A Commonplace Book

New York has had an embarrassment of great, free art shows to see in the past few days. To recap:

Last weekend, on the same day as the Art Parade, Jeff Soto and Jim Hauser opened at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery. I’m upset I missed this show on its opening night, but I was fairly exhausted from walking the city that morning. I hope to get to Chelsea for it sometime in the coming week.

Mike Nelson has an awesome maze of an installation at the abandoned section of the Essex Street Market. It was a very relaxed environment and fun to wander aimlessly through for 15 minutes. Sometime after I’ve gotten to see Jeff Soto I intend on returning here with my camera. The whole exhibit is screaming for me to spend a few hours wandering through and taking pictures.

But most endearing of all was the army of wildly disfigured Bart Simpson clones that invaded Toy Tokyo’s The Showroom starting this past Saturday. In the usual style of the designer toy scene, basic molds were passed around to bigger and smaller artists, with everyone turning in their finished project for the show.

According to a quick conversation I had with the curator(?), the show is much bigger than I realized. After spending some time here in New York, it will make its way to London, and then on to Beijing, hopefully in time for the 2008 Olympics. With the end of the tour all of the works will be auctioned off on eBay. I think some, like the one by Matt Groening, will go for almost absurd prices. Proceeds will go to charity.

And now, some pictures of Bart. Full gallery can be seen here.

(Apologies for the general weakness of the photos. The light was messing with me for some reason and I was in a hurry to get to a meeting for a top secret project I’m working on right now.)

Ziggy Bartdust!

Kaiju Big Bart!

Piss Bart!

And Tape Bart?!

One wall was also a mural, with a school of Blinkies by a personal favorite artist of mine, Andrew Bell.

School of Blinkies!

(Attribution for particular models will be given, if I ever figure out who actually made each. Thanks to all of the artists who put in the time making such great Barts.)

I don’t trust art. “High art,” specifically, although I’m willing to cede that it is a fairly ignorant position. (Not ignorant in the sense that all who mistrust what I classify as high art are ignorant, but ignorant in that I don’t really know enough to have a position, but have adopted one anyway.)

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon contains many discursions, and one of the more memorable even after all these years is his prison-cell lecture by Enoch Root about the difference between the gods of war, Athena and Ares. One meme Root (or rather Stephenson) mentions is the idea of metis, a greek word for “art”, but which is specific in describing art as craft and technology. It was a distinction that I had never heard made so clearly, and is one which stuck with me for some time.

So it is with great pleasure that I have seen the rise of interest in craft over or alongside art. When a magazine like Make is as popular (internet-popular, at least) as it is now, and when Theo Jansen gives a talk at TED, I think its fair to say that craft is cool.

Straddling the line between art and craft is the Conflux Festival. It is back, starting today and going through Sunday. Conflux seems to have enough ties to the academic/artistic theory that so tempers my interest, but more than makes up for this with a heavy dose of projects that can only be described as awesome.

One artist involved this year (by whom I was fortunate enough to see a preview talk at the inestimable Dorkbot) is Michael Dory, whose Concrete Crickets will be on display Friday through Sunday. Check his work out if you get a chance.

Hit the schedule of events here.

(Note: It has been several years at best since I’ve read Stephenson’s magnum opus, so its possible my memory of what was in it is completely fabricated. I’m just warning you.)

This past Saturday I spent an hour or two sitting on the pavement between Prince and Spring watching a merry procession of New York’s finest lunatics strolling down West Broadway. It was The Art Parade, organized by Deitch Projects. It was as fantastic as I hoped it would be (I missed it last year), although the sheer number and variety of outfits became a bit overwhelming at a certain point.

I might have appreciated the event even more if they cut in half the number of groups and allowed more space between each as they walked. Doing so would have allowed more time for us sitting by the sidewalk to appreciate the spectacle to its fullest. By the Parade’s halfway point I felt numbed to the never-ending wall of fishnets and balloons and puppets and marching bands.

The entire set is here on Flickr, and a select few pictures can be found below

One of the few places a blue-feathered Spartan helment looks downright tame.

I’ve seen this outfit/character before somewhere. Don’t know where though.

I want one of these costumes so badly.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get an invitation to an afterparty.