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Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation, Girls at the Pool (detail), 2005
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Time-Based Art
May 30 - June 12, 2007
With media technology becoming ever cheaper and easier to
use, film and video are emerging as the dominant forms of contemporary art.
While the original pioneers of video art are going gray, a new generation reared on camcorders and computers is at the
helm, reinterpreting time and movement with techno-wizardry. Our issue on time-based art spans the arc from Robert Rauschenberg's
groundbreaking Open Score performance in 1966 to video artist Keren Cytter's YouTube-ready vignettes. Along the way, we discuss the artists, collectives, nonprofits, and festivals that are fostering
film and video art, including the LOOP festival in Barcelona, Perpetual Art Machine, and e-flux video rental. We interview Anne Pasternak from Creative Time about the New York nonprofit's visionary commissions of film, video, and performance art and review a
handful of stellar exhibitions around the globe, from Zak Smith in Chicago to Zarina Bhimji in Zürich.
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Wired.com is the real-time version of WIRED magazine, delivering exclusive, original reporting at the intersections of technology and business, entertainment, politics,
culture, science, and art. With five million unique readers per month and more than 200 posts — 7-10 unique stories per day
— Wired.com is the go-to site for thoughtful, hip technology news and information.
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Hirst Wants $99 Million for Skull
(Bloomberg.com, May 16)
British artist Damien Hirst is getting set to reveal a very pricey work of art at White Cube next month — a platinum skull festooned with over 8,000 diamonds. Titled For the Love of God, the piece will go on sale for the tidy sum of $99 million. If a buyer pays the sticker price, Hirst would join Picasso and
Klimt in terms of art-market pull. Hedge-fund manager Stephen Cohen previously paid $8 million for the artist's pickled shark in 2005. In addition to the glittering skull, the gallery exhibition, titled Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief, will include two series of paintings — one concerned with the birth of Hirst's son Cyrus in 2005, the other dealing with
terminal illnesses — as well as 12 new sculptures.
Christie's Auctions Prouvé Prefab
(New York Times, May 16)
French designer Jean Prouvé's Maison Tropicale, a prefabricated aluminum house made in 1951, will be auctioned off by Christie's next month. The structure is one in a series of three made by Prouvé, and the auction house hopes to receive between $4 and
$6 million for the small dwelling, which is wired for electricity but lacks plumbing. The house comes in a kit and was the
designer's proposed solution to house French officials working in Africa. The Maison Tropicale currently resides in Queens, New York, just south of the Queensboro Bridge, and is owned by French antiques dealer Eric Touchaleaume,
who salvaged the other two models and is selling the third in order to help fund a Prouvé museum.
Chef Preps Food Art
(Times, May 17)
It's delicious, but is it art? That's the question being asked of Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, whose comestibles will be included in documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. While the exhibition, which is held every five years, had been trying to keep the names of its selected
artists under wraps, information has begun to leak. Adrià's creations — such as popcorn-foam canapés dusted with gold leaf — have garnered widespread acclaim, and his eatery,
El Bulli, was recently named the best in the world by Restaurant magazine. The chef is taking the controversy in stride, saying, "True, I am no Picasso, but what is art in times like these?"
Libeskind's ROM "Crystal" Opens
(Globe and Mail, May 19)
Daniel Libeskind, one of the world's most famous architects, has made his (land)mark on Canada. Next month sees the opening of his $135 million
addition to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. Libeskind initially designed the 80,000-square-foot glass-and-aluminum structure — dubbed "the Crystal" — on a series of napkins. His bold design and meticulous attention to detail beat out 51 other proposals, but the project
has nevertheless been called a "colossal gamble" due to its high cost and the unorthodox nature of the building's jigsaw structure.
Defending his starchitect status, Libeskind said, "It's about time people appreciate that architecture is not anonymous. Nobody
buys a book without an author."
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Julian Schnabel wins best director prize at Cannes more »
Art lovers prepare for Grand Tour more »
Aboriginal painting breaks the million-dollar barrier more »
Barack Obama gets an art world push more »
Gallery space scarce in Chelsea more »
Call for Marc Quinn's Trafalgar statue to go more »
Modernist buildings slated for destruction more »
Rothko painting sparks record sale more »
Building up starchitects a bad policy for all more »
Alice Neel documentary reveals troubled family portrait more »
A gallery scene grows in Berlin's old Jewish quarter more »
Vezzoli hires Bush, Kerry campaign ad advisors for Venice project more »
Photographer Miwa Yanagi's new work looks to the future more »
Rocker Pete Doherty sells blood paintings in London more »
MASS MoCA sues to show Büchel's unfinished work more »
Record sales boost profile of Warhol museum more »
Are black British artists' identities being constrained? more »
American cities nab funding to go green more »
LA boasts strong shows by female artists more »
Guggenheim Bilbao celebrates ten years with survey of contemporary Basque art more »
Banksy takes on banks with new graf work more »
Royal Academy administrator's nude-model past on display more »
MoMA's 75 years of architecture more »
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[
Video Art
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Javier Téllez / Alexander Reyna / e-flux / Jemima Burrill
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Video art burst onto the international art scene in the mid-'60s and since then its presence has only intensified. Inexpensive and
highly versatile, video's flexibility renders it an ideal artistic medium, capable of bringing the impossible (or images of
the impossible) within reach. Mobile and reproducible by design, video became even more accessible with the advent of digitalization;
media can now be shown and shared in festivals and galleries both real and virtual. This summer promises video to the max,
online and in the flesh.
LOOP, Barcelona's annual video art festival founded in 2003, runs through early June. Throughout the city's center, screens flicker as museums, shops, and schools transform
into uniquely localized exhibition spaces. This year's event features more than 800 artists and numerous special programs.
Highlights include the first Barcelona screening of Matthew Barney's five-part Cremaster Cycle, an allegorical series exploring processes of creation; the debut of a brand-new piece by Beckett-esque UK artist Ceal Floyer; and LOOP Maghreb/Pakistan, an initiative encouraging small migrant-owned businesses to host artworks from their home countries.
LOOP presents a three-day video art fair at the tail end of the festival, with participation from 45 international galleries. Among them, New York's Luxe Gallery offers a solo show about facial distortion and masking by Finnish artist Pia Lindman, and Frankfurt's Galerie Anita Beckers screens Irish artist Clare Langan's prizewinning Metamorphosis, an experimental piece centered on landscape.
e-flux video rental (EVR) is a traveling rental shop and public screening room as well as a rapidly expanding film and video archive, operated
under the auspices of New York's electronic flux corporation since 2004. Installed as a stylishly minimalist, glass-faced boutique, EVR's globetrotting shop boasts a formidable inventory
of videos, any of which can be borrowed, or sampled on the premises, at no cost. The collection includes works from the late
'50s to the present day, with contemporary titles ranging from RE: The Operation, a Paul Chan piece about prewar life in Baghdad, to Laleh Khorramian's Sophie and Goya, a colorful animation that follows its wistful protagonist through a succession of striking environmental shifts. With previous
appearances in Antwerp, Budapest, Miami, Seoul, Istanbul, and the Canary Islands — to name only a handful of geographical
locales — EVR is currently moored in Paris through mid-July.
Perpetual Art Machine (PAM), founded in 2005, bills itself as "the video art portal" and supports an online video art community, gallery, and database
as well as a related traveling video installation. Artist videos submitted to PAM's website are categorized according to a
list of keywords, which can be used to "auto-curate" the group's exhibitions. Installations comprise a grid of up to 16 videos
from the database playing simultaneously, and viewers may manipulate the theme or enlarge a single image if they so desire.
Cacophonous juxtapositions give way to calming abstractions as video works, and reworks, its magic. (SK)
LOOP Video Art Festival runs through June 3 in Barcelona, and the related LOOP Video Art Fair takes place from May 31 through June 2. e-flux video rental is currently in Paris through July 15, and Perpetual Art Machine
has a project on view at House of Campari in West Hollywood through May 31.
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Anju Dodiya: Throne of Frost
Mumbai
Bodhi Art
Now through May 31
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Inspired by the opulent Lakshmi Vilas Palace in Baroda, India, where it debuted earlier this year, Anju Dodiya's Throne of Frost currently stands in the multinational Bodhi Art's Mumbai gallery. The installation consists of freestanding panels, as high
as eight feet, adorned with watercolor and charcoal paintings on one side and embroidered fabric on the other. Dodiya's brooding
protagonists appear enmeshed in mythical narratives referencing the past grandeur of courtly civilizations, pairing a Balinese princess with a woman in a kimono. In Love Cordon, a troubled face peers out from behind a massive diamond ring linked to a circle of keys, evoking the oppressive yet elusive
nature of love intermingled with wealth and power. (LV)
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Zak Smith: Half the Artist's Proceeds from This Show Will Go to Benefit the Victims of God and Capitalism
Chicago
Kavi Gupta Gallery
Now through June 16
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New York-based artist Zak Smith's new works at Kavi Gupta Gallery range from expressionistic abstract paintings to deft, ambitious portraits and self-possessed
pen-and-ink sketches. The exhibition includes a sprawling, semi-autobiographical project called Drawings Made Around the Time I Became a Porn Star — a disjointed, dystopian series that illustrates Smith's fascination with the unconventional women he has encountered while
moonlighting in the alt-adult entertainment industry under the name Zak Sabbath. These small works on paper offer peep-show fantasies with dreamy decorative flourishes. Also on display are several large-scale
portraits depicting quirky, confident women surrounded by overflowing shelves of tapes, books, and equipment in a mosaic-like
jumble — the detritus of creative life. (AMM)
Zak Smith's new book Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas
Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow is available from Tin House Books.
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Marnie Weber: Variations on a Western Song
New York
Fredericks & Freiser
Now though June 22
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LA-based artist Marnie Weber's pop-noir show of large-scale photocollages, carnival-inspired sculptures, and a 16mm film conjures a stomach-churning menagerie.
Populated by a campy cast of ghost-faced performers dubbed the Spirit Girls, the collages reinvent greeting-card Americana landscapes. The girls, clad in Victorian-style dresses, perform occult ceremonies
in a field or levitate above a plateau. Weber's freakish sculptures, including a lean circus bear and a golden-hoofed pig, suggest the crossbreeding of sideshow acts and carousel animals. The film, A Western Song, finds the Spirit Girls exploring a ranch and dancing in animal costumes, heightening the baroque hayride atmosphere. (CEK)
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Houcine Bouchiba: Hatta Mouchkla!
Amsterdam
De Praktijk
Now through June 3
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A former boxer, Tunisian-born artist Houcine Bouchiba collages jubilant, contorted figures from bulbous shapes of corrugated
cardboard and paper, painting them in muted tones such as blue-grey, mahogany, and ochre. Bouchiba depicts his subjects in
poses that defy anatomy: bent-over backwards, dancing on one arm, or flying through the air. In Raad, a man's simply rendered grey head is tucked under his long, outstretched arms, resting adjacent to his exceptionally lean
torso. The tangle of lanky, olive-shaded limbs in works such as Jatto evokes the sinuous, delicate forms of Arabic calligraphy. Both portraits and fond reminiscences, these figures glorify a
simple life filled with vivacious characters. (HGM)
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Zarina Bhimji
Zurich
Haunch of Venison
Now through June 2
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Gazing at Zarina Bhimji's still, careful photographs of deserted African villages feels like climbing aboard the abandoned Mary Celeste. The Ugandan-born Bhimji's exhibition of large color prints includes studies of peeling paint on a boarded-up building, an
empty cabinet, and neat bundles of official-looking papers that reveal poignant details of the town's past inhabitants. The
works' titles — including Bapa Closed His Heart, It Was Over, and No Border Crossing — suggest their own lost stories, inviting you to imagine ghosts just outside the frame. With such powers to evoke human
life and loss, it's little wonder that Bhimji is on the shortlist for this year's Turner Prize. (CA)
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[
Keren Cytter
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Keren Cytter
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Self-confessed YouTube addict Keren Cytter creates video portraits by dismantling and reconfiguring the clichéd filmic techniques of noir, soap dramas, and psycho-thrillers.
Casting her own friends, Cytter constructs an idiosyncratic home-video universe of tragicomic characters, framing their relationships, dreams, and
desires within a diaristic format.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1977, Cytter first worked as an arts writer for a local Israeli newspaper before developing her hybrid
video aesthetic while on a fellowship at de Ateliers, Amsterdam, in 2002. She recorded The Friends Series and The Dates Series in grainy, hand-held video, and by 2006, the prolific young artist had won the Baloise Art Prize, exhibited solo at Berlin's KW, and published her catalogue/novel The Man Who Climbed Up the Stairs of Life and Found Out They Were Cinema Seats.
Throughout her video, film, and prose works, Cytter unfolds narratives like grand möbius strips, forever looping and turning back on themselves. Atmosphere, from 2005, finds the artist's flatmate Julia trapped in her memories of an absent friend. Dubbed voices and simple scenes
are revisited with minor changes, dialogue is amended or deleted, and linear time is warped. Another 2005 work, Dreamtalk, sees Cytter's friends inadvertently parallel a reality TV show's melodrama to the point of comedic absurdity. (ILY)
Keren Cytter has two solo exhibitions currently on view: Something Happened at Galerie Elisabeth Kaufmann in Zürich through June 14 and Dreamtalk at Thierry Goldberg Projects in New York through June 17.
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[ Anne Pasternak ] |
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Adrian Piper / Brian Alfred / Jeremy Blake / Gelitin
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| Celebrating its 33rd anniversary in New York with a slew of urban events and a comprehensive new book about its history, Creative Time continues to be one of the world's most experimental public art organizations. Artkrush editor Paul Laster interviews Creative
Time president and artistic director Anne Pasternak about the organization's history of involvement with time-based art, its dynamic website, and its future projects. |
AK: When we first met in New York in the mid-'80s, you were the director of a prominent SoHo art gallery. What motivated you to
get involved in the nonprofit side of the art world?
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AP: Wow, time flies! I really enjoyed the exciting energy around the gallery scene, but I wanted to be more immersed in the world
of ideas and work more closely with artists. After all, that's what brought me to the art world in the first place — the intersection
of artists, art, and ideas. I went back to school to get my master's degree in art history at Hunter College while getting
curatorial experience for Real Art Ways, an alternative arts nonprofit in Hartford, Connecticut. It was quite the commute.
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AK: Over the past 33 years, Creative Time has presented over 300 projects in New York City. When commissioning projects, how important
is it that the artist explores something new rather than present existing work?
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AP: It is absolutely essential that Creative Time commission new works — there are too few opportunities for artists to create
new, experimental, and ambitious projects in the US. While commissioning is much more complicated than presenting existing
work, our collaborative partnership with artists is so much more satisfying and exciting. It also means that we're actively
engaged in shaping our culture. Of course, I applaud organizations that do wonderful jobs in re-presenting existing works
in new contexts, but I don't see a need for Creative Time to mirror those activities.
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AK: The 59th Minute series has been offering video on the huge Panasonic Astrovision screen in Times Square since 2000. What kind of an impact
do you think these one-minute silent works have on passersby?
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Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg
Barbro Schultz Lundestam
E.A.T. & ARTPIX
The first in a set of DVDs documenting 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a 1966 series of collaborative performances using new technology by artists and engineers and scientists from Bell Laboratories, Open Score by Robert Rauschenberg is a remarkable look back at an avant-garde moment in the New York art world. Open Score was performed before a live audience in the 69th Regiment Armory, the site of the celebrated 1913 Armory Show, on October 14 and 23. Two tennis players — Frank Stella and Mimi Kanarek — hit a ball back and forth using sound-wired rackets. The loud bong sounds controlled the lights, turning them down until the hall went dark. A crowd of 500 people then entered the darkness
while infrared television cameras caught their choreographed movements and projected their ghostly actions on large overhead
screens. For the second performance, Rauschenberg added a third act: a young woman (Simone Forti) in a cloth sack was repeatedly raised and carried to another place as she sang a Tuscan folk song. Barbro Schultz Lundestam
mixes the original film footage with interviews filmed later to create a lively montage of this momentous event. (PL)
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Cover
Art
Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation
Girls at the Pool,
2005
Production still from The Rape of the Sabine Women
Dimensions variable
Courtesy Roebling Hall, New York and Creative Time, New York
Photo: Benedikt Partenheimer
All Rights
Reserved
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