Christopher Grimes Gallery: News

Brambilla in Goup Show at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm

2012-02-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

A Trip To the Moon. Before and After Film

February 8-April 8, 2012

The love affair between art and film started the moment the film camera was invented. This spring, Bonniers Konsthall will investigate the centurylong relationship.

A century after the first film experiments, moving image is an inevitable part of our visual culture. We interact constantly with moving images on different screens: computers, mobile phones and game consoles. With the development of portable equipment and social networks on the internet, the making, screening and distribution of film have become available to everyone. One could say that we have now reached the stage after film, a shift in technologies, maybe as decisive as the invention of film itself. A sad consequence of the invention of new technologies is that other techniques have to move to the graveyard of the outmoded and the obsolete. Those funerals also mean the burial of a certain vision.

How those shifts, those births and deaths in the history of the moving image, influence and change art is the core in this spring’s major exhibition project A Trip To the Moon. Participating artists and program will be presented during fall 2011.

A Trip to the Moon is part of a collaboration project between Bonniers Konsthall and Moderna Museet. Together we will conduct a conference on film in art, screenings, and a publication due to be published in spring 2012.

FRANK NITSCHE AND KATHARINA GROSSE

2012-01-28T11:22:00.000-08:00

Flash Art 281 – November – December 2011
Viktor Neumann

FOCUS GERMANY • CONVERSATION

WHAT IS OUR LIFE?

VIKTOR NEUMANN: I would like to talk about the role of space and spatiality in your work. What role do pictorial as well as factual or architectural space play both in your thinking and working process? What spatial situations and concepts are you working with?

Frank Nitsche: In comparison to Katharina’s, my work functions within the four points on the painting surface: I am interested in the spatial situation on this surface.

Katharina Grosse: I am interested in the immersion and emergence of the factual pictorial space and the interactions resulting from this process. In my studio I also work with canvases, isolating the imaginative pictorial space. However, spatiality always results from simultaneous factual and imaginative spatiality. My big spatial works are like a visualization model of this interaction, and often one’s own body becomes an element. The given architecture is just one among other already defined parameters. I am interested in the relationship between the object and the surface, which also plays a big role in my canvas works. The picture field is a surface which then re-articulates itself spatially when the background becomes sculptural. There are different possibilities for becoming sculptural: one can work with the minimal, conspicuous or even destructive sculptural, and then let it function against the picture field. My aim is to try out the whole spectrum.FRANZ NITSCHE, PEW-14-2011, 2011. Oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Gebr. Lehmann, Berlin / Dresden. Photo: Bernd Borchardt, Berlin

FN: Though I deal with the architecture while installing an exhibition, principally I am just interested in the problems within the four pictorial vertices; that is already plenty to deal with. Objects, sculptures and my photographic archive are parallel works. The design, overlaps, interferences and spatial conditions in my sculptural works exist in my paintings as well, of course. In painting I am interested in specific compositions, and this is a very different approach concerning the picture field. I have to concentrate on my paintings to create a new, specific picture field both in terms of composition and color. It is a cognitive process and one of understanding — it is always continuous. Right now I am trying to paint spatial entities.

KG: I agree that the question of picture spatiality is very complex. I try to explore it closely within my spatial works. The spatial work functions like a magnifying glass under which I can take apart and decelerate everything. There is a different speed and acceleration in the condensed form of the canvas works. This is why I see them as parallel to each other. How can an image create spatiality within the spatiality of the picture itself, which isn’t figurative or produced under figurative conditions? I have the feeling that you work the opposite way, Frank.

FN: I am also not mainly interested in figures. I am more interested in the picture spatiality emerging in the work process. Figures are a means to an end: to create a specific spatiality.

KG: Exactly, you come from the opposite way since the quotations are no longer clearly visible nor are they definite.

FN: I want to keep my works free from quotes. Continuous quoting gets on my nerves right now, and it also shows helplessness. Concerning dimensions, it is really hard for me to produce small works, but I have to do them. Sometimes small pieces take much longer to get done than bigger ones. Due to its materiality, big pieces have already an overwhelming nature to be materially experienced in themselves. But I also expect a small picture to be able to fill a big room and I have been working with this in mind.

KATHARINA GROSSE, “One floor up more highly,” 2010. Mixed media, installation view at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2010. Courtesy MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.

KG: There is a certain rawness of movement in my practice that is barely possible to show in small dimensions. I am interested in the field where there is no clearness yet, where the direction of the form is still open and as plural as possible. The medium I chose is incredibly fast, and I am fascinated by the possibility to completely invert a work through one or two actions.

FN: I also sometimes delete half of a picture and repaint an area to get a completely different one. Those radical decisions are obviously easier with works of small or medium-sized dimensions. On some of the paintings I work for two or three years, get them out again and again and repeatedly strip them. Sometimes that entails quite a long process, and I want them to convey an appearance of smoothness. I like what Francis Bacon said about transmitting a feeling without the dullness of the transmission — to not see that one worked for two years on a picture. It should evoke effortlessness.

KG: My installations are incredibly time-bound. The scale of the single components of an installation allows a shift in the psychological perception of time. My spatial decisions are therefore dramatic decisions as well. A simultaneity of emotions emerges through the condensation of space and time, which can be as various as extreme enthusiasm, repulsion, love or excitement. I appreciate in painting the phenomena of allegedly contradicting things becoming simultaneously visible.

VN: Both of you work with the method of layering. Could you tell me more about the decision process concerning form and color? What functions do form and color have in your works? Is there a clear endpoint to one work or do you think about it more in terms of a continuous process?

FN: In fact my works never have a real end point. My pictures show my current state of knowledge, which changes constantly, so I would rather describe it as a process. It’s hard to decide whether a picture is finished; it’s mostly determined by a deadline, otherwise I could go on painting it perpetually.

KG: Yes, a clear end point would suggest the existence of an absolute achievement. I’d rather describe my works as snapshots of specific situations: If you go on painting, you overpaint, but if you decide to conserve this state of knowledge, then you stop. At the same time, I find the possibility to discover the substantiality of the layers very fascinating. There is always a certain feeling for the presence of the layers that are no longer visible. If you hypothetically overpaint a red area with green, the presence of the red, though not visible, still exists; the erased is still latently perceptible and responsible for the layer coming over it.

FN: Actually, thinking about color comes secondary in my paintings. Primarily I’m interested in form. I don’t conceive green, for example, as a color but rather more like an alien element in and towards the picture that I consciously put in as a disruptive factor.

KG: Though color is a kind of elixir for my work, it’s not an element for examination. I am rather interested in the simultaneity of incompatible conditions within the work, and color is being used to make this clear. Of course it has the function of creating a physical closeness. Like the voice in a song, color has a strong evocative power. It is hard to determine it in opposition to pictoriality when it is figurative. Color can’t be spatially determined. It’s essentially atopic, and I find this condition highly interesting, especially in my spatial works: since color has no space that can be defined, color can occur everywhere, it can be deposited everywhere and therefore change the spatial situation. And that’s how I can change the surrounding and declare my displeasure towards certain given conditions. Furthermore I am interested in the simultaneity of color and lines. To assign a body to a surface establishes specific hierarchies and balances of power, relations that aren’t easily changeable. Color can make these relations unclear.

KATHARINA GROSSE, “Hello Little Butterfly I Love You What’s Your Name,” 2009-2010. Mixed media, installation view at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøi, Denmark. Courtesy the artist and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøi, Denmark

VN: It seems to me that a common element in your practices is to perform a continuous transformation of meaning and attribution on allegedly ontological, hierarchical and representative levels.

KG: Yes, this becomes very distinct in my spatial works. Object boundaries are being dissolved here through something as harmless as color and color movement. Then, a direct contact with the surrounding takes place, without reacting with ideological discussions or recourse to quotations. This is how I can resist my surroundings, the situation one is confronted with — resistance to specific social conditions, systems and institutions that we construct though they are just meant to remain static. Systems always want to maintain themselves and it is highly difficult to keep such systems fluid, but this flux is what I find fascinating in the possibilities of thinking.

FN: Through various influences I try to create a context that is universal. For example, in my pictures I want to push a specific design through destruction and deformation ad absurdum. At the moment I am highly interested in geometry and especially symmetry, which you have to split open so that it won’t get boring, of course.

KG: Your new works seem like a sketchbook of someone trying to invent a new form of writing not bound to a function. There is something anarchic about it since this symmetry, or the formation of signets, is power-oriented as well; let’s say one wants to organize specific structures. I have the feeling that though you are using this approach you release it from any function.

VN: What other cultural or everyday phenomena have influenced your thinking and your work?

KG: I am extremely interested in the strategies of field sports, the spatial sectioning in team sports for example — how a team works together or anticipates certain situations. I have recently read Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (2008). I am also interested in how people develop creativity in rigid systems. Competitive sports are like paramilitary disciplines. I have recently seen Ryan Trecartin’s exhibition at MoMA PS1, and his videos are quite astonishing. Especially exciting is the way he deals with various interfaces in society. The works are crowded, bulging and remarkably produced. In my work there is also constant interfacing. In 2004 I made a painting of my own bedroom (the walls, floor, my bed, books, clothes) just the way I had left it the previous night. A bed is an interesting shape, it functions like a frame, with a mattress stretched to almost become a horizontal sculpture of a surface for projection. This work was not just about questioning the quotidian, but also about symbolism-imbued materials. Untitled (2004) presented a turning point for me: since then I have allowed more plural elements into my work.

FN: As for me, I would rather ask myself which materials don’t have any influence.

Viktor Neumann is a curator and writer based in Berlin. He is currently the assistant curator for the III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau. She lives and works in Berlin.

Frank Nitsche was born in 1964 in Görlitz. He lives and works in Berlin

FRANK NITSCHE, YOO-35-2007, 2007. Oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm. Courtesy Nathalie Obadia, Paris / Brussels; KATHARINA GROSSE, “One floor up more highly,” 2010. Mixed media, installation view at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2010. Courtesy MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.

Sundance Film Festival 2012: Marco Brambilla's Evolution (Megaplex) and the New Frontier

2012-01-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

LA Weekly
By Karina Longworth Wed., Jan. 25 2012 at 3:02 PM

The theme of the 2012 New Frontier -- the Sundance section devoted to installation work, experimental film and video and art utilizing/ exploring emergent technology -- is "Future Normal." At a preview of the lineup held for press, programmer Shari Frilot defined that branded theme as reflective of an attempt to analyze the role of film in an age when "screen culture is evolving," to the point where "media technology integration really sustains humanity."

It's fitting the first piece visitors to the New Frontier gallery encounter, and by far the highlight of the whole exhibit, uses the trendiest technology of the moment to synopsize the past.

Marco Brambilla's Evolution (Megaplex) comes to Sundance eight months after its debut at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. A triumph of both three and four dimensions, the three-minute moving painting is projected continuously on a multiplex-sized screen, in a dark room outfitted with a bench and a box full of 3-D glasses. The imagery is a spatially dense, multi-layered collage of a hundred-plus video loops, set amongst one another to loosely narrate man's history of conflict, in the form of a horizontal pan across a landscape spanning space, sky, land and sea, stacked on top of one another vertically.

Every image in this spectacle is excised from a Hollywood film, some more obviously linked to the blockbuster phenomenon (Ghostbusters, Star Wars, more than one King Kong) than others (Ghandi, Jailhouse Rock, Dirty Harry). In other words, it's a panoramic image of the entire universe of commercial American film, with all its fire and fireworks, lone warriors and roiling mobs, working together and against one another.

Evolution is intended as a "comment on the idea of film having become such a spectacle," Brambilla said at the preview. "It's about the removal of narrative, and the foregrounding of spectacle."

Of course, that phenomena isn't a marker of the evolution of the medium -- as long as cinema has existed, it has been used as an agent of spectacle, and the earliest film experiments were pure spectacle, sans narrative. In fact, what's exciting about Brambilla's installation is that although he's borrowing the very "now" experience of 3-D, room-size spectacle, his approach to constructing illusion is reminiscent of the illusory techniques developed to add a spectacular quality to the earliest silent films/ Vastness is depicted, and populated, through miniatures.

The booming score of the Brambilla piece can be heard far away from the room in which the piece is contained. It occasionally fully drowns out the sound of another room-size video installation, The Cloud of Unknowing, by Ho Tzu Nyen -- from which it's separated by two walls and a full room. Inspired by classical landscape and traditional Chinese painting, Cloud consists of a non-narrative film set in a high-rise apartment building, in which every resident has two things in common: they all have soft, doughy bodies, and they find their living spaces invaded by a mysterious cloud.

The physical symmetry between the people and their "guest" on screen is mirrored by the space in which the film is shown: viewers can sit or recline on one of three giant white bean bag chairs on the floor, and at synchronized moments during the film, the room fills with steam shot from behind the screen. The clouds seem to seep out of the movie and into the room, drawing attention to space in a tangible way that artificial 3-D -- that is, the kind that requires glasses -- can't compete with.

This approach to spectacle is no less immersive than Brambilla's, but it loses out for being less bombastic. Its soundtrack, which is sometimes as minimal as whispers of breath or the scratching of a pencil, is no match for the thunderous familiarity of Brambilla's appropriated Hollywood spectacle -- which is, of course, exactly Brambilla's point.

Follow @karinalongworth and @LAWeeklyArts on Twitter.

Marco Brambilla Tells The Story Of Human Evolution

2012-01-28T11:04:00.001-08:00

Huffington Post
January 24, 2012

The world may know Marco Brambilla best for his directorial work on Kanye West's "Power" music video, but the video artist's scope exists on a much larger scale: try the entirety of human existence. For his ambitious video piece, "Evolution (Megaplex)," now showing at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and previously covered on the Huffington Post, Brambilla pieced together human history using samples from cinema's past.

"Evolution (Megaplex)" illustrates the story of humanity from pre-historic to contemporary times by using around 400 individual film snippets that are "blended into a fluid, interconnected tableau." Brambilla chose to focus primarily on genre films as source material because of their sensationalized take on historical events.

Seamlessly melting into one another, the film clips conjure feelings of brutality and violence alongside love and spirituality. In true Brambilla fashion, "Evolution (Megaplex)" is a visual feast for the eyes that will leave you eating leftovers for quite some time. The overwhelming scope of the work almost pales in comparison to the cultural landmarks that it is created from. View a slideshow of stills from Marco Brambilla's "Evolution (Megaplex)" below and feel free to play an impromptu game of "Where's Waldo?" with your friends.

Marco Brambilla's "Evolution (Megaplex)" will be showing at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art from January 20th through the 28th, 2012

Second for second, the most cinematic excitement in Sundance

2012-01-28T11:02:00.000-08:00

Los Angeles Times
January 22, 2012

Second for second, the most exciting film at the Sundance Film Festival is not on any movie theater screen: It's being presented at the fest’s New Frontier exhibition space and it has the daunting title of “Evolution (Megaplex).”

Created by video artist Marco Brambilla, director of the 1993 film "Demolition Man," this large-scale installation is hard to describe but delightful to experience. It’s a stereoscopic, 3-D video collage which plays onscreen like a moving tapestry, offering a wild abundance of arresting images during its three-minute span.

As stirring music from Prokofiev’s “Romeo & Juliet” plays on the soundtrack, looped segments from hundreds of Hollywood blockbuster films crowd onto the screen, arranged in roughly chronological order as a cracked movie history of the world.

Loops from 30 to 35 films are visible at any given moment, and viewers will recognize "King Kong," "Ghandi," the parting of the Red Sea from "The Ten Commandments," John Wayne in “The Searchers,” Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, even Elvis Presley in “Jailhouse Rock.” One of Brambilla’s favorite moments places the droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” on the Great Wall of China. The more you look at this video mural, the more you see.

Brambilla worked for a year on the project, which also appeared as part of a major retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum of Art last year. “It’s a spectacle, it’s supposed to be indulgent,” the artist said here. “Since it comments on content taking a backseat in movies, I thought why not go all the way and make it really bombastic?” Not to mention a whole lot of fun.

RELATED:

Photos: The scene at Sundance 2012

Sundance 2012: Rashida Jones does romantic dramedy

Art review: 'Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining' at Santa Monica Museum of Art

–- Kenneth Turan in Park City, Utah

Photo: A scene from "Evolution (Megaplex)." Credit: Sundance Film Festival

Marco Brambilla's Evolution (Megaplex) at 2012 Sundance Film Festival

2012-01-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

Detail from Marco Brambilla's 3D video, Evolution (Megaplex), 2010

Evolution (Megaplex) will screen tomorrow, January 19th, as part of the "New Frontier" selection at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The video work will simultaneously exhibit at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (formerly called the Salt Lake Art Center).

Highlighting work that pushes the boundaries of storytelling and the moving image, "New Frontier" celebrates the convergence of film, art, and new media technologies as a hotbed for cinematic innovation.

Evolution (Megaplex) had premiered last year at the 68th Annual Venice International Film Festival, in addition to being featured in his first survey exhibition, "The Dark Lining", at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

To learn more about Evolution (Megaplex) at the Sundance Film Festival, please click here.

For additional information on Marco Brambilla, please go here.

Arts Beat LA: Scott Short Exhibition

2012-01-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

Scott Short’s paintings at Christopher Grimes Gallery

By Pauline Adamek

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Scott Short's works on display at Christopher Grimes Gallery

Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica is currently presenting an exhibition of new paintings by Scott Short. Expanding upon a precise and highly laborious art making technique, Short’s new works continue to investigate the dialectics of representation and the relationship between the mechanical and hand-made.

These elaborately rendered paintings begin with simple colored construction paper that the artist copies then re-copies numerous times on a black-and-white photocopying machine. The resulting image is photographed and projected onto a large primed canvas, where Short begins a meticulous rendering of the original using black oil paint. Randomness and acts-of-faith play a part in Short’s adherence to the copy machine’s unpredictable translations of patterns and abstract marks.

Short states that the exhibition’s title derives from Aristotle’s “Law of the Excluded Middle”, the principle “that for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is.” In addition, “The Excluded Middle becomes a “Truth” that is beyond our sight and expression, the recognition that the ambiguity lies in the “facts” themselves. While we may realize the fallacy of black and white thinking, the structures we have created remain inescapable, and for our everyday purposes, we are left to express the truth we conceive through the lies of our own making.”

Currently based in Vallauris, France, Scott Short received his MFA and BFA from Ohio State University. His work has been included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and in group exhibitions entitled “Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art” at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy and at the Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, Belgium. He also had a solo exhibition at The Rennaissance Society at The University of Chicago for which a catalog has recently been produced.

For more information about Scott Short, please click here.

Scott Short: The Excluded Middle

Christopher Grimes Gallery

916 Colorado Avenue

Santa Monica, CA

Exhibition dates:

January 14 – March 3, 2012

Hours:

Tuesdays – Saturdays 10am – 5:30pm

Gallery contact:

phone (310) 587 3373
fax (310) 587 3383

Chicago-area Professor Manglano-Ovalle Wins $50,000 USA Fellow Award

2012-01-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

By Chicago Art Magazine

Jan 09, 2012

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle has created projects that make abstractions -- such as DNA or a cloud -- tangible.

Artist and Northwestern University Professor Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle –who once created a video installation block party in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods — was named a USA Fellow this week. With awards of $50,000, the fellowships are given each year to 50 outstanding visual, literary and performing artists.

A professor of art theory and practice in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Manglano-Ovalle is known for his technologically sophisticated artworks that combine sculpture and video to raise questions about social and political issues. “The quality and ambition of his work have won him many of the highest honors the contemporary art world has to bestow,” said art theory and practice chair Lane Relyea.

A 2001 winner of a MacArthur (“genius”) Fellowship, Manglano-Ovalle often creates elegant forms that mask social and political themes, such as immigration, climate change and gun violence. Working with scientists, he has created projects that make abstractions — such as DNA or a cloud — tangible.

Manglano-Ovalle has had solo or group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art and Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; and other venues around the world.

Born in Spain, Manglano-Ovalle was raised in Chicago. His acclaimed “Gravity Is A Force To Be Reckoned With” is a 25-by-25 foot recreation of a famous but never-built glass house designed by pioneering Chicago architect Mies van der Rohe. The sculpture/video piece was part of an in-depth look by the Whitney Museum of van der Rohe’s early career.

In addition to working with graduate students, Manglano-Ovalle will teach an undergraduate video art class in the upcoming quarter. In spring quarter, he will teach “Alternatives to the Object,” a class in which students learn to create conceptual- and performance-based art.

The Demonstrators Also Waited - Allan Sekula in Conversation with Kaja Silverman

2012-01-14T09:24:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, January 17, 2012; 6:30-8:30 pm
Slought Foundation
Free; reservation not required

Slought Foundation is pleased to announce "The Demonstrators Also Waited," an evening conversation with Allan Sekula and Kaja Silverman on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation.

The title of this event comes from a short essay written by Kaja Silverman about Allan Sekula's Waiting For Tear Gas, a slide show consisting of 81 images taken in Seattle during protests against the World Trade Organization in the autumn of 1999. In Waiting For Tear Gas, Sekula records "the lulls, the waiting, and the margins of the events." Photographing without a flash, telephoto zoom lens, or auto-focus, he refuses the pressure "to grab at all costs the one defining image of dramatic violence." Instead he presents us with a sequence that evokes the slow time of conflict in the street where the orchestration of police operations opens onto moments of uncertainty. These are scenes where everyone's role is pre-determined, but no one is quite sure how things will actually proceed.

With the clearing of many of the Occupy camps late this fall, we have come again to see how conflict in the street entails waiting and how uncertainty and anticipation color the experience of bodies asserting themselves against the abstraction of global capital. Occupation has been described as a tactic that is opposed to the temporality of protest since it does not begin or end at a pre-given moment, but rather insists on the principle of open-endedness. But waiting occurred everywhere and threats of eviction shaped the Occupy movement's struggles. Occupation as a tactic has now opened on to new and as of yet undefined horizons, in some cases trading visibility for new forms of self-organization. The first few months of Occupy gave rise to an explosion of documentation, indelible moments of violence, but also many images that correspond more closely to the principles of what Sekula has called the "anti-photojournalism" behind Waiting For Tear Gas. Such scenes of volatile collectivity invite reflection, especially now as many of the most visible elements of the occupations have begun to disappear from view. The conversation between Sekula and Kaja Silverman will be an occasion to ask how a work like Waiting For Tear Gas appears now in the light of the politics of occupation that have taken hold in our own moment, as well as a time to consider the shifting relationship between photography and temporality in Sekula's larger body of work on the operations of global capitalism, particularly at sea. This subject has been the focus of a related series of projects focused on maritime trade, in works such as Fish Story, The Lottery of the Sea, and Sekula’s latest film, The Forgotten Space, which will be screened at International House in Philadelphia on the evening following this event (January 18, 2012, 7:00 pm).

Since the early 1970s, Allan Sekula has theorized the practice of documentary photography as both an artist and a critic. He often works in essay form in order to challenge the apparent autonomy of the singular image; for example in "Untitled Slide Sequence" (1972) employees at General Dynamics emerge one by one or in small groups at the end of the day just as workers at the Lumière factory did nearly a century before. Sekula is also the author of a number of seminal essays including, "The Traffic in Photographs" (1981) and "The Body and the Archive" (1992). His trenchant critique of social documentary turns on his account of the tension between the technological and aesthetic discourses of photography. Sekula's prolific body of work has continued to revolve around issues of labor and the aesthetic and economic traffic in images bound up with the processes of globalization. In recent years Sekula has turned to the medium of film which has offered up new and rich means for bringing together image and word in works such as The Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010).

Sekula lives and works in Los Angeles where he also teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. He has had solo shows recently at MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium; Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary; e-flux, New York; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, Austria.

This program is made possible in part through the generous support of the Department of the History of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Special thanks: Erica Levin, Alex Klein.

Interview with Miguel Rio Branco

2011-12-30T10:26:00.000-08:00

Miguel Rio Branco from Kulturhuset on Vimeo.

Miguel Rio Branco in conversation with Bill Kouwenhoven regarding "Solo" exhibition at Kulturhuset galleri 5 (8 oktober 2011 - 29 januari 2012)

Oceans and Campfires - Sekula at SFAI

2011-12-30T10:19:00.001-08:00

CURRENT EXHIBITION ::::

Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralonguee
Curated by Hou Hanru

Exhibition Dates: 1 December–18 February, 2011

The San Francisco Art Institute is pleased to announce Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue, an exhibition featuring two of the most innovative figures in the field of contemporary documentary photography and video. The show is on view December 1, 2011–February 18, 2012 in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries. An opening reception will be held on Wednesday, November 30 from 5:30–7:30 pm.

Photography and video documentaries have played a significant role in the evolution of global contemporary art, opening a new dimension of artists’ engagements with social and political changes, and producing an aesthetic genre highly relevant to our age of media and communication. Differing from traditional journalistic photography and films, these works negotiate the moving boundaries between reality and imagination, reportage and critique. They also provide a new space in which contemporary art can reconnect with real life, serving as a site of resistance to the hegemony of established powers. At a time when “Occupy Wall Street!” has become a rallying cry against the domination of neoliberal capitalism, this exhibition of Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue is especially relevant.

Allan Sekula is a Los Angeles-based photographer, writer, and filmmaker who, for the last three decades, has been traveling around the world to document the impacts of globalization on the everyday life of people and social systems. His critical examination has focused on the maritime economy, namely intercontinental transportations. In his long-term engagement with this adventure, he has developed interrelated exhibitions, books, and films such as Fish Story, Lottery of the Sea, Ship of Fools, and The Forgotten Space. These works reveal the complexity, contradictions, and violence of this key sector of global capitalism and help voice the muffled claims of those who risk their lives laboring in the system.

Parisian photographer Bruno Serralongue has developed a distinctive body of work that questions the truth of photographic representation and how images are produced, disseminated, and circulated in contemporary contexts. He pursues traces of media events that marked key moments in regions facing geopolitical changes: global economic and social forums; celebrations of new independent nations such as Kosovo and South Sudan in the aftermaths of civil wars; strikes and labor conflicts. Instead of seeking spectacular images of these events in the voyeuristic and dramatic style of paparazzi, Serralongue chooses to catch angles excluded from the mainstream media’s framings of “reality,” and surmounts considerable difficulties to cover events in his independent manner. Through images such as campfires in the campsite of striking workers at the New Fabris factory in Châtellerault, France, Serralongue symbolizes rage and determination in the face of exploitation and oppression

This show at the Walter and McBean Galleries is part of the Global Figures component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs structure, designed to bring some of the most remarkable actors in the current global art scene to West Coast audiences.

Super 8 Opens at YBCA

2011-12-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Super 8
January 26 - July 8, 2012 • CrossFade Video Lounge

Super 8 is an artist-curated video art exhibition organized by the Los Angeles-based Christopher Grimes Gallery. Eight artists from eight different cities across the globe were invited to present their own videos and, in addition, invite four other artists from their respective cities to present works as well. A total of 40 artists from Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, and Tokyo are represented in the project. A unique feature of Super 8 is that this collection of diverse work in one-, two- and three-channel formats, selected through a peer-to-peer curatorial process, accumulates into a serial format exhibition with a global scope. The diverse selection of videos include Brazilian artist Thiago Rocha Pitta’s Homage to JMW Turner, a performative video honoring British Romantic painter Joseph Mallord William Turner; Los Angeles-based artist Euan Macdonald’s The Healer, which questions the illusion of the recorded image; and Dublin-based artist Jaki Irvine’s The Actress, which addresses issues of the human condition. The artists/curators are Marco Brambilla, Takehito Koganezawa, Reynold Reynolds, Julião Sarmento, Tunga, Richard T. Walker, Walker and Walker, and Wood & Harrison. Additional invited artists include John Baldessari, Nate Boyce, Yuki Okamura, and João Onofre.

Events

Super 8

January 26, 2012 – July 7, 2012

CrossFade Video Lounge

See Visit page for gallery hours and admission.

------------------

Artist Bio

Berlin

Reynold Reynolds
Reynold Reynolds is an artist and filmmaker with a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Reynold Reynolds primarily works with 16mm film as an art medium. Influenced by philosophy and science, his practice is based on transformation, consumption and decay. Reynold Reynolds was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2003, and in 2004 he was invited to The American Academy in Berlin with a studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien for one year. Reynolds has received numerous awards for his films, including the Festival Award for Secret Life at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck, 2008, the ‘09 Distinction Award for Six Apartments at Transmediale Berlin and Mention spéciale du jury, Last Day of the Republic at Videoformes, 2011. www.reynold-reynolds.com

Dublin

Walker & Walker
Joe Walker and Pat Walker started collaborating as artists in 1989. In 2005 they co-represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. They have exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Their film Mount Analogue Revisited was selected by Fergus Daly in Senses of Cinema as one of the best films of 2010.

Lisbon

Julião Sarmento
Julião Sarmento was born in 1948 in Lisbon, Portugal and studied painting and architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, where he received his master’s degree in 1976. Sarmento has developed a multi-media visual language – combining film, video, sound, painting, sculpture and installations – which often deals with issues of complex interpersonal relationships. His work has been exhibited in museums worldwide including The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Holland; and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Sarmento lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. www.juliaosarmento.com

London

Wood & Harrison
British artists John Wood (born 1969 in Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (born 1966 in Wolverhampton, England) both studied at the Bath College of Higher Education and have been working together since 1993. They are best known for video-based works that often involve the manipulation of familiar objects. Their works, often minimalist and sculptural with elements of installation and performance, take a position between tragedy, comedy and irony. They have exhibited widely in Europe and North America and have works in the permanent collections of the Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Solo shows include Some words, some more words at Ikon, Birmingham, 2009; Answers to Questions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010; H&R Block Artspace, Kansas City; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas, 2011.

Los Angeles

Marco Brambilla
Marco Brambilla is an Italian-born Canadian artist and filmmaker who works in the United States. Brambilla studied film at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and initially worked in commercials and feature films, which resulted in him directing the successful 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man. In 1998 he shifted focus to video and photography projects. He has exhibited works in private and public collections, including at the Guggenheim Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Brambilla’s latest work is the stunning video collage, Power, commissioned by Kanye West. www.marcobrambilla.com

Rio de Janeiro

Tunga
Tunga was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1952 and is the youngest of a group of conceptual Brazilian artists that emerged in the 1970s. Tunga’s main medium of sculpture is influenced by performance art, photography, drawing and video, and investigates themes of language, myths and poetry, using materials such as steel, copper and wax. His work can be seen in permanent collections of major museums around the world, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Tunga is based in Rio de Janeiro.

San Francisco

Richard T. Walker
Born in the UK and currently living in San Francisco, Richard T. Walker's tender and provocative videos challenge the presumption that the natural world revolves around us. Walker received an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London in 2005. His international group exhibitions include Don Quijote, Witte de With, Rotterdam; Romantic Damage, De Appel, Amsterdam; Beyond The Country, The Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Terminus, Para/Site, Hong Kong; and Meditators, at the National Museum in Warsaw. In 2010, he had solo shows at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, Angels Barcelona and Christopher Grimes Gallery in Los Angeles, and a solo presentation of work as part of Transplanted at the San Francisco Arts Commission. http://richardtwalker.net/Richard_T_Walker_.html

Tokyo

Takehito Koganezawa
Takehito Koganezawa was born in 1974 in Tokyo and is an artist living and working in Tokyo and Berlin. In 1998, Koganezawa graduated from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. He has developed a diverse art practice, which shares a minimalist aesthetic. His media work includes drawing, video, sound sculpture, and performance.

ARTINFO's 10 Weekly International Art Picks --- Katharina Grosse

2011-12-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

From Anselm Kiefer's Alchemy to Katharina Grosse's Rainbows

View Slideshow

Courtesy the artist and Mass MOCA

An installation view of Katharina Grosse's “One Floor Up More Highly”

by Alanna Martinez

Published: December 13, 2011

TOKYO

“Undressing Paintings: Japanese Nudes 1880-1945” at the National Museum of Modern Art, 3-1 Kitanomaru-koen, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Through January 15

Despite a rich history of the representation of the nude in art history, its appearance in Japanese art has been fairly recent. This exhibition focuses on Japanese artists's perspective on the nude through the presentation of 100 oil paintings.

SHANGHAI

Chen Man at MOCA Shanghai, People’s Park, 231 Nanjing West Road, Shanghai, Through February 7

In her largest solo exhibition in China to date, photographer Chen Man will display new works in a series based on the Buddhist idea of the “six dusts”: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and idea.

ATHENS

Layet Johnson at Ciné, 234 West Hancock Ave., Athens, Georgia, Opening December 16

Arkansas-based artist Layet Johnson, who was recently featured in Modern Painters’s December issue “100 Artists To Watch” presents “Marcus” at Ciné in Athens, Georgia. The show will be comprised of 15 Rothko-inspired drawings and 10 sculptures completed during a recent residency in Iowa.

SAN FRANCISCO

Tara Tucker’s “If Wishes Were Horses…” at Rena Bransten Gallery, 77 Geary St., San Francisco, Opening December 15

Tara Tucker’s impeccable graphite drawings enliven the walls of Rena Bransten with a menagerie of natural creatures. Pieces like “Spat (Two Old Forest Rams)” and “Spring Time With Ferns” mix Tucker’s zoo of friendly creatures with flora and fauna.

NORTH ADAMS

Katharina Grosse “One Floor Up More Highly” at MASS MoCA, 87 Marshall St., North Adams, Massachusetts, Through January 1

Mountains of multi-colored earth and stark white undulating peaks of Styrofoam create an otherworldly landscape at MASS MoCA. Grosse’s installations, which will run just until the start of the new year, stretch floor to ceiling, bringing to mind an intergalactic journey.

STOWE

“Epic: Original art of Dogtown and Custom Decks of Iconic Artists of Our Time” presented by Ghettogloss, at Darkside, 2160 Mountain Rd., Stowe, Vermont, Ongoing

The street kings of Dogtown, who have dominated the skate world for years, give the art world a treat with original deck designs. Skateboards have also been contributred by art icons Shepard Fairey and Tommy Chong, who pay homage to the medium.

BEIJING

Zhan Wang’s “My Personal Universe” at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing, Through February 25

Over 5,000 stainless steel replicas of stone fragments produced during the making of Zhan Wang’s film “My Personal Universe” float in the gallery space, echoing the multiple projections of actual rocks being blown apart displayed on the walls.

BILBAO

Constantin Brancusi and Richard Serra at Guggenheim Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra, Bilbao, Through January 25

Two sculptural giants share gallery space at Gehry’s silver cathedral of art in Bilbao. As Serra was greatly influenced by Brancusi’s work seen in his reconstructed workshop in Paris, it is only fitting that the two artists be shown together, exploring the potential of sculptural form.

LONDON

Anselm Kiefer’s “Il Mistero delle Cattedrali” at White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey St., London, Through February 26

In the largest exhibition of Anselm Keifer’s work in London yet, 11,000 square feet of gallery space will be filled with the artist's alchemical works on canvas and large-scale sculptures.

Spaghetti Sessions: Allan Sekula at Concord

2011-12-30T10:07:00.001-08:00

“Concord is an experimental initiative: an artist run space, a community node, a place to eat and a growing cluster of ideas and passions.”

*** Spaghetti Sessions present

…

Friday December 9th, 7:30pm, Spaghetti Sessions at Concord hosted The Experimental Impulse and On Aesthetic Difference: Journey into Southland Video Anthology of the 1970s with David Ross and Allan Sekula.

Concord
1010 San Fernando Road.
LA CA 90065
cell: 818.649.0189

Conversation & Screening: Sekula at ICA

2011-12-30T09:30:00.001-08:00

Institute of Contemporary Art University of Pennsylvania

Conversation & Screening: Allan Sekula

Tuesday, January 17, 2012 @ 6:30pm

Follow the exchange of container cargo and the workers who facilitate its journey around the world through The Forgotten Space (2010), a film by Allan Sekula and Noel Burch. Sekula will introduce the film and discuss his ongoing exploration of the sea as an essential, but all too often invisible, site of labor and global exchange.

Allan Sekula & Kaja Silverman in conversation
@ Slought Foundation (4017 Walnut St.)

In collaboration with the Department of the History of Art, International House, and the Slought Foundation.

"California Stories": Allan Sekula, photographs review by LA Weekly

2011-12-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

Detail from Allan Sekula's Untitled Slide Sequence, 1972-2011, 25 black & white photographs, 16 x 20 inches. Image courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery

The Art of a Complex Military Industry

By Shana Nys Dambrot

Simultaneously using photography to document societal change while questioning the limits of veracity in the documentary stance itself is a neat trick, and one which artist, professor, and public intellectual Allan Sekula has managed to pull off for decades. "Allan Sekula: California Stories" (now extended through January 7) at Christopher Grimes Gallery is really two shows in one — a suite of new prints made from the original 1972 slides from the Untitled Slide Sequence, and the never-before-shown California Stories: 1973-77. Timed to coincide with the Pacific Standard Time juggernaut, as Sekula is represented in PST shows at both MOCA and OCMA, this two-pronged exhibition feels both historical and contemporary. Demonstrating his unique combination of deadpan wit and serious social commentary on the plight of workers at various levels of the economic food chain amid the imbalances of globalization, these remarkable images are both timeless and timely. As union workers leave their factory jobs at the end of a shift, individuals emerge from a milling crowd framed by the subtly oppressive architecture of a public transportation hub. Once an examination of the facelessness of streamlined, powerful industry, nearly 40 years on, they have ironically developed a hint of nostalgia for the paradoxical security they also depict. Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica; runs Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., thru Jan. 7; free. (310) 587-3373. cgrimes.com.

Price: Free

Manglano-Ovalle at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art

2011-12-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

Placemakers

Artists | Isabelle Hayeur, Tim Hyde, Anne Lindberg, Cybele Lyle, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Jason Manley, Zach Rockhill, Quynh Vantu, Letha Wilson
January 13 – March 31, 2012
Opening Reception | Friday, January 13 | 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Artists and Curator Tour | Saturday, January 14 | 12 noon

Placemakers Process Talks
Quynh Vantu + Letha Wilson | Thursday, December 8 | 6:00 p.m.
Cybele Lyle + Zach Rockhill | Thursday, December 15 | 6:00 p.m.

Anne Lindberg, raume yellow, 2010, Courtesy of the artist and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, photo by Michael Spillers

The exhibition Placemakers brings together nine artists engaged in interventionist and transformative acts that make places. Working in multiple media — video, photography, installation, sculpture and digital forms — each artist occupies and re-imagines a specific site. The exhibition includes seven commissions of new work and spans 12,000 square feet of the Bemis Center’s first floor and extends beyond the gallery’s interior.

Isabelle Hayeur’s (AIR 2011) site-specific video installations emphasize the porosity of our physical perception with virtual space. Responding to a quotidian space on 14th Street, two blocks from the Bemis Center, Hayeur’s video and sound installation is an invitation to experience a mise en abyme, an exploration of infinity.

Tim Hyde’s video and photographic works amplify singular experiences of place fused to specific psychological, historical, and technological contexts. Hyde’s The Keeper (2006) records a silent and delicate negotiation between the artist and an anonymous elderly woman in the courtyard of a former KGB building in Kiev, Ukraine.

Anne Lindberg's current works utilize fine rayon threads to create luminous spatial passages and forms. Optically they are immaterial; materially they are fundamental. Lindberg is presenting a forty-foot installation and a two-dimensional work — both color-saturated works expand her involvement in new modalities for drawing.

Cybele Lyle (AIR 2010) works in both video installation and photography, and layers imagery of domestic architecture with the natural environment. Within a restrained palette, Lyle creates a subtle, yet encompassing spatial disorientation that heightens the slowness, impermanence and sexuality of space.

Chicago-based artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth, final installment in a set of works that Manglano-Ovalle filmed in buildings by Mies van der Rohe. In this HD video, Manglano-Ovalle documents an event that “refers to the end of the utopia of transparency.” The work observes a ceremonial window smashing — by Mies’ own grandson — and aftermath at Mies’ Crown Hall at the IIT campus in Chicago.

Jason Manley’s (AIR 2005) drawings and installations compact the language and forms of advertising into off-kilter beacons. Manley’s monumental icons are open-ended and speculative propositions that trump the gamesmanship and diversions of conventional public messaging. For Placemakers, Manley imagines the Bemis Center as a locus of collective possibility and personal hope.

Zach Rockhill’s work engages physical impossibilities of architecture and material. Through low-tech illusions, Rockhill’s works accelerate gravity, make architecture liquid and find permeability within seemingly solid forms. Rockhill has created a 40-foot nylon curtain whose translucent moirés improbably pass through a four-by-four-foot concrete cube.

Quynh Vantu’s (AIR 2011) installations torque the experience of transitional spaces — hallways, atriums, thresholds — into condensed social exchanges, compressed physical negotiations or buoyant places for interaction. Vantu’s works occupy two Bemis Center corridors to distinct effect, and reward spirited participation.

Letha Wilson (AIR 2011) builds photographic and architectural tableaux that conjoin bucolic visions of nature with misbehaving construction materials. Her site-specific works for Placemakers conflate pastoral images with alien and unexpected architectural moments. Beyond the specific jolt of this work, Wilson sends up the often ill-fitting interface of the built and natural worlds.

Placemakers is curated by Hesse McGraw, Bemis Center chief curator.

Exhibitions Presenting Sponsor: Omaha Steaks
Sponsors: Justin V. Allen Design + Development, Clark Creative Group, Davis Erection, Design 8, Echo Tech, Education Power | Robert Webber, Larry Gawel Photography, Chris Headley / OmahaComputerHelp.com, Nebraska Arts Council, Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Quail Distributing, Recycling Rudy | Grandma M, Rybin Plumbing & Heating, Sherwin Williams, Upstream Brewing Company, Visions Custom Framing, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Warren Distribution

Tim Hyde, The Keeper, 2006

Quynh Vantu, Inflated, 2008

Jason Manley, Exceptionalism, 2010, Acrylic Ink on Paper, 30x34

Isabelle Hayeur, Innerland, 2011

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Always After (The Glass House), 2006

Sekula in Light Years Exhibition at Art Institute

2011-12-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964-1977
Art Institute of Chicago

December 13, 2011–March 11, 2012
Regenstein Hall
Member Previews: December 10–12, 10:30–5:00

Overview: Among its many accomplishments, the pioneering movement known broadly as Conceptual Art succeeded in bringing photography definitively into the mainstream of contemporary art. Artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Eleanor Antin, and Sigmar Polke took up the production of new photographs—as opposed to using found images from mass media and consumer culture like the Pop artists—and placed photography firmly on an equal basis with avant-garde painting and sculpture. They did this by exploiting the photographic image in every way possible: in books, slides, canvases, films, and room-size installations. The results were liberating for all the arts and made it possible for contemporary art to become a field without a medium.

Light Years is the very first museum exhibition to examine the pathbreaking role photography played in these critical years. More than 140 works by 57 artists will fill Regenstein Hall in an exhibition that will only be seen in Chicago. Bringing to the fore work from the Italian group Arte Povera as well as artists from Eastern Europe who are rarely shown in the United States, Light Years also includes many pieces that have not been seen in decades by such major artists as Mel Bochner, Tony Conrad, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Emilio Prini.

As befits this innovative presentation, a special opening event is planned for Friday, December 9. Beginning at 6:00 p.m., the Art Institute will project Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire—a single, eight-hour-long nighttime take of the Empire State Building—from the museum’s Bluhm Family Terrace across Millennium Park to the upper stories of the Aon Center. Warhol’s work thus sets the stage for the artists featured in Light Years who redrew the boundaries of both photography and contemporary art.

John Baldessari. Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts), 1973. Detail (1 of 12) from the artist's book, edition of 2000. Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Marco Brambilla New Work: RPM

2011-12-10T10:08:00.000-08:00

The Artist's F1-Inspired Short Gets Behind Ferrari's Wheel

Video artist Marco Brambilla shares his densely hypnotic and kaleidoscopic 3D film RPM, commissioned by Ferrari in celebration of their latest auto masterpiece, the 458 Spider, and premiering at Art Basel Miami tonight. Assembling footage shot on location over several months at the Italian Formula One Grand Prix in Monza with imagery from the Scuderia Ferrari archives and the artist’s own recordings, RPM is a visceral, cubist representation of a Formula One driver’s state of mind during a race. “I wanted to make a portrait of speed,” says Brambilla, a life-long F1 fan. “Something as subjective as can be, that explores the connection of man and machine and tests the limits of human endurance.” Featuring Möbius strip racetracks, wind-gritted teeth and a howling soundtrack of throttling engines, RPM accelerates in complexity with every turn of the circuit. “[The film is] always accelerating,” says the artist, “just building, no payoff, no win.” The New York-based Brambilla, who created the digital tableau vivant for Kanye West’s “Power” and the 3D videos Evolution and Civilization, wanted to push the limits of his own aesthetic vocabulary with this project. “This one is a little bit different in that we used 3D as an editing tool,” he says. “As the piece speeds up, the multi-planing—the foreground, mid-ground and background objects—all cycle through each other to create an acceleration in 3D space.”

Manglano-Ovalle: USA Visual Arts Grant Recipient

2011-12-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

50 artists, 50 states, $50,000, 8 disciplines

Every year, 50 USA Fellowship grants of $50,000 each are awarded to outstanding performing, visual, media, and literary artists. In the last six years, we have invested $15,000,000 in America’s finest artists.

Visual Arts Fellows 2011:

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Lorraine O'Grady, John Outterbridge, Allen Ruppersberg, Carolee Scheemann, Roger Shimomura, Mike Smith

-----------------------------------------

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

USA Guthman Fellow Visual Arts 2011

Chicago, IL

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle has a varied and complex practice that encompasses mostly sculpture and video. Manglano-Ovalle often collaborates with scientists on projects that make abstractions, such as one’s DNA or a cloud, tangible. These elegant forms often mask political agendas that can include, for example, immigration issues, climate change, or globalization. He has also created a series of sculptures and films based on the modernism of architect Mies van der Rohe. Manglano-Ovalle is a professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Chicago, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001.

Interview with Hou Hanru and Allan Sekula

2011-12-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

Saturday, Dec 3, 2011 9:00 AM PST

“Oceans and Campfires”: Documenting society’s elemental ills

A new exhibition examines working-class stories and narratives of civil unrest through two artists' lenses

SLIDE SHOW

By Emma Mustich

Allan Sekula, "Churn." From the series "Ship of Fools," 1999-2010. (Credit: Courtesy of the artist, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris)

View the slide show

Topics:Five-Minute Museum

How can artists illustrate the most pressing social, cultural and political questions of the day — and how can they make their work more probing, more complex and more relevant than the split-second, establishment news coverage that reigns supreme?

A new exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute explores this thorny question — and many others — through the work of two photographers and videographers who “[fuse] the role of the documentarian with the new role of the artist as global citizen.”

Allan Sekula seeks to put a human face on modern globalization, exposing the harsh realities of working-class life on the “forgotten landscape” of the high seas — “one of the most precarious and exploitative systems of neoliberalism.” Bruno Serralongue is drawn to a different element — fire — in his quest to document the birth pangs of countries like Kosovo and South Sudan and capture the tenor of strikes, rebellions and social tension internationally.

Over the phone, Sekula and Serralongue — along with curator Hou Hanru — discussed their work and the artistic convictions it represents. See the accompanying slide show for a quick exhibition preview.

What’s the philosophy behind this exhibition? It seems very timely, in light of recent events at home (the Occupy movement) and abroad (the Arab Spring revolutions) — but it must have been planned relatively far in advance.

Hou Hanru: It’s an interesting coincidence — but not really a coincidence. I’ve been quite interested in exploring the role of artists in the changing world today. For the last few years, we’ve had this program called the New Models of Culture and Art Production, which explores alternative initiatives in terms of negotiating different models of production in the context of globalization.

I was very impressed by Allan’s recent work, and also I saw a wonderful show by Bruno in Paris last year. I decided to propose this project to both artists — for them to come together, with their individual works, and create this interesting momentum. (Allan and Bruno have known each other for the past few years, but this is the first time that they are exhibiting together.)

The artworks cannot be innocent or insensible to what’s happening around us. And people like Allan and Bruno — they’re not simply reacting to this moment; it’s really been a long-term engagement on their part to explore the historical reasons why we are here, at this [point of] crisis.

When it comes to documenting these sorts of stories and events, how is an artist’s work different from that of a photojournalist or paparazzo?

HH: My personal interest is in the very subtle distinction between journalism — the media — and the artistic approach, [which] I would say is more like that of a researcher trying to show the complex historical background and conditions that make up a particular event. I think that’s where the artist actually has a role to play. [The distinction between an artist and a journalist] is really important, even though sometimes it’s not easily perceived at first glance by the public. But making an exhibition showing the whole system of image research and production can actually show this invisible aspect that makes up the substance of our work — the position of an artist’s engagement.

Bruno Serralongue: I think Allan and I are experimenting with another way of making photos — even if the subjects cross the interests of the paparazzi. We are not only interested in the photo, but also the process [of getting it].

Allan Sekula: I think one difference is that artists — if we use the term “artist” in a way that isn’t an honorific (we’re not saying that we’re more creative than journalists) — more readily call the formulas of representation into question. That’s more at the forefront of what we’re interested in. When Bruno uses a 4×5 camera to photograph political events, he’s using a technique more traditionally associated with landscape photography or architectural photography to show these fleeting political moments which have pretty much conventionally been shown by means of small-camera images (because those cameras are quick and portable). He’s also not doing it electronically; the whole point of his photos is not that they can be uploaded immediately to a home newspaper or a website — but that they give a slower, more deliberate take on things.

The one thing I would say to slightly amend what Bruno and Hanru have said is that journalism is also in flux — and it’s important to understand that journalists have their own struggles [to survive] in a media environment that’s changing and brutal but also has certain openings and promises. I always think of the journalists I admire, because — whether it’s George Orwell or Ryszard Kapuściński — these are all people who didn’t fit the norm of their professions, [but] were able to work in it. We’re all working with nonfiction, and we’re all working with contemporary events, and we’re trying to figure out nonformulaic ways of looking at these events. For me, part of that is reorienting the point of view: Changing the point of view from the land to the sea is a crucial thing for me.

Why did you decide to focus on sea-related stories? And Bruno, how did you settle on the idea of campfires (and fire more generally)?

AS: If we think of our economic problems, not so much in a terrestrial way, but in terms of this watery planet we live on … What happens when we treat the ocean as if it were a giant interstate highway system, without rest stops? (Why doesn’t it have rest stops? Because the whole sea is a toilet — right?) There are a whole bunch of consequences that follow from instrumentalizing the environment in this way, and obviously it’s not sustainable. Also, there are consequences from treating it as a place where you can just exploit the hell out of people because there are no sovereign, national laws that apply, in terms of working conditions and the like. So it’s a kind of hidden space of exploitation.

The prevailing fantasy [right now], of course, is that everything’s moving at this electronic pace, and that’s what sets the standard for the world. But the fact is that there’s all this heavy stuff moving around slowly that provides both the material energy and the physical objects that are produced by the use of that material energy. So those are some of the concerns.

What interested me is that, historically speaking, the sea was a place where — in the 16th through the 18th centuries — there was this enormous exploitation; these were the most modern machines in the world, and they were like factories. The sailing ship was a kind of engine of colonial conquest, and it also ground down the people who worked on it. But out of that came certain dreams of freedom. Going back to the mutinies in the British fleet at the end of the 18th century — roughly, say, at the time of the French Revolution — [we see that the] idea of mutiny and of maritime revolt is a really strong one in the formation of democracy. And … abolitionist ideas were also circulated among seafaring workers. There are historians who have worked on this: Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh are two who’ve really done the yeoman’s work of exploring this history. What happens in the 20th century, of course, is that seafarers for a brief period of time are recognized as human beings, and accorded labor rights because of their struggles. These are not granted to them from above; they win it by shedding blood, as happened here in San Francisco with the general strike in 1934. But global capital is not content with that solution, especially as it enters into yet a new stage of crisis, and so it wants to return to [its past] exploitation. And it has done so. Seafarers now come from the Philippines, or from China, or from the former Soviet Union, or socialist-bloc countries like Romania, Bulgaria and so on … That’s kind of the framework, for me: What is the cargo container? What does it mean that this box was invented in the ’50s that came to be the dominant way of [transporting] dry, semi-manufactured or manufactured goods? It allowed this massive re-localization of production, away from the developed world, to developing countries like China. And shifted, essentially, the global economy in a very profound way. And I think that, in turn, liberated finance capital in the West to just spin in increasingly complex circles of derivative trading and the like — to lose any sense of connection to the real economy.

BS: For me, just a few words! I’m really interested in conflict; that’s what fire means. It’s more of a metaphor of the conflict between two sides.

“Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue” is on view at the San Francisco Art Institute through Feb. 18, 2012.

e-flux: Sekula SFAI Exhibition

2011-12-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

Left: Allan Sekula, "Churn." From the series "Ship of Fools," 1999–2010. Photograph, 48 x 52 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, and Galerie Michel Rein, Paris.
Right: Bruno Serralongue, "Feu de machines, New Fabris, Châtellerault, jeudi 30 juillet 2009." From the series "New Fabris, Châtellerault, 2009." 2009. Photograph, 49 x 61 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Air de Paris, Paris.

Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue
Curated by Hou Hanru

December 1, 2011–February 18, 2012

Opening:
November 30, 2011, 5:30–7:30 pm

Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture series, Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue in conversation:
November 30, 2011, 7:30 pm, SFAI lecture hall

Film Screening: The Forgotten Space
Co-Directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch
January 25, 2012, 7:30pm, SFAI lecture hall
Introduced by Allan Sekula

Walter and McBean Galleries
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public

www.sfai.edu
www.waltermcbean.com

Curated by SFAI's Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs Hou Hanru, Oceans and Campfires: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue is an exhibition featuring two of the most innovative figures in the field of contemporary documentary photography and video.

Photography and video documentaries have played a significant role in the evolution of global contemporary art, opening a new dimension of artists' engagements with social and political changes, and producing an aesthetic genre highly relevant to our age of media-based communications. Departing from traditional journalistic photographs and films, these works negotiate the moving boundaries between reality and imagination, reportage and critique. They also provide a new space in which contemporary art can reconnect with real life, serving as a site of resistance to the hegemony of established powers. At a time when "Occupy Wall Street!" has become a rallying cry against the domination of neoliberal capitalism, this exhibition of Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue is especially relevant.

Allan Sekula is a Los Angeles-based photographer, writer, and filmmaker who, for the last three decades, has been traveling around the world to document the impacts of globalization on social systems and the everyday lives of people. His critical examinations have focused on the maritime economy, particularly systems of intercontinental transportation. In his long-term engagement with this adventure, Sekula has developed interrelated exhibitions, books, and films such as Fish Story, Lottery of the Sea, Ship of Fools, and The Forgotten Space. These works reveal the complexities, contradictions, and violent realities of this key sector of global capitalism and help voice the muffled claims of those who risk their lives laboring in the system.

Echoing Sekula's explorations, the Parisian Bruno Serralongue pursues events that mark key moments of geopolitical and socioeconomic change in various parts of the world: global economic summits; social forums; celebrations in newly independent nations; the aftermath of civil war; strikes and labor conflicts. Instead of seeking spectacular images of these events in the voyeuristic and dramatic style of the paparazzi, Serralongue chooses to catch angles excluded from the mainstream media's framings of "reality." Through images such as campfires in the campsite of striking workers at the New Fabris factory in Châtellerault, France, Serralongue's photographs symbolize rage and determination in the face of exploitation and oppression.

Oceans and Campfires at the Walter and McBean Galleries is part of the Global Figures component of SFAI's Exhibitions and Public Programs structure, designed to bring some of the most remarkable artists in the current global art scene to West Coast audiences.

SFAI's exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund with generous support for Bruno Serralongue provided by étant donnés: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art and Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco.

San Francisco Art Institute

Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. Focusing on the interdependence of thinking, making, and learning, SFAI's academic and public programs are dedicated to excellence and diversity.

For more information about SFAI, please visit www.sfai.edu or call 415.771.7020.

Marco Brambilla RPM 2011 Ferrari Party Video

2011-12-03T13:12:00.000-08:00

Sekula Conversation at SFAI

2011-11-26T10:00:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - 7:30pm

San Francisco Art Institute

Lecture Hall

800 Chestnut Street

San Francisco

French artist Bruno Serralongue employs the techniques of photojournalism to expose the conditions of contemporary humanity. Instead of focusing on obvious, newsworthy spectacles, his camera looks at less-acknowledged phenomena. In this manner, he has developed a distinctive body of work that questions the truth of photographic representation and how images are produced, disseminated, and circulated in contemporary contexts. Serralongue has had solo exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; La Virreina, Barcelona; WIELS, Brussels; and Air de Paris, Paris. Two monographs of his work have been published, including Bruno Serralongue (JRP Ringier, 2011).

Allan Sekula is a photographer and writer whose works make critical contributions to questions of social reality and globalization, focusing on what he describes as “the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world.” His books include Photography Against the Grain, Fish Story, and Allan Sekula: Dismal Science: Photoworks 1972–1996. He has had solo exhibitions at Witte de With, Rotterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; and the Berkeley Art Museum, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Getty Research Institute, Atelier Calder, and United States Artists. Sekula is on the faculty of the Program in Photography and Media at the California Institute of the Arts.

Both artists are featured in Campfires and Oceans: Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue, which will be on view in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries December 1, 2011–February 25, 2012. The conversation follows the opening reception, which will be held November 30 from 5:30–7:30 pm.

RPM Video for Ferrari by Marco Brambilla

2011-11-26T09:56:00.000-08:00

Ferrari, Peter M. Brant and Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer, will be hosting a party in honor of Ferrari’s Chairman, Luca di Montezemolo, during Art Basel Miami.

The evening, hosted by Interview, will include the unveiling of the new Ferrari 458 Spider; a screening of RPM, a 3D video installation by artist Marco Brambilla; and a surprise musical guest.

Marco Brambilla, RPM 2011

1m50s continuous loop

(Single-Channel video installation, 3D high definition/color, Stereo sound)

The line between man and machine is blurred in Marco Brambilla’s latest 3D video collage. Commissioned by Ferrari S.p.A., RPM presents a compelling psychological portrait of a Formula One driver’s point-of-view during a race.

RPM was photographed by Brambilla at the Italian Formula One Grand Prix in Monza, then processed in his signature style; Images from the Scuderia Ferrari archives as well as race broadcasts and film clips were sampled to create an abstract and kaleidoscopic series of images which seamlessly unfold before us in 3D space.

The result is a kinetic, ever-accelerating series of video loops that accelerate as the subject approaches his own internal “terminal velocity”. A Formula One driver’s state of consciousness is connected to the machine that propels him at speeds of up to 200 MPH. The resulting visual collage functions much like a driver’s subjective peripheral vision. Brambilla states: “I wanted to capture the sense of being on the very threshold of the limits of control – the feeling of euphoria and danger which are equally present in the mental state of a driver during a race”.

There is no beginning or end in RPM, just an accelerating trajectory that has no specific destination, compressing time and reflecting the elevated mental state necessary to maintain control under extreme pressure.

Marco Brambilla is a Milan-born, New York-based video artist whose work has been exhibited in major private and public collections including the Kunsthalle Bern, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. His video installations have also been screened at Venice Film Festival (2011), and will be in the upcoming year's Sundance and Cannes. In May 2011, Brambilla's first major retrospective opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. He is represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Sarmento at Museu da Electricidade – Cinzeiro 8

2011-11-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

Julião Sarmento
What Makes A Writer Great

Curated by João Pinharanda

14 October - 31 December 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 13 at 9:30 pm

What Makes A Writer Great ( in her ), 2000

Water based enamel, acrylic, collage and graphite on paper
152,5 x 122 cm, Courtesy Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon

Museu da Electricidade – Cinzeiro 8
Avenida de Brasília
Central Tejo
1300 Lisboa
Portugal

Opening hours: from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 6:00 pm (Monday closed). T: +351 210 028 130

Grosse Mass Moca Exhibition Extended

2011-11-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

Katharina Grosse

One Floor Up More Highly

at MASS MOCA

through JANUARY 1, 2012

Article: The Brooklyn Rail

Allan Sekula Film Retrospective at Stills: Scotland's Centre for Photography

2011-11-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

12 Nov 2011 - 18 Dec 2011

Allan Sekula: Film Retrospective
Saturday 12 November 2011 - Sunday 18 December 2011

Allan Sekula: Ship of Fools
Saturday 21 January 2012 – Sunday 18 March 2012
Preview: Friday 20 January 6pm – 8pm

For the second installment of Stills’ Social Documents programme Allan Sekula presents his most recent series of photographs Ship of Fools alongside his award-winning documentary film The Forgotten Space. Together, they examine the sea as a space of trade, work, exploitation, activism and the sublime. As a prelude to this major exhibition we will present a retrospective of his moving image works. Spanning over thirty years of his practice the films will be both projected in the gallery and available to view on individual monitors.

Rio Branco at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm

2011-10-08T12:49:00.000-07:00

Miguel Rio Branco - SOLO

With his intense visual language, Miguel Rio Branco captures the world surrounding him. The exhibition Miguel Rio Branco – Solo is the first major presentation of Rio Branco in Scandinavia and introduces him as one of the most important photographic artists of our time.

Son of a diplomat, Miguel Rio Branco was born in 1946 in Las Palmas, Spain and spent his childhood moving around the world. Since the 1970s he lives and works mainly in Rio de Janeiro. Rio Branco was self educated in painting before he started experimenting with photography and filmmaking during his stay in New York in the 1970s. He became a correspondent for Magnum Photos in 1980 and since then, he has received wide acclaim for the painterly and constructive aspects as well as the unique dramatic quality of color in his photographic work.

Miguel Rio Branco makes use of various media to construct his very personal, labyrinthic universe, and in his work he combines photography with projections, newspaper and magazine cuttings, film, sculptural elements and music. Painting has always been an important part of his art practice.

His work focuses on life on the outer edges of society in a poetic statement, sometimes related to the Latin American context and Brazil as a complex society defining its own identity. His work references the documentary genre and western art history and reveals his background as a filmmaker.

The exhibition reflects Miguel Rio Branco’s very personal view on society. His installations, films and photographic work have an almost physical effect on the viewer and reveal a dark world where innocence and evil, pain and pleasure, life and death exist side by side.

The exhibition will include around 70 photographs, installations and films from the 1970s until today. Recent work that has not been extensively presented will be included in the show, as well as Miguel Rio Branco’s more emblematic work. A starting point for the exhibition is the film I won't take anything with me when I die, those who owe me something will pay me in hell (1979), together with the acclaimed photographic series from Salvador de Bahia, Pelourinho district from the same year.

Other works central to the exhibition include the early black and white series Dislexia, the Blue Tango cibachrome series from 1984, depicting boys engaged in capoeira, the installations Between the Eyes, the Desert (1997) and Out of Nowhere (1994). Several works from Miguel Rio Branco’s stay in Tokyo in 2008 are presented.

LA Weekly

2011-10-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's The Forgotten Space at LACMA: What Happens When Young, Cheap, Exploited Chinese Workers Say 'No'?

By Veronika Ferdman
Fri., Oct. 7 2011 at 8:00 AM

"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!"
-Allen Ginsberg, Howl

Transportation. Globalization. Capitalism. Exploitation. Poverty. Ginsberg's words in 1956 still ring true in Allan Sekula and Noël Burch's The Forgotten Space, which is about the places and people whose existence the capitalist machine would like to forget. Or better yet, exploit.

This essayistic films takes us on a journey from one port city to another (Rotterdam, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, etc.), all the while retracing the same narrative of poverty and exploitation that is a fact of life for many of the marginalized and immigrant communities living by the waterfronts of these cities.

The film wonders what's going to happen when the Chinese youth no longer want to work 12-hour days for little pay. Which population will we find to exploit for cheap labor? The financial structures the world has erected are collapsing in on themselves. And the answer to the flailing global economy is not to produce more and more merchandise.

Though Sekula and Burch do not suggest any potential solutions to our problems, they are adamant that something must change. There is an anti-industrial strain to the film. A stand against a system that either exploits people to no end or else gets rid of human labor in favor of machines carrying out tasks. A system that builds train tracks through residential areas, forcing people who have lived there for decades out of their homes. The filmmakers are wistful for the abstract idea of the seafaring days of old. But, the recurring image of a behemoth barge carrying multi-colored rectangular containers of cargo set against the sea and bright sky has its own queerly industrial sort of romanticism. It works to offset the increasingly gloomy tone of the film.

There's a bit too much reliance on Sekula's History Channel-like voiceover (though it is undeniably informative). Sometimes it would have been better to simply let the images speak for themselves. And the 113-minute running time feels overlong. The film indulges in spinning its own wheels, suggesting that this entire project could have been condensed.

Nonetheless, this is a work that is carefully conceived and constructed, and its laments are worth listening to.

There will be a free screening of The Forgotten Space at LACMA on Saturday, October 8th. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Allan Sekula and Bérénice Reynaud, along with a few surprise guests.

Sekula at MOCA, LACMA and OCMA in October 2011

2011-09-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

MOCA (October 1, 2011):

As part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, MOCA will present Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from October 1, 2011, through February 13, 2012. Featuring works by more than 130 artists, this exhibition is the most comprehensive survey to examine the exceptional diversity of art practices in California during the mid- to late 1970s.

The years covered by the exhibition bracket a tumultuous, transitional period in United States history, beginning with Richard Nixon’s resignation and ending with Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The exhibition borrows its title from the album by the Los Angeles–based punk band X to suggest that the California Dream and the hippie optimism of the late 1960s had been eclipsed by a sense of disillusionment during this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era. Under the Big Black Sun seeks to demonstrate how this collective loss of faith in government and institutions yielded a spirit of artistic freedom and experimentation that reached its apex in California through the pluralistic art practices that flourished here. Across the state, competing social and political ideologies and clashing cultural perspectives resulted in heterodox approaches to art-making. A DIY attitude was embraced by California artists, particularly young, recent art school graduates, resulting in the hybridization of media and the breaking apart of traditional forms and genres. The dystopian atmosphere of the 1970s created an artistic milieu that seemed to include everything under the sun.

Raymond Pettibon, Black Flag at the Starwood, Tuesday, November 18, 1980, 1980, photocopy, 11 x 8 1/2 in., collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, gift of Barry Sloane, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Organized by MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel, Under the Big Black Sun will include more than 500 objects, including documentary, staged, and conceptual photographs; abstract and representational paintings; freestanding sculptures, installations, and environments; performances and public demonstrations; narrative and documentary films and videos; zines and posters; ceramics and models; works on paper; decorative crafts and design objects; and ephemera. The exhibition presents topics of race, gender, sexuality, presidential history, international relations, (sub)urban blight, war, spirituality, American life, punk culture, media and Hollywood commentaries, and political activism.

“Under the Big Black Sun addresses the dynamic period in American art when modernism, characterized by a master narrative of progress and succession, reached a dead end, and a multiplicity of movements, forms, and genres began to take shape simultaneously,” said Schimmel. “Indeed, the very notion of art history was called into question during this pluralistic period.”

FEATURED ARTISTS

Bas Jan Ader
Peter d’Agostino
Terry Allen
Carlos Almaraz
Eleanor Antin
Robert Arneson
Asco
David Askevold
Judith F. Baca
John Baldessari
Lewis Baltz
Judith Barry
Billy Al Bengston
Tony Berlant
Bob and Bob
Jonathan Borofsky
Ellen Brooks
Joan Brown
Robert E. Brown
Nancy Buchanan
Chris Burden
Carole Caroompas
Karen Carson
Vija Celmins
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Carl Cheng
Judy Chicago
Guy de Cointet
Robert Colescott
Bruce Conner
Eileen Cowin
Robert Cumming
Lowell Darling
Joe Deal
John Divola
Karen Finley
Hal Fischer
Judy Fiskin
Robbert Flick
Llyn Foulkes
Terry Fox
Howard Fried
Charles Gaines
Charles Garabedian
Rupert García
Jim Goldberg
Jack Goldstein
Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Joe Goode
Gronk
David Hammons
Chauncey Hare
Helen Mayer Harrison
and Newton Harrison
James Hayward
Robert Heinecken
Suzanne Hellmuth and
Jock Reynolds
Mel Henderson
Victor Henderson
Roger Herman
Anthony Hernandez
Lynn Hershman
Charles Christopher Hill
Patrick Hogan
Douglas Huebler
Randy Hussong
David Ireland
Richard Jackson
Kim Jones
Stephen J. Kaltenbach
Allan Kaprow
Mike Kelley
The Kipper Kids
Paul Kos and
Marlene Kos
Tony Labat
Suzanne Lacy
David Lamelas
David Lamelas and
Hildegarde Duane
William Leavitt
Fred Lonidier
Greg Mac Gregor
Kim MacConnel
Mike Mandel and
Larry Sultan
Tom Marioni
Paul McCarthy
Michael C. McMillen
Jim Melchert
John M. Miller
Richard Misrach
Susan Mogul
Linda Montano
Malaquías Montoya

Ed Moses
Matt Mullican
Bruce Nauman
Senga Nengudi
Maria Nordman
Tony Oursler
John Outterbridge
Bill Owens
Gary Panter
Raymond Pettibon
Jim Pomeroy
Peter Reiss
Martha Rosler
Nancy Rubins
Allen Ruppersberg
Edward Ruscha
Betye Saar
David Salle
Alan Scarritt
Terry Schoonhoven
Ilene Segalove
Allan Sekula
Allan Sekula and Nöel Burch
Bonnie Ora Sherk
Alexis Smith
Barbara T. Smith
John Sturgeon
Survival Research
Laboratories
(Mark Pauline)
T. R. Uthco and
Ant Farm
Irvin Tepper
Masami Teraoka
Mark Thompson
Jeffrey Vallance
Carlos Villa
James Welling
Henry Wessel
John M. White
William T.Wiley
Andrew Wilf
Christopher Williams
Bruce and Norman
Yonemoto

--------------------------------------------------------

LACMA (October 8, 2011):

The Forgotten Space

Saturday, October 8, 2011 | 7:30 pm

Los Angeles Premiere

2010/color/112 min./digital

Scr/dir: Allan Sekula & Noël Burch.

View the Trailer

This new essay film by photographer Allan Sekula and film scholar Noël Burch offers a lucid and multifaceted look at global capitalism and its manifold effects, human and environmental, as filtered through the journeys of container cargo from the Netherlands to Southern California and onwards to Asia.

Bing Theater | Free, no reservations | This screening will be followed by a discussion with Allan Sekula, Bérénice Reynaud (Co-Curator, Film at REDCAT) and other guests to be announced.

---------------------------------------------------------------

OCMA (October 9, 2011):

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970

oct 9, 2011 - jan 22, 2012

Opening Reception: October 8, 8-10 pm

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, co-organized by Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), is the most comprehensive exhibition to date to focus on Conceptual art and related new genres in both Northern and Southern California during this pivotal period in contemporary art. Featuring more than 150 works of art, the exhibition includes installations, photographs, works on paper, videos and films, artists’ books, extensive performance documentation, and other ephemera. This includes newly discovered work as well as materials culled from archives that have rarely been viewed.

Some of the highlights of the exhibition include the important early surveillance installation Being Photographed, Looking Out, Looking In, February 4-20, 1971 by Chris Burden, currently in a private collection and not exhibited since the 1970s; the most comprehensive installation of artifacts, photographs, and the original soundtrack from Allen Ruppersberg’s, Al's Grand Hotel (1971); the most complete documentation ever presented in a museum of Bonnie Sherk’s street performances Sitting Still Series (1970); and archival photographs from William Wegman’s studio, recently discovered at the BAM/PFA and never before seen in California. Other artists featured in State of Mind whose practices deserve greater attention are Gary Beydler, Nancy Buchanan, Adam (the late Paul Cotton), Lowell Darling, Stephen Laub, Darryl Sapien, Susan Mogul, Ilene Segalove, Fred Londier, and Robert Kinmont.

In conjunction with State of Mind there will be public programs that bring together a range of artists, scholars, and curators for opening weekend symposia, lectures, and performances. The exhibition is accompanied by a 250-page catalog with essays by exhibition curators Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, as well as additional contributions by UC Irvine Art History Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson and Anne Rorimer, an independent scholar. The catalog, published by the University of California Press, will feature 70 color plates and more than 125 black-and-white images.

Tunga at the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_VIdeobrasil

2011-09-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

e-flux
September 15, 2011

www.videobrasil.org.br
www.sescsp.org.br

The 17th International Conemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil opens September 30th in São Paulo, with significant structural changes from past editions. Now open to all artistic languages, the Southern Panoramas competitive show is comprised of video installations, performances, artist books, photography and painting. The Festival also features Olafur Eliasson's first solo exhibition in South America, to be held at three different venues in São Paulo.

The changes that characterize the 17th Festival find an icon in a trophy created for the Southern Panoramas show by Brazilian artist Tunga. In the sculpture/object he has developed for the event, elements from his own poetic repertoire, such as crystal and liquid amber, contained within a metal mesh, envelope a video camera and half-obscure its lens. The fully-functional camera-trophy affords a view that has been irremediably tampered with by the artist.

Tunga is one of the better-known contemporary artists in Brazil and in the international scene. He has featured in the Venice and São Paulo biennials, and had solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, in London (1989), and at the Louvre Pyramid (2005), in Paris. Carmela Gross, Raquel Garbelotti, Luiz Zerbini, and Rosângela Rennó are among the artists who have been invited by Videobrasil to create trophies for previous editions of the Festival.

The trophy will be delivered to the artists awarded with the Grand Prize in cash and the eight residency prizes to be offered by the Festival in 2011. Strategic partnerships with educational, research and production institutions enable the 17th Festival to confer eight residency awards across three continents. The Festival strengthens its partnership network by presenting its programs in detail and participating in work sessions destined to reflection on the impact of residencies on artistic output today.

Another concern reinforced by this edition is that of fine‐tuning the criteria by which an artist is allocated to this or that residency, a decision based not only on the nature of the programs themselves, but also on the characteristics and developmental stage of the work. This aptness is critical in the context of a network that offers experiences as diverse in nature and focus as does ours.

The two Brazilian residencies are a case in point. The FAAP Artistic Residency, which offers two awards through the Festival, is based in the Lutetia Building in downtown São Paulo and stimulates artists to explore the urban context. It is run by the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation. A third residency takes place at the Sacatar Institute, located in Itaparica, Bahia. This program stresses the importance of its beach-side environment to creating a convivial dynamic for collaborative action between residents. The prize is sponsored by the Prince Claus Fund (The Netherlands).

Two other residencies take place in Latin America, at Galería Kiosko, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Created in 2007, the gallery program teams up one Bolivian artist with a non-Bolivian counterpart for a two-month period of collaboration. With a social and political bent, this program encourages artists to tackle cultural issues through original proposals. A member of residencias_ en_red, the residency is granted by the Spanish Cultural Center and the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID).

The network extends to Europe through partnerships with Videoformes, in Clermont-Ferrand, France—thanks to the French Consulate in São Paulo and Aliança Francesa—and the Vrije Academie voor Werkplaats Beeldende Kunsten, in the Hague, Holland, both of which receive one prizewinning artist. A center for the production and diffusion of artistic languages based on video and digital technologies, Videoformes offers technical support and knowledge-exchange through its residency program. At WBK, the program encourages young artists to explore new visions that might contribute to their work.

For the first time, Videobrasil is offering a residency in Africa. Created in 2003 by an artists' association, the contemporary art center pARTage, based on the Mauritius Islands, fosters the development of projects that respond to the environment by stimulating interaction with local artists and the islanders in general. The prize is sponsored by The Prince Claus Fund.

The 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil is an undertaking of Associação Cultural Videobrasil (www.videobrasil.org.br) and SESC São Paulo (www.sescsp.org.br).

17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil
SESC Belenzinho
SESC Pompeia
Pinacoteca do Estado (São Paulo State Art Gallery)
September 2011–January 2012

São Paulo, Brazil

Walking Tour: Miguel Rio Branco Gallery at Inhotim, Brazil

2011-09-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Miguel Rio Branco Gallery . Inhotim from arquitetos associados on Vimeo.

Art Daily Review: Marco Brambilla presents first ever video art selection in 68th Venice film festival

2011-09-14T10:52:00.000-07:00

VENICE.- On September 9, Marco Brambilla will screen his latest 3D video collage, Evolution (Megaplex), 2010 as part of the 68th Venice International Film Festival. This is the first time in its existence that the festival is screening video art as an “Official Selection.” The ten-minute screening will commence at Sala Perla at 7PM. The 68th Venice International Film Festival runs from August 31 – September 10.

Evolution brings to life the origin, evolution and destiny of humankind as a large-scale, stunning 3D video mural. A dense montage of imagery illustrates events dating from the dawn of man through present-day and into our hypothetical future.

Brambilla blends approximately 400 film samples into a fluid 3D video collage. The source material for Evolution is primarily genre film where the artist interprets historic milestones as spectacle. The theatricality of the images presents us with a satirical take on the origin and destiny of man as told through the lexicon of the “Hollywood” epic.

The response to Evolution has been extremely positive. Jeffrey Deitch, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, sees Evolution’s larger impact, as told to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Marco Brambilla is pushing film and art into this new convergence,” says Deitch. “And with the 3D works, he's pushed it to a point that no one else has arrived at yet.”

In three minutes and four seconds, Brambilla challenges established notions of video art, according to artist Marina Abramovic in The Los Angeles Times.

"’Evolution' is only a few minutes long, but it has so many layers of meaning you can see it over and over again,” says Abramovic. “Your sense of time is totally different — you never see enough.”

Brambilla is excited to experience the video’s reception.

“I'll be interested to see how it is received by a film audience,” says Brambilla, “especially the actors and directors whose films are featured in the work.”

Evolution made its debut at The Standard Miami in December 2010 during Art Basel Miami. This third screening at the Venice Film Festival follows its inclusion in The Dark Lining, Brambilla’s first solo museum exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Marco Brambilla studied film at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, and then worked in commercials and feature films, directing the successful 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man. In 1998, he shifted his focus to video and photography projects as an artist and filmmaker. His work has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as the Kunsthalle Bern, screened at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, and can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the ARCO Foundation in Madrid, amongst others. Brambilla’s awards include both the Tiffany Comfort Foundation and Colbert Foundation for his video installations. He was born in Milan, Italy, and currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. He is represented by Christopher Grimes Gallery.

Paradigm Shift - Sarmento at Serralves

2011-09-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

Paradigm Shift
Serralves Collection 60’s 70’s
September 24th, 2011 - January 8th, 2012

Curators: João Fernandes, Agustín Pérez Rubio

Coordination: Helena López Camacho (MUSAC), Filipa Loureiro (Fundación Serralves)

Artists: Vito Acconci, Helena Almeida, Armando Alvess, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Artur Barrio, António Barros, Lothar Baumgarten, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Fernando Calhau, Alberto Carneiro, Manuel Casimiro, Lourdes Castro, Jan Dibbets, Valie Export, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Hamish Fulton, Anna Bella Geiger, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Ana Hatherly, Alex Hay, Sanja Ivekovic, Joan Jonas, Imi Knoebel, Jannis Kounellis, David Lamelas, Álvaro Lapa, Gordon Matta-Clark, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Leonel Moura, Matt Mullican, Antoni Muntadas, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Gina Pane, Lygia Pape, Jorge Pinheiro, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vítor Pomar, Martha Rosler, Dieter Roth, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Julião Sarmento, Gerry Schum, António Sena, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Ângelo de Sousa, Francesc Torres, Ana Vieira, Lawrence Weiner, Hanna Wilke, Gilberto Zorio

Paradigm Shift is the first large showing of the Serralves Foundation– Contemporary Art Museum Collection (Oporto, Portugal) ever to take place at a Spanish museum. Built by Alvaro de Siza, the museum was opened to the public on the 6th June 1999, and nowadays it is a worldwide reference for the international art scene, not only for the important collection it has amassed, but for the wide and varied scope of its exhibitions of the highest regard.

The exhibition, focusing on a selection of the principal contemporary art collection, surveys a period of shifts in artistic language—the 60's and 70's—that ushered in the new contemporary. With Paradigm Shift, MUSAC opens its exhibition space to a referential era, the decades spanning the 1960's and 70's. This period has been crucial to understanding the most up-to-date artistic practices—mainly from 1989 - present—that represent the core of our exhibition programming here at the Castilla y León Contemporary Art Museum.

Paradigm Shift presents an overview of a period that redefined the nature of art and its place in life, creating a new grammar that, even today, establishes the perimeters of what we consider to be contemporary art. In the mid 1960's, within a context of social and political change, a revolution in artistic practice broke loose both on form and content levels. From this, a myriad of concepts would emerge: brainchildren of the prevailing social milieu.
During these years, the concept “avant-garde” thus becomes comprehensive, forcing the broader aspects of life to seep into artistic experience. At this time, the condition of an artwork is redefined as both an interaction with life and a criticism of the autonomy, the essence and inwardness of art that translates into minimalist experiences.

In that way, Paradigm Shift is organised around a number of conceptual nexus which would lay the foundations for defining artistic practice from this period into our days.

Among other practices, the idea of landscape are revised by currents such as land art, which makes use of the framework and materials of nature to redefine the genre; a social-spatial revision and critique of architecture and urban planning by way of new practices such altering the perception of edifications in their environment.

During this period, the use of new materials also becomes popular, sculpture specially, either inferior materials or those recycled from pre-existing objects, such as in arte povera or the use of simple forms and materials such as in American minimalism.

In this paradigm shift, an intersection of formal languages takes place, and film and video, photography and text are used as platforms for conceptual projects. Thus, text becomes a substrate for the conceptual and photography and video emerge as vehicular media and documentation for actions.

Sarmento at the CAC

2011-09-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Julião Sarmento

September 24, 2011-January 2012

Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati

This exhibition of Portugal’s most influential and celebrated artist will explore literature and books as a theme. It addresses the artist’s unique relationship to certain books that have informed his work in addition to the book as a visual object. He investigates how people find themselves in literature and how our lives are inevitably changed by the thought process they can trigger.

The exhibition includes large-scale, reimagined covers of books that have impacted the artist, as well as portraits of Sasha Grey, star of Steven Soderbergh’s film The Girlfriend Experience, photographed in the act of reading.

Sarmento was born in 1948 in Lisbon and studied painting and architecture at the University of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Today he lives and works in Estoril, Portugal. His exhibition history is extensive; he represented Portugal at the 1997 Venice Biennale and is included in the collection of the MoMA, Guggenheim in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

images: Julião Sarmento, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (detail) and Cincinnati – Žižek, both 2011 © Julião Sarmento.

Anton Henning: Antiunconventional Stillifes, Landscapes & Interiors

2011-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher Grimes Gallery

Opening Reception: Friday, September 9, 7-9pm

Exhibition Dates: September 9 - October 29, 2011

The Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition featuring new work by Anton Henning. This will mark Henning's fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Anton Henning's work is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of art historical styles and realized through a myriad of media. Often combining traditional art genres (landscape, nude, portrait and still life), Henning appropriates stylistic motifs of modernist masters and reconstitutes them into his own signature style. The harmonization of these artistic tropes can at times seem absurdist or contradictory in nature, but are in fact methodical attempts to defy categorization.

Henning not only transgresses the traditions of high art through his paintings, but also extends this practice to the dramatic presentation of his work. Though Henning has widely exhibited his collages, drawings, and videos, these works always relate to his paintings. In the artist's words "I'd be ashamed to describe myself as anything other than a painter."

Anton Henning lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe. He has had major solo exhibitions at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Kunstmuseum of Art Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; the De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Holland; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, Germany; and the Stedelijik Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium.

Art in America Cover Story: Katharina Grosse

2011-09-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

Katharina Grosse

Art in America, By David Ebony

Mass MANY EUROPEANS THINK OF AMERICA in terms of vast landscapes and infinite sky, and urban centers packed with towering buildings and teeming masses, all in a rather precarious state of flux. The sprawling and spectacular site-specific exhibition by German artist Katharina Grosse at MASS MoCA, “One Floor Up More Highly,” seems to reflect this view. Organized by the museum’s curator Susan Cross, the show could be seen as an homage to an idealized if not wholly fictional place, such as the American frontier. But it soon proves to be a multifaceted installation, inviting myriad interpretations.

This project, like most of Grosse’s large-scale installations, incorporates massive sculptural features that allude simultaneously to empirical space and an imaginative vista. Yet the artist’s primary means of expression is painting, and the thrust of the work is rigorously abstract. She employs painting’s illusionistic devices of light and shadow, and, with a subtle manipulation of other elements, suggests complex narratives. Over the past decade, she has developed a unique working method and a singular approach to painting that has taken the medium far beyond its traditional domain.

Grosse typically designs intricate but ramshackle constructions using mounds of dirt, found objects and fabricated abstract shapes in wood, Styrofoam or plastic. Once the tableau is in place, she dons protective gear that resembles a hazmat suit and wields an industrial spray gun. She moves through the environment—usually on foot, but sometimes on scaffolding or suspended from a crane—covering almost everything in her path with brilliant, saturated color. Occasionally, she coats the gallery’s furniture, walls, windows and ceiling, incorporating the architecture into the art.

Grosse’s rather novel practice has been compared to graffiti and street art. More convincingly, she commingles the diverse tactics of artists such as Robert Smithson (in his earthworks) and Jules Olitski (in his misty Color Field canvases) to create something startlingly new. A large part of her practice is performative, albeit without much of an audience. Since she uses a compressor to keep the paint moving, she must act quickly and deliberately to complete the work. Unlike the Action Painters or Expressionists, with their convulsive brushwork and gestures, Grosse never comes into direct contact with the surfaces. Her physical if not psychological detachment seems related to Conceptual art. However, her technique involves a machismo stance, with aggression modified by a kind of opulent sensuality.

BORN IN FREIBURG/BREISGAU in 1961, Grosse studied with Gotthard Graubner at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Works by Gerhard Richter and Nam June Paik were early influences. She currently teaches at the Kunstakademie, even though several years ago she relocated to Berlin. She now lives and works much of the time in a striking Bauhaus-style home and studio in Berlin’s old city center that she commissioned from architects Ute Frank and Georg Augustin.

Her early paintings, from the late 1980s and early ’90s, are spare gestural compositions that at times recall Mark Rothko’s work or, more closely, the Zenlike, brushy late abstractions of Hans Hartung. Attracted to shaped canvases and unconventional materials, Grosse experimented with unusual painting supports ranging from found objects to a lightweight resin material used for surfboards. In some sense her work is akin to postwar movements such as the French Supports/Surfaces, in its approach to abstract-painting-as-object, as well as Arte Povera, in its use of abject materials.

Grosse’s art blossomed and her career took off when, in 1998, she began adding passages of spray paint onto canvases and directly onto gallery walls. Growing increasingly bold and elaborate over the past decade, Grosse’s large-scale installations, which she has been invited to produce in many parts of the world, have brought her significant notice. Her first in the U.S., at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in 2001, was widely praised in the art press, as were subsequent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2006), and the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2007). Her untitled work for the 2008 New Orleans biennial, Prospect.1, garnered considerable attention and was reproduced in numerous art publications, including this one [A.i.A., Feb. ’09]. Amid post-Katrina devastation, she covered a derelict home in sweeping sprays of yellow and orange-red to suggest that it was on fire.

The most ambitious installation Grosse has produced in the U.S. to date, “One Floor Up More Highly”—whose title comes from a phrase scrawled on a building, directing patients to a dentist’s office near Grosse’s Berlin studio—is an interrelated, multipart work that fills three enormous galleries. The largest section is a rather theatrical panorama situated on the ground floor of the former textile mill. Stepping into the cavernous gallery of MASS MoCA’s Building 5—about the size of a football field—viewers encounter hills, valleys and mountains. Pathways allow easy passage and offer numerous vantage points to view this peculiar and richly varied terrain. Visitors are dwarfed by tall slabs of unpainted white Styrofoam rising some 30 feet. Sliced and shaped with a hot wire into pointy stalagmites or giant crystals, the pieces also evoke sections of collapsed skyscrapers, or even more closely, crumbling glaciers.

The jagged white slabs thrust skyward from waist-high mounds of dirt, studded with real twigs, gravel and rocks. These, plus huge resin boulders, are all spray-painted in great swathes of outlandish hues: hot pink, deep red-orange, Day-Glo green, yellow and blue. The piles of sprayed dirt have the rich density of tons of dried pigment, a feature that recalls certain Yves Klein works of the 1950s.

The overall image conveys the sense of awe that one feels in response to nature, like paintings by 19th-century German Romantics. Specifically, the work calls to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s majestic 1823-24 painting of a ship wreck in the arctic, The Sea of Ice, in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This painting of a doomed expedition imparts a sense of tragic beauty not unlike the mood Grosse establishes. Her wildly colorful environment indicates an abstract, phantasmagoric mindscape that might offer a transcendent experience. At the very least, “One Floor Up More Highly” invites a sustained reverie. In order to arrive at that state, however, the viewer traversing the space is obliged to accept a visual, intellectual and physical engagement with the work. Grosse’s installation is most effective as it envelops viewers in a kaleidoscopic fusion of color, form, rhythm and texture.

In the middle of one long wall, sprays of red, blue and purple rise from the floor to cover rows of high windows. The translucent acrylic allows highlights of color to further enliven the space in the manner of stained glass. At first unnoticed, tangled wads of clothing appear throughout Grosse’s installation, including sweaters, pants and shirts wedged between rocks or partially buried under the dirt, all garishly painted over. Despite the high tones, the gnarled garments imply something sinister. Conjuring disappeared bodies and unknown human remains left behind after some calamity, the ragged clothing adds an abrupt note of discord to the lush environment, and a hint of despair.

Literally embedded in the landscape, the perplexing details provoke considerable consternation. What has happened here? Where are we? Are we confronting the past, present or future? The overall design suggests the scene of a momentous event, but whether apocalyptic or regenerative remains a matter of speculation. What is clear is the unexpected emotional impact these garments give to the entire installation. What initially appeared rather simply as Grosse’s witty and fanciful cosmic playground suddenly implies a narrative with darker connotations—the aftermath of war or an environmental catastrophe, as examples. It could be the site of a nuclear disaster, where everything still glows with a sort of radioactive aura. Providing no specific answers, the artist leaves the viewer to conjure his or her own scenario.

In a counterpoint, Grosse, with a sizable dose of humor, adds a passage of quiet respite. A long bench, in the form of a wooden plank traversing a large mound of bright red dirt, allows visitors to rest and contemplate the view, as one would in a nature preserve. Across from the bench, one of Grosse’s large, shaped abstract compositions lies on the floor. Painted with sprays and splashes of yellow, green and red on a thick white panel made of surfboard material (glass-fiber-reinforced plastic), the concave, elliptical object recalls a giant kite or stylized airplane wings.

MOVING FROM THE MAIN GALLERY into a smaller room with lower ceilings, visitors enter an entirely different realm of Grosse’s invention. This space appears enclosed like a large basement or a warehouse. Broad passages of paint in fluorescent pink, viridian green, purple, orange and lime seem more urban and graffitilike than those in the larger gallery. They cover the floor, walls and ceiling, suggesting the interior of a tacky nightclub after the crowd has gone home and the lights have been turned up.

Articles of clothing appear again—T-shirts, underwear and slacks—this time strewn about the floor and covered with paint. Once again these disembodied garments spark broad and unsettling speculation. Perhaps they belonged to hedonists who disrobed during a heated, drug-fueled rave. Or is this evidence found at a crime scene: murder at the disco, perhaps, or a shoot-out at the bar?

At the far end of the room, seven tall, white rectangular shapes on the wall stand out against a florid background of neon green, blue and bright red. Made with stencils that blocked the spray, the rectangles appear like doors or windows, an illusionistic device to suggest the source of light that fills the room. The painted doorways imply a world beyond the gallery, like portals to a fictive space. Near the last rectangle, in front of an actual doorway, narrow passages of white look like beams of light cast on the floor. They help guide visitors toward the door, out of the room and up a tall staircase, at the top of which one finds yet another imaginative environment.

This upper gallery, smaller than the others, is a kind of terrace overlooking the main space. From here, the view of the vast installation below is arresting. And, on this upper level, the scope of Grosse’s vision becomes apparent. The works here may be seen either as a summation or an introduction to her art. On view are finely wrought examples of the three principal types of works that have preoccupied her for the past decade: installations, three-dimensional paintings and more conventional wall-hung canvases.

A kind of abbreviated version of the ground floor installation, a mound of dirt and twigs at the center of the gallery is sprayed luminous shades of blue, orange and yellow. Bundles of clothing poke out from the mound. Placed horizontally on the floor, an enormous convex panel painted mostly red looks like a stylized surfboard 15 feet long. It partially covers the colorful pile of debris. The elliptical work corresponds to the concave panel piece integrated into the first-floor installation. It also relates to a series of huge shaped paintings that Grosse recently created as permanent public works in Germany.

One such piece, an approximately 30-foot-high convex oval composition in purple and green, was installed last year on the facade of the Johanneskirche, a 19th-century Baroque-style Protestant church in downtown Düsseldorf.

More traditional in format, if not in image and design, a single, untitled canvas from 2010, an approximately 8-by-6-foot rectangle, represents the third group of works. Using sprays, pours and stencils, Grosse suggests here an undulating, fractured field of purple, red and gold. Though abstract, the painting echoes the collagelike layering found in some of James Rosenquist’s deconstructed images. The only wall-hung work in the show, the painting appears as a solitary icon on the otherwise empty back wall. The canvas bears a contradictorily grand and elegiac demeanor as if emblematic of the evolution of abstract painting. It also serves as a key to the entire exhibition, since it brings Grosse’s endeavor full circle. She transmutes the abstract visual language that began with paintings by artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky and Kupka in the early years of the 20th century and makes it intelligible and practical in the 21st century.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly,” MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass., through Oct. 31.

Art in America Interview: Katharina Grosse

2011-09-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

Between the Lines: Q+A With September Cover Katharina Grosse

by David Ebony 09/02/11

The subject of Art in America magazine's September cover story, "Chromatic Theater," the work of German painter and installation artist Katherina Grosse, is currently on view in a major exhibition at Mass MoCA, North Adams, Mass., through Oct. 31. To further explore the aims and endeavors of an artist in the midst of expanding the very definition of painting, the author recently proposed some discerning questions for her in person in New York, and via email from her Berlin studio.

EBONY Your painting is not exactly gestural, yet the action of its making is apparent. At times there is a level of violence in the execution, especially in the installations. One imagines you wielding the spray gun in a fierce attack on everything around you as you move through the space. Certain passages even convey a sense of vandalism-as in covering windows, walls, floors and furniture. Unlike acts of vandalism, however, the results of your efforts are coherent and often strikingly beautiful. What is the role of violence in your art?

GROSSE The painting process is a curious coincidence of thinking and acting. Let's say you start out with one paradigm and while doing the first steps in the painting exactly that paradigm gets extinguished by the newly materialized situation. That triggers off another set of paradigms that will be dropped as a consequence of the work process, and so on and on. It is the continuous flux of visual intelligence constituting reality in every moment. Aggression is the energy that enables you to bear the loss of what has to go. It feeds and sustains that process.

EBONY When we spoke in New York, you said that your work has little or nothing to do with graffiti, that it is not related to tagging or directly associated with vernacular urban language. Yet your endeavor seems related to street art, not only in the use of spray paint and neon colors, but also in the sense that it takes painting out of the confines of art's traditional space, its conventional realm. What is the relationship of your work to street art?

GROSSE My work is rooted in the tradition of wall painting dating back to the Lascaux caves. It could be inspired, for instance, by the positioning of a last supper scene in relationship to the dining hall or the tag on my garage door. But I do not place my work in the street without a link to an art context. Besides, street art is usually derived from graphic forms, typography and handwriting. It demarcates territories in public space. It marks individual presence. I am opposed to all these things in my work. I deliberately exclude sign systems, just as I exclude photography or pop culture.

EBONY Unique to the Mass MOCA installation, "One Floor Up More Highly," and unlike anything I have seen in your work, are the towering unpainted carved white Styrofoam pieces in the main gallery. They recall stalagmites or icebergs. For me, they evoke the great 1823–24 painting by Caspar David Friedrich of the North Pole, Sea of Ice, in the Kunsthalle Hamburg. Was this a deliberate reference on your part? Your best work, for me, does have an epic quality that approaches the sublime in a way not unlike the German Romantics. What is the relationship between your work and 19th-century Romanticism?

GROSSE I am more interested in the phenomenon of Romanticism in German literature. For me, the literary movement was much more influential than the painting. Especially useful to me was Hölderlin's effort to free language of academic stigma and to let occur all sorts of different writing genres on the same page. He even gave the different pockets of writing various sizes, fonts and spaces on the same page. I am also very intrigued by what is called Romantic Irony, the theatricality of emotions. You create an emotional setting using anger, love, anxiety, fear or aggression while you watch yourself doing it.

Rather than a direct reference to Friedrich's painting, the large polyurethane or Styrofoam shapes came about through a response to the Mass MOCA space. I wanted to bring the white walls into the volume of the space. My intention was to avoid the white walls becoming merely a kind of frame or backdrop for the show. An enormous amount of daylight passes through the windows from the outside, permeating the space. I needed the forms to crystallize the light and manifest it in the work.

EBONY Based on the two large-scale installations of your work I have seen (de Appel in Amsterdam in 2005, and Mass MOCA), you guide the viewer through space in a consistent but often unpredictable way, with materials and color that flow from one space into another. You do not insist upon a specific system of circulation or one direction for viewers to follow. There is an overall sense of freedom in that respect in the work. How carefully do you anticipate the viewers' circulation through the space when you are in the process of creating the installation? Is that important to you?

GROSSE I don't try to influence the viewer´s circulation or reading of the show in any way. Nevertheless, de Appel has a very different spatial set up than the Mass MOCA show. Located on two floors, the show filled six rooms-some with natural light, others without. They led into one another. I let items and thoughts reappear throughout the show, so I could shift the viewer´s focus from room to room.

At Mass MOCA I rather worked around a plot. It is important to me that there is no singular point of view, so there cannot be an overall image. There is not a fixed centerpoint. I am interested in the varying relationships of the objects I use and the multiple layers of meaning they can convey through my painting. Let's look at the bundles of clothing that occur here and there in the show. They could be debris; they could be loaded symbols of loss; they could indicate the human body or they could be just painted clothes. My painting opens up all these possible readings.

EBONY Both the Amsterdam and the Massachusetts exhibitions featured a room with four or more large vertical rectangular shapes rising from the floor. They suggest doorways or tall windows created by masking out an area of the wall that was subsequently sprayed, and then removing the stencil. Do you use these illusionistic devices to suggest another space beyond the gallery or do they refer to the tradition of conventional easel painting?

GROSSE The gaps are indications of illusions. They take up the rhythm of the windows at Mass MOCA, and suggest a light source or space behind the painting, yes.

EBONY On the second level at Mass MOCA, you feature all three types of paintings you do—a wall-hung work in a rectangular painting-on-canvas format, another more sculptural work on the floor, and the spray-painted installation. You have only one canvas wall-hung painting in the entire show. I began to think of this work as the starting point to the entire exhibition, the key element. As an iconic image, albeit abstract, the painting could be seen as the centerpiece of One Floor Up More Highly, or perhaps the "seed" from which the vast installation below grew. What do you see as the primary relationship among the three painting formats you employ—rectangular two-dimensional painting, shaped surfaces, and the elaborate installations? And do your three main formats constitute a hierarchy of image, object and environment?

GROSSE There is no hierarchical order of object and environment, no. It is very difficult to separate the object from the space, they are so intertwined. I use these three formats to explore painting under different conditions. The in-situ work allows me to expand the painting, to slow it down and magnify aspects of the movement. In my studio practice I compress the space of activity. I allow a lot of different layers on top of one another even on a small canvas.

EBONY For me, One Floor Up More Highly makes a powerful statement about humanity and the state of the world. It has an apocalyptic mood, yet it also invites reverie. The crumbling structures, the articles of clothing suggesting crushed bodies, and the piles of colored dirt could all be the residue of war or some futuristic catastrophe. Perhaps contradictorily, in one area, you provide a bench for viewers to rest, as if one is visiting an otherworldly nature park. The brilliant colors offer a dazzling visual experience that on one level is all about pure pleasure. Which is it? Are we witnessing the end? Or a new beginning? Apocalypse or rebirth? Pleasure or suffering? In other words, are you an optimist or a pessimist?

GROSSE The coexistence of contradictory elements in my work is not a dialectical juxtaposition. Therefore, I do not experience qualities such as good, bad, wrong or right as excluding one another. An artwork opens up the possibility of being engaged by all of those feelings at the same time. That is the thrill that is intensified by giving the work a stage without using traditional means of framing or pedestals. It is rather the extra spotlight of theatrical pathos I use to create a kind of multifaceted space for these kinds of contradictory feelings to converge.

EBONY One Floor Up More Highly is clearly an ambitious work meant for a large audience. But what about this work is totally personal to you?

GROSSE My work has nothing to do with my singular authentic experience or the personal.

EBONY What is most often misunderstood about your work?

GROSSE There seems to be a constant attempt to pin the work down to either a paticular mode of working (such as graffiti, or violence) or a specific history (Ab Ex or German Expressionism) or a specific practice (painting as opposed to sculpture) or a political motivation (anarchy), and so on-whereas my motivation is to keep the field as open as possible. But yes, I do have roots in the history of painting, and I do use aggressive decision making that is sometimes politically motivated. My curiousity involves uninhibited thinking in a public space.

Brambilla Review: New York Times Style Magazine

2011-09-02T16:22:00.000-07:00

Artifacts | The History of the World in Two Minutes or Less

By Linda Yablonsky
August 29, 2011, 12:10 pm

For the artist Marco Brambilla, any debate over the origins of life is wasted breath. God didn’t create humankind, nor did it evolve by Darwinian means. Hollywood made it happen. And, in typical Hollywood style, Brambilla is remaking it — in 3-D. He’s also cut the story of human history down to about 90 seconds.

“Evolution (Megaplex),” Brambilla’s new, very short film, is a dense collage of peak moments from 400 genre movies that dramatize the noble, heroic and dastardly deeds performed on this terrifying, gorgeous, space-invading planet from its beginning to “The End.”

Remember the club-wielding ape in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The parting of the Red Sea in Cecil B. De Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”? Raquel Welch fighting off dinosaurs in her “One Million Years B.C.” cave-girl bikini?

For “Evolution,” coming soon to the 68th Venice International Film Festival, Brambilla appropriated those images and many more – thousands more. There are so many knitted to every micrometer of his “video mural” that they flip into overkill, and deliberately so.

The Tower of Babel, the Great Wall of China and the pyramids are easy enough to pick out, partly because they are stationary, but the figures moving to conquer or escape them are harder to catch. Even if you recognize the scarlet hands of the alien from “E.T.,” they make way for a “Clockwork Orange” Droog or a Rambo before you know it. Lightning strikes, stars explode, and flood waters cascade down mountains or past the Roman Coliseum, while Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry tramples the masses fleeing from some other B-movie disaster.

Though Brambilla’s digital stitching compresses the ages into seconds, the film rolls by at a more stately pace — a good thing, too, since there is so much for the eye to register. And because he restricted himself to horror, doomsday, war, sci-fi and Biblical pictures, the threat of extinction looms as large as the promise of renewal.

Brambilla, who is 50, is perfectly at home with such material: he started out in Hollywood as the director of “Demolition Man.” Now, he says, he’s not interested in commercial filmmaking, except as the subject for his computer-generated art.

Anyone taking an elevator to the roof of the Standard Hotel can watch “Civilization,” his first film remix, as they go. Like “Evolution,” that 2-D presentation also relies on sensory overload, making both as hard to register as they are dazzling.

An earlier work, “Sea of Tranquility,” is exquisitely simple. Brambilla constructed that 2002 time-lapse video from news footage of the first moon landing, sans astronauts. Over three minutes, the lunar module sets down and the American flag is planted, and then those symbols of power crumble into dust with surprising pathos, accompanied by a soundtrack of hiccuping bleats and squawks.

Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was a natural choice for music to “Civilization,” an ascent from the bowels of a fiery hell to the pillowy heights of heaven and back, through an encyclopedic collage of movies both romantic and violent.

“Evolution” is its companion piece, mashing up minute details in a single, horizontal tracking shot to counterpoint the vertical scroll of “Civilization.” Each puts the simultaneity of life on display in a universe of spectacle that would take a Busby Berkeley or de Mille to master.

When “Evolution” screens in Venice, on a program of shorts, it will be the first time in the festival’s history that an art video will appear with its films. It will also be the first and possibly the only time “Evolution” will play in a movie theater. That way, Brambilla says, his cinematographic madness can connect back to its roots.

Marco Brambilla’s “Evolution (Megaplex)” plays Sept. 9 and 10 in the Sala Perla at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.

Brambilla's Evolution 3D at Venice Film Festival

2011-09-02T15:56:00.000-07:00

68th Venice International Film Festival

Director: Marco Müller

31st August - 10th September 2011

Synopsis

Evolution (Megaplex) brings to life the origin, evolution and destiny of mankind as a large-scale 3D video mural. A dense montage of imagery illustrates events dating from the dawn of man through present-day and into our hypothetical future. Approximately 400 film samples are blended into a fluid 3D video collage. The source material for Evolution is primarily genre film in which historic milestones are interpreted as spectacle. The theatricality of the images presents us with a satirical take on the origin and destiny of man as told through the lexicon of the “Hollywood“ epic.

Director’s Statement

My video work uses found film footage that is edited, layered and spliced to create abstract narratives. Evolution (Megaplex) is a 3D video collage re-telling human history with an emphasis on conflict through the ages. It is a visual remix that moves through past, present and future, simulating the sensory overload of contemporary studio films.

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 8 - Dublin

2011-08-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

Dublin
August 30 - September 3

curated by Walker & Walker

Tuesday:

Walker & Walker - Mount Analogue Revisited (2010)

Wednesday:

Gerard Byrne - Homme a Femmes (2004)

Thursday:

Jaki Irvine - The Actress (2003)

Friday:

Grace Weir - Dust defying gravity (2003)

Saturday:

Dorothy Cross - The Eyemaker (2000)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 7 - Berlin

2011-08-22T23:55:00.000-07:00

Berlin
August 23-27

curated by Reynold Reynolds

Tuesday:

Reynold Reynolds - Six Easy Pieces (2010)

Wednesday:

Marc Aschenbrenner - Rotweiss (2010)

Thursday:

Julian Rosefeldt - The Perfectionist (2005)

Friday:

Rui Calçada Bastos - The Mirror Suitcase Man (2004)

Saturday:

Bjørn Melhus - Deadly Storms (2008)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 6 - Los Angeles

2011-08-15T23:55:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles
August 16-20

curated by Marco Brambilla

Tuesday:

Marco Brambilla - Wall of Death (2001)

Wednesday:

Euan Macdonald - Healer (2002)

Thursday:

Julie Orser - Bloodwork (2009)

Friday:

Morgan Fisher - Protective Coloration (1979)

Saturday:

John Baldessari - Script (1974)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 5 - London

2011-08-08T23:55:00.000-07:00

London
August 9-13

curated by Wood & Harrison

Tuesday:

Wood & Harrison - Notebook (2004)

Wednesday:

Graham Gussin - Spill (2006)

Thursday:

John Smith - Worst Case Scenario (2001-2003)

Friday:

Ruaidhri Ryan - Exercises is how to be cool (2010)

Saturday:

Marcus Coates - Finfolk (2003)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 4 - Rio de Janeiro

2011-08-01T23:55:00.000-07:00

Rio de Janeiro
August 2-6

curated by Tunga

Tuesday:

Tunga - Cooking (2010)

Wednesday:

Louise Botkay - Mammah (2006)

Thursday:

Marta Jourdan - Zona de Lançamento #5 (2006)

Friday:

Laura Erber - The funambulist and the diver (2008)

Saturday:

Thiago Rocha Pitta - homage to JMW Turner (2002)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

Henning Exhibition in Scotland

2011-08-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Anton Henning

August 5 - October 22, 2011

Talbot Rice Gallery
The University of Edinburgh

In his first solo show in Scotland, German artist Anton Henning will create a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) within Talbot Rice Gallery. Bright painted walls will transform the space providing a backdrop for the exhibition, which brings together furniture, lighting, easel painting, sculpture, window painting and drawing.

Henning’s bold, individual style, fluent in art historical references, challenges notions of ‘good’ taste. His work pays homage to revered Modern artists like Matisse and Picabia while including subject matter, such as ‘chocolate box’ images of birds and sunsets and naked female figures that are often subject to censure. Henning’s approach also draws from the movement of ‘bad painting’ of the late 1970s and 1980s, a movement of artists disregarding restrictive conventions in order to explore alternative possibilities in painting. In Germany this movement had a particularly rebellious attitude with the Neue Wilde (Young Wild Ones) and artists like Martin Kippenberger.

The use of space in this exhibition bypasses the ubiquitous ‘rational’ white cube. The white cube is closely connected to the authority of the Modern Art Critic, a space where art was supposedly separated from everyday life so that disinterested judgments could be passed. In the environments Henning creates, paintings melt into their surroundings and furniture and bright colours suggest a more domestic environment.

Henning is idiosyncratic and moves away from the cold, conceptual boundaries of much contemporary art to embark upon an exploration of what has been described as ‘painterly desire’. In this spirit Henning’s practice hinges on an individualistic lust for life that is compelling and uncomfortable at the same time.

Anton Henning lives and works in Berlin.

Richard T. Walker in Bay Area Now

2011-07-30T10:31:00.000-07:00

July 9 - September 25, 2011

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

"The sixth edition of YBCA's signature triennial exhibition, , a roundup of exemplary talent across an array of disciplines, continues with a visual arts exhibition showcasing 18 artists and artist collectives. Included is photography by Tammy Rae Carland and Sean McFarland; paintings by David Huffman and Robert Minervini; video works by Ranu Mukherjee and Richard T. Walker; sculptures by Mauricio Ancalmo, Suzanne Husky, Allison Smith, and Weston Teruya; conceptual work by Amy Balkin and Tony Labat; installations by Chris Fraser, Brion Nuda Rosch, Chris Sollars, and Rio Babe International; and textiles by Ben Venom. These artists investigate such subjects as the relationship between humans and nature, whether it involves environmentalism, geopolitics, nineteenth century romanticism, or artificial landscapes; Americana, including the rural South and colonial history; and contemporary culture, specifically globalization, Afrofuturism, and the politics of marijuana in the Bay Area." - From the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts website

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 3 - Tokyo

2011-07-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Tokyo
July 26-30

curated by Takehito Koganezawa

Tuesday:

Takehito Koganezawa - Sea of Bills (2011)

Lecture at 7 pm:

Independent curator, Carole Ann Klonarides, will speak on the history and collecting

of Los Angeles based video work

Wednesday:

Tatsuo Majima - California (1997)

Lecture at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips, curator at the Getty Research Institute, on video art in Brazil

Thursday:

Yuki Okumura - Anatomy Fiction - Zenbei's Eyeballs (2010)

Lecture at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips on video art in Japan

Friday:

Mai Yamashita & Naoto Kobayashi - Dogsled (2008)

Saturday:

Meiro Koizumi - Portrait of a Young Samurai (2009)

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

Richard T. Walker at Spike Island

2011-07-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

the speed and eagerness of meaning

Saturday 9 July - Sunday 4 September

Richard T. Walker
Spike Island

Richard T. Walker, the speed and eagerness of meaning, 3 channel HD installation (2010).

San Francisco based artist Richard T. Walker works with photography, film, text and music to navigate the fault lines between our experience of the world and our ability to express it. This Spike Island exhibition includes a three screen video installation and photographs which, set against the dramatic vistas of the American West, emphasise the physicality of distance in both real and emotional terms and the impossibility of the Romantic ideal of a true connection with the landscape.

Walker’s works document improvisational and ultimately futile attempts of being and belonging within the sublime beauty and immensity of nature. At once endearingly sincere and wryly absurd, the isolated wanderer – usually the artist himself – attempts to make sense of his place within the landscape through monologue and music.

"Walker's anthropomorphizing of nature, his assignation of human qualities of will, character and emotion to the land is amusing, charming even. It's also utterly telling. In an appealing and nonthreatening way, Walker lays bare (and implicitly challenges) the presumption that the natural world revolves around us. He gently mocks our inability to step outside of the self-appointed center by showing himself attempting more meaningful communion but failing, due to fundamental flaws in the terms of the search."

- Los Angeles Times on Walker's 2010 work successive inconceivable events

Richard T. Walker received his MFA from Goldsmith College in 2005 and is currently based in San Francisco. He has exhibited at institutions such as the Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin, De Appel, Amsterdam, and LAXART, Los Angeles. His work was recently included in the group exhibition Embodying (2011) at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center and features in the current exhibition, Big Picture, at K21 in Düsseldorf.

- Los Angeles Times on Walker's 2010 work successive inconceivable events

Spike Island has a curated programme of exhibitions, talks and events. Currently the gallery programme is focused around solo commissions and guest curated group shows, many of which are the outcome of our residency programme.

Recent residency artists who have shown new work across 2010 include Amanda Beech (Arts Council England, South West Residency), Aaron Williamson (Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary), Zoe Williams (Rootstein Hopkins Artists' Award) and Jorge Santos (Calouste Gulbenkian Residency).

We also host occasional residencies for writers and curators, one of whom, Gordana Nikolic (Accented Residency) curated the group show, Wealth of Nations in Autumn 2010 alongside Kristian Lukic.

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 2 - San Francisco

2011-07-18T23:55:00.000-07:00

San Francisco
July 19-23

curated by Richard T. Walker

Tuesday:

Richard T. Walker - the hierarchy of relevance (2010)

Wednesday:

Nate Boyce - Untitled (2011)

Thursday:

Michael Damm - Passenger Film: city is a bell (the eye strikes), islands, opposite daylight (2008-2011)

Friday:

Kota Ezawa - Home Video 2 (2010)

Saturday:

Desiree Holman - Magic Window (2009)

Tuesday, July 26th at 7 pm:

Independent curator, Carole Ann Klonarides, will speak on the history and collecting

of Los Angeles based video work

Wednesday, July 27th at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips, curator at the Getty Research Institute, on video art in Brazil

Thursday, July 28th at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips on video art in Japan

--------------

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

'Super 8' exhibition focuses on the world of video art

2011-07-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

The Christopher Grimes Gallery's eight-week show draws from video artists around the world, including Takehito Koganezawa and Tunga.

July 07, 2011|By Jori Finkel, Los Angeles Times

Gerard Byrnes Homme a Femmes is part of the videos curated by Walker &…

Video art is notoriously hard to show in art galleries. It can hog a lot of space, its sound can spill over into other rooms, and its equipment can be cumbersome (though lighter and cheaper with every year).

And that's not considering challenging content, like Brazilian artist Tunga's recent video of a bizarre, alchemy-fueled sexual encounter that makes David Lynch movies seem sweet and straightforward by comparison.

So when gallery owner Christopher Grimes had the idea of doing a broad sampling of international video art in his space in Santa Monica, he wanted to make the format, if not the content itself, more accessible. And he came up with a festival-style program as a way of working around the gallery's space limitations.

Starting Friday, the Christopher Grimes Gallery is presenting eight weeks of video art programming, each week featuring work from a different city curated by a different artist.

"The idea of doing a collective simultaneous video exhibition with light spill and sound spill was very problematic," he says. "And there's so much video being produced these days I wanted to do something more expansive than a two- or three-person exhibition."

The artist-curators are a strong group: Marco Brambilla for Los Angeles, Richard T. Walker for San Francisco, Walker & Walker for Dublin, Wood & Harrison for London, Juliao Sarmento for Lisbon, Reynold Reynolds for Berlin, Takehito Koganezawa for Tokyo, and Tunga for Rio.

Each artist or collaborative team chose five artworks, starting with one of their own, so there is a new video running on a loop every day the gallery is open, Tuesday through Saturday. In a small screening room at the back of the gallery, visitors can call up any of the 39 videos not on display at the time to view on demand. (A full schedule is online at http://www.cgrimes.com.)

Another sign that this is not your usual gallery show: The exhibition will, Grimes reports, be traveling, running at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco early next year and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio later in 2012. When asked how much of the show is available for sale, Grimes replied, "The majority of it is probably for sale, through the artists' galleries." (He represents only five of the 40 artists being shown.) "But it's a long shot that anything would sell to begin with because that's just the way it is for video. I wish it were different."

Also look for some museum-style programming accompanying the L.A. show. At 7 p.m. on July 26, independent curator Carole Ann Klonarides talks about L.A.-based video work. At 7 p.m. the next night, it's Getty Research Institute curator Glenn Phillips on video art in Brazil. The next night, Phillips returns to take on Japan.

And no, "Super 8" the exhibition has nothing to do with "Super 8" the movie, besides paying respect to old-school motion-picture format.

"I had absolutely no idea that the movie was coming out when we started working on this six months ago," Grimes says, suggesting that video art and the movie business are still worlds apart.

Particle Tickle

2011-07-16T09:52:00.001-07:00

Takehito Koganezawa
PARTICLE TICKLE
Langen Foundation in Neuss.

Exhibition dates: 17 July - 6 November 2011

Opening on 16 July, 5-10 pm
Performance Paper Plate Juggling at 8 pm.

14 July, 6 pm: artist talk with Takehito Koganezawa and presentation of the artist book published on the occasion of the exhibition

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 1 - Lisbon

2011-07-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

Lisbon
July 8-16

curated by Julião Sarmento

Tuesday:

Julião Sarmento - R.O.C. (40 plus one) (2011)

Wednesday:

Alexandre Estrela - O Cobra Verde (2010)

Thursday:

Gabriel Abrantes - Olympia I & II (with Katie Widloski) (2006)

Friday:

João Onofre - Untitled (N’en Finit Plus) (2011)

Saturday:

Vasco Araujo - The Girl from the Golden West (2004)

Tuesday, July 26th at 7 pm:

Independent curator, Carole Ann Klonarides, will speak on the history and collecting

of Los Angeles based video work

Wednesday, July 27th at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips, curator at the Getty Research Institute, on video art in Brazil

Thursday, July 28th at 7 pm:

A lecture by Glenn Phillips on video art in Japan

--------------

Subscribe to the blog for weekly schedule updates (see subscription box to left)
Subscribe to the gallery's email list click here

Fast Company Article - Marco Brambilla

2011-07-09T16:06:00.000-07:00

Marco Brambilla's Global Pop Culture Adventure, Starring Sly Stallone, Kanye

BY Susan Karlin
Fri Jul 1, 2011

How groundbreaking, genre-bending collage artist Marco Brambilla traded the Hollywood filmmaking machine for artistic freedom and found himself feted by the pop culture he satirizes.

click here to view full article

Visura Magazine - Miguel Rio Branco, Tokyo

2011-07-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Click to see more images and full article

KCET Social Focus - SUPER 8 Summer Exhibition

2011-07-09T15:42:00.000-07:00

Media Arts Preview: Wicked Critters, Cave Paintings and More

by Holly Willis

on July 7, 2011 12:00 PM

Friday, July 8

The Christopher Grimes Gallery continues its excellent support of video art with an extraordinary show of contemporary work from around the world titled Super 8. To ensure multiple perspectives from divergent regions, the gallery invited eight artists to curate a week's worth of programming from eight different cities, including Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Los Angeles. The first week features Lisbon and was curated by Juliao Sarmento, with video art by different artists screening each day, Tuesday-Saturday. Week 2, July 18-23, features San Francisco-based artists and was curated by Richard T. Walker. The week dedicated to Los Angeles was curated by Marco Brambilla and features an eclectic collection of work by Euan Macdonald, Julie Orser, Morgan Fisher and John Baldessari, and will screen August 15-20. Check the site for the schedule. The show opens tonight with a reception 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Art in America Review - Richard T. Walker

2011-07-09T11:38:00.000-07:00

Richard T. Walker

6/24/11

By Leah Ollman

A charming absurdity trickles through Richard T. Walker's videos, though what registers most strongly is the work's earnestness, its quiet urgency and the vitality of its questions. Since the mid-2000s, the British-born, San Francisco-based artist has been trying to sort out his relationship with nature, a particularly vexed and lopsided attachment owing to his-or at least his on-screen persona's-wholesale adoption of the pathetic fallacy. In numerous short videos and multichannel installations, Walker appears alone, from behind, confessing his love to the landscape and striving to turn his monologue into a dialogue. Inescapably human in his need to be needed, he pleads for nature to fulfill his expectations: "Please be how, how I desire you," he sings in a 2010 piece. Nature, complete in itself, fails to answer back, return his affections or reassure him.

A recent exhibition at Christopher Grimes presented work from 2011. In the speed and eagerness of meaning, a three-channel video projected on contiguous walls, Walker shifts his focus explicitly inward, onto the process of perception. Through a tape recording he plays as he stands overlooking a dramatic desert expanse and the voiceover that follows, he reflects on the way pure sensory response quickly gives way to the mind's reflexive habit of naming, categorizing and interpreting. There is comfort in recognizing the forms one sees and ordering the familiar parts into a coherent whole, but "you mourn a little for what you have lost, for you could never again acquire the not knowing that so beautifully placed you in the center of it all." Walker follows his verbal musings with a gentle, folksy chant, a serenade to the wilderness. He strums a guitar in one sequence, beats a drum in another and vocalizes into a microphone connected to a portable amp, all the separate lines joining into lovely, continuous song and drawing the 10-minute piece to a close. Three related photographs accompanied the installation and completed the show.

Walker is a 21st-century Romantic, a solitary rambler in the British tradition, a one-man band and a homespun phenomenologist. His work is utterly endearing, but also provocative and telling. It addresses the limitations of thought and language in mediating experience, and lays bare the simultaneous, contradictory impulses-humility and entitlement-that humans typically have toward nature. Walker suffuses his work with awe, while illustrating, with wistful humor, that the encounter with beauty is about more than reverence. It's a complex personal and cultural negotiation that also entails vulnerabil- ity, compromise and loss.

Photo: Richard T. Walker: the speed and eagerness of meaning, 2011, 3-channel video, approx. 10 minutes; at Christopher Grimes.

75 Photographs, 35 Women, 42 Years

2011-07-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Juliao Sarmento
Curated by Sergio Mah

Centro de Arte Contemporânea Graça Morais, Portugal

July 8 - September 30, 2011

AUTÓCTONE, Pirinéus, França, Agosto 1972, 1972/2010

Inkjet print on paper
21,7 x 31 cm
Collection António Cachola

Christopher Knight Review: Marco Brambillat at SMMoA

2011-06-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Culture Monster

Art Review: 'Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining' at Santa Monica Museum of Art
June 15, 2011

"Sea of Tranquility," the hypnotizing single-channel video at the start of the Marco Brambilla survey exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, is and isn't what its title says. A dramatic, silvery landscape does show the famous broad plain of that name on the Earth's moon; to see it, however, leaves a viewer anything but tranquil.

The Sea of Tranquility is the site where Apollo 11, the American manned lunar module, touched down in July 1969. The first time Earth-bound humans stepped onto another natural satellite, the event also marked the climax of the furious "space race" between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Brambilla's three-minute computer-generated video is a time-lapse study of the landing craft, the Eagle, and the American flag that the crew planted beside it. The artist started with an image first broadcast on television, removed voices from the original radio transmissions to create a crackling soundtrack of static, beeps and buzzes, then compressed time to show the Eagle and the flag disintegrating into rubble and tatters. Days, even years, zoom by in speeding flashes of traveling sunlight.

This gorgeously aestheticized picture of natural decay is overlaid with poignant spiritual reverberations -- ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- while speaking of socio-cultural transformations as well. An astounding human accomplishment goes to rack and ruin, as surely as the Parthenon fell from breathtaking utilitarian grace into a poetic shambles.

Brambilla is a Romantic poet here, as obsessed with wreckage as Wordsworth and Shelley were in writing, or Piranesi and J.M.W. Turner in pictures.

Yet, thanks to its deft digital fabrication, the piece also exudes a subtle element of wry humor. A day after landing, the Eagle took off from the moon's surface, returning to an orbiting module (and apparently knocking over the flag in the process). So Brambilla's time-lapse video of the craft's lunar decay is as fake a picture as the one that kooky conspiracy theorists still insist applies to the actual event.

The Apollo 11 moon landing, claimed by deniers to be an elaborate hoax shot at a studio back lot with incriminating evidence carefully destroyed, is a famous modern template for now ubiquitous denials of truth -- evolution, global climate-change, a certain presidential birth certificate, etc. To watch Brambilla's video is to witness profound beauty and simple verity unravel into topsy-turvy confusion and chaos.

Milan-born, L.A.-based Brambilla, 50, knows something about movies, having directed the 1993 science fiction hit, "Demolition Man," set in an apocalyptic Southern California four decades into the future. (The museum show is titled "The Dark Lining," which suggests some troublesome tarnish within that silvery screen.) Film reviewers took careful note of the film's presumed recycling of earlier movie conventions -- common enough for popular culture, and which Brambilla effectively exploits in his art.

The most obvious examples are in the last room of the show, ably organized by curator Lisa Melandri. Two wall-size, stereoscopic 3-D extravaganzas face each other, accompanied by a driving, melodramatic soundtrack engineered from Igor Stravinsky's dissonant 1913 exercise in pagan rhythms, "The Rite of Spring."

The conceptual hinge is of course Disney's 1940 animated "Fantasia," a wacky effort at making high art safe for a mass audience. (The movie included a comeback role for a faded fictional star, Mickey Mouse.) It featured cinema's first stereo soundtrack, a multichannel method brought up to date by Brambilla's use of currently fashionable 3-D technology.

Yes, special glasses are required for viewing. The videos ramp up a nod to contemporary kitsch into marvelous hysteria. Viewers get a visual assault loosely approaching "A Clockwork Orange," with its infamous Ludovico Technique for forced visual intake of unspeakable mayhem.

An ascension from hell to heaven is composed from more than 300 channels of looped imagery clipped and woven from genre movies, creating the continuous vertical scroll of "Civilization (Megaplex)." Across the room, a cinematic epic of human history, limned in outsized terms of Hollywood sex and violence, unfurls horizontally for "Evolution (Megaplex)." Each moving mural runs in a continuous three-minute loop -- long enough to pull in a slack-jawed viewer, short enough to allow for closer scrutiny of the densely packed projections.

Sampling on steroids, it's a high-tech version of the Pop magazine clippings of Richard Hamilton or the occult collages made from book engravings by Jess Collins. Colossal visions on the order of "The Last Judgment" underpin the action, told in the punier persons of Conan the Barbarian, "Showgirls," Han Solo, Mighty Joe Young, Gandhi, "Ghost Busters," Dirty Harry and more, including an anonymous cast of thousands.

Rather than a young girl dancing herself to death, as "The Rite of Spring" displayed, or Disney's pageant of prehistoric life, Brambilla's tours de force show a young culture -- ours -- amusing itself into an oblivion worthy of the eye-popping medieval tortures of Hieronymus Bosch. The famous (and sometimes questioned) audience riot that accompanied the first performance of Stravinsky's music is unthinkable today -- except, perhaps, as an extravagantly cruel, ideologically driven culture war played out in shouting television pictures on 24-hour cable news.

A few of this compact survey's seven works are thin. "Cathedral" runs scenes of an engorged shopping mall at Christmas-time through an electronic kaleidoscope, making a glittery stained-glass window from conspicuous consumption. "Half Life" juxtaposes the violent action of a virtual reality video-game with the passive, staring faces of youthful gamers playing it. Both works supply pictures for a too-familiar cliché.

But others snap your head around. Among the best is the percussive "Sync (Watch)," 103 seconds of rapid-cut movie sex, violence and theater-audience reaction shots. One-third of a larger triptych, the brief video-assault conveys a complete story arc: Individuals become crowds, then become individuals again.

A display of audience horror is followed by tears, laughter, applause, laughter and tears once more, as if an entire life has been lived, birth to death, in one minute and 43 seconds. The imagery is often squalid and sometimes nutty. Like Elias Canetti, whose incisive book about modern dystopia, "Crowds and Power," portrayed society as a mass pathology, Brambilla is also perversely funny. (The title "Sync," after all, is a layered pun.) His carefully manufactured movie experience also fabricates its audience.

"Marco Brambilla: The Dark Lining," Santa Monica Museum of Art, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, (310) 586-6488, through AUg. 20. Closed Sun. and Mon. www.smmoa.org

— Christopher Knight

Ester Partegas in ARTnews Review

2011-06-18T09:47:00.001-07:00

Talking Trash

More and more artists are using trash not just as a material but also as a subject

by Kim Levin

For most of the 20th century, the modern world was so involved with progress and abstraction, the utopian and the man-made, the disposable and the throwaway, the obsolescent and the newer-and-better, it was hardly noticeable that the underlying material of modern art and life wasn't really any of those things. In fact, from our early 21st-century vantage point, it appears that the true fabric of the modernist century was none other than trash. Rubbish was the repressed that is now making its return.

We should have guessed. Picasso's earliest collages with scraps of newspaper and wallpaper should have warned us; so should have his sculptures using old handlebars and seats. Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau, pieced together from canceled tickets, tram receipts, and other discards, made it clearer still. Think of the very process of collage. Remember Joseph Cornell, fitting nostalgic premodern bits and pieces into his compartmented boxes like a jackdaw into its nest, from his brother's naive drawings to outmoded clay pipes. And let's not forget Gaudí's ceramic shards in Barcelona or Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in L.A. or Arman's most radical pieces, called Poubelles—Plexiglas boxes containing trash, ranging from household detritus to the waste-bin refuse of other artists (Lichtenstein, Kosuth, and LeWitt among them).

In Italy, Alberto Burri stitched together old burlap bags into elegant abstractions, and the arte povera artists made equally refined use of impoverished objects. In the United States, Louise Nevelson, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and a host of others, including the scatter-work artists, Richard Tuttle, Jessica Stockholder, and Tony Feher, employed discards and debris in ways sometimes considered formalist or decorative. John Miller's excrement-brown sculpture gave way to gilded miniature dump sites. The throwaway culture infiltrated art so slyly over the years that its presence went unnoticed, even in discussions of Abject art, Funk art, and Grunge.

For much of the 20th century, trash was a material that referred to the past—recycled by artists whose credo was to make it new. By using materials that hadn't yet made their way into art, they were making it new: recycling was an oblique way of trashing the past during a period of optimism about the future. Garbage could also be a source for making form that fit the ethos of the time: it was based as much on chance as on choice. But now, with a subtle but crucial shift in attitude, trash has become a subject with ecological and environmental importance. Context is everything—should we call it ironic that in our society, suddenly aware of greenness and zero-carbon coupons, garbage is coming to the fore? The striking survey of Rauschenberg's work at Gagosian Gallery in New York last fall couldn't have been better timed. It revived the full greatness of Rauschenberg's trash-based oeuvre and managed to obliterate our memories of Rauschenberg's many late imitations of himself.

It wasn't until the 21st century that it really began to dawn on most of us: trash, detritus, and the results of what Robert Smithson called entropy are the by-products of the Industrial Revolution and the consumerism it engendered. Trash is the inevitable outcome of a century of disposal. It is also the consequence of an age of earthquakes, floods, melting glaciers, tornadoes, and tsunamis. The earth itself very likely gets several tons heavier every day simply by absorbing garbage. It has also been calculated that if laid end to end, the nonbiodegradable plastic bottles on earth would reach to the moon and back. Space itself is littered with satellite debris, just as the seas are inundated with waste.

Recently, there has been a radical shift in our consciousness of trash, with artists now using obsolete things not just as materials but also as content—turning them into landscape, still life, and other artistic genres. This awareness informs the work of artists like Sarah Sze, Mike Nelson, Christoph Büchel, Marjetica Potrc, El Anatsui, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Kristen Morgin.

Consider three unlikely pioneering artists who chose early on to engage with trash in this way. German action artist HA Schult, feminist service-oriented artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and elusive African American conceptualist David Hammons have long been considered almost as atypical and eccentric as the man in Houston who built a house from 50,000 used beer cans. What is more interesting is that, in the work of Ukeles, Schult, and to some extent Hammons, the trash quotient—while perfectly obvious—has gone mostly unremarked upon.

"I started to work with trash in 1969," notes Schult, whose public extravaganzas have sometimes been compared to those of Christo, but whose pioneering environmental art acknowledges the crucial role of trash. "We live in the era of trash and we are running the risk of becoming trash ourselves," says Schult, who has his own museum in Cologne. In 1969, in an installation titled Biokinetic Situations, he filled a museum in Leverkusen with molds, fungi, algae, and anaerobic bacteria and littered a street in Munich with trash. In 1976 he covered the whole Piazza San Marco in Venice with wadded newspapers. In 1977 he staged the crash of a Cessna nose-first into the Staten Island garbage dump. Since 1996, when he began producing life-size "Trash People"—1,000 in all—he has taken this nonbiodegradable army, fashioned from crushed cans, bottles, and discarded electronic parts, to major tourist sites, such as Red Square in Moscow, the Great Wall of China, and the pyramids of Giza. (In addition to the 1,000 figures, he made 500 others for sale at $14,456 each. And they've been selling well, according to his manager.)

In the summer of 2010 he built a temporary rubbish hotel on a beach in Spain. Sponsored by Corona beer at a cost of about $720,000, it consisted of 12 tons of refuse that had washed ashore on beaches. Then, this past March, he took the trash people to Longyearbyen, in the Arctic.

Ukeles, too, began her trash work in 1969, issuing her "Manifesto for Maintenance Art," in which she stated, "My working will be the work." The artist, who shows with Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York, queried, "After the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?" The manifesto proposed an exhibition titled "Care," which was to include interviews with maintenance men, maids, and sanitation workers; the contents of one garbage truck; and containers of polluted air, Hudson River water, and ravaged land. It was all to be serviced, depolluted, and conserved throughout the exhibition. Ukeles's other projects have used recycled materials and garbage trucks. Between 1978 and 1980, her Touch Sanitation Performance involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers at the New York City Department of Sanitation. Since 1977 she has been the official artist-in-residence of the New York Sanitation Department.

Cultural overtones have prevailed in Hammons's work from early on, with his attention to racial content in the '70s. He has consistently chosen worthless and distressed materials—chicken wings, cheap wine bottles, basketball hoops, gnawed barbecue bones, plastic garbage bags, torn plastic tarps—as a way of paying homage to the inner-city black tradition, forged by necessity, of making the most of hand-me-downs and leftovers. His installations and performative works stress the dirty, worn, and impoverished rather than the clean and pure. His esthetic may appear almost accidental, but the nearly invisible Concerto in Black and Blue—an installation in pitch-black rooms at the former ACE gallery in New York—or the partly hidden tarp-covered paintings in his most recent show in the city, at L & M Arts, are deliberate ploys. They signify that his art is—spiritually, politically, and materially—from and for the streets, not the art world. (Nevertheless, gallery director Sukanya Rajaratnam reports, the show sold out at prices of $800,000 to $1 million.) His art appears to highlight not only deprivation but also the moral beauty of debris.

The landscape of waste as it relates to the inner city has also had an impact on Paul Chan and Vik Muniz. Chan's 2004 double-screen digital animation, My Birds . . . Trash . . . The Future, is a 17-minute two-sided exploration of utopia and violence based on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the Book of Leviticus (it also refers to Goya, Blake, Pasolini, Biggie Smalls, and the Iraq war). Chan went on to stage Waiting for Godot outdoors in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, in Rio, Muniz—who has a long history of making images out of chocolate and other unlikely substances—began collaborating with an association of "catadores," or trash pickers, who think of themselves as environmental recyclers as they sort through one of the largest garbage dumps in South America. The result of the collaboration was a monumental series of portrait photographs made from dirt and trash and containing references to early Picasso and to other purveyors of clichéd masterpieces. Muniz calls them "Pictures of Garbage."

By intention, or merely coincidence, three solo shows in Chelsea in the late fall had trash as their overt content: Ester Partegàs at Foxy Production, Mika Rottenberg at Mary Boone Gallery, and Chris Doyle at Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The Barcelona-born Partegàs has been making sculpture and installations about formerly overlooked spaces of consumption and the rubble that follows progress since 2001, when she constructed a quarter-scale airport lounge, complete with luggage and litter. From 2001 to 2003 she made a series of "Detours," pencil-on-paper drawings replicating shopping receipts, and then a series devoted to food labels emphasizing the additives, preservatives, and emulsifiers in packaged food. Hollowmess, her 2003 installation at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, was a full-scale, trash-littered version of a highway underpass. On view at Foxy Production last fall was "More World," in which the gallery was wallpapered with a photomural of an empty lot: weeds and trees behind a construction fence. Hanging on the mural were candy-package drawings, while sitting on the floor was Partegàs's sculpture of a potted plant and plastic bag; adding to the mix was her video Ghost (2009), which reflects the world in a trash-strewn puddle.

Partegàs summed up her enterprise this way in a 2006 issue of the magazine Slave: "I find the subject of garbage especially fascinating as a suggestion of ‘inner dust.' This way of looking at the city stems from my anthropological interest in the rituals of the body/community in which a decision is made to hide or to celebrate its impurities."

Rottenberg's Squeeze (2010), a 20-minute video loop shown last November in a boxlike room within the Mary Boone Gallery, is a mystifying allegory about trash and the globalization of production, the exploitation and pampering of women, and "the mechanisms by which value is generated," says Rottenberg. Accompanied by the noise of compressors and compacting machines, the video depicts elevatorlike cubicles, conveyor belts of lettuce in Arizona, women being squeezed by walls closing in, and rubber being expressed from trees in India. It shows a tongue poking through a wall, and a row of buttocks appearing on an opposite wall. Migrant women workers in the lettuce fields thrust their hands into holes in the earth to be massaged by a row of kneeling Asian women in a cramped underground space. It is a surreal expression of ideological structures, fusing the social, the economic, and the political into an absurdist symbol of a global production system that is a torture chamber and a massage parlor, as well as an elaborate way of producing garbage.

In yet another sense, Squeeze is about the production of its own materials. It can be seen as a 21st-century update on Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961). To fully explain Squeeze, two details outside the video room were crucial. The first was a photograph of Mary Boone, all dolled up, holding the outcome of this global labor: a cube of compressed garbage. The second, affixed to the opposite wall, was a shipping certificate stating that the cube was sent to be permanently stored "offshore" in the Cayman Islands.

The content of Doyle's Waste_Generation (2010), at Andrew Edlin Gallery, is also trash, but it is completely virtual. Doyle manipulated the subject into a hand-drawn, animated video in which things continually morph into other things. This approximately six-and-a-half-minute loop is from a series of five videos based on Thomas Cole's cycle of paintings The Course of Empire. Doyle's first video, Apocalypse Management (2009), was about destruction—the sack of a city, an approaching storm. As he explains, "In 2009 I was thinking about landscape in general—the destroyed landscape, the landscape of trash. I began thinking about trash as the other side of production or generation, and also what to do about the downside of that overwhelming technological generation."

Waste_Generation is not only about trash but also, like Squeeze, about global technology and creativity in the face of destruction. Opening to a dump overflowing with computers and other devices, it segues into oil rigs morphing into a paper mill, whose smokestack churns out currency that flits away in the breeze. Weeds sprout, then turn into flowers, and felled trees become wallpaper patterns and oriental rugs. Factories spring up, their smokestacks belching smoke and vultures. A suburban subdivision is subsumed by ornament and symmetrical patterns. All these images mutate, adapt, and transform to the accompaniment of a soundscape composed by Joe Arcidiacono. Doyle has also begun working with dust. His 2011 performance piece and installation, titled Red Rovers, considers the lifeless landscape of Mars—the two robotic rover explorers and the red extraterrestrial dust itself.

But dust is another matter. It is related to trash but is not the same. Dust has to do with disintegration and mortality rather than with obsolete material goods. A study of dust might begin not with Picasso but with Marcel Duchamp; it would move through Joseph Beuys to the Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad, who in 2000 installed a wall-to-wall carpet piece in an exhibition in London. Those who looked closely at the carpet underfoot saw that Auad had fashioned clumps of lint into minuscule animals and figurines.

Detritus continues to be a fertile subject. Consider "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," running through August at the Wellcome Collection in London. The show is about dust and rubbish, but also about bacteria, excrement, and soil. Viewers are left to contemplate Spanish artist Santiago Sierra's installation of five huge slabs fashioned from latrine waste gathered by Dalits (Untouchables) in India.

Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.

Julião Sarmento 2000 - 2010 at Es Baluard

2011-06-14T13:17:00.001-07:00

Es Baluard – Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma

Julião Sarmento
2000 - 2010

Curated by Fernando Francés García

22 June - 25 September 2011
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 22 at 8:00pm

Femininity As A Multipurpose Signifier (Pornstar), 2002
Mixed media on canvas
194 x 217 x 6,3 cm
Private Collection
Photo: © José Manuel Costa Alves

Julião Sarmento (Lisbon, 1948) is one of the most world-renowned Portuguese contemporary artists. The exhibition to be seen in Palma is a retrospective of the artist's works from 2000-present. 10 years of production, featuring works with an intimate nature and that raise extraordinarily issues not referred merely to the thing visual. "Julião Sarmento, 2000-2010" features painting, drawing, sculpture, video and collage. The exhibition is coproduced by Es Baluard and CAC Málaga.

Curated by Fernando French, "Julião Sarmento 2000-2010" is a retrospective of the latest production years of the most world-renowned Portuguese contemporary artist. Sarmento's work is notable for its intimate character and his extraordinary ability to raise issues that go beyond the visual, even creating a reality that moves between experience and memory. This dichotomy is very present in his works, with which the audience raises the dilemma of choosing between spirituality and eroticism, morality and sexuality or narrative and speech. Semi-figurative paintings and drawings, minimalist sculptures, videos and collages make up this exhibition, which demonstrates the eclectic nature of the artist and his enormous capacity to address almost all creative disciplines.

The exhibition reflects the most prolific period, regarding to technical resources, of this conceptual artist who suggests rather than shows, who implies more than evidence. Behind each piece are the obsessions of an individual who consistently questions the pleasure, time, desire, absence, and the word, inviting the viewer to be answer himself to all these questions. To do so, the artist uses the language, literature and cinema, essential tools in his work, which often includes quotations or allusions to become images. More or less explicit references in English, Latin and Portuguese of Bataille, Borges, Joyce, Flaubert, Pessoa, Foucault and own expressions (Bukowski, 2008, Slowly Dying, 2005 or Under My Breasts, 2005) go through his work, phrases intendedly taken out of context to leave to the audience the effort of finding a new reality, to exercise their eyes and find a different meaning.

In Seven Days Times - Katharina Grosse at Kunstmuseum Bonn

2011-06-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Katharina Grosse
In Seven Days Time, 2011
Permanent outdoor installation at Kunstmuseum Bonn
Acryl auf GRP
920 x 1950 x 12 cm
Photo: Olaf Bergmann
© Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011

In a Dark Room. Intoxicated.

2011-06-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

Art Talk with Edward Goldman, KCRW
June 7, 2011

My recent trip to Europe ended up in Barcelona, sneaking from one dark room to another in the hotel where I was staying. But let me assure you, I was doing this for all the right reasons. About fifty art dealers from around the world gathered there for Loop, an annual video art fair. Each dealer, in his or her room, was allowed to show only one video work by one artist. Corridors were crowded with people going in and out of these small hotel rooms, converted temporarily into darkened galleries.

One room was especially crowded all day long. People were sitting on the bed, on the couch or just standing in the few remaining square feet of the room occupied by Los Angeles gallerist Christopher Grimes. Look at the picture on the KCRW website; everyone is wearing dark 3-D glasses to experience at its fullest the fascinating, intentionally bombastic video by American artist Marco Brambilla. Throbbing music by Prokofiev from his ballet Romeo and Juliet is playing nonstop at full blast.

A successful film director in his own right, Marco Brambilla, in the last ten years, shifted his focus to video and photography projects. Evolution, his latest video, is only a few minutes long, but you would never guess. Consisting of hundreds, if not thousands, of clips from Hollywood blockbuster movies — ingeniously stitched together into a gigantic quilt — this video is the ultimate homage to the magic of movie making. But there is also a healthy dose of irony there, as if to acknowledge the formulaic and bombastic tendencies of so many big budget movies. Just look at the voluptuous Raquel Welch strutting her stuff or super-macho Clint Eastwood marching back and forth across the screen and you get the idea.

You can check out all this for yourself here, at Santa Monica Museum of Art, where the first-ever museum show of Marco Brambilla's video works opened two weeks ago. Just one hour after my plane from Barcelona landed in L.A., I was already at the opening of his museum show, going through the labyrinth of the darkened galleries with various videos done by him over the last decade. And once again, the biggest crowd stood in front of a large screen, transfixed by Evolution, the latest and most ambitious work by Marco Brambilla.

In the last couple of decades, video art has slowly been shaking off its status as stepchild in the world of art-making. These days, it's resolutely the darling of the international art scene. Last weekend brought the news that the American artist Christian Marclay just won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale for his much admired and talked-about video. Once again — lucky us — we can check out this truly astounding, 24-hour long video work, continuously playing here at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There, in a large darkened gallery, you will find people stretching out on big white sofas, spending hour upon hour watching the Marclay video, hypnotized by its cleverness and virtuosity. Altogether, it's pure theater.

Titled The Clock, it consists of millions of movie clips with continuous reference to the passing time. Every clip shows the hands of a clock moving forward yet another second or minute, and the astounding thing is that the onscreen time always corresponds with the actual time of your being in the museum watching this very video. One wants to congratulate LACMA on its prescient purchase of this video in April for just under half a million dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if the Christain Marclay video, with the Golden Lion Award attached to it, soon commands a healthy price of a million bucks and major museums and billionaire collectors fight for the honor of owning it.

Marco Brambilla & Juliao Sarmento - Commercial Break at the Venice Biennale

2011-06-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

COMMERCIAL BREAK

Garage Projects, 54th Venice Biennale

June 1 - June 5, 2011

For our second project in Venice, we are presenting Commercial Break from 1 to 5 June 2011 as part of the opening week of the 54th Venice Biennale.

Commercial Break is a conspicuous intervention into the historic city of Venice, featuring over one hundred artists, each engaging with the relationship between advertising and culture. Short digital works by globally recognized and emerging artists from around the world will bring the form and language of advertising to Venice. The project is curated by Neville Wakefield and powered by POST magazine. Commercial Break is both an intervention with the architecture of the city and an iPad application created by POST, the world’s first magazine created specifically for the iPad. The special art issue will allow readers to explore individual artists and films for the 5 months of the Biennale as well as on location in Venice.

CURATOR

Neville Wakefield is a writer and commentator on contemporary art, culture and photography. Author of ‘Postmodernism: the Twilight of the Real’ (1990), Wakefield has contributed to numerous magazines Artforum, Art + Auction, Art in America, I-D, Interview, The New York Sunday Times, American, British and Italian Vogue, High Times, ACNE Paper and the Journal and many others. As well as contributing to monographs on many significant artists including Matthew Barney, Dan Colen, Vija Celmins, Daido Moriyama, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha and Rachel Whiteread, Wakefield co-edited the highly influential 'Fashion: Photography of the Nineties' (1996), was creative director of Tar Magazine and continues to work as creative director for Adam Kimmel Projects and creative consultant for Calvin Klein. In 2005 he co-founded ‘Destricted’, an ongoing series of pornographic films by artists such as Marina Abramovic, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noe which shook critics at Edinburgh, Lorcarno, Sundance and Cannes. Since then he has also served as Senior Curatorial Advisor for PS1 MoMA and Curator of Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair. Recent shows include Greater New York (PS1 2010), 'Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with Wound and Nail' (Schaulager 2010) and the upcoming 'Jack Smith: Thanks for Explaining Me,' Barbara Gladstone Gallery opening May 6th 2011.

Participating artists include:

Aaron Young; Adam McEwen; Adel Abdessemed; AES + F; Agathe Snow; Agnieszka Kurant; Ahmet Ogut; Aida Ruilova; Aleksandra Mir; Alex Hubbard; Andrea Chung; Annika Larsson; Anton Ginzburg; Ari Marcopoulos; Assume Vivid Astro Focus; Baptist Coelho; Barbara Kruger; Blue Soup Group; Brendan Fowler; Bruce High Quality Foundation; Cevdet Erek; Christian Jankowski; Collier Schorr; Cyprien Gaillard; Dan Colen and Nate Lowman; Daniel Newman; Dima Gutov; Dmitry Bulnygin; Dominic Nurre; Dzine; Electroboutique; Eloise Fornieles; Erika Verzutti; Gardar Eide Einarsson; Gelitin; Gillian Wearing; Hanif Kureshi; Hank Willis Thomas; Hans Op De Beek; Helmut Lang; Heman Chong; Hu Jieming; Huang Kui; Ilya Korobkov; Janaina Tschäpe; JD Walsh; Jen DeNike; Jennifer Wen Ma; Jeppe Hein; Jitish Kallat; Johan Grimonprez; John Pilson; Jonathan Horowitz; Josephine Meckseper; Julião Sarmento; Kaari Upson; Karen Kilimnik; Kon Trubkovich; Kris Martin; Lais Myrrha; Lara Favaretto; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Liz Cohen; Liz Magic Laser; Lu Yang; Marcel Odenbach; Marco Brambilla; Marcos Chaves; Maria Petschnig; Marilyn Minter; Martin Murphy; Martynka Wawrzyniak; Matias Faldbakken; Matthew Day Jackson; Maurizio Cattelan; Melodie Mousset; Meredith Danluck; Michael Sailstorfer; Mika Rottenberg; Mike Bouchet; Miltos Manetas; Monica Narula; Munir Kabani; Narendra Yadav; Natalie Czech; Nicolas Provost; Norma Jeane; Olaf Breuning; Olympia Scarry; Paola Pivi; Paolo Canevari; Pascual Sisto; Pavel Buchler; Peter Coffin; Pinar Yolacan; Prasad Raghavan; Rashaad Newsome; Raymond Pettibon; Richard Phillips; Rirkrit Tiravanija; Riyas Komu; Rodrigo Matheus; Ruangrupa; Ruben Bellinkx; Ryan Gander; Ryan McNamara; Ryan Trecartin; Samar Jodha; Sara Ramo; Sarah Morris; Scott King; Sergey Bratkov; Shreyas Karle; Shwetal Patel; Slater Bradley; Stefan Brüggemann; Sudarshan Shetty; SUPERFLEX; Terence Koh; The Propeller Group; Thiago Rocha Pitta; Tintin Wulia; Tom Sachs; Tony Oursler; Uri Aran; Valeska Soares; Vanessa Beecroft; Wilfredo Prieto; Wilhelm Sasnal; Xu Tan; Yi Zhou; Yoshua Okon; Zhou Xiaohu.

Neville Wakefield: Curator
Emma Reeves: Director of Content
Aimee Ehrman: Artist Liason and Film/Editing Coordinator
Nicolas Galetta: Editing Assistant
Video Post-Production: My active Driveway NY
Defne Ayas and Davide Quadrio (Arthub Asia) and Shwetal Patel: Content Consultants

With thanks to all the participating artists and their galleries.

Los Angeles Times - New Grosse Sculpture

2011-06-04T10:03:00.000-07:00

Bonn, Germany — The new sculpture "In Seven Days Time" by German artist Katharina Grosse dwarfs a passerby in its new home outside the Bonn art museum.

Los Angeles Times - Framework Section

Pictures in the News | May 25, 2011

We begin Wednesday’s Pictures in the News feature in Germany, where a new sculpture entitled “In Seven Days Time” by artist Katharina Grosse has found a permanent home outside the art museum in Bonn.

Images from Loop Video Art Fair 2011

2011-05-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

Audience viewing Marco Brambilla's Evolution Megaplex in 3-D

Video artist Marco Brambilla works on multiple dimensions - Review by Jori Finkel, Los Angeles Times

2011-05-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

By Jori Finkel
May 21, 2011

Video artist Marco Brambilla works on multiple dimensions

Hundreds of film clips form a 3-D riff on the excesses of Hollywood and consumerism by video artist Marco Brambilla. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times / May 21, 2011)

Brambilla's multi-layered mosaics, going on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 'The Dark Lining,' includes 3-D takes on cinematic and societal excesses.

Video artist Marco Brambilla knows that some people will see his decision to go 3-D as a marketing gimmick. "It is meant to get attention," he says. "When you walk into the gallery and characters start coming off the walls, it feels otherworldly."

But he also sees the 3-D format as a natural fit for his recent work — which is all about the visual excesses of Hollywood moviemaking and the sped-up consumer culture that goes with it. Once a mainstream film director himself, best known for the 1993 action movie "Demolition Man," Brambilla is not afraid to use the tricks of the trade in his museum and gallery work. And he is now using 3-D technology to add another dimension to his hyperactive, super-saturated, collage-style video artworks made exclusively of film clips.

"My desire was to present the most epic human themes in a way as immediate and bombastic as possible, seeing them all through a pop culture lens," says Brambilla, 50, based in New York. "In my piece 'Civilization' it's the story of Dante's Inferno, the spiritual journey from hell to heaven. In 'Evolution' it's a narrative about conflict throughout the ages."

Both works will be on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art starting Saturday as part of "The Dark Lining," Brambilla's first museum survey. It's the first public screening of "Evolution (Megaplex)," which debuted at a private party during Art Basel Miami Beach in December. It's also one of the first 3-D viewings of "Civilization (Megaplex)," the video introduced at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica in 2008 that has since found a permanent home in an elevator at the Standard Hotel in New York.

These two works are clearly designed to be the pièce de résistance of the show, facing off in a large gallery at the back of the museum. They are blockbusters made of blockbusters, packed with apocalyptic imagery of floods, war, fire, and over-populated with characters such as Dirty Harry and King Kong integrated rather seamlessly within a single frame. But the show also includes a handful of earlier, 2-D videos that also reflects his fascination with spectacle.

"In a lot of his work Marco has walked a line very purposefully between celebration and critique," says Santa Monica Museum of Art curator Lisa Melandri, naming consumerism and popular culture as ongoing subjects. "You can come at it from a 'wow, this is gorgeous' angle or walk away thinking 'Oh my God, this is what we've become.'"

More entertaining than a lot of video art, this work is "not at all didactic," she adds. "The hope is that the beauty that sucks you in can lead you to be thoughtful about the content."

Born in Italy but raised from age 10 in Canada, Brambilla got his start making commercials while still in high school in Toronto. He worked his way up to more ambitious projects, landing a million-dollar job making a Canadian television spot for Pepsi. Then, at 29, he was hired to direct his first feature film, "Demolition Man," starring Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes and Sandra Bullock. Its budget of $59 million was reported at the time to be the biggest ever given to a first-time director.

"It was very unusual for me to make an action film because I hadn't seen one before. My taste was more European — Fellini and Godard," says Brambilla. "I was a tourist in that industry." He says he was ultimately frustrated by the "formulas" he had to follow for an action movie.

But he enjoyed working with the latest technology and is proud of key images in the film: the beehive-style set he designed where the movie's prisoners were cryogenically frozen and the "virtual sex" scene between Bullock and Stallone, done with strobe lighting and freeze-frame images superimposed over the live action.

Drawn to this sort of image manipulation, he soon began focusing more time on experimental videos he was making on the side. (With this shift came more time in New York, and after splitting his time between the coasts, he finally sold his house in L.A. last year.)

An early art-world breakthrough was "Cyclorama," a multi-screen installation completed in 1999 that he initially financed with more commercial work. A video in the round, it simultaneously shows the sun rising from nine different revolving restaurants in cities across North America. Now in the collection of SFMOMA, it was not replicated for the Santa Monica show for space and logistic reasons, Melandri says.

She mentions "Half Life" from 2002, which is in the show, as another important, early piece. For this work, Brambilla documented teenagers in Garden Grove, Calif., as they played the multi-player shooter game Counter-Strike. The resulting work juxtaposes the violent activity taking place in the game with the teenagers' remarkably calm faces.

A later work, "Cathedral," from 2008, shows Brambilla developing what has arguably become his signature style, combining dozens of filmed images into a single frame. Even though this video draws from his own footage, shot at a soaring, glass-ceilinged mega-mall in Toronto during Christmas shopping season, the work has the dizzying, disorienting effect of a collage.

"Civilization" and "Evolution," made exclusively from other films, take that collage aesthetic to new heights. The artist worked with the Mill post-production studio in Santa Monica to achieve the 3-D effects, created in a software program called Flame.

Each piece, running roughly three minutes on a continuous loop, culls images from some 400 different films. In "Civilization" you can spot E.T. riding his bike in heaven and Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing from "Stay Hungry" (perhaps presciently, Brambilla places him in both heaven and hell). "Evolution" includes Raquel Welch in a cave in "One Million Years B.C.," Daniel Day Lewis in a canoe in "The Last of the Mohicans" and small armies of space-age characters from cult-favorite science-fiction movies.

Brambilla is often grouped with other video artists who sample film — like Christian Marclay and Candice Breitz, but his interests tend to be less narrative. He works with smaller samples, no longer than two seconds, which he says frees him from the legal copyright concerns that have plagued Breitz in particular in the past.

As Brambilla sees it, his work is more painterly: "It's like I'm making a video canvas where the brushstrokes are loops or samples taken from film."

Kanye West used a similar metaphor when Brambilla made a video for his hit single "Power" last year. The video featured West as an imposing god-like figure in a landscape inspired by Botticelli and Michelangelo, only he was surrounded by strippers instead of cherubs. West promoted the video in a tweet as a "moving painting."

The performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has followed Brambilla's work for years, has another analogy. "I see his work as a sort of tapestry, weaving together so much visual information," she says. "'Evolution' is only a few minutes long, but it has so many layers of meaning you can see it over and over again. Your sense of time is totally different — you never see enough."

jori.finkel@latimes.com

In God We Trust - Joao Louro

2011-05-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

Joao Louro
In God We Trust

BES ARTE & FINANÇA
Opening MAY 19TH, 7:30 pm
May 19-July 15, 2011

Christopher Grimes Gallery: News

Brambilla in Goup Show at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm

FRANK NITSCHE AND KATHARINA GROSSE

Sundance Film Festival 2012: Marco Brambilla's Evolution (Megaplex) and the New Frontier

Marco Brambilla Tells The Story Of Human Evolution

Second for second, the most cinematic excitement in Sundance

Marco Brambilla's Evolution (Megaplex) at 2012 Sundance Film Festival

Arts Beat LA: Scott Short Exhibition

Chicago-area Professor Manglano-Ovalle Wins $50,000 USA Fellow Award

The Demonstrators Also Waited - Allan Sekula in Conversation with Kaja Silverman

Interview with Miguel Rio Branco

Oceans and Campfires - Sekula at SFAI

Super 8 Opens at YBCA

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Events

------------------

Artist Bio

ARTINFO's 10 Weekly International Art Picks --- Katharina Grosse

From Anselm Kiefer's Alchemy to Katharina Grosse's Rainbows

Spaghetti Sessions: Allan Sekula at Concord

Conversation & Screening: Sekula at ICA

"California Stories": Allan Sekula, photographs review by LA Weekly

Manglano-Ovalle at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art

Sekula in Light Years Exhibition at Art Institute

Marco Brambilla New Work: RPM

Manglano-Ovalle: USA Visual Arts Grant Recipient

Interview with Hou Hanru and Allan Sekula

A new exhibition examines working-class stories and narratives of civil unrest through two artists' lenses

e-flux: Sekula SFAI Exhibition

Marco Brambilla RPM 2011 Ferrari Party Video

Sekula Conversation at SFAI

RPM Video for Ferrari by Marco Brambilla

Sarmento at Museu da Electricidade – Cinzeiro 8

Grosse Mass Moca Exhibition Extended

Allan Sekula Film Retrospective at Stills: Scotland's Centre for Photography

Rio Branco at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm

LA Weekly

Sekula at MOCA, LACMA and OCMA in October 2011

Tunga at the 17th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_VIdeobrasil

Walking Tour: Miguel Rio Branco Gallery at Inhotim, Brazil

Art Daily Review: Marco Brambilla presents first ever video art selection in 68th Venice film festival

Paradigm Shift - Sarmento at Serralves

Sarmento at the CAC

Julião Sarmento

Anton Henning: Antiunconventional Stillifes, Landscapes & Interiors

Art in America Cover Story: Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse

Art in America Interview: Katharina Grosse

Between the Lines: Q+A With September Cover Katharina Grosse

Brambilla Review: New York Times Style Magazine

Brambilla's Evolution 3D at Venice Film Festival

Director: Marco Müller

31st August - 10th September 2011

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 8 - Dublin

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 7 - Berlin

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 6 - Los Angeles

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 5 - London

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 4 - Rio de Janeiro

Henning Exhibition in Scotland

Anton Henning

August 5 - October 22, 2011

Richard T. Walker in Bay Area Now

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 3 - Tokyo

Richard T. Walker at Spike Island

Saturday 9 July - Sunday 4 September

Richard T. WalkerSpike Island

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 2 - San Francisco

'Super 8' exhibition focuses on the world of video art

Particle Tickle

SUPER 8 Schedule: Week 1 - Lisbon

Fast Company Article - Marco Brambilla

Visura Magazine - Miguel Rio Branco, Tokyo

KCET Social Focus - SUPER 8 Summer Exhibition

Art in America Review - Richard T. Walker

75 Photographs, 35 Women, 42 Years

Christopher Knight Review: Marco Brambillat at SMMoA

Ester Partegas in ARTnews Review

Julião Sarmento 2000 - 2010 at Es Baluard

In Seven Days Times - Katharina Grosse at Kunstmuseum Bonn

In a Dark Room. Intoxicated.

Richard T. Walker
Spike Island