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Join the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art - MoCCA in celebrating the world of Archie Comics, one of the oldest and most beloved family-friendly brands in the comic book industry. Thrill to the exploits of Archie Andrews and his friends, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie and the rest. And don’t be surprised if you see a cameo from Josie and the Pussycats, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and some of Archie Comics’ other supporting players. This exhibition features pages and pages of rare and unpublished comic art, animated cartoons, gold record winning music, as well as vintage house ads, news clippings, custom collectibles, toys and other merchandise from Archie’s 65 plus years as America’s eternal teenager.

The Art of Archie Comics is curated by Alex Simmons, Ellen S. Abramowitz, Arie Kaplan and Jeff Trexler.

Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art
94 Broadway, Suite 401
(btwn. Houston and Prince)
New York, NY 10012
Phone: 212-254-3511
Web: www.moccany.org

Evidence No. 1, 2008
Archival pigment print
46 x 58 inches
Edition of 8, AS_01.

Angela Strassheim conceptualized her most recent series of images after learning of a violent crime that involved a student at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she was teaching at the time. Strassheim developed the project utilizing a forensic technique commonly reserved for crime scene investigation, which she learned while working on the field for the Miami Forensic Imaging Bureau. In this particular body of work, Strassheim created her pictures through the application of a specific chemical spray called “Blue Star” to the walls of rooms where violent, aggressive acts were committed.

Long after the struggles ended in these spaces, despite the cleaning, repainting and subsequent re-habitation of the rooms, the “Blue Star” solution is capable of activating the physical memory of blood through its contact with remaining proteins on the walls. Long exposures- from ten minutes to one hour- with minimal ambient night light pouring in from the crevices of windows and doors, capture the physical presence of blood as a lurid glow: a constellation of stars embedded in the walls.

Through a long and painstaking research process, Angela mapped out the exact locations where violent, often horrific crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants, some unaware of the violent history of their residences, to revisit the unnoticed, unseen past. Angela captures the tracing of a final struggle through the hard evidence of a violent moment, thereby revealing the silent yet omniscient memory of everyday living spaces. The physical result of her work is a series of luscious, large black and white prints, which attract the viewer like stills from a film noir with their eerie seduction and mysterious quality. Ultimately, these images are honest and true to the original space; they make visible, once again, the traces of violence and death that took place in those spaces in a forgotten past.

Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York 10001
Phone: 212 627 3363
Web: www.marvelligallery.com

Franz West
The Ego and the Id

The Ego and the Id is internationally acclaimed artist Franz West’s newest and largest aluminum sculpture to date. Soaring 20 feet high, the piece consists of two similar but distinct, brightly colored, looping abstract forms, one bubble gum pink and the other alternating blocks of blue, green, orange, and yellow. Each of the forms curve up at the bottom creating stools that invite passersby to stop, take a seat, and directly engage with the artwork. The sculpture is only truly complete once the viewer interacts with the work. The Ego and the Id is consistent with the artist’s overarching desire to produce sociable environments for viewing art using his signature combination of whimsy and monumentality.

Created specifically for West’s first comprehensive American retrospective this past fall at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Ego and the Id borrows its name from one of Sigmund Freud’s best known texts, in which he explores the ego’s battle with three forces: the id, the super-ego, and the outside world. Removing the gallery walls heightens the connection between West’s work and Freud’s work, allowing these forces to intermingle with the streets of New York City as a backdrop.

Franz West began his career in mid-1960s Vienna during the height of a local movement called Actionism. His earliest sculptures, performances, and collages were a reaction to this movement, in which artists engaged in displays of radical public behavior intended to shake up art-world passivity. In the early 1970s, West began making a series of small, portable sculptures called “Adaptives” (”Paßstücke”). The Ego and the Id is in many ways an oversized version of an “Adaptive.” The sculpture also directly relates to the artist’s furniture installations, which transform galleries, museums, and public spaces into lounge-like environments. West has described the correlation between his plaster objects and furniture installations as a way to put dreams on earth; “The Adaptives would be the dream and the chairs and tables would be the Earth.”

About Franz West

Franz West lives and works in Vienna, where he was born in 1947. He has exhibited internationally for more than three decades in galleries and museums, and at major festivals including Documenta IX (1992) and Documenta X (1997), Kassel, Germany; Sculpture Projects in Münster (1997); and the Venice Biennale (1988, 1993, 1997, 2003, 2007). His first major American retrospective, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972-2008, debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art (2008), and then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2009). His work has been exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, New York (2008); Gagosian Gallery, London (2006); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2003); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2003); and Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2001). He had a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997.

Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park
East 60th Street & 5th Ave.
New York, NY
Web: www.publicartfund.org

Regina José Galindo

Patricia Asbaek, together with internationally known curators, Friederike Nymphius and Barry Schwabsky are creating this collection. At CCA Kunsthalle the visitors will find works by artists selected from all over the world. Artists from the Nordic countries, Europe, North America as well as Asia and Africa, give their view on the most interesting perspectives of today’s art.

To date AFM has collected more than hundred works where mainly paintings and photographs dominate, but the collection also includes drawings, sculptures and installation works.

The 2009 presentation of the AFM Collection add significant new works to the collection by the following artists:

Markus Ahm, Jan Albers, Peter Blake, Tjorg D. Beer, Henning Bohl, Elina Brotherus, Tom Burr, José Pedro Croft, Georganne Deen, Regina Jose Galindo, Kendell Geers, Poul Gernes, Evan Grunzis, Michael Gumhold, Jeppe Hein, Lothar Hempel, Sergej Jensen, Kitty Kraus, Alicja Kwade, Deborah Ligorio, Cristiano Mangione, Mathieu Mercier, Meuser, Jonathan Monk, Laurina Paperina, Florian Pumhösl, Kirstine Roepstorff, Trine & Nicolai Søndergaard, Pascale Mathine Tayou, Alexis Teplin, Mark Titchner, Lisa Williamson, Toby Ziegler as well as new works by artists previously represented in the collection.

AFM is the result of a large number of companies and international art lovers joining forces and creating one of the most striking collections of contemporary art of today, encouraged by Patricia Asbaek and her company AAC.

AFM & CCA Andratx

The aim of CCA Andratx is to create the ideal facilities, allowing the artist staying in the studios to develop his or her talent to the limit. New synergies occur when the resident artists inspire each other or use each other as critics, converting the residency to a unique experience. Today some of Europe’s leading artists apply for residency at CCA Studios. Clearly the dream of giving artists comfortable living conditions and an open environment has been realized.

CCA Andratx
C/ Estanyera 2-07150 Andratx, Mallorca- Spain
Phone: 34.971.137.770
Web: www.ccandratx.com

VIEW EXHIBITION

We are pleased to present Michiko Itatani, a Japanese American artist whose work has been exhibited worldwide.  These works are from the HyperBaroque and the Moon Light / Mooring series and are being exhibited for the first time.

Itatani writes:

In my youth, I wanted to pursue writing fiction. Though my main medium has been in the visual arts for the past 30 years, I am still dealing with the idea of fiction; I strongly believe in fiction’s ability to express the deepest truths.

In my most recent body of work, “Cosmic Theater II”, I am presenting my personal parallels in two series of work.  One is HyperBaroque and another is Moon Light / Mooring. These are my two parallel fictions based on the human desire to reach out into the mental and physical space beyond our reach.   One is looking out and another is looking in.

Through this inquiry into historical, cultural, sociopolitical and psychological conditions, I am trying to come to terms with the complex reality of the 21st Century. And my vision stays pathetically optimistic.

Itatani’s work has been seen internationally in solo and group exhibitions.  She had solo exhibitions at the Alternative Museum, New York City; Musèe du Quebec, Canada; Muskegon Museum, Michigan; Chicago Cultural Center; Shinjuku Park Tower Gallery, Tokyo; Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany; University of Wyoming Art Museum, WY; Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, MO.

Her work form part of many public and private collections, including Museu D’art Contemporani (MACBA), Barcelona, Spain, Olympic Museum, Switzerland, Tokoha Museum, Japan,  Musée du Québec, Canada, Art Institute of Chicago,  Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, State of Illinois Museum, NIU Museum, IL, Muskegon Museum of Art, MI, Erie Art Museum, PA, Maier Museum,VA, Cincinnati Art Museum, OH, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Kresge Art Museum, Michigan State University, MI

Itatani is a Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has taught at many other institutions, including SACI,Florence, Italy; University of Bonn, Germany; Royal College of Art, London; China National Academy of Fine Arts, China; Tokyo National University of Art and Music, Japan.

She received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Marie Sharp Walsh New York Studio Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship among others.

For more information and to see a sample of her larger works go to: www.michikoitatani.com

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2005/Penguin paperback reprint, 2006)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

“Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror. Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way.” Rebecca Solnit

Reading art critic/philosopher/activist Rebecca Solnit’s books and essays is like turning a corner with every page, only to come upon yet another unexpected connection, correspondence or graceful moment of serendipity.1 In order to read Solnit, one need be entirely engaged and focused on essentials while giving way to the intellectual and philosophical meandering she encourages. (And quite a few vicarious road trips through deserts and hikes up mountain ranges, as well.)

In the hands of another author, a book entitled A Field Guide to Getting Lost might be shelved in a bookshop’s Buddhism or self-help sections. A natural evolution of Solnit’s 2000 title Wanderlust: A History of Walking, this “field guide” is itself an example of its modus operandi. Rather than explain how to venture from safe paths and comfortable ways of being, Solnit models an extraordinary inner life attained by leaping into a scary yet exciting void.

The most remarkable aspect of her work is that, while all about Solnit, it is also about us as inhabitants of an endangered planet that still has great resources: nearly extinct species being revived, ecologically sound products and power sources being developed, eroding languages and cultures being preserved, and unselfish people devoting time and money to social, political and economic reform. A leader among them, Solnit employs a powerful tool for change: her books and essays.2 Solnit’s work will resonate with a wide range of readers, as she draws on her passion for art, literature, history, philosophy and the natural world. Foremost of her passions, the unknown, is Field Guide’s territory. The slim volume takes readers across the globe and through the tiniest tributaries of the human imagination.

But readers be warned: As fascinating (and addictive) as Solnit’s twists and turns prove to be, she prefers her travels unmapped. In Solnit’s view, mapped (accurately/erroneously) or imagined (consciously/in dream) itineraries are for breaching. Although kind when blasting short-sighted if well-meaning technological convenience, Solnit rebukes any diversion from individual responsibility for navigating through the world; for example GPS. She ponders the word “track,” or shul, referencing its meaning to Tibetans (a lingering mark of something vanished) and Jews (a place of worship).

Solnit’s uncanny radar for empty spaces—and talent for discerning or inventing meaning in them—impresses. Born in California, now living in San Francisco, her feet and car seem to high jack her into the wilds, although she discovers empty places in urban locals, forsaken rather than untouched (vacant lots, abandoned hospitals). In the nine chapters here, she moves from personal periods of being lost to lost histories, people, objects and species. For example, Solnit imagines her great grandmother’s journey from Eastern Europe to the American west as “stepping out of the noisy compression of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story into the expansive calm of a Willa Cather novel.” That space contains hope and possibility, but also risk. From the visible (recorded) and invisible (imagined), Solnit creates a story in which her great grandmother disappeared while moving from one land to another. Whatever the facts, Solnit weaves a luminous tale from wispy threads.

Similarly, Solnit relates tales of settlers (Mary Jemison, Cynthia Ann Parker) captured, then adopted by Native American tribes who embraced new languages and customs, married, gave birth and refused to return to their own culture. While such captives did not voluntarily leap into a void, they did not fight it, earning for themselves new skills, self-reliance and interior freedom.

Among Solnit’s many leaps are considerations of explorers (Columbus, Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark); Greek goddesses and philosophers (Demeter, Persephone; Meno, Plato); writers (Dante, Cather, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald); naturalists (Henry David Thoreau, an obvious Solnit mentor); songwriters and singers (Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Tanya Tucker, Joy Division); films (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo), and far-flung locales (Africa, Bolivia, San Francisco and New York City’s Chelsea Piers). If not breathless after reading this tiny sampling of Solnit’s terrain, readers will be soon after embarking on her trail. French artist Yves Klein’s obsession with the void, symbolized by flight, levitation and the color blue, figure prominently in Solnit’s consciousness. Of the nine chapters in Field Guide, four are titled “The Blue of Distance,” and these serve as interludes for the others.

Throughout Field Guide, Solnit urges readers to move beyond what they know and what they know they don’t know until they touch the vast terra incognita outside their awareness. To even begin to confront these murky waters feels like stumbling through Dante’s shadowy realms. At times, readers might feel hopelessly adrift but then Solnit weights each of her lofty escapes to a critical concern for humanity and the planet. For those ready to follow Solnit and her spiritual kinfolk, be assured that this journey’s guide has an admirable internal GPS system.

1 In an interview in Believer magazine (http://www.believermag.com/issues/200909/?read=interview_solnit), Solnit stated her conviction: “In a divided culture, being undivided and synthesizing and connecting across broad areas can be an act of resistance, just as being slow—as in doing things deliberately, walking or biking or cooking from scratch or gardening or sitting around and swapping stories, not being dilatory or sluggish—in a sped-up culture is an act of resistance akin to the work slowdowns that were one form of factory strike.”

2 Solnit’s backlist includes Hollow City (2001), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2004), Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (2007), and her most recent A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (2009).

The White Garden by Stephanie Barron (Bantam, 2009)

Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo

A true historian is a detective. His or her joy derives from identifying loose threads while scouring recorded fact and accepted opinions. Best known for her charming mysteries featuring Jane Austen in the role of sleuth, author Stephanie Barron is, indeed, a historian with whom to be reckoned. Honing her skills while earning an undergraduate degree in history at Princeton and pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford, Barron then applied them to fiction.

Like legions of readers before her, from an early age Barron was drawn to Austen’s novels for the author’s wit and unpretentious commentary on the social milieu of her day. Barron sensed Austen’s interest in the then-infant art of detection. After reading the first Jane Austen mystery, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (1996), readers will see the connection as inevitable, a natural extension of Austen’s keen perceptions. Other writers might quail at creating fiction around a beloved figure from the literary cannon but Barron persisted and received congratulatory reviews. Barron’s love for her subject is most apparent in the dialogue in the Austen series; clearly, she hears Austen’s voice as she writes.

In The White Garden, Barron chose to write about another cherished author, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and her one-time lover Vita Sackville-West. The gap in historical fact sparking Barron’s narrative intrigues; a three-week period between when Leonard Woolf found his wife’s farewell note indicating her intention of committing suicide and the discovery of her body floating in the River Ouse. To fill the space Barron weaves a tangle of intricate pathways joining London, Oxford and Cambridge; Woolf, a secret Cambridge society founded in 1820 and a Nazi spy; and 21-st century landscape designer Jo Bellamy, Bellamy’s grandfather and Sackville-West’s White Garden.

Barron narrates her story through chapters alternating from the present day to the weeks after Woolf’s supposed departure from her home in the Sussex village of Rodmell, Monk’s House. Dated March 24, 1941, Woolf’s final diary entry yields no insights into her plans, yet she left Monk’s House four days later. No one has traced her steps, but her walking stick was found on the bank of the river. On April 18, Woolf’s drowned body surfaced in the river. As World War II progressed and she completed work on her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf became more remote and depressed. As Woolf had a history of breakdowns and suicide attempts, the first resulting from her mother’s 1895 death, those who knew her believed that Woolf had, at last, accomplished her objective.

More than half a century later, Bellamy arrives at Sissinghurst Castle, the home of novelist and avid gardener Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. Charged by a wealthy client to recreate Sissinghurst’s White Garden at his Long Island retreat, Bellamy has her own stake in Sissinghurst’s history; like Woolf, her grandfather, who grew up in Kent and worked at Sackville-West’s childhood home at knole and later at the castle, committed suicide. Her grandfather’s death just after Bellamy told him of her trip to Sissinghurst leaves her with a heavy weight of guilt. Again, Barron forms a question that fuels a page-turning plot: What happened in 1941 at Sissinghurst that might haunt a man as he established a new life in America?

Readers familiar with Woolf’s novels, her place among Bloomsbury notables and the groups’ profound impact on the arts will, likely, savor Barron’s recreation of the era. From Woolf’s sister, artist Vanessa Bell, and her husband, Clive Bell, to Vanessa’s lover Duncan Grant and economist John Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury members appear on the pages of Barron’s novel not as ghosts, but alive with all of the power they wielded during the first half of the twentieth century. Scholars, rare book collectors, writers and gardeners will find much to delight in Barron’s novel, particularly a rapacious professor of feminist literature at Magdalen College, Oxford; a rare-book expert at Sotheby’s with insight into auction house shenanigans; references to Woolf’s novels, diaries and letters; and lovely descriptions of the White Garden. Quotations from, for example, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and Sackville-West’s gardening columns in the London Observer; and multiple meanings of the word “screed” possibly affecting the tale’s conclusion make The White Garden a treasure trove for armchair detectives. One caveat: Immersed in the sounds and sights of Woolf’s world, readers may find the dialogue of contemporary characters a bit clumsy.

Nevertheless, The White Garden will appeal to a broader audience soon invested in Bellamy’s personal struggles: deep sadness at her grandfather’s death, resistance to her powerful client’s amorous overtures, and search for love while maintaining her independence. As such, Bellamy and Woolf share a desire for freedom in its many manifestations. In Barron’s vision, the desparing Woolf sought life. Just as, in her tower room at Sissinghurst, Sackville-West dreamed of growing a garden as war threatened her paradise. In light of this vision, it seems quite plausible that, rather than walk into the river, Woolf might have fled to her friend, Vita, whose name in Latin means “life.” Barron portrays a woman uncertain of her intentions as she leaves the man who so minutely managed her life:

“Later, in her fur coat and galoshes, her walking stick in one hand, she traversed the drowned meadows to the river.

A bird was perched on a fence-post, not ten feet away, trilling despite the bombs: Life! Life! Life!“

Invited artists: Anita Glesta (USA), Kim Abeles (USA), Nnenna Okore (Nigeria/USA), Frances Whitehead (USA), Subhankar Banerjee (India/USA), Charley Case (Belgium), Meschac Gaba (Benin/NL), Insa Winkler (Germany).

In (Re-) Cycles of Paradise artists explore the relationship between gender and climate change while scientists and politicians work on climate change agreements.

Through photography, drawing, multi-media installation, and interactive performance, artists use the context of climate change to examine the vulnerability and strength of women; the control, or lack thereof, by women over resources; the consequences of forced emigration; illnesses affecting women; and the resilience and empowerment of women as they face all of these difficulties; at times proposing innovative ways to recreate a new and sustainable paradise.

DGI byen, Hall 55
Tietgensgade 65
DK - 1704 Copenhagen V
Denmark
Phone: (506) 25242724
Web: www.gender-climate.org

Performance #2, video still, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry

From almost six hundred applications and 2,500 individual works of art, the selectors of Emergency4 shortlisted nine artists who are currently appearing in a group show at aspex until 24 January 2010.

The selection panel - David Blandy, artist; Deborah Smith, freelance curator; Michael Stanley, Director of Modern Art Oxford; and Joanne Bushnell, Director of aspex - were charged with the difficult decision of awarding one of the artists the prize of a solo show at aspex in 2011.

It is with great excitement that aspex announces Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry as the winners of the Emergency4 prize.

Joanne Bushnell, chair of the selection panel said:

“The panel’s decision was unanimous.  Selection of this type of exhibition can at times be a grueling process for all involved, but Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry’s work stopped us in our tracks, it stood out as excellent, intelligent and funny.”

Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry investigate ways in which art, cinema and live events are consumed by contemporary audiences and reconsiders the conventional modes of production and presentation which regulate such encounters.

Among their intentions is a desire to jettison realism and documentary truth in exchange for exaggeration and fiction, in order to incite situations and representations that come closer to a representation of the live.

Kihlberg and Henry began collaborating in 2004. They graduated from the University of Central England with BA (Hons) Fine Art in 2002 & 2001 respectively, and are based in Birmingham, UK and Maastricht, Netherlands.

EMERGENCY4 includes the work of Chloe Brooks, Katie Davies, Glad Fryer, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Charlotte C Mortensson, Femmy Otten, Katie Pratt, Jack Southern & Eunju Yoo.

The exhibition is open 11am – 4pm daily, admission is FREE.

aspex
The Vulcan Building,
Gunwharf Quays,
Portsmouth, PO1 3BF
Phone: 023 9277 8080
Web: www.aspex.org.uk

aspex is supported by Arts Council England South East, Portsmouth City Council and is part funded by the European Union.

Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Please join P.S.1, Performa, and Electronic Arts Intermix in celebration of the 100 Years exhibition and the last day of this year’s acclaimed international biennial Performa 09.

With over 200 actions, performances, happenings, situations, and interventions documented from the last century of art involving performances for audiences and the camera lens, 100 Years also includes contributions from artists participating in this year’s and recent Performa biennials. These artists will add documentation of performances, happenings, actions, gestures, video, or films that they consider influential to their own artistic careers which will be presented on November 22 from 3-6PM.

A special performance by Einat Amir, presenting her latest work Men, will take place from 4-6PM in the Third Floor Main Gallery.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave at the intersection of 46th Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101
Phone: (718) 784-2084
Web:  www.ps1.org