Where is the Exhibition Space When There is No Space

There is no most stupid, only more stupid

There are two versions of graduation show plan in front of me. These days, the map of the plan brings a storm and drives everybody crazy in our school. Sadly , I became the most unfortunate man of this crisis. And now, I don’t even have a place to show my artwork! I turned in my proposal and pointed out I just need a simple darkroom, but all I have here, as it is shown in the map, is just a 23 by 4 feet hallway. I couldn’t find any way to show my laser lights installation piece among this area.

So, what I had to face —I have no space.

Exhibition without space

I always believe in a Chinese proverb 否极泰来，“Pi Ji Tai Lai” (Things turn to be better when they come to the extremely bad). So, I think this is the worst situation for an artist in a group exhibition, especially; I am paying to show in vernissage.

Through art history in exhibition, artists have faced a similar situation, like the first exhibition of impressionism. That exhibition was host in a tent outside of an official exhibition building. Along these lines of exhibit without space, NYC challenges the audience by shifting the meaning of display when it happens outside a gallery space. I think the most valuable exhibition space is underground of New York City—the subway of New York (MTA).

Doing art in the subways in New York

The New York subway is truly unique. In its 100+ years of existence, it has become so much more than just a mode of transportation. It is an experience: a canvas for artists, a venue for musicians and a sort of dendrochronological record of the city’s collective subconscious. While moving transporting millions of people where they need to go each day with a minimum of logistical fuss and environmental muss, The New York metro also serves as a great humanizing, socializing force. After all, spending time in the company with strangers is one of the earth's oldest, most direct and stimulating forms of education. Travel is broadening, as they say, and New Yorkers can learn a good bit about the world simply by exercising their right to a $2.75 ride. The experience, formative to natives, transformative to later arrivals, encourages tolerance, curiosity and creativity, basic ingredients of cosmopolitanism.

New York’s subway art started by late 1980’s. I think of doing art in the subway as a powerful concept, a powerful conceptual artwork. People expect it now, which is wonderful, and it has completely changed the environment of the sys- tem. It has made it into the most democratic museum in the city with artists of a caliber that you would see at MoMA like Elizabeth Murray, Roy Lichtenstein, and Sol LeWitt.

When we see the great success of New York subway, we also mentioned that New York subway is not built for art. As what I am facing now, environment had never left any space for art. With an effective usage of the environment, a lot of art work achieves success in the subway. A great example for this is Tom Otterness, a New York city-based sculptor. Tom Otterness's "Life Underground " (at 14th Street and 8th Avenue) has emerged as one of the most popular pieces of subway art in the system. Regular riders doubtless noticed that installation took several years, owing to long disputes with bureaucrats. Currently, Otterness reates exclusively public works and like other public artists -- Christo and Jeanne-Claude come to mind -- he considers dickering with officials as part of the creative process. In the meantime, parts of this installation appeared all over town, from Central Park to Battery Park City to Downtown Brooklyn and Pratt Institute. The entire installation, as Otterness conceived it, is now in place.

The absolutely no means absolutely yes, abandoning the “reliability of art in environment” and change it into “the art changes with environment”. Then, the exhibition environment wouldn’t affect the concept of art. I made a decision, I abandon my dispensable show space.

Time to change, time to go out

Sometimes large, sometimes small, the art in the subway system includes murals of glass, ceramic or stone mosaic; windows and walls of stained glass; sculpture; and forays into Conceptual art and installation art, all permanent. They have been made by artists known and unknown from all corners of the New York art world and beyond. For better and sometimes for worse, this underground type of work reflects the subway's vibrant social reality: it is a fascinating exercise in artistic democracy.

Since I give up this inherence space, then I need to push my art into extremely large or extremely small scale.

An ghost exhibition beyond the Vernissage

If the storm has to come, let it comes harder. How I push my work into the ultimate? This question bring my memory to Yoko Ono’s piece now showing in MOMA New York, the Museum of Modern (F)Art.

one foot by one foot catalogue- the title seems to be Museum of Modern FArt (Ono is carrying a shopping bag with the letter “F” directly beneath the Museum of Modern Art marquee)- which details her concept at length; the catalogue was designed by Ono and produced by Michael Gross.

Since the museum wouldn't give her an exhibition, she curated an exhibition by herself--gesturing at the photographs of her renegade show that are now installed in the galleries. Called The Museum of Modern FArt, the 1971 piece, which went on to became somewhat famous in the alternative Fluxus art community, involved Ms. Ono strolling in as a visitor and then setting scores of flies loose in the MoMA sculpture garden.

Obviously, this is the paradise of artist and curator should both know how to bring the work close to audience and also make sure the artist’s own identity didn’t lose. This is a common goal even sometimes artist and curator may drop into two different directions. But curator should not refuse that there is something can go beyond the exhibition and the physical show space to connect between artist and audience directly heart to heart. And when there is no actual art work, what left over with no space but everything surround with the environment is the soul of the artist.

Alright, I will “cut” this exhibition, cut the whole space. I am going to create an ghost exhibition which is my exhibition beyond the Vernissage

Steps of Cut as shown below:

1. install all the laser light in public area to cut the space
2. to abide two principles:
1. don’t obey the law of US, not going to hurt human bodies
2. not affect on others artwork and their private space
3. set up labels next to installed area, define the concept of cut in each space

The Absence of Space, Transcending in Time

Robert Irwin

rendering of museum ground floor

1999

Why do even the best-installed shows have the appearance of a dud? Why are the plain white rooms of a modern museum as oppressive as the imperial halls of our older museums? Could it be that we spread culture not to liberate but to enchain? It seems strange to me that the “disadvantaged” should want to enter into the cultural trap: if you join our news we will give you the benefits of our discontent.

Modernity is all about objects. But an object is just an object. Those objects are inside of the “white cube”, and yet nothing seems to belong there. As is stated on the website:

Dia’s museum in Beacon has been conceived as an extension of these fundamental tenets: the work of each artist is to be shown in relative isolation, most of the installations are intended to be long-term or permanent, and the spaces are either designed in consultation with the artist or are based on previous installations by the artist.

Michael Heizer
Negative Megaliths
1998

As Pollock took his canvas off the easel in his reinterpretation of the tradition of painting, Michael Heizer and artists like him left the studio altogether, stretching the already elastic boundaries of modern art—in physical, temporal, and conceptual dimensions—to the point where traditional categories of painting and sculpture became nearly irrelevant.

The historical relevance of Dia’s collection, and the founders’ original vision was to present artists’ work not only in depth but also in isolation, and in whatever location and circumstance were dictated by the artist and the needs of the work. That outlook corresponded with a strong impulse of the time to break free of the boundaries of the traditional gallery and museum. In Dia, all the work should remain in this space exactly as the artists placed them. (Dia:Beacon, Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, page 20, Published by Dia Art Foundation, 2003)

By the time artists started trying to show out of those white walls, the museums were setting up a dialectic that pointed to a condition that was outside the gallery and somehow returned to the gallery. Museums like Dia: Beacon, they set up contrapuntal relationships between the institutional indoors and the great outdoors by importing natural and industrial materials previously foreign to art into the exhibition space.

San Francisco Art Institute MFA Exhibition Plan of 2011

Then, what’s left to exhibitions? Is there something else rather than show space. I look into their “closing hours”. I just had this conversation with the curator of the school’s MFA exhibition. Space splitting is a trouble of a 109 artists’ group show. Definitely, no single way can satisfy everybody. Beyond the revolutionary usage of space inner or outer of “white walls”, there is far more to go for avant-garde curators to setup a different exhibition in art history.

What’s going on with those “closing hours”? About 10 artists among those 109 required a darkroom to show their work. Why do we need a darkroom inside a show space? Is it because exhibitions always happened in the daytime? Then why don’t we divide these 109 people into two groups but showing in one space? A darkroom is used to hide light, and keep in the dark. To me, it’s just a fake dark. But when night comes, do the rooms still need to hide? Or can all the works needing to be in a darkroom show up naturally? Time switching is magic to exhibitions.

--Zizhou(Anita) Wang

From Modern to Contemporary: Museums in New York

Madison Square Park, 2011 Douglas Yee

New York, New York. As Frank Sinatra so famously sings, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” But does this city still determine success? Or, more specifically, does it still determine the circulation of cultural production? Okwui Enwezor, the prestigious international curator, art critic and writer, recently said (during drinks in the Bowery) that artists no longer come to New York to make it, they come to New York to get lost. The skeptic in me wants to interpret Mr. Enwezor’s comment to mean that if you have not already made it by the time you arrive in New York: Good Luck. That New York may no longer have the privilege of cultural producer, but is now rather a cultural digester. What I believe he meant though, was that New York is no longer the only metropolis that confirms the legitimacy of international cultural distinction. In an increasingly transnational world, urban centers such as Mexico City, Havana, Shanghai and Johannesburg, to name a few, are innovating and producing artists whose works are having a global influence. But, that long, narrow strip of Manhattan still holds an allure as the pinnacle of success. Many in the arts (artists, curators, gallerists, etc.) feel the draw of New York. So, how are artists, who can’t resist this city’s gravitational pull, managing?

Interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York

In our recent visit to New York, we made our way from museum to gallery to museum carried along by the rush of humanity and the loud, clatter of the subway. Being met by curators who briefly introduced us to the history of each museum, its collection and its vision was as exciting and exhausting as the crush of humanity flooding the streets of the city. It was at the Guggenheim Museum that we received a breath of inspiration. Alexandra Monroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, introduced us to Filip Noterdaeme, who would lead us up the winding path of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural Oz. The Guggenheim is one of the world’s most fabulous institutions but museums are not only bricks and mortar in the middle of Manhattan. Museums are ideas. And Mr. Noterdaeme is constructing his own conceptual museum. The Homeless Museum of Art, established in 2002, is “a live-in museum in a rental apartment in Brooklyn, an activist's initiative, an exhibit in a vacant artist studio, a collection of original artworks, and a mock museum booth embedded in a commercial art fair” (http://www.homelessmuseum.org/). Mr. Noterdaeme performs the role of museum director, board of directors, artist, art and full-time resident (and I imagine it is inevitable that he must also perform the role of visitor at times.)

Homeless Museum of Art at the 2005 Armory Show

Mr. Noterdaeme’s intense passion and knowledge about the history of the Guggenheim’s collection was transfixing. To him, the museum was the portrait of Solomon R. Guggenhiem. The artist Hilla Rebay, who was commissioned to paint the portrait of Mr. Guggenheim, subsequently inspired him to found the museum. Her ultimate influence and contribution was facilitating a profound portrait of the man through an entire collection of art: the Guggenheim Museum. Mr. Noterdaeme, with superb detail and knowledge, shared the history of the institution, its collection and its individual paintings. He transformed the Guggenheim, an iconic monument to a philanthropic donor of immense wealth and a cultural Mecca for the world, into an experience beyond one painting after another. Mr. Noterdaeme paid homage to the Guggenheim as a modern museum, yet he himself is a contemporary museum.

Museum Haulers, 2005 Filip Noterdaeme

The ease and excitement with which he guided us through the Guggenheim belied an aspect beyond basic museum docent. His experience as a university professor at New York University, the New School and CUNY was evident. The question that stayed with me was whether or not Mr. Noterdaeme’s lecture at the Guggenheim was in fact an artistic performance? His response was that:

Every half-decent teacher is a bit of an actor/performer, and vice versa. I think both my students … and museum audiences …appreciate my teaching/performing style – affectations, accent, extravagance, mannerisms – precisely because it betrays, or, rather, celebrates, a perpetual state of inner conflict that has me perform a sort of Fox Trot among a set of alter egos that are never perfectly in step with the music at hand. This foxy dance is a fun "act" to perform because it leaves ample room for improvised, free-style movements never danced before.

Mr. Noterdaeme, an artist who has not found his celebrity in any cultural capital, is dancing to make it in this vibrant city; as long as his feet keep moving, keep touching the ground, he will not get lost. New York may no longer be the epicenter of cultural production but it still dominates cultural economy. Mr. Noterdaeme is an example of how artists must navigate between survival and art in this seductive and ruthless city. It is clear that, for what I imagine the majority, part of surviving as an artist in the city requires alternative endeavors. If you are in New York and have not made it, don’t lose yourself: dance through your alter egos. Be artist, performer, lecturer and teacher. Mr. Noterdaeme seems to be navigating his path with creativity, deftly dancing between his art and his livelihood.

HoMu BRKLYN

New York is not the only city that currently defines the success of art. But, it is still compelling. If one makes it in New York, it might still be true that one can make it anywhere. However, one can also make it in San Francisco, Havana, Amsterdam or Berlin. I am ready to lose myself in my own making.

-Sheeka Arbuthnot

The Talent Show

The issues of fame and voyeurism have always been part of our society, but what has happened in this digital age of easy access and continual information? It seems that everyone wants their privacy but at the same time everyone wants to be famous, there is a contradiction in these behaviors. The exhibition on view from December 12, 2010 to April 4, 2011 at the MoMa PS1 is aptly titled The Talent Show, curated by Peter Eleey, it showcases artists dealing with these themes of exhibition and voyeurism in contemporary society; many concerning the digital age and the effects of web-based social networks on our social interactions. I thought it poignant that upon entering the first room of the exhibition we are greeted by one of Andy Warhol’s screen tests. As I viewed the show, what I found interesting the relationship that emerged between artist, art, participants and audience. How the “participant” (whether he/she is aware of it or not) become part of these artworks and become placed in this gallery context that highlights these issues of privacy and voyeurism.

Whether it be the artist’s own struggle on view for everyone as apparent through Hannah Wilke’s battle with disease in The Intra-Venus Tapes 1990-1993 or whether it is exposing other people’s, as in Amie Siegel in her series My Way (2009), a video of compiled footage from youtube of people singing cover songs; these artworks deal with the issue of self exposure.

Screenshot from My Way 1 (2009)

Image courtesy of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard

In Shizuka Yokomizo’s series Strangers (1999), subjects are left an anonymous note at their house, asking them to stand in front of their window, indicating a date and time when the photographer will come and take a picture and that is all; there is an interesting relationship created between the photographer and subject, that is then captured by the camera, a tension emerging between personal exhibition and voyeurism. As the wall text indicated: “…blank and searching stares of her participants anticipate the combination of anonymity, desire and exhibition that under girds today’s virtual world”.

Shizuka Yokomizo Stranger 6 (1999)

Image courtesy of http://arttattler.com/archivetalentshow.html

Another work changeling the relationship of artist/viewer is Adrian Piper’s Context #7 (1970) which consists of comments, drawings, and thoughts written by people who attended a show opening in 1970 and were asked to write on this notebook. When viewing this installation I immediately thought of a project that can be related to this exhibition. The Scattered Light Project is collaboration between ROLU design studio from Minneapolis and Brooklyn based artist David Horowitz. This project consists of photography “Assignments” that people are asked to complete, these assignments are written on ROLU’s website and are distributed via email and blogs. Examples of these assignments include "A view of a flat horizon line over land or water” and “"A view of your bedroom laying on your bed". These photographs then are uploaded onto the online gallery and showcased at the Art of This Gallery in Minneapolis.

Scattered Light Project Assignment 2

Image courtesy of ROLU Studio http://www.ro-lu.com/

Both The Talent Show and The Scattered Light Project pose an interesting question: how is our society behaving in this contemporary context? And, how art itself shifting to comment on these behaviors and issues of privacy and authorship? Now that there are means to track and archive our every move through various media formats (video, photo, audio) and make them available immediately to a broad audience through technological means, our sense of privacy and desire to exhibit our selves are highlighted; with these changes in society being archived and at the same time analyzed and brought to light through art, we as an audience become more aware of our own desire of self exhibition.

Cecilia Salinas-Rios

Cracker

Exhibition: Shame The Devil

The Kitchen

New York, New York

March 17th, 2011

Individual Artists: Kenya (Robinson) - Kenya Eats a Cracker

Curator: Petrushka Bazin

Kenya (Robinson) - "Kenya Eats a Cracker" - The Kitchen

The show, "Shame The Devil" at The Kitchen gallery in the Chelsea art district, is a group exhibition examining the parallel abilities of stand-up comedians and visual artists to play the roles of cultural observer and provocateur. Curated by guest curator Petrushka Bazin, the show features new sculpture, installations, video and photography by the artists Jabari Anderson, Elizabeth Axtman, Michael Paul Britto, Wayne Hodge, My Barbarian, Huong Ngo, Jessica Ann Peavy, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Kenya (Robinson) and Jimmy Joe Roche.

In all of its various forms, including stand-up, theater, literature, television, and film, comedy has long provided valuable inspiration and techniques for artists seeking to critique society. The artists presented in Shame The Devil utilize parody, satire and dark humor to explore the socio-political dimensions of power associated with cultural, racial and economic issues. Titled after the idiom "tell the truth and shame the devil," which means to speak honestly and without censorship, the exhibition investigates comedy’s ability to survey and challenge the values of those confronted by its jokes.

The artists’ works examine the subtleties and structure of stand-up comedy routines, the mannerisms, oral and physical stage where performances take place. The agency of comedy is considered as a subversive political strategy, inciting debate and reflection. Following the long tradition of political caricature, the artists offer humorous send-ups of political commentary on critical issues like racial profiling, anti-terrorist paranoia and right-wing extremism. The works also highlight the inherent therapeutic qualities of comedy for both stand-up comics and artists who must use humor to assuage harsh realities.

Working in performance, I felt that the performance work, "Kenya Eats A Cracker" by Kenya (Robinson) was very intiguing. There were Ritz crackers, Club crackers, Triscuits, Chicken in a Biskits, Honey Maid graham crackers, and even Premium Saltines (those great objects of desire in Ed Ruscha's 1970 film Premium) sitting on plates on a table at the opening. Very much ready to eat, I was sad to learn that the fine spread was not for the visiting public, though my pain subsided somewhat when I learned that they were to be used for a performance by the artist. At least someone would be enjoying the tasty snacks.

Kenya (Robinson) - "Kenya Eats a Cracker" - The Kitchen

Wearing a yellow raincoat, she walked up to the cracker–covered table, sat down, and started eating. A crowd formed around her as she grabbed crackers by the handful, stuffing them in her mouth, staring up at the crowd, and chewing in rapid bursts as crumbs fell from her lips.

A voice came from nearby speakers as she enacted her feasting. "At Triscuit, we believe less is more," the affectless narrator intoned. "That's why we bake our crackers with quality ingredients like Soft White Winter Wheat." (All quotes come from a paper available at The Kitchen, where her cracker boxes are still on view.) The narrative traveled from the production of Triscuits to the history of Carr's Crackers ("Jonathan Dodgson Carr created the first table water cracker in 1890…") to the Israelites' exodus from Egypt. Kenya kept eating. She took rapid-fire bites, then slow, long chews, and then steady open-mouthed munches, offering a full compendium of eating options.

"It's best when used by January 29, 2011, or better still on January 29, 1954, when Oprah Winfrey was born," the voice continued. "Open here. Made with smiles and a product of the USA." Kenya continued her dining as the voice continued to speak. "Open other end. Lift tab to open. Push to open. Open here." And then the voiceover ended and she got up from her chair and walked off. There was some light applause.

Kenya seems wonderfully out of touch with the times. Much of the most acclaimed or at least most visible, performance art recently has involved the glorification of long-term suffering such as Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present at MoMA.

In contrast, while very much present in her work, Kenya creates for herself a great and pleasurable time. She enjoys the bounty of an unusual buffet in "Kenya Eats A Cracker" , while she twists the codes that govern our basic needs, such as shelter and food, in ambiguous ways and pushes them toward the precarious point when they may break, when the house guest outstays her welcome or when the woman munching maniacally on crackers moves from a representative of freewheeling fun to an object of ridicule. And then there are the racial overtones in Cracker's title and text. What are we to make of them?

Arcs and Lines

DIA BEACON, New York

Artist: Sol Lewitt

Exhibition: Sept 16, 2006- Sept 2010

March 14,2011

I was drawn to the abstract drawings on the walls inside the Dia Beacon the installation by Sol Lewitt. As an American artist, he was one of the leading representatives of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. His large scale wall drawing installations occupy the interior walls inside the Dia Beacon, New York. Lewitt used a visual vocabulary in which he created monumental drawings the size of paintings through color, lines and geometrical forms. Sol Lewitt’s drawings re-use the wall as a surface for his artwork and uses materials such as pencils, brushes, paper, crayon and ink to draw.



It is interesting what he thinks about the relation between the work and the viewer. Sol Lewitt said his work is “made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or his emotions” (Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt 1969). As I walked through the space, both my mind and eye engages with Sol Lewitt’s installation, which affects my emotions too. Plainly, through simple geometric forms and color he questions the combination of sculpture, drawing, and painting. Using complex forms would confuse the work, however, with Lewitt, simple form diminish the arrangement of the space as a property of the architecture as installation site.

Transforming this nonexistence to a concrete form with which the viewer engages, Lewitt’s drawings create an experience by amalgamating painting, drawings and geometrical sculptures. Sol Lewitt’s works explore ideas such as ephemerality and time through space. His art is formed by one artist (himself) and then carried out through collaboration (by written instructions). This continuity enables his work to expand beyond his physical presence. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art“ (Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Sol Lewitt 1969). Once it is out of the artist’s hand, there is no more control in how the viewer will experience the work. This adaptation strongly engages and expresses Sol Lewitt’s concern to make his work mentally interesting to the viewer. As such, the simplicity is a very successful idea but his methods of creation – collaboration brings up larger issues concerning practice within the art world. One of the issues that Lewitt’s methodologies address is the idea of authorship. Presented as a plan through instructions, sketches, scribbles and drawings to form a finished product, who, then, creates the work? Lewitt’s artwork questions not only the idea of copywrite but also how “presciousness” is applied towards art as an object. How can the artwork be a commodity at the same time as being ephemeral?

Cristina Guerreiro