Re-creating a Lawrence Weiner

Using the helpful instructions provided by Temporary Services, Mike and Audra went to work the other night re-creating a Lawrence Weiner "removal piece." Temporary Services is an amazing organization based in Chicago and working world-wide.

Above is the process of removal in pictures!

Lucas and now Lawrence

Lucas Reiner spoke at his closing salon yesterday to an intimate grouping. Then we took down the show and now are batteries (for the drill) are charging to install "A Lawrence Weiner Salon" with reading areas, a re-creation of a piece from 1968, and a text "drawing." And...an opening performance by Andrew Hurst that will suprise us all!

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE:

Pocket Utopia presents A Lawrence Weiner Salon; a reading room, a re-creation, and a text piece, Opening Fri. Nov. 2nd, 6:00 - 10:00 pm

with opening performance by Andrew Hurst

POCKET UTOPIA, 1037 Flushing Avenue (Bushwick), Brooklyn, NY 11237

Please join us for the opening of A LAWRENCE WEINER SALON
OPENING: Friday, Nov. 2, 6-10pm
DATES: 2 November- 25 November, 2007
DIRECTIONS: Take the L train to Morgan Ave. Exit from the front of train, leave the station on the right and you will be at the corner of Morgan Avenue and
Harrison Place. Walk south on Morgan Ave. crossing Grattan, Thames, and Rock Sts. Turn left at the light onto Flushing Ave. 1037 Flushing is the 4th building from the corner of Morgan Ave. and Flushing Ave.

Open Saturdays and Sundays 12-6 and by appointment, call, 917-400-3869

A LAWRENCE WEINER SALON; a reading room, a re-creation, and a text piece


Pocket Utopia is pleased to organize an experimental salon of conceptual art's key figure Lawrence Weiner. The salon will feature a reading room, a re-creation (“A 36” x 36” Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard From a Wall,” 1968) and a text piece. Weiner has long pursued inquiries into language and art-making and posits a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of the artwork. Here too, the venue or gallery and its relationship to the artist also gets redefined.

By transporting his investigations to Bushwick's Pocket Utopia, the viewer will discover a comfortable and unobtrusive means to read and experience Weiner's work and make their own assumptions about the nature of the art object. Working with the Weiner's grateful acknowledgment , Pocket Utopia democratizes access to his work. Although the artist here is all but invisible, the viewer will be able to see even farther, think a little more and read a lot.

"Excuse me, you have art in your teeth" Closing Salon/Lucas Reiner Talk October 28th @ 4pm

"Excuse me, you have art in your teeth" Closing Salon/Lucas Reiner Talk October 28th @ 4pm

Please join artist Lucas Reiner at Pocket Utopia as he discusses his on-going fascination with trimmed trees -- and the photographs, paintings, drawings, and film that have resulted from this, refreshments served.




above Lucas Reiner, installation view



Directions to POCKET UTOPIA

1037 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, ground floor.

Directions:

Via subway:

1. Take the L train to the Morgan Ave. stop (board the first car in the front of the train).

2. Exit the platform at the front of the train and exit the station on the right and you will be at the corner of Morgan Avenue and

Harrison Place.

3. Walk south on Morgan Ave. crossing Grattan, Thames, and Rock Sts.

4. Turn left at the light onto Flushing Ave.

5. 1037 Flushing is the 4th building from the corner of Morgan Ave. and Flushing Ave.


Via car from Manhattan:

1. Take the Williamsburg Bridge (inside lane) to the Humboldt Street exit.

2. Turn right onto Humboldt Street, go 7 blocks and turn left onto Metropolitan Avenue.

3. Go several blocks and turn right onto Morgan Avenue.

4. Follow Morgan to the point where it become a V, stay to the left, and turn left at the light onto Johnson Avenue.

5. Turn right onto Porter Avenue. Go 5 blocks and turn right onto Flushing Avenue.

Pocket Utopia gets another post-studio artist in resident

I arrived at Pocket Utopia to find Libby Hartle, our artist in resident, hard at work. I sat near her in the back and began emailing out notices for Lucas Reiner's upcoming closing salon that will happen next Sunday, October 28th at 4:00pm.

I finished emailing just in time to welcome Christine Catsifas our other fall post-studio artist in resident on her first day. Christine and Libby will share the small table, the floor, the chairs, a tea, and ideas.

I had to leave the artists at their table and dash off to the lower east side for a Pocket Utopia gallery tour. Pictured above are tour participants at gallery Number 35 and at Orchard. Also pictured is a shot of the sand from Mike Nelson's installation at Essex Market. Mike Nelson's piece definitely set the tone for the tour, which ended with a group visit to Fred Gutzeit’s studio.

Seed Bombs Explode

Megan Whiteford's Green Bomb is exploding! Neighborhood kids stopped by thanks to a planting effort by Trees Not trash lead by the unstoppable Kate Gilliam. I can't wait until spring (even though it feels like July now)!

A visit to Fred Gutzeit’s Studio

On Friday, I visited Fred Gutzeit’s studio where he has been making art since 1970. He also lives there and has remained very engaged in the art community around him while continuing to mine his imaginary worlds. I will lead a tour to his studio after we make our way around some lower east side galleries. We might stop for Chinese food and catch Mike Nelson's installation at Essex Market.

My weekend has been spent at Pocket Utopia listening to the Leaves of Grass passage that accompanies Lucas Reiner's film "Trees." At the moment this is my favorite line, "Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore, now I will you to be a bold swimmer, to jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair."

Matthew Miller reviews Lucas Reiner

Matthew, Pocket Utopia's intern and the "post-studio" artist in resident coordinator and curatorial assistant, has written a review of the current show, Lucas Reiner, below:

At the second ever Pocket Utopia show in Bushwick, a mid-career L.A. artist sheds light on the heavy-handed habits of his city’s municipal tree-trimming efforts.

Over the course of the past few decades, an wide assortment of trees have been imported from exotic international locations to the star-studded concrete desert of L.A. Lucas Reiner, a painter and photographer, takes note of the peculiar, if somewhat perverse, nature of the program. These adopted trees are nourished by the city’s acid rain and limited fertile soil. However, Mother Nature has never been much of a pushover, so many of the exotic transplants blossom into a gorgeous height and fullness despite the poor conditions of city living. Go trees.

Of course, city municipal workers - green thumbs with chainsaws – occasionally roll around pragmatically hacking the hard-nosed trees into overgrown bonsai formations. Reiner is satisfied to document the curious spectacle and integrate it into his art practice.

The show takes a contemporary multi-media format: a short film, a wall-sized computer print, a painting, and an editioned series of small hand-worked gocco prints. Reiner takes up the documentary role in the film (a survey flick of short clips dubbed over with elegant Walt Whitman prose) and the wall print (a banal shot of a tired tree pinned to a neighboring industrial building). The editioned print depicts a tree in litho-black silhouette against the atmospheric backdrop of hand-painted blue and gold hues. However, the centerpiece and strength of the exhibit is the large painting.

The painting is as puzzling as the phenomena of the city’s tree project. Most of the large-scale panel is rigorously worked up from it’s slightly visible underpainting into a texture which nearly evokes a sublime bluish ether, but is upstaged by the decorative surface resolution. The deftly painted tree with its thick branches—slashed and overgrown with new spring leaves—appears stamped onto the stylized ground. The collage idiom and the paint handling create a potent visual tension central to the work. Reiner mediates the molested tree with a setting in which it remains fundamentally displaced. Maybe the city is the only suitable habitat for this exiled tree. Or perhaps this tree is a metaphor, a sort of delegate, for our negotiations with the natural world. Go trees.