Where there’s trouble there’s poetry” sang Iggy Pop, proposing that disorder on any scale, manmade or natural, may produce an aftermath of singular, if not terrible beauty. ‘Fallen Books’ a project by Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson could be easily mistaken as an impulse purchase in the museum gift shop or better art supply store. As designed by Francesca Grassi ‘FB’ initially resembles a sample book of vibrantly colored writing paper of the kind favored by female adolescents. But looks deceive. What we hold is an archive in book form, a collection of pages, half of which appear to prophesize its own chaotic future. The organizing principle of this publication by onestar press is the correspondence between photographic documentation of the effects of earthquakes upon libraries, and the Modified Mercalli Scale, a color spectrum used as an alternative to the Richter Scale in mapping the seismic intensity of an individual quake; the ‘hotter’ the color, the greater the disturbance. All of the ‘amateur’ photographs have been culled from American libraries coping with varying degrees of damage. These are mostly reparable messes, multi-colored heaps of splayed volumes clogging the aisles with empty shelving leaning drunkenly. Nothing is irreparable, but wry amusement diminishes to sobriety the more one returns to ‘FB’. How do these unpopulated, cluttered images register the somber mood of the crime scene or the atrocity picture?
The disordered surface of cubism was exploded by WW 1; traumatized Dadaist’s played with art’s broken pieces which were integrated back into painting by the chic surrealists, whose wild juxtapositions were forecasted in the rubble of modern conflict. Wreckage, when filtered through a surrealist sensibility transforms extreme ‘trouble’ into extreme ‘poetry’. Lee Miller’s ‘Grim Glory’ (1940) photographically documented wartime Britain and the London blitz through a surreal lens. One image of a crushed typewriter is an unsubtle Orwellian metaphor for the loss of freedom and the destruction of language. In happier times, the Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, and several cohorts would eject a typewriter from a vehicle speeding through the California desert, documenting the event with scientific exactitude. The resulting information took the form of Ruscha’s booklet ‘Royal Road Test’ (1967) - an ‘artist’s book’ masterpiece if there ever was one.
Dubbin and Davidson’s ‘Fallen Books’ lineage stems directly from Ruscha’s important publications. Both ‘Royal’ and ‘FB’ rigorously apply an organizational methodology to a natural, or whimsically contrived event(s), collecting data and keeping to the game plan. ‘Fallen Books’ cheerful exterior belies it content, a complex exercise in entropy, the coexistence of past and future bound (literally) into the present. The rationale behind the Modified Mercalli Scale buckles under the weight of the Smithson-like ‘heaps of language’ on each opposite page. Dubbin and Davidson recognize the melancholia attending forensic procedure (almost a national television obsession) and with the sustained maintenance of any archive. ‘…..this book is also a forecast’, they state cryptically in the introduction recalling ‘Royal Road Test’s’ own coda; ‘It was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction’.
Tim Maul NYC 11/08
ersailles gave us diamonds, and diamonds are forever. Versailles gave us fashion, and hemlines have never been the same. And today the most touristed site in the world (5.5 million visitors/year!) gives us Jeff Koons. He never looked so good, and probably never will again. He looks even better than Cicciolina flashing her pussy getting out of a limo: vulgar, beautiful, exciting, bright, irresistible as catnip is to cats.Afterart News went en masse, flashing our press cards and finessing the endless lines to get in. It starts in the exterior courtyard, before you find yourself immersed in the odorous river of humanity (overheard: “It’s that New York subway smell!”) that courses through Versailles all day every day: BALLOON FLOWER (green). Standing on a misconceived platform, BALLOON FLOWER (green) is royal eye candy in polished stainless steel, a gem set in the kingdom of kitsch. All dismissive Koons criticism (“What’s he done that Claus Oldenberg didn’t do?”) evaporates from right minds on a glorious fall day in Versailles like dew from the long lawns. Then you really start looking at it. Classical sculptural elements like surface and depth have been pushed to marvelous levels: the “highly sanded” surface both absorbs and reflects the world in its seductive curves. There’s no way into it, there’s no way around it, and there’s no way out. It’s immaculately manufactured, of course. Conceptually BALLOON FLOWER (green) plays a high/low kitsch/classical mind game in perfect pitch. It’s hilarious and majestic. It’s the apotheosis of the banal. And you haven’t even entered the chateau yet.So go, you’ll love it. The only thing missing is Cicciolina in Louis XIV’s bed. But that’s not hard to imagine.As everyone knows, two polemical arguments surround this marriage of ageless in-your-face French pomposity and American kitsch on steroids. The first is best expressed by the grumbling tourists who paid good money to get in and don’t like these pimples of contemporary art on the face and backside of their blue-blooded fantasies. This matter of taste actually works for Koons in a way 10 million tourists would never imagine: it gives the exhibition the de rigeur subversive element it totally lacks and yet needs to succeed. In fact, there is absolutely nothing even mildly subversive here. And yet where would good contemporary art be without a dash of the indecent? 
he Tract House is a “spread-the-word” project debuting at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore May 31, 2008. As part of the “Cottage Industries” exhibition, The Tract House will be distributing free tracts to the public.
watch mostly public television, and one of my favorite programs is ‘Secrets of the Dead’. This hour long show combines elements of history, archeology, and forensic research in unraveling the ‘mysteries’ of numerous grim historical events. Several weeks ago, one segment investigated the ‘secret graveyards’ of organized crime, specifically, a location in the borough of Queens, New York. In the final scenes, the skeletal remains of gang members murdered in the early 80’s were unearthed. Through these somber images, I reconnected to my encounter with Chloe Piene’s sculpture, whose exhibition at Gasser & Grunert in Chelsea had closed a few weeks earlier.The human skull, that timeless logo of death, is having an especially good year both in and out of the arts. Here in Manhattan, poor Yorrick advertises a production of Hamlet, while on ‘The Simpsons’ one of Bart’s trio of tormentors at Springfield elementary sports death’s head on a black t shirt. And there’s that Damien Hirst. Hirst, like other art provocateurs periodically gets it exactly right, as did Warhol’s ‘Disaster’ series, which offered up a ‘little death’ during Pop’s euphoric zenith. 
n the eastern frontier of Austria, surrounded by fields of tomatoes and Grüner Veltliner grapes, people say Radiostation 1 was a radio station used by NATO after WWII to monitor radio emissions in Eastern Europe. Later it was abandoned until the French artist Sébastien de Ganay began rescuing its vast industrial spaces (like “immense glass shoe boxes,” as Sébastien puts it) from desuetude in 2006. At its official inauguration on June 14th, 2008, a few hundred people came to discover this Marfa-like mix of public and private space where Sébastien has framed his intriguing collection of contemporary art with a funky, objective authority. On display were pieces by Hyun Soo Choi, Gerold Tagwerker, Rudolf Polanszky as well as three films by Christophe Boutin and some new work from our host. There were readings, performances and video screenings by Ann Cotten, Richard Dailey, Oswald Egger, Brigitta Falkner, Benedikt Ledebur and Giusepe Zevola. Radiostation 1 is a short drive from Vienna and should become a must-do for locals as well as the international art set. Stay tuned for updates, announcements and future emissions. RD
