Red Hook Criterium n°5

Mots Croisés

...ou le merveilleux mix de Sandrine sur Bird & Whale.

Billy Childish

Nicolas Roerich, Himalaya-White Mountains

Billy Childish, Erupting Volcano Chile, courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery

your golden hair

that hot still summers
day
when we swam out
till a half mile off shore
then let the slowly
incoming tide carry us
back shoreward

and
we noticed hundreds of
tiny spyders
thousands of them
walking the surffiss
tension
only being capsised
by the ripples we made
whilest treading water

it dosnt seam much now
but back then it did
it seemed like a
miricle

and
the 20 or so i saved
lifted by my wet fingers
to your golden hair
that way
to reach land

the uncorrected
billy chyldish: selected poems.
failure books, 2010

Bike Polo @ The Pit

Patrick Dougherty @ Brooklyn Botanic Garden

During my summer internship on the centennial campaign at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I had a great opportunity to work on Patrick Dougherty's sculpture! It's all about weaving wood sticks...
The NY Times just published an article about him...

Ear to the Page - The Center for Book Arts

This exhibition explores the inevitable intersection between books and recorded sounds.

Indeed, music recordings like vinyl can be defined as written sounds being “read” by a needle and record sleeves can be seen as book jackets, or books’ contents can be listened as music.

Here the exhibition explores different categories: the sound work reflecting structure and aesthetic of books, packages entailing a book and CD and books with a sound component.

For example, with Touch, Listen, from 2007 by Dennis Yuen and Morry Galonoy, a phone number is printed in every pages of a book and calling the number will direct you to the voice of a man reading chapters of a book.

In the same range, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, in 1969, commissioned an exhibition with the challenge of having only telephone conversations to get the description of the artists’ works, all written descriptions being forbidden. Although the exhibition was never achieved, the excerpts of telephone conversations can be heard on the vinyl Art by Telephone, from 1969, by Jan Van Der Marck.

Christian Marclay, sound page, where you can find a vinyl as one of the page of a book or A sleeve to be read by Michael Snow, 1975 are others example of concepts presented in this multimedia exhibition.

As David Toop says in the latest issue of BOMB magazine, it is “about sound and listening without having the medium of music”. Thus sound art brings us in situation where the musical and the visual are merging, and unexpected sources for musical potential are emphasized.

Sonic events get expressed visually and visual information gets expressed sonically.

A concrete example is the French artist, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, in some of his works, translating fragments of language typed on the gallery’s office computers into a musical score played in real-time by an acoustic piano placed in the gallery.

Off the wall Part 2- seven Works by Trisha Brown – Whitney Museum of American Art

Off the Wall Part 1-Thirty Performative Actions focuses on body in live performance through the eye of a camera, in a drawing, on a printed surface.

For the Part 2, and on the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of her company, Trisha Brown returns to the Whitney with re performances from 1970 like Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, featuring Stephen Petronio strapped in a harness.

Around 1970, Brown, began to construct dances known as “equipment pieces”, using external support systems like ropes, mountain climbing gears, cables, in order to challenge the force of gravity. “I always feel sorry for the parts of the stage that aren’t being used. I have in the past felt sorry for the ceilings and walls. It’s perfectly good space, why doesn’t anyone use it?” Brown has wondered. Hence, she challenges not only the dance itself as it has no narrative like in a traditional way but also our perception of space and bodies gravity.

This time the audience is standing, on the street, in front of the Whitney Museum, looking up, preparing their camera and phones to record the performance. Suddenly comes to my mind, The Man on Wire, Philippe Petit, who a few years later, in 1974, will cross between the Twin Towers walking on a wire. Was he inspired by her work?

Although bringing performance art outside of an institution, in unexpected places like a roof, seems casual today, I guess she was the pioneer in breaking the rules. I now understand the value of her heritage that resonates from new circus to the recent performance by Willi Dorner, Bodies in Urban Spaces, at Crossing The Line/FIAF festival, where human sculptures are performing on the street of Wall street.