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About the Program
Ticket Information and Program Details
Current Schedule
Previous Talks
Fall
2001 Schedule
Maurizio
Cattelan
Maurizio
Cattelan is one of the most talked about artists working today.
His installations, sculptures, and performances claim a territory
based in Arte Povera, minimalism, and Duchampian ideals; but carry
a specific sense of humor and societal critique in their "slice
of life" presentation that is seemingly antithetical to these
forms. Consistently defying age-old perceptions of art as a source
of truth, Cattelan focuses tightly on segments of reality while
throwing in a twist for good measure.
His 6th Caribbean
Biennial (1999) mocked the international art circuit by creating
all the attendant signs of a major exhibition without installing
any artwork, and providing a vacation in the sun for its featured
artists. Another example, Lullaby (1994) is formally minimal
with its two small rectangular piles of debris stacked on a wooden
pallet, but the source of the rubble is politically charged as it
came from three major Italian art institutions damaged by Mafia-related
bomb attacks. Cattelan seeks to hit a nerve wherever he presents
his work: in London he showed a massive block of black granite reminiscent
of the Vietnam Memorial wall but carved with all the soccer World
Cup matches lost by England, and in law abiding Holland he stole
the entire contents of a gallery, from artworks to fax machines,
for his De Appel exhibition. In this way he consistently
turns modernist form against its own ideology and presents instead
an ethically ambivalent mise en scène.
"Irreverent"
is a word frequently used to describe Cattelan's work. He has managed
to poke fun at artworld luminaries from Picasso to Beuys, and has
even entered the realm of the spiritual and political with The
Ninth Hour (1999), in which a wax sculpture of Pope John Paul
II is hit by a meteorite, and Him (2001), a rendering of
Hitler kneeling in prayer under a halo of natural light.
When: Tuesday,
October 9
Where: The New
School University, 66 West 12th Street(between 5th & 6th Avenues)
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Shirin
Neshat
Shirin Neshat presents universal themes through
a culturally specific lens in her photographic, video and film works.
Having left her native Iran in 1974, Neshat explores love, death,
frustration, and madness, from her own cultural point of view; with
the resulting artworks providing a dense lyricism and poetic visual
language based on personal experience. Beyond Neshat's obvious focus
on gender issues lies a much more profound exploration of the way
differences, whether gender-related or cultural, structure experiences
on the deepest level.
Neshat
first became known for her incisive photographs of chardor-clad
women, often self-portraits, overlaid with Farsi texts in Persian
script. Some explore concepts of self-martyrdom that were central
to the Islamic revolution in Iran, and others include the feminist
poetry of Forough Farrakhzad. Over the last several years Neshat
has received international acclaim for her vivid films which are
layered with rich imagery and stunning music. Turbulent (1998)
won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and featured
two facing screens. On one, a man sings to an audience an impassioned
love song, gesturing and receiving applause. On the opposite screen,
a woman stands on stage in an empty theatre, and begins to sing
an extraordinary wordless song that embodies the deepest emotions.
Neshat's
frequent musical collaborator, Sussan Deyhim is this singer, and
is a composer who often mixes traditional Islamic forms with modern
technology. Neshat's 1999 Rapture also features Deyhim's
gripping compositions matched with stark visuals that depict a drama
of erotic attraction. And most recently, Neshat collaborated with
Phillip Glass on Passage (2001) in which a burial ritual
is carried out on a desert plain, with men and women taking seemingly
prescribed roles. Again the musical and visual impact work in tandem
to provide an almost anthropological study within a forceful experience
of emotion and spiritualism.
When:
Tuesday, October 23
Where:
The New School University, 66 West 12th Street(between 5th &
6th Avenues)
Time:
6:30 p.m.
Jeff
Wall
Trained as an art historian, Jeff Wall appears
as a contemporary Baudelaire with his depictions of contemporary
life, his use of technology to achieve his artistic ends, and his
engagement in contemporary theory, yet all this is seen through
formal compositions based on historical painting and representational
tableaux. While Wall's formal processes are based in art history,
they are paired with advertising-derived display techniques and
complex in-studio technical exercises that yield powerful, massive
images that at once attract for their normalcy and repel for what
might lie beneath the surface.
Wall's
earlier work offered more direct social critique paired with formal
historical types as with The Arrest (1989) which features
police officers leading away a sad-looking, Middle-Eastern young
man and The Destroyed Room (1978) depicting a violently trashed
woman's bedroom.
With
the massive size of his photographs (The Vampire's Picnic
(1991) measures 90 x 132 inches and The Flooded Grave (1998-2000)
measures 90 x 111 inches), Wall invites participation in his presentations
and creates a feeling similar to that of standing in front of Courbet's
Burial at Ornans. Heroic scale offsets the mundane subject,
and the power of his images often comes from this interplay of visual
organization and subject. Despite Wall's attachment to the "everyday"
his process is extremely complex with custom-made photo production
materials and advanced computers and props necessary to create the
outsized transparencies for which he is so well known.
When:
Tuesday, November 27
Where:
The New School University, 66 West 12th Street(between 5th &
6th Avenues)
Time:
6:30 p.m.
*Please
note this lecture was cancelled
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