Contraband is Taryn Simon’s new series of portraits depicting various items confiscated at Terminal 4 at JFK Airport.  It provides an in-depth and curious look at what happens when one culture encounters another.  Simon spent five mostly sleepless days at the airport, photographing over 1,000 contraband objects ranging from the relatively unsurprising (counterfeit designer bags, bongs) to the  flat-out strange (cow-dung toothpaste, insect larvae). While many of the photographs’ subjects are shocking, they open a discussion about the  material values of different cultures and what happens when one set of cultural beliefs is dominated by another. Though the series portrays contrasting cultural values, the repetition of some items demonstrates the universality of certain societal norms, such as the mass-market appeal of cheap, knockoff material goods. The exhibit opens September 22 at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills and at Lever House in New York September 30.

Link to more work by Taryn Simon.

Add-art.org, a FireFox add-on that replaces advertising on websites with curated art images, is featuring an exhibit curated by our friends at Groundswell titled “Our Fire and Our Tenderness.”

“Care is a way of asking questions about the longevity and influence of social movements. I’m interested in how we take care of one another, establish new social relations based around those values, and still maintain a culture that’s antagonistic. To say that in a more complicated way, maybe, it’s a way of addressing a set of concerns that focus mostly on the practical delineations of who is involved in the self-reproduction of social movements, but also involves some affective, and moral considerations.

This show focuses on care as maintenance, a very practical question about production and perpetuation, and one that only slightly touches on the questions about affect and morality. Here, the art itself is maintenance labor, or makes caring labor visible.

While these actions look similar and even seem banal, they offer unique questions about caring labor. Services United interrogates human-cultivated energy, in the form of electricity, to find the value of the work, and to dig deeper into the possible historical contingencies of how we do caring labor. Material Exchange’s DIY Coat Check sets an expectation of care, and asks what might happen when it’s unmet; how far caring mechanisms can extend or be extended is at stake in the process. Other artists include Environmental Services, Natasha Wheat, Mike Wolf, Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, and Hideous Beast.

This theme is also the subject of a forthcoming journal edited by the Groundswell Collective. [http://blog.groundswellcollective.com/journal/]”

Go to Add-Art.org to read more on David Morgan and Groundswell’s latest exhibit, and while you are at it, learn how to install Add-art.

For those in the DC area this month: Check out the Capital Fringe Festival, which will be taking place around the city with varying degrees of cost, accessibility, and interest.

“Since Capital Fringe was founded in 2005, we have been continuously asked: “Why does DC need a Fringe?” As we embark on the journey of our 5th anniversary year, we find it critically important – maybe now more than ever – to have an open-access performing arts festival in the District. Capital Fringe strives to maintain the open-access policy of the Fringe, ensuring performers can take part in a vibrant Festival without being subjected to artistic vetting or selection. DC is full of committees, institutions, special event art promoters and politically-appointed individuals who curate and filter the performing arts. They determine ‘artistic value’ for audiences, and often communicate to many artists that their story/work does not have a place.”

“Capital Fringe strives to provide outlets and opportunities for artists to self-produce in a nurturing and supportive environment while exposing their work to patrons and the local, national and international media that they would never be able to garner on their own.”

You may want to check out Edible Rex written and performed by John Feffer at the Goethe Institut.

carriage trade
62 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
212.343.2944

Through July 18:
Mistaken Identity

Dan Graham
Innocence Project
Carol Irving
John Schabel
Karen Yama
The Yes Men

“While the genre of portraiture tends to feature clearly defined subjects, the portrait show Mistaken Identity focuses instead on the uncertainties of facial recognition and how misperception might affect behavior in everyday experience. Linking the concept of belief to what we can “know” about an individual’s face, the exhibition explores identification as a process influenced by the particular circumstances of any given encounter.

Commonly associated with detective stories and courtroom dramas, the need of proof of an individual’s identity also has a utilitarian aspect, as our memories for faces plays a significant role in the most mundane of exchanges. In the somewhat rare case of people with prosopagnosia (face blindness), friends and family are indistinguishable from strangers, so that the “context” of an individual (hair, clothing, the sound of a voice) often provides the only clues to their identity. For an eyewitness or victim of a crime, these same associations can prove misleading, as they may falsely trigger a link to an innocent person who has chance connections to a perpetrator’s appearance.

The case of imposters provides yet another example of a loss of identity through context, but here the subject willingly foregoes recognition in favor of subterfuge. When exposed, the temporary forfeiture of an identity is often met with a great deal of hostility. Those fooled by the deception are now faced with the uncertainty of their convictions. This need for authentication in connection with facial identification runs deep, as it underlines the survival mechanisms that guide our perceptions of whom and what we can trust.

Approaching portraiture as a means to explore the complex relationship between perception and circumstance, the work in the exhibition Mistaken Identity presents a range of possibilities concerning the construction of belief in the process of fixing an individual’s identity.”

The Innocence Project is affiliated with Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University

[Text from gallery website.]

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

Smack Mellon’s Summer exhibition surveys approaches to the creation of socially engaged art projects.

Image: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation, 1978-80. City-wide performance with 8,500 NYC Sanitation workers. Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

apexart
291 Church Street
New York, New York

June 10 – July 11
Men With Balls: The Art of the 2010 World Cup
Curated by Simon Critchley

Including work by artists Miguel Calderon • Mark Leckey • Hellmuth Costard Maria Marshall • Liam Gillick • Santo Tolone • Douglas Gordon and Uri Tzaig • Philippe Parreno
memorabilia from Roger Bennett • Bill Shankly
match results read by Mark E. Smith

“The FIFA World Cup is the most important and widely watched sporting event in the world. The germinal idea for this exhibition is very simple: to create the perfect football environment, a sort of mini-soccer paradise at apexart for watching games. Around the games themselves, there will be talks, events, and a series of works, objects, and activities that will expand the spectacle into a more conceptual and sensual rumination on the meaning and significance of football/soccer.

The World Cup is a spectacle in the strictly Situationist sense. It is a shiny display of nations in symbolic, atavistic national combat adorned with multiple layers of commodification, sponsorship and the seemingly infinite commercialization. It is an image of our age at its worst and most gaudy. But it is also something more, something bound up with difficult and recalcitrant questions of conflict, memory, history, place, social class, masculinity, violence, national identity, tribe, and group. The hope of the exhibition Men With Balls is to construct a unique situation where these questions can be ruminated on collectively.

Football is working-class ballet. It’s an experience of enchantment. For an hour and a half, a different order of time unfolds and one submits oneself to it. A football game is a temporal rupture with the routine of the everyday: ecstatic, evanescent, and, most importantly, shared. At its best, football is about shifts in the intensity of experience. And stories will multiply from that experience, stories of heroes and villains, of triumph, and a gnawing sense of the injustice of defeat. The aim of the exhibition is to produce with this show some experience of being together with others in a group, watching a game, waiting for something marvelous, unexpected, and possibly magical to happen. And it will happen.”

MORE [schedule of screenings of matches and curator's statement.]

[Cross-posted to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Text and graphic from apex press release.]

Giving us a break in variation from the excessive, sometimes nausiating, dome of advertisment in New York’s Times Square, Creative Time has provided us with a thoughtful exhibit.

AT 44 1/2 Creative time presents video art on the HD screen in Times Square: “From June 15–July 15, Creative Time will present one video each by emerging artists Rob Carter, Graeme Patterson, and Allison Schulnik. The artists freshly mine the possibilities of stop-motion animation, which has been used in filmmaking for over a century. By constructing detailed microcosms of paper and clay, the artists in this series transport us into the kinetic worlds of a city experiencing exponential growth, a discrete memory of youthful contention, and a strange, alien planet. Simultaneously, the analog—and extremely time- and labor-intensive—process by which these worlds are rendered comes into stark contrast with the overwhelmingly digital landscape of Times Square.”

Click here for more on these pieces

Rob Carter, Metropolis:

Graeme Patterson, Grudge Match:

Above, Allison Schulnik, Forest

Capital City Arts Initiative
CCAI Courthouse Gallery
885 East Musser Street
Carson City, Nevada

June 7 – September 10 • 2010

Goal 2010 !
The FIFA World Cup Fine Art Poster Portfolio

To celebrate the first football World Cup in Africa, the Capital City Arts Initiative in association with David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg | Cape Town | New York will exhibit the complete portfolio of seventeen posters.

Exhibition Reception: Friday June 11 • 5 – 7pm
Gallery Hours: Mon – Fri 9am – 5pm
Free admission

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream and to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Graphic: "Bicycle Kick," 2009, by William Kentridge. Kentridge is a leading South African artist internationally famous for his prints, drawings, films, animations, theatre and opera productions. Click on graphic to enlarge.]