Interview in the Forest Hills Times Ledger

Art from Science
Forest Hills artist taps into scientific intuition and applies it to the canvas

By Allison Plitt
Thursday, September 29, 2011 12:34 PM EDT
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Janet Bruesselbach with her cerebral paintings, which blend the principles of art and science. Photo by Allison Plitt

Raised in Southern California by parents who are both laser physicists, Forest Hills painter Janet Bruesselbach grew up surrounded by a world of science that serves as a pervasive theme throughout her artwork. While most artists refer to their pieces as “creations,” Bruesselbach discusses her work in more scientific terms such as “experiments” or “inventions.”

Even Bruesselbach admits to her unconventional view of art. “I have this weird kind of thinking in terms of optics and thinking of things objectively and experimentally — like seeing everything I do as an experiment that I don’t see a lot of other artists doing and I know that is because I always wanted to be in science a lot more actually,” she said.

Bruesselbach divides her artwork into three different categories. The first group is a series of works called “astrae,” in which Bruesselbach paints female models set against different backgrounds of celestial galaxies. Displaying her fascination with astronomy, she employed an inventive technique to create this type of artwork.

Bruesselbach designed each “astrae” piece using what she calls “digital painting.” Describing the process, she said “it started when I happened to have my laptop with me during a figure drawing class in high school. I opened a photo of a space nebula in Photoshop, put another layer on top of it and drew the model as if the nebula were a setting.”

Bruesselbach also conceded to a lifelong love of science fiction as seen by her second genre of paintings, in which bodies — be they human or alien — transform into various shapes. She said, “There’s this crazy stuff with the bodies morphing into each other, which is always sort of based on rules that I make. It’s like an algorithm, kind of like a process of giving myself a lot of invention, but, at the same time, keeping a firm structure in there. I’m actually trying to replace space with space in a way.”

Bruesselbach’s third category of artwork is portraiture, in which she employs her professional training in “traditional representative painting.” She holds a bachelor of fine arts in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and a master of fine arts in painting from the New York Academy of Art.

Rejecting the idea of painting a person from a photo, she prefers the human interaction that develops between herself and live models. “I know that my skills lie directly in working with a human subject and I know that all I want to paint is people,” Bruesselbach remarked. “Quite often with portraits you end up with parts of a person’s personality being revealed that you didn’t expect to.”

In the future, Bruesselbach hopes to do more portraits through a video chat technology she uses on her computer. Describing her portraiture via video chat as a “remote intimacy,” she said, “I am really interested in these sort of contradictions in the way we like to think how technology changes us or contradictions to how we think science works because I basically grew up on the Internet. I feel that connections that we make there are much more intimate and more emotional than those that I have in person.”

Another goal for Bruesselbach is to possibly become an artist representative or open a gallery focused on affordable art, which she says is a current movement in the art world. “I am a great believer in the middle classes being able to afford art,” she said.

From 2009 until 2011, Bruesselbach worked as a curator at a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side called, “A Gathering of the Tribes.” Since the owner of the gallery, Steve Cannon, is blind, she needed to verbally describe each piece of artwork to him. As a result of this experience, Bruesselbach was inspired to work on her current venture which involves finding writers to depict artwork that artists will need to reproduce. By combining the efforts of both the writers and the painters, she intends to organize an art show to exhibit at various galleries.

“In taking Steve Cannon to art openings and describing the work to him, I realized how much effort was involved in really describing imagery, especially considering that many art reviews and press releases neglect to do this properly,” she said. “High art, for a few years, has been so conceptually oriented that it’s more about language and less about exploring the complicated relationships between the verbal and the visual.”

For more information about Janet Bruesselbach’s artwork and upcoming exhibits, you can visit her website at www.bruesselbach.com or email her at janet@bruesselbach.com.

Teleportraiture

Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am a classically-trained portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Unlike paintings from photos, these portraits capture a personality over time. Sometimes things occur like the mirror effect, where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. Yet the resulting painting is still, choosing challenge over cubist adaptations.

I’ve grown up on the internet, communicating throught text, but in the past few years interacting face-to-face remotely has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers. This toggling between performing and concentrating means that, more often than not, the absent, concentrating expression of the computer user will be depicted – if I allow it to be.

This project seeks to examine the tenuous, technology, strange intimacy, and charged emotions around communicating remotely, by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.

I have worked this way on three occasions prior to starting this campaign: once with deep romance, once with a stranger speaking another language, and once for a self-portrait. Teleportraiture in part examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity. In the course of the project I hope to see many faces I haven’t seen in person or ever before. Ultimately, my goal is always to make my subject look good, and give them a unique experience with a tangible result – the conceptual aspects will never supercede that. By making your backing part of this project specifically, you get to participate in a techno-social experiment marking a particular cultural moment in an oddly old-school way.

Your money buys you a portrait, images thereof, and videos of sessions, or goes toward a book, poster, and exhibition of the series. The backing structure is based around backers of the smallest amounts being able to sit in and watch the process. At the next level, you’ll get a pdf book and poster of every portrait. Mid-range backers actively contribute by sitting to have their portrait painted, and keep a scan, but I keep the painting. With the permission of the sitter, sessions will be recorded, and a little more money gets you the video. At a relatively low cost for oil portrait commissions, backerss can buy the painting. Even higher donations will keep lower backers from viewing the session, plus no limitations on time or size. I will continue to take commissions for these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled. All backers receive an invitation to a preview reception of the exhibition of these works. The exhibition’s location is undetermined, but should be longer than a month in New York City in mid-2012, somewhere with wifi and computers for remote attendance and so I can keep painting teleportraits from the space.

I'm hoping to make 20-30 paintings over the course of 2 months. Sittings usually take about 3 hours. Most of the paintings I make through Teleportraiture will be between 8x10 inches and 12x16 inches. Usually, I charge $400 or more for a head and shoulders portrait. That means what I really want to raise is $8000. This is, at bare minimum, what your donation goes towards:

Studio rental 800

Electricity 100

Cable 100

Painting Supplies 300

Printing 300

Shipping 400

Frames 200

Exhibition space rental 2000

Exhibition ad/promo 500

Exhibition hardware and labor 300

TOTAL: 5000

With $3000 more, at least, though, I can rent the space for longer, invest in a bigger, better scanner, and provide a computer and projector for the opening. In fact, I'm looking for a good tech-friendly space for this, and if it's non-profit, that would be a huge help, as well.

Here's a 10-minute demo video in which I paint Lauren while discussing the project.

Teleportraiture

Kickstarter approved my project!



Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am an accomplished portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Often I describe things like the mirror effect where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. The outcome is the result of a face moving through time, capturing a personality, and particularly a personality in interaction with my own.
I’ve grown up on the internet, and in the past few years interacting remotely in this same facial, visual and vocal way has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers.
This project seeks to examine the strange intimacy and changed emotions around communicating remotely by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.
I have worked this way on two occasions: once with deep romance, and once with a complete stranger speaking another language, on chatroulette, where most other video screens showed penises. Thus this project examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity.
The donor structure is based around other donors being able to sit in and watch the process, and, with the permission of the subjects, will be recorded. Higher donations are given private sessions, and there’s plenty to be had if one is shy. A lower donation will allow posing without buying the painting. The intent is to continue to make these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled.
I’m aiming to complete 20-30 paintings through this project and exhibit them. Guests will be able to attend the exhibit remotely.

Blind Painting, or, The Canvas Game

Artists, Writers, and Persons of Interest,

This is an invitation to participate in a collaborative project and
exhibition. I've been brainstorming it as "blind painting": what it
resembles is a surrealist game (Ipupukat/ the Paper Game, a little
bit), and, while it's probably been done before, every time it's done
is vastly different depending on the participants.

Artists will contribute one of their works - we'll stick to
2-dimensional, with a maximum largest dimension of 36 inches, to keep
it simple. Writers will be assigned (randomly) one of these works to
describe as extensively as possible, as if it were to be destroyed, or
needed to be forged. Then I will give another participating artist one of these descriptions of
another artist's submitted piece, and they will attempt to replicate the artwork
from that.

There are a lot of interesting things about image and
language being tested experimentally, here. Go with it. Ultimately,
both the original works and the telephone-reproductions will be
displayed in an exhibit, accompanied by the descriptions.
This project will evolve greatly as it goes on. Clearly, I know more
artists than writers, so please pass this on to more writers. If
you're an artist, and know you're good at visual verbiage, you may
save yourself a lot of work by volunteering to be a writer. I may
change it so that it's all artists, especially if we have mostly
artists who write well. Finishing on deadline will be important for
this project, since there are two stages of difficult creative work
before the exhibition materials can even be prepared.

If you're interested in participating as an artist, reply with a jpg
of the work you'd like to include (with media, dimensions, and date),
or say you want to make something specifically for it. If you'd like
to only be a writer, reply with a short sample of observational
writing. If you think you can do both, send both. If pulling those
together is slowing you down from replying to this, then worry about
it later and just reply.

I'm hoping to have an exhibition sometime in early 2012 - March, in
New York. By default, I can hold the show at A Gathering of the
Tribes, blind guy Steve Cannon's alternative space in the East
VIllage, but if you like the idea and can provide a more accessible
space for 4-6 weeks, or somewhere to re-exhibit, I would love that,
and we should discuss it.

I've sent this call to a very diverse crowd at all career stages. The
project's ultimate form will depend on who responds. Please pass it
on, post it, and let those you think would enjoy it know. They should
contact janet@bruesselbach.com (I may set up another address if things
get too intense).
And if you'd like to be involved in planning or funding, I'd love the help.

Some Remarks by Jeffrey Grunthaner on the paintings of Janet Bruesselbach

Arty review of "I Hate Art"

Hosts

I wanted to generate what the aliens, Ariekei, in Embassytown by China Mieville look like before I looked up the better job other artists have probably done.  It's almost instantly one of my favorite books, everyone.  I don't think I have any better examples of Literary Sci Fi.  I can compare it to Babel-17 or Anathem but better.

Anyway, the Ariekei are described with mixed analogies to earth creatures, enough that you get an idea of something very alien-looking.  Their technology is all biological and they speak a non-representational language with two harmonizing mouths, the "cut" (above, on the neck) and the "turn" (at chest level).  They walk on four "spider"-like legs ending in "hooves", with spines and dark hair.  They have two coral-like "wings", the giftwing (manipulation, from under the turn mouth) and the fanwing (hearing, behind cutmouth and eye antlers).  Wings and eye-antlers all retract or furl and emerge like those of sea creatures or stop-motion plants.  Mature hosts are accompanied by battery creatures (zelles) and older ones grow edible sacs.

Show music

I put together a playlist for the show. This is how it goes:

1. How To Be Eaten By A Woman / The Glitch Mob 5:58
2. Quality Time / Starfucker 2:58
3. A/B Machines / Sleigh Bells 3:35
4. Down On Yourself / Shy Child 3:13
5. Destroy Everything You Touch / Ladytron 4:37
6. Dolls / New Young Pony Club 3:16
7. Mirrorage / Glasser 3:39
8. Artificial Intelligence / Nite Jewel 3:52
9. Conversation / Gary Numan 7:37
10. Universe / Fujiya & Miyagi 4:25
11. Can't Hear My Eyes / Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti 3:20
12. Twin Flames / Klaxons 4:20
13. Too Much / Sufjan Stevens 6:44
14. Go Long / Joanna Newsom 8:03
15. Madder Red / Yeasayer 4:06
16. Red Star / EMA 6:36

Plus entire albums : Ponytail's "Do Whatever You Want All The Time", tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l , Marnie Stern, Geneva Jacuzzi, Crystal Castles, The Fiery Furnaces' Bitter Tea.

I Hate Art

I now have a preview available of my show here: bruesselbach.com. Yes, you contact me for purchases and to set up portrait sittings.

I Hate Art

Janet Bruesselbach

the "I Hate Art" show

April 23 - May 23, 2011

Opening Reception Saturday, April 23, 7-9 pm

Tribes Gallery

285 E 3rd St. 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10009
212 674 3778

"The Artist is Absent" minded : Live Portraits Every Saturday



You have assumptions, if you’re reading this.  Either that it will explain what you’re looking at, or that it will be theoretical gibberish, or that it will be yet another idiot artist whose shtick is to defy of either of those assumptions.  There are many ways what you are observing could only fulfill your expectations. 

 You should probably tell Janet what you’re seeing, and tell her what to paint.  She doesn’t know either any more.  If you have empty wall space, maybe you should put art in it.  Otherwise, it’s not going to try to be socially conscious or transcendent or even successfully satirize those goals.

Consider these experiments produced by an algorithm that forces choices on a well-trained* unconscious human machine.  See something not about art, but about science, that is, the pursuit of truth, and therefore, compulsively honest, to the point of both representational loyalty and continuous contradiction.  Choices were made to please you, to make something that is simultaneously what you want to see and what you’ve never seen before.  They were made by finding sympathetic shapes in other shapes, generating one signal out of another by treating it as noise.  Or simply trying to make a self-deprecating joke.

You should visit on Saturdays and sit for the artist.  You may buy the portraits, and the proceeds will go towards turning this building into somewhere artists can be as stupid as they want to be.  You should leave feedback, but only if it’s negative.  We are fishing for insults, here.  If this attitude annoys, you can reasonably be expected to ignore it.  Thank you.  I’m sorry.

* MFA, New York Academy, 2009. BFA, RISD, 2006. TMI, Internet, just Google her, you hardly know her.

Letter from Steve: Repossession of property at 285 E 3rd St.

A Gathering of the Tribes

(where I'm doing my first solo show next month)


Say folks,

Here's the situation, read it and weep: NY Times Article

Because of the situation I find myself in, and I'm certainly not going to get my eyesight back anytime soon, I need your help.

Since selling this building to Lorraine Zhang, I have found that she has no idea how to manage this property here in NYC.  She seems to have found herself in an awful lot of debt.  

With your help, I was hoping you might know anyone with deep pockets or charitable organizations that might help me with repossessing the building to place it under new management.  

I've owned the building for over 40 years and in the process, lost my eyesight, and currently have nobody around to manage the property.  I'll need someone to manage the property properly.

If you know anyone that might be able to help with this current crisis here, please forward this email to them.

For the last 20 years, for the most part I, Steve Cannon, have been financing Tribes myself.  2/3 on my own, and 1/3 funding

The total loss in running Tribes since opening is well over a million dollars, if not more.  Since Lorraine has proven incapable of keeping up with the bills of the property (tax, mortgage, bills, etc.), she finds that she's had to put it on the market.

What I'd like to do is to rent the other spaces out to artists.  Have them pay a maintenance fee...  And find a philanthropist or charity to pay off the mortgage.  I need your help in this search and if you know someone who can help, let me know. The discrepancy between rich and poor is ever widening in the nation, and artists are among the people who suffer most. For over 20 years, Tribes has sought to help emergent and established artists pursue their calling in the arts, and I should like to keep it that way.

If you have any questions, please give me a call:  212-674-8262

Please read the article line by line carefully.

And here's another article to consider as well:

Create an East Village Dream House by Evicting a Local Legend

For more info about Tribes, check out www.tribes.org. We're also on Flickr, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.   

Love you madly,
Steve

Mix for my dad's birthday

I used to send him these pretty regularly.  This year I reinstituted the tradition.  It's got lots of good music I've been listening to lately, on it. It's topical and stuff.

Side A: War dead baby blues

1. Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs - Devil Do
2. The Builders & the Butchers - Cradle on Fire
3. O'Death - Only Daughter
4. Vivian Girls - Sixteen Ways
5. Amanda Palmer (on her magical ukelele)-Idioteque
6. PJ Harvey - The Glorious Land
7. Arcade Fire - Half Light II (No Celebration)
8. David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, and Roisin Murphy - Don't You Agree
9. Cut Copy - Blink and You'll Miss A Revolution
10. Deerhoof - I Did Crimes For You

(not on 8tracks) 11. Anna Calvi - I'll Be Your Man

Side B : wallow in immanence

12. The National - Conversation 16
13. Wolf Parade - Pobody's Nerfect
14. Jenny & Johnny - Committed
15. Tennis - Baltimore
16. Dum Dum Girls - Jail LA LA
17. Lykke Li - Rich Kids Blues
18. Best Coast - Bratty B
19. Wavves - Green Eyes (these two songs are basically about each other)
20. Thee Oh Sees - MT Work
(not on 8tracks) 21. Scott Pilgrim Soundtrack - Sex Bo-bomb - Threshold
22. Andrew Jackson Jihad - We Didn't Come Here to Rock
23. The Books - Group Autogenics II

Download before March 31

SCOPE Art Fair highlights

       Oh, SCOPE. You are a symptom that screams "ENJOY ME!" I hate myself for loving you, because it means that, whether I enjoy their company or not, I, too, am a hipster.
       This was my last fair. I visited on Saturday around 2. As mentioned before, SCOPE took over Pulse's space from last year, a sprawling seaside warehouse block beside the West Side Highway at Houston. To get to the entrance you had to walk by the entire building, which involved passing a half-open loading bay where they'd parked trailer potties next to their resident caterer, Roberta's, a trendy North Brooklyn pizza place that was selling no pizza but lots of booze. I'll also get Roberta's out of the way by saying the restaurant area was decked out like a space disco on several different drugs. The space seems to go on forever and is easy to get lost in, which very much suited the fair. Maybe I just like the space a lot, because I liked the irrational exuberance of Pulse last year.
       SCOPE is the most promo-savvy (I got updates every day on their schedule, and I'm not even sure how I got on their mailing list). Geographically, this one seemed very Brooklyn- and Miami-heavy, with enough Asian to be notable, as well.  They show up at every major art fair cluster, although they never create one. They are the most like a trade fair, the most commercial, the most circus-like, and possibly the most self-conscious about all of the above.  But you know what?  There's more art I like here than anywhere else.  Which is to say, there's a lot, and it's made more provocative in the competition.  By admitting to pretention, they are less pretentious. They're selling to art lovers and collectors, not museums and dealers. It's the middle class, which right now is a bit concerned with its own mortality, and loves to look like the rich and poor, fucking.

Renee Gertier - Space Junk

An image of satellites in earth orbit made by poking holes in paper bags. Okay.

Kris Knight - "Belladona Atropos" and "Blood Flower"

Miami's Spinello Projects had a sprawling area of the front of the warehouse space, without great identification, and sometimes work displayed on tables like this - possibly visiting-collector fallout. Another highlight of theirs was Antonia Wright's "Are You Okay?", video of her crying in crowded public places.

Jorge Santos - Soapbox King

David M Bowers - The Collector

David Bowers! He has often been one of my favorite artists, illustrating fantasy covers with these classicist allegories. He advised me to join a country club if I wanted to sell work.

Ori G. Carino - "Selfexistenlessness" at Dean Projects

Carino counts as my favorite "find", since I'm a sucker for East/West clashes and stuff that looks like porn. Also he titles well. Jenny Bhatt, take note. I like the Dean Project. I hope I deserve to show there someday.  My quibble with this is that the airbrushing makes the figuration weak.

TRUSTOCORP at Contra Projects (a street art/lowbrow gallery based in Detroit)

Lluis Barba

Jennifer Cutrone and Paul Outlaw for Artists Wanted

Yeah, so, this was performance art about decadence and so forth. A bunch of artists being assholes. Every once and a while one was going around with a platter and offering you his sliced sausage at groin level. They probably took turns - I was also handed some grape juice from that golden fountain.

Andrew Ohanesian (image courtesy of the artist), "Mandies" at English Kills (Brooklyn)

Carrying on with the theme of free booze as relational aesthetics, this was my very favorite. There were two doors, looking grimy and clubby and run-down and covered in graffiti, with "please keep the noise to a minimum and respect our neighbors" signs on the front. One door led to behind the bar, one to in front of the bar. There was space for one or two people on either side. There was a keg underneath and a tap. Whoever entered behind the bar ended up in the role of bartender, and whoever entered on the patron side tried to get beer from them, generating these ad hoc arrangements. The doors weren't marked, so you didn't really know what to expect, approaching them, or which side you'd end up on. I'm told they temporarily had a tip jar going, so it was like a job of a couple of minutes. Maybe it's just because I got weak beer out of this, but I thought it was brilliant.

Apparently there was also a "frat party" performance that was supposed to be going on, but nobody was in the zoo-like enclosure, and I didn't want to volunteer. The upper lounge, "Home Away From Home", had a massage station and meditation and comfort foods and free condoms, and an author.

Matthew Oates - "Red in Red"

Station Independent is not a gallery, but a group of curators and consultants that mostly just do SCOPE NY.  Oates's painting caught my eye immediately - he's probing the uncanny world of living dead faces.

Jenny Morgan - "All This Time" at Like the Spice

I hit this near the end and after going to Mandies until the keg ran out, so I don't have a great description besides that I love Jenny Morgan's work.

       Maybe next year I'll try to hit up Volta finally, and a different set of third-tier fairs, and whatever Dalton and Powhida and Rad and such cool kids have set up for institutional critique (this year it was the Failure Desk). You should too. Look for jobs a couple weeks before hand, lots are available. Call yourself press, I'll show you how, and help me out with this, it's revelatory. Thanks for your attention, and see you next year.

Pulse 2011 NYC

      What happened, Pulse? Was I rushed? Hungry? Or were you just small? You were definitely smaller than last year. You were in the Metropolitan Pavilion on 18th, right in the middle of the city, nearly. Last year, you were where Scope is now, which encourages even more qualitative description in the form of contrasts between you and Scope, and only serves to confuse the two more.

Here's a contrast: 20x200 and Jen Bekman projects gave out free swag bags including useful art tools, canned coffee, chips, and way too much breath-freshening (mints, tongue brush) to avoid insult.  A little art fair humor, aimed more at art proles than VIPs.  Scope, my last stop, was all about the free beer, and wine, and condoms.
      It appears that what caught my eye was mostly based on personal affect, here.  Or maybe Pulse really does lean towards more work by women, more focused on craft, and often concerned with technology.  In fact, the frequency of animals and machines I've seen at it everywhere gives it a perpetually cybernetic theme. Galleries from Canada and the West coast make a good showing.  I often wonder how much local galleries debate whether they can just lure collectors in town for the fair directly to them without renting a booth.  I also skipped last year's repeats, of which I saw plenty.

Cindy Wright, "Web of Tears" at Mark Moore gallery

She makes big juicy paintings from closeups. Non-human subjects fare better - "bacon cube" was another highlight, but I like starry rhizomes, even with maudlin titles.

Laura Ball

These were exquisitely detailed, delicate watercolors, primarily of animals made of animals, were just spread out on a table. I suppose there were too many and they wanted to sell as many as possible.

Tim Etchells

Oh. More neon. Can we stop? With the neon? We get it.  Then again, it always does get my attention.

Carla Camino

Ironically, I cannot find a web presence for her.  Maybe I mis-transcribed her name.  She had some less impressive work up amongst this assortment of small drawings, but I dug this one.

Kevin Bourgeouis - "Inventions of Love (Natural Discourse)"

Syncronicity!  Nina at Causey in Williamsburg got back to me super fast after we chatted.  She is clearly a networker to emulate.

I don't think I liked anything in the artist project spaces upstairs ("Impulse").
Still, so:
Pulse: hip but friendly.

Independent Art Fair, NYC 2011

The Independent is in the X-Initiative, formerly DIA, building in Chelsea. It's touted as being "by and for gallerists", and is the more intellectual but less commercial (and less expensive, being free) Armory satellite.  Very curator-friendly, and dominated by Europeans.  It can claim to be the most vertical of the fairs, and the least walled-in, with natural lighting and a rooftop lounge.  The result was several galleries collaborating to assemble a somewhat cohesive museum show - a socially magic accomplishment!  Labels and identifying info were sometimes hard to find, though.

David Shrigley

Zach Feuer gallery is right next door, and has an eclectic, hilarious, brilliant solo show by Mark Flood (Murk Fluid) up now.

Alex Brown - Hummingbird

Ryan Gander - N.. n... n...nostalgia

This caught my eye because I'm a little nerdy.  That's an enlarged replica of a Roman d20, and there are some magic-force doodles stuck to the wall behind it.

Ricci Albenda - "Universe (Benny)/ Negative - Left"

I'm a fan of these in-wall sculptures.  Overheard collectors: "It IS part of the wall!" "Anish Kapoor does a lot of that."

To play art fair bingo.  I'm that much closer thanks to you, Neon Art.

Maybe I'm weak, but I think art fairs need regular kitten breaks.  We understand these aesthetics.  Kitty!

John Pylypchuk, you had me at "cigarettes smoking cigarettes".  Why did you put other stupid crap in there?

This wasn't at the Independent.  This was a weird painting about old Kraftwerk in a nearby Chelsea show.  I don't know where.  Sorry.

I walked to Pulse from there.  That is coming soon.

Verge Brooklyn Art Fair

I'm going to write wrap-ups of art fair week, even though they're all closing down now, so you can't take my recommendations, except to have an idea of what to do next year.

I went to this Brooklyn thing Thursday night. My friend Cecilia got a piece in A.I.R.'s biennial. She is a better Alice Neel who doesn't ruin children. You also just missed her show at Tribes. Speaking of which, Its building needs a friendly buyer

So this fair took over 111 Front, DUMBO's art building. Plus a nearby ground floor space, which I could see was probably still being set up, and I didn't make it over there.  Some of the galleries were curated by video reporter and artist Loren Munk, who was wearily lamenting intra-Brooklyn art politics.

This is all I saw that I liked:

Stephen Brower - Child Astronaut.  The caption described a company researching reducing payloads by using orphans as experimental astronauts - "half the weight of a real person".

Patricia Smith and Eric Ayotte are also highlights.

I considered buying an artist project space but then realized it was basically for suckers. I was right - and seeing that many desperate artists in a space that would have made them look bad even if any of them were good kind of made me lose interest in looking at art.  The crazy cyberpunk Chiézo was memorable, mostly because of her elaborate installation, costuming, and extremely detailed electronic-looking narrative drawing cycle.

Coming up next: the classy Independent.

Armory Show 2011

This show seemed much much smaller than the previous two years. Either I've learned how to efficiently find what I like or it's a really boring year.

$25 prints on dollar bills by Reed Seifer (the artist that presented the "spray to forget" campaign last year). It looks like he has a very close relationship with the fair as a designer and marketer, and always has this little booth to present ad-art projects.

Laura Oldfield Ford is fun, either slightly scrambled or not.  I'm really into word art at the moment - the only opportunity for narrative in a show sparsely populated by representative imagery.

Ron Mandos was raving about his prodigal artist Anthony Goicolea, although only this funny piece got me.

Erwin Wurm at Regina Gallery - Es, Ich, Uber-Ich (Id, Ego, Superego)
There's so much stuff like this.  Rehashed Freudianism thrown at abstraction with a frisson.  shrug.

Everyone liked this series by Gustavo Artigas of pure pigment painted canvases with the health dangers of the pigment, at Mexico City's Caja Blanca.  The show features galleries from a particular geographic region.  Last year it was Berlin, one city.  This year it was Latin America, so, pretty much a quarter of the earth.  Equal wealth?  Probably more.  Stronger showing than Berlin, in fact - they could have limited it to one country.

Xia Xiaowan at Galerie Urs Miele - Human Body.  Drawing on layers of plexi.  Lovely!

Jonathan Schipper at Pierogi, which has moved into the big leagues this year after previously being sort of Brooklyn and Indie.  This was a machine that was dragging these porcelain sculptures up and down, slowly breaking them apart.  The mechanism was repetitive, but of course, the movements change chaotically.  Liked this much.  Also at Pierogi were super-detailed drawings by Daniel Zeller that must have taken infinite patience.

Untitled Gallery seems to always have an unusual setup, in this case tiles made of pennies on the floor and canvas prints with art jokes by Andrew Hahn.

 Erik Thor Sandberg was in Pulse last year, but here's some gorgeous skeeve showing up at the Armory.  Almost soothing, since such classicism was rare this year.

Naaaaaah na na na na na nah naa, na nah na na-na-naahhhhh.  It's like everything you gather on a trip balled together.  Katamari lodged itself firmly in the cultural unconscious like some self metaphor.  "Cheap Magic Is Anticipated", by Ryan Garder.

I may be my usual unobservant self but that's about all the highlights worth sharing.  Tonight: too many openings?  Independent? Pulse?  We'll see!

John Wellington

John Wellington and I share many resume points - RISD, NYAA, Santa Monica, The Village. It's funny work - the man has based his career around his Asian fetish, essentially, although his artist's statement plays dumb/defensive/evasive about that. Or, like many artists, he can't write about his own work very well.

Still, the pastiche of Asian pop culture with Western classicism, paired with his dedication to craft, makes for an ironic profundity. I love the game-like captions and the combination of cultural levels - he doesn't just nod to Murakami, he includes him in a painting that seems to mock orientalizing generalizations:



Of course there's always that topic of the anti-real idol, the object of desire, but at times it's just another politically incorrect piece of cultural effluvia. The strength is the bizarre narratives implied by the game captions, set in these semi-medieval, semi-postmodern worlds.

Limnrix On Limerence

I know we're all trying to ignore Valentine's Day. I, for one, know that this will be the year the tradition of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind alone and crynerbating will be firmly established.


I Am Whatever You Say I Am, 2008

I did not know this word existed until two days ago.

This may or may not be your response to reading the extensive attempt to define this: I know that I have felt something like it, but my experience differs in various ways from Tennov's attributions to it. I think it's possible that people experience it in different ways, and this is the root of some things attributed to limerence. Like many psychological definitions, you try to self diagnose. Personally, I know that most meaning in my life comes from one or two limerent attachments I've had - primarily one that was, for a while, mutual. My tendency when discussing it is to not be able to articulate more than snarky soundbites.

Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" to describe a kind of long-term infatuation her subjects were describing in her study of love. Limerence and love are not two different things - limerence is a kind of love. (Officially, it's the early stage of love, but I consider that limiting.) It's also a way of evading the dismissiveness of terms like "infatuation" or "crush", although the dismissiveness creeps in as a kind of attempted antidote to limerence's hightened affect. Limerence is both itself an emotion and an intensifier of emotion. It's produced a lot of good music, great literature, and probably not a lot of great art, although it is a decent motivator - or extreme demotivator. The reaction is not binary "elation or despair". Even a good interaction can induce the emotion that, like limerence, needed an English word, but which I have seen called "sangry".

Limerence attaches every intense emotion one feels, regardless of connection through anything but oneself, to the limerence object (LO, or, as I will put it in tribute to David Foster Wallace, subject). If you've resolved to cure your limerence, you will end up avoiding anything interesting or that you like.

One way of thinking about it: If you have love or affection toward a subject, you google it. If you are limerent, you avoid googling anything closely connected to the subject, because you are afraid you will run across them, and end up unable to think about anything else for weeks.

An objection I have to part of the definition is the part about how limerence can end with consummation or conclusive knowledge of reciprocation status. Even with confirmed reciprocation, terror that one's limerent subject would lose the limerence reignited the feeling. Once I'd stopped feeling that fear, the limerence was less urgent, turned into an entity supported by two bodies. Whether an asymmetrically limerent relationship should be terminated is a difference of opinion that can terminate any kind - according to Tennov, relationships with one limerent member are sustainable, though commonly maligned.

The "limerent-limerent" relationship is what I've called a "positive-feedback-based assemblage", but why most agree that that coupling (which I want to think can contain any number, including not just integers but imaginaries, etc. ) is itself inherently unsustainable is hard to define. Positive feedback exceeds the boundaries of its system within some amount of time. With limerence the result could be a "burned out" emotional sensorium. I can't tell whether being unable to become interested in anything without limerence is still limerence, or its fallout.

While it's said that different people are more inclined toward limerence or inducing limerence, I suspect it's more likely that people have different and incompatible ways of effectively de-limerencing. I'd like to hear from anyone who hasn't ever felt limerent. I remember sustaining something from 2000 onward, which was replaced in 2006 by definite limerence - I don't think any was involved in the long-term, healthy relationship I was in starting in the middle of that time. Possibly, I always require transformation - a new subject. Which is kind of a bitch, and something I may have immunized against now, but two years of starvation haven't been cutting it.

I have resolved that next time, instead of having most interaction, with a human, mediated by the internet, I'll aim to be limerent towards a nonhuman (non-animal, probably non-carbon-based) entity. I'm not going to assume it would be an AI, partially because the determination of intelligence and whether it's required for limerence are part of what's so fascinating about this particular weird-ass fantasy. Remember, this woman married the goddamn Berlin Wall.Possibly an element of what makes someone more limerent has to do with how much they question the communication system and what constitutes an autonomous entity capable of reciprocation. Example: I do not believe I can be objectively determined to be intelligent or autonomous. Second example: My subject may have been incapable of reciprocal feeling, only attached if returned feeling was ambiguous. There is nothing psychically sick about either of these attitudes - maybe not even with Mrs. Berliner-Mauer.

Here's a paper(pdf) that argues that limerence is problematic, different from love as seen from instances of persisting into later stages of a relationship. I haven't read the whole thing, but without a threshold in the form of an amount of time or interaction after which limerence shouldn't persist, all it really does is, well, piss me off, make me sad, various other limerence-enhanced emotions, based on feeling that my subject had set a short time after consummation it was appropriate for me to still act limerent, I had appeared to exceed it, and that I am therefore entirely responsible for my own pain, emo emo etc. Basically all this does is induce another source of fear and anxiety in the limerent, towards their own limerence and its inappropriateness. I would say that most defined psychological states, like most things, should ethically lack the presence of either "goodness" or "badness".

Another objection I have to the definition is that the limerent inflates the subject's good qualities. Part of the involuntarity of limerence is not that you think everything the subject does is great, but that everything they do is relevent to your interests. The subject is not superhuman, or uniquely qualified: they are simply what the limerent is About. In fact, the word I was using before I heard "limerence" wasn't "in-love-ness", it was "aboutness", and I felt it could apply to particularly dedicated biographers and specialists. Perceived flaws aren't transformed to virtues, they are considered more important than the flaws of other entities, and have a huge emotional impact on the limerent.

I don't know whether it seems immature and self-absorbed to be discussing what is too often stigmatized as immature absorption, but I'm sick of not talking about what I think about. What are your responses?

Elf Deprecate

9:30-12, THIS Thursday, Jan 27th, Niagara Bar, 7th and A.
You can pay through the bar, and their commission is lower if you pay cash. I will buy you a drink if you show up at 8 to help install, or stick around to 12:30 to help pack. There will be a couple other artists, I don't know who.
This is what I'm putting in. Please comment on whether I should lean toward one genre or another or if something is AWFUL.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc 11x17 mounted poster

Only did one of these but if it sells I'll do another run.
Preorder:

Pinwheel 8x10 digital matted inkjet print

Anthropic 8x10 digital matted inkjet print

Andrea 4x5 digital matted inkjet print

Swan 4x5 digital matted inkjet print

Orbit 5x5 digital matted inkjet print

Bubbles 3x6 digital mounted inkjet print

Violet 4x10 digital mounted inkjet print

Stella 8x8 digital mounted inkjet print

Indulgent

Masturbatory

Derivative

Wasteful

Elf Pity

Elf Sabotage

Elf Efface

Elf Pity Party:
This Won't Help
Therapy
I feel your pain


I am considering, but may not have room for:
Guilt of Representation, 2008, oils on plastic, 7"x8".


Misunderstand Me 2010 23x23 oils



Wallow in Immanence 32x32 oils


Don't buy it. I'm really just competing with worthy charities, and don't need the validation at all. I'm already looking like a self-aggrandizing jerk by announcing all of this when it's a tiny multi-artists popup thing. Wait, I'm sorry, this shtick is really annoying.
Where there are paypal buttons above, domestic shipping is included. If you're up for it, you can just send as a friend/family to jupitre at gmail dot com to rob Paypal of their cut. Also email for arranging details of faster and international shipping. I know personal interaction, especially around money, is a pain in the ass. My etsy may rise from the grave, unless ugallery gets some attention.