20 Sunday Nov 2022
Posted in 2022, Amsterdam, art, conceptual art, dutch, journalism, landscape
20 Saturday Aug 2022
Posted in 2022, conceptual art, NYC, photography
Tags
art, christmas, journa;ism, Karthik, m.t., manhattan, Metropolitan, Modern, MOMA, mtk, Museum, new, NYC, Opera, photos, side, street, streets, trees, upper, xmas, york
This post is like a Table of Contents. It’s a meta-post of links to photojournalistic blogposts of my trip to New York six months ago, amidst the Omicron wave of Covid in Manhattan, for five days in late January. The links are in chronological order, and refer back progressively, like chapters about my trip.
Wednesday
I was able to film as we approached on the afternoon of January 19th, flying into New York City.
Later that night I took Tom to the Metropolitan Opera to see Quinn Kelsey perform Rigoletto.
Thursday
The next morning it dropped thirty degrees and snowed. I spent two hours at the Museum of Modern Art catching the last days of exhibitions of work by Joseph E. Yoakum, Sophie Teauber-Arp and others.
The streets were weirdly quiet and absent of crowds – like I have never seen Manhattan before, even in the heart of winter. New York was dead.
That afternoon and evening I hung out at Summit One Vanderbilt, which was exceptional. Because I purchased the afternoon Premium ticket, the sunset ticket, with access to the elevator to the summit, I was able to hang out in the bar all evening, where I was joined in conversation and fun by rotating groups of tourists (wonderful conversations atop Manhattan), and the elevator to the highest viewpoint was amazing.
Friday
… was in the 30’s.
I hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see Surrealism Beyond Borders, which surprised me.
Saturday
had a perfect breakfast sandwich at Chez Nick in Yorkville, a place to which I returned – delicious spot over there. It was the week that people were putting their Christmas trees out for pick up. Many people and hotels instead, turned them into decorative features in front of their buildings.
Sunday
January 23rd was my chance by appointment only to catch the last days of the chronological exhibition on the ramps of the Guggenheim, Kandinsky at the Gugg. That was, quite frankly, an excellent exhibition.
Five days in Manhattan: Opera. Museums. Observation Bar. Streets. and tossed out Xmas trees – Lakshmi-auntie would approve.
That’s for New York.
Love,
mtk
21 Friday Jan 2022
Posted in 2022, art, journal entries, journalism, NYC
Tags
Aime, Alberto, Aleksander, Alexander, Andre, art, Beyond, Boghossian, Borders, Cesaire, Dorothea, Giacometti, Greil, Harue, Helen, Joans, Joyce, Karthik, Koga, Lipstick, Lundeberg, m.t., Magritte, Mansour, Marcus, Metropolitan, mtk, Museum, Oelze, Penrose, Rene, Roger, situationists, Skundar, Surrealism, surrealists, Suzanne, Tanning, Ted, Traces
Everybody in my generation remembers chapter ten of the late great Greil Marcus’ book, Lipstick Traces, which came out my senior year of university (1989). Chapter ten dealt with the birth of the situationists, via the Easter Sunday performance at Notre Dame in 1950. Marcus wrote that the Surrealists, then ensconced figures in the art world in Europe and New York, claimed the act as that of their protégés, while the artists themselves rejected the notion. Surrealism was over.
The distinction between the situationists and the Surrealists and Dada was for us, an awesome thing to consider that way. The grandparents crowed about them and they rejected their successful grandparents. As a result of being educated from that perspective – a college kid looking at the 1950’s and learning from Marcus how this was a part of the birth of punk – my perception of Surrealism was, if not tainted, at least given greater contrast.
A bunch of us 20-year-olds in the early 90’s became fascinated by the situationists and DeBord. We were watching as they built the cities into grand stages for the Spectacle all throughout that decade. The Millennium was the Spectacle. Until it was 9/11. Everything DeBord foresaw was right in front of us. They even pulled down a few.
<<Flash Forward to 2022>>
If you want to call Booklyn, a fine arts collective dedicated to book arts, you dial my first number in New York. I was romantic about DeBord back then and so refused traditional entry into the group (or any group), but participated in its birth and establishment in Brooklyn in its early days. Booklyn is why many artists I know are in important collections around the country and the world. The collaboration was good and became incredibly important after September eleventh.
I called Booklyn when I dropped in to NYC and Marshall Weber called me back promptly. He chastised me for coming to town to support businesses that Booklyn would be protesting. He included the MOMA and the Met and the Opera. I didn’t bother to mention I was going to the Gugg the next day.
It is to say, the Metropolitan and MOMA have a labor problem. They have a diversity problem. They have a problem reframing the collections in the era of Black Lives Matter and MeToo and LGBTQ+ rights.
The Joseph E. Yoakum retrospective at MOMA I attended the day before and the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition I would be attending today were trying to address the issue: the Yoakum show was directly engaging a Black artist and the Metropolitan’s Surrealism Beyond Borders attempted to show how Surrealism was embraced by diverse groups of people around the world in various states of revolution. It sought to internationalize and radicalize visitors’ perception of Surrealism. It was closing at the end of the month. I went.
Sidenote: Again, I had to schedule a time for my visit as the museum attempted to encourage social distancing by timing the number of entrants. The temperature was in the 30’s and I was fully bundled up.
Only trouble is there was no coat check! Yet another victim of the pandemic was a coat check for all your winter gear when visiting the museums. It was hot inside and we visitors all had to lug all this winter gear around, ha!
Of particular interest to me was the area dedicated to Black Surrealists. I did not know how deeply Aime Cesaire had embraced Surrealism. Originals of his journal Tropiques (1941)
and Retorno al Pais Natal were a thrill to see.
The influence of Surrealism was apparent.
a quote from Suzanne Cesaire summarizes the cross-pollination
was also very deeply touched by this portrait of Charlie Parker by Black Canadian-American Surrealist Ted Joans, entitled Bird Lives! (1968)
But there was so much more from around the world. This shocking work, entitled Tagliche Drangsale (Daily Torments) by the oft-forgotten German Surrealist painter Richard Oelze (1900 – 1980), was painted a year after the National Socialists assumed power in Germany, (1934)
There was this brilliant Giacometti
Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian was an Ethiopian-Armenian painter and art teacher. He spent much of his life living and working in the United States. He was one of the first, and by far the most acclaimed, contemporary Black artists from the African continent to gain international attention. Here’s his Night Flight of Dread and Delight, Skundar Boghossian, (1964).
The Southern California artist, Helen Lundeberg, often credited for movement to Post-Surrealist work, was represented here in a Surrealist painting – Plant and Animal Analogies, (1934 -35).
And an early Surrealist work by the American painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer, Dorothea Tanning – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, (1943).
Roger Penrose was included with this sculpture, entitled The Last Voyage of Captain Cook, (1936-7)
It was my first time seeing the Exquisite Corpse in person.
And this great Magritte, I was born the year he died, you know.
And one of my all-time favorites
Salvador Dali’s Lobster telephone
There was much more to consider in the exhibition, website here.
But one piece stood out amongst the many I saw in my first visit to museums since the coronavirus pandemic struck. It was an obscure sculpture made of nails and sponge by French artist Joyce Mansour and it was entitled Objet Mechant, which means Nasty Object. It looks shockingly like the nastiest respiratory virus in human history. Yet it was made 50 years before Covid-19 struck.
Pretty good exhibition. so says I.
20 Thursday Jan 2022
Tags
abstract, Arp, art, chicago, concrete, drawings, e, Exhibition, geometric, Joseph, Karthik, landscapes, m.t., marionettes, Modern, mtk, Museum, new, NYC, paintings, Sophie, Swiss, Taeuber, Taeuber-Arp, Yoakum, york
When I awoke on Thursday the 20th of January of this year, the temperature in the city had dropped thirty degrees from the previous afternoon when I arrived. It was 14°F and snowing. It would be my first day walking around in Manhattan. I wasn’t ready for twenty blocks in that. It’d warm up later, but to make my museum time I’d have to take a cab.
Protocols of the pandemic required me to buy tickets not only to attend the opera, but the museums as well. A week earlier, I had made the first available appointment at MOMA, set for 10am, expressly to see the last week of the Joseph E. Yoakum retrospective exhibition.
The thinking was to let small groups in, separated by twenty or thirty minutes to reduce crowding and encourage social distancing. We were all masked, vaccinated and boosted, also by protocol. All visitors had to make appointments and book time slots.
My cabbie, Abdullah, turned down WBAI on the radio to talk about how things are in Manhattan, now. Of course he didn’t live in Manhattan, he couldn’t afford it. It was becoming not even worth it to come to town because nobody was around to flag cabs.
He told me he sees no one in the streets except cabbies and delivery drivers or riders. He said nobody goes outside – they ordered everything to come to them. It had been like that for more than a year. “You have to be a millionaire to live in the city. It’s a city only for the rich,” he said, “We used to call Fifth Avenue Millionaire’s Row, now we have Billionaire’s Row.”
Abdullah was referring to the new skyscrapers at the southern end of Central Park, like Steinway Tower, 11 West 57th, on the most expensive street in the world. When you consider the building’s height-to-width ratio, it’s the world’s skinniest skyscraper. The 1,428-foot tower is 24 times as tall as it is wide, with only one residence on each floor.
I saw the Billionaires Row skyscrapers briefly from the plane, but the skinny skyscrapers were, in fact, a little difficult to spot from street level.
Later in the day I’d be seeing them again from above. I had booked the sunset premiere ticket to see the new gallery of windows and mirrors floating above the city that had just opened the previous month – the observation floors of One Summit Vanderbilt.
From the street, though, I only got one decent shot of Steinway Tower on my walk that day.
When Abdullah and I arrived at MOMA, truly lovely tiny snowflakes fell swirling on a light breeze – light, pretty flakes that didn’t stick, just fell and in a few seconds disappeared. I joined the line awaiting in front, yielding my space under cover to an older couple since I had my peacoat and hat.
The flecks of white intermittently caught on the coat and disappeared as we made small talk, masked, in the light snow awaiting the Museum of Modern Art to open on a Thursday morning. They came in from Princeton, where they lived. She had once been a docent at the MOMA. We chatted about NFTs, art, and compared NYC and San Francisco now to times past in the lightly falling snow until the museum let us in.
Joseph E. Yoakum at MOMA
I had read about Joseph E. Yoakum and the retrospective exhibit at MOMA in The New Yorker and it sounded fascinating and inspiring. I mean who was this guy, who suddenly appeared on the art scene wholly composed as an exhibiting visual artist at the age of 76?
At the age of 55, I find myself running out of steam. Dad died and I handled it. My kid is grown and doesn’t want anything to do with me. Almost nobody reads my stuff or appreciates my art. Certainly far less than when I was at my peak. I keep making and writing because I have always done so, independent of an audience, but I grow weary of ignonimity. And here’s this guy … in his 70’s!
Joseph Elmer Yoakum (February 22, ca. 1890 – December 25, 1972) was a self-taught landscape artist of African-American and possibly Native American descent, who drew landscapes in a highly individual style. He was 76 when he started to record his memories in the form of imaginary landscapes, and he produced over 2,000 drawings during the last decade of his life.
They are mostly of small dimension, done with pen, pencil, ink and have scripted titles.
Yoakum started drawing familiar places, such as Green Valley Ashville Kentucky, as a method to capture his memories. However, he shifted towards imaginary landscapes in places he had never visited, like Mt Cloubelle of West India or Mt Mowbullan in Dividing Range near Brisbane Australia.
Drawing outlines with a ballpoint pen, rarely making corrections, he colored his drawings within the lines using watercolors and pastels. He became known for his organic forms, always using two lines to designate land masses.
It was a great show. I am glad I caught it. Afterward, I spent a couple of hours catching up with stuff on rotation from the permanent collection.
Saw a guy contemplating a Pollock
I also caught the last days of an exhibition of the work of Sophie Tauber-Arp, which was remarkable.
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp (19 January 1889 – 13 January 1943) was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer. Born in 1889, in Switzerland, the daughter of a pharmacist, the family moved to Germany when she was two years old.
Some years later she began attending art schools, and moved back to Switzerland during the First World War. At an exhibition in 1915, she met for the first time the German-French artist Hans/Jean Arp, whom she married shortly after. It was during these years that they became associated with the Dada movement, which emerged in 1916, and Taeuber-Arp’s most famous works – Dada Head (Tête Dada; 1920) – date from these years.
Cross on Red Ground (tablecloth) 1924, wool
The weaving was first created for use as a tablecloth, to be seen from above and circumnavigated. In 1926, in an essay in Das Werk, the journal of Swiss Werkbound, an association of designers, the architect Hannes Meyer singled it out as representative of the “new world of forms,” that artists were creating for modern life.
Equilibrium 1934, oil on canvas
Taeuber-Arp’s circles seem to hover over, perch on, or fall from the black lines. The green circle on the right appears to have been tossed in the air toward the edge of the canvas, directed by the skewed truncated line below it. Taeuber-Arp spoke of spoke of such play of circular forms in her work as boulisme (balls) or Petanque. The shapes seem to react to one another creating dynamic designs that give the impression of a freeze frame in an abstract film where the action has been temporarily arrested.
There was stained glass work that pursued the same geometric themes.
In the winter of 1918, Tauber-Arp was commissioned to produce marionettes and stage sets for an adaptation of the 18th-century play King Stag. These were particularly amazing.
Museum curator Laura Braverman wrote:
The marionettes broke away from folk traditions in puppet making, in that puppets at the time were supposed to be as lifelike as possible. You were not supposed to see the way in which they were made, but Taeuber-Arp really left all of that visible.
Curator Lynda Zycherman added, “What is, I think, unusual is the shapes themselves depicting human bodies in geometric ways. The face painting is extraordinary. Sophie Taeuber-Arp traced the shapes in pencil and then painted in between the lines. And if you look closely at most of the facial features, you can actually still make out the pencil lines.”
The Arps moved to France in 1926, where they stayed until the invasion of France during the Second World War, at the event of which they went back to Switzerland. In 1943, Sophie Taeuber-Arp died in an accident with a leaking gas stove.
Despite being overlooked since her death she is considered one of the most important artists of concrete art and geometric abstraction of the 20th century.
mtk and yoko say …
13 Wednesday Dec 2017
Posted in conceptual art, short film
29 Wednesday Nov 2017
23 Thursday Nov 2017
Posted in Commentary, conceptual art, short film
24 Saturday Nov 2012
Posted in Oakland
Tags
3-D, art, bar, california, carving, craft, hobbyist, layer, machined, McGee's, oakland, tool, Wood
apparently there was a machine they sold in the 70’s that allowed one to cut into wood to create layers. Craft machines for hobbyists were popular in those days: rock tumblers, plasticizing half-dome machines and etc.
I’ve never seen the wood carving one, but this guy in the neighborhood of McGee’s in Oakland made a pretty good rendering of the bar from across the street, saw it last week, my first time in this Oakland neighborhood spot.
16 Friday Nov 2012
Posted in installations, journalism, mural, S.F., sculpture
Tags
1934, 1985, 5th, An, art, bloody, Bordoise, contract, Injury, July, Longshoremen, memorial, Mission, one, public, san francisco, sculpture, sf, Sperry, Steuart, Steuert, street, strike, Thursday, to, union
Public art to commemorate “Bloody Thursday” at the corner of Mission and Steuart Streets in San Francisco. The four-day general strike in SF in the summer of 1934 led to unionization of all the West Coast ports of the United States:
37° 47.602′ N, 122° 23.593′ W
Painted in 1985 by an artist’s collective, this mural-sculpture was placed by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union near the previous memorial, this plaque:
When the Hotel Vitale was built in 2004, the sculpture and plaque were moved a short distance and re-erected, with the plaque now mounted on the wall of the hotel. (Source)
The strike began on May 9, 1934 as longshoremen in every West Coast port walked out; sailors joined them several days later. The employers recruited strikebreakers, housing them on moored ships or in walled compounds and bringing them to and from work under police protection.
Strikers attacked the stockade housing strikebreakers in San Pedro on May 15; two strikers were shot and killed by the employers’ private guards. Similar battles broke out in San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. Strikers also succeeded in slowing down or stopping the movement of goods by rail out of the ports.
The Roosevelt administration tried again to broker a deal to end the strike, but the membership twice rejected the agreements their leadership brought to them. The employers then decided to make a show of force to reopen the port in San Francisco.
On Tuesday, July 3, fights broke out along the Embarcadero in San Francisco between police and strikers while a handful of trucks driven by young businessmen made it through the picket line.
After a quiet Fourth of July the employers’ organization, the Industrial Association, tried to open the port even further on Thursday, July 5.
As spectators watched from Rincon Hill, the police shot tear gas canisters into the crowd, then followed with a charge by mounted police. Picketers threw the canisters and rocks back at the police, who charged again, sending the picketers into retreat after a third assault. Each side then refortified and took stock.
The events took a violent turn that afternoon, as hostilities resumed outside of the ILA the kitchen. Eyewitness accounts differ on the exact events that transpired next. Some witnesses saw a group of strikers first surround a police car and attempt to tip it over, prompting the police to fire shotguns in the air, and then revolvers at the crowd.
One of the policemen then fired a shotgun into the crowd, striking three men in intersection of Steuart and Mission streets. One of the men, Howard Sperry, a striking longshoreman, later died of his wounds. Another man, Charles Olsen, was also shot but later recovered from his wounds. A third man, Nick Bordoise—an out of work cook who had been volunteering at the ILA strike kitchen—was shot but managed to make his way around the corner onto Spear Street, where he was found several hours later. Like Sperry, he died at the hospital.
Strikers immediately cordoned off the area where the two picketers had been shot, laying flowers and wreaths around it. Police arrived to remove the flowers and drive off the picketers minutes later. Once the police left, the strikers returned, replaced the flowers and stood guard over the spot. Though Sperry and Bordoise had been shot several blocks apart, this spot became synonymous with the memory of the two slain men and “Bloody Thursday.”
As strikers carried wounded picketers into the ILA union hall police fired on the hall and lobbed tear gas canisters at nearby hotels. At this point someone reportedly called the union hall to ask “Are you willing to arbitrate now?” (Source for text: wikipedia)
“An Injury to One is an Injury to All”
05 Thursday Jul 2012
Posted by mtk | Filed under photography, S.F.
05 Thursday Jul 2012
Posted in mural, photography, S.F.
14 Thursday Jun 2012
Posted in conceptual art, NYC, performance
29 Tuesday May 2012
Posted in artists books, collage, North Oakland
12 Saturday May 2012
Posted in North Oakland, photography, S.F.
17 Friday Feb 2012
Posted in Asia, Japan, photography, S.F., sculpture
17 Friday Feb 2012
Posted in Asia, installations, Japan, our son, S.F., short film
03 Saturday Oct 2009
Posted in collage, installations, MTKinstalls, North Oakland
11 Wednesday Apr 2007
Posted in art, Asia, Commentary, conceptual art, India, talks, Tamil Coast
Tags
after, agree, art, Auroson, auroville, before, contemporary, culture, India, Karthik, lecture, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, po-mo, show, slide, talk, we
After Po-Mo and Before We Agree
art talk by M.T. Karthik
Auroville, India 2007
Begin with the piece on The End of Post-Modernism, October 1999. (pause)
But I thik that Giulianis comment, as ignorant and political as it may have been, is indicative of the feeling at the end of the 20th century. Arthur Danto had written The Death of Art in 1994, the century was limping to an end.
*******K Foundation
On 23 August 1994, the K Foundation (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burnt one million pounds sterling in cash on the Scottish island of Jura. This money represented the bulk of the K Foundation’s funds, earned by Drummond and Cauty as The KLF, one of the United Kingdom‘s most successful pop groups of the early 1990s. The duo have never fully explained their motivations for the burning.
The incineration was recorded on a Hi-8 video camera by K Foundation collaborator Gimpo. In August 1995, the film—Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid[1]—was toured around the British Isles, with Drummond and Cauty engaging each audience in debate about the burning and its meaning. In November 1995, the duo pledged to dissolve the K Foundation and to refrain from public discussion of the burning for a period of 23 years.
A book—K Foundation Burn A Million Quid, edited and compiled by collaborator Chris Brook —was published by ellipsis Books in 1997, compiling stills from the film, accounts of events and viewer reactions. The book also contains an image of a single house brick that was manufactured from the fire’s ashes.
last year I was with Matthew Higgs
Matthew Higgs is director of White Columns in New York. He is also associate director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, England. He has organized more than forty exhibitions, including To Whom It May Concern and Reality Check: Painting in the Exploded Field at the CCA Wattis Institute. A regular contributor to Artforum, Higgs has written for many catalogs and other publications. As an artist, he is represented by Murray Guy in New York and Anthony Wilkinson Gallery in London.
But I think that the socio-political scene drove arts to find new ways to seek new materials and do things that Rudolph Giuliani could do but which are still art. and to communicate ideas through mass media.
I am going to talk about a few different places and people I have met and known in San Francisco, New York, Japan. India and elsewhere and let you see some work here and get an idea of what is being made and by whom.
It is interesting to me that the Venice Bienale opened today is it and I didn’t go to the site to see who is in it or whatever. I wanted to try to construct this talk from – as Auroson suggested – my own experiences of art and artists.
Vik Muniz (Brazil, 1961) is an avant-garde artist who experiments with novel media. For example, he made two detailed replicas of Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa: one out of jelly and the other out of peanut butter. He has also worked in sugar, wire, thread, and Bosco Chocolate Syrup, out of which he produced a recreation of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Many of Muniz’s works are new approaches to older pieces; he has reinterpreted a number of Monet‘s paintings, including paintings of the cathedral at Rouen, which Muniz accomplished using small clumps of pignment sprinkled onto a flat surface.
Vik Muniz’s use of materials is more than a result of aesthetic decisions alone. In his picture of Sigmund Freud, for example, he uses chococlate to render the image. The photograph is printed in such high resolution that one can almost taste the material from which the image is made. In this sense, Muniz is refering to Freud’s theory of the oral stage. Likewise, because of the chocolate’s viscosity and visual similarity to excrement there is an allusion to Freud’s anal stage as well. This conceptual framing of matter is also apparent in his Sugar Children series. In this body of work, Muniz went to a sugar plantation in Brazil to photograph children of laborers who work there. He made the images from the sugar at the plantation. The differential in value between the wages of the laborers, and the fluctuating cost of sugar in the international market as well the price for the photograph, reveal much about geopoltics, global/local economics, and the art world.
Vik Muniz works with the syntax of photography, hut his images are not simply photographic. As Vince Aletti pointed out in the Village Voice, “[Muniz] has teased the medium mercilessly and with an infectious glee. He makes pictures of pictures — sly, punning documents that subvert photography by forcing it to record not the natural world but a fiction, a simulation.” (left: Action Photo (After Hans Namuth), 1997, 60 x 48 inches, Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton, Los Angeles)
Born in 1961, Muniz grew up in Sao Paulo, Brazil where he studied advertising, a field which he acknowledges,”made me aware of the dichotomy between an object and its images.” After he moved to New York in 1983, Muniz made sculptures which he documented in photographs, then began incorporating photographs in his sculptural installations. He discovered that what interested him most was the representation of objects rather than the objects themselves, the dislocation between expectation and fact, representation and reality.
Muniz’s pictures are illusions that draw from the language of visual culture, but they twist and redefine our perception of both the commonplace and the fantastical. His images humorously, as well as critically challenge our ability to discern fact from fiction, reality from appearance. Utilizing a range of unorthodox materials — granulated sugar, chocolate syrup, tomato sauce, thread, wire, cotton, soil — Muniz first creates an image, sculpturally manipulates it, then photographs it. Whether a portrait, landscape, still life, or iconic image from history, Muniz’s works are never what they seem.
More recently he has been creating larger-scale works, such as pictures carved into the earth (geoglyphs) or made of huge piles of junk. His sense of humor comes through in his “Pictures of Clouds” series, in which he had a skywriter draw cartoon outlines of clouds in the sky.
Surasi Kusolwong
born in 1965 in Ayutthaya, Thailand. In 1987 he received his BFA from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and in 1993 he received his MFA from Hochshule für Bildender Künst, Braunshweig, Germany. Kusolwong’s artistic practice includes installation and performance-based work and, since 1996, he has concocted variations on market settings where inexpensive, mass-produced, Thai-manufactured goods are sold for a nominal fee.
The artist has shown widely in Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. Solo exhibitions include Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA), Milwaukee, WI; Arte all’Arte (Arte Continua project), Casole d’Elsa, Italy; Fri-Art Centre D’Art Contemporain Kunsthalle, Fribourg, and Art & Public Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland. Group exhibitions include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Hayward Gallery, London, England; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Academia de Francia/Villa Médicis, Rome, Italy; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Pusan Metropolitan Museum of Art, Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea; Edsvik Art & Culture Center, Sollentuna, Sweden. Kusolwong has exhibited in many biennales including the 2001 Berlin Biennale, Germany; Transfert, 2001 Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, Biel, Switzerland; Kwangju Biennale 2000, Korea; Taipei Biennale 2000, Taiwan; Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; and the 1997 Vienna Secession, Austria
Lu Jie was born in Fujian, China in 1964. He holds a BFA from the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou and an MA from the Creative Curating Program in Goldsmiths College, University of London. Lu Jie has curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions internationally including the Chinese presentation at the 2005 Prague Biennale and the 2005 Yokohama Triennale. He is the founder of the Long March Foundation in New York, and the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing. Over the past six years, Lu Jie has been concentrating his efforts to produce The Long March – a Walking Visual Display which was exhibited in National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, 2004 Shanghai Biennale, 2004 Taipei Biennale and will be exhibited in 2005 Yokohama Triennale, Vancouver Art Gallery and the next Asia Pacific Triennale.
Long March Capital – Visual Economies of TransMedia
Initiated in 1999, carried out on the historical Long March route in 2002, and returning to Beijing from where we are still marching locally and internationally today, the Long March is a multifaceted and complex art project in which the journeys through the realities of different social locations, contexts, and dimensions are part of a process of artistic experience and creation. The Long March’s approach to new media, therefore, extends beyond the faculties of technology, rather looking at the metaphor of the Long March as a medium and methodology in which creative expression can arise. In this regard, the Long March acts not only as an art project but as a “transmediator,” a form of capital which offers a platform, context, and professional service for the realization and display of new media works, as well as a “glocalely” situated “social” as a new media. Participants work together, turning local resources into the international language of contemporary art, and conversely imbuing international art with a local context and significance. As such, the Long March journey becomes a collective knowledge production and performance where both audiences and artists alike become participant observers constantly negotiating the boundaries and relationships of the various visual economies bounded within artistic production.
Lu Jie is the founder and director of the Long March Foundation, New York and the 25,000 Cultural Transmission Center, Beijing. Over the past six years, Lu Jie has been concentrating his efforts to produce the Long March Project, portions of which have been exhibited internationally including in the 2004 Shanghai Biennale, the 2004 Taipei Biennale, at the Vancouver Art Gallery 2005 and The Yokohama Triennale 2005 and Sao Paulo Biennale in 2006.
The Long March Project: : Lu Jie in Conversation with Hsingyuan Tsao and Shengtian Zheng
On the evening of October 12, 2005 the Vancouver Art Gallery presented “Dialogues on Art: Lu Jie in Conversation with Shengtian Zheng and Hsingyuan Tsao.” The presentation was organized in conjunction with the exhibition Classified Materials: Accumulations, Archives, Artists.
Lu Jie: The Long March Project was initiated in 1999 when I was a curatorial studies student at London University. During that time I developed a critique of the representation of politics in the context of international Chinese art exhibitions. I was thinking about the ways that contemporary art practice could connect with social development and social change. I developed the Long March Project as an organic structure that could parallel the grand narrative of the historical Long March initiated by Mao Zedong. I developed the idea that a number of sites could be created according to this historical Long March—this search for utopia, this sharing of resources, this going beyond the limits of body and ideology.
After several years of preparation, the Long March Foundation was established in New York in 2000. I spent two years visiting the six thousand miles historical Long March route. In 2002, we established the 25,000 Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing before launching the project that summer. After a three-month journey, twelve of the twenty planned sites were completed. We already had the contribution of two-hundred-and-fifty local and international artists. People thought that the government would stop us, but there were no political problems.
In the Yanchuan papercutting survey—which we believe is a milestone of the whole Long March up until today—we asked questions such as: what do we do with the so-called folk artists who live in China, whose life and profession is all based on an aesthetic that we do not value? This work is something that other curators and institutions do not deal with. But for the Long March Project—a project that wants to face reality—the different social hierarchies and historical frameworks all connect together to create a new understanding of contemporary Chinese art. So we believed from the very beginning that folk art, such as paper-cutting, is something that should be re-examined.
what’s next?
list and
culture jamming
media pluralism
regionality
18 Saturday Feb 2006
Posted in journalism
22 Thursday Sep 2005
Posted in conceptual art
Tags
2005, art, conceptual, digital, Karthik, lonelyhearts, m.t. karthik, mister, mtk
I conceived of and completed this piece in Japan in nine months in 2005. It took a few hundred games of hearts. It’s been installed once, in India, at atelierMTK in 2006-07.
22 Wednesday Dec 2004
Posted in Oaxaca
02 Saturday Oct 1999
Posted in NYC, performance, reviews
Tags
1999, art, brooklyn, chris, Giuliani, Karthik, m.t., Mayor, mtk, Museum, ny, offensive, offili, Ofili, protest, saatchi, Sensation!, yba
Despite the sheer volume of the events of September 11, 2011 masking the years near them, anyone interested in the arts who lived in New York City at the turn of the millennium – and particularly the borough of Brooklyn – will remember the arrival of the Sensation! touring exhibition of Young British Artists [YBAs] of the 1990’s that opened on October 2nd of 1999.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani protested the exhibition and in specific a work by Nigerian-born, British National Chris Offili – an image of the Virgin Mary made of many materials from his homeland, but which contained elephant dung as a medium, a paint, a process natural to the production of image-based art throughout the tropics or near deserts.
Giuliani protested that it was offensive to Christianity and attempted to prevent the showing of the work. It’s this time I define the end of post-modernism, at the exact moment that Mayor Giuliani stated publicly to the press,
“here’s how I know if something is art … if I can do it, it’s not art.”
I wore this shirt, with a tie, no coat, slacks and dress shoes, to the opening.
mtk October 2, 1999
14 Saturday Jun 1997
Posted in installations, Los Angeles
15 Wednesday Nov 1995
Posted in clips, conceptual art, journalism, press clips, reviews, S.F.
Tags
*surface, 1995, 95, architecture, art, fashion, Francisco, Karthik, m.t., magazine, mtk, mural, paint, Rigo, Rigo 95, San, thyagarajan, thyagarajian
This was a very disappointing edit and when it appeared, I was enraged. My name was spelled wrong – and it’s the third typo on the page!
The first is in the image where the images of his work are labelled, “(Rigo)” – which isn’t his name, and shows the overactive hand of the newly minted fashion magazine’s editors –
whose next immediate typo is in the HEADLINE – an extra apostrophe where it should be “Maos”. The piece is also edited considerably from what I submitted and the editors took liberties adding and removing text that changed the meaning of full paragraphs. But anyway here is how it ran:
I began a friendship and apprenticeship with Rigo after this November interview, in the year 1996, which lasted ten years.
![[W]Art001](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart001.jpg)
![[W]Art002](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart002.jpg)
![[W]Art003](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart003.jpg)
![[W]Art004](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart004.jpg)
![[W]Art005](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart005.jpg)
![[W]Art006](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart006.jpg)
![[W]Art007](https://mtkarthik.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/wart007.jpg)
M.T. Karthik 