Photos of "Variety Evening at the New Museum"
Check out these snapshots of Rhizome's New Silent Series event from last week "Variety Evening at the New Museum." Organized by VVORK, local performers staged works by artists Wojceich Kosma, Adrian Piper, Kristin Lucas, Vladimir Nikolic, Tao Lin, Pierre Bismuth and Claire Fontaine. The acts were presented together in a dramaturgy to be understood as a single performance, allowing for new interpretations of each piece. The evening is intended to be carried on as a single score, with instructions for how it can be repeated at different venues in the future.
Constellations Corpo Real (2008) - Gerald Edwards III
Flying down the back roads and divided four lane highways that cross the southern part of the United States has given me pause over the years to think about the rapidly shifting landscape. Granted being born in the mid 1980’s was like being dropped into the rushing river to maddeningly fast growth and development. When the first Best Buy came to my town it was like dreamland opened its gates right up, with the Sunday circular fueling my insatiable desire to get that fresh video game, or the hot discounted DVD player. As the time passed though, and I began to take these road trips with friends across the south, I realized what was eating me. The disappearing sense of regional diversity, passing through Dothan, Troy, Ozark, Alabama each town had become defined by its strip, the reconfiguring of Main Street, into a bypass road lined with the shiny, glowing colors of economic growth and progress.
Each constellation is a set of points on a laser etched map that correspond to photographed franchises of the projected logo. The first in the group is of Eighteen McDonald’s that spread across the beautiful city of Memphis, Tennessee.
American Landscapes (2009) - Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin
American Landscapes takes the interiors of commercial photography studios across the United States as its ostensible subject. The artists reject the foreground and highlight instead the space in which images are literally "made." In these occasionally abstract photographs, the surfaces of walls, floors and ceilings junction along straight lines and parabolic curves to create the unspoiled white space known in the photography industry as Cycloramas. Broomberg & Chanarin refer to these spaces as 'scenography for a free market economy' or simply 'Landscapes'. For just as the American West came to represent unbound possibility in the minds of early pioneers, so these studio walls act as a blank screen on which any sort of fantasy may be projected.
Thirty-four Parking Lots (2003-Ongoing) - Dave Dyment
A proposal to remake Ed Ruscha’s classic bookwork, replacing the corporate lots with the private lots that spring up in my neighborhood once a year, during the Canadian National Exhibition. A folk-art archive of sorts.
NY Art Book Fair
While combing through the tables and displays set up by artists, book publishers, periodicals, small press bookstores, non profit arts organizations, collectives and presses who participated in the NY Art Book Fair over the weekend, I could not help but recall this past summer's No Soul For Sale festival. Both events succeeded in fostering a feel good environment, while also serving as an inspiring reminder of the number of independent, DIY initiatives out there.
I managed to take some photos yesterday, below. Even if I had camped out in P.S.1 for the entire fair, I would not have been able to see everything. Perhaps the subheader for this post should be "Incomplete Highlights" or "Some Stuff I Saw." As always, if readers want to share information or link to projects I missed, please do so in the comments section.
Camera Ready
"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that fleeting moment when you feel alive." Those are the words of Merce Cunningham, whose death this summer—a month after the passing of Pina Bausch—provoked a wave of public musing on the difficulties of dance’s notation and preservation, as critics expressed a bleak resignation about the medium’s supposed transience. So it’s a fortunate coincidence that the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia is starting the new season with an exhibition that demonstrates what dance has “given back” to photography, film, and video. “Dance with Camera” encompasses fifty years of art—from classics like Eleanor Antin, Bruce Nauman, and Mike Kelley to emerging artists—and all the works are rooted in choreography and modernist approaches to movement. Several of the artists make work for both theaters and galleries, and their use of the camera builds on live performance rather than serving as a record of it. Choreographer Kelly Nipper considers motion’s relation to stillness by bringing dancers to her photography studio to isolate moments, while Flora Wiegmann adapts dance phrases to places outside the theater and the camera’s lens. Elad Lassry’s 16mm films exploit the metaphoric potential of the dancer’s disciplined severity, her unity of mind and body. These artists make their camera an active agent in the work, rather than a documentary device. Their concern isn’t extending a dance’s duration in memory, but expanding the capabilities of the camera through the associative and compositional possibilities of dance. The exhibition opens Friday and runs through ...
Edwin VanGorder