Anni Leppälä | Helsinki School

From the series Possibility of Constancy (Still Life), 2007

William Christenberry

Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama 1983. Chromogenic color print, 17 5/16 x 22" (44 x 56 cm).
© 2009 William Christenberry

American, Hale County, Alabama 1984 - 1985
Balsa and basswood, plywood, tempera, paper, and red soil
12 3/4 x 23 x 21 in.

With the encouragement of Walker Evans, William Christenberry began to pursue photography seriously and focus on the landscape of Hale County, Alabama, which he has photographed for more than twenty-five years. Christenberry is devoted to the heritage of the South and, using his training as a sculptor and painter, interprets it in a range of media.

William Christenberry

Andy Kessler | The End of Falling | Soul Artist of Zoo York

Andy Kessler, West 30th Street, Manhattan, 2005.


Deathbowl to Downtown

The Pictures Generation at the MET

Untitled (President: 4), 1979, Sherrie Levine (American, born 1947), Collage on paper
24 x 18 in. (60.9 x 45.7 cm), Mary Martin Fund, 1990 (1990.1057), © Sherrie Levine

This work belongs to Levine's Presidents series—silhouettes of Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy cut from magazine pages showing mothers with children, fashion models, and other stock images of women. The specter of commodification and exchange value, signified in the penny profile of Lincoln, lurks around the edges of the model's image, revealing the mechanisms of seduction and desire hidden beneath the advertisement's effects. Her treatment allows the advertisement to incriminate itself, a cool subversion of media imagery that characterizes much artistic production in the 1980s.

Young artists who came of age in the early 1970s were greeted by an America suffused with disillusionment from dashed hopes for political and social transformation to the continuation of the Vietnam War and the looming Watergate crisis. The utopian promise of the counterculture had devolved into a commercialized pastiche of rebellious stances prepackaged for consumption, and the national mood was one of catatonic shell-shock in response to wildly accelerated historical change, from the sexual revolution to race riots and assassinations. Similarly, the elder generation of artists seemed to have both dramatically expanded the field of what was possible in the field of art while staking out its every last claim, either by dematerializing the aesthetic object entirely into the realm of pure idea or linguistic proposition as in Conceptualism, or by rivaling the cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world itself as did the so-called earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, who died in 1973.
What these fledgling artists did have fully to themselves was the sea of images into which they were born—the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines that to them constituted a sort of fifth element or a prevailing kind of weather. Their relationship to such material was productively schizophrenic: while they were first and foremost consumers, they also learned to adopt a cool, critical attitude toward the very same mechanisms of seduction and desire that played upon them from the highly influential writings of French philosophers and cultural critics such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva that were just beginning to be made available in translation. Among these thinkers' central ideas was that identity was not organic and innate, but manufactured and learned through highly refined social constructions of gender, race, sexuality, and citizenship. These constructions were embedded within society's institutions and achieved their effects through the myriad expressions of the mass media. Barthes infamously extended this concept to question the very possibility of originality and authenticity in his 1967 manifesto "The Death of the Author," in which he stated that any text (or image), rather than emitting a fixed meaning from a singular voice, was but a tissue of quotations that were themselves references to yet other texts, and so on.

Ute Klein

from the series Resonanzgeflechte – Leibhafter Raum

The Wassaic Project, New York

Bob: Irresistible Possibilities

Rebus, 1955 Robert Rauschenberg

"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore. Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it, and I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

Robert Rauschenberg interviewed on Captiva in 2000.

Petros Christostomou

Skatospore (II)

Pulse (48 Hanway Street)

Hero (18 Fortis Green)

Petros Christostomou’s work is concerned with the relationship between objects and their contexts. He builds models of rooms and then places unexpected objects within them. Through unsettling combinations of scale and content, Christostomou challenges our perceptions. Interested in simulacra (ideas of likeness or similarity), he aims to question the role of the photograph in our post modern era by challenging our visual perceptions.

Petros Christostomou

Stutter: Michael Ridel's Filmed Film Trailer (2008) at Tate Modern

Michael Riedel, Filmed Film Trailer 2008
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Stutter

The onomatopoeic word 'Stutter' refers to an act of speech interrupted by agitated, spasmodic, or involuntary repetitions. As the title for this exhibition, it suggests a metaphor for questions of disruption and discontinuity in processes of thought, systems of communications or conceptions of knowledge. The exhibition encompasses a wide range of artistic practices that incorporate repetition and interruption in order to convey meaning, whether through language, gesture, sound or images. In their highly methodical processes of work, Sven Augustijnen, Anna Barham, Dominique Petitgand, Michael Riedel and Will Stuart create a space for error, irrationality and transformation. Combining actions and strategies such as editing, quoting, translating, conversing, duplicating or indexing, these artists reveal a multiplicity of perspectives, directions and potentialities.
Michael Riedel (b1972, Germany)
Michael Riedel’s Filmed Film Trailer (2008) derives from a 16-hour edit of footage from screenings of experimental films. From 1999 to 2002 over 40 hours of video recordings were made and the results were shown as Filmed Film events at Oskar-von-Miller Strasse 16 in Frankfurt/Main. The auto focus mechanism of the camera often wasn’t able to focus on the film and some of the shots are blurred and appear to be vibrating. Badly filmed, the image moves within the image or the film within the film disappears. Seldom are the original film and the filmed version identical in length, the life of the camera’s battery often determined the duration of the film. Using the programme Final Cut, Riedel distilled the assembly into a frenetic ‘trailer’ for Filmed Film lasting 7 minutes. In the process, an overload of information produces an array of gaps, elisions and errors that create an entirely new work.
Four proposals for the change of modern (2009) belongs to a series of works that Riedel began in 2008 for a group show at The Modern Institute in Glasgow. Cutting the word ‘modern’ from the gallery’s logo out of a piece of black fabric and turning the resulting banner on each of its sides, four new shapes were created by chance. Four proposals for the change of modern foregrounds process by drawing distinctions and opening up an infinite number of abstract forms, which allows the word ‘modern’ to be read as an ever changing moment. Through these methods, Riedel effects a gradual degradation of form and disintegration of language.

Marisa Merz

Marisa Merz (b. 1925, Turin)
The works of Marisa Merz display many of the fundamental themes and preoccupations associated with Arte Povera. These include an interest in flowing, organic forms, a concentration on subjectivity and the visionary, the embracing of 'low' types of art such as craft, and the relationship between art and life. 'There has never been any division between my life and my work', she has said. She often adapts traditional practices associated with female domesticity, such as knitting, and the idea of home as a private, intimate and feminine realm is central to her work. In 1966, for example, she created the spectacular work Untitled (Living Sculpture), both for her own house and as a gallery installation. It was made from thin strips of shiny aluminium, clipped together and suspended from the ceiling to form great coiled and spiralling forms, creating a magical environment.

In 1968, she began knitting nylon or copper threads into simple geometric shapes to fit her body. Little Shoes, 1970, for instance, is a nylon-thread sculpture made for her feet. Bea, 1968, is another knitted work, spelling out her daughter's name. These delicate, web-like works have been installed both along gallery walls and in external locations such as beaches. Outdoors, they appear to grow like plants or grip on like living creatures. This inter-weaving of threads into a complicated network implies both an obsessive energy and ideas of communication and interconnection. Merz herself has spoken of an intense excitement running through these threads.

Mr.Shulman's Case Study Houses

Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22. 1960

Chemosphere. Octagonal home built by John Lautner. 1960

Working mostly in California, Julius Shulman staged his photographs as tableaus to promote the idea of casual living in a Modernist context. Carefully composed and artfully lighted, his images promoted not only new approaches to home design but also the ideal of idyllic California living — a sunny, suburban lifestyle played out in sleek, spacious, low-slung homes featuring ample glass, pools and patios, photographing buildings by some of the era’s best-known architects, including Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Mies van der Rohe and Oscar Niemeyer.