At this year’s SCOPE Miami Contemporary Art Show, duo Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw present Sweat Shoppe, their multimedia performance group.  Situated in an open and inviting space outside of the booth environment, the Sweat Shoppe’s interactive installation space hosts local bands, DJs and live performances each day of the SCOPE Miami Art Show -  combining art, music and technology in an innovative and accessible way.  The performance aspect of Levy and Blake’s Sweat Shoppe showcases the artists’ creation dubbed ‘video painting’.  Video painting allows Levy and Blake to ‘paint’ video anywhere they choose – temporarily marking architectural surfaces with their video images.

In the context of SCOPE, visitors are given the opportunity to use rollers to video paint – revealing through each stroke a video image projected onto the wall.  Video painting was created by the artists through their own specially designed software used in combination with other elements such as light projection and roller paint implements rigged with a button that triggers LED.  It may be difficult to understand the technological complexities of Levy and Shaw’s video painting creation, but participating in the performance is simple.

SCOPE International Contemporary Art Show is a large, global contemporary art fair that supports innovation and work in new media.  SCOPE can also be found annually in New York, London, Basel and the Hamptons.  SCOPE Miami Art Show is on through 6 December 2009.

On view until January 3, 2010 the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents its most ambitious group show since its grand opening six years ago. Curated by Anthony Huberman, For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there starts with the premise that art is not a code that needs cracking. Celebrating the experience of not-knowing and unlearning, the artists in this exhibition understand the world in speculative terms, eager to keep art separate from explanation. Embracing a spirit of curiosity, this show is dedicated to the playfulness of being in the dark.

Among the works included are Sarah Crowner’s re-insertion into circulation of the two issues of the 1917 journal The Blind Man (edited by Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood), offering copies on sale at the museum’s front desk at the publication’s original cover price of 10 and 15 cents. Additionally, In search of an explanation of a painting, Marcel Broodthaers interviews his cat in a recording from 1970 in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Nashashibi/Skaer (Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer) contribute their 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006),  whereby the artists wander through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the lights off, using a strobe light to briefly illuminate portions of small sculptural statues and vessels, as if the long story of the Metropolitan was reduced to a series of short poetic haikus.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, 2009, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NYC

The Institute for Contemporary Art/ Boston (ICA) is currently showing artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s latest work, …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project.  This installation is comprised of light projection and sound and runs on a 7 minute loop – occupying three gallery walls.  The work envelopes the viewer in darkness, which is only broken by the sequence of windows projected near the ceiling.

Sound is by far the most important element of the work as it transports the visitor to an unknown Iraqi interior and to an imagined instance of war’s devastation.  Initially, innocuous sounds of daily life fill the room while noises from a booming market and the chants of an imam can be heard from outdoors.  American Humvees then arrive outside and soldiers subsequently shout commands and communicate with base.  Tensions are raised further as a dog is hit and automatic gunfire sounds.  Exterior destruction is only partially visible as the window projections are broken by bullets and black smoke can be seen rising behind them.  After the Humvees drive off, Iraqi women are heard crying and wailing at an increasing volume until the loop concludes.

OUT OF HERE:  The Veterans Project evokes the uncertainty and devastation of war while allowing for an internal and imaginative viewing experience.  Content demands visual restraint in this work because the complexity and terror of war cannot be visually summarized in an adequate way.  The use of limited visuals and overwhelming sound is arguably a more effective reflection of the opacity and confusion of the war in Iraq for those that have not experienced it firsthand.  The visual spareness of the piece underscores our inability to fully understand the horrors that soldiers experience and subsequently internalize.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, …OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, 2009, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, NYC

Wodiczko’s depiction of wartime Iraq is the result of consultation with Iraq War veterans, medics and refugees as well as from the study of audio and visual recordings of his contacts’ wartime experiences.  It must be seen as an attempt to increase dialogue and acknowledgement for the human impact of current US wars, particularly on soldiers that have returned home.  Wodiczko – born in the midst of World War II and also a former soldier in the Polish army – has taken keen interest in the impact of the United States’ current wars and the proliferation of the oft-isolated veteran figure.  The artist has treated veterans prominently in recent work such as Veterans’  Flame (2009) on New York’s Governor’s Island and the Veteran Vehicle Project (2008).  Wodiczko states in a recent Boston Globe article by Sebastian Smee that he hopes such work ‘provide[s] an opportunity for veterans to open up and to hear what is happening to them’.

Krzysztof Wodiczko is an established contemporary artist well known for his many large-scale outdoor light projections onto buildings and monuments that articulate a variety of social problems.  In the artist’s own words, (quoted in Smee’s article) his work ‘is on the side of those that have less access to rights than others’.  Such relevant and socially-engaged work led to his being awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 1999 and the College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work in 2004.

Krzysztof Wodiczko currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.  Past works include Homeless Vehicle (1988-1989), the ICA/Boston-commissioned Bunker Hill Monument Projection (1998) and the Hiroshima Projection (1999).  Wodiczko represented his native Poland at this summer’s 2009 Venice Biennale with Guests – a work that examined the existence of the economic migrant and non-citizen in Europe.  Wodiczko is also the Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the head of the Interrogative Design Group.

…OUT OF HERE:  The Veterans Project was realized in part through the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and will remain at the ICA/Boston through 28 March 2010.

Come Hither Noise at Fremantle Art Centre in Perth, Australia is an exhibition of sound-based works, which aims to highlight connections between aural, spatial and visual perception. Curator Jasmin Stephens argues that media and even sensory distinctions are growing increasingly arbitrary in contemporary art. In this exhibition she presents a selection of works which are both noisy and resolutely visual, designed to heighten the audience’s experience of both senses. Come Hither Noise features visual artists working alongside composers, producing aural environments which encroach on the musical, but this is not easy listening.

Composer Thomas Meadowcroft’s Monaro Eden references two icons of Australian culture: the Holden Monaro, an engine-heavy muscle car that subjugated the roadways from 1969 to 1982, and twentieth century artist Rosalie Gascoigne, specifically her 1989 work Monaro. Meadowcroft’s installation alludes to Gascoigne’s process of assemblage by sampling the revving engine of a Monaro and layering it with Sine tones, producing a humming aural landscape which the audience can navigate, when seated, by pressing foot pedals which alter the volume of the tones. The artist likens this process to “a Sunday drive” there is no great logic to it: some key musical destinations are dictated by the arrangement of the engine sounds but otherwise listeners are free to hear their own ways through the installation.

Richard Crow’s Imaginary Hospital Radio plays upon the ostensibly therapeutic role of the hospital radio station by injecting bloodless muzak with a form of medical waste the incidental soundscape of the body subjected to surgical technology. The accompanying image is from the archives of the Moorfields Eye Hospital where Crow was treated as a child. Imaginary Hospital Radio was broadcast on ABC Classic FM’s New Music Up Late on Saturday 29 August.

The exhibition also includes Mark Brown (Aus),John Conomos (Aus), Ross Manning (Aus), (Aus/GER), Elvis Richardson (Aus), Sam Smith (Aus), Sriwhana Spong (NZ).

Come Hither Noise is presented as part of the 9th Totally Huge New Music Festival in association with Tura New Music, 10-20 September 2009.

Denver-based sound artist Jim Green currently has a solo presentation in the Project Gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, CO. Thematically, the new work on view, titled Unplugged, investigates the discomfort we feel in public spaces when confronted with private issues, and the practiced reactions we impel when met with such taboo circumstances. Okay, Unplugged is essentially about the sound farts make. And it’s reported that visitors to the show are actually having fun at a museum viewing this work of contemporary art–a grievously unique event, I would lament. Green displays the knee-slapping song of a grid of colorful Whoopee Cushions with almost medical precision, like so many oxygen tanks humming mechanically in a hospital corridor. What Denver area appreciators refer to as their “local hero”’s genius,” is a marked attempt at defying the ideal that art and humor (especially humor that can be purchased in a bin from the 99 Cents Store) are not mutually exclusive. If you are unable to make it to Denver this week, there is a video of the installation found here.

Jim Green holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Minnesota (1970) and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Colorado (1978). He was two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Media Arts. Sight-specific commissions of his work are installed in cities throughout the United States, including Laughing Escalator at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver and Singing Sinks in the restrooms of the Denver Art Museum, CO. As part of the exhibition Extended Remix at MCA Denver, his outdoor installation Affirmative Greetings welcomed unassuming passers-bye with compliments and wishes for a nice day, while Courtesy Phone, a red telephone, inconspicuously installed on the gallery wall, connected anybody who picked up the receiver to the artist’s cell phone.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Murder of Crows is currently at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art). This mixed media sound installation is set within the Museum’s historic hall, which was once part of a 19th century train station terminal. The gallery visitor enters this hall by passing through heavy red curtains to encounter a bold cacophony of sound. The impressive, yet stark setting underscores the intensely physical experience of listening to Cardiff and Miller’s 30 minute-long audial composition.

The Murder of Crows was inspired by Franciso de Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. This inspiration is manifest in the irrational and terrifying dreams Cardiff’s voice describes through a centrally-placed megaphone. The sound of birds flying and squawking, in addition to other soundscapes, help to further articulate the stories. The artist’s spoken voice is interpolated by both booming and soft musical compositions, often accompanied by singing. The almost mournful tone of the piece is inspired by the concept of the ‘crow funeral’, in which crows mourn the deaths of fellow crows by gathering and cawing around the deceased.

Listening replaces looking in what amounts to an incredibly visceral gallery experience.

The Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller currently live and work in both Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada and Berlin, Germany. Their work as been shown internationally since the 1990s. The Murder of Crows, currently the artists’ largest-ever sound installation, was first commissioned for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. It was brought to Berlin as a part of the Musikwerke Bildender Kunstler (Works of Music by Visual Artists) series and is on at the Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin through 17 May 2009.