Posts: Beyond

Ron Kuivila’s two contributions stood out in what was already a good Inventionen Festival. In the basement vault of the Staatsbank Berlin, his pairs of arcing wires produced a network of sparks that resonated through cardboard coffee cups, their sounds providing an erratic, rapid-fire punctuation of the darkened space. Upstairs in the same building, Kuivila’s performance of the edgy telephonic elegy, “Beautification of the Facsmile Tone” (complete with a pair of slowly modulated ringing phones - the old kind with real bells in them), wove a smartly shifting soundfield from the minimal audio language of dialtones and busy signals. Other highlights included Robin Minard’s installation of hundreds of tiny speakers in the deep end of a long-empty indoor swimming pool and Gordon Monahan’s drop-by-drop waterfall onto household objects wired for sound.

- Ed Osborn [Tuesday, July 2nd, 2002]

The other day was music day in Paris. Hundreds of free live shows ranging from folk to classical. I went to see one in a 17th century private mansion courtyard.(a palace really). They were doing minimal tech house as a soundtrack to a 1930 b/w silent fim about Paris. the band was from England, and was called swayzak. 2 guys. Instead of showing up with records, they were playing 2 laptops, so the sound was live. It was really good, stretching the limits of house in unlikely areas. sparse, austere, but the groove was definitively there..

- Ella Delaney [Thursday, June 27th, 2002]

as MOMA moves to Queens with a bang and a whistle. As far as publicity stunts go, at least this one seems like good spectating.

- Tucker Nichols [Wednesday, June 26th, 2002]

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts survived the initial shakeup of its new director, but he’s not finished. So is Malcolm Rogers a CEO or an educator?

- Tucker Nichols [Tuesday, June 25th, 2002]

The latest art-SITES guide to contemporary art, art-SITES PARIS by Sidra Stich, has just been released. Stich subtitled it “The Indispensable Guide to Contemporary Art—Architecture—Design” and you know what? It is. If you’re headed for Paris, get it. It’ll be the best-spent $19.95 (22.95, euros) of your trip.

- Meredith Tromble [Saturday, June 22nd, 2002]

Just back from Dokumenta11, Kassel Germany. With few exceptions, works tended toward heavy-handed didacticism and exemplified an old-school multicultural political agenda. All this was the predictable result of the process-heavy path of so-called “platforms” that had led there over the past five years. Disturbing trends: artists pretending to be anthropologists, the return of text heavy, social/political “art” and so-called video installations that are nothing more than screening rooms for videos being projected on a wall. Watch for my upcoming (and a bit less ornery) rundown.

- Ella Delaney [Wednesday, June 12th, 2002]

From the editors