calendario eventi  :: 

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20/9/2006

Two exhibitions

Wiener Secession, Wien

Julie Ault / Martin Beck
Installation
Hauptraum

Julie Ault and Martin Beck’s exhibition titled Installation will make evident the different branches of their art practices, which include working independently and in collaboration with one another. Artist, designer, curator, writer, historian, editor suggest the primary positions and methods their practices embody, to be articulated in the Secession exhibition. Installation is primarily concerned with methods of authorship and artistic agency, and brings these modes that customarily use differing distribution circuits into a dialogue within a coherent space. The exhibition consists of an arrangement of individually and collaboratively authored installation fixtures, arenas, and works that function as the display architecture produced specifically for the Secession’s space.

The vocabulary inscribed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ series of photographs “Untitled" (Natural History) - Patriot, Historian, Ranchman, Scientist, Soldier, Humanitarian, Author, Conservationist, Naturalist, Scholar, Explorer, and Statesman - will parenthesize the exhibition. The photographs will be hung on the gallery’s permanent walls. The inclusion of this artwork expresses the curatorial dimension of Ault and Beck’s practice while the piece acts as a symbolization of facets of cultural participation. Its inclusion also references the newly published book, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, edited by Ault (2006).

StrucTube is Beck’s reconstruction of a modular exhibition system originally designed by George Nelson in 1948. The system is one of the early precursors of many portable exhibition systems developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the exhibitory apparatus and display were thought capable of realizing a utopian belief in the emancipatory potential of the exhibition as a communication format. In Installation, Beck’s reconstruction of the StrucTube exhibition system is presented in a double way: as an individual work as well as a functional display system activated by Ault and Beck for the show as a whole.

Information, a supersized wall mural, is an account of the history of the poverty measures and guidelines deployed by the U.S. government since 1964, merged with a graphic rendering of the increasing income gap between the wealthy and the rest of the American population over the past twenty-five years. This collaboration by Ault and Beck is an analysis of social and economic issues in an artistic form. For the Secession, Information is being made as a freestanding wall.

Corita Kent (1918-1986) was a printmaker, activist, and art teacher renowned for her individual brand of spiritual pop art, and for her lively negotiation of the boundary that defined what a Catholic nun should look like, be like, and do in the 1960s. Serigraphs are the most lasting and coherent of the mediums Corita employed, but in addition to prints and other publication formats, she produced large temporary exhibitions and choreographed events. Ault has been engaged with Corita’s work for some time through curating exhibitions and recently authoring a book, Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (2006). For the Secession, in order to highlight the ephemeral contexts within which Corita worked, Ault has curated images from Corita’s slide archive that present her milieu in the 1960s and some of the happenings and temporary exhibitions Corita and her students created. A double slide show will be screened in Installation, set-up in relation to a graphically articulated platform designed for the occasion.

Rumor (June 14, 1969) is a project by Beck, consisting of three framed photographs and three bibliographies. The images show a facade detail of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture building at Yale University in New Haven. The textual bibliographies document the shifting critical reception of that building throughout the last four decades. When first completed in 1964, the building was considered a modernist masterpiece, yet it proved to be difficult to inhabit. The building came to symbolize the crisis of modern functionalism and its relation to authoritarian structures. On June 14, 1969 the building suffered a fire and it is rumored, yet never officially confirmed, that it was set during a student demonstration.

A two-channel video by Ault and Beck to be imbedded in the verso wall of Information, takes on the role of visitor orientation. The video addresses particular principles of exhibition as a medium and a form, and methods of exhibition making. The video draws on historical discourse and current imagery, and, along with the surrounding installation setting is made specifically for this exhibition.

PUBLICATION
Installation will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Felicity Scott and Matthias Michalka, published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, Cologne.

EVENTS
Exhibition discussion with Julie Ault and Martin Beck
Tuesday, September 26, 2006, 6 p.m.
An event of Friends of the Secession

Another Form of Order, Lecture by Felicity D. Scott
Sunday, October 8, 2006, 5 p.m.

JULIE AULT, born 1957, is an artist who independently and collaboratively organizes exhibitions and multiform projects. Her work emphasizes interrelationships between cultural production and politics. She is the editor of Alternative Art New York 1965-1985 (2002). In 1979 Ault co-founded Group Material, the NYC-based collaborative, which was active from 1976 through 1996.
MARTIN BECK, born 1963, is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engage questions of authorship, historicity, and display and they often draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. They include an Exhibit viewed played populated, Grazer Kunstverein (Graz, Austria, 2003) and storage (displayed) at Spot (New York: 1997).
Ault and Beck work together to create projects including Social Landscape, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, 2004, and the exhibition Outdoor Systems, indoor distribution at the NGBK, Berlin, 2000. Ault and Beck are the authors of Critical Condition: Selected Texts in Dialogue, (2003).
Ault and Beck live and work in New York.

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I (ICH) / PERFORMATIVE ONTOLOGY
Galerie, Grafisches Kabinett

Bas Jan Ader, Fikret Atay, Johanna Billing, Pavel Braila, Lolou Che'rinet, Martin Creed, Alan Currall, Omer Fast, Stano Filko, Lise Harlev, Saskia Holmkvist, Jiři' Kovanda, Ja'n Mančuška, Fiorenza Menini, Yan Pei-Ming, Ivan Moudov, Roman Onda'k, Boris Ondreička, Jiři' Ska'la, Barbara Visser, Silvie Vondřejcova', Lawrence Weiner, Ella Ziegler
curated by Vi't Havra'nek (tranzit.cz)

I (Ich) I Performative Ontology is the third part or “act" in a series of exhibitions taking place in Bratislava (I Narrow Focus, June 29—August 14, 2005, tranzit), Prague (I Ja', May 3—June 20, 2006, Futura Gallery) and Vienna, with a somewhat different constellation of artists in each, while its core, or perhaps the thematic sphere it contains, remains the same.

In philosophy, ontology is defined in connection with the idea of conceptualization: “A conceptualization is an abstract, simplified view of the world that we wish to represent for some purpose." (T.R. Gruber, A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications, 1993)

However, instead of aiming to define the concept in philosophical terms, the exhibition is about what this definition of ontology cannot capture because it concerns a matrix that changes over time. Ontology exists only in particular lives, in individuals, in the ‘I’ in concrete time. Ontology interests us not as a verbal or theoretical dimension in the existence of the individual, but rather as a performative, temporal dimension. Which is why we speak of performative ontology.

Like a theater play, I (Ich) I Performative Ontology is divided into three acts that follow on from one another: I. Set-up (Sept 21—Oct 7, 2006), II. Confrontation (Oct 8—Oct 25), III. Resolution (Oct 26—Nov 12, 2006). Some of the works will be visible during one act alone, others during two acts, and others during the course of the entire exhibition. Those works temporarily not on show, however, will not be removed, but merely concealed behind a curtain or switched off. Viewers are called on to imagine the missing artworks (on the basis of the title and media) and to visit the exhibition multiple times.

The works shown at the Secession deal with temporality, the relation between subjective and general knowledge, between intimacy and publicness. Some are records of important life situations, others are analytical observations of social structures.

Ja'n Mančuška, for example, writes a simple sentence on the wall: “43. The number of inhales and exhales I made while drawing this number."

In her video performance Personal Politics (2003), Loulou Che'rinet interviews several Egyptian women abut their lives and everyday problems. These conversations conducted in Arabic are translated by a non-professional translator who is present in the exhibition. During this communication, the personal views and attitudes of the translator and of the viewers inevitably become mixed with the work.

Alan Currall describes his video Message to my best friend (2001) as a performance in front of the camera. Calmly, almost detached, he addresses his intimate declaration of love (for a very good friend) straight to the viewer.

Jiři' Ska'la‘s piece entitled Volume every numbers of my family (2002) consists of four “Minimalist" cardboard boxes. Each box is a different size, derived from the volume of the artist’s family members. Ignoring the external appearance of his family, he undertakes a dubious attempt at portraying their inner life. The cardboard boxes are empty.

A catalogue will be printed to accompany the exhibition, with autobiographical contributions by all artists included in the three exhibitions in Bratislava, Prague, and Vienna.

VIT HAVRANEK
Vi't Havra'nek is an theoretician and organizer based in Prague, Czech Republic. Since 2002 he is working as a project leader of tranzit /www.tranzit.org/ supported by the Erste Bank Group. He worked as a curator for the Municipal Gallery, Prague and National Gallery in Prague. He lectures in contemporary art at the Academy of Applied Arts, Prague. He has curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions, e.g.: (Prague, 2006, Bratislava 2005), project The Need to Document (Basel, Lueneburg, Prague, 2005), Definitions of Everyday (Prague Biennale 2, 2005), Lanterna Magika (Paris, 2002), Jiři' Kovanda (Brno, 2004), Otto Piene (Prague 2002), Action, Word, Movement, Space (Prague, 1999). He has had publications on contemporary art in catalogues, has edited and co-edited books (most notably Jiři' Kovanda, 2006, The Need to Document, 2005, Lanterna Magika, 2002, Action, Word, Movement, Space, 1999, and has written for contemporary art magazines (Springerin, Artist, Flash Art) and others.


Image: Julie Ault and Martin Beck

Press conference: Thursday, September 21, 2006, 11 a.m.

Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
Friedrichstrasse 12, 1010 Vienna

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