Monday, September 3, 2007
Horizon 2007
Horizon
Curated by David Humphrey,
EFA Gallery, Summer 2007
EFA Gallery announces a new exhibition curated by David Humphrey, "Horizon." The horizon is subjective, entirely determined by the position of the spectator. Because it has no independent existence it has become a symbol for a variety of thresholds: the visible, the thinkable and the knowable. Every artwork in this exhibition will have a horizon and will be abutted and aligned to adjacent works on it’s left and right so as to make one continuous horizon around the gallery. Horizons in pictures are always cropped fragments, which, nonetheless, confirm the spectator’s position at the center of his or her experience. This exhibition will tether every artist’s horizon with all the other’s to create an irrationally cooperative panorama, a heterogeneous continuity that weakens the boundaries between works while staging their differences.
Approximately 40 artists of all disciplines and career levels will be included in the exhibition including:
Bill Adams, Meredith Allen, Diti Almog, Ellen Altfest, Louise Belcourt, Brian Belott, Katherine Bradford, Benjamin Butler, Dana Carlson, Jennifer Coates, Adam Cvijanovic, Angela Dufresne, Nicole Eisenman, Judith Eisler, Rochelle Feinstein, Jeff Gauntt, EJ Hauser, Catherine Howe, James Hyde, Susan Jennings, Lisa Klapstock, Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Bill Komoski, Julian Kreimer, Michael Lazarus, Medrie MacPhee, Chris Martin, Suzanne McClelland, Elizaveta Meksin, Santi Moix, Donna Moylan, Laura Newman, Gary Petersen, Alexander Ross, Sally Ross, Frank Schroder, Kate Shepherd, Amy Sillman, Elena Sisto, Rebecca Smith, Eva Struble, Team SHaG, Len Tsvetkov, Stanley Whitney, Paula Wilson, and others…
Click here to read the New Yorker review. Click here to read the review in the New York Sun.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Complicit, curated by Johanna Drucker 2006
Moveable Wave Hutch (2004) exhibited in a group show at the University of Virginia, Fall 2006
To listen to an interview with David Humphrey, click here
Art in America Reviews 2006
Review of Mamma Andersen at David Zwirner
Review of Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky
Review of Amanda Church at Michael Steinberg
Review of Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky
Review of Amanda Church at Michael Steinberg
Snowman in Love 2006
David Humphrey, "Snowman in Love," Feb. 26-Apr. 2, 2006, at Triple Candie
Read a review of this show by Chris Bors at artnet.
Nineteen Penises 2006
Nineteen Penises, a curatorial project for the Visual Aids Web Gallery in 2006.
Artists and non-artists alike have been depicting the penis for much of recorded time, in spite of the confusing and sometimes ferocious prohibition against its representation. This selection of artworks from the Frank Moore archive charts a circuitous itinerary through the vast continent of penis. Some of the members included here have been fashioned by hand, others are documented photographically, and all were emphatically made to be looked at. Whether the artist’s purpose was to arouse, protest, explain or provoke, each work testifies to an irrepressible desire to look at what we've been told over and over should not be seen in public.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Life and Limb 2005
Life and Limb, curated by David Humphrey at Feigen Contemporary
June 3 – July 30, 2005
The world is lousy with threats and dangers! It's amazing that we aren't paralyzed with dread. We're good, though, at telling stories that both assuage and kindle our fears. Life and Limb is a story about those stories. Narrative figurative art has flourished throughout history, from prehistoric cave paintings to digital images beamed into space. This exhibition will trace an eccentric itinerary through various regions of modern and contemporary art. Prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and videos will survey various matters of psychological urgency through depictions of figures doing things with and to each other.
Narrative can be purveyed by any media in an astonishing variety of genre. Like brain function, narrative is deep. We don't understand anything without connecting cause to effect, past to present and future. A story uses memory and imagination to organize sense data into something coherent. Because narrative artworks can only represent a fragment, or part of a continuum, the viewer must imagine the before and after based on what's presented.
Life and Limb focuses on intersubjectivity, on what people do and feel between each other. Acts of resistance, surrender, conflict, love, sex, longing and phobia drive narrative operations in general as well as the works in this show. Some artists picture a sanctuary from these conditions while others drive straight into the darkness; some adopt a comic stance while others get serious.
Do we choose to believe the words of the off-frame speaker in Kerry James Marshall's print who asserts, "Everything will be alright. I just know it will"?
To see images from the exhibition, click here.
Oven Stuffer Roaster 2005
Turkey Cone Installation at Morsel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Read about it and see more pix at jameswagner and bloggy.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Lonely Tylenol 2003
A collaborative book project by David Humphrey and Sharon Mesmer, published by Flying Horse Editions, Florida
Click here to read more.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Hi, My Name is Artwork 2000
Artworks can be inconvenient, often making conspicuous efforts to go against the grain. Other times they are more sociable, working hard to insinuate or ingratiate. Whether artworks adapt postures of detachment or engagement, an ineradicable quotient of ambiguity intensifies their vitality. They are, often happily, only human.
The artist's signature, along with the work's material characteristics, inflects the way it navigates and adapts to a future of unanticipated circumstances, much as we do. Alternating positions of resistance, assimilation and participation help us to thrive in different situations. This applies to the course of a day as well as the arc of a lifetime. We assimilate in order to study unfamiliar situations and learn how things work. Sometimes we don't want to be noticed. Resistance builds strength and sharpens our sense of distinction while cooperation rewards us with a connection to others. Who doesn't want to be successful? Freedom from necessity is a recurring dream and art is good at exercising a vision of this freedom. Artworks help us to imagine what freedom looks like and consequently help us to resist the status quo.
New art, for a very long time, has caused things to mean what they hadn't meant previously. It can conjure fresh meanings from familiar forms and render the perceived world like a hallucination. Art can symbolize or symptomatize contradictions and tensions in the culture and can juggle various ratios of conformity and deviance. New art has also thrived on its ability to produce confusion, sometimes for progressive ends and sometimes in the service of mayhem and disorder. Works based on deviant attitudes adapt well to the latter while eventually, perhaps, helping to serve the ever fluctuating use of style to sell consumer products. Art objects still address only one person at a time, and are lucky if they can produce confusion or any strong reaction whatsoever with their shocks and postures.
We artists should not underestimate the importance of the stories we tell ourselves about how art will make a difference. These motivational fictions describe the ways a work might interact with the world to justify our extravagant, and potentially narcissistic, labors: that our art has transformational potential. A work might be understood as being critical of society or that it provides sanctuary from it, for instance, or that the work is like a Trojan horse sent to the enemy as a nasty gift to unsettle their deeply entrenched frames of mind. We need renewable encouragement to make fresh work year after year in the face of uncertain rewards. Political art glows with these motivational fictions no matter how much we may disagree with the editorial content. Paranoia provides one of the most effective sources of motivation. That's why a notion of the "spectacle" has been so engaging for artists in the last few decades. The spectacle is described in theory as everywhere, with no boundary to its insidiously embracing circumference. It can replace deity as the ubiquitous and invisible force that catches us in its address and through which our public utterances are addressed. It neither confirms nor denies our ascriptions but compels us to continue undermining its grand perniciousness.
I don't think artists are reliable, however, at making their work socially useful. Some will be more responsible than others, but the work's capacity to survive depends on its ability to produce engaging interpretations whenever and wherever it finds itself. Do we want to be good citizens or servants of a system we may or may not approve of? The inconvenience that artworks present to pragmatic or utilitarian attitudes provokes both resentment and hopefully unanticipated insight.
The meaning of an artwork is promiscuously slippery, ambiguous and, like artists, not very dependable. Contexts come and go while attitudes within the work often seem to evaporate or shift. The U.K. has recently been embracing new art as an instrument of public policy to promote "diversity, access, relevance, civic pride, community innovation and social inclusion." A recent show at the Met of Renaissance art from Delft had many examples of astonishingly beautiful art that beamed with unambiguous civic pride. Does collectively embraced new art necessarily satisfy an appetite to feel good about ourselves? Works we love often seem to aid insights that come from us, not necessarily about ourselves but issuing from our best self. These special works seem to have significance above the others by virtue of their capacity to bring us a heightened sense of our singularity on the shared plane of culture. Some works almost seem to reorganize themselves as we change over the years; they grow with us and share our power to resist and assimilate.
I feel the artwork's relative uselessness is one source of its enduring radical value. Maybe that's my motivational fiction. If we can't be outside the spectacle, at least our metaphors will continue the always unfinished job of imagining and desiring an outside, that perhaps things are more mutable than we thought.
The artist's signature, along with the work's material characteristics, inflects the way it navigates and adapts to a future of unanticipated circumstances, much as we do. Alternating positions of resistance, assimilation and participation help us to thrive in different situations. This applies to the course of a day as well as the arc of a lifetime. We assimilate in order to study unfamiliar situations and learn how things work. Sometimes we don't want to be noticed. Resistance builds strength and sharpens our sense of distinction while cooperation rewards us with a connection to others. Who doesn't want to be successful? Freedom from necessity is a recurring dream and art is good at exercising a vision of this freedom. Artworks help us to imagine what freedom looks like and consequently help us to resist the status quo.
New art, for a very long time, has caused things to mean what they hadn't meant previously. It can conjure fresh meanings from familiar forms and render the perceived world like a hallucination. Art can symbolize or symptomatize contradictions and tensions in the culture and can juggle various ratios of conformity and deviance. New art has also thrived on its ability to produce confusion, sometimes for progressive ends and sometimes in the service of mayhem and disorder. Works based on deviant attitudes adapt well to the latter while eventually, perhaps, helping to serve the ever fluctuating use of style to sell consumer products. Art objects still address only one person at a time, and are lucky if they can produce confusion or any strong reaction whatsoever with their shocks and postures.
We artists should not underestimate the importance of the stories we tell ourselves about how art will make a difference. These motivational fictions describe the ways a work might interact with the world to justify our extravagant, and potentially narcissistic, labors: that our art has transformational potential. A work might be understood as being critical of society or that it provides sanctuary from it, for instance, or that the work is like a Trojan horse sent to the enemy as a nasty gift to unsettle their deeply entrenched frames of mind. We need renewable encouragement to make fresh work year after year in the face of uncertain rewards. Political art glows with these motivational fictions no matter how much we may disagree with the editorial content. Paranoia provides one of the most effective sources of motivation. That's why a notion of the "spectacle" has been so engaging for artists in the last few decades. The spectacle is described in theory as everywhere, with no boundary to its insidiously embracing circumference. It can replace deity as the ubiquitous and invisible force that catches us in its address and through which our public utterances are addressed. It neither confirms nor denies our ascriptions but compels us to continue undermining its grand perniciousness.
I don't think artists are reliable, however, at making their work socially useful. Some will be more responsible than others, but the work's capacity to survive depends on its ability to produce engaging interpretations whenever and wherever it finds itself. Do we want to be good citizens or servants of a system we may or may not approve of? The inconvenience that artworks present to pragmatic or utilitarian attitudes provokes both resentment and hopefully unanticipated insight.
The meaning of an artwork is promiscuously slippery, ambiguous and, like artists, not very dependable. Contexts come and go while attitudes within the work often seem to evaporate or shift. The U.K. has recently been embracing new art as an instrument of public policy to promote "diversity, access, relevance, civic pride, community innovation and social inclusion." A recent show at the Met of Renaissance art from Delft had many examples of astonishingly beautiful art that beamed with unambiguous civic pride. Does collectively embraced new art necessarily satisfy an appetite to feel good about ourselves? Works we love often seem to aid insights that come from us, not necessarily about ourselves but issuing from our best self. These special works seem to have significance above the others by virtue of their capacity to bring us a heightened sense of our singularity on the shared plane of culture. Some works almost seem to reorganize themselves as we change over the years; they grow with us and share our power to resist and assimilate.
I feel the artwork's relative uselessness is one source of its enduring radical value. Maybe that's my motivational fiction. If we can't be outside the spectacle, at least our metaphors will continue the always unfinished job of imagining and desiring an outside, that perhaps things are more mutable than we thought.
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