calendario eventi  :: 

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10/7/2009

Five exhibitions

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Leon

Ugo Rondinone
The Night of Lead

Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Coordination: Eneas Bernal

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León presents Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone’s solo debut in Spain. The Night of Lead, curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, spearheads the calendar of events for 2009. The show will cover 2500 m2, half of the space normally allotted to temporary exhibitions. Ugo Rondinone employs a wide range of registers, accumulated during his last 20 years’ working experience. The result is a complex and melancholic artistic experience, a dreamscape that reflects Rondinone’s fascination with rituals, dreams, poetry and the everyday of the human condition.

Ugo Rondinone’s project titles spring from literature, folk music and poetry, his sources of influence. In this case, the title comes from expressionist writer Hans Henny Jahnn’s book Die Nacht aus Blei (The Night of Lead) which, in the artist’s words “is about a nameless person who walks into an unknown city on a winter’s night and encounters himself twenty years younger, and dying. The older self guides the younger trough the night, and by the morning the younger self is dead. The novel deals with identity and self-reflection, about how the shelter of the night encourages honesty and catharsis, how the life of the narrator is always at the mercy of its own narration”.

In the same way as the novel, Ugo Rondinone uses his massive installations – produced specifically for MUSAC – to describe an introspective journey through a dreamscape, an oniric and emotional experience. The exhibition is divided into five main chapters, representing the idea of a dense, heavy, sleepless night through a web of room events that traverse the boundaries between dream state and reality through asymmetric settings of symbols and metaphors and the manipulation of space and time. All five rooms work simultaneously, in synchronicity, instead of serially, very much in the same way as dream symbols and dream voices. As with dreams, the symbols and metaphors in play strive towards condensation, free association and communal resonance. With the aid of the show’s curator, Rondinone combines new productions with previous works, making the most of the Museum’s ample floor space. The impact: large sculptural assemblages placed next to small figures, grandscale canvases next to small tablets worked in plaster, the pairing of the banal and the sublime. Emotionally charged spaces are recreated through the installation of videos or readymades. More than 50 pieces and a myriad of expressive forms draw the viewer into the artist’s poetic world.

The lure begins with a cluster of six 2000 years old olive trees and a huge light bulb sculpture. The viewer/participant has no choice but to engage in alternative ways of perceiving images and their narrative baggage. More than a tangible reality, this simulated landscape (still-inert) speaks of the road travelled and memories gathered, of the reflection about time and nature. Further on, one enters a room where fourteen large-format paintings centre around the sculpture If There Were Anywhere But Desert, Tuesday 2002. An alter ego of the artist, a clown who has lost all semantic power – no longer in its appropriate role, the figure lies withered and defeated by the vastness of the starry horizon he sees ahead or has already taken in.

The viewer then enters a space filled with Scholar Rocks, five rock-shaped sculptures made of concrete and rock. Large- scale sculptures reminiscent of the unique rock formations in the Chinese region of Lake Tai, which the artists collects and surround him in his daily life. These sculptures are accompanied by tiny paintings on plaster. Each tiny painting depicts an “unsubstantial” theme on the front (painted on-site on the streets of New York) and a collage on the back (made up of that day’s clippings of the New York Times). In this piece, Rondinone evokes the universal themes that attract him: the obsession with time, the burden of existence, nature’s sarcasm and the artist’s own determination to find a meeting point between personal and collective suffering. For the latter, he chooses a collection of materials steeped in symbolism. In doing so, he makes an ironic nod at the relationship between man’s trivial conception of time and the previously established time of his surroundings.

The two closing pieces are called Still. Life (John’s fireplace) (sculpture) and It’s Late... (video installation). The former belongs to the series of cast bronzes filled with lead entitled Still. Life, and this specific piece is a replica of American poet John Giorno’s fireplace in his New York apartment. The tour ends with It’s late..., a video installation consisting of six black and white projections flooded by blue light coming from the installation’s ceiling. This is the only piece in the exhibition that depicts the human form trough the daily “actions” performed by a man and a woman, twelve sequences in a loop accompanied by the constant repetition of the words “everyday sunshine”, which reinforce the dull and insipid nature of the actions taking place onscreen. With these ambients dominated by psychical aspect, the emotional memory or the fracture of the action, Ugo Rondinone’s project for MUSAC comes to an end. Throughout the exhibition, the viewer is transported to many different places, ultimately he/she is forced to look inward and examine reality from personal experience.

The Night of Lead – The book
An exhibition catalogue (Spanish – English - German) will be published in joint collaboration with Aargauer Kunsthaus (Aarau, Switzerland) and renowned international publisher JRP Ringer to make it available to a broader public. Ugo Rondinone will design the book by hand, presenting a new approach to his most recent and defining works. The catalogue, slated for publication early next year, will contain the curator’s text focused on the show itself as well as two previously unpublished writings on the artist’s work.

Moreover, on occasion of the exhibition The Night of Lead at MUSAC, Ugo Rondinone has come out with a limited edition piece entitled ELEVEN SUNSETS. TWENTYTWO DAWNS. ALL IN ONE: a numbered edition of 50 photographs of each of his hand, or a total of 100 copies mounted on aluminium, signed and certified by the artist. These are for individual sale at the MUSAC store.

Ugo Rondinone (Brunnen, 1964) is one of an outstanding generation of Swiss artists born in the 1960s, along with Pipilotti Rist and Thomas Hirschhorn. Recognised on international circuits from the early 1990s, the scathing defiance of his pieces calls for a new angle on artistic practice. His complex installations are produced with an unlikely mélange of painting, sculpture, video, paper, collage, light, sound, etc. This creative universe carries his unique signature, masterfully combining extreme pop with profound minimalism, articulated in a language at once private, nostalgic and subversive. His acclaimed installations have been shown in numerous cultural institutions: Rainbows (neon lights forming a large-scale rainbow, one of them being Hell, Yes!, permanent installation on the façade of the New Museum, NY); If There Were Anywhere But Desert, (a new take on participation in art, set by a group of seven clown sculptures, each representing one day of the week, undergoing inexplicable agony) and Twentyforhours, large wooden crossed panels combined with a constant breathing sound – whose purposefully formal nature which demonstrate the artist’s constant pursuit of autonomy in his artistic practice.
Resident in New York for over ten years, Rondinone has carried out projects for some the most renowned international centres: Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2006); Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, 2003); Kunsthalle Vienna (2002); 2007 Edition of La Bienalle di Venezia (representing Switzerland along with Urs Fischer); and his recent project as curator at the Palais de Tokyo of The Third Mind, among others.

The Night of Lead – Special Opening Event, John Giorno
11 July, 2009

As an active participant in art of the present, MUSAC hosts interdisciplinary activities that give voice to new art forms frequently absent in institutionalised art centres. To celebrate the opening of The Night of Lead, MUSAC will stage a performance by John Giorno.
This American artist will perform a reading in Hall 5 (installation space of Still. Life (John’s fireplace). This will be John Giorno’s debut before an audience in León. MUSAC will publish an accompanying booklet with a selection in Spanish of the poems Giorno will read. John Giorno (NY, 1936) was a key figure in the Beatnick movement and the New York School of poetry. Creator of Dial-a-poem, along with William Burroughs, he searched for fresh ways to get poetry to the people. In 1965 he founded the record label Giorno Poetry System where he produced names like Robert Crealy, John Cage, Patti Smith and Sonic Youth, among others. He starred in Andy Warhol's second film Sleep. His works have been publicly acclaimed and he is considered one of the pioneers of the poetic evolution which gave way to the Spoken Word, currently one of the most significant poetry genres in the US.

MUSAC, halls 1, 4, 5 y 6

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Kyong Park
Kyong Park. The New Silk Roads

Curator: Octavio Zaya
Coordination: Helena López Camacho

MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, presents Kyong Park. The New Silk Roads, the first show featuring the ongoing ambitious urban research project of the urbanist, theorist and activist Kyong Park, carried out through different journeys along the intricate route between Istanbul and Tokyo. With this exhibition, and the monographic publication accompanying it, MUSAC showcases and examines the complex conditions and relations shaping the cultural, social and political territories throughout the Asian continent, Eurasia and the Middle East that this activist of Korean origin describes as The New Silk Roads.

THE NEW SILK ROADS: The project
The New Silk Roads is an ongoing research project that, through different journeys, explores the new rapidly expanding and transforming urban landscapes that are emerging in Asian cities and regions. Using the urban research method Kyong Park calls “nomadic practice” he has conducted a sequence of expeditions through the regions and cities of the intricate route between Istanbul and Tokyo, first documenting the physical evidence of the urban transitions — through photographs, videos and interviews — and combining them afterwards with data, information and analysis.

So far, Park has carried out 3 expeditions. The first one of them, which took place from July 30th to October 2nd 2007, was through Shanghai, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Guangzu, Foshan, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macao and Beijing. The second one, from December 17th 2007 to January 7th 2008, was a horizontal cut through Asia, by travelling through Istanbul, Delhi and Dubai. The third one, from September 1st to 25th 2008, was made through central Asia: Bukara, Samarkand and Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, and Astana, in Kazakhstan. To date, Park and his team of collaborators have visited and researched eight countries, of the twenty it will involve by the end of the project.

The project embraces several key objectives. The first is to investigate the new cultural, economic and political relations that may be developing between East and West, with a conceptual reference to the old Silk Road as one of the first examples of globalisation. This includes the colonial and post-colonial conditions in Asia, with the political, economic and cultural transitions in the post-communist territories of the former Soviet Union, as well as the neo-socialist territories of the People’s Republic of China, including the new geo-political shifts taking place around the middle region of the historical Silk Road. The second is to represent the spatial and physical effects of globalisation, by visualising the relationships between the materialised movements of products, labour and resources and the immaterial movements of information, capital and services over the real landscapes and virtual spaces of Asia. The third is to analyse the various conflicts and the cooperation between developed and developing nations occuring within the multinational, transnational and post-national cultures, as well as their economic and political dynamics on local, regional and metropolitan levels. Finally the project studies the renewed interrelation between vastly different regions of Asia itself, ranging from the economic strength of the Pacific perimeter to the emerging empire of the People’s Republic of China, the renewal of central Asia, the urban fantasies in parts of the Middle East, the political stasis in Eurasia and northern Asia, the “offices of the world” in south Asia, etc.

Considering the old Silk Roads to be the primeval structure of globalisation, The New Silk Roads construct a geographic narrative of the borders and territories of nomadic policies, economies and cultures, by using visual information to expand upon previously established knowledge of Asia.
Kyong Park initiated The New Silk Roads project with the support and collaboration of the UCSD, University of California (San Diego, USA), Division of Arts and Humanities, Department of Visual Arts and Academic Senate, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago, USA) & ScribeMedia Art Culture.

Kyong Park. The New Silk Roads. The exhibition
For MUSAC, and with the curator Octavio Zaya, Park will create an investigative space which will cover each and every one of the aspects of this project-in-progress. The show is undertaken with a sort of studio/workspace where Park unfurls the textual, documentary and visual, graphic, statistical and geographic elements that shape the complex network it comprises and upon which the entire project-in-progress is sustained. This multi-disciplinary space will be complemented with the exhibitions of photographs, documents and projections and a detailed itinerary/timeline of the expeditions conducted throughout the territories of Eurasia, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, Northern Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The result of the show presented by MUSAC can be understood as an attempt to outline the relationships between texts, data, graphs, photographs and visualisations, to offer a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of the urban transformations that attend the cultural, economic and political evolution taking place on the continent. The underlying platform is the geography of territory, with data, texts, and information overlaid in a timebased format, so as to create a dynamic visualisation, a kind of motion-graphics of the evolution of Asia.

Brief biography of the artist
Born in Korea in1955, Kyong Park is currently associate professor of Public Culture and Urbanism in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California at San Diego, the institution whose contribution is, to a large extent, making this exhibition possible. As an artist, urban theorist, curator and activist, Kyong Park is interested in interdisciplinary projects that alter the borders between the different disciplines and their practices. He was founder/director of StoreFront for Art and Architecture in New York, founding member of the International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit and founding director of the Centrala Stichting voor Toekomstige Steden of Rotterdam.

Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that reviews the territories and themes of this extensive project that Kyong Park will continue to develop. The book, edited by MUSAC, is published by ACTAR Barcelona/New York, and designed by Reingard Steger, ACTAR PRO. In addition to an introduction by Octavio Zaya and an essay by Kyong Park himself, the publication is divided into different chapters that address the conditions and situations of the different cities visited by the artist-theorist through conversations and exchanges with different academic personalities, urban analysts, theorists, architects, activists and artists living in or native to the regions comprising these new silk roads. In addition to these texts, the publication is rounded off by an extensive selection of the artist’s panoramic photographs, as well as maps, graphs and referential publications and visualisations.

Symposium
During the month of October MUSAC will host a symposium around The New Silk Roads, in which Kyong Park and Octavio Zaya, together with architects and specialists in the matter will discuss and analyze the conditions and urban policies, together with the political, economic and cultural transitions in the post-communist territories of the former Soviet Union, as well as the neo-socialist territories of the People’s Republic of China, including the new geo-political shifts taking place around the middle region of the historical Silk Road.

Eduactional Activity. Workshop by Lara Almarcegui
MUSAC’s Department of Cultural Action & Education organizes in relation to the exhibition Kyong Park. The New Silk Roads, a workshop with artist Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972).The work of Almarcegui stems from her research on buildings that are derelict or else in the process of being revamped, vacant lots, vegetable patches and other unoccupied spaces that, although they form part of the urban landscape, are usually regarded as being foreign to it. Using these spaces as her starting point, she engages in a project that generates an action, a direct, physical intervention on the spot being studied, which yields graphic documentation about the undertaking. Refurbishing a marketplace slated for demolition, doing research on vegetable patches within the city, and publishing a guide to vacant lots are some examples of projects that are directly bound up with fieldwork that, in the majority of cases, is carried out over a long period of time. The concept of architecture as an organisational element of space takes primacy over the usual consideration of architecture fitting in with its surroundings, bringing to the fore such external factors as the different power plays developed in relation to the building up and shaping of the cityscape.

Hall 2

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Jorge Galindo
La Pintura y La Furia (The Painting and the Fury)

Curator: Rafael Doctor
Coordinators: Kristine Guzmán, Luisa Fraile

MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León) presents Madrid artist Jorge Galindo’s most recent body of work, La Pintura y la Furia. This exhibition, a veritable manifesto of painting as a craft and the painter’s position in today’s world, opens 11 July. MUSAC’s walls will be lined with the larger part of this painter’s most recent work, staged in such a way that the fury of the creative moment strikes the viewer with full force.

It is generally understood that painting is the most firmly rooted artistic genre in Spanish Art History; some of Spain’s most valued contributions to universal cultural heritage lie on canvas and stretcher, to such an extent that in Spain we often confuse Art History with the history of painting. A sweeping glance at our collection of monumental figures speaks for itself: El Greco, Ribera, Velázquez, Murillo, Zurbarán, Goya, Sorolla...; from the 20th Century: Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Tàpies and many others. We could even include Barceló, the most recently acclaimed contemporary master. We take it for granted that Spain is a land of painters and that our tradition springs from a sustained aesthetic introspection through pictorial language.

If asked to find an example in the art most recently produced in our contemporary context, Jorge Galindo is the artist that most clearly continues in that utopian investigation – that quest pursued by so many painters over the centuries, through their canvases. Galindo has revealed himself to be an utmost explorer of the pictorial universe. This lengthy process has taken him through diverse stages of painting; his resolve and ease are unprecedented. Be it his harshest gestural abstraction or gigantic figurative representation of the urban consumer society, this artist’s work is an honest head-on collision with the essence of the creative act; with the very act of painting. The human being, the tools, the image: this is the outline. In the creative act, he saturates all three elements with rage, valour, determination, shamelessness, arrogance, courage; all moving non-stop. Each painting takes on a life of its own, fruit of the confrontation between artist and elements. The result is an impossible equation where every piece previously belonged to some other assemblage.

The main grab in Jorge Galindo’s universe is without a doubt the stance he takes as a painter on today’s creative scene. His commitment has strengthened in the face of the difficulties encountered: the devaluation of painting as an artistic practice, coming from so-called modern positions in recent decades. In this context, the artist defends painting for painting’s sake. All else is an excuse. Textures, compositions, gestures, styles and images become entangled with no apparent rhyme or reason in the search for a completely autonomous end. This imperative has always been a given in his work.

La Pintura y la Furia: The Exhibition
La Pintura y la Furia is an experiment in the consequences of delivering this creative act directly to the viewer. The museum’s large halls will be completely lined with Galindo’s fury and a faithful recreation of the artist’s studio will bring the very act of creation to life in front of the viewer: the temple is also the god. In his enthusiasm, the artist fearlessly discloses his process. The whole scene smells of paint, we feel the presence of a person behind each image we behold.

The exhibition begins with three series of monochrome drawings. Each series contains 100 large-format drawings where all of Galindo’s creative tools converge on the paper. There is a red series, a black series and a green series. The layout of the huge sheets - placed in a row to form a wall – make it nearly impossible to see the individual drawings themselves, yet each one forms its own cosmos of pictorial resources and allusions to former works spanning the painter’s 20-year career. It all seems to be in a row, yet piled up at the same time. His love for typeface, collage, decorative motifs from the modern world, subtle nods at Art History, the raging creative gesture, are all part of this grand image factory where each item lends to the strength of the whole.

At the back of the main room, the drawings are again stacked, creating a wall that gives way to the series Jägermeister where the logo of this German brand of liquor is shot through with pictorial forms in a continuous construction and deconstruction of the image. The nod at serial imagery, so often used by Warhol and the pop artists, is clear. In this case the medium is paint. The brush stroke varies on each canvas and offers a more sincere and human approach to this obsessive view of an object. The onus here is on the painting, no technical reproductions or fancy tricks to diffuse its aura.

In the same main room there is a series of large vertical paintings that reproduce collages formerly made by Galindo. The huge iconic line-up displays another perverse twist on impossible interpretations. These paintings – each standing in its own right – are grouped here into a panel that harks back to the religious altarpiece constructions of antiquity where a true lineal narrative was never really present either, only a reiterative action toward the same end. In this case the end is the painting itself and the infinite universe of images that surround us, images the author eagerly appropriates. His offering of snippets in the form of collage provide an unexpected and impossible reading.

A small room at the side of the main hall boasts a huge collage that fills the entire space. It represents the horror of emptiness while reminding us that we have regularly ingested the products of media imagery for an entire century. Images ready to cut, paste and serve up! Millions and millions of images at our fingertips made into one enormous tapestry of interconnectedness, at the same time so individual.

The small collage room leads into the recreation of the artist’s studio. The focus is on one motif: a clown as the subject of the painter’s research in a great laboratory. This is where we feel the process of a painting, the inner creative workings of the painter, the sweat and effort of each pictorial adventure.

La Pintura y la Furia is Jorge Galindo’s statement, a manifestation of the grandeur of an ancient craft; romantic but absolutely radical. He displays an art form of continuous transformations where the painter struggles for coherence and a unique voice – a voice that echoes his own rage, his own obsession with reaping the fruits of an endless excavation into the canvas.

Hall 3

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Cyprien Gaillard
Sedimented Landscapes / Paisajes sedimentados

Curator: Tania Pardo

French artist Cyprien Gaillard (Paris, 1980), a leading figure in his generation, is to hold his first solo exhibition for a Spanish institution at Laboratorio 987 in MUSAC. Under the title Sedimented Landscapes / Paisajes sedimentados, the artist will display etchings, paintings, drawings and two videos, all dealing with landscapes.

The work produced by this young artist lies half way between the aesthetics of Land Art and Romanticism. His photographs and videos scrutinise the traces left by man on nature. Cyprien Galliard approaches landscapes, whether they be urban or rural, from an enthropic perspective, drawing on the concept coined by Robert Smithson. The exhibition title points to two essays where the artist explores his ideas regarding the recovery of the picturesque: A sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects, published in 1968, and Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, published in 1973. Against this background, Cyprien Gaillard’s work places its main focus on revealing the relationship between contemporary architecture – perceived as a modern ruin –, nature and landscape.

The exhibition is designed to provide a review of some of Gaillard’s most significant works, where contemporary architecture is represented as a ruin engulfed by the landscape. His work can also be read as an ironic metaphor on the conservation of land and monuments, hence his series devoted to landfills. Precisely that blend of entropy and decadence provides his work the power to transport us to a world dominated by man in conflict with nature. Cyprien Gaillard’s concern resides precisely in revealing architecture as another element in the landscape, where time and decadence mingle.

The exhibition includes etchings from the series Belief in the Age of Disbelief (2005), where Gaillard places modern tower blocks in landscapes taken from 17th century etchings. By doing so, he alters the viewer’s gaze, hinting even at an evocation of the power of time and decadence, in line with those 19th century Romantic painters who found the sublime in the conflict between man and nature. In The New Picturesque, a series of acrylic paintings on canvas, the artist explores the notion of “picturesque”, often connected to an idea of beauty that the artist challenges by subjecting his pieces to an act of radical vandalism. By obliterating given narrative elements under broad brushstrokes, he metaphorically deletes all traces of our falsified human gestures.

The two videos on display allow the artist to deal with landscape in movement. Here, bursts of white smoke conceal segments of the prevailing peace. Gaillard repeats the gestures applied to the paintings, obliterating the narrative scene set in a natural frame.

Cyprien Gaillard, biography
Cyprien Gaillard (Paris, 1980). In 2009 the artist held solo exhibitions at Le Frac Champagne Ardenne, Reims, France; Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Holland; Fridericianum Kunsthalle, Kassel, Germany. His major solo exhibitions include Hayward Gallery (2008, London, UK) curated by Tom Morton; his project for Art Unlimited, Art Basel, with Cosmic Galerie, Paris and Art & Public, (2007, Geneva); the Pentagone exhibition, at L'Atelier du Jeu de Paume, (2007, Paris). Noteworthy group exhibitions include: in 2009 Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York; Re-construction, Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest, curated by Ami Barak (2008); A Stake in the Mud, A Hole in the Reel, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; later shown at MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, Vigo; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; CAAC, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Fundació Suñol, Barcelona, curated by Mariana Cánepa Luna and Max Andrews (2008); Getting Along, Island 6 Art Center, Shanghai (2006). His screenings and events include: The Long Week End, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern (London: screening of a selection of videos with a music performed by KOUDLAM. New Museum, New York City: Desniansky Riaon screening with music performed by KOUDLAM

Laboratorio 987, MUSAC

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Printed Matter. Learn to read art

Curator: AA Bronson
Coordinator: Carlos Ordás

Starting July 11 2009 MUSAC’s Vitrinas project will be featuring Printed Matter, the largest non-profit organisation in the world devoted to promoting publications made by artists. AA Bronson, the organization’s director and the curator of this show, will create a display for MUSAC so that visitors will be able to get to know some of its most representative publications —dating from 1976 to our day— including large artists’ books, small format books, and magazines, catalogues and other artists’ editions produced by the organization.

About Printed Matter
The origin of Printed Matter dates back to 1976, when a group of artists and art workers created a space for artistic creation and workshops in New York, which was converted into the current organization two years later. The founders of this organisation include figures of considerable standing, such as Carl Andre, Edit DeAk, Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard, Walter Robinson, Pat Steir, Mimi Wheeler, Robin White and Irena von Zahn.

Printed Matter specialises in large editions of artists’ books and objects at reduced prices, which distances it from the concept of “book arts” and “book objects” as these are often produced in small pricey editions. Over the last few decades, the organisation has positioned itself as a major agent of investigation and reflection on the changing role of artistic publications in the realm of contemporary art. Printed Matter’s mission is to foster among the greater public the distribution, appreciation and study of artists’ publications, whether these are books or other types of editioned publications conceived as “artworks for the page”. In many cases, Printed Matter is one of the few resources available to emerging artists who are beginning to explore the medium, or for those artists whose work is not commercially viable. Its objectives include fostering critical approach to and discussion about the artistic publishing field, forging connections between the publishing field and other contemporary artistic practices as well as with the social and political environment that contains and affects all art production.

For the purpose of promoting public access to and awareness of its endeavours in its headquarters in New York’s Chelsea district, Printed Matter has a public reading room where its more than 15,000 publications by 5,000 international artists are available for viewing and purchase. It also offers a free consulting service to libraries, art institutions and art professionals. And there is an extensive educational programme including discussions, book presentations, public readings, performances and exhibitions aimed at broadening public knowledge of art publications, as well as offering public visibility to particular artists or artist groups. Furthermore, in 2006 the organisation created the NY Art Book Fair, with the intention of re-establishing the city of New York as a centre of artistic publishing production, attracting more than 700 exhibitors and numerous visitors to what is the only fair that is free to the public in the city of New York.

Find more information about Printed Matter at http://www.printedmatter.org

Printed Matter. Learn to Read Art at MUSAC
For the Showcase Project at MUSAC, the project’s curator AA Bronson will create a display so that visitors will be able to get to know some of its most representative publications —dating from 1976 to our day— including large artists’ books, small format books, magazines, catalogues and other artists’ editions produced by the organization. Also, an edition of 3.000 copies of the badge Learn to read art, created for Printed Matter by artist Lawrence Weiner, will be produced and distributed for free on the opening day. In addition to this, a small editorial project will be created by Ari Marcopoulos for Printed Matter & MUSAC.

About AA. Bronson
AA Bronson lived and worked as one of the three artists of General Idea from 1969 through to 1994, presenting over 100 solo exhibitions, publishing FILE magazine, and founding Art Metropole, Toronto, an artist-run centre for artists’ editions and publications. Director of Art Metropole from 1974 to 1984 and again in the mid nineties, Bronson developed Art Metropole’s permanent collection of 13,000 artists’ books and editions, and oversaw its transfer to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Since 1999, he has exhibited internationally as a solo artist at the Secession, Vienna; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge; and The Power Plant, Toronto. Author and editor of more than 40 books, including his autobiography Negative Thoughts (2001), he is also the director of Printed Matter, Inc., New York City. Recent curatorial projects include solo exhibitions of editions by Barbara Bloom, Aleksandra Mir, Micah Lexier, Fiona Banner, and Fierce Pussy. His interest in contemporary art history has led him to curate exhibitions such as From Sea to Shining Sea (1987), The Power Plant, Toronto; I will not make any more boring art (2006), Printed Matter, New York; and most recently, Learn to Read Art: A History of Printed Matter (2008), Artspeak, Vancouver. He was appointed senior critic at the School of Art, Yale University, New Haven in 2006. In 2007, he was named honorary doctor of fine arts by NSCAD University, Halifax, and most recently was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Proyecto Vitrinas


Image: Ugo Rondinone, exhibition view Big Mind Sky, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2007. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich. ©the artist

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