December 27, 2010. On Christmas night, in the freezing cold before the blizzard hit New York City, crochet artist Olek and her band of enablers managed to fully clothe the famous bronze statue of a charging bull that stands in Bowling Green Park in downtown Manhattan. A potent symbol of Wall Street capitalism, the bull wore its crocheted “cozy” for two hours before the caretaker of the small triangular park arrived and confiscated the work, cutting it up and depositing it in the garbage. But first this photo was taken.

With her obsessive strategy of multicolored yarn – purple, fuschia and orange predominate – sewn up in camouflage-like patterns, Olek seems to combine the Sherwin Williams Paint “cover the earth” mandate with a desire to be the Christo of crochet. She has previously fully dressed a bicycle, an automobile and various performers in her trademark coverings, in choreographed conceptual pieces executed on the streets of New York and Miami.

In her one person show this past fall at Christopher Henry Gallery at 127 Elizabeth Street in the Chinatown/LES neighborhood, she created a room-sized installation in which every domestic object, from bathtubs to tables and chairs to telephones to X-rated samplers with texts derived from Internet chat rooms, was given the full Olek treatment. The show was called “Knitting is for Pus****” (as in “Pussies”).

Paper Magazine did a photo shoot during the run of the installation, which included live performers inhabiting the room, as described in a review taken from Verbicide:

The first thing one sees in the gallery is a miniature studio apartment — nay, an average-sized studio by New York standards — covered in garishly colored crochet that looks more Beetlejuice than “home sweet home.” The entire structure is covered in crocheted yarn or plastic bags. Before entering, shoes must be removed or hospital booties donned to protect the crocheted floor. A crocheted pedestal tub is occupied by a model in a face-obscuring crocheted body stocking. The bathroom sink and toilet are crocheted. A television and phone are crocheted. There’s a clothing rack (crocheted, even as skinny as it is) hung with crocheted clothing that looks like something the Dr. Seuss characters Thing 1 and Thing 2 might wear.

Knitting may be for pussies, but crochet is all about the pussy. The apartment walls and doors are covered in framed photographs of models nude but for some crocheted clothing and crocheted timestamped text messages Olek has received: “Ur pussy is my soul mate,” “I just wanna turn u on as much as I can,” and the profound, if debatable, “Soul is the part of you that sees a lap dance every time you close your eyes.”

Here is Olek in action during the shoot, dressing a model:

The room installation reappeared in Miami during art fair week, as part of Christopher Henry’s -Scope booth, with another car – a convertible – parked outside the tent on Midtown Boulevard and fully customized by crochet.

A feisty, bodacious blonde from Poland, Olek (nee Agata Oleksiak) is a self-styled “guerrilla” artist who is not at all shy in discussing her work and its intentions. From her recent press release entitled “Happy Bullish 2011″:

Thank you for supporting me in the intense 2010!

I had a very successful solo show at Christopher Henry Gallery that introduced my work to an even bigger audience and brought me tons of press! I was lucky to start the year with a residency at AAI-LES and finish it with another one at Workspace, LMCC.

It was truly a year of guerrilla actions that opened a new path in my crocheted investigations. I started it with a bike and ended up with the Charging Bull as a Christmas gift to NYC and a tribute to the sculptor of the bull, Arturo di Modica, who in another guerrilla act, placed the bull on Wall Street in Christmas of 1987 as a symbol of the “strength and power of the American people” following the 1987 Stock Market crash.

This crocheted cover represents my best wishes to all of us. It will be a great, prosperous year with many wonderful surprises!!!

In another self-generated PR effort, she discusses her current internship at LMCC and her penchant for ingesting massive quantities of movies and vodka, while “aggressively re-weaving the world as she sees fit”:

We have obviously not heard the last from her.

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Indeed, it did not take long at all. Here is a video posted by Olek on December 30:

Olek action video

Two comments:

The street art was apparently accomplished on Christmas Eve, not Christmas night. And the bronze bull seems to be anatomically correct, although there is no footage of Olek wrapping his cock and balls in crochet – an action that had been anticipated with a certain prurient interest.

Steven Kaplan’s blog

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James Romberger – artist, gallerist, writer and collaborator with David Wojnarowicz during the salad days of the East Village – was prompted by the current censorship of “A Fire In My Belly” to pen an eloquent analysis and remembrance of his friend. Wojnarowicz’s Apostasy http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/12/wojnarowiczs-apostacy/ is an essential read.

Romberger’s central thesis:

David’s oeuvre was never only about his reactions to organized religion, nor was it ever only about the AIDS crisis. Certainly the disease that would kill him in 1992 gave his work a powerful impetus, but David always took a greater global view. He examined the way that the natural world works and how our relationships with each other and the planet fit within the continually shifting narrative of history. He also expressed a complex interiority as he engaged with different media to make his sometimes lyrical, sometimes enraged or explicit, but always thoughtful and heartfelt art.

David took on heroic proportions because of his outspoken response to the AIDS epidemic. He watched his friends falling around him. After his own diagnosis in 1988, he made a concerted effort to understand the disease and to combat the people and institutions that he was able to identify as enablers of the virus through their homophobia and suppression of information…

But even earlier, in 1986 and 1987 as he watched his mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar, waste away and die, David believed the Roman Catholic Church had abandoned everyone he loved…

The imagery of Catholicism suffused his work from the beginning. David’s friend and my partner, the interdisciplinary artist Marguerite Van Cook says he had “a crisis of faith,” certainly his beliefs were sorely tested…

A Fire in My Belly has been defended as being about AIDS and not about his anger towards the Church, but David’s later motivations should not be retrospectively applied to a film that he made earlier. The Smithsonian has posted a “Q&A” on their website which claims, “This imagery was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS.” However, what is being shown on Youtube and elsewhere online is not the original film, its intent has been changed because elements have been added that are misplaced in time. The versions in circulation now both have imposed soundtracks and their meaning is altered with added imagery that was made years later. David made A Fire in My Belly in 1986, before he was diagnosed with AIDS.

Street Kid, acrylic and collage, 1986.

Romberger goes on to describe a jarring private screening of an early edit of the Mexican footage that would become “A Fire In My Belly”

What followed was an assault on my senses, a view of a world completely out of control. The strobed, often violent scenes of wrestlers, cock and bull fights, lurid icons, impoverished dwellings, clanking engines, an enslaved monkey, cripples begging for coins, for bread, a burning, spinning globe—it was a picture of indifference to the value of life, Mexico as a grinding machine of poverty and cruel spectacle.

and also several installations produced with Wojnarowicz at the infamous Ground Zero project space on East Fourth Street. All fascinating reading, revelatory of the artistic process, and a window back to another era of the East Village. But most of all, a necessary corrective to much of the recent misconstrued gloss on Wojnarowicz produced in the wake of the censorship crisis.

Portrait of Bishop Landa. Mixed media, 1986.

I posted the following to Romberger after reading his text, which I again urge you to read in its entirety:

James, this is the most truthful, informed and sincere text I have read on David and on “A Fire In My Belly” since the whole censorship mess began. Congratulations. I myself have covered the controversy several times on my post.thing.net blog, but never from the “inside”. You and Marguerite were privileged to collaborate with David while he was still alive, and your insights benefit from this working relationship.

Many of the pieces I have read recently suffer rather than benefit from hindsight. However well intentioned, they tend to limit David to his AIDS activism, to make him an ACT UP poster boy. Thanks for presenting the total picture. While there is no denying the effect of the epidemic in galvanizing David’s attention, sharpening his acerbity and crystallizing his imagery, his “complex interiority” was already well formed before AIDS became an unavoidable presence in his life. The Mexican imagery which forms the basis of “Fire In My Belly” is informed by a love/hate relationship with his native Catholicism, with the Church’s betrayal and hypocrisy, with the “crisis of faith” you perceptively examine above.

The forces of repression and reaction might think they have won a round in the culture wars. But ironically, the unintentional effect of the censorship has been to focus a belated and long overdue reassessment of Wojnarowicz’s life and work. Your article is an essential part of this effort.

Mexican Crucifix, acrylic and collage on panel, 1986.

Steven Kaplan’s blog

This is primarily a drawing show, but it’s also much more than that. Wesselmann takes 3-dimensional objects and draws them on 2-dimensional paper, then he takes the drawn image and creates a 3-dimensional work of art out of it. It sounds simple, but in all such instances, one needs to know how various materials are manipulated, will react, and withstand the environmental forces into which they will be sited. This is about idea development, and the process of transforming and translating those ideas for the viewer. These are drawings that also could, and do, function as sculptures.

Coming back to the reality of the drawn surface, each of Wesselmann’s drawings may seem to be just flat areas of graphite, or whatever material is being used on the work, but as with all drawing, the evidence of the hand and the artist’s life force is left on the paper’s surface leaving a residue for us to read. This is part of the beauty, if one can express it with that word, of drawings.

This exhibition of drawings by Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann, which was originally conceived by Wesselmann and his wife, Claire, before the artist’s untimely death in December, 2004. A Cincinnati native who came to New York in 1956 to attend art classes at Cooper Union, Tom Wesselmann was one of the originators of Pop Art.  Along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and Jim Dine, Wesselmann created a body of works that helped define the visual identity of America in the 1960s.

The works in this exhibition vary in scale, yet that is what allows the viewers to have the art making process exposed for them. Additionally, each part of the process is executed with the same precision that we identify as Wesselmann’s operational mode of craftsmanship.

Still Life # 61, 1976
Oil on shaped canvases
104 ½ x 391 x 79 inches

Tom Wesselmann Draws is the most comprehensive exhibition of drawings by the artist that has ever been assembled.  It will be on view at the Museum of Art I Fort Lauderdale from October 2, 2010 through February 27, 2011.  Following its presentation in Fort Lauderdale, the exhibition travels to the Kreeger Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2011.

This is a must see exhibition that is full of richness in a wonderful setting. Please remember the museum is going through a bit of renovation, but the new entry plaza that has been partially enhanced is totally beautiful and brilliantly executed.

Tom Wesselmann Draws,  October 2, 2010-February 27, 2011

Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale
1 East Las Olas Boulevard
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301-1807
(954) 525-5500

David Wojnarowicz “A Fire in My Belly” Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

December 16, 2010. The above is taken from the Vimeo page of PPOW Gallery and from the archives of NYU’s Fales Library. It represents two segments, of approximately 13 and 7 minutes, that David Wojnarowicz shot and edited on Super 8 in 1986-87, which he entitled “A Fire In My Belly”. It is NOT the four minute piece that was yanked from the National Portrait Gallery show on December 1. It is also NOT the video I posted earlier on this blog, with its Diamanda Galas banshee wail/dirge of “Unclean”. Nor the segment I have seen with an overlaid soundtrack of a 1980s ACT UP demonstration. Wojnarowicz shot and presented his original footage without sound, a suggestion of the urgency and severity of the political climate that led to the mantra of “Silence = Death”.

It is two weeks since the “silencing” of “A Fire In My Belly”, and as we near Sunday’s rally on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, it’s clear that the culture wars are by no means over. This is hardly news to anyone following the hurtful antics of the Tea Party. Ever more empowered by their victories in the midterm election, the same purveyors of fear and purposeful obfuscation who demonized Obama for the past two years are trying to legislate and coerce the cultural landscape, to make art conform to their hypocritical and faux Christian yardstick. The fact that their cynical misunderstanding and bad intentions AGAIN fall directly on Wojnarowicz’s shoulders is testimony to the enduring raw, elemental, and confrontational power of his art. Although the forces of reaction and censorship will always find something to belittle and attempt to repress, we almost have to thank them for forcing the issue and focusing attention on work that especially needs to be discussed and re-evaluated right now, as an antidote to right wing resurgence.

First, a excerpt from the perceptive and empathetic analysis of Holland Cotter published in last Friday’s New York Times:

Wojnarowicz made “A Fire in My Belly,” dated 1986-87, at a turning point. In 1987 his longtime mentor and lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, died of AIDS, and Wojnarowicz himself learned that he was H.I.V.-positive. Although his career was by then well established, he was backing off from involvement in the art world and on his way to becoming immersed in AIDS politics.

Both parts of “A Fire in My Belly” are made from video shot in Mexico, a country that Wojnarowicz found mesmerizing for its combination of vital popular culture and daily life lived shockingly close to the bone. The 13-minute video opens with a panning shot, taken from a moving car, of the streets of a Mexican town, interrupted by quick shots of newspaper headlines reporting violent crimes. These sequences are punctuated, very briefly, with a few other images: a suspended world globe; a cartoonish dancing puppet wearing a sombrero; a disembodied hand dropping coins.

Then three scenes of combat alternate repeatedly: a bullfight and a cockfight — each gruesome — and a masked and acrobatic wrestling match. Travelogue-ish sequences that follow — of a circus with performing animals and a visit to a Mesoamerican archaeological site with demonic-looking sculptures — go on too long (as does the wrestling), and the video ends abruptly when the dancing puppet is shot at with what looks like a pistol full of paint. If there is any overriding idea delivered in the video, it has to do with how violence-addicted people, and specifically men, are.

The seven-minute “excerpt” feels more packed and purposeful, and quite complete. The opening image, which will recur again and again, is of metal wheels turning, like some machine of fate. Then, interwoven and rapidly repeated, we see pairs, not necessarily juxtaposed, of related images: street beggars and armed police; Day of the Dead candy skulls and a painting of an Aztec human sacrifice; mummified bodies displaced from graves in a cemetery and an undisturbed tombstone being gently washed.

Certain images were evidently filmed in a studio: coins falling into a bandaged hand, and a hand held under splashing water; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, and a man’s lips being sewn shut. A short sequence of a man masturbating alternates with images of sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. The image of the crucifix with ants comes almost in the middle of all of this, between shots of bread being sewn and blood dripping into a bowl. At the end, images from the first video reappear — the puppet and the globe — both burning.

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.

He felt, with reason, mortally embattled, and the video is filled with symbols of vulnerability under attack: beggars, slaughtered animals, displaced bodies and the crucified Jesus. In Wojnarowicz’s nature symbolism — and this is confirmed in other works — ants were symbols of a human life mechanically driven by its own needs, heedless of anything else. Here they blindly swarm over an emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.

Cotter’s listing of Wojnarowicz’s imagery is fairly complete, although I would add a recurring motif which functions in the 13 minute segment like a title card or periodic marker: face cards from the deck of a fortune teller (depicting characters like “The Siren”, “The Drunk” or “The Scorpion”) juxtaposed with the photo of an onrushing locomotive (a reference to heedless history?) carrying ever successive numbers. It seems to be an attempt at ordering the piece, the suggestion of a Stations of the Cross treatment that W. has augmented with representative elements of street culture.

Like Pasolini, Wojnarowicz was a gay activist, a revolutionary who rejected the restrictions, bigotry and repressive power of the Catholic Church YET whose cultural antecedents were fully rooted in his upbringing, in the rich symbolism of the Catholic soil. Both P. and W. undoubtedly saw the trap of using conventional Christian imagery to make art that would challenge the status quo, which is why both reinvigorated the original story of Jesus administering to the poor and downtrodden of his age by fully representing the contemporary lumpen milieu. Both were also prolific and unrepentant propagators of their own personal mythologies, conscious of their status as gay martyrs and avid to assume the mantle. (Although Jean Genet is often cited by W. and remains his most redolent antecedent in this regard.) These tendencies led P. and W. to imbue their art with the litany of a Christian experience, but willfully “tainted” with lay references to the street, to an earlier and enduring paganism onto which Christianity is but a graft. It is precisely this “taint” that angers the religious right and causes them to view the work as blasphemous. Their special anger seems reserved for the apostate, the lapsed Catholic who was offered the keys to salvation yet repudiated it, betrayed his birthright, willfully disobeyed the Church and rebelled against the full embrace of its “benevolent” conformity.

It is no accident that W. chose Mexico – not just as a travelogue of picturesque primitivisms, not just as a living demonstration of a “close to the bone” culture where the dialectics of suffering and cruelty are graphically obvious, but as the backdrop for his almost biblical meditation on the Age of AIDS. “A Fire In My Belly” is drenched in the symbolism of the body and the blood, lifted right from the Gospels: the loaf of bread being sewn together with thick red string, the lips of the artist being similarly joined, the blood dripping and overflowing the bowl, the luckless and legless begging on the road under the gaze of the police, the animals being led to the abbatoir, the sides of beef on hooks in the slaughterhouse. There is a pervasive, barely submerged violence on the street, ritualized by the masked Luchadors, fully realized in the cockfight, conflagrated by the flame eaters, domesticated in the performing circus animals, mocked by the dancing marionette under its sombrero. The action is surveyed by the panopticon of a rotating, all seeing eye (an indifferent God?). Those who choose to ignore it betray the suffering of their fellow men, and are seemingly being bribed by the infamous 30 pieces of silver, dropped from/into a bandaged hand.

Considering the heavy overlay of Christian narrative, it’s a bit ironic that the so-called Catholic League (a right wing lobbyist group that actually has no institutional connection to the Church) finds the film blasphemous. W. seems to embrace the traditional Biblical progression of redemption through suffering that he learned in Sunday school. And the ten to fifteen seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix that has particularly angered the right and been seized upon as transgressive, while a mere snippet of the total imagery, seems an extension of the accepted iconography of Jesus’ mortification and transcendence. In fact, what seems most dangerous, threatening and anarchistic in the film was never mentioned by its critics: the retributive, apocalyptic imagery of a world globe on fire, a map of Mexico ablaze, a puppet consumed in flames.

W.’s method of associative montage, of cross cutting action to create meaning, provides a “city symphony” that is reminiscent of early silent film practitioners like Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov. Crashing images against each other to create a thesis is a brutal but efficient method of film making. By refusing any ameliorative or distracting soundtrack that might diffuse the power of the imagery, W. is forcing us to confront things directly, a strategy that is well suited to the urgency of the moment.

“A Fire In My Belly” is not a subtle work. By no means. It is a brazen cry, a strident bit of agitprop, the only honest reaction that W. could bring to a moment when multitudes (himself included) were HIV positive, when thousands were dying, and when the reaction of the state was to look the other way – when they were not using the very existence of the epidemic to demonize gay culture. As a new generation of the rabid right comes into its own, with its dumb-like-a-fox cunning and hypocrisy, it is hardly surprising that the work of Wojnarowicz is again at the fulcrum of the culture wars, a cause célèbre and a rallying point for the art world.

Steven Kaplan’s blog

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My friend, Heinrich, from VernissageTV, took pics of the new building going up in Miami by Frank Gehry. I haven’t had a chance to see its current progress, but I did see it several months ago when it was virtually a shell, a framework of a building.

“The new structure is currently being built on a prime piece of land just north of world famous Lincoln Road off Washington Ave in South Beach. Previously an uninspiring surface parking lot, the new structure hopes to transform this urban black hole, which served more like a barrier between Lincoln Road and The Filmore Miami Beach (previously the Jackie Gleason Theater), into an active urban space with a Frank Gehry designed park.” (AdamMizrahi)

Quoting a bulletin board entry by a person named Roark (currently banned on their site):

“I’ve just returned from a presentation of the project. The visionary behind the New World Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas, has been friends with Frank Gehry for a few decades.

The New World Symphony, America’s only full-time orchestral academy, prepares gifted graduates of prestigious music programs for successful careers in orchestras and ensembles. NWS has launched the careers of more than 630 young musicians now making a difference in the profession worldwide.

When Michael Tilson Thomas and the NWS approached Gehry, they went with specific functions and needs.

Gehry has designed around those needs. Unlike Carnegie Hall, which protects the contents of the building, the NWS/Gehry vision is to open the inside to the outside, while maintaining the purpose of the space. That purpose is first and foremost educational.

The NWS is also a pioneering institution of Internet2, a super fast/powerful Internet based system that can stream real time audio/visual to the other side of the globe. Compounding the obvious educational applications, Gehry has proposed a video wall to be able to “receive” concerts to broadcast on the video wall. The video wall faces the $21Million park that is always open to the public.

This project will be far away more interesting than the two surface parking lots that are there now!!!!”

Official New World Symphony information about the building construction project.

It is, however, good to note that this is one of the available islands in Biscayne Bay on which cultural projects can take place. It will be used again in the near future. Miami Art Exchange, for one, has art projects already in the works.

Once on This Island, a D.I.Y. Art Show:

“The curator Shamim Momin and a group of artists mounted a one-afternoon exhibition on Flagler Memorial Island off Miami Beach.”

Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times

A performance with poles, staged by Brody Condon as part of the one-day show on Flagler Memorial Island.

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: December 5, 2010

“Flagler Memorial Island, a tiny oval of sand and coconut palms in Biscayne Bay, is a strange appendage to the city of Miami Beach. It is a municipal park with no means of access unless you own a boat or have friends who do. It is artificial, like the overdeveloped Venetian Islands nearby, but remains uninhabited and a little wild, with no electricity or facilities. It is home to a big white obelisk, but almost no one here seems to know what the monument honors or goes to visit it.

The rules as set out by Miami Beach — which wants to use the island for cultural projects but also to protect its unkempt beauty and ecosystem — were not exactly art-world friendly. Work could be moved into place no earlier than the morning of the show; none of it could alter the island or damage its plant life; no more than 300 people at a time could come out to the island; and all evidence of the show’s existence had to be gone by the next morning. In addition, during the setup and the exhibition, the island would remain open as a public park if anyone wanted to visit for that purpose, and some did.”

(Via NYT > Art & Design.)

Over the next few days we’ll be adding images to our Flickr images of various sights from around all the fairs we’re able to attend. Obviously, there are more places to go, and events to attend than humanly possible, however, we’ll do what we can.

In other words, I felt commendably and reassuringly early. That is, until Jill Clark, an art adviser from New York now relocated to South Beach, informed me that Basel-themed parties generally start in the middle of November, two full weeks before my arrival. Faced with the looming, inevitable immanence of the Great Influx and its concomitant doses of frenzy and glamor, many art dealers, club owners, party promoters, real estate speculators, fashion doyennes and benefit committees cannot resist the obvious marketing ploy. They resolutely hang their efforts on that familiar ABMB shingle, hoping to define their event as some sort of preamble – to such an extent that poor Ms. Clark was already a bit swamped by the Preface, before the page had even been turned to Chapter One of Art Basel: The Book.

Whether I was early or late to the party, I was right on time to view Wynwood in its usual ghost town mode, a working class neighborhood of streetlights blinking through the humid night sky, a semi-deserted urban grid dotted with low rise warehouses, auto body shops, fruit stands, garages. This is the “real” Wynwood, the historic Wynwood, a mixed use district of light industry, hopeful homesteads, weedy lots, “For Sale or Rent” signs on empty buildings, stray dogs and urban blight just above Miami’s downtown. Only recently did it became a mecca for the art world. Aside from the exceptional and privileged moment of Art Basel, the streets of Wynwood generally come to life only once a month, during the Second Saturdays, when the galleries all stay open late. In fact, it was on just such a Saturday – although the fourth rather than the second week of the month – that I made my particular rounds.

First up was White Vinyl Space, an artist run non-profit, a large concrete bunker with high ceilings on a funky stretch of NW 2nd Avenue, across the street from Roberto Clemente Park and an excellent fresh produce stand, yet just blocks from Emanuel Perrotin Gallery and the Rubell Family Collection. Currently featured is the rather grandly titled “Five New Reasons to Live”, with – count them – five Miami based artists mining the trove of found object and recycled image, the poetry of urban detritus, exhibiting their work on digital video screens and projections; as 16mm film loops; employing scatter art, sound and image, and other contemporary installation strategies.

Damian Rojo, an old acquaintance from 1980s grass roots initiatives like Artifacts and Wet Paint, is currently teaching art at Barry University. His camera is always active, and his work plays with notions of the casual or received image, with time signatures, slow motion and split screen in his post-Muybridge meditations on personal space and the Miami cityscape. In one video, a man is tortured to tears by shampoo dripped in his eyes as he is compelled to repeat the title phrase – “I always wanted to smile” – ad infinitum. In another, a stretch of the Julia Tuttle Causeway (which connects the airport to the beach) is rendered mock heroic by cars passing in freeze frame/stop motion, scored to an elegiac New Wave soundtrack.

Rojo’s signature piece is a self portrait displayed in a lightbox, floating in silhouette with arms outstretched against a blue field (like the baby on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album), hung between two digital video screens that show the same subject morphing frame by frame: one is in slow slow motion, one in faster slow motion. The image is interrogated, dissected, in a denouement of time lapse.

Kevin Arrow, another artist I have known for 25 years, is Registrar at MOCA North Miami, where he has recently been busy securing Jonathan Meese sculptures for their upcoming exhibition. Arrow is a bit of an antiquarian of recent pop and circumstance, a scavenger and bricoleur, a memorialist and recycler of discarded slide imagery. In one piece, two slide carousels run in tandem, projecting images that have been rescued from the dumpster, providing a haunting, aleatoric history of unknown people and places.

In an accompanying found photo work, the closely cropped and faded image of a refrigerator interior elevates the random, forlorn cans of Schlitz, Bud and PBR stacked on the shelves into an Everyman parable, a maudlin take on the cheek by jowl, push and shove of the urban dilemma.

Nicole Martinez, the one woman in this boy’s club, incorporates strategies of scatter art, recycled objects, the Rauschenberg combine, and the new hardware store aesthetic. Her use of industrial or commercial detritus includes a semicircular arc of glass bottles, their caps removed and scattered nearby, in an installation reminiscent of Tony Feher. They will be used in a performance scheduled for the White Vinyl opening on Saturday, December 4, as will a series a bass speakers, placed face up on the floor, to be filled with various powders (talcum, sugar) that will be spread through sonic dispersion.

Barron Sherer, an established experimental filmmaker with strong structuralist leanings, has constructed a 16mm film loop using found footage excerpted from a 1992 Hollywood B-film, Into The Sun – seemingly an appropriate title for Miami – starring Michael Pare in full military drag. It is a mediocre Top Gun ripoff that Sherer has joyfully and justifiably deconstructed through various protocols of reprinting, re-editing, and distorting the image. What began as Hollywood glop acquires new life in a frame-by-frame progression of excess and formalism. In an accompanying video transfer, Sherer has appropriated footage from Wall Street to engineer similar poetic violence to the image of Charlie Sheen.

Last but not least is Skip Van Cel, proprietor of White Vinyl Space, his jokey Miami rhyme for White Cube in London and White Columns in NYC. Van Cel owns the hacienda style, stucco-and-tile building that houses the space, and it might well be his embrace of recycling urban detritus that defines the aesthetic of White Vinyl, of using the discards of history to build new art. Certainly his contribution to the exhibition, called “Fountain” in a sly reference to Duchamp, is a readymade taken right off the Wynwood streets. It is the video of a found action: a hose, emerging from a manhole and propped on a construction scaffold, emits a steady stream of water into a flat plastic receptacle perched on the asphalt. Art is where you find it, and this piece is likely brought to us courtesy of the Miami Department of Water and Sewers.

(in progress) next: Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin

For a show centered on the early, punk-inspired work of graphic artist Raymond Pettibon, the Schmidt Center Gallery at Florida Atlantic University has been tricked out in a style that pays tribute to the willful disorder of old school punk clubs of the late ’70s. The effect is approximate–posters and flyers litter the walls but no blood or alcohol spatters the floor. Still, the spirit is there, lively and diverse.

The heart of the show is “Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86,” a traveling exhibition of more than 200 flyers, posters and album covers created for punk bands of that era—chiefly Black Flag and other Los Angeles bands at the center of the early Southern California scene—as well as early artist books like “Console, Heal, or Depict” or the “Tripping Corpse” series.

But the show also includes a selection of Pettibon’s more recent work, on loan from South Florida collectors, contrasting Pettibon’s origins with his later rise to fame within the world of high art. There is also a series of musical events, films and lectures, as well as a collection of vintage punk ephemera, chiefly zines and posters, from South Florida and Tampa.

The punk aesthetic that developed in Southern California in the ’70s was fiercely juvenile, the controlled temper tantrum of young people who had decided the American Dream was a ruse.  A  preceding counterculture had failed to dethrone the capitalist empire, and punk anger was directed as much against the hippies as it was against “The Man.” Nihilism displaced Peace and Love.

The scatological impulse was a key feature of this youth rebellion, and there was a defiant messiness to the music’s sound, the performers’ style and the movement’s venues of choice—typically the dirtiest, grungiest clubs in the most questionable neighborhoods. That a virtue was made of poverty played a role in this: Unemployed or working at the 7-11, who could afford high-grade sound equipment, fancy costumes, or the rents of established clubs?

That Pettibon was not schooled as an artist was consistent with the scene’s belief in inspired amateurism. A graffiti’d artist statement explains: There was the idea you could do it yourself, that you didn’t have to have Warner Brothers behind you or you were going to sink into nothingness.

But Pettibon’s medium was free of poverty’s constraints. There was only so much one could spend on pen and ink, and he used those tools to appropriate and mock stereotypical American figures and gestures, drawing heavily on references from mass culture. Pettibon’s abrasive graphics, with their caustic snippets of text, were a perfect fit for the “faster louder” sound and angry lyrics of the punk bands.

Much of the work resembles single-image cartoon panels, and owes a debt to Marvel Comics, if not Roy Lichtenstein. Drawn almost exclusively in black and white, images of violence predominate: scissors, knives, guns, a chain saw. The body is shown in danger, cornered or under assault—by authority figures, lovers, oneself. There is sex, too, but tinged with despair and alienation.

What emerges, however, is that while Pettibon’s work was a significant part of original punk culture, the common ground was one of content rather than style. While conflict and disorder were virtues in the aesthetic of punk and what went on to become punk’s hardcore wing, Pettibon’s strengths were his precise line and taut imagery. The area of agreement was the acerbic commentary on contemporary culture and mores.

Hardcore punk continues to this day, just one of the varied aesthetic and lifestyle choices on offer in the superstore of American life. Like the others–born-again, stoner, biker, Tea Party patriot, etc.–it has its devotees and diehards, each of whom swears that theirs is the One True Faith. Pettibon, meanwhile, ascended to art world stardom.

By the ’90s, Pettibon was a regular at the Whitney Biennial. In the new millennium he has been feted throughout Europe and in Japan. Currently he is represented by David Zwirner, the prestigious New York gallery, as well as galleries in L.A. and London.

The Schmidt’s selection of later Pettibon comes from the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and Burt Minkoff, a Lake Worth collector. It only extends into the ’90s, and while it shows some development it reveals no radical departure from the early work. The line is thickened, there is more use of color, the accompanying texts include the occasional reach toward more elaborately poetic language. In some, the figures are more supple, and the command of anatomy is stronger.

In Pettibon’s most recent work, on the other hand, there is a striking new emphasis on the whole field of composition, so that works exist as a totality rather than mere figures and background. There is also a growing tendency towards abstraction. Lacking pieces from this stage of his career, however, the viewer may think Pettibon struck treasure early and mined it no deeper.

There is some irony in that Pettibon rose up from within an avowedly anti-hierarchical subculture. But his current stature seems an inevitable development for an artist with such mastery of form and such a well-defined vision. The greater irony is that the punk scene generally, founded on a most anti-authoritarian impulse, with an ethic of “live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse,” would eventually be the subject of veneration and Ph.D. Theses.

For those who were there, it has a bittersweet taste.

The Schmidt Center Gallery is located on the FAU campus in Boca Raton. The Pettibon show runs through Jan. 22.

Punk tribute musical performances are scheduled for Jan. 14 (FAU Punk KÖLLEKTIV, a student group), 21 (Bladesong) and 22 (School of Rock, Coral Springs), all at 6 p.m.

A lecture by FAU graphics professor Eric Landes, “Cut & Paste: Typography, Violence & the Punk Rock Aesthetic,” is scheduled for Jan. 20 at 7 p.m.

Film and director’s appearances by renegade independent documentarian Bill Daniel are scheduled for Jan. 18 at 7 p.m. (“Sonic Orphans”) and Jan. 19 at 1 p.m. (“Who is Bozo Texino?”)

Daily film and video screenings running the length of the show include 1978′s “Louder Faster Stronger,” shot at S.F. punk mecca Mabuhay Gardens, cult classic “Desperate Teenage Lovedolls” (1984) and a number of films from skatepunk documentarian Stacey Peralta.

More information on the gallery and the Pettibon show here:

http://www.fau.edu/galleries/RPettibon.php

More detailed schedule of events here:

http://www.fau.edu/galleries/pettibonprogramming.php

In its cocoon-like setting the show, “A Slice of Time,” invites meditation. The four walls bear just four oversized prints, the end result of the laborious processes Muniz used to transform found or manufactured detritus into one portrait and three re-visions of art historical landmarks. It is nicely balanced against the leisurely ramble of similarly innovative contemporary work from a globe-spanning array of artists that sprawls throughout the warren of walls and walkways in the larger space outside it.

“Jorge”

The intimacy of Whitebox and the abundance of Whitespace reflect the personal aesthetic of collectors Elayne and Marvin Mordes, whose home is in residential quarters within the lakefront former commercial building that encloses the art.

The Muniz prints are in a muted palette. Browns and dark greens dominate the two “garbage” pictures and a portrait ; black, white and grey are all there is to a re-working of an iconic Lewis Hines photograph. All have the easy grace of technically accomplished representational art–a readily digestible formal balance and compelling subject matter. Other critics have noted how accessible Muniz’s work is, and how that has lead many to dismiss it as aesthetically shallow.

The nay-sayers are wrong. The conceptual dimension of Muniz’s work is multi-layered, and its ideas play off and reflect each other like mirrors in an infinity box (and there are pieces in Whitespace that create the same, vertiginous effect with actual mirrors).

“Jorge,” which appears to be a photorealist portrait of musician Seu Jorge, upon closer inspection is composed of hole-punched dots painstakingly arranged so that color and shadow result in the headshot. Like the Chuck Close portraits it resembles, the swarm of detail dissolves with distance into a single, larger image. The single image, in turn, has been photographed and blown up, so that the final product, a 7 ½’ by 6′ Cibachrome print, reflects a process of destruction and accumulation, compression and enlargement.

“Pictures of Paper: Dallas Mill, Huntsville: 1910, After Lewis Hine”

There is also a subtle bit of cultural intrigue to the work. As a musician and performer, Seu Jorge enjoys international renown. The dots, reportedly, were punched from the pages of celebrity magazines. Muniz has defaced these depersonalized commodities and used the waste to build a highly personalized face, in tribute. It may not be, first and foremost, a critique of mass media, but the contradictions are suggestive.

Art history adds a temporal dimension to the three other pieces, and that dimension runs parallel to Muniz’s manipulations of materials.

In “Pictures of Paper: Dallas Mill, Huntsville: 1910, After Lewis Hine,” Muniz has reworked his “Jorge” technique, this time using torn paper in shades of grey, layering it over a copy of Hine’s classic, early 20th century photo (of child laborers outside a factory gate) then photographing the result. The image is a near-exact replica of the original, but with a ghostly caste, a reminder that the original (Hines’ photo) was but an echo of a reality (the mill tableaux), and that what we are looking at is an echo (Muniz’s photo) of an echo (Muniz’s papering) of an echo (Hines’ photo).

This doubling and distancing reappears in two pieces at Whitespace from Muniz’s “Pictures of Junk” series: “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, after Francisco de Goya y Lucientes,” and “Medusa, after Caravaggio.”

These are works Muniz has produced with the help of the catadores—garbage pickers—of Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre open-air dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Under his direction, these poorly-paid workers transform what had been trash into assemblages that mimic images from the history of fine art. The completed works–Muniz’s large-scale photos of the images—are a recycling (via photography) of art recycled via recycled materials. They have a comic grandeur, ennobling Brazil’s underclass and suggesting a wry commentary on the malleability of high art.

The Whitespace show is something of a collaborative effort, as some of the Muniz works are on loan from the Margulies Collection, in Miami. The show also includes video, the trailer for “Waste Land,” a documentary about Muniz’s work with the catadores and how that engagement fits into the rest of Muniz’s life and work.

The current show is the first of a Whitebox series that is the key focus of season two of the Mordes’ multi-year plan to make their collection more public, with expanded hours and activities to draw more of an audience. Each opening night includes collateral work by photographer Jacek Gancarz and performance artist Jackie Tufford, two local lights.

“A Slice of Time” will be open to the public on five more occasions between now and January 2. Private tours for visitor groups are also available, arrangements on request. Even with its limited viewing hours—and as the Muniz show demonstrates–Whitespace is already the most au courant contemporary arts space in South Florida outside Miami.

www.whitespacecollection.com