calendario eventi  :: 

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19/1/2007

Two exhibitions

Miami Art Central, Miami

Peter Friedl. Work 1964-2006

A Retrospective Exhibition

Curated by Bartomeu Mari', from the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

Peter Friedl (born in Austria, 1960) has made a steady incision in the methods and conventions of contemporary art. After publishing reviews and essays on contemporary theater for a few years, Friedl turned to his own artistic production in the 1980s. Presented today in the form of a retrospective, Friedl’s work—consistently heterogeneous in classical terms of medium, style, and meaning—highlights political awareness, autobiography, permanent displacement, design interventions, potential counter-imagery, and the reinvention of genres left over from the history of Modernism. His exhibition presents aesthetic models for disarming configurations of power.

The exhibition Peter Friedl: Work 1964-2006 problematizes the genre of “retrospective," that is, the placement of a body of art work within the framework of institutional logics (the museum) and within the context of its own history. With only very few exceptions, the installations in this exhibition are not re-staged in their original form or in separate spaces, but instead are edited and exhibited together, nearly as documents. In addition, the exhibition brings together a vast selection of drawings on paper, presented chronologically, from Friedl’s earliest artistic production to the present. These drawings offer a glimpse of formal elements (handwriting, motifs, colors) and content (historical references, signs, symbols) that often reappear in other works and projects: the poster-piece Map (1969-2005) is based on an early drawing from 1969 that assigned the names of Native American peoples to the territory of the United States. In Neue Strabenverkehrsordnung (New Traffic Code, 2000), Friedl uses neon to recreate a motif from1995 in large scale.Started in 1995, Playgrounds takes the form of an ongoing anthological project. It currently comprises a selection of 600 color slides arranged for various digital wall projections in kid-sized formats. The pictures—all in “landscape" format and taken by the artist—show public playgrounds around the world.

Playgrounds deals with an urban typology of modernist planning, which can be seen today as a remnant of twentieth-century utopias. It plays with the genre of conceptual and documentary photography, as well as with the representation of childhood, a theme that is also present in other works, such as Snjo'karl (Snowman, 1999) or the book project Four or Five Roses (2001-04), which contains children’s monologues recorded in various cities and townships throughout South Africa.

A singular form of visual and auditory contemplation characterizes the video installation King Kong (2001). Again, the site of action is South Africa—Triomf Park, located in Sophiatown, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. The film mimics a video clip, featuring American songwriter Daniel Johnston against the backdrop of apartheid history. The artist creates a temporary, freed, epic zone where the big story and many little stories come together. In the form of conceptual aesthetic acts, and based on exemplary brief actions, video works such as Dummy (1997) and Tiger oder Lowe (Tiger or Lion, 2000) investigate how art history and social history function.

The computer animation No Photography (2004) comes from the larger project "Out of the Shadows", in which Friedl used the example of Cyprus to mirror the construction of history and of concepts in an aesthetic of division and borders.In the 1990s, Friedl created numerous public art projects with the intention of reassessing the borders of that genre. These types of complex projects present a challenge for a museum. Nothing can stop us (1999), for instance, was probably the only car garage in Venice, installed on the occasion of the 48th Biennale in front of the Austrian pavilion. The title is a quote of an imperialistic U.S. slogan of the 1930s, but also the title of a political pop album of 1982 by English musician Robert Wyatt.

In place of the usual documentary displays, projects such as this are exhibited as separately designed, enlarged catalogue pages on the wall in poster form. Also included, as supplement and complement to the global anthropology of Friedl’s Playgrounds, is a homage to the more than 700 children’s playgrounds that Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck designed for Amsterdam between 1947 and 1978.

Another long-term project, Theory of Justice, is presented as both an extensive installation and an artist’s book published by the museum. The title refers to the attempt at renewing social contract theory undertaken by the U.S. philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002). Friedl’s project, begun in 1992, is based on the collection and selection of newspaper and magazine images, which are displayed in specially designed showcases. “What interests me about a new concept of genre is how it can create a difference to the old politics of identity. It offers the freedom to look at things more differently, which becomes again interesting in a political and aesthetic prospect. Things become a little strange if their relative autonomy is enforced." Peter Friedl About the Exhibition

This exhibition is produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain.MAC @ MAM’s presentation of this exhibition is sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.

Exhibition Catalogue and Brochure

Peter Friedl. Work 1964-2006 is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 370-color page catalogue featuring a large selection of the artist’s writings, along with essays by Mieke Bal, Roger M. Buergel, Norman M. Klein, and Bartomeu Mari', and a conversation with Jean-Pierre Rehm.

Visitors to the show are provided with a variety of education materials, including a free, illustrated brochure designed to provide information concerning the exhibition and its related programs and events.
The catalogue and exhibition and programs brochure are available in the admissions desk.

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Tacita Dean: film works

A leading artist of her generation, Tacita Dean (b.1965) has worked in a variety of media, including drawing and printmaking, but, most notably, film and sound. This exhibition presents a selection of some of Dean’s most compelling 16 mm film works, dating from the 1990s to the present. Ideas of loss and disappearance play important roles in these films, which revolve around forgotten stories, coincidences, singular events, and failed utopian projects. Dean’s films blur fact and fiction, perception and reality. Above all, they present a meditation on the cinematic experience itself, from the traditional structures of narrative cinema to the specific nature and mechanics of filmmaking.

Coincidences have always interested Dean. Her long preoccupation with random associations and unpredictable outcomes has been fundamental to her artistic method. She allows the element of chance to become part of the process of her research, writing, filming, and editing. Chance is the thread that flows through the artist’s films and permits the unexpected to occur.

Since her 1996 work Disappearance at Sea, Dean’s films have comprised long takes, static camera positions, and optical soundtracks created independently of the images. With this film, she stopped using the voiceover narration of her previous work, and most of her subsequent projects unfold around an event accompanied only by ambient sound. Dean’s films appear to take place in real time. Their slow pace and the attention to each passing instant that they allow induces an intense sense of the present moment in the viewer. This can be bewildering and disorienting. On the other hand, this stillness enables him or her to experience a new perception of time, one that is framed by his or her own subjectivity. In order to make sense, the films require the viewer to surrender to their tempo, “to experience them from beginning to end."*

Dean has also produced extensive written narratives about her films. These exist—and are meant to be read—separately from the films. The narratives are not inferred from the images; they do not describe the films, but offer an adjacent story, which exists as an independent entity, side by side with the film. Around Disappearance at Sea, for example, the artist creates parallel narratives, which occur outside the frame of the film.

The film, texts, and some additional works—Disappearance at Sea II (1997), Teignmount Electron (1998), and Bubble House, (1999)—relate to the tragic fate of Donald Crowhurst, an amateur sailor who attempted to fake a solo voyage around the world, and eventually lost his sanity and life to the sea. What we see in the film, however, is the hypnotic rotation of the lenses of a lighthouse and a view out to sea at nightfall, filmed in anamorphic widescreen in a single continuous take.

Dean intends most of her films to be projected in the 16 mm format. When exhibiting her work, she deliberately places the projector and screen within the same physical space. The movement, sound, and specific character of the projector—a nearly anachronistic machine that stands almost as a separate sculptural object—reminds the viewer that the image he or she sees is an illusion, a construct. Dean’s installations constitute a poetic tribute to the autonomy of film and the paradoxical nature of projection.* Dean, in Roland Groenenboom, “A Conversation with Tacita Dean," in Tacita Dean, ed. Mela Davila and Roland Groenenboom (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and Actar, 2000), 80.

Image: Peter Friedl

Contact: Andrea Navarro 305.455.3337 andrea@miamiartcentral.org

Opening reception: Friday, January 19th, from 7:00 to 10:00 pm.

Miami Art Central
5960 SW 57 Avenue - Miami
HoursTuesday-Sunday 12-7 pm
General Admission
Adults: $5; Seniors: $3; Students and children under 12: Free; Free on Sunday.

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