Monday, December 24, 2007

Happy Holidays

Filed under: general — tom moody @ 4:44 pm

christmas lights





BubblyFish
http://www.bubblyfish.com/BubblyChristmasCard2007.html

Hoping you all a great Holiday

Chrismas eve 9.00 A.M. Williamsburg Brooklyn

X-mas morning

Jackhammering at 9.00A.M -
Merry X-Mas, from our new neighbors who still have not introduced themselves.
They are planning to build a hotel. Is this what is going to improve the neighborhood?
In light of the current overkill of buildings which are not being filled- this seems utter lunacy.
All last week the city spent installing a new stop-light system on north12th and Bedford Ave.
Jack hammering incessantly.


Before building goes up. (note huge puddle) this the result of the park origenally being part of the creek, it is land fill- apparently not enough.


Colin's crap, black shoe, and paper towel- Mccaren Park (these photos taken a couple days
earlier)
Fisher Building.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

The Sound of Money

The Sound of Money 1 acrylic on canvas 2002 40x60" Aron Namenwirth

This painting is from a still of a 15 minute video piece in an edition of 2. It mixes "The Sound of Music" (the movie) with family video of a vacation at the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe Vermont.
There is a slightly smaller version The Sound of Money 2 on aluminum honeycomb panel.


I think there is an interesting relationship between myself and Thomas Ruff. I wonder how far back in time our work overlaps in concept?

Thomas Ruff








http://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/18/
http://www.tommoody.us/archives/2007/12/09/guyton-ruff-abject-cyberculture-with-cash/
I got lazy and decided to miss this one.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Hillary Clinton Cracked

She gets a little shiney facelift. And a return of her pornstar celebrity.
(detail) click image for larger cracks in precious pixels. I was sold bad birch plywood from the lumberyard on north 5th st. next to the former location of Schroeder Romero/Sauce
between bedford and berry in Williamsburg. Unfortunately the painting of Barack Obama comes out of the same stock. His painting remains stable so far. This seems strangely symbolic
of Hillary Clintons problems. This youthful portrait was conceived as politician as porn star,
her premature wrinkling parallels her performance.

untitled 35 (Hillary Clinton) acrylic on canvas 36x48" 2007 Aron Namenwirth,

I hope we can work out her problems. Unfortunately they are not on the surface but are structural.
Barack painting here

Blogger Skins/Wall Street Journal



Even Boring Blogs
Are Things of Beauty
In Some Artists' Eyes

By ANDREW LAVALLEE
December 19, 2007; Page B1

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people's pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

[portals]
A zoom of Guthrie Lonergan's "Internet Group Shot"

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. "I'm sort of interested in that boringness," he says.

"Internet Group Shot" is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they're saying "cheese." For "MySpace Intro Playlist," Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they're introducing themselves.

"There are defaults in our culture," Mr. Lonergan adds. "MySpace doesn't set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things."

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Marcin Ramocki is another. He got the idea for his portrait series "Blogger Skins" when a documentary film he made was being shown world-wide. After setting up search-engine alerts to notify him whenever "8 Bit" was mentioned, he was struck by the unrelated images that came up.

INTERNET-INSPIRED ART
"Internet Group Shot," a collage of group photos scavenged from the Web by Guthrie Lonergan
"MySpace Intro Playlist," also by Mr. Lonergan, a collection of personal videos embedded on their creators' MySpace pages
"Blogger Skins," a series of "portraits" made with Google search results by Marcin Ramocki
"Unmonumental," an online and offline group show at the New Museum and Rhizome, its new-media affiliate.
Rhizome has also sponsored exhibits such as "Professional Surfer," which addresses Web surfing as an art form, and "Faultlines," a look at online communities.
"Time-Lapse Homepage," a one-minute video by Paul Slocum that traces a Web page's look over time.
"Monitor Tracings" is a series of drawings based on Google Images results, by Marisa Olson. Her Internet-based work also includes "Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs," in which she sang journal entries in a blues style.
"Kurt Cobain's Suicide Letter vs. Google AdSense," by Cory Arcangel, pairs the Nirvana singer's words with keyword-based ads.
Mr. Arcangel's del.icio.us bookmarks have also attracted attention in digital-art circles. Some artists also flock to "surfing clubs" such as Nasty Nets, Supercentral and double happiness.

For "Blogger Skins," he Googled a handful of bloggers who write about art, then assembled a virtual mosaic of the images that resulted. "The idea is that a Google search for people who are very active in this community changes every day, so I wanted to capture one specific search," he says.

The image reflects the original order of the search results, he says, "and that creates, sort of accidentally, this beautiful shape, but that shape also reflects the popularity of different images." Subjects with common names had wildly random images associated with them. The artists, though, exerted control over their search results by filling them with their work.

Some of these Web-inspired works have been included in the recently reopened New Museum's "Unmonumental" exhibition, parts of which are on view at its New York location and others of which can be seen on the site for Rhizome, its new-media affiliate. "This generation really knows the Net," says Lauren Cornell, Rhizome's executive director. "They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it."

"Art is just going to be what's going on in the world around you. It makes sense to do work about this thing that's changing our life so much," adds Paul Slocum, a 33-year-old Dallas artist whose day job is in systems programming. His video "Time-Lapse Homepage," part of the New Museum exhibit online, is intended to follow the development of the digital aesthetic: in 1,200 screenshots and at 20 frames a second, it chronicles the evolution of a single personal page's look.

He also created a functioning replica of MySpace's log-in page. "I was interested in how you go to these pages all the time that are constantly in flux, changing all the things they show you," he says.

One of the best-known artists in this medium, Cory Arcangel, has "performed" the deletion of his Friendster account in front of an audience at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, N.Y. "People kind of cringed and then cheered when it was all over," he says. He published on his personal site Kurt Cobain's suicide note alongside Google AdWords that served up ads to social-anxiety treatment and spiritual-growth classes.

"Surfing so much, I get ideas of things that I would like to see that don't yet exist," Mr. Arcangel explains. "This is when I make a project."

This year, Rhizome organized an online group show called "Professional Surfer" that took the prosaic idea of bookmarking Web pages and posited it as art.

On other Web sites, such as Nasty Nets, Supercentral and Yahoo's bookmarking service Del.icio.us, artists link to videos, photos and other digital ephemera they've come across.

"They're like sketchbooks," says Paddy Johnson, a Brooklyn art blogger. "Your ability to spot the best stuff speaks to your eye as an artist. ... The better your quoting ability, the better artist you seem to be."

Even some "offline" works are inspired by Internet culture. For a series called "Monitor Tracings," Marisa Olson searched Google Images for headphones, radios and other devices, then drew the results on paper.

One thing most of these artists haven't solved is how to make money off work that is available to anyone online. Ms. Olson says she sells her drawings and editioned copies of video pieces, but never an Internet-based work. "You would think that the contemporary, hip art world is ahead of the curve on this," she says, "and it's not -- yet."

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Williamsburg Doomed David Yassky what are you doing?

Photo taken by Amy Sillman before dropping my favorite blogging camera in the mud.
Photo not so good is it was removed from post. She is a better painter.

North 12th street: one of my favorite little commercial artists buildings ready to be demolished. Turky's nest far right artMovingProjects just a little further...
Epicenter of town north 6th street between Bedford and Berry- lookin good:)

Devon Dikeou in The New Yorker

-------------------------------
GALLERIES-BROOKLYN

DEVON DIKEOU

Conceptual Art meets self-disclosure. Rather than
hide a potentially embarrassing devotion to a
childhood security blanket, nicknamed Niney,
Dikeou makes it the subject of her work. "The
Niney Chronicles" unfolds in a series of photo-
graphs and hilarious text paintings. As the nar-
rative twists and turns (Niney is nearly lost on a
shuttle bus from LaGuardia to J.F.K.!) Dikeou's
homage to her sacred scrap of wool points, with
absurdist levity to the mysteries of our attach-
ment to objects- and that includes art. Through
Feb. 10 artMovingProjects, 166 north 12th st.
917.301.6680

*Note we will be open by appointment through
the holidays. Also, the sacred scrap of wool
turned out to be holy synthetic.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/events/art/2007/12/24/071224goar_GOAT_art?currentPage=5

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Bitten!


Michael Bell Smith



Kathy Grayson


Cory Arcangel


Joe Bradley

BITTEN!

December 15, 2007 - January 26, 2008

CORY ARCANGEL
MICHAEL BELL-SMITH
JOE BRADLEY
RY FYAN
KATHY GRAYSON
BEN JONES
CHRISTINA MALBEK
TAKESHI MURATA
SIMMONS & BURKE
FRANCINE SPIEGEL

KIM LIGHT LIGHTBOX
2656 LA CIENEGA BLVD
LOS ANGELES CA 90034
INFO@KIMLIGHTGALLERY.COM
WWW.KIMLIGHTGALLERY.COM
This looks like my kind of show. Wish I was in LA to see it.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Jens Brand





An evening composed of three pieces that have nothing in common ...
1: Music and a music video based on what Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone) thinks it is (or a respirator sounds like);
2: A vinyl based topographical scratch around the world on the behalf of the one and only TWV - the black beeliner with grooves- and
3: HCATS-MPIGS a piece for trombone, violin and annoying light; at the end of a questionable evening questions can be asked and products can be bought at discount prices;
the concert supported by the Ministerpresident of North-Rhine,
Westphalia and Harvestworks
wth contributions by
Dan Evans Farkas, Phil Niblock and Yasunao Tone
http://www.g-turns.com
http://www.jensbrand.com/
One of the few good things about artMovingProjects paricipation in Diva Miami was i meet the German artist Jens. He is performing wednesday night at Experimental Intermedia 224 center st.
www.experimentalintermedia.org
9.00pm 4.99$

Flux Factory New York NY NY


Flux Factory presents...

New York, New York, New York
So nice we named it thrice.
Curated by Jean Barberis, Melanie Cohn, and Chen Tamir. Original concept by Jean Barberis.

"Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen."
--Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (1978)


Opening Night: Friday, December 14, 7pm
December 14, 2007 – January 13, 2008

Opening night performances by: Miwa Koizumi: “New York Flavors Ice Cream”
and Matt Levy: “Action, Direction, Creation presents: Interactive activity”
Admission: Free
Imagine Coney Island's Dreamland, Steeplechase, and Luna Park reborn. Imagine a sea monster in the East River, a volcano erupting in Manhattan, Midtown in ruins. The contemporary brownstones of Cobble Hill buried beneath its original namesake hill, a big whale in the place of the Museum of Natural History, and The New York Crystal Palace returned to 42nd Street.


In short, a New York City that is the forgotten past and the fantastic future all at once. A New York City where anything is possible.


New York, New York, New York is an interactive, multimedia installation. It is a continuation of Flux Factory's interest in urban landscapes and takes inspiration from the Panorama, Robert Moses’ scale model of New York City in the Queens Museum of Art. Members of the Flux Factory art collective will work in collaboration with over 100 artists from all five boroughs and around the world to re-imagine the public and private spaces of New York.


Each artist will contribute a building, a landmark, a street, an avenue, a block, a park, a neighborhood, an expressway, a bridge, an island, an airport—one or several elements of the urban environment. All of these individual works will be combined to produce a cohesive yet chaotic installation, a multimedia, scale-model of the city. Instead of being an exact replica to scale of the city of New York, this project offers a mental map, a replica of an imaginary New York. The goal of the show is to explore the architectural and conceptual elements of everyday space. It is an investigation into the collective unconscious of the cultural capital of the planet: The sum of all of New York's potential exposed in a great experiment in psychogeography.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Boris Achour, Sandy Amerio, Carla Aspenberg, Leah Beeferman, Dominique Blais, Lise Brenner/Uli Lorimer/Katrina Simon, Adam Brent, Adam David Brown, Jason David Brown, Ben Bunch, Paul Burn, Ian Burns, Matthew Callinan, Anibal Catalan, Emmy Catedral/Valerie Opielski, Andrea Christens/ Takashi Horisaki, Emily Clark, Cluster8 (Parsons the New School for Design), Lewis Colburn, Daupo, Johannes De Young, Andrea Dezsö, Brandan Doty, Thomas Doyle, Kerry Downey/Alan Resnick, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Montpelier, Gregor Eldarb, Stephane Gilot, Tamara Gubernat, Ira Joel Haber, Aya Kakeda, Devrim Kadirbeyoglu, Israel Kandarian, Stephanie Koenig, Miwa Koizumi, Yunmee Kyong, Katerina Lanfranco, Maria Levitsky, Matt Levy, Ellen Lindner, Katja Loher, Marie Lorenz/Doug Paulson, Molly Lowe, Marian Macken, Mapping it Out (Eugene Lang College/The New School for Liberal Arts), Evie McKenna, Mary-Anne McTrowe, Greg Martin, Simone Meltesen, Ian Montgomery, Kirsten Mosher, Martina Mrongovius, Joel Morrison/Hiroshi Shafer, Heidi Neilson, Jo Q. Nelson, Rashaad Newsome, Lothar Osterburg, Miguel Palma, Gail Pickett, Bridget Parris, Bruno Persat, Celia Picard, Annie Reichert, Leonora Retsas, Renée Ridgway, Jaimie Robson/Kristal Stevenot, Karl Saliter, Jon Sasaki, Jean Shin, Mike Peter Smith, Soft City (Rose Bianchini, Sarah Couture McPhail, Yvonne Ng, Catherine Stinson, Jason van Horne), Claudia Sohrens, George Spencer, Joel Braden Stoehr, Etosha Terryll, Nick Tobier, Joseph Craig Tompkins, Momoyo Torimitsu, Christopher Ulivo, Gabriela Vainsencher, Jason Van Horne, Vydavy Sindikat/Anytime Development, Lee Walton, Barbara Westermann, Lauren Wilcox, and Ian Wojtowicz.

Gallery hours: Fridays – Sundays, 1-5pm. Closed Dec. 23rd and 30th.

New York, New York, New York is made possible with public funds from New York State Council on the Arts,
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Queens Council on the Arts, as well as generous support from
the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation,
Materials for the Arts, and Carnegie Corporation of New York.

--
************
Flux Factory is located at:
38-38 43rd Street
Long Island City, Queens

For further information:
http://www.fluxfactory.org
Phone:
718-707-3362
Email contact: Stefany Anne Golberg, info@fluxfactory.org

For directions to Flux Factory:
http://www.fluxfactory.org/directions

Flux Factory is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Linda Post



The Chocolate Factory
5-49 49th ave, long island city, ny 11101


nov 29 - dec 22, 2007

gallery hours:
thursdays & fridays 5-8pm, saturdays 3-8pm, & by appointment
(718.482.7069)

Laura Newman


http://www.lauranewman.com/

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Holiday Shopping Show

The Holiday Shopping Show is here!
An exhibition of limited edition artist multiples from $5 - $500
Curated by Robin Kahn

When: December 12th – December 18th , 2007, everyday 1-6pm.

Opening: Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 6-9 pm (drinks courtesy Mercury Gin)

Where:The Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway, 2nd floor
between Spring and Prince St
NYC NY 10012

THE HOLIDAY SHOPPING SHOW is an exhibition of affordable art multiples made by artists especially for the occasion. Projects range from photographs, sculptures, and prints to custom-made household items, toys and creative surprises that fit the variety and scope of everyone’s Holiday Shopping list. All pieces are available the day they are bought so bring your shopping bags!

Artists include:
AY-O Peggy Ahwesh Blaine Anderson Rebecca Broughton Ellen Brooks Ana Cardoso Carmen Carmona Mary Ellen Carroll
Mary Chatham Julia Chiang Sarah Crowner Greg Curry
Lisa Dilillo Don Dudley eteam Mary Beth Edelson Barbara Ess
Mike Estabrook Alonso Gil Guerilla Girls Kirby Gookin Coco Gordon Federico Guzmán Nancy Hwang Shirley Irons Pam Jacobs Amanda Keeley Alison Knowles Anne Kyle Patrice Lerochereuil Louise Kaye Mahoney Calder Martin Felicia Megginson Larry Miller Rebekah Modrak Ken Montgomery Laurel Nakadate Trong Gia Nguyen Heather Nicol Evelyne Noviant Yoko Ono Anne Patterson Jeff Perkins Terrie Pipa Katia Read Lia Rochas-Paris Reka Reisinger Angelo Ricciardi Aurelien Rivoire Marina Rosenfeld Steven Rotter Christy Rupp Gabriella Russomagno Heidi Schlatter Michael Schmelling Peter Scott Nikko Sedgwick Maura Sheehan Taketo Shimada Eli Silverman Joao Simoes Wendy Small Michael Smith Chrysanne Stathacos William Stone Robin Tewes Nick Tobier Michelle Watt Robert Watts Charmaine Wheatley Matteo Zagolin and others…

Robin Kahn is a visual artist who also produces art anthologies, events and exhibitions (most recently Free Show). Her anthologies include Special Issue, Promotional Copy, Time Capsule: A Concise Encyclopedia By Women Artists (available through D.A.P. books). Her curatorial projects have been reviewed in World Art, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Time Out and MS Magazine. This is the fourth time she has organized The Holiday Shopping Show.

For further information, contact Robin at (917)270-0626 or robinkahn@yahoo.com
.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Joel Klein Gets F/Earth School Field Trip


On our way to The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens learning is not testing...

City Councilman Robert Jackson chaired the hearing.

We had previously collected close to 7,000 petitions to present to the DOE in addition to a 6 foot tall report card for Joel Klein, which read:

Joel Klein's Report Card
You get an F for:
1. Hiding that 85% of the school report card is based on test scores
2. Choosing Standardized Tests Over Meaningful Learning
3. Turning our Schools into Test Prep Factories
4. Misleading the Public About NYC's Poor Showing on National Assessments
5. Reducing Our children to Test Scores

We listened to 3 hours of DOE accountability czar Jim Liebman testifying and being grilled by Council members. Council members were pretty hard on him and many caught on to his obfuscations.

After Liebman completed testifying, Councilman Robert Jackson, chair of the Education Committee, asked that Mr. Liebman go to the back of the hearing room and meet with the parents who had petitions to present to him.

We waited patiently with the whole press corps, but he sneaked out the back door and refused to meet with us!

Numbers of us ran after Liebman and outside had a confrontation with him, captured by the press¢ cameras and aired on last night¢s news programs

Liebman would not stop to talk to us. Instead, he ran away from parents, unwilling to accept the thousands of petitions that you worked so hard to gather!

We then went back in to the hearing and testified.

I am sure you will get to see what occurred on the news or in the papers tomorrow if they cover it in an honest fashion.

Thanks to all the parents who worked hard over the last few weeks getting signatures and mailing them in. They are still arriving, both online and in my mailbox. We will continue collecting, but our work is cut out for us.

The DOE thinks that they are unstoppable, but we must show them that we will be totally vigilant in preventing them from hijacking our children¢s education with their excessive and high stakes testing scheme.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Paul Bauman



Artist Paul Bauman invited me to his studio out in Bushwick the other day. He had alot going on over there. He is making music with the computer, drawing, and collecting and organizing objects according to their color. He also is co-owner of Hand Made Frames this is the place to go for the very best framing. http://www.handmadeframes.us/

Sunday, December 9, 2007

Hotel coming to Williamsburg


http://curbed.com/archives/2007/12/06/another_hotel_coming_to_williamsburg.php

check out the comment thread that our new neighbor's building to come has generated.
Artists are not popular on Curbed.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Google Map KM Construction next door


Great view for the New Hotel in Williamsburg. What about light on McCarren Park/hardtop this is the little public space there is in Brooklyn? Is there no City Planning in Brooklyn?
What the hell is going on with all these ugly buildings by Karl Fischer. Our local politicians must be on the take. The owners we think are KM associates
Kiska



Monday, December 3, 2007

Building Collapses in Williamsburg

Pictures from Gowanus Lounge


Monday, December 03, 2007

Gravity Thwarted on Grand Street?

Never mind that the building on Grand Street that is being demolished and almost self-demolished is now very braced. You still get an unsettling feeling looking up at the wall that started to crack away recently and appears to have come very close to making some building collapse headlines. Brooklyn 11211 first noted the Crack Problem on Grand Street on Friday. We stopped by over the weekend and found it quite impressive, and also found a News 12 car parked outside. The building dates to the mid-19th Century and apparently started to succumb to vibrations from demolition or simply decided to end it all on its own terms. The project also earned a Stop Work Order, but for expired permit rather than the crack problem. A 14-story Karl Fischer "Monster Tower" will be flipping major bird to the neighborhood rising here and iving Grand Street a bold new look.
other collapses.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E6DF1F3CF937A15752C1A96F958260
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0051,robbins,20842,5.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/nyregion/20collapse.html?pagewanted=print
Fingered Again: 'Monster Tower' Approved at Driggs & Grand
Tuesday, May 22, 2007, by Robert
Don't look now, but it appears that a another finger-ish building is going to be flipping a touch of bird in Williamsburg. A neighborhood correspondent who's been keeping tabs on the progress of a proposed 14-story building at Driggs and Grand Street in the Burg passes on word that it's been approved. Our correspondent writes:

It looks like plans have been approved for the Karl Fischer monster (219-224 Grand, not the empty lot). Approved yesterday for 14 stories! City Planning was supposed to review the area and possibly landmark Fillmore place but I guess someone's palm got greased. Residents received letters just last week saying the area was under review.
That's the rendering of "The Grand Tower" from the website of Karl Fischer Architects.
· New Williamsburg Tall Building Smackdown Coming [Curbed]
· Grand Street Foreplay Destructoporn [Curbed]

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