Art as Authority

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Contribution by Lisa Hutton


from the press release



Deephorizon 3 Million Liters


OIL PAINTING: THE SUPREME DISCIPLINE OF ART. THE OIL SLICK, THE SIZE OF PUERTO RICO, IS BEGINNING TO PAINT COASTLINES

Digital Oil Paintings: http://UBERMORGEN.COM/DEEPHORIZON

The supreme discipline of art - oil painting - is back. It has been [39] days since a BP oil and gas exploration well blew out, setting fire to the drilling rig, which sank, killing 11 people. Ever since, crude oil has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, raising the prospects of a historic environmental disaster. Winds from the southeast have nudged the slick northward, where it floated Saturday near the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi and has begun to paint the coastlines.

Finally oil painting has evolved into generative bio-art, a dynamic process the world audience can watch live via mass media. Never before has this art form been as revelant and visible as today - only 9-11 was nearly as perfect, but in the genre of performance art. An oil painting on a 80.000 square miles ocean canvas with 32 million liters of oil - a unique piece of art.

We exclusively use aeriall images from the oil spill. The files are ready-mades but we waived our right to use them "as is" and decided to use a special digital technique to produce a statement about the disconnection of form and color and about contemporary and futuristic imaging procedures. We use a compressor (sorenso codec) and consumer video editing-software and manually loop 2 frames, the image becomes liquid, transforms and deformes. These visualisations represent the "Verkuenstlichung" of nature and the "Vernatuerlichung" of art. Unedited oil-paintings of the event can be found via search-engines, on boston.com or on the NASA Earth Observatory website.

UBERMORGEN.COM are well known for similar projects. What they wanted to achieve with these alienating and retro-visual "web-paintings", as they call it, is not clear. "Since we work for digital penetration of the art market " declared Hans Bernhard "we should get used to radical changes of our networked point of view and in particular about new forms of digital painting".

"I saw the NASA earth observatory images and I was blown away", lizvlx stated "Finally traditional painting made its comeback as a high-tech innvovative art form and not as the starving grandparent of photography, video, digital art and performance. As a former painter I am thrilled and as a digital artist I want to work this material until it bleeds".

"We're breaking new ground here. It's hard to formulate a defense for an artwork exploiting a human caused desaster that has no precedent, which is what this is," Curator Felix Vogel said, defending the artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM against not writing a response for "what is just a shift of perspective what you couldn't anticipate, but possibly with big impact on the art business."

After the images and the video circulated online the feedback hit hard on UBERMORGEN.COM: "It is perverted and sick to compare a mass media spectacle and natural desaster with the century old tradition of fine art painting" comments a curator who chose to remain anonymous "it is obvious that this comes from the ice-breaking european techno-art avant-garde. They step onto our fine tradition without the slightest idea of the consequences - and i am not talking about the butterfly effect"!

UBERMORGEN.COM have a record of experimental projects and radical positions. In 2001 they broadcast a live-webpainting "Attack on Democrazy" during the first 8 hours of the 9-11 attacks. They intuitively understood that the attack was a mass media intrusion, a "Media Hack". They are infamous for their Vote-Auction Media Hack, featuring the buying and selling of individual votes during the presidential election Al Gore vs. G.W. Bush in the year 2000. Since 2001 they work on different series of web-paintings, by definition non-functional websites serving as images rather than interactive document-structures.

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dwell
Paintings and photographs by Maura Vazakas.


Opening Reception
Thursday, June 3
5-10 pm

Sea Rocket Bistro
3382 30th Street
San Diego, CA

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The Summer Salon Series

in partnership with Agitprop

Thursdays, May 27 - September 2
5-9 pm

The San Diego Museum of Art

Free after Museum admission.

Starting tonight, and every Thursday evening this summer, celebrate the legacy of Toulouse-Lautrec and his work in the salons of Paris at The Summer Salon Series. Explore the works of living contemporary artists as they perform and present their works inside and outside the Museum, participate in art-making activities, view the Museum's current exhibitions, and indulge in a cocktail at the cash bar.

Tonight's Summer Salon Series features Alida Cervantes, Josh Bellfy, Zac Monday, Eddie Miramontes, and Steve Willard.

For a complete list of featured artists at The Summer Salon Series, please visit our website.

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I have been told that museum visitors in general stand in front of art works for an average of 30 seconds. At MoMA, some have chosen to sit across from Marina for hours; one young woman sat for the entire length of a day’s performance, frustrating many others waiting their turn in line. Others have returned to sit multiple times. By rough estimate, visitors sit for an average of 20 minutes.

    — Arthur Danto on Marina Abramovic

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The Orange County Museum of Art has announced the artists for the 2010 California Biennial:

David Adey, Agitprop, b.a.n.g. lab, Gil Blank, Nate Boyce, Luke Butler, Juan Capistran, Zoe Crosher, Brian Dick, Dru Donovan, Mari Eastman, Carlee Fernandez, Finishing School, Eve Fowler, Rebecca Goldfarb, Katy Grannan, Alexandra Grant, Sherin Guirguis, Drew Heitzler, Violet Hopkins, Alex Israel, Glenna Jennings, Barry MacGregor Johnston, Vishal Jugdeo, Stanya Kahn, Andy Kolar, Jennifer Locke, Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Tom Mueske, Tucker Nichols, Camilo Ontiveros, Nikki Pressley, Andy Ralph, Will Rogan, Paul Schiek, Taravat Talepasand, Wu Tsang, Zlatan Vukosavljevic, Nina Waisman, Flora Wiegmann, Allison Wiese, Lisa Williamson, David Wilson, Patrick Wilson, and John Zurier.

Key:

San Diego artist
San Diego artist also in Here Not There.

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"He stands for a view that art should not, and really cannot, be a serene island off the chaotic mainland of human experience. Anything that anyone does, anywhere, implicates everybody. Art can dramatize that."
— Peter Schjeldahl on Leon Golub

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Hammer Museum


The Los Angeles art scene in mid-May.

Please enjoy,

Doug Simay

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Agitprop is located behind an innocent-looking though slightly seedy convenience store on 2837 University Avenue in San Diego.

Or is it?

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by Richard Gleaves




Richard Gleaves


The signs have returned to San Diego, signaling that ritual pre-election period where free speech is allowed to tacitly override city regulations prohibiting the unauthorized appropriation of public space with brightly-colored messages... in a word, graffiti.

Not everyone, however, is taking it sitting down, as can be seen in the following excerpt from a Carmel Valley Community Planning Board document. What's most remarkable about this text is how similar the language is ("try to convince them they are better off staying out of this area") to descriptions of civic graffiti abatement efforts.

In 2004 I decided to investigate the sign system for esthetic potential. A day after the election, several signs in my neighborhood were appropriated, altered, and surreptitiously returned to the wild. Surprisingly, they stayed up for several weeks.

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from the press release

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from the press release and artist web sites




Christopher Kardambikis, Heracles and the Mask of Victory




Louis M Schmidt, Untitled (Crowd #1)



RECENT WORKS
by Christopher Kardambikis and Louis M Schmidt

Agitprop
Saturday, May 15, 7-10 pm (or so)

Christopher Kardambikis is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of California, San Diego and exploring an absurd mythology of the future through drawings, paintings, and books.

Louis M Schmidt is currently working on his MFA exhibition, which is a large show entitled There’s No Place Like No Place. It will run from June 8-11 at UCSD’s Visual Arts Facility (Main Gallery), with a closing reception on the evening of June 11.

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from CityBeat and David Rolland


The ballad of Seth, Kinsee and Peter
Staff changes at CityBeat bring bad news and good news

Back in February 2009, I used this space [CityBeat] to announce the departure of Kinsee Morlan as our arts editor and the news that Seth Combs would take her place. In that announcement, I put a lot of pressure on Seth by passionately singing Kinsee’s praises, saying hers would be a hard act to follow.

Well, during the course of the ensuing 15 months, Seth responded by saying, in effect, “In your face, Rolland!” You see, not only did Seth take over Kinsee’s art-and-culture responsibilities; he was already tasked with running our music section. His list of duties has grown ever since, and by now, Seth dons more hats than anyone at CityBeat and is also our most prolific writer.

read the rest of David Rolland's eulogy here.

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from the press release








Free Space is an installation that looks at disparate tactics for appropriating and reclaiming residual spaces in the urban landscape for both public and private use. Residual Spaces are interstices in the city that are abandoned, underutilized, leftover, liminal, and indeterminate. These spaces oscillate between public and private. Residual spaces take the form of alleys, parking lots, building recesses, window ledges, sidewalks, roof tops, fire escapes, blank facades etc.

As a starting point, Free Space focuses locally on the residual spaces of C Street in downtown San Diego. This installation uses video documentation, maps, duct tape and furniture to examine these tactics of appropriation.

Spun by Richard Gleaves at 12:33 AM | Permalink

by Richard Gleaves


The brand spanking new SDSU Downtown Gallery and relatively new Sushi Gallery share a number of spatial properties which belie their origins as architectural leftovers:

• Entries best characterized as down the hall and to your left
• Sight lines compromised by the intervention of skyscraper-grade structural columns into otherwise neutral spaces
• Wall loss due to large banks of pre-existing windows

I'm extremely grateful for the developers and arts professionals who put time and resources into realizing these spaces — given the economy and SD's perpetual Jersey-on-the-Pacific status in the visual arts, it's a marvel they're here at all, and I plan to visit early and often.

But now that they're here, the esthetic issue arises of how best to make use of such compromised spaces. And ways do indeed exist, as evidenced by the current shows in both spaces.

The SDSU show is an object lesson in what not to do: namely, attempt a conventional installation of large-scale work as if the space were a typical neutral gallery. The result in this case yields two Baldessari wedged between windows with insufficient whitespace to breathe, and a couple of Zittels contending with columns.

The current Sushi show, on the other hand, shows how to make it work: Leslie Nemour's relatively small-scale paintings have been installed in nonlinear clouds, directly engaging both the pronounced verticality of the Sushi space and its infamous corner column (hereby christened "Grimace Rock", in honor of a similar outcropping at Tourmaline Cove). The result in this case does exactly what is needed in such spaces: namely, reframe the architectural compromises as inflections which can be incorporated into the installation to achieve esthetic effects unavailable in a conventional gallery space.

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from the press release


AGITPROP reading and performance series

Saturday, May 8, 7pm
AGITPROP


We hope you can join us this Saturday, May 8 at 7pm for a reading and performance by Rozalie Hirs, an interdisciplinary writer and musician from the Netherlands, and San Diego sound artist Cooper Baker.

Rozalie Hirs is a prolific interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates music, text and video. Her work has performed throughout Europe and the United States. Her three books of poetry are Locus (1998), Logos (2002) and Speling (2005, all Querido Publications). She also wrote the libretto for the opera The Cricket Recovers by Richard Ayres. Rozalie Hirs’ recent composition “Roseherte,” (2008) for full orchestra and electro-acoustic sounds was premiered by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and selected for the Toonzetters prize in 2009. Her electro-acoustic composition “Pulsars” (2006, 2007 rev.), commissioned by Café Sonore, VPRO Radio, Netherlands, received the distinction “Recommended work” at the 11th International Rostrum of Electroacoustic Music (IREM) in 2007. A CD, Pulsars, with electroacoustic music and text pieces by Rozalie Hirs will appear in 2010 as a co-production of Attacca records and Muziekcentrum Nederland. You can learn more about Rozalie Hirs’ work online at http://www.rozalie.com/.

Cooper Baker is a sound artist living in San Diego, California. He regularly plays experimental music at venues along the west coast and his artwork has been exhibited in galleries and publications throughout the United States and abroad. In addition to his own creative output, he provides other artists and companies with custom software and electronics as a creative technical consultant.

Originally from Los Angeles, he recently moved to San Diego to attend the University of California San Diego in pursuit of a computer music Ph.D. where he is studying with Miller Puckette, Tom Erbe, and F. Richard Moore. Prior to enrollment at UCSD he was a music faculty member at California Institute of the Arts where he also received his MFA in experimental composition and finished his BFA in music technology. While at CalArts he refined his artistic practice and began incorporating new and experimental electronic media in his artwork and music production, under the guidance of Morton Subotnick, Mark Trayle, and Barry Schrader.

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from the press release

L7: An installation of paintings by Leslie Nemour
May 4 – May 30, 2010

Reception: May 8, 6-9 pm

Sushi Performance & Visual Art
Gallery hours: Wednesday-Friday, 1-6 pm


Sushi presents L7, an installation of oil paintings by San Diego artist Leslie Nemour. Viewers enter Sushi’s intimate gallery to discover an immersive environment of dozens of luminous oil paintings hung from floor to ceiling in idiosyncratic arrangements.

Each painting is a representation of a television still, photographically captured by the artist who then translates the image once more into a painting. The paintings are mined from a wide cross section of popular, once popular, and unpopular television shows. Depicting disjointed movements, blurred boundaries, images between images, and other distortions, the works lend themselves to the paintings’ indecisive brush strokes and restless color.

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Robert Therrien, No Title (Blue Cloud), collection MCA San Diego

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