Recession Art
Recession Art is an arts organization that serves emerging artists and aspiring collectors by providing an affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional art market. By showcasing top quality emerging artists and keeping prices low, Recession Art provides an unusually unpretentious place where art lovers of all incomes can participate in the appreciation and collection of original art by emerging artists. Recession Art’s mission is to open the art market to all art lovers regardless of their income, which will in turn help the careers of emerging artists by opening up a vast new market for their work.
Ways to Hang Three Dimensional Art
by Erin Keane, RAC Intern
I’ve been inspired by the way that Kate Wadkins has displayed the Brainwaves collection at RAC. Lots of three dimensional art is really beautiful and interesting, but you have to get creative with ways to display it. So I looked around RAC and thought about ways that I would display our three dimensional pieces in my home.
First and foremost of course is the Brainwaves display on our gallery wall. If you are anything like our intern Madeline Dahl, you love zines and have more than you know what to do with. Simply letting beautiful art pieces sit on a bookshelf, only viewed when someone picks them up, doesn’t do justice to even the smallest of collections. By taking some rough textured yarn or twine and tying it to nails on the wall you can create the perfect display for zines, magazines, or even light handmade books.
The Wassaic Project Arts Festival, Aug. 3rd-5th! Diverse Arrangment of Artists and Free!
The Wassaic Project Arts Festival Aug 3rd-5th
What is the best way to beat the August city heat? Get out!
Join RAC upstate in the scenic hamlet of Wassaic for a weekend of FREE arts events, including concerts, dance performances and exhibitions from the artists in residence.
By Erin Keane, RAC Intern
Watch a video about the festival
This project is particularly close to my heart because I grew up five minutes from Wassaic in a similarly sweet town across the boarder in Connecticut. This festival provides the perfect combination of quaint weekend getaway to a quiet town and city-quality culture and entertainment. I personally am looking forward to breathing fresh air, feeling clean grass under my feet, seeing more than one star in the night sky, feeling the breeze coming off of the Housatonic River, and hearing crickets as I sleep instead of honking and break sounds; not to mention seeing the amazing exhibits put together by this year’s residents.
There are three exhibitions curated this year; Return to Rattlesnake Mountain, Liesure Work, and Clean Up. Both promising cutting edge
Mark Your Calendars! Come to the Kenneth Anger Screening at Recession Art! Aug. 11, 10pm-1am
RAC presents a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Short Films
Come party with us at Recession Art at Culturefix and enjoy the films of an artist who defined american avant garde!
Kenneth Anger, making films since 1947 and working primarily in the 1960’s and 1970’s, created a body of some of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most influential completed works, with informal seating and a bar atmosphere. Angers films are critiques of Hollywood, its narrative structure and the lure that dangerously surrounds popular culture. Anger sets non-narratively driven images of the occult, counterculture and eroticism to popular musical scores by artists such as The Dells, A Raincoat, Jimmy Page, Elvis Presely, The Angels, Vivaldi, Ricky Nelson and the Shangri-Las.
Bring your friends, have a few drinks, watch the films and casually converse with other Anger fans! Casual ambiance and fun times ahead!
Hosted by Erin Kean, RAC
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Submit to Prolonged Exposure, Recession Art’s Upcoming Show,by Midnight, August 1st!
Submissions are now open for Prolonged Exposure curated by Kaegan Sparks.
Deadline Wednesday August 1, 11:59pm
Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Kaegan Sparks and Art Director Ani Katz. Prolonged Exposure will be held November 3-10 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Accepting Work in All Media Including Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Performance, Installation, and Video.
About Prolonged Exposure
“I will not make any more boring art.”
–John Baldessari
Prolonged Exposure will ask how we can remain curious and speculative in a culture of desensitizing barrage and static. The exhibition will concentrate on artworks that plumb boredom’s latent energy, provoking a restlessness which precipitates a desire for change.
In scholar Sianne Ngai’s investigation of minor affects or ‘ugly feelings’– diffusive, non-cathartic states like irritation, paranoia, anxiety, or envy which seem increasingly endemic to contemporary culture and aesthetics– she posits a surprising parallel between shock and boredom. Though antithetical in intensity and duration (shock is immediate and staggering, while boredom is tedious and numbing), both emotions induce states of suspended agency: “both are responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.”
Sara Bouchard & Careful Perform at Recession Art (9 Clinton St.) this Friday from 7-9pm!
Sara Bouchard and Careful - once fellow artists-in-residence, sometimes collaborators and always kindred song-spinners - bring their solo projects together for an evening of eclectic, avant-garde folk.
ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party at RAC
On Saturday August 11th, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix presents
ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party
August 11th 10pm to 1am, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix, 9 Clinton Street NY, NY 10002
Prolific filmmaker of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Kenneth Anger created a body of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most critically-acclaimed completed works in a relaxed ambiance with an informal seating area. Anger’s films center on and critique the dangerous allure of popular culture and Hollywood through their spectacle-based narrative structure. Visually, his pieces strongly draw on imagery from the occult, 70’s countercultures, and eroticism and are soundtracked by artists such as The Dells, A Raincoat, Jimmy Page, Elvis Presely, The Angels, Vivaldi, Ricky Nelson and the Shangri-Las. Self-described as a magician who uses cinematography as a magical power, Anger’s main goal in his filmmaking is to seduce the audience into entering an alternative construction of artistic realities and create an enigmatic atmosphere for the viewer that goes beyond the screen.
Anger famously screened his films in his windowless apartment in the Lower East Side to a small community that included notable creative minds such as Alfred Kinsey, Mick Jagger, and Tennessee Williams. RAC aims to recreate this intimate screening experience thirty years later in their Lower East Side location. With a gallery space, extensive beer selection, and communal tables with ample seating, enjoy RAC’s relaxed and social ambiance while viewing a selection of Anger’s most influential films.
Kenneth Anger (b. 1927, Santa Monica, California) has been creating films since the 1940s with his first being Who Has Been Rocking My Dreamboat (1941). Anger’s six-decade-long oeuvre includes most notably Fireworks (1947), Puce Moment (1949), Eaux d’artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954-66), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), Lucifer Rising (1970-81)), Rabbit’s Moon (1950-79), Mouse Heaven (2004), Elliot’s Suicide (2004), and the recent Ich Will! (2008) and Foreplay (2008). His films have inspired contemporary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. Anger now resides in New York City and continues to work in filmmaking.
RAC is a project of the arts organization Recession Art and the alternative arts space CULTUREfix. Recession Art connects emerging artists with aspiring collectors and provides an affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional art market. CULTUREfix is a bar, gallery, and event space that combines food, art, and performance to offer a different idea of a public space. RAC is located on 9 Clinton Street between Houston and Stanton streets, accessible from the Second Avenue F Station and Essex Street JMZ trains. RAC is open 2-8 pm Tuesday - Sunday. Visit www.RecessionArtShows.com for more information.
Image: KENNETH ANGER, Hollywood Babylon, Neon and Plexiglass, 1975.
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Sara Bouchard & Careful Perform at Recession Art this Friday from 7-9pm!
Sara Bouchard and Careful - once fellow artists-in-residence, sometimes collaborators and always kindred song-spinners - bring their solo projects together for an evening of eclectic, avant-garde folk.Careful – 7pm
Careful has played a blend of electronics and experimental folk aroundNYC for about 4 years, and releases its third album August 21st. Sadder and more broken than Sufjan Stevens, more cohesive thanXiu-xiu, and more electronically inflected than Will Oldham, bothrecorded and live versions of the music tend toward surreal, tragicomic elegy the New York Times calls “gorgeous.”
Sara Bouchard – 8pm
Sara Bouchard’s song cycle “The News: Monday-Friday” is a futuristic folk tale of migration which she performs on acoustic guitar, mandolin and autoharp. By collaging words and phrases from two Monday-Friday spans of the newspaper, Bouchard has created a historical account of a future civilization, in ten songs. Uprooted from their homeland by a string of natural disasters, a community is forced to
Man Bartlett, Social Media Artist
If the role of the artist is to respond to the society and the times they live in, Man Bartlett is probably on the right track. The young Brooklyn-based artist carries out much of his work through social media platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. These days, we spend a lot of our lives on our computers or smartphones, and we interact more and more through social networks. But precisely because the changes associated with these new technologies are so widespread, it is difficult to judge what impact they have had on our lives and psyches. That’s where art comes in.
Through his virtual projects, performances, and lively online interventions, Bartlett acts as a critical voice, provoking his audience into rethinking how they engage with their favorite websites. He is also a leading practitioner of what has come to be known as “social media art,” a genre which gathered some momentum in recent years with Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian’s 2010 exhibition “The Social Graph” and a comprehensive feature in ARTnews magazine as well as countless articles and essays.
Social media art, according to Bartlett, “uses social media as a function of its existence,” taking advantage of the possibilities of the online social space but also pushing its boundaries. For “The Social Graph,” social media artist An Xiao performed “The Artist is (Kinda) Present,” a riff on performance artist Marina Abramovic’s piece of a similar name in which Xiao interacted with her audience solely through Twitter while sitting across from them. For his part, Bartlett has turned New York’s Port Authority bus station into a platform for an interactive online experience with #24hPort, translated tweets into sculpture with “Kith and Kin,” and documented himself spending a full 140 hours in a Berlin gallery wrapped in an American flag and hanging out with a turkey — a riff on German artist Joseph Beuys’s famous piece “I Like America and America Likes Me” — on his Tumblr with #140hBerlin.
For such a technology-savvy artist, Bartlett’s studio in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood is remarkably low-tech. Wide windows overlooking the industrial landscape cast light on collections of vintage magazines, a massive minimalist drawing in progress, and an incense burner turned into an altar for used-up pens. The flip side of Bartlett’s digital creative process is that he continues to get his hands dirty, making collages out of travel ads clipped from ‘60s lifestyle periodicals that reflect on the presence of technology in culture.
Submit to Prolonged Exposure by RAC by Midnight, August 1st!
Submissions are now open for Prolonged Exposure curated by Kaegan Sparks.
Deadline Wednesday August 1, 11:59pm
Selections will be conducted by the Recession Art Jury led by Guest Curator Kaegan Sparks and Art Director Ani Katz. Prolonged Exposure will be held November 3-10 at The Invisible Dog in Brooklyn. Accepting Work in All Media Including Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Performance, Installation, and Video.
About Prolonged Exposure
“I will not make any more boring art.”
–John Baldessari
Prolonged Exposure will ask how we can remain curious and speculative in a culture of desensitizing barrage and static. The exhibition will concentrate on artworks that plumb boredom’s latent energy, provoking a restlessness which precipitates a desire for change.
In scholar Sianne Ngai’s investigation of minor affects or ‘ugly feelings’– diffusive, non-cathartic states like irritation, paranoia, anxiety, or envy which seem increasingly endemic to contemporary culture and aesthetics– she posits a surprising parallel between shock and boredom. Though antithetical in intensity and duration (shock is immediate and staggering, while boredom is tedious and numbing), both emotions induce states of suspended agency: “both are responses that confront us with the limitations of our capacity for responding in general.”
07.
27.
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07:04 pm
ART + ANGER: Kenneth Anger Screening Party at RAC on August 11th!
ART + ANGER: a Kenneth Anger Screening Party
RAC hosts a night-long screening of Kenneth Anger’s short avant garde films
- by Erin Keane, RAC
August 11th 10pm to 1am, RAC | Recession Art at CULTUREfix, 9 Clinton Street NY, NY 10002
A prolific filmmaker of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Kenneth Anger created a body of the most influential avant garde films. Totaling at 3 hours, RAC will play nine of his most critically-acclaimed completed works in a relaxed ambiance with an informal seating area. Anger’s films center on and critique the dangerous allure of popular culture and Hollywood through their spectacle-based narrative structure. Visually, his pieces