LOS ANGELES — Ever wanted to take a roller coaster through Buenos Aires? How about an invisible one? Yeah, me too. Argentinian film director Fernando Livschitz has released a new video of roller coasters cutting through the lovely streets of the country’s capital.

Leandro Erlich's mirrored installation. Image via leandroerlich.com.ar.

There’s something in the air down south, because I also came across Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich‘s crazy mirrored buildings. “Bâtiment Mirrored” is an architectural-scale installation that helps you scale a three story building with ease. Visitors simply lie down safely on the ground, and a massive mirror makes it look like you’re hanging out with sticky glue.

I like that these two projects use special effects (one digital and one analogue) to make a city come alive as an  urban-scale amusement park. They’re both devilishly simple concepts but incredibly fun.

Need more eye candy? This isn’t Livschitz’s first foray into cities and special effectts. New Yorkers will enjoy Scales, a tilt shift wonderland of the city’s landscape, all in a rapid slightly-miniature wonderland.

Garnet Hertz's graphic that started the meme this month.

Some time early last week, I began to notice the “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” graphics on my Facebook news feed. The first time I clicked on one, I had a quick laugh — I thought it was witty. A few days later it seemed like my news feed had been converted into a focused, peer-curated online gallery devoted to the latest, most clever “What People Think I Do/What I Really Do” graphics.

Then my Mom started posting them too. The speed at which this new internet sensation spread grabbed my attention. A quick Google search led me to www.knowyourmeme.com. The website credited artist Garnet Hertz with starting the meme, so I emailed Hertz to see if I could get the scoop on his original graphic. Hertz was kind enough to give an interview about the history of the graphic he first posted on February 9th and the subsequent birth of a meme.

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Garnet Hertz with a roachbot (photo by Karen Marcelo, via conceptlab.com/roachbot)

Don Edler: What is a meme to you?

Garnet Hertz: I think memes are part of participatory culture that have an important home-brewed or DIY aspect to them in that individuals can create them and distribute them on their own. Because of this DIY aspect, a meme can be emulated easily and is able to change and spread rapidly.

DE: What caused you to make the original image/text collage that started the “What people think I do/What I really do” meme?

GH: I had seen one other graphic like it on Role Playing Games that was laid out a little bit differently, with the same sort of plain Helvetica headings, but with four panels. When I saw it, I thought it was a clever way to visually explain how things are perceived differently by different people. A few hours after I saw the RPG graphic; I opened Photoshop and laid out something similar with five images and captions, and posted it to my Facebook wall.

I hadn’t given it much thought, and I had no idea it would go viral — it was just something that I slapped together with the hope that some of my academic and artist friends would enjoy the one-liner.

As soon as I posted it, I immediately realized the potential to adapt it into a lot of other different topic. In fact, I was considering making a few more but for different subjects, but then my wife talked me out of that idea.

The original image that inspired Hertz. (click to enlarge)

DE: So you created this thing for yourself and your friends and you posted it to your Facebook wall. Then what happened?

GH: Almost immediately, this image started generating a huge amount of traffic. I have about one thousand Facebook friends and it started getting shared and shared and shared. After the first four hours, it had had over 400 shares and was averaging about 100 shares per hour. It kept that up until it had been shared about 4,000 times and the last time I checked it was over 5,000 shares.

DE: You have been credited with starting this meme. How do you think that came about?

GH: I should say that when I first posted my graphic, I had made it a point to say that “I made this,” while the original RPG graphic was made anonymously, or at least I never found an author.  So I think I was attributed to starting the meme because my image was the first of this kind to go viral, I was a clear and attributable author of the image, and that most of the subsequent meme images that people made directly followed my layout.

DE: I really enjoyed the images you used in your graphic. Where did you find those images?

GH: All the images were just found through Google image search. For the first one, I searched for “Weed.” At first I was going to put an image of Cheech and Chong there, but that wasn’t really that descriptive, so I just found the close-up image you see now. Then I searched for “Crayons” for the second image. The third image is of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” which should be instantly recognizable to artists as one of the most famous pieces of modern art history. For the fourth panel, I searched for “misunderstood performance art” and found this great image of this public performance. I was drawn to the image because of the over-sized toothbrush and amazing high heeled shoes, and I thought it represented the risk that a lot of people feel when doing their work. Finally, for the fifth image, I just searched “Exhibition contract.”

One of the funniest versions of the meme discovered on Facebook by the editor.

DE: How do you think memes fit into popular culture? Does the term “meme-ification” of culture speak to you in any way?

GH: In my own art practice, I try to create projects that have a popular appeal to them;  I build my studio projects in a way that can be communicated through a viral-like structure. However, I don’t really make studio projects that can be quickly emulated — they tend to be time-intensive and laborious.

In terms of “meme-ification,” I think that memes function as an insider language for different cultural groups on Facebook. Memes are small treasures that people find on the internet that they take pride in sharing — or modifying and sharing — with their friends. Memes play a role in forming a communication format that people can riff-off of, and expand on in order to include themselves in the cultural group. In comparison to earlier forms of communication, I think memes operate like Fan Fiction or Zines, where people can modify and circulate media within a group and thereby participate in that culture.

DE: What is the difference between something that is viral and something that is meme?

GH: I think something is viral if it gets popular and spreads tremendously fast: a good example would be a highly popular YouTube video. I think in addition to this a meme is something that people can copy or emulate easily: “LOL Cats” are a great example of a meme because all you really need are an image editing application, an image of a cat and the ability to lay text over an image.  You generate an image, upload it somewhere and you’re part of the language of the meme.

DE: When I was doing the research for this interview, I noticed that the history of the “What People think I do/What I Really Do” meme was evolving rapidly, with new versions showing up every few hours. How do you think the rapid evolution of a meme reflects the nature of the internet?

GH: For something to be a meme, it needs to be malleable and spreadable. I think it’s important to note that there is never a singular, absolute originator for most ideas or inventions and especially not for memes.

In fact, if you went back to the original RPG graphic that I found, I am sure you could also find precursors to that graphic and keep digging back further and further into history. Speaking to the changing history of this meme, I think any history — whether it’s the history of film or photography or electric light — anything that is invented like that has a very complicated history. For example, Edison didn’t invent most of the things common history attributes to him; these things have very complicated histories, and the more you research something, the more you find out that histories of origins spiral continually backwards. I think the way histories change is part of what makes historiography an interesting topic.

DE: Can you tell me a little more about your current research or projects?

GH: I am currently an Artist in Residence and Research Scientist in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, where I work on studio projects and do work related to physical computing. A recent project I did was called OutRun which is a drivable arcade game with a 1980s style augmented reality system. I was able to take the project to Denmark last summer and it’s featured in this month’s Popular Science magazine.

I am also working on a new book on electronic DIY culture in the context of contemporary art making, its kind of the maker/Arduino world meets contemporary art. I am also working on a diesel-powered iPad that runs on fossil fuel and belches out smoke, its kind of a hot-rod iPad charger dock.

I have a lot of other projects as well, and I try to stay busy — but I should get rolling — I need to get back to writing that exhibition proposal.

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Garnet Hertz is a Fulbright Scholar and contemporary artist whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is Artist in Residence and Research Scientist in Informatics at UC Irvine and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design.

He has shown his work at several notable international venues in thirteen countries including SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica and DEAF and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based lecture series on DIY culture, electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.

The slogan “Silence=Death” remains one of the most recognizable images from the art produced during the AIDS crisis in America. Created by the activist art collective Gran Fury, it complemented a movement of creativity that held social change as its core. Now, over 30 years since the term “AIDS” was first recognized, the collective’s retrospective Gran Fury: Read My Lips at NYU captivates this tumultuous time in American history and shows us that, perhaps, we haven’t progressed much.

The iconic “SILENCE=DEATH” (1988) poster is on display, but relatively downplayed amongst the plethora of imagery, text and video presented in this show. Initially their art was meant to educate the public by dispelling common misconceptions about the spread of HIV (as in their “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” and “Women Don’t Get AIDS” campaigns) as well as combat the irresponsible complacency and ignorance of Ronald Reagan, the Catholic Church and neoconservative activists. Though reviewing it today (especially as someone born in 1989), the group’s work has catapulted itself into our cultural stratosphere, not only representing the continuing battle against AIDS but also the political function of art.

The murals and reproductions of Gran Fury’s work, from postcards to billboards, overwhelm the viewer, creating a collaged space that both holds a mirror up to society as well as shapes it. But it cannot help to be said that we’ve seen all of this before.

Since it’s basically a necessary unit in most Contemporary Art courses in this country, Gran Fury’s unique contribution to the art historical canon is probably familiar to most gallery-going aficionados, and even casual admirers of art have probably seen the “SILENCE=DEATH” slogans leak into pop culture. So my immediate reaction to the show was “Wow! Gran Fury… Oh. Gran Fury.” It’s all been done before. When I saw the flyer (which does not tout it as a retrospective) I had thought the collective worked up something new for the 21st Century, but it’s more of a “best of” compilation. In Madonna terms, I was expecting MDNA and got Celebration.

Gran Fury's "Read My Lips (Boys)" (1988) and "Women Don't Get AIDS" (1991)

But as I continued through the exhibit, the disappointment dissipated. The more imagery I was saturated with, the more I was provoked to see that this is not necessarily a time capsule; the rapidly growing HIV infection rates here and across the globe should illustrate that we have not yet solved the problem of AIDS and, scarily, we seem to have cast it off, ignoring the pandemic much like the Gipper himself.

As our own John D’Addario reminded us here on Hyperallergic last year:

… the AIDS crisis is not over. On World AIDS Day, let’s also remind ourselves that Gran Fury’s original call to action is one still worth responding to.

It’s well-worn work, for sure, but its goal has yet to be reached. Hopefully this exhibition will not only inspire historical excavation in an incredibly turbulent period of our history, but also compel us to be active in the resistance against this political crisis.

Gran Fury: Read My Lips is on view now at New York University’s Steinhardt School Department of Art and Art Professions (80 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) through March 17.

The original mass-produced Kodak camera, c.1888 (via antiquecameras.net)

The world of photography is changing fast. Here are some recent highlights:

• The renowned photography company Kodak will stop making cameras. The shocking news means that the Rochester, New York-based corporation will stop making mass produced cameras, which it has been churning out since the 1880s. As recently as 2006, Kodak was one of the three biggest manufactures of digital cameras in the world, but by 2010 the company slid to the seventh spot. One of the reasons being cited for the decline of Kodak is the prevalence of good quality cameras in smartphones. Kodak’s leadership in the field is attested to by the fact that the oldest photography museum in the world, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, is located in Rochester. Eastman was the founder of Kodak, then known as the Eastman Kodak Company and his home still houses part of the museum.
• Flickr is getting a facelift on February 28 (finally!)
• Gizmodo got an exclusive on the inner workings of Instagram. The iPhone-only app was, believe it or not, only started in October 2010 and currently has 15 million+ users worldwide.
• Pinterest is the fastest growing standalone site ever but their hardcore fans aren’t from the coasts but the middle of the country, go figure … then there’s that copyright theft problem they’re having … but wait, there’s a solution!

Starting with the landmark Plessy v Ferguson case of 1896 and continuing until the 2009 inauguration of the first US President with African heritage, the Smithsonian has launched Oh Freedom! Teaching African American Civil Rights through American Art at the Smithsonian, which is a new web-based project developed jointly by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

While the concept is welcome, the site still has a ways to go until it accurately tells the story of African-American art and its relation to civil rights. Looking at the 1970s alone there are only five works listed — Barbara Jones–Hogu’s “Unite” (1971), Roland L. Freeman’s “South Capitol Street at M Street. Washington, D.C., February 1972” (1972), Elizabeth Catlett’s “Phillis Wheatley” (1973), Ed McGowin’s “Untitled” (1973) and Romare Bearden’s “Roots” (1977) — which is rather unbelievable considering the flowering of black identity and art that occurred during the era. I can only assume that this sparsity will be remedied as time goes on and more content is added.

The most distressing part of the site is that only four of the 31 artists listed are women and there is no single mention of LGBT African Americans. How is this possible? Are the struggles of LGBT African Americans not part of civil rights? Are there not enough talented female artists to be included on the timeline?

The Smithsonian promises that the site will allow users to draw “connections between art and history” and it will give “educators tools to help students interpret the long struggle for civil rights.” But they also claim that “Oh Freedom! broadens the definition of the civil rights movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s, presenting it as a longer and more complex quest for freedom, justice and equality throughout the course of the 20th century and into the present.” This is something that Oh Freedom! doesn’t deliver. The narrative here is not complex as much as streamlined and it’s quite telling that the only 21st century art work listed on the timeline is Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster, a work by a non-African-American artist.

While I understand that the resource is designed for a national audience and that many schools are located in districts controlled by homophobic school board members there’s still no excuse. If some people would rather not make the connection between civil rights struggles and the rights of LGBT Americans or the need for greater female visibility then that’s their choice, but to think that the history of civil rights can be told without women’s artistic voices and without at least a nod to the contributions of LGBT people is a major oversight that should be remedied immediately.

And if the educators at the Smithsonian need a primer on notable female or LGBT African-American artists they may want to consider adding to the timeline, this and this should help.

The different app payment plans offered by Infinite Monkeys, from free to $499.

LOS ANGELES — It comes up in every conversation I have with art-and-technology types. “I have an app idea,” a friend will say. But then comes the inevitable question: “Do you know any developers?”

While projects like Code Year are putting coding into the hands of average users, sometimes what you need is a quick interface like Tumblr or WordPress that makes it easy and straightforward to make an app a reality.

Maybe something like Infinite Monkeys is the answer. Using a series of training videos and forms, users can create interactive content that taps into pre-existing dynamic content sites like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Apps are developed instantly using the Titanium platform, and Infinite Monkeys claims to manage the distribution channels into the relevant app stores.

There are catches, of course. All apps have banners ads from Google unless you pay a hefty $499 fee for a pro version. You’re limited to what Infinite Monkeys provides, so you’ll have to rein in your imagination for now. And the site’s in beta, so you’ll have to request access as a beta tester.

But I can see a number of applications here for the art world. An app can be easily be adapted for a social media savvy art space that wants to build a mobile community for its members.  Nonprofit spaces can even opt for a waiver of that $499 fee. Maps, calendars and tweets can all be found in one place, along with integrated news, music and video. What Infinite Monkeys provides has to fit within their templates, but it could be a good interim solution for those in a tight budget.

If you use it, please let me know. I’d love to do a follow-up review on its application for folks in the art world.

Robert Lobe, "The Moon is Out" (2009), archival pigment print, 18 x 24 (All images courtesy the Queens Museum of Art)

At the beginning of the 2012 Queens International, the fifth biennial of Queens artists to be staged by the Queens Museum of Art, you are asked to take a journey. The exhibit’s subtitle, Three Points Make a Triangle, was inspired by the French surrealist René Daumal’s unfinished 1944 work Le Mont Analogue, a “roman d’aventures alpines, non euclidiennes et symboliquement authentiques” (“a book of alpine adventures, non-euclidean and authentically symbolic”) in which eight explorers employing science and metaphysics discover an invisible mountain. Daumal died of tuberculosis at the age of 36, the book and its journey cut short, halfway through a sentence in the fifth chapter.

Becket Bowes, "Elegy II" (2008), oil on Dibond, 60 x 120

I love French surrealism and unfinished books as much as the next liberal arts graduate, but it is a somber title for what is a lively exhibit. However, curating a show entirely of artists linked only by their current location is a bit like climbing an invisible mountain. The limits of its space are transparent, imposed by some distant city planning and urban sprawl. The artists are hardly working in a Queens silo, originating from places near and distant, their art influenced as much by their background as living in Astoria, Jackson Heights, Long Island City or Ridgewood.

How do you create a cohesive experience from 31 artists who are connected by these tenuous parameters? Like Daumal’s mountain, you have to find the angles where connections meet into points. The three points of this art triangle are set out broadly in three galleries on the first floor of the Queens Museum:

• “humble materials, basic forms and energies and their discovery in everyday life”
• “possible journeys into the future and past, deploying symbols from traditional cultures, science, and mathematics” and
• “artworks that turn inward towards home and the spiritual.”

If this is all sounding a bit too bizarre, don’t worry, the exhibit is actually much more accessible than its premise. In fact, the journey of the Queens International is a lot like traveling to the Queens Museum, something that is rather daunting when looking at the subway map, but turns out to be a pleasant ride on the 7 train. But art is always welcome to be a bit more caustic than transit. Even if this year’s International isn’t going to take you on any sort of metaphysical mind trip, there are steps in the path that will give you pause.

Joe Winter, "Untitled Model for a History of Light (Void)" (2010), wood, UV-faded cork board, perforated UV-laminate glass, 24 x 32

Joe Winter‘s “Model for a History of Light: Conjunction” (2010) and “Untitled Model for a History of Light (Void)” (2010) are standouts for their intelligent simplicity, using construction paper and cork faded by exposure to light to chronicle the cast of shadows on the art. I remembered seeing the Long Island City-based artist’s “Models for a History of Light” at Marian Spore in Brooklyn (the gallery was a short-term project where a collection was amassed in an industrial space and then closed when completed), and I’m curious if the works in the Queens Museum will also experience some alteration with the gallery lights fading the construction paper, imprinting the invisible waves from the light.

Palden Weinreb, "Untitled (Oscillations 2)" (2011), graphite and encaustic on paper and board, 24 inch diameter

In the same gallery (I believe this was the “possible journeys” section) Palden Weinreb has two encaustic and lithograph pieces that were muted, yet ethereal, with systematic patterns of lines and curves that seemed to echo Becket Bowes‘ Elegy series in the same room. Bowes has five oil on Dibond works numbered from “Elegy I” to “Elegy V,” with mathematic principles used as a measurement of time drawn over and over, becoming more and more smudged and abstract.

William Santen, video still from "A Song for You" (2011), SD video transfer of 16mm color film, 3:18 minutes, ed. 1 of 5

The exhibit wasn’t heavy on new media, dominated by sculpture, painting, collage and photography, but the video work caught my attention. Sam Clagnaz‘s “Behold” (2011) was seven minutes of constant surprise with sacred and silly imagery (my favorite was a monster hand typing at a keyboard) that was done in a handmade, yet obviously meticulous, way. Karen Y. Chan‘s “Myths” (2011) video  had metallic shapes pulsing like an organism under a microscope, Adam Shecter‘s “BCAST Clip Show” (2008-11) was a frenzy of spliced animation and William Santen sang with a the banjo in a bathtub in “A Song for You” (2011), his hair wet and the sound synched off just enough to make what could have been an odd music video into a play on honesty.

Brian Zeeger, Video still from "Pull My Daisy (All My Doors Are Open Mix)" (2011), 28 minutes

Brian Zeeger‘s “Pull My Daisy (All My Doors Are Open Mix)” (2011) has the best back story in the exhibit. The artist squatted in the crumbling former apartment of Allen Ginsberg in 2006, and although much of the poet’s life there had been swallowed by squalor, Zeeger noticed scarce traces and made some stop-motion animations meant as dialogues with the ghosts in the apartment. The pieces culminated into a 2008 adaptation of the Beat film Pull My Daisy (1959), by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, for which Zeeger and other artists built installations that acted as sets for a reenactment in the apartment. The clips of video were then arranged in a real-time collaboration with the musician Baby Copperhead and the improvisation is what was captured and exhibited in the 2012 International.

Allyson Vieira, "f(f(f(f(n))))" (2008), plaster, dimensions variable

While the biennial was a wonderful way to get a quick immersion into the diversity of art being created in Queens, it could have used some editing. For example, I thought Tatiana Berg‘s rolling “tent” sculptures were enjoyable in their exuberance with shape and color, but her two-dimensional spray paint art was less strong and was positioned across from close ups of graffiti by Robert Lobe, where the medium was depicted with scarred beauty. Likewise, Allyson Vieira had the striking plaster heads in “f(f(f(f(n))))” (2008), imperfect casts of a bust of Pericles, yet the inclusion of her “Tie-Dyes,” a watercolor of tie-dyed shirts, was unnecessary.

David Kearns, "The Hill" (2011), acrylic on paper, 92 x 105

The 31 artist roster for the 2012 International is smaller than in its previous incarnations due to gallery renovations at the museum, so perhaps there was a drive to make the space feel more saturated, but I think the works would have stood on their own with some more breathing room. I also felt like the paintings in the exhibit were the weaker elements, although there was an sprawling wall-sized work by David Kearns called “The Hill” (2011), that grabbed me with its dense acrylic depiction of a cemetery clogged with monuments and trees.

While I didn’t experience anything transcendental like climbing an invisible mountain in Three Points Make a Triangle, I did have my mind expanded to what art is happening now in Queens, an eclectic approach to examining time, history and personal experience. Since the role of any contemporary biennial is at its core to be a snapshot of time and place, even if those dimensions are diaphanous, the points aligned in the 2012 Queens International make a mountain worth scaling for the discovery of some of the borough’s emerging talent.

Queens International 2012: Three Points Make a Triangle continues at the Queens Museum of Art (New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park) through May 20, 2012.

Gran Fury, "Art is Not Enough" (1988), printed in the Village Voice

In their first step into an institutional setting, the pivotal AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury’s exhibition Gran Fury: Read My Lips at NYU’s 80WSE Galleries answers the question raised by a reprinted poster of an ad that ran in the Village Voice in 1988: is art enough?

Beginning in tandem with ACT-UP during the mid-1980s, Gran Fury, whose name came from the NYPD’s unmarked Plymouth cars, provided the artistic thrust to the AIDS activist movements during a time when AIDS was barely mentioned by the media or the president. Taking tips from the Situationists, Gran Fury combined the techniques of advertising with information and outrage over the AIDS crisis to educate and motivate the general public with slogans such as “Women Don’t Get AIDS” and “Kissing Doesn’t Kill”.

With galleries filled with reproductions of posters, flyers, takeaways and other ephemera rather than torn and yellowed scraps of archival materials, the Gran Fury exhibition displays an essential and possibly terrifyingly forgotten archive not just for the history of AIDS in America but how art and activism can intersect.

I spoke with Gran Fury member and artist Marlene McCarty and 80 Washington Square East Gallery assistant director and curator Michael Cohen. They both gave me an illuminating walk-through of the exhibition and answered my questions from the history of Gran Fury to its connection with subsequent protest movements, including Occupy Wall Street, to the importance of archiving the history of AIDS activism and AIDS losses.

One of the most striking and perhaps timely pieces in the exhibition appears all over the floor in the first room: Xeroxed dollar bills with powerful and shocking slogans on the back. A part of ACT-UP’s Wall Street protest in 1987, Gran Fury created these fake dollar bills in response to the pharmaceutical companies monopolizing AIDS drugs, making it impossible for a generic version of the drugs. I began by asking Marlene about the Wall Street protests:

Gran Fury, "Wall Street Money (backs)" (1987), printed paper

Marlene McCarty: All these ACT-UP boys got dressed up in nice suits, nice shoes and fancy leather briefcases. They stuffed the briefcases with the Gran Fury Money. In those days there wasn’t any security so they could go in the Mezzanine. So they went on the Mezzanine and when they clanged the bell, to start trading, they dumped all the briefcases on money on the trading floor. It was kind of fabulous because it stopped trading. The New York Times picked up the story not because of the messages but because it stopped trading. But they had to report on why. Within six to eight weeks, the AZT was lowered the price. It had a real effect on people.

Emily Colucci: How do you see Gran Fury’s work in relation to Occupy Wall Street? When I first walked through the show, I couldn’t help but think about the aesthetics of Occupy Wall Street in relation to Gran Fury, particularly with their Art and Culture Committee.

MM: We organized the show before Occupy Wall Street but as the opening got nearer, we were like this is kind of crazy.

Michael Cohen: We organized this show for two years and in that time all these events were happening: the unrest in Europe and the Arab Spring. All these synchronistic events were happening independently from each other. I think there is a relationship in the emotional tone. Both pretty fed up and angry. I think the difference is the generational relationship to the counter-culture. Gran Fury comes out of the hippie era, revolutionary committee meeting mentality. You also had a different imperative.

MM: Death!

Gran Fury, "Kissing Doesn't Kill bus poster" (1989)

EC: Tell me a little about the “Art Is Not Enough” poster, which is positioned hilariously right over the main reception desk in the space.

MM: This was a very small piece that was in the Village Voice. It was one we had done a number of pieces around this time saying “Art is not enough.” We spent years and years saying, “We’ll never exhibit in an art gallery. We aren’t doing that.”

MC: It took quite a bit of convincing to get them in an institutional gallery. They were like we’ve never had our work historicized or institutionalized we don’t want to do it. But I came up with the educational idea. It’s an educational place where there is a continuity between the past and the present. You can make an artwork out of making a historical reuse of your art.

MM: It’s not a commercial gallery and is located within an educational institution was reassuring. Everything is reproduced at billboard size which is the strategy we used in the one institutional thing we did in the Venice Biennale. One of the drives to reproduce rather than display decaying posters under Plexiglas boxes is we wanted the work to still live [and] not be historical artifacts. The work doesn’t have any copyrights on it and in the early days we were like “take it, change the language of it put it into French. We don’t care.”

MC: I think one thing that’s exciting about the project is we’ve got the work 20 years into the future where there are digital permanent versions that won’t crumble under somebody’s bed.

Gran Fury, "The Four Questions" (1994), printed flyer

EC: That’s one of the aspects of the exhibition that really excited me. At the opening, I realized that all the pieces were reproduced, which brought the works into the present. Rather than a strictly historical exhibition about a closed period of time, the work still lives on, which is fitting since AIDS is still a problem.

MM: At the opening I was touched and surprised. People would come up to me with tears in their eyes. Students aged 20-21 came up to me weeping and saying, “thank you so much for making this work.”

MC: The exhibition fills an emotional gap and a gap to history.

EC: I see it as a very important archive that has a risk of being lost. I’ve noticed that some people my age in their mid-20s who weren’t personally affected by a loss from AIDS feel as if they grew up in a time after AIDS. There is a real separation between those who have been affected by it and those who haven’t.

MM: I took a course of freshman year students through the exhibition and they had no idea about the AIDS crisis. They didn’t even know what Sarcoma lesions were.

EC: Why did Gran Fury end?

MM: We were acting during a really specific time. We fought for people have to say the words AIDS on television, people have to see a same sex couple kissing. From 1988 to 1994, things changed radically. It became whole different kind of conversation. The demographics of AIDS changed, the pharmaceuticals of AIDS changed. This is not what Gran Fury does. We decided it was time to stop.

MC: I recently taught a course between NYU and the Sorbonne on Situationism. The Situationists believed that the collective should never last longer than the needs of the mission. And should always be interrogating itself whether the mission is accomplished. So it seems antithetical to your mission to last forever.

Gran Fury, "Men Use Condoms or Beat It" (1988), sticker

EC: Is art enough?

MM: Art has again become so mute in a way. It’s so elite and monied and rarified. But it’s really the idea that art practice can have a different kind of vibrancy around it and can speak back. That art can be active rather than passive is really important.

Gran Fury: Read My Lips is on view at the 80WSE (NYU, 80 Washington Square East Galleries, Greenwich Village, Manhattan) until March 17.

The practice of criticism involves making finer and finer distinctions among like things, but it is also a way to ask fundamental questions about art and life. The MFA program in Art Criticism & Writing is designed to give students a grounding in the philosophical and historical bases of criticism, to improve both their writing and their seeing, and to provide sources that they can draw on for the rest of their lives. Critics cannot afford to be specialists, so our curriculum is wide-ranging.

In addition to our exceptional core faculty, we invite many writers, critics, philosophers, editors, artists, and art historians in each year to give lectures and to meet with our students individually and in small groups. Recent guests include: Susan Buck-Morss, Sylvère Lotringer, Avital Ronell, W.J.T. Mitchell, Michael Taussig, Boris Groys, Leo Steinberg, Peter Schjeldahl, Ann Lauterbach, Bill Berkson and Dave Hickey.

We are now accepting applications for the fall 2012 term. Generous departmental scholarships are available on a competitive basis. To download an application, go to https://www.applyweb.com/apply/svag, or contact us at artcrit@sva.edu, or (212) 592-2408 for further information.

To see sample programs, faculty bios, news, the Degree Critical online journal and recordings of past lectures, go to http://artcriticism.sva.edu.

Artist "William Powhida" getting drunk at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. (photo by Hrag Vartanian for Hyperallergic)

LOS ANGELES — I know a lot of artists who get drunk a lot. I know a lot of artists who are sleepy half the time. It just so happens that these artists are also very creative.

A new study, as reported in Wired, says good ol’ science backs up this observation:

When people were tested during their “least optimal time of day” — think of that night owl stumbling into the lab in the early morning — they were significantly more effective at solving insight puzzles … Performance on the analytic problems, meanwhile, was unaffected by the clock.

Nicolas de Lacy-Brown, "Hombre con Vino" (2004) (via delacy-brown.com)

But then there’s another study out of the University of Illinois with the terrific title of “Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving.” Students with a blood alcohol level of at least 0.075 were more successful at solving creative problems. That’s less than one drink for most people, two at most.

This is good news for hard-partying, insomniac artists itching for a creative breakthrough. Apparently, the reason sleepiness and intoxication are so good for creativity is because they lead to a decreased ability to concentrate. That lack of concentration in turn leads to greater free association, so the brain is more likely to come up with novel solutions and connections.

But what about us poor artists in Los Angeles, where we have to remain alert and awake while driving? Fortunately, another Wired article hints at a solution: self-driving cars are just around the bend.