Anthony Huberman is an independent curator and writer based in New York. He studied sociology and art history at Georgetown University, Washington. Huberman is currently the director of The Artist’s Institute, New York, and an adjunct professor at Hunter College, New York. Previously, he was chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; education director at MOMA P.S.1, New York; and curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He has contributed articles to magazines such as Artforum,BOMB, ArtReview, Modern Painters, Dot Dot Dot, and The Wire, as well as many exhibition catalogue essays. He has organized exhibitions and events with Larissa Harris under the name The Steins since 2007.
On a recent Friday night, lured by the promise of a secret performance, a throng of people piled into a small basement on Eldridge Street. By the time I had arrived, the place was densely packed, and in wading through the crowd I noticed that a foamy, doughy material covered the floor. Behind the front desk, an off-white painting by Lutz Bacher read, in bold black lettering, “Have you heard the one about the cow, the Frenchman, and the bottle of Budweiser?” Nearby, a smiling Justin Bieber stared out from a Chinese-like rectangular banner displayed on a coverless ironing board. It was hot and uncomfortable, and I pitied the blush-cheeked baby who was nestled in a BabyBjörn. The performance still hadn't started, but given that the exhibition on view featured artists Liam Gillick, Matt Keegan, and Amy Granat, I was willing to wait, sure that whatever lay ahead would be worthwhile.
Since it opened last September, the Artist’s Institute has hosted a number of intriguing short exhibitions, lasting only a day or a weekend. Conceived and run by thirty-five-year-old curator Anthony Huberman, whose résumé includes stints as education director of P. S. 1, curator at Palais de Tokyo, and chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the space is quickly becoming a standout in the gallery-dense Lower East Side. Funded by Hunter College, it operates year-round as an affiliate to the school’s graduate visual-arts program. Huberman, who conducts a weekly seminar at Hunter related to the Institute, says he wanted to “counter the conveyor-belt problem in art where, before we have time to think about what a show means, it gets swallowed by what's next.” Each season, the Institute chooses one artist, the “anchor,” around which Huberman and his crew of student “researchers” mount exhibitions and events. The entire fall season was dedicated to the relatively unknown Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, a Frenchman and a friend of George Brecht. He served as inspiration, in the loosest sense, to the shows, and his commands to “unlearn,” “disinvent,” and “misunderstand” were somewhat adopted as the Institute's dogma.
Born 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland Lives and works in New York, New York
Through her performances, films, and installations, Sharon Hayes examines the intersection of history, politics, and speech, with a particular focus on the language of twentieth-century protest groups. Parole, the title of this installation, refers to the term used by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to distinguish individual acts of speech (parole) from a larger system of language (langue). In this installation, several distinct scenes present examples of public speech in different contexts. In each of the settings, which include Hayes’s recent performances as well as fictive scenes without an audience, the same figure appears, recording sound but never speaking. Hayes draws on historical texts—such as early lesbian activist Anna Rüling’s 1904 speech What Interest Does the Women’s Movement Have in the Homosexual Question—that “re-speak” to new audiences. These historical speeches, and Hayes’s work in general, explore the construction of gender and sexuality and the articulations of political protest, revealing unexpected resonances across time periods. Parole encourages the viewer to think about how past forms of protest can inform the present and how the effects of public speech are altered in the process of documentation.
BIOGRAPHY Born in Los Angeles, CA, 1981 Lives and works in New York EDUCATION 2005 Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program, New York 2004 BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York
About the Artist Born in Israel, Ohad Meromi currently lives and works in New York City. Meromi graduated from Bezalel Academy (1992) and went on to receive his MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts (2003). He has exhibited internationally and nationally at venues including The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; Lyon Biennial, France; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Magasin 3, Stockholm; De Appel Museum, Amsterdam; Sculpture Center, New York; and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. Meromi has received numerous scholarships and awards including a Percent for Art commission (2009), the Fund for Video and Experimental film (2004), I.C. Excellence Foundation (2003), Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize (1998). He was recently granted the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2008 Grants to Artists Award.
The term "stage" as a locus of special dynamics is central to my practice in sculpture, installation and video. I'm drawn to the shift a space might undergo from a concrete site to a fictional one. Thought of in the context of the social sphere, I'm interested in this moment of agency, a moment of potent reflexivity where the subject changes its relationship to an oppressive matrix. Thinking of architecture as stage allows me to read modernist space as a fiction, and then to reenact some of its myths: clashes of futurism and primitivism, international style and ethnic folklore, totalitarianism and utopic positivism.
Laura Mulvey was born in Oxford on 15 August 1941. After studying history at St. Hilda's, Oxford University, she came to prominence in the early 1970s as a film theorist, writing for periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. Much of her early critical work investigated questions of spectatorial identification and its relationship to the male gaze, and her writings, particularly the 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, helped establish feminist film theory as a legitimate field of study.
Between 1974 and 1982 Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed with her husband, Peter Wollen, six projects: theoretical films, dealing in the discourse of feminist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and leftist politics. These include: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974), Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), AMY! (1980), Crystal Gazing (1982), Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1982) and The Bad Sister (1982). After these, Mulvey did not return to film-making until 1991 when production began on her solo project Disgraced Monuments, an examination of the fate of revolutionary monuments in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism.
Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, and numerous other anthologies. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework, influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz had attempted to use psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema, but Mulvey's contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism.
Laura Mulvey is the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Zoe Beloff
Zoe Beloff grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1980 she moved to New York to study at Columbia University where she received an MFA in Film. Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. In 2009 she participated in the Athens Biennale, and has an upcoming project with MuHKA Museum in Antwerp. Her most recently completed work is the exhibition “The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and their Circle. She has been working with the Christine Burgin Gallery on a number of artist projects that include books and prints.
Zoe works with a wide range of media including film, stereoscopic projection performance, interactive media, installation and drawing.Her artistic interest lies in finding ways to graphically manifest the unconscious processes of the mind. She considers herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary. Sometimes she uses archaic apparatuses, sometimes, new analog/digital hybrids. Each project aims to connect the present with the past, to create new visual languages where modern media will once again be invested with the uncanny. She has collaborated with artists from other disciplines including composer John Cale, the Wooster Group Theater Company and composer, singer and performance artist Shelley Hirsch.
Zoe has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim Foundation (2003), The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997) and NYFA (1997, 2001). She has received individual artist grants from foundations that include NYSCA, The Jerome Foundation and Experimental Television Center Finishing Funds Award. She has had residences at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, Hallwalls in Buffalo and Tesla in Berlin.
Some links:
Dream Life of Technology was first published in a French cinema journal called "Trafic" in 1997 it was written to accompany my CD-ROM "Beyond". "Beyond" is now online and can be accessed here:
http://www.zoebeloff.com/beyond/
"Staging the Unconscious" was also published in "Trafic" in 2008. A web version of the Somnambulists is online - the actual project is a gallery installation.
Molly Nesbit teaches and writes on twentieth century art, film and photography and is currently faculty at Vassar college. Her two books, Atget's Seven Albums (1992) and Their Common Sense (2000) summarize a part of this work; it also involves a stream of essays on contemporary art. She is a contributing editor of Artforum, has taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Barnard College, Columbia University, and has received many awards, notably from the Guggenheim Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.
On Chan’s website, under the section ‘Free Baghdad’ snapshots, video clips and diary entries can be found. Visitors can also download Free MP3 files, while Chan can also be heard reading 16-hours’-worth of quotations from writers, artists and filmmakers.
Writes Walczak: "At some point during the writing of this EAI bio, Antek Walczak imagined grouping all his nouvelle-vague-grammar-crust videos under the title Old Life of a Sad Film Student. While other film students in 1990s New York were directing music videos for Pavement, starting youtube-before-youtube underground film fests, or going to real film festivals like Cannes with their real films, Walczak was working at his desk in the Bowery offices of a radical offshoot of downtown fashion called Bernadette Corporation. After several years devoted to reconsidering collective avant-garde legacies in terms of the contemporary media environment, change came in the form of an internal power struggle that ended the B-Corp fashion label and split up the collective into irreconcilable factions, leaving behind a pile of tapes from unfinished fashion spots that became material for Antek's solo video debut. It was during this hiatus of 1998-9, between incarnations of Bernadette Corporation, that Walczak developed the post-Godardian narrated essay style that bridges works as divergent as The BC Corporate Story and Get Rid of Yourself.
For fun, here are titles from the various fashion model segments of the aborted 1997 BC video shoot that would become 1998?s Dynasty: Animals in Your Neighborhood; Fresh Brats' Worst; The Robots are Ready; We never loved your body; Lady in a Jam. This is to point out the language that came out of the completely isolated self-authenticated context of early Bernadette Corporation and as well how Walczak's 'failed film school re-appropriation of an alternative cinema could only tenuously exist in a version of the downtown 90s scene that doesn't appear in any forgotten histories. Wanting nothing to do with whatever remained of East Village punk, no wave, or grunge subculture, it was an aesthetic that also happened outside of single-channel video art, operating under an illusion of a post-cinema that thought it was still possible to sit in darkened movie theaters instead of filling up the white empty spaces of galleries. It's worth noting that, in pursuit of such nostalgic resistance, Antek even went as far as moving to Paris to make films, write film criticism, and grow a beard at the start of the 00 decade. The Sad Film Student works fall under the early stages of what would became a full-blown condition at the start of the 21st century -- a passion for dead fictional substances and authentic forms, a haunted authorial voice speaking across grids of nonlinear layers, tracks, clips and timelines."
Antek Walczak was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1968 and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a BFA at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been shown at Cinematexas in Austin, the Pompidou Center, Fri-Art in Fribourg, Switzerland and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. He is a core member of Bernadette Corporation since 1994. He has written for magazines/zines like Purple, Pacemaker, Pazmaker, Zehar, and Made in USA.
From 1995 to 1997, Bernadette Corporation constituted itself as an underground fashion label based in New York, complete with a head designer and four well-received runway shows. Drawing on the vernacular of local subcultures, from recent immigrant communities to the downtown fashion scene itself, the label's collections can be seen as a self-consciously critical examination of social codes and their expression through industrial nexuses of power and money. The shows themselves, which are documented on this video as "a condensed history of anti-fashion," send up the spectacular nature of the fashion industry, incorporating such trappings as bear-costumed mascots, troupes of high-school dancers, and jets of fire.
Matthew Brannon’s work turns on the opposition—and ever-mounting imbrication—of art and design. After an early stint as a painter, he began to draw his inspiration from those printed materials that mediate everyday life in late-capitalist, early twentyfirst- century America, from posters and advertisements to promotional flyers and take-out menus. But if Brannon’s iconography conjures mass-produced, throwaway sources, his methods are laboriously handcrafted, even old-fashioned: screenprint, letterpress, and lithograph works, often executed in a limited palette and consistent in their graphic rigor. His art seems on first glance disarmingly direct. But as one turns to the text paired with his images for explication or illumination, disorder intervenes. An early series recalls the conventions of posters for horror films: in Sick Decisions (2004), the driveway leading to a stately house is cloaked by shadows cast by bare, looming trees. In place of what look to be credits in the lower part of the work, however, is a string of pithy non sequiturs: this film is “A Desperate Appeal Release,” starring, among others, “Abuse of Education” and “Misplaced Trust,” with a screenplay by “101 Unanswered Phone Calls.”
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Matthew Brannon is known for his use of fine art and commercial printmaking alongside a classic sense of graphic design as a means of camouflaging his unpleasant and/or absurd content. This strategy is less a gimmick than an acceptance of the psychoanalytic model which believes that content is filtered before it is exposed. The balance of text and image in the letterpress prints provides the clearest example of this approach. One finds in them a word play dealing with career anxiety, alcoholism, insecurity, guilt, humiliation, sexual misadventure and so on, paired with bedside still-life images of lamps and statuettes. The consistent theme of success and failure here advances to a more literary like form both supporting and opposing the idea of the autobiographical. What Brannon began as mimicking the model of a film poster now operates on it's own visual terms with each print acting simultaneously as chapter and setting.
Amy Granat: Born 1976 in Saint Louis, Missouri; lives in New York, New York.
Ms. Granat received a B.A. in 1998 from Bard College, where she studied film and painting. After moving to New York City, she founded Cinema Zero, a nomadic film and performance series, and collaborated with artists such as Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether, and Richard Aldrich, among many others. Her 16mm films and photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Ullens Center in Beijing, the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, PS1, SculptureCenter, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City, and had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen and the New Museum in New York in 2010. She has been teaching at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education since 2007. Ms. Granat was appointed critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010.
She is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to “draw” with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.
Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. Her most recent work, Contraband, which includes 1,075 photographs of items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad, exposes the desires and demands that drive the international economy as well as the local economies that produce them. Her previous work, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, reveals that which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but remains inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. Her earlier work, The Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates photography's role in that process.
Simon's photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Permanent collections include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Simon has been a visiting artist at Yale University, Bard College, Harvard University and Columbia University.
Her photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ted.com, CNN, BBC and Frontline. Steidl published An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar as well as Simon’s most recent work, Contraband, which was released in September 2010. Additionally, Simon is currently working on a global project that will be exhibited and published in spring 2011 at the Tate Modern, London and the Neue Nationalegalerie, Berlin. Simon will be exhibiting a new work at the Venice Biennale 2011.
She is represented by Gagosian Gallery & by Almine Rech Gallery in Paris and Brussels.
Cora Cohen received a BA and MA from Bennington College. Cohen’s exhibitions include Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, Hering Raum Bonn, Germany, Stalke Kirke Sonnerup, Denmark, Jason McCoy, New York, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, and Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale.
Michelle Kuo is the Editor in Chief of Artforum. She is also a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the History of Art and Architecture, writing a dissertation titled “To Avoid the Waste of a Cultural Revolution”: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966-1979. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, technology, and the postwar think tank--as specifically realized in the organization E.A.T., founded by Robert Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer in order to facilitate collaborations between artists and engineers. Kuo is a contributor to publications including Artforum, Bookforum, October, and The Art Bulletin and is the author of “9 Evenings in Reverse,” in the exhibition catalogue 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 2006. She co-curated the exhibition “The Carpenter Center and Le Corbusier’s Synthesis of the Arts” at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts in 2004, and lectures frequently on modern and contemporary art. Link: Industrial revolution: Michelle Kuo on the history of fabrication
Josiah McElheny
Josiah McElheny is a sculptor who draws from the decorative and functional traditions of glass to craft a new, multifaceted form of contemporary art. Often using narratives inspired by the histories of art, design, and glass as points of departure, McElheny creates objects of exceptional formal sophistication, exquisite craftsmanship, and conceptual rigor. While the beauty of his blown glass objects invite viewers into his installations, the narratives behind each piece encourage thoughtful reflection upon the objects’ significance. One of McElheny’s most ambitious projects, An End to Modernity (2005), consists of a twelve-foot-wide by ten-foot-high chandelier modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers found in Lincoln Center. Through his massive sculpture of shining chrome and transparent glass, McElheny explores the convergence of modernist design and the Big Bang theory, both of which were invented in the early twentieth-century, only to reach their widespread acceptance in the 1960s. Earlier projects have focused on subjects ranging from Roman Imperial glass to twentieth-century fashion, from sixteenth-century Italian painting to the designs of Adolf Loos. To each of these topics McElheny brings the same boundless curiosity and ability to make connections across classes of objects, historical moments, and fields of inquiry. This artist’s technical virtuosity and deep knowledge of his medium’s history have produced a captivating series of sculptures and promise more stimulating, shimmering works to come.
Josiah McElheny received a B.F.A. (1989) from the Rhode Island School of Design and was an apprentice to master glassblowers Jan-Erik Ritzman (1989-1991), Sven-Ake Carlsson (1989-1991), and Lino Tagliapietra (1992-1997). He was an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (1998) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2000) and was a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art (2001-2003). His works have appeared in numerous solo and group exibitions in the U.S. and abroad, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
