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21/6/2010

Rivane Neuenschwander / Amy Granat

New Museum, New York

Rivane Neuenschwander
A Day Like Any Other

curated by Richard Flood

From June 23 to September 19, 2010, the New Museum will present a major midcareer survey of Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil). Covering a decade of the internationally admired artist's work, "Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other" will span the fourth, third, and lobby galleries of the New Museum. It will spotlight the artist's unique contribution to the narrative of Brazilian Conceptualism and reveal her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary practice which merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, collaborative actions, and participatory events. Her authorship of the work is primary, but she also functions as an editor, collaborator, social organizer, and commissioning agent. Like her predecessors Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Neuenschwander resists a singular direction in her practice. Instead, the artist creates a series of organic relationships that interweave themes such as nature, language, temporality, and the poetry of the quotidian.

"It is Neuenschwander's extravagant disregard for artistic categories that makes her work so perfectly tempered for this time. It is the ease with which she lives in the university of the world that guarantees her work its freshness and depth," said Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum.

Three installations in "A Day Like Any Other" will involve direct visitor participation: Neuenschwander's I Wish Your Wish (2003); First Love (2010); and Walking in Circles (2000). I Wish Your Wish will be installed in the New Museum's lobby gallery space (always open to the public free of charge). At the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil the faithful tie silk ribbons to their wrists and to the gates of the church, and, according to tradition, their wishes are granted when the ribbons wear away and fall off. For Neuenschwander's installation I Wish Your Wish at the New Museum, hundreds of similar ribbons will be printed with visitors' wishes from past projects, and will hang from the gallery walls.

Visitors will be invited to remove a ribbon, tie it to their wrist, and replace it with a new wish written on slip of paper, continuing the project that keeps generating new ribbons and dreams. For another piece, First Love, a police sketch artist will sit with visitors and listen as those visitors describe the faces of their first loves; the sketch artist will then produce portraits of these "first loves" to adorn the walls of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. In Walking in Circles (2000), small halos of adhesive applied to the gallery floor by the artist will pick up dirt from visitors' shoes. The work will create a physical and temporal map of the exhibition's traffic patterns.

The exhibition will include two of Neuenschwander's immersive installations. The first of these, Rain Rains (2002), is an environment of leaking buckets that are controlled from flooding by a Sisyphean recirculation tended to by museum staff in four-hour cycles. The second immersive work, The Conversation (2010), will be realized expressly for the exhibition and pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola's revolutionary 1974 film of the same name. Like the film, Neuenschwander's installation investigates the systematic invasion of privacy in an era of dangerously purposed technology. The artist and the New Museum will work with security experts to create an Orwellian environment filled with surveillance devices. Prior to the exhibition's opening, Neuenschwander will raid the "bug-filled" room in an attempt to uncover the devices, a performance that will be recorded by these devices and then played back in the partially dissembled exhibition space.

In addition to these participatory actions and major installations, the exhibition will also contain several suites of new paintings including After the Storm (2010), made with maps of New York counties exposed to torrential rain and At a Certain Distance (Ex-Voto Paintings) (2010), as well as the lustrously beautiful film The Tenant (2010), which follows the journey of a soap bubble as it wanders through a deserted house in a permanent state of suspension. The show will also include Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts) (2001-10), communally evolved sculptures made by customers during conversations at bars and restaurants near Neuenschwander's home in Brazil, and A Day Like Any Other (2008), an informal installation involving a series of flip clocks placed throughout the New Museum building, among other works in the exhibition.

"Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other" is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. The exhibition is organized by the New Museum in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

"Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other" will be accompanied by a fully illustrated 244-page, full color, catalogue co-published by Cobogo, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum. The catalogue will include essays by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum; Paulo Herkenhoff, Independent Curator and Critic; Lars Bang Larsen, Independent Curator and Critic; Yasmil Raymond, Curator, DIA Art Foundation; and Rachel Thomas, Artistic Director, Dublin Contemporary 2011.

After the presentation at the New Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (October 8, 2010 - January 10, 2011); Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ (February 12 - June 19, 2011); Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL (July 17 - October 16, 2011); and will conclude at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (November 15, 2011 - February 2012).

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Shaft Project Space:

Amy Granat
Light 3 Ways

"What you hear is what you see."
Amy Granat

Organized by Amy Mackie, Curatorial Associate, and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Amy Granat is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to "draw" with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.

Granat’s project for the New Museum, "Light 3 Ways," is an exploration of the way light can be perceived. The installation consists of three discrete, yet interconnected works, including a sound piece, an outdoor video projection, and a 16mm film installation. The audio work is a recording of the sound created when one of Granat’s scratch films passes through a projector. The sound is then enhanced by a synthesizer, and the result can be heard by using the headphones on the staircase landing between the museum’s third and fourth floors. The outdoor video projection is an abstract composition of light and dark. Broken black lines dance across the concrete exterior wall of the building just north of the Museum, creating an artificial horizon that only appears when the actual horizon cannot be seen. This component of the installation can be viewed Wednesday through Sunday, sunset to sunrise, from the Bowery or the New Museum’s seventh-floor terrace. The third work consists of three looped 16mm films activated by the viewer’s presence via a motion sensor. A negative of the outdoor video’s positive composition, this more delicate film version has a black background penetrated with flickering white lines.

Granat’s fascination with the potential of light, sound, and movement as mediums not only links her work to postwar experimental filmmaking, but also invokes the rich, but somewhat occluded history of experimentation with kinetic art, from Marcel Duchamp to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Jean Tinguely. Through the phenomenon of electricity and the miracle of movement, these avant-gardists envisioned a future of limitless artistic possibility beyond painting and sculpture. Though "Light 3 Ways" is a creation of the twenty-first century—a time of myriad discoveries that make those of an earlier era seem quaint—it allows us to understand and maybe participate in a very twentieth-century sense of wonder, and see the beauty of dancing light again for the first time.

On the occasion of her exhibition opening, Rivane Neuenschwander will discuss her work with Richard Flood in the theater at the New Museum on Thursday, June 24, at 7 PM

Image: Rivane Neuenschwander, I Wish Your Wish, 2003.

Media Contacts: Gabriel Einsohn
Communications Director +1 212.219.1222 press@newmuseum.org

Opening June 22, 2010, 10am - 12pm

New Museum
235 Bowery, New York USA
Hours: Wed-Fri 12-6 PM
Saturday and Sunday 12-6 PM
Monday and Tuesday closed
General Admission: $12, Seniors: $10, Students: $8

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