Thursday (today!)

• Mechanisms for Validation (Please, please just love me, or at least tell me I’m pretty, but I’ll settle for confirmation that I’m smart)

April 9th, 7pm

threewalls
119 n. peoria #2d
Chicago, IL  60607

Moderated by our very own Duncan Mackenzie

“Join us for this threewallsSALON to discuss the means by which artists and practices are validated in the contemporary art world, where that validation comes from and how it is bestowed.” via their website

• The Generational: Younger Than Jesus

4/8/09 – 7/5/09

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002

“For “Younger Than Jesus,” the first edition of “The Generational,” the New Museum’s new signature triennial, fifty artists from twenty-five countries will be presented. The only exhibition of its kind in the United States, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” will offer a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work being produced by a new generation of artists born after 1976.” Via the New Museum website

[Tim says] This show opened earlier this week, but I did not get a chance to see it.  Billed as the “signature triennial,” the New Museum still seems to be in heavy competition for attention amongst the heavy hitters at Whitney and P.S.1.

Friday

• Five Dollar Store

• Intervals: Julieta Aranda

April 10 – July 19, 2009
The Guggenheim
1071 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY USA 10128

In Aranda’s presentation, four conceptually related works propose an alternative notion of temporal experience as a shifting and unquantifiable state, liberated from rigid conventions of measurement.

[Tim says]
In case you can’t tell yet, my event calendar is usually determined by the artists that surround me.  Julieta Aranda is one of the artists behind e-flux and an editor for their journal, although I have not seen much of her given that she has been installing this show, finally opening on Friday.  Tyler Coburn mentioned Julieta Aranda as an artist to watch in the March issue of Art Review.

• You are Young: New Sculptures by Ali Bailey

7-10pm
GOLDEN
816 W Newport
Chicago, IL 60657



“Ali Bailey’s most recent work describes fictional scenarios that hint to a collective memory or experience while addressing multiple themes of chance, failure, melancholy and loss. Bailey’s body of work utilizes a wide range of materials from industrial plastics and polyurethanes, to plaster, oil paint, and found materials. In a similar vein as Chicago artist Tony Tasset, Bailey forces one to consider the history of sculpture: carving, forming, molding, and the ready-made. Bailey uses his own symbols of adolescence and transience to reveal a tension between a unique experience and a shared consciousness.” via the gallery’s press release

Saturday

• Unbuilt Roads Presented by Hans Ulrich Obrist

OPENING Sat. April 11, 2009
6-8PM

e-flux
41 Essex Street
NYC NY 10002

Based on the book Unbuilt Roads:107 Unrealised Projects, Hatje Cantz (1997)
edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa

From the e-flux announcement:
From April 10 to July 19, 2009, the Guggenheim Museum will inaugurate Intervals, a new contemporary art series, with a multipart installation by Julieta Aranda (b. 1975, Mexico City).

[Tim says] This is the first official exhibition opening in E-flux‘s new project space at 41 Essex street.  This is also the first time in a few years Hans Ulrich Obrist has done a project in New York.

For those who don’t subscribe to the e-flux announcements, or have stopped paying attention to them, there was an intriguing round table discussion going down over the weekend at their New York City space on the Lower East Side.  With the launch of issue #4 of e-flux journal, they set out to ask:

How do art journals reflect what is currently available or possible in terms of content and distribution?
What forms of practice or engagement do they propose?
And how do they produce and reflect readerships?
And, at the end of the day, why produce or publish (an art journal)?

In the interest of disclosure, I must mention that I have been working with e-flux on their e-flux video rental project, but hopefully that doesn’t undermine my saying that their approach towards producing a journal is an all around forward-thinking one.  As an online, freely available, print-on-demand effort, the issue of physical production is not negated but rather deferred.  The publication’s production not only lies in wait for the individual, but also the potential producer/distributor.  From what I understood, e-flux seems to be daring someone to actually take up the task of producing the thing, while they focus on what is surely more rewarding.

As far as the participants in Saturday’s round table, AA Bronson brought a lovely smattering of rare and out-of-print journals for show and tell, dot dot dot’s Stuart Bailey dropped the Deleuze references (“P” is for professor), Silvia Kolbowski valiantly stuck up for October, and Gareth James took a ribbing for the yet-unpublished Scorched Earth. Other participants were Sara G. Rafferty from North Drive Press, Sina Najafi from Cabinet, and of course the three editors of e-flux journal, Brian Kuan Wood, Julieta Aranda, and Anton Vidokle. This was the dynamic that led to the most interesting line of questioning regarding the pedagogical role of a journal, the construction of an audience (otherwise just a phantasm), and the need to publish a journal at all. Look for the recording at e-flux.com, I know there was one.