Three Art21 artists exchange roles at Sean Kelly
Art21 featured artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Janine Antoni (Season 2) and Matthew Barney (Season 3) are all taking part in Role Exchange, a group show of twenty-seven artists at Sean Kelly Gallery through August 3, 2007.
These artists address the process through which identity is constructed by exploring different roles and characters. Though disparate in formal resolution, the artists in this exhibition share an impulse to transform traditional social roles. They require us to redefine our perceived categorizations of gender and identity, allowing for more nuanced systems of classification and a greater understanding of their abiding interest in role exchange.
Other artists in Role Exchange include: Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Samuel Fosso, Robert Gober, Anthony Goicolea, Douglas Gordon, Fergus Greer / Leigh Bowery, Johan Grimonprez, Lyle Ashton Harris, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Michel Journiac, Nikki S. Lee, Kalup Linzy, Urs Lüthi, Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals, Yasumasa Morimura, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare, Gavin Turk, Andy Warhol, and Gillian Wearing.
Alfredo Jaar retrospective opens in Switzerland
The Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, is hosting a major retrospective of the work of Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist based in New York City and featured in the upcoming fourth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images, curated by Nicole Schweizer and produced in close collaboration with the artist, offers a vast overview of his work, including previously unseen pieces and others that are being shown in Europe for the first time. The artwork on display goes from documentations of his first public interventions in Chile (Studies on Happiness, 1979-1981) to his latest installation to date, The Sound of Silence (2006). Other pieces included in the show are his works on gold miners in Amazonia (Introduction to a Distant World, 1985; Out of Balance, 1989), works related to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Real Pictures, 1995; Field, Road, and Cloud, 1997) as well as his latest film, Muxima (2005).
For more than thirty years, Alfredo Jaar, making use of multiple media as public interventions, installations, photography and video, has created an extremely powerful body of works that questions the nature of images and our relationship to them. The crucial questions that he explores in his work concern the very possibility of producing art based on events that we would prefer to ignore, and of creating images in a context characterized both by their over-abundance and, paradoxically, by their invisibility.
Alfredo Jaar. La Politique des Images runs through September 23, 2007.
[via e-flux]
Don’t Miss: Arturo Herrera at the Aldrich Museum
For his solo show Castles, Dwarfs, and Happychaps at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, Season 3 artist Arturo Herrera, uses a Renaissance technique called “pouncing” to transfer a design from paper to the gallery wall. Aldrich curatorial director Jessica Hough points out that “in the Renaissance a pounce drawing would be the starting point for an oil painting or fresco, but here Herrera uses the traditional technique to achieve a contemporary end.” Hough continues that “the result [is] a complex drawing of knotted dwarfs, complete with pick axes and gemstones, composed of dots of several colors.”
In his work, Herrera borrows imagery from children’s books and other popular culture sources to create hybrid works of art that are both familiar and foreign. These works can take the form of a large-scale installation of cut felt, a wall painting, or an intimate work on paper.
This exhibition features work dating from 1998 through the present and besides the 22-foot-long, floor-to-ceiling pounced drawing, the exhibition also includes works on, and meticulously cut from, paper.
Castles, Dwarfs, and Happychaps is on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through September 3, 2007. Read more about the exhibition here.
Major Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective opens in Germany
On July 14, the Kunstsammlung North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf opened an exhibition by Season 3-featured artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The show, simply entitled Hiroshi Sugimoto, is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective ever presented in the German-speaking world of the work of the 59-year-old Japanese photographer based in New York and Tokyo and celebrated for his multiple series of black-and-white photographs exploring time, memory, dreams, and the history of representation.
The exhibition, that begins on the ground floor of the Kunstsammlung North Rhine-Westphalia and continues in nine galleries on the two upper floors, shows thematic series of Sugimoto’s work: Seascapes, Theatres and Drive-in Theatres, Portraits, Pine Trees, Colours of Shadow, Conceptual Forms (Mathematical Forms), Dioramas, Architecture, Lightning Fields and Photogenic Drawing.
Hiroshi Sugimoto can be viewed in Düsseldorf until January 6, 2008, after which the show will travel to Salzburg, Berlin, and Lucerne.
Cai Guo-Qiang wins the Hiroshima Art Prize
The New York-based Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, featured in Season 3 of Art in the Twenty-First Century, has been honored with the 7th Hiroshima Art Prize. The prize, awarded by the city of Hiroshima, celebrates contemporary artists whose works express ways to promote world peace. As part of the prize, apart from the $41,500 award (¥5 million), Cai Guo-Qiang will have a solo exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Fall 2008. Also in 2008, Cai Guo-Qiang will premiere two of his major projects to date: a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opening in early Spring, and his contribution to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, that will reach an estimated 4 billion viewers worldwide.
In addition to Cai, two other Art21-featured artists have previously won the Hiroshima Art Prize: Krzysztof Wodiczko (1999), also from Season 3, as well as Nancy Spero (1996; in collaboration with her husband, Leon Golub), who is profiled in the upcoming fourth season of the series.
Josiah McElheny at Donald Young Gallery in Chicago
Through August 17, 2007, Donald Young Gallery in Chicago presents a solo show by Season 3 featured artist Josiah McElheny.
Cosmology, Design and Landscape‚ÄîPart Two features four new sculptures by McElheny that further explore the legacies of twentieth century modernism. Part One, in September 2006, featured a large-scale sculpture and film that linked mid-century theories of the universe’s origins to period design. Now, Part Two presents a foreboding vision of endlessly repeating modernist design objects and imagines the idea of urban/industrial landscapes remade as a totally reflective aesthetic utopia. These works attempt to realize the attraction and horror of the modern ideal: a perfect world of objects and architecture.
Watch McElheny discuss his work in a lecture given in conjunction with the series Artists and Models at MoMA on March 12, 2007.
Matthew Barney and Pierre Huyghe in Il Tempo del Postino
On July 12, Season 1 featured artist Matthew Barney and Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe premiered new work in Il Tempo del Postino, a group show of performance presented at the Manchester Opera House as part of the Manchester International Festival. Curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, the event was premised on the question “what if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time?”
Huyghe’s comical contribution, Hello Zombie, featured aliens playing tennis. Barney’s, on the other hand, was much more baroque and comprised the entire second half of the show. Entitled Guardian of the Veil and produced in collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, this work involved, to varying degrees, a woman’s corpse (not real, of course), a contortionist, a live bull, a dog strapped to Barney’s head, paramilitary antics, and a Cadillac, among other notables.
Il Tempo del Postino will travel to Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet in February 2008.
Read the Artforum.com diary’s full account here.
Lari Pittman and Mark Bradford in Eden’s Edge at Hammer Museum
Season 4 artists Mark Bradford and Lari Pittman are both featured in the Hammer Museum‚Äôs current survey, Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists. The show explores art made in Los Angeles during the past decade, crossing generations, media, and materials to link artists who create work ingrained with intensely personal visions. In addition to Bradford and Pittman, the exhibition features Ginny Bishton, Liz Craft, Sharon Ellis, Matt Greene, Elliott Hundley, Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge, Monica Majoli, Matthew Monahan, Rebecca Morales, Ken Price, Jason Rhoades, Anna Sew Hoy, and Jim Shaw. These artists share a perspective toward landscape and figure that investigates complex contradictions, which are inherent to life in Los Angeles and more broadly to contemporary American culture.
As part of Art21 Access ’07, Art21 is partnering with the Hammer Museum to present a sneak preview of the “Protest” episode from Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 on October 3, 2007 at 7 p.m. Also, revisit this blog for a special announcement regarding other Art21 events with Bradford and Pittman in Los Angeles in October.
Eden’s Edge: 15 LA Artists is on view from May 13 - September 2, 2007. For additional images, click here.
Jenny Holzer is Twittering
Since May 2007, Season 4 artist Jenny Holzer has been using the microblogging site Twitter as an unusual platform for her text-based work. The Trusim for today? “BEING SURE OF YOURSELF MEANS YOU’RE A FOOL.”
Check the full blog here.
[via lemonodor.com]
Three Art21 Artists in Automatic Update exhibition at MoMA
MoMA’s new media exhibition, Automatic Update, features work by Art21 artists Laurie Anderson (Season 1), Paul Pfeiffer (Season 2), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Laurie Anderson’s short film about cloning herself, What You Mean We? (1986) screens during the program “Automatic Update: Shorts,” this Wednesday and also Thursday, August 30 at 6 p.m.
Paul Pfeiffer’s installed video loop, John 3:16 (2000, on left) is currently on view in MoMA’s Media Gallery.
Two Minutes Out of Time (2000, right), a video by Pierre Huyghe about purchasing the rights to a Manga character, is screening Thursday, August 30 at 8:30 p.m. as part of the exhibition’s ‚ÄúThe Artist and the Computer‚Äù program.
