Weekly Roundup

Catherine Sullivan, "Triangle of Need," 2007. Multi-channel video installation. Collection of Miami Art Museum, Gift of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros.

• The Miami Art Museum recently acquired Triangle of Need, a video installation by Catherine Sullivan (Season 4). Her piece is on view at the museum through October 11.
• A full room installation by Season 2 artist Kiki Smith is included in the exhibition Space-Time at the National Glass Centre in the UK. The artist’s three-dimensional astrological star chart, with cut-glass stars and animals of the zodiac scattered across a night-blue paper carpet, titled Constellation, is on display through September 6.
• The Times Online (in association with Saatchi Gallery) is asking readers to vote for their favorite artists of the 20th and/or 21st century. At present, Art21’s Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are included in the list of leading artists. The Top 200 will be revealed on May 25. Cast your vote now.
• On April 16, Hubbard & Birchler (Season 3) will lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The talk is the second in a series ssponsored by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership in conjunction with Confluence: Points of View on Buffalo Bayou, a public art project on Houston’s historic waterway.
• A site specific piece by Mark Dion (Season 4) has been added to the outdoor sculpture garden at the The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Antiquarian Book Shop (2008), the artist’s life-size curiosity shop, is filled with hundreds of books and collectibles from around the world. Learn more about the installation here.
• Chelsea visits Havana, an exhibition presented by Fundacion Amistad in conjunction with the 10th Biennial of Havana, features work by Season 2 artists Walton Ford and Matthew Barney, among others. The exhibition is part of the Bridges to Culture initiative, which uses the power of art to surmount the cultural, political and social boundaries between the United States and Cuba.

No Room to Answer in Germany

No Room to Answer: Projections, a traveling exhibition of video installations by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler (Season 3), opens at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany on February 28.

The exhibition marks the European premiere of Grand Paris Texas, for which Hubbard & Birchler used a documentary format to equally approach both real and imaginary spaces and situations. Six other videos will be on view: Night Shift (2005–2006); House with Pool (2004); Johnny (2004); Single Wide (2002); Eight (2001); and Detached Building(2001). Read a synopsis of each video here. 

The exhibition closes May 10, 2009.

Hubbard & Birchler at Liverpool Biennial

The Liverpool Biennial is under way. Organized by the Tate Liverpool, this year’s Made Up theme includes nine special new commissions under the subcategory Between the Real. Encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, video, and drawing, the artists invited include Omar Fast, David Altmejd, Rodney Graham, and Season 3’s Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

Tate says it has commissioned works that are “rooted in disparate levels of actuality – history, memory, conflict, art, myth and fable. Using strategies of appropriation and transformation, the artists distort, embellish and rebuild until the familiar nature of our reality is radically displaced.”

Along with show stealers such as Altmejd’s otherwordly sleeping giants, Hubbard & Birchler are presenting The Year without a Summer, a two channel video projection based on paintings of Mary Shelley and her mother installed in Room 18 at the National Portrait Gallery. You’ll want to know more about this one.

Hubbard/Birchler: No Room to Answer

Hubbard/Birchler: No Room to Answer is the first major survey in an American museum of works by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler (Season 3). The exhibition is on view from September 14, 2008 through January 4, 2009 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. 

No Room to Answer presents key works made by the duo since 1991. Their most recent video, Grand Paris Texas (2008) debuts with this exhibition and will become part of the Museum’s permanent collection. The video is named after The Grand, located in Paris, Texas. According the press release, the tiny East Texas town became famous by way of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ movie, Paris, Texas (1984). However, the “cold architecture and barren desert landscapes” in Wenders’ film’s were filmed in and around Houston, the desert area of West Texas, and Los Angeles, “reinforcing the film’s bleak theme of social isolation in America in a way that the wooded landscape of the real Paris would not.” Grand Paris Texas is a study of the physical and social space in that geographical location, which has been described as “the middle of nowhere.”

“One of the most important things for us,” Hubbard and Birchler explain, “is that we have always left the authority of reading the work up to the viewer and there’s got to be active interpretation that’s not just asked for, but is somewhat demanded.” 

Beyond the Reel

On Thursday, June 19, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opens the second installment of The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, titled Part II: Realisms. While Part I: Dreams addressed film’s ability to transport viewers out of their everyday lives and into the darker recesses of the imagination, Realisms explores the irony that in an age where documenting “real life” is made ever easier, the line between fact and fiction becomes increasingly complicated.

Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is one of nineteen artists in Realisms. In his work, “The Third Memory” (1999), Huyghe gives John Wojtowicz, the bank robber portrayed by Al Pacino in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon, a chance to recount his version of the events that inspired the film. Huyghe’s work reveals that, as time goes on, Wojtowicz’s memory of the actual robbery has become intertwined with the story as portrayed in Lumet’s film. Part I: Dreams also included Art21 artists Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler (Season 3). Recently they spoke about their process, artwork, and part one of the exhibition in the museum’s public program series, Meet the Artists, which exists as a podcast.

Part II: Realisms, on view through September 7, also includes works by Candice Breitz, Matthew Buckingham, Paul Chan, Ian Charlesworth, Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Omer Fast, Runa Islam, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Michèle Magema, Julian Rosefeldt, Corinna Schnitt, Mungo Thomson, Kerry Tribe, Francesco Vezzoli and Artur Zmijewski.

Image: Pierre Huyghe “The Third Memory,” video still 1999 © Pierre Huyghe, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris/New York.

Picks from the Blanton Museum

Check out The Blanton Museum of Art’s two exciting exhibitions featuring works by Art21 artists Richard Tuttle (Season 3), Michael Ray Charles (Season 1) and Hubbard + Birchler (Season 3).

Richard Tuttle’s Light Pink Octagon from 1967 is displayed in America/Americas, an ongoing exhibition with rotating works from both the American and Latin American collections at the Blanton. The exhibition shows works from North, Central and South America in a refreshingly new and unprecedented way. Works range from 1909 through 1985, exploring the differences and similarities in creative production throughout the continent and the continuous flow of ideas between borders. Tuttle’s Light Pink Octagon, from his Octagon series, has also served as an inspiration piece for Texan poets participating in the Blanton’s Poetry Project. Tuttle’s own interest in space and objects that cross the boundaries between painting, sculpture or drawing, has turned into poetic visions of shape and color that shed light on our own interpretations of this particular piece.

Michael Ray Charles and the artist team of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler make an appearance in Atelier 2008: Selections from the Department of Art & Art History Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, just about to open in three days and on view through June 8, 2008. Atelier 2008 is the first faculty exhibition being organized by a guest curator (this year, James Elaine, from the Hammer Museum of Art in LA), and it opens a new format of triennial exhibitions that will display faculty work at the Blanton from now on. For more information on Michael Ray Charles’s painting (Forever Free) Jersey #9 (Cultural Value/Black Hand), 2003, and Teresa Hubbard+Alexander Birchler’s video Single Wide, 2002, visit the Blanton Museum’s website.

Caption: Richard Tuttle, Light Pink Octagon, 1967

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