SUPERFLEX presents Pigs, Time and Space for the 11th Shanghai Biennale 'Why Not Ask Again?'
11th Shanghai Biennale
11 November 2016 - 12 March 2017
Pigs, Time and Space is a new film installation that addresses the exchange of pigs between Denmark and China. With a pig as the main protagonist Pigs, Time and Space is set in a dream-like universe unfolding the highlights of a historical loop from I Ching, the ancient Book on Divination, to the Schjellerup crater on the moon.
Art Center Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986-1995
Book launch & panel discussion on Sunday, December 11th at 365 Mission
3-5pm Panel Discussion / 5-6pm Public Reception
ArtCenter College of Design's Graduate Art MFA program announces the publication of the first of three volumes of ArtCenter Talks, a collection of transcripts of lectures given by artists, theorists and historians throughout the program's thirty-year history. For this inaugural volume, Stan Douglas, who joined the Graduate Art faculty in 2009, chose 13 lectures from among hundreds that he deemed best represented the scope and range of the first decade of the program and its guests.
To celebrate the book's publication, on December 11, Douglas will moderate a roundtable discussion at 356 Mission Rd. in Los Angeles that will include former faculty, alumni and visiting artists (Meg Cranston, Stephen Prina, Diana Thater, T.J. Wilcox) who participated in the "Graduate Seminar" during the decade covered by this first volume.
Contributions by: Beth B, Rosetta Brooks, Luis Castro Leiva, Meg Cranston, Charles Gaines, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Susan Hiller, Roni Horn, Kellie Jones, Mike Kelley, Justen Ladda, Thomas Lawson, Sylvere Lotringer, John Miller, Constance Penley, Brian Routh, Mira Schor, Allan Sekula, Robert Storr, Lynne Tillman
Jorge Méndez Blake. The Art of Loving, 2009. 10 ladrillos, edición de The Art of Loving de
Erich Fromm / 10 bricks, edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 24 x 8 x 4 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.
The Variations of its Shadows: An Interview with Jorge Méndez Blake by Caroline Picard
Every book creates a world, a place that readers enter through language on the first page, and inhabit thereafter, as the text's unique character compounds in an individual's imagination. This happens with novels, with philosophy, mathematical treatises, and poems. How astonishing it is to consider the lush autonomous universe each spine on a bookshelf proposes. Each of those worlds has a logical structure that cajoles a reader into its unique proposition—a situation not so different, perhaps, from that of architecture. The Guadalajara-based multimedia artist, Jorge Méndez Blake, addresses this intersection directly by translating nuanced themes embedded in canonical books into art installations. In our interview, we discuss this process of translation, looking at how it differs from literary criticism, and drifting over the site of Emily Dickinson's desk.
Caroline Picard: Your installations interpret the work of different authors like Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare, and Jules Verne, by drawing out nuanced themes within a book (or poem) into a single place and time; it is almost like you draw a three-dimensional translation of the book in space. Do you see a connection between what you do and literary criticism?
Jorge Méndez Blake: My approach to books and language is more as a reader than as a critic. I like reading literary criticism, but I'm working from the side of art, and art should propose different ways of understanding literature, not the same ones as critics. Approaching a book through sculpture expands the possibilities of regular literary criticism. I believe some seminal texts of the history of literature have many possibilities of interpretation: there's nothing new under the sun, but the variations of its shadows are infinite.
Read More
A still of the Los Angeles River from Kerry Tribe's "Exquisite Corpse" 2016.
Kerry Tribe: Exquisite Corpse
Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement
Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève
November 9, 2016–January 29, 2017
Opening week: November 9–13, with a program of performances, special screenings, conversations and round tables
Vernissage: November 9, 6–9pm
1301PE is pleased to announce Kerry Tribe's participation in the celebrated Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement (Biennale of Moving Images) at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland. Tribe's contribution, Exquisite Corpse, was commissioned for the 2016 CURRENT:LA Biennial and will be presented for the first time as a three-channel installation.
Diana Thater, "Colorvision," 2016. Installtion view, 1301PE. Image by Fredrik Nilsen.
L.A.-based artist Diana Thater's mind-bending artwork is so effective in part because of an often overlooked aspect of her artistic process–installation. Thater deeply considers setting in her work, and utilizes space in a way that that emphasizes the architecture and the surfaces upon which she shows her pieces so that the room itself becomes a part of the art. Fortunate, then, that the 1301PE Gallery at 6150 Wilshire Blvd., within spitting distance of the LACMA (where Thater was recently honored with a comprehensive mid-career survey), offers beautiful territory for her explore in her ninth exhibition with the gallery, titled Colorvision, and currently on view until November 5th.
Thater's highly innovative work has been transformative in the world of projection art and video installation. Since the early '90s she has continued to expand the medium in which she works, incorporating a formal and technical element into her artmaking process. This embrace of technology may seem at first thematically incongruent with the subjects of her artwork, which often explore the conflicts between human culture and civilization and nature, but Thater insists that "visible technology, beauty and pleasure (which are one and the same) are not antithetical to one another but may exist simultaneously in the work of art and may produce the sublime."
As 1301PE Gallery describes the series, "Colorvision consists of 8 individual monitor pieces. Each vertically-hung monitor displays the name of a color along with a bouquet of flowers in a different, complimentary, color. The colors used are those of the video spectrum: red, green, blue (primaries); cyan, magenta, yellow (secondaries); purple and orange (tertiary). The word "RED", for example, appears with cyan flowers, while the word "CYAN" appears with red flowers. The series is based on a neurological test that is given to people to decipher the relationship between sensation and language." Thater is interested in this conflict in how we discern visual and textual information, and she suggests that it illuminates something fundamental in how we perceive art: "It's especially difficult for a viewer to think about color and language simultaneously and the dichotomy, when shown one color but asked to read the name of it's opposite, forces a rupture between the two. The question is: Does reason or sensation dominate our experience of art?"
It's been a busy year for Thater and there's no sign she's slowing down, with a solo show opening last week at the MCA in Chicago and more showings in the pipeline for this year. Catch Colorvision while you can though–it closes this week and it should not be missed.
- Sid Feddema
A young visitor to Philippe Parreno's Turbine Hall installation. Photograph: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock
Philippe Parrenos's Turbine Hall review- mesmerizing and unmissable by Adrian Searle
Hyundai Commission 2016: Philippe Parreno is at Tate Modern from 4 October 2016 to 2 April 2017
The length and height of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall is alive with ripples and rivers of pulsing light. High above, the box-like viewing balconies on the side walls throb and wink as light travels from one end of the building to the other, reflected and multiplying on glass walls and casting aberrant forms on the concrete. Here comes a plane, droning invisibly through the hall's indoor sky. And then it is gone.
Anywhen is astonishing, mesmerising, magnificent and unmissable. It is filled with constant surprise. But superlatives aren't sufficient. Over this weekend, I spent five or six hours here during technical rehearsals and run-throughs, and still can't say that I have seen and heard everything.
Anywhen is one of the very best Turbine Hall commissions, filling the space with sounds and furies, grand and small events, stillness and movement, noises and light and silence. Parreno likens it to a public park, where different events and a constantly changing tempo orchestrates the day. He also likens the commission to a kind of instrument that he is only now beginning to learn to play.
Read More
Diana Thater, Delphine, 1999. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015–16.
© Diana Thater Photo: © Fredrik Nilsen
Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
29 October 2016 - 8 January 2017
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The exhibition originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Among the most important artists to emerge during the 1990s, Los Angeles–based Diana Thater creates groundbreaking and influential works of art in film, video, and installation that challenge the normative ways in which moving images are experienced. Her dynamic, immersive installations address key issues that span the realms of film, museum exhibitions, the natural sciences, and contemporary culture through the deployment of movement, scale, and architecture.
Whitney Museum of American Art
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
October 28, 2016 - February 5, 2017
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016 focuses on the ways in which artists have dismantled and reassembled the conventions of cinema—screen, projection, darkness—to create new experiences of the moving image. The exhibition will fill the Museum's 18,000-square-foot fifth-floor galleries, and will include a film series in the third-floor theater.
Dreamlands spans more than a century of works by American artists and filmmakers, and also includes a small number of works of German cinema and art from the 1920s with a strong relationship to, and influence on, American art and film. Featured are works in installation, drawing, 3-D environments, sculpture, performance, painting, and online space, by Trisha Baga, Ivana Bašić, Frances Bodomo, Dora Budor, Ian Cheng, Bruce Conner, Ben Coonley, Joseph Cornell, Andrea Crespo, François Curlet, Alex Da Corte, Oskar Fischinger, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Alex Israel, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and Pierre Joseph, Aidan Koch, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Anthony McCall, Josiah McElheny, Syd Mead, Lorna Mills, Jayson Musson, Melik Ohanian, Philippe Parreno, Jenny Perlin, Mathias Poledna, Edwin S. Porter, Oskar Schlemmer, Hito Steyerl, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Stan VanDerBeek, Artie Vierkant, and Jud Yalkut, among others.
Read More
Phillipe Parreno, Snow Dancing, 1995. Installation detail.
On Snow Dancing by Ina Blom
Some twenty years ago, the effects of an expanding regime of design were starting to be felt in the field of contemporary art. Increasingly, designers seemed to use art contexts as platforms for non-pragmatic reflection and expression. Increasingly, design was also becoming a catalyst in so-called "social" art practices, artistic efforts to engineer or test drive new social and/or economic relations. In the work of collectives like Superflex or Atelier van Lieshout, for instance, design was an all-important feature of their manufacture of innovative objects or technical solutions, as well as the branding of the groups themselves. Concerned discussions about the aestheticization of anything and everything abounded: design should, apparently, know its place. But this new design ubiquity might have actually been grounded less in a political appeal to the senses over reason than on rapidly expanding processes of informatization and a growing preoccupation with their social and economic effects. A wider concept of design thus established itself: defined as "the conception and planning of the artificial," design reflected the fact that, with computation, it was no longer the final outcome of a process, but an interdisciplinary activity embedded in all aspects of production. This was "design thinking," a systematic approach to a plastic environment that more than ever seemed subject to human construction and control.
Read More
SHORT: Diana Thater: "Delphine"
Artist Diana Thater discusses her interest in improving the lives of both humans and animals through art and activism. Speaking from the site of the former Los Angeles Zoo, Thater describes her activism as being focused on "anti-captivity." As an activist she has worked with Ric O'Barry and the Dolphin Project to bring attention to the sale and slaughter of dolphins in Japan's Taiji cove. Thater's multi-channel video installation "Delphine" (1999) is shown in the artist's solo exhibition, "The Sympathetic Imagination," at Los Angeles County Museum of Art last year. In the work "you can see a dolphin spinning underwater and you can almost feel it." Thater hopes "Delphine" generates a sympathetic response from the viewer and creates a new way to communicate between species. "My life as an artist is a different one," says Thater. "The politics are much more subtle."
Ann Veronica Janssens, Chasseurs d'éclipses en Mongolie, 2008. Collection IAC,
Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
Les collections vidéos des FRAC - Projection spéciale FIAC
Organized by Institut d'art contemporain
From 19 to 22 October, 2016
Palais de la Découverte
Avenue Franklin Delano Roosevelt
75008 Paris, France
The Mission to Save Vanishing Internet Art by Frank Rose
In the early days of the web, art was frequently a cause and the internet was an alternate universe in which to pursue it. Two decades later, preserving this work has become a mission. As web browsers and computer operating systems stopped supporting the software tools they were built with, many works have fallen victim to digital obsolescence. Later ones have been victims of arbitrary decisions by proprietary internet platforms — as when YouTube deleted Petra Cortright's video "VVEBCAM" on the grounds that it violated the site's community guidelines. Even the drip paintings Jackson Pollock made with house paint have fared better than art made by manipulating electrons.
Uta Barth, "…and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.5)," 2011.
L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists
LACMA
BCAM, Level 3
October 30, 2016 – April 2, 2017
Since LACMA's establishment, living artists have played an instrumental role in understanding the museum's encyclopedic collection through a contemporary lens. L.A. Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists features a selection of works given to the museum for its 50th anniversary, as part of an unprecedented campaign led by artist Catherine Opie. Featuring over sixty gifts, the exhibition includes additions to the collection by Edgar Arceneaux, John Baldessari, Uta Barth, Larry Bell, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Shannon Ebner, Charles Gaines, Ken Gonzales-Day, Glenn Kaino, Friedrich Kunath, Sterling Ruby, Analia Saban, James Welling, Mario Ybarra Jr., and Brenna Youngblood.
Angela Bulloch, installation view, Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
Angela Bulloch: One way conversation...
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong
14 October - 19 November 2016
One way conversation… is a continuation of Bulloch's latest body of work presented last year in Considering Dynamics and The Forms of Chaos at the Sharjah Art Museum, UAE and L'ALMANACH 16 at the Le Consortium Dijon, France. Formed in steel and MDF, the stacked columns of polyhedra have a stylized geometry and manufactured surface sheen that alludes to minimalism and technology. Often apparent in Bulloch's installations where technology mediates interaction with the work, is her interest in cybernetics, fundamental themes of biological, social and technological systems, and the integration of the human subject with technology.
Rirkrit Tiravanija's 'Untitled 2016 (this is A, this is A, this is both A and not-A, this is neither
A nor not-A)' 2016. Japan Times, Cameron Allan McKean.
Okayama Art Summit 2016 - Development
Okayama, Japan
October 9 – November 27, 2016
Okayama Art Summit 2016 is the first edition of a new triennial contemporary art exhibition to be held in Okayama, Japan. Thirty-one artists from all over the world have been invited to participate, including Cameron Rowland, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rachel Rose, Angela Bulloch, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Katja Novitskova, Trisha Baga, Joan Jonas, Pierre Huyghe, and Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Some of the venues designated for the summit are Okayama Castle, the Hayashibara Museum of Art, the former Fukuoka Soy Sauce Factory, the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, and the Korakukan Tenjin School.
"All the artists involved in the exhibition play with structures—ideological, formal and political. They do this in very specific ways. Each artist layers their work upon what they encounter. They offer various levels of distance to the given structure. And leave us with different strata for encounter, examination, and experience." - Liam Gillick, Artistic Director
Blake Rayne, Untitled, 2013, acrylic & walnut shell on canvas, 24 x 18 inches
Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused
22 October 2016 - 18 March 2017
Blaffer Art Museum
4173 Elgin Street
Houston, TX 77004
1301PE is pleased to announce the opening of Blake Rayne: Cabin of the Accused, at Blaffer Art Museum, the first midcareer survey of the New-York-based artist. The exhibition features major works completed from 2003 to the present which showcase the breadth of his work in various media including in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation.
Superkilen park in Copenhagen
Together with co-creators BIG and Topotek1, SUPERFLEX is awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the artistic contribution to the Copenhagen urban space Superkilen.
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years to projects that set new standards of excellence in architecture, planning practices, historic preservation and landscape architecture. Aga Khan writes of Superkilen:
'Superkilen, a new urban park in one of Copenhagen's most diverse and socially challenged neighbourhoods, emphatically rejects this view with a powerful mixture of humour, history and hubris. (…) It fuses architecture, landscape and art in a truly inter-disciplinary manner, providing new opportunities for shared public engagement.'
Superkilen (2013) is an eight hundred metres long urban park project wedging through one of the most ethnically diverse and socially challenged neighborhoods in Denmark. It is imagined as a giant exhibition of urban best practice with furniture and everyday objects nominated from the future users. Ranging from exercise gear from Muscle Beach in LA, to a playground octopus from Japan and palm trees from China, Superkilen is a collection of global found objects that derive from 60 different nationalities representing the local inhabitants.
Read More
Philippe Parreno today unveiled his new installation, Anywhen, for the Tate Modern's annual site-specific Turbine Hall commissions, sponsored by Hyundai. Courtesy of Tate Photography
Philippe Parreno
Anywhen
Hyundai Commission
4 October 2016 - 2 April 2017
Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK
Prepare to have your senses activated and stimulated by a spectacular choreography of acoustics, sound lighting, flying objects and film, each connected to the other and playing their part in a far bigger score. Tate’s Turbine Hall becomes a universe of inter-related and connected events and parallel realities. Events will unfold anywhen.
Anywhen is a site-specific exhibition that changes throughout the day and that will evolve during the six-month period of the commission. The exhibition is conceived as an automaton which guides the public through a constantly changing play of moving elements, light configurations and sound environments. The artist states that ‘the exhibition is a construction of situations or sequences in a non-linear narrative’.
Blake Rayne, installation view, courtesy of Campoli Presti, Paris
Blake Rayne
Paris
22 September - 15 October 2016
Campoli Presti
6 rue de Braque
4 rue de Braque, third floor
75003 Paris
Campoli Presti is pleased to announce Blake Rayne’s eight solo exhibition with the gallery.
A central figure in shaping current debates about painting, Rayne’s places painting within a economy of signs, revealing the components of the pictorial language and the processes through which they are defined.
Rayne’s last series of works relate to his interest in recording sequential streams of movement into painting, drawing a continuous wandering line throughout the picture plane. Rayne’s lines shift between their uncontrolled direction and their geometrical determination, namely the frame.
In this new series of paintings, a white looping line is created by a steel banding stencil that travels around the edges of the canvas. The line is lightly dusted with colored layers of sprayed acrylic paint. The paperclips that initially held the banding together were released to allow for expansion into final shape of each of the line compositions.
The repeated use of stencil techniques in Rayne’s practice reveals a script of image production through an operation that belongs to the applied arts. Other activities that conventionally belong to a painter’s domain such as folding, spraying, stretching and rolling also form part of the catalogue of procedures that has allowed Rayne to reveal, mask and test painting’s historical forms.
De La Warr Pavilion
Gallery 1
Saturday, 24 Sep 2016 - Sunday, 8 Jan 2017
Leading British artist Fiona Banner presents an immersive installation exploring her ongoing interest in language and its limitations. The exhibition, which takes place both inside and outside of the gallery, is a play on digital vs. material experiences.
Banner continues her Full Stop sculptures – a sequence of full stops from typefaces blown up to human scale, previously produced in polystyrene and bronze – reformed here as large inflatables. They will be presented as a series of happenings around the Pavilion. Full stops also feature in a vast window installation spanning the full length of the gallery, making illusory sculptural interventions, or Buoys, on the seascape beyond.
As part of the Root 1066 International Festival
Read More