Day: July 25, 2008

Tomorrow: Dallas Video Festival

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new monuments

Opening tomorrow night, I will have work in the Dallas Video Festival, along with Marcin Ramocki, Cao Fei, Matthew Barney, and others. Details from the KERA TV blog:

Video art is about to get what may be its most serious and thorough treatment ever in North Texas. Beginning Saturday, the Video Association of Dallas, best known for putting on the annual Dallas Video Festival, hosts a five-week series of video programs, installations and performances at Conduit Gallery.

Curated by art critic Charles Dee Mitchell, multimedia artist Carolyn Sortor and VAD founder Bart Weiss, “The Program” opens at 5 p.m. with a reception, followed by the screening of a 90-minute video compilation. The work will stay up until it’s replaced by a new wave of video and installations each Saturday.

This week’s works include Drawing Restraint 13 by Matthew Barney; RMB City - A SecondLife City Planning by China Tracy by Cao Fei; online access to Serpentine’s website exhibition opening of RMB City; Torcito Project by Marcin Ramocki; New Monuments, Endnotes and Hoedown compilation by Tom Moody; and The Arrangement of Two Opposites While their Maximum Contact is Under Generation by Yves Netzhammer.

The night also includes a talk on Drawing Restraint 13 at 5:30 p.m., a live performance by Treewave at 8 and an after-party performance by Apples in Stereo at Sons of Hermann Hall at midnight (ticket required).

Free screenings also will be held at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth at 7 p.m. on Aug. 5 and 12. And the Dallas Museum of Art will host free screenings and a panel discussion at 1:30 p.m. Aug. 10.

More details from Carolyn Sortor's blog. Festival screenings (more accurately video installations in a multi-part exhibition she co-curated called "The Program," occurring over five weeks) also include work by my fellow Nasty Nets alums John Michael Boling & Javier Morales, Joel Holmberg, Guthrie Lonergan, Michael Bell-Smith, and Paul Slocum (performing with Treewave), plus Rick Silva, eteam, John Bock, Kristin Lucas, Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, and other artists.

Above: detail of still from my video "New Monuments."

Update: Sortor mentions on her blog and I want to note here that one of the three vids I'm showing is "End Notes," which includes animated GIFs I made in collaboration with jimpunk.

Update 2: Photos of the opening.

Steven Parrino Fact Check

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There they go again. The New York Times is turning the late Steven Parrino into a misunderstood Van Gogh figure. Per writer Dorothy Spears:

For years, when the artist Steven Parrino wasn’t jamming power chords on his electric guitar or tinkering with his motorcycle in his garagelike studio in Brooklyn, he was recycling his unsold paintings: twisting them into eccentric new shapes, smashing their stretcher bars or stabbing them repeatedly with scissors.

His destructive approach to art making earned him the admiration of some fellow artists, but it also concealed a painful reality: There was no market for his work. In eight years and five solo New York shows, his former dealer José Freire [of Team Gallery] said, he sold only two of Mr. Parrino’s paintings, one for $9,000 and the other for $10,000.

Parrino is now a hot, posthumous Gagosian artist, we're given to understand. Based on one quote from a dealer who no longer represents the Parrino estate, the Times--"your place for one source shopping"--claims Parrino had no market. But what about all the other solo shows on his vitae, most of them in Europe (at least 25 non-Team exhibitions)? Spears recounts a secondhand story of a Swiss dealer complaining he couldn't sell Parrino's work, but the source of this tale isn't clear. Spears quotes a fax Parrino ostensibly sent a Swiss curator "instructing him to remove all of Parrino's work" from the dealer's gallery but there is no quote indicating she talked to the dealer himself. The dealer's gallery is not named.

Spears' tale of woe prompted the anaba blog to ask how Parrino made ends meet, to which query an anonymous commenter eagerly chimed in that Parrino was "supported by his wife for a good amount of the time" Parrino was showing at Team.

The BS is clearly flying.

A different picture of the Parrino balance sheet is suggested by people who knew him, posting on artist Bill Schwarz's blog. According to these commenters, Parrino had a career and a reputation in Europe and sold work there, and the "only sold two paintings in his lifetime" legend the Times attempts to foster is misleading. As for the "wife support" claim, during an approximately 21-year working career Parrino was married for 6-8 years. According to Lisa Ruyter, artist and co-founder of Team, chiming in on the Schwarz thread, Parrino was not married while at the gallery. One commenter who knew Parrino later in life doubts he was selling much, saying the artist was "hot" in the '80s and "not" from the '90s onward.

An artist's means of support is generally not relevant to anything and this blog wouldn't talk about it. Unfortunately the "newspaper of record" has made it relevant by suggesting a relationship between Parrino's content (recycling, destroying artworks) and his economic status vis a vis the art world. This doesn't square with what I know of Parrino's aesthetic. Sometimes nihilism does mean nihilism, prompting the people it makes uncomfortable to explain it away as career frustration.

Related: An earlier post on how the Times' Parrino obit subtly added to the artist's legend (while not deigning to praise his work). And more corrections of the Times Parrino obit: Parrino did not consider himself a "Neo Geo" artist.

Update: More from anaba.

Update 2: This post has been revised to include the Times quote and a few afterthoughts.

Update 3: And continues to be revised, WIKI style, as new facts and opinions come in.

Update 4: For the Lisa Ruyter referred to in this post see Francis Ruyter.