calendario eventi  :: 

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16/5/2015

Three exhibitions

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971
Curated by Christophe Cherix, and Klaus Biesenbach, with Francesca Wilmott

The Museum of Modern Art presents its first exhibition dedicated exclusively to the work of Yoko Ono, taking as its point of departure the artist’s unofficial MoMA debut in late 1971. At that time, Ono advertised her “one woman show,” titled Museum of Modern [F]art. However, when visitors arrived at the Museum there was little evidence of her work. According to a sign outside the entrance, Ono had released flies on the Museum grounds, and the public was invited to track them as they dispersed across the city. Now, over 40 years later, Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 surveys the decisive decade that led up to Ono’s unauthorized exhibition at MoMA, bringing together approximately 125 of her early objects, works on paper, installations, performances, audio recordings, and films, alongside rarely seen archival materials. A number of works invite interaction, including Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961) and Ono’s groundbreaking performance, Bag Piece (1964). The exhibition draws upon the 2008 acquisition of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift, which added approximately 100 of Ono’s artworks and related ephemera to the Museum’s holdings.

During the first 11 years of her extensive career, Ono moved among New York, Tokyo, and London, serving a pioneering role in the international development of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art. Her earliest works were often based on instructions that Ono communicated to viewers in verbal or written form. Painting to Be Stepped On (1960/1961), for example, invited viewers to tread upon a piece of canvas placed directly on the floor. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday by asking viewers to participate in its completion. At times poetic, humorous, sinister, and idealistic, Ono’s early text-based works anticipated the objects that she presented throughout the decade, including Grapefruit (1964), her influential book of instructions; Apple (1966), a solitary piece of fruit placed on a Plexiglas pedestal; and Half-A-Room (1967), an installation of bisected domestic objects.

The exhibition also explores Ono’s seminal performances and films, including Cut Piece (1964) and Film No. 4 (1966/1967). In Cut Piece, Ono confronted issues of gender, class, and cultural identity by asking viewers to cut away pieces of her clothing as she sat quietly on stage. Two years later Ono made Film No. 4, which again centered on the body, though to much different effect. The film—a sequence of naked, moving buttocks—signaled Ono’s desire to break down class hierarchies by focusing on a universally shared feature. At the end of the decade, Ono’s collaborations with John Lennon, including Bed-In (1969) and the WAR IS OVER! if you want it (1969–) campaign, boldly communicated her commitment to promoting world peace. Upon returning to New York in the early 1970s, Ono—like the flies purportedly released at MoMA—had infiltrated the public realm; her artwork appeared on billboards and in newspapers and she performed internationally with her Plastic Ono Band.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, featuring three newly commissioned essays that evaluate the cultural context of Ono’s early years, and five sections reflecting her geographic locations during this period and the corresponding evolution of her artistic practice. Each chapter includes an introduction by a guest scholar, artwork descriptions, primary documents culled from newspapers and magazines, and a selection by the artist of her texts and drawings.

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Art on Camera: Photographs by Shunk-Kender, 1960–1971
Curated by Lucy Gallun

The photographers Harry Shunk (German, 1924–2006) and János Kender (Hungarian, 1937–2009) worked together under the name Shunk-Kender from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, based first in Paris and then in New York. Shunk-Kender photographed artworks, events, and landmark exhibitions of avant-garde movements of the era, from Nouveau réalisme to Earth art. They were connected with a vibrant art scene that they captured through portraits of artists and participated in through collaborative projects.

The roles played by the duo varied from one project to the next. In some cases, Shunk-Kender worked as documentarians, photographing Happenings and performances; in other instances, they were collaborators, acting alongside other artists to realize works of art through photography. This exhibition features a selection from the more than 600 works from the Shunk-Kender Photography Collection that recently entered MoMA’s collection, as part of a major donation from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation to an international consortium of five institutions.

Art on Camera begins in Paris in 1960 with Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (Saut dans le vide), widely known through the iconic photomontage created by Shunk-Kender. The exhibition then shifts focus to New York; it includes their documentation of Yayoi Kusama’s astonishing Happenings of the late 1960s and selections from Pier 18, a project conceived and organized by independent curator Willoughby Sharp, for which Shunk-Kender photographed works by 27 artists. The resulting pictures capture the chaotic energy, playful wit, and systematic processes of the era’s performance and Conceptual art in two-dimensional black and white.

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From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola
Curated by: Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister with Drew Sawyer

From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires: Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola is the first major exhibition to focus on the German-born Grete Stern and the Argentinean Horacio Coppola, two leading figures of avant-garde photography who established themselves on both sides of the Atlantic. The exhibition begins in the late 1920s with each artist’s initial forays into photography and typographic design. In Berlin in 1927, Stern began taking private classes with Walter Peterhans, who was soon to become head of photography at the Bauhaus. A year later, in Peterhans’s studio, she met Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach, with whom she opened a pioneering studio specializing in portraiture and advertising. Named after their childhood nicknames, the studio ringl + pit embraced both commercial and avant-garde loyalties, creating proto-feminist works. In Buenos Aires during the same period, Coppola initiated his photographic experimentations, exploring his surroundings and contributing to the discourse on modernist practices across media in local cultural magazines. In 1929 he founded the Buenos Aires Film Club to introduce the most innovative foreign films to Argentine audiences. His early works show the burgeoning interest in new modes of photographic expression that led him to the Bauhaus in 1932, where he met Stern and they began their joint history.

Following the close of the Bauhaus and amid the rising threat of the Nazi powers in 1933, Stern and Coppola fled Germany. Stern arrived first in London, where her friends included activists affiliated with leftist circles and where she made her now iconic portraits of German exiles, including those of Bertolt Brecht and Karl Korsch. After traveling through Europe, camera in hand, Coppola joined Stern in London, where he pursued a modernist idiom in his photographs of the fabric of the city, tinged alternately with social concern and surrealist strangeness.

In the summer of 1935, Stern and Coppola embarked for Buenos Aires, where they mounted an exhibition in the offices of the avant-garde magazine Sur, announcing the arrival of modern photography in Argentina. The unique character of Buenos Aires was captured in Coppola’s photographic encounters from the city’s center to its outskirts, and in Stern’s numerous portraits of the city’s intelligentsia, from feminist playwright Amparo Alvajar to essayist Jorge Luis Borges to poet-politician Pablo Neruda. The exhibition ends in the early 1950s, with Stern’s forward-thinking Sueños (Dreams), a series of photomontages she contributed to the popular women’s magazine Idilio, portraying women’s dreams mobilized by the unfulfilled promises of the Peronist regime in Argentine society with urgency and surreal wit.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication edited by Roxana Marcoci and Sarah Meister with a selection of original texts by Stern and Coppola translated into English by Rachel Kaplan. The catalogue will consist of three essays on the artists written by the exhibition curators and scholar Jodi Roberts.

Image: Yoko Ono. Cut Piece. 1964. Performed by Yoko Ono in New Works of Yoko Ono, Carnegie Recital Hall, New York, March 21, 1965. Photograph by Minoru Niizuma. © Minoru Niizuma. Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive, New York

Press Contact:
Sara Beth Walsh, (212) 7089747 sarabeth_walsh@moma.org

Opening: Sunday 17 May 2015

The Museum of Modern Art,
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019, (212) 708
Opening Hours
Saturday through Thursday, 10:30 a.m.5:30 p.m.
Friday, 10:30 a.m. 8:00 p.m.
Museum Admiss
$25 adults; $18 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D.; $14 full

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