Archive for June, 2010
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
R.I.P. Rammellzee (1960-2010)
(Image: Kostas Seremetis)
We are sad to report the death of pioneering graffiti, hip-hop, visual and performance artist, the one and only Rammellzee. Check out Fast Company’s profile and the tribute below, sent out today by our friends at Anonymous Gallery:
New York artist and performer Rammellzee (born in 1960 in Queens, New York) is credited with being one of the inventors of graffiti art as we know it. Through writing, drawing and painting on subway cars in spray paint and felt-tip pen in the late ‘70s, he became interested in the symbolic value of letters. Rammellzee named his style “Gothic Futurism,” describing the battle between letters and their symbolic warfare against any standardizations enforced by the rules of the alphabet. When his style of writing became more mainstream in the world of graffiti, Rammellzee built his letters into flying armored vehicles, bursting forth with a style and philosophy all his own that he termed “Ikonoklast Panzerism”
He has continued to explore these ideas through a variety of media ever since, from the paintings that in 1988 Gerrit Henry described in Art In America as having “a Star-Wars-via-Jackson-Pollock look” to the legendary hip-hop single “Beat Bop” that was produced by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and became not just one of the most collectible hip hop releases ever, but a model for generations of witty and experimental musicians.
In 1982, he appeared in the seminal hip hop documentary Wildstyle by Charlie Ahearn. Rammellzee has shown in galleries and museums throughout the world including P.S. 1 in New York and performed in his iconic self-designed masks and costumes at the 2005 Venice Biennale. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, however Ramm always contended his highest achievements could be viewed from the train yards…
Friday, June 25th, 2010
Preview :: KAWS Creates His Largest Onsite Mural for Aldrich
KAWS – The Wall (detail), 2010. (Image: Courtesy of the artist)
By now you’ve most likely heard about the debut of KAWS’ first museum exhibition, debuting this Sunday at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. The retrospective will survey the artist’s earlier work, products, and most recent paintings, including some never before seen pieces. While, details have been quite tight, the first image from has finally surfaced, providing a glimpse at KAWS’ largest onsite mural to date. More to come….
Thursday, June 24th, 2010
Preview :: Sea No Evil Art Benefit 2010
Details have surfaced for this year’s Sea No Evil art auction, benefitting the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Donating artists include the Clayton Brothers, Audrey Kawasaki, Shepard Fairey, Elizabeth McGrath, Mark Dean Veca, Jeff Soto, Greg Simkins, Richard Coleman, Skullphone, Travis Louie, Amy Sol, Maya Hayuk, Tim Biskup, Glen E. Friedman and Tara McPherson.
Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd and focus of the popular Animal Planet television series, Whale Wars, will be the featured speaker, with DJ sets by the Crystal Method, Shepard Fairey and others.
Click flyer for full list of participating artists.
Sea No Evil Art Show 2010
July 31, 6pm
Riverside Municipal Auditorium
3485 Mission Inn Ave.
Riverside, CA 925o1
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
Recap :: Art 41 Basel, Switerland
Lawrence Weiner – Cat. 1006, hanging opposite the entrance to Art Basel. (Image © Lindsay Pollock)
This year the day job winds to a close one week too late for me to have made it over for Basel. I wasn’t there. These fine people were.
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
Pop Will Eat Itself :: Lichtenstein’s Still Lifes at Gagosian
(All photos: Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
Though Roy Lichtenstein is most remembered for his pioneering contributions to the early American pop movement of the 1960s, he continued to make new art up to the 1990s. From 1972 – 1986 he produced a large body of painting and sculpture that can be described as pop still-lifes. Technically, these were rendered in the same style of his popular comic-book based art, mimicking mechanical methods of production through the use of vivid primary colors, sharp lines, and his trademark simulation of the Ben-Day printing process. Thematically however, Lichtenstein’s subject matter veered away from mass culture and the recreation of commercial imagery. In place of D.C. comic panels we find the objects of traditional still life painting like fruits, vases or items arranged on tables.
Make the mistake of reading too carefully, and you might think there was some grand message here – that in the same way mass media has, the stuff of these works too has become part of our collective consumer conscience. However, like the rest of his art, Lichtenstein was quick to question any profound reading of this series, noting, “When we think of still lifes, we think of paintings that have a certain atmosphere or ambience. My still life paintings have none of those qualities, they just have pictures of certain things that are in a still life, like lemons and grapefruits and so forth.”
For a body of work whose deeper meaning even the artist was quick to denounce, this is truly a site to behold. In the first exhibition devoted entirely to this series, Gagosian Gallery’s presentation of some fifty still lifes is one that rises to museum standards and deserves to outlive its summer gallery viewing. That being said, reflecting on his art with John Coplans in 1972, Lichtenstein remarked, “I don’t think that whatever is meant by it is important to art.”
Roy Lichtenstein – Still Lifes
Gagosian Gallery
May 8 – July 30
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
212.741.1111
(All text and photos: Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors)
Monday, June 21st, 2010
Amusing Ourselves To Death :: McGee + Rojas Together at Bolinas Museum
(Image: Bolinas Museum)
Barry McGee doesn’t watch TV. “These are all things that Americans do, they sit at home and watch television, they go into work the next day and everyone talks about what happened on Taxi—that’s one of the last shows I watched on television, sorry.”
Mcgee is known for overwhelming his audience with an inundation of mind numbing geometric clusters that visualize the psychological and social effects of media bombardment. Like the troubled characters found in them, looking at these works can leave the brain both exhausted and confused in a cognitive haze that Jerry Mander predicted would ultimatley lead to the expansion of power by dominant controllers in society.
Have we been manipulated, or are we to blame? As Neil Postman later distinguished, Orwell’s vision of the future and Huxley’s Brave New World were not one in the same. One warned that we will be overcome by externally imposed domination. The other prophesized something far more unsettling – that we will come to love our oppression, freely trading in our capacities to think for the technologies and entertainment we cherish.
(Image: Bolinas Museum)
Mander urged us to be radical – to “kill our televisions” and dismantle technological civilization. Postman warned it was getting too late – we had already willingly given up and “amused ourselves to death.” Lately, McGee seems caught in the middle. His chaotic wall static has been disrupted, yielding to dense blocks of solid red, with only broken, fragmented shards of pattern remaining. These have given way to simpler forms – a few small floating cubes, a single triangle or an octagon. There are even recognizable objects like detergent bottles – the ultimate sign of the never ending mindless consumer choices that have replaced actual freedom of thought. If the pessimism of his work from the last few years rendered us helplessly adrift in a violent media frenzy, these newer installations show McGee pushing back against the noise, urging us to break through the clutter, recognize our own complicity, and regain control.
(Image: Gamma888)
Partner in life and art Clare Rojas explores similar new territory. The empty interiors of her recent paintings suggest spaces to be filled. Stripped of their belongings, we are pressed to find any identity in what remains in these barren rooms. In one painting a figure lays in bed staring at a TV on a nightstand. Another shows a simple house suspended against a white background. One sad looking woman sits at an empty table, while another reaches out her hand towards a garden of flowers. In an alcove, a woman’s face is partially covered by window blinds. In the same area, walls are cleverly paneled in central air vents and light switch or outlet covers that take on the look of morse code dots and dashes. But what does it all mean? While McGee reveals the brainwashing of our collective conscience, Rojas projects the effects of this dumbing down onto the trappings of domestic living, where we’ve cashed in our free will for freedom at the checkout line.
(Image: Bolinas Museum)
It is interesting that the Bolinas exhibition is being presented with two separate titles. While this isn’t the first time the artist couple has shown together, the two have joined here to deliver what is there most seamless presentation to date. When asked by fellow artist Andrew Jeffrey Wright where he’d like to be in five years, McGee said he “[hoped] to be entirely removed from society by that time. Off the map. Checked out.” With Leave it Alone we can understand why, and with Rojas’ Together at Last it’s clear that if the time comes, the two will disappear hand in hand.
Lots more images over on TAC member Gamma888’s flickr
Barry McGee – Leave it Alone / Clare Rojas – Together at Last
June 19 – August 1
Bolinas Museum
Hours: Fridays – Sundays, 1 – 5 pm
48 Wharf Road
Bolinas, CA 94924
phone: 415.868.0330
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Murakami to Exhibit in Qatar
(Image: Getty Images)
Reporting from Art Basel, the Art Newspaper says dealer Emmanuel Perrotin has revealed that a Takashi Murakami exhibition in Qatar is in the works for 2012, and will be more substantial than the show set to open at the Palace of Versailles this coming September.
Though Perrotin promises the Qatar show to be “a new concept and much broader,” we wonder just how much further it will go. Both exhibits are partly funded by the Qatar Museums Authority, largely an extension of the nation’s royal family (who were among the VIP visitors to Art Basel this week along with QMA director Roger Mandle). Considering the mixed civil and Islamic law code of the Arab emirate, don’t be surprised with a fairly reserved display showcasing the tamer side of Murakami, perhaps heavier on his smiling flowers and DOB characters, with less of the questionable body fluids.
Murakami tours his 2008 exhibit at MOCA Los Angeles. (Video via MOCA LA)
Friday, June 18th, 2010
With Move, New Challenges for Whitney
(Image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architects via NY Times)
In his New York Times piece today, Nicolai Ouroussoff provides an insightful, if somewhat critical overview of the Whitney’s proposed design for its new location in New York’s meatpacking district. The article comes weeks after the museum’s board officially announced plans to break ground next year on their future downtown home, with completion targeted for 2015. With construction prices at a long-time low and its endowment hit hard by the economic downturn, the museum has given architect Renzo Piano the task of trimming costs and meeting crucial building deadlines, before prices rise back to pre-recession levels.
While acknowledging the necessity to do so, Ouroussoff skeptically questions what the final result of such cutbacks in both dollars and time will be. Noting that few institutions’ identities are as closely linked to their physical structures as the Whitney’s is to its original Marcel Breuer building, Ouroussoff challenges the museum and its architect to succeed at making sure the new location “rise at least to the same level as the original building as a place to view art,” warning “Anything less will not only be a shame for the city, but a defining emblem of failure for the Whitney.”
A rendering of the new Whitney, viewed from Washington and Ganesvoort Streets, with the High Line shown in the foreground. (Image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Architects via NY Times)
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
89 Year Old Granny is Banksy
At least that’s what is being reported today by the Onion. Read it here
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Roger Ballen Print Release
(Image © Roger Ballen via 20×200)
Today’s 20×200 print release comes from famed photographer, Roger Ballen. Ballen is represented by Gagosian Gallery and his work resides in museum collections around the world, including the Pompidou (Paris) The Tate (London), and Museum of Modern Art (New York). The release includes multiple sizes and price points as follows: 10″x8″ ed. of 500 ($50), 14″x11″ ed. of 250 ($100), 20″x16″ ed. of 50 ($500), and 30″x24″ ed. of 25 ($1000).
Get it here