Cai Guo-Qiang media explosion
Art21 artist (Season 3) Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition I Want to Believe at the Guggenheim Museum may go down as the most-documented show on video of 2008 in New York. However, Cai faces some serious competition: we’ll have to wait and see if the ongoing Olafur Eliasson exhibition at MoMA, Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum, or the upcoming Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) retrospective at the Guggenheim will out-spectacle the current Manhattan media blitz.
With only 7 days left until Cai’s Guggenheim exhibition closes, who knows how many more videos are in the works, but in the meantime enjoy the following sampling. And for those planning a visit this final weekend, get your tickets early (and hide those camera phones)!
New York aside…if you include Cai Guo-Qiang’s role as director of visual and special effects for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games in August, he will undoubtedly hold the record as the contemporary artist whose work has been seen by the most people on television, ever. (Who previously held the record? Mel Chin and the GALA Committee’s little-known subversive project with Melrose Place?)
Do you have a video of Cai’s Guggenheim show? Leave a link in the comments below!
VIDEO | Channel Thirteen (PBS) SundayArts
Spacey! Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe is “literally” beamed onto Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp. (Fun fact: the Guggenheim is 2 years younger than Sputnik & Cai, and 7 years older than Star Trek)
VIDEO | Guggenheim Museum
Working at the Guggenheim must induce some serious déjà vu—here riggers install Inopportune: Stage One in a way reminiscent of Matthew Barney’s climbing escapades in CREMASTER 3 (2002).
VIDEO | VernissageTV
A non-narrated, comprehensive tour of the exhibition’s major works.
VIDEO | NewArtTV
Some comments from Cai Guo-Qiang on the day of the press preview.
VIDEO | Museum TV
Hello! Enthusiastic host Mel Merio does a “profoundly postmodern” interview with Guggenheim curator Alexandra Munroe.
And…last but not least……..
VIDEO | Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century
Watch an excerpt of the Art:21 episode Power featuring Cai Guo-Qiang, with the artist reflecting on Inopportune: Stage Two (2004) when it was first installed at MASS MoCA.
(Artist) Frays Book
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s latest exhibition, Blood on Paper: The Art of The Book, showcases book-based work by a wealth of modern and contemporary artists, including Cai Guo-Qiang and Richard Tuttle (Season 3) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1).
Since the book form implies a beginning, middle and end, it’s always been a popular form for artists looking to meddle with heads, from Max Ernst’s superlative The Hundred Headless Woman onwards. The exhibition traces a significant transformation in the definition of the artist’s book: from a kind of freeform improvisation on textual illustration (Matisse’s Jazz, Sol LeWitt’s take on Borges’ Ficciones) to an artwork taking the form of a book as its conceptual jumping-off point (Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton’s Inter Faces and Richard Tuttle’s NotThePoint). The connotations of books as cornerstones of religious doctrine are underscored by Damien Hirst’s New Religion, a huge, plinth-mounted mixed-media sculpture in the form of a shelved Bible, set off by a display of Francis Bacon’s much-pored-over ephemera, battered Muybridge photos and snaggly Polaroids, displayed in glass like the fingerbones of a saint.
The most fun is to be had in the illumination artists’ work can cast on a canonical text; Balthus replays Wuthering Heights as a pas de deux of feral adolesence; Paula Rego turns Jane Eyre into a mad psychodrama of Gothic puppetry. Serialism found an easy home in the book form, with Ed Ruscha’s deadpan series of swimming pools and gas stations repeated on every page of a pocketsize book, insouciance itself. Meanwhile, the pages of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Danger Books, charred with the spidery remainders of fireworks, indicate the book as a site of explosive excitement, and anyone who’s ever been 7 will probably agree.
U.S. Embassy Makes Olympic Rings
These big metallic tulips aren’t just going to be on view in Spain, where they are permanently installed along the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao’s riverside façade, above. An edition of Tulips by Jeff Koons, as well as new work by Art:21 artists Louise Bourgeois, Cai Guo-Qiang, Martin Puryear, and Maya Lin are included on the checklist of 18 contemporary Chinese and American artists that will on view when the massive SOM-designed American embassy opens in Beijing, just before the start of the 2008 summer Olympics. Many of the pieces are either new commissions or site-specific works purchased by the State Department. According to The Art Newspaper, the State Department calculates the budget it will spend on art based on a new building’s square footage, and therefore $800,000 will be spent on art for the Beijing project — the largest sum ever splurged on a new US embassy.
MATRIX/REDUX at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.
MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).
Louise Bourgeois’ Awakening
From yesterday’s Observer there is a fascinating article about the “epidemic”, “affliction” and “nocturnal literacy” that is insomnia. Included is a bit on Louise Bourgeois (Season 1), who the journalist Kate Kellaway coins the “Queen of Insomnia.”
She has been an insomniac since 1939 and, even in old age, has fierce things to say about it: ‘I am insomniac, so the state of being asleep is paradise. It is a paradise I can never reach.’ Yet, between November 1994 and June 1995, she produced a remarkable body of work, The Insomnia Drawings. Some are soothing abstracts - Bourgeois described working on them as ‘a kind of rocking and stroking and an attempt at finding a kind of peace’. Others are sharper, more figurative (of water, houses, the figure of a woman). These are a way of dealing with traumatic experience (she had an abusive father, a traitor of a stepmother and, in her youth, tried to drown herself).
Curator Ann Coxon of Tate Modern believes insomnia is crucial to Bourgeois: ‘She has to keep herself in that traumatised place to keep creating such amazing work.’ What I find most interesting is that for Bourgeois art is an alternative to sleep: her drawings process trauma as dreams are supposed to do.
To read Kate Kellaway’s entire article, please click here.
Walker and Bourgeois in Flaunt Magazine
The Spring 2008 fashion issue of the arts and entertainment glossy, Flaunt Magazine, features Art21 artists Kara Walker (Season 2) and Louise Bourgeois (Season 1). While Walker’s work is currently on view at the Hammer Museum in the traveling and award-winning survey, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, a Bourgeois retrospective of nearly 200 objects made between 1940-2007 is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through June 2.
This issue of Flaunt, titled “Reap What You Sew,” also features Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director and a passionate collector of contemporary art; and Prada “Vomit” wallpaper, a floral collage of cropped and pixelated imagery culled from videos, created by the New York design studio 2×4.
Video: TateShots on Louise Bourgeois
In Issue 9 of the TateShots online video series, Tate curator Frances Morris presents an overview of Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois current Tate retrospective (on view until January 20) and introduces archive footage showing Bourgeois at home in New York as she discusses plans for the giant spider and towers that were the very first Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern in 2000.
2007: a brief recap
2007 was a landmark year for many Art21 artists. Apart from the accolades and prizes bestowed upon such artists as Kara Walker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jessica Stockholder, Kerry James Marshall, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the multitude of exhibitions featuring Art21 artists reflect the pinnacle stages in many of their careers. While this is an achievement in its own right, we wanted to mention some of the other critical kudos recently published in print and online.
For Robert Ayers of ArtInfo.com, the two sculpture retrospectives organized by MoMA last year, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Martin Puryear (on view through January 14), are the fourth and fifth best shows of 2007. “Having already visited [Serra’s] show several times, I actually cancelled all of my plans for its final day so that I could see it one last time,” writes Ayers. About Puryear he notes that the artist, “proves himself here a magician of forms that sit happily at the intersection of abstraction and representation and a poet of implied and suggested appearances and meanings.”
As previously cited in December, the top ten exhibitions of 2007 for Time’s Richard Lacayo include those of artists Richard Serra (#1), Vija Celmins (#3), Martin Puryear (#5), and Kara Walker (#6). For Howard Halle of Time Out New York, Serra’s show at MoMA is one of 2007’s best. “Serra put the me in heavy-metal postminimalism, but in this retro of curving labyrinthine slabs, he put you and I and just about everyone else in there, too.” remarks Halle.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the writers from 24 Hour Museum (to be renamed Culture24 this Spring) have their own opinions. Jon Pratty, 24 Hour Museum’s Editor and Head of Content, selected the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern as his top pick. For Pratty, this show (on display through January 20) “was the first in a long time I have seen bringing to life the peculiar talent, skill and craft of a true artist. Everything in her show had been chosen by her, crafted by her, formed by her. It was really inspiring.”
On a more somber note, 2007 sadly marked the death of Season 2 artist Elizabeth Murray, who passed away on August 12. But as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times, “her paintings will be with us for years and years to come.”
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.
Louise Bourgeois: A Retrospective
The Tate Modern in London presents a traveling exhibition of more than 200 works by one of the world’s most respected sculptors, Louise Bourgeois.
The retrospective exhibition includes early drawings, paintings, and prints, as well as later sculptures and installations, providing an opportunity to reassess Bourgeois’ work.
While Bourgeois, who was featured in Season 1 of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century, has worked her way through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde movements, from abstraction to realism, she has always remained distinctively individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art.
Her work is characterized by an obsessive subject matter and an experimental approach to materials and techniques, but despite the way the object is created and presented, her main subject remains the same: femininity, sexuality, childhood trauma, and isolation.
The Tate Modern exhibition explores Bourgeois’s core themes and demonstrates that even in her 90s she continues to defy convention. And that she is still an important, unique voice in contemporary art, is validated by the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: New Work, that is on display at Hauser & Wirth, also in London.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston of The Times writes, “Bourgeois is restlessly inventive. She may be well into her nineties but she continues to experiment, as a concurrent show of new pieces at Hauser & Wirth‚Äôs old Bond Street galleries makes plain.”
The retrospective exhibition will be on view at the Tate Modern through January 2008 and will then proceed to Beaubourg in Paris. From June 2008 on, the exhibition will tour around the US. Louise Bourgeois: New Work is on view at Hauser & Wirth until November 18.
