Anthony McCall : Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture (Installation)

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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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“Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
Installation/Projections
Anthony McCall
2012
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Anthony McCall became known at the beginning of the 1970s for his unique light installations, the so-called solid light films. Hamburger Bahnhof is presenting the largest exhibition of his work to date. A selection of his works from the past ten years will be shown in the historic central hall of the museum. The spacious former railway station with its numerous windows will be transformed for the duration of the exhibition into a cinema space (black box), filled only with haze and veils of light.

McCall has developed a signature technique for his work: animated lines, drawn in white on black, are projected into a room filled with fine haze (originally smoke and dust) so that the two-dimensional drawings are articulated as seemingly tangible, sculptural forms in real space. The artist began this series with the influential film ‘Line Describing a Cone’ and then continued to develop the concept in installations like ‘Long Film for Four Projectors’ (1974).

Originally inspired by the filmic avant-garde, from the very beginning the artist turned cinema on its head, slowed it down, and created a fully traversable, populist space. Thus, his works exist at the borders of cinema, sculpture and drawing. The works are ephemeral, yet they seem tangible and physical. Projected horizontally through the space onto the wall, or – as in his most recent works – from the ceiling to the floor, they engulf the viewer in singular, slow-moving cones of light.

The horizontal works are still reminiscent of the viewing situation in the cinema, where the projector beam is cast lengthwise onto the screen. The vertical projections however, shine light from the ceiling and can be circumnavigated by the viewer, thus moving more fully into the sphere of sculpture. Here too, McCall uses organic, sinuous lines; many works also make direct reference to the body, as illustrated by titles like ‘Between You and I’ and ‘Meeting You Halfway’. Despite his conceptual and formal rigour, McCall always creates an open space where viewers can move around freely, interact with the works, communicate with each other or simply just stroll around. ~ Extract : Exhibition Concept

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Anthony McCall : ‘Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture’

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Berndnaut Smilde : ‘Nimbus’ Series (Probe – Exhibition)

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Probe is an exhibition space, with walls no higher then 1,10m and a surface of 6m2. It’s a test lab, an artistic skinner box. Its small and practical dimensions enables artists, to create works on scale, that are unthinkable in real life. The architecture of the space is flexible and wholly subservient to the exhibition: walls can be extended, doors can be removed, a floor made of glass, mirrors or wood, even the lighting situation can be fully controlled. Albeit a physical space, Probe is only accessible on the internet. The registration of the exhibition is the exhibition. Probe’s flexible dimensions proposes questions, as to the nature of space, seeing for example, that Probe can be wholly absorbed by the installation it contains. Exterior or interior, architecture or sculpture become relative notions. Probe can also be used as an exhibition making tool. The height, size and sequence of several works can be researched without having to drill a hole. Sketches used as dummies, scale warps achieved in seconds.

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Berndnaut is fascinated by anything in between… Corridors and clouds, not yet there
and not yet solid. What if a sculpture were to be nothing but thin air, smoke or scent?
We’d discuss the merits of one cloud over the other or would we just shut up in awe.

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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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‘Nimbus’ Series
Cloud in room, 2010
Lambda print, 75 x 112 cm
Probe#6, Suze May Sho, Arnhem
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Interview with Artist

1. How different was it to work in the space of Probe compared to other exhibition spaces?

I usually make a maquette of the space I’m going to work in. A maquette helps me to control and visualize an idea. It provides a clear overview. Probe itself is a model space, and worked for me in the same way: The manner of working is very direct and functional, and being so close to the subject changes the conception of materials and reality. The space is being emphasized. You create an ideal situation and therefore I think the model can stand for an idea. Working in Probe provides an additional point of view to exhibition making and that is an almost god-like position in which you have control over everything. I think it is similar to why people like model-train-landscaping. It’s having total power.

2. What did you want to create in Probe?

I imagined walking into a museum hall with just empty walls. The place even looked deserted. On the one hand I wanted to create an ominous situation. You could see the cloud as a sign of misfortune. You could also read it as an element out of the Dutch landscape paintings in a physical form in a classical museum hall. At the same time I wanted to make (for once) a very clear image, an almost cliché and cartoon like visualisation of having bad luck.

3. What obstacles did you run into?

The idea I had was going to be an ephemeral work. It would only exist as a photo. I thought this would work very well with the idea of Probe, as the exhibitions only exist in the form of documentation. I didn’t realize there is in fact a very physical aspect about Probe’s presentation. The 9 different perspectives of documentation make it possible for the spectator to wander around the space and create the opportunity of visiting the exhibition. Therefore with every shoot we had to make a new cloud and keep in account approximately the same lighting and position to create the illusion of physically walking through the space.

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Berndnaut Smilde : Website

Project Probe

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Joao Martinho Moura : ‘Supercollider Shape’ (Audiovisual)

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Lab for Electronic Arts and Performance, Berlin – 2nd December 2011

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A minimal audiovisual sculpture of sound and imagined
ink exploring Supercollider generative sound algorithms.

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Joao Martinho Moura : Website

Joao Martinho Moura : Vimeo

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legoman (AntiVJ) : ’3DESTRUCT’ (Audiovisual Installation)

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Originally trained as a graphic artist, he now devotes his time to developing a personal language using video and a wealth of projection techniques. His work is characterised by a desire to break out of the traditional formats of video-projection and finding ways to integrate video into the performance space. These ideas are developed and performed in the form of audiovisual performances, installations and scenography. Often being ‘in-situ’, his works are strongly influenced by questions linked to architecture.

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3Destruct an audiovisual installation
Scopitone Festival / Le Lieu Unique / Nantes / France

Visuals : Yannick Jacquet-Jeremie Peeters
Music : Thomas Vaquie
October 2011

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Legoman : Vimeo

AntiVJ : Website

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Zimoun : ‘Sculpting Sound’ (Installations)

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Solo Exhibition : The Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, USA.
October 11, 2011 – January 08, 2012

Curated by Matthew McLendon.

Using simple and functional components, Zimoun builds architecturally-minded platforms of sound. Exploring mechanical rhythm and flow in prepared systems, his installations incorporate commonplace industrial objects. In an obsessive display of curiously collected material, these works articulate a tension between the orderly patterns of Modernism and the chaotic forces of life. Carrying an emotional depth, the acoustic hum of natural phenomena blends effortlessly with electric reverberation in Zimoun’s minimalist constructions. (bitforms nyc)

The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanized works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the «artificial» and the «organic». It’s an artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviors in sound and motion. Zimoun creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns. (Tim Beck)

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Zimoun : Website

Bitforms

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John Knight : “Commemorative Plates” (Exhibition)

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

John Knight
“Commemorative Plate”
Greene Naftali
2011

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Greene Naftali is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist John Knight, his first solo exhibition in New York following his legendary shows at Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts, Co. Since the early 1970s John Knight has dedicated his practice to mapping the intersections of art, design, and institutional power through a series of spatial interventions and graphic maneuvers. Following closely on the architectural implications of Minimalism, Knight belongs to a generation of artists that has consistently addressed the ideological valences of constructed space.

Knight turns to the museum in an age of cultural expansion. In the last several years it has become necessary for museums to expand not simply to house their ever-growing collections, but also to stake their claim in a global tourist trade characterized by spectacle and speculation alike. In his set of commemorative plates, Knight offers a variety of graphics depicting a varied collection of extensions and new building wings. Omitting the footprints of the original historic buildings, Knight depicts these expansion projects both lost in space and lacking a center, a collection of eccentric shapes deflated of spectacular power. Drawing a radical equivalence between all these buildings, Knight shows them to be less exceptional feats of mastery than the result of a standard, repetitive demand. Together, the plates function as a strange collection of formal glyphs, a lexicon of the morphology of our time that binds together graphic and product design with the “autonomous” practice of architecture.

For the installation of this project Knight has evacuated Greene Naftali’s main gallery so as to turn it into a foyer replete with a sign advertising the exhibition. The sign bears the neologism Autotypes, a suggestive coinage that hints at a productive model informed by an unreflexive desire to create and expand. The installation of the plates themselves has been tucked away in two smaller rooms in back. Only a single vitrine containing a stack of plates emblazoned with footprints of the Guggenheim Museum’s ceaseless expansion is displayed in front. Somewhat precarious, the stack carries a faint echo of the Tower of Pisa as well as the original Guggenheim uptown. Removed from the wall and returned to their use value, these plates appear frozen on the brink of yet another celebration. [press]

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John Knight : Greene Naftali

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