Ebon Fisher Interviewed on Yale Radio

Brainard Carey of Yale Radio talks with Immersive pioneer Ebon Fisher about Immersionist culture, memes, and media organisms, starting with Fisher's early work at the MIT Media Lab, and leading up to his role in Immersionism in Williamsburg in the 90s, and beyond. The discussion is about Fisher's work, but it loops around all kinds of interesting developments in Brooklyn back in the day.

Immersionism Book Underway

Ebon Fisher and Ilene Zori Magaras are the editors of an upcoming book about the Immersionist movement in Brooklyn in the 1990s, it's influences and outcomes. The book will be replete with photographs from the era, and writing by key Immersionists.

Mari Oshima at Shirley Fiterman Art Center

Mari Oshima’s “Unlimited” is on view in Paper Reveries, a show at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in Lower Manhattan. The show runs until February 9, 2015. See Mari Oshima's page on our website.

KB in Venice

Pool Cue Archery Bow Cello from 1981, is one of a large group of Ken Butler's pieces now on display in Art or Sound, a survey that spans four centuries of musical instruments and curiosities.

The mere fact that the esteemed founder of "Arte Povera" Germano Celant has chosen to put Ken Butler in any show is a cause for comment, never mind what the show is about. As it happens this is not exactly an Arte Povera show, but rather an historical survey of musical objects from over the course of four centuries. It is, however, a bit of a curatorial "spill" in the manner of Arte Povera. Very old decorative artifacts and sundry pieces of Weimar whimsy are rolled out into the company of objects from the historical avant-garde.

Antiques are pressed into the service of conceptual art, and all the objects in the show concern "the relationship between art and sound" or the "iconic aspect" of musical instruments. Never mind the context or the century of origin of anything, there is a theory that carries them all in a Prada handbag, whose foundation is sponsoring the show. So it is a good chance to see some beautiful and interesting objects from all over the map, and some really dull moves from the 1970s as well.

Adolphe Sax, Natural Trumpet, 1866–84, brass

But I will say this, Ken Butler's hybrid visions stand up to an Adolphe Sax trumpet or a dazzling old street organ, as much as they stand out against the stylistic uniformity of most of the avant-garde and postmodern representation here. Butler really is a new species in the art world, and in Venice it shows. His work has old world charm, and it looks and feels snappy in the generally mortified acres of assemblage art of our times.

I'll venture that Butler's work is the lynchpin of this show. His work is historically sensitive to the older artifacts. It responds to the antique functional objects as well as it does to the newer and patently art historical pieces. And what's more, Ken Butler's instruments are thoroughly and all about the confluence of objects and sounds.

Musical Chairs, roto-picker (for 8 chairs and channels) concept drawing 23.5 x 18 in. 2005. See enhanced album of these drawings.

Rifle Cello, exhibited at Test-Site in Williamsburg, early 1990s

Art or Sound, June 7 - November 3, 2014

Ken Butler's page on our website

Move in Freedom

Move in freedom, move in total freedom, and each moment remember to drop the past. It accumulates like dust. Each moment you have experienced something, and then it goes on accumulating. Don't accumulate it. Just go on ceasing as far as the past is concerned, dying as far as the past is concerned, so you are totally alive, throbbing, pulsating, streaming, and, whatsoever comes, you face it with awareness.

— Osho

With this long-running show featuring three of our represented artists, we drop the word "contemporary" from the name of our gallery, and embark upon a more general encounter with modernity. And especially, we are interested in the "immersive modernity" that we believe is the key to a theory of Brooklyn art. In a forthcoming catalogue we shall elaborate on this idea, and some further commentary is available in our hard copy press release, which you can download here as a pdf.

— Ethan Pettit

Please join us in Park Slope for a reception for

Move in Freedom

featuring the work of

Mari Oshima, Alkemikal Soshu, and Eva Schicker.

Saturday, September 28, 6:30PM – 9:30PM

Hard Copy Press Release

Facebook Event

Exhibition Homepage

First Sale!

Mari Oshima, Metro Card, paper, glue, metro card. 5 x 7 in. 2011

We are pleased to announce that the gallery made its first sale this afternoon. Although some sales of artists' works occurred before we opened, this is our first sale since the gallery officially opened on June 1st. It is, therefore, our first sale out of the gallery as such.

Mari Oshima created "Metro Card" for a show called "Single Fare 2", a large group show of small works on used metro cards. Single Fare took place last year at Sloan Fine Art in the Lower East Side. This was a very popular event that many may remember. Congratulations, Mari!

Single Fare, a show of small works on used metro cards
Sloan Fine Art press release
Single Fare Opening Day
Mari Oshima's website
Mari Oshima's page on this website

Humann Moves to "Affiliated" After Talks with his Gallery

We are not surprised. It was a known possibility. And we are overjoyed to be affiliated with Richard Humann. He is now "affiliated" not "represented." It initiates as well for us a new and needed category at the gallery. We are now officially in a "creative collaboration" with Richard, but not under any contract with him.

As an aside, I only have one signed contract with an artist at the moment. I established at the outset that we have until September to talk business. And so far it's been all thumbs up.

thirty9 – the work of Richard Humann

Salt of the Earth Richard Humann
won by the author at the wagmag Benefit Raffle
on May 8, 2012. Photo by Paul Behnke

Humann's Lightbox is an assemblage of the portfolio slides of Brooklyn artists in the late 90s, just as archiving was going digital. Eighteen display boxes for more than 300 individual slides, it is a trenchant work of social art, deployed in Humann's signature furniture-grade birch plywood. “I chose slides because they are the currency of artists, and I wanted the currency as the art itself.”


A funny thing happened to me at the Wagmag Benefit Art Raffle at the Boiler in Greenpoint last night. The way the raffle works is, you buy a ticket for $200. For that you are guaranteed one of the works hanging in the cavernous space, of which there were more than a hundred. The sooner your ticket is drawn from the bin, the larger the selection of art you have to choose from.

It is a bracing event, a benefit to support Wagmag, the must-have guide to art galleries across Brooklyn. The raffle has been going annually for a number of years, and has become a key social event in the Brooklyn art world; a kind of barometer of the scene and of the overall quality of work being made. There appear to have been considerably more works contributed by artists than there were tickets sold, so there is an element of competition to be sure. Presumably, at the end of the evening you’d just as soon not see your work still hanging on the wall. And if you are a well-known artist, you probably won't.

Daniel Aycock of Front Room draws a ticket at the raffle

I am starting a gallery of my own in "Bushwick" and a few of the artists I’m representing had contributed work to the raffle, as did some artists who are just friends. So I had a few people in mind as I entered the massive Boiler space on a shabby-chic street on the Greenpoint waterfront. As it happens, coming up right behind me at the entrance was the artist Richard Humann. “Richard” I said. “How auspicious. I had you in mind when I bought my raffle ticket.”

In the lost decade between Gowanus in the early 80s and the warehouse movement of early 90s Williamsburg, Richard Humann occupies an interesting place. He is probably the first conceptual artist in Williamsburg. Granted, his work was cooler and cleaner, more "classical" than the baroque science fiction of the environments who engulfed the neighborhood in the 90s. There is more 70s minimalism in Humann's early Brooklyn work, whereas we find more of a "bladerunner" aesthetic in the warehouse movement. Appreciable stylistic differences. And yet art in this neighborhood that has been provocative about space seems to begin with Richard Humann.

My raffle ticket and the list of artists with work in the raffle.
A total coincidence.

Anyway. The funny thing that happened is this. I discovered that my raffle number happened to be the same as the number indicating Humann's place on the list of participating artists. Unless I am missing something about how this raffle works, this could only have been pure chance. The list of artists is arbitrary, it does not correspond to the raffle number you happen to get — as this picture might suggest. And in any case, when your number is drawn, you get whatever you want that's still hanging on the walls. In this case, my number was 39, and the work I wanted was by Richard Humann, who happened to be number 39 on the list.

The sculpture I won, Salt of the Earth, even resembles a raffle bin. It is a standard saltshaker filled with tiny letters that seem to have been snipped out of a book or text of some kind. It alludes to randomness, chance, and the “aleatoric” in art as I think John Cage put it. I am really quite pleased with my take. Humann is no slouch, the piece clicks.

six33 a five-foot square, 9-inch deep panel of Baltic birch wood,
painted with flat black and gloss white enamel,
with flexographic ink transfer type burnished to the surface.
Art in the Urban Matrix, FFA Gallery, 1989

In 1989 I was in a show in Greenpoint with Humann called Art in the Urban Matrix. Part of his work for that show involved numbers. Numbers encompass the entire idea. In square panels, a number appears, partly as a word and partly in numerals, to acknowledge the spoken sound as well as the digit. "Numbers were chosen," says Humann, "because they allow, much more than words, the viewer the opportunity to make a decision based on his or her own experiences. I originally listed pages of words and phrases, but they were too powerful."

Art in the Urban Matrix, 1989, PDF Download

In the early days, Richard was absorbed with language and signs, his work was astringent, precise, he had an architect’s eye for every detail of the material and conditions of the work. It was very straight-edged for Williamsburg in those days. The “Humann factor” was always an enigma in the local art scene. Why was he so influenced by minimalism and language art, when the news on the street was that we had all been “liberated” from that reductive theology? Hadn’t he heard that “one-liners” were over, and now we needed to immerse ourselves in painting and environmental art?

But Humann stuck with his shorthand and honed it, and the result is a body of work that is limpid, poetic, and of great range in form and subject matter. He was not typical of Williamsburg artists 20 years ago, minimalism was not fashionable, but he took a gamble on his overarching and suspended style of presentation, and it has got him a big space in the field. Richard Humann is the artist who saved conceptual art from postmodernism, the one who has given a second life to "Idea Art" and American conceptualism.

Shelter late 1980s

This was the first time I’d ever been to this raffle, so I was aimless, and basically just making for the absinth-spiked punch bowl manned by the sizzling hipstress in the racy outfit. The place was packed and I quickly became absorbed in socializing, so I managed only a cursory glance at the art on the walls. When my ticket was called, I had no idea what was still available. “Richard Humann!” I yelled out on impulse. And I received a sculpture by an artist who is not only a friend but also a well known artist.

Humann is a dark horse with pedigree. It is because he has been in the Brooklyn scene longer than most, and because he has such a distinctive style, that he stands aloof from much that comes after him. And yet his work resonates in many places in Williamsburg over the course of 30 years. He is a gallery heavy, a veteran of the Venice Biennial, and a contemporary of the foundational Greenpoint school of painters like Chris Martin and Peter Acheson. But his work also anticipates by about half a decade the forceful engagement with space and installation that would engulf the neighborhood from 1989 onward in the work of artists like Lauren Szold, Dennis Del Zotto, and the Immersionists. He tracks two major currents in the formation of Williamsburg art, that of the studios and of the warehouses, and for that I think there's no question that Brooklyn owes Richard Humann a winning ticket.

Wave Swinger bass wood, 22.5" x 36" x 43". 2008

Silently For Me Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, Taiwan, December 2011

Defaults Restored at Camel Art Space

“Conceptual art” has been ubiquitous for so long that the term has lost its original and specific meaning. Now it means anything that riffs on themes or ideas, or anything that borrows stylistically from some earlier idiom that was once called conceptual art. Or anything that looks vaguely like something by Vito Acconci. It is broadly speaking any tableaux that illustrates or "sets up" or "stages" an idea of one sort or another. Rarely is it conceptual in the straight and narrow sense.

Wacdesignstudio (Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amareé Cartwright) Obus Lofts in Houston, TX. Their proposal, based on Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus, is to redesign the city in anticipation of future oil and water scarcity, by situating massive apartment complexes under the freeway system.

We have to remind ourselves that for a work to be "conceptual art," it has to consist in a concept of art. That is, it has to address the conditions that establish the work as art. Conceptual art is about what makes something a work of art. It follows then, that conceptual art is a genre very much in the spirit of “art for art's sake.” The “definition of art” is the main consideration. Early in the 20th century, when objects that were not deemed to have the status of art were introduced as art, a development in the concept of art took place. And later, when words and texts that had no physical existence were introduced as “objects” of art, the concept of art was further developed. A young Joseph Kosuth famously defined conceptual art in the 1960s as being art that "is capable of conceptual development."  

The show Restore Defaults at Camel Art Space has grasped this point with clarity. Curators Carl Gunhouse and Tom Marquet have distanced themselves from all manner of mannerisms wrongly associated with conceptualism, and they've given a coherent idea to an eclectic group show. In essence they have taken an abiding motif of conceptual art — the “found object” — and transposed it to what they call the “default condition.” The result is fresh and convincing.

The artists in this show take on the environment of consumer culture in America, and present it basically as found. As with the art of the found object, there is an astringent, hands-off approach to the thing. But strong points are made with simple maneuvers. A high-rise housing project is spliced into a freeway overpass, where it fits perfectly, in a grim union of two monoliths of consumer culture.

The works in this show, write the curators, “treat their starting points as things that are already of interest, and, rather than seeking to disguise or destroy these beginnings, embrace and emphasize their role in the process of creation.”

Nathan Davis’ sound composition Crawlspace, composed digitally on a computer, uses only the sounds generated by the computer as it goes about its tasks, the spinning of a hard drive, the reading of a disc, the whirring fan.

Jenny Drumgoole’s video about her attempt to win some kind of a Philadelphia Cream Cheese cooking contest was a little too far out on the irony belt for me fully to grok. But the art statement consists in, and only in, Drumgoole’s hassled participation in some semi-conscious cooking show, now teased out and rarefied by the artist. She’s cute and you’d like to see her in a TV show, but of course that's not the point. And this piece works fine as found.

Calvin Lee, photo of a group of celebrity shutterbugs in Los Angeles who call themselves “The Money Shot.”

Calvin Lee has taken a photograph of paparazzi in LA waiting to take photographs. When the art critic one-ups him, as I do, by taking a photo of the photo of the photogs, the conceptual circuitry is complete, and I get zapped! Presto, interactive art. And if you, the reader, repost this photo, well, you get the idea. And notice the pentimenti of reflections in the picture-frame glass, which lend to a distortion of the image as it "runs its course" so to speak.

Hilary Baldwin and Matthew Ward’s collaborative installation is the most conventionally “gallery-style” work in the show, and perhaps for this reason it is the work that best captures the sense of what the curators mean by art as a “default” situation. The artists have installed their own paintings in their assemblage, suggesting that a painting by the artist can be uncoupled from the context of a straight showing, and derived into another frame of reference; a second work by the same artist, involving the same object.

Hilary Baldwin and Matthew Ward, installation view

Thus, a conventional painting can double as a found object. Baldwin and Ward make the point that works of art are part of the “default condition” of everyday life. They are quotidian objects, like consumer goods. Certainly this is true in Brooklyn, and in many other cities where being an artist has become the norm, not the exception, and there is a surfeit of painting. “The paintings hang in an ambiguous relationship to the objects that surround them,” write curators Gunhouse and Marquet, “sometimes reflecting the objects in their own compositions, sometimes seeming to wish they could just have some modernist autonomy and be left alone.”

– Ethan Pettit, 11 April 2011

Restore Defaults, at Camel Art Space on 722 Metropolitan Avenue, right near the Grand Street L stop, runs through May 1st. A talk and performance will take place on April 8, from 6-9 pm. www.camelartspace.com

The Bisected Moon – Takahiko iimmura at Microscope

Takahiko iimura: Between the Frames
Microscope, March 19-April 11, 2011

It was a supermoon over the Township of Bushwick. When the moon is full the penumbra of the City of Williamsburg draws inwards like a contracting tide, and the great heath of northern Brooklyn reclaims its Bushwickness for a night. And in the round ass of that very Bushwick lies the confluence of Evergreen and Myrtle, where in a pocket of that neighborhood is the gallery called microscope.

The more industrial the region, the more rarefied the event. The door to the place actually opens. And though the place is dark and silent, thirty people stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the room. On the wall the moon flickers, cast upon the wall by so many holes punched into a 60-foot loop of 16-mm film. Only the sputter of a projector sounds in the room. The loop of film careens like a cable along the length of the ceiling, and then drops in a corkscrew wiggle down in front of the jiggling moon, bisecting it.

Heads are transfixed, silhouettes are still, cellphone cameras raised all around. All the rest is space | space split open. Space bisected by the string of celluloid that also casts the dancing strobe. When the film finally jams up in a hot red toenail of light and the projector coughs and chokes and sputters out, the room erupts in applause, the house lights go up, and Takahiko iimura waves a springy bush of film triumphantly aloft.

iimura has been working in experimental film since the 1960s. On the press release Jonas Mekas writes, “He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” This is as basic, as classical a work of “conceptual” or “structural film” as you'll find, the work of a master axeman of minimalism. A piece of cinema, sculpture, and performance art, since iimura punches the holes into the film as it is rolling, until the film becomes too weak and jams up.

From an old school conceptualist, this is a poignant remark on Bushwick today. It was not only a clever film sculpture, but iimura deftly illuminated a neighborhood that has in fact made a transformation from manufacturing to a so-called "creative economy" that includes film production.

Sidewalk Intervention Williamsburg 1989

In 1989 I opened and "projected" my storefront on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg out into the street for a day or two. Twenty years later, I repeated the photos I had taken of the same views of the street. The contrast is striking.

facebook note: Sidewalk Intervention Williamsburg 1989

flickr album of photos from this project

Dennis Del Zotto's Starry Night

Dennis Del Zotto, Starry Night

polystyrene with holes and back-lighting

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brüder - über'm Sternenzelt*
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

— Schiller, Ode to Joy, 1785

* Sternenzelt: literally, star tent

This sculpture by Dennis Del Zotto has a good story to tell. An inflatable was installed outdoors on the street at a neighborhood festival on South 11th Street in 1996 (The Human Fest). A crowd of local children entered the inflatable and were dancing. The groundsheet portion, between the dancing feet and the coarse pavement, incurred little holes.

The next day Del Zotto installed the same sheet of plastic at his studio in Greenpoint. This time he installed the piece "upside down" — that is, as a canope´ rather than as a drop cloth — and consequently "discovered" the pin holes. A night sky was caused by the small punctures now back-lit from above. Even the slight undulation of the plastic, from the oscillations of the fan keeping the plastic aloft, was an uncanny effect. The sculpture imparted the feeling of being out under the night sky. It is a characteristic of Del Zotto's work, the immersive experience that they create. It is well known that accident is often a crucial part of authentic works of art. The "stars" in this sculpture were an authentic accident. The result was riveting and uncanny.

Two years later the piece was installed as the ceiling of the chapel in the Inflatable City at the Federation of Ongolia on North 11th Street. And so this sculpture progressed from South 11th to North 11th, first as a floor, then as a ceiling.

The piece is to the Williamsburg Immersionist movement what the Duomo in Florence is to the Renaissance. No less inflated a comparison will really make the point. For like the Duomo it is a patchwork of different events from a certain span of time. Not, for example, a single coherent work such as Brunelleschi’s Basilica of Santo Spirito in Florence, or for that matter one of Del Zotto’s many inflatables conceived and built for a single place and time.

Del Zotto's Starry Night originated on what was once a tucked-away corner of industrial Williamsburg, on a street already known for some bizarre events (hurling live TV sets off of rooftops and such). The banal sheet of plastic, whose aesthetic value is nil by many standards, contains the stamp of a time and place in the history of a local artistic movement. That is, the history of a certain demimonde. But it also contains literally the stamp of the feet of children, of innocent "locals" from the culture that precedes the artists.

In this way Del Zotto is a natural storyteller in material, who maneuvers a slice of social history through a sheet of polystyrene. Later he unfolds the damage that the local children have done to his sculpture, and even grumbles as he does so, with his famous testiness that endears him to his fellow artists. He now exposes the substrate for a second time to a different social chemistry, a nightclub. And the stars come out.

Allegory is a "sticky" attribute of concrete art; it has long vexed concrete and conceptual art. The argument has been made that the “allegorical impulse” of postmodernism began in the work of earth artists such as Robert Smithson ruminating on the meaning of ruins and other features of landscape.

Local children dance upon the shrine of bohemia, mocking it, puncturing it. And then, when the sheet is unfolded later in a nightclub, the same children laugh at us again as "stars.” They mock our hubris, our own aspirations to stardom. They turn the scene upside down, as it were.

But it is also possible to dismiss any corny story in connection with a work like this; that is, we don't have to receive the piece as symbolic. It is a concrete work, and as such also lends itself to the modernist suppression of allegory. Who are we to say it tells a story. We should appreciate it in the stoic spirit of minimalism, and not impute a narrative to the piece. For in essence it is a plastic sheet processed by an event, and revealed to another event. Orientation is involved, up and down, the floor and the ceiling, and the light and darkness of space.

Ethan Pettit, June 2006

Also see Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene

The Inflatable Man

Dennis Del Zotto and the Williamsburg Scene

Del Zotto in Organic TV: a New York Moment Galapagos, 1997

Screen grab from Japanese TV

Dennis Del Zotto is an artist of pitch-perfect economy and timing. He is one of the most well-liked and respected artists to come out of Williamsburg in the early 90’s, where his work was a fixture of the warehouse culture of new media and immersive art. Production outfits in the neighborhood at the time were Lalalandia, Keep Refrigerated, El Sensorium, Hit & Run Theater, The Lizard's Tail, Organism, and many more. Del Zotto collaborated with “illbient” electro-pioneers Gregor Asch (aka DJ Olive), Ignatio Platas, and Lloop Manalog (the three of whom comprise the band called We™. He has worked with Jeff Gompertz at fakeshop and Ongolia, and with Robert Elmes at the first incarnation of Galapagos, the iconic Williamsburg nightclub now located in Dumbo.