Mike Kelley at the National Museum Kraków
According to Artforum.com and The Art Newspaper, the National Museum, Kraków is scheduled to open a new department of contemporary Western art this month—the first devoted to a collection of this kind in Poland. The collection is an eclectic gathering of ten post-modern artists, each of which will be housed in a separate room. The artists are Mike Kelley (Season 1), Nobuyoshi Araki, Miquel Barceló, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, David LaChapelle, Sherrie Levine, Andreas Slominski, Philip Taaffe and Andy Warhol. The total of fifty works will go on public view May 29, 2008.
The National Museum, Kraków was established in 1879, and is the main branch of Poland’s National Museum, which has permanent collections around the country. Visit Wikimedia Commons for a glimpse of their collection.
Kelley’s retrospective exhibition, Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008, is currently on view at the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels, Belgium.
Mike Kelley Retrospective in Brussels
Last week, the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art opened the first retrospective exhibition in Belgium of works by Art21 artist Mike Kelley (Season 1). On view through July 27, 2008, Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995-2008, is conceived as a history in which every work forms a chapter in the artist’s career. According to Nicolas Trembley, writing for artforum.com, the exhibition “borrows its title from one of Kelley’s more famous works: a large-scale model, first shown at Metro Pictures in 1995, that represents the various schools the artist has attended.”
The Wiels Centre, which opened to the public in May 2007, is positioned as “neither a museum, nor a Kunsthalle or a centre for the fine arts, but an institution which articulates a set of complementary functions (exhibition, production and education).” Mike Kelley fills three floors of Wiels–a former brewery and an architectural landmark in the Brussels landscape. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Anthony Vidler, Howard Singerman, Mike Kelley, and Wiels curator Anne Pontégnie. On April 30, Pontégnie will give a guided tour of the exhibition. Other public programs include I Love Mike, a series of creative workshops for children ages 6-12 years old that will explore themes and materials in Kelley’s work.
Life on Mars: Carnegie International 2008
The 2008 installment of Carnegie International, the oldest international survey of contemporary art in North America, will explore what it means to be human in the world today. CI08, titled Life on Mars, opens to the public on May 3, though related programs and events are already underway. A four-session lecture series, Approaches to Contemporary Art & the 55th Carnegie International will explore how art has changed in the last 50 years. Two sessions remain on Thursday, April 17 and 25.
CI08 is curated by Douglas Fogle, the Carnegie’s curator of contemporary art. On April 6, Fogle posted the following on the exhibition blog:
“In David Bowie’s song, ‘Life on Mars,’ he sings about a world spinning out of control. Bowie poses the question of whether Mars is a place to escape to, or whether we’re on Mars already, because this world we live in has become so strange and unfamiliar to us. The title [of CI08]–appropriated from the Bowie song…poses a poetic question of longing, and of trying to connect. It relates not only to a literal search for extra-terrestrial life, but also to sending out signals in the dark, and hoping to get a response…Every curator is a product of their particular time, as well as their own personal history. This show is the show I had to do right now.”
The forty emerging and established artists in the exhibition include Mark Bradford (Season 4), Barry McGee, Mike Kelley(both Season 1), Vija Celmins (Season 2), Doug Aitken, Cao Fei, Phil Collins, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ryan Gander, Thomas Hirschhorn, Sharon Lockhart, Marisa Merz, Noguchi Rika, Thomas Schutte, David Shrigley, Rudolf Stingel, Paul Thek, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Rosemarie Trockel, to name just a few. CI08 closes on January 9, 2009.
Mike Kelley Banners at 1018 Art
On view at 1018 Art in Manhattan through April 26, 2008, Cut Felt Banners features collaged textile works created by Art21 artist Mike Kelley (Season 1) between 1985 and 1993. All objects in the exhibition are large wall hangings made of glued and sewn felt. They include Lincoln‚Äôs Beacon, a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, and Untitled (Christian Drama/ Thursday Night Socials), a piece that reflects Christian themes and sexual celebration at the same time. This exhibition “incorporates Kelley‚Äôs engagement with exposed prejudices; repression, popular cultures, adolescence and sexuality, and transmits his work in quasi-religious mystery.”
1018 Art is located at 1018 Madison Avenue (between 78th and 79th Streets, 3rd floor). Hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-6pm; Saturday 10-5pm.
“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.
Mike Kelley: Kandors at Jablonka Galerie
On display at the Jablonka Galerie in Berlin, Germany, is Mike Kelley’s collection of new work; Kandors.
The exhibition of new works by Mike Kelley features sculptures, lenticular light boxes and videos related to the fictional city of Kandor, the capitol of Superman’s home planet Krypton. According to the Superman mythos, Kandor is the only remaining vestige of the exploded Krypton, and the city is preserved, in a reduced state, in a bottle in Superman’s possession. Interestingly, the image of Kandor was never codified and the numerous representations of it in the comic book throughout the years vary widely in appearance.
In Kandors, Kelley reconstructs ten unique versions of Kandor, with its enclosing bottle. Thus, Kandor, as an eternally maintained, but constantly reconfigured, relic of Superman’s childhood, is an apt symbol of Kelley’s interests in the vagaries of memory, and relates to his own works that refer to Repressed Memory Syndrome.
Kelley focuses on the formal diversity of the various versions of Kandor. Ten images of the bottled city were selected from the hundreds of examples found in Superman comic books, and these have been recreated as sculptures scaled up to human dimensions. The original found images of Kandor were graphically altered to accentuate color and form then rendered as lenticular lightboxes, which gives the images the illusion of dimension and movement.
The Kandors project is an exercise in the translation of graphic two-dimensional images into three-dimensional sculptures. The flat areas of background color in the comic book panels have been rendered as illuminated Plexiglas walls. The various versions of Kandor are represented by under-lit resin sculptures in a variety of colors. The various bases and plinths that the Kandors sit upon have been constructed as actual furniture. But, in many cases, the bottles, bases, and cities have been separated and spaced apart, complicating their formal relationships. Kelley has described this process as an attempt to make an artwork as flat, colorful, and visually simple as a painting by Matisse which operates in three dimensions, yet still maintains an overall sense of graphic flatness. All of the works feature light or motion, and the exhibition is self-illuminated.
Mike Kelley was featured in Season One of Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Jablonka Galerie
Kochstrasse 60
10969 Berlin
Kandors on view until December 22.
