Check out the review of Polaroids: Mapplethorpe (Curated by Henry Director, Sylvia Wolf - on view now at the Whitney) in today’s New York Times.

Check the delightful Jen Graves post about her first meeting with Sylvia in Slog, too.

FYI, Polaroids: Mapplethorpe will be here at the Henry in Fall, 2009.

It’s eighty degrees and gorgeous - but I am going to spend some time this weekend in a lovely dark movie theater. Northwest Film Forum’s, to be exact.

There’s the Alice Neel documentary - read all about it here: http://www.aliceneelfilm.com/, and here in The PI’s Art to Go, in yesterday’s Stranger, and here in the Times.
Get your tickets here. It’s showing the 16-22.

Of greater personal interest to this blogger - Harmony Korine’s new film, Mr. Lonely, opens there tonight.
Can’t wait.

]]> http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/alice-neel-documentary-new-harmony-korine-at-nwff-this-weekend/feed/ Betsey Brock http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/animation-on-the-streets/ http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/animation-on-the-streets/#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 07:15:57 +0000 jamey http://hankblog.wordpress.com/?p=997

More video! This one has been posted around the interwebs this week, and I thought it should be seen on Hankblog. It’s a wall-painted animation called Muto, and it’s by Blu, a street artist from Bologna, Italy. This is a pretty amazing clip, not to be missed. Blu is one of several artists that will create giant murals on the outside wall facing the River Thames at the Tate Modern in London this summer.

From the Tate Modern press release:
“Blu works primarily with drawing, albeit on a large scale. His images often portray a mildly macabre fascination with death and the inner workings of the human body. His work begins as a sketch before being transferred directly on to walls using many traditional painting techniques. Blu’s inspiration, like many Street Artists, stems from the desire to transform ordinary decaying places into beautiful and interesting environments.”

The old Bankside Power Station is going to be a sight!

BBC News article here.
Blu’s blog here.

Roxanna Brown, a internationally known expert on Asian art who was implicated in an antiquities smuggling scheme, died here in Seattle yesterday. According to artforum.com/news she had traveled to Seattle for a speaking engagement at the University of Washington. Brown was trained in art history at UCLA. She died of a heart attack at the detention center, between Seattle and Tacoma.

UW Astronomy Professor Tom Quinn lectures here at the Henry, tonight, 7PM!
You’ve seen how Josiah McElheny sees the Big Bang, check out how these scholars see it, too!

Free for YOU, gentle Hankblog readers.

Details here.

New video on the Art21 blog:

from blog.art21.org posted with vodpod

OBViouS
Object Based Video Sculpture
911 Media Arts Gallery
Opening Reception: May 15th 6pm – 9pm

Regular Gallery Hours
Monday through Friday 12pm – 6pm
Saturdays 1pm. – 6pm

OBViouS, a five-artist show curated by Affiliate Curator Steven Vroom, opens in the 911 Media Arts Gallery on Thursday May 15th with an opening reception from 6pm – 9pm.

OBViouS is a sampler of different contemporary approaches to sculpture which have video as a common thread. The equivocal nature of the practice of making sculpture allows for the curator to “state the obvious”. This group exhibition features works by Tina Aufiero, Casey Cahoy, Joseph Gray, Caroline Kapp, and Tony Weathers.

The show runs from May 15th through June 30th, and follows the multi-dimensional Yellow by Robert Campbell.

This video, created by Scott Lawrimore and Yoko Ott, and the following essay were created as a companion pieces to this year’s MFA catalogue. The exhibition opens this weekend, the community celebration is Friday, May 23 at 7PM.

See you there!

from blip.tv posted with vodpod

WHATEVER: A YouTube | MFA MASH-UP

by Scott Lawrimore and Yoko Ott

So when the sucker m.c.s try to chump my style

I let them know that I’m versatile

I got style finesse and a little black book

That’s filled with rhymes and I know you wanna look

Today, how can we not speak of the university?

But there’s a thing that separates you from me

And that’s called originality…

…A tick a tock y’all a beat beat y’all

A let’s rock y’all ya don’t stop

~ A Sugarhill Gang and Jacques Derrida Mash-Up

Two voices presented as one, sampled and remixed into a new composition to create fresh meaning, the above quote and the following co-authored essay are mash-ups of ideas, reflections, opinions and critical evaluations.

We were, admittedly, implored by members of the 2008 Master of Fine Arts graduating class to do something different. With that charge, and in the spirit of originality and institutional critique offered by Sugarhill Gang and Jacques Derrida, we searched for different beats. Embrace the syncopation.

This MFA thesis exhibition is a culmination of two years spent refining thought and perfecting craft; this catalog the record. Both represent a transition out of a safe academic environment. The feedback loops of studio critiques and oral thesis defenses amongst their peers and advisors are now reverberating in a new forum where the audience is redefined, expanded, and viewer response amped up and tuned in to new frequencies. With the rite of passage of graduation—and degrees labeling these individuals as masters in their field—nineteen freshly dubbed artists are about to be released into circulation. This is their major-label debut. It is a new product launch and we’re supposed to be writing advertising copy, not only for the graduates, but also for the University of Washington School of Art, its Director, and its professors. Heard through those headphones, our resistors temporarily overloaded. Our search for a smart point of entry into the reductive practice of filtering all of these artists’ ideas into one neat and tidy bit of writing led us to ask these questions: Why not create a platform for the artists to share their own words and ideas with this new audience? Why stop there? Why not establish a way to connect with an audience far beyond the confines of this catalog and its limited readership?

In a Web 2.0 era, taking advantage of interactive communication and producing creative, collaborative work in a web-based community is not uncommon. MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc., are ubiquitous examples of how information today is created and shared. Engaging those sites prompted interest in styles of new writing such as hypertexting, metagraphing, hypergraphing, et al, as practiced by the new electrate. We were inspired to write alongside the graduate’s work as opposed to about it. Some in the literary field might call our intervention intertextual, grafting or picto-ideo-phonographic. The art world might recognize it as a form of appropriation or being a member of the ‘-age’ family (collage, bricolage, montage, or découpage). However, as we are from the MTV generation, a more apropos designation of our attempt at writing alongside the artists’ work links it to that of musical sampling, remixing or the mash-up.

The contemporary musical mash-up finds its historical antecedent in the 15^th century quodlibet, from the Latin meaning “whatever” (quod (what) libet (pleases)), a piece of music that combined two or more melodies from different popular tunes. If whatever is the guiding principle, YouTube is the platform nonpareil. It is an open forum where ideas and images are shared on a level the visual arts can only dream of. With our mash-up sources established, we worked intuitively, taking salient excerpts from the artists’ statements provided using them as the search terms to find illustrative videos drawn from this exemplar of popular culture. We tried to approach the graduates’ work and statements in ways that would be meaningful, respectful, playful, insightful, and analytical.

Recognizing that YouTube’s slogan, Broadcast Yourself™ comes part and parcel with open, subjective critique to any of its postings, it becomes the everyman analog to the construct of this thesis exhibition, this catalog and the artists’ future reception by a more rarified arts community. Our intervention—mashing-up the artists’ words with videos found on YouTube—is but a first response to the work and marks this shift in audience feedback. This new composition can now be found on the internet. It is a supplement intended to add to the understanding of the artists’ individual projects while supplanting what might be found in a traditional catalog essay.

As you flip through the images in these pages and reflect on what you might have seen in the exhibition, we invite you to read alongside these artists’ work in a new way—to watch a video and listen to the artists’ own words:

Congratulations graduates.

Scott Lawrimore studied art history at UC Davis and Cal State Sacramento. He owns the contemporary art gallery, Lawrimore Project. Yoko Ott received her BFA from the University of Washington, and has since gone on to do curatorial work. She currently works at the Frye Art Museum in its education department.

]]> http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/14/whatever-a-youtube-mfa-mash-up/feed/ Betsey Brock http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/goodbye-robert-rauschenberg/ http://hankblog.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/goodbye-robert-rauschenberg/#comments Tue, 13 May 2008 16:49:00 +0000 betsey http://hankblog.wordpress.com/?p=989

Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday, at age 82. Here’s Michael Kimmelman’s piece in the New York Times, and Alan Artner’s in the Chicago News Tribune.

Here at the Henry, we’ll be showing a few Rauschenberg works from our collection on the mezzanine this summer. We’ll be exhibiting Booster along with several test stones that were created as part of this ambitious project. This was already in our exhibition schedule - but it now seems appropriate that we will be able to commemorate this amazing artist.

Image - from MoMA.org - Robert Rauschenberg. (American, born 1925). Booster from the series Booster and 7 Studies. 1967. Lithograph and screenprint, composition: 71 1/2 x 35 1/8″ (181.7 x 89.3 cm); sheet: 72 3/16 x 35 9/16″ (183.4 x 90.4 cm). Publisher and printer: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles. Edition: 38. John B. Turner Fund

I recently discovered that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) are now showing their work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The show goes until June 15. SANAA designed the new New Museum building, which appears as a stack of boxes, each one shifted off-center from the level above or below it. It made me happy to see that there are a bunch of Rabbit chairs in the cafe! SANAA had their first U.S. exhibition at the Henry from November 2007 to March 2008.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, photo by Dean Kaufman.