Steve Lambert

“Capitalism Works For Me! True/False” is in Hartford, CT. After visiting Manchester Community College and Blue Black Square, it’s now at Real Art Ways. Get more information at the Real Art Ways website.

I’m speaking at City Hall (!) in Kitchener, Ontario on May 22nd.

Tuesday May 22, 2012 – 7:00 pm
Kitchener CIty Hall Rotunda
200 King St. W., Kitchener

Steve Lambert is an American artist who works in a variety of media, commonly using print and communication vehicles as a means of developing a dialogue with his audience.  He has produced interactive scoreboards, letterpress posters, signage and postcards. One of Lambert’s best known projects is The New York Times “Special Edition”, which announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following the 2008 American election.

Lambert uses art as a bridge to connect uncommon, idealistic, or even radical ideas with everyday life. He carefully crafts various conditions where these ideas can be discussed with people to produce a meaningful exchange. Often this means working collaboratively with the audience, bringing them into the process or even having them physically complete the work.

He has collaborated with well-known art collectives such as the Yes Men and the Graffiti Research Lab, and other organizations such as Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done).

There will be a complimentary shuttle from downtown Guelph to Kitchener for the Steve Lambert lecture, departing from 193 Woolwich St. (Macquarie House) at 6:00 PM. Seats will reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. Please visit http://stevelambertbus.eventbrite.com or contact Danica Evering at danica@musagetes.ca or 519 836 7300 x 103 to reserve your seat.

Image credit: Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

Artists from occupy boston to host night of conversation & action – Featuring artist Steve Lambert

Room 913, 6 East 16th Street. 12:15-1:45pm

Roundtable: Activism On The Ground

Melissa Gira Grant
Nicolas Grau
Steve Lambert
Yotam Marom
Moderator: Deva Woodly

Transmediale has posted audio recordings of the 2012 panels. This recording is me talking about the Capitalism Sign at the “Zombie Play at the Ludic Salon.”

This panel was a lot of fun. Some of the questions come from great folks like Dmytri Kleiner and Jacob Applebaum.

(By the way I say “extinct” when I meant “endangered”)

You can get all the ludic salon recordings from this page on Soundcloud

This is the link to the Debugging and Rebooting panel, which got a little weird and would be difficult to understand without the video.

MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca

Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca Alcalá (IAGO)
Macedonio Alcalá No 507, Centro
Oaxaca, México, CP 68000

MINUS SPACE en Oaxaca presents an overview of graphic arts strategies employed by 31 reductive artists working around the globe, including North and South America, Europe, and Australasia. Spanning multiple generations as well as divergent contexts, the artists on view in this exhibition share a core interest in the language of printmaking and editioned works of art.
The exhibition features an extensive array of printmaking methods, including monoprint, silkscreen, etching, woodcut, lithograph, letterpress, chine-collé, digital inkjet, and offset. The exhibition also includes works of art produced in multitude, such as artist books, record albums, postcards, paintings, and porcelain and wax objects. Many of the works on view extend printmaking’s traditional boundaries by hybridizing two or more artistic media, including photography, computer arts, installation, performance, and written language, resulting in entirely new forms with multiple layers of meaning.

Participating Artists:
 Josef Albers, Soledad Arias, Hartmut Böhm, Sharon Brant, Vicente Butron, Vincent Como, Mark Dagley, Julian Dashper, Linda Francis, Cris Gianakos, Daniel Göttin, Michelle Grabner, Lynne Harlow, Daniel G. Hill, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Gilbert Hsiao, Kyle Jenkins, Steve Lambert, Vincent Longo, Stephen Maine, Rossana Martínez, Russell Maltz, Manfred Mohr, Victoria Munro, Rose Nolan, Carrie Pollack, Erik Saxon, Robert Swain, Tilman, Jan van der Ploeg, Patricia Zarate

College students, take note: this summer I will be Visiting Faculty for the inaugural year of the New York Arts Practicum program.

New York Arts Practicum is a summer program in New York City where advanced undergraduates, recent graduates, and graduate students experientially learn artmaking and participate in intellectual culture outside of the art school.

Here’s some images of my work from the Enacting Populism show at the Kadist Foundation in Paris. There’s more images on Mousse Magazine.

The show is up until April 22nd.

Lincoln, MA, March 27, 2012 – DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announces the tour dates and locations for Steve Lambert’s Capitalism Works For Me! True/False sign, which will be placed in public spaces via one-day installations throughout the Greater Boston area April 6 through 12. The artist will be on site to install the sign, encourage voting, and engage the public in this timely dialogue.

At 9 feet high and 20 feet wide, Steve Lambert’s Capitalism works for me! True/False? brazenly asks for your participation—your vote—in an ongoing debate that has recently occupied Wall Street, Dewey Square, and public discourse throughout the world. Using the space of art as a space for dialogue, Lambert harnesses humor and brashness to address one of the most common and complicated issues of our time—the economy and growing state of class disparity.

His sign, currently on view in the front entrance to deCordova’s Museum as part of The 2012 deCordova Biennial, will travel throughout the Greater Boston area this April to create and capture dialogue, and even more so, votes. As the global economic crisis worsens and Americans take to the street in protest, Lambert’s project echoes a growing public anxiety.

The sign will be at the following locations on the dates listed below (times approximate):

Friday, April 6, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
Davis Square, Somerville (near JP Licks)
In collaboration with the Somerville Arts Council

Saturday, April 7, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
Price Rite Parking Lot
892 River St., Hyde Park
In collaboration with Finard Properties

Monday, April 9, 10:30 am–2:30 pm
MassArt
Adjacent to Kennedy Building, Huntington Ave, Boston
In collaboration with MassArt

Thursday, April 12, 9:30 am–1:30 pm
Newton North High School, inside the main entrance
457 Walnut St, Newton
In collaboration with Newton North High School and the New Art Center

Thanks to the deCordova Museum.

Yesterday I sent off a piece from the new Everything You Want Right Now edition. This “version 2″ edition is in a different color than the original and includes a LED backlit panel – the first time I’ve done this in a piece. The 2nd version was inspired by a website someone passed on to me. On the site they had pirated the original Everything You Want Right Now image (they used it without attribution, against the terms of my Creative Commons license) and altered it to be blue instead of orange.  I liked the color, so I made it real. Their piracy inspired innovation so everything turned out well in the end.

Here’s some images and video of the build process. This is not complete by any means, just some photos I snapped along the way.

The piece will be at the Chicago or Houston art fair this year. Maybe both. I don’t remember. I just make the stuff.

I’m speaking at the Hemispheric Institute on April 19.

Steve Lambert made international news after the 2008 US election with The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He has collaborated with groups from the Yes Men to the Graffiti Research Lab and Greenpeace. He is also the founder of the Center for Artistic Activism, the Anti-Advertising Agency, Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and SelfControl (which blocks grownups from distracting websites so they can get work done). He is on the faculty of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Steve will discuss making engaging, funny, relevant art and how it can help effect change.

Revolutionaries Live! (aka Creative Activism Thursdays) is co-sponsored by NYU Dean for Social Science, the Hemispheric Institute, the Yes Lab, the Humanities Initiative at NYU Working Research Group on Artistic Activism, CAA, and Not an Alternative. Speakers also attend following Yes Lab Friday.

via nyuaa.com | Creative Activism Thursdays: Steve Lambert.

I was quoted in Why Kickstarter Outfunding the NEA Isn’t a Good Thing on Read Write Web. I actually have way more to say about this than what was included. You can read some of what I’ve said in a 4 part post the UCIRA blog (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

Don’t ask me about this in person unless you want to hear me go on for at least 20 minutes.

See also: this video on “why should public funds be spent to support artwork that might be considered offensive?”

I killed my Facebook profile. (More or less.)

Sometime last week I ended my Facebook Profile and turned it into a Facebook Fan Page At the time I had about 2500+ “friends” and a handful of friend requests coming in every couple days. I’m extremely grateful to have so many people who want to be connected to me and my work in some way, however doing that through a Facebook profile had become unmanageable for me. Somewhere between new friend requests, having another inbox for messages, and the dozens of events and reminders, my Facebook profile turned a corner where it no longer made sense in my workflow. So I made a change.

The Facebook Page allows me to continue to post updates, new work, and the occasional silly thought but without the message inbox, event invitations, and I wont see anyone’s updates or profile. For my actual face-to-face friends, we will continue to stay in touch outside this system. For anyone else who wants to connect to me outside Facebook you have plenty of options; email, my mailing list, RSS feeds, or connect on other social networks.

I sincerely appreciate you who choose to follow what I do and want to stay abreast of forthcoming projects. I have to make choices about the time I spend continuing with my work and doing everything else. This small change is going to help me continue with that work. Thanks for staying along!

Steve

We’re taking the first batch of “It’s Time to Fight” prints to the post office today along with some Utopia prints. You can get some for yourself and we’ll send them soon (maybe today).

ENACTING POPULISM IN ITS MEDIÆSCAPE
Curated by Matteo Lucchetti
February 18 – April 22, 2012

Press conference: Thursday February 16 at 11 am at Kadist Art Foundation
Opening reception: Friday, February 17 from 6 to 9 pm.

Alterazioni Video, Heman Chong, Luigi Coppola, Danilo Correale, Foundland, Nicoline van Harskamp, Steve Lambert, Oliver Ressler, Anna Scalfi Eghenter, Société Réaliste, Jonas Staal, Superflex.

with a screening program curated by le peuple qui manque
a public conversation with Ernesto Laclau (Thursday February 9, 7-9 pm)

Kadist Art Foundation is pleased to present Enacting Populism in its mediaescape, an exhibition curated by Matteo Lucchetti, following his residency at the Foundation.

Enacting Populism is an on-going project on the possible relationships between art practices and the populist mediascape that connotes the current political zeitgeist of Europe. At Kadist Art Foundation this project will develop into an exhibition that will take place during the last two months of the presidential elections campaign in France. The space here is interpreted as a sui generis political bureau, immersing the exhibition in an ambivalent environment where the works can be seen as elements belonging to a political party office where a campaign is being prepared.

The show is focusing on the European populism that has heavily influenced the public imagery on politics for the last twenty years. Its leaders and agitators understood at an early stage the shift that occurred both in portraying the figure of the politician and in the role of the political discourse in the mediascape. In fact, when political ideologies ceased to give shape to the political agendas, with the end of the Cold War, the Western parties started to progressively mirror this ending with the flattening of their positions in the public debate, starting to respond only to a general capitalism discourse about a global market that needed to find its way. From that point the political action softened the natural antagonism of democracy, thus creating a lack of opposite and distinct political projects. This situation left space for a popular frustration to arise and consequently demagogues articulated it. Therefore those who understood how the space of politics worked slowly moved from being representative to openly playing with its representation in the media.

Ernesto Laclau was one of the first to acknowledge to populism a dimension inherent to any democratic regime, looking at it through a historical perspective and not just as a right wing party phenomenon. As Laclau states,“democratic politics requires the construction of a ‘people’ on the basis of one or more empty signifiers as well as an antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’ “ .

In order to create alternative, cheap and fictional feelings of belonging, or rather in order to ‘construct’ that empty signifier that is ‘the people’, the visual strategies that take place on a daily basis in the media might not only be seen as completely distorted productions of our times. Instead, they can also be considered as materials that can be easily deconstructed, so as to offer a clearer vision on what democracy looks like today. The process of enacting populism, to make the aesthetic strategies embedded in the creation of a visible consensus, comes together with interferences put at play with the mediascape. Here, the artistic projects find new potentialities to impact the contemporary imagery on politics as seen in the works produced for the show. Moreover, developing a historical perspective on the idea we have on populism, generates tools through which an awareness is created.

Read an extended version of this text here.