October exhibitions

October exhibitions

www.bard.edu/ccs

Opening Today:

Ragnar Kjartansson FOLKSONG
Live performance daily, October 11 – October 20, 2007
11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Opening reception: Tonight, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

FOLKSONG is a ten-day performance. For six hours a day, Ragnar Kjartansson will stand in his tableau vivant of autumn trees and setting sun, singing his heart out to passers-by. The work is a European’s bona fide take on America, loaded with clichés from different cultural productions. Dressed in cocktail wear and braced with a shiny red hollow body and a powerful amplifier, Kjartansson performs over and over again a short verse from an unknown but strangely familiar song.

Born in Iceland in 1976, Ragnar Kjartansson has as an artist and musician taken on countless roles, each a merger of personas from cultural history and his present self. His line of work includes video, drawing and painting, with performance at the centre of his practice. Exploring the relationship between the artist and the viewer, his experiments range from the display of a simple sign apologizing for the artist’s absence, to his physical presence for a whole month performing relentlessly. Combining the video loop, musical tradition and theatre practice, Kjartansson repeats the same thing again and again. In the role of the incurable romantic, he declares: “Art is for me like the blues; I use it to purify my soul.”

Opening Saturday, October 20:

Keith Edmier: 1991 – 2007
October 20, 2007 – February 3, 2008
Curated by Tom Eccles

And

Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibition of Works from the
Marieluise Hessel Collection
October 20, 2007 – February 3, 2008
Curated by Matthew Higgs

Opening reception for both exhibitions: Saturday, October 20, 1:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Limited free seating on a chartered bus is available to the opening from New York City.
Reservations required: 845.758.7598 or ccs@bard.edu.

Gallery Tours with Matthew Higgs, Keith Edmier, Tom Eccles: Sunday, October 21, 2:00 p.m. Reservations required: 845.758.7598 or ccs@bard.edu.
All programs are open to the public without charge.

Keith Edmier: 1991 – 2007
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is pleased to present the most comprehensive survey exhibition to date of work by Keith Edmier. The exhibition features more than 40 key works, and a large-scale new commission–Bremen Towne, a recreation of the artist’s childhood home in Tinley Park outside of Chicago. The installation, Edmier explains, “functions as a curated space. An exhibition of those things, which influenced my early aesthetic development, in the surroundings that helped shape who I am.”

Many of Edmier’s works build upon and expose the intersections between his personal world and such American cultural touchstones as motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel and 70s icon Farrah Fawcett, with whom he collaborated, as well as Janis Joplin and John Lennon. “Through the act of sculpture he voraciously pursues his memories,” writes curator Tom Eccles in the publication that accompanies the exhibition, citing both Jill Peters (1997), a “virginal portrait of his childhood sweetheart standing awkwardly in her sweater, skirt, and bobby socks” constructed in wax from a yearbook picture, and Beverly Edmier, 1967 (1998), a portrait of the artist’s mother, in which the yet-to-be-born artist is revealed through the stomach of his seated mother.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Center for Curatorial Studies and Booth-Clibburn Editions, London, are very pleased to publish Keith Edmier 1991-2007, a new book exploring Edmier’s work in remarkable depth. Including essays by Tom Eccles, Douglas Fogle, and Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith; a thorough guide to the source material for Edmier’s work by the artist’s longtime friend, Jade Dellinger; an interview with Keith Edmier by artist Matthew Barney; a comprehensive bibliography; as well as a limited edition resin rose the book will be officially released at the opening reception of Keith Edmier 1991-2007 at CCS Bard on October 20.

Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Concurrently with Keith Edmier 1991-2007, the CCS Bard presents, Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. This new installation of the Hessel Collection, curated by White Columns director Matthew Higgs, presents a series of exhibitions in each of the 16 galleries in the newly inaugurated Hessel Museum.

Exhibitionism’s 16 exhibitions in the Hessel Museum are (1) Jonathan Borofsky; (2) Andy Warhol and Matthew Higgs including Warhol’s portrait of Marieluise Hessel and a work by Higgs; (3) Art as Idea, with works by W. Imi Knoebel, Joseph Kosuth, and Allan McCollum; (4) Rupture, with works by John Bock, Saul Fletcher, Isa Genzken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Martin Kippenberger, and Karlheinz Weinberger; (5) Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Linn, including 11 of the 70 Mapplethorpe works in the Hessel Collection along with Linn’s intimate portraits of Mapplethorpe; (6) For Holly, including works by Gary Burnley, Valerie Jaudon, Christopher Knowles, Robert Kushner, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Kim MacConnel, Ned Smyth, and Joe Zucker–acquired by Hessel from legendary SoHo art dealer Holly Solomon; (7) Inside — Outside, juxtaposing works by Scott Burton and Günther Förg with the picture windows of the Hessel Museum; (8) Lexicon, with works by Martin Creed, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Bruce Nauman, Sean Landers, Raymond Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Jason Rhoades, and Allen Ruppersberg; (9) Real Life, examines different forms of social systems in works by Robert Beck, Sophie Calle, Matt Mullican, Cady Noland, Pruitt & Early, and Lawrence Weiner; (10) Image is a Burden, presents a number of idiosyncratic positions in relation to the figure and figuration (and disfigurement) through works by Rita Ackerman, Jonathan Borofsky, John Currin, Carroll Dunham, Philip Guston, Rachel Harrison, Adrian Piper, Peter Saul, Rosemarie Trockel, and Nicola Tyson; (11) Mirror Objects, including works by Donald Judd, Blinky Palermo, and Jorge Pardo; (12) 1982, including works by Carl Andre, Robert Longo, Robert Mangold, Robert Mapplethorpe, A. R. Penck, and Cindy Sherman, all of which were produced in close–chronological–proximity to one another; (13) Monitor, with 5 single-channel video works by Vito Acconci, Cheryl Donegan, Vlatka Horvat, Bruce Nauman, and Aïda Ruilova; (14) Cindy Sherman, includes 7 of the 25 works by Sherman in the Hessel Collection; (15) Silence, with works by Christian Marclay, Pieter Laurens Mol, and Lorna Simpson that demonstrate art’s persistent interest in and engagement with the paradoxical idea of “silence”; and (16) Dan Flavin and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Matthew Higgs is an artist, curator, and writer. He is currently the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York’s oldest alternative art space. Over the past 15 years he has organized more than150 exhibitions and projects in North America and Europe. A regular contributor to Artforum magazine, Higgs has contributed to recent publications for artists Kay Rosen, Ken Price, John McCracken, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Marilyn Minter, Elizabeth Peyton, and Peter Doig, among others. Recent exhibitions of his own work include solo exhibitions at Murray Guy, New York, and Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles.

The Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present day. The Center’s graduate program is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating exhibitions of contemporary art, particularly in the complex social and cultural situations of present-day arts institutions. With more than 9,500 square feet of gallery space and an extensive library and curatorial archive, CCS Bard offers students intellectual grounding and actual experience within a museum.

In November 2006, CCS Bard inaugurated the Hessel Museum of Art, a new 17,000-square-foot building for exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of more than 1,700 contemporary works. The new museum features intimate rooms encircling two large central galleries, and is scaled so that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the collection can be shown at any one time. The Hessel Museum extends the reach of the CCS Bard exhibition program, providing a place to test out the possibilities for exhibition making using the remarkable resources of the collection as a whole.

For further information, call the Center for Curatorial Studies at 845-758-7598, e-mail ccs@bard.edu, or visit www.bard.edu/ccs