Friday October 30 MoMA Outing

Rock and roll photography and more! For this Friday's outing, we'll see "Looking at Music: Side 2" and explore the Museum of Modern Art's legendary contemporary art collection. Meet in the MoMA lobby, on the 53rd St side.

Looking at Music: Side 2

In the mid-1970s, right on the heels of Conceptual art and Minimalism, many visual artists turned to making raw, hard-edged work that addressed urban blight and bad economies. With an ear set to punk, these artists worked in the netherworld between music and media, often forming their own short-lived bands. Their rough, do-it-yourself projects pushed the envelope of interdisciplinary experimentation, which soon spread to underground venues from New York to London, Düsseldorf, and Krakow. This exhibition features music videos, super-8 films, drawings, photographs, and zines from MoMA's collection that explore the melding of music, media, and visual art in the final decades leading up to the twenty-first century.

SLASH

This Friday, you get your first glimpse of the MAD Museum's latest show.  The incredibly named.....

Slash: Paper Under the Knife 

Slash: Paper Under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Visual Arts TRaC begins!

Get ready for the ultimate insider's look at the museum world with your instructor Sarah Valdez!  You are in good hands. 

You'll be starting by exploring your homebase for the next 8 weeks.  High 5's partner in the Visual Arts TRaC venture is the Museum of Arts and Design.....

the MAD Museum:


Prepare to have the best view from your classroom of all the TRaC classes.  You look out over Central Park.  (Music TRaC, which is in a mirrored room, has only view of themselves.)  For more info about the building itself, click here.

Meet Sarah in the lobby on Fridays at 4:30. 
MAD is located at 2 Columbus Circle, easily accessible by both subway and bus.

By train:
A, B, C, D or No. 1 to Columbus Circle at 59th Street;
N, R, Q or W to 57th Street and 7th Avenue
F to 57th Street and 6th Avenue
By bus:
M5, M7, M10, M20, M30 and M104 to Columbus Circle
at 59th Street or 57th Street and 8th Avenue

Enjoy!

Artist & Critic Talk on Saturday at 1:30 at Schroeder Romero Gallery

On Saturday 25, we will meet at 1:30 at Schroeder Romero Gallery (637 West 27th Street) for William Powhida's exhibition: The Writing is On The Wall. Bill is an artist, teacher and art critic for The Brooklyn Rail. William will introduce us to the show and talk about his experiences with writing art criticism.

Paddy Johnson (of art blog, Art Fag City) writes:

A testament to the migration of cliche online behavioral norms to the offline world, William Powhida presents an uncensored portrait of the art world from a fictious Thai jail cell, circa September - December 2009 at Schroeder Romero. If you’re part of this community, the show is literally like staring into the sun: you can’t turn away. Hand drawn notebook pages with text on the art world fill the gallery, many of which contain jewels of insider knowledge and reflections on the art world. I spent a good half hour looking at Powida’s, Relational Wall, an annotated watercolor painting depicting virtually every art celebrity in town. “I like to party”, reads the text under Alexis Hubshman of the Scope fair, while dealer Jeffery Deitch sits at the center of the piece. As those in the scene already know, this version of the future isn’t all that different than it is today, but then social economies rarely transform themselves so completely over the course of six months.

On a related note, the exhibition’s press release necessarily references art scholar Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Art, a term identifying works based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt. While appropriate, my hope is that an academic with a better understanding of online culture updates these theories for the fine art world. Powhida’s work may reflect the development of complex social networks lessening our interest in privacy but his mirror is hardly unique. It’s simply one more product in the giant Facebook economy. And even within said marketplace, the idea that this kind of personal information has any lasting or substantive value has been questioned.

William Powhida responds:

1. Hey Paddy,

   The journal pages in the show come from a possible future for William Powhida after he’s bottomed out in the flailing economy while the relational wall is generally a reflection of the last three years of the art boom. It’s an outcome of Powhida’s forced reflection while sitting in a Thai prison cell. Certainly facebook, which my art dealers are probably scouring right now, has informed the structure of the work, but all the images (including the surrounding wall of prints) are primarily from celebratory art world photographs from Artforum diary and Artnet while all the information is based only on gossip, supposition, and personal knowledge. I included the 2,500 plus portraits (the last 3 years of Art forum Diary) around the painting to suggest that there isn’t going to be much lasting value in most of what the art world takes so seriously. The relational wall is a paranoid, obsessive snapshot of the art world at the height of our inglorious gilded age funded with all that money that disappeared when the stock market nearly halved itself. That money is gone, and may never come back. Certainly not without heavy taxes on the wealthy. Still, I completely agree with you that many of the major players will still exactly be right where they are in the hierarchy with only the supporting characters changing and exchanging roles in a year or even five years and I’ll still be doing whatever it is that I do. My hope, like most of my work, is that it reflects my actual cultural experience during this period. I pulled Bourriaud’s quote because it suggests that the relational wall is Powhida’s self-portrait. Anyway, the game isn’t over, as Bourriaud suggests it won’t start over until the ’social setting radically changes’. That would probably require an alternative to capitalism. I hope the painting didn’t cause any permanent damage.

   -Cheers,

   William

Pictures From Outing #2

Here are some pictures that were taken from our second outing.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/visualartstracspring09/

More uploads to come for future field trips so make sure to save the link!

Outing #2 Visit to SoHo

Starting at 1:00 pm, Saturday March 28, at The Drawing Center: 35 Wooster Street.

(That's two blocks North of Canal and one block East of West Broadway. Take any train to Canal Street and follow a map to Wooster, walking West from the N,R,Q, 6 and walking East from the C, E, A, 2, 3)

We will meet just outside of the entrance to The Drawing Center. If it rains, please meet in small lobby.

First, we will be visiting the Apparently Invisible exhibition and the Sun Xun: Shock of Time exhibition.

"Apparently Invisible: Selections Spring 2009 presents work by nine artists selected from the Viewing Program. The pieces included in the exhibition skirt the edge of perception and cognition, requiring a recalibration of the visual and a momentary investment in a more quiet sublime."

"Sun Xun: Shock of Time will present two recent hand-drawn animations by Hangzhou-based artist, Sun Xun (b. 1980, China). Shown together for the first time, Shock of Time (2006) and Lie of the Magician (2005) combine traditional drawing materials and printmaking techniques with digital media."







Then, we will visit the Jon Kessler exhibition at Deitch Gallery, Kessler's Circus, an updated and politicized version of Calder's Circus. (Alexander Calder is the artist famous for his mobiles). 76 Grand Street.







We will also visit another Deitch Gallery installation and view the work of Ryan McGinness. "His work combines all-over composition, inspired by Jackson Pollock and the mechanical silkscreen process inspired by Andy Warhol. The work also fuses naturalistic and contemporary pop culture references." 18 Wooster Street.




Ryan McGinness' psychedelic visions:
Drawing on Andy Warhol's love of commercial symbols and Jackson Pollock's energetic, layered abstractions, Ryan McGinness remixes digital information — referencing street culture, logos, and nature — to make paintings, sculptures, and products that engage the contemporary moment through a conflux of imagery.

He's inspired by skate culture. A former skateboarder, McGinness grew up in Virginia Beach and first became interested in art via t-shirt designs at the local skate and surf shops. A stint as an intern at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh solidified his interest in bridging fine art and pop.

The work is an accumulation of signs. Starting his career as a graphic designer, McGinness realized the importance of symbols early on, and developed his own vocabulary of visual signs and logos that get repeated throughout his work.

Publishers love him. With three new art publications released in the past year — Rizzoli's Ryan McGinness Works, Gingko Press' No Sin/No Future, and Arkitip's Aesthetic Comfort — McGinness continues to keep his art and design aesthetics accessible to everyone.

Visit McGinness' website, check out his current show at Deitch Projects, watch a video about his Arkitip book, and (if you want to be consumerist about it) buy his t-shirts and skate decks.

Outing #1 REALITY CHECK @ the Met

Great visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past sunny Saturday afternoon to see Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography. A few pics to post soon from our OWN photographer, Clark Strong. For now, I'll post a few images from the show.









Scroll down to see more images or click to see all of them at: http://www.metmuseum.org/special/reality_check/photography_images.asp

From the Met's website: "More than any other type of image, photographs seem to have a direct and natural connection to visible reality. A painting of an angel may be admired for its beauty and masterful technique, but a photograph of an angel is either a miracle or a hoax. In recent years, as the art of photography has grown increasingly sophisticated, artists and viewers alike have become particularly attuned to the medium's potential for distortion, ambiguity, and illusion. This exhibition presents a selection of photographs that tread nimbly on the fault lines between reality and artifice, generating a sense of uncertainty about what is real and what is not."