HAPPY NEW YEAR

To our clients, colleagues and dear friends:
Happy New Year from Barbara Balkin Inc.

Alanna Heiss to Retire from P.S. 1

The Museum of Modern Art has announced the retirement of Alanna Heiss from her position as the director of the curatorial department at P.S. 1 after thirty-seven years of running the institution. Alanna Heiss founded P.S.1 in 1971 in an old public school building in Long Island City, Queens, as a space for large-scale visual and performing art works of established and emerging contemporary artists. Heiss's original mission was to organize exhibitions in underused and abandoned spaces in New York City. Today it's considered one of the most respected exhibition spaces in the city. P.S. 1 became a venue for video and performance art, including performances by Gordon Matta-Clark and Dennis Oppenheim. It later expanded to include dance, film and music. In 1999, P.S. 1 formed an affiliation with the Museum of Modern Art, resulting in collaborations with the Manhattan-based institution. Each summer, P.S. 1 presents experimental musicians and DJs. Its annual Young Architects Program, in collaboration with MoMA, awards commissions to young architects for projects in P.S. 1's courtyard. The New York Press’s Jerry Portwood calls Heiss the “powerful force that put the former schoolhouse on the cultural map as an experimental, edgy art destination” before it became affiliated with MoMA in 2000. Portwood notes that John Baldessari has said, “She is P.S. 1, and P.S. 1 is her. It doesn’t seem like she could be replaced.” Following her retirement, Heiss will launch Art International Radio, “an organization that will be devoted to artistic, musical, performance, and experimental programs, in early 2009. Taking its lead from Heiss’s brainchild Art Radio WPS1.org, Art International Radio will bolster a tradition of bringing thought-provoking conversations with noteworthy artists, curators, and academics to a listening audience.” A search committee will be formed in 2009 to locate the person who will replace the retiring director.

ON ARCHITECTURE
Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Illustrated. 478 pp. Walker & Company. $35.

Huxtable was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982 and still, at 87, writes occasional essays for The Wall Street Journal.“On Architecture,” a career-spanning collection of articles and essays, demonstrates that she has always pursued her mission with reason, elegance and wisdom. Her aesthetic was forged by the austerities of high modernism. Huxtable’s work remains the gold standard of criticism — and not just the architectural variety — because she brings to the job a rare combination of aesthetic certitude and roving curiosity.
Huxtable responds to the destruction of 9/11 with a far-seeing suite of essays. “I do not believe for a moment that we are no longer capable of building great cities of symbolic beauty and enduring public amenity,” she writes. “What ground zero tells us is that we have lost the faith and the nerve, the knowledge and the leadership, to make it happen now.”

HAROLD PINTER DIES AT 78

British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter — who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas, died today in London.
In 1958 Harold Pinter wrote the following:
"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false."
I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Meeting

It is the dead of night
The lond dead look out towards
The new dead
Walking towards them

There is a soft heartbeat
As the dead embrace
Those who are long dead
And those of the new dead
Walking towards them

They cry and they kiss
As they meet again
For the first and last time

Harold Pinter, August, 2002

MOCA ACCEPTS ELI BROAD OFFER

The cash-strapped Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has accepted the $30-million bailout plan of billionaire supercollector Eli Broad. MOCA director Jeremy Strick has resigned as part of the part of the overhaul, according to the Los Angeles Times, and UCLA chancellor emeritus Charles E. Young has been named as the museum’s new chief executive. Strick, who has headed the museum for nine years, made no public comment. The plan implicitly splits the museum directorship into two parts, with Young overseeing the business side and a new director, still to be named, in charge of artistic matters.
The Broad plan provides a $15-million challenge grant for a new MOCA endowment fundraising drive, and $3 million a year for five years for operating funds. The MOCA board has reportedly pledged more than $20 million in new gifts, though no details were revealed. The agreement also sets the MOCA budget at $13 million-$16 million a year; in recent years, the museum budget has averaged $20 million. The move also means that MOCA is not taking up LACMA director Michael Govan’s offer of a merger with his museum.

Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life: Part 2

Jan. 27–May 30, 2009
Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life is a two-part exhibition curated by the acclaimed Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy. It presents a diverse range of artists and artworks related to McCarthy's memories of his own career.
The first part, presented in 2008, investigated his student years in Salt Lake City and San Francisco during the 1960s. This second part focuses on his years in Los Angeles from 1970 to the present, with an emphasis on the emergence of alternative performance practices, Conceptual art, and video art. Lacking a definite chronological starting point, however, it follows some of its thematic trajectories back to the 1950s.
McCarthy's curatorial selections are eclectic and unconventional, deriving more from his personal recollections than from any historical, objective measure of artistic influence. Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 features works by Walt Disney, Howard Fried, Rachel Khedoori, Les Levine, Dennis Oppenheim, and Lil Picard. An extensive film program will also be presented.
Although McCarthy did not achieve international recognition until the 1990s, he has been an influential figure on California's art scene for more than 30 years. His early performance work of the 1970s explored the body and sexuality. The intensity of these performances, which often included graphic depictions of taboo subjects, eventually led him into further explorations and exploitations of video and film, special effects, and large-scale installation as he continually strove to heighten the effect of his work. Today McCarthy is considered one of the most influential living American artists.

MARK LECKEY WINS TURNER PRIZE

A witty meditation on the nature of film in popular culture taking in Felix the Cat, Homer Simpson, Titanic the movie and Philip Guston, tonight helped Mark Leckey win what is still acknowledged as the country's most important contemporary art prize. The forty-three-year-old, London-based artist rifles at will through popular culture to create his own works. Leckey was presented with the prize and its attendant $37,000 check by Nick Cave at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London.