Catherine Sullivan in BOMB Magazine
In a BOMB Magazine web exclusive, Season 4 artist Catherine Sullivan (pictured top right) and choreographer Meg Stuart discuss mining the history of the avant-garde tradition and emotional overflow in ensemble-based work. BOMB’s Summer 2008 print issue will include the full-length conversation.
The magazine’s online art section, which currently archives 1,206 articles and interviews, features numerous Art21 artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Andrea Zittel (both Season 1), Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2), Arturo Herrera (Season 3), and Pierre Huyghe (Season 4).
Andrea Zittel in Basel
Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland opens a two person exhibition this Saturday, April 26th, with the work of Monika Sosnowska and Art:21 Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel. Both artists respond to their different surroundings - Warsaw and Los Angeles/New York, respectively - in terms of architecture, living space, daily routine, and traditions. On the “stage” of Schaulager they’ve created an unexpected tableaux of sculptures, objects, and drawings.
Schaulager is an “open warehouse” that acts as the home for the works in the collection of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation that are not currently on exhibition. It is a new kind of space for art that looks at “the lives of works behind the curtain” in an autonomous facility independent of any museum, with specific qualities and functions of its own. Responding to the old and new needs for the storage of works of the visual arts, Schaulager dispenses with the notion of “box storage” and utilizes these rooms as exhibition spaces in of themselves, beyond a “waiting existence” for public presentation.
Beyond Green at Hartford Art School
The traveling exhibition Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art makes its way to the Joseloff Gallery at the Hartford Art School from April 4 - June 10. Eighteen artists and collectives are represented, including Allora and Calzadilla (Season 4) and Andrea Zittel (Season 1).
From the official press release:
Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art. The exhibition includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice. Many of the artists work collaboratively and leaven serious social aims with playful, off-the-grid spark, updating the Bauhaus notion of form following function or more recent Beuysian social sculpture. Their approaches range from the metaphorical to the pragmatic, sometimes serving as models for audience activism.
An extensive, accompanying catalogue is also available, with artists’ texts, interviews, and a podcast. For gallery hours and further information, please visit the Hartford Art School website.
“Liberation through Limitation” - Andrea Zittel’s Smockshop
Saturday, Season 1 artist Andrea Zittel opens her inaugural “smockshop” at Susan Inglett Gallery, coinciding with Fashion Week in New York.
Having spent years gaining international recognition and developing a variety of concepts for living, from furniture manufacturing, A-Z Administrative Services to the design and construction of an island off the coast of Denmark, A-Z Pocket Property, Zittel returns to the gallery as fashion arena with smockshop. With the collection that consists of a series of smocks sewn and designed in cooperation with various artists, Zittel challenges the connection between fashion and function, design and life, and commerce and art, and makes these links explicit by selling her one-of-a-kind smocks at ready-to-wear prices.
Zittel’s designs are more about everyday use and less about rarified statement. “Our current state of consumerism is pretty out of whack right now,” Zittel says. “Wear what you work” The artist hopes her project will inspire a more frugal approach to design, but under all circumstances, the smockshop is bound to tempt the eyes as well as the purse strings.
Smockshop will be on view at Susan Inglett Gallery until October 13. Visit the smockshop Web site at http://www.smockshop.org/
