BEAT Box

[A bit of nifty weekend or Monday morning fun — for dog, music and interactive technology fans, with thanks to KMcG in NYC for the tip:]

Beatbox

[image, close-up from Beatbox Web site]

iconoclasm | ritual | immortality

Apex Art
"291 Church Street - between Walker and White Streets, just two blocks south of Canal Street. The 1 and 9 trains stop at Franklin Station."
[New York, New York]

Boris Groys
Thinking in Loop: Three videos on iconoclasm, ritual and immortality


Opening reception:
Wednesday, February 20, 6-8pm
on view through March 29

Exhibition talk with Boris Groys:
Friday, February 29, 7pm
Tribeca Grand Screening Room
2 Sixth Avenue
Manhattan

"In recent times video, instead of text, has become the leading vehicle for transmitting information of any kind. Not accidentally the contemporary radical religious movements use video rather than text to present their programs and ideas. The videos that are shown on CNN and other comparable channels are the main source of political information for the greater audiences. MTV videos are central for the development of contemporary pop culture. And YouTube made video the chosen medium for anyone to communicate ideas or images to the whole world.

Combining theoretical texts and film footage, the videos in this exhibition are made not with a goal to transmit knowledge, to comment on the news, to spread religious and ideological propaganda, or to be used in the framework of education. The topic of these videos is, actually, video as a medium: the use of the image in the video, the analogy between video and essay, the difference between private and public use of the video, the video running in loop as modern form of ritual. The film footage is not used here as a mere illustration to make the text more comprehensible, or to make certain theoretical positions more evident. Rather, the exhibited videos thematize a gap between what we hear and what we see, and reflect on the relationship between image and word in our media driven world."

[image from Apex Art Web site. Caption: Video still from Immortal Bodies,
Boris Groys, 2006.]

DIY: Honey Space

[With thanks to H.P. in D.C. Reprinted in its entirety from the New York Times.]

No Windows, No Heat, No Staff, No Rent. This Is a Gallery?

By Randy Kennedy
Published: February 18, 2008

The real estate listing would read something like this: Approximately 800 square feet, ground floor, no windows, no heat, no drain pipe under the sink (slop bucket required), constant traffic noise, fine coating of black gunk on everything.

It paints a nice portrait of a squat or a crack house. But what it actually describes is Chelsea’s newest gallery space, which opened its doors on Friday right around the corner from Matthew Marks and other elegant high-dollar galleries. And while the new addition might look like hell by comparison, a small group of New York artists sees it as a kind of paradise, one they know will soon be lost.

Called Honey Space by its creator, the gallery has sprung up in one of the last unused (and as yet undeveloped or demolished) old warehouses in the booming, polished Chelsea art district. No rent is paid by the gallery. There is no sign. The door on 11th Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets looks a little like a breach in the wall. The gallery will generally keep Chelsea hours, open Tuesdays through Saturdays. But most of the time there will be no one attending it. (The security gates will be lifted in the morning and lowered in the evening.)

If you like the art inside, you can call the artist’s phone number on the cards lying around. You could also steal it. But the people involved with the gallery hope that you appreciate the cultural value of this little eddy in the rushing stream of development that has all but swept away such scrappy artists’ spaces in Manhattan.

“Free space to show art anywhere is amazing,” said Thomas Beale, the 29-year-old artist who founded the gallery and has made his studio in the building for more than a year. “But for it to be in Chelsea is just crazy. And we know it.”

“The fact that I had a ground-floor space just made me start thinking that it was this amazing opportunity to have a gallery, even though I don’t really have any desire to run a gallery,” he said Friday morning, after a party the previous evening to inaugurate the space left it scattered with Captain Morgan rum bottles, a stray accordion and a near-frozen fondue pot. (“We have some peppermints left over, but the fondue I don’t think we should touch,” said Adam Stanforth, a friend of Mr. Beale whose acrylic-on-Masonite paintings make up the gallery’s first exhibition, “Still Reaping,” which runs through March 15.)

Mr. Beale calls his creation a no-profit gallery, perhaps because nonprofit sounds far too official for a space where you can see your breath on a winter morning. Alf Naman, a longtime Chelsea real estate developer and broker who controls the property, has allowed Mr. Beale and several other artists to colonize the four-story building over the last few years, converting spaces that had once housed deep storage and a well-known gay bar into raw studios and places to show their work.

A plan to weave the building together into a more organized, environmentally conscious artists’ cooperative called Emergency Arts fell apart because it was growing too unwieldy in the view of Mr. Naman, who has development plans for the property.

But last year Mr. Beale began exhibiting his own work, biomorphic-looking sculptures made from found wood, in his ground-floor space. And this year, when he proposed showing other artists’ work and opening the doors to the space as a kind of autonomous gallery, Mr. Naman agreed.

“The idea is that we’ve got all this empty space, and we really just don’t want to lie fallow,” said Mr. Naman, a partner in a nearby condo tower that is being designed by the architect Jean Nouvel. “We want to give back something to the art community. Any kind of space in Manhattan these days for artists is just so hard to come across and so expensive.”

Mr. Beale still finds it all a little hard to believe. “Besides no rent, I’ve never paid an electric bill and haven’t even given Alf any art yet,” he said. But he knows there is an expiration date on this kind of luck. “Through this whole thing there’s this constant feeling that it could all go away very soon. And we know it will.”

Until it does — Mr. Naman said it could be another year or two — Mr. Beale will continue to plan exhibitions of his friends and emerging artists whose work he likes. He said he put $6,000 of his own money into the space to bring the electricity up to code. Should the artists sell any work, he asks them only to reimburse him for any of the costs he incurred in mounting the exhibition.

While the shows are up and running, he will usually be on the other side of a wall, working on his own art. Or being the building’s Mr. Fix-It, as he was Friday morning, carrying a drill upstairs to screw shut the door of a badly backed-up bathroom. Or making lunch in his studio in the kitchen he built from the ruins of an old one that once existed in the building. Another part of the ground floor, on the corner of 21st street, was the former location of the Eagle, a gay men’s leather bar.

In the first few hours of Honey Space’s first day on Friday, business was slow. A delivery man wandered in to leave Chinese food menus, looking very confused. A well-heeled woman in a bright-red coat came in with her dog, smiled politely and left. Two documentary filmmakers, Laure Flammarion of Paris and Arnaud Uyttenhove of Brussels, stumbled across the space. They came in slowly, apprehensively, emerging from the small entry hall that Mr. Beale and Mr. Stanforth had built and lined with dried morning glory vines and gauzy drapes, like something from a set for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Told that the gallery was called Honey Space, Ms. Flammarion nodded appreciatively. “I like it,” she said. “So that means that we are the bees, yeah?”

Honey Space is at 148 11th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd Streets, Chelsea; honey-space.com

[photo from the New York Times. Caption: Free space to show art in Chelsea: Honey Space, a ramshackle place just around the corner from fancy galleries. Photo credit: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times.]

Grammys Follow-up

[For your weekend entertainment, a live, un-plugged version of Rehab by mutiple grammy award wining singer|composer|artist Amy Winehouse]

Music + Politics

[With thanks to HP in DC and VMcN in San Francisco, below a 'response' to the blazing hot Obama video "Yes We Can" — over 8,000,000 views — also included for context.]



Yes We Can




The 'Response'

Baltic Art Centre Exhibitions

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays
Gateshead UK

Barry McGee
21 January - 27 April 2008
They Don’t Make This Anymore

Barry McGee’s first major UK solo exhibition includes a selection of existing and new works in an installation created specifically for BALTIC’s Level 2 gallery. Rooted in the spontaneity and immediacy of graffiti culture, McGee’s direct approach considers both the melancholy and humour of life. Disrupting ideas of property, surveillance and control, his uncontained practice incorporates damaged surfaces, flash movies and hundreds of ‘tape’ paintings to question the privatisation of public space.


CUTUP COLLECTIVE
From 29 January

CutUp are an anonymous group of artists whose practice incorporates collage, film and installation. They focus largely on the creative potential of the city as a site and inspiration for interventionist art and disruption. At BALTIC, they will create an installation in The Street using billboards, light boxes and reassembled bus shelter advertising posters. The exhibition alludes to the city's role in choreographing movements - both of the individual and the crowd amidst scenes of protest, celebration and modern spectacle.

[images from Baltic Web site.]

Cajun Music at the Grammies

[with thanks to VMcN in San Francisco for the tip: "This year, there's a new category at the Grammys: Best Zydeco or Cajun Music Album. A young band from Louisiana called The Pine Leaf Boys received a nomination for its second album, Blues de Musicien."]



"En provenance de Lafayette en Louisiane, les cinq jeunes poly instrumentists de Pine Leaf Boys bousculent avec un bonheur communicatif la musique Cajun et Créole."



YouTube video. Caption: "Pine Leaf Boys at the Philadelphia Folk Fest in 2007. This is the first 10 minutes of the concert."

listen to February 7, 2008 NPR Morning Edition feature]

[graphic from Pine Leaf Boys Web site.]

A Social Studies Initiative

Josh Greene:
Some Parts Might Be Greater Than the Whole

A Social Studies Initiative

Arizona State University Art Museum

February 18 through May 18, 2008

"As Greene continues to engage the community, you might enter the Museum to find one of the following occurring, which are current thoughts in the mind of the artist:

* The artist available as an actor in artists’ videos and other student/amateur productions.
* A crew of legally hired day laborers creating, writing, acting, and producing a television series.
* A pancake breakfast.
* A telemarketing operation with lots of rows of desks with telephones and telephone books on each desk.
* A basketball hoop and a challenge to people for games of "H-O-R-S-E".
* A chain gang doing some sort of work, maybe non-physical labor.
* The artist helping people re-enact moments from their childhood."

more

[image from ASU Art Museum Web site]

Sid Vicious dead at the age of 21.

February 2, 1979

Sid Vicious dies from drugs overdose
"Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious has died of a heroin overdose in New York.

His mother, Anne Beverley, found him dead in bed with his sleeping girlfriend in an apartment in Greenwich Village this morning."

more

Exene Cervenka dob February 1, 1956

[We highlight Excene Cervenka, born Christine Cervenka, of the legendary L.A. punk band "X" and "The Knitters" on the occasion of her fifty-second birthday with a vintage performance of "White Girl" from their second album "Wild Gift" in 1981. X was central to an extraordinary, creatively rich 'local' music scene in Los Angeles in the early eighties that included The Blasters, The Suburban Lawns, Los Lobos, and Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs.]