Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen recreates Shigeko Kubota's 1965 performance "Vagina Painting" at her opening at Renwick Gallery. Click the screen icon below the image to make it bigger. This was one of 13(!) recreations in addition to her performance of her piece "The Artists' Song" in a three hour time span. She is hardcore.

Yes, that guy in the yellow shirt in the background really is working his Blackberry the entire time. I was standing near him earlier and heard him raving about security prices in after-hours trading.

I will be adding some images to a flickr set when I have time to edit them a bit, but here is one of her reenacting Janine Antoni's "Loving Care", 1992-1996.

Click here if you don't see the video at the top of the post.

It's time to brave the cold and support one of these two wonderful art non-profits.

DUMBO Arts Center Silent and Live Auction

David Humphrey, Landscape Kitties, 2004

The d.a.c. benefit reception begins tonight at 6pm, with a live auction at 8pm that includes the David Humphrey painting above in the impressive roster:

Ivin Ballen, Sarah Beddington, Christo, Andrew Eutsler, Tolland Grinnell,
Mimi Gross, Mary Heilmann, Christopher K. Ho, David Humphrey, Kristian
Kozul, Thomas Lendvai, Jessica Levine, Guy Richards Smit, James Siena,
Nicolas Touron Claes Oldenburg, Liselot van der Heijden, Lawrence Weiner,
Robert Whitman, Peter Young, Purvis Young, Daniel Zeller, Balint Zsako

Visit the website to view all of the works. You can bid on the excellent silent auction online.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, The Artist's Song, 2007

Corrected: The Elk Gallery show opens Friday.

Who could have expected it? There are 2 openings I can't wait to go to tomorrow night, not on the LES or in Chelsea or Williamsburg, but in Soho! One is the inaugural show, titled The Cult of Personality: Portraits and mass culture, of artist Peter Scott's new gallery called Carriage Trade. As the gallery's about page tells us:

Through presenting primarily group exhibitions, carriage trade will function not as a means to promote the careers of individual artists, but to provide contexts for their work that reveal its relevance to larger social and political conditions prevalent today. A project of the artist / curator Peter Scott, whose exhibitions have attempted to highlight this relevance over the value of any given artist’s work within the hierarchy of the art market, these projects will intentionally combine well known with lesser known artists, and historical pieces (60’s, 70’s, 80’s) with very recent work. Originally influenced by the approach of magazines like The Baffler and Harper’s which combine fact based readings with editorial commentary, Scott’s curatorial approach often integrates relevant found material as a means to broaden the scope of an art exhibition by positioning the “evidence” of everyday experience in direct relation to an artist’s mediation of social conditions.

Some themes to be addressed in upcoming shows include issues of propaganda in mass media, the effect of neo-liberal policies on the built environment and social relations, as well as the concept of “mistaken identity” and likeness within the realm portraiture. The location of Soho, a neighborhood that could be seen as a now historical model for the intense gentrification taking place in cities everywhere, provides an appropriate setting for addressing the cyclic nature of urban transformation, (Soho enjoyed a previous incarnation as a high-end shopping district in the mid -1800’s during America’s Gilded Age) due to seismic shifts in economic relations.

Peter Scott made one of my favorite things I've ever seen at the Brooklyn Museum -- the "Suspect" piece at the 2004 exhibition "Open House." Read this review by Stephen Maine on artnet.com for a description.

The second is an opening with a performance by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen whose work James and I saw in Miami at the NADA art fair. It's at the Renwick Gallery.

Correction: Opening Friday

The third is the exhibition "Dropped Frames," described as a "A Collaborative Experiment in Film," at Elk Gallery. We're interested in anything that includes Andres Laracuente and Elizabeth Huey. Admittedly, this one is kind of between the LES and Soho.

[image above is from the invitation JPEG I received from Renwick Gallery.]

Paddy Johnson has written an article for the ArtCal Zine about the ArtCal survey results.

Libby and Roberta encourage artists to sign up for the Culture Pundits artists program. Wouldn't you rather have your images show up on smart culture blogs rather than next to trashy gossip? Also, our footers on the images are much more subtle. Here is an example for Jonathan Podwil:

From Roebling Hall's press release for the Doug Young show opening this Friday:

Doug Young has exhibited widely in New York and Chicago. In 2001 he was awarded the Guinness Book World Record for the longest nonstop banjo performance in history—24 hours total.

James already wrote about this, but here are my photos taken the same day. This is part of the "Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today" exhibition opening next week at MoMA.

Tim Sullivan 2007
2007
c-print
24 × 20 inches

Despite my dazed feeling by the time I reached Aqua Wynwood, the work I saw by Tim Sullivan, being shown by Lisa Dent Gallery, really stood out. The image above is from his series of self portraits taken once per year. Below is an installation shot of the video "Hamburger A/Hamburger B" from 2007. The image above is from the artist's website, and the one below is courtesy of the gallery. Apparently he has never been in a show in NYC!

James and I don't only follow the purely visual arts. We attend a lot of theater, dance, and other performance. The next few weeks have a lot of things of interest. I'll do several posts with recommendations, but this one is really important, and has a visual component too. Come see it with us on the 1st.

Ensemble Pi: The Rest is Silence

Saturday March 1st, 2008 at 8pm
Tickets at the door $15.

Venue:
The Great Hall at Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
map

Program:

• William Kentridge, Philip Miller: Two Shorts from Nine Projections featuring a live performance of original score for string quartet, trumpet and piano (2003)
• Frederic Rzewski: Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, for piano (2003) U.S. premiere
• John Harbison: Abu Ghraib, for cello and piano (2006) N.Y. premiere
• Kristin Norderval: Far From Home, for two voices and computer-generated sound (2007)
• Dmitri Shostakovich: Piano trio No 2 in E minor, opus 67 (1944)

Guest Speaker: Naomi Wolf, author: The End of America

[image at top is Eyal Danieli, invitation for Ensemble Pi]

[screengrab from my profile]

Via C-Monster, I learned that the Brooklyn Museum is sharing images of works in their collection via a Facebook application called Artshare. They set it up so that other institutions can join in too, and so far the list includes

• Metropolitan Museum
• Victoria & Albert
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Picture Australia (which combines images from multiple collections)
• Powerhouse Museum
• Walters Art Museum

I particularly liked this, from the Museum's blog announcement:

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you're already on Facebook, go here to add it.

Related:

• The Brooklyn Museum group on Flickr
• the ArtCal Facebook page
• the Culture Pundits Facebook page

The ArtCal weekly newsletter went out to just over 2000 subscribers today. We sent out the first one on March 30, 2006.

Until yesterday I had never seen someone seated in the front room of 303 Gallery. I'm wondering if this is in response to James Kalm's "down low" video tour of the Karen Kilimnik show, as 303 Gallery, despite its founder's interest in appropriationist art, has a strict "no photography" policy. Here is James's video on the subject. Use this link if you don't see the video below.

There is also an interesting comment thread on this post at Edward Winkleman's blog.