Artipedia - Arts News

Exit Art

Guerra de la Paz, The Kiss
(from the GI Joe Series)
digital print, 2006

Love/War/Sex
December 1, 2007 - January 26, 2008
Exit Art
475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
212-966-7745

http://www.exitart.org

Jakob Boeskov, Margot Herster, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Fawad Khan, Ellen Lake, Rebecca Loyche, Guerra de la Paz, Francesco Simeti, Nick Waplington

Exit Art wants to tell you war stories through the vision of nine international artists. Love/War/Sex considers memory, history, weapons and personal stories. As a cultural center, our mission is to reflect what is going on in our society. We respond to current global conflicts by presenting this exhibition, Love/War/Sex, a comment on our culture’s fascination with, and addiction to, war. The title itself demonstrates the paradox of what war is, a combination of emotions, passions and idealistic convictions. This exhibition connects longing with violence and love with war, imagining the business of war in all its sensual manifestations.

Exit Art is known for its unique exhibition and installation design that heighten the concept of the show. The installation of Love/War/Sex, conceived and designed by Papo Colo, is an innovation in exhibition design and presentation, in part for its inclusion of real weapons of war. Choosing these objects, these “readymades”, and applying their historical contexts to the exhibition, creates an environment that provokes and confronts the viewer with the real tools of war. The idea of exhibiting weapons as art hearkens back to Leonardo da Vinci, who designed weapons for a living, and allows one to experience both the extraordinary craftsmanship and design of these killing machines.

Another installation approach was to wallpaper the exhibition space with texts of personal experiences of the war. This allows the viewer/reader to evoke images from the text. Here, the force of the narrative replaces the object and gives the viewer another kind of visual imagination, creating a sacred space for meditation. Taken from newspapers, magazines and soldiers’ blogs, the texts make one think of war in terms of these intimate stories. The juxtaposition of these weapons and the wall papered texts creates a stage for the exhibition and the public.

Jakob Boeskov’s apocalyptic video War Wizard depicts lustful soldiers and their “wizard” enemy as they invade a little boy’s dreams. The “wizard”, who embodies at once Jesus, Osama bin Laden and an Iraqi prisoner, is tortured with sex and violence by dancing soldiers. Margot Herster presents an insider view of Guantanamo politics with This is an introduction tape, a video of the families of detainees telling their relatives to trust the lawyers representing them. Referencing sports and porn as stimulants, Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s ‘educational’ video Watch Out! explains how explicit films can warp the minds of young men. Fawad Khan fuses car culture with war imagery to create a sexy but violent wall painting that evokes the chaos of a suicide bombing. Ellen Lake’s short film Betty + Johnny combines digital video and home movies shot in the 1930s and 40s to tell the story of a love lost during World War II. Rebecca Loyche’s three-channel video installation
, All’s Fair in Love and War, is a disturbing portrait of a weapons specialist who teaches military personnel how to kill. Guerra de la Paz presents Crawl, a sculpture of a dying soldier, and The Kiss, an intimate photograph of two soldiers embracing. Francesco Simeti’s Watching the War combines landscapes and images of the war in Afghanistan to create deceptively ornate wallpaper. Nick Waplington’s photographs juxtapose images of life at the war front and back at home.

Curators: Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo

ABOUT EXIT ART
Exit Art is an independent vision of contemporary culture. We react immediately to important issues that affect our lives. We do experimental, historical and unique presentations of aesthetic, social, political and environmental issues. We absorb cultural differences that become prototype exhibitions. We are a center for multiple disciplines. Founded in 1982 by Directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo, Exit Art has grown from a pioneering alternative art space, into a model artistic center for the 21st century. Exit Art is internationally recognized for its unmatched spirit of inventiveness. With a substantial reputation for curatorial innovation and depth of programming in diverse media, Exit Art is always on the verge
of change.

Exit Art is located at 475 Tenth Avenue, at the corner of 36th Street. Tuesday - Thursday, 10 - 6 pm; Friday, 10 - 8 pm; Saturday, noon - 8 pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.

For more information: 212-966-7745 or http://www.exitart.org

Anna Ning Fine Art

Requiem for Matter — The Transformation of Material by Jiao Xingtao
December 4 - 16, 2007
Opening: December 4, 2007 6 pm - 8 pm
Hong Kong Arts Centre
4th & 5th Floors, 2 Harbour Road,
Wanchai, Hong Kong

Anna Ning Fine Art is proud to present the first-ever solo exhibition in Hong Kong of the work of the exciting young Chinese sculptor Jiao Xingtao in collaboration with Hong Kong Arts Centre from December 4 - 16, 2007.

Born in 1970 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Jiao Xingtao takes familiar everyday items such as discarded packing boxes, an empty milk carton, toothpaste boxes, a rolled-up Wrigley’s chewing gum wrapper or plastic bags from department stores, and using fibre glass transform them into meticulously crafted aesthetic objects.

These works at once thrill, amuse and shock the viewer as not only does Jiao Xingtao recreate the objects with hyper-realistic attention to detail, he also plays with scale to produce the most amazing visual effects. In Jiao Xingtao’s work, small insignificant objects suddenly assume grand proportions. An old cardboard packing box, crushed at the corners, is enlarged to become a formal, monumental sculpture. One is reminded of Rauschenberg’s cardboard boxes of the 1970s, and of his determination to “work in that gap between art and life”. In the same way, Jiao Xingtao questions the distinction between art object and everyday objects, portraying boxes with marks and worn labels that reveal their history and create a patina of wear and age.

In today’s consumer society, Jiao Xingtao seems to be saying, packaging has taken on an importance out of proportion to the object it contains. Packaging may inspire and induce a desire to consume and possess; or confer a certain status. Several of his works bear well recognized luxury logos and commercial symbols including OMEGA, A/X, AK47 and bar codes. Such commercial symbols are reminiscent of Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series. However, Jiao Xingtao also distances himself from this consumerism and chooses instead to portray thrown away packaging. With a healthy disrespect for luxury brands, he prefers a trampled Hermes tie box to the pristine bright orange original; and finds a crumpled Marks and Spencer bag pleasing to the eye. In an ephemeral consumer culture, he manages to invest trivial and cast-away objects with dignity and value.

Jiao Xingtao considers these discarded items to be the by-products of mankind’s ceaseless pursuit of materialistic desires. He is also fascinated by the inverted relationship between the “inside” and the “outside” of such packages; he would like to inspire our imagination to penetrate the packaging and go beyond the surface. In “Green Bust” he uses a Wrigley’s Doublemint chewing gum green paper to “wrap”, Christo-like, a bust of Mao Zedong. This would once have been sacrilegious, but today the wrapping merely hints at something forgotten, fading into the past. The combination of a Chinese icon with a Western brand refers to the idolization of American commercial culture in China; and perhaps conversely, since a Chinese icon is packaged as if for export, to the current popularity of Chinese art in the West.

Jiao Xingtao’s choice of subject matter could not be further removed from that of traditional sculpture. At first it may seem strange, risky, even absurd. But he feels as his crumpled and shapeless objects impart unconscious information about our everyday lives, they gain a spiritual symbolic value forming a closer connection with us. Certainly they present a different dimension within the form of sculpture. They explore the ambiguous relationship of reality to artifice as the objects are familiar and vivid, yet transformed and strange. Jiao Xingtao pushes artistic boundaries, creating sculptures that provoke a philosophical as well as a visual response.

For information:
Anna Ning Fine Art
Room 101, 1/F, St. George’s Building, 2 Ice House Street, Central, Hong Kong.
Tel: +852 2521 3193 Fax: +852 2810 9228
email: info@annaningfineart.com
http://www.annaningfineart.com

frieze

frieze issue 112 out now

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‘documenta 12 was a wildly subjective curatorial indulgence — which was what made it so interesting.’ Matthew Higgs

‘Enrico David’s show at London’s ICA was a fiercely political challenge to stupidity and repression.’
Polly Staple

‘One of the best shows I have seen in 30 years was the Robert Gober retrospective at Schaulager in Basel.’ Gary Garrels

‘Taryn Simon goes a long way to restoring my faith in photography.’ Udo Kittelmann

‘An air of excitement has descended on Beijing with the opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.’ Carol Yinghua Lu

In its annual round-up frieze looks back over 2007 by asking 23 critics and curators from around the world to choose what, and who, they feel to be the most significant shows and artists of the past year, and to reveal what they are looking forward to in 2008.

Looking back, Vivian Rehberg visits the Lyon Biennial 2007, Martin Herbert assesses the 1st Athens Biennial and Dominic Eichler reflects on the 10th Istanbul Biennial.

James Trainor talks to Douglas Fogle about the forthcoming 55th Carnegie International, Adam Symczyk and Elena Filipovic, the curators of the 5th Berlin Biennale discuss what lies ahead, Andrew Hunt considers Jan Verwoert’s plans for the second Art Sheffield and Jon Bywater anticipates the 16th Biennale of Sydney.

In the magazine’s ongoing series of city reports, Aaron Schuster and Vivian Rehberg explore Brussels, a city whose sardonic humour, cultural treasures and cheap rents are attracting an increasing number of artists to work in the Belgian capital.

This month’s respondent to the frieze questionnaire is Enrico David

In the Front section, Robert Storr explores the relation between religion and the art world, George Pendle considers the implications of retro culture, Nancy Spector asks if the booming art market is bad for art and Jennifer Higgie reports on the new Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Also discussed are highlights of 2007 in architecture, design, film, literature and music, with contributions from Ali Smith, Liz Brown, Brad Horn, Cathryn Drake, Eugenia Bell, Thierry Jousse, Juliane Wanckel, Anne Powers, Simon Reynolds and Jace Clayton.

The Back section includes reviews from Austria, China, Germany, Mexico, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, including ‘The Painting of Modern Life’, Richard Prince, ‘The World as a Stage’, Christina Mackie, Geoffrey Farmer, Charles Henri Ford, Mike Kelley and Trisha Donnelly.

frieze.com
Keep up-to-date on current shows around the world with frieze.com, featuring reviews this month on Roman Signer, Olivia Plender, Alina Szapocznikow, Sam Durant, Marlene Dumas, Takashi Murakami and many more. Join the discussion with twice-weekly opinion and debate from frieze editors and watch video features on-line including; David Maljkovic’s Lost Memories from These Days from the 5th Berlin Biennial, Fikrit Atay’s Tinica from the 10th Istanbul Biennal and Manon de Boer’s
Perfect Sound.