Artipedia - Arts News

Douglas Gordon, “24 Hour Psycho”, 1993, Courtesy the artist, Gagosian Gallery, New York

The Mart will be hosting “prettymucheverywordwritten,spoken,heard,overheardfrom 1989…”, the first museum exhibition to be dedicated to Douglas Gordon in Italy.

From 7 October 2006 to 21 January 2007, the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (Mart) will present a retrospective dedicated to the British artist, as well as an installation produced specially for the museum.

Douglas Gordon, winner of the Turner Prize in 1996, has established himself as one of the most important international artists around. He has always been interested in the double expressive register of verbal communication and the communication of moving images. Gordon has made a name for himself for video-installations of unusual dimensions and for his texts, printed on the walls of the exhibition spaces in the most varied of locations. Over the past ten years, he has held exhibitions in the world’s leading galleries and museums. The latest in the series is a retrospective dedicated to him this year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Gordon has always considered a place where the public relates to the work as artistic, as a space open to dialogue and social dynamics, a place in which to reflect on life.

The Mart exhibitions has been based on this initial idea and intends working actively on the exhibition spaces. The works on show, chosen by the artist, are 24 Hours Psycho, a video in which the artist intervenes on real time and alters it, and on the moving image to render it more monumental, in order to modify radically the habitual concept of real space. The images are drawn from Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho, the duration of which is distorted to last 24 hours.

Play dead. Real time (2003) will be the second video-installation on show, playing on the double image projected on to giant screens, of a circus elephant trained to “play dead”. Finally, Pretty much every film and video… will present a large number of the artist’s video works since 1992 on a series of television screens.

This part will be presented in the gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions, in the dark, in a section which the curators, Giorgio Verzotti and Mirta D’Argenzio, have counterbalanced with a daylight area making use of natural light: in the circular corridor liking the mezzanine with the second floor at the Mart. Gordon will present a work formed of all his verbal texts, recontextualised in a new version planned specially for this architectural space, and with the addition of a new text, also produced for the Mart.

The catalogue, published by Skira, documents the activity of Douglas Gordon in Italy. The artist has exhibited in this country since 1992, when he produced one of his “Instruction Pieces” at the cafè Picasso in Rome. Subsequently, he took part in group shows in galleries and exhibition spaces, and participated in the Venice Biennales of 1997 and 1999. His most recent exhibition in Italy was held with Philippe Parreno at the Fondazione Davide Halevim of Milan in 2006.

The catalogue will document these events with images of the works exhibited and a graphic elaboration of the “text work” produced for our museum.

DOUGLAS GORDON

Douglas Gordon, born in Scotland in 1966, expresses himself through video installations, film, photography, objects and verbal texts. Using these different forms, he explores the problems regarding psychological introspection, the search for identity, the concepts of innocence and guilt, the tension between the opposing principles of good and evil, all of which indicate his interest in a profound sounding of the human condition.

Highly regarded for his video installations, in which he reuses sequences drawn from famous Hollywood films, Gordon studied at The Glasgow School of Art and at The Slade School of Fine Arts, London. In Glasgow, his performances gained a close following in the art world between the late 1980s and early 1990s. The work which has gained greatest international attention so far has been 24 Hours Psycho, in which Hitchcock’s famous film is projected at a surreally slow speed to last 24 hours. Much of the artist’s work explores popular culture, from films such as “Rear Window”, “The Exorcist” or “Taxi Driver” to anonymous documentaries, in order to study the perceptive processes and interfere with the expectations of the viewer.

Gordon has received major international awards for his career, including the Turner Prize in 1996, the Biennale di Venezia award in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He has recently held thematic exhibitions in New York and Scotland.

Curated by Giorgio Verzotti and Mirta D’Argenzio

With the contribution of the Fondazione Davide Halevim

MartRovereto
Corso Bettini, 43
38068 Rovereto (TN), Italy
Infoline ++39 0424600435
T ++39 0464454110
T (press office) ++39 0464454127
http://www.mart.trento.it
info@mart.trento.it

Mon. – Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Fri- 10 a.m. – 9 p.m.

Tickets: Friends of the museum: free

La Wilson: Constructions

John Davis Gallery
362 1/2 Warren Street
Hudson, New York 12534

Thursday, October 12th, La Wilson will open a solo exhibition at the John Davis Gallery. The work will be on display through November 5th with a reception for the artist on Saturday, October 14th from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m.

John Davis began showing the work of La Wilson in 1983 in Akron, Ohio and continued with Ms. Wilson when his gallery moved to New York City. Including the 2004 retrospective that Mr. Davis curated, La Wilson Altered Objects (at the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College), this upcoming show will be the 12th exhibition of Ms. Wilson’s work that the artist and dealer have presented together. It will also mark Ms. Wilson’s fourth exhibition in Hudson, New York, (the first, having been recognized and reviewed in The New York Times). She visits Hudson, New York from Hudson, Ohio where she lives and works and she has shown extensively in the mid-west and New York City.

Ms. Wilson was given a retrospective of her work at The Akron Art Museum in 1986/1987 titled La Wilson Metaphorical Objects with the sharp vision of director, Mitchell D. Kahan, curator, Kathleen M. Monaghan with the late Ellen H. Johnson’s contribution to the catalogue. In 1992 Tom Hinson, curator of Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Museum, chose a group of La’s works to exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1993, the artist received the top award for sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art May Show. It was in this same year that La was awarded the prestigious “Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts” for sculpture. In 2004 the Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College (Collegeville, Pennsylvania) mounted a retrospective of her work, titled La Wilson Altered Objects with catalogue essay by Edward M. Gomez, curated by John Davis.

In the current body of work, La Wilson continues to confound those who have watched her development as an artist over the years with her ability to defy the material and transform everyday objects into visual delights that convey profound meaning and sustenance. In her words, “I try to steer clear of objects that are too loaded with meaning; but then, when I think about it, everything I use is loaded - snakes, pencils, firecrackers, matches, hair pins. What I try to do is free myself from the conscious associations so that the unconscious ones can take over. I am much more interested in what I don’t know than what I do know.”

Sculpture Garden:

Ben Butler will be the featured sculptor in the garden in October/November. Ben, who grew up mostly in Winnetka, Illinois, and now lives on Long Island, was interested in math and science as a teenager, and in college he considered a double major in art and neuroscience. He ended up majoring in art, and in 2003 also got an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben feels that all things, under close enough observation, will reveal the complete stories of their making. His objects simply reveal themselves much more readily than most, and therefore hope to teach us something about looking.

The spirit of science, of discover and illumination, is central to his art. Ultimately, everything made is first found. Yet, for both art and science, successful work must allow others not to simply rediscover what the artist has discovered, but to make, through the work, their own discoveries. Then, he feels, the work remains alive.

Carriage House:
There are four artists within the carriage house: Harry Leigh, William Jaeger, Claude Carone, and Laurel Sucsy

There will be an installation of a sculpture by Harry Leigh In the elevator shaft of the Carriage House. Mr. Leigh was born in 1931 in Buffalo, New York, his father a cotton-spinner and immigrant from Manchester, England, his mother, a farm girl from the finger lake district. He was educated in the public school system and attended Albright Art School and SUNY, Buffalo, where he received his B.A. in 1953.

Harry worked as a laborer on construction sites, in steel mills, and on the assembly line of Ford Motor Company. He was drafted into the Army in 1954 and trained as a radio operator. While serving in Europe, he traveled extensively, visiting museums and architectural sites.

Upon return, he studied on the GI bill for a Masters of Art at Columbia University. He studied privately with Richard Pousette-Dart (1956-1960) in painting. He also took a course with Peter Volkus in clay sculpture. While painting from 1955-65, he began experimenting with large works from cardboard, plaster, then plywood in 1960. His sculpture became his main focus with his first solo exhibition representing a full assimilation of his diverse work experiences.

Also on the ground floor of the carriage house, there is a group exhibition of other gallery sculptors: John Van Alstine, John Ruppert, Jon Isherwood, and Solin-Iacone.

William Jaeger
The Edge of Darkness

William Jaeger received his M.F.A. in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1984. In addition to his photographic work, Mr. Jaeger is also a writer, having been the art critic for the Albany Times Union and, at present, New York Editor/contributor to Art New .

Mr. Jaeger explains, “My process can seem complicated if I think about it too much, but in short, I photograph what I find. The images here might have documentary, formal, or even (happily) poetic elements, but those are elements I can only intuitively understand. When I take a photograph, the event is something I don’t really want to probe beyond the results, which are here for you to approach much as I did.”

Claude Carone began his studies in New York at the New York Studio School but he was no stranger to art at that time, having grown up with a father who was a major contributor to the Abstract Expressionist school, Nicolas Carone, a contemporary and comrade of Jackson

Pollock, William de Kooning, and other founding fathers of the abstract expressionist movement. After the New York Studio School, Claude continued his education at the Maryland Institute of Art and then, independently, in Rome, . He has exhibited in various cities in , , and the .

Carone is an intuitive painter. He may start a canvas with a gesture and then respond to that gesture with another until he sees and feels the beginning of a visual composition. As he goes back to a painting, he may re-enter into a situation that he then plays into or finds a certain rhythm in the painting or a dialogue between the image and the space and respond to it. He paints on wooden panels with casein, powdered pigment, polymer and wax. The resulting work is sometimes brooding and always energetic painting that emanates from his ability to tap the unconscious and let his body channel these emotions into a rhythmic and dynamic composition.

Laurel Sucsy is the newest edition to the roster of artists in the John Davis Gallery. She has an M.F.A. in Painting from the Tyler School of Art In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work will be on display on the top floor of the Carriage House.

The paintings emerge as a moving back and forth between physical and conceptual settings as she negotiates the questions of where things appear and where they are expected to be found. By establishing rules and then breaking those rules, she choreographs an exchange between color, light and edge. In this way, she offers proximity to the visible and to the unseen.

Gallery hours are Thursday through Monday, 10:00 till 5:30 p.m. For further information about the gallery, the artists and upcoming exhibition, visit

http://www.johndavisgallery.com

Picture by Adrian Williams. The library in Prishtina

Indefinite rituals are visible through a neo-Oriental style and neo-Ottomanism in the public sphere, and in new facades built by individuals.

These rituals are recognized by artists when people are praying at a library. This library stands opposite an Orthodox church which was built by Milosevic during the occupation. Albanian artists such as Florian Agalliu are addressing these issues in their work. In his video work “Rituals”, Agalliu depicts a neo-Ottoman reaction: men gathering to pray at the library in Pristina, opposite the Orthodox church whose construction was ordered by Milosevic but never completed. It stands next to the Faculty of Arts, a concrete monument which not only destroys the unity of the area but also makes it impossible to build on the rest of this otherwise unbuilt-on area of the city centre.

From 24 September to 29 October 2006, Leonhardi Culture Projects will be presenting, under the title “Indefinite Rituals”, works by Florian Agalliu, Alban Muja, Driton Hajredini, Ilirios, Zake Prelvukaj, Adrian Williams, and Sislej Xhafa (Live debate).

These young artists have been profoundly affected by the experience of being driven out and forced to flee their homes. They deal with this experience in their works. One example of this is Alban Muja, who has drawn up a plan for a Museum for Contemporary History in his divided hometown because he is no longer allowed to visit the place where he lived as a child. Driton Hajredini lives in Germany, but he paints blackbirds on suitcases because Kosovo means “field of blackbirds”. His picture “The guardians” makes this clear in a striking way with its depiction of two birds sitting on a suitcase, ready to depart. Adrian Williams has set up a Contemporary Arts Library in Prishtina together with Shannon Bool, and has now developed a collection of photographs in order to promote this project. Zake Prelvukaj is not only an artist who portrays the ambivalent attitude to democracy in Kosovo in her pictures and through her own body; she also teaches in the Faculty of Arts in Pristina, and will present recent works by her students.

The indeterminacy of this toponym – Kosovo, “belonging to the blackbirds” (and was it not the defeated Serbs who left the notorious battlefield as blackbirds?) – determines the ability of the Kosovo-Albanian art and culture scene to express itself.

Indeterminacy can be seen in the works of these artists, just as the status of Kosovo is indeterminate. This absence of statehood affects forms of cultural expression in Kosovo, and is captured in a precise way in the artworks.

During the opening of the exhibition on 24 September, Sislej Xhafa will lead a live debate with the artists exhibiting their works. This debate will start with a radioshow on the 8 September on Radio x in Frankfurt. Beqe Cufaj will give an introductory lecture on his most recent visit to Prishtina, entitled “What does it mean to live two doors down from the president?” Cufaj’s work has become known to a German audience through his books Kosova Rückkehr and Der Glanz der Fremde. Adrian Williams will introduce the work of the Contemporary Arts Library.

Florian Agalliu * 1970 in Tirana, curator, Mediaartist.
Alban Muja, *1980 in Mitrovica, Kosovo, lives in Prishtina, Video- Performanceartist
Driton Hajredini, * 1970 in Prishtina, painter, Videoartist
Zake Prelvukaj, *1961 in Martinaj, Montenegro, lives in Prishtina, Faculty of fine arts
Iliros, Ilir Osmani, *1971 in Prishtina, HipHop Producer, curator
Adrian Williams,*1979 in Portland, Oregon, USA, artist, lives in Frankfurt /M.
Sislej Xhafa, * 1970 Peja / Kosovo, artist, lives in New York

Leonhardi Culture Projects
Leonhardi Culture Projects organizes exhibitions which provide the public with insights into current positions being taken by artists from crisis regions, and tries by means of cultural exchange to stimulate democratization processes in countries such as Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iran. We want to contribute to an improved understanding of these societies rather than just to look at them from the perspective of conflicts and crises. For this reason, we speak of countries like Afghanistan and Kosovo as “wounded societies”. The exhibitions also give vistors an opportunity to familiarize themselves with positions currently being taken in contemporary art. In the two selected cases of Afghanistan and Kosovo, these are as different as they could possibly be.

Kosovo: Indefinite Rituals
25 September - 29 October 2006

Sunday, 24th September 2006: Opening of “Kosovo: Indefinite Rituals” with Florian Agalliu, Alban Muja, Driton Hajredini, Iliros, Zake Prelvukaj, Adrian Williams und Sislej Xhafa

Programme:
3 pm lecture by Beqe Cufaj
4 pm Live debate with Sislej Xhafa
music ILIROS

radio and dicussionforum on http://www.leonhardikulturprojekte.org

Leonhardi Kulturprojekte e.V.
Burgräfenröderstr- 2, 61184 Karben
fon 0049/176/62006867
open wed 2-6 pm an on request
info@leonhardikulturprojekte.org

“The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach”, Iris Häussler 2006, The “Sun-room”

Iris Häussler: The Legacy
of Joseph Wagenbach
16.9. - 12.11 2006

Goethe-Institut Toronto
105 Robinson Street
Toronto, Canada

http://www.goethe.de/toronto

The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach is a site-specific installation by Iris Häussler, curated by Rhonda Corvese. A secluded house in a downtown Toronto residential neighbourhood is the setting of a fictitious artist’s sculptural legacy. Visitors are guided through the house by an archivist. In this crossover between art, literature and theatre, Häussler has transformed her psychological narrative into an immersive reality. Memories of the early 20th century, set in the unique context of immigration and identity in Toronto, are created through an unsettlingly detailed reconstruction of the art and artefacts of “Joseph Wagenbach’s” life.

Joseph Wagenbach, was born in Germany in 1929, left his home in 1946 and immigrated to Canada, via Paris, in 1962. Making a modest living in unrelated jobs, he created his art in absolute privacy, gradually transforming his physical environment into a pandemonium of sculpture. His legacy was discovered at the age of 77 when he was transferred to a nursing home after suffering a stroke. The Municipal Archives are currently archiving and assessing the site and the work.

Iris Häussler: The Legacy is an accompanying exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Toronto that documents the conceptual process in the creation of “The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach” and related work.

Iris Häussler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany and has shown widely throughout Europe. Grants received include the Karl-Hofer Prize, Berlin and a Kunstfonds Fellowship. Iris Häussler emigrated to Canada in 2001. The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach is her largest and most complex installation in a succession of off-site narratives over the last eighteen years. It marks her first major show in North America.

The project has been realized with funding from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Peter CAMPUS “Interface”, 1972 Closed circuit video installation, Musée national d’art moderne Collection, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Miami Art Central is pleased to present Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005., an international group exhibition based on the video and multimedia installations of the Centre Pompidou which recounts the history of this very contemporary field, punctuating the main phases of contemporary art from 1965 to 2005. Curated by Christine Van Assche, Media Arts Curator at the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition will be on view at Miami Art Central from September 20 through December 10, 2006.

“The Moon is the oldest TV” said the pioneering Nan June Paik (Seoul, Korea, 1932) who, in 1963, first introduced a television work into a museum space. Two years later he reproduced the lunar cycle using seventeen televisions situated on pedestals in a darkened room. Each set showed a different phase of the moon, the shape of which was the result of transforming the signal being transmitted by means of a magnet located in the cathode ray tube. Moon is the Oldest TV is the earliest historical work in the exhibition Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005, and laid the foundation for many video works created in the last decades.

Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005 presents an overview of how video has developed in the last forty years. Video as a means of creative expression appeared in the early 1960s and has developed considerably since then. Originally used by artists to record their live performance works, video became an artistic art form in its own right in the 1990s, and now plays an important role in contemporary art practice. Developed in the 1970s as a more practical alternative to film, video, like television, has been available to mass audiences from the beginning, making it especially appealing to artists seeking a wider forum (Nam June Paik) for their work. The medium dominated in the 1980s, and the term “new media” was coined to describe video-as-art. Video was initially adopted by many artists seeking to document performances. A number of these artists sought to push the boundaries of the medium, utilizing strategies taken from television, and experimenting with closed-circuit recording monitors, feedback, slow-motion and fast-forward functions, etc. Others used it to critique the images and content of mass media (Dara Birnbaum), particularly as they related to phenomenological concerns of identity. New media evolved in the 1980s and ’90s toward experimentation with installation through discursive devices, the systems of cinematic narrative, the parameters of installation, the active role of the viewer, and installations that function as exhibitions (Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, and Isaac Julien). In the 2000s, many aesthetic directions are being pursued through technological research, interactivity, theatricality, etc. However, the issues that have captured the focus in this exhibition are the works made by artists responding to more global concerns and issues of form and content.

Tracing the history of video from 1965 to the present, this exhibition is structured in five sections: Imaginative Television and Quests for Identity explore issues related to the essence and structure of the television medium; meanwhile, From Video Tape to Installation, Post-Cinema and Contemporary Perspectives address questions such as artists’ status, the role of the spectator and the relationship between fiction and documentary. Covering some forty years of the history of this media, this exhibition brings together a selection of 37 works by some of the most important artists in this field ranging from the earliest pieces made with extremely limited resources, to impressive displays of audiovisual resources unleashed in more recent productions.

Artists in the Exhibition
Vito Acconci (USA), Isaac Julien (U.K.), Samuel Beckett (Ireland), Thierry Kuntzel (France), Dara Birnbaum (USA), Matthieu Laurette (France), Peter Campus (USA), Mark Leckey (U.K), Stan Douglas (Canada), Chris Marker (France), Valie Export (Austria), Bruce Nauman (USA), Jean-Luc Godard (France), Marcel Odenbach (Germany), Douglas Gordon (U.K./ USA), Tony Oursler (USA), Dan Graham (USA), Nam June Paik (Korea/USA), Johan Grimonprez (Belgium/USA), Walid Ra’ad / The AtlasGroup (Lebanon/USA), Clarisse Hahn (France), Gary Hill (USA), Zined Sedira (France/U.K.), Pierre Huyghe (France/USA), Bill Viola (USA)

About the Curator
Christine Van Assche is the Media Arts Curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. She has curated exhibitions and produced new works with such media artists as Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, Joan Loeb, Nam June Paik, Marcel Odenbach, Joan Loge and Thierry Kuntzell. She was, along with curator Catherine David and critic Raymond Bellour, co-curator of the exhibition “Passage de l’Image,” which was presented during its international tour at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1992. In 1993, Van Assche began to acquire works of video and computer art for the Centre Georges Pompidou, resulting in an addition of over 600 videotapes, 27 installations and 2 CD-ROMs to the permanent collection. The entire collection is available to the public through an open access policy in a video space located in the Paris museum.

About the Exhibition
Miami Art Central’s presentation of this exhibition will include video, sculpture and multimedia installations in a chronological conversation about the medium while highlighting the relationship between the pioneer video creations of the 1960s and 1970s with those of younger artists. In addition to the actual works, various documents from the archives of the Centre Georges Pompidou Collection (scripts, drawings, film stills and artists interviews) will also be included in this seminal exhibition.

On view: September 20 – December 10, 2006 at Miami Art Central.
Opening reception: Tuesday, September 19th, from 7:00 to 10:00 pm.
Please RSVP via e-mail to info@miamiartcentral.org or by phone 305.455.3336.

Miami Art Central’s presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.

Special Event for Opening Week of Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005

• Tuesday, September 19, 11:00 am - PRESS PREVIEW
Gallery walk-through with exhibition curator Christine Van Assche

Exhibition Catalogue and Brochure
Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005 is accompanied by a fully illustrated,
192-page catalogue edited by Christine Van Assche and includes texts by the later, François Michaud, curator at the Musee d’art Moderne de la ville de Paris, and Françoise Parfait, Professor of Art History at the University of Amiens. In addition the catalogue will include a number of historical texts and reproductions of each work presented.

Visitors to the show are provided with a variety of education materials, including a free, illustrated brochure designed to provide information concerning the exhibition and its related programs and events.

The exhibition and programs brochure is available in the admissions desk

MIAMI ART CENTRAL, 5960 SW 57 Avenue, Miami, FL 33143
For more information please call 305.455.3333 or visit http://www.miamiartcentral.org

Hours
Tuesday-Sunday 12-7 pm

General Admission
Students and children under 12: Free; Free on Sundays

Sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation and through the supporting partnership of Porsche Cars North America, Inc. The 2006 Conversation Series at MAC has been generously underwritten by Gonzalo Parodi.

Miami Art Central (MAC) is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the presentation of exhibitions and programs that explore contemporary art and culture. Our mission is to provide an alternative, experimental space with a multidisciplinary focus. MAC is committed to stimulating and nurturing a dialogue with the various communities of South Florida and beyond.