Author Archives: lisa

Francis Ruyter @ school, Vienna, Austria “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” November 20, 2015

school presents

Performative Screenings #39
Francis Ruyter
Let us now Praise Famous Men

Friday November 20, 2015
Lecture 8 pm

lisa ruyter 1990

​©Francis Ruyter, 1990 (approximately)

Francis Ruyter’s recent work turns to the archive as subject matter, abandoning the use of self-made photographic source material in favor of appropriation of a self-indexed version of the The Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Collection, housed at the Library of Congress, which includes photographs created from 1935 to 1944. There is a relationship between this new work and the drawing-driven works that Ruyter showed in NYC in the early 90’s. This presentation will feature both bodies of work.

school
Grüngasse 22
A-1050 Wien
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part of Vienna Art Week

school is supported by BKA Kunst and MA7

Francis Ruyter @ Eleven Rivington, New York, USA; “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” May 21 to July 3, 2015

Lisa Ruyter “Russell Lee: Sign of the times. Yakima, Washington” 2011 120 x 150 cm

Lisa Ruyter
“Russell Lee: Sign of the times. Yakima, Washington”
2011
120 x 150 cm

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Francis Ruyter, on view at both gallery locations from May 21 through July 3, 2015.  Titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, it marks Francis Ruyter’s 32nd career solo exhibition, and the artist’s third show using photographs from the Library of Congress’ FSA/OWI archive as source material. The Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Collection includes more than 164,000 black and white and color negatives created from 1935 to 1944 by a small but highly influential photography program.

“These images, produced through government agency, quite miraculously transcend propaganda, and have become the material of an American identity. It is a defining and generative archive, ever more so as it is digitized, repeated and further disseminated.

There are lessons to be found in this archive containing an army of readily reanimated ghosts. These ghosts are sacred spirits to some, untouchable for what they represent. To ‘appropriate’ therefore becomes another assault on their memory, as if any previous incarnation had ever been free of appropriation. These photographs are of Americans, and they represent those who go unnoticed, unrecognized and, um, unrepresented. They are us, or at least some idea that we have of ourselves, they belong to us because of the way that they came into our world, as photographs, not as people. It is a record of what was already being lost to Americans even as it was being constructed, an American dream of self-determination, independence and freedom.”  (Francis Ruyter)

Francis Ruyter began showing in New York in 1993, as part of a generation that was the subject of the New Museum’s ‘NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star.’ Like many of the artists in that show, Ruyter’s concerns involve identity and pathologic constructions that cross biological and social boundaries. This work emerged from an education that had pop art and minimalism functioning like shopping mall anchor stores, in relationship to which Ruyter formed a special interest in navigating the glut of images, storytelling, invisible architectures, dissolving skins and representation, especially self-representation.

Francis Ruyter’s early work is drawing-driven, comprised from an archive of found images forced into relationship via traced outlines, a web-like structure that ultimately could be seen as representing an architectural form, such as that of the internet. Such architecture affects movement and gestures but does not have a clear, visible, physical manifestation or author. The work evolved into a colorful and immediately recognizable treatment of a range of subject matters via photographic images taken by the artist.

Francis Ruyter has returned to the archive as subject matter, but in a major conceptual shift, has abandoned the use of self-made photographic source material in favor of a self-indexed version of the FSA/OWI photo collection. Two groups of these works will be presented at Eleven Rivington: figurative works featuring women with patterned clothing, and works drawn from source photographs of salvage collection sites.

Both series emphasize the function of the lines that have been present in the work since the early 90’s. The patterns hint at a volume that might escape the surface tension of the paintings, emphasizing the manner in which the line functions to contain color.

A salvage pile stands in for the earlier collaged jumble of images. With the mass explosion of images that such things as the internet have engendered, it seems sensible to recycle. These works look like abstract paintings, yet they have a very concrete origin (the photograph) loaded with circumstantial content, which happens to be quite relevant and plays no small part in delivering Francis Ruyter’s intentions.

This is Francis Ruyter’s first exhibition in New York since 2006.  Ruyter has exhibited in the US and internationally since 1993.  Selected solo shows include Alan Cristea Gallery, London; Connersmith, Washington, DC; Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; Team Gallery, NY; and Leo Koenig, Inc., NY, among many others.  The artist’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; La Coleccio Jumex, Mexico City; Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuberg; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, and Le Consortium, Dijon.  Ruyter has been a resident of Austria since 2003, and remains very active in the Vienna local scene, where he has run exhibition spaces and produced more than 30 exhibitions of other artists.

LIVE IN YOUR HEAD

Lisa Ruyter [Venice Biennale, 2013] (this is meant to be a written version of a Lisa Ruyter work)

Architecture is a stealth participant of the Encyclopedic Palace, Massimiliano Gioni’s proposal of a new, and somewhat authorless architectural form. Time, as it often does, will tell.

I will now try to perform this architecture.

The Arsenale is a great place to start. Think of it as a digestive system (but only for now). The long passage has a pretty great ending deep inside someone’s bowels.

Gioni’s narrative, as did mine, begins just after the entry of the Arsenale, where the title work of the exhibition, Marino Auriti’s “The Encylopedic Palace,” is paired with the Nigerian women’s hairstyle archive/catalog of J.D.’Okhai Ojeikere. Already a few key elements of the architecture of this exhibition are in place; personal and social identity expression and human attempts to record everything, a search for a way to frame and capture and preserve the world. The Encyclopedic Palace proposes a museum of all human knowledge, a map of the world. For now.

Nature is added to what constitutes ‘everything,’ so at the same time this old binary is noted, it is put into place in a broader sense. Chris Williams’ sinister photos of hyper-realistic artificial flowers is already an archive of an archive. Micro-macro scale shifts and continuity of ‘natural’ forms are echoed between Lin Xue and Roberto Cuoghi. The nature vs man binary has morphed into the natural vs the artificial and the hybrid is born, a queer resistance to tendencies of categorization.

Behind the walls containing Eliot Porter’s birds and Edward Spelterini’s aerial photographs of mountains and cities are two filmworks, which echo and invert something of what is on the skin of the rooms containing them.

Behind the aerial photos of mountains and cities, (an early attempt to make images capturing the world) the work by Camile Henrot includes the phrase ‘in the beginning’ bringing an arch equation of religion and creationism to the artist and anthropologist, along with quotations of contemporary use of computers in these pursuits.

Across the hall, behind the birds (nature), Neal Beloufa imagines a future present of telepathy, time compression and fantastic movements through space and time.

A tricky question is now in place regarding the difference between creation vs archiving, and with the films, representation vs narrative. Is it better to get an overview and attempt to capture everything, or can we find everything within specific objects? The location of the author begins to be determined by gesture. Gesture is a character and at this juncture, Gioni’s own gestures included.

Gioni has introduced a number of binaries, which together hint not at a blanket, or a web, but something multi-dimensional. His gestures are at times illustrative and at others performative.

Some gestures are illustrated metaphorically, rather than performed in the next room. The trees of Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, trees with human entries, tree vaginas. Human enters nature. The body-masses of Hans Josephson appear sprouted out of the material of the earth itself, perhaps the offspring of this union. Nature becomes (not yet authorless) architecture and not just a landscape.

Notably, the traditionally gendered relationship of human vs nature has been removed.

Ștefan Bertalan finds geometries in the study of plants and in the evolution of their growth. Yüksel Arsalan illustrates the various narratives in his images, describing the intersections of historical, personal and religious narratives. Time becomes an image as well, whether it is found in the growth of a single plant or in the intertwining narratives around an individual life.

Capture becomes a gesture, an odd inversion, doomed to fail at its original intentions, as all representation will. But as we understand and accept that, other possibilities emerge. Gesture becomes an integral part of this architectural form. An argument can be made that gestures are lost to this architecture, that they are images even before they happen. The idea of existing in a present moment, becomes a failure, an impossibility, as limited as any other photographic image.

And yet, somehow there is still theater.

The film projector installation by João Marcia Gusmão and Pedro Paiva is a collection/archive of gestures from an elephant grabbing a peanut to people making or assembling things, in slow motion, human and animal effort presented side by side.

Gesture does seem to be knowledge when it becomes touch. Even put to images, we can see the universe in everyday life. So how is it possible to preserve all of these gestures in an Encyclopedic Palace along with all of this other knowledge?

For the moment, there is still a human body being described by the architecture of this exhibition, a human body that navigates along these intercrossing, nostalgic, binary structures.

Phylida Barlow’s meteorites announce a darker vision that comes with the surrealism of Jakub Julian Ziółkowski. Dismemberment, disease and pathology are a kind of anti-gesture, rather than something the body does, it is something that happens to the body, at least this is true in the catalog of all biological things. Morphing and shapeshifting is not always so healthy. Now there is the diseased and the healthy body.

With Eugene von Brunchenheim paintings and photos of his wife looking blissed out or recently fucked, the psychedelic is now in place. Steve Mc Queen presents a human projection into outerspace, to some unknown other. From here, a domestic departure from the broader themes between the individual and the universe. This room occupies the binary space that was formed with the acceleration of a scientific practice called psychology. Suddenly our bodies are containers, architecture, there is inside and there is outside, with endless numbers of windows, and entries but almost no exits. Outer space is something to project to but never physically or corporeally. So now it is not just a diseased or healthy body, it is also a diseased or healthy mind determining what should or should not be added to the palace. Even our furniture becomes dysfunctional as Jessica Jackson Hutchins shows, perhaps it is morphing to our sick bodies. The healthy is now more abstract than the diseased.

This disfunction / pathology transforms Phylida Barlow’s gigantic balls into something cancerous, a scale shift. What has happened? We have tried to reach the universe, which we stopped reaching for with our bodies, by mistaking it for what goes on in our heads. We think this was done to us, it could not possibly be the result of our own movements and gestures.

There is a kind of hopelessness in the long archive video bank Kan Xuan masoleums/tombs moving snapshots animated from still photos. It seems not possible to reanimate something that was never animate. It is no surprise that there is hardly any sex for anyone so far in the palace (except perhaps for the ‘outsider artist’ Eugene von Brunchenheim and his wife.)

Danh Vo’s room shows objects and building materials containing an archive of their (colonialist?) history – a material image and a material index. (The photograms become physical material) Images, as in photographically and representationally dead images, are beginning to take material form. Nearby, Matthew Monahan attempts to recreate the human form out of similar historically imprinted ‘building’ material.

Ed Atkins film “The Trick Brain” contains footage of surrealist Andre Breton’s personal objects, which is somehow intended to describe Breton’s expanded body and at the same time describe this archive as a destructive force to that body. After dismemberment it should be no surprise to find corpses everywhere.

What is to be done about all of this? Are these pathologies something to be eradicated or is the pathology something that we are supposed to bring into our palace? If we bring it in will it infect everything else? Or will it be a grander and more perfect map of the world?

Of course many of the solutions bring with them even more problems.

R Crumb illustrates a famous story, the Book of Genesis, installed in a room surrounding the mysterious, sinisterly sweet creatures of Shinichi Sawada. Gioni is posting his own architecturally cartoonish depiction of insider-outsider literalness, in case we have not gotten the picture yet. R Crumb’s raw and deviant but socially acceptable application of this biblical story is surrounding the work of the speechless and autistic ceramicist, a circle in a square.

Rosella Biscotti literally works with the medium of imprisoned women. She appropriates their dreams and their compost in a work exhibited a short vaporetto ride away.

In the same room, transplanted Senegalese Papa Ibra Tall’s pictures and tapestries attempt to deploy color and patterning as a vehicle of national and racial identity and as an anti-colonialist statement.

Frederick Bruly Bouabec’s approach is an attempt to record everything, through the founding of his own religion, (The Order of the Persecuted!) his own language and collection of all things through notational drawings.

Arthur Bispo do Rosário made a lifetime of work interned in a psychiatric hospital. In his objects he attempts to make a record of every thought or vision.

Haroun Faroki documents people interacting with memorials, rituals by gestureless, presumably non-interned or otherwise isolated people against monuments to corpses. If it were installed a few rooms before, or later, it might read very differently.

Farocki’s point seems to echo the narrative of the show, that there is some degree of cross culture universalism or even faith in the idea of contact with or connection to something that ‘cannot be reached,’ something universal that has been divided up by labels of woman, artist, insane, immigrant, visionary.

A question of appropriation and some suspicions about anthropology emerge in relation to this hunting and gathering of all things in the universe.

Matt Mullican attempts to transcribe the experience of inhabiting a state of altered boundaries into an environment consisting of pictograms that emerged while in such a state, but somehow mediated outside of that state. It is perhaps an attempt at changing the nature of representation, or rather displacing it, stepping aside, not necessarily the construction or map of his mind, but perhaps a guide to a field of action/interaction in an overly mediated world.

In Jos De Gruyter /Harald Thys’ film the characters have even loss the ability to express their lives through death. Michael Schmidt records his study of European industrial food production.

Aurelien Froment’s film discusses mnemonic strategies for memory recording, such as using imaginary architecture and images to aid recall.

One approach to expression might be to study the production of expression and identity of others. Sharon Hayes restages Pasolini style interviews in the US to present systems of sexual identity building within social groups. Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj tries to visualize a landscape occupied by the spirits of recently dead people from a map created by Brazil’s Spiritist community.

After this catalog of proposals/ strategies, and negations/deaths of various individual engagements, the zombie apocalypse is in full force as released by Paweł Althamer.

Gioni begins to perform his own solution to this question of everything with a show within a show, curated by an artist, specifically Cindy Sherman, who is known for taking various identities, hybrids and deformities in her own work.

The room is a collection of figurative representation. Architecture was seemingly left behind. After the zombie apocalypse of Paweł Althamer, it is a nice break to stop and focus on the human body.

Though there are plenty of things in this room that have links to past Gioni projects, it does have Cindy Sherman’s name and is convincing as such. It is also another paragraph in our narrative so lets look carefully.

In this room (subdivided into a few rooms) are more or less figurative representations of the human form by John de Andrea, George Condo, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, Jimmie Durham, Phyllis Galembo, the makers of Pano drawings, Laurie Simmons and Alan McCollum, Norbert Ghisolan, Vlassis Canaries, Duane Hanson, Hans Schärer, Miroslaw Balka, (ex votos from Santaurio di Romituzzo), James Castle, Hans Bellmer, Pierre Molinier, Carol Rama, Herbert List, Charles Ray, Enrico Baj, and Sergey Zarva.

The Hatian vodou flags are not entirely figurative looking but given the ‘representation’ behind the magical talisman, a conceptual argument can be made that they are.

A work of Linda Fregni Nagler (The Hidden Mother) – uses a collection of photographs, and Cindy Sherman’s photo album collection is a nice scale and location shift, or maybe even a talisman, like a locket on a necklace, in this contained section. The Rosemarie Trockel vitrines in the context of Gioni’s show, remind us that Rosemarie Trockel is a giant that has had no small influence on curators like Gioni.

One thing stands out as being notably different within this archive of figurative representations: Robert Gober’s house. One might be attempted to make an arc for it as we might do with the Nagler or the Trockel or the Voodou, but mostly the biggest question is “what is this house doing in here?”

It, of course, is carrying, along with the Rosemarie Trockel, and a number of other works in this room, the arc of our narrative, which is now converting bodies into architecture.

In the next room we move to the interior of that Gober house in a more contemporarily contained version in Ryan Trecartin’s (and Ryan Trecartin/Lizzy Fitch) grand installation. We are left with our own choice of whether to immerse ourselves completely into the frenzied immersive vernacular of Ryan Trecartin (and Ryan Trecartin/Lizzy Fitch).

After the Trecartin/Fitch theater, is a more classic gallery exhibition where Wade Guyton’s digital appropriations of late 60’s attitudes seem at first jarring and a little out of place. The long, vertical works of Alice Channer and the monochromes of Pamela Rosencranz are a contrast to the insistent figuration of the previous rooms, it makes no sense to introduce minimalism at this point so lets go with the digital vs the analog. Ah! This is still all about the realm of images, even though it seemed a moment that abstraction threatened our belief in the flatness of images. Does flatness exist at all? It begins to seem an illusion. The digital and digital replication has fueled an acceleration of the changeability of the nature of images, archives, libraries, museums and encyclopedias. They are now self-replicating, self-recording.

Yet again it is the work of a woman artist that literally whispers a hint of where this narrative is going. The digital panel in Pamela Rosencranz’ series of blue rectangles “Because They Try to Bore Holes- Death of Yves Klein” is delivering the next architectural development of this exhibition.

A digital robotic voice is saying things such as “pigments enter your skin, protect your skin, painting is dangerous, colors are dangerous, if you had no skin your bodily fluids will seep out.” There is even a warning about smoking. All warnings about one’s skin being penetrated, creating anxiety about the dissolution of the protective barrier between our insides and the world. And in fact that is exactly what is beginning to happen at this point in the Arsenale.

Gioni is describing the evolution towards an architecture with no skin. The membrane became completely permeable, and has now dissolved. In 1993, our systems of sattelites, tv, radio and telephone networks were already an architecture of sorts, but in 1993, this still seemed like a reference to flatness, a mirror, a blanket and a skin. 20 years later, we have completely occupied the space within all of this flatness. There is no flatness to this at all. Flatness is an illusion.

Professor of Architecture Beatriz Colomina proposed a skinless architecture as a future a few days before the Biennale opening at the Kunsthalle Wien in her talk called “Illness as Metaphor in Modern Architecture,” where architecture has followed the technologies of imaging devices used to seek out pathologies from x-rays to CT and MRI scans. I would propose that this skinless architecture has been there for some time, and we do not need to make a building to realize something that is already constructed.

Lets remind ourselves that the definition of technology is not so far away from the definition of representation. Insistent media specificity predicts that we will find plenty of artists trying to use the materials of our decaying technologies to challenge some of these indexical assumptions.

Albert Oehlen uses images as image-making matter. James Richards takes this image processing into the filmic realm. Simon Denny sculptural installation uses representations and images of spent image technologies. Channa Horwitz makes geometries, patterns and structures intended at a synesthesia with sound and movement, rather than indexical representation. Prabhavathi Meppayil in this context is a delicate homage to a former analog of wire connections, and handcrafted surfaces.

Mark Le Kay’s “The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things” touring exhibition that does not exist, but is in fact a remodel of another exhibition. Here is yet another show within a show, but then again, importantly, it is not. The suggestion is that when we are finally pulled through and completely transformed by our images, there may yet again be a chance for animism.

Helen Marten’s “Orchids, or a Hemispherical Bottom” presents various “image cultures” in physical and virtual form, a meditation of “humanity’s conquest of nature” ironically questionable.

Helen Marten and Mark Le Kay expanded responses to this question of massive image material overload announce the dissolution of many of the binary concepts that we swallowed at the beginning of the Arsenale.

The last big room of this long passage is a bath in a large Stan Van der Beek installation of image cacaphony. We no longer have the choice to ‘opt out’ of this total imageverse as we were able to in the Trecartin (and Ryan Trecartin/Lizzy Fitch) room.

By now, very close to the end of our digestive tract, the divisions between archive, museum, encyclopedia, library, and so on have dissolved to the point of total permeability, we are no longer protected, more like we have been digested ourselves, and here is the final turn of Gioni’s multidimensional narrative.

The future and the past inform the present, but what if your present is not so nice, what if there is a pathology in your architecture? Perhaps you must operate.

After a healing moment (or anesthesia?) with the light balls and constructions of Otto Piene we are plunged, very succinctly into the concluding remarks in the pathology of some nameless body depicted in the filmwork “Da Vinci” by Yuri Ancarani.

The film starts with a blue beating thing – an organ with no body. It is perhaps an underwater scene. Operation tools start to poke through sometimes intimate sometimes violent, intimate from inside, violent from the outside view. From the outside view, the doctors/robots working on the patient have the roughness of an auto mechanic. We see the patient’s hands, but little more to indicate that it is human flesh.

The machine and instruments have labels such as Da Vinci / Intuitive / Bipolar. We see the doctors from tv’s point of view. Are we the patient? Or are we the tv?

Hands of doctors are attached and detached, it is a strangely mediated touch. And there is even smoke (!) inside the nameless body at some point. Could that mean we have found a habitable planet?

To practice using the DaVinci machine, there is a simulation with dominos. One false move ends with dominoes falling over.

Gioni’s final gestures (in this particular sector of the exhibition) are older works, a Bruce Nauman from 91 called “Raw Material a continuous shift – mmmm” which is paired with Dieter Roth’s ‘solo scenes’ (97-98), a video diary of the artist’s ‘everyday life’.

In this room the artist’s body dissolves, and ours is beginning to go with it. What happens if there is no body? If there is no body, can there be a corpse? Can there be pathologies? Can there be mental illness? Insanity? Judgement? Heros? Victims? Lovers? Haters?

Why is this thing that Gioni has made architecture? And not landscape? Or a depiction of landscape? Not because it has an author here, although that is very convenient for this purpose. It is architecture because it is the space we move in. I do not have an answer that has ever convinced anyone in the last 20 years. Isn’t there a field called landscape architecture?

The final work, Walter De Maria’s “Apollo’s Ectasy” (1990) comes at the end and in fact does feel more like an object on the ground, something that went through the entire digestive process, something that establishes our relationship to it, rather than something that is enveloping us, the immersive (and thankfully not overly moist) environment of the journey up until here.

Walter De Maria is the end point. It is not just the period at the end of the sentence, it is the exit of a carefully built, not quite yet authorless, architectural environment. Our pathologically determined architectural mass has passed a Freudian turd.

I overheard a complaint that Gioni’s exhibition was almost entirely about personal narratives, with political and social dimensions left out of the picture. I completely disagree. How can something that makes such a clear argument for us to stop taking the work of women, the work of people from different cultures, as a pathology or a cancer to be removed from our system, or to be cataloged and tagged and preserved in the name of science or other ‘higher orders’ – how can this be only about personal narratives, and not socially involved or political?

When will this new attitude become form?

When we get too caught up in specific objects, there is a destruction involved. Not only a destruction of the object, but also a kind of suicide. Let’s take off from the gorgeous and complex Walter De Maria turd at the end of the Arsenale exhibition.

But first, that question again, about the curator as artist, or the artist as curator? If you have been thinking up until now that this Biennale is remarkably free of ‘the market,’ lets not forget that our common definition for these sort of ‘encyclopedic’ attempts at preservation, gathering, archiving, saving, and so on has often been called “collecting.”

I leave you for now with an image of two other works by the artist in the Prada Foundation’s re-presentation of Harald Szeeman’s “Live in Your Head – when attitudes become form.”

Walter De Maria “Art by telephone” 1967

It is a telephone on the floor and nearby this telephone is a sign that says “If this telephone rings, you may answer it. Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.”

Nearby is:

Walter De Maria “Suicide and Black Telephone” 1966-67 in Artist Studio, New York City, 1966–67

It is a photographic depiction of the piece above, I suppose installed in the artist’s studio.

This is not a conceptual death. This is a real and literal death.

Temporäre Autonome Zone >< September – December 2012

• September – December: Temporary Autonomous Zone

ABOUT Temporäre Autonome Zone

The Temporäre Autonome Zone is an independent experimental exhibition platform produced by Lisa Ruyter with ff, a group of international women artists who meet regularly to collaborate on feminist projects. The Temporäre Autonome Zone, in practical terms, will have a festival format, comprising of performances, lectures, talks, workshops and film screenings. The nature of this project is collaborative, performative, pedagogic, necessary and non-commercial.

The Temporäre Autonome Zone is a frame for a living and evolving network of women artists. This network is formed around a constantly shifting discussion of contemporary feminist and participatory practices. Our views and approaches vary extremely. Some of us are focused on naming and identifying a specific methodology and some of us choose to develop a personal practice independent of such identification. Temporäre Autonome Zone is not the name of an exhibition, but a fluid, independent platform in which collaborative artistic production occurs in tandem with a search for a lived feminism. Production is not associated with commercial concerns, though our discussion may overlap with issues women artists have within a ‘marketplace.’

Artist Lisa Ruyter has invited ff to Vienna to develop this concept live, in collaboration with an extended network of Vienna-based artists, students, writers and curators. ff is a group of international artists who have been meeting weekly in Berlin for similar discussions. ff is Delia Gonzalez, Mathilde ter Heijne, Antje Majewski, Amy Patton, Katrin Plavcak, Jen Ray and Juliane Solmsdorf.

We will develop a variety of productions within the frames of an exhibition space, the city of Vienna, our limited resources, and a time period of about three months. The subject and content of the ‘exhibition’ is simply the productive results of a network of women artists. This network mediates our individual practices as well as our collaborative efforts. The highlight will be the chaotic and creative development of ideas from a living and breathing body of participants. Our research is not scientific, certainly many have made thorough studies of specific topics that we plan to approach. The point of our research is our need for discussion of an applied feminism allowing for diverse individual artistic practice by artists who happen to be women.

 

Wednesday, November 21 // Mathilde ter Heijne & Amy Patton // Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise.

THIS BEGINS AT 17H

5 PM!!!!!!!

Reflecting on renewed claims to the revolutionary potential of participatory art and anti-hierarchical strategies in the art context (“Forget Fear,” the 2012 Berlin Biennale), artists Amy Patton and Mathilde ter Heijne will be leading a discussion on the legitimacy of art as an actual agent for social change.

With previous models showing ideas of collectivity, gift economies, the exchange of aesthetic and social experiences, encouraging dialogue and inhabiting spaces that are non-traditional for art, how

and why do participatory art forms claim to break down hierarchical structures, and could we say these strategies are successful? Is the abuse of power inevitable in any hierarchical situation, and if so, how could its “losers” embrace failure as a tactic? In what ways could failure offer new, more effective models of knowledge production, different aesthetic standards for ordering or disordering space, and other modes of aesthetic and political engagement?Amy Patton, artist and filmmaker, lives and works in Berlin. She completed studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and The University of Texas at Austin. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, New York (2009) and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2010); other group shows and screenings have been held at Magazin 4, Bregenz, and Brandenburger Kunstverein, Potsdam (2010); Sculpture Center, New York (2009); Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Cairo (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2007); PIEROGI Brooklyn / Leipzig (2006).Mathilde ter Heijne, visual artist, lived for many years in Berlin. She studied in Maastricht at the Stadsacademie and in Amsterdam at the Rijksacademie Beeldende Kunsten. Since April 2011 she is professor of visual art, performance and installation art at the University of Kassel.
She has participated in numerous national and international group and soloexhibitions including Migros Museum for Contemporary Art in Zurich, at the Goetz Collection in Munich, in the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the Künsthalle in Nuremberg, Lentos Museum of Modern Art in Linz (all solo shows), and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, PS1 in New York, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin or at the Shanghai Biennale .

Saturday, November 10 // Nina Prader // Zine-Workshop

A zine is a radical piece of paper.
Suffragettes used printed flyers to spread the word about women’s lib.
DIY riot grrrls used paper booklets as a megaphone for creative manifestos.
Learn how to fashion your own zine and how this medium can playfully explore  artistic, creative freedom of speech and thought. The workshop will teach you some basic zine skills from glueing, cutting, printing to distribution.

-Nina

BARBARA KAPUSTA // Live Hypnosis Session // WEDNESDAY November 7, 19h – 21h.

In an open to public hypnosis session a group of women will narrate stories related to the topic of feminism and solidarity. The audience will be invited to participate. The state of trance is used as tool to create text and decipher images. This experiment is the attempt to imagine and suggest stories about women, collectivity and story telling.

 

Barbara Kapusta’s Website

MONDAY November 5, 19h – 21h // Feminism for Every Body with Johanna Kirsch & Katharina Lampert.

 

Johanna Kirsch und Katharina Lampert wagen an diesem Abend eine kleine Reise durch das WWW und zeigen, was sie auf ihrer Couch-Surf-Suche nach kurzen Artefakten zum Thema künstlerische, direkte, feministische Aktion bzw. Performance so alles angefunden haben.

Ausgehend von den Performance-Damen der ersten Stunde, führt ihre Reise in weitere Gefilde und bis ins Jetzt. Es wird an diesem Abend nicht analysiert, bewertet oder kritisiert, sondern mit viel Humor in der YouTube und Co.-Kiste gekramt.

Ganz im Sinne von “Feminism for Everybody”. Im Anschluss wird ein Cunttail serviert, bei dem das Gesehene informell und entspannt gemeinsam verarbeitet werden kann.

PERFORMANCE // Alice Cohen & Delia Gonzalez // Saturday November 3, 7pm

“Sacred Rite” is a performative dinner theatre created by artists Alice Cohen and Delia Gonzalez. Inspired by Isis and the Rite of Rebirth, this masquerade performance comes to life with a ritual honoring female deities. Like a mystery dinner theatre, the artists will deliver a prompt upon serving the meal and the guests (the spectators) will embark upon a journey through the secret dimensions of their  innermost minds. From celebrating the female as the caretaker, the one who feeds, to ritualizing her in her highest form, Cohen and Gonzalez’ performance invokes the tradition of mediumistic circles, metaphysical channeling, and trance-work to stimulate the ecstatic energies of spiritual communion between Self and Deity. This cosmic cabaret of the inner planes opens up a celebratory space where the nurturing, earthbound elements of the hearth co-create with the Divine feminine in a feast of transformation.

Delia Gonzalez

Alice Cohen


Abstraktion und Subtraktion // from October 31 // Photo Gallery

EXHIBITION OPENING // Abstraktion und Subtraktion // October 31, 19h – 21h.


Opening of exhibition with works selected by Esther Stocker and ƒƒ.

Participating artists include Astrid Bechtold, Svenja Deininger, Karine Fauchard, Delia Gonzalez, Mathilde ter Heijne, Suse Krawagna, Antje Majewski, Katherina Olschbaur, Doris Piwonka, Nina Prader, Katrin Plavcak, Lisa Ruyter, Esther Stocker, Juliane Solmsdorf, Rita Vitorelli, Christina Zurfluh.

ABSTRAKTION UND SUBTRAKTION ///

In der Ausstellung Abstraktion und Subtraktion sollen verschiedene gegenwärtige Positionen der abstrakten und konzeptuellen Malerei vereint werden.

Malerei wird dabei als unmittelbares Thema verhandelt, aber auch als Begriff, als Idee und als Verfahren.

Abstraktion und Subtraktion sind verwandte Begriffe: Das Wort Abstraktion kommt aus dem lateinischen abstrahere was soviel wie abziehen, entfernen oder trennen heisst. Ebenso versteht man unter Subtraktion den Prozess des Abziehens, zum Beispiel wird eine Zahl von der anderen abgezogen.

Das bedeutet dass beide Begriffe mit einem eindeutigen Verfahren der Reduzierung
in Verbindung zu bringen sind.  Der Begriff der Abstraktion hat in der Kunst schon viele Bedeutungen durchlaufen, oft steht er jedoch für eine Distanzierung oder auch Befreiung von Wirklichkeit oder unmittelbaren Bedeutungen.

Der Begriff der Subtraktion soll zu dem bereits kunsthistorisch aufgeladenen Begriff der Abstraktion eine Verstärkung bilden und steht ganz direkt für den simplen Akt der Befreiung: Was nicht gebraucht wird, wird subtrahiert, ganz einfach weggelassen.

Das nimmt einerseits Bezug auf ganz allgemein reduzierende Verfahren in der Kunst, andererseits kann es im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe (von FF) auch feministisch verstanden werden.

In der Ausstellung sollen die formalen und kognitiven Möglichkeiten einer neuen zeitgemässen abstrakten und subtrahierenden Malerei gezeigt werden.

Was  für jede Künstlerin immer genau der Ausgangspunkt der Subtraktion/Abstraktion war, soll in der Ausstellung offen bleiben. Was auch immer die Motivation für eine Distanzierung, Reduzierung oder Trennung in der Bildsprache ist: das Zeichensystem für die Subtraktion wird in der Ausstellung sichtbar werden.

– Esther Stocker

SATURDAY October 27, 11h – 15h // Abstract Expressionist collaborative painting workshop with Antje Majewski.

We’ll make our own paint colors and create some abstract expressionist canvases together. Please bring whatever you think can turn into paint (pigments, berries, curry powder, earth…) or a brush (cloth, toothbrushs, strings, feathers…). Remember to wear washable clothes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WEDNESDAY October 24, 19h – 21h // Front Tier, Back Water. A Video evening with curator Christina Linden.

Image: still from Anne Walsh, Monster Lip Sync, 2005, Single channel, split screen video projection, transferred from super 8, 3 minutes TRT Silent. ////////////

Front Tier, Back Water

The five videos included in this screening – all work by artists who live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area – might be characterized by means of associative connections having to do with edges and frontiers. Moments of deviation are made possible by the rough and loose at the edges of rural decorum, childhood or cronehood, legal precedent, gender, identity and settlement.

Video works include:

Anne Walsh Monster Lip Sync, 2005, 3 min
Single channel, split screen video projection, transferred from super 8, Silent.

Cybele Lyle, The Last Resort, 2008, 10 min

Falling in Love… with Chris and Greg (Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans) Episode 2: “Road Trip! TV Special”, 2008, 23 min

Torreya Cummings, Frenchy vs. Lily Belle, 4:15 min

Anne Walsh Two Men Making Gun Sounds, 1996, 12:24 min. Shown as single channel projection, originally designed as two channel laser-disc installation with electronic sychronizer, to be shown on 23” monitors, each on a single pedestal.
curated by Christina Linden

Monday, October 22, 7pm // Amy Patton presents a selection of works and films.

Still from “The Mirror of Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love” (2011) ////////////////////

Amy Patton‘s videos deal with conventions of filmic storytelling, voiceover narration, character acting and pacing. Working in a range of media that includes film, performance, writing, installation and photography, her work explores how we make sense of objects, image and text with the imperfect understanding and irrationality of the way we think.

The talk will include a screening of  two of her films,  including “Oil” (2010) a filmed theater piece and a documentary on the making of the film itself. Taking Upton Sinclair’s Oil! as a point of departure, Patton plays with slippages between the novel’s characters and plot and the experiences of the actors and artist in making the film.

The second film, “The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love” is another theater-film work based on an early 14th-century vision and manuscript by the French Christian mystic, anarchist and “Free Spirit” heretic Marguerite Porete. The film shows a cast of non-professional actors, friends and dancers occupying a theater space, being filmed whilst in pursuit of the ecstatic state.

Amy Patton, artist and filmmaker, lives and works in Berlin. She completed studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and The University of Texas at Austin. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, New York (2009) and the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2010); other group shows and screenings have been held at Magazin 4, Bregenz, and Brandenburger Kunstverein, Potsdam (2010); Sculpture Center, New York (2009); Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Cairo (2008); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2007); PIEROGI Brooklyn / Leipzig (2006).

WEDNESDAY October 17, 19h – 21h // Magda Tothova: An evening with Offred and Ellador.

An evening with Offred and Ellador ∆ hosted by Magda Tothova
supported by Mathilde ter Heijne and ELE

On October 17, Ellador of Herland and Offred of Gilead will be our guests for one night at the Temporäre Autonome Zone. Both women come from foreign countries and are very interested in meeting new people.
As their societies are very different from ours, we will have a very rare opportunity to ask them how their social and political systems are built up and how their everyday lives function. Ellador, for example, hails from an all-female society isolated somewhere in South America. Offred is a refugee from Gilead. Offred is not her real name, she was a handmaid with special skills. Both women would like to spend this evening with a friendly audience.

Join us at 7 p.m.
Galerie Lisa Ruyter
Kantgasse 3/20, 1010 Vienna

MONDAY October 15, 19h – 21h // Anja Manfredi, performativ analog

 

Der Körper als fotografische Langzeitbelichtung
Anja Manfredis Fotografie zwischen Bewegung und Einhalt von Astrid Peterle (Auszug)

(…) Manfredis Arbeiten der Serie Eine Geste wird belichtet (2011/12) gehen von zwei disziplinierenden Objekten aus. Die fotografische Posevorrichtung diente vor allem im 19. Jahrhundert dazu, Personen für die lange Dauer der Belichtungszeit ruhigzustellen. Im 16mm-Film Eine Geste wird belichtet, Teil 1 löst sich die Akteurin nach und nach tanzend von der Posevorrichtung. Nachdem Manfredi sich bereits einige Jahre zuvor mit historischen Tanznotationen beschäftigt hatte, entwickelte sie zu diesem Film eine eigene Form der Notation. Kader für Kader des analogen Materials wurde eingescannt und die einzelnen Fotografien schließlich als Grafik notiert – eine abstrakte Ordnung des Körpers in Raum und Zeit entstand,

der Einhalt und Bewegung fixiert und auch die Blickachsen der Akteurin festhält. Teil 2 der Serie widmet sich der Korsettschnürmaschine. Das Korsett galt über Jahrhunderte als Instrument eines Ideals von „Weiblichkeit“, das den Körper regulierte und dabei deformierte. Nachdem die Körper von Frauen zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts vom Zwang des Korsetts befreit wurden, kehrte dieses als Fetisch zurück. Die Korsettschnürmaschine lässt die Frage offen, ob sie Instrument der Disziplinierung und/oder Instrument der Lust ist. Im Super-8-Film zu Eine Geste wird belichtet, Teil 2 entfernt sich die Akteurin ebenfalls vom Objekt. Auch hier nahm Manfredi das Filmmaterial als Basis für eine weiterführende Arbeit. Mit der Idee, Bewegung im fotografischen Bildraum zu visualisieren, warf die Künstlerin während der Belichtungszeit die Super-8-Film-Rollen auf das lichtempfindliche Fotopapier. Die so entstandenen Fotogramme vervielfachen die Schichten von Bewegung: Die spiralförmigen Lichtchoreografien enthalten in sich die Bewegungen der Filmakteurin, die an manchen Stellen durchleuchten. Zunächst erscheinen die Fotogramme in Kontrast zu den Notationen des 1. Teils als kontingente Fixierungen von Bewegung und Körpern. Bei näherer Betrachtung erweisen sich sowohl Notation als auch Fotogramm als Eingriff der Künstlerin in Raum und Zeit der Fotografie, der Bilder, der Bewegungen, als mehr oder weniger geordnete Zugriffe und Variationen auf den Körper als Ort der Disziplinierung und der Möglichkeit zugleich.

Eine Geste wird belichtet steht damit paradigmatisch für Manfredis künstlerische Praxis, in der ihr Medium, die Fotografie, und ihr zentrales Referenzobjekt, der Körpers, stets aufs Neue auf ihre historischen Konditionierungen und gegenwärtigen Handlungsspielräume befragt werden. Anja Manfredis Kunst erfasst so den „Körper als fotografische Langzeitbelichtung“: „Man könnte sagen, dass jeder Mensch, an jedem Tag und zu jeder Stunde belichtet wird, und das jedeR dafür verantwortlich ist, im Prozess für die Entwicklung, das Stoppbad und die Fixierung zu sorgen.“ (Manfredi 2012)

See also: http://www.anjamanfredi.com

WEDNESDAY October 10, 19h – 21h // Tanja Widmann presents: Part 1 of 3

INSTEAD OF AN IMAGE I SENT YOU A TEXT

 

Tanja Widmann will connect three different artspaces in a three-part presentation, the first one being October 10 in the Temporäre Autonome Zone. The other presentations will be on 19 October at School ( www.weloveschool.org ) and on 30 October at Saprophyt ( http://www.saprophyt.net/ )

 

Tanja Widmann presents
(1 von 3)

(1 of 3) ist der Auftakt zu einer kleinen Serie von Präsentationen. Dabei werde ich über die Logik der Serie auch 3 Kunsträume in Verbindung setzen, deren Protagonistinnen mich unabhängig voneinander und in sehr unterschiedlicher Weise eingeladen haben, etwas, meine künstlerische Arbeit, Bezugspunkte oder auch Überlegungen zu einer feministischen Praxis, zu zeigen.
In meinen künstlerischen Arbeiten, die ich als videobasierte Performances bezeichne, untersuche ich Prozesse zeitgenössischer Subjektproduktion über Aspekte von Sprache, Affekt und technologischen Mitteln. Davon ausgehend befasse ich mich im ersten Teil der Reihe (1 von 3) mit filmischen Arbeiten, die Affekte einsetzen und zugleich auch oft vorführen. In (2 von 3) liegt der Fokus auf dem Einsatz von Sprache an der Grenze von Sinn/Unsinn und ihrem Potential Mittel ohne Zweck zu sein. (3 von 3) wird Fragmente und Variationen meiner letzten Arbeit Eine von Euch (2012) präsentieren.

(1 von 3)
Allgemein gefasst wird Affekt als eine Fähigkeit des Körpers bezeichnet, zu affizieren oder affiziert zu werden. In meiner eigenen Arbeit befasse ich mich diesbezüglich mit affektiven Triggern wie Musik, Farbe und technologischen Effekten (das meint den Code einer Kameraeinstellung ebenso wie die nachträgliche Bearbeitung eines Bildes). Affekt zeigt sich dabei sowohl als etwas ungeregeltes, noch formloses, das die agierenden Körper in den Szenen ergreift, aktiviert und in Bewegung versetzt wie auch als das, was über technologische Mittel zum Einsatz kommt.
In diesem ersten Teil der Reihe möchte ich den Blick auf das Potential der Affekte jedoch noch etwas enger führen.
In den letzten Jahren wurde Affekt vielfach über die Perspektive des Postfordismus unter dem Begriff affektiver bzw. immaterieller Arbeit ins Auge gefasst. Affektive Arbeit ist jene Arbeit, der in den gegenwärtigen ökonomischen Produktionsformen der Dienstleistungs-, Kommunikations- und Informationsgesellschaften eine Vorrangstellung eingeräumt wird, insofern sie als Technologie und zugleich lebendiger Anteil jedwede Arbeitsform unterfüttert. Diese Arbeit ist immateriell, auch wenn sie körperlich und affektiv ist, insofern als ihre Produkte unkörperlich und nicht greifbar sind: ein Gefühl des Behagens, des Wohlergehens, der Befriedigung, der Erregung oder der Leidenschaft, auch der Sinn für Verbundenheit oder Gemeinschaft. (Michael Hardt)  Genau genommen handelt es sich hierbei um den strategischen Einsatz, das Produktivmachen positiver Affekte, die Schmiere in unseren Netzwerkökonomien. Dabei fallen aber alle jene Affekte scheinbar nicht ins Gewicht und aus dem Denken der zeitgenössischen Produktionsökonomien, die sich auf unangenehme Weise artikulieren oder erfahren werden – wie etwa Wut, Scham, Angst, Traurigkeit oder einfach auch jener Anteil des Affektes, der in Unförmigkeit die Form unterbricht.
Ausgehend von diesen Überlegungen zeige ich folgende Arbeiten:

Ulrike Müller, Mock Rock, 2004, 3 min
Daria Martin, Wintergarden, 2005, 13 min
Sophia Grace and Rosie at the De Generes Show, 2011, 2 Teile, ca 11 min
Enlightened, (HBO 2011, by and with Laura Dern), 29 min
Melanie Gilligan, Polpular Unrest. 2010, episode 1, ca. 30 min
Andrea Fraser, Standing Where She’s at, 2003, 30 min

 

(2 von 3)
school, 19.10.2012, 19h
Grüngasse 22, A-1050 Wien
http://www.weloveschool.org/

(3 von 3)
Saprophyt, 30.10.2012, 19h
Webgasse 29, A-1060 Wien
http://www.saprophyt.net

MONDAY October 8, 19h – 21h. // Screening of films by Antje Majewski & Juliane Solmsdorf.

Join us for a night of films by ƒƒ members and long-time collaborators Antje Majewski and Juliane Solmsdorf. /////

Bridge is a dance performance by Antje Majewski and Juliane Solmsdorf.

Erde Asphalt Wedding
Juliane Solmsdorf and Antje Majewski crawl on the asphalt of the streets around my studio in Berlin-Wedding. They come out of the canal and vanish behind a ramp at the local Jobcenter.

Procession
There is a procession, costumed and singing, bringing some colorful abstract paper gifts over the street from my studio to the canal, where they throw them into the water.

Nest
“At night I take a lamp outside my studio and light up my environment: bicycles, a huge wall, a car. I cross the street, dragging the cable that is plugged into the studio behind me. Now the light shows trees, branches. I color my face and hands with tempera paint and proceed to a sandy spot, where I lie down a birds nest, and into it some metall balls.” – Antje Majewski

SATURDAY October 6, 13h // Madeleine Bernstorff presents "The Fanaticism of the Suffragettes"

Madeleine Bernstorff presents “The Fanaticism of the Suffragettes” + Discussion (brunch and open house from 11h – 15h).  /////

(Madelein Bernstorff’s website)

 

The FANATICISM OF THE SUFFRAGETTES is a compilation video (and trailer for a film program)  inspired by an article*** from the German film magazine Lichtbildbühne from 1912. It is based on the observation that the women’s suffrage movement became radicalized at almost exactly the same time as cinema, still in the process of self-invention, began to consolidate itself and to shrug off nineteenth-century forms of expression. This historical conjunction is revealed in numerous newsreels and comedies. Our primary interest lay in the portrayal of rebellion, activism and an often high-spirited intervention against the ruling order at a time when cinema was itself experiencing a radical upheaval. We also wanted to show not only that the films made between 1900 and 1914 generally satirize the movement for emancipation, but also that the movement itself strategically deployed public images.

From 1903 on, the radical Women’s Social Political Union (WSPU) fought for political rights for women in Britain under the autocratic leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst. They organized demonstrations, campaigns and countless petitions. Around 1910, the WSPU’s approach took an increasingly radical turn. Their members generated publicity using militancy and violence; harsher repression ensued. Many comedies refer to the actions of the WSPU. The non-fiction films show a more orderly image, often consciously managed by the suffragettes: long marches in white garments with the insignia of Holloway Prison and well-placed placards bearing slogans like “Taxation without representation is tyranny”.  F.e. in 1918 one harassed husband still dreams of being Prime Minister and inflicting draconian punishment on suffragette activists to quash their militancy, yet in fact the outbreak of World War I saw most (bourgeois) suffragettes rushing to serve the national cause and setting aside their demand for the right to vote.

(idea and concept: Madeleine Bernstorff, editing: Angelika Levi/English version: Sebastian Bodirsky. Voices: Elsa de Seynes and Christabel Pankhurst, produced by support of: exhibition Bertha-von-Suttner-revisited, Niederoesterreich and Kuenstlerhaus Buechsenhausen, Innsbruck and many others) 17 min, 2009/2010

***
“The “Modern” Women’s Movement in England
The fanaticism of the suffragettes has again contrived a new battle method to attack the deeply hated male sex and above all the state government impeding their endevours. During all their future events and marches, the suffragettes are to be accompanied by female camera operators so as to immediately cinematographically record all police “assaults”. The films are then to be shown to women throughout the land so that other women in smaller towns can learn about the difficulties with which the women’s movement has to struggle. This new means of propaganda, to call a spade a spade, is meant to instigate women in the towns of the province, who have hitherto been spared by this ugly movement, and encourage them to greater “heroic deeds”. Of course, the English police will fight this new mischief and simply take the cinema apparatuses away from the suffragettes. That would be the only means, since private screenings of the films cannot be forbidden due to the lack of legal regulations. But the English police does have a powerful ally in the audience that will lend a helping hand if the suffragettes again go too far.”
(From the filmmagazine Lichtbild-Bühne – Berlin, Dec. 14, 1912)

MONDAY October 1, 19h – 21h // Film Night with Barbara Kapusta and Katharina Aigner.

Barbara Kapusta and Katharina Aigner will screen films by Berlin-based artist Jenni Tischer and Bernadette Anzengruber (Vienna) /////////

Bernadette Anzengruber
The order of event (ENACT : an deiner Zunge)
Video, Farbe, Ton, 28:00 min, 2012

The order of event entstand in der Auseinandersetzung mit der Figur Ludwig Wittgenstein. Die Videoarbeit nähert sich in einer Reihe von Versuchsanordnungen dem Denken, Schreiben, Sprechen und Schweigen Wittgensteins konkret anhand der von ihm 1929 in Cambridge abgehaltenen Lecture on Ethics an und wirft generelle Fragen nach dem Gelingen und Scheitern von Sprache auf.

An deiner Zunge”, Lecture-Performance im Rahmen von Philosophy on Stage am 25. November 2011 im Haus Wittgenstein, Wien
Performerinnen: Bernadette Anzengruber (Ms Tongue), Philipp Fleischmann (Mr. Lion), Salvatore Viviano (Mr. Miracle)

 

Jenni Tischer
Und jetzt weiter im Text
HDV, 16:9, Farbe, Ton, 13:21min, 2010Das Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts (20er Haus), welches ursprünglich als temporärer Pavillon für die Weltausstellung 1958 in Brüssel von dem Architekten Karl Schwanzer entworfen wurde, bildet den kontextuellen Ausgangspunkt meiner Arbeit. Im Schweizer Garten in Wien als Ausstellungsraum fest installiert wurde es zunächst vom MuMok bespielt, stand anschließend mehrere Jahre leer und ist nun seit 2010 in Teil des Belvederes.Die derzeitig stattfindenden Bauarbeiten umfassen sowohl die Sanierung des Gebäudebestands, als auch eine Erweiterung durch den Neubau eines Turms und dem hinzufügen eines zusätzlichen Untergeschosses. Durch die Dekonstruktion der Gebäudestruktur, dem Zerlegen des historischen Gebäudekörpers in Einzelteile, und dem Hinzufügen von neuen erweiternden Gebäudeteilen, befindet sich der Bauprozess in einer ständigen Bewegung zwischen Ab- und Aufbau.Durch die Beobachtung dieser für den Ort und die Konzeption des neuen Gebäudes spezifischen Bewegung, dem Aufnehmen vorhandener gewachsener Formen und dem Hinzufügen neu zu bestimmender einzelner Fragmente, lag für mich die Notwendigkeit begründet mit zwei Künstlerinnen, Katharina Aigner und Astrid Wagner, zusammen zu arbeiten, bzw. diese einzuladen. Die unterschiedlichen performativen Handlungen, die sich mit der Herstellung von Bühnenraum über Performance und der seriellen Produktion von Abgüssen auseinandersetzen, bespielen den Ort.Zwischen dem Szenarium fragmentierter Räumlichkeiten im Museum und einer schwarzen und einer weißen Studiosituation eröffne ich eine Kommentarebene. Der Topos des künstlerischen Arbeitsprozesses, der künstlerischen Handlung selbst, dient als Struktur, um imaginative, dokumentarische und fiktionale Bilder an den Schauplätzen miteinander in Verbindung zu bringen. Die Frage nach den Anfängen und den Übersetzungen von Text in Bild, von Konzept in Performance, von Material in Objekt stellt sich in den offen gebliebenen Prozessen. „Der Text, die Rede unter den Zeichen ist kein gehaltener, festgehaltener (…)“ (aus Foucault: Die Ordnung der Dinge), sondern ein ständig zu aktualisierender, an Identität und Entscheidung gebundener Subtext. (…)

 


What should we speak about and what can we speak about? Mathilde ter Heijne hosts a Round Table discussion with Veronika Dirnhofer, Nina Höchtl, Ursula Maria Probst, Francis Ruyter, Bettina Steinbruegge. // MONDAY 24 September, 19.00 – 21.00.

One important agenda of Caroline Christov-Bakargiev’s documenta 13 (mentioned in the first lines in the accompanying guidebook) is described as ‘ecofeminism’. In her book Le Feminisme ou la Mort (1974), Françoise d’Eaubonne uses this term first and called upon people to lead an ecological revolution in order to save the planet. This entailed revolutionizing gender relations and human relations with the natural world. The microcosm of the home and the macrocosm of the world recognize two realities; the overwhelming presence of patriarchal societies and the subjugation of nature on a global scale. This suggests that the coining of the term was not meant to posit an inherent connection between women and nature but to suggest a disproportionate subjugation of both.

Although the eco feminist agenda can be felt in many decisions concerning the theoretical backgrounds, the presentation and the assignments given to artists in this documenta, there aren’t many works of outspoken (eco) feminist artists criticizing harsh conditions for females in patriarchal societies nowadays (think of sexual exploitation, human slavery, difficulty of double burden of job and motherhood, lower wages for female workers, low self esteem of young girls, etc.) Even the amount of female artists participating (around 30%) wasn’t really higher then in similar shows like this.

How do/can feminist cultural workers support each other globally, which issues should they address nowadays and which difficulties do they come across?

 

Official launch + opening party // FRIDAY 21 September, 16.00 – 19.00 h. // VIENNA

16.00 – 19.00

Launch of Feminist Archive featuring BUST, NOWISWERE and PETUNIA // FRIDAY 21 September, 16.00 – 19.00 h

Veronika Hauer (Nowiswere), Lili Reynaud-Dewar (Petunia) and Laurie Henzel (Bust magazine) will be presenting their magazines and talk about their understanding of feminist writing and the questions of archives, collective memories and the making of art histories.

This marks the inauguration of the ff Feminist Archive, which will gather our own personal libraries into one place to be used for the duration of this project. The emphasis is to be on a very contemporary feminist dialog, to include magazines, fanzines as well as theory and monographs. This archive will be available at all events and by appointment for the duration of the Temporäre Autonome Zone.
(TIP: also check out the ZINE FAIR)

Please bring us your books, catalogues, magazines, pictures, videos, music files that connect to female or feminist art, for temporary or permanent inclusion in this archive… and get a free artwork by Mathilde ter Heinje, Antje Majewski & Juliane Solmsdorf or Aleksandra Mir and others in exchange!

19.00 – 21.00

FLY OR FLOW

Exhibition of collaborative works by ff: Delia Gonzalez, Mathilde ter Heijne, Antje Majewski, Amy Patton, Jen Ray, Juliane Solmsdorf, additionally featuring collaborators Katrin Plavcak and Mathilde Rosier. Works included in this exhibition have evolved out of discussion and common interest within the extended network of ff during the last year in Berlin and Vienna.
This show will evolve with our program.

Including live photo sessions for the project Gentle Men
“Two female artists are looking for volunteers who are not afraid to have their testicles photographed. The photographs will be exhibited in an art gallery. Models will remain anonymous and will receive a copy of the photograph in exchange for their time.”

Galerie Lisa Ruyter
Kantgasse 3/20, 1010 Wien
+43 1 505 6100
Beethovenplatz@gmail.com
www.GalerieLisaRuyter.com

Francis Ruyter @ CONNERSMITH., Washington DC; "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," September 8-October 20, 2012

Lisa Beck >< Looking Through >< May – June 2012

Lisa Beck

“Looking Through”
May 24 – June 30
Opening Thursday 24 May 19-21h.

 

We are extremely pleased to present the first European solo exhibition by Lisa Beck, titled “Looking Through” from 24 May to 30 June. The exhibition will include paintings and installation works installed in an environment mediated through wall paintings.

In a Lisa Beck exhibition, paintings double themselves, a room is reflected, compressed and inverted into a small sphere, wall paintings link illusionary space with real space.

In 2010 Lisa Beck was included in our exhibition “Pull My Daisy,” and was invited by Lisa Ruyter to make a project with Olivier Mosset at Bell Street Project Space in Vienna, known for having a large mirrored wall. The mirrored surface has since become a greater part of the artist’s language, the materiality reflecting, both literally and metaphorically, core interests at the heart of her practice.

Lisa Beck writes:

“Transparency and reflection are the visual qualities that link all the works ‘Looking Through’. Patterning through repetition and an exploration of the pictorial suggestiveness of material and abstraction come into play as well. The way the reflective surface brings its environment into the work is of primary interest to me, as well as the illusion of depth it lends to the flat surface. The smoothness of the glass allows the diluted paint to pool and separate in ways that are both allusive and formally focused. This serves my concurrent interests in the materiality of the art object and its metaphorical references to space, landscape and mood.”

Visual awareness and perception are a bridge between us and the world we live in. There’s everything and there’s us, and although we’re part of – inside – everything, we also stand apart – outside – as we perceive, analyze, and interpret it. Encouraging pure acts of observation and heightened visual awareness with these works, I want to look at seeing…I’m interested in optical illusions and other visual effects, and am interested in how they inform the innate desire we have for order, the stories we tell ourselves about what makes sense in our experience. Symmetry, repetition and pattern are some of the ways we make sense, make order from chaos. And maybe it doesn’t matter if we fool ourselves with this illusion that things match up and dance together in an orderly fashion. Because maybe there really is order beneath the chaos. Or not.”

A catalog “yes, no, something, nothing, never, always” includes selected works by Lisa Beck and an interview with Bob Nickas has just been published by Feature Inc.

Lisa Beck lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in film. Her artworks are created in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and installation, often in combination. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally since 1989 in galleries and other venues including Feature Inc, New York; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; de Pury & Luxemburg, Zurich; Le Magasin, Grenoble; La Salle des Bains, Lyon; PS1, Long Island City; CCNOA, Brussels; White Columns, New York. She has just been awarded a residency with the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Space Program.

Lisa Ruyter @ Alan Cristea Gallery, London; "Lisa Ruyter: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," April 26-May 26, 2012

Tamuna Sirbiladze >< Naked Ground >< March – April 2012

Tamuna Sirbiladze

“Naked Ground”
March 23 – April 28
Opening Thursday 22 March 19-21h.

 

We are extremely pleased to announce the first solo exhibition by Tamuna Sirbiladze in Vienna, “Naked Ground” from 23 March – 28 April 2012.

“Naked Ground” will consist of a series of oil-stick on raw canvas works, and a literal wall-painting, a wall-object built into the space as a site-specific painted work.

Tamuna Sirbiladze work is clearly dealing with gestural issues, in the works themselves and in the placement of the works in the room. Her installations often present situations which hinder the viewer’s movement, or which are stacked so that a kind of withholding becomes a part of the gestural act, a kind of reversed erasure, an explosive expression of an anti-aesthetic take it or leave it approach. The “Naked Ground” raw canvas support becomes a field of action. Her drawing practice takes on the epic gestural nature that her paintings have. Not quite a sculpture, nor a painting, the ‘wall painting’ introduces the performative element of Tamuna Sirbiladze’s approach. In the oil stick works, Tamuna Sirbiladze’s performative space has been taken into the works themselves.

Tamuna Sirbiladze was born in 1971 in Tbilisi in Georgia, and currently lives and works in Vienna. Her work has been exhibited in several institutions worldwide, including Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Austrian Cultural Forum in London, Shusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, Musée d’Art Contemporain in Marseille, Museum of Modern Art in Passau (Germany), Albertina Museum in Vienna, Museum für Angewante Kunst in Vienna, Künstlerhaus Wien and Zwanzigerhaus in Vienna. Her work was included in the Arsenale section of the 54th Venice Biennale. Solo exhibitions include Charim Ungar Contemporary in Berlin, Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner in London, Gallery Collet Park in Paris, and Old Gallery in Tbilisi.

This exhibition is produced in co-operation with Charim Gallery, Vienna.

Lotte Lyon >< Souterrain >< January – February 2012

lyon

Lotte Lyon

“Souterrain”
January 20 – February 25
Opening Thursday 19 January 19-21h.

We are pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Lotte Lyon, “Souterrain,” from 20 January – 25 February 2012.

“Souterrain” will consist of new objects built in response to the gallery space, a wall painting, and recent photographs from 5 different series.

Lotte Lyon’s sculptures employ a pragmatism in the materials used, in the methods of assembly, and in the delivery of associative ideas. The two sculptures made for “Souterrain” respond to un-heroic architectural elements of the gallery space: the stairway leading from Beethovenplatz is matched with a stepped object propped against a large empty wall, and a small utility cabinet seems to have yielded a stack of boxes that could be drawers pulled out of an impossible space hidden by that cabinet. A wall painting transports the visitor from one space to the next, and a room filled with photographs makes it clear that Lotte Lyon’s staging is meant to give an impression of theatricality and performance, as much as they are referencing various Minimalist traditions.

In the catalogue produced for Lotte Lyon’s exhibition in 2010 at the Landesgalerie Linz, Midori Matsui describes the work as having a strategy of gestural, metonymical analogy, which connects the artist to an American Minimalist tradition by way of the performative elements of Robert Morris, the perceptual elements of Donald Judd and the associative elements of Robert Smithson. The element missing in this description, as Matsui points out, is the lightness in Lotte Lyon’s work, which has an important humorous element, and is carried out through the use of prefabricated two-dimensional materials, rather than solid mass. This work would just as readily find a lineage within a European tradition as well, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, and Lily van der Stokker, as examples.

Lotte Lyon has exhibited in a number of Austrian institutions, including Landesgalerie Linz, Kunstpavilion Innsbruck, Camera Austria in Graz, Secession Vienna, the Jesuitenfoyer in Vienna, das weisse haus in Vienna, Galerie Stadtpark in Krems as well as a number of alternative spaces in Vienna including LOVE_, Area 53, and Kunstbuero. Internationally, the PS1 in New York, the MMC LUKA in Pula, Croatia, and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo. She shows extensively with Galerie Aoyama|Meguro in Tokyo.

Francis Ruyter @ Leeahn Gallery, Seoul and Daegu, Korea; Francis Ruyter, November 24-December 31, 2011

Is the Pope Catholic? >< 20 November 2011

Sunday November 20, from 14h: Is the Pope Catholic?


from 14h Sunday Brunch will be served.
Dessert will be performed by Salvatore Viviano at 17h

 

Gallery Weekend 18 – 20 November 2011
an exhibition in four parts

In the frame of Vienna Art Week and Gallery Weekend, we will present a program of local artists representing quite a few corners of our lively Vienna scene. The format is a group exhibition and a series of salon events, all of which are responses to the titles of the events, and the start of a dialog, rather than a fixed resolution to the proposal at hand.

Exhibition November 18 – December 17
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Tatiana Lecomte
Lotte Lyon
Reka Reisinger
Tamuna Sirbiladze
Six & Petritsch
Dorota Walentynowicz

Friday November 18, from 14h – 21h: Does a bear shit in the woods?
Hans Scheirl
MCs a day of performances, art and dialog. “P3 – Kunst + POstPOrnPOlitix”. Bring your own bear.
Everyone coming in drag is especially welcome!! with Andrea B. Braidt, Katrina Daschner, goldcadavre, Matthias Herrmann, KlitClique, SI.SI.Klocker, Jakob Lena Knebl, Denise Kottlett, Dorit Margreiter, Armin Medosch, Gini Müller, Norah Noizzze, Andreas Riegler, R:U//(d)ead.s.ouls, Johanna Schaffer, Hans Scheirl, Toni Schmale, Ruby Jana Sircar, Martin Sulzbacher, Gabriele Szekatsch

Saturday November 19, from 14h: Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?
Michael Hackl
, The Atom, Years, The Sleeping Beauty, A Quantum Physicist, A Drug Designer, Schrödinger’s Booze Booth, Vodka Sunny Side Up, Technocalyps, Dr. Aschan, A Miracle, Adapter, Duck Legs.

Salvatore Viviano >< Is The Pope Catholic? >< Photo Gallery

http://www.salvatoreviviano.com

 

Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? >< 19 November 2011

Saturday November 19, from 14h: Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?


Michael Hackl
, The Atom, Years, The Sleeping Beauty, A Quantum Physicist, A Drug Designer, Schrödinger’s Booze Booth, Vodka Sunny Side Up, Technocalyps, Dr. Aschan, A Miracle, Adapter, Duck Legs.

 

Gallery Weekend 18 – 20 November 2011
an exhibition in four parts

In the frame of Vienna Art Week and Gallery Weekend, we will present a program of local artists representing quite a few corners of our lively Vienna scene. The format is a group exhibition and a series of salon events, all of which are responses to the titles of the events, and the start of a dialog, rather than a fixed resolution to the proposal at hand.

Exhibition November 18 – December 17
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Tatiana Lecomte
Lotte Lyon
Reka Reisinger
Tamuna Sirbiladze
Six & Petritsch
Dorota Walentynowicz

Friday November 18, from 14h – 21h: Does a bear shit in the woods?
Hans Scheirl
MCs a day of performances, art and dialog. “P3 – Kunst + POstPOrnPOlitix”. Bring your own bear.
Everyone coming in drag is especially welcome!! with Andrea B. Braidt, Katrina Daschner, goldcadavre, Matthias Herrmann, KlitClique, SI.SI.Klocker, Jakob Lena Knebl, Denise Kottlett, Dorit Margreiter, Armin Medosch, Gini Müller, Norah Noizzze, Andreas Riegler, R:U//(d)ead.s.ouls, Johanna Schaffer, Hans Scheirl, Toni Schmale, Ruby Jana Sircar, Martin Sulzbacher, Gabriele Szekatsch

Sunday November 20, from 14h: Is the Pope Catholic?
from 14h Sunday Brunch will be served.
Dessert will be performed by Salvatore Viviano at 17h

Michael Hackl >< Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? >< Photo Gallery

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? >< November – December 2011

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

Tatiana Lecomte
Lotte Lyon
Reka Reisinger
Tamuna Sirbiladze
Six & Petritsch
Dorota Walentynowicz

November 18 – December 17
Opening during Gallery Weekend November 18
an exhibition in four parts

featuring one day only events:

November 18: 14h “Does a bear shit in the woods?”
November 19: 14h “Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?”
November 20: 14h “Is the Pope catholic?

In the frame of Vienna Art Week and Gallery Weekend, we will present a program of local artists representing quite a few corners of our lively Vienna scene. The format is a group exhibition and a series of salon events, all of which are responses to the titles of the events, and the start of a dialog, rather than a fixed resolution to the proposal at hand.

Exhibition November 18 – December 17
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Tatiana Lecomte
Lotte Lyon
Reka Reisinger
Tamuna Sirbiladze
Six & Petritsch
Dorota Walentynowicz

 

Friday November 18, from 14h – 21h: Does a bear shit in the woods?
Hans Scheirl
MCs a day of performances, art and dialog. “P3 – Kunst + POstPOrnPOlitix”. Bring your own bear.
Everyone coming in drag is especially welcome!! with Andrea B. Braidt, Katrina Daschner, goldcadavre, Matthias Herrmann, KlitClique, SI.SI.Klocker, Jakob Lena Knebl, Denise Kottlett, Dorit Margreiter, Armin Medosch, Gini Müller, Norah Noizzze, Andreas Riegler, R:U//(d)ead.s.ouls, Johanna Schaffer, Hans Scheirl, Toni Schmale, Ruby Jana Sircar, Martin Sulzbacher, Gabriele Szekatsch

Saturday November 19, from 14h: Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?
Michael Hackl
, The Atom, Years, The Sleeping Beauty, A Quantum Physicist, A Drug Designer, Schrödinger’s Booze Booth, Vodka Sunny Side Up, Technocalyps, Dr. Aschan, A Miracle, Adapter, Duck Legs.

Sunday November 20, from 14h: Is the Pope Catholic?
from 14h Sunday Brunch will be served.
Dessert will be performed by Salvatore Viviano at 17h

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? >< Photo Gallery

Does a bear shit in the woods? >< 18 November 2011

Friday November 18, from 14h – 21h: Does a bear shit in the woods?


Hans Scheirl
MCs a day of performances, art and dialog. “P3 – Kunst + POstPOrnPOlitix”. Bring your own bear.
Everyone coming in drag is especially welcome!! with Andrea B. Braidt, Katrina Daschner, goldcadavre, Matthias Herrmann, KlitClique, SI.SI.Klocker, Jakob Lena Knebl, Denise Kottlett, Dorit Margreiter, Armin Medosch, Gini Müller, Norah Noizzze, Andreas Riegler, R:U//(d)ead.s.ouls, Johanna Schaffer, Hans Scheirl, Toni Schmale, Ruby Jana Sircar, Martin Sulzbacher, Gabriele Szekatsch

 

Gallery Weekend 18 – 20 November 2011
an exhibition in four parts

In the frame of Vienna Art Week and Gallery Weekend, we will present a program of local artists representing quite a few corners of our lively Vienna scene. The format is a group exhibition and a series of salon events, all of which are responses to the titles of the events, and the start of a dialog, rather than a fixed resolution to the proposal at hand.

Exhibition November 18 – December 17
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Tatiana Lecomte
Lotte Lyon
Reka Reisinger
Tamuna Sirbiladze
Six & Petritsch
Dorota Walentynowicz

Saturday November 19, from 14h: Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?
Michael Hackl
, The Atom, Years, The Sleeping Beauty, A Quantum Physicist, A Drug Designer, Schrödinger’s Booze Booth, Vodka Sunny Side Up, Technocalyps, Dr. Aschan, A Miracle, Adapter, Duck Legs.

Sunday November 20, from 14h: Is the Pope Catholic?
from 14h Sunday Brunch will be served.
Dessert will be performed by Salvatore Viviano at 17h

Justine Kurland >< There’s a Hungry Mouth for Every Peach >< October – November 2011

Justine Kurland

There’s a Hungry Mouth for Every Peach

Opening preview Tuesday 4 October 19h – 21h

5 October – 12 November

 If I had explained myself clearly you would realize by now that through this non-“artistic” view, this effort to suspend or destroy imagination, there opens before consciousness, and within it, a universe luminous, spacious, incalculably rich and wonderful in each detail, as relaxed and natural to the human swimmer, and as full of glory, as his breathing: and that it is possible to capture and communicate this universe not so well by any means of art as through such open terms as I am trying it under.

In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact. As for me, I can tell you of him only what I saw, only so accurately as in my terms I know how: and this in turn has its chief stature not in any ability of mine but in the fact that I too exist, not as a work of fiction, but as a human being. …

-James Agee: from the introduction of “Let us now praise famous men”

‘There’s a Hungry Mouth for Every Peach” is Justine Kurland’s second solo exhibition of photographs in Vienna, and reflects significant artistic exploration since her 2003 exhibition ‘Welcome Home’ at Galerie Lisa Ruyter. On the road with her son, Casper, Justine Kurland has turned her attention from mothers and extended families to focus on nomadic life: train-hoppers, hitchhikers, wilderness squatters, wayfarers, and drifters, mostly men.

The ghosts that are behind an American identity are very present in this work. Justine Kurland evokes the distinctly American experience of creating small utopias in an expansive rural setting with simply the material at hand. These are similar spirits to those conjured by Walker Evans and James Agee as they documented the life and experience of poverty stricken sharecroppers during the great depression and the dust bowl era.

The photographs are narratives gleaned from America’s dream of itself: a collective identity based on firm faith in the inalienable right to freedom. The pastoral and utopian themes explored in her earlier work are here cut with a new sense of urgency, borne straight out of the struggle to leave home because it did not feel like home, to go it alone, to give up what society has to offer, to say “fuck you” to parents, God, and country, and to find redemption in the barest elements of everyday life.

Justine Kurland was born in 1969 in Warsaw, New York. She lives and works in New York, USA.

She received her B.F.A from School of Visual Arts, NY in 1996, and her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1998.

Her work has been exhibited extensively at museums and galleries in the U.S. and internationally. Recent museum exhibitions have included : 2009 : Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA ; CEPA GALLERY, Buffalo, New York, USA (solo) ; 2008 : Role Models: Feminine Identity in Contemporary American Photograph, National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., USA. Her work is in the public collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the ICP, all in New York; the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal.

She is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris.

Laleh Khorramian >< Water Panics in the Sea >< May – June 2011

Laleh Khorramian

“Water Panics in the Sea”

Opening 29 April from 19h – 21h
29 April to 18 June 2011
I am pleased to invite you to view Laleh Khorramian’s “Water Panics in the Sea” from 29 April to 18 June. The exhibition consists of animated films and works on paper.

Laleh Khorramian draws from the parallel and chaotic universe of unconscious and intuitive processes. Khorramian’s animations often unfold within the sorts of scrambled space-time configurations that Michel Foucault termed heterotopias, spaces that exist outside the conventions of time, space and history, where microcosm and macrocosm, particular and universal, virtual and real, overlap and blur.

The centerpiece of this exhibition, “Water Panics in the Sea” (12:27 min, 2011) is an animated film that follows a narrative derived partially from the materials of its construction, which includes magnification and manipulation of minute details derived from monotype prints, drawings, video clips, monotypes, and collages created by the artist. This narrative is further structured as an odyssey in which a ship becomes a living vessel traversing vast nautical expanses which discover glimpses of parallel dimensions where things appear simultaneously alien yet somehow intrinsic. The soundtrack for this film was produced in collaboration with composer and musician Shahzad Ismaily, who will be performing at this year’s Donaufest in Krems and has toured extensively collaborating with artists such as Laurie Anderson, Iggy Pop and John Zorn.

The hieroglyphic-like moving shell of the ship in “Water Panics in the Sea” is soloed in “Skin” (35 min loop, 2004) a moving image of a twenty-five meter long drawing that the viewfinder slowly travels across.

Khorramian’s series of five elemental studies (Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Ether) continue for “Liuto Golis” (5:35, 2011) reflecting ether, the next and final element. “Liuto Golis” is the first of the Golis Galaxy subset of sci-fi films in which Khorramian combines animation with live action narrative. The camera-work was done by Florian Lorenz and shot on location in west Texas and New Mexico.

Laleh Khorramian (b. 1974 Tehran, Iran, lives and works in New York) was first introduced to Vienna by Krinzinger Projekte, during a residency there in 2009. “Water Panics in the Sea” was partly made during her stay in Vienna. Her work has been seen in New York, Dubai, Beirut, Milan, Paris, Moscow and featured internationally in exhibitions including Site Santa Fe, New York’s PS1, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, and the Saatchi Gallery. Her animation “I Without End” (6:36 min, 2008) which we exhibited in November was included in last years Sundance Film Festival.

Patricia Reinhart >< avant de mourir >< March – April 2011

Patricia Reinhart “avant de mourir”

Open 12 March 2011 from 18h – 21h
12 March to 16 April 2011

I am pleased to invite you to view an installation by Vienna based artist Patricia Reinhart.

“13 poèmes visibles” is comprised of 12 Super-8 film loop projections titled “avant de mourir” juxtaposed with a single projection, “Ophelia.”

Patricia Reinhart uses a technique to produce these films which she has named ciné-collage. Multiple still photographs of characters and location details are collaged together in painterly layers and given just enough movement to provide a living depth of color and space.

Patricia Reinhart’s work is a ‘one-woman production.’ She is the model for every character portrayed and all of the images are sourced and arranged by her in a very private studio practice. This process offers a singular viewpoint using a character which is as once a symbol, avatar, and metaphor.

The theme-setting image in this installation, “Ophelia,” functions both as a reference to the artwork by John Everett Millais and to Shakespeare’s character herself in Hamlet. Ophelia’s character represents women’s sexuality and passions as a madness leading to tragedy and death, in her case by drowning that is assumed to be suicide.

These works have a direct relationship to melodrama as a form of performance technique, especially in certain operas. Reinhart’s melodramas, rather than having the stock characters of hero, heroine, villain, and so on, consist of a single female character. The overall effect is a narrative of personal growth in the face of an apocalyptic existential state of being.

b. Vienna 1977 Patricia Reinhart studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts under Wolfgang Hollegha, Sue Williams and Muntean/Rosenblum. She has exhibited at a number of spaces in and near Vienna, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Dana Charkasi, and group exhibitions at Kerstin Engholm Gallery and at the Essl Museum.

Herwig Weiser >< Filmworks >< January – February 2011

Herwig Weiser “Filmworks”

Open 22 January 2011from 18h – 21h
22 January to 26 February 2011

I am pleased to invite you to view Herwig Weiser’s “Filmworks” from 22 January to 26 February 2011.

Herwig Weiser is known for his experiments with sound sculptures and machines that he calls ‘analog sculptural processes.’ A production process involving a network of artists, scientists and technicians has yielded an almost unselfconsciously developed parallel practice of filmmaking. Herwig Weiser’s moving pictures tend to go beyond pure description into expressive territory with images that are as mysterious as those his real-time material explorations produce.

This exhibition presents a selection of Herwig Weiser’s moving pictures, including super 8, 16 mm and analog video explorations, videos made in collaboration with artists such as F.X. Randomiz, Philipp Quehenberger, Gabriel Lester, Wim Jongedijk and Thea Djordadze.  Also presented is a video relating to his latest machine, (currently being developed with the support of Dr Wolfgang Hansel of Happy Plating) which features an electro-chemical image machine called “Lucid Phantom Messenger.”

These filmworks show a natural talent in a medium ideally suited for Herwig Weiser’s interest in the relationship of sound, image and his focus on decaying technologies being returned to material origins. They also reveal a bit more about his personal motivations than what is immediately clear from his intriguing machines.

Herwig Weiser (b. 1969, Innsbruck) Weiser studied Architecture at the Technical University Innsbruck, Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, and at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne with Professor Siegfried Zielinski and Jürgen Klauke. His works have been shown in exhibitions across Europe, North America, and Asia, including the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, the China National Art Museum, the Nam June Paik Art Center, Southkorea, Centre Le Fresnoy Tourcoing/France, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kunsthaus Graz and at Art Basel Miami Beach. Among his awards of distinction are the Hermann Claasen Award for Photography and Media Art (Cologne, 1999), Jury Award at the Festival of New Film (Split/Croatia, 2000), Transmediale Award (Berlin, 2001), and the Nam June Paik Award (Düsseldorf, 2002) and numerous production grants, including Dock e.V. Berlin(2010).

His films Entrée and Distroia (a video for Mouse on Mars in collaboration with Rosa Barba) were included in the Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Privatphysik was included in the Goethe Institute’s travelling exhibition “Constantly in Motion: Current Trends in Experimental Film and Video in Germany 1994-2004”

I hope you can see this show!

Pull My Daisy >< Photo Gallery

Anne Eastman >< Seen from Elsewhere >< September – October 2010

Anne Eastman  “Seen from Elsewhere”

September 14 – October:      Anne Eastman “Seen from Elsewhere”
opens September 14, 19-21h.

Lisa Ruyter is pleased to inaugurate her new art space • with an installation by New York City based artist Anne Eastman, titled “Seen from Elsewhere.”

Anne Eastman makes and uses image-capturing devices. Mobiles, mirrors, video projections, and sculptural objects are arranged to provide fleeting visual displacements. Patterned fabrics and design elements become surrogates for place, culture and time.

Handheld photos of the moon become classic sculptor’s drawings, a meditation about space, material and the artist’s hand. The strange atmosphere of a barely missed lightning bolt reveals a banal landscape with an extraterrestrial aura highlighted by the simple fact of a chance encounter. In both sets of photographs, specific light images become purely subjective, yet not individuated mark making.

Anne Eastman’s project questions artistic identity, an inversion of Richard Serra’s “Hand Catching Lead.” Through the use of mirrors in her videos, lived space becomes flattened and dislocated, a collage of random glances, aligned more with Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements than with the spectacle of materiality.

Anne Eastman (b. 1973, based in New York City) studied sculpture at Yale and Cultural Anthropology at Smith College. She has presented solo exhibitions at ATM Gallery in New York, and with Groeflin Maag Galerie who also featured her at LISTE 08 in Basel. Anne Eastman a founding member of B’L’ing, an art collective that screens and trades bootleg video art and rare media. In addition to maintaining her studio in New York, Anne Eastman spends a lot of time in Nikko, Japan, where her parents live. This exhibition was produced this summer during a • residency in Vienna.

• is the name of artist Lisa Ruyter’s new art space in Vienna, Austria. Artists and other cultural agents are invited to interact with Vienna, to develop projects in response, not always in the form of an exhibition. Performances, printed matter and perhaps more will come out of this residency program. Additionally, local artists will draw a spotlight, with an emphasis on emerging artists who are preparing to enter the commercial gallery scene. While • does not represent artists, guidance, advice and continuing support will be offered.

LR] OM+LB [BS

Lisa Ruyter invites Olivier Mosset and Lisa Beck to Bell Street Project Space. Vienna, July 2010

ArtWorldSalon.com >< Blumen for Peter Noever

Blumen for Peter Noever

Friday May 28, 2010 | 08:42 by Lisa Ruyter

 

Originally posted at ArtWorldSalon.com

 

 

As South Korea and the world tries to sort the best response to the latest provocations from North Korea, an exhibition of contemporary ‘official’ art of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea) opened at the MAK (the Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna, with a rather dodgy title. “Flowers for Kim Il Sung” was launched despite opposition and questions about the nature of the museum’s collaboration with the Pyongyang regime.

By admission of MAK director Peter Noever in a number of interviews, the work is presented without any critical context.

Perhaps there is no other art in North Korea, as it seems the MAK believes. While that may be true, it is hard to imagine that much first hand research went into that position being taken. Perhaps the director’s trip to the DPRK was not so unlike this one taken by Vice correspondents:

http://www.vice.com/alps/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-to-north-korea-1-of-3

 

Watch all three episodes. But perhaps it is another experience for a European museum director.

Surely there is a difference between exhibiting a display of historical propaganda versus a contemporary, active one constructed through forced labor and dictated entirely by one family’s aesthetic viewpoint, if you can even call it that.

The MAK makes a case that this show fits in a tradition of previous exhibitions centering about specific political systems, and yet the defense of this show is that it is about aesthetics, not politics, and about seeing the visual production of an ‘other.’ It is hard to imagine that this will open doors for us to see anything except what the current regime wants us to see.

Beyond the occasional report in English that this show is causing big controversy in Austria, the picture left behind for outsiders is the critical context created for the Museum itself through the multiple, self-condemning interviews with the director of this museum saying, among other things, that this is the same as showing Russian constructivism.

Anyway, the images are out there now, for all of you to see, and let’s hope for now everyone’s curiosity about the art of the DPRK and the architecture of Pyongyang (presented in this exhibition as the model city, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a manifesto of Juche ideals with Utopian elements) is satisfied. What you do not see in these pictures is that there is no electricity, no items to buy in the supermarket, destroyed farmland, extreme poverty, and even in this model city of Pyongyang, reportedly only two hours of drinking water available per day, and not enough food to feed even high-ranking military officers.

The show seems to exist merely as a provocation itself. If this is the case, is there a benefit gained over what is lost here in the sense of academic scholarship and institutional research? That is Mr. Noever’s core argument in defense of the show. I am open to new experiences if someone can back it up, however I fear what a lack of education does for visitors in this case.

 

Reference material (there’s plenty more than this):

MAK website in English: http://mak.at/en/program/event?article_id=853&event_id=1337668286614

Some perspective from a North Korean defector living now in Vienna: http://www.falter.at/web/shop/detail.php?id=32233

Interview with Peter Noever: http://derstandard.at/1271376865449/Blumen-fuer-Kim-Il-Sung-Es-war-ein-staendiges-Ringen-um-Vertrauen

Matthias Dusini, who wrote the review below, has interviewed Peter Noever about this exhibition (Falter Nr. 20/10 19.5.10 p. 33) I could not link to that but here is his take:

http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/flowers_for_kim_il_sung

ArtWorldSalon.com >< Berlin calling

Berlin calling

Tuesday May 4, 2010 | 10:11 by Lisa Ruyter

originally published at ArtWorldSalon.com

hanf-haus

A cheap plane ticket purchased on a whim resulted in me attending Berlin’s recent “Gallery Weekend” (and the May 1 ‘riots’ party). As I have not really been to Berlin in years, it gave me a lot to think about. I decided to go with an open mind and little advance research, to get a reasonable overview of the scene. I did find out about a few openings, but also came across velvet ropes and guest lists.

My first impression is that the scene is much, much bigger than before, so big that one really needs to make choices about what to see and do. I guess there are 500 some galleries in Berlin, 40 of which participated in Gallery Weekend.

My second impression is that the Gallery Weekend was trying to be just that—a weekend for a carefully selected group of people. If you came, like me, without a particular invitation, you were pretty much on your own. If I didn’t know people in Berlin, I would not have met a soul. I would have eaten every meal alone. I imagine that would have turned me off deeply if I were a serious collector who didn’t have a particular gallery invitation.

My third impression was that the programming was decidedly blue chippy international artists, rather than being focused on the new and local talent on which Berlin has built its reputation.

I do wonder what exactly this Gallery Weekend is meant to accomplish. Zürich has done them for years. There, it is clear where you are supposed to be and when; there are gallery clusters, so the openings are split over three days for the three clusters. There is talk of a gallery weekend to come in Vienna, where I live, in September. We could organize it on the Zürich model, as the galleries already cooperate in coordinating their openings. But it is also quite easy to imagine it being organized in a way that leaves out new arrivals and curious outsiders. (This week in Vienna we have an art fair, but also a new kind of event, for the second year. A selected group of galleries have organized shows, all curated by artists, on the theme of “Art & Film” (http://curatedby.at/index_en.html).

And what of the upcoming New York gallery weekend? Are so few people buying in New York that such an event is necessary? Are these meant to be an alternative to art fairs? Is it necessary to have an event in order for sales to happen? Does the size of a city change the meaning of such an event?

My main question, in the end: is this event model really sustainable? As soon as there is a group of galleries presenting what you can already see anywhere else in the world, the rest, the core local scene, seems irrelevant. And yet, that is often where the good stuff is. Will people continue to visit if they think the local scene is irrelevant?

Lisa Ruyter @ Georg Kargl, Vienna; "Atoms For Peace," November 14, 2008 – January 11, 2009

ArtWorldSalon.com >< Art Fairs: one artists viewpoint

originally published at ArtWorldSalon.com

Art fairs: one artist’s viewpoint

Tuesday May 27, 2008 | 10:16

Lisa_Ruyter_03station.jpg

With Art Basel around the corner, this just in from Lisa Ruyter in Vienna:

When I was commissioned to do the art for The Armory Show 2004 catalog, I wrote an introduction that was a rhapsody about my love of art fairs. Not so many years before that, I began showing at Art Basel with Art & Public gallery, with such clear, positive results that I decided to make my largest and most risky piece, a Stations of the Cross, for a five day exhibition at Art Unlimited, with the support of Pierre Huber. This seems like ages ago, but it really isn’t, and my changing feelings about fairs are probably mostly a reflection of my own growth rather than a reflection of trends of the marketplace.

Since then, I have continued to participate in fairs in different ways, including with my own eponymously named gallery, presenting work by other artists. I see the limitations more and more clearly. I am very aware that it gave me an opportunity to develop a broad and solid international system of support for myself as an artist, and with that, secure a large degree of freedom to live wherever I want in the world. I can put my focus on getting involved deeply in local scenes that I really love, and to take much larger risks with my artwork when I want to. It has allowed me to indulge my independence without self-destructing.

As long as these fairs continue in their current popularity and with galleries as their primary clientele, they will continue to be a measure of what makes an important gallery (and also an unimportant gallery). For example, an artist can significantly raise his or her profile by signing up with a gallery that regularly gets into Frieze or Basel, and often there is only room for one or two other fairs in the world to share that top status. To me Basel holds the top spot because it always put the artworks first. But that is another discussion.

What makes the galleries important within these top fairs are the same things that have always made galleries great: priority given to the best possible presentation of an artist’s work and vision, the attention to developing an institutional following for an artist, and a program that
somehow has a strong relationship to its home base, wherever that might be. It follows with these things, that they also cultivate relationships with collections that will lead to long-term positive results. I think it is easy to tell the difference between a gallery with a clear program and vision, or at least a plan, and a gallery that is just hopping from fair to fair without ever leaving that system. One type has a reason to exist beyond, and the foundation to survive a market turndown and one type does not, just like the last time around. I really don’t think in the end that survival has anything to do with money, nor is our situation so different from what has passed before.

But,

I can put a solo show at an art fair on my bio, but will I ever get a serious review, or will I ever have a serious conversation with a curator about where this work is going? I doubt it. And the work will likely be sold and scattered, especially as a painter, before it is given a chance to stick to anything. So here I am again; I just have to have faith that of the gabillions of people who saw it, one might remember it even two months later. I have come to believe that the best art experiences – even in such a mass-market situation – are really only meaningful to a small handful of people. It only takes one person seeing a show to make something really great happen, and in my years of showing, I know that this is much more likely to happen at a small and remote gallery than the greatest art fair in the world. For example my Stations of the Cross – 14 panels at 12 x 8 feet each, eventually was shown installed the way a “stations” would be in a church in Regensburg, Germany, the scariest exhibition of my life, that had a kind of a mass for an opening. There were maybe two or three art world people who saw it in this context because I was too afraid to tell people about it, but it was ultimately the most genuine and rewarding exhibition that I have ever done. It would never have happened without one single curator seeing it at Basel, and this is the kind of experience that I live for. It was what I expected at the fair, but did not get until two years later in a church. Who knew?

At this time, I am not represented by any gallery in New York or London. The art fairs serve as my perfect London and New York gallery for me at this moment where I don’t seem to fit any particular mold and I am not really a New York artist anymore. All of my dealers show at the major fairs, so I can keep myself in everyone’s mind with a minimal effort once a year, and then do the real work with them back at home, until I come to a new understanding of that big city context.

Lisa Ruyter @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; "The Comfort of Strangers," January 12-February 17, 2008

David Benjamin Sherry >< but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said >< May – July 2006

David Benjamin Sherry

“but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said”
May 11 – July 15, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the debut solo exhibition of photographic works by David Benjamin Sherry from May 11 until July 15.

David Benjamin Sherry’s romantic explorations are realized primarily in photographic form, and have a strong connection to visual imagery surrounding music.

The titles of his works such as “Blue eyes and I were fire” or “A kiss on the wind and we’ll make the land” are often evolved from song lyrics, much in the same way that his images are often inspired from record covers, films and poetry. In fact, the work “My faith in love is still devout” is a re-photograph of the New Order album “Power, Corruption and Lies,” which itself is a re-presentation of a 19th century still life by Henri Fantin-Latour.

His work often employs a range of motifs and techniques that are shared by artists working in other media. Taking cues from the work of artists such as painter, Paul P. and filmaker Kenneth Anger. Inspired by writers such as Oscar Wilde and the musical lyrics of Morrissey. He uses various methods such as freezing his lens to form condensation over the image being photographed. This creates a haze to the final image thus dramatizing the emotional pull of past events and other eras. David Benjamin Sherry’s work tells of small romances with his subjects isolated into atmospheric and suggestive moments.

The dominating subjects of David Benjamin Sherry’s works are beautiful young men, often blended into a garden-like scenery and he uses a variety of iconic and erotic references viewed through soft focus. He creates a fantasy world for the viewer to float in. The surreal colors and unusual printing techniques are all done in the darkroom. Going against digital means for printing and photographing, the artist lends to his nostalgic nature for the formation of his pictures, simply using film and straight color printing techniques. In this work we are catching a glimpse of a just awakening sexuality in a tension between innocence and obvious eroticism.

David Benjamin Sherry was born in Stony Brook, New York in 1981 and lives and works in New York. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and is receiving his MFA from the Yale School of Art.

David Benjamin Sherry >< but take me to the haven of your bed was something that you never said >< Photo Gallery

Katherine Bernhardt >< Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 pm >< March – April 2006

Katherine Bernhardt

“Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM”
March 23 – May 6, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Budapest – The Gellert Hotel 10:15 PM” an exhibition by American artist Katherine Bernhardt. The exhibition is on from March 23 until May 6.

The exhibition shows entirely new paintings, produced during Katherine Bernhardt’s stay at the gallery’s Project Space in Vienna last year. Most of the images show nudes, whose pale, slightly distorted bodies stand against the dark background. Through her daub and drip way of painting and the partly slipped, partly too tight image-section results an aggressive esthetics, which captivates the observer.

Katherine Bernhardt’s style is mostly described as neo-primitivism or Pop-Expressionism and compared to Kirchner, Picasso and Basquiat. Wild brushstrokes and dripping, vivid colors are used to depict images of men or women set against dark backgrounds. The subjects of her paintings one has seen perhaps too many times before: fashion models, consumer goods, and pop stars. Her approach to it is petulant and skeptical, but nevertheless with a lot of enthusiasm and playfulness.

Katherine Bernhardt was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1975 and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Suzanne Tarasieve, Paris (France), Kineko Ivec Gallery, Toronto (Canada), Galeria Comercial, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Canada Gallery, New York, (NY). She has been included in group shows at Modern Culture, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Canada Gallery, New York (NY), Hales Gallery, London, (England).

Herwig Weiser >< BlackBox Arco, Arco – Arte Contemporaneo en España, Madrid >< Photo Gallery

The Image is Gone >< January – March 2006

The Image is Gone                                             

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.03.2006

Marc Bijl, Banks Violette, Paul P., Michael Huey
January 19 –  March 18, 2006

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the group exhibition “The Image is Gone“ with Marc Bijl, Banks Violette, Paul P. and Micheal Huey. The exhibition is on from January 19 until March 18.

Marc Bijl, born 1970, Leerdam NL, takes in his work a good look at social issues and the symboles and norms involved. This results in acts or installations which undermine or emphasize our perception of the world. Thus he entitles his Lara Croft sculpture pured over with bitumen “La rivoluzione siamo noi“, or decorates spontaneous a Berlin garbage truck with the Dutch lion. Last year his works were shown at the Superstars Show at the Kunstforum Wien, in the exhibition ’Populism’ at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, and others. He is represented by the young gallery ’The Breeder“ in Athens, which showed his solo exhibition ‚’Chesed/ Dien’ 2004. ’The Breeder’ gallery has supported us in every way for this project.

Banks Violette, born 1973, Ithaca, New York, USA, lives and works in New York. After a well noticed solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of the American Arts he became a Superstar of the young American art scene. He creates sculptures,graphite drawings and partly huge oil paintings inspired often by bands and record sleeves. 2006 he is going to participate in the most important projects in Europe such as “Die Jugend von heute“ at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (curated by Matthias Ulrich), “DARK“ at the Museum Boljmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, (curated by Jan Grosfeld) and “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body“ at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

Paul P., born 1977, Toronto, Can., is painting primarily portraits of young males and now also increasingly atmospheric landscapes by use of traditional techniques like Kreuzschraffur, pastel, oil and watercolour. While creating his paintings of unknown persons he rejects on the one hand the traditional process of producing art, on the other hand he is completely absorbed by it. His models are unknown to him and thus he is deceiving the intimacy usually linked to portraying.

Michael Huey, born Traverse City, Michigan, USA, living in Vienna since 1989. Michael Huey’s artistic method  has developed from painting, genealogical studies, art historical enquiries and collecting photographs. Since 1996 he is concentrating on historical photography and it’s realization in his work. The shining surface of the Diasec – technique reminds Michael Huey of the nineteenth century – the era of his initial specification – like for example daguerreotypes or the wet collodium – process.

Slater Bradley >< Intermission >< November – December 2005

16bradley

Slater Bradley                                   

“Intermission”
4 November – 17 December 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Slater Bradley’s “Intermission,” the artist’s most recent attempt to capture the ghost of Michael Jackson in the video medium.

“Intermission”, a perfect pastiche of the silent film form with direct references to F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” is one of Slater Bradley’s most recent and well-developed Doppleganger works. In this work Benjamin Brock, a friend who looks very much like the artist, becomes a Micheal Jackson figure walking through an empty winter landscape.

The voice-over of “Intermission,” recorded by the artist at the Museum of Natural History in New York, is a father’s conversation with his little boys — among the topics discussed is the behavior of vultures. The intertitles, which foreground the piece’s allegiance to silent film, are the lyrics of a Michael Jackson song called “My Childhood.” The barren trees and the icy landscape into which the Brock/Doppelganger/Jackson figure is placed mirror the cultural landscape that is so quick to create mythic figures and to immediately destroy them.

For the past five years, Slater Bradley has enlisted the help of Benjamin Brock to create a body of imposter works. In Slater Bradley’s work, Brock has been Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and even Slater Bradley in a complex autobiographical fiction. Slater Bradley probes the elasticity of identity and its relationship to mediated images of powerfully iconic public figures. Occupying the space between lived life and learned life, between the real and the fictive, the Doppelganger Project measures the distance from experience to its representation. What becomes of us? And how do we become us?

Slater Bradley’s first Michael Jackson reflection, “Recorded Yesterday” is concurrently being shown in the “Superstars” exhibition organized by the Kunsthalle Wien.

Slater Bradley has had one-person shows in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Geneva, San Francisco, and Basel. He was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a solo show featuring his Doppelganger project, which included “Recorded Yesterday.” He has participated in numerous museum and gallery group exhibitions in such venues as the Palais de Tokyo, the Kunsthalle Fridericianium, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, the Reina Sofia. He has recently made one-person exhibitions at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In the next year he will have solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris and London.

Slater Bradley was born in 1975 in San Francisco and currently lives and works in New York.

Herwig Weiser >< Death Before Disko >< September – October 2005

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Herwig Weiser                                            

“Death Before Disko”
8 September –  29 October 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Death Before Disko” an exhibition by Austrian artist Herwig Weiser. The show will open on 8 September and will continue through 29 October.

Herwig Weiser’s work crosses many boundaries of art-making. His art supplies are magnetic systems, low-tech electronic equipment, and chemical composites. His suppliers are innovative recyclers, university research departments, machinists, and chemical companies. His works are intense points of focus, the result of thousands of phone calls, hours of research and development, and trial and error.

The exhibition features a prototype of a machine being developed for a solo installation in a shipping container for Art Basel Miami Beach this December.

The machine is a sort of liquid disco ball, a sound-sculpture that looks like it was designed by Nikola Tesla for a high end electronics company. Similar to Weiser’s “zII” the work looks like it could fit right in with your entertainment system. The piece consists of a grey plexiglass tube, speakers, LED lights, a computer system, a motor, an array of magnets, and magnetic fluid, which is activated by the movement of the motor, the pressure of the sound system, and the programming of the lights.

A component element of most of Herwig Weiser’s work, is that of collaboration. In this case, electronics technician, Albert Bleckmann; programmer, Patrick Homolka, who has designed a program to process live feeds of sounds of outer space, sampled from sources on the internet. This program also controls the LED lights. A large number of people helped develop all of the individual parts of this compact work. The title “Death Before Disko” is in memory of Christian Morgenstern, who released a record with the same title.

Herwig Weiser (b. 1969 Innsbruck) studied architecture at TU-Innsbruck, fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Media Art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. He lives and works in Cologne and Seoul.

Irina Georgieva >< Walking on Broken Glass >< July 2005

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Irina Georgieva                                            

“Walking on Broken Glass”
29 June –  30 July 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter presents ‘Walking on Broken Glass’, the debut solo exhibition of Irina Georgieva from June 29 – July 30, 2005.

The exhibition consists of one large drawing installation and a few smaller works. Irina Georgieva’s sources for her diaristic constellations are reproductions of works by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Tracy Emin, Yoshitomo Nara, etc., as well as photos of her own personal history, family, friends.

Georgieva unifies her combinations with her technique of using sepia ink, a method she learned in her native Bulgaria. Referencing an outmoded style of photography, this technique makes the play between images found and invented more mysterious; this is where Georgieva begins to insert her own free associations.

“These are the days of our lives” and  “A day in the life”, consist of drawings the size of snapshot photographs, and take their logic from the measuring of time.

In the installation ‘Hold the Line,’ Georgieva’s associations and connections have more of a narrative character, a story of her life as an artist in Vienna, complete with interruptions of family and fantasy, jealousy and admiration.

The artist lives and works in Vienna.

Michael Huey >< Full Death >< May – June 2005

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Michael Huey                                            

“Full Death”
22 April –  25 June 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present „Full Death“, an exhibition of photographic works by Michael Huey, whose artistic practice is evolved from painting, genealogical studies, art historical research, and collecting photographs.

„ Artifacts are robust: on the one hand, they usually outlive us. On the other hand, they are fragile, and not just physically: they are open to manipulation and have no way of defending themselves (except, as I say, by outliving the manipulator and waiting around for the next, possibly fairer, interpreter). I have always been intensely passionate about justice (Gerechtigkeit), and I tend to want to apply it to the past, as well.“  -Michael Huey

Michael Huey re-photographs historical documents and, in particular, photographs from the second half of the nineteenth century. In looking at his own family, he identifies the 1860s and 70’s as the time period where the tangible and intangible become irresolvable. It is also one of many points in Huey’s work where nostalgia, fetish, and death become interchangeable stylistic flourishes. The identities of relatives and strangers become confused with the identities imposed by the decorative, scientific and stylistic processes of the image-making of different eras.

For Michael Huey, the highly reflective surface of the currently trendy Diasec technique calls to mind daguerreotypes and the wet-collodion photographic process of the era of his primary fixation, the middle and last decades of the 19th century. With diasec, a reflection is impossible to avoid, the viewer is included in the image through the same channels of distancing. Michael Huey’s other techniques include scale, meta-narrative implications, cropping and coincidence.

Michael Huey considers his appropriation to be related to the act of photography itself – related to the act of using a camera to „take“ a picture. By recovering nearly lost artifacts of moments in time, sometimes with identifiable origins in family members or 19th century photo studios, Michael Huey’s work begins to tackle the bigger subjects of personal history, authorship, ownership, inheritance, legacy, and justice.

This is Michael Huey’s first solo exhibition. He was born in 1964 in Traverse City, Michigan and has lived and worked in Vienna since 1989.

Suburbia >< March – April 2005

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SUBURBIA

Adam McEwen / Bill Owens / Steven Shearer / Banks Violette

3 March – 23 April, 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter’s Project Space
Waaggasse 5/First Floor/Top 6, A-1040 Wien

“I am more at home in Vienna generally than I am in Upper Austria, which I prescribed for myself as a survival therapy sixteen years ago, though I have never been able to regard it as my home. This is no doubt because right from the beginning I isolated myself far too much in Nathal and not only did nothing to counter this isolation but actually promoted it, consciously or unconsciously, to the point of utter despair. After all, I have always been a townsman, therefore not without reason that once I am in Vienna, I find that I can breathe freely again. On the other hand, after a few days in Vienna I have to flee to Nathal to avoid suffocating in the loathsome Viennese air. Hence, in recent years I have made a habit of switching between Vienna and Nathal at least every other week. Every other week I flee from Nathal to Vienna and then from Vienna to Nathal, with the result that I have become a restless character who is driven back and forth between Vienna and Nathal in order to survive, whose very existence depends on this strictly imposed rhythm — coming to Nathal to recover from Vienna, and going to Vienna to recuperate from Nathal.” – Thomas Bernhard (from Wittgenstein’s Nephew)

Suburbia is defined as a space between urban and rural, yet it is also a space that tends to have none of the qualities of either, no culture as in the urban and no nature as in the rural. The suburbs of America are especially quite famous, and there is not really such a thing to be found in Austria. Yet, the concept of Suburbia is a well-understood term. In a way it has become an elemental part of the culture that America exports, as well as a description of a suspended or compromised state of being.

This show here begins with Bill Owens, who has documented a very specific moment in the evolution of the term. Bill Owens presents barbecues, garage sales, daily domestic life, prayer groups, ribbon cuttings. In a Bill Owens photograph, an alternative lifestyle, dysfunctional family or XXX is first flattened by the concept of ‘suburbia’ into a mold of the generic. Stylistically the work differs from his contemporaries because of this particular message or emphasis. In the work of Owen’s contemporaries, the formal elements of suburban life are romanticized through craft to take on a Hopper-esque aestheticism. Owen’s work, when compared to his contemporaries, seems to embrace diversity, despite a technique which renders it generic or ‘suburban.’

As a counterpoint, we present three of the best young artists getting attention at the moment, who are working through many of the issues of identification alluded to in Bill Owens’ photographs.

Adam McEwen presents a series of obituaries of celebrities who are not yet dead, and sandwich board sign sculptures. Steven Shearer presents an installation of posters on the ceiling, with a mattress for the viewer. Banks Violette’s blank sign makes sculpture out of the suburban structures in Owen’s work.

Bill Owens (USA)
Adam McEwen (UK)
Steven Shearer (CAN)
Banks Violette (USA) was featured in the most recent Whitney Biennial and will open a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in May.

Tam Ochiai >< the back part of something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you >< March – April 2005

11Ochiai

Tam Ochiai                                            

“the back part of something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you”
3 March –  16 April 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Austria of artist Tam Ochiai. This drawing installation is titled “the back part of something, or something that is connected to the back of something, especially something that is moving away from you.” It is a continuation of what the artist calls his “Tail” series.

Much of Ochiai’s work is deliberately child-like in language, but includes abundant references that exist for a cultural intelligentsia. Most of his subjects are women, or are at least ambiguously feminine, or ambiguously human, and most of his obsessions are of French origin.

Made in no particular style, or rather made from a compendium of a variety of styles, Tam Ochiai’s work is about style, about its construction and formal functioning, in art, literature, and in fashion: in life, and in life-style. In the work of Tam Ochiai, style is moved from the periphery to the center. Style is not used to cover or reveal something inside, rather it is an integrated and necessary part of human functioning along with language and craft, with the corporeal, the sensual, the psychological and the sexual.

In this exhibition, Ochiai has confined himself to the medium of drawing. Despite the variety and complexity of the ideas in the work, Ochiai retains a consistent ephemeral quality, the clearest marker of the artist’s own personal ‘style.’

Tam Ochiai is currently in the exhibition “Flashback” at the Kunstverein Freiburg. He will be included in the upcoming “25 Years of the Deutsche Bank Collection” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. He shows with Team Gallery in New York, Tomio Koyama in Tokyo, Arndt & Partner in Berlin, and Francesca Kaufmann in Milan. He lives and works in New York.

Francis Ruyter @ St. Wolfgang Church, Regensburg, Germany; Stations of the Cross; February 29-May 9, 2005

Cory Arcangel >< 19 January 2005

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Cory Arcangel   

January 19, 2005 at 9.30 pm

ORF

 

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present a one-night-only performance/lecture by Cory Arcangel on January 19, 2005 at 9.30 pm. The performance will take place at our new PROJECT SPACE, an empty apartment located at Waaggasse 5/1/6, just around the corner from the gallery’s main space on Wiedner Hauptstrasse.

The performance is hosted in cooperation with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, where Cory Arcangel will be featured in the gallery’s ‘Video Cube’ series, beginning on Saturday January 22, 2005 at 11 AM, continuing through March 12.

Cory Arcangel (b. 1978) is a computer artist, performer, and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He is a founding member of BEIGE, a loose knit crew of like-minded computer programmers and enthusiasts. He spends most of his time surfing the INTERNET, fooling around on his guitar, and listening to acid house music.

Cory Arcangel’s recent shows include The 2004 Whitney Biennial, ‘Seeing Double’ at the Guggenheim, the 2004 Liverpool Biennial, ‘Welcome to my Art Show’ at Team Gallery, and ‘Super Mario Movie’ at Deitch projects. Forthcoming exhibitions include the Migros Museum in Zurich, and Vilma Gold in London. He will be featured in ‘Premieres’ a series inaugurating the Museum of Modern Art’s new Film and Media theaters.

Cory Arcangel will be giving a lecture demonstration (in English) involving several new works. Topics included will be computer hacking, how Jay-Z would sound on a Nintendo, and modern day uses of Power Point.  The focus of the show will be a musical performance of the NiPOD, an IPOD emulator that runs on a Nintendo cartridge that the artist has hacked.

The PROJECT SPACE is a new initiative of Galerie Lisa Ruyter, and will regularly host events, performances, artist residencies and exhibitions. The next event is ‘SUBURBIA’ an exhibition featuring Adam Mc Ewen, Bill Owens, Steven Shearer and Banks Violette, opening on March 3, 2005.

Pulse >< January – February 2005

09PULSE

p u l s e

/ Jon Rouston / son:DA / Herwig Weiser  
19. Jänner  –  26. Februar, 2005

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present “Pulse”, featuring works by Jon Routson, son:DA and Herwig Weiser.

The artists in „Pulse“share an interest in low-tech structuralism, in finding a simple way to express ideas with untraditional methods. They tend to follow logics of binary oppositions, and as a group, this, more than anything else, connects their work to the traditional forms of art making that are usually encountered in a gallery setting. Together, the works make an interactive environment – a sort of music room.

Jon Routson (b. 1969 Washington, D.C., lives and works in Baltimore) presents “Strober,” very simply, a video of a strobe light. This is a recent remake of Routson’s first video work, which led to his well-known series of bootlegs of movies, which were shown in two exhibitions at Team Gallery in New York. Routson conceptualizes his “Strober” as video vs. film, with the strobe light being a surrogate for the blinking or flicker that creates the illusion of a moving image in film.

son:DA (Metka Golec, born 1972 in Maribor, Slovenia. Miha Horvat, born 1976 in Maribor, Slovenia. They live and work in Vienna and Maribor. ) creates a ‘constellation’ of interactive television devices. The cabling of the televisions are rewired so that they become instruments where the image interrupts the sound or the sound interrupts the image, or looked at in another way, the boundaries between the viewer the image and the sound become slightly fluid and malleable.

Herwig Weiser (b. 1969 Innsbruck, lives and works in Cologne) exhibits a version of his ‘zgodlocator,’ a low-tech machine that magnetically re-animates recycled elements of computers, and gives them a sound program. It is basically a low-tech computer made out of destroyed computers, or as the artist calls it ‘dead information.’

On January 19,  at 9:30, after the opening of „Pulse“, there will be a performance lecture by Cory Arcangel at Galerie Lisa Ruyter`s Project Space.

Paul P. >< In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom >< November – December 2004

08paulpPaul P.

„In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom“
November 10 –  December 23, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Paul P.’s exhibition “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom”, from 10 November – 23 December 2004.  This will be the first European solo show by the Canadian artist.

This exhibition consists of head-and-shoulders drawings and paintings of young men and a single atmospheric landscape. These works are modeled after pornographic print sources of late 1970’s and early 80’s vintage, and are rendered in traditional techniques of cross-hatching, watercolor and glazing. Paul P. has developed a simple and sophisticated engagement with portraiture, aesthetics, the art historical, and gay representation.

“In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom” is taken from an antiquated English language naming of the 1919 volume of Marcel Proust’s great work “In Search of Lost Time”. In the text, the adolescent narrator anguishes over a brash young gang of girls in summertime coastal France. Within his writing Proust, as the narrator, appears as a heterosexual in a world teeming with same-sex desires. By using Proust’s title, Paul P. suggests a reversion.

Taken at face value, the work of Paul P. is quite romantic in nature. In the portraits, there is nostalgia for the mythical age of sexual freedom and liberation, which was abruptly cut short by AIDS. Too young to have experienced this moment in person, Paul P. projects a complicated ambivalence towards gay representation which has often relied on – almost longed for – the quixotic pursuit of impossible fantasies.

In his processing of sexual images of unnamed people, Paul P. both embraces and rejects traditional processes of art making. He does not know his models, belying the intimacy generally implied in portraiture. Through Paul P.’s inter-textual strategies, fear, desire, paranoia and intimacy are separated from issues of sexual representation, and returned to a place of lived experience.

Paul P. was born in 1977 and currently lives and works in Toronto. Recent solo exhibitions include Daniel Reich, New York, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles and Angstrom Gallery, Dallas.  He has been included in group shows at David Zwirner and Andrea Rosen, both in New York, The Power Plant in Toronto and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg.

Cecily Brown >< September – October 2004

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Cecily Brown                                  

23 September –  30 October 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present paintings by Cecily Brown from the 23rd of September through the 30th of October, 2004.

Cecily Brown’s subjects have ranged from figures engaged in sex to landscapes, and many places in between. In a Cecily Brown painting, form and subject collide and explode, yet remain separately identifiable. De Kooning, Bacon, Goya, and Guston are referenced through moments of specificity; through a pictoral composition, a choice of color, scale, mark-making, even copying. This work is both classical and wildly experimental.

Given a shared interest in eroticism in the accumulations of flesh, it should be no surprise that Cecily Brown has looked at the work of Rubens. “Study after Paradise 1, 2 and 3” are studies made after a famous collaboration between Rubens and Brueghel the Older. In these works it becomes clear that at each pass, the artist is focusing her attentions on a different area of the original painting.

“Crapolette” is a big, red, meaty painting, with the scale and the colors of a late Philip Guston work. This rather violent painting looks like it could be a depiction of a pile of discarded bits of flesh.

Cecily Brown has been the subject of a number of museum exhibitions internationally, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., at MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea) in Rome, and this summer at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. She was featured in this years Whitney Biennial in New York. Brown has had a number of important and well-reviewed solo shows, with Deitch Projects and with Gagosian Gallery in New York, Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, with Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, and with Victoria Miro Gallery in London.

There is currently a major exhibition of new works by Cecily Brown at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.

Cecily Brown was born in 1969 in London and currently lives and works in New York City.

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< July – August 2004

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„The Rose Garden without Thorns“
8 July –  11 September 2004

Slater Bradley, Brice Dellsperger, Dan Fischer, Irina Georgieva, Erik Hanson, Michael Huey, Justin Lieberman, Tam Ochiai, Jon Routson, Jack Smith, Jean-Luc Verna

This show is about the richly complicated relationships that artists have with each other. It is not a show about appropriation, theft or homage, but these strategies are certainly addressed. The emphasis here is on figuration rather than abstraction in art objects. The inspiration for “The Rose Garden Without Thorns” is a drawing made by Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker whose spirit runs throughout Andy Warhol’s network of ‘superstars’. 

Slater Bradley has made many series using a Doppelgänger as a stand in for himself, and also for Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Ian Curtis.

Brice Dellsperger remakes scenes from movies using the same actor for every part in the scene. Often the actors are playing their parts in drag, confusing identifications and identities.

Dan Fisher makes very tight renderings of well known photographs of artists.

Irina Georgieva is making pieces she considers diaristic, combining images of artworks with images from her childhood in Sofia. All are distilled to a commonality of technique and then subject to her train of consciousness associations.

Erik Hanson deliberately quotes the music that defined him as the subject of all of his work.

Having recently completed a massive genealogical study of his family, Michael Huey is now re-photographing odd remnants he has come across, including receipts for death certificates, or a drawing of the stars made by a grandmother.

Justin Lieberman references artists and musicians in combinations he finds interesting. He reimagines Henry Darger landscapes populated by Jock Sturges’ adolescent girls and Paul McCarthy’s monsters.

Tam Ochiai makes work that references cinema, music, artists, and even galleries, museums and museum gift shops. He once made a sculpture of Gilbert and George’s singing sculpture.

Jon Routson has made a twenty minute version of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, edited for TV, and interspersed with commercials.

Jean-Luc Verna has starred in many of Brice Dellsperger’s films. His own work is very much about his body, he makes drawings that are made the way tattoos are made and refer to something he loves.

 

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< Photo Gallery

Benjamin Butler >< Tree Alone >< May – June 2004

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Benjamin Butler                                  

“Tree Alone”
11 May –  26 June 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter presents Benjamin Butler „Tree Alone“ from 11 May to 26 June 2004. This will be the first solo exhibition in Europe of this young American artist. The show consists of modestly scaled oil paintings of trees.

Butler started making landscape paintings when he was asked by his grandmother to make one for her. The result, his first solo exhibition, consisted of about 15 paintings of mountains, each rendered in a distinctly different style. The emotional challenge of pleasing this person, while making an object which functions within the context of contemporary painting, has become the challenge which drives his practice.

Butler’s paintings are familiar, though not just as a depiction of a famous formation such as the Matterhorn. Looked at individually, a painting may seem a naive reference toward a debased lineage of abstraction, or a painfully sincere attachment to nature, but Butler’s affection towards his subject could not be more complex or contemporary.

In some ways his practice is a campaign against the impersonal and distanced nature of the current state of painting, and a comment on the difficulty of finding a place for emotional expression and connection in contemporary art.

His sources and methods are similar to those of a Pop artist, appropriating found images and styles, mixing high and low. A Butler painting may seem to reference what one might find in a hotel room painting, or that creepy painting which will haunt forever from childhood. Butler invites a sophisticated audience to accept the pleasure that others take in visual images that we think are worthless or worse: in deeply bad taste. He helps us remember a pre-formed stage of visual awareness.

Recent solo shows include „Little Mountain“ at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Japan last year and the exhibition „Trees“ at Team Gallery, New York City in January 2004.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and most recently at Grimm/Rosenfeld in Munich and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg. Benjamin Butler was born 1975 in Kansas and lives and works in New York City.

The Armory Show 2004 Artist Commission

Originally published in The Armory Show 2004 catalog

I love art fairs. I love art fairs because I love art and art is what I live for.

Although the project of making images for the Armory Show was presented to me with few guidelines, there was a strong suggestion to keep the theme related to ‘New York.’ The first places that came to mind were ones I have photographed repeatedly, especially Central Park, but they did not seem to relate to the excitement that is generated when the show is in town. It dawned on me that this is not the New York that the Armory Show is really about.

The Armory Show is about the people of New York, and those who come to visit, not about the place itself. It is about the interaction of ideas, the connections that are made and lost and remade, the juxtapositions of artworks and gallery programs, and all the slippages of human interaction. It is these that make this show something more than a trade show, for it grew out of the idea that this major center of cultural production is made all the greater by inviting colleagues from around the world to come and participate in the energy of this city.

This event is exciting to me. During the Armory Show, the intense compression of being at an art fair becomes every-day life, if only for a week. It reminds me of the county fair when I was a kid, which was actually the first place that I ever showed things that I made. This is a very young fair, and it is great to feel a part of something that is still being defined.

I love exhibiting at art fairs. At a fair, showing work is performance, it is ‘show-business’. It is collaborative because of the many agendas in play all at once. Positive or negative, there is instant gratification of an audience response for which there is absolutely no substitute. Things happen so fast at an art fair, ideas, trends, acceptance, rejection, interest, loss of interest, discovery and rediscovery; all the things that get people excited or upset about art, all bubble to the surface. Although there are wonderful, random juxtapositions of artworks and gallery programs, and you never know whom you will run into, very little happens by chance.

I love art fairs because I love galleries, and the often intensely personal vision that drives their programs. At an art fair, galleries are on display, as raw and exposed as any artist ever is during their own show. I loved Pat Hearn and I especially loved Colin DeLand, both of whom were involved in this fair and both of whom are no longer with us. Colin significantly shaped my understanding of being an artist in the world, and I had no idea just how much until he was gone.

For me, art is taking a position in the world, and that is what is measured at events like an art fair.

I like to think that people who come to the Armory Show who are not familiar with the participants can get an idea of what a complicated and wonderful thing it is to make art, to show art, to buy and sell art, and most importantly to look at art and to find that there is a place for themselves in all of this.

 

Lisa Ruyter

New York / Vienna 2003

Miles Coolidge >< Drawbridges >< March – April 2004

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Miles Coolidge

Drawbridges
March 5 – April 24, 2004

Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Miles Coolidge’s series of drawbridge photographs from March 5 to April 24, 2004. The artist will be present for an opening reception on March 25th from 19-21 hr.

Coolidge has photographed raised drawbridges throughout Southern Florida. The result is a roadway grid, raised to square with the picture plane of the photograph itself. The depth and perspective the lowered roadway would have indicated, is destroyed and replaced by the formal, self-referencing picture of the roadway surface. Coolidge has found these temporary, (existing only for a moment as recreational boats pass underneath) industrial monoliths in the heart of some of the most kitschy American suburbs. The images in this series are impenetrable with all the weight of modernist picture-making behind it, yet the viewer is aware that this is only a momentary statement, as the bridge will again lower to let those in the perspective of the viewer pass through.

Coolidge consistently maintains a conceptual methodology in all of his series. Previous work has included photographs of empty elevators, suburban garages, a town built to 1/3 actual scale (‘Safetyville’), and temporary housing for farming workers.

These are all spaces that are defined by human use. Coolidge deliberately makes quasi-photographs, from quasi-architectural spaces. The meaning of Coolidge’s pictures is shaped in between what is visible, and what is left out, between form and content.

Miles Coolidge was born in Montreal, Canada and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts and at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf with Berndt and Hilla Becher.

Coolidge has shown with Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, Galerie Capitain in Cologne, ACME in Los Angeles, and at the Orange County Museum in Newport Beach, California. He has participated in many group shows internationally, including the MCA in Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland; Nederlands Foto Instituut, Rotterdam; and Nikolai Contemporary Art Center in Copenhagen.

 

Lisa Ruyter @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; "Canʼt See The Forest For The Trees," January 17-February 28, 2004

Katherine Bernhardt >< Pleasure and Paint >< January – February 2004

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Katherine Bernhardt

“Pleasure and Paint”
January 15 – February 21, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present new paintings by Katherine Bernhardt. This is the 28-year-old painter’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Bernhardt’s paintings suggest that something new is possible in the pleasure of painterly excess. Like Polke or Kippenberger, they are bold, arrogant, risky and disruptive. Her practice is stridently irreverent. Bernhardt takes advantage of the material hybridity of contemporary painting; she is a master of economy and aggression.

Her most recent work – in which she has narrowed down her choice of materials to acrylic, spray paint, and canvas cutouts – playfully and consciously references the artists she has been looking at most recently: Donald Baechler most obviously, in the canvas cutouts and formal arrangements, but also painters such as Laura Owens and Chris Ofili.

To get an idea of Bernhardt’s position, simply look at her personal iconography, which includes references to the flashy fashion of American rap, pop and sports stars – Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana – all pulled from promotional materials, ads and even magazine articles on the stars themselves.

Bernhardt places herself in a similar dynamic in relation to the fashions of painting. Though a background may, at a glance, seem like a badly executed reference to Pollock, the masterful depth she ultimately achieves is all show business: an unrestrained, performative and completely natural expression.

Justine Kurland >< Welcome Home >< November – December 2003

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Justine Kurland

“Welcome Home”
November 6, 2003 – January 3, 2004

Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Justine Kurland’s first solo exhibition in Vienna.

The exhibition features black and white, and color photographs Kurland took in isolated rural communities across America, including communes located in Arizona, Montana, Utah, California, Oregon, New Mexico and Florida. Members of these alternative societies often greet each other by saying “Welcome Home.”

Justine Kurland is attracted to the idealism of individuals who build small, independent communities away from larger urban centers, and live according to an ethic of stoicism and economy. In her photographic study, Kurland explores fundamental dichotomies–man vs. nature, the individual vs. community, private vs. public. She focuses on individuals as well as large groups, combining a subjective view with one that addresses a larger social whole. “Communion,” a color self-portrait achieves this aim. Works such as “Katy’s Farm” or “Black Bear Ranch study social positioning.

According to Kurland:

“The naked figures in the color photographs have willingly undressed. They represent perfect beings heroically occupying their Edens, or else gardeners after the Fall, lost and exposed to both the elements and the lens. In some cases the frame is stripped, an unembellished document. In other cases the subjects perform quasi-biblical narratives or ritual acts as they elaborate fantasies of communal living and communion with nature. And sometimes it is the natural landscape that dominates, swelling to engulf the figures who inhabit it. The photographs are shared acts of faith, romantic gestures impelling us towards a transcendental experience of being human in the world.”

Justine Kurland was born in New York State in 1969 and lives and works in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts and an Masters of Fine Art from Yale University, where she studied with Gregory Crewsden and Philip Lorca di Corcia. Kurland has shown internationally, with Gorney, Bravin and Lee in New York, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels and Emily Tsingou Gallery in London. She recently participated in “The first ICP triennial of Photography and Video” at New York’s International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured in major art and photography magazines as well as such publications as Vogue, Elle and The New York Times.

Brice Dellsperger >< Body Double 16 and 17 >< September-October 2003

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Brice Dellsperger

September 11- October 25, 2003
Opens September 11, 19.00 – 21.00

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“Body Double 16” 2003, starring Jean-Luc Verna. Duration: 6.24 minutes
“Body Double 17” 2001, starring Gwen Roch and Morgane Rousseau. Duration: 16.27 minutes

Galerie Lisa Ruyter will open its doors to the public for the first time by presenting a show of video works by Brice Dellsperger from the 11th of September through the 25th of October, 2003.

Two pieces will be screened one after the other for the duration of the exhibition. “Body Double 17” from 2001, is a remake of the roadhouse scene from David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.” In “Body Double 17” all of the roles are played by sisters, who are not twins but who do in fact look very much alike. “Body Double 16” from this year, puts a lesser known scene of Stanley Kubrick’s very famous 1971 film “A Clockwork Orange” with the very famous naked wrestling scene from Ken Russell’s not-as-famous 1969 film “Women in Love” (Both films, by the way, were banned in England for their content.)

Two of Dellsperger’s primary themes are that of the Body and that of the Double.

To understand Brice Dellsperger’s project a little better, begin by looking at the artist’s use of the name “Body Double” to title all of his films. The name, borrowed from the 1984 feature by Brian De Palma, is also a film production term. A ‘body double’ is a person who stands in for an actor to perform certain types of scenes or to facilitate special effects. Dellsperger points out that it is an individual who takes the place of a famous person, in fact, he even describes himself as a body double for a director.

Dellsperger thinks of his project as an attempt to break down the hierarchical structures of mainstream filmmaking and its attendant star machinery. His productions are shot on digital video, and edited on his home computer. These remakes usually star only one or two people who play every character on screen, lip-synching with the original soundtrack. The collaging of separate pieces of footage of the same person creates slippages that are not unlike Andy Warhol’s mis-registrations. These are often ghost-like and expressive. Brice is at heart a pop artist and his project is intrinsically linked to confusions and appropriations of popular style, consumable culture and celebrity.

The star of “Body Double 16” is artist Jean-Luc Verna, who has a very large, very tattooed and pierced body. He is also the star of Dellsperger’s full-length masterwork “Body Double X,” a remake of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1975 melodrama “The Important Thing Is To Love.” When he stars in Dellsperger’s work, he plays every character on screen, styled and dressed as a transvestite. This creates a replacement for a body, outlined by gender. The viewer is forced to use alternative skills in the act of identification, of naming, just to hold onto the narrative structure of the piece.

Dellsperger’s pieces are numbered upon conception of the piece rather than on completion. The pieces often have a personal agenda at their conception, but the many acts of doubling in their execution often results in negating this along with the agendas of the original film. What are left are the slippages, the reversals and the outlined ideas, through which connections are made – physical, emotional and cultural. These become more important than any notion of an “original,” and therefore superior– text, body, work or idea.

The gallery is owned and operated by painter Lisa Ruyter. We are happy to introduce the director of the gallery, Andreas Fischbacher, who has been an invaluable help from the very beginning of the project. Galerie Lisa Ruyter will open at the same time as a solo show of new works by Ms. Ruyter at Georg Kargl, just around the corner on Schleifmühlgasse.

bd17c

 

Artforum: Top Ten

Originally published in Artforum

September 2001, p 48

Lisa Ruyter

Lisa Ruyter, a New York-based artist, exhibited most recently at the Galerie Georg Kargl in Vienna. She is currently working on a solo show due to go on view next year at Berlin’s Arndt & Partner.

  1. Olaf Breuning: Olaf Breuning’s sculptures often look like sets for his photographs, which often look like stills from his films, which often look like documentation of his sculptures. While creating a highly sophisticated, media-unspecific practice, he skirts kitsch, rearranging pop clichés in a way that disrupts any high/low discussion. This fall, New York’s Metro Pictures will be showing Apes, a sculptural installation that debuted at the Kunstverein Freiburg in June.  With a low-tech presentation that includes spooky music, smoke machines, dirt, trees, and primates with glowing eyes, Apes is wholly lacking in irony. You walk away with a pure moment, a stolen pleasure, an embarrasingly sweet feeling.
  2. Jessica Craig-Martin: The formal brutality of Craig-Martin’s flash photography flattens out the deepest space. She might be the photographer Warhol couldn’t be. Shooting people desperate to be seen at parties but with no desire to protect her subjects’ vanity, she opportunistically crops out their primary identifying features – faces, essential body parts. I’m curious to see her work develop now that people know what comes out of her camera. Will the parties change her or will she change parties?
  3. Muntean/Rosenblum: Known for paintings based on magazine photos of teenagers, this collaborative team also makes sculptural installations that include “performances”—a person leaning against a sculpted car or sitting on a handmade workout bench. Coming upon live props can be unnerving, as if you’d discovered the mannequins in a store window were alive. M&R took me to “The Blue Lagoon,” a group of contractor’s model homes located in a lot near the Vienna Ikea. For their next show at Galerie Georg Kargl, the duo will erect a façade based on one of these houses.
  4. Mary Heilmann: In the future, when we ask, “What did an abstract painting look like at the end of the twentieth century?” the answer may well be, “Like a Mary Heilmann.” Her bright, playful abstract canvases never look dated and can handle just about any context. It’s rewarding to see a seasoned pro prove to be hipper than anyone else around.
  5. Brice Dellsperger: Assigning the name Body Double to almost everything he does, Dellsperger remakes specific movie scenes (often from Brian De Palma films), replacing the original actors with pierced transvestites via video collage. He has done the museum cruising scene from Dressed to Kill twice, setting it once in Euro Disney and once in the Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden. Amplifying the effects of De Palma’s constant doubling, he appropriates the work of the master appropriator. Check out www.bodydoublex.com, a site created for Body Double X, his recent full-length remake of a popular lowbrow French melodrama from the mid-’70s, in which every role is played by an actor named Jean-Luc Verna. It gets really disorienting, especially when a half-dozen characters are on screen at once.
  6. Kim Sooja:  Kim Sooja makes videos in which she is often at the center of the frame, facing away from the camera, absolutely motionless. This allows us to observe actions around her (and in some cases reactions to her) – a flowing river and the reflections of the sky, a rocky landscape under clouds, a busy street. Her work, which sometimes incorporates multiple-channel projections and installations of bright Korean fabrics, provokes a consideration of the displaced self.
  7. Rachel Harrison: Harrison forces sculpture and photography to live together, however awkwardly, and in so doing, brings up one of the key challenges of modern life: How do we negotiate between physical and depicted space in a world where most lived space also functions as representation, or virtual reality? As place becomes more and more generic, her pictures show us a world where human presence defies the empty repetition of mass-market architecture; when she weds her pictures to a physical structure, the match is at once lifeless and exciting – the art equivalent to being stranded in an airport.
  8. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html. A good way to brush up on these seminal American photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee. But there’s much more than Farm Security Administration images here. The most entertaining way to navigate is to search “all categories / collections” and just type in a few of your favorite things or random words like ‘dream’ or ‘hair.’ The results are fast and fascinating, and the site can put you in touch with the odd idea of being “American.”
  9. Lily van der Stokker: Straddling those twin conceits—the intimate and the public—van der Stokker’s wall paintings and furniture accompaniments function as performance art rather than objets d’art. Her paintings flaunt bright pastel colors and decoratively psychedelic patterns that are unabashedly pleasing, but there’s a conceptual end—a challenge to the role of the artist as pleasure provider— which fits snugly with the decidedly less-than-commercial format of work on walls. Her recent large-scale outdoor commissions, such as The Pink Building, created for Hannover’s Expo 2000, take her funky stuff and makes it epic.
  10. Mitchell Algus Gallery (New York) Algus scours his collection of magazines, catalogues, and textbooks, to rediscover artists who, despite having been fundamental to the development of art trends in the ’60s and ’70s, weren’t written into the canon because they didn’t fit the categories of the moment. With a season timed to draw comparisons between his artists and current, flashy trend-setters, Algus’s increasingly attracts well-respected critics and fashionable artists who are willing to acknowledge the amnesia that goes hand in hand with fashion. No other gallery in New York so convincingly undermines received wisdom—and history.

 

Team Gallery, D.C. >< Washington DC >< September – December 1994