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Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title), Foto: Bonniers Konsthall. |
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title).
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title).
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title).
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title). |
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Through his work Tomás Saraceno explores possible visions of a better world; his interest in architectural projects is part of this ongoing fascination with utopian theories and astronomical constellations. Taking his inspiration from the natural environment he rethinks how we live and our relation to one another; reshaping ideas and perceptions on ownership, property and even nationality. He challenges our ideas about the stability of the built environment and the structure of urban environments. Occupying the border regions between science, art and architecture his works include anything from spheres and cloud creations to flying gardens, space elevators and futuristic dwellings. BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents a new work by renowned Argentinean artist and architect Tomás Saraceno. For 14 Billions (Working Title) Saraceno enlisted the aid of spider experts to create an oversized model of the web of the Latrodectus mactans (Black Widow) spider. This new work is previously unseen in the UK. In collaboration with arachnologists, astrophysicists, architects and engineers, Saraceno has spent two years developing 14 Billions (Working Title). His point of departure for this new work was science’s use of spiders’ webs when describing the origin and structure of the universe. The resulting installation spans an enormous 400 cubic metres, is composed of 8000 black strings connected by over 23,000 individually tied knots and depicts a monstrous Black Widow spider’s web. Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Argentina and lives and works in Frankfurt. He has participated in numerous exhibitions world-wide, including solo presentations at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009; the Mudam, Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxemburg, 2009; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2008. He participated in the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009 and group exhibitions at the Barbican, London, 2009; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, 2009; Wanås, Sweden; and Life Forms at Bonniers Konsthall, 2009. In 2009, the artist received the Calder Prize.
Tomás Saraceno, 32SW/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City/Iridiscent, 2007. Foto: Bonniers Konsthall. |
Tomás Saraceno, Iridescent Planet, 2009. Foto: Bonniers Konsthall. |
John Cage (1912-1992), Where R = Ryoanji (3R/17), 1992, Pencils on handmade Japanese paper, 25.4 x 48.3 cm, The John Cage Trust, Red Hook, New York, Photo: David Heald/SRGF, New York, © The John Cage Trust at Bard College. |
John Cage (1912-1992), Rolywholyover A Circus, Installation view, September 12-November 28, 1993, MOCA-LA.
John Cage (1912-1992), Rolywholyover A Circus, Installation view, September 12-November 28, 1993, MOCA-LA.
John Cage and Calvin Sumsion. Not wanting to say anything about Marcel. Lithograph B. Eye Editions, Cincinnati, 1969. Copyright John Cage. Reproduced by permission of the John Cage Trust and courtesy of the Margarete Roeder Gallery, New York.
John Cage (1912-1992), Rolywholyover A Circus, Installation view, September 12-November 28, 1993, MOCA-LA. |
Baltic Centre This exhibition is the first major survey of the visual art of the American composer, writer and artist John Cage (1912-1992). The exhibition was conceived by artist Jeremy Millar, and organised by Hayward Touring in collaboration with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and the John Cage Trust. John Cage was one of the leading avant-garde composers of the 20th century, most famous perhaps for his silent work of 1952, 4'33". Cage was closely connected with art and artists throughout his long career. He collaborated frequently with Robert Rauschenberg and the dance choreographer Merce Cunningham, was a friend of Jasper Johns and Marcel Duchamp, and was a major influence on the Fluxus artists of the 1960s and 1970s. It was not until he was in his mid-sixties that he began to practise seriously as a visual artist himself, producing over 600 prints with the Crown Point Press in San Francisco, as well as 260 drawings and watercolours. In these works he applied the same chance-determined procedures that he used in his musical compositions. This exhibition, the largest ever organised, presents over 100 works on paper, spanning his whole visual art career, including his extraordinary Ryonaji series, described by the art critic David Sylvester as "among the most beautiful prints and drawings made anywhere in the 1980s". In these works he drew around the outlines of stones scattered (according to chance) across the paper or printing plate, in one case drawing around 3,375 individually placed stones. He also experimented with burning or soaking the paper, and applied complex, painstaking procedures at each stage of the printmaking process. Inspired by John Cage's own practice, the exhibition will differ markedly from a conventional touring show. Each showing will be selected and hung according to chance operations, using a computer-generated random number programme similar to the Chinese oracle, the "I Ching," which is essentially a random number programme. This will result in works being hung at different heights and in arrangements and groupings that no curator would ordinarily choose. Further changes will occur at intervals during each showing, a number of works being added or withdrawn. Cage himself, who disliked linear displays, employed this method in several exhibitions, notably Rolywholyover, in Los Angeles in 1992, which he described a "composition for museum." The exhibition will reveal the radicalism and continuing relevance of John Cage's ideas across all the media and disciplines in which he worked. The tour will involve an ambitious ongoing programme of musical events and activities at each showing, organised by the partner venues. Baltic collaborates with neighbouring concert hall, The Sage Gateshead, and in Huddersfield the showing will coincide with Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which Cage himself attended in 1989. Details of events will be available from each gallery nearer the time of their showing. The book accompanying the exhibition is the first to cover all aspects of John Cage's graphic art, with more than 60 plates and other illustrations, interviews conducted by Jeremy Millar with people who knew Cage well and are authorities on his work, a "Cage Companion" of quotations and commentaries on important aspects of his life and work, and a substantial extract from an interview with Cage by the American art critic Irving Sandler.
John Cage (1912-1992), 4′33″ (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds or, as the composer himself referred to it, Four, thirty-three) is a three-movement composition, 1952. |
John Cage (1912-1992), River Rocks and Smoke: 4-11-90 #1. Collection: The John Cage Trust at Bard College. |
Cornelia Parker, Perpetual Cannon, Courtesy of the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, Collection La Caixa, Barcelona. |
Cornelia Parker, Transitional Object II, Net, hooks, thread and bags of lead.
Cornelia Parker, Bullet Drawing, 2008, Lead from a bullet drawn into wire, 66 x 66 cm (framed).
Cornelia Parker, Six Killed by Icicles, 2008, Pencil on acid free notebook, text drawn by Lily McMillan (born 2001), 24.5 x 20.5 cm (image). |
Baltic Centre Cornelia Parker’s compelling transformations of familiar, everyday objects investigate the nature of matter, test physical properties and play on private and public meaning and value. Using materials that have a history loaded with association, a feather from Sigmund Freud’s pillow for example, Parker has employed numerous methods of exploration — suspending, exploding, crushing, stretching objects and even language through her titles — transporting them to a realm between two states. Doubtful Sound, a major new exhibition by one of Britain’s leading artists Cornelia Parker, incorporates new work with rarely seen pieces, including sculpture, film, drawings, photographs and objects. A highlight of the is Parker’s Perpetual Canon 2004. Shown in the UK for the first time, the installation consists of 60 silver-plated instruments from a marching band that have been squashed and suspended in midair. The title of the work is a musical term to describing a ‘round’, the repetition of a phrase again and again. The instruments robbed of their third dimension have a cartoon like quality, appearing as if they have inhaled, but not exhaled, a catastrophe frozen and forever silenced. Lit from the light of a single bulb, a cacophony of shadows replace the sound, both amplifying and containing the instruments, the shadows of the viewers replacing the absent players. The exhibition reveals a long-standing preoccupation in Parker’s work of the hidden acoustic: percussive moments, intricacies and identities and that are somehow intensified through their absence. Her Bullet Drawings 2010 consist of bullets that have been melted down and drawn into lead wire. Through the process of being drawn, they have been made into their own possible trajectories. Woven into a grid-like structure, a bullet’s worth of lead wire is trapped between two sheets of glass in a box frame, creating a 'suspended' drawing with its own shadow. The absent gunshot is replaced with a visual ricochet. In her ongoing series Avoided Objects, objects have been extracted from their current existence and manipulated into something new. Some of her objects are not yet fully formed, having been removed prematurely from production (Embryo Firearm• 1995) and some cannot even be classified as objects in any traditional sense: The Negative of Whispers 1997, ear plugs made of fluff gathered in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's Cathedral, London. Put together like sculptural material, the result is an web of associations. Parker has also explored the idea of "Latent News," a surrealist game in which newspaper articles are cut into individual words and phrases and rapidly reassembled to make some other kind of sense. (The "cut-up" technique has long been used by writers and musicians, and now has become even more ubiquitous in the form of Spam.) With the help of the innocent hand of her 6-year-old daughter, Lily, new mantras are spelled out.
Cornelia Parker, Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson), 1999, Wire mesh, charcoal, wire, pins, nails, 365.8 x 152.4 x 182.9 cm. |
Cornelia Parker, Perpetual Cannon, Courtesy of the Artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, Collection La Caixa, Barcelona. |
Paul Ramirez Jonas, Paper Moon (Create As I Speak), Installation view, 2009, dimension variable, height 10 ft., Multimedia, Edition of 3 with 1 AP, Courtesy Alexander Grey Associates, New York. |
Paul Ramirez Jonas, Paper Moon (Create as I Speak), Installation detail, 2009, dimension variable, height 10 ft., Multimedia, Edition of 3 with 1 AP, Courtesy Alexander Grey Associates, New York.
John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma (foreground), Caroline Brown, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley (background): Variations VII.
John Cage, Preparing a Piano. |
Baltic Centre Consistently unconventional, John Cage unravelled the rules of musical composition, re-thinking and re-presenting the score. His subversive ideas and lectures on music in the 1940s and 50s were catalysts that continue to be significant to contemporary artists working today. Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound brings together the work of eight contemporary artists that use the writings and scores of Cage as a source of inspiration: Sam Belinfante, Graham Gussin, Christian Marclay, Jeremy Millar, Katie Paterson, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Richard Rigg and Katja Strunz. Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound includes work by New York-based artist Paul Ramirez Jonas; with Paper Moon he has created a scaled version of the moon comprising 165 individual sheets of paper. The sentence ‘I create as I speak’ is repeated over and over again, as one long text. A lone page, a fragment of the image, is removed from the wall and left on a lectern while the public is invited to read this piece of the moon either out loud or to themselves. Katja Strunz has a constellation of components arranged on the slate floor comprising a series of brass and steel rods and parts from left over musical instruments, circular cymbals and the horn of a trumpet. Like sentinels marking time they appear associated with the production of sounds and form a bridge to astronomical listening; an aerial station of weathered instruments, the sounds of origins, and the source of the big bang. Newcastle artist Richard Rigg has created a visual conundrum with Before Interruption (2010) by creating a glass bell jar containing a brass bell. The bell is attached to a simple device that allows it to chime however the intermittent actions of a vacuum pump, suspends the sound of the bell leaving us with a bell that moves, but that we can no longer hear. Graham Gussin shows three works, including a large wall drawing in blue ink. Here sound has been put through a software program that translates it into image, producing a kind of audio map or territory, a new landscape of peaks and troughs. Another work, Vortex Mix, uses the cover of five vinyl records, placed on spinning devices on the wall. Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound is curated by Alessandro Vincentelli.
Paul Ramirez Jonas, Paper Moon (Create As I Speak), Installation detail, 2009, dimension variable, height 10 ft., Multimedia, Edition of 3 with 1 AP, Courtesy Alexander Grey Associates, New York. |
Katje Strunz, Einladung zur Anget, 2005, (detail) Various metals. |
