Friday 12 February 2010

Heidrun Holzfeind + Pedregulho / Affonso Eduardo Reidy








Pedregulho building, Rio de Janeiro 2002 Digital C prints


CASE STUDY I / PEDREGULHO: "Conjunto Residencial Prefeito Mendes de Morais Pedregulho” was built between 1948 and 1958 by Affonso Eduardo Reidy as a model for a social housing complex. Today the building is run down since the maintainance is pretty much left to the inhabitants. Not many keep paying rent. Only the school, part of the complex has recently be renovated.

www.heidrunholzfeind.com


Sunday 7 February 2010

Dorit Margreiter + Chamberlin Powell and Bon




Dorit Margreiter, Aporia, 2008, 35mm, color, sound, 12:50 min
Film still. Produced by the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Co-produced by the 11th Cairo Biennial, Austrian Contribution
Courtesy Krobath, Vienna; Stampa, Basel

www.henry-moore.org

The New Monumentality explores the attraction of modern post-war buildings for three artists born in the heyday of monumental architecture, as typified by London’s Barbican Centre. Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter are among the most interesting artists working in Europe today. All three use film and script to investigate and animate the architecture of the 1960s and this project brings them together for the first time. After World War II, architects looked to the abstract language of sculpture as a way of investing their buildings with greater power and significance. These forward-thinking forms, which still seem modern today, frame the exhibition.

Both Gerard Byrne and Dorit Margreiter present newly commissioned work filmed on the 1960s campus of the University of Leeds, one of the most ambitious of all European post-war university campuses. Chamberlin Powell and Bon created the celebrated Barbican Centre in the same years, but their monumental campus in Leeds is little known and still unlisted. This unique exhibition thus provides a special opportunity to fuse an international idiom with the locally site-specific. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster presents a recent work, filmed in Brazil, set under the canopy designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the first São Paolo Bienal in 1951. Together the films look at how we understand and remember space, at what was modern then compared with what is modern now, and at how sound-tracks both corroborate and undermine the proof of the naked eye.

Gerard Byrne + Chamberlin Powell and Bon



Gerard Byrne, Subject, 2009, Film installation commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute

www.henry-moore.org

The New Monumentality explores the attraction of modern post-war buildings for three artists born in the heyday of monumental architecture, as typified by London’s Barbican Centre. Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter are among the most interesting artists working in Europe today. All three use film and script to investigate and animate the architecture of the 1960s and this project brings them together for the first time. After World War II, architects looked to the abstract language of sculpture as a way of investing their buildings with greater power and significance. These forward-thinking forms, which still seem modern today, frame the exhibition.

Both Gerard Byrne and Dorit Margreiter present newly commissioned work filmed on the 1960s campus of the University of Leeds, one of the most ambitious of all European post-war university campuses. Chamberlin Powell and Bon created the celebrated Barbican Centre in the same years, but their monumental campus in Leeds is little known and still unlisted. This unique exhibition thus provides a special opportunity to fuse an international idiom with the locally site-specific. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster presents a recent work, filmed in Brazil, set under the canopy designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the first São Paolo Bienal in 1951. Together the films look at how we understand and remember space, at what was modern then compared with what is modern now, and at how sound-tracks both corroborate and undermine the proof of the naked eye.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle + Mies van der Rohe 6


Always After (The Glass House)
Description
Filmed at a ceremony launching the 2005 renovation of Crown Hall, one of Mies van der Rohe's modernist landmarks at IIT, Manglano-Ovalle's painstakingly edited work follows the architect's unseen grandson as he breaks the building's windows with a sledgehammer.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle + Mies van der Rohe 5




Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's project Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, is based upon Mies van der Rohe's uncompleted project, the 50x50 House (1951), a square structure open to view on all four sides through glass walls. In Manglano-Ovalle's work, the house will be constructed at approximately half scale and inverted, the ceiling of the original becoming the sculpture's floor, the floor becoming the ceiling, and all interior elements such as Mies-designed furniture and partition walls installed upside down.
Within the sterile, modernist space, a small narrative is evident. Miraculously suspended from above, two empty chairs flank a café table, on which apparently had rested a coffee cup and saucer, which has fallen from the table to the (actual) floor of the sculpture. This cup is shattered and has spilled its contents. Above the broken cup, a cell phone sits precariously on the edge of the café table. Its screen displays a relentless series of video messages that go unanswered by the anonymous and absent occupant of the glass house. As the unrequited callers grow increasing frustrated we are left to piece a story line with only the (anti)gravitational consequence of a sudden occurrence.
This singular mysterious tableau provides a touchstone linking the glass house to what is widely regarded as the first science fiction novel; Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921). Set in a futuristic world where individual freedom does not exist and all inhabitants live and work in transparent buildings, the novel tells the story of a state-employed engineer who falls in love with a terrorist and ultimately finds himself in a political and emotional state of desperation culminating in his futile attempt to destroy power and banging his head on glass walls. This narrative relates to yet another unfinished project of Modernism, Sergei Eisenstein's film The Glass House (1930), said to have been inspired by the Zamyatin novel. Eisenstein, who was looking at Mies' drawings for glass skyscrapers in Berlin at the time, intended the film to be his first Hollywood studio production, but his aim to shape the film as a cultural satire of America, ultimately prevented its production.
By conflating these histories Manglano-Ovalle acts as an alchemist, transforming references from literature, film and architecture into a new artistic hybrid. In a sense, Gravity Is a Force to Be Reckoned With manifests itself as much as an event, and a place of artistic action, as it does a traditional exhibition, turning upside down, literally, figuratively, and elegantly inverting separate utopian and dystopian gestures in order to precariously suspend itself in balance between the two.
In conjunction with Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned Withh will be Manglano-Ovalle's 2006 film Always After (The Glass House) (2006). Functioning as a prelude to his new work at MASS MoCA, the film is about the end of utopian transparency. While Always After documented an actual event, it was neither choreographed nor orchestrated. The action is minimal and seemingly simple. Inside a building, massive windows have been broken, and someone is slowly sweeping up the shattered remains. From a floor level perspective, we see the legs of an anonymous audience/public and hear the sound of broom-swept glass. The location, action, and incongruous audience reaction are unexplained. What is clear is that we have arrived late, always late, always after. The film was created at Crown Hall, Mies van der Rohe's 1950 School of Architecture building on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus in Chicago. In conjunction with Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With neighboring Williams College Museum of Art presents Juggernaut, a new video work by Manglano-Ovalle. Juggernaut, was filmed in El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve in Baja Sur, Mexico using super 16mm film, which was then transferred to HD video. El Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve is the largest protected area in Mexico, and is best known as the site of the mating ground for the endangered grey whale. However, instead of filming the endangered whales, Manglano-Ovalle chose to track the seemingly enormous salt mining vehicles and the expansive horizon of the landscape. A “juggernaut” is defined as any large, overpowering, destructive force or object, which Manglano-Ovalle presents to the viewers as these salt mining vehicles as they consume the pristine environment.
Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Krichman Family Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation, with additional support from Phyllis B. Lambert, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Special thanks to R.K. Miles.
Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With, 2009 Courtesy the artist and Max Protetch Gallery, NY. Photo by Dylan Lathrop

Friday 5 February 2010

James Welling + Mies van der Rohe

James Welling, "Farnsworth House (Scratched)," 2006. Chromogenic print. Courtesy Donald Young Gallery, Chicago

Tobias Rehberger + Ponti






Tobias Rehberger has created the PARADISE BOOKSHELF for onestar press.
Edition of 12 copies + 2 AP’s
Based on an old piece of furniture that T. Rehberger found in the abandonned hotel PARADISO in Val Martello - Switzerland - (designed in 1935 by Gio Ponti), the PARADISE BOOKSHELF is painted with the distintive colors used by the artist. Originally designed to carry onestar press’s books, this finely crafted piece of furniture is aged as if it was left in an attic for more that 50 years. The 12 copies (all unique because of the aging process) are accompanied by a numbered certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Allora & Calzadilla "How to Appear Invisible"


Allora & Calzadilla, How to Appear Invisible, 16mm film on HD, 2008.
Filmed in Berlin on the site of the Schlossplatz at the close of 2008, it documents the last remains of the Palast der Republik being torn down. Bearing witness to this event is a German Shepherd dog wearing a makeshift cone collar fashioned from the trademark container of one of the largest American fast food franchises: Kentucky Fried Chicken. The camera follows the dog roaming through the barren no man's land of the palace ruins as if it was searching for the last remains of an utopia that has vanished.