chelsea art ghetto promenade

"is a memorial allowed to be cosy?"*

through snow trenches we are shuffling

recognising the types

why else would we be here in this run down place?

body shop bricks car parking dirty bridges

we are on the fringes we enter our fridges

tombs to creativity morgue for dead art

awaiting final resting places on walls of stellar pads

the latest talent will hang

by fur coats in halls art trophy from the hunt

negotiated for a snip "did you see anything good?"

pass the word who's fair game? pack animals emerge

from luxury lairs scout for a move

and pounce

in white cube concrete aesthetic terrain

fashion art home decor-plan/lifestyle choice

trash to treasure swipe that card

strike that pose convey that serious aura

the knowing nod nothing happening here today

gallery makeover for the next new thing

distance between box and street only a pane of security glass

preventing grime getting in

hermetic sealed air leaking

outside

torn dayglo posters patch broken brown shutters

small herds of strutting creatures tawny and crisp

alert sedated eyeing seeking

calculating following

we are one

we are artworld

a few gems I have to admit

my caution my aversion my neck hairs prickling

(brooklyn radar...? chelsea radar here!)

*stolen line from show at Anton Kern Gallery

images:

1. dustbin at Anton Kern Gallery

2. work on show at Cueto Projects

3. gallery poster & art outside ZieherSmith

4. floor of Paula Cooper (I think)

5. lobby of Kim Foster

The Really, Really Free Market

no money changes hands

no direct swap

take

what you need

give

what you don't

exit consumer world

an open invitation

enter a field

positive social relations

object transmissions

transcending stations

human interactions

conversations

a smile

a gift

a laugh

a line

a word

a lift

a self-helping hand

Judson Memorial Church, Washington Square - Really, Really Free Market

3pm -7pm last Sunday of every month

image: sculpture, Washington Square

Took a trip up MomA PS1. Some works of note:

Phil Collins' excellent 'Free Fotolab', 2009 in which the artist asked people to send him their undeveloped rolls of film which he would then process and send a set of prints back to the participants on condition that they surrender all rights to the images. The result is a 9 minute slide sequence of selected shots providing candid portraits and representations; out-takes of the unexpected and the personal. The photos are derived from broadly Eastern European locations and provide a fascinating, touching and unfamiliar yet strangely familiar collective impression of people caught on camera.

Hannah Wilke, 'The Intra-Venus Tapes', 1990-93. Hard going and compelling document of the last years of the artists life.

Gracielle Carnevale, 'Encierro y Escape' (Entrapment and Escape), 1968. Funny.

Shizuko Yokomizo, 'Stranger 6', 1999. The artist left notes to occupants of ground floor dwellings and apartments asking them if they wished to pose in their living rooms for ten minutes at an appointed hour, at some point during which time they would be photographed. This one of the resulting, simultaneously intimate and distant portraits.

Stephen Willats, 'Cybernetic Still Life' 2010, 'The Multi-Channel Messenger' 2008 and 'The World As It Is And The World As It Should Be' 2006. Diagram as artwork and social mapping device.

What is interesting and apparent when viewing works in the environment of PS1, is the uniform consistency and universal aesthetic of the scene of engagement with art, where the presentation of the work does not so much reveal the circumstances of the works creation but rather heightens consciousness of the circumstances of its display.

Art in the streets all photographed within 100 yards of PS1.

At the Skyscraper Museum near Battery Park there are proposals for the green integration of skyscrapers into the urban fabric of New York as high rise production platforms. Since the flight of global capital to markets elsewhere, the idea of various forms of productivity utilising existing structures has remerged. The exhibition charts the evolution of this form of industrial processing from the early vertical cotton mills of the eighteen hundreds through to the likes of the FIAT factory in Turin with it's rooftop test track and utopian designs such as the cotton processing geodesic dome developed by Buckminster Fuller and his students. This is seen as a way of reinvigorating the vacant vertical spaces of New York, providing employment and income.

As a further note, check out www.planetaryone.com for some very interesting ideas about how the future city might be 'designed'. It features ingenious and creative solutions as to how large concentrations of people could live in a more symbiotic relationship with the natural environment.

The only thing I would question is: What are these populations co-existing to serve through the functioning of the city? Is this re-design simply a mutation of the technology that is already engaged in the constant reproduction of the machine which entraps the human organism in the cycle of consumption? Will it be for the perpetuation of the hegemonic global capital system? Or is it possible to re-imagine these solutions as part of the progressive evolution of the human project of enlightenment? Can happiness be achieved through these means?

residential jazz stroll up to the stone

spinning blur of musical threads

new york city rapid fire fed fluid sequences

highly orchestrated slalom skids

through street collage of street beats

fog-horn crescendos flood rivers of passion

serpentine dizziness captures en-trances

intoxicating rhythm of life on the level

Tony Malaby - Novela, Live @ the Stone January 22nd 2011

New York Public Library

Exhibition THR33 Faiths:

ancient and modern

illuminated texts form

Islamic, Jewish and Christian signs

calligraphic ornamented emblematic

gold leaf

natural pigments

common threads

horned Moses

no photos

use your eyes

use your mind

Broadway Through Times Square:

media blitz

heavy police presence

hawkers beggars and advertising

looking for your money

refuse the photo-op

no free ads in your album

externalised interior nature of corporate fantasy/mind

perfect image re-production

social sculpture for gains

profit and power and accumulation

moulding collective consciousness

Like flocks of sea birds

nesting in crevices

of neon cliffs

eating and excreting

money and goods

trading values and economies

beyond any reasonable limit

excess of production:

TOTAL

absorption into

dangerous material intelligence

virtual life suspends the natural law

at a price beyond conception

meanwhile...

a green Latin leprechaun

face freezing stiff on ice-wind-blast street corner

ill fitting garb and a dejected aura

high class shoppers spend plastic wads

homeless shadows mill and scour

Grand Central Zone:

women in furs

men in rags

horned traffic

walk/don't walk

ghosts apparitions shades souls

moving within

momentarily visible

stray flows

on singular missions

free radicals pick up

the small change

of an indifferent form of illusion

multiple dimensions shifting proximity

superimposed

between and within

choosing to see... or not

register... or not

acknowledge... or not

Circle line

The subway riff - Obediently herded by by unseen voices of instruction people particles negotiate trajectories following signs, instincts and routines and to the left a stompimg country blues outfit of time-served keepers of the thrumming rhythm bass shifting the crowd along.

Circle line tour of the river shows the skyscraper views of the Manhattan Mountain range steel gold glass concrete copper gold turquoise black silver and shiny reaching and stamping marks of financial market returns. Liberty powdered blue static gesture in cold wind off the river surge. We hear of famous residents and the prices they paid for their pads in the sky with personal lifts from car to apartment no photos please. but we are click happy in the freezing cold shaking to catch the view random shots grids and blocks layering of architectural gestures constant sedimentation of successive power proclamations one upon another juxtaposition of historical moments of economic conquest and dominion.

On the Brooklyn side non-places now spaces await their return to becoming places once again. The narrator gives us the low down on affordable housing and the lack: Living competing with Economy for Life.

metro-politick observations around the fastline

Security checked I entered the US where the border begins in Dublin airport. A redrawing of the political map of the world establishing a new frontier within another territory. The Atlantic journey of adventure just another domestic trip.

In flight floating people journey as one disconnected, united only by direction of travel - objects falling through space together alone obedient passive trajectory with screen magnets for the mind.

Taxi to the apartment and I get the story that this is the land of opportunity for a man with a family to feed and clothing to move when not at the wheel. Schwarzenneger is the quoted paragon of rags to riches, immigrant to pillar of society and I am a bit surprised by this coming from a hard working Ghanian (My thought was of James Brown's rise from shoe-shine to superstar). First surprise of many. My ignorance is broad and long. We always look to an opposite pole.

Union Square Farmers Market. Fresh produce in the thick of the hustle, wooden money for food stamps, emerging economies of inter/in-dependence.

Two onions for 45c my best deal. Living parsley and basil on the cold and snow-pile littered streets. A woman closing in on mortality treated by paramedics and concerned passersby. Strangers' compassion erasing difference and separation. Oxygen face mask and frosty breath on the hard street life of the elderly.

Julia shows me the ropes of the place and a rooftop view of Union Square. A great welcome to set me on the way.

Jetlagged and tranquilised nodded through the The Encyclopedia Of New York book launch, a 'wealth' of information, a massive and yet still selective chronicle of some of the histories of the City. And what of the unwritten... unremembered... unknown.

Street furniture seen only in movies now surrounds in a virtual movie of actuality. Ambulances, police cars, fire engines, taxis, street crossings, sounds of voices, accents, moods, advertising, prices in dollars, faces you feel you could have seen before, tube steel, red leatherette, chrome plated, plastic coated, ensembles of transportation, concentrations of people, all in constant motion.

The subway, jammed, crammed, hot, sweat, close and enclosed we are all navigating the catacombs of the Metropolis, underground graffiti, culture of the creative scrubbing of grime, personalise, territorialise, exteriorise/externalise, marking to signify.