Nobody cares about your precious objects. And while your show sits idly for a month at an empty gallery, gathering dust, 30 other shows will have come and gone. Those galleries and alternative spaces were crowded each night with provisional, experimental projects that burst open and shimmered for one day or night. They converge, rather than emerge, existing more as participatory group play done for the process, not the result. No goals loitering on the horizon. Teleological creativity is so Old Testament. Now, groups of people can join in the fun, and the art is about the doing together, rather than the done alone. So stop priming all those canvases, and put your power tools on eBay.

Artist Lizzie Wright Polishing Pennies

That seems to be a paradigm, maybe powered by the desperate instability and uncertainty of the conventional distribution system. Nothing is really selling, the gallery might not be open next month, and who can afford cadmium colors or bronze fabrication? (I mean, just look at these horrible photos. I’d like to replace my stone age Canon poop-and-shoot, but gadgets don’t grow on trees.)

DiSoRgAnIzEr: Artist Jacob Robichaux

Jacob Robichaux embodied an epicenter of creative activity last night at Museum 52, the cool gallery succeeding Participant, Inc at 95 Rivington, next to the synagogue that collapsed about two years ago.

Artist Scott Hug w/ local heartthrob Alex Hudson w/ Jake Ewert

Jacob’s solo debut at the gallery last year, ...bell, string, whistle, cube… featured sculptures, collages, and sculptural paintings, “painthings” (as coined by the indispensable Sam Gordon), each of which was then selected by a peer, who would enact a performance based on/inspired by that particular piece. What a smart way to ensure that dialogue circulates around one’s work, while constantly revitalizing an inevitably stationary show. Another example would be Richard Aldrich’s sound performance, which I wrote about here a few weeks ago; that exemplified collaboration and casual performance embedded in the commercial space of luxury goods. Or the current Laura Parnes show at Participant, marked by screenings and readings. Or the recent Paper exhibition at Artists Space, perforated by weekly performances. An older one would be A.L. Steiner’s panel discussion in the project room at John Connelly Presents, during her show, One Million Photos, 1 Euro Each (Minimum Order), or her co-labia-rative project co-founded with Nicole Eisenman, Ridykeulous, which hosted a freewheeling performance/exhibition night at the very same space, when it was still Participant, Inc. (Gee, Participant must be onto something!) You could note scores of other artists who insist that the gallery be a relational, performative space, and not just an exhibition room. Personally, I’m excited for TM Davy’s upcoming night at Envoy Gallery.

1. Harry Potter, 2. Artist Julia Goldman, 3. Museum 52 Director Liz

So Jacob’s night, DiSoRgAnIzEd, was the penultimate twinkling link in the chain of one-offs happening at Museum 52 as it leaves Rivington St, roams in a holding pattern and eventually settles into a new space, rumored to be the space formerly known as the seminal Rivington Arms. DiSoRgAnIzEd included penny cleaning, popcorn popping, web surfing, a dance class, and many other events, in the midst of casual, disheveled objects, art or art-related. For example, the accomplished and essential sculptor and painter Lucky De Bellevue hung a recent rejection letter from the Guggenheim Foundation. The work in the show was intimate and “submitted for the approval of” the immediate community/scene, compounding the communal atmosphere electrified with collaboration.

What's Poppin? Artist Elizabeth Reddin @ Popcorn bowl; dogs need art, just like humans.

So I’m tossing out all my brushes and gesso. Objects completed in solitude are relics, while the real action is in the real action.

You Can Dance if You Want To: Artist Mariah Robertson leads a dance class

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough

Looking to get away this summer? Recession cut into your travel budget? Too old for STA discounts? Too restless for a staycation? Then Lisa Kirk has a deal for you.

Open for one more week, her project at Invisible-Exports, House of Cards, is a shanty assembled entirely from found materials. You can enter the enclosure and tread across the cardboard floors, pausing to examine its improvised amenities: dining room, bar, sleeping quarters. When you reach the exit of this shotgun space, you’ll find yourself in a sales office, carpeted and painted an innocuous beige, where one of the sales specialists – not gallerists – will pitch the selling points of the shanty and offer you the opportunity to purchase a share in the shanty timeshare.

That share, only $199.99, consists of a week-long occupancy in the shanty during the period in which it will be installed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. For a little extra money, $599.99, you can add to your week-long getaway one of the 52 component pieces of the shanty. And for much more still, $8999.99, you can have that piece cast in bronze. I tried to purchase the week of July 4, but that was “on hold.” A friend bragged that he had scored Fleet Week; wish I had thought of it. Act now: after the show closes next weekend, share prices will go up.

Interior (l) and kitchen/sink (r)

A satirical show about timeshare shanties – luxury slumming – is perfect for this year, rued for the recession caused at least partly by foolhardy home loan deals. The devastating tsunami of foreclosures and stalled construction sites tragically has deposited many of the victims into tent cities, ghettos of lean-tos for the down-and-out. -Maybe her next project could be an orchard of guillotines for AIG executives.

Let Them Eat Cake

For those in the know, a “sub-exhibition” is installed downstairs in the basement, featuring Molotov cocktails, gunpowder, pipe bombs, and a projected video, which is the commercial for “Revolution.” It’s sexy and dramatic, with mercenaries dashing through the city amidst snipers, sirens, and chaos, ultimately demasking and handing off “the package,” a bottle of the subversive scent.

Opening night: Participant's Lia Gangitano (l), Curator Adriana Farietta (r) with heartthrob Alex Hudson

I don’t really need to mention the haunted houses, meth labs, bodegas and mini cities by Mike Nelson, Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and Christoph Büchel. Nor Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room in last year’s theanyspacewhatever at the Gugg. Actually, I really named those artists simply to show off how I learned to type the umlaut. I always thought you needed a special keyboard. Anyway, the mimetic environment installation genre is HOT: Envision a subculturally loaded space, often abject, recreate it in another designated space, then add water. I guess I could point to Claes Oldenberg’s Store(1961) as a precedent, though its items were handmade.

House of Cards unfolds in the wake of her institutional debut at PS1 in 2007, where Lisa, an SVA alumna, installed Time Suspended, a kitchen laboratory where hypothetical separatists brewed their subversive perfume, “Revolution.” Both shows used scavenged materials, exemplifying a resourceful “something from nothing” aesthetic. The post-apocalyptic House of Cards is a freegan gesamtkunstwerke. Again, the shanty is built from found objects, including the wheatpasted poster of “Sgt. Guy Debord,” a serendipitous match of guerilla and gallery. Moreover, the stock-styled photographs displayed as sales aids have as their models friends and family members of Lisa and the gallery staff. Her real-life infant son stars as the progeny of the archetypical, focus-grouped young family, who are otherwise pushing strollers around Williamsburg. House of Cards is built from components at Lisa’s fingertips, imbued with overlapping personal connections.

Happy Shanty Family

One additional layer of coincidental co-identity: if you’re lucky, the sales specialist twisting your arm will be the charming and effective actor, Susan London. She’s a natural, answering any question without pause. The twist is that outside business hours, she actually owns an impressive art collection, with top-tier names to raise your eyebrows.

Now

I knew Chip Kidd was a famous designer because I had seen his name on book jackets that he designed, and book jackets about the book jackets he had designed. His work is so ubiquitous that I figured he must be ancient, slightly junior to the pantheon of Rand, Glaser, Bass, and Chermayeff.

But actually, he’s only 44. And given how prolific he is you’d expect him to look weathered, but he doesn’t. This multi-tasker is a published Batman expert and rabid comics fan, and he’s also in a band. By day, he’s an art director for Knopf. And now he has produced his second novel. So all the elements are there: superhuman abilities, bifurcated life… There should be a superhero comic about him!

Bartman

The Learners follows up Chip Kidd’s art school satire, The Cheese Monkeys. It follows our hero, Happy, out of college in 1961, to New Haven, CT where he scores a job at a mom and pop ad shop known to him as the former employer of his most influential commercial art teacher.

Though Happy is talented, we later learn that he was hired for reasons outside of his control, if not birthright. He adjusts quickly and smoothly to the agency, earning the mentorship of two elders, Tip and Sketch, both of whom are overqualified. Sketch, for example, is a drafting wizard who should instead be doing pencils for funny pages or for comics. In fact, it’s fascinating to observe some similarities between an ad shop and a comics bullpen: non-photo blue pencils, Photostat machines, pen nibs sorted like golf clubs, and the absorbing rapture of drawing. So maybe comics artists and ad men are two sides of the same commemorative gold coin. (Would Stan Lee and Charles Saatchi want to trade places?) But ad men eventually have to meet with clients. Some are despicable, others time-tested and reliable, such as the jolly potato chip rep Dick Stankey, whose regrettable fate embodies the end of this golden age of handrafted advertising design. Both are outvoted by the revolutionary demand for photographs, leading us to the wasteland of the gentrified Getty ghetto.

Okay, if you had to choose...

Happy is a workaholic whose life outside the studio is limited. (Sounds familiar.) We get a whirlwind sample of his long-lost partner in crime, the emotionally volatile Himillsy Dodd. She, though pixielike, is a renegade firebrand, a fallen angel, a drunken Bacchae who dazzles Happy, the studious Apollo. “For Himillsy, living dangerously was the only way to live. And me, I’m practically a crossing guard…I was her unwanted conscience.” Or she is his unfathomable Id. Our pent-up hero sublimates his sexual frustration into the elegant strokes of typography; it’s no wonder that he’s captivated by her untethered spirit.

The first half of The Learners is light and witty, full of snappy, bawdy humor covering everything from bitches to bestiality. Yet, the humor gives way to heartbreak, guilt, and failure, pushing the story toward more pithy terrain and toward the bildungsroman tradition. An all-too-close untimely death turns Happy upside-down. And then a cryptic “message in a bottle” prompts him to participate in a Yale experiment for which he had previously designed the cattle-call ad. This turns about to be the legendary Milgram experiment, Obedience to Authority, now covered in nearly every Intro to Psych course, which revealed ugly truths about those who participated. The harrowing section describing Happy’s trial in that lab is masterfully researched, a detailed, dramatic reenactment of the theater that occurred between science and subject. On the persuasive omniscience of the experimenter:

“How could he be so sure? So sure of everything? But he was, and I realized, yes, I was grateful for that – in the way I always was for people who were obviously smarter than I am. I no longer cared that he was a cold fish. His otherwise calm, beatific demeanor was the only thing that made this bearable. He could have told me that the air was black and I’d take his word for it, thank him for it.”

Shocked

The Learners compares the manipulation of advertising to the banality of evil, whereby an ordinary person can be persuaded by authority to betray their better sense or conscience. “Is this about the Nazis and the Jews?” asks Happy, now catching on. “I was just following orders,” pleads another bewildered participant. True, propaganda and advertising have the same motive; advertising is just propaganda dressed up as your neighbor. But doesn’t it seem insensitive to compare direct mail ads to the Holocaust? Wouldn’t that mean that a Superbowl ad could convince us to commit crimes against humanity? I don’t know, but I was in California last November, and I saw the “Yes on 8″ TV spots, using children’s faces like human shields to convince a narrow majority to deny two consenting adults the right to marry each other. Those weren’t coercive orders, but they were persuasive, manipulative suggestions. So a poster ad for the next disposable reality show on the Bravo Network may not reveal my inner Eichmann, but maybe it’s just a question of degree.

IMAGES: Anonymous

You could think of it as Bible Study for art zealots. Or AA for art addicts.

For the most recent Town Hall Meeting, just a few days ago, about thirty people filled a seminar room at the New Museum. It was Thursday night, when the museum offers free admission. Many of those thirty people were random museum visitors who had the luck to wander into the event. The meeting began with presentations by the cultured, ambitious, and utterly gorgeous hosts Christopher Stiegler and Dina Shaulov. Their topic was Michael Blum’s Exodus 2048, part of the New Mu’s Be(com)ing Dutch exhibition.

townhallmeeting

Dina identified some common characteristics of political art: that it is often diaristic and often uses documentation, namely photography. She then led a discussion about the fictional diaspora depicted in Exodus 2048. “Is there a point to getting upset over something that never happened?” Chris reviewed the Golden Age of Dutch painting and then tracked some of the ancestry of Exodus, noting traits shared by both 17th Century Dutch painting and Blum’s 21st Century installation.

Jan Steen, The Life of Man, 1665

Both presentations sounded solidly researched and critically alert, yet they were accessible enough to warm the crowd of strangers into a fluid discussion. One noted how the installation’s plastic dolls reenacted and represented how wartime violence always putrefies life force. Another commented on its “Hegelian subject/object dichotomy.” (Pretty heavy for a Thursday night, and it’s been years since I’ve read Hegel, so I can’t tell dialectic from diarrhea…)

Thirty minutes – and several stimulating threads – later, the meeting wound down and the strangers shuffled out.

New Mu Crew

The first Town Hall Meeting, almost a year ago, occupied a Chelsea gallery to discuss on issues of city life, while neighboring galleries bustled with art-opening persiflage and wine (more…)

You could think of it as Bible Study for art zealots. Or AA for art addicts.

For the most recent Town Hall Meeting, just a few days ago, about thirty people filled a seminar room at the New Museum. It was Thursday night, when the museum offers free admission. Many of those thirty people were random museum visitors who had the luck to wander into the event. The meeting began with presentations by the cultured, ambitious, and utterly gorgeous hosts Christopher Stiegler and Dina Shaulov. Their topic was Michael Blum’s Exodus 2048, part of the New Mu’s Be(com)ing Dutch exhibition.

Standing Room Only: Town Hall Meeting at New Museum

Dina identified some common characteristics of political art: that it is often diaristic and often uses documentation, namely photography. She then led a discussion about the fictional diaspora depicted in Exodus 2048. “Is there a point to getting upset over something that never happened?” Chris reviewed the Golden Age of Dutch painting and then tracked some of the ancestry of Exodus, noting traits shared by both 17th Century Dutch painting and Blum’s 21st Century installation.

Jan Steen, The Life of Man, 1665

Both presentations sounded solidly researched and critically alert, yet they were accessible enough to warm the crowd of strangers into a fluid discussion. One noted how the installation’s plastic dolls reenacted and represented how wartime violence always putrefies life force. Another commented on its “Hegelian subject/object dichotomy.” (Pretty heavy for a Thursday night, and it’s been years since I’ve read Hegel, so I can’t tell dialectic from diarrhea…)

Thirty minutes – and several stimulating threads – later, the meeting wound down and the strangers shuffled out.

New Mu Crew

The first Town Hall Meeting, almost a year ago, occupied a Chelsea gallery to discuss on issues of city life, while neighboring galleries bustled with art-opening persiflage and wine (more…)