Paul Chan & Close Proximity

Paul Chan's talk, held at Hunter College's Lang Recital Hall last Friday, was an informal event led by his friend and former Bard-mate, Jennifer Hayashida. Though the conversation was marked by open-ended, broad questions that bore almost no relevance to Chan's practice or career, the conversation was tolerable due to his easy manner, openness, and modesty.

He had an easy answer for everything, delivered through carefully chosen words and in a pleasantly soft and unassuming voice. He wasn't pedantic, despite his in-depth references to Henry Darger and Charles Fourier, the collective sources of inspiration for his video installation, Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization.

He spoke very elaborately about his recent trip to New Orleans, where last fall he successfully staged Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, New Orleans style. The project was co-produced by Creative Time and other supporters that guided him along a journey of artistic self-discovery and impromptu production. He meaningfully embraced New Orleans -- its culture and people -- by offering to teach at local colleges, refusing pay and insisting that his classes were open to students enrolled in different schools. He had other stories, too, all better told in his voice over mine.

Today I visited the third floor of the New Museum, where his 7 Lights series is on view. I was effectively blown away.

I'm tempted to outfit our apartment in Chan-inspired projections, though probably couldn't come close to his eloquent use of space -- floor, ceiling, wall edges -- nor his balanced placement of shapes (a softer take on Gorey) and timed movements. In addition to the projections are various works on paper that incorporate charcoal, Styrofoam, and music sheets, all sharing the same shadowy contrast as the projections.

On a separate note, it's feeling very spring-y and art-full in New York City. How do I know this? Two nights in a row, Chuck Close and I attended the same event. Love it!

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.

An Ontological-Hysteric Disasterpiece

Counting, screaming, references to time, vogue-ing, vampire teeth, twin video projections, and blindingly flashing bulbs. These are some of the elements of Richard Foreman's current work on view/experience, Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote:

Looking for the travel agent of your dreams, someone to fly you out of the muddy rut of midwinter monotony? Allow me to suggest Richard Foreman, a man whose slogan, spelled out in a ravishing new show called “Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland,” gets right to the point: “Go to other places.” And, boy, does he make sure that you do.

The title of the work, description, and Foreman's reputation were motivation enough for American/Mexican to battle through the City's first annual snow storm to attend on Tuesday night. But with a deep sigh and a mutual look of defeat, we left St. Mark's Church in disappointment.

We expected the promised feeling of being transported to a dream-like world of theatrical exploration, endangerment, and surprise led by a man who answers to no one -- a raw, gritty, more daring version of Tim Burton --with 70 years of age and 40 years of experience, and takes his audience through territory that is feared too gooey and nihilistic by other experimental artists.

Instead we watched projected video of beautiful people from Japan and Britain set against a live cast of beautiful people in mismatched clothing, who took on mannequin-like configurations, while the tension/relationship between the worlds of video and live performance was weak and undeveloped.

The work's greatest achievement was in its elegant stagings of people, props, and costumes, all aligned with perfect timing and delicacy. But the work overall felt dated and crusty, leaving us desperate for something more energetic than the periodic, temporary blindness brought on by the frequent discharge of light emitted by several large flares that were aimed at the audience. This is, like other old tricks in this piece, was simply annoying.

The Future, The City

The fascination with rapidly changing technologies and their ubiquity in our daily lives leaves some of us wondering what the future might look and feel like. Naturally, cities are particularly vulnerable to activities that occur on a massive scale. The lines that separate public and private spaces get blurrier and blurrier, given our fondness for mp3 players, cell phones, PDAs, and other hand-held, personal devices that in some ways cut us off from others, and in other ways provide connections between us and strangers. But the ability to unlock information that is valuable to how we shape our daily lives in cities and create identities within them is also within our reach.

On Friday night, American/Mexican listened intently as Adam Greenfield led an inspiring panel discussion, Nextcity: The Art of the Impossible, as part of the New Silent Series, curated by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome, at New Museum. He invited three other leading experts in the field -- Christian Nold, Meejin Kim, and Eric Rodenbeck -- to weigh in on issues about The City, namely how it is expanding into a netherworld of technology that has the potential to leave us blindingly dependent on connectedness, forcing us to shed the ability to communicate organically and effectively without it.

Greenfield opened with an abysmal portrayal of what systems can and will do. It's an exciting time to be alive, he reminds us, but there is a dismal reality to the politics of technology and society. His three guests addressed different ways of dealing with our tendencies to be utterly impressed with the fading, near-invisibility of the medium -- which brings us dangerously close to mindlessly accepting our connectedness and interpreting it as need -- by showing us examples of their own work, a balance of forward-thinking technologies and creativity.

Nold's emotional mapping brings thoughtfulness to technology while Rodenbeck's Stamen Design firm's work brings a sophisticated version of the ever present fuzz buster of the 90s, and feed aggregators that are specific to user location and interest. Kim's work reflects the combined beauty and simplicity of technology, illustrating that the mind, body, and technologies need not have separate motivations.

Successfully downplaying the apocalyptic possibility of the technological takeover of humankind, Greenfield remains optimistic. His insight into the possibilities of the future, for better or for worse, are admirable, his judgments drawn from the wise words of those who preceded him. More importantly, his delivery of heavyweight information is accessible and reflective of a generation of thinkers who are confident, bright, and technologically savvy yet unspoiled by arrogance and nonchalance.

We look forward to reading Greenfield's book, Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, and to the release of his upcoming book, The City Is Here For You To Use.

And, on a separate note, we realized that he's married to the visual artist Nurri Kim, whose work explores The City in its own way.

(We want this in our living room.)

Art @ South Street Seaport

South Street Seaport, a tourist destination in Lower Manhattan, is admittedly a Disneyland eyesore, but beyond the scores of family restaurants and retail (chain) clothing shops, visitors can find pockets of art worth seeing.

@SEAPORT, located at 133 Beekman, is formerly the Liz Claiborne store and has recently been transformed into a unique, two-story gallery space. It currently houses Human Resources, a multimedia exhibition held as part of LMCC's Out of Site series. The show features the work of 13 LMCC resident artists who, through their art, reflect on human interactions and respond to working in downtown Manhattan. The pieces range from photography to interactive media and unexpected forms of projected video. A lunchroom table, reminiscent of the kind we all sat on in grade school, sits in the center of the main floor.

New Yorkers should consider making the trek to Lower Manhattan to view this show and help promote art in this sometimes artless area. Tourists who are pressed for time can skip the overpriced Bodies exhibition across the street.

@SEAPORT
133 Beekman Street at Front Street
Through Feb. 3, 2008

Election Results

Jim Rice got robbed today - losing out in the latest Hall of Fame ballot by just 16 votes. 2009 is his last chance before being sent off to the Veterans Committee. For the record, he hit a lot of HR's, here he is hitting his 199th and 200th home runs at Fenway in 1988. Among his many career accomplishments, Rice batted .298 for his career, hit 382 home runs, and grappled with the Green Monster in left field day after day. In the late 70s he almost strung together three straight seasons with 40-plus homers. Plus, he wore a cooler mustache than just about anybody. Next year baseball writers must do the right thing.

Our Place in Cairo

An excited phone call this week from one of our longtime sources in Portland, Maine alerted us to an item in in the latest issue of The New Yorker, which we couldn't miss - a poem entitled Cairo, N.Y. It was a delightful surprise to the Am/Mex team, who owns a house in the said little town located on the northernmost side of the Catskills. Read on...

Cairo, N.Y.

by Cornelius Eady

The town near our house
Isn’t fancy, but it is ripe.
At present, it is still on
The wrong side of
The Hudson River,

But there’s potential.
What happened
In Woodstock,
What happened
In Red Hook,
What’s happening
In Catskill,

Could easily
Happen here.

Our streets are sad
In the way our bodies
Are sad as we
Dream of our
Beautiful selves,

Floating, light,
Light-filled,
Transcendent.

How could anyone
Have missed or
Overlooked us,

Even with our
Bad haircuts,
Our paunchy clothes,
Our gin-mill
Mouths?

One day
Some car drives by
And the rich folk
Who hunt for
Cut-rate rubies
Slow down,

And here we are,
They think,
All ready to be
Scrubbed.