PAPER, SCISSORS, STONE
Curated by Gyonata Bonvicini

TAUBA AUERBACH
KERSTIN BRÄTSCH
KNUT HENRIK HENRIKSEN
RAY JOHNSON
REE MORTON
SCOTT OLSON
R.H. QUAYTMAN
FLORIAN SCHMIDT

‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’ brings together the work of nine international artists who share an artistic language primarily interested in painting, without necessarily integrating it as a medium or a tool. In this way, the artists offer a model that eludes the incessantly returning discussion about the relevance of painting without doing away with the significance of painterly concerns.
 
The title for the exhibition is borrowed from the English name of one of the most popular games played using only the hand. Invented in Japan as Jan-ken-pon in the late 19th century, the game is based on an extreme economy of signs and their interchangeability. This reflects the fluidity of the artistic process, its anti-hierarchical patterns, but also implies a confrontational tension and a kind of shifting equality of values in the diverse media.
 
This group of artists investigates painting’s contemporary potentials by taking up specific discourse from previous decades, so pinpointing the historical conditions of each medium and the associated ideological approaches. The inclusion of Ree Morton and Ray Johnson reflects an attempt to historicize the positions of a younger generation of artists, and is not simply for the sake of revivalism. Rather, the strength of such reflection is that, from a distance, key works of the past can shed new light on contemporary attitudes towards abstract painting.
 
‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’ can be seen as an attempt to offer manifold examples of abstraction’s inventive potential and will suggest varied reasons why it remains vital and essential to the contemporary critical debate.

Gyonata Bonvincini was born in 1972, in Milan, Italy. He has worked as a freelance curator based in London and is currently the director of Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin. In 2007 he won the international award for Young Curator at Marco Vigo.

Tauba Auerbach, born in 1981, recently relocated to New York from San Francisco. She is currently exhibiting in the inaugural exhibition of Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Brussels, curated by Francesco Bonami. In February 2009 she will be presented in a solo show at MoMA New York.

Kerstin Brätsch was born in Hamburg in 1976. In February 2009 she will be included in a group show curated by Massimiliano Gioni at the New Museum in New York.
 
Knut Henrik Henriksen was born in 1970 in Oslo and is currently Berlin-based. Simultaneous to Paper Scissors Stone he is exhibiting in a two-person show with Hans Arp at Galerie Würth in Hagan, Norway.

Ray Johnson (1927- 1995) was a seminal figure of the Pop Art movement. Somewhat of a cult figure, little is known of his life and the circumstances of his death. In 2002 an award-winning documentary produced by John Malkovich was made on Johnson’s life and work including interviews with his friends and fellow artists such as Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Jeanne-Claude and Christo. Johnson’s work is currently included in Looking at Music, MoMA, New York
 
Ree Morton (1936-1977) died while still young and in her prime. Surviving her is the product of seven years of artistic activity. The significance of her influence has been reflected in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1974) and the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1985). A major retrospective of her work opens at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in December.

Scott Olson is based in Ohio and was born in 1976. He recently presented solo exhibitions at Overduin and Kite in Los Angeles and Taxter and Spengemann in New York.

R.H. Quaytman was born in 1961. Based in New York, she is founder and director of the artist-run space Orchard in New York. She has an upcoming solo show at Vilma Gold in London in December and Miguel Abreu in New York next year.

Florian Schmidt was born 1980 and lives and works in Vienna. This year he has exhibited with a solo shows at New Galerie de France in Paris and Andreas Huber in Vienna.

*Nordenhake

*Elastic Gallery

wwww.elasticgallery.com

For those of you who are interested in seeing more of Al’s work.  We are happy to announce an exhibition he will be opening this Saturday at the Composition Gallery in Atlanta, GA.  More information is included below.  If you are in the neighborhood, stop by and experience some incredible moments in history.

ARTSPROJEKT X OBEY SKATEBOARDS

I first moved to California in 1996 to work with my friend and art and skateboarding role model Andy Howell. If you don’t know who he is, Andy founded New Deal Skateboards, Underworld Element (now Element), and Sophisto Clothing. Now Andy has started artsprojekt.com and is re-issuing some classic skate art, along with some new boards. We are re-releasing some Obey classics, and have added some new boards into the mix.  Enjoy.
-Shepard Fairey

The Geometry of Uncertainty and The Construction of Crisis
Through a simultaneous construction and deconstruction of meaning, the reading of well established signs and symbols are deliberately obscured in the work of Kasper Sonne. Common signifiers – deployed to achieve instant recognition in the viewer in order to create an autonomous entrance point to the works – are manipulated to reveal and expose a shift from the familiar, rendering the obvious ambiguous and prolonging the process of decoding – something that Sonne refers to as ‘extending the narrative of the singular cliché’. Much interested in dualities, Sonne often investigate, invent and reinvent, words, phrases and objects that are capable of representing oppositional stances.
For ‘The Geometry of Uncertainty’ the artist had two regular heptagons laser cut from large sheets of aluminum and then painted and machine-polished a high-gloss black by a professional car painter. After being send to his studio, Sonne then cut lines on these high-finish industrially manufactured objects with a screwdriver, connecting the seven sides of the heptagons to create the geometrically form of each of the two possible regular heptagrams – more commonly identified as seven-pointed stars.
Geometry being an ancient science part of mathematics, is concerned with questions of size, shape, and relative position of figures and with properties of space and is thus a representation of the build world, the logical and the known, and the heptagram is originally a sign thereof. But throughout history this scientific creation has also gained a much different meaning. Appropriated by various religious groupings, from Christianity to Judaism and occult organizations like the Ordo Templi Orientis, the seven-pointed star is also a representation of the unknown, the mystical and magical. In many Christian religions the heptagram is a symbol of perfection – or God – and the seven days of creation and is believed to ward of evil. Some pagan religions believe the heptagram to be of magical power and the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley – dubbed “the wickedest man in the world” – used the heptagram as the star of Babalon, a goddess found in the mystical system Thelema, established in 1904 from Crowley’s writing of The Book of the Law. In her most abstract form she represents the female sexual impulse and the liberated woman, although she can also be identified with Mother Earth, in her most fertile sense. At the same time, Crowley believed that Babalon had an earthly aspect in the form of a spiritual office, which could be filled by actual women—usually as a counterpart to his own identification as To Mega Therion – The Great Beast.
From afar the lines cut by Sonne look quite precisely executed, but up-close it becomes clear that this is not the case. Cutting through the perfect surface of the heptagons with a screwdriver as his tool – reminiscent of hard manual labor or perhaps even vandalism – proves incontrollable by various imperfections. From differences in depth and width of the lines, to the breaking of the paint and small traces of slips of the hand, the otherwise sublime fabrications are no longer flawless. And so, in Sonne’s work it is not only the meaning of the heptagram itself that is uncertain, but also the very outcome of its formal materialization.
This is also the case in another series of work titled ‘The Construction of Crisis’, inspired by Ovid’s version of the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus and Oscar Wilde’s famous novel ‘The picture of Dorian Gray. In Ovid’s tale the handsome youth is punished by the gods for his vanity and the spurn of his admirer – namely the young nymph Echo – when made to fall in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Not daring to drink from it in fear of shattering this image of absolute beauty, Narcissus eventually dies of thirst gazing at his own mirror image. In Wilde’s much later story the young and beautiful Dorian Gray is doomed by a similar self-obsession, when his wish that the portrait painted of him grows old instead of himself is granted. Plunging into extreme hedonism and cruelty, Dorian’s portrait serves as a reminder of the effect that each act has upon the soul, with each of the young mans sins being displayed as a disfigurement of his form or through a sign of aging. In the end Dorian tries to destroy this evidence of his immorality, but ends up destroying himself instead.
Ovid’s story is likely to have it’s roots in the old superstition that the reflection seen of one’s self in water, was the reflection of one’s soul and thus the subject to harm should anything happen to damage the reflection. The Romans, who were the first to make glass mirrors, later attributed the superstition of the seven years of bad luck when breaking a mirror, to their belief that life renewed itself every seven years. This superstition – handed down in history and still widely believed today – laid the foundations for Sonne’s construction of crisis. After creating a mirror by laminating black mirror foil on a piece of ordinary window glass, Sonne then breaks another piece of window glass with a hammer, before laminating it on top of the mirror. And so it is essentially only the top piece of transparent glass that is broken and not the host of reflection. By this manipulation – the construction of the illusion of a broken mirror, one of the most exhausted of clichéd images – Sonne questions our notions of belief, myth and superstition, as well as our notions of art. With reference to Nietzsche’s theory in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ of the ancient dualism between two types of aesthetic experience, namely the Apollonian (identity, order, regularity, and calm repose) and the Dionysian (intoxication, forgetfulness, chaos, and the ecstatic dissolution of identity in the collective) Sonne orchestrates a similar conflict in his work through the deployment of tactics similar to both Conceptual Art of the 1960’s – the highly planned execution that stems from a carefully conceived thought – and early Expressionism in the 19th century – the act of coincidence and carelessness. Dualities are ever present in Sonne’s work, be it in contradiction of terms, the reduction of color to black and white, the hand made and the industrially produced or in this case the rendering of an act of violence into something poetic, destruction into beauty.
Stephen Dedalus

“Sack of Bones (Los Angeles)” curated by Blair Taylor and Ellen Langan

Mark Flood
“Entertainment Weakly”
November 22 – December 22, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 22, 6 – 9 pm
Peres Projects Culver City (2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, 90034)

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“Sack of Bones (Los Angeles)”, curated by Blair Taylor and Ellen Langan
A group exhibition featuring Jack Goldstein, Dan Colen, Tara Delong, Neil Jenney, Dash Snow, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Mark Flood, Bill Hayden, George Herms, H.C. Westermann, Rosy Keyser, Richard Lidinsky, Bruce LaBruce, Daniel McDonald, Andrew Rogers, Arsen Roje, Agathe Snow, William C. Taylor, Donald Urquhart, Oscar Tuazon, Kaari Upson, Sebastian Mlynarski and Banks Violette.

Toted around, thrown in the corner, recovered as relic or disposed of as useless, a sack of bones is unavoidably deformed. It is an apparently dead object subject to the intentions of its creator, or its purveyor, or its consumer, or maybe just its times.

The group exhibition “Sack of Bones” comes from a viewing of Paul Rachman’s 2006 film, American Hardcore, in which Mark Flood appears as an interviewee on the topic of 1980’s punk rock. The tone of the film is reverent, to be sure, but more than an ode, the voices in the film present conflicting parts pride, humor, fraternity, anger, bitterness, nostalgia, and what are often doleful mechanisms for dealing with the here-and-now. That Flood was both part of Hardcore as it existed musically (in 1980 his band, Culturcide, put out their first 7-inch: “Another Miracle/Consider Museums as Concentration Camps”) and has been practicing visual art for over 30 years poses an interesting question: how, if at all, can art be hardcore? By embodying adolescent punk obsession? By miraculous use of irony? By a simple withdrawal from popular territory?

Consider, for example, the tangled ‘attitude problem’ precipitated by Reagan-era punk; there is the myth of a pure strain of FUCK YOU, there is the myth of the majority’s snide perception of its counter-movements, and then, somewhere in the overlap, there is the problematic dilution of any rebellion’s once-potent beginnings (causing cycles of backlash and resurgence pretty much ever after). In the art world this tangle is further convoluted by the relishing of trade and an inherent affluence, elitism and circuitous pandering that can compromise anyone’s well-intentioned we/they stirrings.

The exhibition as a whole may appear deadpan, satirical or pathetic – in any case each of the constituent works turns its back on complacency, and, in doing so, becomes material evidence of resistance (kicking from within the sack). In other words, with all that is stacked against the mutinous artist and the mutinous viewer, hope could lie in objecthood itself.

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“Entertainment Weakly,” a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood.
Inaugurating the Peres Projects gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles, the exhibition will include mixed media drawings, paintings, sculpture and installation from the past and present.

Flood is a Merry Deformer, romping through the art world’s carefully arrayed aisles with a stencil and a can of spray paint, rearranging its face. Matters of identification are fertile ground upon which to sew mischief, and yet Flood never abandons the potential of a beautiful phenomenon in favor of just being stabby. The surface of a text panel or lace painting still holds all the subtle irregularities and shiny moments prone to seduction.

The works exhibited here cover three decades of Flood’s output, from the defaced advertisement drawings of the early 1980s to brand new assemblages fashioned from the local Texas debris of Hurricane Ike. Bathed in a acid-lime light, the group together presents, in Flood’s words, “topics for non-discussion: our relationship with pictures of celebrities, the effects of vibrant community on layers of dust, market correction fluid, accidental suicides, casual sex with photographs, healthy stalking, shared recipes for aesthetic disasters.”

Crazy, wild and nice::