P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave
at the intersection of 46th Ave in Long Island City
New York, NY
New York
North America
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Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out On view May 3, 2012—September 10, 2012
MoMA PS1 presents the first survey of Lara Favaretto (b. Treviso, 1973), comprising a dozen works from the past fifteen years, as well as new pieces created specifically for the exhibition. Organized by MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey, the show will also feature the first presentation of the extensive archive of images that the artist has collected as source material and inspiration.
Favaretto's installations and audio, sculptural, and kinetic works balance between failure and aspiration. A sense of resignation to the forces of decay and obsolescence runs throughout her work—most visibly in her minimal cubes made of confetti, which decompose during the period of their display. Favaretto represents the eventuality of loss through a recuperative memorialization, often recycling elements from previous installations as new works, reusing discarded industrial materials, and encasing found paintings in loose tapestries of wool yarn. The memorial form is pointedly evoked in a series that the artist calls "momentary monuments," which loosely adopt but also subvert the vernacular of public sculpture. Beginning with a swamp that she created at the back of the Giardini in Venice to commemorate twenty historical figures who have disappeared, and continuing with her sandbagging of a 1896 statue of Dante Alighieri in a civic square in Trento, she has conceived a series of sculptures and public installations that draw attention to the futility and impermanence of memorials themselves. Favaretto memorializes the body in a similar state of limbo, often through mechanical representations that gradually degrade: car wash brushes whirl repeatedly, wearing themselves down against metal plates; a platoon of compressed air cylinders randomly empties itself, blowing silent party favors. These animist machines celebrate their own absurdity, taking on lives of their own, while also reflecting ours. http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/350/
In conjunction with Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 at The Museum of Modern Art, an eight-channel video and sound installation especially developed for the exhibition is now on display in the MoMA PS1 Performance Dome. Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider founded Kraftwerk In Düsseldorf in 1970 and set up the pioneering Kling Klang studio, where all Kraftwerk's albums have been conceived and composed. By the mid-1970s, Kraftwerk had achieved international recognition for its revolutionary experimentation with sound and imagery. Its compositions, which feature distant melodies, multilingual vocals, robotic Beats, custom-made vocoders, and computer speech, anticipated the impact technology would have on art and everyday life, capturing the human condition in an age of mobility and telecommunication. Kraftwerk's innovative looping techniques and mechanized rhythms, which had a major influence on the early development of hip-hop and electronic dance music, remain among the most commonly sampled sounds across a wide range of musical genres. Kraftwerk uses robotics and other technical innovations in its live performances, illustrating the belief that humans and machines make equal contributions in the creation of art. http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/351/
Max Brand: no solid footing – (trained) duck fighting a crow On view April 19, 2012
Max Brand (German, b. 1982) paints with a wide variety of media including sidewalk chalk, crayon, pencil, marker, spray paint, ballpoint pen, chlorine bleach, and oil and acrylic paints. His chaotic lines, lush washes, and indeterminate stains create thickets of representational noise that are as exuberant as they are deceptively scatterbrained. The artist’s line quality, often similar to a doodle or illustration, is both idle and obsessive, serving for Brand as the raw material of the mind, as a transcription of the automatic or subconscious. Taken as a whole, his visions—drawn as much from cinema, ceramics, comic books, Japanese anime, and graphic design as from painting itself—hint at codes or constellations of thought. http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/353
