Art After Dark

Art After Dark, produced by the Artist Network, NY, NY, is a talk show that speaks many languages, both literally and metaphorically. Part Charlie Rose meets Graham Norton by way of the analyst’s couch, Andy Warhol’s TV (1982), Lucio Fontana’s Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement (1952), and a spin on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosopy of the primacy of language, Art After Dark serves more than a platform for exchange between host and guests and interviewer and interviewees. As hosted by independent curator and critic Raul Zamudio, Art After Dark is an exhibition of sorts in real time that appropriates the talk show format. It inverts the traditional function of the exhibition as repository of art objects in which curatorial narrative is conveyed through selection, placement and so forth. For if the art object is an extension of the artist then the inverse must be true as well: now the artwork manifests through the artist. Thus, Art After Dark reconfigures the interview genre as performance art in which dialogue, communication and interaction are framed symbioticaly as curatorial/artistic articulations. Art After Dark is a curatorial model whose title is inspired by two disparate sources: one is the ubiquitous Art After Dark programs offered by museums that the curator/host finds banal and superflous. The other has to do with cable televison's inception and one of the shows it offered that the curator/host tried to illegally access when he was an adolescent: Playboy After Dark. Artists curated/interveiwed so far include Javier Tellez, Wenda Gu, Surface 2 Air, Pablo Helguerra, Katja Loher, O Zhang, Filip Noterdaeme/The HOMU Museum, Jeff Gompertz, Alfredo Martinez. Art After Dark Link: http://theartistnetwork.org/streaming06/Sindex.html Art After Dark was first launched in September of 2004; since then there have been others who have jumped on the bandwagon, although those endeavors are more akin to art journalism for the cocktail circuit rather than a conceptual curatorial project.