TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT

A contemporary art project that takes place in various locations on the streets of Downtown Cairo
5-15 November 2007
In the megalopolis that is present-day Cairo, public space is a scarce resource. 3ARRASIF: TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT is a contemporary art project exploring Downtown Cairo's existing public spaces where residents are allowed to gather and interact as a site in which the complex relationship between the city's dwellers and its various governing bodies is constantly negotiated and redefined. 8 artists, designers and architects are commissioned to produce new projects through which they subtly disrupt the urban landscape by reinventing some of the guerrilla-style tactics and survival strategies employed by city dwellers on a daily basis in the public sphere.
Curated by Aleya Hamza and Edit Molnar

TALES AROUND THE PAVEMENT (CAIRO UNCLASSIFIED) is a project commissioned by MEETING POINTS 5 (MP5), a multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival organized by the YOUNG ARAB THEATRE FUND taking place in the Middle East and North Africa in November 2007.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Marwan Fayed
Eklego Design
Mohamed Allam
Malak Helmy and Essam Abdallah
Mahmoud Hamdy
Kareem Lotfy
George Azmy

Weather Report: Art and Climate Change

SEPTEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 21, 2007 -- "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition curated by internationally renowned critic, art historian, and writer Lucy R. Lippard held at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. It is presented in collaboration with EcoArts.

This exhibit partners the art and scientific communities to create a visual dialogue surrounding climate change. Historically, visual arts play a central role in attracting, inspiring, educating and motivating audiences. "Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" will exhibit artwork, in the museum and our partnering venues, and in outdoor site specific locations throughout Boulder, that will activate personal and public change.

Our collaborating partner EcoArts is a new effort bringing together scientists, environmentalists, and performing and visual artists - along with producers, presenters, scholars, spiritual leaders, policy makers, educators, businesses, and people from all walks of life - to use the arts to inspire new awareness of, discussion about, and action on environmental issues, with new possibilities for envisioning a sustainable future. Its programming principles are artistic excellence, scientific accuracy, environmental effectiveness, ethical practice, and whenever possible, presenting activities that strive to follow "the middle way" of being either non-partisan or bi-partisan to reach the widest audience possible.

Participating Artists:
Kim Abeles, Lillian Ball, Subhankar Banerjee, Iain Baxter&, Bobbe Besold, Cape Farewell, Mary Ellen Carroll (Precipice Alliance), CLUI (Center for Land Use Interpretation), Brian Collier, Xavier Cortada, Gayle Crites, Agnes Denes, Steven Deo, Rebecca DiDomenico, Future Farmers (Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine), Bill Gilbert, Isabella Gonzales, Green Fabrication (via Rick Sommerfeld, University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning), Newton & Helen Harrison, Judit Hersko, Lynne Hull, Pierre Huyghe, Basia Irland, Patricia Johanson, Chris Jordan, Marguerite Kahrl, Janet Koenig & Greg Sholette, Eve Andree Laramee, Learning Site (Cecilia Wendt and Rikke Luther), Ellen Levy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Patrick Marold, Natasha Mayers, Jane McMahan, Mary Miss, Joan Myers, Beverly Naidus, Chrissie Orr, Melanie Walker & George Peters, Andrea Polli, Marjetica Potrc, Aviva Rahmani, Rapid Response, Buster Simpson, Kristine Smock, Joel Sternfeld, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ruth Wallen, Sherry Wiggins, The Yes Men, Shai Zakai

PRIMARY EXHIBITION SITE:
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street, Boulder, 80302
bmoca.org
Tuesday?Friday, 11am to 5pm
Saturday during the Boulder County Farmers' Market (through October), 9am to 4pm
Saturday (beginning November), 11am to 5pm
Sunday, 12noon to 3pm

ADDITIONAL INDOOR GALLERY SITES:
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
University of Colorado, Norlin Library Galleries, 1720 Pleasant St.
University of Colorado, ATLAS (exhibit Sept. 13 Oct. 6, 10am to 2pm), 125 Regents Dr.
National Center for Atmospheric Research, (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.

OUTDOOR SITES:
Boulder Municipal Campus (Along the Boulder Creek to Boulder Public Library)
Boulder Public Library, 1000 Canyon Blvd.
Central Park (park directly west from the museum)
Dairy Center for the Arts, 2590 Walnut St.
Eben G. Fine Park, 101 Arapahoe Ave.
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab, 1850 Table Mesa Dr.
Twenty Ninth Street (Canyon St. and Broadway)
17th and the Boulder Creek Path

Waiting for Gordon

the floor is a double floor, a surface upon a surface, a disjointed and amended space, a room within a room, dislocated and relocated, from Antwerp to Los Angeles, from 1975 to 2007, a floor without its building, and yet finding a building here, suggesting a link while skirting the connection, remaining out of bounds, and yet all the more considered, cared for, examined - scrutiny in the cracks, along the floorboards, amidst the dust - a question in the form of a splinter, poetry in the abandoned, the floor is but a piece, ripped off from its origin, torn from the whole and made a part: it plays its part in this performance of spatial imagination, of art historical surveying, a cataloguing and disseminating of floors... This is Gordon's calling card, in the form of a floor, yet one which I do not stand on, but which I stand back from, admire as a bystander, a participant once or twice or three times removed, like a distant cousin arriving too late for the party... It comes in the form of additions and subtractions, of locations and dislocations, of making do and cooking up more, of occupying and being occupied, and it leaves according to surprising exits, through sudden doors and new perspectives, rough edges and cut slivers: the alphabet of the built is given a boost on this floor, arriving at new dance steps that makes every background useful material for transformative constructions.

LA performance/sounding out

i you us them whose their mine
Brandon LaBelle
Audiometer aka Tommy Grenas / Michael Esther
Friday, October 26, 8:00--10:00 p.m.
Dangerous Curve
500 Molino Street #101
Los Angeles

casting glances at Smithson

James Benning's new film screened in Los Angeles tonite... it's an elegant, eighty-minute homage to Smithson's Spiral Jetty and takes the form of an extended series of one-minute shots of the jetty filmed over the course of a couple of years. Without presuming to have an easy answer, Benning seems interested in what happens when geologic time meets cinematic time?

Social Action: KunstMarkt

Kunstmarkt Am Schöpfwerk - Art Market in Vienna: using art to facilitate social exchanges across ethnic and economic lines
Samstag, 20. Oktober 2007, 14.00–19.00
Ort: Stadtteilzentrum Bassena Am Schöpfwerk 29/14, 1120 Wien (U6-Am Schöpfwerk), http://www.bassena.at
TeilnehmerInnen: ANRONVIAGDPIOVSA/2007, Brandon LaBelle, Dominique, GirlsOnHorses, Mai Gogishvilli, René H., Reni Hofmüller, Biggi Holzwarth, kampolerta, Maiken Kloser, KulturDrogerie, Thomas Northoff, Ferry Rodinger, SambAttac, Anna Witt
Kunstmarktspenden: Linda Bilda, Carla Cruz, Veronika Dirnhofer, Hilde Fuchs, Nina Höchtl, LILA, Cornelia Silli, Karin Sulimma, trans/gender, Mounty R. P. Zentara uvm.

Not a Cornfield publication

A somewhat mysterious package arrived in the mail recently, addressed to someone with a name close to mine if spelled quite creatively. Upon opening the elegant package I discovered a two volume boxed set of books documenting the Lauren Bon-spearheaded Not A Cornfield project, which transformed a historic downtown tract of land in L.A. over the course of a growing cycle from May 2005 - April 2006. The two volumes extend the project in the form of an elaborate archive. One volume consists of images shot over the course of the project documenting the massive effort to turn a brownfield into an earthwork in the form of an agricultural cycle of corn planting and harvest. The aerial photography included in the collection gives a sense of the scale of this monumental project. The slightly thicker second volume is a timeline of the project and a collection of essays that contextualize the site historically and aim to position the artwork culturally. Divided into five sections that mirror the sequence of the project - brown, green, gold, blue and clear - the "text" volume navigates through the complex terrain of an ecologically-minded, politically charged site-based project in an urban context. Of particuar interest are Michael Dear's assessment of the site in the historical (non)memory of the city, Michael Ned Holte's discussion of the work in relation to other site-based projects and especially in relation to Agnes Denes' "Wheatfield: A Confrontation," and Christine Wertheim's response to the charge that the project should not be considered art. Wertheim employs Duchamp to remind us that what constitutes art after modernity is no longer a matter of categorical inclusivity or exclusivity. I think the legacy of Duchamp is an interesting lens through which to view the project, but not in exactly the way Wertheim proposes. The lasting relevance of the Duchampian readymade is the potential for an artistic project (or act or gesture) to point to the context in which we are viewing the work. The fact that Fountain was deemed too offensive for the exhibition to which it was submitted is precisely why the work had resonance. If Not A Cornfield is read in a Duchampian light, it seems less important that we think of the project as art or non-art. Rather we might focus on the context out of which the project emerged. The context of this project proposed innumerable challenges: the logistical dynamics of a project of this scale, negotiations with the city, relations with a community of activists who worked for years to get the site designated as park land, the inevitable class and racial questions that emerge when doing public projects in an urban context, and the fact that the artist is a trustee to the Annenberg Foundation. This last challenge, which Bon herself reckons with in a forthright manner in the publication, is perhaps the most curious. It is not very often that we are forced to consider the challenges of an artist who, with the help of her family foundation, can receive funding in the millions of dollars to produce a civic-minded public project. While the fact that she herself is a trustee on the board of the foundation funding the project does not diminish the project, it gives the project a very specific valence. The discussion of the question of art or non-art might be more productively directed towards this unique set of circumstances and the very particular challenges that accompany this arrangement. That is to say, the question "Can we consider a corn field art?" is less interesting than "How is this project possible here and now?" Personally, I think one of the ways for Bon to confront the challenge of her position with the foundation would have been to refuse to take authorial credit for the project. This would have allowed the project to question the relation between artistic production and authorial subjectivity.
One of the most interesting aspects of Not a Cornfield was the vast and disparate groups that Bon brought together through a programming series at the site during the run of the project. I remember an evening watching films organized by the Echo Park Film Center and then dancing to cumbias by Very Be Careful amisdt corn stalks and stunning downtown views. Maybe Bon's strength as an artist has more in common with Warhol than Duchamp: She seems to be a master at bringing interesting people together to work on a project that bears her name. Although when I asked her, at one of the symposia at the edge of the cornfield, if she felt an affinity for Warhol during the Factory years, she seemed less than pleased.

notacornfielddotcom/
farmlabdotorg/