my new Erik Hanson drawing

Oh Shit...

UBU goes FULLSCREEN and embedable...
celebrate by watching Mark Leckey's
insanely satisfying masterpiece
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999)

BLUR channeling CAN

my favorite blur track

Late Picasso

I've been pretty obsessed with the normally much maligned
late period Picasso. I missed a big museum show of them in
Germany when I was there last year, have found a few choice
examples here in LA at LACMA, and now there is a big show
going up in NYC.

To me these paintings still seem
unbelievably
free, fresh, and seriously tough.

anxiety of influence

Chuck Schumer

comes through

CALIFORNIA.... where are you?

Moments ago, the following statement was released:

March 23, 2009—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) today announced his support for marriage equality for same sex couples and for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The announcement followed a meeting on Sunday evening in Manhattan, initiated by Senator Schumer, with a group of New York LGBT elected officials and leaders of the city's largest LGBT organizations.

"I want to congratulate Sen. Schumer for defending marriage equality and the repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act,” said Ron Zacchi, executive director Marriage Equality New York (MENY). “This is an important move for my family" says Cathy Marino-Thomas, Board President MENY, "Sen. Schumer recognizing that only marriage equality provides my family with the status, protections and rights afforded to all other Americans."

Sen. Schumer is Vice Chair of the U.S. Senate's Democratic Conference and the highest ranking member of the Senate to endorse marriage equality.

Schumer's office confirmed the meeting and also the senior senator's change of heart, issuing the following statement from the Brooklyn Democrat (who is traveling upstate today):

"It’s time. Equality is something that has always been a hallmark of America and no group should be deprived of it. New York, which has always been at the forefront on issues of equality, is appropriately poised to take a lead on this issue."

Published: March 19, 2009

Xylor Jane

N.D.E.

Canada

55 Chrystie Street, near Hester Street, Lower East Side

Through March 29

Xylor Jane shares with many painters a sense of touch, color and craft, but she has something else: a private, intuitive mathematics in which prime numbers, calendars and the passage of time figure large. Her systems add another wrinkle to the use of grids (Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt, Jennifer Bartlett), progressions (Donald Judd, Mario Merz) and counting (On Kawara, Roman Opalka) in modern art.

Ms. Jane’s grids are superfine; their squares are anointed with a single slightly raised dot of color or they are left blank to form negative motifs defined by surrounding dots. In the most amazing works these motifs are extended numbers that repeat down entire surfaces, forming columns of pattern that fade in and out of legibility, as in the rainbow spectrum of “13,831” — a prime number that is also a palindrome.

Other patterns are abstract, the product of counting systems that yield elaborate bilateral symmetries. This is the case with “Selfsame,” and the butterflylike patterns of “Lepidoptera,” which both use the rainbow palette. Sometimes larger ghostly shapes or patterns can be glimpsed floating behind the dots — signs of a system that is impossible to trace. This occurs in the large X’s of “Selfsame” and the seemingly all-white “Day Break 1” or the repeating chevrons in “12.11.10,” another white work.

“Bombinating,” where pearlescent patterns have an Art Deco cadence, seems to offer a microscopic view of natural surfaces like butterfly wings or shells.

The stunning variety and handmade imperfections of Ms. Jane’s art reflect its autobiographical nature. N.D.E., the show’s title, stands for Near Death Experience, in reference to one she recently had. Her counting systems often begin with her birthday and measure different periods of her life. In ways alternately explicit and subtle, her work reveals the miracle and the drudgery of art-making as well as the wonders of the human mind and its needs. ROBERTA SMITH

Jeanne Dielman in LA!!!

Jeanne Dielman,

23 Quai du Commerce,

1080 Bruxelles

April 10 - April 11

LACMA

A groundbreaking work of art cinema, Chantal Akerman’s sharply observed and compellingly restrained masterpiece recounts the seemingly innocuous household chores of single-mother Jeanne Dielman (Seyrig). But beneath the surface of her modest Belgian petit bourgeois behavior, recorded in real time by cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Akerman uncovers a feminist tragedy.

Hanne Darboven starb mit 67 Jahren

Hanne Darboven, a German pioneer of Conceptual art, has died at the age of sixty-seven. Although the artist passed away on March 9 outside of Hamburg, her death was not known until March 13. “Hanne Darboven’s art was never plainly accessible,” writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Holger Liebs, recalling her “thousands, sometimes ten thousand hand-written pages, each furnished with a personal musical note, individually framed and quasi-tiled on the wall.” Darboven first participated in Documenta at the fifth edition in 1972 in Kassel. In 2002 at Documenta 11, her monumental Kontrabasssolo, opus 45 was a highlight of the exhibition and spanned three stories inside the Fridericianum. Despite the opaqueness of the artist’s installations, writes Liebs, Darboven was “driven” by the effort to be understood and to propagate education for all. “What does it help if only an elite group deals with art,” Darboven once asked, “if for the others nothing is done [to help them] understand what it’s about?”

learning from LEARNING FROM

.

LAMP

nyc.

PAUL THEK

momofuku and muji

armory

back in the city