This Week’s Must-see Art Events: OK Computer

There’s something great about a serious gallery that doesn’t take itself too seriously. 247365, number nine on Artnet News’s list of the top 15 Brooklyn galleries, is celebrating their relocation and grand re-opening on Tuesday with an exhibition that we hope will be as nonchalantly clever as its title. (P.S.: As of this opening, 247365 will be a Brooklyn gallery no more. What will become of the donut district?!)

“Living a body that shouts through the underbelly,” says the Facebook Event description, “a protested or protesting body, a black body, a body of the multitudes, a body of color, a body no one believes, a body of rage or exhaustion, a body on the ground outlined in chalk.”

Bodies – the literal and metaphorical – are central to contemporary protest culture. Movement seems like an ideal way to explore embodied political action in light of recent racial violence and subsequent protest. Incorporating chants, collective actions and dance, the Movement Studies Research Project promises to do just this.

The premise of this teach-in is that Marxist theory is more popular than Marxist practice. If the philosophy still has some currency but the movement dwindles, what does that mean for today’s Marxists? The Platypus Affiliated Society (a project for the “practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left”) might not have answers, but they’re sure to open up a discussion with some illuminating questions.

Ah, the internet. SPAMM, or SuPer Art Modern Museum, is an online archive of curator-selected new media art. The show at Babycastles Gallery actually one of three irl exhibitions (the others are in Paris and Moscow) connected by webcam. We’re not sure which artists out of the lengthy roster will be exhibited at Of Virtualism’s New York iteration, or if being digitally connected means that all of the artists will be at all of the galleries in one form or another. SPAMM tends to showcase new media artists at the top of their game, like Jon Cates and Nick Briz, so you’re sure to see something good no matter which gallery is closest to home.

Take an unflinching look at today’s art world with contemporary painters/art market veterans Walter Robinson (former editor-in-chief at artnet) and Chris Dorland. They’ll cover unsavory but good-to-know topics like the potential perils of social media and new technologies, the possible necessity of extra-studio practice, failure, zombie formalism, and the eternal question: is painting dead or still dying?

This discussion, moderated by squatter-historian Rowan Tallis Milligan, will fill you in on the history of the squatting movement in the UK. You’ll get to talk about squatting as a technique, a politics, and a lifestyle, and hopefully learn this chant:

We wondered where our wages went,
We wasted most by paying rent,
Since, we’ve learned to change our lot,
So now we’re living in a squat.

Spring is here, and so are all of the MFA shows. New York has so many MFA students, their capstone work warranted its own biennial, in two parts. Friday’s event opens the second part of the New York New Work biennial, with 35 artists on the roster. So if you want to know what the kids are up to these days but can’t make it out to every single show, consider New Works New York your CliffsNotes saving grace.

Cut and paste, scan and print, burn and rip. As new technologies allow for endless reproduction, how can copyright laws keep up? How are concepts like “original” and “copy” legally determined? Will new tools for copying necessitate revised intellectual property laws? This conversation will take a look at how technologies have changed notions of making and ownership over time.

Panelists: Edward Lee, Jennifer L. Roberts, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento & Allyson Vieira Moderated by Triple Canopy editor Alexander Provan

Myth and Mutations is a spectacle of worlds colliding. Artists meme-ify, 3D-print, and generally re-imagine old lore and iconic objects. There’ll be pop-fortune cards and pink creatures performing workout routines.

Artists: Richie Brown, Rachel MacLean, Jonathan Monaghan, Yara Travieso, Wang Fe-Yeng, and Yaloopop

Curated by Chris Romero

A BitchCoin is conceptual art currency with real-world monetary value. It’s backed by photographer Sarah Mehoyas’s artwork (at a fixed exchange rate of 1 BitchCoin to 25 square inches of photographic print). So if the value of Mehoyas’s work increases, the value of the  BitchCoin goes up as well. Friday’s panel with Sarah Mehoyas, Lucy Hunter and R. Lyon, Jenny Jaskey, and Laurel Ptak will unpack BitchCoin’s implications for the artist, and whether it helpfully critiques or further commodifies the market.

Here’s the flyby version of the press release for this talk: Bina48 is a sentient robot, and will be taking questions live on Twitter. A Mindfile is a personal archive of your memories enhanced with geo-mapping and a customizable avatar. These Mindfiles will, with the help of evil genius software developers, yield MindClones, or sentient cyberbeings that create their own memories and consciousness from our mindfiles. Wait, what???

All of the objects (primarily sculpture and drawing) in John Zane Zappas’s solo exhibition are inspired by interplanetary folk music, i.e., seminal synthesizer-based records by 1970s and 80s producer Craig Leon. Leon’s records were meditations on an exhibition of sculptures by a small tribe in the Republic of Mali, whose religion centers on an alleged extraterrestrial deity. In other words, the artworks are an interpretation of an interpretation of an interpretation of aliens.

Six hours, ten channels of sound performance, and 50,000 square feet. AUDITORIUM promises to be large, long, and noisy.

In addition to their own contributions, artist-curators Lea Bertucci and Tristan Shepherd commissioned new work from five artists specifically for this event. The artists come from different disciplines, so if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you put composers, instrumentalists, sculptors, and installation artists in a site-specific, extra-large blender, here’s your chance to find out.

New works by: Lea Bertucci, Sabisha Friedberg, Phill Niblock + Katherine Liberovskaya, Marina Rosenfeld, Tristan Shepherd, Woody Sullender, and Nate Wooley

Tickets are $15-20 on a sliding scale