The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) Announces less like an object more like the weather

On view March 24, 2013 – May 26, 2013 in the Hessel Museum of Art

Opening receptions on Sunday, March 24, and Saturday, April 20 , both from 1-4pm

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 2012 – The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) has announced details on its spring exhibitions and projects, less like an object more like the weather, the annual exhibition series showcasing the curatorial work of CCS Bard master’s degree candidates. less like an object more like the weather, will include 15 solo and group exhibitions and projects featuring the work of more than 54 established and emerging contemporary artists working in a variety of media.

For the spring of 2013, the fourteen participating students have elected to present their individual curatorial projects simultaneously in the Hessel Museum of Art. As an unprecedented gesture of institutional engagement through collectivity, all exhibitions and adjacent programming come together under one title.

John Cage characterized his longtime collaboration with Merce Cunningham by stating: “It’s less like an object and more like the weather. Because in an object, you can tell where the boundaries are. But in the weather, it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends.” The ethos of the students’ collaboration reflects Cage’s sentiment and prompts the viewer to experience the venture’s heterogeneity less as an object to be assimilated, and more as a movement towards a climate of engagement.

less like an object more like the weather will be on view from March 24 through May 26, 2013. Curated by CCS Bard graduate students Robin Wallis Atkinson, Juana Berrío, Olga Dekalo, Cora Fisher, Sarah Fritchey, Stephanie Harris, Marie Heilich, Sarah Higgins, Fawz Kabra, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Marina Noronha, Tara Ramadan, María Montero Sierra, Karly Wildenhaus, these exhibitions will feature the work of artists including Vito Acconci, Liam Gillick, An-my Lê , and Bruce Nauman, An-among others. There will be two opening receptions taking place on Sunday, March 24 from 1.00-4:00 p.m., and Saturday, April 20 from 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

New Hours: The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Thursday through Sunday from 11:00a.m. to 6:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. Limited free seating is available on a chartered bus from  New York City for the March 24 and April 20 openings. Reservations are required; call +1 845-758-7598 or email [email protected].

About the Center for Curatorial Studies
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an exhibition, education, and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day.

In addition to the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art, the Center houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archives that are accessible to the public. The Center’s two-year M.A. program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating contemporary art. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art, providing students with the opportunity to work with world-renowned artists and curators. The exhibition program and the Hessel Collection also serve as the basis for a wide range of public programs and activities exploring art and its role in contemporary society.

General information on the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College can be found on its website at: www.bard.edu/ccs. 

# # #

MEDIA CONTACTS:

For further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:

Mark Primoff

Director of Communications

Tel: +1 845.758.7412      

Email: [email protected]                   

CCS BARD CONTACT:

Ramona Rosenberg

External Affairs Manager

Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574

Email: [email protected] 

less like an object and more like the weather

March 23 – May 26, 2013

Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS:  

CROSS//ROADS

Artists: Willie Birch and Liam Gillick

Curated by Robin Wallis Atkinson

“By pairing Willie Birch’s three works on paper and a set of papier-mâché sculptures from the New Orleans based artist’s 7^th Ward Series alongside conceptual and text-based artwork by Liam Gillick, the curator draws on formal differences to point towards related conceptual attitudes about history and materiality. The three practices in the exhibition, two artistic and one curatorial, represent three modes of creative production as well as different generational ideas on working in the cultural sphere. Across generations these practices share a common investment in exposing or documenting the often-overlooked material traces of socioeconomic and cultural histories as they manifest within the lived environment.

Birch’s visual style, a form of conceptual Southern Vernacular painting, is a syncretic blend of representation and abstraction that utilizes African diasporic retentions - cultural traits that have persisted across history - to create a record of the past’s symbolic traces on the present, in order to create a record for the future. Gillick similarly extends backwards to look forwards, contemplating the time just before something begins or just after it has finished as a place of possibility. The notion of vernacular - a form of everyday parlance specific to a social group or region - manifests in his work through a graphic and discursive style developed in the context of globalized art production. In his work formal and textual elements are interdependent, expanding his engagement with abstraction and the built environment. By bringing the artworks of Birch and Gillick together, the curator hopes to bridge a gap between local and global discourses about production and materiality to emphasize the importance of memory and locale and to create a simultaneous complication and interpretation of each by the other. “

- Robin Wallis Atkinson

Don’t blame anyone

Artists: Bruce Nauman, Giovanni Anselmo, Giorgio Griffa, Al Taylor, Nicolás Paris, and Julio Cortázar

Curated by Juana Berrío

“Don't blame anyone is an exhibition that draws its inspiration and title from a short story by Julio Cortázar that narrates, in agonizing detail, a man's struggle to put on a blue sweater. The exhibition includes works by artists whose practices pay particular attention to process as opposed to progress, via absurd or overemphasized ways of engaging with ordinary objects and activities. Including a newly commissioned work by artist Nicolás Paris, as well as existing works by artists Bruce Nauman, Giovanni Anselmo, Giorgio Griffa, Al Taylor, and writer Julio Cortázar, the exhibition provides alternatives to the perception of efficient processes as heroic narratives. Recognizing recent legacies of process-based art that highlight myriad ways in which the means might be seen as more significant than the end, Don’t blame anyone is also interested in highlighting the role of the ordinary and the pointless as deep-seated, if less recognized, elements of process itself. Through drawing, sculpture, painting, video, and writing, the works in this exhibition take permanent detours, reverse work methods, and delay efficient or fantastic finales. By focusing on task-like activities and everyday elements, they dismiss the potential for a magnificent future by amplifying the simple gestures within the already existing present. Instead of formulating a recipe for everyday existence, these works provide exit doors that allow us to withdraw from it.”

- Juana Berrío

Flip The Script

The unfolding of a newly commissioned dance, Reverse to Reverence, by Vanessa Anspaugh is a collaboration with performers Lindsay Clark, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read, with audio by JD Samson.
Curated by Olga Dekalo

“Flip The Script stages a collaboration between choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh, performers Lindsay Clark, Lydia Okrent, Mary Read, and artist JD Samson to foreground the process of negotiation and dialogue integral to the conception of dance. By interrogating modes of representation and choreography itself, the project tests how an audience might come to experience these interactions differently. The work-in-progress will be presented at the Hessel Museum on three occasions: as a rehearsal initially open to the Center and the Bard community, and as two subsequent performances staged for a larger audience. When the space is not occupied by dancers, an audio piece by JD Samson, integrating aural documentation footage from the working process, will be installed in the gallery. Bringing together intragenerational practices, this project enacts dynamics of compatibility and discord inherent to the new commission by Anspaugh. By individuating modes of choreography, documentation, and staging in a collaborative process, Flip The Script foregrounds singularities within an ensemble.

Vanessa Anspaugh is a choreographer and a performance maker. She shares the space of dance-making with her peers who conceive costumes, sound design, and create dramaturgy. Anspaugh has worked in New York for the last six years with collaborators: Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, Mary Read, Susan Mar Landau, Emily Roysdon, Chris Haag, Lily Gold, Devynn Emory, Cassie Peterson, Ryan Mac Donald, and Lindsay Clark. In this new commission, Reverse to Reverence, Anspaugh seeks to address the complex power relations embedded in the director/performer paradigm to ask questions about directorship, authorship, collaboration, sacrifice, and devotion. By looking at ways to subvert the dynamics and/or reverse the structures around the act of choreographing, the work stands as a metaphor for multiple power dynamics in the world at large.”

-Olga Dekalo

Persona Ficta

Artists: Tania Bruguera & Jota Castro, Kristin Lucas, Dread Scott, and Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento

Curated by Cora Fisher

“Persona Ficta presents performances that inhabit formal spaces of law as vehicles for poetic political action. A legal person, or persona ficta, is by definition a proxy, a representational “vehicle” charged with powers to act. In the institutional domains of art and law, the document masquerades as the artist. Taking up this elusive designation of personhood, the exhibition instigates a more nuanced perception of art as immanent threat to power. 

Interventions into the space of law, both symbolic and real, allow artists expanded political agency. With gestures ranging from parody to protest, Kristin Lucas, Tania Bruguera, and Dread Scott alter perceptions of what it means to perform by exploiting courtroom procedures and documents. A legal name change allows for self-transformation and plants possible loopholes in the system. A partnership agreement tests the limits of future creative license. A tactical public spectacle leads to both a summons and institutional support for free expression. Adjacent to the exhibition, arts lawyer Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento will perform legal consultations.

These challenges to legal definitions of personhood, partnership, and institutional practice encourage us to reconsider the conditions of performance art in the exhibition space, a civic forum with its own codes and possibilities. Procedure is performative. Bureaucracy is rendered otherwise.”

-Cora Fisher

Landing Field: Vito Acconci and Yve Laris Cohen

Curated by Sarah Fritchey

“Landing Field commissions architect/designer Vito Acconci and artist Yve Laris Cohen to collaborate on a series of site-specific responses to the white cube. Laris Cohen begins with a dance that ruptures the commanding weight, sightlines and material scaffolding of the exhibition space. Acconci responds with an architectural proposal developed from his studio’s 2004 plan for a Research Station in Halley, Antarctica that gives voice to space.”

-Sarah Fritchey

“The land here is white: the world here is a sheet of ice—it’s too white, too bright, to sleep…”

Blueprints

Artists: Trisha Brown, Peter Halley, Sean Paul,and Nick Relph

Curated by Stephanie Harris

“Blueprints engages the organizational forces of material and dematerialized architectures by considering the physical and psychical distance between the drawn and the built, the architectural representation and its muse. On the page of a blueprint, the architect maps the expectations of inhabitants, anticipating needs while creating a building with expectations of its own. Blueprints is charged with asking how these expectations are translated in the meeting between body and architecture. What produces attitudes of resistance between body and wall and when is cooperation with the wall sufficient?

But artists are not architects, and these are not buildings.

Trisha Brown's rhythmic and organic line on paper suggests a body's motion through space while Nick Relph's line through the gallery causes an action to be performed. Peter Halley's cell and conduit paintings represent our relationship with architectures we occupy daily, blueprints from which we cannot build, but instead reflect on our relationship with the built. Sean Paul's paintings are almost blueprints in reverse, utilizing orthographic projection, objects are projected onto the 2D plane and our relationship to the built is pure information. By adhering image to architecture Paul's work considers how simply turning the corner adds a third coordinate.

A reconsideration of matter and form takes place. Questions are posed relative to how we might imagine bodies as matter that not only inhabit but, in the space between the drawn and built, form architecture. Not limited to choices of resistance to or cooperation with the walls, but free to physically and psychically reflect and diffuse in space, a new series of relationships emerge that consider the codependency of opposites: 2D and 3D, the unbuilt and the built, the picture plane and the line in space, a painting or a sculpture, a plan meant to be built or merely considered.”

-Stephanie Harris

None the Wiser

Participants: Jessica Baran, Matt Mullican, Carlos Reyes, and John Smith

Curated by Marie Heilich

“None the Wiser explores the artistic operation of framing candid subjects. In works from the past four decades, Matt Mullican, John Smith, and Carlos Reyes delegate aspects of their process to unwitting persons, shifting the process away from the notion of the singular artistic act and providing content otherwise inaccessible to the artist. As a result, the work is granted a candid perspective, the potential for chance, and the realism of everyday, unstaged gestures. Through the use of sculpture, painting, and film, the artists frame unaware actors through various points of entry contingent on their medium. Jessica Baran probes and teases out these points of access through a series of commissioned poems displayed throughout the gallery. None the Wiser takes as its starting point the avant-garde’s historical trope of artistic authenticity. Through performance, language, and duration, the artists provide form which allows unaware subjects the agency of visibility in a delineated arena, promising a filter of anonymity. Medium and message conflate, reality congeals and disintegrates, and doubts begin to surface.”

-Marie Heilich

Terms & Conditions of Use

Artists: Owen Mundy, Deborah Stratman, Brad Troemel & Jon Vingiano, Commodify, Inc.

Curated by Sarah Higgins

“Expanding forms of virtual connectivity and networked interaction have given rise to modes of monitoring and control that no longer resemble traditional audio/visual surveillance. Digital interactions, such as social networking or the use of search engines and reference sites, is now contingent on a voyeuristic model of give and take. This reciprocity forces an implicit social contract: the user relinquishes control, not only over their produced content, but over their accumulated history of actions, connections, and behaviors. This is offered in exchange for greater connectivity, social visibility, and an increasingly personalized consumer experience. An industry has rapidly proliferated, driven by advances in information aggregation and predicated on the commodification of the online subject.

Monitoring and control-embedded beneath the architecture of online communities founded on the promise of connectivity-have altered the conditions upon which artists build resistant and critical practices.

Artists working to generate visibility and resistance to this substructure face two primary but limiting positions of refusal: to unplug from networked technologies, or to employ methods evolved from a hacker ethos at the risk of replicating the exploitative operations of the power structure. As an alternative, Terms & Conditions of Use argues for a technologically embedded and ethically effective structural critique. The title references the contractual agreements, implicit and explicit, to which participants in online communities are subject, while pointing to forms of artistic engagement that revise terms and conditions towards resistance.”
-Sarah Higgins

We took the image and put the sound too loud

Contributors: Shumon Basar, Jean Marie Casbarian, An-My Lê, and Michael Rakowitz

Curated by Fawz Kabra

“A story is written on the wall, lending it a voice. A voice that does not know whom it is from, only where it starts and where it is received. We took the image and put the sound too loud; a we that brings together the you and the I. How we project the image directs its reading. Does it drown out or bring forth that voice? Here begin the breaks and transformations in reconstructing a narrative. Depending on which way you look, drifting past a contested land can be a metaphor for the command of a military's soft-power, as captured in a set of photographs on the USS Dwight Eisenhower carrier navigating through the Suez Canal. Looking in the other direction, that same land becomes an ideological symbol or a character playing its part in a fiction. Histories of Egypt, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq are woven through the rise and rift of The Beatles. Multiple narratives intersect, and souvenirs from a previous time act as a device for remembering the past, imagining one narrative as it cuts through another's trajectory. A slide projection holds still an image of a tarnished terrain, while a video loops the action of sweeping away the residue of a chemical weapons test. This is how the real is projected. The sequences that arrange and reproduce a narrative that we put together. “

-Fawz Kabra

The Very Quick of the Word

Artist: Ken Okiishi

Curated by Annie Godfrey Larmon

“The Very Quick of the Word elaborates Ken Okiishi’s investigation into the relationship of externalized material memory to subject formation, through a new work commissioned for this exhibition. Multiple temporalities of memory-making and recording are overlaid in the gallery, as gestural painting rubs up against the television support surface of the delayed playback of home VHS tapes, whose magnetic particles have become significantly unstable. Transferred to a crude digitality of USB sticks and HD flatscreens, which play video in a way that becomes sticky against transfer-speeds that are indeed too slow for perfectly smooth high-volume data playback, a compressed memory emerges against both a degraded recording and a gestural, bodily one. A live feed to a camera gazing out the window at the sky enters the space like a singing void—a midday nap, a sleepy glance away— narcolepsy induced by the overcharged possibilities of networked, recorded life. A hiccup in the heart, a breakdown, staring at the sky. A way out that is also a total system failure… A way out that is also a permanent shut down… A way out as hovering.

This marks a site of indeterminacy, by way of a sort of immersive, prosthetic brain space.”

-Annie Godfrey Larmon

Unless Otherwise Noted

With contributions by John Cullinan, Ivana Králíková & Marta Dauliute, Falke Pisano, Reto Pulfer, Arden Sherman, Rebecca Stephany, and Julia Valle

Curated by Marina Noronha

March 14, 2013

Dear Sirs:

You are invited to come or send a representative to the public opening of:

Unless Otherwise Noted, a project about the curatorial process, with contributions by John Cullinan, Ivana Králíková & Marta Dauliute, Falke Pisano, Reto Pulfer, Arden Sherman, Rebecca Stephany, and Julia Valle. Through conceptual exercises that merge everyday maintenance with collection stewardship, the project invests in practices that change the status of the art object within collections. Some works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection and a number of houseplants will be on display.

Sunday, March 24, 1-4 pm

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art

Bard College

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

The project will open to the public from Sunday, March 24, to Sunday, May 26, 2013

Thursday — Sunday, 11am-6pm

Free Admission 

For further information about this project please call me at +1 (321) 345-6222.

Sincerely yours,

Marina Noronha

Curator, M.A. Candidate 2013

Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College

The Ecstasy of the Newness of the Image (or the Communicability of an Unusual One)

Artists:Trisha Donnelly, Analia Saban, and Gedi Sibony

Curated by Tara Ramadan

“Yes to visual trickery. Yes to slow digest over rapid intake. Yes to idiosyncratic beauty. The Ecstasy of the Newness of the Image (or the Communicability of an Unusual One) combats daily doses of hurried image intake by reconsidering customary ways of seeing. Trisha Donnelly, Analia Saban, and Gedi Sibony author objects whose material construction act as provocation, asking viewers to consider what it means to make objects that refuse traditional categorization. Cardboard reveals and paint masks. Senses are set on refresh.

Using gestures subtle and sincere, Gedi Sibony unveils unfettered materials, enhancing their original states. Materials are recast to consider the breadth of what gets framed, and of image making more specifically. Analia Saban reconfigures representation with sly tricks, where canvas and acrylic are manipulated to resemble everyday materials. And Trisha Donnelly puts us face to face with the unknown, however familiar it may appear. Here, objects stunt immediate apprehension, and put to these works is the following question: what expectations do these objects unsettle? Or asked differently, in the material morsels of these objects, what hidden information is revealed?
What we think we’re looking at is both what it seems, yes, and more.”

-Tara Ramadan

Are You In?

Curated by María Montero Sierra

“Are You In? presents a site-specific intervention into the student lounge at CCS Bard by the Spanish architectural collective Zuloark.

Are You In? tests the extent to which design made specifically for our community can expand the public sphere, by way of how design modifies or creates everyday activities and routines. These everyday practices produce the field of social relations. The project will be developed through collaboration between Zuloark and the curator, and will involve cooperation with CCS students, as well as visitors to the museum, both of whom will participate in the final design and in the activation of public space.

If curating could be a political field, an important strength of Zuloark’s intervention lies in providing an alternative space for CCS Bard students to explore and present their working process, accomplish projects and develop their curatorial identities.

Zuloark, based in Madrid and Berlin, combines highly structural design with intense research into economical materials traditional and local crafts. Working both indoors and outdoors, Zuloark is interested in activating collaborative social models in public space. “

-Maria Montero Sierra

Point of Sale

Designer: Studio Manuel Raeder

Curated by Karly Wildenhaus

“Point of Sale operates as a functioning bookshop for the duration of the spring 2013 CCS Bard thesis exhibitions and projects. The bookshop’s display structure is the result of a site-specific commission by Studio Manuel Raeder, which focuses on close collaborations with artists, designers, curators, theorists, and musicians in a wide range of formats that include exhibitions, publications, type design, and furniture design. For Point of Sale, the Studio has designed a setting that can function simultaneously as a retail operation, reading room, and social space and has adapted existing structural elements from the Hessel Museum of Art.

The inventory of Point of Sale has been selected in relation to the concurrent spring exhibitions and their participant’s respective conceptual investments. It also features materials published under the CCS Bard imprint and projects by faculty and alumni/ae. A student-initiated publication produced by the CCS Bard class of 2013 accompanying less like an object more like the weather is also available, and its purchase further supports the group publication as an economic vehicle. Point of Sale presents and circulates various art publishing efforts through processes of economic exchange, to activate the intersection between art, entrepreneurship, and publishing—particularly as it has occurred and continues to occur through CCS Bard’s expanded network. In this way, the bookshop as a site within the art institution’s infrastructure has become available for curatorial and economic intervention.

Ongoing research on the subjects of “Bookstore as Medium,” “Print Economies,” and “Entrepreneurial Aesthetics” is available on the collaborative online research platform Arena. Contributions are welcome: http://are.na/point-of-sale”

-Karly Wildenhaus

Object Permanence

Artists: Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Guerrilla Girls, Wade Guyton, Robert Morris, and Andrea Zittel

Curated by Robin Wallis Atkinson, Cora Fisher, Sarah Fritchey, and Marie Heilich

“Object Permanence considers a selection of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, through a socio-economic lens that is both theoretical and grounded in current financial realities. Curated by four second-year students who have worked extensively with the collection, the exhibition runs parallel to the curators’ study of current research from the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Object Permanence refers to the psychological understanding that objects still exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. Once acquired by a museum, an artwork receives measures of care, display and preservation that ensure its object permanence, even when the work is in storage. The exhibition exhumes nine works from the 3,000 work collection, spanning the period between the 1960s and 2012. It also includes an inkjet printed painting, Xeroxed political posters, and an outdoor public sculpture usually on display in the front lawn, to ask: what is the cultural value of art? How might the methods of production, acquisition, and circulation affect an artwork’s value? And how might an artwork retain, or in some cases, resist critical purchase?

Situated within the run of the second-year student’s thesis projects, the exhibition considers the connection between the school and the collection, as well as the curator and the art object. Object Permanence thinks specifically about how the economy might quietly shape these behind-the-scenes connections, especially when art objects may already outwardly possess evidence of these economic systems. By teasing out the nuanced relationships between education, curating, and collecting, the exhibition aims to think of cultural production in relationship to the financial systems that, in turn, influence art and the economy’s intertwined cultural value.

# # #

Website: https://www.bard.edu/ccs

This event was last updated on 03-12-2013

Back to Top