From the Lower East Side Printshop’s Special Edition Residency 2010 Catalog Essay by Sarah Hanley.
Steve Lambert
Many artists aspire to be revolutionary, but Steve Lambert is truly original and radical. To begin, it takes more than a few seconds of preemptory scanning of his webpage – the main hub for his action and web-based work – to fully understand what he is about. Second, his intended audience is much larger than the art world. Though he possesses traditional degrees in art from respected institutions, he has managed to escape the solipsistic trap that often results from such training to create work that anyone, anywhere, can connect with and understand. Finally, though the final product is frequently something that cannot be owned or possessed as an investment in a traditional sense, this is not his sole intention or driving concept. Instead, Steve Lambert has dedicated his career to creating pubic signs, freeware, websites, and publications that will truly cause anyone who is lucky to witness them to stop and think, or to just improve their lives in a simple but meaningful way.
Take for example his freeware Firefox application titled ADD-ART, which replaces all ads on the browser with artwork. Or his special mock edition of the New York Times (http://nytimes-se.com), which unlike its sarcastic relation The Onion, envisions a truly guileless and utopian alternate reality in which all public universities are free and Condoleezza Rice holds a press conference to frankly confess that the Bush Administration knew all along that there were no WMDs.
Lambert brought this spirit of enjoyable subversion to his residency at the Printshop with a series of three prints that challenge basic ideas behind ownership of art. He was guided by one of two (or a combination of both) of the following self-determined principles. First, he wanted people who buy the work to have to come to terms with the fact that “you can’t get a perfect one.” This concept sprang from Lambert’s interest in Buddhist ideas, specifically, that one must accept things as they are, because that is how they should be. OUT OF IDEAS is a screenprint in Lambert’s signature brushwork lettering style (downloadable on Lambert’s website) and each impression is either torn in two, splashed with coffee, or both, depending on the artist’s whim. Likewise, each impression of the variable edition screenprint This is Perfect is uniquely off register. No two are alike, but also – none are perfect. Lambert’s choice of palette for this print was inspired by the color scheme for a palace he visited during a trip to Turkey with a friend, who noticed that one of its tiles had a mistake in the pattern. They later learned that this was intentional and all Islamic art incorporates a flaw, as Muslims believe that nothing can be perfect but Allah.
Lambert was also interested in overturning the expectation that a collector can buy his work and simply look at it. This was the guiding principle for In BLANK days… , an interactive print that requires the owner to fill in the chalkboard-painted blanks. Depending on the choice of words, the resulting statement can become a directive/goal, a means of stress release, or a source of humor. “If you own the work, you have to do something. It’s not just…I own it, and that’s the end. “
Group show Palling Around with Socialists questions the nature of an individual as an autonomous being or as a component to an equitable community.
“Our nation presently finds itself in a culture war, where language is traversing outside the bounds of denoted definitions: words like socialist, fascism, czar and terror are volleyed around public debates,” the gallery said in a statement about the exhibit.
“While different parties and groups fear a loss of personal freedoms, we may be at greater risk of misarticulating the perceived conflicts with which we are faced.”
Concerns about the nature of private property, authorship and current intersections between economics, ethics and philosophy are raised by artists Shinsuke Aso, Gabriel Boyce and Preston Link, Alton Falcone, David Horvitz, Justin Kemp, Steve Kemple, Julia Schwadron and Steve Lambert.
Through June 26. Noon-4 p.m. Saturdays. U·turn Art Space 2159 Central Ave., Brighton. West End. E-mail: u.turn.artspace@gmail.com
Stephanie Syjuco created a hub for artist’s books that are print-on-demand called Particulated Matter. My Everything You Want Right Now catalog is on there as well as the Shopdropping catalog which includes an interview with me (which hopefully has been checked for grammar and spelling by now).
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.
“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
The Mission District is a hot spot for street art, the largest concentration in the world of public painting that embodies activism, culture, passion, and desire for social change.
Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo!, edited by Annice Jacoby [Abrams; June 2009; hardcover] showcases these vibrant works in hundreds of color photographs, with in-depth commentary by the artists who produced them and Mission-savvy writers including a foreword by Grammy Award Winner Carlos Santana.
Birthed in the early 1970s, a provocative new street art scene transformed San Francisco’s legendary Mission District into an art epicenter that crosses popular culture, fine art and political audiences. “Mission Muralismo,” is an ever-growing movement of accomplished street art combining elements of Mexican mural painting, surrealism, pop art, urban punk, eco-warrior, cartoon, and guerilla graffiti that has catapulted many San Francisco artists into the international spotlight.
Featuring over 500 full-color photographs and 30 essays, including artists R. Crumb, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Barry McGee (TWIST), Rigo, and Spain Rodriguez, Street Art San Francisco comprehensively exposes more than three decades of this expansive and vibrant public art movement.
This is one of the interviews I did while at Prix Ars. Somehow we started talking about death in video games. If you want to know what I think about Grand Theft Auto, watch this:
Emberly Modine did an interview with me for Buzzine Magazine that covers some of my favorite topics; advertising, public space, sociology, and getting evicted.
Steve Lambert gained considerable notoriety eight days after last November’s elections when he collaborated with a group called the Yes Men in publishing a politically progressive hoax edition of the New York Times, its banner headline declaring “Iraq War Ends.” The debut Los Angeles solo show for the New York-based artist at Charlie James Gallery includes video documentation of that work, as well as well-traveled intersections between art and advertising.
The Mission District is a hot spot for street art, the largest concentration in the world of public painting that embodies activism, culture, passion, and desire for social change.
