Artipedia - Arts News

Podesva and McConchie, Emotional Google Index (2007-08)

The Helen Pitt Gallery presents

Google Emotional Index (GEI)
A web-based artwork by Kristina Lee Podesva and Alan McConchie

Opening Reception: Thursday, March 13, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Beverages served.

The Helen Pitt Gallery artist-run centre is pleased to present GOOGLE EMOTIONAL INDEX as the first of our year-long series of web-based artworks. This interactive project utizilizes and alters the Google image search engine in a subtle act of co-option to provide an ever-evolving database of images associated with the full spectrum of human emotion.

Accessible through our web-site, www.helenpittgallery.org, the GEI interface allows the participant to conduct searches for words indexing emotions far beyond our more general categories—happy, sad, angry or depressed—to help locate points of personal reflection. GEI offers the opportunity for users to explore a vast, real-time archive of individual or group images for discussion, experimentation, intervention and play As a vast, real-time image archive,

While GEI works to expand our sometimes narrow understanding of human emotional states—and highlight the highly abstract, linguistic limitations that allow us to both communicate and understand this nebulous terrain—it also challenges our ideas of the role that the image, pictorial representation, plays in our notions of emotional understanding. As GEI quickly reveals, it is these very representations that compel users to measure and compare their own feelings against what appears in the index.

Within the medium and context of the web, Google Emotional Index specifically draws a contrast between the cacophony of diverse and conflicting representations of emotion online and the narrowing of information through a single channel, specifically the Google search engine. In cataloging images from a variety of sources according to a coherent theme, GEI, among other things, proposes questions about the relationships between emotional understanding, communication, memory and representation—not to the mention the sometimes impersonal structures of categorization that underpin our most personal emotive experiences.

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, and curator based in Vancouver, Canada. She is the founder of colourschool, a free school within a school dedicated to the speculative and collaborative study of five colours (white, black, red, yellow, and brown) and cofounder of Cornershop Projects, an open framework for the examination of the relationship between art and economic transactions. In between things, she is Assistant Editor at the Fillip Review.

Alan McConchie is a MSc student in the department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His current research explores the critical and emancipatory potential of web mashups and mapping on the internet. He is the author of the popular linguistic mapsite PopVsSoda.com.

Helen Pitt Gallery
#102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6A 1B5
http://helenpittgallery.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren, Director/Curator

New Museum

Sound editing suite, Berlin, 2007.

NEW YORK PREMIERE: A CRIME AGAINST ART

“A Crime Against Art” Peleg - This staged conceptual trial on the morals of participation in the contemporary art field blurs the lines of script and character with its real performers and their possibly actual beliefs. Suddenly art promoters and theorists take on the appearance of criminals in a kind of daily TV-court, questioning the responsibility and negotiating the performative aspects of the art discourse.”
New Vision Award, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, 2007

Following successful premiers at the Copenhagen and Berlin Film Festivals, The New Museum is pleased to present the New York premier of A Crime Against Art. The screening will take place on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 7:30 PM. For tickets please go to http://www.newmuseum.org/events/158

A Crime Against Art
Director: Hila Peleg, Madrid/Berlin, 2007, 100 min, original footage DV

A Crime Against Art is a film based on the trial staged at an art fair in Madrid in February 2007. The trial, inspired by the mock trials organized by avant-garde movements in the 1920’s and 30’s, theatrically raised a number of polemical issues in the world of contemporary art: collusion with the ‘new bourgeoisie’, instrumentalization of art and its institutions, the future possibility of critical artistic agency and other pertinent subjects. The trial begins with the assumption that a crime has been committed, yet its nature and evidence are allusive and no victims have come forward. The testimonies and cross-examinations become an attempt by the Judge (Jan Verwoert), the Prosecutors (Vasif Kortun and Chus Martinez) and the Defense Attorney (Charles Esche) to unravel the nature of the puzzling “crime against art”. Set as a television courtroom drama and filmed by four camera crews, A Crime Against Art presents a condensed 100 minute version of a the trial.

Cast:
Defendants: Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar
Prosecutors: Vasif Kortun and Chus Martinez
Defense attorney: Charles Esche
Judge: Jan Verwoert
Expert witnesses: Maria Lind and Anselm Franke
Artist: Setareh Shabazi
Public: Keti Chukrov and Barnaby Drabble
With special contribution by Liam Gillick.

A Crime Against Art is based on The Trial in Madrid, February 2007
Organised by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolgdhar.

A Crime Against Art is distributed by bdv

bdv (Bureau des Videos)
7/9 Rue Gabriel Laumain
75010 Paris, France
Tel. +33 1 48 24 97 28
Fax +33 1 48 24 97 29
info@bureaudesvideos.com
http://www.bureaudesvideos.com

A Crime Against Art is the 2008 official selection at the Canadian International Documentary
Film Festival

It will be screened in Toronto at:

4/18/2008 - 9:45:00 PM at the INNIS theatre
4/20/2008 - 1:15:00 PM at the ROYAL theatre

Artes Mundi 3

Where does the dust itself collect, 2004 Xu Bing
Xu Bing, Artes Mundi 1 prize winner returns as a judge for third prize

Artes Mundi 3 Jury

Xu Bing
Jack Persekian
Tuula Arkio
David Alston

http://www.artesmundi.org

The Artes Mundi 3 Prize, worth 40,000 British Pounds, will be awarded on 24 April by an international jury comprising Xu Bing, Jack Persekian, Tuula Arkio and David Alston. The prize, awarded every two years, recognises outstanding emerging artists from around the world who discuss the human condition.

Xu Bing, artist and the new vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, is most well known for his iconic work Book from the Sky. Xu Bing returns to Artes Mundi as a judge after winning the inaugural Artes Mundi Prize in 2004 for his haunting installation Where does the dust itself
collect (2004).

Jack Persekian is a curator and writer and was Director of the Middle East’s prestigious Sharjah Biennale in 2007.

Tuula Arkio is a freelance curator and writer and is the former General Director of the National Art Galleries, Helsinki.

David Alston is Arts Director of Arts Council Wales and a curator. He was Keeper of Art at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales in Cardiff for four years during the 1990’s.

The nine artists shortlisted for the Artes Mundi 3 Prize are Lida Abdul, Vasco Araújo, Mircea Cantor, Dalziel + Scullion, N.S. Harsha, Abdoulaye Konaté, Susan Norrie and
Rosângela Rennó.

Artes Mundi 3 exhibition opens on Saturday 15 March 2008 at National Museum Cardiff and features major works by the nine shortlisted artists. In addition, the exhibition will feature new works not seen before by Araújo, Harsha and Konaté.

Artes Mundi organises a two year programme of art, education and work in communities which culminates in the Artes Mundi Exhibition and Prize.

Artes Mundi 3
National Museum Cardiff
Cathays Park, Cardiff,
Wales, UK CF10 3NP

+44 (0)2920 397 951
Open 10am-5pm Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holidays
Admission Free

Artes Mundi core supporters: Welsh Assembly Government, Cardiff Council, Arts Council of Wales, BBC Wales, National Museum Wales and The Derek Williams Trust.

Artes Mundi 3 major sponsors: St Davids 2, Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management, Gerald Eve and Arts & Business.

Media partners: Western Mail and Sky Arts

ZKM | Center for Art and
Media Karlsruhe

Lynda Benglis at work on a project commissioned by the University of Rhode Island, Kingston, 1969 (documentary photograph)
photo: Henry Groskinsky

High Times Hard Times:
New York Painting 1965 - 1975
March 29, to June 1, 2008

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Lorenzstrasse 19
76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
phone: +49 (0)721-8100-1200
info@zkm.de

http://www.zkm.de

About the exhibition:

In the late 1960s the New York art world was, famously, an exciting place to be. New mediums such as performance and video art were developing, and sculpture was quickly expanding in many different directions. Recapturing the liveliness and urgency of this important moment, High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 delves into the field of experimental abstract painting at a time when it was beginning to be pressed to its limits. Organized and circulated by iCI and curated by Katy Siegel with David Reed as advisor, the exhibition brings together over forty works by thirty-eight artists living and working in New York from 1967 to 1975. A 176-page publication accompanies the exhibition, which captures the work, the scene, and the spirit of this crucial but overlooked period in New York painting.

High Times, Hard Times not only captures a tumultuous period of political and social change, but also reflects the impact on the art world of the civil rights struggle, student and anti-war activism, and the beginnings of feminism. Painting is the one element usually left out of this complex narrative, remembered only as a regressive foil to the various new mediums. But this version of the story greatly oversimplifies the situation, effacing painting that earned a place among the most experimental work of the moment, very much in sympathy with the era’s radical aesthetics and politics.

The artists in this exhibition range from well-known figures like Mel Bochner, Yayoi Kusama, Elizabeth Murray, Blinky Palermo, and Richard Tuttle, to now less-familiar names such as Dan Christensen, Harmony Hammond, Ree Morton, and Alan Shields, who were extremely important and influential at the time. High Times, Hard Times recovers the thrilling innovations of the period, as well as their social context. Half of the included artists are women, and several are African-American (including Al Loving, Joe Overstreet, Howardena Pindell, and Jack Whitten); these identities are not incidental but essential to grasping the possibilities of the period.

Artists in Exhibition:

Jo Baer | Lynda Benglis | Mel Bochner | Dan Christensen | Roy Colmer | Mary Corse | David Diao | Manny Farber | Louise Fishman | Guy Goodwin | Ron Gorchov | Harmony Hammond | Mary Heilmann | Ralph Humphrey | Jane Kaufman | Harriet Korman | Yayoi Kusama | Al Loving | Lee Lozano | Ree Morton | Elizabeth Murray | Joe Overstreet | Blinky Palermo | Cesar Paternosto | Howardena Pindell | Dorothea Rockburne | Carolee Schneemann | Alan Shields | Kenneth Showell | Joan Snyder | Lawrence Stafford | Pat Steir | Richard Tuttle | Richard Van Buren | Michael Venezia | Franz Erhard Walther | Jack Whitten | Peter Young

About the Publication:

The first book to capture the work, the scene and the spirit of this crucial yet overlooked era in the history of New York painting, this 176-page catalogue features a major essay by Siegel, and an introductory text by painter David Reed on the artistic and political context of the work. Additional essays, written by Dawoud Bey and Anna Chave, focus, respectively, on African-American and women artists in the New York art world during this period. Statements from 17 artists in the exhibition are also featured, as are texts by critic Robert Pincus-Witten and curator Marcia Tucker who each reflect on the art, its meaning, and the social scene of the New York art world. Color illustrations of each work in the show, along with numerous historic photographs from the period, are also included.

High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975 is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI. The guest curator is Katy Siegel, with David Reed as advisor. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible in part with support from the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., the iCI International Associates, and the iCI Exhibition Partners, Kenneth S. Kuchin, and Gerrit and Sydie Lansing.

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Opening Hours:
Wed-Fri 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
Sat, Sun 11 a.m.-6 p.m.
Mon, Tue closed

Guided Tours:
Sun 1 p.m.

Press Contact:
Karin Bellmann
phone: +49(0)721-8100-1821
fax: +49(0)721-8100-1139
e-mail: presse@zkm.de