Curators' Notebook
Curator's Notebook is a ongoing collection of links, events, artists, and cultural refuse the SculptureCenter staff has recently found of interest.
Sep 17, 2009
The Art of Blandman
Event Link
Thu, Sep 24, 2009
7:00 PM
New Museum theater
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
$8
Throughout his career, Michael Smith's original approach to video, installation, and performance has broken artistic ground-albeit subtly. Steering away from the transgressive actions associated with avant-garde performance, Smith employs the idioms of popular entertainment and comedy to critique culture at large. His eponymous alter ego Mike, who is known for pathologically banal behavior, sends up cultural normalcy and spotlights the ways people consume ideas and lifestyles marketed to them. For this event, New Museum Adjunct Curator and Rhizome Executive Director Lauren Cornell will talk with Smith about his use of comedy, both as a way to engage and quantify audience response and to generate new work. Their conversation will cut through Smith's expansive body of work by focusing on pieces that have been exhibited at the New Museum, including Down in Rec Room, shown in "Not just for Laughs: The Art of Subversion" in 1981; Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snackbar (made in collaboration with Alan Herman), shown in "The End of The World" in 1983; and Open House, a site-specific installation by Smith and Joshua White created for the New Museum in 1999.
Photo credit: Mike: circa 1979
Photo: Kevin Noble
Sep 16, 2009
Wood
Exhibition Link
September 12 - October 24th, 2009
at Maccarone
630 Greenwich Street
New York, NY 10014
A sculpture show featuring: Carol Bove, David Lamelas, Corey McCorkle, Oscar Tuazon, Eli Hansen, Kaari Upson, H.C. Westermann
Wood can be shaved, chopped, molded, carved -- or merely left alone. The choice of found wood, the materially old and worn washed-up along shore or usurped from the wilderness, illustrates a concentration on the forms and ideas in culture that re-surface time and again, suggesting a broader examination of the meaning of survival. Once-living trees now as sculptural conceit further constituent the concept of regeneration - the tree in itself being a haunting emblem for the passage of time. Via the use of wood as art object comes an acknowledgment of the vulnerability of all things.
Certain works in this exhibition contemplate wood's function as shelter and as element of support, and in other instances as an element of intrusion, proposing a paradoxical dialogue around its inherent principles. Other instances present meditation on design practices and an investigation of culture's emphasis on decorative motif and industrial-fabricated forms of the medium. Wood is further utilized as allegory of past sculptural conventions, specifically the late 20th century's romanticization of the unlimited availability of natural resources as raw material, as well as the post-modern idealization of monumental sculptural produced by immense industrial means, when mass-production began to dominate culture-at-large.
Curated by Ellen Langan
Sep 16, 2009
Tim Hyde: How to Draw a Cathedral
Exhibition Link
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17th, 6-8PM
September 17 - October 31, 2009
at Max Protetch
511 W. 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
Tim Hyde's photographs and videos examine the psychological and bodily experience of space, navigating the acts of inhabiting and moving through built environments, natural landscapes, and socially engineered infrastructures in both subjective and objective terms.
The exhibition will feature three new bodies of work: two photographic projects and a video. In addition, Hyde has curated an exhibition of video works by other artists dealing with related issues, which will run concurrently in the gallery's Project Space. This video exhibition will close on Thursday October 15th.
All three bodies of work on view foreground aspects (time, emotion, language) of structures, physical and otherwise, that often fall outside our conscious experience of space.
Sep 16, 2009
Ann Craven: Shadows Moon
Exhibition Link
Opening Saturday, September 5th, 3PM
at CIAP
Site Gelatinefabriek
Armand Hertzstraat 21 bus 1
BE-3500 Hasselt, Belgium
While Ann Craven is, fundamentally, a painter, her work unfolds within a conceptual framework which constantly reflects on the production, reproduction and distribution of images. As a painter she consciously situates her oeuvre on the divide between the 'aura' of uniqueness of the iconic image, as in traditional religious imagery, and the devaluation of images in 'the age of mechanical reproduction' (W. Benjamin). Craven's work incorporates the many paradoxes that are intrinsic to a world which is saturated with images to the point that these images become inseperable from reality. The grid of images through which nature is perceived is one of the main focal points of her work. Ann Craven paints traditional subjects like birds, flowers or deer, often refering to popular sources like field guides or greeting cards. These images might at one point have represented real emotions, but by reproducing them in even bolder colors on large canvases, the sweetness of the pictures is highlighted up to the point that they become perverse. By hanging various handpainted copies of one and the same painting side by side with large 'Stripes paintings' composed of oblique lines in the same colors, we are barred from an all too easy reading of these pictures as nothing more than appealing representations of nature. We are reminded that these paintings are - indeed - paintings, colored patterns on a flat surface, as well as cultural artifacts that mediate our perception.
Text: Peter Pollers
Aug 21, 2009
Tom Burr's Sentence at Bortolami
Exhibition Link
Opening Thursday, September 10th, 6-8PM
at Bortolami
510 W 25th Street
New York, NY 10011
sentence
Movies and sitcoms, like Men in Black and Bewitched, acknowledge the crux of the ephemeral by giving
protagonists the unearthly power of being able to snare those moments. They stop time with a click, a twitch or
a wiggle. Burr positions himself as this hero and casts the viewer as his sidekick. We walk into a room full of
scattered objects, many of which appear to have been suddenly abandoned. It feels almost-familiar; you are in
your neighbor's bedroom, perhaps. The scale is human and humane and even in his most monumental works
bears a direct proportional relationship to the spectator. Materials have a latent potential-the hinged figure
could collapse flat, the shirt could fall, the bare wood could be painted, varnished or otherwise concealed.
A sense of timing lingers between the objects and their ownership remains ambiguous. It might appear that
there is a story or scene involved-and in fact there may be. Or not. Officially, no specific narrative is ever
revealed by the artist, no interpretation or assignation ever described as blatantly 'wrong.' The shirt or pants
may have belonged to the artist, or his lover, or his father. The portraits may be devotionals culled from a fan's
stash of memorabilia-to Jim Morrison, Brad Davis, John Cage, Kate Bush, etc. Or they may be surrogates,
stand-ins meant to represent elements of the artist himself, discrete clues about the artist's own biography or
experience.
The use of language enhances this ambiguity. Titles for works and for exhibitions are deliberately elusive,
typically bearing many meanings and leaving the visitor to speculate which-if any-bear real significance.
Sentence, sliver, silver, and so forth.
Jul 3, 2009
On the Pleasure of Hating
Exhibition Link
Opening Thursday, July 9th, 6-8PM
July 9 - August 23, 2009
at Lisa Cooley
34 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
On the Pleasure of Hating
Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; Hatred alone is immortal.
Josh Faught, Simone Leigh, Nicolas Lobo, Shana Lutker, Mike Quinn, Dario Robleto
Curated by David Hunt
"Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal."
-William Hazlitt, 1823
The Plain Speaker
Image: Dario Robleto, Sinew of Purpose, 2008. Leather, cut paper, lead and silver coated roses,
ribbon, waxed thread, sepia and ink. 60" x 22" x 22". Courtesy the artist and D'Amelio Terras.
Jun 23, 2009
This World & Nearer Ones
Exhibition Link
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 27th, 2 - 4 pm
Fridays: 11-4 pm, Saturdays and Sundays: 12-6 pm
Summer 2009
at Governors Island
Edgar Arceneaux, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Adam Chodzko, Tue Greenfort, Jill Magid, Teresa Margolles, Anthony McCall, Nils Norman, Susan Philipsz, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Tercerunquinto, Tris Vonna-Michell, Mark Wallinger, Klaus Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Judi Werthein, Guido van der Werve, and Krzysztof Wodiczko
Curated by Mark Beasley
PLOT is a new public art quadrennial, produced and presented by Creative Time. This World & Nearer Ones is the first edition of PLOT, and will be held this summer on Governors Island. 19 artworks by international contemporary artists will be presented.
Image: Tue Greenfort, Project for the New American Century, 2009. Photograph by Charlie Samuels, courtesy Creative Time.
Jun 22, 2009
No Bees, No Blueberries at Harris Lieberman
Exhibition Link
Opening Reception: Friday, June 26th, 6 - 9 pm
June 26 - July 30, 2009
at Harris Lieberman
89 Vandam Street
New York, NY 10013
John Baldessari, Andrea Blum, Douglas Boatwright, Kim Seob Boninsegni, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Heman Chong, Martha Colburn, Ann Craven, Das Institut (Kerstin Braetsch & Adele Roeder), Nikolas Gambaroff, Nicolás Guagnini, Guyton/Walker, Karl Haendel, Gareth James (with Roe Ethridge), i-cabin, Haley Mellin, Olivier Mosset, Steven Parrino, Luciano Perna, Allen Ruppersberg, SALOON (with Debo Eilers, Jane Jo, Jason Loebs, Charles Mayton, Blake Rayne, Georgia Sagri, Thomas Torres Cordova, Viola Yesiltac), Karin Schneider, Peter Simensky (with Charlotte Beckett, Patty Chang, Jennifer Cohen, Rachel Foullon, James Hyde, The Invisible Glove, Daniel Lefcourt, Michael Mahalchick, Ohad Meromi, Carter Mull, Adam Putnam, Allison Smith, Meredyth Sparks, Jane Virga)
Curated by Sarina Basta and Tyler Coburn
No Bees, No Blueberries takes its title from a playful observation, made by artist Andrea Blum, linking the low yield of blueberries last summer to a decline in the bee population. Over the centuries, various communities have attempted to explain the cyclical disappearance and rehabilitation of bees by the preoccupying issues of the times, from the recent concern with global climate change and the predominance of synthetic insecticides, in the 1960s, to a 19th century theory of the "low moral fiber" of the insects themselves.
In the midst of an economic moment that increasingly draws focus to the top-down frailty of the art world, No Bees, No Blueberries investigates the artist, her resilience, her capacity for self-organization and the flexibility of her communities. Many of the exhibiting artists pair formal pursuits with meditations on social structures. Among them, Peter Simensky, Nikolas Gambaroff and SALOON employ sub-curated artworks and performances that call conventional delineations of production into question. Nicolás Guagnini, Heman Chong and Kim Seob Boninsegni assemble visual lexicons from the material and rhetorical fragments of exhibition posters and propaganda. John Baldessari's shallow-relief sculptures and Ann Craven's fluttering birds offer representations of the organic and programmatic forces at play throughout the exhibition.
A series of performances and events will run concurrently with No Bees, No Blueberries, with contributions from B'ling, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Catherine Czacki/Summer Guthery, Cleopatra's and others.
Image: Kim Seob Boninsegni, no regrets, 2009. Ink on paper, 12" x 8.25".
Jun 16, 2009
Lessons in the Sky: A Filmic Tribute to Audubon
Event Link
Tuesday, June 16, 2009, 8:30pm
Dia at the Hispanic Society
Audubon Terrace, Broadway between
155th and 156th streets, New York City
By subway take number 1 train to 157th and Broadway
Free admission.
John James Audubon's New York farm, Minniesland, once occupied 40
wilderness acres of what is now the Washington Heights Neighborhood in
Upper Manhattan. This cinematic tribute to the universal pastime of
bird watching is a nod to the farmland that once comprised this
region, Audubon's life work with birds, and the timeless current of
artists' studies of wildlife. This screening will showcase artist-made
short films and videos on birds and natural history in a variety of
genres including performance, documentary, experimental, animation,
audio works, and found footage. Includes works by Simone Bennett,
Klara Hobza, Nina Katchadourian, Emily Kuehn, Julia Oldham, and Dana
Sherwood and the Black Forest Fancies, among others.
Organized by Andrea Grover
Jun 9, 2009
Samara Golden: There's More but it's invisible
Exhibition Link
May 29 - June 27, 2009
at Marvelli Gallery
526 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001
There's more but it's invisible is an installation constructed out of prints of items from Ebay and Blogs, found objects, photos of found objects, mirrors, monitors, video and lighting equipment. The surveillance camera broadcasts live images of the audience onto a monitor within the installation. Samara creates a continuous circuit of transmitting and receiving between sculpture, monitor and viewer. These elements produce a hyper stimulating scenario that allows the freedom to interact with the piece in different ways.
Also, check out this recent interview with Samara Golden at Rhizome!