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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol.5, no.9 (June 10, 2004)
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*Underbelly*
Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:
http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569
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CONTENTS:
- *A Big Hairy Deal* Makeovers to
benefit Visual AIDS
- *Un-Patriot
Act* FBI charges artist...full story archives
- *Infinite Fill* BEIGE Group Show: Call for entries!
(post-data.org)
- *New Age Butt*
Last chance for AA Bronson’s healing massage
- *Beached* Gallery attacked over Abu
Ghraib painting (SF Examiner)
- *Pretty Terrible*
Kissinger tapes + photos of abuse (NYTimes)
-
*Fire + Brimstone* From Form to Formlessness (ArtForum.com)
- *i-ronic*
Inkster bites Apple in NOHO (VillageVoice.com)
- *Film Grist* Control Room (nettitme.org)
- *Book Grist* McSweeney's No. 13: Chris Ware
(DesignObserver.com)
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A
Big Hairy Deal Benefit is billed as one of the hippest, hairiest
fundraising
events of the year. Guests can get beautiful with New
York's top hair and
make-up stylists with haircuts, make-up, and massages for
a $40 donation
to Visual AIDS.
Appointments are first-come, first-served. While guests wait
they can enjoy art, music by top DJs, drink specials,
raffle prizes and mingle
at the Gallery Lounge.
A Big Hairy Deal has no cover charge... it all gets
going Sunday June 13 at the Alice Band Studio; get hooked up here.
============================
Update/Archive: FBI Presses Charges Against Artist Steve
Kurtz
This is a thread archived on Rhizome.org that contains various posts,
opinions,
letters, and info on the situation:
Rhizome.org: more on steve kurtz
Most recently there was an article in Wired and in
today's New
York Times.
Complete info here.... and some more info on the NEWSgrist blog.
============================
BEIGE Presents:
The
Infinite Fill Group Show call for entries!
(put together by Cory + Jamie Arcangel)
For the Infinite Fill show BEIGe and Foxy Production
Gallery are putting out an
open call for all work dealing with black and white
patterns! Anyone call submit
to the open call. Works of all mediums are accepted! There
is no size limit [well
if things are really bug, email Cory to check it
first....]. Works can be video,
knitted, drawn, painted, collaged, spray painted,
rendered, etc, etc. In fact, you
don't even have to make work. If you see a pair of black
and white checkered
pants at the salvation army, submit it, or if you have a
lot of Chinese Checker
boards lying around, submit those too! The only rule is
that it has to somehow
use black and white repeating patterns!
DEADLINE: July 10th!!!
Please contact Cory if you plan on submitting or have questions, etc, etc: cory@post-data.org
Please mail submissions to Foxy Production Gallery, or email Cory Above
[he can print out all submission up to 6ft by 6ft].
547 WEST 27 ST NEW YORK, NY 10001; more
info
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AA Bronson
JOHN CONNELLY PRESENTS
526 W. 26th Street, Room 1023
May 13-June 19
by Nick Stillman
ArtForum Online
http://www.artforum.com/picks/place=New%20York?sid=9448917d05b111f0b02b81a420805f1d#picks6981
Although they're the only
objects immediately recognizable as "art" in AA
Bronson's exhibition at John
Connelly Presents, the posters advertising his
services as a healer and the
photographs featuring the artist lounging
languidly (and nakedly) in bed
don't begin to convey what the show offers
the gallerygoer. A massage
table, complete with oils, towels, and scented
candles, hints at the
exhibition's conceptual centerpiece: Male visitors are
invited to make appointments for
"healing sessions" consisting of Tantric
massage and what Bronson calls
the "infamous AA BRONSON BUTT MASSAGE."
That's rightthe artist focuses
on the human posterior as the locus of the
body's deepest repressed trauma,
promising to release the client's
sublimated memories over the
course of a few hours. An extension of
Bronson's quest to overcome the
grief resulting from the AIDS-related deaths
of his General Idea partners
Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz, AA BRONSON BUTT
SPA obliterates all boundaries
between art and the service industry. The
project seems equally indebted
to Beuys's shamanistic spirituality and the
mid-'90s New Age movement
antecedents that Bronson appropriates with a
straight face and a pure heart.
============================
============================
Will the Crazy
Right Shut Down a SF Art Gallery
for
showing art about Abu Ghraib Prison?
by Art
Censored by Thugs
Wednesday,
May. 26, 2004 at 4:00 PM
http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/05/1682298.php
photos: http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/05/1682533.php
The same
right that storm trooped Florida's election count and gave it
to Bush
has closed a gallery here in San Francisco. Is this a time to make a
stand?
Last
straw for art gallery
Threats
and attacks over Iraq painting force owner out.
San
Francisco Examiner
http://www.sfexaminer.com/article/index.cfm/i/052604n_gallery
By J.K.
Dineen | Staff Writer
Published
on Wednesday, May 26, 2004
A North
Beach art gallery owner who has been attacked and threatened for
showing a
controversial painting of American soldiers torturing Iraqi
prisoners
has decided to call it quits.
After
having her life repeatedly threatened, her business egged and her face
spat
upon, Lori Haigh papered up the windows of her Powell Street gallery,
Capobianco,
on Tuesday.
"I'm
totally disheartened by this -- this was my dream," Haigh said. "I
felt
like this
was a legacy I could leave my children; that we had a gallery in
North
Beach."
The
painting, titled "The Abuse" by East Bay artist Guy Colwell, shows
Pfc.
Lynndie
England and another soldier smiling gleefully as they look upon a
trio of
naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners who are hooked up to electrical wires.
In the
background, a third American soldier is escorting a Muslim woman in a
dress
into the torture chamber.
The
painting is black and white, except for American flag patches on the
soldiers'
uniforms, which appear to be splattered with blood.
A week
ago, Haigh realized the nerve the painting had struck when she
arrived
at work to find the place egged and heaps of trash dumped at the
gallery
entrance. On her computer and voice mail were stinging messages
calling
her anti-American for showing the artwork.
Even
after she took the painting out of the front window, she received six
threats
against her life. The last straw was when a man spat at her.
"He
came walking in with a fisherman's cap and a fatigue jacket on and
slowly
made his way along the wall, looking at the pictures," she said.
"Then
he put his fists on my desk, put his face close to mine and spat. It
was a
real big loogie spit -- it was not a tiny spit."
As Haigh
ran to the back of the gallery for some napkins, the man fled.
Haigh has
filed a police report on the incident.
Among the
messages left on the gallery answering machine were, "You f---ing
coward,
you're dead" and "I think you need to get your gallery out of this
neighborhood
before you get hurt."
She said
she felt like a "a sitting duck."
"I
feel like my gallery had finally reached a level where I represent
important
Bay Area figures like Winton Smith and Guy Colwell," she said. "If
I can't
do that, then I don't want to have a gallery. This is a labor of
love --
galleries don't make a lot of money."
On
Saturday, Colwell will bring a U-haul to the gallery to retrieve his
artwork,
and a number of the artist's supporters are expected to turn out.
The next
show scheduled by famous punk rock and counterculture artist
Winston
Smith has been cancelled.
Smith, a
North Beach resident, who was himself denounced in the 1980s when
he was
the album cover artist for punk rock band The Dead Kennedys, said it
was
"too bad" that the gallery was closing.
"It
is a good location, and [Haigh] is a sincere person who is a hard worker
and was
going out of her way to feature local talent," Smith said.
Smith
said he didn't understand why those outraged by the graphic depictions
of
torture in the Iraqi prison would have such a strong reaction to a
painting
depicting one artist's vision of the abuse.
"They
must be anti-American if they despise freedom of speech so much, which
is the
essence of American freedom," he said.
Smith
said Haigh was respectful of artists and didn't approach her gallery
with a
political agenda.
"If
someone wanted to show a flag-waving solider in Iraq, she would say,
'You're
the artists, do whatever you want,'" he said.
Haigh's
lease runs out at the end of the year, and she hopes to sublet the
gallery
in the interim. She said she is disappointed with North Beach, which
still
clings to its reputation as an artists' haven developed in the 1950s.
One
figure from that era, poet and City Lights Bookstore co-owner Lawrence
Ferlinghetti,
stopped by the gallery to offer his support.
"I
gave it a week and weighed the options," Haigh said. "Had I felt that
there was
enough support, my gallery wouldn't be closed down right now."
Book
publisher Ron Turner, whose company Last Gasp published Colwell's art,
was
sympathetic.
"She
got threats," he said. "She is a single woman with two kids trying
to
be a
business woman and there are crazies threatening to roast her
children."
Neighborhood
activist Marc Bruno said he "felt terrible" when he heard what
was going
on at the gallery.
"I
brought flowers there," he said. "I felt bad for her."
============================
============================
Kissinger
Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark Photos of Abuse
By
ELIZABETH BECKER
NYTimes;
Published: May 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/politics/27TAPE.html
WASHINGTON,
May 26 News had just broken of a
terrible wrongdoing committed
by American
soldiers, and the secretary of defense and the national security
adviser
debated whether there was any way to stop newspapers and television
news
programs from showing graphic photographs of the victims.
"They're
pretty terrible," said Melvin R. Laird, the secretary of defense,
of the
color photographs of the men, women and children killed in the My Lai
massacre
in South Vietnam.
Henry A.
Kissinger, the national security adviser, responded that one of
President
Nixon's top aides had "heard that the Army is trying to impound
the
pictures that can't be done."
A
transcript of this 1969 telephone conversation, with its uncanny echoes of
the Iraq
war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, at least in the fact of
the
photographs, if not in the severity of the wrongdoing, was released on
Wednesday
by the National Archives as part of 20,000 pages of records of Mr.
Kissinger's
telephone conversations. The documents cover the years from the
beginning
of his service in 1969 until August 1974, when Nixon resigned.
The
conversations portray a senior adviser trying to juggle foreign policy
crises
under a president increasingly distracted by the Watergate scandal
and, on
at least one occasion, too drunk to talk to the British prime
minister.
They also
show Mr. Kissinger using his charm on Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet
ambassador
to the United States. One minute the two men are joking about Mr.
Kissinger's
date with a former Playboy playmate, the next they are
discussing
the Mideast or disarmament treaties, all on a secure phone line
to avoid
having to share their conversations with the State Department.
The
transcripts were released over the objections of Mr. Kissinger after the
National
Security Archive, a nonprofit organization, initiated legal
proceedings
to make them public.
Mr.
Kissinger issued a statement Wednesday saying he had not seen the
released
material and would have no comment.
"It's
nice to have these juicy details, especially now when I feel like I'm
seeing dj
vu all over again," said Stanley Karnow, the author of "Vietnam: A
History"
and a war correspondent who covered the Indochina conflict.
The
episode involving Nixon's drinking occurred on Oct. 11, 1973, shortly
after the
1973 Arab-Israeli war erupted. Aides to Prime Minister Edward
Heath of
Britain telephoned shortly before 8 p.m., hoping to reach the
president
so the two leaders could discuss the war.
Mr.
Kissinger asked: "Can we tell them no? When I talked to the president,
he was
loaded."
Brent
Scowcroft, then an assistant to Mr. Kissinger, said: "Right, O.K. I
will say
the president will not be available until first thing in the
morning
but you will be this evening."
The
papers cover major events of the cold war, like the opening of China,
which was
soon followed by calls to Mr. Kissinger from influential figures
like
David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Jack Valenti,
president
of the Motion Picture Association of America, who wanted help
getting
the first visas to Beijing.
But war
and conflict were the most constant topic.
In their
conversation on Nov. 21, 1969, about the My Lai massacre, Mr. Laird
told Mr.
Kissinger that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug," the
photographs
prevented it.
"There
are so many kids just laying there; these pictures are authentic,"
Mr. Laird
said.
The
telephone transcripts show how frustrated Nixon was becoming with the
Vietnam
War and his failing effort to withdraw American troops from Vietnam
by
expanding the war into Cambodia.
He became
especially angry on Dec. 9, 1970, with what he considered the
lackluster
bombing campaign by the United States Air Force against targets
in
Cambodia.
"They're
not only not imaginative but they are just running these things
bombing jungles,"
Nixon said. "They have got to go in there and I mean
really go
in."
Mr.
Kissinger then cautioned: "The Air Force is designed to fight an air
battle
against the Soviet Union. They are not designed for this war."
But the
president persisted, suggesting that the bombing campaign could be
disguised
as an airlift of supplies.
"I
want them to hit everything," he said. "I want them to use the big
planes,
the small planes, everything they can that will help out there, and
let's
start giving them a little shock."
He ended
by saying, "Right now there is a chance to win this goddamn war,
and
that's probably what we are going to have to do because we are not going
to do
anything at the conference table."
Mr.
Kissinger immediately relayed the order: "A massive bombing campaign in
Cambodia.
Anything that flies on anything that moves."
Few
foreign officials had a more complicated relationship with Mr. Kissinger
than Mr.
Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador.
At first
they were formal with each other, testing whether this new back
channel
would make it easier for the rival superpowers to avoid war and
possibly
cooperate on arms reduction treaties or defusing tensions in the
Middle
East.
They were
soon on a first-name basis Henry and
Anatoly and treating each
other
like old buddies.
One
afternoon Mr. Dobrynin teased Mr. Kissinger about his latest date.
"I
guess I have her picture," said the Soviet diplomat. "I think she was
on
this
Playboy calendar."
"Oh-h-h-h,
you're a dirty old man," Mr. Kissinger said.
As peace
negotiations progressed with Hanoi, it was Mr. Dobrynin who brought
proposals
from the Vietnamese Communists to Mr. Kissinger, who would win a
Nobel
Peace Prize for the treaty that brought an end to America's
involvement
in the war.
In the
spring of 1972 Mr. Kissinger telephoned the president with news of
something
of a breakthrough from the Vietnamese.
"We
got some pretty quick action out of our Soviet friends Dobrynin was in
slobbering
over me," said Mr. Kissinger. "He had a message from the North
Vietnamese
for us which was a lot more conciliatory than the one that they
gave us
in Paris."
============================
============================
Art Forum
INTERNATIONAL NEWS DIGEST
by
Jennifer Allen
http://www.artforum.com/news/week=200423?sid=5a8199418e432d3ef3b78290b3ef19e6#news7002
DINOS
CHAPMAN ON ACTS OF GOD
"It's
as if the nineties are finally over," writes the Sddeutsche Zeitung's
Dirk
Peitz in reference to the warehouse fire that destroyed major works of
modern
and contemporary British art, many from the Saatchi collection. "[The
YBAs]
provided the most powerful images of the second half of the 20th
century.
. . . [E]ven if some imagine otherwise, this phase has finally
become an
epoch." As Peitz notes, two iconic '90s works, Tracey Emin's
Everyone
I Ever Slept With, 196395, and Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell, were
among the
losses. While some are mourning the passing of the "Sensation"
era,
Peitz reports that Dinos Chapman remains in good spirits. "If the
insurance
companies discover that the fire was an act of God, it would be
really funny--that
God destroyed Hell," says Chapman. "If that were true, then
I would
go back to church."
MAX
HOLLEIN IN DEFENSE OF AURA
"Save
the aura!" That's the latest exhortation from Max Hollein, director of
Frankfurt's
Schirn Kunsthalle. Writing in the Tagesspiegel, Hollein speaks
out
against the use of virtual technologies to display artworks in the
museum.
Internet terminals, touch screens, and wireless audio tours, which
are
increasingly displacing the works themselves, may cater to "limited
attention
spans" but actually do nothing to deepen visitors' understanding
of art.
"The museum must remain an asynchronic space," argues Hollein,
"a
place for
contemplating things and staying put. The museum must
differentiate
itself from the outside, from the easy and rapid aesthetic of
the
street." Citing Marc Aug's ethnographic study of the
"non-places," such
as
airports and waiting rooms, that dominate contemporary society, Hollein
believes
that museums should offer an experience of perception that is
linked to
a specific place and to specific works of art.
GERHARD
RICHTER ON WAR AND FORM
In the
Neue Zrcher Zeitung, Gerhard Richter discusses his latest work, WAR
CUT,
2004, an artist's book featuring collages that mix details from one of
Richter's
own abstract paintings with newspaper reports on the outbreak of
the Iraq
war. While reworking the imagery of the war, Richter pays homage to
form.
"Form is the only thing that we can bring to bear on the fundamentally
chaotic
facts," says the painter. "I trust form my feeling or my ability to
find the
right form for something." In addition to exploring form, says the
artist,
WAR CUT deals with mourning and anger. "Actually, more with anger,"
he adds.
"Because war destroys, it shows us our powerlessness, we cannot
prevent it,
we cannot appropriately judge it. That's why I avoided offering
an
opinion, which would be futile here and would prevent the attempt to come
somewhat
closer to the truth."