‘Sup ya’ll. Drumroll please…

1. Three cheers for Futurism!?

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.

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.

Friday

Saturday

“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