STEPHEN MAINE: When I heard about the IABF, my first thought was: terrific! My second thought was… what a load of work it must be to launch a new art book fair. I’m wondering for how long you’ve been focused on developing the IABF. What were the circumstances of its genesis? How did the idea take shape?

KAREN SCHAUPETER: When I first conceived of the idea, I wanted to get it out the door around February 2016, during either the time of the LA Contemporary Art Fair, or Paramount Ranch — things that happen at the end of January — or alongside the LA Art Book Fair (LAABF) in the second week of February. But the timing was tight and the venue I wanted wasn’t available, so I went down to Mexico City and did an artist residency about two blocks from the Material Art Fair. They said “Come do this in Mexico City.” So I had Mexico City and LA developing before New York — those locations are essentially available when I get there. It felt like I was already getting off the ground in three different locations.

I first announced in May 2016 that I would do the fair, and the response was fantastic. I was expecting… well, you never know. I thought people might be protective of the PS1 event. But the responses were nothing but positive.

I created the IABF to include people from all over the world. This is the first fair, so we’ll see what happens. It’s all open to interpretation — I have certain expectations but I’m trying not to let my expectations overshadow whatever will actually happen, or the democratic spirit of the event.

Is IABF in any sense modeled after the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF)? Do you see IABF as a satellite fair, in the way that smaller-scale projects have proliferated around art fairs such as the Armory Show and Art Basel Miami?

I don’t know what word would best describe it. “Satellite” is kind of unavoidable, since IABF is the smaller of two fairs happening concurrently. But my goal is to make something a little more digestible, and more of a hybrid of an art fair and a book fair. We’re definitely not modeled after NYABF, though some other things have been inspiring, like the Index Art Book Fair in Mexico City. That venue is amazing, and the sellers are not overly pressured — it’s a relaxed environment. I’d like to see that at the IABF. And at the LAABF, I liked seeing the zines and the smaller publishers alongside the limited edition publishers. Seeing the high and the low together makes everyone appreciate what it is they’re looking at a little bit more.

We’re not competing with NYABF, because there’s been such an incredible rise in book publishing that they just don’t have the physical space for everyone who wants to do something. It’s great, and it’s definitely the “institution,” what everyone wants to be a part of, but there are boundaries and limitations. With all the newcomers making great things, there’s plenty of room for another fair.

Why is the IABF scheduled for the same weekend as NYABF?

It’s part of my effort to be efficient. Bookmakers from all over the world are in New York then, so why would I do IABF in, like, October? With all the fairs going on all over the world, you have to respect people’s time. I think it will alleviate some pressure at the NYABF — we’re one stop away on the East River Ferry, at the Greenpoint ferry stop.

Fairs are a function of capital as well as culture, of course, so I’m curious about IABF as a corporate entity. Who are the fair’s primary backers? Have you been pursuing corporate sponsorship?

There is no financial backing for this. I’m very DIY by nature. It’s completely operated by me, putting in time whenever I can. Our director, Kayla Fanelli, puts in a lot of time. There are a lot of other people volunteering, but in terms of administration, it’s Kayla and me.

IABF isn’t set up as a corporate entity at this point. I want to get through the fair first, then figure out the structure moving forward. We might decide it should be a nonprofit, or remain a sole proprietorship, fiscally sponsored by a group like NYFA or Fractured Atlas.

How has the IABF attracted exhibitors?

Mainly, I reached out to my email list, which includes about 700 publishers all around the world.

Can you give me an idea of who the exhibitors are? Will there be a concentration at the zine end of the spectrum, or of artist books/limited editions, or something else? And what price range can visitors expect to see?

We have over 60 exhibitors from the US and internationally. As to publications, there is quite a price range — from about $10 to $1,500. The mix is a little bit of everything, some of the zine-y/lowbrow/fetish material; the more crafty zines, using screenprint and woodcut techniques; and then higher-end publications and independent periodicals; a little queer culture; the independent gallery projects presenting one or more artists; and some larger academic things will be happening. Designers and Books will present their facsimile reproduction of an important avant-garde book, Depero Futurista, also known as the “bolted book.” The original dates from 1927, and it presages so much of where we’ve gone with graphic design over the past nearly 100 years. The new edition will be available for pre-order. It’s a great example of the book as a vehicle of communication, and of our effort to strike that delicate balance between art and commerce. 

You are a hybrid insofar as visitors can see original art also.

Yes. I wanted to open the door to smaller galleries, so they can present an artist’s work and not have to kill themselves financially. 

You’re keeping exhibitor costs affordable, then?

Exhibitors’ fees range from $250 to $2,500. I want to create a fair that’s more democratic and I hope to be able to keep a simply structured pricing arrangement. That way, gallery can get in for $2,500 and get 16 to 20 linear feet of exhibition area on two flat walls — and they can do whatever they want.

Nowadays, many if not most print publishers have some kind of online presence, but are any of your exhibitors involved solely in online publication?

No IABF exhibitor publishes online only, except for Tiny Atlas Quarterly. Tiny Atlas was started with the intention of making it a quarterly print magazine, but the Instagram handle took off, and the hashtag #mytinyatlas has something like 1.7 million photos attached to it. This is a project that is only about three years old. They have a huge community of people who embrace what they’re doing, and because they are a major part of the publishing community, it made sense for them to participate. It’s about the project, working with artists, and involvement with the community. Our lines are open.

Who is handling the exhibition design, and what is the concept regarding the look and feel of the visitor’s experience of the fair?

I am the creative force behind the exhibition design, much of which is rooted in being resourceful and democratic with materials and fees. Most of the contributions we have received have been in-kind with time, or majorly discounted flat rates. Kim Sutherland of Full Time-Part Time Design studio did our logo/brand element. I have help from interior architect Sarah T. Engelke, Faster Horse Designs, and countless others who are helping with poster layout, exhibitor catalog design, and printing: Nic Jamieson, Alexander Soiseth, C&B Printing and more. It’s really a grassroots project at this point. I think I have used up my friend favors for a while now!

How did you settle on the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse as a venue?

I’ve been in photo production for 17 years, and I’ve done a lot of location scouting. For IABF, I did quite a bit of legwork to find an appropriate place. A tip lead me to the Brooklyn Expo in Greenpoint, which wasn’t available, but the contact for that venue showed me a photo of their new space, the Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, and I said, “Done! I want that space.” The vibe of this raw warehouse in Brooklyn is in some ways similar to the vibe of the fairs in Mexico City and LA.

Is any additional programming scheduled?

We have some help from a Brooklyn publisher called Perfect Wave, with performances daily from 5:00 to 7:00 pm, by Alice Cohen, The Vets, Sex Crystals, and Tropical Rock. There will be readings and panel discussions. Stephen Shore just started a new publication called Documentum, published by Fall Line Press, for which there will be an event. Hana Pesut, a photographer from Vancouver, will do portraits of couples who’ve switched their clothes, in the spirit of her book Switcheroo. It should be hilarious. We want to have some fun, and to keep a nice rhythm of something happening maybe every hour or two.

Of all the challenges this project undoubtedly presented, what was the biggest hurdle you had to clear?

Organizing during the summer was a huge challenge, because everyone is away. We were getting auto-replies from some people for the entire month of August. 

As a new venture, IABF has no financial track record as a baseline measure. By what criteria will you grade its success? Is exhibitor feedback important to you? I mean, in the event that exhibitors overall make money, gain contacts, get some publicity, etc. but the fair itself is not profitable, how will you proceed?

I’m determined, but I don’t want to be the blind leading the blind. I don’t measure success by what’s in the bank account, but I realize people need to sell their goods and make enough money that that they would do it again.

That’s a big part of the puzzle for a lot of the exhibitors, isn’t it?  

Well, maybe half-and-half. For some projects, it’s not important to make money. They have followings wanting to come see them, and we’re going to share in that. A publisher or gallery might go into it not expecting to be able to sell high-priced works. People have been managing their expectations in a healthy way. Everyone knows this is the first fair, and everyone — exhibitors and IABF crew — will be working hard to get people there. I think there’ll be a lot of interest just because it’s something new.

The bottom-line numbers are not the only measure of success. That will be based on the exhibitor experience and visitor experience: how exhibitors are taken care of, and how visitors feel about it while they’re there. Those are the most important things — without them, I don’t have a fair. I want it to feel roomy, with enough space to flow through and everyone getting proper attention, not lined up like trade show. The idea is for there to be movement, and a lot of people enjoying themselves. I think it will be like a breath of fresh air.

The Independent Art Book Fair runs at Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, 67 West Street, Brooklyn, September 16 to 18, 11:00-7:00. Admission is free of charge. For more information: www.independentartbookfair.com.

The post “We want to have some fun”: Karen Schaupeter Describes IABF appeared first on artcritical.

MoMA PS1, Sunday, November 2, 2014

Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, better known to the world as members of Pussy Riot, were co-winners of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, 2014. The performance artists spent 22 months in a Russian jail in terrible conditions for their notorious anthem, “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and were released on the eve of the Sochi Olympics last year. Their film-performance of their “Punk Prayer” is part of PS1’s current exhibition “Zero Tolerance,” a show that brings to mind the alternative spirit of PS1 in its foundational years in the mid-seventies. Last month, the curator of “Zero Tolerance,” PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, interviewed Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, and Tolokonnikova’s Russian-Canadian husband Petya Verzilov, who served as spokesman of Pussy Riot during their incarceration, in a public event which I attended.

Although I wrote an article supporting Pussy Riot in August 2012 in the Parisian paper Liberation, this was the first time I have seen them in person. Their manner and appearance were both graceful and forceful. I was impressed by their detailed attention to the Russian-English translation of their “Punk Prayer,” which they corrected several times in order to get it precisely right. At the very outset they emphasized a clear statement: they love Russia. They confirmed that they love living in Moscow, where they plan to continue their courageous activism. Their future goal, they said, is to publish an account of their time in jail and to organize performances concerning sexual issues such as homophobia in Russia. They plan to stay very active in denouncing the local justice system and conditions of imprisonment, which have not changed since the Stalinist era. Apparently the Gulag survives perfectly in Russia today. On the very first day they arrived in prison, they were beaten and dressed in clothing that would not be changed for almost two years (clothing is only changed once every three years in this prison system). In their 22 months in jail, they were never allowed minimal privacy; one noted that conditions were so bad that her menstruation cycle ceased.

When their performance prayer to the Virgin in August 2012 was interrupted, the Cathedral’s security personnel asked them to leave. It was a full week later, and based on manipulated witness accounts, that the police arrested Alekhina and Tolokonnikova, along with a third member of the band, Yekaterina Samutsevich, who was later released on a suspended sentence.

The artists said that when one is put on trial, one automatically goes to jail afterwards in virtually all cases. As the world knows, they were already incarcerated in a cage during their trial.

Pussy Riot is an artistic collective in which multiple members represent the whole. We can all be Pussy Riot, they seem to be saying: it is a state of mind. Their artistic and political activism translates itself into punk music, interviews, writing, and disguises. The group recalls the long history of agitprop, which was so creative and effective in Russia during the revolution. Indeed, their work derives specifically from that of Vladimir Mayakovski, the poet and creator of Russian Futurism, and perhaps the ultimate propagandistic agitator. This tradition of political and creative movements reaches back to the Paris Commune (1871) and the engagement of Gustave Courbet. Even earlier, it appears in Eugene Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), which presents a beautiful young topless woman with a French flag, guiding and inspiring the people at the barricades. In the 20th century, after the Russian Revolution, there are many examples of related activism, such as the amazing creative process that produced the posters during May ‘68 in Paris. The Situationist movement was composed of visual artists and philosophers who created paintings, comics, posters, and now-familiar slogans such as “la Beauté est dans la rue” (“Beauty is in the street”). Dada and Surrealism likewise contributed to their critical commitment against what Guy Debord would later call The Society of the Spectacle (the title of his 1967 book). The members of Pussy Riot studied philosophy, literature, and visual arts, and certainly read Debord.

Women play a particularly striking role in this and other related contemporary resistance movements. It’s very important to relate Pussy Riot not just to the Guerrilla Girls, but also to contemporary Muslim women in revolt against the sexism of their societies. I am thinking, for instance, of Taslima Nasrin who I met at the premiere of by Steve Lacy’s “jam opera” The Cry (1999), which sets some of her texts to music. And of Ayaan Hirsi Ali who wrote the scenario for assassinated film director Theo Van Gogh. Ali denounces the situation of women in Islam through her books and her contributions to films like Submission (2004).

In China there are extremely courageous artists like the sculptor Ai Weiwei, now in permanent household arrest, and the great writer Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Add to their number Salman Rushdie, one of the first writers to undergo a fatwa, and we have a long line of writers, filmmakers, cinema photographers, dancers, and visual artists that are explicitly expressing their sense of revolt against repressive political situations around the world.

Creation is an act of resistance. Today in our world, the resistance is against the sleekness of kitsch. Kitsch, as I define it, is a simulation of emotions and the representation of derision. The Austrian writer Hermann Broch reminded us, in his 1955 essay “Some Remarks on Kitsch,” that behind a kitsch work of art there is kitsch man and kitsch society. There is a connection between kitsch and fascism: this form of art should never be taken lightly. Creation is a political act when it’s not kitsch, but rather alive with subjectivity and emotion. A rebellious work of art is as challenging to dominant institutions as an explicitly political artwork. Both are political and complementary.

Pussy Riot received worldwide support against their imprisonment in part because the arbitrary regime of Putin is obviously complicit with the Russian Orthodox Church, notably the Patriarch Kirill. Whereas, in the West, there is no democracy without the separation of church and state, Putin has eliminated this separation. Today Pussy Riot can be arrested at any time and attacked by any nationalist individual. Last March, Alekhina and Tolokonnikova were attacked by a group of young nationalists in a restaurant in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. The thugs poured a green antiseptic liquid over the women, an action that was filmed. In Sochi, police were ready to arrest them on the basis of false accusations of stealing in their hotel. Their commitment is crucial in a world of cynicism and corruption where art is manipulated by capital. They believe in the endless symbolic power of art. This is the reason why the art world should not be silent on their actions but, on the contrary, deeply vigilant in its support of them. Theirs is a deeply artistic engagement.

Translated from French by Philip Barnard.

The post Pussy Riot at PS1: A Report and Some Reflections appeared first on artcritical.

Born in 1941, in Sharon, Pa., Leffingwell took art classes as a teenager at the nearby Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, stimulating the interests in art making and museums that would eventually define his life. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he became a regular at Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory, enthralled by the iconoclastic spirit of Lower Manhattan. His friends at the time ranged from the likes of political activist Abbie Hoffman to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet to sculptor John Chamberlain (who became a lifelong friend). He was equally at home in the art world of Los Angeles, also spending much time there. In 1978, he returned home to care for his mother and to finish his schooling, earning a B.A. at Youngstown State University in 1982 and an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1984.

In 1983, he presented “Chinese Chance: An American Collection” at the Butler, his first curatorial project, featuring the collection of Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, who had recently died of a drug overdose. It was followed by an exhibition by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner at the University of Cincinnati. In 1985, Leffingwell returned to New York as the program director, then chief curator of P.S. 1, hired by Alanna Heiss, its founding director. Heiss said that Leffingwell preferred artists of “extreme vision” whose work his own vision would make coherent. He curated shows of James Rosenquist, Neil Williams and Michael Tracy. One of his most notable exhibitions for P.S. 1 featured John McCracken, the first comprehensive survey of the Californian minimalist sculptor on the East Coast. Leffingwell often introduced little known artists from California and elsewhere to New York. It seemed natural, then, when in 1988 he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. His most ambitious venture for the gallery was “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” in 1992, a seven-venue biennial installed throughout the city, conceived as a model for future exhibitions.  He returned to New York in 1992 after his job was eliminated due to budgetary cuts. In 1997, he curated an important, critically acclaimed exhibition of Jack Smith at P.S. 1, renewing interest in the provocative artist who is now acknowledged as a major influence in the history of performance art, experimental filmmaking and queer cinema.

In 1989, Leffingwell became a contributor to Art in America, writing hundreds of reviews and articles over a 20-year span. He also began to visit Brazil with increasing frequency as his interest in South American art and his love of the country deepened.  He was named the magazine’s corresponding editor from Brazil, reporting on six of the São Paulo biennials and becoming an authority on contemporary Brazilian art. Elizabeth C. Baker, former editor-in-chief of Art in America, credited his curatorial experience and acumen for his ability to write on “an unusually broad range of artists. He brought us things we didn’t know about and he was willing to tackle almost any subject we might suggest.”

He wrote numerous essays and monographs; one of his last published essays was a contribution to AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1960-2007), a catalogue documenting more than 40 years of the work of Lawrence Weiner, co-published by LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum in 2007.

For much of the time after he returned to New York from L.A., Ed lived in a tiny walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, elegantly jam-packed with ornate and curious objects, artworks, books and the memorabilia he had acquired during an eventful, multifaceted life. It was his castle, where he cooked bouillabaisse for friends and entertained them with endless, often digressive, sometimes scandalously humorous anecdotes about the art world—true and not—enjoying himself immensely.

The post Critic, Curator, Dandy: Edward Leffingwell, 1941 to 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

The installation of “Mike Kelley” at LA MoCA is more comprehensive than any of its previous three presentations, at MoMA PS1, the Centre Pompidou, or the Stedelijk Museum, where former Stedelijk director (and former LA MoCA curator) Ann Goldstein first organized the show in 2012 in consultation with the Mike Kelley Foundation. The exhibition at MoCA was organized by Bennett Simpson and held in the Museum’s Geffen Contemporary, a former warehouse in Little Tokyo with 40,000 square feet of exhibition space. The Geffen’s open floor plan (with small galleries at the periphery) makes for a very different show than the most recent iteration, at New York’s PS1, which was broken up into smaller groupings due to the Museum’s diminutive galleries appropriated from former classrooms. The LA show puts particular focus on Kelley’s evocative, ritualistic and often hallucinatory video installations, which, shown simultaneously, take center stage in the Geffen’s enormous space. Here, sounds ricochet, lights flash and music drones, contributing to a feeling of sensory overload frequently attributed to the artist’s later works.

Kelley’s appropriation of kitschy stuffed animals and puppets, naughty cartoons and images from high school yearbooks have placed him in line historically with a “postmodern” rubric of production popularized by his Metro Pictures peers in the 1980s. However, rather than open-ended rejections of authenticity or originality (à la Richard Prince or Louise Lawler), Kelley’s work resonates with recurrent references to his own biography as expressed through his deep social and political investments. Be it via inquiries into the controversial subject of “memory repression” with his Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions (2000- 2006); the politics of labor with From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003); or the sanctity of art with his massive (and now iconic) More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (1987), the artist’s work is imbued with the vulnerable politics of our discursive and manifold selves.

Day is Done (2005-2006), an epic multimedia installation composed of Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32, opens the show and serves as an important barometer for Kelley’s ongoing artistic concerns. Central to the project is the experience of viewing each narrative from different angles and perspectives, a metaphor that aids the viewer in considering the artworks that follow. Day is Done was inaugurated by Kelley’s 30-minute video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), which is on view on a small monitor near the exhibition’s entrance. All of Kelley’s EAPRs were staged and scripted around images from high school plays found in yearbooks. Latching onto a new cultural investment in the study of repressed memory therapy, which rose in popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s due to a moral panic over alleged satanic abuse rituals, Kelley uses these installations to examine the multiple layers of signification in American folk rituals. Understanding the slippages between personal and collective memory, Kelley crafts a series centered on “socially acceptable” forms of performance, such as school plays, Halloween, and corporate “dress-up days.” In one scene, a cherubic middle schooler wanders out alone for a haircut and finds himself at the mercy of an obnoxious, sweaty barber who morphs into a vile, red-faced devil as standup comedian. In another, the same child is chased around a creaky attic by a ghoulish Virgin Mary, while he screams “I want to wake up!” Originally designed as a live 24-hour installation, Kelley hoped to eventually film 365 tapes, a monumental unrealized undertaking.

An entire gallery is devoted to From My Institution to Yours (1987/2003), an installation that incorporates the artist’s Loading Dock Drawings from 1984. For the work, Kelley reproduced flyers that feature naughty cartoons or institutional gripes circulated among administrators at CalArts via fax. The wall facing the drawings features a stenciled fist in representation of workers’ solidarity, while a carrot dangles from the ceiling as the clichéd symbol of futile incentive. The relationship of the fist to the goofy cartoons speaks to the potential of these administrators to organize, even if only through shared grievances and blue humor. Originally, red tape was intended to connect the installation to the administrative offices of the institution in which it was presented. At MoCA, a door which reads “employees only” has been built alongside, a testament (albeit less impactful something the artist might have come up with) to Kelley’s original ideological intent.

A number of Kelley’s installation-cum-shrines are featured prominently, composed of plush toys, felt and afghan rugs which reinforce the artist’s complicated investment in childhood, memory and spirituality. Also on view is a selection of ephemera from early collaborative performance works — tape recorders, megaphones and whoopee cushions — which feel a bit precious in their given context. Perhaps the most compelling installation in the show is made up of Kelley’s monumental Kandors series of (1999 – 2007, 2009, and 2011), which taps a quality of failure that pervades the whole exhibition — not of pessimism so much as a sense of sympathy for inadequacy, the underdog, or the misunderstood. Kandors reproduces Superman’s fictional home planet of Krypton, shrunken by his arch nemesis Brainiac, in a series of hyperbaric bell jars that sputter, smoke, and glow neon. Each is reproduced according to the graphic history of the comic at different historical moments as closely as possible. Again, the complicated relationship of Superman to his home, the nostalgia for childhood and an attempt to fill gaps in memory left blank are central components to the piece. In the wake of Kelley’s untimely death, his monumental retrospective encourages us to come to terms with the complicated experience of childhood, imparting a sense of trepidation, wonderment and hopefulness.

The post Multiple Layers of Significance: Mike Kelley at LA MoCA appeared first on artcritical.