The Sum and All Parts

This is the last weekend to check out The Sum and All Parts...a group show at a temporary space @427 Manhattan Ave./Bayard St in Brooklyn. It is really a smart show with a great mix of works. Stop by the closing part on Saturday night, from 8-12.

I did an interview with the curators Beau Rutland and Jenny Borland. See it below:

JL: I’m interested in the generation of The Sum and All Parts…I like the idea of a focus on multiple/serial imagery in a contemporary context, but it seems like you are also going for something more…

JB, BR: We wanted to put on a show where the work was accessible – not just in terms of affordability, but accessible in the sense that it could be understood and enjoyed by many different people in different ways. So, the original concept of the show, the idea of multiples, stemmed from this interest. We also wanted to avoid the presentation of artwork as "precious" or catering towards an art-market sensibility.

LeRoy Stevens, 2009, Favorite Recorded Scream, LP and poster, ed. of 500

JL: It seems like you have made a conscious effort to include a wide variety of media in the show…did you choose the works more based on personal inclination/taste or based on supporting the theme?

JB, BR: The work for the show was chosen fairly organically from a combination of both (personal taste and the theme) but we made it clear from the start that the artists would be given freedom to explore the concept set out to them and allow for their work to evolve over several attempts. Exploring the concept of multiples through a variety of media was only natural and appropriate.

David Rothenberg, 2005, Pointers I, II, III, DVD loop, LCD monitor, ed. of 10

JL: Do you think contemporary artists are increasingly interested in dissection or diminution of a subject?

JB, BR: Yes, and this idea was definitely useful while considering work for the show. To try and demonstrate both ends in our show, David Rothenberg’s Pointers series and Lanya Snyder’s Contact... series each deal with photography and imagery and methods of display, but on quite different terms. In David’s digital video loops, made from found 16mm footage, the hunting dogs appear strangely motionless against a moving background, deliberately framed by monitors and mimicking a static image – it forces the viewer to focus within the context of this frame. In Lanya’s work, the act of displaying photography is essentially broken down in itself.

Lanya Snyder, 2009, Contact 41, Contact 42, Contact 43, Contact 44, 38 c-prints, dimensions variable

JL: How do some of these artists move beyond what has been done with multiples in the past?

JB, BR: From the Bird’s Mouth by LeRoy Stevens is a good example of an artist going beyond what has been done with multiples in the past. It breaks down the idolization of one work, and spreads attention to all its encompassing parts – photographs, a film, a large-scale magnifying lens, and a sculpture- they become “art” unto themselves. In turn each piece can function as its own entity.

JL: I really enjoy how you have stretched the notion of a multiple…how does a work like Economics 101 by Boris Rasin and Kenny Komer fit?

JB, BR: Economics 101 kind of turns the tables on Gonzalez-Torres and ‘generosity.’ By taking a whole dollar bill and returning it to the viewer shredded, it works backwards from the way the take-away operates. It is endlessly engaging in the sense that it affects a possession of your own, leaving its mark for you to consider. We see it as displaying a Xerox machine for the viewer to press ‘copy’ instead of just showing the print produced for visitor to mindlessly take.

Kenny Komer & Boris Rasin, 2009, Economics 101 (detail), mixed media

JL: Are there particular artists that provided a conceptual backdrop for the show?

JB, BR: Absolutely – while working in the beginning stages on the show we thought a great deal about Allan Kaprow and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who may not typically be paired together but we feel like their work has a similar spirit - the ideas of “art as life,” art that doesn’t have to be confined to a gallery space, or art that can be removed from conventions of display. In this current atmosphere it seems that a number of artists are returning to those notions of conceptual art of the 70s and 80s and seeking something a bit more authentic. In our show, a work like LeRoy Stevens’ Favorite Recorded Screams stems from this type of thinking: operating within the community (not just the gallery) to reach a certain end, and gives back in the process. The project is a collection of New York record shop employees’ favorite scream on a song, meticulously compiled over a period of 6 months or so. LeRoy then pressed vinyl records of the screams and plans to redistribute a few to each store.

JL: Do you see connections between some of these artists and those of the late 70s/ early 80s?

JB, BR: Another conceptual influence was Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube text, dealing with methods of display and the function of the gallery for both the artist and viewer. We felt like the space itself was equally important to how the show operated, and knew from the start that we wanted something unconventional. The space we found has a number of distractions and flaws, but in this sense offers possibility for site specificity and adds a kind of performative element, allowing for a different kind of interaction with the work.

JL: Is there another show in the works for you guys?

JB, BR: Hopefully! We’ll both be returning back to school in the fall, but still want to be involved in projects like this. It’s fantastic that temporary shows and spaces – and curatorial endeavors like Apartment Show and your Daily Operation – are popping up everywhere, we feel it really was time for a change in that direction.

first 4 pics:
Boris Rasin, Boom, 2008 (ongoing), acrylic on wood, 10 parts, dimensions variable; Jaime Gecker, Bugaloos, Polaroid collage on plexi, 12 parts, 5" x 5" each
LeRoy Stevens, 2009, From the Bird’s Mouth, DVD loop, lens with frame, melted coins, 2 c-prints
Lanya Snyder, 2009, Contact 41, Contact 42, Contact 43, Contact 44, 38 c-prints, dimensions variable; Kenny Komer, One, 2009, inkjet print (on left), 40" x 45"; Kenny Komer, Two, 2009, inkjet print (on right), 40" x 45"
Kenny Komer & Boris Rasin, Economics 101, 2009, mixed media

Don't Miss: Use Your Illusion

Jesse Hamerman, Mean Girls; J.D. Walsh, Cloak, Frame, Disguise

Sherri Caudell Brennan, Untitled, Untitled, J.G. Ballard

Little Stars, Lake Michigan, Untitled

Patrick Brennan, Untitled; Jesse Hamerman, Jacqueline

Patrick Brennan, Dead No.2; Ned Colclough, I Found Out

Ned Colclough, Holy Evening

Use Your Illusion, a show set in the back of a Bushwick bodega, is a must see. In case you didn't have a chance to make it out last Sunday night for the opening, there's good news: it will be open by appointment for the rest of the week. Send organizer Jesse Hamerman an email to stop by: jhamerman [at] gmail [dot] com. Also see my labels for my posts on each artist in the show...

Upcoming One Night Shows

There are a few one night shows coming up that I'm really looking forward to (one of which is my own). They include many of my favorite artists...some of which have appeared on this blog. Click their names for the link to related posts.


April 26
Apartment Show, Far Out
Patrick Brennan, Elizabeth Deasy, Alicia Gibson, Christina Leung, Nolan Simon.



May 1 (...actually runs through the weekend)
HKJB, Personal Abstraction
Judith Braun , Chong Chu, Michael Dopp , Jay Henderson, Elizabeth Hirsch, Shawn Kuruneru, Benjamin King, Osamu Kobayashi, Denise Kupfershmidt, Jim Lee, Chris Martin, Craig Olson, Stephen Westfall, Wendy White


May 3
Use Your Illusion
curated by Jesse Hamerman w/ Sherri Caudell Brennan, Patrick Brennan, Ned Colclough, Jesse Hamerman, J.D.Walsh



May 9
My upcoming show. Also see Daily Operation and artist's links for more.

J.D. Walsh at Anthology Film Archives

THIS SATURDAY: J.D. Walsh’s newest (and most ambitious) video, "Untitled RPG" will be included in a program of short films and videos as part of the Migrating Forms film festival. The program, Conjurer Visit begins at 8:30 at Anthology Film Archives. Other participants include: Shana Moulton, Stephanie Barber, EMR, Sabine Gruffat, Grey Gersten, Steve Claydon, Darrin Martin and Torsten Zenas Burns, Jacob Ciocci & Shana Moulton.

Get your tickets HERE.

Also see: Walsh's website and my previous posts.

Matthew Fisher

Matthew Fisher's Forever Is opens this Saturday night at Rare.

See my interview with Matthew here.

Jasmine Justice

Rosie View, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 16" x 12"

Fingerhut, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 48 " x 48 "

Jasmine Justice's New Kind of Kick opens this Saturday, the 27th at 65Grand in Chicago. See my past post with Jasmine here.

Pierre Obando

Edits, 2008-09, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 24"



Abduction, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 12” x 16”

Be sure to check out Pierre Obando's superb show at Rush Arts Gallery before it closes on March 28.

Gina Beavers

Check out her show Conversations, which opens tonight and runs through March 5. Also see her website here.

It was a good day, 2006, acrylic on polypropylene paper, 40” x 26”

Z to the A, 2007, acrylic and flashe on polypropylene paper, 26” x 20”
Combat Rock (from 99 Luft Balloons Installation), 2000, tape on faux lizard paper and plexi
Doctor Free, 2006, acrylic on paper, 26" x 20"
untitled, 1999, charcoal on paper, 18” x 24”
Shoddy Journalism, 1997, charcoal on cardboard, 48" x 50" and detail
Sept 50th, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”

Eddie Martinez and Chuck Webster

untitled, 2006, mixed media on paper 6" x 8"

Lionheart, 2008, mixed media on panel, 40” x 40”

untitled, 2006, mixed media on paper

Don't miss the great Eddie Martinez and Chuck Webster Collaborations show up now at ZieherSmith. It closes next weekend, Feb. 7, so go there and then come to my show, Make it last...

Harry Shearer

After a seemingly endless election period, Harry Shearer’s The Silent Echo Chamber, now at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, feels like the appropriate palette cleanser. While Shearer is mostly known as the voice of many Simpsons characters and for his various collaborations with Christopher Guest, it is less known that he has been exhibiting these videos of "found" live feeds since 1992. It's surprising how enthralling and fun it is watching television screens of public figures sitting, doing nothing while waiting to go on air.

The Silent Echo Chamber at the Aldrich closes on Feb 8. See my interview with Shearer below:

Jon Lutz: Your various projects really seem to compliment each other and bring something different to the table. The same could be said for The Silent Echo Chamber. Can you talk about the impetus to create this work? How long have you been making videos?

Harry Shearer: I had started collecting these images when I realized that we were in the first generation of humans where so much ordinary behavior of so many well-known people was being videographed, and that somebody should be collecting it, after which I nominated myself. So, at some point, it seemed interesting to assembled the images for public view, and the art world seemed the most congenial place to do it. I started with a show called Telesthesia, a word I'd like to think I made up, at the Fullerton Museum in Orange County, CA, in, I think, 1989. Then came Barney's windows in NYC in 1992 for the figures involved in the Democratic Convention in the city, then The Wall of Silence at MOCA's Santa Monica storefront, commemorating the OJ trial circus, and then a long pause before the Conner Contemporary Art gallery in D.C. invited me in 2004 to do what became Face Time, the immediate predecessor of this show.

JL: Do you see yourself as a “video artist?”

HS: I see myself as a guy who puts these shows together. The term "video artist" is relevant only in the sense that gives people a recognizable category into which to insert this stuff.


JL: Your long running radio show, Le Show, features your recap of the lesser-known, but significant news stories of the week. You approach the details of these stories with a dry mix of sarcasm, humor, and critique. With The Silent Echo Chamber, it appears that you have taken a more objective or contemplative approach. The biting wit is replaced with a powerful ambiguity that emerges while watching figures like Karl Rove stare blankly, James Carville fidget, or Joe Biden eat a sandwich. Is there any kind of critique here of these individual personalities or is it solely up to the viewer to come to their own conclusion?

HS: That's one reason I enjoy doing this in an art context: much more conducive to ambiguity, multiple meanings, or total lack of meaning, than the comedy/satire world, where you really care whether the audience "gets the point." There's much less critique intended here, although some may occur to some viewers. But I think, in terms of what these shows mean to me, they're much more about the contrast between TV as we know it-basically, to a large extent, radio with pictures--and the possibilities of a truly visual medium.


JL: Most of the figures are politically involved, but then you throw in people like Dr. Phil. Are your choices of subject matter colored by any personal experiences with these people or comments upon the entertainment/news business in general?

HS: Choices constrained by two factors: the ubiquity of these people, and my ability to access images of them.

JL: In one case, Ben Stein and Henry Kissinger are shown, at different times, on the same screen. Given that they bear some resemblance to each other, there is some evidence that you have done some subtle constructing and arranging for humorous effect. Is this deliberate or merely coincidental?

HS: I'm very scrupulous--or obsessive--about not editing or altering the videos. It's too easy, and then it's about me. Kissinger and Stein showed up on the same screen because neither of them is in the immediate current spotlight, a la the other folks, yet they both amuse me. And, of course, that's the Jewish screen.

JL: You have also appeared on cable news shows many times. Is any part of these about your experience of waiting to go on air? Is there an inside joke here or something going on that someone not familiar with television production might not know about these clips?

HS: No, as a matter of fact, there's no joke. Well, if there is a joke, I guess it's that never before in human history has so much valuable time been spent by so many "important" people sitting around doing nothing. That may be a distinctive mark of our era. Or of our (former) prosperity.

up now

EJ Hauser, magic man, 2006, oil on panel, 8" x 10"

Unbreak My Heart at Pluto Gallery in Brooklyn, curated by Brent Burket, with artists Rosanna Bruno, Beth Gilfilen, Kate Gilmore, EJ Hauser, Robert Schatz, and Luke Whitlatch.

See my past post about EJ Hauser here.

The Object Direct

Mike Hein, rock in the woods, 2008, plexiglas, 35” x 24” x 7”

The Object Direct, curated by Matthew Fisher, opens this Thursday the 2oth at Heskin Contemporary. It includes a few artists who have appeared here in the past. In the next post, I'll have an interview and more work from one of them, Mike Hein (above). For now, see the artist list and press release for The Object Direct below:

Pat Brennan, Stacy Fisher, J.J. Garfinkel, Dan Gluibizzi, Mike Hein, Jim Lee, Dustin London, Saira McLaren, John O’Connor, Meridith Pingree, Rudy Shepherd, Mark Stockton, Cindy Stockton-Moore, Charlotta Westergren, Mitchell Wright

For the artists in this show, it's both who shot J.R. and who shot Mister Burns. Equal parts the Pepsi Generation and New Coke, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan, the Challenger explosion, the first Gulf War and President Bush. Art today cannot be reduced to an "ism" or single movement. Books entitled Painting People and group surveys such as USA Today remind us that art has gotten so large that what binds it together are simple comparisons and geographic groupings. These artists are apart of a single generation whose works features a strong presence of the hand.

These fifteen artists know the 1970s. They know the 1980s. These years formed their foundation for understanding both the real world and the art world. They are also not afraid to allow for the inaccuracies of their hand be apparent. For them, the concept of object exists in the artworks finial state, not in the process in which it was made. These younger artists differ from the idea of object-ness that was apart of the definition of 1970's LA Finish Fetish. Then, artists like John McCracken, Ken Price and Ed Ruscha allowed for 'object' to manifest its self in the form of perfect fabrication and machine surfaces. This removal overshadowed their presence in the creation of their art works. The artists in The Object Direct, permit the trace of their hand to be apart of the final piece. Reminding the viewer of the process in which an idea went from mental to physical, creating a directness and accessibility between artist and viewer that was shunned before.

Call & Response: J.D. Walsh

(Untitled) Imposing Entrance from JD Walsh on Vimeo.
2008, video projector, tripod, wood armature, 11" x 14"

The last, but not least, artist from Call & Response is J.D. Walsh. The Jaime Keiter stills are great, but the above video documentation gives a better sense of how amazing these look exhibited. Since my interview with him, these are dealing more directly with a delicate play between rhythm, video-as-painting, programming, and sensory experience. Also see his two works in this pic from the last post for a sense of scale.

Related: his website, the new album by his band Nights, Solomon Projects, Perfect Strangers..., and The Longest Day.

Call & Response, curated by Gianna Commito, is up now at Kent State University and closes Nov. 21. Previous posts on Call & Response: Carrie Pollack, Patrick Brennan, Suzanne Silver, Mary Lum.

Call & Response: Carrie Pollack

Mirror, 2008, oil on canvas, 12" x 16", Diamonds, 2008, oil on canvas, 16 x 20

Fracture, 2008, digital print on canvas, 18" x 24", Betwixt, 2008, oil on canvas, 16" x 20"

Over the next week, I'm going to post a few images from each of the artist's in Call & Response, an exhibition curated by Gianna Commito at Kent State University. Unfortunately, I won't get a chance to see the show, but Jaime Keiter, of The Light Archive, took some pics. In case you're in or around Ohio, the show closes Nov. 21.

I started with Carrie Pollack because, as this is the first time I'm seeing her work, I'm really curious about what's she's doing. The press release says that she "photographs quiet, often 'accidental' occurrences in her Brooklyn neighborhood." These photos are then are printed or reproduced in paint on canvas. You can see more of her works here.

Martin Bromirski

Humberto, God of Knowledge and Rapture, 1991








Two Potatoes Two Worlds, 1989
Celestial Potato, 1989

from Circus on Mars, 2008

Texas Potatoes, 1989

Untitled, 2006

Martin Bromirski's show, Circus on Mars is up now at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY. The works are hung in an old carriage house and it closes on Nov. 2. See a discussion with Martin about the show and his work in the comments...