Boston based performance artist Garrett Yahn proved himself to be a grade-a sissy this past Saturday when, during his exhibition and performance “Old Work/New Work” at Happy Collaborationists, he applied women’s makeup to his face for nearly an hour.
Garrett Yahn doing “man stuff”
Yahn’s solo show in collaboration with ACRE and Happy C’s also featured two video works highlighting repetitive manual labor, the artist’s meticulously handwritten CV and a photo of Yahn with the goopy black mascara beard that his performance culminated in. One of the video works starred the artist’s father, who is probably horrified by the fact that his son parades around, wearing mascara in public.
Attendees of the show sheepishly sipped their beer while pretending to “get it.” Afterwards, many returned home to experiment with makeup and ponder the relationship between factory work and male drag.
Blog Roll
They Won’t Roll Themselves
Sometimes life imiates art. Other times art imitates life. But occassionally life kicks arts ass so hard that art gets really embarassed and has to stay home from school for at least a week. Internet gem “You Had One Job” is one of those times.
Girl Don’t be Dumb, because you shouldn’t be. And you can never get enough pink.
Meeting of the minds: Neff & Walker
“Does this cyanotype make me look fat?”
John Neff in Conversation with Hamza Walker at the Renaissance Society
John Neff killed it last night at his opening and artist talk The Renaissance Society. The 58 chronologically titled black and white photographs in the show, produced with a MacGyvered scanner camera were striking and solemn, framed identically and hung on dark gray walls that bisected the gallery.
Neff and Walker’s discussion at the opening nothing short of enlightening. Spanning 16 years of the artists work and evolution, topics discussed ranged from John Cage to instagram and went well over the allotted time, though no one in the packed and captive audience seemed to care. Footage of the conversation will soon be available on the Ren’s vimeo page.
More information on the exhibition can be found here.
Kate Moss commissions portrait
As if there weren’t enough already
Its been reported that the model/badgirl recently commissioned British street artist Bambi to create a painting of Moss for her home in the Cotswolds. Ever humble, Moss simply requested that her portrait be “similar to the iconic ‘Marilyn’ by Andy Warhol.” Since Kate’s country retreat has wall space to spare, What’s the T? has taken the liberty of creating a hypothetical art collection specially curated for the contemporary English Marilyn.
After announcing an in-depth partnership with the City of Chicago during a recent press conference, EXPO Chicago made a puzzling move this week by naming Los Angeles-based Shamim M. Momin as the curator of their IN/SITU program for the 2013 fair. No T, No shade; Momin is obviously qualified, but is the goal of EXPO Chicago ultimately to showcase the city or to become a platform for touring curators? Is there room at the young fair for both?
Erratum
What’s the T? would like to note a clarification concerning this article: EXPO Art Week is meant to be a separate city-wide initiative of arts and culture programming while EXPO CHICAGO is still the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art.
The Weatherman Report
For Chicago IL
Per Kirkeby, Birds Buried in Snow, 1970
On The Street:
Fashion from the line outside the SAIC BFA show
All images taken in the unbelievably long line outside The School of the Art Institute’s 2013 Spring Undergraduate Exhibition Opening Reception last Friday night, unless not.
These things.
Stranger finds himself surrounded by mediocre art, after grueling wait
Onlookers struggle to make sense of SAIC BFA Exhibition
After waiting hours in a line full of respectable adults and “interesting” looking millennials, a lone Chicagoan found himself trapped amongst useless ceramics, twigs, rice and what appeared to be gigantic collaborative finger paintings at the SAIC BFA Exhibition Opening this past friday night.
“All of a sudden I was sitting inside of skinned muppet surrounded by kids who looked like they all got haircuts in the dark,” said the bewildered attendee.
Confused by the plethora of elaborate business cards in a place where absolutely no business could possibly be taking place, the lone outsider struggled to make meaning out of rocks covered with sponges and photographs of morose teenagers.
After spending nearly 20 minutes watching a video of a girl to licking a suspended donut, the visitor left in a hurry, stating angrily “What is this cracked-out corn-maze and and why is everyone drinking La Croix?”
Work by Megan Isaacs (Rebuild), 2013
Header image is a installation shot of “No Show” at the West Pilsen Sculpture Garden.
You’ve got to love an art movement obsessed with industrialized warfare who’s adherents where so woefully incompetent at warfare that most of them died as soon as they set foot on the battle field. Remember dears, function before fashion on the battlefield. If you’d like to learn more about the Futurists, stop by Istituto Italiano di Cultura on Friday around 6pm. They’ll be reading the Futurist Manifesto alongside contemporary music and dance commemorating Futurism’s 100th B-Day. Hooray for Futurism!
2. Inflatable Art at Spoke!
OK, so I don’t think I’ve ever seen Claire Ashley’s work before in person, but I looked up her website, and her performances look weird enough to warrant an in-person look. For Spoke she is creating a giant blow up mattress/wall/window voyeur object-thing. Apparently there will be a camera there to shoot people playing with it, so go play! You can have interactive art with no one to interact with it. Friday night from 5-7pm.
3. Everyone likes art raffles, right
Well my dear friends, it’s time to say bon voyage and go to heaven. Not the dead people one, the one on Milwaukee. Harold Arts is raffling off art by their 2009 residents to raise money for the future Harold Arts Residency. That’s a clean little loop if I ever saw one. So come, play the odds, and perhaps you’ll go home with some art you like. Friday from 8-midnight.
4. The ultimate battle: the herbivore vs. the carnivore.
Dude, high five to Hyde Park Art Center and the people who put on Artist Run Chicago. They just keep having awesome stuff, why must it end? Well it’s not over yet my friends, and this week they’ll be holding the great “Fryvalry.” Ya’ll are invited to bring meat or veggies (whatever fits you persuasion) for Phillip Von Zweck and Kevin Jennings to grill up in the ultimate test of gristle vs. greens. It’s just cool. Saturday afternoon, 3-6pm.
5. Indie films..
If you’re looking for some fun Sunday evening, and have $10 to spare, you should head over to the Elastic Arts Foundation and check out some indie films. The screening was curated by Ehsan Ghoreishi and is being held to raise money for another film, Voices and Faces of the Adhan: Cairo. Voices… is a documentary about muezzins, and how soon, for the first time in over a thousand years, they’re all going to be out of a job. Thanks technology, sometimes you suck. You can learn more here. Movies start at 7pm and go ’till 10pm.
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.
One night-only special event – Artists make items for a convenience store, most cost 5 bucks or less. Yay cheap art! [Claudine]
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.
The work gathered for Case-By-Case Basis will address instances where the relationship between an individual and an institution are in flux. More info over at Lloyd Dobler’s website.
Western Exhibitions: Geoffrey Todd Smith
Opening: Friday, April 3, 2009
5:00pm – 8:00pm
119 N Peoria St, #2A
Chicago, IL
“Geoffrey Todd Smith relentlessly (and patiently) seeks to discover
beauty in his abstract painting/drawing hybrids amid the ceaseless
interruptions and distractions of daily life. Using a limited
vocabulary, he delineates a seemingly impenetrable field of optical
buzz and hiss. Beginning with a grid of painted dots, he adorns his
color fields in a “horror vaccui” fizz of zigzags while directing the
viewer through densely hand-drawn patterns and painted elements that
optically mix and integrate colors. In each of Smith’s works, small
painted dots and ellipses become embedded in the structure of a grid
or interfere with it, depending on absorption or reflection of light,
while also reinforcing the rhythm and direction of the zigzags.” via Western Exhibitions
ThreeWalls:Judith Brotman: Captive Audience
April 3rd – May 8th, 2009
Opening: April 3rd, 6-9pm
119 n. Peoria #2d
Chicago, IL
“Working in industrial felt, miscellaneous hardware and materials
culled from the everyday, Judith Brotman sculpts an abstract tableaux
of traps and teasers, prosthetics and instruments. Her sculptural
installation practice combines an exercised restraint with a sense of
elegant craftsmanship in service to arrangements that both invite our
intimacy and confound our sense of modesty.” via ThreeWalls
Saturday
Recesselation: “The Foolish Toys”
Spoke: at the intersection of ideas, dialogue, and change
119 N Peoria street #3D
Chicago, IL 60607
March 29th – April 9th
“The Foolish Toys” will build a post-decadent shrine or memorial to our excessive past. Materials, objects, sounds, actions, and images, will be incorporated into one large sculptural form that evolves over time. Viewers are invited to leave a remembrance of things past: useless, excessive, non-essential items. Check out their website for more information.
The Renaissance Society:Paul Chan: “My laws are my whores”
March 01 – April 12, 2009
5811 S. Ellis Avenue
Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418
Chicago, Illinois 60637
“My laws are my whores marks the premiere of a new ensemble of works by Paul Chan. Using the writer and philosopher Marquis De Sade (1740–1814) as a point of departure, Chan has created moving image works, ink and charcoal drawings, a sculpture, and a set of computer fonts that evoke what the Sadean legacy might look like today and how his obsessions with forms of sex, violence, freedom, and reason echo in the 21st century.” The fonts that Chan has created are also available for free download via the Ren’s website.
Sunday
Spertus:Black Like Us
Lecture/Multimedia Presentation
Sunday, April 5, 2009
2pm
Spertus
610 S Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60605
$20/$15 members/$10 students
“The fates of African Americans and Jewish Americans have often been seen as entwined, as an index of the nation’s capacity to live up to its democratic ideals. With audio and visual examples, Dr. Stephen J. Whitfield lectures on stories of both minorities—separately and together—overcoming barriers and speaking out through literature and the arts.” More information at the museum website
