November 2010

BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) - Nov 12

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More detail on the BYOB NY show tomorrow night at Spencer Brownstone gallery (from the announcement page):

Friday, November 12, 2010, 6-10 PM
Spencer Brownstone Gallery,
39 Wooster St, New York City.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

AGNES BOLT, ARTIE VIERKANT, BILLY RENNEKAMP, BRITTA THIE, BRIAN CLOSE, CALLA HENKEL & MAX PITEGOFF, CHARLES BROSKOSKI, DAMON ZUCCONI, DUNCAN MALASHOCK, DANIEL CHEW, DENA YAGO, HAYLEY SILVERMAN, JEREMY BAILEY, JESSE ENGLAND, JOEL HOLMBERG, JOHN MICHAEL BOLING, JOYCE JORDAN, KARI ALTMANN, KRIST WOOD, MAI UEDA, MARLOUS BORM, MICHELLE CEJA, MIKE RUIZ, RENE ABYTHE, RILEY HARMON, RYDER RIPPS, SARAH WEIS & ARTURO CUBACUB, TOM MOODY, TRAVESS SMALLEY, TRAVIS HALLENBECK, WOJCIECH KOSMA.

Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to present the New York edition of BYOB, a one-night-exhibition exploring the medium of projection. 25 artists are invited to bring their own projectors to create a collaborative happening of moving light, sound and performance.

An acronym for Bring Your Own Beamer, the evening will propose a glimpse of computing in the future. Today the internet is confined to screens. Tomorrow information will surround us, composing our surfaces, defining our spaces, enmeshing itself with the ether. No longer simply part-and-parcel of everyday life, it will become a medium in which the everyday exists.

Featuring a generation of artists that grew up behind the screen, BYOB will have an open and dynamic structure that not only allows for spontaneity and experimentation, but also places questions concerning the formalism and engagement of the exhibition directly in the hands in the artists. A moving image is never an object, and when it is coupled with the increased flexibility of portable projection, the realm of experience quickly expands. The individual works will often overlap and sometimes even merge, producing a total environment that is more than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, this loose, free form format will mirror the chaos of the internet. Gallery visitors will stroll in a forest of browser windows much in the same way one browses sites on the web.

Curated by Rafaël Rozendaal

BYOB exhibitions were done previously in Athens and Berlin. A YouTube of the Berlin incarnation gives a foretaste of Friday's show.

Dry Cell

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dry_cell_Rauschenberg

Gagosian has a Robert Rauschenberg mini-retrospective at its Chelsea satellite gallery. Lots of so-so work mixed with good pieces, an ahistorical mingling of early and late. Was glad to spend some time with Dry Cell, 1963, reproduced above.

Jim Long, writing in the Brooklyn Rail, described the piece as follows:

In [this] assemblage a military helicopter is screened on a piece of Plexiglas attached to the frame of a folding camp stool mounted on the wall. A sound sensor activates a small motor that spins a shrapnel-like fragment of metal; it’s terrifying.

The motor wasn't operating at Gagosian--possibly it might have frightened the venerable and well heeled patrons milling about last Saturday and made one or more of them think about exerting some social pressure on that nice military contractor in their co-op, you know, the one that keeps pushing these silly foreign wars for profit. Vietnam flashbacks aside, what I find interesting in Dry Cell is its complex spatial layering of angled lines, a formal puzzle to rival the social vectors of mass destruction: the camp stool is one set of such lines; another is screened onto the pane of glass attached to the stool, and a third resides in the outlines of a swaybacked '60s Army helicopter (just visible in the above photo). An incongruous coat hanger complicates matters even further. The assemblage has a rough, dirty quality, like a prototype robot that has just come back from the field with holographic combat images, mounted for its final debriefing.