NEWSgrist: *Summer Issue* Vol

NEWSgrist: *Summer Issue* Vol.4, no.12 (Summer 2003)

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

http://newsgrist.net

{bi-weekly news digest}

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Vol.4, no.12 (Summer 2003)

NOTE: NEWSgrist is on VACATION from

|||||||||16 June - 15 September|||||||||

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Spiral Jetty re-emerges (a photo-travelogue)

- *NEWSgrist’s Underbelly* post your own

- *Quote/s* the way reality looks

- *Url/s* Utopia Station; A Hacker Manifesto

- *Textatic* Rachel Greene on text.com

- *Big Hair* Visual AIDS haute coiffure benefit

- *MoMA Milage* on schedule

- *Maxed Out* Max Anderson + the Whitney

- *Wrapture* Christo + Central Park

- *The Ritz* Dia:Beacon opens

- *Dead or Alive in Beacon* Amy Lipton, Live! at Dia

- *Book Grist* Earthworks, by Suzaan Boettger

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*Splash*

http://newsgrist.net

Spiral Jetty re-emerges (a photo-travelogue)

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Smithson.html

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*NEWSgrist’s Underbelly*

Check for new posts, or post your own news, press releases,

urls, opinions, rants, etc., in the Underbelly :

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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*Quote/s*

<< Bonami also addresses the apparent contradiction between

treating themes of globalization—however metaphorically—and

maintaining the national pavilions. "These are the two spirits at the

heart of the Biennale. That's why the title is 'Dreams and Conflicts':

on the one hand, the idea of a universal exhibition, of language

barriers and political borders that are overcome; and on the other

hand, the conceptual conflict with the national pavilions, which need

this form of representation and these borders for their own identity.

That's the way the reality around us looks." >>

06.02.03 ArtForum Int'l News Digest:

Gearing Up for the Biennale, Jennifer Allen

http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200323?sid=473c805901abfd9c2a5320adecad7f02#news4933

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*Url/s*

Utopia Station

As the catalyst burns, it fumes.

http://www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia/index.html

McKenzie Wark ~~~~~~~A Hacker Manifesto version 4

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html

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*Textatic*

Open Books

RACHEL GREENE

ArtForum, June 2003

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=4903#hotlistsidebar4903

In some ways the Net remains like a seedy nightclub: The fuzz

rarely knows what's really happening, even if they bust in

occasionally. Subversive projects flourish in the shadows of more

respectable activities, and despite Napster's public evisceration,

kids, opportunists, and indie types enjoy a new class of open-

source browsers, peer-to-peer tools, code libraries, and

uncontrollable flows of cultural data (music, movies, porn, writing).

Out of this wellspring comes http://textz.com

A free archive of radical writing or "backup system for scientific and

artistic purposes," textz.com, created by German artist and activist

Sebastian Luetgert, differs from Napster, Bearshare, and the like in

that it's not an application and doesn't offer audio or video files.

Instead of facilitating decentralized sharing among many

participants, textz.com presents a tightly curated, comparatively

static inventory of ASCII (plain text) documents. Those looking for

Anne Rice or Harry Potter will be disappointed. But for tactical media

heads, textz.com, stocked as it is with works by Guy Debord, Luther

Blissett, Matthew Fuller, and McKenzie Wark, will be the library

carrel they never had. Other free reads are sometimes canonical

(Les fleurs du mal, Crime and Punishment), generally radical

(Burroughs, Red Army Faction, Empire), and often technocultural

(Kathy Acker, Baudrillard, ADILKNO).

Textz.com lacks a simple, easy interface, but its design—conceptual,

dense, and labored— fits its sprawl of thick, intellectual properties.

Borrowing Situationist/anarchist strategies to defy copyright and to

appropriate material and acting on the conviction that texts "

change lives," Luetgert offers precisely enough free culture to last

"3 months 0 weeks 3 days 13 hours 36 minutes and 3 seconds"...

and counting.

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*Big Hair*

Visual AIDS announces A Big Hairy Deal - Part Deux

An Evening of Hair, Beauty and Style benefiting Visual AIDS

Presented by ECRU New York

Wednesday, June 18th, 2003 6:00PM - 1:00AM

Web invitation at:

www.thebody.com/visualaids/current/hairy_deal.html

One Love Wednesdays at B Bar and Grill

40 East 4th Street (formerly known as Bowery Bar)

Haircuts by NYC's top stylists: $40

Makeup: $10-$20

Raffle: One for $5 and Five for $20

No cover charge. Hair and Makeup booked on a first come, first

served basis. Gift Bags for guests who receive beauty services or

buy five or more Raffle Tickets.

Special Guest Host

DJ's: Max Pask & Marcos aka The Orphans (Knowmatic Recordings)

Premier Gifts and Donations (list in formation): Toys in Babeland,

Triple 5 Soul, Kata Eyewear, Royal Elastics, Make Up For Ever,

Redken, Kiss My Face, Bowery Tattoo, Temptu, Davoucci, Curl

Friends, Mecca, Sage70, Astroglide, Spiffer, Mecca, Valerie's Oscar

Bond, ECRU New York, BodyNow and dinners at Parish & Co., Chow

Bar and Petrosino (as of 6.4.03).

New York, NY, June 4, 2003: Visual AIDS, the only national arts

organization offering professional support to artists living with HIV

and AIDS or their estates, presents one of the hippest, downtown

fundraising events of the year: A Big Hairy Deal-Part Deux. The first

A Big Hairy Deal benefit event raised over $2500 for Visual AIDS.

This year we want to double it, so come out and get beautiful for a

good cause. The party takes place on Wednesday, June 18, 2002

from 6:00PM to 1:00AM at the legendary B-Bar (formerly known as

Bowery Bar) in conjunction with the "One Love Wednesdays" party

hosted by the notorious Pascal Sugar!

Along with the venue's spacious outdoor patio (where tobacco

usage is still allowed!) the evening's main attraction is the

opportunity for guests to receive professional haircuts and styles

for a mere $40 from a team of high profile professional hairdressers

and stylists along with makeup services. No appointments will be

taken before the event itself. All bookings will be taken at the event

so come early to get yours. Participating hairdressers from ECRU

New York, Oscar Bond, John Frieda, Valerie's, Kropps & Bobbers,

Carlos Lobo Salon, and Lair and make-up artists from MAC

Cosmetics and Make Up For Ever. There will also be a raffle for a

variety of valuable prizes, premium gift bags, art installations and

DJs Max Pask and Marcos of the will rock the house all night long!

There is no entrance fee and Visual AIDS will receive a percentage

of the bar so come have an after work drink and bring your friends!

Can't make it? All donations to Visual AIDS are tax-deductible. This

is a benefit after all. Send checks to Visual AIDS 526 West 26th St.

#510 New York, NY 10001

For media inquiries and/or more information contact:

Amy Sadao, Visual AIDS: 212 627-9855 asadao@visualaids.org

or Annette Gallo, Benefit Committee 917 647-8365 Annette@bluemedium.com

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*MoMA Milage*

NYC art museum's midtown galleries may reopen late next year

By DAVID MINTHORN

Associated Press Writer

Newsday,June 4, 2003, 8:19 PM EDT

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--moma0604jun04,0,6115625.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire

NEW YORK -- Reconstruction of the Museum of Modern Art is more

than halfway complete and the museum is scheduled to reopen by

early 2005 for the gallery's 75th anniversary.

Delays caused by the Sept. 11 attack that put the $600 million

project slightly behind schedule have been made up, museum

director Glenn Lowry said Wednesday as he led reporters on a

tour of the construction site in midtown Manhattan.

MoMA's new galleries will feature column-free viewing areas for its

modern masterpieces, glass curtain walls, a light-filled atrium

soaring 110 feet above street level and a restored sculpture

garden on 54th Street, just off Fifth Avenue.

The museum boasts the largest collection of modern art in the

United States. It moved to a temporary gallery, MoMA Queens,

across the East River, a year ago when major construction got

under way.

Floor space is being nearly doubled to 630,000 square feet,

including almost 130,000 feet of viewing areas, up from 80,000 in

the old MoMA. The reconfigured MoMA will also include a new

research and educational wing, but that part of the project will

take at least a year or two longer, Lowry said.

Architect Yushio Taniguchi, interviewed from Tokyo, said he

designed "a museum within a city _ a city within a city," integrating

it into the midtown location rather than attempting a radically

distinctive design. He said he put special emphasis on restoring

the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden to its original form.

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*Maxed Out*

Director of The Whitney quits: "I didn’t want to preside over the

museum if it was not going to try something significant"

Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum, New York,

resigns after the trustees shelve the proposed extension by

Rem Koolhaas

The Art Newspaper, 6/6/03

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11133

By Jason Edward Kaufman

NEW YORK. The director of the Whitney Museum of American Art,

Maxwell Anderson, resigned last month, saying in a statement that,

"It has become clear in recent months that the Board and I have a

different sense of the Whitney’s future, in both the scale of its

ambitions and the balance of its programming." In March the board

had cancelled a long-planned expansion by architect Rem Koolhaas,

which a disappointed Mr Anderson says, "Signals a pace of growth

that is different from what I envisioned."

The 47-year-old New Yorker, who has led the Whitney Museum

since 1998, does not come cheap. In 2000, the most recent year for

which records are public, he made $548,000 with $24,000 in

expenses and other perks. Although Mr Anderson’s departure has

been presented as a resignation, his is the sort of position one does

not leave unless one is told to do so.

So what went wrong? Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Mr Anderson

said: "We had great ambitions for physical expansion when I

arrived in 1998, but between the financial travails of the economy

and the gap in tourism and earned income, there are enough

problems besetting museums without embarking on major capital

projects that can be deferred. Our first priority should be rebuilding

financial health in the short term so that we can flourish in the long

term."

Financial prudence is understandable. The museum will post a

$2-million deficit this year and is sure to remain in the red in fiscal

2004. According to Mr Anderson, the endowment has shed at least

$2 million since 2000 and this year stands at $43 million, so

trustees are seeking to replenish lost capital.

The belt is already being tightened. Deputy director Willard Holmes

has left to take up the position of director at the ailing Wadsworth

Atheneum. He will not be replaced. He takes with him his wife, the

Whitney’s communications director Mary Haus, which leaves

another department understaffed. Half the publications department

has also been laid off, including the department head Garrett White.

The library has lost one full-time and one part-time position and has

reduced its opening hours. From next month the museum will close

to the public on Tuesdays, remaining open only to groups.

When the Whitney emerges from this trough, the public will have no

greater access to its 14,000-work collection of 20th-century

American art than it did when Mr Anderson took over. He proposed

three solutions to the space problems: the Koolhaas expansion;

annexing the Armory on Park Avenue, and opening a satellite space

in Miami.

The Koolhaas expansion was to be a massive, faceted structure

rising from behind the existing Breuer building, then cantilevering

over that building and the adjacent brownstones like a giant fist,

skillfully filling the site’s misshapen zoning envelope. In October

2001 the board voted unanimously to proceed. The New York press

routinely cited the cost as $200 million but, according to Mr

Anderson the total, including endowment and soft costs, would

have been "in excess of a third of a billion dollars--not a

considerable amount when one considers the excitement it would

have generated and the generosity it would have uncorked." Facing

a daunting campaign, the board opted to scrap the scheme.

A backup plan was to make use of the New York State-owned

Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue to mount an annual

exhibition and the Whitney biennial every other year. Mr Anderson

says some trustees feared the second venue would dilute the

Whitney brand: "Again the board was cautious about taking the

risk."

The third option was to open a branch in Miami, which Mr Anderson

describes as "the last great American city without a great public art

collection." Mayor Manny Diaz committed capital to renovate 15,000

square feet of industrial space near a new performing arts center.

"My argument was that the Whitney is a national museum," says Mr

Anderson, but the board did not see a future in Florida. "I didn’t

want to preside over the museum if it was not going to try

something significant," says Mr Anderson. "Of course, I was ready

to ride out the recession, but that was not the issue. It was more

about the scope. At a certain point you say I’m not the right guy to

be here."

"The other concern among the board was over our artistic

direction," he says. Mr Anderson’s predecessor David Ross favoured

shows of young celebrities whose stars have since fallen, while Mr

Anderson, instead mounted shows of under-exposed talents from

the past such as Alice Neel, Joan Mitchell, Wayne Thiebaud, Mies

van der Rohe, and Elie Nadelman.

Of the 42 trustees, many are collectors of contemporary art with

strong ideas about which artists the museum should show, but Mr

Anderson believes a board should not be involved in shaping

exhibition policy. "The quilts of Gee’s Bend was a kind of turning

point in this debate," he says, referring to a 2002 show of

traditional quilts from an Alabaman African American community.

"I wanted to open up the boundaries of fine art, and it was a very

contentious choice. The board despaired of it."

A Harvard-trained scholar of antiquity and a devout internationalist,

Mr Anderson never seemed quite comfortable at the all-American,

Modernist Whitney. An able manager, he capably steered the

institution, but seemed more in his element as director of the

Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University (1987-95), where his

innovative exchange programme secured loans of antiquities from

the storerooms of European museums. "The US is more insular than

it should be and I’m eager to get back into a more international

realm," Mr Anderson admits. He remains at the Whitney until the

autumn when he begins a fellowship at the Yale School of

Management, an interim position while he considers his future.

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*Wrapture*

INSIDE ART

A Windfall From Christo

By CAROL VOGEL

NYTimes 6/6/03

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/arts/design/06INSI.html

While February 2005 may seem like eons away, it is not, at least for

Christo and Jeanne-Claude. That is when the artists will finally

realize their 24-year-old dream of decorating 23 miles of Central

Park's walkways with 7,460 gates, 16 feet tall and topped with

translucent saffron-color fabric.

Whether wrapping the Reichstag in Berlin with more than a million

square feet of aluminium-colored fabric or swathing the Pont Neuf in

Paris with 454,178 square feet of a champagne-colored textile that

shimmered like silk, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always

financed their mammoth undertakings themselves. They raise

money by selling Christo's drawings and collages, as well as early

artworks of wrapped objects from the 1950's and 1960's.

"Each project is like a child--it costs whatever it has to cost," said

Jeanne-Claude, who estimates the gates may cost up to $20

million.

While the potential for marketing products related to these project

is almost limitless, the artists have never allowed any licensing or

taken any such initiatives themselves. Until now.

For the first time, they have agreed to let the Carriage House

Center, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that oversees a

consortium of foundations, have the exclusive worldwide rights to

set up licensing agreements for products based on the Central Park

project. None of the proceeds will go to the artists or toward

producing the project: everything goes to protecting and restoring

New York City's natural environment and supporting arts causes.

Deutsche Bank Americas is joining the initiative, giving $250,000 in

seed money to become a corporate founding partner with the

Carriage House Center.

The center's president, Theodore W. Kheel, the former labor

negotiator, has worked with the artists since they filed their first,

unsuccessful application with the city to do "The Gates Project for

Central Park" in 1979. They have remained friends.

"They offered to give the city marketing rights, but the city was

not in a position to accept them," Mr. Kheel said in a telephone

interview this week. "Knowing about the Carriage House and my

interest in environmental matters, we agreed to work together."

Mr. Kheel is passionate about helping raise New Yorkers'

awareness about dangers to the city's environment, which he

says is an issue "as serious as terrorism but not as immediate."

Mr. Kheel and Deutsche Bank executives say they do not know how

much money they will be able to raise through licensing, nor have

they determined what kind of licensing efforts to embark upon.

Paul Wilmot, managing partner of Paul Wilmot Communications,

has been asked to help develop licensing programs and seek

additional corporate sponsorship.

Gary Hattum, president of Deutsche Bank Foundation, a

philanthropic arm of the bank, said he saw its involvement as a

way to support the city, the environment and the arts. "We view

this as seed money that is an investment," he said. "It will have

a long-term legacy for the city."

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*The Ritz*

Inside the Box Factory

By Suzaan Boettger

Artnet Magazine 6/6/03

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/boettger/boettger6-3-03.asp

The Dia Art Foundation's conversion of a voluminous 1929 factory

along the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y., (where Nabisco's cardboard

cracker boxes were once printed and assembled) into vast

exhibition spaces for its collection of large, abstract works from the

1960s (a return of the box, this time crafted of durable industrial

materials and called Minimalist sculpture) is fascinating for several

reasons, few of them having to do with specific objects. For viewers

aware of the art of recent decades, most of the collection will be

deeply familiar. The majority of the 24 artists are established in

art history's pantheon of the 1960s and '70s -- Dan Flavin, Donald

Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra. Big art by big names. Many works

are either huge or serial installations consisting of numerous

elements, hence Dia's need for this structure of 300,000 square

feet of interior space -- a quarter million of it for galleries -- to

display its collection. Attention shifts, then, to the placement and

installation of their works and to the architectural environment.

The main building's series of sawtooth skylights illuminates the

works with clear light bouncing from the river. The light is further

reflected by blond maple flooring, another treasure discovered

within the brick walls. Robert Irwin's master plan for the renovation

of the factory, working with the architects of OpenOffice, piggy-

backed onto the facade a small vestibule. Like the low-ceilinged

entrance at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, passing

through this small room intensifies the experience of expansion

when emerging into the huge, radiant gallery.

The floor plan combines room-sized galleries and great halls, and

the sense of being within a structural grid is underscored by Irwin's

geometric pattern of fenestration juxtaposing translucent and

transparent panes. Scanning these acres of right angles brought to

mind the New Yorker cartoon of a corporate executive speaking into

his desk intercom, "Ms. Jenkins, would you please bring a round

object into my office?"

The proliferation of squares logically dotting the space includes

Judd's slightly varied 15 unpainted plywood boxes (and that's just

one of his eight works on view); LeWitt's Wall Drawing #1085

(1969), an array of 96 drawings each ca. 40 inches square (there

are also five other works by LeWitt, one made up of 56 variations

of steel cubes); and Andy Warhol's Shadows (1978-79), 72 large

(76 x 52 inch) black paintings with an identical abstract shape in

different hues installed contiguously like a rhythmic band of

decorative wainscoting around a very large vacant hall. The tick-

tack-toe effect is less dizzying than enervating.

Even the vitality of irregular crunches and popping hues of John

Chamberlain's 16 sculptures strewn over a long gallery take on an

orderly, mechanical, feel. One expects respite in an enclosed room

of Agnes Martin's quiet linearity -- but then almost chokes on the

suffusion of 15 big square paintings done in cotton candy colors.

An antidote to all these exercises in installation excess is the

analytical tautness of Serra's trio of experiential Torqued Ellipses.

The impact of their compressed caverns are further heightened by

their placement within a narrow corridor.

But the sense that many of these massed objects are playing

strong silent types comes not only from the works' familiarity, but

because they are utterly decontextualized. The only thing on view

other than the works themselves are wall labels listing artist, title,

date. The curatorial M.O. is the old-fashioned formalist idea that

"the art speaks for itself." It doesn't. It speaks through us, and

thus has many possible voices, and is part of history. In relation to

the values of our own time, of economic contraction and acute

awareness of global duress, these works shout "conspicuous

production."

By contrast, when they were made, these abstractions' bold scale

was deeply radical, inspired by big refusals of expressionist juice

and touch, overt visual pleasure and poetic metaphor. The Dia

collection harkens back to a decade when the convergence of

strong fiscal growth, the largesse of Great Society programs,

increasing support for civil rights, anti-Vietnam war protests, and

myriad forms of personal and sexual liberation made such artistic

innovation on a large scale a cultural manifestation of the utopian

belief that "anything is possible."

This may explain why Postminimalism's enactment of the chaos and

conflict of the late '60s' years of political assassinations and anti-

Vietnam tumult, of anti-form and disarray, has been relegated to a

back corner. There, it's a thrill to discover in an alcove Joseph Beuys'

messy piles in an installation that was a setting for one of his anti-

war Coyote performance pieces. Another historically important,

rarely exhibited work is Serra's 1967 scatter piece of rubber latex

and rods.

And another back-room boy here is Robert Smithson, who in 1972

recalled his skepticism of Minimalism, saying that, "The very

construction of the gallery with its neutral white rooms became

questionable." Significantly, works by Smithson did not enter the

collection until Nancy Holt's gift of the Spiral Jetty in 1999 became

an offer Dia could not refuse. The Lannan Foundation then

purchased the Smithson works on view at Beacon as a long-term

loan. Three of Smithson's four sculptures here are rarely seen

"nonsites," works that contain geological matter (loose gravel, salt

crystals or sand), from specific places and juxtapose hard mirror

panels to their loose disarrays.

The grittiness of this rear building's brick walls and concrete floor

does correspond well with Beuys' and Smithson's piles, the official

reason for these works' placement. But an effective installation not

only makes each work look good, but collectively tells a story.

Walter De Maria, one of the artists still alive and thus given the

choice of his space, staked out a gallery front and center for his

floor-bound stainless steel outlines of circles and squares. It is

twice as wide and three times as long (300 feet) as the rear spaces

allotted to Beuys and Smithson.

One wonders why the parents at this institution, director Michael

Govan and curator Lynn Cooke, didn't referee their charge's land

grab instead of allowing the placement of works to imply a topsy-

turvy art history, contrary to each artist's achievements and impact.

The misleading effect of that contrast, already seen in the press, is

to encourage a downgrading of Smithson's achievement by the

uninformed.

And was it an innocent coincidence that no pictures of works by

Smithson were available at the press preview? In recent years

Michael Heizer, whose mammoth desert project is being funded by

Dia and Lannan, and who was a pal of Smithson in the latter's

lifetime (he died in 1973), has whacked his dead friend in print (in

the New York Times, 12/12/99) and claimed his own priority (saying,

"High-speed hustler… What was some guy from New Jersey doing

building a sculpture like mine on a lake in Utah?").