Art Basel Miami Beach 2009, Day 4

I took it a bit easy on the Friday of Art Basel and only ventured out to see some of the satellite fairs starting with a very sad Photo Miami. I'm not 100% sure but they were inside of a old Circuit City location and the wold building just dropped with Bankruptcy. I really don't think separation of a medium in an art fair as a very sustainable model.

Sure I enjoy photography more and I look for it when I am at an Art fair. But walking around in an all photography fair felt flat to me. Maybe it was just the overall quality of everything there was weaker then normal? Either way I only ended up taking a few pictures of work I liked. Also my friends who were with me and didn't have a press pass had to pay the insane price of $20 to get in. They were not happy nothing in there was worth a $20 entrance fee just to look at it.

PHOTO MIAMI 2009

Photo Miami cover photo by Sean Higgins, Raga Jog, 2009, courtesy of Collette Blanchard Gallery.

Rinko Kawauchi at Mountain Fold Gallery, New York, NY.

After that sad experience we drove off to the NADA Art Fair. This Year's NADA fair was in the Deauville Beach Resort in North Miami.

NADA 2009

Daniel Gordon's "Flying Pictures" at Leo Koenig Inc., New York, NY

Tony Matelli's Weed, painted bronze at Leo Koenig Inc., New York, NY

Jacob Dyrenforth at Renwick Gallery, New York, NY.

Jacob Dyrenforth (detail) at Renwick Gallery, New York, NY. I love this detail. Do you think I could have plugged in my iPhone?

Another Daniel Gordon. This is from at Callicoon Fine Arts / Photios Giovanis, Callicoon, NY. Its not surprising that was everywhere at this years fairs. Reciently he was included in the 'New Photography 2009,' MoMA show reat the 'NY Times Review here. What does surprize me is how different his two bodies of work look.

Daniel Gordon at Callicoon Fine Arts / Photios Giovanis, Callicoon, NY.

Jasper Niens' installation piece "5 ROOMS" at Galerie West, the Netherlands. Consisted of a small maze of hallways and doors, echoing Dan Graham a little.

Zipora Fried at On Stellar Rays, New York, NY.

Zipora Fried at On Stellar Rays, New York, NY.

The best booth of all the fairs goes to twenty twenty projects, Miami, FL. Believe it or not but the book was turned into a FM transmitter / low power radio station. Re-broadcasting a famous Miami pirate radio station that has since been shut down.

Hanging at the pool, Deauville Beach Resort in between looking at art.

Ellen Harvey, "The Room of Sublime Wallpaper II," 2009 at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, New York, NY.

Ellen Harvey, "The Room of Sublime Wallpaper II," 2009 (detail)

SVA MFA Alum Yamini Nayar was showing these great built enviorments this one entitled "BY A THREAD," 2009, 30 x 40 inches at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY.

Brendan Fowler, on the left side - "Fall 2009 (Flowers Outside Silk Flowers Show in LA 1, Fall 2008 West Coast Tour Poster - C, Flowers on Walk With Andrea/Terry/Cindy 1, 2 Screen Flower Print), 2009, Digital C prints, silk screen ink on paper, frames, plexi, 46.5 x 49 x 5 inches (variable) at Rental Gallery, New York, NY

Tuesday's Art Photo Tweetchat - continuing the discussion on the Photobook. UPDATE

UPDATE: I'm pleased to announce that tonight's #PhotoArtChat we will be graced with our very first guest tweeter, Darius Himes. We are very lucky to be joined by an expert in the field of fine are photography books as well an a great thinker on photography. Please read his bio below and follow along or join us as we talk more about the current and future of the photobook.

Himes' bio:
Darius Himes is an acquiring editor at Radius Books, a non-profit publisher founded in 2007 that publishes books on the visual arts and photography. Prior to that he was the founding editor of photo-eye Booklist, a quarterly magazine devoted to photography books, from 2002–2007. He is also a lecturer, consultant, educator and writer, having contributed to Aperture, Blind Spot, Bookforum, BOMB, PDN, and American Photo. He earned his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University and a Master of Arts in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College. In 2008, he was named by PDN as one of fifteen of the most influential people in photo book publishing.

--
Tonight, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 9-10 PM EST we will be continuing last weeks successful tweet chat on the Future of the Photobook. Last weeks chat went really well with a number of people joining in and adding in their perspective into the mix. We began by discussing the Future of the photobook from a technological perspective and then we began to discuss content. Tonight we will continue to discuss the photobook but this with our guest tweeter publisher Darius Himes. We'll be talking with him about how he see the future of the photobook especially as it pertains to subjects and content.

A few interesting posts have been written since last week.
Catch up with this round up on Livebooks Blog:
12 Hot Thoughts on the Future of Photobooks | RESOLVE - the liveBooks photo blog

These Art Photography Twitter Chats anyone can join in or just read it live by using the hashtag #photoartchat on Twitter. One easier way to transform twitter into a chat room is Tweetchat.com and entering the photoartchat room here: http://tweetchat.com/room/photoartchat.

PS., you should follow OcularOctopus on Twitter, here:http://twitter.com/OcularOctopus and me here: http://twitter.com/harlanerskine

Thinking about the future of the Photobook.

Paul Graham's 12 book called "a shimmer of possibility"

I've been thinking a lot about the future of the photobook lately. Tonight there is going to be a online chat through Twitter. More info on that here: http://www.harlanerskine.com/blog/2009/12/first-art-photography-tweetchat-future.html

There is also an interesting experiment in blogging on the subject on the Livebooks blog, RESOLVE. Their crowd sourced blog collects all the recent posts into one big page. Lots to check out and think over.

All these discussions are an interesting contrast to the Aperture Foundation hosted talk I attended few months ago. The talk featured many different voices. Some of the names on the panel included:

Charlotte Cotton, curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, LACMA, will moderate a discussion with panelists Alex Klein, artist and Curatorial Fellow in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, LACMA; Matt Keegan, artist and editor of North Drive Press; David Reinfurt, graphic designer and co-founder of Dexter Sinister; and Denise Wolff, Aperture Editor. Other special guests include special guests Paul Graham, Darius Himes, and Laurel Ptak.

Sadly, the panel never quite got to the meat of a real discussion. After each panelist gave an introduction there wasn't much time left. Maybe this is where a Twitter based chat can work better? We'll see.

NDP #4 (ed. 1000)

I did manage to learn about some interesting work from the panelists - especially, artist and publisher Matt Keegan's North Drive Press. Their hybrid publishing of magazine / book / art object in limited edition batches is an example of where creative art books are headed. As production gets cheaper, artists are more easily able to produce their own larger edition artworks.

In preparation for tonight's first art photo chat, Todd Walker reminded me of this Words Without Pictures piece by Darius Himes and it's a great starting point for thinking about the photobook going forward from 2010. Darius Himes also wrote a post contribution that's worth checking out.

There are two parts to the future of the photobook; one part is technical and the other is creative. New technologies in printing and reading are emerging. How will they change the way we consume photography? What new creative trends will emerge through these technology developments as well those through developments in art production? These two areas are interdependent and each will change as the other does.

Photobooks, and particularly art photobooks, are unlike their book cousin the novel which may suffer massive declines in paperback book sales because of reading devices like Amazon's Kindle. The enjoyment of the novel, and especially a paperback doesn't greatly diminish when consumed on such a device. Many readers swear by them. I have to agree with Darius Himes when he writes in his essay, "Who Cares About Books?":

And while the sensual experience of receiving and holding a Mac AirBook borders on the rapturous (I almost feel like I'm dissimulating when I enter the Apple shrines scattered around the country), it is still not something I want to read a book on-even if it is something I want to use to send an email about a book I just read.

Books are so archetypal for the modern wo/man that we form nearly permanent bonds with them as teenagers and adults. They are the security blankets and teddy bears of the adult world. Most of us cart our books from state to state, from college dorm to rented apartment to newly purchased home, and lovingly set them up on our shelves as reminders of knowledge acquired and courses and degrees completed, and as familiar companions.

I enjoy books for many reasons and the little subjective memories they pick up along the way is certainly one of them. There are two recent books that might be interesting to discuss.

While the consumption of an artistically produced book would lose much of its presence on a downloaded format, there probably will be rare cases where the end design is for electronic consumption. One particular piece I recently came across is made by Eve Susman and the Rufus Cooperation. It's produced by a new publisher started by Schroeder Romero and Winkleman Gallery called Compound Editions called White on White. The edition is sold as a 6-minute video installed on ARCHOS 5 media tablet.

Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation
A COUNTRY ROAD. A TREE. EVENING. 2009
Original music by Lumendog
Geoff Gersh - guitar and electronics
Adam Kendall - keyboards & electronics
Christof Knoche - bass clarinet & electronics
Bradford Reed - pencilina
6-minute video installed on ARCHOS 5 media tablet
5" x 0.5" x 3.1"
Edition of 100, plus 10 APs
$450.00 for numbers 1-50; SOLD OUT
$600 for numbers 51-100.

While we can't say for certain what the future of the photobook will be, it's exciting to see artists stretching the boundaries.

SELF PROMO ALERT: While you're thinking about photobooks be sure to check out my artist published photobook:

ten convenient stores
I made the 7 x 7 inch booklet with laser paper on a high end xerox laser printer. It is packaged in various convenient store bags. Produced in an artist edition of 20 in 2005 and a bigger edition of 100 in 2005.

Looking forward to tonight's experiment.