The Marina Abramovic Institute has reached its target goal of $600,000 on the Kickstarter online funding platform, with two days left before the campaign closes. The funds will go to cover the design process for the museum, before it moves into its construction phase. In total, the project is anticipated to cost a total of $20 million. (more…)
The Apology Line, a confessional telephone art project that enabled callers to phone in and confess their misgivings and misdeeds, has been revived in New York City. Originally created by artist Allan Bridge, the project fell silent after Bridge was killed in a boating accident. But recently, posters have reappeared across the city, thanks to the efforts of an anonymous Brooklyn artist. “A voice inside of me said there’s no reason that the line had to die just because Allan died,” the unknown artist said in an interview with the NY Times. “It’s an outlet, and some people need that outlet.” (more…)
New York’s popular Performa biennial has announced the commissions for this year’s edition of the festival, including new works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Subodh Gupta, Marianne Vitale, Raqs Media Collective, Ryan McNamara, and Pawel Althamer, among many others. Centered around a loose theme of “citizenship,” the festival will also feature a special segment on black performance at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as well as the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. “We have a thrilling line-up of new work this year,” said Director and Curator, RoseLee Goldberg, “showing that more and more visual artists consider performance an important medium for expressing their ideas, and that cultural institutions now appreciate performance for its communicability to a broad public and as essential to their programs.” (more…)
David Bowie, Original Photography for the Earthling Album Cover (1997), via Victoria and Albert Museum
Perhaps one of the most widely talked about (and best attended) exhibitions this summer, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is currently showing a comprehensive exhibition of materials from the David Bowie Archive, marking the first time a museum has had access to this collection. As holders of the national collection of live performance material in the UK, this opportunity is a chance for the museum to showcase one of the UK’s most important artists. Compiling costumes, programs, documents, instruments and even a film specially made for the exhibition (including exclusive interviews with Jeremy Deller, Daphne Guiness, and Thurston Moore), the exhibition is an exhaustive look at the work of one of the UK’s greatest rock stars and artists.
David Bowie Is (Installation View), via Victoria and Albert Museum (more…)
Artist Chris Burden, whose upcoming retrospective at the New Museum this fall will fill all five floors of the institution, will also bring a series of works to the space’s exterior. Burden will install a pair of 36-foot skyscraper structures (Two Skyscrapers) on the roof of the museum, as well as Ghost Ship, an automated, double bowed boat that will circle the building’s facade. The exhibition will be the first major retrospective for Burden in New York, and opens on October 2nd. (more…)
“Picasso Baby,” the final cut of rapper Jay Z’s marathon performance at Pace Gallery earlier this month, will premiere this Friday on HBO. Directed by music video veteran Mark Romanek, the film will document the 6 hour performance, which included cameos and interactions with Marina Abramovic and Alan Cumming, among many more. “Concerts are pretty much performance art,” Jay Z says, “but with this smaller venue you can get a bit more intimate. You can feel the energy of the people.” (more…)
Rhizome has announced its list of 2013 Commission Award Winners, including its first round of award recipients for the Tumblr Internet Art Award. Projects run the spectrum of internet and performance based works, including an online television show by Colin Self and American Medium, an app design by Aaron Meyers and Lauren McCarthy titled God’s Eyes (where one user at a time is granted omniscient access to all other user’s camera phones), a new visualization system for net art collective The Jogging, and even a one-week national tour by performance art/musical duo Extreme Animals. (more…)
The Museum of Modern Art has announced an expansive retrospective for artist Sigmar Polke, set to open on April 19th, 2014. Pulling from the artist’s broad explorations in painting, film and performance, the exhibition will feature some of Polke’s largest paintings and digitally rendered works, requiring their exhibition on the second floor of the museum, which is generally reserved for special exhibitions. “Some of the paintings are so big, they can only fit on the second floor,” says MoMA Associate Director Kathy Halbreich. “This is one of the largest shows MoMA has ever done.” (more…)
Rapper Jay-Z appeared at New York’s Pace Gallery today, performing his song Picasso Baby for 6 hours straight. The marathon performance was part of the artist’s “Docu-music” video for the song, and featured a moment where the rapper danced with Marina Abramovic. Other notable attendees included Marilyn Minter, Laurence Weiner, Klaus Biesenbach, Aaron Young, among many more. (more…)
Jean Dupuy, Performances/Bouffe Théâtre d’en face (1979) (detail), via Galerie Louevenbruck
Galerie Louevenbruck Paris is currently exhibiting Jean Dupuy: the collective years (1973-1983), a first time retrospective of the artist’s “collective” period during the late 20th century. This period of work was developed after Dupuy left Paris for New York in 1967. Having begun his art career as a painter, he infamously threw his old works into the Seine before heading off to America, where a year later his Cone Pyramid (Heart Beats Dust) sculpture became his introduction to the notions of the collective. Shortly after its creation the piece had already been exhibited at both the Museum of Modern Art and the Brookyln Museum, and its success launched the artist into his 40 year study of “techno-sensual” techniques and collective art practice.
Jean Dupuy, The Collective Years (Installation View), via Galerie Louevenbruck
Hong Kong Convention Center, site of the Art Basel Hong Kong Art Fair, via Forbes
With the closing of the doors at the Hong Kong Convention Center this past Sunday, the first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong was brought to a conclusion after a flourish of strong sales, critical praise, and notable attention for the art fair giant’s first foray into the Asian continent.
Financial Times reports on the growing popularity of performance works at major art fairs, helping the traditionally market-centered proceedings to rebrand themselves as cultural events. The trend is especially notable at this year’s edition of Frieze New York, where nearly every piece covering the fair has reported on Tino Seghal’s Ann Lee, of particular note because the work is sold via oral contract, in which Seghal explains to the buyer how to re-enact the work. “I’m an expert and even I get tired after seeing 180 booths. But performance can capture viewers’ attention.” Says Frieze Projects curator Cecilia Alemani. (more…)
Marcel Dzama, The Chessmen (2010), courtesy David Zwirner London
Currently on view at David Zwirner gallery in London is a solo exhibition of new work by Marcel Dzama, spanning a diverse range of media that centers on the aesthetic and thematic elements of Chess. The exhibition, entitled Puppets, Pawns, and Prophets opened on April 5th and will continue through May 11th, 2013.
Boléro, a collaboration between artist Marina Abramovic and Belgian choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, is set to open tonight in Paris. Interpreting Ravel’s immediately recognizable work for dance, the work debuts at the Palais Garnier alongside Maurice Béjart’s “Firebird” and versions of “Afternoon of a Faun” by Nijinsky and Jerome Robbins. “In my own work I am completely in control, but the interesting thing with collaboration is to give up part of yourself, the ‘I,’ ” said Abramovic. “It’s very liberating to be in a new field, dance, to let things come to you and not to make decisions.” (more…)
This Sunday, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson will present A Lot of Sorrow, a performative sound piece that will present the band The National, playing its song “Sorrow” for six consecutive hours at MoMA PS1. Embracing duration and endurance as fundamental to the piece, the work explores the line between pop music and sonic sculpture. As stated in the press release: “the idea behind A Lot of Sorrow is devoid of irony, yet full of humor and emotion. It constitutes another quest to find the comic in the tragic and vice versa.” (more…)
New York’s Park Avenue Armory has released its list of Artists-in-Residence for 2013, including singer-songwriter Somi, choreographer Faye Driscoll, the Trusty Sidekick Theater Company and artists Ralph Lemon, Okwui Okpokwasili and Alex Dolan. The artists will present works during the Armory’s 2013 calendar year, including an immersive mystery theatre piece, and a curated night of Nigerian music created during Somi’s 15-month residency in Lagos. (more…)
Artist Nick Cave was in New York on Monday, presenting his new performance piece, HEARD•NY, at Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall. Co-presented by Creative Time and MTA Arts for Transit, Cave’s ambitious project involves sixty dancers from The Ailey School suited in 30 life-size horse costumes. In choreographed gestures, the horses move around as a colorful herd, bobbing their heads and kicking their feet, intermittently grazing and foraging like real equines. (more…)
Artist and musician Nick Cave’s Heard•NY opened at Grand Central Terminal in New York yesterday, filling the terminal with actors dressed in surreally designed horse costumes. Bloomberg spoke with the artist about his practice, and his goals for the installation, which will remain open all this week. “I’m looking at the station as a platform to get people back to that place where we dream. We’re in a world where we’re trying to do what we can to exist and hold on to our jobs. So I’d like to transmit this dream-state feeling, to get us out of our day-to-day routine for a moment.” Cave says. (more…)
Visitors to The Museum of Modern Art in New York were treated to a special performance by actress Tilda Swinton yesterday, as the actress launched a month-long performance at the museum called The Maybe. The artist spent the day sleeping in a glass case in the museum’s lobby, and will return to the case several times during the duration of the performance. No one knows when Swinton will appear for her performances, emphasizing the unpredictability of the work. “There is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist’s statement released, no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued,” MoMA stated in a press release. “Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real-shared-time: now we see it, now we don’t.”
As part of its new “Artists Experiment” initiative, The Museum of Modern Art has announced Kenneth Goldsmith as the first “poet laureate” of the museum. Seeking to bring contemporary artists into dialogue with the institution,the initiative has welcomed Mr. Goldsmith, who also runs the online arts archive Ubuweb, to program a series of readings and events at the museum. “Poets have this idea that what they do is casual, but the minute you get up onstage anywhere, it’s performative. Poets tend to want to show some degree of “authenticity,” and the structural theatrics around the performative gesture are never questioned. That’s something I always do. I’m a bit of a dandy as a result.” Goldsmith says. (more…)
Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors (Installation View) via Luhring Augustine, New York
Luhring Augustine is currently exhibiting “The Visitors,” a nine-channel video installation by artist Ragnar Kjartansson, a musician and artist living and working in the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik. As a member of the group Trabant, Kjartansson pushes the boundaries between electronic rock and performance while working in multiple media formats, focusing primarily on various aspects of performance. (more…)
The View from Outside The 2013 Armory Show
The doors opened this morning on the 2013 edition of the Armory Art show, welcoming press and VIP’s into the massive exhibition halls of Piers 92 and 94 on the waterfront of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. It was a special year for New York’s biggest annual art event, marking the 100 year anniversary of its namesake, the 1913 exhibition that welcomed the European avant-garde to American shores, and gave many their first glimpses of Marcel Duchamp, Matisse and Edvard Munch, among many others.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg Makes the Opening Remarks at The 2013 Armory Show (more…)
Aki Sasamoto, Talking in Circles Talking (Installation View), via Soloway Gallery
“My grandfather died when I was fourteen and became an abacus. In the way ice turns into water, he became this object he left behind.” So begins the performance of Japanese artist Aki Sasamoto’s Talking in Circles Talking, an immersive performance and installation at Soloway Gallery in South Williamsburg. Exploring the notions of value and vibrancy at play in the space between human relationships and physical objects, Sasamoto effectively fuses personal discourses with her surrounding environment.
Aki Sasamoto, Talking in Circles Talking (Installation View), via Soloway Gallery (more…)
