When in Rome 78
Through May 22nd at Anthology Film Archives is a retrospective of artist/filmmaker James Nares, perhaps best known for Rome 78, an anachronistic, subcultural take on decadent Rome via New York circa 1978, with a cast of “downtown personalities” that include Lydia Lunch and John Lurie.
James Nares: Motion Pictures also includes a bevy of never-before screened works from 1975 and 1976, discovered in deep storage only last year. Nares, who is also an accomplished painter, made these films solo and rapidly, usually in one take. They owed stylistically to minimalist, action-based “artists’ films” of the late ’60s to mid-’70s by notables such as Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman (both Season 1), “often combining live and sculptural elements.” Serra’s Hand Catching Lead was one of Nares’ favorites, which influenced subsequent films Arm and Hammer and Steel Rod.
“California Video” at the Getty features 4 Art21 artists and many others
The Getty Research Institute has amassed one of the largest institutional collections of video art in the world. California Video, on view at the Getty Center through June 18, 2008, is the first major survey of video art produced in California. With more than 50 videos and 15 installations, this exhibition combines selections from the Getty’s collection, recent works by established and emerging artists, and rarely exhibited single-channel works on loan to the Museum. Artists include Mike Kelley (Season 3), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Bruce Nauman, William Wegman (both Season 1), John Baldessari, Brian Bress, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Jim Campbell, Meg Cranston, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Allan Kaprow, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Martha Rosler, Jennifer Steinkamp, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, Diana Thater, and Bill Viola.
According to L.A. Times writer, Christopher Knight, the introduction of the Sony Portapak in 1967 was an “epochal event in image-making history, and [is] smartly signaled at the show’s entry.” Ever shrinking dimensions and greater fiscal accessibility, among other developments over the decades, has contributed to the large number of artists experimenting or working exclusively with video. Today, writes exhibition curator Glenn Phillips, “portable video is ubiquitous, but in the late 1960s and 1970s it was a new technology.”
In a video exhibition of this scale, it can be challenging (perhaps even impossible) to see everything in a single visit. The Getty seems to offer a smart solution, however‚Äîa ‚Äúvideo study room‚Äù that gives visitors the opportunity to see all of the single-channel videos in the exhibition on demand via touchscreen kiosks. Visit the Getty’s website to view excerpts from the exhibition, as well as a schedule of indoor and outdoor screenings.
Martian Museum show at Barbican features real Art21 artists
Examining contemporary art from the perspective of an extraterrestrial, the group show Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, which opens this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, features the work of Art21 artists Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Eleanor Antin (Season 2), Mike Kelley, Cai Guo-Qiang (both Season 3), Jenny Holzer, and Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (both Season 4). This unusual exhibition’s starting point is the fantasy of an alien anthropologist attempting to understand and explain human culture solely from contemporary art, and it builds from there to offer a quirky look at recent art practices. The curators invent a humorously imprecise classification system designed to raise questions about the practice of anthropology, as well as the role misunderstanding plays in the understanding of contemporary art. Interested patrons will also want to download mp3’s of the the exhibition’s audio guide, narrated by the director of the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, the “esteemed” Dr. Klaatu.
The show is open until May 18. Find more information, images, and the audio guide here.
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.
The Sum of Its Parts
Next week, New York gallery Cheim & Read will open a group show of works by twelve artists, among them Art21-featured artists Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Roni Horn (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois, and Bruce Nauman (Season 1). This diverse group creates artworks configured from multiple parts, sequences, or series - hence the connection among all of them and the exhibition title: The Sum of Its Parts. This title references to Gestalt theory’s statement “the whole is greater or different than the sum of its parts.”
Gestalt psychology studies the viewer’s innate tendency to create patterns, and to perceive separate parts as pieces of a greater whole. It is in this subconscious grasp at cohesion that the possibilities of meaning lie. The artists in The Sum of Its Parts effectively exploit language, repetition, and sequence to produce multi-faceted yet unified compositions.
Roni Horn’s piece, “When Dickinson shut her eyes: no. 859″ (1993), employs language from an Emily Dickinson poem, separated in parts, to create a work in which overall meaning is expanded. The repetition of circular shapes in Louise Bourgeois’s “Hommage Duras” (1995) is almost musical, the different rounds like notes of a harmonious score. Bruce Nauman’s separate images of contorted mouths in “Studies for Holograms” (1970) are unified by their serial layout and their identical format. Jenny Holzer’s “Hand Yellow White” (2006) also relies on format to unite the various parts of her subject; the heavily censored, wartime pages of declassified U.S. government documents become that much more haunting in the cool formalism of their presentation.
The Sum of Its Parts opens Tuesday, January 8 and runs through February 2 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, New York.
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman’s Formative Years
A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman’s Formative Years is currently on view at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.
The exhibition, which provides new research and insight into a vital early stage of Nauman’s career, features the full range of Nauman‚Äôs work from the 1960s, when he laid the foundation for all of his subsequent, groundbreaking work in sculpture, performance, and film and video art.
These early experiments, in which he discovered process to be more fundamental than product, established his reputation as one of the most innovative artists of his generation.
Featured is more than 100 works, including drawings, sculpture, neon reliefs, photographs, documentation of performances, films, videos, sound and text works, installations, artist books, and ephemera.
Over the past forty years, Nauman’s work has remained constant in its explorations and, at the same time, varied in its scope. His work employs forms that range from Post-Minimalism and Conceptual art to film and video and installation art, through which a series of themes and ideas consistently appear: the use of the body as a material; the integration of art and language; the relationship of art and architecture; and dichotomies as concealment and revelation, interior and exterior, and positive and negative space.
The New York Times: “A pioneer in Post-Minimalist video and performance art, and a sculptor of seemingly limitless versatility, Mr. Nauman has been famous and critically admired since he arrived on the scene‚Ķand his work has exerted an important influence on contemporary art ever since.”
The Menil Collection
1515 Sul Ross
Houston, Texas 77006
Exhibition on view October 25, 2007 - January 13, 2008
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.
