#12 ANGELORENSANZFOUNDATI ON
NEWSLETTER Nov ember2, 2011
_ cont ent s AtOr ens anzFoundat i on Rus s i a nAr t sFe s t i v a l 2011
Cul t ur ei nNY PERFORMA11
RecentEv ent s “ Cont a c t ”Summi t 2011 Phot ogr a phi cRe por t
OnTV Be nj a mi nBa gby , “ Be owul f ”
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At Orensanz Foundation
Russian Arts Festival November 14 - December 14, 2011
T
he Angel Orensanz Foundation and the Russian Academy of Arts proudly present the Russian Arts Festival, 2011.
Russian Arts Festival, 2011 November 14 – December 14
As a cultural institution, Orensanz Foundation is proud to host again this festival celebrating Russian arts and culture in all its expressions. Our organization has established numerous links with Russia for the last twenty years, well promoting its artists, well bringing Angel Orensanz’s artwork to several Russian institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, the Hermitage or the Alexander Pushkin Museum, among others.
Angel Orensanz Foundation, Inc. (Basement gallery) 172 Norfolk Street, New York NY, 10002. T. 212 529 7194
In this occasion, The Russian Arts Festival will pay special tribute to the Russian New Yorkers killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11, as well as to the artistic contribution of Zurab Tsereteli, director of the Russian Academy of Fine Art and a prolific artist with numerous pieces around the world. For this reason, and as a remembrance of the ones disappeared on that tragic events, the festival will present the exhibition “Photos of the WTC” by Anatoly Pronin and Angel Orensanz’s video for 9/11. Other artists included in our program are Grigory Gurevich, Andrey Bogoslowsky, Alexander Kedrin, Serge Sinitsyn and Natalia Nordman. Photography, sculpture, video and painting will be presented in our “Russian Month”. We welcome you all to enjoy it! Al Orensanz Director
Click here for the complete program and artist’s bios foundation@orensanz.org
H
ailing from the Bronx with roots in the Dominican Republic, artist-brother duo Felix and Dexter Ciprián work in art, photography, performance, and film. They began their joint venture in 2007 at the annual Deitch Art Parade in SoHo with a piece that was part performance, part sculpture, part event. Since then, their work has been an ongoing effort in the breaking down of labels and categories. Their work embodies an exciting urban edge and an authentic insider-outsider art hope. They have been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, ArtNet Magazine; their latest collaboration “Se Acerca Un Ciclon”, premiered at BAX (Brooklyn Arts Exchange). Their upcoming exhibition, “Felix & Dexter Present: FELIX & DEXTER” will open on November 21st at the Angel Orensanz Foundation.
Exhibition Opening November 21 | 6pm Angel Orensanz Foundation, Inc. (Museum Level) 172 Norfolk Street, New York NY, 10002. T. 212 529 7194 www.felixanddexter.com
Cultural Events in NY
PERFORMA 11
Founded and curated by RoseLee Goldberg
O
nly a few days ahead of the awaited starting date of Performa 11, the fourth edition of the internationally acclaimed Biennial of visual art performance, the event, to be held all over New York City, has already grabbed a considerable amount of press attention. It is probably due to its innovative, flawlessly researched nature, or maybe to the fact that 40,000 people participated in last Performa’s edition in 2009. Participation and originality can easily be named the key words that make up the essence of this unique biennial. Under the meticulous fostering of RoseLee Goldberg, Peforma’s Founding Director and Curator, and through a collaboration with a network of more than 50 curators and over 50 art institutions across the city, the organization will inaugurate an ambitious program that is said to break down the boundaries between visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, design, and the culinary arts. Its motto? Act as a think tank that succeeds at bringing people together, not only to witness the countless, wide encompassing performances, but also, and particularly, to get actively and fearlessly involved in them. The Angel Orensanz Foundation is no stranger to the enticing happenings organized by Performa in previous editions. As it’s the case, during the 2005 first Performa Biennial, the Museum for African Art presented at our venue South African artist Berni Searle’s About to Forget, and Home and Away, curated by Laurie Ann Farrell. The two screen projection pieces were installed in the magic, evocative space of the 160-year old synagogue.
Following Searle’s projections, the work of Paul D. Miler, aka DJ Spooky was showed. Reset reconstructed the famous Nam June Paik’s 1971 performance TV Cello with a live performance, composed sound, and a multi-media projection. Nonetheless, RoseLee Goldberg was already acquainted with the Orensanz Foundation space one year earlier, when she wrote an article for Artforum reviewing Catherine Sullivan’s Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land performance, part of the 2004 Whitney Museum Biennial. If you still don’t know and are wondering who is this prodigy of a woman able to put up such a vast, discipline-spanning programming and at the same time engage numerous collaborators –both public and private institutions—, you’d rather go on reading. RoseLee Goldberg is one of the pioneers in the study of performance art through her writing and curating (The Kitchen, New York) during the last four decades, on top of teaching at NYU since 1987. Relying upon her extensive experience and well-respected scholar career, Goldberg’s brainchild was born in 2004, with the intention, in her own words, “to provoke a new chapter in performance history”. It is worth noting that one of the starting points that enthused and encouraged her to create a performance biennial comes from seeing the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s video Turbulent (1998); its title explicitly describes the gripping potential as well as raving emotions it can provoke in the viewer –not least the awareness about socio-political issues in her native country.
Mai-Thu Perret, Love Letters in Ancient Brick © Marie Lusa
And this is how, steadfastly, a new performance organization and biennial entirely dedicated to probe into the critical, experimental role of performance and the many paths it can follow in the present century, has reached a well-deserved, international reference role, sparking remarkable artistic and cultural events, exciting collaborations, and definitive content and documentation gathered into various Performa catalogues. On the occasion of the 2009 publication, Performa: Back to Futurism, The New York Public Library hosted a conversation between RoseLee Goldberg and artists Wangechi Mutu and Shirin Neshat, on October 5, 2011. “We’re setting up a radical form of urbanism. We’re very aware of the audience moving through the city, and we want to hold them and give them specific experiences and provoke different memories”, said Golderg. Performa’s team of curators and producers – including Defne Ayas, Mark Beasley, Esa Nickle, Douglas Phillips, and Lana Wilson—, and the fact that the work to be showcased is brand new and comprises a total of 120 pieces, are two of its assets that lead to reassure and predict a successful outcome, as well as a long-lasting clout in the field of performance. The Biennial is structured in two central parts, the so-called Performa Commissions and the Performa Premieres. As the name clearly indicates, the former refers to live pieces specifically commissioned to the artists by Goldberg and her team of curators in tow. Therefore, they provide artists a flawless support for the development and production of their new performing projects due to
be presented in the international context of a biennial. It’s also a great opportunity for some artists that don’t have much or any experience in the medium of live performance; hence, the diligent, devoted work of the curators’ team and their expertise, are of much help for them to hone their artistic skills and carry out their ideas –not least in financial terms, considering the rocketing budgets some contemporary art performances entail. As Goldberg puts it, “these awards allow artists to take off in whatever directions they choose and bring their ideas to life in extraordinary ways (…) For many artists, their Performa commissions were their first major projects and they have subsequently gone on to build new work with such a cross-generational group of artist, ranging from up-and-coming artists like Simon Fujiwara to legendary figures like Robert Ashley.” The other main program of the Biennial, Performa Premieres, was only launched in 2009 with the attractive trademark of presenting exceptional live works that have never been seen in New York –not an habitual fact for the city art insiders. The role of the organization is to find the perfect frame for every piece, in the form of a bespoke venue that can contextualize and enhance the nature of the projects. Highlights of Performa Commissions, awaited with big expectation, include names such as, Elmgreen & Dragset (Elmgreen, 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark and Dragset, 1969, Trondeim, Norway), Shirin Neshat (1957, Qazvin, Iran), filmmaker Guy Madin (1956, Winnipeg, Australia), Mika Rottenberg (1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Tarek Atoui (1980, Beirut,
Lebanon) or Gerard Bryne (1969, Dublin, Ireland), among others. Admittedly, well-known figures abound in this year’s program, as it did last year’s with the captivating presence of Tacita Dean (1965, Canterbury, UK) and William Kentridge (1955, Johannesburg, South Africa). Elmgreen & Dragset’s Happy Days in the Art World –plus a special live retrospective— will be featured as a world premiere on the opening night, conveniently turned into a benefit dinner event. If you can afford it, don’t miss the opportunity of seeing actors Joseph Fiennes and Charles Edwards impersonate two struggling artists, in a wryly told story about the pressures to succeed in the increasingly marketdriven, celebrity-obsessed contemporary art world. Madin would present a live recreation and re-staging of his 1998 feature film, Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed; this time, with audiovisual additions and a musical score with the likes of Mum and Sigur Ros’ female members. But it is undoubtedly Shirin Neshat’s directorial endeavor the sparkling gem of the Commissions. OverRuled is based on her 2003 film, The Last Word, and will showcase live actors and projections in a captivating, almost harrowing courtroom scene piece. She says of the experience: “In the magic of the live situation, there could be disasters or it could be unpredictably wonderful, depending on the chemistry of the audience and the cast”. The film was written by artist and filmmaker Shoja Azari, and deals with the censorship of women artists in the Muslim world, mirroring also the eternal human suffering that pervades at political trials. Neshat will transport and re-arrange the film in her
usual stylized way of working, with a poetic beauty that entwines lyrical fragments of feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad, excerpts from the Qu’ran and from the Old Testament –all interpreted by celebrated Iranian singer Mohsen Namjoo. A noteworthy new discovery is iona rozeal brown (1966, Washington, DC). With battle of yestermore, the painter ventures in her first work of live performance. It is an homage to the “onnagata”, –male actors who impersonate women in Japanese kabuki theatre— which happens to be one of her main influences since she went as a little girl to see a Kabuki theater show in Washington with her mother. “Kabuki is color and bright lights and beautiful sounds and white makeup; it never left me”. In her paintings she absorbs this Japanese inspiration and blends it with hip-hop culture motifs in a unique, hybrid merging. The latter is a direct consequence of her second job as a DJ, and the influence of ‘vogueing’ –the elegantly precise, funky dancing style made famous in the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1960´s. House of Ninja voguing legends Benny and Javier will be part of the live performance at Skylight Soho, on November 17-18 to dance for all of you. Don’t miss it! Regarding some of the outstanding Performa Premieres to come, Love Letters in Ancient Brick, by Mai-Thu Perret (1976, Geneva, Switzerland) looks as a not to be missed event. Presented in partnership with the Swiss Institute and held at Joyce Soho, for her first dance project the artist will collaborate with choreographer Laurence Yadi to present a contemporary ballet adaptation of George
Harriman’s Krazy Kat comic, which wittily delves into the surreal love triangle between a lighthearted, simpleminded cat, the mischievous antagonistic mouse, and a shielding police dig. There will be a five-dancers rotating cast and a singer-narrator. The Premieres program includes also pieces by Robert Ahsley (1930, Ann Arbor, Michigan), Zhou Xiaohu (1960, Changzhou, China), or Boris Charmatz (1973, Chambéry, France). Interestingly enough, several galleries and nonprofit venues will introduce the audience to different art projects in cooperation with Performa. As such, the soon to be inaugurated new space of e-flux is presenting on November 5, Out of Town: Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, curated by prominent art critic, professor and philosopher Boris Groys. Collective Actions was founded back in 1976 by A. Monastyrski, and have since undertaken more than 125 performances, marking an essential contribution to Moscow Conceptualism movement. In addition to this, the biennial organization has also the time and energy to make accessible to the public the Performa Hub (233 Mott Street). Designed by nOffice and open seven days a week, it functions as the biennial’s headquarters and as a
venue for special performances, screenings, panel discussions, as well as a visitor information center, adequately furnished with a lounge space and the inevitable bookshop. With perfect timing, and as part of the Performa Intensive program –a new curatorial and arts administration course for graduate studies– NYU welcomed last Monday, October 17, within its Public Lectures series, Jens Hoffmann (1974, San José, Costa Rica), writer and curator based in San Francisco, where he is the director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts and curator, alongside Adriano Pedrosa, of this year’s Istanbul Biennial. In a highly interesting and inspiring talk, titled Curatorial and Biennials Ambivalence, Hoffmann made an adamant statement about the nature of the curatorial practice. From his point of view, while many curators nowadays are far more concerned with the social and political aspects of art –he cited the brilliant exhibition Living as Form, recently on view at The Historic Essex Street Market– he asserted the nature of the curating activity as one closely connected to exhibition making, thus centered on the artwork itself and how it is displayed and presented to the audience. According to Hoffmann, and as paradoxical as it may seem, the only way to move forward nowadays involves not abandoning the ‘normal’ exhibition
Collective Actions, “The Third Variant,” Gorky village, 28 May 1978 © e-flux
making premises, the traditional ones. Having said this, however, it doesn’t mean a come back to some old, rigid, and conventionally dull way of curating. He precisely discussed about what were the standards of quality and professionalism in curatorial practice, and emphasized the process of breaking through certain codes and rules from long time established. This was the departure point indeed for this year’s Istanbul Biennial. Pedrosa and Hoffmann sought to make a strong argument in favor of the continuity of the classical exhibition making when tackling the challenge of curating the 2011 Biennial.
directly from his work. They are, namely, Untitled (Abstraction); Untitled (History); Untitled (Passport); Untitled (Death by Gun); Untitled (Ross).
Repelled by the idea of biennials’ exhibitions used as an attraction for tourists, and also trying to avoid a biennial as a social-political project in itself, this year’s Istanbul’s art event –comprised in two warehouses, next to each other, where seemingly metallic boxes in different sizes act as ‘containers’ for the five different sections, signed by SANAA architecture studio– takes its starting point from the Cuban artist, Felix Gonzalez Torres (1957-1996). The cue isn’t as much an explicit quote –none of his works are exhibited— as it is a conceptual, inspirational guide, with the formal aspects of his production made evident in the Biennial’s graphic design, and the themes that name and structure each section of the show, taken
Marta Arenal
With the prospect of this unique performance biennial that has so far had a great impact on the contemporary art scene, and has already arouse substantial interest and expectancy in varied circles, it is time to tune your calendar and save the date for Performa 11’s heavy-loaded programming.
PERFORMA 11 November 1 – 21, 2011 For more information and a complete calendar, click here
Recent Events
“Contact” Summit 2011 Re-Cap & Photographic Report
T
he 2011 Contact Con Summit was hosted at the Angel Orensanz Foundation last Thursday, October 20. This convention of new innovative ideas for the future proved to be a great success. Douglas Rushkoff was the convention’s honored host and mediator for the day. This all-day convention started promptly at 9 A.M. with a series of “provocations” from the featured participants. James Vasile of Freedom Box, Laura Flanders of GRITtv, and Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation, were among the dozen or so provocation speakers. They spurred ideas and thoughts of the latest net developments and challenges, alternative currency, gamification, etc. The duration of the convention consisted of teachin sessions and meetings to discuss new ideas and projects. There would be over twenty meetings going on simultaneously all throughout the synagogue. Rushkoff proclaimed, “We have to end the day making things!” The proposed ideas centered around this one question by Rushkoff, “What concrete step can we take to release a true concept for the network era?” There would be over twenty
meetings going on simultaneously all throughout the synagogue. Rushkoff proclaimed, “We have to end the day making things!” The proposed ideas centered around this one question by Rushkoff, “What concrete step can we take to release a true concept for the network era?” In addition, there was a Bazaar, which transformed the former synagogue into a marketplace of innovative ideas and projects from a number of participants, organizations and companies. This was an opportunity for the participants to network, conduct demos and compete for the ‘Innovation Awards’. There were three awards given of $10,000 each (courtesy of Pepsi) and free campaigns on IndiGogo. The winners were: - Fayetteville Free Library Fab: A library that aims to be the first U.S. library to build a free public access. A Fab Lab is, “a collection of commercially available machines and parts linked by software and processes developed for making things.” - Free Network Foundation: An organization that
is dedicated in the creation of a censorship-proof, disruption-resistant, global peer-to-peer network. - FreedomBox Foundation: A free software operating system (and free applications), designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. There were also four additional projects chosen among the series of meetings that convened throughout the day to see further development. They were: - Upgrading Democracy: An effort to use the net to enact the new forms of democracy—Dynamic Democracy, Liquid Democracy and Delegable Proxy voting. - Local Foodsharing Platform (The Food Matchlt Project): To identify local food matching needs, inventory existing matching tools and adapt existing tools in coordinated “makeathons.” - “Kick-Stopper” Crowdsourced Unfunding: An effort to bring banks under democratic control and
create a mechanism for organizing and coordinating large scale debt strike and divestment campaigns. - Collaboration Matchmaking Application: A matchmaking service to bring artists and “geeks” together with other sectors. To learn more about these organizations and projects and how to get involved and stay connected, please visit the Contact website “We came together to declare and release the greater potential of our networks to make a better world.” – Douglas Rushkoff.
Mary Paulyshun
ON TV
Arts from the Orensanz Benjamin Bagby and Sequentia
PROGRAM November 8, 2011 | 7:30PM Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf
On April 11 and 13, 2003 artist performer Benjamin Bagby (from the ensemble Sequentia) returned to the Angel Orensanz Foundation with a Jon Aron production of the legendary Anglo Saxon poem. Historians believe Beowulf was written in the early 8th century by a single author after England became Christian, while pagan habits and thought still exerted a strong influence on the culture. Benjamin Bagby, dressed in simple, unassuming black, on a stage illuminated as if by candles, took the role of the chieftain’s bard, recreating the chilling and bloodthirsty tale of Beowulf. In the revered medieval tradition of itinerant weaver of stories, Bagby accompanied his expressive tenor voice with a six-string lyre. He improvised melodies using a brilliant array of dramatic rhetorical techniques. In his 75 minute performance Bagby transported the audience back to a time when monsters roamed the earth. The performance was in the original AngloSaxon with projected subtitles. A previous presentation of Bagby’s Beowulf at the Angel Orensanz Center was reviewed in Artscape Magazine’s Spring 2001 issue by Derek Bentley in his article, “Lars Lubovitch and Benjamin Bagby’s Beowulf: The Fall of the Spoken Word.”
“(...) For seven nights of last January, Benjamin Bagby came to the Orensanz Foundation from Cologne, Germany to face an audience of 300 people. At 8 pm sharp, the lights on the stage centered on a visceral screen that would jolt the rows of academics, students of ancient and Anglo-Saxon dialects and other university bound young souls. At the end of two hours of solid uninterrupted old Anglo-Saxon narrative, the audience would exhaust every second of the post performance discussion with questions that seemed to calculate life and death, for everybody in the new gothic space. Is it out there a problem of Anglo Saxon identity? We are not talking just about nostalgia, of some ancestral common soul, but of a committed search for the genuine self. How is it possible that a dead language that very few individuals can understand, fascinates us so deeply? Through the songs, the screaming, the threats, the gesturing and the intonations of Benjamin Bugby, the language comes to us as a primal reality, as an object, as and objectual factor. It doesn’t depend on our understanding, or our nostalgia. Language breaks in from itself into the audience and manifests a deep solid reality beyond all the individual experiences”.
Benjamin Bagby
November 15, 2011 | 7:30 PM Sequentia’s Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper
This week’s episode presents a concert of Sequentia with Benjamin Bagby that took place on November 2, 2004 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper (10th-11th centuries). In our archives we also preserved Bernard Holland’s music preview of the concert that appeared in the October 25, 2004 issue of the New York Times: “One of the joys of performing thousand-year-old music is that we know so little about it. The 18th century, for example, is awash in musicology, causing musicians to anguish endlessly over what they should be doing and what they should not. Programs like Sequentia’s Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper at the Angel Orensanz Center for the Arts on the Lower East Side, can speculate with some freedom on the nature of medieval music. And if the result passes into fantasy, we are entertained handsomely nonetheless. This collection of secular songs and instrumental pieces comes to us –we think— from France, Germany and Italy by way of a manuscript copy found in Britain. The texts are Latin, the musical information left to us is basic, and if Benjamin Bagby of Sequentia and his three colleagues are to be believed, the users were traveling minstrels taking their roadshows from
aristocratic house to aristocratic house. Mr. Bagby, an American who has made a substantial career from ancient music in Cologne and now Paris, plays lyres and harps and sings with modern baritonal fullness. He also regaled his audience with a long and dramatic declamation in Icelandic: a retelling of the Rhinegold epic that originated in Central Europe. Everything on this delightful program seemed to come from somewhere else. Does it matter that we sometimes don’t know whether this music was sung or played, or how fast or slow, or with what kind of instruments, or in what kind of voice? Like Blue Moon or Tea for Two, the song Felix qui potuit boni is perhaps best left to the tempos, instruments and particular moods of whoever is doing the performing. Our own ears, furthermore, are so permeated with diatonic harmony and Wagnerian modulation that such ancient melodies will necessarily sound muted and severely bounded by modal scales. Yet at the same time, Sequentia’s two singers Agnethe Christensen and Eric Mentzel – and their virtuoso flutist, Norbert Rodenkirchen, impressed on listeners a sense of grace and order that never confused incivility with passion.”
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