Dark Matters - Takes on Conceptual and Minimal Aesthetics – Düsseldorf / Los Angeles
Krysten Cunningham, Adam Feldmeth, Tobias Hantmann, Christian Jendreiko, Analia Saban, Monika Stricker
October 1, 2012 - October 29, 2012
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it’s all dark.
Pink Floyd
Let’s start off with some seemingly obvious remarks, whilst it’s funny that we seem to so obviously know what it is that we don’t know. With dark we commonly describe for lack of better knowledge what we can’t see or recognize. But dark is also what we are not supposed to see or don’t want to see. The term herein describes, on the one hand, a field of possibilities and a threat on the other. We have to make a decision as to what to do with the dark.
Less than 5% of all the mass and energy in the universe presents itself to us. My guess is that the percentage of certainty in our lives (if via some formula, it were calculable) is about the same ratio, maybe less. Everything can change at any given moment. To be able to live with the all-determining dark you need to trust. But in what? God? Science? The romans invented the answer: Securitas, the goddess of security. Her likeness decorated Roman money and she guaranteed the safety of the borders, security of the empire and fittingly, financial stability.
This 2,000-year-young concept seems like new. Yet, it is precisely the idea of a guaranteed risk free life as the ideal of our time, which causes a constrictive understanding of how we move within the world and how we act towards one another. It is bizarre that we believe that safety and security could be products, which exemplifies that our true faith lies in monetary exchange. But security is not a product. It is always only a temporary state of the absence of danger. You can pay for it, but you won’t own it.
So, do we see dark as the imponderability of life, which we have to be armed and protected against? Or, is dark the cubbyhole of our fantasies?
Dark is indeed our true home. Dark is ultimately where everything arises, where we come from, the stream of potential which only in our intrepid consciousness unfolds as world into what we envision, what we are and who we want to be.
It’s the dark that matters.
The exhibition brings together 6 positions from Düsseldorf and Los Angeles that deal with those matters. The visualization of hidden structures by means of actions, temporary interventions and minimal gestures are techniques employed by the participating artists.
A contentual arc is traced from Krysten Cunningham’s video, a theatrical meditation on speculative physics and multidimensional models, reflections on systems of communication by Christian Jendreiko, over to Adam Feldmeth’s often times not physically materialized investigations of the internal discursiveness of the artistic process, as well as psychologically dark material in Monika Stricker’s Sweat Piece. Analia Saban and Tobias Hantmann re-illuminate the possibilities of representation through painting.
Especially in Düsseldorf and the surrounding Rhineland (unlike as for example in Berlin), there is a long regional history tracing back to the 1960s in which minimal and conceptual tendencies have been located. Herein lies the connection to the American West as a cradle of conceptual art, and both here and there, the background radiation of minimal and conceptual art produces contemporary approaches which extend and exceed these models.
Lick it into Shape - Friending the Ephemeral
Brandon Andrew, Young Chung, Public Fiction, Samara Golden, Alex Jasch, Cyril Kuhn, Davida Nemeroff, Paul Pescador
August 20 - September 20, 2012
Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA
Lick It into Shape is about shifting concepts on how ideas manifest. About the question as to how presentation shapes the presented. An impulse that finds a realization in many forms. The work that is open ended to the extent that it seems unfinished. “We are wanderers between the worlds and all we create are in-between stadiums”°. It's about the tension that arises between the possibilities of a situation and the need to put it into shape. The moment when a piece that was completed lives again and demands a new manifestation. Memory, archive and aspiration.*
We are time-bound beings. Because everything flows and withdraws from our grasp, we create images that are supposed to last, to carry us through time and anchor us. But the image and the artwork as a stationary, fixed manifestation have conceptually served their time more than half a century ago. The ephemeral in art has been explored since the 1960s and today we deal with the background radiation of the radical work of Dieter Roth, Bas Jan Ader, Felix Gonzales Torres and the like.
The exhibition gathers a group of artists (all but one) living and working in Los Angeles, whose endeavors present a broad spectrum on the notions of the fleeting and the elapsing. The focus is put on this aspect of their production in a selection of works, some of which are created specifically for the show. While feeling obliged to the idea of radicalism and pushing the boundaries of their work, today there is no need to strike a blow for the elusive. The inclusion of ephemeral concepts by the artists in Lick it into Shape is casual, part of the repertoire, and applied distinctively in each approach.
* Excerpt from the invitation to the artists to participate in Lick it into Shape
° Christian Jendreiko in a publication on Juergen Staack and Tobias Hantmann
JB JURVE at Co/Lab: Steven Aldahl, David Burch, John Seal
Friday, 28 September 2012 - Sunday, 30 September 2012
Artra CoLab Artfair
Barker Hanger, Santa Monica CA
Geoff Tuck - To the Lighthouse
David Bell, John Burtle, Young Chung, Adam Feldmeth, Daniel Lara, Carrie Mc Ilwain, Davida Nemeroff, Ivette Soler, Geoff Tuck, Alexander Wolff, Aaron Wrinkle
May 19, 2012 - June 19, 2012
JB Jurve is thrilled beyond belief to announce:
Geoff Tuck - To the Lighthouse; an exhibition with David Bell, John Burtle, Young Chung, Adam Feldmeth, Daniel Lara, Carrie Mc Ilwain, Davida Nemeroff, Ivette Soler, Geoff Tuck, Alexander Wolff, Aaron Wrinkle
Geoff Tuck is a Los Angeles based artist, best known as founder of Notes on Looking - Writings on Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His writing, poetry, photos, videos and drawings, revolve around the act of observing.
His work interprets strategies of the Situationist’s drifter, witnessing art’s fleeting moments like a flanuer. His encounters with art and artists bring together a disparate community in a city that is as vast as Los Angles. Geoff’s material as an artist is the art world itself and his work presents a peculiar incarnation of the term of the soziale Plastik. As he states: “For the past two years I have gotten to know a lot of people and written about them, now I want to connect them.”
My Words
they cut and lead me nowhere
they mock me in my dreams
Each sentence causes shame
and every phrase brings me pain
Queasy - my gut wrenches
Tight - my butt clenches
Why do I show this stuff? Where can I hide?
Ego and desire, they drive me
Neurosis is my master
Attention my fuel
Hah!
And then I find something crazy, and am saved from my navel-gazin worrries
Briefly perhaps
But for long enough to get the work done
Posted on Notes on Looking, February 16, 2012 by Geoff Tuck
Dear friends,
Tuesday, June 19 is the final day for To the Lighthouse. JB Jurve will open at noon and then close with a toast at 8:00 PM.
We presented the work of eleven artists (plus a few more), each of whom as individuals support and investigate the work of other artists. In addition to this exhibition, we have had nine thought-provoking events: parties and conversations that will live in legend and that have served to join together several of our city's art worlds.
It was my hope to discover whether artworks and events produced by such artists would indicate their social engagement, and if in relation to each other they might serve as a group critique of the top down, heirarchical, single source art culture that currently prevails. Quoting a friend on a recent Parkfield retreat, "What if art objects exist as evidence of other experiences and as conduits to conversation?" Such a condition wouldn't obviate the art object, but it might lead outward, toward questions raised in conversaton by others, away from answers.
And as we move away from answers, the world gets more interesting.
Join us Tuesday at JB Jurve as we look at the work, talk, shake hands and give hugs and begin to understand what it is we have done.
David Bell, John Burtle, Young Chung, Adam Feldmeth, Daniel Lara, Carrie McIlwain, Davida Nemeroff, Ivette Soler, Geoff Tuck, Alexander Wolff, Aaron Wrinkle with an in-play addition from Andy Robert. Our hosts have been Marcus Herse and Michael Rey.
Thanks to all the above,
and thank you.
Geoff Tuck
Vous Play
Roy Dowell, Bart Exposito, Julie Kirkpatrick, Lari Pittman
March 17, 2012 - April 7, 2012
And/or/poison/remedy/inside/outside/good/evil/homer/bart/speech/writing/plus/minus/seinfeld/friends/accident/essence/green/orange/binary/singular/thelibrary/theweb/jessica/allison/amber/notamber/white/black/modern/postmodern/1001/1010/appearance/appearance/center/margins/signifier/signified/berlin/rio/presence/absence/food/fecese/master/slave/safari/firefox/sex/kids/self/other/vague/precise/benign/profound/right/wong
Aaron GM: BIGZONE - Everything #1
February 18, 2012, 7 -10pm
The moment that life is upon us, the moment that our senses have shifted to the very thing that is around, in and of us. Is a simply radical and radically simple move into the very truth of our being here, present. Present to the moment that is infinitely upon us. The beingness of the moment, the simplest thing in the world; being, is the most infinite and radical. Being is the greatest form of mobility, for it absorbs all others. The present moment is the new readymade. The present moment is in a continual state of birth and death. Just like a dancer in a dance. Just as a body moves and thus affirms the presentness of our being, our aliveness in the moment. This is no joke, this is simply put: what is. There is no exit, yet the exit is affirmation. Affirmation from within the mundane. This is the revolutionary act; this is the act that empowers the individual in the face of alienation. This is the Judo reversal upon the attacking landscape. Affirmation of what is, must begin with our bodies. It is phenomenological and is in an instant a feeling, a concept, extending to the farthest reaches of the cosmos, the breath of being. Embody then the authenticity of your movement. Take back what connects us, make submissive what alienates us. Then perform upon the stage you have shifted into consciousness. The present moment is a revelation. Something already there, laid bare. For transparency is a fact of vision. Redirected into authentic movement and thus empowerment, thus expression, thus self-love, thus love of everyman. And it is equal, available and free.
Aaron GM 2012