Born 1976 in Buenos Aires, Argentina; lives in New York, New York
Video installation artist Mika Rottenberg envisions the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues such as labor and class inequities. In her short films, women cast for their notable physical features and talents perform perfunctory factory-line duties, manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. Her homemade machinery and decor are functional but crudely constructed. These contraptions, operating by pedal, conveyor belt, paddle, rubber band, or string, are reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s kinetic props, though the human interaction in her works adds a carnivalesque element to Rottenberg’s environments, the physical comedy implicit in her narratives recalling Eleanor Antin’s filmed performances. The bright colors of Rottenberg’s self-contained sets don’t disguise the close quarters in which her characters work or mitigate the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job. A blue-collar work ethic is conjured through the women’s uniforms, ranging from diner-waitress dresses to jogging suits. Her cast often use several body parts at once, reminding the viewer of the feminine capacity for multitasking while it suggests an ironic futility in her sweatshop-like situations.
He is best known for his performance persona named Mike, the central figure in an ongoing series of narrative projects. Mike, an innocent character who continually falls victim to trends and fashions and his own naive ambitions, allows Smith to comment on discrepancies and absurdities in American culture while creating an unsettling and poignant mixture of humor and pathos.
Kelley Walker (b.1969 Columbus, Georgia) is an American artist.
Walker graduated with a BFA from the University of Tennessee in 1995.
Walker’s work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo in Spain, the New Langton Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and FRAC Franche-Comté Musee des Beaux-Arts de Dole in France. His work was included in the Greater New York exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and USA Today at The Royal Academy in London. He participated in the 7th Sharjah Biennial. He is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.
Scott Rothkopf comes to the Whitney from Artforum, where he has been Senior Editor since January 2004. During his time at the magazine he has been intimately involved in planning its editorial direction and has worked closely with many distinguished writers and artists on essays, projects, and special issues. He was a guest curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where he organized Mel Bochner Photographs 1966-1969 (2002), a survey of Bochner’s photographic works and related drawings, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. At the Fogg, Rothkopf was also co-curator, with Linda Norden, of Pierre Huyghe’s This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), a site-specific installation, performance, and film made by Huyghe in response to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, where it has entered the permanent collection of the Musée national d’art moderne. Scott Rothkopf was a contributing curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial, for which he selected and installed the work of Wade Guyton.
“I’m delighted to join the Whitney and its distinguished curatorial team at this pivotal moment for the museum,” said Scott Rothkopf. “The Whitney has long been a venturesome advocate for contemporary artists and an imaginative steward of a rich historical collection. I look forward to advancing that dual mission and to exploring new approaches to our understanding of art in the United States within a broader international context.”
As a frequent contributor to Artforum, Scott Rothkopf has written on exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, and on topics ranging from the art and architectural criticism of the 1980s to the writings of 1960s critic Gene Swenson. His texts for the magazine have addressed the work of Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Paul Chan, Carroll Dunham, Josiah McElheny, T. J. Willcox, Katharina Fritsch, Richard Aldrich, Diller & Scofidio, Francesco Vezzoli, and Karen Kilimnik, who was the subject of his 2007 book, Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Meredith Martin. Scott Rothkopf’s museum and gallery catalogue contributions include essays on Jeff Koons, Wade Guyton, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Kelley Walker, Terry Winters, and Takashi Murakami, as well as interviews with James Rosenquist and Laura Owens, for, among others, Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Le Magasin, Grenoble, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to writing for the catalogue of Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, on view at the Whitney from November 6, 2009, through January 24, 2010, Scott Rothkopf is contributing to a book on Paul Thek, which will accompany the Whitney’s retrospective in the fall of 2010.
Scott Rothkopf has served as a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has participated in numerous public lectures and panels, as well as having organized and chaired “Photography and Conceptual Art” with Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Jan Dibbets at Harvard University, and “Transatlantic,” a College Art Association session devoted to the interchange between American and European artists in the 1960s and ’70s. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, for which he is completing his Ph.D. on the work of Jeff Koons and the art of the 1980s
Jonathan Berger’s work encompasses the fields of sculpture, drawing, architecture, installation, performance, design, education, and curatorial projects. Since 2006, Berger has been a part-time lecturer, teaching art and art history in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU and the Department of Sculpture at the University of the Arts.
His most recent curatorial projects include “Stuart Sherman: Nothing Up My Sleeve,” presented in November 2009 at Participant Gallery, NYC, as a major contribution to the 2009 PERFORMA Biennial. He is presently organizing “Peter Schumann: Black and White,” the first major retrospective exhibition of Bread and Puppet Theater Founding Director, scheduled to open at the Queens Museum in 2012. In process is “Andy Kaufman: On Creating Reality,” a retrospective exhibition scheduled for 2013. Past curatorial projects include “Where Art and Life Collide: Ron Athey, Vaginal Davis, Franko B,” a series of premiere performances, lectures, and events (presented in 2006 at Artists Space, Participant Inc., and Siberia, NYC), and the 2005 exhibit “Founders Day: Jack Smith and the Work of Reinvention,” at Grimm-Rosenfeld NY.
Jonathan Berger was born in New York City in 1980. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1998-2000, completing his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2002, and receiving his MFA from New York University in 2006. He has been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Corporation of Yaddo.
Every six months, Alisa Grifo and Marco Romeny (KIOSK) prepare to take a trip. The outcome of each trip is a collection of sorts, or rather, a portrait of a place in the form of a collection. The objects that constitute each collection challenge the way that we see, value, appreciate, historicize, consume, exoticize, understand, and learn. KIOSK is as specific to itself as it is to the vast array of practices and formats by which it is influenced and upon which it comments. Their work, and the venue it inhabits, navigate a hybrid terrain that incorporates aspects of the formats of the store, museum, academy, studio, gallery, and design collection. What KIOSK is and does puts all of these contexts, along with their baggage, in a constantly evolving dialogue with one another. Grifo and Romeny take on the roles of historian, anthropologist, ethnographer, tourist, curator, designer, user, producer, critic.
It is the accumulation of expansive narratives, the investigation of aesthetics, representation, and shifting perspectives and contexts that become the substance of each collection. In viewing a KIOSK collection in its entirety, we are presented with an alternate truth of that place: what we assume it is, what we want it to be, what we have been led to believe, what we don’t know.
Sharon Lockhart received her BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Since 1994, Lockhart's work in photography and film has been widely exhibited in national and international venues. Her film Goshogaoka, 1997, launched Lockhart's career in film-making and has been screened in museums and film festivals throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Lockhart has also participated in several international art exhibtions including the 1997 Site Santa Fe Biennial and the 1997 and 2000 Whitney Biennials. A major survey exhibition of her work was organized by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam traveled to the Kunsthalle Zurich and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. In March 2000 the San Francisco Art Institute presented her work, along with the photographs of Kelly Nipper, in the exhibition 2 Artists in 3 Takes.
Sharon will be screening her film Double Tide, a luminous and meditative portrait of a woman digging clams in the mudflats of the Atlantic Ocean, at MoMA this Thursday November 11th. Filmed in Seal Cove, Maine, a historic site for commercial clamming, during a rare natural phenomenon—when low tide occurs twice during daylight hours, once at dawn and once at dusk—Double Tide depicts an ageless tradition of backbreaking work within the sublime and quiet beauty of a wild coastal landscape. The film, which also exists as a double-screen gallery installation, continues the fascination with ritual and labor seen in Lockhart’s other recent works, from her choreographed study of Japanese farmers piling hay (NO, 2003) to her recent look at Maine shipyard workers at rest (Lunch Break, 2008) and leaving the factory at day’s end (Exit, 2008). As with many of her films, Double Tide occupies the liminal space between stillness and movement, and between actual time and subjective time.
Kerstin Brätsch’s practice moves fluidly between mediums and between individual and collective practice. Brätsch's installations feature large oil paintings and three-dimensional units, such as magazine and poster racks. She blurs the divisions between traditional media. Posters and zines both advertise and remix corresponding paintings. She is the co-founder of Das Institut, a quasi-commercial 'import/export agency.'
Brätsch currently lives and works in both Hamburg and New York.
Fionn Meade is Curator at SculptureCenter in New York. Recent independent curatorial projects include Degrees of Remove: Landscape & Affect, co-curated with Sarina Basta at SculptureCenter, NY; Entr’acte, a group exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY: and Bivouac, a guest-curated exhibition at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA. He received his MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. His critical writing appears in Artforum, Bidoun, BOMB, Parkett, and The Fillip Review, among other publications.
"It is my overall concern to reveal people as they are engaged in various kinds of activities—alone, with each other, with objects—and to weight the quality of the human body towards that of objects and away from the super-stylization of the dancer." —Yvonne Rainer, STATEMENT accompanying The Mind is a Muscle, 1968
Rainer was one of the organizers of the Judson Dance Theater, a focal point for vanguard activity in the dance world throughout the 1960s, and she formed her own company for a brief time after the Judson performances ended. Rainer is noted for an approach to dance that treats the body more as the source of an infinite variety of movements than as the purveyor of emotion or drama. Many of the elements she employed—such as repetition, patterning, tasks, and games—later became standard features of modern dance.
In her early dances, Rainer focused on sounds and movements, and often juxtaposed the two in arbitrary combinations. Somewhat inspired by the chance tactics favored by Cunningham, Rainer’s choreography was a combination of classical dance steps contrasted with everyday, pedestrian movement. She used a great deal of repetition, and employed narrative and verbal noises (including wails, grunts, mumbles and shrieks, etc.) within the body of her dances.
A turning point in Rainer’s choreography came in 1964, when she turned to game structures to create works. All movement aimed to be direct, functional, and to avoid stylization. In so doing, she aimed to remove the drama from the dance movement, and to question the role of entertainment in dance.
Rainer's work has been linked strongly with minimalist sculpture: she compared the neutral, specific qualities of those objects to her own "work-like" or "task-like," "ordinary" dance, and she collaborated early on with Robert Morris.
Rainer sometimes included filmed sequences in her dances, and in the mid-1970s she began to turn her attention to film directing. Her early films do not follow narrative conventions, instead combining reality and fiction, sound and visuals, to address social and political issues. Rainer directed several experimental films about dance and performance, including Lives of Performers (1972), Film About a Woman Who (1974), and Kristina Talking Pictures (1976). Her later films include The Man Who Envied Women (1985), Privilege (1990), and MURDER and murder (1996). The last-mentioned work, more conventional in its narrative structure, is a lesbian love story as well as a reflection on urban life and on breast cancer, and it features Rainer herself. Her film work has received several awards, and in 1990 she was a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
Some of Yvonne's earlier works:
Her latest choreographic endeavor:
A Review of RoS Indexical written by Dominic Eichler in Frieze:
Four women of differing ages and dance biographies sit at a café table wearing headphones and trying to sing along to a recording of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913). Each, in her own way, gets it wrong. This is the charmingly atonal and consciously silly opening to Yvonne Rainer’s much-anticipated dance work, RoS Indexical (2007), a co-production of documenta 12 and PERFORMA 07, which premiered in Kassel and will have its US debut at the New York performance biennial in November.
Eventually, the women – dancers Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer and Sally Silvers – get up and start to mark out fragments of Vaslav Nijinsky’s original choreography with stomping feet, angular arm movements, pelvic emphases and crude jumps – a relentless reiteration of Stravinsky’s lyrical, raucous, high-impact composition. Where Nijinsky’s interpretation for Serge Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes culminates in the sacrifice of a virgin, however, Rainer intentionally omits this in favour of comic movements inspired by Sarah Bernhardt, Robin Williams and Groucho Marx. But Rainer’s piece is more than an iconoclastic parody. Deemed lost for many years, Nijinsky’s original choreography was painstakingly reconstructed in the late 1980s, due in great part to the efforts of dance historian Millicent Hodson and to the discovery of dancer Marie Rambert’s score notes in a cupboard after her death. Rainer took the template and soundtrack for her piece from a televised BBC film, Riot at the Rite (2005), which reconstructed Nijinsky’s original choreography in a dramatization that climaxed with the piece’s scandalous premiere in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris. The music in Rainer’s interpretation is constantly interrupted by excerpts from a recording that restages the original audience’s extremely vocal outrage; into these cutaways, she inserts actions such as the performers throwing imaginary stones at the audience or a group of people storming the stage. While the delivery is sometimes a little awkward, Rainer’s intention is not to create a farce, but rather to revisit a crucial historical moment in which the avant- garde ruptured with the past. The result is a kind of Postmodern superimposition that contains aspects of both homage and critical revision: Rainer wants us to use our mind as a muscle rather than be spellbound by physique or physical feats.
An intense combination of excitement and reverence was palpable in the full- house audience, which was a fitting mix of eager young dancers and the Berlin art world (Rainer having officially quit dance in favour of film in 1975 only resumed her work with dance in 2000). The reception seemed appropriate, given that without the revolutionary work of Rainer and her colleagues in the ’60s and ’70s – in particular at the Judson Church – many of contemporary dance’s conceptual moves would be unthinkable. Their groundbreaking legacy includes the use of untrained dancers, ‘pedestrian movement’, task- based choreography, new forms of staging and exploring non-hierarchical and democratic structures and working relationships.
The same night also saw a performance of Xavier Le Roy’s own Le Sacre du Printemps (2007), which is similarly based on mediated material – in this case footage of Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. Taken from a special-edition DVD of the documentary film Rhythm Is It! (2004) – which records a social project involving hundreds of young Berliners on a confidence-building dance excursion into high culture – Le Roy’s solo involves a kind of air-guitar spoof of Rattle’s full-bodied conducting style, interpreted as choreography. His was a ‘bad’, if highly complex, imitation that was at once funny and excruciating, as all aped passion is, especially that of a public figure. His audience, with multiple speakers placed strategically under their seats, in turn became a helpless, instrument-less orchestra.
We are excited to present New Humans: Mika Tajima and Howie Chen on October 5th.
Mika Tajima is a New York City–based artist who, by connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, explores activities, form, and performative roles defined by divisive social spaces. A Columbia MFA graduate, her recent exhibitions includes Sculpture Center, Bass Museum, and X Initiative with upcoming exhibitions at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, and collaborative project at South London Gallery.
Formed in 2003, New York–based New Humans make collaborative works that explore the intersection of sound, installation, and performance. New Humans emerged out of Mika Tajima's art practice and is a moniker for her projects with curator Howie Chen, as well as musicians, artists, and designers including Vito Acconci, Charles Atlas, C. Spencer Yeh, among others. New Humans performances and recordings employ a working use of physical materials, piercing drones, sheer static, and low bass frequencies.
Howie Chen is a New York–based curator who is a cofounder of Dispatch, a curatorial production office and project space. This year Chen and artist/attorney Jason Kakoyiannis founded JEQU (Juicing the Equilibrium), a project to assess how sociological and cultural economic approaches to art world debates can augment artistic critique.
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer whose work deliberately blurs lines between social science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us.
Paglen's visual work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, and has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Wired, Newsweek, Modern Painters, Aperture, and Art Forum.
Paglen has received grants and commissions from Rhizome.org, Art Matters, Artadia, and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology.
Paglen is the author of four books. His first book, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (co-authored with AC Thompson; Melville House, 2006) was the first book to systematically describe the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program. His second book, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Melville House, 2007) an examination of the visual culture of “black” military programs, was published in Spring 2008. His third book, Blank Spots on a Map, was published by Dutton/Penguin in early 2009. In 2010, Aperture published his first photographic monograph entitled Invisible.
Paglen holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley, an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from UC Berkeley.
Paglen lives and works in Oakland, CA and New York City.
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