Prow

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PROW

ART IN GENERAL
79 Walker Street
January 22–March 20

PROW, Pyre (detail), 2010, aluminum, polyester, theatrical lighting, industrial fans, electric equipment, cello, violin, various technical parts, dimensions variable.

How might artists position themselves between entertainment culture and traditional techniques of representation such as drawing? How might those different possibilities map onto the display practices of commercial gallery venues or nonprofit art spaces? Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen, collaborating under the name PROW, challenge conditions of spectacularization that entangle artistic practices, paradoxically by adopting elements of the most successful model of collective media production: cinema.

In “PROW: The Prequel,” the foyer of Sara Meltzer Gallery contains a series of light boxes displaying posters for sequels to nonexistent movies such as a slasher pic titled Pet II and the disaster flick Iceberg III (mischievously tagged MATTER HAS A MIND . . . ONCE MORE). Lining the main gallery’s walls are six watercolors appropriated from Google’s open-source 3-D modeling software. The drawings, each hand-rendered by one of the two artists, adopt an eclectic range of imagery conjured by wiki-culture’s anonymous users: a floating baby, a stunt actor hoisted aloft in a green-screen environment, a staged plane crash. The exhibition’s central kinetic sculpture, Pyre, 2010, is an agglomeration of B-movie gimmicks: As the lights dim, a dramatic chord is struck by a mechanized cello and violin, activating a phalanx of industrial fans that raise a curtain of theatrically lit fabric into a simulacral fire.

Replacing the gadgetry of Pyre, the central sculpture in the “Anti-Prow” exhibition at the nonprofit Art in General is a Tatlin-like monument consisting of an interlocking group of red ladders surrounded by walls papered with historic political and artistic manifestos. On each wall is a framed graphite drawing of an iconic public death scene (split along its vertical axis, with one side rendered by Rostovsky and the other by Westphalen): the bodies, lying in state, of Lenin and Mao, the corpses of Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara surrounded by police, and the victims of the Jonestown massacre. Like its Chelsea counterpart, “Anti-Prow” addresses a set of questions about the value of artistic labor—this time by taking up the legacy of political activism, and representations of politics, in the visual arts.

“Prow: The Prequel” is on view at Sara Meltzer Gallery, 525–531 West Twenty-sixth Street, until February 27.

— Eva Díaz

Prow

The Making of Images: musée du quai Branly

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Musée du quai Branly Proposes the Discovery of an 'Image Factory'

Installation view of the exhibition. ©Musée du quai Branly. Photo: Antoine Schneck.

PARIS.- After Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? and Planète métisse, the 3rd major anthropology exhibition of the musée du quai Branly proposes the discovery of an 'image factory' spanning 5 continents to the public. With 160 works and objects on display, the exhibition solicits a decryption of the great artistic and material productions of Humanity in order to reveal all the things that one does not see outright in an image. This comprehension of images is based on 4 major iconological models created by Man, which go beyond any geographical or chronological classification, whether in Africa, in the 15th to 16th century Europe, in the Americas of the Indians from Amazonia or of the Inuits of Alaska, right up to the Australia of the Aboriginals. The exhibition unravels these 4 models – translating 4 major world views – which are totemism, naturalism, animism and analogism. With the image Factory, the visitor discovers the different principles of decryption according to which civilizations see the world and account for the world. The itinerary of the image factory solicits the visitor to go through 4 sections corresponding to 4 major systems of world views known as “ontologies”: the part “an animated world” is devoted to animism, “an objective world” to naturalism, “a sub-divided world” to totemism and “an entangled world” to analogism. A 5th section, for comparative purposes, makes it possible to understand, with a few examples of “deceptive cognates”, that formal procedures or iconographic devices very close in appearance actually meet completely different figurative intentions. The exhibition the image factory helps the public understand and decrypt these 4 major systems of world views created by Man. An animated world: animism masque "Atujuwa" femelle  © musée du quai Branly photo Thierry Ollivier,  Michel Urtado The 1st section of the exhibition deals with animism, i.e., the generalization to non-humans of a human type interiority. All entities – an animal, a plant, an artefact – are endowed with interiority, animated by its own speci fic intentions, capable of action and judgment. On the other hand, the physical appearance changes from one entity to another. The animist model makes the interiority of the different sorts of the existing beings visible and shows that this interiority is lodged in bodies with dissimilar appearances. The most common images are those which contain tenuous signs of humanity – features of the face, for instance – grafted on mainly zoomorphous shapes. They generally feature non-humans about whom, through a few human attributes, it is shown that they do possess, just as the humans do, an interiority which makes them capable of a social and cultural life. Thus, the Yupi’k masks of Alaska feature the interiority of animals with the insertion of a human face in an animal head, or by adding human limbs to an animal body. In Amazonia, the Indians were attached to transforming human bodies themselves in images, by borrowing from designs and attributes with animal bodies in order to do this. By putting on an animal costume, humans borrow their biological aptitudes from animals and therefore the effectiveness with which the animals make use of their environment. Humans do not content themselves just with collecting appendages from animals, they also borrow from them designs for adorning their own bodies and mark speci fic status or states – maternity, paternity, mourning, illness… An objective world: naturalism arrière cour d'une maison hollandaise, Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684) © R.M.N. photo Gérard Blot The 2nd section of the exhibition exhibits another ontological model: naturalism. The idea behind naturalism is the opposite of the one behind animism: it is not by their bodies, but by their mind that humans differentiate themselves from non humans, just as it is also by their mind that they differentiate themselves from among one another. This world view, which has been dominant in the West for centuries, must represent two features: - the distinctive interiority of each human (the painting of the soul): only humans possess an interiority and are capable of rational discernment, - the physical continuity of beings and things in a homogenous space (the imitation of nature): all humans are subjected to the same decrees of nature, and do not allow standing out by ways of living, as was the case in animism. Contrary to the 3 other sections of the exhibition, “an objective world” brings out a very clear historic movement in the iconography, arising from a tension between the interiority and the physicality specific to naturalism: the interiority which asserts itself at the beginning in a resounding manner (right from before the Renaissance) dissolves over time to pave the way for an auto-referential physicality, reducing henceforth both interiority and life to physical parameters (birth of photography in the 19th century). A sub-divided world: totemism peinture sur écorce © musée du quai Branly photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado This section presents the world of totemism, made of a great number of classes of beings comprising humans and various sorts of non-humans. The members of each class share different sets of physical and moral qualities that the totem is considered to incarnate. Totemism ignores the differences between beings on the moral as well as physical plane in order to favour sharing, within the same class, of qualities which apply as much to humans as they do to non-humans. In the aboriginal societies of Australia, the core of qualities characterizing each class originates from an ancestral prototype traditionally known as “Dream being”. All the images are all over linked to the Dream beings and to the actions in which these prototypes have been engaged in order bring the world to order and render it apt for the subdivisions that they themselves incarnate. The figurative objectives of Australian totemism are implemented by means of 2 well differentiated strategies: - the body appears as i f at the origin of the image that it has given rise to; it is for example “imprint of the body” of a painting on bark, - the 2nd strategy shows how the world was formed by beings that one cannot see but which have left traces on the landscape; this is what we call “the imprint of movement”. An entangled world: analogism  poupée rituelle © musée du quai Branly  photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado The 4th section of the image Factory proposes the discovery of the iconological model of analogism to the public, the opposite model to the preceding model. To hold an analogical point of view on the world implies perceiving all those who occupy it as being different from one another. Thus, instead of merging entities sharing the same substances within the same class, this system distinguishes all the components of the world and differentiates them into singular elements. Such a world, in which each entity makes up a unique specimen, would become impossible to inhabit and to imagine if one did not strive to find stable correspondences between its human and non human components, as between the parts that they are made up of. For example, as per the qualities that we attribute to them, a few things will be associated with heat and other with cold, with day or with night, with dry or with wet. Analogist thinking thus aims at making networks of correspondence between discontinuous elements present, which implies multiplying the components of the image and demonstrating their relations. We can find numerous contemporary illustrations of animist ontology among the great Oriental civilizations, in West Africa or in the Indian communities of the Andes and Mexico. The classic figure of analogism is the chimera, a being made up of attributes belonging to different species, but presenting a certain coherence on the anatomical plane. The chimera is a hybrid whose constitutive elements stem from heterogeneous registers, but which can meet in a conjunctural manner in a completely singular being. Mirages of resemblances: the deceptive cognates grand masque de diablada © musée du quai Branly photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado The itinerary culminates with a didactic presentation, side by side, of images having similar formal properties, but whose figurative conventions meet completely different principles. This last stage of the exhibition explains to the public how to decrypt these images in order to weigh the differences, drawing its attention to the fact that a purely formal approach of images does not allow demonstrating the different world views that they express. For example, a Dutch landscape painting (naturalism) holds a dialogue with a Chinese landscape painting (analogism); a bird shaped mask representing a human type interiority in an animal body (animism)is compared with a bird shaped mask having composite attributes (analogist chimera). see the exhibit site at musée du quai Branly (in French with some English)

The Making of Images: musée du quai Branly

Carlos Amorales' Urban Gothic Dream World

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Carlos Amorales' Urban Gothic Dream World Comes to Cornerhouse

Carlos Amorales, 'Discarded Spider', 2008.

MANCHESTER.- Cornerhouse will present a solo show by one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists, Carlos Amorales, featuring two of his most recent works Psicofonias, and Discarded Spider, both from 2008. Psicofonias, 2008 Flooding Gallery 1 will be the soundtrack from Psicofonias, 2008, a large-scale two-screen video installation Carlos Amorales created along with musician Julián Lede and digital programmer André Pahl. This realtime-animation or ‘virtual pianola,’ translates Amorales’ digitized graphic drawings, into musical notes, which trigger two synthesizers as they scroll down the screen. Alongside this, expect video installation Discarded Spider, 2008, which depicts Amorales’ silhouette as he manipulates giant sculptural spider webs. A metaphor of entrapment, these sculptural spider webs create intricate patterns across the screen. Dissolving boundaries between his media, Amorales’ works are rendered mysterious and menacing in surreal visions influenced by gothic literature, mythological motifs, and Mexican popular culture. This exhibition coincides with this year’s ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival (6 – 27 March).

Carlos Amorales' Urban Gothic Dream World

Banks Violette at Gladstone Gallery

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New Installation by Banks Violette at Gladstone Gallery

Installation by Banks Violette. Photo: Courtesy Gladstone Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Team Gallery, presents a new installation by Banks Violette. Violette’s work ranges from haunting yet exquisitely rendered graphite drawings to sculptural installations composed of cast salt, light, and sound. Throughout his practice, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning through the process of mythology, often embodied in forms strongly associated with sub-cultural communities, personal memorials, or historical obscurities. The black and white spectacle of his stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion. For this new installation, Violette continues to mine a rich art historical terrain in which the materials and forms associated with Minimal and Conceptual Art become reactivated as theatrical platforms of performative decay. He pairs a large chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes with a black wall that seems to buckle and melt against the reflection of the light. Both aspects of the installation recall the monochromatic tone and the use of replaceable industrial materials common to Minimalist and Conceptual sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; however, Violette’s works seem self-consciously constructed and theatrical. Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these more banal technical necessities, Violette heightens the artificial spectacle of his installation, as if willing these two canonical art historical movements into an internecine danse macabre. He unmasks form and content as sites vulnerable to intellectual vandalism and moribund mythologizing. Banks Violette was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium; Kunsthalle Wein; the Modern of Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Royal Academy, London; P.S. 1, New York; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; among others.

Banks Violette at Gladstone Gallery

Kiki Smith: Sojourn Installation

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Site-Specific Installation by Artist Kiki Smith at the Brooklyn Museum

Kiki Smith, 'Sojourn Installation Image: Gallery 7'. All artwork: ©Kiki Smith, Courtesy: PaceWildenstein, New York. Photo: Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

BROOKLYN, NY.- 'Kiki Smith: Sojourn', a major site-specific installation that explores the ideas of creative inspiration and the cycle of life in relation to women artists, will be on view February 5 through September 12, 2010, in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The exhibition will draw from a variety of work by Kiki Smith in a range of media including cast objects, unique sculpture, and works on paper. The artist will also incorporate her work into two of the Brooklyn Museum's eighteenth-century period rooms in the nearby Decorative Arts galleries. Major Henry Trippe House Chamber Room Inspired, in part, by an important eighteenth-century New England needlework, Prudence Punderson's 'The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality' (Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford), Smith focuses on a variety of universal experiences, from the milestones of birth and death to the quotidian, such as the daily chores of domestic life. She also analyzes the artist's creative development and associates it with the stages in a lifetime, beginning with the creative awakening or birth and followed by a period of exploration, the achievement of artistic maturity, the later part of life, and, finally, death. The exhibition's gallery space will be divided into segmented rooms containing the sculptures and components of the installation. 'Sojourn' will include work incorporating other iconographic appropriations that have interested the artist in the past, including representations of the life of the Virgin Mary, ancient mythical figures, and more contemporary figures such as the suffragettes of the 1920s. In a career spanning more than three decades, Kiki Smith has produced a body of work unique in its engagement with social and political mores, particularly as they relate to the physical experiences and emotional lives of women. She has worked in a remarkably wide range of media. Best known as a sculptor, she is also an adept print maker and draftsman and has made significant work in glass, including installations using stained glass. One of three artist daughters of the late Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith (1912-1980), Kiki Smith at an early age helped her father fashion cardboard models for his monumental geometric sculptures. Her interest in the body as subject manifested itself early in her career and was augmented by her training as an emergency medical technician. By the mid-1980s, she had gained a reputation for work that focused on the biological systems of human bodies. Themes of regeneration, birth, and the cycles of life proliferate in her art. Her early affiliation with the political action and artists' collaborative group Colab fostered her interest in print media and the adaptation of commercial strategies for disseminating information. Smith gained international fame with her first major New York exhibition in 1988, and her influence has continued to grow through more than 150 solo exhibitions. She was the 2009 recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and has also been honored with a Skowhegan Medal for sculpture in 2001. 'Kiki Smith: Sojourn' is organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. It is the fourth venue in a series of site-specific installations, a long-term project by the artist that originated at Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld (March 16-August 24, 2008) and traveled to Kunsthalle Nürnberg (September 18-November 16, 2008), and Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (February 19-May 24, 2009).

Kiki Smith: Sojourn Installation

Anselm Kiefer Installation - Palmsonntag, 2007

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Anselm Kiefer Installation an International Coup for the Art Gallery of Ontario

Anselm Kiefer, Palmsonntag, 2007, 44 panels of mixed media on board, fiberglass and resin palm tree, clay bricks and steel support, dimensions variable. ©2010 Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery. Photograph © Joshua White.

TORONTO.- Acclaimed international artist Anselm Kiefer’s monumental installation Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday) is coming to the Art Gallery of Ontario this March. Kiefer, known for his epic themes and operatic flair, will be adapting and adding to the installation for its Canadian premiere at the AGO, opening March 4 and continuing through August 1. Palmsonntag is composed of a 60-foot-long palm tree, cast in fiberglass and resin, that lies on its side across the Gallery floor, surrounded by a cycle of 44 massive panels hanging in rows on the walls above. The panels, eight of which Kiefer is creating specifically for the AGO exhibition, combine paint, plaster, mud, wood, human hair, dried plant materials and rusted chastity belts, among other materials — forming a massive collage of images at once unnerving and expansive. Palmsonntag blends religious symbols, ancient text scrawled in multiple languages, and images of fossilized decay in a work that deals with life, death and rebirth in equal measure, says AGO Curator of Contemporary Art David Moos. “Palmsonntag is an installation of profound impact,” says Moos. “It must be seen, felt, and encountered. Its historical reach and epic vision are signatures of one of today’s most important living artists.” “Anselm Kiefer is a major artist, an innovator and a visionary,” says AGO Director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum. “The AGO is proud to be a key destination for major international artists like Kiefer; Palmsonntag is an ideal addition to our spring season of contemporary art on the leading edge.” Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany in 1945. His works, often enormous in scale, are thematically rich with historical, spiritual and political allusions. His paintings and sculptures are in the collections of virtually every major museum of contemporary art in the world, including the MOMA, the Tate and the Louvre. Anselm Kiefer: Palmsonntag will be installed in the AGO’s fifth-floor galleries, which will be closed for the month of February to prepare the space for the work. Earlier versions of Palmsonntag have been shown at the Grand Palais in Paris and at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. Anselm Kiefer: Palmsonntag opens in conjunction with the contemporary sculpture exhibition Sculpture as Time: Major Works. New Acquisitions. — also opening March 4. The rest of the AGO’s winter exhibition season focuses on new and established masters of contemporary art, and includes the exhibitions Wangechi Mutu: This You Call Civilization?, Rembrandt / Freud: Etchings from Life and Françoise Sullivan: Inner Force – Winner of the 2008 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO. Additionally, King Tut: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs continues until April 18.

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Anselm Kiefer Installation - Palmsonntag, 2007

Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters

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Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters on View at La Casa Encendida

Thomas Hirschhorn, “Tool Vitrine”, 2009, 300 x 85 x 220 cm. Mannequin, tools, foam, photos. Photo: Courtesy Arndt & Partner Gallery, Berlin.

MADRID.- Thomas Hirschhorn, a Swiss artist resident in Paris, presents an exhibition entitled 'The Subjecters', which features a series of vitrines containing mannequins and two installations. According to the artist, every work is a 'commentary' on the 'complex, chaotic, cruel, beautiful and wonderful' world we live in. The work of Thomas Hirschhorn (Bern, 1957) is a politically committed reflection about contemporary reality. Employing a variety of disciplines such as sculpture, video and installation, Hirschhorn produces works charged with social and political criticism. Three of the works featured have never before been exhibited: 'Tools Vitrine', 'Subjecter', from which the exhibition takes its name, and the vitrine 'Ingrowth', originally created to be shown in a public space in Paris. 'The Subjecters', which will be on display at La Casa Encendida of Obra Social Caja Madrid through 5 January, comprises a series of vitrines with mannequins and two installations. According to the artist, every work is a 'commentary' on the 'complex, chaotic, cruel, beautiful and wonderful' world we live in. Using everyday materials such as adhesive tape, cardboard, sheets of plastic, photocopies or, as in this case, mannequins, he represents universal situations in a transgressive, direct way. Through the mannequins, which are intended to represent human beings, the artist talks to us of a 'universal wound', which personifies his assertion, 'Each wound is my wound.' The exhibition begins with a newly produced piece, 'INGROWTH', which unlike the other works was originally planned to be exhibited in a public space in Paris. However, as it never went on display, it will receive its first showing here at La Casa Encendida. For Hirschhorn, a vitrine is a public space because it is an enclosed place which exhibits an object for a hypothetical audience. In addition to this piece, the artist has produced two new works for the project: 'Tool Vitrine' and 'Subjecter', which lends its name to the title of the exhibition. In 'Tool Vitrine', a mannequin appears to threaten us with a hammer, although he might just be going about his daily work, surrounded by all kinds of tools. The implements are typical of those used by the inhabitants of industrial areas such as Aubervilliers, where the artist has his studio. In the midst of the tools, as if it were an instruction manual, sits a copy of Spinoza's 'Ethics', one of Thomas Hirschhorn's favourite books. Meanwhile, in 'Subjecter', a single mannequin riddled with nails appears outside the vitrines, like a fetishistic representation of a human figure. The mannequins in the works are all "connected" in some way with society, be it through the tattoos on the surface of "4 Women", the magazines that highlight body care in "Mono Vitrine (Interview)", the art books on Goya that remind us of the horrors of war in "Mono-Vitrine (Goya)", the tools in the piece "Tool Vitrine", or the Manga figurines in "INGROWTH". Completing the exhibition are two installations situated in the middle of the room, "Black&White Hemisphere" and "The One World". The Subjecters 'The Subjecters' is the title of the exhibition but also the global term for the pieces the artist has made with mannequins or parts of them. As the artist himself says, 'The mannequin (or the parts of mannequins) is not the Subject – it's a Subjecter. The Subjecter is an invention of mine – it stands for what I cannot give a name but for what I can give form (and must give form, as the artist), and I worked it out with the form of mannequins, which is not new in the history of art, but which is a form to express the 'closest-far-away of myself.'' Thomas Hirschhorn has been using mannequins for several years now, regarding them as a material that is 'inclusive and non-intimidating, unpretentious and democratic, non-hierarchical and simple', like the adhesive tapes, tinfoil and magazine clippings that he usually employs in his installations.

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Thomas Hirschhorn's The Subjecters

Art in the Age of Orbitization - Gotchi Universe | Φrbit° sφaceφlace :: art in the age øf Φrbitizatiøn

Art in the Age of Orbitization - Gotchi Universe | Φrbit° sφaceφlace :: art in the age øf Φrbitizatiøn: "

Art in the Age of Orbitization - Gotchi Universe

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Art in the Age of Orbitization - Gotchi Universe | Φrbit° sφaceφlace :: art in the age øf Φrbitizatiøn