Goings On: posted week of May 06, 2019
CONTENTS:
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1. Pamela Sneed, Julie Tolentino, FF Alumns, at Tribeca 360°, Manhattan, May 16
2. We Make America, FF Alumns, at Battery Park, Manhattan, June 1
3. Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Dread Scott , FF Alumns, in The New York Times, April 29
4. Dick Higgins, FF Alumn, now online at http://sigliopress.com/book/dick-higgins/
5. Joey Perr, FF Member, at Vinyl Fantasy, Brooklyn, May 19
6. Michael Paul Britto, Shaun Leonardo, Lorraine O’Grady, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Dread Scott, FF Alumns, at Studio Museum 127, Manhattan, May 7
7. Donna Henes and Daile Kaplan, FF Alumns, at The Brooklyn Museum
8. Carmelita Tropicana, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, May 4
9. Jennifer Miller, FF Alumn, at Circus Amok Loft, Brooklyn, May 18 & June 11
10. Kate Gilmore, James Siena, FF Alumns, at Pierogi, Manhattan, opening May 11
11. Laura Bernstein, FF Alumn, at Childrens Museum of Art, Manhattan,
12. R. Sikoryak, FF Alumn, at Town Stages, Manhattan, May 11
13. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, opening May 10
14. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumn, now online at debbieweil.com
15. Tulis McCall, FF Alumn, at Pangea, Manhattan, June 2
16. Paul McMahon, FF Alumn, at The Catskill Pines, Mt. Tremper, NY, May 10
17. Harley J. Spiller, FF Alumn, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=PuRRHzOzl4o
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1. Pamela Sneed, Julie Tolentino, FF Alumns, at Tribeca 360°, Manhattan, May 16
Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards
Thursday, May 16, 2019 • 6:30-10:00 PM
Tribeca 360° 10 Desbrosses Street, NYC
HONORING:
Tom Bianchi
Presented by Michael Denneny
Muna Tseng
Presented by Julie Tolentino
Joyce McDonald
Presented by Shirlene Cooper
Hosted by Tyler Ashley and Pamela Sneed
Performance by Stanley Love Performance Group and special guests
Music by DJ Matthew J
Please join us on Thursday, May 16 from 6:30-10:00 PM for VAVA VOOM, the Visual AIDS Vanguard Awards. We are proud to recognize the achievements of this year’s honorees: Tom Bianchi, Muna Tseng and Joyce McDonald.
VAVA VOOM is a major fundraiser for Visual AIDS, bringing in significant funding for our programs supporting HIV+ artists and raising awareness of the impact of HIV and AIDS through art, dialogue, and activism. In addition to being a thoughtful and moving evening of tribute to those who have been on the front lines of AIDS activism, it’s always a fun event and celebratory evening.
Your purchase of a ticket or table provides major support for our public programs, exhibitions, publications, and art programs-and your gift is tax-deductible. Buy your tickets today:
https://visual-aids.mybigcommerce.com/shop/benefits/vava-voom/
This event brings together artists, arts patrons, HIV and AIDS advocates, and the LGBTQIA+ community, who have supported Visual AIDS’ commitment to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness over its 30+ year history.
Even if you are not able to join us, there are many ways you can support VAVA VOOM-please consider buying tickets to donate to HIV+ artists, allowing them to attend the event, or make a donation in honor of one of our honorees. Thank you for your support and we hope to see you on May 16!
Questions about the event?
Contact emcgowan@visualaids.org
Copyright (c) 2019 Visual AIDS, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Visual AIDS
526 W. 26th Street #510
New York, New York 10001
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2. We Make America, FF Alumns, at Battery Park, Manhattan, June 1
KICK HIS ASS!
New York, NY -June 1, 2019
We Make America will launch two giant helium inflatables to mock the president and call for continued resistance to his divisive administration. Come watch as a Thanksgiving Day parade-sized, red, white, and blue high-heeled boot, inspired by the women’s marches and the new women in Congress, kicks an orange ass in the sky!
“Kick Ass” will float above Castle Clinton National Monument in Battery Park, facing the Statue of Liberty, from 10 am until 5 pm. Choreographed actions will take place from noon to 2 PM. Come chant, hold signs, take in great music and drumming, share a much-needed laugh, and get in the spirit to kick HIS ass in the next elections.
We Make America is a collective of concerned artists and activists. We have responded to the White House bully and his enablers with our own flavor of agitprop since the 2016 general election. We express our rage against injustice with humor and grace. Members will carry hand-painted kicking boots and other props created over the last two years. These include liberty torches, blue waves, pants on fire, soaring eagles, bloody hands, and protective shields. Come hold one of our props, or bring your own! Let’s turn our mass revulsion into revolution, and Kick Him Out!
wemakeamericany@gmail.com
FB: We Make America
Instagram: @wemakeamerica, #wemakeamerica
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3. Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Dread Scott , FF Alumns, in The New York Times, April 29
The New York Times
Whitney Biennial Artists Call for Board Member Linked to Tear Gas to Step Down
By Colin Moynihan
April 29, 2019
Dozens of artists connected to the Whitney Museum of American Art – including more than half of those selected for the coming Biennial – have called for the resignation of a museum board member whose company sells tear gas that activists and the art publication Hyperallergic say was used on migrants at the Mexican border.
It was the latest volley in a monthslong series of letters involving the board member, Warren B. Kanders, museum employees, artists and academics over his role as owner, chairman and chief executive of the Safariland Group, which sells multiple lines of military and law enforcement equipment including tear gas. According to Hyperallergic, photos showed tear gas canisters marked with the company’s name at a site where the American authorities used tear gas to disperse hundreds of migrants running toward a crossing that leads from Tijuana to San Diego last fall.
On Monday, artists, including Dread Scott, Barbara Kruger, Cameron Rowland, Nan Goldin, Yvonne Rainer, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Laura Poitras, whose work is owned or has been exhibited by the Whitney, added their names to a letter published this month by scholars and critics who urged the museum to remove Mr. Kanders from his position as a vice chairman of the board.
Forty-six of the 75 artists and collectives chosen for the Biennial, which opens May 17, also signed the letter, which said tear gas from Mr. Kander’s company had been used against Palestinians in the Middle East and protesters in Egypt, Puerto Rico and Standing Rock, N.D., and called for a conversation about private funding of cultural institutions.
“Alongside universities, cultural institutions like the Whitney are among the few spaces in public life today that claim to be devoted to ideals of education, creativity and dissent beyond the dictates of the market,” the letter said. “These institutions provide cover for the likes of Kanders as they profit from war, state violence, displacement, land theft, mass incarceration and climate disaster.”
Mr. Kanders and the Whitney both declined to comment.
Last year, Mr. Kanders replied to a letter by museum employees dismayed by the tear gas connection with his own letter to the Whitney board, in which he expressed pride in Safariland, which also sells body armor and protective suits, and said that the company plays no role in deciding how its products are used.
“Regardless of one’s political persuasion, I hope we can all agree that uncontrolled riots pose a serious threat,” he wrote, adding: “I think it is clear that I am not the problem the authors of the letter seek to solve.”
The Whitney’s director, Adam Weinberg, wrote last year in a letter addressed to staff members and trustees that the museum has “a critical and urgent” role in recognizing “unheard and unwanted voices,” but added that the trustees do not hire staff, select exhibitions, organize programs or make acquisitions, and that staff members do not appoint or remove board members.
“The Whitney is first and foremost a museum,” Mr. Weinberg wrote. “It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2019, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: Artists Seek Whitney Board Member’s Ouster.
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4. Dick Higgins, FF Alumn, now online at http://sigliopress.com/book/dick-higgins/
Dear Colleague,
Last November, Siglio Press published a collection of Dick Higgins’s writings titled Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press. Steve Clay of Granary Books and I edited it, and Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press realised it in a beautiful edition that would have pleased Dick immensely. The book includes a lovely biographical memoir about Dick by his daughter, Hannah Higgins.
This book meets exacting standards that Dick set in the essay for the Something Else Press 1965-1966 catalogue, “What to Look for in a Book – Physically.” Natalie Kraft’s elegant design moves between well set pages with rich illustrations and Dick’s own scholarly footnotes for some writings with documentary reproductions of Dick’s own publications for key works, as well as for Dick’s cover designs for many works. Martha Ormiston’s cover uses a Wolf Vostell photo of Dick performing Danger Music, a reminder of just how lively and musical Dick Higgins was.
In the half year since the book was published, it has been the subject of reviews in Artforum, Artist’s Books & Multiples, Brooklyn Rail, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, Kirkus, Leonardo, Svenska Dagbladet, White Hot Magazine, and more. Many of the reviews offer a deep, reflective look at Dick’s contributions to the arts of the late 20th century – and the shadows he continues to cast on the arts of our time. Siglio built a terrific web page for this book, and it allows you to link direct to most of the reviews, with essays by Natalee Harren, Dave Dyment, Jennie Waldow, Michael Galbreth (of the Art Guys), James Gibbons, Jack Ox, Mark Bloch, and Bengt af Klintberg, the Fluxus artist and a Something Else Press author.
http://sigliopress.com/book/dick-higgins/
To celebrate the advent of May, Siglio is offering a 20% discount on this book. Even if you have the book already, the page is worth a look with its links to some fine reviews.
If you haven’t yet seen it, I invite you to visit the Dick Higgins page at Siglio Press.
Warm wishes,
Ken
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Email ken.friedman.sheji@icloud.com | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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5. Joey Perr, FF Member, at Vinyl Fantasy, Brooklyn, May 19
Vinyl Fantasy
194 Knickerbocker Ave, Brooklyn, New York 11237
7-9 pm, May 19
Panels to the People is a monthly comics reading, now also featuring animators! Come to Brooklyn’s best comics store, Vinyl Fantasy, for a night of brilliant comics and animation. Admission is FREE!
Comics by:
Suerynn Lee
Joey Perr
Jess Suttner
Mojo Wang
& more TBD
Drinks will be available for purchase.
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6. Michael Paul Britto, Shaun Leonardo, Lorraine O’Grady, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Dread Scott, FF Alumns, at Studio Museum 127, Manhattan, May 7
Please Join Us at The Studio Museum in Harlem for
Studio Salon | The Supper Club
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
6:30 to 8:30pm
Location: Studio Museum 127
429 W. 127th St., Harlem, New York
Please join the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and The Studio Museum in Harlem at Studio Museum 127 to celebrate the publication of Elia Alba’s new book The Supper Club. Alba is an alumni of the Museum’s artist in residence program (1998-99). The evening will feature an interactive “menu” of events including vignette-style readings by artists Dread Scott, Lorraine O’Grady, Michael Paul Britto, Nicole Awai, and Shaun Leonardo, and a special performance by artist Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz as “Chuleta.” Alba will close out the program with remarks alongside contributor Brandi T. Summers and editor Sara Reisman.
Featuring critical conversations and contributions on race and visual culture, as well as fifty-eight portraits of artists of color, The Supper Club documents Elia Alba’s six-year multifaceted project addressing issues ranging from sanctuary, policing, and post-black identity to the intersectional entanglements of gender, race, and privilege. Published by Hirmer and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, copies of The Supper Club will be available for purchase following the program.
inHarlem is made possible thanks to Citi; William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust; Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Council.
The 8th Floor is open Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm.
Please email info@the8thfloor.org for any gallery and tour inquiries.
the8thfloor.org
Join the conversation with hashtags
#RubinFoundation, #The8thFloor,
#RevolutionfromWithout, and #ArtandSocialJustice
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation | 17 West 17th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10011
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7. Donna Henes and Daile Kaplan, FF Alumns, at The Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum of Art just announced:
“The acquisition of more than 3,000 vintage photos on women’s history taken between the 1850s and 1980s from the Kaplan-Henes Collection, assembled over 25 years by Daile Kaplan, Vice President of Photography and Photobooks at Swann Gallery, and Brooklyn-based artist Donna Henes;”
We call our collection THE BETTER HALF. It was a quarter century endeavor of pure love. You can see a power point of it here:
Thank you. Daile & Donna
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8. Carmelita Tropicana, FF Alumn, in The New York Times, May 4
Please visit this link to the complete illustrated article. Text only follows below. Thanks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/style/met-gala-camp-theme.html
‘It’s Unnatural? Absolutely.’
Just in time for its enshrinement in the Met, six experts debate camp, that celebration of artifice and exaggeration.
By Matthew Schneier
May 4, 2019
Overture
Looking back on his life and career in “The Glass of Fashion” in 1954, Cecil Beaton, the society photographer and social fixture, reported a curious incident sometime in the 1930s. “Hearty naval commanders or jolly colonels,” he wrote, “acquired the ‘camp’ manners of calling everything from Joan of Arc to Merlin ‘lots of fun,’ and the adjective ‘terrible’ peppered into every sentence.”
It wasn’t terrible, but it was camp. Camp, in this sense, is not a pup tent, but a circus tent: not an activity, but a way to see, a gimlet-eyed but eyebrow-cocked gloss on the world. To the connoisseur of camp, the world is a stage, artifice trumps art, and exaggeration rarely goes far enough.
It is, in the words of the critic Susan Sontag, whose 1964 “Notes on Camp” became its codex and its decoder ring (and in so doing, made its author’s reputation), “a vision of the world in terms of style.” Camp, she wrote, “sees everything in quotation marks”; it “converts the serious into the frivolous.” It is a feint and a frolic. It’s “terrible,” with a giggle. (“You’re terrible, Muriel!”)
What Is Camp (Now) ?
The theme for this year’s Met Gala is “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” So what, exactly, does that mean? Six experts attempt to define a largely indefinable sensibility.CreditCreditJonah M. Kessel/The New York Times
Sontag did not invent camp. The word has been recorded since the very beginning of the 20th century, and the concept has likely been with us much longer, but she brought what had been an esoteric, private code, used largely by and among gay men, into the open air. (From the Oxford English Dictionary’s first documented use of “camp,” in a 1909 dictionary of Victorian slang: “Used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character.”)
Having been brought into the open, camp has coursed into general use, and what was marginal has gone mainstream. Camp has inflected art, fashion, film, TV and design, even if what does and doesn’t qualify remains a subject of furious debate.
In 1968, Esther Newton wrote of her study of drag queens that “this ethnography is a map of terra incognita as far as most middle class social scientists are concerned”; now RuPaul is not only in vogue, but in Vogue.
Next week “Camp: Notes on Fashion” will open at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its famous celebrity-stuffed gala as ribbon cutting. As it does, it’s fair to wonder: Is camp still “lots of fun” when everyone’s on board, aboveboard? The “fugitive sensibility” Sontag hoped to capture is now enshrined in the museum.
So, whither camp? And are we any closer to agreeing on what it is? On the occasion of the new exhibition, The New York Times invited six individuals whose work or study has touched camp or been touched by it, to discuss.
Our cast
James Bidgood, 86, is a photographer and filmmaker whose work – from early phantasmagoric beefcake photography to “Pink Narcissus,” an erotic film anonymously released in 1971 – is the subject of “James Bidgood: Reveries,” a retrospective running through Sept. 8 at the Museum of Sex.
Charles Busch, 64, is an actor, playwright and cabaret performer, often in drag. His credits include “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” (Off Broadway) and “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (Broadway). His play “The Confession of Lily Dare” comes to Primary Stages in January.
Jack Halberstam, 57, is a professor in the department of English and comparative literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. Dr. Halberstam is the author of “Female Masculinity,” “Gaga Feminism” and “Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability.”
Parker Kit Hill, 23, is a dancer, performer and model. His short videos attracted an audience of one million on the mobile platform Vine. He now works, as himself and in character as “Parklynn,” primarily on Instagram.
Carmelita Tropicana, 68, the alter ego of the Cuban-American performance artist Alina Troyano, is a veteran of the New York alternative theater scene and the subject of the short film “Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen” by Ela Troyano.
Zaldy, 52, a fashion and costume designer who has created tour outfits for Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Michael Jackson, is best known for his long collaboration with RuPaul and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” for which he has won two Emmy Awards.
The curtain rises
We’ve all come here today to discuss the most important, most frivolous topic: What is camp? I’m interested to know if camp is something that has, in fact, inflected your work, and if it has changed from the way it used to be discussed in the ’50s and ’60s.
James: When he talks about the past, he looks at me.
Charles: I’m just so relieved. I thought that I was the oldest one here, but then I saw you and, thought, “Oh, thank God.”
Jack: I was rereading the Sontag essay in preparation for this, and I do think that camp is a sensibility, an aesthetic sensibility. I would imagine it really derived from gay culture, gay male culture initially, and then has widened through every different group. Sontag starts with Oscar Wilde, which is a reasonable place to start because he was such a funny commentator on the unnatural.
At the time, people wouldn’t have necessarily expressed their antipathy to same-sex sexuality through what we call homophobia, but they would have said, “This is unnatural.” And so, you could say that one of the foundational gestures of camp is to say, “It’s unnatural? Absolutely.”
Zaldy: The term was in black and white in the dictionary in the last century, but camp and its queer roots have been there as far back as it goes. It’s just … camp. I mean, imagine Roman orgies – that’s camp! That is full-on camp.
Charles: If we were back at the Roman orgy, it’d be our perception of it as opposed to somebody else’s. Maybe a heterosexual person at the Roman orgy might just be going at it from purely the sex angle, but if we were there, we’d be amused at the look of it, or the person who’s posing and looks foolish because they want to be something that they actually are not. I think an element of camp is what the truth is and what the perception is, when they’re two different things. That’s where often the humor comes in.
Carmelita: I also think that it’s really important to put women in. I came from the ’80s, but women were also dressing up and were also acting out in cabaret around that time. Maybe they were not as visible.
James: I think they’re all stretching it all too far. It’s just a word that meant exaggerated, too much for the occasion. Susan Sontag did so much writing about nothing, she made a big patootie about something that was a minimal thing and that really defies definition.
Carmelita: Maybe it’s better to say, “This is the type of camp that I do.”
James: The way you appear right now is camp.
Carmelita: Exactly.
James: But until you put the boobs on, it wasn’t! That’s what camp is. It’s doing something outrageous and over the top. That’s what camp was. I don’t understand what camp is anymore.
Parker, does “camp” mean something different to you? Is it even a consideration you have? We’re talking about its origins, but not as much about its present.
Parker: Well, being 23, I’m just now learning about camp, so camp to me is just self-expression. It can be that I dress up like a woman, or I dress up like a dog, or I dress up as a house, or something that’s just super over the top and not me. I don’t want to be like myself.
Zaldy: The idea of camp is more around us now than ever, but we would never refer to it as camp. We just don’t use the word.
Jack: It’s lost its resistant edge. At the point that it becomes a show at the Met sponsored by Gucci, let’s be clear that we are not in open rebellion. At that point, whoever defines themselves as camp has entered the mainstream with a flourish.
I’d love to hear what you all think about that. If camp began as a kind of private language, it is now, I think, the lingua franca of pop culture – along with irony. I mean, so many things are camp. We were talking just before about the Kardashians …
Charles: What’s the difference between just pop culture and camp? I’m not quite sure. Why are the Kardashians camp?
James: I don’t think the Kardashians are camp at all.
Zaldy: If you think of the level of artifice of what it is to be a Kardashian – like, somehow, miraculously, they all look exactly the same now. They’ve all been sculpted to look like a Kardashian and that, to me, is so camp.
James: Doesn’t camp have to make you giggle at least? Camp, to me, is like a wife going to her husband’s funeral wearing a Day-Glo orange dress and a big feather boa on her head.
Jack: There are certain things that we probably would agree on as camp that have now disappeared into the mainstream, far removed from any kind of subversive, queer culture. They could still be funny, but the question is, is there a sting to them the way that there is when you watch the queens in “Paris Is Burning,” for example?
That kind of camp is very pointedly a critique, not just of the fashion world but of the cultural appropriation that the fashion world engages in when it basically is mocking and stealing from Latinos and black gay men, and then calling it high fashion. We could talk about cultural appropriation, I think.
Parker: I don’t understand why people don’t get it yet, or why it’s taken so long with cultural appropriation. When are we going to get the proper recognition for it? Because it’s authentic to us, you know.
Carmelita: I really like hybridity, that’s what I think of. Mixing everything into something. I am Cuban American, a Latina lesbian, a woman of color – all those things are brought in.
I’m very happy that I came, in the ’80s, to New York to find the WOW Café. I studied theater, but this was a totally different world, and being open to what was going on at that time gave me a camp sensibility without me having read Susan Sontag. I didn’t create thinking of camp, it was just in the culture. I wasn’t thinking, “Oh yes, I’m going to do this because it fits this theory, or this is what’s going on.”
I think that’s an interesting question: Do any of you now think about camp consciously when you’re making work? Is this something that just sort of occurs, or is it something that you pursue?
Zaldy: Well, maybe more in my work because I create costumes – it just goes hand in hand. If I’m working with Ru, there’s a level of camp, just because RuPaul is RuPaul, and what Ru does is camp. Working with Cirque du Soleil is camp.
In a way, it always comes up. I don’t really think about it, it’s just a part of how I was raised, what my outlook is, what my references are. But I would never describe myself as camp, even when I was doing drag.
I’m curious about the way that camp sensibility is passed down. For all of you, is it something that you absorbed from mentors or environments you were in? Or does it have to be taught?
Zaldy: Watching all those classic ’60s and ’70s variety shows, they were all so camp. Camp imagery was just part of my life. Benny Hill. “Hee Haw.” Everything was camp. Cher, Carol Burnett, that was camp. “The Brady Bunch,” “The Partridge Family,” camp, camp, camp.
James: Was “Valley of the Dolls” camp?
Carmelita: So much.
James: I don’t think you can just do a bad movie and call it camp. That’s just a bad movie. Unless they went and said, “We’re going to do this camp,” then it’s just that nobody knew what they were doing. But I’m out of place here. I’m, like, 2,000 years old, and what camp was back in the Stone Age is totally different. … I mean, I don’t know what anyone’s talking about!
Was camp part of your understanding of what you were doing?
Parker: I feel like my inspiration from it, and the way it came into my life, is through musical theater and ballet. It was like I was taught camp without really knowing what it was, because I was becoming these characters, doing “Romeo and Juliet,” “Swan Lake.”
Charles: Certainly there’s a camp element to my work, and I’m part of a tradition. I was influenced by Charles Ludlam, and I guess there are people who are influenced by me. We step on each other’s shoulders in a very good way.
I’ve sometimes felt that straight press, and even gay press, has sometimes limited me by trying to define anything I do as camp, but there’s certainly large camp elements to my work. Sometimes I can’t really define it myself.
Parker: Yeah, and I think that is the kind of camp that I have. It’s just something I can’t define, it’s just there.
We’re talking a lot about the past. Do we need distance to understand camp? Is it easier to be camp about an old movie actress, a ballet role from the repertoire?
Charles: I would have thought, yet actually listening to this conversation, it’s opening my eyes a bit. I really do think that every generation has the stuff from five years before that they grew up on – whether it’s the ’80s for you, or the ’60s for you.
For me, being a teenager in the ’60s, I’m referencing the things I watched – old movies from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, but I’m seeing them on TV, on the 4:30 p.m. movie after school. The past for each generation is a very different place, and that’s the point.
Jack: What if we had a critique of camp, how about that? I’m not somebody who thinks that camp is all that. In fact, in my work I’ve critiqued it as being this sort of canonization of a certain set of cultural expressions, often by white gay men, that then stands in for all of gay culture.
I think that what we’ve seen with camp is the movement from the margins of society – being critiqued, and then using camp to answer back – to the mainstream. Like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” it’s now just mainstream TV. It’s just a mode of making money. When you have five gay men on a cable-TV channel telling everyone how to dress, what products to use, at that point how is it not just capitalism?
I think that’s a convincing critique. What about on the other side? Are there reasons to celebrate the arrival of camp into the mainstream, or at least into the Met?
Charles: I think the positive thing about the exhibit – and I haven’t seen it – but I think how wonderful to see the costumes of these great figures of the past that have real artistic merit. It’s a great aesthetic, and it’d be wonderful to give it one more viewing.
Jack: I personally don’t think there’s much left of camp. I really don’t. I think the fact that it’s in a museum tells us this is pretty much a punctuation mark at the end of an interesting conversation.
Carmelita: I wouldn’t say just put the nail in the coffin for camp, because I’m really excited about the young generation. I’m looking for Parker in the future of camp.
The punch line
Charles: Do we all get to go to the gala because we participated in this?
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9. Jennifer Miller, FF Alumn, at Circus Amok Loft, Brooklyn, May 18 & June 11
Save the Dates!
Performances and In-Progress Works by Friends of Circus Amok
At the Circus Amok Loft
53 South 11th Street, #5A
(Between Wythe & Berry)
Free Free Free!
RSVPs Encouraged
Saturday, May 18
Ashley’s School for Wayward Children
with Ry Szelong, Justin Allen,
Emily Waters, and More!
Hosted by Ashley Brockington
Come enjoy spectacular views, existential seeking (tarot and astrology readings), and Young Artists imagining the future.
6:30pm Fellowship
8:00pm Church
9:00pm Snack and Spiritual Seeking
And upcoming:
Tuesday, June 11
THE EICHELBURGLERS – An Ethyl Eichelberger cover band!
Featuring: Lee Free, Heather Green & Jennifer Miller
And keep your eyes open for the Circus Amok Band
CircusAmok.com
Copyright (c) 2019 Circus Amok, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Circus Amok
53 South 11th Street
Suite 5A
Brooklyn, NY 11249
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10. Kate Gilmore, James Siena, FF Alumns, at Pierogi, Manhattan, opening May 11
Opening at PIEROGI | Saturday, May 11th. 6-8pm-
Martin Wilner
The Case Histories: Pierogi / Responsa*
*Responsa artists include-
Dawn CLEMENTS: August 2016
David SCHER: January 2018
Brian DEWAN: February 2018
Sarah WALKER: March 2018
Daniel ZELLER: April 2018
Darina KARPOV: May 2018
Joe AMRHEIN: June 2018
Fred TOMASELLI: July 2018
Kate GILMORE: August 2018
Ati MAIER: September 2018
William LAMSON: October 2018
Ward SHELLEY: November 2018
James SIENA: December 2018
Opening Reception | Saturday, May 11th. 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates | May 11 through June 16, 2019
Panel Discussion | May 29th. 6:30pm
Moderated by Douglas Dreishpoon (Director of the Catalogue-Raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox Museum)
Press Release | Martin WILNER
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
-Albert Camus
The Case Histories is a continuation of his existential and idiosyncratic time-based artist’s practice, begun in 2002 with his decade-long Making History series. These works deploy the framework of the Gregorian calendar as a means of incorporating the passage of time into the work itself. As Philippe Ducat noted in artpress April 2019, “It is a grid that could have been that of an imaginary artist in La Vie Mode d’Emploi by George Perec. The result is astounding.”
After developing vocabulary that incorporated portraiture, caricature, comics, typography, micrography, cartography, and musical code, in 2012 he made a dramatic departure in transforming a self-analytic process into an analytic one. He began inviting a correspondent each month to send him messages daily via email, text, or phone, which became the basis of his daily drawing practice. The relationship that developed over the course of each month became an opportunity to create a portrait both of the state of mind of his subject as well as a reflection of the relationship between artist and subject.
In 2017, while working with a group of psychiatrists from his own department at the Payne Whitney Clinic, Weill Cornell Medical College, he began to post each day’s work on Instagram along with a daily short text documenting reflections on his work process. Intended as a means of expanding his work process beyond the confines of the work on paper itself into the virtual realm, it also functions as an archive of his work made public.
For this exhibition, the artist chose to work in 2018 with a group of his fellow artists from the roster of our own gallery, and others with past associations, as a reflection of his view of the unique community of artists that the gallery represents. In his ongoing efforts to expand the scope of his endeavor, he invited each artist to produce a responsa, a work in answer to their experience of this process and to include these works as part of the exhibition itself.
His subjects have included friends and family, artists, physicians, psychiatrists, scientists, writers, musicians and filmmakers. Past subjects include Darren Aronofsky, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, and Betsy Sussler. He was selected to be an artist-in-residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute for 2015-16 and worked with a dozen space scientists on projects including the New Horizons Pluto Bypass Mission and the planning of the first manned mission to Mars. The work was included in the first SETI Biennial AIR exhibition at the New Museum Los Gatos. His work has been a subject of a solo exhibition at the Freud Museum, London. Work from The Case Histories has also been exhibited at Hales Gallery, London and Galerie Jean Brolly, Paris.
Wilner has exhibited widely and has had three prior one-person exhibitions with Pierogi, and two one-person exhibitions at Sperone Westwater. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions internationally including the Morgan Library and Museum, the Jewish Museum, New York, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, and University Art Museum, University at Albany, State University of New York. His work is currently on view a group exhibition at Fundacion Banco Santander, Madrid, Spain. His work has been published extensively and is in many prominent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Morgan Library Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum, New York, and the Vassar Art Library. Wilner grew up in New York City and is essentially self-taught as an artist. His academic background is in English literature as an undergraduate at Columbia College, medicine at New York University, psychiatry at the Payne Whitney Clinic/Weill Cornell Medical College, and as Scholar in Psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.
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11. Laura Bernstein, FF Alumn, at Childrens Museum of Art, Manhattan,
Laura Bernstein
Hybrid Ecologies
Bridge Projects at the Children’s Museum of the Arts
103 Charlton Street New York, NY 10014
On view May 16-September 2nd, 2019
Taking inspiration from The Book of Miracles, an illustrated manuscript depicting miraculous phenomena and awesome apocalyptic visions of the 16th century, Hybrid Ecologies looks to the past – ancient and medieval mythology – to speculate on the future of our changing times. As visitors travel through Hybrid Ecologies, the boundaries known to separate ecosystems collapse and begin to break. Creatures of the sea swim with those who fly in the sky, while sharing terrain with those known to inhabit the land. Desert, forest, and mountains, converge. Fusing and confusing space and form and new relationships between species are built. As these barriers are shattered, visitors are invited step inside the suspended forms that act as helmets, to contemplate possibilities for cohabitation, mutation, and hybridization. With extinction and devastation comes the need for imagination, possibility for revelation, the discovery of new creation. An evolving community full of transformation and metamorphoses, Hybrid Ecologies offers visitors the opportunity to play within a living diorama to experience shifts in scale and time, to imagine a world where borders are fluid between all living species, are shattered, and a new sky’s the limit takes hold.
Laura Bernstein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses video, performance, sculpture, installation, and painting to reflect on human and animal behavior, alternative histories, mythology and the grotesque. Her work has been included in exhibitions at BRIC, NURTUREart, and the Long Island University Humanities Gallery, in Brooklyn New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Vox Populi and Icebox Space, in Philadelphia, PA; ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL; and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna, Austria. She is a 2018-19 Grant Recipient of The Franklin Furnace Fund and has directed and produced A Speculative Performance presented by The Institute of Super-Species Research and Experimentation in conjunction with the BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition. Bernstein holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a teaching artist at CMA since 2014.
ABOUT BRIDGE PROJECTS
CMA’s Bridge Projects are a rotating series of interactive site-specific installations located in CMA’s multi-level Bridge Space. Past artists have included Ian Berry, Ryan Frank, Elissa Levy, Rachel Marks, Anne Muntges, Steed Taylor, and more.
ABOUT CHILDREN’S MUSEUM OF THE ARTS
Founded in Lower Manhattan in 1988, Children’s Museum of the Arts’ unique curatorial program introduces children to world-class contemporary art exhibitions. The central Cynthia C. Wainwright Gallery displays a rotating series of contemporary artwork by emerging and established artists from New York City and around the world. Featured artists have included Louise Bourgeois, Ed Ruscha, Vik Muniz, Fred Tomaselli, Jean Shin, Dustin Yellin, Hank Willis Thomas, Misaki Kawai, Michelle Grabner, Tom Sachs, Penelope Umbrico, Sheila Pepe, and Jenny Holzer.
CMA’s program consists of four distinct initiatives: thematic exhibitions of work by contemporary artists; on-site public programming, including interactive art stations and artist-led workshops for early-childhood, children’s art classes, and family programs; school and community outreach programs throughout New York City that provide free art education to underserved children, including children living with disabilities, children in transitional housing, families in the foster care system, and more; and a permanent collection of 2,000 pieces of children’s art from around the world. More information is available at cmany.org .
The museum is open to the public: Monday and Friday, 12PM to 5PM; Thursday, 12 PM to 6PM; Saturday and Sunday, 10AM to 5PM. Open Tuesday and Wednesday for stART drop-in classes. Admission: Adults $13; Children $13; Infants (0-12 months), Free; Seniors, pay-as-you-wish; Thursdays 4-6 PM, pay-as-you-wish.
cmany.org
103 Charlton Street New York, NY 10014
Press Contact:
Kerry Santullo
ksantullo@cmany.org (917) 409-1206
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12. R. Sikoryak, FF Alumn, at Town Stages, Manhattan, May 11
PEN World Voices Festival presents:
Finding Your Voice: Comics Carousel
Saturday, May 11 3:30pm-4:30pm
Town Stages, Main Space 221 West Broadway, New York, NY 10013
With Nidhi Chanani, Jerry Craft, and Molly Ostertag. Hosted by R. Sikoryak
Ages: Eight to fourteen
Watch graphic novels come to life! The creators of award-winning books will perform the voices of their characters as artwork appears onscreen and pages turn. Audiences will be captivated by real and magical coming-of-age tales, in which characters explore mysterious family secrets and demonstrate how to speak up and claim your place when you don’t feel like you fit in. Join graphic novel pioneers Molly Ostertag (The Witch Boy), Nidhi Chanani (Pashmina), and Jerry Craft (New Kid), with emcee R. Sikoryak (The Unquotable Trump), as they combine visual storytelling and live performance during this innovative afternoon of entertainment.
This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Space at Town Stages is sponsored in part by Sokoloff Arts.
Saturday, May 11
3:30pm-4:30pm
Main Hall
Town Stages
221 W. Broadway, New York, NY 10013
$15
Tickets and info: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10393330?fbclid=IwAR0Q4BXf8CdpeynwWzGHvTuoZBiwUEsp7dqR-Vw4fXeK_k_AUrYn_D-rglA
https://worldvoices.pen.org
Copyright (c) 2019 R. Sikoryak, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
R. Sikoryak
10 Stuyvesant Oval Apt. #10-D
New York, NY 100092424
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13. Gabriel Martinez, FF Alumn, at William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia, opening May 10
Tonight is Forever investigates, celebrates and honors the ongoing global, national and regional struggles for LGBTQ+ liberation. This immersive multimedia project by Gabriel Martinez in being presented in relationship to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. Martinez draws from over 5,000 images sourced from the John J. Wilcox Archives, along with images contributed by local Philadelphia communities, to create a visual confluence of perspectives and historical moments (mid 1960s to present) that reflects vitalaspects of LGBTQ+ courage & pride.
May 10th – June 28th
Opening Reception: Friday, May 10th, 6-8pm
William Way LGBT Community Center
1315 Spruce Street, Philadelphia
Monday-Friday 11am – 10pm
Saturday-Sunday 12pm – 5pm
215.732.2220
waygay.org
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14. Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo, FF Alumn, now online at debbieweil.com
Please visit this link:
thank you.
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15. Tulis McCall, FF Alumn, at Pangea, Manhattan, June 2
At Your Service: Advice from a Woman Who Knows Better
Directed by Austin Pendleton
June 2, 7 pm
Pangea
178 2nd Avenue
Manhattan
$20/food drink minimum; tickets are $20 online, $25 at the door
212 995 0900
Pangeanyc.com
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16. Paul McMahon, FF Alumn, at The Catskill Pines, Mt. Tremper, NY, May 10
Paul McMahon Tree-O at the Pines with Eva Friday May 10
May 10 at 9 PM – May 11 at 11 AM
The Catskill Pines
5327 Rt 212, Mount Tremper, New York 12457
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17. Harley J. Spiller, FF Alumn, now online at youtube.com/watch?v=PuRRHzOzl4o
Richard Ledes and anti-fascist documentary films present a 60 minute film of Harley J. Spiller aka Inspector Collector leading a tour of the objects in his home. Please visit this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuRRHzOzl4o
This film will be screened at City Reliquary Museum on May 18, 2019 from 3-9 pm in celebration of Harley’s 60th birthday – come one come all for a festive museum show called Psychic City – 370 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg Brooklyn – in lieu of gifts please consider a tax-deductible donation to this 501 (c)3 nonprofit organization.
Thank you.
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
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Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.
80 Arts – The James E. Davis Arts Building
80 Hanson Place #301
Brooklyn NY 11217-1506 U.S.A.
Tel: 718-398-7255
Fax: 718-398-7256
mail@franklinfurnace.org
Martha Wilson, Founding Director
Michael Katchen, Senior Archivist
Harley Spiller, Administrator
Dolores Zorreguieta, Program Coordinator
