Angelika and I visited the home of Billy Name last week to have a chat with that man of myth for an upcoming episode of Dead Hare Radio.
A selection of Billy's photographs from his days documenting life in Warhol's Factory are currently on view at the Albert Shahinian Fine Art in Rhinebeck, NY ( 22 E Market St.) through May 22. Billy will be giving a talk at the gallery on Saturday April 30th during a reception taking place from 5-8pm. These particular photos on exhibit were originally included in an exhibit curated by Emma Lavigne entitled "I Am A Cliche - Echoes of the Punk Aesthetic" which was part of the 41st Rencontres D'Arles Photography event last year.
I'll be capturing audio from Billy's talk which I expect will join portions of our conversation with him from last week for the radio show.
Considering he's the man responsible for making the Silver Factory silver, I couldn't resist snapping a few images of the shiny-backed insulation on Billy's back porch, from which one can see the Mid Hudson Bridge, the color of which he claims inspired the choice of decor for Warhol's studio.
Billy's roommate. I didn't catch his Name.
By chance, Flavorwire recently published a "where are they now" item on Andy Warhol's surviving Superstars, including Billy.
One of the drawings on the wall of Charlotte's studio.
In fact, this Meet yer Maykr is an audio studio visit which will be heard on The Dead Hare Radio Hour on WVKR 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie NY. My conversation with Charlotte, and fellow Beaconite artist Peter Iannarelli who joined us will be aired on Tuesday April 19th at 5pm on WVKR, 91.3 FM in Poughkeepsie, NY. If you can't pick up the station, you can listen to the live stream at wvkr.org.
As usual, the podcast version of the show will be available to listen to and available for download on iTunes later in the evening of April 19.
Listen to the episode here and now:
Images from the installation Object Lesson, curated by Karlos Carcamo at Para/site in 2005.
courtesy, the artist, via: charlotteschulz.com
There are more images from the Para/Site exhibit on Charlotte's website,
NYC is simply a dense cluster of little villages and nowhere does that notion ever feel truer than in Chelsea. I had a little time to catch a few shows back after making an art delivery back in mid March.
I saw two colleagues from MoMA at the Andrew Kreps Gallery. I ran into a designer I was helping install this week at Bard CCS. I ran into Amy Lipton on 11th Ave. Amy told me about a new gallery in Beacon that I hadn't even heard of. It's called Estuary Gallery. It's located over at the loft project off of Rt 52. Amy said she tried to go to the opening of the inaugural show the previous Saturday, but couldn't find the place (it can be confusing to navigate that area if you're not familiar with it, especially at night.)
At the Josh Smith Show at Luhring Augustine Gallery, I met Jerry Saltz, who was marvelling at the great awfomeness (my word, a cross of awesome and awful) of Smith's work - which has provided me with at least a couple of hours of entertaining conversations. Peter Acheson and I caught his previous exhibit from last March at Luhring Augustine. His latest painitngs seem to be striving more for awesomeness than awfulness (something I'm not sure could be said of previous groupings) - aside from those stop signs; I was challenged by Mr. Saltz to put something that awful in my next show. That will be priority one, next show I have.
I also met Phong Bui, editor of the Brooklyn Rail who was at the Augustine with the artist Joel Shapiro. I spoke with Phong about recording an interview with him for Dead Hare Radio. I was actually capturing ambient sounds during my walk through the galleries and created a sound collage for show #3 of Dead Har Radio.
Let's see....what did I see? Some unexpected and weird videos - in 3D by Gary Hill, “of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment,” at Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY through April 23.
I watched Terence Koh edging his way around a mound of salt on his knees at Mary Boone. Some black and white reliefs of Ellsworth Kelly at Matthew Marks, I believe. A Tara Donavan at Pace(?) that was a bit too prim for me. Also, Richard Butler had a show at Freight and Volume. I'm back and forth with his work, but I'm digging some of his new larger heads.
I can't remember when I learned about the Dazzle Camouflage that was used for British and American navy vessels in WWI and WWII, but I do remember my surprise and thrill at the discovery of it. You'll see these images repeatedly online, along with other contemporary incarnations of the concept. For some reason, the newer and alternative (non naval) implementations of the Razzle Dazzle paint schemes don't have the umpphh that the forms overlayed onto these vessels have. The ships themselves are visually stunning canvases on which to deploy the patterns. There are many references and links to a RISD site that accompanied an exhibit about Dazzle Camou, constituted by material donated by RISD Alum, Maurice Freedman, who was a camoufleur in Florida prior to attending RISD.
The graphic patterns of the Dazzle paint schemes are particularly appealing to me currently. I'm relating them to the repetitive graphic qualities of road signs which have been becoming more an more fascinating to me in recent years and which have been finding their way into some of my paintings, but more on that later..
It seems my main site, christopheralbert.com was hacked or simply had a bad day last week. I'm forwarding traffic here until I get a little time to get things in order, sometime this week.
Sorry for the inconvenience....and deprivation to your visual senses...
This week's ECF is a belated stream of consciousness addendum to the ECF of the week before last in praise of the found object.
Our recent Art Book Club (ABC) selection was W.J.T. Mitchell's What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images; a really astute investigation of images (totems, fetishes, idols) and their presence and power society. It's well worth a read, or two. It's one of those reads that asserts itself as framing overlay for how you (I) relate to images. I also surmise that it's a book that due to the subject and structure is timeless in its relevance; it added a layer of insight and reflection on recent events in Egypt, Libya, Japan and the National Portrait Gallery and more distantly Iraq, as well as the even more quotidian visuals we encounter without noticing.
Mitchell articulates the essence of the found object in a way that I meaningful and recognizable, noting the very finding of which is, by nature a 'fortuitous circumstance'.
What better place, though, to locate the roots of the found object than in the foundling, a poor, orphaned creature that might just amount to something. The moment of finding the found object is the moment when one feels oneself to be pregnant or about to adopt something (which comes to the same thing). This is, I think quite distinct from the moment of finding the lost object (fetishism) or the sublime object of ideology (the idol), neither of which are capable of surprising anyone or of binging newness into the world.
The excerpt above, paired with a portion of a conversation I captured between Angelika and Peter Iannarelli as part of the Beacon Art Salon's Contemporary Artists on Contemporary Art series, in which Peter talks about his penchant for claiming authorship of found objects..even when those objects aren't lost crystallized the thought in my head that in some way, the studio is a place where conditions can be set in such a way as to create an instance - one that approximates that sensation of an object found.
I don't work in an overly determined manner in the studio. In fact, I leave a lot of room for randomness and automatism in the pursuit (unconsciously) of the found object. I don't think he'd agree, but when I visit Peter Iannarelli's studio, I see the mechanism found object cloning at work. But then, we're all just trying make personal discoveries...
So, slightly appropos of nothing other than through the stream of consciousness and fortuity of time, we come to the visual portion of your Eye Candy Friday serving.
Today's images come from the pre-MAYKR photo archive that I happened to be perusing through recently. I came across these images of an installation that Peter Iannarelli did in his studio at Spire Studios back in 2004, when Spire was still very much the beating heart of Beacon's art life (to my mind). This installation probably stands as the high water mark of Peter's Walmart phase. His studio was bedecked as a crazy post big box rave, complete with strobe lights streamers and giant shopping bag windsocks. Come to think of it, if I'm correct, it was a rave that sported only the sound of oscillating fans and rustling plastic. I was a majorly cool visual experience, and I treasure these photos of it. I feel fortunate that I uploaded these images two weeks ago since my external hard drive crashed to the floor last week, and possibly along with it, a substantial chunk of the unpublished MAYKR photo archive (along with a boatload of other data). I haven't yet had the stomach to really try to investigate what might be salvageable.
BTW, if you're looking for other treats in the found object category, look no further....yes, indeed, look further, but don't miss looking at......than Joy Garnett's Unmonumental series of images.
