Bike Polo @ The Pit

Patrick Dougherty @ Brooklyn Botanic Garden

During my summer internship on the centennial campaign at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I had a great opportunity to work on Patrick Dougherty's sculpture! It's all about weaving wood sticks...
The NY Times just published an article about him...

Ear to the Page - The Center for Book Arts

This exhibition explores the inevitable intersection between books and recorded sounds.

Indeed, music recordings like vinyl can be defined as written sounds being “read” by a needle and record sleeves can be seen as book jackets, or books’ contents can be listened as music.

Here the exhibition explores different categories: the sound work reflecting structure and aesthetic of books, packages entailing a book and CD and books with a sound component.

For example, with Touch, Listen, from 2007 by Dennis Yuen and Morry Galonoy, a phone number is printed in every pages of a book and calling the number will direct you to the voice of a man reading chapters of a book.

In the same range, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, in 1969, commissioned an exhibition with the challenge of having only telephone conversations to get the description of the artists’ works, all written descriptions being forbidden. Although the exhibition was never achieved, the excerpts of telephone conversations can be heard on the vinyl Art by Telephone, from 1969, by Jan Van Der Marck.

Christian Marclay, sound page, where you can find a vinyl as one of the page of a book or A sleeve to be read by Michael Snow, 1975 are others example of concepts presented in this multimedia exhibition.

As David Toop says in the latest issue of BOMB magazine, it is “about sound and listening without having the medium of music”. Thus sound art brings us in situation where the musical and the visual are merging, and unexpected sources for musical potential are emphasized.

Sonic events get expressed visually and visual information gets expressed sonically.

A concrete example is the French artist, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, in some of his works, translating fragments of language typed on the gallery’s office computers into a musical score played in real-time by an acoustic piano placed in the gallery.

Off the wall Part 2- seven Works by Trisha Brown – Whitney Museum of American Art

Off the Wall Part 1-Thirty Performative Actions focuses on body in live performance through the eye of a camera, in a drawing, on a printed surface.

For the Part 2, and on the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of her company, Trisha Brown returns to the Whitney with re performances from 1970 like Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, featuring Stephen Petronio strapped in a harness.

Around 1970, Brown, began to construct dances known as “equipment pieces”, using external support systems like ropes, mountain climbing gears, cables, in order to challenge the force of gravity. “I always feel sorry for the parts of the stage that aren’t being used. I have in the past felt sorry for the ceilings and walls. It’s perfectly good space, why doesn’t anyone use it?” Brown has wondered. Hence, she challenges not only the dance itself as it has no narrative like in a traditional way but also our perception of space and bodies gravity.

This time the audience is standing, on the street, in front of the Whitney Museum, looking up, preparing their camera and phones to record the performance. Suddenly comes to my mind, The Man on Wire, Philippe Petit, who a few years later, in 1974, will cross between the Twin Towers walking on a wire. Was he inspired by her work?

Although bringing performance art outside of an institution, in unexpected places like a roof, seems casual today, I guess she was the pioneer in breaking the rules. I now understand the value of her heritage that resonates from new circus to the recent performance by Willi Dorner, Bodies in Urban Spaces, at Crossing The Line/FIAF festival, where human sculptures are performing on the street of Wall street.

Christian Rizzo/l'association fragile: b.c, janvier 1545, Fontainebleau-The Kitchen

After witnessing Stephen Petronio walking down the wall of the Whitney Museum as part of a re performance from Trisha Brown, I headed south to the Kitchen to experience b.c, 1545, Fontainebleau from The French choreographer, Christian Rizzo.

There, the master of ceremony, wearing lousy jeans and a ruffled shirt with a rabbit mask, Christian Rizzo himself, welcomed the spectators to this stunning performance. His outfit and the extreme silence required before entering the room already immersed us in a cinematographic atmosphere from an undefined time and space like David Lynch or Donnie Darko movies.

In a white square box, lying on an altar stands Julie Guibert, the classical dancer from the Lyon Opera Ballet, who inspired Rizzo this solo piece, by her “incredible intelligence on stage” and her personality. For one hour, she will perform an astonishing dance ritual where she contorts herself in a non human way with very sharp slow paced moves emphasized by her steel high heels shoes and her cold face that looks like an old Flemish painting.

In this religious ceremony, she evolves in the space where organic dream catchers and hairy fetishes are hanging from the ceiling and random disposed tea candles are slowly moved to the altar by the rabbitman.

The music suddenly breaking the silence in the second part gave impression of echoes and watery sounds from a cave.

The mysterious title of the performance is actually referring to The Nymph of Fontainebleau, a sculpture of Benvenuto Cellini that you can see at the Louvre Museum. In this sculpture, the woman personalized a source surrounded by forest animals. Cellini also introduced the automat with this piece by putting a simple movement and lightning in the sculpture.

Hence, Rizzo is looking way further in time to avoid the inevitable reference in dance history to what happened in the 50’s/60’s with pioneers like Trisha Brown, Pina Bausch or Merce Cunningham. However, it would be difficult to avoid the link between those precursors and the representatives of the “non dance” movement as Rizzo, or Jerome Bel, recently seen at the JoyceTheater. Even if this heritage is unconscious, it certainly influenced them, from interdisciplinary work to the interaction with the audience or the way of using the space.

Marcel Broodthaers @ Marian Goodman Gallery and the Département des Aigles present Section Cinéma, 1972

“I don't believe in film, nor do I believe in any other art. I don't believe in the unique artist or in the unique work of art. I believe in phenomena and in men who put ideas together”. M.B.

The Belgium poet and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) seventh section of his major achievement of his life‘s work is presented here for the first time in the United States.

Le musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles is a reproduction of Marcel Broodthaers’own studio. It is composed of old dusty files, reels, projectors and two screens, one of them actually being a map of the “fragile” political/poetic world. With some part of texts appearing on the map, we could see it as poetry endangered by the encounter with the technological apparatus. As he said himself “poetic reality is over. I am sorry to say. What is left? Pessimism and a museum which gives one something to think about, as a place of communication and not a shelter for works of art.”

Another part of the museum recreates the dark room.

Stencils of Figure 1, figure 2, figure 12, words like “silence”, “museum” are randomly placed on the walls, on the screen, without any objects behind.

His work, recreating a dusty museum and his nomenclature in a parody way, is thus criticizing and questioning the legitimized art and analyzed the mechanisms of the art world.

Further in the gallery, a room gathers four of his movies, “un film de Charles Baudelaire” with random words written on a black screen, “La pluie (projet pour un texte)” where he’s writting under the rain, or a movie with a representation of a pipe, directly referring at Magritte, “ceci est une pipe, ceci n’est pas une pipe...”

It is then becoming evident that he explores the nature and meaning of language, word and image through film and writing.

In the last section of the gallery stands a few frames of truncated texts, where he integrated his poet experience background in his art works. You’re not sure if you have to read or look. Le Corbeau et le Renard revisited and some other absurd texts could be interpreted as a direct critic of French literature or like Ferdinand de Saussure or Mallarmé before him, a way of breaking the logical of language.

MoMA: The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

Assembled by photo curator Roxana Marcoci.

Through this exhibition, one could discover how and under which circumstances photography became an art form and slowly reinvented sculpture.

Through the first daguerreotypes or Eugene Atget straightforward pictures of statues in Parisian parks we have a great example of how this art form has been used to record, preserve and archive art works; that was also a perfect subject for the early version of photography that needed a long time of exposure.

The art work could now reach a wider audience, photography allowed it to circulate in mass.

Later the camera begins not only to reflect but alter the shape and substance of the art work. Rodin, with Steichen photography of Balzac sculpture at moonlight in 1908, is maybe the first one who decided through which angle and light the picture should be taken, which almost makes the sculpture alive.

In the 60’s/70’s, the photo conceptualist works by Robert Smithson -Yucatan Mirror Displacements, or Gordon Matta-Clark - Circus of the Caribbean Orange, dematerialized the art work by replacing actual 3D objects with a picture and transforms environment into art by a subtle change, using mirrors or with pictures of abandoned houses sticked together with red tape.

Furthermore, the provocative “Photosculptures” by the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (closed-up of stretched chewing-gum) or La soupe de Daguerre of Marcel Broodthaers in 1974 questioned the presence and definition of sculpture.

And it’s in the last part of the exhibition, that we can examine the performance art and the use of body as living sculpture. Here the photography don’t have anymore a role of documentation but becomes a key in the work, generating actions through its presence.

The performing body object of Bruce Nauman, from 1966 - Eleven color photographs, as a response to Duchamp’s urinoir as a fountain is surely the best example.

This exhibition definitely changed my perception of photography and sculpture by blurring their limits; however the choice of the pictures could be of further investigation.

Miroslav Tichý et les surréalistes à l'International Center of Photography

J'étais partie voir une exposition de photos sur Paris vue par les surréalistes, à l'International Center of Photography; et je me suis retrouvée en train d'admirer les photos de Miroslav Tichy.
Ce photographe tchèque, qui fabrique ses appareils photos lui même, a prit une multitude de photos de femmes sensuelles, dans sa ville natale de Kyjov, dans les années 60 et 70. Non, il ne peut être qualifier d'outsider, comme Henry Darger, puisqu'il a étudié aux Beaux-arts de Prague...Découvert à la Biennal de Séville en 2004, il a depuis fait l'objet d'expositions à La Maison Rouge et au Centre Pompidou à Paris, entre autres. C'est sa première expo dans un musée aux Etats-Unis.

Windham--skiing in the Catskills on President's Day