Jordan Carter Curator Dia Art Foundation

Jordan Carter

Curator at Dia Art Foundation

Dia Art Foundation announced (September 21, 2021) the appointment of JORDAN CARTER to the position of Curator. With a specialization in Fluxus and global Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, Jordan Carter will play a key role in Dia’s commissions, exhibitions, acquisitions, and public programming across its eleven sites. Jordan Carter comes to Dia from the Art Institute of Chicago, where he held the position of Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. He will begin his new role in December 2021.

“Jordan Carter brings with him broad expertise in the period of art history that sits at the core of Dia’s collection. His curatorial interests also offer a vital expansion of this period and its enduring influence on contemporary art, that will be key to Dia’s programming in the coming years. We are elated to welcome Jordan to the Dia team,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg director.

“I am thrilled to join Dia Art Foundation and to collaborate on a program that honors the institution’s history while advancing its role as a vibrant and essential hub of radical hospitality—hosting artists, publics, and risk in ways that let the outside in,” said Jordan Carter. “I look forward to contributing to Dia’s mission of championing and expanding the histories and legacies of Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, and engaging living artists in sustained and meaningful ways that extend these stakes and dialogues into the twenty-first century.”

CURATOR JORDAN CARTER

Jordan Carter comes to Dia following a tenure of over four years at the Art Institute of Chicago, where most recently he held the position of Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. In his time at the Art Institute of Chicago, Jordan Carter curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (2018); Ellen Gallagher: Are We Obsidian? (2018–19); Benjamin Patterson: When Elephants Fight, It Is the Frogs That Suffer—A Sonic Graffiti (2019); and Richard Hunt: Scholar’s Rock or Stone of Hope or Love of Bronze (2020–21). Jordan Carter is co-organizing upcoming exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago of the work of stanley brouwn and Shahryar Nashat. Jordan Carter is also co-curator of the exhibition Ray Johnson c/o, forthcoming at the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition marks the first major institutional presentation of the artist’s work since Ray Johnson: Correspondences, a 1999 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, organized by Donna De Salvo, currently Senior Adjunct Curator at Dia.

From 2015–17, Jordan Carter was a Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center. Prior to his time at the Walker, he was the twelve-month Fluxus Collection Intern at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, where he researched, catalogued, and organized displays of MoMA’s Fluxus collection. Jordan Carter has also held curatorial and research positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Centre Pompidou in Paris. He holds a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he focused on Fluxus and global Conceptual art.

DIA ART FOUNDATION

www.diaart.org

John Armleder @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash

John Armleder: Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
June 27 – August 24, 2019

David Kordansky Gallery presents Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash, a solo exhibition of new work by John Armleder. Featuring paintings of several different kinds, as well as wall-mounted mirror objects and installation-based elements, the show highlights the artist’s use of painting––and the tropes associated with it––as a playfully experimental vehicle for posing questions, provocations, and aesthetic quandaries. 

John Armleder consistently rewires presumptions about what art can be in the wake of the modernist and postmodernist revolutions of the last century. His early association with the Fluxus movement has provided the springboard for an ever-evolving array of projects and conceptual approaches––he has produced performances, music, sculptures, and installations as well as paintings––each of which leaves room for the operation of chance and the eruption of humor and pathos alike. These qualities posit John Armleder as one of the most representative artists of his generation, and as a key figure in the story of Swiss art.

John Armleder’s second solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery is organized around a central motif, a stylized splash of paint that is found in several different kinds of works, rendered in several different materials. Splashes and puddles have been defining characteristics of many of the paintings the artist has made over the last few years, so that this sharp-edged, graphic iteration alludes to––and symbolizes––a significant portion of his recent work, one in which he detaches the idea of the action-based splatter from the movement of the hand, undermining preconceptions about authenticity and the subjectivity of the heroic individual artist.

Even when it comes to the paintings with “actual” splatters and pours––several of which are included in this show––he proceeds less with specific compositional ideas in mind than with a curiosity about the interactions between different materials. In his Puddle Paintings, for instance, he often combines large quantities of paints made from contraindicated mediums that react in unpredictable ways, and throws glitter, toys, and other bric-a-brac into the still-wet puddles that accumulate. As they dry, visual and sculptural incidents emerge out of what seems like the materials’ own volition, exceeding the artist’s intention and placing him, like any other viewer, in a position where he can stand back and observe formal relationships between textures and colors.

John Armleder’s Pour Paintings, meanwhile, focus attention on the movement of paint across the canvas as it is thrown. In each he privileges sweeping, calligraphic arcs (complete with the drips that fall from them), channeling the energies of abstract expressionism and action painting. And yet, as is often true of his work, these paintings somehow replace the solemnity of their modernist predecessors with a light-hearted appreciation for the ingenious nature and innate visual interest of their materials, not to mention the very act of creating and looking at energetic splashes of color. In Sh/Ash/Lash/Splash he includes examples of the Pour Paintings that have also been emblazoned with a stenciled splatter. Symbol overlays gesture, and two seemingly competing ways of including a splatter in an artwork exist side-by-side, as if prodding one another into states of mutual admiration––and skepticism.

The splatter threatens to break entirely free of its relationship to painted abstraction in a series of new wall-based mirror sculptures, each of which shares the same silhouette. Fabricated in mirrored glass in a variety of colors and in two sizes, these objects exemplify John Armleder’s propensity for engaging viewer participation in implied and literal ways, as well as his tendency to activate the spaces in which his artworks appear. The mirrors not only reflect the other artworks in the show and the bodies of the viewers before them; they allow for perspectives in which the exhibition as a whole appears inside the shape of a splatter, so that this caricature of a specific kind of painting also becomes an optical container for other kinds of artmaking strategies.

These approaches include two paintings, each titled Suit, in which the splatter has simply been screened onto a canvas, where it stands on its own like an emblem or aesthetic coat of arms. These works are reminders that John Armleder’s art is as straightforward as it is complex, and that what you see really is often what you get. Embedded in this notion, of course, are any number of philosophical, visual, biological, and language-based subtleties. Over and over again throughout the course of his multi-staged and varied career, he has demonstrated how such openness sheds light not only on foundational principles of art itself, but on the ways in which people interact with the artifacts of the physical world.

This summer, John Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva) is the subject of two museum solo exhibitions, at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (opened June 7) and the Aspen Art Museum (opened July 4) . He has also been the subject of solo shows at institutions that include MUSEION, Bolzano, Italy (2018); Museo MADRE, Naples, Italy (2018); Istituto Svizzero, Rome (2017); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014); Fernand Léger National Museum, Biot, France (2014); Dairy Art Centre, London (2013); Swiss Institute, New York (2012); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2011); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2010); Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2006); Tate Liverpool, England (2006); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2006); among many others. Recent group exhibitions include A Time Capsule Continued, Parkett Exhibition Space, Zurich (2019); Abstraction: Aspects of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Art, Osaka (2019); THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2018); Brand New. Art and Commodity in the 1980s, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2018); Sanguin. Luc Tuymans on Baroque, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); Inaugural exhibition: The Bunker, The Bunker, West Palm Beach (2017); The Trick Brain, Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2017); and L'Oeil du collectionneur. Neuf collections particulières strasbourgeoises, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2017). He lives and works in Geneva.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019
www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Expo Ben @ Musée Maillol, Paris : Tout est art ?

Tout est art ? Ben au Musée Maillol
Musée Maillol, Paris
Jusqu'au 15 janvier 2017

BEN Vautier

Art = Ben, 1963

21,3 x 29,6 cm, acrylique sur toile

Jon and Joanne Hendricks Collection

BEN Vautier

Être, 1975

60 x 73 cm, acrylique sur toile

Collection Lella et Pierre Le Pillouër, Vallauris

A l’occasion de sa réouverture, le Musée Maillol présente la première exposition d’envergure à Paris consacrée à Ben, figure majeure de la scène artistique contemporaine en France. Rassemblant plus de 200 oeuvres issues pour la plupart de sa collection personnelle et de collections particulières, cette rétrospective révèle les multiples facettes d’un artiste iconoclaste et provocateur qui récuse la pensée unique depuis plus de 50 ans.

Dans la continuité d’une ambitieuse rétrospective dédiée à Ben au Museum Tinguely de Bâle en 2015, le commissariat pour la partie historique de cette exposition au Musée Maillol a été confié à Andres Pardey, vice-directeur du Musée Tinguely. Pour la partie contemporaine, carte blanche est laissée à Ben, invité à investir les espaces du musée avec ses créations les plus contemporaines, dont certaines seront présentées pour la première fois au public.

Cette exposition s’intègre dans le nouveau programme d’expositions mis en oeuvre par Culturespaces au musée Maillol.

Depuis la fin des années 1950, Ben Vautier (né en 1935), plus connu sous le nom de Ben, dit lui-même : « Je signe tout » – commentant ainsi, par ses images et ses actions, le monde comme un tout. Chaque phrase, aussi brève soit-elle, recèle un immense potentiel de questions capitales sur la vérité dans l’art, le rôle de l’artiste dans la société ou le rapport entre l’art et la vie. Ses écritures couvrent un très large éventail : réflexions intimes ou théories postmodernes sur l’art et jusqu’à l’anthropologie ou la religion. Elles sont le reflet de ses questionnements personnels sur ces thèmes et témoignent d’un esprit critique qui n’hésite pas à remettre en cause tout et tout le monde – y compris son propre ego. Par la manière dont elle mêle les arts, la philosophie et le quotidien, l’oeuvre de Ben est unique. À partir des readymades de Marcel Duchamp, Ben perpétue de façon systématique l’idée selon laquelle une oeuvre d’art est reconnaissable non pas par sa teneur matérielle mais exclusivement par la signature.

Ben fut l’un des premiers artistes en Europe à faire descendre l’art dans la rue. À partir de 1959, avec ses fameuses « actions de rue », qui peuvent être autant des gestes quotidiens (attendre à un arrêt de bus) que des gestes plus « décalés » (traverser le port de Nice à la nage habillé, avec un chapeau), il devient l’un des artistes majeurs du mouvement Fluxus en Europe. Artiste, performeur, organisateur, inventeur de langage et nouveau penseur de l’art, il est également l’un des artistes fondateurs de l’École de Nice où il était étroitement lié à des artistes comme Arman, Yves Klein et Martial Raysse.

UN PARCOURS À LA FOIS HISTORIQUE ET CONTEMPORAIN EN 200 OEUVRES

Le parcours de l’exposition débute par la section historique, sous la direction d’Andres Pardey, qui présente les débuts de la carrière de Ben avec une sélection d’oeuvres-clés des années 1958 à 1978. Ces témoignages retracent la quête de Ben d’un langage formel abstrait bien à lui et mène à un ensemble de « premières écritures ». Ben se détourne de l’expérimentation purement formelle pour s’intéresser ensuite davantage aux contenus et à la signification. Tout l’éventail de son répertoire artistique est présenté dans cette partie de l’exposition : nombreuses « actions de rue » à partir des années 1960, grands moments de « Fluxus » à Nice, jusqu’aux prises de position de Ben en tant que théoricien et philosophe de l’art. Tout cela s’inscrit dans une période relativement brève et constitue le fondement de son oeuvre ultérieure.

Pour la seconde section de l’exposition, carte blanche est donnée à Ben, appelé à investir le rez-de-chaussée de ses installations les plus contemporaines. L’univers de Ben est ainsi donné à voir, en une succession de moments qui, de ses « petites idées » jusqu’aux « nouvelles écritures », en passant par les « miroirs », la « photographie », le « temps » et la « mort », dressent un kaléidoscope de ses réalisations les plus actuelles.

Le visiteur va découvrir à cette occasion, des oeuvres inédites conçues spécifiquement par Ben pour son exposition au Musée Maillol et inspirées par les oeuvres d’Aristide Maillol conservées dans les collections permanentes de cette institution.

Cette exposition est réalisée en partenariat avec le Musée Tinguely à Bâle.

MUSEE MAILLOL
61 rue de Grenelle - 75007 Paris
www.museemaillol.com

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

Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm - Pioneers of sound art exhibition at Raven Row, London

Exhibition: Gone with the Wind 
Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi, Walter Marchetti, Resonance104.4fm  
Raven Row, London 
Through 17 July 2011 

RAVEN ROW LONDON

This exhibition brings together three pioneers of sound art, Max Eastley, Takehisa Kosugi and Walter Marchetti. Each artist has developed a distinct approach to the problem of representing immateriality, while sharing a lightness of touch, approaching sound with patience, restraint and fidelity. As well as presenting new and historic work, the exhibition comprise live performance, and a selection of material from the artists' substantial archives.

MAX EASTLEY (born 1944, UK) is an artist and musician whose sound sculptures play on a balance between the natural environment and human intervention. His musical collaborations include the 1975 album New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments with David Toop, produced by Brian Eno. His response to the interior of Raven Row is a meditation on the 18th century Picturesque, achieved with 21st century technology and a ‘Bergsonian’ approach to time. 

TAKEHISA KOSUGI (born 1938, Japan) is a major figure in modernist sound art. In the early 1960s his event pieces were realised by Fluxus in Europe and the USA. Kosugi pioneered the development of Japanese experimental music with Group ONGAKU and the Taj Mahal Travellers. Since 1977 he has been a composer/performer at Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and became its Music Director in 1995. As well as archival material, Takehisa Kosugi will present a number of works including the sound installation Mano-Dharma, electronic, 1967/2011.

WALTER MARCHETTI (born 1931, Italy) was a founder member of ZAJ, a recalcitrant Mediterranean parallel to Fluxus, which in the 1960s produced action-music-performances, anarchic gags, and elegant assaults on the music establishment. Marchetti befriended John Cage in 1958, and went on to collaborate with him on a number of projects. His work has often focused on the grand piano – for more than 50 years he has been preparing them like a chef intent on marinating sound. Two of Walter Marchetti's pianos, alongside works from Emanuele Carcano's Collection, are exhibited. 

WALTER MARCHETTI

Walter Marchetti, Musica da camera n. 182

Milano, Pianofortissimo, 

Fondazione Mudima, January 1990. 

Photograph by Fabrizio Garghetti 

Courtesy of Raven Row, London

Alongside these positions, RESONANCE104.4FM is installed at Raven Row for the duration of the exhibition, broadcasting, and hosting workshops and live events, as well as presenting an 'overhung' sound installation – the Resonance Open – with contributions solicited from local and international sound artists. Resonance104.4fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective, it started broadcasting on May 1st 2002. Its brief is to provide a radical alternative to the universal formulae of mainstream broadcasting.

The exhibition is curated by ED BAXTER, director of Resonance104.4fm.

RAVEN ROW, LONDON, UK
56 Artillery Lane
London E1 7LS

www.ravenrow.org

Resonance104.4fm website: www.resonancefm.com

Tell Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976–2011 A MCA Sydney and MOCA Seoul Collaboration

Tell Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976-2011 
MCA Sydney off-site exhibition at the National Art School Gallery, Darlinghurst, Sydney 

17 June - 24 August 2011 
National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, Seoul

8 November 2011 - 19 February 2012 

YEESOOKYUNG

Yeesookyung, While Our Tryst Has Been Delayed, 2010, DVD, 16:25 mins, sound 

Image Courtesy and © Yeesookyung

TELL ME TELL ME: AUSTRALIAN AND KOREAN ART 1976-2011 is a major new exhibition of Korean and Australian contemporary art celebrating 2011 as the Australian-Korean Year of Friendship. 

The exhibition is a first-time collaboration between the MCA in Sydney and the National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea in Seoul (MOCA Korea) and is the first stage in a two-part cultural exchange of art and ideas. The project highlights the historical and ongoing connections between Australian and Korean art and showcases works from the collections of both museums. Due to the MCA's redevelopment the exhibition take place at the National Art School Gallery, Darlinghurst. Tell Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976 - 2011 will be exhibited at the MOCA Korea in Seoul from 8 November 2011 to 19 February 2012. 

It is inspired by Nam June Paik’s 1976 visit to Sydney and the 1976 Biennale of Sydney, that included a group of important Korean artists. Tell Me Tell Me explores conceptual, fluxus and technological art being created in both Korea and Australia at that time and regional variations in both countries over three decades to the present day.

The exhibition also explores the idea of artists using recent art histories to influence new work and sculpture, installation and object- based art forms now under the weight of conceptualism. 

LOUISE WEAVER

Louise Weaver, It would seem that eyes can live without hearts (Oracle Fox), 2005  

wool, foam, glass, felt, nylon, cotton, perspex, plastic, lurex thread, Swarovski crystals, 

wood  53 x 50 x 30 cm (fox)  37 x 61.5 x 67 cm (base)  

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, purchased with the assistance of Jill & Michael Hawker, 

Andrew Cameron, John Reid, Mark Nelson, and silent pledge at Bella Dinner, 2006  

Image courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney © Louise Weaver 

The core of the exhibition comprises a significant collection of historical works by important artists from both countries, including Nam June Paik, Marr Grounds, Terry Reid, Noel Sheridan, Stelarc, Ken Unsworth, Moon-Seup Shim, Kang So-Lee, Insik Quac, Rosalie Gascoigne, Gaiyabidja Lalara, Don Gundinga and U-Fan Lee.

The contemporary Australian and Korean artists featured include Brook Andrew, Louise Weaver, Nyapanyapa, Charlie Sofo, Brown Council, Lou Hubbard, Stuart Ringholt, TV Moore, Beom Kim, Park Chan Kyong, Haegue Yang, Kim Eull, Hyun Ki Park, Chung Seo-Young, Jooyeon Park. 

Jointly curated by MCA Sydney Curator GLENN BARKLEY and MOCA Seoul Curator INHYE KIM. 

This exhibition is a partnership between the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, presented in association with the National Art School, Sydney. Supported by the Australian Government through the Australia International Cultural Council and the Australia-Korea Foundation, initiatives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
www.mca.com.au

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART KOREA, SEOUL
www.moca.go.kr

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead - Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit

George Maciunas: The Dream of Fluxus 

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 

25 November 2008 – 15 February 2009

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art explores the history and works of Fluxus through the renowned Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit. This unprecedented exhibition of over three-hundred and fifty works from 1961 – 1978 is the largest display of Fluxus ever mounted in Britain. 

Fluxus is often historically regarded as a global network of influential and vibrant artists who shared a unique, if not united, aspiration to revolutionise the avant-garde. Through the introduction of concept art, intermedia, and radical performance practices, Fluxus pioneered an aesthetic appreciation for the everyday. By intentionally confusing the boundaries of how and when an artwork could begin or end, exiting a room, making a salad, or ending a war were transformed into performative works of art. 

Reflecting its international network of artists, Fluxus began in many places from as many creative perspectives. The origins of this network have been traced to the teachings of John Cage, the serial compositions of German composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen, and the organisational talents of graphic designer, architect, and artist George Maciunas. Maciunas was the self-appointed chairman of Fluxus. His political and agitprop approach to Fluxus aspired to a complete overhaul of the complacent bourgeois art world. George Maciunas dreamed of a Fluxus whose collective spirit enabled the availability of Fluxkits, Fluxfeasts, Fluxfests, and Fluxfilms for the price of a paperback. Having coined the phrase Fluxus in 1961, Maciunas organised a series of groundbreaking European performance festivals beginning in 1962 that set the tone for countless Fluxus events that continue throughout the world in theatres, galleries, and on the street. 

Centring on George Maciunas’s contributions to Fluxus until his death in 1978, The Dream of Fluxus is curated by Thomas Kellein of Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany in collaboration with Jon Hendricks, curator of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection. 

This collection of works, many of which were acquired directly from the George Maciunas estate in 1984, began with Gilbert Silverman’s interest in the work of Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks in the early 1970s. Silverman adds: “You have to understand that real collectors are on a major ego trip and that the idea of collecting something is to have something more than someone else, that if I worked very hard and really fast I could put together the biggest Fluxus collection in the world.”

Artists whose works feature in George Maciunas, The Dream of Fluxus include: Genpei Akasegawa, Eric Andersen, Ay-O, Jeff Berner, George Brecht, Gieseppe Chiari, John Chick, Jack Coke’s Farmer’s Co-op, Robert Filliou, Albert Fine, Ken Friedman, Henry Flynt, Geoffrey Hendricks, Hi Red Center, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Joe Jones, Per Kirkeby, Jane Knizak, Milan Knizak, Alison Knowles, Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, John Lennon, Carla Liss, George Maciunas, Jackson Mac Low, Larry Miller, Peter Moore, Olivier Mosset, Claes Oldenburg, Serge Oldenbourg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Benjamin Patterson, Jock Reynolds, Willem de Ridder, James Riddle, Takako Saito, Paul Sharits, Tomas Schmit, Mieko Shiomi, Daniel Spoerri, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, Yoshi Wada, Robert Watts, Emmett Williams, and La Monte Young.

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 

Gateshead Quays, South Shore Road, Gateshead NE8 3BA

www.balticmill.com

Yoko Ono Retrospective, Israel Museum, Jerusalem - Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Yoko Ono

Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

November 26, 1999 - May 31 2000

Yoko Ono is one of the true pioneers of conceptual art and a prolific and influential innovator in forms ranging from installation to film. The full range of Ono’s originality and influence is apparent in “Yoko Ono: Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a major retrospective of Ono’s work at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Covering Ono’s career from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and installations as well as works in photography, video, and conceptual art. 

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono studied opera and classical music from an early age. As a girl, she moved with her family to the US, returning to Japan during World War II. She later studied music and philosophy in Japan and in the US. 

In the 1960s in New York she helped found the avant-garde Fluxus movement, a loose group of artists, musicians and poets whose works were inspired by the Dada movement and by Marcel Duchamp as well as by John Cage’s radical musical experiments. Key avant-garde figures with whom Ono collaborated included John Cage himself, Nam June Paik, and George Maciunas. Throughout the 1960s, Ono traveled between New York, Tokyo, and London, exerting a major influence on the avant-garde art scene and pioneering conceptual art with works involving the participation of the viewer through mental or physical interaction. At her first exhibition in London in 1966, Ono met John Lennon, who would remain her partner and collaborator until his death in 1980. In 1967, her controversial film Bottoms, showing a series of naked buttocks, was promptly banned after its London premiere. Although ignored and even scorned by the art establishment in the 1970s and 1980s, Yoko Ono continued to work steadily. 

Many of her works reflect the influence of Zen Buddhism, to which she was exposed from an early age, while more recent work focuses on the complex interactions between women and male centers of authority. “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?” displays a range of Yoko Ono’s conceptual works, including: Ceiling Painting, which frames the word "yes” on a piece of paper; and The Wishing Tree, on which viewers are invited to write their wishes, echoing a tradition from Japanese temples. Half a Room, one of the most striking installations from Ono’s London period, displays the interior of a room whose objects and furniture have been cut in half and painted white. Portrait of Nora, a more recent work, presents the blurred, pixelized face of Ono herself and underscores her connection with the struggle for liberation from male dominance as experienced by Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll House. 

The exhibition also includes screenings of Bottoms and other early Ono films, including Fly, Rape, and rarely seen short “FluxFilms.” “Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?,” a touring exhibition of the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in England, arrives in Jerusalem from Helsinki. Ono’s outdoor installation Ex-It, on display at the Museum since May, remains on view. 

James Snyder, Director of the Israel Museum, states: “At the turn of the millennium the Israel Museum is honored to host one of the great creative artists of our time, who is only now receiving the recognition she deserves. We are grateful to Ms. Ono for sharing her vision with the people of Israel, and we hope that her presence in Jerusalem will promote the causes of peace and understanding to which she has dedicated much of her career.”

ISRAEL MUSEUM, JERUSALEM

Ruppin Boulevard 11, Jerusalem

www.imj.org.il