ARTIST-TALKS

CLOSED: Lara Favaretto 03/05/12-10/08/12 MoMA PS1, New York

Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out

PRESS RELEASE COURTESY MoMA PS1

MoMA PS1 presents the first survey of Lara Favaretto (b. Treviso, 1973), comprising a dozen works from the past fifteen years, as well as new pieces created specifically for the exhibition. Organized by MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey, the show will also feature the first presentation of the extensive archive of images that the artist has collected as source material and inspiration.

Favaretto's installations and audio, sculptural, and kinetic works balance between failure and aspiration. A sense of resignation to the forces of decay and obsolescence runs throughout her work—most visibly in her minimal cubes made of confetti, which decompose during the period of their display. Favaretto represents the eventuality of loss through a recuperative memorialization, often recycling elements from previous installations as new works, reusing discarded industrial materials, and encasing found paintings in loose tapestries of wool yarn. The memorial form is pointedly evoked in a series that the artist calls "momentary monuments," which loosely adopt but also subvert the vernacular of public sculpture. Beginning with a swamp that she created at the back of the Giardini in Venice to commemorate twenty historical figures who have disappeared, and continuing with her sandbagging of a 1896 statue of Dante Alighieri in a civic square in Trento, she has conceived a series of sculptures and public installations that draw attention to the futility and impermanence of memorials themselves. Favaretto memorializes the body in a similar state of limbo, often through mechanical representations that gradually degrade: car wash brushes whirl repeatedly, wearing themselves down against metal plates; a platoon of compressed air cylinders randomly empties itself, blowing silent party favors. These animist machines celebrate their own absurdity, taking on lives of their own, while also reflecting ours.

CT EDIT

Unfortunately I cannot find much content in English as the artist speaks Italian and Fasi, but the show is fantastic and the work offered me something joyful, even a little humouress, but with a deep sense of unease – it knocked my socks off. I'd urge you to see it if you're over in NY between now and September.

Favaretto interviewed at the Resonance Booth at Frieze Art Fair 2007

Favaretto's ideas for Without Earth Under Foot a project for Wonders of Weston (2010) are explained (duration, 4:34).

CLOSED: Sarah Pierce and The Happy Hypocrite 02/06/12 Book Works, London

PRESS RELEASE

AGAIN, A TIME MACHINE – FINAL EVENT

THE ARTIST TALKS – PERFORMANCE AND

THE HAPPY HYPOCRITE – INTERVIEW

THE SHOWROOM
63 PENFOLD STREET
LONDON NW8 8PQ

5.00-8.30PM

For the final event for The Artist Talks, Sarah Pierce has choreographed an ‘artist’s talk’ with six London-based art students. Staged as a group performance and using props and the central stage from the installation, this short, revised speech draws on a text written in 1905 by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the idea of the artist talk as a mode that all artists occupy; a mode where speech, gestures and archives coalesce, and documentation both anticipates and disturbs the finished work.

To conclude the exhibition The Happy Hypocrite – Interview, hosted by Maria Fusco, presents a series of short readingsby Apexa Patel, Barry Sykes, Sam Hasler, Nathaniel Pitt, Hanne Lippard, Jo Melvin, Anthony Iles and Stephen Sutcliffe.

For an Q&A interview with Maria Fusco please visit Q&A

LUCKY DIP: John Baldessari by Tom Waits

Video Biography of John Baldessari by Tom Waits, 15 May 2012 (duration 5:55)

(Thank you @Barry_Sykes)

John Baldesarri discussing the project,Your Name In Lights, as part of the Sydney Festival 2011 with Caroline Baum, 2011 (duration 37:53)

Artist video: John Baldessari sings Sol Le Witt, 1972 (duration 3:39)

Baldesarri in conversation in 2009 with Daniel Birnbaum, curator of the 53 Venice Biennale (duration 9:57)

LUCKY DIP: Amos Vogel April 18, 1921 - April 24, 2012

"With him an entire epoch ends," added Werner Herzog in a statement to the Film Society this morning. A close friend of Vogel's for more than 40 years, the filmmaker added, "The Last Lion has left us."

Film as a Subversive Art by Paul Cronin, 2004 (duration 56:08)

Further footage courtesy of Paul Cronin, (duration approx 10:00 each)

OPEN: Jenny Holzer 27/04/12-16/06/12 Sprueth Magers, London

Endgame

PRESS RELEASE COURTESY SPRUETH MAGERS

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present a solo exhibition of work by Jenny Holzer. The American artist finds ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict. Entitled SOPHISTICATED DEVICES, this exhibition provides a survey of Holzer’s practice, encompassing her spray paint canvases, granite benches, LED works, painted signs, and cast plaques.
The large spray paint canvases on view at the gallery are the result of collaborations with New York graffiti artists Lady Pink and A-One, whose haunting images are supplemented with Holzer’s provocative statements. In I AM NOT FREE BECAUSE I CAN BE EXPLODED ANYTIME (1983-84), Holzer’s characteristically cryptic phrase is hand-lettered over a scene, spray-painted by Pink, of bodies in despair. The collaborative works feature text from Survival, a series of cautionary texts, in which each sentence instructs, informs or questions the ways an individual responds to his or her social, physical, psychological and personal environments. Just as street art seeks to have an immediate impact on an unsuspecting public, the Survival phrases have an urgent tone, the sentences short and pointed so as to be instantly accessible to passersby.

The artist’s granite benches will be on display in the front gallery, inscribed with words from the Living series (1980-1982), in which Holzer presents a set of quiet observations, directions, and warnings. The commentaries touch on how the individual negotiates landscapes, persons, rules, expectations, desires, fears, other bodies, one's flesh, and one's self. Holzer began working with stone in 1986. Her idea was to find a home for her texts that was resistant to the vagaries of time and destruction, as lasting as the light of her electronic signs is transitory. The bench form was selected because it offered people a place to sit and converse with others. The utility of the object allows her to insinuate texts that are not immediately consistent with the domestic or park-like settings where they might be placed.
Similarly delivering messages from the Living and Survival series will be a selection of vintage LED artworks, enamel on metal hand-painted signs, and cast plaques. Recognized as Holzer’s signature medium, electronic signs have been part of the artist’s practice since the early eighties, initially adopted for its association with news and advertising, and as a mode of direct address. The LED work Under a Rock (1986) features text from the series of the same name, here showcasing the words ‘Tick Tick’. Composed specifically for electronic signs and stone benches, this series explores the unmentionable as well as pain’s manifestations and persistence. The plaques and painted signs, installed in the rear gallery, recall those that often appear on historic buildings, lending the writing authority and a voice of the establishment.