Artists who have exhibited at BOX include Kathleen Morris (featured image; Flight/2007); Joanne Lefrak, Tom Miller; Kate Carr; Alice Leora Briggs, David Nakabayashi; Angela Berkson and more. For a full list, click this link. At press time rumors that other Santa Fe Railyard galleries were already shopping the artist talent were afoot.

BOX opened in the Baca Street district in 2000 and moved to the Railyards in 2006.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/02/arts/design/mike-kelley-influential-american-artist-dies-at-57.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries

“[On The Road] is about a group of crazy young people who just travel back and forth across the United States. Sometimes they hitch-hike and sometimes they drive cars. They steal cars and just want to be on the road the whole time. I’ve always liked that notion,” Ruscha said.

So it’s not unexpected that Ruscha would try to elucidate Jack Kerouac by lifting phrases from the novel and painting them in his signature-style: block print over nearly colorless, textured backgrounds, or vibrant hues with photorealistic images of mountain peaks along the bottom of the canvas.

Other common objects of Western culture also play a significant role in the art of Ed Ruscha. These are evident in the limited edition artist’s book version of On The Road created by Ruscha in 2009. The book is 222-pages printed on Hahnemühle paper and illustrated with photographs taken by the artist, commissioned or found. The photo plates are all blind embossed and tipped in by hand. An unbound version of the book, double-pages framed for display, is on view at the Denver Art Museum in Ed Ruscha: On The Road. Installed in an elegant grid at one end of the gallery, the rest of the space features 15 related paintings.

“If you weren’t familiar with the lines from Kerouac, you wouldn’t just know the source,” Thomas Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western Art said as we toured the exhibition. “You would think it was just Ruscha pulling literary verse out of context. At the heart of what Ruscha is, he’s a pop artist. In sort of the Andy Warhol sense of grabbing soup cans and images that are in popular culture, Ruscha is grabbing language that’s part of, and has become central to, popular culture, and the American story.”

Ruscha uses an all-caps typeface he invented, of curved letter forms squared-off, named “Boy Scout Utility Modern.” It’s his re-creation of the aesthetic of old-fashioned billboards and handmade commercial signs. And he knows something about this since he started his artistic career as a commercial artist. But it was his interest in words and typography that provides the primary subject matter for his paintings, prints and photographs.

A brilliant blue Western sky is the background for Mañana a large painting that is near the center of the gallery. “Sure, Baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard—mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.” The words “probably means” nearly disappear into a rugged, snow-capped mountain peak that juts up into the bottom of the painting. Ice-capped peaks protrude into an emerald green background on another painting across the room. “Greatest seventy-yard passer in the history of New Mexico State Reformatory,” written on the canvas. And in this one “reformatory” dematerializes into the peak.

The photo realistic mountains began appearing in Ruscha’s work in 1998, a few years after he created a mural for the Great Hall at the Denver Public Library. And an early example from the DAM collection is on view in a nearby gallery.

But even if one is unfamiliar with Ruscha’s background, his affinity for artist’s books, his inspiration found in language, one will find a link between his version of On The Road and his paintings in photography, which has played a crucial role throughout his career. His photographs typically feature deadpan depictions of subjects not thought of as having aesthetic qualities. This is evident in the imagery selected to illustrate On The Road the book. Like his paintings, most of his photographs are devoid of human presence, emphasizing the structure and its placement in a built environment. The same could be said of the phraseology in his paintings. His choice of words are straightforward while also being inscrutable. “The Holy Con-Man Began to Eat.” “Brakemen eat surly meals in diners by the tracks.” “Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself.”

And they are Western. Contemporary Western. Pop Western. Deadpan Western.

“In a gravity-defying array of color and form, Shapiro will suspend wooden planks, vibrantly painted with supersaturated pigment, from the gallery’s sixteen-foot ceiling,” according the University’s website.  Shapiro adds, “I feel like I’ve been working for so long to have finally built up this moment of discovery that I can get the work off the floor and be more playful in the air.”

Installation Museum Ludwig Cologne 2011 Photo: Lothar Schnepf

Shapiro is part of both the Menil Collection in Houston and the Nasher Collection in Dallas. As well, the artist is represented in collections throughout the world.

Time-lapse photography captures the effects of 12 hours of changing daylight on Shapiro’s 4 Elements (2003), a work installed in the Skyroom at L.A. Louver in Venice, California, as part of the exhibition Recent Sculpture (2004). Courtesy L.A. Louver.

Curated by artist Matthew Winters, a Saint Louis transplant who attended DePaul University, Last New Year overtakes an older east Austin home with the theme: the inevitable apocalypse. Art busts through the frame of the house (literally), defacing walls and windows. Hiding out in every nook and cranny, artifacts to sleuth. The home exudes that eerie, empty and/or just bored feeling that might accompany awaiting impending doom. Imagine knowing that the end of the world was near, but wanting to stay indoors for fear of looters for days, weeks, months—one would probably resort to games of scrabble, burying time capsules, or venerating aliens. Ink Tank exceedingly explores such possibilities, and in so doing turns an entire house into a work of art.

TJ Lemanski's "Untitled"

It’s work that is intended to have a hurried, or agitated feel, perhaps likening it to outsider art, but which is constructed with care. Of course, a piece that deserves special mention, and can be viewed driving-by the house or on the street, is The Purge by Chris Whiteburch. Fantastic. TJ Lemanski’s pieces seem to represent something precious and reclusive, or ritualistic—like the intricately constructed Untitled installation in the bedroom closet, including UFOs, candles and magnifying glasses.

Chris Whiteburch's "The Purge"

Qualifications aside, there is something very pleasurable in experiencing art that is completely integrated with its environment and that doesn’t require one to stand at arm’s length to admire.

Julia Clark's "Untitled"

As Jonathan Frantzen quipped, “inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”

Ms. Weedman’s own desperate drive to be part of a ‘real’ family, no matter how awkward orunnatural, is the central conceit of ‘No, You Shut Up’, Ms. Weedman’s side-splittingly funny solo show. We follow a neurotic, bitter, and newly divorced Ms. Weedman as she returns to her adoptive family, quickly falling for a single father and widower (David). The lengths she’ll go to insert herself into David’s grieving family (or any family, really) are by turns hilarious, humiliating, and stingingly resonant. It’s a modern tale for the modern family. Along the way she channels a hilarious cast of characters; her marvelously horrific adoptive mother, a needy and theatrical lesbian foster mother, a gay foster child, sullen and ludicrously naïve 14 year olds, the emotionally fragile tattoo artist- each carefully and articulately rendered.

With a simple turn of the head, droop of the shoulders, or curl of the lip, Ms. Weedman brings her cast to life. She knows and loves these people, and never delves into caricature or cliché, and, with few exceptions, never patronizes. This masterful skill should be no surprise, as Ms. Weedman is something of a solo performance expert (‘No You Shut Up’ is her sixth solo show). Though she’s been performing this piece for four years, it never felt stale, robotic, or routine. Rather, it has an invigorating vitality and a sense of danger.

Within seconds she had the whole audience roaring. She does this not through her material, which is fairly rote and ends on perhaps too nice a note for her piercing and astringent style, but through the personal lens. By simply reacting to the world around her, she makes us complicit confidantes in her humiliating adventures. Her characters are perfect foils for her frantic, furious, and self-deprecating personality. Ms. Weedman wonderfully merges Robin Williams’ mania with Margaret Cho’s vivid characterizations (see: unflinching mimicry of mothers). To clone Ms. Weedman, you’d have to combine a pathological need for attention, clever insight, a dose of rage, and pitch-perfectcomedic technique.

The direction by Jeff Weatherford kept the pacing quick and the transitions short, balancing sculpted action with vivid improvisation. It’s a balance otherdirectors would do well to imitate. Yet one of the most inspired turns was the reversal: Ms Weedman, acting as a Midwestern adoption agent, asks Lauren Weedman about her marital status, and then tries (and increasingly fails) to politely listen while ‘Lauren’ rants, finally screaming out ‘You’re single!’. It was an inspired turn I would like to have seen more of in the show.

All due credit to Tanya Taylor Rubenstein for bringing Ms. Weedman to the Lodge as part of her solo show series (for more info, visit Projectlifestories.org).

The respective contrast between “grades” deals in the gulfs that are seen between auction prices, and on e-commerce channels. We’ve reported on art investment grades’ apotheosis moments. November 9, Sotheby’s Clyfford Still for $61 million; also David Hammons Lot 4 for $2,266,500. (Hammons, for whom dematerialization was the real deal, in an early performance sold snowballs on New York City sidewalks.)

Skate’s thinks investment grade art is maxing out. Straitened money from tech and emerging market pipelines, will saturate the art market at a trading volume of $100 billion per annum, “Skate’s believes.”

"Extremely Rare" Poster on eBay; $95 reserve

“As buying and selling art becomes less and less akin to entering a temple and hearing from the gods, the entire (art) industry will have to reform to meet new consumer patterns.”

The result rides in a “consumer product vertical” of websites led, yes, by eBay in first place of 30 places Skate’s has assigned to e-platforms deemed tech and audience-ready for consumer grade art sales.

eBay has capitalization (and thou, Art.sy?) of $39.59 billion, “which is 33% more than the total value of the world’s Top 5000 masterpieces by auction prices.” Collectibles and art is its fourth most popular category already (after fashion, electronics and motors.)

On the top 30 list liveauctioneers comes in second, and artnet at third. Christie’s is four, Sotheby’s 7, Saatchi Online (which has linked us in the past) 9. Gagosian’s at 12, and Art.sy, still in beta (development), at 16. Part of what will be worth watching is how consumer patterns will price-inform in possibly riotous ways. Can one imagine a future “spot” market in Damien Hirst as rumors of auction are supported with a bevy of postmodern repro men selling spotted pencils or mousepads online?

Skate’s sees the technical prowess of eBay as unbeatable: platform and people already together online.

What else can be read between the lines of this report – after the baseline conclusion that “investment” grade finds high-end dealers needing to focus on the hold and the buzz-build until fever pitch and gavel fever correlate – is that there is going to be a lot of room for penetration into the “vertical.”

As, you just never plain know when “consumer grade” will veer over into investment grade, truly. David Hammons’ de-materialization of yore, which (speaking of snowballs), is just an excuse to cite Idler magazine and the Practical Home Onanist July 1993 column. “The ‘second bitterness equation,’ subtitled “Not in the Right (Fucking) Place at the Right Time (Was I)?”

(Idler 1993: “Greece is an idler’s spiritual home.”)

Marketwatch reported Sunday from Davos that buzzword of the World Economic Forum was “firewall.” For investment grade’s sake.

Let’s take Revelation again, the angel’s muscled arm, hooded lids. The scene goes in chronological proximity to Bisttram’s memory of Mexico in 1932. He had won a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Mexico but it was the Great Depression and the fellowship was cut off at five months in 1931. He painted this just one year after he had returned to Taos (which he had first visited, from New York, in 1930).

One can see in the Revelation side a clear homage to Rivera, though the interpretive possibilities of St. John on his rock are complex and fascinating. The angel figure including her wing and finger pointing spans the vertical canvas’s left side. Her feet hover above the rock where John sits above a dark jut of waves triangulating turquoise to cobalt blue. The petal-edged cloud abstracts desert buttes.

One could call this a universal picture; for St. John, the light of revelation offers a kinetic stillness. The angel wears bright yellow; her worker’s arms and pendant feet have more than shades of discernable Rivera styling. Think now of Taos (and the rift valley), and look again into the cloud. Then back at the saint’s aquiline profile and silhouette – stoic, planar, ancient.

None of which and all of which – seen as geometry of spiral and light pool – bear on the composition on front, 1964’s Homage. If I close my eyes and squint a little I think can see in Homage the mighty tower of Brooklyn Bridge, or at least a gateway image. The blinking eyeball emits a halo radiating a cone of light in the upper right of the painting: a spell? A foreground of black glyphs, a calligraphy and pattern language, go to planes behind planes; the work is an indelible study in what Clem Greenberg likely would have considered essential flatness.

Bisttram danced over time with variegated influences we can observe or impose: Russian constructivism, certainly expressionist color ways, then a reduction in color that let the dynamism of form do the work. Evocation of sacred is the impermeable impression of this terrific painting, appearing miraculous to me on a winter Wednesday. Auction records for Bisttram are around $40,000 $80,000. Payne said this piece is on offer for $145,000 and is quite a rare juxtaposition of two entirely different periods in the artist’s 46-year maturity between 1930 and his death in 1976.

Painting: ”Homage” (recto), 1964, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 inches.  signed and dated lower right:  Bisttram ’64

“Revelation (of St. John of Patmos)”, Circa 1932

Where did the idea for BANDHAPPY first come from?

Matt Halpern: Musicians don’t make a lot of money, just being in a band, so I started teaching people who were fans of my band. I would just set-up next to our van with a throne and a pad, and teach them there (while on tour). When we got home from the tours, I would have all these students from all over the country and all over the world. I would teach others via Skype. After that, a lot of other musicians started coming to me and saying, “Hey, are you making money off this and can you help me?” So I started booking lessons for all of these musicians and it just became too much to handle.  I was having to verify Paypal payments for them, coordinate through email and Facebook, and do the lessons via Skype. It was just too disjointed and cumbersome. So I moved everything over and started to put it all in one place. Which is really what BANDHAPPY is: It’s a centralized location where musicians can come and schedule, communicate, pay and get paid, and have an online video chat lesson or an on tour in-person lesson as musicians travel.

What new technologies did you have to develop for the site?

Matt Halpern: We really put a lot of things together that were already out there. Video chat is something that is really popular right now. You see it on the iPhones and all computers come with webcams for that purpose. We just needed to find the right servers for it, and the right people. We spent a lot of time on the system to make a really reliable video chat server. We made it so that if there’s going to be lags or delays because of end user connection, there are things in place to warn [the user]. So there’s all kinds of stuff built into the system and it’s real custom. It has been a lot of trial and error, and it’s only going to get better.

Is there any part of the world where the video chat isn’t very reliable?

Matt Halpern: It’s all about the end user. If someone in Australia, one day, has a bad connection, [then] the next day it might be great—it depends on where they live and what kind of equipment they are running, and if the people in their neighborhood are jamming up their lines, then it’s going to be shitty. We have had lessons from Norway to Montreal, from Holland to Australia, and seriously from the ends of the world and it has been very reliable. Right now let’s take a look: We have Los Angeles going to Dallas, Colorado to France, and Holland to somewhere I’ve never heard of. It’s really making the world a lot smaller for musicians.

On the website now you can choose from a wide range of instruments so I’m assuming the vision is to eventually encompass every style and instrument within reason?

Matt Halpern: Right now I have everyone from bassoonists, to flute players, to music business people that are in the process for approval. We have a very, very stringent approval process for teachers. We very carefully go over their profiles. We read their information, watch their videos. Yeah, we have teachers right now that are about to be approved for a whole bunch of new instruments that we don’t even have listed on the site yet because these instructors are bringing them to the plate.

So if a teacher is qualified, they don’t have to be a rock star/touring musician do they?

Matt Halpern: We started with musicians in the network I am in because that’s where a lot of my friends are: Touring musicians that have been in this world for a long time. Those were the people who initially came to this thing and said, “Yeah, let’s do this” but it’s by no means limited to being in a band. We have music teachers that teach at Berkley College of Music. There’s this one dude, Scott Fernandez; he sent in videos with his application that just blew me away and I posted them on the BANDHAPPY Facebook and immediately had one-hundred-plus comments with people going “Holy shit! This guy is amazing.” So that’s what it’s about: Finding the right talent and people that can communicate to others what they are doing and teach that. It’s a great extra way to make some money. Moe Carlson, who is the drummer for Protest the Hero, was saying to me the other day, “If I could just teach three half hour lessons a week for the next four weeks I’ve paid my mortgage.” That’s it. It’s just that simple.

What about price range for the lessons?

Matt Halpern: Teachers can set their own rates; it’s completely up to them. Some guys were doing deals for the first week. Some guys were doing $15 to $20 half hour lessons; some were doing $30 to $40 half hour lessons, all the way up to $100 hour lessons. It just really depends on the instructor. To be a member of the site is free. To be a teacher you simply have to have your shit together, so to speak—so when you apply you have a good profile, you give good information, you provide enough details about yourself for us to say, “Okay, this person has enough of a professional manner to be involved with the site.”

Now can you search instructors out? Say, some dude wants to learn 80′s hair metal from the guitar player of Skid Row. Can you make that happen?

Matt Halpern: Yeah, absolutely. We have a vast network that can bring in anyone that we need. Having the right kind of secret weapons on the team, who really have the experience, know a lot of people in the industry on all levels. I have been touring professionally since I was 18 years old, and in that time I have always maintained the network. Everybody knows everybody and you always have to be professional. You have to be out for the good cause, because people can see through bullshit.

As a drummer do you ever wish you had more camera angles for the lessons?

Matt Halpern: Sure. Those are some of things that we are working on. In the near future there will be multi-camera angles and different inputs and outputs for different mics; there will be options for all that stuff. Right now it’s all about where you set the camera. If you set the camera where they can see you, your hands, and see the drum set working together it’s really not too much of an issue. It’s cool because it’s musicians who are teaching and they are very creative so they always find a way to make it work.

What’s the goal for 2012 and where do you see this in December?

Matt Halpern: We have a lot of great initiatives that we are going to be doing with non-profits, schools, and a lot of stuff with expanding the artist base. The goal for me is to improve the system and really beef it up and make it as cool as I envision it. Right now, this is version one. And, like the iPhone, when the first iPhone one came out, Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple headquarters were thinking about iPhone 10. That’s where I am with this. I see everything that it should be when I look at it, but I want the users to tell me what they want and in what order.

Do you think you will be working with schools on a large basis at some point?

Matt Halpern: Absolutely, we have a fairly big initiative that we are working on. Basically it will start in the Baltimore-area, where I am from, and we are going into the school systems and a lot of the different teachers will be broadcasting-in and using our platform to help enhance what is going on in the music classrooms all over the country. With the deficits they have in their budgets [for music classes] we can help make it a lot better without spending a lot more money, by putting the internet right into the classroom. That’s a big thing that we are spending a lot of time developing right now.