At the Independent Curators International (ICI) Book Sale today

So many great art books!
Directions: 799 Broadway nr. Union Sq, Manhattan.

Paul Rudolph House

A & I went to see Paul Rudolph's "Modulightor" Building earlier this month, aka 246 East 58th Street. Rudolph bought the building in 1989 and the interior is officially "Late Modern". Unofficially, however, it's gorgeous. Bookcases line every surface to unreachable areas of the walls and ceiling, making one wonder how library lust for the top shelf books is ever quenched without accident. A collection of Transformers toys stand by the bed and, while helping myself to a glass of wine and some cheese (an unlimited supply comes with the $10 ticket) a black-eyed rabbit holds court in the living room.

There's no organized tour so guests are left free to roam the small home, stopping to ask the current owner - a good friend of Rudolph's with whom he bought the building and who owns the lighting store downstairs - questions about what living in the space is actually like. The kinetic assemblage of stairs, different horizontal levels and vertical walls, is magical. A & I got chatting to a Rudolph acolyte by the grand piano downstairs who told us about tours across the country in pursuit of his architectural hero. As we walked away in the summer evening gloaming, it struck us on nearby busy Lexington Ave that we hadn't heard a peep from the outside world once while in Rudolph's ocean-liner interior. Perfect start to a date night.

Open House at the Modulightor happen once every two months, next time in early October. See the Rudolph Foundation  website for more details.

The un- and underinsured at MoMA's PS1

Greater New York at PS1 has an interesting event this Saturday (June 19) with Dr. Maria Raven talking about Obama's public health insurance option as part of the GNY exhibition's performance series. Good friend and great doctor Eamonn Vitt is part of the crew. Eamonn has been running a program for some years now where he exchanges medical care for artists and takes payment in artworks.

Speaking of Greater New York, here's some photographs of ICI's Kate Fowle installing the Rotating Gallery at PS1 today - her show "the backroom" is part of the GNY exhibition.

Saturday June 19 at 3pm

Dr. Maria Raven, MD/MPH will be giving a powerpoint presentation this Saturday at PS 1 as part of programming organized by Greater New York artist Lucy Raven related to an art-for-medical-care health clinic run in collaboration with Dr. Eamonn Vitt for artists later this summer.

The talk will be making sense of Obama's health care plan, and discussing what it means to the un- and underinsured. For the last few years, Dr. Raven has been running an incredible pilot program at
Bellevue—now expanded to several hospitals around the city---to improve care and reduce hospital admissions and ED visits for patients with frequent, suboptimal use of the health care system. She is an advocate for public health reform, and she's a fantastic speaker on the topic. The talk will be brief, with time for questions after.

The Portrait of a Lawyer

Idiom Magazine's Sam Biederman's thoughtful, personal essay on subject-artist-viewer relationships in the Joel Sternfeld photograph Barefoot Attorney (1989) caused a stir this week. Biederman's father happens to be the subject of the photograph and so the essay offers access to the usually-silent subject. Almost as soon as the piece was posted, Idiom received a strongly-worded email from Sternfeld via his gallery, Luhring Augustine, asking for the illustrating photograph to be removed immediately (from the journal's website, and apparently everywhere else, because it's disappeared from the Art Institute of Chicago's online collection too). It seems that Sternfeld didn't like the mystique of his image transgressed by his subject's autobiographic details. 


I wrote a thesis on Sternfeld's Hart Island series and met him in the process (an engaging man). For me, Biederman's essay only serves to highlight the contested nature of subject and subjectivity in photography, without contesting the enduring beauty of Sternfeld's work. It's a shame the artist didn't see it this way too.

Mociun

Went to a book launch for the excellent Lines & Shapes design series tonight on the way home which my friend C's work was part of, and it made me think of last Easter weekend. Some pictures taken in early April for the upcoming fall/winter Mociun line below. Her textile designs are influenced by Bauhaus, Bourgeois and baking. A fine triumvirate.

Did Holy Moly start an art blog?

Just got switched on to this blog by a friend in L.A.  Cathedral of Shit is "sporadically posted art gossip/updates/news/unfounded gossip and hard idle chitchat. Speculation welcome."

Not necessarily hard news then, but the art world takes itself far too seriously to necessitate anyone else doing so on its behalf.  Interesting open letter to the Tate posted a few scrolls down the page, protesting the recent program "No Soul for Sale" organised by  artist Maurizio Cattelan and curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni at Tate Modern in London.

Apparently (or possibly "allegedly" is a safer bet) a fair few of the particpants were paying to appear in the iconic Turbine Hall, resulting in said letter from which an excerpt:

"Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?"

The hidden gem of this conversation is the lone comment at the end that points out "if poor unpaid artists are the elephant in the room, then interns are the elephant’s dung."  Too true, yet how to resist the hegemony we're all part of, unwittingly, unwillingly, or otherwise? Apparently not through the NSFS program or Tate.

And on a lighter note:

Mark Bradford @ MoMA a week ago = best artist talk I've seen in ages. Read about how he went from hairdresser to MFA grad to MoMA guest in NY Mag.

Lucinda Devlin

Ha. I love Jim Johnson's blog - I think about Lucinda Devlin today (after finally seeing her work in the flesh at the Wadworth Atheneum's 'again:serial practices in contemporary art' show last month) and there she is, the most recent post on Politics, Theory and Photography. From the first time I saw them, I was transfixed by the jewel-like colours of her photographs, morbidly fascinated and then uncomfortable, and then left drained. Necessary photographs.

Between 1991 and 1998 Lucinda Devlin photographed in penitentiaries in twenty states, with the permission and cooperation of the local authorities. She called the resulting series The Omega Suites, alluding to the final letter of the Greek alphabet as a metaphor for the finality of execution. Devlin expresses an interest in "let[ting] the environments themselves communicate directly with viewers."