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ARCO

REVIEW OF ARCO’07

ARCO MEETS ITS TARGETS AND CLOSES WITH A 15% INCREASE
IN SALES

As forecast, the 26th International Contemporary Art Fair will close its doors today with one of the best financial results of its career. Added to ARCO’s satisfaction at seeing its targets met, there is the success of its sales figures, with an estimated 15% increase in total sales, and higher number of collectors and buyers attending. There were around 20% more professional visitors, due both to visitor segmentation and to the fact that the private collectors’ showings were extended to two-and-a-half days.

In addition, the estimated number of visitors was similar to those in previous editions - around 190,000. This was topped off by the high standard of the 271 galleries that took part, all of whom went to great lengths to produce fine displays, showcasing a splendid selection of artists.

Having concentrated on putting several aspects of the fair to the test, with a view to consolidating future potential, and enhancing two essential areas (collecting, and ARCO’s business profile), the results not only confirmed ARCO’s own forecast, but it also proved that the Spanish market is increasingly in tune with the upward trend of the international art market.

Three other features were unanimously spotlighted by the press and marked this 26th edition of the fair, which is undergoing a period of smooth transition led by Lourdes Fernández’s new management team: greater focus on professional visitors, higher quality of the goods on offer, and the consolidation of an emerging body of local collectors.

Supporting collectors. Earning trust through its focus on professionals, and becoming an appealing option for collectors abroad and in Spain, was a specific undertaking that helped to boost this year’s fair. The strategy was visitor segmentation, devoting an entire extra day to professional visitors, thereby encouraging work and business contacts between galleries and buyers. Proof of this can be seen in the numerous sales transactions that took place on those days. There was a marked difference between the first day, Wednesday, when a large number of preliminary contacts and reservations were made, and the second and third days, when a high number of actual sales took place. For corporate visitors - an area where major new buyers were apparent - the Berge Group (via Hyundai), contributed a VIP Lounge which served as an exclusive meeting place for collectors and professional visitors.

The Special Guest Country, South Korea, also ended on a high in terms of business results. Its strong turnout of galleries aroused huge interest amongst collectors, and generated a large volume of sales: over half the galleries sold 100% of their selected works. This also goes to show the growing acceptance of Asian art on the international art scene.

Focussing on professionals. The results confirm what critics have unanimously described as the great progress made by ARCO in terms of professional visitors, with a balanced presence of major international artists, some of the world’s top galleries, and artworks of a very high standard. By enhancing its profile in this way, ARCO is right on track, in the highly competitive world of international contemporary art fairs. Art spaces were better laid-out and contained more balanced proposals, many of them making some brave artistic choices, all of which met with great approval this year. Some galleries also decided to hold one-man-shows, a feature that really appealed to visitors. And distinctions were made between visitors themselves, who were also generally better qualified.

The target: quality. The care taken with the selection process and the growing international interest in the Spanish market have turned ARCO into a leading art fair, ever more international in scope, and deeply rooted in an expanding market. The fifty top galleries that attended the fair for the first time this year joined firmly established ARCO regulars. This was one of the major steps taken this year, with a view to making quality a priority, and it means ARCO is now seen as a business platform that is fully equipped to meet current market demands.

2008. This year’s strong results are undoubtedly a huge step in the right direction in terms of ARCO’s firm decision to achieve top quality. This goal will be the basis of the selection process for next year’s fair, which features Brazil as Special Guest Country. The 2008 edition, which will transfer to Feria de Madrid’s new exhibition halls, will have a brand new, well-defined layout and design. Collecting will once again be the highlight, with particular focus on corporate collecting, one of the areas with the greatest potential right now.

For more information go to: http://www.arco.ifema.es

The Power Plant, Toronto

3 March – 22 April, 2007
Fiona Banner: The Bastard Word
Yael Bartana: Ritual

The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto ON Canada M5J 2G8
+1 416 973 4927
http://www.thepowerplant.org

Fiona Banner: The Bastard Word

Fiona Banner, a leading mid-career British artist and former Turner Prize nominee, has been exhibiting widely since her first solo show at City Racing in 1994. Her exhibitions include ‘Asterisk,’ Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 1999; ‘Your Plinth is my Lap,’ Dundee Contemporary Arts / Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 2002. Banner is represented in various collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum, The Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, London and the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis.

‘The Bastard Word,’ curated by The Power Plant Director, Gregory Burke, is an exhibition of new and recent work that brings together a range of sculptures, installations, drawings, and a selection of newer pieces that are among her most ambitious to date. Banner investigates the limits and possibilities of written language, drawing on source material from military hardware and films to pornography and the tradition of the nude. Recent work that addresses her interest with the concept of war include Parade, 2007, an installation of 179 Airfix models of all of the world’s fighter planes and Tornado Nude, 2006, a drawing on the wing of a Tornado airplane that stands at nearly 6 metres high. Every Word Unmade, 2007, is a work of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet in neon physically bent by the artist. These rather crude and primitive letters are indicative of a ritualistic process of personally re-creating language. Banner will also be giving a rare performance, relat
ed to the ‘Nude’ series, for which she will create a word painting as a life-drawing.

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Power Plant and The Vanity Press are producing an illustrated newspaper with a rare and insightful interview between Fiona Banner and Gregory Burke, and an essay by Cay-Sophie Rabinowitz, the Senior US Editor of Parkett.

Fiona Banner: The Bastard Word is generously supported by lead donors Yvonne & David Fleck, Guy Knowles, Phil Lind, Liza Mauer & Andrew Sheiner, Nancy McCain & William Morneau, and the British Council.

Fiona Banner is represented by 1301PE, Los Angeles, Frith Street Gallery, London, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, and Tracy Williams Ltd., New York.

Yael Bartana: Ritual

Documenting and restaging everyday activities, Yael Bartana’s films suggest how social rituals and other group activities promote national and cultural cohesion. Bartana’s context looks to her native Israel with regards to how militarization, nationalism and the possibilities of protest resonate in many contemporary situations. Her approach to the quotidian has been likened to “amateur anthropology,” a notion borrowed from the Polish-Canadian writer Eva Hoffman. Yet while Hoffman posits the immigrant as one who sees minute details that others take for granted, Bartana is no detached voyeur. By slowing down footage, manipulating and editing footage, she isolates moments of ambivalence, resistance or over-compensation that undercut simple national and cultural affiliations. In so doing, Bartana hopes to “provoke honest responses and perhaps replace the predictable, controlled reactions encouraged by the state.” There will be four film works shown at The Power Plant, including h
er latest piece, Wild Seeds, 2006 – a video of young Israelis playing a game based on the forced withdrawal of Jewish settlers from Gilad’s Colony in 2002. This exhibition has been curated by The Power Plant’s Senior Curator of Programs, Helena Reckitt.

Yael Bartana divides her time between Amsterdam and Tel-Aviv, and her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2003, Kunstverein Hamburg, 2006, and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2006; group exhibitions include Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 2002, 10th Istanbul Biennial, 2005, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2006.

Yael Bartana: Ritual has been generously supported by the Consulate-General of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. It is presented in conjunction with 20th annual Images Festival, Toronto. Bartana is represented by Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

For more information go to: http://www.thepowerplant.org

Kunstmuseum Bern

HORN PLEASE – The Narrative in Contemporary Indian Art
Exhibition at the Museum of
Fine Arts Berne
September 21, 2007 – January 6, 2008

Kunstmuseum Bern
Hodlerstrasse 8-12
CH-3000 Bern 7
Phone +41 31 328 09 44
press@kunstmuseumbern.ch
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

Unlike Western modernisms of the 20th century that rejected the narrative in favour of the self-reflective artwork, India has had a strong tradition of figurative, narrative painting that goes back several decades. The exhibition Horn Please attempts to follow the journey of the narrative over three decades, from the 1980s to the present, by tracing certain ‘critical’ moments in Indian art – moments of both assimilation and intervention – through which a particular kind of narrative was constructed. Our points of departure are the exhibitions Place for People (1982) and Question and Dialogue (1987) of the Radical Painters and Sculptors Association. Both these moments serve as reference points only to try to capture what followed until today, across time shifts and media, breaks and continuities.

The Place for People exhibition in 1982 was put together by a group of artists – Jogen Chowdhury, Bhupen Khakhar, Nalini Malini, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gulam Mohammed Sheik and Vivan Sundaram – based in Baroda mainly, but with their links in Bombay, Delhi and Shantiniketan. This was, at that moment in time, a significant exhibition because it brought into focus new ideologies of narration (formulated almost as a manifesto by Geeta Kapur) and narrative paintings that appropriated the vernacular and the global, drew as much from traditional styles as it did from the West and told everyday stories without resorting to the monumental or the iconic.

This move was in turn rejected by the Question and Dialogue (1987) exhibition constituted by what came to be known as the Kerala Radical group. This short-lived collective was formed on the lines of left-wing political activism through what they saw as alternate art practices. Narratives were condensed into gestures that emphasized the political, the humanitarian and the social. Everything international, commercial and Western was rejected by the artists in this group who included Krishna Kumar, Alex Mathew, C K Rajan and Anita Dube, who was also the “chronicler” of the movement.

Horn Please will revisit some works and writings from these seminal exhibitions, juxtaposing them with current works made by the same artists, and place them alongside the works of much younger artists, for many of whom the exhibitions referred to might be of no significance whatsoever. By representing scenes from everyday life, fictive happenings, mythology and satire as well as autobiographical, societal and historical material, the contributing artists will in turn reflect an India that has changed economically, politically and socially over the last three decades.

Horn Please tries in its own way to bring together the multiplicity and diversity of art practice around the well-defined, the ambiguous and sometimes fragmentary narratives told through painting, sculpture, photography, photomontage, video, animation and installation work. The exhibition also shows how people who do not come from a primarily artistic background bring in new types and styles of narratives and how a number of women artists began using the narrative in different ways in new media work. The definite artists list will be communicated later.

Horn Please is curated by Bernhard Fibicher, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts Bern and Suman Gopinath, independent curator and partner/director of Colab Art & Architecture, Bangalore, India. A catalogue in German and English will be published and distributed worldwide.

Contact:
Ruth Gilgen Hamisultane, Press + Communication
Phone +41 31 328 09 19, ruth.gilgen@kunstmuseumbern.ch

For more information go to: http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch

CCA

CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS CELEBRATES ITS CENTENNIAL
A Yearlong Schedule of Programs and Events

From its humble beginnings in 1907 with three classrooms, 43 students, and three teachers, California College of the Arts (CCA) has developed into one of this country’s most prestigious art colleges. Today CCA boasts state-of-the art campuses in San Francisco and Oakland, 19 undergraduate and six graduate programs, 1,650 fulltime students, nearly 500 faculty members, and an estimated 14,000 alumni.

A Yearlong Series of Events
A host of celebratory events will be held at locations both on- and off-campus. As a tribute to the college’s influence and reputation, more than 40 galleries and museums from New York to Los Angeles and the Bay Area have organized exhibitions to celebrate the centennial. Highlights for coming weeks include:

Through April 8: CCA: A Legacy in Studio Glass, San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design

Through April 22: 100 Families Oakland: Art & Social Change, Oakland Museum of California

March 23–August 16: California College of the Arts at 100: Innovation by Design at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

April 1: Graduate Open Studios, San Francisco campus

April 25: Centennial Gala and Threads Fashion Show at Fort Mason in San Francisco

Other highlights include Celebrating a Centennial: Contemporary Printmakers at CCA at the de Young Museum September 29, 2007–April 20, 2008; and CCA: 100 Years in the Making, at Oakland Museum of California October 13, 2007 through January 27, 2008.

Galleries and museums participating in CCA’s centennial include 871 Fine Arts, American Craft Council, John Berggruen Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum, Rena Bransten Gallery, Braunstein/Quay Gallery, Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Charles Campbell Gallery, Claudia Chapline Gallery, Crown Point Press, Di Rosa Preserve, Gallery Paule Anglim, GarageGallery, Brian Gross Fine Art, Hackett-Freedman Gallery, Haines Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Hosfelt Gallery, Intersection for the Arts, Gregory Lind Gallery, Walter Maciel Gallery, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Heather Marx Gallery, Modernism, Montclair Gallery, Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, Palo Alto Art Center, Paulson Press, RayKo Photography Center, Richmond Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sculpturesite Gallery, Andrea Schwartz Gallery, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Thompson Art Gallery at San Jo
se State University, Traywick Contemporary, Triangle Gallery, and Stephen Wirtz Gallery.

For a complete list of CCA’s centennial events, please visit http://www.cca.edu/100.

For more information go to: http://www.cca.edu/100

Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR)

Restlessness by Jan Lauwers
Curated by Jérôme Sans

02.03 > 06.05.2007
Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (BOZAR)
Rue Royale 10 Koningsstraat - 1000 Brussels
http://www.bozar.be
+ 32 (0)2 507 82 00

The visual artist, man of the theatre, and film-maker Jan Lauwers is known, above all, for his theatrical work with Needcompany. This spring he is exhibiting his work in the visual arts at the Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels) for two months in a solo exhibition entitled Restlessness. The exhibition, which focuses on his work in the visual arts from 1996 to today, has been put together in collaboration with the curator Jérôme Sans.

Jan Lauwers (b. 1957) lives and works in Brussels. He studied painting at the Academy in Ghent but over the last twenty years has made his name primarily as an international theatre-maker. The productions by his group, Needcompany, are striking for their expressiveness and the meticulous combination of words, language(s), music, dance, and movement as structuring elements. Jan Lauwers is also a visual artist. His work in the visual arts has only been exhibited sporadically to date, as he has always tried to preserve the intimacy of his studio as far as possible.

In 1997 he took part in Documenta X in Kassel with his performance of Caligula (No beauty for me there, where human life is rare, part one). At Grimbergen 2002 (a group exhibition together with Atelier Van Lieshout, Thomas Schütte, Ann Veronica Janssens, and others) he showed the monumental work Verre van der menscen dinghen en vant ic neghene scoenhede. At "Grasduinen 02/SMAK aan zee" in 2004 he showed a video installation on violence called C-Song 01. In 2006 he is presenting the video installation Untitled Construction in the "DARK" exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, a group exhibition that also includes Juergen Teller, Luc Tuymans, Dirk Braeckman, and others. Part of this installation is the 1997 video piece Duchamp’s Moustache.

Jérôme Sans (b. 1960) lives and works in Paris. As adjunct curator at the Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee, he organised numerous monographic exhibitions there before moving on to a similar post at the Stockholm Konsthall’s Magasin 3. As well as an exhibition curator – Taipei Biennale, Taiwan, 2000; "Live", Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2004 – he is also a critic, author of a volume of interviews with Daniel Buren, and a contributor to a wide range of art publications. He is currently "Director of Programme" at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (UK).

This exhibition will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated book on Lauwers’s art work, focusing on the period from 1996 to 2006. It is published by Mercatorfonds, BOZAR, Actes Sud, and Needcompany. French and English editions will be available in bookshops, at the exhibition, and at all NC performances. It will appear on the French market in September.

Opening hours
Tuesday > Sunday 10:00 > 18:00
Thursday 10:00 > 21:00

Entry
Admission free

For more information go to: http://www.bozar.be

Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum

Werner Reiterer
Eye Sucks World
Curators: Peter Pakesch, Katia Schurl

Opening: Friday, March 2 / 7pm
March 3 – May 13, 2007
Tue – Sun 10am-6pm

Kunsthaus Graz am
Landesmuseum Joanneum
Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz

T +43-316/8017-9200, F -9212
info@kunsthausgraz.at
http://www.kunsthausgraz.at

The works of Styrian artist Werner Reiterer are characterised by dialogue and communication. The
beholder “may feel addressed”*, as the artist invites him to reflect on the sense and senselessness of the world we live in. “I believe that art per se is actually always about to develop new rules as to how one may perceive the world”, says Reiterer finding himself in the lucky position of someone capable of turning the world upside down and make new rules.

In addition to sculptural works, it is mainly drawings that serve as an outlet for the play of Reiterer’s thoughts. The artist’s constant formalism, expressed in the consistent use of exactly 17 pencils all differing in thickness for 17 different shades of grey and the consistent format (70 x 50 cm) recall drafts on a sketch pad. Many works from the “Gezeichnete Ausstellungen (Drawn exhibitions)” series, constantly expanded and complemented by the artist, were implemented in the form of installations and sculptures.

Seemingly familiar as these sculptures are at first glance, they are very irritating on closer inspection. The works appear like a source of irritation in a normal world and quite often it is only small details that are confusing and they involve the person who notices them in a private dialogue. It is a strategy of the paradox Reiterer uses to deprive us of the implicitness, we need to understand reality. It is very evident here that the artist takes pleasure in testing the recipients of his art, undermining expectations vis-à-vis pieces of art per se.

A lapidary note, for instance, mounted on the wall of the exhibition room, invites visitors to roar as loud as they possibly can. Whoever succeeds in overcome his or her cultural education forbidding him or her to be loud in the public space, will be rewarded by a reaction from outside: the exhibition lighting in Space02 starts breathing, both visually and acoustically (Breath [Kunsthaus Graz], 2007). Reiterer’s principle, to let both objects and material act in a human way stems from an absurd tradition.

In fact, the artist admits, “to rape, abuse, ravish and form various objects of everyday life, according to various different rules”**, in reality, however, he liberates them from the prison of pre-determined contexts rather than tormenting them. “The lapidary creep (like a virus) into unexpected contexts with conscious platitude, but without doubt in a somewhat cryptic manner […]“*** Lapidary is the term one might also use for Reiterer’s way of dealing with his own person, being used as a tool in numerous sculptural casts to represent the unacceptable.

May 3 / 7pm
Stephan Berg:
Werner Reiterer and the imaginary effectiveness
Kunsthaus Graz, Space02

ARTFORUM

EVERYONE WAS THERE

SCENE & HERD AT THE ARMORY SHOW Artforum’s online diary takes you behind the scene during New York’s art fair week

02.24—BRIAN SHOLIS on the fairs

“The buttoned-up uniformity was a little disappointing, but, always up to a challenge, I offer the names of (more or less) new-to-me artists whose work I enjoyed: Charlie Hammond, Adel Abdessemed, Anne Hardy…”

READ ON http://www.artforum.com

02.22—TRÂN DÚC VÂN on Jeff Wall at MoMA

“One virtue of Galassi’s extra-taut Jeff Wall retrospective is that I had time to make four laps of the exhibition before the dinner trumpets sounded. When I located my table in a part of Russia where some of you have likely done time, a glance at the place cards revealed another happy/worrisome sign of global warming….”

READ ON http://www.artforum.com

02.24—BRIAN SHOLIS on the fairs

“These days the big-four fairs are a bit like publicly traded companies (and dealers impatient shareholders): Fair organizers have to beat expectations. As one first-time exhibitor put it, ‘You’d have to be an idiot not to make a profit,’ so making back the booth-rental fee is no longer enough….”

READ ON http://www.artforum.com

WHILE YOU’RE IN NEW YORK

Artforum.com is the art traveler’s “to do” list. Log on to make the most of your week at the fair.

Critics’ Picks: What’s best in the best of the galleries.

artguide: A comprehensive listing of exhibitions around the planet

eat/sleep: A curated list of restaurants and hotels for the art weary.

ARTFORUM.COM

For more information go to: http://www.artforum.com

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Discover how the modern west was won in the first exhibition to highlight how the Western landscape shaped the modern art movement. Featuring masterpieces from Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and Frederic Remington, The Modern West offers a fresh and innovative look at one of the most important movements in the history of art.

The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950
Opens March 4
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Boulevard,
Los Angeles CA, 90036.

For more information, visit http://www.lacma.org.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) offers a fresh assessment of American modernism in The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950, on view from March 4 to June 3, 2007. In the first major exhibition to explore the role of the American West in the development of modernism in the United States—a movement traditionally associated with the East Coast—the works of some of the most influential artists of the last century and a half will be highlighted. Together, pieces from Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, Jackson Pollock, and others challenge the notion that the art of the West is unrelated to modernism in the U.S. and demonstrate that the vast, rugged land of the West, in fact, left an indelible mark on modernism. Organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Modern West features approximately one hundred paintings, watercolors, and photographs that collectively redefine commonly held perceptions of modernism as well as western art.

“The Modern West offers an extraordinary opportunity to see the American West anew—through the eyes of some of the most important modern artists working in America in the early twentieth century, many not traditionally associated with the West,” noted Austen Bailly, Assistant Curator of American Art. “The impact of the western landscape on American modernism has long been underestimated and this exhibition makes the connections stunningly visible.”

Evening Star No. II (1917) a watercolor by Georgia O’Keeffe, is among the artist’s earliest, most intense visual responses to the western landscape, specifically to the prairie of the Texas panhandle. From 1916 to1918, O’Keeffe lived in Canyon, Texas while she headed the art department at West Texas State Normal College (now called West Texas A&M University). In west Texas, O’Keeffe established her aesthetic goals: she began to use bold color as an expressive vehicle and to understand the landscape in modern terms as a place of freedom, power, and seemingly infinite space and time. These watercolors suggest the kind of intuitive response to the western land and sky, at once representational and abstract, that O’Keeffe cultivated in her art.

Though Jackson Pollock is commonly associated with modernists working in New York, he was born in Wyoming and raised in California and Arizona. Night Mist (1945) reveals his attraction to symbols of ancient cultures and Native American art, and also showcases the iconography he generated on his own. Symbols of a primordial spirit world—fragmented images of humans, birds, eyes, and faces—lurk beneath a web of white paint. Pollock was profoundly interested in the psychological and physical characteristics of the western landscape and in the cultural references he placed on it. His efforts to express his personal experience of the West led him to paint in radically new ways and to become a pioneer of abstract expressionism.

Photographs, a key medium in modern American art, account for half of the works in the exhibition. In Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas (1938), Dorothea Lange documented the changing relationship between Americans and the land in a formal manner that reveals her interest in modern aesthetics. The subject of the photograph is twofold—the geometry, form, composition, and divisions of space that the modern landscape offered an artist and imposed on its inhabitants, as well as the farmers who had been “tractored out.” The absence of workers in this picture signals the human costs of mechanized farming and also enables the artful vision Lange constructs of the empty farmland.

Edward Weston also explores western American modernism through the lens of the camera. Oil on Rocks, Point Lobos (1942) depicts an area three miles south of Carmel, California, where Weston settled in 1929 and established his portrait practice. In the photograph, Weston is not merely capturing a formal, modernist pattern he perceived in the oil on the rocks; he also aims to portray a collision between ancient geology and modern life. The environmental degradation of the spilled oil does not, however, obscure the rock textures and markings formed by weather and water over millions of years. The marks and splashes present in Weston’s photograph instead represent the layered history of land and life in the West that interested many modern artists.

Rather than offering an exhaustive survey, The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890–1950 highlights the various groups and artists who played integral roles in shaping visions of specific regions and how they pursued related issues of modernity and concepts of national character that were relevant at this time. For these artists, the West provided a “new” environment—a new nature and the people who inhabited it—for constructing American art on thoroughly modern ground.

Credit: This exhibition was organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Generous funding was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional support was provided by the Stark Foundation; the Hamill Foundation; Mr. Frank Hevrdejs; Mr. and Mrs. Peter R. Coneway; Wells Fargo; Fulbright & Jaworski; Jeff Fort and Marion Barthelme; Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Clarke; Mr. John R. Eckel, Jr.; Linn, Thurber, Arnold & Skrabanek; Lisa and Will Mathis; and Carla Knobloch. The catalogue for this exhibition received support from Palm Beach! America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair. In-kind support for the Los Angeles presentation was made possible by official hotel sponsor Millennium Biltmore as part of the Millennium on View program.

Organizing Curator: Emily Ballew Neff, MFAH

LACMA Curator: Austen Bailly, American Art

About LACMA
In April 2006, Michael Govan became CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He is the seventh person to hold the position of Director in the museum’s 41-year history. Established as an independent institution in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has assembled a permanent collection that includes approximately 100,000 works of art spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States. Located in the heart of one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, the museum uses its collection and resources to provide a variety of educational and cultural experiences for the people who live in, work in, and visit Los Angeles. LACMA offers an outstanding schedule of special exhibitions, as well as lectures, classes, family activities, film programs, and world-class musical events. The museum offers free admission after 5 pm every day th
e museum is open and all day on the second Tuesday of each month. LACMA’s “Free after Five” program is sponsored by Target.

General Information: LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles CA, 90036. For more information, call 323 857-6000 or log on to http://www.lacma.org.

Museum Hours and Admission: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, noon–8 pm; Friday, noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesday. Admission (except to specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month, and every evening after 5 pm

For more information go to: http://www.lacma.org

Columbus College of Art & Design

Prophets of Deceit
Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, Ohio

Opening reception: February 28, 2007, 5:30–8 p.m.
Exhibition: February 28–April 18, 2007
Canzani Center Gallery
Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
Thursdays until 8 p.m.
Curated by Magali Arriola.

http://www.ccad.edu/events.htm#prophets

This exhibition has been organized by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.

Lecture: Vitaly Komar, March 12, 6 p.m.
Canzani Center Auditorium
Sponsored by Neil K. Rector

The Columbus College of Art & Design presents Prophets of Deceit, an exhibition that looks into predictions and prophecies as guidelines to the development of history. This exhibition explores the significance of messianic and apocalyptic cults as systems restraining social behavior. Rather than announcing unsuspected events, claims of anticipated knowledge tend to administer fear and uncertainty in order to dictate the outcome of the future.

“Looking into notions of mysticism, religion and the occult as guidelines that assess the development of history, Prophets of Deceit constitutes an essay on the pervading significance of messianic and apocalyptic cults both as systems of restraint of social behavior, and as seditious exercises that seek to subvert those very same structures that brought them into play,” says curator Magali Arriola.

The works in the exhibition posit a series of scenarios in which retroactive myths and self-fulfilling prophecies are enacted as exercises of ideological juggling. In doing so, they not only point to the symptoms of a widespread phenomenon that embraces the specter of authoritarian irrationalism, but also investigate the role of art within the culture industry by questioning artists’ function and the interpretation of their messages in a media-saturated society.

Artists include Craig Baldwin, Tacita Dean, Rod Dickinson, HCRH, Christian Jankowski, Joachim Koester, Komar & Melamid, John Menick, Melvin Moti, Raymond Pettibon, Mungo Thomson, PHAUSS (Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser).

Columbus College of Art & Design
107 North Ninth Street
Columbus, Ohio 43215
614 222 3270
http://www.ccad.edu

The Ohio Arts Council helped fund this program with state tax dollars to encourage
economic growth, educational excellence and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

For more information go to: http://www.ccad.edu/events.htm#prophets

ARC / Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Cie
Expodrome
until 6 May 2007

Open daily 10am-6pm, Wednesday 10am -10pm
closed Monday

http://www.mam.paris.fr

This is ARC’s first major solo exhibition of the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In preference to the more conventional retrospective mode, the artist has opted for presenting an ensemble of works created in collaboration with an "exhibition team" – her version of a film crew. Embodying the notions of "shared space" and "playground", the exhibition puts the viewer at the heart of the set.

Since the early 1990s, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has been pursuing a thoroughly independent line, never hesitating to move beyond the art field, push back its frontiers and explore its relationship with such other domains as cinema, architecture, fashion, music and literature. She has built her oeuvre around "space", beginning with the intimacy of Chambres and working through films and environments to her extreme urban situations and landscapes.

In ARC’s modernist architectural setting Expodrome brings together a number of "space-times" that trigger singular experiences: Solarium, La Fée Electricité, La Jetée, Promenade, Panorama, Cosmodrome and Cinéma.

These environments – visual, sound-based, physical – make up an exploratory journey "on the edge of the exhibition". The exhibition is the medium for the artist: designing potential spaces and exploring limitations are ways of producing situations a little like staged scenes with which viewers can engage as they move through the exhibition.

The first such situation – created with Nicolas Ghesquière – is the environment/projection Solarium on the great staircase leading to the Salle Dufy.

Then, integrated into the exhibition, comes Dufy’s panoramic La Fée Électricité, accompanied by an instrumental montage by Alain Bashung.

On the ARC floor itself La Jetée, another joint creation with Nicolas Ghesquière, slows visitors’ progress down with an artificial landscape, an accumulation of sombre blocks and modules.

The large space opens out onto Promenade, created with Christophe Van Huffel: an invisible work whose cinema-inspired use of sound turns this into a radically tropicalised zone.

Panorama, created with Benoît Lalloz and Martial Galfione, presents, in the curved area, a contemporary version of 19th century panoramas, a luminously nocturnal vision of our planet’s great metropolises.

Tapis de lecture is an invitation to leaf through piles of paperbacks: these are the artist’s "reservoir of possibilities", the source material for her fictions.

Next, an outdoor walkway takes the visitor into Cosmodrome (2001), a launch pad with sound by Jay-Jay Johanson.

Lastly, Cinéma is a selection of Gonzalez-Foerster’s films – some made with Ange Leccia – since 1996. Every Sunday at 3 pm a guest will offer a special cinema programme that ties in with the exhibition.

The written and visual collaborations making up the catalogue played a large part in the genesis of Expodrome. Among the contributors are Jean-Max Colard, Nicolas Ghesquière, Francesca Grassi, Lisette Lagnado, Ange Leccia, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Rahm and Angeline Scherf.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has already shown several times at ARC, with Numéro Bleu (1991), L’hiver de l’amour (1994), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno (1998) and Voilà (2000); at many international biennials and film festivals; and more recently at the 27th São Paulo biennial (2006). She was invited at Documenta XI in Kassel (2002) and will be taking part in the next Skulptur Project in Münster this year.

Director of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris : Fabrice Hergott
Head of ARC : Laurence Bossé

Curated by : Angeline Scherf with Emilie Renard

Contact Press & Communication : Héloïse Le Carvennec
heloise.lecarvennec@paris.fr / Tel. : 00 33 1 53 67 40 50

For more information go to: http://www.mam.paris.fr