Simon Denny @ MOCA Cleveland - The Founder’s Paradox

Simon Denny: The Founder’s Paradox
Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
February 16 - June 10, 2018

SIMON DENNY is a Berlin-based artist who explores the aesthetics, rhetoric and cultural impact of technology and technologists, both in the public and the private sector.

For his exhibition at MOCA Cleveland, Simon Denny presents new sculptures, paintings, and prints that employ the language of board games to explore and unpack political narratives associated with a side of radical conservatism emerging from influential parts of the technology business community in recent years. Reflecting on the growing subcultural popularity of board games, and resonant with the histories of game theory’s influence on the technology sector, these works present popular board games remapped with narratives distilled from texts like Peter Theil’s contrarian Zero to One and the cult libertarian book The Sovereign Individual. For example, Settlers of Catan, which is the favorite board game of tech entrepreneur and founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman is re-imagined as a story of expansion where a player “settles, trades, and builds” their way from a decaying earth to New Zealand, then out into international waters to found a sea-steading nation, and finally to the Moon and Mars to create space colonies.

Simon Denny: The Founder’s Paradox includes remapped sculptural versions of three existing popular board games that include Settlers of Catan, The Game of Life, and Descent: Journey’s Into Darkness. Each sculpture is accompanied by a group of paintings and prints that present the new rules, characters, and graphic identity for the remapped games now retitled Founders, Game of Life: Collective vs. Individual, and Ascent – Above the Nation State.

In the works on display, newly prominent mythologies about the figure of the entrepreneurial “founder” and the role of the nation state in a libertarian future collide with fantasy genre imagery, expansionist ambition, and the role of political ideology. These narratives are present within globally impactful innovations like Bitcoin and emergent platform monopolies enabled by the network effects of big data and Web 2.0.

In an exciting collaborative component, Simon Denny’s exhibition also explores the intersection of technology and management philosophy through an experimental seminar and workshop led by Denny and Youngjin Yoo, a Professor at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western University, which also includes Patrick Barrett, Adjunct Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA). Here he works with MBA students and Design students to produce designs for sculptural board games that investigate the impact specific technologies might have on various industrial sectors — such as transportation, healthcare and housing as they meet Augmented Reality, the blockchain and big data —providing a counterpart to his own board game sculptures.

SIMON DENNY

Simon Denny (1982, Auckland, NZ) is a Berlin based artist whose work focuses on the production, dissemination, and consumption of contemporary media and technology with a particular focus on the internet based exchange of capital and information. His works take shape in a range of forms that often mimic the visual language and devices that appear at various technology industry trade shows and launch events. Denny is a research based artist whose work offers critical and celebratory insights into the content and structure of the technology industry, governmental information agencies, and individual cult figures in the field. Recent projects include exhibitions, objects, and installations that investigate the emergent cryptocurrency Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that makes it possible; the Berlin based SoundCloud startup; and a series of graphics—including cartoons, maps, and charts— made by a senior designer at the National Security Agency (NSA), which were part of the information leaked by Edward Snowden. Denny has been based in Berlin since 2009 following his studies at the Städelschule, Frankfurt. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Business Insider, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Products for Organizing, Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2015); The Innovator’s Dilemma, MoMA PS1, New York (2015); New Management, Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); All You Need Is Data, Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2013); and Full Participation, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2012). In 2015 he represented New Zealand in the 56th Venice Biennale.

Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
Toby Devan Lewis Gallery
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
http://mocacleveland.org

Tauba Auerbach and Eliane Radigue @ MOCA Cleveland

INDUCTION: Tauba Auerbach and Eliane Radigue
Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
February 16 - June 10, 2018

Tauba Auerbach's rich exploration of painting, sculpture, sound, and typography considers the possibilities of multi-dimensional space and phenomenological encounters. Her work often engages with systems of logic — mathematical, linguistic, and spatial — proposing ways to enhance their fluidity, or subvert them entirely. Most recently, her large-scale paintings and glass- and 3D-printed sculptures articulate the relationship between such natural forms as the wave, the vortex, and the helix with planes of sight and human gesture. Alongside innovators such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and La Monte Young, Paris-based composer Éliane Radigue is one of the leading figures in experimental music and sound art. From the 1960’s until 2000, Radigue worked primarily using a single synthesizer, the ARP 2500 modular system and tape. Since 2001 Radigue has composed primarily for acoustic instruments, creating works that are uniquely influenced by her study of Tibetan Buddhism.

The exhibition represents Tauba Auerbach’s first collaborative installation in a museum with an experimental composer. Similarly, the exhibition marks an important point for Éliane Radigue. At 85, Éliane Radigue is highly esteemed within the field of electro-acoustic composition, yet she has rarely been acknowledged for her sound installations.

INDUCTION brings together the work of Éliane Radigue and Tauba Auerbach in an architecturally responsive installation that explores the artists’ shared interests, including Eastern philosophies, the body and states of consciousness, and the concept of phenomenology. The exhibition will include a gallery-sized installation of one of Radique’s earliest compositions, OMNHT (1970). Premiered at Galerie Rive Droit in 1970, and presented at MOCA Cleveland for the first time in the United States, the work is composed of three simultaneous multi-durational loops of modified recordings of a flowing river. The work is installed inside the walls of the gallery space so that its low volume creates a vibration that can be felt as visitors lean against the wall, creating a sonic connection between the body and visual landscape that Auerbach has created for the exhibition.

Tauba Auerbach’s contribution features new paintings from her Grain series, installed for the first time as freestanding, two-sided objects. Presented in tandem with these paintings is a suite of new video works, projected on hanging screens and marking the artist’s first time working in this medium. Additionally, the exhibition will include a series of new flame-worked interlocking glass sculptures crafted by the artist herself. Auerbach’s new works emerge from an inquiry-based process and self-experimentation, focusing on the body’s relationship to induced states of consciousness, such as hypnotic induction and trance states, and growing to other systems that make use of frequency and flow including Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Tension, Stress and Trauma Release (TRE), acupuncture and Frequency-Specific Microcurrent. These healing modalities reveal particular shapes and rhythms, and are here elaborated in the gestures of Auerbach’s new videos, sculptures and painting.

As part of the exhibition, MOCA Cleveland will present a concert of Eliane Radigue’s acoustic compositions in the gallery space, performed by world-renowned musicians Carol Robinson (Paris) and Nathan Wooley (New York), who are longstanding collaborators of Radigue. The band that Tauba Auerbach collaborates with, Zs, will also perform a series of new works in the gallery as a closing program.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that will premier newly commissioned texts on Tauba Auerbach’s work and new translations on Radigue’s work in English. It will be launched in the spring of 2018.

TAUBA AUERBACH

Tauba Auerbach (1981, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in New York. Working in a variety of media, ranging from painting and photography to book design and musical performance, Auerbach explores the limits of our structures and systems of logic (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities. A major solo exhibition of Auerbach’s work was organized by Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2011), and traveled to Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2012), and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2013). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012 and 2013); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013); Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2015–16); and the Kitchen, New York (2016). Auerbach has also participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009) and the Whitney Biennial (2010). She was the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship, The Fleischhacker Foundation (2008); SECA Art Award, SFMOMA (2008); and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2011).

ELIANE RADIGUE

Éliane Radigue (1932, Paris) is a French electronic music composer. She studied under Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who oversaw her early exploration in microphone feedback and long tape loops. Over the course of her career, she has developed a unique sound influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. Her masterpiece, Trilogie de la Mort (1998), follows the path of six states of consciousness as interpreted by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bardo Thodol. After 2000, Radigue began working in acoustic sounds, as demonstrated in her Occam cycle. She has collaborated with the improvisation group La Petites on the album Before the Libretto (2005). Performances of her music have taken place at galleries and museums such as the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs (Paris); Foundation Maeght (St. Paul de Vence); Issue Project Room (New York); Gallery Sonnabend (New York); Galerie Yvon Lambert (Paris), at festivals including the Festival de Como (Italy), the Festival d'Automne a Paris, Festival Estival (Paris), International Festival of Music (Bourges, France); and at the New York Cultural Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (New York), The Kitchen (New York), Columbia University (New York), Vanguard Theatre (Los Angeles), LACE (Los Angeles), Mills College (Oakland), the San Francisco Art Institute, and the NEMO Festival (Chicago 1996).

Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA Cleveland
Mueller Family Gallery
11400 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106
http://mocacleveland.org