Dead Halloween Show at RCMH

October 31, 1980
Radio City Music Hall
The Grateful Dead

Listen | Archive.org

Gracie turns 70

Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing on October 30, 1939), lead singer of the seminal San Francisco psychedelic rock group The Jefferson Airplane.

To New Horizons

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, New York

Wednesday, October 28, 6:30 pm
Public Talk:
To New Horizons

Emre Huner, current apexart resident, and Lauren Cornell, Executive Director Rhizome, will discuss utopian constructs, speculative fiction, and the juggernaut of modernism. In their conversation they will touch upon the inspirations for Huner's latest work from the New York World's Fair, to the NASA Space Program, and Walt Disney.

Born in Istanbul in 1977, Emre Huner is an artist producing drawing, video and spatial works following different techniques. He now lives and works in Istanbul after being in Milan for eight years. Central to his oeuvre are over technological, industrial progressions and the concept of society of risk in this respect and the themes such as the affinities of the modern man with architecture and nature. Huner creates a common language in his works through using an archive he formed out of various sources such as internet, found out pictures and books.

Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome, oversees and develops Rhizome's programs, all of which serve to promote and contextualize art engaged with technology. Previously, Cornell worked as a curator and writer in London and New York.

Part of apexart's international resident lecture series.

[text and graphic from apex art website. Caption:
"Trylon, Perisphere and Helicline. Photo by Sam Gottscho." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Erratic Anthropologies

Art in General
79 Walker Street
New York NY 10013

Opening Oct 29 6–8pm
Erratic Anthropologies

"Art in General presents three performance installations by Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk that mine the visual culture of flawed but influential community structures: the hippie commune and the American suburb. Using narrative strategies the artists act as quasi-anthropologists, investigating domestic objects and architectures to pick apart the promises identified with these cultures — wealth, power, happiness, and transcendence. With a dose of the fantastic, these artists highlight the psychological, economic, and environmental fallout from the failure of idealistic attempts at redefining western social dynamics."

Presented by Art in General for Performa 09

[text and graphic from Art in General website. Graphic: "Rancourt/Yatsuk, Phase IV.**"

** See correction below in the comments section, identifying the image above as one from "Shana Moulton's The Undiscovered Antique." Click here for a graphic for "Phase IV."

In Phase IV artists Rancourt/Yatsuk enact the story of fictitious star realtor Don Donavucci and his desperate attempts to construct the model home for his idyllic community during the height of the housing market crash. Donavucci’s fantastic architectural vision (a mixture of elegant suburban excess and raw construction materials) will house a series of “OPEN HOUSE” days, where Don will be on-site to show his creation and attempt to make the sale. Drawing inspiration from failed suburban housing developments of the past century, Phase IV will investigate issues of sustainability, urbanization, and limitations of natural resources. Phase IV seeks out the dramatic extremes of the housing crash to reveal the grim human ecology that has spread throughout United States and the world." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter

The Museum of Jurassic Technology
9341 Venice Boulevard
Culver City, California 90232

The Delani/Sonnabend Halls
Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter

The Delani/Sonnabend Halls which occupy the entire rear quarters of the Museum's original building house a sequential array of exhibits which, when taken together, detail the lives and work of Madelena Delani, a singer of art songs and operatic material and Geoffery Sonnabend, a neurophysiologist and memory researcher who's three volume work "Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter" stands a milestone in the field.

In the work Mr. Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective, he states, "We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events."

more:
"'Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter' by Geoffrey Sonnabend
An Encapsulation by Valentine Worth"

New York Times review of Lawrence Weschler's "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology."

[text and graphic from museum website.]

Windows 7 Whopper

Getting an early start on weekend amusements, meat eaters and PC users rejoice: Microsoft teams up with Burger King to have it your way!

From an October 22 post on a Computer World blog dubbed, Microsoft's Windows 7 'Whopper' campaign: The worst promotion ever?

"Microsoft is celebrating the release of Windows 7 in Japan with a Burger King promotion for the Windows 7 Whopper: Seven patties stacked on top of one another in one sandwich. Given that Microsoft has been criticized for releasing top-heavy, bloated operating systems, this could be one of its worst promotional ideas ever."

Mac Daily News cleverly, viciously, self-servingly and succinctly put it:
"One bloated puke-inducing heart attack-in-a-box deserves another."

[click on image for full-blown impact. NB: this post in no way endorses the Apple Computer Corportation.]

Shelter

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)
New York, NY 10128-0173

Sackler Center for Arts Education
Design It: Shelter Competition

On the occasion of the exhibitions Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward and Learning By Doing, the Guggenheim and Google SketchUp invited amateur and professional designers from around the world to submit a 3-D shelter for any location in the world using Google SketchUp and Google Earth. Over the course of the summer, nearly 600 contestants from 68 different countries submitted designs that met the competition requirements. Current Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture students then selected ten finalists for the People's Prize award.

view the winning designs

[text and graphic from Guggenheim website. Thanks to CB in NYC for the tip on FB.]

Copyright Criminals

Bijou Theater
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

October 25 - 7 pm
COPYRIGHT CRIMINALS
Directed by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McCleod

Produced by University of Iowa professor Kembrew McCleod, Copyright Criminals is a documentary that poses the question: Can you own a sound? The film traces the history of sampling in the music industry and the increasing government regulation on the practice, featuring interviews from music legends like Chuck D, George Clinton, and Clyde Stubblefield.

Q&A session with producer Kembrew McCleod following the free screening.

[text from Bijou mailing. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Vic Mizzy

[Vic Mizzy, perhaps best remembered as the composer of the theme songs for The Adams Family and Green Acres*, died on Saturday. Below is a link to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times.]

Vic Mizzy dies at 93; film and TV composer

* On a related note, highly recommended: David Marc's remarkable 1984 book Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture that includes a relevant chapter, "The Situation Comedy of Paul Henning." Mr. Marc writes: "Green Acres is as utterly self-reflexive as any program ever aired on network TV."

[Thanks to Norman M. for the FB posting.]

Material Witness

Berkeley Art Museum
2625 Durant Avenue #2250
Berkeley, CA 94720-2250

through December 20:

Material Witness

"Material Witness brings together works of art from the Berkeley Art Museum collection, ranging from Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War to new acquisitions such as Carrie Mae Weems’s The Capture of Angela, that can be seen as forms of witness. Evidencing truths and questioning commonly held beliefs in modes that vary from reportage to activist response, the works in Material Witness offer distinctive, often critical views of current affairs and cultural memory.

Goya’s famous series of eighty-five etchings, created between 1810 and 1820, continues to resonate today as a harrowing tale of human suffering and depravity. Responding to the wartime atrocities of the Napoleonic invasions of Spain and referencing the dark past of the Spanish Inquisition, Goya’s extraordinary work bears witness to a brutal era of history that the artist experienced firsthand. The Disasters of War was not published until after Goya’s death in 1828.

Just a few decades later, the invention of photography gave rise to dramatic changes in the public understanding of current events, particularly war. In 1855, British photographer Roger Fenton was commissioned by the London publishers T. Agnew and Sons, at the urging of the British government, to photograph the Crimean War (1854–1856), a brutal but mercifully short conflict that originated as a dispute over precedence at the holy places in Jerusalem and Nazareth. In a four-month period Fenton made nearly four hundred glass negatives—largely landscapes, portraits, and scenes of camp life. Mid-nineteenth-century photographic techniques were too slow and cumbersome and British tastes too Victorian for the kind of bloody war reportage that would follow.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, photography, film, and video, often mirroring the technical form and look of mainstream media, have became potent avenues through which artists voice opposition and offer alternative perspectives on human rights and other social, cultural, and environmental issues. Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon claims allegiance to the unseen and the unwanted in our society—bikers, prison inmates, the underclass. In a recent New York Times article, critic Randy Kennedy identified Lyon’s “idea of conscience” as a driving force in his hard-hitting works. Carrie Mae Weems, an internationally acclaimed artist with a graduate degree in folklore from UC Berkeley, challenges cultural memory in photographic series that question histories as constructed through mainstream media imagery and commentary. As part of the series Constructing History: Requiem for the Moment, Weems’s The Capture of Angela (2008) reenacts the 1970 arrest of political activist Angela Davis as an archetypal moment in our collective memory.

Also including works by Trevor Paglen, Kota Ezawa, Catherine Opie, Andy Warhol, Robert Arneson, Lutz Bacher, Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and others, Material Witness is presented in dialogue with Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet and the upcoming exhibition Fernando Botero: The Abu Ghraib Series, a potent series of paintings and drawings inspired by written, rather than photographic, news accounts of the notorious prisoner abuses in Iraq.

Lucinda Barnes
Chief Curator and Director of Programs and Collections

[text from BAM|PFA website. Image from Google image search for 'The Capture of Angela.' Caption: "Carrie Mae Weems: The Capture of Angela, 2008." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Klatsassin

Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V6Z 2H7

Stan Douglas
Klatsassin
through November 8

Klatsassin takes its title from a Tsilhqot’in chief (the Tsilhqot’in are Athapascan-speaking Aboriginal people in British Columbia) and will include two series of photographs and a high-definition video projection. The video, set in 1864 in the forests of Canada’s Cariboo Mountains, focuses on the hostility between the Tsilhqot’in tribe and encroaching settlers seeking gold on the Chilcotin Plateau. Klatsassin led an insurgency but at first evaded capture. He was eventually lured with the gift of tobacco, taken prisoner, tried for murder, and hanged.

[text and graphic from google search for 'Klatsassin'. Caption: "Stan Douglas. still from Klatsassin (the prospector). 2006." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

ACT UP NEW YORK

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel 617.495.3251

October 15—December 23
ACT UP NEW YORK: ACTIVISM, ART, AND THE AIDS CRISIS, 1987–1993

"Harvard exhibition of visual media in AIDS activism marks 20 year anniversary of the formation of ACT UP New York -- Premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project"

ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 is an exhibition of over 70 politically-charged posters, stickers, and other visual media that emerged during a pivotal moment of AIDS activism in New York City. The exhibition chronicles New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) through an examination of compelling graphics created by various artist collectives that populated the group. The exhibition also features the premiere of the ACT UP Oral History Project, a suite of over 100 video interviews with surviving members of ACT UP New York that offer a retrospective portal on a decisive moment in the history of the gay rights movement, 20th-century visual art, our nation’s discussion of universal healthcare, and the continuing HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The exhibition opens just over 20 years after the formation of ACT UP and also marks the 40 year anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States. The exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993 provides an opportunity to reinvigorate a debate around the realities of HIV/AIDS today, and about the links between visual art, political activism, health, and human rights.

more – lectures | readings | talks

[text and graphics from Carpenter Center website. Neon version Silence=Death graphic and "Men Use Condoms or Beat It" by Gran Fury. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Sax & Drumming Core

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center

Mon., Oct. 12 | 8 pm
Hallwalls & Resurrection Music present:
Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core
$12 general
$8 members/students/seniors

Larry Ochs (tenor/sopranino saxophone)
Natsuki Tamura (trumpet)
Satoko Fujii (piano, synthesizer)
Don Robinson (drums)
Scott Amendola (drums)

"Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core was formed in June 2000 for a special - invitation performance in San Francisco. The Core's music is a meditation on and a 21st-century distillation of the songs of American and eastern European blues-shouters, and of traditional chant-singers from Asia and Africa. This is the space that this band was inspired by—at first. But then, after all, the end result is modern."

deeper background

[text and graphic from Hallwalls website.]

Recycle LACMA

Recycle LACMA

On January 14th, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was deaccessioning more than 100 items from its costumes and textiles collection. Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be recycled or disposed of.

Recycle LACMA is a project of Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot. At three separate auctions he purchased over 50 items deaccessioned by LACMA and is now trying to find new uses for these otherwise unwanted items.

Although each item has not yet been used, each item can have a use.

Recycle LACMA blog

NPR Weekend Edition Story

[Text and graphic from Recycle LACMA blog. The photograph displays a Korean Girl's Hood recycled as a sling.Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Speculating on Change

The New School
Kellen Auditorium
66 West 12th Street
New York City, New York

October 16, 2009 - 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
Michael A. Cohen
Speculating on Change: Four Paradoxes of Our Urban Future

Each year, an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center's annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that will be explored in public programs throughout the year. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as a guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand, and rooting the concept within The New School's intellectual tradition.

This year's programs call for a speculation on notions of "change," specifically some of the descriptions, procedures and perceptions associated with change that inform collective action, whether political, scientific, or cultural. The inaugural lecture is delivered by Michael A. Cohen, Director, The Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School.

The current global economic crisis demonstrates the impact on the economic welfare and political stability of both rich and poor countries of accelerating global flows of people, ideas, capital and competition for control over human and natural resources. Cohen discusses cities both as sites of the greatest impacts of global change, but also as sites providing solutions to some of the challenges that result from such change.

Admission: $8, free for all students, New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID

[graphic and text from New School electronic mailing. Caption: "Slum, Cape Town, South Africa." Photo by Theo Scheffler. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Laid Over To Cover

Walter Phillips Gallery
Glyde Hall, St. Julien Way
Banff, Alberta Canada

October 17 – December 13, 2009

Laid Over To Cover:
Photography and Weaving in the Salishan Landscape

Curated by David Bellman and Meirion Cynog Evans

"This exhibition will present key examples of historical (ca. 1890–1950) and contemporary Coast Salish and Interior Salish weaving juxtaposed with nineteenth century photographic documentation of aboriginal territories and terrains. The contemporary work of two prominent artists, Keith Nahanee (Squamish Nation/Coast Salish) and Melvin Williams (Lil'wat Nation/Interior Salish), will augment the vital morphology of their culturally integrated, inherently invisible craft of weaving."

[text and graphic from Banff Centre press mailing. Caption: "Alexander Barton Thom, Tenth Crossing of Kicking Horse River, British Columbia, 1886-87. [Kootenay / Ktunaxa and Shuswap / Secwepemc territory.] Courtesy McCord Museum." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

Auto-Tune the News

[Setting aside fears that we're the last to learn of The Gregory Brothers' "Auto-Tune the News," we present below our favorite example of what is arguably a new media type–one we at least associate with the previously featured "Hitler Finds Out" phenomenon. Enjoy.]



Auto-tune is described on on the late night U.S. television program show Jimmy Kimmel Live during which musical artist T-Pain shamelessly hawked his "I Am T-Pain" iPhone application, the first successful general public monetization of the technology.

Watch

[Thanks to David in Berkeley and Josh in Iowa City for introducing us to Auto-Tune the News and I am T-Pain. Show-outs to Noah and to AF's students and colleagues at Clemson.]

Fix the World

The Yes Men

The Yes Men Fix The World

[graphic from Yes Men electronic mass mailing. Cross-posted to Signal Fire. Click to enlarge.]

Beatles to Bowie

National Portrait Gallery
2 St. Martin's Place
London WC2H 0HE
England +44 20 73122490

October 15, 2008 – January 24, 2010
Beatles to Bowie: the 60s exposed

"Beatles to Bowie explores the leading pop music personalities who helped create ‘Swinging London' in the 1960s. Bringing together 150 photographs, together with a range of memorabilia, the exhibition evocatively illustrates how image, music, fashion and performance combined to make these musicians the leading icons of their time and London the world's most important cultural capital."

[text from NPG web site. Graphic from artdaily.org article. Caption: Jimi Hendrix, 1967 by Fiona Adams. Private Collection. © Fiona Adams.]