Culture

We won’t be in Miami for the various art fairs in early December. We’re boycotting the state right now.

However, if we were, our first stop woud be the Frisbee Art Fair.

[via Monya Rowe

It’s embarassing to admit that this is the first time I have read William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Here is my favorite quote so far:

Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art.

Here is his web page, complete with weblog.

Charles Mee, playwright

James and I attended the Rhizome Blogging and the Arts event tonight. During the discussion, Lisa from CultureKitchen mentioned the concern about intellectual property and just letting art or writing be out there that scares so many artists and writers. I was reminded of the wonderful and generous playwright Charles Mee. His website, called the making project, has the complete texts of his plays. If you wish to perform them as written, or essentially as written, you have to get permission as they are copyrighted. Otherwise, if you want to use elements of them in your own work, they are free. To quote from the site:

Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them as a resource for your own work: cut them up, rearrange them, rewrite them, throw things out, put things in, do whatever you like with them—don’t just make a few cuts or rewrite a few passages, but pillage the plays and build your own entirely new piece out of the ruins—and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.

But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights with…

James and I saw him at Wallsé when we were there with friends for one of the Monday night wine dinners (a bargain I might add). We were probably the only people in the place excited to see him. We didn’t react as strongly to seeing Kristen Johnson at the next table…

If you prefer to read his plays via a real book, I recommend History Plays.

P.S. I’m going to turn comments back on for everything but political posts. Those attract too many right-wing idiots finding people to argue with via Google.

My favorite link so far to the new ArtCal is one from a discussion board in New Caledonia.

The title of this post is my favorite line from Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul.

I haven’t been diligent about updating the openings calendar lately, as I was getting ready to launch my new and improved version, with information on recommended shows, not just openings. I present:

ArtCal

I apologize that there are no iCal or RSS feeds yet. Those are coming soon.

American Fine Arts closes its doors for good tonight. There is a closing party from 5-8 with performances. Be there.

530 West 22nd Street

Zach Feuer of LFL Gallery has bought out his partners and changed the name of the gallery to Zach Feuer Gallery. Note the page title at that link.

P.S. The Dana Schutz show up now is great. I think it’s the best work I’ve seen from her.

P.P.S. We went to MoMA today for the members’ preview. Expect posts on that subject from James and me later.

It’s the talented young painter Dan Levenson. I saw the photo here on From the Floor, and then I looked up who owns the domain name. I think that’s Orly Cogan standing next to him! We love her too.

I was looking at Casey Kaplan’s web site just now. It’s new. It’s flash. It’s awful.

Derek Jarman’s manuscripts are featured in an exhibit titled The Writer in the Garden at the British Library. I read about it in The Guardian.

Some of his late manuscripts and notebooks – covers beautifully personalised with gold or black impasto, full of poems, jottings and memories – will be revealed this week at an exhibition at the British Library in London.

Jarman kept 16 volumes of diaries recounting the making of his garden at Prospect Cottage, on the Kent coastline, where he moved in 1988. Here he created a curious Eden in the most hostile, salt-caked, windswept environment imaginable, a strange garden full of twisted metal and driftwood, in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station.

Much of the material from the notebooks was incorporated into his published diaries, Modern Nature, but the exquisite objects themselves, two of which the British Library has borrowed from Jarman’s estate, have never before been seen in public.

Speaking of visual/film artists with a talent for the written word, last night we attended an event at PPOW featuring writers and artists inspired by the works (written and otherwise) of David Wojnarowicz. The main reason we attended was to see Matt Wolf’s slide show on Wojnarowicz’s “magic box” in his archives at NYU. It’s amazing to realize that Matt is only 22. We have already seen several works by him, and even “invested” a small amount into his latest film project. It’s titled I Feel Love — Matt titles his latest films after Communards/Bronski Beat songs — and has Andrew Cunanan as its subject.

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ Untitled (One day this kid . . .) 1990
photostat edition of 10 60 × 48 inches