calendario eventi  :: 

X

21/1/2013

Two exhibitions

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (new location), San Francisco

Claire Fontaine
Redemptions
January 22–February 16, 2013

Following her residency at the Capp Street Project, Paris based collective artist Claire Fontaine, presents an exhibition entitled Redemptions. This exhibition is one of two inaugural exhibitions in the Wattis’ new gallery space.

Redemptions is a singular art work that radically transforms the space of the gallery, and obliges the viewer to perceive the artwork as an oppressive presence, almost a threat. The installation consists of thousands of aluminum cans stashed in plastic bags, presenting itself as a metaphor but it also has an intense material and sculptural accumulation. Redeemed from their status as “trash,” the crowd of cans take on an unexpected beauty. Their hollowness reminds us of the disappeared liquids absorbed into multitudes of unknown bodies, and their material presence seeks to trace the paths of vagrants, homeless, and unemployed people that collect these empty shells.

Redemptions can also be interpreted in relation to Claire Fontaine’s specific concern with the use value of objects in culture. Suspending for a moment the continuous cycle of exploitation of the cans (used, abandoned, melted and re-used virtually forever), the artist creates a form of redemption for them. Transforming them out of their value-less and meaningless condition into art objects, Redemptions also alludes to the possibility of salvation for people who are continuously evicted from the productive cycle and deprived of a destiny by poverty. Redemption can be seen here as both a material process of re-use, and a messianic hope for a superior social and human justice that will repair the wrongs.

In the third Thesis on the Concept of History Walter Benjamin writes of a redeemed humanity, for whom the totality of the past is quotable and nothing is lost for history. For Benjamin, redemption is defined as the full ownership and accessibility of history by everyone; this accessibility to both an individual and a collective destiny takes place under the sign of happiness. But this happiness isn’t a new one. Rather, it’s the familiar joy and fulfillment we are used to, that comes from habits, repetition, and familiar possibilities As he explains: “the kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.”

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "readymade artist" and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people's work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes—there is always the possibility of what she calls the "human strike." Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property

------

The Way Beyond Art
Infinite Screens
January 22–March 30, 2013

The Way Beyond Art: Infinite Screens is the 4th iteration in The Way Beyond Art Series. Infinite Screens will examine the relationship between the moving image and the evolving contexts in which it is exhibited through a solo project by the artist and filmmaker Werner Herzog. The exhibition will feature the West Coast premiere of the 5-channel video installation Hearsay of the Soul, 2012.

An adjunct program of weekly talks will be presented by selected CCA Film Faculty, focusing on the changing nature of film language in a rapidly evolving landscape of physical and economic challenges to exhibition and distribution. These presentations will expand the content of the exhibition, further develop the research around this topic, expose students and audiences alike to a wider breadth of moving image practices, and incorporate a multitude of voices and perspectives into the presentation of this subject. Similarly, this strand of the exhibition hopes to acknowledge the work of moving image artists based within CCA, while highlighting their relationships within national and international communities connected to their practices.

The Way Beyond Art, refers to the title of a book written by the visionary German art historian Alexander Dorner, who advocated in the early 20th century for a closer dialogue among different artistic disciplines. He is best known for his collaboration with the Constructivist artist El Lissitzky on the Abstract Cabinet (1927) at the Landesmuseum Hannover, Germany, a unique, specially constructed space that explored a new form of multidisciplinarity produced by juxtaposing art, fashion, design, film, and literature.

The exhibition and public program is made possible through the generous support of the Cinema Visionaries Grant and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.

Founding support for CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts programs has been provided by Phyllis C. Wattis and Judy and Bill Timken. Generous support provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Grants for the Arts / San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Ann Hatch and Paul Discoe, and the CCA Curator's Forum.

The inauguration of the new building on January 22, 2013, will coincide with the openings of the exhibitions Claire Fontaine: Redemptions and The Way Beyond Art 4: Infinite Screens.
The new building, renovated by the architect Mark Jensen, is located at 360 Kansas Street (between 16th and 17th Streets) in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. It has 10,000 square feet of space for exhibitions, public programs, education, and performances.

Press contact:
Brenda Tucker - Director of Communications 415.703.9548 btucker@cca.edu

Opening Tuesday, January 22, 2013, 7:00–9:00 pm

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Kent and Vicki Logan Gallery 360 Kansas Street San Francisco, CA 94103-5130
Gallery Hours
Tues. - Fri. 12pm - 7pm
Sat. 10am - 6pm
Closed Sun. & Mon.

stampa

permanent link