SanArt

Until April 3, 2010, Mike Weiss Gallery in New York presents Remote Control, a multimedia installation including sculpture, photography and drawing by artist Sofi Zezmer. It’s the artist’s third solo exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery. Work her work, she uses fragments of manmade, mostly synthetic materials.

Sofi Zezmer constructs her works by a gradual additive process dependent on intuitive responses to the materials and objects she uses forming color-saturated assemblages. Among the elements she incorporates are objects such as drinking straws, IV drip tubing, construction netting, film, foil, packing materials, bicycle helmets, cable ties and funnels. “In fusing the elements and breaking them down, Zezmer disrupts the common meaning assigned to the items and calls into question our own familiarity with them. Zezmer’s sculptures suggest irrational Duchampian hybrids of mechanical and biological systems. They are embodiments of the complexity of life in the modern age, ruminations on the omnipresence of mass-production, space travel and biotechnology.” (Excerpt from the press release).

Sofi Zezmer lives and works in Germany. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international gallery and museum exhibitions, such as her solo exhibitions at Museum Wiesbaden, at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan and her forty two foot long hanging sculpture, Es Darf Kein Mangel Herrschen, commissioned by the NASPA Bank, Wiesbaden, Germany.

Sofi Zezmer: Remote Control / Mike Weiss Gallery, New York. Opening reception, February 27, 2010.

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Anish Kapoor
Tall Tree & the Eye, 2009
Stainless steel and carbon steel
14 x 6 m
Courtesy the artist
Installation: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2010
Photo: Erika Ede © FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, 2010

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
16 March – 12 October 2010

This is the first large-scale solo exhibition in Spain dedicated to the work of Anish Kapoor, one of the most critically-acclaimed and influential artists of his generation.

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For the past couple decades ever more museums have invited artists into their store rooms to curate exhibitions: in an early example, the RISD Museum invited Andy Warhol; MoMA asked Chuck Close and Scott Burden; and Fred Wilson has made a career of the practice.  The results have almost always been interesting.  Artists, of course, have their own questions of and approaches to objects and collections and it’s always enlightening to see familiar things in unexpected ways.

The Penn Museum’s  recent  invitation to Pablo Helguera (as part of Philagrafika ) was well-rewarded.  Helguera spent time in the museum’s archives and discovered that museum director Froelich Rainey had made use of the quite new medium of television to bring the collections to public attention in the1950s. He hosted What in the World? in which a group of scholars and occasional celebrities were shown a museum object which they tried to identify; it was the first ever educational tv program.  Helguera’s response took three forms: a recreation of the tv show’s format for a live event on Feb. 28th (above), a small gallery installation on view through April 11, 2010 and a book of stories about objects in the collection and the people behind them.

The What in the World? re-creation on Feb.  28th was hosted by current director, Richard Hodges with Helguera, artist Mark Dion and PMA curator, Joe Rischel as contestants.  The objects they were given to identify were hardly from the museum’s best-known collections and a number of them were obscure indeed: Ainu prayer sticks, fetishes from Eastern Siberia, an apron from British Guiana.  The participants were good sports and Dion’s habit of talking through his examination process (this is heavy, which means the wood isn’t completely dry so it’s probably 20th century) was particularly edifying for the audience.

Mark Dion, Joe Rischel and Pablo Helguera attempt to identify a Siberian hat

The gallery and book reveal Helguera’s interest in the history of the museum’s artifacts in the course of excavation and once they left their originating culture (or burial site) and came to the museum; some of them passed through the market first.  While hardly a typical approach of archaeology and anthropology museums the Penn Museum looks at similar issues in its current exhibition about the excavations it sponsored at Ur (which I wrote about here).

The book, What in the World; A Museum’s Subjective Biography (which is available for purchase at the museum, ISBN -10:1-934978-28-0) is filled with stories about some of the obsessives, eccentrics and rogues responsible for five areas of the collection, and the gallery covers the same material with five objects on display, each with an associated video. The installation suffered somewhat from the fact that watching an 8-11 minute video projected on the wall above the objects case is awkward (all are available on Youtube, as are clips from the original television program ), but the videos themselves are great fun.  Helguera has faithfully re-created the style of the original What in the World? complete with dry ice mist and haunting background music; and he has unearthed wonderful stories that include deception, theft, fakes and madness, which make for entertaining viewing and reading. Richard Hodges said he checked with Penn’s lawyer before allowing Helguera to publish the material, and I’m not certain whether he was joking.

There’s been a proliferation of recent interest in the role of the curator, accompanied by criticism that Harald Szeemann set a harmful example in the late 1960s by using the curatorial function as an art form itself.  In that light it’s ironic that Helguera, working as an artist, took no more liberty with standard curatorial approaches than Fro Rainey had done sixty years earlier.

First Annual Print Invitational at Little Berlin

Stella Ebner, Car Lot on HWY 101, Screenprint

This first print invitational was organized by Tim Pannell, the only printmaker in the artists’ collective, Little Berlin,  and I had a chance to talk with him at the opening.  If many of the invited artists’ bios included R.I.S.D. it’s not a coincidence; that’s where Pannell studied. The twelve artists from across the country covered a broad range of what print-makers are doing these days from traditional uses of sreen printing and intaglio processes to mixed media and photographically-generated work.  Both the work and the event were somewhat more sedate than the always lively, sometimes noisy openings at the gallery.  I don’t mean anything negative by sedate; it’s just that most of the work was framed and sat quietly on the walls and none of it was edible.

I like prints, but I’m always asking why an artist did a work in multiples. Is the subject something that many people will want? Is there an audience that can’t afford the artist’s paintings (Durer sold engravings of commonly desirable subjects, such as madonnas, to finance his travels)?  Is the image an effect that can only be done in drypoint, silkscreen, or whatever; or is the subject somehow connected with the medium and/or the multiplicity (one might say that Warhol’s off-register silkscreen was integral both to the visual effect and the subject)?

Vicky Chen’s series on the Port of Oakland employed the unusual technique of silkscreen on translucent gampi paper glued to wood, so the underlying wood grain becomes part of the image. Ports these days are filled with standardized shipping containers, and printmaking seemed an apt way to depict their global uniformity. Chen’s means were not easy to understand at first glance, but the results are subtle and something about her delicacy of line and use of space reminds me of Ben Shahn’s work.

Stella Ebner filled an entire wall with a grid of screen prints of a car lot along a highway strip.  The only variation was the writing on the signage, an apt commentary on our culture of endless, interchangeable commercial appeals.  Amelia Hankin used woodcut to create multi-color prints (variations of grey) of extreme subtlety.  They gave the impression of landscapes, despite the fact that none of the forms was identifiable.  She studied in Japan, and the sensibility comes through.

Serena Perrone exhibited a large, two-sheet mixed-media work that contrasted the boldness of a woodcut ship at sea with the delicacy of gold ink she used to draw in two female figures. Pannell’s own work was an homage to nineteenth-century wood engraving (cut on the end-grain of very hard wood, which enabled very fine lines).  He gives historic tours of Philadelphia and, inspired by some of the mis-information he hears, produced the first in a planned series of fallacious histories: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln seated together, with the Statue of Liberty just visible through the window.

The print invitational, on view through March 27, also includes work by Kabuya P. Bowens, Kate Copeland, Juan Garcia, Morgan Hill, Fleming Jeffries, Alice Thompson and Tanya Ziniewic; it is also associated with Philagrafika.

Dead Flowers at Vox Populi

Work by Marti Domination

Dead Flowers, on view at Vox Populi through May 2 was curated by Lia Gangitano of PARTICIPANT INC, New York, where it will be exhibited May 9 – June 20, 2010.  Inspired by the work of actor/director Timothy Carey, Gangitano assembled a variety of work by contemporary artists and those of the 60s-70s to explore the idea of the artistic underground and the shifting boundaries between underground and mass culture.  The exhibition includes a recent documentary interview with Carey’s brother recounting how the actor made trouble for the nuns at grade school, among other stories.

Genesis Bryer P-Orridge ‘Red Chair Posed’ 2008 C-print

Gangitano’s underground is largely associated with the more flamboyant aspects of gay culture, so the exhibition is filled with false eye-lashes, heavy eye-liner and very high heels.  While all of this was certainly underground in the 60s, who could have anticipated a broadcast television program called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, much less same-sex marriage?  Alvin Baltrop’s black and white Pier Photographs (1975-86) portray an insider’s view of  gay coupling conducted out-of-doors in a then unfrequented area of New York.  It’s hard to know what Baltrop’s intentions were, but the series records changing real estate as well as sexual values, as the far West Side has entirely succumbed to gentrification.

Charles Atlas, still from video

I’m not sure how Cynthia ‘Plaster Caster’s work fits in either with art or with the underground.  Word circulated in the late 60s that a couple of rock groupies managed to get into the (mainstream) stars’ dressing-rooms with the intent of making plaster casts of their erect penises (and providing the necessary stimulation).  The story was too outlandish to be made up, and now at Vox you can see the results yourself; although who but Cynthia can vouchsafe whether that is, indeed, a cast of Jimi Hendrix?  As I told Andrew Suggs at the opening, penises without men attached hold little interest for me, but chacun à son goût.  As to changing bounderies of the underground, not so long ago I saw photos of a middle-aged Cynthia in her kitchen (with casts) in the pages of some forgettable mainstream magazine.

Pat O’Neill at Screening

Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries (2008, film transferred to video) is showing through May 2 at Screening, in Vox’s Space, and I found all 23 minutes mezmerizing.  His collaged images move in changing rhythms that at times resemble a heartbeat, at others a racing train, with elleptical snippets of dialog that echo Beckett. O’neill has worked with the most mainstream of Hollywood filmmakers, but this is rigorous, exciting experimental film by a seventy-year-old who can still out-run his juniors.

Olga Chernysheva
Second Life
Series of light boxes
100×150 cm
2001, courtesy of the artist

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
18 – 19 March 2010

In the frame of the Former West project, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will hold a two-day seminar focusing on art in the former Soviet Union and its immediate zone of influence after the transition of 1991.

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Hi,

This Tuesday is another event in a year-long series of weekly conversations and exhibits in 2010 shedding light on examples of Plausible Artworlds.

We’ll be talking with the instigators of the Hong Kong-based Community Museum Project (CMP).

The CMP was founded in 2002 by Howard Chan (cultural programs curator), Siu King-chung (design educator), Tse Pak-chai and Phoebe Wong (cultural researchers) — basically a group of disaffected curators who believed that another museum is possible and, pointing at the streets, shops and housing of Kowloon, that it was this one. The Community Museum Project thus focuses not on establishing conventional “museum” hardware and elitist collections, but carrying out flexible exhibition and public programs, within specific community settings and driven by timely issues. Through this process the Community Museum Project aims to nurture platforms that articulate personal experiences and under-represented histories. For though Hong Kong is highly multicultural, it is not transcultural: CMP seeks to foreground overlooked forms of everyday, non-professional creativity and to reevaluate the cognitive contributions of the city’s marginalized populations, by creating platforms that can also be occasions which facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations and neighborhood participation. To CMP, the word “Community” has three connotations: subject matter, settings and creative public interface. It is the site of their reframed museum — a plausible artworld.

CMP website:
http://hkcmp.org

See you all Then!

Join us every Tuesday night – in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck chat in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
Basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa

Follow Plausible Artworlds:
http://twitter.com/basekamp
http://basekamp.com/info

Join this week’s Skype chat:
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Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" from the series "Immediate Family", 1989. © Sally Mann. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

In today’s roundup you’ll read about three kids in Switzerland, political defiance, Latin American photography, a map upstate, Opera House sails, the nature of light, and airborne balls:

• The Family, The Land is the first museum exhibition in Switzerland devoted to the work of Season 1 artist Sally Mann. The controversial photographs of her three children, published in the 1992 book Immediate Family, will be on view along with recent works, some of which picture her children in adulthood. The artist, according to the museum, “questions memory and the ephemerality of life,” or as Mann has stated, “what remains.” The Family, The Land is on view at Musee de L’Elysee through June 6.

• On March 11, a conversation between Julie Mehretu (Season 5) and Pat Steir (moderated by Susan Harris) will take place at the RISD Museum. Both artists will discuss the central role of drawing in their work, with a focus on issues specific to women artists of their respective generations. The event (free and open to the public) is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Pat Steir: Drawing Out of Line, on view February 16 through July 3.

• Art21 artists Barbara Kruger (Season 1), Laurie Simmons (Season 4), Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons (both Season 5) are included in Your History is Not Our History — a group exhibition organized by artists David Salle and Richard Phillips for Haunch of Venison. The show features works produced in the 1980s by artists working in New York City. Phillips says, “We reject the sterilized view that is offered…and hope to offer a more accurate portrayal of the energy and experimentation that was permeating the city during that time.” According to Haunch of Venison, “Salle and Phillips believe that the best work of the 1980s shares a belief in the necessity to take forms, ideas, and content to their extremes.” The exhibition continues through May 1.

• Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line at Malmö Konsthall in Sweden brings together work by artists John Baldessari (Season 5), Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Thomas Kratz, Falke Pisano, and Ryan Siegan-Smith. The title is borrowed from a 1973 work by Baldessari in which the artist repeatedly documents his attempt to toss — with geometrical precision — three balls in the air. This piece has guided the entire exhibition, which explores an artist’s own self-awareness in the conceptual and pictorial dimensions of their work. Throwing Three Balls is on view through April 11.

• Works by Gabriel Orozco (Season 2) and Alfredo Jaar (Season 4) are on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in the exhibition Changing the Focus: Latin American Photography (1990-2005). Comprising over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean), Changing the Focus explores personally-charged response to local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. The exhibition, which continues through through May 2, is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art generated between 1990 and 2005 to be presented in the Los Angeles area. Read the LA Times review.

• Living Under The Same Roof, an experimental exhibition at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), is organized by Curator-in-Residence, Ana Paula Cohen. Over the course of the exhibition, the CCS museum will in effect become a laboratory activated by the audience. Visitors are presented with a map of the entire Marieluise Hessel Collection — some 2,000 objects — developed in collaboration with Paris-based Brazilian artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. The public is invited to select works from storage to be seen in a viewing room in the museum space. The works will then be displayed in a rotating system according to weekly requests. A series of related artist talks have been organized in collaboration with Bard College undergraduate studio arts professor and Art21 artist Judy Pfaff (Season 4). Speakers include Pfaff, Nicole Eisenman, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Martha Rosler, and Stephen Shore. View the complete schedule here.

• Works by Bruce Nauman (Season 1), Kara Walker (Season 2), and Paul McCarthy (Season 5) are included in the group exhibition Abstract Resistance, on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis through May 23. The show focuses on artists working from the 1950s to the present who have revolted against the aesthetic orthodoxies of their times. Starting with Michel Foucault’s assertion that “where there is power, there is resistance,” curator Yasmil Raymond argues that art made since World War II has been shaped by traumatic historical events in complex ways. Such art, she says, is “resistant to interpretation; it withholds information, it tends to evade identification, and certainly it protests interrogation.” Abstract Resistance proposes a new framework for art that is “aesthetically inventive, ethically engaged, and politically defiant.” In conjunction with the exhibition, the Walker will publish a collection of essays that will be available online in April.

• A new publication dedicated to the work of Season 3 artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has been released. Nature of Light focuses on Sugimoto’s recent investigations into the science and presentation of photography. Published to coincide with his upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, it also offers detailed documentation of the artist’s architectural and landscape redesign of that space. For more information, visit the RAM Publication website.

• Laurie Anderson (Season 1) and her husband Lou Reed (of Velvet Underground) will co-curate this year’s Vivid Sydney in Australia. Previously called Luminous, the live performance festival is partly inspired by the illumination of the Sydney Opera House sails. This year’s festival (only the second in its history) includes large scale light installations and projections; music performances and collaborations; creative ideas, discussion and debate. Reed said: “We see Vivid as being a critical, high-value anchor event in Sydney’s calendar for years to come. Something that has been built and is owned by Sydney, [it] can’t be bid away and will drive those visitors and those dollars and that image of Sydney around the world for many years.” Vivid runs from May 27 to June 21.

• John Yau has written about the work of Robert Ryman (Season 4) for the Brooklyn Rail. Ryman’s exhibition Large-small, thick-thin, light reflecting, light absorbing is on view at Pace Wildenstein through March 27.

Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th Street, 212 242 2772

Chelsea

February 18 – March 27, 2010
Web Site

Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by William Bailey, including recent still-life and figure paintings as well as a selection of works on paper. This will be the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery.

Bailey is known particularly for his still-life paintings. Although unlike other still-life painters, Bailey composes his paintings on the canvas from his imagination, adjusting the light source and relative scale of each object as he paints.

Also included in this exhibition are six figure paintings (four on canvas, two on paper). Like the objects in the still-lifes, the figures are painted from Bailey’s imagination and have a strange, dreamlike presence. Unlike the major works in this exhibition, Bailey’s drawings of the figure begin from direct observation.

William Bailey’s work can be seen in a host of public and private collections, most notably the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Bailey is the subject of two monographs, one by Mark Strand and the other by John Hollander and Guiliano Briganti.

William Bailey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa. After serving in the United States Army during the Korean War, he studied under Josef Albers at Yale where he received both his B.F.A. and M.F.A degrees. He has been exhibiting in New York since the late 1960’s. He lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut and Umbria, Italy.

An essay by Alexi Worth will accompany the exhibition.

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EXCLUSIVE: From her home in New Haven, Connecticut, Jessica Stockholder discusses the strength of form and the difficulty in articulating the meaning behind abstract shapes.

A pioneer of multimedia genre-bending installations, Jessica Stockholder’s site-specific interventions and autonomous floor and wall pieces have been described as “paintings in space.” Her work is energetic, cacophonous, and idiosyncratic, but closer observation reveals formal decisions about color and composition, and a tempering of chaos with control.

Work by Jessica Stockholder is included in the exhibition Embrace! at the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition includes site-specific installtions by 17 artists, spread throughout the museum’s Frederic C. Hamilton Building. Stockholder’s installation, titled Wide Eyes Smeared Here Dear, spans several levels of the Daniel Libeskind-designed building. Embrace! is currently on view at the Denver Art Museum through April 4, 2010.

Jessica Stockholder is featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode Play of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch the full episode online at PBS Video

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller and Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Mead Hunt. Sound: Merce Williams. Editor: Jenny Chiurco and Mary Ann Toman. Artwork Courtesy: Jessica Stockholder.

Santiago Forero, The Riot, 2009
from the series Action Heroes, digital print

Two films about Palestine by noted artist Suha Shoman deal with critical issues concerning the Israeli occupation of her homeland.

Charif Benhelima’s photographic project, Welcome to Belgium, illuminates the plight of Arab immigrants in Europe. An essay by noted Belgium painter, Luc Tuymans, describes Charif’s project as “a testimony, beginning at the beginning and covering a research period lasting nine years.”

Santiago Forero presents a singularly perceptive perspective on life in the United States through his cryptic photographs. Santiago is a graduate student from Colombia attending the University of Texas.

Saluto Romano by Czech artist Martin Zet is a series of photographs portraying himself as an object within various environments. This is his ongoing attempt to find freedom and his true identity in a post-communist world.

Houston artist Ed Wilson’s steel sculptures are based on photographs that he took of concentration camps in Germany. They convey moral outrage at the same time as they represent his powerful sculptural identity. His photographs will be exhibited along with his sculptures.

Station Museum is also presenting a group of mystical paintings by Elliot Wolfson who, in addition to being an artist, is one of the world’s most important authorities on the Kabbalah, understood as esoteric teachings concerning about mysticism and nature of the universe.

These exhibitions will be on view:
March 13, 2010 – May 30, 2010

Station Museum is located in Midtown on the corner of Alabama and La Branch.
The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Admission is free.
For more information or to schedule a tour, please call or visit our website. www.stationmuseum.com

Things are getting lively at the Penn Museum.  I’ve just heard the museum is inviting the public (18 and older – not sure who they’re protecting – this morning’s BBC World Service carried a story about a company that’s marketing extra-small condoms for young users) to join in a discussion of what an exhibition on human sexuality might encompass; that sounds too interesting for artists and museum studies students to pass up! What about Sex(uality)? will be held at the museum on Tuesday, March 23 from 4:30 to 6:00 pm.  Several distinguished experts will discuss four objects from the collection, including an Indian linga and Ancient Egyptian papyrus containing a story of a sexual encounter between two gods, which includes imagery of gender mutability. Participants will be allowed to examine the objects then formulate their own questions about them. Pre-registration is required.  Check it out here.

Lakota pipe bag with image of double woman Penn Museum