We're Excited About...

It's hard to avoid the elephant in the room that is our obvious absence/hiatus from blogging here, so we'll just put it out there plainly. Yes, it's been a while since we've posted anything here. We're excited to be back, hoping to have a more regular presence, and feeling the energy of the art world heating up as temperatures similarly increase. Moving forward we plan to draw from all of this activity and translate it here with praise, confusion, disgust or (worse) indifference.

It's a busy week as Paul Chan is giving an artist talk Friday night at Hunter College. His work, The 7 Lights, is currently on view at The New Museum until June 29. This piece explores light, projection, space, and absence through text, audio, and video. It's also viewable online, but it's worth the visit to the Museum for the real thing.

DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller) has a new book out (!), Sound Unbound. He's calling it a manifesto about sound art, digital media, and contemporary composition. It has essays and interviews from Brian Eno, Pierre Boulez, Moby, Chuck D, Saul Williams, Jaron Lanier, Pauline Oliveros, Naeem Mohaiemen, and others. The audio companion to the book includes rare material from Sub Rosa Records, Allen Ginsberg, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Iggy Pop, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others. As far as mashups go, this book probably scores a 10.

His book release party is this Friday night, where he'll share the spotlight with famed novelist Jonathan Lethem at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. It will undoubtedly be a crowded affair, making it more likely that we'll attend Paul Chan's talk uptown.

In the coming weeks we will hit MoMA to see LoVid, the New York-based artist duo Tali Hinklis and Kyle Lapidus. They will perform Wire-full, a multimedia performance that involves their Sync Armonica synthesizer. So our cup of tea.

In a rare effort to attend two theater/re performances, we plan to see Stolen Chair Theatre Company's The Accidental Patriot: The Lamentable Tragedy of the Pirate Desmond Connelly, Irish by Birth, English by Blood, and American by Inclination, which runs through May 17 at the Milagro Theater and The Euthanasist, which runs through June 15 at PS122.

Finally, we will squeeze in a trek to Brooklyn to see the work of Japanese pop artist extraordinaire Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, which is on view through July 13.