Check Allora & Calzadilla’s project at onestar press here.

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present Allora & Calzadilla’s third solo show at the gallery ‘Vieques Videos 2003-2011’. Made over the course of a decade Returning a Sound (2004), Under Discussion (2005) and Half Mast/Full Mast (2010) are now shown here together for the first time. Each video addresses the complicated history of Vieques, an inhabited island off Puerto Rico that was used by the United States Navy as a bomb-testing range from 1941 until 2003. The Navy was forced to evacuate by a civil disobedience campaign waged by local residents, with supporters throughout the world. Allora & Calzadilla contributed to the visual culture of this campaign with a long-term, multi-sited project entitled ‘Landmark’, informed by the following questions: ‘How is land differentiated from other land by the way it is marked? Who decides what is worth preserving and what should be destroyed? What are strategies for reclaiming marked land? How does one articulate an ethics and politics of land use?’ In Vieques the future of the reclaimed land remains uncertain and largely insulated from democratic claims. Returning a Sound (2004) was made at the beginning of the process of demilitarisation, decontamination, and future development and at once celebrates a victory and registers its precariousness. The video addresses not only the landscape of Vieques, but also its soundscape, invoking the memory of the sonic violence of the bombing. It follows Homar, an activist, as he traverses the island on a moped with a trumpet welded to the muffler. The noise-reducing device is diverted from its original purpose: with every jolt of the road and spurt of the engine, the trumpet might summon up the siren of an ambulance, Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Intonarumori or experimental jazz. In his circuit Homar acoustically recapitulates areas of the island formerly exposed to ear-splitting detonations. Scarred with bomb-craters and with its ecosystem contaminated, the former military land has been designated as a federal wildlife refuge. This designation entails further violence by marginalising the demands of island residents for decontamination and municipal management – the point of departure for Under Discussion (2005). An overturned conference table has been retrofitted with an engine and rudder grafted from a small fishing boat. A local activist uses the motorized table to lead viewers around the restricted area of the island, re-marking the antagonisms that haunt the picturesque coast and bearing witness to the memory of the Fisherman’s Movement, which initiated the first acts of civil disobedience against the ecological fall-out of the bombing. The hybrid device explores the absurd political inequalities of the situation: the table, a common trope for the non-violent resolution of conflict, is forcibly reliant on local navigation. Half Mast\Full Mast (2010) draws attention to the unfinished political, economic, and ecological reconstruction of the island as inhabitants grapple with the legacy of military occupation. Departing from the noisy dynamism of the earlier videos, Half Mast\Full Mast adopts a slower, more meditative approach. Projected at life-size, the silent video is comprised of 19 partitions; each is split into two landscape views of various sites in Vieques, stacked on top of one another. The horizontal divide is then crossed by two poles, aligned as if a continuous object. In each partition a young man hoists himself up the pole from standing to a horizontal position, and with intense exertion momentarily becomes an unofficial flag – before endurance gives way to gravity. The gesture functions to reframe specific sites around Vieques significant to the military occupation and subsequent struggles in terms of a deceptively simple semiotic convention: the flying of the flag at half-mast (a sign of mourning) or full-mast (‘normal’ conditions). In ‘becoming’ a flag, however unofficial, absurd or precarious, the performers short-circuit the flag’s symbolic relation between parts and wholes. In Half Mast\Full Mast, the individual body ‘literally’ stands in for the flag, obliterating it as an official place for the collective body of the nation. Alternating in an unpredictable manner between upper and lower segments of the composition, the appearance sometimes celebrates or salutes a particular site (such as places related to the history of civil disobedience), while in others it indicates a sense of discontent, if not crisis (such as the luxury W hotel recently constructed in Vieques). In other instances, the gesture is ambivalent relative to the sites in question, suspended somewhere between disaster and progress, oblivion and memory, grief and hope – oscillations that rebound on a broader scale between all three Vieques videos.

From the press release

Check Allora & Calzadilla’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery here.

Le Prix Jean Lurçat 2011 a été décerné le 28 octobre 2011 à : 88 Maps, de Matt Mullican aux Éditions Three Star Books. Ouvrage exceptionnel à bien des aspects, 88 Maps regroupe 36 planches proposant une vue d’ensemble de plus de 40 ans de recherches artistiques de l’artiste américain Matt Mullican. Grâce à un système de classification propre établi dans cet ouvrage à travers une série limitée de couleurs représentatives – rouge, bleu, jaune et vert –, il élabore un véritable modèle de cosmologie toute personnelle, usant de pictogrammes. L’artiste imagine des villes et des contes universels qui simulent les phénomènes de la nature ou les mystères de l’être humain.
Le Prix Jean Lurçat est un prix de bibliophilie créé en 2005 à l’initiative de Madame Simone Lurçat, à la mémoire de son époux, membre de la section de peinture de l’Académie des beaux-arts, qui a pratiqué l’art de la bibliophilie. Il est doté d’un montant de 7.000 € et récompense chaque année un peintre ou un graveur ayant illustré un ouvrage original récent de bibliophilie. Il s’agit du seul Grand Prix de bibliophilie en France.

Check 88 MAPS by Matt Mullican at Three Star Books here.

Photo: © Juliette Agnel

Check Tobias Rehberger’s project at Three Star Books here.
Check Tobias Rehberger’s projects at onestar press here.

All of the above

18 october – 31 december 2011 As a way of mapping the artist’s brain, desires, and influences, offering carte blanche to an artist provides the opportunity to approach the creative process and the forging of aesthetic links from a novel angle. ALL OF THE ABOVE is the rerun in reverse of “none of the above”, an idiomatic expression, and the title of an earlier curatorship of an exhibition by the artist at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2004. Each of the works was distinguished by its extremely small size, or even its immaterial nature. From NONE OF THE ABOVE to ALL OF THE ABOVE, invisibility gives way to photogenic quality. As the Palais de Tokyo is involved in building work throughout 2011, artists are being invited to devise an exhibition in the former auditorium, transformed in turn into a building site, a theater and a scientific laboratory. Each of them had used a platform which was first architectural, then theatrical, then scientific. John M Armleder in his turn has decided to use this platform in the manner of a stage and invites around 20 artists to present a work. Whatever the nature of the works (painting, sculpture, video), placed on this stage they are subject to a frontal viewpoint and a visual superimposition making the whole effect oscillate between chaotic entanglements, groundbreaking meetings, and mixtures of genres. ALL OF THE ABOVE overturns a logic that Marc-Olivier Wahler deliberately initiated at the Palais de Tokyo which in the course of his program scheduling has taken us from the super-visible to disappearance, by way of stealthiness. The arrangement of this project likewise bulldozes the very foundations of exhibiting, namely the moving body and the unmoving eye: which only goes to prove that only John M Armleder was a suitable candidate to bring the cycle 2006-2011 to a close – completing the circle.
From the press release.

Check John Armleder’s projects at onestar press here.

French publishers onestar press and Three Star Books, Paris have been invited by Galerie Perrotin to showcase a selection of artist’s books, bookshelves and unique projects. This special temporary exhibition will take place at Galerie Perrotin (Turenne showroom), 76 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris, France. Visiting hours are 11:00 to 19:00 from Tuesday to Saturday.
onestar press A series of bookshelves, print portfolios and projects by artists will be featured, along with the core production of artists’ books by Tim Maul, Nathan Carter, Dzine, Daniel Gordon, Tobias Rehberger, Annika Ström, Lawrence Weiner and many others.
Three Star Books Three Star Books will present artist’s books and special projects which challenge the parameters of artist’s book publishing. Productions include a large work on canvas, passport and a lamp. Presentation includes works by Maurizio Cattelan, Jonathan Monk, Olivier Mosset, Matt Mullican, Simon Starling, Lawrence Weiner and Heimo Zobernig.

www.onestarpress.com

www.threestarbooks.com

Thank you to Dutch artists Marius Lut and Tineke Van Veen for building our books and multiple stand for Crossing Border Festival

onestar press was cordially invited by Tineke Van Veen and Stroom Den Haag to present their international collection of artist’s books and had the opportunity to introduce three new titles and multiples of Dutch artists from The Hague as well.

Check out the titles by artists: Marius Lut, Navid Nuur and Magali Reus.

Photos by Darlene Lin

1) Presented, arrange, collect, desire, settle for less, curate, objects, things, marriages between things, chachkas, collectibles, value (decline and rise of), display, craft, choosing, connoisseurship, taste, disruption of fields, rings created by an object thrown in a pond, Duchamp, readymade, the readymade and the occult, barometers of value, commodity, ‘replicant fading’, domestic maintenance (feather duster), Pop Art is Liking Things, Warhol, Warhol ‘raids the icebox’ at RISD ’70, Oldenburg (Maus Museum), accelerating of time in the production of antiques, death, the photogenic, sour childhoods (Koons), the art dealer’s discriminating ‘eye’, creating atmosphere, the gallery as ‘showroom’, the dead air of the display case, trophy, trophy ‘wives’, ballerina as Picasso’s ‘trophy wife’, Donald Judd, Judd boxes as ‘traps for time’ (Smithson), poetry, nostalgia, authenticity, ‘distressed’ surfaces, ‘outsider’ art brought inside, ‘outsider’ art left alone, proclamations, Artschwager’s exclamation point, Disneyfication of Chelsea, “It all started with a mouse…”, color, scale, corresponding dimensions, levels, A Judd wall piece installed on the walls reveals a interior shaft of reflections when looked down from close proximity, alchemy, lead into gold, ‘Antique Roadshow’, personal narratives, panel of experts, family myth, attic treasures, salesmanship, ‘shelf life’, belief systems, Next Year’s Stella and Next Year’s Pontiac (Hickey), first, earliest, original, the fireplace mantel as installation art, shopping surrealists, display of wares, Cornell as archivist, plastic, hardware stores, the 60’s, gift shop as final room in exhibition, Gods & Monsters, ‘Star Wars’ at the Brooklyn Museum, curators replacing artists, artist as brand, IKEA, production costs, fakes, the staging of objects, interior decorators, Andy and Jed, Victoriana, federalist, ‘plating’ food, Arte Povera, Pino Pascali, “…they don’t match but they flourish” (Marisa Merz), Italian design, catalogues, celebrity objects, icon, trafficking in kitsch, Prince’s car hoods, Robert Watts, cause and effect, relics, Fritsch’s Madonna, reliquaries, sealed into a tomb for use in the afterlife, aliens, angels, orcs, imps, toys, novelties, conceptual folk art, set theory, Holy Grail, African Fetish, trade show aesthetics, Scott Burrton’s chairs and tableaux’s of furniture, department store as museum, re-gifting, bronze or dark chocolate, distinguishing features, ‘Hoarders’ reality show, getting one’s ‘ducks lined up’, Indiana Jones reaching for a ‘carpenters cup’, props, hard-edge painting, scenarios, physical elevation in regard to an objects status, mixed signals, memorabilia, office party as institutional critique, categories, hierarchies, benign neglect, wall units, souvenirs (my Fort Ticonderoga cannon), trends in collecting, shrink’s office, Duchamp’s comment on American plumbing and Smithson’s reaction, recontextualizing, one thing canceling out another thing, fleets, model making, model boats, scrutiny over admiration, Hummel Wars, art object as ‘host’ to embedded pockets of shifting value……..
2) Haim Steinbach’s exhibition drifts like a flotilla across the walls of the Tanya Bonadakar Gallery. I recalled the opening scene of ‘Star War’s with Lucas’s reimagining of the space ship as elongated triangular multi-tiered platform fortress.
3) 60’s art was hard and bright while 70’s art was soft and dispersed. In the 80’s art got hard again.
Tim Maul 10/2/11
in memory of Richard Hamilton

Photo: Robert Barry

Art termed ‘conceptual’ had a strong presence in New York this wet spring. Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Braco Dimitrijevic, Sol Lewitt, and Alison Knowles occupied spaces both modest and extravagant. Robert Barry also participated in this ‘konzept’ surge simultaneously showing work at the towering new Sperone Westwater colossus on the Bowery ‘Gold Coast’, Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea, and at ‘A Place To Which We Can Come’ at the Convent of St. Cecelia in Greenpoint Brooklyn. The last two of these exhibitions overlap in an intriguing manner and allow for a closer reading of Barry’s participation.The origins of abandoned urban space as an aesthetic site requires lengthier scholarship but the local development of downtown lofts for living/working and an awareness of Arte Povera’s unglamorous industrial contexts contributed toward the attraction of the ‘raw’ exhibition space. Post-minimal works like Richard Serra’s lead-throwing piece included in the important ‘9 at Leo Castelli’ at the Castelli warehouse (1968) were too physically demanding for the austere galleries on 57th St and the Upper East Side. This necessity for more durable surroundings also reflected an emerging romantic strain in the construction of the male artist persona as working dude, perhaps in guilty reaction to the chic Pop artists, or at least to Andy Warhol. Romantic connotations could be also found in the opening of an unused Queens elementary school PS 1 in 1975by Allana Heiss to host second wave post minimalism. This reanimation of ‘dead’ real estate placed the artist in the role of mediumistic empath or mystic archeologist, communing with the ‘space’ in an ‘excavation’ of history. The dominant metaphor of PS 1, of course, is that of the academy- offering the best ‘students’ shows and later in the 70’s residencies. Unlike sculptural interventions which led to the tepid category of ‘installation art’ discrete conceptual art either disappeared into the grime or relied on the photograph/document to mark its territory. Having originated on the blank white page the conceptual was dependant, despite the period optimism over new communication technologies, on the white wall or in a well produced and distributed publication.Serra Sabuncuoglu, a young Turkish-American curator was offered by a clergyman the convent at Saint Cecelia’s in its entirety to host an exhibition.

Read entire article

Cornelia Lauf and Christophe Boutin from Three Star Books behind bars at the MAXXI.