Weekly Roundup
A teaser image for the exhibition "Blood of Two: Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peyton." Courtesy of Deste Foundation.
- Matthew Barney (Season 2) and Elizabeth Peyton have collaborated on a site-specific installation for the Deste Foundation in Hydra, Greece. Blood of Two is on view through September 30 in the foundation’s new project space, which used to be the local slaughterhouse. Read The Moment to learn more.
- Tonight at 7pm, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh will lecture at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
- Sally Mann (Season 1), Kara Walker, Collier Schorr, Louise Bourgeois (all Season 2), Ellen Gallagher, Roni Horn (both Season 3), and Jenny Holzer (Season 4) are included in a mega display of works by women artists at Cheim & Read. The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Women opens June 25.
- Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Josiah McElheny (Season 3) are on view in the exhibition Universal Code at The Power Plant in Toronto. Timed to coincide with the International Year of Astronomy, the exhibition presents artists responses to cosmology and ideas of the universal in the current age of information. Continues through August 30, 2009.
- The Art Newspaper reports that nearly twenty bronze sculptures in the Tasting Garden (1998), a public art project by Season 4 artist Mark Dion, have been stolen. The garden was created for the inaugural Artranspennine exhibition organized by Tate Liverpool and the Henry Moore Institute.
- Art critic Christopher Knight of the LA Times has reviewed Hipnostasis, a collaborative video and multi-screen installation by Raymond Pettibon (Season 2) and Yoshua Okon at Armory Center for Arts in Southern California.
- Read Deborah Sontag’s extensive New York Times article about Yinka Shonibare (Season 5), poetically titled Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination.
This Week’s Roundup
Alfredo Jaar, "The Sound of Silence", 2006. Installation with wood, aluminum, fluorescent lights, strobe lights and video projection. Software design by Ravi Rajan. Installation view at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne, Switzerland, 2007.
What’s happening now:
- The Sound of Silence, an exhibition of works by Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), is on view at Galerie Lelong in New York through May 2. Visitors are invited to enter an enclosed aluminum structure that presents an 8-minute silent film. Read more about the exhibition here.
- Read Quinn Latimer’s interview with Season 3 artist Ellen Gallagher for Modern Painters. Gallagher’s first exhibition in London is on view at South London Gallery through May 2.
- Her Memory, an exhibition of recent works by Season 2 artist Kiki Smith, is on view at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona through May 24.
- Roni Horn’s first major museum show in the U.K. is on view at Tate Modern through May 25. Watch a webcast of the Season 3 artist in conversation with curator James Lingwood; art historian Briony Fer; and Tate Curator Mark Godfrey here.
- Through June 1, two new videos by Allora & Calzadilla (Season 4) are on view at the Museum Haus Esters Krefeld in Germany.
- Andrea Zittel and Shahzia Sikander (both Season 1) are included in Fashioning Felt at Cooper-Hewitt, a survey of more than 70 contemporary objects made of the material. The exhibition is on view through September 7.
- Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has collaborated with the Los Angeles-based workshop Gemini G.E.L. to produced new works, including three 3-dimensional objects and twenty-five prints. A reception with artist and a book signing will be held on March 19 from 6 to 8pm.
Iceland of Fire, Water and Light
This past week I was in Reykjavik, Iceland attending and participating in the Sequences Real Time Festival. Needless to say, it was a strange time to have come just days after the financial crisis blanketed the entire country. Friends from far and wide were emailing with comments such as “historical” and “unprecedented” to describe the predicament that by comparison, made Main Street look like a ticker tape parade.
The mood was somber, uncertain, and optimistic at the same time as the drinks went down and the show went on. A large contingent of friends and colleagues (from the Kling & Bang collective) who were going over to the Frieze Art Fair to re-create Reykjavik’s defunct but legendarily bacchanal Sirkus bar relayed feelings of reluctance but determination. How will the English react to such potential callous activity in times of turmoil? Apparently, everyone loves a good party, and by all accounts, the reception was just dandy.
At Sequences, related or not, some of the strongest works augured the crises and responded with messages about Nature reclaiming its own, in big and small ways. At the Reykjavik Art Museum, Rúrí, in collaboration with composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, created a visual and sound installation that invoked a quasi international summit on the environment, complete with choir barking texts from the former’s collected discussions on water. Rúrí, a 2003 Venice Biennale artist best known for her “archive of water” project, projected a massive, rushing waterfall on a large screen for the duration of the 45 minute performance, while musicians bearing gongs and flashlights rallied and mixed it up with the assembled mass. The water theme might also remind one of another project in Stykkishólmur, Iceland by Roni Horn, the Season 3 artist who last year created a Library of Water in the little western town.
At the opposite extreme of spectacle, Halldór Arnar Úlfarsson’s intimate Installation for Seven People at the tiny Útúrdúr bookstore was an escapist act. Taking off the mantle of collective social responsibility and in its stead donning a cap of personal meditation, the small performance was activated by the simple push of a button that revealed a private, poetic display of physics for the lucky viewer. As the title hints, the performance happened only once per day over seven days for seven people.
One of the most memorable performances at Sequences was the Helix collaboration between siblings Elin Hansdottir and Úlfur Hansson that took place in the evening at Grótta lighthouse. An American museum’s liability nightmare, one had to walk the rugged landscape in the darkness for a quarter mile, led only by a path of small candles. The foggy night at sea was inverted, whereby once inside the lighthouse, a smoky dense air filled the tower. A claustrophobic queue of people patiently walked up the circular stairway toward a blinding light while an invisible choir sung what is known as the “shepherd’s scale,” a tonal registry whose up and down movement is difficult to determine. As one got closer to the light… well, you had to be there.
Every evening one could also see from a distance Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace Tower project. Located on nearby Viðey Island, the landscape installation honors the legacy of John Lennon, staying lit from his birth date October 9th to the anniversary of his death on December 8th. The single column of light is reminiscent of the September 11th Tribute in Light at Ground Zero. Like its visual counterpart in New York, Imagine Peace Tower’s infinite beam is a presence that is at once awing, ghostly, soothing, natural and manmade. In the barren Icelandic landscape, entwined with the Aurora Borealis, the limits of the impossible seemed within reach. And like the protagonist from John Berger’s novel G., I too felt like I was witnessing something oddly human scale and intimate, behind the scenes of history happening at that very moment.
FLAG, Ruscha, Kruger, Brain
The FLAG Art Foundation last week opened the exhibition WALL ROCKETS: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, curated by Lisa Dennison. The title of the exhibition refers to a painting made in 2000 by Ruscha, whose consumerist aesthetic has influenced a host of artists. Gathered together in this broad show is photography, painting, and sculpture from over 70 artists, including Art:21’s Mark Bradford (Season 4), Roni Horn (Season 3), and Barbara Kruger (Season 1).
By extension, Kruger’s “brainy illustration” for a New York Magazine cover with Eliot Spitzer also recently won magazine cover of the year from the American Society of Magazine Editors.
Roni Horn at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills
July 24 through August 29, 2008, works by Season 3 artist Roni Horn will be on view at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Los Angeles area in almost ten years, and her first with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on July 24 from 6-8pm.
Included in the exhibition are sculptures from the ongoing series of inlaid aluminum rods that Horn began in the early nineties. As seen in the picture above, the rods lean against the wall and bear bits of text. In this exhibition the texts relate to writers Flannery O’Connor and Emily Dickinson. In an Art21 interview, Horn said, “My relationship to my work is extremely verbal, extremely language-based. I am probably more language-based than I am visual, and I move through language to arrive at the visual. So I’ve always questioned whether I am really a visual artist. You get into this situation where your ‘identity’ takes over your actual being because you get stuck with whatever it is you resemble to other people- not who you are. They’re not necessarily the same thing.”
Click here to read about other objects in the exhibition. Follow this link for directions to the gallery.
A new reason to go to M.I.T.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has an amazing program where students can borrow a framed work by major artists from their List Visual Arts Center’s collection for an entire academic year. The Student Loan Art Program was founded in 1996 and boasts of over 400 pieces with which your dormroom can be beautified. There are plenty of big names on the list including Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Sol LeWitt, and Ed Ruscha to name a few, as well as many Art:21 artists like Allora & Calzadilla, Ida Applebroog, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Susan Rothenberg, Collier Schorr, Laurie Simmons, Nancy Spero, Richard Tuttle, and Fred Wilson. At the top of my own M.I.T. wishlist would be Bernd & Hilla Becher’s Cooling Tower. Learn more about the Student Loan Art Program here.
Above, from the M.I.T. Student Loan Art Program’s collection: Alex Katz’s Portrait of a Poet : Kenneth Koch, 1970
Spaceship Earth
Buckminster Fuller was one of the most inventive and prolific visionaries of 20th century who was keenly intuitive. Much of the work in the new Whitney exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with Universe, is on display for the first time. “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.”
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the science fiction classic, was created at the pinnacle of the Apollo space exploration project beginning with manned Earth orbiting missions and reaching its plateau with landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. The Hal 9000 computer gave us a preview into how computers would one day dominate our lives.
In Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicolas Carr makes several references to Hal: “… the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman, in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, is calmly and coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. ‘Dave, my mind is going,’ HAL says forlornly. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it.’” Reading about Carr’s experience and how Internet searching and surfing has affected his thinking process and focus level, I realize that I am not the only one.
Are we becoming more aware of the hybridization of human and machine even though our minds are numbing by the plethora of information? As Internet has shifted our reading habits, how is it influencing the way we perceive art? Do we spend as much time contemplating works of art as we did in the past?
Depth and form are perceived in the visionary light creations of James Turrell (Season 1). His Roden Crater Project acts as a giant naked eye enabling viewers to see the sky as a dome and to feel the roundness of Earth. This is an experience similar to what Fuller experiences, “The earth is revolving to obscure the sun. The sun is not going down. I want you to really feel this with me. We’re rolling around to obscure the sun. We’re about to have a sunclipse: the earth is revolving around rapidly to obscure the sun. It’s perfectly easy to feel it, particularly if you face north and look over your left shoulder. Just watch! and you suddenly begin to feel this enormous earth revolving on its axis.”
Another visionary artist who is acutely aware of the environment is Roni Horn (Season 3). Her Vatnasafn/Library of Water replaces the solid with liquid as it engages the community to participate and to interact through a variety of activities. It is the epitome of relational art. An extensive collection of books on Fuller, Horn and Turrell are available for on site and take home use at the Art Collection of Mid-Manhattan Library.
At the 2005 Art Basel Miami Conversation, Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Robert Rauschenberg what advice he had for young artists and he replied, “Just nurture your curiosity and have respect for change. And I think the curiosity part will make life very exciting. It will also fight back habits like repeating oneself.”
Earthrise. NASA AS11-44-6548
Berliner Salon: Don’t miss Roni Horn at the Deutsche Guggenheim
True North, a group exhibition featuring Art21 Season 3 artist Roni Horn, closes this Sunday at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The exhibition includes work by seven contemporary artists, “whose photographic or video-based projects evoke the tradition of Northern Romantic landscape painting as well as its legacy in later nineteenth-century photography.” Despite allusions to formal antecedents, the general tone of the exhibition undermines any romantic idealism associated with the notion of the “North.” Rather, the viewer is confronted with modernity’s attempts, however futile, to “colonize or commune with” this unforgiving and utterly unapologetic climate.
Horn‚Äôs installation consists of a photographic series hung conspicuously above eye-level, creating a horizon that effectively distances each image from the viewer’s comfortable gaze. As with her previous work, this series focuses on elements of Icelandic life, specifically unspectacular routines like daytime soap operas and the tides, which emphasize the melancholy that dominates both the island and this latitude in general.
True North closes at precisely the correct time, heralding the much anticipated onset of spring (assuming it ever arrives), as well as the beginning of the 5th Berlin Biennial, which officially opened to the public last Saturday. The bb5 brings an energy to the city’s cultural calendar that easily aligns itself with metaphors of spring rejuvenation. Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic and entitled When things cast no shadow, the Biennial’s traditional day program is divided among three venues: the Schinkel Pavillon, Skulpturenpark and Kunst Werke. In addition, 63 “noctural events” are systematically being announced in conjunction with the Biennial’s evening program, My nights are more beautiful than your days, finally giving Berliners a legitimate reason to cease with hibernation and brave the less-than-beautiful April weather. The 5th Berlin Biennial runs through June 15th.
Roni Horn at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi in London
Season 3 artist Roni Horn has concurrent exhibitions on view in London and M√°laga, Spain.
In a solo show that opened on Tuesday and runs through April 12, Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi in London presents the culmination of the artist’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds, the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs‚Äô surfaces. Horn‚Äôs photographs, like the stuffed birds represented, are quizzical. These are terse, slippery images in which clear-sighted, accurate detail only serves to underline the limited knowledge offered up by appearances.
Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are all presented in pairs; images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling ‚Äì as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy ‚Äì has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work. She has noted that “with two objects that are one object you have an integral use of the world. You have the necessary inclusion of circumstance.”
Alongside the bird photographs Horn is showing a new sculptural work entitled Blue by Blue, which consists of two almost identical objects made of solid cast blue glass. Horn has elucidated. “the experience of blue unlike most colours is always half you. So this is a pair that is both mirror and window. The window contains the view of blue. The mirror reflects the blue in you.”
A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.
Until March 30, A Kind of You is up at CAC Málaga (read more here) and a major touring exhibition of Horn’s works will take place in 2009-2010, organized by Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Podcast: Roni Horn at Frieze 2007
From the Frieze archives: a podcast of artist Roni Horn (Season 3) describing the site-specificity and seriality in her work. In this 40-minute keynote lecture from the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London (”Cultural Cartography,” October 14), Horn talks about her time and works in Iceland and her most recent project, Library of Water, in particular. It is the culmination of a lifelong interest in the relationship of language to place.
Access this podcast here.
[via Frieze]
