Abramovic at MoMA: Museum Mediation

I didn’t get a chance to see The Artist is Present before this past week, the week before it closes. Fortunately enough, my visit towards the end of the show was a way for the visit to point out to me the brevity of presence, and what presence means in a museum context.

The title work of the show is the one in which Marina Abramovic sits in a large square and receives visitors who can sit facing her for as long as they want. Abramovic doesn’t speak, reciprocate movements, or move much at all, and the viewer is limited to a set of actions as well (not to touch, place anything in front of, etc., the artist).

While this work can be read on many levels, especially in light of her retrospective on display four flights up, I found it a perfect example of the museum altering behavior and perception, both implicitly and explicitly. Something as simple as a non-verbal human interaction when transplanted into the museum becomes infinitely more complex and regulated. For me, the show revealed more what a museum needed and imposed onto people, than what people did onto themselves.

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For Thirty Days in New York

Tonight is the opening party for a new gallery and a new gallery concept, Thirty Days Gallery. (See site for details on attending the party.) Curated by Family Bookstore (I believe it is this curated bookstore in LA?), the gallery is located in Tribeca and will be on view, as its name suggests, for only 30 days, now through May 7th.

Looking at the lineup and the calendar, it seemed that the planning and effort were disproportionate to the length of the display. But maybe Thirty Days is not meant to be looked at as just another gallery, but a total work in itself. While their page does not say this, I believe the gallery project is an homage to the art forms it will be presenting, and the under-appreciated ephemerality of art and art spaces of New York.

The gallery, like the art it will house, exists and can only be experienced aesthetically for a set amount of time–installation, film, music, and (the act of reading) books. Thirty Days seems to want to respect the temporality of these art forms by aligning itself with their organic cycles of coming into/disappearing from the public eye, rather than transcending it with permanence. This is a gallery project that respects the nature of this art, and perhaps suggests that a gallery is defined by its composite parts.

Thirty Days also shows its affinity for its fellow gallery spaces, many of which have closed in the past year due to economic pressure. While art (categorically and historically) is considered to be eternal, it is clear that those that struggle to build lives around it are not. In its graceful entrance and exit, Thirty Days honors whole gallery practice and struggle.

I am disappointed that I will not be able to see this gallery at all. Please if you have the chance, pay a visit.

Thirty Days Gallery
70 Franklin Street, between Church & Broadway
Tribeca, New York

Through May 7th, 2010

PS1 and Studio Space

MoMA’s PS1 started a project a while ago called Studio Visits, in which artists of the boroughs of New York can upload images of their art in their studios to be featured on the virtual apartment complex. Photos include not only artwork installed in their sites of conception, but of the exterior of the studio’s building, perhaps for context, perhaps for a greater sense of realism in having visited the space.

A Studio Visit feature: Suhee Wooh

Increasingly, the studio has become a space of interest in the art world, but is typically excluded from participating directly in the highly-glossed circle of the art market. Perhaps this is because the studio is still romanticized as a place of genius, or individual creative expression–separate from transaction or commerce. The studio, as a site of process, remains conceptually and somewhat physically isolated as a result.

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Visiting the Destination, @ (MoMA)

I learned via the MoMA blog that the Modern Museum made an interesting, if unprecedented acquisition into its collection today. It acquired @, the (at) symbol–not just an @, or an object, but the universal @. Some day I hope understand the legal logistics of that transaction and contract, but today, I am just in awe of the implications this has for collecting museums, and the definition of the museum itself.

Canonically, museums are inseparable from their collecting habit, by which I mean the process of owning and/or adding to their collection of objects. The identity of the Louvre is inextricable from that of the Mona Lisa now, for example, but more on the relationship between objects and their spaces later. Where non-collecting museums toed this boundary of museological identity, MoMA has just blasted a hole in it by starting to collect non-objects.

This action seems to be a two-fold commentary on the nature of collecting (object-fetish) and of the predominance of new media in art. It seems also to be a continuation of many recognized museological themes, such as declaring ownernship over something that has existed in the public domain (antiquities), collecting non-physical (conceptual, performance, some installation) art, and locating within the museum something that physically does not fit in the museum (architecture, ethnography), but breaks with these trends by combining them, and by incorporating the element of non-presence. Conceptual art, architecture, ethnography, are tied to a physical space, but @ is not. It floats between us all in the contingency of its use, and everywhere on the web.

The acquisition of @ itself is rather significant as well. It is a symbol with simultaneously limited and indefinite scope. It is a highly malleable icon that also happens to be recognized universally, and cross-culturally. In its own existence, it has served as prefix, transition, indicator, but infrequently as a thing-in-itself. In some way, the acquisition of @ is its existential liberation.

While I ponder this some more, I’m excerpting part of MoMA’s post after the cut. Please see MoMA’s original post for details and the history of @. For more on punctuation, please also see Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play, by Jennifer Brody (Duke University Press, 2008).

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The Face of Virtual Galleries

I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on Gawker Artists, in case you were wondering about that large, colorful, ever-changing banner to the right. Rather than making this a glorifying post of my experiences, I’d like to look at what I think the next frontier of gallery space might be after my time with them. Please see the extended version below.

Click here to register with Gawker Artists as an artist.
Click here to register for a banner for your own site.
Be a fan on Facebook.

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Honey Space: Gallery Revisited

I read about this place originally in a Times review in 2007 or 2008, and recently looked it up again for research on alternative art spaces. I’m really happy to hear it’s still open and exhibiting shows.

Honey Space is a self-proclaimed gallery space in Chelsea with none of the commercial, posh fixings of its neighbors. In fact, it doesn’t have in-house staff most of the time. Or heating. Or a door. (Metal gates come down over the place when it’s not open on its business schedule.) It’s a raw space for site-specific installation, started by a Brooklyn-based artist. The artists showing in the space count entirely on the good faith of the viewing public to contact them to purchase work (rather than stealing it), and the owner of the gallery doesn’t charge rent, or take a penny of the earnings.

This place interests me because it implies that art is an environment, and that an artistic environment has definite characteristics. It calls upon a moral code, a basic level of respect, and a two-way faith between viewer and creator mediated by objects. Furthermore, the entirety of the space as a whole installation (the gallery exhibition) can be broken down into its composite parts (the artwork) and still retain its articulacy.

There is something heartening about a kind of space like this, that is an open-ended creative environment. It was from sites like these that early installation art, and performance art came into being. Places like this cannot be underestimated in terms of importance in the larger food chain known as the art world.

Please drop in sometime if you are in the area.

Honey Space
148 11th Ave. (btw. 21st & 22nd); New York, NY
Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat 11-6