Skip to content

The Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science: Public Art Commissions

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Image Credit: Miami Science Museum Collection

In 1949, a group of women decided that kids in Dade County needed to have an enriching museum experience since none was really available. So the Junior League of Miami, a local chapter of the national women’s civic organization, set up in a member’s house off Biscayne and 26th street. They put a goat on the lawn, a beehive in the chimney, and gave tours to the kids that lined up on the sidewalk. Ipso facto, the Miami Science Museum was born.

These humble beginnings have given way to a maximalist vision for what the Museum will be. Relocating from its current site in the lush expanse across from Vizcaya, it will reopen downtown in 2015 as the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science in “Museum Park,” which will also house the new Pérez Art Museum Miami. Not only will it be bigger, more centrally located, and built with sustainable architectural practices – it will also be a place where art can live.

Kevin Arrow is an artist who for the last fifteen years has held the position of Head Registrar and Exhibition Coordinator at MOCA North Miami where he also curated “Abstract Cinema and Technology,” “Miami Works,” and “Optic Nerve,” editions 1 through 3. Earlier this year Arrow was hired by the Miami Science Museum as Art and Collection Manager. His primary role, besides maintaining the 55,000+ objects that the Museum holds, is  focused on initiating the public arts commission for the new building. The commission is meant to broaden the Museum’s scope to include contemporary art, in the recognition that art and science have shared a bed for millennia and that new paths are being blazed that fuse the two.

The work will be displayed outside the grand four-acre building, and will showcase what Arrow hopes to be a collection of local, national, and international artists. The only specifics for the proposals are that they embrace the overarching themes of the Museum, which are “People, Planet, and Prosperity.” The artists that plan to enter should feel free to interpret this theme “openly and broadly.”

Arrow, himself an artist who works fervently in the areas of collecting and the collector mentality, has already begun integrating arts programming at the Museum of Science. He recently held a screening of science fiction, astronomy, and experimental films all on the 16mm format, with accompanying live “musical interventions.” With more shows on the way, including an audio-visual timeline of Kraut Rock in the planetarium, his goal is to both push the Miami Science Museum closer to the burgeoning art scene, and to attract the crowds of said scene to the Museum.

During Art Basel on December 7 and 8, 2012, the Miami Science Museum will host an open house so that anyone can come in and get information on the commissioning process and details on the new building. It’ll be hosted at the Miami Beach Public Library, located at 2100 Collins Avenue, from 10AM to 5PM. You can also contact Arrow directly at karrow (at) miamisci (dot) org or visit http://www.miamisci.org/publicartcommissions/.

Image Credit: Grimshaw Architects.

This post was contributed by Rob Goyanes.

Related Posts

Filed in Reviews | | Comments (0)

UNNATURAL at Bass Museum

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Hilja Keading, The Bonkers Devotional, 2007-2009. Four-channel HD video installation, sound 13:20 minutes. Cameraman: James Zucal. Courtesy of the artist.

UNNATURAL, the current exhibition at the Bass Museum is a richly visual examination of art and the natural environment through a variety of contrived or artificial devices meant to mirror the complex relationship human beings maintain with their natural environment. Although this is a particularly beautiful exhibition that is nicely lit (against a dark grey instead of white background), the work here intends to go beyond the usual sublime and beautiful responses to Nature.

Over the centuries, as Humans have developed a seeming dominance over Nature, we have allowed ourselves to imagine that Nature serves us, perhaps in a way that parallels the Earth-centric, and Euro-centric concepts that once seemed so obvious. However as the consequences of our misunderstanding and consequent mistreatment of Nature inevitably come into focus, we realize that Nature is not in fact a function of the Human Species; rather that we are, and always have been, a function of Nature.

Curated by Bass guest-curator Tami Katz Freiman, this exhibition’s artistic selection manages to live up to anyone’s expectations of a show that proffers awesome beauty and sublime power as fundamental in our response to Nature. It also manages to reflect the primordial, the apocalyptic, the cosmic, and the terrifying aspects that Nature can evoke in its most thoughtful and creative manifestation: we Humans.

The Press Release for the exhibit identifies: “…romantic, conceptual, poetic, sensual, and ecological conceptions of nature primarily through video and photography….which question conventional means and methods of representing the natural world…and thus reflect a cultivated, synthetic, manipulated, nature….” And of course, the thoughts begin to turn on themselves: the human response to Nature has, in all it s forms been one that is most convenient for our intellectual, cultural and social purposes. What we call ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ is entirely relative: synthetic material is derived from natural material after all; whether it s high fructose corn syrup, meth-amphetamyne, or nuclear waste: it’s really just a question of how much something has been manipulated by humans into something else conveniently or hideously derivative.

So this exhibition, which includes 25 artists form all over, offers a wide variety of responses and materials and media in the process. Blaine de Saint Croix’s maquette-like ruined swamp, suspended conveniently at table height seems to reflect the human-centered view of Nature best: at best a lab for our experimentation, convenience, and exploitation, at worst, our play thing.

Video and photography dominate the show, and the video of US artist Hilja Keading was the particularly absorbing. ‘BonkersDevotional’ is a 13-minute documentation of the slim, comely artist interacting with a 400 lb. brown bear in a bedroom. The video uses close ups and slow-mo camera work to help the viewer comprehend the inherent threat the bear poses. The artist’s struggle to appear un-afraid even though she is subtly on the verge of terror, contrasts sharply with the bear’s self-indulgent almost sybaritic mood of careless, almost sleepy interest in his human roomate. The tension in this simple situation is simultaneously comical, terrifying and transfixing; it’s references to human sexuality, vulnerability, intimacy, fear, and brutality are immediate and vivid reminders that we encounter ‘Nature‘ every time we encounter our own, or a fellow creature’s sexuality: that that s just how close up and personal our actual relation to ‘nature’ is no matter how much we try to paper over it.

Sigalit Landau DeadSee, 2005. Digital HD video, silent 11:39 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

In a rather more poetic video, by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau, we see a slowly unwinding string of watermelon in the Dead Sea, evoking the passage of time, the unwinding of Nature’s processes and purposes, the sense of complex order and inevitability that an understanding of Nature invariably confirms.

Meirav Heiman and Yossi Ben Shoshan Sperm Whale, 2009. Four-channel HD video installation, sound 216 1/2 x 521 5/8 x 194 7/8 inches. Courtesy of the artists. Thanks: The Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Nadav Smulian and the Israeli Fund for Video Art and Experimental Cinema.

Another stand-out: The giant sperm whale video, projected on a large projecting corner showing sync’d front and side views of the life-sized whale that creates the illusion that the giant creature is suspended in a huge tank before us. In fact, Meirav Heiman and Yossi Ben Shoshan, also Israeli, generated the scarred gracefully moving whale digitally: his image, projected in 3 carefully sync’d but independent sources, has no relation to an actual whale. So here the recognition that what you see might have no connection to reality, no matter how real it looks is central to a lot of highly technical expertise and labor.

Yehudit Sasportas, The Lightworkers, 2010. Two-channel HD video installation, sound 10 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and Eigen + Art Leipzig / Berlin.

Another interesting video work is Yehudit Sasportas’ who’s full wall video of a swamp outside Hamburg Germany, erupts into sores of burning almost bubbling , glowing light; as if the earth is alive, or at least haunted, scarred by it’s history: the swamp is symbol of primordial memory that seems to contain secrets that refuse to disappear, of sins that are yet to be punished. In fact the Piece references German Holacaust atrocities of murdered Jews (the artist is again Israeli) as well as Israeli attempts to re forrest land seized from Palestinians by Israeli’s. Whether we bury them or not, our dead return to our earth, and this video evokes the sense of memory, of sanctity, of knowledge, that we project unto the natural landscape.

Gilad Ratman, The 588 Project, 2009. Two-channel HD video installation, sound, 8:11 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Another video, this one a bit more humorous, if not without it’s own primordial and dark overtones, is Gilad Ratman’s 8-minute Piece on the mud bathers of Arkansas USA. Apparently people like to take off their clothes and cavort in mud pools there, breathing through plastic tubes so they can submerge themselves completely. It’s scatalogical and sensual, and really a superb example of the sheer variety of ways people respond viscerally to the earth, perhaps trying to re-connect with an Earth-mother.

Ori Gersht, Falling Bird, 2008. Digital HD film, sound 5:53 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

Ori Gersht’s video ‘Falling Bird’ seductively beautiful riff on the history of nature as a theme of art, uses a 16th century ‘Nature Morte’, (which means ‘Still Life’ in French), painting as the central device, is not without it s own dark references to decline, death and decomposition.

Samantha Salzinger, Untitled 1, 2011 inkjet print, 32 x 44 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Samantha Salzinger’s series of photos, purportedly of ‘Natural’ scenes that look weird and suspicious, are in fact dioramas made by hand by, the artist, out of all sorts of ‘non-natural’ material.

Samantha Salzinger, Rural South Dakota, 2008. Inkjet print, 40 x 50 inches. Collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz, Fort Lauderdale.

Once again, contrived, man made renditions of nature; often as strange, beautiful and powerful as the real thing articulate the central issue of acute disconnect on a planet where the people making the most important decisions are nowadays completely removed from the sources of their food, the vagaries of climate, the intricate exchanges and cycles that maintain the fragile balances of Nature.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Dancing Figures. Oil on canvas. French, circa 1660.

Arguably, when one considers naturalist artists like Albert Bierstadt, or even Romantics like Constable or Claude Lorrain, the sublime and Arcadian tradition would seem to be intact: even when the work is at it s most artificial, it maintains that sense of awe and beauty, even if, some artists’ work like Salzinger, or Uri Shapira’s microscopic-looking creations seem almost mocking of the subject of Nature s beauty.

The more apocalyptic view of Nature like Sasportas’ swamp, or Hilja Keading’s encounter with the bear, mentioned above, hark back to artists like Winslow Homer (‘The Gulf Stream’) or John Stuart Curry (‘Tornado Over Kansas’). The more transcendent mystical response to Nature notably depicted by Turner or Van Gogh (‘Starry Night’).

Winsow Homer, The Gulf Stream. Oil on canvas. American, circa 1880.

John Stuart Curry, Tornado Over Kansas. Oil on canvas. American, circa 1900.

J.M.W. Turner, Heidelberg. Oil on canvas. English, circa 1846.

Whether we’ve learned anything about our relationship with Nature other than how to represent it in video and manipulated photography, is a much bigger question; one that the show rather more generally brings again to the fore, if it doesn’t actually answer it.

Man-made renditions of Nature are old: cave paintings of animals, idealized Japanese or English Gardens, both meant to mirror the complex asymmetry of Nature in cleaned-up form. But these forms used the actual trees and rocks of Nature. Now in the Age of the virtual, the simulacral, it’s less clear: using a patch of land next to nobleman’s house or a Buddhist Temple to construct a re-interpretation of nature seems harmless and potentially interesting. In the era of genetically modified food, ranch raised (and fecal-fed) seafood, cloud seeding and de-salinization of seawater, forestation projects, water reclamation, etc., should we expect artificial trees that simulate photosynthesis?

Everywhere we look, Humans are re-organizing the fundamental structure of the planet’s systems to manage it’s ever-expanding population; and experts claim that without these innovations, we can’t feed or provide water for the planet’s people.

So the inevitable human-centric treatment of Nature continues, even though many people fully recognize that we are not the masters of nature. And this exhibition surveys the relationship between humans and nature in its current variation, according to a wide variety of artists[.]

UNNATURAL at Bass Museum runs through November 4th.

This post was contributed by David Rohn.

Related Posts

Filed in Reviews | | Comments (1)

Locust Projects’ Tenth Annual Smash and Grab Fundraiser

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Locust Projects, 3852 North Miami Avenue, Miami, FL 33127. Image courtesy of Locust Projects.

What: Locust Projects’ Tenth Annual Smash and Grab Fundraiser

When: October 27, 2012 6:30-9:30pm

Where: 3852 North Miami Avenue, Miami, FL 33127

Preview exhibition: October 20 – 26, 2012

Each year Locust Projects’ “Smash and Grab” fundraiser brings contemporary artists and collectors together for their support. Part raffle, part kickin’ party, the event, now in its 10th year, attracts a seminal crowd of South Florida’s art community. The atmosphere as attendees creating their wish lists mingle with the artists spectating the competitive hubbub, each waiting anxiously for the raffle to begin, has been electric in previous years.Participants buzzing with anticipation as their raffle numbers are called at random, inspires a race for work. Its a fun way to get artwork into collections, connect with Miami’s art community, and of course support Locust Projects for which the “Smash and Grab” event is their largest source of revenue for the year.

This year, local, national and international artists including Carlos Betancourt, Justin Beal, Sean Dack, Karl Haendel, Marie Lorenz, Jillian Mayer, Emmett Moore, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Agustina Woodgate have contributed over 115 works.

“The quality of the artwork we received this year truly demonstrates that artists and galleries recognize the importance of an organization such as Locust Projects in the community. We greatly appreciate their support and can, because of their generous donations, move into our 15th year stronger than ever,” says Locust Projects Executive Director, Chana Sheldon.

Locust Projects is Miami’s longest running non profit art space, set apart from other venues by a dedication to experimental site-specific installations. 2013 will mark their 15thanniversary.

Purchase tickets for Locust Projects’ “Smash and Grab” fundraiser online:

http://www.locustprojects.org/events/event/locust-projects-tenth-annual-smash-and-grab-fundraiser/

Artwork Raffle Ticket (admits 2): $450 / $425 Locust Projects Member

General admission (per person): $50

For the complete art catalog please visit: http://locustprojects.org/smash-and-grab-2012/

This post was contributed by Emma Galler.

Related Posts

Filed in News | | Comments (0)

This Might Take Some Time To Process: “Spatial Recognition,” A Show of 3-Dimensional Photography by Mark Diamond

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Mark Diamond. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond.

The brain inside your skull is a complicated mess composed of smaller messes, each of them equipped with separate, yet cross-functional functions. It routes blood, electricity, and chemicals through a molecularly expansive network that you and the rest of the inquiring human race will never fully comprehend, but which certain shadowy powers will continue to manipulate. Attach two optic nerves and some eyeballs Et Voilà, you get a moving picture of the visual world. Or at least, one small slice of it.

Mark Diamond is an artist in Miami whose recent show, “Spatial Recognition,” at the Swampspace Gallery, showcased a year’s worth of efforts 3 Dimensional photography. The 3-D images were made from Diamond’s personal photographs of artists and musicians that he’s had the fortune of meeting and conversing, and include a fingerpicking Les Paul (co-produced with Clayton Munsey), an illustration of R. Buckminster Fuller, and Kenny Scharf taking a piss on a Wynwood Wall. There are also 3D renderings of sculptures, paintings, and other works by artists local and not, as well as some natural shots of begonias, purple cabbage, and some fractal cactus – but the portraits are without a doubt the most mesmerizing.

Les Paul. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond and Clayton Munsey.

R. Buckminster Fuller. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond.

Kenny Scharf. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond.

These 2D versions are flat imposters of their real selves; it’s impossible to represent them on this screen because of the necessity of light and movement in modulating the thousands of optic cells on each of these prints, which creates the holographic effect of movement. Alongside the portraits, there were several viewfinders built into the walls: binoculars you must more-or-less cross your eyes for in order to see the foreground, background, and grounds in between. One shows a series of bucolic landscape shots taken aerially from a helicopter over Miami, another shows a Miami Beach home that’s been preserved just as it was left when the owners lived in the 1960’s.

Visitor and view finder. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond

There were in total 250 works present, but if you include the number of images required to concoct each 3D work, the number is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000. Each has a unique degree of depth and range of motion, and all require the viewer to come in close, back off, reorient, pace back-and-forth, and strain (but then relax) the retinas. All the people I observed observing these images seemed transfixed, or at least amused. The subjects and styles straddle a kitschiness that Diamond himself acknowledges, but for him, what’s important is the play between the 3 dimensional subject, optics, and the audience. What follows are GIFs showing the series of images used in a 3D image of Diamond’s, so you get an idea of the effect (it’s impossible, though, to get the full monty without seeing it in person):

Sam Moree. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond.

Elvis Keel. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond.

Many of the works are proofs that are still in progress, and they represent the 4,000-plus hours of experimentation that Diamond has conducted over the past year with a 100 year old 3-D technique, now gone digital, that on the scope of its possibility he has only begun to engage with. It’s known variously as a lenticular, xographic, or parallax panoramagramic process, and it comes on the heels of Diamond’s 40+ years of tinkering with the three-dimensional. The process of making these images – combining 3D photography and holography – is one that’s rarely been attempted. Though Diamond told me, “If you wanna know how something is done, I will tell you precisely how it’s done,” there are hints that he is working in a field shrouded in alchemical mystery and Cold War-Era intrigue, and suspicions that he may be working as a Double or even Triple Agent were perked when it came to light that he “traveled to study with a Russian programmer in hopes of acclimating to the software he had written for creating these images.”

Diamond got his start in the 3D art world when he saw his first hologram at a Coconut Grove Arts Festival in the early 70s at 12 years old. At 16 he worked as a teenaged photographer working for a radical leftist news services. He worked for an organization called the Liberation News Service and did things like take pictures of Jerry Rubin and reported on the RNC Convention in ’72 in Miami, further evidence that he may in fact be churning out Manchurian Candidates for this election year. Really though, he comes from a family of photographers, who “told stories through pictures,” and his passion for crystallized moments is obvious in the show.

I visited Diamond at his home in El Portal. It’s a well-kept abode filled with art on the walls, stringed instruments and amplifiers, a very well stocked library, and a studio fitted with cameras, pneumatic sliders, and caches of papers. His home and workspace are manifestations of a mind constantly at work, one that makes dizzying leaps between histories of art, semiotics, material sciences, optics, and sociopolitical musing. He unloads references with the authorial sweep of a professor, though he has no formal training. He is, as he said, “self-taught,” and “a student of human visual perception…” He’s got a radicalism wrought from his start as a political photog, and exalts the Duchampian notion that “art is whatever the artist says it is,” and “recommend(s) that kids don’t go to art school.”

Bart Bakes Batter Boy. Image Courtesy: Mark Diamond

Diamond, who has the curly hair and humor of a George Carlin and the white mustachioed learnedness of someone close to an Einstein, is a nocturnal creature that works in the silence of night, laboring in a laser lab that requires a near-zero amount of sonic vibrations from cars or people in order to execute the 3D imaging process correctly. His inviting warmth is infectious, as is his zeal for the visual world around us. What he claims to want is for people to stop and see things, to get past or forget for a moment the normal, everyday logging and cross-correlating of objects, shapes and colors that we’ve evolved to perform, and be able to appreciate the verisimilitude before us, and the furious work our brain does right behind our eyes[.]

“Spatial Recognition” closed today at SwampSpace in Miami’s Design District.

This post was contributed by Rob Goyanes, winner of the 2012 Miami Writer’s Prize.

Related Posts

Filed in Reviews | | Comments (2)

Tony Goldman: December 6, 1943 – September 11, 2012

Monday, September 17, 2012

Image credit Michael Bryant of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Everyone dies, but not everyone lives,” said Joey Goldman, Tony Goldman’s surviving son, to a crowd of yarmulked men and done-up women, a crowd mostly finely attired except for the casual rags of some artist-types. They gathered at the golden-domed Temple Emanu-El for the elder Goldman, who died on September 11, 2012 (the significance was not lost on the speakers: Néstor Torres, a Grammy Award-winning jazz flautist and friend, said that when Goldman died, it was as though “100,000 men had died.”). The rows of pews were skinny to the point that whenever someone had to leave to the aisle, those with longer legs had to stand up. “The world knows you were here,” he went on.

Tony Goldman was a developer that didn’t want to be known as such. He, along with his tight-knit, familial real estate empire, Goldman Properties, bought dozens of properties at break-neck speeds in New York’s SoHo district in the 80’s, on Miami’s Ocean Drive and Philly’s 13th street in the 90’s, and then in Wynwood in 2004 (his most recent project was located in downtown Boston). His model of urban renovation consisted of a gentrification-lite approach that sought out decaying industrial enclaves and moved in hip restaurants and spaces for artists to live and work as a way to attract commercial business. Not satisfied with just renting out space to artists, he integrated the arts into the neighborhoods he helped change, as evident in the Bowery Mural in SoHo and Wynwood Walls. The murals illustrate Goldman’s near monopolistic effects on both hoods, and are a reminder that sweeping change from one place (or person) can sometimes spur homogeneity.

Recounted by many as a visionary, Goldman was praised for his ability to see the manifest future in seedy frontierlands, but he was also heralded as an “ardent preservationist,” highlighted by his involvement in the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Not content with urban renewal based on older paradigms, Goldman also helped fund and found the Goldman Infill Studio with Olivia Ramos at FIU. The architecture studio focuses on platforms for renewable energy implemented throughout buildings themselves, and as Ramos told me, was the first of it’s kind to require “design based on financial calculations.” Student architects in the studio worked on such designs for Wynwood, which, with Goldman’s passing, is heading in an uncertain direction. Ramos commented that there’s going to be many changes in the neighborhood in the next 6 months, and that Goldman’s “vision for it will definitely live on” through the developers that are coming in.

Tony Goldman ushered in an art epicenter in Miami and did it elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard. His passing, at the too-young age of sixty-eight, will have ramifications unknown, though his Goldman Properties will surely continue on in his footsteps. The one thing certain now, is that he’ll be bringing his stylish magnetism to that ever-growing, great-weather development in the sky[.]

This post was contributed by Rob Goyanes, winner of the Miami Writer’s Prize 2012.

Related Posts

Filed in News | | Comments (0)

“Luscious didn’t get me” – Nick Klein and the Search for Sincerity Amidst Unbearable Heartache

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Image courtesy of Nick Klein.

We sat at a table outside a bar whose walls on the inside were layered with crappy, faux-punk ephemera. A tall, hatted man in grey mounted his motorcycle and kick started it, letting out a squall that turned all patrons’ swimming heads. He sat there solemnly, his eyes fixed on the bar’s entrance. “I feel that guy’s pain,” Nick started. “It sucks to be that guy when everybody’s looking at you.” This surprised me, you’d think most bikers would relish in this display? “Nah. It’s different when you’re cruising by. But waiting for someone like that and disturbing everyone and being super noticed for it, that’s some Freudian shit that’ll fuck with your head.”

Nicholas Barry Klein was born in Lake Worth, Florida on September 22nd, 1987 and has lived in Miami since 2008. His work includes sculpture, painting, performance, sound, and combinations thereof. A New World School of the Arts dropout, Klein has worked as a studio assistant at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery and Locust Projects, had a solo show at Chris Miro gallery, and is currently one of 46 artists showing in Salon de Notre Societe, a group show at Primary Projects. The East-facing windows of his studio at the Wahab Construction building off Calle Ocho offer a view of the top halves of Brickell’s buildings and I-95. Presently he’s working on several paintings, music projects, and selling the majority of his possessions so that he can move to New York City. Over the course of several weeks, Klein and I spent time talking and exchanging emails and texts about the difficulty of working with explosives, space highways, and the ‘one thing you can’t not do.’

Klein’s art in physical mediums is spare, both in number and characteristically. His sculptures are crude and can seem like unfinished construction projects. Recent paintings include triangular, monochromatic abysses and inchoate scrawls. The imagery is both product of, and response to, the limited resources of a young, broke artist. It’s reactionary to the privilege of art making, as Klein references his spray-painted plywood panels as ‘fake fine art.’ In some ways (many if you think that the following is generally true) the ideas are more important than the objects. The following is Klein’s artist’s statement for Primary Projects, which was never used:

“You spend time in the studio researching the contradictions of human creative output over the history of man and end up distracted. You spend time at the McDonalds on South Beach – both of them – at two or three in the morning every couple of evenings to re-evaluate your perception of how you stand up in the city you live in. You make it a point to not answer the phone, someone promises you money, someone promises you not enough money, and someone else promises you nothing. You work in galleries or you don’t work in galleries to solidify an angle that people can pull at you from. Your friends try to save you and find you work in retail; you work construction for their fathers companies, you call your Dad to see if he has any connections to anyone. You romanticize your friendships; nobody calls unless they want to smoke. You take the money from the jobs you flake on and you buy as much paint as you can and fill your lungs up with the aerosol and get existential. Your narcissism engulfs your practice and you don’t hang around the studio so much anymore. You’re at the McDonalds again, or the Checkers, and the phone is ringing and you get a voicemail from somebody who used to work with somebody else and they tell you this and that and you go back to the studio and somebody really ‘gets’ something in the work. You make a bunch of garbage that you know is garbage and think maybe people will buy so you can get out of Miami and no matter what you do, the joke is on you. Poor thing.”

Image courtesy of Zack Balber.

Image courtesy of Zack Balber.

Conversationally, Klein moves between dead-serious assertions and humor that can be both self-flagellating and corrosive. He’s a cherubic, self-professed Homer Simpson who has no qualms with admitting to his flaws, or with declaring the moral and/or aesthetic bankruptness of certain others. He rails hard against careerists that seem bent on selfish advancement. “The tendency for people [in the art world] is to analyze how you will play into their upward mobility.” The social atmospherics of the Miami art world come under Nick’s radar as well. “Often I am naive and want to make friends and pick brains, but I learned after the last few years not to expect people to acknowledge you after meeting them, or that they’ll look you in the eyes during conversation.” With Nick, the realness begins immediately and is relentless, but he maintains a composure that is measured and well articulated, most of the time.

Image courtesy of Nick Klein, http://nickbklein.tumblr.com/

Klein makes his concerns with the relationship between art and wealth very clear.  When I asked him, mostly for the effect of his response, what purpose art serves in people’s lives, he said, “The audience is beholden to its broader interests beyond merely looking at art. A million shitty galleries exist in Wynwood and four, maybe five, I personally care to see. Mega rich collectors hold personal shrines to their leisure capital investments and everyone seems to love going to them. I don’t know what purpose it serves in people’s lives.” While he may be too quick to generalize, he’ll contrarily admit to the necessity of $$$ in simply surviving, and in creating things that have a transformative, redeeming impact on a usually and rightfully depressed human spirit.

Image courtesy of the author.

Image courtesy of the author.

Image courtesy of the author.

Klein’s recent sculptures and paintings reflect these weary, critical views and openly mock the art market that he needs one foot in. But when you compare his visual work to his performance and music, you get a sense of the shuttling between hopeless cynicism and the positive, head-above-water thinking that’s going on in Klein’s head.  His performances have a grace that testifies to the influence of his parents, both of whom are artists that “revel in the athleticism of dance.” His boditude is hulking but with a subtle elegance, he’s a big dude with studly poise and a deep sense of rhythm. This doesn’t only come off during performance, it’s apparent in his general affect. There’s an ambient awareness of the self – a stoically straight posture, the big breaths and shakes of the head before he speaks his mind – yet it doesn’t come off as a front[i].

This consciousness of the body is not only a confidence-booster; it’s also a curse. On one of our first meetings, we talked about the reality of each of us having a parent that’s experienced a serious stroke (his mom, my dad) who was then radically altered by it. This carries over into his work, and he said that he “thinks about the body breaking down, and letting that be broadly metaphorical and insightful.”

Video courtesy of the author.

Klein’s favorite book is ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life,’ the holy writ of keeping a fiercely independent, punk-historical ethos about music. He regularly plays as an auxiliary percussionist for Cop City/Chill Pillars, who’ll be releasing their highly anticipated follow-up to the lauded Held Hostage on Planet Chill, titled Hosed. It builds on the band’s wonky creepery and sounds like little else Out There. Klein also beats the tubs for Universal Expansion, a free funkadelia outfit also set to release a full-length.

Besides his involvement in more formal bands, Klein also produces solo work as Nick Klein. He just finished recording a split with the Miami-based, dreaded techno phenom Dim Past. Klein’s noisy and highly-danceable loops fit snugly against DP’s cold, bleeping elucidations and warm oceanic pulses. His palatable enthusiasm for these projects illustrates the fact that music seems to be the thing that keeps him from staring at the darkness for too long.

Image courtesy of Lazaro Rodriguez.

He enjoys living at General Practice (a nearly windowless spooker of a house in Little Haiti that functions as a gallery and show space, which hosts some of the most paradoxically best yet worst parties in the city) and says that he’s “been able to work through a lot of ideas outside of a commercial or academic context because of it.” I asked Carlos Rigau, who runs the space, what he thought of him, and he remarked on Klein’s inability to do the dishes and take out the trash. To which, Klein retorted, “FUCK YOU, I TAKE OUT THE TRASH ALL THE TIME.”

Image courtesy of the author.

Klein is leaving Miami for New York at the end of the month. About this, he said that he’s “going to New York City to see more things in life. It’s a little cliché and annoying to make the pilgrimage up there for a new life. If I don’t like being up there, I will just be somewhere else soon.” He’s uncertain about his future, but assured in what he wants.

“If people have ambition and are into the careerist approach, then at my age and level of participation, I have nothing that I can say that really matters. What I do notice though is a trend throughout history of artists just being in the studio or applying the practice of their work to whichever contexts they need to, and if done honestly, and well enough, trends eventually will sway to where your work can fit. I would like to do whatever I have to do to be able to continue making work, so long as I never have to compromise my interest in making work in the first place. What will make me happy is to eventually just have a stable place to make work from as years go on. Maybe people will like it, and most times, chances are they won’t. I will be happy securely making things and figuring out new ideas for myself.”

Nick described his own artistic process as a stumbling toward conclusions. He makes plain the need that people have for some sort of distraction, no matter what it has to be, from the radiating pain that will surface too often if not tended to. That deep-rooted tyranny of feeling out of control, you could call it. His work and words address the tedium of working within your interests and among others who share those interests, and the back-and-forth sorts of feelings that come with that[.]

The Struggle of Working Within the Confines of Your Own Head, courtesy of the author and Nick Klein.

[i] Sure, we all have our moments of frontin, but his criticism of others and of things in general often sit next to self-decrying, deprecating criticisms of himself. Though one can never be sure of true intentions and the sincerity of another (especially in professional settings), it seems that this is not just a rhetorical maneuver for legitimizing himself. Put another way, it’s not that he talks shit, it’s that he has a near-pathological honesty that’s actually quite refreshing. Unless of course, you’re on the wrong side of it, in which case, it sucks to be you.

 

This post was contributed by Rob Goyanes, winner of the Miami Writer’s Prize 2012.

Related Posts

Filed in Interviews, Muse, Reviews, Videos | | Comments (3)