Artipedia - Arts News

Museum of
Contemporary Art,
Roskilde

Dick Higgins, Danger Music Number Seventeen, May 1962, performed by the artist. Photographer unidentified. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit.

Fluxus Scores and Instructions
The Transformative Years
“Make a salad.”
June 7 to September 21, 2008

Works from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman
Fluxus Collection, Detroit

Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde
Stændertorvet 3D
DK - 4000 Roskilde
Denmark
info@samtidskunst.dk

http://www.samtidskunst.dk

In 1962, George Maciunas declared Fluxus: “anti art, concept art, automatism, Bruitism, brutalism, Dada/ism, concretism, Lettrism, nihilism, indeterminacy—Theatre, happenings, prose, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, music, cinema, dance.” *

Fluxus Scores and Instructions, The Transformative Years: “Make a salad.” looks at the armature of the movement to think about the function of scores - what they are, how they work, what they lead to…. Some are scores in the traditional musical sense, some are instructions for events or performance, some describe set-ups for situations or installations, and some are the work itself - that is, the concept.

We invite visitors to come into contact with material that has all too long been unknown to the public, hidden away like the secret recipes of chefs or grandmothers. Fluxus is often described in a two-dimensional way, as a movement of repetitive gestural performance - leaving the extraordinary range and conceptual framework of Fluxus, for the most part, unacknowledged.

“Make a salad.” brings viewers close to the actual scores, to read and interpret them for themselves, to take ideas away from the museum and try them out on their own, in the privacy of their homes or in public places. Most of the scores and instructions are complete original manuscripts or the earliest printed versions of the works. There are also performances of scores recorded in photographs and realizations presented in other forms, alongside scratchy audio from the 1960s and blurry films of early Fluxus performances. The exhibition will also include germinal pre-Fluxus scores by George Brecht, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Walter de Maria, Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and La Monte Young.

The exhibition will include work by: Bengt af Klintberg, Eric Andersen, Arman, Ay-O, Joseph Beuys, Michael von Biel, George Brecht, Sylvano Bussotti, John Cage Giuseppe Chiari, Henning Christiansen, Philip Corner, Robin Crozier, Walter de Maria, Willem de Ridder, Marcel Duchamp, Nye Ffarrabas, Robert Filliou, Albert M. Fine, Fluxus Collective, Hi Red Center, Geoff Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Terry Jennings, Yves Klein, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Addi Køpcke, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, Györgi Ligeti, Jackson Mac Low, George Maciunas, Yoriaki Matsudaira, Pierre Mercure, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Yoko Ono, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, James Riddle, Terry Riley, Tomas Schmit, Dieter Schnebel, Paul Sharits, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Karlheinz Stockhausen, James Tenney, Yasunao Tone, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young, George Yuasa and Marian Zazeela.

The exhibition catalogue includes new, original texts by Eric Andersen, Anna Dezeuze, Letty Eisenhauer, Yoko Ono, and Susanne Rennert, as well essays by Marianne Bech and Jon Hendricks. La Monte Young has written a separate text, to be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Jon Hendricks, with Marianne Bech and Media Farzin.

“Make a salad.” is the score for Alison Knowles’ Proposition, first performed during the Festival of Misfits, ICA London, October 24, 1962.

* George Maciunas, “Fluxus Brochure Prospectus,” was distributed during the first Fluxus concert, June 9, 1962, “Kleinen Sommerfest/‘Après John Cage’,” in Wuppertal, West Germany.

Fluxus Scores and Instructions, The Transformative Years: “Make a salad.” is supported by Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Art, the Oticon Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, The City of Roskilde and Manden med Cameraet.

For further information about the exhibition, please contact Trine Friis Sørensen, curatorial assistant, at trinefs@samtidskunst.dk or tel. +45 4631 6577

Bonner Kunstverein

FIKRET ATAY: THEORETICIAN
Opening, Sunday, 15 June, 11 am
16 June - 18 August 2008

in cooperation with Biennale Bonn: Bosporus 2008

THOMAS BAUMANN: BALANCING THE WRONG AND THE TRUE …

ANNE COLLIER
Opening, Sunday, 15 June, 11 am
16 June - 17 August 2008

http://www.bonner-kunstverein.de

FIKRET ATAY: THEORETICIAN

The video work THEORETICIAN, which the Kurdish artist FIKRET ATAY has developed for the Kunstverein on the occasion of the Biennale Bonn: Bosperus, has as its theme the religious education of the youth in Turkey.

In order to imprint the daily lessons in religion better in their mind, the youths repeat the subject matter after school. The pupils, up to fifty strong, chant out loud while circling the room. Since none pays attention to the rhythm of the others when reciting, a discordant babble is the result.

ATAYS work underlines the contradictions that are associated with such teaching practices and sharpens our consciousness for the problematics of a strict religious upbringing. Also interesting is the question of the effects that physical activity and movement, such as walking and talking, have on the processes of learning and understanding.

FIKRET ATAY’s video works are closely linked to the specifically cultural, social and geographic phenomena and issues of his homeland. The artist in his videos thematizes the way young people grow up in a society that is characterized by upheaval and manifests the way it has developed by combining oriental traditions with current western influences. The situations he shows arouse in the viewer familiar and, at the same time, unfamiliar scenarios and engender a feeling of contradiction and dissonance. Whereby the situations we are shown raise questions as to tradition and development, identity and the role of the individual in society. Thus the issues claim a validity that allows them to be carried over to other cultures and situations.

ATAY was born 1976 in Batman, a region in southeastern Turkey close to the Iraqi border. He has had solo exhibitions, among others, in Paris, Le Plateau/Frac Ile-de-France (2006) as well as in Kunstverein Rheinland/Westphalia in Düsseldorf (2005). He has also participated in various group exhibitions such as the Sydney Biennial (2006) and the Istanbul Biennial (2005). The artist lives and works in Batman and Paris.

THOMAS BAUMANN: BALANCING THE WRONG AND THE TRUE…

“BALANCING THE WRONG AND THE TRUE …” is the first solo exhibition in Germany of the Austrian artist THOMAS BAUMANN (born 1967 in Salzburg, lives in Vienna), which has been conceived in collaboration with Kunsthaus Baselland. BAUMANN can point to numerous exhibition activities, among others at the Museum of Modern Art in Passau, at the Secession in Vienna or in group exhibitions at Museum Tinguely, Kunsthaus Graz and Haus Konstruktiv Zurich.

Characteristic for BAUMANN’s artistic production is a method of networking and circulating art genres and a critical questioning of evaluations or value and form systems. With his electronic sculptures, his mechanically-produced paintings, films and installations, he installs a platform for visitors to (re)act and at the same time seeks structural points of contact between material and mental space.

THOMAS BAUMANN, through the interactive character of his works, transmits to the viewer a curiosity for experimentally sniffing out new ways. He expands classical sculptural training to include contemporary scientific components and issues. In his artworks he places scientific achievements and cultural developments once again at our disposal and then, thus modified, leads them back into the endless political and cultural circulation of history. Statics, dissolutions and dynamics, past, present and future, perception, thinking and doing, appear in an ever new balance that brings variables to a fleeting state of being.

A Folio Verlag catalogue on the exhibition has been published, edited by Sabine Schaschl/Kunsthaus Baselland with contributions written by Chistian Höller, Gregor Jansen and Christina Végh and an interview with Thomas Baumann and Sabine Schaschl.

ANNE COLLIER

The Bonner Kunstverein presents the American artist ANNE COLLIER (*1970, lives in New York) in her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Born on the west coast, she got her degree at UCLA in 2001. Her work was shown at the Whitney Biennial 2007 in New York. She was invited this year for the first time to give solo exhibitions in Vancouver (Presentation House Gallery, January 2008) and in Liverpool (Open Eye Gallery, April 2008).

ANNE COLLIER is aligned with the tradition of a conceptually oriented work ideal as practiced by artists such as JOHN BALDESSSARI, SHERRY LEVINE, LOUISE LAWLER or CHIRSTOPHER WILLIAMS. With her photographic approach, COLLIER reflects the medium of photography per se, as well as the role of photography in contemporary culture. Photographic images of the everyday media world – from film poster via art magazines to books and record covers – serve her as motif.

By photographing photographic material, the artist makes her theme that of our pictorial access to the world. This is reinforced when the artist takes up the motif of the eye, as well as its technical counterpart: the photo camera. Besides the precise and simultaneously reduced and low-key focus on the artistic issue of seeing, understanding and appropriating, COLLIER frequently charges her pictures with a strange patina of nostalgia and longing. Since the artist openly reveals her use of photographed images – folds in the paper and other traces are visible on the perfect picture surface – the motifs are given a history of personal usage. Who may have collected, preserved or used these photos and for whatever purpose? Intimate associations and social networks seem to shine very quietly forth from behind the intentionally distanced photographs.

An artist’s book in the form of a poster with a portfolio will be published, with articles by Stefan Kalmár and Christina Végh in Ger/Eng.

Contact: Anna Dietz, Bonner Kunstverein, a.dietz@bonner-kunstverein.de

Image Above:
Top: FIKRET ATAY Theoretician, 2008, Filmstills. Copyright: Bonner Kunstverein and artist

Midst: Thomas Baumann, Asilver, 1999/2007
installation view Kunsthaus Baselland. Copyright: Galerie Krobath Wimmer, Wien, und Nicolas Krupp, Basel, an artist

Below: ANNE COLLIER, Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007. Copyright: Gallery Corvi-Mora, London and artist

SMS Contemporanea

Gordon Matta-Clark
Conical Intersect, 1975
Copyright: Gordon Matta-Clark, by SIAE 2008
Courtesy the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark
and David Zwirner, New York

Gordon Matta-Clark
6 June - 19 October 2008

SMS Contemporanea
(ex-Palazzo delle Papesse)
Piazza Duomo, 1-2
53100 Siena
contemporanea@santamariadellascala.com
http://www.papesse.org

The Siena Contemporary Art Centre is delighted to announce a retrospective on the works of Gordon Matta-Clark, curated by Lorenzo Fusi and Marco Pierini in collaboration with the Estate of the Artist. The show opens in a new venue for the Centre, shortly to be moved from the Palazzo delle Papesse to the museum hub of Santa Maria della Scala, situated opposite the Sienese Cathedral.

The exhibition is the first to be devoted to the ‘anarchitect’ Matta-Clark in Italy, and one of the most important ever realized in Europe. The aim of the show is to propose a reconstruction of the artist’s varied and prolific career, ranging between the most diverse languages and forms of expression from the end of the Sixties until his premature demise in 1978. The itinerary, while following a chronological order, is structured around themes and groups of works. It opens with Garbage Wall (1970), a wall built with found materials and garbage, offered as a response to the plight of the homeless vis-a-vis the failure of affordable housing policies. Matta-Clark’s first interventions took place in abandoned buildings that were later to be defined as ‘non-sites’. Matta-Clark’s action marks the arrival of both conscience and environmental awareness in art. As an example, the Fresh Air Cart 1972 performance, where the artist offered free oxygen and rest to pedestrians. Matta-Cla
rk’s research investigated entropic processes and the changes in urban textures and the transformation of architecture in urban environments.

The idea of endless transformation of nature is later juxtaposed to that of ‘artist as alchemist’. Matta-Clark is interested in the evolution and transformation of matter from one stage to the next: discarded bottles found on the street melted into glass bricks to be used as construction materials (Glass Brick, 1971), or how a vacant city pier can be transformed into a city park (Days End, 1975). In his pursuit of economical housing in the early Seventies, trees became a source of inspiration for the artist. Examples are the 1971 performance Tree Dance and many drawings and sketches where trees are folded, woven and composed in order to give life to shelters (Tree Forms, 1971). In 1973-1974, Matta-Clark began playing with the American myth that the U.S. has enough land for every citizen to become a property owner.

In Reality Properties: Fake Estates, thanks to the re-zoning cities are periodically forced into, the artist was able to purchase fifteen “estates” in Queens, NY for between 25 USD and 75 USD each. Several estates were a foot wide but several hundred feet long, some were completely landlocked. The more inaccessible the property was, the happier Matta-Clark was. Santa Maria della Scala will be proud to present these as part of the exhibition.

Special attention is also given to Matta-Clark’s famous ‘cuts’, such as Sauna (1971), in which the artists strips his friends bare in a sauna, and to the carrots in Conical Intersect (realised for in 1975 during the works for the forthcoming Centre Pompidou). Also on show will be many of the artist’s most beautiful photographic documentations of his notorious building cuts from projects such as Splitting, Bingo, Conical Intersect, Office Baroque and Circus.

Finally, the exhibition includes the almost complete filmography of the artist around which the exhibition itinerary was conceived, as a demonstration of the artist’s versatile power of innovation of the media as well as the impact of his performances and public interventions.

The catalogue, edited by Silvana Editoriale in bilingual italian/english edition will contain critical essays by: James Attlee, Jane Crawford, Louise Désy and Gwendolyn Owens, Lorenzo Fusi, Marco Pierini, Judith
Russi Kirscher.

SAVE THE DATE

OPENING: 6 June 2008, 6 pm
PRESS PREVIEW: 6 June 2008, noon

SMS Contemporanea (ex-Palazzo delle Papesse)
Piazza Duomo, 1-2
53100 Siena
contemporanea@santamariadellascala.com

Info and Press
Carlo Simula
+39 0577 220721
carlo.simula@sms.comune.siena.it

H+F Curatorial Grant

H + F CURATORIAL GRANT
2nd edition 2008/2009

CALL FOR AN ASSISTANT CURATOR /
EXHIBITION COORDINATOR

FRAC Nord – Pas de Calais (F), de Appel arts
centre (NL), H + F Curatorial Grant

The “H+F Curatorial Grant” is an ambitious and original initiative which allows the FRAC Nord–Pas de Calais (Dunkirk/France) in close partnership with the private collector Han Nefkens (H+F Collection) and the de Appel arts centre (Amsterdam/NL), to give young international curators the opportunity to participate in the development of exhibition projects based on the collection.

This grant which was launched in 2007 offers emerging art curators a unique infrastructure and environment with free access to a research and documentation centre as well as to one of the best French collections of contemporary art. The FRAC acts as the first intermediary for these future professionals of contemporary art by helping them to develop and implement their projects.

A panel composed of Han Nefkens (H+F Collection), Ann Demeester (Director of de Appel) and Hilde Teerlinck (Director of the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais) will select the new candidate. The selected person will become part of the FRAC’s team as an assistant curator, coordinating local, national and international exhibition-projects. The grantee selected for the period 2008-2009 will be specifically responsible for the ArtAids project which brings together contemporary artists from all over the world –Part of the project will be presented in France in 2009 and will focus on creating awareness about HIV/Aids and tackling the stigma connected with it. See http://www.artaids.com

She / he will receive in exchange a grant for 18 months that will help finance her/his living and
travel expenses.

An excellent knowledge of English is required, knowledge of French would be helpful.
The candidate will have to install her/himself in Dunkirk for the mentioned period.

This project has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Han Nefkens (journalist, writer and art collector), which enables the FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais to reinforce the development of a strong and active policy of patronage around its activity. From 2008 onwards the application process is open for former students of de Appel Curatorial Programme and all aspiring young curators who wish to enhance their expertise and further develop their skills and agilities in project management.

Please send your application containing a recent CV (including a photograph) and a motivation letter before July 15th 2008 to:

FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais
930 avenue de Rosendaël
59240 Dunkerque (France)
Tel. 03 28 65 84 20
http://www.fracnpdc.fr

Annette Schemmel (D), the first curator to be awarded the H+F Curatorial Grant, will present her exhibition-project “decollecting” on 29.05.2008 (part I) and 10.07.2008 (part II) at the FRAC NPDC. Artists: Peggy Buth, Marjolijn Dijkman, Corey Escoto, Paul Huf, Joseph Kosuth, Sands Murray-Wassink, Vesna Pavlovic, Peter Piller, Koen Theys, Barbara Visser.