Hope Ginsburg: Curated by Regine Basha Exhibition Catalogue

Hope Ginsburg

Hope Ginsburg Curated by Regine Basha March 24 - May 7, 2011

Board of Directors

CUE FELLOWS

Gregory Amenoff

Gregory Amenoff

Theodore S. Berger

Polly Apfelbaum

Sanford Biggers

Theodore S. Berger, Chair

Patricia Caesar

Ian Cooper

Thomas G. Devine

William Corbett

Thomas K.Y. Hsu

Eleanor Heartney

Vivian Kuan

Deborah Kass

Corina Larkin

Corina Larkin

Jan Rothschild

Jonathan Lethem

Brian D. Starer

Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow

curatorial

Carolyn Somers

Advisory Council

Lilly Wei

Gregory Amenoff Bill Berkson

Staff

William Corbett

Executive Director Jeremy Adams

Michelle Grabner Jonathan Lethem

Development Director Marni Corbett

Lari Pittman Thomas Roma

Programs Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese

Marjorie Welish

Programs Coordinator Ryan Thomas Gallery Assistant Jessica Gildea Development Assistant Alexandra Rose

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CUE Art Foundation is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit forum for contemporary art and cultural exchange that provides opportunities and resources for underrecognized artists. We value the astonishing diversity of creativity that artists provide and the importance of their activity in the social context of the city.

CUE provides artists, students, scholars and art professionals resources at many stages of their careers and creative lives. Our programs include exhibitions, publications, professional development seminars, educational outreach, symposia, readings and performances. Since 2002, we have operated from our 4,500 square foot storefront venue in the heart of New York’s Chelsea Arts District.

CUE exhibiting artists are chosen by their peers who are themselves selected by a rotating advisory council from across the country. This pluralistic process ensures that CUE consistently offers diverse viewpoints from multiple disciplines of artistic practice.

Simply put, we give artists their CUE to take center stage in the challenging world of art.

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Artist: Hope Ginsburg

I believe that the image is the great instrument of instruction. What a child gets out of any subject presented to him is simply the images which he himself forms with regard to it.

I believe that if nine-tenths of the energy at present directed towards making the child learn certain things, were spent in seeing to it that the child was forming proper images, the work of instruction would be indefinitely facilitated.

I believe that much of the time and attention now given to the preparation and presentation of lessons might be more wisely and profitably expended in training the child’s power of imagery and in seeing to it that he was continually forming definite, vivid, and growing images of the various subjects with which he comes in contact in his experience.

I believe that interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator.

I believe that these interests are to be observed as showing the state of development which the child has reached.

I believe that they prophesy the stage upon which he is about to enter.

I believe that only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood’s interests can the adult enter into the child’s life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully.

I believe that these interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below the surface and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest.

–—John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed”, The School Journal vol. 54; Jan. 1897: 77-80.

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Biography:

In a body of work that spans over a decade, Hope Ginsburg has engaged contexts such as corpoarations, universities, and farms, and has imagined who she can be within them. As employee, student, teacher, and researcher, she has made sense of those contexts through direct participation and generated projects in the form of contributions, oppositions, and propositions. Ginsburg’s Sponge project, which began at MIT in 2006, was born of that institution’s culture of pedagogy, experimentation, and learning by doing. Her shift in identity between student and teacher as she moved into the role of professor has continued to fuel the Sponge project for the last five years.

Ginsburg grew up outside of Philadelphia and received her BFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. After attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME, she moved to New York City, where for the next eight years she produced installations and performances. She then moved to Cambridge, MA to study at MIT where she received a Master of Science in Visual Studies.

Ginsburg has exhibited her work at venues such as MoMA PS1, New York, NY; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; SculptureCenter, New York, NY; and Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Germany. In addition, she has had solo exhibitions at Solvent Space, Richmond, VA; the Julia Friedman Gallery, New York, NY; and Parlour Projects, New York, NY. She has been a visiting artist at institutions including the Bauhaus University and NSCAD University.

Ginsburg served on the advisory board of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies from 2004-2006 and she has been on the board of Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, PA since 2008.

In the fall of 2007, she moved to Richmond, VA where she is Assistant Professor in the Art Foundation and Painting & Printmaking departments at VCUarts. Her project Sponge (2007-present) is currently headquartered at the VCUarts Anderson Gallery.

For more information, please visit: www.hopeginsburg.com www.spongespace.net/blog www.spongespace.net/colablablab

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Curator: Regine Basha

A boundary object is a term used primarily in sociology as a way of pointing to a form, an issue or body of knowledge that, in one community, might have one kind of use-value, while in another community a wholly different one. The term has also found traction in fields such as computer science and environmental activism.

For instance, when considering the issues related to ‘water’ or bodies of water as a boundary object, the (sometimes conflicting) positions from environmental activists, biologists, health officials, and homeland security must come into play. Though more often ‘entities’ than objects, the discussion around boundary objects could parlay easily into the work of Hope Ginsburg.

Ginsburg creates structured, yet informal scenarios (actual objects as well as situations) for the very purpose of generating a more participatory hybrid model for knowledge production and discovery. The materials she brings in—felt, sponges, bees, and other organic matter—are often symbolic in their porousness, liquidity or material properties, and are as significant to the work as the gatherings that form around them. As an artist who comes to the field with a Masters of Science in visual studies from MIT and an undergraduate degree in sculpture from Tyler in Philadelphia, Ginsburg’s position as an artist, or ‘maker’ resembles a community organizer and activist with a strong belief in the potency of visual and tactile forms.

Her work, or labor really, has focused recently on university settings, (she currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University), or as part of interdisciplinary initiatives with factories and science labs. In fact, this marks the first instance in which an exhibition of several different projects from the past several years are on view together in a traditional gallery setting.

Ginsburg comes from a generation of artists who, in the 1990s, were thoughtfully revisiting artists such as Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark and Mierle Ladermen Ukeles, and who struggled with what to do with the cultish, but important legacy of Joseph Beuys. Investigating the social landscape of ‘the everyday’ and the critiques of institutional hegemony became, for many, a point of departure. Though this history might have propelled Ginsburg into the mode she currently works in, much of her ideas and methodology also arise out of critical pedagogy, such as in the writings of Paulo Freire, John Dewey and The Pragmatists. These continuums, alongside the rising popularity of DIY movements in the past decade, have created a timely context and relevancy to her roving, maker-oriented gatherings.

As time-based scenarios, Ginsburg’s gatherings may, at any given time resemble a play, a home economics class, a science lab, a flea market, a factory, or absurdist theater, but are not ever any of these things categorically. Smack between realism and surrealism, her parallel universe is formed through a shuffle; the object6

making process as living symbolic order, the teacher as student and the collective as microcosm for a radical utopian society. Ginsburg’s disarming personality and contagious energy shapes the character of the projects at the onset (perhaps even in a performative way), but the project’s viral progress is driven by the group of participants/collaborators and their own knowledge base.

Though the development of such projects on view here such as Sponge, Colablablab and Maker’s Market, are thoroughly tracked by video, blogs and narrative text to account for their collaborative format and aggregate information, one could argue that it is the objects—or boundary objects—that become in themselves vital entities of progress.

Biography: Regine Basha has been curating critically acclaimed exhibitions and projects independently for more than a decade. She has worked with contemporary art institutions and public spaces in New York City and Austin, TX as well as globally in cities such as Berlin, Cairo, Istanbul, and Montreal. She is interested in enabling artists to realize ambitious work in new contexts. Art for her is the third space through which we communicate, test out new ideas, and envision a different reality.

Her exhibition and writing history appears on www.bashaprojects.com.

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Hope Ginsburg

Sponge HQ (doorway), 2010 Customized door, aquarium Installation view at Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond, VA Photograph courtesy of Terry Brown

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Sponge HQ (apiary, library), 2010

Hive 05 (top-bar beehive by Max Goldfarb), Hexagonal (sound composition by Joshua Quarles), wool felt elements, library. Installation view at Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond, VA Photograph courtesy of Terry Brown 10

Top: Sponge: Felt, 2009 Wool, 1’ x 6” x 1’

Bottom: Sponge: Makers Market, 2009 Wool, prints (designed with David Reinfurt) Installation view at Makers Market, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY Photograph courtesy of Otto Architecture & Design.

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Sponge HQ (Colablablab table), 2010 Including works by Colablablab participants Jessica Dodd and Michael Horton. Installation view at Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond, VA Photograph courtesy of Terry Brown 12

Colablablab Poster, 2009 Dimensions variable

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Colablablab for Science Fair, 2010 Including works by Colablablab participants Katie Connor, Olivia Gibian, Hyunji Lee and Andrew Schmidt Installation view at Flux Factory, Long Island City, NY 14

Other Pedagogies & the Phylum Porifiera, 2010 Documentation of a two-day Sponge produced for Curiouser, the 2010 joint conference of SECAC and MACAA hosted by VCUarts, Richmond, VA Photographs courtesy of Andrew Brehm.

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Top: Sponge research lab of Dr. April Hill, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA Bottom: J. Morgan Puett presenting

Spongespace, 2008 Wall painting (designed by Leah Beeferman), wool Installation view at Solvent Space, Richmond, VA Photograph courtesy of Myeongsoo Kim

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Spongespace Poster, 2008 Designed by Jack Risley Dimensions variable

Sponge: IAP, Poster, 2007 Dimensions variable

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Sponge: Makers Market II, 2010 Wool, Dimensions variable Installation view at Makers Market, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY

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Feltmaking Mini-Sponge, 2009 Documentation from Retail 21c. event at Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA Photograph courtesy of Claire Pentecost

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Sponge HQ (rug making), 2010 Documentation from opening event at Anderson Gallery, VCUarts, Richmond, VA Photograph courtesy of Terry Brown

Sponge HQ (wayfinding signage), 2010 Dimensions variable

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The Archaeology of Experience

By Emily Sessions

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE Art Foundation, which pairs emerging writers with AICA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit www.aicausa.org for further information on AICA USA, or www.cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Elizabeth Baker and Lilly Wei are AICA’s Coordinators for this

Walking into Hope Ginsburg’s exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, you are confronted with an array of objects that, like archaeological artifacts, seem to vibrate with significance. These books, mittens, trophies, and photographs don’t reveal their meanings immediately.

They invite investigation, questioning. What are these objects, what are they saying?

This exhibition is a survey of Ginsburg’s Sponge project that has been ongoing for the past five years.

Sponge consists of a variety of workshops, classes, and performances that take place in different spaces and contexts. Each is a structured and well-documented event in which participants learn about a subject, anything from Mongolian craft to undersea ecosystems, through different media. Ginsburg acts as the leader of this learning process and the participants act as “sponges”, soaking up information. After learning, participants then switch roles and teach their fellow workshop participants, as well as Ginsburg herself, about a subject in which they have expertise. Finally, participants are encouraged to replicate the process by

program this season.

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The Archaeology of Experience

organizing their own events so that the project is continual and expansive. These participants — present in this exhibition in the form of a slideshow of photos — and their experiences are at the center of this work. Ginsburg explained, “much of the project has to do with people and celebrating people’s engagement with things that fascinate them.” Thus, Ginsburg’s artistic production takes the form of an encounter for which she acts as facilitator. She states, “My background is in sculpture and performance, and to engage in these event-based projects, I consider it a type of performance.”1 This practice aligns her with a certain approach to art making which is known by different names, including Social Practice art and Relational Aesthetics. Artists in these practices do not necessarily create traditional objects; rather the experience of the people who see or participate in their actions constitutes their work. Ginsburg’s work relates especially to feminist practitioners of this approach in the 1970s who critically examined how certain roles and jobs are devalued in our society. One of these artists is Mierle Laderman Ukeles who, in her work Touch Sanitation (1970 1980), set out to shake hands with every worker at the New York City Department of Sanitation while saying the words, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” By this action, Ukeles wanted to increase people’s respect for the work these people did as well as to overturn traditional power relationships between the provider and the user of an undervalued service. This mirrors how the roles of teacher and student are reversed over the course of a Sponge workshop. In both cases, this reversal takes place in a specially structured act and, like Ukeles, Ginsburg hopes that the effects of destabilizing roles will extend beyond this act and into the outside world.

Another artist who worked in this paradigm in the 1960s and ’70s and whom Ginsburg calls an important influence is Joseph Beuys. Like Ukeles, Beuys believed deeply in the transformative potential of art. He felt that encouraging creativity and artistic sensitivity and increasing knowledge could bring about political and social change. These utopian beliefs are exemplified in pedagogical projects like his Free International University at Documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977, which included a variety of talks and discussions. It was accompanied by his sculpture, Honeypump in the Workplace (1977), in which two tons of honey flowed through the space in clear plastic tubing and symbolized the flow of knowledge between participants.

Not all Social Practice artists create environments for their actions, which might instead take place in the most ordinary settings like city streets or museum

1. All quotes are from the writer’s interview with Hope Ginsburg in January 2011.

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walkways. However, Ginsburg is committed to a setting’s potential to enhance the transformative effect of the art action. She states, “I’ve always been married to the idea of preserving the visual. It’s something that I feel is very important. And so this [Sponge] project, although it has a lot to do with duration work, has never lost sight of aesthetic material, of object-making.” This visual element is present at Sponge events in everything from the decor of the Sponge HQ (headquarters), currently located at Virginia Commonwealth University where Ginsburg teaches, to special Sponge water bottles. These elements set the spaces apart, increasing the participants’ awareness and allowing them to become more “spongy”, more sensitive to information and shifting relationships. By presenting materials from previous events to us in the gallery context, what she calls “the wonderful challenge of walls and a ceiling and that mechanism of translating things that happened,” Ginsburg has created a different type of charged space for our own unique learning experience.

Ginsburg also explores the ability of objects to frame and strengthen social and personal transformations in the Sponge felt workshops. In these workshops, she teaches participants how to bond wool fibers together using friction and water to create a new shape. This process symbolizes how people come together and change when they participate in Sponge events. Ginsburg has also displayed and sold objects made in these workshops for the past two years in a booth at the Maker’s Market, a juried open-air market for crafted products at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City. These booths also contained information about Sponge and gave Ginsburg an opportunity to interact directly with a wider audience. The objects from these booths included in this exhibition encourage us to imagine the effects of different environments on learning and again underscores the potential of non-traditional exchanges of knowledge to effect social change.

These same issues are raised by the materials in this exhibition from Colablablab, the name derived from the collaborative aspect of the two labs involved. In this project, Ginsburg and a group of Virginia Commonwealth University students took a class together in biological concepts and met at Sponge HQ to create artworks inspired by what they were learning. These artworks, along with information about the project itself, were then presented at the 2010 Science Fair exhibition at Flux Factory in Long Island City. The exhibition at CUE includes a trophy from this fair, as well as a Colablablab wall painting and documentation of the project, so it

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The Archaeology of Experience

has become a presentation of a presentation of an experience, which was in turn a synthesis and presentation of information learned earlier.

This series of transformations and contexts mirrors the other personal, social, and informational transformations that occur in Ginsburg’s work and that ripple out from participants into the world. These experiences are encoded in objects and information included in this exhibition. Like archaeologists, we are invited to examine these things and imagine what actions they came from and to gauge how we react to them in this new context. We become sponges ourselves, absorbing and filtering information about the history of this rich and complex project.

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Emily Sessions is a master's

Eleanor Heartney is a

candidate in art history at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is focusing on modern Latin American art. She has worked and interned at a number of museums, galleries, and private collections in Boston and New York.

Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and author of numerous books and articles on contemporary art. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992 and was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2008. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel, 2007).

Other books include Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Midmarch Arts Press, 2004), Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Hardpress Editions, 2006) and Art and Today (Phaidon, 2008). Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

Major program support is provided by: Accademia Charitable Foundation Inc. CAF American Donor Fund The Viking Foundation AG Foundation The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. The Greenwall Foundation The Greenwich Collection Inc. Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation The Joan Mitchell Foundation The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts National Endowment for the Arts New York City Department of Cultural Affairs New York State Council on the Arts (a State agency) William Talbot Hillman Foundation The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust The Koret Foundation The Hyde and Watson Foundation

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media sponsor:

Additional funding for this exhibition was provided by a research grant from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts

Cover: A Pencil Sharpener for Sol LeWitt, 2010 Wool, Pencil Sharpener, 4" x 5" x 6", Edition of 2 Photograph courtesy of Jaime Permuth All artwork Š Hope Ginsburg

CUE Art Foundation 511 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001 212-206-3583 f 212-206-0321 cueartfoundation.org

ISBN: 978-0-9843122-8-3 Catalog design: elizabeth ellis Printed by mar+x myles inc. using 100% wind-generated power

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2010-11

CUE Art Foundation 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 212-206-3583 f 212-206-0321 cueartfoundation.org