Joan Jonas, Songdelay, 1973
16 mm, 18'35".
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
At a moment of transformation of the city and of intense de-industrialization of the urban spaces where the artists had woven their community relationships, in 1970, a weakening of the rhetorics that legitimated formalist Modernism took place. This made it possible that, in the very center (Manhattan), there appeared a subjective, private and minoritarian enunciation, which refers to a sensibility which transforms the impersonal language of objectivity, of Minimalism and of its derivations, in a shelter for speech, thus turning art into one of the few spaces where to communicate private life and public experience. It is no wonder that at it is in that moment that the most politicized feminist discourses would start taking shape in the liminal space between the private and the public. Thus art becomes an element of relationship and personal affection between the margin of experience and the continuity of reflection on time and on events in photography, performance and cinema.
Dates: June 10 - September 27, 2010
Place: Sabatini Building, Floor 4
Mixed Use, Manhattan is an exhibition about the uses and pictures made of New York City beginning with the intensive period of de-industrialization and neglect in the 1970s and counterpointed with recent works by artists who, well aware of their predecessors’ practices from that earlier moment, continue to find aesthetic potential in the city. The show will include several important photographic series: Peter Hujar’s nighttime photographs taken in 1976 on the West Side of Manhattan from the Meat Packing district south to the financial district; Alvin Baltrop’s Hudson River pier photographs from the decade 1975-86, most of which have never before been shown; David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York, 1978-1979, and, more recently, a number of Zoe Leonard’s photographic projects from the late 1990s forward, including the Tree + Fence and Bubblegum series. Other photographic series, video installations, and films by Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey and Emily Roysdon, among others amplify these core works and attest to the vitality of their legacy, as artists continue to engage with New York in ways that suggest how urban space may be made truly public.
Related activities:
Action Behind The Margins is a seminar and screening series which reveals how productive the period since the 1970's has been in terms of the creative use of abandonned and peripheral spaces, especially in Lower Manhattan, at the same time that this part of the city was bturning into the center of the world's art market.
Dates: March 31 - July 12, 2010
Location: Sabatini Building, Floor 3
This first European exhibition by Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) presents the limits of the categories by which Art History defined and evaluated art production. Isolated in American psychiatric hospitals for over 30 years, the work of Mexican artist Martín Ramírez is an exercise of recognition of the craft of a painter, in which he produced his own materials, as well as an evaluation of the syncretic possibilities of painting: the rural Mexico against the railways of the U.S., imposed confinement against the new outdoor landscape and the sophisticated expressive research against a firm self-taught attitude. In this sense, Martín Ramírez overflows any attempt at confinement, but also at categorical exclusion, going beyond both the notions of schizophrenic art, or art brut, and of abstraction or informalism.
