#class: Jennifer Dalton & William Powhida @ Winkleman Gallery

*****


...and behind the front desk...Ivin Ballen

pics:tryharder

#class
Organized by Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida
"#class will turn Winkleman Gallery into a 'think tank', where we will work with guest artists, critics, academics, dealers, collectors and anyone else who would like to participate to examine the way art is made and seen in our culture and to identify and propose alternatives and/or reforms to the current market system..."
February 21 - March 20, 2010

Winkleman Gallery

pretty much at this point

Marcel-Broodthaers-Interview-with-a-Cat

i like when museums play jokes on you: The Museum of Jurassic Technology

pics:tryharder

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

"In his 1995 book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, author Lawrence Weschler portrays the museum, and David Wilson's curatorial role, as a work of conceptual art. Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2001..." more

frenchybutchic: institutional critique field trip of the day

Things My Students Would Love To See At Museums

TRYHARDER bookclub: Pre-order now

Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings
October 2009, 7 x 9, 440 pp., 60 illus. $39.95

it had to be said

"In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their esthetic heads up the esthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism and institutional critique. Before the schadenfreud-aholics concur, I am not talking about artists like Wade Guyton, Kelly Walker or Josh Smith, all of whom deploy the above artists in optically original and intellectually complex ways, but hordes of wannabe followers who do so in safely imitative unoriginal ways. These second-stringers have spawned a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played...

'Younger' should be much more exciting than it is. For long stretches it is just the same old rote conceptualism and latest iterations on retreaded ideas (curators everywhere love this kind of art). The show is filled with frustrating moments, most of which occur when the curators conform too completely to biennial habit, choosing art that follows standard conventions of late-late-late conceptualism...

'Younger than Jesus' indicates that the alchemical essence known as the sublime, the primal buzz of it all, is no longer in God or nature or abstraction. These young artists show us that the sublime has moved into us, that we are the sublime; life, not art, has become so real that it’s almost unreal. Art is being reanimated by a sense of necessity, free of ideology or the compulsion to illustrate theory. Art is breaking free. Even the New Museum itself, founded in 1977, is 'younger than Jesus.' Since it reopened in December 2007, it’s become, despite its clinical spaces and a couple of misfires, the most consistently challenging, polemical art institution in the city. It, like the art in this show and everywhere, is being reborn." Jerry Saltz
"JESUS" SAVES

“PLEASE NEW MUSEUM SHOW MY WORK”

I think they should have just stuck with the banner as their art....STORY HERE via C-monster

Silvia Kolbowski: Two in One

Silvia Kolbowski: Two in One
"The following is President Obama’s inaugural speech, edited to remove references to religion, the celebration of militarism, delusions of national power, the phantasmatic projection of enemies, the glorification of the struggles of the poor, the puritanical elevation of suffering, the erasure of difference, etc." CONTINUE
E-Flux Journal

tryharder's museum studies

pics:ⓒtryharder
@ moca

thoughts about museums in the news

Why museums have become our home from home : People are visiting our galleries and museums at a startling rate. Is it the cafés, the absence of swearing... maybe even the art? /// Hugo Rifkind, The Times UK

"...So, here's theory No1: museum numbers are up, because, quite suddenly, museums aren't much like museums.
*
This is what you might call the “dumbing up” theory. In other words, museum numbers are up because people are getting cleverer. (opposite to the dumbing down theory)
*
That brings me to theory No3. Museum numbers are up because museums are safe. “They attract only a certain type of person, let's face it,” says Margaret Child, 79, from Essex, visiting the National with a group of older ladies and then heading off to see Sunset Boulevard: “In any museum, do you ever hear the F-word?
*
Free entry has a huge amount to do with this. That should probably be Theory 4, the credit-crunch theory.
*
People are flocking to museums because museums are the best public space we have..."

riddle me this

what came first:
large artworks or large museums?

imposed learning break: thinking about museums today

If the museum's publicity has the function of structuring popular identification with bourgeois privacy, it does so first simply through the museum's visibility and accessibility: open "on a regularly scheduled basis," it offers up what was formerly the content of homes to public display. Second, as "a nonprofit tax-exempt organization," often with direct municipal subsidy, the museum imposes popular investment in itself, inasmuch as the museum comes to that population already with the population's economic support. Third, on this, the museum's real "debt" to the public, is superimposed a symbolic debt of the public to it: a debt produced by the philanthropic gestures of the patrons who provide it with much more visible support. The museum thus draws a population into a cultural contract, obliging that population to make itself "worthy" of capital's gifts. Finally, after indebting a population to it and thereby obliging that population to enter it, the museum offers to it, as its own, what it has already turned into "public" culture.

If culture consists of the narratives, symbolic objects, and practices, with which a particular group represents its interests and its experience, its history and possible futures, fine art represents the interests and experiences first of the professional community of primarily middle-class artists who produce it, and second of the bourgeois patrons who collect it and re-present it in museums which their names alongside those of its producers. The museum, as a public institution, offers up fine art as a general public culture, a national or even universal civic culture, and turns it into the single cultural currency that can be traded by members of the civic community. The museum's patrons are represented as being in primary and privileged possession of this cultural currency, while all of the symbolic objects produced outside of the specialized sphere of publicized artistic activity are banished to the oblivion of individual lives, without authority to represent "public" experience.

from Museum Highlights

you are coming to my book club whether you like it or not

"...In a 1985 interview, McCollum described his practice as 'a sort of working to rule': a job action in which workers do precisely and only what is required contractually, both refusing excess work and excessively observing rules and regulations. 'In a sense, I'm doing just the minimum that is required of an artist and no more.' Each of the plaster objects McCollum has produced is signed and dated. Although McCollum works with assistants, he insists on painting the outer edge of every black center and the inner edge of every frame. No two objects are identical: each member of each group is systematically distinguished from the others by color, shape, or both. McCollum thus reduces his activities to the production of unique objects and the act of signing them: the bare minimum of what still constitutes artist labor..." Museum Highlights

Ten Plaster Surrogates
1982, Enamel on hydrostone

artist of 4:08 PM: Louise Lawler

pics from: Louise Lawler: Sucked In, Blown Out, Obviously Indebted or One Foot in Front of the Other, 2008 Metro Pictures

and something to chew on:

"...Lawler's literalization and reversal of presentational positions was also apparent in the first room of her 1982 exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, where she presented an 'arrangement' of works by gallery artists (Sherman, Simmons, Welling, Goldstein, Longo). Despite its somewhat unconventional hanging, Lawler's 'arrangement' might have been mistaken for another anonymous group show of the Metro stable. But upon realizing (or remembering) that this was a 'one-woman' show, viewers were confronted with a ambiguity of occupation, a shift in position that illuminated the role of the often unnamed 'arrangers' in the exhibition and exchange of art...her 'arrangement' was for sale at the combined price of all the individual works plus 10 percent for Lawler (the fee customarily charged by art consultants)..." Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser

time for your think break

"...For an artist to write reviews, curate exhibitions, or run a gallery is a contemporary art-world commonplace. But these occupations are usually regarded as secondary; the artist is identified primarily as a producer of a body of works, which other activities only supplement. By abdicating this privileged place of artistic identity, Lawler manages to escape institutional definitions of artistic activity as an autonomous aesthetic exploration. Her objective is not so much to uncover hidden ideological agendas, but to disrupt the institutional boundaries that determine and separate the discrete identities of artist and artwork from an apparatus that supposedly merely supplements them..." Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights

TRYHARDER is doing cartwheels