Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, Choice Shopping, 2006, Various materials, 259 x 198 x 114.5 cm, Goetz Collection, Munich, Photo: Aaron Igler.
Paper Rad, P-Unit Mixtape 2005, 2005, Single-channel projection (21:08 min, color, sound), Courtesy of the artists and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Paper Rad, P-Unit Mixtape 2005, 2005, Single-channel projection (21:08 min, color, sound), Courtesy of the artists and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Jessica Ciocci, Untitled (Grid Drawings), 2009, Marker on paper, 21 x 28 cm, Courtesy of the artist.
Jacob Ciocci, Untitled (Dogtailz), 2007, Acrylic and collage on Paper, 21.5 x 28 cm, Courtesy of the artist. |
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migros museum
für gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270
41 1 277 20 50
Zürich
Deterioration, They Said
Cory Arcangel, Jessica Ciocci & Jacob Ciocci / Paper Rad, Shana Moulton, Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch
August 29-November 8, 2009
American artists Cory Arcangel, Jessica Ciocci & Jacob Ciocci / Paper Rad, Shana Moulton and Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch, have been brought together for the exhibition entitled Deterioration, They Said. Each will present an individual project in the migros museum für gegenwartskunst. In their works the artists create an overreaching, colour-charged aesthetic of excessive density of content, reacting to the consumer-oriented condition of Western society, while at the same time formulating something out of it. In their image spaces the four positions address a culture of excess, constructing their critique via a form of appropriation, which simultaneously releases a veritable deluge of images. In the tradition of experimental film and “Scatter Art” they probe potential unconventional narrative patterns and test for the disintegration of stereotypes. As a result, the video works are often shown in sculptural settings, in which fragments of pop culture and hand-crafted forms are amalgamated into an “intermedial Gesamtkunstwerk”.
Cory Arcangel’s works (born 1978 in Buffalo) frequently treat the subject of the apparently obsolete. The artistic works emerging from this theme know no media limits — video installations with outdated home-computer game systems, videos featuring low-tech aesthetics, performances, or computer programmes all feature in his work. In the exhibition he will present for the first time in Switzerland his video work A Couple Thousand Short Films about Glenn Gould (2007). In this work, the artist uses two contrary starting points which he allows to correlate with one another. On the one hand Arcangel engages with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations of 1741 — which belong to the standard repertoire of the concert pianist — while on the other he examines the phenomenon of the innumerable YouTube videos showing amateur musicians playing. Arcangel arranges the first movement of the Goldberg Variations anew and (audio)visualises the composition by means of YouTube videos, which he cuts again. In Arcangel’s version a video is inserted for each note. The double projection — acting as the bass and violin key — becomes such a hysterical kaleidoscope of the most varied musical instruments and practices that it breaks off into the visuals of the overstimulation of the brain, in the tradition of a Flicker experimental film.
In her videos and performances Shana Moulton (born 1976 in California) probes, with humour, the interplay of a popular culture shaped by consumption and commercialised New Age philosophies, and an “elite” culture, exemplified in the spiritism of Mondrian, and the late works of Georgia O’Keeffe created in New Mexico. The psychedelic low-tech videos recalling the late 1970s and 1980s, and important representatives of early film history such as the films of Maya Deren, exhibit a constant “Migration of Form(s)” — that is to say forms which oscillate between “high” and “low”. In the surrealistic videos •Whispering Pines• (2002 to the present) constructed as a series, Cynthia, a bored, hypochondriac housewife — an alter ego of the artist — persistently seeks salvation in the household consumer world; inevitably, it eludes her. In the exhibition the videos will be screened in a sculptural setting.
The label Paper Rad, founded in 2000 by Jessica Ciocci (born 1976 in Lexington, Kentucky), Jacob Ciocci (born 1976 in Lexington, Kentucky) and Ben Jones (born 1977 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), uses the most varied media, including video, drawings and wall painting, and also combines with art sectors such as fashion and photography. Paper Rad has put itself together — collectively as well as individually — as an all-embracing multi media company. Paper Rad is not active only in the art world; it also infiltrates cyberspace. Likewise Paper Rad works continually with other artists. In the videos — many of which are made by Jacob Ciocci — TV film outtakes and self-drawn comic and animation pieces are assembled into rapidly cut, hallucinatory flights that can be read as commentaries on the contemporary media world. The Mandala-like, rainbow-coloured neo-geo drawings by Jessica Ciocci directly reflect, in their mixture of excess and monotony, today’s consumption and youth culture. In Paper Rad’s complex staging of space, individual works continually blend into those that have been created collectively to form a seductive but deceptive carpet, lying over the abyss of a consumer and media-contaminated world.
At first glance the sculptures of Ryan Trecartin (born 1981 in Webster, Texas) and Lizzie Fitch (born 1981 in Bloomington, Indiana) stand out on the one hand through their fragility and fragmentation, and on the other through their colourful, playful forms and striking narrative. In the sculpture Choice Shopping (2006) a figure with a pumpkin-like head stretches out her hand to an anthropomorphic stocking puppet figure — recalling Hans Bellmer’s dolls — almost touching it. Upon more precise examination it becomes visible that the gesture of care, the tension of the fabric that is filled with consumer goods entails something. The gesture of care toward consumption becomes the body-defining authority. Trecartin and Fitch frequently collaborate with other artists on their sculptures, which are created with widely varied techniques and materials, one of the most important of which is papier-mâché. The fabrication of papier-mâché is not only a cheap and simple method for the construction of a sculptural body, but it also recalls experiences of childhood when one used this technique for making masks and costumes. The sculptures often serve as props and stage sets for Trecartin’s films.
Exhibition curator is Raphael Gygax. |
