To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
— Voltaire
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Jung
I bet on a horse at ten-to-one. It didn't come in until half-past five.
— Henny Youngman
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
— H. L. Mencken
"Mediocrity rules, man, mediocrity rules..."
How does a fevered curatorial brain pick a title/theme? For a while, the title of the 2007 Members Exhibition was going to be: Mediocrity Rules. Which is a pretty good title. I had been listening again to an album by Le Tigre which had a song by that name on it and I was listening to it right when Attorney General Alberto "Babyface" Gonzales first sat there in the spring of 2007 and remembered nothing about the firing of the US attorneys. There's nothing political in the disappointment of learning that the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement official apparently—by his own testimony— knew less than Sgt. Schultz in all 167 episodes of Hogan's Heroes.
But we had the vaguely political title/theme Hey America, You're So Fine, You're So Fine You Blow My Mind, America a couple years ago and Mediocrity Rules seemed like a bit of a downer. Also, I didn't want to infer anything about the content of the members' exhibition, which often contains more than a few gems produced by Hallwalls' members. So then the show was going to be called Win/Win!, a beautiful American notion of conflict resolution that I've always loved. But then it seemed obvious that we should at least give some props to our recent Albright deaccession imbroglio. De-accession-themed titles that did NOT make the final cut (though they all have merits) were: Stag, Betraying the Children of the Future, Fascists Are People Too, The Crazy McGillicutty Memorial Exhibition, and Unbreak My Heart (Say You'll Love Me Forever).
During a moment of deaccession saturation, I thought maybe we should go with Hallwalls' Media Curator Carolyn Tennant's number one choice for an Artist&Models title: Fuck Art, Let's Dance! But in the end, it seemed sensible to revert to the local and topical and enable members to proffer their antiquities of the future. 107 artists opted to participate this year. We'll post images in the coming weeks, but the News link below will give you a taste of one work, Bradley Butler's heartbreaking crab/walrus boy...
Hallwalls 2007 Members Exhibition
Future Artemi
Opens tomorrow!
Saturday, July 28, 8—11pm
continuing through September 1
Buffalo News
Including works by:
Bruce Adams • Linda Anderson • Mollie Atkinson • Amanda Besl • Nancy Belfer • Kristyn Bellino • Dennis Bertram • Bruce Philip Bitmead • Pricilla Bowen • Nelson Bradley • Bradley Butler • Patricia Carter • Virginia Cassetta • Stephanie Cassidy • Attilio Celotto • Lukia Costello • Cassandra Couch • Nancy Treherne Craig • Kara Daving • JM Reed • Jax Deluca • David Derner • Aasta Deth • Liz Drumm • Val Dunne • Donna Jordan Dusel • Edollia • Andrew Erdos • Curtis Erlinger • Kristina C. Faulkner • Jackie Felix • Donna Fierle • Lizzie Finnegan • Joan Fitzgerald • Dorothy Fitzgerald • AJ Fries • Suzie Molnar Goad • Brenda Godert • Jennifer Gottdiener • Alison Greene • Jody Hanson • JT Hayer • Joyce M. Hill • Tom Holt • Ani Hoover • Billy Huggins • Anita L. Johnson • R. Kat • Kevin Kegler • John E. Kennedy Jr. • Zoe Knauss • Jamie Kubala • Susan Lakin • Mark Lavatelli • Zoe Lavatelli • Elizabeth Leader • Polly Little • Sandra Ludwig • Adrienne Lynch • M. Matthews • Scott McCarney • Chris McGee • Marty McGee • Peggy McKendry • Mark McLoughlin • Gerald Mead • Diane Menchetti • Lily Mendez • Coni Minneci • Julian Montague • Bernard Mullane • Asia Negron-Esposito • Gary Nickard • Frank O'Connor • Mary Grace Ohrum • Cathy Pardike • Nancy J. Parisi • James Paulsen • Kate S. Parzych • Kirby Pilcher • Joanna Raczynska • Lorin Roser • Nicki Santini • Salvatore Scrivo • Caesandra Seawell • Katie Sehr • Victor Shanchuk Jr. • Kathleen Sherin • Benjamin Spencer • Catherine Linder Spencer • Nathaniel Spencer • Norine Spurling • Rosemarie Bauer Sroka • RH Stamps • Luke Strosnider • Nathan Sutton • Kurt Treeby • Ramone Troutman • Christopher M. Verel • Christopher Vesper • Kurt Von Voetsch • Alfonso Volo • Patty Wallace • Adam Weekley • Mary Weig • Janet L. Winkie • Diane Yunque
Opening Elsewhere
• Artsphere Studio annual group exhibition Garden Mystique pens Fri July 27 6:30-9:30 (thru Aug 25)
• The Third annual Peter Fowler Retrospective and Silent Auction at Kepa# Fri July 27 5:30-9pm
• Bruce Adams, Monica Angle, Dorothy Fitzgerald, Peter Fowler, Dana Hatchett, Ani Hoover, Becky Koenig, Kathleen Sherin, Catherine Linder Spencer at InSite Gallery, opening Friday, Aug 10 6-9pm (thru Sept 7)
From Latin: to break, crush...
The Buffalo Infringement Festival is taking place....right now! Through August 5 at various venues, including Hallwalls. Here are my 10 favorite project titles from this year's festival:
Call It Chocolate Cake
Crush the Junta
Fountainhead
Highway to Asgard
Knife Crazy
Marginal Buzz Machine
Me and You From Kalamazoo
Severely Departed
Suzy Wong and the Honkeys
Victory Light Black Honey
For more info on performances, dates, and venues, go to Infringe Buffalo
Free Anime for Hiroshima Memorial Day Event
Monday, August 6th, 7pm-9:15pm
co-sponsored by the Western New York Peace Center, The Year of Japan Committee and the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society
Year of Japan in Buffalo-Niagara
Barefoot Gen trailer
Continuing Elsewhere
(winding down/see em now)
• Francis Bacon at the Albright-Knox through July 29
• The Twisted World of Sean Madden at College Street Gallery thru July 29 Buffalo News
• Starlight Studio's Spring Break Show thru Aug 3
• Diane Baker at the Gallery at Artpartk(thru Aug 19) and Kouros Gallery, NYC (thru Aug 17), and at The Mansion on Delaware (indefinitely)
• Sarah Prochownik at the BPAC thru Sept 9
• RH Stamps at Art Dialogue thru Aug 24 Buffalo News
• Mark d'Agostino at Squeaky Wheel thru Aug 5
• Ken Heyman at CEPA thru Aug 26 Buffalo News
• Mark D'Agostino at Squeaky Wheel thru Aug 5
• Linda Tarli at Buffalo Big Print thru Aug 22
• Rita Hammond and Sharon Orendorf at Go Art! (Batavia) thru Aug 14
• Beyond the Barrel and Open House at Niagara Arts & Cultural Center thru Aug 26
• Geraldine Liquidano at redFish (E. Aurora) thru July 31
• Terresa Ford at Unity Gallery/Church thru Aug 30
• Emma Hollister Colby at Nichols School thru Sept 30
• George Morlock at Stuyvesant Gallery (Elmwood) thru Aug 22
• Paul Mercalski at College Street Gallery thru June 30
• Lukia Costello at Betty's thru Aug 12
• Joshua Marks at the Tang Museum in Sarasota Springs thru August 12
• Rob Lynch at the Castellani Art Museum thru Sept 16 Artvoice
• Mary Begley at Delish on Elmwood thru May and Brodo Restaurant thru July
"Dumping the Shark"!!
I've always liked Damien Hirst's notorious shark-in-formaldehyde sculpture. Long before I'd ever seen an image of it, someone described the notion to me and I thought, well, that's sounds utterly compelling. Meaning the concept of the work was so strong, he could almost get away with not making the piece. (And if you've read anything about the ridiculous lengths to which you have to actually go to realize such a thing—to submerge a real shark in a tank of formaldehdye—you couldn't blame the artist if he didn't bother realizing it.)
Nonetheless, thar she bobs. At this point, as noted in the piece below, Hirst is into his "second edition" of the work, there being natural "conservation issues" with maintaining such an ambitious work. As I've said to my colleague Carolyn many times, "It it what it is." As a sculpture, I love the thingness of it, an ominous actuality that is safely contained. I love that the shark is floating at a comfortable eye level for the viewer. I love the absurdity of the idea, I love its presence. It's hard to dismiss it. Like it or lump it, it's hard to deny.
Hirst, of all the artists of his generation, seems to have succeeded best at enraging people. The editorial below refers to his newest work—a diamond-encrusted human skull—as his "most recent artistic farce." I don't know. I don't think the shark is a farce and while part of me thinks the skull is absolutely fucking crazy, that same part of me accepts it as sublime in some meteoric way. There is some measure of absurdity interwoven in the piece—it's impossible that Hirst would deny the fairly ridiculous notion of actually making such a thing. He's smart enough to know that audiences will respond precisely to the mere fact of having having realized such a lunatic notion. Then again, put that all aside and tell me it's not beautiful. Death as the Ultimate Bling.
Back in the 1990s, 60 Minutes' correspondent Morley Safer—king of condescending urbanity and low-rent Oscar Wilde impersonator—did a story about the Young British Art movement, in which he interviewed Damien Hirst. I am pretty certain the story was actually called, believe it or not, "But Is It Art?" It's the story that killed 60 Minutes for me, I would never entirely trust them again, as Safer foppishly attempted to skewer this latest contemporary art movement with that snide derision he wears like a silk ascot. Hirst, to his credit, never blinked and never snapped at any of the bait Safer was peddling—all the while sitting cross-legged and comfortable on the edge of his gigantic white ashtray sculpture, smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes into the work. Take that, Morley.
Dumping the Shark: New York Times editorial, July 20, 2007
"In August, the shark in formaldehyde—Damien Hirst’s signature work—will come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on loan from Steven A. Cohen, a hedge fund trader and art collector. Mr. Hirst’s shark, whose proper name is “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” is usually called a piece of conceptual art. So when you go to visit the shark (actually the second to be entombed in this vitrine) it will be worth considering the entire scope of the conceptualism surrounding it.
"First, you will have to shelve any objections you might have to the idea of killing a female tiger shark in the interests of Mr. Hirst’s career. You might even wonder whether the catching of the shark, somewhere off the coast of Australia, wasn’t in its own way more artful than the shark’s lamentable afterlife suspended in formaldehyde.
"But the real concepts here are money and reputation. It may appear as if Mr. Cohen is doing the Met a favor by lending this work. In fact, it is the other way around. The billionaire, number 85 on the most recent Forbes 400 has been collecting art at a furious rate since 2000, and he is being courted by museums in the way that prodigiously wealthy collectors have always been courted. Part of that courtship is, of course, endorsing and validating the quality of the collector’s eye. The only defense against the skewing of the art market created by collecting on Mr. Cohen’s scale is to appropriate the collector himself.
"The difference in this case is Mr. Hirst, who has gone from being an artist to being what you might call the manager of the hedge fund of Damien Hirst’s art. No artist has managed the escalation of prices for his own work quite as brilliantly as Mr. Hirst. That is the real concept in his conceptualism, which has culminated in his most recent artistic farce: a human skull encrusted in diamonds.
"You may think you are looking at a dead shark in a tank, but what you’re really seeing is the convergence of two careers, the coming together of two masters in the art of the yield."
Bottom line, everything else aside, sharks are cool and skulls are cool. Always have been, always will be.
How about a diamond-encrusted Paris in a tank of Chanel No. 5?
In case this one slipped by you, in 2006, artist Daniel Edwards produced a sculpture of Britney Spears on a bearskin rug, giving birth to her firstborn child:
Talk about a new antiquity to replace our departed pal Artemis. Edwards, at the very least, is aspiring to outdo himself. He has also made sculptures of a topless Hillary Clinton and Suri Cruise's bronzed baby poop. It would be easy from someone to dismiss Edwards' work as opportunistic and shallow because of its celebrity-infused subject matter, but Edwards' work seems to contain both an idolatry and revulsion of celebrity culture. His most recent work depicts both a dead and post-autopsy Paris Hilton. If you're merely a social necrophiliac, you might prefer the toasty golden just-dead Paris:
The more hardcore deathophiles will undoubtedly prefer the cool, smooth alabaster of the autopsied hotel heiress:
This is no ordinary autopsy and Edwards pulls no punches. As the gallery pr explains, "With Paris's legs splayed in stirrups for postmortem pelvic examination, the "Hilton Autopsy" tragically reveals drunk driving's heartbreaking collateral damage—a 'double abortion' of fetal twins discovered in her uterus." Heartbreaking, laughable, disturbing, graceful, mournful, absurd...fun for the whole family!
We haven't even arrived at the best part yet...in a fairly inspired move, Edwards' Brooklyn gallery, Capla Kesting Fine Art, sponsored a Paris Hilton Obituary Writing Contest, based on high school kids' responses to the sculpture. And you thought she had no redeeming virtues.
Excerpt from a winning entry:
Her best friend Nicole Ritchie organized the funeral this week at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Over 300 celebrities around the world are expected. Nicole told the associated press "Paris wanted her funeral to be hot, she'd be like- 'That's hot T', you know?"
And this from an honorable mention:
And for all of you who still drink and drive,
Paris awaits you—and she's not alive.
And this:
Paris was known as a party girl. She did not do anything note worthy, but she was famous for her frequent "crotch shots" and partying lifestyle. She lived life in the fastlane and made decisions that affected her future.
Go here to enjoy more: Obituary Contest
And since we're already deep into celebrity death culture reference, we should really give a nod to the waxy unreality of Britney from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.
flickr
Death, near-death, pseudo-death, and general waxy unreality leads me to conclude this ludicrous thread with the Nearly-But-Not-Quite-Dead Larry King interviewing the Sculpturally-Depicted-As-Dead Paris Hilton. I actually love this photo, which the NY Times used in their coverage of Ms. Hilton's recent obligatory mea stupido culpa. The Vapid interviewing the Vacant. Awww.
How Much Warhol is Too Much?
Click below to learn why Charlie Finch wrote: "that Andy manqué self-portrait T-shirt Paris Hilton wore last week may be, spiritually, the truest Warhol yet."
A World Without Warhols
Cerdos del Vuelo
Okay, so I was under the impression that Roger Waters had sold the old Pink Floyd pig to cartoon Peter Frampton, who used it at the Hullabalooza Festival while cartoon Sonic Youth were stealing sandwiches from his cooler, but apparently I was mistaken.
Seems artists at each of Waters' summer tour stops are being invited to paint a pig...I really don't know how to follow that. Here's a video showing the Darien Lake painted pig wafting about, as decorated by Buffalo artist Tom Holt:
Sadly, no one has posted any of the classic Kids in the Hall skits in which Bruce McCullough plays a flying pig who "entertains people at bank-machines and other of life's many lineups."
Or the brilliantly-perverse Scutz Brothers (Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis) from SCTV, who were: 1) half men/half pigs, 2) butchers, AND 3) film editors! I count at least 6 gags in that premise.
The Flying Pig is also a "contemporary art gallery and greenspace" in Algoma, Wisconsin. And Flying Pig Gallery is a "quirky gallery space" in Sussex County, New Jersey. Then there is The Flying Pig Roadhouse, where they encourage you to "eat, drink, and go hog wild" and where the logo (naturally) depicts a pig with black wings and dark sunglasses. And finally, for the kids, there is the Flying Pig Youth Hostel, which advertises itself as "clean, laidback, and safe."
This Flying Pig History will explain how the flying pig became an unofficial symbol of Cincinatti.
And lastly, enjoy these brilliantly awful song lyrics for the Bulletboys song When Pigs Fly.
Hundalasiliah! The Once and Future Prince...
There was a pretty great article on Prince recently in the Times, which basically addressed the notion of what a musician, free of major label commitments, does if he no longer needs the money.
NY Times
3121 Homepage
Prince performs Fury on SNL:
Sekou Sundiata 1949—2007
NY Times
Laszlo Kovacs 1933—2007
He shot, among others, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, New York New York, The Last Waltz, Ghostbusters, and one of my favorite films, Paper Moon. Not to mention that Jean Paul Belmondo's character in Godard's Breathless uses the alias Laszlo Kovacs...
NY Times
Something I listened to this week...
Sure, clowns teaching tricks to a dog looks like rollicking good times (unless you're afraid of clowns—then the cover art and unnervingly brilliant title [a previous BS album had an equally great title: Rembrandt Pussyhorse] could induce a cold sweat), but press play and the dismantling of the viewer's comfort zone is relentless. The album—which has been appropriately described as the "aural equivalent of a nightmarish acid trip"— opens with a swelling and lyrical melody line that fades in slowly until a small boy's voice is heard plaintively asking, "Daddy?" "yes, son?" "What does regret mean?" "Well, son, the funny thing about regret is that's it's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't haven't...and by the way, if you see your mom this weekend, be sure and tell her: SATAN!!!" The S-word echoes, the guitars kick in and the anxiety train does not stop until the final track 22 Going On 23 (which utlizes talk radio audio samples to great effect) fades out. A great album to be playing when the kids come trick or treating.
Butthole Surfers
Calling All Brainiacs
Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
