Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 08:12AM First performance on his home turf in Brooklyn in many, many years. Congratulations to Ed Patuto and everyone at Issue Project Room for making the performance a reality.
Cecil Taylor live at Issue Project Room May 19, 2012
Cecil Taylor live at Issue Project Room May 19, 2012
Use the search box in the right column for previous posts on Cecil Taylor.
Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 12:10PM 
Graceful and gritty.
A dysfunctional family as dissimilar and familiar as my own.
I know these characters and yet (like all of us) they remain unknowable.
Poetry twists around concise prose.
Katrina is the backdrop. Medea a recurrent metaphor.
Time is the scarcest currency. Mine was not wasted.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 11:24AM 
Source: The Whitney Museum; Alicia Hall Moran and Jason MoranThis year's soon-to-close Whitney Biennial has featured more performances than in any year past.
Curators Elizabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders made many smart curatorial choices including dancer Sarah Michelson (recently awarded the Melva Bucksbaum Award, bestowed every two years to one of the artists in the Whitney Biennial. Michelson will receive a $100,000 grant).
However, their boldest and most imaginative choice was vocalist Alicia Hall Moran and her composer/pianist husband Jason Moran.
Jason never dissapoints. He's a consummate musician incorporating countless cultural, historical, political and artistic sources into coherent sonic tapestries. If you were to look at his mashup of ideas on paper you'd say "nah, ain't gonna work." But it does. The output transcends the inputs. It's an alchemical experience.
"During BLEED, past video collaborations with Glenn Ligon, Joan Jonas, Kara Walker, and Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser—and a new video by the cultural historian Maurice Berger—will be continuously screened on the fourth floor."
The complete schedule is here.
My previous thoughts on Jason Moran can be found here.
Robert Bielecki
Sketch of Jason Moran by Agi Z. at the Whitney Museum, 05/09/2012
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 10:26PM 
Pianists Craig Taborn, Amina Claudine Myers, guest of honor Cecil Taylor, and Vijay Iyer; Executive Director of Harlem Stage, Patricia Cruz; and poet Amira Baraka moments ago at the conclusion of the first evening of "Cecil Taylor: A Celebration of the Maestro."
Robert Bielecki
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 09:13PM 
Source: The New Yorker, May 14, 2012
Artist Sarah Sze, fresh off an exhibition at the Asia Society and recently chosen to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennial is featured in the May 14, 2012 issue of The New Yorker's Innovators Issue.
"What does the Gutai manifesto say?" she [Sze] said referring to a Japanese art movement from the nineteen-fifties. "Decay is just the material's revenge for being extracted from the earth."
Monday, May 7, 2012 at 06:30PM Emerging North Carolina raised painter Damain Stamer, currently enjoying his inaugural solo NYC exhibition Southern Comfort at Freight & Volume until May 19th, is voyaging across an aesthetic trail through the South's idylic terrain and cultural underbelly. He abstracts picturesque vistas provoking recognition that there's a labyrinth of meaning behind historicized notions of Southern landscape.
His compositions intrigue, and though the balance of elements in his oil on panel paintings can be uneven, he shows promise.
There's a single video work on display, Down in the Den, a colloboration with artist George Jenne. It demands to be seen. Its Southern copulation of beauty with ugly is like watching a car crash with no survivors on a cloudless sunny day with the temperature set at 75; picture perfect and fatal.
Although I haven't a chance in hell of adeptly recreating the superbly written and spoken text, I'll give it a whirl because it deserves to be heard and feels good in my mouth in the most devilish way.
CLICK TO PLAY (rough draft)
I own the work because it deserves to be owned.
From the Press Release
Damain Stamer & George Jenne, Down in the Den, 2012In the video room this month we are pleased to present a collaboration by Damian Stamer and George Jenne, titled Down in the Den. This 5-minute HD video installation serves as a portal between two disparate worlds and invokes the uncanny disorientation of witnessing spaces that are simultaneously familiar and foreign. A minimalist basement den frames a monolithic video projection, a window into a southern gothic terra incognita that swings fluidly between lucid serene landscapes and the relentless detail of a grim microcosm underfoot. The work is made in the spirit of Jean Luc Godard’s decidedly low-tech science fiction film, Alphaville and the suburban grotesqueries of John Cheever’s short fiction.Monday, May 7, 2012 at 01:25PM Abolish art fairs. Yeah, it's a tired story, everyone chants the same mantra and we all keep attending. It's a sick compulsion.
There is no art community. There are a million art communities. There are too many artists and galleries and arts organizations chasing too much money that's concentrated in too few pockets. The system operates with all the grace of a ceaseless political campaign - in Romania. It artificially inflates the cost of art at every price point. It's an ugly viscious cycle of which I am complicit.
I have two modest suggestions - neither particularly original - for restoring a modicum of sanity for those of us who don't engage with art as an "asset class," who could care less about "status" and don't sell the art we acquire:
1) Eliminate Armory and replace it with Frieze. Frieze understands the importance of the art viewing environment: natural-like lighting, spacious layout with plenty of places to sit, a good selection of local restaurants, and a decently curated mix of blue-chip and unfamilair international / emerging artists. (Smartly, no "Modern" section although they are introducing it as a satellite component to Frieze London in October.)
Their NYC debut was a success. (And fuck anyone who didn't feel like trudging out to Randall's Island. I hope they got their Pradas good and muddy.)
As a side note, over the last few years, the Pulse experience has gone from bad to worse to intolerable. It's dead. Shut it down. NADA? Precisely. Umm, ok, not exactly. It's not on life support but neither is it the welcome outlier it once was. The farther it strays from the center, the more interestng it'll remain.
2) Require all gallery owners, sales directors, assistants, registrars - christ! might as well include installers and secretaries - to attend a Dale Carnegie course or two (or three or four), compel everyone to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the art in the gallery, bonus them on the frequency and quality of interaction with visitors - whether they're in jeans and a t-shirt or a three piece suit, and though I'm loathe to say it because it cuts harshly against my grain, restrict internet access. If I walk into one more gallery where the screens are on Facebook and the gallerist's gaze never rises above the screen, I'm gonna piss on the monitor.
A few articles released pre and post the fairs this weekend worth your attention:
On an Island, Worker Bees Fill a Long White Hive, Holland Carter, NY Times, 05/04/2012
Outside, after I saw the fair, I thought of the poor, the crazy and the criminal who once, whether they wanted to or not, called Randalls Island home. Their ghosts must be looking at that big white worm of a tent, at the Wall Street suits, and at this stuff called art that you can do nothing with but buy and sell, with wondering distrust. I’m looking at it all that way myself.
How To Make It In The Art World, The New Rulebook, Jerry Saltz & others, New York Magazine, 04/30/2012
(I have a soft spot for NY Mag but this was a totally useless cover story - with a few interesting exceptions)
These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus. Jerry Saltz
All Is Fairs, Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 05/07/2012
Even with the best of mutual good will, a spiritual gulf steadily widens between the people who buy art and those who only love it.
Friday, May 4, 2012 at 10:07AM Third post in a little over a month. With Cecil, too much is never enough - still a force of nature at 83.
He's performing solo twice this month. Once in Harlem and once in Brooklyn (first time on his home turf in decades). If you're not already a disciple, now's the time. See you there.
Ben Ratliff writes a reasonably decent article / interview in today's Times.
Performance details here:
Friday, May 4, 2012 at 10:05AM
Bang on a Can 25th Year Celebration, Lincoln Center 04/28/2012
Bang on a Can, that now venerable, yet scrappy institution celebrated its 25th anniversary with a performance at Lincoln Center last Saturday. Founders David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon know that a smart way of paying hommage to the past is to remain adamantly in the present. Boundaries, musical and otherwise be damned.
(Christian Marclay, a kindred spirit, was in exceptionally good form both in his innovative use of video throughout the evening (the mastery of his timing is as thrilling as a good jazz solo) and composition Fade to Slide.
Read The New York Times review here.
Bang on a Can 25th Year Celebration, Lincoln Center 04/28/2012