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If I Can’t Dance - I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution

Huis & Festival a/d Werf presents If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution

Edition II: ‘Feminist Legacies and Potentials in
Contemporary Art Practice’

Episode III at Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht
May 17 – May 26 2007

http://www.ificantdance.org
http://www.festivalaandewerf.nl

bel hook talks about ‘feminist movement’, reactivating the term in a transitive way - as a verb almost - so that it becomes this notion of constant action and a kind of restless criticality.
– Connie Butler 2007

If I Can’t Dance… is a rolling curatorial project based on performative practices, which departs from a spirit of open questioning and a long term enquiry with artists. Currently it focuses on the legacies and potentials of feminism(s) in relation to art today. Inspired by the quote of Emma Goldman, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”, the project explores the critical and celebratory implications of this statement in artists’ work.

This edition of If I Can’t Dance… explores how feminist thinking on all levels (social, artistic, political, theoretical, ideological or structural) may be important in our cultural life. The project has explored these tendencies as inquisitively and openly as possible over the last year and a half by repeatedly working with an expanding group of over thirty artists and mounting exhibitions, organising symposia and performance events, and running an on-going reading group.

This May for Festival a/d Werf in Utrecht a new programme of performances by Jutta Koether, Jon Mikel Euba, Itziar Okariz and planningtorock will take place. If I Can’t Dance… will also premiere the newly commissioned film of The Otolith Group, “Otolith II’”, at Casco in Utrecht.

Programme

The Otolith Group - “Otolith II”
Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, Nieuwenkade 213-215
Dutch premiere on Thursday May 17, 20:00 with an introduction by the artists Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun; further screenings on Friday May 18, Saturday May 19 & Sunday May 20 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00, 19:00, 20:00 (45 min)
“Otolith II” is coproduced by Huis & Festival a/d Werf, If I Can’t Dance…, KunstenFestivalDesArts & Argos, Centre for Media and Art

Jutta Koether - “Touch and Resist”
Huis a/d Werf, Studio 2 and 3
Monday May 21 & Tuesday May 22 19:30 hrs (30 min)
“Touch and Resist” is coproduced by Huis & Festival a/d Werf

Jon Mikel Euba – “Re: HORSE” & “RGB Horse”
Cartesiusweg
“Re: Horse”: Tuesday May 22 & Wednesday May 23 17:00 (60 min)
“RGB Horse”: Friday May 25 & Saturday May 26 19:30 (30 min)

Itziar Okariz - “Climbing Buildings”
De Neude
Friday May 25 & Saturday May 26 in the afteroon

planningtorock - “Show me what you got”
Huis a/d Werf, Koepelzaal
Friday May 25 & Saturday May 26 22:15 (45 min)

Curators
Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher.

Partners & Episodes
Edition II of If I Can’t Dance…is staged in 4 episodes: Huis & Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht, May 2006 & May 2007 | de Appel, Amsterdam, November 2006 – January 2007 | MuHKA, Antwerp, October 2007 – January 2008

Financial Support
Edition II of If I Can’t Dance… is financially supported by Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst, British Council, Stichting Cultuurfonds van de Bank Nederlandse Gemeenten, The Netherlands Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Mondriaan Foundation, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.

Information
For updated information on the programme and addresses of the venues, times and entrance fees check: http://www.festivalaandewerf.nl.

Contact
info@ificantdance.org

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

Flash Art International

Flash Art International No.254
(May-June 2007)

http://www.flashartonline.com

Flash Art International # 254
May-June Issue
SPECIAL REPORT: ART FAIRS

Which are the best art fairs in the world? In the May-June issue’s “Special Report: Art Fairs,” Giancarlo Politi explores the present and the future of the main art fairs through a series of interviews with Samuel Keller (Art Basel/Art Basel Miami Beach), Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover (Frieze Art Fair), Katelijne De Backer (The Armory Show), Lourdes Fernández (ARCO), and Martin Bethenod and Jennifer Flay (FIAC).

This issue has two features dedicated to the Georgian artist Andro Wekua. Daniel Baumann’s essay introduces the artist’s practice while Maurizio Cattelan’s interview plunges the reader into the surreal atmosphere of the work itself.

In a conversation exclusively conducted for Flash Art, Banks Violette and Terence Koh suggest two sides of the same coin, the darkness and the light. Here they tell us what they most love and hate, and why they think Romanticism is an essential element in their respective works.

Part 2 of Jan Tumlir’s essay “Sci-Fi Historicism” focuses on the sun-baked architectural landscape of Southern California, exploring the work of Amir Zaki, Andrea Zittel, Anthony Burdin, Rodney MacMillian, Mario Ybarra Jr. and Aaron Curry among others.

Isa Genzken’s concept of geometry, the influence of Minimalism on sculpture and the photographic legacy of Hilla and Bernd Becher are only a few of the issues covered by Andreas Schlaegel in his tribute to the German artist, titled “Fuck The Bauhaus.”

This issue’s Reprint is dedicated to Robert Gober. The psychoanalist Henry Schwartz analyzes the lapses of consciousness in the artist’s works.

Ouverture introduces Marcellvs L.’s work; this issue’s Global Art presents Andreas Gursky’s new series of photographs “Pyongyang”; Spotlight features Francis Alÿs’ “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.”

Group show reviews include: “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at MOCA Los Angeles; 2nd Moscow Biennale; CIRCA Art Fair in Puerto Rico; San José’s “Estrecho Dudoso”; “Elelphant Cemetery” at the Artists Space in New York; and the 5th Triennial of Slovenian Contemporary Art at Moderna Galerija in Lubljana.

Solo show reviews include: Christian Jankowski, Goshka Macuga, David Hammons, Hellen van Meene, Superflex, John Bock, Peter Coffin, Tom Dale, Izima Kaoru, Laurenz Berges, Hans Haacke, Ulla von Brandenburg, Lothar Hempel, Athanasios Argianas, Jonathan Monk, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Carolina Caycedo, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Adriana Varejão.

For Fresh Start, Gea Politi meets Pippi Langstrumpf.

The COVER ARTISTS of this issue are: Andro Wekua and Isa Genzken.

Get your hands on a copy of the May-June issue of the world’s leading art magazine while supplies last.

For information and subscriptions:
Flash Art International
Via Carlo Farini, 68
20159 Milan
ITALY
Tel. 39 02 668 6150
info@flashartonline.com
http://www.flashartonline.com

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

GAMeC

VANESSA BEECROFT. PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio

ELDORADO.
JORDAN WOLFSON. OPTICAL SOUND
curated by Alessandro Rabottini

Opening:
TUESDAY 8 MAY 2007 at 6.30 pm
GAMeC, Bergamo

9 MAY – 29 JULY 2007

On 8th May GAMeC will present a solo show dedicated to Vanessa Beecroft and a Jordan Wolfson exhibition, part of Eldorado series GAMeC conceived for the most exciting international emerging artists.

Vanessa Beecroft. Paintings and drawings
At GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Vanessa Beecroft’s painted work will be the subject of a solo show for the first time at international level. The exhibition, curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, will offer visitors an exhaustive look at a particular aspect of Beecroft’s output, and provides a unique chance to emphasise the pictorial and figurative roots that have been fundamental since the start of her career but often little known by the public at large.

The solo show will occupy four rooms on the second floor of the museum and include approximately 350 drawings, 30 medium-sized oil portraits, and more than 20 large canvases of which two are from the early 1990s and 14 have been specially painted for the exhibition at GAMeC.

Vanessa Beecroft is known internationally for her performances and for photographs of semi-nude and immobile women in the spaces of some of the most important museums and galleries in the world. Taking the female condition as her field of investigation and using the female body as her material, Beecroft tackles some of the most controversial aspects of contemporary culture and society, for example, the relationship between food and sexuality, and society’s obsession with beauty and physical appearance. Her work draws on sculpture, painting, photography, cinema and theatre.

So all her work originates in drawing and painting. In her famous tableaux vivants, her characters are dressed and set out in a manner that is clearly related to pictorial language. At the same time their clothes and hairstyles may be inspired by the metaphysical world of Giorgio de Chirico, the art of antiquity, Italian and Flemish Renaissance or the Pre-Raphaelites painting. In turn, Vanessa Beecroft’s painting has its raison d’être in “expressionist” modern drawing, in Egon Schiele’s bodies marked by desire or neurosis, or in the synthesis of Matisse’s line-drawing which she expresses in her own artistic language.

The exhibition will examine one of the least known aspects of Vanessa Beecroft’s output: it is both intimate and private, yet it is also fundamental to her work in general.

The show will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Electa (Milan), with a text by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. The catalogue will discuss Beecroft’s painting exhaustively, not just the works on show, but almost all the paintings and drawings that the artist has produced till the present day.

ELDORADO
JORDAN WOLFSON. OPTICAL SOUND
GAMeC presents the first solo show in a public institution in Italy by the American artist Jordan Wolfson. For the occasion the artist has conceived an exhibition, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, comprised of three recent works, culminating in Landscape for Fire, a new video work commissioned and produced by GAMeC.

The work of Jordan Wolfson ranges in video, photography, and environmental and sound installations. Using various tools and means, the artist’s array of themes and atmospheres is evoked with great freedom, bringing together myths and pop culture, references to conceptual art and the poetry of our everyday experiences.

The three works in the exhibition represent chapters in a story made up of pauses and enigmas, and featuring themes dear to Wolfson, such as time, language, memory and absence.

Both the 16 mm film Forest from Above in Reverse and the sound installation appeal to the sensibilities of the observer in our capacity as consumers of entertainment and, through the isolation of elements typical of cinematic narration (sound in the first case and movement of the camera in the second), stimulate a gentle choreography of suspense, irony and imagination. In both works, nature is the desolate, minimal setting for an obvious mise-en-scène, one that always calls into question art, suggestion and the construction of images as artifice, convention and a linguistic game. The complexity of the artist’s personal relationship with the history of recent art lies at the centre of the third work Landscape for Fire. It’s a video that has grown out of a film made in 1972 by the English artist Anthony McCall titled Landscape for Fire. The film was McCall’s first attempt to integrate performance, installation, sculpture and images in movement. Thirty years on, Wolfson p
roduced a “cover” and by an extreme use of citation and appropriation, he realized a work in which nostalgia and the past are interwoven with a reflection on the nature of artistic creation. He stages a work of the past as though it were a ritual, the repetition of which invokes the almost mystical aura that surrounds many of the visual works of Conceptual, Land and Performance art from the early 1970s.

Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday: 10 am–7 pm
Thursday: 10 am–10 pm
Closed Monday

For information:
GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea
Via San Tomaso, 53
24121 Bergamo
tel. +39 035 270272
fax +39 035 236962
http://www.gamec.it

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