NICK PAPARONE

September 2

Scaramouche Gallery

52 Orchard Street NYC

6pm

http://www.scaramoucheart.com/

Salon Series:
Don’t Fetishize our Post-Fordism
(we still go to cocktail parties with Communists)
 
Nick Paparone: Rent Time
Julia Brown: L’Entartage
Ryan Daley: Reasons against lighting up for Mother Theresa, and other poems
Arlen Austin with the Nail Workers Chorus: Song of the United Front
 
Curated by David Everitt Howe, associate director.
 
Thursday, September 2, 2010, 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Manicures begin at 6:30, performances at 7:00
 
Scaramouche is delighted to introduce a new series of interdisciplinary events born out of the gallery’s casual summertime gatherings between young artists, writers, and intellectuals. Welcome to K-Marx kicks off the Fall season early as the first Commie Cocktail evening. Featuring manicures, Communist muzak, a very loud lecture, French anarchy, song, dance, and the spirit of Michael Smith, Welcome to K-Marx repurposes political agency. Might subjectivity, colonized by late-capitalism, still be a perversely retooled site for Leftist agitation?
 
Nick Paparone begins the evening with a persuasive motivational speech; Julia Brown presents a video complication of anarchists hurling pies at political targets; poet Ryan Daley muses on Mother Theresa, the Empire State Building, and other strange conflations of the sacred and profane; trained opera singer Arlen Austin and a chorus of beauticians conclude the program with a musical paean to the legacy of Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht’s lesser-known collaborator, also known as “the Karl Marx of music.”
 
About the participants:
Nick Paparone received his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and is currently working on his MFA at Columbia University. His work has been included in exhibitions at X Initiative, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Julia Brown received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and recently completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The Kitchen and LMAK Projects, both in New York. Ryan Daley received his MFA in poetry from Brown University. His writing has been published by Greying Ghost press and BlazeVOX books. Arlen Austin received his BA and MFA from Columbia University. His work has been included in exhibitions at White Box, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and Scaramouche, all in New York. David Everitt Howe recently completed an MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. He is associate director at Scaramouche and a regular contributor to ArtReview and Art in America.

Nick Paparone

David Dunn

Jamie Dillon

We\'re Working On It

Vox Populi\'s first publication is hot off the presses and at the gallery!  The books will be on sale for $30.

We\'re Working On It, is a visual representation of Vox Populi\'s 21st year of programming. Also included in the pages is the first written history of Vox Populi (by Amy Adams), the starting point for a history of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia (by Richard Torchia), and an essay on our city\'s identity as a center of artistic production (by Paul Galvez).

An illustrated timeline of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia, dating from the 1960s, rounds out this important publication.

Design by Ashley John Pigford, 120 pages, full color.

Opening: Friday, March 21st 7:00pm-12:00am
March 21-22, 2010

6-8 Months Project Space, 18 Floor (#18s), 265 W 37th St.
between 7th and 8th Ave, New York, NY 10018

2010 First-year MFA Exhibition
April 7-17
Opening reception, Saturday, April 3, 6-8 pm
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University

Inbal Abergil, Maria Antelman, Adam Axel, Guy Ben-Ari, Alexander Carver, Matthew Fischer, Nadja Frank, Jesse Greenberg, Nora Griffin, Emily Henretta, Christopher Jehly, Yve Laris Cohen, Joseph Michael Lopez, Pooneh Maghazehe, Norbert Martinez, Tracy Molis, Nick Paparone, Rory Parks, Stephanie Prussin, Christine Rebet, Brie Ruais, William Santen, Francisco Vidal, Julia Sherman, Walter Smith, Leah Wolff, Yeon Joong Yue

Interview MagazinePhiladelphia's Vox Populi Gallery is an artist-run non-profit space with 25 members who vote collectively on the space's agenda. A consensus might sound like task enough; then consider that Vox (as it's called for short) is actually four rotating spaces with a video lounge and a project space for which outsiders can apply to exhibit. Vox's populist model isn't so much a radical rejection of the ways of seeing art than a practical (more than it seems) intervention into the culture of exclusivity and hierarchies in galleries, says director Andrew Suggs, "Other than that, the space follows, you know, a museum model, its white walls, it looks like sort of most galleries I guess..." Here he explains the gallery's participatory plans for the X Initiative, and why a collective memory isn't always the best one....

Nick Paparone’s solo show at Vox Populi is a rambunctious affair, composed of sculptures and wall hangings that turn the gallery into an anxious landscape littered with past fits of excessive inebriation, sexual adventures and scatological accidents. The gallery is decorated with large beer labels and sheets with spray-painted images of billiard balls that create the effect of bouncing off objects and walls like a cue ball. It’s a bit too frenetic at times, but maybe that’s the point. The title of the show seems to leave little doubt — this experience, like the tale told in the 1974 song by the rock outfit Humble Pie, is a jaunt into a world of overindulgence with all the usual risks, dangers,and consequences.

Paparone’s visual referents function like flotsam and jetsam from the unconscious, gathered together as surreal expressions of the tensions between repressed desires and powerful acts of personal catharsis.  The objects are the strongest aspect of the show, more so than the installation effect evoked by the wall elements, and the sculptures evidence solid craftsmanship and an adroit use of vernacular materials. Paparone seems at his best when working with free association between words and things, and engaging in semiotic associations with his chosen combinations and juxtapositions is provocative to say the least.

A saddle horse structure with a bucket of scatological slop and a lurid orange turd, mounted with a riding saddle, elicits aesthetic sophistication in a cocktail with something beastly. But at times the visual noise from the surrounding walls has a tendency to compete slightly with the full potential of Paparone’s objects.  With all the sexual and scatological imagery in the show, and the large kinetic sculpture of a bloodshot eye at the center of the room, I’m reminded of polemical surrealist Salvador Dalí, whose sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound seems recast through the hovering, lonely eye. But Paparone’s eye is not an outside observer. Instead, it seems to function as the ocular nexus of this visceral world, a way of presenting a haunting visual metaphor of the persistence of self-reflection. If Paparone’s intent in “30 Days in the Hole” is to take me on a trip down a perverse memory lane, recalling psychic and physical ups and downs along the road of life, then he succeeds with ease.

-Jonathan Wallis

Posted in Art by T.J. Carlin on June 27th, 2009 at 10:56 am

For some rooftop pleasure tonight, try Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon’s performance at X, Regular Tripping, which is based on urban folklore about the guy who ate too much acid and thought he was a glass of orange juice. Get this: As the story goes, if he were to spill he would die. Talk about a legend in your own mind. Aren’t you curious to know what happens next?

"I can't believe I fuckin' turned into a glass of orange juice, man," he says. "At least I'm high in Vitamin C, man. Fuck man, I hope I'm pulp-free, because otherwise that'd just be gross. It's going to be tricky making it through life as a glass of orange juice, man."

Regular Tripping
collaborative performance by Nick Paparone and Jamie Dillon

June 27th 6-7pm

X Initiative 548 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

Vox members will be exhibiting at SPACE in Portland, Maine from June 5 - July 23. The show, Expanded Marks is curated by Andrew Suggs and features Vox artists Amy Adams, Anita Allyn, Leah Bailis, Gabriel Boyce, Robert Chaney, Micah Danges, Jamie Dillon, Charles Hobbs, James Johnson, Jacque Liu, Nick Paparone, Joshua Rickards, Dustin Sparks, Brent Wahl, and Linda Yun. Visit here for more info.

EDITH NEWHALL  (PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) Sun, Dec. 21, 2008

Now in its sixth year, the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery's open invitational exhibition has become this city's most anticipated roundup of the young and talented. It's the kind of rigorously organized, exciting survey of emerging area artists that all galleries and local museums should be aspiring to.

This December's iteration, "You Open So Late, You Close So Early," which features no videos - or any pieces involving sound, for that matter (except for a gently whirring plate and a fan in two sculptures) - strikes a more contemplative mood than its predecessors. The calmness is also the result of the show's installation, which allows more physical distance between works than previous invitationals have.

It's become unusual not to hear some noise in a show of contemporary art, you realize - but the quiet here is deceptive. There is a lot of bite and attitude in this show, and it accumulates strength as you walk through it, slowly savoring each artist's contributions.

Nick Paparone, an artist who has been showing sprawling, deliberately trashy sculpture installations of all-American debris at Vox Populi, looks better than ever in this show with his more distilled efforts, The Long Now (2008), a swirling, motor-operated plate of painted-plaster eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon against a laminated poster backdrop of outer space, and The Philosopher (2008), a fan-inflated sculpture of joined plastic bags arising from a cardboard carton like a jack-in-the-box and covered with vinyl decals of blue eyes. If this sounds over the top, then you missed Paparone's recent installation at Vox.

Hyper-realist drawing has been back in style for a while, after a 30-plus-year hiatus, and it looks entirely new in the hands of Mark Stockton, who plucks his subjects from the tabloid news of the past - Patty Hearst, Pete Rose, Arnold Schwarzenegger - and renders them with the utmost precision, transforming them into misunderstood, media-maligned action heroines and heroes.

The artist-brother team of Steven and Billy Dufala stand out as well with their creepy, distorted sculpture of a huge oak sledge-hammer handle inserted into a tiny steel head, and their digitally altered photograph of a Converse sneaker that stretches it into a long, coiling, snakelike form.

C. Pazia Mannella, an artist who was completely new to me, contributed works that put the dots on the i's, in case the intense, outsidery nature of this particular invitational hadn't already sunk in. Mannella's Your Grace (2008), a serpentine floor sculpture of zippers, fabric and thread, is a descendant of such icons of kink as Nancy Grossman's leather masks of the early 1970s, but sweeter and more toylike, with none of Grossman's obvious figurative references.

Having seen so many diverting video and film pieces in past invitationals, it struck me that this show would have benefited from the presence of an artist working with moving images. The monotonous sounds of Paparone's endlessly swirling plate and fan are unnerving in this unusually still show. But maybe that's the point.

"You Open So Late, You Close So Early" also includes works by David Clayton, Charles Hobbs, Nick Lenker, Josh Rickards, Shawn Thornton and Alex Lukas.

Curated by Amy Adams, Patrick Blake, Claire Iltis and Heather Shoemaker, the 2008 Juried Winter Show features David Clayton, Jeremy Drummond, Billy & Steven Dufala, Charles Hobbs, Nick Lenker, Alex Lukas, C. Pazia Mannella, Nick Paparone, Josh Rickards, Mark Stockton and Shawn Thornton. The show opens with a reception on Thursday, December 11, from 6 to 9PM.

fleisher/ollman

Despite the fetid air that today cloaks such announcements, bellowed chiefly from the stuffy corridors of academe, we should not shy away from committing this axiom to memory, digesting it, as Marcel digested Mallarmé’s poems.  

As Paparone shows indelicately, with pomp, fist pound, and bombast, its grip on our artistic present tightens all the more that it is dismissed as the concern of theoretical curmudgeons who frown fustily on aesthetic delights.

Of course Paparone's Bacchanal does not follow the path of my dear Marcel.  Such a grand spectacle of our hopelessness is not to the latter’s taste.  The spectacle is hopeless not because it exposes us to our miserable condition, to our incessant infantalization.  Rather it is hopeless because the feelings it rouses in us are the very affects that keep us subjected.  We remain enthralled to the very thing that menaces us. 

Being forced now and then to bath in one’s own vomit, to consume one’s own abscesses, has its virtues.  But if we are to slurp up our own phantasmagoric mess, we must not cloak its taste with sweetener, disguise it with candy coating. There is no more cynical a gesture than reinforcing the confusion that leads us to think we are eating chocolate while all along we are swallowing shit.

But before the thread is lost let me return to the wound swollen with puss, for like all infections they fester with neglect. So it is a great thing indeed that Paparone has exposed the wound to Philly’s fresh air, restaging the empty ritual of the art market, its continual and desperate attempt to resuscitate the fallen idol, ART, by injecting a little 'life,' i.e., capital, into its veins, comically rendered through the serial sacrifice of a little Mountain Dew before an altar erected to Brancusi’s The Kiss. 

But the sacrifice could not be more delusional, the scene more pathetic, the maenads less feminine, reduced as they are to cruel and pitiless embodiments of the most adolescent of male gazes.  Faceless and exhausted, they pour libation after libation, drained of joy, unable to summon the god.  As lifeless as a gangbang.  There is no Dionysian revelry in this bacchanal, in this simulation of the orgiastic, that seeks through its wasteful and senseless consumption, this ultra mundane bloodletting, to breathe life back into art, into the modernist monument.

So hopeless is the attempt at revitalization that all we devotees of the market can offer it are gift’s in the form of small framed abstractions that give back to the idol, works composed of its own excretions (the pictures resemble shit or chocolate smears). Blood and shit to soda and chocolate: an abject transubstantiation.  A sardonic parody of high art’s fetishization, of its deification and destruction at the hands of the market’s unrelenting law.  This is all too cleverly conveyed by the equivalence of sign established between Brancusi’s The Kiss, updated in gold, and Pennsylvania’s own, Hershey’s Kiss, establishing at the center of the altar the symbolic relation between gold and shit, the high (the Museum) and the low (the Market Place), as if signed by John Miller himself.  The lovers’ embrace sullied by the Hershey turds they excrete, surrounded by images that reflect back to the idol its own filth.  Reification indeed dear Marcel.  The strategy no doubt is to rouse the corpse with its own deadly evacuations.

And indeed such a vision of excess is worth pursuit.  One would hardly be astonished if one found a well worn copy of the selected writings of that grandiloquent terrorist of the concept, George Bataille, upon Paparone’s bedside table, so innocently and naively does he move through a whole litany of Bataille’s favorite tropes: the grand equation that links high and low culture, porn and art, the sacred and the profane, the ecstatic and the abominable, shit and gold, sex and death, expulsion and consumption through the restriction and unrestriction, build up and release, of this cosmic economy. 

But to write large the spectacle of the art market’s reification hardly disturbs the spectacle.  Too little does it transgress its law, too little does it thirst for its annihilation. 

What it does do, however, is trample on the nostalgia, drifting toxically through our present, for that utopian spring that once gushed naturally from the pores of the artist-militant.  I agree.  Nostalgic fits for adolescence must be crushed.  Good riddance. 

But if in fact we are left only with the cynical pleasure of enunciating the obsolescence of the utopian dream, I want none of this dilemma.  Nostalgia or cynicism is a false choice, fit for a night on the town and its promise of good fun, but not the artist’s vocation.  This is not la promesse de Bonheur.  We have simply leapt from the horn of nostalgia to be impaled upon that of cynicism. 

We artists must dissolve this dilemma upon which Bacchanal—Tootsie Roll Whip divides.

Winner of the P.T. Barnum Best Show on Earth award this month is Nick Paparone. His two bag-headed Daisy Mae's pouring Mountain Dew into trash cans First Friday in his Reynolds Wrapped installation is the anti-spectacle spectacle that's hard not to love. Not only does this piece,  Bacchanal-Tootsie Roll Whip, call to mind frat parties and youthful hooliganism in general but the hooliganism of our crassly over-consumptive culture as well. Oh, and then there's some art content. Surely the ladies are fountains of a sort. (Think Duchamp among other art references.) A platform in the middle of the room -- festooned with bikini tops -- is the showcase for framed abstract finger paintings in what could be called fecal colors. And, this dubious ship of state is topped by a gilded icon: Brancusi's Kiss--an emblem of old world art, craftsmanship, love -- and the Philadelphia Museum of Art which owns the original. This critique of the times reminds me of Mike Kelley's giant high school fair at Gagosian in 2005 “Mike Kelley: Day Is Done”, only unlike Kelley's B-movie funhouse which fetishized teen culture which it was in love with, Paparone's teen aesthetic is lighter, brighter and more conflicted.