Major

Fri, Jun 5, 2009
7:30 PM

Third-Floor Gallery (directions)

YTJ: Complain The Explanation

Part of Exhibition Related
 
Music / Performance

In Complain The Explanation, Mariechen Danz activates her life-sized diorama, Fossilizing the Body Border Disorder (2008), through performance and song. Accompanied by Jackson Fledermaus, Danz’s vocal performance bridges indecipherable sounds with pop melodies in order to create tension between audience reception and rejection. The performance draws on epochs throughout history, harkening back to images of early man. As the embodiment of “Bully,” a fictional character based on images of tyrannical dictators, Danz demands space with brutish gestures slipping between the ultra masculine and feminine, as the character’s interior psychological state is extruded into action. Both the figurative sculptures and the elaborate costumes of the performers depict what Danz describes as a “folk extroverting the inner in both their expression and their physical states, their bodies of armor consisting of the structure and entrails of the human body.”

Music by Mariechen Danz and Bodi Bill.

Sponsors TOP

“The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” is made possible by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Major support is provided by the Friends of the Generational, co-chaired by Maja Hoffman and Dakis Joannou; Steering Committee Members Lonti Ebers and J. Bruce Flatt, Lorinda Ash Ezersky and Peter Ezersky, Ken Kuchin, and Randy Slifka; and Friends Shelley Fox Aarons and Phil Aarons, Hilary and Peter Hatch, Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis, Toby Devan Lewis, and Lisa Schiff.

Additional significant support is made possible by the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund, Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso para el Arte, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Robert Mapplethorpe Photography Fund, and Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Special thanks also to the New Museum’s Leadership Council: Cesar Cervantes, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Nathalie and Charles de Gunzburg, Maria and João Oliveira-Rendeiro, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Ellen and Michael Ringier, and Pamela and Arthur Sanders.

Support for artist travel and participation provided, in part, by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway. Support for the accompanying publications is made possible by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.

Profiles TOP

Mariechen Danz

Mariechen Danz was born in 1980 in Dublin. She studied art at the UDK in Berlin and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, and received her MFA in Art and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2008. Danz’s work encompasses various mediums such as drawing, sculpture, photography, ritual, tools, and objects that are then activated through elaborate costumes, staging, and vocal performances. Danz has presented work at German venues including the Kasseler Kunstverein, the Kunsthalle Bremen, and Forgotten Bar Project, Berlin. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin.


Jackson Fledermaus

Jackson Fledermaus is an artist and folk singer from New York currently based in Los Angeles. Fledermaus’s work ranges from taxidermy to interactive performances and organic farming. He has exhibited at spaces in Los Angeles including Sea and Space Explorations, Machine Project, 533 Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Musuem of Art. Fledermaus performs as a solo artist and in the punk band Fresher Flesh.