Curators' Notebook
Curator's Notebook is a ongoing collection of links, events, artists, and cultural refuse the SculptureCenter staff has recently found of interest.
Aug 27, 2010
Gwangju Biennial
Clockwise from top left: Lee Friedlander, Florida, 1963. Danh Vo, Untitled, 2010. Dieter Roth, Solo Scenes, 1997-1998. Tuol Sleng Prison Photographs, Unidentified Prisoners, S-21 Prison, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 1975-79. © Doug Niven/© Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Cambodia. Courtesy Doug Niven. João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Eye Model, 2006. Kerstin Brätsch, "Untitled" from Psychic Series, 2007. Henrik Olesen, Some gay-lesbian artists and/or artists relevant to homo-social culture I - VII, 2007. Gustav Metzger, Historic Photographs: No. 1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19-28 1943, 1995/2009.
Gwangju Biennial - Gwangju, Korea
September 3 - November 7, 2010
http://www.10000lives.org/
The Gwangju Biennial is one of the largest biennials in the world and has had some pretty amazing Artistic Directors over the years--from Harald Szeeman to Okwui Enwezor's dynamic entry in 2008, Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions. This year Massimiliano Gioni (from the New Museum and Trussardi Foundation) opens 10,000 Lives: The Eighth Gwangju Biennial this September in Gwangju, Korea. Taking its title from a 30-volume epic poem by Korean author Ko Un--who was imprisoned for two years for his involvement in the 1980 South Korean Democracy Movement--the project is structured as a series of portraits that explore the passion for images and image-making and the desire to create substitutes, effigies, and stand-ins for our affections. It promises to be one of the most ambitious exhibitions of the past few years with works by 134 artists--made between 1901 and 2010--and though difficult to travel to, appears ready to push the dialog about how large-scale biennial exhibitions of contemporary art can be approached. -FM
Aug 13, 2010
The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today
Clockwise from top left: Sibylle Bergemann, The Monument, East Berlin, 1986. Bruce Nauman, Waxing Hot 1966-67/1970. Rachel Harrison, Voyage of the Beagle, 2007. Fischli and Weiss, Equilibres / Quiet Afternoon, 1984. Horst P. Horst, Costume for Salvador Dalí's Dream of Venus, 1939.
The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today
Museum of Modern Art
August 1 - November 1, 2010
The images speak for themselves in the Museum of Modern Art's The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (through November 1). A compelling show, it takes up the influence and transposition between mediums and manages to be entertaining and insightful. While its thematic frames are often too broad, it stands as the starting point for a highly relevant conversation. -FM
Aug 6, 2010
Summer Reading
From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual
By David Levi Strauss
David Levi Strauss' newest book, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual, is a must read for those who enjoy criticism that is grounded in attentive engagement with specific works of art. In this collection of essays, Levi-Strauss considers the creative act as one that requires and engages intelligence, passion, patience and an openness to the world. He writes with knowledge and clarity about a range of work -- from the sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard and Joseph Beuys and the paintings of Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, to the writing of John Berger and Leo Steinberg. Levi Strauss is best known for his perceptive writing on photography and the relation between art and politics. Here, he focuses on the relationship between idea, material and labor, providing an example of how we might think about art and how that might shape the way we think about life and our presence in the world. - MC
Jul 30, 2010
Nashashibi/Skaer
Top: Still from Our Magnolia, 2009.
Bottom: The Good Ship Blank and Ballast (after Brancusi), 2010. Installation view, Intensif-Station, K21 Dusseldorf
Nashashibi/Skaer
Murray Guy
453 West 17th Street, New York
The 16mm film Our Magnolia, 2009, currently on view at Murray Guy Gallery responds to Paul Nash's 1944 painting Flight of the Magnolia, intercutting a series of iconographic leaps -from the visage of Margaret Thatcher and footage of the looting of Iraq's National Museum at the onset of the Iraq War, through to the relic of a whale carcass, and magnolia trees in bloom ? to reanimate the associative potential of an image. Made by Nashashibi/Skaer (a collaboration between artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer), the show also includes their two-channel film installation Pygmalion Event (2008).
Lucy Skaer also has a remarkable new project up at K21 in Dusseldorf, The Good Ship Blank and Ballast (after Brancusi), 2010, that includes an image made from a woodcut carved into the floor of the exhibition space. Installation shots of the project can be found at her gallery website. - FM
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