Curators' Notebook
Curator's Notebook is a ongoing collection of links, events, artists, and cultural refuse the SculptureCenter staff has recently found of interest.
Jul 16, 2010
Charlotte Posenenske
Exhibition view: Pergola: Retrospective. Palais de Tokyo, Paris. February 19 - May 16, 2010
Charlotte Posenenske
Artists Space
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor, New York
Following upon the long overdue and indelible exhibition of Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Enough Tiranny Recalled, that began Stefan Kalmár's tenure as Director at Artists Space this past Fall, Charlotte Posenenske brings another remarkable European artist to the attention of New York audiences. Marking the first one person institutional exhibition of her work in the US, the installation of Charlotte Posenenske's (1930-1985) Square Tubes Series D, 1967, has been re-interpreted into different iterations by guest artists Ei Arakawa and Rikrit Tiravanija. - FM
Jul 2, 2010
The Mass Ornament
The Mass Ornament installation view, 2010.
Image via Gladstone Gallery
The Mass Ornament
Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street, New York
John Rasmussen, Executive Director and Curator of Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, has been running one of the best non-profit exhibition spaces going since 2001, and now he's put together a show that elegantly crosses mediums to flirt with themes drawn from the writings of German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer. Taking its title from an indelible collection of Kracauer's essays, The Mass Ornament appears effortlessly installed and includes highlights from Patricia Esquivias, Matias Faldbakken, Jay Heikes, Patrick Hill, Lisa Lapinski, Michaela Meise, Gedi Sibony, and Alina Szapocznikow. - FM
Jun 18, 2010
Paul Ramirez Jonas: Key to the City
Bestowal ceremony via Creative Time
Paul Ramirez Jonas: Key to the City
Times Square, on Broadway, between 43rd and 44th Streets
This public art project invites you to explore the city on a micro-level. Pick up your key (in a bestowal ceremony) in Times Square and use it to gain access to everything from a bedroom closet in Gracie Mansion or early admission to the Met to the kitchen of a tortilleria in Corona where you can learn to make tortillas. While reminiscent of a childhood scavenger hunt, and just as much fun, the work operates on the borders between public and private spaces and considers the degrees to which parts and aspects of the city are accessible and to whom. - MC
Jun 4, 2010
A Relative Expanse
Margarete Jakschik, Untitled, 2008.
A Relative Expanse
Renwick Gallery
45 Renwick Street, New York, NY 10013
A Relative Expanse currently on view at Renwick Gallery continues a run of dynamic, thoughtful group shows organized by Maxwell Graham. Following last month's The Same Sight Slighter, which included memorable works by Bianca Beck, Heather Guertin, Charlotte Posenenske, and B.Wurtz, among others, this month's show features a discrete and finely balanced consideration of how certain artworks can condense, imbue, and even collapse our perception of space and volume.
- FM
May 6, 2010
Xavier Le Roy
Xavier Le Roy in 'Self-Unfinished' Photograph: Katrin Schoof
Image via www.guardian.co.uk
Lecture by Xavier Le Roy
7.30pm, Friday 7 May 2010
Martin Segal Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, NY NY 10016
Admission FREE - first come first served
The Right of Spring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZUxQJ5NDIk
Self Unfinished: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3rv1TeVEPM
Xavier Le Roy was originally trained as a biochemist and then became a dancer. But he has made his mark on the world as a choreographer. Le Roy is often called a "conceptual choreographer" but what some might consider a brainy approach to dance is focused on the body, a heightening of the awareness of all of the senses, and the staging of the relationships between what is heard, seen, gesticulated or projected in the experience of performance.
- MC
Apr 7, 2010
Operators' Exercises: Open Form Film and Architecture
Zofia Kulik, Przemyslaw Kwiek, Jan S. Wojciechowski, Pawel Kwiek, Open Form, 1971.
Operators' Exercises: Open Form Film and Architecture
Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University - Main Campus
1214 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
If you're interested in knowing about the avant-garde cultural background that informs much contemporary Polish art, don't miss Operators' Exercises: Open Form Film and Architecture, on view through May 7th. Curated by Łukasz Ronduda and Mark Wasiuta with curatorial assistant Natalia Sielewicz, the exhibition approaches the status of a facsimile as it uses a bank of flatscreens, slide shows, and sleek vitrine displays to pack in an incredible amount of dynamic material into one small gallery. Focused on Polish architect Oskar Hansen's practice and theory of "Open Form" and the student-led experiments in art, film, performance, and architecture that his teaching inspired in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is an ambitious yet agile exhibition filled with ideas and energy.
- FM
Apr 2, 2010
Ursula von Rydingsvard and David Smith
Ursula von Rydingsvard, Droga, 2009. David Smith, Installation view, 2010
Images via www.galerielelong.com and www.gagosian.com
Ursula von Rydingsvard: Erratus
March 18 - May 1, 2010
Galerie Lelong
David Smith
February 26 - April 10, 2010
Gagosian Gallery
On the Chelsea front, I recommend Ursula von Rydingsvard: Erratus at Galerie Lelong. Suggesting geologic, domestic, and organic forms, these works are monumental but far from static. They are simultaneously formidable and vulnerable. Nota bene: Von Rydingsvard will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the SculptureCenter opening in January, 2011.
Also, be sure to see David Smith at Gagosian Gallery. The five works on view are all from the early sixties and suggest connections between architecture, landscape and human form. This small but focused show not only reminds us why Smith is so influential but also how a few well chosen works can make a very engaging and complex show.
-MC
Mar 26, 2010
John Bock and Charlene von Heyl
John Bock, Untitled (dance lecture), 2010 - performance detail. Charlene von Heyl, Woman #2, 2009
Images via www.antonkerngallery.com and www.petzel.com
John Bock
Feb 27 - Apr 3, 2010
Anton Kern Gallery
Charlene von Heyl
March 18 - May 1, 2010
Friedrich Petzel
When next in Chelsea, check out two significant solo shows currently on view. Following a memorable opening night live performance, Untitled (dance lecture), John Bock's most recent solo exhibition at Anton Kern features hard and soft, noisome and mesmerizing, debased and charmed. It closes April 3rd. Charlene von Heyl unveils a new painting series at Friedrich Petzel (through May 1st) that intensifies, ruptures, and ultimately extends the dialogue with her recent works on paper, including her unforgettable 2008 book project Sabotage. A side-note of interest is von Heyl's isolation of a salient fragment of text by George Didi-Huberman in the description of her show, a noteworthy acknowledgement of one of our most important critical voices.
- FM
Mar 4, 2010
Amazement Park: Stan, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek
Johannes VanDerBeek, Documentation of Body/Building, 2007. Sanded magazine pages.
Image via http://tang.skidmore.edu/
Amazement Park: Stan, Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek
June 6, 2009 - April 25, 2010
The Tang Museum at Skidmore College - Saratoga Springs, NY
Amazement Park is a yearlong exhibition that combines work by the influential filmmaker and artist Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) with work by his daughter Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976) and son Johannes VanDerBeek (b. 1982). This long overdue institutional exploration of Stan VanDerBeek's work builds upon and extends an impressive exhibition of Stan VanDerBeek's films, collages, and installation works, that was organized by Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek at Guild & Greyshkul just prior to the artist-run gallery closing its doors in December 2008. Organized by the Tang's Curator Ian Berry, the exhibition takes its inspiration from a recombinant exhibition space envisioned by Stan VanDerBeek wherein an exhibition might be collaboratively remade and revised. In this case, the exhibition has shifted every month to include selections from each artist's work, including newly commissioned works by both Sara and Johannes VanDerBeek, formidable artists in their own right. Innovative in spirit, the exhibition is a highly successful example in experimental exhibition making. Amazement Park is on view until the end of April, and well worth the scenic drive up I-87.
- FM
Feb 23, 2010
9 Screens at MoMA
Alejandro Cesarco, Turning Some Pages, 2010. Digital video (color, silent, 13 min.)
Image via www.moma.org
9 Screens
February 3 - May 18, 2010
The Museum of Modern Art
If you normally skip the lines at MoMA and head straight for the members' desk to pick up your admissions tickets, you run the risk of missing one of MoMA's most experimental exhibitions in recent memory. MoMA invited artist Nicolas Guagnini to critique the workings of MoMA from an artist's perspective. the result is a series of 5 videos shown on the screens behind the ticket counter in the lobby. The New York-based artists and collectives in the exhibition are Fia Backström, Alejandro Cesarco, Bernadette Corporation, John Pilson, and Union Gaucha Productions (which Guagnini cofounded). Each video is screened continuously for three weeks and because the work is in the lobby, you need not buy an entrance ticket to see them!
-MC