William Wegman: Writing By Artist @ Sperone Westwater /  by melinda shopsin

Sperone Westwater is pleased to present William Wegman: Writing by Artist, a show of texts, drawings, paintings, early photographs, and videos by the artist dating from the early 1970s to the present, many shown here for the first time. This solo marks Wegman’s seventh at the gallery and coincides with Primary Information’s book of the same name, edited by exhibition curator Andrew Lampert and published in April 2022.

Installed on two floors of the gallery, Writing by Artist offers a wide range of entry points into the artist’s universe. Spanning five decades, the works in this exhibition all hinge conceptually and pictorially on writing and language, including games, puns, and palindromes—incorporating words in one form or another. In some instances, the text is simply a caption or a few handwritten words. In others, prose delightfully unravels in surprising forms—Wegman types absurd non-sequiturs on Princess Cruises stationary, witty annotations are scribbled onto a curator’s essay, and words are deliberately mistranslated, reworked, and fictionalized in graphite and ink on paper. The works are installed in thematic groupings such as architecture/houses, furniture, history, language, perception/multiplicity, relationships, time/calculations, and television/media.

Featured also are the artist’s early photographic works, dating back to the three years he lived in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1973. During this time, Wegman became closely associated with such artists as Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom he shared both a sense of irreverence towards conceptual art and, more importantly, a sense of humor. Poking holes in the stuffier, more academic, East Coast version of conceptualism, Wegman and his LA colleagues used paint, drawing, video, and photography in ironic ways, often paired with language, to turn didactic formalism on its head. Turning away from handcrafting objects, Wegman utilized domestic, readymade props and banal subjects close at hand. He sometimes used video to improvise short performances— staged vignettes in which expectations are reversed, and puns and homonyms are pursued to absurd conclusions. In one 1972 photograph, the artist is seen jumping away from a pile of his clothes, scattered nearby on the studio floor. The accompanying type transforms the scene: “For a moment, he forgot where he was and jumped into the ocean.”

William Wegman: Writing by Artist will be on view from 5 May – 29 July 2022. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, 5 May from 5 to 7pm.

Sweethearts (Twice for Emmet Williams, Now For Enrico Camporesi) @ Centre Pompidou /  by melinda shopsin

Wednesday, April 20 2022
Centre Pompidou, Paris
A new version of SWEETHEARTS (For Emmet Williams), an old piece, tightened and more timely, revised for the present moment. Featuring Kendra Walker and Stefano Canapa.
Presented as part of the series TYPO FILM curated by Enrico Camporesi.
Screened alongside the Japanese subtitled version of EL ADIOS LARGOS (2014) and works by Len Lye, Yann Beauvais, George Landow and Paul Sharits.

INTRADAY premiere @ Lampo /  by melinda shopsin

Lampo presents Andrew Lampert and Chris Corsano perform Lampert’s Intraday, one of the text scores in the Lampo Folio, at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago on Saturday, April 2 2022 at 12pm.

Intraday is a musical study of Spotify’s stock fluctuation between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. on May 13, 2021. The work is a structured improvisation performed in accordance with the ups and downs of the stock price, as represented by 92 line charts in the score. Performers are presented with a wide range of tactics to guide them through a small amount of musical space.

The Lampo Folio is a collection of text-based scores by ten interdisciplinary artists who are all engaged on some level with sound and language. Each commissioned work provides written instructions that can be used to enact a personal, possibly intimate performance at home. Lampert is a co-editor and contributor to the collection.

Today’s concert coincides with the hour Intraday was composed, and it is presented in the domestic context of the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House, which was a home from 1902-1963. Lampert and Corsano also note they are being paid more than the musicians and musical rights holders on Spotify who earn between $0.003 to $0.005 a stream.

Chris Corsano & Andrew Lampert, premiere of INTRADAY, presented by Lampo at the Graham Foundation, April 2, 2022

Is There Sex After Death? /  by melinda shopsin

Tuesday, February 1, 2022 at 7pm
Alan and Jeanne Abel's Is There Sex after Death?
Light Industry
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Introduced by Andrew Lampert

Is There Sex after Death?, Alan and Jeanne Abel, 1971, digital projection, 102 mins

An all-but-forgotten masterpiece of underground comedy, Jeanne and Alan Abel’s Is There Sex after Death? is arguably the most important precursor to the mockumentary as we know it today. Structured like a Mondo film, Is There Sex after Death? is narrated by one Dr. Harrison Rogers—played by Alan Abel—of the Bureau of Sexological Research, who travels around the country in his Sexmobile posing provocative questions to passersby on the street. Along the way, Rogers visits with experts in the field like Dr. Rhinelander Elevenike, Professor of Dildography and Linguistics, and Merkin the X-Rated Magician, and ultimately attends a seance to learn the answer to the film’s titular mystery. The movie seamlessly zips from scripted sketches to real-life interactions to improvised banter; countercultural comedy figures like Holly Woodlawn and Robert Downey Sr. appear as themselves, while Buck Henry and Marshall Efron show up in character, respectively, as sexologist Dr. Manos and pornographer Vince Domino.

By the time they produced, wrote, directed and edited Is There Sex after Death? in 1971, the Abels were already a notorious comedy team who had hoaxed multiple generations through a now-legendary series of elaborate media pranks, which included appearing on talk shows beginning in the 1950s to tout the imaginary organization SINA (the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals) and running a fictitious Jewish housewife, Yetta Bronstein of the Bronx, for President in 1964 (“Vote for Yetta and things will get beddah!”). To create one of the most memorable sequences in Is There Sex after Death?, they promoted and staged an event called the International Sex Bowl in Houston, tricking press from around the world into attending what purported to be a live sex competition between teams of different countries.

This rare screening of Is There Sex after Death? will be presented by artist Andrew Lampert, a longtime Abel fanatic and card-carrying SINA member. He will share a selection of ephemera from the making of the film alongside a newly recorded interview with Jeanne and her daughter Jenny Abel that reveals the chutzpah and genius required to make and distribute one of the world’s first X-rated independent comedies.

Screening/Discussion of Carolee Schneemann's FUSES /  by melinda shopsin

Dec. 9, 2021
7:30PM @ Anthology Film Archives, NYC

A screening of a brand-new 16mm print made from the 2007 restoration I did of Carolee Schneemann’s FUSES back when I was Archivist at Anthology Film Archives. Followed by a roundtable discussion with Rachel Churner (director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation), John Klacsmann, Erica Levin, Kenneth White and myself.

Japanese Expanded Cinema Book Launch @ MoMA /  by melinda shopsin

MoMA, Sat. February 20, 2021
6PM

A Celebratory Reading for Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia

Of all the manifestations of Japan’s boundlessly experimental moving-image culture, one has gone under-examined outside of Japan: while filmmakers and artists intrepidly brought film into contact with performance, counterculture, and political protest in the 1960s, they were also writing. Concepts and debates around technology, collapsing boundaries between disciplines, and viewership populated film journals and bulletins published by alternative spaces and even reached the mainstream press. Collaborative Cataloging Japan’s new volume Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s (published by Archive Books, Berlin) brings together an essential selection—featuring Takahiko Iimura, Yasunao Tone, Rikuro Miyai, and many others—available in English translations for the first time. As the printed page was an essential forum for critical exchange in this period, this indispensable resource sheds light on individual filmmakers and a collective moment.

This book launch will include selected readings by scholars, curators, and archivists Rebecca Cleman, Vivian Chui, John Klacsmann, Andy Lampert, Barbara London, Jesse Pires, Peter Oleksik, Takuya Tsunoda, and Alex Zahlten; and book editors Ann Adachi-Tasch, Go Hirasawa, and Julian Ross in conversation with legendary artist and composer Yasunao Tone.

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DIA TALK /  by melinda shopsin

Saturday, January 16, 2021

Curator Howie Chen and archivist Andrew Lampert engage in a conversation with artists Cheryl Donegan and Kristin Lucas on extending artistic practices into emergent media and the unexpected archival considerations of these experiments. In revisiting Donegan’s Studio Visit (1997) and Lucas’s Between a Rock and a Hard Drive (1998), the speakers aim to contextualize these early web-based commissions within the artists’ overall conceptual practices and draw connections to their current projects.

The Steve Circuit /  by melinda shopsin

In Summer, 2020, ISSUE and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council presented The Steve Circuit, an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist Matt Mottel. Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.

Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.

Over the course of six events throughout the Summer, 2020, these historical sites will be revealed in a weekly online presentation. Each week, videos made by Otomo & Mottel will be streamed pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation will provide a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history.

In addition to Otomo and Mottel, the series will feature contributions from Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon, Andrew Lampert, Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson, William Parker & Matthew Shipp, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, and Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille.

The Steve Circuit is co-commissioned by ISSUE Project Room and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).

HARD TRUTHS Conversation for Art in America /  by melinda shopsin

May 19, 2020
WHAT IS AN ETHICAL MUSEUM?

Consultants and A.i.A. columnists Chen & Lampert discussed some hard truths about the future of art institutions. With special guest Dana Kopel, they proposed solutions to the post-pandemic art world's most urgent problems. Dana is a writer and the former senior editor and publications coordinator at the New Museum, where she helped organize the New Museum Union. The conversation was hosted and moderated by William Smith, former Editor of Art in America.

ALIVE IN ST LOUIS /  by melinda shopsin

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Alive in St. Louis A CD/Video commission for Issue Project Room’s Isolated Field Recordings Series

Thursday, May 7th at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to present Alive In St. Louis, a new recording, video, and “CD” from filmmaker, video artist, musician, and performer Andrew Lampert. The recording is part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, commissioning artists to produce field recordings to be streamed over the course of this challenging and isolated time.

Note from Andrew Lampert on Alive In St. Louis:

“Music recorded on the run, upon my return to a home I no longer know. St. Louis, my cage for 18 years, a place I instantly longed to leave after first visiting Manhattan at age 9. And now forced back after a couple decades by a cocktail of crises, coronavirus coupled with a broken boiler and burst pipe that wrecked my Brooklyn home, hard drives, and gear. Heartbreak in a time of global wreckage. Construction halted, options diminished, bags packed, an exhausted family and a sedated cat that fled 16 hours by car into the Midwest to requarantine and recalibrate. But for how long? Home school, sketchy virtual employment, suburban seclusion, too much time to sink and stew. In the absence of almost everything, the best stress relief is plucking strings, hitting keys, and making sounds to replace the negativity sparking in my synapses and shooting out my mouth. I may not make music to live, but these days I live to make music.

Alive in St. Louis contains a selection of songs, sounds and noises produced with a guitar, keyboard and electricity, largely captured on Iphone and mostly made alone. Featuring intermittent appearances from family and the radio, insistent reminders of where I am, and how/why I came to be anywhere at all. Even in isolation, I retain my constant collaborator, Zazie, age 7, co-member in the “couch rock” band The New Restaurants, whose tracks you will immediately recognize by their distinctive vocalese. One track includes my oldest friend, Josh Weinstein, playing double bass, recorded together at a safe distance apart in his backyard.

This is a CD. It happens to be presented as a live stream, and is delivered in the form of a video, but trust me, it’s a CD. The images you will see do not make it a video, a CD-Rom, or a laserdisc. They are the liner notes that come in the jewel pack. Your bluetooth enabled laptop, tablet and phone are not smart screens with speakers. They are CD players. You are not at home. This music is being played on the CD player in your car. You are at the wheel, listening and gazing out the window at passing billboards. Maybe you are the passenger noticing that at times the music syncs up with the landscape and everything feels as if somehow it was meant to go together. Keep in mind that this may not be a CD you listen to from start to end, what with all the pit stops along the way to wherever it is you are headed."

DOUBLE RAINBOW Conversation for Screen Slate /  by melinda shopsin

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Screen Slate’s Jon Dieringer hosted a “historic” and in memoriam conversation on the YouTube video sensation “Double Rainbow” by Paul "Bear" Vasquez with guest commentators and major fans Nellie Killian, Caroline Golum and myself. It was broadcast on Screen Slate’s Twitch account and may still be available for their subscirbers. In any case, go brighten your life and watch the original video now.

Tony Conrad Book Launch @ Mcnally Jackson /  by melinda shopsin

Please join us for a celebration of Tony Conrad’s Writings. Published by Primary Information, this is the first collection to survey Conrad’s diverse and expansive writings. Spanning 1961 – 2012, the volume includes 57 pieces, including essays from small press magazines, exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other unpublished works. 

Co-hosted by Greene Naftali, Galerie Buchholz, and Primary Information, the event will include an introduction by James Hoff, readings by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the editors of the collection, and a performance by musician and artist C. Spencer Yeh. The program will be followed by a reception.

Event date: Thursday, February 27, 2020 - 7:00pm

Event address: 
McNally Jackson
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

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New Social Environment with Raha Raissnia /  by melinda shopsin

“Film and performance artist Raha Raissnia (Instagram: @raharaissnia) joins us for the New Social Environment #34 with host and fellow moving-image-art maker Andrew Lampert (Instagram: @lamphole) for a conversation on Raha’s recent work, her relationship with collaboration, and working with film as a tactile medium. In response to the imminent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brooklyn Rail shifted our operations online. These New Social Environments provide a place to have vibrant conversations in a time of great physical distancing.”

Tony Conrad Book Launch @ Light Industry /  by melinda shopsin

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Saturday, November 9, 2019 @7pm
Tony Conrad: Movie Show
@ Light Industry
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn

Presented with Primary Information
Introduced by Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert

I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectations, their sense of the world, their predispositions toward the way they think or use their language, and then to use these things perversely, politically, colorfully, “expressively.”
- Tony Conrad, “Dolomite: Having No Trust in Readers”

Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was an artist known for his groundbreaking art, music, films, and videos, although his work doesn’t fit comfortably within any of these disciplines. He eschewed categorization and actively sought to challenge the constraints of media forms, their modes of production, and the relationships of power embedded within them.

Newly published by Primary Information, Writings is the first collection to widely survey this singular polymath’s prolific activity as a writer. Edited by artists Constance DeJong and Andrew Lampert, the book spans the years 1961–2012 and includes fifty-seven pieces: essays originally published in small press magazines, exhibition catalogs, anthologies, and album liner notes, along with other previously unpublished texts. He devotes critical essays both to grand subjects—horology, neurolinguistics, and the historical development of Western music—and more quotidian topics, such as television advertising and camouflage. He also writes on media activism, network communications, censorship, and the political and cultural implications of corporate and global media. Its release has occasioned our show this evening.

Conrad’s writings on cinema form a substantial portion of the anthology, with entries concerning particular works of his like The Flicker, Loose Connection, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, and the “Yellow Movies,” as well as numerous theoretical forays into the nature of moving image art. Our program surveys Conrad’s film and video output over several decades, marking his shift between these two technologies with a rare screening of Film Feedback, Conrad’s remarkable attempt to create the structures and effects of electronic feedback using celluloid. The screening also includes his final experiment in the flicker film, Straight and Narrow, made with his then-wife Beverly Conrad; early analog videotape documentation of Conrad explaining and displaying his fried and pickled films to an astonished audience at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1974; his first video, Cycles of 3s and 7s, a digital exercise in computational rhythms; Movie Show, in which Conrad manipulates footage from of his earlier film Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals; the rare musical performance video Accordion; and In Line, a psycho-reflexive study in maker-viewer power dynamics.

Straight and Narrow, Beverly and Tony Conrad, 1970, 16mm, 10 mins
“Straight and Narrow is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. Straight and Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon, not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film the colors which are so illusory in The Flicker are visible and under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created.” - B&TC

Film Feedback, Tony Conrad, 1974, 16mm, 14 mins
“Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?” - TC

Lecture and Screening with Tony Conrad at Carnegie Museum of Art for Independent Film Makers Series, Carnegie Museum of Art Department of Film and Video, 1974, digital projection, 10 mins (excerpt)

Cycles of 3s and 7s, Tony Conrad, 1977, digital projection, 12 mins
“Cycles of 3s and 7s is a doubled statement. First and foremost, it is a commentary on computer art and the role of computers in video. Secondly, its arithmetic project has some bearing on the construction of musical scales. In reclaiming the computer as a performance instrument, I intended that the human operator must compete directly with the computer, doing what the computer does best. The selection of a simple hand calculator was a deliberate denial of the computer aesth/ethic of bigger, faster: computer art must be doable within even the most modest architecture. Cycles of 3s and 7s shows that it is not the answer that ‘counts,’ but the pleasure in getting there. Simple rote calculation is turned into rhythm and song; accuracy of gesture and count become a game. These are ‘stories’ about numbers, the kind machines should like to hear and tell—if they ‘liked.’” - TC

Movie Show, Tony Conrad, 1977, digital projection, 6 mins
“A curiosity, Movie Show looks backward to the era of structural films, particularly Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. The clip of film used in this performance is taken from my Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals, the work with which I closed out my interest in combinatorial and logical structures.” - TC

Accordion, Tony Conrad, 1981, digital projection, 5 mins
“A man, an accordion, a ladder, and a video camera. It’s as simple as that.” - AL

In Line, Tony Conrad, 1985, digital projection, 7 mins
“How peculiar that people like being an audience because they enjoy their submission to the authority of the program. This ritual of being dominated is a conspiracy with themselves that we enjoy but refuse to acknowledge. ‘Oh, no. I don’t like TV because I’m submissive; it’s because it makes me feel good.’ The programs are always carefully crafted to be sensitive to people’s self-protectiveness, even if they offer a good scare, or a good cry. Well, if this is all true, what happens when, by chance, you submit to a program that refuses to be polite about your closet masochism? That tells all?” - TC

Tickets - $8, available at door.