calendario eventi  :: 

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13/5/2014

Two exhibitions

Wiels - Contemporary Art Center, Bruxelles

Allen Ruppersberg
No Time Left to Start Again and Again

curated by Devrim Bayar

Introduction

Allen Ruppersberg (b. 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio; lives and works in Santa Monica, California, and Brooklyn, New York) belongs to a generation of American conceptual artists that changed the way art was made and thought about at the end of the 1960s. His multiform artistic work, which includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, performances and books, amongst other media, is inspired by the Beat Generation and anchored in a critical approach to media and consumer society. Over the years, Ruppersberg, an avid collector, has accumulated an impressive quantity of books, posters, postcards, educational films, magazines, records and other documents or objects that bear witness to American popular culture. This archive serves as a regular resource for the artist, who tirelessly draws, copies, classifies and recycles elements in the making of his works.

Having studied commercial illustration at Chouinard Art Institute (CalArts today) in the early 1960s, the artist became an excellent draughtsman; he has often copied out fragments of his archives by hand, but he also regularly employs a variety of mechanical reproduction procedures to the same purpose. In the past fifteen years, he has been more and more prone to using a photocopy machine. He was a regular at Kinko’s for a while, but it didn’t take long for him to decide to buy his own machine, which he uses to enlarge or reframe his archive. The technique bears a certain resemblance to the process of human memory, which by continually redefining and reframing, reveals our memories.

At WIELS, Ruppersberg presents one of his more recent works, entitled No Time Left To Start Again/The B and D of R 'n' R. It is a sweeping survey of recorded American vernacular music, from folk to rock, passing through gospel and blues. The monumental installation assembles various materials drawn from the artist’s archives, such as amateur snapshots, obituaries for deceased musicians and images of old records. These documents were photocopied and then laminated before being hung on pegboards like the ones you see in hardware stores. The mural arrangement of the photocopies acts as a visual history whose order, and narrative, are interchangeable. The presence of boxes filled with similar documents in close proximity to the pegboards reminds us that other narratives are there, waiting to be told. Finally, a soundtrack composed of a hundred popular songs accompanies the installation. The songs are taken from the artist's collection of over 4,000 78rpm records, and are contained on 8 vinyl records especially produced for the exhibition.

In parallel with the installation, Ruppersberg presents a selection of earlier works that echo certain notions important to The B and D of R 'n' R, such as memory, the transmission of knowledge and the relationship between art and popular culture. In the central hallway is a selection of silkscreened projection screens made in the 1990s. These vintage screens are silkscreened with images taken from the educational films – he owns over 2,000 – in the artist’s collection. On the wall is a series of works whose titles begin with the formula, ‘Honey, I have rearranged the collection’, and end with a joke. The jokes vary: some often offer a glimpse into the obsessions of the art world, some turn on relationship issues, and some on more existential concerns. These witticisms were initially jotted down on Post-its that Ruppersberg used to adorn his own work, as if he were himself the collector who had left his wife a note. In 2000, he replaced the practice of appropriating his own work with that of drawing a home library. Over the years, he has retouched the drawing using a variety of techniques: silk-screening the image in multiple colours and positions, enhancing it with watercolours, stickers, found photos, texts, etc. In each instance, the visual alteration is linked to the punch line of a joke. The image of the library, whihc returns time and again in this series, can be interpreted as the equivalent of the collection alluded to in the text. More broadly, though, it alludes to the notion of the archive. The library is this reservoir – of ideas, forms, stories and lives – that has been the source of Ruppersberg’s work for the past forty years.

Ruppersberg puts the vestiges of history to infinite variations, and in so doing he breathes life into a culture threatened with oblivion, even though it is an integral part of our history and subjectivity. For the artist, the point is not to reconstitute the past: the present is far too short for that. In his own words, there is no time left to start again.

Biography
Winner of several prestigious prizes, among them the National Endowment for the Arts (1976 and 1982) and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), Ruppersberg has participated in numerous international collective exhibitions, such as When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle, Bern, 1969; dOCUMENTA V, 1972; Biennale de Lyon, 1996. Important solo exhibitions of his work have been staged by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1985, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2005, and the Museum of Art, Santa Monica, 2009.

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Robert Heinecken
Lessons in Posing Subjects

curated by Devrim Bayar

Although he rarely used a camera, Robert Heinecken (1931–2006) is widely regarded as one of the most influential photographers of post-War America. He described himself as a 'paraphotographer', and it was as such that he tirelessly explored the nature of photography and the ideas traditionally associated with it through a large variety of techniques, including sculpture, video, printmaking and collage. The exhibition at WIELS examines a pivotal period in his career, during which Heinecken used a Polaroid SX-70 camera.

In 1976, Heinecken studio burnt in a fire that destroyed a significant part of his work and left him with no workplace. It was around this time that Heinecken split up with his first wife and met the artist Joyce Neimanas, who would remain his partner until the end of his life. A portrait of Neimanas is in the centre of the triptych Figure/Joy/Girdle, at the start of the exhibition. She herself used a Polaroid SX-70 camera in her artistic practice, and she introduced Heinecken to this new technology. The SX-70 appeared on the market in 1972; it was the first automatic camera to produce colour photographs instantly. The ease of its use, along with its elegant design, ensured its rapid and wide success, both among artists and amateurs. The equipment appealed to Heinecken not least because he no longer had a studio and because he was so emotionally detached from his earlier work that he had no interest in reproducing it.

The artist's first tests with the camera consisted of over fifty unique collages, several of which are presented here, from the series He/She. Each plate combined one or several snapshots with a handwritten text, a dialogue between a man and a woman, invented by Heinecken himself. The images show the artist, his partner and their environment, but the dialogues are fictional. They reveal gender power games. The tone is often sarcastic, sometimes even hostile. Published in 1980, the artist book He/She closes this series. Here, the images are not as autobiographical, since he re-photographed images of models. Toying with the inherently real effect of the snapshots, the artist decontextualized images found in mail-order magazines, which he infused with a spontaneous and natural feel.

This same principle returns in the series Lessons in Posing Subjects, which the artist worked on for the following two years. A group of work documents attest to Heinecken's laborious working process: cutting, gluing and re-photographing fragments found in magazines. Contrary to his previous works, the texts are typed rather than handwritten, a fact that confers a falsely didactic air to the captions, which are in their turn overtly inspired by the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) envisages socialising as a stage on which we are both actor and spectator. At once seductive and full of humour, his 'lessons' are no less provocative, bearing witness to the commitment of this controversial artist, who considered his approach essentially a 'guerrilla' artistic practice.Heinecken's interest in magazines is not limited to mail-order catalogues.

Throughout his career, he appropriated from mass-distribution glossy magazines and constantly diverted their content. Pornographic magazines were one of his major sources, as can be seen in the series Hite/Hustler Fashion Beaver Hunt (1981), presented in one of the side cabinets. Beaver Hunt, also published by Larry Flint, was an offshoot of Hustler: it printed amateur, reader-submitted porn photos. Hite, in turn, the magazine published by sexologist Shere Hite, included studies of female sexuality in the 1970s. In this series, the artist adds cut-outs of sexual organs and breasts taken from erotic magazines onto photographs of models posing for lingerie. The artist demystifies the advertising image by displaying what the pose openly suggests but is hidden by the clothing. On the contrary, The texts Heinecken pins onto the models are false confessions inspired by the letters supposedly sent to porn magazines by its readers, but most likely written by the editors themselves.

From the seductiveness of advertising to the obscenity of pornographic photographs, Heinecken has explored a range of representations of the female body, as well as the complex links between fiction and autobiography in mass media. Announcing the Pictures Generation that was emerging at the time, Heinecken's work explores the normalising effect of mass media, the link between original and copy, true and fake, while pursuing recurrent topics in his work, such as American popular culture, consumerism and gender.

Biography
Robert Heinecken's work has been presented in over sixty solo exhibitions. In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is organising a major retrospective, which will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include The Photographic Object 1970, at Le Consortium, Dijon, 2013; The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013; Sinister Pop, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2012; Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012.

Complementary Programme

05.06.2014
Look Who’s Talking: Devrim Bayar (FR/EN)

18.06.2014
Lecture of Dennis Jelonnek: ‘The vast difference between taking a picture and making a photograph’ – on Robert Heinecken’s Polaroid practice. (EN)

Image: Robert Heinecken, Seated Figure / Martini, 1991. Magazine collage on found freestanding display figure, 101,6 x 50,8cm, unique. Petzel Gallery, New York

Press contact:
Micha Pycke
micha.pycke@wiels.org
T +32 (0)2 340 00 51
M +32 (0)486 680 070

Press conference: May 14 2014: 11am

Opening May 15 2014: 7pm

WIELS
Contemporary Art Centre
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354 - 1190 Brussels
Opening hours
Wednesday – Sunday : 11am– 6pm
Nocturne: 11am – 9pm, every 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month
Closed: Monday – Tuesday
Tickets
8 € – 0€
0 € Every first Wednesday of the month

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