Mandy Sa

Posted on April 10, 2013

On the occasion of the Art & Process program at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Sunday, April 14, 2013), sound and media artist and With Hidden Noise curator Stephen Vitiello and Academy Award- and Grammy Award-winning musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto will perform a tribute entitled Strange Music for Nam June Paik. For the Smithsonian’s blog Eye Level, Vitiello interviews Sakamoto on his relationship with Nam June Paik, from influence to collaboration. SV: You collaborated with Nam June on the video, All Star Video. I believe you also appeared in one of the satellite broadcasts (Bye Bye Kipling from 1986). Do you have any memories or anecdotes about the nature of the collaboration? How did that project come about? RS: I met him for the first time when he had the big retrospective in Tokyo. I cannot forget what he said at that moment. He said something like “Here comes a friend from the distant” which is an excerpt of an old Chinese poem. The meeting was coordinated by Sony which was a big supporter of him for decades and they also arranged the collaboration for the video. I’m not sure that was really Nam June’s intention or not. To read the full interview, please click here. Stephen Vitiello (left) and Ryuichi Sakamoto (right) collaborate in a studio recording session. Copyright © Eye Level.

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Posted on May 31, 2013

John Menick and Yusuf Misdaq on ARTonAIR.org. Originally aired on May 27, 2013.

Independent curator Leeza Ahmady brings together artists John Menick and Yusuf Misdaq. While from widely different backgrounds, both artists have made works that are simultaneously process-based, conceptually vigorous and span across mediums: writing, sound, film, and more.

These programs are produced in partnership with the radio station of the Clocktower Gallery, operating at ARTonAIR.org.

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Dialogues in Contemporary Art: Take 3

Posted on July 11, 2013

Holland Cotter from The New York Times reviewed State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The review gives a comprehensive overview of the exhibition curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, stating that the works and the curators’ words create “an absorbing narrative of a place and an era.” Featuring many works of the exhibition, Cotter aims to define “West Coast Conceptual Art” from that period as not having a single profile but points to similarities in “an investment in social agency, a focus on mercurial identity, an appetite for ideas and an appetite for art that has reasons for existing beyond itself.” Cotter ends, “their work is meant to wake us up” calling attention to the relevancy of this show today. To read the full article, please click here. To see the slideshow created by The New York Times, please click here.

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Posted on July 12, 2013

The Space, a freely available digital arts platform from Arts Council England and the BBC, features a compilation of videos made on the occasion of the do it 2013 exhibition on view at the Manchester Art Gallery, which is a part of the ICI tour and the largest presentation of do it thus far. The exclusive video pages created on The Space invite the public to take part in the do it show through artists’ instructions, interpretations, and other documentary videos all concerning do it.

Some of the videos are taken from the live stream that The Space organized on Friday July 12, 2013, at the Manchester Art Gallery, featuring live art performances and interviews. The main video, Welcome to the ‘Active’ Room, presented by BBC’s Geeta Pendse, includes performances from the opening night and interview of Hans Ulrich Obrist. In addition some other performances are featured on the website: Second Messenger presents Maria Jose Arjona’s homage to Mara Teresa Hincapie, involving a vulture flying across the gallery space to deliver a message; Cleaning Conditions is a performance organized by Suzanne Lacy in homage to Allan Kaprow.

Other pages are dedicated to the artists’ instructions and their interpretations, beyond the do it 2013 exhibition. The page Twenty years of do it gathers video archives featuring the original do it artists presenting their instructions, such as Gilbert and George, Rirkrit Tiravanija, or Erwin Wurm. On another page, the Artists’ responses, are featured contemporary artists’ creative responses to do it instructions, such as Tessa Power’s or Adriano Vessichelli’s responses to Lucy Lippard’s instruction. Other pages present the public’s responses to artists’ instructions, such as Yoko Ono’s instruction – “Circulate a picture of your smile to say, ‘Hello. How you doing?’” –, or Cory Arcangel’s instruction – “Photoshop CS: 11 by 8.5 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Russell’s Rainbow” (turn transparency off), mousedown y=1100 x=550, mouseup y=2100 x=1450.”

To watch all the videos from do it 2013, please visit The Space here.

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Posted on July 15, 2013

On the occasion of the State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 opening in New York City at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Constance Lewallen, one of the show’s curators, was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail publisher, Phong Bui. In the interview, Lewallen and Bui discuss the genesis of the exhibition, the specificity and differences of West Coast artists, and the rise of performance and conceptual art in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The conversation reveals the trajectories of artists such as Bruce Nauman, Michael Asher, or Martha Rosler. Lewallen emphasizes on the liberating aspect of California Conceptualism: “There was a collective and pervasive sense of freedom, especially in California, partly because there really was no infrastructure, or much of any kind of critical response, which in some ways worked to the artists’ advantage. They had freedom to do what they wanted, to be playful and inventive with new materials and mediums.”

To read the full interview, please click here.

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Posted on August 1, 2013

Writing for Boca Raton Magazine online, John Thomason reviews Create, which is currently on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The author qualifies the show as a “revelatory experience,” as an exhibition that is not “like any other art exhibition, because its creators aren’t just any other artists.” Thomason shares his positive impressions on the exhibition, his thoughts about the artists’ selection, and the artworks that most affected his visit, by artists such as Aurie Ramirez, William Scott, and Michael Bernard Loggins. As Thomason ends, “I won’t be forgetting this show’s impact anytime soon.”

To read the full article, please click here.

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