106 Green is proud to present “No Kineme Stands Alone”, a show conceived and curated by Saira Mclaren and Fran Holstrom. The opening reception will be on July 20th from 6-9pm. The show will run from July 20th – August 18.
No Kineme Stands Alone
106 Green
July 20- August 18, 2013
Jenny Blumenfield
Mike Hein
Hein Koh
Matt Miller
Irvin Morazan
Keiko Narahashi
Tracy Thomason
Lizzie Wright
Using the recent resurgence of craft as a springboard, Saira Mclaren and Fran Holstrom bring together eight New York City artists whose work references “the body” and the elusive messages conveyed in gestures, while simultaneously challenging the meaning or common use attributed to their materials. Presented in pairs, the works converse with one another, making signs, relaying messages and traces of a body once present and now gone. Unexpected material use and an informal DIY aesthetic are king.
Gallery hours are on Sunday from 1-6pm or by appointment. Please contact Mitchell Wright at 106green@gmail.com or 865-771-0666. The gallery is located at 104 Green @Franklin in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. For more information: http://106green.blogspot.com
The term kineme was first used (in 1952) by Ray Birdwhistell, an anthropologist who wished to study how people communicate through posture, gesture, stance, and movement, and later popularised during the late 1960s by members of the counter-culture seeking to de-verbalize human communication–Wikipedia
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Art Book Club at NYABF
ABC was back at the 2012 New York Art Book Fair, hosted by Printed Matter at PS1.
Thanks to Saira McLaren for curating!
We had:
Prints by galería perdida in Michoacán, México
Publications by Possible Press
Editions by Jon Lutz
Print works by Lizzie Wright & Janine Polak & Matthew Zing
Jewelery by Globe & Nugget
Keychains, pens, and T-shirts by Gina Beavers
Bags by Ariel Dill
Special-edition totes by Art Book Club (Saira McLaren, Letha Wilson, Carolyn Salas, and Emily Weiner + Miyeon Lee)
Vancouver-based artist publication Setup (edited by Mitch Speed, Claire Balderston, Charlie Satterlee)
Print collaboration by Colby Bird & Jesse Butcher
Photo of our booth, and neighbors, here (thanks Blonde Art Books!).
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Art Book Club Event– 09/23/12
Art Book Swap
ART BOOK SWAP hosted by The ART Book Club and BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn!
In conjunction with BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn’s exhibition at BRIC Rotunda Gallery, 8 Artists Making Sculpture: The 5th Annual Registry Exhibition, exhibition organizer Jamie Sterns has invited the ART Book Club to host an art book swap so that artists and art lovers can meet, share, and trade.
Please bring your old art books, zines, comics, prints and swap for new ones!
The ART Book Club is a group of artists based in New York City who convene regularly to host member studio visits and to discuss art related texts. Members include artists Inna Babaeva, Gina Beavers, Stacy Fisher, Amanda Friedman, Elizabeth Hirsch, Fran Holstrom, Saira McLaren, Carolyn Salas, Emily Weiner, Letha Wilson.
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Inna Babaeva
Inna is circling the globe on a Catamaran, we are excited to hear reports from her trip and news of upcoming projects when she returns.
Gina Beavers
Gina had an amazing solo show at James Fuentes, and curated a stunning group show at Gallery Diet which included some of my favorite artists, including Letha Wilson.
Oh yeah, and there is this!
http://galleristny.com/2012/07/the-15-hottest-artists-of-the-summer/#slide15
Amanda B. Friedman
Amanda and Stacy are both currently included in a beautiful group show at Nudashank, Primary
AND, Amanda has a solo show opening October 19th at Eli Ping.
Stacy Fisher
Stacy, in addition to the show at Nudashank, has the following awesome shows coming up!
Michael Byron / Stacy Fisher at Regina Rex, October 20th through December 2nd.
Stacy Fisher / Allison Miller at Weekend, January 2013
Fran Holstrom
Fran is currently building an utopian settlement on the Caspian Sea.
Saira McLaren
Saira is waiting for dates, more to come soon.
Carolyn Salas
KATE WERBLE GALLERY
“The Unnatural” Anna Betbeze, Carolyn Salas, Molly Smith and Sarah E. Wood
August 31 – September 29, 2012
http://www.katewerblegallery.com/
curated by Jamie Sterns
BRIC Rotunda Gallery
September 13-October 27, 2012 http://www.bricartsmedia.org/events/8-artists-making-sculpture-the-5th-annual-registry-exhibition
Upcoming Residencies:
SWATCH ART PEACE HOTEL, SHANGHAI, CHINA
FOUNTAINHEAD RESIDENCY, MIAMI FLORIDA
Current studio residency
NARS international studio residency, NY
Emily Weiner
Emily will be publishing a few articles this month, one on the Yayoi Kusama Whitney retrospective for Domus magazine and another for Artforum.com–a pick on the Storm King show Light & Landscape.
Artforum, Light and Landscape: http://artforum.com/archive/id=31727
Domus, Yayoi Kusama: http://www.domusweb.it/en/search/author/?filtro=Emily%20Weiner
Emily just returned to NYC from residency in the Canadian Rockies at The Banff Centre led by Silke Otto-Knapp and Jan Verwoert. She is currently working on a publication in conjunction with them and other residents, to come out this Fall. http://www.publicationstudio.biz/about/
AND stay tuned for an upcoming show at Grizzly Grizzly in early 2013!
Letha Wilson
Letha also has lots of great shows on the horizon.
Black Foliage at Nudashank, Baltimore, MD. Opening September 22, 2012
New New York at Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria. Opening November 22, 2012
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Your (and our) summer reading assignment is My Ways by Rita McBride. Come discuss the book with us at Muelensteen Gallery on August 13th. We will be creating a follow up publication through Pilot Press referencing our (and your?) discussion of the book. Many thanks to the awesomeness that is Court Square for including us in this exciting project! Official info and links below!
• Monday, August 13 • 5-7pm • The Art Book Club
The Art Book Club invites the public to take part in a conversation about MyWays (Ways Books), a fictional novel by visual artist Rita McBride. Pulling together numerous artists, writers, and cultural thinkers to contribute “chapters,” all of which are set in the visual art world, MyWays culminates as an “accidental” novel that subverts our traditional ideas of narrative and literary genre while satirizing the sacred institutions of art and industry. The Art Book Club is a group of artists based in New York City who convene regularly to host member studio visits and to discuss art related texts, and includes artists Inna Babaeva, Gina Beavers, Stacy Fisher, Amanda Friedman, Elizabeth Hirsch, Fran Holstrom, Saira McLaren, Carolyn Salas, Emily Weiner, Letha Wilson. https://artbookclub.wordpress.com/
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We’re very excited to announce that we will be discussing our next book, ‘My Ways’ by Rita McBride in conjunction with Muelensteen Gallery’s show, Young Curators, New Ideas on August 13 from 5-7pm. We have been invited by Court Square, who is also hosting a very exciting event with Pilot Press on July 19th:
An artists’ book open call and publishing night, an event that welcomes those who want to share their feminist artist’s books with new audiences, and those who want to learn more about the variety of such works being made today. Guests are invited to come together for an evening of discussion and publishing. The first twenty artists to RSVP will be able to present their artists’ books to an audience of other artists, curators, writers, and pilot press… published authors. RSVP to contact@contemporaryfeminism.com
More info about the show at http://www.meulensteen.com/
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Relational Aesthetics is a collection of essays written by Nicolas Bourriaud. Wikipedia informed me that:
Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (1998/English version 2002) and Postproduction (2001). Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. Bourriaud coined the term in 1995, in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition Traffic that was shown at CAPC contemporary museum in Bordeaux.
Bourriad’s point of view is that the world has changed, and art has a job to do. So batten down the hatches and get ready for the “fight for modernity”! Bold statements resembling propaganda for a new and better world are introduced in the beginning and continue throughout the book, such as “art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modeling possible universes”. You have to let go of your skepticism to see that a very beautiful and thoughtful view of the world and what it could be has been laid out for you. (Think recycling.) I thought this was a moving quote:
-“The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist”.
But did this really happen? Did a guy stringing up a hammock in the garden at MOMA really mean this much? It would be much easier to say “no” and cast this book aside, but I think digging deeper into the meat is worth it.
Relational art is defined on page 14 as: “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”. The book continues with examples of artworks that bring into question our societal roles and emphasize inter-human exchanges: “Art is a state of encounter”.
More than actually discussing art in the 90’s, this book provides a great historical set-up for it. Under the heading of “Transitivity”, an interesting progression of art history is outlined as first being a relationship between Humankind and deity, then Man and the world, then Humankind and objects, and finally between inter-human relations. Here is where the idea of a new formal field is emphasized, as “meetings, encounters, events and festivals all represent, today, aesthetic objects”. He later states that “these works in no way celebrate immateriality”, and that “in a way, an object is every bit as immaterial as a phone call. And a work that consists in a dinner around a soup is every bit as material as a statue.” Okay!
If I had to give one reason to read this book it would be for the chapter on “The theoretical legacy of Felix Gonzalez-Torres”. Under the heading “Contemporary forms of the monument”, he states that for some people “a pile of paper cannot be included in the masterpiece category”, and “present-day art has no cause to be jealous of the classical monument when it comes to producing long-lasting effects.”
Although a difficult read that often felt like a slap in the face, Relational Aesthetics was a great follow up to our last book, Since ’45, which focused on beginnings and endings. Did relational aesthetics come to manifest itself after Bourriaud’s book was published through social media, and, instead of remaining in the realm of art, become owned by the public? Was that the goal? And, if so, would that mark the beginning or the end of the concept? It’s interesting to consider in light of the resurgence of abstract art in New York over the past few years.
-Stacy Fisher
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Instead of writing a proper review, I thought I’d list some of the notes, questions and quotations from the book I kept track of as I read. Some of it may come off as confused and confusing, but I think it gives you an idea of the scope of issues raised in this book, which is a must-read!
The book begins with a discussion which reminded me of the French movie Amelie and how she lives upstairs from a painter in Monmarte. I remember thinking how difficult it must be to be a French painter, with all that history. Much easier and freer to be an American artist. Seigel discusses this idea of making art without the burden of history in this book.
Questions for Katy Seigel If I could ask her:
How would you categorize the difference in the experience of artists between the ending of the first and second world wars? In the former case, they had sometimes experienced the war and in the latter had witnessed (through photos) the dropping of the atomic bomb, which was so distant.
Also, the second world war resulted in victory for the West yet, there seemed to be a flip-side to all that violence, this incredibly long stretch of peace time in Europe and the United States, albeit with the nuclear threat. So is the mindset one of a very abstract, removed menace?
Do you think the ideas about contemporary art you discuss are increasingly taught in schools? Because I feel like I was taught the European version of the Avant Garde in an American art school.
If you were to write a book ‘since ’01, what might be some similar/opposing themes to the ones in this book?
You say on page 44, that the ‘American version of the modern’ is without a predetermined direction or end. Do earlier framings of art history anticipate this?
SPACE: what does it mean to be an American in New York, where there is no space? It’s a huge city, but no space!
P64 so when you talk about black and white there seems to be this link between black as a political move reflecting grime/poverty and also a reflection of fashion? Such an interesting combination of high and low, immediately.
Other thoughts:
I went to an international school in Denmark when I was a kid and one of my friends who was half Chilean/half Italian said, ‘I feel sorry for you because there are no old buildings in your country.’
Cady Noland, and this idea of ruin..but having lived overseas as well as the suburbs, one built after 69, I never really saw ruin except overseas or in American cities.
Again, struck by black and white discussion and how it has to be considered immediately in like 6 or more different contexts:
The bomb, death, clinical
Poverty, grunge
Suburbs/urban
Race
Fashion/design
The influence of photography
Corporate
Goth
Lucy Lippard on page 79: Saying that photos in 80’s harkened back to the 50s
Planned obsolescence p102
P125 ‘critics have described feminism and professionalism as emasculating, feminizing, based on conformity and consumption, on pleasing others rather than asserting oneself.’
P156 discussion of copies
P158 Kaprow: ‘Middle-class money, both public and private, should be spent on middle class art, not on fantasies of good taste and noble sentiment.’
P161 talk of Koons stainless steel sculps, high/low leaving out middle class taste?
P164 ‘Self-repetition, anonymity, role-playing, constant style shifting, and collectivity are among the the artistic strategies for dealing with the same basic situation, the sheer # of artists and the threat that situation poses to the idea of the artist as a special person.’
-Gina Beavers
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Art Book Club in Philly!
Fran catching up on our reading before our meeting at Fleisher/Olman!
Sarira McLaren had a show at Grizly Grizly, we stopped by!
Chillin after our book talk at Fleisher/Ollman!
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Art Book Club 