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WPS1 Art Radio is the Internet station of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate, featuring an MP3 stream of music, talk, and historical recordings and a free on-demand archive of over 1200 programs.
WPS1.org was the official internet radio station for the 2005 Armory Show, a half dozen football fields worth of riverside real estate carpeted in art and open to the public for five snowy, icy days in March.
Here we offer a moderately edited reflection of WPS1's live daily coverage of the fair, originally broadcast from our cozy corner module on Pier 92 at West 52nd Street in the second-floor V.I.P lounge, from Wednesday March 9 through Saturday March 12, 2005.
Katelijne DeBacker plays music from bands or musicians that are also visual artists, have inspired visual artists, or are linked to visual artists.
Playlist
Daniel Johnston (makes drawings & a song from the soundtrack for Kids by Larry Clark)
Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band (Don Van Beefheart is a painter)
Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon)
The Velvet Underground (Andy Warhol)
Sam Prekop (painter & will dj at the opening of Art Rock)
Björk (married to Matthew Barney)
Elliot Smith (painted by Elizabeth Peyton)
Cordero (drummer Chris Verene is a photographer)
Beck (has exhibited together with his grandfather who is a Fluxus artist)
Cheap Suit Serenaders (R. Crumb)
Katelijne de Backer has been the Director of the Armory Show since the year 2000. Among her many interesting exploits, she was a producer/director for MTV Europe for much of the 90s where she created some highly respected, innovative and enduring programming. She is a native of Antwerp, Belgium and now lives in Brooklyn.
On this second day of his scheme, Artist Peter Coffin gave another team of
artists $100,000 of genuine bright yellow WPS1 "munny" and sent them out to
deal with the dealers. Some were drawn to the weirdest stuff while others
really wound up thinking, and thinking, and thinking... A new experience for
the collection-challenged, the quest
allowed each young artist a glimpse of the "other side" of an otherwise
alienating experience.
In addition to commenting on what art was good or worth buying, discussions about the Armory Show experience generated some pointed criticism, healthy mockery of the art market and dialogue about current trends in art.
The Day Two panel participants were host Peter Coffin with Alex Singh, Lisa Kirk, Anne Collier, Adam Helms and Scott Hug (who was lost on the Armory floor somewhere or being held by Security, we never found out for sure).
Host Max allows the talented and perpetually sparking Mr. Farrell free range of the coffee bar, MP3 player and assorted props and documents resulting in a centrifugal and vertiginous discussion/oration.
Malachi Farrell is an installation artist who lives and works in Paris and New York. His work often incorporates mechanical and computer-assisted devices in tandem with strong political or social imagery and objects. Comparisons with Tingueley are common. He was born in 1970 in Ireland and raised in Paris.
His most recent installation tableau - an automated and astoundingly cluttered sweatshop inhabited by spirits - appears in a racy exhibit of "l'art trash" called Dyonisiac at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (through 9 May 05).
Max Henry is an independent curator and art critic. He writes for Time Out New York, Modern Painters, Art in America, and Artnet. He is currently working on a November show for Apex Art in New York. He is art editor of The Paris Review.
Curator and critic
Bob Nickas, smack in the middle of installing the 2005 Greater New York Show
at P.S.1, crossed town to meet with his invited guests, artist John Tremblay and art fan, collector and author Marjory Jacobson, to discuss their favorites and the sure treasures at the Fair, the highs and lows of owning art, and to consider the lowest common denominator du jour.
A telephone call from David Weinstein who is sitting in the VIP Lounge at the WPS1 Armory Show remote site to P.S.1 Curatorial Assistant Lumi Tan who thrusts her mobile phone into the hands of artists in mid-installation, hunts the long corridors for a missing colleague, and describes what excites her just hours before the opening of the
Greater New York Show.
P.S.1 curatorial assistant Sarah Kessler spends 15 minutes on her mobile with David Weinstein as she attempts to gently ambush artists in mid-installation and get them to reveal what's up and what's not during the occupation of P.S.1 by the artists of the Greater New York Show.
Martha Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has appeared around the world to lecture and particicpate in panels, forums and workshops on a variety of subjects - often with an eye to women's experience - from the media to architecture and the built environment.
Nick Stillman is a writer and artist living in New York City. He contributes to Artforum.com, the Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, and Tema Celeste and his art has been show at ABC No Rio and 65 Hope Street Gallery.
Artist Peter Coffin gave each of a team of artist friends a $100,000 wad of counterfeit WPS1 "munny" and sent them out to deal with the dealers. The gimmick cut both ways as the artists found themselves detected, rejected, and, sometimes, collected. A new experience for these non-acquirers, the quest allowed each young artist a glimpse of the "other side" of an otherwise alienating experience. In addition to commenting on what art was good or worth buying, discussions about the Armory Show experience generated some pointed criticism, healthy mockery of the art market and dialogue about current trends in art. On this, the first of a two day effort, the participants were Jen DeNike, Tim Davis, Ellen Altfest, Rose Kallal, Craig Kalpakjian, and Nancy Chaikin.
Two museum directors, an art critic, a collector and an artist all reflect on why the art fair has become central (for better or worse) to the art world. This lively debate addresses the pecking order among artists who show in fairs and those who don't; how institutions go about collecting at fairs; competition among private collectors; which fairs will survive and which won't.
Host Michael Rush with Melissa Chiu, Director Asia Society Museum; Charles Desmerais, Deputy Director, Brooklyn Museum; Eleanor Heartney, critic; Mickey Cartin, collector; and artist Tony Fitzpatrick.
Just days after a New York judge awarded collector Jean-Pierre Lehmann a $1.7 million judgment against the Project Gallery, for breach of contract, Lehmann sat down with writer Linda Yablonsky and photographer Todd Eberle
for a heart-to-heart on the volatile state of art collecting, with additional commentary from Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters. Unique perspectives from an unusual (and stylish!) cast of characters.
Host Mark Fletcher in an epochal conversation with Irving Blum and Barbara Gladstone, who represent two different eras in high-end art dealing. In 1957, when Blum bought the (now-legendary) Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and gave Andy Warhol his first show (when the pop star's soup-can paintings were but $100 each), the art world was quite a different place than it is today, as Gladstone, a former Long Island housewife turned world-class gallerist, quickly attests. Her
philosophy? The same as Gypsy Rose Lee's: "Never take everything off." Priceless listening.
Host Althea Viafora-Kress sits down for a live opening night conversation from
The Armory Show 2005. Find out how the Armory, Rockefeller Center and Phillips, de Pury & Company cross paths with guest Abby Messitte, co-director of
Clementine Gallery and Daniel Kunitz, U.S. editor of ArtReview.
How do 250,000 people a day see an exhibition with ten young artists? Abby
Messitte, produced Art Rock, an indoor/outdoor public exhibition on the plaza at Rockefeller
Center and tells us about sponsorship, curating and collecting.
How do emerging artists exhibit at
Phillips, de Pury & Company and not be on the auction block? Daniel Kunitz tells us how he and Assistant Editor, Jo?o Ribas, selected these artists and how they arrived.
Collectors will hear tips about selecting and showing emerging artists, such as
Ivan Navarro and Taylor McKimens and Charlotte Bercket.
Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn Lowry in a freewheeling exchange with two collectors, Michael Lynne (CEO, New Line Cinema) and Agnes Gund (National Medal of Arts recipient). Both are also Trustees of the Museum and widely valued champions of contemporary art. The trio share impressions of the Armory Show and discuss their uniquely informed views, fears, and excitement about the global landscape of galleries, artists, generations, art fairs, auction houses, studio visits and storage space.
Another of our roving correspondent reports as Mr. Weinstein attempts to
visualize both world peace and the condition of P.S.1 under seige by the
160-plus artists installing the Greater New York Show, as described by Mr.
Wakefield on the handy. 10 minutes.
It's all Illy and fillies as our two bombastic bards, espressos in hand, assay the art fair with an eye to the female form. Over uninvited comments from their pal Linda Yablonsky, O'Brien and Blagg blithely titter and tattle through their entire show, a living poem in itself.
Historic and rare recordings of sculpture that makes sound by artists Jean Tinguely (1925-91), Harry Bertoia (1915-78), Horst Rickels (b. 1947) and Alan Lamb (b. 1944).
Playlist
Jean Tinguely -- Meta-Matics and other motorized scrap sculptures from the late 50s.
Harry Bertoia -- Sonambient, recorded in the artist's barn in Pennsylvania late 60s.
Horst Rickels -- from Mercury (235 Media CD) excerpt from the organ pipe construction played by the artist and Joop van Brakel, 1988.
A telephone call from the P.S.1 directors from the WPS1 Armory Show remote site to the mobile phone of
Clarissa Dalrymple
as she wanders the halls of
P.S.1
assessing and caressing the installation and the artists in anticipation of the impending opening of the
Greater New York Show.
Ms. Dalrymple is a private art dealer and curator who has dedicated her professional life to discovering and supporting emerging artists and their work. Her ideas and opinions are widely respected among other prominent curators, dealers, and collectors. Ms. Dalrymple was born and educated in England and has lived in New York since 1968.
P.S.1 Deputy Director
Brett Littman has a featured
work in the
Radiodays experimental broadcast from De Appel in Amsterdam during April
2005.
P.S.1 Deputy Director Brett Littman hosts a roundtable about the cold hard facts of life in Sweden, social democracy, relational aesthetics and the current Swedish art scene with this year's Armory Show catalog artist
Jockum Nordström,
Jonas Dalhberg,
Anneé Olafsonn and
Mia Enell.
At Pier 92's Armory Show VIP Lounge,
sipping Illy Caffé with artist and
Illy Cup Collection curator and project manager Carlo Bach, P.S.1's director Alanna Heiss gets the story. Born in Cologne in 1967, Carlo Bach lives and works in Trieste. His main concern is with the patient work of recovering and 'recycling' industrial residue and abandoned objects - literal, authentic 'objets trouvés' carefully re-inventoried and re-described.
P.S.1 and WPS1 founder and director Alanna Heiss spent one day of twenty away from the corridors and galleries of P.S.1 where the
Greater New York Show
was taking form. And she spent it with us to hold court on the front porch of the massive
Armory Show
facility to discuss the worlds of art fairs, museums and luxury with collector David Teiger and gallerist
Amalia Dayan.
