calendario eventi  :: 

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22/1/2009

Two exhibitions

Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis

Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms

In January 2009, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents the first monographic museum exhibition with New York-based artist Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms. Along with a selection of the artist’s recent pieces, including the carefully balanced Partly Me Manners (2008) and the multipart Probably Eight or Half of Each (2007), the exhibition features major new works in a site-specific installation for the Contemporary’s Main Galleries.

Sibony challenges the sculptural demands of space, weight, and materiality. Retrieved objects—carpeting, cardboard, vertical blinds, plywood, hollow-core doors, metal pipes, and fragments of salvaged scraps—form the physical backbone of his process. While the prominence Sibony gives to castaway materials might suggest a destitute spirit of decay and ruin, his sculptures are elegant, graceful, and human. If they seem wobbly and discreet, the playful, finished pieces are arranged in space with boldness and precision. Mixing subtlety and wit, the artist pushes a sense of the “almost” to an extreme: the objects are almost invisible, almost solid, almost blank. He often leaves his materials as he found them, making only slight changes in placement and shape that seem accidental. What emerge are the fundamental power of bare essentials and the effortless magic of the mundane.

Sibony’s work addresses political and ecological concerns in addition to sculptural ones. His materials are unneeded objects, but salvaged before they become trash. His economy of means add nothing to an existing state of industrial overabundance. His sculptures are something new for the world, but don’t use up many of its resources. Sibony gathers what comes his way and redistributes it efficiently.

With so little to look at, the heightened viewing experience itself takes on a prominent role. The appearance of a new shadow or a small change in perspective allows one impression to slip towards another. What initially seems fragile becomes musical, and what looks forgotten turns out to be closely related to nearby works. Using light, silence, and hints of humor, Sibony’s work achieves a nonchalant awkwardness, a proud nudity, and an overall implausibility. Art, just like life, isn’t a safe destination but an always-incomplete process of finding whatever we want to find, and Sibony steers his viewers towards the hidden but omnipresent harmonies in the world.

A monographic catalogue published with JRP-Ringier accompanies the exhibition and includes an introduction by the curator, an essay by French curator François Quintin, and an interview with the artist by Dia Art Foundation Director Philippe Vergne.

Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms is organized by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Chief Curator Anthony Huberman.

Support for Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms is generously provided by Charlotte and Bill Ford, Peter and Jill Kraus, and Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Special thanks to Greene Naftali Gallery, New York; Art: Concept, Paris; and Galleria Zero, Milan. General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Over the past few years, Sibony’s work has become increasingly visible in prominent group exhibitions such as Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the 2006 Whitney Biennial, and, more recently, the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition Unmonumental in New York, underlining the contemporary relevance of his practice. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is the first to recognize Gedi Sibony in a significant one-person museum exhibition. Other recent one person exhibitions include FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France (2008); Kunsthalle St, Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2007); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2007); and gallery exhibitions at Galerie Neu, Berlin (2008); Greene Naftali, New York (2008), Zero..., Milan (2008); and art:concept, Paris (2007). Sibony was born in 1973 in New York, New York.

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Bruce Nauman: Dead Shot Dan

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is pleased to present Dead Shot Dan, an exhibition of works by the preeminent American artist Bruce Nauman.

Bruce Nauman’s work is often discussed in relationship to the writer Samuel Beckett, a playwright who evoked the painful drama of existence, and yet never left laughter too far behind. Beckett’s only film screenplay, appropriately titled Film (1965), stars the ageing Buster Keaton and adds a comic edge to the classical Beckettian loop of tragic paralysis. And indeed, Keaton’s own films tell tales of endlessly violent acts tinged by the comedic gesture of Sisyphean traps, bodily contortions, linguistic slip-ups, and misunderstandings. Similarly, Nauman’s comedy comes with a sour after-taste, and this selection of neons, drawings, prints, photographs, and videos make us laugh and cringe. While Nauman works with a wide range of themes, processes, and ideas, this exhibition underlines his particular use of humor—deadpan, painful, and relentlessly tongue-in-cheek. Greeting viewers to Dead Shot Dan is Nauman’s 1985 neon Double Poke in the Eye II. The pair takes turns poking at each other as the neon light alternates—becoming enemies in perpetuity, caught in an endless back-and-forth of mindless aggression. Like Keaton, they are permanently stuck in a bind. Each poke becomes a tiny victory, and viewers often find humor in these small successes. In the two-channel video Jump (1994), the artist has a succession of very short victories against gravity itself.

Nauman had taken on gravity before. In an iconic 1966 photograph, Failing to Levitate in the Studio, a double exposed black and white image presents his attempt to hover above his studio floor. A large series of color photographs from the same period, Eleven Color Photographs (1966-67/70), points to the artist’s interest in dumb one-liners and linguistic puns. The image Eating My Words depicts the artist at a kitchen table spreading jam on a series of letters; for Waxing Hot, he is seen polishing the letters H, O, and T with wax. Also on view is the 1966 drawing Love Me Tender, Move Te Lender, in which the artist shuffles around the letters of an Elvis Presley song.

Failure, self-deprecation, and uselessness—concepts central to Nauman’s practice—can often be hilarious. In Nauman’s rarely-seen video Bar Tricks (1995), a woman auditions in front of the artist, performing card-tricks. The illusionist, nervous in the audition setting, delivers an awkward magic show, never quite impressing her audience. Hearing the artist chuckle with each flashy sleight of hand, we laugh along. Nauman’s work is ruthless in making its audience into victims caught in uncomfortable places. But we still try to laugh our way out of it, particularly when the artist addresses and disparages his viewers explicitly, as with Pay Attention (1973).

This exhibition draws its inspiration from Buster Keaton’s physical comedy, funny violence, and sleights of hand, traits that appear throughout Nauman’s oeuvre. The title of the exhibition refers to the 1921 silent short film The Goat, in which Keaton plays an innocent hero who is mistaken for a criminal named Dead Shot Dan. “The 27 minutes of narrow escapes, disguises, and hide-outs are among Keaton’s most memorable performances and serve as an apt stand-in for Bruce Nauman and the way he makes us laugh,” notes the Contemporary’s Chief Curator Anthony Huberman.

Bruce Nauman: Dead Shot Dan is organized by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Chief Curator Anthony Huberman.

General support for the Contemporary’s exhibitions program is generously provided by the Whitaker Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; William E. Weiss Foundation; Regional Arts Commission; Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; Arts and Education Council; Nancy Reynolds and Dwyer Brown; and members of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bruce Nauman (b. 1941, Fort Wayne, Indiana) studied mathematics, physics, and studio art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then pursued an MFA at the University of California, Davis. In 1966 Nauman had his first solo show at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles and in 1973, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art co-organized his first museum survey. A large-scale retrospective exhibition in 1994 was organized by the Walker Art Center and the Hirschhorn Museum, and traveled to The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. In the summer of 2009, Nauman will represent the United States in the Venice Biennale.

Image: Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in the Eye II, 1985. Neon tubing mounted on aluminum monolith, 24 x 36 x 9 1⁄4 inches, edition of 40. Collection of Lois and Steve Eisen. © 2008 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Press contact
Jennifer Gaby, Director of Public Relations and Marketing
314.535.0770 x215 or jgaby@camstl.org.

Contemporary Art Museum
3540 Washington Avenue - St. Louis

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