Conversation with Jenny Holzer at MoMA this Friday
September 28, 2007 at 6:30 pm
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 West 53rd Street
New York City
Tickets: $10; members $8; students, seniors, and staff of other museums $5. Tickets can be purchased at the lobby information desk, the Film desk, the Cullman Building lobby, or online at www.ticketweb.com.
Season 4 featured artist Jenny Holzer will be the guest speaker this Friday in MoMA’s series Conversations with Contemporary Artists. Holzer will discuss her work, the creative process, and general issues in contemporary art.
Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. Holzer’s recent use of text ranges from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse, to poetry and prose in a 65-foot wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.
Protest, the Art:21 episode featuring Jenny Holzer, premieres on Sunday, November 4 at 10pm on PBS. Check local listings.
Art:21 Season 4 Premiere Screenings in NYC
Art21 is proud to announce the following premiere screenings of Art:21 – Art in the Twenty-First Century Season Four in New York City:
SculptureCenter
Wednesday, October 3, 7:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 1: Romance
Discussion: Season 4 artist Judy Pfaff with Mary Ceruti, Executive Director, SculptureCenter
44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, Queens
Free. No reservations required
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Thursday, October 4, 7:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 4: Paradox
Discussion: Season 4 artist Mark Bradford with Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, The Studio Museum
144 West 125th Street, Manhattan
Free. Reservations required, please call (212) 864-4500 x 264 to reserve
Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)
Saturday, October 6, 12:30 p.m.
Screening of Episode 1: Romance
Discussion: Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons with Susan Sollins, Executive Producer and Curator, Art21
BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn
Free screening and reception sponsored by Bloomberg
Reservation required. Please call BAM’s Patron Services Department (718) 636-4182
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
Saturday, October 6, 3:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 3: Ecology
Discussion: Season 4 artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle with Sergio Bessa, Acting Director of Programs, Bronx Museum
1040 Grand Concourse @ 165th Street, Bronx
Admission $5, free for Bronx Museum members
Queens Museum of Art
Sunday, October 7, 2:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 3: Ecology
Discussion: Season 4 artist Mark Dion with Valerie Smith, Director of Exhibitions, Queens Museum
New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens
Free. No reservations required
Tribeca Cinemas
Wednesday, October 10, 7:00 p.m.
Video Artists from Season Four
“Meet the Filmmakers” panel: video artist Charles Atlas, Art21 Creative Consultant Ed Sherin, Season 4 artist Laurie Simmons, and Art21 Executive Producer & Curator Susan Sollins,
54 Varick Street @ Laight Street, Manhattan
Free screening and reception sponsored by Bloomberg
Free. Reservations required. To make a reservation please email specialprojects@tribecafilmfestival.org
El Museo del Barrio
Thursday, October 11, 6:30 p.m.
Screening of Episode 4: Paradox
Discussion: Susan Sollins, Executive Producer and Curator, Art21 with Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo
Heckscher Building, 1230 Fifth Avenue @ 104th Street, Manhattan
Free. For advance registration email public_programs@elmuseo.org
Brooklyn Museum
Saturday, October 13, 2:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 2: Protest
Discussion: Season 4 artist An-My Lê with Wesley Miller, Associate Curator, Art21
Sunday, October 14, 2:00 p.m.
Screening of Episode 4: Paradox
Discussion: Q&A with Eve Moros Ortega, Series Producer, Art21
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
Free with museum admission. No reservations required
For more information, read the full press release at http://beta.art21.org/doc/3314/art21_access_-07_in_new_york/
These screenings are part of Art21 Access ‘07, an international celebration of contemporary art and creativity, presented in partnership with Americans for the Arts during National Arts and Humanities Month.
Season 4 of Art in the Twenty-First Century premieres Sundays, October 28 and November 4, 11, and 18, 2007 at 10p.m. (ET) in the United States – nationwide – on PBS.
Watch the trailer and exclusive clips on YouTube!
Art21 Season 4 PBS station mini-grants awarded
Each new season, Art21 offers a limited number of grant awards to PBS stations for administering outreach efforts in conjunction with local broadcasts of the Art in the Twenty-First Century series. These mini-grants are a springboard for inspiring outreach that is truly collaborative, bringing together organizations and individuals at the local level to explore the vitality of contemporary art.
After a competitive application process, four PBS stations received a $3500 mini-grant to create action-based involvement encouraging wide audience viewership and community engagement around Season 4 of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century series, premiering in Fall 2007. These stations and their initial plans for multi-part Season 4 programming are KPTS, Wichita, KS; Louisiana Public Broadcasting, Baton Rouge, LA; WDSE, Duluth, MN; and WXXI, Rochester, NY.
Read more about each project here: http://beta.art21.org/doc/3331/2007_pbs_mini-grant_recipients/.
Neither New Nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford
Neither New Nor Correct, the latest body of work by Season 4 artist Mark Bradford, recipient of the Whitney’s 2006 Bucksbaum Award, is now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as of September 14, 2007. With intricate surfaces composed of numerous layers of salvaged paper, Bradford’s most recent large-scale works, made in 2007, will be shown on the Museum’s main floor.
Bradford’s works allude to the physical layers of the metropolitan environment of South Central Los Angeles, where the artist lives and works. Repurposing the advertising posters that he finds built up in layers on walls, windows, and light posts in his neighborhood, Bradford creates collage works of extraordinary impact, exploring the concept of place, and reflecting on the social and economic patterns of his community. Evocative of archeological excavation and the language of maps, these works delve into personal and collective memory, suggesting hidden histories and submerged traces of the past. Bradford’s collages recall the torn-poster works of French affichiste artists such as Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Villeglé, who worked in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.
For this exhibition at the Whitney, Bradford has created new works that layer advertising posters with string and other collage materials. The artist builds up his surfaces and then sands back into them, revealing hidden depths. Water, which can erase, erode, or act as a medium for mixing disparate elements, becomes a powerful metaphor in this series.
The title of both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue is a comment on the limits of knowledge – or on information that looks plausible, but perhaps isn’t. It refers to a description on an 18th-century map of the world, disingenuously labeled as “new and correct.”
Neither New nor Correct: New Work by Mark Bradford is on view through November 25, 2007 at the Whitney Museum.
As part of Art21 Access ‘07, Mark Bradford will speak at the Studio Museum in Harlem on Thursday, October 4, following a screening of the episode in which he is featured, Paradox. Call 212-864-4599 x264 to reserve a space at this special event.
Photos from Charles Atlas screening at EAI
Photos from last night’s screening and discussion with Art21 artist Charles Atlas at Electronic Arts Intermix in New York. His recently restored classic underground film, Hail the New Puritan was shown, along with an excerpt from his live installation Instant Fame and clips from recent live performances he’s done with Antony and the Johnsons and experimental Austrian musician Fennesz. EAI’s John Thomson led a lively conversation with Atlas after the film and between each clip.
View more photos on Art21’s Flickr site here.
Raymond Pettibon: Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) at Zwirner
Raymond Pettibon’s seventh solo exhibition just opened at David Zwirner Gallery in New York. On display is a set of drawings, Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture), where the thematic scope has become increasingly topical compared to his previous works, addressing current political and social concerns, including American foreign policy and the war in Iraq. Pettibon was featured in Season Two, included in the current 52nd Venice Biennale, and in 2004, he received the Bucksbaum Award following his participation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Pettibon was closely associated with the record label SST Records and the punk rock band Black Flag, started by his brother Greg Ginn. Contributing work for album covers, concert flyers, and fanzines and producing photocopied books that the artist distributed himself, Pettibon was a pioneer of the do-it-yourself ethic and aesthetic, which came to characterize Southern California underground culture.
Pettibon continues to blur the boundaries of “high” and “low,” pulling freely from a myriad of sources that span the cultural spectrum. His obsessively worked drawings tackle aspects of art history, religion, sports, movies, music, and sexuality. And his early inspiration in comic books has allowed for the development of a remote rather than deeply personal drawing style.
Despite his strikingly varied subject matter, certain images have risen to canonical status within the artist’s body of work, such as surfers, baseball players, trains, Gumby, Superman, Vavoom, and Charles Manson. Known for his prolific output, Pettibon’s works often incorporate text borrowed from literature and other sources, as well as the artist’s own original writings. The diverse literary referents for his pen and ink drawings range from Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, pulp fiction, and the Bible. Considering text as vital to his process as the drawn image, Pettibon’s visual and textual pairings oscillate from the quirkily connected to the bafflingly enigmatic, always remaining emotionally and intellectually provocative.
Here’s Your Irony Back (The Big Picture) is on view through October 20. Read more info here.
Art:21 Preview - Catherine Sullivan
From the forthcoming Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4.
Premieres on PBS Sunday, November 18, 2007, at 10:00 p.m. ET. (Check your local PBS station for details)
Catherine Sullivan’s anxiety-inducing films and live performances reveal the degree to which everyday gestures and emotional states are scripted and performed, probing the border between innate and learned behavior. Sullivan’s appropriation of classic Hollywood filming styles, period costumes, and contemporary spaces such as corporate offices draws the viewer’s attention away from traditional narratives and towards an examination of performance itself.
This segment is also currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in tandem with the exhibition Catherine Sullivan: Triangle of Need.
Robert Adams: Questions for an Overcast Day
This past Saturday, Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City opened an exhibition of new photographs by Robert Adams, a featured artist in the upcoming Season 4 episode Ecology.
Adam‚Äôs refined black-and-white photographs document scenes of the American West over the past four decades, revealing the impact of human activity on the last vestiges of wilderness and open space continues in this new show, entitled Questions for an Overcast Day. The exhibition displays a series of 33 photographs of young alder trees growing along the Oregon coastline, near the artist’s home. The series begins by focusing on the branches of the trees and, progressing from one image to the next, narrows its focus, culminating with several images of a single leaf.
The leaves on the trees appear perforated, the precise cause of which is unknown. The artist likens the particular pattern of erosion on each leaf to hieroglyphics, reading in them a unique “calligraphy of disaster.” About them, Adams writes:
“What would account for the condition of the leaves ‚Äì
drought, insects, rocky ground, disease, herbicide, wind?Are the leaves beautiful?”
Robert Adams: Questions for an Overcast Day will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery through October 27, 2007.
Charles Atlas at Electronic Arts Intermix tomorrow night
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
Free Admission
Electronic Arts Intermix presents a screening of the work of Season 2 video artist and Season 3/4 director Charles Atlas, followed by an in-depth talk. The recently restored Hail the New Puritan (1985-86), Atlas’ groundbreaking collaboration with choreographer Michael Clark, will be screened, along with excerpts from his recent Instant Fame installation series and his live collaborations with Fennesz and Antony and the Johnsons. Atlas will discuss his work and take questions from the audience.
A mesmerizing blend of dance, music, drama and “mockumentary,” Hail the New Puritan engagingly presents Clark as choreographer, dancer, celebrity, lover, and nightclubber. It portrays the vitality of London’s mid-’80s underground scene in the face of economic turmoil and political division, through the lens of athletic, post-modern dance.
Atlas has collaborated live with many eminent performers. In Turning, his recent partnership with celebrated singer Antony, he captured and processed images of thirteen “beauties” as they literally turned on a podium onstage, projecting their refashioned images onto a large screen. Atlas’ video intensified Antony’s intimate investigations of image, identity, and metamorphosis.
In his collaboration with Austrian electronic music composer and performer Fennesz, Atlas processed visual samples live, while Fennesz played guitar and manipulated appropriated sounds. In dialogue with the composer’s moody, atmospheric music, Atlas’ poignant collages were a dramatic mix of found film footage and video clips.
Atlas also used live mixing in his recent video installation Instant Fame. In a Warholian celebration of exhibitionism, he set up a studio in a gallery and shot footage of anyone who wanted to be videotaped: they could perform or simply sit for the camera. The images were reworked in real time and simultaneously projected in an adjacent exhibition space.
View additional images and clips of Atlas’ work on EAI’s site here.
Also opening in LA tonight: Lari Pittman at Regen Projects
Tonight, Regen Projects in Los Angeles unveils an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Season 4 artist Lari Pittman. This show presents seven large-scale paintings, three mid-size paintings, and 17 works on paper. Pittman’s operatic, intricate, multi-layered works synthesize figuration and abstraction to create a unique vocabulary. Each work is composed as a web of interconnections, overlays, and interlockings that resonate on both a visual and conceptual level. The meanings that unfold are emotional, social, philosophical, and above all else, intensely personal.
Pittman’s works are a visual stimulation that seduces and unsettles both the eye and the psyche. In his compositions, images are not arranged traditionally around a central focus. Rather, they are placed expansively - essential elements run laterally across the surface, or dot the perimeter, or sprawl in a dazzling array all over. The surface of the works is multifaceted and the image field appears to be constantly shifting and reinventing itself. This visual cacophony is not accidental but carefully calculated with acute attention to formal properties and rooted in Pittman’s own discourse with the history of modernist painting.
Watch an exclusive clip from Lari Pittman’s Art:21 segment, premiering October 28 on PBS.
Pittman will speak at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Thursday, October 4, at a special sneak preview screening of the new episode Romance from Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4. Read more about the event here.Lari Pittman is on view through October 20, 2007.
