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9/10/2012

Judith Bernstein / Jonathan Horowitz

New Museum, New York

Judith Bernstein
Hard

October 10, 2012–January 20, 2013

curated by Margot Norton

The New Museum is pleased to announce the first solo museum exhibition of the work of New York-based artist Judith Bernstein (b. 1942). For over forty years, Judith Bernstein has created expressive drawings and paintings that boldly critique militarism and machismo in a manner that is at once humorous and threatening. The exhibition at the New Museum will include a selection of works ranging from the ’60s through the present, including a new site-specific rendition of Bernstein’s Signature Piece (1986), painted in explosive gestural strokes directly onto the Lobby Gallery windows. For Bernstein, this piece, presented in counterpoint to her large-scale images within the gallery, proclaims her presence and confronts egotistical posturing of artists within the art world and society.

“Judith Bernstein: HARD” will be on view in the Lobby Gallery from October 10, 2012–January 20, 2013, and is curated by Margot Norton, Curatorial Associate. The exhibition’s title, like Bernstein’s work, carries an explicit meaning as a sexual reference. Yet it is also semantically elastic, conjuring up multiple associations within layers of political, personal, and artistic struggle. As a student at Yale in the ’60s, Bernstein developed a fascination with the graffiti she found in men’s restrooms, images that would later inform the basis of her work. Within these crude sexual scrawlings, Bernstein discovered a window into the male subconscious as well as her own. Her works from this period, predating the wave of feminist artworks in the early ’70s, assert female rights and address the underlying connection between sexual aggression and warfare.

These mordant antiwar and antisexist statements bristle with the political activism and fury that characterized the Vietnam War era, and continue to resonate viscerally today. Bernstein’s most well-known artworks are her subsequent series of biomorphic screw drawings, which she began in 1969. These monumental pieces provocatively appropriate the image of the screw as a phallic symbol of oppression—as in the expression “being screwed”—and evoke ominous power. One of these works, HORIZONTAL (1973), was censored from the exhibition “FOCUS: Women’s Work— American Art in 1974” at the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center for “lacking redeeming social value,” phraseology commonly applied to pornography. At the time, a petition letter was issued in protest, signed by many significant artists, critics, and curators, including Clement Greenberg, Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, Louise Bourgeois, and the New Museum’s Founding Director, Marcia Tucker. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery (the first gallery devoted to showing female artists) where she had her first solo exhibition in 1973. She was an early member of many art and activist organizations including Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition, and Fight Censorship.

About the Artist
Born in 1942 in Newark, NJ, Bernstein has lived and worked in New York City since 1967. She received her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1967. She has had solo exhibitions at Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (2008), The Box, Los Angeles (2009 and 2011), and Alex Zachary, New York (2010). Her work has been included in group exhibitions, such as “The Comfort of Strangers” as part of “Greater New York” at MoMA P.S.1, New York (2010), “The Last Newspaper” at the New Museum, New York (2010), and “The Historical Box” at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (2011) and London (2012). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, New York, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Exhibition Support
“Judith Bernstein: HARD” is made possible, in part, through the generous support of the Producers Council of the New Museum.

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Jonathan Horowitz
Your Land/My Land: Election ’12

October 10–November 18, 2012

The New Museum will present “Your Land/My Land: Election ’12,” (2012) an installation by artist Jonathan Horowitz to coincide with the 2012 American presidential election season. The exhibition will be staged simultaneously at art museums across the US. It will be on view at the New Museum in New York from October 10–November 18, 2012.

“Your Land/My Land: Election ’12” is a reimagined installation originally presented by Horowitz during the 2008 presidential election. At each location (as in ’08), red and blue area rugs will divide the exhibition space into opposing zones, reflecting America’s color-coded, political, and cultural divide. Back-to- back monitors will be suspended between the carpets, with one broadcasting a live feed of Fox News, the other of MSNBC. The installation will provide a location for people to gather and watch coverage of as well as talk about the presidential election. Its central trope is a divided United States swathed in only red and blue.

At the New Museum, the installation will occupy the Lobby, incorporating the front window and its view on to the street. The text “Your Land/My Land” will be adhered to the window, referencing This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie, which originally addressed the issue of land ownership.

According to Horowitz, “If race and gender were the defining themes of the ’08 election, economic policy and economic disparity will likely be the defining themes of the 2012 election. The placement of the text on the window will extend this metaphor to the land of the museum and the land outside. To some, museums are decidedly blue—elitist bastions of liberalism—to others, they are lynchpins of a capitalist art market analogous to other capitalist markets that have been collapsing around us.”

When “Your Land/My Land” opens, a portrait of President Obama, as the current representative of all Americans, will hang from the ceiling between the two sides and a portrait of Mitt Romney will sit on the floor. On election night, each venue will host an election returns event, with the installation becoming a minimalist backdrop. If Obama wins, the position of the two portraits will remain the same. Should Obama be unseated, their positions will be switched.

The installation will be customized for each particular museum and attention will be drawn to the role that cultural institutions can play in a democracy. Over the course of the exhibition, some participating venues will offer voter registration and host presidential debate screenings. A website, accessible at each museum, will link the different locations and visitors will be invited to post comments. Visitors may also connect on Twitter using #YLML.

Participating venues include:
Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, MO - September 7–November 11
Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, NC - September 22–November 12
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX - September 29–November 11
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles - September 30–November 18
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT - October 5–November 24
New Museum, New York - October 10–November 18
Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA - October 12–November 11

About the Artist
Since the early 1990s, Horowitz has made art that combines the imagery and ambivalence of Pop Art with the engaged criticality of conceptualism. Often based on popular commercial sources, his work examines the deep-seated links between consumerism and political consciousness, as well as the political silences of postwar art. Recent solo exhibitions include “Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum,” Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2010), “Apocalypto Now,” Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2009), and the retrospective exhibition, “And/Or,” P.S.1, New York (2009).

Exhibition Support
Jonathan Horowitz’s “Your Land/My Land: Election ’12” is made possible, in part, by the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.

About the New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

Image: Judith Bernstein, HORIZONTAL, 1973. Charcoal on paper, 108 x 150 in (274.3 x 381 cm). Courtesy the artist and The Box, Los Angeles

PRESS CONTACTS:
Gabriel Einsohn, Communications Director
press@newmuseum.org
Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc.
info@andreaschwan.com

Opening 10 october

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