Stoner Starns

Poster:  $27.95.  Tee Shirt: $55.00.  Rolling papers:  $1.29.  

Big Bambú at the Met:  $20.00

Birds of a Feather Bambú Together

GaGa, Giabarba, and the Impossible

Sleeve and package design for PG Special Edition of the Polaroid One Camera, 2009

Paul Giambarba

What a relief!  Or maybe not? How did Polaroid do a 180 on the demise of instant film and end up with Lady GaGa as creative director?  The new Polaroid Classic Instant 300 takes pictures the size of a business card.  A ten pack is ten dollars at Target online.  More promisingly, the Impossible Project is now marketing their own versions of Polaroid film and new cameras, with package designs by Paul Giambarba, the creator of the original Polaroid product identity.  With the art market in mind, their custom camera kits are also instant, as in instantly disappearing into buyer's hands, and their initial beta film products are selling briskly -- a new black and white stock called Silver Shade goes for $33 USD for an eight pack, including shipping.  Best news of all:  an article on the Impossible site describes how the Silver Shade film can be manipulated just like the original SX70 film. 

Polaroid Classic Instant 300 and Instant 300 Film
Paul Giambarba Website
The Branding of Polaroid
The Impossible Project
"How Did you Get That F*&%ing Awesome Job," ReadyMade, Aug-Sept 2010

No Direct or Indirect Affiliation or Involvement with Copyright

"The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with AT&T."

This disclaimer has been appended to the current AT&T commercial "AT&T Rethink Possible - Blanket Commercial" in which silky orange fabric drapes landmarks such as the Hollywood sign, the St. Louis Arch, the Hoover Dam, and the Las Vegas strip.  Hmmm.  Isn't this a little like a bank robber claiming that the money he is spending has no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with the bank it came from?

Perhaps you assumed that perhaps Christo did, in a moment of grief at Jeanne Claude's passing in November, agree to license his concept to AT&T?   Were you then surprised to see this teeny-lettered disclaimer added to the end of the commercial?  Apparently, directly or indirectly implied in a recent CNET news posting, AT&T actually thought they were ripping off a Bosnian/Herzegovinian cell phone company called Eronet which first ripped off Christo and Jeanne Claude in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christo_and_Jeanne-Claude

http://trendland.net/2010/05/10/att-infringes-on-the-art-of-christo-and-jeanne-claude/

It's Not Worthless

Roxy Paine,  Conjoined, 2007

Say what you will about Texas, they don't stint on their museums -- that "bigger is better" phenomenon that is typically applied to steak, egos, and trucks can also benefit the arts, even if there is often a Remington-room whether you want it or not.  A recent foray to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth helped to redeem the entire city.  According to the museum's website, "The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth's building was designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. [...] Ando's design, which embodies the pure, unadorned elements of a modern work of art, is comprised of five long, flat-roofed pavilions situated on a 1.5 acre pond."  In fact, the building is a temple in which the permanent collection is allowed the luxury of space and context to be perceived as it should be.

Martin Puryear's “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” climbs up through a grey concrete tower to the infinite heights and Anselm Keifer's "Aschenblume" is the only piece in its own underground bunker. The collection leads you into unexpected alcoves, where work installed in the end points of the glass pavilions can be seen as reflections in the water, the water reflects in the glass, the building floats in space and art time. 

Cornelia Parker, Rorshach (Endless Column I ), 2005

14 silver-plated objects crushed by a 250 ton industrial press

A  right nice selection from the permanent collection includes three Richter's, a Rothko, a roomful of Scully's, a perfectly installed Donald Judd, and more.  A really big travelling exhibit of Andy Warhol -- really big -- with a little bit of everything -- and a small exhibit of Ben Jones' digital paintings round out the institutional cred.    If you are ever stuck in Fort Worth, the Modern might just make it worth it.

Pictures of the Museum

Nina, We Think You're Keen-a

 Caterpillar Picture in the Contemporary Show "Substitute Teacher"

Last weekend we went to Atlanta to the Contemporary to enjoy the new show "Substitute Teacher" and to hear "Co-curators Regine Basha and Stuart Horodner discuss the evolution of Substitute Teacher with exhibiting artist Nina Katchadourian."  What a treat.  As a long time Nina-phile, it was wonderful to see that in person she is low-key, funny, unpretentious, smart, and has what must be a great relationship with her parents.

The group opened with discussion about the meaning of the title "Substitute Teacher."  Horodner said, "We all remember that moment when a substitute walks into the room and you knew right away that it was not normal."  Katchadourian added, "And immediately you begin to think about what you can get away with."  Their point, it seemed, was that the work in the show embraced learning, unlearning, teaching, and the unexpected outcomes of tackling a particular subject.  They referenced the "Apprentice Syndrome," coined by artist Daniel Boshkov, for artists whose practices involved research projects as a foundation for their work. Examples in the show included an artist whose project was to learn Arabic as an artistic act, and Paul Ramírez Jonas, whose project involves climbing the highest summits in each of the fifty states.

The show had emerged from the curation process with a strong element of text and language that would have been much less successful if it had been sought deliberately. Instead, words provide subtext or counterpoint to the overt messages of the piece.  In Katchadourian's photograph, the first thought I had was that it was some kind of anti-authoritarian protest, followed quickly by the second realization that her subjects are talking to her, which is funny and subversive.  She had noticed them out the window and had decided to use them to make a mustache, but they kept crawling up her nose.  Her mother suggested putting honey on her upper lip to keep them in place to get the picture.  L.H.O.O.Q revisited. 

Best quote from Nina:  "The job description of artist is the alibi, or the umbrella, that allows me to do all of the things I want to do."

Nina Katchadourian's Web Site


The Contemporary

Atlanta is Flooded

Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum

On a recent dreary Saturday, Richard Flood ventured forth from NYC's New Museum to the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, where he was called upon to explain why Matthew Barney, why Richard Prince, and why him.  Like an experienced dinner party guest, he related the evolution of his career as, well, a series of dinner parties:  serendipitous opportunities that arose out of his interests, relationships, and the strange way that life can present a solution at just the right juncture to just the right person.  His gifts of story and humor combined with his sensitivity to the artist have enabled him to shepherd artists to the forefront through multiple contexts, including Art Forum, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, and the Walker Art Center. 

Swirling around in decades of anecdote, some choice tidbits:

• On being a managing editor:  "The most horrible, brutal job you can get."
• On first going into the unknown Matthew Barney's studio:  "I walked into the future, it was nothing like anything I'd ever seen, an incredible fusion between sports and art."
• On reaching out to the unappreciated Richard Prince:  "He was sitting in the dark like a dog who had been horribly abused."
• On his decision to go to Minneapolis:  "Both of my parents had died.  I was shut down and negative.  I was in analysis.  I didn't like who I had become, how I was using my humor."
• On Minneapolis:  "I never liked Minneapolis but grew to fall in love with Minnesota."
• On working with artists: "When you ask an artist to do a solo exhibition, it's a huge weight on them -- you're asking them to take off their clothes and stand there naked and be assessed, and the market has changed and the critical marketplace has changed."
• On Robert Gober's "Slides of a Changing Painting":  "It's the Rosetta Stone for his practice."
• On the disappearance of major works into private collections:  "It's an American problem."
  
• On younger staff guiding him through the "prairie dog village" of the blogosphere during the recent controversy surrounding "The Imaginary Museum," an exhibition that will expose the private collection of museum trustee Dakis Joannou:  "There's a growing crisis in print media.  Horrible things are happening to newspapers.  I have 23 year old interns who have told me they have never touched a newspaper.  I am starting to doubt the necessity of the catalog.  We are walking into an entirely new world.  [I decided to] embrace the controversy and found a brand new public.  We'll go through it and learn from it.  Of course, it will be worse when the show goes up -- the collection is provocative."
• On the provincialism of NYC, affirming in part the insularity that affects cultural institutions including the New Museum:  "Get rid of it, get New York out of your system, and start a conversaton with the rest of the country."
  

Suicide: Real and Imagined

Suicide is not funny or cute.  The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, however legitimately it proposes to extinguish and extricate the prisoners of social networking sites, has a cute Hello-Kitty-style logo that is actually a goodbye noose.  Yes, social networking can be a real waste of time.  Yes, it is ridiculous that someone would have 800 virtual friends but no real social life.  And, yes, it is true that many people avoid social networking for the same reasons that others wish to disentangle themselves from their online relationships:  too much data, too accessible, too perpetual, too much blah blah blather.

The cease and desist letter that Facebook sent to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine suggests a more sinister issue however:  their ownership of your "stuff."  They own it, not you, and you are not permitted to allow scripts such as those employed by the W2SM to operate as your agent.  Only a person can make those actions.  Of course, there are good reasons that websites don't want automated agents running through their servers and deleting things.  Imagine what kind of unintentional damage could be done.  On the other hand, people want those agents because it is too time-consuming to do the deletion yourself.  In an example cited on the W2SM site, one person with 1000 friends took 9 hours to delete manually and 52 minutes to delete using the W2SM site.

Make new friends and delete the old -- one is silver and the other was a mistake you made when you thought you wanted a thousand imaginary friends.  Perhaps you should pay for that the old fashioned way:  one click at a time.  The use of a flippantly-named, brilliant and rebellious site might be just another mistake, this time in social un-networking. 

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention