Artipedia - Arts News

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

From left to right: Cheryl Donegan, Head, 1993, Marieluise Hessel Collection, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York; Birgir Andresson, N buar, 2004, Courtesy of the estate of the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik; Superstudio, Supersurface-Life, 1972, Courtesy of the Superstudio archive, Italy.

Spring Exhibitions in the CCS Galleries, May 11 - 25, 2008
Opening reception: Sunday, May 11, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.

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

Modernism: On and Off the Grid
Martin Beck, VALIE EXPORT, Dan Graham, Dorit Margreiter, and Superstudio
This exhibition brings together works by four artists and one architectural collective that repeat, revise, or reject a legacy of Modernist architecture and design, exploring form’s relationship to history, subjectivity, and social space.
Curated by Niko Vicario

Act Out
Vito Acconci, Cheryl Donegan, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Sturtevant, and Hannah Wilke
Act Out presents video works by artists who use their bodies, or others’, to resist and repel. They emphasize the consequences and processes that occur when outside forces are integrated with those of the body, intentionally blurring distinctions between the personal and the performative.
Curated by Tyler Emerson-Dorsch

Degrees North: Six Artists and the Icelandic Landscape
Birgir Andrésson, Douwe Jan Bakker, Hreinn Friofinnsson, Kristján Guomundsson, Sigurour Guomundsson, and Magnús Pálsson
This exhibition brings together work by six artists who utilize the Icelandic landscape, language, literary tradition, and culture as source material for their conceptual artworks.
Curated by Nicole Pollentier

Museum Hours:
Wednesday - Sunday, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public.

Free transportation is available on a chartered bus that leaves from New York City for the opening reception. The bus returns to New York after the opening. For reservations, call 845.758.7598 or write ccs@bard.edu

For more information, call CCS Bard at 845.758.7598, write ccs@bard.edu , or visit http://www.bard.edu/ccs

Also on view:

Second Thoughts
Hessel Museum of Art, March 16 - May 25
Second Thoughts presents exhibition as revision. Curated by 14 graduate students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, it is a direct response to Exhibitionism (October 20, 2007 - February 3, 2008), a series of autonomous and idiosyncratic micro-exhibitions that were curated by Matthew Higgs for each of the 16 galleries in the Hessel Museum of Art. By engaging amplification, erasure, extension, and redress, Second Thoughts seeks to alter the strategies utilized by Higgs in Exhibitionism to progressively revise the
entire exhibition.

Lisi Raskin: Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station
CCS Bard Audrey and Sydney Irmas Atrium, April 15 - September 7, 2008
Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station is a new project by Lisi Raskin commissioned by the Center for Curatorial Studies as part of it’s first artist-in-residence program. On April 14, 2008, Raskin departed CCS Bard in a converted cargo van for a month-long journey across the American west to visit sites of nuclear testing and development. Throughout her journey, Raskin will send art works and ephemera 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 has been 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 installation will be on view at CCS Bard daily from April 13 - September 7, 2008.

These exhibitions were made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund, Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg, and the Patrons, Supporters and Friends of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Additional support provided by the Monique Beudert Award and the French Embassy in the US. Special thanks to the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

MuHKA

Yael Robin, Jerusalem 2007

DIE LUCKY BUSH
a project by Imogen Stidworthy
23.05 - 17.08.08

OPENING THU 22.05.08 8pm

MuHKA
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
Leuvenstraat 32 2000 Antwerp Belgium
T +32 [0]3 260 99 99
info@muhka.be
http://www.muhka.be

With work by Caroline Bergvall & Ciaran Maher, John Cage, Raoul De Keyser, Fernand Deligny, Jimmie Durham, Werner Feiersinger, Pablo Helguera, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar, Aglaia Konrad, Joseph Kosuth, Ines Lechleitner, Anestis Logothetis, Teresa Margolles, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Willem Oorebeek, Ria Pacquée, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anri Sala, Dominique Somers, Imogen Stidworthy, Richard Wentworth, Robert Wilson & Christopher Knowles, Jun Yang and Artur Zmijewsky

Imogen Stidworthy explores the physical and social impact of the spoken word. She looks at how the use of language affects communication between people and the objects around them through her stratified installations centring on language and combining a variety of media such as film, video and audio. The artist makes language manifest in the space: she likens speaking to unrolling a carpet. Her work hinges upon questions like: What is language? What do we do with language? What does language do to us and to us in relation to others? Who or what is speaking? How is it, she wonders, that two people manage to understand one another - even in situations where no language is used - when something disturbs the connection between a thought and a word or between
those people?

In DIE LUCKY BUSH Stidworthy explores this theme by means of three of her own installations, the work of some twenty artists chosen by her and material that is not normally regarded as art. The artist came across the title on the street in Jerusalem [Israel] in December 2007. The words ‘Die Lucky Bush’ had been graffitied onto a wall behind a street musician sitting on a chair playing the balalaika. The statement serves as a shibboleth, i.e. a word used to detect whether or not the speaker belongs to a particular [cultural or political] group by his or her pronunciation. For English speakers the words ‘Die Lucky Bush’ allude to George Bush or perhaps to ‘fortunate bushes’, but in Hebrew it is the phonetic transcription of ‘Stop the occupation’.

‘Die Lucky Bush’ is not really a watchword, like for instance the shibboleth ‘Schild en Vriend’ or ‘Shield and Friend’ used during the Battle of the Spurs to unmask the French and the gallicized bourgeoisie. Rather it is an ideologically charged variation of the sort of word play Stidworthy is so interested in, the osmosis or differentiation that can result when language, word and sound interact. The photograph of the graffiti is emblematic of an exhibition concerned with the thresholds of language: the borders or meeting of different languages. For example, Werner Feiersinger’s work - a fibreglass object reminiscent of an upside-down boat placed diagonally across the floor of the central exhibition space - immediately becomes a physical threshold in an exhibition which unfolds like an acoustic landscape, strewn with linguistic thresholds. The central question in DIE LUCKY BUSH is what other form of meaning can arise when something is experienced as unreadable.

The point of departure for the exhibition is Stidworthy’s film installation I hate [2007], which the artist created for Documenta 12. The subject of the work is the photographer Edward Woodman who lost his power of speech in an accident and his long struggle to rediscover his fragile voice. Practising words is part and parcel of his photography, which also changed after the accident. As a professional photographer, between 1970 and 2001 he documented installations, exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture models. Since the accident he has used the camera to record social change, and the whole process of change around him. A series of photographs relates to the King’s Cross area where the new Eurostar terminus is located. This subtle configuration of video, illuminated news trailer and sound are shown here for the first time since Documenta 12.

The second Stidworthy installation in the exhibition is entitled Get here [2006], an example of the Scouse dialect spoken in Liverpool. For the sound recording [reproduced in surround sound] she called upon Liverpudlians, Somalian refugees and actors trained by professional voice coaches to master the authentic Scouse dialect. “Get here!” is a typical command often heard on the street, for example, when mothers call their children to order. It characterizes the Liverpudlian culture, but at the same time the installation raises questions about place and identity. The diversity of voices and intonations alters words and relationships between the speaker and listener. The word ‘here’, normally a simple and quite straightforward indication of place or position, suddenly becomes a multiple, even contradictory and intangible notion. For the exhibition at the MuHKA Stidworthy gives her work a more sculptural form for the first time.

Stidworthy’s third work in the exhibition bears the title 7 A.M. Every morning crowds of people pass through the gates of Tiantan Park in Beijing. The artist’s video evokes the morning exercises and the social and acoustic space which the park becomes. The isolated figures and small groups among the trees fill the park with sound. Time and distance are measured by the hundreds of simultaneous, but individual rhythms, which evolve into an extraordinarily complex, percussive language, both acoustically and visually. The film examines the relationships, the dynamic and the implications of this social-acoustic landscape for the public.

For the first time Stidworthy uses the exhibition as a way of directly relating the ideas she employs as an artist to the work of other artists and other material. In so doing she deals not only with the purely linguistic meaning of language, but she also harnesses other forms of language – visual language, the language of sound and body language. So apart from spoken language, DIE LUCKY BUSH also comprises spatial and physical sounds and visual language. Some works are concerned not only with linguistic distinctions, but also play on political and cultural differences. There are for example the drawings in which the French educationalist Fernand Deligny recorded the actions of severely autistic youngsters who had been written off as unmanageable; whistling a lee hazelwood song through a straw in which Dominique Somers uses her body physically to record a melody graphically; Say: “Parsley” by Caroline Bergvall and Ciaran Maher, where the point of departure is a shibboleth
; Lak-kat by Anri Sala, a film about language, memory and meaning; Trepanaciones, a sound work in which Teresa Margolles examines the Western perception of death, and the compositions on paper by modern composers such as John Cage and Anestis Logothetis, which can be read as spatial-acoustic maps of sound works.

In a publication, Imogen Stidworthy pulled together conversations, essays, graphic systems and scores. Though it can be seen as a part of the exhibition, it is in fact the embodiment of research that goes a step further.

Imogen Stidworthy developed the project at the invitation of MuHKA_curator Edwin Carels and in dialogue with the Programme Director of the Liverpool Biennial Paul Domela.

Looking at Leaves: Photographs by Amanda Means, thru 2/8/2009 at Harvard Museum of Natural History

Looking at Leaves: Photographs by Amanda Means
Photography Exhibition opens May 9, 2008 at Harvard Museum of Natural History

Dramatic black & white images of single leaves by New York photographer Amanda Means are a monument to the remarkable diversity and beauty of nature’s botanical forms. These detailed blow-ups, some printed as large as 38 x 46 inches, were created by using the leaf itself in the same way as a photographic negative. The immediacy of the process gives the images an eerie intensity and adds to their compelling beauty.

“Means has the eye of both an artist and a scientist.” commented Elisabeth Werby, Executive Director of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. “These extraordinary photographs offer new ways to see and think about plants, raising intriguing questions about leaf form and function.” Looking at Leaves is the third in the museum’s series of photographic exhibitions which invite visitors to look closer at the world around them, to observe detail and pattern, and are designed to provoke inquiry.

Means’ fascination with botanical images over the last twenty years is, in part, scientific. The leaves she works with reflect lives lived in the wild, whether in the rain forest or in Central Park. Some show cracks. On others you can see pathways of insects as they ate their way across the surface. Some reflect the evolutionary history of plants, from the Peacock Plant’s more primitive pattern of parallel leaf veins to the leaves of later plants with branching veins – reflecting how the plants evolved a more efficient way to transport water and nutrients through the leaf’s surface.

Looking at Leaves will be on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History through February 8, 2009. The photographer will offer gallery talks for the public on Friday, May 8 at 3:00 pm and Saturday, May 9th at 10:00 am, free with museum admission.

About the Photographer:
Raised in rural upstate New York, Means has lived and worked in Manhattan and Woodstock, NY for 25 years. She’s a graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from SUNY Buffalo. Her work is held in the collections of numerous museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US, as well as in London, Madrid and Jerusalem. She is represented in New York City by the Ricco/Maresca Gallery and by Gallery 339 in Philadelphia, and has been shown at the Yezerski Gallery in Boston.

Looking at Leaves continues a series of important photographic exhibitions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. A 2006 exhibition, Looking at Landscape: Environmental Puzzles from Three Photographers, featured works by three acclaimed photographers— award winning aerial photographer Alex S. MacLean, MIT Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Anne Whiston Spirn, and MacArthur Fellow Camilo Jose Vergara. Looking at Landscape was subsequently exhibited at the New York Hall of Science in New York City. The second exhibition, Looking at Animals: Photographs by Henry Horenstein, which closed at the end of April, featured haunting close-ups of creatures from land and sea by the renowned Boston photographer and RISD professor.

The museum is located at 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, on the Harvard campus. With more than 150,000 visitors a year the museum is the University’s most visited attraction. For more information on exhibits, classes and events, explore www.hmnh.harvard.edu or call 617-495-3045.

Harvard Museum of Natural History: Open 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, except major holidays. Admission: $9.00; seniors and students $7.00; $6.00 ages 3-18; under 3 free. Free for Massachusetts residents Wednesdays, 3-5 p.m. (Sept-May) and every Sunday morning, 9:00 am –noon.

Kunststiftung NRW

Nam June Paik Award 2008 – Experts
nominate young artists from all over the world
http://www.kunststiftungnrw.de

In February 2008, five artists and artist groups from all over the world were nominated in Cologne by an international group of experts for the fourth International Nam June Paik Award donated by the Kunststiftung NRW (Arts Foundation North-Rhine Westphalia), Düsseldorf. The works selected for the award will be exhibited in the permanent collection of traditional European fine art in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne from 26th of September until 16th of November 2008. On October 16, 2008, the prize will be awarded by the president of the Kunststiftung NRW, Dr. Fritz Schaumann.

In 2002, the late world artist Nam June Paik lent his name together with a drawing to this most important award for media art in Germany. The drawing, which reads: „Paik NRW okay“, commemorates Paik’s 19-year activity in this German federal state – particularly in the two cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf – of which he spent more than 10 years as a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of arts. 1963, the year the „Exhibition of Music“ was held in the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, is considered the year of birth of media art. With this award, the Kunststiftung NRW intends to revive the enormous creative energies which are active until this day within the works of this global artist, and to encourage a young generation of artists to break new innovative ground. The award includes an exhibition of the nominated, during which the first prize amounting to 25,000 euros will be awarded as well as a junior prize for an artist from North-Rhine Westphalia for finishing a pro
ject amounting to 15,000 euros.

The nominating experts met on the spot in Cologne at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corbout, with its extraordinary collection from medieval art to impressionism: Solange Farkas, Videobrasil and MAM-Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (Sao Paulo/Salvador de Bahia), Yukiko Shikata, NTT InterCommunication Center ICC (Tokio), Walid Raad, artist, (New York/Beirut), Miklos Peternak, C3 Center for Culture & Communication (Budapest) and Udo Kittelmann, Museum of Modern Art (Frankfurt/Main).

They selected the following artists and artist groups for the award:
The Speculative Archive / Julia Meltzer and David Thorne (Damaskus/Los Angeles); Biopresence / Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel (Tokyo/London); Attila Csörgo (Budapest); Tatiana Blass (São Paulo) and GIA Grupo de Interferência Ambiental from Salvador de Bahía.

The selected works position themselves in a direct relation to the focal point of the museum’s collection and will correspondingly be presented at the very heart of the collection, distributed over several storeys. The aim is to search for visual connections between the cultures and times, and to review the pictorial traditions of different cultures. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of lectures and workshops on the subject.

For more information please contact:
Kunststiftung NRW
Roßstraße 133
40476 Düsseldorf
phone 0049-211-650 40 70
info@kunststiftungNRW.de
http://www.kunststiftungnrw.de

Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud
Obenmarspforten
50667 Köln
phone 0049-221-221 21119
wrm@museenkoeln.de
http://www.museenkoeln.de

frieze

Untitled (footprint)

The Cartier Award 2008: Winner Announced
http://www.frieze.com

Frieze Art Fair is delighted to announce that the winner of The Cartier Award 2008 is Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Prieto, based in Barcelona, is a talented young conceptual artist whose works often take the form of site-specific installations. His winning proposal was chosen from over 400 applications submitted by artists across the world.

The Cartier Award is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading art awards and forms an exciting and highly visible element of Cartier’s long-standing commitment to supporting contemporary art. It allows an emerging artist from outside the UK to realise a major project at Frieze Art Fair as part of the influential Frieze Projects programme curated by Neville Wakefield.

Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Habana in 2002. His work has been exhibited at SMAK (Ghent) in 2008, the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, at the Kadist Art Foundation and Apolitical at the Louvre Museum in Paris and at the VIII Havana Biennial in 2006 and in A Moment of Silence at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2003. Prieto was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.