Last Chance: The Old, Weird America
Closing at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston on July 20, The Old, Weird America is the first museum exhibition to explore the widespread resurgence of folk imagery and history in American contemporary art. The exhibition borrows its inspiration and title from music and cultural critic Greil Marcus’ 1997 book examining the influence of folk music on Bob Dylan and The Band’s album, The Basement Tapes.
This exhibition of works from nearly 20 artists and collaborative groups, includes Kara Walker (Season 2), Eric Beltz, Jeremy Blake, Sam Durant, Barnaby Furnas, Brad Kahlhamer, David McDermott and Peter McGough, Aaron Morse, Cynthia Norton (a.k.a. Ninny), Greta Pratt, Dario Robleto, Allison Smith, and Charlie White.
The exhibition is curated by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston senior curator Toby Kamps. Click here for museum hours.
Pretty Ugly at Maccarone and GBE
Pretty Ugly is a dual-part summer show that just opened at Gavin Brown Enterprises and Maccarone Gallery in the West Village. The neighboring galleries conceptually explore the back and forth of how art defines beauty, cast in flux as opposed to a rigid model. The exhibition includes over thirty artists including Ida Applebroog (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois (Season 1) and Raymond Pettibon (Season 2).
The press release quotes a text by Umberto Eco: “Today everyone (including those bourgeois who should have been stunned and scandalized) recognize as artistically beautiful all those works that had horrified their fathers. The ugliness of the avant-garde has been accepted as a new model of beauty, and has given rise to a new commercial circuit.”
Pretty Ugly runs though August 29th.
Berliner Salon: Richard Serra at Kunst Werke
Last weekend Kunst Werke opened an exhibition of films by Ricarda Roggan, Albrecht Schäfer and Art:21 Season 1 artist Richard Serra. Serra’s part of the exhibition, entitled Thinking on Your Feet (in reference to a 2005 documentary about the artist by Maria Anna Tappeiner), is comprised of 5 videos shot by Serra between 1968 and 1976. The press release touts this exhibition as the first devoted solely to the artist’s cinematic work and quotes Serra as stating, “Seeing Chelsea Girls and Yvonne Rainer’s hand film, I felt that making film was open to me. Up to that point, I’d felt a deference for film, and maybe I was a little bit frightened of it; I wouldn’t have picked up a camera… I probably had to shoot these films so as to make the difference to sculpture clearer to me.”
Thinking on Your Feet is on view at Kunst Werke until September 7th. To learn more about the exhibition click here. Schoenes Wochenende.
Mark Bradford at Artpace
Artpace annually invites nine artists to conceive and create new art projects as part of their International Artist-in-Residence program in San Antonio, TX. Each residency is for a period of two months and composed of one artist from Texas, one from elsewhere in the United States, and one from abroad.
An exhibition of works by the program’s most recent residents–Mark Bradford (Season 4), William Cordova and Marcos Ramirez ERRE–opens July 10. Curated by Lauri Firstenberg, the exhibition is titled New Works: 08.2. A dialogue with Bradford, Cordova and ERRE will take place during the opening reception.
Previous participants of the Artpace residency include Art21 artists Shahzia Sikander (Season 1), Do-Ho Suh, Paul Pfeiffer, Kara Walker (all Season 2) and Arturo Herrera (Season 3).
Allora & Calzadilla’s Munich Harmonies
Check out this interview and footage from Vernissage TV’s coverage of Allora & Calzadilla’s (Season 4) concurrent exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Kunstverein München includes several installations of “geological bunkers” with hidden opera singers and musicians plying militaristic beats and crooning apocalyptic. Continuing to explore the politicization of music, the collaborative’s Haus der Kunst show offers Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano, a new performance work that scrutinizes the famous Ninth symphony and its shared history with the museum’s architecture and both their subsequent usurpation by the Nazis.
Berliner Salon: Sugimoto at the Neue and Street art in F-hain
As previously posted, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s retrospective opened today at the Neue National Galerie. Having seen the show in the context of Mies van der Rohe’s brilliantly minimal architectural monument, I can honestly say that Sugimoto’s work has never looked better. The installation is lovely and the clean lines of the Neue perfectly compliment the Japanese artist’s tendency for monochromatic refinement and pristine geometry.But, for those who are more interested in the lowbrow aesthetics of the public sphere, as opposed to the highbrow conceptualism of the institution, tomorrow marks the opening of the street art festival Urban Affairs, which will combine action painting, site-specific installation and original artwork by some of the graffiti genre’s most notorious activists. El Tono and Nano 4814, both of whom were recently commissioned by the Tate Modern to create large-scale on-site murals, will participate in the festival. Other notable urban artists on view include Dolk, El Bocho, Alias and Nomad, plus there will be an after party in the beer garden immediately adjacent to the venue, a converted former brewery located in the predominately punk neighborhood of Friedrichshain (F-hain) that boasts an unglaublich 900 sq. meters of exhibition space. Considering Berlin’s reputation as a graffiti mecca of the urban art world, this opening is not to be missed.In other news, there are fire works going off in Berlin right now, which is helping this American feel almost disturbingly at home. The American Embassy opened today after a prolonged construction coma and George Bush Senior himself is in town to do the inaugural honors, in an ironic nod to all of us Expats who left America to avoid the Bush family in the first place. Regardless, happy 4th of July! Schoenes Wochenende.
Nancy Spero Retrospective at MACBA
Appropriately enough, Nancy Spero’s Dissidances opens on Independence Day at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Long an active voice in contemporary political and feminist art, the exhibition includes early work from her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago to recent presentation at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
It is the first major retrospective of Spero’s (Season 4) career held both in Europe and the United States. The title of the exhibition, taken from the text by Hélène Cixous for the catalogue, suggests a “potential reading which subsumes two basic aspects of the artist’s work: its critical, non-conformist nature in terms of the politico-artistic situation she has lived through during her career and the importance of movement and of the body as vehicles for articulating her discourse. Organized chronologically, the exhibition presents her work as a unitary project in which past and present become blurred, as in the ancient fables and narratives that have been an inspiration to her.”
The traveling exhibition runs through September 24th at MACBA, then to Madrid and Seville.
Happy July 4th!
Hiroshi Sugimoto Retrospective in Berlin
Opening today, Neue Nationalgalerie presents the work of Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) in what constitutes the Art21 artist’s most comprehensive retrospective exhibition in German-speaking countries. Berlin is the third stop for this traveling exhibition, which also goes to.Düsseldorf, Salzburg (Austria), and Luzern (Switzerland).
The exhibition consists of more than seventy photographs and a single sculpture. Sugimoto is planning an entirely different presentation of his work for Neue Nationalgalerie that will highlight relations to the Berlin collections, as well as the architecture of the Mies van der Rohe building. The exhibition is on view through October 5, 2008.
Collier Schorr: Freeway Balconies
Freeway Balconies, a group exhibition curated by Collier Schorr (Season 2) is on view July 5 through September 21, 2008 at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The exhibition is “at once a self-portrait and a riveting display of some of the most vital trends in contemporary U.S.–based art.” Borrowing its title from the 1960s poet laureate Allen Ginsberg, Freeway Balconies refers to the meeting place of spectacle and voyeurism in American culture.
Schorr has gathered nineteen emerging and established artists, arranging their work around selections of her own work. The exhbition ranges in mediums from photography to sculpture, installation to video and, according to the website, explores “the performative impulse so operative in today’s innovative forms…Freeway Balconies is a roundtable discussion in exhibition form, addressing the problems that drive Schorr’s artmaking.”
A panel discussion including Schorr, Sara Gilbert, Herbert Molner, Adam Pendleton and Matt Saunders takes place on July 5 at 11 a.m. Panel members will discuss the core themes of the exhibition and the role of performance in contemporary art. The conversation is moderated by Dominic Eichler.
Louise Bourgeois at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
In the mid-nineteenth-century, Botany was regularly taught to medical students. Because they did not yet have that invention known as the slide lecture, large illustrations of plants were instead hung from bent pins on fabric rollers. John Hutton Balfour, the Regius Keeper for 34 years (from 1845 to 1879) at the Royal Botanic Garden Ediburgh, commissioned well over 1000 such diagrams.
For the bicentenary of Hutton’s birth, Louise Bourgeois (Season 2) was invited to exhibit drawings and sculpture alongside these teaching diagrams at the Inverleith House on the garden grounds. As a young woman Bourgeois studied mathematics and her favorite geometrical form remains the ellipse, a shape with two centers that metaphorically relate to the cycles of life and the dualities of identity. For Nature Study, her concise drawings made in red gouache on white paper demonstrate a specific concern with motherhood, human nature, and the polarities of birth and death, growth and decay, separation and togetherness.
“Though widely divergent in time, purpose and style, these two bodies of work show curious formal affinities, and occasionally, touch on strikingly similar themes. Taken together, they form a dialogue that communicates a particularly strong and authentic fascination for the natural world - and for life itself.”
Nature Study is part of a series of exhibitions at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in which contemporary artists show together with works from the permanent collections. Previous exhibitions have featured Laura Owens (also paired with the Balfour collection) in 2000; Rudolf Stingel (with nineteenth-century botanical drawings by Indian artists) in 2006, and John Cage with Merce Cunningham (shown with early twentieth-century botanical drawings by Lilian Snelling) in 2007.
Nature Study with Louise Bourgeois runs until July 6th.
