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| Francis Alys Born 1959Francis Alÿs was born in 1959 in Antwerp, Belgium, and currently lives in Mexico City. His projects include Paradox of Praxis (1997), for which the artist pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted, and most recently, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), in which 500 people at Ventanilla, outside Lima, Peru, formed a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune and moved it four inches using shovels. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford (2002), the Lisson Gallery in London (1999 and 2001), the Galerie Peter Kilchmann in Zurich (1999 and 2001), the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (1998), and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (1997). He has also shown in group exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2002), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Witte de With center for contemporary art in Rotterdam, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (all 2001), and the Hayward Gallery in London (1999), among many others. Post media website |
| Carl Andre born 1935 Carl Andre was born September 16, 1935, in Quincy, Massachusetts. From 1951 to 1953, he attended the Phillips Academy, Andover, where he studied art under Patrick Morgan. After a brief enrollment in Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, Andre earned enough money working at Boston Gear Works to travel to England and France in 1954. The following year, he joined United States Army Intelligence in North Carolina. In 1957, he settled in New York and worked as an editorial assistant for a publishing house. Shortly thereafter, he began executing wood sculptures influenced by Constantin Brancusi and by the black paintings of his friend Frank Stella. He was a leading member of the Minimalist movement, which coalesced during the early to mid-1960s. In addition to making sculpture, he also began to write poems in the tradition of Concrete Poetry, displaying the words on the page as if they were drawings. From 1960 to 1964, he was a freight brakeman and conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad in New Jersey. Andre’s first solo show was held in 1965 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. In the 1970s, the artist prepared numerous large installations, such as Blocks and Stones for the Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, in 1973, and he made many more outdoor works, such as Stone Field Sculpture in 1977 in Hartford. In his work to date, he continues to emphasize material and spatial specificity. Notable among the many retrospectives of his work are those held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970; the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas, in 1978; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, in 1987; the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England, in 1996; and the Musée Cantini, Marseilles, in 1997. Andre lives in New York. Guggenheim website |
| Bernd Becher born 1931 Hilla Becher Born 1934 Bernd Becher was born August 20, 1931, in Siegen, Germany. He studied painting and lithography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Stuttgart from 1953 to 1956 and studied typography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1957 to 1961. Hilla Becher was born Hilla Wobeser on September 2, 1934, in Potsdam, Germany. She studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she met Bernd Becher. The two artists first collaborated in 1959 and were married in 1961. They began working as freelance photographers, concentrating on industrial photography. From their first series of photographs of water towers, the artists have not veered from architectural portraiture subjects, using both industrial and domestic structures such as gas tanks, silos, framework houses, and the like. They were given their first gallery show in 1963 at the Galerie Ruth Nohl in Siegen and by 1968 were exhibiting in the United States as well as in European cities outside Germany. In 1972, the artists began showing at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York. In 1974, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, organized an exhibition of their work, which toured the United Kingdom. The couple was invited to participate in Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, and 1982, and at the São Paulo Bienal in 1977. The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, organized a retrospective of the artists’ work in 1981. In 1985, the artists had a major museum exhibition, which traveled to the Museum Folkwang Essen, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Liège, Belgium. In 1991, the artists won the Leone d’Oro award for sculpture at the Venice Biennale. (In 1969, the artists had called the architectural subject matter of their photographs "anonymous sculpture.") The Venice installation was reworked later in 1991, in a retrospective exhibition at the Kunstverein, Cologne. The Typologies installation was exhibited again in 1994 at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Both artists are instructors in photography at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Guggenheim website |
| Paddy Bedford Born c1922 Paddy, or Kuwumji (pronounced "Koomsie"), was born at Bedford Downs Station approximately 1922. He worked as a stockman on Bedford for many years and retired to Warmun Community, Turkey Creek. He is a respected senior Kitja Lawman, sometimes serious, sometimes lighthearted – but always polite and quietly spoken. He is a very proud man of gentle and genteel manner, but those who know him quickly realise that he is extremely strong-minded, determined and rarely changes a decision once made. When painting – he is totally focused. He makes it very clear he is not to be interrupted – we found that out when he was painting in the Gallery. Paddy painted a series for us – all of his mother’s country "just at the back of Bedford". He was named in the Australian Art Collector January/March 2001 – "Australia’s 50 Most Collectable Artists" – we are very fortunate to have his works available. Paddy only began painting 1997/98 and since then has participated in an incredible number of Group Exhibitions, as well as Solo Exhibitions. His work was noticed almost immediately he commenced painting - his style is easily recognised – strong lines with swirling images and determined patterns – rather like the man himself. Recently, Paddy has been very involved with his people and culture, concentrating on visiting relatives at Fitzroy Crossing, Derby etc. We trust he will return to his painting, but then, this will only happen when Paddy wants to paint. Aboriginal Art Shop website |
| Vanessa Beecroft Born 1969 Imagine the shock of entering a gallery to find a room full of nude models. You'd either thank your lucky stars for Postmodernism or shrink from the vulgarity of it all, but both reactions would undoubtedly be accompanied by a certain amount of intrigue. So what happens when these flesh-and-blood models stay as still as celluloid, gazing lazily at the empty corners of the room? The experience becomes a tangle of attraction and repulsion. Ask any of Manhattan’s elite, who filed along the Guggenheim’s sinuous halls to witness Vanessa Beecroft’s 1996 "Show." What Beecroft presented were bodies, but not personalities; she constructed a detached fantasy of femininity encircled by a web of nothingness. It was a performance in which no one performed – or a sculpture that used human flesh instead of stone or bronze. The Italian-born, New York-based artist posits an art that obscures the idea of set media. By designating the human body as a museum piece, Beecroft subverts photography, painting, sculpture, and even video art. She undermines the power of the stage, calling the narrative force of language into question simply by eliminating it. However, Beecroft’s criticism doesn’t focus solely on the female. In her 1999 show, "US Navy," Beecroft selected a group of Navy SEALs to stand at various forms of attention, clad in their immaculate summer whites. With dadaist flare, Beecroft uses humanity as a function, not only a function of itself and society, but of art as well. If the toothbrush, ostensibly a tool for one task, can enter the museum, why can’t a human expertly trained for one operation enter as well? Ultimately, it is the viewer whose existence becomes scrutinized. For how do we, lolling around with our hands in our pockets, act the role of the engaged person? Beecroft suggests that we are just as programmed as those ever-posing models Culture Council website |
| Christo & Jeanne-Claude Born 1935 Christo and Jeanne-Claude were both born on June 13, 1935, he in Bulgaria, she in Morocco. They met in Paris in 1958 when Christo was commissioned to paint a portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. Since that time they have collaborated on an impressive oeuvre of artistic work. The wrapping of the Reichstag in the summer of 1995 once again placed the Christos in the spotlight of the international art world, a center stage position they have held several times before: in 1991 during the installation of The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A., 1984-91; in 1985, with The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-1985; in 1976, with the installation of the Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76; and so on back to their first collaborations in 1961 on the docks of the Cologne harbor. Yet it would be incorrect to associate Christo and Jeanne-Claude only with these particular "high points." The previously mentioned installations took years of planning. The considerable activity which precede the installation of a piece is as much a part of a particular work as the actual installation. It took twenty-four years before the Reichstag could be wrapped, seven years to organize The Umbrellas, ten years to plan The Pont Neuf Wrapped, and three years for the Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay. Numerous books and videos have documented the remarkable succession of zoning board hearings, public forums, parliamentary debates, public and private meetings, legal releases and contract negotiations, press conferences, materials' tests, drawings, collages, exhibitions, as well as the enormous effort and teamwork required for the actual installations. This is why each particular progression of activities is correctly referred to as a "project" and the dates for each piece start with the inception of the project idea and end with the de-installation of the piece. Currently the Christos are engaged in two projects: The Gates, Project for Central Park, New York City (1979-in progress); and Over the River, Project for the Arkansas River, Colorado (1992-in progress). Individual aspects of the Christos' art may be linked to any number of artistic precursors, yet in its totality their work is truly unique. Their oeuvre has been approached critically via its resonance with Constructivism, Nouveau Rèalisme, happenings, conceptual art, land art, and the tradition of draped figures in art, especially those of Giotto and Rodin. Yet any single point of entry must be left behind if one is to fully appreciate the Christos' unparalleled achievements. Of the many perspectives from which one can investigate the Christos' art it is the use of fabric as an agent for transformation and revelation that is perhaps most crucial. The wrapping or surrounding of familiar objects, the curtaining off of familiar views, the intervention of fabric where one least expects it undermines our comfortable residence with the accustomed and creates a sense of dislocation. This substitution of a more ambivalent than unfamiliar presence for the predictable is one of the key elements of their work. Yet the wrapping, draping, surrounding, or veiling action of the fabric does not dissolve the known. Rather it recontextualizes it within a variety of corresponding associations. As the curtain surges in the wind, as the wrapping billows over a form, the fabric's fluttering surface serves as a mediator between our preexisting conceptions concerning a particular condition and inferences of shifting states. Visually, the wrapping of an object reveals its essential forms as they swell beneath the fabric. Volumes and shapes lost when seen with their usually coexistant forest of details become paramount when sheathed, as in The Pont Neuf Wrapped. Existing cultural contextualisations associated with an object and its milieu may serve as springboards for revisional analysis when that object is veiled. The wrapping of the Reichstag raised several political and historical issues, including the failed earlier attempts at a parliamentary system of government by a unified German people. With the dismantling of the wall and the reunification of Germany, the Wrapped Reichstag serves as a sort of tabula rasa against which many questions may be posed, not just by the German people or the European community, but indeed by the entire world. The final realization of a project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude is not the installation of a particular piece. A project is not completed until the installation is removed and the site is returned to its "normal" state. Yet that formerly inviolate condition has been forever altered by the installation and the lingering resonance it leaves behind. While the fabrics, ropes, cables, poles, and whatever other materials used in an installation will be recycled and the site returned to its pre-installation status, the uncertainties and questions raised by the Christos' efforts remain, dispersed among all those who have been engaged by the project. This process of reevaluation continues long after the project is supposedly completed. This creation of permanent states of reconsideration, instigated by work which is temporary by design, is perhaps the Christos' greatest achievement. Stanford University website |
| Aleks Danko Born 1950 Aleks Danko was born in Adelaide in 1950 and grew up in suburban Edwardstown, studied sculpture at the South Australian School of Art, then moved to Sydney and Melbourne – currently he is based in Daylesford in Victoria. Danko has exhibited extensively since 1970. In 1971 Danko was included in John Kaldor’s Art Project 2, in which international art curator Harald Szeemann organised an exhibition of the work of 22 up-and-coming artists from around Australia. Danko has also been involved in a public art commission in the Lion Arts Centre courtyard, outside the University of South Australia’s City West campus in 1999. Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia |
| Thomas Demand Born 1964 Thomas Demand was born in Germany in 1964 and studied in a number of art institutions across Germany and Europe including the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and Goldsmiths’ College, London. Demand’s work essentially consists of large-scale photographs of cardboard models made by himself. These models depict relatively commonplace objects or scenes, usually taken from Demand’s own memory or life experiences. The models are built life size making the photographs appear, at first glance, merely documentary; however, on closer inspection, the absence of certain details, such as light switches, gives the images an almost surreal quality. Demand’s subject matter relates to the human experience nevertheless there is an obvious lack of people. Often Demand’s work can seem banal, depicting interior scenes and the objects of daily existence, nonetheless they often have deeper, underlying historical contexts and represent darker, more sordid aspects of humanity. Ultimately, Demand’s work questions the documentary or factual nature of the medium of photography. His photographs are in one sense documentary evidence; however, the subject of these images is fictional and entirely constructed by the artist. |
| Gilbert Born 1943 George Born 1942 Gilbert was born Gilbert Proche in 1943 in the Italian Dolomites. He studied at the Wolkenstein School of Art and Hallein School of Art, Austria and the Akademie der Kunst, Munich. George was born George Pasamoa in 1942 in Devon, England. He was schooled at the Dartington Adult Education Centre, Devon; Dartington Hall College of Art; and the Oxford School of Art. Gilbert and George met while students at the St. Martin’s School of Art, London in 1967, and have lived and worked together in London since 1968. Moving to the working-class neighborhood of Spitalfields in London, Gilbert and George revolted against art’s elitism, naming their house "Art for All" and declaring themselves "living sculptures." Although their early work centered around Performance, the artists soon turned to video, photography, and drawing. As early as 1969, the artists were given an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and by 1972–73 were frequently showing with prestigious galleries like Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, Sonnabend Gallery, New York, and Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf. Their use of black-and-white photographic assemblages first surfaced in 1971 and by the late 1970s had developed into grid like photo combinations. The duo was invited to participate in Documenta in Kassel in 1972, 1977, and 1982. In 1980, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, organized a mid-career retrospective of the artists’ work, which traveled to the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle Bern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. In the first years of the 1980s, Gilbert and George added a range of bright colors to their photographs, emphasizing their slick, stylized, and cartoon like appearance. The content of the work of this period centered around urban life and the hope and fear associated with modern society. In 1986, Gilbert and George were awarded the Turner Prize, and in 1987 had a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London. In 1989, Gilbert and George exhibited 25 large pieces dealing with illness and destruction at Anthony d’Offay Gallery for an AIDS charity organization. The following year, the artists created The Cosmological Pictures, which toured ten different European museums from 1991 to 1993. Gilbert and George also exhibited in Moscow in 1990. In 1992, their largest production ever, New Democratic Pictures, was exhibited at Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark. This was followed by a solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery, Beijing, and the Art Museum, Shanghai, in 1993. In 1994, the artists were given an exhibition at the Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, Switzerland. Gilbert and George live in London. Guggenheim website |
| Donald Judd born 1928 Donald Judd was born June 3, 1928, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He registered at the Art Students League, New York, in 1948 but transferred a few months later to the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1949, he moved back to New York to study philosophy at Columbia University while he took art classes at the Art Students League. The Panoramas Gallery organised his first solo exhibition in 1957. The same year, Judd took art history classes at Columbia University. He began to write articles for Art News in 1959 and the next year became a contributing editor for Arts Magazine until 1965, when he wrote reviews for Art International. In the early 1960s, he switched from painting to sculpture and started to develop an interest in architecture. Judd challenged the artistic convention of originality by using industrial processes and materials—such as steel, concrete, and plywood—to create large, hollow Minimalist sculptures, mostly in the form of boxes, which he arranged in repeated simple geometric forms. His second solo show was held at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1963. From 1962 to 1964, he worked as an instructor at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. The Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, organized the first of a long series of individual exhibitions in 1966. This year, Judd was also hired as a visiting artist at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, and the following year he taught sculpture at Yale University, New Haven. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized the first retrospective of his work in 1968. During this decade, the artist received many fellowships, among them a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1968. In 1971, he participated in the Guggenheim International Award exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, along with other Minimalist and Conceptual artists. Judd moved to Marfa, Texas, in 1972. He participated in his first Venice Biennale in 1980, and in Documenta, Kassel, in 1982. In 1984, he started designing furniture for the purpose of manufacturing. During the first half of the 1980s, Judd drew the plans for the Chinati Foundation, Marfa; the renovated compound of buildings opened in 1986 as a showcase for his sculptures, as well as for the work of other contemporary artists. In 1987, Judd was honored by a large exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; this show travelled to Düsseldorf, Paris, Barcelona, and Turin. The Whitney Museum of American Art organized a traveling retrospective of his work in 1988. In 1992, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, and received a prize from the Stankowski Foundation, Stuttgart, increasing the list of his numerous awards. During his lifetime, Judd published a large body of theoretical writings, in which he rigorously promoted the cause of Minimalist Art; these essays were consolidated in two volumes published in 1975 and 1987. The artist died February 12, 1994, in New York. Guggenheim wesite |
| Jeff Koons Born 1955 Jeff Koons was born in Maryland in 1955, he trained at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. During the 1970s Koons worked as a commodities broker on Wall Street which assisted in funding his art practice. From very early in his career, Koons’ work has examined the notion of consumerism – from the 1970s when his work consisted of mass-produced inflatable flowers and animals through the 1980s when Koons became one of the leading exponents of the Neo-Geo art movement: a movement concerned with appropriation and parody of seemingly common and banal objects. Koons expanded the ideas of the early Pop artists of the 1960s taking everyday objects such Vacuum cleaners and basketballs and ascribing them status as art objects. Koons’ work often shows a preoccupation with sensuality and sexuality – in the same way that he ascribes common objects with artistic merit he also ascribes them an inherent sense of sexuality. Much of his work reinforces the sensuality of all aspects of everyday life. In the late 1980s Koons’ work became more explicitly sexual particularly in his series entitled Made in Heaven – photographs of himself and his wife Illona Staller (La Cicciolina). |
| Michael Landy Born 1963 Michael Landy was born in London in 1963 and trained at both the Loughborough College of Art and Goldsmiths College. Landy is perhaps best known for his installation work, although he also works in the media of drawing and video. His work focuses on the dehumanising aspects of contemporary society and our complicity in sustaining these aspects. In his installation Break Down (2001) Landy made a database of all of his material possessions (a total of approximately 7000), including his art collection and his Saab, and subsequently destroyed them. Landy has also completed a number of other large installation works including one for the Tate Gallery entitled Christmas which consisted on a large rubbish bin filled with empty bottles, used wrapping paper and a dead Chritmas tree. Landy’s art focuses on notions of consumerism and materialism often drawing on his own life for inspiration thereby creating art that is first and foremost individual, yet at the same time successfully encompasses issues relating to contemporary society. |
| Roy Lichtenstein Born 1923, died 1997 Roy Lichtenstein was born October 27, 1923, in New York City. In 1939, he studied under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York, and the following year under Hoyt L. Sherman at the School of Fine Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus. He served in the army from 1943 to 1946, after which he resumed his studies and was hired as an instructor. He obtained an M.F.A. in 1949. In 1951, the Carlebach Gallery, New York, organized a solo exhibition of his semi-abstract paintings of the old West. Shortly thereafter, the artist moved to Cleveland, where he continued painting while working as an engineering draftsman to support his growing family. From 1957 to 1960, Lichtenstein obtained a teaching position at the State University of New York, Oswego. By then, he had begun to include loosely drawn cartoon characters in his increasingly abstract canvases. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in New Jersey while teaching at Douglass College, a division of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He met artists such as Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Robert Whitman, who were all experimenting with different kinds of art based on everyday life. In 1961, he began to make paintings consisting exclusively of comic-strip figures, and introduced his Benday-dot grounds, lettering, and balloons; he also started cropping images from advertisements. From 1964 and into the next decade, he successively depicted stylized landscapes, consumer-product packaging, adaptations of paintings by famous artists, geometric elements from Art Deco design (in the Modern series), parodies of the Abstract Expressionists’ style (in the Brushstrokes series), and explosions. They all underlined the contradictions of representing three dimensions on a flat surface. In the early 1970s, he explored this formal question further with his abstract Mirrors and Entablatures series. Beginning in 1974 and up to the 1980s, he probed another long-standing issue: the concept of artistic style. All his series of works played with the characteristics of well-known 20th-century art movements. Lichtenstein continued to question the role of style in consumer culture in his 1990s series of Interiors, which included images of his own works as decorative elements. In his attempt to fully grasp and expose how the forms, materials, and methods of production have shaped the images of Western society, the artist has also explored other mediums such as polychromatic ceramic, aluminum, brass, and serigraphs. From 1962, the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, held regular exhibitions of the artist’s work. Lichtenstein participated in the Venice Biennale in 1966, and was honored with solo exhibitions in 1967 and 1968 at the Pasadena Art Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, respectively. The artist was the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1994, three years before his death September 30, 1997. Guggenheim website |
| Richard Long Born 1945 Art as a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials Nature has always been recorded by artists, from pre-historic cave paintings to 20th century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking. Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary long-distance walkers. My first work made by walking, in 1967, was a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going 'nowhere'. In the subsequent early map works, recording very simple but precise walks on Exmoor and Dartmoor, my intention was to make a new art which was also a new way of walking: walking as art. Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking - as art - provided an ideal means for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded or described in my work in three ways: in maps, photographs or text works, using whichever form is the most appropriate for each different idea. All these forms feed the imagination, they are the distillation of experience. Walking also enabled me to extend the boundaries of sculpture, which now had the potential to be de-constructed in the space and time of walking long distances. Sculpture could now be about place as well as material and form. I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'. Over the years these sculptures have explored some of the variables of transience, permanence, visibility or recognition. A sculpture may be moved, dispersed, carried. Stones can be used as markers of time or distance, or exist as parts of a huge, yet anonymous, sculpture. On a mountain walk a sculpture could be made above the clouds, perhaps in a remote region, bringing an imaginative freedom about how, or where, art can be made in the world. Richard Long, Bristol 2000 Richard Long’s website |
| Barry McGee Born 1966 A lauded and much-respected cult figure in a bi-coastal subculture that comprises skaters, graffiti artists, and West Coast surfers, Barry McGee was born in 1966 in California, where he continues to live and work. In 1991 he received a BFA in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. His drawings, paintings, and mixed-media installations take their inspiration from contemporary urban culture, incorporating elements such as empty liquor bottles and spray-paint cans, tagged signs, wrenches, and scrap wood or metal. McGee is also a graffiti artist, working on the streets of America’s cities since the 1980s, where he is known by the tag name "Twist." He views graffiti as a vital method of communication, one that keeps him in touch with a larger, more diverse audience than can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or museum. His trademark icon, a caricatured male figure with sagging eyes and a bemused expression, recalls the homeless people and transients who call the streets their home. "Compelling art to me is a name carved into a tree," says McGee. His work has been shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and on streets and trains all over the United States. He and his daughter, Asha, live in San Francisco. |
| Mario Merz Born 1925 Mario Merz was born January 1, 1925, in Milan. He grew up in Turin and attended medical school for two years at the Università degli Studi di Torino. During World War II he joined the anti-Fascist group Giustizia e Libertà and was arrested in 1945 and confined to jail, where he drew incessantly on whatever material he could find. In 1950, he began to paint with oil on canvas. His first solo exhibition, held at Galleria La Bussola, Turin, in 1954, included paintings whose organic imagery Merz considered representative of ecological systems. By 1966, he began to pierce canvases and objects, such as bottles, umbrellas, and raincoats, with neon tubes, altering the materials by symbolically infusing them with energy. In 1967, he embarked on an association with several artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio, which became a loosely defined art movement labeled Arte Povera by critic and curator Germano Celant. This movement was marked by an anti-elitist aesthetic, incorporating humble materials drawn from everyday life and the organic world in protest of the dehumanizing nature of industrialization and consumer capitalism. In 1968, Merz adopted one of his signature motifs, the igloo. It was constructed with a metal skeleton and covered with fragments of clay, wax, mud, glass, burlap, and bundles of branches, and often political or literary phrases in neon tubing. He participated in significant international exhibitions of Conceptual, Process, and Minimalist Art, such as Arte povera + azioni povera at the Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica, Amalfi, and Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1968; the latter exhibition travelled to Krefeld, Germany, and to London. In 1970, Merz began to utilise the Fibonacci formula of mathematical progression within his works, transmitting the concept visually through the use of the numerals and the figure of a spiral. By the time of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1972, he had also added stacked newspapers, archetypal animals, and motorcycles to his iconography, to be joined later by the table, symbolic as a locus of the human need for fulfilment and interaction. Merz often responds to the specific environment of his exhibitions by incorporating materials indigenous to the area as well as adjusting the scale of the work to the site. His first solo European museum exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1975, and his most recent retrospective was organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1989. Merz works in Turin, where he resides with his wife, artist Marisa Merz. Guggenheim website |
Nam June Paik Born 1932 In 1945, Nam June Paik went to Kyunggi High School in Seoul. At the same time, he took piano and composition lessons. In 1950, his family moved to Tokyo: there, he studied philosophy, music and the history of art, gaining a diploma in aesthetics and writing a thesis on Arnold Schönberg. He continued his training in Germany, at Munich and Cologne Universities, and then at the Freiburg Conservatory. These years of training (1958-1963) were for him a time of decisive encounters and his first collaborations. Nam June Paik worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the WDR Electronic Music radio studio in Cologne. 1961 marked his meeting with George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, whose manifesto he fully espoused: he took part in Wolf Vostell's review De-coll/age and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe (concerts, performances and actions) with Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Robert Filliou, Allan Kaprow and George Brecht. After working on the piano, a symbol of western culture, Paik began diverting the television from its conventional place, in collaboration with Vostell. In their performances and installations, the frame of the monitor was destroyed, demythifying the television set and depriving it of its traditional associations and connotations. Electronic Music-Electronic TV, his first personal exhibition in March 1963 at the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal (Germany), presented his first musical and video works (Distorted TV: thirteen television sets showed the same program in thirteen different versions, since Paik had developed thirteen different ways of electromagnetically deforming the picture). Nam June Paik moved to New York in 1964. The same year, the Bonino Gallery offered him his first personal exhibition in New York: Electronic Art. With the Japanese sound engineer Shuya Abe, he built Robot K-456, the first robot to walk and talk. A year later, when the portable Sony "portapak" video kit became available in America, he was the first to take advantage of this new tool, which he bought in October 1965. He then filmed Pope Paul VI's visit to New York through a taxi window and broadcast the recording (Electronic Video Recorder) the same evening at the Café à Gogo in New York. The technical novelty and the possibilities offered by this portable 1/2-inch video kit (live recording, autonomy of the production tool) led to creations and experiments with the medium. With Nam June Paik, a wave of video artists suddenly appeared who, by calling into question the communication codes of a society accustomed to the institutional style of television, proposed an alternative type of television. In 1963-64, he met the cellist and composer Charlotte Moorman, with whom he began a long an fruitful collaboration. In their performances, he explored the body with as a metaphor and extension of the musical instrument: "When two Americans like Charlotte and video make love, you mustn't miss it", Nam June Paik would later say. In 1967, with Opera Sextronique, they were arrested for indecency and involved in a sensational court case against the limits of artistic censorship. Other important works by them included TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) and TV Cello (1971). As early as 1963, Nam June Paik was already producing video installations and sculptures. His major pieces include: TV Clock (1963), Magnet TV (1965), Moon is the Oldest TV (1965-1976-1985), TV Buddha (1974), T V Garden (1974-1978), Fish Flies on Sky (1975) and Video Fish (1979-1985). In 1974, his first major personal retrospective, Video 'n' Videology, was organised at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse (New York, USA). As artist in residence, Nam June Paik produced experimental works for the WNET / 13th Channel Television Laboratory in New York and, in 1969, for the first time on television, used the Paik / Abe video synthesizer developed with the electronic engineer Shuya Abe at the WGBH New Television Workshop in Boston (producer: Fred Barzyck). This process for manipulating and colouring images revolutionised the technological grammar of the medium. Nam June Paik married the artist Shigeko
Kubota in 1977. During the same period, alongside his interest for television as a medium
and information technology, he began experimenting with satellite transmission. Documenta
6 in Kassel opened with a broadcast of a performance by Paik / Moorman and included TV
Garden, an installation which would be seen in 1978 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in
Paris. He was asked to work for the opening ceremony of the Oly mpic Games at Lake Placid
in 1980, producing a 4-minute video tape. On January 1st 1984, Nam June Paik, along with Joseph Beuys, Merce Cunningham and Allan Ginsberg, among others, greeted the new year with Good Morning Mr. Orwell (co-produced by the Centre Georges Pompidou, the WNET / 13th C hannel Television Laboratory and FR 3). This was one of the first programmes designed by an artist and transmitted live by satellite simultaneously in Europe, the United States and Korea. With his live satellite broadcasts (Good Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984, Bye Bye Kipling, 1986, Wrap Around the World, 1988), Nam June Paik created connections between the universe of art and that of the media, between popular culture and the avant garde, between technology and philosophical discussion and between East and West. Starting in 1985, he devoted himself to constructing monumental installations and cybernetic totems made up of stacked monitors, thus perpetuating the spirit of Fluxus: he deconstructed and diverted the medium of television to demythify the language and content (Arc Double Face, 1985, La Madeleine Disco, 1989, Video Arbor, 1990). For the Seoul Olympics in 1988, he built The More the Better, a "media tower" made up of 1003 monitors. Ever since the early days of his career,
Nam June Paik has given considerable importance to collaborations with avant-garde artists
like John Cage (A Tribute to John Cage, 1973), Merce Cunningham (Merce by Merce,
1978), Allen Ginsberg et Allan Kaprow (Allan' n' Allen's Complaint, 1982), Julian
Beck and Judith Malina (Living with the Living Theatre, 1989), and Joseph Beuys (In
Memoriam George Maciunas, 1978, MAJORCA-fantasia, 1989, Be uys / Voice,
1990). Elisabeth Harter - Fabien Lagny Encyclopedia of New Media websitehttp://www.newmedia-arts.org/cgi-bin/show-art.asp? ID=D001522&LG=GBR&DOC=IDEN&na=PAIK&pna=NAMJUNE |
| Paul Pfeiffer Born 1966 Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu in 1966, he trained in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and subsequently the Hunter College and the San Francisco Art Institute. Pfeiffer extensively explores the media of video and computer art utilising cutting-edge technology to address the problems raised by these new media in art. He invites his audience to consider and reconsider issues of personal identity (including body image), race and architectural space. Moreover, Pfeiffer investigates the way in which computer technology has changed the role of photography – both moving and still – from its role as an objective ‘factual’ form of documentation to one where it can be subjective and constructed. This is reinforced by Pfeiffer’s choice of display medium – he emphasises the subjective nature of video by mounting his miniature monitors on poles a significant distance from the wall. One of Pfeiffer’s key tools is erasure – he deliberately erases or excludes elements of images in order to obscure their meaning, thereby forcing the viewer to consider the significance of this absence. |
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| Richard Prince Born 1949 In the mid-1970s Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires. "Untitled (Cowboy)" is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, "Untitled (Cowboy)" is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience. Metropolitan Museum of Art websitehttp://www.metmuseum.org/collections/view1.asp?dep=19&full=1&item=2000%2E272 |
| Robert Rauschenberg Born 1925 Port Arthur, Texas Robert Rauschenberg was born Milton Rauschenberg on October 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Texas. He began to study pharmacology at the University of Texas at Austin before being drafted into the United States navy, where he served as a neuropsychiatric technician in the navy hospital corps in San Diego. In 1947, he enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute and travelled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian the following year. In the fall of 1948, he returned to the United States to study under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, which he continued to attend intermittently through 1952. While taking classes at the Art Students League, New York, from 1949 to 1951, Rauschenberg was offered his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Some of the works from this period included blueprints, monochromatic white paintings, and black paintings. From the fall of 1952 to the spring of 1953, he travelled to Europe and North Africa with Cy Twombly, whom he had met at the Art Students League. During his travels, Rauschenberg worked on a series of small collages, hanging assemblages, and small boxes filled with found elements, which he exhibited in Rome and Florence. Upon his return to New York in 1953, Rauschenberg completed his series of black paintings, using newspaper as the ground, and began work on sculptures created from wood, stones, and other materials found on the streets; paintings made with tissue paper, dirt, or gold leaf; and more conceptually oriented works such as Automobile Tire Print (1953) and Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). By the end of 1953, he had begun his Red Painting series on canvases that incorporated newspapers, fabric, and found objects and evolved in 1954 into the Combines, a term Rauschenberg coined for his well-known works that integrated aspects of painting and sculpture and would often include such objects as a stuffed eagle or goat, street signs, or a quilt and pillow. In late 1953, he met Jasper Johns, with whom he is considered the most influential of artists who reacted against Abstract Expressionism. The two artists had neighbouring studios, regularly exchanging ideas and discussing their work, until 1961. Rauschenberg began to silkscreen paintings in 1962. He had his first career retrospective, organised by the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1963 and was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale. He spent much of the remainder of the 1960s dedicated to more collaborative projects including printmaking, Performance, choreography, set design, and art-and-technology works. In 1966, he co-founded Experiments in Art and Technology, an organization that sought to promote collaborations between artists and engineers. In 1970, Rauschenberg established a permanent residence and studio in Captiva, Florida, where he still lives. A retrospective organized by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States in 1976–78. Rauschenberg continued to travel widely, embarking on a number of collaborations with artisans and workshops abroad, which culminated in the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project from 1985 to 1991. In 1997, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, exhibited the largest retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work to date, which traveled to Houston and to Europe in 1998. Guggenheim websitehttp://www.204.168.68.231/site/artist_bio_133.html |
| Frank Stella Born 1936 Frank Stella was born in a small suburb of Boston, Massachusetts in 1936. He studied at Phillips Academy and subsequently Princeton University. Stella first came to prominence with his exhibition of completely black paintings in 1959, a reaction against Abstract Expressionism (these works are often seen as precursors to Minimalism). Throughout the 1960s Stella’s work was exhibited in many of the largest abstract exhibitions, including those at the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. However, during the 1970s Stella moved away from abstract paintings on canvas towards three-dimensional paintings and multi-part wall installations, successfully blurring the lines between painting and sculpture. Since the 1980s Stella has become increasingly interested in architecture and public space and has completed a number of public art pieces across the United States and Canada. |
| Thomas Struth Born 1954 German photographer Thomas Struth trained at the Dusseldorf Academy under Gerhard Richter, Peter Kleeman and Bernd and Hilla Becher – whose industrial landscapes had a vast impact on Struth’s work. Struth’s early photographic work drew inspiration from celebrated nineteenth-century Parisian photographer Eugène Atget. His heavily constructed and framed urban scenes discuss at once the unremarkability of urbanity along with its specificities, while at the same time questioning the objectivity of the medium of photography. However, Struth is best know for his series of images entitled Museum Photographs, in which he has taken photographs of people looking at famous works of art (specifically Renaissance works). In this way his photographs discuss the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. In his work the viewer often becomes the viewed through which he discusses issues such as class, race, education, religion, politics and necessarily aesthetics. In 1993 Struth was appointed professor at Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe and in 1997 won the Spectrum International Photography Prize of Lower Saxony. |
| Bill Viola born 1951 Bill Viola (b.1951) is widely recognised as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 30 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. Viola's video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. His single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologised for international readers. Since the early 1970s, Viola has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973. Since then he has produced over 150 works that have been shown in museums, galleries, film festivals, and on public television worldwide. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production in one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then travelled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. From 1980–81 he lived in Japan with his wife Kira Perov on a Japan/U.S. Cultural Exchange Fellowship, where he studied Buddhism with Zen Master Daien Tanaka and was artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi research laboratories. In 1984 he was an artist-in-residence at the San Diego Zoo in California for a project on animal consciousness. Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995, premiering an ensemble of five new installation works titled Buried Secrets. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organised Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey, an exhibition that travelled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. He was invited to be a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1998, and later that year created a suite of three new video pieces for the rock group Nine Inch Nails' world tour. His 1994 videofilm Déserts, created to accompany the music composition of the same name by Edgard Varèse, received its American premiere at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1999 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. His most recent project is a large scale, five-part projected "fresco" cycle in digital High-Definition, Going Forth By Day (2002), commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. Viola is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989, and the first Medienkunstpreis in 1993, presented jointly by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, and Siemens Kulturprogramm, in Germany. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The Art Institute of Chicago (1997), and California Institute of the Arts (2000) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. He lives and works in Long Beach, California, with his wife and manager Kira Perov and their two children. Bill Viola’s website |