Selected by Ivaylo Gueorgiev
1995
_______________
MARTIN CREED
Work No. 127
Martin Creed
Work No. 127
1995
The lights going on and off
Dimensions variable; 30 seconds on / 30 seconds off
. . .
1973
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GEORGE MACIUNAS
Excreta Fluxorum
Maciunas’s Excreta Fluxorum fluxboxes—the “Anthologies of Animal Shit” began in 1972 and continued compiling until his death in 1978. They exemplify the non-artificial, purged-rather-than-crafted art of “flux.” Each box contains a carefully curated assortment of animal poop—from a tiny mouse turd nested in a pill capsule to a flaking mound of cow manure—separated in plastic containers and classified in Latin.
George Maciunas
Excreta Fluxorum
1973
Plastic box with offset printed labels containing various animal droppings
Box: 9.3 x 12 x 2.5 cm (3 11/16 x 4 3/4 x 1 in.)
. . .
1966
_______________
HI RED CENTER
New York - New York
Event Score:
"Performers are dressed in white coats like laboratory technicians. They go to a selected location in the city. An area of a sidewalk is designated for the event. This area of sidewalk is cleaned very thoroughly with various devices not usually used in street cleaning, such as: dental tools, toothbrushes, steel wool, cotton balls with alcohol, cotton swabs, surgeon's sponges, tooth picks, linen napkins, etc."
Hi Red Center
Street Cleaning Event
June, 1966
Grand Army Plaza
New York, NY
. . .
1975
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N.E. THING CO.
A Painting To Match The Couch
"By making life more interesting for others, we may indirectly help to alleviate the human condition. We up your aesthetic quality of life, we up your creativity. We celebrate the ordinary."
- N.E. Thing Co.
. . .
1990
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LAURIE PARSONS
New York - New York
For her third solo exhibition at Lorence-Monk Gallery in New York, Laurie Parsons decided not to present anything. The invitation card indicated only the address of the gallery, without mention of the artist's name or the exhibition dates. When asked about the gesture, she said: "I felt it essential that I consider the gallery itself, rather than continue to unquestioningly use it as a context. With its physical space and intricate social organization, it is as real, and as meaningful, as the artwork it houses and markets."
In 1994, having come to the realization that "art must spread into other realms, into spirituality arid social giving," Parsons leaves the art world behind and focuses her energies on her own personal writing and on social work.
Laurie Parsons
Lorence-Monk Gallery
Lorence-Monk Gallery
578 Broadway, 11th floor
New York, NY
May, 1990
. . .
1919
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MARCEL DUCHAMP
50 cc of Paris Air
Another one was the vial. I was in Paris in 1919 and I was thinking of bringing back a present for Arensberg in California. So I went to a drug store, and said: "Will you give me a vial that you will empty of whatever serum is in it and seal it again." What it will be in it, will be Paris air, air of Paris. Of course it had to be. (laughs) So the druggist did it and I brought my present to Arensberg in California, and it was called: "Vial with 50 cc of air of Paris."
- Excerpt from an interview with Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
50 cc of Paris Air
1919
Glass ampoule (broken and later restored)
Height: 5 1/4 inches (13.3 cm)
. . .
1996
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MAURIZIO CATTELAN
De Appel - Amsterdam
Invited to participate in the group show Crap Shoot in De Appel, Amsterdam, Cattelan stole the entire contents of the nearby Galerie Bloom, packed the art works, fax machines and filing cabinets in plastic bags and cardboard boxes and then exhibited them as his own work under the title Another Fucking Readymade.
. . .
1921
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ALEKSANDR RODCHENKO
Moscow - Russia
I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.
- Aleksandr Rodchenko: Working with Majakovskii. Ms., 1939
Aleksandr Rodchenko
Pure Red Color, Pure Blue Color, Pure Yellow Color
Oil on Canvas
1921
First shown at the two-part exhibition 5x5=25 in September–October 1921 in Moscow, Russia.
. . .
1969
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JANNIS KOUNELLIS
Galleria L'Attico - Rome, Italy
Jannis Kounellis
Untitled (12 Horses)
1969
Galleria L'Attico
Rome, Italy
. . .
1974
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HANS HAACKE
Manet-Project '74
In 1974 in his home town Cologne in Germany on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Haacke participated in the "Project 74" exhibition. He provided a series of 10 panels revealing the provenance of Manet’s "Bunch of Asparagus" (1880). This painting was donated to the Museum in 1968 by the Friends of the Wallaraf-Richartz Museum, under the leadership of its chairman, Hermann Josef Abs, in memory of Konrad Adenauer, the Federal Republic of Germany’s first chancellor.
The last panel was an analysis of Abs’s background – he had been a prominent banker and financial adviser of Hitler’s Reich during the second world war. After the war he had been put into a position of particular power again and remained there through the 60’s up to the moment of his gift to the Museum.
The other panels were tracing the provenance of the still life from its first owner Charles Ephrussi to figures such as the German publisher and art dealer Paul Cassirer and the German - Jewish painter Max Liebermann (whose work was outlawed by the Nazis), finally to be bought from Libermann’s American granddaughter by the Friends of the Museum led by Abs. The last panel announced Abs as an ex-Nazi and it showed how easily the posture of cultural benefactor allows an individual to "clean" their ambiguous criminal past. The exhibition was a scandal and Haacke’s proposal was rejected.
____
Exhibition details: 10 panels in black and white frames under glass; 1 color photo reproduction of Manet's Bunch of Asparagus in its museum frame. First installed, Galerie Paul Maenz, Cologne, 1974.
. . .
1963
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NAM JUNE PAIK
Zen for TV
Nam June Paik
Zen for TV
1963 (executed 1975/1981)
Altered Television Set
. . .
1973
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MICHAEL ASHER
Galleria Tosse - Milan, Italy
In 1973 at Galleria Toselli, artist Michael Asher sandblasted the gallery walls and ceiling, stripping away the neutral white paint and pristine surfaces to reveal the underlying brown plaster. The effect physically recreated the gallery as a site under construction, rather than one engaged with the conventions of display. For visitors the transformation was stunning. Asher’s intervention at the Toselli gallery marked a significant transition that clearly positioned his work in terms of the more analytical, site-specific approach that has come to define Institutional Critique.
. . .
1974
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MARCEL BROODTHAERS
Peter Freeman Inc - New York, NY
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present the first American exhibition of Marcel Broodthaers's installation "Ne dites pas que je ne l'ai pas dit – Le Perroquet" ("Don't Say I Didn't Say So – The Parrot"). The installation is comprised of a caged African Grey Parrot, two palm trees, a vitrine containing his catalogue from a 1966 exhibition along with a reprint from 1974, and a recording of the artist reading the poem "Moi Je dis Je Moi Je dis Je..."
"Ne dites pas..." was created in 1974 as one of the earliest of Broodthaers's "Décors," a series of retrospective installations begun that year with "Un Jardin d'hiver." As art historian Rachel Haidu has noted in her work on Broodthaers, the series of "Décors" plays on the aspects of repetition and artificiality that were critical to Broodthaers's practice from the beginning. Using as his title the French term for interior design as well as a film set, Broodthaers's installations, often with palm trees, nineteenth-century furniture, and antiquated prints, mock the retrospective as a form by reducing the artist's production to a trite arrangement. In her forthcoming book (MIT Press, 2010), Haidu writes that the inclusion of a live parrot in "Ne dites pas..." emphasizes the notion of the retrospective as repetition more than any of the other "Décors": "By highlighting the species of tropical bird famous for repeating itself as well as what others say, Broodthaers underscores, pathologizes and parodies the aspect of repetition intrinsic to the artistic retrospective."
"Ne dites pas..." was first presented at Wide White Space as the opening exhibition in the gallery's Antwerp location, and it coincided with "Catalogue-Catalogus," Broodthaers's major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Only a few days after the opening of this work the artist installed the similarly themed "Room of the Parrot," or "Dites partout que je l'ai dit" ("Say Everywhere I Said So"), as part of his exhibition "Eloge de sujet" at the Kunstmuseum Basel. For both installations Broodthaers appropriated his own 1966 Wide White Space catalogue for the exhibition "Moules oeufs frites pots charbon."
Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) was a Belgian poet who turned to the visual arts in 1964 when he was forty. In the brief 12 years before he died, Broodthaers created a broad and influential body of work dealing with object, text, history, museology, and identity (particularly Belgian identity) within a Europe that was being profoundly redefined through new, radical art and politics. Broodthaers rapidly established himself as one of the most original artists of his day, and his influence on younger artists both in Europe and the United States is still present.
Marcel Broodthaers
Ne dites pas que je ne l'ai pas dit - Le Perroquet (1974)
November 5 - December 23, 2009
Peter Freeman Gallery
New York, NY
www.peterfreemaninc.com
. . .
1970
_______________
DIETER ROTH
Eugenia Butler Gallery - Los Angeles, CA
For his first exhibition in the USA, at the Eugenia Butler Gallery of Los Angeles (1970), Dieter Roth exhibited a series of 37 suitcases filled with cheese on the floor, below pictures made with cheese on the wall. Called Staple Cheese (A Race), a pun on Steeple Chase, the suitcases were to be opened one a day, whilst the wall pictures included a horizontal line tracking the vertical movement of the cheeses as they slid toward it. However, within a few days the over-powering smell, maggots and flies combined to make it impossible to enter the room. As a gesture to honor what he called “the exhibition’s true audience,” Roth collected some of the dead flies lying on the floor of the gallery space and put them in a glass jar. The suitcases were later stored in a container designed by Roth for a number of years until Butler's husband threw the whole exhibition away in the desert.
Dieter Roth
Staple Cheese (A Race)
1970
Eugenia Butler Gallery
Los Angeles, CA
. . .
1987
_______________
CHARLES RAY
Matthew Marks Gallery - New York, NY
Ink Line, 1987, is a continuous stream of black ink traveling from a dime-size opening in the ceiling into a similar hole in the floor. At first glance, the narrow stream appears static, but when carefully observed, the viewer is able to detect subtle fluctuations in the ink's flow. Ink Line relates to the artist's iconic Ink Box from the previous year, in which a steel cube is precipitously filled to the brim with black ink. Although Ink Line has been widely reproduced, this is the first time it has been exhibited publicly.
Spinning Spot was made in 1987. In this work, a section of the floor measuring 24 inches in diameter is set spinning at 33 RPM. The third work in the exhibition is Moving Wire from 1988, consisting of a single 8.5 foot length of wire. Both ends of the wire protrude from the wall and are set 14 inches apart. As one end of the wire extends out from the wall at random intervals, the other retracts.
Charles Ray is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Ray has been included in two Venice Biennale (1993, 2003), Documenta IX (1992), and four Whitney Biennials. His monumental sculpture, Hinoki, 2007, will be exhibited in the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago this May. In June, Ray's first commissioned outdoor work will be permanently installed at the edge of the Grand Canal at the Punta della Dogana in Venice. The artist currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Charles Ray
Ink Line, Moving Wire, Spinning Spot
May 8 - July 10, 2009
Matthew Marks Gallery
New York, NY
