New Museum Exhibitions

"Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision" May 08, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:34:01 -0500

Guest curator Heejin Kim, Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea

The complex and contradictory national characteristics of modern Korea are condensed in the region of Dongducheon, the subject of Insa Art Space’s Museum as Hub presentation on the topic of neighborhood. With a population of 88,000 people, Dongducheon is a small city located between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Because of its geographical conditions, surrounded by a wall of mountains and a stream running right through the middle of the city, Dongducheon has been a crucial military base of the Japanese imperial army and then the US armed forces stationed in Korea over the last century. Dongducheon has evolved through a long historical process and its history is full of conflicts and regrets, prosperity and downfall, despair and hope. What is crucial in these histories is the motivation and awareness of the issues by local residents who believe in the significance of these memories, histories, and narratives as something worthy of representation and documentation.

Insa Art Space has commissioned Sangdon Kim, Koh Seung Wook, Rho Jae Oon, and siren eun young jung to work on projects about Dongducheon and to participate as members of a collective team, along with project commentators, designers, local activists, and IAS to realize this project. For the team, the Dongducheon project is an act of rousing consciousness in individuals as subjects and social beings through encounters, dialogue, and participatory activities. Theirs is an active process of intervention, documentation, and evolution that is open to various methods and strategies.

A partnership of five international arts organizations, Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance our understanding of contemporary art. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events. Initiated by the New Museum in 2006, the partnership includes Insa Art Space (Seoul, South Korea); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).

Showing May 08, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

"SANAA: Works
1998-2008" Mar 28, 2008–Jun 15, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 14:24:18 -0500

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA have, in a short time, developed from a relatively little-known Japanese partnership to an internationally esteemed firm responsible for high-profile projects including The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and our museum, the New Museum in New York. Often referred to as an architect’s architect, SANAA has avoided a signature style while embracing qualities of light, transparency, and openness. The show (in the gallery, the café, and lobby) marks SANAA’s first comprehensive exhibition in New York and presents commissions and projects made over a ten-year period, characterized by an alchemy of understatement, lightness, warmth, and respect for human scale.

SANAA’s work is luminous and deceptively simple, sophisticated in its treatment of complex building details and fluid, nonhierarchical space. Their inventive use of exterior façades as permeable membranes establish subtle but provocative relationships between interior and exterior, individual and community, and the realms of public and private experience. Their intricate use of variation, unevenness, and off-centeredness emphasizes the relationship of architectural elements not as discrete entities along a single axis, but rather how they relate to one another. The models and plans in “SANAA: Works 1998-2008” reveal an intense interconnectedness between, for instance, commercial building projects such as the Christian Dior Bulding in Omotesando, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Vitrashop Factory Hall in Basel, Switzerland (2004—); domestic architecture like the House in a Plum Grove, Tokyo, Japan (2001-2003) and Flower House, Suiza, Switzerland (2006—); and cultural projects including the Zollverein School of Management and Design, Essen, Germany (2003—); EPFL Learning Center, Lausanne, Switzerland (2004—); and the highly anticipated Louvre-Lens, France (2005—).

Smaller, complementary prototypes, furniture, and housewares are presented in visual conversation with SANAA’s building designs. Among the already existing SANAA-designed tables and Rabbit chairs in the New Museum’s café, is a model of SANAA’s Flower chair; a set of Alessi Tea & Coffee Towers; and a hanahana (flowerflower) stand with fresh flowers.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, Karen Wong, Director of External Affairs, and SANAA.

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Banner image: Model of "Flower House," Suiza, Switzerland (2006—), courtesy SANAA.

Showing Mar 28, 2008–Jun 15, 2008

"Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer" Apr 23, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 15:47:42 -0600

This exhibition brings together two artists - Daniel Guzmán (born 1964, lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico) and Steven Shearer (born 1968, lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada). Both artists work in a variety of mediums exploring issues of male identity, extended adolescence, rock culture, death, and the seductive ambiguity of self-portraiture. Experiencing their work, one immediately sees a parallel adoption of 1970s and 1980s pop icons and bands as surrogates and personal avatars.

Daniel Guzmán draws. His work is a tidal wave of drawing that also becomes a dynamic inventory of drawing styles. His myriad influences range from Aztec codices, Haight-Ashbury psychedelia, comic books from his youth, and Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco. The topics of Guzmán’s drawings fuse old gods with current events, cultural idols, inventories of deadly sins, and cardinal virtues.

Guzmán’s sculpture is a natural extension of his drawing techniques. He uses the simplest of materials to sketch a three-dimensional incident and establish encounters with the magic realism of the everyday. In much of his work there are two levels of interpretation - what it is (the sum of its parts) and what it signifies (the poetry of its allusions).

While it is impossible to think of Guzmán’s art outside of the context of Mexico, it is equally impossible to ignore the wider cultural context provided by the United States and the world beyond. It is the ease of his citations (be it William Burroughs or Roberto Bolaño, Bruce Nauman or Kiss) that creates a floating universe of sublimely mismatched equivalencies.

Steven Shearer curates collections. He maintains thousands of digital files from which his art is evolved and created. In service to his work, Shearer harvests the aspirations of those souls wandering on the Web, riffing on air guitars, catching their zzz’s, selling their stuff on eBay, or posing as the stars they yearn to be. From these enormous files, Shearer creates collage accumulations that are epic documentaries of the possessions and the poses of a slacker paradise.

Shearer also paints the ghosts of the Web. His portraits of anonymous adolescents and fallen teen idols are replete with the keyed-up color of the Symbolists whom the artist admires, but they also come with the subjects sheathed in a psychedelic aura that has vibrated around metal bands for decades. It is, in fact, the names and lyrics of metal bands from which Shearer derives the acid-etched poems that are reminiscent of William Burroughs’ cut-up techniques.

Shearer’s sculpture has grown to be an increasingly important part of his work. It comes with narratives that imply design as a tool for character reformation and psychic healing. Like the music Shearer references, his sculpture is both a narcotic promise and a harmonic convergence.

The exhibition is organized by Richard Flood, Chief Curator.

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Showing Apr 23, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

"Paul Chan: The 7 Lights" Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:36:33 -0600

This exhibition marks the American premiere of Paul Chan’s complete series “The 7 ~~Lights~~,” offering a unique occasion to explore the practice of a New York-based artist whose work engages such fundamental themes as politics, poetry, war, death, and desire. Begun in 2005, Chan’s ambitious cycle combines obsolete computer technology with hypnotic imagery to create a series of enigmatic encounters with light and darkness. In the title, the word “light” has been struck through, drawing attention to its dramatic absence.

Presented alongside a selection of works on paper, older videos, and a new projection, the ~~Lights~~ create a vast image of cyclical destruction and rebirth, spread across floors and walls like light falling through windows. Structured over the course of a day, each of the ~~Lights~~ begins peacefully, with the warm colors of dawn. Slowly the atmosphere changes: silhouettes of objects rise up through the air and are dismantled by obscure forces, while human shadows plummet towards the ground. Like a dream deteriorating into a nightmare, the sequence becomes increasingly horrific until it fades to dusk and peace returns, waiting for day to break again.

Just as a shadow cannot fully describe the object from which it emanates, “The 7 ~~Lights~~” convey a narrative that is inevitably incomplete, yet rich with historical references, including ancient Greek mythology and Baroque painting. “The 7 ~~Lights~~” can also be related to Biblical accounts of the origin of the world and its impending end, suggesting a possible reading of Chan’s cycle as an allegory of the seven days of creation. Furthermore, Chan’s work calls to mind contemporary tragedies such as 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing eruptions of terrorist violence around the globe. Unfolding like a present-day Last Judgment, a subjective and anonymous hand decides what rises and what falls; touching on the viewer’s own fears, the result is not as one might have imagined - worthless objects ascend while human life is cast aside like rainfall. However, caught as they are in an endless repetition, the ~~Lights~~ suggest that perhaps there is no end, just an eternal beginning.

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This exhibition was organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions

A 158-page catalogue, The 7 ~~Lights~~, produced in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, includes color reproductions of Chan’s complete oeuvre to date, with essays and interviews by George Baker, Paul Chan, exhibition curator Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Adam Phillips, and Kitty Scott.

“Paul Chan: The 7 ~~Lights~~” is made possible by the lead support of the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection, Greece, and Randy Slifka. Additional generous support provided by the New York State Council on the Arts, Julia Stoschek, and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.

Support for the accompanying publication has been provided by the J. McSweeney and G. Mills Publications Fund at the New Museum.

All works courtesy Greene Naftali, New York, unless otherwise noted.

Showing Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

"Tomma Abts" Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:10:05 -0600

Since abstraction was introduced into Western European art at the beginning of the twentieth century, art history has defined it as an artistic language that freed itself from subject matter to concentrate instead on content; that content was an essential expression of an idea or feeling, rather than a representation of an object from the real world. When Tomma Abts’ paintings first came to public attention at the turn of this new millennium, abstraction was not widely found among young artists practicing in centers like London, Berlin, or New York. Painting of a decidedly narrative kind, with roots equally in old master paintings and vernacular illustration, was the focus. In this climate, Abts’ paintings delivered a shock to the eye, as well as to the prevailing taste; small in size, subdued in palette, they were, and are, profoundly nonrepresentational. This exhibition, the first solo show of the artist’s work in the U.S., consists of fourteen works painted over the past eight years. All of them are exemplary of Abts’ remarkably consistent method and stylistic language.

A hallmark of Abts’ work is that it is composed of forms painstakingly assembled into compositions that are as complex as they are contradictory. Her paintings display balance without symmetry, movement and depth without optical tricks, and luminosity without the harshness of bright color. Abts is one of the few contemporary nonobjective painters who don’t paint pictures of forms, however unidentifiable. Freed from all reference to nature or to the world at large, Abts’ works are not pictures of something, but rather create something albeit unnamable and inchoate. This distinction between paintings of things and paintings that are things in themselves is not merely visual; it represents an almost ideological split between a kind of art that concerns itself with reflecting the world, and one that strives to add to it, or even remake it.

The idea that the artistic act can be empowered in such a way hasn’t been a part of the mainstream contemporary painting discussion for at least a decade, but it seems peculiarly pertinent for our uncertain times. There is no doubt that the dawn of the new millennium did not conjure Abts’ paintings, but their anxious beauty could not be more appropriate for the moment we are living in.

The exhibition is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

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Showing Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

"Jeffrey Inaba" Dec 01, 2007–Nov 09, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:42:55 -0600

Jeffrey Inaba uses a radical approach to research and design to make opaque information come alive. Inaba has created Donor Hall for the New Museum’s lower-level hallway, a bold, immersive graphic environment that identifies and quantifies public and private philanthropy around the world. The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture.

INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.

Banner image:
Jeffrey Inaba / INABA / C-Lab, Donor Hall (detail), 2007
Digital print on vinyl
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Showing Dec 01, 2007–Nov 09, 2008

New Museum Exhibitions

"Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision" May 08, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

"SANAA: Works1998-2008" Mar 28, 2008–Jun 15, 2008

"Double Album: Daniel Guzmán and Steven Shearer" Apr 23, 2008–Jul 06, 2008

"Paul Chan: The 7 Lights" Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

"Tomma Abts" Apr 09, 2008–Jun 29, 2008

"Jeffrey Inaba" Dec 01, 2007–Nov 09, 2008

"SANAA: Works
1998-2008" Mar 28, 2008–Jun 15, 2008