Artists Space

Opening Reception
March 11, 8 - 11 pm

The exhibition When Artists Say We reflects on the context in which artists work as colleagues, as collaborators, in collectives, as friends, as critics, as bystanders, and as allies, sharing New York City as their site of practice.

Artists have always created alliances. The needs that drive artists together are manifold: a discourse that educates, a horizon that widens, a complexity of knowledge, the ability to fail, or a larger capacity to remember critically and productively within their own field and beyond. But artists are also driven by the need for shelter, protection, and support. Such relationships are grounded in structures and language that are inherently self-critical and rarely reflected upon when art is shown. When Artists Say We takes up this task by trying to present some of the forms such collective exchanges have taken in New York City over the last thirty years. One could understand these alliances as a necessary methodology that enables artists to do their work. But rather than assuming that all art is necessarily produced in collaboration, this exhibition suggests that art—made individually or as a collective—is constituted from within such exchange.

When Artists Say We is constituted by four different elements. In the center of the gallery, a mobile archive unit, designed by Nanna Wülfing, holds materials from approximately 90 New York-based artists, artist groups, collectives, and collaborations. To frame the exhibition within an attempt to map historical as well as personal relationships, twelve wall diagrams were commissioned for the surrounding walls, each charting particular discourses, relationships, histories, sites, and people, as well as the ideas that influenced them. Each diagram will take a distinct form: analytical, historical, non-linear, partial, suggestive, indexical…. Some of the diagrams will invite visitors to continue their mapping.

Doug Ashford charts “some of the people who worked together to make Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America (1983/84); the beauty that was embodied by their work, and a partial archive” (Ashford).

Mike Ballou engages the history of the artists-run space Four Walls in Williamsburg through four selected projects and their overlapping constituencies.

Gregg Bordowitz delivers a chart of David Hume’s treatise on the Passions, a personal, intimate reading as much as a commentary on the mechanisms of human emotions and an appeal for passion as the basis of it all.

Dean Daderko creates a growing mural, a spatialized coversation with his peers, friends, and collaborators, on the nature of community. As the exhibition runs its course, the wall diagram will grow.

Liam Gillick and Gareth James collaborate in a subversive text culled from Robert Musil on the impossibility of charting itself, a text that puts pressure on the exhibition as a whole and serves as the voice of skepticism.

Arianne Gelardin maps the origins of Artists Space and gives a sense of institutional self-questioning as well as a grounding of the exhibition in the history of its host.

Oui, Sylvia Kolbowski’s class at Cooper Union, produced a wall diagram based on the children’s game Musical Chairs, where a community of contestants whittles down to a single survivor. Here, it could be read as a metaphor for what happens after art school, as the community of the class gets reduced to the single “significant” (or lucky) artist, while the diversity of the group, and its potential for sustaining dialogue and friendship, is rendered absent.

Julie Mehretu and Jessica Rankin create a poetic chart of their lives, comprised of influences, residences, and friends.Organized intuitively, rather than following discerning principles, their chart is one of all the things that touch you in ways only fully understood when shared, and impossible to be explained.

Yvonne Rainer contributed a historic letter and diagram that was produced as a response to an article by Arlene Croce published in the New Yorker, and serves as a reminder of the ways in which the writing of history is a subjective and often willfully distorting operation, as well as an example of an artist taking that act of historiography into her own hands, again.

David Reed, Katy Siegel, and Ulrike Müller chart the various relationships among abstract painters in New York between 1967 and 1975, pointing to a moment when the practice was intimate, experimental, daring, and often overlooked.

Mira Schor contributed a large wall installation created by scanning the covers of a few of the many books, journals and some ephemera on feminist theory and art that have mattered to her in the past thirty years, to create a kind of personal visualized theoretical and artistic timeline.

And Jeremy Sigler produced a Poet/Artist/Flowchart, wildly charting the proximities and gravitational centers of writers, poets, and artists, as filtered through his contacts, collaborations, and friendships.

In five small spaces that surround Artist Space’s main gallery, five artists—Ayreen Anastas, Andrea Geyer, Emily Jacir, Cristóbal Lehyt, and LTTR—each put together an individual group show, mapping the work with which they find themselves in dialogue. And as a final element, weekly events, organized by Emily Jacir/Jenny Perlin/John Menick, Jesal Kapadia, Ben Kinmont, neuroTransmitter, and Yates McKee, will be held for the duration of the exhibition on Saturday afternoons from 3-5pm, beginning April 1.

March 28, 2006

Of The Passions and Art Today
Talk
6:30 - 8pm

April 1 – April 29, 2006

Saturday Events
Talks, Performances, Screenings, & Readings

Johnson, Ken. "Charting Degrees of Separation and Connection in the Art World." The New York Times. April 7, 2006. Print. E29.