Artipedia - Arts News

Walker Art Center

Tetsumi Kudo, Cultivation—For Nostalgic Purpose—For Your Living Room, 1967–1968 painted cage, cotton, plastic, polyester, painted artificial flowers, vacuum tubes, chains, artificial soil
17-5/16 x 23-1/4 x 12-5/8 inches
Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan
Photo courtesy Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan.

Tetsumi Kudo:
Garden of Metamorphosis
Opening October 18, 2008

WALKER ART CENTER
Minneapolis, Minnesota

http://walkerart.org

Tetsumi Kudo’s room-size installation titled Philosophy of Impotence, a culmination of his early radical performances and installations, stunned the Tokyo art world in 1962 and came to be known as one of the most iconic works in postwar Japanese art history. Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, the late artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, premieres at the Walker Art Center on October 18, 2008.

Organized by Walker visual arts curator Doryun Chong, in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the retrospective exhibition features more than 100 works of diverse media—objects, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting—covering the entire trajectory of Kudo’s productive career, from the late 1950s through the 1980s, drawn from important collections in Japan, Europe, and the United States. Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis introduces the artist and his singular body of work to American audiences.

Born into an artistic family, Tetsumi Kudo (1935–1990) belonged to the generation that came of age in the late 1950s, when Japan had emerged from the rubble of World War II and the subsequent American occupation (1945–1952) and was beginning to enjoy rapid economic growth and relative political stability. At the same time, the forced postwar demilitarization and refashioning of society in a pacifist guise left many youths politically disenchanted and intellectually confused.

Although Kudo received a traditional education at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, he began, even before his graduation in 1958, to react to the restless social climate. For the abovementioned Philosophy of Impotence he filled an entire gallery in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum with objects that resembled either penises or chrysalises and symbolized the “pathetic despair of human efforts.” Shortly after the exhibition, Kudo headed to Paris and made it his base for the next quarter century. Ever a provocateur, he quickly developed a practice that challenged and critiqued the Western dualistic way of viewing humanity in opposition to nature or technology.

Kudo’s previously abstract work grew figurative, and his increasingly lurid, even morbid and grotesque objects began incorporating sculptural fragments of the human body—face, hands, brain, penis, skin—inside bird cages, fish tanks, and wooden boxes, in which he also often included found everyday objects. Calling these works Your Portrait, the artist declared, “I wanted to tell Europeans that humanism and love and sex are virtually on the same dimension as such mundane commodities as instant soup or cigarettes.”

Kudo’s diagnosis of the ills and contradictions of the uncontrollable consumerism and the technologization of postwar society gradually evolved into another idiosyncratic, artistic vision of symbiosis between humans and nature, which they have irreversibly polluted, and between humans and the technology that infiltrates and dominates their lives. In the last decade of his life, Kudo sharply shifted the orientation of his art, turning away from belligerent confrontation to a more self-reflective stance toward his own identity, origin, and culture. His work grew less visceral and more abstract and contemplative.

While Kudo’s art and vision were consistently and uniquely transcultural, international, and cosmopolitan, he remained, in his private thinking and public persona, an eternal outsider. As an artist, he exuberantly explored forms and colors and invented a strikingly eccentric visual vocabulary that gave, and still gives voice to, complex contemporary human conditions.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 304-page catalogue, featuring writings by Doryun Chong, Hiroko Kudo, and Mike Kelley and also including a number of the artist’s statements, manifestos, and interviews, many of them translated into English for the first time.

For further information on the Walker Art Center visit http://walkerart.org or call 612.375.7600.

Valerie Salez, Hat Warren, 2008

The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture’ s ODD Gallery presents:

Valerie Salez: Congregations
October 2 to November 14, 2008

The ODD Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent collages by Dawson City’s own Valerie Salez. Congregations features 15 framed works that utilize printed animal imagery that has been culled from hundreds of publications from the 1920s to present: storybooks, nature guides and science texts. Salez’s collages are in turns playful and confounding, illuminating the various interpretations and representations that artists, illustrators and graphic designers have utilized to capture the spirit of domestic and wild animals throughout the decades. Each creature is cut free from the pages that keep them bound between dusty covers, released from the didactic texts that romanticize and over-analyze their every gesture. For Salez, the cultural constructs in which we define and imagine—and hence limit—our bestial bonds is a source of mild skepticism. In Congregations, the animals are liberated from expectation to raise uncanny connections between is!
sues of
cuteness and the carnivorous, anthropomorphism and psychological projection, the potential for human/animal understanding and our irreconcilable differences.

VALERIE SALEZ is a multidisciplinary artist whose work celebrates creative tangents that deny categorization. Her projects look to the creative and social potential of directionless meanderings, spontaneity, obsession, dreams, the unknown and the yet-to-be-discovered as a means of investigating of cultural structures. Salez received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2002, and has exhibited and sponke about her work throughout Canada, as well as in Japan, Germany and England. She grew up in the Yukon and dwells in Dawson City.

Klondike Institute of Art and Culture
Bag 8000
Dawson City, Yukon, Canada Y0B 1G0
http://kiac.org
Contact: Lance Blomgren

AC[Institute Direct
Unlimited Chapel]

New spaces & projects
in Chelsea and beyond…

AC[Direct]

UNEARTHED—Call for Participation

We opened the door. We opened a box.

http://www.artcurrents.org

Unearthed uses a relatively simple device –a human skeleton on the floor of the gallery- in order to instigate a much wider series of responses and relationships and life. The object is a departure point. Unearthed re-examines the strategy of presenting an object inside of textual concept. The object is an imperfect and flawed, but basic “life” model found in all art departments and medical schools. It is a plastic artifact. It is a model, 4th quality copy of our basic sculptural form, our hidden physical structure which is used as a device that mirrors or reflects the ultimate human condition. The key concerns of the project are the issues of the human condition, hidden structures in our lives and art, private and public worlds, and relationships with the larger institutional framework, trade and globalization, art and anthropology.

We are looking for a forensic team(s) to help with this investigation. They will need to ask and present new questions. Material will be catalogued and displayed. Information that is contributed maybe visual, sound, video or text. Supposition and conjectures are needed and very welcome. Any and all investigative techniques, scientific to paranormal, will be considered and utilized.

Aqua Alta by China Blue
Sound Art installation, Sept 25-Oct 18

Aqua Alta, is exhibited concurrently at AC [Direct] in New York and at OPEN XI, in San Servolo, Venice, Italy in conjunction with the architecture biennale. Venice was curated Edward Rubin.

An acoustic environment is created by her recording of the interaction between the natural and man-made elements of water and architecture are a constant although often ignored tension.

In San Servolo “Aqua Alta” is positioned in a portico of the Benedictine monastery. Exhibiting this work in the open space against the historical backdrop of a stunning example of medieval architecture, and simultaneously in the centrally located, urban gallery in the Chelsea section of New York City, effectively invokes thoughts on global warming and the impact of rising waters on not only on Venice but all of our coastal cities and cultural repositories around the world.

AC[Unlimited]

Critical Conversations in a Limo, Art Dubai, March 2009
Call for participation

Critical Conversations in a Limo, The Trailer,
2008 (New York, Melbourne, San Francisco)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8630278715149133602

AC[Institute]

NEW Book
Artistic Bedfellows, Histories, Theories & Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices, ed. Holly Crawford, released 9/2008

Artistic Bedfellows is an international interdisciplinary collection of historical essays, critical papers, case studies, interviews, and comments from scholars and practitioners that shed new light on the growing field of collaborative art. This collection examines the field broadly, while asking specific questions with regard to the issues of interdisciplinary and cultural differences, as well as the psychological and political complexity. This reader is designed to stimulate thought and discussion.

Published and distributed by UPA/Roman and Littlefield.

AC[Chapel]

Sounds From the Choir Loft
September 2-20.

Sound art from pop to phonographic from 6 Australian artists: Danius Kesminas; Camilla Hannan; Simon Hampson; Sue and Phil Dodd; Geoff Robinson

AC [Institute Direct Unlimited Chapel] is a lab for experimentation and critical discussion. AC [Direct], AC [Chapel], and AC [Institute] are our new office & exhibition spaces in New York City. AC [Unlimited] projects are executed anywhere else in the world from a white limo to a museum. Projects explore the performative exchanges and experience across visual, verbal and experiential disciplines and practice. Boundaries are challenged as conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity are brought into question.

For more information see http://www.artcurrents.org

Holly Crawford, Ph.D
Founder and Director
hc@artcurrents.org

Christine Licata
Gallery Director
cl@artcurrents.org

AC[Institute Direct Unlimited Chapel]
501 (c)(3)
547 W. 27th St., 5th floor (#519-529, north alcove)
NY, NY 10001

Delaine Le Bas - Paradise Found

DELAINE LE BAS
PARADISE FOUND

8 November 2008 - 7 February 2009
Opening 8 November 2008

“Fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and in my mind’s darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms. Tranquillity sudden, vast, candescent: form of forms.”
James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

The God of Eden saw disaster in the Fall, the awakening of the beings he had created. For those beings it was their punishment, the expulsion from the Garden, that actualised the change. The glade of lyres and fruits and lulling sleep is lost, guarded by the cherub with its lion body, head of man and flaming sword. In place of the Garden there would be the scattered domicile, each with its four frenetic walls of childbirth, relationship, activity and death; a diaspora clogged by claustrophobia.

Within these walls Delaine Le Bas works, roofed by the long shadow of Eden, the gazes of spies seduced at the threading of new gardens, seething at them. A womb of dolls will populate the stage, a weaving of different tendrils shade them; light and sky and bird preciously stitched to the world, charms and lucky numbers cast, some hemmed in tight to seal the second world against expulsion by the “miasma of a rotting God” .

The underworld colludes in the project. Skulls are embraced as helms and emblems by the fabric children, masked and dressed in frills that match their own gauze skins, machined gifts of maternal layers, guarding and pretty. The doll wields powers here. Lurking among beds and tents, its dark eyes and sunken cheeks like the toucan-nosed quack of the plague, it stalks the wicked. And the ambiguities are frightening to Hell. The masked ones might be hero, phantom, human with animal mother’s mask, a knowing puppet suckling the wild in fenced confines. Even the belted tormentors of Dante and Bosch will run from them, chased out of their element by peachy faces decked in leather and skulls.

The dragon scales of darker places are rent and scattered, made sequins on the backs and wings of gaudy new species. Begetting, remembering, listening to each other’s whispering antennae, they are the soldiers and the nurses of Le Bas’ work, a conspiracy of parts rejected for their uselessness, irrelevance or evil, changed and quickened by living stitches loving colour, clutter, seeing paradise encrusted on the off-cast and the found.

Delaine Le Bas has exhibited in the First Roma Pavilion PARADISE LOST at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and in a solo exhibition at Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, in 2008. PARADISE FOUND is her first solo exhibition at Galleria Sonia Rosso.

Damian James Le Bas, 2008

Galleria Sonia Rosso
via Giulia di Barolo, 11/h
I - 10124 Torino
tel.: +39 011 8172478
fax.: +39 011 8172478
info@soniarosso.com
www.soniarosso.com

Poster

Cris Orfescu has been invited to exhibit NanoArt to the 2008 Prince of Asturias Awards at the Campoamor Theatre in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias, Spain.

The Prince of Asturias Foundation has conferred its Awards yearly ever since 1981. They are intended to acknowledge scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work carried out internationally by individuals, groups or organizations in the following eight categories: communication and humanities, social sciences, arts, letters, scientific and technical research, international cooperation, concord and sports. H.R.H. Felipe de Borbón, Prince of Asturias and Heir to the throne of Spain is the Honorary President of the Foundation that bears His name since its creation in 1980. The aim of the Foundation is to contribute to encouraging and promoting scientific, cultural and humanistic values that form part of mankind’s universal heritage. Bob Dylan, Al Gore, George M. Whiteside, Google, National Geographic Society, Maya Plisetskaya, Woody Allen, Paco de Lucia, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lance Armstrong, Vittorio Gassmann, Yehudi Menuhin, Michail Gorbachev,!
Carl
Lewis, are among the winners since the beginning of the award. The award presentation ceremony is considered as one of the most important cultural events in the international agenda. Throughout its history, these awards have been honored with different recognitions, such as UNESCO’s declaration in 2004 acknowledging the extraordinary contribution of these awards to mankind’s cultural heritage. This year, the grand presentation ceremony is to be held on Friday, October 24th at 6:30 pm.

NanoArt is a new art discipline at the art-science-technology intersections. It features nanolandscapes (molecular and atomic landscapes which are natural structures of matter at molecular and atomic scales) and nanosculptures (structures created by scientists and artists by manipulating matter at molecular and atomic scales using chemical and physical processes). These structures are visualized with powerful research tools like scanning electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes and their scientific images are captured and further processed by using different artistic techniques to convert them into artworks showcased for large audiences.

NanoArt is the expression of the New Technological Revolution reflecting the transition from Science to Art using Technology and could be for the 21st Century what Photography was for the 20th Century. Over the past two decades the ability to measure and manipulate matter at atomic and molecular scales has led to the discovery of novel materials and phenomena. These advances underlie the multidisciplinary areas known today as Nanotechnology. The responsible development and application of Nanotechnology could lead to create jobs and economic growth, to enhance national security, and to improve the quality of life. Some of the benefits would be cleaner manufacturing processes, stronger and lighter building materials, smaller and faster computers, and more powerful ways to detect and treat disease. NanoArt is aimed to raise the public awareness of Nanotechnology and its impact on our lives.

For updated information about the event, please check the event site at http://www.fundacionprincipedeasturias.org/ing/00/index.html.

To view Orfescu’s work visit www.crisorfescu.com or www.absolutearts.com/nanoart

Mudam Luxembourg

Mudam Luxembourg presents 7 new exhibitions
Mudam Luxembourg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3 Park Dräi Eechelen, L-1499 Luxembourg
t. +352 45 37 85 1
info@mudam.lu

http://www.mudam.lu

Mudam Luxembourg presents from 11 October 2008 seven new exhibitions: seven distinct projects (including 200 artworks by 80 artists from all generations) that prove once again that the museum is open to the diversity of approaches and media that go to make up contemporary art. The hanging is intended to be multi-disciplinary, illustrating reflections on visual arts as well as design or fashion. Various points of view are presented, through works that raise questions about territory, materials, formal exploration and contemporary society.

The exhibition Elo. Inner Exile – Outer Limits presents a snapshot of current artistic production in Luxembourg and examines a decade of effervescence in the art field. Certain artworks have been specially created for this event.

The itinerant project RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion is devoted to the use of materials that are similar to (or derived from) paper in fashion design. This exhibition, proposed by the Athens Cultural Organization ATOPOS, is both historical and prospective in approach.

The paintings by American artist Ena Swansea have a distanced view of contemporary society. Their elaborate preparation with graphite creates a rainy, mineral atmosphere that, combined with the framing and diaphanous colours, gives a sombre and disturbing image of Manhattan.

The exhibition Ettore Sottsass & Sottsass Associati presents pieces that resulted from the collaboration between Ettore Sottsass, one of the leaders of contemporary design, and the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres. It also presents architectural objects that were the fruit of the work carried out by the designer’s agency using the material Corian® (invented by DuPont).

Known for his performances as an actor and musician, John Lurie kept his painting activity a secret until 2004, the date of his first exhibition in New York. In the Mudam exhibition The Skeleton In My Closet Has Moved Out To The Garden he presents a series of paintings that are emblematic of his caustically humoristic aesthetic.

The project Go East I presents artworks by Roman Ondák and Zilvinas Kempinas that joined the Mudam collection thanks to a programme aimed at establishing a collection of artworks by Eastern European artists and sponsored by KBL European Private Bankers.

Finally, the exhibition Nouvelles Formes. Pierre Charpin à Sèvres presents a group of pieces resulting from work carried out by French designer on the catalogue of forms of the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres.

Exhibitions:
Elo. Inner – Exile Outer Limits (11/10/2008 – 02/02/2009)
RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion (11/10/2008 – 02/02/2009)
Ena Swansea (11/10/2008 – 02/02/2009)
Ettore Sottsass & Sottsass Associati (11/10/2008 – 01/12/2008)
John Lurie. The Skeleton In My Closet Has Moved Out To The Garden (11/10/2008 – 08/12/2008)
Go East I. Mudam Collection supported by KBL European Private Bankers (11/10/2008 – 08/12/2008)
Nouvelles formes. Pierre Charpin à Sèvres (11/10/2008 – 17/11/2008)

Press contact: presse@mudam.lu

Opening hours
Every day 11am – 6pm, Wednesday 11am – 8pm, closed on Tuesday

Bonniers Konsthall

Cao Fei, My Father, 2005.
Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space.

Publication and programs accompanying the
Sprout from White Nights –
A Meeting with Chinese Contemporary Art exhibition
September 17 - December 21, 2008

Bonniers Konsthall
Torsgatan 19, SE-113 90 Stockholm
Phone: +46 8 736 42 48
info@bonnierskonsthall.se

http://www.bonnierskonsthall.se

Bonniers Konsthall’s main exhibition of the autumn is Sprout from White Nights – A Meeting with Chinese Contemporary Art. The exhibition presents 17 young Chinese artists at the interface of thousand-year old traditions and new technology. In order to open up a dialogue and an exchange, Bonniers Konsthall has invited the Chinese curator Zhang Wei to present her perspective on contemporary Chinese art. In collaboration with Bonniers Konsthall she has curated an exhibition that provides us with an insight into today’s China, not only through the works by the participating artists, but also through workshops, lectures, conversations, film screenings, design and an extensive publication.

The publication accompanying the exhibition Sprout from White Nights will be released by the end of October 2008. The Sprout from White Nights publication brings together texts that focus on the participating artists, like the “One Minute Reading” project by Hu Fang, where the artists have made a selection of texts, as well as interviews which discuss contemporary art and the role of the artist in contemporary China. The publication also includes a dialogue between the exhibition curator Zhang Wei and the director of Bonniers Konsthall Sara Arrhenius and a short story by writer and playwright Alfian Sa’at. Artist Pak Sheung Chuen and Jiang Jun, editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine, have contributed with artworks commissioned for the publication. The design is made by graphic designer Liu Zhizhi.

Talks, workshops and film screenings
• October 6-15, 1-3.30 pm. Workshop with Xu Tan. The Keyword School workshop is based on the artist’s ongoing research project Searching for Keywords which originates in a series of interviews with people in the Chinese society. By inviting participants at different places in the world, Xu Tan opens up for a discussion on our perception of today’s China. Xu Tan was born in Wuhan in 1957, and lives and works in Zhuhai and Shanghai. His work has been shown around the world including P.S.1 in New York and the biennials in Venice and Berlin.
• October 15, 7 pm. Artist talk with Xu Tan. Moderator: Journalist and China expert Ulrika K Engström.
• October 22, 7 pm. Screening of Yang Fudong’s film An Estranged Paradise.
• October 29, 7 pm. A talk between the exhibition curator Zhang Wei and the publication editor Hu Fang, who together are artistic directors for Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, China.
• November 12, 7 pm. Screening of Cao Fei’s film My Father.