Artipedia - Arts News

Ostrich

Life is More Important Than Art
Edited by Gilane Tawadros with an
introduction by Paul Hobson

‘Art is the most important thing in my life because it’s the only way I have of understanding life. I don’t have any other means of doing it other than through recording and then reconstructing it.’
Terry Smith, artist.

‘The question ‘What is art?’ still interests me although it’s not a question I ask myself when I’m working – I know it is art, I have no doubt about it because what I am doing I’m doing with the intention of it being art.’
João Penalva, artist.

‘Without art we wouldn’t have a means of reflecting on life. Art reveals what we don’t know that
we know.’
Susan Hiller, artist.

`Life is more important than art’ wrote James Baldwin, `that’s why art is important’. A novelist, playwright and essayist, Baldwin was concerned with the dynamic and contingent relationship between art and everyday life. What is the relationship between art and the everyday world? What does it mean to be an artist at the beginning of the C21st?

Based on a series of interviews with artists spanning at least three generations, this book investigates the current conditions for making and presenting contemporary art. Both candid and thought-provoking, artists discuss a range of topics rarely discussed in print, including their views on cultural institutions, on audiences and on being an artist today. They reflect on the contemporary art world, private and public institutions, censorship and their agenda for change.

Edited by Gilane Tawadros with an introduction by Paul Hobson, the book includes contributions from Faisal Abdu’Allah, Simon Callery, Stuart Croft, Yara El-Sherbini, Raimi Ghadamosi, Susan Hiller, Gabriel Kuri, David Medalla, Stephen Nelson, Uriel Orlow, João Penalva, Zineb Sedira, John Seth, Yinka Shonibare, Terry Smith, Alia Syed, Anne Tallentire and Simon Tegala.

Gilane Tawadros is an independent curator and writer. She was formerly the founding Director of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts), a contemporary visual arts organisation based in London and joint Chief Executive of Rivington Place. She has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes (50th Venice Biennale, 2003); The Real Me (ICA, 2005), Brighton Photo Biennial (2006) and Alien Nation (ICA, 2006). She has written and edited a number of books on contemporary art, including Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation (inIVA, 2004).

Paul Hobson is Director of the Contemporary Art Society. He was formerly Interim Director of The Showroom in London and Director of the Moose Foundation for the Arts, a foundation which supports new work across all art forms, prior to which he was the Head of Strategy & Development for the Serpentine Gallery and Head of the Royal Academy Trust. He is currently a Governor of The Place and the London Contemporary Dance Trust and a member of the Development Board of the South London Gallery. He also sits on the Ambassadorial Council for the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) capital campaign.

Life is More Important Than Art is published by Ostrich, a not-for-profit arts agency concerned with challenging and revealing the prevailing attitudes, consensus and modes of cultural production, with a specific focus on contemporary visual art. The book is designed by Dean Pavitt at LOUP.

For further information or to order a copy, please contact Ostrich by emailing ostrichmail@waitrose.com

The Museum of Modern Art

Jan De Cock. Denkmal 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, 2008. Diptych 2, module CCCXXVI, Module CCCXXVII. Chromogenic color prints. Copyright Photo Atelier Jan De Cock. Courtesy Galerie Fons Welters and Luis Campaña Gallery

Jan De Cock
Denkmal 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street,
New York, 2008
January 23 - April 14, 2008

Exhibition organized by Roxana Marcoci,
Curator, Department of Photography

http://www.moma.org

ARTIST JAN DE COCK TO CREATE FLOOR-TO-CEILING PHOTOGRAPHIC AND SCULPTURAL INSTALLATION AT MoMA FOR FIRST UNITED STATES MUSEUM EXHIBITION

The Museum of Modern Art presents Denkmal 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, 2008, Jan De Cock’s (Belgian, born 1976) first museum exhibition in the United States. De Cock, whose work has been the subject of critically acclaimed exhibitions throughout Europe during the last five years, has to date created thousands of images of sites and monuments, compiling them into large volumes which he calls denkmals, the German word for monuments. The exhibition is on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery, third floor, from January 23 through April 14, 2008.

The title Denkmal 11 refers to the Museum’s location at 11 West 53 Street. For this exhibition, the artist photographed works in MoMA’s collection, the Museum’s architecture, and spaces within the building such as the conservation labs, frame shop, library, and film theater. These color and black-and-white images are juxtaposed with images the artist has culled from the history of photography, architecture, and film, resulting in a kaleidoscopic portrait of MoMA through an interdisciplinary lens of references. In his signature encyclopedic style, hundreds of the artist’s photographs and photomontages will be hung from floor to ceiling and will be complemented by both free-standing and wall-mounted plywood sculptures informed by the aesthetic of early twentieth-century Constructivism and 1960s Minimalism.

The exhibition launches De Cock’s year-long American Odyssey project. Following Denkmal 11, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, 2008, at MoMA, the artist intends to take the images from the installation and display them at landmarks across the United States—including Jackson Pollock’s studio in East Hampton, New York; Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Mill Run, Pennsylvania; the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; the Everglades, Florida; and the Grand Canyon, Arizona. De Cock will photographically document each installation throughout his travels, generating a potentially endless atlas of images within images that will be the subject of his fourth volume.

Ms. Marcoci states, “In addition to the German definition, the word denkmal in Flemish incorporates two meanings: denk, which signifies ‘think,’ and mal, which translates as ‘mold.’ For De Cock, a denkmal is a mold for thought. De Cock’s freely associative approach to image-making and non-linear display seems to ask, ‘What is the most important thing that remains: the images or a way of looking?’ His work underscores the idea that there is no closure or definitiveness in the interpretation of the history of modern art.”

Influenced by experimental European cinema, chiefly by Jean-Luc Godard’s collage film Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98), and the protocinematic work of photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge, De Cock’s installation offers a multi-faceted view into the lineages of modernism. Shooting at the Museum in the summer of 2007, De Cock used two cameras—an analog Sinar and a digital Hasselblad—serially and from different angles, in a filmic manner. He focused on works in the collection by such artists as Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Broodthaers, Edward Hopper, Donald Judd, Kazimir Malevich, Muybridge, Lyubov Popova, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Andy Warhol. The resulting works comprise single images, diptychs, and triptychs that incorporate De Cock’s use of repetitive framing devices, extreme close-ups, and fragmentation.

De Cock made his museum debut at S.M.A.K., Ghent, in 2002, followed by a series of critically acclaimed exhibitions at De Appel, Amsterdam (2003); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2004); Manifesta 5, San Sebastián (2004); Tate Modern, London (2005); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2005); and Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2006).

To read an interview by the curator with the artist, please visit the Museum’s Web site at http://www.moma.org/jandecock

The exhibition is supported by the Society of Friends of Belgium in America.

For press inquiries, please contact Kim Donica at 212/708-9752 or kim_donica@moma.org

Arizona State
University Art Museum

Yang Fudong, Honey (video still), 2003, video.
Photo courtesy of Shanghart Gallery, Shanghai.

Available for tour through 2009

BUSINESS AS USUAL:
New Video from China /
Cao Fei and Yang Fudong

Arizona State University Art Museum
Tempe, Arizona

http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/businessasusual

Available for tour through 2009

Tour information
Business as Usual includes:
Three video pieces
1,000 gallery guides
Labels (hard copy or disc)
Insurance: Provided by venue
Availability: through 2009
Security: Moderate
Space and installation req: Variable

Exhibition information
http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/businessasusual

Business as Usual is an opportunity to examine two of the most prominent contemporary Chinese video artists. Both Cao Fei and Yang Fudong address the emergence of a new middle class in China. Contemporary artists in China employ a range of media to explore the experience of living in a rapidly changing urban environment. Globalization has brought them into contact with Western contemporary art, but their concerns remain unique to present-day China.

In Whose Utopia (2006), Cao Fei portrays workers who left their small hometowns to pursue life in the big city. They took with them dreams to be dancers and singers, and ended up in factories. Working with employees in a light bulb factory, Cao Fei has the workers dress in the garb of their dreams and perform within the environment of their actual lives, the factory.

Yang Fudong’s City Lights (2000) and Honey (2003) portray his generation of people in their late 20s and 30s who are part of the emerging middle class in China and who hover between the past and present. Fudong’s work epitomizes how the recent and rapid modernization of China has overthrown traditional values and culture. He skillfully balances this dichotomy to create works endowed with classic beauty and timelessness.

Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, China. She received her BFA from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. Her work is frequently exhibited in international biennials and surveys of contemporary Chinese art. Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing.

Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang Fudong graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou where he trained as a painter. He began working with film and video in the late 1990’s. Yang Fudong’s work has been exhibited in the 2003 and 2007 Venice Biennale, the first Moscow Biennial in 2005, and the fifth Shanghai Biennial in 2004. Yang Fudong lives and works in Shanghai.

Exhibition is made possible by the Haudenschild Collection, San Diego.

Business as Usual was featured in the September 9, 2007, New York Times article on contemporary art from China by Holland Cotter and in Art in America’s fall preview issue for 2007.
The exhibition is a Moving Targets Initiative of the Arizona State University Art Museum.

Curators
Heather S. Lineberry, Interim Director/Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum
Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Independent Curator, Former Director, ASU Art Museum

Moving Targets Initiative – ASU Art Museum
Moving Targets builds on the Museum’s long history of exploring the role of new media in the arts. It expands into new territory through presentation of new media and new systems for information delivery to the Museum’s audiences. The Museum presented its first media exhibition in 1993 with the exhibition Nam June Paik: Time for Change and represented the U.S. at the 1995 Venice Biennale with the work of Bill Viola. The Museum supports emerging artists and critically acclaimed practitioners of new genres, including solo exhibitions with William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Jim Campbell, Pipilotti Rist, Gary Hill and Francesc Torres. In 1997, the Museum developed an annual short film and video festival which continues to present the work of international artists. As technology penetrates all aspects of art, the Museum showcases outstanding innovative works.

For more information contact:
Heather S. Lineberry, Interim Director/Senior Curator
ASU Art Museum
Tenth Street and Mill Avenue
Tempe, AZ 85287-2911 USA
480.965.5272
heather.lineberry@asu.edu

http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/businessasusual