Artipedia - Arts News

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

Lisi Raskin
Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station
April - September 2008

Center for Curatorial Studies and
Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
845-758-7598
ccs@bard.edu
http://www.bard.edu/ccs

Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station is a commissioned project by the Center for Curatorial Studies’ first artist-in-residence, Lisi Raskin. Raskin is a Brooklyn based artist working with subjective responses to the contemporary climate of fear and its legacy stemming from the Cold War. Her practice involves a sublimation of childhood fears of and adult desires for nuclear apocalypse into a slightly twisted and highly physical recreation involving makeshift production and playfully dark fantasy. This project continues her investigations into spaces of fear.

The American West has long been associated with a list of familiar tropes: the cowboy, the desert and boundless expansion. In the mid-20th century, however, an entirely new articulation of land use entered the vocabulary of the West – that of the atom bomb. Atomic testing in sites from the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada; to Wendover, Utah; to Los Alamos, New Mexico have been conducted by the U.S. government in an unprecedented form of manifest destiny.

The ever-present paranoia of Cold War rhetoric in Reagan-era American politics has led Raskin to a fascination with this form of land usage in the American West. For her residency, she will be taking a custom van through a tour of historic nuclear test sites and sites of nuclear development. On this month-long trip she will make plein air outdoor sculptures, installations, transmissions and drawings inspired by and built from the landscape of the sites she visits.

From this mobile observation station, art works and ephemera will be mailed back to headquarters at the Center for Curatorial Studies, where they will be processed and displayed by CCS Bard graduate students in a post office/receiving station constructed specifically for the project. The entire Audrey and Sydney Irmas Atrium will be re-configured into a plywood bunker cum post office replete with satellite dish, an artwork receiving station, and an audio and video diary station, which will be updated with intermittent transmissions from the field.

The sites to be toured by the artist may include, but are not limited to, the Titan Missile Museum in Tucson, Arizona; Wendover Air Force Base in Wendover, Utah; the Nevada Test Sites in Las Vegas; and the White Sands Missile Range twenty miles to the east of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

LISI RASKIN (Miami, FL 1974) lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, New York

Selected exhibitions include: Bard Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum, NY (2008); Milliken Gallery, Stockholm (solo) (2008); Guild & Greyshkul, New York (solo) (2007); Signal Galeri, Malmoe, Sweden (solo) (2007); Gavle Konstcentrum, Gavle, Sweden (solo) (2007); Riccardo Crespi Gallery, Milan (solo) (2006); PS1 MoMa, Queens (solo) (2006); Kuenstlerhaus Bethanian, Berlin (solo) (2005); Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany (2007); IASPIS Project Space, Stockholm (2007); Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania (2003)

Lisi Raskin’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, Tema Celeste, and Frieze magazine.

For more information about Lisi Raskin contact Guild & Greyshkul:
http://www.guildgreyshkul.com

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall

Inside Modernism
Axel Lieber and
Jörgen Carlo Larsen
19/4 – 1/6 2008

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall
Slottsgatan
261 31 Landskrona, Sweden

http://www.landskronakultur.se

Axel Lieber and Jörgen Carlo Larsen

Axel Lieber is a sculptor and an active teacher and visiting professor at various art schools in Sweden and abroad. He was educated at Staatliche Kunstakademie (the State Art Academy) in Dusseldorf and is a member of the artists’ collective “Inges Idee,” which is dedicated to art in public places.

Jörgen Carlo Larsen, also a sculptor, was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He is a member of the Danish Arts Foundation Expert Committee for Environmental Art.

Axel Lieber and Jörgen Carlo Larsen are artists whose work combines humour, wisdom and inventiveness with sculpture.

Inside Modernism

Landskrona Konsthall was designed in 1963 by architects Sten Samuelsson and Fritz Jaenecke. The severe architecture in concrete and glass is considered one of the prime examples of Swedish modernism. The modernist aesthetic of the museum is the foundation of the entire exhibition, as Axel Lieber and Jörgen Carlo Larsen work with parallels between the building as an art museum and the building as a home. They use the museum as a laboratory to explore the nuances of modernism, undogmatically and personally. The artists move between the sweeping ideas of modernism and the details that have set their stamp on them in concrete terms, as people and as sculptors. The exhibition becomes a kind of “modernism revisited,” where they playfully examine the ideas that originated from that time.

For instance, Ray and Charles Eames, key figures in the “new” modernism after the Second World War, were one point of departure for the exhibition. Their work spanned a broad field – from designing houses and furniture to being enlightening educators, always with a sense of fun. A photograph of the Eames couple peering into one of their house models was one of the catalysts for the exhibition concept at Landskrona Konsthall.

The exhibition is built around a number of modules, including Greenhouse, a kind of model of the museum in and of itself. Herbs and vegetables are grown inside that are used to prepare the soup that visitors are offered and can pick up in Abstract Cooking, an abstract sculpture that is also a kitchen. The dishes used to serve the soup are the ones used in the exhibition’s looped video, Building up, Falling down. In the video, the artists build an urban landscape using white, everyday household dishes – a game with things found around the house that blends the micro and macro perspectives.

It is precisely the shift between the micro and macro perspectives – along with the life cycle, with circles appearing and reappearing in various ways – that ties the exhibition together. The artists want to mix the experiences and give onlookers an opportunity to “travel” through space and time, through different scales, through then and now, and to switch between being active and passive. Art is mixed with the mundane, and the changes of perspective are exhilarating.

The “donut” shape of the building, with the atrium courtyard forming the centre hole, is used to create a lamp. The atrium courtyard is covered in a coloured foil, casting a very special light over the exhibition. The entire gallery is thus transformed into a massive lamp in reference to the famous rice paper lamps designed by the Japanese-American designer and sculptor Isamu Nogushi.

A number of sculptures that interact with the exhibition are placed in the park surrounding the museum. Lieber and Larsen invited fourteen other artists to contribute their visions, in model form, of what a sculpture park might look like fifty years from now. The proposals are presented as the utopian group exhibition Sculpture Park 2058 inside the museum, where the visitor can look at them and the existing sculptures in the park at the same time.

Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall
Inside Modernism is the second of three exhibitions in the Spelplan Landskrona Konsthall project, a joint initiative of Kultur Skåne and the Municipality of Landskrona.

Hours
Tuesday 12-17, Wednesday – Sunday 13-17. Closed Mondays.

Information
http://www.skane.se/kultur
http://www.landskronakultur.se
Jaana Järretorp, Kultur Skåne, +46 418 35 07 24
Birthe Wibrand, Landskrona Konsthall, +46 418 47 05 69

S.M.A.K.

Guillaume Bijl
Bidet Museum, 2002
Collection De Coninck Mechelen

EXPO S.M.A.K.
Guillaume Bijl
05.04 - 06.07.2008

S.M.A.K.
Citadelpark z/n
9000 Ghent

http://www.smak.be

For more than thirty years Guillaume Bijl (b. 1946, Antwerp) has explored the boundaries separating art and (social) reality in his work, and is one of the most prominent Belgian artists of his generation on the international scene. In his installations he creates ‘environments’ using materials that are familiar to us, or, better said, materials we have all ‘experienced’, such as a shoe shop or a driving school. In this way he creates a sort of ‘reality within an unreality’ in his work. As Guillaume Bijl usually displays his work in a neutral space, such as an art gallery or museum, this reality acquires an element of surprise. Through the transformation of the context into sets which have completely lost their social function, these orchestrated ‘bits of reality’ become frozen. With his ironic sense of humour he confronts us with our modern western society and its ‘formatted environments’. Consequently, as consumers we are forced to think critically about
this reality he ‘exposes’.

By way of his artistic activities Guillaume Bijl therefore explicitly questions the culture of our everyday lives and has himself divided his work as a whole into five categories. First and foremost we have the Transformation Installations, such as the Flanders Extra Fair, which have been specially compiled for the exhibition in S.M.A.K., and includes the Miss Flanders Contest, a Marriage Bureau or a Disco Wine Bar. Here his aim is to achieve an almost perfect merging of fiction and reality. By incorporating an imitation of reality he highlights the social processes inherent this same reality. Apart from this he also creates Situation Installations as a type of sham operation: concrete interventions in reality. They are barely visible to the spectator, like the posters which will appear here and there in the street advertising the exhibition. Thirdly we have the Sorrys in which the artist takes everyday objects and rearranges them in small compositions. The assemblages of exi
sting and strange objects, which strike us as poetic works of art, are exhibited in the galleries in the museum. The fourth category of his work comprises Compositions Trouvées which, as the name suggests, are compositions of reality such as a glass display case or shelving in a shop. However these ‘still lifes’ are not included in the present S.M.A.K. exhibition. A large section of the top floor of the museum is devoted to Cultural Tourism. This category comprises six installations in which Guillaume Bijl addresses the phenomenon of cultural tourism and presents certain archaeological and sociological arrangements such as The Concise History of Prehistoric Man or ‘De stoel in de kunst – In de Vlaamse Ardennen van 1980 tot nu’. In both wings of the museum we see the Bidet Museum, the Lederhozen Museum, the Erotic Museum and ‘20th-century Souvenirs’, for example.

There is an historical connection between the S.M.A.K. and Guillaume Bijl: in 1985 the first museum director Jan Hoet purchased the ‘Lustrerie Media’ installation, and the museum collection also includes a Sorry installation (1987) and the film ‘James Ensor in Oostende’ from 2000. The museum hopes to explore the collection of his ensembles in the collection even futher.

For more info and queries please contact:
Els Wuyts
S.M.A.K.
Citadelpark z/n
9000 Ghent
T +32 (0)9 240 76 47
E els.wuyts@gent.be

EXTRA. Practical information.
From 05.04 to 06.07.2008 the museum will be open every day from 10 am to 6 pm except on Mondays, with the exception of Monday 12th May (public holiday). The museum is closed from 17th March to 4th April 2008.

The museum offers a wide range of discounts on the usual admission price.
Discounts are also given to holders of a teacher’s card, student card, Cultural Youth Passport, Plus-3-pass, Knack Club card, etc. Registered job-seekers, over-55s and under-26s are also entitled to a discount. Cultural cheques, the Museum go-as-you-please-ticket and the Museum Pass are also valid admission tickets.

Free: children under the age of 12, handicapped persons and group supervisors. The museum is also open to Ghent citizens, free of charge, on Sundays between 11 am and 1 pm.

EXTRA. Visual material
Pictures of the exhibition are featured on the site at http://www.smak.be . To download these pictures you need a login and password. Applications for these may be sent to the following e-mail address: fabienne.gros@gent.be