Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart exhibitions/performances at Wexner Center
Every Beat of My Heart is the culmination of Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall’s Wexner Center Residency Award. The work grows out of his Rythm Mastr series, an expansive sequence of narrative works that tells a tale of urban life featuring superheroes inspired by African archetypes and African-American culture (view Marshall talking about the series on his Art:21 webpage here).
Marshall’s Wexner residency began last summer with a trip to Japan to study the traditional art form of Bunraku puppetry. He then convened a group of 23 Columbus teenagers to train as puppeteers in order to present Every Beat of My Heart as a live performance with musical accompaniment by jazz drummer Kahil El‚ÄôZabar.
The performances take place this weekend: Saturday, February 2, at 4pm and 7pm, and Sunday, February 3 at 2pm and 4pm in the Wexner Center Galleries.
After the performances, the puppets and sets will be on view as part of the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart, through April 13. A video of the complete performance will be on view in the lower lobby during this time as well.
Tickets are extremely limited and are available only in person, first-come, first-served at the Wexner Center Ticket Office/Patron Services Desk on the day of the performance (two tickets per patron maximum). Overflow seating with a live video feed will be available in the Film/Video Theater during all performances. (The ticket office opens at 10 am on Saturday and 11 am on Sunday.)
Read more about the project here and here.
Jenny Holzer: DETAINED opens in London
Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers gallery in London presents DETAINED, an installation by Jenny Holzer that opens tonight and runs through March 15. Beginning with her 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified US government documents the content for her context-based practice.
In DETAINED, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer’s hangs the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, representing the fog of war. Her LED artwork, Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails from the case files of the accused soldiers. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. DETAINED makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska’s lament and statement in her poem “Tortures” that “the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”
Read an interview with Jenny Holzer and watch a video clip in which she talks about her redaction paintings on her Art:21 webpage here.
Hubbard and Birchler speak tonight at Vanderbilt University
More in artists’ talks: Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler (Season 3), the internationally acclaimed video artists, will speak tonight at 7pm at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Hubbard/Birchler began their collaboration in the mid-1990s, making sculpture, installation, photography, and performance-based work. They make short films and photographs about the construction of narrative time and space without the context of a traditional story line. These open-ended works elicit multiple readings.
In their first commission for television, Art21 invited Hubbard/Birchler to create original works of video art to conclude each of the four episodes in Season 3. Each beautiful and enigmatic short film uses the same setting—the interior of a police car at night—and begins when one officer brings a cup of coffee for another. Using recurring and non-recurring characters, interrelated dialogue, and ambient sound, the suite of films evoke not only the Season 3 themes of Power, Memory, Structures and Play, but also sleep, dreams and longing. View each film on their Art:21 webpage here.
This lecture is free and open to public.
On a related note, Season 4 artist Mark Dion will be speaking as part of the same StudioVU lecture series on February 27.
Vanderbilt University
Room 103 of Wilson Hall
Nashville, TN
Gabriel Orozco speaks January 30 at MoMA (sold out)
Tomorrow at 6:30pm, Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art will moderate a talk with Art21-featured artist Gabriel Orozco (Season 2). Orozco’s sculptures, photographs, drawings, installations, and videos weave the everyday with the philosophical; he explores how meaning is made from chance encounters and found objects. Works by the artist are currently on view in MoMA’s current exhibition, New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930‚Äì2006: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions.
The event is sold out but perhaps you may have some luck with getting a ticket at the door.
Ursula von Rydingsvard with Martin Friedman at NYPL Feb. 4
Art21 and the Mid-Manhattan Library
present
a film screening and conversation
Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 4 episode Ecology.
After the screening Martin Friedman, Curator, Writer, and Director Emeritus of the Walker Art Center, will join Ursula von Rydingsvard for a conversation and Q&A session.
Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 6:30pm
Mid-Manhattan Library
The New York Public Library
40th Street and 5th Avenue, 6th floor
New York, NY 10016
212-340-0871
Elevators to access the 6th floor.
All events are FREE and open to the public.
About Ecology
How does our culture influence and affect our understanding of the natural world? Ecology delves into the work of four artists who explore the relationship of nature and culture, including the submission of wilderness to civilization, the foundations of scientific knowledge, the impact of technology on biology, and our relationship to the earth forged by working the land. This episode was shot on location in New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Chicago, Il; Rochester, MN; Seattle, WA; Astoria, OR; Cape Disappointment, WA; King County, WA; Beach Lake, PA; and Williamstown, MA.
Ursula von Rydingsvard uses sculptures as a means to express the memories of her childhood. Her studio is filled with massive cedar sculptures, which she painstakingly constructs layer by layer. The end result is a complex and unpredictable surface for viewers to explore and experience.
Robert Adams, working closely with his wife, created Turning Back (1999-2003), which illustrates deforestation in the West, a practice that Adams describes as “not just a matter of exhaustion of resources. I do think there is involved an exhaustion of spirit.”
Mark Dion explains, “I’m not one of these artists who is spending a lot of time imagining a better ecological future. I’m more the kind of artist who is holding up a mirror to the present.” Viewers follow him on a journey during which he brings a “nurse log”—a fallen Hemlock tree which is home to a wide variety of flora and fauna—into the heart of Seattle.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s interest in architecture, politics, and science underscores much of his work. His various exhibitions are featured in the documentary including Random Sky (2006) façade in Chicago, for which computers process weather data at the installation site to generate a visual representation of climate conditions.
Podcast: Mark Dion lecture in Toronto
Learn more about Season 4 artist Mark Dion in an audiocast of a talk Dion gave the inaugural 2008 Canadian Art International Lecture Series on January 18 at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Listen as he discusses the development of his work over the past ten years. (running time: 1 hour 15 minutes)
[via Canadian Art Online]
Laurie Simmons at the Metropolitan Museum on Sunday
THE MUSIC OF REGRET
A film by Laurie Simmons
Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 3pm
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, The Metropolitan Museum
The Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography
In conjunction with the opening of the new Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Doug Eklund, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, moderates a discussion with Laurie Simmons (Art:21 Season 4), who has work in the Museum‚Äôs collection. Simmons’ film is part of the afternoon‚Äôs focal point to explore contemporary photography and filmmaking.
At 2pm, there will a screening of No by Sharon Lockhart, followed by discussion with the artist.
View an excerpt of The Music of Regret on Art21’s YouTube channel.
Podcast: Roni Horn at Frieze 2007
From the Frieze archives: a podcast of artist Roni Horn (Season 3) describing the site-specificity and seriality in her work. In this 40-minute keynote lecture from the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London (”Cultural Cartography,” October 14), Horn talks about her time and works in Iceland and her most recent project, Library of Water, in particular. It is the culmination of a lifelong interest in the relationship of language to place.
Access this podcast here.
[via Frieze]
Bruce Nauman selected for 2009 Venice Biennale
Season 1 artist Bruce Nauman, a pioneer of Post Minimalist video and performance art, will represent the United States at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The Philadelphia Museum of Art was chosen as the commissioner for the 2009 United States Pavilion. Carlos Basualdo, its curator of contemporary art, and Michael R. Taylor, its curator of modern art, will organize the Nauman exhibition. After the museum acquired one of Mr. Nauman’s early neon works - “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” (1967) - the curators began considering Mr. Nauman’s career and proposed an exhibition of his work for the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Read the New York Times announcement here.
Lecture on An-My Lê at Dia:Beacon
This Saturday, January 26, Luc Sante, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography at Bard College, will lecture on artist An-My Lê at Dia:Beacon, on the occasion of her show Trap Rock. On display through September 2008, the exhibition features twenty-two color photographs examining the operations of the trap rock quarry located on the Hudson River in Clinton Point, New York.
Apart from Trap Rock, the series Lê is filmed photographing in her Season 4 segment, her most recent project is Small Wars, comprised of a book (Aperture Press, 2005) and an exhibition of photographs currently touring the United States.
This lecture is part of the Dia:Beacon’s Gallery Talks, a series of presentations that take place the last Saturday of every month in the museum’s galleries. They are free with admission to the museum.
Saturday, January 26, 2008, 1pm
Dia:Beacon
Riggio Galleries
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York 12508
Reservations are suggested
845-440-0100 ext 44
info [at] diaart.org
