Dada Exhibitions etc.
Duchamp and/or/in China
A big name in the art world, Marcel Duchamp has a unique look on modern art. By modifying the primary function of an object, he turns it into a piece of art. The ready-made, initiated by this master only about one hundred years ago, has turned the art world, including China, upside down. Within the frame of this beautiful exhibition of Duchamp's work, which are presented in three packed boxes, the works of ten Chinese artists will engage in dialogue with one of the most important artist of the 20th century: Ai Weiwei, Cai Yuan, Guo Hongwei, Huang Yong Ping, Lee Kit, Song Dong, Taca Sui, Wang Luyan, Wang Jun-Jiyeh, Wang Xingwei, Zheng Guogu.
The Chinese artists who are featured in the exhibition will share their conceptual acquaintanceship with Duchamp.
Beijing, April 27 - June 16, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA).
Duchamp's Presence Lacking in His Beijing Exhibit
by William Wang -- May 3, 2013
Marcel Duchamp's name is revered in modern art society, his influence somehow still forcefully impressing itself into the ideas and works of contemporary artists today, abroad and in China no less.
The largest exhibition of his work in China to date has built up a considerable amount of anticipation. The DUCHAMP and/or/in CHINA exhibit at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art includes a collection of Duchamp's works, each notable in and of itself, though his most important works are all notably absent.
The surprisingly small exhibit is held in two of UCCA's modest-sized halls. Their contents are works by Duchamp as well as by Chinese artists whose work dialogues explicitly or implicitly with his. The end result is a bit murky: viewers all fastidiously check the notes to verify a piece's creator before deciding how much time to spend dwelling on its deeper meanings.
The number of original Duchamp pieces is much smaller than visitors expect, and ironically, the exhibition's focus is basically a collection of miniature art replicas. Duchamp's works consist of his Boite-en-Valise (Box in a Valise) miniature representations of his collected seminal works, magazine covers that he designed, roto-reliefs he designed, an aquatint and a collotype of his painting Bride, and various prints of posters by or about Duchamp. Art reproduction is an unintentional and unfortunate theme of the exhibit.
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Man Ray, Picasso, Matisse and Jackson Pollock to feature in Tate Liverpool's Constellations exhibition
A SEWING machine wrapped in a blanket and tied with string is one of the key works in an upcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool.
The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse
The piece by American modernist Man Ray will feature in a major rehang of the Albert Dock gallery's collection displays starting in May 2013.
Works by Pablo Picasso, Barbara Hepworth, Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock will also be included in more than 100 pieces to be shown in the DLA Piper: Constellations exhibition, including many never seen in Liverpool before.
The displays will be opened in two stages, coinciding with Tate Liverpool's 25th anniversary.
For the first time, a major museum retrospective of Man Ray's work is opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The exhibition, entitled Man Ray Portraits, focuses on his career in America and Paris between 1916 and 1968 and features more than 150 of his key works.
Celebrated as one of the leading artists of the Dada and Surrealist movements. Man Ray rose to fame because of his experimentation with color as well as his, at the time, revolutionary photographic techniques.
Born in Philadelphia and having spent his formative years in New York, this influential and innovative artist was first a painter who only turned to photography to reproduce his work and then later to fund his work. At fateful meeting with Marcel Duchamp in 1915 led Man Ray to Paris and, as they say, the rest is history.
Guests who visit the exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery will enjoy vintage prints from international museums as well as personal collections with subjects ranging from cultural figures and friends including Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, Aldous Huxley, Coco Chanel and Wallis Simpson, to name a few. Mark your diaries and get here before it's gone.
Man Ray Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery until May 27, 2013.
by Casey Gillespie February 27, 2013
I was particularly excited this morning.
Two reasons for this: firstly, to make my own opinion about the duchess of Cambridge's portrait, and secondly, to see the Man Ray exhibition.
As you may know already, I LOOOOOOOVE Dada. I studied it at uni, along with Surrealism. I even thought of writing my M.A. dissertation about Surrealism and Sexuality, and having done a lot of research, I had intended to use several Man Ray's pictures, like those two (!!! explicit material !!!): those pix belong to a four-piece set, "Printemps, été, automne hiver" (you can recognise – ? – Kiki de Montparnasse's lips – that's her too in Le Violon d'Ingres above; I'm afraid I can't tell you who's the male... model). Oh, they are NOT part of the exhibition, sorry...
more with porno pictures...
Madame la Baronne in Me, Myself & Art, February 20, 2013
It was impossible to be a Dadaist in New York, Man Ray believed, because the city itself was the epitome of manic, anarchic Dada.
So on July 14, 1921, he set sail for France and took the photographs that form the heart of the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery "May Ray Portraits." For many, these encapsulate the seductive spirit of Paris between the wars.
As befits a Dadaist, Man Ray was a paradoxical person. He was born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia and brilliantly re-branded himself with a new name both punchy and slightly futuristic.
The notion of the human ray seemed to permeate the best of his portraiture. His subjects -- including such artists, musicians and writers as Le Corbusier, Hemingway, Stravinsky and Schoenberg -- seem to radiate a powerful, enigmatic force. Picasso stares charismatically out of the frame. Dali looks equally intense, but weirdly melodramatic with a light below his face.
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"Man Ray Portraits" is at the National Portrait Gallery, St. Martin's Place,
London WC2H 0HE through May 27.
Information: http://www.npg.org.uk//whatson/man-ray-portraits/exhibition.php
or +44-20-7306-0055.
by Martin Gayford in Bloomberg - Feb. 18, 2013
By Mark Hudson in The Telegraph on February 13, 2013
I'm watching a flickery, tantalisingly brief video-clip of Marcel Duchamp being interviewed in 1966 for BBC Two's Late Night Line-Up, by Joan Bakewell. It has the feel of an unlikely encounter: on the one hand, the archetypal dollybird intellectual, who is still very much with us; on the other, the so-called Father of Conceptual Art who had produced his most famous work back in 1917. Yet there he is, two years before his death, hatchet-faced but supremely affable, dragging occasionally on a cigar, explaining himself in disarmingly simple terms and in excellent English.
When the clip cuts out, after just over a minute, what sticks in the mind is a comment he makes just before the screen goes blank: "Artists often do things without knowing why they do them," he says. "I never ask myself why." Then he's gone.
He never asks why? You might be forgiven for thinking that conceptual art would be all about asking why. But then very little about Duchamp – one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of art – is as you'd expect it to be.
If Picasso was considered the defining artist of the age for most of the 20th century, the Spaniard has been relegated over the past couple of decades to the role of a mere precursor to the man who, proverbially, changed the world by signing a urinal and calling it art. Duchamp's Fountain of 1917 -- – a china urinal laid on its back and signed R. Mutt --– has taken on the iconic status once reserved for creations of the order of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. It has become the work that removed art to the cerebral realm from the physical – or the "retinal" as Duchamp liked to call it – enabling Minimalism, Conceptualism, Performance Art and just about every other significant development of the past half century. It is the work, in short, that got art where it is today.
A new exhibition at the Barbican, in London, looks at Duchamp's influence on and interactions with four key post-war American figures: composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham and artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But what of Duchamp himself? While he's universally characterised as the arch-conceptualist, does that label do justice to what Duchamp did or who he was?
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The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns
February 14, 2013 - June 9, 2013
Barbican Art Gallery
London, England
Exploring one of the most important chapters in the history of contemporary art, The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns focuses on Marcel Duchamp's American legacy, tracing his relationship to four great modern masters – composer, John Cage, choreographer, Merce Cunningham, and visual artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Encountering Duchamp and his work in the early stages of their careers, each of the younger artists embraced key elements of his ideas and practice, resulting in a seismic shift in the direction of art in the 1950s and 60s. Characterised by the integration of art and life, the work of Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns heralded the advent of Pop Art.
The Bride and the Bachelors features around 90 works, some by Rauschenberg and Johns are being shown in the UK for the first time. The selection reflects the artists' multiple levels of engagement across the disciplines of art, dance, and music.
Leading contemporary artist Philippe Parreno has devised a dynamic experiential staging of the exhibition inspired by the choreography of Cunningham and music of Cage, featuring two Yamaha Disklavier pianos playing live Cage scores, while the "ghost" of the dancers can be heard pounding the floor. The soundscape is also punctuated by Parreno's own interpretation of Cage's famous 4' 33".
Live dance "Events" are performed on Thursday evenings and weekends throughout the duration of the exhibition by students and graduates from London Contemporary Dance School and dancers from Richard Alston Dance Company.
Special ticketed dance events taking place in the gallery setting include Cunningham's RainForest (1968), presented by Rambert Dance Company and Richard Alston Dance Company performing mixed pieces of his repertoire. Both are followed by a Q&A with Mark Baldwin and Richard Alston respectively.
The exhibition is curated by Carlos Basualdo (The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Contemporary Art,) in collaboration with Erica F. Battle, (Project Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art) and organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with the Barbican. The exhibition has been developed with the full co-operation of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, John Cage Trust, Merce Cunningham Trust and Association Marcel Duchamp.
For Marcel Duchamp, the cracks that appeared in his work The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) during transit in 1926 were nothing more than a happy accident – a continuation of the tangles of replication and infinite adjustment, a further debunking of the role of the artist and his divine creation. And yet, the exactitude with which he carefully "repaired" and recreated the piece, noting the way that the cracks formed new lines of thought, new traces of paths for the Bachelors to pursue the evasive "Bride", reveal what Robert Hughes described as the "fine tuning" of Duchamp's indifference. Duchamp may have been a master of the throwaway, the readymade and the aleatory, but he was also a meticulous calibrator of thought, where ideas are suspended in their solid states with aching deliberateness. The exhibition presents Duchamp as a type of spider, weaving a web of strings and lightly thrown "stoppages", in which he catches his illustrious protégés: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Words/Photo Matilda Bathhurst © ArtLyst 2013
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The word "NO" dangles on a wire tacked to the front of a beautifully shabby and drab painting by Jasper Johns at the Barbican Art Gallery. The shadow of the metal word gets confused with the grey painting behind it, where Johns used the template as a stencil. Somewhere else in the exhibition The Bride and the Bachelors, a drawing – or should we call it a text – by Marcel Duchamp, just says "NON". Hanging there like a suspended refusal, is Johns's no a reply to Duchamp? Is it a no that really means yes? Is Johns saying yes to no? As soon as you mess with Marcel, things get complicated.
Adrian Searle in The Guardian, February 15, 2013
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Marcel Duchamp – artist making waves at The Barbican
February 14 - June 9, 2013
Published: 18 January, 2013 by ANDREW JOHNSON
MOST people associate Marcel Duchamp with a urinal which he famously – or infamously – described as art in 1917, naming it "Fountain". So you can blame him if you think modern art is rubbish.
His influence on the course of Western art and culture can't be so easily dismissed, however.
In fact, like it or not, he's one of the century's most important figures, moving through Dadaism and Surrealism before giving all up to devote his life to chess. Born in 1887, his life spanned the momentous break in artistic tradition in the late 19th century and continued its revolutionary path until his death in 1968.
The Barbican is going Duchamp crazy between February and June. This week, it unveiled its Dancing around Duchamp season which will see exhibitions, dance, theatre, film and music events devoted to or inspired by the artist.
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The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America
Until July 14, 2013
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel Street,
New Haven 06520, USA
Tel.: +1 203 432 0600
http://www.yale.edu/artgallery
Paul Eluard: Poetry, Love and Liberty
February 2 - May 26, 2013
Palais Lumière
Quai Albert Besson,
74500 Evian
France
Tel.: +33 04.50.83.15.90
http://www.ville-evian.fr