Collaborations & Recent Work, with Peter Zellner, Julieta Aranda, Cristian Manzutto and students at Krabbesholm College. We are surrounded by the de-radicalized revolutionary, graphical, iconographic and architectural schemes of the early 20th century, a period of great political, social and artistic activity which set itself the mission of changing the world.
Collaborations & Recent Work, with Peter Zellner, Julieta Aranda, Cristian Manzutto and students at Krabbesholm College.
Massimo Audiello is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition - Anton
Vidokle: Collaborations & Recent Work, a show of new works by the
Moscow-born artist, Anton Vidokle.
We are surrounded by the de-radicalized revolutionary, graphical,
iconographic and architectural schemes of the early 20th century, a period
of great political, social and artistic activity which set itself the
mission of changing the world. At the root of the period's aesthetic
sensibilities lay utopian hopes whose vestiges, in the form of the
artifacts of modernist abstraction, still permeate our visual field, and
still attempt to function as signs of advancement and progress, and thus
of the future.
Tracing the afterlife of these hopes by repurposing their aesthetic
devices and iconography are the projects of New York-based artist Anton
Vidokle. In four joint projects to be presented at the exhibition, Vidokle
and his collaborators explore and "detourne" the emptied-out vehicles of
vacated promise. In his 2003 film, Nuevo, which was shot and edited by
Julieta Aranda with sound by Cristian Manzutto, Vidokle documents a
large-scale public project that he undertook last summer, in which he
organized the painting of the late modernist facade of the Salto del Agua
metro station, a modular building located in downtown Mexico City. Both
the film and a wall-sized still from the film will be on view, along with
specially designed bench-seating. The artist will also present a large
grid of 39 photographic prints of the building, showing the gradual change
of color.
Also exhibited will be drawings for an outdoor sculpture/pavilion proposal
for a public space in Southern California made in collaboration with an
architect Peter Zellner, as will the English-language and Turkish versions
of the tabloid newspaper Popular Geometry, a project of Vidokle's and
Julieta Aranda's from earlier this year. The newspaper, initially
published for the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul,
reprints a selection of the popular press's responses to abstract public
sculptures. For this show, plastic street dispensers will be used to offer
the tabloids to visitors.
Another one of Vidokle's abiding interests-the abstract geometric
logotype-will be explored in the exhibition's four additional works. The
first is the book and stickers of Here There Elsewhere, a collaborative
venture for the 2003 Venice Biennale made by the artist and students of
Krabbesholm College in Denmark. The second is a set of drawings for a
proposal/plan for a public project initiated by the mayor of Tirana, the
project seeks to create a sense of change and hopefulness in a city where
no money exists for substantial infrastructure improvements. Rounding out
the exhibition will be a pair of new, large-scale untitled sculptures-48 x
48" cubes-which continue the artist's longstanding interest in both the
logotype and working out a form for translating printed matter into
sculpture.
Anton Vidokle's work has been featured in exhibitions including: Utopia
Station at the 50th Venice Biennale; Form-Specific, Moderna
Galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Made in Mexico, ICA Boston/UCLA
Hammer; Urgent Painting, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Greater
New York, P.S.1 Museum, Chelsea Rising, Contemporary Art Center of New
Orleans; Do It, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico
D.F.; Without You I Am Nothing, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center,
Istanbul; among other. Vidokle's work has been the subject of several
publications including Here, There, Elsewhere, with texts by Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Jens Hoffman, Kurt Finsten, Krabbesholm Books, Denmark 2003; Three
views of Salto del Agua, texts by Lauri Firstenberg and Peter Zellner,
Gabriel Kuri, Gilbert Vicario, Revolver < Archiv fur aktuelle Kunst >, Frankfurt
2003; Popular Geometries - Anton Vidokle, text by Joshua Decter, TRANS> Publications,
New York 2001.
Image: Here, There, Elsewhere. A book project for the 50th Venice Biennale in collaboration with students at Krabbesholm college, 2003
The show will open on January 31 and
run through March 13, 2004. Opening reception is Saturday, January 31st,
from 6 - 8 pm.
Opening: Saturday, January 31, 6-8pm
Massimo Audiello
526 West 26th Street
No. 519, NYC, NY 10001
212.675.9082 TEL
212.675.8680 FAX