NEWSgrist: *NITE NITE – Bill Jones + Ben Neill* Vol.4,
no.5 (Mar. 10, 2003)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 4, no.5 (Mar.
10, 2003)
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* “Nite Nite” –
Bill Jones + Ben Neill
- *NEWSgrist’s
Underbelly* post your own
- *Quote/s* military porn...
- *Url/s* Blue Button Project; postcard from eutopia
- *Friends + Fiends* Mirapaul on Quake happenings...
- *Urban Bloom* Bloomberg draws up new arts panel
- *Uh-oh
Go-go* Copping to art fraud
- *April in
Paris?* Flood panic
- *Book Grist* Jarhead
- *Art
Obits* Maurice Blanchot; Colin de Land
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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net
“Nite Nite” – Bill
Jones + Ben Neill
March 22 - April 19, 2003
reception:
Saturday, March 22, 6-8pm
Sandra Gering Gallery
534 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
improvisational real-time
performance of music to
moving and still images...
instantly responsive narratives
of sight and sound...
photographs and digital prints
generated from Neill’s
musical score....
“When we wake up tomorrow,
what will the world be like?
When we wake up tomorrow, how will we feel inside?”
Nite Nite is a real time video
remix of an animated Volkswagen
television commercial played
live by networked computers. The
music for Nite Nite and nine
other VW spots was originally
composed by Neill for
Volkswagen via Arnold Advertising. He
then remixed and extended
these compositions to form the
tracks of his latest CD
Automotive, released on the Six Degrees
label. Jones and
Neill have created video remixes of all ten
VW ads. Photographic stills in the installation represent
images
captured from the Nite Nite video remix.
splash archived at: http://newsgrist.net/Splash_NiteNite.html
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*NEWSgrist’s Underbelly*
Check for new
posts, or post your own news, press releases,
urls, opinions, rants, in the
Underbelly : http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569
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*Quote/s*
“Vietnam War films are all pro-war, no matter what the
supposed
message, what Kubrick or Coppola or Stone intended. . . .
The
magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despic-
able beauty of their fighting skills. Fight, rape, war,
pillage, burn.
Filmic images of death and carnage are pornography for the
military man.”
Anthony Swofford, NYTimes Book Review of "'Jarhead':
A
Marine's Desert Song," Sunday 3/2/03
(See *Book Grist* below)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/books/review/002BOWDET.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
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*Url/s*
1) BLUE BUTTON PROJECT http://bluebutton.info/
... We invite you to participate in the Blue Button
Project to
promote education and informed discussions about the world
and how U.S. policy impacts the billions of people inside
and
outside its borders.
2) postcard from eutopia - Ryan Griffis
http://www.faculty.smsu.edu/r/rrg454f/eutopia/
postcards.from.eutopia is a simple, bureauratic interface
that
will collect information from visitors and compile that
information
into the form of a postcard that can be printed and sent
to a
pre-selected entity that is making decisions about our
biological
future.
The postcard images are of the transitional spaces of the
inter-
national airport. Spaces that are at once historical and
futuristic,
but always under construction. The modern airport, like
the
internet, is a space where mobility is the game, and
traffic is
considerably monitored, directed, and controlled by signs.
Borders are expanding and contracting in efforts to
increase the
movement of capital while confining most of the world's
people –
becoming naturalized, biological limits, as much as
geographic,
political delineations. But like the uncontrollability of
genetic
material, the mobility of resistance can find space in
unfinished
spaces of construction.
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*Friends + Fiends*
ARTS ONLINE
Take That, Monica! Kapow, Chandler!
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes 3/3/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/arts/design/03MATT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
On a coming episode of the television show
"Friends," here's
what might happen. Ross arrives and starts to whine.
Suddenly
an armor-clad warrior rushes in and with a blast from a
space-
age weapon reduces Ross to a pile of twitching viscera.
But the
show must go on, so Ross pulls himself together and rises
to
complete his sniveling soliloquy. Just as he finishes, he
is
slaughtered again. Call this episode "The One Where
Ross Is
Repeatedly Annihilated by a Plasma Rifle."
Except that this full-combat "Friends" takeoff
will be seen on the
Internet, not on television. And rather than a cozy New
York cafe
built on a Hollywood sound stage, the show's setting will
be the
futuristic digital scenery of "Quake III Arena,"
the ultraviolent
computer game.
This marriage of carnage and comedy is the creation of
Joseph
DeLappe, an artist and professor at the University of
Nevada,
Reno. On Saturday Mr. DeLappe and five fellow players will
convene in cyberspace to perform
"Quake/Friends." The actors
will appear on the computer screen as typical
"Quake"
gladiators, but each will have assumed the role and
identity of
a "Friends" character. Then, using the game's
instant-message
system, they will re-enact the real show's 1994 pilot
episode in
the "Quake" space by typing and transmitting
dialogue to other
players' screens.
So far, so dull. But online performance is, in a way, a
form of
street theater, and audience participation is expected to
enliven the action. While the "Quake/Friends"
actors won't fire
their weapons, unsuspecting "Quake" players will
notice that a
game is under way and will be able to enter the show with
their
own guns blazing. In a game whose sole goal is to kill as
many
as possible, Monica will be mowed down and Chandler
chopped
in half. Happily, actors who die can, at the click of a
button,
return to the virtual stage and continue delivering their
lines, a
concept any actor would cheer.
"Friends" was recently renewed for a 10th and
final season.
Anyone puzzled by its sustained success should greatly
enjoy
the notion of its congenially witless characters being
dispatched
in such gruesome fashion. At the same time, by executing
the
six beloved "Friends" characters instead of
anonymous warriors,
"Quake/Friends" effectively exposes the shameful
violence at
the heart of many computer games.
The "Quake/Friends" project is another instance
of using a
computer game as a medium for creative expression and
cultural
criticism. While the first examples were mostly
commentaries on
the games themselves, the latest projects have grander
ambitions.
Mr. DeLappe said he was motivated to combine the brutal
"Quake" and the genteel "Friends"
because both are pop-culture
creations that "present a fantasy, a simplistic
view" of the world.
He said the "Friends" characters' happy life in
New York is "this
perfect existence, and it's totally fake." To him the
"Quake"
violence is equally phony. "You're killed but you're
instantly
O.K.," he said. "There's no real consequences to
it."
There are other similarities as well. Both
"Quake" and "Friends"
take place within tightly defined universes. The action on
"Friends," such as it is, rarely occurs outside
the characters'
apartments or the Central Perk cafe, while
"Quake" shoot-outs
are confined to their computer-generated environments.
Nor is it obvious whether it is "Quake" or
"Friends" that can
claim to have the most three-dimensional characters. Both
function on a set of predetermined rules. So just as we
can
predict that an opponent will need to reload at a certain
point,
we also know that Joey won't get the joke. As for
character
development, neither Phoebe nor the gun-toting skeleton
has
matured much since we first met them.
But Mr. DeLappe is less interested in cultural criticism
than in
establishing the Internet as a new kind of theater.
Computer
interaction is not usually considered to be a form of perform-
ance, but it can be. We adopt roles. We communicate in
real
time. We speak publicly. It is something of a cliché to
say all
the World Wide Web's a stage, but there is some truth in
it, too.
No one wants to watch Shakespeare on a computer screen, but
to determine what will work theatrically on the Internet,
it makes
sense to experiment with a classic text from another
medium. In
2001 Mr. DeLappe started "reading" antiwar poems
into
computer games like "Medal of Honor," a game
that simulates
World War II, in an attempt to provoke a reaction from
other
players. He held a private "Quake/Friends"
performance last fall.
With this "Quake/Friends," Mr. DeLappe, 39, has
upped the
ante. It will be staged in the campus art gallery with six
large
screens displaying what each actor sees as he delivers his
lines. A Webcam will allow online viewers to observe from
afar.
(The performance, which is expected to last two to three
hours,
is scheduled to start at 10 p.m. Eastern time, and will be
accessible online at delappe.ws.)
Rachel Greene is the author of the forthcoming
"Internet Art"
(Thames & Hudson, 2004). In a telephone conversation
she
compared "Quake/Friends" to the conceptual-art
"happenings"
of the 60's. Like those performances, she said, Mr.
DeLappe's
project does work from a script. "But in other ways
it's very
much not scripted," she added. "And it is in
this very particular
environment."
Mr. DeLappe is not the first to conduct such experiments
with
Internet theater. In 1998 computer scientists performed a
version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in a
crudely rendered
3-D environment. It was not for the faint of heart or slow
of
modem. In 1997 Desktop Theater, an experimental online
group, staged a reading of "Waiting for Godot" within
an Internet
chat room. The play's main characters were represented by
lime-green circles that talked. The performance was
derailed
when a muscleman who claimed to be Godot arrived and
declared the wait to be over.
Adriene Jenik, a co-founder of Desktop Theater, said that
if the
Internet was to be used in a theatrical way, "you
have to push
against the boundaries to see what's possible."
Still, efforts like Mr. DeLappe's make sense to Robert
Thompson,
a professor of television at Syracuse University. When
characters become as culturally ingrained as those from
"Friends," he said, "They become part of
this repertory theater
that can be re-interpreted by other performers."
After all, isn't "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?" just a slightly
more psychological version of Pong?
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*Urban Bloom*
New city art panel drawn up
David Saltonstall
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/62296p-58136c.html
A month after Mayor Bloomberg donated $10 million to cash-
strapped city arts groups, he appointed a new Cultural
Affairs
Advisory Commission - full of financial heavy hitters like
himself.
The commission, largely ignored in recent years, was re-
constituted by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a decency panel
in
April 2001 after the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibited
works he
found offensive.
But Bloomberg apparently has another model in mind: a
"working
board" full of established art enthusiasts, some of
whom just
might write out a hefty check in a pinch.
"Do they have the potential to be helpful in all
kinds of ways?"
said one City Hall insider when asked about the
commission's
21 members. "Sure."
The board's new chairwoman will be Agnes Gund, an heir to
the
Gund fortune and president emerita of the Museum of Modern
Art. Other members include Robert Soros, the son of
billionaire
hedge fund investor George Soros and chairman of a
nonprofit
arts group, The Kitchen, and Daniel Brodsky, a Manhattan
real
estate developer who is also a trustee at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
"These accomplished artists, administrators and
supporters will
rovide invaluable services and expertise to both large and
small
rts organizations," Bloomberg said in a statement.
The appointments come as Bloomberg is struggling to close
a
$3.5 billion budget gap in the fiscal year that begins
July 1.
Part of his plan includes slashing the city's Cultural
Affairs
Department, which channels grants to more than 500 arts
groups, by roughly $12 million in the next fiscal year.
And
that's on top of a 5.5% hit the agency took in July.
City Hall officials emphasized the new board members were
not expected to fill that gap. Nor were they chosen simply
because of their bank accounts.
But, one official noted, "If they fall in love with
an idea, certainly
this group could provide the scratch."
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*Uh-oh Go-go*
BUSINESSMAN COPS TO ART FRAUD
Artnet News 3/4/03
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews3-4-03.asp
Disgraced Imclone Systems former chief executive
Samuel D.
Waksal has pled guilty to
evading sales tax on $15 million worth
of contemporary art bought from a Manhattan gallery.
Though the
dealer is not named by prosecutors, the New York Times
identified him as Larry Gagosian. The scheme called for
the
gallery to prepare false invoices indicating that the
artworks had
been shipped out of state, when in fact they were
delivered to
Waksal's SoHo apartment. According to court papers, Waksal
purchased nine paintings during a 16-month spending spree,
including Untitled (Plum and Brown) by Mark Rothko for
$3.5
million; Mahoning II by Franz Kline for $3 million and
Study from
the Human Body by Francis Bacon for $3 million. Waksal
owes
a total of $1.26 million in state and city taxes on the
purchases.
NYTimes article:
ImClone Founder Admits Evading Taxes on Art
By CONSTANCE L. HAYS and CAROL VOGEL, NYTimes 3/4/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/business/04WAKS.html
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*April in Paris?*
Flood panic sweeps Paris
French
Culture Minister orders the evacuation
of 100,000 works of art
The Art
Newspaper 3/7/03
http://81.112.115.148/allemandi/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=10918
PARIS. Paris’s museums situated along the Seine have been
ordered by French Culture Minister, Jean-Jacques Aillagon,
to
empty their stores to a site in the north of the city
because of
the threat of flooding. The evacuation, estimated at €5.4
million,
will put many museums out of action for a long time. Mr
Aillagon
described the move as “the most important movement of
works
of art since 1940”.
Recent disasters in Dresden and Prague, and high waters in
southern France, have prompted new studies carried out by
the
government which show that flooding is possible despite
flood
barriers built in the 1980s. The situation is critical
because of
three consecutive years of heavy winter rains which have
saturated the subsoil around Paris.
“The threat is real,” said Mr Aillagon last month. “We have to
take it seriously and implement a plan to safeguard the
national
collections as quickly as possible.” On 13 February he
outlined
details of evacuation plans for institutions at risk which
involve
transporting an estimated 100,000 vulnerable works of art
to a
warehouse in north-east Paris, the exact location of which
is
being kept classified for security reasons, and 72-hour
evacuation drills for all works of art remaining on low
ground.
The measures spell the end of easy access to stored collections
for scholars and curators.
This exodus will involve 600 trips by unmarked trucks and
is
estimated to take until 7 April to complete.
The solution is only temporary,” said Mr Aillagon, who hopes
that the situation will only last four years, “but it is
impossible
to fix a date when the collections will return to their
museums.”
The Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, are sited right on the banks
of the river, which snakes through Paris in a series of
grand
curves. Many others are also having to evacuate their stores:
the
Musée des Arts Decoratifs, the Ecole Nationale Superieure
des
Beaux Arts and the Orangerie.
The current urgency is particularly unfortunate given that huge
underground galleries and stores were built under the
Louvre as
recently as the 1980s as part of I.M.Pei’s Grand Louvre
project.
At the time no one was worried about floods.
Architect Michel Macary told French newspaper Le Monde that
the Grand Louvre project, on which he worked, was carried
out
“on the basis of flooding estimates much lower than the
great
flood of 1910. We estimated that the works being carried
out
upstream were sufficient to prevent any major threat”
The same was said by Jean-Paul Phillipon, one of the architects
of the Musée d’Orsay, inaugurated in 1986: “We calculated
that
the water could rise to 33 metres, just to the top of the
river
banks, but nobody expected levels like the 1910 flood,
33.62
metres”.
THE LOUVRE
The 8,000 square metres of underground space at the Louvre
hold most of its reserve collections. The evacuation to
the north
-east has already begun and a third of the Campana gallery
(Greek pottery) is closed to the public to allow the
gathering and
sorting of works from the basement.
Every department of the Louvre is affected. The department of
Oriental Antiquities has some 30,000 inscribed clay
tablets
which make up a veritable ancient library, indispensable
to
scholars, and the papyrus section is a mine for
Egyptologists.
The stores are not the only rooms under threat. Flooding could
affect the ground floor exhibition rooms as well: the
Sphinx
room, Cycladic Greek gallery, Romano-Egyptian gallery,
Islamic arts and Coptic galleries.
Plans are being made to evacuate these rooms in 72 hours,
which means removing all fragile pieces. The Louvre’s
evacuation operation is estimated to cost €3 million, and
will
have to come from its own budget.
THE MUSEE D’ORSAY
Here the new director Serge Lemoine did not even wait for the
culture minister’s announcement before he gave the order
to
evacuate some 10,000 objects in storage. His museum is
uniquely ill-equipped to face floods as it is built in an
former
railway station, open to the Seine, and in the 1910 flood
the
trains seemed to be floating in the water.
Some of its stores will be moved to upstairs rooms, but, “use of
the museum will suffer,” explained Mr Lemoine. The rest
will be
sent to the warehouse.
On ground level, everything that is very precious or fragile
(glass, for example) and which could not be evacuated
quickly in
the event of a surge is also being moved. “Only pieces
which are
part of current collections and which we can remove in 72
hours
will be kept on site,” said Mr Lemoine.
ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS
The Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, (ENSBA),
whose buildings look out onto the quai Malaquais, is in
almost
the same situation: in 1910 it was under 1.2 metres of
water. It
is, therefore, imperative to save the 300,000 works in its
collection: plaster casts, paintings and drawings. The
most
precious works have been placed in a strong room which is
fire-
and flood-proof.
Only fragile drawings will remain on site, on higher floors, where
some of the collection is already held. The rest will be
sent to
the warehouse in north-east Paris.
MUSEE D’ART MODERNE
The Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris is on higher
ground, so its main galleries are safe, but much of the
museum
is underground, built into the hill, and its stores are
situated in
the basement.
The museum has begun evacuating the stores and archives,
only keeping on site those works which are usually on
view. The
rest will join items evacuated from the Musée Carnavalet,
also a
city of Paris, rather than national museum.
MUSEE CARNAVALET
Not near the river but in the Marais, which used to be crossed by
a tributary of the Seine, and, therefore, is also at risk.
CONSERVATOIRE DES ARTS ET METIERS
Also in the Marais and already in the process of evacuating its
stores, which includes its older books, to a site in the
Plaine-
Saint-Denis.
BIBLIOTHEQUE FORNEY
In the hôtel de Sens next to the river and potentially at great
risk. Three quarters of its 150,000 volumes are being
moved
to the 19th arrondissement. “For us, this is like a death
sentence,” its director, Marie-Claude Lelier, told Le
Monde.
“Even if the books are stored well, it will still take two
days to
get them to our readers. And all this effort for a flood
which
may never come. It is the fault of the zero-risk culture”.
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*Book Grist*
Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other
Battles
by Anthony Swofford
Scribner; (March 2003)
ISBN: 0743235355
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 3
from NYTimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/books/review/002BOWDET.html?pagewanted=all&position=top
Years later, out of uniform or promoted to some more dignified
rank, old
soldiers clean up their memories. It is considered
noblesse oblige.
Reality gets filtered through a gauzy lens of patriotism,
pride and the
overall dignity of the cause.
Rare is the marine who is willing to share the raw
experience, and rarer
still is one like Swofford -- the marine who can really
write. ''Jarhead''
is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991
Persian Gulf war
that will go down with the best books ever written about
military life. It
is certainly the most honest memoir I have read from a
participant in any
recent war. Swofford writes with humor, anger and great
skill. His prose
is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like
poetry. He
captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of
the long prewar
desert deployment, and then powerfully records the
experience of his war.
As he moves through a nightmare landscape of exploding
ordnance, raining
petroleum, the threat of invisible killing gases, and
death, his terror
and his joy are one.
>From Publishers Weekly
A witty, profane, down-in-the-sand account of the war many
only know from
CNN, this former sniper's debut is a worthy addition to
the battlefield
memoir genre. There isn't a bit of heroic posturing as
Swofford describes
the sheer terror of being fired upon by Iraqi troops; the
elite special
forces warrior freely admits wetting himself once rockets
start exploding
around his unit's encampment. But the adrenaline of battle
is fleeting,
and Swofford shows how it's in the waiting that soldiers are
really made.
With blunt language and bittersweet humor, he vividly
recounts the
worrying, drinking, joking, lusting and just plain sitting
around that his
troop endured while wondering if they would ever put their
deadly skills
to use. As Operation Desert Shield becomes Desert Storm,
one of Swofford's
fellow snipers-the most macho of the bunch-solicits a hug
from each man.
"We are about to die in combat, so why not get one
last hug, one last bit
of physical contact," Swofford writes. "And
through the hugs [he] helps
make us human again." When they do finally fight,
Swofford questions
whether the men are as prepared as their commanders, the
American public
and the men themselves think they are. Swofford deftly
uses flashbacks to
chart his journey from a wide-eyed adolescent with a
family military
legacy to a hardened fighter who becomes consumed with
doubt about his
chosen role. As young soldiers might just find themselves
deployed to the
deserts of Iraq, this book offers them, as well as the
casual reader, an
unflinching portrayal of the loneliness and brutality of
modern warfare
and sophisticated analyses of-and visceral reactions
to-its politics.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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*Art Obits*
MAURICE BLANCHOT DIES AT NINETY-FIVE
ArtForum News Online 3/3/03
http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200310#news4353
Maurice Blanchot, one of the most reclusive writers of the
last
century, died on February 20 at the age of ninety-five at
his
residence in Yvelines, just outside Paris. The formidable
writer
and critic—of whom there exist only two blurry
photographs—
seems to have hoped that his death, like his life, would
go
unnoticed.
As Libération's Eric Loret reports, http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=90854
a neighbor who visited Blanchot daily left a message on
the
answering machine of France Culture to announce that the
writer had passed away. His death was confirmed only later
by
family members, who seem to have had no intention of
making
an official public announcement. With due respect to
Blanchot's
silence, others close to him—including Jacques Derrida and
Jean-Luc Nancy—made no comment until after the funeral,
which was held last Monday.
Le Monde's Patrick Kéchichian offers an in-depth portrait
based almost exclusively on bibliographical information,
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3246--310471-,00.html
Beginning in the 1920s with Blanchot's close friendship to
Emmanuel Levinas—the only person with whom he ever used
the
familiar "tu" form of address—Kéchichian looks
at the writer's
right-wing and anti-Semitic writings of the 1930s, which
reflected attitudes eventually transformed by the German
occupation of France during World War II. Active in the
French
Resistance, Blanchot later came to see the Holocaust as
the
"absolute event of history," a central—and
insurmountable—
point in his writings.
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Colin de Land, Art Dealer Who Fostered
Experimentation, Dies at 47
By ROBERTA SMITH
NYTimes 3/6/03
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/obituaries/06LAND.html
Colin de Land, a New York art dealer whose ambivalence
about commercialism
was reflected in an art gallery that sometimes resembled
an anti-art
gallery, if not a work of Conceptual Art, died on Sunday
at Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Hospital. He was 47.
The cause was cancer, said Dennis Balk, an artist
represented by Mr. de
Land's gallery, American Fine Arts.
With little display of exertion or financial solvency, Mr.
de Land oversaw
galleries in different art neighborhoods for nearly 20
years. He was known
for his relaxed work habits and even more relaxed art
installations, which
did not all open on time, as well as an insistent
sartorial style that
presaged the "white trash" look. At times he
exhibited fictive artists,
like John Dogg, whose work was widely assumed, but never
confirmed, to
have been made by Mr. de Land and the artist Richard
Prince.
Mr. de Land was born in Union City, N.J. He attended New
York University,
studying philosophy and linguistics. He backed into art
dealing when,
while living on the Lower East Side, he offered to sell a
Warhol painting
for a neighbor who needed money for drugs.
In the heyday of the East Village art scene in the early
1980's, he had a
gallery called Vox Populi in a former butcher shop on East
Sixth Street.
But he had his greatest impact after he relocated to the
relatively quiet,
southwest area of SoHo in 1988 and evolved American Fine
Arts, a gallery
that functioned as an art world laboratory, hangout and
refuge.
In largely unrenovated spaces at 40 and then 22 Wooster
Street, he gave
shows of cutting-edge artists whose interests ranged from
large-scale
installation to institutional critique to video to
abstract painting. They
included Cady Noland, Jessica Stockholder, Mariko Mori,
Alex Bag, Mr. Balk
and Peter Fend. He also showed work by the filmmaker John
Waters and by
Art Club 2000, a collective formed by students at the
School of Visual
Arts that included Daniel McDonald, who became the
gallery's director in
1993.
Once in the mid-90's when Mr. de Land's fortunes were at
an usually low
ebb, he held a benefit at and for the gallery. More than
200 artists
donated work, including many who had no previous
affiliation with him.
Mr. de Land took over the Chelsea space of his wife, Pat
Hearn, after she
died in 2000, also of cancer. The events he staged there
included a
raucous, decidedly non-Chelsean performance by the women
from a band
called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, led by the
performance artist
Kembra Pfahler, his companion. In addition to Ms. Pfahler,
he is survived
by his mother, Aleta de Land Hamada of Union City.
Mr. de Land disdained consistency. He allowed one artist
to close the
gallery for a month to protest art commercialization, but
he also taught a
course for art collectors and helped found the New York
Armory Show, which
fills two piers on the Hudson River every year. His booth
in this year's
fair, which opens tomorrow, will feature walls that spell
out his
gallery's initials, A.F.A., mimicking the unaccountably
restrained
typography of his announcement cards.
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