Weekly Roundup

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, "Better Dimension (detail)", 2010. Ink and tape on glass slide from an installation of silkscreened wood panels, four Hasselblad slide projectors, one 16 mm eiki projector, resin and steel projection screen, 106 × 252 × 268 in. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gagosian Gallery, New York.

Biennials, cremated canvases, German faces, cashmere sportswear, sculptural tour de force, fashionable shoes, and an iPhone app comprise this week’s roundup:

• 2010: Whitney Biennial will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Thursday, February 25. Art21’s Ellen Gallagher (Season 3) is one of fifty-five artists selected by curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari for this year’s show. She was also included in the 1995 Biennial, and had a solo exhibition at the museum in 2005. This time Gallagher has partnered with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne on a film installation that includes sculptural construction and silk-screened panels. Gallagher recently told The Providence Journal: “In some ways, it feels very similar to my first Biennial. I mean, it’s a huge honor for any artist to be invited to participate in a Whitney Biennial. In a way, it’s a little like being nominated for an Academy Award. You feel this wonderful sense of validation.” 2010 is on view through May 30.

• Shrew’d: The Smart & Sassy Survey of American Women Artists, a biennial invitational at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art, focuses on the work of artists who question social norms of representation in art, pop culture and daily  life. According to the website, the survey “takes a critical feminist perspective on society’s mixed messages about assertive women, which describes what some contemporary women artists have had to become.” Carrie Mae Weems (Season 5), whose work is included in the exhibition, will lecture at the museum on March 30. Shrew’d continues through May 9. (Watch a slideshow here.)

• Pure Beauty is the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain that is dedicated to Season 5 artist John Baldessari. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of the artist’s most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965); Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvases he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969); and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as “Singing in the Rain” and the American national anthem. Pure Beauty (titled for one of Baldessari’s early works) will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• German Faces — an exhibition that draws from a long-term body of work by Season 2 artist Collier Schorr — is on view at Modern Art Gallery in London through March 20. Every summer for the past 18 years, Schorr has traveled to southern Germany, working in and around the small town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. She used the landscapes of artists Sander, Kiefer, Beuys, Baselitz and Chagall as a ground on which to play out imagined and inherited histories of Germany and her own Jewish heritage. Schorr’s images are further influenced by reportage, fictional films, and portrait photography. The installation of this project, completely arranged by the artist, includes photographs, drawings, collages and videos. Schorr was recently named “Artist of the Week” by The Guardian.

• Through April 23, works by Season 2 artist Maya Lin are on view at The Arts Club of Chicago. The exhibition includes wood constructed land formations and bodies of water, wire wall pieces, drawings, pastel rubbings, and a piece created specifically for the city. According to Chicago Art Magazine, “Maya Lin’s show is a sculptural tour de force, which will surely be counted among the year’s best.”

• Art21 artists Vija Celmins (Season 2) and Robert Ryman (Season 4) have inspired recent runway fashions. Payless ShoeSource tapped designer Lela Rose for a special fall shoe collection that debuted during New York Fashion Week. According to CNN Money, “The collection’s inspiration stems from the textural and ‘craggy’ landscapes of the moon and earth, and the graphite works by Vija Celmins featuring lunar floors and nighttime skies.” Huffington Post reports that designer Jason Wu’s fall collection was inspired by Ryman’s monochromatic canvases, resulting in minimalist “sportswear with a highly civilized twist and turn.”

• Works by Barbara Kruger (Season 1) and Lari Pittman (Season 4) are featured in the exhibition Disquieted at the Portland Art Museum. The show explores our social condition and how living artists have responded, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times. The exhibition boasts its own iPhone application that includes video interviews with artists; commentary from curators and educators; and a map so visitors can easily locate featured works of art. Disquieted is on view through May 16.

Weekly Roundup

Ida Applebroog, "Group A #9", 1969. Ink on paper, 10 5/8" x 8 1/4". Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

This week Art21 artists depict nether regions, play with light and space, bundle and fuse old toys, mirror the dandy, reimagine rooftops, photograph electricity, and display cookie cutters by the thousands:

• Beginning January 19, a new body of work and major installation by Season 3 artist Ida Applebroog will be on view at Hauser & Wirth in New York. Central to the exhibition, titled Monalisa, is a collection of more than 160 drawings of the artist’s crotch based on reflections of herself in a mirror. Applebroog made the drawings in 1969 during her nightly bath ritual. Packed in a basement and forgotten until studio assistants discovered them in early 2009, they are now key in her Hauser & Wirth installation. Applebroog has created a room-sized wooden structure covered with more than 100 new drawings made from her original vagina images, which she has scanned onto handmade Gampi paper, enlarged, digitally manipulated, and enhanced with washes of color. The exhibition will also include a selection of the original drawings. Monalisa will be on view through March 6. Read more about the exhibition here.

• The Visible Vagina, on view concurrently at David Nolan and Francis M. Naumann Fine Art galleries in New York, is inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues. As the exhibition title suggests, “the show is designed to make visible a portion of the female anatomy that is generally considered taboo―too private and intimate for public display.” Works by Art21 artists Jeff Koons (Season 5), Kiki Smith (Season 2), Laurie Simmons, and Nancy Spero (both Season 4) will be included. The Visible Vagina is on view January 28-March 20. A panel discussion with artists in the exhibition, moderated by Anna Chave, will be held at David Nolan Gallery on January 30.

• Through February 6, works by James Turrell (Season 1), Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Laddie John Dill, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine are on view at New York’s David Zwirner Gallery. Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960-1970 surveys the diverse art practices that flourished in 1960s California and are often placed under the umbrella term “Light and Space.” The selection of works in this show are intended to capture some of the more specific aesthetic qualities of the Los Angeles scene during the 1960s. A guided walk-through of the exhibition with co-curator Tim Nye will take place on January 23 at 11:30am.

• Two sculptures by Season 2 artist Maya Lin made from recycled toys (titled Toy Asteroid: Boy and Toy Asteroid: Girl) are included in Animamix Biennial: Visual Attract and Attack at MoCA Taipei. The exhibition presents the most recent developments and trends in Animamix art, or “contemporary comic aesthetics” from across the world. Featuring works by nearly 300 artists, Animamix Biennial is hosted simultaneously by three other museums in China and Taiwan: MoCA Shanghai, Today Art Museum Beijing, and Guangdong Museum of Art. Visual Attract and Attack, according to the New York Times, only features about 50 artists, not all of whom are from Asia. Other artists hail from Japan, Italy, France, Israel, Russia and the United States, showing “the international spread of the Animamix language.” The exhibition is on view through January 31.

• Shapes from Maine (2009), a project by Season 5 artist Allan McCollum, is included in the exhibition Vertically Integrated Manufacturing at Murray Guy Gallery in New York. Shapes of Maine is an extension of an earlier Shape project, for which McCollum developed a system to generate over 30 billion unique shapes, at least one for each person on the planet. McCollum worked over the internet with Holly and Larry Little, founders of Aunt Holly’s Copper Cookie Cutters, a home business in Trescott, Maine, to create this installation of over 2,200 one-of-a-kind works. Vertically Integrated Manufacturing brings together works by artists who, like McCollum, respond to changing processes of labor. Continues through February 20.

• Since the 1980s, a number of Art21 artists have been commissioned by The Stuart Collection to create permanent works for the grounds of University of California San Diego. Most recently, Season 2 artist Do-Ho Suh proposed Fallen Star — his first major permanent outdoor installation in the United States — for the Collection. At the center of his proposed piece is a small house which has been picked up by some mysterious force (such as a tornado) and has “landed” seven stories up atop the Jacobs School of Engineering. The house is cantilevered out over the edge of the building and can be entered from the roof, or roof garden (also part of the artist’s design). The actual structure might serves as a student/faculty lounge or meeting room. See images of Fallen Star here.

• Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui: From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, on view at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, reveals concepts and strategies developed by nineteenth-century dandies in the work and attitudes of contemporary artists. The curator considers how iconography and themes of dandyism remain significant. The show takes George Bryan Brummell, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde (with passing references to Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly, the Countess of Castiglione and Joris Karl Huysmans) as its point of departure. Season 5 artists Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, and Yinka Shonibare MBE are included in a roster of more than 40 artists. Sur le dandysme aujourd’hui runs January 15-March 21.

• Hiroshi Sugimoto (Season 3) is featured by Wired Magazine Online for his new series of electricity volt photographs, while his seascape photograph on the cover of U2’s album, No Line on the Horizon, has ranked #48 in Art Vinyl’s annual album cover awards.

Examining the Lives of Jenny Holzer’s Works/Words: A Discussion with SAAM Conservator Hugh Shockey

In 1993 the IMA acquired its first and only work by Jenny Holzer. The IMA’s 1983 piece is Untitled and consists of selections from her “Truisms Series.” It is the first in an edition of four. Cybernetic Data Products fabricated the original, which used an internal computer processor to send signals to the red LED lights to display Truisms in a variety of patterns–they flashed, dashed, blinked, etc.

Today, when you take the escalators to the contemporary galleries on the 3rd floor you will encounter this work installed just above the elevator. But this isn’t really the same sign that Ms. Holzer made in 1983… what’s there now is a little bit different.

2009 Installation of "Untitled" © 1983 Jenny Holzer

By doing some quick research in the IMA’s conservation, curatorial, and registration department’s files I was able to piece together Untitled’s exhibition and conservation history, and even discover its previous owners and pre-IMA exhibition locations. Why did I do this? I wanted to know about its conservation history and I was looking for some guidance on “correct” installation parameters. Truth be told, I was really looking for a note from Ms. Holzer or one of her assistants that stated precisely how the work should and shouldn’t be installed. Does it have to be above a door? Or entryway? Can it be hung like a painting, 62″ on center? How about pushed into a corner?

The variable installation locations of this artwork make it dynamic and somewhat playful in that it can represent an authoritative voice and at the same time question authoritative voices. While of course a certain amount of common sense could be and should used when installing it—after all, it is a sign and it gives information so it seems rather straightforward to install it in a place where we would find a “sign” and also authoritative information. The IMA has only installed the work in one other location. In the image below taken last week you can see a gallery placard (a sign!) just about exactly where Untitled was installed from 1993-2003.

1993 - 2003 Installation location of Jenny Holzer's work, "Untitled"

In addition to looking at the IMA’s files I also searched IDAA (the INCCA Database for Artists’ Archives) which led me to this case study on Inside Installations website about Ms. Holzer’s 1997 installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, Proyecto para Bilbao. While the Guggenheim’s installation is a lot more complex than the IMA’s, there are many similarities related to its preservation and future.

Continue reading »

Weekly Roundup

Bruce Nauman, "One Hundred Live and Die," 1984. Neon tubing mounted on four metal monoliths. Collection of Fukake Publishing Co., Ltd., Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa, Japan Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York, © Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

• Bruce Nauman (Season 1) has won the Golden Lion award for Best National Participation at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Visit the Daily Best Media Gallery to see images of his installation.
• Nauman is the first Art21 artist to appear on the Times list of the top 200 artists from the 20th century through today. He comes in at #24.
• Songs of Ascension, the multimedia work by Season 1 artist Ann Hamilton and composer Meredith Monk, will be included in this year’s Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).
• BAM has also commissioned a new piece by the Dessner Brothers. The musical duo will collaborate with Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie, as well as vocalists from The Breeders for this project.
• Videos by Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe (working in collaboration with Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Liam Gillick and Melik Ohanian) are on view in VRAOUM!, an exhibition of comic strips and contemporary art, at La Maison Rouge in Paris.
• A major mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare MBE (Season 5) will open at the Brooklyn Museum on June 26, 2009.

Weekly Roundup

• Vernissage TV takes a close look at Let the Priests Tremble…(1998/2008), a large hand-printed wall installation by Season 4 artist Nancy Spero. The piece was included in Spero’s retrospective at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Spain.

• 9/11-9/11, an animated film by Season 1 artist Mel Chin, will screen tonight at MOMA (7pm). The piece will be screened twice, and a discussion with the artist and the audience will take place in between. Tickets are available at the Museum.

• On the occasion of the fourth Berlin Gallery Weekend (a program of 38 gallery openings in a 3-day span), c/o–Gerhardsen Gerner gallery will present works by Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie. Read more about the exhibition, titled The Need-Fire, here.

• Ann Hamilton (Season 1) has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. Visit Artforum.com to read the full list of inductees in the visual art category.

• The Guggenheim exhibition catalogue Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe has won the 2008 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in visual arts and architecture. The catalogue accompanied the comprehensive exhibition of work by the Season 3 artist.

• Kara Walker and Raymond Pettibon (both Season 2) appear in the May issue of Black Book magazine.

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.

Matthew Ritchie | Architect Benjamin Aranda

EXCLUSIVE: Architect Benjamin Aranda, of Aranda/Lasch, discusses his contribution to artist Matthew Ritchie’s anti-pavillion project The Morning Line (2008), produced in collaboration with engineer-architect Daniel Bosia & Arup AGU, and physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok.

Comissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville, The Morning Line opens today and will be on view through January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.

Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judaeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.

Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 (2003) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

ART21: What conceptual challenges emerged while working on The Morning Line (2008)?

ARANDA: One of the great meetings we had on this project was with the physicist Paul J. Steinhardt, whose theories on the universe influenced the structure of the project. Steinhardt is the physicist who developed the cyclical model of the universe, which is an alternative theory of how the universe was formed with multiple big bangs.

It was a landmark meeting for us because Steinhardt confirmed a suspicion we all had: that at the root scientific breakthroughs — what underlies them — is an enormous amount of intuition. He said that while science is very empirical, some of the initial breakthroughs are formed through these very intuitive moments that are then substantiated through more empirical calculations and research. Continue reading »

Matthew Ritchie | “The Morning Line”

EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Ritchie discusses his upcoming exhibition The Morning Line (2008) in his New York studio, with animated architectural schematics of the installation. The Morning Line will be on view October 2, 2008 – January 11, 2009 at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain, as part of the 3rd Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Seville.

Matthew Ritchie’s artistic mission has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project (continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems from his imagination, and is cataloged in a conceptual chart replete with allusions drawn from Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles.

Matthew Ritchie is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Structures of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

ART21: What are you aiming for the viewer to experience with your work?

RTICHIE: What I’m aiming for is to describe the whole spectrum of experience, simultaneously. There are an enormous number of things in the world that we know about, and there are an exponentially larger number of things that we don’t know about. And those things that we don’t know about affect the things that we think we know about all the time. So we have our daily experience, and we go through our day and things happen the way that we think they’re supposed to happen (sort of). But when something changes, we automatically accommodate to that change and read it as part of our life. This is the narrative of a person’s life, and one of the ways that we describe what’s going on is we tell stories. We always tell the stories after things have happened, not before. There is no real story of what’s going to happen next. But once something’s happened there’s always a story about how and why and what the reasons were.

In one sense what I’m trying to do is create a manual of all the codes — all the stories that have ever been told — or a way to read all those stories through a lens. What are those stories trying to describe? They’re all trying to describe the same thing, which is how everything works. Why is it, on any given day, one person crosses a street and has a great day, and another person crosses the street and is hit by a car and that’s the end of their life? We’re always trying to make sense of this dramatic shift in, this incredible potential for all of these vast, unknown forces to suddenly reach through — reach out — and touch you and that’s it. It’s always in the air, for all of us. This could be the day you win a million dollars, or the day your life is over.

So in a way these things that I’m making could be thought of as meaning machines that take apart all the stories, lay out all the parts in front of you, and then allow you to choose one little piece of the story. Instead of it being chosen for you by the forces of fate, I lay out the parts and say, “Here, you can actually pick this up and have a look at it.” See what it’s made of? Tap it on the table, bite it a little bit. See what’s going on with this piece of fortune.

A good metaphor is a pack of Tarot cards — in itself it’s not a story, but lay out the cards and it always tells a story. What I’m trying to do is give people a sense of control over the narrative. A story is not any more real or less real than anything else. A story is just something you do with your brain. It’s a function — like walking — you tell stories wherever you go. And stories are all made up of pieces. And you can change the way you understand the story by changing the way you understand the pieces. And if you can do that, in a sense you’ve changed the dynamic of how you relate to reality.

The piece The Morning Line (2008) is like a frozen piece of reality. It’s like in the movies, where everyone’s suddenly turned into a statue and only you can walk around the world. You can look behind the scenes where the puppet master is controlling everything. I’m trying to show you what’s going on, like a magician showing you his trick in slow motion: this is what it looks like when you stop everything and look at the parts you can’t see.

ART21: Where does the title for the piece come from? And what’s its relationship to music?

RTICHIE: The Morning Line takes its title from a British racing paper. It has the lineup of the day — all the horses — and what they’re going to accomplish. But to me it’s also a reference to the beginning of a new day, when everything is a new possibility.

The Morning Line building is really a gigantic musical instrument. It’s programmed with a series of scores that are based on the Medieval idea of polyphony, which is multiple sliding tracks that have a specific relationship to each other, but to the listener, the tracks always seem to be moving past each other. When polyphony was first invented, it was believed to be the Devil’s music because of its possibility for multiple interpretations. Instead of a very rigid set of canonical moves forward, you can actually have lots of different things happening at the same time. It’s about this idea of multiple voices.

Every time you come back to The Morning Line, not only does the piece track you through various technologies and produce sounds that move around you, but it’s constantly reorganizing its own musical mind. It will sing you a different song or tell you a different story every time you go through, which goes back to this idea that there’s always another story, but it’s always the same story.

ART21: The Morning Line is a physical building, and yet it comes out of an interest in drawing, in scale, in fractals. Is there a tension between the flat one-dimensionality of drawing and architecture in three dimensions?

RITCHIE: Initially the project was to take this idea of drawing, which I was experimenting with in smaller architectural pieces, and ask “Can you make a drawing that’s in a space as big as the world? Can you draw in space?” If you’re going to draw in space, your drawing has to be supported by all the rules of reality. For what I wanted to do, it meant designing a structure out of parts and each of the parts replicates itself at smaller and smaller scale. You can take this down and down and down, all the way into the nano spectrum from the size of a cathedral. We don’t need to think about a given building as having a single frame of reference, which is the size of a human being who’s going to go through the door, use the washroom, and sit down at a table and a chair. I want to think about a building that is designed for the universe to occupy it — the same way it occupies everything else — which is to say at every single scale simultaneously.

It’s a kind of trick that people have been trying to do for 3,000 years, though they never succeeded in solving the geometry of making a structure of this kind scale in three dimensions. There are drawings going back to Plato of this kind of geometry working as a model of the universe, but no one could ever make it because they didn’t have computers

The Morning Line is built out of what’s called a truncated tetrahedron, which is a pyramid with the corners chopped off. If you look past the tetrahedron shape and consider just the surface of it — the drawing on the surface — every point in this sculpture attaches to another point. The line becomes an infinitely recursive form moving through space. You can start to draw a trajectory with it. You’re drawing a journey, and a journey is always the thing that I’m most interested in.

We’ve sort of grappled with what to call The Morning Line structure. You could call it a quantum building, because any one of these tetrahedra can support across its surface twenty-two other smaller tetrahedra of the next scale down and so on. It can grow like a crystal, infinitely smaller in any direction. You could also call it a holographic building, because the premise of holographic theory is that the universe is the same at every scale. Just like a hologram — if you break it — it has a million little tiny holograms inside, all the way down.

The idea is that at every level it maintains the same integrity, but it also maintains the property of the drawing, which is that every little point will always connect to every other little point. There’s always a connection. It’s not just about bricks; it’s about lines moving through space and connecting to the next level down. The journey moves through scale. There’s a connection between the speck of dust that gets into the brake line and jams the brakes of the car that doesn’t stop in time to knock someone over in the road. In the end it all comes back down to a speck of dust. Shakespeare’s famous “my kingdom for a horse.”

VIDEO | Producer: Eve Moros Ortega and Nick Ravich. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Judy Karp. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Matthew Ritchie and Aranda/Lasch. Thanks: Benjamin Aranda.

PHOTO | All works: Matthew Ritchie and Aranda/Lasch, studies for the The Morning Line, 2008.

Matthew Ritchie at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Season 3 artist Matthew Ritchie’s The Hierarchy Problem (2003) and The Fine Constant (2003) are on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao as part of Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections, an exhibition curated by Nat Trotman and which just opened a couple of days ago. Together with three more pieces by artists David Altmejd (The University 2, 2004), Rirkrit Tiravanija (Untitled 2002 – he promised-, 2002) and Javier Pérez (Mask of Seduction, 1997), Ritchie’s multipart installation completes the selection of works that look to envelop audiences in the total experiences provided by their installations, which gain their full meaning through interaction and participation. Viewers are encouraged to dive into the pieces and explore architectural constructions and spaces through painting, sound, sculpture and a variety of different media.

In a playful game of space and physics, The Hierarchy Problem and The Fine Constant create relationships between different objects (a mural, a painting, a carpet, a light box and a sculpture), materializing the visual connections that exist in space between these objects and thus turning what we usually cannot see (the space between things in the vastness of the material universe) into a physical reality. The system of symbols used in Ritchie’s murals has a very particular beauty and appeal to the eye. Their black over white curving shapes seem to form almost an alphabet where our gaze is lost when trying to decipher its meaning.

For more information and other related materials on installations visit http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es

The Influencers: Trevor Paglen

From The Influencers festival, our last guest is Trevor Paglen.

In a review in the New York Times, Trevor Paglen was defined as “a geographer by training, a conspiracy theorist by instinct and an investigative reporter by avocation.” His most recent projects are up-close investigations of state secrets, the Californian prison system and practices of “extraordinary rendition” (i.e., the transport of terrorist suspects in post-9/11 US government lingo) used by the CIA in the last few years via secret flights and ghost airline companies. His work blurs the boundary between social science and contemporary art by aiming to create unexpected–and meticulously documented–ways of visualizing the anomalous practices of the authorities as well as weird military subcultures.