On the eve of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, Gerhard Richter talks about his life and work with Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate.
Gerhard Richter: Panorama
Tate Modern 6 October 2011 - 8 January 2012
Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career. (more)
Gerhard Richter is among Germany's most celebrated contemporary artists. Richter usually shuns the media spotlight, but he granted filmmaker Corinna Belz access to his studio and allowed her to film him at work. The resulting documentary provides a unique insight into the painter's creative process.
The spectator is now inside the film, no longer conceived as a circumscribed form within a predefined space but as the very field within which the experience takes shape.
...the point is not to produce the mechanical phenomenon of the shutter’s action but to dramatize it; it is not about the phenomenological reduction of the cinematic projection, but its reconstruction.
-- Philipe-Alain Michaud, "Line Light: The Geometric Cinema of Anthony McCall" October 137
Tr. Annette Michelson
Tara Donovan: Drawings (Pins)
The Pace Gallery 510 W 25th St, NYC
Feb 12, 2011 - Mar 19, 2011
See website for images from this current exhibition: The Pace Gallery
In her latest series, "Drawings (Pins)", on view this month at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, shimmering metallic "canvases" are composed of dressmaker pins — tens of thousands of them. The cumulative effect is almost painterly. While these works are two-dimensional, they deal with the same issues as her "site-responsive" sculptures, as she calls them: "It’s all about perceiving this material from a distance and close up and how the light interacts with it."
The new series, which in fact arose from a stretch of print-making, is a perceptual delight, with light striking the pins in such a way that some clusters appear as inky black, others as gray, still others as shimmery silver, like a lake glancing in the setting winter sun.
While the majority of the drawings on view are visual fields that radiate from different light sources (determined by the density of pins on the surface area), two of the earliest works in the show depict clusters of circular organic shapes evoking cellular or molecular forms.
-- The Pace Gallery | Pace Press Release (more- pdf)
Tara Donovan builds large, labor-intensive, and site-specific installations out of everyday materials such as scotch tape, drinking straws, paper plates, roofing paper and Styrofoam cups. Donovan takes these materials and grows them through accumulation. The results are large-scale abstract floor and wall works suggestive of landscapes, clouds, cellular structures and even mold or fungus. In her words, "it is not like I'm trying to simulate nature. It's more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow."
-- Pace Prints Tara Donovan Artist Portfolio (more)
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What appeared to be a question of object/non-object has turned out to be a question of seeing and not seeing, of how it is we actually perceive or fail to perceive “things” in their real contexts. Now we are presented and challenged with the infinite, everyday richness of “phenomenal” perception (and the potential for a corresponding “phenomenal art,” with none of the customary abstract limitations as to form, place, materials and so forth) – one which seeks to discover and value the potential for experiencing beauty in everything.
-- Robert Irwin, Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Confidential Art
The movies–among other games–teach the natural, a natural made up completely of artifices ...
-- Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers
On Sunday, December 19, MoMA visitors were treated to a “walk-in performance” by artist and musician Patti Smith, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of prominent and challenging French writer and political activist Jean Genet. The performance, in MoMA’s Marron Atrium, could not have been better. (more at MoMA Inside/Out)
Kit Webster's ENIGMATICA II installation is part of the Illusion/Illusion group exhibition at McClelland Gallery, Victoria, Australia 11 July - 19 September 2010
In his video environment he projects syncopated patterns of coloured lines and shapes which form and dissolve over geometric forms, at times reinforcing the three dimensionality of the objects before running counter to the geometry and destroying our spatial readings. His video projection installation is an intricately composed synesthetic environment which plays with the coupling of light, sound and space. (more) -- McClelland Gallery
The installation merges mechanics, video object mapping, intelligent lighting and sonic triggers into one choreographed sequence . . . (more)
I'm also thinking about implementing camera tracking or some other form of input device to allow the observer to have some form of control as to how their environment is shifting. I would also like to implement the Perspective Anamorphosis [at the next level]. It's really my dream to be able to create a virtual environment that is indistinguishable from the real thing. I think its interesting that if you have complete control over one's environment, you can have it eloquently shift from the real to the imaginary.
These environments are not defined by natural characteristics but by one's imagination, allowing for the superimposition of a mindspace onto (or deep within) a physical domain. Awakening a space with life through the connection of the perceptual awareness of the observer and the creativity of the designer, based on the theory that the mind is essentially a tool [for] perceiving the enigma that is our surroundings and vice versa. It's based around the notion that we have only skimmed the surface when it comes to identifying and experiencing the complexities of a given space. Complete digital control has taken over the environment,allowing realities to shift from the actual to the imaginary. Real-world environments are augmented in such a way that perception cannot be defined as being under cerebral or environmental control and thus reality is undifferentiated from hallucination. I really feel that there could be an infinite number of experiences that we are not yet equipped to discover. We are really on a threshold of technological discovery. (more) -- Kit Webster
The artist as pickled cucumber. This self-portrait, shown in his recent solo-exhibition, says a lot about the artistic strategy of Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. Whether his famous one-minute sculptures, almost immaterial work between sculpture and performance requiring the visitor to follow the artist's detailed instructions, or his deformed cars and bodies: everything's equipped with Wurm's acid sense of humour. The show is travelling to Bonn, Vienna, Bejing, etc.
MoMA will show a retrospective of Marina Abramović's body of work March 14, 2010-May 31, 2010.
from Marina Abramović's Art Must Be Beautiful 1975, more info (link)
This performance retrospective traces the prolific career of Marina Abramović (Yugoslavian, b. 1946) with approximately fifty works spanning over three decades of her early interventions and sound pieces, video works, installations, photographs, solo performances, and collaborative performances made with Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). In an endeavor to transmit the presence of the artist and make her historical performances accessible to a larger audience, the exhibition includes the first live re-performances of Abramović’s works by other people ever to be undertaken in a museum setting. In addition, a new, original work performed by Abramović will mark the longest duration of time that she has performed a single solo piece. All performances, one of which involves viewer participation, will take place throughout the entire duration of the exhibition, starting before the Museum opens each day and continuing until after it closes, to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.
Marina Abramović Luminosity 1997, Marina Abramović Archive and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
"Marina Abramović’s performances, feats of endurance involving self-denial and even self-mutilation, are so influential that MoMA has asked 35 artists to re-create them for an upcoming retrospective—and so provocative that it is building a separate entrance for the show"
Michael Snow Place des peaux 1998, 34 wood frames with gelatin, lighting, 15,45 x 5,75 cm, Biennale de Montréal, 1998; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Photo: Guy L’Heureux (source)
Michael Snow Wavelength 1967, Ontario, 45 min.
The zoom is punctuated by what Snow laconically called "4 human events": a woman directs two men who carry in a bookcase and place it against the left wall of the room; two women come in and listen to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields" on the radio; a man briefly appears after protracted crashing and glass-breaking noises, wheels around, and drops dead; a young woman comes into the room and makes a frightened telephone call reporting the dead man ("And he doesn't look drunk, he looks dead."). (read more)
On the soundtrack we hear (among many other things) an aural equivalent to the zoom lens shot(s), a sine wave which goes from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest note (12000 cycles per second). (read more)
One of the First Cindy Sherman's super-8 film,"Doll Clothes" has not been viewed since 1975, the year it was made. It comically crosses Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase with animated paper dolls in a sly, funny and clever precursor to the concerns that became signature elements in Sherman's remarkable body of photographic work.
Torbjørn Rødland ACV10 (2009) showing at Standard (Oslo) till 26 September 2009
Perverted photography doesn’t sell a product or communicate a message. It’s not meant to be decoded, but to keep you in the process of looking. It’s layered and complex. It mirrors and triggers you without end and for no good reason, and that is erotic.
Robert Irwin, Untitled @Hirshhorn Museum (Music: Sigur Ros)
I couldn't find an image to illustrate the story of the stairwell so am using this video of Untitled instead.
"Then I ran into a utility stairwell which presented a very interesting situation. There were a couple things that were very nice about it. One was that while the front stairwell was very formal, with floating steps and everything, and was the architect's attempt to be very 'designed,' very artistic, in a way–I didn't like it particularly–this utility stairwell was simply that, a utility stairwell. It had the minimum. It met all the legal requirements, period, and nothing else. How steep it was–I don't think it could have been any steeper. It had those kind of institutional railings. The corners had an angle on them. It was the simplest kind of concrete shaft; I mean, in terms of architecture, there was no attempt to modify or make that space interesting at all. Institutional light fixtures, the whole thing, just by the book.
"But there was one thing funny about it: the architect, in wanting to continue his illusions about the building from an architectural point of view, did not want the exterior facade of the building to stop at a certain point; so he continued it on to include this utility stairwell, which was very funny, in a way, because it had nothing to do with the stairwell at all; it had all to do with this idea about facade. In other words, he ran this series of windows the entire length of the building so as to fit his modular conception.
"But the unintended effect of all of that was that that utility stairwell was quite a nice place. One of the things that was very nice about it was that all the light in there was reflected light. Only in the morning was there a little slit of direct light, but most of the light was reflected. And interestingly enough, in this situation it was reflected off an awful lot of different kinds of surfaces–a very red building across the way, some very strong green grass; it depended on the time of day you were there as to the color the stairwell was. I mean, it was subtle. Most people would have probably said it was white all the time; but to me, you'd walk in there, and at a certain time of day it was violet, and another time of day it was green, and another time of day it was a subtle mixture of colors. It was a very loaded kind of situation.
"So I did a lot of things in that stairwell. I changed a lot of things. I neutralized things and blocked things and removed things. I fooled around with the covering of the baseboard; there was a situation in terms of one of the windows where I made it look as though it continued where in fact it didn't. I covered up one section of one window so that the far corner looked as if it were angled as all the other corners were angled. All sorts of things like that, which no one really saw–which, by the way, they weren't intended to see; it was just the presence of the situation which I liked.
"Then, I think, I probably made an error, and it probably had a little bit to do with my not being on top of the situation. I put a piece of scrim material up near the second floor, up high, and stretched it out flat. It did a nice thing; I mean, it did work in the room in a way. But in a way it also defeated me in the sense that the few people who did deal with the stairwell at all finally said, 'Oh that's it,' and pointed, dealt with the scrim as though it were the art; whereas it was simply a device that I had used hopefully to try and get the situation maybe a little more strongly identified. Without the scrim I don't know if anybody would have seen it–maybe one or two people. And a curious thing, when the show eventually came down, I went back there and found a number of the things which I had done had not been removed. For some reason they either didn't notice them or didn't know that I had put them there. But in a funny way, even with a lot of the things removed, that stairwell still was doing exactly what it did so well. It didn't need my scrim. And in a funny way, maybe it didn't need any of the details I added. What was really essential was going on there anyway."
-- Robert Irwin to Lawrence Weschler, seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees by Lawrence Weschler
Even more important to Duchamp, I believe, is the ambiguity of his presence, due to the fact he is neither entering nor exiting the room, but, in Foucault's words, "coming in and going out at the same time, like a pendulum caught at the bottom of its swing."
-- Bradley Bailey, from "Once More to this Staircase: Another Look at Encore à cet Astre"
To use Naumann’s terms, Duchamp’s opening move was to develop – as with chess – an intellectual system of symbols and imagined mechanical movements between figures in his practice. This ambition was most fully realized in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), which Bailey takes as a focus in order to illustrate the thematic and iconographic correlation between the aesthetics and concepts of Duchamp’s artistic production and his identity as a chess player. Proposing that chess is a critical and largely unrecognized thematic element in The Large Glass, Bailey finds within the work a disguised self-portrait.
. . . As Duchamp said, ‘The transformation of the visual aspect to the grey matter is what always happens in chess and what should happen in art.’
