Antonio Puleo, One For Me, One For You

Cherry and Martin presents Antonio Adriano Puleo’s exhibition I Am a Bird Now, featuring ecstatic murals, paintings and sculpture that possess a bold fusion of natural history and modern abstraction. This will be the first solo exhibition at the gallery’s new location at 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.

Antonio Adriano Puleo’s pictorial exploration is a twenty-first century hybrid of art history, including the painterly experimentations of modern abstraction as well as the illustrations of the 19th century American naturalist John James Audubon and Medieval illumination. The third in a series of solo shows by Puleo, I Am a Bird Now, follows up on two previous exhibitions, To This World I Must Give In (2005) and Birds and Beasts (2007). Whereas Puleo’s previous exhibitions furthered a pictorial investigation of the tensions between opposing forces (Birds and Beasts) and the individual’s place amongst these tensions (To This World I Must Give In), Puleo’s new body of work explores the manipulation of these tensions through symmetry, pattern and the hermeticism of alchemy. Inherent in Puleo’s work is the translucent dimension of ecstasy, the idea that revelation can be had through the polarities of perfect geometrical proportions, radiant color and a visceral connection to the material world.

Central to the exhibition and the artist’s concerns are two wall installations, Follow The Light (2009) and They Know Why They’re There (2009). Painting becomes architecture as vibrant bands of color seamlessly emerge from strategically placed, intimate canvases. These small paintings, whose compositions magnify exponentially onto the gallery walls, chart the implicit energy of expansion and contraction.

Story

A show of power that this particular audience wasn’t ready for.

“LOST&FOUND is the first in a series of displays which explore themes relating to the library and its collections and practices. Turning to a particularly inconspicuous collection - the library’s lost and found, artist Joshua Callaghan has created an archive of objects made entirely of wood and wire and based on pure conjecture. When denied access to the actual lost & found the artist embraced the speculative, generating a playful anthropological display of banal technological contrivances and personal effects. What’s lost, then, is not only “found” by the artist but recreated as pure object, neutral stand-ins for what may or may not exist. By rendering these items in wood they are given new substance and materiality but are stripped of their original use value — the cord does not generate electricity, the pen no longer writes, the iPod will never play. In lieu of functionality these pieces remain static and on display. They present gestures. Shapes and outlines are vague, details are added selectively and objects appear as generic suggestions rather than precise representations. This formal ambiguity places the viewer at the center of a unique process of identification - a kind of visual “lost and found,” activated by the object’s abstraction.”

Inside Motto Berlin, Skalitzerstrasse 68, Im Hinterhof.

“We are proud to announce the European launch of Fillip 9 in partnership with Konst-ig, Stockholm, and Motto Berlin. As part of these transcontinental events, Fillip staff and board members will discuss recent writing and artist projects that situate the publication within the larger landscape of international art criticism. This will also be an opportunity to expand discussions begun during our recent Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism series presented this past February in collaboration with Artspeak, Vancouver.”

All are invited to attend and participate in these discussions:

About the current issue
In Fillip 9, Diedrich Diedrichsen provides an in depth discussion of Paul Valéry and pop music, and critic Shepherd Steiner considers the Martha Rosler Library project through the lens of the Boolean search. The issue also features conversations between Lea Feinstein and Christian L. Frock on second wave feminism and last year’s proliferation of feminist art shows, and between Boris Groys and Andro Wekua on art practice and production today and in the former East Europe. In addition, Fillip 9 includes an interview with Steve Lambert of the New York Times Special Edition project among exhibition reviews and other texts.

We are very pleased to present a special audio project for the issue, a yellow vinyl 45 by artists Cranfield and Slade, which is included in each copy of the magazine. The edition is produced in collaboration with the Or Gallery, Vancouver, and in support of the artists’ forthcoming album 12 Sun Songs by the Or Gallery, Christoph Keller Editions, and JRP/Ringier.

Rudo y Cursi. This special evening is part of Cinema Tuesdays, a new weekly series curated by Flux celebrating innovative film at The Montalbán special events theatre in Hollywood.

Tuesday May 5th, 2009
7pm — Acamonchi art show; Clorofila (Nortec Collective)
8pm — Screening plus Q&A with director Carlos Cuarón

by Julie Bosman

The scruffy players in brick-red jerseys and secondhand shoes hailed from Haiti, Togo, Mexico, Honduras and Harlem. The fresh-faced team in black had neatly trimmed hair, new gear and degrees from Carnegie Mellon, Syracuse, Pace and universities in China and Australia.

Most of the players in black work together at the Royal Bank of Canada, bonded by the financial cloud hanging over their industry. The reds, too, are united by financial circumstance, sharing a temporary address, 1 Wards Island: a homeless shelter.

They faced off the other night at Chelsea Piers, perhaps Manhattan’s premier soccer spot for young professionals, and this spring also the base for the newest team in Street Soccer USA, a 16-city network of homeless players that started in 2005 in Charlotte, N.C., and is under the umbrella of Help USA, a national homeless services provider.

The idea behind homeless soccer is something like this: Take a group of poor people, disconnected from the regular rhythms of life, lacking both physical exercise and much to look forward to. Add soccer.

In Ann Arbor, Mich., and Austin, Tex., Minneapolis, St. Louis and Washington, the program has been credited with helping players pull themselves out of homelessness. There is even a Homeless World Cup. This year’s, the seventh, is scheduled for September in Milan.

“When I’m out there, I feel like I can’t do any wrong,” said Dexter Burnett, 47, who played soccer in his native Jamaica, where his speed earned him the nickname Pepper. He was laid off last fall from a job as a medical assistant. “It allows me not to think about my situation so much and just relax and enjoy the moment.”

The league is the brainchild of Lawrence Cann, 31, once a nationally ranked soccer player at Davidson College, who moved in the fall from Charlotte to New York, with one of the nation’s largest homeless populations, estimated at 35,000, but no established homeless soccer team.

With the help of a few volunteers, Mr. Cann cleared out a dusty gymnasium that had previously been used for storage at the shelter on Wards Island, a patch of land in the East River. He recruited a few reluctant players, promising they would not be punished for missing the standard 10 p.m. shelter curfew.

At an early practice on a rainy night in March, a couple of the 15 people standing expectantly in a circle had evidently been drinking. Most spoke little English. And they did not even know one another’s names.

“Hey, you,” one player called out before kicking a clumsy pass that landed far from its target.

Taking note, Mr. Cann imported a drill familiar to early practices of soccer teams everywhere: Before making a pass, the kicker had to call out the name of the receiver. He gave instructions in English and Spanish. He declared that anybody who showed up drunk or high would not participate that night (but could return the next week). And between running, passing and shooting, players are expected to talk to the coach about their goals outside soccer, their job searches and their state of mind.

Of the 30 people who have turned out for a practice, only six have not returned a second time.

“You need something to occupy your time around here,” said Woods Matthews, 45, a regular whose long braid swings when he plays. “That’s why people get so mad around the shelter. We don’t get any exercise, we’re all cooped up, and then people get in fights.”

As the players smoothed their ragged edges, Mr. Cann began to look for opponents.

Chelsea Piers, with its state-of-the-art facilities, is among the city’s most expensive places to play — $2,450 per team for 10 games — and normally has a waiting list of more than 25 teams. But the bad economy led a lot of corporate-sponsored teams to drop out. Mr. Cann raised the entry fee, Nike donated equipment, and Chelsea Piers provided matching jerseys, as it does for all the teams that play there.

Just getting to the field is a 70-minute trek: the M35 bus to Harlem, a downtown train, then a half-mile walk to the West Side Highway.

The homeless players lost their debut game, 14-4, playing without a single substitute. The next week, they faced a team from Bloomberg, the financial information company, whose players were politely intrigued.

“I guess I figure being homeless, they’ll play pretty aggressively,” predicted Louis Brun, 22.

Street Soccer NY lost again, 11-5. As the teams headed to the locker room, Mr. Burnett chatted up an opponent, asking if Bloomberg was hiring.

“If these guys can get out there, feel comfortable talking to new people, and not get frustrated, then it’s really going to help them integrate,” Mr. Cann said. “Then eventually they’ll keep jobs and not get kicked out of their apartments.”

He is already seeing progress: One player left the shelter and returned to his family. Another, Jarvis Strose, who had refused to meet with caseworkers and regularly missed curfew over two years of homelessness, arrived promptly at practice every week. A caseworker told Mr. Cann that a third man, who had developed a nervous disorder after being beaten in prison, was beginning to recover from his trauma because of the exercise.

On Tuesday, Street Soccer NY met the team made up mostly of Royal Bank of Canada workers, called the Gunners.

Chris Lodgson, 25, who plays center back on the homeless team, came straight from his new job at the cafe at Bloomingdale’s; he was planning to move from the shelter to an apartment in Washington Heights. He will continue to play with Street Soccer, which he said has been instrumental in his getting back on his feet.

“I don’t want to say it’s a return to being normal, but it makes me feel like myself again,” he said. “Two weeks ago, that was, like, the first time in a while that I forgot. I forgot where I was and what was going on.”

The red team took an early lead, passing fluidly, players calling one another by name. Players from the adjacent field wandered over to watch.

“Is that the homeless team?” asked one. “Wow,” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “They’re good.”

Mr. Strose scored his fourth goal of the game, panting with exhaustion as he ran off the field. When Mr. Matthews, sent in to substitute, kicked for a goal but missed the ball entirely, his teammates shouted encouragement.

“When we started, they didn’t know how to play,” Mr. Cann said. “They didn’t know how to pass. They didn’t trust each other.”

Final score: Homeless 10, Bankers 4.

Mr. Cann, surrounded by celebrating players, looked relieved. “We really needed a win,” he said.

Still clapping, he called out to his team, “Shake hands!”

Thanks Ryan

Good friend of mine Johan Prag is a Swedish Art Director working, living and breathing
in Tokyo, Japan. His new blog “And Seen” just launched. Take a look, its worth to bookmark.

CONTRA MUNDUM I
Sunday, May 3, 2009
7pm

An Other Interior: Spatial Objects

Rupert Deese, artist and former fabricator for Donald Judd, discusses building and living with the furniture of Judd, Gerrit Rietveld, Josef Albers, and Gerald Summers.

The talk will be followed by a DJ set of related music.

Bea Arthur, 1922 - 2009.

Bea Arthur by John Currin.

by A. O. Scott

The first thing you see in “Tyson,” James Toback’s powerful and troubling new documentary, is an old television clip showing Mike Tyson, on Nov. 22, 1986, defeating Trevor Berbick to win the W.B.C. heavyweight title. Just 20 years old, Mr. Tyson was the youngest fighter to win that belt, and to see him take it is to recall, especially in light of the shambling, thuggish caricature he would later become, what a dazzling and ferocious boxer he was in his prime.

The only thing more astonishing than the speed of his combinations was their force, and his ability to blend quickness with brute strength quickly overpowered his early opponents, not many of whom lasted very long in the ring with him. Mr. Berbick, a taller, heavier and more experienced fighter, was done before the second round was over, and what the slow-motion video shows most indelibly is the terror on his face before the referee mercifully called a TKO.

The essence of boxing is violence, but few fighters have refined it — have embodied it — quite as effectively as Mr. Tyson has; he sometimes speaks to Mr. Toback’s camera about the murderous clarity he took into the ring with him. He says he used to imagine his fists smashing through his opponent’s faces and out the backs of their heads. The pure terror in Mr. Berbick’s eyes (and in those of most of the other fighters Mr. Tyson met during his rapid rise and brief reign) suggests that he might well have been capable of wreaking that kind of damage.

But the damage surveyed in “Tyson” is mostly self-inflicted. Fear is certainly one of the film’s motifs, but it seems that Mr. Tyson suffers from at least as much as he inspires. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” he says at one point, giving voice to his state of mind in the moments before a bout. He also remembers being bullied and humiliated as a child in Brooklyn, but in listening to his moody, rambling and frequently thoughtful disquisitions on his own life you are struck by intimations of a dread much deeper than the fear of physical harm or loss of face.

With a single exception — his relationship with his trainer and mentor, Cus D’Amato — Mr. Tyson’s experience of the world has been marked by mistrust and suspicion, by a view of other people that is hard and pitiless. They are users, operators, “leeches,” he says, but he rarely claims to be any better. He is only human.

Most of the movie consists of the former champ sitting in a house near the Pacific Ocean, speaking into the camera as if no one else were around. This produces an effect of almost unnerving intimacy — it is a bit scary to be so close to him — but also an upwelling, perhaps unexpected, of compassion. It is hard to imagine anyone more radically alone.

Whether or not he deserves our sympathy is a fair question. It is easy, and not entirely unjustified, to look at Mr. Tyson, his left eye ringed by a Maori tattoo, his head shaved clean, and see a self-pitying, self-justifying man who squandered his talent and good fortune and caused much more hurt than his brutal profession required. He started out as a street criminal in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and was plucked from juvenile detention by Mr. D’Amato and his associates, who disciplined the young man’s natural volatility and turned him into a fighter.

But Mr. Tyson never learned to control his brutish, self-destructive instincts. His brief first marriage, to the actress and model Robin Givens, was marked by accusations of abuse, and in 1993 he went to prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a beauty pageant contestant in Indiana. By now he may be better known for ranting and press conferences and for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear during a 1997 fight than for the mighty pugilistic feats of his youth.

And a lot of people, even passionate boxing fans, might prefer to forget about Mr. Tyson rather than spend 90 minutes in his company. But “Tyson” is worth seeing even if you have no particular interest in the sport or the man.

It may lack the detachment and the balance that Barbara Kopple brought to “Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson,” the 1993 documentary she made for NBC, but Mr. Toback’s film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson’s point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

From time to time the screen is divided into two or three almost identical images, and the sound is edited to make it sound as if Mr. Tyson is in dialogue with himself, his words echoing and overlapping. These effects emphasize the film’s main point, which is that Mr. Tyson is too mercurial, too self-contradictory, to be easily summed up.

He is by turns boastful, angry, remorseful and bewildered, choking up when he recalls Mr. D’Amato, whose death in 1985 remains the central tragedy of Mr. Tyson’s life. He relates the details of that life with candor and feeling, and also with an analytical ardor that is moving because it reveals his struggle to figure himself out.

Without the sympathetic presence of Mr. Toback, whom he has known for many years, it is unlikely that Mr. Tyson would have opened up in this way. And it is also likely that without Mr. Tyson’s presence, the director would have been unlikely to restrain his own self-indulgent impulses.

Mr. Toback’s fascination with hyperbolic visions of masculinity predates his filmmaking career, going back at least to a notorious 1967 essay on Norman Mailer. As a screenwriter and director — from “Fingers” to “Harvard Man” — he has been preoccupied with brutality, vanity and sexual conquest, and with the interplay between those elemental impulses and the refinements of art and culture.

His protagonists tend to be variously romanticized versions of himself: intellectuals seduced by fantasies of crime, risk, sexual wantonness and violence. Even in his most interesting projects he frequently loses track of the difference between exploring such fantasies and indulging them, but in “Tyson,” his first nonfiction film, he is held in check by the irreducible, excruciating realness of the man in front of the camera. The transaction between them is charged with a strange kind of magic. The filmmaker allows the fighter to have his unchallenged say to justify, condemn and contradict himself. In exchange Mr. Tyson has enabled Mr. Toback to make his best film, which is also, paradoxically, his most personal.

“Tyson” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity and violence.

TYSON

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by James Toback; director of photography, Larry McConkey; edited by Aaron Yanes; music by Salaam Remi, with the song “Legendary” by Nas; produced by Mr. Toback and Damon Bingham; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 30

via South Willard

I guess Lotte is holding a dance contest to promote a new gum. MG pointed me to this great entry. If you need a Japanese language tutor, this guy seems pretty solid.

Naomi Watanabe also has mastered her Beyonce impersonation.

by Martin Fackler

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate.

And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term.

Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island.

Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. Some jokingly take the analogy a step further, comparing themselves to a much more repressive family-run regime in Japan’s geopolitical neighborhood.

“Hime Island is North Korea, just a livable version,” Naokazu Koiwa said with a laugh. Mr. Koiwa, 32, repairs fishing boats.

Unsurprisingly, the current mayor, Akio Fujimoto, flatly rejects the North Korean comparison. Rather, he and most other islanders call Hime a repository for traditional Japanese values, like economic egalitarianism and social harmony. They say the rest of the nation has lost these in an embrace of more competitive capitalism, especially under the prime ministership of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-6.

“Our thinking is, ‘let’s all share the economic pie and get along, instead of giving all of it to the rich,’ ” said Mr. Fujimoto, whose father, Kumao Fujimoto, devised the work-sharing system in the 1960s. “Avoiding competition is the traditional Japanese way.”

Now, with the current crisis causing a national questioning of American-style laissez-faire economics, and business leaders and unions seeking alternatives to widespread job cuts, Hime’s work-sharing scheme is suddenly being held up as a new model. Islanders call it ironic that the current crisis has made traditional values appear progressive, even utopian.

Nor does the island’s penchant for equality stop at work-sharing. At an annual village ceremony to mark the coming of age of 20-year-old islanders, women are forbidden to wear traditional kimonos for fear the differences in quality could reveal their households’ economic status.

Dismayed by the inconsistent television reception across this mountainous island about half the size of Key West, the current mayor installed a free cable TV system that now reaches 97 percent of homes.

Even by clannish Japan’s standards, the island seems a friendly, close-knit place. Islanders cheerfully greet passing strangers. Roads, parks and even public toilets are immaculate. Doors are left unlocked, and the island has only one policeman.

Mr. Fujimoto also cites traditional attitudes to explain his own political longevity, a claim most islanders seem to accept. He says islanders shun public elections because of a deep-rooted abhorrence of confrontation. He said the last time the village held a mayoral election, in 1955, it split the island, creating ill feelings that took a generation to heal.

To avoid a repeat of such trauma, he said, the island decided to choose mayors by consensus, finding someone on whom everyone could agree beforehand. Last year, Mr. Fujimoto won his seventh straight four-year term, once again by default in an uncontested election.

“My job is to prevent elections by keeping everyone equal, and thus happy,” said Mr. Fujimoto, 65, sitting in a modest office in the village hall. His only visible sign of authority was a buzzer on his desk that he pushed to summon an assistant.

Mr. Fujimoto said he would resign immediately if a serious rival appeared in an election. “That would be a sign the village has lost confidence in me,” he said.

Many islanders say Mr. Fujimoto is able to stay in office partly because of the reverence still felt here for his father, who lifted Hime from postwar poverty by turning it into a loyal source of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, which rewarded the island with generous public works.

“We have our own little personality cult,” said Shokai Dozono, a Buddhist monk who runs one of the island’s two temples.

The island and its mayor also have outside critics. Keizo Nagai, the ombudsman for Oita prefecture, which includes Hime, calls the island the least transparent local government in the prefecture. He criticized it for refusing to make information like detailed budget records available to non-islanders, which he attributed to a closed local culture rather than to a cover-up of wrongdoing.

“Hime Island acts like an independent kingdom,” Mr. Nagai said.

Many islanders say they accept the status quo simply because life here is comfortable. They say rocking the boat would only ostracize them on an island where everyone knows one another.

“Everyone is basically satisfied,” said Shusaku Akaishi, 29, who works at his family’s gas station. “This is a conservative place.”

That conservatism is strong enough at times to annoy even Mr. Fujimoto. His biggest complaint is that traditional attitudes prevent him from extending family control of the mayor’s office for another generation, because he has only a daughter.

“Hime Island can’t be run by a woman,” he sighed. “This place is too medieval for that.”

via South Willard

thanks Arash Saedinia

Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social critic, talks about society, materialism, relationships, government, religion, and happiness. Interviewed by Mike Wallace. 3 part video.

Found from the blog my friend Shane Lester keeps. (Happy Birthday!)

Ice T rappin over Jam on it via West Coast Pioneers TV broadcasting rare footage, videos, interviews and commercials of the early West Coast.
Have a great weekend!

via Arduous Glamour

thanks Arash Saedinia

Printed Matter is pleased to announce a signing with Charlie White for his new publication American Minor, a photographic exploration of the American teen as a fabricated subject and idea. The signing will take place at Printed Matter’s storefront at 195 Tenth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Street) in New York City.

Aiming for the jugular of the American unconscious, the photographs of Los Angeles-based artist Charlie White inspect the culture’s fictions through staged artifice, reminiscent of, say, Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson. American Minor delves into an important and ongoing theme in White’s work–the American teen, and all that goes into its manufacture.

Having approached this theme with an earlier project whose protagonist was a hairy, fragile doll named Joshua, here White tackles the taboos of nascent sexuality in the American teen girl–both the vulnerability of that sexuality as a topic and the ruthlessness with which it is exploited when it goes unexamined. Cataloging studio archives, film stills, animation stills, and scripts, and using images culled from White’s two-year study of one teenager, archives of magazine covers featuring iconic blonde models, stills from his first 35mm film and his photographic comparative study of teens and transgendered people, American Minor presents White’s ongoing and never-before-seen studies of the American teen subject as both image and idea. American Minor is a bold excavation of the sociosexual forces that surround us all.

by Helen Pidd

A man with three ears will appear at Edinburgh Napier University today to talk about his “extra” ear, which has been surgically implanted on to his forearm.

Australian performance artist Stelios Arcadiou, known as Stelarc, had the third ear created from cells in a lab in 2006. At the Edinburgh Science International Festival today, Stelarc will discuss his plans to install transmitters in his new ear, so people listen to what it is hearing online. He also hopes to grow a soft earlobe using his own stem cells.

The ear is made of human cartilage. Stelarc, who is visiting professor at Brunel University School of Arts, took 10 years to find a surgeon willing to perform the operation. He uses medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality and the internet in his work.