Online art magazine goes live on Lower East Side

Volume 1, Number 52 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | September 14 - 20, 2007

Chelsea: Arts & Lifestyles: ART

Michael Rizzo

Noah Becker, publisher of Whitehot magazine

Online art magazine goes live on Lower East Side

BY ABBY LUBY

If you were checking out the lively art scene last weekend between Delancey and E. 6th Street, you couldn’t miss the large vinyl banners draping three trucks: the Whitehot Office Truck, Whitehot Cinema Truck, and Whitehot Concert Truck.

The vehicles were parked for The Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art’s coming out party, the first physical celebration of the online publication. Occupying real space in the burgeoning art mecca of the Lower East Side was Whitehot publisher Noah Becker, who operates the site from his home in Vancouver, Canada. Becker said the festival was a conceptual performance art piece driven by the magazine’s format. “We applied what we write about in the magazine to the festival,” he said. “We had interviews, cinema, music.”

The festival was curated by Jan Van Woensel & Tracy Candido, who situated the Whitehot Trucks near two art galleries: Envoy at 131 Chrystie Street and Smith-Stewart at 54 Stanton Street.

Whitehot (www.whitehotmagazine.com) launched in March 2007, and was embraced by a growing international community of artists who sought its immediacy for art news, reviews and informal dialogue. The monthly online publication includes reviews authored by writers, artists, curators and college professors from New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Zurich, and Tokyo.

For Becker, the support to hold the street fest was overwhelming, especially with some surprise appearances from oversees contributors.

“We had people like Tamsin Clark of the Serpentine Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum in London show up with Diane Smyth, who is deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography,” Becker recounted. “Also Shana Nys Dambrot, the California art critic and author was here along with photographer/writer Leigh Harris from Japan. These folks just wanted to be here because something interesting was happening.”

Interviews inside the Whitehot Office truck were staged in a cozy ‘mise-en-scene’ replete with couch, chair, area rug, cocktail table and lamp. Among those being chatted up were Paul Laster, editor at Art Asia Pacific, Artkrush.com and Boldtype.com, popular New York culture critic and curator Carlo McCormick and artist Jim Powers.

Becker marveled at how local artists and writers volunteered their time to the festival.

“A lot of people came together to make this festival happen,” he said. “People at the festival had the opportunity to know about what we were doing in a more direct way, as opposed to just over the Internet — this was a direct connection.”

Local bands performing on Thursday and Friday nights in the Whitehot Concert Truck across from the Envoy Gallery were The Quavers, Brent Green, Huff This!, Forest Fire, Noah Becker Jazz Ensemble & Guests, Cassanova Brown. Although Whitehot had a sound permit, not a noise permit, amplified sound was not allowed except for microphones. Some bands had to improvise.

“These were all acoustic bands,” said Candido. “It had a feeling of a happening. At one point the singer from Forest Fire, who didn’t bring any mics, improvised by moving over into the cinema truck, which had better acoustics and started singing. That grabbed everyone’s attention.”

Films ran both Thursday and Friday nights at the cinema truck on Chrystie Street and were mostly shorts curated by Kweighbaye Kotee of the Bushwick Film Festival, a collective of emerging and underground filmmakers. A handy map pointed out both truck sites and the participating east side galleries including Smith-Stewart, Envoy, Thierry Goldberg Projects, Little Cakes, Sunday, Rivington Arms, and 31 Grand.

Unlike the competitive edge of printed art magazines, Whitehot garnered support from other online cultural publications like ArtKrush and Flavorpill, each advertising the festival on their site. Whitehot also partnered with Club Midway and The Cascade High School - Center for Multimedia Communications.

“We were pleased with the festival because a lot of people hadn’t heard of the magazine before this,” summed Candido. “They seemed impressed with the idea that we didn’t just want to exist in cyberspace, but that we wanted to be physically present on the Lower East Side.”