New First Unexpected

SOUND OF SILENCE: ART DURING CENSORSHIP

Oleg Yushko, from the series "Implications," 2002-07

Panel Discussion

Sunday, January 29, 2012, 4:00 PM

Austrian Cultural Forum
11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY
Admission: Free with RSVP through
http://www.acfny.org/event/art-during-dictatorship/

A panel of artists, curators, critics and activists will discuss the recent developments in contemporary Belarusian art that have emerged in response to political and economic turmoil, state-initiated mass repression and abuse of human rights. The discussion will focus on artists' courageous positions and contributions to the popular protest movements in Belarus against the dictatorial regime of President Lukashenko, and on the possibilities for individual artists and for communities of artists to act under state repression.

Moderator:
Marek Bartelik (MIT), art historian, art critic, President of AICA International

Participants:
Nelly Bekus (University of Warsaw), philosopher, sociologist
Olga Kopenkina (NYU-Steinhardt), curator, art critic
Tatsiana Kulakevich, journalist, member of Belarusian-American Youth Association
Sergey Shabohin, artist

Panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition Sound of Silence: Art during the Dictatorship at EFA Project Space.

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TOUGH BOOMERANGING FOR THE KREMLIN

From my piece for Bomb Magazine's Web site on the 40th birthday of Octobriana and the Russian Underground:

In 1970, Petr Sadecký slipped across the border of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with a cache of illegal comic books and the fantastic story of the dissident Russian artists who risked everything to create them. A year later, the publication of Octobriana and the Russian Underground, with its lurid illustrations and the suggestion of secret organizations staging drug-fueled orgies behind the Iron Curtain, was just the thing to send the anxious Western imagination over the edge.

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UN/OFFICIAL: ILYA KABAKOV AT EDELMAN ARTS

My review of The Study of Kabakov exhibition at Edelman Arts for Bomb Magazine:

...In 1965, Ilya Kabakov, officially a children’s book illustrator, gained intense notoriety when his Shower series was exhibited with other Soviet unofficial artists by a Communist organization in Italy. The series depicts a man standing under a shower head, but the water that comes out of it somehow avoids touching him or lands like snow on top of his head. Western critics claimed the work symbolized the lack of material resources in the Soviet Union, and Kabakov was heralded as the voice of the anti-Soviet generation. But the artist himself explained that it simply depicted an existentialist dilemma, one of a person who is forever waiting. Indeed, in a recent interview with the Daily Beast, the artist’s wife, Emilia Kabakov, put it this way: “If you go looking for political meaning you can always find it. If you don’t, you don’t.”...

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ON TURTLE BAY

I have a *personal essay* up at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

On Turtle Bay

Twice weekly, we ride the ferry across the East River from the India Avenue landing in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn to 34th Street on the Island of Manhattan. Two hours later, we make the return trip. Each time we come aboard, the pilot, the bill of his cap pulled low on his brow, greets us with a taciturn nod. In turn, we reward his sullen acknowledgement with just the same gesture. No more, no less. The crossing, including a brief stop at Hunter’s Point in Queens, is short, but for those seven minutes on the river’s steel-gray waters—a trip that spans three boroughs—we are among the river folk...<read more>

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THE PEOPLE WHO GOT IN TROUBLE

My review of the Boris Mikhailov: Case History photo exhibit at MoMA appears on Bomb today:

“It is a disgraceful world, populated by some creatures that were once humans, but now these living beings are degraded, ghastly, appalling.” Kevin Kinsella discusses the photography exhibition, Boris Mikhailov: Case Study, which runs at MoMa until September fifth.

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MEMORY LANE

My review of Ammiel Alcalay's "neither wit nor gold" (about then) is up at New Pages:

For Alcalay, “neither wit nor gold” (from then) is not so much “a trip down memory lane,” as a statement about the present and how a body of work might be made not only to cohere but become “the carrier of messages no longer available.” Not surprising from the founder and general editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, a program of the City University of New York that makes available essential but virtually unknown texts “to expand our knowledge of literary, cultural, social, and political history.”

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ANOTHER READING FROM CHILDREN'S ISLAND

More cookies and wine--not to mention: sick dolls, surly gnomes, sarcastic parrots, and other broken toys. I will again be reading from Poems from Children's Island on Sunday, May 22 @ 7pm at:

Unnameable Books

600 Vanderbilt Ave. (@ St. Marks)

Prospect Heights, NY

Hope to see you there!

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PAINTED INTO A (BEAUTIFUL) CORNER

My take on the "Malevich & the American Legacy" show at the Gagosian Galleries for Bomb Magazine.

Just before the 1915 opening in St. Petersburg of 0,10: The Last Futurist Painting Exhibition, the main exhibitors came to blows. Kazimir Malevich, whose new Suprematist school of painting was to have its debut at the show, and Vladimir Tatlin, a founder of Constructivism, were in violent disagreement over the validity of abstract art.

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LAUNCH PARTY FOR POEMS FROM CHILDREN'S ISLAND

I'll be reading from my translation of Sasha Chernyi's Poems from Children's Island (illustrated by Jessica Seamans) on May 5 @ Book Thug Nation, located @ 100 N3rd Street in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn from 7:30 pm until 9;00--hopefully afterwards to adjourn to the Radagast Hall & Biergarten across the street .

As appropriate for a reading of 100-year-old children's poetry, wine and cookies will be on hand. As will copies of the book and related posters designed and illustrated by comics artist wunderkind Gabrielle Bell.

Please come out and support: