Conceptual Art @ BAMPFA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
October 19 - December 23, 2016

Ant Farm

Media Burn, July 4, 1975

Performance, Cow Palace, San Francisco

BAMPFA collection

Photo: © John F. Turner

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection, on view October 19 to December 23, 2016. Showcasing BAMPFA’s considerable holdings of first-generation international Conceptual art, it is one of several shows spotlighting key areas of the collection during the inaugural year in BAMPFA’s new downtown Berkeley building. Mind Over Matter is a lively illustration of the Conceptualist notion, reflected in the exhibition title, that the idea behind an artwork is primary, and its manifestation is secondary. The exhibition is divided between language-based works and performance documentation, in the form photography, film and video, mail art, artists’ books, and ephemera by Ant Farm, James Lee Byars, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lowell Darling, Gilbert & George, Fluxus, and others.

The wide-ranging exhibition offers text-based works by such well-known artists as John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha. Text also figures importantly in objects by Alice Hutchins, and maps in more documentary-like works by Howard Fried, Douglas Huebler, Richard Long, and Robert Smithson. Posters by Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Tom Marioni, and Lawrence Weiner show how ephemera was integrated into Conceptual exhibitions of the late 1960s to the 1980s, while Yoko Ono’s instructional “paintings,” collected in the artist’s book Grapefruit, provide a link to Fluxus’s event scores in which text and object, viewer and performer are inseparable.

Performance documentation was a focus of early video art, and the exhibition features key examples by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Eleanor Antin, Scott Burton, Terry Fox, and Carolee Schneemann, to name a few. In video art by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Bruce Nauman, Linda Montano, Ant Farm, and Paul Kos we see the various ways artists adopted this new medium.

Not all the artists in Mind Over Matter reject the art object altogether. Among the most intriguing and delightful pieces on view are the various boxes and Fluxkits, including George Maciunas’s Burglary Fluxkit, providing all the keys needed for break-ins, but no addresses.

BAMPFA is one of the world’s leading centers for the study of Conceptual art and related materials. Its collection, housed in the Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center, includes the archives of the Museum of Conceptual Art, the Ant Farm collective, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, as well as significant Fluxus and mail art holdings and extensive materials on James Lee Byars and Lowell Darling. The recently acquired Steven J. Leiber collection added a wide selection of works on paper, posters, mail art, artists’ books, and ephemera by virtually all of the major international Conceptualists.

As part of BAMPFA’s ongoing commitment to engage students with our collections, curator Constance Lewallen invited UC Berkeley professor of art history Julia Bryan-Wilson to bring her students to view Conceptual works from the collection during the planning stages of the exhibition. Twelve undergraduates enrolled in the course Contemporary Art in the Americas were selected to engage withand write about works included in Mind Over Matter. Their essays, as well as contributions by Bryan-Wilson and Lewallen, are presented in an accompanying booklet that will be available for download on the BAMPFA website.

Mind Over Matter: Conceptual Art from the Collection is organized by BAMPFA Adjunct Curator Constance M. Lewallen. The exhibition is supported in part by Alexandra Bowes and Stephen Williamson, Rena Bransten, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
2155 Center Street Berkeley, CA 94704
www.bampfa.org

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978, ICA, Philadelphia

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadephia
September 8 - December 12, 2004

ICA presents the first exhibition to survey the work of the legendary architecture and art collective, Ant Farm. A group of radical architects who were also video, performance and installation artists-but above all, visionaries and cultural commentators-Ant Farm was founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michaels in 1968 amidst the hot-house San Francisco counter-culture. Influenced by "alternative" architects like Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, and Superstudio, Ant Farm's early inflatable structures were suited to a nomadic, communal lifestyle, divergent from the mainstream Brutalist architecture of the 1960s. The group was also known for spectacular performance events like "Media Burn" (1975), for which Lord and Michaels dressed up like astronauts and sped a customized Cadillac El Dorado through a pyramid of burning televisions.

Ant Farm officially disbanded in 1978 after a fire in their San Francisco studio destroyed a great deal of their work. Much of their photographic documentation and videotapes survived, however, and this, along with a wide range of Ant Farm materials organized into a visual "timeline," will form the core of the exhibition. A comprehensive catalogue, published by UC Press, will accompany the exhibition. It includes essays by Caroline Maniaque, Michael Sorkin, Steve Seid, a conversation among Constance Lewallen, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier, an Ant Farm-designed timeline, and a reprint of Lord's essay on American car culture, Automerica.

Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 is co-curated by Constance Lewallen, Senior Curator for Exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, and Steve Seid, Assistant Curator for Video at the Pacific Film Archive. Ant Farm: 1968 - 1978 was previously presented at Berkeley Art Museum, University of California (January 21 through April 26, 2004) and at Santa Monica Museum of Art (July 2 through August 14, 2004). After its presentation at ICA, the exhibition will travel to University of Houston, Blaffer Art Gallery (January 15 through March 13, 2005); ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, Germany (April 30 through July 24, 2005); and Yale University School of Architecture Gallery (August 29 through November 4, 2005).

Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania
118 S. 36th St. Philadelphia, PA 19104-3289
www.icaphila.org