1.

45 Years of Performance Video from EAI
as part of 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009)
On view November 1, 2009 - April 5, 2010
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY

In conjunction with 100 Years, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) has organized a special presentation 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI. Featuring works from 1965 to the present, this survey highlights over four decades of artists' performances created specifically for video, from conceptual exercises of the late 1960s to new, digitally-mediated performance narratives.

Organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa. The exhibition is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Chief Curatorial Advisor and MoMA Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art; and RoseLee Goldberg, Performa Curator and Director.

-

Featuring works from 1965 to the present, 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI highlights over four decades of artists' performances created specifically for video, from body-based conceptual exercises of the late 1960s to new, digitally mediated performance narratives. The histories of performance art and video art are inextricably linked, with a rich cross-fertilization between them: performance artists deploy video space and time as another dimension in which to stage their performances; video artists step in front of the camera as performer and actor in their own works. The thirty-eight works on view, all drawn from EAI's extensive collection, trace the multiple creative and critical strategies that artists have applied to the merger of video and performance.

The exhibition 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009), a Free Space program, a collaboration between P.S.1 and Performa, gathers important happenings, actions, moments, and gestures to outline a history of performance art that is still largely unknown. This version of the exhibition is presented on the occasion of Performa 09, the third visual art performance biennial taking place November 1-22, 2009.

Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ant Farm, Eleanor Antin, Charles Atlas, Alex Bag, John Baldessari, Phyllis Baldino, Lynda Benglis, Chris Burden, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, General Idea, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Harry Dodge + Stanya Kahn, Mike Kelley, Tony Labat, Kalup Linzy, Paul McCarthy, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Rita Myers, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Alix Pearlstein, Pipilotti Rist, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Stuart Sherman, Michael Smith, Ryan Trecartin, Steina, William Wegman, Hannah Wilke, Jud Yalkut


2.

Vital Signals: Japanese & American Video Art from the 1960s & ‘70s
as part of Fall 2009 Performing Arts Season: Japan Transatlantic: Tokio-Berlin.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Frank L. Ellsworth Performing Arts Lecture Series
Japan Society, NY

Open Television 2–4 pm
The new medium of video and its inherent accessibility changed the way artists approached the mov­ing image and spurred the growth of communities. The artists presented in this screening saw video as a way to directly engage with culture. This pro­gram includes work by Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Toshio Matsumoto, Fujiko Nakaya, Chris Burden, TVTV, Saburo Muraoka, Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Keiji Uematsu, Ko Nakajima, Shirley Clark, Video Earth and Video Information Center. Video works lists

The Language of Technology 5:45–7:15 pm
This section highlights early examples of video art that explored technical developments such as electronic image manipulation and instantaneous play­back. Artists include Nam June Paik, CTG, Gary Hill, Toshio Matsumoto, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Keigo Yamamoto, James Byrne, Takahiko Iimura, Kohei Ando and Morihiro Wada. Video works lists

Artist Discussion 7:30–8:15 pm
With Takahiko Iimura and American video artist Mary Lucier, moderated by Barbara London, Curator of Video and Digital Media, Museum of Modern Art.

Body Acts 8:30–10:30 pm
The artists featured in Body Acts use video technology to experiment with physical and emotional gesture in performative works created for the camera. Artists include Joan Jonas, Takahiko Iimura, James Byrne, Norio Imai, William Wegman, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Ante Bozanich, Mako Idemitsu, Paul McCarthy, John Baldessari, Hakudo Kobayashi, Mobuhiro Kawanaka and Vito Acconci. Video works lists


Takahiko Iimura, Observer/Observed, 1975-76

-

Vital Signals, a program of early video art from the U.S. and Japan, highlights the parallel developments in these countries during the 1960s and '70s. Co-presented Japan Society and EAI, and organized in collaboration with the Yokohama Museum of Art and a team of Japanese curators and scholars, the three-part screening program brings together early Japanese video alongside seminal works from the EAI collection. A special discussion moderated by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York will include artists Takahiko Iimura and Mary Lucier.

The introduction of the first consumer-grade video recorder, the Sony "Portapak," in the mid-1960s contributed to a fertile period of creative exploration, as artists and activists engaged with the new video technology. Video by artists based in the U.S. and Europe in the 1960s and '70s, including Nam June Paik, Joan Jonas and Bruce Nauman, is well known internationally. Until now, however, the parallel activities of artists working in Japan, the birthplace of the camcorder and other video technologies, have been screened only rarely. Using a familiar tool kit, these artists explored the nascent medium in unique and innovative ways.

An accompanying catalogue and DVD compilation of the Japanese works from this series will be published by EAI at the end of the year. Vital Signals is currently touring the U.S. and Japan. For information on screenings outside New York, please click here.

Vital Signals has been organized and produced by Ann Adachi of EAI. The video programs were curated by Ann Adachi and Yukie Kamiya, Chief Curator, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan, and Hirofumi Sakamoto, Professor, Wakkanai Hokusei Gakuen University, Hokkaido, Japan.

This program is supported, in part, by the Japan-US Friendship Commission.

Toshio Matsumoto, Mona Lisa, 1973

 
Toshio Matsumoto, For The Damaged Right Eye

Toshio Matsumoto, Andy Warhol - Re-production, 1974

 
Paul McCarthy, Black and White Tapes, 1972.

개관 5주년 특강 시리즈 1 - 플라잉시티와의 만남

일시: 2009. 11. 18 (수) 오후 2시
장소: 삼성아동교육문화센터 B2 강당
접수기간 : 2009.11.03 ~ 2009.11.17


개관 5주년 특강 시리즈 2 - 미디어 작품 상영 : 샘 테일러 우드, 요나스 달버그, 정연두, 장영혜 중공업

일시: 2009. 11. 25 (수) 오후 2시 ~ 4시
장소: 삼성아동교육문화센터 B2 강당
접수기간 : 2009.11.03 ~ 2009.11.24

CHASING NAPOLEON
16 octobre 2009 - 17 janvier 2010
Palais de Tokyo, Paris

DAVE ALLEN / MICOL ASSAËL / CHRISTOPH BÜCHEL / DORA WINTER / GARDAR EIDE EINARSSON / DAVID FINCHER / TOM FRIEDMAN / RYAN GANDER / ROBERT GOBER / ROBERT KUSMIROWSKI / PAUL LAFFOLEY / TONY MATELLI / OLA PEHRSON / CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE / HANNAH RICKARDS / DIETER ROTH / TONY SMITH / JOHN TREMBLAY.

1977, Theodore Kaczynski – qui ne répond pas encore au surnom de «Unabomber » – vit isolé dans une petite cabane du Montana en prévision de «l’effondrement du système technologique ». Paul Laffoley termine The Renovatio Mundi, confiné dans les quinze mètres carrés de son atelier et Dieter Roth travaille à un projet de longue haleine : l’inventaire photographique de toutes les rues et les maisons de Reykjavik (35.000 diapositives). La même année, le Community Reinvestment Act est voté, une loi qui introduit les subprimes dans le système bancaire.

Vacillement des interprétations, renversement des valeurs, paradoxe des situations… CHASING NAPOLEON prend acte d’une bérézina qui met en déroute le réel lui-même. Après GAKONA et SPY NUMBERS, le spectre électromagnétique et l'infra-mince, Marc-Olivier Wahler réunit dix-huit artistes dont les œuvres sont autant d’instructions pour se soustraire au regard et se réfugier dans les marges du visible.

images

-

Paul Laffoley on Wiki
Laffoley's Odyssey
Official blog of Paul Laffoley

-

Loris Gréaud on Wiki
Loris Gréaud on Vibrö
Loris Gréaud on Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Taste of Nothing, the Smell of Mars / The New York Times, March 9, 2008
Loris Gréaud / Frieze Magazine, Issue 98 April 2006
Loris Gréaud / Performa 09

-

Micol Assaël on Johann König, Berlin
Micol Assaël, Chizhevsky Lessons, Kunsthalle Basel, 2007 / Curating Discourse
Micol Assaël at Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Italian Artist Micol Assael Holds Her First Solo Show at Vienna's Secession / artdaily.org, November 7, 2009

-

Christoph Büchel on Wiki
Christoph Büchel on artleak.org
Christoph Büchel on Hauser & Wirth
the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s lawsuit against artist Christoph Büchel / The Boston Globe
Christoph Büchel / Frieze Magazine, Issue 107 May 2007

-

Gardar Eide Einarsson at Sorry We're Closed
Gardar Eide Einarsson at Standard Oslo
Gardar Eide Einarsson at Honor Fraser
Gardar Eide Einarsson / Interview Magazine
Gardar Eide Einarsson: The New Art Politico / Blackbook Magazine, January 09, 2009

-

Robert Kusmirowski / Freize Magazine, Issue 99 May 2006
Robert Kusmirowski "Bunker" at Barbican Artgallery
"Machines from a past that never was" on We Make Money Not Art
Robert Kusmirowski: Migros Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst / ArtForum, March, 2007
"Robert Kusmirowski at Beaufort03" on art design kitsch, September 18, 2009

PAUL McCARTHY: WHITE SNOWIntroduction
4 November – 24 December 2009
Opening: Wednesday, November 4, 6 – 8PM
Hauser & Wirth, New York

Hauser & Wirth New York will present WHITE SNOW, a group of never before seen pieces from a new body of work by Paul McCarthy, drawing upon the famous 19th century German folk tale ‘Snow White’ (‘Schneewittchen’) and commenting upon the modern interpretation of the story in Disney’s beloved 1937 animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

WHITE SNOW at Hauser & Wirth New York will be comprised of two sets of drawings made by the artist since late 2008. The first is a selection of diminutive black and white pencil works as detailed, atmospheric and unapologetically lovely as Old Master drawings. Here, McCarthy develops his characters – the young Snow White masturbating in a solitary romantic reverie, various phallic-nosed dwarfs in a dither at the arrival of the beautiful stranger in their midst – as players in a sly yet poignant coming-of-age narrative packing a metaphorical wallop. The images touch upon myriad dark associations invited by the Snow White tale while simultaneously suggesting a love story with profound personal resonance for the artist.

By turns heartbreaking and wickedly witty, these intimate works provide the foil for a second set of images – more than a dozen massive drawings, ranging in height from 7 to 10 feet and incorporating pages torn from auction catalogues, illustrated books, tabloids and pornographic magazines. McCarthy created these enormous, fiercely gestural and unstintingly funny drawings through a performative process – walking around and into his picture plane, coming from different directions toward paper stretched out on specially constructed tables while intermittently speaking aloud “in a sort of trance”, in a recorded monologue of words and sounds.

One of the few exhibitions ever to focus exclusively upon Paul McCarthy’s drawings, WHITE SNOW provides rare access to the initial stages of exploration that fuel the work of one of America’s most challenging and influential artists. McCarthy’s early investigations into his characters always occur through repeated and even compulsive sketching, a process that reveals layers of connections – in this case, connections between Snow White and icons of femininity as diverse as Venus, the Mona Lisa, the classical high art nude and an array of expertly packaged celebrities who populate our movies and tabloids, as well as people from the artist’s own life and private fantasies – and will ultimately give rise to sculptures, installations, a film and other works over time.

With their antecedents in his now famous 1992 Heidi collaboration with the artist Mike Kelley, the new WHITE SNOW drawings shift the Heidi narrative back to the New World where McCarthy has been inspired by impressions of the deep forests and magical clearings on his own property above the Mojave Desert and books about Disney’s version of Snow White given to him by friends. Weaving his ideas about these and other influences together, he has embarked upon an investigation of the culture that generates and embraces mass-produced images – and of artmaking itself. “It’s more about making than telling,” McCarthy has said. “Drawing is a form of analysis. I’m not controlling it, just allowing it to unfold. It’s not about clarity, it’s about each piece suggesting the next one in a continuum.”

The WHITE SNOW exhibition simultaneously introduces McCarthy’s ambitious long-term plans for his theme and vividly reveals the deep complexities of his varied agenda. The drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth New York extend his hallmark critique of our most stubbornly held and hypocritical societal norms. But while McCarthy continues here to polish his funhouse mirror onto the contradictions of Hollywood-generated fantasies and cherished American notions of purity and decency, he also opens – perhaps more widely than ever before – a window onto the deeper regions of his artistic discipline and his psyche. The large WHITE SNOW drawings, with their bold, sweeping lines and structural rigor, are simultaneous celebrations and critiques of monumental painting and its aggressively male heroes; he duels overtly with such titans of Modernism as de Kooning, Rauschenberg and Twombly, appropriating their visual language while subverting it. At the same time, McCarthy’s drawings contain worlds of self-reflection, with memory as the artist’s constant co-author.

“WHITE SNOW is a history, and some of that history is a self-portrait,” he has said. “The longer you live in the world the more you transpose present and past. At times, the past becomes the window you travel through, the window between the present and past, and things become more layered. You aren’t in the past but you are thinking about it. This [work] is not just about the story of Snow White, it’s a story about a lot of things. It’s about art, it’s a love story. I don’t have a concrete answer about what it is and I’m not looking for one. I don’t look for art to provide answers. I do something and it takes me to the next thing and the next after that.”



-

Go see this now: Paul McCarthy’s “Shit Pie (White Snow)” (2009) at Hauser & Wirth
November 4th, 2009 / A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

... Beneath that are four pieces of collage – a torn page from a porn magazine featuring a naked young woman surrounded by a group of older men, also naked; the front cover of a Christie’s Postwar and Contemporary catalog featuring a particularly sloppy De Kooning; a section of a page from a fetish porn magazine showing four pictures of women in the act of defecation; and an ad for a transsexual phone sex line headed “TS SLUTS” and featuring a photograph of someone wearing women’s shoes and holding their engorged penis.

Elsewhere there are a couple Disney-esque deer, one with a human vagina, the other with an erect human penis; there’s a smiling dwarf thrusting a broom handle into another dwarf’s anus; there’s a collaged photograph of a penis sticking through a hole in a wall; there are scribbled words – “Pussy” followed by a series of variants, or a list what appear to be actions from Disney’s Snow White movie, “going home … Disscovering [sic] the unknown … Going up stairs … Finding Snow White … S.W. wakes up …”.

The whole upper left quadrant of the picture is filled with black and yellow scrawling, and seems to refer again to the similarity between untutored scribbling and the appearances of abstract expressionist painting that was hinted at by the inclusion of the de Kooning catalog cover. And by extension between all mark-making, no matter how unguarded, and all art. There’s an illustration of a Rothko glued there, and a Cindy Sherman, and a list of artists’ names from Artschwager to Yuskavage. Elsewhere there’s the rather unkind inclusion of a picture of the artist who looks more like a Disney dwarf than any other, John Baldessari. ...

Guggenheim Announces Short List for the Hugo Boss Prize 2010

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and HUGO BOSS AG have announced the short list for the Hugo Boss Prize 2010. Established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art, this biennial award is administered by the foundation and juried by an international panel of museum directors, curators, and critics. The finalists for the eighth presentation of the prize are Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Roman Ondák, Walid Raad, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Given to an artist whose work represents a significant development in contemporary art, the Hugo Boss Prize sets no restrictions in terms of age, gender, race, nationality, or medium, and the nominations may include emerging artists as well as established individuals whose public recognition may be long overdue. Previous winners include Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), and Emily Jacir (2008). The 2010 prize carries with it an award of $100,000.

The jury for the 2010 prize is chaired by Nancy Spector, Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the jurors are Udo Kittelmann, Director, Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Yasmil Raymond, Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York; Joan Young, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Tirad Zolghadr, independent writer and curator.

The prizewinner will be selected and announced in fall 2010, and the artist’s work will be presented in an exhibition in 2011 at the Guggenheim Museum.

-

The 2009 Hugo Boss Prize Finalists Announced, Nov 3, 2009 / flavorwire.com
Finalists Announced for 2010 Hugo Boss Prize, October 8, 2009 / The New York Times

-

Official page of Hugo Boss Prize
History of the prize on Wiki

A jury of curators, critics and scholars is responsible for the selection of the artists. They nominate six or seven artists for the short list; several months later, they choose the winner of the prize. In 1996 and 1998, the nominated artists exhibited their work at the now-defunct Guggenheim Soho; since 2000, only the winning artist has shown his or her work.

+

fancy shark-jaws and gin-socked cock..for sale..

Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100, November 3, 2009 / The New York Times

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

-

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss dies, 19 hours ago / AP
French anthropologist Levi-Strauss dies at 100, Tue Nov 3, 2009 / Reuters
UNESCO pays tribute after death of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, 3 November 2009 / UN News Center
Claude Lévi-Strauss était "un passeur exceptionnel", l'entervue avec Françoise Héritier, 04.11.09 / LeMonde.fr
Lévi-Strauss par Lévi-Strauss, 03.11.09 / LeMonde.fr
Lévi-Strauss, le dernier des géants Par Aude Lancelin, 1er mai 2008/ le Nouvel Observateur
Lévi-Strauss: Hommage de l'Élysée, 03/11/2009 / leJDD.fr
Mort de l'anthropologue Claude Lévi-Strauss à l'âge de 100 ans, 03 novembre 2009 / France24
Lévi-Strauss est mort, 03/11/2009 / Libération.fr
«Mes livres sont des collages» l'entervue par DIDIER ERIBON, En 1983 / Libération.fr


+

La page speciale pour rendre hommage à Claude Lévi-Strauss sur Arte.com
Et un portrait de Claude Lévi-Strauss sur Arte ce soir !

The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble remix Kava Kon - Palace Of Tiger Women


The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation - Succubus (visual: Jess Franco, 'Succubus', 1969)

-

Official Site of TKDE
TKDE on MySpace.com
Ad Noiseam
TMFDC on Last.fm

Grey Area: Julie Mehretu
28.10. 2009 - 6. 1. 2010
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

The term “grey area” speaks to a condition of indeterminacy, a liminal state in which something is not clearly defined or is perhaps impossible to define. Julie Mehretu adapts such enigmatic circumstances as a tool to engage the viewer in her complex compositions of meticulously drawn mechanical renderings, spontaneous gestural markings, and colorful interjections. Whether capturing specific settings or the general tenor of the urban experience, such as in Berliner Plätze (2008–09) and Fragment (2008–09) respectively, Mehretu’s paintings evoke the psychogeography of the city and the effects of the built environment on individuals while at the same time contemplating the past and the surviving traces of lived history.

Berlin plays a significant role in the investigation of memory and the urban experience in the Grey Area suite, first conceived during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007. Walking through the city, where one still encounters the vestiges of war, an American such as Mehretu might recall that such destruction is currently perpetrated in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; to see memories preserved after decades of recovery is a poignant reminder of conflicts from which the American public has been carefully screened. Believer’s Palace (2008–09), referencing the partially destroyed palace that sat atop Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad bunker, addresses these current events directly. This painting, along with Atlantic Wall (2008–09), which renders the interiors of bunkers built by Germany along the Western European coastline in World War II, conjures the physical aftermath of war.

Through Mehretu’s layering, erasure, and smudging of marks, structures seem to dissolve on the surface of the canvas, like a virtual rendering of a fading memory. As suggested by the title of the painting Middle Grey (2007–09), which designates the midpoint between the two extremes of black and white, the compositions often exist at a fulcrum where the work could either plunge into dense obscurity or almost disappear into an ethereal cloud of dust. Yet a remarkable sense of pictorial space always exists in Mehretu’s paintings, created not just by their layering but also by the contrasts inherent in them. Solid forms and precise line drawings underlie frenetic forces painted on the surface. These gestures in black acrylic can be detailed and precise or looser, like the quickly drafted scribbles in Notations (2009), to indicate atmosphere or set a mood.

The title of the painting Plover’s Wing (2009) poetically evokes one’s interaction with Mehretu’s works. The plover bird feigns a broken wing, pretending to be easy prey in order to distract predators from its young only to fly away just before being harmed. So too might one be deceived by a first impression of Mehretu’s art. What appears abstract from afar is replete with detailed drawings when viewed close up, but just as one is able to glean some bit of information by which a rendering might be identified, the work seems to vaporize into indeterminacy that compels the viewer to look again and again and again.

-

further information
Program / Tours
Education
Edition / No 49
Information / When and Where
Press Service / News

-

Tracing the City
Julie Mehretus’ Grey Area for the Deutsche Guggenheim
issue 57, Oct. 09 / ArtMag, Deutsche Bank

...Berliner Plätze (2008–09) most clearly captures a specific setting, as referenced in the title and line drawings derived from photographs of late-19th-century Wilhelminian architecture. Yet the dense layering of lines obscures the individual buildings, creating a kaleidoscopic composition of line that destabilizes the viewer’s gaze. Created by projecting historical photos of Berlin onto a canvas and outlining the structural details of the architectural facades, this painting demonstrates the role of photography in Mehretu’s work. The layered imagery suggests double or multiple exposure; the reflections in the upper regions of the canvas recall the inversion of a landscape made by a camera obscura. One might recognize a structure or have a fleeting impression of a familiar locale, but these chimeras quickly slip back into the ethereal world depicted on the canvas. The composition also captures the unsettling nature of the urban experience where block after block of repetitive facades mask the individual lives that are played out behind them—one is surrounded yet often isolated. The individual’s relationship to architecture has long interested Mehretu, who typically interweaves aspects of modernist architecture, city plans, and public spaces such as airports and stadiums into her compositions.

The painting Fragment (2008–09) also captures parts of the urban experience. Layering a variety of streetscapes, the painting explores how city planning frames one’s objective perspective as well as subjective experience of a city. The gestural markings on the surface seem to illustrate Michel de Certeau’s L’invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1980), which reads the city as a text whose narrative is told by its inhabitants’ paths, with the paintings rendering their activity and energy. Mehretu’s paintings evoke the psychogeography of the city (or the effects of the built environment on individuals), while at the same time contemplating the past and the surviving traces of lived history. Always present is the memory of things past. Yet the images of historic architecture or structures in ruins do not necessarily venerate the past as much as highlight the continually shifting nature of the urban landscape. While the layering and thereby partial obscuring of imagery has been prevalent in Mehretu’s practice as a means of building a composition, in this work and others in the series, parts of the painting have actually been purposefully smudged or erased: Markings and structures seem to dissolve on the surface of the canvas, like a virtual rendering of a fading memory. As indicated by the title of the painting Middle Grey (2008–09), which designates the midpoint between the two extremes of black and white, the compositions often exist at a fulcrum where the work could either enter dense obscurity or almost disappear into an ethereal cloud of dust.

Berlin plays a significant role in the investigation of memory and the urban experience in this suite of paintings. The project was conceived during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin in 2007 and later completed when she established a studio in the city in 2008–09. Walking in the city, where one encounters the vestiges of war in bullet-pocked facades and the damaged spire of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, an American such as Mehretu might recall that such destruction is currently perpetrated in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A society at war often does not think of the lasting effects of its actions, and to see memories preserved after decades of recovery is a poignant reminder.

The painting Believer’s Palace (2008–09) addresses these current events. The line drawings in this work depict the partially destroyed palace that sat atop Saddam Hussein’s bunker in Baghdad. Widely published photos of this dilapidated structure belie the preserved condition of the underground military fortification beneath it. Mehretu has long been fascinated with military structures and the influence of military encampments and strategies on the development of cities. The painting Atlantic Wall (2008–09) incorporates computer-generated line renderings of the interiors of bunkers built by Germans along the Western European coastline in World War II. The solid, neolithic structures seemingly dissolve into a tangle of lines and markings. But the flat gray and white forms in the upper-left corner of the surface ground the picture, indicating the solid nature of these concrete structures. As with the gray "ceiling" at the top of Middle Grey, these painted forms help contain the seeming chaos within the images.

A remarkable sense of pictoral space always exists in Mehretu’s paintings, created not just by the layers but also by the contrasts inherent in her works. The underlying compositions of solid forms and precise line drawings counterbalance the more spontaneous gestural markings made by the artist on the surface of the paintings. Different levels of energy denoted by the stable ground of solid forms, the careful, delicate renderings, and the frenetic forces on the surface, are captured on a single canvas. These surface gestures in black acrylic can be detailed and precise or looser, like the quickly drafted scribbles in Notations (2009), to indicate atmosphere or set the mood. As its title suggests, this painting seems to be a diary of unmediated reflections on the work at hand, gathering the energy invested in all of the other canvases into a cloudlike accumulation.

As a final counterpoint in this remarkable new suite of works, the painting Plover’s Wing (2009) also references art-historical traditions as seen in the colorful underlayer, which recalls the abstract compositions and utopian ideals of modernist painting. The plover is a bird that feigns a broken wing, pretending to be easy prey in order to distract predators away from its young and then flying away just before being harmed, and as this work’s title suggests, one might be deceived by a first impression of Mehretu’s works. What appears abstract from afar is replete with detailed drawings when viewed close up, but just as one is able to glean some bit of information by which a rendering might be identified, it seemingly vaporizes into indefinability that requires that a viewer looks at each work again and again and again.



-

Grey Area
Julie Mehretu’s Commissioned Work for the Deutsche Guggenheim
issue 57, Oct. 09 / ArtMag, Deutsche Bank



-

Videos on Vernissage TV
1. Julie Mehretu: Grey Area / Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin / part 1/2
2. Interview with Julie Mehretu / Julie Mehretu: Grey Area, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin / part 2/2

Dan Graham: Beyond
October 31, 2009 - January 24, 2010
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

One of contemporary art's most innovative figures, Dan Graham has been at the forefront of numerous artistic developments since the 1960s, from the rise of conceptualism and minimalism to video and performance to explorations of architecture and the culture of rock and roll. His rejection of the high-seriousness of modern art emerged at the same moment as Pop art, and the fluid, democratic quality of his work continues to exert a powerful influence on younger generations.

This ground-breaking retrospective, the first in the U.S., showcases Graham’s expansive body of work—including his innovations with video and performance, glass-and-mirror pavilions that play off architecture and public spaces, and magazine projects, as well as media installations, prints, drawings, photographs, and writing. In tracing the evolution of Graham’s work across its major stages, the exhibition highlights persistent underlying motifs and concerns—most notably, the changing relationship of individual to society, as filtered through American mass media and architecture.

Dan Graham: Beyond comes to the Walker following presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (February 15 - May 25, 2009) and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (June 25 - October 11, 2009). A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue with major essays by exhibition co-curators Chrissie Iles (Whitney) and Bennett Simpson (MOCA), and many others, is available in the Walker Shop.

Dan Graham: Beyond is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Dan Graham: Beyond is presented by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The exhibition is made possible through endowment support from the Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment. Major support is provided by The Suzanne M. Nora Johnson and David G. Johnson Foundation. Generous additional support is provided by Hauser & Wirth Zürich London; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris; The MOCA Contemporaries; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; Mary and Robert Looker; the Pasadena Art Alliance; Betye Monell Burton; Peter Gelles and Eve Steele Gelles; John Morace and Tom Kennedy; Eileen and Michael Cohen; Bagley and Virginia Wright; and Marieluise Hessel.



-

VISUAL ARTS | Beholding the eye of Dan Graham at the Walker
By Jay Gabler,
October 31, 2009 / TC Daily Planet

... The 67-year-old Graham has an erudite yet impish quality; he seems to be thinking about everything at once, and finding most of it tremendously amusing. As we walked through the exhibit, Simpson and Iles took turns explaining Graham's historical significance and the interrelations among his works, but kept finding themselves enthusiastically interrupted by the artist, who clarified a point here, shared a story there, and kept emphasizing that whatever place he's earned in the international contemporary art world (and he's surely earned a place; Beyond is the cover story of the current Artforum), most of his work was meant to be funny.

... If one key to understanding Graham's work came from the conspicuous joy and amusement with which he watched visitors interact with his work—after the group split into the two rooms of his mirror piece Public Space/Two Audiences, he urged us to switch sides so everyone could get the whole experience—another came from his statement that he and his peers in the heady New York art world of the 60s "wanted to destroy value." In other words, they wanted to place the focus on the function and concept of a piece rather than fetishizing the piece as a physical object. Performance was obviously one means to this end, the mass-produced magazine pieces ("the editor of Artforum would print whatever I sent her") were another, and his mirrored pavilions are yet another: you're not looking at "a Graham," you're looking at yourself.

That said, Graham's pavilions are physical objects, and they now fetch princely sums—plus requiring the additional cost of transportation and assembly. Ralph Burnet, real estate mogul and owner of the Chambers Hotel, owns one. "I paid Dan Graham a frickin' fortune for a piece installed in my house," he told me. "Then I had to hire a glass company, have the whole thing installed...it was very tedious." But what could he do? He had to have one. "Dan Grahams," he said, "are Dan Grahams."

-

Walker Art Center Opens Major Dan Graham Retrospective
November 1, 2009 / artdaily.org

... At the same time, Graham was closely involved with underground music, writing a series of free-ranging, yet historically rigorous speculations on bands like the Kinks, the Fall, and the Sex Pistols. The attempt by youth culture to shake off social control—to get free from the ideological norms of postwar life—rhymed easily with the artist’s own work in conceptual and media art. Rock My Religion (1982–1984) is an hour-long “video-essay” in which Graham traced a continuum between the Shakers, the early-American religious sect that sought spiritual transcendence through collective dance and song, and hardcore punk music. In the latter’s cathartic noise and social rites, Graham located an ongoing, if latent, spirit of separatism that has demarcated American culture from its origins. With its bracing footage of Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, and Black Flag mingled with historical images of a rapt Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker religion, the work is a classic of underground video and one of the most penetrating commentaries on American youth culture ever made. ...