First SDP teaser!
A sneak peek of The Agnes Movie that is dropping this summer. Following the lives of a couple #vanlyfers cruising around the continent in search for snow and the friends that they encountered along the way. Featuring Dylan Vachon, Dale Bailey, Craig Mcmorris, Will Fraser, Ben Giesbrecht and many more!
Thomas Kilpper workshop, dispari&dispari project, Reggio Emilia, 2012.
Thomas Kilpper
Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech. The work was originally created for the Danish Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, where it took the form of a raised wooden platform appended to the pavilion. Into the wooden floor of this structure the artist has carved 33 portraits—including images of leading figures from Denmark and around the world, in politics, business, the church, and media. All of them are people who Kilpper believes have been directly or indirectly responsible for promoting censorship, social exclusion or intolerance
Artist unknown, Issue Fence installation, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable.
Prepared: Strategies for Activists
“Stop staring comrades. The spectacle is everywhere.” This anonymous intervention, scrawled in black permanent marker and hung from a chain link fence at the entrance to the Spencer Museum of Art, marked the beginning of a collaborative exhibition led by Beijing-based artist Chen Shaoxiong. The result of a month-long residency in March 2012, Prepared: Strategies for Activists is a dynamic multi-media installation that delves into the complexities of contemporary social activism, drawing on the perspectives of a diverse cast of contributors, including scholars, students, artists, and activists.
In light of recent political movements around the world in 2011—from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street—Chen conceived his project as an attempt to better understand the “anatomy of a protest” and offer a research platform for social engagement. A primary aim of the project is to foster a better understanding of the broader historical and cultural iterations of demonstration strategies and tactics deployed around the world.
During the course of Chen’s residency, the Museum became a “training camp for activists”—a site for sustained inquiry into protest strategies and activist discourse. In the Museum’s Central Court, a stage was installed as the locus for weekly workshops where artists, activists, and experts shared insights into past and current protest phenomena. With its grassroots approach to exhibition-making, Prepared: Strategies for Activists attempts to embody the organic, dynamic processes of the protest in action. As a self-reflexive point, the institution of the Museum also emerged as a contested site, raising the question: Can institutions truly and effectively investigate far-reaching, even radical social reform advocated through protests and demonstrations?
A substantial part of the exhibition comprises artwork dealing with demonstration tactics. The exhibition also features protest artifacts that trace the turbulent history of social activism in the 20th century, including banners, posters, and other ephemera that range from local 1980s anti-nuclear activism to more recent events by Occupy Wall Street. Drawn from the SMA permanent collection, a timeline charts different historical iterations of protests and includes documentary photography and works on paper by artists Bullet Space, Andre Devambez, Lesbia Vent Dumois, Archie Scott Gobber, Guerrilla Girls, Lewis Wickes Hine, Hugo Kaagman, Michael Krueger, Alex Lukas, Josh MacPhee, Lee Neary, Sean O’Neil, Marion Palfi, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur S. Siegel, Andy Warhol, and Dan Wynn.
About Chen Shaoxiong
After graduating from the print department of the Guangzhou Academy of Art in 1984, Chen quickly developed a multidisciplinary approach to art-making that has incorporated conceptual approaches to media as far-ranging as ink painting, photography, video animation, installation, and performance. Through his early involvement in the 1990s with the “urban guerrilla” group Big Tail Elephant in Guangzhou, Chen developed an artistic practice that deploys humor in an abiding pursuit to explicate the mechanisms of contemporary political culture. After relocating to Beijing in 2007, he teamed with Tokyo-based artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Seoul-based artist Gimhongsook to form the Xijing Men. The name of the group plays on an imaginary, nonexistent “Western capital” for a fictitious Asian country.
Godard in his 1975 film Numéro deux, proposed to “think of the house in terms of a factory.”
Godard even went so far as to associate the mother with the landscape and the father with the factory, in a bold reiteration of the pictorial dialectic between content and form. If the factory itself remains situated in the landscape today, it is now delocalized, emptied of its machines, on which other workers work elsewhere, wherever the market decided to transport them, disassembled, on cargo ships. Through a selection of contemporary representations of domestic life, urban landscapes, and gestures of love and labor, the exhibition traces new paths from house to factory, from home to work, between these two spaces that so far apart and yet so close. Since Godard’s film, relationships and family structures, as well as economic and social structures, have changed considerably, and the problems evoked in Numéro deux have accentuated in the era of globalization.
Michael Jones McKean, The Rainbow, 2011 (test
Michael Jones McKean’s The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms creates a simple but phenomenal visual event—a rainbow in the sky. The public artwork will produce temporary rainbows above the Bemis Center using the most elemental materials: sunlight and rainwater. Twice per day with clear sun, for 20 minutes each, a rainbow will appear above Bemis Center’s downtown building.
This commissioned artwork and exhibition represents extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. Irrigation and rainwater harvesting experts from Omaha-based Lindsay Corporation and Watertronics, structural and mechanical engineers, atmospheric scientists, plumbing and electrical experts have joined McKean in creating a wholly integrated system for this site-specific work. McKean’s work will amplify the placeless, celebratory, seductive, and elusive qualities of the spectacular event of a rainbow.
Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center’s five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place—creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured storm water will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks. Within the gallery, a custom designed 60-horsepower pump supplies pressurized water to nine nozzles mounted to the 20,000 square foot roof of the Bemis Center. In the morning and early evening, a dense water-wall will be projected above the building in which a rainbow will emerge. Based on atmospheric conditions, vantage point, available sunlight and the changing angle of the sun in the sky, each rainbow will have a singular character and quality—one could see the rainbow from a thousand feet away or seemingly touch it with your hand.
A rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice. McKean is deeply interested in the rainbow as a complex form—ephemeral and steeped in mythology—that possesses an out-of-time existence as pure optical phenomena. The image of a rainbow extends through time, surpassing our known and archived histories, and operates as a constant unchanged form. Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded, and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like, and meaningful.
The Rainbow is a work of significant logistical complexity that realizes a silent, delicate, and temporary visual experience. The work provides a direct and momentous experience of art, science, ecology, and wonder.
The Rainbow: Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.
What if history actually did end with the fall of communism and the end of the cold war, as Fukuyama claimed, and we are now enjoying some kind paradise of liberal democracy with no better political framework to strive towards? Or, what if a recognition of exploitation and social inequities actually is leading to a massive workers’ revolution that will reclaim the means of production and lead to a more equal distribution of resources and power—whether Marxist, democratic, or otherwise? Indeed, we are unsure whether we are still inside of an idea of progressive social emancipation and human self-realization that defined the modern era, or whether we have truly, actually surpassed these questions. The popular uprisings of 2011 only complicate the issue further with their ability to mobilize massive social movements with a near-total absence of political ideology in any traditional sense. It almost seems as if the entire world got the gist of all the postmodern and postcolonial ideas that came after 1968 to theorize an era of dreary political prospects.
What is clear is that, in spite of an enormous amount of action and movement, we remain unable to think in terms of totality—whether collectively, socially, or ontologically. And it remains hard to say whether this is because we choose not to, for fear of authoritarian implications, or because something much larger has seized us and rendered us too frightened or simply incapable of thinking and dreaming on such a scale. In her essay in this issue of e-flux journal, Elizabeth Povinelli advances a fascinating proposal that, because we are all “trapped in an enclosure” of a single system now more than ever before, any sensuous modes of being to be found within this system are tied precisely to negotiating its horizon. Furthermore, in this issue Boris Groys interrogates the contemporary artist’s reliance on critical theory to explain what is to be done, how to do it, and why, and he relates this to a privileging of action hardwired within the ethos of critical theory itself. In place of philosophical contemplation, theory animates life and performs the fact that one is alive and full of energy. In place of a rationality that could extend beyond the self to become total and universal, theory confronts us with the finiteness of our lives, and thus with a paradoxical urgency to act now, before it is too late.
—Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Doug Wheeler, “68 VEN MCASD 11,” 1968/2011. Exhibition view “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface.”
Judith Fegerl—known for her sculptural work that combines intangible elements with the constructed and using electricity as a medium in her work—will intervene within the architecture of the building itself, creating drawings via controlled electrical fires in the walls
Spencer Finch, Lunar, 2011. Two solar panels with charger, light-emitting diodes, and lamp fixture, lead, aluminum, stainless steel, and polycarbonate. 11 ft 4 in x 16 ft 8 in x 11 ft 6 in
Light and Landscape
May 12–November 11, 2012
Storm King Art Center
Old Pleasant Hill Road
Mountainville, NY 12553
Storm king presents contemporary art that explores creative and conceptual possibilities of natural light.
Storm King Art Center presents a special exhibition devoted to contemporary art in which natural light is both a primary medium and a conceptual focus. Light and Landscape, organized by Associate Curator Nora Lawrence, encompasses 25 works by 14 artists who use a variety of strategies to engage with light as a central component of their art. Encompassing sculpture, installation, works on paper, and video, the works encourage viewers to contemplate not only their natural surroundings and the effects of sunlight, but also the vast impact of light on our daily lives and ecosystem.
Artists represented in the exhibition are Matthew Buckingham, Peter Coffin, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Katie Holten, Roni Horn, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, William Lamson, Anthony McCall, Katie Paterson, Tobias Putrih, Alyson Shotz, and Diana Thater. Their work will be installed across Storm King’s 500 acres of hills, fields, and woodlands—interspersed with the Art Center’s permanent collection—and in the Museum Building.
Works installed outdoors include Spencer Finch’s 2011 Lunar, a “lunar lander” that comprises a solar-powered element resembling a geodesic dome, perched atop the landing structure. During the evening, the dome glows the exact color of the light of the full moon as measured in Chicago, where the work was first shown, in July 2011.
For Untitled (Bees Making Honey), Peter Coffin built an apiary; a beekeeper will give tours every Saturday, explaining the importance of bees to the ecosystem and the ways in which honeybees use the sun to communicate and navigate. Participants will receive a sample of local honey.
Tobias Putrih has fashioned a large, organically shaped sculpture for the exhibition. Made of monofilament wire attached to an armature, White City, Corner Entrance filters ambient light. The artist has referred to this work, which defines the space it occupies with minimal material and weight, as “disappearing architecture.”
Another outdoor work, William Lamson’s Last Light, illuminates and traces a ray of sunlight as it penetrates a pond, thanks to a reflective, triangular form submerged in the shallow pond. Visible to bystanders, it is positioned at an angle matching that of the sun at the summer solstice, providing a reference point for the angle of the sun on other days, thereby indicating seasonal changes in the sun’s position.
Roni Horn’s mesmerizing Untitled (“…it was a mask, but the real face was identical to the false one.”) is sited indoors. Dating from 2009/10, this solid, cast-glass sculpture has a top that has been fire-polished to make it as shiny and smooth as liquid. As it is installed with no artificial light, the color of both the sculpture and the floor beneath it change continually, depending on the quality of sunlight entering the gallery. It is installed alongside photographs from her series Untitled (Weather), multipart photographic portraits of a single subject across time and under shifting natural light.
Anthony McCall’s 1972 video Landscape for Fire documents a performance in which McCall and members of the British art collective Exit, having placed flammable material in a grid pattern in a field, set each on fire following a predetermined score.
Katie Holten’s Timeline (A Light History of the Earth) enables visitors to peruse books about the history of natural light, either in the Museum Building or outdoors, in specially designed chairs with books stored alongside them.
Remco Torenbosch, An Inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations and the general theory of employment, interest and money, 2011. Performance as part of the exhibition There, I Fixed It at Stroom Den Haag, curated by Maaike Lauwaert.
buttonCongratulations!
Pillars of salt.
Dylan Vachon bs blunt gap out over the stairs.
