Dancing and Dazzling. Lost in time and space.
You Who Are Getting Obliterated In The Dancing Swarm of Fireflies
Yayoi Kusama, 2005
Phoenix Art Museum
January 30th, 2019
Tag: installation
Repartition
Sarah Lucas : Au Naturel
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York
January 6th, 2019
Sarah Lucas : Au Naturel
A love-it-or-hate-it situation
Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire. – New Museum
The exhibition was on view between September 2018 – January 2019.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York
January 6th, 2019
Liquidation Totale
Three Heads Fountain (Three Andrews) (detail), 2005, epoxy resin, fiberglass, wire, hoses, immersible pump, rubber-lined basin, water;
Bruce Nauman, Three Heads Fountain (Juliet, Andrew, Rinde) (detail), 2005, epoxy resin, fiberglass, wire, hoses, immersible pump, rubber-lined basin, water;
From Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts @MoMA PS1
December 14th, 2018
Dead or Alive
It’s what you see that defines you
Part of Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts @MoMA PS1
December 14th, 2018
Banging your head against the Wall
Once too often, and you become the Wall
Part of Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts @MoMA PS1
December 14th, 2018
Encaged & Entrapped
In a claustrophobic, social distancing-ready installation by Bruce Nauman (if you are petite enough to squeeze in, that is)… I didn’t feel up to the challenge then.
Double Steel Cage Piece (1974)
paired with:
Going Around the Corner Piece (1970)
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts @MoMA PS1
December 14th, 2018
Fragmented Masculinity
Playing with Bruce Nauman’s Contrapposto Studies, i through vii 2015/2016, on view at MoMA PS1 through February 2019.
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
December 14th, 2018
The Art of Ageing Gracefully
Even a hundred-and-twenty-year-old basement boiler becomes a work of art, when it is lovingly restored and partly covered in gold. It helps, of course, if the boiler is found in the basement of MoMA PS1 and the person responsible for its restoration is an artist.
Saul Melman took it upon himself to bring a previously unnoticed element of the building back into the spotlight, by sandblasting the boiler and spending days scrubbing and cleaning the floors and surrounding area. Finally, he applied gold leaf leaving small sections of the pipes uncovered, showing their original beauty.
Saul Melman, “Central Governor” (2010)
MoMA PS1, Long Island City
December 14th, 2018
Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974–1995
”Before Projection” shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception while simultaneously placing it within the history of sculpture. Exploring the connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space, Before Projection presents a tightly focused survey of monitor-based sculpture made between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. [source: Sculpture Center]
Maria Vedder’s ”PAL oder Never The Same Color”, a video installation with twenty-five monitors, was first presented in 1988. PAL (Phase Alternating Line) is the system used to standardize color broadcasting in Europe, developed for analog television. NTSC (National Television System Committee), mockingly dubbed “Never The Same Color,” is the competing standard in North America.
Ernst Caramelle’s ”Video-Ping-Pong” (1974) examines the relationship between the human body and video through a recording of a Ping-Pong match, which plays on two monitors mounted on AV carts at approximately eye level and positioned in front of a “real” Ping-Pong table. Sounds of the bouncing Ping-Pong ball are audible, although no ball is visible between the two monitors. The result is a disarming sense of the players’ presence in the space of the sculpture.
Nam June Paik, ”Charlotte Moorman II”, 1995. Nine antique TV cabinets, two cellos, one 13-inch color TV, two 5-inch color TVs, eight 9-inch color TVs, and two- channel video.
Friederike Pezold, ”Die neue leibhaftige Zeichensprache (The New Embodied Sign Language)”, 1973–76. Four digitized videos.
”The New Embodied Sign Language” comprises four monitors displaying close-up videos of the artist’s body altered by theatrical makeup. The videos (subtitled Augenwerk [Eye Work], Mundwerk [Mouth Work], Bruststück [Breast Piece], and Schamwerk [Pubic Work]) are shown on monitors stacked on top of each other to reach roughly the height of a human body.
In Takahiko Iimura’s ”TV for TV” (1983), two monitors are positioned face-to-face, each tuned to a different broadcast station or to static. Their respective streams are only directed toward the other television set, rendering their images nearly invisible to the viewer.
Shigeko Kubota’s ”River” (1979–81) is composed of three monitors hung at eye-level above a curved, stainless steel trough equipped with a wave motor. The monitors alternate footage of Kubota swimming with brightly colored graphic shapes, which were created with state-of-the- art postproduction equipment of the time. Reflected on the surface of the water, the images’ legibility is periodically disrupted by the wave motor. The work typifies Kubota’s recurring interest in water and video as apt mediums to represent cyclicality, as well as her idea of video as “liquid reality.”
Before Projection ran between September & December 2018.
Sculpture Center, Long Island City
December 14th, 2018
The Humble Fabulist 