Links to some of our press

Daniel Durning, WPS1, interview with Holly Crawford in the Flatland Limo, Armory Show, first boadcast May 19, 2008

Christine Licata, "Reflections on Space," MFA Thesis in Criticism and Writing, SVA, 2008, excerpt Chapter II, Porous Spaces

As a participant in the 'Flatland Limo' project this past Armory show, the experience was a transformative one--completely converting me to Crawford's limo-symposia. The discussions about the pieces brought them to life and promoted me to explore further into my own experience in order to articulate it to the group. The sun set as we were driving down the pier along the Hudson. The effect was an aesthetic vertigo that blurred the exterior world of the city with the videos inside the limousine, unexpectedly enhancing the work rather than detracting from it, leaving an effect similar to the memory of dreams upon waking. 'Flatland Limo' lived up to Crawford's promise that 'infinite pathways through the city's text are created, in a moment, an instant a whole new city unfolds.' AC Institute represents another example of the whole fragment that creates a porous space that once you enter "all possibilities change in your perception and understanding of who you are with what it is.'" --pgs 48-49

Michael Dwyer, "Scamming the Festival," The Age, Oct 5, 2007

Stephanie Bunbury, "Art That's Going Places, The Age, October 19, 2007.

Fenella Kernebone,reporter and producer, "Sound Art Limo," interview, ABCTV National Sunday October 21.07

Amanda Smith, Artworks, ABC National Radio, 10.14.07,

James Panero, "Art, The New York Art Fairs," The New Criterion, April 2007.

Blog: Everywhere, There and Here

Stunned.org Ireland

Artnet, Sound Art in a Limo, news 2007

Holly Crawford, "art on words," art.es, no. 17, 2007. (Article on Critical Conversations in a Limo, New York published in art.es.)

Holland Cotter, New York Times, Art Review: The World Tour Rolls into Town...March 10, 2006

Artinfo.com review, 2006

More text excerpts

Stephanie Bunbury,
October 19, 2007
The Age,
"Art That's Going Places,"


Holly Crawford's bewilderingly crammed CV includes a degree in economics as well as professorial appointments in art schools. She has an abiding interest in nailing the meeting points between art, money and privilege. For example, she wrote her doctoral thesis on the use of Disney's images in fine art.

Knowing how jealously Disney guards its rights to anything that looks like a mouse (her thesis, when it became a book, had to come out without illustrations), she wondered how pop artists such as Robert Lichtenstein had been able to get away with it. As she soon discovered, a few deals had been done.

So it is perhaps not so surprising to find her inviting people to discuss art or experimental music in the back of a limousine. Crawford developed Sound Art Limo and Critical Conversations in a Limo, two projects that now form part of the visual arts program of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, as adjuncts to New York's art fairs earlier this year.

Her "critical conversation" limousine picks up anyone who wants to join an hour-long salon about anything to do with art. She provides champagne while an artist or curator leads each discussion, which is recorded on camera. In the sound art limousine, participants hear music from local sound artists, who also act as DJs and hosts.

We may think of a limo as something hired for hen nights; as a Californian, says Crawford, she associates them with the Oscars. In New York, she found it was different. "A limo is something of a power statement. At the art fairs, every collector had a town car or limo and was jumping around from fair to fair."

She would tell people to look out for her white limo among the sea of status black. "So the project was part of the fair, but at another level it was a kind of statement: here are the people who bring you art and culture."

She is interested, she says, to see how they go in Melbourne, "which is not a limo place".

The point of the limousine, however, is less about its symbolic value than the fact that it offers an intimate, isolated space. The one rule of engagement in Critical Conversations is that conversation should not fragment into groups; it is the hosts' job to ensure that everything is part of the group experience. The recordings in New York tended to reflect an art business agenda; a festival, she predicts, should yield a whole new set of subjects.

The sound art limousine rides are shorter: only half an hour. Ideal, Crawford points out, for a city worker's lunch break.

The interesting thing with the sound art limo, she says, is that the whole group experiences the sound at the same time. "Normally you go into a museum and put on headphones. And normally a show is a monumental work by one artist or a group, which is OK too, but there are a lot of artists who play round with fun little bits of experimental music and found sounds. That is what this is about."

Crawford's father was a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, but both her parents were more interested in the arts and were always taking the family to museums. Which is why she wanted to study economics, even though she was already painting and had her sights set on becoming an artist.

"That was a subject matter at home that wasn't sort of there," she says. "It was wanting to know what's going on in the world."

But what she ended up studying, she says, was the economics of institutions. "I still am looking at institutions: an art fair, a museum, or the art market itself."

Festival fever

The Melbourne International Arts Festival will again embrace the city during 11-27 October. The visual arts program, curated by Artistic Director Kristy Edumunds, will present around twenty projects, collaborations and exhibitions across Melbourne. Highlights include major presentations featuring works by Laurie Anderson, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Brazilian installation artist Ernesto Neto. The Festival will also include exclusive sound art experiences inside a roaming limousine with cross-media artist Holly Crawford’s Sound art limo and Critical conversations in a limo. Also worth a mention is Riceboy sleeps at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Fitzroy, a collaborative project between Icelandic duo Jon Thor Birgisson and Alex Somers, which features dreamlike drawings, paintings, photographs and a haunting soundtrack.--Melissa Hart, Artnotes, Art Monthly Australia, Oct 2007, no. 204

Amanda Smith, Artworks, ABC National Radio, Oct 2007

One of the more unusual venues being used for the Melbourne International Arts Festival this year is an experimental art space, on wheels. Holly Crawford is a conceptual artist based in New York and she's hosting a couple of events in a very particular venue -- a white limousine.

One event is all about sound art, the other is all about the art of the conversation. In Critical Conversations in a Limo a group of people travel around in the back of the car. Their conversations are recorded and videotaped and posted to the web. In the sound art section, Holly Crawford travels around with a group of people sampling soundscapes and seeking reactions from her fellow travellers. Holly Crawford and her white limousine will be on the streets in Melbourne until October 21, departing from Federation Square.--Amanda Smith

Sound Art in a Limo, New York, 2007
Artinfo.com
NEWS & FEATURES
Armory Week: Sound Art to Go, in Style, Holly Crawford,
by Jacquelyn Lewis

NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2007--A day at The Armory Show is likely to leave even the most focused collector with bit of sensory overload. So when the endless number of artworks starts to make your eyes swim, duck outside for a ride in a posh but unconventional limo, where you can sip some champagne, take in the city and open your ears to the AC Institute's Sound Art in a Limo project.

ArtInfo took a spin around Manhattan with Holly Crawford, curator of the project and founder of the AC Institute. "It's a perfect space for sound art," Crawford said of the limo, adding that about 100 artists "including John Baldessari, Kiki Smith and Joseph Beuys" are on the soundtrack, with audio projects that mostly run one to three and a half minutes. (Crawford is present for every ride, armed with a list, and she takes requests.)

Each spin is also a trip down memory lane for Crawford, who created her own sound art piece, The Dinner Party: Play With Me, while teaching at UCLA alongside Doug Harvey in 1995. She said the piece "which includes recordings of children on a playground and a dinner conversation about a sex change" has only been heard twice before, but we talked her into playing it for us.

Another of our favorites was Holly Hughes' Art Mart, which was delightfully fitting for Amory week: "Art Mart is slashing prices to the stretcher bars on these late-model masterpieces: Schnabel, Salle, Haring" the speaker boomed. "We've got the brand names you want at prices you won't believe!... Want something that will shock the neighbors for years to come? Let our home-decorating department help you select that very special work-in-progress for any room in the house."

"An artist doesn't make any money doing sound art," Crawford pointed out. "It's just fun."

Other projects playing during the Westside cruise ranged from hilarious to beautiful to ominous, including an appropriate piece in which the artist dropped a microphone into the Hudson River.

The atmosphere during a limo project staged last year was a bit rowdier, full of artists and curators discussing the state of the arts, but Crawford said the beauty of this year's program is its obscuritie--most people don't know that artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Magdalena Abakanowicz dabbled in sound. "You have no idea that they might have done something little like that," she said.