ZOE STRAUSS STARTS A TRUST FUND FOR YOUNG FILMMAKERS

Zoe Strauss is starting up a trust fund for young filmmakers by selling limited edition prints on her website.

The film that started it all is the Zoe Strauss documentary If You Break the Skin You Must Come in ( website here) which must be excellent because when I went to go see it the other night this many people were there:




. . .and it was all sold out so me and the Fabric Horse blogger, Mary, who also showed up, went to go see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford instead, and all I have to say about that is this.

Review of two recent art publications (or thankless jobs)

As a person who has made "catalogs" for each of her last three solo shows, and has more then a hand-full of each of them (except for the latest which I gave away for free) left, I have a soft-spot for anyone who can get a collection of zeroxed writings together. Everyone will take your publication if it is free but hardly anyone will read it. If it costs money, someone may pick it up and browse through it, and maybe even like it, but no one will buy it.

Still, though, the creator of zines (even if they call their zine a mag--as is the case with Megawords) is a hero in my book:



The catalog of Anthony Campuzano's recent show at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, either called Love Everyone (the words which grace the cover-image based on this woodcut by Ben Franklin) or titled like the show as Note on Door.

Authors: Anthony Campunzano, William Pym, and Pablo Colapinto with help from (most likely without permission) reprinted texts from the likes of Vladmir Nabokov to the BBC's Compliance Manual.

Immediately I like that this catalog is standard zine sized, a folded in half sheet of regular copy paper, and most of the text appears to be properly zeroxed, though one wonders if some of the common "mistakes" of zine creators; too much black, off-center copying and etc. were aesthetic decisions or actually accidents.

The text itself proves to both disambigufy (I think I just made that word up) Mr. Campuzano's somewhat ambiguous show while creating a gestalt of mystery all of it's own. The best original essay award goes to Pablo who blew my mind by straight up comparing Anthony's paintings to Shrodinger's cat theory. I enjoyed the longer essay by William Pym, the director of Fleisher/Ollman, which gave further insight into the work of Campuzano but I can't help feeling that Mr. Pym and I have some deep philosophical disagreements.

The rest of the copied text, including that of Mr. Campuzano, weaves a highly intriguing cloud of ideas and dots could be connected in infinite directions. No doubt that each piece of text was included because it struck some personal chord with the editor. All in all very awesome, please make one for every show.




Megawords Magazine

Published by Dan Murphy and Anthony Smyrski.

This edition of Megawords actually contains more words then pictures, which is different. The content is all interviews and though no information is given to this effect I have concluded that the interviews are with all of the people who have helped the Magazine through all its various incarnations. I really liked this issue because I am a sucker for interviews. The only problem I have with interviews is getting interested in the words of people I have never heard of before, but I was very interested in the words of William Pym and former Independant publisher Sam (Matt) Schwartz because I always see them around.

It was great to read these two speak because I've had nothing but the most awkward conversations ever with them in person. I do wish William Pym would leave myspace alone--it's not hurting anyone, and I was overjoyed to hear Mr. Schwartz articulate something about journalism that I've been thinking for awhile:

"Journalism that people get paid to do--nowadays, so far as I can tell--is about access and betrayal. You try to get access to people, institutions and situations that the public is interested in, that either have some celebrity value, or some intrigue value. You get really close to your subject, and you sell them out."

I don't know what to say after that except; THE END.

A SQUID EATING DOUGH IN A POLYETHYLENE BAG or AIDS Wolf at Copy

AIDs Wolf rolled up to Copy with Old Time Relijun (who I enjoyed but I LOVED AIDs Wolf)--also playing were Philly natives Drums Like Machine Guns and Satanized--a couple of Sundays ago when it was still October and I was worried about global warming. Dave Dunn and I carried all their stuff inside:



And, besides the fact that neither of the bands really helped carry their stuff in, the show was amazing. Seripop posters were hung all over Copy's store and I thought twice about buying one but I think I'll quote Chloe Lum, Seripop poster maker (with Yannick), and screecher for AIDs Wolf when she said "I'm too cheap to even buy my own art". . . but then she went on to buy three Steve Keene's ($5), which aren't too expensive for anyone's blood.















As with most art collectives slash music makers AIDs Wolf is kind of hard to understand. I mean you see them, you like them, you get their vibe, but when you try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together you find you really don't know that much. Like, you really don't even know their real names, even on their Wiki Page they go by code: Hiroshima Thunder, Him, the Maji, Special Deluxe, and Barbarian Destroyer.

So I put a couple of questions to Chloe on her Facebook account:

Annette: How are AIDs Wolf and Seripop related?

Chloe: AIDS Wolf and Seripop are related in the fact that Yannick and I do both and that we do 99% of the AIDs Wolf graphics.

We started seripop because we both played in (unsuccessful) bands and wanted to promote em. by the time AIDs Wolf rolled around , Seripop was getting some respect and notoriety here and there so people perked up their ears a bit to the unknown noise rock band from Montreal; Most of those people ended up hating us.

A: Just for kicks what are your musical and artistic influences?


C: AIDs Wolf influences:

Chrome , Captain Beefheart (!!!!) , Discharge , Throbbing Gristle , Us Maple , Royal Trux , Arab on Radar , Voivod , Emerson Lake and Palmer , Jean Louis Costes, This Heat , Sun City Girls , Caetano Veloso, Sightings.

Seripop influences:

Saul Steinberg , Art Chantry , Eduardo Munoz Bachs , Simon Bosse , Basil Wolverton , Wiktor Gorka , Dan Decarlo , Mark Beyer , Jean Dubuffet , Henriette Valium, Vittorio Fiorucci

And now everyone understands everything!

SUNDAY DECEMBER 2ND EQUALS OFFICIAL LAUNCH

YO! I AM NOT READY FOR VISITORS YET! JUST GOT OUT OF THE GODDAMN SHOWER!

So Philebrity blew the whistle on my new blog before I was ready to tell anyone about it. The official launch date will be the date of my gallery talk at Vox Populi: SUNDAY, DECEMBER 2ND AT 3 PM. There will be foodstuffs and etc. per usual.

I am 27. I make art.

For all of those who haven't followed me from blog to blog a little art introduction; I just had a little art show at Padlock Gallery in Philadelphia. It was called "27" in honor of the fact that I turned 27 the day before the show. Lately I have been drawing large groups of people composed of people I know and people I find on the internet or in glossy mags, these drawings don't photograph well for me. I also produce "floral arrangements", copy essays, and draw (mostly flowers) on sheets. This show was accompanied by a little zine called "Ordinary People Can Typically Gain Power by Acting Collectively."

I dedicate my most recent work to Edward Gorey, Philip K. Dick, and Susan Sontag, but a big inspiration for my recent thought processes has been the books Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut and The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari.

Basically my thesis is art takes time and you judge an artist on a life's work, this is a problem if you want to live and eat on a daily basis so you have to find a way to do that:



You'll have to excuse my love of pictures with lots of flash--this is what you'd see when you walked into the gallery, a mirror's eye-view of "Portal of History" which is a beaded curtain made out of tapes of my recorded voice reading The Lives of the Artists.



Outside of the mirror, you cannot read Giorgio Vasari.



A detail.



The right side of the gallery.



"Decorative Element", a drawing on a sheet.



"Flower Arrangement 12"



"Yellow Sign Menu"



Detail.



"Spiderman" I was planning on naming this piece Black Flag but Jasper Johns might already have one like it, plus I already reference Raymond Pettibone--I'm punk rock at heart but this piece is about claiming responsibility for the place you live in and the mess you have allowed that place to make. Think of the ending scene in the first Spiderman movie.

Now some bad flicks of my drawings:



"Dial 481" everyone's favorite, it refers to a mood you can dial in Philp K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The mood is about coming out of despair and seeing endless possibilities for the future.



Detail.



"Really Full Subway Car" This flick is so terrible you can't see anything, basically many people are in the subway car, which floats in a sea of thoughts.



Detail. There was also one other drawing that I didn't even attempt to photograph.

Special thanks to Fabric Horse for writing my show up!

That's me, now let's talk about the rest of the world.

REPOST OF MY LAST ART IN THE AGE POST

The following post has been taken off the Art in the Age site, it is the last post I made as blogger for Art in the Age, so the final paragraph is a little obsolete:



GYRO TAKES OVER ART IN THE AGE THOUGH IT ALWAYS HAD IT

Yesterday morning we read something Philebrity linked to in New York Magazine about Gawker and became caught up with the idea of transparency, which for a business means not keeping any secrets from the people reading or buying you. It is in the interest of transparency that I regret to inform you of some new developments for Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

Yesterday afternoon Tim Gough and Nick Paparone the inventors of the idea of Art in the Age, and the people in charge of the look of the line, basically its art directors, were taken off the project by their financial backers; Gyro Worldwide. Reasons for their removal were not any wrong-doing on the part of Nick and Tim, rather Gyro considered the amount of money they asked for in their contract to be beyond what it could spend on the line. As we all can believe it sometimes takes years to turn a profit on any business venture and Steve Grasse, owner of Gyro, reported that "It took seven years to turn a profit on Sailor Jerry"--Gyro's other clothing company.



Concerns abound about the integrity of the clothing line and whether it will live up to the high standards set by Tim Gough and Nick Paparone, as to that, only time can tell.

I personally regret what has happened with Art in the Age, Nick and Tim are good friends and I wish them every possible success and happiness--and I know, talented as they are, they'll have no problems moving on. However, I am going to stay on as Art in the Age's media component. Dave Dunn and I will continue making video interviews and I will continue to cover the arts from Philadelphia and vicinity using this site. I also cannot help but hope, that even under different hands Art in the Age will continue to produce high-quality artist made multiples.

Please make use of the comment section to give voice to your opinions on this matter. I am especially interested in what people have to say about my own choice of staying with Art in the Age and what they think will happen with the company in the future.

As always thanks for reading!

-Annette Monnier



This whole situation was the balls and no one ended up looking good, here are some of the comments people made. (There were some really nasty ones towards the end but I couldn't "publish" them because I had already quit.) I have removed all the names of the commentors, not for anyone's protection but mostly because I don't know all of their real names and feel like a jerk writing LordVoldemort7:

Well, it sort of seems unfair that the inventors and the dreamers got the shaft. It's the old business model of chewing up the creative side and then, having dined, moving on. As for you, don't let anyone else tell you what to do. See what happens and then make a decision--your decision. Gotta love you for feeling loyalty to your friends and feeling some squeamishness, here.

"Don't Give Up" possibly the best t-shirt ever, and appropriate for all situations.

I agree with L---- that the creative capital (Nick, Tim) has been steamrolled and that it's not the first time and won't be the last time that "stuff happens" and the artists take the hit. The economy sucks right now and Gyro made a business decision. It hurts but they're bottom line is important to them. I'm sad about this and I am sad for Nick and Tim. I do think talent will out and Nick and Tim will rise up with another venture. Annette, you are great as the voice of Art in the Age and it would be sad to lose you as well. It's got to be very hard for you.

The line will NOT be the same. The dream is dead. Time to move on to the next thing.

I'll miss shopping here.

Seems like the biggest thing she forgot to mention is that from what I know, not only are Tim and Nick the creative backbone of the company, they also concepted the entire project, building it from scratch; too bad that aspect of ownership doesn't seems to be as important to the blogger as the financial ownership.

What is gyro? It is a meat wrap sandwich, right? I don't eat meat. I eat falafal, why doesn't falafal take over art in the age?

Didn't the same thing happen to John Kricfalusi with Ren and Stimpy?

This is what happens when you put yourself and your talents at the mercy of faceless monetary interests at the core, that was the whole point of DIY, everything, collectives, etc. Out generation of thinkers put into the modern condition of the wealthless with a wealth of ideas being bought and gaining very little in the end has to find ways to push this like a self sufficient vehicle so as not to hit potholes and have boundaries. . . hard to say with bills to pay, I know, I know. I just hope this has positive results, in sparkling something new and beyond. PUSH IT.

It's sad that we reach a point in our lives where we'd rather stick around after our friends get trampled by greedy businessmen than show some compassion and integrity for an obviously foul situation. Between Urban Outfitter's and Gyro, Philadelphia has become a breeding ground for unethical behavior. I think I'm going to vomit.

WTF

BOOOOOOOOO

New blog, no money.

This is tough.

I started this blog because my other on-line journal, "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" lost all meaning due to dark times of failure and corporate betrayal.

Blogspot is not as pretty as Art in the Age, and although it is nice that Blogspot is free it also does not pay me anything. This blog has no budget, come here a lot and maybe I can change that, even buy a new location and pay some brilliant web genius to design a page worthier of your aesthetic sensibilities. But, comrades! if you can't judge a book by it's cover, I think it follows that you can't judge a blog by where it's hosted.

You may have noticed that this blog is once again titled after an art essay, this time "One Culture and the New Sensibility" by Susan Sontag. The whole essay is pseudo-reasonably summed up by this quote:

"From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of a machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a painting by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible. "



So what you're reading here is a blog that is not a snob in any of the traditional ways. This web-log may review some Alex Katz on the same day that it asks you to appreciate horribly-taken photographs of cheeseburgers (this blog loves nothing so much as a digital camera with a flash), it asks you to do this because it believes that's the way people are beginning to see things anyways. We are becoming one big schizophrenic culture-monster, and rather then belittle this way of seeing the world, this blog wants to find out if we can use it to actually understand the world (and each other) a little better. Also, I don't really want this to be a one-woman show, if you like me please help me out.

Also this blog is mostly about art and culture in Philadelphia, that's where I live, that's what I love, and that's what I want to bring into the discussion with the rest of the world but I care about shit that happens all over the global town.