Experimental Geography

Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, land fill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism. This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether).

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer and artist Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water-treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. For example, Ilana Halperin explores the intersection of personal, historic, and geologic time, as may be seen in the photograph of her stooping at the edge of natural hot springs to boil a small cup of milk. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, examines the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using pragmatic skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, CLUI forces a reading of the American landscape (which includes traffic in Los Angeles, submerged cities, and the broadcast towers in the San Gabriel Mountains) that refamiliarizes the viewer with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.

Experimental Geography is curated by Nato Thompson, curator and producer at Creative Time in New York, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with texts by Thompson, Jeffrey Kastner, Paglen, and others.

Friends of William Blake, The People’s Guide to the RNC, 2004, from the We Are Here Map Archive

Exhibition Itinerary

Richard E. Peeler Art Center , DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana
September 19 – December 2, 2008

Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota
February 7 – April 18, 2009

The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 28 – September 20, 2009

Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
February 21 - May 30, 2010

ICI: Experimental Geography

BROADCAST

BROADCAST
Curated by Irene Hofmann and co-organized by iCI, New York, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore

September 12 through December 28, 2008

"Ranging in date from 1966 to 2007, the works in Broadcast make use of one of two strategies: broadcasting and re-broadcasting. The former refers to works that involve an artist intervening into existing broadcasts or broadcasting channels by participating in a live broadcast (either as an invited or uninvited participant) or by creating a broadcast. The latter features the use or manipulation of previously existing TV or radio material. Within each of these strategies, there are two impulses followed by the artists—either an iconoclastic, aggressive position, at times intended to question FCC regulations, or a more cooperative and collaborative position on the other.

While this exhibition focuses primarily on more recent artists' explorations of broadcast themes, Broadcast includes a selection of important early works that traces the development of this increasingly relevant area of artistic production. Some artists in the late 1960s and 1970s began to broadcast on their own, seeking a parallel system to commercial broadcast television, while others began to cooperate with progressive public television stations that invited artists to participate in residency programs.

Artists in this exhibition include:
Dara Birnbaum
Chris Burden
Gregory Green
Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter
Christian Jankowski
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
neuroTransmitter
Antonio Muntadas
Nam June Paik
TVTV (Top Value Television)
Siebren Versteeg

Some of the first works by the guerrilla television group TVTV were edited at WNET's TV Lab such as the landmark documentary, Four More Years, (1972). An iconoclastic view of the American electoral process, Four More Years is TVTV's irreverent coverage of Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign and the Republican convention in Miami.

In a hostile intervention, Chris Burden's TV Hijack, (1972) was his response to a TV station's repeated rejection of his proposals for TV programming ideas, and was a challenge to what Burden viewed as the control television has on our lives. During a live broadcast on Channel 3 Cablevision in Irvine, California, on February 9, 1972, Burden took his interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans hostage with a small knife held to her throat and threatened her life if the station stopped the live transmission of the incident. At the end of the recording the artist destroyed the tapes of the interview.

Instances of critical reuse of previously broadcasted material include Hostage (1994) by Dara Birnbaum that uses archival media coverage from the 1977 kidnapping of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader Meinhof group, or Antonio Muntadas' The Last Ten Minutes, (1976-77) which studies broadcasting conventions in cities worldwide at different moments in history.

Christian Jankowski's video work, Telemistica, (1999) which was first shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale, features footage from live broadcasts of psychics on local Venetian television stations. Jankowski called a number of these popular shows and posed questions to the psychics and astrologers about how his work would be received at the Biennale. Some of Jankowski's questions include: “What will the public think about my work?” “Will they like it?” “Will I be successful?”

12 Miles Out, (2005) by the artist group neuroTransmitter, explores the practice of offshore pirate radio prevalent in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the US a decade later. Merging analog radio technology with line drawing, this visual and sound installation uses ambient sound and archival audio material broadcast from a transmitter incorporated into the representational drawing of the 1964 host ship of Radio Caroline, one of the most infamous radio ships that occupied international waters off the coast of Great Britain.

Whether appropriating its conventions and programs, or engaging in a live TV or radio broadcast, the artists in this exhibition subvert the authority and influence of a pervasive and powerful medium.


About the Curator
Irene Hofmann is the curator of Broadcast, and the Executive Director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. Prior to moving to Baltimore, she was Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach, California where she was the curator of the museum's New Media “Orange Lounge”, co-curator of the 2002 and 2004 California Biennial, and curator of solo exhibitions by Jason Dodge, Fabrice Gygi, and Marjetica Potrc. From 1996-2001 she served as Curator of Exhibitions at Cranbrook Art Museum where she organized exhibitions with artists such as Buzz Spector, Kutlug Ataman, Mark Dion, Joseph Grigely, and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle."

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

ARTeCINEMA Sulmona

ARTeCINEMA Sulmona
3-8 novembre 2008

a cura di Marco Maiorano
http://marcomaiorano.blogspot.com/

Studio Target, Via Angeloni
L'altro foyer, Vico dei Sardi
Avatars Gallery, Piazza XX Settembre

Video, performance, live painting

Questo sarà il menù da gustare a Sulmona nella settimana di ARTeCINEMA,2ª rassegna collaterale al Sulmonacinema Film Festival, nata con il proposito di indagare il rapporto tra il cinema e le altre arti visive: un ambizioso obiettivo che l'associazione Sulmonacinema si è prefissa anche quest'anno, dopo la fortunata prima edizione del 2007.

La linea seguita consisterà nell'approfondire la ricerca sulla contaminazione tra discipline artistiche, esplorando altresì l'evoluzione della kermesse cinematografica sulmonese e i temi che hanno caratterizzato i suoi quasi trent'anni di vita.

In omaggio al clima artistico degli anni settanta ci sarà inoltre una sezione dedicata alle azioni: sessioni di pittura live, nylon painting, una performance di bodypainting camaleontico, per finire con una grande opera collettiva, ad evocare le atmosfere sollecitate dalla visione dei film sul 'Sexantotto' in rassegna.

I lavori video proposti saranno attinenti alle suggestioni tipiche del Festival.
Vedremo opere sull'anarchia, l'indisciplina, i temi sociali, la poetica ovidiana, la fantascienza, le nuove tecnologie, la diversità, l'alienazione.

Artisti:

Barbara Agreste, Alessandro Amaducci, Riccardo Battaglia,Blu, Jordana Canova, Francesco Cinelli, Corposcenico, Francesco Di Santo,Roberto Di Rocco, Matteo Fato, Mery Favaretto, Tommaso Garavini,Idea Destroying Muros, Marco Lamanna, Niko Mainieri, Miruco e Degene,Monticelli e Pagone, Giulia Perli, Francesco Petrilli, Francesco Sambo,Chiara Scarfò, Chiara Schiavon, Fabrizio Sebastiani, Silvia Serenari, Daniela Vola.

Marnie Weber

Praz-Delavallade is pleased to announce the fourth solo show devoted to the Los Angeles artist Marnie Weber. On this occasion she will present her multi-layered, inter-connected body of work embracing collage, sculpture, costume, video and music in both space of the gallery. By combining her own mythology of imaginary creatures, animals and female characters in different mediums, she creates fairy tale worlds whose inhabitants are placed in dreamlike settings.

Ride Through the Bridge, 2008 - Photographic Collage

In her exhibition at Praz-Delavallade, Marnie Weber relates the most recent episode of her on-going series: “The Spirit Girls”.The story follows a group of girls who perform together in a band, die tragically and then return as spirits to communicate their message of emancipation. This series was inspired in part by the American Spiritualist movement of the 1850’s, which is credited with giving women their first public voice as “performers” in this country. In this episode, the terrain of the Spirit Girls’ journey is a surreal western landscape marked by a melancholy circus populated by strange characters wearing fantastical circus costumes. The resulting images reveal a childlike world of wonders with subtle and perverse undertones.

The exhibition’s centerpiece “A Western Song”, is a 24-min film project that melt classic western, surrealist experiment, expressionist drama, and contercultural elements, which narrates the journey of the Spirit Girls through their spiritual quest in the countryside. While the Spirit Girls’ narrative has built a parallel universe in the realm of film, Marnie Weber’s band The Spirit Girls has simultaneously given several live performances over the past few years.

MARNIE WEBER - PRAZ-DELAVALLADE

Media_City Seoul 2008

THE 5TH SEOUL INTERNATIONAL MEDIA ART BIENNALE
2008. 09. 12. - 2008. 11. 05.
Seoul Museum of Art, 1st, 2nd, 3rd

"The 5th Seoul International Media Art Biennale (Media_City Seoul 2008) will be held at the Seoul Museum of Art from September 12 to November 5 under the theme 'Turn and Widen.' While most media art exhibitions are held once, the Seoul International Media Art Biennale starting from 2000 and opening the 5th this year has become one of the remarkable Media Art Biennales in and outside the country serving as a stage for keeping the alive history of media art.

Particularly this 5th Biennale is based on the theme 'Turn and Widen,' paying attention to the aspect that the advent of media art and its fashion have derived new media into the field of art, and it has turned into a new form, and it caused the area of art experience to be changed and extended. Thus, this Biennale is aimed to find answers through a variety of exhibits to those fundamental, essential questions; What is media art? What is different from the conventional art? What changes have been made by that in the field of art? and what influences could come from now? "

Seoul Metropolitan Government - Seoul Museum of Art(SeMA)

Tactics. Optical Instruments in History and Contemporary Art

"Visual Tactics.
Optical Instruments in History and Contemporary Art
23.11.2008 bis 10.05.2009

Pictures and images have become the leading medium of our time – the area in which they become active and, hence, the continuous variation in our way of seeing things is a consistent field of exploration. Parallel to video, the digital camera and the computer, today’s artists frequently turn to the characteristic charm of historic media. This exhibition highlights contemporary artistic positions in connection with pieces from the Werner Nekes Collection. On view will be approximately 200 works from this collection and around 60 pieces from contemporary artists since the 1960s such as William Kentridge, Kara Walker, Mischa Kuball, Sigmar Polke, along with many others."

Museum for Contemporary Art Siegen - Visual Tactics. Optical Instruments in History and Contemporary Art

28th Bienal de São Paulo: “in living contact”

28th Bienal de São Paulo: “in living contact”
October 26 – December 6, 2008
Pavilhão Ciccillo Matarazzo – Parque Ibirapuera

Curators: Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen

By definition, the Bienal should accomplish two major tasks: to place Brazilian Modern Art in living contact rather than in sheer confrontation with world’s art, while at the same time to try and position São Paulo as the art center in the world. (Lourival Gomes Machado. Introduction. First Bienal – São Paulo Modern Art Museum, 1951, p. 14).

From October 26 through December 6, 2008, the 28th Bienal de São Paulo: “in living contact”offers visitors the opportunity to experience active participation and contribution for a process of reflection on the model and the culture of biennial exhibitions in the international art circuit as well as on the role played by Bienal de São Paulo in that context. In a different format from its previous editions, and counting on 57 years of experience as the basis for this research, the Bienal de São Paulo intends to set in motion a process of investigative and critical work to keep pace with changes perceived not only at the location where the exhibition takes place, but also internationally.

At the closing of 42 days, the Bienal de São Paulo will hopefully have re-encountered its specificities and once again have placed itself “in living contact” with its own time.

With the 42 invited artists from 22 countries, Curators Ivan Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen propose different tools to accomplish such task. Considering that some contemporary art practices are not restricted to the production of one single object subject to contemplation at a one given time and place, the 28th Bienal articulates different strategies for exhibitions, debates, and diffusion.

The 28th Bienal web page (http://www.28bienalsaopaulo.org.br/) allows the public to actively participate in the debate on the Bienal de São Paulo by adding documents and defining the individual pathways and readings of the event. In addition to the complete program for the exhibition, the web page will also make available videos of the colloquiums and a data base with information on participating artists and their projects.

bienalsaopaulo.GLOBO.COM

STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth and 150 years after the publication of his famous ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES expeditions still have plenty to discover. Explorers continue to find new species, as in the depths of the sea or in the Amazon basin. How many species exist on earth is impossible to say. But the planet’s biodiversity is gravely endangered. Every hour, three animal or plant species become extinct around the world. 16.306 are presently on the international »Red List« of the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. According to the UN’s climate report in spring of 2007, should global warming continue, close to every third animal and plant species will have disappeared by the end of this century.

The STRUGGLE FOR LIFE symposium will deal with the process of acclimatization and obliteration from both a scientific and artistic point of view. Eight distinguished artists have been chosen to address such aspects as our evolutionary legacy, the winners of the present development as well as the species that have already been wiped out. They will also scrutinize scientific categorization and simulate new biological hybrids, not for better commercial results, but to create new art forms for their own sake. Several installations are being created especially for the exhibition, others have been selected because of their relevant positions in regard to the topic.

The scientific lectures will take place in the exhibition as an alternative to the stereotype images we are accustomed to in natural history museums, the media and advertizing. The open exchange of ideas between scientific and artistic points of view is intended to help find new ways of presenting these explosive scientific insights to the public. Three internationally acclaimed professors will be delivering lectures. Evolutionary biologist Ulrich Kutschera will sketch the development of life and elaborate on the role of mass extinction in evolution. Biosphere expert Wolfgang Lucht will be confronting the question »Which species will be the winners, which ones the losers if global warming continues and what will the world look like in 100 years?« Developmental biologist and Leibniz Prizewinner Detlef Weigel, Tübingen, will present fascinating insights into the ability of plant life to adapt in a rapidly changing environment. In a concluding panel discussion, scientists and artists will talk about their viewpoints and ideas.

Artists
Dorothy Cross, Mark Dion, Carsten Höller, Jan Fabre, Klaus Fritze, Sanna Kannisto, Oliver van den Berg, Jess von der Ahe


Scientists
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kutschera, Full Professor of Plant Physiology and Evolutionary Biology and Head of the corresponding Department in the Institute of Biology, University of Kassel
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lucht, apl Professor of Biosphere Dynamics and Earth System Research at the Institute of Geoecology, University of Potsdam (PIK)
Prof. Dr. Detlef Weigel, Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, as well as Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute

Organizer
www.eres-stiftung.de

The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz takes L. Frank Baum's popular novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as its starting point to examine the relationship between art and literature, our idea of home and place, as well as the cultural and social fabric of America itself.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Robert Bechtle, Jennifer Bornstein, Ulla von Brandenburg, Bruce Conner, Walker Evans, Simryn Gill, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Loris Gréaud, Joseph Grigely, Carsten Höller, Evan Holloway, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Gareth Moore, Rivane Neuenschwander, Raymond Pettibon, Clare Rojas, Harry Smith, Donald Urquhart, Andy Warhol, Cerith Wyn Evans

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, NY - Video

"The latest project is Pulse Park by prolific Mexican-born conceptual artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose vast digital installations utilize technology, architecture and social interaction to create dazzlingly inventive public spectacles."

Video: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, NY - Art - Wallpaper.com - International Design Interiors Fashion Travel