Book launch & reception

Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Director’s Roundtable Garden | LACMA

Please join the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department to celebrate the release of the WORDS WITHOUT PICTURES publication, meet some of the authors, and start your own discussions.

Books will be available for purchase at the special discount price of $25 (plus tax).

www.wordswithoutpictures.org

Documentation: Danielle Levitt

Second Floor is a private exhibition space started by curator Sarvia Jasso and artist Kathryn Garcia. In part fueled by the economic crisis, Second-Floor was developed as a way to challenge the “white cube” mentality of the market driven NY art-world by providing artists a platform outside of the normal exhibiting structure.

“Every city has its own gang history, part of Chicago’s are Gang cards, most prominent in the 70’s and early 80’s”

Klansmen dingbats!

Thanks Ray for the link.

demand a cubicle
and then go watch this movie

Yrsa Roca Fannberg, In Total Ecstasy (sexual), 2008. Watercolor on Paper, 18 x 26 cm

by Jennifer Doyle

“Art versus Sport” is the name of Yrsa Roca Fannberg’s blog detailing the ups and downs of being an artist and Barcelona Futbol Club supporter. Entries alternate between meditations on the trials of experimental documentary filmmaking and the melodramas produced by loving perhaps the most storied side in the world. Illustrating this blog are Fannberg’s watercolor studies of life on the pitch—men in training, leaping into each others arms, throwing their bodies in the air, or glued to the ground in stupefied defeat.

It is tempting to think that Art and Sport sleep in separate beds. The discovery that one is at home in bohemia is often accompanied by parallel experiences of deep social isolation, of awkwardness and bullying, of being taunted for walking, running, or throwing “like a girl.” Maybe in your childhood, men and boys gathered in the living room around televised sport spectacle while you sprawled across your bedroom floor on your belly, pouring over magazine photos of Andy Warhol, Halston, and the superstars of Studio 54. For many of us in the arts, sports provided the childhood setting for our exile from normalcy. We tend to imagine these worlds as separate spheres, in which sport is fully masculine, and art is coded socially as effeminate and queer.

Full essay published in X-TRA contemporary art quarterly, Summer 2009.

The perfect addition to any summer reading list: Owen Hatherley’s new book
Militant Modernism (Zero Books, 2009). Owen also writes the consistently inspiring blog Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy.

From the back cover: Militant Modernism argues for a Modernism of everyday life, immersed in questions of socialism, sexual politics and technology. It features new readings of some familiar names - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, Vladimir Mayakovsky - and much more on the lesser known, quotidian modernists of the 20th century. The chapters range from a study of industrial and brutalist aesthetics in Britain, Russian Constructivism in architecture, the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich in film and design, and the alienation effects of Brecht and Hanns Eisler on record and on screen. Against the world of ‘there is no alternative’, this book tries to excavate Modernism’s other futures.

Zero Books
Amazon

Such a bonkers work ethic; I don’t think this Flickr account represents even 20% of his total output.

Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History Of Modern and Contemporary Art In The Arab World / Part I_volume 1_chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992-2005)

A Project By Walid Raad

On view at REDCAT
April 10 - June 14, 2009