Dada Exhibitions

Christian Kathriner: 'Voglio vedere le mie montagne!'

Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp
Quai de l'Indépendance / Place d'Armes
Ch-1096 Cully
Switzerland

28th January - 3rd March 2012

Christian Kathriner's exhibition at the KMD is a homage to Marcel Duchamp's Trois stoppages étalon (1913-1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York), one of this great artist's most significant works. To use Kathriner's own words, it interprets 'Duchamp's seemingly most prosaic work as a self-manifesting and genuine act of creation. The artist himself becomes the demiurg, the deus artifex who creates the world. The performative element – the dropping of the threads (and the chance inherent therein) – turns this tripartite work into a sublime cosmogony.

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John Cage: A Centennial Celebration (With Friends)

From January 25, 2012 | Free
Carl Solway Gallery

Phone: 513-621-0069
Address: 424 Findlay St.
Cincinnati, Ohio 45214

The Carl Solway Gallery celebrates its 50th Anniversary and the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth with a new exhibit, John Cage: A Centennial Celebration (With Friends), exploring the artist's prints, drawings, multiples and scores. The exhibit also includes work by William Anastasi, Dove Bradshaw, Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, Yoko Ono, Jasper Johns, Allen Ginsberg and many more.

Gallery Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday and Noon-5 p.m. Saturday.

Let chance take hold at Cage exhibit.
Review by Karen S. Chambers

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at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers

The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum
Rutgers University
Eisenberg Gallery
71 Hamilton Street
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Until April 1st, 2012
Tuesday - Friday: 10:00 am - 4:30 pm

[...] Fluxus has often been tied to Pop Art, because it was engaged with mass-produced objects and similarly attempted to offer more accessible art than "advanced" painting movements. You can see the overlap between the two movements in works like Al Hansen's 1962 collage outlining a woman's body ("Calliope Mama") and made from Hershey chocolate-bar wrappers cut into shorter words ("her," "she," "hers"). But Fluxus was more international and more conceptual than Pop Art, and included composers and artists who blurred the lines between visual and sound composition. (Besides Duchamp, the other patron saint of Fluxus might be the composer John Cage.) [...]

[...] Fluxus could also dissolve into an existential nothingness. Ben Vautier's "It is all Nonsense" from 1966 is a simple acrylic rendering of the words from the title inscribed on a sheet of paper in the upper gallery, and Larry Miller's "Chewed Drawing" from 1968 is just a piece of notebook paper masticated at one end. [...]

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Icons of Modernism

The Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada, goes modernist in February with the opening of its star attraction for 2012, Icons of Modernism.

The exhibition, announced Tuesday, charts the transformative changes in the art world in the early part of the 20th century and features the work of avant-garde artists who have become household names, among them Cézanne, Dali, Duchamp and Picasso.

"They changed the nature of art, what art could be," AGA chief curator Catherine Crowston says. "They pushed art to its boundaries."

Icons of Modernism, a National Gallery of Canada exhibition show, shows how the avant-garde school, faced by industrialization and mechanization, began to question naturalism and representational art such as landscape painting, moving toward abstract forms.

Among the works is Duchamp's famous Bicycle Wheel, a bicycle fork with wheel mounted upside down on a wooden stool. The French Dadaist founded the notion of the readymade, in which an artist takes an ordinary object and makes it art by recontextualizing it. Instead of limiting art to works made from scratch, such as watercolour paintings and bronze sculptures, "art could be made from the world around you," Crowston explains.

"It's a questioning of that materiality."

Icons of Modernism runs until May 21, 2012.

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Focus: Marcel Duchamp

Miami Art Museum presents Focus: Marcel Duchamp, a rare opportunity for Miami audiences to experience the seminal French artist's work firsthand. The display presents Miami Art Museum's edition of Duchamp's Box in a Suitcase, from 1961, alongside a small trove of works hailing from the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota.

"The exhibit represents an exceedingly rare opportunity for Miami audiences to encounter the work of this seminal artist," says Rene Morales, MAM's associate curator, who organized the show. "It is intended primarily as a kind of 'Duchamp 101,' a primer or introduction to this massively influential yet highly inscrutable body of work."

Visitors can see Duchamp's iconic edition of Box-in-a-Suitcase, part of the museum's permanent collection. The piece is Duchamp's own miniature retrospective of his work and is complemented by a handful of his pieces borrowed from the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.

Morales says the exhibit questions the notion of whether the readymades Duchamp reproduced later in life were a cynical moneymaking venture for the artist or an extension of his vision.

"It's clear that he approached the process of making replicas of his earlier works as an opportunity to expand upon, complicate, and even contradict (in a tongue-in-cheek way) some of the ideas that underpin the originals, redoubling his iconoclastic gestures vis-à-vis artistic authorship," Morales says.

Some of the other works displayed include a glass bauble filled with "Paris air," a typewriter dust cover, and a hat rack — which the artist could have easily gotten straight from a department store but chose instead to hire craftsmen to re-create painstakingly. By doing so, Duchamp was able to further emphasize what he called the "infra-thin" differences between the original and the copy, and between the handmade and the mass-produced.

Morales observes that the process was Duchamp's way of "re-issuing" his challenge to the traditional assumption that there is an inherent difference between artworks and regular commodities and between aesthetic objects and utilitarian ones. Call 305-375-3000 or visit miamiartmuseum.org.

The exhibition is on view in the Focus Gallery section of MAM's Permanent Collection installation, a space dedicated to highlighting artists or themes considered cornerstones of MAM's collecting goals.

David JOSELIT, author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941, will give a lecture on the complexity and variety of readymades. "Beyond Repetition: Marcel Duchamp's Readymades" on February 18, 2012 at 2 pm.

Until March 18, 2012
Miami Art Museum
101 W Flagler St.
Miami, Florida 33130

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Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Romania

Until February 18, 2012
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Exhibition of 90 works of Jewish avant-garde artists from Romania, created between 1910 and 1938, explores the question of center and periphery and illuminates the role of Jewish artists in the avant-garde. Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco played a crucial role in the development of Dada, co-founding the anti-establishment Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and Victor Brauner was a leading force in the Surrealist movement in Romania. Works by these artists, as well as by M. H. Maxy, Paul Paun, Jules Perahim, and Arthur Segal, seen outside of Romania for the first time at the organizing venue of this exhibition, the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam, are now revealed at the Israel Museum. This exhibition was organized by the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam.
Catalogue available.

Exhibition ponders 'Why so many Jews?'
Jerusalem exhibition tries to answer poignant question about Avant-Garde artists from Romania
Article by Vlad Solomon
Published: 01.05.12, 14:27 in Israel Culture (Ynet News)

" Under these circumstances, can we talk of a "Romanian avant-garde?" Almost all of the celebrated avant-garde artists from Romania were Jewish, victims of racial hatred, persecuted in their native country, guilty of being "allogenous," "Kikes," while the Romanian art of the time was obsessed by its search for "national specificity," excluding these "foreigners."

Therefore, this was not a "Romanian" avant-garde; it is absurd to label it thus, only because the artists were born in Romania. Can we, alternatively, state that the avant-garde in Romania was Jewish? No, because the values, the themes, the agenda of the avant-garde movement were stepping away from such distinctions (national or ethnic) and were not focused on Jewish topics or on the Mosaic religion."

Eastern avant-garde
Article by Smadar Sheffi
Published: 01.30.12 in Haaretz.com

In the exhibition catalogue Radu Stern, one of the show's curators, writes about early 20th-century Romanian nationalism, which glorified the prospect of an ethnically pure, homogenous nation. Stern surveys a selection of art posters and advertisements that articulate a nationalist rhetoric, inciting xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments, which had a direct effect on the artists in the exhibition.

Romania, it turns out, was the last European country to grant citizenship to its Jewish residents, in 1923 (this was later revoked with the rise of Fascism in 1938). Romanian nationalism decried the participation of Jews in the arts, as this was considered the highest expression of the nation's culture.

Stern's explanation for the large following of Jews in the avant-garde (five of Dada's founding members in Zurich were Romanian Jews) is in keeping with historical understandings of the overwhelming Jewish presence in the Modernist movement at large. Many Jews hoped that their difference would not be an issue for the future-oriented Modernist movement, which championed the erasure of the past.