Postcards from the Edge

I've given a piece to this worthy cause. For only $75, you could buy a Jeff Koons and make the world's first Koons paper airplane. Or use it on your Swiffer. Or you could get an Ida Applebroog or Robert Longo and keep it on your wall forever. No matter what, the money goes to a worthy cause. What's to think about?

The 11th Annual Postcards From the Edge
A Benefit for Visual AIDS
Start the New Year off right -- over 1,600 postcards unveiled at Metro Pictures

January 9-10, 2009

Hosted by Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street, NYC

The Benefit Sale -- ONE DAY ONLY!
Saturday, January 10, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Over 1,600 original postcard-sized works of art. $75 EACH. Buy four, get one free! Works are signed on the back and displayed anonymously. Artists' name revealed only after purchase. First-come, first served
$5 suggested admission

The Preview Party
Friday, January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 PM
$75 admission* includes one raffle ticket. Additional raffle tickets $20. Your only chance to get a sneak peek at the entire show! No sales, but one lucky raffle winner selects the first postcard. More prizes: Keith Haring the new 10lb $100 Rizzoli catalog & artist multiples from ARTWARE editions and Tulip Enterprises. Special hosts: The Imperial Court of New York. Plus a silent art auction. Wine courtesy of Wine & Spirits Magazine. *Participating artists attend free.

2009 participating artists include: Vito Acconci, Ida Applebroog, David Armstrong, John Baldessari, Barton Lidice Benes, Nayland Blake, Ross Bleckner, Patty Chang, Marcel Dzama, Tony Feher, Adam Fuss, Ann Hamilton, Jane Hammond, Mary Heilmann, Arturo Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Emily Jacir, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, Kalup Linzy, Robert Longo, McDermott & McGough, Barry McGee, Julie Mehretu, Marilyn Minter, Slava Mogutin, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Paul Pfeiffer, Jack Pierson, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Joel Shapiro, Kate Shepherd, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Annie Sprinkle, Harry Swartz-Turfle, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kara Walker, John Waters, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, T.J. Wilcox, Fred Wilson, and so many MORE!

Questions?
Visit http://www.thebody.com/visualaids/current/postcards2008_faqs.html or call Visual AIDS at 212-627-9855

A special secret in Brooklyn

Clearly I don't take the Q train enough. I haven't seen Bill Brand's subway zoetrope in person yet, but the NY Times has an article on its restoration. Created in the late '70s, Brand's zoetrope is based on the 19th century invention that showed movement with a series of still pictures seen through slits. Decades later, the subway zoetrope was abused and in disrepair from graffiti and neglect from the city. Brand, getting access with an MTA key someone slipped him long ago, spent years lovingly going back to clean graffiti from his work in this abandoned train station until it was a hopeless cause. Now, after getting funding for clean up and proper lighting, it's back in full force. Below is good video of it since the Times's stinks. I love how the passengers totally dig the suprise in the first video.

Here is great vintage news footage from the early '80s, including interviews with passengers and artist Bill Brand talking about the zoetrope's conception and construction.

Pretending

Kelefeh Sanneh has an article on Will Oldham in The New Yorker, called, appropriately enough, "The Pretender." The editorial slant is that Oldham has to play a role to feel comfortable. He bristles at any suggestions he's calculating and putting on a character, but warmly created the persona of Bonnie "Prince" Billy in order to connect with more people. He avoids his indie rock ghetto, and doesn't want to be thought of as an Americana country/western/blues hillbilly. Fair enough.

When I told Jen the name of the article, she asked whether David Berman had written it.

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Beyond the canon

Sometimes I love a show that's messy and sprawling. "Beyond the Canon: Small American Abstraction, 1945-1965" at Robert Miller is one of those shows. The point is to complicate the history of abstraction, to go beyond the Art History 102 roster of Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, etc.

The space is chock full of all manner of abstraction, creating a real map of what American abstraction looked like during the era. There were some real gems from many artists I hadn't heard of, and the range of abstraction was even greater than I thought. Honestly, there are a lot of paintings that don't work in this show. But it's like looking at old newspapers instead of history books. There's a real virtue in bringing a contemporary eye to a more unfiltered body of work. Below are a few that caught my eye.

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Curtain's dropping: Elmer Bischoff

Elmer Bischoff, Untitled, 1952

Here's your last chance to see a room full of great jazzy abstractions from Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff at George Adams gallery. The show closes tomorrow. Though I love his later representional stuff even more, this work from the late '40s and early '50s shines with his rhythm and evocative West Coast color sense.

Click here for more info and images at George Adams.

Two citizens of the world, (almost) ready to embark

Tony and Rebecca are beginning their great affair. After quitting their jobs in D.C., putting their house on the market, and moving back to Tennessee, they're embarking on a six-month journey around the world. They will start in India and plan to end in Italy. Godspeed, you crazy enchiladas! I'll be tuning in.

Merry Christmas from Jorge Fick

Joanne Mattera has some great pics from the Red Dot Fair in Miami. I was struck by Jorge Fick's work, which is all about color and shapes forming a simple but dynamic space. I love how he uses tone and his figures get a lot of movement. The picture above, called "Two Potatoes," is appropriate for both Christmas and, obviously, St. Patrick's Day. Humor is undervalued in abstract art.

'Surrounded by a lot of woman'

James Kalm takes a look at the Marlene Dumas show at MoMA in a recent video. I haven't seen the show yet, but it looks really good.

The point

"The primary subject is the surface, which has its colour and its laws, beyond the objects."

-Pierre Bonnard

The state of art

"When I walk into a gallery now, I don't see anything. It's as if the artists spent all their time trying to find ways how not to do anything. Just because you don't do anything, doesn't mean you've said something. And, as Harold Rosenberg once pointed out, just because you don't say something doesn't mean it's true."

-Willem de Kooning, 1966

Feeling Zoe

Zoe Strauss is an American artist. Which is to say she's pragmatic, works too much, and is completely crazy.

The Philadelphia photographer talked at FIT on Saturday. She told a crowd of students that she only started taking photos three years ago, didn't go to college or study photography, but has already appeared in the Whitney Biennial and now has a book coming out (called America, in celebration the Robert Frank's The Americans). Until three years ago, she was a babysitter.

Strauss is impulsive, tentative, and talks in circles about her work. She said she feels uncomfortable teaching because the students don't work enough, and she has a hard time divorcing herself from personal feelings about the work during critiques.

My favorite part of the talk came when Strauss talked about the photo above, and navigated us through her feelings about the composition. The swath of black on the far right drove her "nuts," she said, but she just had to live with it. Similarly, she beat herself up over whether to center the photograph on the vertical line on the wall, or the line on the sidewalk. She couldn't figure it out, and the small difference loomed large as she looked at different crops. Eventually, she was fine with it. It doesn't really matter that much, she told us.

A shocked student in the crowd asked her whether this small editing makes the difference between artists and non-artists. Strauss's answer was perfect: It doesn't matter. If you think the tiny difference between the sidewalk and the wall makes a big difference, you're losing sight of the content of the photo.

She ended her talk by posing like a bodybuilder.

Check out Zoe Strauss's blog here, her Flickr site here, and the official artist page here.

Franz Kline on Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola

"Now that's one hell of a social realist painting!"

Grand Theft Art

Walking around Soho, I saw a poster from about 50 feet away and had to do a double-take: Why would a gallery plaster the street with posters of an Alex Katz self-portrait?

Once I got closer, I realized the mistake. It's just an ad for Grand Theft Auto IV that happens to feature a character that looks like the artist (and in Katz's flat style).

But still. Since this is the fourth installment of the notoriously violent game, maybe they're trying a different approach to keep it fresh. Summering in Maine, cocktail parties, lunches with poets... The kids are going to love it!

Finding subject matter

Given the infinite number of possible subjects in the world, it's hard to believe any painter has ever been strapped for an idea of what to paint. But it happens. It's happened to me. Last night, painter Wolf Kahn gave a talk on "Finding Subject Matter," along with a four-point program to get through the problem.

Kahn is a total pro. With his shock of white hair and a grandpa sweater, he speaks with the ease and assurance of an artist who knows who he is and who has done this kind of talk over and over again. He is a funny storyteller and an engaging personality.

He began his talk by apologizing for repeating anecdotes, but that certain stories are the best illustrations of certain point. He said he tries to keep people from taking his workshops more than once because the facade of clever spontaneity crumbles once you've heard the same story a few times.

His four ideas for finding a subject matter were:

1. Explore the visual field. Look around you, and try to paint the things you don't know the name to (his examples were the space between a figure's ear and shoulder, and the space between the lowest branch on a tree and the ground). "There's nothing more useful in art than what you don't know," Kahn said.

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Willem de Kooning on Clifford Still

"His paintings have a defensive stance: they leer at you with argumentative edges, as if he expected you to criticize them."

Petah Coyne Living

It's true: Petah Coyne has a Martha Stewart problem. Which is to say she's thoughtful, gracious, interesting to meet -- and emotionally impossible.

Her current show, called Vermillion Fog (at Galerie Lelong until 12/13), made me swoon on first seeing it. There's something so engaging in her sprawling sculptural installations of bubbling, waxy flower blobs that pulse with taxidermied birds clawing and brawling.

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The shape of Ben Shahn

I picked up Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" from the library a few weeks ago. I've always admired his engagement in the political and social realities around him, although sometimes his work veers into illustration. But some pieces hit me hard.

His painting of "The Passion of Sacco and Venzetti" in their coffins haunts me. Shahn believed in the innocence of both Sacco and Venzetti, and painted them compassionately as corpses laying below a triumvirate of academics, bureaucrats and the judge responsible for allowing a travesty of justice.

I believe Shahn was wrong about the two Italian men being wrongly accused. I don't think both Sacco and Venzetti were innocent; there is a lot of evidence to indict Sacco and plenty to exonerate Venzetti. As I read more about the case, a strange thing happened. Instead of dismissing Shahn's work, I began to appreciate it even more.

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