Conversation on Jordan Belson /  by melinda shopsin

Jordan Belson: Hidden Formations
Curator Raymond Foye and artist Andrew Lampert join Rail contributor Charles Stein for a conversation.
The Brooklny Rail, New Social Environment #1072
Recorded on Wednesday, May 22, 2024 at 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

My Harry @ The Whitney Museum of American Art /  by melinda shopsin

December 8-10, 2023
Whitney Museum of American Art.

I organized a 3-day festival as the public programming component of the exhibition Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith. Carol Bove, co-curator of the exhibit, and I had a conversation on the first evening.

https://whitney.org/my-harry

Paper Airplane contest judge Bradley Eros and contestants

Peter Stampfel

Raymond Foye and Charles Stein

James Inoli Murphy

KEN JACOBS: BOOK OF ETERNALISMS @ Corbett Vs. Dempsey /  by melinda shopsin

Ken Jacobs: Book of Eternalisms
March 17 - April 29, 2023
Corbett Vs. Dempsey, Chicago

In celebration of the artist's 90th birthday, Corbett vs. Dempsey excitedly presents a bewildering suite of new works by moving image pioneer Ken Jacobs. A native New Yorker, Jacobs began his artistic career as a painting student of Hans Hofmann in the 1950s, however he quickly concentrated on a more flexible canvas – cinema. A foremost figure in the underground film movement of the 1960s, Jacobs’ decades of restless output include more than forty motion pictures and dozens of expanded cinema performances made with both his self-invented double 16mm “Nervous System” projection apparatus and his nearly indescribable, almost intergalactic “Nervous Magic Lantern.” Since embracing video in 1999, Jacobs has produced well over 150 space-, time-, and perception-bending pieces that transpose his formal and 3D explorations into the digital dimension.

The six-part Book of Eternalisms series from 2022 is composed of the GIF-like digital works that Jacobs has been producing in recent years. Hovering somewhere between street photography and abstract expressionism, these strobing images present once static shots of a Manhattan in perpetual 3D motion. Jacobs writes that: “The word eternalism is meant to suggest a movement in time and deep space -seen without special screens or glasses- that stays, doesn't repeat, but keeps happening and can be seen in illusionary depth by both eyes or a single eye. Decades ago my wife Flo and I got into live projection, which is when we first found the eternalism. There was and is no way to seek it out, or even to imagine it. The eternalism befell us while we were performing with two side by side stop-motion 16 mm projectors. We were investigating close frames on two simultaneously projected prints of the same film, using a spinning shutter upfront to alternate and visually meld the images. The resulting illusion of 3D depth could be recorded and played back, but only after switching to video and digital did the precise construction of eternalisms become possible. The momentary blackness created by the spinning shutter in our film performances is now replaced by an interval of opposite colors on the color wheel. Instead of projecting adjacent film-frames, my videos are based on the left and right frames of a twin-lens stereo still-camera. I hire young people, Antoine Catala and Viktor Timofeev, artists in their own right, to actually create eternalisms on the computer as I look on and make requests. They do the formerly impossible! combining perspectives. Moments! that do not repeat as much as prolong, eternalisms, a name to trip over."

(Andrew Lampert)

This program of Ken Jacobs works has been curated by Andrew Lampert for CvsD

William Wegman: Art By Artist @ Marc Selwyn Fine Art /  by melinda shopsin

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present William Wegman: Art By Artist, a show of drawings, paintings and photographs dating from the early 1970s to the present. This marks Wegman’s fifth exhibition at the gallery. The show is curated by Andrew Lampert, editor of the recent book William Wegman: Writing By Artist (2022, Primary Information).

William Wegman: Art By Artist presents a concise overview of Wegman’s interdisciplinary practice with a special focus on his lifelong passion for art and music. Spanning five decades, the works collectively make visual and verbal art historic references that hearken back to the artist’s irreverent conceptual roots. Among the multitude of subjects are uproarious homages to a vast array of figures from Richard Serra and Josef Hoffman to Frank Sinatra and The Beatles. While the selected pieces bridge multiple eras and mediums, they readily demonstrate the consistent playfulness and signature humorous touch that permeates all of Wegman’s highly diverse output. The show spotlights the artist’s consistently comedic use of writing and language, most especially in his drawings. The title or the work often alters one’s read of the image, or sometimes the title appears within the work itself, acting as a caption or ironic commentary. Either way, Wegman constantly subverts viewer’s expectations by treating word and image as tools to undermine, surprise and induce laughter.

Wegman first gained significant attention as a conceptual artist in Los Angeles at the dawn of the 1970s, and one of the earliest pieces included in the show is the photo Learn To Dance with Modern Electronic Equipment from 1973. The classic photos and videos he created in this period remain revelatory today, but just as surprising and enjoyable are the drawings that he began making that same year. Untitled (1973) shows a wavy music staff that looks like it is dancing to the music, while Cher By Wegman (1975) appears to be just as focused on the artist’s signature as it is on the subject. Homage to 'Albers' (1975) is an unmistakable nod to the Bauhaus master, while Afraid of Yellow (1975) is a possible reference to Willem de Kooning. Classical artists and themes are parodied in vintage 20”x24” Polaroids like Caravaggio (1983), Huddle (2007) and Daisy Nut Ball (1994), a visual twist on Arcimbaldo’s iconic fruit faces. The latter photo features one of Wegman’s famous Weimaraners, who make appearances in a number of other rarely if ever seen large scale Polaroids, including the diptych On and In the Landscape (1988), Underdog (1992) and Framed Portrait (1996).

Wegman returned to painting in 1985 and has since created an expansive body of works that extend his singular vision into dazzling imagistic dimensions. The paintings Gallery Installation (2021) and Paneled Room (2021) are two recent examples of the artists’ remarkable skill and finesse. The latter is a portrait of Philip Guston’s painting The Studio (1969) actually repainted by Wegman but set in a wood paneled room, while the former painting reveals a textural play of different wood boxes that may possibly be shipping crates set up as an art installation. As intricate and striking as they are beautiful and funny, Wegman’s work always possesses a depth that goes far beyond the punchline.

SWAN SILVERTONES FOR TWO ROBERT'S: FENZ & HALLER /  by melinda shopsin

Monday, June 20 2022
7:30PM @ Microscope Gallery
525 West 29th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

Microscope is very pleased to present an evening with Andrew Lampert including “Other Means” (2014) and “Swan Silvertones for Two Roberts: Haller & Fenz,” (2022) as part of our series of imageless film performances taking place in connection and collaboration with the “Imageless Films” series at Anthology Film Archives.

First presented at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, IL in 2014, “Other Means” is an audio piece consisting of filmmakers and fellow travelers of Lampert’s talking about the “relevance of cinematic viewing versus the convenience of an iPad and other technologies.” This subject feels particularly timely after the recent closures of cinema theaters and our experience of being forcibly deprived of the theatrical projection.

The new piece “Swan Silvertones for Two Roberts: Haller & Fenz” is a “memorial reprisal” of the artist’s Projector Euthanasia series in which he “cares for” broken and barely working projectors. Lampert feeds them food and liquids, performs minor surgery
and subjects them to other restorative/destructive
actions in in order to provide a swift and painless passing.

ATTENTION LINE @ Artists Space /  by melinda shopsin

Attention Line

June 11 – August 20 2022

Blaster Al Ackerman, Craig Baldwin, Ed Bereal: Wanted for Disturbing the Peace, Circus Amok and Jennifer Miller, Vaginal Davis, Manuel DeLanda, James Luna, Tom Murrin (aka The Alien Comic), Tamio Shiraishi, Hannah Weiner, and Johanna Went.

Organized by Artists Space and Andrew Lampert, Attention Line considers the important ways that artists who generally operate outside the commercial confines of the visual art world can actively address and reconfigure media, power, and public space—through parody, exaggeration, confrontation, internalization, structured confusion, and the serendipitous nature of working out in the open. Rooted in late 1970s New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, San Antonio, Portland, La Jolla and elsewhere in the United States, Attention Line presents eleven iconoclastic artists who self-reflexively enact radical subjectivity within the urban environment. Taking form as visual art, media interventions, stage shows, mail art, and surreptitious public performances, these artists disrupt communication channels and the trafficking of cultural material by intervening in the pervasive flows of normalcy that underpin and uphold everyday consumer culture.

Each of these remarkably singular artists has carved out their own dynamic relation between form, culture, and their suspecting or unsuspecting public. Whether working between covert urban intervention and filmed documentation (Craig Baldwin and Manuel DeLanda), exaggerating and embodying notably troubled cultural stereotypes (James Luna and Vaginal Davis), accelerating and fracturing the commonplace logic of live performance to imbue material culture with energetic chaos (Johanna Went and Tom Murrin), skewering political and hegemonic power with dark comedic parody (Ed Bereal and Circus Amok), expressing their internal subjectivity as disjunctive projections in urban space (Hannah Weiner and Tamio Shiraishi), or self-distributing their kaleidoscopic output and invented personae through decidedly unconventional means (Blaster Al Ackerman and others), these artists each bring forth critical aspects of a largely untold, uniquely American history of tactical situationist artmaking.

Improvising saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi will perform in Cortlandt Alley six times throughout the course of the exhibition. Performances will begin promptly and be brief, according to the following schedule:

Saturday, June 11, 6:30pm
Thursday, June 23, 6:30pm
Saturday, July 2, 1pm
Saturday, July 16, 1pm
Thursday, August 4, 6:30pm
Saturday, August 20, 1pm

New York’s legendary Circus Amok will present a new outdoor circus performance in Cortlandt Alley, commissioned by Artists Space as part of Attention Line.

Saturday, August 13, 2pm

William Wegman: Writing By Artist @ Sperone Westwater /  by melinda shopsin

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present William Wegman: Writing by Artist, a show of texts, drawings, paintings, early photographs, and videos by the artist dating from the early 1970s to the present, many shown here for the first time. This solo marks Wegman’s seventh at the gallery and coincides with Primary Information’s book of the same name, edited by exhibition curator Andrew Lampert and published in April 2022.

Installed on two floors of the gallery, Writing by Artist offers a wide range of entry points into the artist’s universe. Spanning five decades, the works in this exhibition all hinge conceptually and pictorially on writing and language, including games, puns, and palindromes—incorporating words in one form or another. In some instances, the text is simply a caption or a few handwritten words. In others, prose delightfully unravels in surprising forms—Wegman types absurd non-sequiturs on Princess Cruises stationary, witty annotations are scribbled onto a curator’s essay, and words are deliberately mistranslated, reworked, and fictionalized in graphite and ink on paper. The works are installed in thematic groupings such as architecture/houses, furniture, history, language, perception/multiplicity, relationships, time/calculations, and television/media.

Featured also are the artist’s early photographic works, dating back to the three years he lived in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1973. During this time, Wegman became closely associated with such artists as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom he shared both a sense of irreverence towards conceptual art and, more importantly, a sense of humor. Poking holes in the stuffier, more academic, East Coast version of conceptualism, Wegman and his LA colleagues used paint, drawing, video, and photography in ironic ways, often paired with language, to turn didactic formalism on its head. Turning away from handcrafting objects, Wegman utilized domestic, readymade props and banal subjects close at hand. He sometimes used video to improvise short performances— staged vignettes in which expectations are reversed, and puns and homonyms are pursued to absurd conclusions. In one 1972 photograph, the artist is seen jumping away from a pile of his clothes, scattered nearby on the studio floor. The accompanying type transforms the scene: “For a moment, he forgot where he was and jumped into the ocean.”

William Wegman: Writing by Artist will be on view from 5 May – 29 July 2022. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, 5 May from 5 to 7pm.

Sweethearts (Twice for Emmet Williams, Now For Enrico Camporesi) @ Centre Pompidou /  by melinda shopsin

Wednesday, April 20 2022
Centre Pompidou, Paris
A new version of SWEETHEARTS (For Emmet Williams), an old piece, tightened and more timely, revised for the present moment. Featuring Kendra Walker and Stefano Canapa.
Presented as part of the series TYPO FILM curated by Enrico Camporesi.
Screened alongside the Japanese subtitled version of EL ADIOS LARGOS (2014) and works by Len Lye, Yann Beauvais, George Landow and Paul Sharits.

INTRADAY premiere @ Lampo /  by melinda shopsin

Lampo presents Andrew Lampert and Chris Corsano perform Lampert’s Intraday, one of the text scores in the Lampo Folio, at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago on Saturday, April 2 2022 at 12pm.

Intraday is a musical study of Spotify’s stock fluctuation between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. on May 13, 2021. The work is a structured improvisation performed in accordance with the ups and downs of the stock price, as represented by 92 line charts in the score. Performers are presented with a wide range of tactics to guide them through a small amount of musical space.

The Lampo Folio is a collection of text-based scores by ten interdisciplinary artists who are all engaged on some level with sound and language. Each commissioned work provides written instructions that can be used to enact a personal, possibly intimate performance at home. Lampert is a co-editor and contributor to the collection.

Today’s concert coincides with the hour Intraday was composed, and it is presented in the domestic context of the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House, which was a home from 1902-1963. Lampert and Corsano also note they are being paid more than the musicians and musical rights holders on Spotify who earn between $0.003 to $0.005 a stream.

Chris Corsano & Andrew Lampert, premiere of INTRADAY, presented by Lampo at the Graham Foundation, April 2, 2022

Is There Sex After Death? /  by melinda shopsin

Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 7pm
Alan and Jeanne Abel's Is There Sex after Death?
Light Industry
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Introduced by Andrew Lampert

Is There Sex after Death?, Alan and Jeanne Abel, 1971, digital projection, 102 mins

An all-but-forgotten masterpiece of underground comedy, Jeanne and Alan Abel’s Is There Sex after Death? is arguably the most important precursor to the mockumentary as we know it today. Structured like a Mondo film, Is There Sex after Death? is narrated by one Dr. Harrison Rogers—played by Alan Abel—of the Bureau of Sexological Research, who travels around the country in his Sexmobile posing provocative questions to passersby on the street. Along the way, Rogers visits with experts in the field like Dr. Rhinelander Elevenike, Professor of Dildography and Linguistics, and Merkin the X-Rated Magician, and ultimately attends a seance to learn the answer to the film’s titular mystery. The movie seamlessly zips from scripted sketches to real-life interactions to improvised banter; countercultural comedy figures like Holly Woodlawn and Robert Downey Sr. appear as themselves, while Buck Henry and Marshall Efron show up in character, respectively, as sexologist Dr. Manos and pornographer Vince Domino.

By the time they produced, wrote, directed and edited Is There Sex after Death? in 1971, the Abels were already a notorious comedy team who had hoaxed multiple generations through a now-legendary series of elaborate media pranks, which included appearing on talk shows beginning in the 1950s to tout the imaginary organization SINA (the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals) and running a fictitious Jewish housewife, Yetta Bronstein of the Bronx, for President in 1964 (“Vote for Yetta and things will get beddah!”). To create one of the most memorable sequences in Is There Sex after Death?, they promoted and staged an event called the International Sex Bowl in Houston, tricking press from around the world into attending what purported to be a live sex competition between teams of different countries.

This rare screening of Is There Sex after Death? will be presented by artist Andrew Lampert, a longtime Abel fanatic and card-carrying SINA member. He will share a selection of ephemera from the making of the film alongside a newly recorded interview with Jeanne and her daughter Jenny Abel that reveals the chutzpah and genius required to make and distribute one of the world’s first X-rated independent comedies.

Screening/Discussion of Carolee Schneemann's FUSES /  by melinda shopsin

Dec. 9, 2021
7:30PM @ Anthology Film Archives, NYC

A screening of a brand-new 16mm print made from the 2007 restoration I did of Carolee Schneemann’s FUSES back when I was Archivist at Anthology Film Archives. Followed by a roundtable discussion with Rachel Churner (director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation), John Klacsmann, Erica Levin, Kenneth White and myself.