NICK CAVE

Recent Soundsuits

January 8 - February 7, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Recent Soundsuits, Nick Cave's second solo exhibition at the gallery. A diverse selection of the highly imaginative, mixed-media, wearable sculptures, Soundsuits, for which Cave has become well-known, are on view starting January 8th.


A row of suits of woven hair in vibrant colors, from fluorescent orange and lime green to royal blue, lines one wall in the back gallery. These creatures with their amorphous and undefined bodies are apparitions hovering between a human form and an abstract painting. A U-shaped runway situated opposite these figures features another diverse group of Soundsuits, some with sleeker, formfitting bodysuits comprised of found fabrics and materials including buttons, sequins and beads that are combined and sewn together into intricate patterns and designs. Metal armatures adorned with a range of objects including painted ceramic birds, flowers, brass ornaments, and strands of beads, top the figures and serve as headdresses that activate the sculpture and provide a visual and textural contrast to the soft bodysuit.


Soundsuits, named for the sounds made when the sculptures are worn, are as reminiscent of African and religious ceremonial costumes as they are of haute couture. A multitude of references bring to mind not only disparate cultural traditions but they also highlight Cave's diverse background and artistic training. Cave studied and danced with Alvin Alley and created his own clothing line which he featured in a shop he opened and ran for ten years. He is as interested in fashion and cultural, ritualistic and ceremonial concepts as he is in politics, a domain that has always been part of his work as demonstrated by acts of collecting and reconfiguring elements and concealing the identity, race, and gender, of those who wear his suits. Rendering them faceless and anonymous the suits help these individuals transcend the political realm in order to enter the realm of dreams and fantasy.


Here Cave also presents a number of new sculptures that break from his traditional form, the Soundsuit. Comprised of recognizable ready-made objects these sculptures are overt political statements in themselves.




White Fungus Recommends The Real News

White Fungus would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a merry Xmas and to recommend The Real News. Started by veteran Canadian documentary and television producer Paul Jay in 2007, The Real News is the flagship show for Jay's vastly ambitious news network, Independent World Television (IWT). Fed-up with the standard of television news in post-911 America, Jay launched the network in 2005 to directly challenge the existing structure and economic model of daily newsgathering. IWT and The Real News are 100% audience funded and refuse any corporate or government money.

Jay wants to one day take on media giants like Fox or CNN and says he could launch a global independent news network for $25 million made up of $50 donations from 500, 000 subscribers. It's a mountainous task but Jay and IWT have already raised more that $5 million, enough to set-up headquarters in Toronto and New York with four satellites, including an AP news feed, beaming in news stations from around the world.

The Real News is now being broadcasted daily, available on the Internet and, thanks to various deals with cable networks, soon to be seen in millions of homes throughout North America. Featuring in-depth analysis by its team of seasoned journalists, on-the ground reports from international hot spots by local journalists and interviews with luminaries including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, The Real News is riveting and essential viewing for anyone interested in world politics.

Check out some clips...





Empire Classic or Empire Lite?

Pepe Escobar is a journalist based in Sao Paulo, Brazil who is an analyst and correspondent for The Real News. He also writes a column for Asia Times Online titled The Roving Eye. His prescient article Get Osama! Now! Or else... was published less than two weeks before the 911 attacks. In this clip Escobar discusses the imperialistic leanings of Obama's foreign policy.






Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, talks to Paul Jay about China's Super Capitalism.






Gore Vidal On The US Media and Society

Legendary author Gore Vidal is key advisor to The Real News. In this clip Vidal talks to Paul Jay about the relationship between media and society in the US.



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Tamas Revesz, Reflections, 2004


Hungarian Cultural Center presents


Random Utterness 2


an exhibition presenting works by Mara Bodis-Wollner, Andras Borocz, Andrea Dezso, Shandor Hassan, Thomas Lendvai, Anna Pasztor and Tamas Revesz


Curated by Agnes Berecz


December 11, 2008 – February 6, 2009


Opening reception on Thursday, December 11, 6-9pm


The Hungarian Cultural Center is pleased to present Random Utterness 2, the second installment of a group exhibition featuring the recent work of New York-based artists of Hungarian origin. The exhibition brings together photographs, videos, artist’s books, photo-based installations, and objects.


Appearing in the interiors of homes, the female protagonists of Mara Bodis-Wollner’s videos reenact socially conditioned rituals of intimacy and perform the everyday rituals of domesticity. Fragments of conversation appear in moving images that are evocative of classical still-life painting and propose a cinematic reclamation of the patriarchal order of painting.


Anna Pasztor’s video, Why didn’t you trust me?, reflects her interest in dance, movement and choreography. The rhythm of New York and the pace of female bodies create a visual and physical montage, both contrasting and connecting the bodies and the urban environment they inhabit.


Andrea Dezso, Retreat, McSweeney’s cover, Issue 23András Böröcz’s book, Home Sweet Home, is based on his recent series of the meticulously executed Outhouse Drawings. Böröcz uses the profane motif of the outhouse as an allegory to reflect on the collective, historical memories of Eastern Europe. Merging fiction and reality, his outhouses replace objects and humans. They appropriate images as disparate as Auschwitz or TV-watching couples, bringing together the banal and the traumatic.


As Borocz’s Eastern European fables, Andrea Dezso’s much-acclaimed embroideries, "Lessons From My Mother", also play on traditions of allegory. Her absurd texts, fusing maternal warnings, superstitions, and proverbial wisdoms, are accompanied by diagrammatical drawings and sign-like fragments. The color embroidered texts and images act as emblems of culture stereotypes, and recall the moralizing tradition of allegorical representation. Dezso’s cover design for the 23rd issue of McSweeney’s demonstrates her commitment to handmade craft as well as her interest in design and visual patterns. Using paper cutouts, embroidery, drawing, painting, collage, and calligraphy, Dezso explores the relationship between text and image, the handmade and the digitally reproduced.


Thomas Lendvai’s objects and installations use practices iof architecture and construction. Revising the agenda of Minimalism, Lendvai’s large-scale installations and serial, geometric sculptures reconfigure the spatial perception of the viewer as a constantly shifting experience. His site-specific installation, created for the space of the Hungarian Cultural Center, slants two mobile walls to construct an architectural form which appears to be in a state of collapse and disintegration.


Shandor Hassan’s photo-based installation presents a selection from his photographic project, Collection of Objects. Based on the sterile-looking studio photographs of Hassan’s personal collection of objects found on the street, the installation satirically explores the obsessive practice of collecting, the often arbitrary taxonomies of archives, and the alienating effects of object display. The phantom-like afterimages appearing within the frames of Tamás Révész’s photographs explore the medium of photography as a screen that both exposes and conceals its subject. Révész’s most recent Colors of Spirit, a digitalized sequence of photographs of kaleidoscopic images—through its references to 19th century visual devices—historicizes his current explorations of visual spectacle and optical illusion.

Image: photo of a spread from Current featuring a work by Richard Killeen,
The temptation of Saint Anthony, 2007

New Book Of Australian And New Zealand Contemporary Art

Recently edited by Art & Australia is Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, a mammoth tomb of recent art sure to entertain, enliven and enrage with its selection of artists - a necessary pitfall for any project seeking to be definitive. But it’s nice to see a big book with New Zealand artists in it and it’s encouraging to see so many of these artists making traction in Australia. Parochialism aside, the book is a useful tool for entering into Australian art for the non-jet setters amongst us in the arts community. Many of the Australian artists will be familiar to audiences here from recent shows including Mikala Dwyer, Hany Armanious and Tracey Moffatt. As well as including a large selection of New Zealand artists – including Richard Killeen, Peter Robinson, et al, Michael Stevenson, Yvonne Todd, Andrew McLeod and Michael Parekowhai - there are articles by Justin Patton and Robert Leonard, who’s kept up his involvement in New Zealand art since moving to Brisbane to become Director of the IMA.

To find out more about Current check out:
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US prepares for "continuity of government"



Why Robert Gates is a Terrible Pick

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation.

The appointment of Robert Gates -- a vocal critic of Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan who will undoubtedly shape policy-- is alarming.

Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq but , as he told us earlier this year, "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." So it is troubling that a man of such good judgment has asked Robert Gates to stay on as Secretary of Defense -- and assembled a national security team of such narrow bandwidth. It is true that President Obama will set the policy. But this team makes it more difficult to seize the extraordinary opportunity Obama's election has offered to reengage the world and reset America's priorities. Maybe being right about the greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history doesn't mean much inside the Beltway? How else to explain that not a single top member of Obama's foreign policy/national security team opposed the war -- or the dubious claims leading up to it?

The appointment of Hillary Clinton, who failed to oppose the war, has worried many. But I am more concerned about Gates. I spent the holiday weekend reading many of the speeches Hillary Clinton gave in her trips abroad as First Lady, especially those delivered at the UN Beijing Women's Conference and the Vital Voices Conferences, and I believe she will carve out an important role as Secretary of State through elevating women's (and girl's) rights as human rights. As she said in Belfast in 1998, "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." That is not to diminish her hawkish record on several issues, but as head of State she is in a position to put diplomacy back at the center of U.S. foreign policy role -- and reduce the Pentagon's role.

It's the appointment of Gates which has a dispiriting, stay-the-course feel to it. Some will argue, and I've engaged in my fair share of such arguments, that Gates will simply be carrying out Obama's policies and vision. And a look at history shows that other great reform Presidents -- Lincoln and Roosevelt -- brought people into their cabinets who were old Washington hands or people they believed to be effective managers. Like Obama, they confronted historic challenges that compelled (and enabled) them to make fundamental change. But Gates will undoubtedly help to shape policy and determine which issues are given priority. And while Gates has denounced "the gutting" of America's "soft power," he has been vocally opposed to Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan. And at a time when people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz are calling for steps toward a nuclear weapons free world (a position Obama has adopted), Gates has been calling for a new generation of nuclear weapons.

For Obama, who's said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn't it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century? Isn't the idea of a broader bandwidth of ideas also at the heart of this ballyhooed "team of rivals" stuff?

Powerful establishment voices have been quick to praise the continuity, expertise and competence of Obama's team. But if President-elect Obama is really serious about changing the global perception of the U.S. -- not just in Paris, London, Tokyo and Berlin but in the Middle East, the global South and the developing world -- he would worry less about reassuring establishment stakeholders and the representatives of the tried, the true and the failed, and make some appointments that represent some genuinely new departures and new directions. Instead, as one longtime observer of U.S.-Russian relations reminded me the other day, in Gates, a veteran Cold Warrior, you have "an establishment figure with the longest institutional involvement in our failed Russia policies of anyone in DC."

And with all the talk about the importance of foreign policy experience, why is there so little attention paid to the quality of that experience? (Let's not forget, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had quite a bit of Washington experience.) What we need after eight ruinous years is experience informed by good judgment. What is gained by bringing in people who traffic in conventional wisdom and who have shown the kind of foreign policy timidity that acquiesced to disasters like the Iraq war?

Obama may believe that Gates will give him the cover and continuity he needs to carry out his planned withdrawal from Iraq. But so could many others, including Republicans like Chuck Hagel who, at least, opposed the Iraq war. By keeping Gates on Obama worsens the Democratic image on national security -- sending the message that even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the military. And even more troubling for our future security, Gates has sounded ominous notes about how more U.S. troops can pacify Afghanistan. Speaking only days after a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the U.S. was caught in a "downward spiral" there, Gates asserted that there is "no reason to be defeatist or underestimate the opportunity to be successful in the long run." Extricating the U.S. from one disastrous war to head into another will drain resources needed to fulfill Obama's hopes and promises for economic growth, health care, energy independence and crowd out other international initiatives.

Of course, Obama still has an opportunity to change the mindset that got us into Iraq and, more important, he has a popular mandate to challenge and change failed policies and craft a smarter security policy for this century. But he's sure making his work tougher by bringing people like Robert Gates on board.

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/109298/why_robert_gates_is_a_terrible_pick/


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greetings all! The 3rd Annual Hamilton Underground Film Festival Begins 11th and 13th December 2008

YOU ARE INVITED!
11th December 2008
Waikato Museum
1 Granthen Street
6pm -7:30pm
First programme screenings of films
$5 or $10 with DVD
13th December 2008
Auteur House
555 Victoria Street

8pm-10pm +10pm onwards @ Dreadnought Spitoon and
Platform 01 Gallery at 467 Victoria street
free event

8pm Film screening (part two of the museum selections)
9pm The Parasitic Fantasy Band
Live expanded cinema;16mm film manipulations and projections
www.thedustpalace.co.nz/

BLUE TIDE, BLACK WATER is an investigation into the world's minute reactions. One of the most basic of chemical interactions, heat applied to liquids, is transformed from a scientific investigation to a study of the intricate details of the natural world. The resulting microcosmic environment seems a lush, rich primordial soup.

Then at the Dreadnought Spitoon and Platform 01 Gallery at 467 Victoria street...(AFTER 10PM TIL LATE)
The Trons -HAMILTON'S PREMIER ROBOT BAND-W/LIVE ROBOT MADE VIDEOS http://www.myspace.com/thtrons
Der Kranks -28 STRINGED WONDERS OF THE EASTERN SECTORS-MUSIC http://66.51.114.213/

Internet link with Cataluña HUFF at 12 pm (Midnight hahhahahhhahhaaa!!!!!)
simultaneous screening of the 4TH Hamilton Underground Film Festivals in Cataluña, Europe.
http://www.prioratcentredart.cat/

Live streaming of a selection of HUFF films + INTERNET LINK SITE
www.mogulus.com/huff

Huff website-
www.circuit47.com/hufffilms included in the museum screening:Passion by Peter Caldwel- a super 8 mini-epic documenting a controversial crucifixion which actually took place in Hamilton's own garden placeCampbell Farquhar's fantastic and surreal Moth UfOs from Jed Towne's Cloudscapes of Aoteaoa http://www.digitalwallpaper.net/Tinkernicks by Mike Crook & Rosie Percival Blue Tide, Black Water Eve Gorden & Sam Hamilton (Parasitic Fantasy Band - http://www.thedustpalace.co.nz/the-parasitic-fantasy-band/eve-gordon+++++++++++++++MANY MANY MORE -SCREENING DURATION APPROX 1 HOUR-STARTS AT 6PM PROMPT as do the Auteur house events -
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