Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.

In the makeup factory the blush source (the blond woman, dressed in an alluring outfit) is literally squeezed by walls for profit. Meanwhile, a nozzle from the wall of bare asses sprays water, and an obese woman spins on a circular floor — all to ensure that the priceless block of lettuce-rubber-blush is made to perfection.

“This piece, which is trying to collapse these geographically distant places into one space, is a natural step for me,” Rottenberg says. “It’s about using your body and being alienated from your body, objectifying your body and using it almost like a factory that can produce stuff. I feel like that’s very feminine. I’m interested in how selling one’s body can be empowering.”

Mika Rottenberg
Still: Squeeze, 2010

Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.

Christian Boltanski
Autel de Lycee Chases, 1986-87

From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiraling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.

Joan Jonas
Mirror Piece, 1969

Artists: Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Joan Jonas, Sally Mann, Christian Marclay, Susan Philipsz, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner, as Well as Commissioned Performances by Sharon Hayes, Joan Jonas, and Tris Vonna-Michell

Marina Abramovic
Cleaning the Mirror #1, 1995

Waters calls his art conceptual and acknowledges its connection to Richard Prince’s appropriative work. The craft is not the issue here. The idea is and the presentation.

John Waters
“Children Who Smoke” (2009)
Eight C-prints, each image 5 x 7 in

John Waters

John Waters
Pay $ or $ Play

John Waters
A Passion For Audrey (2010)
C-prints Photographs

John Waters
“Rush” (2009)
Polyurethane, oil, PVC plastic

Read and see more John Waters’s work at:

• www.artnet.com
• www.marianneboeskygallery.com
• www.artinfo.com

Jennifer Allora (American) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuban) have been collaborating since 1995. On October 13th they will debut new large-scale works incorporating performance at the Lisson Gallery in London.

“Hope Hippo”
2005. Mud, whistle, daily newspaper, and live person.
nstallation view: 51st Venice Biennale.

Allora & Calzadilla approach visual art as a set of experiments that test whether ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, and democracy adequately describe today’s increasingly global and consumerist society.

“Returning a Sound”
2004. Single channel video with sound, 5 minutes 42 seconds.

Their hybridized works—often a unique mix of sculpture, photography, performance, sound and video—explore the physical and conceptual act of mark making and its survival through traces. By drawing historical, cultural, and political metaphors out of basic materials, Allora & Calzadilla’s works explore the complex associations between an object and its meaning.

Clamor
2006. Mixed-media sculpture
Installation view: The Moore Space, Miami

More info: http://www.pbs.org

David Hockney
Luncheon at the British Embassy, Tokyo, Feb. 16, 1983 1983.
Photocollage. 1996.74.183

Photo/Synthesis highlights the dynamic trend in the field of contemporary photography, collages, assemblages, and other multi-part or composite photo-based projects. Dating from the 1960s to the present, the works in this exhibition transcend the limitations of traditional photography in which the camera simply captures a unique view or a decisive moment in time. Breaking free of the conventional frame, they are instead the products of various methods of assembling and organizing multiple photographic images into larger artistic statements. In each case, the sum communicates much more than the component parts.

The Lost and Found Project:
Dance of Life: YOU, 1979
Skrits I’ve known, Jane #27, 1978

Artists like David Hockney, Olafur Eliasson, Ed Ruscha, and Nigel Poor have used photo-collage, photo-assemblage, and related practices to explore elements of scale, space, time, and narrative. Photo/Synthesis features a selection of photographs by these artists and others from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Charles and Diane Frankel.

Gerhard Richter
Strontium, 2005

German artist Gerhard Richter has created Strontium, a large-scale mural for the new de Young derived from digitally-manipulated photographs, that together form a geometric black and white motif representing the atomic structure of strontium titanate, a synthetic substance often used to create artificial diamonds. The monumental piece is constructed of 130 digital prints, each one measuring 27-1/2-x 37-1/4 inches, mounted on aluminum with plexiglass coating. It spans a total of 31 x 29.86 feet and is installed in Wilsey Court, the de Young’s central public gathering space.

Nigel Poor
The Relative Value of Things
A document of discarded items. For several years he have kept a list of everything he got rid of, this does not include garbage – only functional items he thought he needed.

At Photo/Synthesis Poor showcased his project July 1988, a conceptual self portrait made of single found object photographs.

SFMOMA is commemorating its 75th year as a pioneering force in art, locally and globally. To celebrate their anniversary, they are presenting a series of exhibitions and events that illustrate the stories of the artists, collectors, cultural visionaries, and community leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum. A suite of exhibitions highlights the unique strengths of SFMOMA’s collection and moments when the museum broke new ground, expanding the conventional wisdom of what an art museum should present and collect.

Featured contemporary artists include:

Nicholas Nixon’s
Brown Sisters
series of thirty-one portraits of his wife and her sisters that he’s made since 1975

Jeff Koons
Michael Jackson and Bubbles
1988; porcelain

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
“Untitled” (Golden)
1995/2008

Richard Prince
Untitled (Cowboy)
1991-92

Sol LeWitt
Steel Structure
1975/1976; sculpture; aluminum and enamel

Bruce Nauman
Wall/Floor Positions
1968. Video (black and white, sound), 60 min

The issue of sexuality and transcendence touches on a fundamental conflict in art in general because, beyond mere appearance, behind it hides the general question of the relationship between reality (life) and imagination (image). And so the relationship between form and vision becomes a crucial issue for any artist dealing with sexuality and transcendence.

Which direction is a particular work going for? Does it answer the challenge with a praise of distance (form/transcendence) or with a demonstration of intimacy (life/sexuality)? The answers to these questions are so varied because, in addition to the paradigms inherent in the theme, the concept of desire is of central importance here. The general idea is kept open, both in respect of a desire for an ideal mental clarity, intellectual penetration and clarified form, and in respect of a desire for an ideal of realism, emotional directness and dissolution of form. Something Janus-like clinging to desire means that the two poles of sexuality and transcendence can be reflected within each other. The desire for the two things, sexuality and transcendence, dominates our existence; it is the driving force behind our earthly performance and, especially for artists, the search for an appropriate form.

Jeff Koons – Baloon Rabbit (violet), 2005-2010

The exhibition presents nineteen work groups with a total of 150 individual works in twenty rooms on four floors of the PinchukArtCentre. The staircases of the building are used as art spaces for the first time with installations by Jenny Holzer; the central stairwell features an in-situ piece with her famous texts from the series Inflammatory Essays and a second staircase houses a work with LED.

Takashi Murakami – Hiropon, 1997

In addition, for the first time ever, the PinchukArtCentre utilised the historical Bessarabskiy market hall located opposite for an eighty-meter-long frieze by AES+F, a group of artists from Moscow. With its intense sociocultural flavour and distinctive architecture, this historical site, which is of great importancse for Kiev, provides an ideal public counterpoint to the artistic message propagating a new hybrid aesthetic of fusion.

Takashi Murakami – Lonesome Cowboy, 1998

Artists in this show include among others: AES, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Maya Deren (American, 1917–1961) was a visionary of American experimental film in the 1940s and 1950s. A precocious student, she studied poetry and literature at New York University and Smith College, where she became interested in the arts. While working for modern-dance choreographer Katherine Dunham, Deren met her future husband, filmmaker Alexander Hammid, who introduced her to European avant-garde film. In 1943, the couple collaborated on the short film Meshes of the Afternoon, which has since become one of the most widely influential films of the American experimental-film movement.

Deren, who received the first Guggenheim Foundation grant for “creative work in the field of motion pictures” and formed the Creative Film Foundation to broaden support for experimental film, continued making and self-distributing her own films and lecturing and writing about avant-garde cinema theory until her untimely death at the age of forty-four. Her pioneering formal innovations—performing in front of the camera, using semiautobiographical content, and meshing literary, psychological, and ethnographic disciplines with rigorous technique—inspired future generations of experimental filmmakers.

This exhibition, which consists of a video installation in the Theater Galleries and short-film programs in the theaters, examines Deren’s legacy through both her own work and that of a trio of women directors upon whom she had an indelible influence: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Su Friedrich.

Yoshitomo Nara was born in Hirosaki, Japan in 1959. This will be his fifth show with Tomio Koyama Gallery, since “new drawings” exhibition in 2003. In this show, ceramic sculptures will be shown mainly. They were created during Nara’s stay with the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Shigaraki since last February. This has been a new development by the artist who worked with wood and FRP in the past. This show will be his debut using ceramics, after more than a year’s training. There will be large and small sculptural works, in combination with some drawings.

installation view from ceramic works at Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2010

Miss Forest, 2010
ceramic decorated with platinum, gold and silver liquid
h.144.0 x w.102.0 x d.100.0cm

ANYMORE FOR ANYMORE, 2010
ceramic
h.72.0 x w.60.0 x d.72.0cm

OTAFUKU No.2 (Moon-faced Woman No.2), 2010
ceramic decorated with platinum liquid
h.118.0 x w.127.0 x d.125.0cm

Head Vase, 2009
ceramic
h.23.0 x d30.0cm

installation view from ceramic works at Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2010

This year Schaulager is presenting Drawing Restraint by Matthew Barney. Drawing Restraint is a series of performances, numbering sixteen thus far, in which Matthew Barney leaves traces in an environment of self-induced physical and psychological restraints. Works emerging from these performances, such as sculptures, vitrines, drawings and videos, are juxtaposed in the Schaulager exhibition with works of art from the Northern Renaissance.

The basic idea of Drawing Restraint is that form can only take shape when it struggles against resistance. Drawing Restraint was initially conceived such that its apparatuses would frustrate the ease of drawing. The first performances consisted of environments with ramps, sloping surfaces, elastic belts and obstacles that expressly served to restrict the artist’s skill.

As the series developed, the setting of the performances became increasingly sophisticated and the narrative more allegorical.

Objects deriving from the performances capture certain aspects of the action as “secondary forms“ – drawings, sculptures, vitrines and photographs. These objects are never random but always carefully selected and arranged. Each action is also documented on video.

About Schaulager: Schaulager was created in Basel in 1933 by the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation. It is an institution dedicated to contemporary art – its conservation, research and dissemination.
It is a new kind of space for art. It is neither museum nor a traditional warehouse. Schaulager is first and foremost a response to the old and new needs for the storage of works of the visual arts.