Exhibition: In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artist Since 1955

In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artist Since 1955, 25 January -25 March 2012
ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art, London

In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 is a survey exhibition of the often-overlooked genre of serial publications produced by artists around the world from 1955 to the present day. From the rise of the small press in the 1960s, to the DIY zine culture in the 1980s and early 1990s, professional artists have always seized on the format of magazines and postcards as a site for a new kind of art production.

In Numbers does not claim to be an exhaustive survey of serial publications since 1955, but aims to provide the contours of the genre. An extensive collection of artists’ serial publications is arranged into different groupings of periodicals in the Lower Gallery at the ICA, proving a diverse array aesthetically and globally, and requiring close inspection. Although periodicals first appeared in Europe around the end of 18th century, this exhibition features periodicals by avant-garde artists working within the last 60 years who adapted the format in their own ways, coming from movements such as Dada and De Stijl. There is no typical publication on display, although a commonality between the artists featured is that they are outsiders. There are general themes of subversion, resistance, evasion and innovation running through works in the survey.

art

Main

Back

From the Archive

Martine Syms, Fact and Trouble, ICA London, Exhibition

1 May 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Martine Syms, Fact and Trouble, Lessons I-XXX, 2014, Motivational Text Message and Installation View of Fact and Trouble, 2016

Fact & Trouble is an exhibition by American artist Martine Syms that examines the space between lived experience and its representation. Syms’s video series Lessons (ongoing), on view at the ICA, is a long, incomplete poem in 180 sections. Each piece is thirty seconds in duration and articulates a lesson from the tradition. One of these lessons is painted on the gallery walls. The videos use the idea of inheritance as a departure point, simulating the private-public unconscious of television shows, advertisements, animated GIFs, police cams, surveillance footage, Vines and other digitally-circulated formats. In the alcove, this abundance of signifiers manifests in an immersive floor-to-ceiling collage. To accompany and expand upon the videos, Syms has created an installation of double-sided photographs and cookies mounted on century stands, a standard workhorse of film production. The exhibition compiles original and found photography, alongside images taken by her father, weaving together familial, cultural, and historical legacies. Fact & Trouble demonstrates Syms’s multifarious artistic practice which includes video, performance and writing as well as publishing through her imprint Dominica.

Martine Syms (b. 1988) is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including recent presentations at Karma International, Bridget Donahue Gallery, the New Museum, Kunsthalle Bern, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Index Stockholm, MOCA Los Angeles and MCA Chicago. She’s lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Upcoming exhibitions include Made in LA at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Manifesta 11 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Source: Magazine Contemporary Culture.
Text: Press Release, ICA London.
All images belongs to the respective artist and managment.

Read Full Article

Porn vs. Eroticism

3 August 2014

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture No Comments

In 1969, Susan Sontag had referred in her article “The Pornographic Imagination” to three domains of pornography: in social history, as a psychological phenomenon, and within the arts. She claims that from the social and psychological standpoint all pornographic texts have the same status – they are documents. As a psychological phenomenon, for example, pornography is the representation of the fantasies of infantile sexual life for purchase by so-called adults, and social pornography becomes “the disease of a whole culture.”

From art’s point of view, some of these texts may become ‘something else’. When she argues for the recognition of artistic values in certain contemporary pornographic literature, she refrains from the feminist movement’s negative attitude towards all kinds of pornography since, in her view, while pornography is commonly treated as only a social or psychological phenomenon and a locus for moral concern, there can be no argument that some books that she terms as pornographic are interesting and important as works of art.

Georges Bataille takes a similar approach in his book The Accursed Share (1993), arguing that humanity forms various ‘worlds’ that exclude and ignore one another; two of these are eroticism and thought. It isn’t that man’s sexual activity is forbidden in principle, says Bataille; only eroticism that is “marked off by the violation of rules” is forbidden. Sontag suggests that “’the obscene’ is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick society’s aversion to the body.”

Read Full Article

Liliane Lijn

4 October 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Artists Main No Comments

Liliane Lijn, In The Valley of Darkness, 1973

Partly, perhaps as an act of mourning; more obviously as a reparative act, Lijn conceived of her manipulation of prisms as giving them a kind of restorative posthumous existence to remedy their mutilated identity: “A prism on its own is lost. It has no feet, no legs to stand on”. Her fantasy ran that they had lost their function in a world of technical forms by no longer being “anchored into a machine, which one way or another will be a machine for seeing… I must give it a body”.

Liliane Lijn (born 1939), is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962. She has lived in London since 1966.

Utilising highly original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and female mythology. Lijn is particularly known for her timeless, cone-shaped Koan series. In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to ‘see the world in terms of light and energy’. Lijn describes her work as ‘A constant dialogue between opposites, my sculptures use light and motion to transform themselves from solid to void, opaque to transparent, formal to organic.’

Read Full Article

Gosha Rubchinskiy Menswear Spring 2017 Florence

2 August 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Gosha Rubchinskiy Menswear Spring 2017, Florence

A change of scenery, a change of pace. The menswear designer invited by Pitti Immagine to stage a show in Florence for Spring 2017 is Gosha Rubchinskiy. Moscow born, based, and somewhat obsessed, his collections thus far have unraveled his Soviet identity, nostalgically harking back to the time before the curtain fell, and immediately after. He’s offered branded sportswear like ersatz ’80s Russian Olympic gear, and reclamations of teenage clubbing attire from the mid-’90s. What would Gosha do in Italy, though?

Firstly, he found “the only Soviet-looking building in Florence,” to borrow the words of his stylist Lotta Volkova—a tobacco factory in the high rationalist style, built in the ’30s and abandoned 15 years ago. Most of the building was derelict, the show staged in a courtyard bordered by stained concrete and smashed windows. It also provided the backdrop for a short film by Renata Litvinova—Rubchinskiy and Volkova also featured. The film was dedicated “To Pier Paolo.”

Pasolini was the key inspiration for Rubchinskiy—the life and death of the man himself, as well as his creative output. He was a communist, for one, which no doubt appealed to Rubchinskiy’s Eastern Bloc fascinations (then again, so was Miuccia Prada). The sly undercurrent of sexuality that is so often evident in Rubchinskiy shows was here more explicit: The first model, bare-chested beneath a loose-cut pinstripe suit, could stand in for Pasolini’s teenage lover Ninetto Davoli, or Pino Pelosi, the 17-year-old hustler who confessed to his murder in 1975.

If Rubchinskiy has referenced generations of Soviet youths in seasons past, these Italian ragazzi felt tied intrinsically to the reality of modern streets Rubchinskiy has contributed heavily to—namely, the streetwear-clad legions of contemporary menswear. The designer showcased multiple collaborations with a veritable closet of historically Italian sportswear labels—Fila, Kappa, and Sergio Tacchini. Each iteration, combining classic elements of the brand with Rubchinskiy’s own signature branding, had the feel of black-market counterfeits. Indeed, it was only after the show (upon inspecting labels, and asking the right people the right questions) that you could ascertain if those Canal Street–style sweatshirts with Fila’s serpentine logo and Gosha’s name stitched below in trademark Cyrillic were real or make-believe. Most plumped for the latter camp. More fool them. There was also a hookup with Levi’s to create Gosha-brand denims and corduroy jackets.

More than any of Rubchinskiy’s other collections, this linked to the idea of a wardrobe: sportswear-focused, sure, but aren’t many people’s entire lives geared up to athletic gear? The standouts in Rubchinskiy’s Italian debut were, surprisingly, the tailored pieces, rounding out his guy’s closet, offering his loyal customers something new, and maybe even securing fresh blood. The opening pinstripe, a pair of double-breasted velvet jackets, cut confidently broad of the body and wide in the shoulder, even had a touch of another leading designer to their swaggering shapes. Giorgio Armani. That’s something you never expected of Gosha. It was certainly something he’d never shown before.

Last season, Rubchinskiy cited the end of a cycle, and the beginning of something new. Perhaps that means a move away from his usual stomping ground, both creatively and physically. The shift to Florence seems to have shifted his creativity. It kicked it up a gear.

Source: Vogue.com.
Text: Alexander Fury, Vogue.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

Read Full Article

James Turrell

12 June 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

James Turrell, Alta (White), 1967

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory.

“Well, my interest is working with light and space.
And you got light and you got space, there’s no doubt of that. And it’s always something to work with light in the outdoors.
That’s something that I wanted to do, wanted to shape space, to use the light that was here naturally.
Also, I wanted to use the very fine qualities of light.
First of all, moonlight.
Also, there’s a space where you can see your shadow from the light of Venus alone – things like this.
And also wanted to gather starlight that was from outside,
light that’s not only from outside the planetary system
which would be from the sun or reflected off of the moon or a planet,
but also to emanate light from the galactic planes
where you’ve got this older light
that’s away from the light even of our galaxy.
So that is light that would be at least three and a half billion years old.
So you’re gathering light that’s older than our solar system.
And it’s possible to gather that light,
it takes a good bit of stars to do that,
and a good look into older skies, away from the Milky Way.
You can gather that light and physically have that in place so that it’s physically present to feel this old light.
That’s something that you can do here in a place like this,
where you have good, dark skies.
So to have this sort of old blended light and to have this sort of new,
eight and a half minute old light from the sun.
And I wanted to look at light that way, because to feel it physically,
almost as we taste things, was a quality I wanted.”

In 1966, Turrell began experimenting with light in his Santa Monica studio, the Mendota Hotel, at a time when the so-called Light and Space group of artists in Los Angeles, including Robert Irwin, Mary Corse and Doug Wheeler, was coming into prominence. By covering the windows and only allowing prescribed amounts of light from the street outside to come through the openings, Turrell created his first light projections. In Shallow Space Constructions (1968) he used screened partitions, allowing a radiant effusion of concealed light to create an artificially flattened effect within the given space. That same year, he participated in the Los Angeles County Museum’s Art and Technology Program, investigating perceptual phenomena with the artist Robert Irwin and psychologist Edward Wortz. In 1969, he made sky drawings with Sam Francis, using colored skywriting smoke and cloud-seeding materials. A pivotal environment Turrell developed from 1969 to 1974, for The Mendota Stoppages several rooms in the former Mendota Hotel in Santa Monica were sealed off, the window apertures controlled by the artist to allow natural and artificial light to enter the darkened spaces in specific ways.

Read Full Article