Sunday, December 28, 2008

FAAN Tribough Bridge Adoption


Now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge
My Gratitude For The Art Adoption Program and Aron Namenwirth

On the forth date, I was asked to decorate his home. Everyone had told me not to do it.
Don’t decorate the home of your brand-new boyfriend... especially when his divorce
papers are still being negotiated. Well, I didn’t listen to them. I’m not a stupid girl. I
knew I’d be doing it for free, with no future ownership of any of that decor. But, I saw
the need and I knew it was something I could do.

It was late. I had been searching the web for hours, for all things for someone else’s
home. I clicked into my email, remembering I had forgotten all day. And there it was.
Some email about art. Art. Yes, his house needed art. I started looking into the art
pieces... quickly thumbing through. And then... I saw it... this stunning piece. But,
even with all its drama, it was its subject matter that made me pause... the tollbooth into
Manhattan. Not only the place I dreamt of being, but the place that reminded me of
home.

My parents lived in Brooklyn Heights as a young couple, long before me. They saved
their money and purchased their first house in the southern tip of the Adirondack park.
Growing up in New Jersey, we would often spend weekends at the house in the
country... until we moved to Wisconsin. I hadn’t seen the house since I was ten.
Twenty-five years later, my father passed away. And instead of deciding we were going
to mope around with sadness in our hearts, we loaded up the car, grabbed the dog, and off
my mother and I went... to refurbish the home two newlyweds first purchased some forty
years prior. One day my mother would move back to that house, and I wanted it to be
ready for her. We completed most everything on our list, with the exception of art. There
was one wall in particular which was just a massive amount of empty space. It still was
not a home. But, after rooftops and windows and radiators, there was certainly no money
left for reupholstering or art. We had left the house for many months, and I had long
forgotten the empty wall.

But, then, there I was staring at this painting of the tollbooth into the city, and thought of
how many times my parents must have crossed those tolls. I thought of how much fun
they must have had in Brooklyn Heights, and remembered all their stories. I thought... if
only this painting were hanging in mom’s upstate house... to remind her that “yesterday”
is only a few roads and a toll away. I started to read more about this painting. Then, I
saw the size... it was much taller than me every which way it could be turned. And with
the obvious talent of the artist, surely this was no painting I could afford. Then, I noticed
the title of this website... “Art Adoption.” What on earth was this?, I thought. Well, just
a little bit of reading later, I discovered... this was a gift. The entire website. It was a
gift of the heart. I immediately understood, as it was for this same reason I was helping
this recent divorce. I was compelled to write to the artist, sharing this story as best I
could. There was only one painting, and surely many of us who asked to adopt. But, I
wanted the artist to know how much his gift had meant to me in so many different ways.
To my great surprise, I received a wonderful email back from him, Mr. Aron
Namenwirth. He and his wife had chosen me as the adoptive “parent” to his beautiful piece of art. And... it was going to hang in mom’s upstate house, on the massive wall
having patiently waited.
It was then when I realized, had I listened to the “others” and not seized the moment in
helping this now ex-boyfriend, I never would have taken the time to open that email
about the art adoption program. And I never would have discovered that many times
good things do come back to us... just not necessarily from the person you expect.

I am so grateful for the program... just knowing how many other lives must have been
touched by art in this similar way. This summer I look forward to meeting Mr.
Namenwirth and his family, and continuing a friendship which all began with everything
I always feel truly is art... a sense of love for our fellow-man.

My sincere gratitude,

Christina Peters

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Christmas tree salesman

video: nicholas sullivan
*edited by my computer- for full 10min. version go to utube.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

John Giglio and Paul Slocum at aMP


artMovingProjects
166 N.12th St, between Bedford and Berry Sts., Williamsburg (917-301-6680, 917-301-0306).
Subway: L to Bedford Avenue Thurday -Sunday, 1pm - 6pm www.artmovingprojects.com
info@artmovingprojects.com
www.artmovingprojects.blogspot.com


Opening: Friday December 12th 7-9 through Feb. 8th
by appointment: December 21st through Jan. 14th. Closed: Jan. 15-18th


John Giglio
“Designing Heaven”

Designing Heaven is a series of drawings that propose what the afterlife may look like, what form those who live there may take, and how they might spend their time. The project began as a simple challenge to myself: as an artist interested in alternative architecture, I spent a number of years designing and building amorphous, temporary, and transient structures – but could I design a space which is, by it’s very nature, completely intangible? What’s more, could I make the task a calculated and impartial investigation, one devoid of any form of critique or political statement concerning my subject? In short, could I simply do the job of designing heaven? While the answer to most of those questions may very well have turned out to be “No, I can’t”, the product of a sincere and even obsessive effort can be seen in over sixty drawings that make up the show.

Most of the drawings are small, 11”x 14” or less, and are done with Pencil, Gouache, and Ink. Included in the set are titles such as Transfer Station for Heaven-to-Earth Transitions, Apparatus for Heavenly Ascension, Depiction of a Soul, Ribbon Soul Communities Over Washington Square Park, Souls Doing Useful Work, Soul Residing Under A Child’s Bed, and Everyone Loves a Beanbag Chair, Even Souls.

New Media Project Space
Paul Slocum
“Transformer Fire”

As seen on Spirit Surfers an internet surf club “Transformer Fire” is transformed to
run in artMovingProjects N. M. P. S. What appear as 5 different videos depict failure of infrastructures looping infinitely and conjure systemic breakdown.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

Collapse of Culture in America (part 3)

5. Jan Mancuska : Andrew Kreps
This show had all the elements of a great show, but I not sure if it all added up to something or not. The variables included over the top installation, building out of screen with sheet rock, lots of super cool vintage collectible furniture stacked to make walls to the ceiling, video that was non-narrative and searching, vitrines filled with etched glass and ceramic, at huge production cost. This experience was of such large ambition that it made me feel lost, somewhat like going somewhere with the right address but in the wrong boro, and having a friend tell you that they are there and you are there but you can't see each other.




5. Meredith Allen : Edward Thorp
Another great show. In these photographs of trash, we find a symptom of our collapse.
Meredith using a medium that for the most part I have become bored with, touches on what
is destroying and what holds together society. This being our need to shop and buy beyond our needs and means. What is so amazing about these pictures is not what they represent but what they contain. (they remind me of the early work of Rachel Harrison, pictures of people walking by bags of garbage on the street). Here I think about presents made in china that will be on the street in a years time. I have talked about emotional content: an expression of Bruce Lee......
When I look at one of Allen's pictures it reminds me of the feeling I get from re-reading or looking at an illustration of a creepy scenerio in an old childrens book from when I was 4. What little hair left stands, and waves of feeling rush through my entire body:) In this case it is what covers the surface that delivers depth. Thank You Meredith. Her Partner Carol Saft is also good at navigating rough seas.


Detail (click to enlarge images)

4. Christian Schumann at Leo Koenig Inc.

This is one of the best shows I have seen in a while and it proves that while culture collapses
aspects of it can expand. In this work lie the ruins of civilizations. The bones and artifacts left behind a species in the process of self-destruction. Cheers Christian!

This show is great!

3. Lari Pittman at Gladstone Gallery: This guy seems to have taken Richard Princes place at Gladstone he influences a lot of young(er) painters namely my buddies Jay Davis, Emelio Perez, and Dan Kopp and others. Although they seem to be going for the thin gestural paint that is so now- anyway they Rock. I remember Carl Ostendarp once telling me you are only as good as those you influence.
So does Lari in this new show, all the paintings are consistently complex, tight and packed to the max with imagery that reveals itself slowly. So slowly in fact, that I did not have enough time to really give to it. The layering of form, use of line, and all that formal stuff was pretty incredible.


2. Richard Prince at Gagosian: This show lacks any of the wit Richard is know for. He is looking at Picasso and trying to redo him, but suffers from making the same painting over and over again. Does he think if he makes it big, and slings a brush around covering photo-shopped imagery of Richard Kern (who at this point is a much better artist) he is going to impress. Even the car in the window lacked the edge that Prince normally serves up. I think if this artist can not find any conceptual bite he should stop cranking out bad art, or he is going to devalue everything he has done up to this point. He should be looking at Duchamp more. Interesting expressionistic thinly painted canvases are back in fashion reminding me of neo-expressionism that preceded the last crash of the art market. Probably a symptom of a fast way to make a painting and a buck.

Another of my favs who has dropped the ball.





1. This first show was so bad I felt sorry for the artist, and am totaly blocking out his name,
but remember it was at Mathew Marks- oh yeah Terry Winters. What the hell happened to him? When I was in grad school he was the shit! That guy painted better than all the rest of them including Julian. His painting was fluid, they made themselves, worlds of all the stuff that existed at the beginning of the world. They seduced and sucked the viewer into their delicious realness and abstraction. They moved and danced. Nothing seemed contrived- they came from the earth and everyone in art school was trying to match him. Sam Reveles came close. The work at Marks lacked every quality of the earlier work except the oil paint and scale. Now the color seemed artificial and the composition static. This imagery rejects the grid template Terry imposes on it. What a disaster.

As I am opening up artMovingProjects with John Giglio and Paul Slocum in the New Media Project Space (N.M.P.S.) on Dec. 12th and presenting my own work "Made in U.S.A. at VertexList
on the 13th, so I am going to take the advice I gave to one of my very favorite artists Tom Moody and cool it on the criticism for the duration which is Febuary.

Blip Festival

Glomag
Bitshifter
Blip festival through sunday 149 7th st. Brooklyn between 2nd and 3rd ave. (Carrol Gardens)

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Made in U.S.A.

Charles Beronio artist and new director of VertexList with Party City and Barak Obama
in my studio. The show will opens Saturday the 13th of DECEMBER 2008. I am thinking about calling the show Made in U.S.A.
See links for influence's
http://bricebrown.com/
title only:) have to get to show http://francisnaumann.com/
through Dec. 19th
The Rematerialization of Art Ed Halter
http://rhizome.org/editorial/287
recent reading.
Crust by Lawrence Shainburg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3379900.Crust
Current interests: Freud psychoanalysis
Things with similar title:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060647/

also, Glomag performing at 8:00


Opening the same weekend John Giglio at artMovingProjects.

VertexList

-- 138 Bayard St Brooklyn NY 11222 * Tel/Fax: 646 258 3792 * email:info@vertexlist.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For Immediate Release:

Aron Namenwirth: Solo Exhibition at vertexList

vertexList has the distinct pleasure to present “Made in U.S.A.”, a solo exhibition by artist and curator Aron Namenwirth.

A reception will take place on Saturday, December 13th 2008 from 7pm - 10pm, with the artist in attendance. The exhibition will be on display until Sunday, February 1st, 2009 (by appointment December 26st through January 8th).

Live performance by glomag at the reception, 8 PM.

Aron Namenwirth presents “Made in U.S.A.”, a series of meticulously rendered “pixel paintings” depicting current presidential figures (including a winner, loser, and lame-duck), as well as religious prophets and spiritual and cult leaders, and one international villain, along with several abstract works. “Made in U.S.A.” marks several years of diligent work by Namenwirth exposing the manufactured and fabricated reality presented by media production and representation of political figures as celebrities in the post-American era. The work reveals our televised reality as an atomized and reified dislocated abstraction. In other works, global mapping, satellite imagery, and landscape images are fused into a new genre of Cartesian landscapes. Seen as an accumulative process of negation, the renderings merge the tradition of painting with contemporary digital imaging in fragmentary grids that appear as frozen blurs. Namenwirth’s work certainly announces that New Media has become “now” media.



vertexList gallery hours are Friday, Saturday, Sunday 1pm - 6 pm, or by appointment.
We are located between Graham and Manhattan Avenues at 138 Bayard St. For more info
please visit our website www.vertexlist.net or call 646 258 3792.
(rough cut) press release
These 7 paintings and one sculpture are concerned with the remateralization of technology,
Politics, Culture, Spirituality, and their convergence with Nature. They were made over the last three years using tape, wood, glue, acrylic paint, computer, and software. At Vertexlist for the second time Aron Namenwirth continues to play with pixels that result from blowing up digital imagery via the Internet. Some of these portraits become exposed while others remain abstract. Representational images of George Bush, Barak Obama, Osama Bin Laden, and Hillary Clinton become obvious at a distance or when one’s eye is squinted, the other paintings Extinction, Spirit Surfers, and Party City, are the combination of 4 or more images that when layered negate each other, much in the way competing radio stations on the air become static. The one sculpture is from a google map satellite blowup of Williamsburg, more particularly the areas occupied by artMovingProjects, McCarran Park and VertexList. Aron is interested in the codes of perception; just how much information is needed in order to create a recognizable image. How patterns generate associations, and how meaning is transferred through memory and experience.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008









Looks like I will be doing a solo show with VertexList opening Friday or Saturday, Dec.. 12th or13th 2008 so save the date. All I can say at this point is expect Paintings, nothing plugged in.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Cory Arcangel Adult Contemporary at Team Gallery



Photos: Aron Namenwirth from performance at New Museum last night. Basically the performance was Cory putting out (selling) a lot of ideas for new work to the sold out audience.
They were instructed to applaud the good ones and put down the bad ones, although he said ultimately he was going to do what he thought best anyway. He was very funny and reaching for the sublime that technology provides as default. His comments on lack of respect for film making and slowed down museum tour on tape elicited many giggles. If you can make the art crowd laugh that is quite an accomplishment. His show at Team is much better than the last one. The sculpture downstairs in which two computers sent out of office messages back and forth to each other is particularly excellent and seems least concerned with selling itself. Which is probably a good idea as Collectors may be saving what money they have left. this piece would be my choice if I had a room big enough to devote to it alone as was done to perfection at Team
No accounting for memory. I had a little post discussion about the event/show with Marcin Ramocki who affirms Cory a Modernist. I think that not true. While a master at taking ideas down to there basic foundations, Cory's real passions lie in the convergence of cheesy pop culture and personal taboo rule breaking. How do I get my parents pooch into the New Museum
- make him part of the performance. That the dogs tricks are lame all the better. With the death of Clement Greenburg so went the Death of Modernism and a good thing for it too. Behind every important art movement lies some great critic or critics/theorists hopefully New Media will find it's champions. If I could spell/think i might step up to the plate.
www.teamgal.com/artists/cory_arcangel/exhibitions/137

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Voting for the first time


Anticipate long lines, we got to PS. 17 in Williamsburg Brooklyn around 8.00 and waited in the longest line since Disney Land. It made Jane sick to her stomach literally. People seemed unusually irritated. The couple in front of us were not in the book, they said it was their third time voting at PS. 17 and were given a sheet of paper and told their votes would be counted.
A pregnant woman who looked like she would give birth at any moment asked if she could cut the line, and was told no cutting by the woman with the book at the table and told to see some
invisible supervisor. I always wonder why when people go into the booth to pick there vote it takes so long. What are they doing in there? Must be picking their nose. I would not wait to the last minute to vote in this election.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Peter T. Church



(click on image to enlarge)
Photograph from Salisbury Yearbook 1981 (note I am behind David Brock having been knocked down to ground) Peter T. Church is not in the picture. I remember on graduation day he opened his diploma binder to find it empty. He and I were not having a good day. I called Salisbury this morning and talked to Lisa Duntz who informed me he was dead. No further information was available, although she said she would send out an email. He was my roomate and best friend. Any information about Peter's death, or his parents whereabouts would be greatly appreciated.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Friday, October 31, 2008

Collapse of Culture in America (part 2)


I have been involved in some non-art related matters for much of the year, but I am back in New York and with the gallery artMovingProjects closed temporarily, I have had more time to concentrate on my own and others art outside of the gallery. This has been a special time in that without my curatorial mission, I feel more free to critique the work of my peers.

The first show seen recently was the work of Joe Bradley at Canada Gallery. This is an artist who has been showing minimal geometric stick figures that remind me of 3 dimensional Joel Shapiro sculptures minus the concern for craft. This show shocked me, which these days is in itself an accomplishment. Everything I expected out of this artist who was on my radar was erased in the new work. The canvas upon entering the gallery and the sole work in that room was a blank un-primed poorly stretched and dirty piece of cotton duck on a fairly large stretcher that I walked right by. In the main room where more of the same with minimal symbolically looking and boldly gestured char col stick figure, eye, cross, and something else. My first thought was he should of just left the gallery empty- which is the way artMovingProjects sits as I write this. But it left an impression, it is 4.30 in the morning and I can not sleep am writing about it. I have my fingers crossed for him. I understand perhaps he felt he had nowhere to go with the last body of work, and can't wait to see what comes next.

Elizabeth Peyton "Live Forever" at the New Museum
I meet Elizabeth only once at a bar down on Ludlow street in 1991, and was totally taken with her after only a couple of drinks. I thought I might ask her out, but the very next day at a party
at Devon Dikeou's I found she had met Rikrit T. and married him 24 hours later. This woman has an amazing presence, but her work in this retrospective was a real let down. I had just seen the documentary on I am forgetting her name______Alice Neel- from a Documentary , a story of a woman who had struggled most of her life without commercial success, and could not help make a comparison between their works. Both woman painters, and both focused on the portrait. With Peyton's painting I was very impressed with her ability to seduce, the sensitivity of the handling of color, light, paint. She really has a mastery of her surface and composition, the scale is very exciting in it's minuteness, but all the people in her paintings looked the same. This really started to bother me as I moved through the show. They all looked like Kurt Corbain and then I started looking for her self-portrait. At when I found it, "Born to Ride" she painted herself looking like Kurt. Napoleon looked like Kurt. Every one had the same blue expressionless and slightly sad eyes.
The emotional content something, I look for in art was either missing entirely or trapped in the
facile paint handling, in the backgrounds of the gesso itself. I was sorrowed that for all the painting in the museum covering 2 floors those faces lacked the specificity that would conjure the personalities of their owners and this is the power of portraiture. As a culture collapses it's artists become conservative looking backward to traditions mired in convention. The safeness
of figurative painting and it's collectivity can be a manifestation of this setback.

Mary Heilmann "To be Someone" at The New Musuem

This show is great! Mary does not really fit into the Collapse of Culture. I think she pre-dates it. This artist while employing a lot of the same formal strategies comes up with fresh results.
This work is vibrant, fun, and inventive, I will write more about her work later. Sit in the chairs
she made, roll around, look at the work for a long time.

Richard Kern at Feature
(this is part of an interview that went with the show)
10.02.08
you've been taking photos of girls for almost thirty years. will you ever tire of them? will you photograph girls for the rest of your life? do you think of them as girls or women?
I don t see any reason to stop taking photos of women. Photographing naked girls was a career change for me when I started doing it seriously at age 34. At the time, I thought that it would be a nice occupation to have as I grew older. Sometimes I think of the models as girls and sometimes as women.

what keeps your interest?
Trying to think of new things to do within a cliche-ridden format.

when did you start mashing panties and bras into your photos? how did that happen?
A fashion magazine asked me to shoot Kate Moss and told me that she would do whatever I wanted for the photos. I'd been reading about the crazy prices people were paying for clothes worn by Marilyn Monroe at auction. Each piece in the auction was shown with a photo of Marilyn wearing the item as proof that it was authentic. I thought that I would shoot Kate in a bunch of different panties, frame up the panties with the photos and sell them.
The magazine didn't get approval for the shoot and I never got to shoot Kate Moss so I had to alter my plan. I was thinking of shooting celebs in panties because I'd heard that perverts pay for used panties (and stockings etc) along with photos of women wearing them. Because it was going to be hard to get celebrities to model for me in their underwear, I decided to go for this simpler plan. Once someone is seen in a photograph hanging on a wall or in a magazine or book, they gain a kind of celebrity anyway. Art collectors, memorabilia collectors and panty collecting perverts all share a similar desire to own something that has been 'touched' by a specific person.

I think the interview says it better than I can. I think Richard pre-dates the collapse and is not conservative. I am always interested to see what he is up to.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Friday, October 24, 2008

New work


Aron Namenwirth "Party City" acrylic on panel 48x60x3'" 2006-2008

detail (click on image to enlarge)

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