Brazen critics of the art establishment William Powhida and Steve Lambert dominated the booth for the Charlie James Gallery (Los Angeles). Perhaps best known for “The Special Edition” (2008), a 14-page fake New York Times newspaper heralding the end of the Iraq War, Lambert's high-watt, blinking signage singed messages such as “Money Laundered” and “Invisible” into your field of vision, even after looking away.

via New York’s Satellite Fairs: Bling, String, and Subversive Things – News – News & Opinion – Art in America.

Pulse New York
General Admission $20, Students and Seniors $15
330 West Street
Thursday, March 4 – Press and VIP Private Preview – 9am – 12pm
Thursday, March 4 – Open to public – 12pm – 8pm
Friday, March 5 – 12pm – 8pm
Saturday, March 6 – 12pm – 8pm
Sunday, March 7 – 12pm – 5pm

Ok first, the audience was actually responding and laughing, but it sounds strange because the only mic is on the stage so it’s difficult to hear. But they were there…. Also, this is taken from a stream, so the quality is as good as it’s going to get – sorry about that.

Excerpted from the Liquid Democracies discussion at Transmediale 10 in Berlin.

Start: Sun, 7.2.2010 – 17:00
End: Sun, 7.2.2010 – 19:00
Location: Auditorium, House of World Cultures, Berlin
Participants: Matteo Pasquinelli (it), Steve Lambert (us), Sascha Lobo (de)
Moderator: Tiziana Terranova (it)

To raise a question about the future always also implies to ask for the actualisation of the political and, in particular, ethical concepts for the society that we live in today. We are about to lose our operational sense for ethics, politics and culture. Rather, we see ourselves confronted with a depersonalised politics and a ‘desubjectified’ communication as the result of two factors: the disappearance of the political body with institutions capable of acting on the one hand; and increasingly faster digital social media tools that reduce the space for reaction and reflexion on the other hand. This is a moment of crisis where we must think about the role of social media.

Due to the recent events in which social networking sites have replaced traditional news coverage it seems worthy to closely examine the ‘radical’ role of tools like Twitter and Facebook as ‘revolutionary’ media. Are we dealing with a new force, a new social mechanism for the exchange of information, a new truth? Or are we only listening to a new siren song?

Steve Lambert will be featured at Impulse with Charlie James Gallery at the Pulse Miami Art Fair from December 3 thru 6, 2009. Selected works from Lambert’s “Everything You Want Right Now!” solo show will be featured, as well as the debut of his Arrow Sign print editions. This solo project will be entitled “You Are Still Alive” and is organized around the idea of the liberating power of simple truths.

Steve Lambert has been working as an artist and provocateur for over ten years now, disrupting the stream of corporate-driven communication that showers down on us 24-7, and more importantly empowering regular people to Think Different, and not in the way of those old, fairly vacuous Apple computer ads, but by actually causing it to happen through his work. For an example of Steve jamming the corporate communication system, we can look at his newest edition of prints. Steve bought a large, lighted arrow sign on a stand and put it up around LA with non-corporate and sometimes personal messages on it: You Are Still Alive pointing at a cemetery, for example. Funny, definitely, but poignant as well. Using the techniques of commercial signage, Steve will make for PULSE Miami light-box marquees that take commercial speech to its logical conclusion: Park & Spend, Money Laundered; Everything You Want, Right Now! Steve’s signs tell baldly, as if it were the truth, the lies that hide behind commercial signage: endless abundance, endless choice, consumption with joy. For his solo project at IMPULSE Miami, Steve will present a combination of lighted signs, hand-painted signs, and new print work in an installation organized around the idea of the liberating power of simple truths.

Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings
Edited by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson
Introduction by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson
MIT Press

From the MIT site:

“Institutional critique” is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own place within galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when—driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art—institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present, gathering writings and representative art projects of artists who developed and extended the genre. The artists come from across Europe and throughout North America. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect, and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique.

Like Alberro and Stimson’s Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance.

Artists represented include: Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers’ Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d’Études, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann

Eyebeam is pleased to announce our call for next season’s Residents and Fellows is OPEN. Eyebeam Residencies are a five month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Eyebeam Fellowships are an 11 month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time.

The start date for both the next Residents and Fellows is March 1, 2010. For deadlines, descriptions, current Eyebeam research initiatives, and full information about both the residency and the fellowship programs, please go to our website and visit these links:

FELLOWSHIP CALL

RESIDENCY CALL

And listen to my advice/rant about applying on the how to apply to Eyebeam special podcast.

Live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Please join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice.

At the intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis lies advertising, most often deployed in service of selling stuff. For this installment of our series, author Carrie McClaren and artist Steve Lambert will present projects that engage a sense of play as they leverage principles of the persuasion industries, to both critique consumer culture and question the power structures at work in our daily lives.

ABOUT STEVE LAMBERT

Steve Lambert is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. He founded the outdoor, guerilla art gallery, the Budget Gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. He earned the Best Public Art award from the San Francisco Weekly in 2008. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, Artweek, and Newsweek magazine and featured on National Public Radio.

ABOUT CARRIE MCLAREN

Carrie McLaren is the founder of the now defunct Stay Free! magazine, and editor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives (June, 2009). A longtime blogger, she is currently at Consumerist, a website owned by the publishers of Consumer Reports. She is the curator of Adult Education, a “useless lecture series” based in Brooklyn, New York. In a previous life, she organized the Illegal Art Exhibit, a traveling multimedia art show and website devoted to copyright reform. A former advertising columnist for the Village Voice, her writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother Jones, Time Out NY, and SPIN magazine, among others. Carrie lives in Brooklyn with one each of husband, son and cat.

The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.

via Everything You Want w/ Steve Lambert and Carrie McLaren | the change you want to see.

The Arts Guild of Rahway
1670 Irving Street
Rahway, New Jersey 07065