Tag: Miami

title [edit me /]

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I really enjoy the titles of well-titled artworks. Through the use of titles one can be literary, art historical, museological and fun. It is hard. But it is rewarding to an art audience and it enriches the art discourse (artist-artwork-audience).

Cooper titles well. Below are the titles from his current show, Seven Years Bad Luck, at Snitzer gallery ( pictures are in my previous post).

Fredric Snitzer Gallery
Artist: COOPER
Show Title: Seven Years Bad Luck
(free standing sculpture located in the very back of the trailer)
Black Lungs: Ever notice how all artists are super-sensitive, temperamental,
selfish crybabies, and it only gets worse as they get older and continually more
bitter. The long dark tea time of the soul right before death and then your taxes-
now, imagine a world with two Elvis?s, twin brother performers. Best to die young
and famous. In her hand, a faded Polaroid of her white Corvette totaled beyond
repair.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, resin, charcoal, distillant,
quadraurethane, electric pump.
2008

(wall piece located just outside of Mr.Snitzer?s office)
Eye surgery for the attempt of re-construction. (Eyes will be grown in jars and
trays and stored in generator backed-up refrigerators, not like in the movies, but
in fluorescent lit, formica-covered multi-plex office condos converted into
profitable organ production start-ups. It will feel like the nineties.)
Materials: wood, paper, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard, masking tape,
galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, monourethane.
2008

(wall mounted sculpture fountain located just inside the trailer, across from the door)
First our garbage will become our fuel, then with all the smoke and fumes and
enough time, our waste will become suns. (Trapping light invites all sorts of
intriguing questions, for instance, if you light a candle in a room lined with perfect
mirrors [mirrors that return nearly 95 percent or more of the light that contacts the
reflective surface], would the room stay illuminated even after the flame is
extinguished.) But first, let?s mine the cemeteries for fresh things to sell.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(free standing fountain sculpture located in the middle of the trailer)
GETOUTOFHERE! (then) BOOM! Waves of mutilation follow, the truth is set free
all at once, enlightenment for everyone simultaneously, the world de-materializes
becoming speeding light, everyone and everything is everywhere at once. Floating
now, awake in pure information, thoughts can instantly become form, any
psychical thing becomes possible just from thinking it. Mankind becomes gods,
the universe is complete, all matter available for any purpose instantaneously.
And just like with any sitcom, the real humor lies in the set up, waiting patiently
like a hunter who sits motionless as the sun rises over a smoky field of wet grass
mixed with broken pavement.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(fountain sculpture located just outside of Mr.Snitzer?s office)
Battlefield horror from the war of northern aggression, slave rape, abu ghraib
torture, grassy knolls, rich girl bank robberies and “pig” finger-written in blood on
mansion walls, slow spiked garrote death, a bucket with all of Friday night?s vomit
spilled across every city street collected, restaurant dumpsters, dead drug addicts
in the morgue?s walk-in refrigerator, lies between lovers, profitable deception,
death-row lunch trays sitting soiled in a broken industrial dish-washer or a
speeding pickup slamming into a pregnant dog on a backcountry road.
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, quadraurethane,
electric pump.
2008

(leaning wall sculpture located in the trailer)
Mr. Stardust himself:
Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark.
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
When the show was over, as he walked through the last curtain into the hall,
he thought to himself that awful joke his father would tell him,
“Ugly girls work harder.”
Materials: wood, paper, found objects, ink, duralar, paint, stainless steel, plasterboard,
masking tape, galvanized metal bucket, plastic, charcoal, distillant, monourethane.
2008

This month’s wynwood art-ing

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It boiled down Gavin Perry and Cooper at Snitzer; brilliant shows! And Raul Mendez at TwentyTwenty. I didn’t take pictures at the other places that I visited.
I’ll try to go see Pepe Mar at Castillo and Cristina Lei Rodriguez’s show at Perrotin, in the few days.

Brett Sokol’s “Miami Art Machine”

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New York magazine features a piece by Sokol, on Craig Robbins and his ‘Art + Research’ an University of Miami parterned venture.

This area will also be home to his new program, headily named Art + Research. If all goes according to plan, it’ll open in September 2009 with eight-to-twelve “resident artists”—who will receive full scholarships, studio space, housing, and stipends. They hope to expand it later. The University of Miami–operated venture already has an impressive roster of New Yorkers onboard. Founding faculty include artists Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, both of whom teach in Columbia’s M.F.A. program; Yale instructor Steven Henry Madoff; and White Columns gallery director Matthew Higgs (they will all squeeze Miami tutorials into their current gigs). Former Columbia art-school dean Bruce Ferguson consulted on it. And for added star power, sitting on the board of Robins’s nonprofit Anaphiel organization to guide the school are former Whitney director (and Robins’s cousin) David Ross, John Baldessari, and ex–Art Basel director Sam Keller. Robins will kick in $2 million to help fund Art + Research for its first four years, and the University of Miami has promised to help raise another $2 million.

Unlike at Columbia and Yale, there won’t be any formal M.F.A. degrees awarded to those who complete the two-year program, which will revolve around a topical theme that changes with each entering biannual class. Accordingly, don’t expect to see the “resident artists” hunker down in front of easels and live models. “Most art is conceptually based now. It’s art based on an idea,” says Madoff. “It didn’t turn out that the twentieth century’s most influential artist was Picasso. It turned out it was Duchamp … We don’t need to do foundation courses, how to draw, how to sculpt … You don’t need three credits for American Art History From 1945 to the Present.”

I wonder if and how this project will benefit any Miami artists.

The article has a little sidebar of story on the second page. I find it amusing.
on the Cuban factor

Brett Sokol’s “Three Miamians in the Whitney…”

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The article is here

Being tapped for New York’s Whitney Museum Biennial — a sweeping survey of ”where American art stands today” — isn’t an instant ticket to art-world fame and fortune. But it is the next best thing. Just ask Miamians Hernan Bas, Dara Friedman, Luis Gispert and Mark Handforth, all of whom saw their international profiles, as well as their artwork’s price tags, soar in the wake of their inclusion in Biennials over the past decade.

The trend should no doubt continue for this year’s selectees: William Cordova, Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez. Three is a record number for Miami, more than any other burg outside New York and Los Angeles. And for those seeking a quick indicator of this city’s post-Art Basel status, it’s a sea change from the 1980s and ’90s, when the only South Floridians to receive the Biennial’s curatorial nod were (posthumously) Carlos Alfonzo and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

And another quote:

… Adler Guerrier’s untitled (BLCK — We wear the mask) mines the same turbulent era of U.S. history as Cordova’s piece but to a much more engrossing — and poignant — effect. Guerrier wondered why there hadn’t been a forceful artistic response to the 1968 riot that tore through Liberty City. So he created BLCK, a fictional art collective whose faux-vintage posters and sculptures sprawl across a wall while an old TV set plays news footage of civil-rights marches being superseded by Black Power protests. Hampton appears onscreen, as does Mark Rudd, one of the prominent Anglo radicals Hampton dismissed as a ”masochist” for courting violence.

Guerrier is just as conflicted by such dueling impulses, and he quotes and riffs on the period’s insurrectionary slogans in BLCK’s placards even as he ultimately rejects them in favor of a more nuanced strategy.