communimage - a moment in time VI
Through February 8, 2009
The Art of Participation, 1950 to Now
San Francisco MoMA
On view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" presents an overview of the rich and varied history of participatory art practice during the past six decades, exploring strategies and situations in which the public has taken a collaborative role in the art-making process. Curated by Rudolf Frieling, the exhibition features projects both on-site and online, from early performance-based and conceptual art to online works.
Several Austrian artists are represented in the show, including VALIE EXPORT and Erwin Wurm. Two of the four members of the pan-European collective c a l c (casqueiro atlantico laboratorio cultural) also stem from Austria: tOmi Scheiderbauer and Malex Spiegel. Formed in 1990, c a l c is a self-styled "cultural laboratory" of multimedia artists and designers.
In 1999, at a time when the idea of shared authorship and collective production took on new meaning as the Internet introduced new opportunities for networking, c a l c, alongside guest artist Johannes Gees, began to develop communimage, a "common, or shared, image" - a project which has continued to this day.
Visitors to the website are invited to upload pictures to a grid system, along with some basic meta-information. Contributions are unfettered and unregulated, resulting in widely varied subject matter: from the photorealistic to the animated, from the intimate to the exhibitionist.
Together, the images form a collective map, so large that if it were printed out at actual size it would reach a height of nearly forty-six feet. As of late June 2008 it contained more than 25,700 images uploaded by some 2,220 visitors. Viewed as a whole (one encounters it in the gallery as a large-scale print), communimage forms an abstract, polymorphous shape, a representation of the global internet community. To display the site in the museum as a static print [communimage - a moment in time VI, printed September 17, 2008] may seem a contradictory gesture, but it is also a compelling reflection on the status of the image in the public realm.
Quoted in part from Melissa Pellico in the "The Art of Participation, 1950 to Now", exhibition catalog.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco CA 94103
www.sfmoma.org
www.calcaxy.com
www.communimage.net
January 13 - February 15, 2009
unfiction
College of Fine Arts, Illinois State University
Lena Lapschina
1000 mm or The Bedroom Window
For more than two years, Lena Lapschina pointed a Zenit camera with a 1000-millimeter super tele lens out of her bedroom window on the seventh floor of the Gasometer apartment complex in Vienna's Simmering district. In thousands of images, some sharp, some blurred, she captured an ever-changing microcosm in the urban landscape between idyllic garden plots, a rock concert hall, and a supermarket car park. The protagonists include hobos and upright citizens, punks and superstars, graffiti artists and policemen, pissers and lovemakers, dog owners and postmen, gangs and horses, exhibitionists and underdogs.
White Studies, a video exploration of daily/nightly social behavior in the area between Vienna's Eastern railway line and the Central Cemetery, pulses across the two screens to the accompaniment of acid jazz by Nuclear Los.
Lena Lapschina's message is about "the perfect place" that does not exist. Vienna is "as great as areas in Eastern, Western, Southern, and Europe". And Vienna is "just as stupid as all these other places".
Believe it or not: It happens just outside your bedroom window.
"During the Cold War, people in the Eastern Bloc believed the rumors that life was better in the West. But they soon found out that life there was no more interesting, fun, or boring than at home." Lena Lapschina
College Of Fine Arts
Campus Box 5600Center for Visual Arts 116
Normal, Il 61790-5600
www.cfa.ilstu.edu
January 15 - February 21, 2008
OLIVER DORFER the pulpproject/.....
Freight + Volume, New York
For his first solo exhibition at Freight + Volume, Oliver Dorfer will present a new group of paintings from the ongoing series titled thepulpproject/..... These works, painted from the back onto Plexiglas, carry Dorfer's signature shiny flatness even further. Using an acrylic carving technique, woodblock-esque printed images are combined with silk-screen-like coyness melding the roughly-handmade with the world pulp magazines and comics. Ultimately, each painting, comprised of four approximately 80-inch-square panes, becomes a single imaged behemoth of gloss.
AUSTRIA: IMAGES OF SOUND
Leica Gallery, New York
This small selection of mostly contemporary images of artists who live in Austria sheds light on silence and sound, tonalities and dissonances. Some explore absences while others give a close-up view so you can almost hear a tune. In dialogue with Lessing's splendid images of Herbert von Karajan, these more recent works by the young photographer Oliver Jiszda introduce a newer Austria - but at once an Austria that in almost every corner of its realm is still immersed in music.
Leica Gallery in New York
670 Broadway / Suite 500
New York, NY 10012
leicaphoto@aol.com
The Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program is the flagship academic exchange program of the United States. It was established in 1946 under legislation introduced by Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) from Arkansas at the beginning of his distinguished career in the US Senate (1945-1974). Fulbright was a committed internationalist, and the objective of this program reflected one of his ongoing concerns: "the promotion of mutual understanding between citizens of the United States and other nations." Bilateral exchange and binational decision-making are the enduring guiding principles of the program.
The Fulbright Program currently operates in 140 countries, including 51 countries with binational Fulbright Commissions such as the Austrian-American Educational Commission. The Fulbright Program in Austria dates back to a bilateral agreement that was concluded in 1950, and the first exchanges under its auspices were during the 1951/52 academic year. In 1963, a new agreement established the Austrian-American Educational Commission, a binational organization with a binational board, to oversee the program, which is funded primarily by direct contributions from the governments of the United States and the Republic of Austria.
Since its inception in 1946, over 250,000 students, teachers, academics, and professionals have participated in the Fulbright Program, including 5,000 citizens of Austria and the US.
The Austrian-American Fulbright Program has a wide spectrum of different grant opportunities. It provides grants for Austrian graduates or scholars to study, teach, or pursue research in the US, and for US citizens to engage in similar activities in Austria. Candidates for Fulbright awards are recruited upon the basis of annual, national, open, and merit-based competitions.
Along with opportunities for intellectual, professional, and artistic growth, the Fulbright Program offers invaluable opportunities to meet and work with people of the host country, sharing daily life as well as professional and personal insights. The program promotes cross-cultural interaction and mutual understanding on a person-to-person basis in an atmosphere of openness, academic integrity, and intellectual freedom.
For more information on the Austrian-American Fulbright Program visit www.fulbright.at.
