John Menick

I’m in LA this week for a group show at Sandroni Rey gallery. Occupation will be screening as a gallery projection here through May 19. Also in the exhibition are Rainer Ganahl, Mario Garcia Torres, and Hugo Hopping. It’s been organized by Nu Nguyen and Mario Garcia Torres.

(PS. Just before leaving, this groovy Reyner Banham video on LA started floating around the intertubes. I’ll be humming the theme song my whole time here.)

I got to see the Fischli and Weiss retro at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris yesterday. Of course, it included their amazing The Way Things Go:

I’m in Paris for an upcoming show at la maison rouge, and right before leaving, I noticed Michael Kimmelman reviewed a photo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume called “The Event.” I consider myself persuaded. From the review:

The show surveys — takes snapshots of — five topics, which, presented in no particular order, are the Crimean War; the introduction of paid holidays in France in 1936; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the attacks on the World Trade Center; and the conquest of the air by men like Latham and Louis Blériot, the mustachioed Frenchman who, in a monoplane called the Blériot XI (guess what happened to the first 10), first crossed the Channel, gladdening his countrymen while causing the English, a few decades early, to dread the prospect of aerial assault.

The best bit:

When the French Parliament democratized leisure in July 1936 by mandating two weeks off annually, it promoted the new law through the government’s Organization of Leisure, circulating photographs of vacationers to magazines and newsreels. Frenchmen were supposed to look at the pictures and dream.

Prophets of Deceit, which opened at the CCA Wattis last fall, travels to Columbus College of Art & Design, in Columbus Ohio, and opens February 28. The group show, which was curated by Magali Arriola, includes my video The Secret Life of Things. From the press release:

“Looking into notions of mysticism, religion and the occult as guidelines that assess the development of history, Prophets of Deceit constitutes an essay on the pervading significance of messianic and apocalyptic cults both as systems of restraint of social behavior, and as seditious exercises that seek to subvert those very same structures that brought them into play,” says curator Magali Arriola.

The show includes: Craig Baldwin, Tacita Dean, Rod Dickinson, HCRH, Christian Jankowski, Joachim Koester, Komar & Melamid, Melvin Moti, Raymond Pettibon, Mungo Thomson, PHAUSS (Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser). A review from the San Francisco Chronicle is available here. The archived Artforum pick from San Francisco is here.

Michael Rakowitz’s The invisible enemy should not exist opens on Friday, January 12, at Lombard-Freid Projects. The show follows up on a few of the Iraq themes Michael started exploring in his project for Creative Time.

This Saturday, “The Nightly News,” a group show, opens at Luxe Gallery. 16 Beaver collaborator Pedro Lasch and Nomads and Residents collaborator Liselot van der Heijden are included. Unfortunately the Luxe Web site is not current, but here is an excerpt from the press release:

“The Nightly News” an exhibition curated by

Kathleen Goncharov and Stephan Stoyanov

LUXE Gallery,

24 W. 57th Street # 505

New York, NY 10019

January 13th – February 10th , 2007

Opening Reception: Saturday January 13th, 2007. 6-8pm.

http://www.luxegallery.net/

Reading by Charles Doria and performance by Pia Lindman. Saturday, February 3. 6 PM.

Artists: Robert Boyd, caraballo-farman, Jody Culkin, Lieven De Boeck, Al Fadhil, Liselot van der Heijden, Dominik Lejman, Ahmet Ogut, Pedro Lasch, Pia Lindman, Christodoulous Paniyatou, Jackie Salloum, Lydia Venieri, Michael Waugh, Fred Wilson, Michael Zansky, and others.

The Nightly News is an exhibition of works by artists from around the world, some showing in New York for the first time. These artists were born in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, Belgium, Poland, Mexico and Finland, as well as the United States. Current events and issues such terrorism, war, surveillance, xenophobia, racism, religious fanaticism, immigration, nationalism, and the abuse of power drive the exhibition.

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

Previews of 40 films.

The Disappearance is part of the traveling group exhibition In the poem about love you don’t write the word love opening on Thursday November 16, 6-8PM at Artists Space. The exhibition is curated by Tanya Leighton. From the press release:

In The Poem About Love You Don’t Write The Word Love takes the distinction that French critic Serge Daney made between the “image” and the “visual” as a starting point for a selection of works in this two-part exhibition. Daney’s distinction refers to an “image” that can critically challenge and destabilize predominant models of information, resisting the “purely technical,” that which is nothing other than the verification that something functions. Through various strategies of dislocation or slippage, these works stage an unsettling tension that challenges visual conventions in an increasingly mediated culture.

Artists include:

Artists: Ayreen Anastas, Marcel Broodthaers, François Bucher, Matthew Buckingham, Bruce Conner, Bernadette Corporation, Jeremy Deller, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Sharon Hayes, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Emily Jacir, Gareth James, Alexander Kluge, Phillip Lai, David Lamelas, Simon Martin, John Menick, Avi Mograbi, Lucas Ospina, Giulio Paolini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mai-Thu Perret, Walid Raad, Jose Alejandro Restrepo, Marc Robinson, Keith Sanborn, Allan Sekula, John Smith, Sue Tompkins, Andy Warhol

The exhibition is followed by a great film program at Anthology this winter. Here is the full line-up:

Film Program
Mondays from January 8 through February 12 at Anthology Film Archives located at 32 Second Avenue (at Second Street)
For showtimes, please visit our website, www.artistsspace.org or visit www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Program 1
Bruce Conner Report (1963-1967) 13 min.
Alexander Kluge The Blind Director (1986) 113 min.

Program 2
Andy Warhol Outer and Inner Space (1965) 33 min.
Pier Paolo Pasolini Notes For An African Orestes (1968/69) 75 min.
François Bucher Television (an address)—Ernesto Samper Addresses Washington, January 20th. Inauguration Day (2005) 20 min.

Program 3
Marcel Broodthaers La Pipe (Magritte) (1969) 3 min.
Marcel Broodthaers Ceci ne serait pas une pipe (Un Film du Musée d’Art Moderne) (This wouldn’t be a pipe) (1969-71) 2 min. 20 sec.
Marcel Broodthaers La Pipe (Gestalt, Abbildung, Figur, Bild) (1969-71) 4 min. 20 sec.
Ayreen Anastas Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2003) 60 min.

Program 4
Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica Videograms of a Revolution (1992) 106 min.
Matthew Buckingham Situation Leading to a Story (1999) 21 min.
Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis Battle of Orgreave (2001) 60 min.

Program 5
David Lamelas The Invention of Dr. Morel (2000) 23 min.
Phillip Lai His Divine Grace (2000) DVD 25 min.
Bernadette Corporation Get Rid of Yourself (2002) 60 min.
Program 6
Avi Mograbi How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) 61 min.
Walid Raad Hostage—The Bachar Tapes (2001) 16 min.

From Creative Time:

Michael Rakowitz will re-open Davisons & Co., based on the importexport business his family operated in Baghdad. Located in a storefront on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue, the project will provide free shipping for the Iraqi diaspora community, as well as other families who have military personnel stationed in Iraq, thereby creating a space where human concerns on both sides of the conflict can meet.

Davisons & Co. was originally opened in New York by Rakowitz’s grandfather when the family was exiled from Iraq in 1946, leaving behind a legacy that spanned centuries. In this incarnation of the business, Rakowitz will also attempt the importation of Iraqi dates and other products, offering them at prices that are clearly the result of prohibitive import charges and restrictions that remain years after the Gulf War embargo was lifted in 2003. This situation has kept Iraqi products from legally entering the United States, with severe repercussions for the previously thriving, world-renowned date industry in Iraq that produced over 600 different varieties.

Michael is also blogging the project.

The short essay on apocalyptic films I wrote for the “Prophets of Deceit” exhibition catalog is now online (and in print).