Exhibitions at the New Museum

"Museum as Hub: The Bidoun Library Project" Aug 04, 2010–Sep 26, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:52:11 -0500

The Bidoun Library Project at the New Museum is a highly partial account of five decades of printed matter in, near, about, and around the Middle East. Arrayed along these shelves are pulp fictions and propaganda, monographs and guidebooks, and pamphlets and periodicals, on subjects ranging from the oil boom to the Dubai bust, the Cold War to the hot pant, Pan-Arabs to Black Muslims, revolutionaries to royals, and Orientalism to its opposites.

Most of the 700-odd titles on display were acquired specifically for this exhibition. The shape of the collection was dictated primarily by search terms on the World Wide Web rather than any intrinsic notion of aptness or excellence. Searching for “Arab,” “paperback,” “1970s,” and “<$3,” we acquired dozens of books about the Oil Crisis, the cruel love of the Sheikh, and the lifestyles of the nouveau riche. A similar search for “Iran” produced its own set of types and stereotypes. We did not set out to find the best books about, say, the Iranian revolution; in a sense, we looked for the worst. Or, rather, we tried to look at what was there.

The result is less a coherent group of titles or texts than an assortment of books as things, sorted roughly into four themes or units. Catalogues hang from the ceiling in front of each shelf cluster. Inside is a documentation of a selection of books from that shelf, in dialogue with excerpted texts and images from the library as a whole.

The Bidoun Library includes a program of Iranian film, video, and television culled from low-fidelity DVDs and VHS tapes that circulate among Iranians in the Diaspora. The selection includes post-revolutionary variety shows, music videos, and other totems of middlebrow—unibrow?—culture. This is an Iranian cinema unlikely to be shown at Lincoln Center.

Please exercise caution when investigating the Bidoun Library. Many of the books, magazines, and pamphlets on display are in delicate condition. Gloves are provided for you to wear, to preserve the integrity of the materials on view.

If you should examine a book more closely, please remember to return it to its original location. Keep sealed items sealed. Thank you for your interest in the Bidoun Library.

This exhibition is organized by the magazine Bidoun: Arts and Culture From the Middle East.

The magazine Bidoun: Arts and Culture From the Middle East was founded in 2004 as an arm of Bidoun Projects, a non-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting contemporary artists in and around the Middle East. For more information about the project please visit bidoun.com.

Click here for a PDF version of the brochure for "Museum as Hub: The Bidoun Library Project."

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 | 12:00 AM

"Amy Granat: Light 3 Ways" Jun 23, 2010–Sep 19, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 11:28:21 -0500

Amy Granat is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to “draw” with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.

Granat’s project for the New Museum, “Light 3 Ways,” is an exploration of the various ways light can be perceived. The installation consists of three discrete, yet interconnected works, including a sound piece, an outdoor video projection, and a 16mm film installation. The audio work, created in collaboration with Christopher Anderson, is a recording of the sound created when one of Granat’s scratch films passes through a projector. The sound is then enhanced by a synthesizer, and the result can be heard by using the headphones on the staircase landing between the museum’s third and fourth floors. The outdoor projection is an abstract composition of light and dark made from a digitally manipulated video transfer of a scratched 16mm film. The video, which was made through a process of removal or erasure as a means to create a series of images, leaves in its wake an almost ghostly presence on the concrete exterior wall of the building just north of the Museum. Its pulsating biomorphic forms recall the results of a Rorschach print, used by psychologists to gage and record human perception. This component of the installation can be viewed Wednesday through Sunday, sunset to sunrise, from the Bowery or the New Museum’s seventh-floor terrace. The third work consists of three looped 16mm films activated by the viewer’s presence via a motion sensor. These stuttering, delicate films give the illusion of animated drawings. The rhythmic flicker of the white lines dancing against black is wholly absorbing; meditative, almost hypnotic.

Granat’s fascination with the potential of light, sound, and movement as mediums not only links her work to postwar experimental filmmaking, but also invokes the rich, but somewhat occluded history of experimentation with kinetic art, from Marcel Duchamp to László Moholy-Nagy and Jean Tinguely. Through the phenomenon of electricity and the miracle of movement, these avant-gardists envisioned a future of limitless artistic possibility beyond painting and sculpture. Though “Light 3 Ways” is a creation of the twenty-first century—a time of myriad discoveries that make those of an earlier era seem quaint—it allows us to understand and maybe participate in a very twentieth-century sense of wonder, and see the beauty of dancing light again for the first time.

“Light 3 Ways” is organized by Amy Mackie, Curatorial Associate, and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Banner image: Ghostrider (projection stills), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

“Brion Gysin: Dream Machine”
July 7 – October 3, 2010

Amy Granat is a contributor to the catalogue for “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” available in the New Museum store.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 | 12:00 AM

"Rivane Neuenschwander:
A Day Like Any Other" Jun 23, 2010–Sep 19, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:34:25 -0600

Participate online »

This major midcareer survey of Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander (b. 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) will cover a decade of the internationally admired artist’s work. It will spotlight the artist’s unique contribution to the narrative of Brazilian Conceptualism and reveal her wide-ranging, interdisciplinary practice which merges painting, photography, film, sculpture, installation, collaborative actions, and participatory events. Her authorship of the work is primary, but she also functions as an editor, collaborator, social organizer, and commissioning agent. Like her predecessors Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Neuenschwander resists a singular direction in her practice. Instead, the artist creates a series of organic relationships that interweave themes such as nature, language, temporality, and the poetry of the quotidian.

“It is Neuenschwander’s extravagant disregard for artistic categories that makes her work so perfectly tempered for this time. It is the ease with which she lives in the university of the world that guarantees her work its freshness and depth,” said Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum.

Three installations in “A Day Like Any Other” will involve direct visitor participation: Neuenschwander’s I Wish Your Wish (2003); First Love (2010); and Walking in Circles (2000). I Wish Your Wish will be installed in the New Museum’s lobby gallery space (always open to the public free of charge). At the church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil the faithful tie silk ribbons to their wrists and to the gates of the church, and, according to tradition, their wishes are granted when the ribbons wear away and fall off. For Neuenschwander’s installation I Wish Your Wish at the New Museum, hundreds of similar ribbons will be printed with visitors’ wishes from past projects, and will hang from the gallery walls. Visitors will be invited to remove a ribbon, tie it to their wrist, and replace it with a new wish written on slip of paper, continuing the project that keeps generating new ribbons and dreams. For another piece, First Love, a police sketch artist will sit with visitors and listen as those visitors describe the faces of their first loves; the sketch artist will then produce portraits of these “first loves” to adorn the walls of the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. In Walking in Circles (2000), small halos of adhesive applied to the gallery floor by the artist will pick up dirt from visitors’ shoes. The work will create a physical and temporal map of the exhibition’s traffic patterns.

The exhibition will include two of Neuenschwander’s immersive installations. The first of these, Rain Rains (2002), is an environment of leaking buckets that are controlled from flooding by a Sisyphean recirculation tended to by museum staff in four-hour cycles. The second immersive work, The Conversation (2010), will be realized expressly for the exhibition and pays homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s revolutionary 1974 film of the same name. Like the film, Neuenschwander’s installation investigates the systematic invasion of privacy in an era of dangerously purposed technology. The artist and the New Museum will work with security experts to create an Orwellian environment filled with surveillance devices. Prior to the exhibition’s opening, Neuenschwander will raid the “bug-filled” room in an attempt to uncover the devices, a performance that will be recorded by these devices and then played back in the partially dissembled exhibition space.

In addition to these participatory actions and major installations, the exhibition will also contain several suites of new paintings including After the Storm (2010), made with maps of New York counties exposed to torrential rain and At a Certain Distance (Ex-Voto Paintings) (2010), as well as the lustrously beautiful film The Tenant (2010), which follows the journey of a soap bubble as it wanders through a deserted house in a permanent state of suspension. The show will also include Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts) (2001–10), communally evolved sculptures made by customers during conversations at bars and restaurants near Neuenschwander’s home in Brazil, and A Day Like Any Other (2008), an informal installation involving a series of flip clocks placed throughout the New Museum building, among other works in the exhibition.

“Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other” is curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator at the New Museum. The exhibition is organized by the New Museum in collaboration with the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

On the occasion of her exhibition opening, Rivane Neuenschwander will discuss her work with Richard Flood in the theater at the New Museum on Thursday, June 24, at 7 PM. For more information visit http://www.newmuseum.org/events/454.

Banner image: Chove Chuva [Rain Rains], 2003
Aluminum buckets, water, steel cable, ladder.
Dimensions variable
Installation view at Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; image courtesy the artist.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010 | 12:00 AM

"Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" Jul 07, 2010–Oct 03, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:32:41 -0600

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The New Museum will present “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” the first US retrospective of the work of the painter, performer, poet, and writer Brion Gysin (born 1916, Taplow, UK–died 1986, Paris). Working simultaneously in a variety of mediums, Gysin was an irrepressible inventor, serial collaborator, and subversive spirit whose considerable innovations continue to influence musicians and writers, as well as visual and new media artists today. The exhibition will include over 300 drawings, books, paintings, photo-collages, films, slide projections, and sound works, as well as an original Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes the flicker effect to induce visions when experienced with closed eyes. “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” is curated by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and will be on view in the New Museum’s second floor gallery.

“An exhibition of an artist who died more than twenty years ago represents an approach to the notion of the new that is somewhat different from the Museum’s standard—one that emphasizes relevance and fresh information over chronology, and brings to the fore a relatively neglected yet very influential innovator who continues to have a strong impact on artists working today,” said Laura Hoptman.

In 1959, Gysin created the Cut-Up Method, in which words and phrases were literally cut up into pieces and then rearranged to untether them from their received meanings and reveal new ones. His Cut-Up experiments, which he shared with his lifelong friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs, culminated in Burroughs and Gysin’s The Third Mind, a book-length collage manifesto on the Cut-Up Method and its uses. Transferring this notion to experimenting with tape-recorded poems manipulated by a computer algorithm, Gysin created sound poetry and was among the earliest users of the computer in art. At the same creative moment, Gysin conceived of the Dreamachine. During the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, Gysin would continue his collaborations, and prove to be a mentor for myriad artists, poets, and musicians, from John Giorno to Brian Jones, to David Bowie and Patti Smith, to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Keith Haring, among many others.

“Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published with Hugh Merrell, Ltd., featuring essays by Laura Hoptman; John Geiger, literary scholar and author of the definitive Gysin biography; Gerard Audinet, Chief Curator of the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, which houses Gysin’s artistic estate; James Grauerholz, Gysin’s friend and literary executor; as well as appreciations by contemporary artists, musicians, and poets including George Condo, Paul Elliman, Ugo Rondinone, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cerith Wyn Evans, Shannon Ebner, Trisha Donnelly, and Sue de Beer.

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine is traveling to the Institut d’art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, October 16 – November 28, 2010

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 | 12:00 AM

"Ugo Rondinone" Dec 01, 2007–Dec 01, 2010

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:34:18 -0600

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, Rondinone’s work explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life. For the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, Rondinone will reprise his 2001 work Hell, Yes! The installation encapsulates the philosophy of openness, fearlessness, and optimism that surrounds the New Museum’s reemergence in the contemporary art community, as well as its history as the home of socially committed contemporary art.

Hell, Yes! is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.

Saturday, December 1, 2007 | 12:00 AM