Brendan Fowler at Rental Gallery
This Sunday November 15, 2009, 1-6 pm, free and open to all…come whenever you like, stay for however long! This event is part of Performa 09, the huge festival of performance art that is taking over they city of New York all this month!

If you go to this, say hi to our very own Max, who is in NY for a week and will be helping with the performance! AND on that note, please be extra extra patient with your mail-orders this week and next, as we are temporarily without the awesome MAX!

Q&A with Hanne Mugaas of Art Since the Summer of '69

Hanne Mugaas is the founder and co-director of Art Since the Summer of ’69.  The gallery, which began last year as a fun curatorial project with artist Cory Arcangel, recently became a full-fledged art space operated by Hanne and her friends Fabienne, Paul, and Ludwig the dog. Nestled in a 96 square-foot room on the second floor of an office building in NY’s Lower East Side, the gallery—which previously existed mainly in glow-in-the-dark art fair or PDF formats—finally has a physical home for its refreshing and polymorphous projects.  Since opening this past summer, they’ve hosted a week-long bar, a 15-inch art show, and perhaps more dogs per square foot than any gallery in New York City: their last show was an exhibition that traced the role of the Bichon Frise dog in the history of painting. Recently we got to visit the gallery and chat with Hanne…

Tell us about the origins of Art Since the Summer of ’69.
Art Since the Summer of ‘69 came about in 2008, when Cory Arcangel and I were invited to participate in the Dark Fair (an art fair that took place in the dark) at Swiss Institute in New York. The problem was that we did not have a gallery, so we had to start one. So we did, and named it Art Since the Summer of ‘69. Fabienne Stephan helped us put together the booth, as she is a real gallery director (at Salon 94) and knew how to do art fairs. The booth at the Dark Fair was our first “exhibition.” Shortly thereafter, Cory quit, and I did the project alone as a mobile thing for a while, with Secondary Market at Ooga Booga and a screening at the Dark Fair at Kolnicher Kunstverein, among others. Fabienne acted as a consultant on some of the projects, and we started talking about opening a space together. In May 2009 we found our current space, which is 6 x 16 feet, and opened it in June 2009 with the show “As Small As It Gets.” By then, Fabienne’s husband Paul Aymar Mourgue d’Algue had joined our team. So now we are three directors, plus Fabienne’s and Paul’s dog—the daschund Ludwig Von Truffel—who is always with us at the gallery.

Awesome, congratulations!  Is there a story behind the name?
The name is based on the Bryan Adams hit single “Summer of ‘69” and on Rauschenberg’s ‘40 year rule’, where he said that to do something great / become successful, go forty years back in time, steal something and make it yours. Our space opened in the summer of 2009, 40 years after the summer of ‘69.

Can you give us a run-down of the shows and projects you’ve done thus far?
The Dark Fair, which gathered friends, family and associates of the gallery; Gallery Show No. 1, which was in a makeup room on Broadway; Secondary Market at Ooga Booga, which was “art debris objects” which I found on Ebay and then sold in my little shop (still for sale, here). At Ooga Booga we also showed Josh Blackwell’s plastic bags in the windows.

Next was “KINO, A Screening of Dreams and Hopes for Times like These,” a screening I put together for the Dark Fair in Cologne. This was not long after the recession happened, so I decided to make a screening of happiness to cheer everyone up, including works by young artists, but also clips from movies that were in cinemas during the Great Depression, such as those by Busby Berkeley, which intention was to make people happy, at least for a couple of hours. Then I did the “PDF The ‘Painting’ Show,” and finally we found our space which opened in June with the exhibition “As Small As It Gets,” where our tiny space had fifteen sculptures by fifteen artists, all under 15”. In August we had a small secret “Ar Bar,” where Paul collaborated with the artist Bozidar Brazda on a week with different themes every night, and the space was designed like one of those Japanese hole in the wall bars. Since we’re really a hole in the wall gallery it was very successful.

As a fellow “tiny upstairs business,” how do you like being in a small second floor space?
We love being upstairs in a tiny space. The space is very manageable; we never have the problem of not having enough works to fill up the space. We like to say that our floor space is the same size as a painting hanging in a Chelsea gallery. I often try to prepare people for how small it is, and everyone says, “Yes, we get it, it’s tiny,” but then they still go, “Wow, it IS really small,” when they’re finally here. On the opening of “The Bichon Frise in Art,” we had fifteen Bichons here, the space was packed with cuteness, the best art opening I’ve ever been to, and certainly the only one where everyone was looking down on the floor instead of at the art/each other.

Haha…what was the idea behind the Bichon Frise show?
“The Bichon Frise in Art” show, which just closed, was based on a project by Edward J. Shephard Jr., a librarian at Binghamton University, who in 1996 started working on his website, The Bichon Frise in Art. His project, which is still ongoing, is to go through art history books, and any painting or sculpture with a little white dog that might be a bichon in it will get scanned and uploaded to his website, which is a museum by now, with different “rooms” for different centuries and artists. We hung reproductions of a selection of the paintings in the gallery, and we also invited five artists to get inspired by the website and make new works, which were also on view.

I see that you guys represent an artist named Marcel Dionne.  May I ask who he is?
Sure!  Marcel is our in-house artist, an “international man of mystery.” Keeping with the gallery’s small size, Marcel is exploring cuteness through his work. Unfortunately, according to The New York Times, 2005, not 1969, was the year of cute.

What’s coming up next at the space?
November: sculptures by Lina Viste Gronli, and two performances in collaboration with Performa ‘09, by Nils Bech and Bendik Giske.
December: Objects, Furniture and Patterns, an interior design show (I’ve always dreamed of doing an interior design show), where the gallery will be made into a living room, with artists contributing the furniture, including table, chairs, curtains, lamps, etc. etc.  Ooga Booga will be part of the show too!
2010: Solo shows by Charles Irvin, Benjamin Valenza, and Ligia Dias and more to come..!

Lastly, you made a very popular calendar and glow-in-the-dark prints for us last year, will there be a 2010 calendar?
Yes! It’s coming soon.

Cool! Thanks so much for talking with us :)

Chips Ahoy!

German photographer Annette Kelm’s show opens in London this Saturday at Herald St. gallery.

If we were better globetrotters, we would be there. 

Now through November 22nd.

And and and….our champagne glasses are raised to Londoner Pablo Bronstein for his U.S. show at the Met! A toast to you from coast to coast…

It’s running from now until February 21st at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.  If you can’t make it to the Big Apple between now and then, you can still get these two books by him and daydream of mythical architectural histories from your bedroom.

New auto reflection photos by Amy Yao

Chinese Box

Ree Morton

For those of you in NYC, the Drawing Center’s exhibition of artist Ree Morton (1936-1977), opens this Friday! The show’s title, “At the Still Point of the Turning World,” takes its name from a T. S. Eliot poem Morton kept above her studio desk. This exhibition highlights Morton’s influential body of work, remarkably all produced between her decision to turn to art full-time in the late 1960s and her tragic death shortly before her 41st birthday. While reflecting many of the currents of Postminimal and Conceptual art of the 1970s, Morton’s work also looked to a pioneering use of personal narrative, intimacy, humor, and poetic imagination. Yet the scope of her artistic production remains largely unrecognized, as does her vital contribution to feminist art practice and the importance of drawing to her development as an artist. Fortunately, there has been a recently revitalized interest in her work, with her inclusion in MOCA’s WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and her solo exhibition at Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles two years ago.

You can also check out The Mating Habits of Lines, a publication containing pages from Morton’s sketchbooks and notebooks, compiled by Allan Schwartzman and Kathleen Thomas. This book is a poignant insight into the relentless and methodical curiosity that characterized the artist’s short-lived career. Morton, who claimed her life’s work to have begun at age three, springing from a fascination with “watching ant hills and protecting lady bugs,” was encouraged by her family to pursue science. It wasn’t until she had already started a life as a nurse, married with three children, that she realized her passion for observation was at its core an artistic instinct. Within six years she received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from the Taylor School of Art, and moved to New York to teach and work as an artist. This left her only nine years of postgraduate work before a car crash took her life in 1977. Morton’s sketches and notes, which are composed mainly of lists, quotes, visual patterns, and explorations of unresolved motifs, seem to insist a commitment to observation over analysis, to playfulness as the guiding principle behind her sculptures, drawings, and installations. These pages feel open-ended and intimate in a way that can’t help but inspire.

Last Sunday at Ooga Booga

Thanks to all who came out last Sunday to celebrate the debut of Motherwell journal and Pearl Hsiung’s awesome new window installation

The party was heavily attended by kids…

and even more dogs

Here’s the new journal:

Each copy is hand-bound and seared with a hot iron brand by the editor, Paige K. Johnston

If you let her brand you, you might even get a free copy

Congrats Paige and Pearl!

DISBAND was an all-female band and performance collective formed in 1978 and comprised of feminist artists such as Ilona Granet, Donna Henes, Ingrid Sischy, Diane Torr, Barbara Kruger, Barbara Ess (of Y Pants & The Static), and Martha Wilson. Their intention was to discard standard pop instrumentation, in favor of crafting sharp-witted, catchy, a cappella pop songs. During the late 1970’s, Martha Wilson had watched other musicians play the Mudd Club, CBGBs, and other New York venues and thought, “They all knew how to play instruments and I didn’t, so I called up artist girlfriends who were long on concept and short on skills, and DISBAND—the all-girl band of artists who couldn’t play any instruments—was born.” Wilson was inspired by the No Wave scene that was going on around her in downtown Manhattan—acts like Theoretical Girls, Bush Tetras, and James White and the Blacks sparked her interest in making music. The group tackled issues of gender inequality, politics, fine art, and sexual identity in their genre-blurring performances. Audiences were often unsure if what they were seeing was a pop group or a performance art piece. The group eventually split up in 1982, never officially recording an album and leaving behind very little documentation. This self-titled CD, featuring 21 live recordings from 1979-1982, is the first comprehensive release of an often-overlooked experiment in music and art. Click here for more info.