Artists include:
Roman Signer
Isa Genzken
Gabriel Kuri
Jessica Stockholder
Helen Marten
Eric Wesley
Robert Smithson
1) Roman Signer: Yellow Ribbon for Plasy
"For the ambit of the convent, Roman Signer created a sculpture in time, a bicycle work and a combination of oil barrels and yellow ribbon. He drove around the columns made of empty barrels, marking the trajectory with a line of plastic yellow ribbon, attached on the back of his bicycle.
Yellow Ribbon is the bicycle work that Signer had created in 1982 for the then derelict Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. He rode around two monumental pillars several times, whereby a yellow plastic ribbon, a roll of which was attached to his bicycle rack, unwound and wrapped itself around the pillars, marking the path just taken. Movement in space thus becomes visible and materializes as spatial structure, as sculpture. Two years later, the artist expanded this conception for an exhibition at the Städtische Bodensee-Museum Friedrichshaven by unwinding a ribbon from a bicycle circling around four pillars, thereby fencing off a square of space. The bicycle leaned against a pillar at the conclusion of the process and the ribbon wrapped several times around the columns, enabling the course of action to be reconstructed. Roman Signer repeated this basic setup in the courtyard of the Swiss Pavilion: Bicycle (1982/1999) in Venetia. This time, he mounted his bike, and circled only around one single pillar. The riding movement is thus made visible, but becomes fixated at one point to a three-dimensional image of complete immobility. The dynamics of the process are even more clearly suspended in the static concentration of a compact object, producing an impression of senselessness whose meaning lies exactly in the unbridgeable contradiction. This basic setup between the dynamic and the static evolves into that singular quality of the absurd that is so characteristic of Roman Signer's work.
The work was supported by Pro Helvetia and Martina Tomášková (bike), ČEPRO a.s. (barrels), Aeroklub Plasy (transport)."
"Roman Signer (born 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland) studied at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich and Lucerne between 1966 and 1971. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland from 1971-72. Signer started his career as an artist later in life at the age of 28, after working as an architect’s draughtsman, a radio engineer apprentice, and working a short stint in a pressure cooker factory.
Signer's work has grown out of, and has affinities with both land art and performance art, but his works are not typically representative of either category. They are often described as following the tradition of the Swiss engineer-artists, such as Jean Tinguely and Peter Fischli & David Weiss. Signer’s "action sculptures" involve setting up, carrying out, and recording "experiments" or events that bear aesthetic results. Day-to-day objects, such as umbrellas, tables, boots, containers, hats and bicycles, become part of Signer’s working vocabulary. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Signer advocates "controlled destruction, not destruction for its own sake." His work gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evident nature of scientific logic as an artistic challenge."
2) Isa Genzken
Isa Genzken's sculptural, installation works reflect a material quality that incorporates found material to create structures that speak to treatments of these elements within everyday architecture. I am interested in how she looks at forms/objects from a particular use that can be given a new meaning through structuring them in particular ways as clustered, paired, recompiled assemblages in a space.
Aesthetica Magazine- https://aestheticamagazine.com/versions-real-world/
GENZKEN’S ANARCHIC OBJECTS
“Genzken has a unique and inimitable visual language as a sculptor. She is inspired by a host of different sources – Genzken brings all of these aspects together to create a practice that is continuously looking around itself, translating experience into a three dimensional form.”
"The collected artefacts are mostly elements of publicity material derived from Genzken’s previous exhibitions. The structure echoes formal components of minimalism’s floor-based works such as those by Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. By placing the publicised history of her art practice within this format, Genzken credits these artists’ influence but ensures her own personal engagement with minimalism is evidenced."
"When Duchamp initiated the ready-made, he did so in an attempt to question the very foundation of artistic tradition. Today, the ready-made has become part of that tradition and is used by artists for a range of purposes. While Duchamp set a strict non-rational set of rules for selecting his ready-mades, such as imposing a random time of day or weight ratio as the deciding factor to guide choice, Genzken’s decisions seem driven by personal fascination. Materially, there is a predilection for lacquered wood, designer chairs, shiny surfaces, wooden crates, plastics and Disney memorabilia."
3) Gabriel Kuri
Nobody Needs To Know The Price Of Your Saab https://www.estherschipper.com/exhibitions/397-nobody-needs-to-know-the-price-of-your-gabriel-kuri/
"The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens Gabriel Kuri: Nobody Needs To Know The Price Of Your Saab, the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States. Using familiar materials such as receipts, newspaper or plastic bags, Kuri focuses our attention on contemporary consumer culture and the way money mediates almost all our human relationships and daily transactions. Approximately 25 sculptures and 10 collages are on view, including Untitled (Superama), one of three towering tapestries ranging from 8 to over 12 feet in height, each intricately hand-woven in Mexico to replicate Walmart receipts. “Gabriel Kuri’s sculptures and photographs capture daily rituals, commerce, and how the passage and marks of time are reflected in overlooked objects,” said Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA. “Along with Dr. Lakra and Damián Ortega—whose work we recently introduced at the ICA—Kuri was part of an informal collective of brilliant artists that gathered at the Mexico City studio of sculptor Gabriel Orozco. This exhibition provides Boston audiences the opportunity to discover yet another powerful voice from this hub of artistic innovation.“ „What we see as merely the residue of daily life—receipts, crushed cans, slivers of soap—Gabriel Kuri sees as the stuff of sculpture, objects that track our movements through systems of economics, politics, consumption, and production,” said ICA Associate Curator Randi Hopkins, who coordinated the exhibition at the ICA. Alternatively described as a “unique accountant” and a “poetic activist,” Kuri raises questions about the ways we represent information and the objects to which we assign value. A conventional, color-coded pie chart is re-imagined as a series of three-dimensional, interlocking bins, literally stuffed with the materials it has been created to quantify. Disposable items are recast as bits of personal biography, as Kuri transforms rows of tiny hotel shampoo bottles into a visual tally of time spent on the road. Other works explore the relationship between consumerism and the art world, such as a lowly grocery store receipt elevated into an exquisite, hand-woven tapestry of monumental scale. In the artist’s hands, works that borrow from the quantifying languages of charts, graphs, and numbers seem to become sentimental measures of time, space, and memory."
4) Jessica Stockholder
‘PAINT THINGS’ is off the wall
This sprightly exhibit with deep theoretical roots blurs boundaries — between painting and sculpture, painting and performance, painting and architecture. Genre busting is nothing new. Artists habitually push at edges and rewrite definitions. Think of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, which positioned collaged paintings more as objects than pictures, or of Anne Truitt, who was as much a colorist as she was a sculptor. Sculpture spawned installation art. It’s all constantly changing.
"Stockholder saw sculpture through a painter’s lens with works in her 1988-1990 “Kissing the Wall” series, one of which is on view here. Traditionally, paintings hug the wall; sculptures stand free. Not here. Yellow and gray paint coat skeins of yarn and sheets of newspaper piled on a chair. A light bulb behind the chair lights up the wall. Painterly, composed on a human scale, it’s confrontational in its three-dimensional assertion that it’s as much painting as sculpture."
5) Helen Marten
Helen Marten Wins the Turner Prize
- no hierarchy within viewing
7) Eric Wesley
Images: https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/eric-wesley-at-bowie-van-valen-amsterdam-1287
"Wesley is interested in how the familiar architectural cues of these chains create a national non-place, and the way laws in this country consider bodies and corporations interchangeable. There are some ideas on consuming the body of Christ at play, too, on the McDonaldization of global society, and on fast-food culture as America’s primary contribution to humanity. The Bell, Mannahatta also extends the original project’s look at the subsuming of Native American legacies (Taco Bell being, after all, a distinctly fast-and-loose American interpretation of ideas that predate it)."
Text excerpt: https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/gy8aqm/what-every-art-fair-needs-a-combination-pizza-hut-and-taco-bell
9) Theory of Non-Sites, by Robert Smithson (1968)
A Provisional Theory of Nonsites
By Robert Smithson
1968
Image: Robert Smithson, Nonsite “Line of Wreckage,” Bayonne, New Jersey (1968) Painted aluminum container with broken concrete, framed map, and photo panels Cage: 59 x 70 x 12 1/2 in. (149.9 x 177.8 x 31.8 cm); three panels: 3 3/4 x 49 in. (9.5 x 124.5 cm) each Collection Milwaukee Art Museum © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York
Essay:
"By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a “logical two dimensional picture.” A “logical picture” differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two dimensional analogy or metaphor—A is Z.
The Nonsite (an indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is abstract, yet it represents an actual site in N.J. (The Pine Barrens Plains). It is by this three dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it—thus The Nonsite. To understand this language of sites is to appreciate the metaphor between the syntactical construct and the complex of ideas, letting the former function as a three dimensional picture which doesn't look like a picture. “Expressive art” avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely “new sense of metaphor” free of natural or realistic expressive content. Between the actual site in the Pine Barrens and The Nonsite itself exists a space of metaphoric significance. It could be that “travel” in this space is a vast metaphor. Everything between the two sites could become physical metaphorical material devoid of natural meanings and realistic assumptions. Let us say that one goes on a fictitious trip if one decides to go to the site of the Nonsite. The “trip” becomes invented, devised, artificial; therefore, one might call it a non- trip to a site from a Nonsite. Once one arrives at the “airfield,” one discovers that it is man-made in the shape of a hexagon, and that I mapped this site in terms of esthetic boundaries rather than political or economic boundaries (31 sub-divisions—see map).
This little theory is tentative and could be abandoned at any time. Theories like things are also abandoned. That theories are eternal is doubtful. Vanished theories compose the strata of many forgotten books."
SMITHSON, ROBERT. "A PROVISIONAL THEORY OF NONSITES." IN ROBERT SMITHSON: THE COLLECTED WRITINGS, JACK FLAM. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1996.