Structural Patterns

Puerto Rican publication, Dialogo Digital ran a review and interview of “Transmit-Transit” Hatuey Ramos Fermin’s first solo show in NYC that I curated. The article presents an in depth interview with Hatuey regarding the development and concepts behind the exhibition currently on exhibit at the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos in the Bronx.

Hatuey Ramos Fermín’s first solo exhibition in NYC opens tomorrow night at the Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos!  Last fall, Dominican / Puerto Rican artist Hatuey asked me to work with him and to help him realize his first solo show as its curator.  I listened to his concept – an exhibition that investigates the livery cab drivers in the Bronx and was intrigued and agreed to help however I could.  The conversation got started, we shared ideas, he presented to me portions of his interviews with drivers, I gave the best feedback possible and tried to lend some direction in how to translate the video interviews into a gallery installation and Hatuey executed!

The show looks great and presents an intriguing insight into the little considered labor of the livery cab drivers.  I also wrote an essay and designed a small catalog in the form of a full spread newspaper sheet, English on one side, Spanish on the other and featuring a map created by Michael E Jimenez for the exhibition.

The day before the opening, Hatuey and I did a walk through and here are a couple photos taken.

And below is an excerpt from the essay that I wrote for the exhibition:

“Attending to the local, by taking the local seriously” this is the mission of TRANSMIT – TRANSIT.  Ramos Fermín has engaged in deconstructing an element of local space to investigate just one detail of modernity and globalization.  He has not done so as a traditional artist, walking the streets of the Bronx, getting lost in the vernacular of the city to generate creative musings that reflect one person’s vision.  Instead he has worked as an investigative journalist or documentary filmmaker. Ramos Fermín has logged several hours of video interviews with livery cab drivers, he has visited several dispatch offices, diners, gas stations, car repair shops… the local spaces of the drivers.  Over the last several months, he has engaged with the livery cab community to learn of its reality, document it and create an engaging portrayal that is both attentive and serious.  The final outcome of his investigation is a rich installation that attempts to capture the hardship and diversity of the trade.  And the encompassing device of the installation is the live radio feed from cab livery dispatches surrounding the gallery.

By incorporating the live radio dispatch, Ramos Fermín transforms the gallery visitor from art viewer to voyeur, listening in on the orders being transmitted all around us.  Radio transmissions that direct one human being to drive a vehicle to a specific site, pick up a passenger, and drive to a new destination.  It happens at all hours of each day; it is a common reality of the urban space and absolutely nothing exceptional.   And yet it is fascinating to take a moment, listen and consider the wide implications of these transmissions.  By having us listen, Ramos Fermín effectively dislocates our consciousness into a private space – that radio spaces employed between dispatch and drivers – transmissions that we are only privy to when in a cab and even then hardly take note of.  But when these transmissions are re-contextualized within the gallery walls, when we are invited to listen, not as passengers eager to arrive at our destination, but rather as art viewers expecting to engage with creative work, the transmissions gain new depths.   The gallery becomes a portal to an alternate real-time reality – we listen to what others are doing and experiencing at that same moment, but elsewhere, not far, but beyond the gallery’s walls.

Jennifer DePriest and Charisse Williams two graduate students at Columbia’s Journalism program recently produced a nice little piece on Post-Studio art practices that features Douglas Paulson, Christopher Robbins and myself. The piece revolves around the necessity or desire for artists living in New York City to find alternative modes of art making, beyond the traditional studio. View the video on Vimeo

“Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” by Carolyn Kane (May 27th, 2009) presents a thoughtful perspective on private performance for public consumption. The interview revolves around Bookchin’s latest installation consisting of edited YouTube footage of people dancing in their homes.  As Bookchin puts it:

…the YouTube dance, with its emphasis on the individual, the home, and individuated and internalized production, embodies key characteristics of our economic situation of post-Fordism. If Fordism once described a social and economic system that focused on large-scale factory production, post-Fordism describes a shift away from the masses of workers in the same space, to smaller scale production by workers scattered around the world. These workers are linked by technology rather than an assembly line, and there are more temporary or contract workers, often working from home, producing more specialized, less standardized goods.

Ideas that Jeff Crouse and Stephanie Rothenberg’s virtual sweatshop piece “Double Happiness Jeans”.  An installation and performative work that has real people using their Second Life avatars making jeans for gallery visitors.

October 18th 2008 at Eyebeam during Park Day.

Resident Voting Cart Documentation is also on YouTube:

VOTEMOS.US an online initiative that questions how the 2008 United States Presidential Election would differ if all residents of the United States could vote, takes to the streets in the form of a voting cart by which participants may take the voice of either McCain or Obama as they make public a hypothetical vote for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections.

Catch the cart at Eyebeam during Open Studios on Saturday, October 18th, 3-6pm. Watch video of the cart traveling from Not an Alternative through Williamsburg to McCarren Park.

Special thanks to Jason Jones (cart fabrication), Charles Rittman (bust chiseling) and Not An Alternative for helping me realize the project.

Generally, I blog art that I like and find inspiring, but every now and then when I find art really annoying and over the top, I can’t help but including it in this site and Olafur Eliasson’s NYC Waterfalls fall into the annoying and ridiculous of contemporary art.

Jerry Slatz gets it right when he states that “the waterfalls seem dinkier than you’d think…  In addition, it’s obvious that these aren’t waterfalls at all; they’re just plumbing, tall metal scaffoldings with pipes pumping cascades of water off the top.”  Then in the following paragraph of his NY Magazine review he waxes poetic, not so much about the Waterfalls, but how they enhance the NYC skyline.  But the NYC skyline doesn’t need clunky$15.5 million waterfalls to enhance it!

The NYC Waterfalls strike me as a failed attempt at monumentalism and an example of the worst type of public art – public art that can not be enjoyed and experienced by people, it can only be stared at from a distance.  Whenever I visit Chicago, I make a point of going to Millennium Park, the grand public arts work in downtown Chicago.  Millennium Park has its own conflicts, but as I watch people interact with monumental contemporary works of art at the park, I see success because people are able to enjoy the work first hand.  Children play in Plensa’s “Crown Fountain”, people stand within Kapoor’s giant bean and are mesmerized by the reflection and visual play.  Of course Millennium Park is permanent, but the park presents exciting possibilities for public art at a monumental scale, whereas the Waterfalls presents a modernist throwback to public art.

People have compared the Waterfalls to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, but The Gates managed to transform Central Park at both the sweeping grand scale of the park as a whole as well as at the level of the individual pedestrian.  Whereas the Waterfalls are not attractive, they merely appear as a lot of scaffolding with running water that shrinks below the scale of the city.  It’s a shame that the Public Art Fund doesn’t take a more visionary approach to the possibilities of what public art might be.

This past week, I happened to be running errands on Canal St. and decided to stop by Deitch to check out what was up and was wonderfully surprised by an incredible installation by the Brazilian twins that go by just that – Os Gemeos. I’ve been a fan of Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo’s work for a while and it was just at the right time to walk into their installation, because it presented the sort of inspiration I’ve been in need of… Simply Latino, celebratory and brilliant. More documentation at SuperTouch.