensory richness of the space. In a notable example, Wyeths’s painting “Spring Fed” (1967) references the echoes of dripping water and rustling animals heard throughout the barn.

The IPod Shuffle and CD passed out to visitors

Today, the museum conducts twice daily tours of the historic property, leading visitors through an hour-long excursion. In an effort to provide fresh insights and encourage visitors to engage with the space in a novel way, Kiley was brought in to create a sound installation component to the tour. In a previous work centered around Rittenhouse Square, Kiley created a GPS-enabled IPhone app that played different environmental sounds depending on a pedestrian’s location, which sought to prevent people from retreating into themselves in public.

The auditory sense of place invoked by this earlier piece is what led to Kiley’s selection for the Kuerner endeavor; Cronin and Podmaniczky wished to explore the previously unexamined aural elements that make Kuerner Farm unique, something they felt Kiley would be acutely sensitive to.

The view from the back porch

Michael Kiley creates sound art inspired by space and place

After first being contacted in March, Kiley was given a tour of the property, during which he quickly became acquainted with Wyeth’s relationship with the farm. Kiley later returned alone to capture field recordings. The five minute piece that results from the melding and layering of these clips is available to visitors on an IPod Shuffle as they enter the farm house. Visitors are encouraged to wander while listening; a particularly serene spot to listen to the work is on the back porch, with a prime view of the animals, pastures and architecture that informed its creation.

The impetus behind Kiley’s installations lies in a captivation with the manner in which sound shapes one’s experiences in particular locales. Kiley puts forth that while sound art is often obtuse, he strives for wider accessibility with his own work. His goal is to bring sound design out of the theater (where Kiley composes for a number of productions) and into public places. At Kuerner Farm, Kiley’s work reflects his shifting reactions to the space, which he found “spooky” and foreboding at first, but peaceful after further reflection. There is a weight here, the artist asserts, tied into the rich history of the area.

The farm’s resident cat, Sophie

Kiley’s recording is available online, as well as in person during the tour. It incorporates frogs, whose “singing” frames the piece, along with manipulated field clips resembling dripping water, the opening of a screen door, and distant howling. To this, Kiley adds resounding claps, soft guitar strokes, and his own voice, a haunting choral accompaniment. A reflection on Wyeth’s relationship with Kuerner, perhaps a pseudo-father figure after the death of N.C., the lyrics capture what Kiley believes to be a universal phenomenon: “the loss of a vessel for our love means that love needs to go somewhere else … [loss] affects where we put our feelings.” The lyrics are as follows:

When you left, I wasn’t done pouring myself into you

Now I am left to search over tilted ground

I’ll have no shape to mold to

Until the inertia you created in me finds elsewhere to rest

Taken together, the assorted clips, embellished and melodized, create a piece that will resonate with visitors, offering a personal moment of reflection in an otherwise collective, well-choreographed experience. It will be interesting to see what the Brandywine River Museum does in the future to bring new context to an otherwise well-explored narrative.

“Kuerner Sounds” runs to May 24. Brandywine River Museum, 1 Hoffman’s Mill Road, Chadds Ford, PA 19317. To schedule a tour of Kuerner Farm, click here.

A Charles Searles celebration – Three concurrent exhibitions

jennifer zarro — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:19:28 +0000

The work and legacy of the great Philadelphia-born artist Charles Searles (1937-2004) will be explored in three concurrent exhibitions at LaSalle University Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, and Tyler School of Art. The kernel for these exhibitions formed when Kathleen Spicer, Searles’ wife and fellow artist, contacted Temple University’s art history program requesting assistance cataloging and organizing the Searles estate. This eventually led to a series of exhibition seminars, in which undergraduate and graduate students at Tyler School of Art and LaSalle University worked to fulfill Spicer’s request. The result is three different but complementary exhibitions, along with an extensively researched 200-plus page catalogue devoted to Searles’ life and work. For their efforts, the students received funding for the shows from the Knight Art Challenge, an accomplishment which speaks volumes about the power. Searles’ work is staggering in its scope and emotional and visual impact. These exhibitions advance our understanding and appreciation of an artist who explored the figure and abstraction, photography, painting, and sculpture, and a visual language informed by western academic art traditions, music and dance, and the visual and cultural life of Nigeria and Ghana.

Charles Searles, “Untitled (The Boxer)”, 1963, ink and watercolor on paper, collection of the Woodmere Art Museum

From realism to abstraction, on display at Woodmere

Searles studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and his traditional figurative training is evident in the Woodmere’s Charles Searles: A Focus on the Figure, curated by Tyler School of Art Art History Ph.D. candidate Maite Barragan. This small and effective exhibition contains drawings and paintings from the 1960s through the 1980s.

During this time, Searles moves from realistic to flattened, abstracted figures. Searles’ style, “changes so rapidly,” noted Barragan in an email. “In his earlier work he really attempts to recreate figures in a naturalistic manner. He focuses on anatomy and attempts to get every detail correct.”

Charles Searles, “Bo Bro Bill,” 1969, mixed media on masonite and wood, collection of Kathleen Spicer

Location as inspiration at LaSalle University Art Museum

Eventually, Searles became frustrated with the traditional teaching modes at PAFA and in 1967 he took a semester leave to work in his South Street studio and develop his own modern style inspired by images and ideas from the streets of Philadelphia. The mixed media painting “Bo Bro Bill,” 1969, in the LaSalle University Art Museum exhibition, exemplifies this period. The mix of Coca-Cola signs and bottle caps are evidence of the urban signage and detritus that Searles collected and then assembled in his work. He also discovered the African art collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These collections impacted Searles’ developing style which at the time included collage, flattened figures, and an interest in African art and aesthetics.

In 1972 Searles’ was awarded PAFA’s Lewis S. Ware Memorial Traveling Scholarship which allowed him to visit Nigeria and Ghana.

Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of Art History at Tyler School of Art, mentioned in a phone conversation that Searles was one of the first artists to visit Africa during “an early phase of a number of black American artists who traveled to Africa to experience the culture and to engage the culture in their work.” During a lecture on Searles’ work, Spicer noted that this trip was “a life altering experience,” where he realized that “people walk while wearing patterns…they were like walking sculptures.”

Charles Searles, “Three Soul Visitors,” 1977, acrylic on canvas, collection of Kathleen Spicer

Rhythm, dynamism, and musicality in Searles’ art

Indeed, the brightly painted surfaces in Searles’ works move, dance, and suggest rhythmic surges. His sculptures stretch out against a wall or leap into space. Patterning and movement are abundantly present. Many of his paintings and sculptures are synesthetic, suggesting dance, rhythmic sound, and songs, all communicated with interacting shapes and intense colors. In some works, such as those from the “Soul” series of the mid-1970s, mask-like eyes peer out of patterned, colorful shapes; areas of dark, flat color are interspersed throughout. Art historian Michael D. Harris describes the single-color, flat shapes as similar to the “musical jump spaces” of jazz, the pauses that mark and keep the time. The textured surfaces, then, fill the time with more notes.

A Searles’ painting is a like a carefully constructed song of rhythms, resonances, and beats that move our eyes around the canvas. While Western art historical parlance may categorize these “empty,” flat spaces as “negative space,” with Searles these shapes are the positives that attract, organize, and hold together the remainder of the composition. A noted musician and drummer himself, Searles often played his drum to mark the completion of a work. Music is everywhere in Searles’ art.

Charles Searles: In Motion, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, installation view

The large scale sculptures on view in the atrium of Tyler School of Art appear to be walking or moving, extending across the floor or bounding off the wall. At times referred to as “leaners” for the ways in which they interact with the gallery walls, these pieces appear to exist somewhere between painting and free-standing sculpture. Several beautiful examples of these works are on display both at Tyler and LaSalle.

Searles began exploring the possibilities for painted wood sculpture in 1978 when he moved from Philadelphia to New York. In “Freedom’s Gate II,” 1990, we see the artist bending and arching wood in ways that may suggest parts of a human figure. The black and yellow spikes on the top of this sculpture are a repeating motif in Searles’ work, a reference to the braided hairstyles worn by his daughters. We can see these same braids on the head of a young girl in “In Front of the Store,” 1971, a painting also on view at Tyler.

Charles Searles, “Freedom’s Gate II,” 1990, acrylic on wood, collection of Kathleen Spicer

One of the strongest elements of these three exhibitions is the focus given to Searles’ evolution as an artist. The three shows form a complete survey of Searles remarkable career, and visiting all three venues allows us to get to know Searles deeply. As Maite Barragan notes, the exhibitions let us “come out with a great understanding of what Searles loved and how he worked.”

Tyler School of Art, Temple University — Charles Searles: In Motion, on view through June 16

LaSalle University Art Museum – Charles Searles: The Mask of Abstraction, on view through May 31

Woodmere Art Museum — Charles Searles: A Focus on the Figure, on view through June 15

Not-So-Friendly Skies – Jason Varone at Grizzly Grizzly

edward m. epstein — Sun, 19 May 2013 05:19:13 +0000

Video installation has progressed greatly since the days of the chattering box in the darkened room. Jason Varone’s It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great seamlessly integrates moving and still images in ways that might not have been possible only a few years ago. Curated by Grizzly Grizzly member Michael Konrad, the installation cleverly combines painted textures, words and some rather disturbing footage of aerial bombardment.

Jason Varone, “It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great,” mixed media installation, 10′ x 16′, 2013. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Varone has designed a diverse yet unified show

Though it comprises very different elements, Varone’s installation is singular in its unity. A pair of large snake-like forms undulates floor to ceiling and wraps around corners, carrying the eye with it. Projected words and images flow amidst the in-and-out of these hand-painted coils, disappearing precisely at their boundaries. One projection has a news feed looping around the corner of the gallery, while a second shows flocks of birds (and inexplicably, the occasional land animal) flying in an endless and hypnotic fashion. Painstaking digital masking techniques and high quality projectors have allowed Varone to crop the video to fit precisely into the irregular shapes of his wall paintings.

Just what do the two painted whiplash forms represent? Their surface is suggestive of many things, including scales, bark, or feathers. Another possibility, smoke, arises when you watch the rectangular video projection in the opposite corner of the gallery.

In a blurry montage which Varone pieced together from actual military footage, a drone locks its sights on a series of targets—cars, buildings, and people—then blam! They explode in flames. In this moment, the snake-like coils are transformed into smoke trailing behind a missile as it winds toward its prey, or a plume rising from a demolished target.

Jason Varone, “It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great,” mixed media installation, 10′ x 16′, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

Varone uses irony to create unsettling associations

A key element of Varone’s gun-sight montage is the soundtrack. The artist plays the footage against a sequence of 1960s Henry Mancini recordings whose cheerfulness adds more than a bit of irony to the work. Colored splotches the artist has inserted into the video reinforce that irony by referencing old-time celluloid film. Alternating between inane gossip about celebrities and news headlines about drone attacks, the text feed on the opposite wall has a similar disconnect. One story line with the title “So Romantic” even tells of a man who proposed to his future wife using a drone. Against this backdrop of insanity, flying land animals begin to seem normal.

Varone excels at making linkages in both form and subject matter between the installation’s disparate elements. He designs for the entire room, drawing the eye up and down with the serpentine forms and side-to-side with the scrolling projections.

While the drone video is on the surface very different in appearance and tone from the other elements, small details to tie them together. The painting on the walls resembles the form of the smoke in the video, and the splotches in the drone video resemble the color and feel of the painting on the walls.

Jason Varone, “It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great,” mixed media installation, 10′ x 16′, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

The most effective part of Varone’s approach is its subtlety. The work rewards slow, careful observation of its many connections and divergences. It Isn’t Always Going to Be This Great doesn’t seem so great to begin with—then blam! It hits with a punch line that is both well-crafted and frightening.

It Isn’t Always Going to be This Great is on view at Grizzly Grizzly, 319 N. 11th St., Philadelphia, May 3 – June 1, 2013.

News – Hennessy Youngman’s found art discourse, Isaac Lin & Leah Bailis in Austin, Doug Witmer curates at TSA, opportunities and more!

alyssa greenberg — Sat, 18 May 2013 16:29:44 +0000

News

“C’MON SOMEONE BUY THIS. YOU GOT TA FEEL ME. $20. SO MANY VISUAL COMPUTATIONS.”

In the vein of similar endeavors by Rauschenberg, Hammons and Orozco, greg.org posted an amusing item about Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) selling found objects on the street via his twitter feed. The resulting tweets are predictably priceless,

Athena Barat, long known to us as a powerhouse of art and social practice, was recently honored when the Women’s Center for Entrepreneurship Corporation jointly awarded her and her mother Chandri Woman of the Year. Athena, a former Philly resident, created The South Philly Biennial in 2008, and has been supporting her family’s foundation at their home base in Newark.

Douglas Witmer is curating a show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in August, called ICE WATER FLYSWATTER. We’re told it’s “Abstract painting on holiday in the Philadelphia summer,” and the lineup includes Alain Biltereyst (Belgium), Mary Bucci McCoy (MA), Donald Martiny (NC), Cary Smith (CT), Mark Wethli (ME), Paige Williams (OH), with a special poem/drawing by Ian White Williams commissioned for the show. curated by Douglas Witmer, the show runs August 2 — September 1, 2013 with a reception Friday August 2, 6-10pm.

Opportunities

The John D. Mineck Furniture Fellowship is offering a $25,000 award to encourage and support a “young in career” furniture artist. Administered by The Society of Arts and Crafts, they ask Selection guidelines, criteria & application instructions will be available by May 12, 2013 at www.societyofcrafts.org. Completed applications are due July 1, 2013.

The Clay Studio (TCS) seeks a Studio Technician to provide technical and administrative support to our Education Department and building maintenance as needed. They’re particularly interested in candidates with strong customer focus and effective communication, planning and organizing abilities, occupational knowledge and skills, and above all a great attitude. Job responsibilities run the gamut from supervising interns and volunteers, updating and monitoring schedules, tracking inventory, firing reduction and oxidation kilns, and maintaining safety of facilities and studios. The application requirements include a bachelors degree in Arts, Arts Education or related field, 1+years studio technician experience in a studio. The position, which reports to the Vice President, entails a salary of $25K for 40+ hours a week (depending upon qualifications, experience, and performance), as well as studio space. The Studio Technician is expected to be present for all scheduled gas firings for the School and special events, including First Fridays. To apply, e-mail a cover letter and resume to Jennifer@theclaystudio.org with Studio Technician in the subject heading by June 1, 2013.

Artist News

Mariposa, wood and wool, 24½ ’ x 13½’, 2010 – 2012.

Shelley Spector’s latest exhibition at Bridgette Mayer, “But Not as Much as Tomorrow,” garnered accolades in Art in America this month.

Isaac Lin and Leah Bailis are two of the exhibiting artists in Wally at MASS Gallery, a presentation of works in painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, and sculpture. Wally runs from May 18 to June 22, with a full-day opening in coordination with other East Austin galleries as part of Frame. If you’re in the area, there is a free public event at the gallery on Saturday, May 18 from 12 pm to 10 pm, boasting art, live music, lawn games, refreshments and more.

Work from the upcoming “Nature’s Mark” show at the Hunterdon Art Museum.

Dianne Koppisch Hricko and Richard Hricko are two of the artists showing work in Nature’s Mark: Printing on Fiber, opening at the Hunterdon Art Museum on Sunday, May 19 with a reception from 2-4 PM. Curated by Gravers Lane director Bruce Hoffman, it’s up until Sept. 8, 2013.

Judith Schaechter’s Battle of Carnival and Lent arrives at Claire Oliver Gallery in NYC on May 23, with a reception from 6-8 PM. If you’ve visited Eastern State Penitentiary in the last year, you’ll recognize this as the beautifully-macabre work custom made for the site. The show runs until June 29.

Roberta pauses for refreshment in Karlsruhe and Paris

roberta — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:48:32 +0000

Dear artblog readers, I will be absent for two weeks for some R&R in Germany and Paris. Stay cool (if there’s a heatwave) or warm (if there’s a cooling spell). I will post some pictures periodically and will have a report when I return. Below are a couple shots from our apartment windows in Karlsruhe, where Steve is visiting professor for the summer and Stella and I are visiting the visitor.

Sunset looking towards France. Caspar David Friedrich minus the lookers.

Steve’s apartment is on Turmbergstrasse. And when they use berg in that name they are not kidding. Its a minor mountain you have to climb to get up here. We are not on the tip top of the mountain and there is a funicular, from 1888, and a castle atop the mountain!

Rail for the funicular that runs up Turmberg. Picture of the car coming in another post.

Karlsruhe is higher longitudinally than Philadelphia (which lines up roughly with Rome, for comparison). There is some Mediterranean influence which keeps it moist, and the plants love it. Right now the lilacs are blooming in the backyard — what a treat for the eye.

That is it for now. I am looking forward to going to the ZKM museum, which opens a show of Matthew Day Jackson tonight.

I just read the Susan Orlean piece in the New Yorker (read part of it here) about treadmill desks and I Want One! Ciao, bambini!

Within Mirrors – Successful collaboration of short films by Paul Clipson with Sound by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

dashiell farewell — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:31:21 +0000

It is not uncommon for the current generation of experimental and noise musicians to incorporate film into their performances. Oftentimes, the moving images feel arbitrarily chosen, as if selected merely to give the audience something to look at during performances in which the artists remain static. In rare instances, however, the relationship of abstract music to the film images with which it is paired is a symbiotic one, each informing and complementing the other. Such is the case on “Within Mirrors,” a DVD collection of seven short films, originally released between 2005 and 2008, by Paul Clipson featuring music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. The result is a stunning example of how successful a collaboration across mediums can be.

Kaleidoscopic films of urban, natural and industrial environments

Clipson has been screening his films, frequently with live musical accompaniment, in art galleries, museums, and independent venues around the world for over a decade, in addition to designing multi-channel video installation pieces. His primary medium is heavily manipulated Super 8. Images are overexposed and superimposed upon one another. His films often rapidly cut from one image to the next and the filmmaker relies heavily on fading many superimposed images in and out simultaneously, creating a highly dynamic series of ever-shifting collages.

Sprawling kaleidoscopic explorations of urban, industrial, and natural environments, Clipson’s films are meditations on architecture, unexpected or unintended geometries, textures, and patterns found all around us, and on the ways in which human environments and natural environments collide. His images move from dreamy, dissolving landscapes, to frantic, explosive masses of shifting light and color, and from quiet, chiaroscuro-tinged explorations of darkness and negative space, to exuberant journeys through dense thickets of foliage at an insect-eye level, road trips down bleary, rain slicked highways, and bird’s-eye views of rippling, sun-drenched bodies of water.

These films are most successful when blurring the line between the abstract and the concrete; when we realize that an undulating chain of red and yellow dots is actually cars snaking down a highway, when chain-link fences, the veins on leaves, or the halos around light bulbs are transformed into inscrutable geometric patterns, or when a tree canopy dissolves into a Rorschach ink blot, we are invited to discover new, often startlingly beautiful ways of gazing at the mundane.

Within Mirrors

Influenced by the American Avant-Garde

In many ways, Clipson’s films are rooted in the traditions of American Avant-Garde film. Appearing throughout the works collected here, his warped, psychedelic cityscapes are reminiscent of Stan Brakhage, while his more naturalistic, insect-level journey through wind-whipped grasses in The Lights & Perfections recall moments from Jonas Meekas’s As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Other references abound, however.

The frequent vibrant abstractions of cityscapes into a series of colored nodes in a geometric plane seem almost like a Mondrian set into explosive motion.

The industrial yards in Sphinx on the Seine, hypersaturated with color, could be an homage to Rossellini’s chilling Deserto Rosso. The soft color palette and nostalgic shots of fading architecture on Corridors calls to mind Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, while the black-and-white ruminations on the geometry of scaffolding and building frames in the same may have been inspired by similar images in Yasujiro Ozu’s pioneering use of pillow shots in his many films. Meanwhile, Clipson’s textural, expansive shots of water might remind the viewer of a Vija Celmin painting, while his fog-enshrouded meditations on landscape evoke Hiroshi Sugimoto’s more abstract ocean photographs.

Sphinx on the Seine

Texture, repetition and submerged melody in the music

One key element that sets these films apart is the accompanying music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Cantu-Ledesma, well regarded for over a decade by fans of experimental, noise, and drone music both for co-founding the Root Strata record label and for his work in numerous projects including Tarentel, The Alps, Moholy-Nagy, and The Holy See, was one of the first sound artists to collaborate with Clipson. As a solo artist, especially in the examples gathered for this collection, Cantu-Ledesma is deeply interested with texture, repetition, and the blurring and abstraction of elements we expect in music – melody, for example – often keeping them submerged and near-obliterated but not altogether lost. Just as Clipson’s abstract images resolve into concrete forms, so too does Cantu-Ledesma at times unearth for the listener some lost fragment of song beneath all his sonic wash and decay.

Both artists are also highly interested in texture; Cantu-Ledesma frequently draws from the aural palette of early 90s shoegaze, churning out vast, blasted guitarscapes and angular, aggressive assaults, rich with static and reverb.

At other times, Cantu-Ledesma creates soundscapes that are redolent in aural fog, with ghostly pulsations of static and low-end rumble slowly seething, unfurling, and decaying all at once. Cantu-Ledesma draws from an array of influences, referencing everything from droning Indian Ragas to 60s psychedelia. The Phantom Harp, for example, is a dreamy, glacial piece for treated autoharp, a kind of post-New Age drone that is equal parts hypnotic and mysterious. Two Suns, by contrast, sounds far more primal. Built upon a heavily distorted vocal drone and featuring jangling percussion, it transforms the human voice into a blurry, thrumming soundscape that perfectly accompanies Clipson’s propulsive, grainy images. Corridors, meanwhile, is much denser, with ferocious tonal layers butting up against glimmering, ambient movements. Throughout the collection, whispers of static, pulsing harmonics, and grinding post-industrial clatter meld into and spill out of one another.

The Lights and Perfections

Cantu-Ledesma’s work, much like Clipson’s, is stylistically diverse, and simultaneously capable of evoking a multitude of influences and inspirations while still retaining, at its core, a truly original aesthetic. Like many of Clipson’s images, Cantu-Ledesma’s sounds are impressionistic; both not only allow, but actively encourage, the audience to get lost in sprawling landscapes of color, light, and noise, or shadowy ambient fog.

Although both the film and music stand on their own merits, taken together they create an entirely new whole. Rather than both elements merely existing side-by-side – a common affliction in collaborations across media – the two complement one another beautifully. Both artists are fascinated with the interplay of dark and light, with pastiche, with layers, and with exploring texture, angularity, and repetition. In many ways, it feels as if Cantu-Ledesma is scoring Clipson’s films as much as Clipson is creating a visualization of Cantu-Ledesma’s music. For collaborations of this kind, there is perhaps no higher praise.

The films/sound compositions on Within Mirrors are:

Sphinx on the Seine (8:29)
Two Suns (23:50)
Constellations (7:23)
The Lights & Perfections (10:42)
Corridors (25:21)
The Phantom Harp (20:36)
Within Mirrors (21:15)

Within Mirrors was released by the record label Students of Decay. It is available for purchase from Experimedia.

101st Member’s Medal Show at the Plastic Club – A little nostalgia and a brush with the technological present

ali blum — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:29 +0000

—Ali finds that the big group show at the Plastic Club has some gems and the building sparks some memories.–the artblog editors—————>Despite its name, The Plastic Club is not a clubhouse made out of plastic, nor is it an organization devoted entirely to the shiny polymer stuff. Founded in 1897, The Plastic Club began as an art association for female artists but has since opened its doors to members of all genders, shapes, sizes, hair colors and affiliations. The “plastic” in The Plastic Club actually refers to any type of art that is unfinished and largely symbolizes the club’s mission: to promote the exchange of artistic knowledge and ideas.

The club’s 101st annual Member’s Medal Show is on display from May 5 until May 23 and features work from 97 of the 200 club members. It is judged by this year’s selected juror, Sharon Ewing, the current director at the Gross McCleaf Gallery.

The artists submit pieces that they feel will resonate with the juror and the show usually caters to his/her opinion and taste. As to who wins, VP Michael Guinn explains, “The juror picks pieces that speak to her, that are relevant to her personal world.” One would think that this is somehow unfair or discriminatory but Guinn responds with a fair point, “There is really no way to accurately judge art, it is really in the eye of the beholder.”

Wonderfully diverse show

Admittedly, determining the winner can be somewhat of a “crapshoot” but the resulting show is a wonderfully diverse mixed-bag of work. With ninety-seven completely different pieces to choose from, it is quite difficult to find an overarching subject, tone or commonality and so like the juror, I will review those pieces that strongly spoke to my personal experience as a viewer.

“Spring Forward,” Bob Jackson
(Junk and Stuff)

Featuring symbols of growth, birth, baby animals and blooming flowers, Bob Jackson’s “Spring Forward,” a collected assortment of Barbie-sized junk attached to a photograph, contains every thinkable image typically associated with springtime. Amongst a sea of paintings and primarily flat works, this piece stands out in its three dimensional quirkiness. Centered around a black and white picture of a baby-turned-angel, there is something eerie and shrine-like about the piece. I especially love the pair of legs pinned on to the baby’s feet, as though to suggest that it has grown right out of the frame!

“Primordial Sun,” John Baccile
Photograph, photo courtesy of The Plastic Club

Keeping in mind this idea of childhood and warmth, John Baccile’s color photograph “Primordial Sun” reminds me of those summer afternoons I spent drawing on my driveway with pastel chalk. To me, the photo’s title refers to the sun’s status as a “choice doodle”- meaning, since the first human wielded a drawing tool, men and women have been doodling pictures of suns on cave walls, pyramid murals and sidewalks alike. In the vein of hopscotch courts and love hearts with arrows, this image captures the universal symbol for light, life and vibrancy- all it’s missing is a pair of sunglasses!

“Code,” DoN Brewer
(Ink Jet Print/ QR Code)

In the midst of nostalgia, an encounter with QR codes

The most frustratingly intriguing piece is most definitely DoN Brewer’s “Code.” “Code” is an interesting work that features eight colorful QR Codes that the viewer can scan on her smartphone. My frustrations were hardly the artist’s fault- I left my cellphone at home. This piece presumes a sort of exclusive/inclusive dichotomy where those people still using “old school” flip phones are left to ponder what sort of evasive wonders they’re missing. To be honest, I like that. Sure, I didn’t actually get to admire the work, but I appreciate the drama that “Code” creates and the mystery of the unknown. If the point of art is to teach, then Brewer’s piece taught me to always bring my phone!

“Breaking Borders,” Carla Ligouri
(Terracotta, Acrylic, Gold Leaf)

I appreciate the cheekiness of Carla Ligouri’s statue “Breaking Borders” and love the originality of her concept. Is this a sculpture being framed or is it the artist’s portrayal of a subject trying to squeeze out of its frame à la The Fat Lady in Harry Potter? The ornate eyeballs painted down the torso of the woman suggest that the art observes us just as we observe it and I appreciate the subtle humor.

Between the cozy atmosphere (the space dates back to 1824 and is a certified Historic Building), the creaky floors, the pervasiveness of lace doilies and the various works of art crowding every wall, ledge and open space, viewing the Member’s Show feels like a warm and comforting trip through my Great-Aunt Ida’s house. With such a vast range of styles, subjects and mediums, every visitor gets the chance to play juror and each guest is bound to find something that strikes her fancy.

The 101st Member’s Medal Show is on display at The Plastic Club from May 5 until May 23. The exhibition is open to the public during workshop hours or by appointment only. For further information, please click here.

Letter from Berlin – Forgeries, pheromones and clones, ten questions for Jonathon Keats

matthew rose — Mon, 13 May 2013 14:10:14 +0000

Jonathon Keats has brought the cerebral into the art marketplace. Nearly 15 years ago he sat in a gallery for 24 hours looking at a nude model and selling his thoughts to art collectors. A few years later he copyrighted his mind as a sculpture. In 2004, he tried to genetically engineer God to get to the essence of the Divine. He’s enlisted string theory to purchase real estate in other dimensions, and created a silent four-minute and thirty-three second ring tone remixing John Cage’s composition 4’33” . And he even sold collectors the experience of spending money. Now in a new exhibit in Berlin he’s presenting a dozen of his “paintings” – made with mixtures of his own pheromones soaked in a linseed oil sauce – in order to get to the heart of Abstract Expressionism, artworks he accuses of being both passive and unsuccessful. In addition to his show in Berlin at Team Titanic, the artist has a project opening in New York June 11-14, and a new book “Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age.” I asked the provocative and art critical artist some questions recently.

No Crayolas for Keats. Instead: Tasty out-of-this world refreshment. Keats produced his own Martian and Lunar Mineral waters using meteorites. Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, 2010.

Matthew Rose: We all experimented with art as children – what sort of child artist were you? What did you do with your finger paints and Crayolas?

Jonathon Keats: I was never especially interested in making art as a child, at least not by the means provided. Teachers made us finger paint in preschool and I hated it. I resisted instruction, not that I could have competently obeyed. Even when no one was telling me to be artistic, I pretty much ignored my magic markers and crayons.

I think I started making art without realizing it. (And keep in mind that I still don’t know whether what I’m doing is making art, nor do I really care.) When I was around six years old, I began selling rocks. I’d set up a table in front of my parents’ house in suburban Northern California and set some generic rocks on it, which I’d price to sell at a bargain one or two cents.

All around the table were other rocks left on the ground, essentially identical, that anybody could pick up for free if they wanted. Now I’ll admit that I didn’t have many customers, but still people preferred paying me.

I don’t think anyone ever took a rock from underfoot, or even asked about the distinction. Looking back — and probably totally over-thinking things — it seems to me that at the age of six I’d figured out the basic form of what I still do today. My street-side enterprise was absurd, but the absurdity of it let me explore the meaning of something society cares about very much with little understanding: money. I was naively experimenting with financial transactions. I’d instinctually stripped them of purpose so that I could see how they worked in the abstract.

At the time I obviously didn’t have the language to express any of this, but aside from that, I really haven’t progressed. I still refuse to follow instructions, and probably couldn’t paint or draw correctly if I tried. I still have no inclination to make art in the sense of creating objects for the sake of their aesthetics. Whatever you want to call my practice, I’m still working with only one motivation, which is curiosity, and with one technique, which is naiveté.

Forgeries as masterpieces

MR: You say forgeries in art are a good thing, in fact forgeries are the most performant art works. You say that artists, because they are in the business of anxiety, optimally force us to question our place on the planet, and even in our own minds. But the art enterprise has mostly failed to get our juices going. Forgers bring consciousness to a boil, and create a wealth of anxieties and questions about life, art, beauty and indeed, our existence – which is the purpose of art.

Your book Forged – Why Fakes Are The Great Art Of Our Age, says forgeries are the great art of our age. Do you mean contemporary works that are forged? Banksy’s stenciled graffiti works are often the subject of forgery. What about Hirst and Koons and other living artists? Isn’t it harder to forge living artists works? Maybe forgers could be content by forging signatures?

Forgery in art is the opposite of plagiarism, you say. Instead of passing off other people’s work as one’s own, forgers attempt to pass off their own work as someone else’s. The art world strategy of appropriation in the 1980s (Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Mike Bidlo) turned this notion a few degrees by “re-presenting” work and questioning originality, ownership, creativity and art market value.

Jonathan Keats: Their [forgeries'] real art is to con us into accepting the works as authentic. They do so, inevitably, by finding our blind spots, and by exploiting our common-sense assumptions.(From an interview about the book.)

Jonathon Keats at the headquarters of his Center for Epigenetic Cloning, AC Institute, New York, in 2012. Keats is set to clone German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Lady Gaga and Jesus Christ in Berlin this month.

The artist and author contends that forged works force us to confront the flaws in our everyday perceptions and conventional beliefs, and that forgers are making some of the best art works.

Jonathon Keats: If you look at any avant-garde since the mid-19th century, you’ll see the worthiest artists are trying to rile society. From Edvard Munch’s Scream to Andy Warhol’s soup cans, modern art is a provocation, goading us to question our belief in everything from the marketplace to our own sanity. Yet the provocation is limited by the passive form art takes when it’s merely an image or object to be seen behind glass in an air-conditioned museum.

Forgeries in contrast are dangerous for everyone involved, regardless of the period or the quality of the art that’s faked. If museum art is housebroken, forgeries are feral.

To successfully pull off a con, a forger must have a keen sense of how we think. Forgers prey on our unjustified assumptions and our false beliefs. Sometimes they operate at an individual level. For example, a forger might take advantage of experts’ overconfidence. Other times forgers work on a societal level. For instance, a forger might exploit our unquestioning respect for institutional authority by tampering with archives. In one way or another, forgers shadow our blind spots, and when they get caught if they get caught), we’re forced to confront the flaws in our everyday perceptions and conventional beliefs.

The scandal provokes us to reexamine our worldview — which is exactly what good art strives to do. For that reason, I believe that the scandal deserves to be taken seriously as an artwork. A great scandal is a masterpiece.

Ceci n’est pas un Warhol? No. It’s the 2005 Discount Soup Can, by Banksy.

The essential difference between legitimate art and forgery is that we can choose whether to look at a painting, whereas a forgery confronts us against our will. Even if you’re not personally defrauded, and even if you aren’t interested in art, you’ll hear about the scandal on television or read about it in the newspaper, and it’ll probably make you a little bit anxious. You’ll almost involuntarily ask whether you could have been duped, and in the process you’ll experience the most constructive effect of art, which is to understand yourself and your world more clearly. That’s why I believe that great forgeries are the most powerful and universal artworks produced by our society.

What’s the value of originality?

MR: Originality and value lie at the heart of your work. What is the true value of the original in these baroque and digital times?

Jonathon Keats: To me there’s no inherent value in an original, but there is immeasurable value in originality – or independent thinking – and if the exercise of an original idea requires the production of an “original” (or the creation of distinctions between ‘original’ and ‘copy’), then making originals (or copies) is a valuable activity.

In our society, the artistic concept of an original is related to the idea of authenticity as well as the notion of individual genius. In the first case, it’s equivalent to an original document. In the second, it’s related to authorship. Both senses of originality – authenticity and authorship – were explored by Duchamp and (less interestingly) by Sherrie Levine. But I don’t think that art has to be so narrowly artistic to examine these phenomena, because both phenomena resonate well beyond the art world. In my opinion, the work of the artists Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel is far more interesting than Levine’s brass urinal.

In 1992, the Australian company Florigene patented a sequence of petunia DNA that could be implanted in carnations and roses to make them blue. These genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were greenhouse-cloned and sold to florists pre-cut, ensuring that the Florigene holding company Suntory was the only source of the vastly popular flowers for nearly two decades. Then in 2009 Fukuhara and Tremmel tested the premises of this scientific monopoly. They reverse-engineered the plants, and released blue carnation seed into the wild.

As Fukuhara explained on the artists’ website, they were giving the plants a “chance of sexual reproduction” denied to them by Suntory. Living this wild new life, the flowers infringed on Suntory’s intellectual property by making countless unauthorized copies of their patented DNA. The pirated flowers became pirates in their own right just by attempting to live a natural life. Non-modified carnations were potentially also implicated by cross-pollination. The intellectual property protection of life – and the notions of originality inherent in intellectual property – were put to the test by the disobedience of flowers.

Ripe for a rip-off? Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” (1990). The work features a dead cow’s head, flies born in it then electrocuted above it in a mad cycle of life and death. Installation detail, Tate Modern, London.

The value of forging Damien Hirst’s work

MR: What contemporary artists do you think are ripe for ripping off? Banksy? Koons? Hirst?

Jonathon Keats: If you’re asking which of these artists could be profitably forged, I suppose that all of them could be, since all have immense market value and cultural influence. And in the sense I described above – in my response to your second question – the forgery of any of these three artists could easily result in a scandal that might be a greater artwork than the work that’s been faked.

If you’re asking which artists’ ideas could be productively appropriated, I think that Damien Hirst offers some interesting opportunities. His most significant work comes from early in his career, and was never much pursued by him after he became famous. For instance consider his 1990 vitrine containing the maggot-infested head of a slaughtered cow and an insect-o-cutor that kills the flies nourished on the decaying flesh. The work is remarkable because it delves into the familiar artistic territory of the memento mori without succumbing to traditional artistic strategies.

Much of the history of art is the history of visual metaphor, in which abstract ideas are symbolically explored in concrete imagery. Hirst doesn’t provide that comforting detachment. His early transpositions are from one messy reality to another that proves equally messy. The lifecycle of those flies explains nothing about what it means to live and die. They take an enigma at the back of your mind and place it in front of you. They make the incomprehensible palpable. But as the market took him up, Hirst largely lost his touch. His medicine cabinets - with portentous names like ‘God’ – are a regression into symbolism, as is the famous diamond-encrusted cranium. His earlier way of working still has immense potential. Since he isn’t going to exploit it, others might as well.

Experimental philosophy and naivete

MR: What sorts of thinkers have fueled your interest in “cloning” the likes of Lady Gaga, Obama or any other famous person? Are you interested in evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins or language philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, or even the deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida or perhaps Gilles Deluze, whose main interests seem to be identity and difference?

Jonathon Keats: I studied philosophy in school, and though I thoroughly enjoyed Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I have serious reservations about the discipline as a whole. The questions pursued in academia are highly abstract and exceedingly narrow, and the audience for them is minuscule.

Before my studies began, I naively believed that philosophy would be a broader conversation encompassing everything and engaging everyone. When it didn’t turn out to be that way, I decided to drop the academic study of philosophy and to pursue my naiveté.

That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I call myself an experimental philosopher not to be pretentious but because that’s the best job description. My projects are thought experiments, except that they aren’t written up as hypotheticals in scholarly journals. They’re designed to be experienced. Anybody can encounter them, interacting with the hypothetical and discussing the implications. I want to emphasize here that I don’t have any fixed ideas. There’s nothing I’m trying to demonstrate or prove. Unlike the thought experiments in academic journals, mine are truly experimental, and the results inform further experiments. It’s a positive feedback loop. The questions keep developing. In a sense this is a technique for bootstrapping curiosity.

So I wouldn’t say that any ‘thinkers’ have fueled my interest in cloning. I’m not working from or toward an academic theory. Rather what I’ve done is to take up the latest scientific research in epigenetics and apply it as rigorously as possible to current cultural obsessions that anybody might observe in the popular media. My thought experiment goes both ways. I’m interested in exploring the scientific assumptions of genetics while also examining mechanisms of celebrity and how we think about our past.

Cloning Lady Gaga and Jesus Christ

The experimental philosopher has been cloning Obama and Lady Gaga with yeast, nicotine, vegetables and fish via epigenetics.

However there’s a danger in front-loading these explorations with my own explanations, which are no more worthy than anybody else’s. Better for me to concentrate on epigenetically cloning Lady Gaga and Jesus Christ – a process that may sound complex but is actually quite simple since it avoids the antiquated genetic concepts that have dogged would-be cloners in the past.

In recent years biologists have learned that the genes you inherit do not determine who you become. What matters is which genes are expressed, and gene expression depends on your environment. Epigenetics takes into account environmental factors including diet, stress, and exposure to toxins.

The idea behind epigenetic cloning ts to evaluate these factors and replicate them. So in the case of Lady Gaga or Jesus Christ, I begin by assessing their gross biochemical intake as reported in leading gossip magazines or books like the Bible. Then I administer these chemicals in purified form to people who want to become their clones. The easiest way to grasp the technique is to think of twins. As they age, identical twins diverge in appearance due to epigenetic drift. I’m doing the opposite, compelling genetically distinct people to converge by applying intense epigenetic force.

Emotional paintings made with pheremones

MR: Your newest works – the pheromone soup paintings that rescale the Abstract Expressionists’ cultural ranges – tug at our sensibilities while at the same time appearing to be consistent with the kind of self-consciousness art-making has concerned itself with during the past few decades. Does size matter with these new AbEx works? Can they be put in bottles? Or atomizers or spritzers? Is Dior a potential candidate to pick up your formula for a new AbEx scent? Jackson Pollock: Feel The Passion … But Drive Carefully…

Jonathon Keats’ emotional paint set. The artist is revisiting Abstract Expression with his own Olfactory Expressionism: He paints with pheromones. Viewers in Berlin will hopefully get more of charge from these works than from Pollock’s canvases.

Jonathon Keats: Art history certainly informed these works, but I certainly don’t mean for these paintings to be thought of as an insider critique a la Sherrie Levine. My purpose is to see what art can achieve that hasn’t yet been attempted.

Just think about it. Abstract Expressionism is now over half a century old, and yet emotive art is still dominated by Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. If you want to express your feelings, the preferred technique is still to spill or spread colorful pigments onto a swathe of canvas. Through some sort of synesthetic transference, the artist’s tormented mindset is supposed to be experienced by the audience.

But to me it seems that there’s a more direct way to paint emotions: All you have to do is to paint with pheromones.

Pheromones have provided a way to express emotion for far longer than we’ve had museums, paints or language. They predate our species as a means of communication, and they remain our most direct conduit, telling how we really feel even when our words deceive.

I make my emotional pigments by collecting pheromones from my pores while watching the TV news. Each sample is classified according to how a news item makes me feel, using standard psychological categories. The pheromones are saturated in linseed oil to produce a palette of colorless paints. My colorless paintings are made with combinations of those oils, thickened to the consistency of putty. Each painting expresses a different combination of mixed emotions for as long as the oil remains wet. They could last several centuries.

Through the mechanism of empathy, spectators can feel what I feel, far more primally than they would through the arcane – and culturally specific – language of Western painting. Moreover, through my mixture of pigments I can create and induce novel emotions never before experienced.

Of course there are other directions you could take this. For instance it could be incorporated into dance, in which each performer would be doused with an emotion and their movement in a room would chemically induce an emotional experience. Or, as you suggest, emotions could be bottled. I think it would be especially interesting to make perfumes with unnatural emotional mixtures that would expand the gamut of human interaction.

How to put a price on it, or, selling space with string theory

MR: Now that you are deep in the market yourself, how do you set prices for your works? Are prices an aspect of your creativity? Part of the work? Are they serious reflections of your work? Or do you think your own prices are philosophical investigations as much as your works are?

Keats entered into housing market with his multi-dimensional blueprint for real estate devised using string theory.

Jonathon Keats: When my works are monetized, monetizing them is part of the work. For instance at the height of the 2006 Northern California real estate boom, I paid homeowners for the legal rights to the extra dimensions of space posited by string theory – applying the contractual framework for air rights – and then I sold subdivisions of those extra-dimensional properties through my own real estate agency. Because string theory is unproven, and may not even be provable scientifically, I priced my parcels competitively at 1/100,000 of the Zillow estimate on the base property. My prices were trivial – generally under ten dollars – but the transactions were essential. They were the means by which people participated in the thought experiment. They gave the thought experiment meaning.

In the case of my works of Olfactory Expressionism, the canvases will be sold in the same way that paintings were sold by the Abstract Expressionists and are still sold by artists today. They’ll be exhibited in a gallery, which will issue a price list. All the procedures will be familiar to anyone who’s ever bought art in a gallery before.

Modern and contemporary paintings exist within the context of a market much as Medieval icons existed within the context of religion. This context is an essential part of the experience, a dimension of the thought experiment.

(Of course as we were discussing earlier, pheromones are potent material for other philosophical explorations. If I were working within the realm of perfume, I’d seek to sell the products in a mall.)

Cloning Jesus is not easy, but it’s possible, says Keats.

But is it ironic?

MR: In 2004 you tried to genetically engineer God in a lab with UC Berkeley geneticists, and sometime afterwards moved in a very different direction, producing ‘extraterrestrial abstract artworks’ based on signals from outer space detected by SETI. In a great deal of your work there is – as far as I can detect – a sincere interest in the universe. Your take is almost that of a Talmudic scholar (and I’m a bit reminded of the film Pi π, without the violent, self-destructive behavior. There is a sense of humor in your work that seems very present in discussions about the universe, God and our origins. What place does irony have in your work?

Jonathon Keats: I sincerely hope that my work is not ironic. Irony is too assertive for my temperament. Like satire, irony has a target, and a point to make. I don’t. That’s why I strive instead to make my work absurd. Absurdity seems to me to be totally open-ended. A situation is absurd when it’s almost familiar yet not quite right. It’s a parallel universe where a few of the rules have been upended. Absurdity is slightly disorienting, and ideally compels us to reorient ourselves with respect to our everyday lives, no longer taking for granted our standard assumptions.

I can’t say whether I succeed, but it’s a strategy I often use. One of the simplest examples is the porn theater for plants I first built back in 2007. I made my pornographic movies by filming honeybees pollinating flowers – titillating if that’s your sexual proclivity – and screened the video onto the foliage of potted rhododendrons for them to experience the play of light photosynthetically. Another more complex example of absurdism was my attempt to genetically engineer God using the scientific method of continuous in vitro evolution.

People often laugh when they encounter these works, which I consider to be a positive response. One of the most attractive qualities of absurdity, in my opinion, is that it’s funny. It’s difficult to be dogmatic when you’re laughing. Humor facilitates genuine conversation.

You mention Talmud, which is one of my great interests. (I even wrote a collection of fables, The Book of the Unknown, based on Talmudic legend.) I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Talmud and absurdism are two major Jewish literary traditions, and that Talmud is sometimes absurd. Both absurdity and Talmudic reasoning resist conclusiveness. And for me there’s no greater enticement than the chance of reaching a higher level of uncertainty.

Collecting stimulates new ideas

MR: Do you collect art at all? What artists interest you? What artists do you like to look at, or like to have in your home? Do you collect anything outside of art? Post cards? Autographs? Books?

The artist grew cacti in soil made by pulverizing chunks of chondrite, a type of meteorite from the asteroid belt. California State University, Chico, 2010.

Jonathon Keats: I collect most everything in an undisciplined way because the stuff around me often prompts ideas, especially when collections are most disorganized. My home is a sort of Wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities. The juxtapositions can be serendipitous, and serendipity is a good proxy for creativity.

Several years ago, I started collecting meteorites, especially specimens from the Moon and Mars. I had no good reason for doing so, but they unexpectedly led me to start my own space agency. Ordinarily space travel is very expensive, requiring rocketry and toxic propellants. The meteorites I’d collected led me to consider an alternate option: Rather than going to other planets, I could wait for them to come to me. Since I already had some raw material, I started by smashing a piece of asteroid with a hammer and planting two cacti in the rubble. They lived on the asteroid isolated under a bell jar for twenty-one days, exploring the alien terrain by osmosis. (The total cost was about $25, plus $2.99 each for the cacti.)

After that success, I increased the ambition of my program by mineralizing distilled water with pulverized lunar anorthosite or Martian shergottite. I bottled these lunar and Martian mineral waters and retailed them to the public (for as little as $30, considerably less than a seat on Virgin Galactic). As I explained to potential customers, my system is safer than any other means of space exploration, and more convenient even than hailing a taxi. You just sit back and sip. Alien minerals such as pyroxene and maskelynite will gradually build up in your system. Like those pioneering space cacti, you’ll become alien, and you never even have to leave San Francisco or Berlin.

Living the unstructured life

MR: Since your book Forged appeared, have you reconsidered your own work in any way? What’s next for you over the coming few years?

Jonathon Keats: Like my collecting habits, my life is pretty unstructured. One thing leads to another, everything gets mixed up, and I’m usually the last to realize how it happened or to notice the connections. It’s serendipity, again.

A week after my opening in Berlin, I’ll be traveling to New York to install a new work that relates to questions about authenticity – and therefore takes up some of the themes in Forged – though I wasn’t thinking in those terms when I conceived the project.

Simply put, I intend to fix the world economy by using quantum mechanics to generate unlimited money. Naturally I’m going to give the money away to everyone for free.

Keats loves money and puts the world’s currencies to work: In one project, he extracts the fluctuating electrical energies from Chinese Fen and American pennies soaking in a seawater bath to power a data center – pocket calculators. Engineer’s Office Gallery, New York, 2012.

To understand how this will work, consider the famous thought experiment first proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, known as Schrödinger’s cat: A cat is put in a box with some poison. The poison will or will not be released based on the outcome of a quantum event. Since quantum theory states that quantum events only have definite outcomes if observed, Schrödinger reasoned that the cat would remain both alive and dead for as long as the box was shut. I’m applying quantum phenomena in an analogous way to generate quantum cash.

Seven billion dollars will be generated for each dollar deposited into a quantum bank with seven billion accounts. The money is deposited by a quantum event: the action of an alpha particle emitted by a uranium glass sphere set inside a grid of seven billion microscopic boxes. The coordinates of each box correspond to one of the seven billion accounts. The box exited by the alpha particle determines which account gets the cash. Were the system being measured, the particle would pass through just one box, putting the dollar in one account, providing the bank with one dollar in total assets. However by encasing the entire bank in metal so that no external measurement can be made, quantum uncertainty will prevail, much as it did for Schrödinger’s cat. The alpha particle will not be constrained to pass through only one box. Since the particle is quantum, it will pass through all of them. All seven billion accounts – one for every human on earth – will be credited. The money will subsist in a quantum-economic superposition.

I’ll install a prototype quantum ATM in the basement of Rockefeller Center on June 11th. Anyone can come to open an account, and to make deposits or withdrawals. And since my technology is all open-source, established banks and governments will be invited to visit, and to emulate my quantum bank on a global scale.

>>Jonathon Keats: On the Wikipedia; Modernism Gallery; the artist’s Forbes.com Column, and the exhibition in Berlin: Team Titanic, Flughafstrasse 50 12053 Berlin. The exhibition opens at 7 PM, 31 May and runs through 7 June.

>>Jonathon Keats, Engineer’s Office Gallery, 20 Rockefeller Plaza (Basement Level), New York, NY, June 11 to June 14. Opening June 11 at 1 pm.

From the vault – November, 2003 – Our art in the middle of the street

ali blum — Sun, 12 May 2013 18:06:50 +0000

Ed. note: In celebration of artblog’s 10-year anniversary, we are bringing you content from our inaugural year, 2003. In November, 2003, we were peering our peepers towards the pavement. Viewed from above or below, we relished street art’s accessibility as something we can view while waiting for the bus or walking to work. We kept an eye out for painted street signs, symbolic graffiti tags and those colorful mural-covered honor boxes sponsored by Mattathias Schwartz and the Philadelphia Independent. The art was intriguing in all of its casual and anonymous forms and the successes of our search had us dancing in the streets!

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Looking up and down and finding art

By roberta

November 21, 2003

About two years ago I noticed an anonymous street beatification project at the corner of 17th and South. Somebody had put up a landscape painting on the 1 hr parking signpost. The scene of mountains and valley is painted on a thin sheet of metal cut to the dimensions of the official city signs above it. It’s a nice, brushy painting and it’s weathered well outdoors. I like to think of it as a kind of anti-mural– a gift of art that’s not sanctioned, not photoshopped and just humbly hanging out.

Anyway, I consider this painting on a post a found object even though I can’t put it in my pocket and bring it home.

Speaking of found objects, my editor at the Weekly, Liz Spikol, is organizing a writing/exhibition project called Philly Phound based on found objects in Philadelphia. Apparently there’s an entire universe of finders out there (see foundmagazine)weaving stories around objects they’ve found in their neighborhoods. (If Joseph Cornell were alive I think he’d approve. His mystery boxes have found object appeal.) By the way, any writers out there interested in participating in Liz’s project, email her at lspikol@philadelphiaweekly.com.

There’s something about the intersection of South and 17th that brings out the street art. I was walking up 17th St. with Stella the other day and she stopped abruptly at Kater and 17th and pointed down to a mystery piece of stencil art on the sidewalk. I can’t make out the star depicted (Val Kilmer, maybe? or some other slick frat boy type). But it’s a nice, two-color stencil, right there at your feet.

Crossing Kater, the sidewalk on the north side of the intersection has another — equally mysterious — piece of stencil art, this one of a madonna and child, all stylized and curvy-roundy. Is this a group stencil show? Could these two images be the work of two people responding to each other? They’re stylistically very different and yet that blue ink/paint’s pretty consistent.

Speaking of blue, here’s a small sticker I found around the corner on South St. between 16th and 15th (on a favorite postering and stickering wall on the south side of the street). It’s notable mostly for the relationship between the curling edge and the image which seems to relate. It’s a nice small moment on the street.

I don’t often brake for art but I pulled over for this Philadelphia Independent honor box on 22nd and Lombard. The Independent commissioned a couple of artists to paint their boxes a while back. I hadn’t seen this one before and its pop art, bubblegum pink and drippy yellow design appealed.

Painted by alt-illustrator Hawk Krall, the box has a nice, edgy, R. Crumb-iness going on that fits the corner and fits the publication to a t.

Any other Philadelphia found art stories, anybody? Or found art elsewhere in the universe? I’d love to hear them.

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Found up on the wire

By roberta

November 23, 2003

Post by Shelley Spector

The best public/found art I have ever seen in Philly is right in front of my gallery, SPECTOR, on Bainbridge between 5th and 6th. It is a pair of sneakers — actual size — that are made out of plywood and attached to each other by a shoelace. Someone made them and threw them over the telephone wire. If you don’t look carefully they seem 3D and real, especially since someone threw a real pair next to them. There is another pair at 3rd and South. [Ed. --stay tuned for pictures of these sneakers coming soon.]

I noticed them about five years ago and have tried to find out who made them. Does anyone know?

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Sneakers up

By roberta

November 23, 2003

Here’s a photo of those sneakers Shelley was talking about

[see post earlier today].

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Cloudy doppelgangers

By roberta

November 29, 2003

I was clearing out my photo library, moving things to cds and off the computer. You know, trash, trash, move, duplicate, trash. After the big purge, I noticed this nice pair of images left side-by-side in iPhoto. One image is a wall installation by Nami Yamamoto at Vox Populi, from a show several months ago.

The other is a photo I took out a plane window when flying out to the Midwest last month. I believe we were somewhere over Ohio or Michigan. Both images make me smile and I offer them as the sweetness of serendipity…something I can’t get enough of.