The self-proclaimed “most important survey of contemporary art in the world ever” opened this week in at 350 West Broadway in SoHo, New York.  The Brucennial 2010 edition, titled “Miseducation,” is presented in a 5,000 square foot space temporarily donated by the real-estate mogul and art collector Aby Rosen and supposedly “brings together 420 artists from 911 countries working in 666 discrete disciplines.”  But who’s counting?  The creative art collective behind what is seen as a parody version of the Whitney Biennial is made up of five mysterious guys known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation.  Although the Foundation participated in the recent “1969″ exhibit at P.S.1, Brucennial remains the collective’s signature celebrated program since the founding of the event in 2008.

Focused on reshaping the art world via a more democratic and DIY approach, the Foundation places some of its more visible functions, like PR and the organization of exhibtions, into the artists hands.  Perhaps the result can best be described as a visual cacaphony.  The Brucennial’s rather lax entry standards (an email asked prospective participants to “either dredge something up or create something new…As fast and as loose as you like”) is a refreshing juxtaposition to the supposed stringent selection criteria of the Whiteny’s Biennial.  With a “sharing is caring” attitude and limited wall space artists move their pieces around in order to make room for new arrivals.  Neither first-come basis nor celebrity secures an artist a better spot, and emerging artists as well as blue chip artists (like Julian Schnabel) display their pieces side by side.  The title “Miseducation” and its press release offer insight into the Foundation’s desire to question the politics and institutional protectionism that seem to run the art world. However, one has to wonder how “lax”  and rebellious the event can remain with heavy-hitter curators Francesco Bonami and Vito Schnabel involved with curating the event.

The Brucenial 2010: Miseducation runs through April 4 at 350 West Broadway, SoHo, with projects also on view at Recess at 41 Grand Street.  The event also includes performances and a literary supplement.

With the title “Size Does Matter”  for his debut show as a curator, one has to wonder if Shaquille O’Neal is talking about the size of one’s wallet, connections, ego, or one’s preference to bra size.   With the opening of the show at Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation the famous basketball player, actor, and rapper can now add “art curator” to his ever-expanding resume of accomplishments.   The exhibition includes work by 39 different artists, or “artstars” to be more accurate, whose works explore the myriad ways that scale affects the perception of contemporary art.  The scale theme is extremely fitting: weighing 320 pounds and standing 7′1 atop his size 22 shoes, Shaquille O’Neal has described his own size as “monumental” and he has the ability to dwarf just about everyone in his presence.

O’Neal made sixty-six selections for the show, which features works ranging from the ginormous billboard-sized Andreas Gursky’s photograph Madonna I to the microscopic work of Willard Wigan.  It is rumored that the works were chosen from over 200 images that FLAG founder Glenn Fuhrman and director Stephanie Roach showed him over dinner after a game.  O’Neal has also admitted that he is a great friend of Donald Trump who has four or five Picassos on his plane that O’Neal likes to look at when flying with him.  And with that, viola, a curator is born.  Describing the process of picking the works to include in the show, O’Neal explains, “Art is a process of delivering or arranging elements that appeal to the emotions of a person looking at it.  It’s what you feel.  I picked those things because they were beautiful.”  With this criteria in mind it is not surprising that another theme of the show could be “half-naked women,” or “ginormous breasts,”  as pieces by Richard Patterson, Dr. Lakra, and Lisa Yuskavage graphically illustrate.  O’Neil also plays the role of the muse for the show inspiring works like Willard Wigan’s  Micro Shaq,  Mark Wagner’s Shaq by Marq and Peter Max’s Portrait of Shaquille O’ Neal. These pieces embrace the famous basketball player’s happy-go lucky attitude, goofy grin, and larger than life attitude.

“Size Does Matter” is on display from February 19, 2010-May 27, 2010 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea. Shaquille O’Neil is best known as a center for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Cleveland’s controversial best-selling author James Fray, who has written extensively on art, has an accompanying book for O’Neal’s art show that features installation images and an essay.

Olafur Eliasson’s Multiple Shadow House opened Thursday, February 11th at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.  Eliasson, who has been described as “an ecstasy-inducing Danish-Icelandic artist,” has perfected the concept of smoke and mirror art that consistently wows its audience and draws crowds (including a Michael Bloomberg and numerous body guards).   The packed opening felt a bit like Disney World meets the hands-on section of a science museum; particularly because the exhibition involves the viewer in a collaborative creative process.  Opening attendees played obsessively with their color-split shadows on the wall, made shadow puppets with their hands and basically behaved as if this was the first time they had even seen light divided into color spectrums or their own corporeal outline for that matter.  This  behavior illustrates Eliasson’s emphasis on the visitor’s experience and his tendency to create work in which the potential lies in the exchange between the piece and the viewer.

Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The first floor of the two-floor exhibit consists of clusters of rooms comprised of a simple wooden framework supporting large projection screens.  Each room allows for the viewer to stand in front of projected light, thus causing the light to fracture into colored shadows on the wall.  These projections, like much of Eliasson’s work, causes the viewer to re-examine even the most common familiarities, such as light, with renewed appreciation and wonder.  Eliasson is particularly interested in how we understand, see, and experience space. Multiple Shadow House does not disappoint on this level. The user negotiates and constructs his or her own surroundings while experiencing subtleties of color, thrill of participation, and magic of science.

The theme of perception of visual imagery and viewer involvement is continued upstairs in Intangible Afterimage Star (2008).  Six spotlights project geometrical forms in magenta, blue, yellow, green, magenta, and turquoise onto a wall, layering and intersecting.  As explained in the press release, “the intense projections fade in and out, and complimentary afterimages stay on the visitor’s retina and appear to multiply the color compositions.  As a result, the film is only partially produced by the spotlight’s projection; the rest is contributed by the viewer.”

Also upstairs is a stunning collection of what appear to be studies in color, sequences, and shape done in watercolor and pencil on paper.  Minimal and intimate, these stationary works are a refreshing change from the rest of the exhibition.  Configured in sequences, the watercolors use ellipses and circles as narrative exercises on the perception of space and movement.  Another piece, Colour Experiment no. 3, is a circular oil painting that at first glance appears to be a basic study in color or a large color wheel.  However, the painting is actually an expansion of the traditional model of a color wheel, wherein each of the 360 degrees is painted in one color and corresponds to its complementary afterimage located directly across from itself.

Eliasson has cited the work of close friend Einar Thorstein, a philosopher, scientist, and engineer, as a constant source of his visual vocabulary.  He has found inspiration in Thorstein’s spatial ideas such as geodesic domes, fivefold symmetries, spiral spheres, towers and pavilions, the golden ratio, and kaleidoscopes.  Eliasson uses these concepts to create works like Multiple Shadow House which exist as experiences more than material objects.  Presented via transparent means of constructions, these experiences illustrate the nature of perception-based stimulation as well as the artist’s ability to manipulate the experience.

Current solo exhibitions for Eliasson include Olafur Eliasson: Your Chance Encounter at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan and Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Stan VanDerBeek with his Movie-Drome, Stony Point, NY. Courtesy Yale School of Architecture

Making films is not easy. Most people know this and almost as many find the difficulties of movie-making enthralling, which explains the proliferation of articles, TV interviews, and radio specials on the subject. Just last week, I nearly pulled off the freeway to better concentrate on radio host Elvis Mitchell’s interview with Oren Moverman, the directed of The Messenger (who, apparently, had 3 different directors, including Sydney Pollack, walk away from the picture before he took the helm himself), and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of Quentin Tarantino’s story (told most recently on Tuesday’s Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien) about how his hands, and not the hands of Nazi Colonel Hans Landa, came to strangle Diana Kruger’s character in Inglourious Basterds.

This fascination with filmmaking has something, if not everything, to do with the fact that, while the production process may be a tangled mess of misplaced funding and last-minute game-changes, the watching process often feels effortless. Well-made mainstream features are meant to pull you through a seamlessly self-contained fiction that twists and turns, periodically threatening to derail but never actually doing so. They’re meant to leave you strangely satiated, even if you just witnessed an apocalyptic blood bath. Video art and art films, on the other hand, tend to be neither seamless nor satiating; and sometimes, watching them feels like it must be at least as difficult as making them.

On Tuesday night, in a crowded basement auditorium at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I listened as Tate Modern curator Stuart Comer talked about, among other things, organizing experimental film events at a museum that has practically obliterated its film budget. Snaring potential backers can be difficult, since Comer’s programming has a reputation for being “aggressively avant-garde”—which is another way of saying films at the Tate require a bit too much of their viewers.

Stan VanDerBeek, March 22, 1969. Inside the Movie-Drome. Courtesy Black Mountain College Museum.

Before Comer took the podium, art historian Gloria Sutton spoke at length about Stan VanDerBeek, a graduate of 1950s Black Mountain College who built the infamous Movie-Drome, a grain silo turned multimedia screening room, in his Stony Point, NY, backyard. He filled his Movie-Drome with an assortment of projectors, so that multiple still and moving images could occupy the curved ceiling at once. VanDerBeek’s films, which resemble fugitively animated Wallace Berman collage, champion what he called the “aesthetics of anticipation.” They ask their audience to stay alert, trace connections between fragments and look for meaning that they will never quite be able to find. They’re demanding and rigorous, but, really, once you’ve decided to submit yourself to them, they’re mostly exhilarating.

In one of VanDerBeek’s best, Poemfield No. 2, a series of pixelated words punctuate the screen then disintegrate into blurs of light and specks of neon color.  At first, you try to read the words for meaning, then the film starts to resemble a sort of absurdest nightmare in which the text becomes unreadable before it’s even materialized. Yet the constantly foiled desire to decipher still propels you through, and you’re always anticipating the moment at which the flickering screen will become legible again–it’s more suspenseful than anything Hitchcock ever made, because the suspense lasts indefinitely.

Note: LACMA will host two more panels on experimental film, one in March and one in May. The dates should be finalized and posted to LACMA’s website in the near future.

Catherine Wagley, DailyServing’s longest standing contributor is no stranger to the Los Angeles art community. Since our inception in 2006, Wagley has regularly contributed to the massive list of artist’s featured on DailyServing, while also building insightful commentary on the art happenings of Los Angeles, including the recent articles Another End to Irony, The Third Chapter of Blum and Poe and Faux Koons. Thanks to her dedication to DailyServing and the Los Angeles art community, I am proud to announce that Ms. Wagley will now be conducting a weekly column for DailyServing. It only seems fitting to start this new column with the recent news that has set the art world ablaze this week, Jeffery Deitch’s relocation to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Make sure to visit the site each Friday for new commentary by Catherine Wagley on anything and everything L.A.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Jeffrey Deitch was officially named MOCA’s director early on Monday; by the afternoon of the same day, the web homes of leading papers, art mags, and blogs were Deitch-driven blurs of cultural commentary. MOCA held a press conference  on Tuesday (I was there, along with a painfully small handful of others), at which  philanthropist Eli Broad, who bailed MOCA out of destitution last year, gave a speech unnervingly similar to the one he gave at the opening of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary two years ago. He again celebrated L.A. as the emerging art capitol of the world, only this time, MOCA, not LACMA, helmed L.A.’s rise.

Deitch spoke last, with a voice that wavered slightly and eyes that almost looked watery. He said he “was happy to lead” and not, as video artist Diana Thater duly pointed out, “happy to join” MOCA, its curators and its artists. He corroborated Broad, saying he would “continue to build MOCA so that, over the next decade, it is indisputably the leading contemporary art museum in the world”— it’s the sort of  thinly veiled domination rhetoric that seems more unsettling coming from art executives than from world leaders.

Keith Haring, "The Ten Commandments," Deitch Projects, 2008

Bravado aside, the list of what Deitch, who’s championed many of the same artists DailyServing has featured over the years, could bring to MOCA probably outstrips his conflicts of interest: business savvy, fundraising experience, a staggering reserve of energy, contacts galore, a likable persona, familiarity with a wide range of cultural outlets (he interviewed actress Chloe Sevigny for Paper Magazine the same year he entered the Smithsonian’s Oral History Archive). Still, it’s hard to say how venture will play out in reality.

Roaming around before Tuesday’s press conference, I ran into an old timer from L.A.’s Arts District, a man who’d arrived on the scene long before MOCA opened its doors in 1979. Downtown has changed, he said. It’s been evacuated in favor of the city’s Westside, but there are young people, young partiers, who are setting up camp down here, and they’re the crowd Deitch could reach. Then, almost with the same breath he’d used to tell me of the young downtowners, the man switched gears, talking about attending Pharmaka’s exhibition of Warhol prints last year, and seeing all the young “Snoop Doggs” at the opening. After seeing these kids, and hearing the owner of the prints carelessly discuss their value, he was, of course, unsurprised when the high-priced prints went missing a few months later.

I felt I’d been handed the perfect argument for why Deitch matters—Deitch may be flashy and financially vested in a few too many ways, but he certainly knows how to disrupt stereotypes about visual culture (this is the man who championed surf/hip-hop/punk energy of the 90s, and made minimal distinction between imagery from People Magazine and actual artwork in the catalogue for his Posthuman exhibition). I don’t see him blindly equating young people who [purportedly] listen to Snoop Dogg and look at Warhols with theft.

“Los Angeles has a remarkable, young audience who responds to art in a fresh way and wants to get involved,” Deitch said on Tuesday. “Young audience” doesn’t mean the 20-somethings graduating from BFA and MFA programs in SoCal (that demographic will attend MOCA with or without Deitch); it means a graffiti-savvy demographic with street cred.  If he can make that audience MOCA’s audience, he’ll have accomplished something memorable.

Ross Moreno

In its last week at Boots Contemporary Arts Space in St.Louis is the exhibition The 7th Annual Midwestern Assorted Produce Snuff Shorts Film Triennial. The group show consists of video and performance works by the artists Benjamin Bellas, Clinton King, Noelle Mason, Magdalen Wong, Justin Cooper and Ross Moreno, whom often collaborate under the curatorial moniker “i.e.”

The videos on display range from Noelle Mason’s large projection Bob and Weave, that features the artist slap-boxing a much larger male opponent that leaves her bloodied by bouts end, to Magdalen Wong’s and they lived well but we live better which documents the artist entering the translated phrase into the keypad of an ATM during a transaction in Greece.

At the opening there were two performances by artists Justin Cooper and Ross Moreno.  Moreno started the evening off with a bang; dressed in a rainbow clown wig, suspenders and a Speedo, he attempted to break the Guinness World Record for the “Most Balloon Animals Twisted in One Hour.” It became clear during the performance that Moreno was not prepared to accomplish his goal. He struggled to twist balloons into dogs, flowers and other unrecognizable forms. Balloons exploded and deflated flying across the gallery as a timer counted down the hour. At one point he gave up and stormed out, only to be coaxed back by a supportive audience. The tension and frustration built till finally Moreno completely defeated and extremely agitated unleashed his anger toward the spectators. “I twist for tips”, he yelled which made some members of the audience question whether they were supposed to actually tip him money for the performance.

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Synchronicity is a multifaceted art space on Melrose Avenue in the Los Angeles neighborhood of East Hollywood. Bravely (or otherwise, depending on how you feel), they opened their inaugural show at the end of 2008, during the crux of the American economic collapse. Yet Katie Vonderheide and Chris Gere– the diligent duo of the Millenial cohort that run the gallery–remain hopeful and excited about their eclectic program. DailyServing’s Allison Gibson first met the team at the opening of Synchronicity’s show The Sensual World, after a cone of vegan Scoops ice-cream from across the street, and recently caught up with them both again to discuss the surprises and realities of running a gallery, the jam-packed roster of events they host and their convenient location to said ice-cream shop.

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