Attention Line

June 11 – August 20
Opening: Saturday, June 11, 6pm

Attention Line

Blaster Al Ackerman, Craig Baldwin, Ed Bereal: Wanted for Disturbing the Peace, Circus Amok and Jennifer Miller, Vaginal Davis, Manuel DeLanda, James Luna, Tom Murrin (aka The Alien Comic), Tamio Shiraishi, Hannah Weiner, and Johanna Went

In conjunction with the exhibition, Canal Street Research Association with Rolando Politi will inaugurate a participatory alternate currency project.

Organized by Artists Space and Andrew Lampert, Attention Line considers the important ways that artists who generally operate outside the commercial confines of the visual art world can actively address and reconfigure media, power, and public space—through parody, exaggeration, confrontation, internalization, structured confusion, and the serendipitous nature of working out in the open. Rooted in late 1970s New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, San Antonio, Portland, La Jolla and elsewhere in the United States, Attention Line presents eleven iconoclastic artists who self-reflexively enact radical subjectivity within the urban environment. Taking form as visual art, media interventions, stage shows, mail art, and surreptitious public performances, these artists disrupt communication channels and the trafficking of cultural material by intervening in the pervasive flows of normalcy that underpin and uphold everyday consumer culture.

Each of these remarkably singular artists has carved out their own dynamic relation between form, culture, and their suspecting or unsuspecting public. Whether working between covert urban intervention and filmed documentation (Craig Baldwin and Manuel DeLanda), exaggerating and embodying notably troubled cultural stereotypes (James Luna and Vaginal Davis), accelerating and fracturing the commonplace logic of live performance to imbue material culture with energetic chaos (Johanna Went and Tom Murrin), skewering political and hegemonic power with dark comedic parody (Ed Bereal and Circus Amok), expressing their internal subjectivity as disjunctive projections in urban space (Hannah Weiner and Tamio Shiraishi), or self-distributing their kaleidoscopic output and invented personae through decidedly unconventional means (Blaster Al Ackerman and others), these artists each bring forth critical aspects of a largely untold, uniquely American history of tactical situationist artmaking.

Improvising saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi will perform in Cortlandt Alley six times throughout the course of the exhibition.