Anton Vidokle
Collaborations & Recent Work
31 January – 13 March 2004
Massimo Audiello
526 West 26th Street
No. 519, NYC, NY 10001
212.675.9082 TEL
212.675.8680 FAX
www.massimoaudiello.com
Opening: Saturday, January 31, 6-8pm
Anton Vidokle: Collaborations & Recent Work, with Peter Zellner, Julieta Aranda, Cristian Manzutto and students at Krabbesholm College.
image: Nuevo, 2003, film still
Massimo Audiello is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition – Anton Vidokle: Collaborations & Recent Work, a show of new works by the Moscow-born artist, Anton Vidokle. The show will open on January 31 and run through March 13, 2004. Opening reception is Saturday, January 31st, from 6 – 8 pm.
We are surrounded by the de-radicalized revolutionary, graphical, iconographic and architectural schemes of the early 20th century, a period of great political, social and artistic activity which set itself the mission of changing the world. At the root of the period’s aesthetic sensibilities lay utopian hopes whose vestiges, in the form of the artifacts of modernist abstraction, still permeate our visual field, and still attempt to function as signs of advancement and progress, and thus of the future.
Tracing the afterlife of these hopes by repurposing their aesthetic devices and iconography are the projects of New York-based artist Anton Vidokle. In four joint projects to be presented at the exhibition, Vidokle and his collaborators explore and “detourne” the emptied-out vehicles of vacated promise. In his 2003 film, Nuevo, which was shot and edited by Julieta Aranda with sound by Cristian Manzutto, Vidokle documents a large-scale public project that he undertook last summer, in which he organized the painting of the late modernist facade of the Salto del Agua metro station, a modular building located in downtown Mexico City. Both the film and a wall-sized still from the film will be on view, along with specially designed bench-seating. The artist will also present a large grid of 39 photographic prints of the building, showing the gradual change of color.
Also exhibited will be drawings for an outdoor sculpture/pavilion proposal for a public space in Southern California made in collaboration with an architect Peter Zellner, as will the English-language and Turkish versions of the tabloid newspaper Popular Geometry, a project of Vidokle’s and Julieta Aranda’s from earlier this year. The newspaper, initially published for the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, reprints a selection of the popular press’s responses to abstract public sculptures. For this show, plastic street dispensers will be used to offer the tabloids to visitors.
Another one of Vidokle’s abiding interests-the abstract geometric logotype-will be explored in the exhibition’s four additional works. The first is the book and stickers of Here There Elsewhere, a collaborative venture for the 2003 Venice Biennale made by the artist and students of Krabbesholm College in Denmark. The second is a set of drawings for a proposal/plan for a public project initiated by the mayor of Tirana, the project seeks to create a sense of change and hopefulness in a city where no money exists for substantial infrastructure improvements. Rounding out the exhibition will be a pair of new, large-scale untitled sculptures-48 x 48″ cubes-which continue the artist’s longstanding interest in both the logotype and working out a form for translating printed matter into sculpture.
Anton Vidokle’s work has been featured in exhibitions including: Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennale; Form-Specific, Moderna Galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Made in Mexico, ICA Boston/UCLA Hammer; Urgent Painting, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Greater New York, P.S.1 Museum, Chelsea Rising, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans; Do It, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico D.F.; Without You I Am Nothing, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; among other. Vidokle’s work has been the subject of several publications including Here, There, Elsewhere, with texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffman, Kurt Finsten, Krabbesholm Books, Denmark 2003; Three views of Salto del Agua, texts by Lauri Firstenberg and Peter Zellner, Gabriel Kuri, Gilbert Vicario, Revolver , Frankfurt 2003; Popular Geometries – Anton Vidokle, text by Joshua Decter, TRANS> Publications, New York 2001.
