Triple Canopy is pleased to announce the opening of an office space and venue at 177 Livingston Street, in downtown Brooklyn. The 5,000-square-foot storefront will be operated in partnership with Light Industry and The Public School New York and will regularly host artist talks, screenings, workshops, lectures, classes, and performances. 177 Livingston will also host a library of books, magazines, artist publications, and film, video, and sound work, which will be open to the public starting in March. (Visit the 177 Livingston website for more details and a calendar of upcoming events.)
On February 20, Triple Canopy, Light Industry, and The Public School will throw a benefit party to celebrate the opening of 177 Livingston and help the organizations cover the costs of building out the space's interior, which was designed by Rachel Himmelfarb and Gabriel Fries-Briggs with support from Common Room.
The evening will begin at 8 p.m. with readings by Ed Park and Lynne Tillman. Next, there will be a rare stateside presentation of Lis Rhodes's Light Music (1975, pictured above). Rhodes's double projection is a seminal exploration of 16-mm optical sound—the on-screen abstraction is "read" by the projector as audio—and a classic of British expanded cinema. The "Anti-Matter Cabaret" of Ambergris and a set by the avant-pop ensemble Skeletons will follow, as will DJ sets by Josh Kline and Gary Murphy & Tim Lokiec.
Readings at 8, film at 9, music at 10
Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days and a founding editor of The Believer.
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, and three nonfiction books. Her most recent novel, American Genius: A Comedy, was published in 2006 by Soft Skull Press.
Lis Rhodes has been at the forefront of British experimental cinema since the early 1970s, working as part of the London Filmmakers' Co-op and later cofounding Circles, the first organization in the UK dedicated to distributing artist's film and video made by women. She lives and works in London and teaches at Slade School of Fine Art.
Ambergris is a band conducting spelunking tours into fluorescent lagoons of narrative imagination. Citing influences from Gilbert and Sullivan to Flipper, Ambergris has performed its "Anti-Matter Cabaret" in locations such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Issue Project Room in New York, and the Fumetto Festival in Lucern, Switzerland.
Skeletons is a New York-based avant-pop ensemble. The band's sixth full-length record, Money, was recently released on Tomlab.
Light Industry is a venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has evolved into a series of weekly events, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of time-based media. Bringing together the worlds of contemporary art, experimental cinema, new media, documentary film, and the academy (to name only a few), Light Industry looks to foster an ongoing dialogue among a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
The Public School is a school with no curriculum. It has chapters in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Brussels, Paris, Puerto Rico, and other cities around the world. Via the Public School New York website and its discussion boards, members collaboratively generate ideas for free reading groups, skill-based workshops, seminar-style discussions, lecture-driven classes, and participatory projects. The Public School is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything. The Public School is a project of Telic Arts Exchange.
Common Room was established in 2006 as a space for collaboration with a focus on the built environment.
Very special thanks to Katie Dixon and The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Sébastien Venuat, and Brooklyn Brewery.
Triple Canopy’s development has been inspired in part by a critical engagement with the legacy of Aspen magazine (1965-71). Artists and writers contributed projects to Aspen in the form of easily distributable media such as flip books, flexi-disc records, and paper sculpture. These projects coincided with a broader contemporaneous phenomenon: artworks intended to appear exclusively in magazines. The Medium Was Tedium examines how this move from the exhibition space to the printed page has been subsequently repeated by artists in relation to other media, such as television programming and the Internet. Triple Canopy’s editors will discuss practices that traverse mediums and the media with artists Mel Bochner, Daniel Bozhkov, and Erin Shirreff.
This event is presented as part of the New Silent series, organized by Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.
$6 New Museum members, $8 general public
Press release
Image: Erin Shirreff, 2008
"The question of whether Crude Oil by Wang Bing is an installation or a film screening is basically trivial. It is an important and grand work and the label is not that relevant. What is relevant is how an exhausting work like this can best be presented. And how it can live on." —International Film Festival Rotterdam
From November 4 to 8, Triple Canopy and Light Industry present the East Coast premiere of Wang Bing's Crude Oil, a fourteen-hour film installation tracking a fourteen-hour workday of crude-oil extraction in northwest China. Wang's film will be on view from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. each day, running five times in its entirety.
Accompanying Crude Oil in an adjacent room will be a film program by Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Lucy Raven (7:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 4; reception to follow), as well as the American premiere of Wang Bing's Coal Money (4 p.m., Saturday, November 7; discussion to follow with NYU professors Rebecca Karl and Zhen Zhang) and a screening of Wang's nine-hour West of the Tracks (12 p.m., Sunday, November 8). A curated DVD library of related films will be available for viewing throughout the week.
Full press release and schedule
Triple Canopy is pleased to present The Invisible Grammar: A Tribute to Aspen's "Time, Silence and Reduction, and Language" Issue on its Forty-Second Anniversary, as part of Printed Matter's annual NY Art Book Fair. Ten issues of Aspen were published between 1965 and 1971. The famed "multimedia magazine in a box" generally contained vinyl recordings, writing, artworks, film, and other objects. Today, Triple Canopy editors, contributors, and friends will read, perform, play, and otherwise interpret works from issues five and six, which were edited by Brian O'Doherty and published together in the fall of 1967. These endeavors will take place throughout PS1 as well as in The Classroom, where the fair's programs will be held, and where select editions derived from the interpretations listed below will be available.
Tom Roberge: The Death of the Author, by Roland Barthes • Catherine Czacki: "Text for Nothing #8," by Samuel Beckett • Adam Helms: Seven Translucent Tiers, by Mel Bochner • Nicole Russo: "Nova Express," by William Burroughs • Molly Kleiman: "Conditionnement," by Michel Butor • Dan Torop & Alexander Provan: "Fontana Mix-Feed," by John Cage • Georgia Sagri: "Space, Time and Dance," by Merce Cunningham • Nolan Simon & Oliver Newton: "The Creative Act," by Marcel Duchamp • Summer Guthery: "A L'infinitif" by Marcel Duchamp • Nathan Gwynne: "The King of Denmark," by Morton Feldman • Peter Simensky: "The Realistic Manifesto," by Naum Gabo • Caolan Madden: "Poem, March 1966," by Dan Graham • Julia Weist: "Jealousy," by Alain Robbe-Grillet •
Forté Magazine: "Phantastische Gebete," by Richard Huelsenbeck • Nadja Millner-Larsen: "Style and The Representation of Historical Time," by George Kubler •
Kate Shepherd: "Serial Project #1," by Sol Lewitt • Andrea Merkx: "The Russian Desert: A Note on Our State of Knowledge," by Douglas MacAgy • Natalie Campbell & Bridget Lewis: "Lightplay: Black-White-Grey," by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy • Zack Rockhill: "Site," by Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek • Hannah Whitaker & Sam Frank: "Structural Play #3," by Brian O'Doherty • Andres Laracuente: "Linoleum," by Robert Rauschenberg • Jessie Stead: "Rhythm 21," by Hans Richter • Rachel Owens: "The Maze," by Tony Smith • Alexander Provan: "The Aesthetics of Silence," by Susan Sontag
Filmmaker Ben Russell & musician Joe Grimm (a.k.a. The Wind-Up Bird) perform "Mazes," a double 16mm projection that uses photo-sensitive electronics and film loops to produce a transcendent barrage of flickering white light and audio signals.
Grimm & Lauren Carter perform "Mirror Phases," an exchange of feedback and exercise in boundary loss.
Lichens performs a song cycle for one vocalist.
$5 donation | $3 drinks
Beer generously donated by Kelso.
Ben Russell is an itinerant media artist and curator. He has made films about Maroon tribes in Suriname, the divining powers of Richard Pryor, and the end of the world. He began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence in 2003 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. He currently resides in Chicago.
Joe Grimm is a composer and performer based in Chicago. He has collaborated with Lucky Dragons, Glenn Branca, and Alvin Lucier, among others. His most recent record is Brain Cloud (Spekk).
Lauren Carter is a Chicago-based sculptor and installation artist. She works in sound, film, and video.
Lichens is Rob Lowe. His most recent record Omns (Kranky). He lives in Brooklyn.
Press release
Featuring a film program curated by Light Industry, visuals by Michael Bell-Smith, video games by Mark Essen, and DJ sets by Josh Kline, Ceci Moss, and others. Musical performances by The Tourettes and Tanlines.
7 p.m. film | 9 p.m. music
$7 donation | $3 drinks
http://www.gowanusstudio.org
Beer generously donated by Union Beer Distributors and Kelso.
Thomas Beard and Ed Halter of Light Industry present Reductions. Created for home viewing, digest films transformed theatrical features into short subjects, bumping down the originals from 35mm to Super-8, often stripping them of color and sound, and re-editing the narratives into a concise ten to fifteen minutes, in the process changing their meaning in subtle, strange, and surprising ways. This selection includes a range of miniaturized movies, including Jerry Lewis vehicles, horror films, kung-fu pictures, and ‘70s disaster epics.
Michael Bell-Smith is an artist who uses digital forms to explore contemporary visual culture and the way in which it is mediated through popular technologies. His works have been shown at the New Museum, Foxy Production, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Mark Essen makes video games. Tonight he's showing Scrap Collector, a game about making money, and The Thrill of Combat, a game about flying a helicopter and collecting organs. Since 2008, his work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto, Canada and Light Industry, Brooklyn. His work is currently on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
Josh Kline plays upbeat social justice jams from the 80s and 90s about topics including homelessness, famine, and rampant inequality. Expect dance party mega-hits by Arrested Development, KLF, Crystal Waters, Public Enemy, Tom Tom Club, Inner City, and others who bummed out while getting down.
Tim Lokiec is a painter based in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited at de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich, Saatchi Gallery, London, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Oliver Kamm 5BE, New York. He received his MFA from Columbia University.
Ceci Moss plays the psychedelic-scientific explorations of 60s musicians who took stereo-channel panning over the edge, including Apryl Fool, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Harumi.
The Tourettes broke your heart nearly fifty years ago, when they came on the da-doo-ron-ron-core scene with their relatively flat hair and voices, and a boundless enthusiasm for a world you, as a sheltered and joyless Boomer teen, could have hardly imagined. Now that you've grown up, test the seams that you've carefully stitched around your heart as these surprisingly youthful-looking grandmas take the stage again, yelping and crunching and clapping through the wreckage of your adolescence.
Tanlines is Jesse Cohen (Professor Murder) and Eric Emm (Storm & Stress, Brothers production) playing electrified island sounds, synthesized live. Their first single, New Flowers, is out now on Young Turks.
Press release
For this event, expanding on an issue devoted to new and old forms of urbanism, Triple Canopy excavates real, unrealized, and potential spaces: a planned mega-eco-city in the desert Southwest, a grand Utahan suburb nurtured by copper-mine tailings, an aerial view of the architecture of Texas oil fields, the spiraling sprawl of Mexico City, the coincidences of megachurches and office spaces, and more. Participants include the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Joseph Clarke, Nine 11 Thesaurus, Lucy Raven, Emily Richardson, Melanie Smith, the VPL Authority (Thomas Moran & Rustam Mehta), and Zs.
Also available: Wrong Place, Right Time (2009), a digital print by José León Cerrillo in an edition of 100.
7 p.m.
Free and open to the public
http://www.thekitchen.org
Literature programs at The Kitchen are made possible with generous support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation and with public funds from The National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Press release
Performances by New Humans (Mika Tajima and Howie Chen with Nick Phillips), Orphan, Bob Nickas, and Mark Ibold (Sonic Youth, Pavement). Art by Colby Bird, Jonah Groeneboer, Jacob Kassay, Andres Laracuente, Rachel Owens with Matthew Lusk and Lucy Raven, and John Powers.
Press release
Gil Blank presented remote photography. Andrew Maxwell read literary product trials. Laura Steenberge showed slides of words.
Video by Keren Cytter, Jen DeNike, Lucky Dragons, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell, Felipe Zuniga, and others. Music by Hecuba, Peter Kolovos, and Revolutionary Patriots.
Art by Wennie Huang, Natalia Porter, and Julia Samuels. Video by Lene Berg, Keren Cytter, Kate Dollenmayer, Hannah Frank, Dan Hoy, Ara Peterson, Emily Richardson, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell, and Jessie Stead. Music by Puttin' on the Ritz, Sebastian Mlynarski, and Ted Turner.
Featuring Anthony Auerbach, INS Chief of Propaganda, and Simon Critchley, INS Chief Philosopher.
