Ursula von Rydingsvard at the Portland Art Museum
A new show of work by Season 4 artist Ursula von Rydingsvard opens tomorrow, September 1, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. This exhibition, the first one of von Rydingsvard’s work in the Pacific Northwest, presents a major sculpture, Pod Pacha, and a series of dynamic new drawings completed during the artist‚Äôs Italian residency as a recipient of a 2007 Rome Prize.
The German-born, New York-based artist, internationally recognized for her massive carved cedar sculpture, creates a dialogue between intimate gesture and architecture in the highly articulated and complex surfaces of her work. Years ago, the New York Times praised von Rydingsvard’s work for “standing on its own, shunning the influence of Minimalism‚Ķ putting emphasis on the handmade and the associative.” As von Rydingsvard explains in the upcoming companion book to the PBS series, Art:21‚ÄîArt in the Twenty-First Century 4,
“If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I’m not sure that’s what I do or even if that’s what I want to do) it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. I have this feeling that the more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention.”
This exhibition, marking the first time von Rydingsvard shows her drawings, runs from September 10 to December 30, 2007. The artist will speak on her work and practice as they relate to her current installation on September 16. Read more about the exhibition and view related images here.
Don’t Miss: Bruce Nauman in Montreal
Monday, September 3, is the last day to visit Bruce Nauman, an exhibition presenting the work of this Season 1 artist for the first time in Quebec and Canada.
The show, at The Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, aims to reflect the multidisciplinary aspect of Nauman, one of the leading figures in contemporary art, who has had a major influence on succeeding generations of artists for more than 40 years.
The exhibition is split in two separate but complementary parts. The first one, entitled Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light and organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum, features a remarkable series of about 15 neon sculptures and light installations produced in the first two decades of the artist’s career (1965-1985). Neon tubing fills the space both proposing word games such as None Sing, Neon Sign or Run from Fear, Fun from Rear or showing clown-like figures as Mean Clown Welcome. These light-based works apply irony and humor to the contradictions intrinsic to the human condition and its opposites of sex and violence, humor and horror, life and death, pleasure and pain.
The second half of the show, assembled exclusively for The Musée d’Art Contemporain, showcases a selection of films and videos from the 1960s, seminal video installations from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and the masterly recent work One Hundred Fish Fountain, 2005. In Nauman’s films and videos, which focus on body language and usually show the artist “performing” in his studio, the artist expresses the passage of time, repetitiveness, the ritual of everyday gestures and the resulting self-awareness.
Find more about the show here.
Circa 70 feat. Louise Bourgeois closes Friday
This Friday is the last day to view the exhibition Circa 70 at Cheim & Read Gallery, featuring work by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois and fellow artist Lynda Benglis, in New York.
In this show, sculptures by Bourgeois and Benglis, mostly completed between 1967 and 1974, coexist in surprising harmony despite their completion by two very separate artists within a shifting political and artistic landscape. Working within the charged artistic atmosphere of postmodernism, Bourgeois and Benglis created material-savvy sculptures more attune to messy abstraction and process-oriented gesture than to conceptual formalism. Their sculptural manifestations explored autobiographical experience and the female subject.
Though the two artists are 30 years apart in age—Bourgeois was born in 1911 and Benglis in 1941—their sculptures in the early 1970s have unexpected similarities. Both artists created organically-shaped, often grotesque amorphous forms. Both reference the undulating, layered landscape of the body and its private, internal anatomy while connecting to the ripe fecundity of the natural world, and the earth’s own internal brewing and bubbling.
More than 30 years later, their work provides reflection on our own cultural and political situation. Revisited, it still shocks and is charged with the energy of the artists’ physical manipulation of material and their intuitive, emotional and rebellious response to a burgeoning decade.
View images and read more about the exhibition here.
Pierre Huyghe’s first Spanish venture
Season 4 featured artist Pierre Huyghe is currently enjoying his first solo show in Spain. A Time Score is on view until September 9 at the MUSAC-Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in the city of León.
A Time Score was conceived as an event to exhibit different events: a performance (Toison d‚ÄôOr), a celebration (A Smile Without A Cat, Streamside Day), a puppet play (This Is Not a Time For Dreaming), a concert (L‚Äôexp√©dition Scintillante, Act 2. Untitled (Light Show), a journey (A Journey That Wasn‚Äôt), a book (The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote Of La Mancha by Pierre Menard), and even a video game (Atari Light). At the same time, the show aims to enable visitors to journey through the past and future of Huyghe’s career, on a ride driven by concepts such as collective subjectivity, copyright, and especially his commitment to the idea of non-linear time.
Huyghe notes, “usually an artist thinks of an exhibition as an end point, a resolution of something. He‚Äôs working in his studio, and there‚Äôs a process, and at the end of this process he‚Äôs showing his work in what we call an exhibition. I‚Äôm not interested in that. I‚Äôm interested that the exhibition is not the end of the process but a starting point to go somewhere else. In a certain way, that‚Äôs what this is all about. Like a world‚Äôs fair, it‚Äôs a presentation of some news, some novelty.” (taken from the Art in the Twenty-First Century 4 companion book, forthcoming from Harry N. Abrams publishers)
Download the press release and read further details here.
Art21 Access ‘07 partner list tops 250
The up-to-date list of current Art21 Access ‘07 partners is now online at http://beta.art21.org/doc/3252/art21_access_-07_partners/.
Find out about preview screenings in your area! Read details about planned events on our online calendar. View this information visually on our Season 4 screenings Google map.
Want to sign up and host your own screening? Visit the Art21 Access ‘07 Web page here.
Last chance to visit Josiah McElheny’s The Last Scattering Surface
Through Monday August 27, the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota is featuring The Last Scattering Surface by Season 3 artist Josiah McElheny. In this exhibition, McElheny continues his investigation of the history and implications of twentieth-century modernism through a series of new and past works that revolve around the unusual intersection of theoretical cosmology and industrial design.
Since 2004, McElheny has collaborated with The Ohio State University cosmology professor David Weinberg on the conceptual realization of a series of sculptures that depict the theory of the Big Bang with the language of mid-1960s industrial design. This unexpected pairing of high modernist thought finds its origins in 1965, the year the Big Bang was first confirmed by physical evidence and when the Viennese firm Lobmeyr and Co. was commissioned to design a chandelier with a “galactic appearance” for New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House. The serendipity of these two events inspired McElheny to create his series of scientifically accurate, precisely manufactured sculptures.
Also on view as part of The Last Scattering Surface is McElheny’s first film, Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965, shot in part on location at the Metropolitan Opera House, as well as a series of related photographs and digital images.
Read more about the exhibition here.
An-My Lê: Small Wars at the Henry Art Gallery
This exhibition comprises two photographic series by Season 4 artist An-My Lê that explore the military conflicts that have framed the last half-century of American history: the war in Vietnam and the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lê approaches these events obliquely. Instead of addressing her subject by creating reportage of actual shocking events, she photographs places where war is psychologically anticipated, processed, and relived. Her series Small Wars (1999‚Äì2002) depicts men who spend their weekends reenacting battles from the Vietnam War in the forests of Virginia. Lê’s current series, 29 Palms (2003-present), documents a military base of the same name. Located in the California desert, it is a base where soldiers train before being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. These dramatizations of war -one a reenactment, one a rehearsal- allow her to create a unique kind of war imagery: unexpected, removed, and revelatory.
Small Wars is on view at the Henry through November 4, 2007. It is a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago; the Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe, NM; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; National Media Museum, Bradford, UK; Ffotogallery, Cardiff, Wales, UK. It will travel to SFMoMA in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; and the Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 2008.
For further details on Small Wars, read the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s essay here.
On October 13 at 2p.m., An-My Lê will be speaking at the Brooklyn Museum following a screening of the Season 4 episode Protest in which she is featured. Check back for more details soon.
Art21 Access ‘07 now has its own Discussion Group!
Art21 Access ‘07 partners, join our new listserv. Ask questions, find collaborators, share information and anecdotes, and trade tips on how to organize screenings of Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 this fall.
Membership is voluntary. Enter your email in the box to subscribe. Visit the group homepage here.
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Don’t Miss: Mark Dion’s European exhibitions
Two exhibitions of work by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, The Natural History of the Museum and Systema Metropolis, are running concurrently in Sweden, Switzerland, and London, respectively, this summer and fall.
In both shows, Dion continues his wide-ranging investigations into art and science—the relationship between animals, humans, and environments, and the Western systems of classification and collection and modes of presentation. Through intriguing art installations, Dion examines how humans make order out of chaos by collecting and classifying organisms and, at the same time, recreating the categorization and exhibition practices of museums. Moreover, he specifically celebrates the 300 years since the birth of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern biological classification system that gives every species a two-part Latin name.
In The Natural History of the Museum, on view at the Dunkers Kulturhus in Helsingborg, Sweden, until August 26, 2007, Dion uses irony, humour and allegory to build bridges between the traditional role of the museum as an authoritarian educator and a new role as a conveyor of knowledge and an entertainer. The show will then travel to Seedam Kulturzentrum in Pfäffikon, Switzerland, from September 15 to November 11, 2007.
Systema Metropolis, at the Natural History Museum in London until September 2, 2007, is based on a four-part installation that explores the strange and surprising biodiversity of London through wildlife samples collected at different sites across the city and its classification.
Kara Walker’s art graces New Yorker cover
In a departure from its usual roster of artists, and in honor of the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, The New Yorker magazine features Post Katrina—Adrift, a piece by Season 2 artist Kara Walker, on its August 27th issue cover.
The work follows Walker’s 2006 exhibition about the aftermath of Katrina, After the Deluge, shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more about the exhibition here.
