Art

ArtAsiaPacific is once again sponsoring a set of free talks at the Rubin Museum of Art called Artists on Art. One of the artists in our curated exhibition at Dam, Stuhtrager in October, Jaishri Abichandani, is giving the talk on September 29th.

There is no charge to attend, or to visit the galleries of the museum on Friday nights. In addition to Artists on Art there are theater programs at 7 p.m., Cabaret Cinema at 9:30 p.m. and either a DJ or live music in the K2 Lounge (which has nice drinks).

We saw Hiroshi Sunairi and DJ Spooky during the set earlier in the year. Highly recommended.

SCHEDULE

Friday, September 15th, 2006: Sheela Gowda,7:30p.m. Admission is free. Blurring the line between fine art and craft, Sheela Gowda questions the role of female subjectivity in the volatile mix of religion, nationalism, and violence in contemporary Indian society. Her work is currently on exhibit at Bose Pacia Gallery, New York.

Friday, September 22nd, 2006: Shen Wei, 7:30p.m. Admission is free. Marking the premiere of his new work, Re-, at the Joyce Theater (Sept 26 through Oct 1), Chelsea, choreographer Shen Wei leads a tour of the galleries.

Friday, September 29, 2006: Jaishri Abichandani, 7.30p.m. Multimedia artist and curator whose work explores schisms between sexuality, gender and representation. Jaishri is currently included in the group show “Believe” at Rush Arts Gallery, New York, and is co-curating the Queens International 2006 at the Queens Museum of Art, opening October 1.

Friday, October 6, 2006:Charwei Tsai, 7.30p.m. Addresses the dialectics of purity and perversion, emptiness and exploitation by meticulously copying out Buddhist mantras on unconventional surfaces such as tofu and plants. Recent exhibitions include the Hydra School Project in Greece and the inaugural Singapore Biennale, through November 12.

Friday, October 13, 2006: Derrick Adams, 7.30p.m. Brooklyn-based performance and mixed-media artist whose works revisit childhood innocence through costumes, play and subliminal erotic and ritualistic undertones. Recent exhibitions include Marvelli Gallery, New York, and Performa05 in 2005 and Momenta Art, New York, in 2006.

Friday, October 20, 2006: Susan Kleinberg, 7.30p.m. Multimedia artist who has presented installations at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2001. Susan will discuss her work Fear Not (2001), for which she interviewed figures ranging from Bill Clinton to Gore Vidal about “courage,” in relation to the Buddhist hand gesture “fear not.”

Friday, October 27, 2006: David Abir, 7:30p.m. Composer and multimedia artist whose collaborators include Alfredo Jaar and Shirin Neshat. David is currently developing a sound installation recreating the anatomical structure of the human ear. It will premiere at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut, in 2007.

EVENT DETAILS: Rubin Museum of Art – 250 W 17 St / 6th and 7th Avenues / 212.620.5000.

I’ve been reading the comments over on Edward Winkleman’s blog post about galleries and diversity, particularly regarding gender.

James and I don’t really think about whether the shows we see, or the art we buy, are by women or men generally. Sometimes we realize we have written about only women for a bit on our blogs, and certainly our collection has many women in it. Our records aren’t organized enough for us to tell you percentages.

When it came time to curate our first shows at Dam, Stuhltrager, we wanted to make sure we didn’t have an all straight white male show. That doesn’t describe the people we know and live around, so it didn’t really make sense to have a group of artists like that.

I will say we struggled with the idea of thinking about diversity without choosing artists by “category,” or expecting a specific person to be some kind of representative of a group. I think setting out with some kind of quota system wouldn’t really have been in the spirit of the way we explore the art world and find new things.

Come to the next opening on October 13th, and check out the works. We have a title now:

Dangling Between The Real Thing And The Sign In The Window

The title is inspired by this Morton Feldman lecture.

The lists of artists is: Jaishri Abichandani, Ina Diane Archer, Peter Corrie, Susan C. Dessel, Nicolas Garait, Joy Garnett, and Jacques Louis Vidal.

Susan C. Dessel’s installation will still be in the backyard sculpture garden during the run of the “Dangling” show.

I’m surprised that I haven’t really seen mentions on art blogs of the new art fair, ART(212), which opens this week. I like the fact that the opening night preview is a benefit for Aid For AIDS and The New York Foundation For The Arts, rather than for something like a big museum’s acquisition fund.

The private preview is Wednesday, September 27, 6-9PM. Tickets are $75 each, or $130 for two. After that it’s $15/day, or free on Friday from 6-9PM.

Some bloggy friends such as Daniel Cooney Fine Art, Moti Hasson Gallery, Hudson Franklin, Magnan Projects, Mixed Greens, Morgan Lehman, and Priska C. Juschka Fine Art are participating. I know that Robert Koch (San Francisco) will have some Brian Ulrich photos available, for his fans here.

There are also special projects, including an exhibition curated by the Asia Society and El Museo Del Barrio.

A very worthy project, with excellent silent art auctions each year, is having its annual benefit tomorrow night at Exit Art:

Groundswell Community Mural Project

10th Anniversary Gala Benefit & Art Auction

Wednesday September 20th, 2006
7-10 pm at
EXIT ART— 475 Tenth Avenue
at 36th Street in Manhattan

Tickets start at $35. Click on the benefit link above to see the impressive list of artists who have contributed work.

I saw this while walking on Bedford Street in Williamsburg yesterday. It is her project for Conflux, described on the website as “the the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets.”

You can find out more about the artist and the project on her blog.

James and I are thrilled with the description of Susan C. Dessel’s work on Artinfo.com:

Poli See

Speaking of predictions, maybe it was the forecast that gallerists Edward Winkleman and Daniel Papkin recently gave to ArtInfo, or maybe it was the blaring media volume on the pending 9/11 anniversary, but when we joined the crowds in Chelsea, we were expecting to see a number of artists engaging with our charged political climate. And that did, indeed, prove to be the case at a few galleries. And, weÂ’re happy to report, most of the work that could reasonably be read as carrying political overtones was well-crafted; there was little pat sloganeering going on (although there was some).

But while Chelsea had its fair share of political art, it was indefatigable gallery visitors who hit openings in Brooklyn on Friday who got to see an especially strong work that explicitly evoked the political climate. Susan C. DesselÂ’s installation, Our Backyard, A Cautionary Tale, in the sculpture garden at Dam, Stuhltrager, featured a series of white plastic body bags lined up on a patch of grass. To get from the back door of the gallery to the outdoor bar, visitors had to either navigate a narrow path or step over the body bags to reach the far side of the outdoor space. As the opening got crowded, it provided perhaps the most apt metaphor for why we may see more “political” art this fall—under contemporary circumstances, itÂ’s simply unavoidable.

More information on the exhibition is here.

Related: Opening night photo from James.

Tonight is our Muse Fuse event, presented by NURTUREart at 7PM. Details are here.