Society Must Be Defended: June 2008

Sunday, June 29, 2008

WE HAVE MOVED

SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED HAS RELOCATED TO

societymustbedefended.com

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Band of Outsiders Fall 08 highlights

Monday, June 23, 2008

K8 Hardy and Stefan Tcherepnin: Bare Life

Live performance by K8 Hardy with Live music by Stefan Tcherepnin; "Dead Already" curated by Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether at Reena Spaulings.

Group show at Green Naftali including works by:
Bernadette Corporation
Roe Ethridge
Rachel Harrison
Alex Hubbard
Allen Ruppersberg
J. St. Bernard

"Greene Naftali Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition, Payday. Titled after the 1972 film starring Rip Torn as a morally bankrupt country musician, this exhibition brings together artists who share an irreverent attitude toward the boundaries of the mediums and genres in which they work. The artworks exhibited collapse categories within mediums--like the genres in photography (still life, landscape, portraiture) in Roe Ethridge's work--and across mediums such as Allen Ruppersberg's intersection of literature and conceptual art, blending within single works a range of cultural interpretations.

Ethridge will present a new suite of photographs, recombining new and old images--either reproduced in print or exhibited in different contexts, challenging the photo essay format as it moves between different forms of display. Allen Ruppersberg's image/text work in six parts, As the Crow Flies; or How I Miss the Avant-garde, reformats a rejected written proposal he had made for an outdoor sculpture dedicated to the avant-garde practices of Allan Kaprow and Ian Hamilton Finlay. In these prints, recurring visual elements from other projects of Ruppersberg's provide a colorful visual ground on which the rejected text is printed.

The artist collaborative Bernadette Corporation will exhibit three works that utilize salvaged televisions. In one, their own video Hell Frozen Over is presented on a cracked plasma monitor's abstract image, leaving only the sound to be discernable. A second sculptural work leans a pile of large monitors against each other, the top one displaying a still jpeg image of Judy Garland's Hollywood star after a nearby neighborhood fire. The third displays a scratched dvd’s attempt to play. This misuse of the monitors and different techniques of generated on-screen stillness underscores Bernadette Corporation’s history in making video and their interest in the politics of detournment. As with many of the artists in the exhibition, medium takes on an expanded role, even extending to occupy the role of artist/producer. This is noticed in Bernadette Corporation's move from fashion brand to publisher, to artist, and J. St. Bernard, an earlier precedent. Dating back to the late '80s, this artist’s identity has remained elusive, producing painting/sculpture hybrids that mixes abstract brushwork with pop culture references and readymade materials, playfully mimicking sculptural trends and artistic ambition.

The intersection of physical mediums (and its ability to satirize) is also apparent in the work of Rachel Harrison, whose 2006-2008 work, Double Vision, incorporates video projection, assemblage, sound and museological-cum-retail display into a single work. Alex Hubbard's hybrid form of painting, performance, and video coalesce into spatially confounding tabletop videos whose extensive editing and overdubbed sound further blur one’s ability engage the work as medium-defined endeavor."
-Press Release from Green Naftali website

Green Naftali Gallery
Bernadette Corporation
Roe Ethridge

Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns at Tony Shafrazi Gallery

Group show conceived by Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer for Tony Shafrazi Gallery.

NY Times review by Roberta Smith
Tony Shafrazi Gallery
Gavin Brown's Enterprise
Urs Fischer
Wikipedia Entry on Tony Shafrazi

Scotch: Disco Band

Bruno Munari

Libro Illegibile
("The Illegible Book") 1951

"Sedia per Visite Brevissime"
("Seat for Short Visits") 1945

Fork, 1958

"One of the last surviving members of the futurist generation, Bruno Munari has been the enfant terrible of Italian art and design for most of this century. Munari was born in 1907 in Milan and it was against the active background of futurism that his artistic experiments developed, but his mechanical fantasies, practical inventions, and didactic writings continue to be enjoyed by a public that has no memory of Balla, Prampolini, and Marinetti.

Munari's 40-odd books, ranging from futurist manifestoes to design manuals to children's books, have been widely read in many languages. But this book, itself designed by Munari, is the first comprehensive account of his total achievement. Here are the Unreadable Books (that told stories through the possibilities of typography, papermaking, and binding), Traveling Sculptures, Fossils of the Year 2000, Theoretical Reconstruction of Imaginary Objects, Original Xerographies, Negative Positives, and the famous Useless Machines of the 1930s (constructions for wagging the tails of lazy dogs, predicting dawn, making sobs sound musical) as well as numerous other works, some published for the first time.

The hundreds of illustrations, many in full color, recreate Munari's relentless inventiveness, his love of irony, chance and humor, his intensely experimental orientation and constantly fresh approach to new technologies and materials."
-Aldo Tanchis

http://www.dolcevita.com/design/designers/munari2.htm

sukiyaki western django

Notorious cult-film director Takashi Miike's latest film, sukiyaki western django, is a western that takes place in the countryside of japan-turned america. The script is written in english and spoken entirely by actors who do not speak english. The film plays out like a sort of absurd situationist experiment crossed with one of Miike's shock films with plenty of horrible acting and terrible camp. Think Fistful of Dollars meets Takeshi's castle meets Weekend. Also, keep an eye out for Quentin Tarantino's starring role. (does he have to insert himself/co-opt every cult japanese film made in the past 10 years?)

The film screens july 5th at the japan society in NY as part of the new york asian film festival.

Seth Price: Title Variable

Seth Price's project "Title Variable" is made up of four continuous mixes of music. Each mix is comprised of music made at a time when the impact of evolving recording technologies could be clearly heard in the music being produced. The mixes are all available in various formats including vinyl, cassette, cd, and mp3.

As of this moment, "Title Variable" includes the following mixes

Video Game Soundtracks 1983-1987
NJS
Industry
Akademische Graffiti / Unique Source / All Natural Suicide Gang

All of Price's "Title Variable" mixes as well as his most recent 8 hour long mix of dance music is available at

http://www.ubu.com/sound/price.html

Essays on "Title Variable" as well as images of the packaging of the mixes can be found on Seth Price's website amongst a wealth of other information about his work at

http://www.distributedhistory.com/

below is an excerpt about the project from Distributed History as posted by UbuWeb:

"An inquiry into the ways that digital technologies have effected music production, both in popular forms as well as in more rarified modern composition, the project examines a brief but tumultuous history that in 30 years has brought us the sampler, MIDI, cheap synthesizers, the compact disc, personal computers, and the World Wide Web.

In an ongoing series of music compilations, each concentrating on a technologically transitional but culturally ill-defined moment within this recent history, Price suggests how production tools have changed music, both in distribution and who controls it as much as in structure and sound.

These moments so far include the growth of the early video game sound track as a musical form; the "New Jack Swing" era, when pop producers began really tightening their hold on rap and hip hop; the consolidation of experimental Industrial music into beat-oriented dance genres; and the first years of the sampler, when the technology was embodied in machines of such expense that only institutions like university composition labs could afford them.

These compilations have each been released in various audio formats and packaging designs, occasionally with changing titles. Some have been available cheaply in bookstores, museum shops, or on the internet, while others have been self-published or produced as limited art editions. As an accompaniment to each, Price has written an essay on the music in question and published it in a magazine. These pieces take rough cues from the music, and range in style from the tersely schematic to the base journalistic to the more abstractly theoretical.

As a mass form operating outside commercial channels, the mix tape seems to stubbornly and perversely retain its purchase on the imagination long after actual mix-tapes have slipped free of storage constraints and lost any clear definition. This is evident in recent aggregation phenomena such as "celebrity play lists", consumer my-favorite-genre lists posted to shopping sites, podcasts, or mixes freely available on specialist file-sharing blogs (which themselves often focus on musical moments presented as obscure or lost; these sites must be seen as generously redemptive gestures).

The need for such gentle but total recommendation, i.e. a packaging with no form, a package constituted mainly of taste, has always been with us, but seems only to increase with the decline of previously important guideposts like the music video, the niche radio station, and, above all, physical packaging itself." - Distributed History

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Carsick Cars

If this band was american they would be everywhere right now. An awesome, very classic shoe-gaze-y/golden era post-punk sound from a contemporary band from beijing. They just opened for sonic youth and released a self titled album. One of the better cds I have heard in a while.
Shitty quality youtube video, myspace stuff is much better but this is still good:

http://www.myspace.com/carsickcars

Friday, June 20, 2008

Ponytail: Ice Cream Spiritual

Baltimore noise rock duo Ponytail has a new album out this week on We Are Free. The guitarist from Ecstatic Sunshine's relentless prowess shows no sign of diminishing,and combined with the album's ferocious drumming, awesome ethereal vocals and just altogether sleek sensibility, this is one worthy of play at your next tribal dance party. They are playing basements and lofts all over the northeast this summer, with shows in brooklyn just about every single weekend.

Listen and pick up the album: http://www.myspace.com/jreamteam

Night Wraps the Sky

"Mayakovsky as better known as a person, as an action, as an event."
Night Wraps the Sky-Writings by and about Mayakovsky, a newly translated volume of poetry edited by filmmaker Michael Almereyda (perhaps best known for his modern dress adaptation of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke), serves as part biography, part anthology, part manifesto. Mayakovsky, perhaps Russia's greatest Futurist poet, is here shown as perhaps best deserved: madman, artist, troubled youth (he committed suicide at 35), poet, and thug. We are presented with an image of Mayakovsky refracted through eye-witness account, memoir, biography, his own poetry and the poetry of others, leaving one, ultimately, dumbstruck.
http://us.macmillan.com/nightwrapsthesky