ART 519: Exhibition Design

Friday, February 9, 2018

Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘‘Austin,’

Ellsworth Kelly, Austin, 2015 (Interior, facing south). © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation. Courtesy of Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.

Ellsworth Kelly spent the second half of his twenties in Paris, enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and neatly sidestepping America’s growing fervor for Abstract Expressionism in the years following World War II. He spent much of his time alone (“I didn’t speak French very well, and I liked the silence,” he once said), often travelling through the countryside sketching centuries-old churches.

“It was a really formative period for him,” Carter Foster, a curator at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art, told Artsy. “He was fascinated by the Judeo-Christian traditions of art history more generally, but he particularly loved Romanesque and Cistercian medieval architecture.”

These early preoccupations would resurface in grand fashion during the last years of Kelly’s career, in his final and most monumental work: Austin, a 2,715-square-foot building constructed alongside the Blanton’s existing home on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The work opens to the public on February 18th, the culmination of a multi-year effort by the museum to make the artist’s design a reality.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions at the GRI

Wrapped Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland, 1967–68, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Part of 12 Environments: 50 Years of the Kunsthalle Bern, Bern, 1968.

Harald Szeemann (11 June 1933 – 18 February 2005) was a Swiss curator and artist and art historian. Having curated more than 200 exhibitions, many of which have been characterized as groundbreaking, Szeemann is said to have helped redefine the role of an art curator. It is believed that Szeemann elevated curating to a legitimate art-form itself. Read more on wikipedia...

Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions

February 6–May 6, 2018, GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

One of the most distinguished advocates of conceptual art and postminimalism, and a figure who became synonymous with the advent of globalism in contemporary art, Harald Szeemann (Swiss, 1933–2005) developed a new form of exhibition-making that centered on close collaborations with artists and a sweeping international vision of contemporary culture. Szeemann's exhibitions covered vast areas of research, challenging traditional narratives of art history and often embracing creative fields outside the visual arts. For each of his more than 150 installations and exhibitions, Szeemann added materials to his vast library and research archive, which he referred to as the "Museum of Obsessions." His museum comprised not only the physical place of the archive but also a mental landscape that encompassed all moments of genius and artistic intensity treated in Szeemann's exhibitions, both realized and unrealized, past and future.

This exhibition is divided into thematic sections. "Avant-Gardes" addresses Szeemann's early exhibitions and his engagement with the artistic vanguards of the 1960s and early 1970s. "Utopias and Visionaries" explores a trilogy of exhibitions Szeemann organized in the 1970s and 1980s that rewrote the narrative of early 20th-century modernism as a story of alternative political movements, mystical worldviews, and utopian ideologies. "Geographies" examines Szeemann's own Swiss identity, his penchant for travel, and his focus on broad international exhibitions and regional presentations later in his career.

Tuesday, February 6, 2018

How Meow Wolf’s immersive, psychedelic art resists our urge to Instagram everything

My brother and I weren’t sure what we were in line for. It was a Sunday morning in mid-October and we stood outside a former bowling alley, miles from the art galleries along Santa Fe’s Canyon Road.

The sun was hot, and the line moved slowly. Above us, in yellow, pink, blue, and green, the sign read ‘MEOW WOLF.’ What that meant—and what we were doing here—was still a mystery.

According to Caity Kennedy, one of Meow Wolf’s several art directors and co-founders, we were in an enviable position. She prefers people not know what they’re walking into. Early on, people would come up to Kennedy and say, “My friend told me to come here, but I have no idea what it is.” She would reply: “Well, you’re here, so how about I not tell you? Because I won’t be able to explain it anyway, and the less you know, the better.”

If she’s pressed—by me, for instance—she’ll say that Meow Wolf is a Santa Fe-based collective of more than 70 artists that creates “‘massive, immersive, multimedia installations.” Since that doesn’t help most people, she’ll often start listing things the installations are sort of like: “‘A haunted house... choose your own adventure... dreamscape... playground…’ the list sort of morphs depending on who I’m talking to.”

The group’s latest work, The House of Eternal Return, similarly defies description. Vince Kadlubek, another of Meow Wolf’s co-founders, has called it a work of “immersive storytelling,” a “psychedelic indoor park,” and “Myst meets Peewee’s Playhouse.”

Though none of these descriptions quite captures the artwork’s hallucinatory weirdness, each contains a trace of truth. Massive? Check: The installation spans 39,000 square feet, all of it built inside the former Silva Lanes bowling alley, purchased in 2015 by Game of Thrones author and Santa Fe resident George R. R. Martin. (Martin paid for basic tenant improvements, then turned the building over to Meow Wolf, charging a well-below-market rent.)

Immersive? Completely. Once visitors get past the ticket counter (admission is $20, $14 for kids), they walk through a door and find themselves standing before a giant Victorian house, built to scale and fully furnished: bowls in the cupboard, blankets on the beds, and, throughout the house, the ephemera of the fictional family who owns it, the Seligs.

Read the rest at Curbed...