SPOTLIGHT: ART AREA: May 8, 1985


(“Art Area: May 8 [1985], 11 pm, $15 admission, Area, 157 Hudson Street, NYC”). 1985. 8 x 10”. Photo: “Michael Halsband at Mr. Chow’s.” Lithograph on card stock. 



The 1980’s answer, perhaps, to the 1951 photograph of “The Irascibles” appearing in Life magazine, Michael Halsband’s decade-defining image of New York artists is printed here in its original reception context: a vintage invitation to the nightclub, Area, on May 8, 1985. Area was recently chronicled by the New York Times as “the nightclub-as-art-gallery that came to define the creative hedonism of 1980s New York.” Apart from this, Basquiat, wearing a bow-tie in the group portrait, wryly marks his own place within the matrix of race, class, and power in the 1980s artworld: as the only black man in the photo, he holds a plate, posing as a server. Printed in an unknown edition size. Every picture tells a story.



© Todd Alden 2013                                         

SPOTLIGHT: On Kawara




I Got Up at 10:36, 22 Set. (September). 1968. Ink, postage stamp, and off-set printed sticker on readymade postcard printed on both sides. 3 3/8  x 5 3/8”. Rubberstamped, postmarked and sent through the mail from Mexico City to New York.



On Kawara began the series, I Got Up in May, 1968 in Mexico City and continued through 1979. Wherever he happened to be, the artist purchased and mailed two photographic postcards daily onto which he rubberstamped his location (also depicted on the postcard’s verso), the recipient’s location, and the specific time that the artist “got up” each morning. This work picturing Mexico City on the recto, dates from September 22nd, 1968, identifying this as one of the first works in the I Got Up sequence. Addressed to fellow artist, John Evans (1932-2012), a leading initiator of mail art, the association poignantly magnifies Kawara’s intimate interest in simple, re-duplicative registrations of the floating world.


© Todd Alden 2013                                         

Alden Projects™ at NADA Miami Beach 2013: OFF THE WALL (Booth P12)




Alden Projects™ presents at NADA Miami Beach 2013 Off the Wall: a re-valuation of 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s Pop and Post-Pop works which dispense with the conventions of the gallery wall as a universal and timeless support in favor of ephemerally insistent, fugitive, transient, or contradictory works which transport art...off the wall. Needless to say, approaches and intentions vary. Works include: a sheet of perforated stamps by Robert Watts (1963); a screenprinted Christmas card by Robert Indiana—the original, first printing of Love (1965), commissioned by MoMA, and preceding all Love to follow; a stamped post card by On Kawara announcing the time he got up in 1968 (1968); screenprinted wallpaper by Roy Lichtenstein (1968) rescued after being removed from the wall of a collector’s home; photographic images of Bronx wallpaper in a unique book by Gordon Matta-Clark (1973); a unique, grey-painted monochrome executed in a cardboard box, slyly distributed (like a wolf in sheep’s clothing) as an editioned “catalogue” by Gerhard Richter (1974); a drawing of a soup can in a philosophical book by Andy Warhol (1975); a chalk drawing of a UFO by Keith Haring removed from the 42nd Street subway walls (1982); a drawing of a space shuttle on a mailed envelope by Tom Sachs (1997); an “angry girl” drawing in a catalogue by Yoshitomo Nara (2004-10). All of these works once did (or still do?) eitheror bothof the following: 1) occupy the walls of everyday life (and were thus “off the wall”), or 2) remove and eschew the vertical support of the wall altogether in favor of surprising destinations: a mailbox, a book, a catalogue. Gerhard Richter's painted monochrome (1974) exhibited here in Off the Wall was sprayed in “original grey” anti-rust paint by the artist co-terminously with other grey monochromes that he otherwise hung on a German museum’s walls in 1974-75. What was the difference between the (unique) grey monochromes that occupied a museum wall and the (unique) “original grey” spray-painted monochromes occupying the space of a museum’s editioned catalogue?  What is the difference today? (Alden Projects proposes that Gerhard Richter knows the answer...)

What does it mean for Alden Projects™ to reorient these “off the wall” Pop and Post-Pop works on to the temporary support walls of a Miami art fair? 


Todd Alden says: “To be involved with art, (to paraphrase Marcel Broodthaers), is to move from art fair to art fair.”


© Todd Alden 2013                                         
  Enquire 

Alden Projects™ at NADA Miami Beach: Booth P12



Alden Projects™ is pleased to participate in NADA MIAMI BEACH 2013.


Booth P12, Napoleon Ballroom


December 5 - 8, 2013


The Deauville Beach Resort
6701 Collins Ave.
Miami Beach, FL  33141


PREVIEW BY INVITATION:
Thursday, December 5:   10am - 2pm

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:
Thursday, December 5:  2pm - 8pm
Friday, December 6:   11am - 8pm
Saturday, December 7: 11am - 5pm
Sunday, December 8:   11am - 5pm


FREE