calendario eventi  :: 

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8/9/2014

Three exhibitions

Greene Naftali, New York

Dan Graham
SEPTEMBER 9 – OCTOBER 4, 2014

Greene Naftali is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new and historical work by Dan Graham. This is the gallery's first show with the artist and the inaugural exhibition in its ground floor space, which was designed by Rexrode Chirigos Architects.

Design for Showing Rock Videos (2014) is an architecturally scaled optical device made of reflective glass and stainless steel. It contains a selection of rock videos from acts associated with the 1970s and ‘80s counterculture in New York and Europe. Hardcore, post-punk, and No Wave bands like The Fall, Minor Threat, UT, and Theoretical Girls were part of underground music’s turn toward radical experimentation and are crucial for Graham who has written extensively about rock music throughout his career. Videos on view here are Ericka Beckman’s 135 Grand Street New York, 1979; Rodney Graham’s Angel in the Morning; The Fall: Perverted by Language; Punk Cocktail; and Minor Threat.

The structure, itself a meeting place for visual and auditory saturation, also creates a series of unexpected optical and physical experiences. The porousness of the piece’s zig-zagging metal form and the semi-reflective surface of the opposing glass curve create a constantly shifting landscape that refracts its changing environment as passersby come and go. This emphasis on the situation of the spectator is central to the artist’s practice. Since the 1980s Graham has created many pavilion designs, some which have never been realized. Among these are two featured here: Graham’s Children’s Pavilion, a playful schematic that takes the dynamic between children and adults as its primary subject; and the Liza Bruce Boutique Design, an unrealized project whose aim was to heighten the bodily experience of shop goers through shape shifting mirrors and foam flooring.

Proceeding from the legacies of Minimalism and Pop Graham’s investigations have drawn on the fields of architecture, rock music, film, photography, and performance—engaged always with the psychological life of objects, and the reciprocal relationship between subject and viewer, interiority and exteriority. Also on view is a group of key Dan Graham publications, architectural models, and a selection of photographs, drawings, and other works from 1966 onwards.

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Gedi Sibony

Greene Naftali is pleased to announce its fourth solo exhibition with Gedi Sibony, his first in its new ground-floor space. Continuing to recruit objects of disuse, Sibony presents a new body of work comprised mostly of pieces cut out of decommisioned semi trailers. Presented here is a group of them in the main room. They are flat, hang on the wall, and have occurances of paint used to block out logos or text. In the backroom is a small, playful ensemble of copies of a Fontana and two ancient figurines.

Gedi Sibony (b. 1973) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2014); Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2012); Culturgest, Lisbon (2011); and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009). His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

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Harun Farocki
8th Floor
SEPTEMBER 9 – OCTOBER 18, 2014

Greene Naftali is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition by German filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki.
For over 40 years, Farocki mined the fields of film and digital images, drawing out their impact on the history of cinema and on our social and political consciousness. His characteristic film essays have taken as their subject a variety of global themes, including the perfunctory act of employees leaving their work places at the end of their shifts, the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and the US Military’s use of computerized simulation. Consistent throughout these works is an underlying interest in the various uses of visual technology and its sociopolitical impact.

For this exhibition, Greene Naftali presents his final work: Parallel 1-1V (2012-14), a new four-part video installation that traces computer graphics from its early stages—when horizontal and vertical lines were used to denote people and objects—to its current state of hyper-mimesis. Screened simultaneously on four different screens, each video focuses on different aspects of the video game genre and its rapid technological progression over a short span of 30 years.

Parallel I tracks a trajectory from early popular video games—Mystery House (1980), Pitfall (1982), and King’s Quest (1984)—to its current, more advanced versions where symbols on the screen are barely distinguishable from the reality they attempt to portray. Parallel II explores the subject of boundaries— how animated games conceive of space and their seeming limitless borders. Parallel III concentrates on the illusion of reality produced in game play, and Parallel IV approaches the topic of subjects, and how characters superficially navigate relationships between one another in these simulated worlds. Interspersing computer-generated material with footage of real programmers at work, Farocki illustrates the shifting dynamic between real and virtual worlds, and the changing status of the image from one focused on reproduction, to one focused on construction.

Also on view is Ein Bild [An Image], Farocki’s 1983 Direct Cinema film that documents the meticulous process of creating a centerfold for German Playboy. Here Farocki steadies his gaze on the highly constructed environment—documenting set hands, cameramen, directors, and model all at once. Turning the camera back onto the image-makers themselves, Farocki’s descriptive lens captures the scene and its many subjects, providing an overview rather than a prescriptive narrative. In this scene, the model is not the only person on display.

Image: Harun Farocki, Parallel I-IV, 2012-14, 2 two-channels video, 2 one-channel video, 4 parts video installation: 16min, 9 min, 7 min, 11 min.

Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street New York
Hours: tuesday - saturday 10am-6pm

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