This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Homemade Art Machines

I could recommend this talk on the title alone. In “Make Them Choke On It,” Fry will talk about how her cultural obsessions (teen heartthrobs and Bret Easton Ellis among others) inform her art writing. Go hear about art without the artspeak.

The genre of weirdo ceramics by artists like Ken Price, Ron Nagle, Kathy Butterly is big right now. Butterly’s ornately smushed objects—which in this exhibition are never more than nine inches in height—look like creatures straight out of a psychedelic children’s book from the 1970s. They’re incredibly imaginative, and just nice to look at.

Flux Factory residents have made a machine—a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption—spanning the residency’s galleries, offices, and living spaces. From the press release:

Over the next year, the Flux community will live and work inside the machine, activating it at the end of weekly Monday meetings to set into motion a series of automated steps that move throughout the building to announce, instruct, prepare, and photograph those gathered. At the end of its life, Exquisite Contraption will have produced a year-long record of residents and guests who have gathered inside the machine … Since Exquisite Contraption can be activated at any time, it will be available to the public throughout its year-long run by appointment and during select public events.

Collaboration at its finest.

Created by Stephanie Avery, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Jason Eppink, Justin Lange, Adrian Owen, Amelia Marzec, Sean McIntyre, Alex Nathanson, Nick Normal, Eric Petersen, Sascha Pohflepp, and Chris Woebken.

Artists wanna be designers, too. For Post Neo Proto Demo, Clive Murphy will do what he’s been doing for awhile: making funky home-living spaces inspired by any number of imaginary personal philosophies, like “Feng Shui Disco” or “Jacobean Psychedelic.” When the alternative’s IKEA or Martha Stewart Living, why not?

Chris Meigh-Andrews tells the history of video art from the perspective of artists using the medium. In celebration of his 2013 text A History of Video Art, Meigh-Andrew’s mustered up a quite big panel of video art’s earliest proponents: Artists Peter Campus, Beryl Korot (also co-editor of Radical Software), Terry Flaxton, Mary Lucier, and Lori Zippay (Executive Director of Electronic Arts Intermix).

This one’s for the word lovers. Thanks for Writing one-ups the typical looking-at-text-based-art-on-the-walls model by including plenty of ways to read the art. Yes, the art’s still on the walls,but you can also sit on a sofa, pull out some books from the shelves full of writing about art, writing about artists, and writing about writing. In sum, there’s a whole lot of writing, and it’s by a fine bunch of artists.

Curated by Mariam Rahmani

Featuring artists: John Baldessari, Taysir Batniji, Jennifer Dalton, Oskar Dawicki, Oasa DuVerney, Shahab Fotouhi, Sara Al Haddad, Ann Hamilton, Liz Larner, Christian Marclay, Rivane Neuenschwander, William Powhida, Jessica Rankin, and UBIK

“Recently, a new medium has emerged in contemporary art,” reads the Met’s press release, “and has found its way from artists’ studios to galleries and museums—digital art.” Uh, oh.

Digital art has not been a “new medium” in contemporary art for a long time, but we’re sure the digital-art-savvy panelists can dispel the myths proffered by the Met’s communications department.

On Friday we’ll get a good round up of voices, with Mia Fineman (curator of the Met’s 2012 exhibition Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop), Julia Kaganskiy (Director of New Museum’s new Incubator for Art, Technology, and Design), and Cory Arcangel (who you probably know as digital artist who had a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2011), and artist-Twitter mavericks Carla Gannis and Clement Valla.

 *Must be 21 years old or over to attend this event.

Over the last few years, Keltie Ferris has made a name for herself with a distinctive quilt-and-pixel style of painting. Her blurry landscapes look like what happens when you push your fingers against your closed eyeballs. They’re not figurative at all, but her new show might be bucking that style with a series of work called “Body Prints.” We shall see.

Harsh Patel’s a graphic designer whose drawings and texts look as though they come straight out of some teenage punk rocker’s zine. They seem to answer the question of what would’ve been made in the 1990s if kids were using Photoshop.