Artists Space Presents Summer Exhibitions

June 11 – August 20
Opening: Saturday, June 11, 6pm 8pm performance by Sugarlife

Blaster Al Ackerman, Craig Baldwin, Ed Bereal: Wanted for Disturbing the Peace, Circus Amok and Jennifer Miller, Vaginal Davis, Manuel DeLanda, James Luna, Tom Murrin (aka The Alien Comic), Tamio Shiraishi, Hannah Weiner, and Johanna Went

In conjunction with the exhibition, Canal Street Research Association will inaugurate a participatory alternate currency project.

James Luna, In My Dreams: A S urreal, Post-Indian, S ubterranean B lues E xperience, 1996. Performance still, La Jolla Indian Tribal Hall, La Jolla Indian Reservation, California. Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery.

Rooted in late 1970s New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, San Antonio, Portland, La Jolla and elsewhere in the United States, At tention Line presents eleven iconoclastic artists who self-reflexively enact radical subjectivity within the urban environment. Taking form as visual art, media interventions, stage shows, mail art, and surreptitious public performances, these artists disrupt communication channels and the tra cking of cultural material by intervening in the pervasive flows of normalcy that underpin and uphold everyday consumer culture. Organized by Artists Space and Andrew Lampert, At tention Line considers the important ways that artists who generally operate outside the commercial confines of the visual art world can actively address and reconfigure media, power, and public space—through parody, exaggeration, confrontation, internalization, structured confusion, and the serendipitous nature of working out in the open.

Each of these remarkably singular artists has carved out their own dynamic relation between form, culture, and their suspecting or unsuspecting public. Whether working between covert urban intervention and filmed documentation (Craig Baldwin and Manuel DeLanda), exaggerating and embodying notably troubled cultural stereotypes (James Luna and Vaginal Davis), accelerating and fracturing the commonplace logic of live performance to imbue material culture with energetic chaos (Johanna Went and Tom Murrin), skewering political and hegemonic power with dark comedic parody (Ed Bereal and Circus Amok), expressing their internal subjectivity as disjunctive projections in urban space (Hannah Weiner and Tamio Shiraishi), or self-distributing their kaleidoscopic output and invented personae through decidedly unconventional means (Blaster Al Ackerman and others), these artists each bring forth critical aspects of a largely untold, uniquely American history of tactical situationist artmaking.

As part of this exhibition, Artists Space’s downstairs gallery will feature a cinematheque with screenings of these artists’ films and videos. Specific programs and screening times will be announced soon. Cinematheque Schedule:

Saturday, June 11 Ed Bereal
June 15 – 25 Craig Baldwin
June 29 – July 9 Manuel de Landa
July 13 – 23 Johanna Went
July 27 – August 6 Vaginal Davis
August 10 – 20 James Luna

Improvising saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi will perform in Cortlandt Alley and at Artists Space six times throughout the course of the exhibition. Performances will begin promptly and be brief, according to the following schedule:

Saturday, June 11, 6:30pm

Thursday, June 23, 6:30pm

Saturday, July 2, 1pm Saturday, July 16, 1pm

Thursday, August 4, 6:30pm

Saturday, August 20, 1pm

New York’s legendary Circus Amok will present a new outdoor performance in Cortlandt Alley, commissioned by Artists Space as part of At tention Line.

Saturday, August 13, 2pm

Public Programs:

I See Words: The Life and Work of Hannah Weiner Presented in collaboration with Zoeglossia Saturday, June 18, 1pm 11 Cortlandt Alley

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Introduction: Jennifer Bartlett

Reading of C lair voyant Journal: Darcie Dennigan, Farnoosh, and James Sherry

Panel Discussion: Declan Gould, Judith Goldman, Phill Niblock, and Susan Bee, moderated by Leeann Brown Closing Reading: Charles Bernstein

Craig Baldwin in Conversation with Adam Khalil Wednesday, June 22, 7pm Online

Canal Street Research Association with Rolando Politi: A Symposium on Alternate Currency Tuesday, June 28, 7pm 11 Cortlandt Alley

Manuel DeLanda Screening & Lecture Saturday, July 2, 4pm 11 Cortlandt Alley

Banner Image: Ei Arakawa: Social Muscle Rehab (outdoor performance). Performance documentation, October 16, 2021, Artists Space. Photo: Filip Wolak. [Tennis players stand in an alleyway, ready to hit balls from an automatic ballfeeder. A crowd watches intently in the background. Suspended above them the words “Social Muscle Rehab” are painted in white capitalized text on black and green signs.]

Artists Space

Founded in 1972 in downtown Manhattan, Artists Space fosters the artistic and cultural life of New York City as a primary venue for artists' work in all forms. An affinity with emerging ideas and artists is central to our institution, as is attentiveness to the social and intellectual concerns which actively inform artistic practice. We strive for exemplary conditions in which to produce, experience, and understand art, to be a locus of critical discourse and education, and to advocate for the capacity of artistic work to significantly define and reflect our understanding of ourselves.