Record Heat for CANADA

 

For four sweltering evenings in July, New York artist and musician Sadie Laska hot-boxed the Lower East Side's CANADA Gallery. The sessions she curated, called "Slummer Nights," were music and visual art performances that seemed impartial to polish and were all the better for it. The night Art in America visited, a selection of short films chosen by Brooklyn project space Cleopatra's were buttressed by two dark comedy performances.

Frankie Martin, an artist who works in both comedy clubs and art venues, was on first, pitching a routine of carefully botched stand-up. "Who here wants me to give them a tattoo? I don't have my license yet!" Was her opener. A nervous laugh was her audience's response. Martin's performances are usually a trial of endurance: for a recent project at the NADA Callicoon Art Fair—a "one-on-one" stand-up show taking place in a tiny teepee—she offered free admission, but only allowed those paying an exit fee to escape before the show ended.
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The Reluctant Orator

I entered the Guggenheim Museum this past Saturday for New York-based Sharon Hayes' performance as the second half of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic 1963 speech, "I Have a Dream," echoed through the museum's rotunda. It's Twentieth Century America's most famous bit of rhetoric, although it's unlikely many Americans can recall more than a few lines. As a part of Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, the museum's collection show that examines how artists' photo-based works test and invigorate the image's famous relationship to death, Hayes installed behind a DJ booth on the ground floor of the rotunda and spun spoken-word records.

Hayes is best known for her politically charged performances and installations that use the strategy of "respeaking" (a term associated with her often direct recitation of non-fiction dialogues and political addresses) that calls for participation poignantly provoked but not seized upon. Stemming from the artist's similar but only 20-minute performance in 2004, Hayes' five-hour DJ set here included It highlighted speeches from the Civil Rights Movement and poems, dating primarily from the 1960s.
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Portugal Looks Downtown

What exactly do we call Portugal Arte, the month-long show of contemporary art in and around Lisbon that opened this past weekend? It's casually being described as a biennial, although there's neither a unifying theme nor a guarantee that it will be back in two years. It's billed in the press materials as an "international survey" of contemporary art—although you could say that it's international in the way that certain U.S. airports with the odd flight to Canada are.
 
Without coming out and saying it, this show (funded, in the midst of a national-debt crisis, primarily by Portuguese energy giant EDP) seems primarily to be about the American art scene in 2010—without marquee names and creatively shoehorned into a large building that isn't a museum but sort of looks like one. It's a bit random, which is not to say that it's not interesting.
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East of (and Late to) Eden

One July afternoon in 1993, the 23-year-old founder of London gallery Factual Nonsense, Joshua Compston, staged an eccentric street fair called A Fête Worse than Death in the heart of Shoreditch. It comprised artists, not galleries. Last week, some of the participants gathered at Whitechapel Gallery to talk "Art and London's East End," and to discuss whether the scrappy ole' days might return to the very professional and serious neighborhoods.

Amidst all the nostalgia, it was hard not to discuss how far they'd come! Maureen Paley (now of Maureen Paley Gallery), Greg Muir (a director of Hauser and Wirth), Kate MacGarry (Kate MacGarry Gallery), and Iwona Blazwick (Director of Whitechapel Gallery) all have moved up the ranks with their neighborhood. Blazwick set the stage with an abridged history of Twentieth Century East London, which began as a cargo yard. The onset of the plastic container made it "a ghost town, a vast track of uninhabited land." Plastic, it seems, made the art boom possible.

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